Posts by Davidmb

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

I think it relates to this investigation: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Re: No headphone jack?

You can use Bluetooth headphones and listen to Audible books - if Bluetooth is acceptable?

The show Musk go on: Elon asks Uncle Sam to let him fly his Starship over Texas, scores fat NASA contract

Re: Techno Hobbiest?

Surprised you got upvoted, when the words "techno-hobbyist" are a link to this piece. That techno.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Rubbish

No life can survive in the near-vacuum of Slough.

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

Why the downvotes for this comment?

After all, the US never abolished slavery completely, as it is still legal for those in jail.

For those wondering why this is a problem, imagine a world where you want to enslave a certain section of the population (or as many of them as possible). You create laws that will affect them disproportionately and direct law enforcement to monitor them disproportionately. The prison population swells with members of the targetted population, who can then legally be forced to work - slavery. If such a thing were to happen in the US, it would be a stain on the country's reputation and a terrible shame.

Remember the big IBM 360 mainframe rescue job? For now, Brexit has ballsed it up – big iron restorers

"It's a poor world we live in when you cannot have any faith in politicians

... and even less in reporters"

Have you just been released from the cave you grew up in?

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

Re: Compunding the irony

How ironic!

Holograms to Match of the Day: Huawei shindig shows 5G is still playing all things to all people

Watch the Mobile Man video and prepare to cringe

Still, not the worst I've seen. And nice to see Huawei using a sort of self-deprecating humour. I think 5G will need people to maintain a sense of perspective (5G Match of the Day transmitted from a backpack).

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

Re: Jenkins?

I think the downvotes are coming because you read an entire article about Jenkins, a popular CI tool, and rather than acknowledge a gap in your own expertise and move on you decided to go to the effort of making a Victor Meldrew-style rant forum post. Two, in fact. The article was hardly controversial.

Of course, I've hardly helped by getting irritated by it. And I'm not even a Java developer, or a user of Jenkins. I just prefer my angry rants to be better targeted.

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

Nice Try, "Fred West"

You must be new here.

Microsoft's elderly .NET Framework shakes stick at whippersnapper Core while Visual Studio drops another preview

Re: there can be multiple versions of .NET Core , .NET Framework is not so fortunate

That used to be the case, yes...

Since 4.0, every release has replaced the previous version upon installation. This may be why they're still on the 4.x version numbering, as they always install to the 4.0 folder. For this reason no breaking changes are allowed.

Are meta, self-referential or recursive science-fiction films doomed?

Two films

There have only ever been two Alien films. Agree that the first is the best, although they're almost different genres and both very good.

Look at stupid, sexy Kubernetes with all the cloud firms hanging off its musclebound arms

They made it easy for developers to pick up.

When I first started researching Kubernetes, I immediately came across the online interactive tutorial, which is a very useful hands-on introduction. Straight away I had a positive impression of the project and understood what it was for.

It just seems that, despite the buzzword-filled nature of the sector, they understood that you need people at the coal face using your product and that's why they have done well.

Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men

You're trying too hard

When the trolling starts to sound strained I have to downvote.

However, I do like the mocking of the view that there's an "elite" that are simultaneously unemployable layabouts while also starting all the most successful companies and running the media.

The only bit you missed was the shadowy group who somehow co-ordinate the billionaires, hippies, dole scrounging single mums, actors, pop stars, refugees and muslims.

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

Re: The only way to make cars give back to the environment

Sorry, but this is wrong. The United States has a much higher population density than Norway and Sweden, with much bigger cities than either. While the rural US may be too distributed, the situation in the metropolitan areas is entirely due to choice.

Bluetooth makes a mesh of itself with new spec

Re: MANET v2?

I took the line " only main-powered nodes get the job of relaying messages" to mean that battery-powered devices would not perform the role of gateway, which eases that concern. Makes the mesh sound less useful though...

SQL Server 2017's first rc lands and – yes! – it runs on Linux

Re: What about performance and security - on Linux?

I saw a presentation several months ago that said that performance on Red Hat was slightly below Windows in most or their automated tests, although it beat Windows in at least a couple. This was prior to optimisation, so the speaker thought that it may well be faster in general on Red Hat by the time of release.

I'd wait for some independent benchmarking before making any decisions however.

Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

AMP is training people to be conned

This happened to me yesterday, but is indicative of the messed-up Google experience right now:

Google something from widget on phone homescreen.

Click link to BBC article in list provided by Google app.

Article appears, but with bbc.co.uk in weird in-page header. Looks dodgy.

A "more info" link tells me that the page has been somehow improved by AMP. Sounds dodgy.

As I'm suspicious, click "View in Chrome" to see if it looks different outside the Google App, in a real browser.

In Chrome, realise that the address bar is still a Google URL. So to proceed with this, I have to trust the in-page HTML header that states "bbc.co.uk". Something no-one should ever start doing, as it undermines decades of user education that only the address bar can be trusted.

TL;DR: AMP is training users to be phished and should be destroyed with fire.

The Psion returns! Meet Gemini, the 21st century pocket computer

There's a video if you want to see it in action

I haven't seen this referenced anywhere else, so dropping this here:

https://vimeo.com/205778039

Kids these days will never understand the value of money

There's always one after every currency article

You describe two perfectly reasonable practices as if they are some horrendous fraud.

Firstly: fiat currency. The horror! A society agree to exchange tokens as a representation of value. That's how a huge, complex civilisation works. Yes, the fact that the government can just print more is potentially a very real problem. It is also potentially a solution to other problems as well. Like everything governments do, the people should hold them to account.

Secondly: fractional reserve banking. The horror! This is just how banks work. If you have excess money, but are too busy to directly invest it, you lend it to the bank by placing it in an account. They in turn lend it out to people or businesses who need it. Interest gets paid along the way. The fact that the money gets repeatedly lent out each time it hits a bank account means that it's being utilised fully. Yes, the numbers on screens are far in excess of the actual cash. Yes, it's a huge trust exercise, and if everyone withdrew their cash the banks would go bust. Sometimes that happens.

Society is a huge network of people all trusting each other not to screw everything up. That's how it has always been. That's why we should be nice to each other and try to get along, for all our sakes.

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

Except the new regulator must be approved

By the Press Recognition Panel. So far only Impress has been approved.

Almost as if someone wanted to give the appearance of independent regulation, while snuffing out small independent publishers.

Busted Windows 8, 10 update blamed for breaking Brits' DHCP

Definitely occuring on EE too

Windows 10 laptop connecting via an EE Brightbox router - happening consistently.

Only solution: ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew

Has Canadian justice gone too far? Cops punish drunk drivers with NICKELBACK

Great pop song

And a perfect demonstration of the KLF's "How to write a number one" technique. See The Manual for more details.

As a Doctor Who-mad kid in the 80s, I loved it, even though it was insane.

Who's in Peter's file? Moneybags Thiel hits up Silicon Valley brains to join his Trump think tank

Nice try

I'll bite anyway.

This is a UK-based web site - we had no "guy" in the race. The article is reporting verifiable facts: that Thiel has tried and failed to get Silicon Valley support for the incoming President. It is well known that Trump is unpopular in California, so is not surprising, but it is genuinely of interest to a tech audience.

Who cares? If you think that Trump cannot affect the tech industry (positively or negatively), then perhaps no-one should. Perhaps the office of POTUS is impotent, just bread and circuses to keep ordinary Americans distracted. That would be sad (but would explain a lot).

Emulating x86: Microsoft builds granny flat into Windows 10

They tried that once already

Remember Longhorn? The project that got restarted after 4 years of development and eventually became Vista? Its first iteration used the CLR extensively for OS features, but it just didn't work well enough. Some pieces (WPF) got released separately, but MS won't make the same mistake again.

It's hard to say whether the new cross-platform (hardware platforms) strategy will work. I don't see the demand for Windows on phones and tablets, at all.

Microsoft announces Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming this summer

Re: Article author lives in a bubble.... Meanwhile reality check...

His point is that cloud game-delivery systems should be able to cope with an automatic system restart. All the alternatives, such as Steam, do. It's not as if he pulled the plug - Windows initiated the restart and the Windows App Store was installing the game. This will happen (a lot).

As for disk space - all installers should check for disk space before running. App stores should be even more user-friendly.

This isn't the early 90s. Expecting meaningful feedback and for installers to just work is a reasonable expectation, especially when using an app store.

The new Huawei is the world's fastest phone

Honor 7 storage and battery

It takes an SD card, and the battery lasts at least 2 days (for me at least). If you want more than that in the world of 2016 smartphones, you'll be lucky.

PETA monkey selfie lawsuit threatens wildlife photography, warns snapper at heart of row

Seems like you also didn't read the article.

As stated therein:

Slater said misinformation has been spread by shrill anti-copyright bloggers and other online bullies. Some have wrongly stated the camera was on the ground...

HMRC ditches Microsoft for Google, sends data offshore

To all the people commenting about tax evasion:

Remember that back in 2001 the Labour government sold their offices to a Bermuda-based company, which they have leased back ever since.

When your entire department is dependant on (legally) tax-avoiding arrangements, it's hard to take a moral stance against it.

Intel adopts 40Gb per SECOND USB-C plug for Thunderbolt 3.0

This sounds like the port on the new MacBook

It has only one USB C port, that also supports Thunderbolt. Is this a case of Apple adopting the standard early, or of Intel being railroaded onto adopting a change their main Thunderbolt-supporter wanted?

Next-gen Freeview telly won't be another disruptive 4Ker

Why this will succeed

It's based on HbbTV, which is the same standard used in Europe. TV manufacturers are already supporting it - part of the reason they were lukewarm towards YouView. Having it built into TVs as standard means people will use it by default.

Fanbois, prepare to lose your sh*t as BRUSSELS KILLS IPHONE dock

Like this?

I assume that this is Apple's response. Since the change has been coming for years, they've had plenty of time to prepare:

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MD820ZM/A/lightning-to-micro-usb-adapter

The Metro experiment is dead: Time to unleash Windows Phone+

Re: ha ha

Such a waste that you log into the forum, write a comment and post it. If you devote this much time to loser sites you must indeed be a busy person.

The El Reg analysis is based on an historical pattern that Microsoft have tended to follow. It seemed fairly even-handed to me.

Yahoo! scuppered! in! Dailymotion! buyout! attempt!

Re: Nice to see

Except the French government owns 27% of the parent company (and appoints its CEO). So it does have a say.

Why British TV drama is crap – and why this matters to tech firms

You didn't like it...

But clearly watched most of it. Personally I liked the unrealistic bits - all TV drama is unrealistic, so occasionally it's nice to see a show embrace it so fully,

El Reg user forum opens to public, HTML for all (mostly)

They're just hidden, usually

Switch to number keyboard (12# button) then second page (1/2 button). There they are, along with the £ sign!

Long-winded and might not work with every phone.

Spotify v. Pure Music

Based on practicalities I suspect

The desktop Spotify client uses P2P, which keeps the server load/bandwidth/costs down. However, the mobile apps can't really do the same. There's a case to be made for a premium, although twice the cost sounds a bit high.

Flat-pack plug designer wins top award

Plug can be used folded up

As his multi-plug design demonstrates:

http://www.phtaipei.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/choi_uk_folding_plug05.jpg

I like that, a nice space-saver.