Posts by Sarev

RISC OS Open plots great escape from 32-bit purgatory

However I suspect they will try to modernize it all and ruin the whole point of the familiar cozy environment.

That's not the intention. ROOL is as aware as anyone that the appeal of RISC OS is the elegant design of the UI.

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: All that said has anyone looked at *actual* average staff productivity?

> All that said has anyone looked at *actual* average staff productivity?

> The figure is roughly 20-30 Lines Of (executable, debugged) code /developer/day

>

> Allowing a 9-5day with a 1 hr lunch that's 1 line every 14-16mins

That'll be due to the number of pointless meetings and context switches in the average workplace.

Beneath Microsoft's Surface event, AI spreads everywhere

Re: Smoke and mirrors

* Can't drive a car - that seems to be 50% of people on the roads today

* Can't tell fact from fiction - US polls indicate that's more than 50% of the population

* Can't write anything original - anyone seen any good films recently?

* Can't reliably recognise a face - we all know that feeling...

Joking aside, if you stop going off on one about whether AI is true intelligence or not, the bottom line is that it's already providing some bloody useful tools, which can be used and/or abused. As with most technological advances: you can run, but you can't hide (forever).

Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink

Re: Open Source...

There's GCC. There are licensing problems with making the native tools free. Also, it's one of the main sources of funding that kept ROOL alive for the last decade. In such a small community, donations alone aren't enough and companies aren't cheap to run in the UK.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Three things...

Three things I'd require before I'd touch this with a bargepole:

1. A clear EULA stating the data (blobs) belong to me (as the owner of the device upon which the data were generated) in perpetuity and a reasonable mechanism exists for me to exercise my right to be forgotten.

2. Also clear in the EULA, a statement of intended use for the data (tracing potential transmission of COVID-19 while there is still an outbreak), and that the data will not be used, shared, sold for anything other than that intended use. All harvested data is automatically deleted once the outbreak is determined to have passed.

3. The app is Open Source.

Antivirus tools are a useless box-ticking exercise says Google security chap

Whitelist == censorship == dictatorship

Why is it when I read this article, all I hear is Google saying "all your programs need to be authorised by us"? Then, later they will be saying, "oh, and by the way, we need a cut of your revenue".

999 What's your emergency: Mega millions Met call handling IT muckup?

£35M per person in London per year

You could hire a 1:1 ratio of private detectives to people and save > £25M a year. That suggests to me there might, just, be a case that the Met IT systems aren't entirely cost effective.

Yahoo! Mail! is! still! a! thing!, tries! blocking! Adblock! users!

Re: Do people still use Yahoo?

Same here. I can see from the login history that nobody but me accessed my account and my password was pretty strong, fairly new and unique to yahoo so I was surprised to hear from my address book contacts that they'd had spam from 'me' addressing them by the name I used in my address book. This was a couple of months ago. I changed my password as a matter of protocol although it's pretty clear that wasn't the cause of this.

Fortunately, I only use yahoo mail for signing up to all the sites I don't give a stuff about so at least they've got somewhere to send their spam.

Windows Mobile 10 nears point of no return

Re: I can't imagine why

I agree on every point. I thought Skype's UI had got bad over the years but Skype for Business (i.e. not Skype) is a car crash.

Microsoft, Tesla, build battery that knows how much (energy) you suck

This can only mean one thing

Microsoft bring their patented estimation technology to mobile phone charge remaining indicators.

Obligatory XKCD link.

It’s Adobe’s Creative Cloud TITSUP birthday. Ease the pain with its RGB-wrangling rivals

Darktable

I tried Darktable a few times over the past few years (albeit probably not for a year or more) and it seemed to stiff more often than actually get to the end of editing - especially when first loading a RAW. I reckon at least 50/50 odds of stiffing on load. How reliable is it nowadays? I'm guessing from your "very awesome" assessment that you're not being driven mad by it the way I was... :)

Preserve the concinnity of English, caterwauls American university

Discombobulate

Makes me smile every time I imagine Rowan Atkinson saying it. Especially the "bob" bit.

Mirror, mirror: Seagate shows off 1TB data shiny at HDD beauty contest

Can I take this opportunity to moan about UK pricing?

> You can buy a basic 1TB Seagate external drive for $64.99 on Amazon

I assume that's before sales tax and that the tax rate in the US is around 75%, because Seagate are selling the same drive to us in the UK on Amazon for £75. What was the US/UK exchange rate again?

Elite:Dangerous goes TITSUP

And the wait for a review goes on...

El Reg still too busy bemoaning the issues, which all online games have, might I add...

Frustration with Elite:Dangerous boils over into 'Refund Quest'

A question for The Register

So, we've had five articles about Elite: Dangerous thus far. When might we expect to see a review?

Re: Arguing over nothing

I bought into the Kickstarter right at the outset because of the promise I could see in FD creating a game which came significantly closer to the vision I had in my imagination back when Elite first came out. The specifics were always going to be fluid - I didn't pin my hopes on any aspect of it other than hoping to see a vision that met mine. In many ways, they've exceeded it. It's beautiful and lots of fun.

Having said that, the fact I can't pause even a mission that I've accepted means missions are a non-starter for me. Being a parent with small children means you simply cannot give much time to a game, let alone time without interruptions. So the idea of somehow being able to perform an eight hour mission in real time is crazy. If you're not time rich, you're going to be massively penalised in ED.

'We're having panic attacks' ... Sony staff and families now threatened in emails

Re: Whoever wrote that sure sounds like...

It does not mean it is difficult to hide the origin of your text . Simply translated into Japanese and then in English back Google is .

I'M SO SORRY, sobs Rosetta Brit boffin in 'sexist' sexy shirt storm

Re: Sad, y'know?

Yeah, right, El Reg - pot meet kettle... The Reg slagged off his taste in music in the article about him getting some ink.

There's me thinking this is a tech news site for techies and here we have a clear-as-day, honest-to-god Übergeek who not only _looks_ like a geek but is actually successful and doing something worthwhile for Humanity. Here are the rest of us geeks reading this in our moderately well paid, dull as dishwater, 9-5 drudgery (for example, endlessly fixing shite code that some other muppet wrote) and what do we do when we see this guy? Criticise his taste in music/clothing. FFS.

WATCH Rosetta's Philae's SUCCESSFUL drop on Comet 67P

Riveting

The ESA live feed is truly shambolic. They've had 10 *years* to script eight hours of content... muppets.

P.s. Thanks for the xkcd link!

Most convincing PHISHING pages hoodwink nearly half of you – Google

Re: Hardly surprising

> My bank sends emails which _always_ contain:

> my name (my correct name, not the version I hand out to places not needing to actually know this)

> the last four of my account number

And emails being sent in the clear means you only need to intercept one of these in transit and you've got some excellent ammunition for a spot of spear phishing. Other posters are right: banks should never be emailing customers in the first place thereby setting the precedent for this type of attack.

'MYSTERIOUS PYRAMID STRUCTURE' found on COMET beyond Mars: Landing planned

Weathering

It looks to me like a collection of more dense matter than the rest of the surface, which has clearly 'weathered' away, perhaps due to being bombarded by solar radiation. Presumably, this blob of more dense matter was inside the structure of the comet until it gradually got exposed as the surface around it was stripped away.

It'd make an interesting target for drilling - assuming it formed at the same time as the rest of the comet then it might be like the speck of dust that a raindrop forms around. Perhaps these dense aggregates of matter are the seeds of comets?

Bash bug flung against NAS boxes

Routers

I'm waiting for them to target (ADSL) routers - but I suppose the majority use ash rather than bash so that'll hopefully mitigate it.

'Windows 9' LEAK: Microsoft's playing catchup with Linux

Windows had this back in the days of XP

It was one of the XP PowerTools. And yes, other OS have had this for decades. I implemented this feature on RISC OS back in 2006 and there were already several pre-existing apps that did similar.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: TV is TERRIBLE and stuck in the 1970s

Just what we need

The solution to TV being "stuck in the 70s" will no doubt include:

* a TV that you need to replace every two years

* requirement for another Apple device to actually control it

* piles of unskippable adverts everywhere (unless you pay more)

* a rental model for everything

* Apple keeping tabs on everything you do

Erm, no thanks.

We need less U.S. in our WWW – Euro digital chief Steelie Neelie

Can I have that job?

I quite like the idea of being well-paid to sit and talk about how we can talk less. Even better would be to be well-paid to pretend to listen to people talking about talking less while "taking notes" (doing my own thing) on a laptop. Three jollies per year to all kinds of interesting locations. I'd subcontract the actual, mundane, talking notes and "doing stuff" to my lovely and well-paid assistant, of course.

Brit Sci-Fi author Alastair Reynolds says MS Word 'drives me to distraction'

Reminds me a little of the Gimp

I know, I know, you get what you pay for but this reminds me that I could write a book about all the shit things I keep finding in the Gimp. Yes, I could use Photoshop but they want to move us all to a subs model. F*ck that.

Yosemite Siri? Apple might plonk chatty assistant on your desktop - report

Presumably processed in the cloud...

I'm guessing the Siri function would be passing your audio (or some representation thereof) to the cloud in order to calculate what you've actually said, giving the potential for Apple to be tracking what you're asking Siri to do. I imagine that's just another seam of personal data to be mined.

LG unfurls flexible SEE-THROUGH 18-inch display

Rollable touchscreen

I've been waiting a while for a roll-up touchscreen that can connect wirelessly to my phone. Leave the phone in my pocket and I can easily unroll the screen to do a bit of work (tablet style) then roll it back into its protective tube when I'm done. Nice.

LG drops G3 quad HD Android mobe with FRIGGIN' LASER camera

Why 3000mAh?

Why do people insist on writing 3000mAh - why not 3Ah? It'd save all that extra typing - phew - I need a brew after that.

S is for SMACKDOWN: Samsung takes Galaxy Tab slab war fruit-side

Photoshop

A photo worthy of Photoshop disasters there... must've taken, ooo, 20 seconds to create that one.

Patch NOW: Six new bugs found in OpenSSL – including spying hole

Re: @LDS Quick to fix in Open Source, but it leaves questions.

Just a stab in the dark here, you got downvotes from all the single devs and upvotes from those with a real life. I await my downvotes...

Chap rebuilds BBC Micro in JavaScript

RISC OS Pico

If you like JSBeeb, then you're bound to like RISC OS Pico - so you can boot your Raspberry Pi directly into BBC BASIC.

10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10

Try BBC BASIC on your Raspberry Pi

Free download or pre-installed on an SD card for a fiver. What's not to love? https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-pico

Amazon loads Docker app containerization into its cloud

For someone with an HTML 2 understanding of web technologies, I cannot for the life of me get my head around what Docker is or how it works. :( Nor can I get my head around what adding it to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk means... I grok a VM. And a "cloud server" is just a VM on a remote machine (like most VMs then). I can run Docker in a VM (so I'm lead to believe). But I can't quite understand from the flowery language what things like Docker and Elastic Beanstalk _actually do_ and why they need to be integrated. I must be a dinosaur.

Ubuntu N-ONE: 'Storage war' with Dropbox et al annihilates cloud service

25 and 50GB free - erm, who?

The headline and subheadline state that Ubuntu can't compete with "Dropbox et al" and we've got their statement saying "particularly with other services now regularly offering 25GB to 50GB free storage."

Genuine question here from a Dropbox user who regularly hits the top of his free 6.25GB quota - who are these mythical(?) providers offering 25 to 50GB free? All I've found is:

* Dropbox - you start at 2GB free and earn extra by inviting other people

* Amazon Cloud Drive is 5GB free - but it's Amazon :(

* Google Drive is 15GB free - but it's Google :(

Oh, and I'd still be needing/expecting the desktop client integration on Linux, as per Dropbox...

Blinking good: LG launches smart light bulb for Android/iOS

Lights flash when your phone rings

Right, so even the lightbulb manufacturers are getting in on the act of syphoning their customers' call logs. Or am I the only one who immediately connects hearing "we have an app" with "we're grabbing as much data from you as we can"?

'Disruptive, irritating' in-flight cellphone call ban mulled by US Senate

Commercial flight

Of course, the Senators will be permitted to continue using their phones on their private jets, but that's because rich people are better than us therefore deserve more freedom. Yes, what the plebs need is more laws to tell them how to better to behave like the unthinking cattle they are.

Falkland Islands almost BLITZED from space by plunging European ion-rocket craft

Good news!

You weren't KILLED by doomed GOCE satellite's fiery reentry

Er, I was.

Oh no, no I wasn't. False alarm. Sorry.

Tough luck, bumpkins! Blighty broadband speed gap misery worsens

Re: RFC 1149

> At the present moment in time, what are you planning on shoving down a pipe bigger than 10Mbps that is worth looking at?

Erm, you do remember this is Reg readers? We mostly work in computers, therefore we mostly use computers heavily, therefore we probably have lots of important stuff on large hard drives (build trees, databases, etc) never mind photos and videos - one RAW file from my camera is 17 MiB.

So, exhibit A: Off-site backups that take less than a lifetime to finish uploading?

No chance of me using cloud backup here with 3 Mbps down, 320 Kbps up. Yes, that single RAW file takes around 7 minutes for me to upload to a cloud backup server. If I go out for the day and take 200 photos, it'd take the best part of 24 hours to upload the sodding backups...

Worldwide smartwatch shipments predicted to top 5 million next year

Ah, just like 3D TV

Massive increase in sales predicted? Bound to be a runaway success story then.

Tea, Earl Grey, hot! NASA blows $125k on Star Trek 3D FOOD PRINTER

Re: Just like inkjet printers...

If it's anything like my printer, I'm betting you'll order a pizza and get 50 blank bases followed by the bottom third of a pizza.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

How about protecting metadata...?

It should be your right to not have third parties strip your metadata out of your works. If I upload a photo onto Facebook, they shouldn't be permitted to strip out my EXIF data (at least by default).

Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan

Donny Darko

I'd say it's one of my favourite sci-fi films - certainly one of those films I find myself thinking back to the most.

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

Zap on RISC OS

It's worth using RISC OS just to use Zap. Mind you, it's probably as hard as vi to the uninitiated.

Boffins implant almost-cellphone in the BRAIN

Re: 5cm!!!

Agreed! When the caption said "tiny" I assumed an error in the diagram. 5cm is huge - the average mouse brain is less than 2cm in its longest axis. There was me expecting to see a 2 x 2mm bit of silicon...

Samsung Wallet slavishly copies inspired by Apple Passbook

I can only assume

that some of the Samsung execs are non-execs on the board for some legal firms so they'd love nothing more than a good old multi-million dollar Copyright/patent smack-down.

Why you need a home lab to keep your job

Good plan

Most of us can barely afford to pay our heating bills, but yes, let's all change employer perceptions that it's OK to offload equipment and training expenses onto the employees.

'Silent but deadly' Java security update breaks legacy apps - dev

Re: Just one more thing....!

> Please help me understand why Java and .NET really need so many damn versions and different libraries to begin with? Why should I have Dot Net 1.1, 2, 3.5 and 4

Because API designers (especially those for the sprawling, monolithic frameworks that are the current de rigueur) don't seem to give a shite about backwards compatibility.

Boffins prep tasty data-cramming 3D metal-sandwich chip

Eh?

So is this article talking about processors or memory chips or both? It seems confused.

It also seems to say moving electrons 'vertically' is difficult and costly. Is the implication here that this new process solves those issues, or was that an observation about some remaining known issues here?

I get the feeling Gavin didn't fully understand whatever source material this article was based upon. Either that or I'm having a slow brain day (i.e. a normal day).

Liferay's not dead yet - but what's keeping it alive?

What is Liferay?

Liferay is supposed to be the answer to your traditional corporate problems, such as: how can we store our documents in a shared, central repository that's easy to access direct from the desktop? And how can we have a central per-project calendar which everyone can easily sync with and update? All the stuff I'm pretty sure Sharepoint has solved (but don't get me started on that!).

We use Liferay and it was my misfortune to be the one who had to set it up and maintain it. There are a billion configuration options, the documentation is poor, there are so many different permissions and attributes on everything with so many ways they can interact I'd be amazed if there aren't massive security holes everywhere from my misconfiguring it all.

On top of that, the fundamentals we want to use it for never actually a) work well or b) work at all. For example, WebDAV is quite unreliable from various flavours of Windows - I'm sure that's Windows' fault, but most people (non-engineers) use that so it's a bit of a bummer.

As for missing features, the calendar portlet is next to useless with no sensible integration to people's own calendars or central iCal servers. The document library is next to useless with no ability to put commit comments next to a revision of a document and no way to control the version number for a given commit. Oh, and you can't recursively set permissions and the like on a folder and all its contents!

And yes we did raise all of these on the Liferay forums/bug trackers over the years but nothing ever changed.

Oh, and it's veeery slow, too. But that seems to be the norm for server-side stuff nowadays. Hey ho. So we keep using it and it keeps limping along but it's a shadow of what I was hoping it would be when I first read about it. Maybe it's all sunshine and rainbows in the latest Liferay but after going around the painful upgrade cycle a few times, I have no idea what the latest version is like.

I should temper all of this by saying I'm no sys admin and my company is too cheap to a) hire one and b) go for the commercial Liferay package. Still, let the downvotes roll in for one poor sod voicing his real world experience...