Posts by Pen-y-gors

Panasonic preps Pocket Server

wouldn't it be easier....

to just plug the SD card into the iThingy directly?

DOH! Housing contractor loses unencrypted stick down the pub

Call me Mr. Naive, but...

I know we have all this stuff about data protection and so on, but what is so secret about bank account details? Every time I pay by cheque I give a piece of paper to someone, who I probably don't know, which contains my name, bank a/c no and sort code, and a copy of my signature. Quite possibly if I have posted this information the covering letter includes my address.

Similarly all my invoices contain details of my company bank a/c.

All the recipient can do with this info is to pay money *into* my a/c - and I have no problem with them doing that.

London plods raid Wikipedia in counter-anarchist operation

Why?

Why should all information relating to anarchists be reported to the local police? It's not actually illegal (yet), is it?

Good news: A meltdown would kill fewer than we thought

Well, that's all right then

Time to start building a nuke next to every school and hospital in the land.

Beeb rolls out global paid iPlayer app in €urope

Great deal

So if I do the maths, they should be able to offer it at 50 euro less 30% Jobs tax = about £30 a year for Web/Android subscribers - that's a lot cheaper than a licence fee...and they get the archives as well.

Freesat ITV Player out of beta

4OD

Now how about adding Channel 4 On demand?

Grenade-gasm autogun gets Raoul Moat Taser shells

So, if I understand correctly....

this can be used to fire multiple taser rounds at high speed, which will presumably mean that the poor sod on the receiving end will probably get multiple high-voltage, incapacitating shocks one after the other - which will probably end up incapacitating their heart, permanently! Wouldn't a bullet be simpler?

The whole point about tasers (according to the marketing spin) is that they are meant to be used with care, in specific, well thought out situations, to non-lethally disable armed individuals who pose a threat to others. Spraying them at high speed in the general direction of a crowd of peaceful demonstrators is not what the adverts suggest they'll be used for (but I bet they will be!)

TalkTalk drags arse in Ofcom ISP survey

CrapCrap more like

Friends (who sadly had switched to TalkTalk to 'save' a few pence a month) recently had problem with PC/Internet. After hour on phone TalkTalk decided that they needed to send an engineer out but, as they lived in the sticks, there wasn't a TalkTalk engineer in the area so they'd have to get a BT engineer out. The cost would be £99.95!

I wandered round and after two minutes talking to them and a few questions had solved the problem: It seem that the phone worked if the computer wasn't plugged in and the computer/router worked if the phone wasn't plugged in. Let's try swapping the filter (cost £1.95). Surprise - it worked!

If I can sort it out in two minutes why can't TalkTalk?

But actually BT aren't any better - another friend had problem, hour or two on phone to BT in Bangalore - various suggestions. Five minute visit by me and a bit of cable swapping and it's clear router is stuffed. Phone BT and they agree at once to send a replacement. Why can't they just do that up front? It's a simple flowchart of what works and what doesn't!

UK gov 'Spads' hefty salaries released/buried

Nah...

I assumed they were referring to the WWI French aircraft (produced by Société Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés) - couldn't work out why they got a govt salary though.

Bill seeks to decriminalise pianos in pubs and schools

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...or the Tories...or the Lib Dems

Hundreds of dot-brand domains predicted

ICANN money-printing machine

Rubbish! Even if 10,000 global brands go for their own TLD (i.e. $1.85 BILLION for ICANN) then there will still be 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 business websites that are still on .com , .co.uk, .cymru or whatever, so people will NOT forget .com - Joe's Widgets (annual turnover $150,000) is not going to set up website.joeswidgets for $185K!

Half of Virgin Media broadband ads are wrong, says ASA

Why bother?

What's the point of the ASA? Virgin (and others) repeatedly run misleading ads and the ASA just say 'don't run that one again' - where's the penalty? How many suckers have been taken in by the misleading ads? How much money have Virgin etc made as a result of those misleading ads?

Until the ASA have the power to hit the advertisers where it hurts, and actually use that power, then they might as well wind it up. How about a practical penalty such as banning Virgin from publishing ANY adverts in the press, online, TV, radio etc for say one month? Then if they still mislead, the next time it's two months etc. It's the only language they understand...

UK smartphone market growth stalls

Do tell more?

Who are you with? - 10 squid for unlimited internet sounds quite good (is it *really* unlimited?)

Dinner Spinner

Or of course....

You could just go to allrecipes.com in your browser and search for 'chocolate' in 'soups, stews and chillis' and lo, up comes the recipe for Big Game Chilli - why faff around with an app? Or if you just google for recipes for soup with chocolate you get some wonderful-sounding suggestions. Anyone for chocolate soup with caramelized bananas?

Mmmmh....chocolate.....

GOLDENBALLSUP! Beckham website defaced

Seven?

Harper, whilst unusual, doesn't sound too weird as a girl's name. But Seven? That actually raises some interesting questions - the practice of numbering children is an old one - the Romans were keen on 'Secundus' 'Tertia', 'Septimus', 'Octavia' and so on, and today you'll find many people in the Latin countries called Segundo and so on. In which case does 'Seven' suggest there are three little fitzBeckham's floating around that haven't been publicly acknowledged?

Scientists print out solar cells using inkjet tech

When will it all end?

There's a major problem with solar PV etc - the research and technology is just moving too fast.

Every week there are several stories in the press about another research team making another PV breakthrough that will reduce the production cost/increase the efficiency of solar cells. Great!

But no-one in their right mind would invest in any of these brilliant ideas, 'cos you'd lose a packet. Why? Because six months after your wonderful two-billion-dollar factory opens, some joker down the road will open THEIR factory with newer, cheaper technology (the fruits of another 6 months research breakthroughs by someone else), and they will undercut you by 50% - and six months later THEY go bust as yet another cheaper producer comes on-line.

We're not going to get seriously cheap solar PV everywhere until someone develops a technology (possibly something simple like this ink-jet thingy), that can totally change the game and be produced in worthwhile quantities, quickly, using production methods that only cost a few million quid to set up (i.e. low risk) rather than the usual few billion needed for major high-tech silicon FABs.

Patrick Byrne: 'See, I told you America's economy was busted'

We need to slow things down

A major problem now is that the stock market has become a casino - the basic premise is excellent: businessperson has idea, needs money to develop idea, person with money invests in business in exchange for a share of the company, reaps rewards in form of dividends and, maybe, one day sells the investment ('shares') for a profit (or loss) - all long term stuff and directly linking lender and borrower. Both have an interest in making the company succeed.

Present actual system is very different - people trade shares and try to make money on fractional percentage points of increases/decreases in value, and have an incentive to short sell and manipulate the market. They have no interest in the actual company and whether it is a success or a failure - they don't care.

Several simple things could help this - simple, but totally unacceptable to the governments and 'regulators' who have a vested interest in the status quo.

1) The tax on transaction proposed - say a 2% tax on all share deals, payable by the buyer. Not a problem for a long term investment when you're planning to hold the shares over years (and it could be refunded if the shares are held for say 12 months.)

2) Slow down the whole trading system - computers are great but the ability to trade in micro-seconds encourages the gambling and short selling. Let's make the stock market a real market, where people exchange money for real things, like buying a couple of pounds of spuds from the local market stall. To buy shares you should have to find someone who wants to sell (websites could help here) - who must be the registered holder of those shares (i.e. holds the physical printed share certificates in their name). You then give them money (real money, transferred from one bank a/c to another, possibly via an escrow a/c for security), and then the sale details are registered with the company (by completing the transfer details on the paper certificate and returning it to them - like selling a car) and new certificates issued. Only then is ownership transferred, allowing the buyer to re-sell the shares. Wipes out the whole short-term buying/selling on margin and not having to pay until 'settlement date' silliness.

I really should be Chancellor of the Exchequer! Economics is very easy if you stick to reality....

Dear Ubuntu: The netbook is toast

Reports of my death...

Way off course - but then someone whose business is developing mobile apps would tend to suggest that tablets/smartphones are the future.

Tablets are a neat idea - I can think of a few situations when they'd be really useful. But there are also situations where they're no use whatsoever.

I have my trusty Aspire One, and it's excellent - because is has a KEYBOARD and REAL PROGRAMS like OpenOffice. With a big battery I get seven hours out of it and it's SMALL and very portable and CHEAP. A proper netbook has a definite place - at one end I have my main laptop - heavy-duty web development machine, expensive, powerful and heavy - works best at a desk when tied to a big monitor, real mouse and proper keyboard.not something I want to risk taking out and about too often. Other end there's a smartphone - handy for quick things, looking up train times, news, bit of e-mail when out and about (and within range of a signal), and general odds-and-sods. Somewhere in-between there's a tablet - handy for watching a DVD (well, so long as it's not actually on a physical DVD of course), and a bit of casual surfing, or even reading a book (although a kindle is better). And then there's a netbook - small, cheap, real computers that you CAN take on the beach or on a train and do some serious work on - like writing an essay or a novel, fiddling with a Powerpoint or a spreadsheet, even a bit of web development - how do you do THAT on a tablet (without lugging along an external keyboard)?

Nope, I'll hold off replacing my very functional and practical and cheap Linux netbook with an expensive and not-very-functional tablet for a while yet.

Android app brings cookie stealing to unwashed masses

What a good idea...

So when is El Reg going to support always-on SSL (or even sometimes on) for the comments?

Kingston readies wireless portable storage

Share files?

Surely that's illegal in Amerika? Won't purchasers automatically get 10 years in the slammer?

CEOP announces 'record results' in child protection battle

thinkuknow?

Think UK Now? Presumably some sort of UK citizenship awareness programme? Why is CEOP ingvolved in pushing that to kids?

Yanks officially recognise the word 'boffin'

irresponsible!

What a prat! You realise that productivity in IT facilities throughout the land will now plummet, servers will crash and be ignored, hell-desk phones will ring unanswered as the entire readership of el Reg spends the next couple of hours crafting such sentences!

David Cameron wants to push all of Blighty online

Errrm....

How does he get everyone online if they provide connectivity via Three's 3G mobile service? Is he extending that to provide 3G everywhere in the UK for everyone? (jolly nice idea - might be worth getting a smartphone then)

Scrabble friends Facebook, innit

an old fart writes...

what the fec does 'blook' mean?

DWP's poor IT systems threaten back-to-work scheme

nice one!

>the Work Programme could be could be hampered by duplication of data entry

could be!

Google opens peephole on mystery data center practices

bionic technology?

> if an unauthorized person did gain access to a hard drive, the data could not be read by the human eye.

my eyesight's not too bad, but I really, really struggle trying to read the data on any of my unencrypted hard drives, never mind the encrypted ones - and I have the same problem with CDs. DVDs, USB sticks, floppies - in fact, I've not be able to read data directly off storage since I stopped using punched cards and paper tape...

Top-secret US lab infiltrated by spear phishers – again

>Representatives didn't return emails

well, if their internet access has been completely cut off....

Scottish news site hit by 'DDoS attack' in run-up to elections

Minor technical correction

> ...on Monday days before Scotland is due to vote in fiercely contested local elections.

In fact Scots are due to vote in a fiercely contested NATIONAL election on May 5th - the local elections in Scotland have been postponed to 2012. The Welsh General Election also takes place on the same day and that's pretty fiercely contested too.

Fired-up eco-boffin gives it '180 per cent'

Pregnant sheep

Program on telly t'other day had some bod scanning a flock of sheep and reported the pregnancy rate as 181.3% - it actual made sense, as it was an average over the flock, and 1 lamb meant that the ewe was 100% pregnant (you can't be 'a little bit pregnant'), twins was counted as 200%, triplets 300% and so on.

Still an interesting concept though!

Named: Ten towns with slowest mobile broadband

Let's not forget...

all those towns and villages with a 3G download speed of precisely zero.

MPs criticise banks on online fraud despite declining losses

Does not compute

Interesting - this report says cost of cyber-crime to banks (i.e. real dosh lost) is less than £50million.

So how come we regularly see reports like:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/17/cyber_crime_total/

which reckons that 'the UK economy is losing £27bn a year' due to cyber-crime, of which "£1.3bn goes thanks to direct online theft."

Someone needs to buy a calculator.

Steven Moffat promises 'darker' Doctor Who

Confused...

How can you miss one? Every episode is transmitted at least 19 times on various BBC channels during the first week or two after initial broadcast, (along with 11 repeats of 'Dr Who Confidential') and then at least 3 times a week on BBC 3 for the next decade.

And isn't a series of 13 episodes with a big break in the middle actually just two short series?

Microsoft wraps Windows 8 in Ribbon UI?

Just say NO to Ribbon UIs

>It was first introduced by Microsoft to make it easier to find features buried in the depths of long menus of Office.

... and to make it impossible to find features previously easily accesible from straightforwrd, simple, logical menus

Recently got a copy of Office 2010 - productivity seriously reduced. Time to switch back to OOo

The Cisco Borg in your TV

usual MBA bullshit

Why exactly does a carrier need to add value? If they are carrying something that the people at each end consider is worth being carried, then surely they just charge a fair price for their service.

I have a water pipe running into my house. I get water out of it. I am happy to pay for that water. The Water Company don't seem to feel a need to 'add value' and sell me orange squash to mix with my water or shower gel or garden sprinklers. They haven't decided to offer a choice of pre-heated hot, cold or mineral water direct from the pipe. Why can't telecoms carriers just provide a good, fair-priced service?

Labour MP debuts fondleslab-assisted Parliament oratory

reading?

I always thought one of the arcane rules of the Commons was that Hon. Ladies and Gents were required to speak without reading a prepared speech - in other words in their own words rather than that of a speech-writer - although referring to brief notes was allowed.

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Egg/basket situation

Okay, so far the engineering has done pretty well - but the underlying point for future development (or not) of nuclear power is risk. Not simply the obvious 'will it melt down and turn East Anglia/England/Western Europe into an uninhabitable wasteland' - which I accept with next generation thorium reactors etc may be really, really unlikely - but the basic risk to electricity supplies. Nukes are very big budget items. Get it wrong and you've wasted a hell of a lot of dosh. And no matter what you plan for there will be times when a reactor or set of reactors goes offline, even if it's only temporary (terrorist attacks, snow bringing down grid cables, floods, crashing Jumbo, industrial action - whatever) - and bang goes a sizeable chunk of your total generating capacity in one fell swoop, and the lights go off. This is what the Japanese are finding now. Going for a very widely distributed generation network, using a wide variety of small-scale, localised power sources (wind, wave, solar, fossil) gives overall resilience to the generating system, which you will never get with massive multi-gigawatt plants, whether nuclear, coal or whatever. And of course lots of small generation sources tends to smooth out expenditure and generate many more, localised jobs.

Dentist cuffed for using lost credit card to pay for pizza

Probably a silly question but....

how did he get the PIN?

Cobalt-barrel machine guns could fire full auto Hollywood style

and also curious to know ...

...how do you get the mandrel out of the barrel once you're done?

Apple 'greed' tax spreads beyond music, movies, magazines

yeah, but 30%???

It's perfectly reasonable for Apple to want to charge a fee for using their 'wonderful' on-line payment system. But 30%? Do Paypal charge 30% to process a payment? No. Do Visa/mastercard etc charge 30%? No. Do some businesses on tight margins add a small surcharge for people to pay by card? yes? So, if Apple were charging say, 1.5%, minimum 25p, and allowed apps to charge more via the App Store (to cover the Jobs tax) than via other means, then I don't think anyone would complain.

But 30%? And no way to recoup it? Come on - that's a hell of a 'fee' for using a 'smooth' checkout system!

Huawei to gift underground coverage to London

Beware the Greeks bearing gifts..

Or in this case, Chinese. Given the track record of the Chinese government when it comes to cyber-naughtyness, this is a bit on a par with KGB Systems Ltd. offering to install a free new phone system for GCHQ!

South African dam sluices 609 elephants per second

Too confusing!

You can't use elephants as a unit of liquid volume - elephants are a unit of time. If you remember "Gregory's Girl" the geek photographer/voyeur kid makes it clear that one elephant corresponds to one second (he counts 'one elephant, two elephant' etc)

So that would make the dam handle 609 elephants per elephant...or is that elephants squared?

IT grad claims £5m for crap degree

What's worrying is...

...that they even gave such a plonker a 2.2 in the first place.

Clinton demands net freedom for all... 'cept Wikileaks

Remember Tom Lehrer?

I remember Tom Lehrer was quoted as saying that he gave up writing his songs when they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger for bombing Cambodia into the Stone Age and he felt that political satire could go no further.

I think La Clinton may just about trump that - has she no sense of irony? Does her dictionary not include the phrase 'crass hypocrisy'?

UK police crime map website: Who's the victim here?

But on the plus side...

the site does actually work in Welsh...well, sort of, most of it at least - some odd words and phrases still appear in English in the middle of a Welsh page and they can't quite seem to cope with letters with accents on them, even though the web page is tagged as utf-8 - î comes out as Ó, and an apostrophe comes out as í, but I think 6/10 for effort! Cais da ond rhaid ceisio'n galetach...

And the best bit was looking at my village and discovering we'd had a grand total of zero offences - rural Wales may be short of services but it seems to be lacking in crims as well.

Couple crash into church, curse satnav

Not another one!

Can we please introduce a system so that anyone claiming that they had an 'accident' due to following their satnav's instructions is automatically charged with driving without due care and attention - which they obviously were!

'Personal Air Vehicle' VTOL jump-copter in key flight test

I WANT ONE - NOW!!!!!

Forget saving up for the Porsche - I really, really, really want one!

BT eases iPad hotspot hop-ons

But what about BT Biz?

Fair play to BT, free openzone/fon for Home users is a nice extra - but how about BT Business users? All we get is 250 Openzone minutes a month - and we pay more in the first place!

Raygun dreadnought project reports 'remarkable breakthrough'

All we are saying...

...is give peace a chance!

The money spent trying to develop more and more technologically extreme ways of killing people gets more obscene by the day. I know that there are some civil spin-offs of military research (GPS) but I'm hard pressed to think of any peaceful use for this.

Although I suppose it does suggest that the ConDumbs were being rather prescient when they decided to equip the Navy with aircraft carriers (sorry, a carrier, single) without any aircraft.

Galileo euro-satnav 'driven by French military', says sacked CEO

i don't need no stinkin' title

I believe it's called Minitel...

California's green-leccy price system will stifle plug-in cars

It's a scale thing...

Approx no. of vehicles in Venezuela: 2.5 million

Approx no. of vehicles in Saudi: 7.5 million

Approx no. of vehicles in Iran: 10 million

Approx no. of vehicles in Mexico: 20 million

Approx no. of vehicles in USA: 250 million

Now, do the sums: which has the most impact, persuading Merkins to drive more efficiently, or persuading Venezuelans to drive more efficiently?

[Sources: Wikipedia list of no. of motor vehicles per head by country multiplied by the country population]