Posts by montyburns56

Less than half of paying ransomware targets get their files back

As seen on TV....

They could always try and get their data back Carrie Mathison style....

Crisis? What crisis? Samsung is raking in $109m profit a day

I guess that that plan to artificially increase RAM prices worked then?

Phab-u-lous, Mate: Huawei's business phabs go upmarket

How much?

I think preferred Huawei when they used to make cheap and cheerful devices. I know that that high end devices are where most of the profits are, but still....

New York Police scrap 36,000 Windows smartphones

Rookie Blue the IT budget on some crappy phones.

Android beats Windows as most popular OS for interwebz – by 0.02%

Your mileage may vary...

That's odd because for my blog the Statcounter statistics say that Android visitors are still in single figures with the various Windows OS being responsible for about 80% of the traffic.

Marissa! Mayer! out! as! CEO! of! Yahoo! corpse! post-Verizon! gobble!

Buyer beware

"Verizon was due to buy Yahoo! for $4.83bn, but that price tag fell by $350m after it emerged the web biz was ransacked by hackers on two occasions"

That's like finding out that the car that you are about to buy is riddled with rust, yet the owner will only give you a 10% reduction in the price.

Iconic Land Rover Defender may make a comeback by 2019

Re: thanks to EU regulations

Are there not some rubber bumpers left over from the Triumph production line that they could use?

Uber: Please don't give our London drivers English tests. You can work out the reason why

Re: The Knowledge

"Didn't take me to a quiet lane and murder me. A+++++ Would use again."

New Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters can't transmit vital data

They could train some pigeons to do it, as that recent BBC4 documentary showed, it wouldn't the first time that they had proved to be a valuable tool in combat.

Co-op Bank up for sale while customers still feel effects of its creaking IT

Yeah, I'm also a customer and I also thought that the old password system was way more secure

than the new one which relies on bog standard passwords and a six digit number, for which I'm betting a lot of customers have just used their date of birth.

Felted! AI poker bot Libratus cleans out pros in grueling tournament, smugly trousers $1.8m

What happens in Vegas...

Yeah, but unfortunately a week later Libratus had spent all of it's winnings on hookers and cocaine and ended up married to an Atari ST with a damaged MIDI port.

Western Union coughs up $586m for turning a blind eye to fraudsters

But in order to get the money the FTC will first have to pay an administration fee of $1million which will be sent to Prince Ogebeyo of Lagos.

Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer

Re: Do you remember that 286 PC you paid over a grand for? Ah, those were the days!!

It became sentient in only four months?

"Dave, can you set up my direct debit for IBM?"

Brit cops cuff 14 in £11m money-laundering malware ring sting

Well at least they didn't blackmail their victims into having a fight to the death or robbing a bank.

'Facebook and eBay need to be subject to greater scrutiny' - Margaret Hodge

My Ebay

She should should add those companies to her Watch List so that she doesn't forget about them.

Bloodhound supersonic car backed by Chinese taxi biz Geely

The Knowledge

Sorry mate, I don't go south of Bonneville at this time of night.

Going, going, done: Trio of prolific auction fraud fraudsters jailed

Is this what people mean when they say that EU migrants are a big boost for the economy?

Avoiding Liverpool was the aim: All aboard the world's ONLY moving aqueduct

Re: A wonderful piece of engineering.

Yeah, I'm surprised that the article didn't mention it especially as one of the aforementioned scrap metal ships has been trapped by the closure for almost three months!

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

A painless upgrade for me.

Even though I only have Windows on my gaming PC these days, my upgrade from Win 7 to 10 was surprisingly painless even though it took a ridiculously long time to do it. I dunno if I had no issues because I don't have loads of programs installed apart from the games themselves nor loads of peripherals, but I've got no complaints.

Microsoft axes 2,850 more Windows Phone, sales staff – a week after Justin Timberlake sang on stage for them

Piling on the agony

Having your employers sacking you is unpleasant, but being forced to listen to Justin Timberlake is just plain cruel.

Brits don't want their homes to be 'tech-tastic'

Re: Show me the money

Do you control with an app on your Rabbit phone?

Microsoft's equality and diversity: Skimpy schoolgirls dancing for nerds at an Xbox party

Presumptive comments...

But how do we know that they weren't developers who just like to dress as "sexy" dancers?

Ofcom should be the BBC's ultimate overlord, UK.gov told

That's because the BBC was forced to have a policy of having a certain percentage of it's output made by external production companies. The BBC could easily make them themselves, but this way it gives an illusion of how "superior" private production companies are.

Microsoft releases Windows 10 preview for Raspberry Pi 3

Re: No, thank you.

Thank you for your input Mr Ackbar.

LA hospital coughs up $17,000 to free PCs held to ransom by hackers

Is that all?

$17,000 sounds like a lot, but isn't that roughly the amount that US hospitals charge for something relatively simple like fixing a broken leg?

Uni of Manchester IT director resigns after chopping 68 people

Re: his work there is done

Sadly a lot people in seniors positions have got there due to their (over) confidence and their bullshitting skills rather than any useful talents.

For sale: One 236-bed nuclear bunker

Re: Interesting

"The problem was that none of the secret bunkers were really all that secret, so they might as well have had giant bullseyes painted on them."

Especially the former one at Hack Green which is marked as Secret Nuclear Bunker on OS maps!

After-dinner Mint? Stylish desktop finale released as last of the 17 line

Re: Linux & Games

While I have become a Linux Mint fanatic for everyday use, I must admit that Windows is still the king when it comes to PC gaming, especially if you want to play the AAA titles. And to be honest I don't think that the Steam OS will change that situation much either.

Old jet bits, Vader's motorbike gear, sonic oddness: Hats off to Star Wars' creative heroes

Re: The guns

And the Stormtrooper's guns actually fired blanks in the film and you hear one that wasn't overdubbed in the scene were Luke is trying to cross the Death Star chasm.

Doctor Who: Nigel Farage-alike bogey beast terrorises in darkly comic Sleep No More

Re: Apart from the chance to offer a gratuitous insult to Farage...

Well at the minute the terrorists are winning with the help of our porous borders that the likes of Merkel are such fans of.

Star Trek to go boldly back onto telly, then beam down in streams

Re: It will be called>>>>>>>

"And Ensign Ro."

If only...

'Profoundly stupid' Dubliner's hoax call lost Intel 6,000 hours of production

Re: Phoning it in

The question that the authorities should have been asking themselves is why would IS want to blow up an Intel fab plant? Does it really fit in with their modus operandi?

Noughty by nature: Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection and Rock Band 4

Unfinished

"A couple of its shooting sections, for example, go on for an inordinate amount of time. But my larger irritation is with repetitive hand-to-hand brawls that require the same sequence of button presses to complete every time."

Although I quite enjoy playing the Uncharted games I think you've summed up perfectly my two big issues with them. If I wanted long gun battles I'd play Call Of Duty or some other FPS. What's the point of creating beautiful scenery if you are too busy fighting off an endless of procession of bad guys to be enable to appreciate it? And I've never even completed the first Uncharted because I just got so sick of that last QT fight against the big boss.

Terror in the Chernobyl dead zone: Life - of a wild kind - burgeons

Re: Any 3-eyed fish, six-legged deer or carniverous, sabre-toothed elk?

There's some 8' long catfish in the cooling ponds near the reactor apparently.

Re: Radiation is safe for wildlife...

There was a feature about Chernobyl on C4 News months ago and they interviewed this stereotypical old Russian woman who was living in the contaminated zone for years without any health issues. You can watch it on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khv87k68kIs

Grinning BBC boss blows raspberry at UK.gov, eyes up buffet

Re: Replacement, not collaboration

But presumably part of the reason why they have had to carry out these cost cutting exercises is because their revenue from job ads & other classifieds has collapsed by such a significant amount. I remember when there would be about five or six job pages each day in my local evening paper whereas now there is usually about one to two on a good day.

Back to school: Six of the smartest cheap 'n' cheerful laptops

Re: A quick search...

I seem to remember there being a recent article on The Reg about budget laptops and by budget they meant a mere £400-£600!

Honor 7 – heir apparent to the mid-range Android crown

Re: Facebook and Twitter (both pre-installed)

I've had a number of Huawei phones and FB and Twitter have been removable on all of them.

Nano – meet her: AMD's Radeon R9 4K graphics card for non-totally bonkers gamers, people

Re: $649 (£420)

Indeed, I was getting quite excited about this product until I saw the price!

Intel doubles its bounty for women and ethnic minorities

The taste of Paradise?

Perhaps the reason for the lack of ethnic minorities at Intel is ironically because they don't like coconut? How about offering them Snickers Duo or Mars Duo instead?

Nokia Networks is going to make zer Vaterland's trains run on time

Re: a photo of a mamod steam engine-COOL!!!!

Hands up all of those who only clicked on the article because of the picture...

Swimming in smartmobe profit? Let us guess, you're Tim Cook?

" it would appear Apple are the only one pricing their products at a realistic level. "

Err, no they just have a huge profit margin compared to the small profit margin of other manufacturers.

Papa don't breach: Wannabe singer jailed for hacking Madonna

An Open Letter

Dear Celebs,

Do not put anything in this Cloud thing unless you want the whole world to see/listen to it. It might be the latest thing which some will have you believe will lead to a cure for cancer or create world peace, but it's just a load of over hyped insecure nonsense.

P.S. Thanks for all the nude pics.

WHAT ARE the 'WEIRD' SPOTS seen on far-flung PLUTO?

Is it just puberty?

Are you sure that Pluto isn't just going through The Change now that it's 13 billion years old? Next it will refuse to come out of it's orbit and will be surrounding itself in black clouds.

Foxconn to hire a million Indian staff in major base shift

"The *really* amusing thing is that the campaigns for Foxconn to raise the wages of its Chinese workers may actually have had an effect. But not the one the rich westerners pushing for those pay rises might have had in mind."

You do realise that one of the reasons why the wages have gone up is that China is running out of people from farming/poor regions to do the work, so the Chinese aren't losing jobs it's just that there aren't enough people who can or want to do jobs like this any more.

BPI fiddles with music consumption figures while revenues burn

Google Music often have good deals on older albums with many being available for £2 or less, although it's usually pretty mainstream stuff.

Intel 80386 queen Renée James quits as chipmaker's president

Just walk away (from Intel) Renee.

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

Re: But public money... @Alan

But don't forget that bus services in London weren't privatized, as we couldn't have the government having to deal with the chaos that they created on their doorstep.

Re: If you are old enough to remember

"The Water industry (to take an example) had a pending programme of major infrastructure renewal that HMG Just couldn't fund in a million years. Privatisation put that risk onto the new owners."

Who then got their customers to fund the infrastructure improvements.

20 years ago this week, Microsoft just about killed Australian PC manufacturing

Re: Wangaratta *snigger*

"Can you go into PC-World (shudder) and buy a PC without Windows?"

Why would anyone who wants a PC without Windows want to go to PC World in the first place? It's a piece of piss to buy a PC without an OS these days, just because the big boys don't sell them it doesn't mean that there aren't loads of places that do like Ebuyer, CCL, Novatech, Scan etc.