Posts by DiViDeD

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Re: I have't used wired headphones with any sort of plug for donkeys.

What size plugs do donkeys take?

Asking for a friend

Re: Koenigsegg

Koenigsegg (assuming I could pronounce it

As Top Gear have already proven, the trick is not in knowing how to pronounce Koenigsegg, but in learning when it's time to stop pronouncing it.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Re: More guns = safer for everyone

number of folk killed by their own* gins is very high

I very nearly got killed by my own gin once, so these days I only drink it in halves.

Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

... and why is the number of housholders killed by their own weapons by intruders so high? Kind of goes against the whole "protection" thing there.

Re: AC

More guns in the hands of more people leads to a lower crime rate.

Is this true? I've seen arguments regarding US states where some form of gun control has been introduced having higher rates of gun crime than US states where people wander the aisles of Walmart with assault rifles over their shoulder (often using carefully cherry picked statistics), but these all relate to a country with a history of widespread gun ownership and where there are, apparently, many more handguns in circulation than there are citizens.

Are there any studies showing that gun crime actually went massively down when a previously unarmed populace were given AK-47s and assault helicopters?

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Re: Samsung Galaxy S10 is $799 or £799

Deeper Sigh.

Funny that, since in Arsetrailer they always use the correct currency exchange (currently defines as market rate plus a bit more ... bit more ... higher ... there you go), making the Galaxy S10 an eye watering $2,199 here (JB Hifi - lower prices? We've heard of them)

I have 2 x internal Samsung ECO SSDs in my gaming rig. 6 Gb/s SATA, cost me about $500 AU total, and not an Apple Logo in sight.

And when the time comes, I can swap em out for whatever the future brings.

Shock! US border cops need 'reasonable suspicion' of a crime before searching your phone, laptop

Re: America has always been weird about visitors

Nice place to visit*

Not really. Been to the US twice, under protest, for business. Neither visit could be remotely described as "nice".

From snide immigration officials (so what can a bunch of limeys do that an american couldn't do better?), through insulting hotel staff (what the hell kinda accent is that anyway?) to being refused service at a roadside diner (partly because we "talked funny", but mostly, we believed, because we were travelling with an experienced barrister they described as a "niggrah"), both experiences were nasty, brutish, but thankfully short.

Re: Apples T&Cs are longer

The fact that almost everyone loves to hate Apple is a bonus

Hey, don't put yourselves down!

Plenty of people hate the US too.

And the US has plenty of billions in the bank. Admittedly, it's someone else's bank, but, hey ...

Astroboffins baffled as Curiosity rover takes larger gasps of oxygen in Martian summers

Re: Easy option

Certainly, nobody can handle aMfM's truth - not without a couple of stiff drinks inside them.

'That roar is terrific... look at that rocket go!' It's been 52 years since first Saturn V left the pad

Re: In any case it was good enough to get the job done.

No, he's absolutely right, you know. This (admittedly rather elderly) link below shows the whole truth(tm)

What a Clanger!

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Not Just in Ireland

From speaking to parents, it seems the policy of getting parents to buy iPads is well established in state schools here in ArseTrailer, certainly in Sydney. Pupils get a list of software which they must purchase in order for their child to participate in lessons. Of course, the software (or must we all call them "apps" these days?) determines the processing power required, thus guiding parents to the top end of the price bands.

And every single software title is available as freeware on Android ( and mostly as freeware on iPad, although these titles are "not authorised"), which would make the cost to parents anything up to 10 times cheaper than an iPad, especially bearing in mind that these are children, children break stuff, and buying a new cheap Android tablet every year or so is a shitload less expensive than replacing iPads.

Maybe it's an agreement between the Education Department and Apple as compensation for Apple's tax evasion compliance

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: Contact your credit card company.

I believe the OP may have been using it in the Sir pTerry "avec with everything" sense

Huawei. It's the patriotic choice: Mobe behemoth predicts 20% sales spike despite US sanctions

Re: Not so sure

perhaps global sales in 5eyes countries will decline

Funnily enough, Australia is most enthusiastically 5eyes, and has it's moist, if slightly sunburnt tongue so firmly up that nice Mr Trump's arse that you couldn't separate them with a crowbar (it looks like we will be the first freedom loving western democracy to make it a criminal offence to not do business with a company because you don't approve of its politics/pollution/exploitation of workers/etc), yet I seem to see Huawei mobes everywhere - Optus even has a promotion on the flagships right now, which my woman had no hesitation in taking advantage of.

I guess under the new "anti having an opinion about anything" legislation, we shall be limited to only Jesus phones or something mechanical from Motorola.

IT contractor has £240k bill torn up after IR35 win against UK taxman

Re: laws ... could be reviewed ... loopholes removed

Except that the very consultant companies (PW, EY, etc) who are paid large sums of money to "assist" governments to draft those laws are the very same consultancies who are also paid large sums of money to "assist" companies to take advantage of the loopholes built into those very same laws.

Trebles all round, I think!

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

Re: Scio ... I have one

Does it still need you to tell it what you're looking at so it can tell you what it's looking at?

Re: You can already pay for one that doesn't exist

+1 for Thunderf00t (Dr Phil Mason) - one of the best (if a little pompous, but let's face it, he has a lot to be pompous about) science based debunkers out there.

And I'm with him - when a SCIO can tell the difference between a Golden Delicious, a Granny Smith and a potato, I'll consider buying one.

WTF? Apple iPhones shrank by more than $22bn in fiscal '19

Re: crazy prices

apple kit can only be classified as luxury items

I think the word you're looking for is veblen

Re: I find my Apple devices to be pretty and hassle free

Couldn't agree more (except for the pretty bit - one featureless glass oblong looks very much like any other featureless glass oblong to my mind). But hassle free? Definitely.

Work gave me an iPhone7 a couple of months back and it's no trouble at all - just sits in the jacket pocket, gets taken out every so often for charging and, well, that's it really. Never actually used it, but you can't have everything.

Thought you were good at StarCraft? DeepMind's AI bot proves better than 99.8% of fleshy humans

Re: Want to play a game?

does DeepMind also have the thermonuclear war simulator game at it's disposal?

The bigger question is: Does DeepMind have the response "Strange Game. The only way to win is not to play" built in, at priority A One One!11!, with flashing lights and a positive feedback loop to give it extra chunky electrons as a reward whenever it chooses that response?

asking for a friend

Re: the tedium of playing it for real

Although I have to disagree with you there, I readily admit that the early stages of any StarCraft game (just like the early stages of any Dune, Age of Empires, Warcraft, you name it game) can be exceptionally tedious if you decide to play safe and build up your troops and resources before you try anything, or suicidally exciting if you decide you're bored and go off for a bit of a skirmish before you're ready

If you're going to exploit work's infrastructure to torrent, you better damn well know how to hide it

Re: (in)appropriate use of their fairly impressive internet pipe

Back in the mists of time, I worked for a major American merchant bank (now long defunct), with a thriving culture in the Computing department (yes, I predate the term "IT") of downloading from binary usenet groups.

This was curtailed when a beancounter, investigating larger than expected phone bills, unearthed the cabinet chock full of 28.8 modems, each with its own phone line and the operation was shut down.

Luckily, he let slip that "phone bills are high enough already", what with the 24/7 data connection to New York costing north of £12,000 per month.

The solution was obvious. By the next day the modems were gone, replaced by a single machine hooked up to the NY fatpipe. Ah, the good old days!

NB: pleae note that we were a professional group and didn't use our usenet access just for downloading porn, Oh No. Although it was mostly porn, come to think of it.

Re: Wow

Ingenious solution but incredibly unprofessional.

and yet you say that as though it's a bad thing?

20 years ago?

Or look a little further back. Like when the DoH was getting spanky new desktops with 16 Mb RAM in 4x4Mb SIMMs.

Obviously the users could easily get away with 8 (and I think we were being overly generous there), and obviously too, there was a lot of beer money to be made at around a hundred quid a pop to all those enthusiastic computer club members with their 2Mb PC clones.

Of course, being professionals, we would never have considered such an underhand operation.

Top American watchdog refuses to release infamous 2012 dossier into Google’s anti-competitive behavior

Re: Splendid response

The problem is that Labour are worse.

Are they though?

Really?

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

Sorry Mr Morrison,

.. but I'm not buying a webcam just so you can watch me wank. Buy your own bloody porn!

It's back: The mercifully normal-looking Moto 360 smartwatch

Re: expensive!

Unfortunately, the "replacement" for the Gear 2 Neo is the appalling Samsung Watch 3.

But at least it runs under Android these days, rather than Tizen, and can handle phone calls when you don't have your phone with you

Uncle Sam demands summary judgment on Snowden memoir: We're not saying it's true, but no one should read it

Re: Free publicity - Banning Spy Catcher

... the Right Wing of Australian Liberals

You say that as though Australian Liberals (or Australian politics for that matter) ever had a left wing.

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

Bear with me here - It's the mists of time blocking the view

I seem to remember that Microsnot tried this many years ago, when they claimed that some small publishing company (Scanrom Publications of Cedarhurst, NY) had infringed their copyright on Microsoft Bookshelf by producing a CD-ROM (remember those?) library called "The First Electronic Jewish Bookshelf"

I believe the judge determined that you cannot trademark commen English words, although where that puts Zuck's trademark on the word "face", I have no idea.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: how about two LED bar graph lights?

glass half empty ..., or a glass half full

Personally, I've always felt that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Re: Would someone explain

If you want to see chaos from driving on the right side of the road, spend some time in Myanmar. The old Prime Minister, during his late, underpants on head period, decreed that, from 6th Dec 1970, his country would drive on the right.

Unfortunately, bus companies continue to operate (and buy!) buses designed to operate on the left, which means that, every time a bus stops, passengers have to enter and leave via the middle of the bloody road. With much hilarity ensueing.

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

Re: And of course, "no details."

China ... throwing its weight around in a most undiplomatic way.

Something you could never accuse the US of doing. Oh, wait ...

Junior minister says gov.UK considering facial recognition to verify age of p0rn-watchers

Minimum of an O face

Will an "Oh! God, Yes!!!" face do instead?

I Haz a Question

Am I missing something here? Is the norrmal process, when looking for a little action with Mrs Palm and her lovely daughters, to first set up a webcam and a lighting rig?

Will those of a less narcissistic bent, who don't have a webcam focused on their face 24/7 be excluded from this brave new world of government assisted wanking?

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

More clueless rambling from people who don't know what socialism is

Socialism has a tendancy (sic) to communism as people demand more and more stuff for free

And of course, Scandinavians, living under the oppressive yoke of evil, commie loving socialism, are the most miserable people in the world. Oh, wait.

Re: TV ownership fine

You could argue that it's a tax

Except that it isn't, since, unlike taxes, the money goes, not to the government so it can decide to hand it to the BBC as it pleases, but direct to the BBC itself. The government cannot withold part of the licence fee unless the BBC toes the party line.

And if you want to see how dire things can be where the government can directly starve a non commercial broadcast channel of cash because it has been critical of some policy or other, pop over here to arsetrailer and see what our pentecostal, doG fearing prime minister does to with ABC funding in an attempt to stop them pointing out his political bollocks.

Re: pissing off nearly half the audience nearly all the time...

.. and you'd be right. From my time there around 25 years ago, I can remember that the viewer/listener complaints people used to get roughly similar numbers of "blatant labour bias" and "blatant tory bias" complaints - often in relation to the same broadcast!

So, what's fashion going to look like on the Moon in 2024? NASA's ready to show you the goods

Re: White → Orange

or

D) Large, well equipped Chinese launcher, spacious Chinese orbital insertion module and specially designed Mahindra "this time for sure" lunar lander.

Tinfoil-hat search engine DuckDuckGo gifts more options, dark theme and other toys for the 0.43%

The only thing that a website may need to know is your browser version

To be honest, not even that. In my dim & distant past building web applications, we generally put the browser specific options into the code, and let the client sort it out once it received the html/javascript.

We never knew nor cared what browser our visitors used, we just made sure we covered as many options in the code as we could. Even server side code (asp) could be wrapped in dhtml so, again, the question of which bits to display and how to display that was sorted out in the client render.

Don't tell me browsers have become less sophisticated in the intervening years?

A spot of after-hours business email does you good, apparently

Re: "don't look at work email on work mobile device"

After many years with work mobiles and notebooks, as well as a mobile I only ever use for work, the policy that has always worked for me at the end of a day is:

- Ensure all work related devices are charged up and place in desk drawer

- Lock drawer

- Go home

So far, these actions have not led to the collapse or bankruptcy of a single company,

And before someone points out that I may be deeded out of hours for an essential matter, that's what callout payment arrangements are for.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Re texted the Other Half from the supermarket, "do we need carrots?"

You keep your carrots in the FRIDGE?

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Re: Dear BBC

'the legendary Maida Vale studio'

Anyone who's ever had to work at Maida Vale would have plenty of words to describe it, but "legendary" wouldn't get a look in!

Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...

Re: an accounts package that contained two sets of books

In the early 90s, I worked with a girl who ran a husband and wife accounts software house in East London.

None of that '2 sets of books' nonsense for them. A simple electromagnet pair, one disguised as a very heavy and secure lid for their floppy storage case, the other housed in a drive bay in the PC, flicked on by a single desktop switch that could be yanked off the desk, pulling the cables with it, and chucked in the bin when the Excise Men came a callin was quite possibly the reason why she never turned up for work one morning.

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Re: Not sure of the details or veracity, barn lofts

Oh it's true, in one case at least. Droitwich, the primary MW/LW transmitter for England & Wales, suffered transmission drops back in the50s? 60s? long time ago anyway, leading to widespread complaints. The signal drop was traced to a farmer who was powering his home (and his bloody milking parlour!) from a Tesla Coil in his attic.

Whether that was just one of many such incidents, or the seed for a thousand urban legends, who can say?

Droitwich was also well known for the engineers' habit of scaring visiting dignitaries by carrying fluorescent tubes through the RF gallery, whereupon they would light up with the light of a thousand suns (well, of a couple of fluorescent tubes, at least), and for the story of the staff tog, taking photos for the 50th anniversary edition of the Radio Times who decided the RF gallery would make a wonderful image. Holding his light meter high to get the perfect exposure, the resulting arc welded one of his shoes to the gantry. He survived, but the remains of his shoe became a favourite subject during safety inductions for a long time afterwards.

Re: 'Shit, It's Twins!'

Oh yes. When my twin boys were born, we joined something called the Twins And Multiple Births Association (TAMBA) and quickly discovered that, almost invariably, whatever plans for offspring numbers the parents had started out with, the twins (or triplets, quads, etc) were always the youngest, even if they were the first. Make of that what you will.

And don't anyone try to tell you twins are twice as much work as one - they are at least 1,437 times as much work. And that's on a good day!

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Re: isopropyl alcohol?????

I've managed to persuade my local pharmacy to supply me with a 30ml bottle of 100% (no added water - critical when dealing with electronics) every so often for cleaning tape heads, capstans and the like.

He was initially reluctant until he understood that I wanted it for kit cleaning and not to maske cheap cocktails with (it can make you blind or kill you, apparently)

Re: MX mice from Logitech

Plus one for the MX series. I just got their Master 2S and it's a dream to work with - precise, even on glass and very comfy in the ageing, arthritic hand.

So much so in fact that I'm seriously considering getting one of their 'handshake' MX mice, having had a crack with one over the weekend.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: HP wouldn't try to bork printers with third party cartridges again

My (rather expensive) Canon printer doesn't actually bork itself with third part cartridges, but the sheer volume of "OMG!! This isn't a Canon cartridge! Have you any idea what damage this thing could do to the planet?" messages, usually followed by a clickthrough dialog worded along the lines of "I agree I'm a fecking eejit and accept that all my printouts could be shit because of my appalling buying habits" that I have to go through makes the whole prospect of buying cartridges just because they are 80% cheaper than Canon (and the little fucker takes six of the damn things!) just too much of a hassle for a sheet of A4.

US government sues ex-IT guy for breaking his NDA (Yes, we mean Edward Snowden)

Re: That's treason.

And before anyone argues that you can't commit treason against a country you don't live in or have never visited, consider (for a moment) Julian Assange