Posts by Robert E A Harvey

SpaceX 'Dragon V2' rocket podule can hover-land on Earth - or MARS

But how ?

But how does the falling curtain at the ceremony work? Where did it go?

SPACE!!!

Hurrah!

Elon Musk for world president, I say!

Could a 'Zunewatch' be Microsoft's next hardware foray?

Re: Roslyn compiler

Not seen that. does it produce code that runs on Templar buildings?

re: Samsung claim they are selling

or, as you say, shipped.

They are trying to give them away at Schiphol with the associated tablet and a case in a special promotion. Not seen one move yet.

Re: zune

Nah. It will be like a Diskworld device and have a demon that says "Bingley-Bing"

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

I'm with the wolves

I'm with the wolves. Good luck lads

Google: Use this tool if you want your search query quashed

errr..

I just checked the form, and after asking for my name and email address (which seems reasonable) they then say "If your request concerns more than one URL, please provide an explanation for each URL.".

I have to list everything about me? I thought they had a search engine!

For your next privacy panic, look no further than vending machines

Re: Masks

Yes, for a blissful few hours I had.

Masks

I think we should all go shopping wearing Masks. Pick one of:

* Jeremy Clarkson

* Jar jar Binks

* Richard III

* The Pope

Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Re: The females in the house have this request:

Most seamen refer to the washbasin in the cabin as the 'night heads'

Re: Personal numbers

Surely anyone having an affair has a 30quid 'burner' from tescos?

Re: Snowblower

In this domestic regime it would have to collect the snow, too.

Face and name

Another app for google glass. Remind me of people's names when I am looking at them. (Additionally, their wife, children, job title.....)

Subtitles

Subtitles for people, for when I go abroad.

This is something that google glass ought to make possible.

Passwords consigned to history.

Some method of identifying myself to a computer (door, car, checkin desk) just by being there, instead of having to type the name of my first girlfriend and her telephone number.

An end to passwords, please.

Anti-spam

Replacing all those arpanet email protocols with something secure and traceable, so that spam, phishing, 419, fraud, and cyber bullying could be easily traced and contain enough evidence to prosecute.

Paintbot.

You remember all that guff about hoe Gecko's feet work?

Put it to work on a little wall creeper that paints just the flat surface it is on, ignoring skirting boards and architraves.

Grass cutting

I always fancied one of those robot mowers -but they don't collect the clippings so they get traipsed into the house. A robot. Mower that deals with the clippings please.

Solar power

What happened to that idea of solar film on windows?

Standard batteries

A standard battery pack for battery drills, saws, etc. so I don't have to buy the whole scmozle again when a battery fails. Sell the tool, charger, battery separately.

The EU intervened for phone chargers. Now do it for tools.

Personal numbers

Why is my landline number different from my mobile number?

Why can't I have one number - and one contract - that will ring my house phone, mobile, and car dashboard etc. all at the same time, letting me answer with whatever is handy?

Keys.

On my car I have one key that opens every door, and even includes a thing to remote lock/unlock by wireless. On some cars that could open the boot or start the engine.

My house needs 5 separate lumps of metal, and can't open the door for me when my hands are full.

I know who I am. I could wear a posh thing round my neck, that combined with CCTV would let the house recognise me and open doors for me with out doing anything except walk towards it.

The end of the typewriter.

Some non-19thCentury way of interfacing with computers. Either Voice or direct neural will do.

Hello Moto... It's the Nokia Lumia 630

"shown the door, preferably from a few floors up"

Nice. Been reading the BOFH?

Boeing CEO says no more 'moonshots' after 787 Dreamliner ordeal

The end of the West

Is this what we have come to?

If we are too frightened to take risks, we will go into a spiral of decline. I am immensely saddened by this.

For heaven's sake, we have drawings for the Skylon and for the Bristol Ascender ready to go. Let's take a few risks!

Microsoft’s 'FIRST NOKIA' arrives at £89

Hmmm.

Dual Sim, micro SD. Very tempting. When will the Dual Sim version surface? and will it be 4G?

Mae Microsoft yn addysgu Swyddfa, Bing, siarad Cymraeg^*

Different OT

I have never understood why bilingual road signs stop at Offa's Dyke and the Seven Bridge. Do they suppose that Welsh speakers never visit England?

Dixons and Carphone Warehouse confirm £3.7bn merger

Re: tthe Poole retail jungle

I bought something from that branch of PC whirled once. It just goes to show how crushingly boring Poole/Bournemouth are on a wet January monday. There is a maplin nearby, for those who want a serious dose of people being patronising, rude, and wrong in one sentence.

Re: At least it saves me some effort

my thoughts perrzakerly. have you been reading my mind with your alien space ray?

But that...

But that was a sensible answer from a salesdroid, and probably even true.

How did he get in?

Google Maps adds all UK public transport timetables

Rotting cabbages

Good point, well made. Upvoted for managing to say "Sane" and "Spalding" in the same paragraph.

Maybe not all.

It has the Delaine services, such as Bourne to Stamford, but not the Call Connect services, such as Bourne to Spalding. For Bourne to Spalding it sends you via Peterborough

call connect: http://www.lincsinterconnect.com/

Microsoft throws Kinect under a bus, slashes Xbox One to $399

shame

Kinect is about the only cool thing Microsoft have done in aeons.

Apple pulls iPhone 4 from sale in India after just four months

Inventory

Would it be too cynical to suggest that this deal has come to an end because whatever unexpected surplus inentory Apple found in the cupboard has now been shifted, and they still have a load of C5s to unload next?

ZTE Open C, the Firefox OS mobe you'll almost want, now on eBay

If it has ...

>If it has the usual required functions of an SD Card, portable access point/tethering,

Yes. If it does. I want a cheap small phone for making calls and tethering, rather than trying to use the phone screen for the intertubes.

Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer – advice from US, UK, EU

Cleverness

it seems to me that any badhat capable of discovering and exploiting this is sufficiently clever to have a proper job. Meaning that the blackhats who do exploit it are likey to work for theybuggerm in the government.

Windows XP market share GROWS AGAIN, outstrips Win 8.1 surge

well quite

$MEGACORP migrated me to W7 and Office2007 last month.

Re: That has got to be embarrassing for Microsoft

It is quite interesting that Garmin are still selling a phone with WM6.5 on it.

MtGox accepted new customers JUST DAYS before collapse

Chronos

"MtGox was still accepting new customers right up until the eve of its shutdown, The Reg has learned."

Err, of course it was. Had it stopped trading earlier there would have been an earlier date for the shutdown. If you stop doing something, you must have been doing it right up till when you stop.

Microsoft joins the cloud-empire club with Japanese bit barns

Alternative view

"Some part of Azure is always in the dark?"

What the world really needs: A telescopic SELFIE STICK

head, hands etc.

If this was the last problem that needed solving, the world is in a pretty good state!

Software needs meaty cores, not thin, stringy ARMs, says Intel

These diesel engines will never be as powerful as a steam locomotive! - says steam locomotive designer.

NHS England tells MPs: 'The state isn't doing dastardly things with GP medical records'

Re: Of course the state isn't doing dastardly things!

I think this is the real problem.

I don't suppose for a minute that anyone at the NHS wants to do dastardly things. I also assume good faith on the part of most of the Government. But that isn't enough. We now don't trust any of our power structures in this country, after 5 decades of ineffectiveness and occasional magnesium flares of corruption.

Duck houses, the way failed politicians run away to well paid sinecures in Europe, Blair and his housing stock, Thatcher and her cover ups. We don't trust them any more. At all. Over anything.

So when they try to do something that /might/ need us to take a balanced view of why they are doing it, we can't. Because we suspect everything they do. We have become uber-cynical.

The shame is entirely theirs.

What's up with that WhatsApp $19bn price tag? Answer: Voice calls

who are all these users

Twit.tv says that Whatsapp is big in Europe because it is cheaper than cross-border texting. You say that it's big in the orient ditto ditto. I'm an international service engineer, I go to dozens of countries and meet hundreds of people. I've never met a whatsapp customer asking if I am one too. Never.

Who are all these gazillions of users?

Microsoft tries to re-invent GPS with cloudy offloads

"contacting" satelites

GPS systems do not "contact" satellites. They merely listen to them as they go past. I can't imagine that a radio reciever - or twelve paralel ones - is the real problem with power consumption compared to the processing.

I should be used to Redmond talking bollox.

Antarctic glacier 'melted just as fast Long before human carbon emissions'

does it matter?

Never mind the global warming. If we carry on burning hydrocarbons as we are we are going to run out before my Grandaughter retires. Can't we stop because of that?

Office Online rises from ashes of 'confusing' Office Web Apps

Re: clean cut & paste

And Edit-PasteSpecial-Unformatted always seems to work

Seagate's LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o' disks for your DESK

offsite?

25TB? offsite? that's going to hurt the wallet.

You'll NEVER guess who's building the first Ubuntu phones in 2014

Re: Hmm

Catch?

You only appear to be able to buy it in Portugese and Spanish.

Re: "a global presence in China, Hong Kong, Israel, Russia and Ukraine"

New york, Paris, and Peckham