Posts by /\/\j17

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

"Marie-Christine Pygott, a senior analyst at Context, told The Register that there had been improvements in the growth and share of Copilot+ PCs, although she noted that the "growth comes from a small base" and had been driven more by marketing, promotions, and price cuts rather than Microsoft's promises of productivity gains."

Also worth noting that the number of Copilot+ PCs manufacturers have on the market has increased/you'd assume a corresponding reductions in non-Copilot+ ones in the same time period, so the number purchased by people on the "This one's expensive so must be better than the cheaper ones" basis, not even knowing what the "Copilot+" sticker meant, will have gone up.

Amazon grounds drone deliveries in Arizona after two crashed into a crane

"Crane jibs and cables can be hard to spot by a human pilot."

True, but also part of the reason aircraft don't generally fly 1,000ft above the highest point within 5nm of the planned flight path and cranes aren't generally 3,000ft tall.

But when you're talking about drones, which I'm guessing have a mandated minimum altitude of a few hundread feet to keep them out of the way of general air traffic, you're very much flying in cluttered, dynamic airspace where you will get cranes/kites/power lines/...

Android drops mega patch bomb - 120 fixes, two already exploited

Not far off.

In addition to the bug fixes there's quite a lot of UI changes, fron the base font up (having just installed it on my Pixel 7 Pro).

Let's just hope it sorts out some of the battery life and device temerature issues they introduced with Android 16!

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Server naming need intelligence, not just a pattern

This was just my response to me trying to get myself fired for incompetence. Wasn't in any way company policy or anything (though a couple of the other guys copied me).

Server naming need intelligence, not just a pattern

I learnt the hard way that good server naming requires intelligence and not just a pattern. I learnt this when the only difference between the 'nix server I was meant to be reinstalling on was only 1 character different to the live production one - and that character was "c" on one/"e" on the other. When your main clue is the server name at the command prompt, well the human brain can easilly see what it expects to see rather than what's actually there...

A also learnt that day the joys of colour coding your Putty sessions, so anything done on the production server was done in bright red text/orange on DR/green on Dev!

Mike Lynch estate owes HPE $943M over Autonomy fallout

What would you do?

So the compensation award's greater than the value of the Lynch estate so what would you do if you were in control of that estate?

Option 1: Pay over as much as possible until the estate's bankrupt so HPE get as much as possible of the award/the Lynch family get nothing.

Option 2: Burn through the estate's value in endless appeals and legal challenges, either getting things overturned/reduced so the Lynch family still end up with something - or the entire estate's burnt through and HPE get 100% of £0.

Think I know what I'd be doing, especially as overturning the verdict could potentially open HPE up to a counter suit for damages so end up with HPE paying the Lynch estate!

Samsung Galaxy S25 is so smart it wears Crocs, allegedly resists quantum decryption

Question is - can you switch all the AI BS off?

Sure it has loads of (pointless) AI on board but can you switch it off?

"Now Brief..uses unspecified techniques to prepare a schedule, advise of weather conditions, and suggest transport options to get you to engagements on your calendar in a timely fashion."

Or I can plan ahead for the route, probably ignoring the terrible suggestions things like the TFL journey planner comes up with - and look at a weather forecast/out the window for the weather.

"Now Bar suggests which app to use based on historical analysis of how you've used your phone."

Or I could like, use my memory, knowing what apps I've installed on my phone and which I prefer to use for different situations. Chances are this will be no better than Amazon's shopping suggestions, where for months after buying a new pair of shoes it insists on suggesting I buy another pair of shoes. I don't get through shoes THAT quickly!

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Selective maths

"Tokamaks didn’t verifiably make more energy than they consumed until a 2023 experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA"

Yea, but from memory only just and only if you purely measured the energy required to maintain the plasma and ignored the gigawatts required to get it up and running in the first place.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: (excluding walking time)

Because that just adds the following, pointless conversation to the fix:

Me: "Did you remove the orange pully things from the new cartridge before fitting it, like the instruction on the box say?".

User: "Yes.".

Walk down and what do you find when you get to the printer? Yes, an empty box/silver bag/old cartridge sat next to the printer (not IN the bag and box of course so leaving another back toner smudge on the white desk) - but zero orange tabs. Remove cartridge, see 2 orange tabs still attached, sigh, remove orange tabs/refit cartridge/see perfect prints start spooling out, grab a tea on the trudge back to your desk.

Issue diagnosed in 0 seconds/fixed in about 6 seconds (excluding walking time)

I can't be the only one to have taken printer support call that went "I've just changed the ink in my printer and it's not working any more".

Queue one walk to the offending printer, remove the cartridge, remove the bright orange "Remove before fitting" tabs, refit cartridge, walk back to desk.

Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability

Re: Given that my monthly spend on airtime is under a tenner

I'll take the pint of beer, thanks all the same.

HPE wants investors to buy shares to help finance $14B Juniper Networks acquisition

$14Billion today, so we can expect that to become $2.8Billion in 12 months time :)

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

Re: Puzzled Experts

I'd assume this refers to the Greek equivalent of the UK's Marine Accident Investigation Branch - or possible the MAIB themselves as the Bayesian was UK registered and I'd assume marine accident investigations run along similar lines to air ones, so are undertaken by teams from where the accident occured, where the vessel was registered, and where the vessel was manufactured.

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

"Really, its about time that those needing high speed terrestrial comms realise that fibre is the best option, and that bulk data transfers should use fibre...".

I do wonder if the math of these LEO clusters actually make sense. No matter how you slice it designing, testing, building, and launching rockets is an expensive business and yes, does give everyone on the face of the Earth theoretical access to a high speed Internet connection. But what if the same money had been spent laying fiber everywhere, especially if we consider the lifespan of a fiber cable around 40 years which with a 5 year life for LEO space junk means 7 full replacement cycles. I'd also guess you could be providing the resulting Internet access for less than £75/month...

'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

Re: "Christian values" - Right Wing Evangelical flavour.

"There is virtually no overlap between the spirit of the new Testament and policies of right-wing Evangelicals"

Does the New Testament not teach us "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself - unless they art a furry, as that's like coveting his ox or his ass"?

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

Are the windscreen wiper a "critical part of a vehicle's safety features"?

On a Cybertruck at least. I mean isn't the advice not to drive them in the rain as it damages the bodywork and no rain/no need of wipers!

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Agile or "agile"...

I think everywhere I've worked/every project I've worked on in the last 10+ years has said it's using agile - but I think only 1 ever actually was/did (and was successful).

Most "Agile" project are just ones where people have watched the first 2 minutes of a PowerPoint presentation and ended up as some half-assed effort where people pick and choose which practices they do/don't follow. Normally this ends up as "We're going to do the development Agile but everything else on the porject will still be Waterfall" - so you get no requirements in at the start, no business owner involvement until the end when they (eventually, about a month after you asked them to and 2 days before the go live) test, tell you it's wrong then complain about IT being crap, and zero documentation by anyone as "everything is self documenting". Oh, and of course managed by Waterfall PMs who's DCM isn't a quick round of max 12 people covering; what they did yesterday/what they are doing today/any blockers, but 30 people sitting in silance as the PM goes through every ticket in the Jira board asking for updates.

UK law gives green light to self-driving cars from 2026

Naa, this is the UK mate, init. We'll just ignore the bug for years and prosecute 900 mechanics because "There are no bugs so they must have broken it"...

That or uptake of self driving cars will turn out to be really low - when people see it costs the same to buy as a normal car...but you can only insure it using the manufacturers insurance company (because nobody else is willing to take the risk), can only get it serviced by the manufacturer (because that's a term of their insurance policy), and either half the contract's made up of the exemptions where you accept full liability (literally anything from letting the sensors get dirty upwards) or the computer sees __anything__ it doesn't like (like the muck from 10 minutes of motorway driving in 'just stopped raining' conditions on a single sensor) it brings itself to a stop and becomes a driver driven car again (fun in the outside lane!).

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

"Slack would insist that email's time has passed"

Well they would, wouldn't they - but as a victim forced to use Slack I can say I'd MUCH rather be using Outlook.

Slack's the communication equivalent of running into a room, shouting a message, then running out. Great if you're in the room at the time and hear it but if you weren't and it's stopped echoing your chances of knowing it happened are next to zero!

I spend half my time having:

"Didn't you see X, we posted it on Slack?"

"Which channel?"

"The Y channel."

"We have a Y channel?!?"

"HR" keep pulling this trick, changing rules/policies/processes and only informing people on Slack - but I have no idea what out "HR" department's actually called this week, if it's HR, People Operations, Human Capital Management - and even if I guess that it doesn't mean the same name's been used in the one of 10,000 channels they are currently using.

UK Civil Aviation Authority ponders vertiports for flying taxis

"Trains spring effortlessly to mind but lack the "cool" factor of a flying taxi."

"They also lack affordability..."

Yea, you might change your mind on the affordability of flying taxis once you look at what the cost of a journey in one of them's going to cost.

Assuming you're 'calling' a taxi to come to A (in this context an "existing aerodrome") and take you B (another "existing aerodrome") you've got a pair of landing fees to pay for, so based on the Argyll & Bute council prices (first detailed ones to pop up on Google) that's at least £13.50 at each end, quite likely £18:50 or even £27.00 (aircraft weight under 500kg/500kg to 1000kg/100kg to 1500kg). And those are prices for a fairly small, quite airfield. Prices say in/around London... And of course that's before the cost of the journey.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Doesn't say much for the law department at Santa Clara University in California

"It would be fundamentally unfair for a copyright owner to encourage wide dissemination of still images for publicity purposes, and then complain that those images are being imitated by an AI because the training data included multiple copies of those same images." - Tyler Ochoa, a professor in the law department at Santa Clara University in California.

Umm, the professor does realise his own statement that copyright owners 'disseminate still images for publicity purposes' kind of explicitly states that they aren't making them "public" or "copyright free" but are granting a limited licence for people to use their copyrighted image for the purpose of publicity, don't they?. And "training a commercial, monitized AI" would NOT could as "publicity" - nor any currently accepted definition of "fare use".

We're about to hit peak device count, says HTC veep, as AR takes over

I'll be first in the queue to sign up for this, to use while I'm in my flying car...

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Re: Testing failover.

Testing failover, or testing failover scenarios?

I worked for C4 back in the 00's when failover from the main broadcasting control in Horseferry Road to the DR at I think Old Ford Lock was tested regularly and always worked. The failover process was for someone at HFR to switch control to OFL (I picture a huge blade switch but probably just a little, red button). As soon as that was done you had 30min or so to get someone to the desk in OFL and queue up the next set of programmes.

What wasn't tested though were different failover scenarios, which resulted in the channel going off air for a good few hours despite a perfectly good, fully functional failover solution. From memory builders on the site next door cracked a gas main so HFR and the other surrounding buildings were told to evacuate, which HFR did by pulling the fire alarm. Assuming it was either another drill or false alarm everyone trooped out and stood on the street. And stood. And stood. And started looking nervously at watches and sent someone scurrying to OFL. And started asking the fire brigade if they could go back in and press the failover button (and being politely told to feck off). So stood while the programme queue ran out and someone sat at the desk in OFL watched the channel go off air unable to do anything about it because OFL couldn't TAKE control, it could only be GIVEN control.

Doh!

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Ah, supporting printers takes me back...

User: "The printer's stopped working".

Me: "OK, let me just pop down." - thankfully only 1 floor below in the same building.

...

User: "The printer's stopped working. It was out of ink so I changed the cartridge but it's just printing blank pages with smudges on them.".

Anyone else guess the issue/solution?

1. Open printer.

2. Remove new, black as my heart toner cartridge.

3. Pull the (as bright as the sun) orange tab marked "Pull" and at the end of the big white arrow and text saying "Pull tab before fitting.".

4. Refit toner cartridge.

5. Manage to politely say "Try it now...".

6. Return to desk.

Pass that Brit guy with the right-hand drive: UK looking into legalising automated lane-keeping systems by 2021

Re: re: Is this the final triumph of the middle lane hogger ?

"Range rover Evoques... (by the way, that's the absolute ugliest car on the road, looks like the hulk sat on the rear end of it!)"

Naa, the ugliest car on the road is still the Porsche Panamera, with the individual crown going to one in shit brown with gold metalic flakes.

The Evoque is up there, but the standard Evoque is actually quite pretty...next to the convertable version!

Segway to Heaven: Mega-hyped wonder-scooter that was going to remake city transport to cease production

Ahh, those were the days...

I can remember the days of the pre-announcement Segway hype, with co-workers running around telling me how amazing it was going to be and how it was going to change the world over night. OK, so when pressed none of them could tell me what it was, with guessing covering everything from a book, through a new type of computer, to self driving and even flying cars. I kept saying "Sounds like a load of BS to me and it's going to be shit.".

Mark one up for the glass half empty crowd as I'm not sure anyone even mentioned the name Segway in the office after the day it was actually revealed.

Health Sec Hancock says UK will use Apple-Google API for virus contact-tracing app after all (even though Apple were right rotters)

Re: NHSX devs apparently superior to Google devs

"we’ll share our algorithm and the work that we’ve done on distance calculation and combine that with their work to deliver a new solution."

By which he mans "...and end up using the Google/Apple one but changing a few parameters from "X" to "X*0.00000000001".

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Re: Jedi

I am NOT going to refer to "teacher" and "padawan" processes!

Some people need to understand that not EVERYTHING is racist

Blacklist, for example is fine and has NOTHING to do with race.

Blacklist is a term first recorded in reference to the list of people who were going to be sent to meet their maker in short order for the killing of Charles I, following the restoration of the monarchy and Charles II taking up the throne. That being going to the ultimate darkness. Being touched by the bony finger of the Death, the man in black robes. Seeing the judge don the black cap worn when scentencing people to death. The colour their families would wear following their deaths during the period of formal mourning.

None of these origins have anything to do with the levels of melanin pigments in different people's skin.

OOP there it is: You'd think JavaScript's used more by devs than Java... but it's not – JetBrains survey

Honestly, do you really think this counts as journalism?

Yes exactly BECAUSE of the point you raised - rather than just blindly copy/paste the JetBrains press release as a fluff piece, or scan read the first couple of lines of it and write 'shock and awe' piece Mr Anderson has read it, analysed it and clearly raised the concern that the numbers may contain a degree of bias to us, the reader.

Read articles on this report on half of online 'news' sites and it will just be an intro paragraph of "New survey says JavaScript is dead.", followed by the press release more or less verbatim.

Read this article on the IT news equivalent of the Daily Mail and it would be "New survey says JavaScript is dead. Won't someone think of the children! Unnamed sources in the IT industry (probably the journo. writing the piece) say this will lead to billions of job losses in the next 48 minutes and is a result in the huge infulx of foreign Java developers.".

Repair store faces hefty legal bill after losing David and Goliath fight with Apple over replacement iPhone screens

I think the devil here will be in the detail - which is probably only readable by legal Norwegen speakers reading the actual court documents.

Case 1 - Aftermarket screens without Apple logos. The should be fine as no logo=no copyright and "must fit/must match" rules would apply to the design.

Case 2 - Second hand Apple screens with Apple logos. These should also be fine as they are orignal Apple parts.

Case 3 - Aftermarket screens with Apple logos. These are correctly a trade mark infringement.

Case 4 - Refurbished second hand Apple screens. A lot depends what 'refurbished' means. At the one end "cleaned" should be OK but at the other you have "Triggers broom", where the only thing that's retained IS the logo...not so much.

If you're appy and you know it: The Huawei P40 Pro conclusively proves that top-notch specs aren't everything

Re: In a world, where smartphones aren't shitty PCs

Think I lasted 1 day on Android before installing the Square Home launcher to get some of the WinPho UI usability back!

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

One of my early sins involved moving a local newspaper group's archive from a room filled with boxes and boxes of physical newspaper clippings to a web based digitzed library - and the journalists having to switch from shouting at the library staff to find them something to jumping on a shared PC and searching for things themselves.

Now most of these people were reasonably intelligent and had been using 'computers' for years...but those were dedicated publishing terminals with crazy keyboards covered in buttons to do anything and everything, not IBM PCs with their simple keyboards and new-fangled mice. Things started well, with most of the staff picking it up quickly and not reporting any issues, and then I get the call...

Them: "The mouse isn't working properly"

Me: "What's happening?"

Them: "I do my search but when I click on the link with the mouse thing sometimes it works, but usually it doesn't, and sometimes it opens a different link"

Now you don't have to support users for very long before you know that 90% of "That just doesn't make sense" issues aren't in either the hardware of software but in the pinkware. One quick trip downstairs and a "Can you show me the issue?" and I see them at work...

1. Gingerly move mouse, holding it between the tips of thumb and first finger, like you think it's a ive hand grenade till it's over the link.

2. Withdraw hand from mouse.

3. Index finger out.

4. Hammer down on the left mouse button from a height of 2ft, possibly with eyes closed.

Yes it did click the mouse button. It also tended to move it a random distance in a random direction on the desk and so the pointer on the screen.

Re: Even easier to get wrong with Sun optical mice

Back in the day my Uni had a CAD/CAM room decked out Sun boxes with those optical mice. The room had something like 20 optical mouse workstations...and 19 mousemats.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

"The data shows that the magnetic north pole will continue moving south for a while."

Am I missing something, but doesn't the ESA video show the magnetic north pole has moved CLOSER to the geographic north pole between 1840 and 2019, something I would struggle to describe as "moving south"?

We're also long over-due a complete polar inversion I believe. Always wondered if that was a slow (in human terms but still a blink of the eye in geological ones), progressive rotation or it would get to a point and suddenly flip overnight...

Commit to Android codebase suggests Google may strong-arm phone makers into using 'seamless' partitioned updates

Re: Not only Pixel

Yep, with an Android One phone you too can have the joy of waking up to your phone telling you to reboot for an update, only to discover you're now running Android 10 and your phone's a bag of crap. Don't worry, 75% of the issues will be resolved if you wait about 3 months for the 'security' updates to fix non-security related issues.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

"In an email to The Register, Lloyd said he wouldn't necessarily call Apple's behavior anticompetitive...Apple simply wants a monopoly on repairs and parts..."

Umm...isn't trying to gain a monopoly sort of the deffinition of anticompetitive practice?

WTF is Boeing on? Not just customer databases lying around on the web. 787 jetliner code, too, security bugs and all

"Once Boeing was aware of the nature of the programming blunders in the Honeywell software found by Santamarta, the manufacturer verified in the lab and then on an actual 787 that it was not possible to seize control of a $150-million-ish jetliner via the holes Santamarta discovered."

Was that verification that the exploits couldn't be used on an actual 787 carried out by the same Boeing engineers who failed to identify the same exploits when certifying the code to be installed on their aircraft...?

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

Lunch isn't always a bad thing

I still smile when I think back to one short-lived job I had at an outsourcing hire/fire shop. Having recruited us to ramp up resources based on an expected project win the client then delayed, so said company had us working on a crazy internal project. After a few weeks we'd worked out the best way to do it and decided to clear down the failures and false starts by wiping everything prior to starting over.

Clean-down complete we decided to go to lunch, so we would have the solid afternoon to do the rebuild...except most of us got pulled aside going back to the office to be told we had "failed our probation period" and should not let the door hit us on the way out.

Karma #1: About 2 weeks later the client came back and said "OK, let's start tomorrow", resulting in one of my fellow probation failures going back as a contractor on about 3x the salary.

Karma #2: I moved on to a much better role and had the pleasure a year or so later of walking in to a meeting with a potential outsourcing provider to see the face drop of one of the bosses who had fired me sat over the desk. Still knowing some of the people who worked for said outsourcer I also got to seem him wince every time the sales guy said something like "Oh yes, we have a whole team of XXX people" or "Oh no, we aren't a hire/fire shop, so you'd usually be able to have the same resources who knew your systems come back for later projects", my boss looked at me, and I'd respond with a little shake of the head or raised eyebrow.

My HPE-funded lawyer wrote my witness statement, reseller boss tells High Court

Re: Handshake protocol

"So the two signed a document which did not reflect the real deal. The handshake did."

Except the two in question are NOT the two in the dock. The two in the dock would probably be the ones wih their names on the written contract that says "no changes to this unless in writing". All this witness seems to prove is corruption in the US arm of the company, so a fraud committed by the witness (come on, he must have been at least a LITTLE suspicious that everything wasn't 100% above board when the company he was reselling for offered to just give him money) and a third party who isn't on trial here.

Unless someone can find evidence that Lynch/Hussain knew about and approved/did nothing to stop it this is irrelevant to the actual case on trial and should be a separate case in the US courts between the state or HP and Baiocco/Egan.

HP crashed Autonomy because US tech titan's top brass 'lost their nerve', says lawyer for ex-CEO Mike Lynch

Re: Creepy 'Maths qualified' Salespeople

The guys on the IDOL side of Autonomy were always easy to play with though, you just had to say "So, IDOL...it's just a search engine then?" and they would go nuts with the official "Our search engine isn't a search engine" mantra. Remember doing an IDOL training course years ago alongside some BBC guys and we basically took it in turns to keep asking the question, watching the trainer slowly go mad :)

2-bit punks' weak 40-bit crypto didn't help Tesla keyless fobs one bit

"As yet, however, the vulnerability as described in the paper has not been proven to affect our vehicles and we know of no McLaren that has been compromised in such a way."

Translation: We KNOW the stable door is open but as the horse hasn't walked through it yet you're not going to both closing it. If the horse DOES leave the stable we'll look at closing the stable door to stop it.

Bug bounty alert: Musk lets pro hackers torpedo Tesla firmware risk free

Musk lets pro hackers torpedo Tesla firmware risk free*

* Well, other than the risk of him randomly branding you a peadophile on Twitter and having a child bride (who's in her 40s).

Close, but no Tigar! Appeals court slaps judge, drags Apple back into touchscreen spat

Re: Those patents are so broad

"These patents basically cover "swiping from point A to point B", so if they were upheld only every iPhone but also every Android phone up until now and in the future until the patents expire would be in violation..."

Umm, exactly what do you think the Apple's "slide to unlock" pattent basically covers...?

Blighty stuffs itself in Galileo airlock and dares Europe to pull the lever

Re: It won't cost that much

"Since it only has to provide location information within Great Britain + Gibraltar*"

Which would be correct if any of these systems were actually built so us plebs could drive around without having a sense of direction. Of course they aren't built for that, they are built so our armed forces can drop bombs on the 'right' things without the need for someone to sit in sight of it pointing a laser at the target.

Building a system that only covers the UK would only be of use if we have a civil war, which hopefully won't be the way Scotland becomes independent.

Mozilla whips out Rusty new Firefox Quantum (and that's a good thing)

Terrible For Web-Devs

I'm a web dev. and been using Firefox for years as there are a number of add-on tools for Firefox that just made life easier than using Chrome, like the Web Developer toolbar. With this now killed by Mozilla removing one add-on framework and replacing it with one that has about 25% of the features I'm seriously considering either dropping back to 56 - or switching to Chrome, something I never thought I'd find myself considering.

Oh, anyone wanting to get their tabs back in the correct place in 57:

1. Find profile folder (%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ on Windows).

2. Open/create a "chrome" sub-folder.

3. Add a "userChrome.css" file containing

#TabsToolbar { -moz-box-ordinal-group: 2; } #nav-bar{ border-top-width: 0px !important; }

4. Save and restart Firefox.

Please do not scare the pigeons – they'll crash the network

Reminds me of my days as a desk troll...

“in the days of 10BASE2 cheapernet cabling that was hung around the office like a string of Christmas lights. For those not old enough to remember, the major disadvantage of this type of cabling is that a single break anywhere would bring down the entire network.”

Reminds me of my early days as a desk troll, where I seems to spend most of my day hiding under desks with a real of sellotape. Ahh, AppleTalk network connectors...

Come celebrate World Hypocrisy Day

"...and Apple is a manufacturer creating value from the ground up."

Umm, don't Pear Technologies, sorry Apple (got confused by the logos - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/27/apple_lawyers/) actually make a lot of their money by forcing music creators to accept lower royalty payments for their IP than they would have received through traditional channels that actually had manufacturing and distribution overheads?

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

"So the entire point of the new device - the keyboard - wasn't there, doesn't exist in even the only demo unit? But you saw a HINGE? Wow!"

You've clearly never played with an old Psion device. You could spend hours* just opening and closing a Revo, constantly being amazed that someone could think up and make something so complicated yet elegant.

* Sat bored in meetings while everyone else was impressed at all the notes you kept taking.

Next-gen Tor to use distributed RNG, 55-character addresses

Re: RNG as an Internet service?

"It would be pretty trivial to use a bank of hardware RNGs to feed a server that will supply a different random number each time one is requested."

...which instantly makes hardware RNGs pointless in this context. The whole point of a network like TOR is that there's no 'home', no central hub that can be used as a point of attack.

Either you have to have a central set of hardware RNGs feeding the TOR network (that the authorities could take control of) or each TOR user has to buy a hardware RNG generator to use the network (that authorities could attack at the manufacturer level - and considering they would probably end up being manufacturer in China...).