Posts by Tromos

Mozilla goes where Google fears to tread with geolocation service

nomap suffix can't be implemented on all routers

I use a Cisco EA4500 router. One feature of this beastie is a guest access facility that gives the guest internet access but keeps them off my network. The SSID of the guest network is whatever SSID I choose with an automatic suffix of "-guest". Unless "nomap" is allowed as an embedded string, I have no way to opt out.

What about all those with BT home hubs blasting out 3 SSIDs? Can all 3 be easily changed to give all these people their opt-out rights?

Ohh! The PRECIOUS! Give it to uss. We WANTS it: Shiny iThings coming in 2014

Whatever it is...

...won't come cheap.

The Raspberry Pi: Is it REALLY the saviour of British computing?

It isn't going to happen

Forget the next generation of bedroom programmers, it just isn't going to come about. It happened in the 80s because of the lack of Linux distros and software packages and internet. Few people were content to be limited to what their computer came supplied with. The only options were a limited range of (usually quite expensive) software, entering source code from hobbyist magazines (the cover cassettes soon followed) or do-it-yourself. Even the purchased software often led to a future programmer as I know of several people who learnt Z80 assembler purely to hack Jet Set Willy, etc. These days, they'd just look for an extra lives patch on the internet. Back then, every classroom needed at least one machine code expert. There is no incentive now to learn anything beyond using Google to find whatever it is you want and then download it. The magic has gone out of computing and nobody will ever again struggle with trying to get their complex text based role-playing adventure squeezed into 4 kilobytes of RAM.

Twitter IPO: We want $17 to $20 per share for all our - sorry, your - witterings

Good for celebs

Alan Davies begs to differ.

Carl Icahn broadcasts his $150bn Apple shakedown effort to world+dog

Does not compute

By Icahn's logic, Apple could borrow 450 billion and buy back 3 times as many shares, making earnings per share double and leading to share prices doubling. What I fail to see is why the hell anyone would then want shares at twice the price in a company that owes almost as much as it is capitalised at.

India tops APAC ransomware table with £2.5 BEELLION losses

Average cost per victim

Is it any surprise that this is lower than average in a country with lower than average incomes? I suspect it would probably be higher if normalised to average earnings.

Call yourself a 'hacker', watch your ex-boss seize your PC without warning

Forget qualifications and experience...

...just put 'Hacker' on your CV.

NASA, start your torrents: 622 Mbps broadband link FOUND ON MOON

Up to 622MBPS

Fair usage applies. Speed may be throttled if more than 5Gb/month downloaded.

New iPad mini gobbles Retina display, 64-bit brain, puts on little weight

RAM price

300 dollars to go from 16 to 128 Gb is taking the piss.

Mark Shuttleworth labels Mir opponents 'the Open Source Tea Party'

Trying to think of a political tag for Mr. Shuttleworth...

...for some reason 'Pol Pot' comes to mind.

Fiendish CryptoLocker ransomware: Whatever you do, don't PAY

Re: Online backups

Not that new to computers. I remember making backups 44 years ago. The spools of magnetic tape had a plastic ring placed on the back to enable writing otherwise the tape drives could only read them. It was a running job until the tape was dismounted and the ring taken out, and only then was it regarded as a backup.

Online backups

It's either online or it's a backup. It can't be both at the same time.

Forget Wi-Fi, boffins get 150Mbps Li-Fi connection from a lightbulb

I've had a reply to my car-to-car tweet

It says "Dip your headlights you tosser"

MEGA ASTEROID could 'BLOW UP EARTH' - Russian space boss

Lottery odds

My chance of winning the UK lottery is 1 in 13,983,816. That's amazing. What would it improve to if I bought a ticket?

Ubuntu 13.10 lands on desktops, servers and (er, some) phones

More like a millstone in computing history.

Vastly overrating the importance of simply another version of a Linux distro, slowly sinking down the rankings as more and more people turn to Mint/Debian/whatever. Possibly a flyspeck in computing history would be about right.

Why a Robin Hood tax on filthy rich City types is the very LAST thing needed

Opposite of Robin Hood

Cream off a quid for each withdrawal.

The rich guy will just pull out the max amount and have a bulging wallet. This will last for ages as he rarely pays cash for anything anyway. The not so well off are the people who typically take out twenty quid to keep them going a day or two. They are the ones who would be hammered by this. Not exactly Robin Hood.

Let police track you through your mobe - it's for your OWN GOOD

Re: how to do this?

Triangulating relative signal strengths from at least three towers would do a reasonable job if the paths to all were free of obstructions and reflections. The aircraft VOR relies on two signals, one being an omnidirectional reference and the other is a narrow rotating beamed signal whose phase w.r.t. the reference signal depends on the angle of the rotating aerial. As mobile phone masts lack this rotating element there is no way a single tower will be able to provide directional information. In a built-up area the best way would be using WiFi SSIDs compared against a central database (I believe Google has quite a good one) and would only require the WiFi to come on for less than a second, hardly going to make any difference to the battery status, especially if it dims the screen while it does so.

This is one of the few beneficial uses of tracking and should be put to use even if it isn't very accurate and doesn't help in all cases, it could just make a crucial difference in a few.

D-Link: Oops! We'll slam shut that router backdoor by end of month

How long does it take?

Working on a fix! Why? Just how long does it take to change the code so that the authentication fails? They seem to be taking long enough to put in a less obvious backdoor with the authentication strings no longer clearly visible in the binary. No trust without a FULL source code release.

Custom ringback tones: Coming to your next contract mobe?

I'm happy with Brrrrrr Brrrrrr

If the quality of the replacement RBT is anything like the typical 'hold' renderings of Vivaldi played through a guitar effects fuzz-box, I'll go without.

Boffins build BEELLION-YEAR storage medium

And the write speed is...?

Not a great deal of use if it can only be written at half a kilobyte per week. Storage density isn't mentioned either and nobody is going to take any storage medium seriously these days unless it can pack terabytes into a reasonably small space.

That 'DIAMOND SUPER EARTH' may actually be WORTHLESS ball of gas

We need that diamond planet...

...to mount on Larry Niven's ringworld

Samsung touching up ROUNDED, CURVY plastic enhanced MODEL

One for the drinkers

Combo phone and hip flask

Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates

Image quality is not the be all and end all

For a first viewing, VHS quality is perfectly adequate if the movie is really good. Higher definitions come into their own for second and subsequent viewings where your attention can drift away from the main action and pick up all the little details. All of us must surely have experienced spotting something on a subsequent viewing that we totally missed first time around. My main point here is that I don't particularly care for a second viewing if the movie itself was crap. For an exceptional movie, I'm prepared to hand over a number of beer tokens to have my own high quality copy. For the merely good, a supermarket DVD from the bargain bin will do. The other 99.5% of Hollywood's output I can happily do without.

I suspect the torrents and other internet sources will continue to supply avi/mkv/mp4 movie files of around a gigabyte or so in size that provide adequate quality with little chance of an identifiable watermark getting through. At least these provide an real idea of what the movie content is unlike the studio supplied trailers which cherry-pick snippets to give the impression that a movie is non-stop action/comedy/whatever when the reality is two fights/jokes/whatever embedded in 90 minutes of otherwise monotonous filler.

I challenge the movie studios to make the first half of their movie releases available for free download so that we get a reasonable idea of what we're getting for our dosh.

Two years after Steve Jobs' death, how's that new CEO working out?

Curates egg performance from Cook.

Firstly, let me clarify that I'm not a fan of Apple products, I've always preferred black and gothic to white and rounded.

It is early days yet in the reign of Tim Cook, but his performance thus far has been good in places, bad in others. Not much different from the last few years of Steve Jobs if the reality shields are breached. The maps fiasco can be weighed against the holding it wrong (but have a free bumper). On the good side, the decision to make a smaller tablet. Having dismissed it, the Jobs ego would never have allowed him to back down and admit the evidence of demand. The peak share price was obviously unsustainable and the company have done well to get it as high as it is riding currently. As for the analyst that predicted the ridiculous 2015 figure, well, there's always one.

Over the next couple of years, Cook's grades firmly rest on the success or failure of the iWhatever. It is unlikely to be of the magnitude of the iPod or iPhone, but if it turned out to be a success on that scale, it could well start to reduce the hold that the Jobs legend still possesses. Cook is in the comfortable position of knowing that a new set of the current product line with minor tweaks is still likely to bring in enviable profits, even if it disappoints a few analysts. It buys him time to get his people to come up with something. I look forward to reading his report card in a couple of years.

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

Control Data had it right

The old CDC mainframes used a 6-bit character set - and no multibyte codes (until some idiot went and wanted lower case put in too).

British support for fracking largely unmoved by knowledge of downsides

Fresh ideas needed

Most people are sick and tired of the "down with this sort of thing" mentality. If the greenies want public support they need to come up with alternatives that are practical, feasible and economically viable.

The life of Pi: Intel to give away Arduino-friendly 'Galileo' tiny-puter

The price will make it or break it.

Sounds like a desirable piece of kit, but so did the MS Surface Pro until you got to the price tag.

Yo, mall rats: Facebook and Cisco in Wi-Fi hookup to track your retail, social life

Give them data.

Anybody up for a fork of Android? Features to be included: Spoofing MAC address and geolocation data, randomly selecting user ID and contacts from a pool, random web searches so the real ones become statistically insignificant, etc. They want data? Give them data, lots of it, all useless crap.

You put up with CRAPPY iOS 7. You can put up with Obamacare too, says prez

"I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads..."

Obama's obviously not a Reg reader then.

Techno-thriller author and gaming franchise Tom Clancy dies at 66

RIP Tom Clancy

I'm pretty sure he lent the name not just to game franchises, but also to the so-called co-written books. The average quality of these is so far below that of his solo works that it is difficult to believe he had very much to do with them. Pity to see him go so early, it isn't often that you get an author consistently pushing out best sellers that also make a good movie.

APPLE is the new COCA-COLA: Bubble-beverage globocorp beaten by Foxconn rebrander

"seamless omnichannel experience"

That can only have come from one of those random buzzphrase generators.

EU move to standardise phone chargers is bad news for Apple

Maybe a MONSTER...

...but a compatible MONSTER. You can take your 5 year old charger and lead and use it to charge a device with a Micro USB 3 socket. Backward compatibility just isn't in Apple's lexicon, they prefer to obsolete kit the day after it gets sold.

Not just phones

I sincerely hope that the coming legislation is phrased so that it applies to all portable/wearable rechargeable devices up to a certain power rating. Allowing mp3 players/watches/glasses/etc. to go their own way while phones are standardised doesn't make sense.

Google's boffins branded 'unacceptably ineffective' at tackling web piracy

A coherent responsible answer

It is relatively easy to remove sites offering 'naked kiddies' or whatever the term du jour is, as ALL these sites are illegal. Not so easy when the search term is 'Justin Bieber' (but by all means remove all of these too, especially the ones belonging to RIAA members).

Asus NV550JV 15.6in full HD notebook - the one we didn't have to send back

Re: I stopped reading when...

I stopped reading when I got to the end of the article.

The notebook would be much improved by adding a second (user accessible) drive bay that could be used for an SSD or simply HDD expansion.

Apple Maps directs drivers INTO path of ONCOMING PLANES

That's what I want for my android phone...

...combo satnav and Instrument Landing System.

Greece ends extra hols for civil servants forced to use hated computers

The perks couldn't have been scrapped much earlier.

At the time these perks were introduced it kind of made sense. Think back to an era where DOS ruled the roost and the 5.25" floppy disk was the only mass storage. There was a skills shortage and a need to reward those who had mastered the command line (in a foreign language) and the arcane arts of Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. Windows (especially in Greek) and the Internet were some years away yet from being generally available, even in the universities. I believe it was Windows 95 that first had Microsoft support for Greek with truetype fonts and all, even then using a computer was a rare skill and Internet usage even rarer. It was only in the run up to the 2004 Olympics that OTE (the state Telco) was shamed into providing a limited broadband service (mainly 384kbps as the heady heights of 1Mbps cost a fortune), with most businesses still being on 128kbps ISDN.

Of course the extra holidays should have been scrapped years ago, but who was going to face down the militant unions during the years money was being frittered away left, right and into politician's pockets? It has taken this crisis to enable these measures to be taken as the civil servant union protests will get very little sympathy from the private sector workers struggling to feed a family or the even less fortunate multitude seeking employment.

Shopping list for Tesco: Eggs, milk, bread, tablets (the £60 7in Android kind)

No GPS

No sale