Posts by Anonymous IV

El Reg's festive dating app guide, Pt. 2: The FEMALE perspective

Prior art

It would have been nice if the cartoonist had acknowledged that Banksy, quite some months ago, did a picture named Mobile Lovers which is remarkably similar to the cartoonist's "Mobile Obsessed" cartoon...

German minister photo fingerprint 'theft' seemed far too EASY, wail securobods

Some day my prints will come

Fingers ain't wot they used ter be...

ASA slaps Ebuyer AGAIN - this time for ignoring regulator

What's the next level below Toothless Tiger?

Initially I thought this was the next version of Ubuntu, but the ASA is beyond even that and could thus be described as Utterly Useless.

REVEALED: Titsup flight plan mainframe borks UK air traffic control

Re: There's legacy, and there's legacy

I suppose most people know that JOVIAL is an acronym for "Jules' Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language", named in the heady days of the 1960s when such whimsy was quite acceptable.

In these more enlightened tennies, who would ever dream of giving a version of an operating system a ridiculous name such as Flatulent Ferret or Mangy Mongoose? It just couldn't happen, could it...

BOFH: Santa, bloody Santa

Part Two next week?

Too many matters left unresolved, I felt.

Or a too-abrupt ending.

Take your pick!

Outage STILL hitting Virgin Media Business broadband customers

Business customers don't get the option to run in modem mode! All you can do is a bodge by buying 5 or 6 "fixed" IP addresses and creating a dummy subnet.

Mmmmffll-CHOMP: I won? Reg reader to have CHOC-TASTIC YEAR

Tasting notes?

Something more complicated than:

1) remove wrapping

2) insert orally

3) savour

?

Tough Banana Pi: a Raspberry Pi for colour-blind diehards

Re: Is there a collective name for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts?

Surely Pi-oneers?

Re: "Gigabit Ethernet is also a very welcome edition"

Isn't it ironic that someone should misspell "misspelling" as "miss-spelling"!

If you wish to be marital-status-neutral, perhaps you should have used "ms-spelling"?

Mighty Blighty broadbanders beg: Let us lay cable in BT's, er, ducts

Re: BT: Over-Spec'd and out of date

> everyone has a sewer connection

Strictly-speaking yes, but you'd be surprised how many go only to the septic tank...

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

Upgrades

Does Mint still have the 'feature' (common to other Linux distributions?) where if you want to upgrade to a new version (every six months) then it's a complete reinstall from scratch, and thus a complete recustomisation of everything?

'Regin': The 'New Stuxnet' spook-grade SOFTWARE WEAPON described

Is the clue in the name?

"El Reg" and "Regin" - 60% of the letters are the same! Is there a connection? I think we should be told.

Oh, and has anyone seen mention of any scanner which would check for the presence of Regin (rather than plough through the information at the end of the PDF), and remove it? It may be early days, though.

Countdown contestant pays homage to IT Crowd's Moss

Re: Collins' definition - sort of

That's where I saw the Approval status: Rejected...

Word rejected by Collins' dictionary

Could someone please explain, for those who may well have thought that The IT Crowd was utter rubbish, whether TNETENNBA has any actual meaning, or is just a in-joke like Mornington Crescent (which may also be considered as a waste of time)?

Blackpool hotel 'fines' couple £100 for crap TripAdvisor review

Self-certified as 3-star

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the Broadway Hotel self-certifies itself (tautology?) as being of a 3-star standard. The fact that this is possible says a lot about the tourist industry.

Also the fact that there are only ten hotels lower down in the ranking than that hotel, since those at the very bottom of the list are those whom nobody has ever rated.

There is a notorious guest-house in Beverley which self-certifies itself as 4-star, and has filched the 4-star logos from Visit England and stuck "Self Certified" at the top of each on its website. On a good day, it might be assessed as 2-star. Rather better than the Broadway Hotel, though!

Windows 8 or nowt: Consumer Win 7 fans are out of luck

Re: A year?

> Final release is likely to be either spring 2015, or roughly a year from now

I think that what we have here is an example of irony, where the author is rather sceptical of the claimed delivery dates provided by software manufacturers. (If you need to look up "irony", you are not British!)

'Urika': Cray unveils new 1,500-core big data crunching monster

Met Office

Does anyone know how this compares in power with the "IBM supercomputers" which the Met Office in Exeter boasts of using on their website, without them being any more specific?

Ofcom chief exec Ed Richards to step down in December

Purpose?

It doesn't really matter who is chosen to run Ofcom, since (to mix metaphors) it is a figurehead without any teeth. I think of Ofcom much like the IBM mainframe Assembler instruction NOP.

Microsoft on the Threshold of a new name for Windows next week

Windows Ukulele?

... for the new, cleaner Windows (apologies to George Formby).

Infosec geniuses hack a Canon PRINTER and install DOOM

I thought this was a function of the printer firmware...

"The proof-of-concept demo by security researchers at Context Information Security [...] allowed them to exhaust the ink of the printer by printing out hundreds of documents."

Now it seems that my printer may have been hacked, and it wasn't just Canon's rapacious ink cartridge greed.

Moto 360: Neat gizmo – if you're a rich nerd

Re: How about a watch that has the correct time?

"The killer app for a smartwatch is that it will have the correct time, automatically."

You mean like Network Time Protocol, available from a whole bunch of Time Servers in each country?

Go on, corporate drone, log in... We'd recognise your VEINS anywhere – Barclays

So they did not use artificially-coloured blood?

No, they did not dye in vein...

Data entry REAR-END SNAFU: Weighty ballsup leads to plane take-off flap

Wouldn't weighing them infringe the passengers' Human Rights?

And, most importantly for the check-in staff, Why Didn't They Think Of The Children?

No, thank you. I will not code for the Caliphate

Re: Funny?

Disappointing that the author didn't manage to crowbar in something about "a caliphate worse than death"...

Football legend Gary Lineker in TWITTER POO TROLL SCANDAL

Surprised you missed...

... calling the whole story "poo-erile". Must be a slow Friday at El Reg Towers?

Cops baffled by riddle of CHICKEN who crossed ROAD

Philosophical question

Why can't chickens just cross the road without having their motives questioned?

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

"Redundant data centre"?

"We have done everything we can to minimise impact and are working to get the redundant data centre up as soon as possible."

If the data centre was redundant, then why is there a problem? Have I missed something?

The Register editorial job ad

Bring Back Sarah Bee!

We miss the demon Moderatrix, who presumably went on to become Maleficent in that recent movie...

Scotland's BIG question: Will independence cost me my broadband?

The new Scottish single regulator

... will presumably have to be named OffAll, or Offal for short.

GoTenna: How does this 'magic' work?

Citizens' Band

Perhaps the manufacturers could consider using this? Or did they never watch those anarchic trucking movies of yesteryear?

But maybe the operation of this would be stuffed by sunspots...

German government orders local CIA station chief to pack his bags

Sour Krauts

+1 to the sub-ed!

Indian government flings ONE HUNDRED BILLION rupees at startups

Re: Should this title not be...

No. Such usage is incredibly infantile. And stupid.

Test drive Microsoft Azure & meet Mark Russinovich

Re: page defrag

All his PageDefrag did was to combine together all fragments of the page file (usually no more than two, maybe three) into a single 'fragment'/extent. Whether than improved performance or not is arguable. Was that your actual question?

PageDefrag doesn't work on Vista+, and was last updated in November 2006. Hardly worth the bother of asking the great man, I would say.

Crusty API opened Facebook accounts to hijacking

All together now

"API days are here again..."

Brit celebs' homes VANISH from Google's Street View

Re: It's on Bing

@Pedigree-Pete

Well done! You appreciated my very amusing collective noun joke!

Re: It's on Bing

Surely a mews is where a herd of cats lives?

Re: But, but, but...

@ You have not yet created a handle

I think Tony Blair's house is the one with the precisely-formed tornado on the pavement outside. It enables all his words to be taken up to heaven, to be judged...

Alabama quadchopper hits THREE THOUSAND FEET next to AIRPORT

Re: UAV's : bigger threat to planes than carry-on kit?

> I have a distinct feeling that the US will soon be deploying Ack-Ack batteries around every airport just in case some idiot tries to fly one of these into the patch of a passenger jet.

Ack-Ack batteries to shoot down a quadcopter? Isn't that what cruise missiles were invented for?

O2 and 'leccy firm's MNVO bid flops as £25m glugs down the drain

Re: Lycra Mobile?

Probably just a Fraudian Slip...!

Royal Navy parks 470 double-decker buses on Queen Elizabeth

Bust-up

Just because you can park 470 double-decker London buses on an aircraft carrier, it doesn't mean that you should...

(Has anyone any idea of the relative purchase cost, BTW?)

Big Java security fixes on the way – but not so fast, Windows XP users

Re: Java???

Are you referring to Javascript? This is an entirely different animal from Java (the language) or the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) (what unfortunate users get to install)..

More useful will be when LibreOffice finally manages to escape from any dependency on the Java Runtime Environment.

El Reg is looking for a new London sub-editor

Re: BEEELLION

Conversely, any candidate who thinks this stupid and unnecessary neologism is appropriate should be hurled out of the door with great force.

Re: Sir

Surely journalists are showered with the 'perks' not available to IT staff?

The free lunches from fruity firms for puffing their products?

Hardware and software on test which 'doesn't need to be returned'?

The unquestioning approbation of El Reg's intelligent and perceptive readers?

(Maybe I got the first part of the last perk slightly wrong...)

Like frozen burgers, 'Bigfoot' DNA samples have a touch of horse

Obligatory final line of report

"More research is needed."

True fact: Your CAT wees ... like a racehorse

"More research is needed."

Sadly the link is only to the Abstract of the paper, so we cannot see whether this compulsory final sentence was included.

Retiring Reg hack explains how bass playing = tech reporting

Is it true?

...that you can do a bass face like Este Haim?

(I won't ask about the legs...)

BBC: Bumpkins, hobbits need fairer coverage

Re: The count wee?

I remember the quote from the BBC radio comedy programme as:

Posh blonde female undergrad: "The countryside? You mean that green thing that Daddy owns?"

Farewell Felix Dennis, deal-maker supreme of tech publishing

So what happens now to PC Pro magazine?

Will it be sold, or will it fold? It's becoming thinner and less focussed as time passes.

Own goal as World Cup Wi-Fi passwords spilled in newspaper snap

Re: I Don't Get It

It doesn't! That's the high-security feature in the password!

Who needs a ride-on mower when a ROBOT will cut your grass

So if it's robotic...

... what is the point of the two ethernet sockets at the front?