Posts by Dave Murray

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Seems the same to me but then I come from EVE too so maybe it's just us. General chat reminds me of Local in a system with Goons, although not as rude, profane or disgusting.

I'm perfectly happy with downtime being from 8am till 4pm/5pm, I'm at work then. But if they took the servers down at 4am I'd be pissed coz I'm still playing at that time! Admitedly I might get more sleep. :p

iOS 5's iMessage chops carrier SMS routing traffic

"I also had no issues with the usual text message delays we usually experience over new year's eve/morning when almost the entire population try and send messages of goodwill and cheer to one another. All the iMessages went through almost instantaneously"

Ah but did you actually try to send any SMS messages this year? I sent approx 50 SMS messages just after the bells and all went through. I had replies from all, including 2 from Spain, within minutes. I also made several calls to family and had no problems with them either. And, I had the same experience last year. I think the traditional New Year's phone & text issues are now a thing of the past (on Vodaphone at least).

Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver

8m 22s my arse!

Windows has always lied about how long an install takes so there's no way that figure is true. My bet would be roughly 30m and then you have a completely useless machine with no applications installed. The last time I installed Windows it took me something like 3 days by the time I had everything I need installed and updated.

Oh and how long does it take to re-install all the updates since RTM after you use this feature?

Somerset buses bin paper tickets, sniff journey-logging chips

Busses will be quicker to board! But, not usable by visitors, tourists or casual users that might feel like taking the bus instead of using their car. Oh and big brother will no where everyone has been.

At a time when the country is supposed to be trying to save money would this not be better spent elsewhere? Fixing roads maybe?

Fans lose grace with Star Wars MMO

Correction

"Star Wars: The Old Republic flies onto UK shelves tomorrow, 15 December. Each copy comes with 30-days access, thereafter customers must pay either £9 every month, £25 every three, or £46 for half a year."

Or buy 60d time cards from Amazon for £18: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B006FAZ12Q/

Winamp mends trio of old-school security holes

No the problem was integer & buffer overflows which just happen to be in the dlls. Nothing to do with Windows and everything to do with bad coding by the Winamp devs.

Your platform of choice has it's own version of dlls which are no more or less secure. Libraries are libraries and we all need them.

OnLive Game System cloud gaming console

Re: And how much does a decent PC cost?

I bought a new PC 18 months ago and paid about £350. It is perfectly capable of running Rage, Warhammer 40k Space Marine, Alice Madness Returns, SW:TOR and other new / recent games. There is no need to pay £600+ for a gaming rig. Just don't buy from rip off stores like PC World.

UltraViolet: Hollywood's giant digital gamble is here

Lifetime rights? Are you sure?

What about in 30 years time when your DVD player is broken and you can't buy a new one because they've been replaced by some new format? Those boxed sets going to work for you then?

Alec Baldwin kicked off plane for playing with his phone

You are worthless Alec Baldwin

People using phones on planes when they're not supposed to annoy the hell out of me. I wish flight attendants would do this to people more often.

Vodafone Android app babysits lazy parents' kids

So you didn't let her go ride a bicycle, to the cinema to see a film, etc without you there to watch over her? Sounds like a terribly oppresive childhood to me.

At a suitable age I was allowed to go play in parks & fields, ride my bike, etc without always having adult supervision. Gaining a little autonomy is an important part of growing up and helps develop a child into an adult that can think and act for themselves.

Apple probed by EC antitrust arm over ebooks market

That would depend if Amazon has done anything illegal. Presumably they haven't but in trying to get some of Amazon's business Apple have.

AMD helping Android fans port to x86

FUD

Seems you missed some news, both Intel and Google see a point in running Android on x86...

Intel Prepping Android 2.2 For x86 Devices:

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Prepping-Android-22-For-x86-Devices/

Intel is working on Honeycomb for tablets:

http://www.androidcentral.com/intel-working-honeycomb-tablets-expect-intel-powered-smartphones-within-12-months

Future versions of Android will be optimized for Intel starting next year:

http://www.androidcentral.com/future-versions-android-will-be-optimized-intel-starting-next-year

Intel says Android 4.0 for smartphones, tablets ready:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222383/Intel_says_Android_4.0_for_smartphones_tablets_ready

And you seem to have completely missed Fusion, AMD's alternative to Atom + ION.

NASA confirms first Earth candidate in habitable zone

larger = stronger gravity

So more likely the land of short, squat but very muscular people.

No Samsung ban for Apple in US

Re: AC 16:20

I bet you couldn't tell the difference between similar Honda and Yamaha motorbikes if I showed them to you. But to me they're obviously different.

Geek seeks cash for Top Trumps-style CPU game

Hell yeah!

Provided he doesn't get sued off the face of the planet by the owners of Top Trumps this is the perfect gift for us 30 and 40 something geeks who were kids back in the 70s and 80s.

Hands on with Star Wars: The Old Republic

I played the beta all weekend until they kicked me at 6am on Tuesday. Going to work on Tuesday after 2 hours sleep was tough.

There were lots of people in the general chat saying "it's just WoW with a Star Wars skin" but it's exceedingly rare to find any game that is completey new and anyway WoW is just Everquest with a Warcraft skin. Personally I found SWTOR reminded me of older Bioware games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights. The quality of the storyteling and voice acting made me forget that most quests are of the 'kill x of something' type and the class quests in particular were great.

I've participated in a few MMO betas in recent years and SWTOR was the most polished and stable at this stage of development. I only had one crash to desktop all weekend, no lag and the fps on my old Geforce 9800 was more than good enough.

I still haven't decided if I will part with my hard earned cash for SWTOR but I think I will and I'm a tight Scotsman with an EVE addicion to finance.

BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps

Read the article ffs! Nokia are using this software. Just because a device is FOSS doesn't prevent someone installing a rootkit or other malware.

The technical knowledge of Reg readers is slipping badly.

Lol you don't understand what a rootkit is do you. Due to the rootkit features you will not find this program in your list of running apps because it hides itself from the operating system (and hence you). It even pretty much says that in the article.

Zuckerberg submits privacy mea culpa after FTC ruling

They're still dumb fucks, he just doesn't say it in public any more.

Developers get new IE10 for Windows 8 preview

I encourage all developers to write for standards first by ignoring HTML5 because it isn't a standard yet! I wish browser makers would spend more time working on real features like security and speed and less working on vapourware like the unfinished HTML5 spec.

Wi-Fi may damage sperm, boffins warn

Keep that laptop away from your 'nads, lads

Something you should have been doing anyway. Everyone knows that laptops emit an incredible amount of heat and as well as risking burning your legs they will decrease your fertility.

The BBC Micro turns 30

The 8-bit 1980s dream machine?

More like the 1980s broken dream machine. BBC owners were crying themselves to sleep at night because their parents didn't buy them the Speccy or C64 they wanted. Even the geeks at school laughed at BBC owners.

Acer, Samsung, Lenovo line up behind Nvidia Tegra 3

A five core chip for mobile?

What kind of battery life are Nvidia predicting for these gadgets? 5 minutes?

Rogue Russian Mars probe communicates - but in gibberish

If only we had some kind of spaceship that could go up to the probe and repair it in situ or retrieve it and return it to Earth. Like a kind of interstellar breakdown service. We could call it the space breakdown truck... hmm not catchy enough... we could call it the space shuttle!

Oh wait...

San Diego woman strips to bikini to look for her chihuahua

Who needs pictures?

Follow the link and there's video!

Not bad looking for a mental patient.

Spillover from 400lb man squeezed fellow flier into galley

Cabin crew should have made the fat bastard stand.

Actually they shouldn't have even let him on the flight unless he had a ticket for two seats. It's not just the extra space he's taking up but also the extra fuel the plane wil consume to shift his obscene weight.

Ubuntu savaged by rivals infected with fondleslab fever

Try reading your own site

"Now it seems the distros are more or less on the same page, although Ubuntu got there first in April - seven months ahead of the latest Fedora and openSuSE."

Fedora 15 had Gnome 3 back in May so they were 1 month behind Ubuntu in shifting to a different interface, not seven. One month hardly counts as Gnome not moving fast enough as Shutleworth claimed and you are implying. You would have known that if you bothered to do a 5 second search on this very site or didn't that fit with your personal Ubuntu bias?

Inside the BBC's R&D Labs

DVB-T2 standard makes Freeview HD possible?

Where I live no one that has a Freeview HD box can actually watch any of the channels. If you actually get a picture at all it will become distorted and then the dreaded 'no signal' will pop up within 5 minutes of watching.

Chromebooks: the flop of 2011?

Crapbooks

Overpriced paper weights basically.

Nuclear power will let NASA Mars rover beat 1970s Soviet record

bathtub-like bodies

I always thought the Lunokhods looked like old fashioned prams.

Coders are creatives too: Where's our love?...

Sales and marketing do not "bring cash in" they only think they do. You need to have a product to sell in order to make money, sales and marketing are just self important fluff.

Southampton hampton vice shocker: Exclusive snap

Nice!

But where is Optimus Prime?

No charge after woman gave fellow prisoner a cop-car BJ

Why would a muscle relaxant make it an achievement? Ain't no muscles in your bone boy. (no bones either)

US general: 'We're cleared to cyber-bomb enemy hackers'

All states possess an inherent right to self-defense

Except Lybia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, etc obviously.

Obama says his birthplace is 'in Asia'

So he wasn't born in Asia but he is stupid enough that he doesn't know which land masses are in the country he's president of and which are in another continent?!?! That's even more stupid than Bush. Where do they find these morons and why do they elect them?

Facebook says it's winning against Justin Bieber smut onslaught

What kind of a moron can be tricked into pasting code into their address bar? I'd have thought most people stupid enough to do something like that haven't heard of cut + paste and would probably be scared by that complicated code stuff.

And how the hell does a dodgy shopping site make money from people being tricked into posting fake celeb porn on Facebook?

Whole thing smells fishy to me.

Apple's cloud music service 'WIPES your iPHONE'

So no listening to your music while in a subway tunnel or otherwise receptionally challenged. lol

Facebook ad helps Scot cops seize fake goods, drugs

Booo! That story was quite normal. I was hoping for a Polis advertised they were looking for drugs on Facebook and some stupid neds offered to sell them some kind of story.

Where are all the decent handheld scribbling tools?

So did I! Been a long time since I've seen one.

Miley Cyrus hacker let off with probation

I'm sure the rightful owners of the 200 credit card numbers he possessed and the people he scammed out of $100k will be very happy he basically got off scot free. Yeah very happy.

Survey: '4 million' Brits stung by ID theft

Indeed the banks are largely to blame with schemes like Chip&PIN and Verified by VISA being huge security holes that are used to claim the crime was the victim's fault.

But how are NI, driving licence or passport numbers any more secure? You hand out your NI number to the accounts dept at work, tax office and benefits offices any time they're asked for, you give your DL number for car/van rental, insurance, etc and you give your passport number to airlines & customs. These numbers are also shown any time you use one of said documents as proof of ID or age. Ok so you don't list them on your Facebook page but you shouldn't list your DOB or mother's maiden name there either.

1m iPad 3s being built this quarter, says analyst

Is this one of the analysts that was telling us all about the iPhone 5 a few weeks ago?

How do these guys get paid so much money for making up such utter garbage and then cliaming a chinese person told them it?

Flashback trojan targeting OS X shuns virtual machines

Learn to read

This issue is not being caused by poor security in Flash, it's being caused by poor security in and stupid users of OS X.

Social net sites do wonders for crooks, spooks and bosses

I've been saying this for years whenever someone asks me why I'm not on Facebook, etc. Usually I get looked at as if I'm some kind of anti-government survivalist nutter with a house full of weapons somewhere in the hills.

Where am I going tomorrow? My electric car charger wants to know

What if a customer phones with an emergency that needs you to visit today? Or your child has an accident and needs to be taken to a hospital? The range on electric cars is crap as it is without Intel and the electricity company restricting it still further.

Sony network ransacked in huge brute-force attack

I bet this isn't really a brute force but someone trying the list of usernames & passwords from the earlier attack again and these 93,000 idiots, sorry... users, had changed their passwords back.

Which actor should play Steve in upcoming biopic?

Trey Parker

He did a great job as Jobs in that documentary about Apple, HUMANCENTiPAD.

Microsoft flags Firefox and Chrome for security failings

Other browsers

If you look at the page source it's obvious that it can't rate any browser other than IE, FF or Chrome due to the terrible way it's been written.