* Posts by AndrueC

5080 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009

Anatomy of a killer bug: How just 5 characters can murder iPhone, Mac apps

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Re: Signed lengths

Don't use one parameter to mean two (or more) different kinds of things.

That's one of my golden rules. I'm also a firm believer in Syntactic salt. Combining two things into one is 'syntactic sugar' - it's more convenient for the developer. I actually avoid returning errors when I can. Most languages allow you to ignore returned values I can't force developers to use an error code returned by reference but I can bloody well force them to declare a variable to store it so at least they can't claim they didn't notice it :)

'Peeping while you're sleeping' NSA parody T-shirt ban BACKFIRES

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Joke

In the online dating world, NSA also means 'no strings attached'. So there.

Now you tell me. "Attractive woman. Loves Formula 1 and golf. Happy to live in separate houses and won't try and change your life. NSA"

I ran a mile when I saw those initials. You mean I missed a golden opportunity like that?

Arse.

Decks and plugs and rock and roll: Tascam CD-A750 cassette and CD combo

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Ah brings back memories of the 80s when I was an audiophile(*). One of the last tape deck reviews I read featured a unit with a cute track following feature. It compared the phase of the left and right channels and somehow used that to adjust the head alignment. I also seem to recall there was one that required you to break off the tabs on the front so that it could pull the tape out and wrap it round a helical head like VCRs do/did.

(*)Happy days. I had no money do anything with it though. These days I've got the money but have lost the inclination - mainly because the lousy production standards on modern recordings make it pointless.

Science fiction titan Frederik Pohl dies, aged 93

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Happy

Re: Thanks for your visions.

Sadly Cherryh's gone on a bit of a Foreigner series treadmill though, presumably because the publisher keeps asking for more.

Yeah. I think I'm one behind the latest but don't really feel motivated to buy it. I actually thought the Gene Wars series had potential although I get the impression it wasn't a huge success.

I'd definitely like to hear more about Finisterre. The atmosphere, descriptions of scenery and sometimes downright terror of those books is awesome. I read the second one during a stormy Christmas and that really added to the atmosphere :)

But I have to admit that my primary interest in her work are the Merchanter/Compact series which I like to treat as being the same thing really given the cross references between them.

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Re: Very Sad

Yup. Gateway is one of those mind expanding novels. It's written in a jocular style but actually putting yourself on that asteroid as one of the prospectors is both scary and invigorating. I also have one of the earlier sequels to thank for explaining the Big Bang theory to me :)

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Re: Thanks for your visions.

C J Cherryh is still alive and writing ;)

The last survivor of my personal Science Fiction golden list.

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Aw shame! One of my favourite authors. His Gateway novels were an inspiration. I've often wondered if I'd have had the guts to get into one of those spaceships and squeeze the go button. Robinette Broadhand - lucky bugger and unlikely hero of Mankind :)

Returning Acronis CEO plans Parallels universe

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Sigh. What Acronis needs is a return to the stable, efficient UIs of yesteryear. It'd be too late for me though. I've given up on Acronis and gone to Macrium Reflect. It's cheaper, runs better and has never crashed. You also get the benefit of scripting (albeit with Visual Basic) to control it.

South Carolina couple cop cuffing for shed shag

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Joke

Re: Not exactly flashing

The cops had to make a deliberate effort to find them

Yet another example of Police invasion of privacy :)

Tencent offers 10TB of free cloud storage for all

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Big Brother

How times change. Storing my data on a Chinese server bothers me no more and no less than storing it on a US server.

China confirms plans for first Moon visit later this year

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Excellent news! It's about time we got back into manned space exploration. I don't much care which country does it as long as someone does.

Fandroids blow $200,000 on secret PANIC BUTTON for their smartmobes

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Go

Re: Very clever

I use my Galaxy S3 for music every day. But I have Bluetooth headphones so the headphone socket is still empty all the time.

Snowden journo's boyfriend 'had crypto key for thumb-drive files written down' - cops

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Joke

Re: Write me down a mule

Yeah, it's not like he left it on a bus or anything.

Revealed: HUNGRY frosty Arctic cleft that could eat 2 Grand Canyons

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Joke

Re: Plus side of global warming!!

It'll have to warm up a helluva lot before we can visit it. Put yer foot down in that SUV :)

Dopey dope-growing dope smoked out by own dope dope-growing vid

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Facepalm

D'oh(pe)

3D printed guns are for wimps. Meet NASA's 3D printed ROCKET ENGINE

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Joke

Re: Sorry this model is out of print

nanotechnology meant before marketdroids looking for the next big thing

Nanotechnology, the next big thing!

NASA's nuclear Mars tank REBELS against human control

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Happy

Re: Curious Joyride

LOL! I just had a mental image of a Martian sitting on Curiosity like a go-kart trying to make it go faster.

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Joke

"Make a U-tuuuuurrrrrrrn. Make a U-tuuuurrrrrn. Make a U-tuuuurrrrrrn"

Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

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Joke

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-06-24/

:D

Microsoft DMCA takedown requests targeting OpenOffice

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Facepalm

That probably involves tuning whatever 'bot it uses to compile initial lists so it is more accurate.

A bot? What could possibly go wrong with that?

Microsoft to fund Blake's 7 return as Xbox Live exclusive

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Joke

Re: The original started surprisingly raw and gritty.

The Federation is ebil! They blocked Facebook and Twitter. Dude!

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Joke

Re: Blakes 8

Cue the usual boring register suspects vowing never to upgrade from Blakes 7 to 8.

It'll be fine as long as they don't get rid of Orac's start button.

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Unhappy

Re: Nooooooo

Pushing Daisies

Better off Ted

Dead Like Me

All gone before their time.

Microsoft pulls faulty Exchange 2013 patch HOURS after release

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Happy

A post on the Microsoft Exchange blog puts the problems down to shortcomings in Redmond's testing process.

I'd mock, but the challenge is gone :)

BRUCE WILLIS (ad) DIES HARD (in Sky broadband telly fib ban)

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Happy

Re: I haven't seen the ad

Lol! I think I saw a few frames of it once while zipping past the adverts but I think I got away with it.

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WTF?

Re: I haven't seen the ad

Can someone post a link please?

Please tell me you just forgot the joke icon?

WoW gold farmer throws sueball over real world gold theft

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those who rubbish WoW as a way to acquire life skills have another piece of evidence they can trot out when tut-tutting about the game

"Now listen son. You should never, repeat never, play MMORPGs because if you do you might end up earning seventy-five grand in real money."

Is that supposed to be evidence against playing an MMORPG?

NSA gets burned by a sysadmin, decides to burn 90% of its sysadmins

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Flame

At the end of the day it's about people and trust

..and the spooks neither trust us nor regard us as people apparently.

Chrome, Firefox blab your passwords in a just few clicks: Shrug, wary or kill?

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WTF?

I use Chrome and I'm more concerned that it had three passwords saved. I've never told it to save them. I never want my browser to save passwords. I've always thought it was risky and the more often I type them in the less likely I am to forget them.

Brits give thumbs-up to shale gas slurping in university-run poll

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Joke

Well fracking hell!

Two more counties to get gov-funded bumpkin broadband from... guess?

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Re: Re-nationalise BT...

And does anyone trust our government with complete control of the telecoms infrastructure? They don't exactly have a stellar record when it comes to protecting our privacy and right to personal freedom. At least now BT has commercial reasons for objecting to some of the things they want to do.

Brit Skylon spaceplane moves closer to lift-off

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Re: Frakking Skylons

I guess it would be possible to schedule fairly regular trash collections...

I have an idea.

It's on YouTube if you're curious. Lousy video quality but watchable.

See a young Brit's mobe? 55% chance it has nekkid selfies on it, claims poll

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Joke

Clearly your correspondent is in the wrong demographic, with his phone galleries being full of family gatherings

I have several pictures of a naked bird on my phone.

Tor servers vanish as FBI swoops on kiddie-smut suspect

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TOR is “investigating these bugs and will fix them if we can

'If'?

Mystery object falls from sky, area sealed off by military: 'Weather balloon', say officials

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Joke

Re: released from Where?

Do they really expect me to believe there is a place called Wallop's Island?

It's well known to fishermen. They often find a load of cod there :)

UK economy to lose £198m if BBC and pals lose EPG slots - Ministry of Fun

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Only watch pre-recorded, skip all adverts

Same here. It's a habit. I even record F1 races from Sky although I usually start watching within ten minutes of the race start anyway :)

I can tell an advert is coming up even if I'm not paying attention and will automatically reach for the remote. I wish Sky boxes had a +30 seconds like my Freesat box though.

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Too late for me. I don't pay much attention to the channel anyway. I just surf the EPG and if I see something I like I mark it to record. Don't really care who the broadcaster is.

Plods probe death threat tweets to MP - but who will rid us of terrible trolls?

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Meh

Re: Kinda pointless if you live in a safe constituency, though.

Get out and vote.

I do. So did nearly three-quarters of my fellow constituents last time around. But with 55% of the vote being Tory and more than double the second-place candidate it was a slam dunk. The only way they could have been defeated is if everyone who didn't vote had chosen to vote for the second place candidate and even then it would have been close - 42% against 48% if my maths is correct.

So yes, I have a voice. It's blue. And female. And we all know what that kind of situation that can lead to :D

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

Re: who will rid us of these terrible MPs!

You could stop voting for politicians that you don't like.

Or you can get out and vote for ones that represent your interests.

Kinda pointless if you live in a safe constituency, though.

Anyone care to predict my next MP?

It was this for a while. Big difference, huh?"

Even if everyone who voted picked the same 'non-Tory' person it wouldn't have changed anything.

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Joke

Re: Unfortunately phrased

Officers in Waltham Forest [northeast London] received an allegation of malicious communications from an MP.

I've been harassed by politicians all my life. The feckers never know when to leave well enough alone.

Planned SMUT TSUNAMI fails to wreak havoc on UK.gov email

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FAIL

It later emerged that the TalkTalk system logs data on every URL customers visit, even in cases where the customer has opted out of the system

Shocker.

BT's not at home to Mr Profit, but its lordly boss probably isn't too fussed

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Go

I suspect it will be more than enough where there's a cabinet within 500m or so; arguably even 1,000m.

I agree. I think that 20Mb/s per member of the household is reasonable at the moment and probably for at least the rest of the decade. Given that the biggest bandwitdh hogging application is video and given the way codecs are developing it's hard to see why any individual would need more than 20Mb/s. I suppose the next generation of HD might push things a bit but I'm not convinced that's really going to take off.

No I think it's the premises that fall below 20Mb/s per member that need to be sorted out and sorted out fast. It's just a shame that the RoI for those locations is inevitably poor to non-existent.

AndrueC Silver badge
Holmes

Meanwhile, 5.1 million BT customers are wired up to its broadband network via the firm's copper cabling.

Technically all but a few thousand people are using 'the firm's copper cabling' since even their FTTC roll-out relies on it. True fibre connections are still a small minority of BT's connections. Of all the things the ASA has whined about I think that allowing FTTC or even VM to use the term 'fibre broadband' was wrong. Well - that and allowing 'unlimited' to be abused.

Verizon offers Motorola mobe with 48-HOUR battery life

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Re: Question

It's called 'Power Schedule'. I preferred the older UI but this gets the job done.

Power Schedule.

AndrueC Silver badge

My Galaxy S3 lasts over a week on a single charge. That is with an aftermarket 4.3AH battery. I don't use it for phone calls very much but I do use it to play music for an hour each day (bluetooth headphones) while I walk and every 10 minutes it checks in with my mail server to see if any mail has arrived. Plus the usual Android related stuff. It spends most of its time within range of a usable wifi connection and I have an app that switches off all the radio stuff between 11pm and 8am.

Discharge level averages out at about 9% a day typically.

Obviously a heavy user wouldn't do as well but I think most people could get 48 hours out of it without too much difficulty.

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

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ITU readies gigabit G.fast standard for copper's last wild ride

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Boffin

Vectoring, vectoring! Wherefor art thou vectoring?

F'shame. No mention of vectoring in that article. Boo!

Our hopes and dreams and some more information.

It's showing a lot of promise but without it higher speeds on copper are dead in the water for most practical purposes. How can you discuss G.Fast without talking about vectoring?

Researchers seek Internet's choke points

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Although the way backhaul is handled in the UK with multiple providers and ISPs all trying to compete on price you'd think that would count against them. Perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps it actually helps. Then again it's hard to tell with only VM to compare against. That has a rep for high levels of jitter and the usage limits imply a lack of capacity but there's also a lot of people very happy with what they get.