Posts by Loud Speaker

DVLA misses out on £400m in tax after scrapping paper discs

Re: In reality...

The NOx problem is caused by running the engines very hot (improves fuel economy)

The NOx is allegedly countered by urea injection (except in VWs).

However, if you think anyone can compute the exact amount of Urea to inject in a 16 litre truck engine which can go from idle to max RPM and from cold to hot, each time it changes through its 24 gears in climbing from 0 to 56MPH and back between roundabouts and traffic lights, then you are going to need some seriously magical thermodynamics and sensors as well as computational skills.

The fact is, the Urea injection lobby (read people funded by the Urea sellers) are the problem here, not VW,

Ad-blocking ‘plateaus’, claims hopeful ad industry

Re: Ad-blocking 'plateaus'

Would you raise a similar objection to "Ad-blocking peaks"?

If you had read the post, you would realise that should be "Ad-blocking piques".

Personally, I am with the crowd who are shouting "If I wanted malware, I would have installed Windows myself."

Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD image

Re: Just another good example...

MS don't have a binary blob which is important enough to make people want to use their version of FreeBSD

What about all those NSA backdoors? Only the genuine (TM) MS version will have those.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

Personally, I am happy for them to call it UnfreeBSD, but maybe they could revive the name Xenix. Or, perhaps they could base the team at Santa Cruz, and call it SCO all over again.

Re: this is not your father's Microsoft.

1987 is indeed a large number of disks!They were probably single sided, single density 8" floppies. If you used DS, HD, it was probably only around 600 disks, and since you were unlikely to need the majority of printer drivers (since either the driver or the printer did not work anyway), very few people ever had to install more than 400 disks in any one install procedure.

GMB tests Uber 'self-employed drivers' claim at London tribunal

Re: Missing the point

This is complete rubbish. We still have black cabs (very tightly regulated) and minicabs - which mostly have the same technology as Uber anyway these days.

The main difference in business model is that minicab drivers pay weekly "rent" to the cab office for their business, not a percentage of turnover. They are still required to have police checks, public carriage insurance and twice annual vehicle inspections, and the cab office is required to check that they do, every week.

Uber's business model in the UK is to try to weazle word its way through the regulations to the maximum possible extent. And as a user, you risk paying more than even the black cabs would charge you.

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Re: Full marks for extra experience!

I still have a ship load of SCSI cables - I have been trying to sell them on Ebay!

The History Boys: Object storage ... from the beginning

Re: Erm...

Content addressable memories have been constructed in hardware. I believe several chips were produced i the early 1980's to do this. I worked on a project at GEC where we were contemplating using one to implement a switch (case) statement that would execute in a single cycle, rather than step through a table. We had a choice of a chip made by GEC or one made by a German company.

However, the project was scrapped in favour of using a VAX off the shelf - as it already had software, and we would have had to port Unix to our weird hardware (which also had a transputer array).

Computers vs Ebola: Scientists use big data to predict future disease hotspots

Batty!

I thought it was confirmed that the first human in the chain in Sierra Leone was infected by a pet monkey.

The bat theory was because bats spread it in Angola (about 5,000 miles away).

Disclaimer: I used to work for a company exporting anti-Ebola disinfectant to Sierra Leone.

Google doesn’t care who makes Android phones. Or who it pisses off

James 51 - I dont know when you last checked - maybe 1963?

Yesterday I installed a version of Cyanogenmod based on Android 6 on my Samsung S3 - a phone which was shipped with 4.4 - and my 5 year old phone is now like a new one. It doesn't do 4G, but then I live in Central London - we don't have 4G here most of the time anyway!*

It was not something I would expect my non-technical aunty to do, but I am sure she could get the guy who sells phones in the market to do it for £5 - which is far cheaper than even a Chinese "flagship".

* who IS hoarding all the 4G? Is it the northerners? Or have the SNP hijacked it?

McDonald's says bigger fonts cooked up improved profits

Re: Really? Fonts?

I take it you are referring to the fact that the size of McD's customers is measured in kg, not points.

Marauding monkey blacks out Kenya

Re: Bananas

And there was I listening to "One Money don't stop no show"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gfzj2EOing

Who's to blame for the NHS drug prices ripoff?

Re: The problem often is...

As a victim of this, I can explain: the council will not approve replacement of life expired boilers with newer models, because it could lead to the engineers being corruptly induced to replace boilers unnecessarily.

In other words, the public sector is totally committed to the idea that the whole concept of a public sector is unmanageable (except at union meetings).

You never hear anyone on the streets saying "Save our NHS by stopping the appalling waste and mismanagement".

And it is not normally the public sector that says "OK, I will buy IF YOU HAVE A SECOND SOURCE" and then buying from multiple sources in inverse proportion to their prices (used to be standard practice in industry for high volume procurement).

On her microphone's secret service: How spies, anyone can grab crypto keys from the air

Re: Rock on

I think you will find that playing Angry Birds,or even Hunt the Wumpus would interfere with the power usage sufficiently to remove any risk of this working.

However, for maximum security, you may need to watch porn videos at a high volume setting.

UK Home Office is creating mega database by stitching together ALL its gov records

Re: That wouldn't be so bad...

The Government data is unlikely to persist across queries either (or indeed at all, across Hadoop kit supplied by the lowest tenderers on the basis of a spec made from the shells of teenage mutant ninja turtles), but good luck explaining that to the jurors.

Three UK: Our MMS prices are up. Get around us with WhatsApp or Skype

Re: Spokesman be telling porkies!

Personally, I would describe completely blocked (see my previous post) as competitive with "16p per MMS".

Re: Can I disable MMS?

I am on Three for one reason: you can cap all calls that will cost over your contracted payment: if your contract is £17 per month, you cannot pay more than that. No calls to sex lines, no MMS. And 4G at no extra cost (or, more likely, no 4G at all).

The other networks refused to do this, although I understand some might have changed their policies recently.

I have never sent an MMS message intentionally, ever. The entire cocept is, as stated by others, entirely stupid.

And the Bell Telephone Company discovered video calls were discovered were a technology no one wanted in 1955.

A UK digital driving licence: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: OK, I'll bite

What problem is this a solution for?

Excuses to give out lucrative contracts?

World goes SIM-free, leaving Sony and HTC trailing behind

Re: I just bought a £45 phone...

I know for a fact that Primes did not run Windows.

Facebook promises release of own 'modular routing platform'

Undefined variable at or near line 1, column 1!

SDN = "Software Defined Nepotism"?

The 'new' Microsoft? I still wouldn't touch them with a barge pole

Re: WOW!

They must all want to be associated with the hip, cool kids.

I thought he target market for Facebook was 14 year old girls with no real friends. I can't understand why anyone else would use it.

Re: The lock in Question

Why should license admin not be considered a support task?<P>

In order to minimize the number of new licensees.

Oof! Acer suffers 25 per cent hit to PC sales in turbulent Q1

Re: eh, eh, Lenovo

Yesterday I was in John Lewis (to return an ASUS laptop that had died for a second time) and I thought I would look at the Lenovo offerings as there were quite a few.

None could out perform my 7 year old T61p (which I had upgraded to SSD myself). Why would I upgrade? No wonder their sales are not going well. If they cannot beat their own product that is theoretically 2 generations old?

Yep, we run Ubuntu on all family machines (except servers, which are BSD), so Win10 is NOT going to make a difference to any decisions.

Car analogy: Even Ford know that current models have to outperform a model T (pun intended), although I bet a 1968 Mustang would out perform our current (con)Fusion unless cornering was involved.

US-CERT advice says kill Quicktime for Windows, quickly

Personally, I would run it in the cat litter box. Much more appropriate.

If you want any security, why are you using Windows?

Nest's bricking of Revolv serves as wake-up call to industry

Re: Unfair comparison

A tub of hummus is quite useful

Not in the cloud.

The lesson here is that the cloud is "here today, gone tomorrow" and cannot be depended on, even if the service is provided by the biggest company on the planet.

If you need a server, buy one and put it in a rack. (I suggest buying three is more reliable).

Giving someone else money because they offer the performance of 3 for the price of 0.3

is likely to lead to you paying the price of 3 and getting the performance of 0.

FreeBSD 10.3 lands

Re: No one expects users to RTFM

As FreeBSD user, I can say I dont often need to read the manual, because not much has changed since I learned Unix in 1978, except the bugs have been fixed. And some new hardware is supported - I have migrated from PDP11 to Oracle (ex Sun) with little need for changes to source code for working software.

If you want Android, buy Android. Leave our Unix alone.

'Devastating' bug pops secure doors at airports, hospitals

Re: The service runs as root?

Less than zero? Definitely not.

I beg to disagree. I have a great need for a device that will flash an LED a negative number of times - it would eliminate the annoyance of all those other blinking LEDs in the bedroom at night. And if the same device is to be used in the server room, it will probably need to be a 32 bit signed integer.

I await a reply explaining the practical use of a negative float to enumerate LED flashes. Although I think an imaginary count might be an aid to handling hypothetical and virtual LED flashes.

Bloaty banking app? There's a good chance it was written in Britain

Fewest comments is best?

LOC is basically as useful as you would expect for a count of the number of LF characters* in a file. It is a very accurate measure of Lines of Code, and completely useless as a measure of anything else.

Anyone using LOC as a measure of anything other than the popularity of LF chars is deranged, and should not be allowed to publish papers.

* With apologies to those who use CR or CF/LF, although I admit some counting programs cannot handle this kind of complexity,

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Re: nothing more than a software update.

The observant will note that it is quite difficult to update DIP switches from 23,000 miles away over the Internet. Some people care about security, though calling their Security feature iSIS, is probably less than clever.

Gartner: RIP double-digit smartphone growth. 2016 has killed you

Re: Math, again.

Pretty soon all dogs and cats will have three phones each as well.

Re: Who are these morons ?

I don't know about where you are, but where I am (UK) we are not allowed to have phones with the features we want (LG V10). The networks not only won't allow dual sim phones with removable SD cards and battery, they have somehow prevented the independents from selling them too.

We know what we want, and they are not selling it to us. If you do that, you can expect a crash in sales. If they want to sell phones, they are going to have to go back to removeable batteries and SD cards, and give us dual sims.

Bash on Windows. Repeat, Microsoft demos Bash on Windows

Re: Hell is indeed freezing over

Don't be such a spoil-sport. Windows has always needed a good bashing!

Met Police cancels £90m 999 call command-and-control gig

Re: Unique system?

Why does the Met need a bespoke solution?

To maximise backhanders.

Watch six tiny robo-ants weighing 100g in total pull a 1,769-kg family car

Re: Mighty tiny car?

Imagine a spherical car, on a friction-less horizontal plane, in a vacuum

I did. It had a Google logo on the side!

Home Ebola testing with a Tricorder? There's an app for that

I think you will find that it was West Africa, not East, that had Ebola.

Perhaps this is an example of the "Artificial Negligence" that is predicted to take over the world - or at least make idiots redundant!

North Dorset Council hit by ransomware, flips the bird at miscreants

Re: AppSense

well setup Windows security policy

You might want to look up "Oxymoron".

The latest backup technology?

I have had tape backup since 1973, and my mother had it before me. LTOx works fine, and has been around for at least 10 years. I doubt many people still use 556BPI 7-track tape.

Today's tar is only marginally better than 10 year old versions - it is compatible with tar from 1996 (possibly older, but I no longer have any tapes older than that to prove it).

Of course, if you use proprietary backup software instead of open source, you probably won't be able to read your old tapes - I should know - I wrote some of it!

Baby Ubuntus toddle forth into the big scary world of beta

Re: It's your own fault

I have been a Linux user since version 0.99. Nothing on earth would drive me back to Windows. I started with Yggdrasil, and I switch distros occasionally. I also use OpenBSD on servers and FreeBSD on servers and desktops.

I have at least 4 Ralink adaptors that don't work reliably on Ubuntu (its not the hardware, they work on FreeBSD). The hidden cost of Ubuntu is that hardware that was working on earlier versions, mysteriously stops despite the fact that it is not faulty, and software that was working fine is swapped for half-baked crap. Wpa-supplicant and Wifi manager (or whatever its called) were both very unstable on my previous desktop with different Ubuntu versions - now I have a new system, and currently have no problems, but not looking forward to the next LTS experience.

I install and maintain Linux on other people's machines, and telling them "Oh, your wifi card is crap, you need another" when it worked on Windows, and can't be changed cos its in a laptop, is not the way to inspire credibility - even with people who reboot their Windows every two hours cos the Wifi locks up :-} I know - I talk to these people.

I also do not think OpenBSD on Sun servers is the answer for my niece whose HP laptop is virused yet again.

Sod Unity-alike. Ubuntu has real problems.

Will the new one have libtiff4 - so we can use our Canon printers? (Canon support Ubuntu like a rock supports Olympic swimmers).

And will Wifi work? Even with Broadcomm chips?

How about Nvidia drivers that actually display video? on the second day too?

Despite the agro, it seems to work better than Windows, or even Mint on Thinkpads.

OS makers in general need to get a grip - they are there to provide infrastructure, not a virtual wrestling experience. And Bizarro names are not generally a good selling tool outside of that Silly-cone Roundabout.

Windows 10 claimed another point of desktop share in February

I absolutely insist on pie charts.

Damned right - make that steak and kidney pie charts. With real ale.

IOCCO: Police 'reckless' for using terrorism powers on journo sources

Re: Scotch plod...

If you do it for them, I'll try and get a Youtube video of them spinning in their graves!

Re: Or, to summarise in 5 words.

If they can, they will.

And if the can't they will anyway.

We suck at backups. So let's not have a single point of failure any more

Of course, space is limited, <P>

You might need to read "Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy". <p>

Alternatively, if you don't have space to store the LTO6 tapes, you probably don't need the data as much as you need a bigger office. (Or, you might want to move your data out of central London).<p>

I have found, by experiment, you can store a lot of LTO6 tapes in the space that accommodates a single PHB.

ICO fined cold-call firm £350k – so directors put it into liquidation

When I first ran a Limited Liability company, I was told that "if I broke the law, then the liability would no longer be limited".

Is this no longer true?

Was it ever true?

Why the hell is it not true?

We, the people, give permission for people to incorporate limited liability companies on our terms it is up to us to set terms that are good for society. The people giveth, and the people can take away.

Black Monday: Office 365 down and out in Europe

Re: I'm getting bored of these useless outage reports

Assuming they do the addition on Intel processors using MSSQL, probably not even MS are able to know the answer.

OpenBSD website operators urged to fix mind-alteringly bad bug

Re: Robert Norton's Legacy?

I have found, over a large number of years, that Comic Sans is useful for two reasons:

1) to indicate that the content is not to be taken seriously

2) because on some seriously crap hardware, it is actually the most legible font from the MS kit.

Sure there are other, better, fonts, but are they available at the other end of the comms line?

Su*7^$%eeee... No Career

Q: How many guns to arm nine coachloads of terrorists?

Re: So why ...

an uzi with a bayonette

I think a pickle fork might be more effective! Make mine a genuine Turkish Kebab knife!

Re: Isn't it more worrying ...

Surely the BBC charter states that a balanced view requires they quote a policeman and a terrorist?

Libraries of congress full of terrorists

My mind is still boggling!

We're four years away from digitising England's courts – report

I Bet ...

I bet 100 Bitcoins that this will be a multi-billion pound fiasco, ending in some foreign contractor being paid a couple of billion more to sod off, taking all the equipment worth having, and all the best staff, and leaving a toxic environment of colossal waste.

And hundreds of pockets well lined.

Even Africa's greatest tyrants could not dream of stealing money on this scale.