Posts by Gordon 10

Right, who feels like going to an Ofcom meeting? Anyone? Bueller?

Dear GSMA

You can pry my 700Mhz out of my cold dead set top box when your any of cowboy members can get me a seamless signal end to end on my commute to from Reading to London using your current technology. Show some willing FFS.

BILL GATES DRINKS 'boiled and treated' POO. Ah, 'delicious'

Re: Well

arguably Wetware

If Europe is against US's Irish email grab, it must pipe up now

Re: to 1st poster

I call bollocks to you on that one AC. Its not that simple. Otherwise the US Tax man would be seizing all the profits Apple and Co. are storing oversea's.

You would have been far more correct to say there are a complex web of legislation and treaties whose interpretation in different legal and govermental remits can sometimes result in the appearance that the Patriot act trumps everything. Don't get me wrong its a steaming pile of dog crap that needs to be repealed - but the reality is far more nuanced than you are shrieking about.

Yes, we need two million licences - DEFRA

Re: They get you coming and going

@AC

It is when the salesman thinks he can get away with it.

Re: Weasle Wording?

I remember when Oracle tried to pull this stunt with my company at the time telling us we needed a per transaction license for the database supporting our Online booking engine. Given that this was for a significant country-wide ecommerce site the license volumes were in the range given for DEFRA. Needless to say they were given a robust F*ck You until sense prevailed.

As others have stated I suspect there is a combination of conflating of different license types, plus some fast ones being pulled by Oracle salesmen against civil service PHB's who knew no better.

To be fair (if I must) I seriously doubt the Civil service were the only people to fall for this trick.

Sardine fishing in Kerala: Who benefits from mobile phones?

Re: Unwanted side effects @Arnaut

"Worsthall fails to consider that mobile phones in poor countries will not work well if there are multiple carriers - too much dispersion - which, in the absence of government regulation, would result in monopoly carriers"

How on earth do you justify that cobblers? With a real life example please. Why is too much dispersion a problem, and why would it occur in the first place?

The government has a regulatory role to play to ensure that spectrum is allocated reasonably and to dissuade cartel behaviours, Im not sure they should be more rewarded for that than they already are through pre-existing channels such as tax, and spectrum regulation. If a Government makes the right regulatory decisions they are "rewarded" by economic growth and a booming tax take. It they try to over-reward themselves they close down market opportunities and create stagnation and lack of growth.

Toyota to Tesla: we can play the free patent game as well

Re: Could be useful

Why?

Alien Earths are out there: Our home is not 'unique'

Re: 2 cups oxygen

Don't you mean 2 atoms 1 cup?

1,000mph ROCKET CAR project dogged by beancounters

Re: Nobel gas bag

And probably India and Poland as well. Although no doubt some of the quacks are too.

I wonder if

Mr Noble would be so quick to slag off the accountants at Jaguar and Rolex who signed off his lucrative sponsorship deals?

Brit iPad sellers feel the pain of VAT-free imports

GIFT

Is no guarantee of zero tax/duty treatment neither is second hand nor declared low value. Basically you play customs roulette with a high proportion going under the radar but plenty being caught by hmrc or the courier companies themselves using the admin fees as a profit center.

Plus with declared low value you risk any insurance not paying the full worth should the courier company shag your parcel (hello yodel)

UFOs in the '50s skies? CIA admits: 'IT WAS US'

Re: I am outraged by you all

Am I the only one who thinks the meaning of Christmas to you is just that its the prime time to restock your tin foil?

Tor de farce: NSA fails to decrypt anonymised network

Seems to me

That if Microsoft really wanted to stick 2 fingers up to the feds over the attempted Dublin data slurp they should deploy a compromise free version of Skype

When algorithms ATTACK: Facebook sez soz for tacky 'Year in Review' FAIL

Re: Blame the messenger.

@Monty how do you work that one out? Unless you are going to dislike someone's ashes or dead daughter how is it going to help?

El Reg's festive dating app guide, Pt. 2: The FEMALE perspective

Re: Online dating sounds like hell on earth

Hopefully you will never find out but it's no better or worse than any other method of meeting potential partners, understand the social situations you are operating in and you'll be grand.

Re: Not sure why there was a breakdown in gender perspective ...

Errmmm. Met many men on online dating? I can assure that on average there are completely different approaches between men and women on dating sites.

I found the 2 articles complementary

Buses? PAH. Begone with your filthy peasant-wagons

Re: Obvious troll is obvious

Indeed. The question of whether buses are more efficient than other forms of transport is irrelevant - right now there is no other form of transport that is more efficient for a buses particular use case if there were anything materially better buses would not exist

so yes the article was a long form troll. Or OpEd if it's written by a journo.

Reg man confesses: I took my wife out to choose a laptop for Xmas. NOOOO

I did the same - ironically the only thing that has ever given the missus problems is Word for Mac which seems to be an unstable piece of crap.

Ireland: Hey, you. America. Hands off Microsoft's email cloud servers

Re: Will we (the US) now invade Ireland?

One suspects that if the US were serious about this particular case they would have been happy to go the treaty route already - that they haven't suggests this has always been about establishing a precedent for doing an end run around international treaties and laws

Re: This, and Google's fight against the MPAA/Hood are important.

Or on behalf of lobbyist organisations bought and paid for by Google neither of which are particularly relevant to this case

Xiaomi: It really ISN'T a biz-miracle idiot tax like Apple

Tims whole point was that it has yet to quack like an Apple - arguably at this stage not even a Samsung

Grab a SLIM MODEL for Xmas cheer: Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact

Re: Like the specs on this, but a little pricey

Unfortuately your major selling point is only relevant for nerds who want to root & flash their device. For the 99% of users who want to use their tablet as it came out of box CM is irrelevant.

Hack flings bootkits from Macs' Thunderbolts

Re: Well duh!

agreed. Whilst research into closing off these vulnerabilities is always good, log this somewhere below unknown USB keys in the threat hierarchy.

If I had a farm of Mac Pro's in an office somewhere I would be slightly more worried, but since my MBA rarely leaves my house or my sight when travelling I dont see this as a big risk.

Care.data's a good thing? Tell us WHY, thunders watchdog

@AC and John

I presume you are both in 'Pathfinder' areas?

The electronics island where COPS shoot ARMY and workers are rioting

Re: I kind of expected more focus on Simon's fake iPhone

Except millions more people can now afford an iPhone or an iPhone knockoff than could 5 or 10 years ago in Indonesia.

Economic growth in developing nation is pretty tough on individuals but very good for entire populations. The fact of the matter is that people have to endure shitty conditions for much less time than those generations who went through industrialisation in most Western developed countries.

Now unless you have a magic wand that can conjure western lifestyles overnight, I suggest you read Tim Worstall's latest article before getting on your Dickensian high horse.

Pick a superior Christmas No. 1 from El Reg's computer crooning compilation

Goldie lookin chain

Halfman half machine.

STAY AWAY: Popular Tor exit relays look raided

Foreshadowed me arse

How on earth does a few exit nodes being taken down relate at all to the directory servers being taken down?

Presumably this guy had a sizable set of servers operating as exit nodes but I would actually like to know what proportion of the available TOR bandwidth his servers represent - presumably it's peanuts.

FURY erupts on streets of Brussels over greedy USA's data-slurping appetite

Re: Hate Machine

Hating someone who keeps fucking with my personal data for very little reason or justification seems pretty fair to me

Welsh council rapped for covert spying on sick leave worker

You would expect wrong

You'd be wrong on the first of those assumptions in the UK.

You can self-certify for the first 7 days of an illness and the company can do nothing to force you to get a note from a doctor. In fact most doctors these days will refuse to give you one.

https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave

Don't panic, US Navy has only deployed a ROBOT SHARK (but where are the lasers?)

Shark?

Looks more like a baby whale to me

Friday: SpaceX will attempt to land rocket on floating, robotic 'spaceport drone ship'

When does their UK division open

Some days it feels like Elon is doing more to make the future happen than virtually anyone else on the planet.

Im sure he's standing on the shoulders of giants - but that guy has the vision, will and moolah to achieve something incredible.

Soon everyone will be doing it with a strap-on: The Reg's 20 festive wearables

Nike are bailing....

Are bailing out of the hardware side of the wearables market - so better hold onto that Fuelband receipt.....

Bill cram woes piling up for Sprint: Campaigners lob in a sueball

OMG

How is third party billing even legal? I'd like to think it cant happen over this side of the pond but that's probably wishful thinking.

Beware of merging, telcos. CHEAPER SPECTRUM follows

Bit of a stretch

"For everyone in the business it raised awareness of creative financial engineering"

That's a pretty naïve statement to suggest that before the great spectrum auction they weren't aware of just how many ways they could indulge in tax evasion.

Sony sued by ex-staff over daft security, leaked privates

Re: 12 years gone from the company, and they still have all his details...

Err most companies need to keep ex-employee records for pension & tax purposes.

Little big phone: Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, a toothsome hand-fulla Android

Damn

Of all the companies to produce a sensibly sized flagship phone why did it have to be Sony?

London teen pleads guilty to Spamhaus DDoS

going down

That kid has screwed his life up. Even if he doesn't go to the Big House he's won a free ticket to the Sex Offenders register.

Oh well. Another idiot has Darwin'ed his life goodbye.

El Reg's mighty rocket spaceplane Vulture 2 arrives in US of A

Am In the only one?

Who thinks that lohan is a splendid example of requirements creep but thinks it should be be celebrated anyway?

Independent inquiry into British air-traffic-control IT nightmare

Re: Stick with the dancing job!

And what the muppets are currently failing to understand - from everything I have read this was a deliberate failsoft event. i.e. designed to fail this way so that planes don't start falling out of the sky or flying into each other.

Re: If it works, don't fix it.

I have just skimmed that article - all I can say of its author Matt Ridley is that he is a clueless c**t.

How on earth can you conflate what seems to be a "standard" but serious production issue to a problem with the development methodology? That somehow fixable by adopting the medialuvvie approach of those lunatics who do development at the cabinet office.

He has now raised the bar for idiotic technology reporting waaayyy above Rory Clueless-Jobsworth on the Beeb - something I hitherto thought impossible.

Parallels to adopt Docker as native app format in Cloud Server

Docker flocker schmocker

Dislcaimer I know nothing about Docker but how many of those "45,000+ “Dockerized apps”, are actually in widespread commercial usage?

At least the bulk of Parallels stuff has proven commercial use cases.

A more cogent question would be is Docker the new hype-du-jour finally knocking Hadoop off the top.

To misquote an exec at a recent big data conference. I've just spent £1m on Hadoop Docker - now what do I do with it?

Deprivation Britain: 1930s all over again? Codswallop!

Link please?

Re: Spot on

Oh no Mr Syntax in a delicious case of irony the error is yours

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

My boss called

He now knows I am reading El Reg just by looking out of his office window.

Gee thanks Reg.

REVEALED: Titsup flight plan mainframe borks UK air traffic control

Software release issue.

The airline industry is riddled with legacy apps running on OS/370 and its descendants. When I were a lad you werent a man until you triggered at least a Ctrl-3 core dump on Prod.

A friend of mine one took out ticketing for all of Italy for 8hrs with a particularly buggy piece of assembler.

if it is OS/390 I wonder if its an ALCS/TPF relative?

Re: There's nothing like state of the art hardware

@JS19

OS/370 and its descendants were running mission critical workdwide apps when you were in nappies boy. Give me known failure modes over unknown any day of the week.

What future is there for UK's Care.data info sharing scheme?

The stupid thing was

That if there had been a legislative guarantee that this data will not be sold on to third parties or made available to anyone other than public research institutions there would have been far less outcry.

But because they got data-greedy and wanted more than the basic goal of joined up records between GP's and hospitals it became a shambles.

If they had done it in stages there could have been an informed debate about each stage as and when it was proposed.

GCHQ releases teen-friendly code-busting app

It aint on the play store yet....

I wanted to download just to see what ridiculously elevated permissions it needed.

Access Contacts check

Access dialler check

Access Internet check

Install Rootkit check

Bong Ventures LLC: We've been cyberhacked

Excellent!

I find Bong a bit hit and miss but this was a definite hit.

Sonic BOOM: 10 blast-tastic soundbars

FAD - WTF is the point

Of having an ultra flat telly mounted to the wall if you have to have some lumpen mass of a soundbar under it?

Only about 2 of those were actually slim enough for wall mounting.

Talk about a Fad market segment - apart from the technology advances like Bluetooth and lots of HDMI ports how is this materially better than my 8 year old Sony 5.1 DAV-IS 10 all-in one tucked in a cabinet with tiny micro speakers and a monster sub tucked out of the way. ( it was the WhatHiFi 5* model of the time - all for £500.)