Huh?
Doesn't the driver's door require the key to be inserted for it to lock? Has on every single car I've ever owned.
Then again, I don't drive cars people would want to steal. I'm more likely to have things placed in the car out of sympathy!
Posts by The BigYin
3080 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2008
Page:
Thieves jam key-fob lock signals in mystery car thefts
iPhone mules are taking our handsets, damnit!
Tuesday 21st September 2010 12:09 GMT
Free trade...
...until the EU make it illegal (again). When a company causes a price disparity (either through malice, collusion or ineptitude) a free market will self-correct to a large extent. This story (if tru; it's the Mail FFS) is simply an example of that happening.
It doesn't always happen in reverse though, sometimes the people who are meant to protect free trade and an open market (e.g. the EU) are to kill it off. This is why you can't buy cheap Levi's, CDs, DVDs etc from outside the EU anyone. The government has decided the free market is no longer in your interest.
Back-to-college 15in Notebooks
Tuesday 21st September 2010 10:40 GMT
Can I read that as...
...'Windows 7 is an OS for laptops, other choices would be available if there wasn't so much abuse of market position'?
Many think it is harder to find a laptop without Windows even though it isn't and there is an increasing choice (e.g. FrostBite, System76) and even OS-free (e.g. Novatech). So how about the Novatech Xplora for £280? That's at least half the price of the cheapest reviewed here and would save the starving students quite a bit if they can click a few buttons to drop a OS on it.
Hmm...y'know - that might make an interesting review, choices from left-field or something. Some will probably suck butt, but there might be a nice surprise. Can't be any worse than that Dell... :o)
Monday 20th September 2010 16:14 GMT 
OS of choice?
"Windows 7 is the OS of choice for any new laptop."
Is it? Really? How myopically blinkered of you. It might be the only optional easily available at many locations due to monopolistic abuses, I'll grant you that much; but it's not the only choice and certainly not the OS of choice in many cases.
Morgan Chase blames Oracle for online bank crash
4chan launches DDoS against entertainment industry
Monday 20th September 2010 12:47 GMT 
How long before...
...some of these 4channers find themselves before the beak? The MAFIAA bending/breaking the law is "Ok" (they can afford to manipulate the democratic process; e.g. ACTA), but when citizens feel they have to take the law into their own hands due to abject failure of their governments, then that is just wrong and you can be sure that the MAFIAA will be pressing their case for prosecutions.
I do not agree with depriving content creators (i.e. "the talent") of their fair wage, but anyone who thinks that the RIAA, MPAA, BPI etc protect the content creators is a blithering idiot. Many creators get little more than a pittance from the studios who hide behind the MAFIAA, to the point where the content creator has to sue in order to be paid. What does the MAFIAA do about this abuse of the content creators? Sod all. They'd much rather fight an impossible battle against geeks with entirely too much time on their hands.
Screwing the public and shafting the content creator is a dead business model when the content creator can (pretty much) go direct to the consumer. At least it would be on an open and free internet, which is why the MAFIAA et al cannot allow that to happen (hence why ACTA is coming).
Surprise Automotive X Prize winners announced
Monday 20th September 2010 09:01 GMT
100mpg?
This is a UK site featuring a USA story - so is the MPG in Imperial or in English? Why not quote figures in metric anyway, this is the 21st century you know and it saves the confusion caused by historic measuring systems. I guess they're asking the vehicle to do about 2.35 litres/100km.
Anhyoo - have they not heard of the Honda C90? It's been doing economy of that level for years! Why do people need a car when there is usually only one person in it?
Project Canvas becomes YouView
IE9 strips to win Chrome fans
Thursday 16th September 2010 09:12 GMT 
Disappointed
I got so excited about the new, faster, stripped-down IE9 as a replacement for Chrome that I downloaded it and could hardly contain myself. Imagine my disappointment when it wouldn't install on Ubuntu, Fedora or OS X!
Well it just the beta, so I hopefully MS will make the other platform installs available on release day.
Microsoft: IE9 will never run on Windows XP
Thursday 16th September 2010 09:17 GMT 
Oh well...
...one more reason to ditch MS then. Plus ca change.
As for the "great job" they're doing on Windows 7, could they please explain why Windows 7 runs slower for me than XP ever did? Can they also explain why it takes Windows 7 longer to log in than it does for Lucid (on much older hardware) to wake from a cold boot and let me get going?
And is it just me, or does the phrase "It's now like a website running outside of the browser" in reference to Windows give anyone else the screaming heebie-jeebies?
Dell comes clean on open source
Veteran spam suit troll plaintiff calls it quits
Tuesday 14th September 2010 09:09 GMT
They may be a troll...
...but they're my kind of troll. I waste more time than enough telling companies again and again that I do not want adverts (any media) for their crap. That's despite telling them at the time of original purchase/contract I don't want any garbage posted/e-mailed.
And the thing that really irks is that every time you contact them they presume that you want to get their crap and have to jump through hoops to (unsuccessfully in many cases) prevent the deluge.
For spammers (and marketeers in general) no punishment is too harsh in my book.
Mozilla chucks Roc at Microsoft's new hardness
Burglars used social network status updates to select victims
Tuesday 14th September 2010 00:03 GMT 
New "Adventure Staycation"?
Post on "FB: I am sad! Just got a new 3D TV system and full home theatre, but have to go away for a week. Haven't even managed to get them out of the boxes!"
Then hide in the under-stairs cupboard armed to the teeth and wait to be "burgled".
Cheap and low-carbon!
(Don't actually try this at home kids)
Pandora tops 1000 boxes
2 CPUS 1 CUPP
Monday 13th September 2010 12:39 GMT 
I fixed it for you
"You can run the PC in two modes, opting for ARM and Ubuntu for low power and long battery life, and Intel /Windows 7 mode for high performance"
should read
"You can run the PC in two modes, opting for ARM and Ubuntu for low power and long battery life, and Intel /Windows 7 mode for viruses and other malware"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/malware_threat_lanscape/
Cinema chain bans laptops, tablets
Friday 10th September 2010 11:42 GMT
Get a grip
It's not taking the equipment in that's the problem, it's the use of it. It should be easy for the ushers to spot someone actually using said kit have have them dealt with.
An last time I checked, we all have audio-visual recoding equipment hard-wired to our organic control units (full 3D too!). Are we all now banned from Vue cinemas?
Email worm wants to party like it's 1999 (almost)
Friday 10th September 2010 09:14 GMT
Autorun?
Am I the only one that disables that as pretty much the first thing on a new Windows install? Mount the device, sure; but don't do anything else. Don't even bring up an irritating dialog asking me what I want to launch it with, or a file browser or anything. Just mount the sucker and be done with it.
Microsoft to embrace and extend HTML 5?
Thursday 9th September 2010 17:56 GMT
And you also miss the point
Flash is at least fully cross-platform (slow, bloated and a security threat I grant you; but fully cross-platform nonetheless). Silverlight is not, so shrinkage of OS share is *very much* the point when it comes to such technology. Why base a site on it when a reducing portion of customer can access it with that tech?
As for the in-fighting, if you draw up a list of the company reps throwing a strop and blocking progress and a list of companies bringing out their own proprietary tech to "fix the standards lagging" issues; you will find you have two *very* similar lists. These bully-boy tactics are also affected by OS shrinkage.
Thursday 9th September 2010 13:22 GMT
In ten years...
...I hope that Windows share has dropped far enough the proprietary crap like Silverlight is simply not viable. MS is nowhere in the mobile market and that can only be a good thing for standards plus the industry as a whole.
And speaking as a developer, IE (all variants) does my box in. IE9 is the least bad, but it's still bad.
Police, ACPO, public set to clash on filming rights
Microsoft wins court order crushing mighty spam botnet
Thursday 9th September 2010 10:05 GMT
That's one for the list!
Good things MS has done:
1. Jiggered Waledac
2. "Freecell"
3. Err...that's it I think
As for disinfecting...perhaps if Windows wasn't the Swiss cheese of OSs it wouldn't have been so easy for the black hats to crack it in the first place. The Windows paradigm is to run as Admin so one can get things done, Win7 has addressed this to a small extent but it still looks like a kindergarten attempt when compare to more mature and capable OSs.
Although one does wonder why MS had to make these moves (or are they indirectly admitting their OS is insecure?), what the heck are ISPs doing? Why are they continuing to fail (bar Cox it seems) to detect and isolate infected client systems (be they home PCs or servers)? Or to report infected PCs/servers to fellow ISPs and then block those ISPs if they do not take action? Surely protecting their primary asset (network bandwidth) is in the interest of ISPs?
McKinnon family welcomes extradition treaty review
Thursday 9th September 2010 09:36 GMT
One sided is right
Whilst the USofA has ratified the treaty, the level of proof they need to grab anyone from the UK is non-existent whilst the UK must prove it has a case in a USofA court before any extradition, It is high-time our "ally" stopped treating us like the enemy and dealt with us on a fair basis.
What McKinnon is was wrong, no doubt on that, but he only managed it because in the 15-odd years the USofA has had to increase security since Clifford Stoll raised the alarm, they have done jack-shit.
We should, in this instance, try McKinnon in the UK, punish him here (if the cased is proven) and tell the USofA to shove it. Of course, maybe the USofA will just "extract" him covertly - they have form for not caring on the legalities of foreign countries or individual freedoms.
Adobe Reader 0day under active attack
Thursday 9th September 2010 09:16 GMT
Simple answer
Hmm...why not run a Linux distro as a host OS and have it fire up a VM on power on? The VM can be Windows, and hold Adobe Reader etc, with all files held on shared folders (either managed by the host Linux OS or up on a server). End users won't notice any difference (the only clue to them might be a change in what they see during boot) and "machines" can be easily reverted to a clean base-state should they become infected.
Interesting that all OSs seem to be vulnerable - why the hell does a PDF need JS anyway?
Brits don't want in-flight calling
Wednesday 8th September 2010 16:12 GMT
Flying calls?
If one's staff are so inept that they can't cope for the few hours while one is out of contact due to a flight, then one has hired the wrong people or failed to train them adequately. What do they do when one is asleep? Or on holiday? Or ill?
And if the answer is "Well, I'm big and important and I am the only one who can make decisions. Plus it makes me look big and important to the plebians." then...[slow clap] you have just gone and made yourself a single point of failure. Way to go.
We don't need "always on", all we need is a little bit of fore-thought. Proactive, not reactive.
'Copyright troll' seeks $150,000 from republican candidate
Wednesday 8th September 2010 09:21 GMT
Hear, hear
The more people who set/support these crazy laws (or the crazy abuses of the law) who get it in the neck, the better. Hopefully we'll see some changes.
However, I do wonder about the legality of this. Surely the first question from the court will be "Did you give the defendant an opportunity to rectify?" hopefully followed by "No? Kindly bugger off then."
Open source's ardent admirers take but don't give
Rise in Latvian botnets prompts Spamhaus row
Northern Ireland gets upgraded spycams
Thursday 12th August 2010 09:34 GMT
Not just in N.I.
Before they got booted out for being inept (allowing in a coalition of ineptitude) Labour policy was total observation. This is why they began rolling out ANPR all over the south of England. So recording the movement of mostly innocent people in N.I. is just brining them into line with the British values.
Labour may be out of power for now, but you must still obey the machine they put in place.
Conroy, Family First isolated on Oz internet filter
Wednesday 11th August 2010 17:20 GMT
If I had kids old enough...
...I'd give them a restricted account, only sites/services on white-lists allowed. As they get older and smarter, they will work out how to by-pass the security. By they time they can get all the pr0n they want, I'd expect them to be old enough to cope with it.
(I only ask to be in the room when they stumble across 2-girls-1-cup for the first time. Evil? Me?)
Wednesday 11th August 2010 17:20 GMT
Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.
"Labor, they claimed, had comprehensively failed to deliver on cybersafety policies for children"
That pisses me right off, it really does and I'm not even Australian. We see the same thing here. "The Government MUST protect the children!" blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Last time I checked it was the responsibility of the *PARENT* to protect their children! Do they let their children play with guns? On the motorway? Drink bleach? No! So why when it comes to the 'net to they want to divest responsibility to the government?
And what will happen to children on the net?
A few will be predated on and that's not a good thing to have happening, but it happens all the time (relatives/family-friends are the worst - ease of access). Do parents expect the state to mind-scan Uncle Joe when he pops round for tea? So why demand the near-equivalent when their kids go on-line? We are talking about people savvy enough to realise that there is some level of threat on the net. If they are smart enough to work that out, they are smart enough to apply their own content filtering (plus firewalls etc). And if they are not smart enough to do that, they should not let their sodding kids on-line!
But for most, by and large nothing untoward will happen. Apart from the fact they will realise 99.99% of decent, 99.99% are honest. 99.99% of people want the same things they do. Oh, and 99.99% of people are seriously pissed of with the increasingly dictatorial nature of supposed democratic governments.
Deviant Google Android probes Linux kernel re-entry
Anti-virus defences even shakier than feared
Tuesday 10th August 2010 15:54 GMT
@Bollocks
So if a local admin account is logged in and walks away without locking the PC, then any moron can just click "OK" and do what they want? FFS. It's still crap!
*ALWAYS* challenge. Or store a time-limited permission or something. But *DO NOT* assume that just because the logged in account is "AdminBill" that the primate bashing the keys is also "AdminBill".
I do wish people would think through basic security before commenting.
Malware gang steal over £700K from one British bank
Turkish groom accidentally sprays wedding guests with bullets
Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance
Friday 6th August 2010 09:34 GMT
Err...Sean
You do know you are using a Unix OS on your Mac, yeah? And be thankful to sweet zombie jeebus that you are!
As for flint axes...they (well, bladed weapons in general) score over more modern equivalents in many ways. 1. They are cheap. 2. They are silent. 3. They don't need reloading. 4. One can draw a knife and complete an attack faster than one can use a gun (just ask the Thai army...).
Unix may be old, but that does not make unfit for purpose. In fact, one could take the view that Unix (and Unix-a-likes to an extent) have most of their mistakes in the past.
IE9's Acid, speed and HTML5 trip to land lost surfers
Friday 6th August 2010 09:33 GMT
Just a guess...
...but maybe IE9 vs FF3.6 isn't considered "fair" and they're waiting for FF4? I really don't know though.
I did the tests last nigh on FF 3.6 running on MS's end-user OS (Windows XP) and some worked (slowly) others didn't (e.g. "Space Invader"). Here's the thing, you can get FF for FREE! You could test and publish your own results! You'd need to test IE9, Safari and Opera on the same hardware for a fair comparison though.
As for "it can [optimise] everything for Windows", I really don't care. Windows is becoming increasingly irrelevant by the day.
Thursday 5th August 2010 23:25 GMT
95%?
It does not get 95% The 95/100 isn't the "score". I realise that "The Register" is not pitching itself to be the IT equivalent of "Nature" but really... ...there are something simple things that the authors should *know* and to be able to explain correctly to readers.
When writing a price of browsers, the author should actually have a clue what ACID3 is and how it is measured.
Microsoft dry-cleans browser trousers ready for IE 9 beta
UK ICT classes killing kids' interest in tech
Thursday 5th August 2010 13:10 GMT
Word processing...
...is to computing as cooking is to chemistry. They are both vital skills, but it is important not to confuse the two.
"Hard" subjects (mathematics, all sciences etc) have been in decline in Britain for years, while or competitor nations (India et al) invest heavily in such subjects. We are already paying for that failure with lower investment and a lack of innovation.
I did the GCSE back when a Master 128 was a shit-hot beast. We never did mail-merge or anything (I have no idea how to do it today, but I have a fair idea of how computers work and how to read the chuffin' manual!), we had to write our own applications in BBC BASIC (I did a very small amount of assembler). Then again, we weren't allowed calculators in maths classes either.
And we were told back than that the GCSEs were too easy!
Google boss turns Wave demise into success of sorts
Thursday 5th August 2010 12:41 GMT
Exabytes
"There was five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,"
Probably. And most of that data was unique and precious. Today we get 4.99 exabytes of regurgitated, manipulated, distorted and duplicated vacuous bullcrap (this post adding to that total) every two days!
There is probably more value in one essay from Aristotle than there is in the sum total of most blogs that are spewed forth every day.
Apathy kills Google's new-age Wave
Thursday 5th August 2010 10:26 GMT
It was interesting...
...it just didn't solve comms problem any better than anything else. And some of the features just sucked donkey ball (showing people what you type, as you type? Pun-leeze).
It was newsgroups for Web 2.0 and it managed to not be as good as newsgroups.
Oh, and not havig stand-along apps was a fail. I don't want my comms in a browser, I want them integrated to my device/desktop.
I am sure that we'll see components/ideas in other offerings despite it's problems.
Want to solve my comms problems? Give me voice, video, instant messaging and email; all integrated. Encrypted, based on Open Standards and working seamlessly with MS Office (no matter how good OpenOffice is (and it is pretty good, i use it at home) it does not format/render documents etc *identically* to MS Office and some of us have to use it....grr...).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
