Posts by JRS

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

Who gets the billions?

Does it go to Ireland (who didn't seem to want Apple to pay it) or the EU ?

Life, interrupted: How CrowdStrike's patch failure is messing up the world

Major crisis averted - just

Local Wetherspoons was cash only this morning.

Was severely concerned I'd miss my weekly breakfast.

Fortunately one of the team had enough for coffees, then an acquaintance lent us some cash.

Normality resumed - apart from a small debt to someone we don't see very often.

Meta's ad-free scheme dares you to buy your privacy back, one euro at a time

Re: Shocked?

Ummm

13.75 / 1000 = 0.01375

about 0.7 US cents per UK ad view

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

eventuate

Really ???

Teens take a million metaverse Ryanair flights in Roblox

Re: Bathroom?

Bog

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

And the pub on the moon's not very good.

There's no atmosphere.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Variation

You were lucky.

We 'ad to shout "ONE" and "ZERO" into a can tied to an old bit of string....

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

It's not just phones

What about old usb memory sticks, sd cards etc with insufficient capacities / performance.

I think my pile of them almost matches old mobiles.

And then there's old 3.5inch (and 2.5) hard drives. They do exceed mobiles in terms of weight.

I don't need paying for it if I know it's properly & responsibly recycled (including turning all the 1s into 0s to go into new devices).

Fresh details on the flash that sits inside Mars Perseverance Rover

Not Muppets

I couldn't read "RISC-V in space" without trying to voice it as "PIGS IN SPACE...."

(Why no muppet icon?)

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: Smart fridge

If I wasn't in such a good mood I'd downvote you for unnecessary use of the word "Already".

Unless there's some sort of irony in a smart device not being learnt how to talk proper.

CEO told to die in a car crash after firing engineers who had two full-time jobs

Stealing?

So if anyone puts in some overtime that doesn't get paid then surely the company is stealing from the employee.

Of course this wouldn't happen at Canopy right?

* Just to be clear, overtime should not be because the employee is slow, but because the demands of the job couldn't be reasonably met in the full time hours.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

Space bar

Yes, but it's rubbish. There's no atmosphere.

Forget BYOD, this is BYOVM: Ransomware tries to evade antivirus by hiding in a virtual machine on infected systems

Are you not overrating "normal users" ???

Microsoft puts dual-screen devices and Windows 10X in the too-hard basket

Dual Screen Woes

Multiple screens needs improving on regular Windows 10. Why do apps open up on different monitors, and dialog boxes pop up off-screen where they're difficult to track down or move. All too frequently I'm jumping back to single screen mode just to find them.

Don't Zoom off elsewhere: Google plugs video-chat service Meet into Gmail as user eyes start wandering

Re: Variation

Agree. Meet is really easy to use and get other users connected onto, but Zoom seems to have really good screen sharing quality, and also you can do remote control which google has been missing for far too long.

Both Meet and Zoom seem to lack Team's background "white noise feature" which can be very distracting.

SAP bet the house on S/4HANA but most users aren't ready to move

Profitable

Even though your customers don't like or trust you, it doesn't mean you can't run a very large, highly profitable business.

Surely something wrong there?

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Honestly can't decide

between Johnny Morris and Patrick Moore

iFixit engineers have an L of a time pulling apart Apple's iPhone XS

Re: Variation

XL sounds too much like a Microsoft product...

Review: Philips Hue network enabled multicolour lightbulbs

Re: Variation

[What would be useful (and may well already exist) is a way to control a collection of portable lights, that are powered from ordinary mains outlets, from a single location. It's useful to be able to switch all the table lamps in a room from the doorway, especially in an old house where the room height doesn't allow ceiling lights. But it's expensive and disruptive to wire up dedicated lighting outlets.]

http://www.homeeasy.eu/ or http://www.lightwaverf.com/ will do this for you with socket adaptors and stick on wall switches or remote controls. Much faster than X10 in switching, and can be disappointingly simple to set up. Possibly lacking in the ability to report a switch's state though (for more advanced automation).

Uni plagiarism site buckles under crush of last-minute essays

Re: Variation

11 Hours downtime would mean 8749 hours uptime which is about 99.87% of 8760 hours. This is more than the 99.5% quoted. Don't understand why they didn't claim "almost 99.9% uptime" if that's realistic.

(I work for a small University and whilst we get occasional problems with Turnitin they're few & far between & usually resolved pretty quickly)

The Hardware Hacker's Guide to Home Automation

Re: Question?

I've looked into this but haven't jumped at anything yet. The closest things I've seen have been either on openenergymonitor (looked too complicated for me) or I found a thread on a forum: http://www.electriciansforums.co.uk/central-heating-systems/23969-immersion-heater-pv-electricity-15.html (jumping into the middle of it!) in which some people seemed to be offering to sell a semi-ready-built system for a reasonable price.

UK kids' art project is 'biggest copyright blag ever' – photographer

Re: Variation

Just had that here (North Somerset). The letter makes it sound like your childs work has been carefully selected as a winning entry, they even include a certificate. A few parent playground discussions reveal that practically every child in the school has had their work selected and this is just a money making printing scam.

Apple launches three-pronged education assault

Don't you mean

ieye...

Reg reader lost for words over blank HP keyboard

why?

I bought one of those a few years back. Good for touch typing, but the strangest thing was the double space bar as you can see in the pic. The left side is backspace, the right side is forward space. Takes a bit of getting used to...

Men in Green step back from GM's 230mpg Volt claim

Alternative MPG

For the purposes of calculating MPG for electric/hybrid cars, just make each recharge come from a petrol generator. The manufacturers have to get as many miles as possible out of just one gallon of fuel with which to power the car either by direct burning in the cars engine or via the generator.

The alternative is to have a standard cost per mile for petrol / diesel / grid electricity, and price up a standard weeks travel in each vehicle.