Posts by FartingHippo

Spy Hunter

BIG HAPPY SMILE

Halcyon days, and a great way to fill the time 'till Outrun hit the arcades.

Selecting 'Magical Sound Shower'...

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Haggis pakora v huevos rancheros

Re: Chinese pub grub

"mystery meat onna stick" - provided by CMOT Dib Lah?

Apple 'fesses up: We broke App Store downloads

Re: 20,000 users

99.9% of Apple's users thought it was a feature. 20,000,000 affected in reality.

Disappearing space dust belt baffles boffins

Re: Just a publicity stunt

Will they empty the bag and build a Dyson Sphere?

CERN catches a glimpse of Higgs-like boson

Re: They found the Higgs Boson?

"a 125 GeV Higgs is probably inconsistent with the "Standard Model" at high energies, implying that something further is required"

GOOD. Be a shame if everybody just packed up and went home.

Mighty ROBOT achieves total SUPREMACY over feeble humans

@AC Blue Scream of Death

Ha! You win. Everyone else can go home now.

Raspberry Pi to skipper microship across Atlantic

Re: A smuggler's dream?

Or a terrorists. Scale it up a bit, stuff it full of C4, make sure it only just floats (for low observability) and send out a swarm of 300 to sit in the mid-ocean shipping lanes. Or into a submarine base.

Apple wins US ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1

Ouch!

That's gonna hurt.

Android Firefox: Screaming, awesome, you'll go blind etc

Hello? Anyone there?

Where are you, Opera fans? Sleep in today?

NASA counts down to nuclear tank invasion of Mars

They added the tether specifically to make it a one-in-a-million shot.

Apple users get pricier hotel options from Orbitz

Re: @heyrick - Not a big deal

+1 for introducing me to "Veblen goods"

Even Apples sometimes have worms in them, admits Cupertino

My dusty neurons tell me it's Mean Aerodynamic Chord.

Users still slack about passwords: Trustwave

Re: Yes...

My company is even worse. As well as 8+ characters, with 3 from upper/lower/number/special they make us change it every month. It wont allow incrementing of the previous password, or re-use of any one of the last 12 passwords. If they make the requirements that rigorous, surely they can let us use them for a quarter at a time...

I never thought I'd ever resort to it, but now I have a post-it stuck under my keyboard with the password on (with the last two characters reversed to foil cleaners/colleagues).

No special characters

True. Why is that, in this day and age?

It can't be a technical limitation, surely? Just lazy developing?

Lithe British youngsters prioritise fun over privacy and security

Re: People who've been around the block a few times...

I'm going to print that out in 36 point and laminate it.

'We've got $6m and we will use it to REVOLUTIONISE storage'

Re: Would you trust...

There's a Nyan Cat tattoo on his neck. He thought that would hit his credibility even harder.

Lollipop Chainsaw

Re: Kerching!

Maybe, maybe not.

See also Sucker Punch. I really, really tried to like that film...

Nintendo supersizes 3DS

Losing it

Nintendo is like RIM 3 years ago. Sitting fat and happy with their success, but slowly losing it with lacklustre updates and misguided new products.

Big shame.

Vatican subtly shifts its position on The Blues Brothers

Re: How do they rate..

You, sir, will burn.

Re: Lets get to the gig

"how much for the women?"

Fatties are 'destroying the world'

@NomNomNom

"Why can't you be jolly and full of life like the vast majority of fat people out there?"

Bless their sweaty-faced, wobbly-bellied little souls.

China aims to redraw the petaflop graph with 100 Pflops in 2015

RTFA

See title

Fujitsu cracks 278-digit crypto

Re: They should use my code

fu uv csvuf ?

Microsoft next-gen Xbox details leak

Re: Will it be backward compatible?

Only 'cos he's still playing Saber Wulf on the Spectrum.

Not even God can find the exit in that game.

Sustainable

I do wonder how long the world can support different console manufacturers. The barriers to entry for software developers are huge, and become higher and higher for each machine generation. The only way to reverse a trend which will see 3(?) studios producing lowest-common-denominator schlock would be to harmonise the platforms, like with, uh, PCs.

Hmmm. Not gonna happen, is it.

Must try harder: Cumbria tells BT and Fujitsu to resubmit fibre plans

Re: fairly obvious but

Perhaps when Cumbria get a taste of the millions and millions and millions that fund the national ballet, the opera, the musuems, the tube network, the overland rail network, et-fucking-cetera, then you might have a point.

Otherwise you're just another metropolitan pillock.

£CHING: ICANN bags $357m from 1,930 dot-word domains

Omission?

.milf

A money-spinner for sure.

Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

Suspicious, me?

So the top 6 comments are all saying this is not a big deal. On the Reg. Which is full of iHaters.

*dons bacofoil chapeau*

Apple pulls in TomTom, kicks Google off iPhones

Re: TomTom iPhone/iPad app

"Are TomTom suicidal"

No, probably the reverse. Smartphone penetration will continue to eat into the SatNav market, if not reduce it to a small fraction of its former size. TomTom's products are feeling increasingly clunky; the touchscreens are a generation (or two) behind the phones; they just don't have the resources to keep up. The deal with Apple allows them to remain a relevant player for a few more years, and the massive increase in user base will should allow them to keep their maps more current through their crowd-sourced corrections scheme.

I'd guess they'll end up as an Apple subsidiary (with a nice fat payout to their shareholders) somewhere down the track.

Apple juggernaut cranks out big, big numbers

Re: A question on the subject of pixels

Huh. That mostly makes sense :)

Cheers.

A question on the subject of pixels

Can anyone tell me why a MacBook display with 5 megapixels is called a retina display because the eye can't see the individual pixels BUT an A4 print from a 5mp camera looks shit?

The incredible shrinking NAND: I'm MEELLLLTING

640k

"We can say with certainty that we will not see 4-bits per cell NAND and that we might not see – in fact probably won't – NAND process geometry going below 10nm, or even below 15nm. It's a dead-end game."

Oh dear; that's a keeper.

An early iPad adopter? You smut-ogling filth-gobbling perv!

Re: Porn and the Pad

"The problem lay within the fact that it requires 2 hands to hold the damned thing"

Impressive! But probably untrue :)

Fans get date with Lara Croft

Big Smile

Yeah I know trailers can be misleading, but goddammit that looks good. Ms Croft has come a long, long way since I first enjoyed her company in 1996.

Seems a bit silly now, but I almost pooped my pants when that first T-Rex arrived :)

SpaceX Dragon SPLASHDOWN in Pacific! Private space triumph

Yay!

*clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap*

Sheer weight of Brits' interest knackers new tax tool

Re: scaling

Recyle, reuse, rinse, repeat. I posted this a year ago here, when the e-petition site went down:

Every, and I mean *every* time the government puts up a shiny new website it falls over due to 'unexpected demand'.

If you can't see the problem with that statement I can only assume you are a government IT provider.

Steve Jobs' Atari memo, Apple I to go under the hammer

Re: "... who he considered to be "dumb shits"."

Maybe it was the same turtleneck all the time. It was fused to his skin by a material so malignant, so caustic, that removing it would have required the sort of kit usually reserved for stripping out asbestos.

We need a biohazard icon.

SpaceX joy as Space Station robo-arm grabs Dragon's tail

Re: By the tail?

Wait until they open the hatch. They'll find a veritable smaugasbord of delights inside, by George.

Apple's trial experts are 'slavish fanbois who believe in magic'

Re: "the Foxconn-rebrander"

iBaiting at its finest.

Must be a slow day in El Reg Towers...

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Re: Worst argument ever...

"I'd like 47 grapes and 51 cherries please, Mr Greengrocer."

"Get out."

Real-time drone videos get GPU-tastic

Tsk

guys last shaved --> guy's last shaved

Watchdog bites bar over 'offensive' Facebook ad

Re: What about

"WTF is WTF?"

Well, yes. Clearly a = a.

Virgin straps on phone masts for the flying upper classes

Re: "...which means a dish..."

I seem to have your icon. Swap?

Telly is becoming moving wallpaper for constantly online Brits

Re: I like the Graphics

Indeed. Delightfully 90's.

Maybe you could animate them too, so they sort of swooped in from the side. That NEVER gets old.

UK's new drivers now in safe hands... of laser-wielding robots

non-forgeable licence?

That's up there with "unsinkable ship"...

Star Trek's Wesley Crusher blasts Google+ landgrab

Re: Wil who?

Excellent on TBBT. Utterly, utterly punchable on NG.

GCSE, A-level science exams ARE dumbed down - watchdog

Re: About bliddy time

Anyone with 10% of a brain can see grade inflation for what it is: the government's desire not to be tarred with the brush marked "failing our children". Because sure as shit smells, teaching didn't get better that quickly, and nor did our kids get brighter.

So, you either mark more generously, set easier questions, or have combination of the two.

However if you want to see denial and delusion on a truly epic and utterly depressing scale, just pop over to The Guardian article on the topic, and skim through the comments.

Baffling barcode-on-steroids stickers plaster the Earth

Colour QR

I'm sure I read, oooo about 10 years ago, about a bright idea to store data on a4 sheets of paper using a colour printer. The capacity was pretty impressive (for 10 years ago). Certainly several orders of magnitude higher than a QR code.

And by the magic of Google: http://www.vestaldesign.com/blog/2007/01/rainbow-format-missing-the-point

So hardly original. But then, few things ever are...

Half of Apple fanbois would bank with the iPad titan

Re: icoin

Good idea. They could patent the fact that iCoins had rounded corners too.