Posts by Mostly_Harmless

Japanese password protector floods screen with hoax cursors

Re: I'm unsubscribing from your mailing list

Nope - the thing used to show the position of a mouse on screen is a cursor (which is why they're stored in .cur files in the cursors directory under windows

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

mmmm.....venison

Reg readers brew up the ultimate cuppa

Bovine Mammary Fluid

Brewing in the drinking vessel - add milk after brewing (otherwise the brewing process is compromised)

Brewing in a pot - add milk to drinking vessel before pouring tea in (no stirring required)

First C compiler pops up on Github

Re: mixing your metaphors

"no skin off my teeth"

It's either no skin off your nose, or you escape by the skin of your teeth

So you won a 4G licence. The Freeview interference squad wants a word

"£10,000 per household ensuring they get some sort of free-to-view TV service"

how much!?! per household?!?!?!

Apple FINALLY fills gaping Java hole that pwned its own devs

"all but dismissed malware as a Windows-only problem."

Pride comes before a fall

Clarkson: 'I WILL find and KILL the spammers who hacked me'

spam...

...it's the most annoying thing....IN THE WORLD!

iOS 6.1 KNACKERED our mobile phone networks, claim Vodafone, Three

code of connection

I'm sure that Vodafone (indeed all mobile networks) have a code of connection - device manufacturers have to test their devices for conformance against the the network to guard against SNAFU's like this.

If that's the case, then potentially some of the blame lies at VF's door for not picking up on the problem in testing at their labs.

Although it may sound like I'm trying to defend Apple there, I'd still like to stress that I detest the very ground they walk on.

El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa

@I ain't Spartacus

True Cofftea is not merely coffee-flavoured tea or coffee-flavoured tea...it's a beverage all of it's own, and needs to be brewed/concocted as such to be truly appreciated.

My worst vending machine incident was when I accidentally got a 50:50 mix of hot chocolate and chicken soup. Truly vile....although I was several sips in before I realised my mistake, such was the dire nature of "normal" drinks from that machine

options

I'm very much a mash-a-bag-in-a-cup-to-get-it-fairly-strong-and-add-a-splash-of-milk kind of guy, and would never contemplate sugar in a normal cuppa, but there cases where I'll allow sugar near my beverage...

Arabic style tea with a fair bit of sugar - it's a different drink altogether to the British cuppa

The faitigue-defying nectar that is cofftea (mug of boiling water + 2 teabags, stew to oblivion and add 2 or 3 spoonfuls of good instant coffee...add milk or, ideally, powdered creamer like CoffeeMate). 2 or 3 spoonfuls of sugar are essential for a brew like this.

Schoolgirl's Hello Kitty catonaut soars to 93,000ft

Lucky Landing

Not far at all from a watery grave for Kitty

'Doomsday' asteroid Apophis more massive than first thought

nomenclature

Naming it after an Egyptian god of death hardly seems like a good move if you want to avoid causing panic among the populace.

Are we going to stop giving hurricanes names like Sandy and start calling them things like "Mighty Wind of Doom"?

5.6TB helium disks could balloon, lift WD onto enterprise throne

Scene from the Hitatchi factory canteen

Employee #1: So what have you been up to this morning?

Employee #2: [comedy, high squeaky voice] Assembling those new hard disks

This photo slide scanner costs €60... The bundled malware? That's free

Re: Strewth,

It's a scanner for photo slides - they're so last century

MEGAGRAPH: 1983's UK home computer chart toppers

Here's a sobering thought...

Out of curiosity, I viewed the image info for that graph...it's over 190KB....way bigger than the RAM on any of the machines referenced in the graph itself.

Possibly a commentary on how complicated the graph is, but sadly I suspect it says more about how profligate we've become in our attitude towards memory and resources.

Interesting

Graph readability notwithstanding, a very interesting piece....makes me feel quite nostaligic

Revealed: The Brit-built GRAVITY-powered light that costs $5

I think the Law Of Conservation Of Energy may be a barrier here

Assange: Google, Facebook run 'side projects' for US spooks

Re: True, all true...

Agreed.

I can't stand the fact that he's getting the oxygen of publicity...although what really hacks me off is that he's still getting the oxygen of oxygen.

Troll sues Apple for daring to plug headphones into iPhone

Re: I am sure

"It won't really cost Apple anything to contest the patent: they can show "blitheringly obvious" prior art pre-trial; if they then win in a full trial, they'll then claim and get costs."

Makes a change from hounding other manufacturers, claiming patent infringement on blitheringly obvious details

Ten badass brainy computers from science fiction

The General

A slightly obscure / cult-ish reference, but what about The General from the episode of the same name of the original "The Prisoner"? The font of all knowledge for the inhabitants of The Village, but eventually has its circuits blown in response to Number 6's question "Why?"

Ten weird Chinese mobile phones

Re: Is it wrong...

I'm with you - that watch-phone looks pretty cool

Data cops seek 'urgent clarification' on new Facebook advertiser plans

Re: Facebook's current problem

If you took the above comment and replaced "userbase" with "viewers" and "Facebook" with "daytime TV" I suspect that the statement would still be true.

The fundamental issue here isn't so much a Facebook-related one as a "how does *any* company generate income using adverts people would rather avoid?"

BTW, fixed the possessive apostrophe in the title

Extreme teleworking: A Reg hack reports from the internet's frontier

WBAGNFARB

"Cable Of Uncertainty" would be a good name for a rock band

HDMI hitch hounds Mac Mini holders

No fault in the hardware

People are just looking at it the wrong way

Mobile phone sales slump bites Nokia

Re: Or a table..

No - that would be rectangular, and so be the subject of a lawsuit by the fruity firm

What a clockup! Apple's Swiss clock knock-off clocks up $21m fine

who would have thought you could have rights to a rectangle?

Sellafield's nuclear waste measured in El Reg units

Re: Rename all things nuclear

I've noticed that rationality of argument is inversely proportional to the frequency at which the arguer refers to nuclear as "nucular"

Chinese boffins discover bizarro fish-oid creature with FOUR LIMBS

Re: They lie!

I agree with you about the idea of Genesis time units being different to physical time units. I listened to an album by Genesis that was supposed to be about 45 minutes long....felt like hours and hours to me....

BBC pulls plug Ceefax ahead of analogue TV's end tonight

Does anyone remember....

A TV ( I think it was a Ferguson, but I don't trust my memory sometimes) that had a built-in thermal printer. You could press a button and it would print out a hard copy of the teletext page you were viewing?

Seemed like Star Trek tech at the time...all looks a bit Button Moon tech nowadays....

Why James Bond's Aston Martin Top Trumps the rest

Re: "I had the Corgi model that fired Swan Vestas out of the front bumper"

Front bumper? I remember the DB5 model that had machine guns and whatnot that popped out the front when you pressed a button. The Vestas-launcher that I remember was the white Esprit that had rocket launchers in the rear windscreen (and the little plastic rockets got lost so got replaced by matches)

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

Walkman

For the benefit of the younger readers you explained what a Walkman is/was, but neglected to explain your explanation by saying what an audio tape cassette is....sadly I think there could be some younger readers still saying "what??"

I, however, am content to be an old codger with not only >1 tape player but many, many cassettes.....and a whole heap of other electronic bits'n'bobs of hoardage

On-demand streamed music services compared

Live 365

My streaming music service of choice is Live365 - excellent selection, and reasonably proied IMO

Six months under water and iPhone 4 STILL WORKS

Sansa Clip

Another happy Sansa Clip user here - it's a great bit of kit and often gets admiring glances when it's on my desk.. My Clip's a more recent one with the micro SD card slot....that upgrade might have been an improvement on the original, but it also introduced "SlotRadio" which is a class example of "what the **** were they thinking of?!?!"

Submerged?

It's a Jesus Phone...surely it can walk on water

LOHAN plugs into some hot LiPo treatment

can I just be the first to point out that...

"Sexy Flexible Motor Toaster" would be an excellent name for a rock band

Pair face £250k fines for spamming mobes with millions of texts

one use for them

Personally, I always make a note of the numbers that these spam texts come from, and then quote that as "my" number when baiting 419 scammers or trying to set spammers against each other.

Reg hack uncovers perfect antidote to internet

missing

The best thing about this story isn't what's included but what's missing....no hard hats...no hi-viz jackets....no clipboard-toting H&S jobsworth ....

Boffin named Jubb to fire whopping hybrid thruster

units

"Although the unit (seen below during an October 2009 static test) is capable of of an average thrust of 111kN (25,000lbf) during a 20-second burn, peaking at 122kN (27,500lbf)"

I can't believe the El Reg omitted to express this in the standard unit of measurement for force, namely the Jubb

Home Secretary to decide on McKinnon extradition by October

Re: 10 years

Agreed. Same goes for that Assange character...Innocent? then no worries, just go and plead your innocence in court. Guilty? Man up and face the consequences of your actions.

Apple's new iPad set for July 20 China launch

Re: New iPad

Dum de dum de dum.."Here comes the new iPad...just like the old iPad..."...dum de dum de dum....

We know a song about that don't we children?

CERN catches a glimpse of Higgs-like boson

Re: I thought

I think you're correct - my belief is that it's actually an abbreviated form of "goddamned particle".

Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster WERE in India

Re: It's a two way problem

Is there a new Register Unit waiting to be defined? The RBS - a measure of system downtime, where 1 RBS = 4 days of system outage

Ex-Soviet space gunboats to be FOUND ON MOON

slightly OT

I'm intrigued by the fact that the craft had a working gun, which was test fired. In a low-/no-gravity environment, wouldn't Newton's 3rd Law have the craft flying backwards when the weapon fired?

Tesco grabs Peter Gabriel's musical streamer

here's hoping

Here's hoping they do something to improve We7. It used to be brilliant but since they changed to the "personalised radio service" kak, I've pretty much given up on it.

PFY vs Bearded 80s Netscape Bore: BOFH

Best one for a while

that is all

Why MongoDB? It's the developers, stupid

3rd standard?

"the third standard within enterprises for databases"

I would have thought that the main 3 standards for DBs are Oracle, MSSQL and Postgres. What do you have as your top 2 standards?

Terror cops hunt laptop snatched from retired MI5 spookmistress

tip-off for the crims

"Whoever stole Dame Stella's laptop was [...] more interested in selling the computer down the pub than attempting to uncover any secrets on her hard drive."

Until now

Special Projects Burro pops his hooves

RIP

Condolences

That is all

World+Dog to demand ever larger tablet-phones

Samsung Galaxy Y

Samsung Galaxy Y - slightly larger than my current smartphone, and with an inferior spec.

Motorola Defy - ditto

Xperia XP10 Mini Pro - comes with Android 1.6 (upgradeable to 2.1)

It just doesn't look to me like the manufacturers are working on providing good features and decent capability in a traditional "candybar" (shape and size) form factor.