Posts by diodesign

Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami

Re: "the assembled press were told, inferring that we should rejoice"

I am sorry that we can't catch every error while under pressure, but we do try. You are quite right, and the article has been tweaked. Thanks.

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Virus lab blogger collared by blundering copyright cop bot

Re: Re: encrypted?

The zip files are password protected, so it's highly likely the bot either was told the password, managed to grep the password from the blog or simply compared filenames and/or a hash.

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Mars probably never wet enough for life, nuclear bomb crater indicates

"FWIW, you Register folks use the word boffin WAY too much."

No such thing as too much boffinry!

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The world's first Windows Phone 8 hands on – what's it like?

Re: Re: pensioning off your ipod?

"an Orbital album to hear the whiney, grating tones of David bloody Gray"

Oh come on, Illuminate wasn't /that/ bad an album track. Gray's voice was so distorted and edited in the end you could hardly tell it was him ;-)

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Re: It's not thicker actually as the hands on states.

"how is that you glossed over NFC, dual-core processing, a much better screen resolution with motion mprovements and more choice in customization"

If it means anything, this was mentioned in Andrew's previous piece on the new Lumias, published this evening.

No doubt a full review will cover such stuff.

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Dawn probe slips Vesta's grip, heads for icy dwarf planet

Re: Steve Hosgood

In fairness, the commenters above were probably looking at an old version of the article - the wording was qualified soon after go-live.

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Re: "Ceres, our solar system's only dwarf planet"

Ah, the key distinction is inner solar system: the others are wildly far out (man). Sorry!

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Android spat loser Oracle ordered to toss Google some change

Re: Oracles amazing mutating claims caused the $1mil bill

"Oracle did not place great importance on its copyright claims until after its asserted patents started disappearing"

Yes, I've reinstated that quote. It was too hastily lost in the edit.

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UK's non-x86 server sales dive off cliff, vendors take a hit

Re: Arghh! My eyes!

There are no italics in the article.. this sounds like a browser thing.

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Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket

Re: "Good afternoon, Mr. Amer. Everything is going extremely well"

I admire your pedantry - but in my defence (for I did proofread it) rocketing can generally mean "move or progress very rapidly".

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Firefox, Opera allow crooks to hide an entire phish site in a link

Re: But, but, but ...

No, the shortened URL redirects to the data URI that the shortener has stored against the hashed short URL.

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Thanks ever so much Java, for that biz-wide rootkit infection

Re: Re: Why blame Java at all?

Yes, it was added minutes after publishing in what was a slight oversight on my part. I thought I'd added that detail in.

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Re: Why blame Java at all?

The article does say malicious JAR files were involved - certainly other people infected tell of Java activity in their system tray before the rooting occurs.

I double-checked with Trevor on this point - because there is little gained in attacking a technology without basis - and he said the thing was originally detected as malicious jars - which spontaneously ate themselves. Flash was not installed on the PC at the time; Firefox, Chrome and IE were completely up to date. Acrobat wasn't in the browser. Those last two plugins are alternative vectors for delivering the malware, leaving just Java. And the mystery .jars.

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AMD snubs hackers' tiny package, will fix raided blog

Re: department of redundancy department

I fear for your blood pressure.

Re: Eh?

Point taken.

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Chemical biz 'Nitro' hackers use Java to coat PCs in poison ivy

Re: "Bobby-trapped" web page?

No, as in typo'd by me :(

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Sharp's slim screen factory 'flogged to death' by Apple

Re: Re: "Cupertino idiot-tax giant"

"It's probably just rose tinted glasses, but the Reg seems to be getting worse for this"

I'm not sure I can imagine a Reg that isn't rude about a large corporation. If you want to understand where the Apple teasing comes from, bear in mind that a number of Reg hacks are Apple users and we've suffered and enjoyed Cupertino kit over the years.

Plus, have you seen how much Apple charges for RAM? How is that not a tax?

"The other day they were going on about a Samsung Cameraphone that wasn't even a phone"

Which one was that? Did you mean the Samsung SH100 camera-with-Wi-Fi? There's no mention of it being a phone :-)

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A load of Tosh: External hard drives the new 'personal clouds'

Re: "The box only holds 3TB - USB sticks will hold more and you can carry them in your pocket. "

Yes, oops. I did intend to fully qualify the USB stick quip by referring to what we'll be carrying in our pockets in the future. Brain fart in the morning. Apologies for the stupid oversight.

Chris W (not Chris Mellor).

UK: 'We're legally bound to arrest Mr Assange'

Voting system

It's not entirely surprising given that the number of votes is a tiny fraction of the number of visits to the article.

Also, it was posted late on a Thursday evening UK time, but daytime US time.

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Robot rover Curiosity sets out on first long Mars trip

Re: Nuclear raygun tank on the prowl

Hi, you must be new around here.

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AMD to double up cores with Jaguars

Re: Re: pronouncing "Jaguar"

It's alleged that the original reason Steve Jobs personally banned all contact between Apple and The Reg is because, way back in the day, we poked fun at his pronunciation of "Jagwire".

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Official: Google's brazen domination of Earth nearly complete

Re: Deeper Meaning.

Well, it is August. And, er, it's odd that there are more google.tlds than nic.tlds.

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Superworm Crisis eats Macs, VMware and - shock - Windows

Re: Worm? Virus?

There's no trickery involved if transfered by an infected drive, AIUI.

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Re: late?

Yeah, it's the four-way whammy of VMware, Mac OS X, Windows and Windows Mobile (what's that?) that's new.

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Boffins zapped '2,000 bugs' from Curiosity's 2 MILLION lines of code

Re: WTF?

Actually, embarrassingly, it was the Mars Climate Orbiter that had cocked-up measurements. The Beagle 2 crash-bang-wallop was another story.

The article has been amended. Apologies! it's damn annoying when this happens.

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Re: Beagle2...

Yes, you're right - that unfortunate misunderstanding has been corrected.

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Councils launch eight spying ops on Brits A DAY using RIPA

Re: Re: Hang on a sec

It is indeed to do with checking people are paying their licence fees. We're looking into it.

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Netflix puts end to fumbling, penetrates Scandinavia

What would you prefer? Fenno-Scandinavia?

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Beck's open-source challenge to freetards: play it yourself!

Re: Anon

"Beck doesn't explicitly say that the sheet music release is a response to piracy ... However his UK publisher is happy if you were to draw that inference."

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Tech hacks should admit taking corporate coin, but don't start a witch hunt

Re: I can't be the only one...

Ah, all time Reg gold. It's still chuckled at in the office from time to time.

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Re: Foss patents

"you are much more friendly when your big advertisers have an epic fail"

I think Microsoft et al would struggle to agree.

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Nokia hails hacks for New York Lumia WinPho gig

Re: DrXym

Point of order, point of order! Jesus phone is in the bottom drawer at the moment, Chocolate Factory is heading that way. Open sourcers aren't freetards, those are other people entirely.

Some things are here to stay though, like! the! yahoo! headlines! I'm! afraid! In fact I think I saw some rumour the other day that yahoo might ditch the !

I was distraught.

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Undead galaxy cluster spews 700 zombie baby stars A YEAR

Re: You guys employing the old NotW writers now?

Someone once branded me a News of the World journo and I took it as a compliment.

In all seriousness, we've always used boffin and we always will. It's a term of endearment. You have to be seriously clever to be a boffin, though, with some kind of doctorate in a real science.

Otherwise you're just an egghead.

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Windows 8: Microsoft's tablet-desktop still painful to swallow

Re: Small article correction...

"Windows 8 is now available to developers and IT administrators"

Nice try amigo, but I note that Tim didn't say Win 8 was in the hands of all developers and IT admins ;-)

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Unite workers at Capita ITS vote for strike action

Re: Re: so 25% of 65% of members voted for a strike

I'll put my hands up and apologise: that was my fault. I totally cocked up the figures during the editing process, I completely misunderstood what the author meant.

The article has been amended.

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Android spanks Apple iOS in sales as fanbois hold out for iPhone 5

Re: Please compare like with like.

Yeah, we had spotted that - which is why the story is about Android v iOS than Samsung v Apple.

Although Samsung was up 29pc on 2011, Apple was up 47pc, even though Apple dipped from Q1 to Q2 this year - that's the backing behind Gartner's view that people are holding out for the iPhone 5.

However that doesn't change the fact that Android grew and iOS stayed static.

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Saudi royals seek ban on .virgin, .sex, .catholic, .wtf and 159 MORE

Re: .reg, .vulture, .lohan

It costs $185,000 a pop to request those. In total, that's 100,000 pints of Soho-priced beer!

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YouTube escapes Google's piracy site smackdown

We're talking about the Google News front page. That story is ages old now, it'll never be on the front page again.

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It happens more often than I care to remember, but one example was this one that appeared and then vanished: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/google_account_activity_tool/

Not actually that critical, just a rude headline that GN didn't appear to appreciate.

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Google may face grilling by MPs over 'immoral' tax avoidance

Re: MP grandstanding rather than doing their jobs properly

"Yet another misleading, sensationalist article by which appears to be doing so by deliberately conflating turnover with corporation tax"

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, or so the razor goes. The article has been amended.

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Lone config file in Mac OS X SIGNALS DEATH OF THE DVD

Re: Re: Dupe

"it makes you sound like a petulant child"

Well, guilty as charged.

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Re: Dupe

"it was also already said that the same plist file also lists other models WITH optical drives"

I'm not sure how that makes a difference; the point is some file has listed USB booting so OBVIOUSLY Apple is going to ditch optical drives. I think the cynicism is clear.

(As for the HardReg dupe, Chris's angle is on the storage side rather than possible new expensive laptops.)

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London Fire Brigade: This time we'll send the NEAREST fire truck

Re: WTF is a fire truck?

Duly noted.

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Sick of juggling apps on biz PCs? This install tool will save your sanity

Re: Tom

We can't hate /all/ technology. It's Trevor's opinion.

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Chinese Twitter shuttered during murder trial

Re: subhead?

She did not contest the allegations.

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Jimbo Wales: Wikipedia servers in UK? No way, not with YOUR libel law

Re: Totally confused

UK law is pretty simple on this: everyone involved in the process of publishing a defamatory statement to a third-party is technically liable for libel. There is a defence in the schedule to the Defamation Act that exempts, say, ISPs from being liable for libel committed by their users over their networks. The same defence is used by websites that allow unmoderated comments.

So if you want to sue a newspaper for libel, you can sue the writer, the news editor, sub-editor, the revise sub-editor, the production editor, the editor, the publisher and anyone else who participated in the story. Usually, though, you go after the money: the publisher.

Similar goes for websites: the comment poster, the web master, the host, etc. Having Wikipedia based in the UK makes it easier for a claimant to pin down those in the chain - but not having a server in the UK doesn't make it immune to proceedings in England, it just makes it harder to get someone into court.

And as for Twitter, that was a criminal investigation by the police into threats made over electronic communications. Libel is a civil matter and totally different.

PS: For those suggesting adding "I think" to a sentence makes it immune to action, consider the case of a music concert reviewer who was successfully sued for an opinion that wasn't substantially based on the truth.

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RIM, Samsung thrash Apple in UK fondleslab sales growth

Re: "idiot tax"

Have you seen how much Apple charges for RAM?!

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Re: Retarded Maths by the reg as usual

RIM sales up 63pc, Samsung up 50pc, Apple up 36pc. There's the thrashing, in terms of sales growth.

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Russia slashes space station ship trip to just six hours

Re: Ummm

You are correct. Oops. Article amended.

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Apple iPad fondlers are about to enter a THIRD DIMENSION

Re: Re: "...similar to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect games controller."

"Apple Patent != forthcoming product."

But who could resist writing a Twilight Zone headline?

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