* Posts by tellytart

33 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2009

Apple Vision Pro has densest display iFixit's ever seen, and almost-OK repairability

tellytart

Do El Reg not use sub-editors any more, or is that delegated to AI? Spot the glaring mistake in the sub headline:

You can fit more than 50 Virgin Bro pixels into a single iPhone one while angular resolution remains a little low

That should be Vision Pro of course! I've no idea what Virgin Bro pixels are!

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

tellytart

Re: My phone was the only one that worked in the Y2K crowd

I had the same. I worked for a local radio station at the time, and as there was no BBC station in the area, we were part of the emergency broadcast network. As I was the on call engineer, my phone was placed on the priority register.

For several years after 2000 until I changed my provider, I never ever had any problems phoning or texting anyone - never got a network busy notification :)

The mobile base sites treat emergency calls the same way - if the local cell can't service an emergency call, it will drop one of its in-progress calls to allow it to process the emergency call.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

tellytart

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

That's simply not true. I drive a BEV, I can't charge at home, can only charge on public superchargers and fast chargers. Over the last 2 years of running a BEV (because I've an app that tracks all the data), it's costing me 9 pence per mile, with an average price of 32p/kWh. If I could charge at home, the cost per mile would be less as I'd be able to switch to an EV specific electricity tariff to give me cheap overnight electricity for charging.

tellytart

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Your Tesla prices are a little out of date. If you're a Tesla owner (or pay the subscription to Telsa to be able to charge your non-Tesla car at the Tesla chargers that are open to all), it's actually around 35p off-peak, and 43p peak per kWh. (Peak times vary at different superchargers but usually it's similar to 4pm to 8pm).

I've had a Tesla for over 2 years now, I can't charge at home, but using superchargers, free charging at supermarkets etc, over the last 2 years my cost per mile has been 9.1p - so around half the cost of running a petrol car that averages 40mpg. Not to mention cheaper servicing costs.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

tellytart

Re: Or maybe...

As in towns and cities postcodes only cover around 15 houses on average (or 1 block of flats), they are usually very small geographic areas - so it's not surprising the satnav seems uncannily accurate. On a long street there'll be multiple postcodes covering only few of the houses on either side of the road.

There are also 55,540 postcodes in England and Wales that cover a single household according to the Census 2021 website.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

tellytart

Wow, that can escalate quickly. If that means what I read it to mean, by adding outsourcers...

So if I outsource my telephone call handling to a third party call centre, I have to pay a fee for every single employee of that call centre, not just the ones handling my phone calls?

It's highly ambiguous. The last bit of the sentence reads "that support your internal business operations" - how do you define that. Dropping the list of employment types, the line reads all of the full-time employees, part-time employees and temporary employees that support Your internal business operations.

So is that all staff of the companies that support your internal operations, or just those third party employees directly involved in supporting your internal business operations?

The number’s up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111

tellytart

Re: Multiple redundancy

The mobile network shouldn't get locked up. the GSM specification means that emergency calls are specifically flagged in the communications between the mobile and the base station, and if the base station is busy, it must drop an active call to allow it to service the emergency call.

So in theory, emergency calls from mobiles will always be able to be made.

Also, around the turn of the millennium, because I was working for a radio station deemed critical infrastructure, my mobile was put on the system as a high priority device - after all, if it all went wrong on NYE 2000, they needed to get hold of me to go into the station. Oddly enough, for several years until my number was removed from that list, I never had any problems phoning friends/relatives or texting around midnight every new years eve!

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

tellytart

Nothing unexpected. I only ever used Apple Pay within the app, so no stored payment card details.

tellytart

I received around 3 or 4 of these. All to an e-mail address I only used for BK.

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

tellytart

Re: Shifty

Ah, but even on commission, if you're an employee you're entitled to minimum hourly wage. This has already been tested in the courts over waiters/waitresses and tips, if the tips don't come up to minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference to pay the employee minimum wage.

NSA warns that mobile device location services constantly compromise snoops and soldiers

tellytart

Satellite phones would offer some level of protection. While the satellite cell configuration might be able to narrow down your position to perhaps a city, it wouldn't get any more accurate than that. Certainly not down to street/junction level that GSM triangulation might be able to get you.

Firefighters to UK Home Office: Yeah, maybe don't turn off emergency comms network before replacement is ready

tellytart

Re: Been saying it for a long while

The GSM spec has always implemented this. Because I was working for a broadcaster considered vital infrastructure in 1999/2000, for the period over the millennuim my phone was added to the system as having priority - if I needed to make a call and the local cell had no spare channels, it would drop an existing call to service mine. (The network is also configured to drop any active calls as necessary for anyone trying to make a 999 call so that the closest cell with the best signal will service the 999 call).

Smile? Not bloody likely: Day 6 of wobbly services and still no hint to UK online bank's customers about what's actually wrong

tellytart

Re: one egg in one basket

Ah, but notes are promissory, not legal tender. Legal tender is actually a very tightly defined term for settlement of debts.

Only coinage is required to be accepted for payment, and only in "reasonable" amounts - so you couldn't settle a £100 debt with 1p coins.

An Internet of Trouble lies ahead as root certificates begin to expire en masse, warns security researcher

tellytart

Re: Of course if they weren't so greedy ....

That'll be the STB recognising there's a copy protect flag in the MPEG stream, and encrypting the recording on the disk.

However, if you use a PC DVB-T2 tuner card, you can view, and record, the HD streams without any encryption.

Outages batter UK's Virgin Media into wee hours as broadband failures spike 77% globally

tellytart

If you're in a suitable area, try Hyperoptic - they provide several packages including 500Mb/s symmetrical and 1Gb/s symmetrical.

After intense scrutiny, Zoom tightens up security with version 5. New features include not, er, spilling video calls to network snoops

tellytart

Re: Makes my job harder

You're forgetting one vital part of these conferencing systems - they ALL have to be able to be decrypted by the servers of the company if you want to be able to use features like the ability to join the conference by telephone.

If the supplier can't decrypt the streams on their servers, how do they get at the audio to send it to the telephone participant, and how do they inject the telephone participant's audio into the conference?

Not only is Zoom's strong end-to-end encryption not actually end-to-end, its encryption isn't even that strong

tellytart

Re: People don't buy encryption

What most people are fogetting is that end to end encryption client to client isn't possible when you want to use other features offered by zoom:

* Recordings of the conference

* Telephone dial-in numbers to join the conference

Aria Technology loses Court of Appeal bid over £750k VAT dispute

tellytart

Limited only offers protection as long as you obey the law. Once you start defrauding the taxman you lose the protection being a limited company offers the directors of the company.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

tellytart

Actually, the majority of HV transmission lines are also AC, and depending on need could be running at anything from 1,000VAC up to 800,000VAC. (Due to the nature of AC, the higher the voltage, the lower the current required for transmission, and therefore the further it can be transported with minimal losses - the losses are caused by resistance, so the less current flowing, the less the resistance affects the transmission)

PIN the blame on us, says Monzo in mondo security blunder: Bank card codes stored in log files as plain text

tellytart

Re: Backhander

Actually, from reading the details fully, the app was logging the fact the user viewed either the full card number and/or the PIN from within the app, but was also incorrectly logging the card number/PIN when it should only have logged the fact they were viewed.

Ahem, ahem... AI engine said to be good as human docs at spotting lung cancer developing

tellytart

Re: Strange

The benefit would be more akin to allowing the AI to decide what goes forward to a human radiologist.

I.e. If the AI is 90% certain that an image is cancer, then a follow-up is automatically scheduled, no radiologist needed.

If the AI is almost certain the scan is cancer free, then no action taken.

If the AI probability of cancer falls within a certain range, then the scans are flagged for a radiologist second option.

This would reduce workload on radiologists to those cases where a trained eye and patient history (including familial history of cancer) is needed.

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

tellytart

Re: Backhander

It was the air feed into the cockpit that used to be fed from one engine, and in the newer model was switched to be fed from the other engine.

The pilots observed or smelled smoke coming in via the cockpit ventilation system, and shut down the engine they believed to be feeding the cockpit, not realising Boeing had changed the design and the cockpit was now fed from the other engine to the older model.

Dead LAN's hand: IT staff 'locked out' of data center's core switch after the only bloke who could log into it dies

tellytart

Hmm, wonder if I worked the same place as you! I wondered what a RPi was doing in one of the racks on the lower ground floor apps room with a label strikingly similar to yours!

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

tellytart

Magic Roundabout?

I vaguely remember thinking years ago someone at Demon was a Magic Roundabout fan. If I recall correctly, Demon had one of the first transatlantic fibres for an ISP rather than internet backbone, and the routers at either end were called Ermin and Trude!

Google to yoink apps with an unauthorized Call Log or SMS habit from Android Play Store

tellytart

Re: Backhander

Check is correct if the OP is using American English. Cheque if you are British.

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

tellytart

Re: but... That city spent all that money..

Actually, the Eiffel Tower is not copyrighted. You can take photos of it during daytime and exploit that photo for monetary gain if you like.

Where French copyright law will hit you though is if you take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night - the lighting is a more recent art installation, and is covered by French copyright. Therefore while you can photograph it for personal use, you may not exploit that photograph commercially without permission.

Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

tellytart

Re: "Blocking ip traffic is really difficult"

"I'm not an expert, but if you can do exactly that in the Windows hosts file, I doubt it can be any more of an issue for an ISP with trained professionals."

You can't just block an IP address - the way many modern sites are hosted now, if you block one IP address, you could also block many innocent sites that are hosted on the same server.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

tellytart

Windows NT4 was quite good

A few years ago we retired an old Windows NT 4 box that was used as a shared for a Quantel video editing system. I took a screenshot (though now mislaid) showing the box had an uptime of over 4 1/2 years!

Apple's iOS 9 public beta lands: El Reg pops it on a slab, strokes it up

tellytart

Re: I hope it fixes the little UI niggles

That's because the forum isn't the place for reporting bugs - very few apple staff read it. You need to post bugs on the proper bug reporting website.

Europe's highest court: Apple CAN trademark its retail store layout

tellytart

Re: Just to be clear here

Or, if you own an iPad or iPhone (or even iPod Touch), you can install the Apple Store app, scan the items barcode in the app, pay for it via itunes, and walk out of the store without need to queue up for a sales assistant.

TomTom slashes LIVE subs

tellytart

Speed Camera Databased

In several EU countries now, including Switzerland and Germany it's illegal to use a GPS device that has a speed camera database unless the speed camera part is disabled. If you can't disable it, it's illegal to carry the GPS unit in the car.

Apple posts iPhone update

tellytart

Data Usage

I wonder if this update fixes the bug that O2 admitted to me exists: I was in the USA with data roaming turned off, yet the iPhone still managed to clock up some data roaming charges on my behalf!