Posts by Blank Reg

Bloke who claimed he invented Bitcoin must hand over $5bn of e-dosh in court case. He can't. He's waiting for a time traveler to arrive

Well their true value is pretty much zero. It's not like there are many (legal) places where you can spend bitcoin. The best you can hope for is that there an even greater fool who is willing to buy your bitcoins with real money.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: That's Chromebook right out of my buying list then

It's ridiculous that you have to pay for map updates on your car when my 2007 era standalone Garmin GPS still gets free map updates.

I get free lifetime map updates on a device that probably cost about the same as filling the tank on a car 3-4 times, that makes no sense.

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

Re: What redundancy?

That's mainly a US problem, in the rest of the civilized world you can't treat employees so poorly. Here in Canada you can expect anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks per year of service for anyone that's been there for more than a few years. If you're older or management then it will be towards to top end and possibly higher.

If there isn't one already then I see a class action lawsuit in their future. And settling that could run in to the billions if even half of the 100k that they let go sign up.

And negative PR would be hard to spin.

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Re: God loves idiots or He/She wouldn't have made so many of them.

"That would mean God is Evil"

Total number killed by God in the Bible

- Using biblical numbers only: 2,821,364

- With estimates: 25 million

https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/04/drunk-with-blood-gods-killings-in-bible.html

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Re: In answer to his question

There is no need for hot pokers or any of those other messy methods. A properly worded facebook quiz can get people to spill all kinds of info.

Boeing's 737 Max woes trigger BEEELLIONS in losses – and that's just for the latest quarter

Re: Will the 737 MAX ever be safe?

Even if it can be made safe, will it ever be perceived as safe by the general population?

There is a chance, but from now on there will be zero tolerance for failures. If another 737 Max goes down then I think that model is done. People just won't want to fly on it.

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it's just 6Mbps? And you're unhappy? Can't imagine why

Back in the early days of telephony they sometimes made use of barbed wire fences to connect to the phone system in rural areas.

I couldn't get by on 6Mbps, I have some very large files (~3-5GB) that I need to move around a few times a week. But I found that paying for 1Gbps was a waste of money. My ISP has always delivered higher speed than what I pay for, but for me anything over 150MBps is overkill. The time saving is just too small to bother paying extra, instead of less than a minute to download it takes 5.

And now they are running fiber to my house and will offer 1.5Gbps, it still won't save me more than 5 minutes.

Li-ion battery 'price-fixing' case settled with bonus fury over lawyers pocketing eight-figures

Over the years I've received quite a few notifications that I'm eligible to claim awards in some class action. I've never bothered to claim any of them as they are typically barely enough to cover lunch at McDonalds. It's just not worth the effort.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

No but you may be drinking from one. The way things are going with these planes it won't surprise me if many end up being scrapped and turned into beer cans.

Amazon Alexa: 'Pre-wakeword' patent application suggests plans to process more of your speech

Re: How is this patentable?

Not having used any such devices this is how I had assumed they worked all along. ""what time is it Alexa" would be a natural way to interact with the device and only requires keeping the last several seconds of data at all times.

Refactoring whizz: Good software shouldn't cost the earth – it's actually cheaper to build

Re: This is nothing new

A problem that I've seen is people spending months on design when I could get v1 up and running in weeks. And at the end of that prolonged design phase, there are still too many issues because you only really understand a problem after you've solved it, even if you solved it with the worst code on earth.

So my preferred approach is to do minimal design up front, get something working so that you understand the problem, then throw that away and do it right.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Re: ScyFy?

https://www.syfy.com/

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

The difference is that with Android there are already phones available in a range of sizes, prices and capabilities. No matter what you need you can find it, so some vendors that depend on overpriced, oversized and overpowered devices may suffer, but there are others there to provide whatever the consumer might want.

Timely Trump tariffs tax tech totally: 25 per cent levy on modems, fiber optics, networking gear, semiconductors…

Re: *NOT* Emabarrassed American!

The entire world is trying to reduce reliance on trade with the USA since they have proven to be an unreliable and unfair trading partner.

Crap band sues crap beer maker: Hair-metal rockers have an Axl to grind over Guns N' Rosé

Re: The brewery should take a tip from Apple

Then they will get sued by the band Butthole Surfers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butthole_Surfers

Tractors, not phones, will (maybe) get America a right-to-repair law at this rate: Bernie slams 'truly insane' situation

Many farmers are competent mechanics. I've seen garages on farms as well equipped as any auto shop. When things break down they often need to be fixed ASAP, crops and weather don't wait for you.

Make America Infringe Again: Trump campaign video pulled over Batman copyright

"Hillary doesn’t exactly have scrupulously clean hands"

$100 million wasted over decades of investigations and not a single charge, I'd say her hands are about as clean as can be.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Re: Don't travel to the US.

I've never had any issue entering the UK in the 10 or so times I've been, in fact, out of the couple dozen countries I've visited only the USA has ever given be any sort of trouble at the border. And I've been to Russia, China, most of Europe, Japan and Korea.

For every country except the USA, it's rare that they even talk to me, they look at my Canadian passport and just stamp it, no questions asked.

Re: Don't travel to the US.

There's a trump bumper sticker that says

pray for Trump: Psalm 109:8

Psalm 109:8

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

Re: Don't travel to the US.

I don't remember my passwords so there is no way I can log in to any of those sites no matter how much I'm threatened.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

Re: a write-once, run anywhere binary

Or ANDF

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

Re: A meme-laden soup of troll-tastic nihilistic nonsense

"it's liable to totally discredit the Aryan cause"

If you've seen any of those involved then you'd know they do a pretty good job of that just by being themselves.

Security storm brewing for Oracle Java-powered smart cards: More than a dirty dozen flaws found, fixes... er, any fixes?

Javacard started 20 years ago under Sun. And though it was called JavaCard, it was vastly different from desktop Java.

Re: Security? We've heard of it

There were about 6 billion javacard devices produced last year alone, and they have been shipping for 20 years with very few security issues. I doubt you can find any other platform that ubiquitous yet with that good a track record.

Prodigy dancer and vocalist Keith Flint found dead aged 49

Re: Smack My Bitch Up

"most popular song world wide."

And yet I'd never heard of him nor the song.

Blockchain is bullsh!t, prove me wrong meets 'chain gang fans at tech confab

Re: Nor a good solution

But unless I'm a criminal, why do I want anonymised, decentralised currency token transfer with full auditing and accountability

Re: Nor a good solution

And what problem is crypto-currency solving? You can hardly buy anything with any of them, I don't know about this conference but in the past, even many crypto-currency conferences didn't accept crypto-currencies as payment. If you want to pay for something anonymously you could pay cash. If it's a large amount where cash is impractical and you need to remain anonymous then odds are that what you are doing isn't legal.

So other than facilitating money transfers for criminals, what good is crypto-currency?

Sorry

I can't prove you wrong. It's still a solution in search of a problem.

And there is no evidence that such a problem exists.

I won't bother hunting and reporting more Sony zero-days, because all I'd get is a lousy t-shirt

Re: A little shortsighted

Your analogy doesn't work, they weren't asked to find vulnerabilities. It would be as if a mechanic walked up to your car to do an inspection that you never asked for and then demanded to get paid.

Oh cool, the Bluetooth 5.1 specification is out. Nice. *control-F* master-slave... 2,000 results

Putin-Trump makes more sense

Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

Re: So I gather

The technology to take your photo and print it on a pass card has existed for decades, and I've even had theme park season passes that used just such a process. There is no need for them to save your photo, just take it, print it and delete it.

They already have people checking you when you enter the park anyway to keep out evil contraband like a bottle of water, so having them look at your face and pass while they do that isn't going to slow things down.

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

I would never be a billionaire as I would have cashed out long before that and gone on to enjoy life rather than trying to make yet more money than I could possibly spend without being entirely stupid.

Oracle exec: Open-source vendors locking down licences proves 'they were never really open'

Re: Yes, the bad companie are

Not if they own the code. They can fork a proprietary product off from the open source version and never contribute back to the open source side. So eventually they will be two separate products

Oregon can't stop people from calling themselves engineers, judge rules in Traffic-Light-Math-Gate

Re: Great for this Engineer

Software Engineering wasn't available as a degree until a year after I graduated, so I got a BSC in computer science and physics.

But I've had various "engineer" titles for over 3 decades. That only ever became an issue in the last year of my previous company where you couldn't have engineer in your title unless you were licensed as a professional engineer. They also forced people who had the appropriate degrees to put MSC, PHD etc. on their business cards, whether or not they wanted it there.

Boffins don't give a sh!t, slap Trump's face on a turd in science journal

Re: Very disrespectful

When has the orange idiot ever done anything worthy of respect?

'Bomb threat' scammers linked to earlier sextortion campaign

I think that is the real reason

With Bitcoin heading towards its true value of 0, this is one way to drive the price back up. Any of these companies that actually decided to pay would have to buy Bitcoins. Why else would you ever buy them, it's not like you can spend them anywhere useful.

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

Good for memory makers

Since Chrome is such a memory hog.

I switch off Firefox when it became slow and flaky, then switched from Chrome to Edge because Chrome had become bloated. And now Edge will be just as bloated as Chrome, consuming much more memory and spawning endless processes.

Maybe Opera next.

If you ever felt like you needed to carry 4TB of data around, Toshiba's got you covered

Re: This has been available for a while

I have at least a dozen WD passport drive from 120Gb to 4tb, none have failed.

Every drive that has ever failed for me has always been a Seagate, so I just don't buy those any more

GTA gamer cuffed, charged after PS4 live mic allegedly overheard him raping teen girl

Re: Re:Reporting bias

Due to his debts and the now negative value of the trump brand, It may turn out that he has less money than you'd find down the back of your couch.

A 5G day may come when the courage of cable and DSL fails ... but it is not this day

46.2Mbps fiber?

What kind of crappy fiber are they using? I can get 1Gbps on cable, and they have just started running fiber to the home in my area so it could still improve further.

Russia: We did not hack the US Democrats. But if we did, we're immune from prosecution... lmao

Do any of those people upset by the Clintons even have Internet access at the trailer park?

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

Re: 3-axis accelerators are everywhere

That depends on your time frame. There are extremely accurate accelerometers used for tracking the movement of soldiers indoors. But that only needs to be accurate for a matter of hours, I don't know how far off it would be after a few days, though I expect it would be adequate for navigating a boat or plane.

Dollar for dollar, crafting cryptocurrency sucks up 'more energy' than mining gold, copper, etc

Bitcoin transactions also have an energy cost, I may be mistaken but it's my understanding that this cost increases with the size of the blockchain.

Samsung loses (again) to Apple in patent battle (again). This time to the tune of a mere $539m

Re: design is design..

I discovered the secret to Apple design a few years back after getting back in to CAD after having been away from it for a few years. When you don't know the controls and features available in a CAD package everything comes out looking like it was designed by Apple.

It only took Oz govt transformation bods 6 months and $700k to report that blockchain ain't worth the effort

You could probably add several 0's to the cost had the PHB decided to just go ahead and use blockchain everywhere because they had heard it was the latest thing so we must use it.

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

Re: C

I can't remember how it is in the rest of Canada as I've not driven outside Ontario or Quebec for quite some time, but trigger locks are rare in Ontario. Costco has them, but hardly anywhere else that I've seen,

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

Re: For once, Google won fair and square

And they ripped off Java knowing full well that they needed a license. Their own staff, many of them ex-Sun even told them so, but money is only supposed to flow in one direction at Google.

Oracle pours a mug o' Java 11 for its addicts, tips pot of Binary Code License down the sink

These methods are redundant if you know regex as you can use the various replace* methods. I guess they were added to appease the kids that don't know regex.