* Posts by Chronos

1257 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007

Mozilla returns crypto-signed website packaging spec to sender – yes, it's Google

Chronos

Because the motive was mentioned in an earlier story about changing the way Chrome[ium] exposes the API that uBlock Origin et al uses, so it went without saying. GoOgle are trying to reinvent the way client-server works which removes all choice from the client and forces the server elements that aren't GoOgle into a framework that gives GoOgle and a few selected (read monied) providers control of the traffic.

Enjoy the www while you can. The halcyon days are over if this isn't stopped firmly with a clue-by-four, a classic Etherkiller or several cattle prods. The trick is going to be getting the ordinary users to care.

Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence?

Chronos

Re: Milk Snatcher

"Staff"? We had three teachers, each with two years' worth of brats to teach, and two dinner persons. The sodding milk was the least of their worries. It was dropped off in several miniature crates in skyscraper configuration and left on the veranda with all the bikes until 10:30.

Chronos

Re: Stop it.

You really have to see the big picture for that one. You have to factor in recycling energy, transportation costs, the footprint of creating the replacement, longevity, parts, electronic waste (it's worse now everything is electronic) and so on. The Sportrak has a 1.6l Bosch controlled mulit-point fuel injected sixteen valve engine; it's Japanese so it's about as efficient as anything modern from non-Japanese manufacturers could possibly be. The early ones were carburated, admittedly.

There's also herself's 57 plate Aygo in disguise which returns mid-sixties MPG and the ancient '91 Rover SLD which returns the high fifties, although using the oily fuel. The latter is off the road right now as I haven't plucked up the courage to try to take the gearbox off to replace the pressure plate which is short of a few release fingers as it also needs a rear crank seal, which means taking the sodding flywheel off. 240k miles on the same clutch isn't bad, though...

Chronos

Re: C-90s

Much less the Sinclair branded C-15s. However, it was great fun replacing my dad's classical cassette in the car with one that had a copy of Manic Miner on it, spooled just past the leader...

Yes, little bastard was my name for the longest time. How did you guess?

Chronos

Re: Milk Snatcher

To be fair, for around four months of the year it was bottled cheese by breaktime anyway.

Chronos

Re: I scream

It was dire muck. The raspberry ripple, for example, was so hard that you treated the ripple bits as fault lines. Then it thawed a bit, say a couple of degrees C, and turned into sandy crap that fused with the cardboard. As Dr_N hints, no bugger would eat it unless there was sod-all else.

Chronos

Re: Brilliant idea

Fscked on rainy days, found on road dead, flung on recycling dump...

Yes, this was Dagenham Dustbin era. My uncle used to work in the tractor plant and wasted 20 years of his life putting one bolt in as they went past. Given the monotony, it's easy to see why the people on the lines didn't GAF.

Chronos

Re: Stop it.

My mother got a Sunbeam mixer when she married in the 60s, it lasted until the early 2000s, being used at least once a week. My wife has been through 3 mixers since I met her, and they weren't used nearly so often!

Mrs Chronos has one of the old Moulinex Masterchef processors. Its jug interlock failed a few years back but she was adamant she wanted it repairing because the new ones are, in her own words, "designed by bean-counters and assembled by muppets," so one destroyed relay for some decent contacts and a bit of soldering later, "Brenda the blender" was fully operational again. The work was simple, the pride was in herself and her BOfHness. It's still in service now.

For technology products that are quickly superceded

But are they? I have a Toshiba Tecra here that is all but obsolete, yet it took 8GB of RAM and an SSD. Being a CoreNumberNumeral something-or-other¹ it is no slouch in the CPU department for everyday tasks and, with Devuan on it, it's fast enough that I'm not even considering replacing it. Unless there's a compelling reason for the Latest'n'Greatest™ I see no logical advantage to buying it except lightening the weight of one's wallet. How much of this continuous upgrade->throw away cycle is peer pressure?

It's the same with 'phones. I have a Wileyfox Storm here that works fine, gets Pie security updates through LineageOS and is fast enough. Even though it has a couple of design flaws, I'm not replacing it unless and until it fails to do something I need it to do.

Don't even get me started on cars. The 1994 Daihatsu is still going strong, TYVM.

¹ I don't care enough to remember the T number. It's fast enough.

Chronos

Indeed. And they tried to return as much oil from whence it came as they could possibly manage - usually right through the concrete on your driveway.

Chronos
Stop

Stop it.

You're pressing all my pet hate buttons. Deliberately. Far better to keep adequate kit working for longer than have it fall to bits on cue. The real problem with consumerism is the "keeping up with the Joneses" element or, in the connected age, your e-peen.

BTW, polylactic acid or PLA that we 3D printing nuts like to say is biodegradable is only biodegradable under certain circumstances with the right bacteria. The stuff generally doesn't turn into mush and compost on its own.

This is a sett-up! Mum catches badger feasting on contents of freezer

Chronos

Re: Badgers are awesome.

I suspect, as CrazyOldCatMan points out, Gary had some residual honey badger genes. I must admit my testes felt a little vulnerable...

I have no problem with badgers and I really wish people would stop running them over; it's not as if they're hard to spot. Just thought the Gary anecdote, which actually happened and no amount of commenting to the contrary about the natural temperament of badgers is going to change this one's Geordie Friday night attitude, was fitting. I saw Gary a time or two afterwards and often left him a few treats as a peace offering. The offerings were inevitably accepted by something, the peace was conditional on my staying the hell out of his way. I don't think he liked the idea of a nocturnal human.

Rural North Wales. Y moch daear (earth pigs) around here are pretty brave.

Chronos

Re: Badgers are awesome.

Also, I discovered if you're stood still being absolutely quiet and a badger is walking in your direction and you don't want to make it run off in a blind panic, make loud breathing sounds through your nose and it'll realise something is there then turn round and saunter back a different direction.

Blind panic? Let me introduce you to Gary. It was one night/morning in the wee small hours and I had, yet again, lost track of time obsessing over another project in the workshop. As usually happens when one realises it's 3AM and the world is almost silent, the old ears started picking up softer sounds, one of which was a snuffling and rustling sound coming from the driveway. Dispensing with the usual thoughts of The Thing and remembering we don't live in the Antarctic, I ventured out to find out what the giddy frig was going on.

My word, a bin bag moving on its own! If we had these a long time ago it would have saved me many an evening lugging fetid waste away from more civilised areas. No such luck, though, because inside this one was Gary. I called him Gary because, upon disengaging from his foraging, he looked at me like I had just spilled his pint, rose up about six inches and you could just hear the bugger:

"What you lookin' at, mate? You want a knuckle butty?"

Whether he had an XR3i convertible and was cohabiting a sett with his skanky girlfriend and six brats I never found out; he looked as if he could back up the attitude so I made a polite withdrawal from the scene. As I left I'm pretty sure I caught sight of an Elizabeth Duke sovereign ring, though...

Tesla big cheese Elon Musk warns staffers to tighten their belts in bid to cut expenses (again)

Chronos

Re: Critical vs Functional

Even tiny, cheap microcontrollers have lots of analog inputs these days, and can tell if a channel has gone O/C or S/C. PTC not needed.

Except you still need code to handle the error. If silly-con valley employee #183453 fat fingers one line, all bets are off. You need to do this in a hard-wired, can't be pissed about with way on each cell pack. if (analog.read(A0) < BATTERY70CPOINT) then pwm_global_bias--; simply isn't good enough. As I said, there's nothing wrong with a bit of feedback as long as you have a good old-fashioned crowbar-like failsafe with a bipolar attitude to thermal runaway. KISS principle for safety, always.

You can't simply limit current to the motor because it has to be converted to multiphase AC; the motor control circuitry must be told to restrict maximum power, you can't simply put a honking great MOSFET in the DC input and use it as a current regulator, because the downstream voltage will drop and soon after your MOSFET will melt.

I said nothing about limiting current in the traditional sense. PWM. You don't leave a power FET in between its off and saturation point; a honking great MOSFET (probably HEXFETs in this application) is usually a fuckton of them parallelised and the power wasted from a load of those in limbo would probably fuel a miniature sun. Basic, assumed practice which I shouldn't have to explain here.

As for multiphase AC, assuming you meant that literally, these things are either "honking great" steppers, i.e. pseudo AC which is really just a DC source being alternated between windings or pure PM units, either of which means you can recover energy through regenerative braking, which is where the concern about rare earth mining for these electrojalopies comes from. If Tesla are using energised field coils and fancy waveforms, someone's not doing their design properly and it's no wonder Jezza can't get 300+ miles from a fancy milk float.

I still maintain there should be an autonomous safety system segmented from the "upgradable" firmware that any old jumped-up skiddie with a massaged CV can piss about with and push OTA which can overrule the likes of the infotainment system when the owner sticks it in OMFG, THE TORQUE! mode. I'm sure most rational human beings would rather their car lose a bit of oomph or stop than lose all power and catch fire which, ironically, also disables Tesla's fancy door latches which, as far as I can ascertain, were only implemented so they can open and close the doors in "celebration" mode. Yes, there's a bit of string in the rear quarter for first-responders but that's little consolation when you're sitting there wondering why it's so hot and there's an overwhelming smell of roast pork coming from your trousers.

That last point emphasises my concern with fancy bollocks over safety.

Chronos
Facepalm

Critical vs Functional

Yesterday the company updated battery software on Models S and X following vehicle fires in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Batteries, particularly those on fire, are strictly in the hardware domain. Software updates that "stop" them raise the question of how the giddy frig software is allowed to overcharge/under-regulate charge and discharge cycles in the first place. That, I would have thought, should be the job of the pack designer who, one would hope, adds at least a thermistor to the region around each cell and makes things stop/slow down quite outside the firmware's control when one is noticed to be going a little high-R (PTC thermistor, if anyone cares, as they'll fail high-R if a leg falls off and trip the protection).

Or do we not separate critical and functional any more? Nothing stopping the critical bits throwing a CANbus message out saying "whoa, 4Q, sunshine, you're overtaxing the cells" but the resultant action should be to go ahead and limit the current anyway, regardless of the artificial stupidity's decision.

Polygraph knows all: You've been using our user feedback form

Chronos
Paris Hilton

Re: Race to the bottom.

All I'm going to say to that is "The Cougar Song" since most of your articles introduce the reader to musical experiences they probably haven't tried before.

Paris, for obvious reasons.

Chronos

Re: Poor taste

Satirising a TV show and its underhand manipulative methods and the schadenfreude-loving audience that allowed it to exist in the first place - BOOOOO! - that drove someone to suicide is not.

Chronos
Devil

Wrong. Some of us have fully functional shit filters and words like "Jeremy" followed by Kyle or Vine tend to trigger them. Far from being impossible to miss, for us it's almost inevitably a blind spot, forcing us instead to focus on less trivial matters such as how many wallpaper seams there are on the south wall and the quality thereof.

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

Chronos

Re: Well...

Oh, sorry, this is abuse. You want 12A, just down the corridor.

Chronos
Stop

Re: "You'll be missed."

No, Piers is just a professional shit-stirrer with a face born to slap, clueless about whatever subject he's meddling with and fuckwitted in his willingness to consider he may be wrong, which is pretty much all the time. Jeremy Vine is of the same ilk.

You do Andrew a grave disservice. At the very least, Andrew's articles were thought-provoking and had a human angle rather than just being an opinion-diktat on how we all should think. Unlike Piers, you could persuade him to reconsider with facts rather than uninformed opinion.

Whether you agree with some of his opinions or not, his talent will be missed and I, for one, wish him all the best in his future endeavours.

US foreign minister Mike Pompeo to give UK a bollocking over Huawei 5G plans

Chronos
Meh

I'm trying my best...

...but I really cannot locate that shit to give about yet another bloody Five Eyes proponent spouting off predictably. Opinions: Like arseholes, everyone has one and most of them stink.

There's an ironic dichotomy of opinion on the ethics of backdooring core kit. It seems that as long as your glass house runs on some form of "democracy," being the worst system of government bar all the others, you're fine to lob boulders at whim. Can't expect Pompeo to understand irony, of course.

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Chronos
Flame

So move to Chrome-by-another-name... good luck with that!

[Chrom]ium. It's in every major distro's repo, works well, doesn't spew your PII to GoOgle (disable SafeBrowsing as you would in Fx) and supports uBlock, uMatrix in default allow/blocklist mode and HTTPS everywhere.

What we really need is a modern day GUI-ified Lynx that supports the useful subset of HTML5, HTTPS 2.0, TLS1.4, granulated javascript control and so on without all the advertising and tracking cruft that browsers tend to come with. Stuff DOM storage, WebRTC, supercookies and Flash - nobody here needs that crap. Oh, and give me an extension in HTTP that reads a list of hostnames/IPs that the browser will never, ever make GET/POSTs to, just silently ignores them. Don't say /etc/hosts because the damned thing still tries to connect to 127.0.0.1 or ::1.

Chronos
FAIL

Eggs, single basket

Yes, centralise everything so it all breaks at the slightest whiff of a senior moment. Well done Mozilla. Are you going to include two keys with staggered renewal dates in future or have you learnt nothing from this?

As an aside, it's fairly easy to turn off the signed check in about:config, although it does leave your Extensions page looking like someone threw up a load of dire, bile-coloured warnings all over it. Don't enable studies, though. Yes, sure, just run arbitrary, untested code on my browser - what could possibly go wrong?

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Chronos

Re: Year of Linux

what about those custom software that people use everyday that ONLY run on Windows and ONLY Windows

Yes, we have some. More often than not it's some HTML piped over the Intranet and shown in a UI decorated window using the awful HTML rendering engine in %%WINDIR%%. Worse, if you take it off the desktop and onto, say, an Ultrabook-like device, it gets all confused and renders like an upturned sack of shit and woe betide you if you forget some of it is broken and try to do a transaction in IE instead of Chrome, such as <UI elided to protect the guilty> because you'll be filling that form in again with the customer watching you and thinking "what an incompetent arse" written all over their face..

I'm so glad I'm recovered (ASR-wise). I only have to use this crap now, not support it.

Chronos
Facepalm

Year of Linux

This perpetual myth that open sourcerers want "market share" has persisted for far too long. The whole point of open source is choice, not to be tied down with someone else's defaults which is why "fragmentation" is a given in the ecosystem.

My desktop has followed me from FreeBSD through Debian to Devuan. It is pretty much the same in form and function and has remained unchanged on the surface (updates get done, of course) for about a decade. Nobody else uses it as it's a mashup of my own creation, having been disappointed with the offerings from Redmond, Cupertino and the various GDEs for *nix-alikes, yet I can do exactly what I need to do without fighting the UI. I fully accept that it would be utterly incomprehensible for anyone else, so its market share of one bothers me not one bit.

Please, get over this "year of Linux" nonsense. Linux as a kernel is already overwhelmingly relevant due to Android, Chromebooks, set top boxes, router firmware, IP cameras, televisions and so on, ad infinitum. The GNU userland is also deployed in more places that Redmond could imagine. Windows doesn't even come close.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

Chronos

Re: The Mueller report was one big nothingburger

Like it or not, tech has been politicised. Even the most lowly, recovered and peripheral of us need to understand this shit if for no other reason than "asbestos underpants."

US: We'll pull security co-operation if you lot buy from Huawei

Chronos

Re: Wanna bet?

Yes, but the current incumbent makes Dubya look not only good but progressive. At least one could laugh at Dubya's upside-down book reading, inadvertent faux pas uttering antics. Arsenoise, on the other hand, is deadly serious when he goes blundering in, with emphasis on the deadly.

Chronos

Wha-hey!

Is this the end of Five Eyes and its attendant snoopage of everyone's private communications? Personally, I can't think of much better news than that. I'm beginning to suspect it's because Huawei refuse to put backdoors in their FW and the Five Eyes wallahs are too thick to reverse engineer it or it's too much bother to intercept and infect the way they do with outbound Switchzilla kit.

Fine, Trumpettes¹, take your ball home. It was soggy, a funny shape, you kept cheating and, as they say in your vernacular, "ain't nobody here gives a shit."

¹ I'm talking directly to the political class here. Ordinary Americans are, as a rule, decent folk just like anyone else, while their politicians are about as clueful as ours.

Astronomer slams sexists trying to tear down black hole researcher's rep

Chronos

Re: Let's hoist one

I'm a Yank, so perhaps I shouldn't use the term "Boffins"

We're all humans, adaptable and willing to learn. Use whatever term you wish.

/me looks at first post

Perhaps I should qualify that...

BT Tower broadcasts error message to the nation as Windows displays admin's shame

Chronos

Re: MSDOSh

Oops, sorry, I just repeated your joke. I'll get me coat.

Chronos

BBC Microcomputer 32k

Acorn 1770 DFS

BASIC

> _

For $DEITY's sake, someone hit <Shift><Break>!

Q&A: Crypto-guru Bruce Schneier on teaching tech to lawmakers, plus privacy failures – and a call to techies to act

Chronos

Re: Yes, really ...

NO! The civil service writes the wishlist and gets the legislature to effect laws that punish malcontents. You deal with the government or find yourself in a fate worse than death.

FTFY

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Chronos

Re: Travelling to client sites

I was "asked" (as in "you do not have a choice")

There's a word for that: "Voluntold."

Linux 5.0 is out except it's really 4.21 because Linus 'ran out of fingers and toes' to count on

Chronos

Re: "as evidenced by it reaching end of life with just 1½ service packs"

Granted, but I liked the implication. Agree with the Win2k comment upthread, too. I doubt 10.1 will be any better, though. The bits that make 10 brown and sticky are core features now, much like XP's Fisher-Price UI and bloody activation cock-ups.

Chronos

Windows version numbering

Windows 7 was and still is actually 6.1, AKA Vista+ despite it being, IMHO, the best OS Redmond ever produced, as evidenced by it reaching end of life with just 1½ service packs and them having to actively sabotage it with telemetry to get people off of it. Just shows you how much shit they have in the upstairs cupboard when it comes to version numbering, eh?

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

Chronos
Devil

So, in a nutshell?

Chipzilla's performance advantage over the competition may be largely due to cut corners and half-arsed security with regards to memory allocation and organisation? Interesting take-away point if nothing else. If only AMD could ditch the SP JudasPuter and give us trustworthy products...

Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit?

Chronos
Trollface

Dear Secret Service

Please can you firewall the troll-in-chief off from any form of social media? Give him a sandbox that looks like Twitter, complete with artificially stupid TKL bots to respond to his nonsense, so that we don't have to read either his or the media's regurgitation of his brain farts.

Regards,

World+Dog

Apple reseller Solutions Inc pulls down shutters, calls in administrators

Chronos

Re: One wonders...

I think this is, in a nutshell, why I didn't understand it. I'll joke about a little light theft employee (which of you thieving bastards has my red stapler this time?) but I could no more do it than set my own damned head on fire. For the same reason many of us make incredibly poor teachers, I can't ascribe to others the traits that make them the sort of people who would quite happily trot out with the departmental colour laser under their arm.

Yes, it would be a kick to the honest, but a little lower down than the teeth. Now, if it were manglement wandering out with half the assets, that I can fully envisage, including coercing subordinate employees to pack the lease-hire Lexus to the point that the pot-bellied, balding golfist can't see through the rear window. Quite what he's going to do with a load of Citrix thin clients is another debate for another time...

Chronos

Re: One wonders...

In defence of grumpy old gits, we are accustomed to the worst possible outcome after so much direct empirical evidence. Still, at least we have the residual decency to apologise when it happens :)

Chronos
Pint

Re: One wonders...

Damn, that was a bit knee-jerk on my part, wasn't it? Well spotted, Mr/Ms X. Have a beer.

Chronos
Big Brother

One wonders...

...if employees' personal effects left on site are really company property or could said employees have a case for theft of said personal effects? Perhaps employees returning isn't the only reason the police may be called...

Icon. Well there isn't a fat bastard with a cigar sitting on a pile of money and employee corpses icon so I had to go with the authoritarian angle.

Secret mic in Nest gear wasn't supposed to be a secret, says Google, we just forgot to tell anyone

Chronos

Re: Oh, crap they caught us again!

telnet bofh.jeffballard.us 666

Croeso.

Pokemon No! Good news: You can now ban the virtual pests, er, pets to stop nerds wandering around your property

Chronos

Re: "Zombie players"?

"Shot to the head. Nothing more, nothing less. Right, that's it, piss off..."

-- Gregg, the grim reaper, CBFD

ACLU: Here's how FBI tried to force Facebook to wiretap its chat app. Judge: Oh no you don't

Chronos

Re: N/M

No, they most likely want the redacted version to show their "dissent" with the snoopage for some public brownie points but cover up just how easy it is for their systems to be internally compromised, which would probably make up the bulk of the federal complaint of contempt, i.e. "They routinely trawl through this stuff for product interest keywords, networking indicators and so on but refused to assist law enforcement by sharing that data."

This is Farcebook we're talking about. The "right thing" is serendipitous.

Uncle Sam to its friends around the world: You can buy technology the easy way, or the Huawei

Chronos

Re: "out of security concerns"

The UK has a choice: [...] seeking to create a national specialty

We have one. I don't think bloody-mindedness sells very well, though.

In a way, China's ascendency is again a monster of our own creation. Oh, those manufacturing jobs were just too dull and low paid to be economically viable for us so we just did the interesting design bits and sent them over there to be made for tuppence ha'penny. Then the design got dull so we just took Shenzhen generics and rebadged them. All of a sudden we're wondering why China is top dog for making stuff. Well, quelle surprise.

It didn't need an economic war. All China had to do was, um, Keep Calm and Carry On™.

Chronos

Re: "out of security concerns"

You mean like handing Poland over to the Soviets in 1945 despite our treaty obligations to them being the reason we entered into the war in the first place and their underrated help in surviving the Battle of Britain, a decision in which both so-called civilised nations were complicit? It's one thing to exercise the will of the people, it's quite another to ignore that will and sell them down the river. Sovereignty? Only when it suits us.

We're barely down from the sodding trees...

Chronos

Re: Be curious, if the UK has to toe the line ...

succumbed to aspirational crap such as "You can be whatever you want to be".

My answer to that particular platitude is usually along the lines of "I can also surely be many things I don't particularly want to be such as dead, skint or stuck in a room with some bellend who actually believes that, scenarios which are much more likely than being snu-snu'd senseless by Keira Knightley and Margot Robbie on my own tropical island."

Sometimes this realism is harsh...

Chronos
Trollface

Re: Does that mean...

You'll go broke from the lack of U.S. business

Pray tell, what will the lack of exports to those "rogue states" do to your trade deficit?

They're obviously issuing those funny 20th Century atlases again which show the North American continent covering 70% of the planet's land-mass and Uncle Sam standing on a mountain (if you can find one that hasn't been strip-mined) being pleasured by Lady Liberty while screaming "Murica, fuckin' A!" You do realise that Canada is bigger than the contiguous 48 combined?

Not really sure how valuable US business is right now, given Arsenoise's love for tariffs, trade barriers and MAGA. It's probably on a par with our own, given Brexit and the uncertainty of becoming a trivial little island with politicians who could start an argument alone in a country 'phone box at 4AM and very little manufacturing industry to speak of.

Still, we have Silicon Roundabout and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the first visible proof that cadavers can be reanimated. What more could we possibly want? [sarcasm]

Posturing and willy-waving, all of it.

Using WhatsApp for your business comms? It's either that or reinstall Lotus Notes

Chronos

Re: Delta Chat

Impressive. However, I remain confused. Why are we buggering about with Google, Facebook, Slack and so on, with the attendant snoopage, when we have XMPP that can do all of those things? Even goOgle used it for a while, until it became clear that OTR enf-to-end was too easy and made snooping on people's chats nigh impossible.

Offline messages: check.

End to end encryption: check.

Voice and video: check.

SIP integration: check.

Conference rooms: check.

Virtual whiteboards: check.

Easily done in-house with sod-all server overhead? Yup, check. Anything it doesn't do can be added with plug-ins that probably already exist Rule 34 style, hence eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Until SMTP is guaranteed to be encrypted for every hop, e-mail should be left well out of the loop for anything more important than Aunty Mabel's cat photos. Banks, I'm looking at you lot.

Ouch, Apple! Plenty of iPhones stuck in tech channel. How many? That's a 'wild card'

Chronos
Devil

Re: Apple boredom

Indeed. They had a pair of them chained to a table in Tesco on Friday. Mrs Chronos, not being a techie, wandered over to have a prod.

"Look at these!"

"Yes, look at the price."

"What do they do that mine [Moto G] doesn't?"

"Lock you into Apple's ecosystem and make you part of the Apple clique."

Unsurprisingly, we completed our shopping without further reference to Cupertino's finest. You will note I said Tesco. Not Waitrose or John Lewis, which would seem to be more their target demographic. It smacked a little of desperation. They'll be in the bargain bins at Lidl next...