Posts by Nick L

Good.

As a buyer and occasional seller, this is great! I've recently bought a DVD that turned out to be counterfeit, and had to leave positive feedback in order to avoid negative feedback... Bloody daft situation, and this sorts that out!

£899 for an iPhone, or...

I do hope o2 aren't pinning their future on this.

Let's see, the minimum you can get an iphone for is a quid short of 900 of our British pounds. OK, you get 18 months call and data in that, but most of us already have enough of that, thanks.

Or as an alternative:

iPhone in the states: $399. Add the import duty if you import one, and that's £250 if you get caught for it and the parcelfarce £13 cartel fee.

Activate it using the freely available tools. £0. Remove the sim lock - £0. Insert other SIM. Continue with service as normal.

I know which route is more appealing to me.

come on o2, where's the prepay option? The iPhone was supposed to be paid for by the consumer and not subsidised by the operator, so why the 18 month contract?

And what about the T-Mobile SNAFU perss release of the 16GB iPhone with 3G support? I realise it is unthinkable to doubt Sir Steve of the Revisionist History, but I doubt battery is the real reason for 3G being missed - could it be that they need to shift units before the new 16GB machine comes out that the market wants?

I would like an iPhone, but with this announcement I won't be bothering with a UK supplied one. Similarly, I am worried at apple's attempts to lock people out of using products as they (rather than apple) see fit. Perhaps Apple really is the next Microsoft? ;-)

I predict...

a glut of these on ebay in 90 or so days ;-)

Thanks for the tip though, I'm in for one of those.

Only years too late...

Toshiba Libretto?

Sony PCG-U3 ? (on ebay right now, you lucky punters)

I'm giving up at home.

This is the final straw. I've used and actually liked MS products - particularly NT4 and 2000, with XP grudgingly used as my main home OS - but the patching is beyond a joke. The big draw for me was Visual Studio, which I think is pretty damn good, but it isn't good enough to put up with this.

I've recently bought a second hand ibook G4, and consequently my primary XP desktop hasn't been turned on in weeks. And of course, when XP does get booted, it'll be bleating about updates required...

So that machine is getting Ubuntu on it. The server (2000 based) is getting wiped and having Ubuntu on it. The mail server is already running OpenBSD.

Where do I take my licenses for a refund? I never knowingly agreed to being treated like an idiot by Microsoft!

Inspired. Pettition to replace SI now!

Superb, and so easy to understand. How do we vote to get that daft metric system overthrown?

(This velocity of sheep had me crying with laughter in the office. My colleagues are worried - but not as worried as some of the sheep in your calculations.)

Superb...

> http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Now that is the work of genius.

For what it's worth,I'd advocate MAC filtering on the wireless access point as well as WEP (or WPA, or whatever) and using a separate subnet with appropriate provisions however even that's not perfect. I used to run my wireless open, but given that the cheerleader defence is not a defence, I've stopped that and put some basic measures in place. If someone hacks that, I should know about it and secondly I've made myself a little more secure in case someone starts doing naughty things...

If you bring back wispas...

...you also bring back the George Michael joke, too.

Ahh, nostalgia!

Anyone checked for alien landings?

Seems a tad unfair to blame the corsa when there's an obvious potential for combustion: Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged, on his quest to insult the universe alphabetically, was getting up to the Dents...

He probably torched the cars on takeoff or landing.

Obvious, really. Bit surprised Mr Haines didn't propose this angle.

(With apologies to Douglas Adams for this pathetic attempt at humour)

As said, nothing new...

The 80s called: they want their idea back ;-)

As I used to work for Unisys, I have to agree with Chris above: this is nothing new. The CTOS boxes which, worryingly, are still part of mission critical systems in the UK, are a very neat bit of design.

Hibernate vs sleep vs "off" vs really off

So apparently this turns the PCs off rather than leaving them in hibernation? Well, that's a waste of everyone's time as it means the PC will have to boot every day rather than just load from hibernation state.

Sorry to post an IT-related comment, but Hibernation saves the current state to disk, then powers off. On next power up, the PC goes through the normal POST routine and the state is reloaded from disk.

There is no difference between power consumption of a computer that's "off" or in hibernation. Both consume a small amount to provide +5V standby in order to turn on with the soft power key

Standby mode consumes a little bit more energy as the computer's state is suspended to RAM, and the RAM is kept refreshed when the computer is in standby mode.

"Hard" off, removing 5V standby, would require turning off at the socket or the use of a physical off switch that some PSUs provide.

Can El Reg get back to the core values of Bulgarian Airbag related stories now, please?

Should be thankful...

Could have been worse.

There is a story in Freakonomics about a boy being named, well, they pronounce it "shuh teed". The second part of the name is head. The first bit is anglo saxon for faeces

It should also be pointed out (before someone else does) that the shuhteed story is believed by some to be an urban myth.

Calling the first one Junior and the second Princess: you can't fault their imagination, can you?

ignore previous comment! Maplins have FreeAgent Desktop, not go!

see title - I was wrong - maplins is the desktop version. Still a bargain tho :D

What will be the straw that breaks licensee's back?

How far will the likes of Microsoft, the music/entertainment industry, and the others go to repeatedly annoy and abuse the position they've wiggled themselves into of providing "content" though licensing and not actually allowing people to own things?

I buy CDs. I like CDs. I rip them to FLAC (for archiving) and mp3 for playback on various devices. I'm not legally allowed to do this, and DRM tries to stop me. I'm not going to stop, as I want to play the music I've bought (I've bought it, not licensed it) when I want, where I want. In my lounge via the Netgear MP101. In my car. On my phone/pda thing. When the worst DRM offenders were around, I did return stuff to shops until I got a non-DRM version. I did rip the DRM'd version just for the challenge: it's not like it's difficult... Never did I upload or share the resulting rips.

I buy DVDs. I somewhat like DVDs, but loathe the enforced adverts, the accusations of copyright being theft and the fragileness of them when compared to the treatment that they get from my 3 year old son. I consequently back them up, removing the propaganda and playing the main movie as soon as the thing is inserted. This is not legal as I'm circumventing copy protection. Will I stop? No. The producers have abused their position to force feed me adverts, so I'm fighting back.

I buy MS software. I also buy Apple software. I use Linux too, and OpenBSD. GPL v2 or v3 is great, as is the BSD license - I'm happy to use that. Commercial licenses however do their level best to remind me that I'm licensing the software I've paid for, and that I should be grateful for that, and also that I shouldn't expect any warranty... I don't appreciate that, but live with it as it's causing me no real issues. At the moment.

Adding adverts into applications I've paid to license will see me spurred into action against the protection racket that's being attempted in the name of "anti-piracy" or whatever that will be spun as a benefit for me. It isn't. Get your fingers out of my stuff, or get lost. I've had enough of people knowing better than me what I want to do with stuff that I've bought (not licensed).

In the UK there's no law of fair use. We need one. We also need a test case about the unfair licensing clauses that are everywhere. And against the bright sparks who abused the measures built into DVD players to force feed adverts.

Rant over. I feel better now.

Pot. Kettle.

Considering Nominet offers to let me reregister any .co.uk domains I let lapse for the bargain price of just 80 quid, I think them accusing others of sharp practice is really rather special.

So...

How *did* they handcuff him if he had no hands?

Al-qaeda

Clearly this is the work of al-qaeda and this fundamentalist OAP should be detained indefinitely without trial.

Please, won't someone think of the children????

what, exactly...

What exactly was Mohin Miah searching ebay for to find this particular gem?

And can Golden Palace casino write its name safely on the crisp?

Keep .co.uk

You're British and proud - it's an advantage, a USP if you like. Redirect .com to .co.uk and leave branding with .co.uk. Keep all the hacker / union flag stuff too...

Alternatively, ask strategy boutique or just bung me a few tens of thousands and I'll tell you the same thing in prettier language ;)

Clue stick for PC world, perhaps?

If anyone senior from PC World - or DSG even - is reading this, perhaps it should serve as a wakeup call.

PC World's customer service notoriety is well earned: I was trying to buy a macbook only to give up as the sales process fell into the "too hard" pile. Currys, on the other hand, were excellent when it came to buying a plasma tv...

Perhaps staff would benefit from moving between the groups in the same manner that stock appears to, because the PC world (and Dixons) staff seem to care little for their job other than when it comes to selling irrelevant and unnecessary insurance.

Typical...

Just sodding typical. I bought a second hand ibook g4 last week... Now I'm just waiting for it to die... Does seem that the soldering process for one chip in particular is to blame?

http://www.coreyarnold.org/ibook/

Seems strange that so many are resurrected by applying pressure to just one chip. "Design fault" seems to be the only explanation.

Quality insights from Toilette & Douche

"a Deloitte and Touche report suggested that consumers will end up footing the bill for better broadband infrastructure"

Insightful. Masterful. Worth whatever was paid for it. After all, who'd believe that it might be consumers that end up paying for infrastructure one way or another rather than the Tooth Fairy or out of dividends from the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

"Bears need better hygiene habits in forested areas" is an upcoming report which promises insights into ursine defecation...

Know its limitations, use appropriately

We use mobile devices to allow engineers to access engineering call details on our internal systems in order to streamline the call process. It works.

Blackberries are, IMHO, potentially useful when you need to be alerted of something requiring your attention, but delicate business is probably best off being given the recipient's full attention with a device that is suitable to compose a considered response.

I have used my HTC Wizard to sync with IMAP directories when I'm in a technology backwater (such as visiting my parents) and I know something is needing my attention that won't need wordy input, but I can't see me using it for business at the moment: I'd use it as a USB modem for my laptop that I carry on business...

Horses for courses, right tools for the job, etc.

FAO Peter (above)

Peter, the article points out that this is indeed aimed at lossless audio formats... Otherwise, as the article says, stick with the squeezebox.

It does read a little like an advert, so I'll be very interested to see how this compares with a good quality CD player, supposed audiophile sound card (not from Creative) using both internal and external DACs, and the differing clock options which is realistically where digital differences can get in the way of things.

It'll need to be a double blind test to be worth the bytes of bandwidth it's transmitted on, too...