Posts by Len Goddard

Western Digital has cloudified the NAS and shoved it in a trendy box

Linux

And no linux support? Not that it matters, I'd rather have a proper NAS. No, wait, I already have a proper NAS ... made by Synology. And it supports linux.

Microsoft's fix for web graphics going AWOL? Disable your antivirus

Is IE still a thing?

Does anyone actually use it?

Kill animals and destroy property before hurting humans, Germany tells future self-driving cars

Re: Who

You are assuming all cars are autonomous and they have faultless programming. As soon as you have non-autonomous vehicles in the mix the problem of avoiding crashes magnifies enormously. As for flawless programming, well you are in an inevitable crash situation when your AI realises too late that the patch of blue sky aheah is actually the side of a light-blue truck.

Re: Who

An early experience when I first went to work in the US was to park in front of a big store then, after persuing their produce, cross the road to look in a store on the other side. I was pulled up by a policeman who considered this suspicious behaviour. Apparently "normal" people get back in their car and drive to the parking lot of the store on the other side of the road.

Who

OK, if a crash is inevitable the car cannot discriminate on race/gender/age etc. But does it prioritize its passengers?

Private sub captain changes story, now says reporter died, was 'buried at sea' – torso found

Re: Something worth remembering

Half mile? On one hill walk I could see someone drinking from a stream while a sheep pissed in it about 30 yards upstream.

Google's Android 8.0 Oreo has been served

Yeah, right

I have an HTC phone which has not been upgraded since 5.something. The news that HTC will be shipping or upgrading devices indicates to me that they will expect me to spend £600 to replace a perfectly good phone with something marginally better(?)/different.

Ain't gonna happen

Scrutiny? We've heard of it. Dot-UK supremo Nominet goes dark

Re: Transparency = Honesty

Almost all big companies cheat lie and steal. Lack of transparency just makes it easier

10 minutes of silence storms iTunes charts thanks to awful Apple UI

Simple tech is good

I connect my player to the car radio with a wire. No autoplay to worry about.

Nokia's comeback is on: The flagship 8 emerges

Updates

I'm stull using my old HTC One. The only thing I miss is android updates. One of these days I might get around to jailbreaking it, but probably not.

Ubuntu sends trash to its desktop's desktop

Trash icon

I honestly don't think I have ever used this thing on linux or windoze (not an apple user). Dragging files/icons/whatever there is more effort than hitting del after you have selected them. TBH I'm not even sure if the trash can is enabled 'cause I've never used it to restore anything either.

At last! Vivaldi lets you kill looping GIFs

Re: I tried Vivaldi once...

uBlock origin works fine.

If you don't like something in an early release it is worth checking back before you slag the product off.

The Next Big Thing in Wi-Fi? Multiple access points in every home

nope

going through all this makes me more determined than ever to stick to nice ease-to-understand wire

Space Duck 2.0 is New Horizons' next destination

If thats a duck

I'd hate to see a goose.

UK IBMers lose crucial battle in pension row

Consultation?

I worked for IBM when this happened. From memory it went something like this:

Here is what we are going to do. We will consult for one month then do it.

Good faith? Only a lawyer could think that.

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

Re: Another microwave story

I worked for IBM in Feltham for a while. The Heathrow high-intensity landing radar used to crash the small on-site mainframe until it was moved into a shielded room.

Capita's smart meter monopoly is owed £42m by industry

Unsurprised

British Gas were unsurprisingly unsurprised when I rang them and told them to put their smart meter where the sun never shines. "Yes sir, I'll make a note on your account not to bother you with this again". Seems it happens so often they have a procedure for dealing with it.

Great British public appears to have more sense than I gave it credit for.

Facebook pulls plug on language-inventing chatbots? THE TRUTH

Re: "They are no more sentient than a bowl of noodles"

As a firm believer in the Flying Spaghetti Monster I take exception to this blasphemous assertion

Windows Subsystem for Linux to debut in Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Re: Standardisation is always welcome

Come off it. Unix had been using / as a directory path delimiter for years before DOS discovered subdirectories. Personally I can't recall any situation I've ever been in where it causes problems or ambiguities with written English or maths.

Backslash was used to maintain compatibility with the 1.x option delimiter. It has caused grief in things like scripts and makefiles ever since due to doubling up as an escape character. It is just about bearable if you work in an entirely windows environment but if you have, for example, a central unix-based build machine you can end up with nightmarish \\\\\\ sequences because you have to escape the backslash enough times that the next stage will still have escaped backslashes.

Also, from an ergonomic point of view putting the separator on a shifted key is irritating in an otherwise case-agnostic filesystem. I believe in some keyboards it actually is on an AltGr key, which is even worse.

Re: slash the right way round

I'd almost forgotten that. Yes, from memory you could reverse the \ to a / but not all utilities respected it. In particular, I think it worked for backup but not for restore.

Latest Windows 10 preview lets users link an Android to their PC

Wouldn't it be easier

just to open the link in your browser of choice to start with?

The ultimate full English breakfast – have your SAY

Re: Proper Full English

I mostly agree but ...

bacon should be smoked back bacon, dry cured by hand (none of this water-injected crap or spray-on smoke), and not cooked until hard.

I'd like some black pudding

Beans must NOT be Heinz - they have a distinctive aftertaste I despise

Side of toast? Depends on how generous the provision of fried bread.

Got some pom-poms handy? UK.gov seeks a geography cheerleader

Why

Why do I need geography when I have google maps?

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

My reasons for not using chrome are sort of the mirror of yours. I hate the appearance of the thing and I loathe the integrated search and URL bar. TBH, I don't actually use firefox any more either as I dislike the new appearance and mobile-phone style interface. I now use Palemoon which is an optimised firefox using the older front end.

Alexa, why aren't you working? No – I didn't say twerking. I, oh God...

This is the best tech news all day

It will save me having to figure out how to disable the stupid thing if I ever buy a phone with it installed.

Microsoft hits new low: Threatens to axe classic Paint from Windows 10

The end

There goes the last Microsoft programme (apart from the actual windows OS) that I use. Really useful when you want to crop, resize and change format of an image. Nothing I can't do in the Gimp but simpler and quicker with Paint.

UK uni warns students of phishers trying to nick their tuition fees

Am I missing something?

Stochasitc is usually a description of a type of (random) process or sequence. Did the author here mean scholastic or was he inferring that all pleasures in Newcastle are random?

NASA whistles up electron noise from the Van Allen belt

Useful

Yay - new phone ringtones!!

Don't panic, but your Bitcoins may just vanish into the ether next month

An alternative

Has anyone considered that a small metal token with a difficult-to-duplicate inscription on each side might be a more viable alternative to this virtual nonsense?

The great phone squeeze wheeze: Getting squidgy with HTC's U11

Re: "range"?

Many many years ago the IBM internal dictionary had the following entry:

verb: verb-transitive. Any noun can be verbed.

Unfortunately this is even more true today than it was then.

His Muskiness wheels out the Tesla Model 3

Mass market?

The Model 3 is, as the BBC breathlessly billed it, "Tesla's first mass-market car".

...

The Grauniad reports Musk as saying initial production will be 100 cars in August, ramping up to 1,500 in September

This is clearly some new meaning of "Mass Market" with which I was previously unfamiliar

New work: Algorithms to give self-driving cars 'impulsive' human 'ethics'

Re: Ethical decisions

There is a variant of the trolly problem. The trolly is bearing down on 5 children. You are on a bridge over the tracks with a very fat man. If you push him onto the tracks the trolly will be stopped before it hits the kids. You can't jump yourself as you do not have the body mass to stop the trolly.

Amusingly the 1-for-5 brigade will generally flip the switch but not shove the fat man.

Zeno

Oh yes, and Achilles never overtakes the tortoise.

Robocall spammers, you have one new voicemail message: Cut it out!

Re: Spammers/scammers

Yes it is, at least in the UK. In theory the telephone preference service list should be respected by callers but so many marketing calls come from overseas that there is not a lot that can be done unless you invest in a smart answerphone which deals with calls on the basis of their origin. Calls from autodiallers with pre-recorded messages are particularly annoying because you can't even amuse yourself by wasting the callers time or trying to get them so worked up that they swear at you.

Google, Mozilla both say they sped up the web today. One by blocking ads. One with ads

Targeted ads

If the targeting algorithms were in any way accurate, I would receive no ads at all. In fact, on the rare occasion I actually become aware of what an ad is offering it is generally because it has irritated me so much I have made a resolution to never buy that product. I haven't eaten Shredded Wheat since the "there are two men in my life" jingle first aired.

Up to 40%?

"The ad giant says ad downloads shrink by between 15 and 40 per cent as a result and therefore delivers “faster page loads and less battery consumption.”"

Eliminating the ads altogether results in a 100 per cent reduction - even faster and even less battery use

Samsung releases 49-inch desktop monitor with 32:9 aspect ratio

Games

Useless for anything else as to see the whole screen you either have to keep swinging your head from side to side, which would give you a stiff neck in no time, or sit so far back normal sized text would be unreadable. Sure, you could bump up the text size but that would reduce the effective resolution.

I use a 3440x1440 34" monitor which works well for both work and gaming. Also, you don't need to phone a friend if you want to rearrange your desk layout. I'd like more vertical resolution but it starts to get expensive.

Do we need Windows patch legislation?

Reluctantly

I have to say that I have a degree of sympathy for M$ in this case. I think a vendor has an obligation to maintain a no-longer-sold OS (or application) for a reasonable period - to use the analogy in the article I believe motor vendors have to maintain spares availabilty for 10 years. However you cannot expect a vendor to continue to support the product indefinitely since it is in no way a cost-free activity. Vendors should be obliged to state a minimum period for which they will support the OS after withdrawal from market. Past that they can offer extended support as a product if they wish.

In this case the waters are muddied by the fact that M$ apparently had a fix which they did not distribute. You can argue that one both ways. The unsafeness of XP was the best incentive for tardy users to upgrade and to launch a fix would encourage them in their behaviour. On the other hand, had they released the fix in a timely manner they would have garnered some much needed kudos as good guys.

Facebook is abusive. It's time to divorce it

it is not just that they sell my data

which they don't to any great extent as I do not have a FB account, but they are now charging me for their advertising services. I had two credit card transactions recently from Facebk (sic) which apparently came from FB in Ireland for advertising costs. Googling reveals this is not unusual. There was no evidence that the credit card (which never leaves the house) was otherwise compromised ... just these two transactions near Xmas. So far I have seen no response from FB to the various complaints but I will be interested to hear what my cc provider has to say.

Transatlantic link typo by Sweden's Telia broke Cloudflare in the US

Is there anywhere left?

"In addition to connections in North America, the outage caused problems for Cloudflare services in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Oceania region."

Antarctica, perhaps?

What is this bullsh*t, Google? Nexus phones starved of security fixes after just three years

Giving up on smartphones

I've looked at my phone usage. Basically I make phone calls and occasionally listen to music/audiobooks. I think I will be backing off to a feature-phone and an mp3 player.

Linux Mint-using terror nerd awaits sentence for training Islamic State

Mint is not harmless

Ask Ubuntu

Well, hot-diggity-damn, BlackBerry's KEYone is one hell of a comeback

Reduced crapware

At last, a phone without twaddle and farcebook baked in and unremovable! I'd almost buy it for that alone

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

Pear computer

In the days of the Apple II there was a company known as Pearcom which marketed the Pear II computer (an Apple II compatible with extra expansion slots and a numeric keyboard). They briefly used a rainbow striped Pear as a logo but gave that up when Apple made threatening noises. That logo obviously a direct ripoff, but this case is farcical.

We're 'heartbroken' we got caught selling your email records to Uber, says Unroll.me boss

IReadItForYou

May I offer my latest service.

IReadItForYou (IRI4Y)

All you have to do is give IRI4Y complete access to your system so I can trawl through and find out exactly what apps you are using. Then IRI4Y will access the T&Cs and, using fractal heuristic AI deep learning altgorithms, identify the pitfalls and tell you what you should not have signed. As a bonus, it will trawl through all your data and tell you where you are in violation of the T&Cs and also what private data has likely already leaked.

Note: Due to the dangers of infinite recursion, IRI4Y does not read its own T&Cs or issue warnings about them. Just trust us.

While Facebook reinvents Sadville, we still dream of flying cars

Ugh

I think I prefer Sadville

Zuckerberg: Escape from the real world into my goofy make-believe science-fiction fantasy

This guy scares me

He has so much money and media presence that people actually take his drivel seriously, which is worrying.

Governments could introduce 'made by humans' tags - legal report

How much has to be made by humans?

like a machine made garment with a hand-sewn made-by-human tag?

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

Excuses

Anything serves as an excuse in this ridiculous debate. It is quite sickening.

Our Sun's been using facial scrub: No spots for two weeks

Predictions?

Where does the data for the rest of 2017 and all of 2018 come from?