Posts by Anonymous IV

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...

USB 3.1 demo shows new spec well on its way towards 1.2GB/sec goal

Re: Users

> How many ordinary small office/home users even need to use USB 3.0?

Perhaps those who want to write a lot of data files to a USB 2.0 device?

Those who actually back up their data and who had to let it run overnight...

Fanbois shun 'crappy plastic' iPhone 5C

Re: 5C...

And, pray, what acronym do you see for the 5S...?

Re: IBM Songbook

Look for "Ever Onward" on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU

It sounds like it was recorded about 1925...

Cisco email accidentally sent to 1000s of employees causes message list MAYHEM

Re: size

@agentgonzo: Maths was correct, holding down of shift was incorrect... I meant 94KB (kilobytes) rather than Kb (kilobits).

Probably you actually meant 94kB!

If I remember correctly the kilo (k) is the only SI prefix for powers of ten great than one (apart from the never-encountered hecto-h) which is in lower case (compare mega-M, Giga-G, tera-T).

Another instance of where a standard is flawed...

</pedant>

Angry Brazilian whacks NASA to put a stop to ... er, the NSA

Re: Come to think of it....

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

Ambrose Bierce

Billionaire engineer Ray Dolby, 80, dies at home in San Francisco

Genuinely surprised...

... to find out his first name was Ray, and not Thomas.

Cold-blooded, INHUMAN visitor hitches ride on NASA moon rocket

A-frog-dizzy-ac

Rockets turn frogs on? (But more probably off...)

Sage 50 activation blackout: Shops sent back to paper age

Surely better to be fleeced by a British firm than an American one...?

Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator

@Brian de Ford

I commend your well-reasoned, insightful and thoroughly researched comment.

OR

Why did you bother?

Microsoft cans three 'pinnacle' certifications, sparking user fury

Re: Underscores the problem with vendor certifications

"I have known people with degrees, doctorates and, dare I say it, memberships of <u>the relevant august societies</u> who I wouldn't trust to change the toner cartridge of a laser printer..."

You must surely be alluding to the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, whose membership is composed of "Current senior members of the industry", "‘Senators’ of the industry", "Accomplished practitioners" and "Young high achievers"!

Women in IT: ‘If you want to be taken seriously, dress like a man’

Come back, Verity Stob, all is forgiven...

"I’ve yet to come across an article that accurately shows what it’s like to be a woman in the trenches like me"

Verity has worked in the trenches of programming and systems analysis for many years - is that no good?

Boffins lay bare exotic Lara Croft meteorite element ununpentium

Copyrighted?

Surely Intel must have copyrighted/trade-marked anything of the format <something>Pentium?

Oh, maybe not - they're not Apple...

Meet the world's one-of-a-kind ENORMO barge-bowling bridge of Falkirk

What's with the "hand-tightened bolts"?

Suppressing the urge to ask why they didn't use spanners to tighten the bolts, I ask why a powered torque wrench wouldn't have been a better tool?

Or is this just a piece of useless information, like "pan-fried sea bass"?

Kim Kardashian's bosom pal in bling snatch Instagram unpleasantness

Re: I'd rather have...

> "Money doesn't make you happy but it makes misery bearable"

Surely the quotation was "Money doesn't make you happy but it makes poverty bearable"?

EXPLICIT VID: Man filmed trying to bang brand new 'budget iPhone'

No relation?

Is that "fitness expert" Jay Blahnik any relation to Manolo, of women's feetal coverings fame?

Wait, don't ditch that IT career just yet: UK vacancies hit 5-year high

Re: Lies, damned lies and recruitment agencies.

You are presumably referring to Thomas J Watson's 1943 statement, ""I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"?

If so, it seems quite unlikely that one of them would be in Cornwall!