* Posts by jzl

400 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2015

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Data-thirsty mobile owners burn through 5GB a month

jzl

Re: Prepaid

I already buy my phone outright and use SIM only deals. I can't be bothered with pre-pay - remembering to top up is a faff and paying attention to my phone expenses each month isn't worth the aggro, so I just have an all-you-can eat plan and don't worry about it.

jzl

I'd like a plan which averaged out over a few months or a year. Most months, I don't use much data, but occasionally I use a whole load.

I can't be the only one, right?

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove dies, aged 79

jzl

RIP

OK, now I feel old.

Top rocket exec quits after telling the truth about SpaceX price war

jzl

Re: Reality versus spin

"Precious fuel"?

The fuel is nowhere near as precious as the rocket.

If Musk is - as you speculate - so dumb, why is SpaceX succeeding?

jzl

Fat, lazy and stupid

I thought ULA was supposed to be a launch vehicle manufacturer? Why are they outsourcing production of their next generation engines? That suggests they have no confidence in their own ability.

Every time anyone from ULA opens their mouth, it just reinforces the impression that they are a bunch of lazy and entitled obstructionists.

Remix OS: China's take on an Android operating system – but for PCs

jzl

Re: Disappointed, no "new" OSes

Oh I agree. It's definitely the cost, which is massive.

Still a shame :)

jzl

Re: Disappointed

> "True, maybe because its more secure than a MS Windows OS and its Open Source and it works :)"

I think @Buzzword's point isn't that it's better than Windows. It's just that it's not new.

I agree. All the major operating system kernels have been around for ages now. It'd be nice to see something genuinely new spring up and gain traction, just for a bit of variety.

Bloody Danes top world happiness league

jzl

Also, what's with all the anti-Americanism? It's petty and says more about you and your insecurities than it does about America or Americans.

jzl

Which country are you in where you can purchase penicillin over the counter?

Clear November in your diary: SpaceX teases first Falcon Heavy liftoff

jzl

What he said. In the UK, diaries are for scheduling, calendars are for hanging on the wall.

Of course in another sense of the word, diaries are also for keeping a log of one's personal thoughts. If you had to design the English language, you'd never do it the way it is!

jzl

Re: Potential

... "Not really competing in the Big League"

Interesting. Which rockets are competing in that league then?

Boffins bust biometrics with inkjet printer

jzl

Re: Of course there is an urgent need to secure things properly

Nothing is 100% secure. The alternative to fingerprints is passwords and they're even worse.

How exactly do you rein in a wildly powerful AI before it enslaves us all?

jzl

Good idea, but ultimately futile

You know how stupid people often think they're smart? They're not capable of understanding the nature of their own intellectual limits.

We're all like that. All of us.

We have no idea what the limits of intelligence truly are, or which rung of the ladder we stand on. Our only reference points are members of our own species.

Can you imagine a bunch of spider monkeys coming up with a plan to breed a generation of human beings, but keep them captive? How well do you think that would work out for the spider monkeys?

Donald Trump promises 'such trouble' for Jeff Bezos and Amazon

jzl

Re: Inherited Wealth

Brits should refrain from comment?

The choice of US president affects our lives almost as much as the choice of our own prime minister, but we don't - obviously - get a vote. Commenting is the least we can do.

US boffins propose yet another low-low power Wi-Fi for Things

jzl

Security and encryption

Can be done in software at the protocol layer.

ARM Cortex-R8 aka 'Now your hard drive will have a quad-core CPU in it'

jzl

Re: Pies. Pies and fingers everywhere.

You're right in a technical sense. ARM chips are not soft coded. But there is logic hard embedded in the design which is indistinguishable from code in the way it is specified.

jzl

Re: Pies. Pies and fingers everywhere.

ARM don't create physical things, true, but it's a bit off to say they don't build anything. Almost all of the microcode in embedded processors around the world was written by them. Many of the fabs churning out ARM processors are doing so using essentially unmodified ARM reference layouts.

I'm not saying there's a problem with ARM - I don't believe that. I'm just saying that it surprises me that they get so little public scrutiny.

Hell, I was a very proud owner of an Archimedes back in the day and wrote my first code on Acorn machines. I'm proud of ARM and what they've achieved.

jzl

Pies. Pies and fingers everywhere.

It's just astonishing how much control one small company has over almost every aspect of the modern world.

People worry about Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. But ARM just goes flying right under the radar.

Not that I'm against ARM - they're a great company and have a good product. But surely this incredible monoculture represents a significant threat to our security and privacy? Isn't it time it was given a bit more time in the spotlight?

Cabling horrors unplugged: Reg readers reveal worst nightmares

jzl

Software

At least you hardware guys have something to show when you're asked by the boss why a small change is taking forever.

I've seen just as much spaghetti in code form before.

That said, still glad I don't have to do hardware.

Rust 1.6 released, complete with a stabilised libcore

jzl

Re: People are in Denial about C and C++

On one level, you're right. It's hard to get buffer overruns if you use the correct trchniques in C++. But it's easy to use the wrong techniques, as evidenced by the enormous number of overruns in even modern software.

C and C++ need to be put out to pasture.

The last time Earth was this hot hippos lived in Britain (that’s 130,000 years ago)

jzl

Re: Back in the 70's...

> "How is relying on nuclear power NOT "a reliance on stuff pulled from the earth and burnt"?"

The key thing is the second part. Nuclear power isn't burning and consequently there's no carbon dioxide released.

We really need to get rid of our collective irrational fear of nuclear power. It represents pretty much the only viable short and medium term solution.

jzl

Re: @GrumpenKraut

Yeah, why do people post as AC? It's reasonably anonymous to begin with. After all, my real name isn't jzl and I'm pretty sure you're not actually called GrumpenKraut.

Although it would be utterly awesome if you were.

jzl

Re: And it's not complicated either

10%?? If only. We add 10% to the CO2 levels in less than twenty years at the moment.

There is currently already 45% more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was 200 years ago. And it's only going in one direction and it's actually still accelerating. We're currently adding around 0.5% per year to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

jzl

And it's not complicated either

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising. That's easy enough to measure.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That's also easy enough to measure.

So what the f*&k do you deniers think is going to happen?

jzl

Re: So let me get this right.

Maybe they have looked at that? But it wouldn't matter to you, would it? You'd just move straight on to the next thing because you're not interested in evidence.

You're no better than those nutjobs who say the moon landings were a hoax, or the nutjobs who don't "believe" in evolution. You're defrauding yourself.

jzl

Rate of change

The rate of temperature change over the last few years is insane. Sure, the Earth has been hotter in the past. But it's not changed so fast before.

The climate change deniers had better be damned sure of themselves. The stakes on this are as high as they come. And I don't see how they can be that sure of themselves, given the evidence.

It's frustrating that climate change has come to be seen as a political issue. It's a scientific issue.

jzl

With the greatest respect, fuck you. Climate change is real, we need to do something about it, and people like you are part of the problem.

Or do you think that there's a spare atmosphere lying around somewhere?

Cat vids return to Pakistan as YouTube turns on censor-matic

jzl

> "In fairness, as well as being an awful film Innocence of Muslims was specifically designed to anger Muslims."

So what?

Jeremy Corbyn was specifically designed to anger David Cameron, but I don't see the PM burning effigies or rioting. These people need to grow up and get thicker skins. Their god is presumably big enough and old enough to protect himself.

jzl

Re: And can continue to marry 16 year-old girls

Not quite. In the UK, the marriageable age is 16 all round, with parental consent. In Pakistan, it's 18 for boys and 16 for girls.

Besides, when an act of parliament is struck down by a bunch of clerics because it is "blasphemous" then you can claim the situation is equivalent.

Note that they didn't just complain about the law. They had - and exercised - the power to strike it from the books.

While you pretended to work, Cloud operators fixed two Xen bugs

jzl

Work?

I stopped pretending to work years ago.

Lenov-lol, a load of Tosh, and what the Dell? More bad holes found in PC makers' bloatware

jzl

Re: Lenovo Skylake Yogas

Besides, in my non-work experience, I have played with Linux. I've found that it seems to knock at least 20% off the battery life, the trackpad drivers never work properly, and good luck with Bluetooth.

Linux is great in server farms. It's great for hobbyists. It's an awesome way to learn - properly learn - about how computers work.

It's just not as strong on the desktop for getting stuff done as either Windows or OS X. You have to spend ages fiddling with it when it should just get out of the way.

jzl

Re: Lenovo Skylake Yogas

Well, I guess I could install Linux.

Would that run our bespoke in-house Windows software? How about Visual Studio? Or a spreadsheet that's 1:1 compatible with Excel, including complex VBA code and Bloomberg integration? Or SQL Server?

Thought not.

But, hey, there's never a good reason for using Windows, right?

jzl

Lenovo Skylake Yogas

Nice machines. I've just bought a couple.

Of course the first thing I did was blast the disk away and install a freah copy of Windows 10. The machines were loaded down woth so much crap I'm not surprised some of it was dodgy.

When will they learn?

Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us

jzl

Standards

We need an interoperable instant messaging standard and we need it fast. Otherwise, this may come to pass and the world will rely on Facebook for communication.

I'm not talking IRC. Something which can stand against Messenger or WhatsApp in functionality and ease of use. SMTP for messaging, if you like.

The planets really will be in alignment for the next month

jzl

Red thing?

You mean the yellow thing?

That's the Milky Way. It really does look like that, but you need good eyes and a very dark sky. A camera which can handle long exposures helps too.

jzl

Bring out the kooks, the imbeciles, and those who sat at the back of physics class.

I'm girding my chakra and clutching my moonstone until it's all over.

For pity's sake, enterprises, upgrade your mobile OS - report

jzl

BlackBerry?

All the large enterprises I've worked at have a stable of mobile devices overwhelmingly consisting of ancient BlackBerry "Curve" handsets.

Trump's new thought bubble: Make Apple manufacture in the USA

jzl

Re: Increasingly convinced that Scott Adams is right

It doesn't stand for anything. I'm Romulan by birth.

jzl

Re: Increasingly convinced that Scott Adams is right

Top tip: acronyms don't make for clear writing.

I had to Google "SJW" and "POTUS".

jzl

A company can move countries without actually changing its physical location. Tim Cook would stay right where he is.

Apple has physical offices all around the world. The country of incorporation is a legal detail and has pretty much no physical significance.

Also, you ask what's wrong with bringing manufacturing back to the USA?

It's one thing if Tim Cook proposes it voluntarily (although it would impose a substantial cost penalty that competitors in South Korea, China and Japan don't face).

It's something else entirely if the president of the federal government forces them to do it. Last time I checked, the law didn't grant the president that sort of power and the US is built on the concept of freedom.

Bone-dry British tech SMBs miss out on UK.gov cash shower

jzl

Almost infinite monkeys

You need a few more monkeys; they're trying, but they're not there yet. This article reads like it was translated by Google from Tagalog.

HP boss hopes MS Surface Book will jack up notebook prices

jzl

Re: I was given free reign

Fair cop.

SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

jzl

The rates that customers are paying at the moment for launch don't include reuse. So the customers are paying for a new rocket each time - they don't care what happens to it once their payload is launched.

jzl

Re: Problem appears to be clockwise rotation

Go you. I'm sure Musk and his team of engineers were just guessing totally blind when he took to Twitter.

As for landing on an aircraft carrier, WTF? Why would they even want to?

Aircraft carriers are insanely expensive and full of explody things and damageable people. They have busy schedules. They're owned by the US navy. Their decks have lots of equipment that wouldn't handle a rocket flame well. They're kind of high above sea level for the cranes. And, again... WTF?

jzl

Re: Extinct volcano

There are gazillions of extinct volcanoes. Including a large number in the UK. The Earth is very, very, very old.

jzl

Re: Live embarassment

SpaceX is a privately held, for-profit launch company. I think you're confusing them with HBO.

LastPass in 2FA lock down after 'fessing up to phishing attack

jzl

My LastPass vault has 156 passwords in it. They're all between 15 and 20 characters and different so that if one site gets compromised, the vulnerability doesn't spread. I need to be able to access them anywhere, including other people's computers from time to time.

I don't suppose there are more than few dozen people in the world who have the memory to manage that without a password manager.

jzl

Simplicity

Most people (commentards excepted, of course) don't know how to use a computer. As in, they can browse the internet and use Microsoft Word, and that's it.

The problem with Keepass is that it requires you to not be one of those people. LastPass is simple and that makes it automatically better than Keepass because people will actually use it.

The real alternative to LastPass isn't Keepass or anything else. The real alternative is post-it notes and "password123" in a hundred places.

PDF redaction is hard, NSW Medical Council finds out - the hard way

jzl

Can't use a computer

Yet another person who can't use a computer.

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