Posts by JimmyPage

You need a 21st century sales strategy

I was walking through Birminghams Grand Central a couple of months ago, and was collared by someone plugging the "VirtualX" store, which was reminiscent of 1980s video arcade.

First off there were no flying "apps" - it was all cars and shoot-em-up.

Fair enough, I said. So if I start on a headset I can see a *virtual* layout of Grand Central, populated with zombies and baddies*, and I can have a scream zapping them ? (I asked this as I had just watched the BBC series where they recreated a virtual Naples, Florence and Venice which looked breathtaking).

No.

There are quite a few current innovations which will need to be rediscovered by our grandchildren, as they completely sail over the heads of today.

*You fill in the joke.

Ensure your *router* is doing your VPNing ...

that way there's less danger of forgetting when each device connects.

EFFECTED ?????

I think he meant "affected".

What the fuck is going on with the UK that the CEO of an alleged serious global company is allowed to make such a schoolboy error ????

Also, really, El Reg should have noted it as "(sic)"

It really is a bad day for the image of UK education when a French and Indian colleague can point out a Brits bad grammar .....

Does anyone seriously use the in-car stuff ?

Having acquired a Citroen with "Sat Nav" and various electronic fripperies, I have realised they are utterly shit. I wouldn't bother updating them if the dealer paid me to, let alone at £249/year.

I hope all car manufacturers give up on any attempt to design car electronics, and just mould a tablet shape into the dash with appropriate power connectors, and a state of the art bluetooth connection, so the driver can choose the sat nav, entertainment system, and whatever goodies they like.

Paying by cash ...

until the government (under the guise of "anti terror") starts recording note serial numbers at the POS terminal ...

I think Noel Coward had the answer ...

"very big, China"

A lot of overthinking here ...

I would bet it's a given that no one here will be affected by any sort of "hack" - almost by definition El Reggers are the 5%.

It will be the 95% who haven't a clue that will fall victim, because not only are criminals stupid, but they are lazy and stupid.

Wow ! BBC "Horizon" managed to inform ...

in the rather OTT "Strange Signals" shown recently (did we *really* need to know the backstory about two researchers ????) Tabbys Star was mentioned, and the intriguing suggestion it's surrounded by an incomplete dyson sphere.

Incomplete ? I wonder if their funding rant out too ....

You'd think after Boaty McBoatface

people would have learned ....

and it's not going to get any better ...

"Android" (like Google search) is fundamentally flawed, as things stand.

Google search - whichever way you dress it up, and whatever pixie dust you sprinkle over it - is a keyword based search. Fine when looking in the first few thousand sites we had in 1998. Completely useless in 2017 - and that's before you factor in the advertising/sponsored cruft that gets returned.

"Android" is already fragmented. I have lost count of the different permutations and combinations of "settings" I have had to juggle with, as each vendor customises each iteration of their version of Android.

It might have seemed a great wheeze in 2008, but as Microsoft and Apple have shown, you really need to nail down the core of the system. I stand to be corrected, but no matter *who* you got your PC from - manufacturer or retailer, "Control Panel" was the same (obviously corporations could then apply Group Policy, but that was still onto a vanilla install).

On an aside, WTF does MrsPages Android require an internet connection to answer the voice command: "What time is it ?"

So who pays if you don't have the smarts yourself ?

I would assume most people reading this would be capable of using another source to Google to read up on how to fix it, and apply it (although I have to say I have idea how to recover a borked BIOS).

What about your man on the Clapham Omnibus who has to take a Clapham Omnibus to his local PC repairshop, and be charged by them to implement the fix ? Which could easily rack up to £100 before blinking.

This is on top of the fact that any time anyone loses on this isn't recoverable in UK law.

So, still adhering to von Neuman architecture ?

It's worth noting that biology has pointedly avoided scaling everything up to be bigger, faster, and more expensive ...

GCHQ/NSA and decryption keys ...

Unless the people behind this hack were better than the average criminal (and I can't see any evidence of that so far) then it's more than likely they botched generating the encryption keys. Certainly enough that the massive computing power (plus special algorithms) packed by the boffins at GCHQ/NSA should be able to provide a good stab at delivering the decryption keys.

Which (in this commentards humble opinion) is *exactly* the sort of thing they should be doing. Certainly before hoovering up all our web searches.

I know they are understandably cagey about their capabilities, but is it too much to hope that in between tweets and election gaffes, the US and UK have in place a mechanism to release decryption keys without it being obvious ? Bearing in mind there's still a mystery over how the Crysis keys were leaked online.

Is this even legal in the UK now ?

as per title

WTF ..., WT actual F ?????

As the patch for this vulnerability is recent (March 14th), many enterprises have not applied it and therefore they are at risk," he added.

March 14th !!!! nearly 8 weeks ago ?!?!?!

I was *given* a Pebble ..

(or is it "Pebl") last year.

I was quite chuffed, as I had toyed with the idea since a couple of friends bigged wearables up.

It took 4 hours to work out that wearables are (at the moment) a geek toy, and in no way ready for the great unwashed.

The subsequent demise of Pebble, and the fact my early adopter friends remain sole adopter friends bears me out.

Consumers need to be aware that the modern age* has bought an ecosystem which can get crappy ideas to market before the sensible people can evaluate them. It reminds me of the old Irish saying "may you be in heaven before the devil knows you're dead".

*Which could be argued started with the Sinclair C5 ......

(Lastpass user here) No problem for me

But then I don't trust 100% to cloud services. I have an exported copy of my vault in an encrypted file on my carry-everywhere USB key.

You mean you didn't ?

I read the article twice, but couldn't see any mention

of where the bank calls *you* and asks you to provide your details "for security" ?

I'll read more carefully later ....

Is it just me, or is this "retro" trend appearing in workplaces ?

Homeworking being phased out in quite a few companies I know of. Never officially, but mysteriously it's homeworkers that are "redundant" and new positions don't allow for it.

It's like we are slipping into the 70s.

I wonder if there's a shadowy cabal of fuel suppliers and car manufacturers behind it - possibly aided by coffee shops ?

One day, a cock up like this will cost lives

when some psychopath gets the details he needs to torch a house or two.

And when (note: "when", not "if") that day comes, there will be a great wailing of "if only we'd known".

It doesn't matter whether you talk, type, semaphore or use Morse code ...

nothing is going to hide the increasingly obvious fact that Google (for example) is horribly broken.

Keyword matching was a pretty neat trick - in the 1980s. But with the exponential growth of "content" (I use the word in the most general sense as it's mainly marketing cruft) it's fast becoming useless.

Unless Google have a strategy to start charging for ad-free searches, they will slip into irrelevance.

Well done chaps !

So, Intel, where is the Linux version of the tool ????

****ing morons.

I suspect *anything* will be futile.

"Big data" is about comparing datasets ... and I *specifically* use the noun "sets" in that statement.

As long as there is a universal set - or one can be assembled - then ANYONE is visible by simple set operations.

So ad-block away. You can be pinpointed by removing the set of people who were served ads, from the universal set. (Yes that's a simplistic description, but it's possible).

I suspect the ad-slingers are rather late to this party. Certainly in the UK, political analysts have been aware of it for 30 years. If you really dig into the stats, June 8th outcome will be decided by a few thousand people.