* Posts by Tegne

153 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Sep 2010

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Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

Tegne
Devil

50p all day!

In the days when you paid an arm and a leg per minute for internet access BT added a 50p unlimited duration Local call option at the weekends.

Cue me and my mate switching to Demon Internet as they had many local dialup points including my town. I still recall 12h sessions costing only 50p instead of what would probably have amounted to well over a tenner to 01260 509666....

Experimental 'insult bot' gets out of hand during unsupervised weekend

Tegne
Headmaster

Re: Costly? No...

After writing COBOL code onto gridded paper on a local College programming course we were then allowed to attempt to compile it and debug it once it had been keyed in by some faceless admin member.

Our time on each terminal was limited so I used this time to do pretty much anything other than what I was supposed to do.

I discovered that you could copy in a new copy of VAX/VMS equivalent of the autoexec.bat file into anyone elses root folder so decided to see what would happen if I copied in a file containing a single command 'Logout' (or whatever the equivalent was).

Much glee was had as my fellow students were immediately logged out the next time they tried to connect.

Much less glee was had when I tested whether the same would work with the Admin account. It did.

There was quite some cursing from the tutor as he failed to log into his account for the rest of the lesson...

CRINGE! Home Office wants to know whether your boss BEATS YOU

Tegne
Big Brother

Nothing unusual here

My mother recalled that she had to have an interview by some German representatives from Adidas when the company she worked for started doing work for the Olympic games. She said the questions were ridiculous (iirc from what she said one of them even may have been do your employers beat you) but it was clear that they were part of a global questionnaire with sections that were clearly aimed at countries like China, India and other developing countries with a less than stellar history of human rights.

UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Tegne
Terminator

This doesn't go far enough

They should also ban them from time travel.

Steve JOBS finally DEFEATS the PC - from BEYOND THE GRAVE

Tegne
Thumb Down

Re: Prognostication

My wife has not used her PC since November when I got her a Nexus 7. That thing goes with her everywhere as it's an ideal size. But I can tell you this - there's no way she'd be lugging a 10" tablet in her bag.

Feds stamp on cash pipeline to Mt Gox, Bitcoin's Wall Street

Tegne
Unhappy

That'll be me moving to Itchy and Scratchy Money then.

Those pesky Feds can't touch them.

Full metal jacket: Nokia launches new Lumia 925

Tegne
FAIL

Shouldn't it be called the 920s?

Ooh it's a bit thinner than the previous model. Bring the Xenon Equipped 928 to the UK market and I may be interested.

Wales slams Amazon over lack of Kindle support

Tegne
Joke

Why is it that all their road signs are in Welsh too? Afterall only 23% of the country...

..can actually read.

Reg man goes time travelling at iconic observatory

Tegne
Mushroom

Comforting to know that during the cold war.

I lived a few miles away from Ground Zero... and probably still do.

PC market to spend ANOTHER year soaked in blood, warns IDC

Tegne
Terminator

I can see this getting worse too.

I've not had to upgrade any component on my PC for nearly 2 years as it plays all the latest games as well as it did with the latest games of 2 years ago. I bought my wife a Nexus 7 in November and she hasn't even turned her PC on (Or her Nintendo DS either) since. The tablet allows her to do everything she ever wanted to do on her PC other than play Warcraft - which she's now bored of anyway.

Pubic louse falls victim to eager Brazilian strippers

Tegne
Paris Hilton

The other type of Merkin..

These were worn by women (mainly prostitutes) to disguise their bald lady-gardens that they used to shave to ward off pubic lice. Nothing new to see here.

Cameron defends U-turn on web filth ban, leaves filtering to parents

Tegne
Childcatcher

What's even more baffling about the Daily Mail's claim to victory

Is their story about Eva Ionesco the 11 year old girl who was shown naked in playboy.. As if they are baiting people to Google her to prove their point.

US patent office: Nice try Apple, but pinch-to-zoom is NOT a new invention

Tegne
Devil

If Apple have licensed this 'tech' to 3rd parties..

Are they due a refund?

Dexter malware targets point of sale systems worldwide

Tegne
Mushroom

I don't know whether things have changed significantly in the past 5 years

But when I used to write EPOS systems (and helped debug one of the first Verifone Chip & PIN interfaces) the Chip&PIN verification was reasonably secure. Unfortunately all the encrypted data was also secured in unencrypted ASCII including TRACK2 (Card Number, expiry date etc) which was sent via a 1200/75 MODEM link to the bank at the end of each day. When things went wrong the support team used to copy files with 64,000 or so Valid credit card numbers around on floppy. Back then all you had to do was bribe a few minimum wage support desk guys to net you a nice pile of valid numbers.

Help-desk hell

Tegne
Flame

The damned thing won't stop beeping!

Back when I was a Junior software developer we had to speak directly to the customers of our software. One day a gent came on the phone asking why his computer keeps making intermittent beeping noises. After discounting POST error messages (the PC was working fine) or anything from the internal speaker (It was turned down - Some Amstrad PCs had volume knobs back then IIRC) I was at a loss.

"Can you turn the PC off and leave it off for about 5 minutes before turning it back on?"

About 3 minutes later I get a call from the chap,"It's doing it when it's turned off!"

"Sir, could it be anything else in your office that is making the beeping?"

"Well the only other thing that's near the desk is this smoke alarm that... oh, sorry to have bothered you."

Tegne

Lovely but clueless store managers.

Whilst assisting the branch manager of a Scottish fruit shop chain on why their PSION handheld terminal wouldn't connect to the modem I asked them to check the RS232 cable to see whether it was physically connected to the modem and the terminal.

"Aye - I've checked the grey cable and one end is plugged into the wee terminal and the other end to the box with the blinking lights."

I was baffled for a short while so asked them to check the whole length of the cable for any nicks in the sleeve.

"I cannae do that as one end goes into the top of the safe before coming out of the bottom"

"Did someone shut the safe door on the cable."

"Aye. Would that cause a problem?"

"..."

Author of '80s classic The Hobbit didn't know game was a hit

Tegne
Gimp

Re: An inspiration

Fantastic memories! I started with The Quill, Moved onto PAWS and then GAC (bows down). A few months ago I found my old Cassettes and rigged up some cables and managed to load a couple of the adventure games I wrote into a Speccy emulator... yep, they still loaded after a bit of tweaking.

Brits admit to using mobile phones during sex - and not in a good way

Tegne
Joke

Re: It may just be me

Is your wife on dialysis?

Lindsay Lohan storm over Hitler, Hurricane tweets: 'It was hackers'

Tegne
Facepalm

Re: Well....?

Nazis - Knotsies?

Amazon ships Kindle Fire HD, Paperwhite to Brits

Tegne
Gimp

Re: More details needed

You can use Calibre to convert most unprotected ebook formats into the Kindle format. In addition you can email books and PDFs to the Kindles own personal address and Amazon's servers perform any necessary conversion.

Perth porkfest crowned ULTIMATE BACON SARNIE

Tegne
Pint

#1 and #2 look divine

#3 looks like the reheated microwave nastiness from sandwich shops.

Just how good is Nokia's PureView 41Mp camera tech?

Tegne
WTF?

With that headline I was expecting an opinion based purely on the fantastic camera.

But I guess unsurprisingly it turned into an anti-Symbian whine.

Samsung chips evicted from iPhone 5, autopsy reveals

Tegne

Would you like a Phone with that battery, sir?

That battery is mahoosive. Thirsty beasts those iphones.

iPhone 5 adaptors goldrush begins

Tegne
Flame

Apple found a way to make milking sheep profitable.

Nice work.

Windows Phone 8: What Nokia and Microsoft must do

Tegne
Boffin

Re: OpenGL

Qt Support wouldn't go amiss either - There's a lot of Qt devs out there with nothing much to do at the moment.

Tegne
Childcatcher

The camera could be the key

Year after year it's the same story. Nokia: Amazing cameras, crappy unsupported o/s. If next weeks model announcement has a camera comparable to the N8's (or even 1/2 what the 808 can do) I'll be right there with my chequebook in hand. If they don't my Aging N8 will be replaced by something Androidy. If they do get a decent camera they should do a marketing campaign showing the typical iPhone/Android night out, duckface blurrycam shots uploaded to Facebook versus the awesome Nokia equivalents. That may get the young ones to notice.

Obama Q&A on Reddit briefly knackers entire site

Tegne
Black Helicopters

Re: Just fools...

Careful now before the men in black suits come a knocking for this tentative hint of violence.

Tegne
Trollface

Re: Funny he never answered the question...

Haters gonna hate.

UK ISPs crippled by undersea cable snap

Tegne
FAIL

Re: Mind made up then

Likewise. I've been procrastinating about moving from BE to 40MB SKY as BE have been so good in the past. But the have lost their way so regrettably it's time to help line Murdochs pockets. The only saving grace I had was I have a VPN option on my Usenet account. I've never used it before but it worked a treat and my WoW latency was at least 10ms lower than BE's standard.

Nokia's WinPho 8 double date announced

Tegne
Gimp

For the love of god

Let one have a Xenon Camera at least comparable to the N8's

Euro NCAP to mandate auto-braking in new-car test

Tegne
Thumb Down

Re: Overtaking fail potential?

I'm not looking for a critique of my driving style but I was making a comment about the potential danger of dumb electronics overruling something that a human has actively decided to do after judging all parameters. What next - auto braking when you're doing 45 in a 40?

Tegne
Facepalm

Re: Overtaking fail potential?

So it's designed for women parking in Tescos then? That's not going to save many lives, only blushes.

Tegne
Terminator

Overtaking fail potential?

When accelerating for an overtaking manoeuvre it's sometimes necessary to get a bit of momentum to get past Miss Daisy holding everyone up.. not good if the car has other ideas and decides to slam on the anchors when it gets nervous. I wonder how the car will deal with this scenario? I also wonder whether some clown will produce some spoofing/jamming devices to confuse the mechanism?

For flock's sake: Scared sheep send SMSes to Swiss shepherds

Tegne
Paris Hilton

Was it Sheep! ?

My Mrs loved that game.

William Shatner confirms Devon town actually prostitute free

Tegne
Paris Hilton

Not according to a postcode search on a well-known UK Escorting site.

There's at least a few working right out of the town.

New Samsung chief: I want SOFTWARE

Tegne
Thumb Down

It's not just the smartphone software they need to fix

There's a lot of shoddy software on their other hardware offerings like their SMART TV interfaces.

EU gives Google till July to offer fix for search dominance

Tegne
Joke

Can they also ask France what they are going to do about their Champagne Dominance?

Clearly unfair to the other countries wanting to get in on Sparkling wine.

Samsung Galaxy S III

Tegne
Thumb Down

Nokia may have something to say about that.

*cough* N8 *cough* Pureview.

Nokia lights up Bat Signal for Lumia 900

Tegne
Terminator

Be cautious of Phones 4 U preorders on the Lumia 900

My boss placed an order for one 3 or 4 weeks ago for delivery a week on monday. He's still not heard any news when his device will arrive. It seems there is some dispute between Nokia and O2 that is preventing their roll-out on this network that they don't want to officially admit to.

Sony pops top on 13Mp Xperia

Tegne
FAIL

Xenon?

It could have a gazillion megapixels but will still suck in low light conditions without a decent flash. Why are these Android manufacturers so afraid of Xenon?

Amazon Kindle Touch touches down early

Tegne

Re: Amazon Kindle Touch touches down 2 years late

I suspect Amazon knew exactly what they were doing with their product release schedule. It's not like they were struggling to sell their previous models. And by now some people may be looking for an upgrade to their previous generation of kindle.

Vodafone fights India's retrospective tax grab

Tegne
Big Brother

Retrospective tax

My wife's colleague had her company car tax band retrospectively recalculated and she ended up paying the difference based on 3 years worth of tax. Funnily enough she's Indian.

POWERFUL solar flare belched at Mars rover Curiosity

Tegne
Alien

Reminded me of the old-school Salamander Arcade game.

Might have to fire up MAME later.

iPad app that lets mute kids speak menaced by patent lawsuit

Tegne
Childcatcher

It's not about milking the parents of disabled kids.

It may be a very emotive subject but someone has infringed on the patent of someone else here.

London ambulances on second try with CommandPoint 999 software

Tegne

Re: The real questions...

I can answer point (1). Nobody in the UK with a C&C system wanted to touch it!

Game closes 277 stores

Tegne
FAIL

No wonder they are in trouble when they have their own stores competing with themselves.

In the Hanley Potteries centre they had 2 stores within a 30 second escalator ride of eachother. Having a look through the list of closing stores it seems like this is a common theme throughout the country. Surely any business manager with an ounce of sense would see this is doomed to failure?

Blizzard ponders World of Warcraft for iPad

Tegne
Facepalm

May explain why Blizzard have been dumbing down the game over the past few years.

I'm the one wiping in a raid because the main tank is playing on his iPad tonight.

BBC iPlayer added to Xbox

Tegne
Facepalm

Even more bandwidth is going to be sucked up by iPlayer now.

Those ISP's better be ready.

Lawyers of Mordor retreat from The Hobbit

Tegne
Terminator

Paying that 'Nominal' £100 could signify some binding contract..

That could come back to bite them. Lawyers are devious like that.

Euro watchdog: Telcos ARE strangling VoIP and P2P traffic

Tegne
Pirate

Own Brand internet? You gets what you pays for.

No such problems with my BE internet account. It's not the cheapest but it's a consistent 18 mbps download no matter what protocols I'm using or what time of day it is. The consumer are victims of ISP price wars. If they sell it cheap, they have to cut corners, it's the same way with anything really.

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