Posts by Trygve

MS sees Windows 7 leap, but XP workhorse refuses to die

You are so right....

I got Win7 64 for £30 on the student deal a while ago and put it on my games machine (since XP needed a reinstall anyway. Works very well, is shiny, pretty much as good as my Mac Mini. Adequate for that price.

A while ago (2 years?) I got Vista Ultimate 64 on the same deal, put it on my 'messing about' PC (retired games machine). Works OK, not quite as shiny, spat it's dummy out regarding graphics cards, some wierd stuttery behaviour now and again, but not too bad. Again, adequate for the price.

In both cases the experience of actually getting the OS installed and working was on a par with breaking a bone or coming down with a serious (but not life-threatening) gastro-intestinal disease. Maybe I'm just unlucky but given that every single problem I ran into was resolved by googling up other people's fixes for the same problem, I'm certainly not alone. All that rubbish and paying full retail too? I don't think so.

Fun fun fun: If Win7 repeatedly hangs on 'completing installation' and the problem can't be fixed by feeding it the correct WHQL SATA drivers, you can work round it by installing to an IDE drive, using a LiveCD to clone that working install onto your SATA drive, rebuild the MBR, disk IDs etc. Then you boot up off the SATA drive and everything works flawlessly.

I'm a PC and I have a high pain threshold.

Royal Navy starts work on new, pointless frigates

Indeed you don't need a destroyer...

You need a modernised version of something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_class_MCMV

plus a third-hand containership to refuel/rearm it and to fly the helicopters from. Massively more useful for any scenario the Royal Navy is likely to get involved in now that the Special Relationship is officially over.

As for aircraft carriers - dream on, those kinds of toys are for countries with real money to spend. Not going to happen.

Lords: Analogue radio must die

Oh what a brilliant idea...

Mandate that every compact low-power all-analogue £2 FM unit must include a bulky high power consuming £5 DAB decoding chip. That's just brilliant, that is!

Maybe we could apply the same logic and mandate that every vehicle sold should have an integrated hybrid engine - including bicycles?

Biometric harvest network can handle just 700k a year

bah!

Whenever I've gone into a post office lately they are only interested in selling me broadband, insurance, mobile phone topups and bank accounts. It normally takes several minutes to persuade the pillock behind the glass that all I want to do is post something at the cheapest possible rate.

Then it takes another few minutes of arguing before they 'remember' what the lowest cost option is (no, not First Class, Standard Parcel, thankyouverymuch). I can't imagine how crap they would be if they were allowed near the biometric turdfest, and how much crap they'd sign you up for if they got access to all your details.

Thank god for Parcel2go, Interparcel and the rest, who will hopefully put the buggers out of business. Ditto for the incompetent posties who keep deliving all my post to the same housenumber three streets away, and delivering their post to me in exchange.

Pandora plus Endor: Multi hab-moon motherworld discovered

Prank call???

I can only imagine the expression on the esteemed scientist's face as the questions from 'The Press' became increasingly deranged and excited.

What a shame the discussion appears to have been terminated before El Reg got as far as quizzing him about the statistical probabilities of steamy interspecies bonkathons interrupting hostilities & leading to a pan-moon peace breakout.

Windows Phone 7: Microsoft's exercise in self restraint

You know, there used to be computers for advanced users once...

They were called workstatkions. Sun, IBM, HP, SGI and lots of other companies used to make big bucks out of high-capability systems designed by experts for experts. 10 years ago workstations could do stuff which is just about becoming standard today. Full 32-bit way back in the day, user interfaces that could be tweaked to the nth degree, blah blah blah.

Windows killed all of them. The ones that still exist probably sell fewer units in a year than Packard Bell sell in a week.

Designing for advanced users is pretty much a 1-way ticket to the corporate graveyard, because in order to accommodate 0.01% of the user base you end up making the product so complex and expensive that the rest of the user base cant afford it and can't figure out how it works.

Build locked-down limited systems for idiots - the advanced users may have to buy 5 and use them all simultaneously to keep themselves occupied, but hey, that's 5x the margin and you'll sell a ton extra to those who just want something simple.

Flat-pack plug designer wins top award

Ah yes, of course - safety with 1930's technology

Such a huge consideration nowadays. How the swedish/dutch/germans/etc. must be cursing the hideous annual death toll exacted by their domestic wiring which has been using circuit breakers etc. for the last thirty years. Except they don't, because it all works just fine.

Nowadays the advantages of the 3-pin plug really are theoretical more than practical - given the number of UK homes which still use rubbish old fuse boards (complete with wrong gauge wire, nails etc. carrying current) I think we are on average far less safe than most of the two-pinners in Northern Europe.

Apple squashes wobbly jub app

Really?

Odd then that the first thing any large group of people seem to do is decide on a social norm and start shunning those who deviate. Most people like to follow each other round like geese - the only problem here is that Apple is trying to herd the yellow-billed geese together with the red-billed geese, and that just won't do. We're Europeans, give us our jubs, dammit!

This caused me to wonder if the Currant Bun had an app - I assume the UK's largest-selling litter-tray liner is Not Good Enough?

MS botches Office 2010 prices, hikes Professional by £30

it's certainly an interesting illustration of how MS have captured the value in the chain

You want a computer to do some work on and are Joe Average, hence MS is the way for you.

Office Suite - £400

Laptop to run it on £400

Laptop price includes, what, £40-£50 for Windows OEM?

So all those multi-billion dollar fabs making TFTs, chips & HDDs, all the sweatshops to put the bits together, the distribution chain to move the parts all over Asia and then on to your front door, and the service and support infrastructure for the actual computer, plus the R&D to improve things - all of that has to exist on £350 or less, while MS scoop up ~£450 for pushing out some recycled code with a few extra layers of lipstick on. Impressive.

France leapfrogs past Australia in Big Brother stakes

You're kidding, right?

In the US things this kind of behaviour is not merely illegal but unconstitutional, however it's all handwaved past in the name of national security and executive privilege and no doubt happens regularly. So what do you prefer, a goverment that says "we can legally intercept and control your communciations" or one that says "it is illegal for us to intercept and control your communications but we are going to do it anyway, because the law doesn't apply to us"?

Schmidt denies Google wants 'dumb pipe' carriers

well friggin DUH!!

Google would like the carriers and handset manufacturers to be involved in a cut-throat price war to deliver commodities while Google scoop all the profit via the ads delivered by Android.

The carriers would like HTC/Nokia/Google etc. to engage in a cut-throat price war to deliver commodity handsets while the carriers scoop up all the profit via charges for service provision.

Every single party in the market (carriers, hardware makers, software providers) wants to grab all the cash for themselves and lock customers to whatever they provide, leaving their 'partners' struggling to earn a 1.5% margin as customers swap them out every 2 weeks. This is what is know as 'business as usual'.

Poor poor carriers, forced to suffer the consequences of customers being able to change their carriers whenever they feel like it, and their utter inability to get anyone to buy on a basis other than 'who's cheapest today'. Lets all get together and cry them a frigging river as they get to feel the shaft for once.

Badgers, because everyone in the mobile industry fights like a sackful of them, and are about as useful.

Freeview HD EPG debuts on iPhone

Why, what an excellent idea!

Why don't you get on the phone to the nice Freeview people and suggest that to them? Perhaps if you offer to develop, test, release and support it for them at a reasonable cost, they might even have you do it for them and you could make some cash out of it?

Alternatively, maybe you could release it yourself as a paid-for app, since there's such a big market for it.

Otherwise you would have to accept that the Symbian 'market' has been written off by everyone as a load of Nokia BS that never arrived, and we wouldn't want that.

Microsoft made a phone, and I hate it already

I bet you want a flying car too...

Something that just ain't gonna happen either. Face it, manufacturing a small compact reliable cheap feature-rich pocket computer with all the latest technology for a global target market of a few thousand turbo-nerds is a guaranteed losing proposition.

No-compromise small computers will never arrive, so you may as well just go out and buy whichever of the many many alternatives currently on the shelves have the compromises that you can live with, or else just shut up.

I am assuming you aren't dumb enough to bankrupt yourself launching a $3000 pocket device that does exactly what you and a handdful of others want, so why demand that others should be?

Weeny SIM Wi-Fi hotspot is here! But why?

Simpler inventory management perhaps?

currently there seem to be a few phones around that are basically identical apart from one or two key features (i.e. model A has GPS and WiFi, B has GPS but no Wifi, C has wifi and no GPS, D has neither). If you can start cramming GPS, WiFi, memory etc into SIMs then there might be an opportunity for a carrier to just stock Model D and offer the extra features using various permutations of SIM. Since they would be model (and manufacturer) independent it could reduce the chance of getting lumbered with a lot of expensive phones no-one wants, or a shortage of particular models. Might simplify certification as well.

No idea if it would make sense in practice, but it seems initially plausible.

Big Blue boffins hatch dirt-cheap solar cells

Hydrazine

Bah. Like you say, its Nitrogen and Hydrogen. If it becomes profitable to use it in a bulk process, production will ramp up and the price will drop from the 'super-specialist' price range to 'cheaper than dirt' in a few years. As for toxicity, it looks to have the same 1ppm exposure limit as Chlorine (production in the US alone, about 1 million tons per month), so I can't imagine that would be a huge obstacle either. It will probably fail for some much more prosaic reason.

Street View catches Finn with his pants down

quite possibly not...

I am not up to speed on Finnish law either, but there are actually some countries in the world that do not follow the US/Saudi "arrest everyone for being naked under their clothes" approach to the human body.

It's not completely beyond the realms of possibility that in Finland one might be able to walk around naked on one's own property without having the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice stormtroopers kicking down the door.

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates

Ah, but...

Replace the galley, bunk rooms, food storage, water processing, etc. etc. with diesel tanks and you get a heck of a lot more range out of a fairly small hull, plus you could probably bin a lot of the the more bulky surface/air systems too.

Not entirely sure how plausible it is to have something chugging round the oceans for months on end without someone giving it a regular once-over, though, the marine environment is notoriously harsh on machinery. I can imagine it needing a lot of bath sealant applied before setting off.

Thinking about it, you might be better of with something rather like a surfaced sub than a conventional hull. And a bloody good insurance policy for when it inevitably causes havoc somewhere - even human captains are forever ramming their warships into islands, continents, boatloads of japanese schoolkids, etc. etc. etc.

You are having a laugh, right?

Exactly how many countries are going to hand over a submarine to someone stupid enough to think that torpedoing a US Navy warship is a good way of passing a dull afternoon? Particularly one that that is sending a minute-by-minute update on his position back to Norfolk, Virginia?

I think "Are you an utter moron?" and "will you get us involved in a major war without asking us for permission first?" probably feature highly on most national sub-skipper selection tests.

Steve Jobs re-invents the portable telly

who cares about broadcast TV?

It's pretty much all shite. If you want good TV (i.e. imports) then you either get it on DVD from lovefilm and rip it to watch at your convenience (with a delay) or grab it fresh from bittorrent. For the 3% of UK broadcast material that's watchable, there's web viewing to get it when you want to see it, rather than when they want to show it.

It's that last bit where it all falls down. Jobsy no like flashy, and UK TV companies no like anything else. Ooops.

But like TFA says - it's a portable media consumption device, for people who can't work an Archos. Might work, I've heard stupider ideas. Might not work. Who cares?

Apple's iPad - fat iPhone without the phone

Good!

Have you seen the state of the internet lately? 95% of the population shouldn't be allowed choice OR free will when it comes to the intertardtubes. The more buttoned-down and idiot-proof things are, the better, because most users are idiots.

And if you want control over your own hardware that much, fire up a hex editor and earn it. Or buy some chips and a soldering iron and build your own.

Airships can defeat roadside bombers, says ex-US officer

haven't you heard of infra-red?

There are plenty of practical obstacles to enblimpinating the war zone, but I think seeing at night or through cloud is one of the lesser ones. Likewise, shooting at a big non-pressurised bag of gas hovering silently 10km directly above your head is probably not a high-success activity.

Now if the IED were to be on the side of a road, then figuring out which of the 87 people who passed that spot in the last 24 hours dropped a bomb there - that could be a challenge. And if you were to rewind the video and figure out where they live, then identifying exactly which of the 158 residents of the mud-walled compound are your bombers - now that might be tricky too.

You'd think by now people would have given up looking for magic easy-fix tech solutions to Being Stuck In A Shitstorm, but I guess that's the power of optimism.

Oracle prez admits 8 1/2 years with billboard woman

El Reg aims...

.. to be the Heat magazine of the tech world. Hence in addition to the usual focus on the beautiful and hideous, anything meriting a point & laugh usually gets published too.

NSA beats warrantless wiretap rap

You need to work on your examples...

Jews in Europe? Dissidents in China? Red scares? How about the tens of thousands of US citizens imprisoned for years without redress due to having suspiciously slanty eyes?

Here you go - Land of The Free, Home of The Brave etc. last time it got seriously frightened of Johnny Foreigner....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

Galileo sat-nav contracts, startup dates announced

total rubbish

Hardened shelters are specifically designed to take overpressure from nearby (as in, a few hundred metres) nuclear explosions, not to resist conventional PGMs. Just like you can puncture a tyre with a nail, you can stick a hardened bomb through a nuke-resistant bunker. But I seriously doubt a 600lb bomb would be the weapon of choice, more like 1000lb or above.

ps. You're not going to get into the megaton range from a nuclear blast, you twit. That sort of yield is for thermonuclear only.

MoD does everything right for once in Xmas shocker

Oh really?

"British equipment needs to be vastly more flexible since there are not the resources for a dazzling array of one-trick ponies."

No, British equipment needs to be CHEAP since there are not the resources for anything other than a very basic set of kit for all three services. End Of. There isn't the money to develop anything fancy or to kit the armed forces out any better than the US National Guard.

When will people get it through their heads that Britain doesn't have the budget to shop anywhere classier than Lidl? Every single attempt to come up with a Better British Alternative in the last 30 years or so has turned into an expensive gold-plated turd with less capability than whatever cut-price second-hand junk was on offer from the US or wherever else.

Buy cheap simple guns that go BANG reliably.

Buy cheap simple planes that fly reliably.

Buy cheap simple ships with radars and weapons that work reliably.

Pay people a bit better.

Whenever theres any cash left over spend it on radios, night-vision gear and other bits and bobs to help use the cheap reliable kit more effectively.

Then you might actually have some armed forces that aren't perpetually on the verge of complete disintegration.

FTC whacks Intel with anticompetition complaint

Interesting definition of 'Optimization' you're using...

As I understand it Intel's 'optimization' essentially consisted of code along the lines of

"If GenuineIntel, then run normally. Else run really slowly"

AMD and VIA were apparently finding that they could get performance increases of 10-20% on their processors just by changing their CPUIDs to say 'Intel'.

That's the sort of thing you can perhaps get away with if you are a bit-part player, but not when you have 90% of the market.

UK air traffic control goes after Wikileaks

won't someone think of the trains?

In several cases there have been put forward proposals for a 'black box' recorder to be installed in train cabs, to provide similar crash analysis information. One of the main reasons why this has never happened is that train drivers and other staff are very much opposed to having every thing they say and do during their entire working day recorded.

With ATC and black-box recordings you are bugging people's workplace on the understanding they are to be used ONLY for safety-enhancing investigations, not for general entertainment, witch-hunts and the like, and I think that is what NATS may be trying to uphold (somewhat unfortunate that this stuff is often also sold to the Discover Channel or whatever, but there you go).

ATC chit-chat is as near to public conversation as you can get, but I can well imagine that pilots still won't be happy about it ending up all over youtube. If the same thing starts happening with cockpit recordings, how long before people are regularly disconnecting the recorders so they can have a gossip about the chief stewards sex life without worrying about adverse publicity?

Head-cam video used to OK Arkansas cop kill

If the same event took place in England...

What on earth do you base that assumption on? People have been shot by English police for such crimes as "carrying a chairleg in a plastic bag" or "looking rather like someone suspected of perhaps being a terrorist" with no prosecution of the officers involved.

Kent Police exceeded powers in too-tall photographer case

badger punching

So how does that work? Presumably you strap the badger to your knuckles like a large agitated boxing glove, since holding it in your hand to add weight to the punch would need a very small badger or unfeasibly large hands.

Perhaps some sort of small harness with loops for your hand would help. But should the badger be fitted to strike head-first (good bite access and nice solid impact but badger soon unconscious) or is it better to strike your victim with the badgers back or stomach and rely on it delivering enough clawing and snapping to make up for the somewhat cushioned impact?

Interesting. Maybe there's some mileage in just wrapping the badger in industrial-strength double-sided sticky tape and throwing it at whoever annoys you.

Atlantis glides home with choked pee nozzle

I'm going to hazard a guess...

That the 2.2lbs which probably came from 1kg may have started out as 1 litre.

Eat frozen food and avoid line-caught fish, says eco study

O RLY?

If you're going to get all hoity-toity about accuracy, you might want to add a few qualifiers to your own statements. That study estimates that the top 16 ship emitters release as much sulphur as all the worlds cars (plus a lot of other muck), not that they (or even all ships combined) are worse polluters than cars overall. I seem to remember that cars in the US alone release 1.5Bn tons of CO2, which is 50% more than your study quotes for all ships in the world. And that's not factoring in NOx, brake dust, antifreeze, engine oil and all the other gunk that cars are responsible for. And it's not like low-sulphur diesel is standard in every country. Overall, the worlds total car fleet probably generates many times as much pollution as the worlds ship fleet. Details details, pay attention.

Still agree with you that they need to get people off bunker C as fast as possible - there's just no excuse for burning that stuff any more.

'Whales can't even hear naval sonar' says Navy boffin

Decompression? Eh?

Tthe other points you make seem vaguely plausible, but even that paper you link to notes that it has only been 'postulated' that decompression might be an issue, and then only if normally deep-diving whales are scared into only making shallow dives for a prolonged period.

If there's one animal on the planet that can come up in a hurry from half a mile down with no adverse effects, it's a whale - they are somewhat notoriously good at the whole diving deep and coming back up thing.

Google Chrome OS - do we want another monoculture?

version 1.0

Currently it looks pretty damn pared-down, but it may interest enough people to keep it viable and develop into something useful. Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were by all accounts pretty rubbish and look what they led to.

I've never really played with any of this Chrome stuff but wouldn't Gears allow them to cobble together some limited offline functionality?

Activision denies Modern Warfare 2 Russian ban

Oh dear, sounds like it's more of the same...

CoD World At War was a big bucket of on-rails shite, but oddly enough no-one complained about the bit where your Russian soldier persona had to choose whether a bunch or prisoners got shot or burned alive. Sounds like this may have been a strategic direction for the CoD franchise rather than just Tetrarch being worthless as a dev team, as I assumed at the time.

Bookeen Cybook Opus

not all PDFs are the same...

Some are properly designed from the ground up for reflow, many are not. And a good few are not even proper e-documents, they are just effectively just pictures taken by a scanner. Meaning on an e-reader PDFs may be great, poor or a bag o'shite. Not great.

Mobipocket - Jury's still out but I wouldn't be surprised if this dies as a multi-vendor format. Sony has gone e-Pub, giving that a huge boost which with Amazon's loving embrace may turn mobipocket into a kindle-only format.

And yes, these gizmos are not a like-for-like replacement of paper books or PDA/phone readers. But in their niche they are very handy. I'm going to New York so I spent last night loading 15 books onto my Sony. I don't fancy taking that many paperbacks in my hand luggage, or reading on PDA for six hours at a time.

Scots slam Germans for 'tight-arsed' slur

Utter bloody twaddle

I think the Germans will stop portraying the Scots as tight-fisted the day Britain as a whole quits making references to World War Two, Lederhosen and sauerkraut - roughly the twelfth of never.

The scots would be much better off focusing their ire across the southern border, where they are all portrayed as chubby ginger gobshites with a drinking problem and a chip on their shoulder (garnished with haggis & mars bar, both deep-fried naturally). Which we all know is not true, right?

Pint of McEwans, obviously.

Europe plots black boxes for cars

£500? More like £5

These things cost a fortune currently because they're specialty items. Once the five or so companies globally that make car electronics standardise these things they'll practically be free - it's just a few megabytes of non-volative memory with selected bits of data from the braking and engine management systems being looped through it with a bit of logic to stop overwriting if the airbag sensors trigger a deployement.

And I find it hilarious that people are bleating about how the eurocrats are stealing our civil liberties. I'm no fan of Brussels but this is the UK we're talking about here, where your car snooping on you is the very least of your concerns. Anyone worried about civil liberties will have emigrated or gone to the re-education camps long before these gizmos get fitted.

Electronic ink: The whole story in black and white

@Gordon10

Try Calibre. My Sony is chock-full of non-copyright stuff, it's all good.

And to everyone bleating about reading on laptops/phones/PDAs whatever. Can you read 6-8 hours a day every day for five days without eyestrain (and on on a single battery charge)? I doubt it. Whereas I took my PRS505 on holiday and plowed through half-a-dozen books with no trouble at all.

These e-ink devices are still too expensive and it's a faff obtaining and loading content. But apart from that they are the bee's knees, even in black & white.

Historian slams 'absolutely crazy' UK time zone

Who cares what a historian thinks about time zones?

I don't ask my plumber to write me a prescription for contact lenses, why should I consult a past-times expert about daylight management and business coordination?

And for all you pig-ignorant types bleating on about how Europe should be able to cope with multiple time zones - meet EET http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/eet.html

A good chunk of the EU is actually two hours ahead of London, not one hour, and are just fine with the arrangement. I'm sure no-one in Europe gives a stuff about what the UK does or the opinions of this loony historian, so I don't know why anyone here is paying attention. It all seems like a very contrived controversy to me.

Timezones = no one cares so long as they don't come in stupid half or quarter hour increments (that means you, India, Australia, Canada and the rest of the awkward squad )

"Daylight Saving" = Pure concentrated bloody nonsense. Having most of the planet arbitrarily changing what time of day it is on arbitrary dates for no good reason is just utterly pointless.

Swissdisk suffers spectacular cloud snafu

Swiss?

Presumably they are attempting to trade off the 'chocolate' connotation, rather than the equally famous 'watch' or 'cuckoo clock' aspects of Swissness.

Although by the looks of that email, maybe they're thinking more along the lines of 'chocolate cuckoo clock'?

Beeb gets grief for Humpty Dumpty rewrite

What about the proper gory fairy tales?

I seem to recall one where three brothers who are woodcutters enter a competition to find a husband for the princess. One of them succeeds and does the whole 'happily ever after' thing, the losers get flogged until their ribs show (!), have salt rubbed into the wounds (!!) and are chased off into the forest to starve (!!!). A valuable caution on the consequences of high-stakes gambling.

Some memorable life lessons from old stories. We want more like that.

FBI chief barred from online banking by wife

@Lee

The problem with cheques are that they are an utterly pathetic, primitive and backwards way of sending money that only continue to exist because of brain-dead semi-literates and companies who like to rob their customers of legitimate refunds. In most civilized countries they long since went the way of other historical relics like rotary-dial telephones, sash windows and black&white TV.

I honestly have not dealt with a single cheque in 3-4 years that has not come from some company hoping to benefit by erecting an inconvenience barrier to getting my own money back. Even my 68 year old mum can manage one-off money transfers - what's your excuse for continuing to inflict cheques on people?

Packing heat gets you shot, say profs

My word, these trolling articles do generate a lot of page impressions...

Must do wonders for El Reg's bottom line ;-)

@Charles 9

"do you really think Sharia law would be really enforcable if those supposed minority elements happened to have ready access to a large variety of firearms? "

Why yes, it would be. If the majority have access to guns and want to pick on a minority who have access to guns, simple numbers win every time. Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen etc which are awash with firearms and various forms of oppression are still rampant.

For some bizarre reason Americans seems to believe that the thing to fear is the government oppressing them and their neighbours, when history suggests that what you have to fear is your neighbours selling you out to the government or killing you off themselves while the goverment looks the other way.

Radio Society to Ofcom: Hear See you in court

@John Murgatroyd

"The problem is the manufacturers of some of the adaptors."

No, the problem is that the UK is basically a shitty third-world country (with first-world price tags) where sensible and necessary laws and regulations are routinely ignored unless they can be used to extort money.

e.g. Ofcom don't seem to give a toss about this issue, indicating they don't get any revenue from sales of standards-conforming kit or from non-compliance fines. If they did, they'd probably be waterboarding small children for info about dad's Powerline kit.

RIM syncs Macs with BlackBerries

yes, why doesn't iTunes support other devices?

Probably because Apple only spends money developing and supporting iTunes to sell its iPods?

I have a great idea - next time Sainsbury's does a buy one get one free on Persil or whatever, why don't you walk in with your packet of Persil bought at Tesco and help yourself to a free packet? Then when they complain you can sue them for abusing your freetard rights. After all, you've bought one, you are entitled to a get a free one, right?

Duff DAB, megamogs and ass-assassins: Your thoughts

4 C cells a month?!?!?!?!?!??!!?

I have a £15 shower radio that takes 2 AA batteries and needs new batteries about once every 9 months. FM Rules!!

Blind one-legged man wins arse-kicking contest

@g e

You'll have someone's eye out, of course. Then they get to complete their pirate ensemble with an eyepatch.

Remember, it's only funny till someone gets hurt - then it's hilarious.

Plug-in Mercedes hybrid saloon emerges

needs independent testing but...

... it could be true if the engineers have been allowed to build a power train with the same overall specs but at two or three times the expense, allowing more fancy materials/engineering.

But I won't believe it either until I read it from some source other than a press release.

Army's £114m battle-comms net not up to Afghan demands

Do you lot even read articles before commenting?

@David Webb - What part of " Asynchronous Transfer Mode over radio" in the article and the assorted mentions of VHF and Satellite in ARRSE make you believe it is a wired-only system?

@Gotno brains - I'm sure Cormorant would have been a triumph if used in WW2, or even in Gulf 1. But unless you're Dr Who, you're better of limiting your speculation to 2002 and after, since that timeframe is actually relevant. Given that the military systems of ANY nation that arrived on time, on budget and to spec can be counted on the fingers of one hand, I find it hard to believe that this is the one and only time the MOD and EADS managed to pull off a blinder and deliver great stuff to a great spec and only two years late.

Seems more likely it was overpriced crap and now we're paying over the odds for rush delivery of bog-standard equipment to add to the existing COTS Nortel/Merdian/Oracle solution EADS cobbled together. What's "Independent and complimentary" about adding more OEMs and system integrators to the existing network?

Fire at Google UK

Amusingly, we are also in that building...

76 Buckingham Palace Rd in case you are interested.

It's a big building, and quite new, so a decent ratio of floorspace to footprint. Squeezing in 5000 people is probably possible if you ever managed to get to 100% occupancy, but certainly not in the last week of august ;-)

They apparently have a proper roof terrace, so no tar-paper. According to a bloke I was chatting to, a gas cylinder caught fire (oops! who didn't check the connectors properly?) and then involved a potted palm tree that was nearby. As AC said above, LFB turned up mob-handed and shut down the entire neighbourhood and even a police chopper was circling overhead. Bit OTT but then that's what happens with fires in high-occupancy buildings - 'better safe than sorry' is a well-established rule.

Big boost for the local pubs and coffee shops, although we were very unfortunate. Once we saw the smoke and realised it was a proper fire rather than a short-circuit we went into The Victoria next door - but then THEIR fire alarm went off and they threw us all out. NOOOO. Fortunately we'd just got a round in, so not all was lost, but the Plumbers Arms was ridiculously packed as a result.