Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Lighting bods blind designophiles with LED-powered lounge lamps

Re: @Duncan Macdonald I'd be happy with ...

If that was the case, colour scanners wouldn't work.

Colour scanners use a white light, and RGB detectors. Not the same thing.

Douglas Adams was RIGHT! TINY ALIENS are invading Earth, say boffins

Re: Moonlighting?

One of those London Rubber Company hazmat suits should do the trick nicely, although depending on where he lands he might have some explaining to do.

New ransomware strain forces hapless users into becoming Bitcoin miners

Locking the users out when the system is infected seems counter-productive, since they'll have to get it fixed. If the process just sat in the background taking maybe 10% of CPU, it could run for years unnoticed. 100,000 PCs all dedicating 10% of their capacity to mining bitcoins could contribute a lot of cycles...

Five reasons why you'll take your storage to the cloud

Re: I wonder...

I don't see how you can avoid this, and it concerns me.

I don't see how you can even know when it has happened. Any cloud providers have a guarantee of an alert for this in their SLAs?

Live now: LOHAN igniter test flight

Re: Max alt difference

Drop one, balloon shoots up before the second is released?

Knock, knock. Hello, delivery person: I am this building's SKYPE OVERLORD

Re: ProleTech

I propose a simpler and purely mechanical solution. A hinged sping-loaded flap in your door, which can be lifted up, and the delivered article then slid through, to rest safe and dry until you return. We could call it a "letter box".

Re: So if you want building automation, get a specialist. Not MS

They certainly aren't targeting DHL drivers, you're lucky if they even get out of the van if they don't see a sign that there's someone in. Assuming they found the house in the first place.

Oracle revenues miss expectations – AGAIN

Re: re: SPARC hardware

My experience of parallel make on huge source trees is that storage bandwidth is more of a bottleneck than CPU.

Mach 8 Scramjet flies but sends no data

Re: LOHAN take heart!

Hopefully a SCRAMjet is next in line after LOHAN, though?

Re: Parsing...

coat, cos i also grabbed that too when i was leaving

Otherwise it would have been a case of coatius interruptus...

Apple brings iCloud bookmark sync to Windows

Scurvy-free curs sail t' seven seas with shiny Chrome and Firefox swag

And a happy Talk Like a Pirate day to you too.

It it really a year since the last one?

Phil Collins' daughter 'will give you A VIRUS' – security bods

Re: Who cares?

the only link you should click on is the one labelled UNINSTALL!

If only it were so easy

THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

Re: Anal Ooze

More likely some camp fire cookout [see icon], when the post-prandial discussion turned to the new cook's talents "that was a great stew, had a hint of vanilla". "Ah, you'll never guess what bit of the beaver smelled like that".

Mid East undersea fibre telco hacked: US, UK spooks in spotlight

Re: A bit of a rum do.

They'll say sorry, and blame it on an over-zealous underlying who doesn't even exist but will be fired and disgraced.

Re: The problem

The agencies have brought it on themselves. By being exposed as hackers and probably involved in espionage they have painted a target on themselves for every hack and espionage detected.

Well, that's true of the agencies we know about, but they're probably just fake fronts to take the heat for the real ones.

There, do I get my Conspiracy Theorist badge now?

Chap unrolls 'USB condom' to protect against viruses

Also, older USB controllers has this stupid requirement that requires the device to establish communication before it would provide more juice to the port.

Not stupid at all. If you have a USB hub plugged into your PC USB port, do you really want 3-4 devices all deciding to draw 1-2 Amps each, or to have the voltage fall to 3-4v due to current limiting so that devices start to see errors? The intent of the negotiation is that a device can take 100mA without asking, but should negotiate if it wants more. The host device can then restrict the total to avoid overload.

All the "just snip the data wires" ideas will either leave you with 100mA max (for a well-designed host) or the risk of a burnt-out PSU (for a badly-designed one).

TWO can play this 64-bit mobile game, says Samsung, crossly

Re: Patent

64 bits is what, $8 ? By that reckoning Apple mobiles are 6400bits

Torvalds: 'We're not doing Linux95 … for a few years, at least'

Re: "Suicidal squirrel”

For some reason the Tufty Club came to mind. I am getting old...

You thought NFC tags were Not For Consumers? Well, they're in Maplin's

Re: wifi access an

How long would it last before someone replaces it with their own tag which instead gives a password for the ad-hoc network on their laptop at the back of the coffee shop, from where they slurp your contacts list and load up a trojan?

Re: One use I've found for NFC

The apps can't read the encrypted data on the Oyster card, so all they do is get the card number & then connect to the Oyster website to get the balance. You don't actually need the card or NFC to do that, the app could just ask you to enter the card details as part of the setup. Like much of NFC, this is just a gimmick.

Cool?

NFC activated C4 would be cool

You really want to get to within 10cm of the C4 to activate it? A little 'hot' for my taste

Steelie Neelie calls for TOTAL BAN on EU mobe roaming charges

Re: Now watch all Western European Mobe companies go bust overnight

If there are no roaming fees then calling Estonian mobile numbers won't be any more expensive than calling their next door neigbour on O2.

BBC releases MYSTERY RIDDLE poster for Doctor Who anniversary episode

Re: Ee, when I were't lad

giant wasps

The Zarbi. Definitely hide-behind-the-sofa baddies, as were the Cybermen. I've never understood why anyone found the Daleks scary, though. Boltcutter through the raygun & then tip them over, they're about as scary as an upside-down tortoise, even with a sink plunger attached.

Re: Old who

burned the tapes on a bonfire.

Nothing so dramatic. Early video tapes were extremely expensive, and union rules limited the number of times a show could be repeated before a whole new set of repeat fees had to be negotiated, so once the BBC felt that the programmes weren't useful, they wiped the tapes for re-use.

Because of the cost, it was commonplace to make basic 16mm film copies to send to foreign TV companies who were considering buying the series. Those copies were often black & white even if the original material was colour, and were supposed to be returned but often weren't.

When, years later, people realised that old programmes were of interest, they started digging around in archives worldwide to see what turned up. There are some fascinating stories about how they managed to recolour old programmes, sometimes by taking NTSC colour off poor US videos, and combining it with the BW film, and even some experiments to recover colour info that was inadvertently recorded on the film due to the way it captured PAL artifacts.

Re: Stairs and manhole covers

> falling down manholes.

Didn't they already do that in Shad Thames, a few decades ago?

Agreed. If there's anything that sums up the decline of the BBC, it's that it now uses the phrase "celebrity guests" in relation to one of its own programmes.

In pictures: El Reg hooks up with rain-lashed Spanish rocketeers

magnificent water contraption

Ah, brings back memories of Blue Peter, a Fairy liquid bottle, and a bicycle pump!

Pair of complete tits sorry for pervy app

Re: You should only apologize for behaviour you can control

dress modestly

How would that help anyway? A pair of breasts nestling behind a sweater can be far more erotic than if they were just swinging around in the breeze.

Seagate parades spinning skinny model to oust flash from fondleslabs... almost

Re: One really has to ask

If the family is that easily bored I'd leave them at home with the DVDs and enjoy the holiday by myself!

Reelin' in the years: Tracking the history of magnetic tape

Re: Important safety tips ..

It wasn't the deflection coils that caused the problem, as much as the degaussing coil around the front of a colour CRT that was specifically designed to demagnetize anything in the vicinity when switched on! Our cleaning lady had a bad habit of neatly stacking any left-around video tapes across the top of the TV...

Peugeot 208 GTi: The original hot hatch makes a comeback

Re: The engine

hardly the fault of the owner, who is never told this

It is entirely the fault of the owner who is told it clearly in the user manual, which is probably still unread and shrink-wrapped in the glovebox from they day they bought the car. Drive the car in such a way that the turbo is red hot and still spinning at 20K RPM, then switch off the engine thus cutting off it's oil supply, and you get what you deserve. It's no different to starting in 3rd gear and slipping the clutch to make it work. You just don't do that if you want the device to have a trouble-free life

Would you be so forgiving of someone who thought that the right way to shut down their PC was to yank the power plug out of the wall by the cable?

Deutsche Telekom: We don't need no steenkin' set tops

The primary goal of virtualizing the set-top box is to move the execution of applications to the cloud. From there, they run in a standardized web browser and are transmitted to various devices as a video data stream (H.264/H.265).

So, they've reinvented the thin client? Again. This time it's embedded in the TV, and you have to pay per-hour communications costs to have your video rendered in "the cloud". Oh joy.

BAN THIS SICK FILCH: Which? demands end to £1.50-per-min 'help' lines

Re: Rare though it be...

Companies need to understand that 0845, unlike in the past, is no longer a 'cheap' call because the majority of people call from mobiles.

So complain to the mobile companies and Ofcom, not to the owner of the called phone number.

Using non-geographic basic rate numbers like 0845 allows companies to route the call to whatever call centre is convenient for the timezone, while keeping a standard basic-rate charge to customers. That should work for mobiles as well, but the realities of termination costs kick in and the mobile operators pass them on, with a mark-up.

Even more annoying is how 0800 "free" numbers aren't always free from a mobile. Even if there is a surcharge, it should be billed to the company that is receiving the call and advertising a "free" number.

Re: France isn't too bad

Which to me seems quite fair.

Unless you're a customer of Free, where the call to the helpline isn't charged, but they bill you separately for providing assistance!

Yes, this article is very misleading. 0845 numbers cost 5p/minute from a landline, although mobile operators can gouge more, up to 50p or so. That's the subject of an Ofcom review at the moment.

To be paying anywhere near £1.50 a minute would require an 09xx number, clearly identified as premium rate.

To say that financial services, the travel industry and public bodies are not included under the "basic rate" rule, and then to say that HSBC, Halifax and RBS use 0845 numbers, imples that those banks are abusing the situation. They are not, since 0845 numbers are charged at basic rate.

Sloppy reporting, or the usual Which? incompetence?

UK investor throws £14.8m at firm that makes UNFORGEABLE 2-cent labels

Impossible to forge?

No such thing. If ThinFilm can make it, so can someone else. Between that, and "It’s a physical test, not a cryptographic challenge" it sounds like security through obscurity. We can guess how that will end.

How long until someone buys off a worker in the company to pass on the secret?

New! Yahoo! logo! shows! Marissa! Meyer's! personal! touch!

"9 degrees of Whimsy"

It would make a good title for an autobiography.

BT doles out measly 2GB to customers in Dropbox-alike BT Cloud

re: Space unused.

Me too, and since there are many people like us, that almost certainly means that the storage available in the BT Cloud is << (2GB * number of customers).

Which I suppose means they should really be advertising up to 2GB ? Maybe we should all use our 2/5/10/50GB, just to see what happens? Start an upload script & go to bed?

Wrist SLAP: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch hands-on

Re: Is it water proof?

Yeah, that "mini speaker in the strap buckle." looks like an instant casualty the first time you wash your hands.

Boffinry breakthrough OF THE DECADE: Teens 'influenced' by friends

Re: @Andrew Jones 2

followed by a loud and long belch.

Debrett's is right, etiquette has gone out the window thanks to digital media...

Hypersonic 'scramjet' aims for Mach 8 test flight

Re: The Australian operation seem to have had more successful launches than DARPA's

Lower the amount the inlet has to be slowed down before reaching the combustor. Historically that has been to M0.5, but raising that to say M0.9 or M0.95

Surely the "SC" bit of SCRAM jet means that they don't need to slow the air to below Mach 1 for combustion?

Rotten routers caused Intermedia service crash, says CEO

Rotten Routers?

Or just a config mistake that propagated before they could catch it? My money is on the latter.

Anatomy of a killer bug: How just 5 characters can murder iPhone, Mac apps

Re: Brings back memories

VT132s were fun, they had a "readback screen" escape sequence. If you crafted the right string in mail you could write something like

DELETE<CR>EXIT<CR> SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN<CR> to the system admin's terminal, and instruct the terminal to playback the string. By the time he had rebooted the system all the evidence had gone...

Brings back memories

Of using VMS mail to send <ESC>[2;9y to people with VT100 terminals. Lots of hilarity (for the rest of the office) until DEC blocked escape sequences in mail.

MPs blocked from ogling 'web smut' 300,000 times – while in Parliament

Re: MPs == wankers

Now we know why tbey don't want TV cameras in The House.

Canadian comet impact fingered for triggering prehistoric climate shift

Or just a fifth elephant?

Furious Frenchies tell Apple to bubble off: Bling iPhone isn't 'champagne'

Oh dear

I'm in trouble, I have some Bordeaux colour shoe polish in a tin at home.

Tory think tank: Hey, civil servants! Work with startups to save £70bn

by 2020 a digitally transformed government could be up to 8 per cent more effective than if it continued doing business as usual.

Only 8% gain over 7 years? Randomly shooting 1 civil servant in 10 would probably be more effective, pour encourager les autres.

Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator

Re: Roundworld's Bergholt Stuttley Johnson

We need people like Sinclair, but with better attention to Production Engineering and Quality.

Probably, but without Sinclair leading the way a lot of such people would never have had the encouragement they needed.

Scots council cops £100K fine for spaffing vulnerable kids' data ONLINE

Re: Policies?

Astonishing. You find an error in an IT policy, probably due to a misunderstanding or unclear goals when it was drawn up, and you want whistleblower protection against ending up on a "shit list"?! Do you still put your hand up and ask your boss for permission when you need to go for a piss as well?