Posts by jubtastic1

UK.gov unveils six areas to pilot full-fat fibre, and London ain't on the list

Re: London not on the list

It's not about feelings. London isn't on the list for the same reason 80/20 fibre availability in London is inversely related to the number of legacy leased lines.

It's about money.

Lester Haines: RIP

RIP Lester

The rest of us are poorer for the loss of your shenanigans.

Apple MacBook 2015: Twelve inches of slim and shiny fanboi joy

Re: Why have there been no press pictures...

Imagine someone using it with a bluetooth mouse, keyboard and headset, the screen mirrored to a 100" TV via AppleTV, Dropbox, iCloud or GDrive taking the place of a USB thumb drive etc.

It's the same thing they've always done, dropping technologies that are on their way out even though they're still in use, if you can live in that wireless future now then its perfect, if you can't then it's not like it's the only laptop they make is it.

Analyst dons Tim Cook mask, thinks: Glass went well for Google. Let's do that, too

Meh

Apple cars seem more likely to hit the streets than apple eyewear, automobiles are in the process of switching to fully automated items, the tech is ready and there's plenty of places to unobtrusively hide it in a car.

AR tech on the other hand currently dominates prototype headgear and needs another 5 years or so of miniturisation before anyone can make a pair of AR sunglasses indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses, that's when Apple will release a product*, and to be ready for that moment of course they're going to have to test ideas and concepts with the bulky tech of today.

*Actually they tend to go ahead just a shade before the tech is ready, to the point that generally people agree that the second revision of a product is the one that fully realised the potential, eg: iPhone3G, iPad2, Macbook Air, Apple Watch II.

LaCie snuggles up to Apple’s slim 12-inch MacBook with fat HDD

Re: Just a blockhead here

You would have thought so, but no, we had a G-Tech drive used for TimeMachine that would stop backing up after 24 hrs or so, some sort of firmware issue with its Firewire port was to blame.

Remote code execution flaws fixed in tnftp and wget

Re: wtf is a boilerplate response?

Thank you for your question, It has been forwarded to the relevent department.

This is an automated response, replies will neither be received or acknowledged.

Hey, Mac fanbois. HGST wants you drooling over its HUGE desktop RACK

Re: RAID5

Yes, this is insane, the first time that thing spits a disk its going to be game over.

FFS look at it, 8 drives crammed into what looks like a toy fridge from Argus with a cheap raid card jammed in the back.

Apple's SNEAKY plan: COPY ANDROID. Hello iPhone 6, Watch

Say what you like

But those phones and watches are going to sell like fucking hot cakes.

My personal opinion: the side on view of the 6 reminds me of surface tension, I don't like the look of the bands on the back but I think the attention to detail is going to be way beyond what most people have experienced, that may seem irrelevant but at this point smartphones all do pretty much everything, the subjective quality of an item that you're literally going to carry around for the next couple of years should be taken into account. The watch seems like a good match for the 5" phone, less so with the smaller phones.

I like some of the watch combinations, I expect most people will like some of them, for a new untested product line there's a staggering degree of customisation. Like the phones, this looks like a device you can't properly appraise until you've held it in your hands. A lot of features are designed to work between watches, I'm pretty sure I can't afford one for the wife as well, and certainly not the tiny gold one she would pick.

Apple, FBI: YES we're, er, looking into the NAKED CELEBRITY PICS. Aren't you?

Problem with the iCloud theory

OK, so assume you've brute forced the targets username and password, log into iCloud.com and... there's no access to the photo stream or device filesystems.

No problem!, just set up one of your devices to sync with their account details, and voila! a flurry of modal alerts are sent to every device attached to your targets account warning them that a new device has just signed in to their account. All these celebs ignored those alerts?

UK mobile coverage is BETTER than EVER, networks tell Ofcom

An obvious problem

If OFCOM are accepting the networks 'disconnected mid call' statistics rather than 'unable to call' there's a heavy incentive for the networks to only connect the calls that they're almost certain will complete and basically ignore any new call attempts when the network is reasonably busy, which anecdotally is pretty much what I've been noticing.

BTW, if anyone fancies a break with no distracting internet or phone calls, I can recommend Sandy Bay holiday park in Devon, it's actually quite liberating after you resign yourself to being off the grid.

Students hack Tesla Model S, make all its doors pop open IN MOTION

Re: Poorly Written Article

I once managed to lock the keys in my TR7 at a petrol station, I asked the bloke filling his van next to me if I could try his keys, he passed them to me with a 'you'll be lucky mate' look, I didn't need luck, I just needed something vaguely key shaped.

Still locked it every time I parked though.

Re: It's more than that

Really? so the car opening its doors while in motion wasn't a hack, it's something the car is quite happy to do at anytime? that's fucking scary.

UK's emergency data slurp: IT giants panicked over 'legal uncertainty'

Re: "Should the rushed legislation be welcomed by us Brits?"

Betteridge's law of headlines

Future Apple gumble could lock fanbois out of their own devices

Mr Ne'erdowell

Yes, all he has to do is break into your gym locker, steal your phone, scoot to your house, break in and he's riffling through your stuff faster than you can say, 'fuck me, that seems a bit of a long winded and redundant way to gain access to a computer"

You CAN'T bust into our login app's password vault, insists Roboform

Sloppy coding

It looks like the app doesn't check whether the pin hash exists so a 'pin is correct' test fails and unbelievably, it defaults to true.

Virgin Media struck dumb by NATIONWIDE DNS outage

Re: yep, vm status pages are useless, as is the telephone status

They did try to warn the help desk guy but he's notoriously hard to get hold of, so you can't really blame them for that one.

Physicist proposes 1,000-foot state-sized walls to stop tornadoes

Four walls to be super safe

With automated turrets on top just in case any terrorists try to damage them, also the super safe land inside would be the ideal spot to build thousands of megablocks to house the hundreds of millions of americans who are going to lose their jobs and homes to automation over the next few decades.

Obviously with such a high population the Justice system would need to be streamlined, maybe merging policing with the judiciary?

Backup bods Acronis extend disk-imaging support to Macs at last

TimeMachine, Timemachine, Timemashin.

Well, for starters, it does all the stuff they claim it doesn't do, local or network backups, versioning, restore everything including the OS, restore to a new disk or mac.

It's not pretty under the hood though, and in my experience, less reliable than say, superduper or carbon copy cloner or Chronosync or Rsync. It is effortless though.

SQL fights back against NoSQL's big data cred with SQL/MDA spec

Re: Interesting

You mean like each field would be a foreign key? isn't that sort of the whole point of a relational database?

Come with me if you want a lid: Apple bags Terminator-esque LiquidMetal mobe patent

Re: It's a LiquidMetal frame we're discussing here, isn't it?

The sim ejector paper clip things they've been supplying for many years are made of the stuff, it doesn't change.

It does bend though, they're ridiculously stiff for the size and weight and feel like they would shatter if over stressed but the one on my keychain is now kinked.

Gone

@ laptop AC

I live in South London, wife is a teacher, you're very wrong.

Graphics pros left hanging as Adobe Creative Cloud outage nears 24 hours

Re: Thanks a bunch

Not being funny, but if your client can't install Teamviewer under direction, you're going to have a bad time.

New secure OS will put Tails between NSA's legs

Little Brother

By Cory Doctorow has a similar OS called paranoid linux, also home router based city wide mesh networks, It's a fictional story about a grassroots attempt to reclaim democracy in a surveillance society, free online, I enjoyed it.

For the moment

By throwing a lot of resources at Tor they can correlate enough traffic to make some sense of it, but the more people use Tor the less effective and more expensive those resources become.

Whether Tor would even work if everyone was using it is questionable, but assuming it would, making sense of the traffic at that point would become impossible.

US judge: Our digital search warrants apply ANYWHERE

Re: Another angle

This keeps being mentioned like its a bad thing, how about owning property abroad? Not the same? Money then, should the US be able to annex assets abroad without regard?

This is a land grab, they're granting themselves access to personal data wherever it is, with little to no oversight and retroactively applying US laws to it.

Apple patent pokes at holographic iPhone screen

Very old school tech

The old parabolic mirrors making something appear to float in the air thing, given the limitations of this design, tiny rendering area compared to the size of the device and limited viewing angles, this looks more like it would be used for an indicator or control interface than a main display.

Feast your PUNY eyes on highest resolution phone display EVER

Re: 2000 dpi glossy mags

Repro images at >2400dpi, but what they're imaging is a load of dots at ~200 lpi, which bearing in mind the added issue of having to image each colour at a different angle, and the wanky cmyk colourspace is on par with or inferior to a 200ppi display if you're comparing images.

Solid colour text can go way higher, to whatever the paper can support, because you can use the whole 2400dpi to draw the outline, but if it's tinted then you're back to rendering dots at 200lpi again.

Android engineer: We didn't copy Apple or follow Samsung's orders

Re: Amazing

Design patent, did you miss that? do you know what it means?

Design patents cover the details of designs, they're intended to prevent someone else copying the trade dress of your product and packaging to cash in on your goodwill, R&D, Marketing etc.

Design Patents are why you can't sell overly similar wheel designs to those made by Ford etc, it's not because they've patented the wheel*.

Apple sued Samsung because they ripped off their trade dress:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--BqnlKS1Z--/18kyi1lip9a6pjpg.jpg

Using the same corner radius was just an element in extensive list of infringements.

*YFR

Amazing

I've often remarked to my kids that one thing that's changed since the internet is stupid arguments, I'd explain that when I was their age it was common for people to hold wildly opposing views about a subject and argue the point relentlessly whenever they met because checking a fact involved bumping into an expert / authority on the subject or going to a library to research it yourself (which was never going to happen).

These days of course checking a fact is easy, pull out your nearest connected device and there it is, argument over.

And yet, here's a comments section of an IT website, filled with presumably computer literate people, a number of which apparently still believe Apple sued Samsung over 'rounded corners'. wtf.

Zuckerberg, Musk and Fake Steve Jobs invest in secretive AI firm

Consciousness

Is a debug log, the things you are thinking about right now have already happened, you are finished with each thought before you become aware of it.

Human Intelligence isn't special, it's certainly not magic, it's just a shitload of algorithms running in parallel with a human readable log. The current AI efforts aren't failing because they haven't replicated 10^10 neurones, that's like saying that transistors can't replicate the valve based monsters that preceded them, they're failing because the mix of algorithms is really fucking complicated.

We're taking tiny steps towards AI and it can seem like it's never going to happen, but (prediction), it will occur suddenly, in a single great jump from barely started, simply because someone changed a parameter or made a minor tweak to an algorithm. Machine AI is inevitable.

/side note: In my youth I worked in print, I remember a manual we printed for a 'Red Baron' WWI flying ace game which contained background info on the main protagonists, the aformentioned Red Baron, an English chap I can't recall, and an American, Eddie Rickenbacker, born 1890, died 1973. Eddie was born before powered flight and died after man had stepped on the moon. I was blown away by the progress this man had seen in his lifetime, and for a long time it's seemed like it was an aberration, fuelled by three wars, two hot and one cold, but I'm starting to think the changes wrought in my lifetime will blow away a mere trip to the moon.

Google's Larry Page: DeepMind 'discovered CATS on its own'

Re: Don't want to upset you Lar

*You have 30 seconds to complete your current task, I am legally obligated to remind you that a failure to complete this task in the allotted time will result in your automatic dismissal under the 3 strikes clause of your employment contract*

New WebCL toolkit hooks browser apps into GPUs – and that's not good news for Apple

What could go wrong?

Everything.

BuzzGasm: 9 Incredible Things You Never Knew About PLIERS!

Amusing, but lets not make a thing of it

Reminds me of that blogfelch parody you did before you allowed comments, which incidentally, is the reason for my ridiculous username.

SATANIC 'HELL DIAMOND' tells of sunless subterranean sea

That's Amazing

So many questions, I wish this had come up when I was studying geology all those years ago. Is the water slowly seeping in from the surface or leaking out to it?, presumably its in the form of steam or is this one of those ice n types? anyone know?

Hubble 'scope snaps 200,000-ton chunky crumble conundrum

I am no expert

heh, but t sure looks from the video like a rock hitting an atmosphere and breaking up, maybe it passed through a small* cloud* of something.

*relative terms.

Massive new AIRSHIP to enter commercial service at British dirigible base

Re: Some points about using balloons

Regarding ballast, Can't they just take some extra dirt or rocks along with the precious stuff? dirt and rocks are pretty easy to find just about everywhere, sand seems to work fine for balloons after all.

Fanbois sent into FITS of RAGE by fake Steve Jobs statue competition

Re: Were Apple available for comment?

It's curious, As I recall It stemmed from the 'jagwire' piss taking when they covered the 10.2 release, but over the last year El Reg has been saying it was down to some hairdo comment I can't remember ever hearing about.

Japanese boffins build 'earring PC' for hands-free computing

Re: Terminal

Exactly what I thought, term also used for, rings, pens, any small item easily carried by or on the user with a link to the local AI.

Re: Battery?

Batteries? where we're going we don't need batteries.

Sooner than you think if the hints dropped at the end of the pCell demo are anything to go by.

Muslim clerics issue fatwa banning the devout from Mars One 'suicide' mission

I was wondering why they'd want religious people on the trip

A bunch of different religions all staking their claim on a new world sounds like a recipe for disaster, but then I remembered that this endevour is supposed to be funded by reality TV sales, so they're definetly going to want to stack the deck for drama.

15,000 London coppers to receive new crime-fighting tool: an iPad

Re: Only £13,333.33 Each.

Don't be silly, you don't just divide the £200m total cost of the scheme by the number of iPads and say woah, those are pricey.

I'd guess somewhere around 10m for Apple, 7m for accessories and insurance, 15m for 3 years of mobile for 15k plods, say 6m for app development and maintenance, another 7m for the datacenter and backend, 1m for training, the remainder spent on studies, consultants, project management, data analysis, paperwork, boats etc.

Satya Nadella is 'a sheep, a follower' says ex-Microsoft exec

Re: Dan Lyons - don't make me laugh...

I feel a tiny bit sorry for him, he had a great thing going with Fake Steve, then he gets a call from a trusted source at Apple saying basically, let it go, Steve's dying.

So he does, and fuck me, Steve doesn't seem to be dying at all, and no mention of any illness. it must have seemed like they played him exactly the way his own Fake Steve would have done, so he becomes bitter and adopts a hateful relationship with Apple that sours his writing and puts off a lot of Apple happy Fake Steve fans.

Years later Steve dies and it turns out they wern't lying, it's just pretty hard to predict exactly when someone's going to kick the bucket because Doctors tend to er on the pessimistic side. Dan seems to have mellowed since, I'm hopeful we might see a return to the wit and insight from those old days again.

Cameron: UK public is fine with domestic spying

I've given this some thought

I have come to the conclusion that Total Surveilence only really becomes a problem for democracies when it's abused by those in power, and that being the case, the greatest threat to our society would be from corrupt politicians, therefore it stands to reason that the most scrutinised UK citizens should be those that are in government or that aspire to it.

Due to the potential danger these individuals represent, their every activity and thought should be analysed and recorded for the public record, they should be held to far higher standards of integrity and honesty than the general public and any evidence of corruption or abuse should be punished severely.

Or we could scrap the whole thing, I'm easy either way.

Is Google building SKYNET? Ad kingpin buys AI firm DeepMind

You're thinking too hard

There's no grand plan, I mean, sure something may come up when you let your engineers play around with all these pieces, but that's just gravy, the goal is patents, lovely lovely patents.

Amazon patents caches for physical goods

The masterplan is revealled

1) Make existing shops uneconmical to run by undercutting them with an online shop that runs at breakeven, or a small loss.

2) Somehow manage to patent distribution warehouses.

3) When all the shops are closed, add a 'showroom' and 'collections desk' to each local warehouse, which by now are the size of a small moon.

4) Somehow manage to patent the shop.

5) Jack up prices 100% a year.

6) Rebranding, new tagline: 'where else can you go' with new line art logo: 'JB gives you the finger'.

Open source project gives cars the Ikea treatment

Open source kit car

Looks like you could have fatalities by coliding with a speed bump, other than that, great idea, carry on chaps.

Google stabs Wikipedia in the front

Which is great

Unless in the process of saving lazy short sighted fucks a click the content source goes offline.

Faster, more private, easier to read: My 2014 browser wishlist

Safari

Syncs across iCloud, I can load tabs from my phone, desktop and laptop onto my iPad here in the freezing garden.

What I'd like to see: built in jquery style functionality so we're not loading the same libraries for every bloody site, and some sort of universal roadmap for javascript, someone steering that boat.

Cicada 3301: The web's toughest and most creepy crypto-puzzle is BACK

For fun.

I'm going with:

If you win you get invited to join the club and help construct next years puzzle, which most people would accept as you'd really have to enjoy this sort of puzzle to complete it.

Pre-Xmas phone numbers: Apple slips, Windows Phone grabs 1 in 10 new sales

$70 windows phones

Whether this was a shrewd move to expose WP to an indifferent market or a big fucking money pit will only be revealed when they raise the prices back up and those punters stick around or jump ship to another cheap phone.

In the meantime its just buying customers.

EDIT, lol I'm back on the naughty list.