Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Assange™: Hey world, I'M STILL HERE, ignore that Snowden guy

After two years of Ecuadoran porn, who knows...

Detroit losing millions because it buys cheap batteries – report

Re: They may indeed have used alkalines

German supermarket batteries are your friends

You need also to consider load. My experience is that for toys and other high-drain devices non-branded cells last less time, but are sufficiently cheaper to be worth it. For long-life devices like remote controls the branded cells usually last so much longer that they're worth it.

Dodgy payday loan ads make up 83% of cases probed by UK's FCA

Usury

Aren't there still laws against usury? It's hard to see 2000% upward APR rates as anything else. Rather than ban the firms like Wonga, just put a reasonable legal limit, maybe 100%, on the annual interest rate that any lender can charge, and maybe ban their TV advertsing (like they ban gambling ads). That will force the firms to police their own business.

Re: A tax on the terminally stupid

They should be left to face the consequences of their own stupid actions.

But that's not what happens. The rest of us have to pick up the bill, we get stuck with higher insurance and welfare contributions to cover the costs of helping the people stupid enough to borrow at 5000%. And if they weren't helped? They'll end up on the street stealing or begging from us, we still pay. Better to stop their stupidity (or more accurately, their ignorance) getting them into trouble in the first place.

Brit infosec firm lets hackers think they've stolen something

"contains nothing of use."

Sounds like a missed opportunity. Why not use steganography methods to put a unique watermark or other identifier into the data at the same time as the useful stuff is being taken out. Then when it appears on someone's website or social media page somewhere they can trace back to the culprit?

The internet just BROKE under its own weight – we explain how

Re: dumb question

Why can't you have an ipv6 router internet facing with an ipv4 back end?

Many reasons, not least that the IPv4 systems connected to the back end have no way to put the IPv6 address of the external system they want to talk to into the address field of the packets. Something would need to maintain a translation table.

Think of trying to address a letter to someone in China if you can only write English characters and the Chinese post office can only process addresses written in Chinese.

Y2K

My recollection is that in fact there were no real issues, or almost none.

Which is entirely due to the considerable effort put in by my colleagues and I, and other engineers in other companies, to find and fix problems well before 1/1/2000.

Of course, we could have just waited to see what went wrong and fixed it then. Based on the bugs that we did fix I can assure you that it wouldn't have been a non-event then, believe me. Perhaps you'd have preferred that?

Re: IPv6 like OSI is far more complex than necessary

How exactly does one ride a gravy train, without drowning in brown liquid?

In a gravy boat, I suppose...

Password manager LastPass goes titsup: Users locked out

Re: Lastpass

why is it still so crap?

Like every outsourced service, there's a reason why it's cheaper than doing it yourself: because it doesn't get done very well when you do it on the cheap. Beancounters never learn.

LOHAN acquires aircraft arboreal avoidance algorithm acronyms

or...

In the spirit of the plucky Playmonaut's thought processes in those last few metres:

¡Automated Yet Comprehensive Arboreal Recognition And Magnetic Branch Avoidance!

¡Ay Caramba!

I wouldn't have hoped that any modern flying vehicle would be equipped with a

Reinforced Arboreal Detection And Repulsion system.

Sorry, I know it's polite, but I'm in work...

US 911 service needs emergency upgrade and some basic security against scumbags

Re: Think of the children ...

I assume that given his age no action was taken against him?

Which is the ain problem, of course. To deter people from making hoax, or even plain stupid ("Facebook is down") emergency calls, the only solution is to slap them with an appropriate punishment that will act as a deterrent.

We had a few bomb scares when I was at school, and the resutant evacuation into the street, watching the fire engines arrive, etc. was all good fun (for 13-year-olds). The inevitable result was that some pupils started calling in hoaxes. For an adult the consequences would have been a jail term, but that's inappropriate for thoughtless kids just being stupid. The headmaster simply announced that every hour lost in hoaxes would be made up on Friday afternoon/evening for the entire school. They stopped.

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

Re: Love that noise

Many years ago I was driving round the Heathrow perimeter road, to return a hire car. I was just passing the end of the runway when the whole world started to shake. I looked up though the sunroof to see what the hell was making that noise, and found myself looking straight into 4 purple afterburner cones of a Concorde climbing away. Beautiful, visually and audibly, and stunning in more ways than one!

Nuts to your poncey hipster coffees, I want a TESLA ELECTRO-CAFE

Re: Decent morning beverage?

In my experience Costa also does a better and more consistent double espresso (a proper morning beverage) than any of the indies who think that an espresso just means a small cup of weak coffee. Nero comes a distant second.

Re: Move to the US

Free refills? So that when you finally get the coffee/sugar/milk ratio right, and are halfway through your drink, some arsehole zooms past and brims it with coffee again?

Twitter can trigger psychosis in users

Re: @Dan 55 (was:To say nothing of the addiction factor ...)

She's not my niece, she's my Wife's brother's child.

So she's your brother-in-law's daughter, which makes her your niece. From the OED (and all other dictionaries I checked):

niece, noun:

A daughter of one’s brother or sister, or of one’s brother-in-law or sister-in-law.

Adoption makes no difference, and I doubt she'd thank her Uncle Jake for considering that her adoption made her somehow less of a family member.

Digital dongle transforms European XBOXen into tellies

Siri, Who's on first base?

- what’s on BBC One?

- I'm sorry, Watson is on BBC Two

- No, WHAT IS on BBC One?

- "What" is an ITV show, shall I select ITV?

Brit kids match 45-year-old fogies' tech skill level by the age of 6

Re: DON'T PANIC

telling little Johnny that he's useless because he can't compile a Linux kernel.

If he hasn't mastered a single syllable word like "Make" by the time he's 6, he is useless.

UK.gov eyes up virtual currencies, fingers red tape dispenser

Re: They can regulate it

That's not the job of politicians, it's why they have civil servants. The definition will be established by the men in grey suits in the Treasury who do know all about virtual currencies. The politicians' job is just to get the rules through Parliament and grandstand about them.

Gmail gains support for non-ASCII email addresses

Re: More work

brings us closer to using a single global language (and therefore understanding each other better) must be a good thing.

I disagree. A single language won't necessarily help either with better understanding, or bringing people together. Some languages are better than others at expressing certain concepts, which is why art and culture are so often tied to language.

To take a trivial example, when people use the term "free software" they always have to clarify whether that's free as in "free beer", or as in "unconstrained". That's a confusion which can't happen in French and other latin-based languages.

What brings people together is an interest in, and appreciation of, our differences. Homogenizing language, like homogenizing society, won't bring people together. If anything it drives them apart as people look for other ways to be different.

Re: More work

some bugger will start using an "illegal" email address that is not illegal anymore and it will be rejected by my code

So stop making assumptions about what's "legal". Are you one of those website developers that rejects "+" signs in phone numbers, or insists that addresses must have a "State" value?

Remember the Postel doctrine as stated in RFC1122 ("Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers"): Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

What's the point of the Internet of Things?

Re: No, Trevor...

ask a friend/neighbour/family member to pop round and replace the fuse for you.

And when it blows again straight away, then what? Leave the poor sod feeling obliged to cram all the stuff in his freezer to "save" it, or to call a repair tech and have to take a day off work so he can wait in?

Life's too short to expect other people to deal with my problems. The freezer's insured.

Re: Fishtanks are useless

What;s he going to do when he gets a message to say that a malfunction has boiled all his fish, spend the rest of his holiday crying into his beer? Rush home to look? Will his travel insurance pay for his changed flight when it turns out that it was a system glitch, or a hoax due to lousy fishtank control security? If he's that worried what does he go on holiday for, it certainly isn't to "get away from it all"?

Anyway, do him a favour and show him how to setup a webcam, then we can all watch his fish :)

Re: No, Trevor...

Technology can help, even with hard problems.

Indeed, but that doesn't require an IoT.

I have an alarm on my freezer that will tell me if it gets too warm, and a max.min thermometer on it that will even let me see if it got too warm (extended power outage?) while I was away. I can check that when I get home.

Would I want it to send me an SMS when I'm lying on a Caribbean beach, to tell me that my garage will be stinking of rotten meat when I get home because the freezer fuse blew? No way, why run my holiday for something I can't change?

So much of the suggestions for IoT seem to relate to "after the event" problems. Call me at the airport to say I left the gas on, email me at work to say that someone rang the doorbell when I was out, etc. Technology has its advantages, but I neither need nor want to be permanently connected to all aspects of my life at all times. I don't think I'm alone in that.

Look at it the other way

...knew what we had in the cupboards and could recommend healthy meals, including information on cooking timeframes, complexity, etc.

I think you're trying to fit a problem to a predefined solution. The fridge doesn't contain a selection of random items like a masterchef contest, it contains things that you bought. Rather than having some sort of AI analyze the contents and suggest meals, would it not be better to have some collection of favourite recipes in a database/filing cabinet/whatever, and then shop to match those?

Either way, you don't need stuff conencted to the internet for that.

Whoops, my cloud's just gone titsup. Now what?

four nines that allows for an outage of 5256 minutes

No, 53 minutes, it's 99.99%. 5-nines is generally taken as no more than 5 minutes downtime per year, or more realistically 1 hour per 10 years, since few people install services for only a year.

A bigger problem is that such a simple calculation only works for a total outage. What if your network is struggling due to, say, a DDoS on the cloud provider, but some traffic is getting through? Or some of your apps are running but some aren't? What number of nines does that give you, and how do you write an SLA for it?

Surprise! Government mega-infrastructure project cocked up

All depends on your audience

I can't help thinking that if this discussion were to be held on a transport enthusiasts website it would be full of people raving about the need for HS2, and dismissing FTTH as pointless.

Re: UK still leads the way in ripping off the taxpayer

cows rarely use their service.

EU rules on live animal transport won't let them, they're too crowded.

African samba queen: Don't cut off pirates' net connections – cut off their FINGERS

Re: Suffering

Co-op staff apparently have the same problem.

Verizon to FCC: What ya looking at? Everyone throttles internet traffic

The problem there is what happens if the Telco increases capacity as happened to me, some new

cable & upgraded modem firmware bumped my long line from 2Mbit/s to 3Mbit/s. Would I have been happy to have my bill increased by 50%? It goes both ways.

Asking Telcos to bill by use would be a big step backwards, it took a long time to get to flat rate pricing, and I'd rather have capped flat-rate than per MB/GB/etc.

Agreed, of course, that if they offer unlimited it should be unlimited, but the only way to stop that is for the FCC/Ofcom/etc. to really clamp down. No ISP is going to be the first to remove "unlimited" tariffs if their competitors still offer them, no matter how non-unlimited they may actually be.

BAD VIBES: High-speed video camera records your voice from trash

Mary had a little lamb?

Wasn't that Edison's test, not AG Bell's? Bell's famous line was "Come here Mr. Watson, I need you"

It's War: Internet of things firms butt heads over talking-fridge tech standards

Re: Cor what a great idea.....

my fridge will be able to tell me I'm out of milk, but I just threw away the carton and noticed

And of course now when you're going on holiday and have deliberately run the milk down to zero you have to remember to tell the fridge as well, otherwise you'll get home to 10 litres of sour milk and a kilo of rancid butter on the doorstep because the fridge kept ordering more...

Ad biz now has one less excuse to sponsor freetards and filth

How will this play with browsers that are configured with adblockers? Will it let the advertisers see who is blocking their ads, and perhaps allow them to circumvent the block, or suppress the display of wanted informatiion unless the user accepts the ads? Or allow them to "punish" websites who have a high percentage of adblocker users?

Remember Palm's WebOS? LG does – check out its smart TVs

Re: Wrong priorities

have you considered getting a second hand AV amp

I have, a new one even, but I already have the TV hooked up to a good audio system with a Dolby surround decoder (I agree 100% with the comments on the quality of TV built-in speakers), and I don't really want to replace it just to add one with an HDMI switch. Not to mention all the additional back & forth cabling between the unit with the TV and set-top boxes and the alcove where the hifi stuff is.

A separate switch is the obvious and probably inevitable option, it's what I had to do when everything was SCART-based, but it's yet one more box and one more remote control that shouldn't be necessary. HDMI sockets aren't physically clumsy like SCART ones, adding a few more to a TV PCB wouldn't be that hard, or expensive.

Wrong priorities

I can't say I care much about my TV being smart, I hardly ever use the "smart" stuff on my Sony, but only 3 HDMI ports, FFS?

I have a Sky satellite box, another satellite box for European TV and a NowTV box. I occasionally plug my camera in to see recently-taken photos. In the future I want to add Blu-Ray, and I can see other people adding games consoles or a connection to a PC or other media streamer. Even my 4-HDMI-port TV is already full.

Forget the SMART crap, just put 6 HDMI sockets as a minimum. Plus S-Video or YUV component and RGB for the legacy stuff (like my DVD recorder).

Call off the firing squad: HP grants stay of execution to OpenVMS

Re: The whole 9 yards

Anyone know what languages VMS was principally written in?

From what I remember of the microcode, the core parts were Bliss32 and Macro32 (essentially VAX structured assembers) with some leftover Macro16 PDP code still there. The utilities were in everything, I remember seeing Fortran and Pascal, even some ANSI Basic. Hopefully the Pascal at least has long gone.

All that would surely have changed for the Alpha ports, though? I never had a chance to play with it post-VAX.

Plug and PREY: Hackers reprogram USB drives to silently infect PCs

Re: Can you still buy memory cards/USB sticks on EBAY?

10 Years ago it was common for usb devices to include keyboard emulators to install software.

I've had freebies from trade shows which look like USB thumbdrives, but which just pretend to be a keyboard and open a browser pointed to the supplier's URL. This sounds like the same idea, and you don't even need to have the malware on the device, just on the website.

As always, the only safe solution is not to connect things to your computer if you don't trust them 100%. For freebie giveaway thumb drives I always put them on a Unix or Linux box & reformat them first, before they go anywhere near a Windows PC. I would guess that this sort of malware attack will produce errors if plugged into an OS it isn't expecting?

Mars rover 2020: Oxygen generation and 6 more amazing experiments

spare wheels, for the other rover

Some nice 5-spoke alloys, with a viking longship on the centre badge?

Bring back samples?

If they're going to do that, the least they can do is pick up Opportunity on the way past, and maybe donate it to the Smithsonian. Put it into a glass box with some Martian sand on the floor, that might help to encourage the next generation of schoolkids.

Has Europe cut the UK adrift on data protection?

Re: Democracy

What part of democracy do you not understand? We are in a minority of one: in a democracy, that means we lose

That's not democracy, that's "Majority rule", and is never a successful approach. Look at N. Ireland from 1920-1970 for the most obvious example.There are plenty of others.

Democracy means rule by the people, which requires agreement, not totalitarianism by the 50.1%

Re: Little Englander syndrome

if we were the first country to leave the EU they'd no doubt make an example of us and then suddenly doing business with them would be a lot harder.

That's the real problem. What the UK really wants is a return to a common market, a trading organization which doesn't try and impose centralized political and fiscal control. Leaving the EU entirely won't recreate that past situation.

Remaining in the EEA would be a good position, but the one thing that the EU cannot tolerate is a country leaving the EU and being successful outside it. If the UK were to leave, Juncker and co. will try every illegal dirty trick they can to make sure that the UK economy fails. The only way to successfully leave will be to find friends aong the other non-federalist states who, even if not yet ready to leave themselves, will be willing to stand up to the dirty tricks brigade. Few if any of the likely friendly countries will take that risk in the current climate.

Perhaps when the Euro finally fails, or when eurosceptic mood hardens elsewhere, something will happen. Right now, being the first to leave the EU, on its own, would be dangerous for the UK, no matter how satisfying it would be.

Re: Democracy

if there is a nation that has historically been privileged in the EU, in terms that their opinion has often been accepted even when it was contrary to the majority and that a blind eye has been turned when it says "We don't like this global EU policy, so we decide that it applies to everyone except us.", that is the UK.

Hardly.

The two most Eurosceptic nations, the UK and Denmark, have historically a far better record on implementing EU directives tham the so-called europhile nations. The UK may well complain about directives it doesn't like, but in general it will implement them, under protest.

Contrast that with France, for example, where every new EU directive is greeted with welcome open arms in public, and then the unpopular ones are either quietly ignored, or implemented on some way that pays lip service to the title, and little else. Since the EU needs France more than it needs the UK, it says nothing.

You, Verizon. What's with the download throttle? Explain yourself – FCC boss

there are many people who - deep down - don't give a bent fuck about being loved at all. But they do like power, and they need control.

And the real question is, why do we keep electing them?

Thirteen Astonishing True Facts You Never Knew About SCREWS

To be continued?

I'm looking forward to part 2, which I hope will cover screw habitats. I've seen some that prefer metal, and some that make their home in wood, but I've heard that there are some rare breeds with other predilections. There's also one, I believe, where the head breaks off the male after mating.

Re: What's the literal transaltion of the Arapaho?

literal translation of their word for screw?

bang-in, twist-out stick.

iWallet: No BONKING PLEASE, we're Apple

Re: I already have an NFC iPhone

Sounds great, that way you can lose both at the same time, and won't be able to call the bank to report the lost card :)

Robot cars to hit Blighty in 2015

by 2020 no one should be killed or seriously hurt by a Volvo.

They should be careful what they ask for, after all no-one's been seriously hurt or killed by an Austin in years...

4K video on terrestrial TV? Not if the WRC shares frequencies to mobiles

Re: Cut or compress

Can't we just cut the dedicated shopping and porn channels?

They make money for the providers. If there's less spectrum available then logically the cost of carriage should be increased, which might indeed drive the dross onto the internet, and leave us with a smaller number of decent channels. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Adam Afriyie MP: Smart meters are NOT so smart

Re: All these posts, and no one has hinted at the real agenda ..

only major significant advantage that I can see, in theory, is the ability for suppliers to provide cheap tariffs for off-peak usage. So, if you're in a position to schedule use of washing machines, dishwashers etc, for weekends and overnight,

Something which has been possible for 40-odd years without a smart meter, using either a simple timeswitch or a switching signal overlaid on the mains.

Re: Why bother?

spending £90 per month on electricity ... some people struggle to find that amount of money for food.

And spending £200 of taxpayers money on a smart meter to tell them how much electricity they're using every instant is going to help them how, precisely?

If they're that short of cash you can be sure that they're already very aware of their electricity use, and switching off everything they don't need. They probably also don't have the smartphone or broadband that they'd need for a "smart app" either.