* Posts by Steve Evans

2772 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2007

How believable are government claims on ID cards?

Steve Evans

@Steve Davies

Exactly...

"ID cards prevent terrorism" Just like they did in Spain the other year.

Germans to blast fish into space

Steve Evans

When I saw the headline...

i thought they were sending some of that tinned Swedish fish up to see it's effect in a combined space!

Brazilian cleaner spots security hole in Heathrow e-borders

Steve Evans

Good greif...

How did these idiots get to run a country, they can't even implement basic security!

Billg quits Facebook

Steve Evans

@Chris

"Just goes to show how daft the 'friends' concept is on social networking sites. People collect them as badges of honour to validate their pitiful existence and give meaning to their empty, howling souls."

I concur. I have a golden rule on Facebook, call me old fashioned, but If I've never met someone in the flesh (oooh errr), then they don't go on my friends list.

My brother on the other hand is the kind of "friend whore" you describe, and spends most of his time buried under application invites from his "friends". Me I'm brutal with the delete button even on real friends if they forward stupid things, this even extended to my sister in-law when she was the 3rd person to send the "Facebook need you to forward this message to prove your profile is active" message a few months back. I still haven't reinstated her!

As for Bill spending up to half an hour a day... Blimee, his PC must be running faster than mine! I wonder what version of Linux he's running?

Orange France iPhone total hits 90,000

Steve Evans

@KOOLAID drinker

And a better camera, with a flash.

And better support for MMS

And a battery you can change without having to loose the phone for a week as it bounces across the globe in a Jiffi bag!

And a lower price!

New England Patriots victims of trademark hubris

Steve Evans
Alert

Oh yes it's such an unusual event...

Until you remove your head from your arse (ass) and look at the outside world...

19-0 is a perfectly reasonable score in Rugby for example. If that happened to be an England vs France match, then would we be prevented from rubbing

Gaelic noses in it from our T-shirts because of a ill-conceived US granted Patent?

Google for "19-0", there's plenty of previous examples... Although I do have to feel a little pity for the sucker who paid up for www.19-0.org.

Skype squishes cross-zone scripting bug

Steve Evans

@Matthew...

I was just thinking the same thing whilst watching it crawl in at 66KB/s *yawn*

Turning a Nokia phone into a hotspot

Steve Evans

@Jolyon Ralph

Firefox has plug-ins that allow you to set a custom user-agent yourself... Plus half a dozen local PC privacy proxies will strip/change this.

As for ending up with it rendered in tiny mobile mode when you pretend to be a mobile app, just pretend to by Opera Mini, from what I've seen when I use it on my N95, it gets a full normal site and then renders it locally to suit the mobile.

Brit scientists brew up three-parent embryo

Steve Evans

Wooo there...

Have these loons thought about the implications?

Can you imagine what the family tree is gonna look like when their great great great grand children end up on BBC212 trying to trace their ancestors?

Steve Evans
Coat

@Mathew Holleran

Even worse than that...

Given this is to solve hereditary diseases, there's bugger all chance of the two lady's being twins!

Mine's the snowboard jacket and floppy eared beanie hat.

Dutch fire up petrol-pumping robot

Steve Evans
Flame

lmao!

Gotta love the 1970's porn movie soundtrack!

"What is it doing with that nossil?!"

I hope it has some kind of visual correction for the database, or can we look forward to every chav car that's been dropped on the deck getting it's rear quarter window punched out and the back seat covered in petrol?

Now I'd pay to see that!

Remembering the Coleco Adam

Steve Evans

I see your RS-128

And raise you the contents of my attic... (A quick look reveals...)

2 x Einsteins

1 x 4032 Commodore Pet

1 x ZX81 (with after market real keyboard add-on)

2 x BBC Micros, both with 80 track (200k wooo) 5.25" floppy drives.

Annoyingly I can't see the Osborne 1. I know I had one once, and would have thought it would be too big/heavy to loose, but somehow I seem to have managed it.

Microhoo! marriage hits Google salaries hard

Steve Evans

Errrr...

So after reading several lines of marketing/hr spin-speak, I found my technically aligned brain disconnecting from my eyeballs and trying to sneak out the door.

Did anyone make it to the bottom of that job description and work out what they are actually after?

All blue-eyed people share one common ancestor

Steve Evans
Dead Vulture

@theotherone

"it's a popular misconception that Hitler had brown eyes"

Well well, who would have believed it, I actually learnt something in the registers comments!

Thanks for that.

Does this mean the 2 pickled brown Hitler eyes I won on ebay are fake then?

Dammmmit!

Dead vulture? Well cos it looks like it's had its eyes removed!

Steve Evans
Coat

@theotherone

Not quite sure what you mean by we're all related to Hitler... You do realise he had brown eyes don't you? (And was Austrian I believe).

He just realised that everyone should worship the blue eyed overlords a little early!

Now buy me a beer or I shall use my mutant blue eyed evil stare a second time.

(Does anyone know how to get the laser bit to work?)

Rocket train smashes world land-speed record

Steve Evans
Paris Hilton

Errr

Not quite sure how much use this is... Sure it's big number (woooo), but I for one wouldn't be tricked by the

"Would you mind standing in the helium tunnel for a second" trick if they wanted to shoot me, nor would I appreciate having to wear breathing equipment for a trip on Eurostar!

Paris, well anything is quick compared to her!

Is this the world's most expensive desktop PC?

Steve Evans

@Sam

As you say, the gold is probably rather thick for the bling value...

Which makes me wonder...

How heavy is this thing! The shipping might be more than the PC!

Submarine cable cut torpedoes Middle East access

Steve Evans

Take that...

..Osama! Think you can use the infidels internet to plot your attacks.

Think again!

MPs slam costly war-tech projects at MoD

Steve Evans

@Anonymous Coward

<quote>

"I'm so scared of aging migs and su fighters.

We could just get some f-18 and f-22's if that were even a remotely plausable problem."

</quote>

You should be... The Russians haven't just sat still either you know, IIRC, their air to air missiles are actually longer range than the American ones.

As for getting some help from the USA, we've only just finished paying for them helping us out the last time thank you very much! And even then they turned up late.

Forget passports - teachers and kids are the new ID card targets

Steve Evans
Black Helicopters

Hmmm...

"it seems on the point of abandoning the notion of forcing ID cards onto the public via passport renewals."

Indeed... Why force people to get them with passports, when you can get far greater coverage by requiring them to open a bank account, change doctor or buy toilet rolls?

(Toilet rolls theory yet to be backed up by leak, but I wouldn't put it past HM Gov!)

Apple's iPhone numbers do not add up

Steve Evans

@Steve Renouf

I don't think many brits are nipping over to France to get unlocked iPhones, cos I don't think many people are bothered about the iPhone at all! All the massaging of the sales figures can't hide this!

I was in an O2 shop on their launch night, I used the late opening as a chance to get some free parking and buy a microSD for my phone before going on a trip, and the O2 shop were the cheapest high street source.

It wasn't exactly busy!

Sure the iPhone looks very flash, but as a phone it is seriously lacking in features the European market has come to expect. Plus the idea of actually having to buy a phone *with* a contract is just so last century!

It's just a case of Apple not understanding the difference in market (or maybe just not caring).

However, the iPod touch is a completely different story. The UI is gorgeous (as it is on the iPhone), but the product is an mp3 player with added browsing, and it does everything very nicely. I suspect that as the iPhone is only a barely passable phone, people that like the UI will now just buy an iPod touch and stick to their free Nokia phones with real MMS messaging and good cameras.

Steve Evans
Jobs Horns

@Giles Jones

I'm with you on that one.

Given the kicking Apple has been receiving for low sales, they are bounded to be quoting "shipped", not sold.

Giant solar plants in Negev could power Israel's future

Steve Evans
Stop

Anyone else see a problem...

So 10% of the Sahara turned into a solar power plant... Ummm.

Am I the only person here who knows what happens to a glass panel when it's been in a sandblaster?!

Even with out that, the cleaning bill just to remove the dust after a storm would be terrifying!

And of course with 350,000 square miles of solar panels to protect, you just know some little toe-rag is gonna sneak over at night and nick the copper wire.

Scottish Government to block wind farm plan

Steve Evans

How about...

We install wind farms on the top of all Govt buildings? Given the amount of hot air that comes out of these places, we should be able to power Europe.

Tesla shifts gear out of park and into interim

Steve Evans

Hmmm..

"The changes mean the existing motor will need extra cooling to deal with the extra power."

So it's pulling more juice...

Any news on the reduced battery range this must cause?

Polish IT worker calculates exact speed of snail mail

Steve Evans

Ha!

Still better than HM Govt, the documents actually arrived!

MP calls for law to force online shops to verify customer age

Steve Evans

@sproot

Exactly my thoughts...

We have a solution, now lets find a problem it can solve. (And I say problem loosely).

Illegal immigrants spared the gamma-ray scanner

Steve Evans

@Andrew Meredith

I agree totally.

I was in Poland at the weekend, and saw a T-Shirt. Roughly translated it said...

"Invest in Europe,

Buy a politician"

They sure have sussed the EU quick!

Tiscali hits 'undo' after bandwidth throttling chokes iTunes

Steve Evans

@Anonymous Coward

"Tiscali actually have a pretty decent policy, "Steer clear of our peak times, and we'll leave you in peace." For £18 a month, for a decent 8Mb line, I sure as hell ain't complaining with that."

Yes and no... That was what I used to do when I have a Pipex connection. Lasted many a year with my p2p client set to auto throttle from 6pm to midnight. Then when Pipex started looking as the bottom line total, I got the "You're a heavy user" letter, and I cleared off to Tiscali. (Silly me).

The problem with Tiscali is they block it completely. I happily schedule big downloads over night, but sometimes, you just need to get something during those peak times, and it's a complete no go. It's not throttled down, I can't even get a connection to the tracker! You're lucky if it's back by midnight.

They are just squeezing so many people onto their over-congested network. I can't believe they are inside their 50:1 contention ratio.

Luckily my contract is up in 2 months, and I'm off!

It was the MacBook Air sub-notebook

Steve Evans

Ahhh, business as usual...

Form over function...

Complete lack of ports because they'd have made it thicker.

Complete inability to swap batteries on the go, or just buy a new battery when the old one dies, because that would have made it thicker (I suspect the battery is actually spread across the inside of the casing like jam!)

I wonder how long it will be before the keyboard is removed, just cos it doesn't "look right" and would give them another 1/8" back... Anyone else remember the ZX81 keyboard?

The only time this thin lightweight Mac is going to be thin and lightweight is when it's on your desk with you carefully guarding it. As soon as it comes to transporting it anywhere you'll have to put it in a steel box just in case someone puts a heavy post-it not on the top and snaps it!

I'm sure it'll sell a bundle.

Messenger skims past Mercury

Steve Evans
Coat

@Johnny FireBlade

Must have been cloudy.

Apple tells iPhone vendors not to reveal sales figures

Steve Evans

Silence speak volumes

If they'd sold shed loads we would have all heard about it.

If they'd sold out, and there were back orders (a la Wii), we'd have heard about it.

Instead there's been very little said, and then a gag applied to completely mute it.

Face it Apple, your over priced, under spec'ed (all be it with with a nice GUI) isn't going down well over here in the continent of picture messages and flash equipped 5meg camera phones you can get for nothing on a contract.

NASA's Messenger closes on Mercury

Steve Evans

@AC

You're not wrong there!

Let's hope they got their maths correct this time, and didn't mix up their imperial and metric units again, or they'll by adding a new crater to the surface.

/me wonders about the sanity of anyone doing scientific calculations with imperial units.

BOFH: Memory short circuit

Steve Evans
Coat

@AC

Actually pound notes were withdrawn in 1984.

However they still remain in the Channel Islands and Scotland.

I'll resist comments about being unable to pry them from the grip of a Scotsman.

Ooops.

AT&T to crush copyrighted network packets

Steve Evans
Alert

Ah...

This must be utilising the little known "copyright" bit flag present in all tcp/ip packets.

aka, how exactly do they plan on spotting copyright material?

Do they plan on inspecting every torrent available on the net, and then telling AT & T the checksum? Blimee what a job that's gonna be. Although maybe I should apply for it... I'd be the only person on the planet authorised to download copyright material and paid to do it at work!

Note to self: Get job, take huge removable USB drive into office each day.

Oh, what's that? Encrypted torrents? Oh they can just block anything encrypted, after all, if you're encrypting data, you must have something to hide.

Ferkin' idiots.

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

Steve Evans
Coat

Surely...

You mean Łódź. (That's assuming you don't filter extended characters from comments!)

Government piles filesharing pressure on UK ISPs

Steve Evans

Hmmm,..

I'd be interested to see this in action...

Given the dire support offered by most UK ISP's, you're lucky if the person at the other end of the support line can understand English, let alone understand a technical issue.

I remember having a huge argument with a large budget ISP about packet loss. Their support staff suggested I check my DNS setting in internet explorer. I asked how they expected this to impact a traceroute to an IP address, and could they talk me through doing it on IceWeasel. (debian's firefox)

Needless to say I assume I received a blank look from somewhere in India.

So would the record industry get a hot line number to a "real" techie? And how long before someone manages to find it and share it with everyone else?

Second-gen Eee PC a CES no-show

Steve Evans
Stop

@Alan Donaly

Don't be sad Alan, you've got a light weight, compact, fast and cheap tool there. By the time the mark II comes out with the bigger screen and M$ onboard, you'd be hard pushed to tell it apart from all the other budget laptops available.

You only have to look at the enthusiast forums, when was the last time you saw so much fuss about one laptop? At £200 people don't mind pulling the top off and poking about.

If the mark II comes as M$ only, and therefore lack the required linux drivers, I'll still be buying a £200 mark I.

As a slight aside, Asus, forget all this wimax b*llox, you've got an RJ11 on the side of the Eee, now give us a damn V90/V92 for it, I've got several perfect buyers for Eees, if only you had a modem in it!

(And before anyone says USB Modem, find me one with linux drivers in the UK... Ta!).

Microsoft pleads ignorance on 'one interweb per child' pork barrel

Steve Evans

Oh what a surprise...

HM Gov shows once more that it really doesn't know what it's doing, or what's going on in the big bad world.

Given that you can go down to PCWorld and pick up a perfectly internet capable machine, complete with all your office and internet proggies for £200 (Asus Eee), it's the cost of the broadband that's going to become the issue. So don't nag M$, we don't need them, turn your attention on BT's pricing and the cable co's who haven't invested any cash in connecting more towns for IIRC about 10 years.

Why do women get plastered at fancy dress parties?

Steve Evans
Thumb Up

I'd love to see the expenses claim...

4 Bottles of Vodka

2 slabs of beer

8 Vicar costumes.

All from the university research grant!

Mobile phone users should drive faster says prof

Steve Evans
Coat

Hmmm... Interesting...

Given that Government statistics supporting the use of speed cameras show that speeds is the major issue in 125% of all road accidents, shouldn't they be actively encouraging talking on phones whilst driving?

Beanie, gloves and brown jacket in the corner.

USB 'compact cassette' promises 1980s nostalgia, home taping

Steve Evans

64Meg? lmao!

I suspect a C90 stored more than that!

Guess we now know what happens to unsold redundant storage... They get put in damn expensive packaging.

Asus to show second-gen Eee PC next week

Steve Evans

How about V90!

Forget all that posh connectivity, you can all do most of that with a USB bluetooth dongle. How about making use of the RJ11 socket already provided and dropping in a V90/V92 modem?

I had a perfect users for the Eee, a little old lady who wanted a laptop to email the Grand children. Perfect I thought, except she has no wifi, or any need for broadband, okay, modem will do fine... Oh, except it doesn't have one... USB modem... Oh, except they're all winmodems, and the Eee is Linux... Cue major search for a source of a Linux friendly USB modem in the UK.

I emailed several suppliers, only to find that there knowledge of linux is just about on par with my Grandmother, who's been dead for a couple of years!

I gave up.

Tesco Mobile complains to Ofcom

Steve Evans
Jobs Horns

So O2 is about to loose a load of 2G capacity?

Can anyone think of a recently launched, over hyped, over price, underspec'ed handset launched exclusively via O2 that can only do 2G?

That's made my day.

N95 struggles to find itself

Steve Evans
Flame

@Anonymous Coward

Posted Thursday 20th December 2007 12:56 GMT

Quote: [if u go and buy crap like nokia, you've got noone to blame but yourself. "I've got an n95 and only have to carry one extra battery round with me to last the day!!" losers]

I don't know where you get your information, but I'd take it back for a refund if I were you.

Sure if you have GPS turned on all day you'll do your battery in, even purpose designed satnavs like TomTom will only manage a few hours away from the car and on battery, it is the nature of the GS beast.

If you use the phone as a phone/mp3 player/radio, the battery life is fine. GPS is for those moments when you need a helping hand, which exactly how I've used it to find restaurants and bars... And the station after leaving the bar several hours later!

The recent(ish) V12 firmware update has made battery life even better, so much so that I regularly get to day 4 without having to reach for a charger.

And at least when the N95 battery finally discharges it last charge we can swap it out for another from a local store, unlike your iPhone (well you whine like a Jobite).

Thank you, and good night.

Dell spills its Guts over Ubuntu gear

Steve Evans
Happy

@LaeMi Qian

Does it matter? It gets Linux on more desktops.

A friend of mine recently screwed up his windows install on an old Evesham laptop. As he only had an OEM XP serial number on the bottom, and none of us seemed to have an OEM XP install CD, I convinced him to let me try Debian Etch on it. It installed like a dream, no driver issues at all, and now his wife is happily back on eBay spending all his money!

His kids had been nagging for Vista (where do they get this from? I thought even 9 year olds knew it was sh*t), but now they are looking down on their Vista'ed friends and talking about Etch and Gnome! lol!

By the time I've finished with them, they're gonna be more of a nightmare to their senior school IT teacher than I ever was... Then again, I did acquire root on mini within the first month and lock the head of department out. Yes it was me! Muwahahaha!

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer's

Steve Evans
Unhappy

Typical...

Has anyone else noticed, but given the number of complete a**eholes on this planet, you'd expect a few of them would contract something like this, but no, they'll still be there p*ssing us off well into their 90s.

National treasures like Mr P don't deserve this.

"Death isn't on line. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?"

US gov silent robot white (?) helicopter prangs itself

Steve Evans
Coat

Surely...

... The best finish to give it for good stealth performance would be a cotton wool cloud look!

UK claims millions saved by scrapping redundant regs

Steve Evans

@Rich

... another £800m the gov will have to extort from us and then post to Brussels!

'Extortionist' turns Wi-Fi thief to cover tracks

Steve Evans

@Steven Raith

You're certainly right there. Unfortunately this isn't due to better informed users, just that BT and SKY (2 of the big UK providers) now send out pre-configured boxes. However you could still get onto them with a little bit of social engineering, the key is on a sticker on the bottom of the box.

Now if only SKY would get a router/firmware that actually worked, I wouldn't have to spend half my life fixing "friends" home networks.