Posts by Adrian

Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2000

@Mad hacker

The accessory shoe is hidden under a cover on the top to keep it clean (it's cold not hot I believe so it can't trigger a flash when used as a stills camera).

Play unveils AspireRevo launch date

You lot have missed the point

the reason they use an Atom is because it will be switched on 24 / 7 to do multimedia (i.e. watch TV). Low power = 'green' = more sales to ecotwats.

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO₂, are melting the ice cap

So Mr NASA, explain this

if human sulphur burning cools the planet and lets the poles have nice ice caps, how did the ice ages come about ? And why did they then end ?

Pre-humans starting a jumbo sulphur-fueled barbie ?

Advent AIO-100

HiDef videos

I've had one of these since January and it can play hi def videos (720p) just fine on my box. But I am also running Windows 7 beta so it might just be the codecs the reviewer used.

Apple Mac Pro

All that power

and they have to run 32 bit apps from Adobe because they don't understand 64 bit is the future. So, 16 virtual processors running and only one is actually working.

Slimline iPhone pictures unearthed

Battery

is now strapped to your belt since there is no room in the phone anymore

Acer sued for shipping Vista-book with GB of memory

they should be sueing

who ever charged the $150 for a 1GB memory DIMM for the 'upgrade'. That is criminal (even for UK pricing)

Serial killer may have been conjured by DNA blunder

perfect alibi

if the woman in the swab making lab really is a serial killer - one for CSi I think

LibDems want gov action on killer lorries of death

It's the SatNav makers fault

Garmin admits to introducing errors into their data to see if other manufacturers are copying their data. All very well protecting your IP but at the cost of a train load of children dieing ? Is it worth it really ?

iPhone 3.0 beta reveals mixed blessing

@Gary F

Free ? Try upgrading for free if you own an ITouch. Suprised the unbiased and informative El Reg didn't spot that.

Brit D-cell torpedo in icepack-bottom probe

D cell batteries

in short supply shock horror - I suppose lithium rechargeables had been considered ?

Samsung PB22-J 256GB SSD

@Matt

Try eBay , USA sellers are charging £600+

Not many takers for some reason :-)

DARPA to build nothingness detector for tunnel sniffing

This isn't up to DARPA's usual lunacy

This is how you detect subs nowadays - they are too silent so the trick is to scan for a void (and allows you to see that it is a sub and not a whale - Jonah's trip aside, whales are not empty). Since boats have this (for a least two years to my knowledge), it was just a matter of time before it gets put on a plane/copter.

So, come on DARPA, pull the proverbial out and think up some proper loony ideas.

Court rules airline secret security list is stupid

To show how stupid this is

This weekend I travelled carrying a Nikon 400mm AFS f2.8 lens with a body attached as hand luggage. These weigh 6+ kilograms. I could take out the security door with it. No one dared challenge me about carrying a potentially lethal weapon. However security did think my Acer AspireOne was a bomb and swabbed it down at the X-ray machine.

Go figure !

Speaking of figures often photographed ....

Comet Lulin poses for NASA's Swift

May I welcome

our new fuzzy overlords - may your reign be swift and fleeting

Fasthosts to offshore support staff

Obvious but

The Romanians as a nation are very internet hacky - ideal (for them) giving them root access passwords to numerous websites. Drive-by downloads of trojans ahead.......

Paris - cos it's just dumb

Facebook does U-turn on eternal data grab

Mark F^&(*kerburg morelike

Since when do ISP's need a license to transmit my emails. Do the recieving organisations license my incoming emails ? No. Same goes for Farcebook. You do not need a license to transmit images/emails etc *if* the originator (normally the so-called 'license holder') asks for it to be distributed.

It's just a rights grab which is appearing more and more often by failing companies desperate to make money.

Paris - dumb f^*k

Apple shares MacBook break-in tips

Wasn't

the advertising saying it's made of a single block of aluminium ? So how can you get in in the first place ?

Paris - I haven've had my caffine hit yet so I'm as intellectual as she is at the moment !!!!

Scots and pilots brace against ID cards

wow

3 prosecutions - and that is out of how many cardholders ?

Brit, French nuke subs collide - fail to 'see' each other

How big is the f*****ing ocean

and they still hit each other ? Obviously someone was driving on the wrong side of the 'road' methinks - and it wasn't the British !!!!

Either that or soemone is letting a girl drive nuclear subs (had to say it!!!)

Networked radar barrage balloons pass milestone

nick a raygun

moved on a Humvee and just zap them out of the sky (or more fun is zap the tether and let them fly off into the sunset)

Apple White MacBook Early 2009

Faster Firewire 400

Faster than what ? USB 2 is 480 Meg, Firewire 800 is (suprise suprise) 800 Meg speed wise.

New ISS piss-extractor drinks unit to go up on Discovery

Obvious solution

Since they seem to be p!$$ing in the wind, drop the ISS down to a level and scope up the urine.

And no, I'm not taking the p!$$

New-age cyber-attack inflicts major damage with modest means

@Chris Miller

Correct but yes, you can expect EVERY SINGLE ISP to pull their finger out and block spoofed IP addresses. Apart from the illegality of it, it wastes their bandwidth (important for small ISPs).

Any ISP which is not blocking spoofed IP addresses should be blocked upstream from accessing the internet. This will lose them customers and encourage them to pull their finger out.

And yes, universities etc are ISPs in this context and shoudl be blocked as a matter of course !!

Rogue sysadmin sues SF for $3m

$1 million salary

I'm off to be a sysadmin

Google on trial over Italian 'defamation' vid

Wrong wrong wrong

"It's akin to prosecuting mail service employees for hate speech letters sent in the post."

Except that the postie doesn't tell the entire world the contents of the letter. Website owners should be personally held responsible for content on *their* site. Just as newspaper editors are for newspaper content and producers are for video/TV etc. Siting free speech etc is absolute cr@p. If they want people to post unsolicited material on their site then it should be vetted before being published.

Does this mean that a gazzilion dollar internet business has to actually employ people to check the content before it is made public? Well yes, they should. Why should they be allowed to post offensive material for all to see until someone complains ? They should not have broadcast it at all.

/end-rant

Toshiba plays sugar daddy to SanDisk

Conversation

Sandisk : you're already up sh!t-street so could you give us 80 billion Yen

Toshiba : OK

Sony's 11in OLED finally lands in Europe

until recently

it was $2 to the pound but it seems that was lost in translation in Japan where they read it as 2 pounds to the dollar.

And what does 3mm thick mean if the required base unit it the size of a couple of house bricks ?

ISS astronauts lose 'alarming' amounts of hipbone strength

@Steve Roper

Steve, do you how dizzy you'd get looking out the window and seeing Earth spin past you 50 times a second ? That and the space tourists would complain they can't get a decent snap out tjhe windo with their P&S because everything is spinning.

You also can't do all those 'fun' activities like putting a drop of water in the middle of the craft and watching it just drift.

Paris - something about dizzy.......

US mulls clicks for cameraphones

What if

I want to write an iPhone shutter-sound - $1.99 I think is reasonable. Now to get the Congressman to get the law passed and all those iPhone/iTouch users will be forced,by law, to buy my app. I'm rich,rich I tell you.

Pauper Paris more like, compared to how rich I'm going to be.

User-generated reviews - blessing or bull?

Hypecritical ?

Not only is UGC often done by interns at the company but how often is so called experts reviews done with an obvious bias - cameras get glowing reviews when they take out double page spreads for adverts, games are a hit when the reviewer is jetted off somewhere exotic to play them. These reviewers know that even a slightly tarnished review means no free junkets for them in the future. Magazine editors knwo that it's the bottom line that counts, not whether product A is actually better than product B.

UGC just is more cost effective for the marketing department but it's no less (or more) truthful than professionals writing about a product.

Paris - what the fcuk happened to her marketing department ?

Obama's rainbow stealth aircraft uncloaks over Virginia

Doh

Haven't you guys ever watched a sci-fi film ? The plane at the back is using a holographic artifical multi-spectrum tacion emitting radar-image (HAMSTER for the group hugging brigade) to project another plane in front of them so when those pesky SAM's get launched, they blow up the holgraphic plane not the real one carrying the bombs.

All hail our holographic overlords !!!!!

eBay revenue shrinks for first time in history

No auctions anymore

I used to buy all my camera gear off eBay (USA/HongKong sellers) but nowadays all they do is BuyItNow and with the exchange rates so deplorable I can actually buy new camera kit in the UK cheaper than I can off eBay - what is the world coming to?

And it's still full of scammers, eBay's profits are probably down because they are getting caught now before getting the money, and that is due soley due to buyers complaining and not eBay's so called Security team doing any monitoring.

Pirates ? Must have hit the wrong icon :-)

Aussie air zealot savages prêt-à-porter stealth fighter

There are no stealth aircraft

Non have ever been built, none will be. Even the 117 etc could be tracked not only by the UK Rapier missile system (built in the 80's !!!) but by civilian ATC radar as well.

It got to the stage where by the US military (and plane makers) stopped calling them stealth and started calling them low-observability aircraft. Their 'stealth' was not in the iron fillings put into black paint but the fact the pre-flight planning was done to fly around radar installations. This is OK for fixed radar but mobile radar setups easily capture ALL so-called stealth aircraft.

Steath, useful in concept, is not a reality but is a major money spinner for US arms manufacturers.

Desperate NFC Forum extends competition deadline

If you are a member

it's Euro 200 but it's US$10,000 to join initially - whoopie on getting a cheap mobile !!!!

Cash-strapped US businessman jumps from light aircraft

Sounds like a Simpsons fan

Did a 'Crusty' then ?

And for those who don't watch The Simpsons because your straight jacket won't let you changes channels....

Crusty the Clown owed the IRS millions and faked his own death by crashing a light aircraft into a mountain but he had parachuted out just in time. Obviously Bart and Lisa found him and encouraged him to come back. But I'm ruining the plot....

InPhase might ship holographic storage this year?

I thought Blu-Ray was expanding

isn't the new standard in the 100's of GB and the cost is certainly less than $18000 for a recorder.

Experts trumpet '25 most dangerous' programming errors

CWE-259

Hard coded passwords

So, that takes mySQL off the internet then - how many eCommerce sites use mySQL as a back end and use a single (private) username/password to store orders etc. Any I don't believe mySQL is modular enough in it's security to allow individual users to lock out only their records.

Nice idea but all are really just common sense which will get overridden by timescales/budgets etc.

Paris - I can think of 25 videos, er mistakes she's made.....

Sony Vaio P netbook taken for a spin

History repeating itself

That's a Spectrum ZX-80 keyboard.

Ubuntu Eee undergoes cheesy Easy Peasy rebrand

But

it's all very well having an EEE(zee) PC OS for EEE PCs but unless they have "One Aspire"ation I won't be loading it onto my Aspire One.

Mine's the one with an Aspire One in it's pocket.

NASA warns of 'space Katrina' radiation storm

Can I be the first to say

All hail our new solar powered overlords who've taken out our technological infrastructure and put us (powerless) in the dark ages.

Nikon D90 digital SLR with HD video recording

@Pat

Except that the Casio is not a SLR - the R standing for reflex as in a mirror. The Casio is just a pimped up point and shoot camera so the Nikon is the world's first SLR offering HD video.

The Casio's viewfinder is a EVF not an optical one.

Apple's holiday Mac sales flatline

Or,

"the numbers could also be somewhat of a reflection of Mac owners doing their homework and waiting rather than a resurgence of Windows love"

just means the worlds drug supply has dried up and reality has kicked in. Only doped up hippies go after the shiney box...

@J

Having been to an expo last week when all the presenters used Macbook Pros (and generally slagged of WIndows at the start of the presentations) - ALL, without fail, had problems including needing to reboot, problems setting screen resolutions for projectors, not enough power to run presentations or high-end software (Photoshop) etc.

They really did a great job promoting Mac's there !!!! My little Asus AspireOne can run anything but then I did install XP on it and add an extra 1Gb RAM and it still cost a fraction of those new shiney aluminium MacBooks !!!

Top UK cybercop dreams of PC breathalysers

The kit is already available and free

Boot LInux from a USB stick - use the inbuilt software to copy internet browser history,emails etc to the USB stick (or ideally another one - the boot stick should be read only so it can't pick up virii etc).

Germany tests tadpole airship

I forsee

a rise in UFO sightings over Germany - cigar shaped ones but pointing upwards rather than the tradional zep. ones (oh wait, is that what the UFO is, a balloon ?).

All hail our helium breathing overlords....

Logitech Digital Video Security System

Small problem

If the perp switches off the mains (just trip the mains RCB, not the lights one!!) then the cameras don't work. Even with a UPS system on the computer (and hopefully cameras in a professional setup with coax/USB/wifi), it's cheaper than £199/camera to run over dead mains.

Microsoft's C# to converse with dynamic languages

@sabroni

well said (from a VB programmer since version 1)

US gun lobby blogs Thanksgiving gun 'facts'

Don't care less

whether Americans want to shoot defenseless animals to prove they're a man but the most likely reason hunters have less lead in them is they invariably live in the countryside and don't breathe in petrol fumes on the daily commute to and from work that town folk are subject to.

The fact that they eat what they kill means they must be very good shots 'cos they are all big fat bar-stewards !!!!!

Google - your source for FREE Adobe gear

Do what I do

Email [e-mail] and tell them that is via Adwords from Google that you find the 'suspcious' websites. I find that the sites are normally gone within a day.

What was I doing - trying to find a cheap copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 7 and kept getting all these obvious fake sites. If I wanted a pirated copy I would use BitTorrent or something but I like manuals made of paper.

Dell pressures workers into leave without pay

Typical

Why doesn't Dell' top management take a (say) 25% paycut and save the $3 billion in a year. Oh that's right, they deserve massive unwarrented salaries and screw the workers (and infact screw the buyers as well from my experience).

Bets for Dell not being Dell this time next year ?

Getting my coat (as are most of Dell's staff it seems)