* Posts by mark 177

113 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2010

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UK good for superfast broadband, crap for FTTP – Ofcom

mark 177

Don't worry, the UK is ahead of Australia still.

Soon, Nigeria will be ahead of Australia as well.

Missed patch caused Equifax data breach

mark 177

Re: Patching

Sounds nice, but do you really want your bank's systems going down every other day?

Following flat financials, Telstra pins hopes on NBN renegotiation

mark 177

Re: A wireless future?

5G is not even standardised yet. It may be as much as a decade away.

Gordon Ramsay's father-in-law gets six months for hacking sweary super-chef's computer

mark 177
Unhappy

Jail - Why?

OK, he was a naughty boy. But six months inside? It's a waste of taxpayers' money.

Should have given him x hundred hours of community service, cleaning out hospital toilets or something like that.

Sons of IoT: Bikers hack Jeeps in auto theft spree

mark 177

Re: Are Jeeps that expensive?

We,, the article says that the Jeeps in question are Wranglers - I think this is one of the less expensive models. According to the Web, the highest list price (no discounts) for a Wrangler model is $ 37k. The lowest is $24 K (again, without any discount).

If you can take a $ 37k vehicle apart and sell its stolen, used parts on the black market for a profit of $ 30k, then either you are a Trump-like sales genius, or the buyers are 100% mugs.

mark 177

Re: Nothing to hide

I think the addition of a second, highly-visible VIN in a hard-to-get-to place behind the windscreen (in addition to the one on the car ID plate) was to make it harder for thieves to swap the VIN for a fake one.

mark 177
WTF?

Are Jeeps that expensive?

"This scheme is believed to have netted members of the Hooligans gang around $4.5m in profits from more than 150 vehicles."

That's $30,000 per vehicle! For dodgy second-hand parts sold under the counter?

Pull the other one.

IBM asks contractors to take a pay cut

mark 177
WTF?

Re: Make hay when the sun shines.

This isn't "working for a living". If you want to do that, get a job as a permie.

This is contracting, i.e. running a business. You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.

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

mark 177

It's the USA - they have to send people down for a long time - helps keep the unemployment rate down - more people inside *plus* more people to guard them. Win win!

Plutus Payroll pledges to pay IT contractors' wages within 72 hours

mark 177

Re: Could it be...

Exactly that happened in Europe a few years ago. A friend of mine lost £ 40,000 when the firm went belly up.

Australia scraps temporary visas for skilled workers

mark 177

Lots of skills are in short supply in Australia - I have worked for companies in Oz where the Brits and South Africans outnumbered the home-grown IT people.

Radioactive leak riddle: Now Team America sniffs Europe's skies for iodine isotope source

mark 177

Re: Not the best choice

With such a long half-life, you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to do much damage!

HPE blames solid state drive failure for outages at Australian Tax Office

mark 177

Re: The drive supplier to HPE is irrelevant

Yup! That's why prime contractors were invented, and why they charge such eye-watering prices!

Texas cops lose evidence going back eight years in ransomware attack

mark 177
Thumb Up

Re: Better than even

And my money is on "else"

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

mark 177

Re: Yet ANOTHER Trump story?

So is The Economist

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

mark 177
FAIL

Re: really...

Even easier - go back to using caffeine tablets (as they reportedly did before). Did they change to powder to save money? Well, that didn't work then.

I can't recall anyone ever dying of a No-Doz overdose.

Irish townsfolk besieged by confused smut channel callers

mark 177

Where's the EU when you need it?

Why hasn't the ever-interfering EU (at least that's what my Brexiteer mother calls it) harmonised premium rate numbers, in the same way they harmonised mobile to 07 numbers and emergency calls to 112?

Where are the interfering, busybody Eurocrats when you need them?

How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

mark 177

Re: WIDtf

I worked in WAP around 1998-2001 and I have never heard of a WID, despite attending several conferences dedicated to WAP.

We used to call them WAP phones.

Nice NBN rival you built there. What a shame if someone taxed it

mark 177

Re: Or another idea

Er, hang on, isn't NBN already a nationalised company? Or have I got it wrong?

Integrator fired chap for hiding drugs conviction, told to pay compo for violating his rights

mark 177

Re: When you've done the penalty, that should be it.

If the company doesn't ask the question, there's no onus on him to reveal the conviction. Most companies *do* ask.

San Francisco's sinking luxury Millennium Tower: Tilt spotted FROM SPACE

mark 177

Re: Not the developer's fault.

So that's a different tower to the *bell* tower in *Pisa* then?

Telecoms Ombudsman praises nbn™ for growing connections faster than complaints

mark 177

Champagne

I prefer my champagne to flow rather than fly. I've always found the latter such a waste, a la F1.

mark 177

Re: Be warned

I got NBN and kept my existing phone number. iinet in Perth.

New Zealand carrier says Cu later, copper: we're giving customers a glassing instead

mark 177

Re: Ahead of Australia on fibre tech

I'm already paying about $10 more for 25 mb/s NBN than I was paying for (approx. 16 mb/s) ADSL. And that's with only a fraction of my previous quota, and no PSTN-type phone, so I have no phone service in a blackout.

So I was far from tempted to go 100 mb/s, especially as it is unlikely to provide much benefit to many websites due to congestion elsewhere in the Internet. This goes double for overseas sites, i.e. those I visit the most.

Microsoft puts Windows Updates on a diet with 'differential downloads'

mark 177

Everybody but Microsoft *did* solve it in the dial-up days. In fact, I think this is exactly how the word "patch" was derived - only the bit that needed fixing got changed.

Facebook chokes off car insurance slurp because – get this – it has privacy concerns

mark 177
Big Brother

Re: Executive meeting: mention social

There is already something similar on the market - my nephew has it. It monitors his driving vs. speed limits, and the mileage covered.

Smartmobe made 'intermittent bright flashes and a hissing noise' in Biz class seat

mark 177
Holmes

Some sense at last

At least in these incidents, cabin crew did the sensible thing, involving a bucket of water.

Not like the bunch of losers at Southwest with the Note 7 who evacuated the whole aircraft over one smouldering phone....

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13175000/samsung-galaxy-note-7-fire-replacement-plane-battery-southwest

MPs want Blighty to enforce domestic roaming to fix 'not spots'

mark 177
Mushroom

Up yours, Mobile UK

" the operators' lobby Mobile UK said if roaming were enforced, there'd be no incentive for operators to build infrastructure."

Unless the operators were told to charge each other extortionate fees for roaming on each others' networks, while still providing such a service free to customers.

I think we'd then see a sudden surge in infrastructure creation.

South Australia blacked out by bad bespoke software, not wind farms

mark 177

Voltage not Frequency

The article said the shut downs were due to voltage fluctuations, not frequency fluctuations. So how is your point relevant?

Source: nbn™'s fibre-to-the-kerb will be VDSL at 100/40Mbps

mark 177

Only Optus customers compensated?

Why do only Optus customers get compensated for moving to the NBN? I didn't, and I'd paid $300 for a PSTN connection only months before.

Doh! Don't understand.......

Latest F-35 bang seat* mods will stop them breaking pilots' necks, beams US

mark 177

"What I had hoped to find out in the article was: How did they find out this was a problem?"

The did tests with dummies, according to The Economist. The Economist also reckons the main problem is the helmet, rather than the seat itself.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21706448-worlds-most-expensive-fighter-jet-helmet-really-good-top-gunu2019s

(might need a subscription)

Is Tesla telling us the truth over autopilot spat?

mark 177

Re: i think most people

You have to hold the wheel once an hour? It depends on conditions, but it's actually more like a minute or two. And I own one, so I'm not making this up.

Australian universities drop tech services to dodge metadata retention obligation

mark 177
Headmaster

Writing course for El Reg?

Never seen an article on this site with so many typos...

"we are going to change who we are providing the services too"

"did our best to broaden our broaden definition of immediate circle"

....plus the odd grammatical error. The word "university" does not have a capital letter.

You're getting almost as bad as the Grauniad or BBC, El Reg!

Tesla driver dies after Model S hits tree

mark 177

Re: @AndyS

and the fire services would have to react far more often - petrol cars have a far higher chance of catching fire than electric ones.

Physicists believe they may have found fifth force of nature

mark 177

Why did it take so long to detect?

The article says the X boson is 30 x the mass of the electron, and that it decays into an electron-positron pair.

This implies that it loses 28 x electron masses when it decays. That's a lot of energy emitted - surely it should have been easily detectable previously?

I suppose I have succumbed to some fundamental misunderstanding here. Can someone help me out?

Native Skype for Windows Phone walked behind shed, shot heard

mark 177

Re: hmm...

I agree with you, except for "still may be...a major player".

They missed the boat long ago.

Networking wonks say lousy planning, not DDOS, caused #Censusfail

mark 177
WTF?

DDoS?

Apparently the site's capacity was 1,000,000 forms per hour. Isn't that a little low for a country of 15 million households who were explicitly instructed all to fill in their online forms on a single day (meaning evening for most people)?

IP mapping hell couple sues

mark 177
Facepalm

Re: $75K, that's it??

Maybe MaxMind's customers could sue too - for having their time wasted going to a "default location" that did not actually correspond to the IP address they were querying.

As a poster above wrote, why didn't they just say no data was available for that IP address?

IT analyst: Oz census data processed as plain text

mark 177
Headmaster

Grammar

El Reg, "census" is not a proper noun. It therefore does not have a capital letter.

We're not looking for MH370 in the wrong place say investigators

mark 177

Comms?

You think that with no power and many, many miles from land, they could communicate with someone? Unlikely, I think. Way beyond the range of air traffic control, and unlikely to be many planes in that region.

Lily Cole: Profit still looks almost Impossible.com

mark 177

"Why the shit did the majority of traffic to impossible.com come from India?"

Those Indians are canny. They see a site where they can pass off some village-made dross as "ethical goods" and charge 1000x what it would fetch in India.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

mark 177

Re: @Ilsa Loving - Amazing

It did. But I immediately dismissed that though as complete stupidity.

mark 177

Historically, yes. But those monopoly days are over for MS. Now we can tell them to take a hike.

BMW web portal vulns pose car hack risk – researchers

mark 177

Re: VIN Confused

Can't display it 'cos it's not a Tesla.

Will display it soon, as BMW+Mercedes are now shit-scared of Tesla.

mark 177
WTF?

VIN Confused

I don't understand how entering a VIN can be part of the authentication process.

After all, it is sitting there at the base of your car's windscreen, in the plain view of everybody.....

Bomb-disposal robot violently disposes of Dallas cop-killer gunman

mark 177
Stop

Re: AC @YetAnotherLocksmith ... It makes sense, but...

Sounds suspiciously like racial profiling + group punishment to me.

Those Xbox Fitness vids you 'bought'? Look up the meaning of the word 'rent'

mark 177

Re: NEVER RUNS OUT OF INK!

In UK, etc., this applies only to private sales and purchases from auctions.

mark 177

Re: Refund? @Deltics

No need to challenge Microsoft in the courts if you bought through a retailer. In countries like Australia, UK and NZ, the retailer is responsible for what they sell.

In the UK, I successfully got a refund on a PVR when the electronic program guide it used was scrapped. The box was more than 3 years old, but I argued it was now effectively useless. I was given a refund without any quibble by the retailer (Boots, of chemist fame).

Big Pharma's trying to kill us, says man with literally millions to lose

mark 177
Holmes

Tough to write it off when he is probably still in the black - just not 30000% in the black as before.

Sliced your submarine cable? Fill in this paperwork

mark 177
FAIL

Do the Maths!

Fail, El Reg.

$550,000/$9,000 /= 161

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