Posts by Chris Phillips

Google decides Chromecast TV-stick apps are a whole NEW THING

PLEX!

Woo get in! Made my day that has! I thought it was going to never happen.

Poker ace's vanishing hotel laptop WAS infected by card-shark – F-Secure

CARD SHARP!

It's a CARD SHARP! Not a Card shark!

Splunk plunks seductive AaaS on Amazon cloud

As far as I know the name comes from Spellunking. One of the founders is / was hooked on trying to kill himself in a flooded underground cavern. Probably nonsense though!

BBC Vision and Audio tossed on bonfire, replaced by 'TV', 'Radio'

Backtrack?? they should've gone further!

Vision should remain in tact and ONLY deal with visual aspects of broadcast media, it's so obvious!

Any programme broadcast on TV or online should have the visual element provided by BBC Vision, and the soundtrack 100% independently produced by BBC Audio. What could possibly go wrong?

When open source eats itself, we win

dodgy data and misleading stats again.

Nginx is most often used as a reverse proxy, not a web server in its own right. So whilst you'd have a an apache with mod_proxy infront of dozens of apache / tomcat / etc instances, it's often nginx being the one handing of the the apache instances behind to actually DO the work.

But the HTTP headers will say nginx as that's what the client is actually talking to.

Apache and Nginx work well together, not necessarily one vs the other.

Schoolgirl's Hello Kitty catonaut soars to 93,000ft

Note to self...

Arborist != Abortionist

UK digital terrestrial TV turns 14 today

its upfront cost was 80 per cent cheaper than ONdigital: £159 to the £199

Erm... who the hell taught you countimatics? blimey.

That's "20% cheaper", or "80% of the price".

Skype touts FREE* Wi-Fi across the UK

nope, totally lost here...

So you can give Skype a tenner and they will then let you give away your bandwidth to the great unwashed? I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but I really zero absolutely no reason for anyone to want to do this at all... where is the benefit to the business??

Virgin Media's 'bye-bye to buffering' ad nuked by watchdog - AGAIN

60mbps and still never get through a youtube video in one go. Virgins fault? Not a clue really, but it buffers nonetheless.

Booksellers club calls in Kobo to aid indies

If only Kobo eReaders weren't trash

I bought one of the basic ones... 3 seconds to load a page? That just makes in instantly unusable for any moderately paced reader, you can't stop for that long between pages! If you plan on saving the independent sector from third rate products and disappointing a lot of users who trust those indies to sell them good stuff, go nuts.

Surrey council plans to SAVE money by switching to BT

Unicorn???

a mythical creature in honour of mythical savings?

Broadband minister Hunt LOSES portfolio, takes on national health

In slight tiny almost defence of his Homeopathy support...

Most people presume that "Homeopathy" covers ALL alternative therapies, including the ones that aren't *UTTER NONSENSE*, e.g. acupuncture, and not just the sugar pill bullcrap.

'Immortal cancer' found in Australia

Heard about this a few years ago on Radiolab... really interesting piece in this podcast... http://www.radiolab.org/2010/may/17/

Microsoft's new retro-flavoured logo channels Channel 4

Simon? Pfft

I think you'll find Chrome is the real Simon rip off http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkvision/2822604151/

Vodafone silences punters in mini-mast upgrade bungle

I was SO SO glad to get rid of that rubbish piece of junk a few weeks back when I moved to T-mobile.

£50 for the privilege of getting an occasionally usable signal as opposed to no signal at all. And STILL using my minutes and data allowance despite all the data going over my own internet connection!

What a rip off and such a sorry excuse for their dreadful network coverage in my city.

Twitter bird reborn to the sound of whalesong

Re: Its Batman

Maybe, but equally the new twitter-is-batman logo is a blackbird with a comb over. Much cooler!

World+Dog to demand ever larger tablet-phones

these things need a proper new name

As pointed out, Smartphones are a phone as their 3rd, 4th or 32nd function... how much longer can they be called "phones" for? Surely a proper new name is needed for them that the unwashed masses can actually be told to use. The Germans call them a "Handy" which despite being the word "Handy" and sounding exceptionally camp in my head, makes a lot more sense...

Where me Keys? Where me portable computation and communication device?

Where me Keys? Where me portable computation and communication device?

Vodafone agrees to Cable and Wireless buy

£0.38p ???

care to write that in a way that makes sense? it's £0.38 or 38p. not both. Can't have two different units on a single value.

SpaceX Dragon gets green-light for launch to Space Station

Who reckons the DragonX explosion will be bigger than the North Korean one last week?

This will be one pricey firework...

The future of the fondleslab belongs to the Fire

So is this finally looking like a genuine format to get internet access to everyone in the modern world? All the confused old grannies and uneducated masses finally have a realistic bombproof way to use computers and not get left behind as the rest of society passes them?

New steganography technique relies on letter shapes

I'm sure this was in one of my Johnny Ball Reveals All books I used to have when I was a kid, along with other codes like "ISISISISISISISISISIS" = Tennis and POTOOOOOOOO = Potato. Clever stuff! For an 11 year old.

Facebook registers mysterious fBoriGin domain names

Just dull cdn stuff?

In my experience, obscure names including "origin" often relates to "not via the CDN". Stabbing in the dark I know, but not nearly as much as you already are!

Even brilliant sysadmins need help plugging holes

I met a security auditor once...

A few years back we had a shiny third party network security firm in to do an audit, reviewing all our IOS configs and whilst they found a few interesting things the main conclusion was that we should immediately and very specifically hire **them** to take over all our network management forever more.

Funnily enough, we declined to pay for the audit...

Twitter goes after born-again typosquatter

Open and shut case, no?

Given how the site you end up staring at via twiter.com is a blatant rip off of twitter itself, and refuses to admit that it's not Twitter it's hardly going to stand up to much

Radio 4 bumped off Freeview by Gaelic TV

What language

Does it broadcast in before lunch? I vote for Esperanto!

Crocodile keyboard becomes top Android app

Man writes software. It's OK.

Super, what a great story, sorry, I mean "short sequence of words". Especially on a Hardware site, given that this is a software keyboard... Great.

6music wins possible reprieve from BBC Trust

Need more joined up programming

The biggest issue I see is the lack of joined up programming across 6m, r1 and r2. Weekday evenings on all three stations is mainly guitar based alternative music - Marc Riley on 6m, Zane Lowe on R1 and the UTTERLY WONDERFULLY EXCELLENT Radcliffe and Marconie on R2. They are roughly similar, ticking the same boxes. However come the weekend evenings and R1 and 6M are both on dance music and R2 is I don't know what... They just don't pay any attention to what the other stations are doing, and so make one person pick between a number of shows at times, and leave them with nothing else at others.

The idea of leaving 6m's demographic for commerical stations scares the bejesus out of me though, it's an alternative audience... the other ones... the ones that no one else wants... 6Music != Heart FM and all that arse.

Bangladesh cuts off Facebook

But there are plenty of drawing of Mohammed within Islam??

Islam used to be perfectly happy with images of Mohammed - http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_full/

O2 limits unlimited broadband packages

Offender here

I got a call about this recently, thanks to her indoors pulling down The Good Wife and Fringe in 1080p. 48GB in a month when I specifically signed up to them last year becuase they said they don't do this. At the time they said that people reguarly have users hitting 400GB/month and have never taken any action.

I am on IPStream, half way out in the sticks... Luckily it'll be back to VM shortly in the abscence of an unbundled exchange.

MPs obsess about expenses, ignore data security

Nonsense, well... minimalsense

Seems like you're clutching at straws here. So in Standard your seat is 4 inches closer to the next passenger, hardly an issue to make or break national security is it? If someone is going to peer between the gap in a seat to see someone's data, then it's just as easy in any class. Possibly easier in 1st due to the extra space.

When there's a Daily Fail front page blaming a type of train ticket for the loss of more prisoner details or something like that, then you come back and put a decent case across. Until then, if it's private data, work on it privately, not just in more expensive company. Or do the ruling classes just commit more acceptable crimes than us scum in standard?

BBC storm cockup: Wrong day's shipping forecast read

Get it orf

Scrap it anyway, stop interrupting TMS! I might miss someone scratching there arse at Long Off when it's on!

Boffin unveils facial expression-controlled iPod

Wow

Quite some tongue there, lizard lady.

UK kids presenter gets online support

Source of all this b*ll*cks

Lazy Daily Fail Hack read this ONE thread on Digital Spy... http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=980250

and a "news story" is born... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152466/One-armed-presenter-scaring-children-parents-tell-BBC.html

Just compare the quotes.

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

Roll on metered services

Why doesn't Virgin take the big brave step of offering full best effort speeds and charging a metered service? The bubble of unmetered services has totally burst, yet keeps being patched up again and again.

Paying per mb (with whatever base levels you might want like a mobile phone contract) would remove a huge amount of the traffic anyway, so this capping implicitly takes care of itself.

International copyright talks seek BitTorrent-killer laws

Profit... what cobblers

This is the same profit that Alan Ellis made from Oink is it? What nonsense. That guy used minimal donations to pay for nothing but hardware and bandwidth, yet Cleveland police reckon he made hundreds of thousands... idiots.

All goes to show how dangerous it is to let non-tech savvy people control technology governance.

UK's tallest bovine soars to 6ft 6in

Chilli?? Why the name???

Presumably because he's a Friesian... Freezing... chilly.... get it....??

Google tips hat to St George - finally

Cheers Lester

Well great, joke or non-joke there goes another English hack perpetuating the exact reason why St George's day has the BNP laden image it sadly has these days. why the arse can't the press just be genuinely supportive and proud about it? Bloody fool you are lester.

No sense of humour? Avoid Bootnotes

What's YOUR IT angle?

Stuff an individual article, what do *you* have to do with IT Lester??

Blu-ray 0, SDHC card 1, THX Chief Scientist predicts

Breaking the link between media and medium

Bit of a stupid report if it predicts half of the future and ignores the other half. As above, inventory free = shop free, how could you possibly justify a long term model of shops with nothing actually in them?? daft.

people will never buy films on solid state media, unless it's some noddy tie in to promote one or the other. The physical device should strive to have nothing whatsoever to do with the media on it, the two should be totally unrelated to each other. You might have a period where you physically go somewhere with an SDHC card, but it's surely never going to also give you a 1/4 postage stamp sized version of the artwork to stick on the front of it.

The alternative would be junk, sorry, high quality integrated products, like the MP3 Classic, one of our favorites when we watch the shopping channels... https://mp3classic.tv bit of class.

Vyatta blows out Cisco routers with study

Another Tolly Group masterpiece

I *really* like the look of Vyatta in the right environment, and hope to experience it in the pretty near future, but as soon as I hear mention of the Tolly Group I feel no point in going on. what a surprise, highly dubious comparisons and illogical arguments.

If you want to be taken seriously in line with Cisco, you need to be water tight and squeaky clean, and I've never seen anything from Tolly Group that comes even vaguely close to it. Shame.

Phorm launches data pimping fight back

mo' money, mo' adverts

I certainly see a logic where a given financial return for a advertiser can be obtained by a fewer number of better placed adverts, but logic then follows that they would make even more profit by even more well targeted adverts. with a given volume of ads being sent to a potential customer per page there's clearly going to be contention for that volume, so surely that volume would creep back up, and a "responsible" level of advertising would be again dropped in favour of what level of user experience will be tolerated before they go elsewhere.

Bolluxed router configuration? Click here for help

Good for them!

If only we could say that to our real customers face to face when they dump this on our desks...

Brits can't distinguish history from the TV listings

That's a lot of 47's!

was there a sale on 47's when this analysis was done? I smell cod-statistics... very fishy!

Tesco punts Xbox 360 bundle for £33.24

Pricing mistake? Seriously... who cares?

yet another tiring pricing mistake... hardly cutting edge IT journalism is it? el reg have been rolling out these dull tales for years...

Police bail OiNK admin after filesharing raid

lucrative??

where is this money meant to come from? The police seriously think it was a paid membership site??? Morons, there wasn't even a single ad on the site. Private membership is simply the only way to make the bit torrent protocol work effectively. some investigation the police must have made into this...

Sony Walkman NWD-B105 2GB MP3 player

"A cutesy little foldery icon appears. awww!"

Who wrote that review? a high quality IT journalist, or your average myspace user? if we have to assume microsoft in all of these revies, they could at least talk at a windows level about explorer extenions, removable devices etc...

Unannounced Slingbox surfaces on the web

why no upnp

why don't these otherwise great little guys support local media streaming too?? talk about missing a trick!

Power gadget set to cut electricity bills

let's reinvent the wheel!!!

No one ever heard of a switch??? they're often standard features on todays modern Bakelite electircal aparatus...

money for old rope.. what a waste of time. now there was another gadget i saw which monitored the power consumption on a master socket and turned it's slave sockets off automatically when it dropped, much better, but still... just get up and walk the 5 steps to the wall!!!

Dell paddles 'blade everything' HP

I thought blades were so last year?

With the rise of virtualization, who cares about blades still anyway? unless you're Google with thousands of the things, surely blades are't much nicer to deal with than normal rack units anyway?