* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3212 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

Nokia crawls towards comeback with new phones announcement

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Happy

If the new batch of resuscitated Nokias is as good as past products, then I may get myself one...

Yo El Reg, do us a favour and review one such Nokia properly - you know, the usual, falling to the floor etc... we will appreciate it very much if you can be brutally honest and let us know what it is like :)

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Will these support the usual bevy of chat clients (eg telegram, whatscrap, allo etc)?

Cyanogen mods self away from full Android alternative

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

What with Samsung taking a triple whammy (two flaming flagships, washing machines and the Apple lawsuit) things may be not what they seem... it may be possible that other smartphone pushers may take a look at Cyanogen as alternative since Sammy won't be that active in the market for a while.

The IT market is a funny thing that is not easy to understand... especially when it comes to widdle wobots and iThings...

Yahoo! halts! email! forwarding! to! outside! email! addresses!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: good reason

Hope you forwarded the ne'er-do-wells a ton of some juicy goatse (or similar) pics...

Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

next step : play ZORK on your coffee machine while it's brewing a cuppa...

Samsung halts production of Galaxy Note 7

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Must be real fun being at Samsung - having to pay out some payola to Apple and this flaming hot battery issue...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Strongly agreed wrt removable batteries. It just is easier replacing a flattery when it's borked.

Waterproofing? Don't need that one as I never had a mishap with a phone and water.

BT Yahoo! customers: Why! can't! we! grrr! delete! our! webmail! accounts!?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And that is the problem with cloud email - you are at the mercy of somebody else & their purdy compoota device.

Hosting your own email will allow you to chop and change things as you see fit, but then you are responsible for MX records, backups, storage, spam filtering, and all those fun things...

Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

I still remember the heydays with fondness - the Z80 powering the Speccy...

Pay up or your data gets it, Fandroid

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Your fave Cryptolocker/ransomware variant on Android.

YAY.

...not.

When will the iOS version be released? I suppose the iOS version will be a damp squib as crApple is controlling their App store much better than Google/Android does.

At least we have the option to prevent silly .apk's from installing themselves - until the ne'er-do-wells find a way around that.

'My REPLACEMENT Samsung Galaxy Note 7 blew up on plane'

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Introducing a whole new generation...

What about "Crash and burn, baby"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuQ19ohlV7M

Reseller offered $$$ for old tech gear – then stiffed thousands with suddenly lower quotes

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

One of Simon's companies?

Never explain, never apologize: Microsoft silent on Outlook.com email server grief

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

format c:

install linux

Killer Hurricane Matthew threatens to wreck Kennedy Space Center

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Day After Tomorrow?

Google's Chrome cloaks Pirate Bay in red screen of malware death

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

"The latter is typified by the recent wave of irritating Android infection pages that nab the agent device type to throw fake banners claiming handsets are infected, often coupled with triggers that make phones vibrate."

Eh? Been there, got irritated by the dozens of popups etc... decided to rather use a linux VM than my phone.

If it get infected, just discard said VM and create a new one. Easier than trying to get rid of malware on your phone.

Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Had the same issue with a Nexus 2012. It was so slow as to be next to useless.

In despair I installed Cyanogenmod. And it was useful once more. No more slowdowns.

Seems the culprit is the Dalvik cache, if you don't clear it out, it will lead to slowdowns over time, especially with OS upgrades.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

SD card storage and Android

"Probably the fact that Google, in their infinite wisdom, have decreed that being able to save to a device's external SD card (and thereby do useful work on it) is somehow a "security risk". The fact that the Android OS even has such a setting is to my mind idiotic; but to have it enabled by default, and locked so that the end user cannot correct it (short of rooting the device), makes less sense than deliberately trying for a Darwin Award. You couldn't make it up."

And I heartily agree with you.

My current device, a Huawei T1-701U mediapad allows me the luxury to use my SD-card as storage, but if I upgrade my OS on that, I will not have that luxury anymore.

That is the reason why I prefer a device with SD-card capability as you can store your data on the card. Device crashed/bricked solid? No fear, pop out the SD-card, pop it into another device and it is business as usual.

SD card getting full? No sweat, procure a bigger one, copy all data over from old to new, and continue as usual.

Any iThing? Sorry, you're out of luck. It is either upgrading (expensively) to any unit with larger internal storage or employing cloud storage (with additional $$$ expenses)

Oh, by the way, I'm not in the mood to, neither do I have the funds available to, pay for extra $$$ expenses for cloud storage just to enable me to store more private documents/pictures/etc in the cloud (aka somebody else's computer). Any beancounter worth his salt will tell you that unnecessary overheads will continue to eat at your bottom line.

So, give me a device with the ability to put all my apps and data on SD card, and I will use that product/device for a long time, thankyouverymuch.

My Nest smoke alarm was great … right up to the point it went nuts

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Nah, just give me dumb devices, very little that can go wrong.

Granted, I still have to manually switch my lights on/off etc, but what the hey, it is far better than having some electronic device go bonkers in the middle of the night...

One-way Martian ticket: Pick passengers for Musk's first Mars pioneer squad

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Re: Larry Ellison and Steve Balmer

Will there be a shipment of four-legged office furniture (aka chairs) also be sent with?

Dublin shopkeeper catches forecourt fouler with his pants down

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Plaashuis vol k@k?

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

So glad sysadmin hell is over for me from this day on forward.

Have fun, guys!

ZX Spectrum Vega+ will ship on time, developer claims amid doubts

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Hehehe.

Lekker soos 'n cracker! :)

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Hope we can also get some of those things here in South Africa...

Pokemon NO! Hospital demands ban on virtual creatures after addicts invade private wards

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

How long before a serious accident occur on a freeway/highway due to somebody having the pokemon app open and got a notification of a new and rare pokemon?

Surely this will rank with vulnerable/pwned IoT spamming/nuking other sites...

Not waiting with bated breath for accidents of this kind to happen.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Place a couple of these over the grand canyon, that'll sort them out quick enough.

WAN, bam, thank you... oh @£$%. We've gone dead. Drop the burger. RUUUUUN!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Will probably never have the experience of working with dual firewalls and the such, but I still note the lessons learnt here.

Because you never know when you'll need an itty-bitty bit of knowledge that may save the company a lot of $$$.

Our Windows windows will be resizable, soooon, vows Microsoft

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Windows 10 Nightmare

I'm using Classic Shell to get rid of the sloppy UI on Win8 and upwards.

However it is not a silver bullet as there are some apps that insists on using the full screen.

I also said the same thing - mobile devices and desktops/laptops are NOT equal, what will work for the one will NOT work for the other.

Most people will still prefer traditional input methods (mouse+keyboard), others will use VR headsets, others will fondle their devices and so on... Lumping them all together and forcing them to use one UI and the such is bound to piss off a lot of users.

Sad reality: Look, no one's going to patch their insecure IoT gear

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Viva the Fruity Revolution

Well said.

I prefer to stick all my things behind a good firewall. Or avoid things that leak security settings and information (like IoT doorknobs or whatever is used for security).

It does not make sense to me to utilize something that can be hacked easily to gain entry to my house. Nah, I'll prefer to be old school and use a physical lock with a physical key. After all, these don't need electrical power to operate, will survive an EMP, and is not so easily hacked/bypassed if you use the right combination of hardware.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

This just sucks.

South Australian mega-storm blacks out whole state

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Joke

eat beans, fart in a jar, and use the resultant farts to power a genny

Samsung: And for my next trick – exploding WASHING MACHINES

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Happy

Ahh...

Some IT techs/sysadmins may recall that some (if not all) Samsung IDE CD-Rom/DVD-Rom drives tend to have a high failure rate. This was before the death of IDE/PATA.

We own a Samsung top loader, can't remember when we bought it, but it's no more than 3 or 4 years old. I'll have to go online and check the particulars for this washing machine, then donate it to one of our useless politicians should it be one of those exploding jobbies.

Seems Samsung's gotten too big for their britches and need to be taken down a few notches.

Oh Snap! How intelligent people make themselves stupid for Snapchat

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Had it installed to chat with a friend in Norway.

Can't see the use of it, when Whatsapp/Telegram can let you share pictures and spew verbal diarrhea at the same time should you want to do so.

Uninstalled it anyway, was just hogging space on my phablet.

Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Can we send a couple of oxygen thieves with? Chances are they have surplus oxygen stored in their bodies (after stealing that much oxygen over the years) so they will be able to give a breath of fresh air to their fellow colonists.

Yahoo! Mail! down?! Great! timing! as! more! US! senators! dogpile! hacked! web! giant!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Wife's got a Yahoo! account... but I'm sticking to Gmail.

Maybe it's time to migrate her off her Yahoo...

That's cold: This is how our boss told us our jobs are at risk, staffers claim

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Current company is hitting a rough stretch what with the Sales team making all sorts of futtups.

Decided that this sort of thing is not for me as I've been struggling financially for more than three years now, and ramped up my job hunting.

I got contacted, went for the interview and all that, got the job. When handing in my resignation, manglement offered a counteroffer twice - which I declined.

Too little, too late. And I'm glad to be out of there, don't want to get a "pink slip" due to the hard work and diligence of the Sales team...

TBH it was either remain with the company, and be unsure about my job future, or bailing out when offered a new job... I took the latter.

EFF dinks HP Inc finks in rinky-dink ink stink

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

We own a multifunction HP Laserjet Color printer.

Which makes me wonder how long this printer will remain exempt from HP's policies. Luckily I haven't updated its firmware in ages, and will block firmware updates to this printer as I don't trust HP any more.

R2D2 delivery robots to scurry through the streets of San Francisco

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Rope in the BOFH to make them more hardened and secured.

Then send them off to go and bother spamlords.

And! it! begins! Yahoo! sued! over! ultra-hack! of! 500m! accounts!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Do you Yahoo! or not?

Heathrow airport and stock exchange throw mystery BSODs

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Bonus points for OS/2's screen of death...

High rear end winds cause F-35A ground engine fire

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Anybody got some marshmallows?

Google rushes in where Akamai fears to tread, shields Krebs after world's-worst DDoS

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Rise of the IoT

Here's how to see Tim Cook or SatNad strut their starkers stuff

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

yecch

what has been seen, cannot be unseen...

Windows 10 backlash: Which? demands compo for forced upgrades

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

I did two Win10 upgrades.

One was on a Lenovo T550 laptop. Win10 worked, but there were irritations like USB working selectively and the dreadful UI.

The UI was sorted by Classic Shell, but eventually I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows 8.1

The other was on an HP Elite Small form factor desktop - it is working 100% still. Installed Classic Shell as well. No issues so far.

WTF ... makes mobile phone batteries explode?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Sooner or later they will announce something that will replace LiOn flatteries with, and which will be touted as safer and have better fault-tolerance ...

lather, rinse, repeat.

My God, I've got nothing on! Microsoft's $200m Wunderlist is down

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Cloud computing. Somebody else's computer, in reality. And subject to the whims of a group of people who may or may not be paid properly. .

Naaaah, I'll rather take my chances with a pencil and paper.

She cannae take it, Captain Kirk! USS Zumwalt breaks down

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

looks more like a submarine than a boat to me...

Lethal 4-hour-erection-causing spiders spill out of bunch of ASDA bananas

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

So how long will those spiders be able to live outside their natural habitat?

Will US border officials demand social network handles from visitors?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Code a bot to post random nonsense to tw*tter and other social media sites, then produce the names of said handles used on said social media sites.

Oh wait... chances are it will post something offensive. So scratch that then.

Indefatigable WikiBots keep Wikipedia battles going long after humans give up and go home

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

write a bot to do the usual rm -rf * ?