* Posts by Aqua Marina

631 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2011

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Elon Musk says he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, which didn’t bite and wouldn't even meet

Aqua Marina

Musk needs to be careful when making comments about apple, or he may find that their phones no longer pair up over bluetooth to Tesla cars.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Aqua Marina

I thought CentOS was one of these bedroom projects, where someone decided to de-Red-Hat a Red-Hat distro and released it. Couldn't someone just do that again?

Genuine question.

Singapore to require smartphone check-ins at all businesses and will log visitors' national identity numbers

Aqua Marina
Big Brother

0000000000001101

Not enough! Instead they should be chipping everyone, old, young, rich, poor at birth like people chip pets. All smart phones should have an app that detects when they come into proximity with a chip, and upload it to the cloud based servers where it will store, log and process. All supermarkets, shops and banks should have the same detectors, in fact all cash registers should have these. If you want to buy or sell you need to be chipped, or service will be refused. For simplicity the chip should be placed in either the right hand, or on the forehead. Hmmmm now where have I read about something similar in the past......

Then tie peoples identity in with the chip, their sexual preference, religion, political leanings. What could possibly go wrong?

Cosmo Communicator: Phone-laptop hybrid is neat, if niche, tilt at portable productivity

Aqua Marina

Re: Deal breaker

Tis a bit of a let down. My Psion 3a went about a month between battery changes. The Psion 7 Netbook lasted about a week, and it was a colour touchscreen. We need to be making the same strides in computer development in power saving and efficiency, as we are at increasing the number of transistors on chips.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Aqua Marina
Flame

"Go round their house with a Molotov?"

Your mention of a cocktail has just flagged you up with Customs and Excise to check that the correct duty has been paid for the alcohol*

*Yes it's stupid but this is the type of 2+2=5 outcomes that transpire when surveillance is granted to ladder climbing jobsworths looking for infractions to go after to help boos their career.

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

Aqua Marina

Re: This was the second attempt

Matt Parker does a very interesting layman’s explanation of what went wrong with Ariane 5*. Fast forward to 56:20

https://youtu.be/6JwEYamjXpA

*it has an IT angle!

United Nations reportedly tears up Tencent's invite to its big 75th birthday bash

Aqua Marina

“ content on WeChat has been known to mysteriously disappear”

And on machines where the user has local administrator rights keyloggers and spyware have been known to mysteriously appear.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Aqua Marina

I can see a rise in reports of companies streaming if this tweet of an empty streaming comedy club being raided is anything to go by.

https://twitter.com/JOE_co_uk/status/1244295903248289792?s=20

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Aqua Marina

Re: But........

2 things stopped that. Time and money. The dealership changed hands due to going bust. It took a year of legal back-and-forths to get to the point where they agreed to swap the radio for a new one.

Aqua Marina

Re: But........

I'm screwed if that's the case. My radio is the digital heart of the car. It controls eveything from radio (duh!) to locks, lights, alarm, speedo display. 2 years ago it started hanging when I entered certain post-codes into the sat-nav, at which point the screen went black for a few minutes, then entered a repeating reboot that could last minutes or hours if left to it's own devices*. After a year of to-ing and fro-ing with the dealership they finally agreed to replace the radio with a new one, I had to wait 2 months for it to arrive from Italy. I went to pick up the car after they did the swap, put my office post-code into it... and hang.. reboot... hang... etc. Turns out every model of this radio has the same fault, and it's never been fixed, and there's no intention to bring out a revised model. The car at this point was 3 years old. The only solution if I want my car to remain usable is to not use the sat-nav. The radio is DAB, but it's rubbish constantly cutting out unless the car is stationary.

*There is a ridiculous method for hard rebooting the radio. Turn off the ignition for 30 secs, open the passenger** door for 30 secs, close it for 30 secs, open it again for 30 secs, close it and turn on the ignition.

**I assume that it has to be the passenger door cos in Italy the driver is on the left, but they kept the hard reset mechanism on the left hand side despite moving the steering and the controls to the right for the UK market.

Tech services biz Allvotec furloughing staff, asking remainder – including top brass – to take pay cut

Aqua Marina

Re: Things are rather difficult for the services industry

If you are a limited company director freelancer, you can furlough your PAYE, which is exactly what my accountant is recommending I do. My statutory duties as a director remain even if furloughed so the day to day leadership of the company I continue to do. The government has offered a lifeline, I suggest as many to take it as possible, ask your accountants, follow their advice and apply for everything on offer.

Money Saving Expert has done quite a comprehensive guide for those of us in the UK. It also has a disclaimer that they don't go into the morality of their suggestions, they are just pointing out the help available.

Call for netizens to demand scraped pics from Clearview, ML weather forecasts, and Star Trek goes high def with AI

Aqua Marina
Childcatcher

Re: StarTrek in Hi Def...

I was gonna suggest that Kes got the most views. But then I remembered in-character, she was only 7 years old!

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Aqua Marina

Re: Academics

It's not as much the nerds rushing in to save us all that bothers me, it's who gets to profit from this afterwards? It's all very well everyone making a concerted effort to crowdsource the work required for a cure, only for some corporation to step in at the 11th hour, patent it and withhold it to maximise profits for a few shareholders. I can't really remember the last time a cure for anything didn't come with a patent attached. Maybe Lorenzo's Oil perhaps.

Equinix closes data centres to customers, contractors in France, Germany, Italy, Spain amid coronavirus pandemic

Aqua Marina

I've spent the last 2 weeks asking every supplier that is sending me "service notice" emails that their operations are now all moved into the cloud, and will continue uninterrupted throughout this crisis, "What happens when due to illness the staffing levels for the cloud suppliers falls below the minimum needed to maintain service". So far no-one has been able to answer this question, most have evaded it, but I can guess that the staffing guarantee Equinix is offering is equally substanceless. At some point in the coming weeks, they may simply have no staff at all available either due to the illness itself, or external factors such as government mandated lockdowns.

Yes, true, fusion reactors don't work quite yet, but, er, maybe AI can help us stop our experiments from imploding

Aqua Marina
Mushroom

Re: Kaboom!

"...that automatically controls the tokamak rather than relying on human intervention."

So MCAS for reactors, what could possibly go wrong!

Tencent is now bigger than Cisco and Lenovo – and predicts this virus thingy will help it get bigger still

Aqua Marina

Tencent QQ

Is this the same Tencent that is responsible for the malware ridden Tencent QQ that's brought every machine I've ever seen it installed on, to it's knees... And the entire network surrounding it. We are screwed if it is.

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

Aqua Marina

"The ASA wants us to explain more clearly that we’ll also send customers £20 if they’re still not happy and we’ve changed our ads to make that more clear.”

The ASA needs to also get them to point out, that even if they don't work, yes you get £20 back, but you are still stuck in a 2 year contract with broken Wifi.

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

Aqua Marina

Would you like to be fried with that?

Sounds more like he's trying to buy his way into heaven. Bill you are as rich as you are, by your own admission because of deceitful and lying practices, whilst not illegal, they certainly were immoral.

I for one will happily be waiting for you to join me down below, where I'll get comfort from watching you burn for eternity because of your DR DOS, Lotus 123 and general Embrace, Extend, Extinguish activities.

Among those pardoned by Trump this week: Software maker ex-CEO who admitted hacking into rivals' systems

Aqua Marina

Re: King Trump

No, the thought never occurred to me!

Aqua Marina

Re: King Trump

A thought occurred to me this morning. In light of recent events that Facebook-and-friends profiling helped get Trump elected, and that Trump ignored precedent that Presidents resign from all commercial activities and companies upon taking office, and that Trump lies and acts with impunity and arranges to have his own bad behaviour pardoned. How long is it going to be before one of the Facebook-and-friends CEOs decides to

a) Run for office

b) Uses targeted profiling to get themselves loved and elected by the people.

c) Set about ensuring that the needs of the people, is replaced with the needs of the company.

d) x

e) Profit

I'm seriously thinking that the corporate owned America of the Robocop films is literally round the corner, with the population and local authorities being in debt to "The Company" for life.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Aqua Marina

Re: CPUs? Apple stopped making servers even though there was a demand

Mac Minis probably “ or dozens of them — hard at work.” according to their current website depicting rows of Mac Minis in racks.

The cynic in me says this is how they portrayed the Mac Mini server in days of old too.

https://www.apple.com/uk/mac-mini/

AT&T insists it's not blocking Tutanota after secure email biz cries foul, cites loss of net neutrality as cause

Aqua Marina

"we are reaching out publicly in the hope of getting the attention of the right people at AT&T."

Reminds me of the early noughties where we had AOL filtering their customers outbound emails, Plusnet putting daily data caps on P2P transfers using Junipers*, and NTL who filtered out any traffic from their customers, if it originated from a device with Linksys’s MAC address range.

“The Right People™” were the ones that had made the decision to do that very thing.

*or it could have been Ellacoya. The memory of the visit to Sheffield on one of their “Meet the staff” days is fading now.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Aqua Marina

Re: There isn’t time to vent the remaining fuel

Couldn’t they use the fuel vent as a thruster and kill 2 birds with one stone?

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Aqua Marina

Ironically

As a result of all the additional scrutiny, the Max will become the safest plane in the world. Literally and statistically.

Love T-shirts, but can't be bothered to wash them? We've seen just the thing!

Aqua Marina

History repeats

From memory I do believe you (el reg) posted a similar article about a t-shirt made from silver woven thread circa 2009 where the t shirt was useful for “whiffy people” and had a side effect of cooling due to the silver fibres dissipating the heat. I’ve had a quick look and can only find this from a couple of years later where the same material was applied to underwear. I shall keep looking and dig it out!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/14/us_marines_british_underpants/

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Aqua Marina

Re: Doomed?

“Without MCAS the plane would not be certified at all,”

This is not true. Without MCAS certification would have to be achieved by different method. Boeing didn’t want to have to change the method or training required because of the cost and time. If money and time was not the issue, pilots would be up in the skies right now flying the plane with the training appropriate to the airframe flying characteristics.

Downvote away!

Space-wrecks: Elon's prototype Moon ferry Starship blows its top during fuel tank test

Aqua Marina

We don't need no steenkin tests!

This is probably one of the most annoying things about the internet. 30 years ago this kind of testing would have been done without anyone in the world knowing about it, and unless someone was killed, people would be presented months or years later with the finished product.

Now everything is streamed to the internet. Joe Public and headline seeking journalists then froth at the mouth screaming down the intertubes how unsafe Product-X is. This then goes viral, and suddenly every self qualified expert commentard offers their factual opinion, resulting in everyone "knowing" that Company-X produces unsafe products. Company-X then goes bust as investors pull out because of a bad reputation.

I'm currently working on a marine project at the moment where destructive testing is considered a good thing, and even more so when it's unexpected, but still within the testing period. Contrary to what expertards believe, science and engineering do not know everything, which is why we test. Best the engineers discover then mitigate issues during production, and not when the ship is sinking.

If it's not cloud, GTFO: Sage flogs payments business to US firm Elavon for £230m

Aqua Marina

Re: Typical useless management

15 years profit in one transaction tho. Most businesses are sold for 5 X gross profit. 15 X is a dream come true for any business owner. Sage then now have 5 years to come up with a profitable alternative, and do the same all over again.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

Aqua Marina

Re: Not golden handshake

I think you have a factoid or two mistaken.

Deputy Director Simon Mayall ordered "no notes to be taken". His HR worker Ana Maru made them anyway and sent a copy to him. The employee had nothing to do with the note taking, so did not leave themselves open. The inference about the lack of notes is that the company was caught trying to hide what it was doing.

Aqua Marina
Black Helicopters

I did have an app on my phone that put it into airplane mode, turned on the microphone and recorded what it picked up, whilst displaying a fake turning off screen. I used to nonchelantly put my phone on the desk during a meeting so they could see it "powering down". Great app that I can't remember the name of, but I ended up replacing it with a spy usb stick. No-one ever suspects USB sticks left lying around, or in your pocket. They both came in very handy when dealing with a toxic line manager trying to cover up his incompetance.

Who loves Brexit? Irish distributors ... after their sales jump by a third

Aqua Marina

Insurance

If the insurance brokers are offering policies aimed at covering hard brexit losses, then their statistical analysis must be telling them it’s unlikely to happen, and therefore a money-earner.

It’s very rare insurance predictions are wrong.

American telcos get 90 days to wrap up deals with, er, dangerous Chinese supplier – that's Huawei the news goes

Aqua Marina

Unless the US suddenly provides investment for these probably-not-profitable remote areas then I can see this 90 day reprieve will be extended again, and again until funds are provided to replace kit. Telco’s don’t like spending money on quiet little towns.

The US Army recruits WALL-E Chris H as its next-generation bomb disposal robot

Aqua Marina

Re: is it alive?

I came on to make a quip about a short circuit. We’ll probably find the comments divided between those who are old enough to remember Johnny 5 and those young enough to only know Wall-E. Hopefully there is no-one who remembers T M!

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

Aqua Marina

Re: There’s a reason people say

This is one of those situations where Europe has come to the rescue with it's mandating 2 year warranties on all their electrical gear, provided by the distributor you bought it from. The best solution to this problem isn't to complain on a forum for months on end, it's to take the unit back to the retailer for a full refund.

The UK goes one step further tho than Europe. We Brits have the ability to take kit back for refund for up to 6 years after purchase if we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the quality of the gear is substandard to the price paid for it. This product has a history of 12 months worth of problems looking at the forums so it would be quite easy to argue the equipment is sub-standard and the manufacturer is aware of it.

The only thing available to you guys on the other side of the pond is class-action. Group up together and hit them with your lawyers.

Morrisons is to blame for 100k payroll theft and leak, say 9,000 workers

Aqua Marina

Headline?

Is Gareth Corfield working for the San Francisco office now because his choice of headline has put all of his future articles at the top of my "Do not bother to read, personal bias or click-bait headline here" list, up there with anything that has been written by the San Francisco guys for a couple of years now.

When I saw the post in the news feed, I only saw part of the headline which made me think that the case had been decided against Morrisons, then I followed and read, and no such thing had happened. Come on Gareth, The Sun, The Daily Sport and most of the other red tops in the first decade of this century were doing what you've just done, deliberately craft your headline so that only the first part of it appears, and gives the impression that the complete opposite of reality occurred.

I've said it before, but can we have a "Downvote this Author" option please.

High Court dismisses nameless Google Right To Be Forgotten sueball man... yes, again

Aqua Marina
Pint

Re: If this who

I tried to google the individual using the above search terms, which led me to this story about The Great Whiskey Fire of Dublin in 1875. According to the story, whiskey in a distillery caught fire, and 13 people died as a result. These 13 people didn't die from flames or smoke inhilation, no, they all died from alcohol poisoning as they drank from a 400 meter long river of flaming whiskey using hats and boots!

Raised glass cos it's pub-o-clock soon!

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Aqua Marina

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

A simple analogy, if a Morrisons cleaner ends his shift, picks up his mop, goes out into the street and starts bludgeoning passers-by to death with it on his way home, are Morrisons vicariously liable because they didn't lock up the mop?

The crux of the matter is not security. It's whether you can be held liable for the criminal actions of someone else.

USAF spaceplane back on Earth after mystery 2-year jaunt in orbit. Jeepers creepers, what has it been doing up here?

Aqua Marina
Black Helicopters

Re: What is the sky?

"Have they developed a Stargate so they don't have to use the sky any more?"

The TV series Stargate, was in fact a cunning ploy to divert attention from the US military's Wormhole X-Treme program, by hiding it in plain sight in the guise of a science fiction TV entertainment serial

The eagle has handed.... scientists a serious text message bill after flying through Iran, Pakistan

Aqua Marina

Re: what a journey!

One does not simply fly into Mordor!

Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec

Aqua Marina

Re: The caption doesn't make sense

Tho teleporting is mentioned in Ep4 in the chat between Luke and C3PO.

Aqua Marina

Upcoming scoop?

“That or someone was about to publicly point out his son's connection to the JEDI bid process. “

Well? Were you?

Watch out! Andromeda, the giant spiral galaxy colliding with our own Milky Way, has devoured several galaxies before

Aqua Marina

Re: Things change slowly

“Now what is lurking in intergalactic space is still to be determined mind you.”

The Vorlons, the Shadows and the remaining First Ones as I recall!

EU's top court sees no problem with telling Facebook to take content down globally

Aqua Marina

There is a US law I believe that makes it illegal to force someone to commit a criminal act in another country.

Ultimately it comes down to a matter of extradition, which unfortunately is political and changes all the time, usually in the favour of the more powerful state. The only answer is to not put yourself in the position of breaking laws, because it's a gamble if long term, you get away with it.

Aqua Marina

Re: Lots of laws!

Or option 3, which incidentally is what both the EU and the USA does with other areas of law.

Social Media Mogul. — we operate in lots of countries with lots of different laws, so, we do not need to comply with any of them.

Big Wigged Judge — you operate a local office in our jurisdiction, so you follow our rulings worldwide or your local office gets the penalties until it a) goes bust or b) pulls out. In either case any executives visiting our jurisdiction will be held accountable upon arrival at the border so either a) your executive is incarcerated until you comply or b) you never visit, including holidays, or transiting.

Essentially your option is to comply, or abandon the market and never enter the area personally again.

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Aqua Marina

Re: That was nice

You have the ulitmate freedom to click the back button, and go somewhere else. No-one forces you to visit any website.

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Aqua Marina

Re: Security?

We simply had MS DOS on stand alone Amstrad 1640s IIRC and we accessed everything from the command prompt. In the Turbo Pascal we had, the compiler and editor were the same thing. We also had Cobol, Fortran, Wordstar, DBase 4 and some DTP package that was a horrible shade of pink running on GEM. We also studied a DOS module. In fact the end of year project was creating an ASCII GUI for DOS that could traverse the disk file structure, allow you to move, delete and rename files and start DOS commands (.COM files only). This used the Amstrad mouse (which emulated the arrow keys rather than normal mouse calls you have now). The Turbo Pascal we used had a curious bug, in that it could call .COM files, but only if the file being called was smaller than the compiled TP file. To get around this we had to simply append text as a comment at the bottom of the source file so that the compiled version took up the full 64K.

Piracy wasn't really an issue because no-one had PCs. Me and a couple of others had Amiga 500s, on which we ran monochrome ASCII only PC emulators and yes, we poached a copy of what we wanted, but it ran so slow on the Amiga, it really wasn't worth it. To draw the first 80 x 25 screen of my DOS gui took about 10 minutes.

In the last few weeks of college, they did install a program called Protec, which was an ASCII based security GUI menu that called up programs with a view to restricting what could be ran on the machine. Unfortunately because we had access to Turbo Pascal, we could look at the contents of RAM (all 640K of it) and very quickly found the admin password, which was obfuscated using a simple cypher, i.e. A = D B = E kind of thing. We got a "well-done" from the course leader when we pointed it out.

Aqua Marina

I was at college circa 1989 and we were using Turbo Pascal as our main tool for the college course. One of the things that bugged me, was the lack of plain english used when code refused to compile because of a syntax error. Over time I learned exactly what each error message actually meant, and wrote my own hex editor and set about editing files to change the error messages to something anyone could understand. For example "A syntax error occurred near line XYZ, invalid <something> and <some numerical code>" was changed to "Error above line XYZ, you forgot a semicolon you dozy prat!", and other similarly worded changes. Much merriment was had by all and coding actually improved thanks to my now actually helpful messages. A month later I was called into the lecturers office. They had over the end of term holidays been running commercial courses, and some senior staff from a nearby large firm were taking a Pascal refresher. My changes had been met with a few chortles, but overall it was considered very unprofessional. I received a dressing down, then was sent to help the college technician revert the changes.

Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse

Aqua Marina

"something isn't quite right here...."

It always struck me as odd that there was a market for this, or that the price was serious considering the Atari Flashback has been available for some time now at £/$ 50 ish for those wanting the nostalgia trip.

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