Re: I'm confused as to how someone can be that confused
Suppose you're not a native speaker, want to accept / place the ads of others on your videos, and you read that as "Get your ad-on-Google today". What does it say now...?
Posts by DropBear
4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Page:
Boy, 12, gets €100k bill from Google after confusing Adwords with Adsense
ISP GMX attempts the nigh impossible: PGP for the masses
Friday 7th October 2016 09:29 GMT
Re: This may explain...
I'm genuinely happy for you if you are. Just let me mention as an anecdotal data point that after years of use, they simply locked me out of my account then when I inquired as to why, using a different account from a different provider, they only replied "yep, it was not an error, the decision was justified". Failing again to offer any clue regarding the reason. And I'd like to note I've never, ever, ever did anything sketchy with that or any other mail account I ever had - to this day it's a complete mystery for me what they were smoking when they did that. So I sincerely hope you have a local copy of your mail and never, ever end up needing to rely on their fucked-up idea of customer support. Oh, and by the way - fuck those uncle-molesting fuckers with a @%$^## &U%^ @#$# &U*&* @#$#$ *)(#$ #$%^^& @$ #$% ^&...!!!
'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'
Friday 7th October 2016 09:12 GMT
Re: Easily fixed...
That's quite amusing - and I'm by no means defending the bloke, but I'd like to note there are people genuinely incapable of ever learning which side is left and which one is right; I'm one of them. After many decades, I still have to conjure up memory aids and parse them to consciously derive the proper side each and every time I need to use them - the words themselves utterly failed to ever associate with anything meaningful in my brain all these years. My spatial orientation and 3D-thinking skills are more than fine, thank you, it's just that the labels themselves seem unable to stick. No idea why. All I know is if we are ever heading into a collision with something never, ever shout "RIGHT!!!" at me, because you've got a 25% chance of me going left, a 50% of freezing up confused, and only a 25% chance of actually steering to the right...
Y'know that ridiculously expensive Oculus Rift? Yeah, it just got worse
Friday 7th October 2016 08:34 GMT
If mainstream VR is to have any future at all (and that's a big "if"), it will be the cheap-as-dirt do-whatever-you-want-with-it Chinese knockoffs, not Vertu-level priced pieces of kit living in walled gardens. And no amount of "tech demos" / "experiences" / ad campaigns / ecstatic reviews in the media will change that. There's nothing exciting about an ocean liner sized yacht at the price of an ocean liner sized yacht. Most people have long accepted that sort of thing is just something they'll never have and they don't really need. Now, start selling speedboats for half the price of a regular car and you've got my attention...
Stingy sapphire lens in Apple's iPhone 7 is as scratchy as glass
Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer
Super Cali: Be realistic, 'autopilot' is bogus – even though the sound of it is something quite precocious
Tuesday 4th October 2016 10:29 GMT
Re: Aircraft
Without getting into the finer points of why even a realistic autopilot on a plane is a very different beast than Tesla's "autopilot", I'd just like to point out that the colloquial general meaning of "having / doing something on autopilot" is "not having to pay attention to it". That's why, regardless of what a NASA engineer might understand the term to mean, it should not be used for something that most decidedly does require your attention while you're using it.
Source code unleashed for junk-blasting Internet of Things botnet
Tuesday 4th October 2016 09:55 GMT
Re: Bah!
Except a dial combination lock is a dedicated security device that you purchase for the sole and consciously chosen role of securing something. A better analogy would be the gas cap on your lawnmower coming with a combination lock - how many people do you think would bother to change that one...? It has nothing to do with digital - it's all about the balance of perceived consequences ("Huh? What did you say DDoS stands for? And my kit is doing it? Really? Whodathunkit...", aka zero) and risk ("Yeah right, of all the people, the Russkies are out to pop my router...", aka zero). Darwin award candidates notwithstanding, most people are fairly good at protecting themselves against well known, proven threats - in that sense, the attitude is perfectly adjusted to the typical real-life consequences to the owner: none.
One-way Martian ticket: Pick passengers for Musk's first Mars pioneer squad
Monday 3rd October 2016 12:00 GMT
That would be irrelevant both for single player gaming and systematic browsing (ie. a handful of sites you visit/read regularly, kept in sync automatically for you - it could even include your Youtube subscriptions if the bandwidth allows). It's only a problem if you're trying to browse randomly...
The web is past peak innovation: It's all negative returns from here
Thursday 29th September 2016 11:30 GMT
Re: Idiots are the root cause of security flaws
"No one has ever complained about this before, so we don't attach any importance to fixing it."
Aviation industry mentality. A problem even if known, even having caused near-misses before, doesn't exist until a plane crashed because of it (preferably killing everybody on board, just so we know it really is serious). Once the obligatory crash took place fixing the issue can be justified (so we can sanctimoniously claim all those people didn't die for nothing), but definitely not before - have you got any idea what it costs to ground all planes of that type for a few hours of retrofitting an improved cargo door latch or rudder drive nut?!?
Thursday 29th September 2016 11:14 GMT
"...you have a choice"
Do you now? So where's the traditional paradigm Gnome 2 desktop (like MATE) that has a notification area that DOESN'T enlarge notification icons along with the launcher ones as you increase the panel height, allowing to group them tightly in a corner? You know, as windows did for, like, forever? For the record, I didn't invent this (I just slowly go crazy using it) - there are multiple bug reports decrying exactly this issue. The last one I saw ended bitterly with "I'll be over there rewriting that @#$#$% applet" - unfortunately, the guy forgot to mention where exactly that might be.
In my experience, twenty settings or twenty pages full of settings makes exactly fuckall difference - there will still not be any settings whatsoever for the five obviously stupid things the software drives you crazy with. Oh, and "fix it yourself" is precisely as dumb as suggesting to design and operate your own 747 if you don't like the legroom of the existing ones: not an actual option for most people.
Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station
Wednesday 28th September 2016 09:50 GMT
Re: Has to be said
"Are we, as a species, losing the ability to distinguish the difference between CGI and the real word? You've certainly conflated the two..."
No mate. He didn't. that would have been saying "Musk succeeded where Lockheed failed!". Instead he merely said "Lockeed failed. Does Musk really hope to best them?".
Oh, and while I have enormous respect for hard science and engineering - at the rate vision paired with will and means to try something difficult keeps getting scarce these days, someone putting a CGI thing like that with a serious intent in a powerpoint presentation might soon become more remarkable than others figuring out how to make it actually happen.
Wednesday 28th September 2016 09:32 GMT
Re: Musk seems to be losing it
"Seriously though how do you keep that many people entertained for months?"
You send the ones who like to read.
Have you got any idea how ludicrously little storage you would need in today's terms to store absolutely EVERYTHING that has ever been written, if it were all available in digital.form..?
'Geek gene' denied: If you find computer science hard, it's your fault (or your teacher's)
Wednesday 28th September 2016 09:03 GMT
Re: Nonsense.
Exactly. Can't qualify any of the mumbo-jumbo but there ABSOLUTELY IS aptitude involved - I have exactly zero interest in trying to look good (you really stop caring about that kind of thing past a certain age) but I'm keenly aware that the specific reason I got into digital electronics (but stayed far away from analog!) and later computers is that I always found it easy to think of logical relations very clearly - I could just hold and see it all at once in my head. I could simultaneously see every last one of the physically possible ways a bug could have been caused in a microchip, and finding the actual problem was a simple elimination of which ones weren't causing it - never really needed more than an LED or the occasional scope to debug something, never needed to inspect internal state. I know for a fact not everyone does this sort of thing - I do suck at most other things (and I have a strong suspicion the exact same wiring fault that makes me irredeemably socially awkward and blind to non-verbal cues is the one that makes me good at this), but this is just something I do. And I can assure you, no amount of studying can replace it...
Unimpressed with Ubuntu 16.10? Yakkety Yak... don't talk back
Tuesday 27th September 2016 14:18 GMT
Re: I find what people hate about Ubuntu weird
" I say that as a fairly die-hard command-line/Emacs user"
No, you say that because you're a die-hard command-line user. Having to type to start a piece of software is the chief reason making it a non-negociable non-starter for me. And I say that as a computer user whose white-hot burning hatred of any CLI shall outlive him by at least a thousand years.
The server's down. At 3AM. On Christmas. You're drunk. So you put a disk in the freezer
Unlucky Luckey: Oculus developers invoke anti-douchebag clause, halt games for VR goggles
Tuesday 27th September 2016 11:50 GMT
Re: That said, I must admit I'm uncomfortable talking politics in a tech forum.
Bollocks. A client of a business has exactly zero responsibility to keep being a client of that business for the sake of said business's employees - they are the responsibility of the BUSINESS OWNER, not of the client. Not only do the developers have the _right_ to boycott whoever they feel like but they have precisely zero _moral obligation_ of any sort to not do so. Suggesting otherwise is no less distasteful than any "think of the children"-type misdirection.
Self-driving Google car T-boned in California crash
Tuesday 27th September 2016 11:08 GMT
Re: solved...
"The requirement isn't that they should be perfect, but that they should be better than humanity."
Except that's a trendy-sounding piece of utter bullshit. Autonomous cars will be simultaneously better AND worse than human drivers; assuming imperfect software, faults will not wait for that uber-specific set of circumstances that only Superman would have been able to avoid - no, when a fault strikes the car will just derp in some way, quite possibly in a situation that any idiot human could have easily avoided. And that's not going to change any time soon as long as any and all software we write is basically made up of bugs held together by bugs, as it is today.
Jeremy Clarkson and Co. rise to top for Great British Bake Off replacements
Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!'
Friday 23rd September 2016 14:25 GMT
Re: A bit elitist aren't you El Reg?
"Gmail has full imap support too."
Yes, and my "me" email address is a Gmail one; there's not much point in trying to hide from an online store you just bought something from who they need to ship it to. My Yahoo address is my "not me" email, for things that have no need or no business having any idea who I really am. Now, this may sound paranoid to you, but I don't find having both those accounts with a single provider such a great idea - hence Yahoo, the only _other_ free email provider I can still access via POP3 or IMAP.
Pretending to be a badger wins Oxford Don 10 TRILLION DOLLARS
Not enough personality: Google Now becomes Google Not Anymore
Pull the plug! PowerPoint may kill my conference audience
I want to remotely disable Londoners' cars, says Met's top cop
Friday 23rd September 2016 09:47 GMT
Re: The Silliest Idea Ever?
"With more and more cars connected to the mobile network via GSMA, all they need is the imei of the mobile, and shut the car down."
Actually, there might just be an idea there. All you need is a short range IMEI sniffer - follow the getaway car for long enough, and ultimately there should be only one IMEI still detected (plus whatever phones the occupants might carry, buy you might be able to just filter those out as "non-vehicle-inbuilt" codes). It's just a question of how long you would need to keep up in practice to find that single remaining IMEI.
Microsoft deletes Windows 10 nagware from Windows 7 and 8
Thursday 22nd September 2016 13:00 GMT
Re: how badly they fuck up something so simple
"none of my Linux machines have ever locked up when patching without so much as an error message."
Oh, mine did, regularly, on a kernel update. Granted, it promptly unlocked itself and continued booting without a hitch FOURTY minutes later, once it concluded I don't actually have a floppy drive connected, but to be fair I DID have to figure out first that I should just not touch the computer at all for almost an hour even though it positively looks dead as a doornail...
What says Internet of Things better than a Bluetooth-controlled smart candle?
She cannae take it, Captain Kirk! USS Zumwalt breaks down
Thursday 22nd September 2016 10:06 GMT
Re: That's what happen when you have a Kirk...
"...gorgeous alien woman who will turn out to be an enemy spy but will do a last-minute heel-face turn..."
Then of course right before the finale a new last-last-minute threat appears and said spy saves the day, the hero's life or both at the cost of her own - this last part is non-negotiable seeing as how having been a baddie is a sin in the eyes of Hollywood that can never possibly be redeemed to a degree that would warrant a happy ending for an ex-spy regardless of how reformed she might be; much as any villain must die of some convenient consequence of his own actions as to not sully the hands of the hero with his murder yet still be satisfactorily dealt with, any reformed baddie absolutely must suffer the heroic version of the same fate so as to not burden the protagonist with any questionable moral choices. Some wholesome mourning and #sadfaces all around is so much better than insinuating that the real world might not be black and white after all...
TRUMP: ICANN'T EVEN! America won't hand over internet control to Russia on my watch
Thursday 22nd September 2016 09:42 GMT 
I think it's quite likely that making any judgement calls of their own regarding the danger the internet may or may not be in is pretty much impossible for the average American (or member of any other nation). You and I may scoff, but they just have no way of telling - so when Trump harps on these allegedly horrible dangers a lot of his supporters might conceivably think "well, even if it isn't as he says, there must be some truth at the root of the issue..." and of course anybody else trying to convince them it's all bullshit is just exactly what you would expect any opposition to do; it's safe to disregard completely.
In our brave new world truth long stopped to be of any relevance (and not only in politics...), there's only somebody asserting something, somebody else asserting the opposite, and a bunch of folks unable to make any meaningful judgement of their own, left with the single choice of deciding who they prefer to believe - which mostly boils down to who they think is more likeable, or to put the same thing differently, mostly just who is saying what they'd prefer to hear. Anyone wishing to refute that, please explain how else can Trump be where he is.
I can only see two ways to stop this sort of thing; one would be to first educate in _all_ relevant arts then keep up-to-date with new developments continuously absolutely everyone to a level where they can meaningfully assess any claim to its true merit on their own. Yes, that includes (among many many others) microbiology, higher maths, quantum physics and climate modelling. Needless to say, this isn't happening within a century - quite likely, ever at all. The time of polymaths is well and truly gone, and even at the time they were rarities.
The other would be to educate absolutely everyone in logic, statistics, critical thinking and the art of debate to a level where even not being able to make a judgement on a claim themselves, people could at least correctly recognize the virtues of somebody else's argument dismantling that claim. Granted, this would still need a functional opposition where sufficiently informed parties never fail to call out bullshit whenever it inevitably appears, but I reckon it would still work. Unfortunately, I see the chances of this happening only indistinguishably little better than the previous case.
A third way would be to have only some selected prominent individuals trained to a level where they can assess various claims then have most laypeople trust the views of some of these; unfortunately that's pretty much what we have right now, and it's proven to be an utter failure. *sigh* We're doomed, aren't we.
...Elon, about that Mars thing you said... did you mean it...?
Robot overlords? Pshaw! I ain't afraid of no AI – researchers
Thursday 22nd September 2016 08:29 GMT
Re: beware of the definition of "mundane tasks."
"We also now know we can build a server farm with at least 1 human processing throughput. It's 1 human, but it thinks several thousand times faster than that human." [Citation needed]
The thing about the human brain is not only that a) it contains a mind-boggling amount of processing elements and b) we have basically hardly any idea how it is actually structured (or how to even tackle describing structural complexity of that level) but also that c) _all_ of those processing elements work in parallel, while any parallelism in current silicon hardware compared to a human brain is so many orders of magnitude off that it's essentially zero.
Indefatigable WikiBots keep Wikipedia battles going long after humans give up and go home
Wednesday 21st September 2016 08:40 GMT
Oh, just wait for artificial intelligence to kick in to see real carnage - you get worst of both worlds: unwavering conviction that the other side is clearly (and "logically demonstrably") wrong (see "The Lessons of Spock, or How Logic Can Be Used To Justify Anything You Want If Only You Apply It The Right Way) and the infinitely dogged determination only robots have...
HP Inc's rinky-dink ink stink: Unofficial cartridges, official refills spurned by printer DRM
Tuesday 20th September 2016 10:16 GMT
Re: Vote with your wallet.
Just be aware that not even having any chips in cartridges didn't prevent my old Epson printer to suddenly and without warning start refursing to print anything at all "until I take it to be serviced", which turned out to be simply a requirement to replace the waste felt cube - obviously I had no "Epson service center" within a few hundred miles so I just reset the counter with an engineering tool I luckily found on the interwebs; but I can tell you the whole affair pissed me off greatly - without the tool, Epson would just have bricked my printer definitively, on purpose.
Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag
FBI overpaid $999,900 to crack San Bernardino iPhone 5c password
Monday 19th September 2016 16:33 GMT
Re: Not really comparable
"The researcher himself acknowledges the risk of damaging the chip when desoldering it."
Then he's not much into electronics himself either, and I'm fine telling this straight to his face if need be. No, the actual risk is not strictly zero, but it's indistinguishable from it as long as de-soldering is done by a halfway decent technician - and ANY three-letter agency should have people that can do it blindfolded, with their hand tied behind their back, in their sleep, at negligible risk, so future official attempts would be even safer. Same goes for accessing the contents of the flash. As long as you have half a clue of what you're doing (and you have the _datasheet_ of the chip - may or may not be the case here) there should be no risk to speak of. How you decrypt it and what risks exist if you place that memory or a clone of it back into a live phone is an entirely different matter - but woo-wooing up an operation simply called "rework" and routinely performed all the time is a massively pompous hyperbole.
Skype shuts down London office, hangs up on hundreds of devs
NASA starts countdown for Cassini probe's Saturn death dive
Swedish appeals court upholds arrest warrant for Julian Assange
The Internet of Things isn't just for Bluetooth toothbrushes, y'know
Friday 16th September 2016 12:34 GMT
Re: alternative view....
"who knows what we could find from other devices"
That there's not a single perfectly healthy individual left on the face of the earth. Grant me the remaining ruins of my illusions regarding my (known lack of) health - whatever else there is I'd rather find out (and be treated with another fistful of pills for the rest of my life, cheerfully shortened by the numerous side effects of the very same in the name of "treating" - but not curing, never curing, natch - the original "health issue") only when I have no other option.
Friday 16th September 2016 12:23 GMT
Re: Real-world IoT applications
"What measures have the vendors taken to ensure these IoT applications can't be remotely compromised?"
They carefully isolated them inside a protective cardboard or plastic blister packaging, often even going to the lengths of removing / insulating / not charging / not including the power source, for extra protection. It's not their fault that you then go ahead and systematically sabotage all those perfectly sensible precautions as soon as you buy the device...
Friday 16th September 2016 12:15 GMT
Re: “The Web of Things was coined in 2007 by a couple of researchers and myself,”
"Myself is a reflexive pronoun. It's only used when you are both the subject and the object of a sentence. "
Not sure what you're smoking but it must be mighty strong. The reflexive use case is just one of the perfectly valid multiple uses of the word. How it makes you sound is a matter of personal taste but its use is by no means "incorrect". It's a perfectly cromulent word if I may say so myself.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
