* Posts by George Johnson

165 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007

Page:

Excessive IP protection causes economic gridlock, says expert

George Johnson

Well blow me down!

Gosh! Shock! Horror! No one could have predicted that now could they?!

Acorn alumni to toast tech pioneer's 30th anniversary

George Johnson
Happy

Get the old playground rivalry stoked up...

"Oh a BBC? They're awful. The graphics are naff and you can't get a decent version of Manic Miner! Elite is OK, I suppose!"

I had a Dragon 32 ( then a CPC464 ). Now when are they going to get the Dragon party started? There'd be all of 10 people turn up, including the customers!

US customs: Yes, we can seize your laptop, iPod

George Johnson

War on terror? My arse!

Big round applause for the DHS and government, you finally got what you wanted! I always wanted to take my kids to Disneyland and visit me relies in Florida, but that has now gone out the window.

"Sorry kids, I'm afraid it's EuroDisney for you lot, if you want to make friends with Mickey and Minnie! Why? 'Cos a group of nasty people in America seem to consider that we are all naughty and want to punish us, even though we have done nothing wrong."

The only reason I will set foot in the US now is when Gordo finally gives up on this country and sells the whole shooting match to his bestest mate Dubya for a knock-down price, and it's finally renamed "GB - The 51st State!"

Sat nav blunder places The Rock in Skegness

George Johnson

What about the ferry/tunnel?

Surely when it said "You next stop after the ferry/tunnel is England!" the alarm bells should have gone off?

Dell offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to frightened customers

George Johnson
Thumb Up

MS don't seem to realise.

The VARs and resellers have to make money, if customers are scared off by Vista, just because cousin Chris, who works with computers says it's rubbish and he told told little old Joan to get XP, then little old Joan will go get XP, no matter what IT geeks, MS fanbois and such like say. The customers will find someone who will sell XP to them. Simple economics, market forces and all that guff.

I can imagine the margins on pre-installed O/Ss, like many other bulk buy/sell industries, are very, very tight indeed. You can't afford to have several thousand people walking away, MS need to understand that DELL and others have to support a business, raw cash coming in, products going out, not pie in the sky dreams with big fluffy ideas.

( Me, I back the penguin, but it's fun watching everyone else fighting. )

The war on photographers - you're all al Qaeda suspects now

George Johnson

Sick of this Phantom Terrorist BS!

I used to go out and take photogrpaphs of the London underground system, I got permission from LT to do this and I had to sign in at every station before taking my shots. I stopped around 2003 because I was getting so many nasty looks from people and tube workers, even got a mouthful of abuse from a driver once.

I had to stop a very enjoyable hobby, simply due to paranoia of people who believe the BS that the government pump out about these so called phantom terrorists.

I now content myself with simply going out into the countryside and taking pictures of trees, mud and wild flowers, but I'm still waiting for the day Plod taps me on the shoulder , in the middle of nowhere, demanding my SD cards from me!

Shopper connects to Jesus via Denon link cable

George Johnson
Alert

Pear Anjou - Bloody ridiculous!

The Amazon reviews are bloody funny, however this is beyond funny!

1 pair of 12 foot speaker cables....$7250! This is no joke, this utter tosh is genuine!

http://www.pearcable.com/sub_products_anjou_sc.htm

Virgin Media collects customer banking details on CD, then loses it

George Johnson
Thumb Up

It's nothing new anymore, is it?

Another lost set of data, another day. It's nothing new for companies to simply pack up data onto a CD and oops! "Sorry, but we lost it, oh dear, never mind!". Everytime some more data gets lost, we care a little less, just another lost set of data.

Sooner or later the government won't have to bother with a 1984 style DB to track us, they simply need to go down to the Royal Mail lost and found dept and demand all the data CDs/DVDs that have been "lost in transit", copy off the data.

eBayer slaps $714 price tag on $630 in cash

George Johnson
Unhappy

Not really worth the bother anymore...

It really has become intolerable on eBay, over the last 2-3 years. Selling stuff is a minefield, with the right to put negative feedback having been taken away. I only sell little bits of my old crap for a few quid, but you have to be careful to put so many caveats in your listings so your arse is covered when it inevitably goes belly up, just like a genuine business! If I wanted to run a business, I would. When you get turned over as a seller, you simply have to wait two weeks, raise a "got fecked over" call so at least you might stand a slim chance of getting your listing fees back, but no sale and lots of wasted time, messing about, just so you can empty your spare room.

Sorry, but in future I think most of my junk room tat will end up outside the local Age Concern shop or in the recycle bin, at least that way someone will appreciate it!

Sweden ushers in bugging for all

George Johnson
Unhappy

No this isn't the final nail, it's truly the first!

Sweden being part of the EU, I fully predict that it's only a short while before all the other well to do governments in Europe contribute funding for a database of EU citizen's information. Not some tin-pot little collection databases scattered hap-hazardly all over the place, but one nice big, fat pan-European, EU funded Ministry of Information db with EVERYTHING in it!

Let's hope they put EDS in charge of putting it in, then at least it might stand a chance of being total crap and never working properly before I step into my grave!

UK developer trio accused of game plagiarism

George Johnson
Alert

What staggers me...

...how come it took them so long? Christ, how long does it take to rip off screenshots, put them together and link them up in one of the multimedia game designer thingies?

Brown pledges annual commons debate on surveillance

George Johnson
Alert

Oh come on!

Please Gordon, do you really think we're that stupid? Most of us know exactly what's going on. Through the use of technology, we are becoming more savvy every day, so please, stop treating us like morons.

Boffins: Roadrunner hypercomputer could drive a car

George Johnson
Pirate

Ha ha

“Roadrunner ushers in a new era for science,” said Terry Wallace of the Los Alamos National Lab - birthplace of the atomic bomb.

Yeah and we all know what a roaring success that was!

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

George Johnson
Thumb Up

Want the truth and the way?

Get some copies of Andy Hamiltons hilarious radio comedy Old Harry's Game, that's the truth my friends.

If it all fails and I'm wrong and doomed to spend eternity with my arse on fire, then I'll certainly have plenty of company, what with the Slashdot, El Reg readers and all people with whom I share my "heavy" musical taste!

Windows Vista has been battered, says Wall Street fan

George Johnson
Thumb Up

Want to run Vista?

Run it like I did, in a VMWare sandbox on an Ubuntu host machine! Ran like a dream, couldn't cause trouble , and if it did, a quick flick of the virtual hardware reset button and it was nice as pie again.

Personally I couldn't see anything wrong with Vista, I just don't really like MS bloated, overpriced products or their attitude to helping their valued, paying customers, especially when I can get free O/Ss with just as many bugs, advantages, good and bad bits. We all want something for nothing right?

UK is not a surveillance society, MPs claim

George Johnson
Boffin

Too late 1984, started in 56 BC!

Oh Jebus on a Bike, we are and have always been, since a well known Frenchman call William stepped onto this "septic" isle way back in 1066, the Doomsday book anyone? Nothing more than a primitive database of names and property, to be honest I suspect the Romans did too under the name of Taxes, but not many records left of that time.

Right through to the paranoia of the post World-War II era, mistrust of big Joe and potential for uprisings from disgruntled peoples of Europe. Rationing still continued after WW2, not due to shortages but a little test of monitoring who was still left and what they were up to. The Cold War came along and the rise of McCarthyism, governments realising that technology is getting cheaper and people have electronic communication at their disposal, just need to simply tap into that to gather data on them. The Internet, let the plebs play on it for a bit, get to trust it, then we'll nail it down.

I too have heard that we have the highest number of CCTV cams per capita of anywhere else in the world, we are an island, we didn't want to be friends with the nice people living next door, the ones with the funny accents and weird ways, no we decided to set up a little province across the road(pond). Then after a bad party the new owners trashed our new des-res over there and changed the locks, they then saw we had been getting grief off our old neighbours, they helped us out and like some old infirm biddy, in return we signed the deeds on our house over to the dodgy owners over the road!

Too late now, fight all you like, but the only answer I can see now is to learn a nice European language, plenty to choose from, go live with the neighbours!

Virgin Media and BPI join forces to attack illegal filesharing

George Johnson
Thumb Up

VM Cancellations are very, very efficient indeed!!!

I jumped ship from VM to Sky 2 months ago. VM 2Mb @ £20/month. Sky 16Mb @ £10/month, I only 6Mb, but 3 times the speed for half the cost.

When I left VM and went to Sky, the VM telephone monkey was a very bitter and very imature, which made me even more determined to leave, I was sort of considering pushing them to see what they could do, but thanks VM your nasty little operator and his attitude, who's name I have, convinced me to make the switch, glad I did!

VM guy: "The sky boxes are all recon jobs you know, they always fail after about 9 months, VM's are all brand new.", Well it's been fine for 2 months, I have at least 12 month coverage, so thanks anyway. My parents have had Sky HD for over 18 months, no problems at all.

VM guy: "Well the 16Mb service is completely oversold, you will only get about 1-2Mb." Well even if I did only get 2Mb, it's still half the cost of yours! I get 6Mb, so I'm happy.

VM guy: "You'll have to buy your own ADSL kit, they won't give you it, VM give a modem for free.". Bollocks! Sky gave me a modem/router, it's crap so I replaced it, but still. Oh and Mr Tosser, you actually rent the VM modem from VM, you don't "get it free".

VM guy: "Sky HD channels are no where near the quality that VM have." Sorry, but we don't really watch TV much, especially not the complete waste of time UK HD TV is, so it doesn't bother me. I only want a decent, cheap BB service thanks, but I have to have the TV. The Sky TV may be rubbish, but once again, it's a darn sight cheaper than yours and I believe has more channels!

Now VM, correct me if I'm wrong, but surely the people on the cancellations desk should be there to avoid people leaving, convince them that VM can change, although you can't argue with the efficiency of the cancellations service with wangers like that on the phones.

TfL hands out contracts for congestion charge tags

George Johnson
Thumb Up

@AC - National rollout

Couldn't agree more! You can see it coming a mile off ( no pun ), nice little sensors all up and down the motorways and major trunk roads. No more road tax, but drive the bugger anywhere outside what you can see from your upstairs bedroom window and we'll have you squeezed for every penny we can get!

The country is slowly returning to the dark ages, can't travel more than 10 miles from your house, fuel costs too much and public transport is crap, plus be back before sundown else the hoodies will have ya!

Swedish authorities pull plug on female Elvis

George Johnson
Alert

WTF?!

Leslie, Tracey? Gender neutral names. Gawd knows what these TAx people would make of the names Gaylord, Gay or Jesus, which are perfectly valid names. Sounds liked some jumped up officious little government twerp with too much time and not enough work to do!

US imposes 72 hour pre-reg for Visa waiver travellers

George Johnson
Thumb Up

That's nice...

What about our "special relationship" with our friends the US government? Don't our friends the US trust us anymore? Probably nothing personal. they simply don't anyone anymore!

UK cops arrest six alleged BitTorrent music uploaders

George Johnson
Thumb Up

Good to see!

Dear old plod's time and resources being bought and abused by the corporate powers that now seem to own the UK justice system, just like our friends in our "special international relationship". Welcome to the 51st state!

Bonce-antenna education downloads foreseen in 30 years

George Johnson
Alert

Hold on!

Wait just a minute, sod the kiddies, let 'em wait. I'm still waiting for my flying car, my food in pill form and my trip to the moon or Mars to go shopping!

Heathrow T5 security tackles Transformers t-shirt threat

George Johnson
Thumb Up

I suppose...

...it's the "table-leg shooting" all over again. I suppose in a certain light, at the right time of year, when the moon it full and the right number of people present, you could mistake the picture of a gun on a shirt for a real one, but come on?! Just another case of your welcome the 51st state!

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot

George Johnson
Happy

Oh the Daily Mail!

Mr Marcus Brigstocke is your man! "The DM read by paranoid, middle-Englanders , breeding pointless kids whose only purpose in life is to work for Foxton's estate agents. 'Do I get a mini? Haw, haw! You want to know if it has a garden, shall we look in the bathroom?'. People who read the Daily Mail think it's just a broadsheet for people for with short arms."

Economist: girls actually better than boys at maths

George Johnson
Alert

Spelling?

After reading some of the comments here, looks like we men are lagging behind in spelling too, or at the very least proof-reading!

What a load of old toss! What about environmental factors too? Quite a few of our young gentlemen in today's society, from certain demographic groups, brainwashed by greedy ad-men to grow up, drink, play GTA and stab and shoot each other, it's hardly surprising we are lagging behind in academia is it? Doesn't take a degree from the University of Bogus-Studies and a grant from the Research Institute of Cods-Wallop to work that out, does it!

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

George Johnson
Alert

The reason I walked!

VM don't give a stuff, they just want profit, so I walked and SKY got my business. When I left the VM telephone monkey kept passing silly comments about the quality of Broadband services and the quality of Sky TV. Well I was paying £20/m for 2Mbit cable line, I went to Sky and got 16Mbit for £10/m, I actually only get 6Mbit, but jeez, 3x the speed for half the cost and no caps or stated limits. VM can go get f**ked, I'm in a buyers market with more choice than their capped crap service!

Government announces shortlist for ID card contracts

George Johnson

All balls

"Cut back terrorism and crime" - Balls! The only ones who will be free are the ones who don't give a toss at the moment, so they sure as hell won't give a toss about a naff little plastic card. As usual the honest people are the ones hurt the most. Much like "MarmiteToast", I too hope EDS/HP get it, they are 100%guaranteed to cock it up big time. Time to look at those job sites and housing brochures in NZ, methinks!

China airlifts bamboo to quake-hit pandas

George Johnson
Alert

Save the fluffy ones!

Sod the bleeding Panda's, what about the poor parents still desperately searching for their kids trapped in the rubble? It's always save the cute, fluffy animals isn't it?

Man barred from posting crimes on YouTube

George Johnson
Alert

I'm genuinely surprised!

I'm genuinely surprised that he has managed to learn to operate a mobile phone and a computer with his knuckles dragging on the floor. What a prat, but like previous posters have said, if he wants to record his crimes for easy processing through the courts, let him.

However there's the problem, so much of this sort of thing is going on, being publicly recorded and these troggs still continue to walk free. So much for all the survellance equipment being put up by Gordo and his cronies, does it only track terrorists and the genuinely innocent going about their business calling a cult a cult? It sure as hell isn't cutting petty crime is it!

Mobiles help UK malls track shoppers' every move

George Johnson
Thumb Up

@Richard Bragg

Oh kindred soul! I too have a mobile, "only for emergencies" (ie. lift home when the trains are up the spout!) and on-call work, all other times it's off, usually due a flat battery much to the annoyance of my better half!

I was thinking of putting an organisation together of people who still manage to live without mobiles, but I can't quite figure out how we would be able to all meet in one place yet?!!

Revealed! The new face of the Eee PC

George Johnson
Alert

Why does she have to be tied to the bloody kitchen?

Oh she's such a super domestic godess, cooks like a gourmet, cleans up after the family and still has time in her busy schedule to surf for the latest formica and chipboard nightmare she wants from MFI!

Are the ad people really still stuck in the 50's? Replace EEE with magazine on good housekeeping and it's Festival of Britain Expo all over again.

Amazon.com: Now with 50% less cockfighting

George Johnson

Great!

So these nasty little people will start their own little locked up websites and publish their interests in underground channels. Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

Teen battles City of London cops over anti-Scientology placard

George Johnson
Alert

Out of interest...

I have several t-shirts proclaiming my faith in metal music, one even declaring the fact using the word "faith". The next time some bunch of brain-dead chavs decide to take exception to my "faith", hurling abuse, I assume I can rely on Mr Plod to come to my rescue, carting the ne'er do wells off to clinky? No, didn't think so!

UK.gov plans central database for all your communications

George Johnson
Alert

Yeah right!

1. They lost several important DB exports on CDs, "in the post".

2. Took them years to get a simple thing like the vehicle reg db up and running

3. The NHS IT systems are still in a mess after, what is it now 8-9 years?

4. They will most likely trust EDS to run and ultimately cock it up.

5. Cost shed-loads of public cash, given to orgs like EMC and HDS for the petabytes of storage required to do this

Piss-up and brewery, spring to mind!

First public Firefox 3 candidate shoots out the door

George Johnson
Alert

Well not much choice left is there?

So lets round up browsers we can no longer use....

Firefox - now thinking about data farming, ala Phorm...

Opera - Closed source, can't be trusted...

Safari - Ditto ( Evil Steve! )...

IE - Ditto and follows standards, just not anyone else's standards!

Lynx - No piccys, but OSS and pretty safe

Konquerer - Gonna need to jump ship to another O/S, to play...

Any readers care to add to rapidly diminishing list?

Can Microsoft 'do' open source by 2015?

George Johnson
Happy

They never will, they simply can't afford to.

At the end of the day MS is beholden to their shareholders and the board, they cannot simply make wild decisions and go off chasing butterflies. The OSS community isn't really beholden to anyone, other than the ire of millions of fanatics, myself included. The dreaded F-word is both a blessing and curse to the OSS community, soon as something starts going of track, it's f*rked and pull back, kicking and screaming!

MS knows that if OSS ever got it's act together on a global scale and on a par with stellar items like Apache, it would have a killer O/S to blow everyone away. However OSS is a bit like a very, very large tent at a church fate, lots of people all shouting, pulling and swearing to get it up. It goes up and does the job but only just, there's always people nipping round the back to pull this and pull that and John tries to undo what Fred did, 'cos John reckons he's more right about X than Fred!

Five misunderstood Vista features

George Johnson

Why bother upgrading?

Not just MS stuff anything. Barring the usual bug fixes and LTS arguments, is upgrading most software simply falling into the ad guy's clutches?

"You have to have this!"

"Why?"

"'Cos you do! It's better and more shiny!"

"No real benefit though?"

"Hmmm....well not really"

This got me though:

"We've heard some of you say that Windows Vista runs slower than Windows XP on a given PC. So what's really happening here? First, we need to avoid comparing apples to oranges - Windows Vista is doing a lot more than Windows XP, and it requires resources to conduct these tasks."

Sorry, but I live in the real world, where I and others have to use a system to get things done, we don't have vast sums of money to buy the latest super-hot PC just to hold up the O/S, let alone any apps to run on it. There are magnitudes more average punters now Bill, and a vast number do not want to spend any time learning how to disable services and tune the system, they just want to get on with stuff, please think about this when you launch the next one, eh?

Wii controller lawsuit costs Nintendo $21m

George Johnson

Make a difference?

Being a family type organisation, I know they don't want the bad press but is $20M really going to cause Nintendo any problems?

Retailers risk libel nightmare over 'no-work' database

George Johnson
Thumb Up

Open to abuse by a certain demographic!

Little 16 year old Johnny Chav, takes first job, doesn't really want it, nicks £50 out of the till, gets blacklisted. DSS tells him to get a job or he gets cut off, he tries 3 places but is blacklisted, can't get off the blacklist and says f**k it and stays on the state scroungers list for the next 3 years. After 3 years, gets a job, nicks something, cycle repeats. Upshot is Johnny Chav, never has to work again and has a perfectly valid reason why he can't get a job.

Vista security credentials tarnished in malware survey

George Johnson
Coat

Right lets get this over with....

...blah, blah, blah...Linux is great...blah, blah, blah...Mac is great...blah, blah, blah...BSD is great...blah, blah, blah...Linux/MAC/BSD never get hit...blah, blah, blah...perfectly safe...blah, blah, blah...thumb nose as M$ plebs...blah, blah, blah...

HSBC in further data loss

George Johnson

It's not difficult is it!

How many of us have walked into another office in our companies and walked off with a bit of kit? You walk in, grab the kit, wave the company photo ID to the security guard and carry a bloody great HP DL380 or whatever out the door. Almost every place I have worked at, this has been allowed, only about 10% of places does the security guard decide to ask to double check that you can take the kit out the door.

I'm not defending HSBC, but companies need to stress to the poor sod on security desk, most likely on just above minimum wage from a third-party agency, that nothing goes in or out without paperwork, even then would the guard really give a toss, it's not his kit and he can always go to another security firm/agency and get signed up again if this firm boots him!

I want a baby, coos broody Paris Hilton

George Johnson

Just see it now...

Her agent obviously spent all of 5 mins on this brainwave. "Paris darhlink, yummy mummies, celeb babies, very now. See it now, full 8 page spread in all the major publications! Killer dahlink, well make another pot-full!"

@Stone Fox - I pissed myself! Many thanks indeed.

Peter Gabriel's website is back

George Johnson
Alert

Hmmmmm

With Mr G having such a high profile theft like this, I wonder if Mr Gabriel was the first to get his servers back up and running, before anyone else, ie before insignificant plebs with limited funds who's businesses would have been losing money by the second and employees livelihoods?

Dope-crazed Canadians sledgehammer iPhone

George Johnson
Flame

Where is it now?

Probably in some landfill. We're all wasting natural resources at a huge rate and these two scruff-bag Cannucks decide to get their mug shots plastered all over the Internet so they can show-off to their 2 mates in college, that they are now "famous"!

For the seven-thousandth time, IF YOU DON'T LIKE SOMETHING, KEEP AWAY FROM IT! DON'T BUY IT, USE IT OR ANYTHING ELSE IT!

Windows XP SP3 leaps into the tubes

George Johnson
Thumb Up

What I want to know is....

...are the ISP's geared up for all this downloading? The vast majority of home PCs are M$ based so are the ISP's going to be throttling the connections earlier than normal this afternoon? That is usually how they cope with large demand, simply "close the valves" to slow the flow!

NASA invites you to travel to the Moon

George Johnson
Alert

Tin foil hats on!

Sounds like our world leaders latest attempts to gather all our details in one convenient database. I mean who's going to have anything bad to say about nice "Uncle NASA" eh?

'Space gemstone' meteorite crashes at auction

George Johnson
Coat

"Fukang meteorite"

That's a bit harsh. Just because it didn't sell there's no need to get all hufty about it!

Texas man tries to cash $360bn cheque

George Johnson
Alert

What I want to know is....

...on seeing the amount, most likely the writing squeezed into the lines on the cheque, did the bank even think about calling some one? Due dilligence has its place but so does common sense. One look at the amount should have been enough for them to tell him to get lost, surely?

Grand Theft Auto 4 queue man stabbed in head

George Johnson
Alert

Latest scapegoat

The media basically needs the public to have a bogeyman and games fit the bill. They are the preserve of the geek, the nerd, the quiet teenager locked in his room hour after hour, they are a great unknown to the chattering classes and middle Englanders all reading the Daily Mail and fearing that chavs or immigrants will invade their cosy little villages and devalue their property. Games industry, unlike music and movies isn't used to the attention yet, they haven't quite got the hang of basically saying bugger off, yes well stick some more labels saying anyone under 48 isn't allowed to buy it, whatever you want, just sod off.

Sorry but alcohol and/or driving ( without or without a mobile!) causes more deaths an injuries than any other aspects of modern life, don't see many angry mothers picketing TESCO demanding all the alcohol be poured down the drain. Don't see the government banning drink or cars, now why is that? Oh yes, 'cos it makes shed-loads in taxes, unlike games which only reel in the usual 17.5%.

Google readies for action against Dutch smut site

George Johnson

All in a name

What on earth is with the Pr0n industry and daft names? Seriously, Ruben Doctor?

Page: