Posts by Z80

You'll never select all and mark as read again after this tale of peril... Oh, who are we kidding? Of course you will

Re: User problem: needed to be escalated.

The quality is definitely diminishing so I think much like the workers in the basement I'll take flight.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: If DAB is faster than FM

I've got an original white Bug which I bought soon after they came out in (I think) 2004 and use it every day. The audio outputs at virtually the same time as my other DAB radios - it just sounds like there's a slight echo when you listen to two together.

The only problem I experience is that sometimes when you use the sleep timer it freezes when it turns off meaning the alarm won't come on in the morning. I've got a separate travel alarm clock to save me in case this happens.

I've updated mine with the v2.2 software (Menu > General Setup > Software version) which gives you the EPG function. The way it stops you turning on or off, changing volume or stations while saving EPG data to the SD card is a bit annoying but I found the smaller the SD card, the quicker it completes this so I bought an old 16MB one from eBay. BBC Sounds renders the recording function redundant for me so I haven't needed the SD card capacity for recordings for many years.

Sod 3G, that can go, but don't rush to turn off 2G, UK still needs it – report

Dual SIM phones

It seems that many dual SIM phones only support 2G GSM on the 2nd SIM? This appears to be the case for my Nokia 2.2.

I'm going to Japan soon and will buy a tourist SIM there because roaming rates are of course insane, but it will be data-only because for some reason Japan doesn't trust non-residents to have a Japanese phone number??

To receive texts with OTCs if I need to use online banking I'll be taking my 3G flip-phone from 2007 as Japan never had a GSM network - they came up with their own standard. I could just take my bank card reader but this way just seemed more pleasingly silly.

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Re: PlusNet Billing

Something seems to have gone wrong since renewing my Plusnet contract. The portal shows the next billing date is 4 weeks ago.

NASA goes commercial, publishes price for trips to the ISS – and it'll be multi-millionaires only for this noAirBNB

Re: $50 per GB for data

Data roaming in Japan using a Three SIM costs approximately 76 times as much.

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

Re: Most powerful wifi?

Beyond a certain power level, the ability of the access point to receive a signal from the client is going the be the limiting factor isn't it?

Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe has got the horn for space rock Ryugu – a sampling horn, that is

Re: "Next step, to hadouken a crater"

The apt use of hunky-dory didn't go unnoticed either (assuming you subscribe to the 'Honcho dori' theory of its etymology.

Pint for the JAXA boffins.

Trolling in the Reg's forums... we mean, er, 'working' on the train still rubbish thanks to patchy data coverage

There may not be many trolls but there's no shortage of people who'd point out that you ought to have written "... who's been drinking since Plymouth and you're now at Durham..." or would at least upvote someone else for doing so.

Japanese cyber security minister 'doesn't know what a USB stick is'

Unicode not showing up until the 90's can't have helped.

There are established sorting orders in Japanese though - how could they have dictionaries otherwise?. There's gojūon which orders words based on the pronunciation of the word. It literally means 50 sounds but modern Japanese only uses 46 of them. It starts with the 5 vowel sounds a, i, u, e, o then has rows of corresponding sounds (where they exist) in a set order with ka, ki, ku, ke, ko coming next so for example you'd find ao (meaning blue, but also green, but let's not get into that...) shortly before aka (red) in a dictionary sorted this way.

Kanji can have different readings so they can be sorted into I think as many as 214 groups based on their radical - a common element a group contains, and then they're sorted by increasing number of strokes within their groups.

Britain's rail ticket-booking systems go TITSUP*

Re: Well..

Sounds like the TOCs weren't the bogie man this time.

I wonder if it was some sort of buffer overrun?

Amazon's sexist AI recruiter, Nvidia gets busy, Waymo cars rack up 10 million road miles

Re: I call BS on Waymo

https://xkcd.com/1897/

Microsoft tells volume customers they can stay on Windows 7... for a bit longer... for a fee

Re: WinXP

If you're keen on accuracy, you probably should have referred to the supported OS by its correct name - Windows Embedded POSReady 2009.

Time to party like it's 2005! Palm is coming BAAAA-ACK

CLIÉ memories

I've still got a Sony CLIÉ PEG-SL10 in the bottom of a drawer at home. 320x 320 monochrome display with green backlight, powered by 2 x AAA cells and with the ability to backup to Sony Memory Stick.

With a Japanese dictionary app loaded onto it, it served me well on a trip to Japan in the pre-smartphone era. I've just remembered one occasion on the same trip where I beamed a location map of a place I wanted to visit onto it from my laptop via an Infrared dongle because I didn't have a cradle or sync cable with the proprietary connector.

Pint because remembering things like this make you want to raise a glass to progress.

'Can you just pop in to the office and hit the power button?' 'Not really... the G8 is on'

Re: Just a beer?

The emo in emoji doesn't come from emoticon. Emoji comprises 絵 pronounced e as is bed, meaning picture/drawing and 文字 moji meaning letter/character.

WD's Purple reign continues: 12TB helium disks for vid spy tech

Boffins from Durham and Oxford found an estimated 54 billion cubic feet (610968 Olympic-sized swimming pools) of helium under Tanzania a couple of years ago. That has eased the supply worries somewhat.

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

If I'm reading that report correctly, the woman was hit by the right side of the front of the vehicle after the human driver made a steering input to the right. I guess she didn't have enough time to assess which direction the pedestrian was moving after finally noticing her on account of not paying enough attention.

The law of run Nintendo consequences: Sega brings out mini Mega Drive / Genesis

I'd hope for games like Toe Jam & Earl, James Pond 2 and Devil Crash. I expect games like Altered Beast, Golden Axe and Golden Axe 2

Exposed: Lazy Android mobe makers couldn't care less about security

Re: Moto E second generation

My 2nd gen. Moto E 4G (XT1524) received Android 6.0 and shows the Android security patch level as 1st Dec 2016. It was purchased in the UK SIM-free if that makes a difference.

Intel gives Broadwells and Haswells their Meltdown medicine

Re: Anything for the Z80 yet?

I wouldn't like to speculate.

Re: What is my CPUID can I see it?

http://www.cpu-world.com lists CPUID signatures

More stuff broken amid Microsoft's efforts to fix Meltdown/Spectre vulns

It broke Asus' AI Suite software as well - caused a nice repeating error window to start cascading across my desktop. I was just using one component of it to set my own fan curves but I've just uninstalled it for now. Asus appear to have released a beta update but it's based on a newer version and I don't know if it supports my old board because, erm, I haven't tried it yet.

To Puerto Ricans: A Register apology

https://xkcd.com/552/

Fridge killed my baby? Mag-field radiation from household stuff 'boosts miscarriage risk'

Re: "at a distance of one-inch, a clothes iron emits..."

"I think the most sensible precaution is to never iron your clothes again."

Well if Dr. Li reckons distance is your friend when it comes to this MF exposure, I'm at least going to take my clothes off in future before ironing them.

ML fails: Loyalty prediction? Not really. And bonus prediction? Oh dear

Re: Even the question is stupid

This.

The other day I called Barclaycard Merchant Services to find out how to perform some tests on a PDQ terminal that was intermittently failing to connect when processing transactions and I got put through to an automated survey at the end of the call asking how likely I was to recommend their services. To be fair they did ask during the call if i didn't mind that happening.

Given my job role there's no scenario I can imagine where my view of payment processing providers would be sought or need to be offered. They honest answer would be 0 - it's never going to happen.

I played along though and gave them a 6 because they guided me through the testing procedure efficiently (it worked this time) but offered no suggestions as to why it was sometimes failing.

This was classed as dissatisfaction on their scale and they then wanted me to put into words why I felt this way. I suppose that's a way of obtaining more meaningful feedback but I wasn't prepared to offer any more brain power than that required to think of a number and press a button so I hung up.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Re: Mini - not really

"In Durham legend has it that some engineers once suspended the VC's car from Kingsgate bridge"

That it was the VC's car sounds like a recent embellishment to me, but, a car, hanging from Kingsgate bridge? It would appear so.

https://community.dur.ac.uk/j.d.little/kingsgate/viewtopichtml_files/414.jpg

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Look into the light

I thought this was quite a striking image from Anandtech's coverage:

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11833/ssp_618_575px.jpg

My caption would be:

iPhone X: "You've made a very good decision."

Girl: "I've made a very good decision."

Virgin Media customers complain of outages across UK

Lightening your wallet perhaps?

Sofa-jockeys given crack at virtual Formula 1 world championship

Re: They should do the opposite

You can pay good money to kind of do that yourself - search online for AkibaKart.

Real-world traffic laws apply.

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Re: Caveat Emptor! (In UK and EU at least)

Caveat Venditor then?

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

For some problems you have to be there

I once got asked to go and take a look at why a certain PC was absolutely hammering one of the MySQL servers. I wandered over to the building where it was located, pondering the possibility of some kind of malware situation on the way, and find there's nobody around when I get there. What I do find is an unlocked PC with a browser open on a web application used for booking time on shared lab equipment that I'd configured coincidentally so I knew it used a MySQL database. I also noticed a pile of journals and folders behind the keyboard have slumped onto some of the keys, including F5...

I shoved the papers clear of the keyboard and reported back to the 3rd line guys. "Cause was...environmental" I said and left them wondering for a bit...

Oil and lube firm offers to ease pains of frustrated office workers

Re: Survey...

There's a physiological reason for the differing attitude between the sexes with regard to what constitutes a comfortable room temperature. It's something along the lines of women's higher proportion of body fat insulating their skin from the warmth in their core, whereas men tend to have larger muscles which kick out sufficient heat to keep the sensation of temperature at the skin surface at an agreeable level in cooler environments.

However I'm still not sure that fully explains the time when I was in an open plan office and had to ask for something to be done about the 2kW fan heater being used at the row of desks behind me as the flow of warm air was making me feel uncomfortable. The owner of the fan had it positioned pointing directly at her shins at a distance of approximately 12 inches.

Acronis adds automated ransomware protection to latest Backup version

Re: True Image?

@Pen-y-gors

See True Image 2017 New Generation

@circusmole

You took the words out of my mouth. When I jumped from 2013 to 2017 I thought to myself have I just turned into an idiot or is it this new interface that's idiotic. I've settled on it being the latter.

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

Re: Regardless of anything else ...

https://xkcd.com/1443/

T-Mobile goes Apple/Google route by separating phone numbers and devices

Re: How does it work?

There's a web site that'll work with a Chromium-based browser and a Mac and Windows app. The Windows one installs to AppData\Local so shouldn't need admin rights.

Amazing what you can find out within about 1 minute of doing a Google search for T-Mobile Digits.

Toshiba conglomerate: Can we keep going? We don't know

I suspect they're practising their 90 degree bows already.

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Re: Melted Printers

I think the reason LaserJet IIIs stuck around for so long was that whenever anyone tried to move one to make room for something newer, they thought better of it for the sake of their health.

Not the biggest printer ever made, but possibly the densest?

iCloud extortion racket nowhere near as epic as we thought it might be

Re: How many jaz drives would that take???

Too many. That's why they use REV drives.

eBay dumps users into insecure authentication mechanism

Re: administrivial..??

Mailing list manager Majordomo has used the term "administrivia" for one of its list configuration options since the 1990s.

FAKE BREWS: America rocked by 'craft beer' scandal allegations

In whose home.

Comcast staffers join walkout over Trump's immigration crackdown

all too common

IT team sent dirt file to Police as they all bailed from abusive workplace

If I'd been on the receiving end of “you must think you are some f**king clever pr*ck for sorting that, eh?”, I'd like to think I could have come up with something along the lines of: "No, not really - this problem you called us to help you with was one of the simplest I've ever had to deal with."

Busted Windows 8, 10 update blamed for breaking Brits' DHCP

Re: KB3201845 needs more than 1GB of free space to install. Glitchy, best to defer.

I'm still OK after KB3201845 has gone on. I don't use fast-start up either as I found my portable USB hard drive and I think also mouse were still receiving power after 'shutting down' my self-built PC with that option turned on.

I figured that the time spent working out why would never be repaid by the imperceptibly faster start-up times so I just switched it off.

OK here...for now?

I'm on Windows 10 using Plusnet though a BT Homehub 4R and things are working fine. There is a restart pending following some updates though...

The only one not for Office is KB3201845

KCL out(r)age continues: Two weeks TITSUP, two weeks to go

Re: Bah!

RAID array - what's wrong with that? Everyone where I work (Department of Redundancy Department) calls them that.

Panasonic wants you to wear Li-Ion batteries. The ones that explode

Re: PCMCIA

I had an A1200 but never used the PCMCIA slot.

I know there were external hard drives available with cases that matched the profile of the computer. My mate at school had one and it sounded like he had no end of Guru Meditation crashes with it. I stuck to internal IDE drives.

There was also a PCMCIA SCSI adapter branded Squirrel I think.

Airbus to build plane that's even uglier than the A380

Re: @Bruce

KLM and Air France do 3-4-3 on 777s.

Death of 747 now 'reasonably possible' says Boeing

Upstairs, downstairs

Japan Airlines used to have 747s with economy seats in the upper deck also. Figuring it was likely to be my only opportunity to travel up there I naturally selected an upper deck seat for a hop I did from Seoul to Tokyo in 2010.

I did actually fly in the business class nose section with KLM to Tokyo a couple of years ago but that was still only on an economy ticket (and with economy meals) - they must have only needed the upper deck for business class so decided to sell a few more economy tickets and opened up that section in the seat selection map on the web site. Got in there for the return leg as well!

Thunder struck: Apple kills off display line

Re: I'm with Sanditz, there.

IEEE 1394

Happy Mappiversary, Ordnance Survey

I haven't been to Tiree but I've been to Mull. One of the reasons I'd like to go back someday is to drive the B8035 alongside Loca na Keal again. In places the single track road is the only thing between the sea and the foot of the cliffs. Magic.

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

£15.4387

Thanks for the precision there.