Is that a long e?

I think it should be pronounced more like pray or prey - as in Palm is praying this will work. Or in that the phone will be prey for whatever stupid cat codename Apple and their quietus bound or possibly post-existence reanimated spook CEO can come up with.

Halo for the resurrection.

You forgot

Free psychoanalytic therapy for us cross-pondians (ameritards) who either lack health insurance or whose health insurance frowns upon such mentally theraputic modalities even if the working environment that provides the insurance is also the impetus for the necessity of these treatments causing the employees to resort to amusing themselves with witty-banter from trans-pondian (brittards) reporters and moderators who must be doing something right as their workday always seems to end five hours earlier than ours as well as writing long winded run-on sentences in venting postings as our only output for our frustrations.

Happy pubbing.

IT? because I need an ODFO for my job.

Will it be available.....

...on iTunes?

IT? icon because I'm in an ODFO kind of mood.

Dian Fossey is at Long Bay jail?

I didn't realize gorillas were indigenous to Long Bay jail. On top of that I am highly OFFENDED (note caps) at these beautiful primates being described as "big, ugly, hairy strong men who've got faces only a mother could love that will pay a lot of attention to you - and your anatomy."

Best ad ever?

Am I the only person who thinks this ad is not the best ad ever? I couldn't tell you which one is, but it's certainly not this one. Most of my fellow Ameritards think of 1984 in terms of Footloose and Ghostbusters. In 1984, the climate was that of cold war and nationalism not of anti-establishment. And they played the ad during the superbowl. How many wankdribbles watching this ad had any idea who Orwell was. And IBM and computers? Are they serious? It's one of those smugtard ads where if you get it you can chuckle to yourself about how better than everyone else you are.

Maybe the US government can do an advertisement spoof on Grapes of Wrath where Hank Paulson plays the role of Rose of Sharon and feeds failing banks and automakers from his teat. huh huh *smug chuckle* isn't that so creative? *smug chuckle*

White computers.....

for white people?

I'm going for the fastest sodium bicarbonate lemon juice renewable energy powered speedboat......

I read this as he was attempting to break the land speed record in a wind powered vehicle, not he was attempting to break the wind powered vehicle land speed record......

While I applaud their effort at going faster than 116.7mph in a wind powered vehicle, it does not compare to going 763 mph and breaking the sound barrier.

But if what I'm reading about apparent wind is correct, maybe they can have a 763 mph car follow behind them with a giant turbofan blowing the Greenbird along?

I for one...

Vote that Vulture Central merchandising change the XXL size to 'merkin.

And for that matter where are the Sign o' the Times logoed merkins? I'd love an RTFM merkin.

Paris - cus I'd love to see a vulture on her..........nevermind.

Rental?

And what if I rent a server from a hosting company? Or rent a virtual server from a hosting company? Can I expect privacy of my data on this server even though the server belongs to someone else? Wouldn't that be like renting an apartment? A landlord has no right to enter an apartment without the tennants permission or a warrant except under certain circumstances (inspections, etc.). "Because the police/governemnt want to nose around" is not one of these circumstances.

Software development is like bulimia.

Many moons ago in a time when PCs were a status symbol for the pocket protector market, I was happily developing applications using C. Thin was in. Standard input, standard output. This was not enough to keep PC manufacturers and software vendors content. Everyone should have a computer. So they gobbled up additional code like pacman eating pellets and came up with robust GUIs. In order to stay current, I went on a bit of a binge myself. I started using Win APIs and Motif. The Victorian full hourglass figure was the style of the day. All the while, P.T. Barnum was sneakily building his three ring circus - Mosiac, Netscape, and Internet Explorer. Lightweight apps became easy. I needed to go on a diet. I was no longer allowed chili dogs. Like an addict I had the shakes in the switchover to tofu. But svelte was the new look and I was determined. A few HTML input boxes, a CGI backend and wow, we have e-commerce. But that wasn't good enough. Now that everyone was on the Internet, looking at porno and chatting with underage Asian girls, browsers had to load up on twinkies and toffee. How will Grandma be able to auction her dentures on E-Bay? What if she enters "three" instead of "3" in the starting price box. We can't possibly have two page loads in order to have input validation/bounds checking. So along came Javascript. Now Grandma gets flashing red asterisks telling her to FIX THAT INPUT. But that still wasn't enough. Pass the sausage. We can't match input to the backend without a page reload. So the fat kid ate his cake and added AJAX and DOM and now no one can tell the page is even reloading without a packet sniffer. I'll have a donut. Throw in a helping of web services, runtimes supporting RPC/RMI/SOAP/Flavor of the Week on the clients and we have one fat little piggy. I'm just waiting for this little piggy to stick its finger down its throat and upchuck all over the porcelain. Watch the industry trend back to thin. Lightweight so it can run on both mobile devices and on your big ol' 1KW dual graphics card tower of power. You can already see it with Microsoft slimming down/splintering the .NET runtimes, Java annotations reducing the time it takes to develop names queries/local and remote interfaces, etc. So either join Weight Watchers or load up on crisps but just make up your mind. The yo-yoing is bad for my health.

I'll get my coat. I'm off to get some lunch.

Mmmmmm.........yummy

Buckminster Fuller and stockings.......I feel like I'm in the middle of a geeky wet dream.

Paris, because I want her to play with my buckyballs.

Why am I not surprised?

"but Microsoft is still extremely pleased about having a new edition out within 24 to 36 months from the release of SQL Server 2005"

Of course it is! When you can charge everyone to purchase upgrades and EOL your previous versions why wouldn't you be thrilled to have a new edition out every 24 to 36 months?

It will make your select statements 5x faster.

iCahn Yahoo! uCahn 2!

Does anyone have a problem with putting faith in the future direction of a company that can't correctly count votes?

Where's Jim Henson and Count Von Count when you need them?

Aha!

"A group of Belgium [sic] tourists had to lick condensation off their minivan's windshield"

I was wondering where my favorite porn site obtained that latest video footage...............

An idea

They could force hime to diet and excercise and drop a few pounds before executing him. Or would that be considered cruel and unusual punishment?

Heart because making him excercise would lower his risk of heart disease and possibly help him live longer...oh wait nevermind.

@Gabor Laszlo

Would that include a guy in a black turtleneck going "I'm an iPhone. I'm not GPL. I was with Drew Barrymore" and another guy with scruffy curly hair who says "I'm a Neo. I'm GPL. I killed my mail-order bride."

Mine's the one with the Slackware CD in one pocket and the map to the body in the other.

(And yes I know it's not funny.)

Fine, I'll pay more for bigger clothing.....

But as a fatty....I demand that all of you twiggies pay more for the cost of the food that you eat. Because it is my lardity and overconsumption that brings down the per unit production costs of food.

Mine's the one that looks like a mainsail.

You may someday take away our right to bear arms......

But you will never take away our right to cheeseburger.

@BBC DBA

I'll take the job at the BBC just because they claim it takes more than 18 hours (or £450) to figure out an average and a range on a list of salaries.

Man, I could do that with pad and pencil in well under 18 hours.

I used to care.

Now I don't. As long as I can download some porn here and there, browse the intertubes, get my patches and updates, and maybe watch a streaming video here and there I don't care how it gets to me or what QOS flag it has. (Assuming I don't have a rate hike)

Man my job has made me jaded. Technophile to luddite. If only I had a cattle prod like the BOFH.

Hah, Stupid Terrists.

Everyone knows that those dark-skeeened non-merican terrists are too stupid to say they forgotted theys identifacashon. Theys aint even smrt enough to know thaff Jesus is teh one savior and Alah is a heethen.

What the fuck happened to my country? Proceed with the Yank flaming.

I'm a Mac!

"Oh, and it'll get Microsoft Exchange support too, in a bid to make Macs more business-friendly. "

*cough* Putting a tie on a t-shirt does not make it a suit. *cough*

But why is he wrong?

What's the problem with selling the company for a decent amount of cash before it continues to fester and deteriorate compared to the likes of Google, etc? The only reason the current CEO doesn't want to sell is that he can't admit they have lost to Google.

They have no plan for sustained growth, sell this bitch before she jumps the shark.

And they're going to prosecute this guy?

Being such a moron is punishment enough for this guy. Not like he's ever going to amount to anything.

Maybe the punishment should be forcing him to get an education.

I for one welcome this new technology.....

For when some goofball behind the machine laughs at my little todger, I can sue for millions and retire.

Thank you good ol' US of A.

Ooops forgot to check anonymous.

Paris cus she takes whatever she gets.

@SpitefulGOD

With the *ahem* size of some of the stars, you could tatto so many brands on a particular body part that it'd end up looking like NASCAR.

I heart all OSes (except the ones I have to buy the box with - That's you TI-99/4A)

@Rune Moberg & Pierre

From Experience:

On a Pentium 200MMX Running Slackware 7, MPEG-4 decoding performance was too slow to acceptably run a 640x480 video in realtime. (Couple of frames every 2-3 seconds)

Running Windows XP (you were able to run XP on that??!?!) it was also too slow to run in realtime. Although slower than the Linux install - (Maybe one or two frames every 8-10 seconds) it was still viewable (although not watchable).

And yes I said Slackware and yes I remember the static/ELF debacle and the 4/7 version numbering fracas. I just think the name Volkerding flows.

@Matt

<rant>

But then you wouldn't have all of these fabulous right out of the University developers creating entity classes irrespective of the DB. Then want to know why the DB is slow, why their Entity Manager is throwing an exception, why there are all these locking issues, key violations, why this worked faster in mySQL, what's an index, etc, etc.

Pray to the Oracle (tee hee) for the DB admin who needs to maintain a databse without knowledge of persistence APIs and how they interract with the database.

I could go on and on about this. Making classes relate to tables and relationships with annotations makes automatic code generation easy. Making code efficient and scalable? PAH!

</rant>

Interesting......

Now if someone wins a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal and was found to be on performance enhancers after the mandatory drug test can they be stripped of their medal? And if so will the medal be awarded to the runner up?

My urine may someday prove to be more valuable than pre-ingested coffee beans.

And how will I impress the misses now?

She used to think I was daring and Bond-like with an explosive device (mobile) strapped daily so close to my crotch. Will her love decrease proportionatly to the risk of loosing my precious bits?

Devil Jobs because I have to contact an Apple service technician in order to swap in these new batteries.

@Daniel B.

Please drop me a note when "Peter the Pimp and the Crack-Whore Orgy" comes out as it sounds like the type of game I'd have an interest in playing.

Paris, cus she'd look like an amateur compared to a real crack-whore.

You guys are missing the problem.....

with my country of origin and residence - the wildly wonderful USofA.

All of this overreaction is not a result of our moronic president's war on terror or the impending wiretap police state. It's a result of our woeful civil law system in which you can sue for being fed a hot battered piece of fried cod. (I personally enjoy a hot codpiece every now and again.) Personal responsibility does not exist on this side of the pond (although you easterners are not far behind.)

Take little Johnny and his shocker for example. If the police and school didn't prosecute little Johnny would probably go around shocking people until he shocks the wrong person. Then said wrong person goes home and whines to his parents. His parents happen to be lawyers who specialize in personal injury. They then proceed to sue three people - the boy who did the shocking, the school that refused to expel the shocker, and the police (or district attorney) who did not file charges against the shocker.

A university I once worked at was sued because a student climbed out his window and fell after an evening of binge drinking. They settled out of court.

AWE 32 GOLD in XP

I have an Awe 32 gold. Thought my soundfonts were awesome (What's MIDI?). Then I upgraded to Windows XP.

No audio. Why? They decided that no one wanted to use SPD/IF in XP. I could have sound, but only out of the analog jacks. I had a nice back and forth with them which ended at me screaming at a tech support guy who said ISA cards don't work in XP.

Granted, you eventually have to EOL a product, but the $20 drivers from 4Front Technologies for the same soundcard work fine under Linux 10 years after I initially purchased them.

Creative suffers from nocturnal emissions of the anal variety.

Do no evil?

While Verizon isn't the saintliest of companies, there is something perverse about a company raising its own bid even though nobody was bidding against them.

If you're doing it for open access, then fine. Bid $4.6 billion and stop. Don't chuckle at yourself with a line like " to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury."

So you inflated the bid for no reason other then to force Verizon to pay more, which in turn will show up as a higher cost to me if I chose to be a Verizon customer. That's less ethical than your average politican.

We need an icon....

called "Why Wiki?" for all the whiners who don't want to see Wikipedia on El Reg. And while we're at it can we get a Jimbo with horns?

You can't parade as a blogsite to dump your woman on, then switch to being an encyclopaedia, then revert to being a possibly inncurate hive kinda-sorta reference material whenever you feel like. It's this sort of wishy washy, can't make up our damn mind nonsense that makes me wish for Wikipedia's non-existence.

I don't want to wake up someday and have to encorporate the Wikipedia search into our corporate portal because some yuk-yuk named Jimbo has come up with enough whalesong to validate Wikipedia's place in the list of useful Web 2.0 utilities.

So please continue to bash Wikipedia and drum up as much bad publicity as possible.

Numbnuts

The fact that these numbnuts are scared that a Chinese company would acquire a US provider of intrusion detection is a good indication that governmental data security is a fantasy.

If you don't like who owns a company, replace your devices with another vendor. If this is not relatively easy, it's a red flag that your infrastucture is poorly designed.

I don't see them complaining about silicon components that are manufactured in China. Who's to say that they don't have secret built in Commie spy mechanisms? Who's to say that Al-Qaeida militants have not infiltrated one of Intel's overseas chip plants?

Where is McCarthy when you need him?

Anyone who thinks this purchase.....

relates to the Cell chip is kidding himself. After Toshiba makes an announcement that they are going to focus on their core business (NAND flash memory) you can bet that plant is going to be quickly retooled for the prouction of of high density memory.

Yeah, the Cells in the PS3 are nice (but I bet Sony has a sweetheart deal to get them from Toshiba at close to cost) but the real bread and butter is the future use of solid state storage.

Re: Does the UK do space?

Everyone knows the UK does space. Haven't you heard of Major Tom and Rocket Man?

It's translucent to me.......

that you probably don't want to wear a skirt while on this thing.

Dell.....well I guess they should be proud to get an EPEAT silver star.

http://www.epeat.net/ProductDisplay.aspx?action=view&search=true&productid=1215

So give the winner of a "green" contest a product that contains cadmium, mercury, lead, and chromium.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah....I'm trolling and almost all electronic equipment contain toxic materials. I'm just tired of "yoghurt-eating fruitcakes in hemp suits and sandals" talking about green and computing in the same breath. I'm tired of "Green is the new black." I'm tired of the environment being the latest cause for ne'er-do-bads. Almost every cause championed in the nineties has been largely forgotten as a result of the overused and melodramatic bleating of the sheep. I'd just like for once someone to say - "Hey, things aren't that terrible. Humanity has made it this far and will continue to make progress. Things are pretty good compared to pushing rocks on mastadons. If you want to, help out. If not, your inaction is NOT going to lead to the extinction of the species." No more doomsday.)

That is all.

Does anyone remember when bandwidth was priced based on its cost to telcos?

I agree with all of the arguments against throttling, shaping, unlimited with the small print, etc. False advertising and should be prosecuted. ISPs have f'ed things up by giving away everything for next to free and are now trying to stuff a genie back in a bottle.

But you can't have everything for nothing. Does anyone remember when bandwidth allotted was based a little bit more in line with the actual cost to the carriers? Before the giant race for who could provide fastest service for the least amount of money......

Now that they've opened up this can of worms with $30 a month unlimited 15/mbps down 1/mbps up (over here in the states anyway), Telcos can't go back to a reasonable pricing model. They expect each user to download one song a day via iTunes, and never download videos or watch youtube.

All this was a brilliant idea when the largest files people were downloading were animated GIFs or flash files. Now that content is so bandwidth intensive even my grandmother would hit some of these limits. Throw in Windows patch Tuesday and several computers per houshold and again, we're using more bandwidth than our $30 is covering in cost.

For less than $400 a year an ISP is supposed to deploy the network, maintain it, perform upgrades, employ a call center for the boobs who download trojans/spyware and blame it on the ISP as well as tech support any network aware application you have that doesn't work, provide you with endpoint hardware to integrate your house with their network, record everything so that when you download kiddie porn/read militant websites it can be provided to the government on a whim, run and secure email (and in some cases web servers) for you, and do everything else under the sun.

Even if you said take the total revenue and divide it by total costs I'd tell you forget it. I wouldn't want to run an ISP. It reminds me of the insurance companies here in the states that insure for natural disasters and than cry for a government bail out when a natural disaster actually occurs.

Not saying that everyone should pay $1500 a month for internet service, but the price point needs to be higher if people are going to expect a minimal amount of performance.

Oddly enough my cable company seems to have been able to keep up a minimal set of network performance - subsidizing its internet access by doubling it's television cost over a five year period.

Thumbs down because there is no good solution where everyone wins.

What is happening to El Reg?

A picture like that and not one comment on how well protected the violin is by those Bulgarian airbags.

I've got.....

A few dollars that I'd be willing to stuff in her underpants if she's that hard up.

Under duress of course.

Studies

Waste of tax dollars.

Has anyone ever done a solid study of the effectiveness of these adverts?

I don't disagree that education helps combat drunk driving, but do these reminder and/or shock ads really work?

I've never had a moment when drinking when I have remembered an anti-drinking advertisement other than one incident where a group of friends and I mocked the melodramatics of these advertisements.

"Huh huh, We're LOS 3RS"

Heh

The only thing I ever found on AFF was a load of people who wanted to charge me to watch webcam shows. Or access their website. Or enlarge my penis.

You find more action on craigslist. It's still not the hot horny nymphos these companies would like you to believe exist - It's the "massage" parlors and escort services of the world.

Everyone knows the real nymphos are out in the clubs looking for men who aren't wankers like myself.

(Should have posted anonymously - But it's ok because *I* never used any of these services personally. It was a friend. Or a friend of a friend. Or something.)

@Anonymous Coward: in re porno

Men in gay porn make way more then female porn stars.

And they make so much more than the average straight male porn star that my lifelong dream has gone from being a porn star to being a gay porn star.

One of the other possible names being -

E - I - E - I - O

or is that I - E - I - E - O

Wow

I do believe most of the houses that burned in California were not in neighboorhoods like Compton.

"Kari said an iPod was not at the top of her list of worries, but it was nice to get one.

“A lot of people were excited about it. It was nicer than the one I lost (in the fire),” she said. Kari said her twin sister, Kimi, also received one. "

It was nicer than the one I already had!?!?!?! I'm gonna start a charity to give Steve Jobs sandwiches. Sammies4Jobs.org. Why would you waste money giving iPods to people who have homeowners insurance and can probably buy their own iPod if needed.