Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

Re: United? Kingdom

>Why doesn't Wales have its own app

You need a widescreen phone to read the name?

Re: Never mind

>do you go out and protest that you have to wear pants as well?

Most certainly do. My ancestors were oppressed by the hated English for daring to wear skirts and no knickers.

Even today if I go out having forgotten to put on the kilt I get funny looks.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

Re: RISC-V Pi

Which RISCV soc can I buy with embedded GPU and Linux drivers in production quantities today?

Tesla to build cars made of batteries and hit $25k price tag about three years down the road

Re: Structural Batteries?!

So how is this different ?

BMW i3 'chassis'

Re: Two interesting statements

This is going to involve a lot of interesting legal cases

Suppose Tesla make essentially the same hardware and configure features and performance in software - and you pay for what you want (like the old Windows NT ws vs server).

If you pay for a 3rd party software patch that enables extra features, is that different from me fitting a 3rd party turbo to my Subaru instead of paying for a WRX? Or is it like buying a pirate satellite TV card?

Do upgrade features transfer with the vehicle? If not do you get to transfer the feature to your new car?

Can you sell the feature to another Tesla owner?

>Tesla's main problem is that the person who runs it is completely barking mad.

I thought this was their only advantage.

BMW's problem is that they had to produce a luxury electric car that no prospective BMW buyer would want to buy - because otherwise their dealer network would revolt.

Re: Disposable tech

Already done BMW i3 teardown

Re: Applefying the car

> but Elon Musk is sometimes still a Pretoria boy at heart...

Wouldn't the Tesla then have flame throwers ?

Re: Applefying the car

The BMW has standard BMW interior controls, the Tesla has a touch screen

So going down the motorway you need to do menu->my profile->settings->environment->windscreen->select wiper->ON if it rains. Turning on the screen demist is like trying to configure a domain controller.

Main problem was that Tesla were trying to ramp up production and weren't super concerned about spare parts, especially body panels. The local Tesla not-a-dealer-honest has a car park full of Teslas with minor bumps, which in the days of crumple zones means half the body work, waiting for parts

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Re: "This means Linus Torvalds has definitely won, doesn't it?"

My android phone autocomplete is obviously possessed

Re: At least

Almost all Office users are using the online version - which now works pretty well from Linux.

With Edge all of sharepoint should work

Re: A web browser based on Chrome by MS

>I believe MS has scrapped IE and their previous in house Edge on Windows for an Edge Branded Chromium.

But when this internet craze ends Microsoft will be the real winner

Re: "This means Linus Torvalds has definitely won, doesn't it?"

Increasingly irreverent desktop software company ports wrapper around dominant Linux browser to Linux.

News at 11

GNOME alone: FOSS desktop folk to start counting in whole numbers again

Re: I just came here to say...

Wasn't Tex's version number supposed to be adding an extra digit of pi?

On the basis that the number of digits in Pi is infinite but the number of bugs in Tex is finite

Re: Point releases are obsolete.

This is a framework, imagine you were programming against some major API and it quietly changed from week to week with no way of knowing what changed or which version you were on

Oh hello Windows10 - didn't see you over there

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Re: Here we go again

Could that be used as a new time standard?

The hourly changing of the Brexit plan announced by a bong from a large tower near Westminster?

Re: Everyone Has Screwed Up

>The real answer is a pivot back to terrestrial technologies like eLoran and radio clock transmitters.

Trouble is that certain middle eastern countries get mighty suspicious when chaps with RAF moustaches start installing LORAN transmitters around their strategic targets.

Re: A Satellite System Just For 70 Million People Would Be Overkill...

Tricky since the British system won't actually be in orbit - they will be placed on top of large towers to be constructed at various northern seaside resorts.

It was all Boris's idea - he saw the tower the French had built for Galileo ....

Re: ...

Does it also have a vision that will leverage synergies ?

Re: Hoots Mon

The UK can already freeload on the Galileo signal, it can also use ground based correction to get better accuracy than the encrypted signal that it's arguing about.

What it couldn't do is use the the encrypted signal for distant military adventures outside the UK.

Re: A dumb question but... where does NATO fit into this?

Galileo is either a backup plan in case the USA was ever crazy enough to elect a president who would start a trade war with its closest neighbours and allies - and could threaten to cut off GPS access to the continent.

Or it's a dastardly French plot to form a great European army to take over the world - and so needs to block the military grade signal from any tea-drinking "allies" it doesn't exactly trust.

Or its a dastardly French plot to give backhanders to its space industry.

Re: You are joking?

>This is the aim, closer social union, not closer political union.

So why do you need an encrypted global positioning system independent of NATO - unless you want your own defense force.

MP promises to grill UK.gov over revelations that Uber handed '2,000 pieces' of user data to London cops a year

Re: Medway towns now part of London?

London Stanstead airport ?

Re: "Police units supporting Uber's appeal"

>How much of it was actually useful in court ?

It is necessary to protect against viking invasions - the details of which we can't tell you about for national security.

1st millennium - no warrantless wiretaps = lots of viking invasions

2nd millennium - increasing number of privacy violations = significant decrease in viking attacks

3rd millennium - total police surveillance = no viking attacks !

>A deal like this makes both sides look corrupt

It's really unbelievable - who let Uber join the masons anyway ?

>The sooner Uber goes under the better.

What we need is an app to allow ordinary black cab drivers to report people they suspect to be undesirables

>A bunch of corrupt cowboys desperate to meet their productivity targets at any cost

And uber is enabling them

Won't somebody think of the Oracle execs? No pay rises, bonuses, equity awards for top brass until 2022 at earliest

Re: Wow...

On a pure ROI basis, political bribes are very affordable

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

Re: hydrogen engines?

>Wouldn't we have seen them in cars if this was viable?

Cos Saudi Arabia and Venezuela still exist - once they're empty you need a plan 'B'

For cars it's probably a battery because you don't care about weight so much and make lots of short journeys and can top up at home

Re: “four times more voluminous"

>And, I'm NOT convinced that cost per Joule is lower for Hydrogen, either...

On a long enough timescale the cost of hydrogen goes down, cost of petroleum goes up.

Re: Looks good to me

A fuel that disperses into a very light gas and floats away vs a liquid fuel that pools over the crash and soaks into materials before burning steadily - I know which one I'd bank on.

Ports in a storm: The Matebook 14 won't set your world on fire, but it's still a half-decent laptop

Re: The 3:2 screen is the single best feature

>The 17" screen is 16:10 (25600x1600) and an absolute pleasure to work with

25600x1600 isn't so much a screen as a ticker-tape

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

And a Star cat-flap

As we stand on the precipice of science fiction into science fact, people say: Hell yeah, I want to augment my eyesight!

Re: A Long Time Ago It Seemed So

But the Scimitar comes with 4 stacks of bricks for free

Re: "testing the limits of what's possible"

You misunderstood - the mouse controls you through thought

It's all part of an experiment to find the question

Re: Like...

" Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a virus that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."

Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

Re: Pull my finger!

>4cm monoblades under the fingernails

Also a bit limiting. With 10 fingers I want the full Swiss army knife, including a multi-bit screwdriver with torx bits

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply

Re: Several Problems Caused This

>Trying for the "scarcity sells" tactic

You can accuse Nvidia of a lot of things but I don't think artificially restricting the number of GPUs to create a buzz is one of them.

One good reason for not buying just now is that somebody is going to be leaning on the QC dept at TSMC and anything that comes out of the fab the right way up is going to get packaged and sold.

>The problem is getting them to define what the wrongdoing actually is

Oh Oh please sir,I know this one sir

It will ban blind screen readers and password managers that paste stored password - while doing nothing about high frequency traders front running pension fund stock buys

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Static

TSMC just announced prices for its new 5nm wafers

One of the figures was 680MTr/$ = I learned that transistors/dollar is a unit and they are now literally too cheap to measure !

GCHQ agency 'strongly urges' Brit universities, colleges to protect themselves after spike in ransomware infections

Re: Password security?

>write them somewhere, something that should be radically forbidden.

Not convinced about that. Having a secure online banking paswd written in the back of your diary in your handbag is probably a better defence against N Korea hackers than memorising "Passw0rd$"

Ps don't write "my XYZ bank password is" in front of it!

Re: Password security?

And the reason for changing your password regularly is ?????

It used to be that brute forcing your password took months so the assumption was if you changed it every 3 months is was secure. Nobody is currently taking 3 months to brute force a hashed /etc/passwd

So forcing you to change it every month just means lots of "my_dogs_name_N+1" passwords.

GCHQ says protect yourself

But don't use encryption; because only terrorists, people-traffickers and (looksup list of today's official daily hate) Eu Brexit negotiators use encryption

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Re: Not the fault of Amazon

>rather than how tax law works in the UK.

Tax law in the UK says that payments to overseas subsiduaries purely for tax avoidance ARE illegal.

So Starbucks paying £50/lb for coffee beans from Starbucks in Switzerland

Microsoft UK paying £100/copy for Windows to Microsoft Grand-Cayman for the rights to use the Microsoft logo - have all been found illegal.

Amazon claiming all it's sales happen in Luxemburg or Apple claiming that a phone bought in Oxford St was really bought in Eire should also be investigated

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: I wanna cut

> a US president would model himself on a street tradrr from Peckham?

I think he's modelling himself on Marlon Brando in the Godfather - unfortunately he has achieved Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now

Re: My head hurts

President wants to look tough on Jina

Advisers point out that turning off the favorite cat video habit of 100M addicts just before the election might not make him look like Santa Claus

China was going to block the sale anyway, Oracle could't afford it and would fsck it up

So Larry donates a few $M to the Don, gets a few $100M contract to run some servers for TikTok and suddenly security is not a problem

It's just like the deals for restaurant services in New York by certain Italian-American family businesses

One down, two to go: Astra's first attempt to reach orbit scuppered by iffy guidance

Surely the oldest ones should have retired to their sheds ?

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Re: Hmm

Would love to but I'm currently training for one of the highly rewarding careers in the turnip picking industry - now that the Eu no longer forces all these cushy jobs to go to foreigners.

Re: How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit?

Although it's a much harder job when the "criminals, drug dealers, rapists" you are rounding up to put in cages are all blue-eyed blonde English speaking europeans.

Might need some software updates