Posts by pɹÉÊoÉ snoɯÊuouÉ 242 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2012
i would assume the downvotes would be for the critiquing the quality of journalism from el reg.
it is Friday after all and you want them to do additional work that 5 min on google will provide you with what you seek....
but it is Friday, so you should be forgiven for not wanting to do some work at beer-o'clock
"Why don't they all grow up?"
Because apple want to fuck every user in the ass without even giving them the pleasure of a reach around. ... And the lawyers want to riffle through the pockets of apple when they catch them with the pants around their ankles with a line of fresh customers prostrate in front of them.... and when they cant reach deep enough in apples pockets they help themselves to the content of the customers pockets....
"The physical and temporal scale of the universe don't suit the human brain well!"
only if you don't understand how insignificant we are in the whole grandeur of the universe, sitting on our own little bit of rock revolving around a little yellow star at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milky way.
" So your industy is owned by MS? perhaps if your leaders had a clue they would form a guild and use the license money to get the job done properly. "
LOL, you need to enter the real world.
A business is there to make money for the owners of the business and shareholders. they put all their time into maximising those profits, yes, they can spend £100,000,000+ on computer systems that are essential to running their facility and the number of companies that can supply those systems can be very small and as in this case, the providers systems all have drawbacks. But so you think for a minute the people who have the authority in a business to open up the wallet to the tune of $100k plus have not looked into an in-house built system? even the possibility of collaborating with competitors to produce a perfect system.
the primary concern will be
1, will this system make our company more profitable
2, how long will it take to install the system to get those new profits
3, if something fails, who is going to pay to fix it, its not going to come out of our profits.
4, will it be significantly different in operation to what we have already, the cost of training will come out of those profits.
So, when the bloke in the expensive suit goes to see the people in more expensive suits to explain the plan that they could do it better in house, the answer to the 4 point above will be, Yes, don't know, us, and us, but the answer to the question if we get an outside contractor will be, yes, 6 months, but for every day over we get £10k off the bill... they will, we will have included in the price a service contract, its the same company we used last time, so its going to be minimal staff training...
You can potentially come up with a better system, but thats not how big businesses work. they want and need stability, or someone to blame for any instabilities. developing in house can and has killed off companies. that's something the blokes in expensive suits will not risk..
"But before that ? Not a chance."
even after that, you have the expense of training staff into using a brand new environment and applications. These days you are expected to be proficient in MS office to get a job where you have to work on a pc...
when you add in the cost of training, not only for users, but support staff that will support nix is going to cost more that the 10 a penny windows help-desk staff... TCO is still going to be way above a windows environment...
its going to ve a very very lng time before nix of any flavour makes it in the work environment
" quivering with joy at the prospect of forcing the country into a hard Brexit. "
totally off topic, but now that were are to have brexit, then a soft brexit will amount to staying in the EU, but without having a voice, we will have to do everything the EU tells us to do, and the way the "negotiations " have been going a lot of it is going to be just out of bitterness, ... Its clear that the EU are playing hardball and will not agree reasonable terms, so a hard brexit it must be....
"However one of these apps simply can't be fixed unless Google reverse the change which broke it"
that is simply not true.... the real fact of the matter is that its not worth the time and effort for the dev to fix it. they have probably released a new app that is "new and improved" and is making them more money that the old one ever will by spending the time to fix it... they just play the SEP card....
"And since there's no way to revert to the (now "a", the) previous build ..."
I am not sure what you are saying here. If you are on about the previous version of android, then for many handsets its just a matter of downloading and flashing to an earlier build.
"The best that can be said about Android is that it's free."
I guess you dont really know much about android if you think the best thing is its free..
the fact that the dev kit is available for free and you are not forced to hand over 30% of what you charge for an app because there is only one place you can market your wares is another.
I am sure other commentards will give you many other good points to android as well as better bad points.....
"If she's well aware of that fact, it might stop her from speeding"
to be honest, she is very law abiding, even when she thinks work has over paid her she tells payrol to check it, and on one occasion when they did say it was right, she still knew it wasn't so made them check again..... this is in her first year post grad and was lucky to get a job paying a little over 40k, shes not going to screw that and her future up over something stupid...
"If you grew up with 6502 assembler and punched tape / cards, chances are you are still filled with a bit of wonder and appreciation when things ... just work."
I am not quite old enough for punch cards, but old enough for my first job in IT was in a tape room. we got a message on a display to load a particular tape in a particular machine....
but as for the wonders of modern technology, the yoof have no idea what it was like before you could google something....
a couple of weeks back, my daughter came back from her holidays, flew into Manchester airport to find the battery in the car flat. It was so flat there was not even enough power to open the door with the central locking and with the immobiliser, push starting the car was just not an option. back in 1979 the procedure would have been after failing to push start it, walk to the nearest un-vandilised phone box and call dad (Saturday, would be lucky to be at home), who would then have to drive half way across the north west of England with a replacement battery, for her to finally get home sometime after midnight.....
with today's modern technology, she has a button in the car connected to a system with its own battery backup (Vauxhall on star), she presses it, tells the nice lady who answers the call, the car will not start,. The system provides the exact GPS location to the RAC, 30 min later, a bloke from the RAC arrives and replaces the battery. away she goes. A system that just works.....
the OnStar service is excellent and although it was free for the first year, its well work the anual subscription for peace of mind. if she is eve in an accident, not only does it automatically contact the emergency services, but we also get a call, the system also sent her an text message one Sunday morning to tell her the pressure in one of the tyres was a little low, followed by another to say it was flat and most likely has a puncture.
it has quite a few functions that the paranoid will be indeed paranoid about, it has a GPS tracking so somewhere there is a hard drive with all the telemetry of every journey she has made (probably) so her car could potentially be used as evidence against her if she was to be caught speeding !! but you have to weigh the good up with the potentially bad...
I use raspberry pis for all sorts of stuff, from my personal email server to a emby front end.
I spent weeks taking the light version of rasbian, and crafting it into a platform that has no bloat at all and have replaced many of the usual system tools for replacements that have better function or use less resources.
I use near enough the same setup based on debian for all my penguin needs...
but this Alpine looks interesting..
my missus has unlimited texts 500min talk and 3gb data from three for ...... £4.19 a month...
I got it down to this for many complaints about a shitty service that did not match up to the map of coverage they have....
its not worth upgrading... we just buy a new phone now and again
"Re: All of which just proves....
.....that GDPR is working."
No it is not. Its showing that a small outfit who has little or no intention of nefarious shenanigans when it comes to private data cant afford to run foul of the ICO.
so the solution is to move support to a platform where they cannot be held responsible for slurping, a platform where your information will in no doubt be slurped.
its typical of euro crap, its easy for a large corp to implement and soak up the costs, but your small business or sole trader cant afford it...
"Which is why the figures you quoted are on a per capita basis"
there's lies, damn lies and then statistics.
unless its individual people producing greenhouse gases then you cant really show the numbers per capita.
the only way to make direct comparisons is to find out how many sq kilometres of land is used for industrial purposes, then compare on like for like.
"And the US is still the second worst [total] CO2 polluter (behind China) and the worst polluter per person on the planet at roughly 16.7 tonnes of CO2/per person/per year. Even China "only" manages 6.7 tonnes/per person/per year."
massaging figures when china has a population of over a 1.4billion (93,800,000,000 tonnes of co2) against usa's 325million (5,427,500,000 tonnes)
they may be second place, but look at the size of the country... its clearly going to be producing more than most others...
"quite, my now retired dad spent 7 years learning to be a decorator, apparently the first year was just rubbing stuff down"
And your old man will tell you that with decorating, its the prep that's the most important bit to get right. if you get the prep wrong then the finish will be shite....
I agree, but i do not like the term bullying being branded around so easy as it is these days.... Its got to a point that you cant tell anyone they have done something incorrectly without being accused of bullying.
If all they ever said to him was "You useless twat, you are only use is to make the tea, so you are also a waste of money because a chai wallah would be cheaper to employ*", then that's bullying....
but giving them a crappy task that needs little or no training, (except, making the tea for the workers on a site can be a very skilled job to get right, getting everyone's tea made to exactly how they like it, i.e. more or less milk, 3 or 5 sugars)** is part of the training.... back in the day of apprenticeships, all they did in a machine shop was brush up and clean the machinery until they knew all the names of the parts. it would take time to learn the skills to work on actual client works...
*with minimum wage a trainee would be on the same pay as a Chai wallah..
** we used to have a chart on the wall in the kitchen area with your name and a picture of your mug, with instructions for tea or coffee and how you liked it, so who ever it was making the brew could get it right, and for the newbie in the office it was a good way for them to learn everyone's name !!
"I've never understood what drives normal, non-psycopathic, people to take up dentistry anyway,"
take a look at the starting salary for a NHS dentist. then consider that after 3 or 4 years of the relative shitty NHS wages, go into private practice and make a very good living out of a 9 to 5 job... then a few years after that, go work in the rich end of LA, and retire at 45..... while we are still fixing people shitty printers that they dont know how to change the toner cartridges...
paris... well I bet her dentist is well paid for plucking pubes out of her teeth.
"That they did not have a signed copy of the Official Secrets Act"
the OSA is a bit of a joke really.... I had to sign it a couple of times, once in my very first job, we did some contract work for Plessys/BT when they were developing systemX and another time working at Harwell labs...
the problem is that if you were to reveal anything that came under the OSA and they were to prosecute you, then that secret would become a matter of public record...
I believe, but have no evidence, that it was more effective to set the spooks on you to cause you problems than it would be to admit to the secret and send you to jail...
regulating and breaking up of companies is not always the best solution for the customer..
not too many years ago, if you wanted to watch premiership football in the UK, you paid sky around £18 quid a month for a sky sports subscription. Then they introduced a pay per view thing, where for an additional one off payment of £50 you got an additional 50 live matches a year. You knew where you were
along came whoever it was complaining sky had a monopoly on premiership football and decided that it had to change....
now, for a pure football fan, to watch the same number of matches you need sky sports and BT sport, which costs more per month than when sky had the goodies all to themselves. Good for competition, but not for the customer.
don't get me wrong, i hate the ethos of the Murdoch empire the the shite quality of broadcasting... and it erks me paying them money each month for sky tv, so i threaten to leave each year and I get another discount..
but care needs to be taken braking up a monopoly... make sure that it is in the best interest of the customer and not just the government creating a gap in the market for their buddies....
"That's a heck of a lot of torrent files."
not so much torrents, but if you have a lot of DVD's and bluerays you have collected over the years ( including replacing previous VHS purchases) and would prefer to watch them in the full glory your UHD HDR tv can provide via an Emby server.... and add CDs ripped as FLAC that you have collected over 30+ years, also replacing vinyl records and compact cassettes you already paid once to format shift, and have no intention of doing so again.....
I think what most affects which network you go with depends on coverage in your local area.
for years, the only network that gave reliable indoor coverage where I live is three.. at one point the local mast was destroyed when the building it was on went up in flames. After complaining about the poor signal, three gave me a little box that plugs into my broadband and fixed the problem. I also got a reduction in price of my monthly bill. so I get 4gb data, unlimited texts and more call time than I use for £4.19 per month. They keep trying to get me to upgrade, but no chance, I'll just buy a handset. It would take a lot for me to switch and go elsewhere...
now which pocket did i put it in?
"I live next to a church. If I fancy an early night on a Tuesday, it's impossible due to the campanologists practicing, but that is their right and their hobby so I would never dream complain."
My dad, used to live within the shaddow of a spire of a church and made complaints about the bells...Not that he had a particular problem with the bells, it was a recording, over amplified into distortion, through large speakers mounted at the top of the spire.... for 15 minutes there was a terrible cacophony of noise... followed by 15 to 45 second silence before the noise started again.
He argued that although the noise was bad enough, it was the gap before it started again that caused the majority of the mental stress inflicted by the 90 minutes of noise every Sunday from 10am to 11.30am.
His complaint was upheld and the church had to stop using a recording but were told that they could use real bells.
"That's not what ABS does,"
I know ABS does not provide the most effective braking directly... but it does prevent the wheels from locking which will allow you to steer around an object, and also, if your wheels lock you loose grip affectively lengthening your stopping distance. which is why I said something LIKE....
I have heard all sorts of tales about the current breed of emergency brake assists, and in your wife's merc its a poor implementation. just going from what you are doing with your feet is not enough information. But put that system with the observation systems similar to whats in the tesla cars and a simple logical line of code...
IF (stationaryObject < 10m && (acceleratorGas=off && breakAppliedForce=hard)) { // perform emergency stop }
From what I can see by the video and others have pointed out, the demonstration was set up to fail, but that's not the point.
The driver did NOTHING. The driver just let the cars computer decide what to do. But I was under the impression that the driver assist was just that, an assist, to take over if your concentration fails and it can react where you have failed. If the computer cannot react in time then its still your fault, you should have been concentrating in the first place. If you wait to see if the computer does something then you should be banned off the roads... for life...
How the system should work is that when the car pulls out revealing that statutory car, the DRIVER should break hard. The computer should assist by assisting that braking with something to stop the wheels locking, something like ABS, it should detect your emergency stop and provide the most effective stop the car is capable of. IF you attempt to swerve to avoid hitting it and its not safe to pull out, for example there is a car along side, then it should prevent you from pulling out.. but also, IF it detects that there is nothing there you could collide with, it should attempt to steer you around, and to be clear ONLY if its 100% safe.
Back to that demonstration, you are supposed to drive with a minimum safe gap that you can stop your car in, if the car in front should suddenly go from whatever speed its doing to stationary in a instant. people say that its a bulshit scenario, as cars cannot just go from 40 to 0 in 0.1 of a second. but this video shows exactly how that can happen in a real world situation and what happens if you don't maintain that gap.
No matter what scheme you come up with now for devising passwords at some point will be crackable.
Ultimately, the cracking of passwords comes down to the N vs NP problem. for those who may not be aware of the N vs NP problem, It asks if a problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be solved quickly. At the moment, it cant. There is still a prize available of $1M for anyone who can solve the problem. I suspect the prize for anyone who does crack it could be worth a lot more as it will essentially break every password.
Current computing can only break passwords by bruit force, but with the rise of quantum computers, neural network and AI I am sure that there is be someone working on N vs NP.
As for cracking passwords made up from the first two letters of a quote or saying with added punctuation, it wouldn't be too hard to scrape all the movie quotes from imdb, then do a list of just the first two letters of the quotes then use that as a word list with a combo of punctuation. So, you will need to use a more complex series of punctuation marks to be "safe" if you use a move quote.
passwords alone are not safe*, you need two factor and I bet in the future that's going to be three factor.
* safe is relative, for a web forum, a password will do you fine, but online banking needs 2 factor ....at least
boffin, because it wont be for long !!
- a "security researcher" with a foot both sides of the line
I doubt there are many people who work with computers who have not donned both a black and white hat, more so those working in security research.... how many security researchers start their career while a teenager with a harmless crack !!
I began reading this and thought it was some sort of joke, but then realised in this age of SJW and special snowflakes that they are serious....
They should take note about a similar thing in Liverpool. England. Liverpool's growth was largely based on the slave trade. Ships would leave Liverpool with trinkets to trade African cheifs for slaves, take those slaves to the Americas and then return to Liverpool loaded up with cargo, mostly sugar and cotton.
many of Liverpool's streets were named after ship owners. This included a one street named after James Penny. James Penny was a very vocal anti abolitionist and had lobbied parliament defending the trade.
Many years later, a group of lads wrote a very popular song about the lane named after James Penny, and not to many years ago there was a call to change all the street names named after slave ship owners. There was a vote and the people complaining were told to fuck off, and I fully agree with them.
Its not that I agree with the slave trade, I don't, but its part of the History of liverpool and brushing the bad things away is just an attempt on erasing the not so nice history.
and just if anyone is interested, the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester comes from this era too. The ships used to land at the docks in Liverpool and the cargo of cotton was then transported to the Manchester mills via canal boats. Someone had the bright idea to build a ship canal all the way to Manchester. This cost the Liverpool dockers a lot of work money , reducing many families to poverty.
so if you want to change names of streets, change canal street in Manchester as this is upsetting to the people of Liverpool !!
"Since March I managed to get most of my family / friends to switch to Signal. They're not abandoning Facebook / WhatsApp / Google altogether."
I have said this before about Signal... yes, its very good, but unless people stop using the usual suspects of social media its just another app taking up space...
I don't understand why people just forget all the nonsense about security and privacy on facebook and friends. Who cares what privacy setting you use, because as we can see the stuff can be made public at any time. The simple solution is to just assume EVERYTHING you put on the internet, and that includes messages on signal, is public. if you have any worry about it becoming public knowlage, don't put it online ANYWHERE. security is that simple !
what it is, you are looking at it the wrong way around.
The maths is ruled by the physical existence of the universe. Maths describes it, it does not explain it.
The mathematical formulas are developed to describe a phenomenon, in fact Newton had to develop a whole new field of mathematics to describe Newtonian physics (calculus).
Its easy to look at parts of the universe and think that they appear perfect as though designed, but when you look closer its far from perfect. for example, the big bang. If it had been a perfect rapid expansion, then all the matter spread out would be perfectly spaced apart and then gravity would be pulling on everything in a uniform way, keeping everything perfectly spaced apart. It is because it was no so perfect that matter started to pull together to create larger objects. All it would have taken is one single atom to be out of place and we have a universe....
If you were to design anything, your aim would be for perfection. But when you look at the universe and all its content very far from perfection.
as for your "sounds stupid, but true", I have heard many stories from people for what made them question religion. A youtube channel "godless Engineer*" does many interviews with people who have turned away from religion. One story was from a guy who even after going through university he was still very religious. It was when he got a job for a film studio and had to do some research for some effects. He had look up some stuff on dinosaurs and it was this research that made him start to question his own faith. In the end, he went back and read his bible and realised that nothing stands up to a reasonable level of scrutiny.
Myself, I have been atheist since I was about7 or 8. It was when I was told to shut up asking questions at school (church of England). The particular subject was Genesis, the 'Let there be a space between the waters.".... I just thought it was wrong to be told to accept without question.... But here in the UK its a lot easier being an atheist than it is across the pond. In some places its less of a trauma to come out as gay than it would be to come out as atheist.
if you are looking for a good read, try Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion" I am sure after reading that it will put to bed any lingering issues you have with religion.
* godless engineer maybe a little too sarcastic for the person recently departed from faith....
When iOS is short of RAM it boots apps out of working memory
what's this boots out of working memory you talk about when it runs out of ram..... it does this for all third party apps, no matter how much working memory it has....
I can switch from a large collection of open apps on my android and each is in exactly the same state as it was when the previous app was brought to front... I can even have two apps on screen at once....
apple close apps down all over the place to conserve battery power so they can get away with using smaller batteries, but then, you always see a iPhone user carrying a phone in one hand and charger in the other...
if i remember my apple history correct, they had actually come up with the concept of the ipad before the iPhone, as in a large version of the iPod touch....
but they used the iPhone to develop the customers into using a online app store to buy small cheap apps. the user-base of the ipod touch was too small to grow it, so by adding a phone to the ipod, therefore cutting down the amount of gadgets people use to carry, (iPod, PDA, phone), would make the phone very desirable, and after the success of the original iPhone 3G and 3GS, with people buying apps , this opened the market up for the large iPod Touch iPad.
I said the iPhone over iPad, because the combination, although an obvious progression of combining three gadgets, was more innovative than putting a large screen on an iPod touch.
I do think that Apple does need to up their game and get back to innovating, but with the money they're making they must be doing something right.
Apple have not been innovative since they came up with the iPhone. And even that was just a obvious transition from the iPod touch.
They are constantly behind on implementing new technology and even then they wrap it up in a fancy package, give it a new i name and tell the world you can only get it on apple...
What they have done "right" as far as a company is concerned is customer retention. Once you are in the apple garden, wallets do not tend to leave, no matter how poorly they treat customers. For example, a few years back, they had an issue with the GPU. It was coming away from the mainboard. After a lot of pressure they decided to have an extended warrantee repair for affected customers. Woohoo, they were going to fix it! Well not so simple. they limited it so the only actual computers that were eligible would have to have been bought in the last 3 to 6 months of it being on sale. Then to add insult, you had to take the affected computer to the apple store (tough shit if there was not one local or even in your country) where they would stuff a diagnostic disk in and start the computer. If it did not boot, then you were out of luck, no repair for you... but they would sell you a new computer with a 5% discount.
You may think this was an isolated issue, but no, across the whole MacBook and iPhone range there are plenty of issues where they just tell you to bend over and lube up...
even though they treat customers like bitches, they go back and scoop it up by the bucket load handing over the wallets and first born.
they do need to change the way they treat customers, (and its not just apple) or they will go the way of others like nokia....
I'm not the biggest fan of religion either, but at least praying doesn't exclude you from trying medical treatment.
I would ask a few Jehovah witnesses to clear that point up for you... no blood or organ transplants and in the bible belt of America there are plenty of people who refuse medical care for themselves and even worse the children because of "gods will".... of course, a child dying of a perfectly curable cancer is the will og god and you don't have the right to interfere with that great plan.....
If I could have my way I would ban religion as well as this quackery...
Homeopathy, on the other hand, is a mostly harmless pastime for the slightly neurotic.
you say mostly harmless, but I beg to differ....
the simpletons who believe in this shite time and time again turn to these remedies because they have been brainwashed into not trusting conventional medicine. The results are that people die of cancers that could have been cured, people die or suffer disabilities due to relying on diluted water to cure things like measles. they rely on sugar cubes to protect themselves from illness that everyone else is immunised against, but put people in danger who cannot be immunised....
I find tap water much better when diluted with a malt whisky - There, fixed that for you.
no... just no...
when you drink whisky drink whisky,,,,, but if you have to sully it with water at least do it the honour of using spring water and not that chemically tainted tap excretion....
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