Posts by Tim Brown 1

This seems like a good racket

I'd like to set up the .xxxxxx top level domain (twice as hard! - so registrations will cost twice as much obviously).

Can I just say...

... that I think Scarlett could do with upgrading her phone. The quality of those pictures is awful!

Has it occurred to anyone...

... that just maybe Google have decided they would like to enter the hardware business and that all this focus on Motorola's patent portfolio is a red herring?

I wonder if...

...Steve Jobs was listening to It's My Party when he heard the news...

It's my iPhone and I'll sue if I want to,

sue if I want to,

sue if I want to,

you would sue too if it happened to you

how about

hapless.gov.uk?

meanwhile...

maybe the real future on the Linux desktop is Android. As people get used to it on their phones, move up to it on tablets and netbooks, in a few years I can see it making big inroads on the desktop, especially when touch screen desktop machines become common and the keyboard/mouse gets relegated to text input.

The key is consistency and familiarity. Designers like to try mess around with stuff to justify their jobs, but there's a reason why even the newest automobiles still follow the same basic control design as the Model T. A steering wheel and pedals, simple and it works.

I gave up on 'free' a long time ago

'Free' like the word 'Unlimited' has been taken over by marketeers and has lost all meaning these days.

The word 'free' should be used when something is given freely, no payment expected, no strings attached. A two-year contract is a pretty big string and means that whoever is offering the deal has just hidden the cost of the 'free' thing in the amount you'll be paying them for the next two years.

These days I prefer to ignore all these promotions and make my choices based on what I like and think is the best deal, looking at all the costs involved.

It's a shame but

although the core Wordpress code is of a generally high standard, the same cannot be said of a lot of plugins. I've lost count of the number of plugins that have interesting functionality, but when I've checked the code (which I always do before running on a live site), many exhibit basic coding errors.

Am I the only one...

... that finds the juxtaposition of the last section in this story somewhat tasteless in a report about a man's death? This is not a "Darwin award" death, but an unfortunate accident to someone who was, by all accounts, a generous and kind person.

Sorry, El Reg, but for me you got the tone of this report wrong.

You'd think...

with all that money they'd have done a better job of covering their tracks!

by 2014...

I've be ready to move all my computing to Android I think :)

Seems like a daunting task...

until you remember that they are in space and therefore all this cargo is weightless :)

the right way forward

This is the future of the tablet for me, the current crop of purely handheld designs restricts their usefulness in my eyes. Having said that, it would be nice to see some standardisation emerge for the keyboard connection so that tablets and keyboards become interchangeable (yes, I know I'm probably dreaming). I can see a setup like this replacing my current laptop when the time comes.

As an aside, does anyone know if this tablet includes GPS?

Another journalist adds question mark to headline when answer is "no", shock

That is all.

Nonce

Number used Once - no really, that's what Wordpress say it is (despite the fact that they use their 'nonces' for a period of 24 hours)

Maybe someone should send them some old episodes of Porridge...

how are you supposed to hold a tablet PC?

Whenever I see these oversized smartphones I'm always left wondering, how do you hold it to use in a practical manner?

And if you aren't holding it but just put it on a desk, doesn't it slide around?

I blame the Beatles...

didn't they start Apple?

(oh wait, wrong lawsuit...)

baldness is not normally a disease

With a few exceptions baldness does not need a 'cure' since it is not a disease. It's simply a part of the natural evolution of the human body and humanity in general to be less 'hairy' Chimps -> us.

Outstayed its welcome

Top Gear should have been taken off the air about three years ago. It has long ceased to be any sort of proper motoring show and is now a poorly scripted attempt at a comedy in the fake documentary style.

I long ago ceased to be a regular viewer, but when I happen to catch the odd five minutes or so now, it makes me cringe.

a tip for anyone using cloud services

If you need your data to be secure, the only way you can be reasonably sure it's safe is to use strong encryption before the data leaves your machines and enters 'the cloud'.

Unecrypted data in the cloud is unsecured, simples.

problem is...

did they manage to write four hundred and eighty two pages on the subject????

More public money being wasted.

Flash... oh dear

Allowing Flash files inside PDFs was just fail in the first place.

And...

In a separate statement, another company working in this field - not Google obviously - said that it had updated the privacy training for its employees to make sure that if it ever did anything like that in the future, the public and authorities don't find out about it.

Oh if only...

...Acorn (the original 'A' in ARM) had had the marketing nous of Microsoft back in the day when the BBC Micro was the pinnacle of home computing, then we might all now have ARM processors in our desktop machines and be using RISC-OS!

French solution?

Here in France, Orange bundle web TV access with a standard broadband package. No idea how the economics work out but they actively promote the fact that if you get their broadband you can access more than 30 realtime TV channels via the net for no extra cost.

users won't change

The plain fact is most end-users will not bother to change because there simply isn't any benefit in them doing so at the present time, but there would be a fair bit of hassle.

I played around with IPv6 for a while last year to see what it's all about. However even if you manage to get all your existing hardware and software working with it, the net benefit to you is... zilch! Unless, that is, you can think of a reason why your toaster and fridge should have their own public IP address.

There's vague promises of better security, but for home users being behind an ipv4 NAT router is in itself a reasonable security measure.

Rebranding seems to be...

...something that companies do when they can't sort out/don't understand the underlying problems of their business.

Before we all get in a panic...

can someone tell me how the malecious DLL gets onto the machine in the first place? If it's the same old thing of 'opening an untrusted program' , 'clicking a link in an email' or 'visiting an dodgy website' then presumably all my existing precautions will continue to keep me (relatively) safe...

But...

If the MP had highlighted the fact that these pre-paid cards are targeted at the financially vulnerable who often cannot obtain a conventional credit or debit card and carry disproportionally high-fees, he might have had more of a case.

I guess...

getting your computers seized is a good test of whether or not your offsite backups are up to scratch!

But on what grounds...

did the police seize his computer in the first place?

He's old and he hadn't washed his mac in some time?

the iPad - a great toy for cats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9NP-AeKX40

nuff said.

following on from my own comment

Here's a fairly full pdf of the research, so it would seem that the ENF signal does remain substantially the same over large distances.

http://www.forensicav.ro/download/2006-05-23%20ENF%20AES%20Paris%20Grigoras_.pdf

(Note El Reg... you mis-spelled Dr GRIGORAS's name wrong by one letter in your article :) )