Posts by Trustme

BBC's Digital Moneypit Initiative known to be 'pile of dung' for years

Re: Legal theft.@Trustme

Actually at my place that's how it is, but at the girlfriend's she has Sky and to be honest we both get a lot out of that (we watch a lot of docs and I love the football), I used to stream the football and just download anything else I wanted to watch but to be honest, I don't mind paying Sky for what I get from them, in concert with Netflix I haven't downloaded any content for a long time, but I don't see why the BBC should legal force me to fund their business just so I can watch a competitor, it's like Google charging you a fee to use Bing. While I agree with you that I can, indeed, go to all those lengths to avoid paying the license fee, the truth is I shouldn't have to. The worst part about it is those who can't afford computers and to be online (and maybe simply don't have the knowledge as well) but who just want to watch "free to air" programs are more often than not the one's who can't afford the license, get caught and slapped with a £1000 fine when they can least afford it. The license fee makes an absolute mockery of the term "free to air" - it's not free, you have to pay the BBC to be able to access it, which is simply wrong..

(Thumbs up for your comment because there are still people who don't know they can do that)

Legal theft.

"Steaming pile of shit"

Or the enforced license fee as it's more commonly known. Seriously, if the BBC is so convinced that it's model is perfect then it should simply go subscription only like Sky. If it's as popular as it likes to think then everyone will pay to have it. But they won't because they know that line of patter is pure bollocks (so WHAT if it has top quality programs, why should I be forced to pay for programs, channels and radio stations I have no interest in - which is MOST of them - just to satisfy the cultural wet dream of a bunch of flag waving morons who equate the BBC with the last vestiges of empire?), so it has to essentially steal the money to operate by using the law to beat the money out of people, and usually the poor at that. If you disagre with that then YOU pay my license fee seeing as you think it's so "worth it" and I'll quite happily watch all the top quality programs I already watch that don't have a damned thing to do with the BBC. This idea that ONLY the BBC produces top quality programs and everything else is rubbbish is just blinkered bullshit by the twat-soaked brains of BBC Imperialists who have completely lost touch with any sense of reality whatsoever (or can so easily afford to pay the fee that they don't even notice the extra tax burden (which is what it actually is) and don't give a shit about those who can't)

Thirty-five years ago today: Space Invaders conquer the Earth

A pint for all the happy memories :)

Google's Schmidt calls climate-change deniers 'liars'

To quote Ken Robinson:

"Those people who don't believe in climate change should get out more"

It's a fiddle! Funnyman's Irish tax flashmob floods Apple flagship store

Re: Speak for yourself

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Smut-for-Glass app suffers premature ejection

"given a choice between spending a weekend with a porn star and a weekend with David Cameron"

To be fair you did massively weight the argument there in your favour (no Google Chrome it is NOT "favor"), if you'd said "given a choice between spending a weekend with a porn star and a weekend with your favourite rock band or favourite team", well I'd still have gone with the porn star to be fair.

Jobs' 'incredibly stupid' prattlings prove ebook price-fix plot, claim Feds

" JOBS' 'INCREDIBLY STUPID' PRATTLINGS"

Well that doesn't narrow it down much!

Google seeks to calm facial recognition furor with app block for Glass

Reality check

"Politicians are also getting concerned"

Are these the same politicians that are busy installing cctv everywhere that definitely does have facial recognition attached where it can? This boat has already sailed. Unless you live in the country you're being filmed constantly by people you can't see but you're going to get stressed about being caught on some guy that you can see's camera? Don't get all stressed about being filmed by casual passers by when you passively accept the ubiquitous nature of cctv.

Look out, fanbois! EVIL charger will inject FILTH into your iPHONE

Re: Yes, but...

Definite upvote for that one lol

Three's mobile data goes titsup in mysterious spreading outage

Down in Someset (ooh-arr).

Netherlands Supremes squash iPad design patent

I can imagine how the conversation went:

Here's a tablet that you can sync with practically any android phone (or tablet) from any manufacturer.

Here's a tablet that can only sync with an overpriced piece of crap iPhone.

Which one is which?

SEC slams NASDAQ with $10m fine for Facebook IPOcalypse

The real IPOcalypse....

.. is that people with money to spend valued the company at $100 billion and were prepared to buy shares of it at that price. If you just listen to the people trying to flog you the company about it's worth and don't do your own research then you probably shouldn't be investing anyway. Everyone with a brain must have known the stock was going to nosedive the moment the bell trolled (literally) and the system was going to come under massive pressure. That's what provisioning is supposed to be for! I really can't believe that with the worldwide buzz that had been generated about the sale of Facebook and the straightforward market analysis that it was heavily overpriced that they didn't expect a practically exponential period of trading compared to normal, and provisioned for it, although reading AC's post above, that plainly wouldn't be a simple task. But the people running the systems are paid to do that task.

My, my Pi, did it spy ya? Bye, bye Pi, did it go higher?

Re: More down to earth...

So is that duck pi?

Lenovo planning US smartphone push as PC sales stall

Unlikely to do another "Samsung"

The reason Samsung has such a large share of the market is because they created an "iPhone killer" - Something that had all the bells and whistles of an iPhone (and looked better as it happens) but without being locked into the Apple ecosystem. Unless Lenovo can create an iPhone AND Galaxy killer, they'll just be fighting for scraps like the rest of the market.

Phones for the elderly: Testers wanted for senior service

"What a dumb idea. Seriously dumb, not to mention insulting to your target market."

My mother is 80 and has never managed to successfully use her mobile phone, the technology confuses her just by "being" and her arthritis makes it next to impossible to use a tiny handset, and she has speed dial but she's never going to remember which one is which. The one phone she can use is about the size of a 10 inch tablet, she's hardly going to slip that in her handbag! She can, however, press one button and ask for someone to do it for her, because like a lot of older people she prefers the comfort of a human voice to coldly mashing a keyboard with no help. This product isn't aimed at seniors who are perfectly happy using a phone, it's aimed at people who are not. Your comment is as retarded as saying "This phone is no use for blue whales", the target market is those who struggle, calling it stupid because it doesn't help those who don't struggle is about as stupid as you can possibly be, not to mention incredibly insulting to the phone's ACTUAL target market by dismissing them as if they don't exist just because you evidently think every senior person in the world is a carbon copy of your granddaddy.

Curse you, old person, for inventing computers!

Re: Yup - Me too!

"And that sounds like a typical ignorant consumer frightened of change"

There's a difference between being frightened of change and knowing when the change is just crap. Self-scan checkouts are a piss-poor design, the scan-as-you-go wand that a couple of the more expensive supermarkets employ is a much better solution - scan the item as you put it in your trolly, get to the checkout area, insert your wand and pay for your goods. Nice, simple, elegant design that means you don't have to queue up, you don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want, and you don't have to drag the entire contents of your shopping over a bar code scanner that only seems to work within a couple of degrees of tolerance. Not to mention if you've got any significant amount of shopping there's never enough room to stack it, but if you try and remove it to create space a loud "item removed from baggage area" starts wailing like the bagging police to the nearest member of staff who is, by and large, a snotty-faced PFY who looks at you witheringly like it's your fault the design of these things is so fekking counter-intuitive and hard work. It's not the people using it, it's the design. And by the way, I frequently have to queue at the supermarket to use the fekking self-serve tills, the only reason I bother is they reduce the "Basket only" till to one, poor, overworked lady with a queue half a mile long from all the people who are trying to avoid the existential nightmare of fighting a machine to purchase their shopping!

Fibre boosters trip the light fantastic with 800G BPS LINKS

800GBPS?

That's only 3,360,000 times faster than my poxy home broadband connection. Not even a terabit. You have to wonder if they're really trying all that hard.

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

I have missed the BOFH. We need them to come out faster!

Pint for always making me laugh!

Penguin pays $75m to settle ebook price-fixing case

Apple won't have the book thrown at them

Judging bythe gushing "We LOVE Apple", "I have all their products" "Even my granddaughter can use them" comments levelled at Apple during their supposed grilling over their tax payments (as shown on the Daily show) I can't see them walking away with anything more forceful than "We're all sure you had a good reason for doing it" from the investigating body!

Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month

New reg reference..

I vote for a new Reg term to define Samsung fans:

"Samdroid"

Of which, it seems, I am one.

Facebook Home phone plans canned in the UK

The problem is putting the word "Facebook" on everything

We know Zuck has to diversify his empire and get into businesses that actually make a decent ROI, but he doesn't seem to have worked out that he's reached saturation point with Facebook, and further branding things as "Facebook this" or "Facebook that" will receive automatic antipathy because of it. He should just start seperate businesses that don't reference FB in any way so they can still be received as fresh and new, not old and stale like everything Facebook related.

Yahoo! continues quest for youth with yet another acquisition

"continues quest for youth"

Yoof, surely?

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

Let's get this right...

We have 3D printed psuedo-food on the way that will at some point become an "order from the wall" food source (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/23/ctrl_p_for_pizza/)

We have Soylent (insert colour of choice here) already with us http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/21/soylent_food_replacement/

And now we are feeding the elderly with reconstituted "unfit for human consumption" leftovers in ice cream.

Dystopian future not so much with the "future" any more it seems...

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

"British English than they do in American English"

British English is simply English. You wouldn't say someone speaks "German German" just because there are other deformations of the language in other countries. The fact there are American and other bastardisations of the language doesn't change the fact that English as spoken by the English (read British) is still simply English. When you refer to "English" you are default referring to the English spoken by the English (read British), it's only when you talk about one of the variant bastardisations of the language you need to qualify it with "American" et al.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

WIred covered this a month and a half ago - http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/30/rossi

Surprised the Reg haven't made any mention of the open-source project that's running alongside it that anyone can contribute to and test for themselves (MFMP)

Startup hires 'cyborg' Mann for Google Glass–killer project

" if I was having a coffee or beer and saw some knob with Glasses on sit across the way from me I'd get a bit twitchy,"

And yet the cafe you're sat in has cctv and you're filmed on cctv the moment you walk out the cafe and wherever you go in town and police dash-mounted cameras are filming you every time they drive past (not to mention the fad for consumer dash cams), and airport security is scanning you even more intimately and your phone is tracking you by GPS and sending that data back to it's masters 24/7 (in good enough detail that it's been the deciding evidence in criminal cases), and all this you're fine with, but god help some bloke with a pair of glasses who may or may not have the cam switched on in a public place while you're already being filmed and tracked at every moment, how dare HE invade your "privacy"??

Why the hell isn't there a bloody "reality check" icon?

Microsoft: We need a pro to flog our Surface slabs in UK

The answer is simple - license Win 8 to Samsung on very generous terms and get them to produce the tablet, and the phone come to that.

Amazon cloud soars far above Google and Microsoft

Aren't the cards stacked though?

If I remember rightly isn't Bezos on a "to hell with profit we want market share" trip? MS and Google are all about the profits. MS and Google might be able to offer competing, technically similar levels of service, but if Amazon are prepared to make little to no profit, I don't see how MS or Google can hope to compete with them in the long run.

Biz bods: Tile-tastic Windows 8? NOOO. We lust after 'mature' Win 7

Roll on Windows 9

MS's OSs go in rounds, one abysmal, one that's actually quite usable. Taking recent history - Win 2000 - pretty dire, Win XP (What 2000 should have been) pretty good, Vista - no words can express how truly awful it was, Win 7 - pretty good (everything Vista should have been). Win 8 - a good stab but falling well short of the mark. So bring on Windows 9!

Murdoch Facebook gloat: You're like my $580m, 'CRAPPY' MySpace

"What interest does he have in Facebook going down the drain? "

Have a look and see if he placed a lot of PUT options on Facebook the other day...

Yahoo! to 'share something special' in New York on Monday

Re: Had a girlfriend once shared something special with me in New York

And how many trips to the clinic did it take to get rid of it again?

Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are way more fun

Paying a hugely over-the top price for a half an hour in which they will struggle to find some level of compatibility due to an insufferably o'erweening arrogance.

And when they've completed the purchase at the Apple store it's off to coffee with Cook...

Larry Page acknowledges creeping vocal paralysis

If anyone....

...in the world is capable of collecting and collating enough information on a subject it is he. Maybe it will encourage a mood swing within Google to open its doors to allowing universities full access to it's anonymised data for research.

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Yay Mr linkbait with his usual drivel.

Because of course Lewis, no one will possibly improve on this design and no one will improve on 3D printers! Just in the same way that the first commercial computers couldn't run HALO but could run a really crappy little game with numbers that didn't have the full, immersive experience of HALO proves that computers are useless and will never be able to run a decent game.

How are you still allowed to publish articles for the Reg? Or is it just because so many people queue up to give you negative feedback in the comments section that they consider it good for the advertising numbers?

Fasthosts CEO Burton hits alt-F4 for last time at web biz

Clunky, overpriced crap (2 years ago anyway)

Fasthosts were awful for several years when I was with them, since I moved my hosting away had virtually no problems for myself or my clients and at a les than a third of the price FastHosts were stinging me for. It's all changed now since 1&1 starting killing the market but you can only comment on what you experience.

YouTube launches subscriptions with 53 paid channels

At last, the option to pay for You Tube instead of getting it all for free!!

Seriously though, good content can be paid for, bad content won't sell (much), and it's a lot better to pay 99c and get the content legally from source than it is to bugger about trying to find it on a torrent, so thumbs up from me, at least for giving it a try.

EMC: 'Hardware? We stopped doing that YEARS ago'

The only problem with Quantum Networks is you can know where a packet is or what it's flow rate is but not both at the same time...

Politically-correct 'Fairphone' goes on pre-sale next week

Re: THere is no such thing as fair

"WHOOSH"

That's the sound of the point flying right by you.

Google Glass eye-cam to turn us all into right little winkers

Luddites? Definitely!!

Well I can leave my smartphone in my top pocket with the camera side facing out and film everything as I walk around (and which I used to record an encounter with a garage mechanic who was talking the p*ss) without anyone noticing or wondering about it, as can anyone else, and pinhole cameras you can wear without being noticed are (and have been for some time) easily available and cheap, so if you're bleating about them recording, you're way, way WAY too late to the party on that. You really have to be a luddite to protest about this simply because you don't realise that anyone who wants to already can film you without being noticed and a lot cheaper than buying Google Glass, if you weren't a Luddite you'd already know that...

3D printer spits out CYBORG EAR... but where will you PUT it?

Hmmmm....

I see the manufacturers of the "Rabbit" releasing a whole new line....

You think Macs are expensive? Get a load of this $260,000+ Apple

Really?

An Apple device that costs a small fortune more than it's actually worth? That's unheard of!

Google to Glass devs: 'Duh! Go ahead, hack your headset'

Re: Love it.

"I'm not a Luddite, so much as I subscribe to the now seemingly-outdated notion that my life is my own, and that my experiences and memories belong to me. I do not consider this notion to be unreasonable"

Neither do I and I agree with your sentiments entirely. I was talking purely from the technological/general availability standpoint. The privacy concerns are manyfold, but as you said, it seems to be easy to jailbreak and therefore a good enough knowledge of the core OS should be able to assure you that you retain control.

Re: Love it.

I agree, it's not perfect but it's first generation of something that you can go out and affordably buy and that's the difference. I'm sure people are making better stuff in labs right now, but you and I can't have them. We can have this, it's available, and others, like the Chinese one for instance, will no doubt improve on it and so on and so forth, but unless it's in the market to buy it's just a pipe dream for researchers. This is something we can all get, and its the first of it's kind to a mass market, and I think that's a significant step. If we wait until it's all things to all people it will never come out. This is version one, and for version one it's not a bad effort.

That much is unfortunately certain lol

Love it.

I don't care what the naysayers, pessimists, Luddites or anyone else who poo-poos this device say, I want one. Not because it will look cool (it won't until it becomes socially accepted, I'll look like a dick to most people), and not because I'm the kind of person who buys the latest shiny shiny, but because of what it represents as a stepping stone in, however clumsily at first, taking the first step towards fully integrating technology into our experience of the world in a meaningful way that we can interact with as we go about our day without having to stop to operate it, and in 20 years when we've got chips in our visual cortex constantly updating us wirelessly with actually useful information overlaid onto our view of the world I will look back fondly at where it all started.

Is this the first ever web page? If not, CERN would like to know

Because I'll never get the chance

to buy him a drink in person. At one stage in the late '90s I was housebound for 2 years and the WWW was a lifeline of communication for me. I couldn't leave the house, yet daily I talked with people all over the world. Thank you Tim Berners-Lee!

Combover King Donald Trump: 'I miss Steve Jobs'

Yes please listen to him...

There's a reason Jobs said no to the larger screen, and didn't diversify the range, This way we get to see why!

Google's Euro antitrust offer: Fine! We'll link to our search rivals

Stupidity reigns again

Using the "logic" of this supposed "anti-trust" complaint, I presume they will show consistency and ban Ford advertising the fact it sells vans as well by using advertising on it's company cars, will stop Sky advertising it's broadband services on its websites without listing all the competitors above it's own services, and essentially stop any company that has become successful from advertising its other products on the grounds it's "anti-competitive".

Yes I KNOW Google get paid to show adverts, and they need to show adverts fairly, and they do, right underneath telling a customer that has actively searched for a product using THEIR search engine that they also offer that product. They have built a successful vehicle that billions of people use, and they promote their own products using that vehicle, That's not anti-competitive, thats COMMON SENSE and GOOD BUSINESS PRACTICE. Anti-competitive would mean hiding or omitting a competitor's advert after it has been paid for, which they don't do, but putting their own products at the top of searches entered for that product is exactly what they should do. This is just Eurocrats looking for an opportunity to wring some more millions out of Google on a trumped up charge so they can enjoy a few more all-expenses paid, 3 week "fact finding missions" to the Bahamas.

The other option for Google to defeat this latest round of "making shit up to create arbitrary fines" is to simply stop accepting adverts from people who are competitors in those areas on the grounds it would be unreasonable to expect them to promote a competitor's product on their own website. Sky aren't obliged to promote Virgin Media on their website, Ford aren't obliged to promote Vauxhall on thiers, so why should Google be obliged to promote rival servcices on thiers?

Peak Apple: Cupertino belatedly spends some money on R&D

"Jobsian diktat 'innovation nothing to do with R&D' "

You can't really call the process of cloning a product that was already innovated by others and give it rounded corners "R&D". Apple's version of "innovation" would more accurately be describe as "creative faxing".

I heard Tim Cook had an original idea the other day and had to sit down for a few hours to recover from such a novel experience.