Posts by David Webb

Hot news! Combustible Galaxy Note 7 to return as 'Galaxy Note FE'

Free Explosions, not an optional extra

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV

A gaming sub forum, awesome, can complain about SE without getting a forum ban! Not that I complain, I can't, they banned me for it.

So. Today SE announced that because they are incompetent and can't figure out how to disconnect players who are AFK they are going with the "lets boot everyone" method, once a day every single person will get kicked off the servers. Let's not get bogged down with how stupid it is to punish paying customers by booting them once a day because of people who won't notice because they are, you know, not playing, lets discuss how we, as people with an interest in IT would have sorted the problem.

To circumvent being booted whilst AFK some players will talk to an NPC or craft, this prevents the method SE uses from taking effect (they use a logout command, the logout command won't work if you're busy with an NPC or crafting or whatever).

My solution to this would be, if a person is detected as AFK for 30 minutes, instead of /logout, the system drops the network connection to their world server which forces the person back to the lobby server. What would your solution be?

Ad 'urgently' seeks company to build national e-ID system

Oh dear, now we Cu Ba puns.

Uncle Sam bungs rich tech giants quarter of a billion bucks for exascale super R&D

Re: Big impressive numbers in the headline

I don't think the 1/4bil is for making the machine itself, it seems to be (if I read correctly) for them to work on the tech needed to run Crysis at 144fps@8k resolution, I might have read it wrong though.

Congressman drafts COVFEFE Act to preserve Trump's Twitter tantrums

Re: the COVFEFE bill

Just what us Brits need, another bloody vote! Count me out, I'm going to get a covfefe instead.

DUP site crashes after UK general election

I somehow doubt the party's policies have changed in the last few days

Most likely haven't changed in the past 100 years, never mind waybackmachine, a time machine would let you read their current manifesto, wrote on freshly cut pterodactyl skin by Ugg and Thugg.

Next few months? And people thought I was crazy for investing in the company that produces ballot papers.

Problem is we're going into brexit talks, May decided that Pride was with her but that has led to a Fall, she should play Fallout 4 and visit Hubris Comics. With a weak government, any divisions between them and their DUP partners may get voted down by the opposition parties ganging up to give May a MayNot.

If Conservatives can't form up with DUP and get assent to power, Corbyn may come in which would put us into an even worse position, every policy could get voted down by Conservatives and whoever else decides to turn up to claim their travel allowance of £1,520 per mile.

On the bright side, if Corbie does get into power he'll probably block Trumps visit and put him on the watch list so he can never visit again, he can declare that hair a clear and present danger.

Expect another election in the next couple of years, wake me up when it's over.

White House sicko sent down for 20 years after sexting underage girls

Re: What's the betting...

The thing is werdsmith, when punishment is out of proportion for the crime, the criminals say "fuck it, if I'm going to get 20 years just for sending a dick pic, I may as well actually......."

Case in point, great train robbery. They didn't use any guns in the robbery but still got a stiff sentence (no pun intended), a sentence that they would have got if they had used guns, so if you're going to get a sentence that you would get if you took a gun, you may as well take a gun.

What the article doesn't make clear is if the agent was black, if he was then 20 years seems par for the course in the American "justice" system.

Chelsea Manning leaves prison, heads straight for booze and pizza

Re: @DavidW

But, and this is a big but, Assange would need to go via the UK to escape, unless Ecuador send in a stealth helicopter to whisk him away. He's basically trapped in a prison in the UK until he leaves the prison and enters the UK where he will be arrested and sent to prison (and then probably America afterwards)

Chelsea Manning now walks free. An epic victory for which many good people fought--including Chelsea herself. I can't wait to meet her.

Oddly, can't see that happening, Chelsea is unable to come to the UK (criminal record) and Assange is unable to enter the UK (he's a wanted criminal, jumping bail and all that), but if Mr Assange wants to visit the US to see Chelsea, I'm sure Trump will arrange a free air ticket (fuck it, I'll pay just to get the policing bill down).

Train station's giant screens showed web smut at peak hour

Re: Does it have to be a train station?

Ohh, you know Dave too? Dude told me about how the Japanese get around it with software that removes the pixels. Can't see why they would do that though when they can just go to the local train station and get the good stuff.

Unless the good stuff was posted up by one of them trolls who will now send DCMA notices to the train companies and demand $100,000,000 per viewer of their illegally obtained porn.

Dave says hi.

Re: Does it have to be a train station?

No, it came with pixels on the privates, if you're going to display porn in public at least display the uncensored stuff! I mean, I've heard Japanese porn is censored and has pixels on the privates, umm, so I was told by err, the next person who posted in this specific thread.

Why Microsoft's Windows game plan makes us WannaCry

Re: @David Webb

@Red Bren - except the nurses/doctors/porters/technicians/etc. won't really get a say in which OS the managers pick.

Yes, in an ideal world we'll have a standard UI with a standard library, where it's totally agnostic and doesn't give a damn what OS you're running on. But we don't live in an ideal world. Have you been to the job centre recently, or whatever it's called now? Their software is bespoke.... for hotels, it was re-purposed for their use and the UI is pre Windows 95.

I think we live in a world of "make the best of" rather than "make the best", especially when it comes to the public purse, I guess we can always get BAE to design some software for hospitals, would totally help with their eventual budget (and make undertakers retire filthy rich)

Ease of use is for the lowest common denominator, the User, sure, us as IT people could easily hop from OS to OS, but a 50 year old nurse who is "bloody brilliant" at being a nurse but "the internet, you mean that blue e?" when it comes to tech, you really want her to have to faffle with many systems just to get the results of the tests?

You can train the nurse to use Windows XP (which she has used for 10 years now), then you suddenly expect her to jump to Linux, OSX and Windows 10? That would cause issues at a hospital, where every job a nurse does is mission critical (btw, I love nurses, they have saved my life a fair few times now).

Though, should we really be blaming MS? I know it's fun to (not as fun as blaming Apple though), but isn't it down to the contractors who built the apps that require Windows XP to run and won't run on 7+ and the NHS that won't pay to update the apps because "it works on XP". We can't blame MS because the NSA didn't disclose the vuln, IT tech's didn't update the OS or patch, scumbags released the vun, then more scumbags used the vuln, that's like blaming Volvo because the car whose driver never bothered fixing the brakes hit me.

Would you really want a hospital where the many different machines ran many different OS's? You can google the tradeoff triangle, security, functionality, ease of use, in a hospital you want maximum security, maximum functionality and maximum ease of use, but you can't because each trades off against another.

Ease of use naturally has to be one of the highest priority, the people who use the machines will have basic training, if the complexity is too high or there any many disparate systems, ease of use drops which reduces safety for the patient.

PC repair chap lets tech support scammer log on to his PC. His Linux PC

VOIP

I guess around a year ago I killed my copper line and went pure VOIP (FTTP so no copper), since then we've not had a single "support" call, so quite obviously the trick they use to spoof their number gets flagged up by Vonage and we never get the evil calls. So the question is, why can't BT do that?

By the way, you win against the scammers if they call you a mother [bleep] before they hang up.

Attention, Asus RT wireless router owners: Patch your gear now to squash web hijack bugs

Re: Get patching

I've used the N66 for a few years now, looks good. As for firmware, it's Asuswrt-Merlin.

DSL inventor's latest science project: terabit speeds over copper

Re: Don't tell BT...

They tend not to do FTTP anyhow, mostly FTTC. FTTP is a major pain in the arse anyhow, the BT guy comes out and sticks the modem on the wall, then sticks on a battery backup for Fibre Phone which doesn't exist, but they stick the battery on anyhow and then nag at you when the battery backup breaks and they have to come out and replace it. "But you don't need it, so why replace it?" "you stick it in, you replace it if it breaks".

Then there is the ISP's that support FTTP, is it 4 or 5? And then they only give you FTTC speeds anyhow, the only bonus being you actually get the full fat 80Mb.

Apple fanbois are officially sheeple. Yes, you heard. Deal with it

Re: More Apple ClickBait

Yeah, El Reg been doing this for years, having a crack at pretty much any IT company you can think of from HP to Intel to Microsoft to BAE. Guess which companies still advertise on El Reg though? Yes, the ones that get slammed by articles on this site, except Apple which bans them from any Apple gathering, press release or anything to do with the company. Vultures might eat dead sheeple.

New satellites could cause catastrophic space junk collisions

The thing is, it doesn't need lots of sat's smashing into each other to cause a problem. One sat getting wrecked by a missile (see China) puts up lots of small debris into orbit, that lil bit of space junk hits another sat at high speed and causes that to go KABOOM and puts even more debris into orbit, which in turn hits another sat..........

Eventually we will have the problem of small bits of junk flying around the Earth at very fast speeds, lots and lots of small bits of junk, so when we try to send up some new sat into orbit it will get hit by the debris and we will forever be trapped on this tiny planet because any launch into space becomes impossible because the amount of debris floating around means anything launched will get destroyed.

Android beats Windows as most popular OS for interwebz – by 0.02%

I'm pretty sure I'm using a PC to type this and not my android tablet or phone (or my windows tablet or phone). I'm also pretty sure I use my PC to play games, or pretend I know what I'm doing with photoshop. Out of interest, how many android developers develop their apps exclusively on their android tablet/phones? None? But you just said it's the world's first-choice platform..........

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

Being rickrolled totally sucks, it sucks so bad I had to replay the video a few times because you know the rules and so do I, so I just want to tell you how I'm feeling, got to make you understand.

New plastic banknote plans now upsetting environmental campaigners

Re: "300 football fields of rainforest per hour is cleared"

Not only would you need a telescope, you would need to figure out a new way to win the bloody game. It would take 45 minutes just to get from half way line to the goal line (using GPS so you don't get lost along the way), so by the time you got there the whistle would blow for half time and you'd be back where you started.

This would really, really suck for England as every match would end in penalties. Germany WC winners forever.

After London attack, UK gov lays into Facebook, Google for not killing extremist terror pages

Re: Distraction tactics - attack is the best form of defence

Yes it did. go and expand your history. Try to look further back than your own adolescence.

I looked back only 15 years ago and found out that in the UK people were being blown up due to religion, this was (in part) funded by Irish-Americans, but after the Americans got hit with a major terrorist attack on their own soil it became apparent that funding terrorists isn't actually a good thing.

Before 9/11 your typical IRA supporting Irish-American would happily state (s)he paid money to the IRA, after 9/11 that same person would deny ever paying for or supporting terrorism in any way, shape or form.

Kodi-pocalypse Now? Actually, it's not quite here yet

Re: "too old to use the site"

Re : Zero is hard mode, though I'm sure there is a cross over out there. The anime that got me into anime are the 90's stuff though, Akira, GITS, legend of the over fiend (okay, I didn't know what hentai was at the time....). Back then C4 was actually airing anime, they did the 4 dragon brother kings one, the one where the prisoners had exploding neck things on so they had to go solve crimes, 3x3 eyes.

Worst things with youngsters is that they cannot appreciate the original sailor moon series.

Re: Get it right

As it is my crunchyroll sub doesn't give me access to everything they have because - geographical licensing restrictions.

And with Crunchyroll they don't region lock their posts stating which new content is available, so you start to read and go "ohh, that looks good" then they list regions "US & Canada"... carry on scrolling down "omg, they got that, I so want to watch that!" "US & Canada". Doesn't help even if you go via .co.uk they still show you bloody shows you can't watch.

Still, $19.99/3mth is a good enough bargain just for Konosuba.

/edit - then you get some toe rag idiot who uses their parents credit card to pay for their sub to tell you you're too old to use the site in the first place. It's good to vent.

Uber loses court fight over London drivers' English language tests

Re: Fluent in English?

Pity the EU can't do something useful like standardizing the actual level of a driving test across the union

As a motorbikerist, I can tell you that the EU has a standard test for motorbikerists, in fact it is so standard it is stupid. Mod 1 of the test you take off road and have to travel at a minimum speed of 31mph, not 30mph, 31. This brings it in line with the rest of the EU who use KPH so the minimum speed is actually 50kph which we can't do so we do 31mph.

All of Blighty's attack submarines are out of action – report

Buying ships off the open market would seriously piss off the SNP, we build boats we don't really need (and can't afford) in Scotland to keep the skills there and keep money going there, the SNP would be the first to slam Westminster if they shopped in Germany. #indyref2

Samsung battery factory bursts into flame in touching Note 7 tribute

Re: Confused

You can explain Tony in one word made from the letters of his surname, Liar. Though I did laugh at Number6's comment, I may be obtaining a sense of humour.

Confused

Is this an actual case of Irony which can be explained to Americans?

President Trump tweets from insecure Android, security boffins roll eyes

Re: His Russians friends promised not to hack it....

The Chinese have a curse "may you live in interesting times".

Thanks China..........

(insert obligatory "thanks Obama meme here with Obama swapped for Xi Jinping")

Could YOU survive a zombie apocalypse? Uni eggheads say you'd last just 100 days

Re: What an incredibly simplistic mathematical model.

But it seems to me that zombies can only walk and there are a large number of inhabited islands on the planet.

But there is also a large amount of people currently in the air and the ocean, planes and boats. One person on a large ship with lots of people could infect quite a lot before people realise "zombies!" and take action, your first thought when you see someone staggering down the road in a strange way is "pub o'clock time, sweet" not "KILL THE BUGGER!" - unless you're in the less friendly areas of Newquay.

Best bet for survival is an island fortress where you can plant veg, fish freely and bring in livestock but once the human population reaches a small amount (is it 40 odd k?) the chance of survival into the future is zero because of eventual interbreeding due to a lack of people to impregnate.

Routes taken by UK prosecutors over supply of modified TV set-top boxes

Re: Thanks for the heads up

Finally found the previous reg article on the subject

Discussing legality of the box

Apple's CEO Tim Cook declines invitation to discuss EU tax ruling with Irish parliament

The Register has attempted to contact Apple, but received no response.

In other news, the pope is Catholic and bears do indeed defecate in the woods.

Sneaky chat app Signal deploys decoy domains to deny despots

As a dictator

I've played enough Tropico to be an awesome dictator (and if anyone disagrees, come visit me at my special pub down town with no customers). So as an awesome dictator, why wouldn't I just block HTTPS requests being sent out by default? We're not exactly talking about regimes that would be happy that their peoples are encrypting traffic so the best solution is to block HTTPS and blame it on western capitalists. El Presidente agrees with this post.

Will Wikipedia honour Jimbo's promise to STOP chugging?

Re: Endless begging emails

Depends on the charity you donate to. I donate to the British Heart Foundation because I *know* they do awesome work, sure, a large amount of money is spent on non-charitable-stuff, but that's things like keeping their shops open or research, but if the money I pay the BHF helps even a little towards the stem cell research for heart repair I'll be happy.

Donating money to help save lives = good

Donating money to help a website steal content and use US laws as "fair use" for everything = bad.

Donating money down the pub on a Friday to keep the landlord open = best.

Murdoch's 21st Century Fox agrees £18.5bn Sky takeover deal

Re: And no doubt..

Nonono, what we can see is a 30% increase in prices for Sky to pay for the cost of buying out Sky, THEN you will get Murduck whispering in the PM's ear (post brexit, sans EU safeguards) that the BBC needs to change because of their $20b operation (and you wonder why the Sun was so pro-Brexit) until eventually the licence fee is removed and we're forced to have a dish and pay Sky £450 a month to get the current FTA channels, failing to get said dish and paying £450/month will get you a) flogged and b) sent down for 6 years.

Who killed Pebble? Easy: The vulture capitalists

Re: Perhaps a "wiser" replacement might be started by...

The thing with crowd funding is that it's becoming good for suckers. You crowd fund to bring a project to the market, if it works and you get the money then you've put out a marker "hey, market here, buy me", see Occulus Rift. Or you have the never ending funding where the product just keeps on growing and growing with no end in sight, see Star Citizen.

So, if someone goes out and crowd funds a new pebble watch, gets the money for it, then gets investment they eventually end up getting sold, bringing out a product that isn't what they said they would bring out or not bringing out a product at all.

Or worst case scenario, you bring out a product that is the dogs bollocks, another company with deeper pockets brings out a similar product and sues you to high heaven for patent infringement.

LAKE OF frozen WATER THE SIZE OF NEW MEXICO FOUND ON MARS – NASA

Nasa disagrees. So not fake news at all.

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

I think the reason that Trump won is because the general population are getting angry at the career politicians and their ways.

Bush Snr. Iraq War Battlefield 1

Bill Clinton. Shagging the intern, impeachment, horrible wife

Bush Jnr. Iraq War Battlefield 2, 9/11, torture, renditions etc.

Obama. will probably be remembered as rather ineffectual, always at loggerheads with congress or whatever with their threats of shutting down the .gov by not putting through budgets or whatever it was, plus more wars.

Trump offered something different, sure he offered hate filled bullshit but that's different to the usual stuff "the powers that be" offer, which is more of the same of the last person in power. Expect more of the same to happen in Europe with the right getting plenty of votes from normal people who are scared out of their minds about what is happening in the world, with the liberal/left only offering more of the same as we already have.

Kotkin: Why Trump won

Re: Missed it......again.

Yeah, the Left is really starting to piss off the moderates (not right nor left) with their "we know what is best" attitude. If Trump had not won, would there be protest marches, would California be wanting to leave the US? I don't think so, if Trump had lost the right would have said "fix!" and got on with their lives for the next 4 years. When the Left doesn't get things their way they try to work out ways in which their own views is the correct one and everyone who didn't agree with them was wrong.

Brexit? Left's stance is "well, X amount of people didn't/couldn't vote so NO BREXIT!" Now it's "I didn't vote for Trump so he's NOT MY PRESIDENT!", not really sure they quite understand how an election works.

Trump won, lets just get through the next 4 years and see how bad a job he does, then the next president can come in on a "Make America Better Again, With Patches, America 3.0!!"

No matter who becomes US president, America's tech giants are going to be quids in

Because the companies use every trick possible to lower their tax bill.

CoffeeShopTaxEvader for instance, they make millions in the UK every year, but they have several companies, one is the one that sells the coffee to the consumer, another sells the coffee to the shop that sells the coffee to the consumer, both owned by CoffeeShopTaxEvader but one is in a very low tax rate area. CoffeeShopTaxEvader Shop will purchase Coffee from CoffeeShopTaxEvader Coffee, the price for that is £1, they then use that Coffee in CoffeeShopTaxEvader Shop, they sell it for £1, there is no profit on that Coffee.

CoffeeShopTaxEvader make their money by selling the coffee beans to the stores, the stores can post a loss to HMRC, corporation tax on sales of £200 trillion a day is something like £2.50 a year.

BT will HATE us for this one weird 5G trick

Money

What the government could do instead is put a sort of tax on cycles, lets call it a road tax, we'll go with £10 a year, this will give the cyclist full access to all the roads in the UK (except motorways), they could then spend the money they get from this (which will be around £120 a year) on beer.

There are some really crap budget phones out there. Vodafone's Smart Ultra 7 isn't

I went direct from China, for under £150 I got.......

3Gb RAM

64GB Storage (+ TF up to 128Gb)

Helio X20 10 core CPU @ 2.1GHz

5.5 inch IPS FHD screen

Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, it's quite nice. Also gets 4G on Voda which is something you need to watch out for. Value wise? Crushes anything sub £400.

CEO of shady ad site Backpage and owners arrested on human trafficking suspicions

Re: Is that so?

No, underage sex is not rape (except where the child is under 13, the age of consent being 16 - or 18 depending on certain factors), rape is penetration where consent is not (or cannot be) given. If a girl is too drunk to give consent, that is rape, no matter how gentle and nice to the girl you are.

Basically the people involved have coerced the children into prostitution, they may get them drunk or drug them or threaten them or whatever but the kids have no way to say no, no way to object, they are not giving informed consent or their ability to give informed consent has been removed, that is why it is rape.

Re: Is that so?

Generally speaking, it's quite simple. The "pimps" have put the adverts up and then sells sex with the child to perverts, the child having no say in the matter (usually with "if you don't have sex with this guy, we will hurt you so badly you'll end up unable to walk"). It's not just limited to children either, illegal immigrants can be imported by criminals who then steal their passports and force them to work in the sex trade, they are forced into having sex as they have no other choice.

Rape really means lack of consent, if the person is unable to give consent or is forced to give consent then it is rape. All rapists should be castrated, with a blunt pineapple.

To the post above, there is no statutory rape in the UK, if you have sex with someone under the age of 16 you are charged with a sexual crime but not rape.

Jeremy Clarkson and Co. rise to top for Great British Bake Off replacements

Re: £75m tent for sale, includes cookers, vacant possession

A quick checks of the facts reveal that C4 actually paid £25 million, which is £10 million more than the £15m offered by the BBC.

Over how long? There you go, the answer to your question on why it's £75 million, all you had to do was a little fact checking.

Ransomware scum infect Comic Relief server: Internal systems taken down

So I'm going to guess you don't like comic relief?

US Congress blew the whistle on tax-dodging Apple, claims Europe

Re: If the USA...

This has nothing to do with the US though (unless Apple get a $13b reduction on the tax they pay in the US..... yes, I laughed too), it's about Apple not paying tax anywhere outside the US as it goes through Ireland who didn't collect the $13b and will have to explain to their electorate why they think not getting $13b is good for the tax payer.