Posts by AdamK

Why are PC webcams crap? Lenovo says it knows the reason

But the USB jobbies are still crap too...

Most of the USB cams seems to be stuck in 2004. They were a dying market before the pandemic and may go that way again.

In Pakistan, a car company will soon be making Samsung mobile phones

It gets more unusual...

Lucky actually started out as, and still makes... cement. The JV deal was pennded between kia motors and Lucky Cement so Samsung Products doesn't sound so unusual. Just don't drop one of ther massive phones on your toes. Toyota got into the fish business in its early days.

The JavaScript ecosystem is 'hopelessly fragmented'... so here is another runtime: Deno is now a company

Mozilla better be careful putting money into something which has no discernable revenue stream. If it becomes a habit they may get into trouble at some point and have to people. It could be as much as quarter of their workforce.

TalkTalk, Three, and Virgin Media, come on down! You've all won a prize for... not being that great at something!

Wake Up Talk Talk

Personal Message to Talk Talk CEO, one Tristia Harrison:

Carry on like this with even moderate customer service levels and unlike your predecessor Didon't Whatsername, you will:

1, Not get a peerage;

2. Not be put in charge of anything quite important which had not worked in any meaningful way and in which you have neither background, experience nor real influence but lots of political connections with bonkers ex Revolutionary Communist Party types who now run the government.

3, Be blamed for being a woman who failed when the male morons around you were in fact as least as bad.

4, Not get £150 for making bovine noises in a Lords "debate" on Zoom,

5, Get to sit next to Ian Botham.

See what you could be missing? Screw it up now. You may not want to but you know you must. Worth remebering that Talk Talk wholesale are not part of this shennanigans. If a company ever needed a new name, its them.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Re: Cables, CDs?

A "few" too many testicles, you say?

Never mind monitoring dead crims, Ministry of Justice has just palmed Serco another £800m

Reminds me of an old legal aphorism back in my crim defence days: "You have a memory like a Serco magistrates court prisoner transport". Bit long winded and scatalogical but that's lawyers for you.

The hold is filled with storage news! Grab a bucket and BAIL

It's a copyright free image but...

It's a bit junior advertising exec to use analogies like this. A bit Ed Stone? The Titanic may have sunk 105 years ago but 1500 people died becaue it was incompetently helmed and there weren't enough lifeboats. One of the victims was my great uncle. It remains one of the great maritime disasters. A lack of profit in some SaaS startup doesn't really compare does it?

No snowflakeism here. Most of the world is here for our amusement. Just not all of it.

Capita's huge role in UK government should go under the spotlight

They tweaked iplayer on the 18 April to kill off the XML program information feeds so now you have to go to one of their increasingly awful websites to find out what's on. Increasingly I don't bother. They are looking for a bail-out on the licence fee collection. They can whinge to the government of the week "look, we did what you want. We gave it all to crapita/poojitsu/Heavy Petting or Bite This" or any other usual suspects.

They have to slip that in before the election. This is the washup of inconvenient for the government reports from select committees. After the election, none of this evidence is worth anything so they start the fun again ready for the election next year.

The Co-Op Bank's online banking has gone TITSUP*

The new site is a bit grim. Printing correctly formatted statements from Chrome is impossible so its back to FF for that which works fine. The new site dumps bank statements in the as PDFs in your TEMP folder which stay there after the session and browser exit. I have messaged them about this. The superb reply was "you will have to contact windows about that". When all is said and done I have been effected by one unplanned outage in 8 years before this, which isn't too bad at all.

Amazon tweaks so-called 'assisted suicide' publishing contracts to ink EU deal

A Monopsonist is...

A monopsonist is a dominant buyer, not seller. That's a monopolist.

No, Microsoft is not 'killing Windows 10 Mobile'

They will next year...

They only promised two years support for Win 10 Mobile or whatever it is this week. . The "Creators Update" is only available for 40 and 50 series phones and as an apology to the few OEM's who produed a Windows phone, less Samsung. Next year they'll can it when all of the last Nokia phones reach the end of their warranty. I don't do Snapchat, so it works for me.

Fired Ofcom Remainer bod sues UK gov for withholding his payoff

It's a bit more complicated...

Not a good article by the Reg here. Private Eye gave a much more balanced view of this two weeks ago (so it's not even news really). The Govt. wouldn't be offering a tax payer funded without prejudice settlement unless they had been advised that he could win. He's no egomaniac. He advised them before his appointment what his position on all of these issues was and that he was going to continue to write about them. The Government said that was OK. When someone further up the food chain than the not terribly bright Karen Bradley saw that he was on the payroll they lightened the pram payload and sacked him for writing the stuff that they had just said was OK with them. His problem may be that by publishing the private correspondence, he has defamed himself. The whole thing is a titsup but not in the way The Reg describes.

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

Not just these

The difficulty occurs with any xhci controller, not just these. It gets tricky if the install is done from a usb3.x port. As long as you have a USB2 port you are fine. I'm writing this on a lappy with sandy bridge and a renesas xhci usb3 controller on one port. I can't install win 7 through that either. Thin lappy with a single USB3 port and nowt else = bad idea. That's all they'll offer then. Corporate grade e.g Dell Latitude will be OK. Consumer? Just be grateful and shut it.

Kindle Paperwhites turn Windows 10 PCs into paperweights: Plugging one in 'triggers a BSOD'

Makes a change

There was a time when the headline would have read "Plugging device into Windows 98 does not cause BSOD" I would have said Windows 95 but it did not really know what a USB device was.

Is this the last ever Lumia?

Tipped By Whom?

The Surface phone is a myth longed for by a band of increasingly embittered fanbois. There is no evidence that MS sees any percentage on phones. They have written off $10Bn on the Nokia handset acquisition already. They have just announced another load of job cuts in the mobile division. I woould guess that they are winding down their handset engineering division. Windows Mobile 10 (its called that this week) is on maintenance. If OEM's want to make a Windows Phone, MS will with them luck.

I read they are rolling out WP10 to older handsets in the middle east. This must be an effort to disrupt communications of certain organisations with a reputation for misanthropy. Don't MS know there will never be a Snapchat app for Windows Phone?

Let me PLUG that up there, love. It’s perfectly standaAAARGH!

"Over the years, I have come across corporate print servers that route your print jobs around the globe and back again before reluctantly spewing the data to the laser five feet away from your own desk."

Yup. It's called cloud printing. Became quite popular I hear.

Ofcom: We're going to shake up the digi comms market

They've done it

Those cute little bunnies are French Lop kits. I have two of the terrier sized adult variety. They can chew through any cable they come across. Mains, ethernet, optical and armoured. They just don't care. They are a highly disruptive innovation and Ofcom have two of them. Mine can be hired at £5,000 per day each, the Jack Straw mates rate.

To Explain the World, Girl in a Band and A Spool of Blue Thread

Kim is so grounded....

Pomme de terre? So Ms Gordon ended up in the big potato? Explains everything.

EE coughs to BROKEN data usage metrics BLUNDER that short-changes customers

WP 8.1 to the rescue

Thankfully Windows Phone 8.1 has an app called Data Sense. Its really useful because it will reset your chosen data allowance on any date in the months up to and including the 28th! Mine with Virgin resets on the 30th.

With WP8.1 its a perpetual February in a non-leap year. Genius

That's right, MICROSOFT is an ANDROID vendor after Nokia gobble

Try Reading The Statement

All they said is that they would offer support for X and Asha handsets. He did not say they would be selling new ones beyond what was currently on offer. They have millions of feature phones in the channel and a whole ecosytem of used phones. If they want to migrates them over to winphone then they have to taper off support over say 3 - 5 years. This is no big deal because outside of Afghanistan, Southern Ukraine and other places where consumer protection is not a priority at the moment, they are legally obliged to do it. With phones of course its meaningless they rarely last that long (apart from the nokia 3300 in my glovebox perhaps?)

New Reg mobile site - feedback here!

Re: Whats your baseline?

And there was me thinking all the worst commentards didn't work for the Reg. As the only alternative for me right now is a building works spreadsheet I'll spend a bit of time...

"Opera Mini accounts for about 0.6 per cent of sessions - but Opera lovers of all ilk appear to be more vocal than users of other browsers."

You mean there are other browers? And users? When did you know this and why didn't you say? A quick word search reveals that you are snowed over by BEELIONS, reg billions that is, of Opera mini users vocalising about your m. site. I couldn't give a flying hoot about Opera. Don't use it on the desktop or the cutting slab. They happen to do the only alternative browser for feature phones which they update periodically for free and works well for what it is. Saves all those Kenyans exporting old phones to themselves in order to recover the coltan because they can't read the Reg with them.

"As for the Asha - no we are not interested in supporting this. Sorry!"

Please don't be. We feel each others pain. I can vocalise it for you if you want. Sounds a bit like a Yoko Ono record over Skype on a Nokia Asha.

Whats your baseline?

Before I waste any more fingertip, are you interested in how it looks on Opera Mini 8 on a Nokia Asha 311. So far, less usable than main site and zooming on clicked article. Cookie dialog is huge, images over indented.

I know Indians are buying Androids and Lumias now, but I am fed up of losing expesnive phones so got a losers phone instead. It sticks to me like sthi. They sold millions of touch Ashas

Plusnet shunts blame for dodgy DNS traffic onto customers' routers

Well my TP link router is patched to prevent WAN side UPNP access, has WAN admin access disabled and a good random password. I resolved the loss of connectivity by changing the DNS to Google's open servers. I don't know whether Plusnet considers this to be malicious traffic.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

I did IT support to help pay for training to be a lawyer. Criminal defence lawyer natch. Common question "How can you defend an iPad if you know its guilty. Now I tell them I'm a Jehova's Witness.

AMD finishes its 'Piledriver' Opteron server chip rollout

That would be Roadroller. The last steamrollers were withdrawn from service in the late 1960s due to the arrival of UNIX.

How digital audio ate itself and the music industry

When it was exciting

I worked as a bench engineer at the Laskys branch at 257 Tottenham Court Road. The big brach was at no 42 which became Micro Anvika (I think they are on the critical list also). The poster who said that the 44.1 was chosen as it could be factored into the 625 line 50 field PAL sync and the 525 line 60 field NTSC sync is correct as it was expected that modifed VCRs would be the intial medium for the largest market segment. It was also above the 20Khz audio bandwith by a factor of two and a bit.

The real memory was Phil Oakey, wonky haired vocalist from the second incarnation of the Human League coming to buy a Sony PCM-F1 and its matching portable (ish) Beta VCR. There was also a Hitachi-Shibaden VHS machine that was a self contained unit of VCR deck and ADA amp. The later VCR "Hi-Fi" arrangement was analogue but with VCR effective tape speed and 70+db dynamic range. Most VHS Hifi recorders had nasty IC based rec and play amps so it never reached its potential. For a long time, with the right recorder, it made more sense than digital for the amateur or semi-pro user.

As I recall you could could defeat the SCMS on the Sony F1 with a small DC voltage to the left PCM output. As two machines were a years wages it was not a practical restriction. You were always going to send analogue to the pressing plant. Some indie recordings were still mixed down to a Dolby C cassette deck and providing you didn't want to stable a stereo image or much dynamic range, neither of which were essential to the synth based pop music of the day, they sounded just fine.

Years later I gave up my soldering iron and became a sysadmin to finance my... law degree. Thus proving that digital audio only eats itself and all those who sail in it.

Dixons to flog off old 'brands' Miranda and Saisho

What have you learned in 14y?

That's easy. The British mostly don't care if its good. They just want cheap, cheap cheap and hope for the best. As for Matsui, I remember a few years ago there was a misrep issue about whether goods had to reflect the origins of their name. The Moben kitchens thing lasted for years. No they did not have to be Scandinavian. The Matsui issue was about applying the name to a Yugoslavian fridge.

Grundig are no longer owned outright by Koc in Turkey, they are just licensed to use it for a bit and then it returns to Harvard international who someone rightly said used to be called Alba Radio, They may have made indifferent stuff since the Fidelity stereos I remember from my youth, but they are one of the most consistently successful private companies. The failure of Grundig, Dual, Aiwa, Sansui and Akai, Zenith etc (not Akai Pro, a separate concern) indicates its not just a British phenomenon.

And for anyone who argues with my thesis for "crap if its cheap enough" I have one word. Amstrad.

Spectrum-guzzling operators will TAKE TV off THE AIR

Pointless and Cruel?

Erm...Isn't that what is known as commercial risk? Mobile TV outside of 3G was a solution looking for a problem, as 3G so very nearly was. If backhaul providers get too involved with the service in order to make the numbers work in their own minds, they then can't think of an alternative use for it without appearing to have screwed up. They got it cheap and you don't want to force them to use it. How else do you want to tickle their tummies? Ban Lilly Allen?

Panasonic patches cameras to block rivals' batteries

Battery DRM

Well its the difference between a "two for $10" IED from Ebay or a good replacement battery from Hama, Hahnel, Energizer etc. They are understandably fed up of getting warranty claims caused by dodgy batts but this is OTT. I was going to buy a TZ7 which has a short battery life (say 100 shots with all Mega OIS stuff etc) and even a good pattern battery was £30. Panasonic want nearer £50. Must replace that crappy battery on my 6230i. Sorry, forgot to say Nokia don't make genuine batteries for them any more.