Posts by Ralphe Neill

Batteries that don't burn at the drop of a Galaxy Note 7? We're listening

Probably just nick an idea from Samsung!

The ultimate full English breakfast – have your SAY

Don't forget ...

... the Walls Pork Sausages ... slow fried in lard and oozing fat!

The bread should be fried in the sausage/bacon fat and should serve as the "plate" for the fried tomatoes ... preferably mashed into the bread.

All of the other stuff is optional although there MUST be HP sauce.

Microsoft in 2015: Mobile disasters, Windows 10 and heads in the clouds

"The phone that works like your PC"

Is that supposed to make me WANT the 'phone??

Cisco forgot to install two LEDs in routers

Cisco at it again

And let us not forget THIS glorious failure ..

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/07/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-network-engineers-worst-nightmare/

'iOS 9 ate my mobile broadband plan'

Re: Only one reason...

And here in Australia you can get caught in a $90/GByte excess charge plan with EFTel (yes, that's right ... ninety dollars).

Fanbois designing Windows 10 – where's it going to end?

A camel is a horse designed by a committee to government specifications.

Go for a spin on Record Store Day: Lifting the lid on vinyl, CD and tape

Have I missed something?

"CDs have the great advantage over vinyl, of course, that they can be quickly and easily converted to digital."

AndroidScript returns to Google Play Store: Ad giant YIELDS TO THE MIGHT OF EL REG

"Mountain View grovels before Vulture's claws"

Hmmm ... should that not be "talons" (just to be pedantic)?

'G-WIZ like' object doing 40,000 MPH CRASHES on the MOON

Move your mouse cursor from the player area and the progress/control bar will (should) disappear!

Classic telly FX tech: How the Tardis flew before the CGI era

Opening titles ...

There was no mention (unless I missed something) of those moving "clouds" in the opening titles. And that was just video feedback ... pointing a camera at a monitor that carried the camera output. Impressive improvisations!

Curiosity's new OS upgrade ready to go live

Re: Roads!

And a CANAL!!!

Booth babes banned by Chinese gaming expo

The Answer?

Playmobil, of course! Get to it, El Reg!

ROBOTS battle bunker-buster bank blast blaggers

Paper money?

Australian banknotes are plastic!

Time for Victoria to adapt, says Climate Commission

Nutters

And Tim Flannery, the chief of the commission, waned us that it was never going to rain again, that Melbourne would run out of water. Since then we've had major floods in Queensland. NSW and Victoria.

Oh ... Flannery also warned that teeth containing fillings should be removed from corpses before cremation to avoid a major pollution threat. Go figure!

The best April 1 gags … or were they?

One you missed ...

Richard Stallman To Launch His Own Fashion Line ... it appeared all over the place but a good example can be found at:

http://techlaze.com/2012/03/richard-stallman-to-launch-his-own-fashion-line/

Graphene photocells could mean hyper-speed internet

... is there anything it can't do?

It's not very good in pencils ...

Apple, Walmart, and you: Making money in mobile

Hmmm ...

What about the Asus Padfone?

Google muzzles political dissidents with YouTube ID tweaks

Happened some time ago ...

This happened, at least for GMail, some five or six weeks ago.

A while before that I experimented to see if an account could be created with no ID whatsoever. It could.

I then needed to check again (to try to get a handle on some "strange" e-mails) and things had changed. You still did not need to give another e-mail address for contact. Indeed. Google told you that you did not have to. But then, after negotiating the captcha, Google required a contact 'phone number for a recorded message or SMS giving a verification code. The reason given for this was that there had been "suspicious activity on your account."

Ad it still works that way.

How odd that there's no "suspicious activity" if you DO give and alternative address.

Google wants that contact information but cannot even be honest about the reason.

Wimbledon grunters turned down by viewers

They're missing the point!

The powers-that-be should be cracking down on the grunting instead of leaving it to people to reduce the annoyance factor.

Much of the grunting is designed to mask the sound of the ball hitting the racquet . The sound can give vital information to an opponent and masking it could be seen as a form of cheating!

So, how many rhinos does a tram weigh?

Unfortunate timing ...

A woman was struck and killed instantly by Melbourne tram on Thursday ...

Linguists use sounds to bypass Skype crypto

What???

Cunning linguists? But you're a vegan!

Fiat 500 TwinAir

Or maybe ...

... a Stig-a-trix??

Apple patent eyes Mac OS X tablet

Ah yes ...

... but Linux has virtual desktops ... Apple "invented" spaces!

Why US antitrust regulators should probe Google search

Can we have ...

... and evil Google icon, please?

Data-mining technique outs authors of anonymous email

Hmmmm ...

What's to stop somebody deliberately changing style? We could have a digital copy-and-paste return to those old blackmail notes that used cut-out newspaper headlines.

The anonymous writer could just copy a "suitable" phrase from one document and one from another and so on. Would that work?

Apple fanbois leak secrets of Mac OS X Lion

They missed one!

Will probably "brick" a significant number of Macs.

Microsoft discovers disposable email

Wildcards can be a problem ...

I'm not sure if what you're proposing is any different but I had a wildcard on xxx.com because so many people were using the US instead of the UK spelling for the domain.

Suddenly, I got hammered by several thousand messages a day. They were all "user not

known" messages from many and various networks. The spammers had used my domain in the From and Reply-to fields and was scattergunning with any and every username they could think of ... both to and from.

Goodbye wildcard!

Vulture falls asleep in front of Christmas TV

Well!

Well? Where are you? Still asleep?

You're winning the bloody Ashes!

There's no El Reg!

This is Christmas??

Skype goes titsup across globe

Skype crash!

Interesting ... I crawled out of bed this morning (Australian time) and found a message that Skype had encountered a problem and needed to close. Obviously, the client is affected in some way ...

Google data center links shot down by 'bored' riflemen

You had 9600?

You youngsters don't know you've been born ... I actually used (and still have somewhere) a 300 baud acoustic coupler ... now ... where's me zimmer ...

Yellow alert over Windows shortcut flaw

What next?

Windows for Warships? The mind boggles!

Consumer Reports: 'We were wrong about the iPhone 4'

Somebody had to say this ...

It's also like the FORCE ... it has a dark side and a light side and it holds the universe (and iPhones) together ...

Southpaws up in arms over iPhone 4

Time for Steve to get a grip himself I think??

I think the problem is that he's already doing that almost to the exclusion of anything else!

FarmVille moooves onto iPhone

I'm so sorry about that headline ...

I should think so, too! It's not fair to udders!

Apple's iOS 4 beams into unprepared world

A good counter

All those "my 'phone has been doing that years" comments are a useful counter to the hype every time Apple adds something that's been around for years but gives it a new name so it will appear they invented it.

And it's not just with the iPhone.. Remember "spaces" ... a crippled version of virtual desktops that Linux had for years?

And then "there's firewire" and "airport" ...

BTW, a neighbour of mine has never used WiFi because, "I never go near an airport!"

Google screws Scroogle

Evil Google

Another vote for an Evil Google icon!

Mystic Met closed Europe with computer model

Air/ground speed 101

"Fwiw, airspeed is *not* the same speed as you'd get from asking a GPS how fast you're moving, because airspeed factors in the influence of the wind as well. This is an important difference if you want the aircraft to stay in the air."

Errr ... no ... the figure derived from GPS is the groundspeed and THAT factors in the wind. The airspeed is the speed of the aircraft through the air ... it matters not if the air is moving.

Just a bit of pedantry ...

Draconian new electoral laws for South Australia?

They've backed down!

The South Australian government has backed down on this. The law is in effect but will not be enforced (they promise) and will be repealed immediately after the election (they promise).

RockYou hack reveals easy-to-crack passwords

ISP don't have a clue, either

The ISP I use here in Australia enforces a strong password policy ... and then stores the passwords in plain text.

The database is available to all employees, including the out-sourced "help" desk!

They insist that there's no security problem.

US gov Photoshops bin Laden wanted pic

Not a blonde

You can see what he REALLY looks like now at:

http://www.astor-theatre.com/images/gen/gtimage001.jpg

Apple sits on critical Mac bug for 7 months (and counting)

Conspiracy theory???

Aha! What this means is that Apple want to USE the vulnerability for CONTROL!!

Oz anti-censorship site is censored

Gotta stop them adults!

"Grrrrrr. I'd like to be treated as an independant adult, instead I'm assumed to be little more than a child."

You miss the point, AC. They ARE treating you as an independent adult. Remember that independent adults who might actually THINK are the last people they want to be allowed to access any information they consider undesirable!

BTW, can we have an evil Conroy icon, please?

Santa in Phones4U booze'n'fags logo 'shock'

Nice bit of culture!

Scroll down to the bottom of their home page at:

http://www.phones4u.co.uk/

'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC

Come on!

Who is going to be the first to welcome our new demonic soul-reaping, parallel globo-Nazi, hyperspherical juggernaut-dinosaur overlords?

Sony Ericsson confirms Android Xperia

Anyone remember the P900?

Oh yes ,,, and the P910i ... for both of them SE promised on-line upgrades but, for both of them, the "upgrade" site gave the message that the handset had the latest firmware. The problem is that it also did that with a colleague's handsets that had firmware with earlier version numbers.

I'm left with the feeling that upgrades were simply not available and am determined never to buy another SE 'phone.

Actually, given disastrous experiences with Sony's computer products in reliability terms ...

Welsh yobs clobbered by cross-dressing cage fighters

Well?

Isn't anybody going to welcome our new cross-dressing, cage-fighting Over ... err ... Thingies?

Sony pulls plug on cabled power

Huh??

So they can extend the range to 80 cm by using a relay unit ... what's wrong with a 1 metre cable?

NASA orbiter returns first shots of Apollo moon sites

AWESOME!

The conspiracy theorists can say what they will ... these are amazing pix.

Imagine having been on the Apollo 14 mission and being able to look at a photo taken from space of the "footpath" YOU made!!

Linux patch sidesteps Microsoft's TomTom patent

This is patent-worthy?

Run that past me again ... Microsoft has a patent for code needed to get around the limitations of its own ridiculous 8.3 filenames???

Police headcams burst into flames

assault and battery (groan)

Put him in a dry cell!