Posts by Joe K

3D handset hits streets of Japan

GRRR!!

So it doesn't have a 3D screen, or camera, or sound, just a fucking hologram casing?!?

Stupid stupid article.

DWP loses £2.5bn to fraud and errors

Yeah!

Great idea, they could give every household a million quid per year for a pretty much undetectable amount from the amount they blow on god knows what.

Though if everyones rich they stop going to work, and bye bye modern civlisation soon after.

Cat senses impending death

The scientific explanation

Cats eat souls.

I would have thought that was obvious, that this moggy is doing side-work for the Reaper.

Flash flaw may prompt Wii to 'hang'

Who the hell cares?!

This is news? That a duff site might crash your browser?

So just frigging reboot and don't go back to that site, hardly like its ripping your bank details.

"venerability" my arse. I notice that Symantec are sniffing around the lampost, obviously desperately hoping a virus comes out on the Wii/PS3 so they can flog some more crappy software.

Sony BMG sues DRM developer

Hmm, yeah

I doubt that Sony gave a flying fart about what would happen to peoples computers:

"So, this software we are offering you will stop people copying your CD's by embedding itself into the operating system, intercepting all CD commands, and performing various scanning and OS checks."

"All i heard there was "it'll stop copying", we'll take it!"

US man flies 193 miles in deckchair

Expect lots of copycats now

The pics look lovely, doesn't everyone want to sit on a comfortable deckchair, enjoying the most amazing view you'd see outside of a scary (and short) parachute jump?

See you in the skies.

Texas porn actress stole classmate's name

If this was a guy...

...he'd be a local legend, and love the attention.

Well, maybe not in America, where the first instinct is to sue for money.

Incidentally there is a guy at work called Ben D'ovur.

eBay chokes on iPhones

Enough with the iPhone stories

Seriously.

I know its big news for Apple, and its a tech story alright, but it means precisely squat to UK readers.

And the vast majority who don't give a shit about Apple, or the overhyped gadget itself will never buy one and be happy with the phones we have already, which play music just fine without iTunes thank you.

Oh, and have a useable camera. And are cheaper. 3G.

You get the idea.

Sony's 80GB PS3 pic points to rumble-ready controller

What i need to know is...

...what on earth is someone who's obviously never used a PS2 pad (WTF!) doing writing on a tech website.

And rumble was dropped because if it goes off the silicon leaf in the motion sensing chip goes mental and returns wild values back to the PS3.

Sure you could get around it by only using rumble in periods without motion, but the marketing droids convinced themselves that putting motion detecting in would make every game use it, Wii style.

Official: Sony to bring 80GB PS3 to USA

What?!

So, $500 for 60GB, $600 for 80GB?

In what world does an extra 20GB cost $100?!?!?

Especially since the drives are easily changable yourself, why not just buy the cheapest version and put in your own 300GB drive or something.

What are Sony smoking.

Skin cancer claims sun bed 'addict'

Tan-junkies

Theres a recent-ish picture of this woman in the paper, she is obviously on holiday(looks like spain), and is tanned a deep orangey brown.

Hmmm. She may, and i repeat MAY, have stopped using sunbeds twice a day at 21, but i bet she kept up her tan obession since then and continued to damage the already aged-DNA in her skin.

Kind of makes you wonder how many other ticking cancer-clocks there are out there.

These tan-shops only really spread about 10 years ago, will we see a huge increase as these girls with their damaged DNA reach a certain age?

Sky is 'silly' to whine about HD for All

Downloading is far better

"Err, you've not quite grasped this... no TV shows broadcast in 1080p, there simply isn't the bandwidth there to do so, so anything you download will be being upscaled to 1080p by your TV, this is NOT HD..."

Err, you haven't quite grasped it, yes there is a VAST amount of HD stuff now available to download, and not all of it "illegal".

And its true HD resolution, after all HD isn't that great a res compared to what monitors can run at.

A gig per 40min show, in HD with 5.1 sound, isn't that bad a stretch.

N-Gage games to equal PC games

What a ridiculous idea

How on earth could it have the same resolution?!

So they have a magical super hi-res screen on upcoming phones that fits a 32" high-def amount of pixels into a few inches?

Or we'll be playing a PC game in a 320x212 window?

I'll pass thanks.

Tiscali TV reaches for Sky channels

Ridiculous marketing crap

Lost and 24, and every other notable series (except The 4400) has finished and wont be back on the air for an age.

Even then, i'd sooner download it, in HD and advert free, than put up with The Simpsons Channel more than i have to.

EU chooses mobile TV standard

More like 3.5" vs 7" floppy

Both pointless nowadays. Yeah, i really want to pay so i can keep up with GMTV on the way to work, and whatever nonsense is showing at 5-6pm on the big 4 channels.

Oh wait, i'll just watch an film or something i encoded myself on my PSP or phone for free. At least that won't cut out every 10 seconds as i go through a tunnel.

New way in for Cisco engineers

Pointless

Agreed.

You pick up far more expertise from doing MS 70-291, and that gets you on the way to an MCSA.

But Cisco don't get any money that way, hence the new course we're expected to pay for.

How to counter premature optimisation

Nonsense article

As proved by the responses, there will always be a place for optimisation. I get the feeling that the article meant "dont sit there all day looking at code to see how it can be better, get on with some proper work"

If we all did that we'd be out of a job ;-)

Anyway, theres nothing better than optimising/bugfixing that teaches you how to code properly, and avoid mistakes and bad habits that others have made. Its a valuable learning tool, and can be fun and immensely satisfying work.

To say we should give it up because computers are fast now is laughable advice from someone a little too stunned by todays CPU power.

C of E blasts 'sacrilegious' Sony shoot-'em-up

Utter nonsense

So i guess the developers of The Getaway owe the whole of London a big wedge then.

I bet these money grabbing god-botherers haven't even seen a PS3, or know what it is. Ooh, they've heard that there is gunplay in their polygonal cathedral, gotta stop that.

The irony is that its only shooting aliens in an attempt to save mankind, not Doom-alike stripped bodies on stakes or anything.

eBay jewellery store fined $400,000 for shill bidding

"deny the claims"

Uh-huh, i'm sure Ebay knew very well that something was up, seeing as they LOG EVERYTHING and probably saw the same IP addresses bidding over and over again for months!

But no, they just wanted to avoid a court battle. how stupid do they think we are.

Paris Hilton dereassigned back to jail

As Nelson would say, "Hah hah!"

Oh and "Can we leave the entertainment news to the tabloid press and keep El Reg on topic with tech news please?"

Come on, we need SOME info about what goes on in the world of normals, at least so we can appear less obsessed with motherboards, java, and benchmarks :-D

Nintendo Wii widens sales gap with Sony PS3

Obvious

Until the PS3 hits the £299 barrier its nothing more than a VERY expensive gadget for the well-off geeks.

Even then, it won't make much of a mainstream splash till it goes to £199, which could be years away.

What a disaster.

Flaws galore in IE and Firefox

why no opera....

...cos Opera is a lot older than most people realise, and was never designed to emulate IE in any way, thankfully.

Shame Mozilla/Netscape lost sight of such a vital "feature".

Mozilla quashes Firefox JavaScript peril

Still beats IE

However, it does not beat the lovely, well programmed, and increasingly wonderful Opera.

Mouse-gestures, Widgets and speed-dial have enchanced my life 10978%!

Online games turn British man into hero

Idiot more like

What kind of moron takes on armed gunmen after some security guards cash?!

Its not your money, the security guards get danger pay for this kind of thing so can get shot should they feel the need, so screw em.

Plus he wasn't carrying any weaponry himself so its not like he sniped em or took em out with a cunning shotgun blast. Sounds more like this wannabe-hero had been watching too many Steven Segal classics.

Toshiba, Canon delay SED TV debut - again

Waste of time

2 years ago this sounded great, now with LCD prices plummetting per year, and the tech getting seriously brilliant (honestly, no-one can tell between a contrast ratio of LCD's 10000:1 and SED's theoretical million-to-one ratio) i can't see the point of bringing these to market now.

Not least because, as a totally new tech, they'll be crazy expensive for ages, by they time they become affordable we'll all be on OLED printable screens and HD mini-projectors.

Elgato Turbo.264 H.264 encoder

PSP users avoid

"a PSP setting that essentially matches the 320 x 240 iPod output"

Well thats totally useless, as the PSP has a resolution of 480x272 and free tools all over the net (3GP convertor, Videodora, PSPVideo9) can convert any videos to this pin-sharp, incredibly beautiful resolution.

Elgato add-on takes axe to Apple TV, PSP video conversion times

Well

You could try a new CPU, that accelerates ALL encoding, and everything bloody else!

Torrent overflows Opera

How many is that this year?

1 bug? And only if you are mental enough to use Opera to download your torrents instead of use a proper program like uTorrent?

I can live with that.

*hugs Opera*

One in 10 webpages scrutinized by Google were laced with malware

More of a browser issue surely?

Maybe the title should be "1 in 10 sites designed to exploit the billions of holes in Internet Explorer".

I've been using Opera for 6 years and refuse point-blank to ever use IE, subsequent scans with Ad-aware and other malware detectors regularly find sod-all.

Just one of the benefits of using a program thats designed to just render HTML and that, instead of being a door onto your whole system.

Google sets legal attack dogs on Dutch cybersquatter

Sounds like Google have a case

Obvious case of cyber-squatting here, though i bloody well doubt those numbers: "claims more than one million members who paid €100 each for the service"

Who on earth would pay 100 euros for a dating site subscription?!? And wouldn't that mean he had earned 100 million euros so could face off googles attack dogs and not have to move.

My bullshit detector is off the charts.