Posts by TeeCee

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

Re: Well, Burma.

Holy Fucking Hell! No banhammer for "B*lgium"?

I suppose there was a NSFW warning, still, I'm going to need a stiff drink and a lie down after running across that unexpectedly.

Don't forget to leave a rating: Amazon chairman meeting with UK prime minister to talk taxes

What's actually happening...

...is that Bezos is turning up to serve a "cease and desist" over the use of the word "Prime" in Boris' job title.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

I'm sure that all works a treat when you're trying to log into a machine to find out why it can't get a network connection.

They have thought of that.......right.....?

The Register speaks to one of the designers behind the latest Lego Ideas marvel: A clockwork solar system

Yup, I reckon that in Lego Technics, the concentric drive sleeves on the planetary arms for satellites moves from the "too hard" pile to the "bloody impossible" one.

G7 countries outgun UK in worldwide broadband speed test

"could have faster" I can agree with.

"could have faster at no extra cost" is, I'm afraid, a pile of porkies.

Unless, of course, you include the "minimum term 48 months, price rockets after 18 months and you must take our hideously overpriced TV package as well to qualify" deals, which is comparing apples with turds.

How a glitch in the Matrix led to apps potentially exposing encrypted chats

Always the way since cryptography was invented. At some point, as the authorised recipient, you will need to acquire the key to decrypt. By definition, since you have no key at that point, that exchange cannot be encrypted in any meaningful way[1] and is often vulnerable.

Asymmetric key protocols help, but there's still the matter of how you store and retrieve your private key[2].

[1] You need a key to decrypt the key and to get that key you need.......oops.

[2] If you have memorised your 4096 bit key congratulations and get a life.

Off yer bike: Apple warns motorcycles could shake iPhone cameras out of focus forever

Translation.

"designed for durability"

Actually means:

"we used the cheapest components that should outlast the warranty period"

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards... commence

Re: Kickstarter

Let me guess, with aglets shaped like little apples?

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Re: History repeats itself

Except, of course, that the reason it took so long to decipher hieroglyphic was entirely due to the misconception that the language was either ideographic or pictographic.

Hieroglyphs represent phonemes.

Now, if you'd gone with Chinese, or Mayan, or (etc ad nauseum) you'd have had a point.

Italian stuntman flies aeroplane through two motorway tunnels

Re: Hopefully...

...as that private jet pilot found out the hard way during an overshoot at Northolt.

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Sesame Street.

Todays programme is brought to you by a letter that we cannot mention for legal reasons and a number that we cannot mention for legal reasons.

Volkswagen to stop making its best-selling product for Wolfsburg workers: VW-branded sausages

Ah, corporate knee-jerk reactionism 101.

Caught with your fingers in the till by the eco-nazis? Do something meaningless, but unpopular, that allows you to play the ecofiddle card

Western Digital unveils 20TB OptiNAND hard drive, pledges 50TB to follow

Sounds to me like, in this case. "boosting performance" actually means "getting performance back to where it was before we started playing silly buggers with areal density".

Holding the metadata and indices in "iNand" may well reduce the need to refresh adjacent tracks, but I can't see it speeding up R/W performance like, say, the traditional "flash cache" drives do.

Having said that, the increased density usually produces a hike over lower capacity platters and we'll probably get to see this, rather than losing it to packing overhead as is more usual these days.

Arms not long enough to reach the plug socket? Room-wide wireless charging is on the way

"...37 per cent efficiency..."

Yippee! Just what we need, a new way to waste shitloads of power. But it's convenient, so we'll probably do it anyway.

I wonder what "maximum efficiency" actually was...?

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: No surprises here

...extreme skinniness and cold sensitivity...

Easy to overlook, he could just have been one of the Lizard People and you don't want to accidently out one of them.

Toyota resumes autonomous Paralympics buses after vehicle hit judo competitor, forced him out of match

Re: "the machine failed to brake in time"

Or...

...just maybe it had passengers on board and (correctly) decided that braking lightly and hitting one person at reduced speed was a better option than catapulting a dozen others out of their seats and down the vehicle?

We need the full details. Sometimes, when driving a passenger carrying vehicle, hitting the pedestrian that just walked out in front of you is the right option, regardless of crossings, right of way, etc.

Bonkers rocket launch sees craft slip sideways, barely climb and tear up terrain

Now I understand...

... what's meant when someone says; "it all went sideways".

Robots don't smoke, says Alibaba, and that's why they deliver parcels so fast

Re: Yes they do.

Let me get this straight.

You had sex with a robot for an hour while not using lube and that made it smoke?

Chinese auto-maker accused of altering data after fatal autonomous car accident

Re: Conspiracy

Actually, if you want to cause a crash, brakes may be the way to go.

You do know that, courtesy of ABS and ESP, it's now possible to lock individual wheels on electronic command, right?

Japan's aerospace agency hooks up with Boeing to make planes quieter when they land

I did hear that Luxembourg has (or had?) a Grand AdmiraL

Presumably the job came with a little fleet for the chap's bath...

Edgy: HPE's first message from the International Space Station to Microsoft's Azure? 'hello world'

The next message?

As it's HPE, that'll be; "Here's your invoice for consultancy, customization and installation services - ${eye_watering_sum}".

US boffins: We're close to fusion ignition in the lab – as seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons

..chemical energy equivalent of a big pile of batteries.

These days that's known as a "Tesla".

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Seriously?

The nation also aspires to become a hub for the automotive industry.

Well they're going the wrong way about it. Not too long ago, anyone buying parts used to run a mile at the sight of anything stamped as made in China. These days, every home mechanic knows that the truly godawful shit all comes from India.

One specialist I know is having suspension parts made to pattern in China themselves, purely because the official aftermarket parts production has moved to India and the failure rate of those is catastrophic.

Green hydrogen 'transitioning from a shed-based industry' says researcher as the UK hedges its H₂ strategy

KABOOM!

Many of us are old enough to remember the transition from coal gas to natural gas. One of the big issues was that coal gas can be smelled when it leaks, while natural gas is odourless. The solution adopted (and in place to this day) as to add smelly stuff to natural gas. This is what you notice when there's a gas leak and it's smelly enough that you notice it at gas concentrations way below explosive.

Hydrogen isn't even a molecule, there are no smelly molecules that'll do any more than settle out of it.

Couple that with the fact that Hydrogen is the very devil to get to stay inside anything (let alone underground pipework - that's just sheer insanity) and the Kaboom is a "when, not if" issue.

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Oddly..

fuck.shit.bollocks.arse is right out in the Atlantic, on the very edge of territorial waters.

I'm not sure what that means, if anything.

See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

Smoking gun.

"email was meant to be channelled through a filtering company and not directly exposed."

Aha. I'll bet that proved tricky to get to work properly as, as is usual in such cases, getting the filtering company to pony up with exactly what needs to be allowed where is like getting blood from a stone. They'll have a document that says to do XYZ which you have dutifully implemented, but it still doesn't work.

The problem will turn out to be (as in you can safely bet your mortgage) that they haven't updated their customer config document for 18 months, or "a hardware refresh cycle and umpty-something software changes" as that's better known as.

So, stick in any / any to get things running with removing same, once you've got to speak to someone at the third-party who can discuss technical detail without drooling, on the "to do" list. Roll on a bit, the "to do" list and the "too hard" pile merge and we are where we are.

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

How much work can you do with eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores?

In Russia, you do work for cores!

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

Re: Optimised in compiler

Oh, it was worse than that for Intel.

They already had a shelved 64 bit Pentium design and when the Fat Lady started clearing her throat, they dusted it off.

The slight snag was that world+dog already had stuff out for AMD64 and this had significant differences to Intel's original design.

They were forced to hit it with a big hammer until it looked enough like AMD64 that it would run what was already out there. Hence the egg-frying sack of shite that was Netburst, which they got out the door just in time for AMD to introduce the world to the concept of dual-core X86.

Rinse. Repeat. Fade...

Hungarian tech store closed by World War II bomb

Re: I have a question...

Probably one of ours.

I think we can afford to be generous and let them keep it.

Compsci student walks off with $50,000 after bug bounty report blows gaping hole in Shopify software repos

Re: Generosity

That's: "you left your keys in the door and oh, look, the keys to your safe deposit box, the back door to your office and your new Bentley are on there too.".

Cellnex complains regulators waved through CK Hutchison mast buyout in Europe – only sticking point is the UK

All your tower are belong to us.

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

Ok, who was it...

...who nicked the bribe out of the document bundle before it got to the court?

UK's National Cyber Security Centre needs its posh Westminster digs, says Cabinet Office, because of WannaCry

Yes, but...

One thing that's been shown repeatedly when moving government departments out to the sticks.

While it may indeed save money, everyone who's not utterly shit and can thus easily get another job convenient to where they are, tells 'em to shove their relocation where the sun shineth. The invariable result is a much cheaper department now staffed solely by time-serving losers, many of whom are then promoted using the Peter Principle to fill the gaps in the organisation.

They then proceed to backfill using local hire and find out the hard way why the office space was so cheap...

SK Hynix hits 3-year revenue high as extreme ultraviolet production kicks off in earnest

Re: EUV in your shed

Well, the necessity for full hazardous chemicals and waste storage, handling and disposal approval is a bit of a showstopper.

Most regulatory authorities don't dish that out to any Tom, Dick and Harry, let alone some dickhead in a shed.

If you can't think of another 10 showstopper reasons, you're not trying very hard.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

Re: Hands up

I'm not sure whether to be horrified that you spliced Twinax or astonished that you got away with it.

It carries a balanced signal and any imperfections in the cable almost invariably result in the attached terminals dropping out at random intervals.

BOFH: You say goodbye and I say halon

Re: Great murder choice.

...you drift gently off to sleep, eventually on a permanent basis

So, much the same as the House of Lords then?

China pushes back against Exchange attack sponsorship claims

Hmm.

53% of how many.....?

He may well be comparing half a dozen apples with a bulk freighter of pears here.

Spanish cops cuff Brit bloke accused of playing role in 2020 celeb Twitter hijacking

...send $1,000 to a Bitcoin address with the promise that the account holder would send twice as much back.

Maybe the Banking industry should give him an award for showing them where they have customers who are way too bloody stupid to be allowed to have their own bank accounts?

As scams go, that one's not even trying to look believable.

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Root cause.

One might be driven to ask WTF it was doing in a bloody browser in the first place!

Oh yes: "Oooo. Lusers lurve this tool. I know, we'll build it into our browser and they'll use that rather than XYZ browser, 'cos they're lazy bastards who hate using the right tool for the job if it takes an extra two seconds.".

See also: Adjustable spanner / swiss army knife.

References: Bloatware. Attack surface.

You're not imagining it. Amazon and AWS want to hire all your friends, enemies, and everyone in between

"talent Hoover."

How apt, given that everything we hear from inside Amazon would suggest that working there really sucks.

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

As usual, the Tw@ter types can't do funny.

Far better would be:

1) While he's stepped out, we all hide.

2) Quick! Everyone dress up as Zombies.

3) Dig a 50' hole where his capsule will land and chuck a few hundred snakes in the bottom.

etc...

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

In that case you might want to get the T-shirt.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Surprise surprise.

Idiot luser blames iffy software on OS.

Windows has suffered from being slagged off because ${software_package} is a POS since forever. I'd have thought that a professional might have been able to spot the difference, but apparently not. Incidently, didn't notice you ranting about how shit your Linux is because Teams misbehaved there too...(!)

This is like the key difference between Windows Mobile (the old CE based one) and Android. Google have managed to get the users to blame the supplier when the implementation on Phone X is a heap of shit. MS never managed that trick, so instability (always down to a shoddy third party RIL) was always blamed on the OS.

Also, on the subject of why multi ID doesn't really exist, you forgot the main reason - Legal. ...I know of no system that allows different simultaneous workspaces with their own IDs.... That'll be because you know most users will log in with both their work and private credentials at the same time and be less than careful about what ends up where, which will land you, not them, in GDPR hot water.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Or.

Do as I do.

1) Sod using the oven to cook stuff, it's not called a fry-up for no reason.

2) Oven to low heat, big dish lined with kitchen roll therein.

3) Occasionally remove same from oven and chuck completed contents of frying pan[1] into dish.

4) Do eggs last.

5) While eggs fry, divvy up contents of dish onto plates.

6) Lob freshly cooked eggs onto plates.

7) Enjoy.

NB: Hash browns have no place in an English breakfast, being of a foreign persuasion.

[1] e.g. Sausages, Black pudding, Fried bread, Tomatoes, Mushrooms...

Fool me OnePlus, shame on me: Chinese phone firm fingered for fiddling with performance figures – again

Cyanogen Mod?

Cobblers, cobblers and thrice cobblers.

OnePlus originally used Cyanogen OS, Cyanogen's commercial offering based on the hobbyist Mod. Unfortunately, Cyanogen then came over all venally stupid and did an exclusive deal with some Indian mob. OnePlus were forced to change or face being shut out of the Indian market.

OnePlus had the last laugh when Cyanogen went comprehensively titsup.com when their Indian connection proved to be rather less lucrative than they'd been led to believe.

Chinese chip designers hope to topple Arm's Cortex-A76 with XiangShan RISC-V design

"The purpose of agile development is not to overtake a corner."

No, it's to sprint around it and faceplant a lamppost.

Google has second thoughts about cutting cookies, so serves up CHIPs

Er, hang on.

...aims to implement multiple technical specifications that change how online advertising works in the browser.

So the world's largest advertising broker is changing the way advertising works, without telling anyone else in the business what they'll need to work with in the future?

I predict the great-grandmother of all arse-reamings from the competition authorities.

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Re: Are one-way tickets

It's suborbital so all tickets are two-way.

The key difference is that the return trip is less comfortable on the cheap ones, although you do get a much better view.

Android devs prepare to hand over app-signing keys to Google from August

That process in full:

1) Code tight, lean app.

2) Hand to Google.

3) Magic Googly encruftulation.

4) APK of massive bloatware.

5) End user buys new phone with more memory / processor / storage.

It's about time! NASA's orbital atomic clock a boon for deep space navigation – if they can get it working for long enough

"...the first trapped-ion space clock..."

Ahem. Let me fix that:

...the first trapped-ion clock IN SPAAAAAAAAACE.