Posts by druck

Ofcom mulls selling UK govt's IPv4 cache amid IPv6 rollout flak

Cattle Prod

It will take an Ofcom cattle prod to get ISPs like PlusNet even thinking about IPv6. Nothing achieved after 5 years of asking for TLS on POP3, so not much chance of them doing anything difficult, unless they are forced to by regulation.

Sony hackers dump more hunks of stolen data, promise another 'Christmas gift'

The Interview

Well I wouldn't have looked twice at The Interview before, but I'm sure as hell am going to see it now.

We're laughing at you, fat boy!

Samsung brings out new longer-lived 1TB Flash podule for PCs, notebooks

Re: Screw you christmas....

Just bought an 500GB 840 evo for £154 on Amazon, hopefully the price will drop further now the 850 is out, and I'll get another one, and we'll be all flash on all laptops.

Microsoft: Hey, don’t forget Visual Basic! Open source and new features coming

Performance?

Microsoft has kept VB mostly on a par with C# in terms of language features, and both compile to similar IL (Intermediate Language) binaries so performance is similar.

Similar as in equally dire compared to native.

Which country has 2nd largest social welfare system in the world?

Re: Tim writes...

Um... militant smokers or child haters or both?

Tim writes...

As an example, someone who spends their child benefit on a packet of ciggies (and who wouldn't need a couple after looking after a squalling brat all day?)

Quite a few actually.

Boffins: We have found a way to unlock the MYSTERIES OF SHEEP from old parchments

The Test of Time

After all, parchment was the writing material of choice for thousands of years, going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And it lasts thousands of years, not like modern paper which yellows in months, and degrades in a matter of years.

Plusnet customers SWAMPED by spam but BT-owned ISP dismisses data breach claims

Re: Where are your passwords and logon details?

PlusNet also don't support any form of encryption on email transit, despite many many years of pleading by users. So if you've set your phone or laptop up to collect email from PlusNet when logged on to public WiFi, you will sending your login details in plain text over an insecure network. The email user name is often the same as the primary email address used on the account.

Feast your eyes: 10 'fortysomething' smart TVs

Re: Dumb TV please

I don't want a completely dumb TV though. I bought a 32 inch for the bedroom last year without smart features as I've had a Raspberry Pi running XVMC to connect to it. However unlike our 2009 smartish TV downstairs it lacks HDMI_CEC which allows the TV remote to drive XBMC, so I have to use a wireless mouse instead. I also miss even a limited form of DNLA which allows me to send pictures and video from phone or laptop to the TV without having to change inputs to XBMC first.

Apple knob refusenik Sir Jony Ive handed award - for talking BOLLOCKS

Re: Talking of plain English

Lost all faith... wrote:

I only tend to wear a watch when it's impracticable to have a phone with me, such as in a swimming pool. Not that swimming pools don't have clocks, just I'm so short sighted I can't read the damn things.

I have the opposite problem, I'm now so long sighted my wrist is too close to see without getting my glasses, so fishing the phone out of a pocket is quicker. I still wear the watch out of habit though.

Evernote aims at corporate market with new chat feature

When I upgraded from my Galaxy S3 to the S5, the Samsung note taking application I had been using disappeared and was replaced with Evernote, so I foolishly signed in to try it out. What a mistake, I've never experienced such incessant nagging from an app, it bombarded my gmail account with endless emails imploring me to make use of it, explain features I don't care about, and offering free trials of the pro version. No matter if the application itself is any good or not, that earned it a swift deletion.

Never fear, Glassholes – Intel to the rescue! 'New CPU' for tech-specs

The real story is how much are Intel paying Google to use x86?

Sick of the 'criminal' lies about pie? Lobby the government HERE

Pi's

I thought this was going to be another article about Banana Pi's passing themselves off as being Raspberry Pi compatible, how disappointing.

Stop the IoT revolution! We need to figure out packet sizes first

Re: LoT is a stupid concept

Just goes to show; there's always a new generation of Luddities to claim we don't need any new form of technology.

Criticism of Uber's journo-Data Analytics plan is an Attack on DIGITAL FREEDOM

Buzz words

Didn't mention post-profit once.

Europe may ask Herr Google: Would you, er, snap off your search engine? Pretty please

Re: Google can't be split so easily.

And they need to sell advertising to fund the search engine.

How exactly do the EU think the worlds largest (and arguably best) search is supposed to be funded?

Or is their next proposal a splurge of billions of Euros of tax payers money to set up an unwanted euoogle search engine, to be what Gallieo will be to GPS. With the added disadvantage it can bend completely to the will of the EU over crazy legislation, such as the right to be forgotten?

Two driverless cars stuffed with passengers are ABOUT TO CRASH - who should take the hit?

TCAS is only advisory, it's up to the pilot to decide to go up or down as instructed (faster than left or right).

Bada-Bing! Mozilla flips Firefox to YAHOO! for search

Re: I for one will NOT be using Yahoo!

Or it could be the kick needed to just use Chrome all the time.

Space Commanders rebel as Elite:Dangerous kills offline mode

Re: Standard mistake to make

And lets not forget that BBC Micro version only had a handful of Kilobytes to play with even with the cleaver split screen technique reducing graphics memory, but it still managed to have 8 different galaxies with thousands of stars.

Vodafone: For Pete's sake! Apple’s 'soft' SIM's JUST AN EE SIM

Re: Sounds like Vodafone is unhappy

@Handy Plough

Make that 11, and have a down vote for name calling, without addressing any of the valid concerns made in the above comments.

This 125mph train is fitted with LASERS. Sadly no sharks, though

Re: Good, but not good enough

You don't need X-rays for finding cracks in rails, eddy current detection is far easier.

UK smart meters arrive in 2020. Hackers have ALREADY found a flaw

Re: Wi Fi meters...nothing but bad...

AC wrote:

If the smart-meters ever get home networked/domotics & Internet of Things, then it'd be just your Fridge/Freezer that was switched-off for 4 or 5 hours, your freezer wouldn't really notice, but the Grid would survive better.

You don't need a smartmeter or internet of things for that. All the device has to do is monitor the mains frequency, when it is below the nominal 50Hz (or 60Hz in some places) the grid has more demand than capacity. With a few pennies worth of electronics fridges, freezes, washing machines and dishwashers, etc could just pause, not for four hours, but a few minutes is all that is normally necessary before fast response hydro kicks in, giving time for slower backup plant to come online.

Apple SILENCES Bose, YANKS headphones from stores

Re: Suing for the reality distortion field?

The Bose system in the RX-8 is pretty damn good. It's got 11 speakers, and compensates for environmental noise, which is pretty important in a car.

Is living with Dolby Atmos worth the faff?

Re: Well it's not just the hassle and faff is it?

Either grow a pair and stand up for you right to decent speaker placement, or covert the garage, or at least get a man shed.

Aboard the GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP, there's a Mobe and a Slab and a TELLYBOX

Re: So Nexus 6 still 32-bit

ThomH wrote:

There are also some performance-oriented subtractions. ARM used to be famous for making every instruction conditional and allowing each to include a barrel roll. Both of those things are gone in favour of a shorter pipeline.

Yes, they've destroyed the beauty of the original 32bit ARM instruction set, the 64bit set has no character and could be anything. But then who actually programs in assembler any more to notice such things.

Radiohead(ache): BBC wants dead duck tech in sexy new mobes

Re: MiniDISC, anyone?

xpz393 wrote:

DAB is to radio what MiniDISC was to pre-recorded audio - A nifty improvement on its predecessor, but quickly outdated by a better, less expensive successor before it became widely adopted.

DAB isn't an improvement in any way shape or form over FM.

I remember in the 70s and early 80s being stuck listening to Radio 1 on flat mono Medium Wave before it got its own FM channel, and looked forward to the hour a day when it took over Radio 2's FM frequency and you could listen in high quality stereo. Most of the DAB channels are sub 128K mono, which is just as bad, if not worse than bloody 1970s medium wave.

US Trade Commission to chase NVIDIA's Samsung sueball

Re: Defunct products?

Ah, true.

Defunct products?

The Reg writes: Watching tech giants fight over defunct products is a magnificent spectacle. We'll keep you ringside.

Except in this case they've named Samsung's latest products.

You can ring my #bellogate. EMAIL STORM hits 29,000 hapless UCL students

Re: Panic

It did occur to her to pretend she hadn't seen it. She spent half the morning on the phone trying to confirm the time and location (missing from the email), complicated by the fact that voice mail wasn't working due to peoples email in-boxes being full of spam. In the end she went down there and did the presentation, and was glad she did.

Panic

My wife has started a masters at UCL and has only just been given access to the university mailing system. This afternoon she was trying to plough through the thousands of spams in her inbox, when she found that she has to do a presentation - tomorrow morning!

Zippy one-liners, broken promises: Doctor Who on the Orient Express

Re: The singer was cute

The Singer was Foxes.

Jaguar Sportbrake: The chicken tikka masala of van-sized posh cars

Didn't want to take a car like that to Tesco, but paired it up to the Netto of mobile phones? At least the GF has some taste!

Top 10 SSDs: Price, performance and capacity

Go for It

I have an 11.6" i3 Vivobook, the wife has the 15.4" i5 Vivobook. I put in a 240GB Samsung 840 SSD in mine, and it's far faster than the i5 for everything. Of course now she wants an SSD too, but it will have to be a 500GB to hold all her unsorted junk, so it's lucky the price has come down in the year since I bought mine.

How the FLAC do I tell MP3s from lossless audio?

Back in the 90s I ripped all my music collection to 128Kbps MP3 to fit on small SD cards of the time, and with no psycho acoustic model due to lack of of hardware FP on the ARM. I always wanted to get around to re-ripping it in much better quality, but I recently found out my hearing drops off a cliff after 8KHz, so not really much point.

Indian mom just loves it on Mars, tweets fave holiday snap

Less than the cost of Gravity

And the Indians understand physics, unlike those responsible for that plonker of a Hollywood film.

A Terabyte in my HOUSE? Got more than that in my POCKET

I'm very surprised it's using wireless-N and not the new 802.11ac.

Euro space boffins narrow down lander sites on comet doing 135,000km/h toward Sun

I'd imagine a big problem is the comet's highly irregular shape, the lander will be making a very slow decent so as not to bounce off, but it also doesn't want to be whacked by the big bobbly bit as it rotates.

Brit balloon bod Bodnar circumnavigates planet

Re: Stealth Baloon

There aren't many helicopters at 13,000m (43,000ft), and the tiny balloon + payload would have zero affect on a jet engine, which is design to handle ingesting large birds.

Call off the firing squad: HP grants stay of execution to OpenVMS

The whole 9 yards

Why not go the whole 9 yards and bring it over to 64bit ARMv8?

Pentagon hacker McKinnon reinvents himself as SEO guru

Re: He was a very naughty boy

You think the tricks used by SEOs to punt their worthless sites constitutes an honest living?

Leaked Windows Phone 8.1 Update specs tease details of Nokia's next mobes

Re: Talk About Dizzying Hardware Specs.

Hardly impressive to Android users who have been enjoying 1920x1080 on sub-5" devices since 2013, maybe WinPho will be able to match that by 2016.

KDE releases ice-cream coloured Plasma 5 just in time for summer

Re: It's not just a GUI change, it's a "trendy" infection....

What next, bloody upper case menus too?

Carbon tax repeal won't see data centre operators cut prices

Good on you Aussies, for ripping up extortionate green taxes.

ARM: We've signed 41 new deals and we are IN to the Internet Of Stuff

Re: 90% market share

ARM has 90 per cent of smart phones

Really, as low as that? If so the other 10% sure as hell isn't Intel, they account for less than 1% according to Forbes. So what is in the other 9%? My guess would be more ARMs.

Mars needs oceans to support life - and so do exoplanets

Re: Bah!

If UAE said the sky was blue and the grass was green, I probably wouldn't believe then now.

At least not until they'd answered and FOI request and released their data.

So whither Microsoft? If Nadella knows, he is keeping it well hidden

BONG?

Is Nadella's new memo writer Steve Bong?

F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track

Re: How many laps?

Can't even do a full race distance - pathetic.

Top ten car gadgets: Get your motor running with new shiny-shiny

DAB

Please elaborate on those scales falling from your eyes, as every time I've driven a car with DAB, I've been forced to retune back to FM within 15 minutes, given the shocking signal quality pretty much everywhere. Even when you can get it, why suffer low bit rate mono, when the same channels are in glorious stereo on FM.

Qualcomm fires DMCA shotgun at alleged code thieves on GitHub – including itself

This will have been done by a IP Protection agency hired by Qualcomm, who will have googled "Qualcomm" and fired off DCMA takedowns without bother to check the ownership of any of the matches.

Bill Gates asks telcoms standards boffins to define future of money

WinPhoFail

I haven't quite spotted how BG is going to get those 2.5 billion people to do mobile banking on Windows phones, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.