Posts by Steve Evans
2203 posts • joined Tuesday 17th April 2007 15:29 GMT
Page:
Ummm
But they use clubs on seal pups, not hammers...
Mines the white fur one with blood stains.
Hmmmm
Last time I dialled 999 in the UK, they asked me the address... Or has Canada gone all IVR now...
Press 1 for Police, 2 for Ambulance... I seem to remember a Simpsons sketch about this...
Eurovision is always amusing...
You can sum up the entire politics of Europe just by watching.
For example, Ireland and UK are generally nice to each other.
France will never give the UK any meaningful votes, and vice-versa.
All the ex-Russian states are so terrified of upsetting their big red neighbour, they always give it lots of votes, even if the song is purely the sound of a Yak breaking wind process by a Vocoder. At the rate Russia is crumbling round the edges, there will soon be so many ex-Russian states that Russia will win every year!
There is of course one remaining question... How exactly does Israel qualify as being in Europe?
Posted in How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour
Hehe...
Not as much fun as my method... For years I've been destroying old hard drives for work... I used to take them apart and use the platters to make wind chimes. Given that most drives stripe data across multiple platters, once they're removed from the spindles and strung together (also involved having some small holes drilled in them), you'd really be hard pushed to get any sense out of them.
However, recently I had a big batch of them which the boss insisted I destroyed completely without any chance of data being recovered, he even asked for proof... Easy... Line the drives up and slice them in half (case and all) with an oxyacetylene cutting torch. Much fun... I took half a drive back to the office and asked if he'd like me to plug it in!
I'll admit thermite would be more spectacular, but with a torch you can be far more creative... I'll see what I can do...
The icon, well come one, it's gotta be hasn't it!
This act is rather concerning...
I, and I'm sure many of you out there in techie land, have files that are encrypted lurking on your harddrive, which we do not have the key too... Many items of software, especially shareware, send you a licence key file which you have to either copy into a specific directory.
So how exactly do the feds determine which files are encrypted and known by you, and which are nothing to do with you really, and you don't have any idea what the key is?
The stupid thing is if you really want to encrypt and hide things, there are many encryption tools available (truecrypt for example) which can create an encrypted volume with multiple keys, which means you can conform to the law and provide the cops with a key, which will open the volume. What they don't realise is there is another key, which will open another volume from the same file where you can hide whatever you like. From the encrypted volume file it is impossible to tell if it contains only the one encrypted collection of files, or if there is a second one hidden in there too.
Posted in Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook
Awwww
That's techy pr0n and no mistake!
Funny how everyone is snotty about "only" 60Gb of storage, only a couple of years ago that would have been generous on a laptop!
I would love on, but at the moment my trusty R52 is working fine, so I can't justify it... The X300 just makes me all misty eyed over what is bound to come in a year or two when it does get to upgrade time... *drool*
Only thing I would complain about is the screen. The reviewer seems to think having a widescreen is a plus point... To me they're annoying. I have 1400x1050 of real estate here on the R52, and I like having 1050 vertical. To me laptop with widescreens feel like I'm operating it from inside a post box.
20 a minute?
Wow, I'm impressed by the capacity of his pipe!
It's the one with the Ben Dover film Co logo on the back.
Posted in No-fly list grounds US Air Marshals
Isn't it amazing...
...that in this day and age, they are still matching people on name only.
Given that it isn't hard to get a fake ID, and therefore a passport, matching on someone's name is pointless to put it mildly. Come to think of it, changing your name by legal methods would probably fox them completely anyway.
Result, the list is pointless.
Needless to say, as I possess a pretty common name, I don't intend on going anywhere near the US of A.
You're
...Back from the pub a tad early today... Or are they wifi enabled?
@Ishkandar
Does it matter if you change the value by looking at it? At least you know the original value, so you can look at the other side and change it back.
@Lee Sexton, just because something has been developed longer, it doesn't mean it will be cheaper. Mr Rolls and Mr Royce have been making cars longer than Mr Lada....
Ahhh...
Of course, silly me... Thanks for pointing that out Mr Vaz, computer games and movies are the cause of all violence in society...
The crusades and Jack the Ripper were caused by a particularly violent Punch and Judy act.
Tw*t.
Mr Vaz, the problem is that some people in society have no respect for others. These people have always existed. Maybe if your government hadn't made parents punishing their children for being bad a legal tightrope, the little oiks might have learnt a little respect early on in life.
@AC
There's something very important you need to know about mobiles in the UK.
First we have things called NIMBYs, these are moaning characters (usually retired - Think Victor Meldew, assuming you know who he is). They complain that the view from their telescope over the trees at the back have been blighted by an ugly phone mast.
Interestingly they're also the first to complain about lack of signal on their mobile phone.
Personally I'd be more impressed to see some phone coverage provided in the underground, it's damn annoying getting messages delivered 2 hours late (the retry period on some networks seems to be based on geological time) just because you happened to be stuck in a packed tube carriage when someone tried to send it to you... Then again, ringing phones could get annoying... How about just have SMS work?
Annoying...
There is a simple solution to most of this.
Most botnets are used to send spam, the zombied machine connects to whichever server is the MX for a domain, and pretends to be another email server relaying a message for one of it's users.
So by default ISP's should restrict connection to SMTP servers so end user machines cannot connect to any SMTP servers apart from the ones owned by the ISP.
Your run of the mill AOL,Tiscali,BT customer uses the email address that came with the ISP, so they'd be fine. The rest probably use web based systems like gmail/hotmail etc.
The more techy savvy of us, who lets face it aren't really the big risk when it comes to ending up on a botnet, would of course have some kind of web interface on the ISP so we can permit other SMTP servers, or open it up for all. Please note web interface, not a call centre in India! (Done that once this week already thanks!)
It's not as if it's a hard thing to spot from an ISP level. They spend so much cash and technology mangling P2P, it wouldn't take 10 minutes to spot zombie behaviour, nobody normal initiates over a thousand SMTP connection in a day for starters. That would be enough to pass on their details to the sales team and send them an internet security package, or at least some advice on protection!
Posted in Skype comes to mobile (almost)
@Ash
Worse than that... WiFi capable handsets like the N95 from Orange/Vodafone etc, are crippled at source so apps like Fring can't do voip over WiFi and it has to go over GPRS, which is definitely not something to try when you're roaming!
Unless you happen to change your handset model number to a generic Nokia one, and then flash the handset with a new firmware release... All theory of course... *cough* would never do it *cough* it didn't really work like a charm and save my bacon in a shopping centre in Eastern Europe... *cough*
Posted in Asus Eee PC 900 Linux Edition
@David Benoit
The speakers are now under the keyboard.
And the reason the keyboard doesn't flex in the middle is because the keyboard's metal backplate is sitting on the top of the 3 big chips and acting as their heatsink! So no cold fingers on a winter night with this little baby!
Ummmm....
"The most vulnerable city in the US, according to the study, is New Orleans"
Is there anything of New Orleans left to destroy? last time I checked the worlds richest nation had made bugger all progress in clearing up the flood damage.
Posted in eBay slams UK.gov touting ban
Nanny state strikes again...
Don't HM Gov have anything better to do? You know, like selling us further down the river to the US of Europe?
If I buy a couple of tickets for one of these premium events and then find I'm unable to go, why the hell should I be prevented from selling a ticket I cannot use on ebay?
I guess eBay should be able to set a max bid on a ticket, so a ticket cannot be sold above face value, or maybe face value plus 5% to cover the eBay commission. That sounds like a nice middle ground solution to me, although we all know what eBay are like at policing listings. I've lost count how many listings I have reported that have "BMW not Audi not VW not Merc not Ford" in their title. I could give them a regular expression to spot these if I could find someone willing to listen!
As someone else has already mentioned, e-touting is pretty new. I'm sure all the touts can remember how to do it the traditional way in a big coat with large pockets outside the venue. "Pssst, 'ere gov, do you need a ticket?"
If they really want to stop this, surely the thing to do is stop the ticket agents selling 200 tickets to one person in the first place!
@Lazy Gun
Yes and no...
I own two Honda motorcycles, and now it's getting to that time of year again, I know I can toss a coin, pick either once, and start it with ease even after an extended winter holiday.
I also drive an 11 year old German car (BMW) with over 150,000 miles on the clock, which has cost me less than £500 in parts during the last 3 years, a big chunk of that would be the headlamp and radiator that the boulder throwing motorway gritter took out for me last winter. Apart from that it's just been brake pads, filters, oil and a couple of hours of my time servicing it myself. I can't fault it.
I defy their GPS...
... to let me drive into a railway station car park and not explode!
Ha.
More than likely HM Gov just wanted a copy of the source code that's 10,000 times faster than the version they have.
I bet next time he'll send the PC + phone via DHL a week in advance!
Given the physical size of MicroSD cards these days, you could smuggle who knows how much "restricted" material on something you could hide in your ear!
Posted in The iPhone learns to read
Not the first time an Apple device does handwriting recognition...
Hope it's better than their earlier attempt... Cue one of my favourite jokes...
Q) How many Apple Newton owners does it take to change a light bulb?
A) Faux! Their to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
Sorry, it's the one with the Motorola 8500 in the pocket.
Agreed...
"Little attempt is made to verify the authenticity of the passwords"
Enough said...
I'd have given them something that looked like a password for a freebie too.
Hell I've had fake business cards, with fake phone numbers in the past to get freebies at shows and to fob off pushy salesmen!
Must get some more printed...
Posted in Monroe BJ film - world exclusive still
Blimee...
You've started early this week, it's nowhere near Friday yet!
Posted in Nokia admits DVB-H still not taking off
Just because you can...
Doesn't mean you should!
Make an N95 with a better camera flash, and a better GPS chipset (i.e. one that locks on in under 2 minutes!) and I'll be a happy man.
Oh, and recompile the old carddeck games so they run on S60 rev 3! I'm sure you'll find more calls for that on various blogs than you will for "I wanna watch tele!".
I love that phrase...
"A small proportion..."
Whenever I see that, I read "99.9%"
Can we have a show of hands? How about an El Reg vote?
Oh dear...
Another gutsy little CPU and nice device dragged to a screaming halt by a huge bloated OS.
You only have to look at the Eee to see what you can do with a nice light OS, for a fraction of the price. No hard drive required!
Now if only the made an Eee phone....
But does it...
Automatically adjust the truss rod to keep the action nice and low, but avoid buzzing the frets?
Mine the one with the Ibanez logo on the back
Pah!
Call that rare?
I'll happily eat some beans and sell them to you for £100 per 100g... But you'll have to fish them out from the U-bend yourself!
Posted in O2 PR calls Reg readers 'techie nerds'
I suspect...
... that O2 only have two classes of customer...
1) Techie nerds (us lot)
2) Gullible Joe Public
Needless to say they don't like us, because we're the ones that poke holes in their contracts, question their adverts and report them to the ASA.
Posted in Ofcom slaps Beeb for Live Earth swearing
Missed opportunity there...
"The BBC said in reply it had "taken note" of Ofcom's findings"
Anyone with a sense of humour would have told them to "fuck off!"
Sorry, mines the one with the feed the world patch on the back.
Hardly a shock...
...given that Tiscali's network is barely capable of handling the traffic they currently have.
And their technical support can barely handle the levels of lying and misinformation required to fob off people reporting problems.
Haha, I'm not scared...
I keep my passport under my tin-foil hat!
@Sceptical Bastard
Let's face it, have you ever seen any sign of a Govn dept, or their advisers, that had the faintest clue about anything IT related?
Every time they open their mouths and say something about IT related stuff it's a laugh a minute. It's like trying to bluff that you speak fluent Polish to your plumber... He's gonna spot you're full of sh*t the moment you open your mouth.
@AC
"Wasn't Zune the I-pod "Killer" and I'm sure we've have other iphone "killer" statements on here in the past.. its all getting rather tedious."
There's a difference... Microsoft weren't an mp3 player manufacturer.
Nokia *ARE* a phone manufacturer.
So they know a thing or two about the global communications game.
In contrast Apple were a computer/mp3 player manufacturer who tried to make a phone, and although they made a lovely user interface (which they know all about), they kinda missed the target on the phone side of things (especially compared to what non-US customers are used to). Price too steap, Camera too cheap, MMS functionality missing etc etc. You only have to look at the sales figures to see that.
Errr...
I'm really not sure what to make of this...
I think it must be good news, as Tiscali's service just couldn't get any worse!
@Will
The only problem with that is sometimes it's impossible to know who to ask!
Someone who's not got the brains to configure wep/wpa isn't going to manage to change the SSID from the default "Netgear".
Plus even if they did, would you put your address on as the SSID, which might attract someone with a van and a habit of long term borrowing of equipment in the middle of the night?
Given that most routers supplied by ISPs, Sky, BT etc, are all WEPed up when they arrive, I would argue that an open wifi point has been deliberately left open as a service to the community.
Posted in Microsoft denies Lite-On Blu-ray rumour
Ummm..
Actually El Reg, Microsoft have not denied they are working with Lite-on to develop a BR drive for the xBox.
They have denied that Lite-on are manufacturing Blu-ray drives for the xBox. Note present tense.
They didn't say Lite-on weren't developing, nor that Lite-on would be making them in the future, just that they weren't at the time you ask (possibly because it was night in Taiwan and they'd all gone home).
Posted in Women overtaking men in tech abuse
@A Gould
"440BX?"
I think you could be right...
Ah, the good old ISA slot...
</sepia tint>
Posted in Jules Verne gets intimate with ISS
Oh yuck!
Look at that font... 8x8 pixel char grid all in caps...
Where's the truetype fonts with anti-aliasing, I thought the USA was supposed to be advanced?!
It's the big white one with the jetpack on the back.
I thought...
...the BBC had already given them a home, last week's Watchdog had a BBC Micro used several times during their seg on fake websites!
Nokia stalled...
I agree, stick with the old N95...
Nokia seem to have had a technological stall, and replaced it with an Appleesk urge to make things look pretty.
I have the original N95. My boss has the N95 8gig. Okay, the 8g has a bigger screen, which is nice, but the buttons have been squashed up to the point that they are hard to use, and the removal of the microSD slot (cos we all know it's just been used inside for the 8gig) is a serious pain in my book. I'm always swapping the cards on my N95.
The N96 doesn't seem to add anything of any use... TV? Errr, right.. Great. How about a better GPS chipset and a real flash on the camera?
@Elmer Phud
I'm getting a bit immune to the picture too...
I find my eyes no longer drawn to the naked flesh, but to the incorrect shadows of the photoshop job that placed the Eee in the picture in the first place!
Maybe someone could photoshop it into the more substantial cleavage you suggested :-D
Hmmm... Well it is Friday afternoon... I wonder...
Posted in El Reg reconstructs Heathrow T5 chaos
@MikeC
What excuse do you need? It's Friday, and they obviously got out of the pub early!
Hang on, what am I saying... I mean... It's Friday, and they obviously took a lappy to their wifi enabled public house!
Posted in OpenOffice update released
@Ashe
If you think that's bad, try to find a UK-EN version of windows... Any version!
All I've noticed so far is they try to avoid words that we spell differently to those in that big colony.
Win2k's Network neighborhood -> XP My network places
However if you poke about, you still find 'merkin spelling...
Display properties, settings, still has "Color" in XP.
No idea about Vista, don't have it, don't need it, don't want it!
I've literally just...
I've literally just had a good bitch at one of my colleagues in a source comment, and you know what, it's staying there!
If he'd consulted me on his proposed modification to the database structure before implementing it, I wouldn't be here with a single SQL query containing 3 derived tables and 7 joins! I've spent an hour trying to find a misplaced bracket! Grrrr!
To be honest I hope he pulls the source off the SVN and reads it!
Youch...
Everyone to their BIOS!
Enable BIOS password: YES
Allow boot from USB: NO
And then stick a chain round the box to stop anyone doing a BIOS reset!
Posted in Ofcom hits green on in-flight calling
Sounds like hell to me...
Only the other day I had the pleasure of sitting in a train with someone who was obviously designed at birth to be an annoying tw*t...
First he received at least 6 calls before we had even left the station, and had the worlds loudest, most annoying ringtone. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd kept the phone to hand after the first call, but no, he buried in a pocket so we all got 15 seconds of his chosen "tune" each time...
Eventually we set off, and the calls stopped... Only for him to decide to use his phone as a mobile hifi unit and start playing some gangster rap through the tinny speaker!
Oh, and then he started to "sing" along with it!
I was half tempted to dig into the mp3 collection on my N95 and start singing Grace Kelly by Mika, cos I could really destroy that song, and I'm sure the 2 speakers on the N95 would have completely drowned out his crappy thing... But I resisted on the grounds that anyone singing gangster rap was probably "tooled-up".
Oh, did I mention this carriage on the C2C train was a designated "silent" one?
Thank God it was only a 20 minute journey for me, I don't even want to try to imagine what it would be like on a long flight... However at least one flight you can find a representative of the airline (easy to spot, they're usually trying to sell you scratch cards), who you can inform of you plan to murder a fellow passenger!
Posted in Blu-ray 'to bloom', now HD DVD's dead
@phix8
That's easy... Plenty of 1TB hard drives out there these days :-D
OMG...
It could only happen in America couldn't it!
I assume a Black & Decker was too complicated for him to operate?
Posted in Transgender man prepares to give birth
Sometimes...
I really really dislike having a very visual imagination!
Steve Jobs? Well some on, it's a bald head that looks like it's about to enter or exit a hole!
