* Posts by Philip Nicholls

43 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2007

Angry Birds tweet fury at Redmond

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Quite how that hurts Rovio isn't clear

Ummm.... no, and I expect the average Reg reader will know that that is complete bollocks when it comes to IP infringement (Eyes passim ..... ooops El Reg passim).

No doubt whatsoever that U-no-Hu tried to pull a fast one, butter wouldn't melt in the mouth etc, but a clear rip-off.

Boffins explain greatest ever free kick

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Troll

Children .. children ...

For those too young to remember....

In the Real World Cup of 1966 two different Brazilians did the exact same thing (which was gob-smackingly noticeable even on 66 vintage screens). One was Garrincha (who looked a bit like the attached icon) the other I forget - may be Pele (although in 66 he spent more time on the ground because of a good kicking than playing footie).

Cheers

Microsoft 'record' results beat Jedi mind trickery

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Thumb Up

The only good thing about Project Talisker ,,,

..is the name. Off the west coast of Scotland, its own brewery, sorry distillery, and output of better-than-passable single malt.

Quick joke : What does "water" mean in Scotland?

It's that transparent stuff you add to whisky when entertaining friends from south of the border.

Och aye!

IK Multimedia iRig and AmpliTube iPhone app

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Thumb Up

Hellooo Mr. Bassist

Good article.

Just imagine what John "Thunderfingers" Entwistle would have done with this.

Or Pete T for that matter.

Cheers

It's non-stop fun in Zero Carbon Britain, 2030

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Big Brother

Greenies ...

..fall at the first hurdle.

Don't drive, Ride your bike to work. Ok - where did the steel and other metals used to make your conveyance come from? The rubber tyres - from next door's allotment where he cultivates rubber trees? Forget about lubricating your bicycle chain, except maybe with dock leaves.

And how was the tarmac road on which you ride built? By hand exclusively - obviously because mining and transportation of ores and steel mills is eco-toxic.

Point made. So how about the greenies who wrote the paper? How the kcuf do you build wind farms without ALL the trappings (ALL!) of modern carbon-unfriendly technology? No computers mind you to control the functioning. Processing of silicon is verboten.

What a crock of.

Make hay while....

Women reveal all for X-rayted pin-up calendar

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Warning - Serious comment Part Deux

I have not tried it on my wife. I like having 5 usable fingers on each hand.

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Warning - serious comment

I forget when and where some scientist - palaeoanthropologist, palaeoarchaeologist? -- anyway, he said when finding a skull if you want to stroke it it is a female. Otherwise .....

And I do mean stroke from the forehead ....

High-living hacker swaps Porsche for porridge

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Unhappy

So how was he caught? (2)

Or to answer my own question, if I move to Sussex should I sell the Porsche first?

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Big Brother

So how was he caught?

See above. Academic interest only.

Drinking coffee offers no real benefit, say eggheads

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

7 am -ish

Has there been any research about what else could possibly make me want to get out of bed in the morning?

Forget it. I already know the answer.

Brit honeybees crawl through rotten winter

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Unhappy

Priority Please

Gentlemen my sympathies but surely we should all be mourning as a priority the loss of Gene Hunt?

Come on. let's get real.

Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Boffin

Artificial consciousness?

What?

I thought all consciousness was artificial.

Wide-eyed kiddies in Scarface school play shocker

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Alert

Ashes to Ashes

Hey come on! Do NOT mention another series of A-to-A without having the sensitivity to say when, how, what rumours blah blah

We expat Brits brought up on Z-Cars and Softly Softly cannot get enough (and I mean that in the nicest possible way).

Cheers

WD targets Win XP users to ease 4KB drive upgrades

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Megaphone

OS/2

Greetings from Rip van Winkle.

This is my quarterly post to boast about using OS/2 all day every day for years and on the same machines. And I run Word Perfect for DOS under OS/2.

AND still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with a reliable, efficient and virus-free system.

The system runs off OS/2 Server on a machine which I last re-booted ... hell I don't remember when.

Cheers

The Hurt Locker sweeps Oscars

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Troll

District 9

Yes

PS. Me too a Wallace n G fan but after the evil penguin.... downhill all the way.

Microsoft embraces another Linux company

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Grenade

No-one will read this if I put OS/2 in the title

I use OS/2 every day all day in my office and have done for years and find no reason to move on.

On where?

MS adopted a strategy of targeting developers of OS/2 killer apps. Taking them over... and out.

None of you will have heard of Faxworks (now PMFax).

Your loss.

Cheers

Googlephone sales off to a sluggish start?

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Thumb Up

Got mone

I am in Hong Kong. I ordered mine first thing in the morning HK time within hours of the announcement. Then I watched the online sales site and the DHL tracking report do nothing for 6 days. The package moved (Indiana? Ohio?) finally and within 36 hours - voila - the package arrived in my office yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon, 13th Jan

Cheers

Google open-source boss comes clean on Android

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Linux

Hard to concentrate on the article..

..because, at the risk of sounding like my Dad, guy needs a haircut.

Cool is now sooo uncool.

The return of the Psion-sized PC

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Coat

10 years after

sigh

google ibm + pc + 110

's in the pocket n I am gonna plug it in n make a call.

Yes (answer to your next question).

Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Boffin

Pot Kettle Black

Responding to those who drew a parallel between China's economic growth and its less-than-satisfactory record in other, ahem, cultural areas, was it not the Wild West where the expressions "carpetbaggers" and "snake oil salesmen" were coined?

Kettle car breaks speed record

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

And it's all over Google (US) News ...

...Not!

Bloke decapitates horse with chainsaw

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Demjanjuk Manueovre

Back end of the '80's in Oz, when the ertswhile generation of wheelers and dealers were being prosecuted seriatim it was called "Craft's Disease: as in :

Can't Remember A F[laming] Thing

Cheers

Hurt yourself? Try f**king swearing

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
WTF?

Research + Bleeding Obvious

Must be lots but here's mine.

There was the research report some years, even decades, ago (was it from Canada?) related to the loss of rubber from car tyres.

Boffin/Research Student/Non-car driving ninnie : "I wonder where it all goes?"

Millions of dollars later :

"Ah! It's deposited in fine granules within a few yards of the edge of the road. Tell the World!"

Swearing helps a hammered thumb but how to achieve closure when faced with such jaw-dropping inane pointless stupidity (which somebody got paid for)?

Cheers

PhilipN

Server platforms and operating systems: Reg readers speak

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

You missed one

You did not mention OS/2 Warp Server.

And you can stop your sniggering at the back.

This has been managing my (small) office network for 10+ years from the same hardware - a Pentium Pro IBM machine with scsi disks. A mix of OS/2 and Win desktop and laptop clients.

I said... "stop sniggering!!!"

Up time? I dunno. Months. Years maybe. Last time I re-started I don't remember but was probably when the building management wanted to check the aircon system at the weekend. Should I even know this if my server does the business?

Oh yeah I've peed around with other systems. Latterly Mac OS/X Server. Does what OS/2 server has been doing without maintenance for years.

Yawn.

Sun revs VirtualBox to 2.2

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

..Microsoft's OS/2 ....

That would be NT?

Posted by Not Quite The Last OS/2 User On The Planet --- 24/7/52 in fact in my office.

Missed flight woman goes absolutely mental

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Stress relief

This is a woman who does not have a stomach ulcer.

All those around her do.

Boffin: Lost Stradivarius violin tech reverse-engineered

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

One test ..

Called 'eardrum"

Strad had one sorry two and would have batted a piece of wood the same as you and I bat a melon in the supermarket. This would have told him which pieces to start with.

THEN the boffin-speak kicks in.

Oh and I suspect his melons tasted better.

:-)

iPhone gets Hong Kong eye transplant

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Thumb Down

Tele-lens

Great idea BUT

I tried one of these lens attachment thingies with my Razr and the hardest thing is HOLDING THE FRIGGING PHONE STEADY

The netbook newbie's guide to Linux

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Fukarwi

I cannot believe (and hope I did not miss it after scrolling quickly through previous posts) that nobody responded to the mention of the Fukarwi pygmies at the beginning of this piece. Allow me -

40 (yes f.o.r.t.y.) years ago one would sing Rugby Songs in which the said tribe would be identified. Alongside Eskimo Nell, Barnacle Bill et al.

One's natural delicacy prevents him from elucidating further.

I do not know what is more troubling : That a Geek Hack pretends to have been a rugby player or that none of those who posted a response even knew.

Zigga Zagga Zigga Zagga Ra Ra Ra

Portsmouth punts naval boy-on-boy to innocent kiddies

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

graffiti

written on the wall of my law school bogs :

"She was only an admiral's daughter but her room was full of discharged semen."

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

ok one more

Any of you landlubbers know what a "fid" is?

Ok no.

Imagine a truncheon 6 inches long.

Affectionately known on board as a "ship's boy's starter".

;-)

Winehouse jibe wins Fringe's funniest gag

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Yanks

Surely those Yanks who read MAD magazine have heard of AW. She is the butt of some jokes in the September 2008 issue.

Hacker unearths young Chinese gymnast scam

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

‘Hacker unearths young Chinese gymnast scam’

... And... ??

Bill Gates has gone, what's his legacy?

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Mozilla

The PC revolution happened despite, not because of, MS.

We all remember Marc Andreessen, yes? And the Mosaic Killa? Just imagine if Web 2.0 had arrived 10 years ago. As it should have.

As Gates strides into the future, we wallow in the past

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Pirate

OS/2 is dead. Long live OS/2

Well I still happily run OS/2 in my office 24/7, waiting for something better to come along.

PCBSD anyone?

PhilipN

US Army funds $10m bat-droid

Philip Nicholls Silver badge
Dead Vulture

Bats - rats - snakes - spiders

1. Any other creatures which mankind generally abhor(s) and result(s) in communal dread? Cockroaches? Women?

2. Anyone remember Martin Cruz Smith's "Nightwing", the book, and the film of the book?

3. Where does all the guano go? And is it positive or negatively charged?

Sated sucker icon.

pN

Vote now for your fave sci-fi movie quote

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Planet of the Apes

The last line :

"You ... IDIOTS!"

with Charlton beating fists into the sand and a broken Statue of Liberty nearby.

At least that's how I remember it. And I am NOT going to watch it again just to check.

No icon. That's for "slack-jawed faggots". (Predator)

Microsoft! bids! $44.6bn! for! Yahoo!

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Dollar a search?

Expensive way to expand its customer base.

A better business model may be to pay each user a dollar for every search through MS live. 44,6bn buys a LOT of searches. The planet times 8,

PhilipN

Starbucks mocha clocked at 628 calories

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Be the first to comment on this article

Why?

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

14..... and?

Don't at least some of us remember 14 accurately? Sure, at 14 we know right from wrong but at 14 who gives a monkey's? From 11 to 14 to 16 to 18 - most of us are a series of different and incomparable personalities.

Oh sorry ... geeksville is here. We are all 14.

Uranus strikes a pose for Hubble's camera

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

How does the World work?

Erudite and articulate individuals can barely agree on anything Up There. How on Earth can we fix anything down here? To put it another way, how does the World work at all?

Discuss.

(Like Hell I will)

(Liverpool to win 2-0)

London man coughs to 172mph Porsche jaunt

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

All wrong

Yup.

When you blink at 172 mph do you know how much road you have covered?

Was this guy driving on a straight piece of road 100 miles long?

With the grass verge 100 yards away left and right?

Did he have 20*20 vision? Zero alcohol?

Get real.

Sun and IBM promise operating system surprise

Philip Nicholls Silver badge

Vern Acular

Russell needs to tell the non-Brit part of the world what "sarnie" means. And tell em "buttie" is a good substitute.