Posts by Bent Metal

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

Re: Hmmm...

> a) ...and women generally are ... less stupid than men.

Certainly to my mind, you lost your way at this point.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: Dumped HP deskjets some time back

> Get a laser printer.

Have to agree - when the kid's homework inkjet clammed up *again* after a short period of not being used, I bought a fairly cheap Samsung colour laser. That was four years ago, and it's only onto its first set of replacement toner. Not the most heavily used, nor stunning quality, but it's happy to be ignored for entire summer holidays and Just Print when asked to.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

"Citation needed"

You're missing the point of the Jones act referenced above. See for example Investopedia on the Jones Act.

"Perhaps [the Act's] most lasting effect is its requirement that goods shipped between U.S. ports be transported on ships built, owned, and operated by United States citizens or permanent residents."

Good ol' US protectionism means shipping goods along the coast costs more in the US compared to the same transport Elsewhere, as there's a restricted set of ships/operators legally allowed to do so.

Also, almost all of Europe is within 200 miles of a coastline. Once loaded on a ship, it's not just Europe you can move goods to. So outside the US, shipping is that bit more economically effective.

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Re: Does it have to be completely disabled?

> The threads only have access to their own data when everything is working correctly.

Not so. The process owns the overall address space, and all threads in that process have access to all the user data within the process. This is why multi-threaded programming is hard; it's remarkably easy to accidentally stomp on another thread's data if you Do It Wrong.

Whilst there may be thread-local storage in play, it's usually very small in comparison to the memory owned by the process.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: Not cleaner, but definitely a squeaky bum moment

Ahh, "triflouride". The following link describes it more than enough for me, and also has that quote from John Clark on chlorine trifluoride...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time

Disclosure: I am not a chemist (though I know a few) and I've never, ever messed with this stuff - but I found it an interesting read.

Take my advice and stop using Rubik's Cubes to prove your intelligence

Re: ICL - It Can't Last

Dear God, man - you can't just fling out nostalgia like that without warning, with no care to the potential effects! Now I'll have to show the kids what I grew up with, and why it's different from yet another "Funny Fails" et al on Youtube...

(and have an upvote! Link very much appreciated)

Euro consumer groups: We think Android tracking is illegal

Re: Also consider Bluetooth

Garmin Connect - for all that nice fitness / activity tracking gear - won't even consider syncing to your Garmin device without Location turned on.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Re: click this

> No. Evolve doesn't mean what you suggest.

Evolve, as you note, didn't originally mean 'simply change'. But it *is* how very many people now use the word.

It evolved...

(and yes, some such changes drive me nuts. But many folk use new words or forms for successful communication; so much so that they are often added to the OED - https://public.oed.com/updates/ )

Dust off that old Pentium, Linux fans: It's Elive

Re: we're not making the OS any faster but taking everything modern and paring it down

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

- Henry Peteroski

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Re: Timing is everything

X-Tree Gold... why that takes me back...</nostalgia>

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Re: Not useful

...you wouldn't be here online, posting on El Reg

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

Re: interesting [re:VMWare Physical to Virtual]

If you're going from Windows, then Mark Russinovich's Disk2VHD may work for you. I've used it on a Win7 -> VirtualBox migration and it constructed the VHD copy easily. Though getting that to then run under VirtualBox took some time; YMMV.

For the curious: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

"no smart card support"

...well, you could just Google and find smart-card tools and libraries for Linux; first few results had pcsc-tools (which I've used) and OpenSC (which I've not).

Or just rant.

London mayor: Self-driving cars? Not without jacked-up taxes, you don't!

Re: What about the downsides?

“A move towards new technologies like electric vehicles is likely to reduce taxation income for the government which could impact on the funding available for highway improvements,” said Kahn

and

TfL insisted that “a modal shift from car use to walking, cycling and public transport use is the only way to maintain and improve our streets"

Yet surely, if successful, such a modal shift in behaviour will also have a dramatic impact on congestion charge & vehicle tax income - thus impacting funding available for highway improvements.

Unless of course the endgame is to tax cyclists and pedestrians.

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

*bought* it?

You can bet your bottom dollar that we, the paying public, will never be allowed to *buy* the self-driving software. It'll be licensed to us, probably under insane terms that almost no-one will ever read.

And that's not the future. It's already here...

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/