Posts by DJV

Single complaint sparks police raid and total ban on rental movie

And, if not that...

...then maybe fined for wasting police time (and therefore taxpayers money).

Gates, Woz, and the last 2,000 years of computing

@Lord Lien

Sinclair BASIC was arguably better when compared to the C64 (I have to POKE WHAT to get hi-res graphics?!?!) but reliability-wise they were far inferior. I should know, at the time I was working in an electronics repair shop and the number of dead Spectrums being returned around Christmas 1983 was astounding.

I also bought a Sinclair Cambridge calculator in the early 1970s (the prebuilt version, not the kit). It lasted less than 2 years before it popped its clogs, however I've still got a Commodore SR-1800 scientific calculator from a year or two later (1975, if memory serves) - I stuck some batteries in it just yesterday (first time in about 5 years) to see if it still worked - it did!

Shaun the Sheep shorts to lure kids to Nintendo 3DS

dip in, dip out appeal?

Shirley, that's SHEEP dip in.....

.

.

Anyway, Shaun the Sheep is wasted on kids - the number of in-jokes and references to films (e,g, Psycho, Close Encounters, Saturday Night Fever, Airplane) and other TV programmes (e.g. Fawlty Towers, Futurama) are way above most kids' comprehension!

Gov will spend £400k to destroy ID card data

£400,000?

Blimey - I'd do it for half that!

Europe bites Hungary over media and internet censorship

Competent Minister?

But, Shirley, that's an oxymoron?

Sony Ericsson sues over Clearwire swirl

That's marbleous!

My cats occasionally chase marbles around my house - I'm sure some of the marbles look EXACTLY like both of those logos. Does that mean I (or possibly my cats or maybe even the marble manufacturer) can sue both Sony Ericsson AND Clearwire over this?

I off to phone my lawyer...

Sarko to use G8 presidency to promote net regulation

Does not compute!

"How do you respond to the problem of terrorism, of paedophilia, to subjects such as the right to be forgotten?"

Just asking... but what happens when the terrorists and paedophiles ask for their right to be forgotten? Will Sarky's brain throw a "does not compute" wobbly and explode? Now THAT would probably be a good result!

Instant storage cloud: just add Atmos

Sontar-HAH

cough cough

White iPhone inbound for spring of 2011

About time!

All those ceiling cats have been jealous of their basement buddies!!

'ALIEN' LIFE FOUND in California

XKCD joke about it...

http://xkcd.com/829/

Ballmer pitches PC as smartest device on planet

Smartest? Which planet?

Well, if the only 2 things on a planet were a PC and Ballmer then I'd definitely agree that the PC would be the smartest out of the two.

Megaphone because that's what Ballmer reminds me of...

Microsoft's IE9 'nearly finished'

March?

Blimey, Google will have issued at least 7 new versions of Chrome before then!

Verizon: we like Microsoft, but not Windows Phone 7

Breaking News...

...Lowell McAdam injured in mysterious accident involving a chair.

POD giveth: Is factory-built HPC the future?

POD?

Are Apple aware of this?

Verizon courts Star Wars set with Droid R2-D2

R2D2?

Look more like R2D2 vs Steam Roller and the droid lost...

LinkedIn Zeus spam run targets prospective business marks

I've seen 2 or 3...

But immediately saw they were fake when I noticed that what they linked to wasn't linkedin (I use MailWasher which previews emails and shows the link and then what that link really links to).

Google's Microsoft browser outlives Wave nonsense

@Alastair 7

Agreed, Alastair. I'm a web site developer too and have just spent the morning attempting to slap IE (prior to 9) into place due to its stupid non-standard rendering. If this site allowed me to upvote your post more than once I would have done it a thousand times! I would have also DOWNvoted clueless idiot Mike OReilly's post a million times too.

So far, IE9 *seems* to render things properly but I'm still waiting to discover the big elephant in the browser that I'm sure is lurking in there somewhere...

SCO gets sale approval

Get in the queue...

that is all

PC World, Currys to offer cash for clunkers

Fantasic!

I've got an old laptop that runs DOS and can just about run Windows 95. Hey, I can get £50 off a new PC!

Oh wait...

...a PC from PC World or Currys...

...knew there would be a downside.

Boffins baffled by 'magnetar': Ought to be black hole, but isn't

But...

...do any Cheela live on them?

(obscure SF reference - go google it)

Voting reform finally on the agenda

Rushing

Well, Labour know all about rushing things through parliament - a prime example being the hated Digital Economy Bill.

I for one would like to see the end of First past the Post asap - not sure yet if AV or PR is the better route, though...

Android PHP option planned for Javaphobes

Androd(sic) Scripting Environment

Good job they hadn't originally named it the Android Rapid Scripting Environment

iPhone 4 developers get software update, but will it fix death grip?

Retrieved from the black box...

Co-pilot: Hey, aren't we about to hit that mountain?

Pilot: Nope, the iAltimeter says we're way higher than that peak.

Co-pilot (looking UP at top of mountain): Oh yeah. My bad.

Plane: Crunch.

Microsoft drops Win7 deadline for XP and Vista holdouts

Downgrade to Vista?!?!?!

Seriously? There are people who would willingly downgrade from W7 to Vista? I can understand downgrading to XP but... VISTA???? Are they completely bonkers?

Government lunatic magnet goes live

Ex Amiga developers?

Love the fact that when I just looked at one of the topics it fell over with:

Error 503 Service Unavailable

Service Unavailable

Guru Meditation:

XID: 0

Varnish cache server

Them ex-Amiga developers get everywhere!

Secret ancient code, basis of all modern civilisation, cracked

Opera 10.54

Bug is still present in Opera 10.54 - just so you know,

Moz tweaks extension crash controls in Firefox

Or it could be your profile

I've updated to 3.6.6 after 3.6.4 and haven't seen a single hang as yet. Sometimes things in the profile get corrupted which can cause the same effects. There are plenty of web sites that explain how to add a new profile to Firefox - google it...

However, before you do that, it seems to me that you haven't actually proved it's not a plug-in as yet. Have you tried disabling ALL your plug-ins to see if that fixes things? If it does then re-enable the plug-ins one by one until the hanging starts happening again. If you can isolate it to just one plug-in then please tell the author (after making sure you really are using the latest version of that plug-in).

Hope that helps.

Microsoft releases accelerated, canvas-ized IE9 preview

Funny?

Are MS are doing their best to piss of Opera? If you run the Amazon Shelf demo - in most browsers it says which browser is running in the bottom left hand corner. For Opera though it says "Other browser" - or are they just reading the user agent string wrong?

Dixons renames itself Dixons

"Pig" + "lipstick"

that is all...

Tom Stoppard: Tech is destroying the written word

Agreed

Except that a good proportion of the other half don't even understand what the red wiggly line actually means and carry on regardless "no mater wot there speling iz liek!" Of course, I blame icanhascheezburger.com

NASA: Civilization will end in 2013 (possibly)

Me too!

There - I've always wanted to post a "me too"

Humanity evolved to cope with 30°C+ heat, says prof

Obese people

"But if all this is really true then we should send all obese people to the great rift valley and get them endurance running. If they survive then our bodies are well adapted.."

Yeah, but don't send 'em there all at once - else it would no longer be a valley - they would fill it to the brim and turn it into a saturated fat marsh.

Indeed!

And if we'd originated in Blighty instead of Kenya we'd probably all be rather hairy and have gills.

Canonical rejigs Ubuntu support services

Ubuntu Advantage

At least they didn't call it Ubuntu *Genuine* Advantage...

(shudder)

Microsoft pulls plug on search bribery machine

Ballmer insists that one day, it will turn black

Yeah, on the day the sun turns nova and burns the Earth to a crisp.

Windows 3.0 turns 20

We won't mention Windows Millennium Edition (ME) nor Windows Vista

Err, just thought I'd mention that the sentence where you say you weren't going to mention certain things became rather self-defeating in that you, er, mentioned the things in the process of trying not mentioning them...

...or something like that.

I'm confused now and have to go lie down.

Ball lightning is all in the mind, say Austrian physicists

You could be right!

Just recently I've seen politicians apparently talking sense! What is the world coming to?!

Clegg promises liberties restoration

Shirley, something wrong here?

This can't be right - he's a politician and he seems to be talking sense. Am I really awake?

Boffins snare swollen 'excited giant' in forcefield prison

What?

Well, they may have tickled a Rubidium atom with laser beams and ensnared it in a crate made of interfering laser beams built by seizing the atom's embulgenated outer valence shell using a ponderomotive force field. But did they remember to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow at the same time? Enquiring minds want to know....

The internet, as imagined in 1965

"No more newspapers as we know them?"

I think that is already true - back in 1964 the newspapers of the day tended to carry ACTUAL NEWS, not the biased, soap-orientated, media-obsessed crap that gets churned out today.

But I live in hope that Murdoch's days must surely be numbered - especially with the paywalls he is now putting up.

Copyright law must be relaxed, says new group

Bloody hell!!!

Someone's talking some sense - quick, lock them up before they start infecting and influencing the idiots in power.

</sarcasm>

Lost mental hospital memory stick had health records

(nt)

"The unit treats patients with severe mental health problems."

Sounds like they employ a few of them as well!

BOFH: On the couch

Best this year!

As above

Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android

Hopefully...

...someone anonymous at one of the "shafted" companies like HTC will post info onto Wikileaks about some of these MS patents involved in these deals. It would be an interesting show if we find that some of their "patents" only cover "obvious" stuff that should never have been allowed to be patented in the first place.

Murdoch newswire sues over 'hot news'

Copy n paste

Tut, tut. When will they learn...

..what they should have done was copy, EDIT SLIGHTLY and paste...

Reverse-engineering artist busts face detection tech

I wonder how...

... Dean and Nigel would do:

www.deanandnigel.co.uk

'Gossips' say Apple will acquire ARM

In a word....

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

MS coughs to Hotmail block

Laugh

"Microsoft is dedicated to providing the most trusted and protected consumer experience on the web," said a Redmond COMEDIAN.

There, I corrected it for you.

Brits still getting bull from broadband providers

About bloody time!

ISPs have been getting away with lies about speed for far too long.

Aussie smoko-proofing drug prevents ill effects of cigs

42

"Australian boffins have developed a treatment which allows mice to smoke cigarettes without the usual negative health consequences."

That almost sounds like the mice had a choice, doesn't it! Of course, as we all know, what the mice were REALLY doing was experimenting on us instead (and the playing dead bit at the end was just because they'd gone back to their own dimension to consult Deep Thought).

Mine's the one with "Don't Panic" written in large friendly letters on the back.