Posts by Ron Eve

Errrr...

I"ll try again and see if this post gets through...

"...the hoi polloi" is grammatically incorrect as 'hoi polloi' means 'the masses' or 'the many', so your sentence reads "the the masses'.

/my coat is most definitely ready...

Camden

As other posters have said here London generally is rubbish for Orange. I've been working in the Camden area for about a year and I've just about given up trying to use my mobile. Even out in the open on the canal the service is spotty. I've had to direct all friends and clients to email me where possible. Several attempts at numbers, connections dropped, horrendous service...

If what some of the people here say is true (cells not working or repaired) then surely we have some recourse to recompense for the failure in service. I swear I got better results than this 20 years ago with my first mobile phone...

@R0CKY

Nope. It's definitely not a "classic case of the end user (good guys) being penalised or inconvienienced by systems put in place due to the potential actions of spammers/hackers (bad guys)."

Everyone should take responsibility for their own security. And that should mean, as others have pointed out, the login pages should NOT give the opportunity of second-guessing email addresses or passwords.

If it means writing login details on a Post-it note because the user hasn't enough brain cells to remember then so be it, at least then that user takes responsibility for being a twunt.

surely

It's to do with the prevention of unauthorised persons/organisations from effectively setting up shop within a commercial property i.e. the mall. The tabloid (if that's what it is) is subverting the actuality.

Quite right too (the prevention, that is).

They haven't paid any rent to the owners for the space they're occupying and they're likely to seriously piss off paying customers with their proselytising about imaginary beings. I mean how would you like to walk into <name of supermarket here> for your weekly supply of toilet paper and be confronted by someone trying to force your to do 'Personality Tests', as formulated by a late science fiction writer?

Thought not.

@Out in Grimsby

Blimey! Since when did Grimsby have Romantics living there?

I think we should be told!

/foil coat

@Hmm..

No problem here....

Good article, thanks for that.

@An absolute shower

haha! That really made me chuckle..

I for one...

...welcome our Conficker Bonet Overloads - it's Our Density

Thank goodness...

...that reason prevailed.

That anyone should think US Budweiser is a beer in anything but name should be taken outside and pelted with their own shite. They should be hauled up under the Trades Description Act then flogged.

Major Road-Works (Retd)

Tunbridge Wells

Pulled

It's been removed already, bastards... if you 'step' along the street that image is 'removed' although one step beyond (!) you can turn and look back and see those guys.

Is this the new sport then? See what turns up on StreetView and alert everyone before it gets pulled?

By the way, it can't have been done at Christmas, everyone's wearing t-shirts. Unless they're Geordies....

/just a coat - I'm a soft southern bastad.

Badger

All I can say is thanks goodness for ifixit.com. Brilliant site showing how to safely dismantle Macs. Their instructions are actually easier to follow than Apple's official ones (well, those I've seen).

As for the rest of these comments @Simon Hobson is spot on. Get over it.

And in other news...

.... a car broke down and me mum's washing machine packed up.

How many iPhones sold? How many have suffered this problem?

Good grief. Slow news day lads (and lass)?

/El Fail

Oh who do you think you're kidding Mr Hilter...

Obviously the cnut never went there.

But I started thinking, there's that whole range of Hitler spoofs on YouTube like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXnt8_okeRA

Maybe someone could create a new one with Blackpool as the theme....

Interesting but...

... sorry to be a pedant, "through several clever slights on hand" is all wrong. The expression is "by sleight of hand' as in like a magician's card trick or disappearing handkerchief.

I'm pretty sure you can't have a plural 'sleights' either. Maybe "through several clever tricks" would have sufficed.

And now I really must get out....

/coat

There is a god

Big Suse and Red Dwarf - together.

<sigh>

/contentment

Epic fail, El Reg

El Reg. As others here have pointed out this is SO not news. It's not even a view balanced viewpoint. Did your writer not get get his soy latte this morning?

As someone who takes Macs apart for a living taking out 8 easy-to-reach screws is a no-brainer. The early iBooks and PowerBooks were a different matter, requiring major disassembly to replace the HD. But even with those you exercise good working practices. Lay it all out on cloth covered, well lit table (so the screws don't bounce off and stay where you put them). Turn to http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/ to find the relevant model and away you go.

I think I can safely say MOST Mac users don't want/need to upgrade their compters. A bit more RAM maybe, but when it comes to changing the HD it's usually because the original has failed.

Does the average Joe expect to change the engine of his car if it fails? No he takes it to a mechanic....

Mind you, I can remember trying to upgrade RAM (or drives!) on the old PowerMac 8500 towers... First tool on the table was a box of Elastoplast (Band-Aid to our US cousins) as you could guarantee cutting something fleshy during the long, tedious process...

'twas ever thus

Samo samo. It's never been any different. In all the years I worked in the music business the way tickets are distributed and sold has never been anything more than a scam to fleece the punter. Even going directly to the box office (i.e. the Albert Hall) to buy tickets for future events there, you still pay a 'booking fee'. If you question it you will never get a direct answer other than 'it's a standard charge for booking'.

It's the same deal with distribution. Promoters and agents tie all this in with the venues and sometimes even with artists management. In the old days it used to be that they'd all sit in the office while the gig was on, count up all the tickets (other than pre-sold), count up the cash and then divvy it up to be carried out in brown paper bags. No, I'm not making this up.

Ticktemaster have been one of the worst offenders for charging all these extras and they hold a near monopoly. I don't really know what can be done about it though. Good for Springsteen on calling them out on it. If he can start the ball rolling with all the other major artists then that would be a great thing. There are a lot of artists (especially big acts) who have been grumbling for years about this.

Well done El Reg for reporting this, I haven't seen it anywhere else yet!

Help!

Please! Won't someone think of the children!

@ Celibrate (sic)

I keep reading so many 'in my last job I replaced so many <insert drive mfg> comments, plus, after reading Google's report on drive failures (related to 10,000+ units), that I'm really getting annoyed. Surely someone somewhere can put all this together and come up with the definitive 'most reliable drive' manufacturer?

Drive manufacturers all have their ups and downs (currently it seems to be Seagate's turn for flagellation), but it must be possible chart these. All you guys who are fitting hundreds of drives must have some data...

Nothing changes

Why oh why etc... First we have garbage trucks that have horrendously noisy engines and now they're completely silent. I wish they'd electrify those horrendously noisy buses too.

Reminds of an apocryphal story from some years ago when some bright spark in health and safety thought it was a good idea to make the indicators on motorbikes beep when used (non-bikers: the indicators don't self-cancel). Apparently when a bike was waiting or turning slowly at a junction with said beeping indicators deployed the sound was uncannily like the beeping pedestrian crossings when it's safe to cross. Only it wasn't. Funnily enough they don't fit them anymore.

Twunts

Who elects these twunts into a council anyway? How on earth do they get away with such poo.

“There will always be an appropriate level of staffing in libraries."

One would always hope that there'll be sufficient staff to do the job...

Any staff freed up by self-service will be used across an expanded, more customer-focused library service for Edinburgh.”

One would always hope the customer comes first...

FFS can we not get rid of these troublesome clowns.

Blimey...

... a PC with some style.

Actually looks quite nice, albeit not dissimilar to another manufacturers earlier foray into white plastic...

Ah wait... There are no stickers all over it!! Wait until the Beast of Redmond's marketing get hold of it!

Cheques?

I thought cheques were being phased out... Imagine your surprise when you try to pay it in and they point to the sign "Cheques no longer accepted".

@Dapprman

If they're so advanced and hi tech why cant' they sort out their *kin web sites so that they're W3C compatible and not just Windoze/IE? Some do so it really can't be that difficult. Or are the back handers from M$ to big to ignore?

/mine's the one with the fake paying-in slips in the pocket...

Facts?

Why let facts get in the way of a good story? All those bleating about Apple, DRM. bit rates and region coding - please do a little research (you can happily search El Reg for all this).

For Apple to even think about selling music they HAD to bow to the record industry (RIAA et al) and infect everything with DRM. There was NO choice about this otherwise the labels would simply not license the music.

Bit rates - Although to some extent there were space considerations (higher rate - more space) again the music industry didn't want any material released at high (i.e. lovely for pirating CD's etc) bit rate.

Movies - substitute the MPAA for the RIAA.

Region coding - <sigh - this is getting boring> see MPAA and RIAA who want to maximise profits from around the world.

Can you see a pattern emerging? If you can't then you need to get back to your class while your computer is downloading all that 'free' stuff, you thick cnuts.

@AC - Steve Jobs Is Not Dead!

That mate, was one of the funniest things I've read in weeks, including the story about the Zune 'lying down for a bit'.

Any chance you could write some articles for El Reg?

Marvellous stuff.

@The internal battery...

"The reasons not to have a removable battery are simply laughable, not to mention that Apple has a long history of defective batteries... "

Errm.. defective batteries are not the preserve of Apple alone, plus, these are usually outsourced items from the likes of Sony.

250,000 battery recall by Fujitsu

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/15/fujitsu_recall_batteries/

4.1 million battery recall by Dell

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08/14/dell_laptop_recall/

28,000 battery recall by Sharp

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/16/sharp_battery_recall/

Acer to recall 27,000 batteries

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/04/26/acer_recalls_27k_batteries/

Sony to pay out $432m to recall nearly 10 million batteries

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/26/sony_q2_fy2007_earnings/

I guess you can see where this is going...

Flame on?

@ AC 16:23 -- Re: @Ted

Nah - can't be Webster. Sentences are too well constructed and nowhere near enough bile dripping from every word.

I sometimes wonder if I live in a different world. Admittedly I deal with (mostly)Macs in (often very) mixed environments, working alongside IT staff who have to deal with both and I've not found anyone yet who has anything but praise for the way Apple have turned their platform round. (OK some still don't like Macs but that's a personal thing).

OS9 was pretty dreadful on a mixed network but OS X, because of it's *nix roots uses the same 'standard' protocols as everyone else.

The OS X interface is pretty universally recognised as being very easy to use, but perhaps you're one of those souls who believes that unless you're getting your hands dirty with command line then it's not a real OS.

Oh wait, have I just taken the bait?

I don't get it.

So you can get more channels on DAB. That's just more channels of shit. Look at TV - you've got five basic channels of shit. If you get Freeview you get even more shit and if you get Sky/Virgin you get a shit load of shit.

I know 4 people with DAB radios, who listen to stuff that's on FM, only in mono. I've never come across DAB in a car and I do a lot of travelling.

Oh wait, we had the BBC computer for a while didn't we? <sound of wind in empty corridors>

Meanwhile I'm listening to Radio Paradise (via iTunes or web site) with no ads and no dj's wittering on about the neighbour's cat.

@AC 13.30

Calm down dear, it's only a commercial!

Tonight Matthew, I'm going to be Webster Phreaky!

Blimey. 'Daily Mail reader, Mr Angry from Tonbridge Wells, moves to the USA'.

Frothing, sputum-flecked bile. Hey AC! - it's only a commercial dear!

I don't use Windows unless absolutely necessary (>0.1%) but when I do to me it's just another tool...

... I just prefer using Snap-On instead of WalMart.

Hah! You nasty English bed-wetting types!

I'm currently working regularly in Peterborough which means travelling by National Express with their 'free' wifi. It's slower than dial up, almost useless. Like someone else here I tried it 'on the train' but i haven't bothered for months.

And staying at the Holiday Inn Express (near the showground) where they charge (business rate, not walk up which is £90) £75 per night, they want £15 extra a day for wifi... or you could get the £11 per day version which 'allows simple web surfing'.

So I found a nice little b&b nearby - free wifi, freeview tv and Sky, beers for a pound and the owner picks me up when it's too wet to walk.Oh err.. £45 per night. If only the rest of the world worked that way, what do you reckon?

I wonder how much Paris would charge per night?

Waste of time reporting

Tch!! "Pandora is not available in the UK iTunes store"

Why didn't you mention that when posting the link?

Twunts

Irritated of Tunbridge Wells.