Posts by David 132

Hells door-bells! Ring pieces paralyzed in horror during Halloween trick-or-treat rush

@AC Bacon ice cream exists.

As do Buttered Mashed Potato and Gravy and Spiced Goat Cheese & Pumpkin Pie ice-cream flavours.

Mmmmmm!

https://saltandstraw.com/flavors/

Well done, IoT wanksters...

...you've managed to take one of the simplest devices in human history (whether it be a bell on a spring, a buzzer on a simple electrical circuit, or even just a rope tied round a goat's 'nads) and give it a central point of failure. Bravo.

What next? The "iWheel" which gives you up to the second reports on how many times it's rotated, but turns square and refuses to roll if it can't connect to Azure?

Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines

Re: From the department of stupid ideas

Streetlights on one side of the street- or alternating - only are a thing. So that would mean trailing cables across the whole street.

Solar panels on the roof of the cars. Park under the streetlights, or within the cast of their light, and get a charge. Simple. And LED bulbs are efficient, typically for a 5W bulb you get 60W worth of light.

Sheesh, so much for these so-called "experts"....

(please note: Trollface icon. With logic like this, I should be giving evidence to Parliamentary committees)

Re: Why should the car be 'slow to respond'

@Nick Ryan The issue with signage is that sometimes it's a total arse trying to work out, at speed, whether the sign applies to you or not.

Good catch. Similarly, in my area (Northern Oregon) I've noticed many instances where a side-road joins a main highway at a narrow angle - and hence the STOP sign at the end of the side-road is practically face-on to drivers on the highway. It's caused me & my (theoretically) adaptable, flexible, carefully-trained-over-years human brain confusion in the past... I wonder how a computer vision algorithm would cope?

One moment your level 4 self-driving car is doing 55... then it suddenly screeches to a halt because of a confusing side-street...?

I have speed-sign recognition hardware on my (2013) car, which theoretically "reads" roadside speed limit signs and represents them on the dashboard. Simple camera, not LIDAR or anything fancy. I'd say it correctly spots them maybe 85% of the time - good, but not good enough for an autonomous vehicle.

Re: Try a sensible design?

You’ve hit on the perfect solution: Send your car to the naughty step

In the case of Spanish VW-group cars, it's a naughty Seat.

Re: I thought my opinion of MPs could go no lower

Now I've pointed you in the right direction I'm sure you can think of more exceptions to your rule.

Dr Jacob Bronowski.

Carl Sagan.

Heinz Wolff (I nearly wrote "Heinz Kiosk", oops, WE ARE ALL GUILTY)

Aleksandr Orlov

One of those, I'd even trust with choosing my insurance.

Re: I thought my opinion of MPs could go no lower

"Put the country on Red Alert!"

"Are you sure, Prime Minister? It will mean changing the bulb...."

Re: Speed Limit Signs

Seen pasted onto a roadside sign in the near future, in infrared-visible ink:

( 30 '); DROP TABLE autopilot-rules;-- )

Re: Try a sensible design?

What, and miss out on all that lovely revenue?

Don't worry, they'll follow the fine principles of ex-North Wales Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom (he of the infamous "that guy we caught doing 31mph in a 30 zone* is no better than a teenage vandal and should shut up and admit his guilt") when designing this. Just be grateful that the speed limit signs aren't in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard", etc.

*-because the guy in question was overtaking a slow-moving tractor, as I recall.

Because it's Britain, and the joyless shitpails who run the country (of which MPs are just a sub-set.. see also councils, quangos, pressure groups and the perpetually offended) decide everything on the basis of: how miserable, coerced, and fleeced can we make the populace? What remnants of light and joy and self-determination and freedom can we stamp out next?

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

@Loud Speaker I used to work for British Rail, and we had a room for wheel-tappers, shunters and other out-door workers to "rest and recuperate"

I thought those guys had their own Social Club? I'm sure I saw it featured on TV once in the 70s.

Re: " I can't even get the spark plugs out of my wife's car."

Plot twist - his wife's car's a Tesla.

Google AMP supremo whinges at being called out on team's bulls***

Not directly relevant, but..

...for those who are puzzled - as I used to be - by the references in this article and elsewhere to "Kool-Aid" and "Jim Jones", I can *highly* recommend this PBS documentary on the Youtubes:

American Experience - The Jonestown Massacre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elrV-14_m5w

Worth watching if you want an appropriately terrifying Halloween-time reminder of how a single charismatic individual can inspire, subvert and ultimately, destroy a large group of people.

<poker face> Thank goodness nothing remotely comparable has happened since or could ever happen again.</poker face>

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

Re: The exciting future of streaming TV is going to be in personalization

I have a couple of Roku 3's, a 4, and a Stick & mainly use them all with Plex to view my content library from my NAS. All are great, although the Roku 4 refused to do 4K on my HDMI 1.4 TV until I got an HDCP converter box (fuck you very much, HDCP and Roku for going along with that crap). The Stick, I find, has awful wifi performance - constantly dropping out or buffering where my previous Roku 3 in the same location performed perfectly.

Li-ion batteries blow up because they breed nanowire crystals

What a promising technique

"Cryo-EM involves freezing the dendrites in liquid nitrogen before thinly slicing them to view under a microscope. By flash-freezing the batteries at different points of its charge and discharge cycle, scientists can see how it changes over time."

This technique has so many possible applications. Think of the things we'll now be able to study in detail by flash-freezing them and then thinly slicing them. Politicians come to mind.

Please replace the sword, says owner of now-hollow stone

Re: Stone? What stone?

Disney got it right, in 1963...

Dumb bug of the week: Outlook staples your encrypted emails to, er, plaintext copies when sending messages

Re: Hire my dad.

If your dad also goes by the name allthecoolshortnamesweretaken then I would imagine he has uncovered quite a few buffer overflows in his time.

That's just his first name. His surname is Smith '); DROP TABLE Comments;--

(and if the Reg comments system goes down after I click "submit", I will not know whether to laugh, cry, or flee the incoming vulture death-squads)

Screw the badgers! Irish High Court dismisses Apple bit barn appeals

Someone has to say it, for tradition's sake:

"Badgers? We don' need no stinkin' badgers!"

Star Wars: Big Euro cinema group can't handle demand for tickets to new flick

@werdsmith Less smelly bastards, less noisy eaters and irritating interruptions.

"Fewer". Not "less".

Now write it out a hundred times. And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off. Hail Caesar.

(this is a tongue-in-cheek joke. I wasn't your downvoter, btw).

Apple's iOS password prompts prime punters for phishing: Too easy now for apps to swipe secrets, dev warns

Gosh.

"Apple, as expected, did not respond to a request for comment."

Awww. Such touching optimism there. So adorably naïve. But hope springs eternal, eh?

How many times can Microsoft kill Mobile?

Re: Hooray

bel***m... totally and utterly bel***m

I'll thank you not to use language like that, this is a family website and there might be children, maiden aunts or horses reading this.

BT fined £25,000 over second unsafe London roadworks this year

@Martin Summers Fantastic job folks, the fines really seem to be doing the trick!

From the article:

Over the last seven years, TfL said it has handed BT 991 fixed penalty notices (fines), netting it £67,270

If the average fine was just over £68, then I'm not surprised it's not having much effect.

Are there a few digits misplaced in the above figures?

The axeman strikes again: Microsoft has real commitment issues

Re: Is it just me?

Ah here, it'd work really well until some old duffer in a scarf or his cricket whites or just a hat bumbled in and reversed the polarity of the neutron flow...

Besides... I seem to recall that in Davros' evil lair(s), there were endless identical corridors and never any Windows...

Mine's the coat with the sprig of celery in the pocket.

Out, damned Spot! Amazon emits Echo ball with screen, inevitable ever-listening mic

Re: Always on microphone?

Has anyone tried acting out a "play" of terrorists organising an attack to see if there's any kind of response?

I suspect that TPTB would handle that in a very similar way to you performing the same "play" in the checkin line at Gatwick airport... they tend not to have any sense of humour or whimsy about such things.

Still, at least we have a free society where we can say what we want, believe what we want, associate with whomever we want, eat what we want and dress how we want - right? Remember, kids, that's why the terrorists hate us.

Re: One for the laydees?

throws of passion

ITYM "throes". Unless your idea of sexytimes is some xxxtreme wrestling with Giant Haystacks or Big Daddy - in which case, not only "throws of passion" but "headlocks of titillation" and "bodyslams of naughty bits", indeed.

Is this cough cancer, doc? No: it's a case of Playmobil on the lung

Re: Now that we're in this area...

Must be awkward with the rest of it stuck outside?

Reel inconvenient, but on the plus side he's the only person in the world with 4 feet between his shoes.

Re: ...bronchogenic...

No point in shutting the door now - they are falling like cats and dogs.

In related news, two cargo aircraft carrying Japanese car parts collided earlier - witnesses say it's now raining Datsun cogs.

Sorry.

7-year-old me will get my coat.

Re: ...bronchogenic...

...but his condition is now "stable".

Oh, Lester, your presence is missed.

If ever a story needed a Playmobil reenactment...

Pint, in memoriam--->

PS: I managed to shove the wheel off a Matchbox car up my nostril at the tender age of 4 or thereabouts. I still have a vivid memory of going to Alder Hey hospital to have it removed, and the doc holding said wheel in tweezers in front of my eyes - but to this day I swear there was nothing on the tweezers. Wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was all a cruel con and the wheel is still there. It would explain a lot.

Microsoft sparks up Ignite with fresh Azure, Office 365 features

Typo?

Microsoft is also aiming a new crop of Windows 10 S hardware

"crop"?

Huh, funny, it's not even as if the 'o' key is anywhere near the 'a' key...

You forgot that you hired me and now you're saying it's my fault?

Re: Idiots in charge of booking ...

Wow! Disney have offices on the Isle of Skye?

Where else do you think they got the idea for McKey Mouse from?

Re: Meeting room naming

@AdamT You've reminded me... at our office Christmas party a few years ago, all the raffle prizes had been purchased by one of the admins, who had her own interests & hobbies and assumed everyone else felt the same. So people won spa sessions, Lush bath bombs, hair straighteners and so on.

But the real hilarity was when a colleague of mine (from Sri Lanka, hence let's just say dark of skin-tone) won.... a free spray-on tanning session. Cue the whole room (including said colleague, who has a sense of humour and has since gone on to great things in the company) erupting in laughter.

Microsoft reveals details of flagship London store within spitting distance from Apple's

Re: A great idea

And I'll be there in me pac-a-mac, writing down the numbers of the trains hotfixes.

"Ooh! KB3213522! I haven't seen that one yet!"

Re: Last time

Penny Arcade - The Hipness Threshold

Aaargh... endless Microsoft puns, I feel like I'm cortana loop...

Well at least I'm safe in the FreeBSD flagship store, it's a garden shed in Skegness.

La-de-dah. I'd be in the Gentoo flagship store, except I haven't yet figured out how to attach the ceiling to the walls, or indeed build the walls.

For the sake of the sums, we shall ignore wind.

"First, assume a spherical cow..."

Gross oversimplification. I'm proud to say that no-one has ever ignored my wind.

Sysadmin tells user CSI-style password guessing never w– wait WTF?! It's 'PASSWORD1'!

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

@jake: not consistently, it seems! In this corner of Oregon I get blank stares. The funniest was a colleague of mine who tracked me down the following Monday and regaled me with how he'd told his son the meaning of the term, and his son had found it hilarious even though Dad couldn't remember what the P, the E or the T stood for...

Re: Favourite

Who's on first base... (Youngsters may need to Google it)

As always, there's an SMBC comic to subvert that one.

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

You forget, this is government we're talking about. Crapita were almost certainly involved.

Getting them to encrypt the data at all was a minor miracle; sending the password separately (or encrypting the data with the recipient's public key) would never ever have occurred to them.

It's Friday, and I find myself explaining the meaning of the term "POETS day" to my American colleagues once again --->

If you need to replace anything other than your iPhone 8's battery or display, good luck

@Voland's Right Hand From some point after Renault Clio Mk2 they went nuts.

A proud tradition. See for example the Renault 4, which had a wheelbase of different lengths on each side of the car (due to the suspension design, not the overconsumption of Gauloises and absinthe by the assembly workers).

How Apple is taming the ad biz. Just don't expect Google or Zuck to follow

Re: What about...

@Pseu Donyme

While I've seldom seen so many nested parentheses in a comment, I thank you for closing them all appropriately. Unmatched braces are very annoying (especially to people with OCD.

From the Dept of the Bleedin' Obvious... yes, drones hurt when they hit you in the head

That article photo

It took me a second glance to realize that it was a dummy in the photo, and not some poor unfortunate bloke in a wheelchair. I did think for a moment that maybe the drive to bring the disabled community back into the workforce had, um, gone a step too far.

"What do you mean, you've got leprosy and your leg's fallen off? You're just malingering. I'm denying your claim for disability living allowance, now apply for this job:"

"Wanted: wheelchair user for passive drone testing. Must not mind frequent blows to the head and/or decapitation by spinning rotors. Pay £7.25/hr, enquire within."

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Re: It only needs to semi automate the process

you just need it to constrain the candidates to a level where human judgement can be used.

Thank you for responding to this Reddit post. We have detected that you are in the UK. Please choose one of the following government-approved responses:

1) "Me too!"

2) to upload dancing_baby.mpg

3) "I LIKE THIS WEBSITE VERY MUCH, PLEASE SEND RESPONSES TO ME BY EMAIL THANKS BYE"

...

The way it'll be done...

...as of $date, all social media content will have to be uploaded via a government proxy, where the finest, keenest bureaucrats will review the content for terror/hate/wrong-thinking/trigger-words/uncomfortable-truths and release it to Youtube/Facebook/Twitter within a guaranteed 6 weeks. The new watchdog, Oftroll, will be funded from a 2p/MB levy on broadband connections, and will create over 40,000 new jobs in marginal constituencies Northern economic enterprise zones.

The scary thing is that to some in power in the UK/EU, the above will seem like a good idea.

Say Hello to my little friend: Nest blasts IoT world with doorbell, home security gear

Re: Umm...

Aren't movement and motion the same thing?

If prefixed by bowel-, yes.

Got bit myself by the Internet Of Shite last month

I have a Kevo smart lock for my back door..yeah, yeah, but it's convenient to be able to e-mail temporary keys to friends/family etc. A recent software update to its iphone app "forgot" my login credentials. Of course, I didn't discover this until I was rushing out of the house, late for an appointment, and found I had no way of locking the door. I know that all Reg readers, with their well-known fondness for IoT, will at this point have nothing but sympathy for me...

Side rant: why does my phone know about, and insist on correcting, every darn trademark, but can't get the simplest other aspects of autocorrect right? I took petty delight above in undoing its "helpful" corrections to "kevo" and "iphone". Trademarks having rAndom cApitalization of letters or wēird accents is arty wankery of the first order, and an Abomination Unto Nuggan.

...and, breathe...

Mobe reception grief turns LTE Apple Watch 3 into – er, a dull watch

Re: Bluetooth & wireless still alive?

By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?

OK, I'll bite.

"A plane? What is it?"

"It's a flying machine, but that's not important right now."

"Surely you can't be serious"

"I am serious. And stop calling me Shirley."

...etc

You've been baffled by its smart thermostat. Now strap in for Nest's IoT doorbell, alarm gear

Re: It's cheaper,

Yes, but I want a security system that's automatic, not Manuel-ly operated.

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

Re: RE: Freecell

Is that what the custody staff look for when they want to put someone in solitaire confinement?

"You're trying my Patience, sunshine" said the duty sergeant, as the suspect gazed whist-fully at the open door...