Posts by druck

Tony Blair tells Russian infosec conference that cross-border infosec policies need more gov intervention

Re: Is this the same Tony Blair...

Sorry I was wrong, apparently after 6 years in office he did get an email address, but claimed he wouldn't read any emails, or reply to anything.

Is this the same Tony Blair...

...who didn't even have an email address while PM?

We've paused Sigfox roof aerial payments, says WND-UK, but we'll make you whole after COVID

Where's the plug?

Maybe by not telling anyone, they were hoping people wouldn't notice, and not pull the plug on the antennas.

A volt from the blue: Samsung reportedly ditches wall-wart from future phones

Re: Thoughts

Be aware that the transformers in dual wall sockets tend to be very inefficient, some even operating when nothing is plugged in. This can mean a lot of heat needs to be dissipated, and how successful that is will depend on the type of wall it is fitted in. A thermal camera shows they only thing worse is an old inductive dimmer switch, and even they are only active when the light is on.

Re: Think of the Pi's

I've never had a problem with the dozens of Samsung chargers we've got lying around. The original 5V only and the newer fast charge 9V/5V all produce a rock solid 5.25V.

Think of the Pi's

This means you'll have to buy a PSU for the Raspberry Pi, rather than using old phone chargers.

Social media giants move to defy Hong Kong's new national security law

Re: @Chris G - Ban TikTok...

You don't keep information on your phone that could be used to blackmail you, your phone does.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

There are much better ways of recovering a deleted open file, than crashing the system and hoping fsck recovers it. I did it the other day on Linux when I deleted an open log file, it wasn't very important but I got it back anyway. I believe even on Solaris the file handle will be under /proc/<pid>/<fd>, and a quick google shows the fsdb command will help in this situation.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: Radio 4 LW?

You can even use Radio 4 LW masts as a Non Directional Beacons when flying, it's also better slightly listening than the morse idents of other NDBs.

As well as low bits rates, most of the stations are mono - in this day and age!

It's like a leap backwards to the 1970s before most stations had an FM presence, and were mono on AM, except that you could actually receive AM just about everywhere.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: Simlar ...

Damn good idea, a giant trackball / foot rest, with buttons you can heal and toe like a Japanese racing driver.

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: c****e

How many innocent female dogs are now being discriminated against? We need to know!

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

Re: Upgrading can be painful?

I've never found upgrading painful. I did come late to the party only starting with Mint 13 (the first with Mate as default), and have been upgrading in place ever since without problems. I'm sure as soon as the option appears to go from 19.3 to 20, that will be smooth too.

My Raspberry Pi 4 running a Raspbian Buster image that started off as Wheezy on a 256MB Pi B, and has been run on every variant since and upgraded in place for each release along the way.

I do make sure I have backups before I start though!

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Re: Sorry to see them go...

My first digit camera was an Olympus 1.3Mpix with a slide out lens cover, which took so long to start up you'd miss the photo, but an improvement on the previous bulky ones containing a floppy disk! My last Olympus was a SP-550UZ, very compact 18x stabilised zoom which was great for taking pictures when flying.

My favourite though was the C-2100UZ which had one of the last CCD sensors before everyone went CMOS, it was only 2Mpix and ate batteries in minutes, but was more sensitive than anything I've had since, able to use fast shutter speeds even at the maximum 10x zoom in low light. I remember buying a 64MB Smartmedia card for it in Changi airport in a 2 hour stop off in Singapore on the way to my first trip to Australia. It cost a huge amount, although cheaper than 32MB in the UK. It increased my budget to an average of 6 photos per day for the month long holiday!

Sadly they didn't have anything I liked last time, so I've now got a Fujifilm X-S1, a huge beast of a 26x zoom bridge camera, but the advantage of lots of external buttons to go straight to a feature, rather than spending ages navigating menus. It enables you to get much more out of the camera.

You'd think lockdown would be heaven for us layabouts – but half the UK has actually started 'exercising more'

Re: Say or do?

UCL is certainly no longer the same institution as when I did my degree there in the late 80s. Junk science and denaming (SIC) of buildings pervades.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

Re: Funding

I'm afraid the reality of the situation hasn't caught up with you yet.

Funding

I think they are going to find it difficult raising the many billions needed for a new collider, after covid inspired global economic suicide attempt.

What's the Arm? First Apple laptop to ditch Intel will be 13.3" MacBook Pro, proclaims reliable soothsayer

Re: Cheaper macs *coff*

I'm looking forward to the Mac Pi.

It's 500 Friday at GitHub as source shack takes an hour-long morning totter

Mastering

Maybe they need to master the ability of staying up, before messing around with names.

'Work pressure' sees Maze ransomware gang demand payoff from wrong company

csa group?

I thought this was about the comp.sys.acorn newsgroup for a second.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Re: Where will this end....

Talking of maths, this is right up there with the fuckwittery that removes 13 from house numbering.

Microwave-tech-touting British upstart scores £3.6m to build 'large-scale quantum 'puters'

Re: It works!

I love a post literally dripping with sarcasm.

Quantum funding

Well that's another £3.6m which will simultaneously occupy the quantum states of valid scientific research and fraudulent waste of public funds.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: 3 years for a terrorist offence ?

f anything, you are probably exposed to far less EMF than you were 20 years ago

Vastly less, analogue TV used to have radiated powers in MW. Those same frequencies are being used at a fraction of the power for digital TV and 4G signals.

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

But its the car which is allowing the fuckwit to achieve even higher levels of fuckwittery.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

88 is just a number, 13 is just a number, they are all just numbers.

Numbers have no race, no religion, no politics, no superstitions.

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Damn!

My wife bought me a second 4GB Pi 4B for my birthday only weeks ago.

I'm not quite running 64 bit Raspbian on it yet, but nearly. I'm using the 64 bit kernel with 32 bit userland, and using Raspbian-nspawn-64 to run 64 bit stuff in a systemd container.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Re: Embrace...

The best example of 'Envelop' being the Microsoft Research centre in Cambridge. It's sole purpose being to suck in promising Cambridge graduates and let them play with toys, rather than going on to setting up their own companies producing superior products, which lead to Acorn and many others.

Turns out Elon can't control the weather – what a scrub: Rain, clouds delay historic manned SpaceX-NASA launch

Re: Fingers crossed for Saturday

i wouldn't call micrometeorite protection required for EVA, semantics or marketing.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Re: simple shit so much easier with cmd

I use cmder, you can still do all the cmd stuff, but with multiple tabs and proper command history. It integrates with git for windows, which also gives you access to all the familiar gnu tools, you could almost be using bash!

Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

And those twenty put another 20 in isolation, so on and so forth.

It's the number of false positives you need to worry about, if you are going to be able to go back to the real world for more than a few hours each time, before being told you need to self isolate for another two weeks.

That's 13 people out of the workforce for up to two weeks (depending on how quickly they can get tested), from contact with just one person who tested positive. It will result in effectively a permanent lock down of everyone using the app, and at some point the money to pay to them keep self isolating over and over again, will run out.

Internet of Tardiness: Microsoft puts on a brave face as IoT boat prepares to set sail

Re: Missed the Bloat

Finally, Microsoft also announced plans to reduce the footprint of Windows for IoT by 40 per cent

Missed the boat, missed the bloat more like.

If they are trimming 40% of the unnecessary crap, there will still be at least another 40% remaining.

AT&T slapped down for its '5GE' ads: You don’t have a proper 5G network, so stop saying so, says watchdog

Lies

But didn't they do exactly the same thing claiming their network was 4G while it was still only 3G HSDPA, and 3G back in the 2G GPRS days?

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

Says an AC.

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Re: It's just so backwards...

But you are forgetting that VHS was replaced with DVD, and DVD should have evolved in to HD-DVD but was replaced with Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray has been replaced by streaming. The Office monopoly won't last forever, not even in its 365 form.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: Excel excels

I think you mean there is no other application that comes close to a spreadsheet in terms of usability, versatility and usefulness.

Excel is one example of a spreadsheet, with quite a few good features, but also a whole load of limitations and bugs, which my fellow commetards have only been too eager to point out.

TensorBlow? Data boffins struggle with GPU shortage in Google Cloud, opposition offers to help out coders

Oracle has plenty

Perhaps Oracle's claims of GPU acceleration for their database is falling a bit short, and hence plenty of GPUs in their coloud sitting idle?

India opens its space industry to private companies

@Bob. Locating your launch site near the equator has nothing to with the extra speed gained from the rotation of the earth, a few hundred mph difference from that is insignificant when you need 17,000mph to reach orbit.

The latitude of the launch site determines which orbits you can reach easily, i.e the latitude of the launch site is the minimum inclination of the initial orbit. To reduce the inclination to get to an equatorial orbit (for geostationary satellites) requires a lot more fuel for the transfer stage, the further north (or south) of the equator you launch from. That reduces the amount of useful payload the rocket can deliver.

Openreach boss denies BT selling stake in UK's national broadband plumber

Re: So it seems BT *can* separate out Openreach assets and liabilities

He posted exactly the same thing back in 1984, must be senility kicking in.

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Re: In keeping

I'd have gone for Bloatzilla, if I'd been out of bed in time.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Not so obvious

Actually some of the earliest mice for the BBC Micro (long before the PC), had the lead at the bottom like a real mouse's tail. Such as the DigiMouse. The lead did move to the top for the more conventional AMX mouse, after people got fed up of trapping the cable under their arm.

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group

Just like...

You mean just like the Tab Group extension for Firefox before they broke it a few years ago.

The end really is nigh – for 32-bit Windows 10 on new PCs

Re: I honestly thought it never existed

Most of the Atoms were capable of running a 64 bit OS, but Microsoft restricted them to 32 bit Windows 7 starter. If you tried installing Windows 10 on them, they would default to 32 bit, but it was possible to do a fresh install of 64 bit Windows 10, it was hopelessly slow with only 2GB of RAM though.

My old N455 netbook has both 32 bit and 64 bit Linux Mint on it. The 64 bit variant is noticeably faster until you open a few tabs in the browser and it runs out of memory, the 32 bit one struggles on a little longer due to a few 100MB less memory usage.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Tables to 10x makes sense. We only needed 12x though when we had shillings and inches, but it has no intrinsic value today.

I'd argue that the 16 times table, up to 16x16, is rather useful in these here parts.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

@Pier Reviewer your first question answers your second. You use your own star to accelerate, and the destination star to decelerate. You'll need the ability to vary the area of the sail in order to get the correct numbers at each phase of travel.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: Automated contact tracing for Covid-19 is a fools' errand

You can't lay contract tracing at Johnson's door, almost every other county is doing it, and most of them they started before us.

You are right about all the false positives, and that's why the decentralised model won't work. The false positive alerts will automatically propage from phone to phone, and countries using it will be paralysed by a large amount, possibly the majority, of their population being told to self isolate, again and again and again. They'll never escape lock down.

The centralised model won't have any less false positives, but has the advantage but there is then control over how fast and how far the positive alerts can spread, so the country won't be crippled. Yes this will also limit the propagation of true positives too, but then the entire point of this isn't to find every case of the virus, its enable lock down to be ended and make people feel safe enough to go back to work.

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: Just don't turn your back on 'em.

Exactly, unless the decision to lift the price cap on .org is reversed, this isn't over.

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

Re: License to Kill

Tesla's autopilot is clearly not perfect, but that should not be the bar to clear. Is it better than the average human driver?

Better than the average driver is nowhere near good enough, it needs to be two or even three orders of magnitude better, so it is a lower probability than a mechanical failure.

Everyone who drives non automated vehicles has had minor lapses of attention and knows how easily it could have lead to an accident, so are accepting to some degree of genuine failings of other humans. However, no one will ever accept a death caused by the failing of AI, is not something that should have been prevented.