* Posts by Gerard Krupa

343 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2007

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Google: Android fragmentation not 'bad thing'

Gerard Krupa

Backwards compatibility

Backwards compatibility may be the goal but Google haven't managed it, even with their own applications. After the release of 1.6 to T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK it was several days before their 'search-by-voice' app was updated so it didn't constantly crash under the new version of the O/S.

Asus ups ante on Acer with two 3D laptops

Gerard Krupa
FAIL

1080p

Seems a little perverse that 3D laptops are supporting 1920x1080 resolution when the best nVidia can manage with their recommended external monitors are 22" 1680x1050 displays.

Bookeen Cybook Opus

Gerard Krupa
FAIL

Mobipocket support

This would be a huge selling point as it opens up the avilability of many more books from many more established stores compared with the still-developing support for ePub. Shame they apparently just made it up.

Vonage drops off the net

Gerard Krupa

Working fine

Works perfectly for me now. Didn't notice any problems but then I haven't tried to call anyone until just now.

New Doctor Who is 'simply the best'

Gerard Krupa

A bit of a kick in the teeth...

...for David Tennant

WTF is this country called America?

Gerard Krupa

@Sergie Kaponitovicz

"It also raises the question: how does "God Bless America" when it does not exist?"

I'd be rather more inclined to dispute the former entity's existence than the latter.

Google-branded Android smartphone inbound?

Gerard Krupa

Deja vu

So just like the G1 but with T-Mobile's logo removed then?

Kanye West death prank used to sling scareware

Gerard Krupa

Dangerous

It's a very dangerous rumour to spread. The entire world could collapse under the weight of its collective indifference.

Sky confirms telly-on-Xbox launch date

Gerard Krupa
Stop

Multiroom subscription

Is the multiroom subscription required for everything or just streaming live channels, as it already is for the PC version of Sky Player?

Sky News election petition defaced by prankster hackers

Gerard Krupa

The scheme

"The scheme is designed to help British voters to become more engaged in the political process, following the expenses scandal earlier this year and steadily declining turn-out numbers for years."

No, it's a scheme to help news Corporation increase their already year-after-year record breaking advertising revenue while still insisting that they need to raise subscription prices to cover the cost of R&D.

Shock jock blames Britain for hack attack

Gerard Krupa

Standard Policy

Isn't this just standard policy for any right-winger in the US? Take a situation, twist it around or simply just make shit up in order to prove your point when reality doesn't agree with you.

Exhibit A m'lud: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPsFIsxM3w&feature=response_watch

How to hack a Sony Reader

Gerard Krupa
FAIL

Hack FAIL

Sadly there's no good hack available yet to fix the atrociously bad rendering of PDF books on the reader.

Brit diplomats' mission to expose Scientology's 'diploma mill'

Gerard Krupa

Be quick

Better view that article fast otherwise Rupert Murdoch will be asking for cash donations to his Church of Newscorpology religion too.

Samsung smartphone keyboard takes wing

Gerard Krupa
FAIL

Fragile

OK it's just a diagram but it looks to me like either of those two 'wings' would snap off altogether too easily if you didn't handle it with extreme kid gloves.

Microsoft bribes Oz to ditch Firefox

Gerard Krupa

Complaints

They must have bowed to the pressure of complaints, as it now says (so get rid of it or get lost...) and when you mouse over it changes to 'get lost in the hunt'.

Reg reader bombarded by 3 sales calls

Gerard Krupa

Selling to friends and family

"Vodafone has even been ringing round customers to offer special deals to friends and family, treating customers as just another sales channel."

3 are doing similar things too. Since I gave them notice on my contract I've had numerous calls to try and urge me back with cheaper deals and each time I refuse they then try to get me to transfer my account to a friend or family member who might be interested in exchange for getting final cancellation without waiting for the one month notice period.

Catholic social club ousts coven of witches

Gerard Krupa

Compatible Faiths

"Parish centres under our auspices let their premises on the understanding users and their organisations are compatible with the ethos and teachings of the Catholic church. In this instance, we aren't satisfied such requirements are met."

So they only let Catholics in. Nobody, not even other Christian doctrines are compatible with the cult of the trinity and their confession-based get out of Hell free card, their bigotry and sex discrimination and their penchant for symbolically drinking the blood of a long-dead Syrian man.

Google slips Reg reader £500k!!!!!

Gerard Krupa

Long Anniversary

"held on 0ct 6th,2008/2009"

I'm impressed that their anniversary celebrations are spanning the entire year. Even more so that they've apparently created the new month of Zeroctober just for this event too.

US firm says handheld puke ray is ready to go

Gerard Krupa

In the wrong hands...

We already have Mr and Mrs Chav's young offspring shining green laser pens into the eyes of any random passing pilot or bus driver. Can't wait to see the effect when they're hanging from an overpass on the M1 blasting these at passing drivers. Lethal vs non-lethal is a matter of where you aim it.

Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology

Gerard Krupa
Thumb Down

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard

He created Scientology as a joke, y'know; the original Big Brother experiment to see just how stupid people can be. If you visit the site of his grave you can still hear the faint sound of hysterical laughter.

Personally, I'm worshiping Klaatu instead (the one portrayed by Michael Rennie in 1951 that is). You don't need Operating Thetans when you have a Gort.

Dutch cat skinner publishes critics' personal details

Gerard Krupa
Thumb Down

Copyright Breaches?

It's almost certain that the authors are breaching copyright by publishing the pictures found on the Internet. I'd be very interested to know how that applies to the hate mail itself - is it considered a copyrightable work that belongs to the author?

"They want to show it all, and think that everybody is interested in everything they do". I would like to call to other the case of Miss Pot vs the Kettles. If Tinkebell wants to comment on society, how about debating how shock has replaced all other qualities as the primary value of an artwork and that such blunt and unimaginative creations as hers overshadow anything the least bit clever, insightful or interesting.

Weary locals scratch Butt Hole Road

Gerard Krupa

It was a sad day...

...when I learned that Treacle Cock Alley in Bingley had been removed to make way for a bypass.

3 has no place Like Home

Gerard Krupa
Thumb Down

Three call centre staff

@nick

It's when attempting to leave or change my tariff that I've had problems with them (or more specifically when the were desperately trying to extract every last penny they could). They are 9 parts salesman to 1 part customer support and have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to sell me things I didn't want or need, and have resorted to outright lies in doing so.

When I canceled, the guy tried to convince me a should pay £8/month for an emergency spare phone (yeah, £8/month for emergencies) with 3 after I told him I'd already signed up with a new provider AND already had a spare PAYG SIM for emergencies.

When I'd previously tried to change my price plan in March the guy tried his best to convince me I needed to sign up to a new 18 month contract because my minimum period hadn't expired. When I asked what date my original contract expired on, it turned out it was the very next day and I could change tariffs in 24 hours without committing to anything.

And from mildly misleading to outright deceptive, when trying to convince me to sign up for a broadband contract a CS guy straight out lied to me and told me that I couldn't use my phone for tethered broadband despite my N95 being quite capable of HSDPA, and the fact that I had a 3Gb broadband add-on (one specifically meant for using the phone as a modem).

Gerard Krupa

Why else be with 3?

This was the only reason I kept a contract with 3 due to occasional trips to Sweden where the tariff applied. They have the worst handset selection, terrible call centre staff, abysmal broadband in the UK and not very competitive call prices. It even costs more to call a 3 phone from some other providers (Vonage for example charge 20p/min for calls to 3 and 12p/min to other providers). Less than 24 hours after I got the text message notifying that this service was ending, my contract was in its 30 day cancellation notice period and the SIM card was in the dustbin.

@Shane McCarrick

I have to agree with your initial sentiment here. Three introduced the service in full knowledge that it included data so why did it 'have to go'?

Taxpayer coughs for AOL Connie's flat

Gerard Krupa

Be fair

Of course all MPs should be able to claim expenses to pay for the upkeep of any children who aren't talented enough to fend for themselves. After all, not every MP is lucky enough to have children who are capable of racketeering a fortune large enough to start a military coup like Margaret Thatcher has.

At least we can live in confidence that Wacky Jacqui's upcoming ID card will help to stop all this fraud malarkey.

Wacky Jacqui defends Michael Savage ban

Gerard Krupa
Alert

Sign here...

...to save us from the wacky one.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/jsmithporn/

Electric racer hits the track

Gerard Krupa

Where the energy comes from

At least they're actually thinking a bit about where that electricity comes from for once instead of just touting electric vehicles as a panacea while entirely disregarding that a coal-fired power station produced 3 times as much CO2 to get you down the shops (or round the track) as a petrol combustion engine would have.

Film industry turns up P2P heat on Carter

Gerard Krupa

Sauce for the goose

I suggest this should be returned in equal measure by preventing organisations who repeatedly make spurious and unfounded bullying legal threats against grannies, toddlers and just generally innocent people on the basis of questionable IP address logs from ever being able to litigate.

US teen pleads guilty over Scientology DDoS attacks

Gerard Krupa
Coat

How the found him

"It's unclear how the authorities tracked down Guzner"

Quite clearly a Scientologist at Operating Thetan level 8 or above was hired as a consultant and used his powers over matter, energy, space and time to locate him by detecting the huge cluster evil body thetans bending him to their will.

Mine's the one with "I bet Xenu never claimed £380 of horse manure on expenses" written on the back.

IBM files patent for shorter meetings

Gerard Krupa
Thumb Down

Wasted time

I've wasted more time trying to schedule meetings through IBM's shitty Lotus Notes software than I ever did by making a meeting run to an integral number of hours. I mean seriously, what kind of software is so anally context-sensitive that it refuses to attach a file if your text caret is in the subject field?

Pioneer BDR-203BK

Gerard Krupa

Nice but not cheap enough to be mainstream

For your £199 you could very easily get 2Tb of external hard drive (maybe a little less if you want portable storage) and the rewritable media themselves are simply less cost-efficient than portable hard drives (10p/Gb minimum for 25Gb BD-RW discs vs 7p/Gb or better for an external desktop solution) based on a quick straw poll of Amazon and for backup purposes it's a lot easier to network external hard drives. Early adopters or niche purposes (e.g. if you need to snail-mail lots of data) IMHO.

Further funding flung at Fring

Gerard Krupa
Black Helicopters

Fring and Privacy

I wouldn't trust Fring as far as I could throw their whole office building because they monitor your usage of the app all too closely. You have to supply them with your mobile number "to get an activation code" via SMS but when you uninstall the thing you start getting phone calls from them asking why you stopped using it and what you thought of it. If they're paying that much attention to how I'm using their software I really don't trust them not to be paying too much attention to what my IM usernames and passwords are as well.

Solwise Piggy 6 multi-device powerline network adaptor

Gerard Krupa

Just what I was looking for

My house lacks a plethora of mains sockets so thus far I've had to insert my homeplug devices into strip plugs, severely crippling their speed. Having a device I can plug direct into the mains while still providing sockets for other devices is exactly what I need.

DHS trials musical brainscan wellness tech on US firemen

Gerard Krupa
Black Helicopters

The next step...

...is to brainwash them all until everyone's mind is playing the Star Spangled Banner on an endless loop.

eBay officially not cheaper than High Street

Gerard Krupa
Dead Vulture

Speaking of misleading text...

...how about the title of this article? Unless I missed something and the ASA did a survey of their own proving officially that high street shops are the same cheaper, there's no "official" status of whether eBay's prices are better or not.

Start-up Bee pledges 'affordable' British e-car

Gerard Krupa
Stop

Green Solution

That would be all well and good if electric cars had any proven environmental benefit. A recent study (published in the Torygraph) showed that electric cars are in fact considerably less efficient than diesels: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenertransport/5176216/Environmental-benefits-of-electric-cars-dismissed-as-fiction.html

Switching to electric cars doesn't help unless the electricity also comes from environmentally friendlier sources.

Prepare for Apple's self-resizing iPhone interface

Gerard Krupa

Prior Art

In breaking news, Apple is sued by 'physics' which designed a system whereby when you move forwards all user interface components of the 'world' application that are in front of you automatically get larger.

SLED 11: a distro for businesses, not idealists

Gerard Krupa
Linux

Screen Layout

"Windows-like arrangement of Gnome, with the main panel, and even start button, down at the bottom of the window"

So, exactly like SLED 10 then?

Lloyd-Webber calls for clampdown on ISPs

Gerard Krupa
Coat

Musical Decline

I didn't switch from commercial music to piracy, I simply stopped buying new music because of the shocking lack of talent and originality in the industry. I agree wholeheartedly that the film industry will suffer the same fate because they are suffering the same problem. Every second song is a cover or remix and every second film is a remake or adaptation from a comic or book.

Mine's the one with "K.I.G's other song is also a rehashed nursery rhyme" written on the back.

WiReD UK: ET found in 19 years

Gerard Krupa
Coat

The Job of Futurologists

Why do people always make this mistake of thinking that the job of a futurologist is to predict the future? It's quite clear that the job description of a futurologist is to sell as many copies of a magazine/newspaper/report or to promote their particular institution of education by periodically making the most outlandish, controversial and unprovable claims possible while still trying to appear credible.

Mine's the with a copy of wired in the pocket sporting the headline: "by June 2012 hairdryers will be powered solely by blancmange".

Emotional arguments do not make Street View illegal

Gerard Krupa

...taken deliberately, in secret...

Has he SEEN those cars? I mean unless you had your back to them you can hardly call the two-foot poles stuck to the tops of those cars secret, covert or hidden in any way.

Boffins sniff keystrokes with lasers, oscilloscopes

Gerard Krupa

Want to know what sometime is typing?

All you need are sharks with frikken' laser beams attached to their heads. This time, ill-tempered mutated sea-bass just won't do.

Pratt changes name to Bruce Willis

Gerard Krupa
Paris Hilton

Bit of a Wally

But as anyone with a TV knows thanks to a bloody annoying insurance ad campaign, the bald movie star is actually called Walter Willis, so all he really did was change himself from a Pratt into a Wally.

At least he didn't name himself after a hotel though.

Israelis develop 'safe' plutonium: good for power, bad for weapons

Gerard Krupa
Flame

Developing Safer Weapons

Now all they need to do is develop a safer Israeli mortar that won't land on a Gaza school and kill the children inside.

The Sun shines out of certified Java programmers

Gerard Krupa
Stop

Re: Or

@AC: You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a web service is. It's an application that runs on a server and can can be invoked using standard internet protocols, not an applet running in a browser. Web services are machine-to-machine interactions and so have absolutely zero 'eye candy' at all, for which Flash is far more prevalant. Maybe 5 minutes looking at Wikipedia pre-rant next time?

The Programmer Certification has really nothing to do with user interfaces or web services at all. It's about knowing the language syntax, standard API libraries and the functioning of the virtual machine. The later certification like SCJD (Developer) however has a large bias towards web services and especially Sun's own technologies (full J2EE, Netbeans, Sailfin) with no mention of alternatives such as Eclipse, Struts, Spring, Hibernate etc. You can guarantee that anyone who is SCJD certified has integrated web service because it's a required part of the course project.

Vista SP2 release candidate gets public airing

Gerard Krupa
Gates Horns

WIndows Search 4.0

Very annoying that they've bundled this into SP2. It was made available to XP via WIndows Update and I had to remove it after about a week because of its performance impact.

'Gv up txt 4 Lent,' urges bishop

Gerard Krupa

Re: Lent?

@Matthew Wilkes

Technically no, it's that old Babylonian tradition that like most other Christian festivals got wrapped up in a bible story and integrated so it was easier to indoctrinate the Anglo-Saxons and others into a new up-and-coming cult about 1800 years ago.

DSGi crosses fingers on new store format

Gerard Krupa

TV World

If my local PC World is anything to go by then "New Format" means a PC World and a Currys next door to each other, both of which devote at least 50% of their floor space to LCD TVs.

iPhone surfs to mobile web domination

Gerard Krupa

And user-agent spoofing?

How many of these figures include user-agent spoofing whether deliberate or unknowingly? For example the Iris WebKit-based browser which runs on Windows Mobile uses a similar user-agent string to the iPhone since pages written for the iPhone will largely work perfectly with Iris also, whereas nobody in their right mind would attempt to spoof as Mobile Internet Explorer.

Anti-mafia cops want Skype tapping

Gerard Krupa
Black Helicopters

Sudden Interest

This sudden increase in interest towards "lawful interception" (I've read RIPA so I use the term lightly) of Skype just makes me think the capability already exists, probably with the full knowledge and compliance of the developers of the official client software, and the authorities are merely trying to encourage its use among criminals with the false implication that it is still secure. Consider this from Skype's privacy policy:

Skype, Skype's local partner, or the operator or company facilitating your communication may provide personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate authority lawfully requesting such information. Skype will provide all reasonable assistance and information to fulfil this request and you hereby consent to such disclosure.

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