* Posts by Jerome

250 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2007

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iPhone 3G S in the UK: what you need to know

Jerome

Beautiful, and stupidly expensive

If the camera takes decent snaps and video (cos lets face it, the fact it isn't an 8MP device like top-end smartphones is a shame, but it's irrelevant to the actual quality) then the whole Apple lock-in thing is the only real downer remaining. If only they'd half the price, I'd snap one up in an instant.

Russian porn starlet brands DD jubs

Jerome

How many?

@D@v3 - I think the clue is hidden in the story itself, the bit where it says "tattooed across her heaving jubs".

As for 50-100 films per annum, I wonder if a huge great ugly tattoo over her assets might adversely affect her marketability?

El Reg reader crafts Gordo Lolcatprat

Jerome

Lost the Impact

Strange how it's just not funny with the wrong font. I'll make an exception for "Invisible Policy Document" though. Genius.

Bing passes Yahoo! in Google runner-up stakes

Jerome

Nice effort

To be fair, the gains might not all be temporary. Bing is the first search engine I've tried since Google which actually works. I'm no fan of Microsoft, and I'll be sticking to Google personally since I marginally prefer their results, but I wouldn't be surprised if Bing picks up some regular traffic. Being the default search engine in IE doesn't hurt any either.

BTW Cade, in Britain "tossed out" means "got rid of", making your final paragraph a touch confusing. The phrase you're looking for is "tossed off". :)

UK Communist website abused by Chinese hackers

Jerome
Gates Horns

Silverlight

"The affected file on the website is associated with serving up Microsoft Silverlight script, suggesting an important part of the site's multimedia environment was affected by the security breach"

Surely it can't be an important part, if it serves up Silverlight?

NASA licences rat-wee based astronaut sports drink

Jerome
Coat

@ Jord

"You long-tailed red-eyed furry little bastards."

Sorry, but you were asking for that.

Jerome

@ Seanmon

Sure, if by "purified and regulated" you mean pumped full of so much damn chlorine that it tastes like drinking a swimming pool.

Wolfram Alpha to venture beyond boron nucleus

Jerome

@ Nate

Judging by how expertly you spell icanhazcheezburger, I can only assume you spend a fair amount of time there yourself. I've never heard of it myself, of course.

12 of the best... mice

Jerome

@ Haku

You can tell when you've moved your scroll-wheel by whether the window has scrolled. Give me a scroll-wheel without notches any day, but only if it has the same granularity of movement as the mouse's movement sensor itself.

I've never understood why we can have ultra-sensitive 3000 DPI sensors for moving the cursor around, but when it comes to scrolling we're only allowed about 10 DPI (i.e. 10 notches per inch of revolution, if you're lucky).

Jerome

The best?

One mouse and eleven gimmicks? Shame, I could do with a new mouse, and a nice roundup comparing offerings from Logitech, Microsoft, Razer et al would have been very welcome. It's so hard to find a mouse with decent ergonomics, a click wheel that works properly and a good selection of well-placed extra buttons.

Acer Aspire One D250

Jerome

And the advantage is...

I've read through the whole review, and I'm struggling to work out where they've improved this over the original AA1. The accessibility of the HD and RAM could come in handy for some I guess. They've shaved a whole 0.14 inches off the height, so it's hardly supermodel skinny.

Spectral Spector Twitterer admits hoax

Jerome

What next, genius?

So, what does Twitter need to start doing to combat fake accounts, Mr. Anonymous-Spector-Impersonator? Visit every new sign up in person, to check they are who they claim to be? What if my name happened to be Gordon Brown (hardly an uncommon moniker) and I signed up before my less fortunate namesake had the chance? Am I then also an imposter, for daring to share a name with the most tediously-appellated politician this century?

It's a shame, I thought Wilson the cockroach was a real nice touch, but I guess this guy isn't quite as clever as he seemed.

Boffins create super flies that need almost no sleep

Jerome
Boffin

Drug addiction?

"Overall, the flies are able to perform better than they should, given how much sleep they miss," says Shaw's fellow fly-breeder Laurent Seugnet. "That makes it tempting to speculate that insomnia is like drug addiction."

Does this mean that drug addiction allows one to perform better than expected? Is this particular boffin implying that I should go out and smoke some crack in order to improve my performance at work?

Microsoft to talk Sun-cloud interoperability

Jerome

Microsoft worried?

I guess Microsoft must be more worried about Google's AppEngine than might have been expected. Admittedly Google beat them to market, and AppEngine is potentially a really nice product, but it is somewhat esoteric and immature at this stage. If Azure delivers even a fraction of what it claims to offer in a stable fashion (which I'm not claiming it will) it's pretty clear that the majority of people will flock to that over AppEngine.

Sony X-Series Walkman

Jerome

Headphone socket

"performed sterling work in developing sound quality and user friendliness in media playing mobile phones"

If they'd done such sterling work, they might have noticed the invention of something called a "headphone socket". It's an exceedingly useful thing to have on any device that claims to play music. It's annoying enough that the other phone manufacturers miss it out, but for a so-called "Walkman phone" to suffer from this defect is laughably poor.

Still, they wouldn't want to make their phones any real use for music, or they wouldn't stand a chance of selling devices like this one.

Google nukes Norks

Jerome
Thumb Down

@ James Dunmore

You know, if you spelt "ronery" right you wouldn't have to point out that it was supposed to be a Team America reference.

Sony Ericsson rolls out Wii-style gaming phone

Jerome

Headphones

"All the standard music features..."

Oh, that would include a standard 3.5mm headphone socket then? You really can't get much more of a standard music feature than the ability to plug in a pair of headphones

iPhone apps - the 10 smartest and the 10 stupidest

Jerome
Heart

The Shaggs

Thanks for that. If I learnt nothing else of use from this article (and I didn't) at least I discovered the existence of The Shaggs. In the words of Dot herself: -

"I have started a song about Pain inspired from knee pain but will probably be turned into a love song."

Respect.

Philips Streamium NP2900

Jerome

It's a start

I can't imagine that little thing "filling a room with sound". Why don't they sell a cheaper version without the toy speakers? Also, unless the "L/R stereo analogue phono input sockets" which the review mentions are actually output sockets, I can't see how the device "covers most users' connectivity needs".

It's nice to see more devices like this starting to appear though. There's been a woeful lack of choice in this area, which is odd since I'd imagine a huge number of music fans would jump at a device like this, if they only knew they needed it.

Amazon joins with TuneCore for on-demand CD pressing

Jerome
Stop

Pressing?

The use of the word "pressing" here is misleading. It implies that these disks will be made using the same process as a CD you could buy in the shops. Just producing the glass master for this process costs four or five times the quoted $31. Unless Amazon has suddenly become a charity for supporting indie musicians, these disks will just be burned to CDR, before being nicely printed so as to look as close to the real thing as possible.

BitDefender launches 'suck it and see' free anti-virus scanner

Jerome

Been around for ages

Lionel is quite right, I too have been using BitDefender free version for years. Just recently it decided to stop working and insisted I download this newer version. Now I get a nice annoying splash screen every time I boot up my PC, telling me how unsafe I am unless I hand over the dosh for the full version. Perhaps this "news story" (i.e. press release) would have been better titled "BitDefender makes their free anti-virus scanner more annoying"?

Adobe convenes 'Come to Jesus' meeting for buggy Reader app

Jerome
Thumb Down

Too little, too late

"the software maker outlined new initiatives designed to reduce the threats faced by users of its ubiquitous Reader and Acrobat applications"

I think this is known as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Allow me to outline a new initiative of my own that I've been undertaking: removing Acrobat Reader and replacing it with a less bloated, more open, more secure alternative.

It's pretty eye-opening stuff. I can actually read PDFs on a web page now, instead of having to save them to disk first, or risk Acrobat bringing down the whole browser. Isn't modern technology marvellous?

Apple touts tips to sidestep iPod earphone electric shocks

Jerome
Dead Vulture

To remove or not to remove?

In the unlikely event that anyone is taking any of this BS seriously, I ought to point out that the El Reg article advises removing your iPod from your pocket frequently, whereas the Apple page states that you should avoid doing so. As if it's going to make a blind bit of difference either way.

Patches bring zero-day relief from PDF and PowerPoint flaws

Jerome
Thumb Down

Nice timing

I was bitten by this Adobe vulnerability earlier this week. It's the first time a virus has gotten onto my computer in a decade. I have uninstalled Acrobat Reader and replaced it with Foxit. No Adobe product shall ever taint my PC again.

Facebook denies denying Holocaust deniers

Jerome

@ greg

"The right to free speech is forfeit when whatever you're talking about is clearly a blatant lie"

Ah, but you're wrong. That means what you are saying is a lie. Therefore you've forfeited your right to say it. Do you see the problem yet?

Duke Nukem Forever developer defunct, says staffer

Jerome

13 years of playing with the king, baby

"many more one-time Duke players have long since moved on to other titles, other platforms"

No shit. It would be kind of odd if anyone had been playing nothing but Duke exclusively for the past 13 years.

An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++

Jerome

@ Rock Lobster

Imagine the entire comments section buried in such a mire of postmodern meta-irony that no-one can tell what's going on, or indeed even recall what the original article was about.

Missile data, medical records found on discarded hard disks

Jerome

@ A J Stiles

That seems like an odd idea for a law to me. How can I fail to act upon something once I know it, and how can the prosecution ever prove that I wouldn't have acted in that way regardless?

It's like your speed trap example. If I'm nicked for speeding, can I use this in my defence? "Sorry m'lud, it would have been illegal for me to act upon the information I had received, so I had no choice but to continue travelling at 90MPH for the remainder of the journey."

Conservative US shock-jock to sue Wacky Jacqui

Jerome

How did it come to this?

Moronic hatemonger banned by lunatic witch - it would all be vaguely amusing had these two clowns not somehow become a prominent celebrity and home secretary of the UK respectively. Much though the world would be a better place without the likes of Savage, it seems he's right for once. Trust our very own Wacky Jacqui to outdo such a worthless specimen of humanity in the idiocy stakes.

Google patent feeds ebook 'monopoly' infrared 3D

Jerome

Depressing

It seems Google are the only people with the money, the knowledge and the will to carry this out. If a sufficient proportion of the world's population cared about such projects, we'd happily pay for them to be carried out in an open manner, with the end result freely available to all.

Sadly we seem to have better things to do with our money, like giving it to the bankers so they can burn it. Best of luck to Google, we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that they don't do anything too evil with their monopoly.

Trade in secondhand BlackBerries booming in Nigeria

Jerome

Airports

Airports auction off lost memory sticks with the data intact? I suppose you could argue that people shouldn't lose their stuff in the first place, and we all know that airports aren't famed for safeguarding people's property, but this seems beyond the pale.

Acer 11.6in notebook-not-netbook demo'd on camera

Jerome
Thumb Down

Good work Acer

So to sum up, it's like an Aspire One but less portable, and twice the price? To be fair, at least they've upped the battery life, and I guess this could be some people's dream machine. Personally, if they want me to part with my Aspire One (and my hard-earned cash) they'll have to offer me something at least as portable, preferably more so.

Virgin wi-fi rolls up two years late

Jerome
Thumb Down

3G

"with 3G coverage and data tariffs improving daily, the service could find itself redundant before the technology does."

Yeah, improving daily - they could hardly get any worse. I've yet to get a signal at all with my Virgin 3G modem on a Virgin train, except for the couple of minute while it's pulled into a station. At least that's long enough to open a few pages in FF tabs, but that's hardly what I signed up to so-called "mobile broadband" for.

Will Virgin Mobile customers get wifi access on Virgin trains too I wonder? It might be the only way I can contact the outside world, I certainly never get mobile coverage on Virgin, while everyone around me is chattering loudly into their phones.

Privacy notices work best in tables, says US gov research

Jerome

Astonishing

I think you've hit the nail on the head there david. If only the researchers had presented their findings in a table, they might have been easier to understand.

Boffins pump out pop-up touchscreen

Jerome
Thumb Down

Dynamically Changeable?

Sure as hell doesn't look like it.

Samsung unveils first Android handset

Jerome

Features

"However, you’ll also be able to record videos... and listen to several audio formats"

Implying that these features are somehow out of the ordinary for any handset produced in the last few years?

Western demand for netbooks in decline?

Jerome
Stop

Everyone's got one already

If everyone's has one, why should they buy another one? Especially when the innovation in the latest crop of netbooks seems to consist of making them bigger (and hence less portable) and more expensive.

Once the whole "bundling with an overpriced contract" thing is well underway, people will suddenly realise they urgently need a new netbook every year or so, because the last one is the wrong colour.

HTC Touch Diamond 2

Jerome
Heart

Help! I'm being oppressed!

Hey guys. Just out of curiosity, was my earlier comment ignored because you're tired of my constant moaning about the lack of true convergence in mobile devices, or have HTC slipped you a few beer vouchers to keep whingers like me quiet?

Jerome

In short...

"In short, it's a great little do-it-all handset"

Excuse me? The camera sounds utterly useless. 7 seconds to take a photo? That's worse than a Samsung! It doesn't have a headphone socket, so it sure as hell isn't a music player. In all, that's not what I'd call a "do-it-all handset". I should know, I've been waiting for someone to build one for five years now.

Apple double takes on shaken babies

Jerome
Alert

Shaking?

Whilst I've never seen the app in question (something it seems I have in common with every commenter on this page, and also Mr. Ray) are you sure you're not supposed to gently rock the baby / telephonic device until it stops crying?

Hefty IT prof develops robot to check that robots are safe

Jerome
Boffin

Turing award?

Doesn't that mean that this particular boffin can't be told apart from an ordinary human being during conversation? High praise indeed for any academic.

iPhone beta OS cracks before release

Jerome
Stop

Banned

"The fact that such developers are banned by contract from working on jailbreaking software makes the swift crack all the more remarkable."

It does? I'm no expert on the jailbreaking scene, but do these guys normally release their hacks under their real name? You know, the same name they signed on the dotted line when they promised Mr. Jobs they'd be a good boy, and only do the things with their hardware which he wanted?

LG Germany cock-up uncovers Viewty successor

Jerome

New name

I'm going for "Kiewty".

Virgin Media switches to Gmail

Jerome

@ Blasmeme

You have the wrong end of the stick. Gmail can be accessed via IMAP or POP3, just like your Virgin email account. Set up Outlook / Thunderbird / your email client of choice to access it and you'll not even notice the difference. You don't even have to put up with any advertising.

Having said that, how much longer can Google continue to provide this service for free? I'm sure it doesn't cost them much per customer, but with world & dog using Gmail these days there must be a huge amount of server resources dedicated to it. The people accessing it solely through a proper email client avoid any advertising, thus removing Google's main revenue source. I'd be surprised if Virgin were paying Google much for the privilege of using their free email service.

Toshiba secretly working on TG02 and TG03?

Jerome
Boffin

Surround sound

It's interesting how the TG03 seems to have 5.1 surround sound built-in. I'll be very intrigued to see how they build the rear speakers into the handset... not to mention the sub.

Google money machine defies common sense

Jerome
Happy

Who?

On the plus side, who could possible take any company seriously with a name as imbecilic as AdGooRoo?

MPs battle to save great British pub

Jerome
Stop

Hypocrisy alert

They want to trust responsible adults to make informed choices - sounds good. They want to end the irresponsible promotion of alcohol too. Is that because adults can't be trusted to make informed choices? Or does it perhaps have more to do with supermarket offers cutting into pub profits?

Next-gen iPhone to sport 3.2Mp camera?

Jerome
Thumb Up

Let's hope...

Let's also hope that the devices can pull off the amazingly advanced tricks of flashing a big light at the same time as taking a picture, and recording multiple pictures in a row to stitch together into a thing I like to call "video". Then I might finally be able to get my hands on some of that lovely Apple interface goodness, without stepping back in time 5 years hardware-wise.

Radiohead and chums demand copyright 'fair play'

Jerome
Pirate

@ Lloyd Patton

What on earth gave you the impression that Radiohead are freetards? Was it their publicity-grabbing "pay what you like" stunt with In Rainbows? The one where people who actually paid ended up with crappy low-bitrate MP3 copies of the songs and no album artwork? The one where Thom Yorke said afterwards that they'll all be buying the "real" album anyway, since people don't want downloads? Or perhaps it's their website, with its anti-capitalist rants, where they sell T-shirts for £18 a pop?

Microsoft's latest open-source release catches a wrinkle

Jerome
Stop

Calm down

Look, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but there's nothing evil about the MS-PL. It's recognised as a free software license by both the OSI and the FSF. Sure, it ain't BSD, and it's not like Microsoft are suddenly the good guys, but we should be careful to criticise them for the right reasons.

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