Posts by daniel

@Time the EC looked at ebay too

Sorry, the rest of Europe is not like this:

In France, any price selling to an end-user should indicate VAT-inclusive prices. If you display VAT exclusive prices you must clearly lable the prices "HT" (hors taxes - without tax), and you may not mix VAT inclusive and exclusive prices in a same pricelist.

This came about generally due to Dell ads aimed at the general public in the late 90's showing computers for sale about 20% cheaper than the competition with great A4 ads with 4 inch high prices and site 6 font small print informing the customer that the price was VAT exclusive at the bottom of the document - as the great unwashed could not reclaim that VAT, the ads were judged misleading.

How to get a mast up Everest

... About 4000 political priconers, half of them equipped with a couple of pounds of kit... the other half are used to pick up the dead who are carted off and used for spare transplant parts... and the survivors are marched off to install the next station on K2....

Why can't it "just work"...

First of all, having just reinstalled for a customer several Windows 2000 servers, I know that before installing any system updates, I have to update Windows Update several times, including a couple of reboots.... so if Windows update can be updated this way, why does MS need to force an upgrade? What would happen if this forced upgrade service got hacked and pushed a malware named 'Windows Update' to several million PC's?

On a similar note, I have also noted that on 2000/XP systems that Windows Update checks that all it's services (3 in total) are not only running, but set to automatic start, otherwise, even if manually started, you cannot update... so your PC's need to run needlessly 5 mb of code and data, 23.5 hours a day... This linked with other unneeded services for a home user (DNS [only works for an Active Directory network], Windows time [most firewalls block it], telephony [no use if you have an ethernet/wifi connection], distributed link [never seen it used]...) Can anyone say bloat?

Finally, when I repair a system,I do not expect the repair to break somthing... OK, several services and applications are going to get rolled back, especially if you repair an XP system with SP2 installed with it's original non-SP CD, but no-one thought of making the update client self repairing?

If updates are set, and with the number of PC's available (and the general technical knowledge - or lack of - with most users), I am surprised that MS cannot maintain a backward compatible service that would allow users to upgrade their updaters until finally being able to upgrade the system - even if it takes a week, between 4 updater upgrades (and associated reboots) and then finally a system and app upgrade...

And if I set the system not to upgrade at all, Not At All means what it says. It's my PC and my damn responsability. I own the hardware, I decide what code gets installed on it: Agreeing to a EULA is one thing, but not to signing a blank check (IE you agree to the EULA now, and this covers your agreement to currently installed code, but also code and functionnality that does not exist yet and that you do not know about).

@Kevin Johnston

"Truth to tell, how many people actually need more than Notepad and Calculator?"

Minesweeper! Don't forget Minesweeper! How can anyone work without Minesweeper...

Maybe also an Internet pr0n browser, but that is, after all is said and done, not an obligatory tool, but probably a close fourth.

It ain't on eBay no more...

Looks like it got pulled:

This listing (230173048291) has been removed or is no longer available. Please make sure you entered the right item number.

Been here already...

Did I not already mention via a comment on El Reg about the dreamliner that if it caught fire, it would shrink up faster than a burning tesco shopping bag, compressing all and everything inside to a hypercondensed hot mass that would transform itself into a black hole...

Car with driver?

I thought that James Bond worked for MI6 as a secret agent, not the bleeding foreign office as a visiting head of state!!!

Maybe the author mixed Century House and Buck House?

The next James Bond, with Prince Harry as Terminator in a Chauffeur driven Roller equipped with laser cannons shot from Spirit of Ecstasy's eyes, and getting calls from Q(e2) telling him to please pay attention...

@Tom Hawkins

This was just as an example of how small a polyvalent high-speed memory card/stick/chip/thumbdrive can be made... I believe that Sandisk also made some sort of rip-off design...

This was meant to illustrate that small cards can be made to fit into standard sockets that equip all PC's for the last 9 years odd, and that you do not need a big metal encapsulated slot/socket/plug to run USB, therefore a usb card slot could easily be built to accomodate this card format, and would not really need extra design or manufacturing to go into widescale production...

Good idea Sony, just bad prices and other business practices... Now, how to get the market to standardise on it!

Architect's instructions

Most architects should be rogered with a dead stiff cat, then... humm.... left to die by dehydration in a tape safe<ahem>comms cupboard<ahem>raised floor<ahem>cable duct....

Who needs a friggin' iphone

Development platform with well known tools and huge codebase, UMTS (sorry Apple), can connect to everything including the kitchen sink, tell you wheren you are, run winamp, videos...

Adding up the prices for PC, UMTS/Edge card, PDA, iPhone and GPS - and not forgetting that it's almost unbreakabke - it seems like a reasonable deal....

Ah well, back to the good old hydrocarbons

Unless the Greens want to make a wind-powered powerstation the size of... um, Scotland - oh, and prey that global warming does not resituate the doldrums there, otherwise their nice green touchy-feely-Applecorply generating station will be an ugly white elephant...

@Mike Richards

Amen Brother.

This is their *security*?

Their thumbdrive needs to install (tamperable) software on a computer to check if the key has been tampered with?

So if the code has been "played with", would it be possible to access data on a protected drive, but they know that software is tamperable, so they hide it...

Has no-one told sony that security by obscurity is not an option?

Does this security system also work when plugged into a Mac/linux/<insert non windows os here>

Sony have made all sorts of electronic wonders. would it be too difficult just to embed an AES module and do any and all processing on-chip?

It would keep the customers happy, and why would you need anything else?

@David Farrell

Because the Thalys to Amsterdam does not go through a 24 mile tunnel where somthing going "bang" could cause a lot of grief... Try getting a medivac chopper to a train accident mid-chunnel... plus the fact that firemen have a heathly fear of tunnels: they prefer to have fort knox security and not having to drive 12 miles *underground* to put out a fire, cut through wreckage and pull out corpses, then drive back...

halle-bloody-leuja

About frigging time!

Voltage depletion is a known phenomena, aka "memory effect" (which is not in reality somthing different): The battery can output (for example) 1.2 volts, and the power management system cries foul at 1 volt. This is ok, but as the battery ages, the battery voltage will drop from 1.2 to 0.9 in 5-10 minutes, then sustain 0.95 volts for the next hour... and this is within the power supply criteria for the device being powered.. but too late, beep beep, low batt and shutdown...

I remember playing with the batteries on my first luggable laptop (386 SX 16 with 2 mb of Ram and 40 mb hard disk...): After a full charge, the portable would die with a low-batt warning after 5-7 minutes, but I could run both filaments in a 50 watt H4 headlight bulb hard-wired into the battery terminals for a further 20 minutes before starting to noticably dim, then 50 minutes dim but usable light (for reading in my bedroom), and 20 more minutes as a red glowing filament before fully empying the battery. With foresight, I probably helped destroy battery this way (deep discharge is not a good idea), but it seemed a good idea at the time to fully discharge the cells - and after playing this game for a few cycles, I managed to get a 30-40 minutes of use out of the battery pack, as opposed to the 5-7 minutes runtime beforehand...

So, about time that someone made a decent battery sensor, and now all is missing is some decent power management software to go with it.

But what they are not telling us is...

How many sheep make a boffin?

How about getting coppers...

Off their ar$e and out on the beat - for me it would seem better that the government is telling the yobs that "you will now have a chance of getting caught" rather than "you have a chance to appear in black and white on candid camera", but this will not get much media coverage for Gordon "Babysham" Brown.

OK, so people will get happy slapped, and they will send their video by mms to their friends, and not upload it to youtube. Build a better moustrap, and better mice find their way through it...

How to castrate Acrobat reader?

Open reader, Go into options, disable warnings, auto updates, spash screen etc.

Close reader.

Go find the adobe reader program directory > Reader > plugins - move all files (leaving the folders, and any files named search* and ia32*) to a different directory.

Open a PDF in a second rather than 40 sec + update warnings et al.

So my DEC Rainbow 100...

with it's 10 meg hard drive does not come into consideration here ?

Already happened in France...

The Officer of Civil Status refused the name "Mégane" (which is a perfectly valid girl's first name in any French speaking country), due to the fact that the family name was Renault (or Renaud). This happened in the late 90's IIRC.

French law (and I guess Belgian law also) allows the state to refuse to register any name that could cause the child prejudice in the future...

Thank god that this is not in America, where the parents would have probably sued car maker - even if the car was one of the most sold cars on the market for the last 8 years...

The universe may not be infinte, but human stupidity probably is...

Cheers,

Daniel

Overlay ads..

I remember a French study a year or so ago that showed that overlay ads were the adverts that pissed off most the user, and that were declared the most intrusive form of advertising.

The number of ads of this sort that I see that cannot be closed because the javascript close method does not work on my particular brand/version/patchlevel of browser, or that you click on a link only to find that the overlay window has focus (though transparent for the moment), and you run the add rather than execute the requested instruction....

A major PITA...

Cheers,

Daniel

Re: By Morely Dotes

Please do not feed the troll

Re: Danger Still Present

Kiddofspeed.com is a great site (I bought the CD's on Chernobyl she makes), and an interesting insight into what happened at that time - she was lucky that her father had a geiger counter and knew when to bug out of town rather than listen to the politicians prattling on about how safe it was...

The main issue would be how was the radiation transmitted from mother to fetoeus, as this sort of contamination would be from transported and inhaled dust, and not from transdermal gamma irradiation...

It would be interesting to see how this compares with the French Chernobyl contamination, as in 1987, the authorities lied to the population, informing them that the fallout stopped at the border... ergo, anyone outside or on mountains got a healthy and wholesome dose of radioactive dust...

Who is pissing the money away?

59p a minute per call (all sums taken into account)... If BT charged these sort of rates, ofcom would cut their nut sack off (due to the general public firebombing ofcom offices).

If BT can make a profit, how come patientline cannot, despite a call cost per minute equivalent to calling God from the Vatican?

Then agan, thinking about it, the hospital has a captive audience for their services... and so that merits a finders fee... So, 80% goes to the hospital, 20% to ofcom, everyone gets a company-financed Audi A8...

Re: They go faster

Sorry John, you seem to have more experience in the matter than me...

Then again, mine were french sheep mesured in France, and adding gravity and curvature of the earth from wales to southern france, a 15% (more or less) speed decrease could be the explanation.

Then again, maybe the sheep were just playing hard to get at that time... oh, oops. I'll get my sheepskin coat :)

The phrase I heard was....

Trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat's ass at night...

After leaving you with that image in your minds, i'll get me coat...

re: <troll>Not IT</troll>

My gawd, can't some people thing about *not* reading the article?

Did Fraser think that this was an article on 45 nm processor technology?

New article for El Reg's hacks: (in)humane culling of the troll population, or the Good, The Bad and The Cattle Prod...

AMD to regain momentum in the graphics card market

You mean that ATI cannot outperform a i945? Not the last time I played Quake it didn't...

Ways and means...

You take your PC to a repair store, and describe the problem. OK. They should ask you (if you are nice to them) if you made a backup, and or/you request them to. By that, they are going to take a glimpse of (under windows) my documents, documents & settings (looking for the outlook / outlook express / thunderbird mailstores, address book & favorites), and have a cursory glance at the filesystem to see where else the user has hidden their files, especially as the system is probably going to get reformatted before being handed back to the customer.

Looking at the browser favorites is also a good trick of checking out the system health, as if it's filled with pr0n shortcuts, then there is a chance that the machine is contaminated with malware... (Oh, sorry, I did not know that you were into hamsters & duck tape, but I understand why you are getting a lot of wierd popup windows....)

On the other hand, running a potentially infested machine is not a good idea: Depending on what nasty was making the user bring the system in for repair may not be detectable / repairable from the user's OS (rootkit, infected system files...) - and that when operating, the nasties could be doing more evil on the system... oh, and certainly do not connect to your LAN, as then the system could be pumping spam or trying to infect the rest of your company while you are trying to find out WTF is happening...

Then suddenly...

God invented USB/IDE interface cables!

Take the drive out and connected to a diagnostic system, that can also be used to take a copy of all the users files off the system pending format & reinstall...

a) No customer software will be spying on you

b) No evilware can run

c) You have better access to the drives files (unless they encrypted their files...)

d) You can check the drive for errors & quick format before reinstalling...

e) While the format is running on your test system, you can do run memtes86 on their PC...

Re: Re: Fuss / interface

$200 for hardware.

$400 for pwetty bwuttons.

Hey, I'm a mac fanboy and I like being screwed over!

Interface? In ya face!