Posts by AIBailey

Huawei's latest smartphone for the UK market costs £1,299. And yes, that's without Google apps

Re: It's a marketing coup

I've been impressed in the past with Huawei phones (I've had one, my wife has one, my son had one and now has a Honor).

However, it was only recently that I discovered that in later version of EMUI. they've intentionally removed the option to install apps to the SD card. This was found out the hard way when Mrs B was no longer able to install anything without deleting other apps first.

There's no workaround short of rooting, and by doing that you probably lose access to online banking from the phone.

I was considering a Honor for my next handset, but unfortunately this restriction has put me right off.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: If the author of this PoC

Twitter haven't suppressed what Trump has been able to say, they've merely added a flag to point out that what he's spouting may not be grounded in any kind of fact at all.

He's still free to say what he wants, but that doesn't meant that anyone else has to take it as gospel. What's really wound him up is that he might not be able to post a bunch of lies any more without it being openly called into question.

Turns out Elon can't control the weather – what a scrub: Rain, clouds delay historic manned SpaceX-NASA launch

You could launch at any time and achieve Earth orbit.

The challenge here is to launch when the ISS is at the right point in the sky, otherwise you waste too much fuel chasing down its orbit.

For the price tag, this iPad Pro keyboard better damn well be Magic: It isn't... but it's not completely useless either

Re: Because ... it’ll just work : Nope

Our main family laptop is a Dell from late 2010. Upgraded several years ago with a SSD, and I've chucked a couple of extra GB of RAM in its direction, but otherwise I've not had to repair or replace anything.

It's still getting all W10 updates as well.

Honor launches new UK store, laptop, kettle, er... toothbrush?

Re: Millimetres?

I'm hoping that last one is a typo. An 8K compatible 5" screen? That's a serious pixel density.

Press F2 to pay respects. New Xiaomi Poco Pro has 5G, top-drawer Snapdragon chippery, 64MP camera

Re: Still a bit sick after the last made in China import

...at least our own spyware does not go to a such a regime.

How do you know?

'Non-commercial use only'? Oopsie. You can't get much more commercial than a huge digital billboard over Piccadilly

You could have stopped after the first 5 words in that sentence.

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: Let's be honest...

Your memory does you credit - taken from ST-Amiga Format, issue 13 (1989), an article on software piracy:

"There is a story doing the rounds of a lad who hacked into Ocean's Operation Wolf, which in ST format comes on three disks, removed a bug on level five which caused the game to crash when a particular object is shot and compressed all the code to fit on one disk. Disks aren't cheap - Ocean would have been extremely happy to have left two disks out."

Of course, the original ST version would have been on single-sided floppies, where the cracked version would be double sided.

Borklays soz for the ailing ATMs but won't say if fix involved a Microsoft invoice

Re: What makes you think it's Windows 7 ?

Windows 7 with the Windows Classic theme does show a gradient across the window title bar.

Motorola bounds out the G8 with a harder, better, faster smartphone for the thrifty

Re: Not progress

Apple have been slapping the "Retina Display" moniker on anything down to about 220ppi. At that resolution, it is possible to just about make out individual pixels, but at 269ppi on this handset, you're exaggerating somewhat to say that the pixels will "stand out".

Can you hear me now? Roadtesting Anker's first Bluetooth speakerphone

Re: an obscure sport largely absent from this country

Hockey != Ice Hockey

Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Is it just me?

It's great to see the scale of performance numbers being floated around, and the idea of supercomputers has always held a mystique, but I can't help but feel disappointed that this continues the trend set many years ago, where supercomputers are just rack mount machines in rows and rows, where the only distinguishing features are the design on the doors and side panels.

Bring back the spirit of the 70's and 80's, supercomputers looked other-worldly, instead of looking like any other data centre.

Huawei unfolds latest shot at the phone-tablet hybrid with reinforced hinge and reassuringly Xs-sive price

"...Baolong modems, which supports ... 5G NSA"

Pre-backdoored? Just the way the Trump administration like it.

Huawei claims its Google Play replacement is in 'top 3' app stores after Trump turns off tap to the Chocolate Factory

Google cannot supply the code for Google Mobile Services to Huawei in China for them to include in their phone build. There's nothing that says that a user of a Huawei phone in another country (e.g. Australia) can't use US-centric apps though.

Netflix (to use another example) may not be able to provide code directly to Huawei, so the Netflix app can't be embedded in the phone from the factory, but again, nothing prevents a user in another country from installing the app.

If I was to suddenly become the owner of a Huawei phone without Google, installing the Amazon App store and F-Droid would probably get me 95% of the apps that I have on my current phone. *

*- ...at a guess. I already have some apps that I've obtained from the two sources above, and know that a great deal of others that I've downloaded from from the Play store are available in at least one of the alternatives.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Simply place the backup tape next to the drive array, and wait for some kind of data-osmosis to occur.

Of course, verifying the backup will be difficult, but I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time that backup integrity checks have basically consisted of crossing your fingers and hoping really hard.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

"There are many tools which tech-savvy children use...

...some of which can be used for both legal & illegal purposes,"

So almost any software development tools are right out then, as they could be used to create all manner of nefarious tools.

Or yet another calculator app.

"Tools" could even apply in a literal sense to things like screwdrivers and hammers. If my kids can use a screwdriver to open a PC case and change a graphics card (they can), should I also assume they will go and commit an assault with it as well?

Razr sharp foldable: Samsung whips out Galaxy Z Flip – and, oh snap, it's £1,300

Re: "..a 21.9:9 aspect ratio."

That actually makes more sense than 21.9:9

At least you can immediately visualise how much wider or taller a screen is from that.

"..a 21.9:9 aspect ratio."

Stop. Just.... stop.

7.3:3 is fine.

C'mon 'Reg, take a stand against this ??:9 nonsense. We're generally intelligent enough here to not need our hands holding and requiring every aspect ratio being something:9.

The smallest denomination is fine.

Raw sunlight is going to cause our asteroid belt to spin itself to death by YORPing – but not for another six billion years

This affects asteroids between 1 and 100 metres in diameter, and a rotation of once every 2 hours will "rip them apart"?

What am I missing here - that doesn't sound particularly violent for an object of that scale, especially if an asteroid is mostly solid rock.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Re: To be honest ...

95% approval in the Republican party...

95% approval amongst career politicians that have realised that the best, in fact the only way to get ahead and remain in a job is to back the orangeutan leader?

Occasionally a few of the Republicans show a bit of backbone and actually resist (Romney being a recent example), but a public dressing down from the comedian in chief usually reminds them not to misbehave again.

THAT says a lot, you know...

Latest battery bruiser Android from budget Moto G range appears ahead of MWC after an Amazon whoopsie

Re: Can't hear you!

I use Poweramp as my media player. Amongst the plethora of options is a toggle to mix audio to mono.

No need to inflict your music on anyone else.

There's got to be Huawei we can defeat Chinese tech giant, thinks US attorney-general. Aha, let's buy stake in Ericsson and Nokia

So is this an admission by the US government that they were expecting other countries to a) deny their markets to Huawei, and then b) turn to the US (primarily Cisco and Juniper) to supply their equipment.

They've suddenly discovered that there are actually other network manufacturers that are neither Chinese or American, and have suddenly realised that they might not be raking in the millions after all. (Because let's not forget that the real reason for going after Huawei is to stifle the competition for US products)

He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges

Re: What a nasty nest of vipers

From the article - ...child sex abuse images the FBI claimed it had found on a server he ran.

This wasn't a picture, rather multiple images. And they were (allegedly) on a server that Schulte ran, nothing to do with the CIA.

Edit : from the earlier article : " Schulte was in charge of a server that contained 54GB of illegal content"

EU tells UK: Cut the BS, sign here, and you can have access to Galileo sat's secure service

Behold, the Brexit Satellite

Those egg-carton solar panels, Mr Kipling foil tray antennas and yoghurt pot thrusters look just like the real thing.

Blue Peter will be proud.

The Foot of Cupid emits final burst of flatulence in honour of fallen Python Terry Jones

Re: Captain Buzzkill

No he didn't, he came here for an argument!

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

Re: Sooo....

The other take home is that if you need to kill time while waiting for your criminal mates to arrive, take a book to read rather than have a few games of Angry Birds.

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Re: USB A

I've got a couple of double sockets in the kitchen that have 3 x USB-A connectors built in, rated at 3.1A total.

They're really useful for charging most devices, and save having to dig out a multitude of plugs to charge the family's' phones at the end of the day.

The exception is the wife's phone, that somehow tries to draw as much power as the national grid can supply to the whole estate. This means that after about 10 minutes, all the devices that are plugged into the USB sockets periodically stop charging for a few seconds as the circuit inside the plug has got hot enough to trip the thermal cutout. The socket itself gets too hot to keep a finger against it for more than a second or so.

The time that Sales braved the white hot heat of the data centre to save the day

Re: There was the time...

... a fire caused by a faulty aircon unit that had been playing up for a week or so?

Image of the actual unit -->

What do Brit biz consultants and X-rated cam stars have in common? Wide open... AWS S3 buckets on public internet

That reminded me of the old News Of The World reports, when they'd get so far into an investigation of some kind of sordid event before "making their excuses and leaving".

Really?

I am broot: The Reg chats to French dev about Rust tool that aims to improve directory navigation

Re: Really?

How about right click, Properties?

That works if you want to see how much space a given folder is taking up, but if you want to know, at a glance, which of the 50 folders in your directory holds the most data then you'll need a pen, paper and patience.

Hence the reference to TreeSize Free, which is an incredibly useful tool.

Directory Opus

This is probably the most useful tool on the Amiga once you have a HDD (and even for floppy disk file management).

I still have it on my real and virtual Amiga's, though I never got on with version 5, which was almost a replacement for Workbench, and hence stick with version 4.something.

For the creators of all versions of Directory Opus -->

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Wouldn't that only be correct if there was also a restriction on setting airports with a 90 degree heading as well?

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

Re: oh no!

Considering the number of reviews that seem to focus on this nowadays, Micro-USB is surely still more prevalent. In the drawer of cables at home, there are only 3 USB-C's , plus a couple of extra in the car, but at least 10 Micro-USB.

USB-C is more convenient by far, but I certainly wouldn't write off a product just because it's using a cable that's been an established standard for well over a decade.

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Who?

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Re: I Can't Stop Myself

No, simply "ban it" because it doesn't bloody work.

The fact that this moron thought he could sort out a dog in the back seat of his car, leaving the driving of said car to a souped up cruise control, is the reason. Give people too much automation and they forget that the need to keep their brain engaged.

You looking for an AI project? You love Lego? Look no further than this Reg reader's machine-learning Lego sorter

Presumably, yes.

Or at the very least, if a piece of the machine falls off, it'll try and file it away. There's something a little bit "wrong" about that however, kind of like someone knitting, not realising they're using wool from their own gradually unravelling jumper.

That apart, this is quite possibly the greatest use of AI I've heard about so far.

US Embassy in London files extradition request for ex-Autonomy boss over HPE fraud charges

Re: Can he claim diplomatic immunity?

I was going to suggest a trade for Anne Sacoolas - seems that the US want the flow of "justice" to only work in one direction.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Jesus wept

Come on 'Reg, surely you can wave the flag for common sense aspect ratios?

...an aspect ratio of 32:10 (imagine a pair of 16:10 monitors side by side)

Can't you use basic mathematics and put this into more sensible values?

"an aspect ratio of 16:5 (imagine a pair of 8:5 monitors side by side)"

I could just about understand keeping things as ??:9, but even that might confuse some people (i.e.is a 16:9 screen the same as 4:3? Why isn't 4:3 referred to as 12:9?). But even that got bloody stupid once 19.5:9 started to be used.

-> Mine's the one with the 80:45 phone in the pocket

Xerox: Prepare to say cyan-ara, HP Inc. We're no paper tiger. We're really very serious about that hostile takeover

Re: IMNSHO...

It does seem to be the wrong way around.

I wonder what would happen if HP decided to try and turn the tables and launch a hostile takeover of Xerox instead?

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: A quirky investigation into why AI does not always work

So the note to take from the book....

... is that AI and earthworms have similar intelligence. This means a cubic metre of soil can be used as a high performance AI cluster.

My plan to conquer the market...

1) Gather worms.

2) Connect to their brains.

3) ???

4) Success

Huawexit means Huawexit! Uncle Sam gets 300 applications to dodge ban on supplying Chinese comms beast

Exactly.

This is the push that Huawei needed to reduce their reliance on US businesses in their products down to zero, and I suspect other foreign telecoms manufacturers will be watching before considering whether they could make the same leap.

The reviews of the new Huawei Mate 30 Pro have praised the hardware, however the lack of Google Play services is the killer if you're not in China. Again, if Huawei can figure out how to get a high percentage of play store apps to load (perhaps by curating an alternative app store), then other phone makers may follow suit.

Trump's plan to help US businesses only works while the non-US companies haven't developed a better solution.

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

I think in this case, the main problem with glue is that the people in the Apple accounting team have obviously been sniffing too much!

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

I thought that the big name drones (and specifically that DJI have been mentioned here in the past) used geofencing to explicitly prevent this kind of thing occurring?

Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

Re: RIP BeOS

I thought NetWare too.

The "competitor to Windows" thing confused me at first as I was thinking of desktop clients (which would probably have been either Mac or OS/2), but once you think server-side (and then take the obvious clue from the capitalised NW), it's clear who it was.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Re: More guns = safer for everyone

So by your argument, a safe state is one that allows you to carry a concealed weapon?

Taking that thought further, if you can assume that everyone has a concealed weapon, and nobody starts any trouble* then surely NOBODY needs to actually own a gun?

Just the thought that someone might own a gun is enough.

* - it depends on what your initial definition of "safe" truly means. Low crime overall, low number of gun related crimes, low homicide rate?

Huawei. It's the patriotic choice: Mobe behemoth predicts 20% sales spike despite US sanctions

I wish them well

Genuinely.

Their smartphone business is another victim of the protectionist racket being run by the US administration. I've been impressed with Huawei's recent handsets, and hope that they can find some way to make this still work for them, and stick two fingers up to Trump's international game playing.

If they do make it work, and break the stranglehold that Google holds over most of the Android ecosystem, I can see a few other phone manufacturers, maybe even Samsung, offering their own alternatives to the multitude of Google apps. This in turn will cause much hand wringing by the US government as Google lobbies hard to stop the loss of all that lovely data.

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Re: How not to hold up autonomous cars

I'm thinking that Deathrace 2000 should be reclassified as a documentary in order to understand what might eventually go on in the "mind" of an autonomous vehicle.

Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data ... but are scared of GDPR

Re: Quite...

You go in for a tin of beans and come out with a car jack.

I totally misread that, and assumed some kind of carjacking scenario.

My first thought was "You're not wrong. The kids that hang around the local Aldi will try and pinch anything."

Huawei with you! FCC's American Pai proposes rip-and-replace of scary Chinese comms kit

We need to make sure our networks won't harm our national security, threaten our economic security, or undermine our values. The ChineseUnited States government has shown repeatedly that it is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do just that

FTFY.

It's not like Cisco kit isn't also full of bugs and backdoors, and the US government has, on many occasions, demonstrated that it's prepared to (often illegally) snoop on networks. 'cos, security or something.

Offering to buy back Huawei kit demonstrates a push towards their policy of Buy USA. Leave 'em to it, and let the rest of the world get on with better or cheaper providers.

This is a protectionist racket to ensure that Cisco gets as big a slice of the pie as possible, nothing more.

Now the US DoJ has charged Apple's insider trading lawyer with, er... well, it's embarrassing

Driven by nothing more than greed.

If you're in the position where you can afford to have $10M tied up in shares anyway, you're generally living a pretty good lifestyle.