* Posts by Mostly_Harmless

147 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Sep 2011

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Cold, dead hands of Steve Jobs slip from iPhones: The Cult of Ive is upon us

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Re: Honestly...

Very nicely and rationally put, and coming from someone in the Windows camp.

Eadon please take note

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Angel

RNIB

" I believe the RNIB still recommend the iPhone"

It's the Jesus phone. It can make the blind see and the lame walk!

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FAIL

Re: Put an iPhone beside a...

"exactly that - the shift key (an upwards pointing arrow) is filled in instead of outlined"

that is a truly terrible bit of user interface design

Forget phones, PRISM plan shows internet firms give NSA everything

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WTF?

surprise

Is the surprise that it happened, or is the surprise that people are surprised that it happened?

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Happy

Re: Echelon?

Remember it, and also remember the excellent Mark Thomas episode about it

Review: Acer Aspire P3 Windows 8 slate

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Meh

Looks quite nice, but I'm not sure if I'd feel drawn to one of these enough to feel ready to shell out 600 notes for just the i3 version.

Also, I'm yet to be convinced about Acer's build quality....

Albert Einstein brings cheese and clean pyjamas to space station

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Boffin

<20 tonnes

I suspect that tonne-age includes the ATV itself, so not strictly true to say that the crew are consuming 20 tonnes of consumables per year

MYSTERY Nokia image-mangling mobe spotted in public

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WTF?

EOS

The EOS name intrigues me a bit, given that Canon use that moniker for their system of SLR cameras, lenses, etc. I haven't heard anything about Canon being involved in the development of this, and even if they had using the same name would seem to conflict with their EOS camera system

Mind control hat makes quadcopter do what brain says

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Coat

I'll drink to that

Is "Brain Controlled Arms" the name of a pub for neuroscientists?

Doctor Who? 12th incarnation sought after Matt Smith quits

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His Fry-ness?

Has anyone suggested Stephen Fry yet? He seems to get all over the place, and I think he could play this with a certain degree of excentricity without over-the-top lunacy.

BOFH: Go on, beancounter, type DROP TABLE asset;

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Happy

phrase of the day

"dropping tables like a epileptic removals man"

I like it :-)

Kettle 'which looks like HITLER' brews up sturm in a teacup

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Coat

Eadon

You could have a point there

NON-ANDROID WATER-HEATING NAZI DOPPLEGANGER FAIL

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Coat

from a story yesterday...

"In one reported case, a York mosque successfully quelled an EDL protest with tea, biscuits and football"

Wonder if they were using one of these kettles?

Soyuz brings new crew to International Space Station

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@The First Dave

"what we know as fire can be achieved with many other combinations of elements"

such as...?

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Re: WHY?

"WHY would you want to take an Olympic Torch on a spacewalk?"

I hope it's not because the torch has sponsors' logos all over it...although I wouldn't put it past a lot of companies to pull this sort of publicity stunt

'Secret Pentagon papers' show China hacked into Patriot missile system

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Holmes

hacking required

At least in this case China had to do some hacking to get this information In the past, our enemy states know about western weaponry because we've sold it to them (best example I guess being the military hardware that was routed to the Afghans back when they were the good guys because they weren't commie Soviets).

I'm reminded of a line from Drop The Dead Donkey during the 1990/91 Gulf War - when an MoD official said that assessments of Iraqi military hardware didn't come from intelligence reports; "we just looked at copies of the invoices"

Tennis pro serves up pic of bad French Open line call

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Re: Line orientation

"as long as if it touches the line, it's good"

Indeed....as the great Mr McEnroe once put it "Chalk dust! EVERYONE could see there was CHALK DUST!!"

Happy 23rd birthday, Windows 3.0

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Happy

Thanks for the memory

I remember going to see a colleague who was the first in our office to have Windows 3 installed.

To this day I remember the gasps of amazement as he booted his machine and it counted through 5 (yes! 5!!!) whole megabytes of RAM before loading Windows.

LOHAN is GO! Reg spaceplane BLASTS OFF on 14 September

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Thumb Up

Excellent news

Good luck with the preaparations

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

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Headmaster

it's Gif I tell you

When I select File->Open in my copy of PaintShop Pro, it offers me a variety of file formats, including...

CompuServe Graphics Interchane (.gif)

JPEG - JFIF Compliant (*.jpg, *.jif, *.jpeg)

...so I'd take that as meaning JIF is a different type of file format to a GIF.

Also Graphics (that being what the G stands for" is pronounced as a hard G, and not as a j)

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

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Happy

good to be able to look on this so light-heartedly

As a child of the 70s/80s I remember when the idea of nuclear obliteration was more of an "when" than an "if". Good to have come out of the other side and be able to look at things like this and have a few light-hearted comments.

Soylent Corporation prepares to DEFEAT FOOD

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Coat

How do they describe the taste experience?

If they use the phrase "it's got a lot of body to it", I want out

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

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WTF?

am I reading that right?

"only 22 per cent is converted by the food industry into feed"

So that means that 22% of animals are fed back to their fellow species?

The iWatch is coming! The iWatch is coming!

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Coat

face off

At least we know what the watch face *won't" look like... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12/apple_payout_swiss_railways/

Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

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Mushroom

"bit windy today"

A relentless diet of greens and life in a space-suit don't sound like a happy combination.

Builder-in-a-hole outrage sparks Special Projects Bureau safety probe

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Unhappy

Re: Killjoy statistician Nazi here

Fair comment, but relatively speaking how much opportunity is there for a UK worker to get killed on the job nowadays? So many of the potentially fatal occupations (factory work, mining, etc.) are a bit thin on the ground and the working population are largely deskbound ....last I heard, nobody's even been RSI-ed to death

IT'S ALIVE: Groupon stock up, spreadsheets still soaked in red

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Re: How do they manage to make a loss?

hardware and infrastructure costs....connectivity and bandwidth costs...website/software development and maintenance costs...systems administration costs...administration costs...fees to credit card companies...fees to specialist testers to ensure security and integrity...etc....etc...etc...

BSkyB seeks 100s of Geordies to deal with broadband customer growth

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Pint

good luck to them

Having spent the last week trying to get a problem with my parents' Sky broadband fixed, I hope any new recruits are better than the absolute shower of s**t I've had to deal with thus far.

Even if they man the phones while off their faces on Newkie Broon, they can't do a worse job than the muppets who have been taking me round in frustrating circles over the last few days.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: OOPS!

"the answer as it turns out was a jet engine type roar and eight foot flames coming from the top of the tree"

I would have bought tickets for that

Facebook: Yeah, we'll ban chainsaw beheading vids - when journos call us

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WTF?

I fail to understand

In what way is a video of someone being beheaded with a chainsaw not "depicting harm to someone"?

Fried-egg sarnies kick off Reg man's quid-a-day nosh challenge

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Thumb Up

Good luck with this

COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO: NASA rovers scrawl giant willy on Mars

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I heard a rumour that there's a hidden message behind this, but I think it's a phallusy

Sord drawn: The story of the M5 micro

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Boffin

Re: 4KB RAM ?

"Stingy" - yes, when machines with 16K, 32K or 48K were relatively common, but...

"the machine had been on sale in Japan for less than a month but had already notched up a software library of 60-odd applications and games"....

Back then we could be genuinely creative with such "stingy" amounts of resource. A lot of developers these days would probably struggle to achieve much more than a simple "Hello World" if restricted to comparable resources.

Kids these days...don't know they're born....etc...etc...

Moist iPhone fanbois tempted with golden Apple shower offer

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Coat

RE: unique to iPhones?

Seeing as Apple haven't threatened to sue anyone over it, I think it's safe to assume it's iPhone only.

German court says nein to Apple's slide-to-unlock patent

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It shouldn't be patentable....

...at all, because it's a stupid idea to try and patent something like that

...by Apple because I had that feature on my old Symbian-based Nokia

'Pong' ported to 29-storey skyscraper 'screen'

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Re: Tower block tetris

"Tower block tetris, from 13 years ago http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/718009.stm, also mentions one from 1995."

That's the first thing that came to my mind...and I think it looks better than the one in the video here

BSkyB punters drown in MASSIVE MYSTERY Yahoo! mail! migration!

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FAIL

Not without warning

The article says this happened without warning, but it's certainly something I was aware of. My folks are Sky BB customers and when I went round to visit in late February, my Mum showed me a copy of an email from Sky about this, followed by the "you're the IT expert...what are we supposed to do about this then?"

My answer was, of course, follow the instructions in the email, then sit back and expect a complete fiasco like the one you experienced when they ported email services over to Google a few years ago.

RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'

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Re: Make of it what you will

"Presumably the problem is that most medals of merit tend to be tied into medals of bravery - because meritorious military service traditionally means you did something brave/stupid in the face of adversity."

Not strictly true - there are medals such as the Meritorious Service Medal (and even the LSGC medal) but you could argue that those are awarded for not doing something bad, as opposed to doing something especially good. Stick with it, get your full 20-odd years in, don;t go AWOL, don't start any fights in the NAAFI, don't pass secret information to Wikileaks, etc. etc.

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Re: Make of it what you will

"Front line pilots are also annoyed that Reaper pilots have been getting awards for bravery whole being able to go home to dinner each day. Make of that what you will."

Gongs for bravery shouldn't apply IMHO. I've nothing against gongs for RC pilots who do something of special significance, but to give them a "bravery" award cheapens the whole thing for those who are genuinely risking life and limb. If no such suitable award exists already, then create a specific medal for RC pilots, for whom the biggest physical risk is no more than DVT or piles.

I have nothing against what these guys (and gals, presumably) are doing, but I think it's wrong to bracket them too closely to the physical front-line troops

Model S selling better than expected, says Tesla

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Boffin

Leccy? No!!

Nothing personal against Tesla Motors themselves, but personally I'd like to see the electric car concept flounder - even fail - to a sufficient degree for people to realise that that electric vehicles aren't the super green bundles of tree-huggery that they're made out to be.

While electric vehicles can claim to be zero emissions at point of use, they still require the electricity which fuels them to come from meaning that there is more-than-likely emission and use of non-renewable fuel at some stage in the chain.

Then people might start to look at other, cleaner platforms, such as fuel cell technology, which doesn't seem to be getting the focus it deserves

Plucky Swede glides spaceplane to Earth from edge of stratosphere

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Coat

@Lester Re: T-shirt

"a short production run"

Would that be a production run of a limited quantity, or production run of apparel aimed exclusively at Geordies?

<--<--<-- icon used in an ironic way, as everyone knows Geordies don't wear coats

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

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Thumb Up

Excellent

Great idea - I really hope this gets somewhere and doesn't get throttled by the nuke nay-sayers.

..and that salt plug/valve is genius in its simplicity

Curiosity succeeds – Mars was wet enough for life!

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Boffin

water-rounded stones

The article mentions stones which appear to have been rounded by water flowing over/around them. How can we be sure that they were rounded by water? I would have thought that there are many liquids which contain hydrogen and oxygen (and/or the other elements that Curiosity found evidence of) which would have a similar eroding effect.

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

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FAIL

EDLIN

Years ago I worked with someone who eschewed the code editor built into our database development platform (a perfectly reasonable, for the time, full file text editor) in favour of EDLIN (on DOS 5 - yes I really am that old).

We all thought they were a bit odd....ended up a a project manager, as it happens.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Seattle drinking den bans Google Glass geeks

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Alert

@ Lars G - Re: Or... more likely ...

"This is just the beginning, how long before a public lynching?"

I recall reading an article a while ago about someone who had been working on a GG type device for years (pre-dating GG). He went into a McDonalds in Paris, was asked to remove them and was then assaulted by a member of staff.

Bacon sarnies can kill: Official

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Coat

Re: Why is bacon "processed"?

"reformed pork"

Don't be harsh on the poor little piggie...if he's reformed and paid his debt to society

DWP denies major IT problems with One Dole To Rule Them All system

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Re: same old same old

That'll be the National Lottery which Cameltoe are taking money to operate, and which Dickie Branson said he'd operate for nothing but his bid got knocked back.

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Meh

same old same old

Large scale government IT project descends into train wreck....not exactly news is it? Can anyone recall a large scale government IT project that wasn't a complete shambles for all, or at least some, of it's lifespan?

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