Posts by no-one in particular

Think virtual reality is just about games? Think again, friend

Re: This has awesome potential

> I do suggest that 360 degrees of view isn't necessary. 270 or so would let you look around while keeping your attention on The Good Stuff. Also allow the film crew to be somewhere out of sight.

And if we're talking about sitting in a cinema, just far round can you crane your neck without getting very uncomfortable or banging into the people all around?

(Yes, you could have some controls to pan aorund without moving your head but wouldn't that remove the feeling of "being there"?)

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

Re: Voice, gesture recognition, no thanks

> Someone tell me why the buggering fuck I would want to twirl my hand in the air in a futile manner instead of reaching a further 2 inches and actually just turning the volume control?

Or using the controls on a stick just below the steering wheel? Assuming BMW can do at least as well as my old rust-bucket Peugeot?

Google GPS grab felt like a feature, was actually a bug

> have built in RFID, for that always tracked feeling.

Do you mean the NFC antenna that, e.g., Samsung put onto some of their batteries? The antenna that exists to let *you* use the NFC functionality (at your discretion)?

http://www.snopes.com/samsung-microchip/

QANTAS' air safety spiel warns not to try finding lost phones

Re: Qantas is mixing up they flights?

> But I still don't understand why the passengers should not search for their phone by them selves

Can you see it down there? Almost got it? Hang on, I'll just adjust the seat so you can get your fingers in. What's that funny smell?

Microsoft to overhaul Windows 10 UI – with a 3D Holographic Shell

Re: They have to be joking

> Ah, wonderful, so you agree with me that this is a covert way for Microsoft to get us to leave our cameras online in confidential areas or in our homes, because something will have to pick up that real world data

Or just as shown, and has existed for a fair old while, a (semi) transparent screen onto which the display is projected whilst you just look through it for the Real World.

Pepper's Ghost

Re: IT'S NOT F**KING HOLOGRAPHY!

I was really hoping that that would be the first comment to this article.

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

Re: Vodaphone, a shining example of customer support

<so annoyed I can't even be bothered to spell their name the way they like - wtf is a "fone'?>

Vodaphone, a shining example of customer support

So I had to learn about this from an El Reg article, no letter, not even an email about it from Vodaphone!

Been with Demon since the tenner-a-month days and foolishly let myself drift into the trap of using lots of xxx.demon.co.uk email addresses, making it a pain to move away. Oh, and the static IP has been very useful to me.

Now trawling the above comments for good ideas about alternative ISPs, trying to figure out a decent way to take the "buy own domain, switch ISP route".

VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

Re: Inappropriate gavels

I assumed it meant that this case is an auction, deepest pockets win...

Protect your staff from Toronto's terrible Twitter trolls, bosses told

Re: The word trolling is morphing into trolls

> I believe trolling is another method of of fishing

Well, you live and learn. We just referred to that as a variant of line fishing back when I were young (on the working coast, btw) - probably because we'd never be able to distinguish the words when spoken!

Re: The word trolling is morphing into trolls

Uh, not really.

In years gone by, even before all this electronic nonsense, you'd get people barging into conversations - the response being "just ignore the troll". As in, reference to the annoying brute beneath the bridge. From that, someone who acts like a troll is - trolling.

However, considering your

> People who are trolling are not just fishing for reactions.

maybe you are confusing "trolling" with "trawling"?

IoT baby monitor style hacks still a threat

> Internet of Things (IoT) products such as ... photo or document storage devices

So some kind of file server (that I just happen to be using for photos and docs) is now part of "IoT"?

Torrent is a word, and you can't ban words, rules French court

> "just because BitTorrent is sometimes used for piracy."

> Er no almost all of BitTorrent traffic is piracy some say upto 99.7% of it is.

Leaving aside the unassailable statistical accuracy of "some say", how does that stack up against the use of, say, HTTP or FTP for piracy? At what level of piracy (and other undesirable activity) should those other channels start to be denigrated?

Tupperware vehemently denies any link to storage containerisation

Re: "Kleenex"

>Probably a convenient shortening of the Elastoplast brand name.

Try t'other way around: 'have you seen that new kind of elastic sticky plaster, I think they called it "Elastoplast"?

You can buy Windows 10 Enterprise E3 access for the price of a coffee

Re: And so it begins

>The only one who is mad is person who thinks that retraining users would be cheaper than

> $7 per user per month. In reality loss of productivity will be more that 100 times of that.

Because Windows never changes from release to release so the re-training costs for that are zero?

Honey, why are porno apps on your Android?! Er, um, malware did it!

Re: Be Wary

> OpenSSL taught us all that lesson the hard way...

So you are saying that a bug that compromises security is on as par with malware that contains multiple ways to deliberately attack your device and works hard to prevent you from removing it?

Don't go chasing waterfalls, please stick... Hang on. They're back

Re: Elmer FUD!!!

> then they need to be released

Oh how I loathe that kind of weasel wording.

Astroboffins create music from SPAAAAAAAAAAACE

Re: Moody Blues beat them to it ... ;-)

the words aren't as good, but Isao Tomita's "Dawn Chorus" album contains music from the stars (for the title track, our very own star).

Not two, not four, but 10 cores in Intel's new PC powerhouse

Prefixes

> "It's designed not just for multi-tasking, but also for mega-tasking," said Gregory Bryant

deka-tasking, surely

Windows 10 with Ubuntu now in public preview

Re: Which way round are the slashes?

> Whoever coded Unix should have understood the World doesn't speak (and type) English only.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Windows uses the other slash because they were trying to be kind to you - it is purely the result of MS using / for command-line options in MS-DOS (borrowed from CP/M via ...) before they even got around to needing a directory separator.

Microsoft cracks open Visual Studio to Linux C++ coders

Re: Whats the point ?

> Compile on my I7 Windows Box, deploy to the Raspberry Pi. Recompile in a fraction of the time it would need on the Pi....

Sadly, no - according to the link posted above by Ian7, the code is copied to your RPi and compiled by the RPi, so the process may actually slower than if you did it all on the RPi.

But OTOH, if you like VS, you get to edit using VS and there is more storage on your PC's hard drive for version control overhead etc.

BMW complies with GPL by handing over i3 car code

Re: What we want to know is...

Did the car stop for no apparent reason on the 23rd?

Re: 950 MB

> According to the file tree on github, it has tcpdump installed. On a car. WTF.

Who says that tcpdump is installed on the customer's car? If a customer asks for the sources to the OSS in the product we supplied they are likely to get a shed load of stuff that is only used for dev and testing simply because it isn't worth the time/effort to strip it out: just copy the entire OSS directory onto the DVD and stick it in the post.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Re: Open Source Software??

> I naively thought the whole point of OSS was that the developer(s) couldn't one day just

> throw a wobbler and tell you that you couldn't use the code anymore.

...

>made it very public by pulling all his code from the repository

...

>Just needs someone else to pick up the code and re-publish.

But from the bottom of the article:

"Meanwhile, Oakland-based Koçulu has hosted his work on GitHub. "

so it is all still published and accessible - just not from NPM. Ok, that "just" seems to lead to some fun times...

Hands on with the BBC's Micro:Bit computer. You know, for kids

Re: The same memory as the BBC Micro Model A of 15 years ago...

IIRC the BBC Micro's MPU and graphics chip accessed the shared memory on a different clock phase, so the snow went away.

Hotel light control hack illuminates lamentable state of IoT security

Re: el reg FUD machine in full gear

> > That's news to me. When I learnt my TCP/IP the hotel's network was referred to as an internet.

> Correct

The hotel's network is just a network (e.g. a LAN), surely, unless you can demonstrate that they've got, say, multiple LAN's with routing to supply the "inter" and make it an internet?

Photographer hassled by Port of Tyne for filming a sign on a wall

Re: Both sides didnt help

>If someone turned up outside my house and set up a tripod and started to film then I too would angrily confront the person and possibly call the police.

Just to be clear, you'd skip asking in a friendly, polite fashion and go straight to angry confrontation and the police?

Bleeping Computer sued by Enigma Software over moderator's forum post

I was beginning to wonder if this whole article is just an advert for Bleeping Computer?

> Most IT people know it as the website you go to when you've got a Windows PC infected with malware.

Never heard of it before this article. Nor has anyone in earshot.

> If you work with Windows desktops, especially personal PCs, you have probably run across ComboFix.

Nope (insert rambling anecdocte about installing Windows 1 from floppy to establish how long I've been at this).

> It would not be an exaggeration to say that Bleeping Computer is a vital part of the Internet's immune system.

Yes, it would.

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

Re: How much effort does it take to copy an SQLite database file?

> if you simply copied the file what would be the outcome if it was being updated during the copy?

SQLite is - from a bit of experience in doing the wrong thing at the wrong time - good at recovering (the incomplete update is ignored and it tidys up, as any good d/b should). Although in this case, as it is the PC that owns & updates the file that would also send the file, it'd be easy to ensure no transactions were pending.

How much effort does it take to copy an SQLite database file?

A program we had written by contractors (of course) has data in an SQLite file on an embedded system; this needs to be transferred, in its entirety, over a LAN to a desktop PC. Instead of using anything tricky, like (T)FTP, it made far more sense to them to:

SELECT every record, extracting the fields one by one into temporary variables, convert some to strings, concatenate these strings together, copy this lot onto the end of temporary buffer (re-allocating said buffer everytime it fills), pass it to a home-grown network layer that copies the data into new buffers; rinse and repeat. Finally, a lump of data is sent over the LAN for the receiver to reverse the process and create a shiny new SQLite file.

Cold reading the code and estimating the amount of data being manipulated in the sender, I gave up when aproximately 100 KiB of SQLite file had already turned into multiple TiB of mempy()'s. I thought I'd made some obvious mistake in the cold reading, but running this, you are shown a "Loading..." message for a minute or so, in the middle of which is a very brief burst of LAN traffic...

To be fair, I haven't checked some of the fine details; perhaps the sender and receiver are using different SQL schema and this seemed like a good way to get the data re-arranged...

Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us

Re: Low end vs. High end phones..

> my old Samsung cell only has a telephone style keyboard and no touchscreen. Texting is damn near impossible.

Ah, that explains why no-one ever texted until touchscreens came along.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

I replaced the IBM Model M with a Northgate OmniKey Ultras (dated April 26 1991) - even bigger, heavier and with more keys! Colleague carried them back to the UK from a trip to the US, so that took up most of the luggage allowance.

If they take this away from me I'll never be able to move the cursor again (upside-down T! Madness!)

Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox

details will appear elsewhere

> The paper itself admits there's a lot of work to be done – phrases like “we take some steps” and “details will appear elsewhere” demonstrate that.

Surely that should be "is left as an exercise for the reader"

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117

Re: A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End

>> flourine

> A key element of bread.

It's lunchtime, I kept hearing my sarnie calling

Re: A Wizard's Staff Has A Knob On The End

The eight-ish connection is a fair point, but the petitioners did put some thought into it; from the article:

> According to Disc mythology, octarine is visible only to wizards and cats, and is generally described as a sort of greenish-yellow purple colour, which seems perfect for what will probably be the final halogen in the periodic table

So we have the right sort of colour and the name fits in well: flourine, chlorine, iodine ... octarine

We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever

Re: Small poll but interesting

> I suspect that the use case for iPhones is sufficiently different from Android phones that the overlap is small

Huh?

Facebook arrives at commonsense 'real names' policy

"They're using a name that they don't go by in real life"

So, just because someone has never heard me being called that, they have the right to assume that nobody else knows me by that name?

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

Ameol2

but I'm probably the only one still using it...

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Re: Yes I remember....

> Windows 1 did do multitasking, despite what the press claimed.

IIRC the press was complaining because back then "multitasking" meant "pre-emptive scheduling" which didn't grace Windows apps for - quite a while.

Apple's design 'drives up support costs, makes gadgets harder to use'

Re: But

> "why is it, a 3 year old can pick up a ipad etc and just run with it, if its so hard to use?"

> Partly because 3 year olds are fantastically competent at figuring out experimentally how things work, and...

and they have all the time in world to spend on it, plus it is all play and any response is a good one.

£2.3m ZANO nano-drone crowdfunded project crashes and burns

Re: Kickstarter need to take some responsibility

They say it in small letters every time you go to make pledge.

@ werdsmith Re: Old proverb

> It's entertainment, and often very ingenious at that.

I get the impression these people are deadly serious; when you get people backing $1 just to post comments and get some entertainment value the creators don't seem to be joining in.

Re: Old proverb

There seems to be a new perpetual motion machine (or similar) per week so you'll have to join the queue. Quite a few of them get backers as well, sad to say. But then the goals are often insanely high that doesn't really matter.

Best stick to potato salad.

Microsoft makes Raspberry Pi its preferred IoT dev board

Re: No comprende

For everyone referring to Win10 IoT as a "full fat OS" and the lack of HDMI on the Galileo, you are referred to El Reg's earlier article, just as a start:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/21/first_look_windows_10_iot_core_on_raspberry_pi_2/

E.g.

> This means that there is no Windows desktop, nor even a command prompt. That said, it does support PowerShell remoting, which gets you a remote PowerShell terminal from which you can run familiar Windows commands.

GPS, you've gone too far this time

> (in real life, not in the fake conditions these guys set up).

The article described walking a perimeter and being driven in a car - both of these are real-life applications.

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

Re: Cut price bungay jumps

> you don't get to live to 66 either

I never knew living in Suffolk was that dangerous!

JavaScript creator Eich's latest project: KILL JAVASCRIPT

> Oh if only there was already a language out there which compiled to byte code and could be used cross platform.

BCPL Cintcode?

Let's kill off the meaningless concept of SW-defined storage

Re: Your point?

On the random assumption that you are referring to my post:

Because I've witnessed wasted time and arguments when a multi-lingual and multi-company project required Router functionality but one group kept saying "ok, we will provide the Switches" and the other side said "No, they need to be Routers". It took a stupidly long time even before someone said the full phrase "Layer 3 Switch" and a reference to the manufacturer's blurb before it became clear that the blasted things are just Routers. Of course, there are places in the design where we *do* just need Switches and where we have Switches - but we still get diagrams floating around where someone has written "Switch" in a tiny box and gawd only knows which one they are referring to.

Re: Please kill "Layer 3 Switch" as well

The point is "Layer 3 Switches" *are* Routers and should just be *called* Routers!

Please kill "Layer 3 Switch" as well

From the outside, who gives a monkey's whether the Router is implemented using s/w, ASICs or monkeys toggling the lines. The time that has been piddled away because the managers truncated it down to just "Switch"...