Posts by Bassey

Re: OPoor Coco

Thanks. That was what I thought, just wanting confirmation. Wasn't sure whether, when two land-masses collide, the upward "push" of land was enough to create an appreciable drop in global sea levels.

SIM Locking

Anyone know if T-Mobile are SIM Locking their PAYG devices at the moment? Would love one of these, but no T-Mobile where I live.

Depends where abouts in Ireland

I've worked with people from Cork where, after five years, I could still only make out every third word - usually "feck".

And what's an "English" accent? Brummy, scouse, geordie, cockerney, manky-union, norfolk, cornwall....

VoIP for price? Why?

Depends where you live. We aren't all in places served by competing Telecom companies. The wife is from Dublin. Our phone bill used to be £15+ per month, mostly due to expensive (long!) calls to her folks.. With our VOIP service it's under £2 a month. It also gives us completely free local calls that we just could not get from our local landline provider. The only other alternative would have been something like skype but that just isn't convenient.

Re: Chris Miller

"Can someone explain the benefits of Gigabit Ethernet in the home?"

Yep. First off, wireless doesn't work in my house. Full stop. Tried it and something is killing it (I suspect the IT lecturer from the local college, who lives next door, is running some non-standard kit). And, whilst I would love to re-wire the house with cat-5, I love my wife and kids too much to suffer the divorce that would come with it.

So that is the homeplug bit sorted. Plug-in, switch on. Done.

Then, I have all my kids DVD's ripped to the home server (personal backup!). The kids destroy DVD's so it's far easier to rip them to storage and then either create copies or, better still, stream them to where it's needed. That same NAS has all mine and the wife's music and all our photos and takes backups of both our PC's. It's not common but all this could be happening at the same time (except for the backups. I'm not THAT stupid. They are scheduled for different times). Two DVD-quality video stream, two music streams and a backup requires a LOT of bandwidth (I'm amazed the server copes, actually).

Try doing that lot on a standard HomePlug connection which, generally speaking, tops out at around 9-10Mbps. And I'm hoping to go HiDef fairly soon - which will add to the bandwidth even more. Call me old-fashioned but I still work on the principle of working out the maximum load and then doubling to allow for headroom.

Re: This may be why I am not a lawyer

In this case, it appears not quite so simple. The council don't claim it doesn't do what it is supposed to do. They claim it isn't fit for THEIR purpose. So it'll probably come down to whose responsibility it was to determine the requirements and whether or not the product met them.

I've written plenty of software that worked exactly as it was intended to do only to discover it doesn't meet the actual requirements - and for a hundred different reasons.

Re: Kit-Fox

"doctors and so called medical 'professionals' ... are all a bunch of uneducated and misinformed idiots"

Part of me REALLY wants to hear you justify that claim. However, a larger part of me anticipates a long, drawn out story of bitterness and resentment and it's only Monday.

Big Balls Up

The problem here is nothing to do with "gagging" or any of that crap. If he's been gagged, how come he was on National Television news, openly criticising government policy? The problem was that he did so whilst being a government advisor - so he had to go.

The other huge balls-up was that the government wanted to raise the classification of cannabis. Rather than going about this the adult way and saying, right 2/3 of the country are against drugs, this is a political decision so we are going to go ahead, they asked a panel of experts. If you've already decided to do something (for entirely legitimate reasons) you are only shooting yourself in the foot if you then demand others create evidence to back it up. It was unnecessary and bound to backfire on them.

Still, I don't think he'll be too disappointed. He wasn't getting paid anyway and now all the papers are queuing up to pay him for his "Story".

simply the best

Well he's hardly likely to go around telling people the new guy is a big bag of shite and not worth watching, now is he?

Froogle

Wouldn't Google's own Froogle fall foul of these rules and be classed as a low quality site?

Improvement

Hey, at last somebody has upgraded their iPhone to have user-replaceable batteries - albeit feck-off heavy ones dangling between your legs. Still, it's got to be an improvement!

Re: Colour scheme

It has nothing to do with the Beatles. You make subs yellow because they are easier to find when they break down. Unless, of course, it's a military sub, in which case you make it as difficult to spot as possible.

There is bugger-all point painting them blue or coral coloured. That's like all those dip-shits who go out walking in the hills wearing green and brown, have an accident, and then wonder why nobody can find them. It's because you went out wearing camouflage you morons!

Re: Early adopter

My understanding is that, as it is, the G1 does not have the space to install Android 2.0 in the boot ROM (about 70MB). However, there are clever folk out there who have boot managers that can take space from the storage, make it available to the boot drivers and then just "chop up" the OS into the two storage areas. Or, you could cut down Android 2 to fit in the 70MB available.

Either way, the G1 isn't really a great fit for 2.0 but, if you think it's worth a fair bit of effort, it's possible.

On the other hand, the G2/Hero now looks REALLY good value at around £300.

Weird

So we get investigations into the Browser market (browsers are free) and the DVD drive market (you can pick up a DVD player for about £15). I'm not suggesting there is nothing dodgy going on but it does seem like they want to be seen to be doing something rather than actually investigating markets that might help consumers.

Stupid names

"How about a solar system with planets called Tatooine, Alderaan, Dagobah and Naboo?"

What a ridiculous idea. How would my GPS StarNav know WHICH Tatooine I wanted to travel to? Your absurdly made up one or the real one on the fringes of the Galactic Empire?

The names are supposed to HELP, not hinder.

Re: Dale 3

"Trick-cyclist" is a derogatory term for those hard working, brilliantly educated individuals known as psychiatrists, whose insights to the human psyche and, more importantly, ability to manipulate the mind and "cure" all sorts of debilitating illnesses makes them a highly regarded and productive part of modern society. Possibly up there with lawyers and politicians.

Sickening...

"The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me"

Especially as he hasn't received his public performance royalties from them yet! Is Guantanamo even licensed to play recorded music?

To quote Mr Partridge

I think he may have been referring to Good Ole' Uncle US of Stateside.

Re: Andy 70

When you say "download hi def content", where are you getting this Hi Def content from? There don't seem to be a huge number of legitimate sources for downloading (and keeping) hiDef content.

Hmmmm

Lack of SD Card slot can be forgiven (USB adaptors are a couple of pounds) but a device designed entirely around portability, yet lacking 3G support is unforgivable. Think I'll wait for the 3G enabled version with capacitive screen that I'm sure will follow within the next year.

Re: whats the thing with 'elevated'

It avoids nasty collisions with big beasties wandering around the desert. We enclose al of our railways but that wouldn't go down so well if you were, basically, cutting the desert in half. Mind you, at just 150mph, the beasties would have plenty of time to see it coming, think for a bit, and wander slowly out of the way. The TGV and Bullet's do over 500kph! Hell, even the brits WERE managing those sorts of speeds about a hundred years ago.

Not wanting to be picky, but I will

You CAN arrange the icons on the Windows Start Menu. Just tap and hold any icon to bring up the option.

Re: Controls on the right eh?

Why? Don't you have a right hand? If not, I'm sorry. Otherwise, stop whining. You don't speak for all us lefties. I'm perfectly fine using either hand, thanks.

Masterchef

It's quite simple. The Magpies in question had clearly seen Saturday Morning Kitchen and were using the grass to impart flavour to the carcass. Had he hung around long enough, he'd have seen them return to devour their fallen comrade, washed down with a nice Chablis.

Not so sure

I have purchased a small form-factor PC - but it wasn't much to do with the form-factor. Because small form-factor PC's use much lower-powered parts, it was a fan-less PC and is almost entirely silent. In fact, switching it on for the first time was disconcerting. Other than a light coming on, nothing happened for a few seconds. The only noise it ever makes is when the hard disk spins up.

But this is why I bought it and I know plenty of people for whom squeezing the last GHz of performance from their PC has become secondary to making it as quiet as possible.

Rocket Scientists

"the whole point of Ares 1-X is to understand how does a rocket this shape, this weight, this tall actually fly"

Call me sceptical, but shouldn't a bunch of Rocket Scientists, working for NASA, have some idea how the rocket THEY designed and built is going to fly?

@ Tony and @Handle

I don't think that's what Handle meant, Tony. I think Handle was suggesting that the Turbo USB drivers under Windows would probably only bring transfer speeds up to those you would get by default under Linux or Mac OS's - the assumption being that Linux/Mac drivers will be far better written than Microsoft ones - and was looking for you to produce evidence to support his fanboi-ism.

@ seno

@ seno, Do you have a reliable, verifiable source for that stat?

There are two camps here. Believers and doubters. Both, to an extent not worth differentiating, believe we should use our energy more efficiently, cut down on the crap we are spouting into the atmosphere and generally treat the planet a lot more kindly than we do at the moment.

I recycle. I've quadrupled the insulation in the loft. We're getting cavity wall insulation. We replaced our knackered boiler with a super-efficient condenser and added thermostatic valves to all our radiators. I drive a small, efficient car. We buy most of our food from local sources etc. I'm doing my bit. Whether we're causing the world to get warmer is, to my mind, utterly irrelevant when it comes to choosing to use energy more efficiently and generating it in ways that don't pump shit into the air.

But NOBODY, surely, can deny that we are, at the absolute minimum, being exaggerated to. There were the NASA temperature figures for last October that showed it was the warmest on record - until someone mentioned how cold it had been in October. At which point they admitted the figures had been copied and pasted from September. There is the nonsense with the selection of the tree samples from Siberia. There is the loss of the data from the University of Anglia etc. etc. etc.

Time and time and time again we are told the debate is over (always an alarm ringer in my head), "scientists" are in agreement and yet I have still NEVER seen any evidence that compels me to believe that the warming seen in the last 100 years is statistically significant when compared to all other similar periods for the last few thousand years.

Now, I'm not saying this would be an easy thing to prove. Reliable data for the last few thousand years is incredibly difficult to produce. Even reliable data for the last few decades seems hard enough. And yet we are told it's been done, it's conclusive but we don't need to see it because "scientists" have seen it and they "are all in agreement".

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

However

They also had a life expectancy 30-40 years less than today and suffered all sorts of muscular-skeletal disorders in "old age" - if they were lucky enough to make it that far.

Seems entirely reasonable

I heard an interview with the head of the FSA this morning (Radio 4 - Today) at his explanation was entirely reasonable. At the peak of the mortgage boom, over 50% of all mortgages were self-cert. In his words (roughly) "It used to be taken for granted that banks would only make loans that were in both their and their clients interests - in the same way that we would never regulate against poking oneself in the eye with a stick. However, it's become clear we DO need to tell banks "Don't lend money to those who can't afford to pay it back".".

As mentioned above, it is not an end to mortgages for the self employed. Just self certifying your income. The Bank will be required to demand proof of income. In fairness, this has applied to the employed AND self employed in the past. My bank would not lend me a mortgage without a letter from my employer and still required me to have been in full-time employment for a certain period.

I can't imagine many scenarios where someone who would be adversely affected by this would be deserving of a loan and, therefore, it seems to make sense.

RE: Is it me being particularly thick?

No. It's limited reporting. Such rules are also in the proposal - they just haven't been reported with the same level of gusto because "Banks told to only lend as much as they can realistically expect to recover from the sale of the security" doesn't make a snappy, alarmist headline, does it?

Re: Statistics

No. 40% of people who have downloaded the MS Security Essentials software are running Windows 7.

So, in answer to your question, that would definitely be a FAIL!

Re: @AC 11:05 GMT

> How can anyone say that education standards aren't falling.

Quite right! I remember a time when such questions ended in a question mark.

And Mike JVX Re: Same old Tories. You forgot the appalling (non-existent) public transport system amongst your excellent list that I would subtitle "What have the Tories ever done for us?".

It truly is remarkable how short people's memories are. Britain was a shit-hole 15 years ago. I'm by no means claiming all is sweetness and light at the moment but, until the sub-prime market collapsed in the US, all most people had to complain about was civil-liberty erosion and incompetent civil servants leaving laptops on trains.

Compared to 36+ students to a class in crumbling schools, shit-infested hospitals with patients left in corridors on stretchers, streets left to whoever wanted to fight over them (because there were no police to fight back) and a public transport infrastructure indistinguishable from an episode of Heart Beat the UK today looks like a blissful paradise.

Although it strikes me that most of the problems of yesteryear would be most likely to impact on the poor and/or elderly. So maybe that would explain the short memories amongst the country's press and El Reg readers alike.

Re: Waterproof @ Annihilator

Nope, you're not the only one. My SanDisk Cruzer 8GB has been through the wash AT LEAST half a dozen times and has been through the Tumble dryer a couple of times too. It's 3 years old now and never misses a beat.

Bit of a mix

I'm not too bad. I have some old VHS tapes I keep meaning to get digitised (family memories etc). I got rid of all my old mobile phones (envirophone - made a couple of hundred quid) last year - apart from my very first, which I keep for nostalgia/bore-the-kids reasons.

After that, I'm fairly middling. No BluRay yet. I'm sure I'll end up with one - but not yet. No iPod, as my phone does all that, but I have a NAS with a media server so all I need now is a media appliance hooked into my HiFi and HiDef telly and I'm pretty much up to date.

Although I REALLY want a robot vacuum cleaner, mop and lawn-mower.

Landline problem

Didn't the reg do a piece some time ago (as in 1-2 years) about how roughly 5% of Finns (mainly young professionals) have now forgone a landline and are using 3G as their only internet access? Seems strange that a country moving away from fixed-line internet access should become the first to guarantee it.

Whilst I applaud the sentiment, I would have thought guaranteeing a certain minimum standard of wireless would be A) cheaper and B) more useful.

Mmmm

Mmmm. Swiss Roll

Re: Moving vehicle?

Picky, picky. The vehicle is "capable" of moving. Is that not enough for you people?

It's not the accent

It's not so much the accent as the use of entirely different words. The first time my brother brought round his Glaswegian (soon to be) wife and we asked if she'd like a drink we got very confused by;

"Aye, I'll just have some dilu'in juice if you have some".

Apparently, dilu'tin juice is "Diluting Juice" and means "Cordial" of some description.

Spent a lot of time in Glasgow but that was a first on me.

Obvious answer

The answer is obvious. The depths of the crater, far from containing large reserves of frozen water, actually contains huge quantities of memory foam. This is fantastic news for the mattress-topper manufacturing industry.

Martial Arts

Can place Martial Artists "in the perfect zone to complete your task and beat any competitor"

What if the competitor is also using the CDs? Would this be a case of the irresistible force and the immovable object*? Would both competitors remain locked in eternal combat? Would Chuck Norris just roundhouse them out of existence?

Incidentally, I strongly suspect the woman quoted as having larger breasts after "just three weeks" had probably just started her period. Had she measured over a reasonable period of time she'd most likely discover they get larger every month around the same time and then return to normal again.

* Yes, I know the two can never co-exist. Crawl back under your rocks people.

Nice work

That statement/rant had all the hallmarks of level 1 blame transference ass saving from a man being asked a whole lot of questions to which he has no acceptable answers.

Amazing

Amazing the number of commentards above who are perfectly willing to hang, draw and quarter MS based on - well, no evidence whatsoever. Am I safe to assume these are the same people complaining about the government/police-state continual erosion of civil liberties etc?

Obviously, this is a huge fuckup etc etc, but there is ABSOLUTELY NO evidence to backup the dozens of claims above that "all the eggs were in one basket" or that there were no backups.

Re: Hideous

Brilliant! I've been trying to think what it looked like and you're right. Someone said "yep, that's perfect", but then accidentally fed the model through the rollers of a printing press. It's the only way someone could end up looking like that!

Clever

So, with the exception of Symbian, he's grouped his figures so closely together that, with a margin of error of just +/- 1% he could move any of those four OSs to any of the four positions and claim he was right. Genius.

IT don't help themselves

As a developer who works closely with the "Service Delivery" function, the service guys often don't help themselves. I notice there was no option for "we fucked up and the phones started flashing".

A couple of weeks ago, a system "just stopped working" (it was a Monday morning - warning bells start ringing in my head). The Service Delivery boys called me up to see if I could help. It was immediately obvious the software couldn't access the database so I asked SD whether anything had changed over the weekend. They denied having changed anything.

To cut a (very) long story short, over the next two hours, in dribs and drabs, they confessed to;

1) Upgrading the version of SQL Server over the weekend

2) Moving SQL Server to a new physical Server

3) Renaming the SQL Server instance

4) Changing the name of the admin account

5) Changing the password for the admin account

Once we had the truth, it was a 30 second fix. But Network administrators (or whatever they're called where you work) acting as if they own (rather than maintain) all the hardware and making changes without following proper processes and procedures account for a fair proportion of phone calls in my experience - and I've worked on both sides of the divide and caused a fair few outages myself!

Hope they don't lose Amazon

The main reason I use Amazon is because of the Royal Mail. Living on an offshore-Island, the Royal Mail are the only ones who charge the "normal" postage rate to delivery stuff here. As a result, the Amazon price I see is what I pay. Unlike thousands of other website who will frequently add-on a £10 or more "Offshore surcharge" at checkout.

If Amazon kick the Royal Mail into touch (and you could hardly blame them) I'm going to have to dig around for another site that uses the RM - if the RM survive. My understanding is that Amazon is a massive percentage of their business and they'd be unlikely to survive the loss of the contract in anything like their current form.