* Posts by MOV r0,r0

204 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2011

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PC survived lightning strike thanks to a good kicking

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Re: Interfering mice

...if you lose the wireless usb dongle, you toss said mouse and keyboard...

Already solved: Logitech 'Unified' adapters will sync to any of their Unified peripherals. I gained a collection as the adapters outlast the micro-switches in the mouse buttons.

Blimey, did you know? It's World Backup Day. But... surely every day is world backup day?

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Those two types of disk drive: failed and ones that have yet to fail.

Uber wasn't to blame for robo-ride crash – or was it? Witness said car tried to 'beat the lights'

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Re: Two sets of traffic lights are needed

Hey, maybe we could have them follow each other in a kind of, I don't know, erm - train! Then the one at the front could have a real driver, let's call them the, erm, train driver!

If you're going to rework city infrastructure at public expense to cater for transport, do it properly and put in a decent mass transit system. This ticks not just the 'cheaper' box but also the 'safer' and 'less polluting' ones.

If Uber want something different they can lease the space to install and maintain their own equipment, city by city.

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Re: Missing an item

Wow, a downvote for the guy who tried to bring facts into the discussion.

Don't know about the others but my down-vote was for the 'ban all humans' stance.

Murder in space: NASA orders astronauts to KILL cripples – then fire bodies back to Earth

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Cheap Seats

That scratching sound (it *can't* be the mice) is the sound of Virgin Galactic taking notes...

Microsoft kills Windows Vista on April 11: No security patches, no hot fixes, no support, nada

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10 is a fixed 8 which is rehash of 7 which is Vista with the boot-up dependencies rearranged leh

Cut off: Big government IT wallets snap shut on BT's fingers

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good, the sooner BT become bankrupt the better

Not really, there's a 'crown guarantee' on their horribly-in-deficit pension scheme that will have tax payers picking up bill if BT go TITSUP. Something to do with it having once been a public utility although somehow the guarantee also covers post-privatisation joiners which is great if you're a BT employee (which most of us aren't) but not so good if you're a tax payer (which most of us are).

Google mistakes the entire NHS for massive cyber-attacking botnet

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Simplistic bordering on naive. For years professional bodies such as the BMA, the Royal College of GPs have restricted the numbers entering training citing 'standards' with the happy by-product that scarcity maintains high remuneration. NHS managers respond by recruiting from overseas where ironically some medical qualifications are of low standard.

None of this benefits patients but the phrase 'Our NHS' was never truer than when issued from the mouths of staff and it doesn't surprise me that Google's traffic algorithms can't quite believe how overstaffed the NHS is.

Apple sings another iTune following Brexit as prices rise by up to a third

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Re: When in the us

Anyone else think running a big balance of trade deficit for a long period of time caused problems? UK has been flogging off assets at a furious rate to compensate and whereas cheap imports are great for offsetting lack of growth and hiding underlying inflation the real price gets paid when the cheap money runs out - the new owners will not start by cutting costs in their home markets.

I'm hearing $1.10 as a mark of sustainability.

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Re: More more more.... like Apple less less less

I mean we obviously know what to do with our money - give it to Apple. It is just that they don't know what to do with it...

Oh but they do. That cash pile will be slowly returned to shareholders in an effort to prop up the share price once those investors finally realise the sort of growth iPhone brought about ain't gonna be repeated.

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Re: Bright ideas - not

Have one back:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37921356

'truly grasping you're making a big mistake in having really believed that you know what's best'

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Re: For Once

'incompetent many' is a phrase often used by the liberal consensus to justify foisting their minority ideas on a population that has resoundingly rejected them at the national ballot box for over 100 years.

The liberal response to that was entry-ism. Local government, schools of ed, charities, the BBC, the EU: places where you couldn't be voted out because you were never voted in in the first place.

Along with the feel-bad factor of static incomes ('immigration') the rejection of non-democratic political institutions was a major influence in the referendum outcome and recognising that bought Theresa May her current meal ticket.

If you're a liberal, expect a generation of pain.

BBC surrenders 'linear' exclusivity to compete with binge-watch Netflix

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Re: BBC should not charge for lrgacy programs.

How many employees does the Beeb have? And they all have salaries. The big cheese probably has a MASSIVE salary.

Undistorted reality from the BBC's own 2016 accounts: they had around 23,000 staff costing £990m. The soon to be abolished Trust cost £4.2m, exec board was a not-massive £3.65m - all increases over 2015 though. Although 'stars' were down £8m to £200m it seems the cost reductions the BBC have been making have been to content rather than staff. Utterly timid.

Average redundancy appears to be around 16 months pay - somewhat more than employment law requires.

On the plus side head of BBC Worldwide Tim Davie is paid more than the DG and none of it comes from the Licence Fee.

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Re: Content is king

To comprehend the BBC is it necessary to understand that it is a make-work scheme and pension fund for metropolitan liberal-consensus hot-housed Oxbridge thirds. The two-and-a-half telly channels and some radio is just a side-line.

If we took the whole four thousand seven hundred million pounds the BBC gets annually and used it solely to commission content, we would truly have a world class pro-UK cultural resource.

Virtual BBC FTW!

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And yet it's been competing, wrongly, with ITV since 1955 and you hadn't noticed?

The rot set in at the BBC a very long time ago.

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Re: End of the TV Licence

Just take a few old copies of The Guardian with you

Apple ordered to cough up $2m to store workers after denying rest breaks

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That would be the ad for the Mac 128 which despite a high price had insufficient RAM that couldn't be upgraded and for serious application development required the additional purchase of an Apple Lisa - one of the slowest, least productive dev machines ever.

So, over priced + under spec with no upgrade + lock-in - seeing a pattern here? Apple didn't change, they've always been like that.

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Re: Should the courts hold an entire huge company...

There might be a reason why Apple franchisees are few and far between, Jerry Pournelle in 2003:

'Back in the early days of Macs we bought 3 of them; each from a different local store; in each case the store was out of business when we wanted another. Apple had a habit of devouring its own children, and any dealer who sold a lot of Macs was in peril of having the company move in and take over its customers, leaving it dead.'

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view277.html

Apple Watch sales go over a cliff: Down 2.8 meellion per quarter in a year

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So that 'we might be vaguely working on a car' leak a few days ago was nothing more than an effort to prop up the share price for when the watch sales figures came out?

Dirty diesel backups will make Hinkley Point C look like a bargain

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You too huh? Brownouts don't happen often enough or for long enough to need a dedicated helpline besides which most people know who their supplier is. www.powercut105.com - something to take the flak when the inevitable occurs?

Next it will be, 'your failure to install personal generation equipment and/or off-peak storage batteries has lead to the triggering of your smart meter kill switch during periods of high demand. It is your responsibility to make supplementary provision as the national grid cannot be relied upon to provide power at all times'

BBC to demand logins for iPlayer in early 2017

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Re: I would have thought El Reg commentards were BBC4 fans

Radio 4? Guardian FM more like. Now largely Archers trailers displacing the pro-migrant stories which were shuffled off to World Service radio, consequently ruining the last bastion of BBC impartiality.

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Why not farm out the whole thing from a small commissioning group?

Four thousand seven hundred million pounds a year would buy a lot of content.

Turing, Hauser, Sinclair – haunt computing's Cambridge A-team stamping ground

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Nope

Acorn didn't 'design the first RISC processor' (although Archimedes was the first commercial RISC based desktop) and they didn't 'develop the technology with Apple' - the first ARM was an Acorn effort. Apple's involvement was funding ~40% of ARM, necessary as they wouldn't use 100% Acorn owned tech in their own products.

Shopkeeper installs forecourt khazi to counter mystery Dublin dung dumper

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I hear the police have nothing to go on either.

Margaret Hodge's book outlines 'mind boggling' UK public sector waste

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FAIL

Hodge-Podge

If the HoC PAC makes so little difference then add to the cash bonfire the cost of the PAC.

Tesla autopilot driver 'was speeding' moments before death – prelim report

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If the semi had been joining a freeway, the Tesla would not have encountered the trailer at the angle it did. Transposing: if full auto-assist use had been restricted to freeways, this 'accident' would not have happened.

The same factors that allow for higher speed limits on freeways make them the only safe place to utilise this technology at this time. We're talking cars and plebs in public spaces here, not $m planes and professional pilots in managed airspace.

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

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Maybe a nine pin mini-DIN Acorn quadrature mouse lead? Unbent pins are OK until they break off inside the socket.

EU referendum frenzy bazookas online voter registration. It's another #GovtDigiShambles

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Re: Cut the late registrants some slack

Tim Farron was on BBC Radio Guardian FM Today Programme this morning saying your vote should devalue over time, like old milk in the fridge and that young people votes are better than old people votes because old people are about dead anyway or something.

Sorry, I tend not to pay too much attention to what Liberals say these days as I can't hear them over the sound of my own derisory laughter. Must be my old voter hearing.

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Fanciful. But we will see a real effort to game the postal vote with immigration arguments in 'mixed heritage' communities and Remain doing nothing about it.

For the preservation of democracy, if a constituency postal vote differs from the ballot box by a statistically significant amount it should be considered potentially fraudulent and investigated and the vote suspended if it materially effects the results. Yeah, ain't gonna happen.

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Re: I'm in two minds about this...

No, voter reg is open all year round so more like PAYE and not a window in time as with tax returns.

How about people maintain their registration and rights outside of election time? You know, like you're supposed to.

Archaeologists find oldest ever ground-edge stone axe

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Re: Truly fascinating, but

Yes, plus out by at least 10 thou' - Birmingham, surely?

Apple Fools: Times the House of Jobs went horribly awry

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Re: My preciousss!!

'When the company sold their stake in ARM years later, they netted $800 million.'

Yep, sold for a tenth of its current market cap (40% stake, over $8B now). Also, 'We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies blah blah blah'.

Oopsie.

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Quite so @VinceH. Dave 126 is right that Acorn weren't the only the designers but they were the only choice. Lowest power, best MIPS/W, room on die for MMU and I guess being the lowest price didn't hurt. Could have got I/O and video on die too if required - already done that previously with ARM250: add 'world's first commercially available SoC' to 'world's first commercially available RISC desktop PC' then? :)

Way to go Acorn, we miss ya!

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No Dave, the microprocessor - not the company! Article mentions ARM in the context of being a chip so VinceH is correct. Steve Furber's micro architecture, Sophie Wilson's instruction set, all implemented by Acorn engineers.

ARM-as-company-not-acronym came much later and the 'We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make' company has long since sold all their 40% stake in them.

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

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Re: License fee funding another management spinoff?

They are involved precisely for reasons of charter renewal. It ticks a 'public outreach' box that the BBC use to justify their existence, the previous pre-renewal scheme a decade ago gave us the BBC Open Centres - remember them?

It's a pantomime of the BBC reapplying for something they know they'll get. Late running, micro.bit could have best been deferred to integrate properly at the start of an academic year except that would leave only three months of impact until charter renewal. Expect all BBC support for it to decline suddenly after December.

BBC telly tax drops onto telly-free households. Cough up, iPlayer fans

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Re: Hurrah!

Three telly channels and some radio is a side-line, running the BBC is what the BBC does best and it serves to corral a bunch of bureaucratic liberal arts Ox-bridge thirds where they can't cause damage to the wider economy, think Remploy but for nice-but-dims. Well worth the annual £3730m which is what a Licence Fee actually costs.

Human cost of California gas well leak revealed

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Joke

All Aboard

88 London buses each making two trips? Mind you, LA/London round trip is some distance and no news on how London plans to house the 11,296 displaced either, El Reg?

Twitter reduces BBC hacks to tears with redundancy notice

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I'd Rather (Not) Jack

I wouldn't trust Simon Jack's technological insight. Couple of years back on Today he got an interview with Warren East when he was still at ARM but stumbled over the fabless model. The latter took multiple attempts to explain, dropping in complexity each time until he actually said 'ARM make chips' - the only known instance of such a thing being said and a sorry reflection of Jack's grasp of tech.

In all other regards his reporting is excellent (seems well connected in the City) but he's willingly admitted he gets his tech understanding from his school age daughters and that it doesn't extend much beyond Apple devices.

LOGITECH - TECH = 'LOGI' ... that's non-Logitech tech, is it?

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'specifically in the categories of mobility.'

Wheelchairs?

Rampaging fox terrorises rural sports club, victim sustains ‘tweaked groin’

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Re: Is this "sports club"

Once we started farming, dogs needed to either be domesticated or dead.

Being low status, had the fox got into the sports club its best strategy would have been to kill all the humans and scatter result about a bit before a higher status predator was attracted and displaced it from the kill - no one has told the fox's genes that we killed all the wolves.

Despite not despatching one, that fox changed those people's behaviour. This suggests the neural routing of any species can be changed by a bit of chasing around. It then follows that the men and women (this isn't golf) on horseback are doing a valuable job teaching the nasty little vermin some fear even if they don't ever catch one.

And townies who think vermin deserves fair play haven't thought that one through, rats have no emetic response so it's hardly fair to poison them is it? Cities - you're never more that ten feet from a Guardian reading idiot.

BT set to undercut rivals with return to mobile biz

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I really hope BT earn loadsamoney with this as thanks to the Government losing in court to them, the public purse is now responsible for any toxicity in BT's pension scheme from its state ownership period.

That moment. That moment right there is when I would have re-nationalised then flogged the whole thing again against the pension risk. BT looks to me like a huge pension deficit with a modest telecoms company hanging off the back for dear life. Think 'Too Big To Fail' ended with the banks in 2008? It's a slower burner but it will not end well.

Yes, yes, Steve Jobs. Look what I'VE done for you lately – Tim Cook

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Here's a representative example from Apple history: the un-upgradable Mac 128. Insufficient RAM out of the box and locked you in to an Apple Lisa for serious software development, one of the slowest, most expensive dev systems ever and entirely a Jobs job (the Mac being employees work he elbowed his way into).

It was Microsoft separating hardware from software that got us a 'machine on every desk', there would never have been an 'era' if we'd waited on Apple and their pricing.

Now Mac is a side note in history: sales have been flat for years. Apple are company who made their money from phones, who still can't believe their luck and have no idea how to replicate it.

While you queued for an iPhone 6, Apple's Cook sold shares worth $35m

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That's a lot of shares, maybe TC thinks AAPL has peaked long-term?

'Space bubbles' may have helped Taliban down 'copter in bloody Afghanistan battle

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For me there's if there's one outstanding achievement of the whole Afghan campaign it's one they said couldn't be done, even by a world-wide 'coalition of the willing'. It took hope, it took billions, it took time, great sacrifice and effort but against all the odds it finally came into being: a police force more gay than the Parisian Gendarmerie.

Boss at 'Microsoft' scam support biz told to cough £000s in comp

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Re: "From Luton" - surprise! (NOT!)

"... in fact, I reckon that the only reason that Betjeman wrote "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough" was because he hadn't heard of Luton."

Crab Air: aim for Slough, hit Luton.

Tony Benn, daddy of Brit IT biz ICL and pro-tech politician, dies at 88

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Re: Must be a techie...

The BBC have corrected 'BBC apple' to 'BBC Apple' in this article.

Is the BBC a YTS scheme for the privileged? Is it somehow full of people who went to Oxford because their parents did but who are nevertheless stupid?

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Re: Must be a techie...

'...from the earliest BBC apple computer to an eight track twin reel recorder. ', Nick Robinson BBC web site

Acorn User magazine regularly ran stories on the huge number of Beebs (and secretaries) required to document Benn's daily spin on politics although they attributed the machine to Acorn and this despite Redwood becoming a BBC property at one point.

At least Robinson got the number of reels on the tape machine correct.

John Sweeney: Why Church of Scientology's gravest threat is the 'net

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Re: East Grinstead

'One does not simply talk in East Grinstead'?

The early days of PCs as seen through DEAD TREES

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Headmaster

Re: BYTE

I took Byte's editorial position to be that hardware cost had dropped to a point where mass consumption was required to drive it down further, that Unix was in the way of that happening and that Windows would be the key driver. They never said Windows was any good. 19 years on and I think you're still misunderstanding the article.

Thanks to Windows we have cheap hardware and thanks to Linus we have free Unix so we should all be systems programmers, right? Enjoy Dr. Pournelle's somewhat optimistic response to someone whining, like you I suspect, that their sysadmin superpower no longer lets them rule over all humanity:

www.jerrypournelle.com/debates/secondrev.html

MP blasts 'ineffective' games regulation

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Facepalm

Calling Alan Milburn a 'prick' in parliament is brave for a man whose last name is one letter change from 'Vag'.

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