Posts by vilemeister

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Related?

And this is relevant to the current discussion how?

Just to get a mouth frothing political rant in?

Does Samsung want you to buy new phones? Asking 'cos Galaxies now get four years of security updates

Re: Mandatory 5 year minimum.

We don't have to guess, it looks like in a few years we'll know with the Apple car.

I won't ever buy one, but I'm interested to see what schemes they cook up to fleece the consumer who buys one of their vehicles.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: Power Grid

The absolutely massive wasteland caused by surface mining in western Germany had 1 train a day leaving before Germany shut down its nuclear generation capacity. Now it has ~6-7 trains a day leaving, all full of lovely coal to burn.

All caused by a Japanese earthquake and Tsunami, of course Germany is well known for having a long coastline and being geologically unstable.

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

Re: "when Wi-Fi gets more reliable every year"

I haven't got round to putting cat5 round my house even though I've lived here for 5 years and I'm very lucky I have 5ghz wireless - everyone else in housing estates with 2.4 is swamped.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

Re: Nope

As a web dev who also plays around with ardupilots and other home made gadgety things this is a godsend. But do I want it implemented in chrome? Do I ****.

if you *need* to do something like this. shoehorn it off to a server, or installed binary or if you absolutely must, do it with electron. Obviously if you don't know how to do that, you shouldn't be allowed near it which defeats the point anyway.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Re: It can go

Schools usually have methods that have been around for centuries of determining who came into contact with who - its called a register.

As long as they seperate people in the playground/on breaks etc that should be much better than some app that was cobbled together in a few weeks. And it can't be hacked.

Prank warning: You do know your smart speaker's paired with Spotify over the internet, don't you?

Re: Spotify declined to make an on-the-record statement...

I'm in 2 minds about heating - there are times when I decide after work to go for a booze up without going home and want to turn my heating off.

I've never invested in one because I doubt it would pay back over those times, but I think there is a use case for that.

Also in the depths of winter I could up the heating before I got out of bed if it was too cold. Nothing like laziness to spur the pounds to leave your wallet.

Consumer reviewer Which? finds CAN bus ports on Ford and VW, starts yelling 'Security! We have a problem...'

Its 'reviews' like this that will make the car manufacturers pot the entire engine bay in resin so can't remove something, and then you also have to go to them to get it repaired/a new engine installed.

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: Finally!

I bought an Fxtec pro1 - they are out now (ish) - they had supply issues but I think finally getting there. Might be worth a look - I loved my desire Z too. Both of these don't hold the screen flat though...

European electric vehicle sales surged in Q4 2019 but only accounted for wafer-thin slice of total car purchases

It may work out cheaper but as someone who can afford to run a golf R in my salary I can't afford the initial upfront cost of an electric car. Its a shame, I really would like to move to electric, but the upfront cost is just too much.

And I cycle to work, so my car is used for a longer proportion of longer journeys than others, so I need one with longer range, which adds even more expense.

Didn't install a safety-critical driverless car patch? Bye, insurance!

So if your car inexplicably fails to install a safety critical update, you get blamed? Because I'll bet that the software vendor will say it works just fine.

Just today we have had HP stuffing windows PCs because their images were wrong - and the blame was passed on from MS to HP and back and forth all while the users (me, I have one) had to do a workaround every time you rebooted.

I just don't have faith in this. Call me cynical but both car manufacturers and software vendors have previous in this. God help us when its both combined.

I love disruptive computer jargon. It's so very William Burroughs

A whole article dedicated to setting up a joke. Excellent.

Batteries that don't burn at the drop of a Galaxy Note 7? We're listening

Or just explain away the fact they catch fire with 'well, you're using it wrong' or use lower capacity batteries, charge more for it and tout the benefits of having to visit a charger more often.

Dixons Carphone: Brexit not a factor as Brits' gadget lust holds strong

I really don't know why I hadn't thought of these to be honest. Apparently its been a long day for me too.

I think I was going for the decent selection of PCs in my hometown, you have no choice which is rather more correct.

Its not really as if you want electronics on the high street you can go anywhere else.

Samsung's Shixby: Reviewers unimpressed with S8 digital assistant

Re: Is this really a surprise?

Someone came up with a way to reprogram that button on review phones, which was very quickly patched.

A real shame, it could do something useful. I've never used these voice assistants regularly, but I don't get whats wrong with the google one - I've tried it out and it seemed alright once.

It seems to be a race to see who can turn up with the most ridiculous sounding name though.

OK... Red wire or black... *Clickety* You've emailed the schematic? Yes, got it! It's opening. And... WHAT? NO!

To be honest, those problems are just annoying.

I wouldn't class health emergencies or lack of energy 'annoying', I'd call them dangerous.

My old business had issues with broadband a few times a month. Which wouldn't usually be an issue, but there was no phone service either, in a large village just outside a large town. If my broadband goes down at home, I wouldn't usually mind, except my phone is through it because I have no mobile signal....in the middle of a large city.

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

Not just broadband...

I must have spent a good few days on the phone to BT support only for them to tell me that the reason for my business voicemail not working was because no-one had actually told the exchange we wanted it. We were paying all this time! Useless, but we had signed a contact so we have to stay with them.

Think your smutty Snapchats can't be saved by dorks? Think again

I will oblige a former commentard - I couldn't give a rats arse. If people trust the people who make snapchat to do it properly with encryption or god forbid actually deleting images when they actually have been viewed, they should trust them when it goes wrong.

Sheep 1, meet sheep 2. Idiots.

Edge-of-space skydiver grounded by ANOTHER bout of bad wind

Nice Headline..

Even made it to the BBC Radio 4 News Quiz!!!

Bucks muck chuck muck-up leaks 840 email addresses

So I've now has this email to be, and I got the one with student finance emails earlier in the year. I'm beginning to build up quite a large collection.

Twitter bird reborn to the sound of whalesong

And this is why I haven't, and will never got or will get a twitter account. I can spew my worthless thoughts on Facebook already, and do other stuff too. And its longer than 140 characters!

8,400 email addresses spaffed by Student Loans Company

I was going to write to the reg when I got this email, it was very interesting!

It was also in an attatched csv file.....

Plan hatched to view Milky Way's black hole heart

The same way a spacecraft can use a planet or the Sun to slingshot itself across the Solar System without using much fuel at all.

Yahoo! 0-day! exploit! hijacks! status! updates!

Oh Dear,

Seriously El Reg, When is this joke going to get old?

Google flings Bing into search engine bin

Seriously El Reg, when is hat joke going to get boring?

El Reg in email address blunder

Well...

At least the reg admitted to it giving exact numbers. More than other companies (ahem*Sony*ahem) would do.

BlackBerry BBM, email offline AGAIN

2 days of major downtime in 12 years. Thats not bad going.

Kick! Bostock! out! too! demands! Yahoo! shareholder!

Old Joke is Old

Seriously, I'm not trolling here, but haven't you guys used that joke enough when referring to anything to do with Yahoo!?

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

Power

I would like to point out that the reg readership consists of IT professionals and people generally interested in IT. That, unless I am mistaken, requires electricity. This has to be generated and nuclear seems to me to be the only stopgap between fossil fuels and 'green' energy.

Although nuclear energy is inherently unsafe due the the temperatures and radiation, the measures taken to make it as safe as possible (even destroying 3 very very very expensive reactors when they may have been able to have been saved) show that it is the only way to go - at least for the time being.

World's bees face multiple threats

Before someone else says it..

Sorry, but people better start 'bee'having if they are to stay with us!