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* Posts by Anonymous IV

781 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011

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Boffins build gesture recognition using WiFi

Anonymous IV
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Why would one ever want to do this?

We have enough annoyance leaping up and down to trigger the motion-activated lights when it's dark at work.

"Gesture recognition using WiFi" looks too much like a solution looking for a problem.

[/luddite]

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Dell bucks PC market tumble with Haswell business systems

Anonymous IV
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Re: How many articles is that on Dell now?

I like to know which Optiplexes I'll be buying second-hand for work, in about three years' time.

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WD's new disk-flogging brainwave will bring you close to tiers

Anonymous IV
Joke

Compulsory joke

I knew it would all end in tiers.

Ba-boom, Tish!

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BBC suspends CTO after £100m is wasted on doomed IT system

Anonymous IV

DAB

Let's hope the DG now has a look into DAB, and bins it for a better alternative.

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Cook: Apple has 'no current plan' to pull profits out of Ireland

Anonymous IV
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Re: Slackers in the US

@Schultz

I think the two AC posts which follow yours seem to support the contention that Americans do not understand irony...

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The iWatch is coming! The iWatch is coming!

Anonymous IV
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Re: display smaller than a smartphone is going to struggle to display ... with any degree ...

Well, it is lousy - and in spite of this it caught on.

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'WikiLeaks of financial data' prompts worldwide hunt for tax evaders

Anonymous IV

Easier

Presumably it's far easier to go after individuals whose tax affairs are, shall we say, slightly suspect than to go after large corporations with lots of accountants and lawyers which help the corporations to pay minimal amounts of tax...

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Adobe price hike: Your money or your files, frappuccino sippers

Anonymous IV

"Can Adobe justify shifting its Creative Suite to a contentious new licensing model?2

Trivial.

Will it make more money for Adobe?

If answer is Yes, then it's justified.

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On the hunt for a new ampere

Anonymous IV

@Andrew Jones 2

"The speed and distance signs in the UK are what they are because it would simply cost far too much to change them..."

Well, they did it in Eire!

"Distance signs had displayed kilometres since the 1990s but road speed limits were in miles per hour until January 2005, when they were finally changed to kilometres per hour. "

I suppose your logic would argue that changing the road signs was the direct cause of the financial crisis in Eire?

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Research explodes myth that older programmers are obsolete

Anonymous IV
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Re: Speaking as a consultant ...

I would be rather worried if asked about RS232 in a job interview, much as I would be surprised to be asked about CP/M. Surely relevant technology is a far better area for questions?

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Continued lack of women in tech bemoaned by ex-techie lady MP

Anonymous IV
Headmaster

Getting the gender terminology correct

In the same way as we have a gender distinction between blond and blonde, would IT be more inviting to women if they could be called a nerde or a geeke?

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New Google Play terms ban non-store app updates

Anonymous IV
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Re: Facebook is evil

@IGnatius T Foobar "Facebook is evil. Therefore, whatever is bad for Facebook is good for everyone else. I support Google's efforts."

Aren't you being a bit binary? You have ignored the possibility of them both being evil...

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Anonymous IV
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Re: Disagreement is good, if you have some basis for it

Possibly people were downvoting Shannon Jacobs for putting "passed master" instead of "past master"?

Stroppy persons really need to minimise grammar, spelling and homophone errors in their posts!

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Reddit: So very sorry for naming innocent man as Boston bomber

Anonymous IV
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Re: Call me sceptical if you will, but...

So what happened to "where there's blame, there's a claim"?

Get a move on, you lawyers - there's an ambulance that needs chasing!

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DDOS strikes BitCoin exchange Mt.Gox

Anonymous IV
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Re: Qui bono ?

If someone is going to quote a Latin tag then they should spell it correctly - here Cui bono...

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Are you being robbed of sleep by badly designed servers?

Anonymous IV
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Re: diurnal cycle

I think the medical name for what you're suffering from is "teenage"...

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It's official! Register hack is an alcohol-flushed cave dweller

Anonymous IV
Holmes

Repeatable?

One assumes that you've done the test twice, with different names and postal addresses and other details?

Let us know the comparative results!

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Manual override: Raspberry Pi beginners' books

Anonymous IV
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Re: Heh

Right now my RasPI runs:

root@rpi / # uname -a

NetBSD rpi 6.99.19 NetBSD 6.99.19 (RPI) #4: Sat Apr 6 13:27:49 BST 2013 sysbuild@....:/home/sysbuild/Sysbuild/evbarm/obj/home/sysbuild/src/sys/arch/evbarm/compile/RPI evbarm

which I cross-compiled myself; presently it is slaving over pkgsrc compilations:

root@rpi / # pkg_info | wc -l

115

(doing some Common Lisp ATM...).

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why most people prefer to run Windows...

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Win a Nexus 7 with reed.co.uk and El Reg

Anonymous IV
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Re: Job title

Reed isn't asking you where your current job is located!

I understand from an insider that the alleged BBC job title from many years ago:

Engineering Information and Electrical Installation Officer

never existed.

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Anonymous IV

Job title

I was thinking of applying, having filched the South Parks Studio job title:

E-mail, Internet and Electronic Information Officer.

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Logitech launches MEGA-PRICEY 15-in-1 remote

Anonymous IV
FAIL

Who are they kidding?

A remote control for the price of a small TV.

Or perhaps you can save money by watching TV programmes on the remote control's screen?

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Sophos picks up axe again, 'plans to DECIMATE staff'

Anonymous IV
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Unhappy

Re: Decimated? Decimated!?

@Androgynous Cupboard

There is a pandemic of inappropriate word usage which greatly pains the pedants among us (but we are not outraged). However I fear the correct use of 'decimated' is a lost cause.

Sorry that you didn't get "its" right, though...

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Rotten spam causing more infections than ever – study

Anonymous IV
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Re: I may be downvoted, but...

I usually complain about the insularity of Americans, but surely the suggestion that "no driver should be allowed to do their driving test in a car with automatic transmission" reinvents the Luddite?

In the US you'd have a hard job actually finding a car with manual transmission, unless it's a sports car imported from Europe.

And if the statement "we have automated spam filtering to the point where they protect even the more stupid of us to a relatively good degree" were true, then surely the spammers would have given up in disgust by now?

It would be unkind to downvote you...

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Finance bods probe RBS over bank-crippling IT cock-up

Anonymous IV
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Re: Not outsourced

"No wonder you never got promoted to management!"

The correct word should be "demoted"...

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Malware-flingers target gullible corporate bods with office printer spam

Anonymous IV
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Happy

Re: Hmmmm....

So it is not just the circumstances which are extenuating?!

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World's first petaflops super dumped on scrap heap

Anonymous IV
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Joke

Re: Just checking in

"Crysis? What's Crysis?"

(apologies to James Callaghan, or, more accurately, The Sun's deliberate misreporting of what he said...)

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Rubbish IT means DEATH for UK Border Agency, announces May

Anonymous IV
Alert

Ooh goody!

Another opportunity to see how well the government can manage a Big IT Project!

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Feds cuff ex-NASA boffin at airport amid state-secret leak scare

Anonymous IV
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"An entity of concern"

Don't you just love the straightforward and jargon-free plain English that they use?

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Yahoo! webmail! hijacks! are! back!...

Anonymous IV

Same problem as psychonaut, but only with yahoo.co.uk compromised accounts, with the person's name as the subject.

The other variant is the url, with the person's name, again, and an American-format date and time beneath.

Until the spam furore dies down I'm just quarantining *@yahoo.co.uk.

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First C compiler pops up on Github

Anonymous IV
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Re: mixing your metaphors

So no possibility that the author well knew these two metaphors, but mixed them for comedic effect?

"Metaphors be with you..."

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Torvalds asks 'Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?'

Anonymous IV
Unhappy

I've looked at the Chromebook Pixel website...

... but there's no mention of being able to wipe the hard disk and install Windows on it!

Pity - we'd have then got a Windows laptop with a decent screen resolution...

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Judge slashes Apple's pile o' cash Samsung judgment

Anonymous IV
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Re: Obligatory

"In British English the normal spelling in general contexts is judgement. However, the spelling judgment is conventional in legal contexts, and in North American English."

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/judgement?q=judgment

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Best Buy takes axe to touchy Windows 8 PCs - lops $100 off price

Anonymous IV
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@AC 14:11

Just install StartIsBack http://startisback.com/ on the WIndows 8 PC, and get all the advantages of Windows 8 with the GUI you know and love from Windows 7. (A swingeing $3 for 2 PCs.)

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BBC Vision and Audio tossed on bonfire, replaced by 'TV', 'Radio'

Anonymous IV
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Re: Helen Boaden

Ah, BBC job titles! It was alleged that in the Sixties (or thereabouts) an engineer at the BBC had managed to get himself awarded the title of Engineering Information and Electrical Installation Officer, so that he could, quite validly, answer the telephone with "EIEIO?", but checking a few years ago with someone who worked at the BBC found no trace of this.

An episode of South Parks apparently recycled the same idea with "Email, Internet, Electronic Information Officer."

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Microsoft 'touches 16k shop workers' to flog Windows 8 hard

Anonymous IV

The "ambitious" user interface design...

One presumes that in the UK, following Yes, Minister, the word that would be used instead of "ambitious" would be "courageous".

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Foxit outfoxes fiendish flaw to fix foxed-up Firefox PDF plugin

Anonymous IV
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Re: useful

Possibly Reg-ers are appalled by the default acid yellow background of Sumatra PDF?

Fix it by adding bg-color to the shortcut, as in

"C:\Program Files\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -bg-color 0xF2F8FD

(a delicate pale blue in RGB).

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Facebook testing $100 fee to mail Mark Zuckerberg

Anonymous IV
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Facepalm

Re: Cheap at..

How ironic if the maximum message length to Lord Zuckerberg was set at 140 characters...

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30 years ago, at flip of a switch, the internet as we know it WAS BORN

Anonymous IV
FAIL

No mention of token ring?

I was always told (probably by IBM customer representatives) that Token Ring was a much more efficient protocol than Ethernet. What a pity that the implementation was so awful, with clunky Media Access Units and thick coaxial cabling. Ended up rather like BetaMax vs. VHS...

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Anonymous IV
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Facepalm

Re: The Internet always existed...

"It just had zero nodes."

Hence the old joke starting: "My internet's got no nodes..."

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It must be the end of the world... El Reg man thanks commentards

Anonymous IV
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Error: no address supplied...

... to receive the mountains of goodies that grateful firms will doubtless shower upon the author, following favourable mention in El Reg...

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Hacking bazaar ExploitHub gets hacked, database leaked

Anonymous IV
Headmaster

@Adze

And to that I say "Ita, esto - quidcumque".

(Perhaps "Yeah, right - whatever...")

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Another Apple maps desert death trap down under

Anonymous IV
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Re: What's with the Apple fixation?

"The laddie doth protest too much, methinks..."

(accurately misquoted from Hamlet, Act III, scene II)

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Mother of All Whistlers: Virgin Media superhub. Listen to recordings

Anonymous IV
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Re: Maplins

So you never watched Hi-de-Hi when you were young?

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Review: Samsung Series 9 super slim notebook

Anonymous IV
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Re: 1600x900

Why not 1920x1200? Probably because the laptop screen would be enormous at current pixel densities - this is the resolution of the excellent 24" Dell U2412M monitor.

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Samsung printers have secret admin account

Anonymous IV
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It doesn't follow...

“The vendor has stated that models released after October 31, 2012 are not affected by this vulnerability.” Which will be welcome relief for those who acquired a printer in the last month."

The welcome relief will happen only when all the models released before 31 Oct 2012 have been sold - which could perhaps be anything up to a year later?

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Scoop! The inside story of the news website that saved the BBC

Anonymous IV
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Fascinating article

Bienly fait, Andrew!

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Troubled OCZ now has feds up ass with microscope

Anonymous IV
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FAIL

Re: I am no reader of this article (just passing through...)

This should not even be nominated for Headline of the Article - it is poor for several reasons:

* "feds" should have been "Feds", since there is presumably no connection with "fed up" nor with " 'fess up"

* "ass" is American usage, our AngloSaxon word is better and less easily confused with equus asinus

* a microscope would be an entirely inappropriate instrument for anal insertion - a colonoscope, sigmoidoscope or even endoscope would be of more use (trust me)

I'm happy with "Troubled OCZ", though.

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Assault on battery

Anonymous IV
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Re: Back in reality

You never thought of carrying your own set of batteries for this eventuality?

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Asus VivoBook S200 11.6in touchscreen notebook review

Anonymous IV
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Re: USB ports?

And can anyone explain why it doesn't have gigabit ethernet? How much extra would that cost?

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