Posts by Unep Eurobats

Cybersecurity snafu sends British Library back to the Dark Ages

"London's famous library, home to Magna Carta"

You can borrow the Magna Carta?

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

This is a distraction, not a solution

Road danger, congestion, pollution and cost are the real, current problems that need addressing urgently, but 'Oh look, shiny electric self-driving cars for everybody soon.'

There won't be, but in the meantime the repeated myth makes it easier for the government and local councils to postpone the difficult decisions they know they need to take in order to bring about meaningful transport improvements.

UK's competition watchdog gives £31bn Virgin Media and O2 merger the seal of approval

OxyGin?

Bluesky creatives are thoughtstorming the new branding even as I type.

Honda sends first consumer Level 3 autonomous car into showrooms, but only to 100 lucky Japanese leasers

‘helps mitigate driver fatigue and stress while driving in a traffic jam’

Or we could just try and, you know, mitigate the traffic jams?

Actually, no, forget that, I don’t know what came over me. I’ll have mine in Obsidian Blue Pearl, please.

Pandemic? Check. World in peril? Check. CES is on? Check. So of course Bluetooth Smart Masks are now a thing

iMask™

Sir Jony is thought-bombing it right now.

Devs strung up about .NET 5.0 string changes that may break working code are told: It's not a bug, it's a feature

Inconvenience or disaster?

I suspect and hope that this functionality is used more for fuzzy logic than anything business critical. For example, if a feedback form contains the word 'complain' it gets routed automatically to /dev/null the complaints department, whereas if it contains the word 'fabulous' it goes to marketing.

SNAFU: Clairvoyant train brings warning of what was coming down the line for 2020

Re: My Money is on

Along with the comment, 'This should never happen.' Ha!

Cereal Killer Cafe enters hipster heaven, heads online: Coronavirus blamed for shutters being pulled down

Re: released a cookbook, …

+1 for the home-made granola. I make this simple version but increase the butter and dial back the honey. I add chopped dark chocolate once it's cooled. The Cereal Killers' Buster Nut may have been similar but now I'll never know.

(El Reg: come for the insightful IT analysis, stay for the granola recipes. Who needs Mumsnet?)

Things can't go on like this. You need to get fit for the sake of your health. I'm going to write you a prescription for... an e-bike

Blake Street

Ouch. That looks tough. But at least there's a pub at the top for more social prescribing.

Poetry in lockdown: hiQ to Supremes / Please leave LinkedIn scrape ruling / well enough alone

hiQ

With this poetic

Piece of punmanship El Reg

Has spoiled its readers

Now that's a train delay Upminster with which London travellers shall not put

'feels like March will never end'

The writer's suffering even more lockdown-induced chrono-confusion than I am. At least I know it's Thursday.

Psst. Hey kid, you want $50 in AWS credit? Great, you just need to fill out this form and sit through these web lectures

Keynote by Werner

Always good value.

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

Buy more cars - drive them less

So the PM wants us to buy more cars but his transport secretary wants us to drive them less.

OK, maybe this isn't completely contradictory. Climate control, surround sound, wi-fi, ergonomic seat - just leave them permanently on the drive, plugged in, as the perfect home office.

Honor launches new UK store, laptop, kettle, er... toothbrush?

Re: Millimetres?

And the TVs are 'available in 65-inch, 55-inch, and 5-inch variants'.

Please, just convert everything to fractions of a diplodocus.

Dickens' forgotten spaceship classic: A Tale of Three Missions

It is a far, far better comment

that I post, than I have ever posted.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: "How about "Microshaft""

I like the Shaft reference. Or how about:

Who's the Redmond software peeps who're a hit with all the geeks?

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Is the government relying on people's trust of the NHS?

The important thing for any viable app is that it gets adopted as widely as possible. The government could be assuming that people will trust the NHS, as a brand, more than they'll trust Apple/Google.

If this is the case then they don't have to worry about distinctions such as centralisation/decentralisation of data, and anonymisation one way versus anonymisation another way, which will be of little concern to the vast majority.

Uber trials fixed-price hourly rentals for visits to the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker

The urban transport solution for coronavirus and afterwards

is not personal chauffeurs. It really isn't.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

Re: "the prangs may occur between the years 2131 and 2923"

OK, done that.

Amid coronavirus epidemic, LG, ZTE hang up on Mobile World Congress, organizers call for 'no-handshake' policy

Re: No handshakes

In general there's far too much pressing the flesh. A terse nod should be enough for all but close relations.

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

Obligatory Bowie references

Diamond Dog Drill.

Or: Ziggy Marsdust and the Pesky Spiders from Earth that Stowed Away in the Glove Compartment.

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

Tell me about it

I got stuck in Peterborough (with bike). Already by the evening word was coming through that there were trains further along the line that needed an engineer to come out and reset them. Fortunately there was a Premier Inn and they let you keep your bike in your room.

Who's that padding down the chimney? It's Puma, with its weird £80 socks for gamers

Personal tech?

This is a Bootnote, Shirley.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

'a cabinet that's as wide as the TV'

... or two cabinets the same height.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Thanks Verity

Always a pleasure to be entertained and informed at the same time.

We(don't)Work: Rent-a-desk outfit cuts 2,400 staff in bid to be a functioning business

'coffee and microbrews replaced with Folgers and Modelo'

I don't know those brands but here in London the barista coffee is still from the excellent Volcano. The beer supplier has recently changed from Meantime to Camden Brewery, which isn't a downgrade.

Moby or not Moby. That is the question: Docker devs debate fate of unloved rebranding

Whale I never

Clearly there was too much confusion between the eponymous creature of Melville's novel and the ambient music practitioner.

You're about to gouda major change in Microsoft cloud security after Redmond agrees to go Dutch on data

'to gouda major change'

Is that 'to get a major change'? My Dutch isn't brilliant but I'm pretty edam sure it's not pronounced anything like that.

Who loves Brexit? Irish distributors ... after their sales jump by a third

Buying servers? Cloud, Shirley

With the cloud it could just be a matter of migrating data to a region that will remain within the EU. But then UK and EU27 data would have to be split between databases in two different regions.

It's then possible to imagine a crazy situation in which amalgamating query results from the two databases might be illegal, depending on where it was being done.

If you've wanted to lazily merge code on GitHub from the pub, couch or beach, there's now a mobile app for that

Re: "If you've wanted to lazily merge code on GitHub from the pub, couch or beach ..."

I thought the same: manage your source code from the pub - what could possibly go wrong?

In fact I imagine the most likely scenarios are seeing if some colleague has checked in yet, or reading the admiring comments on your latest refactor.

Though frankly if you're doing this in the pub you probably ought to find a better pub.

Hey, you've earned it: Huawei chucks workers a £219m bonus for tackling US blacklist

'Take the kids somewhere nice'

I think you mean, 'Use it to get Huawei from it all for a while'.

More Huawei punz plz.

Without any apparent irony, Google marks Chrome's 'small' role in web ecosystem

Re: "spaces won with 51 per cent of the vote"

I was reminded of bikeshedding the other day, coincidentally after plunging down a rabbit hole from another Reg comment thread: it's the tendency to concentrate disproportionately on the trivial.

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: Contact your credit card company.

It depends on the Ts & Cs. There could be something in the small print that says Insignia can do this. It would then be difficult for a credit card company to be confident of recovering any liability it takes on.

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

I've heard you can put things in the oven to soften the glue

Just don't forget about them before you cook the Sunday roast, mmkay?

Watch tiny swimming magnetic robots suck up uranium in a droplet of radioactive wastewater

Clever stuff, but practical?

This sounds like it will work best for open stretches of still or slow-moving contaminated water. It's going to be harder to deploy in other scenarios - where spillage leaks into the ground, for example.

GraphQL a cut above the REST, say query lang's fans: Airbnb, Knotel, others embrace the tech

It lets the client decide

If client coders just want a small subset of the data, then traditionally they have to ask the developer of the server-side REST API to provide a method that returns just this subset. If there's only a standard GET method that returns everything, then the client has to incur the expense of calling that and then discard most of the response.

By giving the client the ability to select just what they want from a standard endpoint, GraphQL has the potential to speed up client/server development and/or interaction. However, there's the risk that in practice this approach will just transfer complexity from the API to the client.

'Earworn Wearables' will save the day (wireless earbuds, but cool name for your D&D halfling)

'somewhat clunky term'

Too right. 'Earworn wearables' is also a tautology. Trouble is, 'earwear' sounds a bit odd, just like a sort of noise, a posh 'ooh err'.

Still clunky, but how about 'earworn insertables', to distinguish them from traditional over-ear headphones?

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

Re: Better incentive.

Or end the nine-year freeze on fuel duty?

Microsoft has made an Android phone. Repeat, Microsoft has made an Android phone. A dual-screen foldable mobe not due until late 2020

Fear of missing out

'Foldable mobile' is a bit of a mouthful. How about fomobe? (You know you want one.)

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

Re: The FIFTH sequel?!

It's actually the fourth sequel but the fifth instalment, or iteration if you will.

I read it in a memo from Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

El Reg unit?

The strength of 30 MRI scanners sounds impressive, but is still a little detached from most people's real-world experience.

President Trump sits down with Twitter boss for crunch talks: Why am I losing followers?

E-peen

Short for e-penis, meaning one's sense of online self-worth. (You're welcome.)

Like all right-thinking people, I measure mine in El Reg upvotes.

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The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Headphone jack?

Don't call me Jack.

I am just a mapper: Solar drones take to the skies above Blighty

Re: Brilliant

A sysadmin is an El Reg unit now? What's that in diplodocuses?

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Hipster demographic

If you could also get a decent coffee and a quick lube for your bike they'd be onto a surefire winner.

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

Nature abhors a powerful vacuum

I thought Dyson wanted to leave the EU because Brussels are going to limit the wattage of domestic appliances, ostensibly in order to save the planet from climate change. Their real reason for doing this, allegedly, is because Dyson's extra-powerful vacuum cleaners are wiping the floor (see what I did there) with the continental competition. The scoundrels.

So it doesn't really matter whether Sir Jim is in Singapore or not, as long as we Brits remain free to Take Back Control (TM) of our living-room carpets with the super-puissant suckage of our Mega-Cyclones.

Forget Finding Nemo: This AI can identify a single zebrafish out of a 100-strong shoal

AI can identify a single zebrafish out of a 100-strong shoal

That's easy, it's the stripy one. Duh.

Forget DeepFakes. This robo-Rembrandt with AI for brains is not bad at knocking off paintings

robo-Rembrant [sic]

Presumably to stop the real Rembrandt suing their ass.

You don't mess with the old masters. That Caravaggio, 'e'll 'ave yer for tuppence.

Samsung 'reveals' what looks like a tablet that folds into a phone, but otherwise we're quite literally left in the dark

Use cases

Cool games, of course. One where you have to get a ball into a hole by bending the display to get it to roll up and down hill. (I haven't thought out the details.)

If Shadow Home Sec Diane Abbott can be reeled in by phishers, truly no one is safe

At least she uses a PC

Whoever the current home secretary is (they will likely have changed by the time I Google it) probably has someone to do it for them.