Posts by Anonymous IV

Passport PIN tech could have SAVED MH370 ID fraudsters

Re: Lost or stolen (or dead)

Shush! You'll give those undercover cops ideas!

Inmarsat: Doppler effect helped 'locate' MH370

Re: Truly astonishing amount of information stored

I would imagine that one ping per hour per aircraft is not going to require NSA-quantities of storage?

Got a Netgear router from Virgin Media? Change your admin password NOW

"what kind of moron leaves the wifi enabled on a superhub anyway?"

All Virgin Media Business customer morons, because Modem Mode is not available on the business firmware on the Super Hub 1.

And no Super Hub 2 yet for business customers, who just get a refurbished Super Hub 1.

Getty offers 35 MILLION images for free – if you jump (em)bed with it

Terms & Conditions

The Terms & Conditions are a snappy just-less-than-4000 words.

I need to install additional Will-To-Live just to read them.

Google kills copycat TfL congestion charge payment ads

Re: ITunes too

So you did click on the correct link, then!

Retiring greybeards force firms to retrain Java, .NET bods as mainframe sysadmins

It shouldn't take more than a couple of days...

"What does Richards suggest CIOs should do to address the shortage in a more coordinated manner? First, profile your IT people by age, skills and the applications and systems they are responsible for. Next, capture and record their knowledge so it can be passed on to new people..."

So years and decades of mainframe experience can be captured and recorded, in a sort of rapid "job handover" process? Mr Richards, you have found the secret of the universe.

Virgin Media sales flat: Firm bags fewer winter sign-ups than last year

Re: Everyone can't gain market share every year

Possibly many/most commentingpersons are too young to remember the Equity Funding financial scandal in the US, where they had to 'sell' (that is, invent) more and more life assurance policies each year to keep the rate of growth up, and the share price high. When the whole thing collapsed, someone calculated that if the 'fraudulent' growth had continued, then in only a few years' time every single person in the US would have had one of their policies!

CCTV warning notices NOT compliant with data protection laws – ICO

Re: How do you read a QR code in a car?

Curiously both spellings of stationary/stationery could be correct here!

Barclays Bank probes 'client data sold to rogue City traders' breach

'Initial investigations' suggest 'data from 2008 or earlier'

Phew! That's all right, then!

Virgin Media's flaky broadband network turns Bolton off

"Virgin Media finally fixed the flaky service just hours after the Reg contacted the ISP. "

Only time will show whether the fault has been finally fixed, as El Reg undoubtedly knows.

Adobe goes out of band to fix frightful Flash flaw

Out-of-band Flash update?

Flash updates seem to come about twice a week, about as frequently as Adobe Reader updates.

How easy it is to hate Adobe...

Fujitsu launches lappie for oldies

Really annoying...

... that the article made no comment about the deeply-patronising term Silver Surfers, so my spleen remains unvented.

BT scratches its head over MYSTERY Home Hub disconnections

Re: Virgin "Super" hub

Modem mode on the Virgin Media Super Hub 1 is all jolly fine if you're an ordinary consumer, but the business firmware is crippled and cannot be put into modem mode. So we have a TP Link wireless access point which gives a better signal through five brick walls than the Super Hub through two.

It's big, it's expensive and it's an audiophile's dream: The Sonos Sub

Re: Virtual purchase

I bow in admiration of your wallet, then, if not necessarily your lifestyle choices!

Virtual purchase

"The damn thing costs the best part of six hundred quid and we've had to save up our pennies."

Are you seriously suggesting that you actually bought this thing, and that it wasn't the usual journalistic freebie?

Nominet goes titsup after update to WHOIS tool

Offline for roughly 10 minutes, only?

I think some major banks will soon be contacting Nominet to see how they do things...

UK picks Open Document Format for all government files

Re: "...Adobe make all the best software for creating PDFs"

I do like the incisive, logical and carefully-argued responses that some commenting-people come up with!

Murdoch's BSkyB stares down Microsoft: Redmond renames SkyDrive to OneDrive

Progression?

SkyDrive -> OneDrive -> 1Drive -> iDrive -> lawsuit...

Apple: That 'white screen of death' nightmare? We'll fix it... AT SOME POINT

Re: Not reboots as such

Oh! Well, that's all right then...

French drug dealers regretfully announce 'temporary closure'

Re: Allô ?

It must surely be compulsory in this context to quote the (alleged, but entirely fake) statement of George W Bush: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur..."

Bing Maps COCKUP: Oracle UK HQ is 'Elvis Impersonators' joint

Have you spotted any Bing howlers?

Its existence?

Reading this headline? You and 9.47 million others

Smarm

Aren't we supposed to post a collective Thank You to all the El Reg hacks who work ceaselessly, day and night, to provide limpid and often-(readable & typo-free) articles for our viewing pleasure and for us to squabble over? Well done, chaps and ms-chaps (if available)!

Lenovo Yoga 10: Mediocre tech, yes, but beautifully fondleable

I like an analogy as much as the next man, but...

... what the hell did the author mean by: I took to holding the 605g Yoga 10 by the bar as an ebook reader like a Catholic takes to guilt.?

Maybe some words left out? Or "Warning - contains some elements of confusement"?

(For the Title, compare with "I am not a racist, but...")

My name is Dabbsy and I am an EMAILOHOLIC

One per company dealt with

Of those I have 135 (at present), forwarded to my standard email address. Takes 15 seconds to set up a new one. If I get spam on any of the forwarder addresses, I can simply close it down.

Audiophiles: These Wi-Fi speakers have a stereo drift of less than 25μs – good enough for you?

I make it about 75 days to go

Until this article becomes appropriate.

You're fired: Lord Sugar offloads faded PC builder Viglen to XMA

Re: Inked

You may well ask! And where did helmed come from?

I suppose an El Reg hack has made a New Year's Resolution to be journalistically edgy...

Two guilty over 'menacing' tweets to feminist campaigner

Re: Some aspects of the case are all too familiar...

"District Judge Howard Riddle warned Sorley, whose previous convictions included being drunk and disorderly on 21 occasions, that it was "almost inevitable" she would receive a jail sentence.

The judge told Nimmo, described in court as of "previous good character", that "all options" to sentencing remained open."

Good enough explanation?

Gorilla Glass fights dirty, dirty germs with antimicrobial coating

Why don't they think of the children?

Oh? This is a story about microbes?

[back to the Daily Mail]

Fasthosts goes titsup after storm-induced power outage

Has anyone checked whether there was a power outage in Gloucester?

Or wherever their data centre is housed? All we saw in the local paper was a story about an outage in Podsmead, a minor suburb - and they're hardly likely to site them there!

(On the other hand, we are talking about FastHosts...)

So, which people you read about in The Register got gongs in the Honours list?

Ecademy

I thought the time when something was made new and relevant and hip (showing my age, there?!) by sticking an "E" in front of it had long gone.

But maybe (Ms) Penny Power is not a considerably-cheaper version of Poundland, but an associate of Paddy Power?

El Reg's contraptions confessional no.5: The Sinclair Sovereign

Re: TI SR-51-II

Surely the real test is 1 / 7 * 7 = 1.00000... and not 0.999...997, or similar?

Joke no more: Comedy virty currency Dogecoin gets real in big Xmas heist

Re: such coins!

I'm sure someone, viz. me, can ascribe the wild perturbations of the so-called "stablecoin" to the actions of a bronco bucking, or a horse bolting after the door was left open.

World+dog: Network level filters block LEGIT sex ed sites. Ofcom: Meh

Re: Where is the list of these banned sites

PC Pro magazine, in mid 2012, did an article on the effectiveness or otherwise of various web filtering packages on various classes of potentially contentious material, and by far the longest list (provided as a downloadable file on their website) was that of porn sites. Unexpected, that...

Want to be a better CIO? Get a twenty-something to show you the ropes

Isn't there a saying, "hire a teenager, while they still know it all"?

Isn't the headhunter just extending the age a little?

UK payday loaners cop MEGA £175K fine for 'misleading' SMS spam

Re: "Mega" just don't mean what it used to.

Certainly "mega" does mean what it used to mean, but the headline writer should have said "kilo" for £175,000.

</pedant>

Excise Xmas prezzie indecision MISERY with El Reg’s gift guide²

Re: Nest Protect

@obnoxious

That source of all wisdom, Wikipedia, says that carbon dioxide "is slightly less dense than air", or, in other word, lighter.

Re: But what sort of hammer?

Surely that present is a Hammer Horror?

Marketing told us: 'Justin Bieber is a fad. He’s not going to last.' – Company formerly known as RIM

Re: Reminds me of Mary Antoinette

[pedant]

It wasn't "let them eat cakes" but "let them eat cake".

And it wasn't "let them eat cake" but "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche".

[/pedant]

Wikipedia is your (not always 100% reliable) friend...

IDS finally admits what EVERYONE ELSE already knows: Universal Credit will be late

> Because all of the projects that ever go wrong/late/over-budget are govt ones, right chaps?

Undoubtedly not, but one failed Government IT project is likely to cost about 10+ times of that of an ordinary company's failed IT project, and will affect a proportionately large number of people.

It's the economy of scale...

IT MELTDOWN ruins Cyber Monday for RBS, Natwest customers

Re: @Steve Todd

Regardless of the argument about whether banking IT systems are complicated or not (I would prefer to call them "multiply-interfaced"), is it not the case that we have quite a number of banks other than RBS/Nat West/Ulster Bank whose systems seem to be much more reliable? Cue the people badly affected by the current débacle moving across...

Over the past dozen years, at least, RBS management has done a very thorough job of "wrong-sizing" by getting rid of the people who knew how their IT systems worked.. This policy works fine - until such point that something nasty goes wrong. At present nobody even seems to know exactly what has gone wrong, and the response was presumably simply to "turn everything off and on again"...

URGH! GPS, that's another delayed mess you've got us into - suppliers

Initialism disambiguation

Since the initialism GPS is already well-known to almost everyone as Global Positioning System‎, one might hope that the Government Procurement Service might abbreviate themselves as GovProSer?

From the Dept of You are Old: 'Selfie' officially 'Word of the Year'

Disambiguation

The New Zealanders (at least) refer to a tow truck (operative) as a towie, little realising that this actually means The Only Way Is Essex...

WHO ate all the PIs? Sales of Brit mini-puter pass 2 MEELLION

Sadly, it seems that The Sun's description of him as a "Crystal Methodist" is not original, but it is funny!

Virgin Media to hike broadband prices by nearly 7 per cent

Re: Increase prices for faster speeds?

I always thought the main reason for faster download speeds was so that you could install Windows Updates faster...

Adobe users' purloined passwords were pathetic

No special characters in the first 100 passwords?

Surprising, but maybe the highly-sophisticated Adobe password mechanism didn't allow them.

Good to see that liverpool came in at #73!

Reg mobile correspondent Bill Ray hangs up his Vulture hat

First our much-loved Fearsome Moderatrix, now Bill Ray...

Good luck, sir, and thanks for your articulation.

London schoolboy cuffed for BIGGEST DDOS ATTACK IN HISTORY

> Great name, Rashlike.

Rather, it looks like one of those 8-character "off the shelf" company names (e.g. DerryWay, EuroNest, Vectoria) that you occasionally see around when the owners haven't realised that you can change them to something meaningful to their business.

VMware to customers: STOP INSTALLING OUR SOFTWARE! NOW!

Recurse

Probably VMWare should itself be running in a virtual machine?

Boffins debate killing leap seconds to help sysadmins

Re: Another rant

Leap seconds? Don't we have enough problems with the two GMT <--> DST transitions each year? And the fact that Windows' NTFS file time-stamps don't handle it neatly...