Posts by bill 36

Apple's iPhone bonk to 'Pay' app launches on Monday

Can't see it

It's bad enough storing your whole life in your wallet. I can't see many taking the ultimate step to transfer that risk to a mobile phone.

But you never know.

Doctor Zuck, I'm so poorly right now! Facebook examines healthcare biz: report

Time to jump ship

I'm going to have a huge smile on my face when Facebook goes titsup.

I think it has a fatal disease with no known cure!!

CONSUMERISM IS PAST ITS SELL-BY DATE: Die now, pay later

Thats the point!

Petrol has become the enabler that allows you to "commute" to work which you have to pay for.

Its not so long ago that most workers either walked to work or used public transport.

Great article.

Want to see the back of fossil fuels? Calm down, hippies. CAPITALISM has an answer

Re: Tim's hopes for solar and wind are doomed

Thats because so many have been claimed by the suicide bombers who are allocated a given number by the Jihadist Committee depending on which energy supply they are fighting to control.

53 is my favourite!

JINGS! Microsoft Bing called Scots indyref RIGHT!

yes Khaptain

but out of that lot, which ones are energy self sufficient and which ones are laundering the riches of the few?

And Croatia is already an EU member, so that leaves a few basket cases, does it not?

For all of its failings, the EU is still a better bet to my mind. And please note, there are no other sabres being rattled by a party in government, anywhere in Europe, that openly declares that if they win the next election they will have a referendum on EU membership.

I firmly believe that's the wrong choice for England.

As someone else has pointed out, the elephant in the room is Germany but whats not to like about the way that they run their economy?

In any case, the UK and Europe were doing well before the big banks, not only in Scotland, fucked up the worlds economy.

If i had a vote

I'd vote yes, only if there was a promise to adopt the euro and become a fully integrated member of the EU.

The world is too small for Nationalism and small countries to stand apart.

Just for the record, i think England should do the same.

City hidden beneath England's Stonehenge had HUMAN ABATTOIR. And a pub

the report

So, i finally got to ask the question last night...in the boozer.

The verbatim reply was "that's show business. you have to sell news somehow".

So there you have it. It made me laugh.

Re: what i would like to know

He wasn't there.

I will report back but when is another matter.

what i would like to know

is

"All in all, researchers found 17 previously undiscovered religious monuments"

How do they know that?

They were just as likely to have been pagan cannibals for all we know.

But since one of the guys who works for the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and who did the scans at Stonehenge, drinks in my local bar, i'll ask him tonight.

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

Re: The BBC is really starting to piss me off.

so we'll have to agree to disagree.

The very name "Television without Frontiers" implies that broadcasts are freely available across member states. But then it depends from which angle you read this. Yes it's to prevent member states blocking transmissions, but unfortunately, the BBC has chosen to restrict the satellite pattern making it nigh on impossible in most of europe to receive these broadcasts and i'm quite sure thats not what was intended by the directive.

But lets look at it another way. The BBC's commercial arm flogs BBC entertainment channels to most of the european cable companies. Allowing FTA channels on Astra in Europe would and did severely undermine that business. The BBC justifies that move by citing copyright and contract infringement. Crap! BBC news on the other hand is freely available everywhere. What a surprise.

I don't see any FTA restriction over satellite from any other EU countries.

Re: The BBC is really starting to piss me off.

Yes indeed but what am i misunderstanding?

Prior to January 2014, Astra 2D was available across Europe with a big enough dish. ( up to 1.5M) This carried not only Freesat but the Sky channels as well.

Come January 2014, actually the opening day of the winter olympics in Sochi. Astra 2E was brought into operation and instantly and deliberately restricted reception across most of mainland Europe. Under the guise of "it will aid reception in the far north"

Are you telling me that this is not "taking action to restrict the availability of programmes from other member states" ?

Bullshit!

Re: The BBC is really starting to piss me off.

Thats not the only way.

This works well outside of the UK https://adtelly.tv/chrome-extension/ and gives you access to BBC & ITV as well as iplayer.

F.T.V is available as an android app and is available in XBMC which gives you access to more content that you can shake a stick at. Much of it in high quality.

But this is not the real problem. The BBC and others ( in Europe) are actively trying to restrict their content, claiming copyright issues and this flies in the face of EU broadcasting directives.

You can read about it here and i direct you to the paragraph headed General Principle.

http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/audiovisual_and_media/l24101_en.htm

As for being able to watch UK FTA channels in Europe, Astra2 cut off most of Europe in January when they fired up the new Astra 2E sat and thereby cut off Freesat to most of mainland Europe.

In my opinion, totally disregarding the EU directives.

Sky, BT, BBC are in my opinion, illegally trying to block IPTV, much of which is accessed across a VPN and they are getting away with it.

If they made it available at reasonable cost across Europe at least, then the problem would go away overnight.

VXer fighters get new stealth weapon in war of the (mal)wares

Re: Thats cruel

ha ha

both of you

question

Whats a registry?

EMC revenues are up. But, hey Joe, I heard you shot your profits down...

Should that not be Hendrix Experience?

Listen: WORST EVER customer service call – Comcast is 'very embarrassed'

Re: America Fuck Yeah...

Fuck yeah..

best comment I've ever read.

have a pint.

Call girl injected Google exec with heroin, drank wine, left him to die – cops claim

Willie Dixon said it

It could be a spoonful of coffee, it could be a spoonful of tea

But one little spoon of your precious love, is good enough for me

Men lies about that spoonful, some of them dies about that spoonful

made famous by Jack,Eric and Ginger of course

ARM arms devs for 64-bit Android push with 'Juno' board

This is always interesting

this argument over 32 or 64.

As far as i remember, 64 bit architectures had an address space of around 41 bits, still a huge improvement over 4GB i suppose. The rest is reserved for ECC, pointers and page frame numbers etc.

So is there really any benefit in a handheld device? I don't know and perhaps you boffins out there could explain the technical benefits other than huge amounts of RAM to flood with cached data.

NASA: Satellite which will end man-made CO2 debate in orbit at last

Re: Debate settler?

I agree but lets show some data.

I don't know if this website has an axe to grind but here goes anyway.

Make of it what you will. The data is only included to year 2000.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

And for your further reading

http://www.icr.org/article/does-carbon-dioxide-drive-global-warming/

Internet of Things fridges? Pfft. So how does my milk carton know when it's empty?

CooooooLLL

Only kidding :>)

Greenpeace rejoices after getting huge renewable powerplant cancelled

Re: Vienna consumes 10% of all the power in Austria

ermmm!!

where did i say it was a problem?

Tip of the hat to Lewis

because he is quite right to point out the hypocrisy of the green brigade.

Here in Austria, there are no kangaroos btw, there is a well developed Nimby mentality that protest against the damming of rivers, the erection of 380Kv power lines, an anti nuclear power station campaign group, electric "green car" campaigners and environmentalists of all shapes and sizes. But when you point out the obvious to them, they bury their heads in the sand.

For example, most new builds of property are built with a "Tiefgarage", (underground garage )office blocks, apartments etc. This uses huge amounts of concrete. Are they bothered? No! Vienna consumes 10% of all the power in Austria, most of which comes from a nuclear power station in Slovakia. Switch it off i tell them. Are you mad they ask? And when you point out that if everyone in Austria bought an electric car tomorrow, they would have to build two nuclear power stations to cope with demand.

Given that the Internet alone is projected to consume 17% of ALL the worlds power in just a few years, any amount of tinkering with energy production will not solve the root problem.

So get over it all you eco-warriors, either we stop doubling the worlds population every 50 years, the root cause of most of the worlds problems, or we keep developing our own Armageddon because that is surely what will happen.

Oracle rewrites 'the brain' of its database to take on SAP

"in-memory" option is compatible with all exciting Oracle apps built via 12c,

I trust this is a typo and you meant existing?

Can't imagine getting excited about Oracle apps at all :>)

Still using e-mail? Marketers say you're part of DARK SOCIAL

I'm a Troglodyte

and quite happy about it. When i want to tell my friends something, i use that old fashioned e-mail thingy. And not gmail or hotmail i hasten to add.

I've got a friend who can't leave his fondleslab alone for more than 10 seconds....ooh a Facebook update..ping ping fuckin ping. Drives me mental sitting in a bar trying to having a quiet pint!!

So come on all Troglodytes lets stand together and eradicate this menace now before we all turn into blobs of blithering, bloated buffoons.

WHOMP! There it is: IBM demos 154TB tape

Re: LTO22?

Yes you're right of course but tape is still being used and will continue to be used for a long time because of compliance issues, of which there are many. Basel 3 & Sarbane Oxley for financial markets for example.

Tapes are easily portable and relatively long lasting especially in the hands of professional data vault companies.

I think that's what the auditors care about more than the restore time.

In any case, most companies these days days keep several "online" copies of the data just in case the data centre goes down. Again a compliance issue.

Greenwald alleges NSA tampers with routers to plant backdoors

oldest one in the book

"How else could kit shipped through normal channels be diverted into the NSA's hands long enough for it to be tampered with?"

Because they have set up spoof companies to do just that ?

Stone the crows, Bouncer! BT defends TV recorder upgrade DELETION snafu

A much cheaper alternative

to these expensive picture frames that seem to be so popular is this..

Minix Neo X7 which comes pre-installed with Xbmc and once its setup properly you can watch anything, anywhere in the world with a wifi connection and an hdmi port to a screen and it's very portable. The browser also gets you access to youtube or facebook or whatever your poison is.

So it's a smart telly in your pocket if you like.

I recommend xfinity and fusion, download the addons like Filmon for Uk telly and Icefilms et voila!!

Costs about 100 quid or so, plus your usb sticks for recordings of course.

IPTV is the way forward

Bevy of tech behemoths aim to plug the next Heartbleed with DOLLARS

Re: Why Microsoft ?

Do you honestly believe that Microsoft runs all of its business on its own software?

Batten down the hatches, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS due in TWO DAYS

Re: I bit the bullet yesterday

I'm not a Unity hater. It's actually not bad and i used it for several months. But i prefer the look and feel of Mate or Cinammon and currently i'm using both.

They are pleasing on the eye by default and much more intuitive from a management perspective.

Ubuntu admittedly is a bit less hassle to get up and running but you "takes your choice".

I bit the bullet yesterday

and put Linux Mint 16 Petra with Cinnamon onto a hard drive partition beside XP.

So far so good. Everything appears to work properly although i had one minor irritant in that trying to install updates kept failing because the default system sources in the States appeared to be down. Once i had worked it out, a quick flip to Killerhorse in Germany, fixed that.

Why not Ubuntu? Unity, in a word.

The... Windows... XPocalypse... is... NIGH

there is another way

I'm going to buy another SATA disk and install it in the spare bay. I had tried dual partitions XP/Linux but grub has an unfortunate habit of messing with bootblocks which can be a complete pain in the posterior.

Mint should be able to mount and read the windows partition if necessary.

Et voila, then over time when XP's usefulness fades i'll keep the old drive spun down and still have the backups that i made on DVD...just in case.

In other words, never boot again from the XP partition unless it's really necessary.

Brawling neighbours challenge 'quiet' cul-de-sac myth

its got to be

A new El Reg unit of measurement surely?

where 1 cul-de-sac is whisper quiet and 120 will burst your ear drums.

Security: It's knowing what you don't know

On the 1st of April?

Rather unfortunate choice of date i fear....

Distro diaspora: Four flavours of Ubuntu unpacked

Re: Minty

Ditto

But if anyone is thinking about installing it; be aware, check out your wifi chipset first to make sure it's supported and there are still some issues with certain graphic card chipsets.

I have a machine running an old Netgear usb stick using RTL8187 and you have to force it to run at 11mb/s to stay stable in /etc/init.d

Its no big deal of course because when i get round to it i'll change it for a stick that is reported as having no issues like the Netgear WNA1100

Other than that i really like it more than some others i have tried.

64bit edition Olivia with Mate desktop.

BBC, ITV gang up on YouView with 'FreeView Connect'

That was a great rant

Nothing to be ashamed of but you're obviously stressed. Have a beer!

I fancied a similar rant last week when the BBC & ITV switched satellites to 2F thereby cutting off most of Europe but then i thought, i'll need to watch the news on Al Jazeera and RT now and what the Brits have just achieved is to cut off one of their best propaganda routes into the minds of a lot of foreigners.

Then i read somebody saying, "bout bloody time" the expats stopped getting the BBC for nowt. Thats as maybe but it completely misses the point. I know many people all over Europe, not Brits, who enjoyed the UK content for a variety of reasons.

The only winners are going to be the VPN suppliers and P2P telly companies many of whom are already on the game, especially in Holland and Russia.

Facebook will LOSE 80% of its users by 2017 – epidemiological study

i doubt it

Many people i know are addicted to it so unless there is a discovery like penicillin, there is no cure.

I think they will probably shoot themselves in the foot eventually which will prompt a mass exodus.

Network Solutions apologises for 'You just paid us $1850' email

This is what you need to know

about the "sharp practices" used by Network Solutions

As it happens, i am in the middle of trying to transfer out a domain name that i have just sold.

So any "work behind it" is created by themselves to make it as difficult as possible.

http://tscadfx.com/network-solutions-domain-transfer-bloody-horror-show/

'BILLION-YEAR DISK' to help FUTURE LIFEFORMS study us

Fred Flinstone

did pretty well with a hammer and chisel.

California OLDSTER in WILD golf course SKATEBOARDING spree

Re: Can't see it catching on. (Snow Crash?)

well that's a very good question.

I'll hazard a guess because i'm a skier.

Precision on a hard surface. Deep powder snow which i suppose could be compared to surfing on water is something of a luxury.

But there is another more dangerous reason, a runaway board in the mountains has the energy to kill. Better to be secured tightly to the leg of a yoof!

Re: Can't see it catching on. (Snow Crash?)

Birds of a feather and all that..........

The point about snowboarding is that with both feet strapped together a fall at speed produces many a broken arm and shoulder or ribs. Believe me i know!

As you get older this becomes serious.

Its also easier to take bigger risks on the steep and deep on a board. Great and thrilling when you're young.

Skiers normally suffer different injuries, normally to the knee which does indeed require a blood wagon to bring them off the mountain.

This a joke right?

"It will do for golfing what snowboarding did for skiing," he said.

I think this guy thinks that American type "condominium golf courses" are real golf courses, where you drive from green to tee in an electric cart and the fairways are flat.

Young people taking up snowboarding quickly realise that its just an easier way to kill yourself on a mountain and if they enjoy winter sports then they learn to ski.

Snowden latest: NSA stalks the human race using Google, ad cookies

love the headline

The Sting is in the tale...

DEATH-PROOF your old XP netbook: 5 OSes to bring it back to life

Linux mint xfce with Mate 32 bit

I installed it on my neighbours Gericom Q10 netbook instead of XP just two weeks ago.

It has an Intel Atom cpu and 1GB memory plus the usual, bluetooth, internal camera, modem, wifi etc etc

He uses it mainly over 3g on the internal modem.

When asked about its performance, he said there was no difference between his experience now and when it was running XP. Boot is faster.

Open Office is installed by default and language packs are freely available. He's a native German speaker.

All features work as they should, including modem, camera, bluetooth, wifi and it is stable.

The desktop looks good and is very intuitive.

As for Minecraft, there is a youtube vid here which gives you the ppa repository to download and install

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OTtIKMH5ow

As for being cool, i would have thought that being the only penguin in the class with a machine that can do everything the others can do would be too cool to touch ......

How STEVE JOBS saved Apple's bacon with an outstretched ARM

DECadent

I remember hearing a rumour back in the mid 90's that DEC were considering using the ARM architecture to replace MIPS and possibly abandon ALPHA.

I had considered buying shares in ARM should that have happened.

Anyone want to buy a crystal ball for spare parts? Wish i'd known what i know now :>(

Ultimate electric driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car

Re: still don't get it

er yes...i meant 5%

projected 25% by 2050

still don't get it

your assertion "lays to rest any claims that electric cars are fundamentally impractical"

That cannot be true.

These vehicles are aimed at city dwellers and short distance commuters.

If you accept that most domestic buildings in the UK have only single phase power and that most city inhabitants park their cars in the street, how do they charge them overnight? Throw cables out the window?

As someone else has pointed out, you have to produce the power somewhere and somehow and with the current, no pun intended, hysteria around nuclear power all thats being achieved, expensively, is moving the pollution and co2 emissions somewhere else.

The Germans, since this is a German car, will phase out nuclear by 2022, 17 % of requirement. They already have solar producing 25% of their needs but what happens overnight in 2023 when they all want to charge their cars?

And the answer is?

Probably more coal burning and lots of nice French nuclear power.

Oh and Germany is already one of the most expensive countries in Europe per kw/h. I wonder why?

In any case, i'm all for us not polluting the planet and limiting power consumption, keeping the cities smog free and eliminating pollutants but i really don't get electric cars. Hybrids maybe.

Need an internet antidote? Try magic mushrooms

Boletus edulis

Looks to be what's called Steinpilze in German.

Every year we get marauding hordes of Italians into the Austrian mountains in search of said fungus.

This year, because of the hot summer, they were in very short supply and were reportedly changing hands for 50 euro/kilo in Salzburg.

But i can confirm that they are indeed an Emperors dinner especially when simmered in a shallow pan with a veggie soup base,,,ie; a knorr cube...some garlic and salt and pepper. Leave for 20 mins.

Deelish :>)

Portuguese chicken invades Spanish airspace

Re: like it

How do you say "what the fuck is this" in Spanish?

The look on the old guys face is priceless.

cheers

like it

But see what you've started :>)

So how about multiple camera angles on LOHAN, that would be really cool!

Microsoft warns of post-April zero day hack bonanza on Windows XP

Re: Wait, hear that?

I've already started to do just that. I've had Ubuntu on trial for over 18 months. Its very good and stable with no driver issues (at least on my hardware) but i don't like Unity and its a little slow. Now i've installed Mint xfce on the same hardware. I had to fix one issue with graphics drivers on install and still have a minor issue with a realtek chip set on the wifi. But, i like the desktop (Mate) and its quick. Looks good and will do all that is required. I've also installed it on the wife's Asus netbook which also works really well without issue.

I've also trialled Opensuse and Debian in the past and still have Opensuse on an old laptop with a Pentium 4 and 512mB of memory. I use it as a jukebox. Works like a dream.

So, MS, the writing is on the wall. The LInux people are getting their act together. I'll be using XP until l it dies and unless there is a compelling reason to stay, i'll be installing Linux next.