Posts by Dan 55

MacBooks slimming down with Sammy's new 3D NAND diet pills

Re: TRIM support as well?

Use Trim Enabler which disables kernel signing on Yosemite and enables TRIM. I've got a Yosemite Mac with an EVO 850 and it works fine.

Snoopers' Charter queen Theresa May returns to Home Office brief

The Bedroom Tax Man cometh

IDS is also back in the cabinet and he's been given an axe. So the nasty party is back doing what it really wanted to do the first time round and this time there's nothing to stop it, unless some backbench rebels have a crisis of conscience (in which case, why are they in the nasty party in the first place)?

What's David Davis up to by the way, have they buried him in a shallow grave yet?

So tablets, if you want to get anything done travelling get a ... yes, a laptop

Ghost Commander lets you a) select a wildcard pattern or b) search for a date range or other criteria and select all the search results then once you've done that you can copy or move the selection to the other pane.

It's a bit fiddly though, if I can I use the Cyanogenmod File Manager or Explorer instead, however they can't do selecting like Ghost Commander can.

Re: Uploading 'everything' to iCloud?

So when you read that iOS can't save to SD card and the kludge was to sync the photos via hotel WiFi and wait a very very very long time, your solution is to throw away the bit that does work (the camera), buy an new iShiny, and shrink the photos down to a useless resolution so they can sync over crappy WiFi.

Would you kindly feck off to the Apple forums and bring your considerable skills to answering the questions where they'll be more appreciated (e.g. Q. My Mac makes a big annoying honking goose noise on startup, how do I make it start up quietly so I don't wake up my baby and piss off my wife? A. The honking goose noise is supposed to be there so you know it's turned on, have you considered keeping the computer on all the time, and don't you dare install any third party software to try and turn it off because it could break the computer and it's not the Apple way.)

Uber and car makers jockey for Nokia's 'HERE' maps – report

Re: @Dan Article Error: Missing Context

That was a typo but like your friend Murphy, I'm not bitter.

Tata have already sold a 0-star NCAP rated car in the west so there's enough of a market in the west that doesn't care. Plus the developing world that tend to be a little less demanding about safety (Honk OK please).

Re: Article Error: Missing Context

... You so KNOW that the average person in India can't afford an Audi, BMW, or Mercedes-Benz but they find a Tata much more affordable? Google being first with the software would allow Tata to be first to open a whole new market in their home country and other parts of the developing world practically zero cost in R&D.

Re: Article Error: Missing Context

@DougS: It would be a threat because Tata could put it in their tin cans and sell it for cheap. Supposedly, self-driving cars won't (eventually) crash as much so it wouldn't matter if you buy a car with a 0-star NCAP rating.

I can see why the auto-makers would want control of their own maps but what could Uber do with HERE that would make it worth $3bn? All they need to do is display a map in its app and they can do that with a contract with Google, HERE, Bing Maps, anyone...

Unfortunately both would probably pull the free Android app, only Baidu would keep it going.

Theresa May: Right, THIS time we're getting the Snoopers' Charter in

It's going to be sooner rather than later

The only thing that divides the Tories is the EU, anything else and they can all pretend to get along. It's going to get pushed through before the EU referendum debate gets started so it can't be used in horse-trading.

Traumatised Reg SPB team barely survives movie unwatchablathon

How about a Nicolas Cage marathon shitfest?

Whoever out of the SPB who makes it out alive after watching his filmography back-to-back wins a Transformers four-film box set.

Go on, you know you want to.

Re: Needs moar Cloverfield

No, there were only three. If they ever made four, that would be nuking the fridge.

T-Mobile prods at corpse of BlackBerry, says 'me too!'

什么他妈的?

"Bringing BlackBerry into our device line-up now also stokes Un-carrier 9.0, which is all about bringing the Un-carrier revolution to business."

From which we can deduce that he was giving the presentation in China in Chinese and the quote was translated by Google Translate.

Crowdfunded ZX Spectrum revival just days from shipment

Look at L34B3 (usr-no). It calls L1E99 (FIND-INT2) which then calls L2DA2 (FP-TO-BC). By the time it comes out of that, BC holds the address given in USR, DE holds STKEND, and the carry flag is not set so it returns back to usr-no.

If you search for 'Part 6. EXECUTIVE ROUTINES', STKEND is 0x5CB6 (23734) or probably little a bit more when the computer starts up.

Somebody else can test it...

But within BASIC there was no explicit integer type for variables, which in other BASICs was normally achieved by suffixing the variable name with %.

You didn't need to tell it to, the interpreter picked the most appropriate format when storing number variables. If a variable needed type conversion (e.g. LET a=1 : LET a=a+0.1) then it was done automatically. I've never seen that done as well in any language since, the usual brain-dead scripting languages around these days are happy to let you do 1+1 but if you're not careful you can get 11 back as the answer.

There were ints, stored in such a way that would never be a legitimate floating point value...

"Small integers have a special representation in which the first byte is 0, the second is a sign byte (0 or FFh) and the third and fourth are the integer in twos complement form, the less significant byte first."

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanappc.html

So, that's ten minutes that I'll never get back looking that up.

Vaguely remember there was a BASIC variable stack pointer which used ROM routines to push and pop or if you were feeling brave accessed directly by reading the pointer from the system variables area. The Spectrum's floating point numbers were stored with a higher precision than 32-bit C floats today, they were 5 bytes long.

If only all problems in software now were like this.

There was a ROM routine which made it save some memory to tape. You could run it on every Spectrum in Smiths to make it look like it was loading and come back later to find out how big the queues were getting. Bonus points for changing the screen colour to black and printing "Bytes: <name of latest blockbuster Ultimate game here>" before calling it.

French MPs say Oui to Le Charteur des Snoopeurs

Re: Cryptocrime

Yep, here it is...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/mobile_phone_tracking/

On 11th November 2008, 150 French anti-terrorist police officers swooped on the 330-inhabitant village of Tarnac to arrest four men and five women aged 22 to 34, since nicknamed the 'Tarnac Nine'. These 'brilliant students' were living in a farm and ran a grocery store. All but one have been released. They were accused of "criminal association connected to a terrorist enterprise". French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie (MAM) was in the news soon after:

The Interior Minister is convinced of having saved France by nipping a revolution in the bud. For MAM, the defendants are the seed of Action Directe.

"They have adopted the method of clandestinity. They never use a mobile phone. They managed to have, in the village of Tarnac, friendly relations with people who could warn them of the presence of strangers," said the minister.

In the village, people laugh at this statement. One of the defendants rented an apartment above the town hall. "Is it a clandestine method?", asks Jean-Michel, who goes on: "Can one be labelled terrorist because he does not have a mobile phone?". Here, mobile reception is poor.

Re: Cryptocrime

Wasn't there a French trial a few years ago that ruled that not carrying a mobile phone with you was evidence of criminal intent?

How Project Centennial brings potentially millions of desktop apps to the Windows 10 Store

Re: Choices? Who needs choices?!

"We really got it mixed up with Win32. We kinda let you do anything," Sheehan said.

Because Win16 and DOS had highly-structured sandboxed applications.

Apple MacBook 2015: Twelve inches of slim and shiny fanboi joy

Re: It's an iPad with a keyboard.

It's a keyboard... with as much feedback as a ZX81's and the left and right cursor keys have been made full size yet the up and down keys are half sized and therefore the cluster of keys as a whole is more difficult to find, at least until muscle memory remembers for you.

Re: It's all wrong

They've got to give it a retina screen or they run the risk of too many people catching on and saying it's a heap of crap. Just compare the specs and prices to the MacBook Airs, there's no reason at all to buy one of these.

Hey! Want a FREE TOASTER that makes BITCOIN? What? You DO?

If you've got something which is always on like a thermostat or a NAS box I suppose it might keep you in pocket money.

How many bitcoins are left to mine, anyway?

Samsung S6: You might get a Sony camera in it - or you might not

Psychobabble

“The colour ‘gold’ represents wealth, abundance, high ideals, optimism and wisdom. After years of recession and tightening our belts, we are now beginning to see some economic improvements and we dare to hope for a better future.”

No, it's because people in Asia like their bling gold and Samsung is selling well in Asia.

The Eurozone is still heading lemming-like towards the cliff.

New Tizen phone leaked: Remember it's not all just Android and iOS

Re: To learn more about Tizen head to TDWTF...

Samsung ripped out Qt from MeeGo and replaced it with THAT?

Round Two in Sky vs Skype trademark scrap goes to Murdoch's men

Skype attempted to argue the “pronunciation of ‘y’ is no shorter in ‘skype’ than it is in ‘sky’.”

Well, it isn't. If it were we would all be saying "skip" as the 'e' is silent and we're not. If the court found against that then they must have been phonetically comparing the two words in another language.

Microsoft discontinues Media Center with Windows 10

They missed a trick

They could have put it on Intel's Galileo and the Rasp Pi.

Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath – solution or part of the problem?

We need privacy. We are social animals and territorial animals, if we were brutally honest about everything while socialising then some would use that information to harm us. We are open to a few who we trust not to hurt us and always use some kind of privacy in our dealings with everyone else. Using privacy in this way is not the same as hiding something that's wrong.

Privacy can be co-opted by some people in power as a way to hide corrupt practices but that does not mean privacy itself is a bad thing. Companies take advantage of a failure in the justice system, not a failure with privacy. People like Saville and Harris didn't particularly hide what they were doing under a facade of privacy either, it was intimidation of people around them which kept what they did hidden from the wider world, not privacy. Sexism and racism are another form of bullying which is done openly, not privately. It is generally unacceptable now and when it was acceptable it was due to ignorance in wider society.

If you want an example which is still relevant now now, gay people value privacy because there are too many people who can use information about their orientation to hurt them.

If you want another example, people who post everything to their Facebook wall or mess up the privacy options often end up with problems at work. They might not have done anything particularly wrong, but then again what they do do at the weekend with friends often doesn't translate well to the working environment. Is that discrimination? Until that question's answered, there's always privacy.

Out of the remit of the book

Why should it go into exactly what is privacy, its history, or different western countries' slightly different definitions of privacy, and just because US cryptomeister Bruce uses the word 'fundamental' he must be talking about Brussels' version of it? The point is wherever you are on the planet your privacy has been abducted by the Spaced-out Invaders from Outer California and the book is about how they've done it and what can be done to get it back.

'Rombertik' malware kills host computers if you attempt a cure

"spreads through an executable screensaver disguised as an Adobe PDF file"

Oh FFS MS, just make Explorer refuse point blank to run any file called [name].[legitimate extension].[bat/com/exe/pif/scr/vbs]. If anyone must shoot themselves in the foot they could open a command prompt and rename it.

Anyone would think they have no interest in making the desktop more secure to push people towards TIFKAM.

HP wag has last laugh at US prez wannabe with carlyfiorina.org snatch

"Fiorina announced her intent to run for President of the US"

China must be bankrolling her millions to give her a fighting chance of getting into office and running the US like she did HP.

House of Cards UI central to Mozilla's plans for Firefox on tellies

Not again

They always come out with something after Android and they can't compete with free (plus a small price for the Google apps). If they did something before Android at least they could have chance to build up a relationship with manufacturers.

Android tool catches apps silently pumping hundreds of ad, tracking servers red-handed

Re: Ghostery browser

This is Google, that's so going to get pulled from the store when they realise what it is.

Meet the man who inspired Elon Musk’s fear of the robot uprising

Re: I may have missed something here...

No, you wouldn't, but then again you aren't physically able to. If you were and you also had a terrible case of OCD you might.

Mozilla to whack HTTP sites with feature-ban stick

Re: Bye, bye, Mozilla

IE doesn't understand opportunistic encryption, Firefox does. With OE you can use self-signed certificates which don't cost a penny and don't throw up errors with OE. Therefore Firefox and other browsers with OE will get an encrypted non-authenticated session and IE will carry on as before.

Now if you're telling me you can't flip the switch for opportunistic encryption and set up a self-signed certificate then perhaps your customer base isn't in very good hands.

What is this fascination with Chrome by the way? It's a Google data slurper with a very uncustomisable and moderately ugly UI. They've also dropped NPAPI support and XP support is on life support so it's not as if Chrome users are immune from the slings and arrows of outrageous developers. And as it's free with everything else then it inevitably becomes the default browser foisted upon unknowing users by the time that an Adobe viewer, Java, or the anti-virus is updated.

Re: Eeejits!

The article says that sites using opportunistic encryption will also get all the features and a self-signed certificate will not set off alarms if opportunistic encryption is used.

Good luck displacing Windows 7, Microsoft, it's still growing

Re: Windows 10 = Windows 8.10

The start menu changes from build to build and lately it's gone from that to something more phoney, in both senses of the word.

Stubborn 'won't fix' Google U-turns on Chromecast vid judder twitching-eye blunder

They do know the incoming frame rate though, that's how extra filler frames are being inserted into the 23.9something/24/25Hz stream so it leaves the Chromecast at 60Hz. Presumably they can't work out that the output might be better at something other than 60Hz, either by querying the TV though HDMI, looking at the Chromecast's own country setting (if there is one), or even a manual setting.

Why should I learn by ORAL tradition? Where's the DOCUMENTATION?

Sorry if it's an obvious question, but...

... who's going to teach you how to use it?

New Windows 10 will STAGGER to its feet, says Microsoft OS veep

Re: Tech enthusiast, not necessarily IT.

The funny thing is you're forced to be a tech enthusiast if you want to do anything with Windows 8 like get a usable start menu. Woe betide you if you're not and you just want a computer that works the way they've worked since the early 80s (before if you include Xerox Parc). Do MS really know their customers?

And upgrading from Windows 7 to some moving target work-in-progress sounds like more of the same. This sounds like it's just not ready and when it finally is it could look like anything. If anyone's got any sense they'll wait 11 months before considering upgrading, tech enthusiast or otherwise.

Age guessing with Microsoft is FUN! Now give us your metadata

Re: Almost fell for it

I don't see how they can do that, unless your name is something like DSC_1234.jpg.

Samsung back on top of smartmobe market

Leohno*

Why do they get a star in the table then? It certainly isn't for good behaviour.

Burger me! Microsoft's chainsaw rampage through sacred cow herd

What about Play Services/Core libraries and frameworks?

I doubt MS can copy them wholesale without an almighty legal battle, so all they're going to achieve is Google moving even more out of AOSP and into Play Services and a huge sueball from Apple.

UK exam board wants kids to be able to Google answers

Show your working out

www.google.com -> crop rotation in the 14th century -> correct.

www.bing.com -> crop rotation in the 14th century -> incorrect.

SHA-1 crypto hash retirement fraught with problems

As always, Firefox

Unlike the rest it doesn't use Windows' crappy crypto libraries.

Gambling with your data: Betfair fixes HUGE account reset email vuln

Or a disposable email address will also work...

SOHOpeless Realtek driver vuln hits Wi-Fi routers

Come on California

It doesn't take much to get you to legislate in computing matters, why not this one?

Your new car will dob you in to the cops if you crash, decrees EU

Re: eCall – Do you have any concerns for your privacy? You shouldn't ...

From that PDF at the end...

The consumer is thus given with the option to choose the free public 112 Pan-European eCall, or at his/her own will engage in a contract with a private third party service provider. In the former case there are absolutely no privacy issues. In the latter case, the vehicle owner will be asked to provide a written consent in case the vehicle location will be continuously tracked in order to enable third party value added services.

Fast forward five years to 2023 to a car insurance website near you...

Typical car insurance form which includes the following...

Apply 50% discount to insurance quote...

[X] Yes, I want a 50% reduction on each monthly payment. *

[ ] No, I do not want a 50% reduction on each monthly payment.

Followed by the small print in which is buried the following:

Blah blah. 50% discount requires a car fitted with e-Call and the installation of our TPS e-Call 50% Discount Plug-in initially supplied by us to the customer on USB memory stick. Once installed plug-in can automatically update to the latest best version OTA. Uninstallation of plug-in means customer will voluntarily decides to stop receiving the 50% discount. TPS e-Call 50% Discount Plug-in complies with standard EN 16102:2011. We take your privacy seriously, we protect your data with something called a digital certificate and all data is backed up at our data centre in Utah, USA under Safe Harbour guidelines. Blah blah.

Apple to devs: Watch out, don't make the Watch into a, well, a watch

Blind? Fuck you then.

High contrast, sound, or haptic feedback would be useful for the partially-sighted but its primary purpose is telling the time so it's banned.

So that's another reason to use a Pebble or Android Watch.