Posts by Anonymous IV

Ballmer says 500 MILLION 'users' to 'have' Windows 8 in 2013

"the navigation is streamlined and intuitive..."

Not a use of the word "intuitive" that I recognise!

BOFH: Siri, why do users lie?

Someone complains about "PIN number" when Simon uses "pinnochio" as a verb?

What is pedantry coming to?!

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: Openoffice?

Yes, and so does LibreOffice!

But LO is working to eliminate the need for the Java Runtime Environment... (yippee!)

Blighty's IP framework one of world's worst for consumers

Intellectual Property or Internet Protocol?

In these articles, please could we have a clue, preferably in the subject, but certainly early in the first paragraph, whether we are talking about IP or IP!

John Lewis Broadband - genius or foolhardy?

Isn't this scheme almost as expensive as Zen, but without Zen's proven level of ISP customer service?

Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

Re: Related?

In the Google email address model [e-mail] can be written as [e-mail], or even [e-mail]. all full stops in the section before the @ sign are ignored...

6.45pm (Pacific Time)

Couldn't the author have gone to the effort of telling us what time that is in BST? It would save the rest of us having to work it out, or ignoring it.

French perfume house bottles 'Eau de new MacBook'

Re: Instinctive but strange

There was the instance of the chap who had just gone to collect his new company car - but rejected it because "it doesn't smell new", and told them to get one which DID smell new!

Student's Linux daemon 0-day triggers InfoSec Institute outcry

Re: The solution is obvious: Make root access forbidden!!!!1!one

There's also a lot to be said for write-only memory...

Windows XP support ends two years from now

Re: "We're not willing to classify Windows NT Workstation as a mainstream desktop OS."

So why did at least one well-known bank run Windows NT workstation on tens of thousands of their PCs?

PLASMA GERM BLASTER GUN invented for cleaning skin

@ArmanX

Yes, brilliant idea - irradiate anything which moves, or stands still!

Not dissimilar to the idea of putting fluoride in drinking water throughout the land.

BOFH: Dawn raid on Fort BOFH

It was a card day's night...

I still have about three trays of unpunched punch cards. They're bound to come in useful for making notes on.

8,400 email addresses spaffed by Student Loans Company

Re: Easy solution?

They can - but the recall might work only if the target email server runs Exchange. Emphasis on the "might work"...

Mobile banking security bypassed in fiendish malware blag

Three letters

If we're really going to get pedantic (we are! we are!) then there are very few TLAs (3-letter acronyms) but a preponderance of TLIs (3-letter initialisms). An acronym has to be a meaningful word (like CAT, DOG, etc), so most of the 26^3 possibilities are necessarily initialisms.

And no, I'm not going to finish with the usual deeply-infuriating concluding phrase, "There, sorted it for you"...

Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit

Re: Itt's been bugging me...

Surely it wasn't named after a small car, but a free newspaper? I agree that both were/are rubbish.

Ten... in-car gadgets and accessories

Re: The best [mount] I've come across by a country mile is 1½" of Velcro ....

But do you mount it on the dashboard with the furry side up or the hooky side up? One way must be better than the other...

The true, tragic cost of British wind power

Ecotricity

It would be interesting if you contacted Ecotricity for a view!

LulzSec SMACKDOWN: Leader Sabu turned by feds last summer

Re: Who the hell writes it "a/k/a"?

Presumably Americans? Remember they still put full stops after abbreviations like Dr. and Mrs..

Intel joins The Document Foundation, pushes LibreOffice

If only it (LibreOffice) didn't have such a terrible name

You mean more terribler than the silly and childish names given to the releases of Linux? Mangy Meerkat? Felonious Ferret? <etc>

Apple files patent for 'polished meteorite' keyboard

That's meaty o'right!

So NOW we know where all the pieces of meteorite lost by NASA have gone!

Any guess as to how much an Apple keyboard with meteoric keys might cost?

Hey Commentard! - or is that Commenter?

Tard and feathered

The Urban Dictionary defines "tard" as "someone so retarded that they do not deserve the 're' prefix".

And Couche-Tard is a large Canadian chain of convenience shops.

Just thought you'd be interested!

Toy Story: Mystic Met needs swanky new kit, swoon MPs

Mystic Met

Brilliant!

Anglo-French nuke pact blesses 4th-gen reactors

How to make it all green

How about getting the nuclear power stations, rather than heating up water to produce steam, to drive enormous "fans" sited in front of wind-turbine farms? Then you have all the kudos of green wind-driven energy and the reliability of nuclear generation together in one package.

Attention tweeters: Your chance to win undying GLORY

@Admiral

Perhaps because they feel that a comments thread is a rather more intelligent communication mechanism that the others you list? Remember what happened to Citizens' Band when all the idiots got to use it...

It beats me why a supposedly intelligent organisation such as El Reg should have anything whatever to do with twitter. A more pointless waste of time has yet to be invented.

Could we ask the BOFH to set up some opposing AntiSocial Media mechanisms?

Indonesian train roof fare-dodgers given the brush off

Perhaps use anti-climb paint AND stinky gunk!

Scientists weave battery into clothing

@Phil O'Sophical

Conversely, I thought the sub-head was the best I've seen for a long time!

The Register Comments Guidelines

Touchy?

"And - this is what you are getting at - articles which many commentards use as platforms for ad homs against the authors.

I will not countenance anyone attacking our staff. It really is very simple - kick the ball not the player."

Not at all - I have no real idea why this author has chosen to go non-commentable. It's just a noticeable difference from all the other authors.

For heaven's sake, he can't be ALL bad, for he likes Verity Stob!

Will ALL articles now become on-commentable?

Even those written by the initially-alphabetic author? You know who I mean...

It would produce a level playing-field.

Samoa takes day off to skip International Date Line

If they'd waited until 28 February...

... they could have just lost this year's leap day, and gone straight to 1st March.

Minimal problems?

UK cops disciplined, sacked, quit over Facebook misdeeds

@Posts_are_Long

Somehow I don't think it was the good cops which were being condemned - it was the bad ones stupid enough to brag about their stupidity.

So at least there's ONE good reason for FaceBook's existence!

Merry Christmas, Stratfor

"Who would have dared to run enterprise systems on something called "Freax"?"

Agreed - so why the childishly-stupid names for each version of Ubuntu? Would you run an enterprise system on something called Manky Meerkat or Fascinating Ferret? The ability to alliterate is no excuse.

Dell flees netbook market, dumps Minis

@Sir Wiggum

So the demise of netbooks is All Microsoft's Fault?

No problems with the useless screen size/resolution, the minuscule keyboard, the lack of an optical drive? Oh, OK, then.

Microsoft beaten down 16pc on software sales to NHS

ONLY 16% discount?

So why didn't the Cabinet Office negotiators suggest that they were engaged in a study for the implementation of LibreOffice government-wide? 16% is loose change to Microsoft.

<sarc>No wonder our NHS is the envy of the world.</sarc>

Fake anti-virus victims in line for slice of $8m payout pie

History repeating itself?

I seem to remember a series of scam emails offering me £lots in recompense for previous scam emails...

Punters even more dissatisfied by Virgin Media's package

@CowardlyAndrew: Which towns have the Ofcom testing kit in them?

All of those where Virgin Media has a presence, probably, because SamKnows has provided the volunteers with a pass-through router which transparently monitors a whole series of network variables, mostly when your own router and the cable line are idle. It works extremely well.

See http://www.samknows.com/broadband/faq/monitoring

So long as nothing changes, it works well...

The VM cable service is quite good, consistently fast, and quite reliable - most of the time. If anything goes wrong, then it's an entirely different matter.

And the VM techies dealing with email must surely hang their collective heads in shame and lie about their job at parties because of a) the migration of the original mail service to becoming Gmail-hosted, and b) the length of time it has taken them to migrate the old blueyonder and ntlworld email domains to the new VM email domain. This was promised about two years ago - and it still hasn't happened. And nobody seems to be sure that it will happen in 2012, either. An utter, utter, shambles! (And that's being kind.)

Swedish college girls now twice as slutty as in 2001

Surely the author meant "laxity" not "lassitude"?

"The figures could be taken as demonstrating a worrying lassitude on sexual health matters".

Lassitude means "weariness of body or mind from strain, etc.; lack of energy".

Oh, I see what he means...

IT bods to prove their prowess in bed with spooks

Certificated or certified?

The British Computer Society has a name quite considerably less silly than The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, but both seem to be an irrelevance, whether certified/certificated or not.

Gallery mulls 'damage' after cleaner scrubs modern art

Marshall McLuhan said...

"Art is anything you can get away with."

How true that is, even today...

If thine brown eye offend thee, blast it with a laser

Five thousand dollars to get blue eyes?

Place the two words "rip" and "off" adjacently, in that order.

Has your account been pwned? New website will tell you

Unbelievable!

"Users enter a username or email address into the site’s search box to find out if their username has appeared in any recent public data dumps. Users are not prompted to enter their password itself."

So this website now has your email address as a result of your search, but not your password.

So what information do spammers use to send you spam?

UK CB radio crowd celebrates three decades of legality

Are you sure you meant "pose" not "posse"?

Oh, ok, then...

TomTom Go Live TopGear Edition

Does any satnav firm use Charlotte Green's voice?

<dreams...>

El Reg in email address blunder

Shows what happens when key staff leave....

This email fiasco would never have been allowed to happen if Sarah Bee had still been working for you.

Pick the right tools for your Office 2010 migration

No comments about *user* compatibility?

Or is a conversion simply just a matter of fixing the VBA macros, and not spending weeks familiarising Office 2003 people with the [sarcasm] esoteric delights [/sarcasm] of the Ribbon?

Microsoft gets trademark for retail store plans

In an intellectual debate, there's nothing like a well-reasoned, closely-argued, response, is there!

Gay-bashing cult plans picket of Steve Jobs funeral

This organisation can have no validity whatever

They can't even spell Westborough correctly...

'Boss from hell' knuckle-rapped for 'firing contests'

Another case of meaning reversal

Egregious used to mean "remarkably good", but now means "outstandingly bad; shocking".

Wicked!

EC to vet Euro broadband performance

"you can apply for your free router over on SamKnows"

Up to a point, Lord Copper!

SamKnows has been monitoring broadband performance for various ISPs for some time using a similar 'router' installed at a user's home. But its function (in the case of a cable line) is simply to be interposed between the cable modem and your original router, and the only functions you can use on the SamKnows router are its ethernet sockets. So if you want to volunteer for this project, don't think you are getting a free wireless router you can play with!

PS all this assumes that they haven't changed functionality from the original ISP-monitoring programme.