Posts by Phil O'Sophical

What ereader decline? Kobo pumps up the volumes despite grim forecasts

Re: Just a consumer.

> bats an eyelid!

Flutters an eyelash, surely?

eBay's festive sales soar, but what's this? Profit DOWN 62%?

Re: All that money so little profit

Not revenue, turnover. Most of that 13bn went from one eBay user to another. ebay will just have creamed off a few % as 'commission'.

Fans of dead data 'liberator' Swartz press Obama to sack prosecutor

So are defense lawyers, it's what they're paid for after all. The job of a prosecutor is to prosecute, it's up to judge and jury to decide on the right/just issue.

Former CEO John Sculley: Apple must adapt or die

Re: Why does everyone assume there are only two smartphone price points?

> Apple cannot create a $100 iPhone.

Oh, I'm sure they can, but would anyone buy it? It would be like a $5000 BMW, or a $200 Armani suit. Fashion accessories are only worth buying when everyone else can see that they're expensive.

Capgemini staffers evacuated by cops after London helicopter crash

Re: Oh nos!

> It sounds to me like it was the fogs fault.

That's like blaming a road for a traffic accident. Pilots (especially one as experienced as this poor guy) are trained to know when not to fly in unsafe conditions. This sort of incident happens either when the pilot ignores his training or when some other, possibly mechanical, problem intervenes. In no way can it be the "fog's fault".

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

> IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist, be routed between... what is it you actually want to know?

Of course they can be, I've been doing it since before IPv6 was officially published as a protocol.

The point, as was made in a post just above, is that having a host with IPv6 is pointless if the network equipment between it and it's destination can't handle IPv6, and no-one will upgrade the network equipment until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make it worthwhile. My question is what incentive there is to fix that, and no-one has been able to answer me. What do you think it will take for BT/Plusnet/Sky/Virgin etc. to replace every single customer router with an IPv6-compatible one? We've been waiting for businesses to transition "gradually" for 15 years, and despite the huge explosion in connected devices we're now at the staggering level of 1% IPv6 penetration. Now it looks like they're transitioning instead to the lower-cost and less painful alternative, CG NAT. Yuk.

There are ways to add new features to protocols such that existing protocol stacks can still process them, while just ignoring the new features. The IPv6 designers chose not to do so, which may have seemed like a good idea architecturally but is now a severe disincentive to upgrade.

Re: When the government can't track down an individual twitter user

Well, of course that's the intention, but that was also the intention with IPv4 and it didn't take long for anonymizing services to popup. IPv6 will make that even easier, you'll be looking for a sand grain on a beach instead of a needle in a haystack!

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

Oh, it's at least 15 years too late for any other solution now. CG NAT is what we'll have to get used to as a transition measure, probably as part of a two-speed internet where IPv6 also exists, but isn't widely used for a long time.

It will be very interesting to look back at this in, say, 2020. Barring a killer app that makes IPv6 essential, no matter what the cost, my money is on widespread CG NAT, at least for domestic ISPs. It's a horrible thought, but I can't see a viable alternative. I suppose we might see IPv6 appearing on mobile networks more quickly.

So far nobody has answered my question, though. What is the plan for really achieving migration to IPv6, other than waving our hands in the air and saying "well, somebody should make it happen", while downvoting the doom-mongers :) ??

Re: When the government can't track down an individual twitter user

> You can bet that we'll be moving to IPv6 pretty sharpish.

The fun thing there is that with IPv6 you can probably get a new address before every tweet. Good luck tracking that!

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

> Well you know what they say: "anything is easy if you don't know what you are talking about"

Sorry, my last 20+ years working with comms protocols must have got lost, I suppose.

I didn't suggest expanding the address length, that is of course fixed, but other protocols have worked around this by adding additional extended headers. It makes temporary co-existence possible. Look at some of the original suggestions in RFC 1287, for example.

IPv6 went through many proposals, TUBA, SIP etc. The final one chosen was designed to fix all the perceived problems of IPv4, and direct compatibility was not seen as a requirement.

As for

> Don't blame the IPv6 designers for stupid people who can't see the benefit of spending money on anything that doesn't bring a result before the next quarter.

Why not, as I said they were academic purists who had little practical regard for commercial interests. Let's face in, when IPng work started, the World-Wide Web hadn't even been described outside of CERN!

I'll bet if you made IPv6 vanish, and asked Google to come up with a solution to IPv4 address exhaustion, you have something that was workable in a year. Ugly, but workable.

Downvote away :)

No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

I can see this becoming more common. It's a great pity that the IPv6 developers chose a new mechanism that was unable to permit a phased change. I assume that was in part due to the "ivory tower" mentality that pervades academia; only a perfect solution to every problem would be acceptable and anything with extended headers or other compatible hackery would have been beyond the pale, architecturally.

Also, of course, when IPv6 was being developed the internet was a lot smaller, and the idea of switching it all off one night and restarting the next day with new addresses probably wasn't as unthinkable as it is today.

I seriously don't see how we can have even a semi-painless move to IPv6 worldwide. Is there a plan? (serious question)

HP maintains seat atop wheezing, spavined PC market

Re: Excuse me Reg - your talking cr4p

I'm not being obtuse, you're just saying exactly what I did. If you only need a £250 tablet, why buy a £1000 computer, recession or not? Likewise, if you need £1500 of twin-head processing power then buying a £250 tablet because you've tightened your belt is just £250 wasted, since it won't do the job.

The only difference the recession makes is that people might buy fewer gadgets just for fun. That's going to affect sales of everything.

Re: Excuse me Reg - your talking cr4p

> In a recession, what are you going to buy - a £250 tablet, or a £500-£1000 PC?

Neither if it's just a plaything. Otherwise I'll buy the one that does the job I need it to. Why, what do you buy in a recession?

Titsup Windows Phone 8 orders user to cram 'boot disc' in mobe

Could have been worse

At least it didn't ask him to press F1 to continue...

Hooking offshore wind farms into UK grid will HIKE bills, MPs warn

Re: Let the madness begin!!!

It's another instance of some naïve bright spark thinking up a cunning plan to get private investors to finance infrastructure, without having the wit to realise that the more complex you make the scheme, the easier it will be for the not-so-naïve investors to find loopholes. This sort of scheme wil only ever attract subsidy farmers.

Ofgem & friends need some lessons in the KISS principle. Let a private company finance and build it, and lease it to the energy suppliers. If someone else builds a cheaper one, they'll get the business. Simple market forces. If they really need these bizarre schemes to convince investors that it's worth sinking their money into such projects, that should be a pretty clear indication that the projects aren't viable in the first place.

Anonymous hacks MIT websites after Aaron Swartz's death

Re: Once again

Of course it's exactly this behaviour of cowards like Anonymous that is the cause of the over-reaction of government agencies when they do catch someone like Swartz.

This is "reactionary training 101" - do something outrageous, wait for the government to overreact, then start screaming "look at the wicked police state beating down this poor almost-innocent person". It''s about time governments stopped falling for it. Sure, looks like Swartz broke the law, and maybe he was mentally ill, but the victim (MIT) had come to an agreement with him. The prosecution should have been happy with a plea-bargain for a few hundred hours community service, perhaps some required treatment for his depression, and a hefty enough fine to discourage copycats.

Unbelievably vast quasar cluster forces universe-sized rethink

Re: Group...........what group?

If you measure it in London buses, would it not be a TfL neutrino?

Forget 3D: 13,000 UK homes still watch TV in black and white

> Freeview boxes will have RF sockets, like every other piece of broadcast equipment (like Sky boxes).

You should test more, Test man. Sky boxes are among the very few digital TV receivers that still have RF modulators in them. I have an oldish Labgear/Icecrypt one that has, I've not seen others recently

Nipper's toy train enjoys journey to edge of SPAAAAACE

Re: Dangerous?

"Accelerating from the edge of space and landing on a person/car/home is going to cause a lot of damage"

Meh. Meteorites come in from a space a lot more often than trains do, and people don't get all steamed up about the risk of being hit by one of them.

O2 refuses to deny plans to offload home broadband product

Re: they were mavricks

> now there are caps, peak time throttling, traffic shaping some traffic down to below dial up speeds, (seriously,) and the prices have gone up.

Looks like they finally worked out that when they sell unlimited service for a limited price, people actually have the nerve to want the service without any limits, and their business model goes titsup.

Woohoo! UK IT channel insolvencies plunge to pre-credit-crunch levels

Will the last channel to close

please shutdown the server.

A pre-ticked box in web forms should NOT mean consent - EU report

Re: Cookies?

Which is why I didn't say "cookies" I said "the new cookie legislation".

Cookies?

Will this also prevent the bypassing of the new cookie legislation, where every website now seems to popup a box that says, essentially, "We use cookies, tick here to agree. If you keep using the website we'll assume you have agreed anyway." with no possibility of saying "No"?

Of course, there are cookie-blocking add-ons for browsers like Firefox, but that's not the point.

'Leccy-starved Reg hack: 'How I survive on 1.5kW'

Re: Pity you're not in France

> EDF has finally started installing huge solar arrays and shiny new connection box free for all and sundry as long as you sign up to giving them the power for say twenty years.

Do you have a source for that? As I understand it, the installation cost still falls on the homeowner, although it can be partially offset against tax. EDF will sign a contract guaranteeing to buy the power from you for 20 years, that's all.

Until a year or so ago it was a good deal, the guaranteed income over 20 years would cover the costs, but between the reduction of the feed-in tariffs and the reduction of the maximum tax break from 50% to 25% there is now no guarantee of payback within 25 years. Since most solar installations are guaranteed for 25 years at max it has become a decidely dodgy proposition. Lots of solar energy installers are going out of business, since demand has collapsed.

Re: Solution

> so if you flick the switch on the kettle it de-powers the telly rather than tripping a breaker.

> It will require kit either in every plug or socket, plus a controller by the main fuse box.

Standard components in DIY stores in France where old apartmemts have the same problem as Lester. Just google for "delesteur". Not sure if they go as low as 1.5kW though, 3kW is the usual minimum household tariff.

At last! A REAL use for NFC: Bonking butler bots and oven-puters

Different NFC

You need Naked Female Co-operation for that. Much less standard, and harder to configure.

€1.5bn swiped from EU cards: Fraud mainly takes place in the US

Re: Another solution would be chip only cards

The problem isn't that the card is copied when it is overseas, it's that the card is copied at home and then the copy is used overseas where there is no chip+PIN protection. Chip+PIN had made use of cloned cards in Europe pretty difficult.

People who don't travel can just ask their bank to block any foreign use of the card. Most banks will have alarm bells that ring if an unusual foreign purchase is made anyway. Buying a meal is one thing, but buying, say, a dishwasher isn't likely to be a typical holiday purchase.

Re: Verified by VISA is horrible

Verified by VISA saved me a considerable amount of money and hassle just recently. As used by my bank, any online order from a retailer who uses it triggers an SMS to be sent to my phone, with a confirmaton code that I enter to complete the website transaction. A very minor inconvenience, but when I recently got such an SMS for a transaction I knew nothing about I went straight to my internet bank account, and found three other online transactions from other retailers which had gone though, for a total of ~ £1000. I called the bank and cancelled the card immediately, during which time 3 other text messages arrived for other retailers. Needless to say none of the attempted "verified" transactions (for substantial purchases) went through successfully.

It took a few weeks for the bank to validate and refund my claim, but it could have been a lot worse if Verified by Visa hadn't alerted me. I still don't know where my card was copied, although I have my suspicions (shifty cashier at a supermarket I don't normally use).

The thing that baffles me is the purchases that were made. Usually people use cloned cards for untraceable stuff like PAYG phone top-ups, or porn sites. What sort of clown makes an online purchase of garden furniture, which presumably requires a delivery address?!!

Facebook snubs storage barons for cheapo Far East kit - insiders

cheap boxes from Taiwan?

Why not? Once they've sold your data on they don't need to worry if it stays around or not, and there'll always be some other suckers ready to upload new stuff, at least for long enough for Zuck & co to cash in their stock.

Scottish Highlands get blanket 3G coverage

Re: Silly question...

Follow the "Claire's house" link in the article...

SFR in France (once part of the Voda empire) also offer Femtocells, you just have to ask. They charge 60 euros, but credit that to your mobile bill so the Femtocell is effectively free. You can order online, giving up to 5 mobile numbers, and the box is delivered within a day or two, already setup. Just plugin, and after a few minutes (in my case) the operator logo on the mobile changes from "SFR" to "SFR Femto".

The box is designed to look like the SFR broadband box, and if you have broadband servive from SFR the two just clip together. Otherwise it's a simple ethernet connection back to the router. Works with any broadband provider, but comes with a warning that if they detect it being moved to another location after initial setup they may disable it. They will disable it if it is used outside France (I haven't tried it through a tunel from elsewhere. Yet.)

I haven't tried range checks or handoffs yet. In my case I do have a decent SFR signal at home, but there is only one cell mast in range. When it goes off-air, as it does from time to time (storms, lightning, etc) I lose cell connectivity so I decided to try the Femtocell as a backup, since it's free :) So far, so good.

Twin brothers nabbed for scrap over sex with 'shared' girlfriend

Re: Sounds like a classy lass

How do you know she's round?

Re: IT angle?

Piggyback connection?

Tiny Brit island stranded after £10m undersea fibre plea sunk

Re: £10m ???

> 10 million pounds for a few hundred miles of fibre optic cabling and a splicing job at sea?

You do realise that armoured undersea fibreoptic cables can cost $50K per km to lay?

Ideal tourist destination

They should advertise it as a real get-away-from-it all destination. A 5* hotel with no chance of internet or cellphone connectivity? Sounds like heaven to me.

Making MACH 1: Can we build a cranial computer today?

ad-blocker? I'd want a 100% perfect anti-virus first, and we know how likely that is :)

Merde! Paris Apple Store in €1m armed raid on New Year's Eve

The French press is now reporting that "initial estimates were of 1m euros of goods stolen, but some boxes thought stolen were just moved". Says a lot for their stock control! Apparently the robbers waited until a cleaner opened a service door, then pushed in and tied up the cleaner and security guard. They carried stuff out to a van, which again suggests a smallish haul. Odd to do it *after* the holidays, maybe they're hoping to return them for a refund next week?

The amazing magical LED: Has it really been fifty years already?

Re: Bootnote

Replace a 100W light with a 15W light and you've got 85W less energy going into the room. Natural variations in temperature being what they are, you might not notice the tiny drop that will result, but if you have a thermostat on a heater that is keeping the temperature constant then it will ask that heater for an additional 85W. That's just how thermostats work.

Re: Bored of Blue LED now!

It's not "Bored of" it's "Bored WITH".

I hate "Bored of". It's horrible, it hurts my eyes, it's unnatural, it doesn't look nice, it's not trendy any more, PLEASE STOP IT, world!

That is all.

Re: Overkill?

"Christmas tree lights are only on from Dec 24th to Jan 6th each year"

Traditionalist :)

Sadly these days they often go on around November 25th and stay on until the end of the January sales...

Re: LED lighting instead of fluorescent 'haz mat'

> I didn't realise how dangerous fluorescent lamps were until recent years.

Dangerous? How? Are you referring to all the US scaremongering about the trace of mercury, where people suggest you need a full hazmat-suited contamination squad to clear up a broken bulb? Maybe if you're a building janitor clearing up several smashed bulbs per day you'll take additional precautions, but in a domestic scenario it's a bit like dialling 999 for a papercut.

The biggest problem with compact fluorescent bulbs is that the need for them to fit standard lampholders, which means that the "replaceable" part contains all the electronics to drive the tube. That is unlike traditional fluorescent tubes where the electronics/ballast was in the fixed part of the appliance. Throwing away (or even recycling) the electronics just because the tube has gone is engineering incompetence verging on the criminal. Only a politician could have mandated that.

LEDs aren't much better, although their lifespan mitigates the problem. Plain halogen bulbs are still likely to be the safest and most efficient solution, at least in a climate like the UK.

Are your landlines buried in the stone age?

Re: Optimistic vendors to say the least

> I am saving something like $3,000 a year in phone bills.

Is that because no-one is able to make calls? :)

Seriously though, is risking your business to save $3k worth it?

I disagree that cellphone experience has lowered people's expectations, and my cellphone quality has always been pretty good. Rather, I think it has increased the expectation that there will always be a phone somewhere that works. In the past if the phone went down, you had nothing. You'd have to go to the neighbours, or find a callbox. Today in most homes or offices it doesn't matter if one phone goes down, there will be several others from several suppliers within easy reach, or Skype, or...

Agreed about keepking the copper line. I not only keep that, but have an old-fashioned wired handset conencted. Total power outage, cell tower down, doesn't matter. That phone always works. Sometimes that guarantee is critical.

Apple said to be testing 46, 55-inch big-screen TVs

Re: If true it will do more than $1BN damage to Samsung

I'll bet that Samsung's lawyers are busy hunting through their TV patents, preparing to sue...

PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

Re: Useful at all?

> you'd have to have made someone enter the password in the first place?

Which is exactly what the article says. You have your nice secure laptop using an encrypted disk. When you boot it, it asks for the key to access files on the disk. When you enter that key it saves it somewhere handy in RAM so you don't need to enter it again and again.

One way around that would be to not store the key, but as the article says, you'd then get a popup asking for it every time you open a file or folder, or write to a file.

I'd have thought an obvious fix for the hibernate/sleep situation would be for the encryption software to catch whatever "hibernate beginning" signal gets sent, and rapidly zap the key. You'd need to enter it again after wakeup, but that's no major hardship.

Wikipedia doesn't need your money - so why does it keep pestering you?

Re: "so why does it keep pestering you"

> anyone of importance on Wikipedia is either a d*ck or an ar*ehole

Sadly that is usually true far beyond the bounds of Wikipedia. Indeed you could remove "on Wikipedia" from that statement and be just as correct.

Me? I'm of no importance, and happy to stay that way :)

Microsoft 'surprised' by Google Gmail 'winter cleaning'

> horrible IMAP interface

???

IMAP is a protocol, used by email clients. Everyone's "IMAP interface" is much the same, see RFC 3501

Naked Scarlett Johansson pic snatch bloke gets 10 YEARS

If he did that he'd be charged anyway...

Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them

Re: No love for DogPile?

Maybe if they'd chosen a better name? When I think of the words "Dog" and "Pile" together, what comes to mind is a brown steaming mess best avoided.

Granted, that may well describe much of the internet, but it doesn't appeal as a bookmark.

Ocean seeding a dead duck as carbon solution

Re: I wonder if there is a way to process atmospheric CO2 into graphite?

> If every type of component had specified dimensions and interfaces, car repair could be greatly simplified.

IIRC that's been tried, and look what happened to the Soviet Union.