* Posts by Robert E A Harvey

3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006

'Apple is not going to change,' new boss says

Robert E A Harvey

Created, not bred

Presumably, in the USA, appealing to an invisible intelligent designer would be more influential than to the mechanism underlying evolution?

VW Scirocco BlueMotion Technology TDI 140

Robert E A Harvey

ah..

Knock 5 grand off the price and I'll have one now. Thank you.

HP: webOS will still run PCs and printers

Robert E A Harvey
Facepalm

Mismanagement

If this lot had any less of a clue, they would be a franchise on a British railway or a political party.

Hardware-happy HP has swallowed a Sun death pill

Robert E A Harvey

fire sales

HP has cut the touchpad prices to $99/$199.

Strange how they could not price it competitively for success, but can for failure.

HP murders webOS tablets, phones

Robert E A Harvey
FAIL

Aye

But what else do they have in the locker? If they have to buy the 'move into something else' they really are bankrupt for ideas.

HP to 'spinoff PC biz'

Robert E A Harvey

WebOs

That will be the end of WebOs on every PC, then.

Shame.

Galaxy Tab still legal in the Netherlands

Robert E A Harvey
Pirate

time to review patent law

it seems that most of these copyright/patent/passing off disputes are about tiny matters of detail. Not about big ideas at all.

In the UK light switches are inside the room you are going into. I'm going to patent the idea of having them on the other side of the wall so you can find the switch in a room already lit.

Samsung's lovely illegal tablet: Why no one wants to know

Robert E A Harvey

AD

I sort of agree with you about AD, but aren't the good bits just LDAP?

Robert E A Harvey

Points to Jen-Hsun Huang

as the man says, it is a "why bother" problem.

To beat the market leader you need to be one or both of:

* twice as good

* half the price.

it isn't, and it isn't.

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

Robert E A Harvey

...and down

Oh look. The ePetition web site has gone down again.

Google promises fix for jittery Usenet addicts

Robert E A Harvey
Meh

yeah

I use it from cybercafe or on the company flatpot, and use pan on my own machines. Gurgle Gropes has been quite convenient, as long as yer mates whitelist your posting name

Robert E A Harvey
FAIL

surprisingly silent

What baffles me is the failure of gurgle to put anything up on the status pages about this, or in their blog.

RIM to turn in BlackBerry-using looters after London riots

Robert E A Harvey
Big Brother

Whoa, hang on a minute

This is a good bit of headline-grabbing publicity, but a very bad precedent.

Who appointed RIM a quasi-judicial organisation? What gives them the right to decide when privacy is disposable?

Cisco warns over warranty discs of EVIL

Robert E A Harvey
WTF?

Autorun?

I really hope someone doing disaster recovery on Cisco gear has atorun disabled

Death haunts government petitions site

Robert E A Harvey
Stop

fuss about nowt

I heard the BBC evening news as though a giant groudswell had been revealed. I went and looked, and the highest count was 2900 against hanging. The other 3 topics mentioned later in the story each had less than 400 votes. the SciFi poll on el reg was far more successful.

I know its early days, but surely the mejia could have waited for more impressive numbers?

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Robert E A Harvey
FAIL

Snore, zzzz, yawn

Another Me Too which is only that.

With no convincing reason to buy this or the HP, I may very well be going for the iPud3 when it emerges. or going back to look at the convertables.

Robert E A Harvey
Thumb Down

Depressing, ain't it?

I want to connect to linux desktops too. Inability to do so is a major FAIL as far as I am concerned

PCTV NanoStick T2 USB TV tuner

Robert E A Harvey
Unhappy

more money

Just looked at Play. £72.50

Robert E A Harvey

Did you try this on Linux?

because it seems that most of the magic is in the software.

Reg readers ponder LOHAN's substantial globes

Robert E A Harvey

soft whumping noise

I used to work with a bu ch of lads who would inflate bin-bags from the oxy-acetelyne welder, and let them drift upwards. Lighted fag-ends flicked at them would eventually burn through and produce a soft, wet-sounding ball of flame and a lot of soot.

Robert E A Harvey

Launch Structure

Surely the launch structure would be two strings of different length, hanging the payload from the balloon at the correct angle to launch and avoid the canopy?

Once the motor fires up it would slacken off the strings which would fall out of their hooks and robert's yer familial relation once removed.

Chrome 13: Google uncloaks search click prediction engine

Robert E A Harvey

Chrome 13 includes more than 5,200 revisions

That's nice dear.

When are they going to fix Groups?

Apple iCloud pricing revealed

Robert E A Harvey
Headmaster

Brits set to pay 14 per cent more than the Yanks

Not this Brit.

Unless you pedantically say that 0 *1.14 = 0

Murdoch's PIE BOY jailed for six weeks

Robert E A Harvey
FAIL

Meanwhile, elsewhere

http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/we-get-the-message-loud-and-clear

Police officer in pursuit of his duty gets thrown in the air by moron in a fast car, who gets a month for hitting the cop (and only for resisting, not for wilful endangerment). Rolled up in a total of 22 months, and I expect he will be out in around 3 or 4. So no real penalty for running someone down.

There are some scrotes out there who are a complete oxygen sink.

Isolated human genes can be patented, US court rules

Robert E A Harvey

Surely

Surely this is the sort of thing we pay politicians to prevent? not permit.

I really hope this is not viable in Europe, and that any such patents will be treated with the contempt they so richly deserve.

Robert E A Harvey

Become a parent

You will be paying for the use of your genes for the rest of your natural...

Mozilla and Baidu join battle for the new cloud OS

Robert E A Harvey
WTF?

Where are the embedded vendors?

This is all very odd.

It is as though device manufacturers are working in a world where they only know the desktop OSs. Since the dawn of microprocessors, there have been vendors of real-time embedded kernels, tiny, efficient, multi-tasking and booting perfectly happily.

What happened to RTOS ? RMOS? eCos? QNX? vxworks?

I'm baffled by the assertion that they are using android 'because it boots'. Surely that is the easy bit?

Nintendo set to make a loss on every 3DS

Robert E A Harvey

Nintendo set to make a loss on every 3DS

They must be so pleased with me, then.

I've not bought one.

Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda

Robert E A Harvey
Facepalm

I have no sympathy with either side

* Why should the law care? When people on that benighted continent can display real guns, why do false goolies matter?

*Why on earth would anyone want a pair of plastic like-size bollocks on a truck? Are these people deranged?

I think there are 'truck nuts' in the story, but they are the nuts holding the steering wheel.

I am also baffled that South Carolina /has an obscene bumper-sticker law/. Is their general legislation on obscene publications so poor? or is it that bumper stickers are the only written material they possess?

Oh, and if you follow the link to the local radio station, you will find that the illustrations of 'truck nuts' have been slightly pixelated, but not enough to obscure anything!

HP's fondle-slab dilemma: What to do when you're No 2

Robert E A Harvey

What OS

What OS are you describing there? If it's unWinows You might have just changed my mind & persuaded me to buy.

Robert E A Harvey
FAIL

Number 2?

The time to worry about what to do when you are number 2 is when you are number 2.

I would be very surprised if they were currently number 22

Post Office banking collapses in computer fail

Robert E A Harvey

@ Michael Dunn

> wrote: " * Royal Mail, who deliver letters" but didn't qualify this

You mean

* Royal Mail, who deliver letters sometime the following month. Occsionally. To a nearby address. Unless it's raining, when you never hear from them at all. Oh look, a christmas card from 1997.

will that do?

Robert E A Harvey

My word yes

I'd forgotten Dollis Hill.

Was it not from there that the men who built the machines at Blethley Park came?

Robert E A Harvey

Claimants

There was a hand-written poster in our local branch saying that benefit "mothers" could claim emergency relief from the local social services office.

And another one saying "When they don't answer the phone come to us" from a group of local churches...

Robert E A Harvey

Post office names

Back when my Dad was a Head Postmaster in the 1950s, there was a government organisation called "The General Post Office". It was a blanket organisation for

* Royal Mail (who delivered Letters and Parcels)

* Post Office Telephones (landline phone provider

* The marine radio stations (Portishead, North Foreland etc.)

* Martlesham research station

* The railway telephone branch (not the same as Beritish Railway signalling division)

* Post Office Telegram services

* National Savings

* Post Office savings bank (both deposit schemes, not money transfer systems)

* Post offices were the retail outlet for mail, for the payment of social benefits like child benefit & the old age pension and the handling of driving licences and car taxes. You could pay your income tax there and buy national insurance "stamps".

Later the government invented the Giro bank, a publically owned clearing bank which used post office counters for public access.

Nowadays we have

* Post Office counters Ltd - the retail operation, including foreign currency, the two saving schemes, and a sort of bank. They still do car tax and driving licences, and pay pensions to people with magnetic cards and no bank account.

* Royal Mail, who deliver letters

* Royal Mail parcels, who deliver broken things in crushed boxes

and that's about it. All the other stuff has been sold off, and they want to sell off those 3 too.

Dell Streak 7 Android tablet

Robert E A Harvey

too much

My local computer store has a wifi-only 7" tablet with a dual core cpu & Gingerbread % better resolution for £135. Another £24 & you get 3G.

Microsoft pushes Windows Phone Mango out to Japan

Robert E A Harvey
Unhappy

@squilookie

Not new, I know. But it does make me sad

*Sad that marketing people still think people will be taken in

*Sad^2 that they are right.

Robert E A Harvey
Thumb Down

Promising?

They've had more than 6 attempts at it so far and it's only "Promising"?

Now, I've had a play, and it seems easy enough to use.

Personally I won't be buying one - not after the money wasted on earlier WP attempts. OK, it was HP that lied about being able to upgrade to the next version when available, and HP who said there was no fix for all the problems. But the Gatesian empire has had enough of my money. I'm sticking to phones that are only phones from now on.

I just think that for a company the size of Microsoft to deliver it a year late and for it still to be just "Promising" is not good enough. If they wanted to beat Apple, they had to do a whole lot better than "Promising".

Robert E A Harvey
Headmaster

Good bye, Arithmetic, it was nice knowing you

What happened to 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 & 7.4 ?

Kit steals Mac login passwords through FireWire port

Robert E A Harvey
Unhappy

Old News

I thought we did this one more than a year ago?

WorldTradeCenter.com on the block

Robert E A Harvey

Well, quite

IWGTST.

I've been to the ones in Dubai, Jo;burg, and Bucharest. Wasn't there one in Cardiff?

Higgs Boson hiding place narrows

Robert E A Harvey

A simpler task

Cern can't find the Higgs Boson, but I know how to find the Greggs Moron.

You go into any branch and try to buy something from the youngest person behind the counter.

Robert E A Harvey
Thumb Up

"Masses of new evidence"

Excellent.

Robert E A Harvey
Coat

Big laugh

My idea is that maybe the Higgs Boson is really large. perhaps 12735 kilometers, with a mass of 5.9721986×10^24 kg, and in an orbit 3.041954×10^11 meters in diameter around something rather larger.

Mine's the one that seems implausibly massive

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo bow to Apple sales edict

Robert E A Harvey
Big Brother

It's what I'd do.

And I'd try to work 'FRO' into the url somehow.

Just in case someone was, you know, err , watching.

Dixons store to sell Samsung 10in tablet early

Robert E A Harvey

299?

I'd be baulking at 199 of her Maj's portraits. I mean, it hasn't even got the fobile moan chip in it.

Grenade-gasm autogun gets Raoul Moat Taser shells

Robert E A Harvey

Now then...

OK, I'm a pacifist, and opposed to arming our police. I don't like the idea of weaponry in the hands of the state, or the populace at large.

But all that said, doesn't Metal Storm sound like it would be a wonderful place to work?

Beeb to fund ad-mungous Local TV for local people

Robert E A Harvey

Oh, really?

And just where is this advertising revenue going to come from?

Memories of the local cinema displaying a generic picture of an Indian meal with "Shah's salmonella palace, station approach, Little Slumdewlling" stencilled into the white space on the top.

Nokia punts NFC touch-data biz cards at £11 each

Robert E A Harvey
Stop

Two things

1. DANGER WILL ROBINSON

This is rapidly becoming an affectation, not a solution to anything. It does rather sound as though the Nokia Asylum is now firmly in the hands of the nutjobs, not the nurses.

2. Your tag

"Near filed Communications". Really?

Microsoft previews 'Juneau' SQL Server tools

Robert E A Harvey
Meh

FileTable

I can't decide if this idea is rather clever or if I should run screaming from the room.

I assume such access will be read-only? The idea of ones database integrity being threatened by windows explorer is a bit like someone designing that vent on the death star that Luke dropped the bomb down.