* Posts by Mage

9252 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Tor blimey, Auntie! BBC launches dedicated dark web mirror site

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

news content easier to access by audiences who live in countries where BBC News is blocked

We used to get bbc.co.uk/news in Ireland. Now it redirects to bbc.com

We still get R4 LW, BBC on FTA Satellite.

However I stopped using the BBC web news because there was so much inaccurate, lazy and propaganda. I checked just now and something has broken as the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news is loading though some articles are coming up on bbc.com

I no longer have any confidence that what is being served is what is seen in NI, England, Wales or Scotland.

Or is honest.

AMD sees Ryzen PCs sold with its CPUs in Europe as Intel shortages persist

Mage Silver badge

Intel contraints

They constrain Intel sales.

Nothing to do with laptop, AIO and desktop PC sales.

Tablets and especially phones are a rounding error market share for Intel?

+

Desktop PC isnearly dead, though really a laptop with external screen, keyboard and mouse is better value than AIO, as they are portable, works out cheaper for same performance and you get a free UPS. The AIO are for people pretending to buy a desktop?

Wondering where the strontium in your old CRT monitor came from? Two colliding neutron stars show us

Mage Silver badge
Alien

Crt?

I think from about 1927 all valve (tube in USA) filaments, and later when developed the indirect heated cathodes, had the similar Barium in the coating. I don't remember Strontium being mentioned.

Supernova for a long time have been thought to be the factories for heavier elements. Anything from beyond Iron needs collisions? Is iron the stable point between fusion and fission? Which suggested EE 'Doc' Smith was doing leg pulling, as he certainly knew enough. Skylark series 1928 to 1930s, also a late one in 1963. Inventor of Space Opera.

Edit. Hmm. Allegedly he started writing Skylark in 1921.

I expect Nova, supernova etc are a lot more common than colliding Neutron stars, but great observations anyway.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: minority interest apps

Likely more people now use such apps on Windows than people BUY Macs each year.

The Mac is a minority HW.

No-one knows how many PCs bought with Windows and Macs run Linux, though likely small. Most Linux is on embedded stuff, servers and some ereaders (some strangely use Android even though Android apps and GUI is unsuitable for eink). Not so many laptops.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Arrogant

Time to abandon the walled garden.

A later version of Mac OS will be Apple store only, assuming Mac OS isn't replaced by a desktop version of iOS.

So much is broken about this release basically due to Apple wanting more control.

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

Mage Silver badge

Oracle

Unless they are selling a Database there is no case.

Stupid.

What next No-one allowed to put Apple in a name? Which Apple Inc pinched from Apple Corp. They even promised they'd not do music so as to get off the hook...

HP CEO: Help us save the world one tree at a time... by printing stuff (with our kit, of course)

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Save trees?

I changed from ink jet to laser years ago.

I "print" to ebook and read on an ereader if possible. Web pages, & Wordprocessor are OK. I use Calibre to convert.

A 6" ereader isn't much good for PDFs and spreadsheets, though the 7" 300 dpi model is better. I use 10" LCD tablet for PDFs as I can't afford a 13" Sony Digital Paper.

I've saved about 6,000 pages so far. Also Annotation is computer readable!

Coat has ereader and 6" phone.

Stop printing so much, not HP paper.

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: DVD rental

Yes, I remember draughty Shannon Centre before they discovered that malls have roofs. The ones in Limerick had roofs then. The architect claimed it was a feature rather than admit the budget was too small. The DVD rental kiosk I saw in Limerick was still there and working today. CEX though is often much cheaper and a bigger stock!

Icon, cos we know what Ireland is like this time of year.

Mage Silver badge

Re: DVD rental

I read that.

Is there a DVD release?

It would be worth getting.

Mage Silver badge

Re: leave one with the company that owns the kiosk

Some use coins!

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re: I would rent that!

Only to record, never to to play an existing recording.

When VHS & Beta was new I had an EIAJ 1/2" VTR. Some versions had a colour under adaptor. The surplus 1/2" spools of computer tape sort of worked transferred to empty reels. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a mad variety of video machines on sale and in our service dept. A 1/4" colour reel to reel Akai, 1/2" EIAJ Panasonic cartridges, stacked spools in N1500 (a chassis that looked like made of meccanno) and N1700. The 3/4" Umatic. VHS and Betamax. The security machines based on VHS with a stepper motor to advance the tape slowly on record. The oft promised but never available Video 2000. The V2000 was a good idea but too hard to mass produce. Arrived too late.

Then ever so much later the S-VHS with more horizontal resolution. The last attempt was Digital VHS, but unlike the two main digital tapes on camcorders it never took off.

There was digital archive based on Video tape, hence 44.1KHz sampling for CD. Then the later helical based made for audio and computer archive machines.

The Digital 8mm camcorder than can play analogue 8mm via firewire is handy, but the Philips audio equivalent, the DCC that could play regular cassette tapes, like the Analogue Elcasette (1/4" audio cassette), was too late and too expensive. RCA did actually have a 1/4" audio cassette before the 1962 compact cassette, which predated the Lear Jet 8 track cartridge, only really popular in USA because of inclusion as standard on some cars.

Ah, memories!

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: cut it because it was neither amusing nor interesting.

I wish I had a good editor like that for my books, though gradually after over 25 years I'm learning. Still need other people to at least beta read.

Also while I have strong views, perhaps an adventure story is the wrong place to preach.

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: plugs and sockets designed to have correct polarity

Even in 1960s people plugged mad stuff into the two pin bayonet lamp socket.

People wire plugs wrong, hence law now to have a pre-fitted plug

People add and wire sockets wrong

I've even seen supply at meter wrong polarity.

UK & Ireland earth of neutral historically was substation in UK (so neutral might not be 0V at home) and at meter + earth spike in Ireland.

Also while the 13A rectangular pin shuttered socket system cam in maybe 1947, plenty of older UK houses in 1970s still had 2A, 5A, 15A round pins and mix of 2 pin and 3 pin plugs and sockets.

Mage Silver badge
Alien

DVD rental

Inexplicably here in Ireland the local mall has recently acquired a DVD rental kiosk.

I do still have a S-VHS machine and recently found a VHS version of Metropolis for 30c. I doubt a DVD or download would be any better quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)

I do wish the 42" HDR 4K TV had a Shrink or inverse Zoom for poor content such as 640 x 480 video games, VHS and early badly encoded CDi video.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

Mage Silver badge

Re: So

Even an 8bit CPU can use 64 bit time if the program is written that way.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Pi

Simpler and cheaper is a Mid Range PIC Micro with an SD Card slot. The connector wires direct to chip which can use an RS232 adaptor for its HW UART. JAL and maybe C have the libraries.

Actually emulating the floppy port isn't that hard either and possible with PIC.

I wonder why the 8" drive never replaced with a 3.5" drive? Maybe hard sectored rather than soft. SOME 8" drives do work on a floppy port for 3.5" drives just with an adaptor cable. Bit late now to put a 3.5" drive so it may indeed be a USB memory stick on new HW using a serial interface. The midrange PIC 18Fxxxx can be a USB slave emulating a USB stick (just USB A connector and a capacitor needed), not so easily a USB host, but using SD cards, PCMCIA and IDE storage directly has been done.

Deus ex hackina: It took just 10 minutes to find data-divulging demons corrupting Pope's Click to Pray eRosary app

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Bit daft, but...

Perhaps more innovative and less stupid than a Nest camera, Amazon doorbell or any of those "voice assistants."

Meanwhile, the Catholic believers should consider nothing more threatening related to Faith, IT wise, than an eBook version of the Jerusalem Bible.

I added an icon even though that's Orthodox.

This fall, Ubuntu 19.10 stars as Eoan Ermine in... Dawn of the Stoats

Mage Silver badge

Re: USB drives ? Seriously ?

Why there has EVER been an option to turn that on, on Linux mystifies me. As was CD auto run and net drive auto run on Windows, given that the Amiga floppy autorun virus already existed.

Why are people copying all the stupid stuff always?

Mage Silver badge

Re: USB drives ? Seriously ?

Windows 95 originally in 1995 didn't have USB at all! USB support came in a later release. There may have been three or four Win95 versions before Win98.

NT4.0 (1996) unlike Win95, Win98 and Win ME was a real OS and only had USB in a preview that might have been in the last service pack that was cancelled to help the Win2000 sales. The Preview USB driver did work with Win2K USB devices, though often you had to install on Win2K and copy because the developers were STILL checking OS version strings instead of what features might be ON the particular revision of the OS. Rumoured to be why NT 9.x was skipped. Though Win7 was really Win 6.something. Win 8.0 should have been Win NT 7.0

Since Apple has been on OS 10 since about 2002, I guess MS will stick with 10. The other extreme is applications like Firefox.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: 32bit

It's not just about gaming.

It's about old applications that no-one is developing further.

People used to go on to other things or die or whatever and the application works well enough and has no equivalent. It's niche or needs special expertise in some field other than programming. So it's NEVER EVER going to have 32 bit dependencies removed or even be a 64 bit version.

I've 20+ year old software that no-one is going to write replacements for. Some works fine on 32 bit WINE on Linux but on no 64 bit version of Windows.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Diminished Compatibility with 32 bit

Complete idiots drinking Apple and Microsoft kool aid!

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Mage Silver badge
FAIL

Teas Maid

A clock and a kettle with a switch under to disable power if you forgot to fill it. They have been selling these since before home computers with CP/M

You still have to remember to fill it each night.

To wash the cups and bring them back.

What about the milk?

Remote controlled TVs sort of make sense. Radio less so. The Teasmaid proves that there is a market for totally useless appliances.

Sudo? More like Su-doh: There's a fun bug that gives restricted sudoers root access (if your config is non-standard)

Mage Silver badge
Happy

Re: I suspect that most didn't even know it was an option

Patch arrived on Linux Mint Update 1st thing this morning. No reboot needed, as usual.

Talk about a calculated RISC: If you think you can do a better job than Arm at designing CPUs, now's your chance

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

neural networks?

The M33 etc more likely to be in a washing machine, remote controller, clock plus weather station, hardly even in a TV or even a router/modem.

The Neural Networks thus seems like a bad example. More likely an instruction related to I/O, perhaps analogue via ADC or DAC or for driving basic dot matrix LCD or VFD connected directly.

Twitter: No, really, we're very sorry we sold your security info for a boatload of cash

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

If you MUST use SM

Use a pseudonym.

Use a unique email address.

Use a unique password.

Use a unique PAYG unregisterd SIM (not possible in all countries) if you think you MUST give them a phone number. Better to regard the account as disposable and ignore 2FA. Use a decent unique password.

Do not ever post your real age or address or real names of any family or friends. Use email with people that need to know that stuff.

*

The Advertisers are the customers and you are the product. Do not use it for Customer Support, use your own website if you are commercial.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

Mage Silver badge

Re: billions shorting Sterling

No, it's about the City of London money Laundering and UK Overseas (inc IOM and Channel Is) offshoring and lack of banking transparency, not shorting Sterling. The EU approved these in 2016 about same time as Referendum and most EU countries, inc Switzerland, implemented on Jan 2019.

Mage Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: An alternative solution

EU is part funding ferries direct Ireland with mainland Europe and an electricity connector with France.

The recent Irish budget suggests an impact of about €400 per person if Brexit. The UK cost might be about £2000 per person and the UK has about x20 the population.

The damage is asymmetrical. It will destroy the N.I. economy.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: borders to be regularised or smoothed out by mutual agreement

Ah, the famous 1922 Border Commission which was unable to operate!

So an IT system that doesn't exist and is unlikely to be be delivered on time and does nothing about deliberate smuggling or "criminality" by the "registered" users. Have they ANY idea how porous it is and how cross border shipping would be monitored?

The EU and Ireland will not ever agree to essentially an uncontrolled 3rd party border. This system can't even be as good as VAT collection and the UK has been doing that badly resulting in two kinds of VAT fraud between UK and rest of EU, often with a conned legitimate middle man in the supply chain.

Seagate, WD mull 10-platter HDDs as pitstop before HAMR, MAMR time

Mage Silver badge
Happy

Sounds good.

More platters sounds better than shingles or leaky helium.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Mage Silver badge

Orwellian?

Surely Kafkaesque?

Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: till honour their side of the GFA re passports

The Irish citizenship requirements (which for people outside NI are hardly affected by GFA) are not at all affected by a legal Brexit or a "no deal" Brexit.

The Irish citizenship requirements for people in N.I. due to GFA are not at all affected by a legal Brexit or a "no deal" Brexit.

If you can prove Irish citizenship, you can get a passport.

Most N.I. people only need a birth cert to prove citizenship and if native N.I. people they are already Irish. Contrary to what Home Office claims N.I. people do not explicitly have to fill in a form and pay a fee to revoke UK citizenship.

The GFA agreement is about having Irish, British or both Identities as the persons there wish. The GFA and the EU are primarily peace treaties and secondarily about economics. Irish, N.I., Scottish & Welsh people understand about being European. Some in Westminster even on "Remain" side are only interested in economic benefits, not peace and the idea of dual local National and wider European identity.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Free Travel Area

Free Travel Area for people since 1920s: True.

But there WAS a border. Goods and Services. Even your own test gear needed a Carnet.

Even the trains stopped for customs checks at one stage.

Also true that the Irish Pound was really Sterling till 1978, with parity ending 30th March 1979.

Joining the Common Market in 1973 was the beginning of the end, but a Carnet was still needed in 1978 at least. It was only the GFA that finally removed the physical border.

The GFA only worked because UK and Ireland were both in the CM/EEC/EU. It's an international treaty between Ireland and UK that was produced with the help of some Americans.

The Leave side ignored the GFA, Scotland and NI and lied about EU and what was involved. The Article 50 was largely created at UK insistence and content decided by them. UK signed that off. The A50 sets out how a country leaves. The only negotiating aspect is the bill for future liabilities. Thus the Withdrawal agreement only has aspirations about future relationship. Nothing binding.

Ireland is an EU member, thus the border between NI (part of UK) and Ireland is a UK - EU border and ALSO covered by the GFA agreement, an international treaty. The Leave side lied about how leave would work and BOTH sides ignored N.I.

A no-deal makes UK a breaker of multiple international treaties, all of which were freely entered.

The Squaring of the Circle (Options):

1) Cancelling the A50 invocation due to Referendum being invalid. The Swiss do this.

2) N.I. remains in EU and part of UK. Complicated but legally possible. See Denmark & Greenland.

3) N.I. leaves UK and is either independent in EU, or federated* with Ireland or becomes part of Ireland.

No other option is long term. The May agreement was an EU compromise intended to be temporary. No-one in EU wanted the entire UK Backstop (UK's proposal). Even the original proposal by EU of N.I. only backstop was supposed to be temporary till something better happened.

The current UK proposal creates TWO borders for N.I. Everyone apart from DUP claims it's worse than no deal. Also Arlene Foster left Unionists to join DUP because she hated GFA. The DUP are a minority party, less than 30% of those that vote. They never agreed with GFA.

Cameron created this mess and had the cheek to resign straight after the result.

Excited about dual-screen laptops? Make your own with duct tape and the ThinkVision M14

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Mad

It would be a LOT more use if it had HDMI too.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Mage Silver badge

Re: c'est un grande domage

A big cheese?

Microsoft has made an Android phone. Repeat, Microsoft has made an Android phone. A dual-screen foldable mobe not due until late 2020

Mage Silver badge

Re: abandoned it for no good reason.

Fell to < 1% of market.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Surface Branding?

Why Brand different things Windows? NT 3.51, Win95 and Win CE were quite different. Unlike the NT and CE, Win9x only ran on x86 and was a hybrid GUI shell based on Win 3.1 & DOS and IBM PC compatible HW.

The fiasco of x86 vs ARM versions of Windows Surface was much later.

It's amazing that MS Xenix, MS Watch, Zune and XBox didn't have Windows in the name. After all Apple's Game console was the Pippin and PDA was the Newton, both Apple related names. As was original Macintosh, which was really a kind of MkII of Lisa..

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: when they owned Nokia?

They never owned Nokia.

They bought a temporary licence for the name, a phone division ruined by mismanagement before Stephan Elop came and factories that were going to close.

Some other company licences the Nokia name now for phones.

Nokia realised they'd messed up by sticking with S60 (killed better S80 and touch based GUI), messed the Trolltech/QT buyout instead of outsourcing GUI to them, messed up the Linux tablet by switching to Intel version. Internal competition in Phone division sowed seeds of doom from about 2003.

Nokia ate Siemens Networks and Motorola Networks.

They have done welly boots, paper, TVs, satellite boxes, computers before phones. No-one expected them to succeed at phones and MS paid them over $10 Billion to take away the dying division. MS didn't get any IP either. Only liabilities and temporary use of the brand.

Mage Silver badge

Re: No thanks

WinCE had maybe over 30% in USA before iPhone existed. Even though the GUI was stupid, especially on 320 x 240 PDAs.

The Zune interface (bought in?) was a step forward, but the Zune product was 5 years too late and poor ecosystem and DRM.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Apps?

Lenovo has a very expensive clamshell tablet that is eink + LCD. Unfortunately it runs Win 10 rather than MacOS, Android, Linux, BSD or iOS.

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Re: Burned

They bought Danger Inc because of the Sidekick. Burned by 2008.

Mage Silver badge

Folding?

Is it the Courier but with Android rather than windows? Seems more like it than the Samsung idea which may be less durable.

I did like my Nokia 9110 and 9210i phone bricks.

Devs getting stuck into Windows 10X on Surface Neo will have to tussle with UWP

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: make nice e-readers

No, not for serious amount of reading or outdoors. You need eink for an ereader, except it's no use for anything else, or not much else.

Google Maps gets Incognito fig leaf: We'll give you vague peace of mind if you hold off those privacy laws

Mage Silver badge

Re: Hang on a mo...

Your pants have slipped and your sarcasm is showing.

Until these so called "Tech" giants (Trolls? Ogres?) are either having internal 3rd party audit teams or shut down or all 3rd party tracking banned along with ads that are only image + link we are not safe.

It's been proven you can't trust what any of them say!

Hate Verilog? Detest VHDL? You're not the only one. Xilinx rolls out easier-to-use free FPGA programming tools after developer outcry

Mage Silver badge

"Programming"

Mostly with an FPGA you are simulating hardware. If there is volume it will be automatically translated to an ASIC, which optionally might have a standard CPU core.

Verilog looks a little like C, except it's not a programming language, it's a HARDWARE description language. More obvious with VHDL. The design becomes a configuration. It's not a program executed at runtime.

So a C like actual programming language is only going to be appropriate for one part of the FPGA design and has to be translated to a hardware configuration. This is a bad idea.

Far better is designing a custom cpu like "machine" that executes a separate runtime program, written by a programmer. I think this tool is for people unskilled to design FPGAs. FPGA design isn't programming. Pretending it is programming is daft. It's hardware design using a specification language instead of a schematic. I've used FPGA DSP and Scilab to develop the DSP filter tables which are imported and FPGA simulated by a Xilinx tool. Then at run time these the design and coefficients are loaded from Flash to the FPGA. If replaced by an ASIC (massively lower power) the filters would be defined in silicon and the coefficients would still be loaded from Flash to RAM to allow updates or changes to the DSP performance / filter etc.

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: I don't understand

BBC still on LW, MW, VHF-FM, DTT and FTA Satellite. Surveillance free.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: BBC still coming in "loud and proud" in sunny Spain.

BBC scrapping red button despite it being scaleable broadcast. Web news and streams are complementary, not a replacement.

Online BBC became unusable years ago in Ireland, even www.bbc.co.uk is now blocked outside UK.

100% R4 LW coverage and after dark, BBC regional & 5 Live.

100% Satellite FTA too.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Privacy

Privacy, resilience and scale are why actual real broadcast (AM, FM, DTT, Satellite*) beats Internet streams.

The old programs should be available as as downloads or archive, and a charge isn't unreasonable (Like DVDs, CDs, Cassettes). Any capture of user information other than temporary data for payment is evil and can easily become the tool of a corrupt government.

(*DTT makes the inferior DAB obsolete. Neither replaces local radio on FM as they are designed for National networks, esp if using SFN)

In 21st-century tech dystopia, smart TV watches you, warns Princeton privacy prof

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Roku now makes more from "platform", which is mostly advertising, than player revenue

Amazon is off my HW purchase list, and the Kindle NEVER has its WiFi on.

Use a laptop to drive HDMI on a "Smart TV". Don''t connect it to WiFi or ethernet. Sony seems to have now provided a way to disable Samba (The ad info company, not Windows style shares on Linux). I'd not trust it.

I'd not use the Google TV stick or Apple TV, Amazon Fire etc. Also Amazon "kindle app" on Tablet / Phone / PC reports everything. Only the eink Amazon and USB mass storage with WiFi/3G off is "safe". Use "Download to PC" option for a physical reader if buying Amazon ebooks. Smashwords is better, though without the big 5 publishers.

Computer says no: An expression-analysing AI has been picking out job candidates for Unilever

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: I am so glad that I'm out of the jobs market

Also psychometric testing is even more fake snake oil than IQ tests (which measure a narrow range of aptitudes that may be irrelevant for most jobs and never measure intelligence!).

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Computer says no?

No matter how good, I'd imagine picking or rejecting applicants on expression by a person is unethical. The computer solution is worse.

Is it even legal?

C.F. now auditions for musicians are supposed to be "blind". The demographic change (vs previous white men of a certain age range) has been amazing where orchestras do it. Better music.