Posts by banjomike

Virgin Media's SPAM-AGEDDON 'fix' silences mailboxes

New feature, random message selection

There is a thread on the Virgin forum which has a post from a Virgin person that basically says that the new super-crappy email system is the same system that Virgin and Liberty Global use in-house. If they are happy to use such an inferior product on a daily basis then there is probably zero chance of the many bugs getting removed.

My favorite bug is the one in webmail that causes a message to be selected, more-or-less at random, when the scrollbar is moved in the message window. If you are lucky it selects one in the visible part of the folder so you can unselect it. If you are UNlucky then it selects one that you cannot see so when you delete or move another message the one that was selected by the system will also move or be deleted.

Buying PCs, any boxes, servers, software? Based in UK? ACT NOW

hanging in the balance ??

The Bank of England interest rate rise is hardly hanging in the balance. The 'bankers' seem to have forgotten how to do anything. If the only thing protecting the UK from price rises in computer hardware & software (or anything else) then we are totally stuffed.

Windows 7 MARKED for DEATH by Microsoft as of NOW

No new features for Windows 7...

So what was the LAST new feature that they added to Windows 7?

Blind justice: Google lawsuit silences elected state prosecutor

Google are power-crazed control freaks

I am SO shocked...

Does anyone still believe in "Don't be evil"?

‘For the love of Pete, America, learn about decent chocolate’

Don't forget the fruitcake...

...Americans are so bad at making anything that resembles a fruitcake that THEY make jokes about it. Tastes like wallboard and looks like housebricks. I agree that Hersheys and the rest are dire. And the cinnamon chewing gum...

Bitcasa bins $10-a-month Infinite storage offer

Bitcasa are tweaking the membership details

Like Sugarsync they are forgetting when people joined up. I've had an account for years but when you go through their "A Better Bitcasa" upgrade it changes your joining date to 'today'.

Note: they say "Important: you must complete this process by 11-15-2014 or your account and all un-transferred files will be deleted."

You have been warned.

Chipmaker FTDI bricking counterfeit kit

All FTDI needed to do...

was have their drivers ignore the 'illegal' kit, not brick it. BUT they would not have got all this free publicity.

Our Vultures peck at new Doctor Who: Exterminate or, er ... carrion?

Capaldi cannot be the worst Doctor

that must be Sylvester McCoy.

POISON PI sniffs WiFi from your mail room, goes on rampage

Price?

The Raspberry and the Awus051NH (not HN spelling mistake) will set you back £50-ish and that is a LOT of rechargeable batteries even if the recharger is 'repurposed'.

I wonder if a WiFi jammer in the postroom would block it?

Shellshock: 'Larger scale attack' on its way, warn securo-bods

Some of the suspicious activity seems to be originating from Russia.

Well, that is a shock...

EE buys 58 Phones 4u stores for £2.5m after picking over carcass

No surprise...

As already said here

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/09/20/vodafone_scoops_up_140_phones_4u_stores_from_troubled_retailer/#c_2305332

SCREW YOU, Russia! NASA lobs $6.8bn at Boeing AND SpaceX to run space station taxis

Re: @Yet Another Anonymous coward safety standards as high as those set for the space shuttle...

"not so much the result of technological or engineering failures, but of administrator-failures"

No argument there but it is still a shitty safety record. I certainly never mentioned "technological or engineering" but safety includes everything.

safety standards as high as those set for the space shuttle...

...right. 135 launches and 14 deaths. More than 1 death per 10 launches. Very high standards.

Vodafone to buy 140 Phones 4u stores from stricken retailer

NOW it makes sense...

Vodaphone (and EE) destroy Phones 4u by cancelling contracts then pick up a load of shops on the cheap. Now let us see if EE buy some...

Weekend reads: A new Poirot, drug-fuelled Champagne Supernovas and The Establishment

Re: Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx said it best: "The covers of this book are too far apart."

Good quote but not Groucho unless he said it when he was nine years old (date of earliest attribution)

Death on the Nile, directed by Michael Bay

I've started to read Monogram Murders but from the first page it just doesn't work. It reads like a novel based on a David Suchet episode written by someone who had never read Agatha Christie.

Europe prepares to INVADE comet: Rosetta landing site chosen

in case conditions change...

what, do they mean if it rains or something?

Phones 4u slips into administration after EE cuts ties with Brit mobe retailer

They are making profits of over £100m...

EE and Vodaphone want that £100m...

Drag queens: Oh, don't be so bitchy, Facebook! Let us use our stage names

Facebook have backed down in the past

Salman Rushdie was being forced to use "Ahmed Rushdie" but they eventually backed down after a very public campaign. A social context is one thing but this is stupid. Some people (not me, I won't use Facebook for anything) might go to Facebook to follow the doings of a celeb but they will need to know birthnames in order to find them... So, film director J.J. Abrams is Jeffrey Abrams, golfer Bubba Watson is Gerry Watson, if John Wayne was still around he would be Marion Morrison. That would have gone down well...

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

Re: I'm a Nespresso fan

Two of the reasons I like the Nespresso system are the variety of flavours that are available and the fact that the capsules are completely airtight and last for years (officially 12 months but I accidently left a few in a box for an extra year and they tasted almost exactly the same ie. very nice). I love fresh-ground coffee but as an idle person I would not use it before it went off and I would get tired of the same flavour each time. Variety rules, Yay.

I'm a Nespresso fan

Pros - straightforward to use, fast, excellent taste, large variety of coffees (21 at the moment) and all are pretty good. Looks good in the kitchen. Aluminium capsules are collected & recycled for free by Nespresso.

Cons - noisy.

Sonos AXES support for Apple's iOS4 and 5

Re: Apple recently added back support for old apps on App Store...

Sometimes the last available version is the bug infested version that won't even load properly.

Re: Not so rare.

No, same problem. The end result of their update & dropping IOS 5+6 was that no device running anything prior to IOS 7 will work. Period.

Not so rare.

IOS developers regularly drop support for older versions of IOS without bothering to tell their users. At least Sonos tell you before you upgrade. The cloud idiots at Barracuda/Copy dropped support for anything before IOS 7 with no prior warning at all. The itunes webpage for the app was claiming support for IOS 5 for days after the update was released. It was made into a much larger problem by the fact that the final version which support IOS 5 was so full of bugs and crap code that it simply will not load. When the itunes system offers to install 'the last version your ancient hardware supports' it will install a completely duff version. I asked Copy about this and they just came out with the traditional trite nonsense about not being able to support all OS versions forever. Idiots. They don't need to support all OS versions forever, all they need to do is warn people BEFORE they drop support NOT AFTER.

Postscript: since I can no longer use Copy on ONE of my devices I won't be renewing my contract for ANY of my devices... How much would it have cost Barracuda to add a line to the update page saying "No longer supports anything prior to IOS 7" ????

Space station 'nauts will use URINE-FUELLED ESPRESSO MACHINE

They must be expecting trouble...

400 bar is 5800 pounds per square inch. Nespresso go up to 19 bar (with metal pipes).

Women are too expensive to draw and code – Ubisoft

double the visual assets

Well, I should hope so...

Poison PDF pusher released to public

Microsoft blocked it FOUR YEARS ago...

Are there any anti-virus packages which don't block it?

World's first ever Nobel Prize winning integrated circuit to be auctioned

A link to a page with piccies

http://www.christies.com/presscenter/pdf/2014/release_microchip_june2014.pdf

EBay, you keep using the word 'SECURITY'. I do not think it means what you think it means

no indication of INCREASED fraudulent account activity on eBay

I love that phrasing.

GM reveals how much you'll pay to turn your car into a rolling 4G LTE Wi-Fi hotspot

send more than 10,000 emails...

...Oh great, a mobile spammer.

Apple’s Mac turns 30: How Steve Jobs’ baby took its first steps

Re: A Mac article with no mention of Xerox or PARC...

The words of Steve Jobs from the Isaacson book after his umpteenth visit to Xerox PARC.

'The Smalltalk demonstration showed three amazing features. One was how computers could be networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked. But Jobs and his team paid little attention to these attributes because they were so amazed by the third feature, the graphical interface that was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”'

ALSO:

'The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with pride.'

AND:

'bs and his engineers significantly improved the graphical interface ideas they saw at Xerox PARC, and then were able to implement them in ways that Xerox never could accomplish. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons, was complicated, cost $300 apiece, and didn’t roll around smoothly; a few days after his second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial design firm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that he wanted a simple single-button model that cost $15, “and I want to be able to use it on Formica and my blue jeans.” Hovey complied.'

A Mac article with no mention of Xerox or PARC...

Difficult, I would have thought, since Apple acquired their GUI and mouse stuff from there.

Almost everyone read the Verizon v FCC net neutrality verdict WRONG

...BT spend a fortune on buying football rights and giving it away with broadband...

Yes, giving it with their broadband but they have also put up the price of landlines, calls, and for the first time in years they have started to charge for Caller ID. I use BT for landline not for broadband or TV so the end result for me is higher prices but no advantages so I don't see that the market has been made healthier, just more expensive.

Think your brilliant app idea will earn some big bucks? HAH. You fool

make less than $1,250 a day...

I wish...

Furtive ebook readers push Hitler's Mein Kampf up the charts

Spock Must Die is not a novelisation

A novelisation would be a book based (maybe loosely) on the plot of a film or TV episode. Spock Must Die is based upon nothing like that and is not a bad tale if you can ignore the Trek characters not behaving quite 'right'.

BT 118 phone number fee howler lands telco giant with £225k fine

Calls to 118 500/404 cost 59p per call plus £2.39 per minute

That is £2.98 per enquiry

You're fired: Lord Sugar offloads faded PC builder Viglen to XMA

Don't compare Viglen with the Amstrad PC

Viglen did make a PC that behaved, most of the time, as a PC should behave. The Amstrad PC was just crap. Unreliable, slow, pure pure crap. It had problems running many standard packages (dBase, Supercalc) and needed its own version of Wordstar (Wordstar 1512 for the Amstrad PC1512). Viglen I might miss, Amstrad games machines I will certainly miss. Amstrad PC I was glad to see the back of.

App to manage Android app permissions

It isn't obvious how much it costs for the full version.

the free version will tell you what is spying but you need the paid version to block it. This is from their FAQ:

How much does SnoopWall cost?

In order to meet the differing needs of individuals, families, businesses and other organizations, SnoopWall is licensed on an monthly or annual basis per device.

Anyone see a price anywhere?

Popular app gets Apple acquisition for founder

Apple wouldn't tell the WSJ what plans it has for the acquisition.

Do you really need to ask? How many of their acquisitions are still available now?

Want Google to erase your data? Just wait for it to kill off one of its apps

...we’ve decided to discontinue Bump and Flock...

...because Google paid us to.

El Reg's contraptions confessional no.5: The Sinclair Sovereign

Casio FX-502P Programmable

In 1977 I bought a Casio FX-502P. I still use it daily and it is on its fifth set of batteries in 36 years. Georgeous calculator, programmable (not in BASIC), with printer and external storage!!. Extremely usable and fast unlike some of the Sinclair models where you could actually watch the display changing while it calculating the answer.

Get lost, fanbois: Nokia pulls HERE Maps from Apple's App Store

Re: "old faithful Google Maps" on Android is becoming MUCH less useful

Not round here. If I zoom to display approx 10 miles of local towns, 'ok maps', and put the phone into airplane mode (simulating loss of signal) then zoom into a town all I get is a grey line where a road or building is but no names or numbers or colours and no voice. It used to download everything.

"old faithful Google Maps" on Android is becoming MUCH less useful

Google maps on IOS might get good reviews but on Android (including Google's own devices!) it is now fairly useless if you don't have an unbroken 3G/Wifi signal for the entire length of your journey since it no longer lets you store a section of maps offline. Once it loses a signal it also regularly forgets where you were going and has to be reset. Wonderful. Even street view is less useful than it used to be. The Apple Maps mob must be happy.

And don't even mention TomTom on Android. Look at these stats https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tomtom.ukireland&hl=en

Proposed California law demands anti-theft 'kill switch' in all smartphones

What happened last time?

I seem to remember that this was going to happen years ago, report the phone stolen and 'they' kill it.

Sugarsync add to the fails of cloud storage

RSPCA???

What gets me is that is that I've happily been using SugarSync for nearly three years with no problems until you think you are using a 'safe' service and then suddenly they take it away. BT did the exact same thing with their free service. Seems like any cloud backup needs a cloud backup of its own. There is plenty of free space around, I have over 120GB lying around the cloud but none of it is reliable.

The Sugarsync paid option is $74.99 after the first (special price) year.

Sugarsync add to the fails of cloud storage

Sugarsync say "beginning on February 8th, 2014 we will transition to a paid service. In order to continue using SugarSync you will need to upgrade your account."

Nice. Another example of a company talking up the idea of free storage UNTIL they decide to take it away (along with your data) unless you pay for it. Very nice.

Our irony meter exploded: Apple moans ebook price-fixing watchdog is too EXPENSIVE

seems slippery at best...

from a company that prides itself on not paying taxes. Hypocrites.

BT Sport scores own goal with £897m Champions League footie rights deal

This explains BT starting to charge for Caller ID

They need the money for crap.

Oracle's nemesis MariaDB releases sleekest seal yet to beta

...doesn't affect our Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud SQL offering for developers...

Yet

Shiny doodad blog Engadget clubbed with Reddit banhammer

Don’t try to game the system...

Don't call it "gaming the system". It is cheating. It is lying. It is fraud.