Posts by blcollier

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

WHDLoad. Honestly, it’s a lot easier.

I can’t say for AROS… But it is possible to image from real floppy drives and/or hook them up to UAE (and its derivatives such as Amiga Forever). The catch is that you need additional hardware between the floppy drive and the computer. The leading contenders are the Greaseweazle (which also allows for imaging disks at the magnetic flux level) and the Drawbridge.

There are people who will still argue that the real hardware is always better, but ask yourself what’s more valuable or important to you: keeping the old hardware running and preserving/archiving old data, or just playing the games. The latter is easy - WHDLoad - but the former is a very deep rabbit hole.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Requirements

Late replies, we love ‘em!

And I don’t disagree with your overall sentiment: the more people use it the better. I do, however, have a great deal of skepticism as to whether it can ever actually be achieved. Maybe this is just early onset “Grumpy-Greybeard-itis”, but I can’t help but think that if “voting with one’s wallet” was sufficient to move the market then we’d have been using Linux by default a decade ago.

It’s sad that we need to rely on one unfathomably wealthy corporate entity to “save” us from another unfathomably wealthy corporate entity, but we really do need Valve pushing back against Windows. In the PC space, there’s no one else who has sufficient clout in the market. Competition is already dwindling rapidly: Nvidia utterly dominate in GPUs, AMD just aren’t competing in budget price brackets, and despite their efforts Intel’s GPUs aren’t making much headway; Intel are being toppled in the consumer space, but AMD are starting to pull the same kind of monopolistic tricks that Intel did when they were on top.

Bleh, it’s too much of a sunny Friday to be so depressed about this. Who’s driving us back from the pub then?

Re: Requirements

> With Steamplay/Proton, Linux is more than viable for most gamers, and doesn't require a new purchase to move away from Windows.

In general you’re not wrong, but there’s definitely some nuance there.

There are still issues with anti-cheat systems running under translation/compatibility layers, where you run the risk of being banned. It’s all well and good to say “we’ll just don’t buy those games then”, but people have already invested time and money into these games (sometimes considerable amounts), and that isn’t something you can throw away lightly.

Then there’s performance. In some cases this is actually better under Proton, but it can very much be lacking when it comes to support for more modern features like ray tracing or upscaling technologies. And, again, as much as RT might be derided as useless frippery, it’s become a lot more prevalent- some games now even *require* hardware RT acceleration. While frame interpolation is still dubious in my view, some of the upscaling technologies are very good indeed.

And finally we have the elephant in the room, drivers… Intel & AMD are definitely better in this regard, but Nvidia still has a hell of a long way to go, even with their proprietary drivers. Simply avoiding Nvidia when embarking on your Linux gaming voyage isn’t an option: like it or not, and for better or worse*, they are the dominant GPU manufacturer for PC gaming.

I don’t want to sound like I’m being overly negative, so I will somewhat temper these criticisms/caveats by saying that the progress made in the last 5 years is *incredibly* impressive. For the most part, it does “just work”.

*Worse. It is definitely worse.

Trump says he has a problem if Apple builds iThings in India

I suspect you already know this quite well, but that answer is no.

I suspect that you already know quite well everything else I’m going to say, so take this as more of a general statement in support of your post, rather than a direct reply/criticism/troll/etc.

Part of the reason manufacturing electronics in China works so well is that *everything* is there. The capacitors that go on the board are made in a factory down the street. The capacitor factory needs metals and other raw materials in order to make their products, and the factories that make those raw materials are down the road from the capacitor factory. And so on. You simply cannot get that kind of supply chain integration at that scale anywhere else in the world right now. Chinese manufacturers can literally walk to a local market and buy half a million components for a production run there and then.

You *can* absolutely make iPhones in America. Of course it’ll take a while to get the facilities built and recruit & train people to work there, and unless you produce *all* the components and raw materials needed domestically, you’re still going to have to import from abroad. And it’ll still cost a *hell* of a lot more.

The Raspberry Pi proudly claims UK-based manufacturing, and while I don’t want to detract from their success in this regard, it’s perhaps more pedantic/accurate to say that they’re “assembled” here. The Sony plant in Pencoed still has to import all the components & materials needed, most of which comes from China (though IIRC some materials do come from India).

But, of course, it’s rather a tall order to expect Drumpf or his lackeys to understand this. He’s acting like exactly what he is: a (failed) real estate developer from the late 80s & early 90s. He cut his teeth on extortion; at the time, the mafia and organised crime had a serious foothold in New York labour unions & construction. Ex-mafia dons have even openly said that they had met Trump, along with many other (unnamed) high profile politicians & business leaders. It seems that the lessons he learned then are the only lessons that ever stuck in his head.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

macOS Terminal Pedantry Ahoy

I know this was a largely throwaway line that was somewhat tangential to the article, but… I am a pedantic nerd, and someone is wrong on the internet ;)

> There is a terminal emulator, but like on a Mac, you can ignore it

As a developer whose daily driver is an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro… hard disagree on this. I’m regularly working in a terminal prompt. I *can* manage without the terminal, but by ‘eck it’d slow me down.

Arguably I’d be much better off using Linux as my day-to-day work machine - aside from the rather impressive hardware and stellar battery life, there’s nothing special about macOS that makes it particularly suited to what I need. However corporate policy rarely aligns with developer preference. I can have a really flexible and powerful MacBook or a heavily locked-down Dell-something-or-other running Windows.

Getting back to the wider article however it’s good to see progress on Haiku, however glacial it may be. I remember being utterly blown away by the original BeOS - running an entire multimedia OS from a single floppy disk was unheard of for the time.

The NPU: Neural processing unit or needless pricey upsell?

Re: Strikes me...

> more useful functionality could be dynamically assigned by replacing the microcode on demand

You mean like... some kind of array of gates, that can be re-programmed... in the field... Huh, what a cool idea, a Gate Array that's Programmable in the Field - maybe we could call it a GAPF.

Wait... Hang on... That already exists, doesn't it...

I am indeed gently poking fun, the fact you used the term 'soft CPU' already tells me you know what an FPGA is ;). But I do remember when FPGAs were supposed to be the Next Big Thing in server silicon, being reprogrammed on-the-fly to execute specialist tasks.

But FPGAs did give us cycle-accurate replication of classic computers and console systems, without the need for software hacks/workarounds or interpolation layers, so there's that to be grateful for :).

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

> If I remember correctly it was very easy to do, it just required a basic computer, a radio capable of receiving the correct frequency and some small software that (from memory could fit on a floppy &) was available on the internet.

I was talking about this exact thing with my other half yesterday.

Back in the very late 90s, me and a friend did exactly that. All you had to do was hook up the audio output from a radio scanner to a computer’s sound card, tune to the right radio frequency (or frequencies, I can’t remember), run the appropriate POCSAG decoder software, and hey presto. My mate already had the radio scanner, so all it needed was a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm minjack cable.

It was laughably trivial even back in 1999; I’ve no idea if similar radio systems are in use now, but if they are I imagine it’s even easier with cheap and freely available SDR dongles.

I hasten to add that I only did this once, and it was out of pure curiosity with no malicious intent. We only actually captured a handful of complete (and utterly mundane) messages, because a handheld radio scanner that a 17/18 year old could afford in ~1999-2000-ish didn’t exactly have the best antenna.

The Register's 2023 in gaming had one final boss: Baldur's Gate 3

Honestly... If Larian had incorporated so much of the lore and backstory that you're describing here I would have regretted buying it. If I'd needed to know the ins & outs of Bhaalspawn lore, or what happened to Viconia, or this character, or that character, I'd never have played it.

I was already somewhat apprehensive about buying the game since I hadn't played the original Baldur's Gate games, but within a couple of hours I realised it wasn't 100% necessary. I'd watched a few "recap" videos about BG1&2 which gave me some brief context, and that was more than enough for me.

When I say "writing", I'm not talking about how it weaves into or follows "established canon", I'm talking about the game in its own right. The characters we meet in the game, the dialogue we get, the story of Baldur's Gate 3 (not the BGU, the Baldur's Gate Universe), the "character" of the narrator, etc. It is leaps and bounds ahead of so many other modern games out there.

Yeah I kinda forgot to mention the player agency side of things. I won't go into detail because there doesn't seem to be a way to add "spoiler" tags here, but anyone who's played the Mass Effect trilogy will understand how disappointing it can be to have your choices rendered meaningless.

With BG3 it really does feel like they've thought of absolutely *everything*. It's refreshing to see so much flexibility in how you can approach any given quest or situation, and as a player it's fantastic that these choices actually have a meaningful impact. You're not Gordon Freeman running around the dilapidated ruins of his workplace while being bossed around by NPCs, you're completely free to do whatever you want (this is not a dig at Half-Life, not by any stretch of the imagination).

For me, one of the reasons Baldur's Gate 3 stands out from the crowd so much is that Larian have done something that other studios/publishers have consistently failed to do in recent years: released a polished product at launch. Of course there are bugs and issues to be found and addressed after launch - something I'm sure that many denizens of this site are familiar with - but on the whole it was a very well-polished game when it launched. Larian made excellent use of the "early access" period, using it to address many game-breaking bugs, much-needed balance changes, and incorporating the feedback of fans.

If you compare to just a handful of "big" releases on PC over the last couple of years... Cyberpunk 2077: 'nuff said. It ran fairly well if you had a spankingly high-end machine, but there were still major issues & bugs in the game and it's taken nearly 3 years to get it to what it arguably should have been at launch (DLC aside). Starfield has utterly dire performance on all but high-end PCs, and it's full of the same bugs and jankiness we've come to know and hate from Bethesda games. Rarely do I experience "game-breaking" bugs that cannot be recovered from, but I had several while playing Starfield; each required either losing dozens of hours of gameplay, or in some cases a complete re-start. Jedi Survivor continues to experience poor performance and image quality to this day, with frame-pacing issues being present on even the top-end hardware. Cities Skylines 2 struggles even on a 14900K or 7950X3D and an RTX 4090 - in fact some of its graphics settings were completely borked, having the exact opposite effect to what you'd expect.

I had this discussion elsewhere recently and, at its most basic level, Baldur's Gate 3 offers as much freedom and flexibility as old school text-based RPGs from decades past. But in the case of Baldur's Gate 3, it's far greater than the sum of its parts in my (not-so) humble opinion. All the core elements - animations, graphics, core gameplay mechanics, voice acting, scripting/writing, etc - are done extremely well in their own right, and they're brought together into a final product that's extremely well polished. Larian continues to put a lot of time and effort into fixing bugs and incorporating fan feedback. They even made the imp "Bing Bong" canon within the game (Context: "Bing Bong" was a character beloved by (at least some of) the party in the tabletop session that the BG3 voice actors did with High Rollers Dnd. His sole purpose was to open the door for prospective customers of a shop while yelling "BING BONG!").

Arguably no one but Larian Studios could accomplish such a massive and in-depth game, given their pedigree in D&D/RPGs, and it shouldn't necessarily be held up as a "standard" that all games should live up to. But it's a fantastic game that deserves the praise it gets.

Although I do wish the performance was a little better on Steam Deck! It's OK for the most part, hovering around 30-40fps (which is fine for this game), but there are points where it tanks right down to 10-15fps. No amount of graphics twiddling, short of making it a blurry mess, can improve it sadly.

Valve celebrates New Year by blowing off Steam support for Windows 7 and 8

So... you're arguing against something I didn't say. Software preservation is important, and I did touch on that (in a roundabout way), but that's not really what I was talking when I mentioned disingenuous positions/arguments.

What I said was that it is disingenuous to start using Steam and then stop using Steam - i.e. "ditching Steam" - if your rationale for doing so is the lack of offline installers. Steam never offered offline installers from day 1. Steam launched as a means to provide updates to Valve games and to function as DRM. Then it became a digital storefront a year or two later, and a year or two after _that_ it started offering third-party games. If offline installers are important to you then fine, don't use Steam; but making a big song and dance about "ditching" Steam over offline installers, regardless of your rationale for wanting them, is IMO disingenuous when 5 minutes of Google searches would have told you that Steam is not the platform you're looking for.

You misread my intent, because I'm not "pushing" anything. I happen to quite like Steam because I've had positive experiences with it, and it's been by far and away the most reliable storefront and digital distribution platform I've used. GOG is... fine... but in my experience, every other platform I've used has been hot garbage: Epic Games, EA Origin, Battle.net, Xbox, Games for Windows Live, etc. I pretty much always have a fast and reliable internet connection, and on the rare occasion when lack of connectivity will be a problem it will usually be a planned activity that I can prepare for (that's exactly what "Offline Mode" is for). Automatic updates are a positive for me because I play a lot of modern games; I would *not* want to play the launch versions of Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur's Gate 3, for example.

Please leave the polarised attitude to social media where it's usually found, and stop misrepresenting what people have actually posted.

There's no simple answer to that question.

There are a lot of reasons why a game might no longer be functional on modern systems - incompatible OS features, deprecated OS features, online services shut down by publisher, reliant on deprecated software (e.g. Games for Windows Live, originally needed by Fallout 3 and GTA4 on Steam), etc. None of those problems can really be solved by having an offline installer. It's true that GOG does make older games compatible with modern OS's, but that doesn't necessarily require offline installers. Even if you did want to rely on offline installers, you need to make sure that you also have the latest patches and that you have the disk space to store all this stuff. Regardless of whether you think it's a good thing or not, modern games can be *big* - the offline installer for one of the early versions of Cyberpunk 2077 was 95GB, and since then a metric buttload of content and updates have been added. It's worth remembering that "GOG" hasn't been "Good Old Games" for quite a number of years - it's CD Projekt Red's platform for digital distribution.

Objections to DRM are one thing, but I think it's a bit disingenuous for people to ditch Steam over offline installers when that's never been a feature that Steam has offered. It's always been a digital distribution and DRM system, right back to when it launched with Half-Life 2 over 20 years ago. DRM in games is... yeah, it's pretty crappy, but unfortunately it's a ship that sailed long ago.

I'm not stanning for Valve here, it's a billion dollar corporate entity that doesn't need fanboys to step in to defend them. So is CD Projekt Red (owner of GOG), for that matter. My preference for Steam is based purely on personal experience over the last 15 years of using it. And there's no easy answer to the question of DRM in games either, because the practice is so heavily established that it's going to be impossible for customers/individuals to influence the industry. If you're a PC gamer you're going to get it shoved down your throat whether you want it or not. Things like Proton and GOG definitely help, but they're unlikely to shift the mindset of corporations like Activision Blizzard, Microsoft, EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Primarily, vegetable glycerine (VG) and propylene glycol (PG). Both are perfectly safe ingredients, even when inhaled - both PG & VG are used in inhaled medicines and smoke machines. The residue left isn't harmful, it's just sticky, unpleasant, and an utter ballache to clean.

Open your goddamn windows when you vape indoors, people!

Not... really sure what you're getting at there...

The term "hotboxing" originates from smoking cannabis, where you (and your compatriots) would smoke so much that you'd fill the room with a thick haze of smoke. The term has been appropriated by vaping to describe the same thing: filling a room with a thick haze of (exhaled) vapour. No one dies because of a hotboxed room, and if you hotbox a room that you share with your pets or unwilling third parties then, even though they won't die from it, you're a bellend.

Other than having some kind of agenda, I have no idea why you'd think it's likely that it kills people.

Lest people think this is exaggerated, I can confirm this from personal experience. I used to vape heavily indoors and I'd often "hotbox" the room with clouds. If you go for the "big clouds, lots of fog" kind of liquids/devices, it will leave a sticky residue when it condenses on surfaces. Dust and other detritus sticks to it, meaning you can no longer simply run a duster or vacuum over it - you have to wash it off.

I never had any problems with the stuff ending up in my computer, but it did destroy a keyboard. I'd converted an old IBM Model M terminal keyboard to USB and had used it for years without issue, but it stopped registering keypresses about 6 months into lockdown. When I tore it down to figure out what was going wrong, I discovered the sticky residue coating the interior and the membrane had multiple traces corroded beyond repair.

I still do vape in my "office"(/gaming room), but these days I stand next to the wide-open window and blow the clouds outside.

Also, I'm surprised you weren't allowed to simply outright reject an obviously filthy machine. It _was_ Geek Squad though, so perhaps you didn't have that flexibility. I used to work in a local(ish) independent computer store around 2000-2001, and we rejected multiple machines for repair (even ones we'd sold) because they were so disgusting. Sometimes you wouldn't discover the full horrors until the case came off, but sometimes they didn't even get as far as the workshop. I can remember a handful of occasions where my boss flat out told customers that he wasn't even prepared to *touch* the machine, let alone take it in for repair. In almost all cases they were machines from a household where people smoked indoors. All half-dozen or so people working in that shop were all heavy smokers, myself included, but even we were revulsed by the state of some of these machines. You could smell them the moment they came in the door, it was vile...

Improved Java support poured into Microsoft's Visual Studio Code – will it be enough to tempt developers?

Re: I don't understand the attraction...

You are here, and the point of this article is way the hell over there. IIRC literally one line mentioned that VS Code has a browser-based offering through Visual Studio Online, and the chances are that people using VSO aren't doing heavyweight Java stuff.

FWIW, you don't need a massive hulking behemoth of a desktop to simply write code. Personally I would *prefer* a desktop, but for the most of the work I do the disk I/O speed (both random and continuous) is far more important than raw CPU horsepower. I *could* get more I/O speed out of a desktop if my company were willing to spend a *lot* of money on hardware (putting me out of sync with every other developer); however if I ever need enterprise-grade performance then instead of trying to get enterprise-grade performance out of consumer/business-grade hardware I simply move my workloads to enterprise-grade hardware.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

Re: You can pry my honorifics from my cold, dead brain cells

>But I would really have liked to be a boffin.

When you start getting called 'boffin' is when you know you've "made it".

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

They'll still remain the market leader, despite hardware niggles. Other SBCs might be more powerful or have more features, but very few support their products like the Raspberry Pi Foundation do.

FWIW people were saying that it would never succeed because of hardware "issues" right back at day 1, nearly 8 years ago. The original launch model was *very* touchy about USB power supplies and prone to brownouts on the USB bus. IIRC, the hardware was designed with the actual USB voltage spec in mind - 4.75v to 5.25v - but many USB phone chargers simply couldn't deliver that and their voltage dropped below 4.75v when under load. Cables were an issue back then also: even if a PSU could deliver in-spec voltages when under load, poor quality MicroUSB cables often caused a voltage drop meaning that the voltage at the power connector on the board was now out of spec. There was also a hardware design flaw that caused the USB/LAN controller to draw way more power than it should do. Yet here they are nearly 8 years later with over 25 million units sold.

UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35

Re: More nonsense

Except in a lot of cases they don't actually receive the benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, etc. They stay employed as a contractor and retain all the risks that entails...

All of the changes to IR35 so far are a pure political ploy so that the Tories can be seen to be "doing something" about tax avoidance without addressing the *real* problems with tax avoiders like Amazon, Google, Facebook, media companies, etc. Global megacorporations who do billions in revenue/profit in this country yet pay a disproportionately low amount of tax. The creative accounting might be perfectly legal but legal != fair.

'Horndog hackers' have a Wales of a time slinging smut from UK gov Twitter account

Re: A Freudian Slip Typo?

Twitter also has likes...

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

I can go one better: the combination for my luggage is 12345.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Not quite

One of the roads on a previous commute used sensors in the road for a right turn. All the other lights were all on a rotating sequence, but the right-turn filter would only go green if the road sensor interrupted the sequence. My motorbike wasn't heavy enough to trigger the sensor either... Usually I'd get lucky and I'd be behind other cars that would trigger the sensor, but every now and then I'd be at the head of the (rapidly growing) queue. I'd have to roll forward over the line and let the car behind me drive forward on to the sensor.

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Re: BTDTGTTS

Unless of course you forget to commit or roll-back your transaction and leave an uncommitted transaction hanging open which eventually brings down the database...

Re: BTDTGTTS

Oh yes, I experienced a particularly fun one last year which I plan to write up...

Re: I'll be borrowing this!

Ditto - I like that one.

Is Google's new cloud gaming service scalable? Yes but it may not be affordable, warns edge-computing CEO

Re: so, uh

I already practically rent access to my library of games, and that's bad enough. Many games these days require some form of back-end communication to a publisher's/developer's infrastructure simply to work; if not always-on requirements, then they're often backed by store-front DRM like Steam. Any one of those services could go offline at any time rendering what I've paid for completely useless. Someone decides that keeping the servers running for a beloved game is no longer profitable and suddenly I can't play the games I've paid for.

This halfway house idea is pointless. If I still need an expensive GPU to play games with this service then I will need a capable CPU which can deliver data to the GPU quick enough so that it doesn't bottleneck. If I have those two core components then I _already have_ a gaming PC, why do I need to let the game code run elsewhere and have my GPU render it locally? It's not like you're going to run out and get an RTX 2080 to install alongside your low-end i3. I get the argument about internet connection speeds but let's solve *that* problem instead, rather than create this weird solution that nobody needed or wanted. The GPU is by far and away the most expensive part of a gaming PC; if I've dropped £200-£300 alone on even a budget GPU then it's really not much more of a stretch to get some kind of i5 (or better) CPU, 8GB of RAM, and ~1TB disk space (you can live without an SSD for games storage)

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ support to arrive in Linux 5.1

Re: I would think ...

The SoC doesn't have the support for it IIRC. It still only supports USB2 too. Changing the SoC would be a massive massive undertaking and would break compatibility for a lot of stuff.

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

Re: Sssshhhhhhh!

> Beer, 'cos it's Friday, and 5 o'clock somewhere.

You wait until 5pm...?

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Elastic band RAM retention

Your little hack from years ago is pretty much exactly how Apple keeps the SODIMMS in place in the 2018 Mac Mini. They are held in place with rubber "shoes" that fit over the end of the sockets... Little plastic or metal clips are obviously too much of a stretch on the BOM.

WLinux brings a custom Windows Subsystem for Linux experience to the Microsoft Store

Re: The only use I can think of:

Wine is not an emulator - "Wine" is literally a backronym for "Wine is not an emulator". WSL is not an emulator either.

Nit-picking perhaps, but this is the comments section so... when in Rome...

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

Re: Top Boss

This. Punishing mistakes doesn't avoid mistakes in the future, it makes people better at covering them up.

Amazon and Netflix join Hollywood to lob sueball at 'Kodi' service SetTV

@Anonymous Custard

I regret that I only have one upvote to give you.

I've been a big fan of Kodi since the days when it was called XBMP (yes, even before XBMC) so I truly appreciate the hard work of all of Team Kodi.

This wouldn't be the first time that El Reg has mentioned Kodi in the headlines of a story which actually has nothing to do with Kodi itself when you dig into it: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/kodi_boxes_fail_safety_standards/. Oh look, who was the author of that story, I wonder...

Multiple-guess quiz will make Brit fliers safer, hopes drone-maker DJI

"Dear DJI, next time I ask for some GPL source code, maybe don't tell me no."

Well done that man. However I fear the message will fall on completely deaf ears: rather than comply with their legal obligations, I suspect DJIs reaction will be to tighten their restrictions/lockouts even further.

Thou shalt use our drone app, UK.gov to tell quadcopter pilots

Re: Autonomous drones ?

Holy crap, that second link... Absolutely demolished the report...

> Where are Mythbusters when you need them?

The Mythbusters might not be much help here. They have bad form with jet engines: they couldn't get a jet engine to flip a car over when Top Gear could. :D. IIRC they made up for it in a later episode though and did actually get a jet engine to flip a car (and Top Gear had an actual airliner at near-takeoff power instead of a smaller jet engine mounted to a truck).

True, you are talking about a relatively small amount of energy in a LiPo battery when compared to the size and strength of your average airliner jet engine.

Re: All I see here is

Your analogy is flawed.

You can drive your car but you can't go more than 40mph, and if you want to drive your car to work then you have to pay for a licence which is equal to or greater than the cost of the car. These new regulations are saying that you now have to carry separate registration documents when you drive your car (in addition to your licence to use your car for work purposes), you have to take another proficiency test, and your car can be confiscated if you don't carry your registration documents or you stray very slightly from ill-defined rules.

Also, what that guy said: recorded deaths directly attributable to multirotors in the last year... Yeah, I'm sure you can read.

>There is no evidence that a consumer drone could bring down an airliner.

There's no evidence but it's conceivable.

Almost everything on my 550mm-footprint hexacopter would likely be shredded by a commercial airliner's engine. Including the 3-cell 5.2Ah lithium polymer battery strapped to the belly... I don't even want to know what would happen if such volatile chemistry ignited in a jet engine...

Re: OK, so which part do I register?

No, I'm not. The Drone Code isn't clear... And on a blog post on the CAA website it also states "400 feet above *you*", which is also totally different to "400 feet above sea level".

Re: Death of the UK drone industry

... and a drone to fly such a camera, such as the DJI Matrice 600, will set you back around £4k-£5k. If you're flying ~10k worth of kit (excluding the lens or any other accessories) then no, a PfCO license at £1k won't be that much of a hindrance. A £1k Mavic Pro on the other hand can shoot 4K footage and is more than capable of professional aerial photography. That's where the problem starts to come in...

Re: Common Sense or New Laws

Not sure I entirely agree with that. Most of the cheapies you'll find for ~£100 or less would probably struggle to reach the existing altitude/range limits. Of course you could still fly it like a total knob, but it would be easy to track you down; most craft in that price range probably won't have a large enough transmission range to make it hard to track you down, especially when so many of them use WiFi for control. The "big boy" stuff, capable of autonomous flights or very long ranges, like DJI phantoms and such are not cheap.

News reports are not a good indicator, since you only get to hear about the extreme ends of the bell curve and usually it's relayed in a sensationalist manner.

Re: OK, so which part do I register?

The 400 foot ceiling refers to an "above sea level" limit (this is already in the Drone Code rules). Technically you're not allowed to fly a drone from your 800ft cliff because you're already above the limit. It's supposedly to avoid interfering with manned aircraft, but it's hard to see a manned aircraft wanting to get that close to an 800ft cliff...

Re: Death of the UK drone industry

Don't see why you're getting downvoted for that. I looked into this and was instantly turned off when I saw the cost of a PfCO license and the fact that you're still subject to the same restrictions as an unlicensed pilot (500m range, 400ft above you, not within 150m of people or crowds, etc) even when you're operating with permission on private property. Literally all that PfCO does is let you legally sell your footage/photos and that's a steep entry price to pay (ignoring the cost of "professional"-grade equipment in the first place).

I still have my hexacopter and I'm still going to fly it, but getting into professional/paid aerial photography is still quite far out of reach.

OK, so which part do I register?

I built my hexacopter from scratch; the "all-up" flying weight is ~1.8kg, so it definitely falls into the "must be registered" category. It crashed during its first flight and I had to completely replace the frame. Very soon I will be replacing the flight controller with a completely new unit. So far that's two fairly major components that will have been replaced; let's assume that at some point in the future I will replace these - or other - components again (that's a fairly safe assumption for a DIY hexacopter). This hexacopter is basically Trigger's Broom, so at what point do I need to re-register it? Replacing which component constitutes it being a "new" device?

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Re: While were at it....

Late to this party, but whatever...

>"Sure you will not. The cost of the damage to a bicycle in an average scrape with a car is significantly LESS than the excess on any insurance policy I know."

Know that for a fact, do you? I ride a frame worth £1000 (devaluation notwithstanding) and my insurance excess - yes, I am insured, my home insurance covers my bike in accidents - is £100. Damaging a carbon fibre frame will very easily make it unfit/unsafe to ride and will cost a lot more than £100 to fix. Even damaging just 1 wheel and the handlebars would cost more than £100 in parts, without even accounting for labour costs. So, yes, I would claim on my insurance, and if a third party was responsible for that accident then the insurance company would pursue that party. That latter point, as it happens, *is* a fact because in the past I have been the person at the insurance company that deals with cases where third-parties are liable for damages paid out on claims. That *includes* cases where motor insurance has had to reimburse costs paid out on a pedal cycle claim.

If you were involved in an accident with a cyclist and found to be at fault then you and your car insurance would pay the price for your negligence in exactly the same way as you would if you were responsible for an accident with a motor vehicle. Sure the costs are going to be lower but in pricing terms, a lower payout doesn't always mean lower risk.

You can't have it both ways. You can't require cyclists to have mandatory insurance in the same way that motor vehicles do and then *not* expect equal treatment when it comes to claims.

Re: While were at it....

I'm riding my lightweight road bike, which has a carbon fibre frame, along a city street and crash into you when you cut across in front of me. I'm relatively OK, the bike is still rideable, but your car has a massive scratch across the bonnet. I get back on the bike and cycle off, after telling you what a muppet you've been.

It's like any other hit and run: how is insurance going to help in this case? To complicate matters, I've got no registration number so you can't report my reg number to the police. Do I need a registration number on my bike as well as insurance?

It might *sound* like a sensible idea to require cyclists to have insurance but it's not entirely practical. If that were to happen however I could almost guarantee you that the cost of car insurance overall would go up; more and more cyclists would be claiming on their insurance, and in many cases the car driver is going to be liable. If I was involved in a cycling accident that wasn't my fault and I have insurance, you can be damn sure that I would claim on the insurance for the damage - and you can be damn sure that my insurance would do everything they can to establish that someone else was at fault and recover costs from the other party. If there's one thing that insurance companies are good at it's finding ways to avoid spending money.

Why are we disappointed with the best streaming media box on the market?

That's what I'd recommend to people looking for a 4K HDR streaming box.

My Roku 3 *was* great, but...

I would struggle to recommend a Roku to anyone else ever again.

The "smart" WiFi-Direct remote for my model basically doesn't work any more; every now and then it loses connection and no amount of fixes/troubleshooting will get it to connect again. I either have to stick with the smartphone app remote or factory reset the box to get the remote back.

Apps (sorry, "channels") are looking very tired these days. Most app developers seem to implement the same SDK with little effort at customising it or providing a decent user experience (see Netflix for an example of how to do it right).

Spotify support is simply dire. The Spotify app is utterly horrendous: it doesn't even support playlists any more - you literally cannot browse or play your own playlists - let alone anything useful like Spotify Connect. Spotify themselves don't want to know because the Roku Spotify app is third-party; they have no plans to make their own or "in-house" the existing one.

Don't get me wrong, the boxes do what they do pretty well... if you ignore the ragged edges.

Brit bank fined £75k over 1.5 million text and email spamhammer

£75k is pocket change.

Seriously. Fines like this show just how toothless the ICO can be. Obvs I don't know the numbers, but if they can generate even £85k revenue as a result of this campaign then they've made a profit and that will prove to their money men/managers that ignoring the rules can make good business sense.

Fine them £1 per message/call, not £0.05 - then we'll see companies sit up and start taking compliance seriously.

EDIT: I had a maths fail...

VPN logs helped unmask alleged 'net stalker, say feds

Re: So many posts about logs ...

So many posts about logs and yet not a single poop gag.

Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties

Re: I fscking loathe PETA

PETA are not an animal rights organisation, and El Reg should not be acknowledging them as such.

An organisation that kills over 90% of the animals it "rescues" cannot in anyone's mind be called an "animal rights" organisation.

An organisation that abducts and euthanises domestic pets cannot in anyone's mind be called an "animal rights" organisation.

This case does raise some interesting philosophical questions about animal rights (although what the hell use does the monkey have for royalties), but PETA are a hate group plain and simple.