Posts by John Robson

Netflix says subscriptions just boomed but tells investors it's no money heist and they should expect stranger things

Re: Less chatty TLS - wow

And of course the stream isn’t the only connection, how many connections are made logging in and searching?

Re: How long before familes feel the pinch

Gluten intolerance most certainly is a thing.

Single biscuit and I’m on steroids for several months.

UK snubs Apple-Google coronavirus app API, insists on British control of data, promises to protect privacy

What’s the point when they’re not testing people...

No way that’s going on my phone.

Get widespread testing sorted and I’ll think about the EU one.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

Re: How about a poll?

First release should probably be 0.9.

Then your first “stable enough for general use” can be 1.0 (well, 1.0.3)

Re: How about a poll?

Of course you count from zero, every time you add an object you add one.

Re: How about a poll?

No Ground is just another name for the zeroth floor of a building.

Mind you my Father used to work in a nine storey building, seven of which were ground level. Big hill, decent sized building.

Android 11 Developer Preview 3 allows your mobe to become a router via USB Ethernet – if you can get a decent signal

Been doing this via USB tethering since 2.2 (that’s the version my android router phone is on).

Not direct to ethernet, but close enough.

Cisco UCS servers slugged by 'This SSD will self-destruct in 40,000 hours' firmware farrago

Re: Kind of Hertz

Should also point out that mine is heated on demand, theirs is tank fed.

Re: Kind of Hertz

Meh, hot water here is at mains pressure, as it is at my parents house.

No need to have a tank with an open header any more

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Is he even capable of a full sentence?

Not limiting it to intelligent sentences but complete, structured, use of the English language.

Heck “The cat sat on the mat.” would do.

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

Re: another Pink Elephant

Noe - the tech is designed to be assymetric, and the ratio is about fixed usually.

Re: another Pink Elephant

ISPs still provide routers?

Haven’t used one in.... forever.

ISPs will sell WiFi6 as Corvus proof, and people will flock to upgrade.

(Just as soon as the price is the same so they can team more profit)

Zero-click, zero-day flaws in iOS Mail 'exploited to hijack' VIP smartphones. Apple rushes out beta patch

Re: Buy Apple

Because no other OS has ever had any security vulnerabilities.

This is particularly bad, but then so are many others.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

By this logic... since U can’t rely on the local police to investigate a crime, what do I do?

Go round their house with a Molotov?

House of Commons agrees to allow Zoom app in Parliament, British MPs will still have to dress smartly

Yes, the general intelligence and maturity level would be wildly increased if a bunch of teenage skiddies got in.

Having to *go* to work. FTFY

Or at least put on a shirt and make sure the headboard isn’t in sight.

Self-isolation champions fresh home from a jaunt in orbit wonder if they've returned to the wrong version of Earth

Failure to land

Is nowhere near mission threatening... for the booster.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Re: Cables with labels on

I blame the fact that I am currently seriously ill. I had to read it three times to realise what I had done...

D'Oh.

Re: Cables with labels on

And a reason it's always at the top (unless you're in some backwards country like the USA)

Re: Cables with labels on

Comments shouldn't tell you what code is doing. the code should do that.

Comments tell you *why* code is doing that - what's the purpose, the decision process that far and the dead ends explored.

So how do the coronavirus smartphone tracking apps actually work and should you download one to help?

I'm intrigued who down voted me, and why?

Do they not think that hearing aids are important?

Re: how do google and apple install these new APIs?

iOS updates come for a lot longer than android updates do.

Additionally, even when a device can't deal with the latest iOS version, it can still get updates - they just push an update of an older version, it's really very easy.

The difficulty will be android, where there is no central update policy.

Because my hearing aids are controlled by bluetooth, so it makes sense to have it on, and them always connected.

Before I had the hearing aids I used to deliberately enable bluetooth for specific purposes, and leave it off otherwise.

Europe calls for single app to track coronavirus. Meanwhile America pretends it isn’t trying to build one at all

Re: Given how long it took them to get Brexit finished...

Took the UK contingent longer than that to bother turning up.

Why would the EU change their offer when the UK weren't willing to do the same?

Re: Given how long it took them to get Brexit finished...

Brexit is nowhere near finished, and the people who slowed it down most were the brexiteers...

The most logical explanation is that they didn't really want to leave, they just wanted a scapegoat to blame for everything they did wrong.

Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)

Audio versions

may be imperfect, but you need some other way of verifying people who have a visual impairment.

The real challenge of course is that you are only as strong as the weakest captcha option.

Apple creates face shield for health workers, resists the temptation to call it the 'iMask'

And that's the joy of 3D printing... it can flip to a new challenge - as requested by the medical community - very quickly.

It takes a fair while, and huge investment, to get injection moulding up and running.

3D printing can cover that time gap quite well, but don't underestimate how long that will take.

The question of course...

Is it what the healthcare community are asking for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbEj7M3aZIg

If at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again: Boeing to repeat CST-100 test, Russia preps another ISS taxi

Re: "Hats off to Boeing for recommending a repeat of their Orbital Flight Test"

Previous errors can't be undone. What you can do is make the correct next decision.

In this case they have done so, although that doesn't mean we should reduce the vigilance on the next one, or the one after....

Watch: Rare Second World War footage of Bletchley Park-linked MI6 intelligence heroes emerges, shared online

Rare...

I'm not sure rare quite covers the scarcity of material from this era of such a famous institution.

The secrecy surrounding, and permeating, the operations at the time must make this virtually unique - it is the only known footage, it wouldn't be that much of a surprise if it was the only remaining footage.

Soichi to join three-spaceship club, SpaceX is going to the Moon (no, really), and rocket boffins step up COVID-19 fight

You could reasonably argue that the lander was cargo until the in flight rearrangement manoeuvre.

Is a car a car when on a truck? Does that phase of delivery count against the car’s mileage?

To consider Skylab surely you also have to consider MIR (and other Russian stations*), the ISS, the two Chinese stations...

The lunar lander is peculiar amongst spacecraft because it started and ended in space without passing through a (substantial) atmosphere, rather than starting on earth and journeying to space (and back in the case of manned craft)

But it was the only vehicle capable of making that landing. I would therefore suggest that it is a craft, but that only two of each crew got to fly in it.

Zoom vows to spend next 90 days thinking hard about its security and privacy after rough week, meeting ID war-dialing tool emerges

Re: To be honest you can't blame people for going to Zoom

Pretty easy on zoom to not see faces.

On a mobile device is has something ironically* called safe driving mode....

You just get a big button which toggle your mute status, and no other info on screen.

Of course it’s probably still streaming all the video feeds anyway...

* at least I hope it’s ironic.

It is easy - it's just below the date/time settings...

Rethinking VPN: Tailscale startup packages Wireguard with network security

Re: Walkthrough is A1

And the overall experience is amazingly good.

There have publicly declared how to disable centralised endpoint logging (including a future hostname that they might move to).

Their decision to import auth from elsewhere is a good one, and the use of the GCNAT space is sensible as well. Don't know of any carriers exposing those to customers at the moment...

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Not the N1, the Saturn V

Re: Checks date

But tried and tested tech we probably would really struggle to put together again.

We just don't have the same skills that we had then. The injectors and baffles of the F1 were works of fine art, eventually sufficiently stable that explosives detonated within the combustion chamber didn't cause more than a momentary flutter....

Each F1 had 1.5MlbF thrust at sea level - that's equivalent to ~ 3 BE4 engines, 2.4 Raptors, or 9 Merlin engines

That's insane thrust levels.... 5 F1s, each of which produced ~ a full thrust version of the Falcon 9 (1.5 Mlbf vs 1.7 MlbF)

That's ~1.5 Falcon Heavies tied together (gonna need more struts, and to check yo' staging)

I blame a lack of coffee

for the number of sentences it took me to realise the date.

Internet Archive justifies its vast 'copyright infringing' National Emergency Library of 1.4 million books by pointing out that libraries are closed

Re: I'd have sympathy....

"the ills of the system and totally evil DRM do not give IA any right whatsoever to do this."

I agree - the rules are as they stand.

But the fact that "copyright has been wilfully extended, mainly to suit USA music, film, TV and animation producers/distributors" still loses them* my sympathy.

* The large organisations which are set up to benefit from the works of others long after they should have passed into the public domain.

I'd have sympathy....

If copyright was even vaguely fit for purpose.

But the current situation where copyright lasts for lifetime+70 years is ridiculous when compared with the 25 years protection for a patent. Now that system is differently broken, but the premise is that you get a sanctioned monopoly for 25 years to recoup your development costs. Quite why authors of books (, writers of lyrics, producers of films, composers of music...) need more than 25 years to recoup their costs is yet to be explained.

In particular, if you haven't recouped your costs of developing the plot device etc before you are dead then there either the product didn't generate enough interest to cover it's cost (in the same way that many many books likely never will, including several of those authored by family members), or your pricing model was seriously odd.

I could see an exception being made for autobiographies... those have a rather different invested content (one's life) to a novel, or a text book (even if said text book contains the results of a life time of research).

Apple's latest macOS Catalina update mysteriously borks SSH for some unlucky fans. What could be the cause?

They are perfectly transparent...

You can't see anything that's going on inside.... light just passes through unaffected.

BT reopens £90m UK High Court case over 1970s VAT 'overpayments'

Re: Meanwhile in IR35 land...

There is no contingency for your mode of working being bizarrely outlawed.

The width of the IR35 regulations basically ensures that you can't work for any large organisation as a contractor - because HMRC will treat you as an employee, whilst employment law won't...

Forget toilet roll, bandwidth is the new ration: Amazon, YouTube also degrade video in Europe to keep 'net running amid coronavirus crunch

Re: Excuse me...

"And no need to consider the blu-ray player, it uses enough energy to light a couple of led bulbs."

Most switch gear uses alot less than that per stream - order of magnitude less in fact.

10W for the first BR player on google... That's more than a hard disk!

(and even the .25W standby would cover a few network devices)

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: Whilst I loved (and still have) my Psion5mx...

That looks quite - nice, how does the fold get supported in use?

I note that they do a semi ergo ones as well:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07TXMCJQF

and someone is doing one that should be quite rigid across the deck:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MTO8Q8J

Re: Whilst I loved (and still have) my Psion5mx...

My BT keyboards don't sleep or miss characters...

Don't know what you're doing wrong with yours.

It's a niche product, a niche that I have reasonable history with (Psion5(s), XDAs to name a couple), as well as having tried palm graffiti and used touchscreen keyboards (which I really dislike) and early netbooks (too bulky by a long shot).

I still think that the niche is better served by a split device - particularly if the fold was good enough that it could be a genuinely everyday keyboard...

Although I'd still be sorely tempted by a true Psion5mx remix - with a modern touchscreen and connectivity. But I think it would be better off eschewing the phone in favour of a plain linux OS - even something like raspbian as a default (obviously raspbian has it's own target hardware).

I spent several years with a candybar nokia phone which allowed my tablet to tether via bluetooth. Was a great combination, I used to plug in a mouse and use the BT keyboard to do various things, including remote admin, and local game play.

Whilst I loved (and still have) my Psion5mx...

I can't help but think that bluetooth keyboards for more mainstream portable screens are a better solution to the problem.

I have a folding bluetooth keyboard which takes a pair of AAA batteries, and folds out sideways (with a sliding hinge in the middle so that the two sides of the hinge are both supported by the 'back' of the device and it doesn't go floppy).

I have to be honest though, when I expect to need a keyboard, I have an old Apple bluetooth KB (2*AA) with an 'origami' case, which props up a phone or tablet very well, even on my lap, so the folding keyboard doesn't see all that much use any more; it used to be in almost daily use, despite being just a faction smaller than I would have liked.

If they made a truly compact folding bluetooth keyboard that was reasonable to type on then they'd probably sell a whole lot more. If said keyboard had a case which could prop up a phone/tablet in a case, all the better. Something that folds down to the size of a small glasses case from laptop sized/spaced keys would be nice.

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

It shouldn’t be something that Parliament has a say in...

Re: Get it delivered for Free with Amazon Prime.

Pretty sure the “get it delivered free” was a reference to the virus, not magically virus free food

Re: "One form of exercise a day"

Good thing you never use any bridges, or in fact anything that was engineered in the last 50 years - all of which have used modelling to determine how to build them.

supermarkets model demand for perishable items, and do a pretty good job most of the time - because on average we are reasonably consistent in our behaviour.

The model fell apart when everyone decided to buy groceries for three weeks at a time... but that'd not unexpected (well, the panic buying was, the model failing on that event wasn't).