Posts by druck

EE scrap connection fee... to hike broadband and telly packages

Oh and did I forget to mention every other ISP using Openreach's wholesale broadband products, as BT make sure they are paying towards BT TV too.

The more BT pays for the football, the more you pay for your phone line, broadand and EE mobile.

Alabama joins anti-web-smut crusade with mandatory opt-out filters

Re: Next

WHAT? You want to look at uncovered females under the age of 5 - STONE HIM!

Re: Now watch Alabama's taxes dry up.

And then watch for the next bill which is to prevent the trafficking of non porn filtered internet devices across state lines (Class Z felony, $1bn fine, 100,000 years hard labour with no prospect of parole).

Welcome to Prohibition 2.0^TM

CompSci boffins propose scheme to protect privacy in database searches

Duh

How about; if you don't trust the database owner, don't use the data. A solution looking for a problem, if I ever saw one.

Happy Motherboards day: Here's some (Optane) memory

Re: Two Lanes

Because the technology doesn't live up to the hype, and they don't want like for like comparisons.

Manufacturers reject ‘no deal’ Brexit approach

Re: But that does assume Spain

@AC if you really knew more about the Spanish situation than a Daily Mail reader, you'd know it is not The Basque Country that's giving them the shits, but Catalan independence.

Researcher hopes to teach infants with cochlear implants to speak – with an app

Re: It's a lot harder than having an app

But it wont though. A 12 month old child might be fascinated by flashing lights in an app, but they won't make the connection between learning and reward that they do in the interaction with their parents or other adults.

Google pulls Hezbollah YouTube channel after we told them about the drone ads

Lethal my arse

Even a "nanodrone" can still deliver a lethal payload; two years ago a drone was used to land a bottle of radioactive sand from Fukushima on the roof of the office of Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

That wouldn't have been lethal even if the drone managed to pour the sand down the PM's neck.

Ubuntu splats TITSUP bug spread in update

Bloody reboots

Luckily I avoided this, as every day there now seems to be an Ubuntu update that wants a bloody reboot - WTF, it's not Windows. So I tend to ignore them until at least the end of the week. But I'll be moving back to Debian when I get the chance.

Decapitating Rockall: How a 1970s Navy expedition blasted the top off the Atlantic islet

"Threre's fuckall on Rockall" was the strap line of the much missed The Rockall Times satirical website.

Safe, staffers? We'll let you know

Re: And the corner office gravy train

It does happy, although not nearly as often, and with a lot more generous settlements.

Norfolk County Council sent filing cabinet filled with kids' info to a second-hand shop

Election day won't change anything, the screw up is by the employees of the council, not the elected councillors.

Intel touts bug bounties to hardware hackers

I claim my $30,000

I've found one critical vulnerability; Intel's management engine in every chip.

Microsoft kills Windows Vista on April 11: No security patches, no hot fixes, no support, nada

Damn

I'd almost managed to erase Vista from my memory, when I saw this article.

Manchester college swaps out disk for rackful of hybrid flash

Disaster Recovery?

So they are now relying on one storage array, what measures have they put in place to avoid ending up like Kings College London?

Hyper-V guest escape, drive-by PDF pwnage, Office holes, SMB flaws – and more now patched

Re: Reboot, Reboot, Reboot

Who said anything about Windows 10? Windows 7 and 8.1 are reboot happy enough.

Reboot, Reboot, Reboot

Well after installing that lot on my home machines last night, I can expect to spend today at work rebooting all those 3 times too.

Tesla, Atlassian told to go through front door in effort to save Australian industrial civilisation

Re: Frequency regulation

It's easy keeping each windmill in sync with the grid using power converters, but they can only follow, never lead. i.e. When the load is too high on conventional generation plant and the frequency drops, they can only match that frequency, and not bring it back up to nominal, as starting more conventional plant would. You then get the situation where you have enough power, but the grid has to load shed not so as not to cause a frequency excursion.

Throwing good money after bad...

...to try to shore up unreliable wind with an insufficient amount of short lived and costly (both financially and environmentally) lithium batteries,

Oh my God, 911 is down. Quick, call… aaargh!

Re: Why is the FCC involved ?

I know that's supposed to be a joke, but you really wouldn't find it funny if you needed the emergency services.

Microsoft: Can't wait for ARM to power MOST of our cloud data centers! Take that, Intel! Ha! Ha!

Re: You've come a long way, baby

RISC OS kept ARM alive, and now some of us are still keeping RISC OS alive on ARM, with Raspberry Pi's and a number of new more powerful development boards.

After 20 years of Visual Studio, Microsoft unfurls its 2017 edition

I remember...

...before Visual Studio when it was Visual C++, and before that Visual C.

The amount of cruft it's gathered since then is enormous. It is still quite useful though.

Watt the f... Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings

Re: Errrmmm....

Before anyone gets too worked up; all UK domestic supply is single phase, and won't be using these 3 phase meters.

Re: built for tuppence

@boltar: The Raspberry Pi is built in the Britain, but world wide demand was so high, they had to open a second source in China.

America halts fast processing of H-1B skilled worker visas

Re: why was this called 'discrimination'

@a_yank_lucker: No government owes any non-citizen anything especially the privilege of working in the country at the expense of citizens. Doesn't matter if it's the US, UK, Russia, China, etc.

You try telling that to the House of Lords. Quite happy to get us to guarantee the rights of EU citizens in the UK, before getting any assurances of the future of UK citizens in Europe.

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

Uber meet RICO

Lets hail down some justice.

Tuesday's AWS S3-izure exposes Amazon-sized internet bottleneck

A complete and total meltdown...

...was experienced by my 3 and 1 year olds, when being told that Amazon Prime Video wasn't working, and they couldn't watch Mike The Knight or Paw Patrol.

Privacy watchdog to probe Oz gov's right to release personal info 'to correct the record'

Re: Twitter yee not

@Paul Renault: If you are worried about the truth coming out, don't bullshit the government on the internet.

Twitter yee not

If you have an issue with a government department and handle it via their complaints procedure, everything is kept private. If you make a public complaint and issue inaccurate statements, the government has every right to respond with the correct data.

Lap(top) of luxury: Porsche Design revs up 2-in-1 Windows 10 slab

Crapware

The Book One runs Windows 10 Professional configured as a Microsoft Signature Edition, which means it should be free of crapware.

Well, just the one piece of crapware then.

So. 256GB. 3D NAND. MicroSD. SanDisk. $199. Any further questions?

Raspberry Flavour?

It might be OK to run Android apps from, but it it any good for using in a Raspberry Pi, without giving up the ghost after less than a year of 24/7 use?

After many cards of various different brands failed before 12 months, my main Pi3 now has a small SSD on an SATA to IDE connector, and my secondary Pi2 has a good quality USB memory stick. So I only now use SD cards in the Pi1 media players, which can just be re-imaged on to a new card.

Two million recordings of families imperiled by cloud-connected toys' crappy MongoDB

Waste of time

Well at least trawling through gigabytes of children's random babbling to their toys, will keep any miscreant busy for a long time. The likelihood of a child reading out their parents full credit card number and CVV code are quite low, so financial losses are unlikely. As for privacy issues, parents should now know what sort of thing not to buy next Christmas.

Microsoft slaps Apple Gatekeeper-like controls on Windows 10: Install only apps from store

+30% & +22%

Well we can look forward to all PC software becoming 30% more expensive to cover Microsoft's cut from the store, plus an extra 22% penalty for currency fluctuations - even when buying from UK vendors.

LUNAR-CY! SpaceX announces a Moon trip-for-two it'll inevitably miss the deadline on

Crew?

There are going to be two paying passengers, but I assume there will also be at least one professional astronaut to pilot the capsule - for whatever value of pilot is appropriate for a full automated system.

Softbank gros fromage: ARM will knock out a trillion IoT chips by 2040

Re: "a trillion chips"

The TrustZone feature in ARM chips gives them excellent security, but no one is forcing the IOT manufactures to write software which uses it.

Post-Brexit five-year UK work visas planned – report

Re: If only..

@Conrad Longmore: you are more than welcome to f--- off to another EU country if you really think their economies are doing better than the UK.

Autonomous cars are about to do to transport what the internet did to information

My Cold Dead Hand...

Is what you'll be prising the keys to my non-autonomous car from.

HPE's Australian tax failures may have been user error

KCL too

What with the Kings College London failure/fiasco, 3PAR is in the news for all the wrong reasons.

From drugs to galaxy hunting, AI is elbowing its way into boffins' labs

GAN?

GAN might result in nice pretty pictures, but that's all it is, you can only do science on the real data.

LTE-U R gd 2 go: FCC gives unlicensed spectrum its coat, pushes it out the door

One word...

..see the icon -->

'Hey, Homeland Security. Don't you dare demand Twitter, Facebook passwords at the border'

What next?

Protests about taking finger prints at the border came to nothing, as will the handing over of passwords.

What next, a full DNA sequence and a brain scan in order to enter that god forsaken former colony?

Automated, insight cannot be: Jedi master of statistics was good – but beware the daft side

Hockey sticks

Graphing tip for climate researchers (I'm looking at you NASA) if you want to have any credibility; don't release updated graphs where you've just rotated the data around the axis to make the past colder and the present warmer. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

Software glitch, not wind farms, blacked out 60,000 in South Australia

Power optional

If all you've got is windmills, don't expect to grind corn unless the wind is blowing.

BT and Virgin Media claim 'broadband' tax will cost £1.3bn

Re: Why are they whinging?

BT has already screwed over both their customers and everyone using wholesale broadband infrastructure with big prices increases to pay for the takeover of EE, and football for their failing TV channels.

'At least I can walk away with my dignity' – Streetmap founder after Google lawsuit loss

Not as good

People stopped using streetmap because it was simply not as good, in just about every way you can think of.

If it has been an equivalent offering with smooth scrolling and zooming instead of an incredibly tedious and clunky tiled interface, then they may have been able to argue the built in search results had something to do with it. As it is she's just made the lawyers richer, and literally lost the farm.

Jun-OH-NO! NASA's Jupiter probe in busted helium-valve drama

Re: Well, crap....

(US billion, not the UK one)

Oh please keep up at the back, the UK hasn't used the long scale billion since 1975.

US visitors must hand over Twitter, Facebook handles by law – newbie Rep starts ball rolling

Re: Huh?

Why go to the USA at all? That place is getting nuttier and more random for every year that passes.

Hell, I stopped going when they started finger printing people at the border. There are plenty of places to go that don't treat people like criminals being booked in to the cells.

Microsoft ups Surface slab prices for Brits. Darn weak pound, eh?

Re: ...or go buy it in the USA

@ Richard Scratcher & AC:

Or perhaps they are scared of the Mexican drug cartels, who are just as effective at removing opposition as their own medieval death cult.

GitLab invokes the startup defence to explain data loss woes

Astroturf

What was the name of that reputation management company again Mr ACs?