Wait...£84mil AND a refit? How much is that refit costing? Who is footing the bill for it?
Posts by nedge2k
36 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2013
Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m
Microsoft's foray into phones was a bumbling, half-hearted fiasco, and Nadella always knew it
Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) was an awesome platform and to a degree, is still better than what's out there now. If they had just done the UI refresh properly, keeping the underlying Windows CE base and allowing for backward compatibility with the old .CAB packaged applications and integrated said apps into a proper store, quickly - instead of the gimped abortion that was Windows Phone - they'd still be a player.
Brit folk STILL not getting advertised broadband speeds – survey
Speed would bother people less if they weren't being charged for something they weren't getting and had no way of getting.
My inlaws are charged for 24mb but barely see 1mb. They can't do anything about it, BT won't do anything about it (rural) yet they are still charged full whack. I'm on 80mb but only get 42mb (I would switch to 40mb but the package i'm on has unlimited this that and the other, no traffic shaping, lower contention etc. etc.). FTTC will fix their issue eventually, FTTDP or G.Fast will fix mine, eventually.
OFCOM should force ISPs to pro rata the charges. ISPs know what speed you'll get and should charge proportionally for the speed you get. Only getting half speed? Then pay half price!
You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg
Fake History Alert: Sorry BBC, but Apple really did invent the iPhone
Re: Apple invented everything...
Lotaresco, I used to review a lot of the devices back in the day, as well as using them daily and modifying them (my phone history for ref: http://mowned.com/nedge2k). Not once did they ever fail to make a phone call. Maybe the journalist was biased and made it up (Symbian was massively under threat at the time and all sorts of bullshit stories were flying about), maybe he had dodgy hardware, who knows. Either way, it doesn't mean that the OS as a whole wasn't superior to what Nokia and Apple produced - because in every other way, it was.
Apple invented everything...
They may have invented the iPhone but they DID NOT invent the "smartphone category" as that article suggests.
Microsoft had Smartphone 2002 and Pocket PC 2000 which were eventually merged into Windows Mobile and, interface aside, were vastly superior to the iPhone's iOS. Devices were manufactured in a similar fashion to how android devices are now - MS provided the OS and firms like HTC, HP, Acer, Asus, Eten, Motorola made the hardware. People rarely know how long HTC has been going as they used to OEM stuff for the networks - like the original Orange SPV (HTC Canary), a candybar style device running Microsoft Smartphone 2002. Or the original O2 XDA (HTC Wallaby), one the first Pocket PC "phone edition" devices and, IIRC, the first touchscreen smartphone to be made by HTC.
Outage-prone Plusnet goes mobile in a bid to become 'quad-play' biz
MPs want Blighty to enforce domestic roaming to fix 'not spots'
Ageing GSM crypto cracked on commodity graphics rig
Stop lights, sunsets, junctions are tough work for Google's robo-cars
The fundamental part of a self driving system, before ANYTHING else, is being able to see - i.e. decent cameras. I don't care what clever tricks you can come up with in terms of radar/lidar/ultrasonics, no camera (that would be fitted to a car anytime soon) can match the human eye's abilities. As humans, if our vision becomes impaired, our license is taken away. Until a camera can match the human eye, self driving is a dangerous pipe dream. In fact, even if there were cameras that could match or beat the human eye's abilities (and were cost effective enough to put in a car - all about the margins remember), self driving cars are an accident waiting to happen - especially the ones planned with no manual controls! What happens when there's a system crash - software never has bugs, right? System hack - auto makers are great at security, right? EMP? Radar jamming? IR floodlight? What about all the other cars with ultrasonics pinging about, telling me they're all going to happily co-exist?
It's progress for the sake of progress, it's already killed once, it won't be the last time and it'll lull the great unwashed into a false sense of security, then they die.
Fuck ABS, fuck traction control, fuck parking sensors. Strip all that shit back and teach people how to drive properly. Gimme a Mk2 Escort with a roll cage and harnesses any day of the week.
</rant> :)
IT boss gets 30 months of porridge for trashing ex-employer's servers
Triangulate?
Wait, what? I was always under the impression telco's only ever stored info about the cell you were connected to and that they only triangulate on request? There's a big difference between you being within a certain radius of a cell tower and actually triangulating you to within a few meters...
IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address
EU reforms could pave way for smells and noises to be trade-mark protected – expert
Fuming Google tears Symantec a new one over rogue SSL certs
Joomla patches critical core shop-pwning flaw
You really shouldn't be running two online shops with practices like that. You're begging to be hacked. I hope to god you at least re-located the admin logins and moved the config out of the web root when you set the sites up (unless of course recent Joomlas do that for you - not used it since 1.5x)
Hackers pop grease monkeys' laptops to disable Audi airbags
No limited to VAG but not too much to worry about...
I doubt very much this is limited to VAG cars - FTDI chips are quite prevalent in most diagnostic cables. Also, the chances of an indie garage laptop (dealers have proprietary kit) being patched and up to date are incredibly minimal - most are still on XP, hell i've seen some still running '95.
That aside, most garages forgo PC software and use a dedicated Snap-On tool that covers most makes/models and won't interact with a PC. It's only small specialists and home mechanics that will used software like VCDS (formerly VAGCOM) - which is what I assume they're talking about here - as it's significantly cheaper than the dedicated aftermarket/OEM equivalent.
In short, if you take you car to a dealer for stuff - nowt to worry about, non-event. If you take it to an indie specialist to have the central locking recoded to allow something like remote window opening, you're taking a risk.
If at first you don't succeed, you're probably Google: Android Pay arrives
I want my EPG, say Windows Media Center users left in dire straits
Mad Max: High-octane dystopian desert demolition derby
Wileyfox smartphones: SD card, no bloatware, Cyanogen, big battery – yes to all!
Testing Motorola's Moto G third-gen mobe: Is it still king of the hill?
Mozilla's ‘Great or Dead’ philosophy may save bloated blimp Firefox
Re: Chrome is neither sleek nor speedy these days...
Chrome is becoming a bloated joke itself. I recently used a shitty old Macbook running Safari on a 3rd world connection and it fetched and rendered pages MUCH more quickly than Chrome was on my 2015 i7 XPS 13 - although full disclosure, I'm running W10. Still...
...and when I say "much", I mean a couple of seconds compared to tens of seconds.
Caterham 270S: The automotive equivalent of crack
Apple's 13-incher will STILL cost you a bomb: MacBook Air 2015
Re: Your phone works on electricity
Until I got the new QHD XPS 13, I thought high-res screens on 11-13" laptops was a waste of time, along with touch. I only bought the QHD because the 1080p display wasn't yet available to UK punters and supposedly wouldn't be for "a long time". A month later, Apple announce their stuff and low and behold, FHD screen is now an option...
I still mostly stand by that POV but the QHD screen on the XPS is bloody gorgeous, even if I have had to take a hit on the battery - but i'm plugged in 90% of the time so it doesn't really matter to me anyway. Windows scaling in W10 does a good job too.
Faster, Igor! Boffins stuff 255 Tbps down ONE fibre
Re: Ok...
indeed, for instance, one of the ideas behind the hybrid electric turbos powering the current crop of F1 cars is already making its way into production cars - see Volvo Drive-E. It's not exactly the same tech (it won't harvest energy from exhaust gas) but it will reduce turbo lag. </tangent>
Need to switch from Windows Server 2003? Here’s a workshop just for you
Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!
Re: Your phone works on electricity
"One of the most common things I do when receiving a message that looks a bit suspicious is to open is in raw text mode so that I can properly inspect the content and headers. Guess what? Outlook won't let you look at the raw incoming message!"
um...right-click > (message options|view source)
Windows Server 2003 end of life: Plan your WS2012 migration now
Reg man builds smart home rig, gains SUPREME CONTROL of DOMAIN – Pics
Done this myself recently but I opted for a more integrated approach - a NanodeRF (arduino clone) which has built-in RF and Ethernet - so it can accept commands directly without the need for a dedicated computer to relay commands. I literally built it in the first instance to turn the bedroom light into a "sunrise alarm" during the winter but the plan in the future is to have a Harmony-esque control structure - i.e. you assign devices to activites - and have it all configurable on the fly. Long way off though! Here's my code for anyone interested: https://codebender.cc/sketch:27612
Web data BLEEDOUT: Users to feel the pain as Heartbleed bug revealed
MailOnline pulls recipe site after innocent young cookbook DEFILED
Gran Turismo 6: Another glossy, gorgeous Mario Kart on steroids
Re: Your phone works on electricity
GT5 was horrendous for a game that took ~6 years to make and GT6 is not much better. The majority of the cars are 'standard', with the rest being 'premium' yet all sound equally awful. I also fail to understand why people praise the handling. It seems most cars are biased toward terrible understeer. If you throw a car into a corner and brake or let off the gas, the back end will come out. So far with the 'standard' cars in GT6, this is not the case - no matter what drivetrain arrangement they have.
The Forza franchise has its problems, not least of which are its arrogant developers but Forza 4 is still the best console racer.
If you could combine Forza 5 graphics with Forza 4 gameplay and the (visual) driving experience (feel) of NFS Shift, you'd have the perfect console racer.
Of course, that's until 'Project Cars' comes out...