Reg Hardware

* Posts by Doogs

19 posts • joined Friday 29th May 2009 08:06 GMT

Doogs

Yeah   

In Germans unveil robots 'controlled by chaos itself'

Where's Magnum PI when you need him?

Doogs

Surfdom?   

In European court pulls plugs on terror stop and search

Cowabunga, dude!

Doogs

Yep   

In Naked scans: Net cries nude-o-geddon

Thought the image was a fake soon as I saw it, just from the shadows under her breasts. Wouldn't have thought x-ray backscatter could create shadows in that way.

Doogs

Staff knowledge  

In UK etailer calls self 'the last place you want to go'

My wife was looking for a digital camera in one Dixons and trying to get some info on the various models. She left PDQ when the PFY "assisting" her asked "what's a pixel?".

Doogs

Alice? WTF is Alice?  

In HP probes 'racist' webcams

Alien

I'd be interested to know why the video is horizontally flipped. Are they behind the looking glass?

Perhaps the webcam does the opposite in the real world?

Doogs

Quantum cats  

In Toshiba unveils new external 3.5-inch drive

Boffin

IIRC it's both 100% alive and 100% dead until you open the case. Of course I could be anywhere up to 100% wrong on that...

Doogs

Hex???  

In Yorkshire cops accused of copyright theft

*** OUT OF CHEESE ERROR ***

Doogs

RE: assault and battery (groan)  

In Police headcams burst into flames

Should have used copper tops. Maybe it was a glitch in the Matrix...

Doogs

Footnotes  

In US sinks $0.5bn into electromagnetic aircraft-throwers

Pint

Nice article as usual, Lewis; just one thing - is it possible to have footnotes on the actual page they're referenced from?

By the time I read them, my (rather terrible) memory means the context gets a bit hazy :)

It's nearly beer o'clock...

Doogs

Perpetuum mobile  

In Russians demand flying cars and telepathy

Megaphone

I've seen a few - how people can talk on the phone for what seems like for ever escapes me...

Megaphone for what some people think they're using; HELLO! I'M ON THE TRAIN, etc

Doogs

@Dex  

In Glasgow unbans Life of Brian

Headmaster

Ravid males?

"I'm only telling the truth. You have got a very big nose..."

Doogs

@John Angelico  

In Masked passwords must go

I don't exactly mask my signature - just change it every time I use it - no one's noticed yet.

Could be a form of mutating encryption, maybe...

Doogs

@GrahamT  

In Spanish court in favour of topless celebs

Boffin

Unless she's an Amazon...

Doogs

@Damien Thorn  

In El Reg commentards offered extra iconography

Pint

... has WAY too much time on his hands.

Well done!

Doogs

RotATM  

In Barclays IT systems have a strop

My step daughter tried drawing out cash to go shopping for herdaughter's prom dress. Screen went blank just before dispensing cash. Result: no cash but debited from account.

Took her ages to get through, but they restored the balance straight away; so must have been a few with the same thing.

Not particularly robust software if a disk array going down causes that.

Doogs

I'm with Jimbo on this one  

In Windows 7 to ship October 22

Windows 7 actually seems slightly faster than Kubuntu 9.04 on my ancient P4 512MB machine. Had to manually find a driver for my old Freecom DVB stick, but apart from that everything installed perfectly, running two different browsers with 3-4 tabs each and watching telly in Media Centre on a second monitor was fine.

Only thing I wasn't keen on was the amount of disk space Windows took up, but hey, disk space is cheap.

Doogs

Hmm  

In Beeb names new Who companion

Liked her on the Kevin Bishop show - that bikini was quite flattering ;)

Bring back Leela, I say! Or Ace - remember Ace?

Ahh memories...

Doogs

Linux v Windows  

In Critical Windows vulnerability under attack, Microsoft warns

Recently started playing with Linux (would have been sooner but the sometimes rather rabid fanboyism tended to put me off).

Actually got interested in OS's again, so thought I'd create a couple of partitions on my aging machine with 512MB RAM, whacked Windows 7 RC on one, tried a couple of flavours of ubuntu on the other.

Wanted something to watch tv, browse a bit of 'net, p2p - nothing too taxing.

Windows 7 ran surprisingly well with IE8 and FF3 running several tabs each and Freeview in Media Centre coming from an old Freecom USB stick (once I'd found drivers for it; Win7 didn't find them automatically) - although that was obviously it's limit as I'd get a pause or two occasionally.

Seeing comments on the good ol' Reg repeatedly telling me Linux is so much less demanding on older machines than Windows, I gave Ubuntu a go.

Tried "standard" Ubuntu - damn that default brown theme is ugly ;), tried Mythbuntu for the TV - failed to install properly; probably my fault for not being clued up enough on Linux.

Then had a look at Kubuntu - now we're talking, I thought. Really liked it with the gadgets an' all - excellent idea to have your UI gadget based I reckon. Took some time to get it to work on both my screens, mostly because of X server config file permissions not letting me save the changed settings.

Running Firefox and Opera with the same tabs as I had in Windows 7 and Kaffiene for TV seemed to work slightly less well than Windows 7, more pauses and telly quality not as good.

Now, I don't know if I could improve Kubuntu performance with the right configuration and optimisation settings, but right now I'm still leaning towards Windows, with Linux an interesting "hobby" OS for when I can afford either a new computer or at least some more RAM.

Windows just seems "to work" a little bit more than the distros of Linux I tried. Perhaps I'm more biased because I'm used to the way Windows works - but that could also apply to the majority of computer users out there, too.

Doogs

Marmite?  

In Welsh mum amazed by Marmite Messiah

s'alright I guess... but it's Vegemite makes the taste buds go round!