Posts by Phil O'Sophical

'F*** you', exclaims Google Translate app, politely

sadly not an actual Babel fish

I dunno, I'm n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ very sure that I don't want Google feeding directly into my brain wave matrix.

Are you running a Telnet server on Windows? Oh thank God. THANK GOD

Re: Please help a penguin

The idea that telnet could be secured

Well, while it's not the worlds greatest protocol, it can be secured, "telnet -x" will negotiate an authenticated and encrypted connection. I've never seen anyone do it, though.

Icelandic brewers knock up whale 'nad beer

Re: What about the flavour?

And is it hand-pulled, or does it come in bottles?

Bloke in Belgium tries to trademark Je Suis Charlie slogan

Re: Brave, or stupid?

Cowardly fecking c**ts... All of the main retailers and distributors.

Well, there is a certain practical problem, in that only a few thousand copies are going to be available to the UK. You can't really expect WH Smiths to try and work out which shops will get a copy to sell, it's better to leave it to the smaller newsagents.

Better yet would be to wait a week or so after publication, and then have Charlie Hebdo give up the copyright, or maybe freely licence it, so that anyone who wanted to could reprint copies.

2015 will be the Year of Linux on the, no wait, of the dot-word domain EXPLOSION

Re: It will be a forced explosion, not a choice.

Exactly, it's just a way to gouge the big names for more money, since the registrars hope that they'll have to buy every possible domain as 'protection'.

Extorting protection money rarely works, though. I can imagine some creative lawyers working hard on ways to make, say, 'ford.car" impossible to use by squatters. The big brands probably have deep enough pockets to sue such scammers into bankruptcy, and although it's not normally a tactic I like, I can see that it has advantages here...

I don't think you're ready for this Jelly: Google pulls support for Android WebView

Re: WTF

This is totally, totally different to MS dropping support for XP,

But it is. It's a bit like Dell dropping support for their OEMed XP SP1 after 2 years, and you being unable to get SP3 or any other upgrades from anyone else, even Microsoft.

It's 4K-ing big right now, but it's NOT going to save TV

Re: A womens story?

Only the wimmin watch tv in this household.

All the males game.

I wonder which is cause, and which is effect?

Tax Systems: The good, the bad and the completely toot toot ding-dong loopy

Re: Tobin/Robin Hood Tax

But for speculators who are doing dodgy deals, banking on making a tiny profit hundreds of times a day, then the tax puts them out of the game.

Well, more precisely it makes them take their game elsewhere, and given how much of the market is made up of such transactions, it will severely damage any financial market where that game is played.

Look at what happened in Sweden in the early 90s, where bond sales collapsed until the tax was repealed.

No, the Linux leap second bug WON'T crash the web

Time lords in Paris

She's bigger on the inside than the outside?

Get your special 'sound-optimising' storage here, hipsters

Re: Too late - it already exists!

I can't tell you how many times those tiny blue lights have caused data corruption on my network.

It's because of the higher energy in the blue photons, they knock the loose low-order bits off the music bytes.

Hang on a second – Time Lords have added one to 2015

Re: since you ask

Not sure about this, if my machine has been off for a while and I turn it on, then the clock corrects much faster than your statement would imply.

There's a threshold value, 900 secs IIRC, if the clock is out by more than that there'll be a step change to fix it.

Similarly we get an hour change twice a year which also happens nice and quickly.

That's a presentation change, the actual clock doesn't change (well, shouldn't change), there's just a DST flag which causes an hour to be added, or not, to the returned value.

the International Earth Rotation Service need to work a bit harder at rotating Earth internationally?

It's getting the international agreement synched-up that's the problem. What do you think is causing all this continental drift and earthquakes?

Re: since you ask

In normal use computer clocks drift and will regularly get 1 second corrections,

A well-configured NTP setup should never make such a gross correction in one go, though. By default it will slew the clock to correct a 1 second difference over a period of 30 minutes or so.

Re: since you ask

the problem is, NTP doesn't work like that. It proactively notifies the client

I didn't know that, thanks.

I'm not entirely clear on why this should be a problem for ordinary computers.

Some central time reference goes:

2015 June 30, 23h 59m 59s

2015 June 30, 23h 59m 60s

2015 July 1, 0h 0m 0s

My computer goes:

2015 June 30, 23h 59m 59s

2015 July 1, 0h 0m 0s

2015 July 1, 0h 0m 1s

Sometime later the NTP update on my system notices that the clock is running 1 second fast, and gradually adjusts, as normal. Unless it happens to be referencing the external service at exactly midnight (easy to avoid), where's the problem?

Erik Meijer: AGILE must be destroyed, once and for all

Blaming the tools...

Good programmers write good code, bad programmers write crap code, the methodology you wrap it in is irrelevant. Neither Agile nor Waterfall will get good code out of a bad programmer.

Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official

Re: @Matt Phil O'Sophical Not a problem

Did they have many suicide bombings in Belfast then?

Not intentionally, even the IRA weren't that dedicated. Not so many virgins waiting for them in the marxist republican hereafter, I suppose. They preferred the proxy technique, locking civilians to bombs and forcing them to drive to targets.

How about IRA or INLA bombings of airliners? Oh, no, they didn't.

Only once, although they fired mortars at airports on several occasions, but there aren't very many internal flights in NI. Trains, buses, they were bombed, frequently. Despite the security theatre.

Indeed, the IRA often made warning calls to avoid civilian casualties so as to not upset their US donors.

Eventually, after the public reaction to murders like the Abercorn, La Mon, etc.

the Troubles led to 3530 deaths on all sides over just short of thirty years.

In a population of 1.5m.

AQ nearly topped that in a single day.

One incident 13 years ago, in a population of 250m, and you're still talking about it. There are twice as many firearm killings and 10x as many traffic deaths in the US, every year.

what you call "security theatre" I see as having been very effective, as showed in the link I included. I used to see it in countries like Israel where searching of bags going into shopping malls and at bus station queues was the norm,

Yes, it was the norm in Belfast too. Every large store had someone at the door whose job was to search bags. It might have found someone with a few kg of explosive linked to a timer, or a sputtering fuse, but almost all attacks on such buildings were through firebombs that were the size of, and often hidden in, cigarette packets. The "searches" never stopped those. Ask the stores why they still employed the security staff and the reponse was simple - after an attack one of the first questions the damage assessors asked was what precautions were taken. Not "searching" bags would mean that the store would be considered negligent, and lose much or all compensation. Pure theatre, on the CYA principle.

Alert people and good behind-the-scenes intelligence was what stopped the serious attacks, not the disruption to everyday life that we eventually realised was pointless.

Re: Tom 13 Booting a laptop, even to a full desktop, proves nothing,

Whilst neither outcome is desirable, I'd sure settle for the former rather than the latter option.

I wouldn't.

Think for a moment. The whole object of a terrorist attack is to frighten people into doing something that the terrorists can't actually achieve themselves. The main damage from 9/11 wasn't the immediate effect of the crashed planes, it was the months of economic harm done afterwards by people too scared to fly, and the spread of that nervousness to the markets. I was on a 747 to the US a few weeks after 9/11, it was empty, maybe 50 people on the whole aircraft.

Set off a bomb in a departure lounge at Heathrow and you close Heathrow for a day at least, and that terminal is out of action for a week or more while forensics and then construction crews work. You also terrify people who were taking flights to places completely unconnected with the political event that lay behind the bomb, and put them off airports in general. Result is huge economic damage far beyond that one small incident.

Blow up one plane and you certainly kill all the people on that flight, and perhaps frighten some people off getting on another flight to that destination for a few weeks. Overall the impact is far less. Clearly that is of no consolation to the families of those killed, but in terms of achieving the aims of the terrorists the former is a far more effective approach. Terrorism is not about the act, it is about the fear the act causes.

@Matt Re: Phil O'Sophical Not a problem

There were at least ten successful attacks on commercial airliners in the 1980s before more stringent checks were brought in

The best checks are the ones behind the scenes that neither we nor the terrorists know about. Those are the ones that stop most attacks.

I grew up in Belfast, I dare say I have a great deal more personal experience of the ineffectiveness of security theatre, and the difficulties of really stopping terrorist attacks, than you have.

Re: Not a problem

Logging on confirms the laptop is likely a functioning PC not a disguised bomb.

Really? My Dell laptop has an option for a mini card that boots in a few seconds into a Linux-based environment for reading email. Doesn't use much more of the main PC than the battery, the rest could be replaced with plastic explosive. For that matter, if you can make a laptop-sized bomb you'll likely be more than skilled enough to put a Raspberry Pi and a couple of AA batteries in with it to look the part when you turn on "the laptop".

As with all this security theatre, it inconveniences the honest travellers while doing absolutely zero to improve security in terms of deterring professional killers.

Another reason not to change planes at CDG (if you needed yet another one).

Yes, we need two million licences - DEFRA

Re: Really?

Where does the 2m licence figure come from? The article says "£155 per employee - typically for many licences per head - at an annual cost of £1.3m", My calculator says that comes out at ~ 8,400 licenses. At the end of the article it then makes a guestimate of ~12,000 employees. 8,000 licences for 12,000 employees doesn't seem that strange.

Even if we take £155 per employee, and around 12,000 employees, then buying everyone a licence would mean ~ £2m total, not 2m licences

??

FREE EBOOKS: Apple falls into line with EU refund laws

Re: Assumptions

people will try and get away with returning anything - artificial Christmas trees or lights that have obviously been used the week after Christmas being a particularly good one.

So charge a "restocking fee" on anything that's been opened. If you charge £5 on the Christmas lights it's probably more than the original profit, and you get the lights back to sell again. The "purchaser" has effectively rented the lights for 2 weeks for a fiver.

The weirdly-synched life of the Google Nest household

Re: Smart Thermostats

Are there any that can just learn how long your home takes to warm up and have a facility so you can tell it "Don't come on this evening, I'm off to the pub instead"?

What about one that looks at the gas bill and then sends you a text saying "if you come home now it'll cost you another £5 in heating. Why not go to the pub instead?". I could go for that sort of smart meter.

And when it's -10 outside and I've popped out to the shops for an hour I don't want the heating deciding "oh, he's gone out, I'll switch off now".

As for phones that let you know if your kid's not home from school yet, if (s)he's young enough that you need to know, shouldn't you be at home when they arrive? Will we have a new generation of IoT latchkey kids, the house is expected to feed and watch them while Mum's out at the bingo with the smartphone childminder app?

Marriott: The TRUTH about personal Wi-Fi hotel jam bid

there is a genuine issue around the kind of unsecured wifi networks that are preferred by hotels and conferences: they are incredibly easy to spoof as clients only care about the SSID.

True, but that's why any business-related traffic should always use a VPN over the WiFi.

I do believe that the hotels are slowly thinking of getting out of providing internet for guests: it's a lot of gear to buy and look after and it's increasingly difficult to compete with what people can get from their mobile provider notionally for a fraction of the cost.

I hope not, at least for those hotels with international customers. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell that I'll use my European provider's data plan when I'm in the US, at $DEITY only knows how many €€ per GB.

‘Get off of my Cloud’ Verizon tells users ahead of 48-hour maintenance outage

Re: WTF?

As customers were informed, this is a planned downtime, and therefore does not count against the SLA's...

"RTFSLA" ? I'll bet customers just love that response...

Ladies and trolls: Should we make cyberbullying a crime? – Ireland

Wouldn't a lot of this be covered by harassment laws?

I agree. Bullying of any sort (even verbal) is an assault, and can surely be treated under existing assault laws? Creating a special case of "cyberbullying" isn't necessary. The risk is that, like using "shoplifting" instead of plain old criminal "theft", it makes the offender seem special in some way. He or she isn't special, just a plain old bully, however they do it.

1,000mph ROCKET CAR project dogged by beancounters

Who cares who makes it, they're using a 550BHP engine as a fuel pump, FFS! That's proper sheddery :)

Renault Captur: Nobody who knows about cars will buy this

Re: There's a fiat 500 4wd????

You can still get Panda 4x4s. They're very popular in snowy alpine regions, cheap, light, and they'll go anwhere.

Re: An ideal car for the French market

"Because they are made in France"

The Captur is made in Spain...

Microsoft has made excellent software, you pack of fibbers

NT was written by Dave Cutler, the guy who wrote large parts of VMS. Microsoft went downhill after he left.

El Reg tests portable breathalyzers: Getting drunk so you don't have to

Re: Scotland

what, you say the 2CV has nothing to do with that?

Haven't they all been crashed by now?

Re: Scotland

the French model, where lower levels of BAC are countered with points, a fine and a Road Safety course, rather than a blanket ban would have been preferred

Unfortunately that creates a culture where people think it's not a problem to get caught once, only the second time (when you'll get a ban) is "serious", so "one for the road" is still commonplace. It's one reason why the French death toll on the roads is twice the UK one, for the same population numbers.

Doctor Who's tangerine dream and Clara's death wish in Last Christmas

Re: RE: Won't improve until Moffat shoves off

Davies deserves credit for the relaunch, but the episodes he wrote were umitigated rubbish. Mills & Boon in space. At least Moffat has some talent, when writing to his strengths.

Buses? PAH. Begone with your filthy peasant-wagons

Re: Some points

Buses can be cheaper, but there's a price for that, of course. In my car I can travel when I want, with whom I want and with my choice of temperature and music. I can change my plans at the last minute. I can also use it for long journeys where bus/train simply isn't fast or convenient enough.

Of course I'll take the train when it is more convenient, it's all down to personal choice. I certainly don't consider not having a car as weird, many of my family members don't drive, but personally I couldn't imagine not having a car.

Re: Check your facts.

Yet these 'subsidies' go to private companies - who cannot make a private profit without public money.

Which demonstrates that bus services are more of a social service than just general transport. If they were expected to make a profit they could, but with reduced timetables and very carefully selected routes. The subsidy is effectively welfare spending, the alternative would be to provide free "taxi passes" or similar.

Re: Buses are like HS2

WiFi on trains, 3G/4G mobiles, charging points, all allow people to work on trains so it doesn't matter that the trip takes 30 minutes longer than a hypothetical HS2.

That's not relevant. Shaving an hour off a round trip can make the difference between doing a business trip in a day, or having to stay overnight. Working on public transport, be it train, plane or bus, is rarely convenient, and doesn't require always-on connectivity anyway. It's easy to download mail, and work offline for a while. HS2 isn't just a slightly-faster alternative to other train services, it's an alternative to the hassle and pollution of plane or car travel. Other european countries that have introduced high-speed rail have all seen a drop in car traffic and virtual abandonment of plane travel between the served cities.

Re: Use Broadband, not the bus !

Couldn't we just simply massively reduce the prehistoric need for a daily physical commute by encouraging work from home ?

Unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem. I'm happy to work from home some days a week, but still need (and want) to meet with my colleagues from time to time. Unless people's WFH days can be coordinated over the week you'll still end up running a Mon-Fri bus service with half the buses running part-full most of the time.

Ghosts of Christmas Past: The long-ago geek gifts that made us what we are

Re: Oh dear

I still have my Mamod traction engine, and my nephews still played with the Lego 4.5v train when they visited, until very recently. They have Lego Technic of their own now, which I consider a positive result.

I don't remember the Tandy electronics kit, but did have a very similar, if simpler, one that I remember as "Waddingtons"? Also an Edison light bulb kit, to make your own experimental bulbs.

For those who regret the passing of such things, I did recently discover a Kickstarter project "Help Bring Back Quality Science Kits": https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165560377/help-bring-back-quality-science-kits-stem-educatio

Mysterious STAR set to appear on Christmas Eve above Blighty: The ISS

Just as well it's not Santa

http://www.xkcd.com/1464/

Mery Christmas

NASA's 'crazy' plan yields dramatic pictures of our X-ray Sun

How hot is that in olympic swimming pools or london buses?

Olympic swimming pools are maintained at 25-28°C, so that makes the Sun's surface a toasty 220x as hot as an OSP. SPF 50 won't cut it, I'm afraid.

Careful - your helmet might get squashed by a Volvo

Re: What a stupid fucking idea....

Hi, Phil: Are you sure the lanes near your workplace are actual bike lanes? I ask because 'roun my neck of the woods a true legal "bike lane" has to be 60" wide.

Oh yes. When they remodelled the road they widened the pavement (sidewalk, for US readers) to something over twice the normal width, and marked it with a lane for pedestrians, and two lanes (one each way) for cyclists. All are at least 60" wide, possibly more. Separated from the road by a kerb, and labelled with the usual symbols. Only at junctions does it meet the road, where there's a separate, narrower, green lane marked across the road beside the black/white striped pedestrian crossings. And still the cyclists blithely swan along among the traffic.

Re: What a stupid fucking idea....

What excatly is "the car lane"? I don't recall having seen a part of the carriageway that's reserved for cars. Is it just reserved for your car, Phil O'Sophical?

You're the only one using the word "reserved". There's a basic principle of traffic management which seems to have escaped you, that of "grading". You optimize certain lanes for certain types of traffic, for safety and improved flow. These aren't necessarily reserved for one type, but the users are supposed to show some common sense and consideration for the preferred users of that lane. Junctions are also sometimes graded with over- and under-passes to isolate different types of traffic.

For example;

· Cars shouldn't park in cycle lanes.

· Pedestrians shouldn't walk on tram tracks, perhaps unless crossing the road.

· Buses should stay in bus lanes unless there's an obstruction.

· Cyclists shouldn't cycle in car or bus lanes when they have an empty, well-maintained, preferred track right be-fucking-side them

If the cycle lane is blocked then of course the cyclist must use one of the other lanes, with due care and consideration. Unfortunately the blockages usually seen around here are between the ears, when cyclists who are asked to use the cycle tracks reply "I've paid my bloody taxes and I'll ride where I like.". Makes me wonder why we wasted his taxes on the cycle lanes in the first place.

I think it's pretty clear which vehicle is being driven by the dickhead.

Oh yes, no question there.

Re: What a stupid fucking idea....

But the loud squawk in the car is a good idea, though it's needed far more in BMWs & Audis, which appear to be driven mainly by arrogant asswipes...

Unfortunately the reaction of the aforementioned asswipes to an unexpected squawk would probably be to pull their phone out of their pocket to see who's sent them a message, and flatten the cyclist without even seeing him.

Re: What a stupid fucking idea....

It would also help if cars would stay out of ASLs,

and if cyclists would stay IN them. One rule for them, one rule for everyone else, as always.

Round my office there are separate pedestrian and cycle lanes alongside the road, and the road itself has been designed with islands so that cars can't overtake such things as stopped buses. for safety. Fine until you get a two-wheeled dickhead cycling along in the car lane at 10MPH, ignoring the cycle lane right beside him (it's always a him), and impossible to pass due to the road layout. The pedestrians manage to stay on the marked path, why can't the cyclists?

Forget Volvos, what about a GPS-assisted helmet that yells "get off the road and use the cycle lane, asshole" in his ear?

Working over Christmas? Government tech suppliers will be

My money would be on someone deciding to spellcheck the final request for tender before sending it out, and not proofreading the resulting changes. Whoever wins the tender may be in for a shock...

Super Cali's futuristic Tesla batt swap focus – even though car tech test is an expected bonus

Re: This is the only reasonable way it works

Everyone's a winner.

Until you do the math on the power supply required by the swap stations to charge the spare batteries they have to keep "in stock". It'll work for a limited-edition luxury car brand that only sees a few dozen customers a day, but you won't see it replacing every street corner gas station that serves hundreds of refills per day.

Tragedy strikes Vulture News Central but details remain scrambled

Re: If that's supposed to be funny...

After 6 months, if she wasn't hardboiled she was already well past her best-by date. Will she be moving to one of those pay-to-view scrambled channels now?

UK air traffic bods deny they 'skimped' on IT investment after server mega-fail

Re: Failover software ?

Probably because failure tends to be less immediately fatal. If the ILS bluescreens when you're 100 yds off the runway in thick fog you don't have much chance to switch to pencil and paper. For the NATS event the backup approach clearly worked exactly as it should, at worst a few people got delayed, that's less disruption than a passing snowstorm would have caused.