Posts by Eltonga

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Depending on the device, you can also use KOreader and have access to a lot more formats, better interface, etc. than the ones provided by the Kindle out-of-the-box. Sometimes the installation is convoluted but worth every minute invested.

The PainStation runs Windows XP because of course it does

Re: Pain

...magic smoke escaped from the power supply. Unfortunately spare parts are impossible to find for a computer that old...

You can always rig a new power supply and replace the connectors on the new PS with the ones in the old one. From that time, the only thing that got added was the "power on" ability which you can bypass by shorting the corresponding contact to ground. Plenty of tutorials on you-know-tube.

Pop!_OS 22.04: New kid on the Ubuntu block starting to show real muscle

Installs fast... does everything fast...

OK, we are all grown ups and know that speed comes at a price.

What are the specs of the machine in which this test was done? Not asking for a full featured benchmark but at least give us an idea, ElReg...

What's the footprint of this thing? Heavier than plain vanilla Ubuntu? Lightweight?

University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired

Re: A punitive sanction against the Uni for approving it

"If they have read, "we will see if people can detect our attempt to deceive them", then the panel would have said no."

I think that it is part of a job well done to go further than what is written in bold in the front page. After all, even people that has no mischief in mind can describe things in a confusing way.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: Dear Canonical...

And don't worry, your anonymity is perfectly safe with us...

Re: Curious? Really?

Calling "targeted advertising" to a straight sales call referencing an action you just did is a show of excessive good nature.

Huawei mobile mast installed next to secret MI5 data centre in London has 7 years to do whatever it is Huawei does

Re: Is that the one..

I'm sure the teachers really miss that secret meeting room in the basement. Did that company also have that other class of room one sees in the spy movies where they "soften" the hero? That could have been useful for the teachers too...

Re: You've heard of Tempest?

And this one being a countryside installation, there is always the lightning protection (and regulations) to comply with, and putting a cable straight from the roof and into the DC could not be the smartest idea.

Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech

Re: Spiderbot

So what? It makes absolutely no difference to anything. The Moon isn't exactly an ecosystem.

Nor is the Earth orbit, for the case. Problem is that all that trash that we leave out there is coming to bite us back sooner or later. The Earth orbit is a worse case than the Moon surface as it is a lot more "populated" and it has a lot more (and more dangerous) trash that can impact any valuable satellite or space ship. There is a lot of dangerous sized trash that is being tracked, but there is a lot that is not tracked at all, not to talk of "unknown" origin one, a.k.a. military/spy satellite debris.

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Re: Who got the wrong census?

Not just me. Luke did too.

He also got his right hand removed by his own father with a Jedi light saber...

Unless you are referring to another Luke...

Don't tell Alice and Bob: Security maven Bruce Schneier is leaving IBM

If he gets RA-ed he goes somewhere else, like the competitor.

Not something the manager that decides on his RA thinks about.

RA is all about budget, and a decision taken by people that does not need to be replaced by a sophisticated AI system. A single Excel spreadsheet is enough to replace most of those decision makers.

Bad news. Asteroid 1999 KW4 flew by, did not hit Earth killing us all. Good news: Another one, Didymos, is on the way

Re: Land Dart on it then electric propulsion

Please stop with this nonsense.

Round. That's how turtles are, and we all know we sit on elephants that are standing on top of a big turtle.

Re: Great Pool Shot!

bury it somewhere where the next sentient species would be certain to find it in 30 million years' time.

Yeah! And make expensive earrings out of it!!!

Re: A pair of asteroids just whizzed past Earth

Not for a few more decades but when the orbital predictions get ultra reliable and the capability of gently steering such rocks has become routine, maybe we could simply eliminate such rocks by re-directing them into collision with the moon. A long way off admittedly.

By that time we could (hopefully) have some lunar base so crashing stuff into the Moon could not be so sound (pun intended).

You don't need a PhD to phish a Brit university: Nonprofit claims 100% hit rate is easy peasy

Re: Hight value

And who exactly will that hurt?

What? The future of humankind itself... NOT

Accused hacker Lauri Love loses legal bid to reclaim seized IT gear

Re: Is this how far we have sunk?

If the Dutch police search your car for drugs (ie take it to pieces) and don't find any, they will return the car in pieces.

As long as they had legal grounds for a search, and they followed the rules for evidence preservation, then they are covered.

Don't you have the right to ask for compensation in such cases?

If you want a vision of the future, imagine not a boot stamping on a face, but keystroke logging on govt contractors' PCs

Re: "at zero cost"

The citizen of Russia, Italy and Argentina lobbies key-logging and screenshot-taking software for US state and federal contractors.

Argentina lobby????????? This is turning out to be extremely conspirative. Too much conspirative I'd say...

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

When I know I'll be using a laptop, I carry a mouse with me.

At the rack aisle or cross connection cabinets, cars, aeroplanes... you're usually condemned to use the laptop at your...lap.

I know it has fallen out of fashion, but I love to use trackballs, which with the "recent" wireless updates, are generally unobtrusive and always require a lot less real estate than a mouse.

Do I hear two million dollars? Apple-1 fossil goes on the block, cassettes included

Re: Sad Days

Mind you, I also remember "Carrier Landing" on the ZX81, and working with the ZX80 (computer, not the chip) when I started work.

Erm... there is no ZX80 chip. Perhaps you refer to the Zilog Z80 (actually a Z80A working at whooping 4 MHz) that was the microprocessor behind both the ZX80 and ZX81.

Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook

Re: Anti-GMO

Not if we had the bollocks to stop uncontrolled breeding we wouldn't.

well, we always have that old reliable option of an all-out war.

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

Re: but that's the same as everyone elses review!

There's no question that someone, young or old, could easily throw together something as basic as this for about the same outlay,

Actually, and IIRC, Ben Heck did it in his sponsored "The Ben Heck Show".

First low-frequency fast radio burst to grace our skies detected at last

Re: Uh, am I the only one

a quiet area of the spectrum.

That might be for us, and right now. Who can know how cluttered that part of the spectrum is in the origin point, moreover if you assume there is a civilization advanced enough to be interested in interplanetary radio? Also, there is the hidden assumptions that this "beings" have the same kind of senses as we have. It could well be that they are a species that communicate through RF emitting and receiving organs and well, the space around them could be really, really noisy in the RF bands...

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

So you're recommending an extension cord? Won't it get tangled around the sun?

Man you are so outdated... what was wireless charging invented for, anyway?

Sorry, Neil Armstrong. Boffins say you may not have been first life-form to set foot on the Moon

Re: "..one small step..."

You know NASA's official position on the telemetry tapes for all 6 missions is that they are "lost"?

IIRC, what was lost was the high definition tapes taken from the local feed and not from the received data.

Re: "set foot"

Hmmmm... not actually an exoskeleton. More like an exoskin but that's totally unnecessary. An exoskeleton has physical support function that an astronaut nor any other kind of suit has not.

UK privacy watchdog to fine Facebook 18 mins of profit (£500,000) for Cambridge Analytica

Ouch... that must have hurt

Actually, Mark lost more in his own time, plane tickets, hotel rooms, plus the hefty bill his attorneys' buffet certainly sent him.

Google weeps as its home state of California passes its own GDPR

Re: Zuck on that Bitch!

"a hefty $7,500 fine."

LOL. Not quite as hefty as the €20 million of GDPR.

It's per user. Do the math.

Cold call bosses could be forced to cough up under new rules

Re: Messing with CLI numbers

All the cold calls I get have a CLI of "international". It appears that the call centre - obviously staffed in the UK - is relaying through another country.

I am sure you are aware that there are call centers in India that are staffed with people trained to speak with a given accent. It is usually done for debt collection as it was seen that talking as the neighbour next door helps in that regard, but may be done for other kind of business too.

Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata

Re: Claim They Did Nothing Wrong...

Or is lying so prevalent at every level, that me being a hermit, i have missed the signs and symptoms of such, in every day life ?

They just follow Herr Goebbels advice: Lie, Lie, Lie... something will stick on.

Oregon will let engineer refer to himself as an 'engineer'

Re: UK had IEE not IET

I don't tend to call myself engineer, so could safely go to Oregon, I suppose.

Yes, but remember to have a beeper at hand to replace improper usage of the E word when somebody asks what you do to earn your living.

Take off, ya hosers! Silicon Valley court says Google can safely ignore Canadian search ban

"poles are closed 5 time zones away"

"The poles are in all time zones!"

Well I'm pretty sure it was a typo and the OP just meant polls instead of poles. And FWIW, I understand you meant poles as in the geographical meaning rather than than the one that has to do with the people natural to Poland.

Hey, IoT vendors. When a paediatric nurse tells you to fix security, you definitely screwed up

"While it's capable of transmitting 24/7, it can only be reprogrammed when a large magnet is placed over it. This happens at three-monthly intervals and the window of opportunity for putative hackers is less than half an hour."

And there is also the non-trivial fact that the cardiac implant is not a long range receiver so the would-be hacker should be very near to you or use a considerable amount of power.

Daily Stormer binned by yet another registrar, due to business risks

Re: It beings.

Actually, Free Speech is a right, and nazis have it too.

The difference is what happens after you exercise that right, and that's what everyone is confusing. One has the right to say whatever one thinks, but there is the rest of the legal aspect that applies.

Defending oneself on the basis of free speech is childlish at best.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Re: EMP

Lead-acid batteries of the kind used in cars, ships and pretty much anything not very finicky with weight are not precisely sensitive to EMPs.

Of course, the ships should have manual power switches instead of electronic ones but that is also not too difficult to overcome.

Re: "whether the Navy should be abandoning low-tech backup solutions"

But... who would want to keep living if an EMP fries all the entertainment and private communications equipment on board?

Yes, mine is just two coats behind the gentleman's one.

Huge ransomware outbreak spreads in Ukraine and beyond

Re: How to stop ransomware

Since only criminals use bitcoin, just make it illegal to trade bitcoin for real money. Then they can be traced through any banking system. Too easy, man...

If this is meant to be an irony, it's great. Otherwise it lets me speechless.

reformat and restore from off site backup :)

Yeah... let's check for first time in history whether the offsite backups were successful.

And let's hope we didn't back up the infection vector too... and oh... that the DR are not infected as soon as we turn them on...

My unpopular career in writing computer reviews? It's a gift

Re: USB cables

according to the 120 quid per millimetre Van den Hul yacht mooring cable literature that came with my free promotional gift.

I assume the promotional gift includes at least a small yacht to try the characteristics of the cable.

IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni

Re: @2Nick3 Just something to think about...

On the train to work every day, I'm surrounded by people using their laptops.

Thomas Watson Jr. used to do that (commuting by train to NYC, I mean). And he was by that time General Manager of IBM World Corporation, IIRC the name, which was the company used for external trade by IBM.

The Big Blue Chopper video that IBM might want to keep quiet

Re: Limo

It's not a 1/4 mile if you know your way around - but then you might miss out on the New Carpet and the Working Toilets.

Whaaaaat??? Working toilets??? Obviously the company keeps wasting the shareholders' money in unneeded (and probably undeserved) luxuries for the employees.

Look at those beautiful bushes all around the field... they look like they could do with some natural nitrogen and urea rich nutrients.

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

Re: So....restore from backup

That's because we ran out of Cathars some time ago ;-)

Aaaah! But that should be no problem for the Spanish Inquisition!

US laptops-on-planes ban may extend to flights from ALL nations

Re: Work time

Portable HDD?

That's what quantum panic theory intends to answer.

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

You are a traitor, not respecting the will of the people. We are going to have our strong and stable leader May negotiate a strong and stable trade deal with every strong and stable country in the world and it shall be good strong and stable.

FTFY

Re: Sounds like a fairly nice system to me

Sell the pigs to a slaughterhouse so they get to their well deserved fate. Cash. Redo from start.

Oz MP flies crypto-kite, wants backdoors without backdoors

Re: Explain it sloooooooowly...

Well, that would mean that you finally decided to take the blue pill and wake up to the real world.

Avast blocks the entire internet – again

Well, yeah, we all know the drill: "It works fine on my machine..."

IBM: Customer visit costing £75 in travel? Kill it with extreme prejudice

@LordElpuss

On which kind of parties, if we may know?

Debian bins keys assigned to arrested Russian contributor

there's a risk involved in operating a Tor exit node, when you're in places like Russia

Actually it is dangerous in a varying degree almost anywhere... if some pedophile traffic could be traced back to the node (and I don't think that is extremely improbable), one would have to handle PRs veeery smoothly.

NASA agent faces heat for 'degrading' moon rock sting during which grandmother wet herself

Re: NASA Don't own the moon!!!

They don't claim they do... they just say they own what was brought back by the men they sent in the spaceships they paid. Or don't you say you own a piece of rock you bring back with you from a vacation in the beach?