Posts by Robert E A Harvey

Chinese admirer fancies WD's 3.5-inch hardness - insider

eh?

China has competition commissioners? In a communist coiuntry?

The world is too weird for me!

Airbrushed Rachel Weisz gets watchdog hot under the collar

Quite

"The beauty and advertising industries need to stop ripping off consumers with dishonest images." should be ' ...stop ripping off consumers by selling worthless rubbish'

Netflix vs Lovefilm

Well, Lovefilm doesn't list "Dambusters" but does have "Dangerous Moonlight" and both of Ms Agutter's versions of "The railway children". And "Casablanca" and "Nosfesterau" and All of Alan Plater's Beiderbecke series.

Netflix refuses to discuss what it has unless I join up. So buggerem.

Decision made, I feel.

Spring launch for Apple OLED TV with Siri, says retail mole

I've been in a few Samsung shipyards, and they are something Apple could not emulate!

That would be so funny to watch!

Boffins make graphene micro-distillery

People who need water tend to live in places with loads of solar heating possible.

webOS daddy Jon Rubinstein exits HP

Slowly?

Ten... smart TVs

This is the problem.

Panasonic, Sony, Philips all think we will pay a lot for some half-baked subset of what our PCs have done for at least half a decade. Then they imagine we want stereooptics.

I won't and I don't.

Eurocom Panther 2.0 Core i7, SLI notebook

And pathetic screen resolution

WD's MyBook takes a Thunderbolt to the chest

Hmm.

I had a Mybook with Gb ethernet, and that was true. It transfered files at about 75Kb/s.

Like a fool I bought the Worldbook which was better, but still crap. I don't have one now.

Small pile of cash, dying platform: 2011 is bad news for Nokia

I saw my first one yesterday, in a phone shop in Berlin. Well, a plastic empty one under a poster. "What about this" a girl was saying. "You don't want that" the man in the shop said, and pointed her to the Galaxy display.

Telly makers aim to put OLED in your lounge in 2012

So do they now regret trying to deceive us all by omitting the 'backlit' from all the supoposedly LED tellies they sold last year?

Apple CEO: 'Amazon Fire didn't dent our sales'

Amazon Fire didn't dent our sales...

Let me finish that for him: "...yet"

Samsung NX200 20.3Mp APS-C compact system camera

My sydlexia must be on tonight.

I managed to read APS-C as 'arse'

I agree about the stupid internal processing. Take pictures with camera. Bugger them about with computer. Still have proper picture somewhere.

Ancient tulip-like stomach-onna-stick creatures found in Rockies

Burgess Shale

If the creationists are right and fossils were planted by God to test our faith/as a joke/whatever, the angels who did the Burgess Shale designs must have been drinking something no longer available. Nearly everything in there is horror-movie weird

Hold on a sec - leap seconds granted a last-minute reprieve

And also

" Other member states wanted further probing."

You really can't resist, can you?

Keep it up.

LightSquared accuses government of ‘rigged’ interference tests

One-way telecomms

Years ago I used to work on seismic survey boats. They all had 'talkback' systems - grab mikes and 100V line speakers all over the shop. People could grab a mike and say "the port tailbuoy is in the water" (or upside down) and people in the recording room could say "we are going to turn now" and everyone knew what was going on.

Then a new ship was planned and specified by an ex-naval commander. He had the speakers, but the only microphone was on the bridge. When challenged, he replied

"People on the back deck are told what to do. They don't have anything to say about it."

qui bono

It is in no government's interest to fudge the results of this test

It is very much in L^2's interest to put a positive spin.

I thinnk Lightsquared need to realise they've been rumbled, and crawl away to die.

It's a dumb name, anyroadup

Spam-squirting hole found in McAfee antivirus kit

Bwahahahhhah haha

Mine's the one being worn by someone grinning from ear to ear.

Plan hatched to view Milky Way's black hole heart

Einstein?

Karl Schwarzschild surely?

MS, Intel challenged over Windows 8 tablet prices

>that price point hasn't hindered the take up of the iPad

No, true. But iPads work.

Ten... stars of the Consumer Electronics Show

>Anything in the 50s is obviously intended for a bedroom. ;-)

Don't start all that off again!

Spectre

The HP device is 1,600x900 . And £1200

Thanks but no thamks.

Bookies set odds on Apple NYC launch

In other news

Desperate hacks scrabble for something with 'apple' in it.

Try a strudel, they are more satisfying.

Microsoft sharpening axe for marketing heads - report

They've been making my life a misery for years. Buggerm.

Foreign sabotage suspected in Phobos-Grunt meltdown

Russian space chief doesn't want to point any fingers, but...

... if he doesn't his arse is on the line

HP Pavilion dv6 15.6in quad-core notebook

What I was going to say

768 pixels is not enough. It's close to half of the correct number.

Listen, moronic manufacturers, If I wanted a toy I'd buy a Vtech

Huawei uncloaks sleek, slim, sexy smartphones

I've a had a couple of no-name chinese dual sim phones, but didn't get on with the software.

I want a proper android smartphone with 2 active sims.

are

are any of them dual SIM? Thats what I want, a dual sim smartphone

Cupertino lawyers mull 'driPhone' name ban

Old McDonald could be in bother then?

Ford unwraps '2013 Mondeo'

I can't. Believe me I've tried. Both use clever valve timing to get more expansion out of the hot gasses in the cylinder, and both return less poer than you'd expect from the cubic capacity. After that I get brainfade.

Where are the 6-strokes? We should have them by now.

So long as it doesn't get the 'startled owl' look currently disfiguring new alfas.

I quite like what I see. I wonder what the estate will be like ( the current one is enormous)

Black hole radiation could provide insight into quantum gravity

Now, all we need is to observe it

There's not some instrument we can build in a giant circular tunnel under Switzerland is there? One will be going spare in a couple of years.

Satnav mishap misery cure promised at confab

And the portable device will let you install custom POI files. And have speed limits. And cameras.

Such provision is patchy, at best, in installed systems.

I've been saying for some time that it should be an endorsable offence to use a car satnav in a truck.

Samsung SSD 830

obvious questions

>Magician software, which has a number of tools to keep

>your drive in tip-top condition.

eh? What do they do?

do they do it on Linux or on a Mac as well?

Boffins demo time-warp cloaking device

'ang on

So all we needed to do was to invent a 'time lens' and everything becomes easy?

Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver

@AC 00:45

You are rather assuming there will be 2nd level staff around. At the moment there aren't.

I notice you rather gloss over the problem of non-core applications, too. Last time I had a rebuild it took two days to re-install the non-core applications and their updates (backup/restore is not permitted because of fear of viruses) including getting new licence instances.

@AC 19:28

No, I am just anticipating the chaos for the 2 out of 10 cases where it doesn't work.

No, I am annoyed that the work previously done by IT support staff paid around £15 per hour will now be being done by sales force or design engineers paid £20 per hour or more and someone thinks they are saving money.

No, I anticipate real problems because of lost production while I re-install engineering apps that are not part of the core build.

No, I am worried that after every restore we will loose the machines while patches and updates are downloaded when we could have just fixed the real problem instead.

No, I am anticipating that any problems that persist through a restore will never be addressed.

@AC 12:09

$MEGACORP are doing this to all of us, more or less. We will get given a recovery partition, all the IT support will be sacked and the first/only answer to all hell desk calls will be to recover. I suspect we will loose application data every time too.

HSBC pinpoints branches with sub-atomic accuracy

There's a very old joke about the engineer watching the labourer lay paving slabs.

The labourer gets annoyed and asks the engineer what his game is, and in the ensuing conversation the engineer explains that he develops machines that will measure down to the nearest micrometre.

"That'll be no good to me", says Paddy, "The council expect me to be spot on!"

Sony intros high-end camera storage card

Something wrong there

Looking at the pricing Sony is NOT gouging for a proprietary format. Are we supposed to think this is the new CF or something?

Nokia: There will be NO smartphone division selloff to Microsoft

I don't recall anyone predicting the sale of the smartphone division to MS. I thought we were all predicting the firesale of the whole kit & kaboodle, patents and all?

Microsoft celebrates the death of IE6

Not monobrow then?

Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup

>Developers working on Gnome, KDE and such mostly do not intersect with

>those that work on the kernel and drivers.

Except, perhaps, in organizations where they are paid to make linux work.

Yes, Mr Cannonical. I'd have far rather you came up with a Linux version of TWAIN that will work inside all graphical and photo apps, than bugger about with the desktop that isn't broken.

Or stop pitching and rolling from one audio driver, patch panel, and music app to another like a drunken sailor who has the price of one bottle of rum and is equidistant between three of them.

yet it still falls over with simple tasks like being able to plug in a cheap printer

Or scanners.

My wife bought me a nice cannon scanner that only works in Windoze, because the one in my HP all-in-one is so bleeding slow.

Or stupid android phones that don't use USB bulk storage, but expect MCP instead

Webcams.

TV tuners.

Sat navs.

Asus asked to decrypt Eee tablet bootloader

I'll only buy from the freedom side.

See, /that/ is the correct answer.

Getting all indignant and making out that the manufacturer is doing something wrong by making something you don't like is foolish. Buying something you /do/ like is far more sensible.

Whot you said. every paragraph.

Saved me a lot of typing there.

BlackBerry PlayBook in US price plummet

I guess the other lorry didn't get nicked then?