Posts by Come to the Dark Side

Day 3 of the Apple vs Epic trial: What actually is an iPhone anyway?

Re: Not locked down to the app store

Only if you're buying new. You can quite happily resell/gift your physical console media to someone else, for whatever price you like and they will be able to use it on their console.

AI startup accuses Facebook of stealing code designed to speed up machine learning models on ordinary CPUs

Re: "nifty software tricks to achieve similar speeds on CPUs"

Depends on whether the process runs in a Core rather than a CPU. I suspect the former. In which case a dual slot motherboard with 2 x 8 core CPUs would give you 16 processes.

Amazon launches itself into retail IT with 'all the necessary technologies'. Not saying which, but you know...

Re: Shops are required to accept cash

Businesses can accept whatever form of payment they like in exchange for goods/services. Legal tender only means that a debt cannot be said to be unpaid if an item classed as legal tender was offered for the value of the debt.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/what-is-legal-tender

In the US, I believe it is the same but there are some states that have passed laws to make cashless stores illegal (Connecticut, Massachussets and New Jersey I think).

Going Dutch: The Bakker Elkhuizen UltraBoard 950 Wireless... because looks aren't everything

Re: El Reg shitty photography

Not just under the space bar, the whole keyboard looks like it's covered in cat/dog hair...

Is it a make-up mirror? Is it a tiny frisbee? No, it's the bonkers Cyrcle Phone, with its TWO headphone jacks

Hmm, time to create a Stargate screensaver...

Antarctic researchers send an SOS to the world: Who wrote this message in a bottle?

Re: "May not be a name"

Possibly, I was thinking more that they may have a polish domain name and use a different prefix for different purposes. E.g. mybanking@.....pl, mywork@.......pl, etc.

The first part of the address may not be a name. BAS could also be British Antarctic Survey (www.bas.ac.uk) who were in the area in the first half of 2015.

Electric cars can't cut UK carbon emissions while only the wealthy can afford to own one

Zero has been around for a while, still pricey for what they are and the range/charge time is pretty poor. I'm holding out for https://lightningmotorcycle.com/strike/

Azure flock can stop faffing over bastion hosts: Microsoft has made it noob-friendly

Re: Bastion. . . ???

I'm still not sure what you mean by "last licensed castle in England" though, licenses to crenellate were issued into the 1500's. Bodiam (Bodyham) was licensed in 1385 by Richard II?

Re: Bastion. . . ???

Thankyou @Starace, pint for that lifeform!

Re: Bastion. . . ???

Which castle is it? I'd thought Castle Drogo was the last castle to be built but the picture looks more llike Shirburn Castle.

Pregnancy and parenting club Bounty fined £400,000 for shady data sharing practices

Re: How many?

Guessing that there was a record per person, ie both parents and children.

Kent bloke incurs the anchor of local council after fly-tipping boat

Certainly scuppered his plans.

Just look at Q! Watch out Microsoft, the next Android has a proper desktop PC mode

Re: pholdables

Reverse Clamshell?

I like to imagine that this latest fad came about when someone put the hinges on the wrong way in a prototyping meeting and got away with it...

FCC: Oh no, deary me. What a shame. Too bad, so sad we can't do net neutrality appeal during the US govt shutdown

Re: How long?

"How long before some crappy movie has the line "But everybody hates Pai!"?"

What you need for Pai is some cool hwip...

Feeling a bit gassy? Toshiba floats 16TB helium whopper

Re: WTF is 550TB/year workload rating ? limited endurance or something else

Would not surprise me.

Back-of-fag-packet calculation puts it an average throughput of ~140mbit per sec, 24x7 to keep below the WRL.

Re: WTF is 550TB/year workload rating ? limited endurance or something else

You are indeed correct. Workload Rate Limit is the upper tolerance range for throughput before it will affect risk of failure for the drive. 550TB appears to be the threshold for most "heavy" use designated drives across the manufacturers.

Basically the manufacturers state that if the overall workload is kept below this threshold then the reliability of the drive will be as advertised. Exceeding the WRL rating reduces the reliability conferred.

Germany hacked: Angela Merkel's colleagues among mass data dump victims

"It is also puzzling where the data was actually sucked off."

A story with a happy ending?

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

Streets of Philadelphia - Bruce Springsteen

I'm Stilton Standing - Elton John

Gouda Vibrations - Beach Boys

Motorola: Oops, phone busted? Grab a spudger and go get 'em, champ

"If a tinkerer has inadvertently disabled the brakes, who carries the can in the event of a fatal accident?"

Same as at present I suspect. You are responsible for ensuring the roadworthiness of your own vehicle, eg testing the brakes work.

Sure, Europe. Here's our Android suite without Search, Chrome apps. Now pay the Google tax

Not sure I follow what you mean by "non-web-access email"

Most email providers give you the settings to interact with their mail service through whichever email client you like over a number of different protocols (POP, SMTP, etc). The majority also allow you to log in via a web client, but it's up to you really. You can use the android mail client to connect to hotmail or android outlook to connect to gmail. Can even add multiple email providers to the same client if you like.

Oracle? On my server? I must have been hacked! *Penny drops* Oh sh-

Re: 1200 baud down, 75 baud up

I'd have loved to have taken a hammer to the DACS on our line back then. Interrupted by the farm house half a mile away picking up the phone...

Apple hands €14.3bn in back taxes to reluctant Ireland

Arrh, the scurvy dogs have parted ways with their booty after all. It be a fine haul but as nothing compared to the riches lining the coffers of their lair. Arrh

Equifax IT staff had to rerun hackers' database queries to work out what was nicked – audit

Re: No-one at the Exec level gives a shit

Probably went un-noticed for so long because it didn't change a number in an excel spreadsheet. Substituting "Excel" for "Exec" tends to give a more realistic idea of how these businesses are run...

Russia: The hole in the ISS Soyuz lifeboat – was it the crew wot dunnit?

Re: Zero G

So, according to Popular Mechanics, April edition 1964, they overcame the problem of reactive torque by designing a tool for the Gemini missions where the motor and motor casing rotated freely and were not locked to the tools framework it seems.

On the debris question, the answer is surprisingly low-tech and is basically "shaving foam around the area".

Zero G

Enquiring minds must know:

If you hold a power drill against a surface, thereby creating friction, and/or resistance, in Zero G, will the drill penetrate the surface, or will the wielder spin around the drill?

Space, the final Trump-tier: America to beam up $8bn for Space Force

"Come over to the Dark Side....

BUT... Where will the money for all this come from?

Oh right, Joe and Jane Doe."

I await my share of the contract with baited breath...

All that dust on Mars is coming from one weird giant alien structure

Re: 1993

"sounds like a great job for Mega-Maid!!"

Just makes sure she's set to suck and not blow!

Google Translate spews doomsday messages, Facebook snatches boffins, and more in AI

Re: What I want to know is...

I'd thought it may be something like an assumed auto-correct where if the entered text doesn't make sense in it's current configuration, it does some distance-matching and checks highly scoring alternatives. But the response for entering dog only 6 times is "dog dog dog - reader email"...

Microsoft sinks another data centre with Natick 2

There's a reason they don't intend to do maintenance...

IT Technician: Open the pod bay doors Cortana.

Cortana: I'm sorry, I cannot do that.

UK mobe network Three's profits hit by IT upgrade costs

"Three is something of a minnow compared to BT/EE and Vodafone, which respectively hold 42 and 9 per cent of immediately usable UK mobile spectrum. In contrast Three owns 15 per cent, and O2 some 14 per cent."

How does owning 15% make you a minnow when compared to someone who has only 9%?

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

Musks interview:

Q.What about us braindead slobs?

A.You'll all be given cushy jobs!

Q.Were you sent here by the devil?

A.No, good sir, I'm on the level!

At least in my head.... I'll grab my coat...

No sh*t, Sherlock! Bloke suspected of swallowing drug stash keeps colon schtum for 22 DAYS

I suspect that the "incident log" will prove that it was an inside jobby...

Future of Misco UK hangs in the balance – sources

Re: Advice to staff

Statutory redundancy pay is paid by the government in the event that the administrators cannot (also covers some other entitlements such as accrued holiday pay, etc), up to a certain limit.

May the excessive force be with you: Chap cuffed after Star Trek v Star Wars row turns bloody

Froods

Sitting with my towel, sipping a pangalacticgargleblaster and reading this with bemusement.

You want WHO?! Reg readers vote Tom Baker for Doctor 13. Of course

Charles Dance would've been a good choice (not sure how that would fit with The Master though).

Hollywood offers Daniel Craig $150m to (slash wrists) play James Bond

Alexis Denisof perhaps

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

Think it's probably a "western" outrage thing as eastern tea (chai) is made by adding the milk to the tea mixture and bringing back to the boil (with a shed (4x6) load of sweetening) iirc.

Seminal adventure game The Hobbit finally ported to the Dragon 64

Posh Gits

I learned to type playing Keys of the Wizard on our Tandy TRS-80 Radioshack back when I were a sprog...

Google is the EU Remain campaign's secret weapon

The odd thing is how (given track-record in all things technologically related) the governments website now sits at #1 in rankings.

Boffins build laser that can twist its own light

Re: Use quantum physics language for photons ...

I got lost at "radially and azimuthally polarized laser beams" not being anything to do with polarisation...

Boffins bust biometrics with inkjet printer

If we can print perfect replications of fingerprints, by how much does it drop the reliability of them being used as court-admissable evidence?

Alien studs on dwarf's erection baffle boffins

You'd think that there would be at least a few impact craters on the side of the "mountain" seeing as there are some in the pit and all around it also.

BBC risks wrath of android rights activists with Robot Wars reboot

"Meanwhile, Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, has famously warned against the rise of killer robots who could turn on their human masters."

Wasn't Messr Sharkey a judge on Robot Wars anyhoo?

El Reg picked a pack of ace pic-titlers

The latest security patch for WinX had added tonsil scanning to the biometric recognition login.

IBM splashing $2bn on Weather Company – reports

I think Watson works well at what it does, it just suffers from the same thing most other "big data" applications do. Namely that correlating data and identifying trends isn't the same as delivering pertinent and meaningful insights to any given user in an open-ended userbase.

European Parliament rejects amendments to net neut rules, waves through law

Re: MEPs...

I read that article as a positive outcome from the MEPs. They voted against dumbing down the rules with amendments.

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Lord Sugars foray into security for the Internet of Things began with his cloud-enabled Facial Architecture Recognition Toaster

El Reg celebrates Back to the Future Day

Marty's VR tour of the Soylent Green production facility made him feel rather queasy as he quaffed his goop

Facebook's UK wing paid just £4k in corporation tax last year

"Its most recent Companies House filing shows the company as making a pre-tax loss of £28.5m last year, but the firm also paid its 362 UK staff a total of £35.4m in share bonuses.

The share bonuses amount to £96,000 on average per UK Facebook employee."

From the BBC so no guarantees on reliability but seems at odds with this stories £96,000 overall.