Posts by Edwin

Geeks?

Funny that the touchscreen is seen as the geek feature.

Personally, I use my Sony only for books (not RSS or whatnot) and since a book will last me a few days, I don't mind hooking it up to my PC via a wire to add or remove content.

For me, it's the wirelessness that's the geek feature.

My money's on Sony. I ran into a Kindlista recently and was appalled at teh loss of real estate to the buttons, but all he could go on about was a quarter of a million books, which I believe I can beat on my PRS-500.

If only Sony can get the advertising right.

neither comprehensive nor international?

That's rich, coming from the country that wouldn't sign Kyoto.

PEBKAC

For years, we have known that compiling your own kernel is cool and results in a faster kernel.

For years, we have complained that ordinary users won't use Linux.

For years, ordinary users have feared Linux because it's not easy to install or use.

More recent distros are much more user friendly precisely because the kernel is so bloated.

So what do we want - a universal kernel that will run on pretty much anything, or some form of hideous hardware scanning autocompilers that recompile the kernel as soon as you plug in a new USB device?

It's a little like Apple's iPhone business model: it sucks, but 90% of the planet likes it, so we happy few will have to live with it.

@dunncha

"some strange Russian country that nobody has every heard off."???

http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/geography.shtml

Base stations?

Is it not possible that they see a way to compensate for the 'inevitable decline in property values' that the recession has brought the US?

More amusingly: if they're suing their local governemnt, who do they think they're hurting?

Profitards.

ASBOs

Listening to the umptieth yoof pedal by with crap music blaring from their mobe, I wonder if increasing the sound quality and the volume at the same time would change my annoyance level any.

Probably not. However, it does look like you could give it a good swing either into the middle distance or the offending twits' head, so there is that to be said for it...

Giggle

When M$ releases a new OS and a bunch of things don't work, then Windows is crap, billg/monkeyboy are the root of all evil etc etc etc

When Apple releases something new which is stupidly and confusingly named just like a previous incarnation, and a bunch of stuff doesn't work, the fanbois go on about how great it is that things do work.

I guess Jobs is better at expectation management, no?

ASEM has a point...

They've no doubt invested heavily in their product, and if it wasn't encrypted, it'd be on tpb within seconds since the hardware is probably just a flash drive...

Popsci

Don't know if it was amended, but popsci now reads 'used' at the end of the 'biggest' sentence...

Power?

Hope they bundle a power brick. I imagine the projector uses quite a lot of power...

Stick with me Sony

Saw my first Kindle on a plane a few weeks back. Nice screen, and the merkin who owned it waffled on about a quarter-of-a-million books.

Shame half the real estate is wasted on a keyboard (eBOOK - geddit?). Taking further cm2s away just reinforces my prejudice. I'll stick with Sony, thanks.

@EdwardP

The rub lies in the assumption of halfway decent defense council.

This is creepy stuff

Frequent traveller to the UK

Why don't you Brits just give it up and join Schengen?

De facto the added border controls only serve to keep twits like Geert Wilders out, but I'm sure you have worse over there as well.

Imagine - being able to fly to and from the UK without queueing for hours at immigration. Mmmmmmmmmmmm

(PS: while you're at it, adopt the euro)

Geez...

@Trygve Henriksen: of course there is. Once you have devices on teh circuit, of course, there will be some voltage there also.

The city of Delft in teh Netherlands used to have no neutral - just 2 lives out of phase. Ask them how well that worked (rolls eyes)

I like the idea, but why don't you brits just adopt the plug standard northern europe uses? A double-insulated device like a laptop PC shouldn't need a ground pin, so you could then use the nice, small europlug standard. Which is also less than 1cm. While you're at it, have the Euro too.

That having been said, this is still a brilliant idea!

@Sarah

Hmmmm.... Custom El Reg fresh in my mailbox...

Can I have Big-G's boobies then?

Wait - that didn't come out right.

*claws eyes out of skull at the mental image of Big-G's boobies*

@AC 11:37 GMT

Nonono. You miss the point.

The Iranian government has tampered with elections, whereas the Chinese government hasn't.

See? Makes perfect sense.

What more to say?

I own a blu-ray player.

It takes the bloody thing ages to load a film

It's region-crippled, which isn't nice when my kids grandparents bring them films from abroad

-> it can't compete with my old Pioneer DVD player.

I own no blu-ray disks.

I rented the latest bond in blu-ray, and although the image quality is veeeeeeery impressive on my HD telly, I won't pay the premium to buy or rent blu-ray disks.

Energy storage?

No, if we're "storing cold", it's an "energy vacuum" or an "unenergy storage" or an "energy "unstorage" or something.

People like this drastically increase Newton's kinetic energy...

Emergencium

after the european emergency services number.

Cheeky boffins may opt for:

seewhaticandoium

ohshitium

watchthisium

LSL10?

'nuff said

illiterati?

of course, the snow white quote quoted here as a misquotation is correct in my translation of the fairy tale.

If we're starting to see film as definitive over original print, I can't help but worry...

but was it

...bitten off in a Buick?

Hurrah for the Dutchies

It seems the incompetent zealot that dumped the dutchies on the list has had their wrist slapped, and I no longer live in a tax haven.

Mark Haanen's hit the nail on the head, and I understand Obama's ire: all of these companies would have to pay tax on these cash transfers if they were all based in the US. Of course, I don't know why he thinks they would shift their operation to the US if the Dutchies changed their tax law...

Nice

but it's soooooooo expensive.

bung in a simple MP3 player and an easy way to sync it with my various computers, and I'm sold.

Oh - and lose the embarrassing typo on the Leyio site's opening flash animation....

Almost, but not quite...

Hitting the 'call' button defaults to using Sim1

*SO* close to implementing LCR (Least-cost routing)

It's the ONLY thing that would make this phone an absolute killer in the enterprise space. Having the phone automatically pick your German SIM when you're in Germany and your British SIM when you're in the UK and the German SIM when calling Germans from China and and and....

Oh well, maybe next time.

@Henry Wertz

'scuse me?

Trumped up?

Joseph Nacchio is one of the biggest crooks in years. Just ask anyone dealing with KPN/Qwest in Europe a few years ago: it looked like such a nice joint venture until Nacchio bailed out and left KPN holding the bag and thousands of customers scrambling to preserve their WAN links.

Biggest headache I've had in years, but at least the boss sprung for backup links from DIFFERENT providers after that ;)

Send him to Leavenworth, please!

Where's me tinfoil hat?

Aliens have three fingers

Three-fingered salutes reboot machines

Coincidence?

I think not

Push vs. Pull

I find it quite hard to form an opinion on these sorts of cases.

On the one hand, the woman should indeed not have published anything she didn't want someone else to read, but I think she has a point about the newspaper publication.

Two points here:

- Copyright: whether or not she published it on MySpace, she wrote it and the newspaper should at the very least have asked for permission before publication.

- Push vs. pull: her mySpace target audience chooses to read her rantings voluntarily - "pulling" the content. By publishing the post, the newspaper "forces" its target audience to read the rantings - "pushing" the content.

I think a distinction should be made between this sort of "passive" vs. "active" publication, and until the law recognises that, these sorts of cases are going to continue to eat up too much bench time...

Stop being cynical!

It's Europarliament election time soon, innit?

@sarah fans

can we have a paypal whip-round and buy the nice lady a pint?

Stupid users vs. clever hackers

@Eddie:

the kiddies (who frequently also maintain mummy's PC for her) will no doubt find it an inconvenience to open the case and leave the switch open.

I once had a BIOS that "included" virus protection, e.g. it threw a warning on the screen if something tried to write to the BIOS or to the boot sector. Problem was that this completely hosed any Windows instance that was running. Maybe that should be brought back.

Alternatively, how about a momentary write-enable pushbutton on the mobo that enables writes for e.g. 1 hour?

@merkuh

I don't care whether they want to rely on vigilantism to patrol their borders or not.

But they should definitely not whine and bitch when the whole system massively backfires or serves to hide a multi-billion dollar drug importing biz.

Remember: there are no SLAs or quality metrics with Aussie pub-goers

@Throatwobbler

Of course, it's also possible that the FBI background check *DID* pick this up, but those in question sensibly decided it wasn't relevant.

Adtards?

@people like pjnola:

While there's a balance between money-grubbing and altruism, ask yourself whether our beloved ElReg hacks are volunteers or if it's possible that the ads you clearly loathe so much are paying for your ability to read this comment.

sigh

The BK story was better

http://www.snopes.com/crime/cops/burger.asp

Not AT&Ts fault

It's the cruise operator's fault.

The only shortcoming on AT&T's side was its attempt to warn him by SMS via a card that didn't support SMS (silly sods).

I would say the cruise company should credit AT&T

Then AT&T can credit their customer