Posts by Anonymous Cowardess

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

http://www.rubberduckdebugging.com/

BAN email footers – they WASTE my INK, wails Ctrl+P MP

Esp. One-Liners

Who prints an email that says "Fancy lunch, mate?"

Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

I've been having this problem for years

It's been a few years since I made a clean install and every time I made an upgrade I had to reinstall the bootloader. Can't remember when it started. Never found anything on the forums. But I'm getting a new hard disk, and with news of this bug, a clean install of 14.04 is looking more and more attractive.

The ULTIMATE cuppa showdown: And the winner is...

Any ideas ...

... why Twinings tea is getting so hard to come by here (i. e. Germany, on the border to Belgium and The Netherlands)? All the shops are switching to Lipton, which seems to only have 1 sort of black tea, a few greens and the many, many other kinds that are not proper tea :( Esp. Belgium used to be a good source for cheap Twinings tea.

OTOH maybe it's because my fellow Germans nowadays think, that you are a tea drinker if you "enjoy" in the morning 2 cups of Turkish Apple or Strawberry Vanilla or some such crap, usually based on rooibos. Instead of going for the usual coffee like they used to and now suddenly feel guilty about. I often decline now, when someone offers me tea, because my definition is so totally different from theirs.

Sorry for the rant. If only shipping costs from the UK weren't so expensive ...

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

Re: @ Anonymous Coward 101 - "circeln"?

We bend the English words to our will ;) Many verbs end with 'n'. Forgot all my grammar lessons, can't explain any better, why this is. Anyway, we tend to "germanize" verbs taken from English. We also say "downloaden" and "updaten". Makes me cringe sometimes. But "circeln" is really cringeworthy. It means to include into your circle of friends/contacts (on social media). And it gets even worse. "circeln" is the form "to circle". When I want to say "I have added X to my circle" (would you say "I have circled X" in English?), it would be "Ich habe X gecircelt" . I've never seen it before and it looks to me like something only marketing/yuppie/hipster types would say. But then I'm not into social media at all ... But e. g. "Ich habe X gedownloaded" (= "I've downloaded X") is pretty common.

US Ambassador plays Game of Thrones with pirates

Re: I want it NOW!

They want my money, they need to give me what I want. Torrents are here to stay and they need to adapt their business model.

Facebook fixes 'Peeping Tom' webcam bug - AFTER 5 MONTHS

I agree with you. Schweitzer is not entirely blameless if she coped the picture. OTOH Facebook could provide a setting that things can be only seen by your friends, not the friends of your friends etc. On the third hand though, and what everybody should have learned by now: If you don't want it to spead, don't post it.

Billionaire Zuckerberg kills to eat

Re: Indeed

"Why do you think such slaughterhouses get an exemption from animal cruelty laws in the UK?"

I know that's why they would need one, but why are they getting one?

German 'minister for cut'n'paste' resigns over PhD plagiarism

Re: extent of his plagiarism

The problem is, we don't really know. The university was pressured last week to take away his PhD without making any further fuss, to get the story out of the media (that thankfully didn't work). I am not sure whether they will still conduct a thorough investigation now. I hope the court cases go through and will shed some light on the extent of the copy&paste. Esp. whether he really used in full a paper written by a tax-paid goverment research department (which he commissioned in his role as MP).

Save us from our users

Ha.

Our admins are one step ahead of you. We're not allowed to use passwords that end in a number.

Eric Schmidt warns Berliners: 'We know where you are'

Gestapo/Stasi

This is the first I heard that memories of Gestapo/Stasi could be a reason for being againt StreetView. But other evidence just points at my fellow Germans not getting it. I think, many of the protestors think, it's some kind of live feed or updated every 2 weeks or so. And the main reasons I heard against it, are a) that it's a tool for burglars to check out the neighbourhood beforehand and b) Google is making _money_ from a picture of _my_ house. Misogynistic and paranoid. A group of 4 protestors went to their not so local newspaper to complain about StreetView and did not object to a picture of themselves taken in front of their house and published on the paper's website with their full names and city mentioned. Sheesh. And Germans generally don't care about other more important privacy issues. They will happily use their Payback cards, which is a joint customer loyalty scheme of the major retail chains. Which all belong to the Metro group. So all information about the what, when and where of their purchases lands in the hands of one cooperation. And no major protests against SWIFT (banking information given over to the USA), Schufa (who discriminates against you depending on the neighbourhood you live in when getting a loan or a cell phone contract), ELENA (all your job details and everything from your personnel records given to the state every month) etc. either.

Sorry for the rant. But it's getting me enranged that something as harmless as StreetView has been in the media for weeks, when other things don't get much coverage, because "ah, those are only for terrorists/frauds/pedos, so they don't affect me".

New iPod crew: 'Phoney, futuristic, retro, doomed'

Do the clips work?

Where do I put my thumb when opening the clip? Looks like you only have very narrow space or you will be accidentally clicking the wheel (shuffle) or activate something on the touchscreen (nano). Or the thing will shoot from your fingers because your thumb is too much on the edge. I always thought the 2nd gen shuffle was rectangular for a reason. It's still the most pretty and mobile MP3 player IMO, shame it's so noisy.

Hup Holland, viva España

55,8%?

That's just like saying "analysing the stats doesn't really give us any results on who will win". Even without doing advanced math Holland starts with a 50 % chance of winning.

And don't insult our Paul. He predicts the future, he doesn't make it. But that's the problem with the superstitious: First they want a prediction and then they blame the oracle.

German arrested for Adolf Hitler ringtone

Not a taboo as such

Believe me, we Germans are educated about the nazis in school. When I went to school, history ended at 1945, because it took 3 years to educate us about the nazis. (That was in the early 80s, so Cold War, Vietnam etc. should have been mentioned too IMO.)

But the display of the nazi's symbols/propaganda outside of an educational context is illegal in Germany. That does clash with the ideal of Free Speech, but I am not sure, I'm really against it ...

Pictures of Ubuntu: Linux's best photo shots at Windows and Mac

And they sell ...

... Linux versions where?

Your internet policy sucks, US tells Aussies

355?

Does the German goverment know this? They keep telling us there's millions of those sites and that they're making billions of dollars.

Y2.01K hits Garmin satnav

When working with

computerized devices, what you know is irrelevant. Just tell your camera what year the Garmin thinks it is and voila, fixed. Not.

Apple iPad spanked with Defective by Design protest

Blown-up iPhone

And now that all the hype and mystery around Apple's new gadget is finally over with, will other companies follow them or give us what we really want: A cut in half netbook (preferably with a choice of Linux flavours), not a blown-up iPhone?

Crypto snafu grounds 3D Avatar screenings in Germany

Paranoia

According to Heise the movies are delivered encrypted on harddisks per courier (no FTP or other modern nonsense). They are then copied to the cinema's servers. They then need to request a key for each copy/projector-combination. The keys can be restricted to certain times of the day and may only be valid for a limited time. So the distributor doesn't trust the cinema to not show the copy more often or longer than it's licensed and the cinema doesn't trust the projectionist to not make a copy in his free time. What they think we would do with a pirated copy though is anyone's guess. I mean, who has a 3D-projector at home?

Swedish bankers punt webcam smut to kiddies

HaHa

What do you expect of "the only value in the world is money (in absolute numbers) and we judge everything by that standard" bankers?

UK judges reject Lucas' appeal in Star Wars helmet case

Even no backups

In Germany (and it's likely that it's an EU law) you're not allowed to make a backups if the DVD has efficient copy protection. The "efficient" part AFAIK hasn't been tested in court, but it probably boils down to "It says 'This DVD is copy protected' on the box." That's why buying and owning CloneCD etc. is illegal here.

Should you lose your religion on your CV?

twisting his words

"Darwin was a Christian and so it would appear you don't think him capable of coming to a reasonable working hypothesis"

That's not what he said. He just said he's wary if a person states his religion prominently on his CV. If Darwin had given the name on his book as "by Charles Darwin, a Christian" then there would be cause for suspicion.

And another exanple of the religious types twisting your words.

Yank objects to Reg cherry-popping headline

How old are your children?

And how come they know what "pop the cherry" means in the first place? Or is this about you being too embarrased to explain when they ask you what it means? And what are they doing googling headlines, if they're so young, that they should be spared the meaning of the term?

Microsoft drops Family Guy like a hot deaf guy joke

@asdf

"I know the Simpsons were on in Germany (had to change many of the jokes though as American humor tends to be more crude than most countries enjoy)."

Erm, no. I think it has more to do with whoever does the German translations of The Simpsons having no grasp of contemporary English/American at all. Sometimes you need to do a "sounds-like"-translation back to English to get what it means. E. g. "fabric of the universe" was translated as "Fabrik des Universums" (factory of the universe), when it should have been something like "Struktur des Universums".

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone

"the only country on Portuguese time is Britain"

erm, Portugal?

As for "Am I the only actually looking *forward* to an extra hour's sleep this weekend?": No, I'm in desperate need of that hour for over 2 weeks now. And the shiny newly elected German government is now threatening us with "We're going to switch to summer time next year, but then we'll cancel switching back to normal time and you will never get that hour back." If that's not enough to start a revolution, what else is?

Blogging vicar casts Tina Turner into hell

For the living

"Rather something real and significant is happening, on earth and in heaven, when these take place."

Some people don't come out of fairy land when they grow up. That's why he doesn't get that funerals are for the living, not the dead.

Microsoft ropes in Family Guy to pimp Windows 7

Heroes?

When I think of "Start me up" and Windows I think of how MS shot itself in the foot by choosing a song that contains the lyrics "you make a grown man cry". And I can't relate Windows and Heoroes in any way, so that campaign must have completely passed me by. But I don't think of the Berlin wall either, but of "Christiane F." Am I getting old?

German Pirate Party MP charged in child porn case

I don't know

I'm alos in two minds about this. His excuse sounds almost too stupid. On the other hand, I think even as a lawMAKER he has the right to investigate. Because if he sees for himself how CP works (or other things), he can make better, more efficient laws. Not like the others, who have no clue at all.

And, as said before, he is innocent until proven guilty and the Pirate Party accepted him on that grounds.

Snow Leopard arrives with meow, not a roar

Photo

For me, the best thing about Snow Leopard is that every time I open El Reg these days, a snow leopard is looking at me. I really, really like that photo from the "first look" article.

Tourist magnet blows off Speedo-wearing men

The disadvantages of prudeness

They haven't talked to their German colleagues lately, have they? According to German Bademeisters (as seen on TV on various occasions) shorts are unhygienic and every time the guy leaves the pool he takes up to 2 litres of water with him wihich costs a fortune to replace.

From tracking sex performance to tracking sex offenders...

Huh?

Isn't wearing a black bra under a wet t-shirt missing the point? Or is that to get the app approved by Apple?

Disney punts hetero luuurv to wide-eyed kiddies

On the other hand ...

... once you're grown up, most of those Prince Charmings come across rather gay.