* Posts by kwhitefoot

162 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2010

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Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

kwhitefoot

Fon/BT

Haven't Fon and BT being sharing residential wifi for years?

IT services giant Wipro fires 300 for moonlighting

kwhitefoot

Re: restrictive conditions?

That's because the UK negotiated an exemption. Here in Norway you cannot opt out of the restrictions on working time as an employee. On the other hand if you are a self employed contractor you can work 24 hours a day 365 days a year.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

kwhitefoot
Unhappy

If you mean the Honda plant in Swindon then that will close next year: https://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/18616711.expert-swindon-better-placed-weather-impact-honda-closure-towns/

By emptying offices, coronavirus has hastened the paperless office

kwhitefoot

Some years ago I bought a Canon LB something laser printer secondhand for 15 quid, had to pay another 50 for a new toner cartridge. At the current rate of use it should outlive me without needing another cartridge. Oh, and I never buy paper, I just print on the back of bills and letters.

Stop tracking me, Google: Austrian citizen files GDPR legal complaint over Android Advertising ID

kwhitefoot

Re: I sense an app in the making...

> that it wouldnt break terms of service.

What service?

I bought a mobile, Google were not party to that contract.

FYI: Your browser can pick up ultrasonic signals you can't hear, and that sounds like a privacy nightmare to some

kwhitefoot
Unhappy

How about web browsers going back to the idea that they are user agents instead of agents of the publisher?

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

kwhitefoot

Re: Something they don't teach in Norwegian schools...

It's an old joke in Norway that you can tell where the Norwegians have been at international conferences because the lights are on in all the empty rooms.

Electricity used to be so cheap in Norway that there was no need to turn off the lights. In addition incandescent lights contributed to the heating which is electric anyway so in Norway in the winter turning the lights off doesn't reduce your electricity bill unless it is in an unheated room.

It used to be, probably still is, common to leave bathroom lights on permanently. We would have to instruct visitors not to turn the bathroom light off because it was way past its expected lifetime due to never being turned on and off. Just one power cycle after the lamp has been on for a couple of years kills it.

Edit: /are/have been/

Why telcos 'handed over' people's GPS coords to a bounty hunter: He just had to ask nicely

kwhitefoot

Re: Freedom!

But they didn't sell it. They gave it away.

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

kwhitefoot

Re: "ignore the bridge"

What, like bridges and overhead gantries, huge billboards, etc? Radar is not precise enough.

SQLite creator crucified after code of conduct warns devs to love God, and not kill, commit adultery, steal, curse...

kwhitefoot

Re: Prayer?

> Sleep deprived programmers.

You mean there is another kind?

kwhitefoot

Re: I have a code of conduct

Really? Where?

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

kwhitefoot

Wrong bridge I suspect.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

kwhitefoot

Re: Hospitality sector had it coming

Thank you for posting that link. I wish more people would post details when they post about exceptional service. In this case it's not relevant to me but I'm sure it could be helpful to someone to have a recommendation directly from someone with firsthand knowledge.

Stormy times ahead for IBM-owned Weather Channel app: LA sues over location data slurp

kwhitefoot

GDPR?

Do they do the same to EU residents? If so surely it is a GDPR violation?

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

kwhitefoot

Thanks, and Merry Christmas

I'd just like you say thanks for all the recipe ideas. You should all get together and write the definitive Learn You Some Sprouts for Great Good recipe book.

Oi, Elon: You Musk sort out your Autopilot! Tesla loyalists tell of code crashes, near-misses

kwhitefoot

Re: No way ready!

> it is so far off what would actually be useful.

Have you tried driving one?

> urban stop/start congestion.

this is exactly what traffic aware cruise control and autosteer are good at.

kwhitefoot
Thumb Up

Re: Whisper it…

> doesn't notice any material impact on range from driving it like he stole it

Agreed/ What really kills the range on my 2015 S 70D is storming down the autobahn at 225 kph on my way from home (Norway) to visit family (UK). But it does that to fossil cars too. Even sub-zero temperatures and mountains (-20 C over Dovre) don't have as dramatic an effect as the autobahn.

Morrisons supermarket: We're taking payroll leak liability fight to UK Supreme Court

kwhitefoot

Re: I expect to be flamed

Pure laziness. KPMG should have audited it on-site.

Linguists, update your resumes because Baidu thinks it has cracked fast AI translation

kwhitefoot

Re: Lost in translation?

It was English to Russian and back last time I saw it.

Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad

kwhitefoot

Re: I'd happily pay $800 to not have one...

Set t car in valet mode before you let anyone else drive it. Anyway, I thought Autopilot was an option.

'Autopilot' Tesla crashed into our parked patrol car, say SoCal cops

kwhitefoot

Re: Hmm

I have a 2015 S70D and I use autosteer a lot. It frequently refuses to engage because of inadequate lane markings and it disengages promptly when they disappear while giving audible and visual alarms.

Elon Musk's Tesla burns $675.3m in largest ever quarterly loss

kwhitefoot

First I've heard of breakdowns because of cold weather. My S75D did a run from Oslo to Trondheim and back last month. It was minus 20C in the mountains. The car drove like a dream.

Yorkshire cops have begun using on-the-spot fingerprint scanners

kwhitefoot

Re: Get a grip

So now they will print 24 times as many. As Stalin is reputed to have said quantity has a quality different from the individual item.

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

kwhitefoot

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

For long term parking you only need a 13A socket. Every bay could have one at very little cost.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

kwhitefoot

Re: GPS

Any idea how soon? For now I'm sticking my trusty N9 to the dash so I can get reliable routing. Tesla's own routes me down B roads; in Devon that's a bit stressful in a wider than average car.

Oregon will let engineer refer to himself as an 'engineer'

kwhitefoot

Re: let me guess

Where I come from Casey Jones would be a train driver not an engineer.

Spy-on-your-home Y-Cam cameras removes free cloud storage bit

kwhitefoot
Alert

Re: Been warning of this since long before...

See the Air Trust by George English.

Self-driving bus in crash just 2 hours after entering public service

kwhitefoot

Re: German Efficiency

> with the same happy outcome.

You mean all of the rest of us being wiped out by a particularly virulent bug caught from a dirty telephone?

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

kwhitefoot

Re: Tepid storage for home users

Perhaps you should write it up as an Instructor or a Github repository.

kwhitefoot

Re: I've been told that SSD isn't good for cold data storage

Temperature variation will probably kill those drives. Lofts are bad places to keep anything temperature sensitive.

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

kwhitefoot

Re: Push the red button, I dare you

Asking the questions doesn't help. In my stint as Unix sysadmin about 20 years ago I pointed out that we couldn't really tell if our plans would really work and asked for funding to run a disaster recovery exercise. The request wasn't denied, just ignored.

Sysadmin finds insecure printer, remotely prints 'Fix Me!' notice

kwhitefoot

That's why I switched to Basic from Fortran at Exeter Uni in 1974. Shortened the length of the debug cycle by nearly 24 hours.

Family of technician slain by factory robot sues everyone involved

kwhitefoot

Forty years ago I was a test technician at Emerson Electric in Swindon. When I discovered a fault in the UPS or variable speed drive that I was testing I immediately padlocked off the main supply breaker and called the foreman of the department that would fix the problem. He padlocked the breaker. When the wireman came to fix the wiring fault he padlocked the breaker.

To power up the machine again all three of us had to agree that it was safe and unlock the breaker.

Surely the same rules apply today?

TV anchor says live on-air 'Alexa, order me a dollhouse' – guess what happens next

kwhitefoot

How often do you check your email and how long is the grace period? I would have to make a special effort to check my personal email more than twice a week by which time the order would surely have been dispatched.

kwhitefoot

Re: "CONFIRM"

Isn't a chimp some kind of monkey?

I think you've just insulted The Librarian. Better run.

How Google.org stole the Christmas Spirit

kwhitefoot

Re: Chromebooks

All a school really needs is teachers. Unfortunately such a school would not be capable of doing what the authorities say they must do.

Just think on this: Pythagoras taught geometry with a sharp stick in the sand, Euclid's Elements were taught without computers, without even proper pencils and certainly without a ready supply of paper.

That'll have to do can't type fast enough on this touch screen to rant properly.

US standards lab says SMS is no good for authentication

kwhitefoot

I assume you are in the UK where SMS is indeed very unreliable. Here in Norway it is rare for me to have to wait more than ten seconds for the text to arrive from my bank.

The mobile phone system in the UK is astonishingly bad. I visited Selby in Yorkshire a few weeks ago and had a really hard time making calls in the villages nearby. And it wasn't just one network that was bad either, family members with UK subscriptions on different networks were just as poorly served.

Philando Castile death-by-cop vid mysteriously vanishes from Facebook

kwhitefoot

Re: America

I think people are getting a bit carried away here.

I've had one interaction with the US police while on a business trip to the US, a traffic policeman in Cary, North Carolina, after I was rear ended by a newly qualified driver. It was one of the most professionally handled situations I have ever encountered. I had three children in the back of my car and my wife in the passenger seat. The 19 year old girl who rear ended me was in shock but that was because she had made a mess of the front end of her father's Volvo not because of anything that the unfailingly polite and professional policeman did. I have colleagues who were also involved in traffic incidents (like me also the innocent parties) and they had no concerns at all about how events unfolded.

So let's calm down a bit and stop claiming that the sky is falling. I'm not denying that there is a problem but we won't get any help from the police to fix it if we all simply assume that all police officers are murderous bastards.

Thief dresses as Apple Store drone, walks off with $16,000 in iGear

kwhitefoot

Surely their value is zero. I thought Apple could remotely kill them. Certainly they can blacklist the IMEI number so that even if they work at all it will only be in a few third world countries.

So Apple has lost the cost of replacement but no one has gained the dollar value mentioned.

Why does an Android keyboard need to see your camera and log files – and why does it phone home to China?

kwhitefoot

Re: That's yet another point caused by needless complexity

VLC is in the play store.

kwhitefoot

And even if she has she doesn't have any way or not giving the permission other than not installing the app. I have a lot of apps that require more privileges than I like to give but I can't revoke them. For instance Kitchen Timer needs rwd access to my SD card and a Latin English dictionary demand the right to read phone status (it's on a tablet without phone capability and still works so it plainly isn't a necessity).

Google to kill passwords on Android, replace 'em with 'trust scores'

kwhitefoot

Re: The end of passwords?

"me" is not a single value concept. I have several online me s and I want them to remain separate but if Android logs me in always as the physical me that isn't going to work very well.

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

kwhitefoot

Re: "systemd isn't just popular because of Red Hat...."

>This is why, for example, that MeeGo (which is the abomination that replaced Nokia's Maemo OS) went with RPM instead of DPKG (deb/apt) for package-management, because RPM is specified by the LSB.

Pardon?

My N9 runs Meego and applications are installed from .deb files. Have I missed something fundamental about RPM and dpkg?

It's Wikipedia mythbuster time: 8 of the best on your 15th birthday

kwhitefoot

Re: Why the hate?

A quick scan of the linked article suggests to me that the incorrect information was itself and was inserted in articles that were of little consequence, who cares if the Buddha turned someone into a goldfish or whether or not a legend exists saying he did.

This seems to be the core quote:

---

Had I not attempted to unravel my deliberate mistakes, I am quite sure that Wikipedia would still say that the Sagami Railway in Japan was initially set up in 1917 to transport corn and fresh spicy shrimp (can you imagine the odor?) along the Sagami River valley. Likewise, a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Edwin Stanton would still be falsely directed to Albert E. H. Johnson. And the legend of Bodhidharma turning a bridegroom into a goldfish would still be Wikipedia’s version of truth.

---

Is that it? No attempt appears to have been made to vandalise a page that contains information that actually matters to anyone in the modern world, that is, information that would affect their livelihood, income, or health.

So, while I agree that misinformation can persist, it is still unproven that important misinformation will persist for very long.

And as for your point about finding a more reputable source; that is surely one of the things that Wikipedia helps you to do.

Engineer's bosses gave him printout of his Yahoo IMs. Euro court says it's OK

kwhitefoot
Flame

Re: Will this mean the death of BYOD

If my company wants me to use a device for work they will have to provide it, pay for it, and maintain it.

UK energy minister rejects 'waste of money' smart meters claim

kwhitefoot

Re: Purpose

That's just incompetence.

Dear Santa: Can gov.UK please stop outsourcing?

kwhitefoot

Re: Law against offshoring

> Why spend more than you have to?

Because the money gets spent in the local community you get a lot of it back.

UK's super-cyber-snoop shopping list: Internet data, bulk spying, covert equipment tapping

kwhitefoot

Re: Cautiously optimistic

Anything that requires the Home Secretary to personally evaluate and decide anything more than a couple of times a year is plainly nonsense because there simply cannot be enough time for him or her to do it. Enshrining such nonsense in the law simply confirms my belief that such laws are not intended to be enforced but are merely intended to give the state the freedom to do as it wishes without any meaningful democratic control. And as for requiring a judge to be involved as well, well that's just another smokescreen as such things will inevitably happen behind closed doors.

GCHQ 'smart collection' would protect MPs from spies, says NSA expert

kwhitefoot
Unhappy

But we all know that we won't be exempt even if they are. Perhaps we should just embrace the technology, learn to love the bomb so to speak, and go for the inadvertent solution described in Clarke and Baxter's the Light Of Other Days and just make everything available to everyone.

Sorry, say boffins, the LHC still hasn't sucked us into a black hole

kwhitefoot
Happy

Re: ADD = Additional Dimensions

It's plural, I presume; MS = manuscript, MSS manuscripts.

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