Posts by druck

We're not looking for MH370 in the wrong place say investigators

At last someone posting sense.

The underwater terrain in that region is so mountainous and irregular they would have difficulty finding the wreckage above water with radar or optically, never mind at depths of many thousands of feed with far lower resolution sonar. They may have passed very close, but not seen it, if it was shadowed by a gully.

Remember how long it took to find Steve Fossett's plane in Sierra Nevada (smaller aircraft, but less scattered on impact), in a far smaller and easily reachable search area.

Firefox to banish hidden Flash files – and kill off sneaky ad snoopers

Raspberry Pi

The BBC News flash video clips play with scrambled sound on my Pi2 & Pi3, not managed to get it to play the HTML5 version yet (no problems with HTML5 on YouTube).

What's big and red and squashes 276 bugs, 19 of them critical?

Well when everyone stops suffering Adobe products, Oracle will be there to take up their mantel.

After Monday's landing, SpaceX wants to do it in triplicate

Re: I just love the idea...

Split into 4 - we want to see the second stage too.

Brit chip biz ARM legs it to Softbank for $32bn

Re: ARM is 10% cheaper than it was a month ago.

I bought at 42p, and sold after 7 years, the last 5 of which it was hovering around a pound, of course it immediately took off like a rocket to the £10 mark. With the takeover I'd have stood to make over 60K in profit if I'd held on another 7 years.

Ronan Dunne jumps O2 ship

No more interference

Well the EU wont be sticking it's nose in to the UK's mobile market for much longer, so O2 and Three could still get together.

Generous Fiat Chrysler offers $1,500 for car security bugs – or two minutes of annual profit

Daewoo

They could always give away a free Daewoo with every bug found, worth about the same as the cash, but perhaps still not much of an incentive.

White hat banned for revealing vulns in news sites used by London councillors

Banned?

What was he banned from? The only mention of banned is in the headline.

Comms intercept commish: There were some top secret orders

Re: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills?

Paranoid rubbish. It's far more likely that MI5 was brought in to investigate industrial espionage by foreign actors against UK based companies.

Post Brexit EU will spend 'stability and peace' budget funding Chinese war drones

Come on remainers (there seems to be a lot of you on here), answer the question; do you approve of the EU doing this, and want us to be part of it?

European Patent Office palace coup bombs

Another institution beginning with European we'll be glad to see the back off.

Verisign keeps its dot-com cash cow until 2024

Re: Greed

Sorry no, if I see a .ru the alarm bells start going off.

Michael Gove says Britain needs to create its own DARPA

Re: Terrifying

@Kurt Meyer

Adventurism/Intervention? When was the last time Britain hared off on its own?

The Falklands, and went pretty well too boot. Gave the our Vulcan it's first and last taste of combat, at a record (at the time) range of 3900 miles.

3GPP sets 2018 as freeze date for 5G air interfaces

3GPP

I always thought 3GPP was the file extension of the crappy low res videos produced by my first Nokia with a camera.

Undergrads build 12.6-TFLOPS cluster out of four nodes, 112 cores

Mostly GPU

A naive look at the top two results suggests that most of the work was being done by the 8 K80 GPUs, and the extra 56 CPUs that the 1st place team used, didn't bring much to the party.

25,000 malware-riddled CCTV cameras form network-crashing botnet

Turn off UPnP

Most of these IP cameras are just plain nasty, even if you've got a reasonably secured router if UPnP is enabled, they will reconfigure the router to open up numerous ports to dodgy Chinese servers in order to allow equally dodgy smartphone apps to remote monitor the camera feed. Often there is absolutely no security, all that is needed is a simple and easily guessable serial number of the camera.

Microsoft joins battery-saving browser bandwagon with Edge claims

He who controls the OS...

...controls the power usage.

Ask yourself how easy would it be to for Microsoft to tweak the OS so that certain programs have better or worse power consumption?

Shakes on a plane: How dangerous is turbulence?

Gloucester to Bankok...

Well not in the same flight. During my PPL training on a humid summers day I felt quite a bump, and my instructor told me to look at the altimeter - it had just dropped 500ft! A few months later my friends and I were flying back from Australia and the plane was attempting to land at Bankok during a thunderstorm. After holding for 20 minutes, they decided to give it a go. During the decent there were several big bumps like the one I experienced. I reassured my fiends everything was OK, but I was wondering how many 500fts we could have left.

Will you get reimbursed if you're a bank fraud victim? Brits think not

Re-imbursement yo-yo

I've suffered two incidents of fraud, in each case I was initially re-reimbursed, then the bank decided to take the money back again. A strongly worded complaint to my branch manager reversed that decision in each case.

Republicans threaten to derail internet transition

ICAN == FIFA

You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

Re: A long time ago ...

It's far more likely that while Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent. was corrected in the language file, the actual text displayed was hard coded in the application, and never changed. They should have tried switching language and seeing if that pop-up was still in English.

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

Re: Wow!

Avoiding any firm with the word Monster in them, would be a good idea. Take Monster Cables for instance, £99 for a 4 gang extension lead or £250 for a HDMI lead - and that was years ago when I was last foolish enough to enter a branch of Dixons/Currys/PC World.

IBM's quantum 'puter news proves Big Blue still doesn't get 'cloud'

Re: Sorry but...

"work with the individual quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing,"

Might be possible if it wasn't all bollocks.

NIST readies 'post-quantum' crypto competition

Re: The Hype surrounding Quantum Computing reminds one of this:

I can't wait for my own quantum code cracker, powered by cold fusion of course.

AMC sobers up, apologizes for silly cinema texting plan

Re: Interesting that...

It smells like a publicity stunt all along to me.

Storage-class memory just got big – 256Mbit big, at least

Re: Hybrid drive?

Lets wait until we actually see it shipping.

iOS 'date bug' can be exploited over Wi-Fi using NTP

bazza wrote:

If nothing else an NTP client should never accept a time that's wildly different from what the client' own RTC is saying.

So if your RTC or it's battery has failed, that's your device screwed?

Likely as not if the RTC isn't working, it will give a default date way in the past, and the NTP client should bring it back to the present once the network is up.

'Fart detector' wins Chinese Physics prize

Blaming the dog...

An alternative to the dog is blaming your children, well maybe just the 6 month old now, as the 2½ year old will happily betray you, laughing hysterically "but that was you daddy". If you are without your own children, you can try someone else's; "aww, has he/she got a poorly tummy".

Trump carded again: Hotel security aced

Curry not Gates

The Trump would be better off asking Acorn's Chris Curry, as he had to explain Bill Gates how networking worked.

Hi! Up here! I'm your Amazon drone. Do you mind if I land now?

Re: Propellors.

Anyone who has ever been within half a mile of the Kamov Ka-50 helicoptor knows that contra rotating blades, don't cancel noise, they multiply it!

Microsoft announces Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming this summer

Cognitive Failure

Unfortunately for sight impaired users each version of Windows gets less friendly to assistive software. Back on NT/Win2K/XP screen readers could hook in to every application at a low level, and find out what it was writing to the screen, allowing a full picture of text and graphics to be built up, and to improve navigation for keyboard only users. Unfortunately each step in improving security in the later OS's, has had the effective of preventing the screen reader gathering the information, and aiding in navigation. There are assitive APIs in the OS, but they fall far short of what is required to give the best experience.

With a good screen reader an experienced user can drive applications as complex as Office and Visual Studio with no difficulties - with the monitor switched off! If it wasn't for the clicking of the braille display and slight sound from the speech synthsiser through the headphones, you wouldn't know the person on the other side of the partition was visually impaired.

Actually you would, from the sheer speed which they can pull up information, being unhindered by the visual ambiguity of most applications, particular the new flat colourless Windows 10 apps, and employing far better honed memory skills to be able to go straight to the right place without having to look for it!

Amazon to bad cable slingers: USB-C yourself out

Re: And in the UK?

An when a trader is found to be selling a dodgy cable what are Amazon going to do? The same as when I pulled them up for selling equipment with potentially lethal poor quality fuseless UK style plugs - FUCK ALL.

They tried to totally avoid responsibility by saying they are just a market place - wrong - it is Amazon who take my money and the product comes from their warehouse, that makes them the seller, and the other company their supplier.

They said they would stop selling the item, but I checked and they had not, the pictures of all the fake plugs were just changed to real ones. They admitted to me that the were still selling existing stock, despite being notified how dangerous they were, after that they stopped replying to me.

I then passed it on to Trading Standards, who were not interested whatsoever. So much for consumer safety.

Pothole campaigner sprays Surrey street with phallic paintings

Re: Councils

JC_ wrote:

You may feel that cyclists are holding you up, but they aren't, other drivers going nowhere fast in their cars are.

No, somewhere ahead of that queue of cars will be a bus or a lorry doing under 10mph because they can't overtake a cyclist on a narrow road.

Samsung Galaxy S7: Big brand Android flagship champ

Re: Embrace the change!

BlackBolt wrote:

Leaving your devices plugged in ALL night is really bad for the, so maybe if you looked after the battery a bit better, you wouldn't have such a strict view requiring a replaceable battery.

Remind me to set an alarm at 3 fucking am just to unplug the phone.

Google tries to run from flailing robotics arm

Re: What an amazing, almost spooky video..

Re: Aqua Marina - Are you sure? All of those robots were in space, back in the 1970s we'd just landed on the moon, we had supersonic passenger aircraft, and were developing space planes, we could believe in the future of both space travel and robots. Now in the 2010s we are pretty much resigned wobbly earth based robots.

Woz: World-changers to Apple Watches, why pay for an overpriced band?

Re: Who actually wears a watch anymore, and why?

My wife has just bough me a smart watch - a no name Chinese one with colour touch screen for £9. The built in apps are pretty useless, and most of the notifications are annoying, but ironically it is good as just a watch, as it has a large bright display which means I can tell the time without glasses.

Airbus' Mars plane precursor survives pressure test

Commentary

Anyone able to hear the commentary on the video, over the music?

Woz waxwork weady to woll

Re: All hail The Mighty Woz!

Hopefully the exhibit will be clearly labelled; the guy who created first Apple computers, the guy who sued other people for using rounded corners, and the guy behind the biggest waste humankind's time,.

FBI says NY judge went too far in ruling the FBI went too far in forcing Apple to unlock iPhone

streaky wrote:

The problem is it probably requires Apple to abuse their signing keys

Well if Apple doesn't want to abuse them, the FBI can always seize them, and do the abuse itself.

Raspberry Pi 3: Four days old and already flying

Re: "We make these Pis"

I told my wife about it on Monday, one turned up on the doorstep on Wednesday!

She's bought me one of each variant of model B so far. The Pi3 is going to replace the Pi2 as my ssh gateway machine, and the others are going to shuffle down the chain of media players connected to TVs, leaving my original 256MB B available for electronic projects as it was originally intended - if I ever get the chance!

Computers abort SpaceX Falcon 9 launch

Re: *Doesn't apply to fireworks

But on rockets with mixture of liquid fuelled engines and solid boosters, they start the liquid fuelled engines first, and make sure they are working, before lighting the unstoppable solids. So the Shuttle, or anything else with solid boosters, can abort in exactly the same way as this did.

Reinvented ransomware shifts from pwning PC to wrecking websites

Re: "Victims...

Just make sure that one of the two free files is a tarball backup of the entire site.

My devil-possessed smartphone tried to emasculate me

Re: As for the RAZR..

My first ever phone was a Motorola, and it was the last ever Motorola too, due to the abysmal UI.

Gosh, what a huge shock: Ofcom shies away from BT Openreach split, calls for reform

Opportunity Missed

This would have been the ideal opportunity on bringing BT to book over their broken promises to run Openreach as an arms length organisation and finally spin it off as a truly separate business. Instead they've been given the green light to carry on the same as usual.

Particularly galling is not a thing was said about BT forcing everyone to fund their acquisition of EE via the hikes in the wholesale broadband prices (The Reg), regardless of who your ISP is (except for a tiny few that don't use the last mile).

Microsoft acquires Xamarin: An obvious move not without risks

@ HmmmYes

Despite all my pre-conceptions I too ended up liking C# when I started using it. It's saving grace was that there was a commercial company supporting it on non Microsoft platforms, but not that's gone now. We can look forward to a $400m to $500m write down in a years time, mono rotting, and Core.NET changing in incompatible ways on every second day of the week.

Can Qualcomm broker a peace deal between LTE and Wi-Fi in unlicensed spectrum?

Ofcom

Lets get in early and start lobbying Ofcom to prevent this happening in the UK.

Plane food sees pilot grounded by explosive undercarriage

Is there anyone on board that can fly a plane?

Just once, please, just once!

Ukraine has a Eurovision pop at Russia

Terry's gone now...

...just let it die with him.

Eurovision Song Contest uncorks 1975 vote shocker: No 'Nul point'!

It's dead, it's an ex-contest

Look dear old Wogan has popped his clogs, just let Eurovision die with him, as even he got fed up with it in the end.

PC sales aren't doing so great – but good God, you're buying mountains of Nvidia graphics cards

Your no-faster but cooler CPU, does give you the opportunity to fit an even hotter running GPU in the case.