Posts by Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese

1,000 cats await stadium-sized sandwich bag launch

Re: Wanaka Airport

For people flying solo?

Kik opens bot shop, promises world+dog access to teen market

“Every bot on Kik should have the potential to improve people's lives,” the company announced. Current apps include an H&M “outfit inspiration” app, a “makeoverbot”, and a Celeb Quizzes gossip bot from a teen entertainment magazine

I did think that with all of the technology we currently have at our fingertips, this is surely the most wonderful time to be alive...then something like this comes along to make me re-assess that thought

Flying Finns arm octocopter with chainsaw

Ooops there goes me arms.

'tis but a flesh-wound

As a wise man once said...

Everything's better with chainsaws

Blighty's nuclear deterrent will get a software upgrade amid cyber-war fears

Britain's 225 nuclear warheads were developed and supported entirely separately from the US by the Berkshire-based Atomic Weapons Establishment. [...] Each of Britain's 58 Trident II missiles are maintained at the Royal Naval Armaments Depot at Coulport, on the remote shores of Loch Long in Scotland.

Maintained by the English but stored in Scotland, so if there's an accident the home counties won't get irradiated

Furious English villagers force council climbdown over Satan's stone booty

Only one upvote - looks like that comment fell on stony ground

I beg you, please don't back up that secret directory full of photos!

Re: Paint Shop Pro

I still use a rather elderly but entirely legit and paid-for v7 for my digital photography work. A lot of my camera club friends are a bit bemused that anyone can use anything other than Photoshop, but Paint Shop Pro does the job admirably. When I submitted a panel of photos for (successful) distinction award by the Royal Photographic Society, every one of them had been post-processed in PSP.

Heartless hackers break into Florida cancer clinic network – 2.2 million records exposed

Re: Patients *and* employees ?

To me it seems reasonable to have both within the same system...patient data cos the system is about patients, and employee data because presumably there's a list of employees allowed to access the data, references in patient data to doctors/specialists who have treated patients, etc.

Knackered Euro server turns Panasonic smart TVs into dumb TVs

Re: WELL

smart Panasonic TV responds maddeningly slowly to the remote, after switching on you have to wait a minute or two before it will respond">

Funny, I have a little LG set upstairs which exhibits that very same behaviour, but the Panasonic smart TV downstairs runs like hot snot. That said, the selection of apps in the Panasonic store is pretty poor, so when it comes to replacement time I don't think I'll be buying Panasonic again.

US chap sharpens paradigm-busting scissors

Phew...

...another first world problem solved

McAfee gaffe a quick AV kill for enterprising staff

Re: Sorry but...

It's far from unknown for pirated versions of software to include a malware payload as well. Install what you think is a hooky copy of Office and get a trojan or two into the bargain.

Brit firm unleashes drone-busting net cannon

Re: Range

"I can see the police wanting to use this to bag a perp on the ground though..."

Our oriental cousins already have something very similar for person entrapment purposes. I can't remember how I came to be watching videos of them on The Tube Of You, but they do exist and look remarkable effective in a slightly comedic way.

Vendor rep 'Stinky Sam' told to wash and brush teeth or lose job

Kind of went off the rails a bit

Re: Stinky Sam Partners

Somebody here was making a very heavy-handed and completely redundant application of perfume, prompting a comment from someone on a nearby desk "Oh, sorry, I didn't realise you had a cold - would you like some of my decongestants?"

Former Brit police IT boss cuffed over bribery allegations

The could tell you what the asterisk means, but then they'd have to kill you.

GDS gets it in the neck from MPs over Rural Payments Agency farce

Re: dial up speeds...

"For filling out a few online forms you really only need dial-up speeds."

As I understand it, a lot of the "form filling" involved marking up maps online. Granted, the performance of map rendering was unacceptable p*** poor, but the process does involve more than filling in some text fields.

Donald Trump promises 'such trouble' for Jeff Bezos and Amazon

Load of hot air

As the late great Linda Smith once said about somebody....I don't so much object to him getting the oxygen of publicity, I object to him getting the oxygen of oxygen.

Google human-like robot brushes off beating by puny human – this is how Skynet starts

control

We need a control experiment to see how a real person responds when they get hit with a hockey stick. There are a few people around here I'd be happy to do that experiment on...let me know when you'd like me to start

Airwave drops lawsuit against Home Office over EE contract win

Re: Optional Networks

"Well, Motorola don't have one of their own"

They own Airwave, which is the incumbent network for blue-lighters. Does that not count as an optional network?

Gov must put superfast broadband along HS2 rail line, says Parliament

There is good coverage at each end of the line, and passengers will get there 20 minutes sooner...plenty of time to go online and catch up with emails before going about their business

Bill Gates denies iPhone crack demand would set precedent

Re: We know how much respect for privacy you have Mr Gates

What is the connection between Bill Gates and Windows 10? Win10 came literally years after he left MS

NASA stormed by 18,000 wannabe 'nauts

journey to mars

"It's not at all surprising to me that so many Americans from diverse backgrounds want to personally contribute to blazing the trail on our journey to Mars."

More likely...it's not surprising that so many people realise that this planet's f***ed and want to get off of it

Linux Mint hacked: Malware-infected ISOs linked from official site

Re: Can happen to anyone...

Whilst any OS can be compromised, what's significant in this case is that because of the open source nature of the OS, a perp can build a fully-functioning poisoned copy of the OS from publicly available source. That sort of thing is a bit harder to do with a closed-source OS.

Not flaming or defending either approach....just saying....

Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph

I think I'll pass

I had a Speccy back in the day, and generally I like a bit of old school tech nostalgia....but, sorry, this just looks a bit shit

Yahoo! axes! websites! you've! never! heard! of! and! lays! off! staff!

Rest assured, there will soon be a lot more people not coming into the office

Remember WordPress' Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

Hmmm....

Given that the next article on the Reg home page is...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/18/ddos_dingbats_enslave_tens_of_thousands_in_wordpress_pingbacks/

...I assume that this would be a Bad Thing?

519070 or blank: The PINs that can pwn 80k online security cams

To much information?

I appreciate that it's useful to bring things like this to peoples' attention, but do you really think it helps when you publish specific details, including the exact user/PIN required?

Telemarketers hit with £70,000 fine for cold-calling pensioners

"One wonders whether the best approach to stopping such calls involves the use of a few large blokes and a dark alley."

Not at all - a couple of medium-sized blokes with baseball bats is the best approach...it's simply more cost effective, you see

Heart Internet in 22-hour TITSUP after data centre power stuffup

Might be tempting fate, but...

I have stuff hosted by them, and I've not noticed any interruption in emails coming in. Just checked, and websites appear to be up and running. Maybe this fault only affecting part of the data centre?

Hold the miniature presses: Playmobil movie is go

Will the Playmonaut be moonlighting as a stuntman while waiting for the FAA to give clearance to LOHAN?

FTDI boss hits out at 'Chinese criminal gang' pumping knock-off chips

Re: Best solution is...

No mention of step 'D'?

Good idea not to list it here, lest someone copy the entire process and pass it off as their own.

Are Indians too stupid to be trusted with free Internet?

$1 per day

For people who earn $1 a day, then, Basics is an entry point into a world that was previously out of their reach.

But what are they going to be entering it with? If they're on $1 a day then where do they get the $100's computer from? And if they're accessing via a communal computer, like the sort that's available at public libraries, why do they need their own ISP?

Drone-busting eagles to darken Blighty's skies?

Legal Eagles

That is all

Cisco's purple princesses gush workplace joy

meanwhile, at my place of work...

...the management seems obsessed with making my hair go grey

Official UN panel findings on embassy-squatter released. Assange: I'm 'vindicated'

Re: Won't make a bit of difference.

"What happens if he's arrested by the Swedish Chef from the Muppets?"

It would still be a lesser display of muppetry than the one we've seen from the UN

'Hopelessly insecure’ Motorola CCTV cameras belatedly patched

Re: Binatone are still a thing?

My thoughts entirely. I've got some quite fond memories of Binatone kit in the early 80s, including a couple of fairly cheap and reasonable cheerful CB radios.

They're alive! Galileo sats 9 and 10 sending valid signals

Re: GPS

"the french are insisting on having their own independent GPS system"

When you ask it where you are, it just shrugs

BT blames 'faulty router' for mega outage. Did they try turning it off and on again?

Re: 'Faulty Router'

"I've no idea how good or bad their HomeHubs are"

They're s**t.

I had the HH3 (or 4) when I moved to them for regular ADSL, which I replaced with a NetGear somethignorother fairly quickly when I realised how flaky the BT kit was. Then, having lost all patience with the HH5 I got from them for the Infinity service, I've just replaced that with a NetGear Nighthawk.

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

Going global

I once worked with a VB6 programmer (I was doing C work while he blundered along with VB).

He was working on a form-based application which, to be fair, worked OK. It was only after he left and I took a look at his code to make a slight tweak that I had a true WTF?!? moment.

For some reason, he didn't use variables. His preferred approach was to use text fields on the form, way off to the right-hand side so they were outside the displayable real estate of the form.

After that, his surname became an unofficial verb, as in "This code is so badly Blenkinsopp*-ed that it won't even compile"

* names changed to protect the guilty

Berlin takes down ‘for sale’ sign over top Nazi’s love nest

Eagle's Nest

"By contrast, the local reports, Hitler’s own love pad, the Eagle’s Nest in Bavaria, has a restaurant, cafe and book shop."

But, sadly no accommodation. Visitors wishing to stay overnight can, however, pitch a tent in the designated area in a nearby quarry. This is known as Mine Camp.

Brit censors endure 10-hour Paint Drying movie epic

Re: Meh

It's the film-makers Crown-ing achievement

Now you can easily see if a site's HTTP headers are insecure, beams dev

Interesting

I tried scanning a few of the security s/w vendors' sites, and the best score I found was an "E"

Retailers urged to create 'CCTV-like' symbol to inform customers of mobile tracking

Re: "... retailer’s smart phone app. " - IKEA

"Lets say you want to ise the free wifi at Ikea."

I'm surprised IKEA have an app you can install. Knowing them I would have expected to be given a load of source code, a compiler and instructions on how to build it myself

'No safe level' booze guidelines? Nonsense, thunder stats profs

bah!

I work on the principle that the amount of stress that comes with worrying about something and then not eating or drinking it is worse than the effect of not worrying and eating/drinking it anyway.

Blighty's Parliament prescribed tablets to cope with future votes

Re: Full of wind

"The loudest trumps deemed the winners?"

Let's hope that doesn't happen in the USA presidential election

Secret

Given that everything is recorded in Hansard, I don't think secrecy is an issue

Star Wars: Episode VIII delayed by six months

Re: RE: Confused

I'm confused

And so is my wife

Europe's satellite laser comms system set to shine

that thing in the photo

just looks like some sort of steampunk CD player

999 What's your emergency: Mega millions Met call handling IT muckup?

Re: 30,000+

Just had a quick look, and saw quite a few lines which are linking in further JS files, so total line count is *well* in excess of the 30,804 lines displayed in the 'view source' window

Competition watchdog to rubberstamp BT gobble of EE

Re: Wales

Really? A few years ago I was involved in a project in south Wales, and it was made a lot easier by the massive investment made by Welsh government in mobile data (GPRS minimum) for the whole area.