* Posts by Hol314

22 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2017

Uncle Sam to put Aurora supercomputer to work on catalyst conundrums

Hol314

Re: "what exactly makes them so deadly to microbial life has proven illusive"

Well, forcing everyone to write in US English so as to spare us poor readers – allegedly – sure does not beat better proof-reading. In fact, the latter should be more than enough in my opinion…

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Hol314

This was interesting but it left me wondering when we can get the full details of how British contributors to The Register were robbed of their spelling. Sorry, couldn't help it.

What if we said you could turn any disk into a multi-boot OS installer for free without touching a single config file?

Hol314

AIO Boot – All-in-One bootable software | Multiboot USB Creator

Being pretty lazy, I went for the easiest (AFAIK) tool available: AIO Boot, which even handles automatically such goodies as Sergei Strelec distribution.

Sadly, it's not been updated in over a year so I might have to try alternatives if it fails to handle newer distributions.

Mozilla ups its VPN game – and the price – with split tunneling for Android, iOS

Hol314

Re: Just use Opera

I don't suppose I need to tell you who the product is when the service is free?

Besides, Opera is yet another Chromium-based browser, which is also Chinese-owned, incidentally. Not that the Chinese government could be suspected of holding a tight grip on its companies or have a particular interest in mass surveillance… Alibaba’s Jack Ma would certainly back me up on this!

Hol314

The warm, fuzzy feeling (...) is not enough compensation for me!

However much I would like Mozilla to thrive, I’m far too tight to splurge more than I do currently with Mullvad. Too lazy to change as well if I’m honest. Don’t know about Mozilla’s offer but Mullvad’s is valid for several devices, already has a beta version of split tunnelling on Windows, offers three flavours of doh DNS which block trackers, ads or both. Very happy indeed to have these set up on my Android devices…

John McAfee dead: Antivirus tycoon killed himself in prison after court OK'd extradition, says lawyer

Hol314

You're welcome but it really is just a neologism that hasn't yet made it to dictionaries...

Hol314

I too felt a bit of a tang learning the news about this hugely entertaining “character”, who also seemed to be a horrendous human being (I know, who am I to judge).

Someone has got to write a uchronia in which he beats Trump in 2016…

Microsoft spearheads a whole new genre with installation on the side of a Lyon tunnel

Hol314

Re: On a related subject...

Sustainable transports, hence the diesel buses...

Hol314

Would fail Turing...

Last time I checked, DeepL would give much better/more natural translations that Google translate, though in this instance it's not really accurate either "That damn Windows crap has crashed again and it's starting to break them for me!": "them" is meant for "bollocks" and "menu" would be "finely", or some other culinary metaphor perhaps...

Seven 'no log' VPN providers accused of leaking – yup, you guessed it – 1.2TB of user logs onto the internet

Hol314

Re: So, recommendations?

I went with Mullvad based on the thorough review by "That One Privacy Guy", who seems trustworthy... Still, I was comforted in my choice when I learned that Mozilla teamed up with Mullvad to offer their vpn service!

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Hol314

Shouldn't it be BorgyNotaMacBorkface?

Hol314

Bugocraft

aka "The global smog company".

I certainly hope all these efforts will be rewarded by the unveiling of Jeff Bezos' nickname even though it’s only of slightly poor taste, I'm sure it'll do fine.

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

Hol314

Re: Trump leads where others follow

Johnson may lie as much as Trump but he allegedly has no actual ideology and his buffoonery is carefully crafted to make him more relatable to non-Oxbridge folks, while Trump is about as knowledgeable as his base…

I don't know if this makes things better, I guess we'll soon find out.

Don't tell us to go Huawei, Chinese ambassadors tell UK and France

Hol314

Re: The irony

"Presidents these days are just high-class salespeople."

Did you not mean to write exactly the opposite? Some presidents/leaders may show some kind of reserved decorum (a varnish which may very well hide some nasty covert deeds) but these days, it’s seems the current trend is: the more crass, vulgar and/or blatantly corrupt, the better. Or may I’m watching the wrong kind of fake news :)

Q. Who's triumphantly slamming barn door shut after horse bolted at warp 9? A. NordVPN

Hol314

Re: Just out of curiousity....

"That One Privacy Guy" who's behind "That One Privacy Site" seems legit. As he points out, most sites reviewing VPNs also publish VPN adverts, which you may think is a bit of a problem, whereas his site has no ads whatsoever - he's not opposed to donations if some of his readers are so inclined....

Also his reviews of VPNs are pretty comprehensive, if not always very up to date.

I went with his top choice "Mullvad" and I'm fairly happy with it, though it does not fool the BBC.

Microsoft throws lifeline to .NET orphans in the brave new Core world

Hol314

Typo?

Presumably WPC should have read WPF...

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

Hol314

Re: Another dumb "top X" list

To me the greatest problem with this list is that each factor is summed up with a single figure, obtained from only one or two sources of information: probably not totally meaningless, but clearly not very meaningful… And incidentally, are the sources even trustworthy?

Hol314

Lyon for speed?

According to https://www.ariase.com/fr/news/couverture-fibre-thd-grand-lyon-testez-article-5196.html, 62% of homes in Lyon are eligible to fibre access.

You also have the option of cable, which is more widely available, offers speeds up to 1Gbps up and 60 Mbps down and is fairly cheap… but is also tied to the worse ISP/telecom company (https://www.thelocal.fr/20180308/and-the-worst-mobile-phone-and-tv-operator-in-france-is).

Java-aaaargh! Google faces $9bn copyright bill after Oracle scores 'fair use' court appeal win

Hol314

Re: Is it just API "theft" though?

Thank you for the link. Although it's probably a very good source of information on the case, I'm not quite ready to spend a couple of days scrutinising it; I fear I’ll have to remain in blissful ignorance…

Hol314
Paris Hilton

Is it just API "theft" though?

I remember reading Andrew Orlowski’s piece https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/google_oracle_comment/ two years ago making the case for the Java copyright to be enforced – and at the same time successfully predicting today’s legal outcome.

The article gives a small example of the code that Google allegedly copied from Java (https://regmedia.co.uk/2010/10/28/oracle_google_code_comparison_large.png) and it’s clearly not an interface but an actual implementation.

This makes Oracle’s win much more sensible to my hardly biased (I really don’t care for either party), law-illiterate mind. But then I'm wondering what the outrage is all about: am I missing something obvious here?

AMD sales soar, actually makes a profit, beats expectations, share price... decimated

Hol314
WTF?

WTF?

This kind of news reminds me that I'm eagerly waiting for my order of Tim O'Reilly's "WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us". In a 90 minutes podcast mostly dedicated to his latest book, he shares with Jason Calacanis his less than deliriously enthusiastic views on financial capitalism and tech giants. All of this nonsense might not last much longer…