Posts by LesB

Kids' TV show Rainbow in homosexual agenda shocker

Re: All we got in my day . . .

Notorious promoters of illicit substances:

Weeeeeeeeed!

Re: Good job they didn't, then....

Bob the Builder? Wasn't he one of Village People?

Good job they didn't, then....

Rainbow was on ITV, preuambly to pander to advertisers of {make up your own guess for stereotypical products}

Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre

Re: If anything can go wrong...

And even if it can't, it will

New low for humanity: ONE BEELLION lost souls log on to Facebook in one day

Souls?

I'm reminded of the words of Terry Pratchett:

Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people.

Windows 10 upgrade ADWARE forces its way on to Windows 7 and 8.1

Re: I'm confused

Christoper Robin must have written that...

GON OUT

BACKSON

BISY

BACKSON

C.R.

(Or so Tigger told me)

BOFH: Mmm, gotta love me some fresh BYOD dog roll

Star Fleet

Not sure if Lt Cmdr LaForge is that much of an expert on the beer formerly made in Newcastle. Perhaps a geordie would be better?

First HSBC, now the ENTIRE PUBLIC SECTOR dodges tax

Claiming 20% back? Now that is a scandal.

If HMRC are letting them do that, then they must be very bad at maths.

Wouldn't it be more like 16.6667%? (Or possibly more decimal places)

No, the Linux leap second bug WON'T crash the web

More bad reporting

I'm sure "Computing" used to be a specialist IT publication[1], so I was a little alarmed to see their take on this subject:

FUD

[1] In the days when it was 60%[2] job adverts

[2] 83% of statistics are made up on the spot

VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that

Pah! Wax cylinders are the only way to go!

Bible THUMP: Good Book beats Darwin to most influential tome title

A shocking omission

Where's "Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying"? (Nice to see it's got a 4.68 rating on Goodreads)

Moon landing was real and WE CAN PROVE IT, says Nvidia

Re: models

Those of a certain age will remember the Buckinghamshire crash mentioned on the site. Not to mention the yearly flights to the moon...

Google kills copycat TfL congestion charge payment ads

Space hens

Otherwise known as astrochickens, perhaps.

I was going to say something obvious and boring about the quote being taken from a longer sentence, where the "w" would presumably have been lower case, but you'd have stopped reading that by now.

Modern-day Frankenstein invents CURE for BEHEADING

How to get ahead, errr a head

Surely it's a body transplant rather than a head transplant? Well, for those of us who keep their brains in their heads, anyway...

#Facebook: Now all your hashtags ARE BELONG TO US, Twitter

Re: if this is a new thing....

Or people cross-posting from Twitter (various automagic methods exist)

Three's mobile data goes titsup in mysterious spreading outage

Back up for me...

Now working in Newcastle city centre.

Three's last tweet said it was back in London, with everywhere else due to be connected this afternoon.

Still down for me...

Newcastle city centre. Phone showing no 3G symbol after a restart, MiFi's web interface shows "Connection failed"

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Giraffics?

Maybe that's what he thought he was playing with?

Biz email slinger Mimecast tumbles over

Over-confidence, or something

Most service providers have a publicly accessible status page carefully hosted well off their own network. The only way you'll see a service status from Mimecast is if you log into the admin portal, which was a wee bit tricky for most of today[1]. When I did finally get logged in, the status messages suggested that all was well, there were no recent problems and world peace had been achieved. Well, I may have made up the last bit.

I suspect it's been so long since they had a significant issue that they assumed they couldn't....

[1] And last I looked, it was only working on even numbered services[2], which many people won't have been trying to connect to...

[2] Customers have two services to use, one even numbered, one odd numbered. In the event that one breaks, it's supposed to fail over to the other. In this instance, it didn't.

Hardware failure, apparently

They've posted an interim announcement.

http://blog.mimecast.com/2013/05/mimecast-service-outage-update-for-customers/

CEO will be offering his head, errr, making a more detailed report later.

I'm posting this at 16:39. Outbound email queue still backed up, around six hours since this started.

This is going to cost them...

Down for several hours (and counting) for numerous customers (and that's just the ones who've managed to fight off the angry mobs of users long enough to tweet about it). That 100% SLA is looking a bit sick right now.

One of Mimecast's selling points was that they have a resilient infrastructure, so that the loss of a datacentre would just require a bit of re-routing to maintain service. Explanations and compensation will be expected by all.

(And yeah, we just renewed our contract after three trouble-free years)

Why next iPhone screen could be made of SAPPHIRE - and a steal...

I saw what you did there...

Sapphire and steal, eh? Nicely done.

The healing hands of guru Dabbs

The disappearing computer problem...

This is, of course, a well-known phenomenomenum[1]. It happens so frequently that I suggested getting a cardboard standup thingy of me, rather like those cardboard cops they have in some shops to deter thieves[2].

Most users are convinced that computers are frightened of me, and start behaving as soon as I appear.

[1] Sorry, it's one of those words I'm never sure when to stop spelling. Like banananana.

[2] Well, I assume that's why they're there.

Google shreds Reader in new round of 'spring cleaning'

New sync services needed....

It's not so much Reader itself going away as the API used by various desktop and mobile apps to sync feeds across multiple devices. Some of those apps will still work, but without the sync (such as NetNewsWire), others seem to have been designed as Google Reader clients (such as Reeder), and seem likely to break horribly...

The long-established FeedDemon won't be developed any further (http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-end-of-feeddemon.html), others may follow.

There's definitely scope for a service to sync RSS - I'd pay for that...

Gartner has its head in the clouds - and its numbers are WRONG

I saw what you did there

Surely it's inevitable that cloud services would be nebulous?

Sacrebleu! Googleplex insists Bush is still le président américain

Muphry's Law strikes again

It's a well-known phenomenon...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

If Hotmail was a person it could have kids now. But it would be a crime

I'm sure I had a Hotmail address once...

Or twice. Had my own name in it, anyway.

I've even signed up for outlook.com, and got the preferred short version of my name.

TiVo takes on Cisco in patent knock down

Have they fallen out?

Vermin Media's TiVo boxes are (or were, at the time I got mine) Cisco hardware....

Compare The Market can't touch web filth extension - simples

X-rated Meerkats

So who's got comparethemeerkat.xxx? Will this be the next campaign?

Now trying to block my mind from the thought of the xxx version of Go Compare....

Sony intros high-end camera storage card

It's a standard, apparently

According to Wikipedia[1]:

"The format was first announced in November 2010 by Sandisk, Sony and Nikon, and was immediately picked up by the CompactFlash Association for development"

Or even

http://compactflash.org/2011/compactflash-association-announces-the-recently-adopted-xqdtm-specification-as-a-new-memory-card-format/

[1] Yes, yes....

Google+ opens up to enterprises and apps

Yes, or no, depending

If Acme-Co has outsourced its email to Google Apps, and the Acme-Co administrator enables Google+ for users, then yes.

Otherwise, no.

Ten... Androids to outshine the iPhone 4S

Quite...

I think we need an official term for this kind of silly writing[1]. Just as anyone who dates to contemplate buying an Apple product for any reason is labelled a "Fanboy", or more likely "Fanboi" by the terminally silly, we need a word for the people who hate all things Apple. Other than the obvious more vulgar ones, of course...

[1] Not to mention the lack of proofreading.

BOFH: CSI Haxploitation Cube Farm Apocalypse

Applause, etc

One of the more entertaining boss destructions

Whitehats break out of Google Chrome sandbox

I think you have the wrong hat colour

Best practice always used to be to talk to the vendor first. These people seem to be saying that they'll only share their findings with their customers. Or to put it another way, if you want the information, you'll have to pay them.

White hat? Hardly. Possibly not black hat, but maybe brown....

Sony unsure if PlayStation Network user data was stolen

Re: i like my playstation 3

I didn't realise the editor of the Daily Fail was a regular on El Reg!

Wordpress backup vuln published

Linguistic differences can be such fun...

I recall when the "nonce" was proposed on the WP development mailing list[1], that somebody or other did post a link to urban dictionary as a hint that this might not be the best word to use, but it didn't catch anyone important's attention...

I suspect that devs who speak UKEnglish kept quiet for amusement purposes. Much the same way that apparently nobody told George Lucas that "Yarael Poof[2]" wasn't an altogether ideal name for a member of the Jedi Council...

[1] Called WP-Hackers[2], presumably so people can laugh at the occasional persion joining to offer credit card numbers, or ask for help getting into someone else's email account...

[2] Name seen in credits, character only in the background.

[2] Yes, *we* all know that hackers doesn't mean that, but since lots of other people don't, it's a losing battle...

George Lucas 'very happy' with 3D Phantom Menace

George is happy because he hates George

Old George Lucas hates his younger self, and is doing all he can to destroy all that his younger self did.

This, like those "Special" (or whatever) editions, is part of that fiendish plan.

Apple confirms dev conference, but not much else

No new rumours, at least...

There's no real information either way about the announcement (or not) of a new iPhone model. El Reg's source bases its not very informative article on the speculations of a Gartner analyst whose comments can be boiled down to "well, they usually do that, so they might not this time".

Personally, I tend to put Gartner comments into one of two broad categories:

1. The bleeding obvious

2. Total bollocks

However, they seem to have got wise to this and are branching out into a new category, which I think I'l list as

3. Too woolly to tell

Beeb reworks Wuthering Frikkin' Heights

Wait till you see it?

But then it's been said[1] that the pictures on radio are better than on TV...

[1] I'll leave the research to others.

MozyHome stiffs unlimited users

@Tim Spence - Data volumes, and costs

I am a home user, and I currently have over 400GB backed up. A lot of that consists of RAW files from my digital cameras (big files, you know) and my music files (combination of iTunes purchases and rips from my own CDs, which I'd hate to have to do again). I don't back up apps, but I *do* backup downloaded installers for applications I've bought - not all of these can be easily replaced.

What I *choose* to back up is my decision - there's no degree of self-deception involved. I certainly don't make any money out of my home computer use, so I don't fall under the "business" heading, either.

Your view appears to be that if you don't need something, nobody else does either, and if they think they do, they're wrong, so there.

I'll be departing from Mozy. Based on my current use, and a finger in the air projection of future growth, my renewal cost for two years would rise from a very reasonable $207.90 to an excruciating $1,049.79. I'd have been prepared to pay more for the service, but not *that* much.

That's me off then...

OK, point of fact first - they've always offered a free 2GB service, in the usual Freemium way.

At the time I signed up, the unlimited package was a good deal (nicely discounted if you bought two years in advance), and more important, they had a working Mac client before some of their competitors. And it's worked well - backups work, restores work, and I've happily recommended them to anyone who'll listen.

I found out about this change via Twitter yesterday. About 24 hours before they sent me the email, which suggest that I need to pick a renewal plan (no chance).

I'm one of the "marginal" customers who stores well over the 150GB their new top-level service allows. And an extra $2 per month per extra 20GB would make the service far too expensive (cheaper to buy a new HDD every few months and store a full backup away from home).

I've got a year or so left on my package, so I'm in no rush to move. My concern is not that Mozy have given up on the unlimited package for a fixed price, others will follow.

Funny, you'd have thought EMC could afford some extra storage....

Alan Sugar's 'cockup braindead in call centre clueless' BT row

Now there's a problem

Most of the time, I'm quite happy to think of BT as the source of all that is dark and evil in the Universe, and whenever I'm in London, I shudder if I have to get too close to Barad Dur[1]. But now I find myself cast into doubt.

BT upset Alan Sugar. Can they *really* be all bad, in that case? I do hope that whoever got the "do you know who I am" treatment gave him the deserved response of "there's a shouty bloke here who doesn't know who he is".

[1] Or the BT Tower, as *they* pretend it's called

Horror AVG update ballsup bricks Windows 7

Pedantic question

"Both server and desktop versions of Windows 7 are affected by the bug."

Say what? Do you mean Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 are affected, or is there some new server OS Microsoft neglected to mention to me?

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

Yup, works for me...

I've had mine about a month now. Like El Reg, I went for the WiFi only version, and I've had no cause to regret that.

The key selling point for me is that Amazon are careful to charge slightly less for eBooks than the currently cheapest physical versions (if the book's in hardback, the eBook will be slightly cheaper than that, if it's in paperback, it'll be cheaper than that), which is where things went wrong with Watersone's tie-in with the Sony Reader. This tends to take books that are currently top-selling paperbacks below £3 for the Kindle version, which combined with instant delivery is a good deal.

Magazine subs work nicely, too - obviosuly this works better for text-focused mags (Asimov's and Analog work well for me), and are generally well-priced.

On a recent three-day business trip, I was happy to have the Kindle (size of one paperback) rather than the physical version of the latest Peter F Hamilton book (size of one brick), and have more to read after that without any extra weight.

O'Reilly eBooks transfer nicely over USB, too.

So far, there isn't anything I don't like about it.

Blighty suffers 'real shortage of serviceable conkers'

Talking of making things up...

You're quoting a story in the Sun which quotes permanent occupant of the Grauniad letters page Keith Flett?

Well, it might be a different Keith Flett, I suppose. Or either of the Keith Fletts might *really* be running a Campaign for Real Conkers. But I suspect "bonkers" might be more like it....

Just 5% of workers ever truly leave the office

There are lies, damned lies, statistics and surveys

Leaving aside the failure to round 5.9% to the nearest integer[1] this is all a bit silly.

40% of "workers" have tried in-flight WiFi? Really? You don't think that might be a little unlikely?

How about 40% of users of a service that's targeted at highly mobile workers who may be very keen on working from anywhere? Which is probably a much smaller proportion of the workforce, don't you think?

[1] Hint: try 6

How extreme is your pr0n? Depends on your lawyer

So they'll be after the boxing fans next, then?

That does tend to involve people "likely to be experiencing severe pain and risking injury as a result", doesn't it?

Or is that OK because it's all above the belt?

Or is there some definitive list of acceptable forms of pain and injury risk that we should know about?

Fear as motivator: why Intel acquired McAfee

It's a cunning plan (allegedly)

Obviously this is really part of a plan by McSplafee. They've grown bored with merely bricking machines at the OS level, having proved they can do it with ease and in huge numbers.

So now comes the new idea: by becoming part of Intel, they can work towards bricking machines at the hardware level!

A brilliant plan, assuming you work from the presumption that McGaffee is in fact the incarnation of Dilbert's Mordac, the preventer of Information Services. It's a great step forward for them.

Not sure what Intel get out of it, other than getting to sell you another new motherboard every time McZapee eats your chipset....

Police told terror ads too terrifying offensive

Before your time?

Wasn't Winston Kodogo the gentleman who kept being arrested in a Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch?

MS Office for Mac 2011 out in October

Not a good move...

As Wibble[1] says, removing the mail client from the Home version is not a Good Thing. MS have made a lot of fuss about (finally) producing a Mac mail client that's Time Machine friendly, then decline to offer it to anyone who isn't prepared to pay far too much.

I think I'll pass on this one.

[1] Good name. Wish I'd picked it first.