Posts by Tim Croydon

Videotree VideoSpa bathroom TV

Not a luxury any more

I've fitted TV's in two bathrooms. In both I've paid about £400 for 19" screens. (e.g. http://www.ebstore.co.uk/iglu-home/index.html). The picture quality on the pricey ones is not really any better.

I love having it so I can watch the headlines while I'm having a, er...., brushing my teeth.

Dead easy to fit if you're replacing your bathroom, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise - had rather messy job with an angle grinder to set it flush in a wall in my last place!

Handy tip - extend all the cables to adjacent room/loft space - makes it easier to plug in a laptop/DVD player/whatever.

Toshiba AC100 Android smartbook

Google said not to try this...

I though Google had told netbook manufacturers to wait for Android 3.0 for exactly the reasons you've given this a crap review.

Dual-dock iPad design gets official EU thumbs-up

Not a patent

There's a difference between Designs and Patents. This does not stop anyone from putting whatever connectors on their devices.

Microsoft strolls into white space

Nip it in the bud now

"White fi"?

No, I don't think so. Can we have a new name please.

Drummers: Looking for a throbbing BumChum?

All sounds a bit PC

I'm sure these have been around for years, but used to be called 'anal exciters'.

PARIS flashes some radio goodies

Re:GPS?

Nothing that'll stop it working, I don't think. (Although you may get poor reception of GPS signals because you fall outside the main broadcast beam area) . You just can't expect the position to be calculated all that accurately.

iPhone must-have crowd inflates UK gadget insurance claims

Only turn down a quarter of suspected false claims?

No wonder insurance premiums are on the up.

Does Apple patent claim show iPad with built-in camera?

Er, good luck with that patent, Apple.

Can't see this one holding up. There are already devices on the market that use touchscreen for this sort of thing (mobile phones, Samsung digital compacts, etc.). And none of the rest seems particularly novel either.

Windows 7 upgrades Vista laptops to lower battery life

Wala!

"And wala! same issue"

Sackrace bleurgh. What will the French think of that?

Google Chrome 4 lands (Windows) extensions on world+dog

NTLM

They just need to get NTLM working so I can see my company intranet without having to enter credentials all the time and I can finally use a single browser for everything!

McKinnon: The longest ever game of pass the parcel

Get Orlowski to write future McKinnon stories

Then you won't have any comments to moderate.

Perhaps the system should tally up the +/- points against posters so we can see how much gravitas they have (like the 'reputation score' on StackOverflow). Bonus points for particularly funny posts, lose points for stupidity and lose lots for bad grammar/spelling/trolling.

I admire your patience!

This is getting silly

If Gary McKinnon is as ill as his defence team claim I can't imagine that all this messing around is going to help his mental state any more than a trip to the States would.

French top MOT failure league

Not the lens

They're clear lenses. It's the film on the bulbs themselves that peels after a couple of years use.

Giving in?

VOSA didn't 'give in'. The Information Commissioner told them they had to release the data.

A bit more info would be useful - I've had 3 or 4 MOT failures on 25,000 mile a year Mondeo's and Vectra's due to the indicator bulbs 'showing white'; hardly a sign of a poorly put together car.

<troll>With regards to Alfa, I'd have thought there's a 50:50 chance of getting it to the garage for any given journey anyway! </troll>

US airport body scanners can store and export images

Foil strips

I'm tempted to write something rude in foil strips stuck to my chest.

IPS in cunning 'get an ID card, get crucified' scheme

@Life of Brian quotes

I don't need to watch the film now. The entire script seems to be in the comments.

p.s. He has a wife, you know...

Guinness to hit three quid a pint

They're reducing prices?

Round our way £3's a bargain!

Nexus One teardown: 'nicely put together'

Dead battery

I think he meant 'dead' as in 'will no longer recharge'. Most mobile phones seem to lose battery capacity after around 18 months in my experience so the ability to replace the battery is pretty handy.

You and what Android? The Google iPhone killer that isn't

Hype?

Is it not the media that have created all the hype and expectation? I don't really recall a great deal of information or news directly from Google until the actual launch.

As for where Google are going for this, it's purely a marketing ploy to get people more comfortable and familiar with Android, regardless of HW manufacturer. I'm sure the majority of mobile users still don't actually care who makes their phone. More Android users will lead to more Google service users which provides Google with what they are always after - more data.

Google have never been a Big Bang company. They always release something basic and simple that works, and after a few months you find yourself wondering how you managed without it.

Mintpass Mintpad

Can it play media from networked storage?

If it can stream audio from other network devices this would be great to leave plugged into a main stereo.

Panasonic releases more capacious, less explosive laptop battery

31Ah per what?

I assume this power relates to some volume or mass of battery?

Design firm sues Microsoft over Bing trademark

Registration of trademarks

You don't have to register a trademark for it to count (thus the need for the 'R' symbol and the 'TM' symbols), in the UK at least.

Hackintosher goes titsup

@Steve 70

"What Apple have done here is effectively exempted their product from a FUNDAMENTAL piece of consumer law which RIGHTLY states that once you've sold a product you can't try to dictate, define or limit what the consumer can do with it."

Not really. Software is covered by both copyright law and the license (EULA) in which you can write pretty much anything you like. It is not a simple 'product'.

Dongles pricey and pointless, says Bluetooth SIG

What will the operators say though?

Don't most operators bitch about using your phone as a modem, even though it's easily technically possible?

Perhaps Bluetooth SIG should get the operators to behave fairly.

I always turn Bluetooth off on my phone as it saps the battery for not much benefit for me.

Webmasters fume as Google profiles signed-out searchers

Suspected this a while back

I switched from working on a Java project to C#. I noticed that when searching for API references the MSDN documentation and C# forums started to climb the list and Java equivalents disappeared from the results, even for API names that appear in both languages.

In two minds about whether its good or not. Bad from a privacy point of course, but it is useful where I'm looking for an answer for something. However, it's probably a bad thing where you're trying to broaden search to unknown areas (e.g. shopping, etc.)

Whatever you've got against Google, it's difficult to hate them when the service they provide is so much better than everyone else's.

Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon?

@John Baglow

What about car crashes? Does that mean it's alright to hit someone head on at 70mph if they're doing 70 the other way because it'll cancel out?

Try your 5 lb trick with a balloon and then say it's not feeling 10 lb of pressure.

Amazon's EC2 brings new might to password cracking

Long passwords

I hate websites that limit the length of passwords. e.g 'You password must be 6-8 characters'. Far too many of them about still. And far too many that store them unhashed and send you a plain text reminder.

@Moore's Law idiots: Just remember what Moore's law *really* says: "The number of people misquoting Moore's Law will double every 18 months". Go Google it, morons.

Google search primed for 'Caffeine' injection

@Why?

Aren't they talking about how quickly documents appear in the indexes, just as much as how quickly search results are returned.

I love the fact that Google are prepared to keep trying new things and advancing, rather than waiting for others to catch up. What engineer wouldn't want to work in that sort of environment!

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

No sound for me

No sound from my M-Audio Delta 66E soundcard after upgrade. Got playback working OK now, but nothing in JACK and can't route sound properly. Grrrrrr. That'll be time wasted trying to sort that.

It is annoying. This is the first Ubuntu since 6.04 I've had any real issues with. I hope they get stuff sorted soon as it is generally getting quite good now.

Proles told to get online to save economy

Eastenders/Internet

Wasn't Dirty Den caught doing something in an internet video chat that he shouldn't have a few years ago?

German firm fails to trademark !

What! have! Yahoo! got! to! do! with! it!?

Different class of goods. No conflict there.

Troll blockers take Microsoft SGI patents

@Baldrick, I have a cunning plan..

Too late, someone's already patented it!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/halliburton_patent/

@Microsoft - about as ethical as a guy testing spells from the Necronomicon

$3.5 *million* to $5 *billion* sounds about right.

Look at Qualcomm/Nokia. Nokia paid $2.3bn just to settle. And they'd have had tens of millions of legal costs on top of that.

Multitaskers: suckers for irrelevancy, easily distracted

Nerd sniping

http://xkcd.com/356/

ISPs vs BBC iPlayer: Missing the point?

Agree entirely

ISPs have been selling their packages on the ability to watch video and download huge quantities of stuff since what feels like the late 90s. I don't see how they can complain when customers actually do that.

I do understand the need to throttle at peak times as an interim solution to ensure that everyone can get a bit of bandwidth rather than completely denying some users because someone' downloading films. However, it would be nice if ISPs can provide a real time indication of exactly how and what they are throttling.

Microsoft's latest open-source release catches a wrinkle

Can you even protect architectural patterns?

Thought you could only protect an implementation. Happy to be corrected if anyone can explain what this story actually means in practice.

Gigabyte touts 'world's first' phone with Flash UI

Clones

Aren't all those Far East iPhone clones flash based?

Wakefield does a Brum with possessive apostrophes

Where to start

I'm annoyed inside, but I'm just losing the will to even bother arguing against this sort of nonsense!

As a software engineer, I get extremely frustrated by spelling mistakes and bad grammar in code comments, let alone actual written documents. If somebody can't be bothered to pay a bit of care and attention to use correct English, then what confidence can I have that they've paid any care and attention to the work itself.

The Boss bitchslaps Ticketmaster

Box Office

Problem is that in the UK all the venues are owned by the promoters (here's looking at you Clear Channel) and so even they charge a 'booking' fee.

No need to redirect...

TicketMaster are pricey enough with their own booking fees. For 'cheaper' gigs, I frequently find myself having to pay something approaching 50% of the face price through fees and P&P for some gigs.

Good on Springsteen though.

Rich-interface patterns get Quince treatment

@MS focused?

Design patterns are usually language-agnostic. Admittedly some patterns suit certain languages better but that is usually because of language support for things like inheritance, events, polymorphism, etc.

DARPA seeks spraycan wound-polyfilla* for injured troops

Two square feet?!

If I had an open wound two square feet I doubt I'd be in any fit state to shake the can and apply the stuff.

Retired army generals: Spend Trident money on the army

Scenarios

I agree that the scenarios presented in your referenced article do make you think "oh no, we must have a deterrent". However, I suspect once a nuclear war starts it's pretty much game over anyway.

I do think the money might be better spent on better ISTAR equipment and a more flexible range of more precise technologies better suited to the most likely threats (terrorist attacks, support to deployed forces, etc.).

Sennheiser VMX Office multi-source Bluetooth headset

Picture - woohoo!

This one tops Asus girl any day!

SkyFire beta goes public

Hmmmmm

Looked at this a few weeks ago, but this sort of term in the T&Cs just makes me a bit wary about any proxy-based browser:

"Skyfire Labs automatically receives and logs information from your computer that your browser sends such as, IP address, browser type, and Skyfire Labs cookie information browser language, referring / exit pages and URLs, platform type, number of clicks, domain names, landing pages, pages viewed and the order of those pages, features used in the Skyfire application, and one or more Skyfire cookies that may uniquely identify your browser."

Will have a look if it turns out to be too good to miss. Flash on Windows Mobile would be great.

Entire class fails IT exam by submitting in Word format

What format was meant to be used?

What type of coursework was it?

IT departments VAT-whacked

Hard-coded values?

Idiots. No excuse.

VAT is not only potentially variable, but can vary from product to product. Anyone that a) designed and built or b) purchased a sales system that can't handle this really is a bit foolish.

MP calls for Jezza Clarkson's head

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgggghhhhh

Just stop it. Everyone.

If you're determined to put your effort into being 'against' something, please channel it be signing up for charity work and leading by example, rather than railing against the (increasingly few) channels of entertainment we have left that, at the end of the day, really don't make that much difference to anyone.

iPhone users to get get-out call

@Neil Hoskins

Where do you keep your phone?

"In a haaaaaaandbag?"

Sarah Palin's words get data mined

If you torture data sufficiently...

... it will tell you almost anything.

Attributed to, I believe, Fred Menger.

TC