Posts by Phil O'Sophical

E.ON fined £7m for smart meter fail

and of course if the power's off there'll be a nice fire roaring up the chimney...

Re: What *customer* wants this?

The good news is we can still buy energy (expensive) from the French who at least have a reliable supply.

Don't bet on it. The French goverment is trying to reduce it's nuclear park, and invest in renewables, and its plan for meeting a shortfall is ... to buy from the Germans. The Germans probably assume they can buy cheap wind power from the Danes, and so on. We're at real risk of a circular dependency loop where each government underinvests and assumes that they can cover any shortfall by buying surplus from the neighbours. Won't work if those neighbours have no surplus and are also trying to buy from next door. Worst case is we have to buy gas from Putin at huge cost and risk.

Cryptowall 4.0: Update makes world's worst ransomware worse still

Re: Hunt the bastards down and publicly execute them

How long do we need to wait before someone at NSA/GCHQ/KGB/etc. figures out that tracking this scum down and releasing the keys would actually get them some good publicity for a change?

Anyway, hanging's too good for them, I'd suggest public "stoning" with the encrypted, bricked, 3.5" disk drives. We could charge $5/throw, money to go to the victims..

Space fans eye launch of Lego Saturn V

Specialised Lego?

Somehow Lego always seems better when you can make something like this out of standard bricks. Having specialsed moulded pieces for every part takes away from the creative aspects, and they can't always be reused for other ideas from kids' imaginations.

Still, I voted for this.

Let's get to the bottom of in-app purchases that go titsup

Re: Totally irrelevant fact

Who makes whitespace part of a programming control syntax?

You can't win, though. Fortran pays no heed to whitespace, hence the notorious space program bug where a line like:

DO 20 I = 1,10

(loop to statement 20, 10 times, incrementing I each time) was mistyped as

DO 20 I = 1.10

so instead of a loop the compiler obediently created a variable named "DO20I" and assigned it the value of 1.1, then did the loop code once with some indeterminate value of I.

Re: Re SCART

SCART (Peritel to the French) was invented as a way to easily connect a Canal+ decoder to a TV, and mandated on all TVs as state-aid to Canal+. The tarif-wall advantages only appeared later.

SECAM was a French invention, and in post-1950s Gaullist France there was no way in hell that they were going to pick a German system like PAL to replace it, even though PAL was better and, at the time, cheaper to implement.

NASA photo gallery: How to blow $200m of rocket in seconds

Re: Ultimate goal

I question that cats are intelligent. Who did they choose for servants?

Hey, you have to work with what you've got.

Google engineer names and shames dodgy USB Type-C cable makers

Re: Er....

"Battery Charging Spec V1.2" from December 2010 raised the limit to 5A.

a Type-C gadget could attempt to draw 3A from a USB 2.0 host or charger

A USB 2.0 device could attempt to draw 3A as well, it's up to the charger to limit the current drawn to whatever it can safely supply, either by a fuse or something more sophisticated. The real problem here is the device manufacturers who just connect the USB power pins to the raw 5v and assume that the conected device will 'play nice'.

Volkswagen: 800,000 of our cars may have cheated in CO2 tests

Re: Hint - time to blame cheap offshore programmers?

OMG, the CO2 in beer might be fixed.

Careful, if governments get the idea that beer contributes to global warming, we're all in the shit.

Re: CNN says that these findings mean VW fibbed about their gas mileage figures too.

VW fibbed about their gas mileage figures too.

Doesn't every manufacturer? The EU tests are so unrealistic, surely nobody believes the actual manufacturers' figures? I didn't even look at them last time I changed my car, I just guessed what I should get based on size, weight & engine power. I was right.

Spanish town trumpets 'Clitoris Festival' thanks to Google snafu

Re: Soon they'll report

Clearly a cosy Galician spot.

World's most frustrating televised Linux install just got more frustrating

Re: Terroirists?!

Do they eat at a gourmet restaurant on a winefarm

No, they're just picky where they dig

Terroirists?!

a rogue backhoe operator

What next, radicalized bulldozer drivers? Will drones have JCB-targeting algorithms installed?

Google snaps Dutch woman completely taking the piss

Re: "A Village Fair with a Church Behind"

Turning the other cheek?

Boffins solve bacon crisis with newly-patented plant

Dulse?

Nothing terribly new about it, it's seaweed and has been sold (together with Yellow Man, a type of very dense honeycomb) at the Auld Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, for centuries. See Lammas Fair. I've never heard it being described as tasting like bacon, though. Frankly it tastes like seaweed :)

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

Re: There is code smell in here

2) sizeof(struct frag_hdr) should prolly be constant, why is it computed here?

It's not, sizeof is processed at compile-time. That expression is a constant.

Feels like "mtu" should be constant in this context. That's what "mtu" means. We are modifying it?

We aren't, we're determining it. MTU is customarily negotiated between the ends of the connection.

Google stock buy-back: You'll groan when you realize where that $5,099,019,513.59 figure came from

"Money is God in action"

Except on Wall Street, where God is Money in action.

Hackers pop grease monkeys' laptops to disable Audi airbags

In this situation having the airbag go off is potentially quite nasty, leading to facial burns and abrasion.

As compared to the quite pleasant sensation of the steering wheel smashing your nose into your brain, you mean?

airbags were invented because Americans didn't like wearing seatbelts

Having an airbag fire in a frontal collsion when the driver/passenger is not wearing a seatbelt is even more lethal than having no protection. The inflating airbag acts like a fulcrum, so that instead of smacking into the bag (or the dashboard) the passenger rides up and over over the bag and out through the windscreen, into the rest of the accident.

It wouldn't surprise me if airbags were disabled if no belt is worn, just as front passenger airbags are disabled if there's no passenger in the seat. This attack could use those mechanisms.

Bacon as deadly as cigarettes and asbestos

Processed food causes bowel cancer?

But by the time it gets to my bowel, everything I eat has been thoroughly processed.

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

You think that I can get you in to see our leader?

Paris bins banlieue bit barn because cloud is too loud

Re: Don't mess with French mayors on planning issues

Also the pub in Maida Vale in London, where a developer who had failed to get planning permission to build a block of flats on the site just demolished the pub, presumably on the assumption that planning permission would be easier to get afterwards. The council are making him rebuild it from the ground up.

German Govt mulls security standards for SOHOpeless routers

And?

A scoreboard will be created based on how each performs with a total score of 770 points, according to the document. Some security facets will be considered essential, attracting more points than those marked recommended, and optional.

but users will still continue to buy the one that's cheapest on amazon.de

That's gotta hurt: NASA suffers attack of the lame Orionids

Re: The Orionids are not a major shower

What about the Haemorrhoids?

You're just itching to see them, I'll bet. They're only visible in places where the sun isn't shining, though.

Lotus F1: 38°C? Sand in your Vblocks? Must be building a data center in Bahrain again

Fascinating technology, but no wonder F1 is so boring these days. How long before the cars are driven by standardized robots as well, to completely remove the human factor?

Ireland moves to scrap 1 and 2 cent coins

Re: Euro transition inflation

there was a lot of abuse in the transition

Some, undoutedly, but did NL not do as France did, and have dual pricing for a long time? The main French supermarkets certainly listed both Franc and Euro prices, so any large discrepancies would have been obvious. Even today my French bank still quotes both currencies in statements and official documents.

Re: backdoor inflation

all prices were rounded up when being converted

Popular myth, but that would not have been legal. The official rules about exchange rate precision and rounding forbid it:

"The conversion rate from national currency to the euro is expressed with 6 significant figures – not to be confused with 6 decimal points – for example SIT 239.640 equals €1. When conversions are made, it is prohibited to round or truncate the conversion rate. This ensures the exactness of conversion operations.

Once the conversion from the national currency has been made, then the euro amount can be rounded up or down to the nearest euro cent: if the number in the third decimal place is less than 5, the second decimal remains unchanged (for example, €1.264 becomes €1.26); but if the third decimal is 5 or above, then the second decimal must be rounded up, for example €1.265 becomes €1.27."

GCHQ to pore over blueprints of Chinese built Brit nuke plants

Re: About time too

a “slash and burn” policy towards renewable energy in order to fund nuclear power stations

So there's something positive coming out of this, then?

Standards body wants standards for IoT. Vendors don't care

Re: @Phil O'Sophical It's going to be a mess

just fail to see how this isn't a standard

You're right, I suppose I am proposing another standard, have an xkcd.

What I really meant was that manufacturers getting together to define some new secure software interworking standard isn't a solution. The problem here is to make security easy to use, and anything which relies on users pressing buttons, logging in to web-based admin servers, or, tbh, doing much more than plugging the gadget in, is doomed to fail.

Re: It's going to be a mess

Unless there is a single, open set of standards.

Frankly, I think that standards are irrelevant in this sort of product, the lack of standards isn't the problem.

If the "Things" are insecure, people won't buy them because of all the bad press.

If the "Things" are secure, people won't buy them because they're too hard to configure.

The only security most people are comfortable with is physical lock&key type security. Maybe what we need is some sort of hardware widget, where you buy a box of 100 tokens that are coded to be unique to you, and plug one into a standardized slot on each device in your home. Any devices with the same tokens can communicate with each other. If someone does manage to compromise your token, you just buy a new batch & replace them. It should be possible to make them for pennies.

Connected kettles boil over, spill Wi-Fi passwords over London

Re: Just take it back to the shop saying that it is leaking

there's not much point in the facility for boiling a kettle if it doesn't have enough water in it to start with

And if it isn't freshly-drawn water the tea will taste crap.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Nope, still looks White&Gold to me.

Self-driving vehicles might be autonomous but insurance pay-outs probably won't be

You should be worried about the sudden stop at 0 feet.

Nah, if you start at 20,000' you'll have passed out long before those last few annoying inches. No worries.

Re: Road Markings

If you think that is bad then take a trip to the USofA.

Or France, where (no doubt after years of Gallic research) they have come up with road marking paint which disappears in the rain at night. All markings then appear as black-on-black.

This may explain why French drivers treat road and lane markings as optional, of course.

Wheels come off parents' plan to dub sprog 'Mini Cooper'

Re: What about...

I'm amazed nobody's yet mentioned Paris Hilton.

True, after all Paris is a boy's name.

Nippy, palaver and cockwomble: Greatest words in English?

On a topical note I'm quite fond of Autumnal, not a rare or seldom heard word, but it's one of those words that sounds as pleasing as the season it describes.

I also like the pure illogicality of English. When the prefix 'in' usually means 'not', why does flammable mean the same as inflammable? Any why is discontent harboured in a hotbed, when a hot bed usually gives me quite the reverse sensation?

Ad networks promise to do something about the awful adverts you're all blocking, like, real soon

A new framework and a new format, designed by the people who couldn't even use the existing frameworks in a secure way? What could possibly go wrong?

No doubt it will also attempt to disable ad and script blockers, since they would no longer be necessary in this bright new world of warm, cuddly, desirable adverts. That will only open up a whole new world of potential DDoS for the bad guys.

It's good that they're feeling the pain, now we just have to tighten the thumbscrews even more.

UK drivers left idling as Tesla rolls out Autopilot in US

Re: This seems like a bad idea

The first is a roller coaster, the second won't spill your tea.

Tea? For landings like that I expect at least a double G&T.

Twitter reduces BBC hacks to tears with redundancy notice

Re: "suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder "

'Non-violent sociopathy laced with a good dollop of narcissism."

Or, to put it more succinctly, Greed.

Re: "This isn't easy for us"

"We're on a journey together."

And I'm afraid you're sitting in the ejector seat.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

Like the classic TV ads where Leonard Rossiter tipped a vermouth down Joan Collins's cleavage. Surveys showed that most people remembered it as an ad for Martini, the best-known vermouth. It was actually for Cinzano, Martini's main rival, but it was the humour+vermouth that stuck, not the brand name. Negative advertising?

Re: New TV

she'll be using the TV's native Electronic Program Guide

At ninety-plus she's probably still using the Radio Times, and marking what she wants to watch with an X, just like mine... :)

Re: @werdsmith - People who use adblockers...

Each "no leaflets" message they see costs them more time and is one less drop they can make.

They have 1000 leaflets, and see 100 "no leaflets" signs. So they deliver 900, drop the other 100 in the recycling bin. Who will know, and who will care? They've covered the 1000 houses they were paid for.

External vs internal: Why hybrid cloud is the way to go

Re: Sooo...

freaking interconnects (which you must make sure is not shared anything).

Easier said than done, especially over time.

We had our main site configured with power feeds from separate substations, network fibres from two different telcos entering opposite sides of the building, no commonality this side of the Atlantic.

Some years later we had a total network outage, which wasn't supposed to be possible. The post mortem revealed that telco A had been bought by telco B, and as part of the post-acqusition consolidation they had merged parts of their infrastructure. One of those merged parts was the fibre sliced up by a construction crew, many tens of km from our office. They were able to reconfigure around it, but we were offline for a few hours, fortunately not a critical problem for an R&D site with local source and build systems.

Science Museum celebrates Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace Day

and no Google Doodle? Shame on them

LOHAN chews the fat with US TV station over Spaceport's FAA-ilure

Re: "...start work on the space elevator..."

the pulley concept becomes a compete impossibility.

Of course, you need a block-and-tackle to get enough force multiplication.

start work on the space elevator.

Just make sure you agree on units first, would be a bummer to get it almost all in place only to find that the first floor end was 10 feet off the ground.

PHONE me if you feel DIRTY: Yanks and 'Nadians wave bye-bye to magstripe

Re: chip and WTF

Visa/Mastercard/etc are requiring terminals to do chip-and-signature

By which they mean those etch-a-sketch terminals with a stylus that produces a squiggle bearing no resemblance whatsoever to my signature?

BT to shoot 'up to 330Mbps' G.fast into 2,000 Gosforth homes

Re: Copper's last hurrah

All of the above powered by nuclear fusion :)

And just in time for video calls to family members off working in the lunar base.

How much do UK cops pay for Microsoft licences? £30 a head or £137? Both

What exactly is an "Oracle licence" or a "Microsoft licence"? They aren't exactly single-product companies. Isn't this a bit like complaining that your "TV subscription" costs 2x mine, and ignoring that you've signed up for sports and film channels that I haven't?