Posts by Tromos

Five critical fixes on deck for Patch Tuesday

Re: Adobe

Which one? I believe it said the second one.

Mind you, if Adobe used all 52 and added Fridays too, it would be barely enough to patch their buggy crap.

Boffins devise world's HARDEST tongue-twister

No problems with 10 repeats

However, the best I've ever managed is 3 in a row for "The Leith Police dismisseth us".

Hear that? It's the sound of BadBIOS wannabe chatting over air gaps

It might only be 20bps...

...but at least there's no throttling and usage caps.

ASA slaps down BT over 'misleading' broadband claims

New advertising campaign.

Simples. Just say "We're not Rupert".

Bold Bezos aims skywards with liquid hydrogen and SPACE ROCKET engine

I presume these are only for Amazon prime platinum supreme delivery.

Apple prepping 4K resolution 12.9-inch MaxiPad – report

Re: 20/20 ... AVG -- Won't happen

Neither of the quotes you have supplied supports your assertion that the average person has better than 20/20 vision.

"Common" just means not rare, and could well be far below average.

The second (Wikipedia) quote refers to the average acuity of healthy eyes. You appear to have forgotten a huge number of people requiring corrective lenses and assumed everybody has healthy eyes.

I rather suspect the "many people have..." amendment would have been more accurate.

Drone expert: Amazon's hypetastic delivery scheme a pie in the sky

Can't see these

Can't see these being allowed in densely populated areas. Can't see these being economically viable in sparsely populated areas.

Why BURN Facebook after reading when you can 'save it for later'?

Re: " free content ad network"

Probably because so many have made that comment that the text is now burnt on the back of everyone's retina.

WTF is the Internet of Things and how insurers will use it against you

@Amorous Cowherder

I beg to differ when it comes to photography. I now take the odd snap, but in the past with the outdated technology I used to take much more care about subject, framing and composition and other parameters, then break out the Patterson tank, chemicals, etc. and start the most satisfying part of the whole process in creating the image. Instant gratification isn't necessarily lasting gratification.

Julie Larson-Green: Yes, MICROSOFT is going to KILL WINDOWS

@Fihart

Use hibernate instead of sleep, or the hybrid method where you just use sleep and don't worry about turning off at the wall. It will just switch from sleep to hibernate when the battery runs lower than a threshold value. Waking up from hibernate is only a second or two with a conventional disk and virtually indistinguishable from waking from sleep with a solid state one. This way, I reserve reboots for patch Tuesdays as it does take a while. Around a couple of minutes in my case until I get a browser home page up or another application loading - time to password entry is much shorter, but I don't regard that as a useful measure as it is obviously still booting as the password is entered and well beyond.

Samsung and HTC face Android 3D graphics test chart removal SHAME

Moving these phones to the bottom of the list makes the list somewhat useless as I'm pretty certain these phones would ride quite high anyway. Wouldn't it be better if the benchmark was changed to penalise shorter battery life when achieving these higher speeds? Personally, I'd favour 20% extra battery life over 20% extra speed and I'd like to see benchmarks and tests that reflect this.

iCan't quite hear you: Apple teams up with Danish firm to make hearing aids

Fruity firm wants first shot at hard-of-hearing fanboi segment

They should stick to the hard-of-thinking

Undercover BBC man exposes Amazon worker drone's daily 11-mile trek

I suggest this reporter tries his luck as an unskilled helping hand on a building site next. He'll be expected to do a lot more than 11 miles, some of that will be up ladders or stairs too. He'll find that bricks, bags of plaster, tool boxes, etc. are on average heavier than a padded envelope containing a USB stick. Not least, he'll find that he doesn't get anywhere near the over 80 quid he picked up for his shift at Amazon.

Reg man inhales the smooth, non-cancerous, taste of USB nicotine

Use in an office would be OK with me, but I've seen their use banned in a couple of places and have to agree with the reasoning behind the ban. These places were a pub and a station platform and in both cases the reason given is that the staff are too busy to wander over and check the nature of each cloud of smoke seen from a distance to determine if it is electronic or burning weeds.

Overall, I approve of them as a way to get the nicotine fix without the tars and crap, but I'm utterly unconvinced that they are a method to break the habit. I successfully managed to give up 20 years ago by just stopping. Wasn't easy until after a full month, but haven't looked back since. Funnily enough, to this day I still occasionally catch my hand unconsciously straying towards my pocket in quest of fags and lighter when sat in a pub with a few friends. Even if I were to find cigarettes there, I know I wouldn't light up, but it shows how powerful the habit is that it remains a reflex action after a couple of decades.

Half-blind Glassholes rejoice! 'Prescription' Google goggles a-comin'

Re: Lexical ambiguity

Save time and effort. Stomp on them without taking them off.

PANIC OVER DROOPING house prices hits MEMBER-shaped estate

I'd like to apply...

...for an extension.

Sony patents LASER-FIRING Wi-Fi SMARTWIG with sideburn buttons

I'm more concerned about...

...the optional touch pad accessory being built in to jockey shorts.

From Dept of REALLY? Sueball lobbed at Apple over crap iOS Maps app

@AC 10:41

You most certainly CAN be both. Some of the worst racism I've ever encountered has been from Asians and directed at Africans and vice versa. There are also plenty of cases of racist attacks (verbal and physical) against white people coming from both whites and blacks.

Qatar whips covers off giant footballing vagina

To complete the picture all that's needed is for the airship providing aerial coverage to suffer some sort of malfunction that causes it to dive in nose first.

You THINK you're watching your LG smart TV - but IT's WATCHING YOU, baby

Who monitors..

...the (LG) monitors?

The right time to drink coffee

Paradox

It's my policy to never have breakfast before 11, although I'd stretch to allowing breakfast in bed around 10:30.

Google SO CAN scan ALL BOOKS onto its sites - judge

@AC 03:17

"...copyright (in the USA) is a temporary right..."

The way copyright keeps getting extended and renewed (esp. by the likes of Disney), there is nothing temporary about it.

'A measly 3 Instagrams? NO!' Sexy selfie Snapchat spurns Facebook's $3bn

Re: This news has cheered me up this evening

If your definition of luxury necessitates solid gold cars and private jumbo jets, etc., then it is hardly enough. If you can make do with half a million a month, which is easily achievable even with current low interest rates, then I think one could scrape by without using up (and even modestly increasing) the capital sum.

Bitcoin mining rig firm claims $3m revenue in just FOUR DAYS

@Robert Long 1

Superior in every way?

When someone can filch them and be impossible to trace inclines me to award the superiority badge to the bag of brass implementation for trading tokens.

Unbelievably RARE, two-horned 'UNICORN' SPOTTED in woods

Enquiring minds want to know...

What does it taste like?

Google goes looking for more GLASSHOLES

Re: Here's looking at you kid

"...technology to enable The Authorities to change the direction of the wearer's head..."

This is currently implemented as little backpacks and they are being tested on cockroaches as these are thought to be the nearest form of life to wearers of Google Glass.

Another day, another Bitcoin burglary as Bitcash.cz goes titsup

Real Vs Virtual

I'm sticking to Bank of England beer vouchers. They might be worth less and less as time progresses, but they are less likely to leave me distraught (and thirsty) by suddenly doing a runner.

New Retina iPad Mini not sold out HOURS after launch - world REELS

And the person sleeping outside the shop for three nights...

...turned out to just be some homeless guy.

Android in FOUR out of 5 new smartphones. How d'ya like dem Apples?

Re: Easy fix for Apple

'Often times price is the only distinguishing feature of "luxury" goods.'

That and a prominent name or logo.

BT Sport scores own goal with £897m Champions League footie rights deal

@Lee D

Actually 3 years and, yes, it is a colossally stupid amount of money, but that is what football is all about these days. Prices of players, shirts with advertising logos, season tickets, everything very costly at the top levels of the game. I am a BT shareholder but definitely not a fan of football, and I'm not overly concerned about the money spent in light of the immediate market reaction and also the fact that BT doesn't really need to make much of a profit on this if it can just add to the subscriber numbers. The profit is available anyway as Sky's current figures show, and all BT is trying to do is copy what Sky did to Setanta. The real fight starts after 3 years when BT will be wanting to hold and even grow the subscriber base and Sky also knows that they'll need to dig deep in their coffers to launch a counterstrike. The downside for me is that the greedy tossers at the FA, EUFA and FIFA look like being the ultimate winners in all this.

RETRO-GASM: The Fuze electronics kit for the Raspberry Pi

Re: Strange desire

The one I had (possibly an older version) had an AF116 and two AC126 transistors and these were raw unmounted components. Everything was built on a set of springs and clips pushed through a board which was overlaid with a circuit diagram with holes to place the springs at component junctions. Wonderful stuff, transistor radio, electric organ, flashing lights, etc. The disadvantage of the components not being set up as little modules was that the wires could break off after being used several times, especially before I learnt not to bend them too close to the component. For me, at least, this disadvantage was more than made up for by the fact that off-the-shelf replacements were cheap and easy to get, and you could also get bits not in the original kit and ad-lib. It was the perfect excuse to haunt establishments like Henry's in Edgware Road or Proops down at Tottenham Court Road. None of the emporia in Harry Potter's Diagon Alley could hold a candle to these for MAGIC! And now you can get all this and a computer too...

Shuttleworth sorry for 'Open source Tea Party' jibe

Non-technical?

I hope Mr. Shuttleworth is open to technical critics of his often non-sentient decisions.

Astroboffins solve birth of the Man in the Moon face

Re: Its a history of the moon saving our butts ....

Look up at the sky. Now look at the moon. Not much of a shield, is it?

Lavabit, secure email? Hardly, says infosec wizard Moxie Marlinspike

The day of Ladar Levison and Moxie Marlinspike has gone by, I'm waiting to see what Naugahyde Neanderthal has to say on the subject.

New wonder slab slurps Wi-Fi, converts it into juice for gadgets, boast boffins

Don't cancel that new nuclear power station just yet.

Back in the 1970s I remember visiting a friend who lived about half a mile from the Crystal Palace transmitting aerial. Just holding apart the test leads on an AVO meter set to a high AC voltage range got a reading around 80 volts. Those old moving coil AVOs required a current of 50 microamps to achieve full scale deflection, so there was definitely a milliwatt or two of power being picked up. With modern voltmeters and their huge input impedances it requires, at most, nanoamps to get a reading. There is no useful power to be got from harvesting normal Wi-Fi signals without a collector the size of a dustbin lid and so close to the transmitting aerial that it would blot out a goodly chunk of the coverage area. You'd be better off with a coil of wire around your hat generating power as you move through earth's magnetic field.

OK, maths wonks: PRIME TIME has arrived

And for those that also miss the afternoon session...

...another chance in 13 days time, simply renounce the Gregorian calendar and switch back to Julian for the day.

McDonalds ponders in-store 3D printing for Happy Meal toys

There ain't no sich animal

The article mentions 'a nutritious McD's. I'd love to know where to get one.

Secrets of Apple's mysterious Arizona sapphire factory: Our expert whispers all

To obtain the maximum economies of scale, the sapphire glass needs to also be sold at reasonable prices to possible competitors. This is something that I just don't see Apple doing, they'd rather take hit in costs as the faithful can always be relied upon to dig a bit deeper in their pockets.

Japanese boffins unveil INVINCIBLE robot rock, paper, scissors 'bot

Re: Meanwhile

I trust you will never rely on a medical procedure involving servo-controlled manipulation or optical image analysis or any of the myriad techniques this technology may be helping to advance. It could well prove to be valueless in this instance, but there are a whole lot of areas more deserving of your scorn than scientific research.

Adobe users' purloined passwords were pathetic

Just why would I be expected to take more care in crafting a password than Adobe exhibited in looking after it?

Linus Torvalds seeks REDEMPTION for every coded SIN

Distros too

This is a great idea. I wish it could be expanded to some of the non-kernel features where long-standing bugs and incomplete (to the point of non-existence) documentation are plentiful. I know this isn't the fun part of development but if the product is ever going to be a match for the commercial offerings, it needs to be done. One prolonged period to catch up with the backlog and then a housekeeping month once a year would IMHO work wonders.

Microsoft founder Paul Allen's money man wants Redmond to break up

Listen to the money men...

...then do the opposite of what they say.

Indestructible, badass rootkit BadBIOS: Is this tech world's Loch Ness Monster? VOTE NOW

Version 2

The next version includes code to flash subliminal images on the screen to reprogram the human brain. The virus is then passed on by sneezing.

Locked-up crims write prison software that puts squeeze on grub supplier

Trust

I'd be inclined to trust the software put together by these guys. The ones who write in the backdoors are on the wrong side of the prison walls.

'It's a joke!' ... Bill Gates slams Mark Zuckerberg's web-for-the-poor dream

@AC 00:38

In mitigation to the "money ... stolen from school kids", I would have to point out that some of these would have gone on and earned significantly more as a result of knowing a little bit about his [soft]wares. Whatever Zuck ends up doing with his cash, there is nothing positive that can be said about the crap he is peddling.

Fed up with Windows? Linux too easy? Get weird, go ALTERNATIVE

Forth

Whilst most current implementations of Forth run under a host operating system, there is no reason that Forth cannot be completely stand-alone. This used to be fairly common practise on 8/16-bit microcomputers and the versions that ran under a host tended to be for mini and mainframe systems.

HP 100TB Memristor drives by 2018 – if you're lucky, admits tech titan

Re: O RLY?

At least the technological kiss of death isn't around any more. All it needed was an appearance on the BBC television programme 'Tomorrow's World' and you could guarantee that was the last you'd ever hear of it.

Cinnamon Desktop: Breaks with GNOME, finds beefed-up Nemo

Just the job

This reinforces my decision to drop Ubuntu and switch to Mint following Mark Shuttlecock's [sic] decision to lead his distro down paths few wish to follow.

DON'T BREW THAT CUPPA! Your kettle could be a SPAMBOT

I'm not worried...

...about anything the kettle might reveal. But don't you believe a word of what the toaster tells you.

New Oz government keeps Huawei ban after spook briefing

One backdoor rather than two

As most western kit is made in China, it would seem that Huawei kit might be slightly less risky as they wouldn't include the western backdoor.