Posts by Andrew

Yahoo! Unveils! Another! Social! Networking! Also-Ran!

The! More! Yahoo! Exclamation! Marks!, The! Merrier!

Anyway! it! was! Yahoo! who! insisted! on! their! use! Don't! believe! me!? Check! the! archives!

Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail strike out Iran

Shouldn't the headline be:

Yahoo! Mail! (and Hotmail) Strike! Out! Iran!

No-humping 20mph limit for London

@ Anon Vulture - Your solution is distinctly lacking

"The problem is road safety so reduce the traffic by using trams/crossrail"

1) There is only 1 tramline in London and no more are planned. For some reason traffic engineers in England hate trams even more than cars.

2) Crossrail is STILL in planning after more than 25 years and is likely to remain in planning if the government continues to insist on "Business" paying for the inevitable cost overruns.

You want to learn about Ubuntu?

Oh for Fuck's Sake!

Would you rather that Ubuntu damaged your monitor or video card trying to run at an unsuitable refresh rate or resolution? 800x600 is a sane (if annoying) default used if the setup can't detect the monitor properly. And what is so difficult about running "sudo xorgconfig"?

French court says non to pre-loaded Windows on Acer laptop

Is it just me imagining things,

Or are the comments full of Microsoft fanbois? (blogwashers?)

Google says go-go-Gadget Ads

For the IE-enhanced among us:

You can also use IE7Pro (it also works with IE 6). A very handy free plug-in that also includes ad-blocking. http://www.ie7pro.com/

Doomwatchers sound Windows and IE vuln alarm

@ David hazzard - Reread the article

The exploit reported a year ago is in Quicktime, however Firefox 2.0.0.6 was meant to prevent URI exploits like the FF exploit. On the bright side, at least Mozilla are trying (not very well, it appears) to do something about URI exploits, instead of pretending it is not their problem, like Microsoft. However perhaps they should put a little more thought into the fix next time. 3 patches in 3 months for effectively the same issue is not good.

Google's PowerPoint beater beta is go

@ Don: OOXML is not an open standard.

it is basically the old MS document formats in an XML wrapper. That proprietary content was one of the main reasons why the standards bodies sent Microsoft back to the drawing board.

OpenOffice builds extensions for v2.3

The Real Problem With OO.org

Is that its support for OpenType fonts ranges between sucks (Windows) and non-existent (Linux).

Cops cuff man for burning Burning Man man

5.7 Morissettes

The last time anything interesting happened at Burning Man was when the insane super-intelligent gerbil's Doomsday Device exploded (instead of destroying the world).

AT&T turns screws on iPhone unlocker

@ Ian O'Friel

You just failed the Internet.

Aussie serves up feral cat casserole

I'm disapointed in you, El Reg.

Where's the "eating pussy" headlines and jokes :(

Microsoft vs. Google – the open source shame

Re: "Super Banana" webserver (and the joy of Word 1.0)

A better analogy is if you then deployed your GPL software based "Super Banana" webserver to 10,000 servers in 20 seperate locations worldwide, offering a variety of commercial and free services, hosted on "Super Banana".

That is at the very least stretching the meaning, if not the word of the GPL.

As for the rise of Word and Excel, The original versions were crap compared to Wordperfect and Lotus 123. They gained market share by MS basically giving them away with large orders of DOS and later by MS continually fiddling with the Windows API's, thus causing the early Windows versions of Wordperfect and Lotus 123 to be almost unworkable.

US airforce in $500m push for better jet turbines

Re: Moller flying cars

Moller has been touting his flying cars for well over 30 years, has raised significant amounts of capital and has still to come up with something concrete. A con? You decide.

Pipex invites customer to get 'c**ted'

What offends me...

What offends me is that the passwords are barely adequate for security. I mean 7 letters with a single, initial capital and a trailing digit? this is the 21st century, not the 1980's!

Fake e-cards signal massive DDoS attack

@ AJ Styles.

Your "solution" would also require everyone to personally audit every line of code that they download and compile on their "unique" hardware. What else is to stop them downloading and compiling a new game or media player which also just happens to turn their computer into part of a botnet? Perhaps that handy tool you downloaded to automate the code auditing? Well, that has just root-kitted your computer.

Desktop Linux: That dog will mount

Congratulations!

First you piss off the Apple fanboys and now you have pissed off the great unwashed!, er, the Linux community!

By the way, I can't get that rather disturbing mental image out my head :/

Yahoo! denies! China! claims!

Sacasm detection and lack therof

Unfortunately for a site that tries to maintain a certain level of humour, many of its readers, and some writers, would be incapable of recognising sarcasm and irony if they glassed them in the face.

The romance and mystery of a good hack

Even more to the point...

Perhaps because "the bots" comments are often funnier and more to the point than most comments?

Intel responds to EU's anti-trust statement

Re: Antitrust and IE

Tom said: "... And it should be considered common knowledge that MS Internet Explorer as we know it today was born in the courtroom, not from quality or even legal programming. It is, in point of fact, and by design, a security risk because it had do be integrated into the Windows OS to comply with the guilty anti-trust verdict.

<snip>.

Anyone who argues otherwise is biased and stubborn as a mule."

IE integration into Win95 was touted as one of the "great features" of the OS BEFORE the antitrust suits saw light, you numpty.

OLPC project goes into production

To John Styles and Anon:

To John Styles and Anon, I grew up in Southern Africa, I did some work for an NGO and knew several people who worked fulltime for NGO's. I KNOW how desperate many schools, particularly rural ones, are for the most basic supplies. And you idiots want to give them computers when some don't have enough pencils and workbooks or even teachers, let alone textbooks! Get your priorities right.

Misguided Waste of Money and Effort

Can you imagine the amount of school equipment $175 per child would buy in a typical Third World country?