Posts by druck

FM now stands for 'fleeting mortality' in Norway

Re: DAB+ DrXym

Tom7 wrote:

Its more a question of replacing 4K full colour TV with 4K full colour TV with seriously reduced reception and usability cos 'new is better even if it really isn't'

No its more like going from 4K back to SD, most of the DAB channels are mono rather than stereo and at bit rates that give audio quality up there with telephone hold music.

It wasn't until Freeview HD arrived that I got a better digital pictures than with a good analogue signal. The artifact riddled Freeview SD was awful even before they reduced the bit rate to fit in all the shopping and +1 channels. Maybe the difference between DAB and DAB+ would be the same leap as Freeview SD to HD, but as it isn't happening in the UK, leave FM the hell alone.

Former car rental biz staff gave customers' details to phone pests

Sue ball

I think I'll be suing Enterprise for a chunk of that £400,000 to compensate me for all the cold calls I've received since I used their company.

Put walls around home Things, win $25k from US government

Re: One idea

"I want an *intranet* of things"

Couldn't have put it better myself.

One idea

IOT shouldn't mean send data to the cloud.

Researchers work to save trusted computing apps from keyloggers

Achilles heel

The real Achilles heel continues to be the Intel Management Engine embedded in all of it's chips. No one knows what it is doing, so you can't trust any aspect of the chip.

How the NYE leap second clocked Cloudflare – and how a single character fixed it

To my fellow programmers

FFS, get a clue!

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Where's the meat

That's all I can say.

Hackers could turn your smart meter into a bomb and blow your family to smithereens – new claim

Re: "Smart meters are 'dangerously insecure'"

The physical security of the meter is strong,

No it isn't, it sits in a box on the outside of my house which can be opened by anyone with a key from a poundshop.

MacBook killer? New Lenovo offering sexed up with XPoint booster

Yes, Yes, Yes, No!

The specification will include a range of compute and storage options, such as Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, Nvidia GeForce 940MX graphics, 32GB of DRAM, a 4K touch display option

Yes, yes, yes, hell yes...

and Windows 10,

...no thanks.

Folders return to Windows 10's Start Thing

Re: Can you imagine Windows 95 going at the speed of today's hardware?

Def wrote:

I hated the Walt Disney UI of XP,

Disney would be less infantile, XP is Telly Tubby land, and no mistake.

The Life and Times of Lester Haines

So much

It wasn't until I followed the links in the obit did I realise that so much of what I love about El Reg was down to one man. A very sad loss to us all, and especially his wife and young family.

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs

Re: Like!!

Just make sure you replace Firefox with Chromium on older systems with less than 4GB of memory, then you'll really see what it can do.

NIST requests ideas for crypto that can survive quantum computers

I'll beleive it when I see it...

...a working quantum computer capable of cracking conventional cryptography, that is.

In the mean time I'll spend the time worrying about the myriad of crypto implementation weaknesses, that don't need magic quantum fairy dust dust to exploit.

Firefox to give all extensions their own process in January

Re: Ditched FF at v48

I've also ditched Firefox on my systems. The performance of the last couple of versions has dropped off a cliff on my more modest and low memory systems which used to be ok, such as an old 2GB Atom netbook running Linux Mint and the 1GB Raspberry Pi 2's and 3's, but strangely also the company 4GB i5 laptop when using a VPN.

The performance on my 4GB i3 and 8GB i7 laptops is acceptable, but what finished it off for me is Firefox's failure to play BBC News video clips, unless you refresh the page a few times until it stops being a black rectangle.

Chromium's performance on all those systems is far superior, and BBC News clips play straight off, so its bye bye Firefox, which is a shame as I prefer it's fonts and rendering on many sites.

China gives America its underwater drone back – with a warning

South China Sea

Recall the 7th fleet - but not too far.

Qualcomm joins Xen Project Advisory Board

Re: Arm is underpowered to be server

You obviously haven't looked at a server class ARM recently, if at all.

I'm looking forward to when I can run RISC OS (just about ARMv7) in a virtual machine on top of a tasty ARMv8 chip running 64bit Linux.

No Soylent for Santa after key ingredient supply is choked off

Re: What a load of shit

Algae is for fish, not people. Stop eating this shit and get some meat down yourself.

Oi! Linux users! Want some really insecure closed-source software?

Re: Bigger jumps in Version numbers

Now according to my roman numerals chart, X is 10, and P means Million... so XP = 10,000,000.

That's not how Roman numerals work. XP would be 10 before 1 million i.e. 999,990.

Christmas cheer for KCL staffers with gift of extra holiday after IT disaster

Repeatable?

...and for backups holding non-repeatable research data to be found well and truly borked.

If it's not repeatable, it's not science.

FYI! – Your! hacked! Yahoo! account! is! worth! $0.0003!

Re: A 'Real' Beeeeelion?

It probably works out at almost a buck per active account.

'Upset' Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

Re: I wonder about the devs

@blotar: My wife is a teacher and agrees 100% with you. Life is very difficult if you are one of the few non-trots that haven't left in disgust at way the profession is going.

Don't panic, friends, but the Chinese navy just nicked one of America's underwater drones

Re: South China Sea

Deploy the 7th fleet.

Will Wikipedia honour Jimbo's promise to STOP chugging?

The WMF is well on the way to becoming the FIFA of free encyclopaedias.

Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

Even slurp hasn't

Not even Microsoft have tried to shake people down for C#.

Could a robot vacuum cleaner monitor your data centre?

Re: Security considerations

Simon said he'd mention security later, but didn't in any meaningful way. From the brief sentence on not having to configure the router, than means it's using UPnP to open up god knows what ports both outgoing and incoming, leaving it and your home network wide open to exploitation. So no marks for it, and no marks for Simon leaving such a dangerous option turned on in his router.

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

Re: is anyone surprised?

The train could make a difference, but also as you are travelling in the opposite direction you may well be using a completely different set of masts due to the call hand off characteristics.

Microsoft skates over Surface Hub sales data

Eye watering prices

I'll wait for the Chinese copy, and loose a zero off the end.

Sysadmin figures out dating agency worker lied in his profile

Re: Enter == submit

RISC OS used the far superior and logical method of Enter/Return moving to the next text entry field, rather than prematurely closing the dialog without all the fields being entered. If you did want to exit immediately, that's what the OK button is for.

Oh and while we are here, the buttons in a dialog box didn't always have to be OK and Cancel, leading to ridiculous Windows dialogs with great big explanations "Press OK to do this action or Cancel to do the other action", Where as on RISC OS you named the buttons "Do This" and "Do The Other".

Can ISPs step up and solve the DDoS problem?

Re: Actually curious...

We aren't even anywhere near ISPs working to make the situation better, they can't won't even stop making thinks worse. Look at Talk Talk, they've been told 76,000 of their customers Wifi passwords are circulating on the internet, and they won't even tell their customers to change them.

Guess King Battistelli's plan to fix the Euro Patent Office. Yep, give himself more power

Re: Ways to get rid of him

They did try other ways of getting rid of him such as cutting the brakes on his bike. But for full comedy effect, they should have suspended a grand piano over the bike, and cut the rope to that.

NASA spunks $127m on SSL-powered robot to refuel satellites in space

Re: "should be capable of refueling satellites that haven't been designed for the job."

Before you can even think about what refueling connector to use, you first have to grab hold of the satellite, which is extremely difficult if it hasn't been designed with any handles, and has protruding solar panels and antenna. It was difficult enough for shuttle astronauts to do by hand, so a machine is going to have quite a challenge.

Sigh... 'Hundreds of thousands' of... sigh, web CCTV cams still at risk of... sigh, hijacking

OpenCAM?

What's needed is the camera equivalent of OpenWRT for routers, allowing the vulnerable firmware to be replaced with something more secure - as long as the camera has re-programmable flash.

What can we use to hit Intel between the eyes, thinks Qualcomm – a 10nm ARM server chip

Raspberry Pi 4

After this mornings disappointment at the cancellation of Broadcom's Vulcan, we can always dream that this could be in a Raspberry Pi 4.

Broadcom quietly dismantles its 'Vulcan' ARM server chip project

Re: Raspberry Pi 4

Yes but it's no Vulcan. I tried it out the Pi3 with an 64 bit version of SLES at the weekend. On a small C++ test program I got a 40% performance increase compared to the 32 bit code. The python version was half the speed though.

Raspberry Pi 4

Damn, I was looking forward to having one of those in the Raspberry Pi 4.

China and Russia aren't ready to go it alone on tech, but their threats are worryingly plausible

Your balls

Going in to a joint venture with China is a worse prospect than even a joint venture with Microsoft. With Microsoft you can expect to have your balls cut off and handed back to you, with China expect them to be cut off and then find cheap copies being sold everywhere before you can wince.

Microsoft says LinkedIn will make Trump, Brexit, voters feel great again

Voted leave

Microsoft says buying LinkedIn will help to address the middle class discontent that saw Britain vote to leave the European Union and America vote to leave politics as we know it behind by electing Donald Trump.

I've got news for Microsoft, I addressed my middle class discontent by voting to leave Microsoft long before voting to leave the EU.

BAE Systems' autonomous research aircraft flies itself to Scotland

Yes people are fallible when in control of aircraft or other forms of transport, but so are the people who design the software for automated vehicles. The difference being that if there is a human in the loop they can try to use their human ingenuity to try to avert disaster, if the computer is in control and the situation hasn't been thought of during the design process, there is no hope.

The Hudson ditching was due to bird strikes taking out both engines.You might be thinking of the Colombian crash, if you are thinking at all.

Ofcom fleshes out plans to open up BT's ducts and poles

Re: How many times?

That would explain the deja-vu.

Sony kills off secret backdoor in 80 internet-connected CCTV models

I had hoped for better

You expect this sort of thing from no-name Chinese camera makers, but a high profile company like Sony? Well I suppose their rootkit team had to go somewhere.

Cassini tickles Saturn's rings ahead of final death plunge

Re: All the best science

The point of the fiery destruction is that the probe doesn't crash in to and contaminate one of the major moons. But with all this diving in and out of the rings with a non trivial chance of collision, are the boffins sure that a debris cloud couldn't form that could eventually reach the moons?

Microsoft boffins think VR visions will rival drugs by 2027

Clunky

If you thought the Windows 8/10 interface was a step backwards, just wait until you have to wear a clunky headset to use it.

Bloke sold cash register code to restaurants that deliberately hid sales from taxmen

Re: the various tax boards WILL check up...

They aren't forced to be a tax cheat in the same way you aren't forced in to childish uppercase name calling.

Hollow, world! Netflix premieres Java in-memory database toolkit

Eh?

I'm pretty sure my smart TV has nowhere near room for a data set of 100GB, what gives?

Why your gigabit broadband lags like hell – blame Intel's chipset

Re: Intel seem to be a bit fallable

Should have gone with an ARM SOC.

Microsoft, IBM, Intel refuse to hand over family jewels to China

The cheek of it

It's not like they haven't stolen most of the secrets already.

Axel Springer boss defends Facebook in fake news controversy

On Brexit

We are better off than the rest of Europe now, and in 5 years we'll be hell of a lot better off.

And that's not a fake story.

Google turns on free public NTP servers that SMEAR TIME

Re: Smearing

You don't use the calendar time set by NTP for anything other than human readable output, any program that is remotely sensitive to time differences should be using the monotonic API, which is just a value incrementing at a constant rate and completely unaffected by leap seconds or any other adjustment to the calendar time.