* Posts by Dan 55

16877 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04: Make yourself at GNOME. Cup of data-slurping dispute, anyone?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Perhaps, if GNOME started gathering some basic data on a larger scale about how people use GNOME the project would make different decisions.

Doubt it, if you take the other example (Firefox) it turned into competition between UXers to see how they could out-stupid each other, using metrics to justify their decisions where they could and ignoring them where they couldn't.

Finally: Historic Eudora email code goes open source

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 460MB of code?!

What's changed? Nowadays if you wanted to make a native-looking multiplatform app you'd have the Qt libraries on both systems.

Kids and the web latest: 'Won't somebody please think of the children!' US Congresscritters plead

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Well thats one way to up the social media entry age.

In some ways you have to be thankful for US social media companies believing COPPA applies everywhere, because the UK didn't do a damn thing. If they applied UK law to UK residents then it would have been a free-for-all from age 0.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yes, because we all know how well laws work....

Read their T&Cs for Europe - they have COPPA cut-n-pasted into them courtesy of the firm belief that the only law which applies is USA law and it is universal.

So much this.

And they can replace that with GDPR. The boot's on the other foot now.

Servers crashed and burned. So, Qualcomm's back to Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V'ing Arm cores into phones

Dan 55 Silver badge

classifying food snapped in pics

Obligatory: Not a hot dog.

'Clive, help us,' say empty-handed ZX Spectrum reboot buyers

Dan 55 Silver badge

The court might be in a position to siphon back the money that Levy siphoned off to his other companies.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not even the QL was late by two years.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Software problems now

It seems they had gained the rights for the Vega but nobody (or nearly nobody) was paid, so now programmers are explicitly stating RCL don't have rights for the Vega+ just in case RCL claim they have the rights for the Vega line of consoles.

Maybe this is part of the reason for a Vega+ V2.

Senator Kennedy: Why I cast my Senate-busting vote for net neutrality

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Does not compute

They wouldn't bar you from calling specific people or businesses unless you and and whoever you were calling paid a special fee.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Does not compute

A utility company would not be able to add artificial restrictions to their supply and remove them if the customer pays a special fee.

So if the Internet is to be treated like a necessity (which it probably is these days), paying extra to unlock certain parts of it goes against that.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Does not compute

"Cable companies that provide internet access contend that in a free market, so long as they disclose it, they should have the right to control their product including which websites download quickly, which websites download slowly and which don't download at all... in principle, I agree with that" followed by "Internet is a necessity: it's like water, it's like electricity it's like a telephone".

How does the first part tally with the second part? A necessity shouldn't have artificial restrictions unless you pay more to make it work the way it was supposed to in the first place.

It's nice he's decided not to follow the party line (we scratch their backs and later on they'll scratch ours), but I still can't follow his argument.

GDPR for everyone, cries Microsoft: We'll extend Europe's privacy rights worldwide

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cynical, me?

GDPR applies to companies inside the EU and companies that deal with EU citizens' data.

If $BIGUSCORP isn't caught by its shoebox office in Luxembourg or Ireland then it's caught because it's processing data from EU citizens.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Msft Employee Perspective

But it's all for nought if on Windows itself the privacy options are opt-out and you must give up PII to use it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I'm wary of geeks bearing gifts

If there's one thing I wouldn't buy it's an Android TV.

Apart from the usual Android privacy problems, it's fairly unreliable on Sony's TVs. I don't know if that's down to Sony or Google.

Article Removed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: .

Posting history of one post. Perhaps you intend to spin up 1000 El Reg accounts to convince people?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Posting history of one post. Keep digging, I'll lend you a spade.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: All these flames - There's More

Up there it would apparently be easy to spin up 1000 e-mail addresses so a Facebook account is needed. Now down here it's apparently easy to spin up 1000 Facebook accounts so your photo album is needed.

It's stunts like this that brought about GDPR in the first place.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Seriously, guys?

El Reg: When commentards say they don't have a Facebook account, they really don't.

If I need to confirm I've received my Scorchiocoin™, what's wrong with clicking link sent through e-mail?

Military brainboxes ponder 'UK needs you' list of AI boffins

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

amanfromMars is writing MoD press releases now?

"The whole system could be built on a federated, disaggregated and self-organising peer-to-peer command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) network – effectively a combat cloud. Such a system should be able to draw on reachback access to cloud-based servers, but be capable of resilient operation provided by command and control applications across a variety of in-theatre platforms. From an operator’s perspective such a system will handle user requests for information and data passage as an intelligent assistant service."

'Facebook takes data from my phone – but I don't have an account!'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 3 more days people

Wileyfox/Yandex Zen?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Banking apps are pretty bad themselves when it comes to permissions.

Doesn't the mobile website work?

Dan 55 Silver badge

It's money. If Facebook paid high enough, at least one manufacturer would make the FB app the default launcher.

10 social networks ignored UK government consultations

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Just wait

Christ, you must be worse at parties than I am.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Just wait

I didn't even know there were 10 social networks.

Apple tells app makers to strip VoIP toolkit from iOS software in China

Dan 55 Silver badge
IT Angle

So what was CallKit doing that was so terrible?

Domain name sellers rub ICANN's face in sticky mess of Europe's GDPR

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: In reality

Thatcher came up with the Single Market, so perhaps it was run for the benefit of the UK too.

But now we've shat the bed, definitely not any more.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: In reality

Are you suggesting that they currently don't pay taxes due to a lack of physical presence and protection due to a foreign sovereignty?

Ate you suggesting no American corporation has been fined before in Europe?

Or maybe they do have to follow laws and can get fined.

Now that's old-school cool: Microsoft techies slap Azure Sphere IoT chip in an Altair 8800

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Running code in an emulator does not demonstrate backward comaptibility

I think all they've done is publicise how difficult it is to get Windows 10 onto another platform. They they took ages to come up with Windows 10 IoT for the Pi and when they did they came up with a nobbled version (Core). Now they have Windows 10 IoT for the Pi, why couldn't they have flipped a few build switches and targetted this other ARM board instead?

The harbingers of Doomwatch: Quist is quite the quasi-Quatermass

Dan 55 Silver badge

There does come a point where the the historical "the way we were"-ness about TV series has some, dare I say it, cultural value and it should be made available on-line. When you've flogged 2000 DVDs of some 70s series, you're not going to flog any more.

I think there's two whole episodes of Micro Live on iPlayer. Why not put the whole lot online? Have BBC marketing decided there's some as yet some unidentified section of the public that wants to buy a box set of one-screen long BBC Basic programs?

News programmes, the whole lot, just put it all up. Perhaps then we might find out that the past isn't as rose-tinted as some would have us believe and it might not be a good idea try and get back to something that doesn't exist.

What's up with that ZX Spectrum reboot? Still no console

Dan 55 Silver badge

I believe the demand is that working units have to be in punters' hands by the end of May, not a web page with a bunch of names on it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This is a trivial design...

The only problem with the Next I can see is they're still not sure if they're going to do a second run and at the moment there's no way to register your interest. A platform with 4000 or so owners won't have enough momentum long-term.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This is a trivial design...

They've probably gone with ARM as the Vega was ARM.

Which means the wait is all the more incomprehensible, firmware development should be quick as it would be practically the same as in the Vega.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: New definition for the Oxford English Dictionary

So if you go to the shop you can try to add 5000 Vega+s to the cart and you're told there are only (currently) 4985 left.

So are these 5000-ish units for sale in the online shop the same 5000 units they're promising to their backers? They really shouldn't be, so that means there are another set of 5000 units just for the public, meaning they've made 10000 units in total.

It also seems they have 4974 Vega and Vega+ bundles but if you ask for just a Vega there are only 1974.

It's just a complete load of bollocks.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Of course, for us oldies, the deja vu is strong ...

He did deliver in the end though and he didn't blame Commodore every time he was asked about the delay... and there was never a two-year delay. What about this lot?

Dan 55 Silver badge

A promised feature of the Vega+ is it accepts snapshot files on SD card.

So there's nothing really stopping them sending those 5000 Vega+s out to their customers... if they wanted to... and they've made enough...

How Google's Smart Compose for Gmail works – and did it fake its robo-caller demo?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Big Brother

"The model was trained on billions of, probably, mundane emails to nail the prediction process."

Phew, just beat the GDPR deadline!

Blood spilled from another US high school shooting has yet to dry – and video games are already being blamed

Dan 55 Silver badge

He was obviously traumatised by Mr Resetti.

Look how modern we are! UK network Three to kill off 3G-only phones

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Forward thinking?

If they're retiring 3G phone sales now, they're thinking of retiring 3G coverage 18 months to 2 years from now. By that time everyone will have had a chance to get a new phone on contract.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Forward thinking?

Or savage cost cutting?

It's too early to retire 3G.

Want to know what an organisation is really like? Visit the restroom

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: We need some ...

Are you allowed to throw up? Because that's pretty similar.

Meet Asteroid, a drop-in Linux upgrade for your unloved smartwatch

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Qt > Enlightenment, but we knew this already.

The bad news is Samsung still haven't refactored Enlightenment into C++.

However the good news is that Samsung have finally decided to wrap an object-orientated language around the original ancient psuedo-object orientated void-*-everywhere clusterfuck.

And the bad news is they chose C# on Xamarin.

Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I can't believe y'all are still falling for this

No, don't look at what Trump does, look at what his administration does while everyone's busy getting upset about his tweets.

Zuck to meet Euro MPs for ‘please explain’ session

Dan 55 Silver badge

Even Zuck knows we're too busy with our long national nightmare to matter anymore.

It'd be fun if he has to change in the UK and were taken aside for a quiet word though.

UK has rejected over 1,000 skilled IT bod visa applications this year

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Priorities

Lots of people in the Leave camp campaigned for lots of things, and some of them were written on the side of a big red bus.

She's out of her job now. The Home Office aren't and doesn't seem very keen on throwing open the doors to the Commonwealth, or even letting those who have been in the UK practically all their lives staying.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Priorities

It is entirely true. Even the government can't recruit the people it needs.

Fury as NHS recruits 100 doctors from India only for Home Office to deny them all visas

Can the people who downvoted the post above face the fact that the UK will not turn into Switzerland, all that's going to happen is the economy is going to stagnate and any training that will take place will be too little and too late. The only time the UK has ever been a high wage economy was when the bubonic plague wiped out a third of the population.

UPnP joins the 'just turn it off on consumer devices, already' club

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Now, home boxes, that's a different matter.

Your choice of words is appropriate. They *won't* know a port *when* it pwns them. If your game needs to allow anyone, anywhere, sight unseen, to access your network then you need a new game. People need to learn that the easy way (from us) rather than the hard way (from their bank).

Many games use P2P multiplayer. Someone somewhere's got to open a port.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Thanks GRC

GRC do have a UPnP vulnerability test so you can test if it's exposed to the Internet. That appeared about five years ago.

Samsung ready to fling Exynos at anyone who wants a phone chip

Dan 55 Silver badge

It seems to be one Trump tweet away from death these days.

Aren't we all?

BT bets farm on consumers: Announces one network to rule 'em all

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So the end of internal BT competition, by switching betw BTRetail, EE and Plus.net every 18...

Do people specifically change between those three providers, or just to whoever's got the best offer at the time if ringing up at the end of the contract period didn't work?

People like convenience more than privacy – so no, blockchain will not 'decentralise the web'

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Spot on

I don't think people value convenience or centralisation over privacy or security. The only thing people value is other people they want to talk to are on the same network and that happens by becoming a big name which requires money.

Signal is just as convenient to set up as WhatsApp, but most people choose WhatsApp because people they know use WhatsApp. WhatsApp wasn't secure before and it didn't matter, at the moment WhatsApp it is about as private and secure as Signal but that doesn't matter, and that might change again in the future and a few people might leave but not many.

Gmail is pretty inconvenient to use, but users put up with that because other people they know have a gmail address. It shouldn't make any difference as e-mail is an open protocol, but it does.

Countries could run their own decentralised operations, connect to the likes of Google via a individual pipeline but something like that just introduces more problems.

Open protocols and importing/exporting data. The only one that got there is e-mail. XMPP was sort of getting there but then Google pulled out when it had served their purpose.