Posts by Tromos

Cali court backs ex-Apple engineer who says he invented Find My iPhone and Passbook

"...lost its fifth appeal..."

I sincerely hope that any damages and costs awards are at least doubled on every failed appeal. Apple just seem to be trying to extend any lawsuit to beyond the lifetime of whoever is bringing it.

Eighty-year-old US 'web scam man' on the run after pocketing $250,000 in Dem 'donations'

Profit!

What idiot set the bail at 100k for someone who scammed 250k?

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

Re: 66 comments not one of you noticed the potential fire hazard.

I've got some of the first Li-Ion laptop batteries lying around at the back of a drawer. Two dozen years on and they seem pretty inert to me. If they were just continuously connected to a charger, then there might be cause for concern, but if unused over a period of years I would expect any bulgy, explody activity to have shown up within the first year.

Microsoft: Reckon our code is crap? Prove it and $30k could be yours

30k bounty

Still loads cheaper than hiring competent coders and testers.

Police costs for Gatwick drone fiasco double to nearly £900k – and still no one's been charged

Re: "London"

And there was me thinking that Heathrow was in the LONDON borough of Hillingdon.

Science and engineering hit worst as Euroboffins do a little Brexit of their own from British universities

Re: ICL..?

In my day it was ICST (Imperial College of Science & Technology). Since when has where it is become more important than what it does?

Green search engine Ecosia thinks Google's Android auction stinks, gives bid a hard pass

Nag nag nag

If you do choose another search engine as default, you will likely be frequently pestered to change back to Google. Whenever I use any Google service a dialog appears offering to install the Chrome spyware^h^h^h^h^h^h^hbrowser. There is a 'No thanks' option, but what is lacking is a 'Never' or 'Try me again in 5 years time' option.

Brit regulator Ofcom put at helm as hosting platforms threatened with hefty fines for violent videos

confused dot ofcom

"...confusion over exactly which sites and services will be defined as Video Sharing Platforms."

Might I suggest they make a start by including platforms that share videos.

UK parliament sends snippy letter to Zuck and his poodle Clegg as it seems Facebook has been lying again

Public cost duty allowance

Blair, Brown, Clegg and co. all with snouts in the trough, raking in 115k pa for nothing worthwhile. Makes the MPs expenses scandal a mere ripple in a duckpond.

If at first you don't succeed, Fold? Nope. Samsung redesigns bendy screen for fresh launch in September

Re: $1,980 ?!?

Find a foldable gorilla and you can have one

Fantastic Mr Fox? Not when he sh*ts on your lawn, kids' trampoline and your soul

Expensive but effective

Electric perimeter fence. Doesn't kill or cause any lasting harm, but is unpleasant enough that the first attempt to get through is also the last. Cheapest way is to get energiser box, stake posts and wire online and do it yourself. Also keeps out cats, dogs, etc. But not squirrels, nothing keeps them out, especially if there is a bird feeder loaded with nuts to target.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

"...need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours"

Not good if the 149 hours is up while on final approach. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to wait for the full 149 hours otherwise this would cause MAX sized problems with scheduling.

It's so hot, UK needs to start naming heatwaves like we do when it's a bit windy – climate boffins

Happy with the current poll leader, but only if delivered in 'Life of Brian' mode:

Woasting Wodger

Don't press the red b-... Windows Insiders' rings hit by surprise Microsoft emission

If, by 'stable', you mean full of horse-shit, I think it's nearly there.

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

Re: "disk drives the size of top-loading washing machines"

The ones I worked with in the 70s were more like a chest of drawers (imagine 2 deep drawers) that held a pair of disk packs. A junior operator was tasked with changing the upper pack and quite correctly checked that the spin light was off before yanking the drawer open. A quick-thinking shift leader supervising the operation quickly yanked him away, probably saving serious injury at minimum as a couple of kilograms of furiously spinning pack popped upwards out of the drive drawer. A couple of days later company engineers fitted a field change order altering the spin light to a safe-to-open light so that a dead bulb wouldn't result in possible fatalities!

The errant pack fell back into the drawer, destroying itself and the drive mechanism and had a good go at inflicting hearing damage to those in the vicinity.

Scientist, war hero and gay icon Alan Turing is new face of the £50 note

Q. What do you call 20 of these notes?

A. Grand Turing.

Now that's just offal: Heap of pig guts hog road after truck spills load in Kansas City

It took guts to write that article

Facebook: The future is private! So private, we designed some handy new fingercams for y'all!

Facebook engineers propose using gestures and movement patterns

Wrist pumping action to send message to Zuckerberg?

Can you trust Huawei... or any other networks supplier for that matter?

Quelle surprise

Man from Radware recommends manufacturers who use Radware services.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

Undermine?

How is it possible to undermine something that has no basis, no foundation, no support, nothing to prop it up and has generally been in free fall since inception?

How do we stop facial recognition from becoming the next Facebook: ubiquitous and useful yet dangerous, impervious and misunderstood?

Re: The antisocial network.

Facebook holds photo and contact data for millions of people who have not signed up to their services and hence have even less control of this data. This blatantly flouts the intention of GDPR as they are using an army of 'darling nieces' to provide contact lists and names to link to faces, etc. without the explicit permission of the people involved.

Facebook MUST be made to go through all the data they hold and delete everything they cannot provide explicit consent for.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

I had a Dyson Hot/Cold fan that failed after just over 5 years service. I decided to get it serviced, so went to the website where the first step was registering the device as I hadn't bothered to fill in and send off the card that came with it. As soon as I completed registration I was taken to a product recall page where I discovered that my model had been recalled several years ago. I got on the freephone number and was told to stop using it and unplug it and asked when would I like a replacement delivered. On saying ASAP, they checked my address on the registration details and said to have the broken one ready for collection next morning when the courier would deliver a new replacement unit. As the model I had was no longer made, the new unit was one that had extra functions and retailed for about £100 more. And I got a new warranty from the date of delivery. OK, so Dyson charge a bit for their stuff, but Apple have even more of a premium. Eleven out of ten for Dyson customer service.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

"...before I get bored of watching Homes Under The Hammer."

Your bones knit in under five seconds???!!!

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

"...900Watts instead of the 100mW..."

As many ready meal packets will tell you in the instructions: At lower powers increase cooking time.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

What did he do wrong?

As I see it, he used digitally conjured dollars to buy some other digitally conjured currency. Was it the exchange rate that his customers are complaining about? Was it even worse than an airport foreign exchange?

Bloody vultures! Cheeky Spanish paraglider firm pinched El Reg's mascot

No it didn't - less than 2/3rds of that. Don't confuse metres with feet.

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

The facebook we've all dreamed of?

Ah! That'll be the one with the homepage containing Mark Zuckerberg's obituary.

Spin the wheel and find today's leaky cloud DB... *clack clack... clack* A huge trove of medical malpractice complaints

Today's lesson is:

Never click a facebook ad.

UK.gov whacks export ban on 'grotesque' crab made by famous Brit potter bros

If UK.Gov really wants it to stay...

...why are they making it £43,450 less likely that it does?

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

If it's an outright purchase and capable of running offline, sign me up. I do not rent or lease software or subscribe to clouds. If it isn't effectively an upgrade or better version of FSX that's where I'll stick, dated or no.

NASA goes commercial, publishes price for trips to the ISS – and it'll be multi-millionaires only for this noAirBNB

Makes London rents seem almost reasonable.

See above

Boffins stole our 3D files – and gave them all to Facebook's AI eggheads, claims Lithuanian biz

Please learn how neural networks work. Hint - no text involved.

Bad news from science land: Fast-charging li-ion batteries may be quick to top up, but they're also quick to die

Having replaced my phone battery due to it nearly catching fire, I have now stopped using fast charging as a matter of course. After a little over a year I noticed a brighter area about a centimetre in diameter on the screen and a full charge only lasted about 20 minutes. The bright area was due to a hot spot immediately behind that part of the screen. I'm glad to say that the screen returned to normal after the battery was replaced.

I used to charge the phone overnight using the supplied charger which only did fast charging. I've now changed to using an older 1 Amp charger for the overnight charges and keep the fast charger exclusively for the infrequent occasions I need a quick top-up. I see no point in stressing the battery to achieve a full charge when the reduced current achieves the same result by the time I'm ready to get up. I agree that having a software option to charge fast with a default of slow would be better as it saves faffing around with two chargers.

Want to train a dragon? You'll need 500 million files, 730TB of data, 54,000 CPU cores...

730TB of data and 54,000 CPUs

Or, alternatively, a mid-range 2029 smartphone.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

If there was a way to just turn off the MCAS input to the trim system, you wouldn't need to turn the electric trim off at all. Another fundamental design flaw in my opinion.

Oracle AI's Eurovision horror show: How bad can it be? Yep. Badder

Re: Oldies but goodies

But ABBA back is the same as ABBA forwards!

File Explorer tweaked and Your Phone borked. A fresh Windows 10 Insider build arrives

Does this year's vaccine...

...protect against the 19H2 strain?

Lightning speed – how fast is that again? Virgin plugs in another 102k to superfast broadband

"...continuing to deliver excellent returns on investment."

If I understand correctly, the above statement is an admission that the service is grossly overpriced.

Jocasta? Jocasta! Don't ram that trolley into the man: New tech promises an end to this scenario

Apply the research effort where it's really needed...

...design a supermarket trolley where every wheel doesn't try to go in a different direction.

Zuck it up: Facebook hit with triple whammy of legal probes, action in Canada, US, Ireland

Contact lists

They should have explicit permission from everyone on the list before hoovering it up. Can't be done? Lay off the contact lists in that case.

I chose to never use Facebook, Twitter and various other wastes of time. I'm fed up with my data being used without permission because I happen to be in other peoples contact lists.

Every country should fine them 10% of global turnover individually and that might slow them down a bit.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

Re: On the other hand, some 60 per cent thought it was a great idea.

However, 72% thought it was a terrible idea and the other 85% were undecided.

Either Facebook is building yet another massive bit barn in Iowa, and doesn't want you to know about it....

Yet another reason to use a shell company

Money laundering.

Huawei P30 Pro: Nifty camera tricks haven't made mobe mandatory over last year's model

Amazing!

No other phone could have recognised that the router was connected to more than one cloud.

Only one Huawei? We pitted the P30 Pro against Samsung and Apple's best – and this is what we found

By "over-aggresive sharpening"...

...do you mean actually being in focus? Unlike the Apple image shown.

Google sparks online outcry after its currency converter goes haywire for third time this year

Only buys a quarter as much

Google was probably just giving the rate you get from a foreign exchange desk at an airport.

If you're worried that quantum computers will crack your crypto, don't be – at least, not for a decade or so. Here's why

Glad to hear...

...that Rot13 is safe for another decade (but you really shouldn't have mentioned it).

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

14 hour outage

Too short - by at least 6 orders of magnitude

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Re: I wonder if they're the first to discover this

20 years ago the head positioning wouldn't have been anywhere as small as nanometres so even with the volume at 12 you probably won't get enough head vibration to be detectable. Also, I doubt that firmware was downloadable then, more likely to be burnt into ROM. If intercepting the drives somewhere at the manufacturing/distributing stage, why bother doing something to use the drive as a microphone as opposed to fitting it with a small condenser mic?

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

If the naming gets clarified much more...

...I won't have an effing clue what's going on!

Danger mouse! Potent rodents 'see' infrared after eyeballs injected with nanoparticles

"With few harmful effects"

I'm probably not alone in thinking I'd rather be using IR goggles than being stabbed in the eyeball even if the harmful effects are "few".

Research efforts are probably better directed at making infrared goggles less bulky and more comfortable to use.

(Icon depicts immediate post-treatment)