* Posts by Sebastian Brosig

216 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2007

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TCL 10L: Remember the white goods flinger that had a licence to make BlackBerrys? It made a new own-name phone

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

what's with the colour on the outside?

Maybe I'm just an outlier, but i find these shimmering "pearlescent" paint jobs super ugly.

Ve hav an idiom in my native Tschermany that is "Schillert in allen Farben der Verwesung", translates as "Shimmering in all the hues of putrefaction". I think that applies here and also to all the perarlescent-finish Subarus and Twatmobiles.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Sebastian Brosig

Re: Quite an upgrade...

Luxury! We had to make do with an Abacus made out of spaghetti and lumps of mouldy bread.

Incredible how you can steal data via Thunderbolt once you've taken the PC apart, attached a flash programmer, rewritten the firmware...

Sebastian Brosig

Case switch?

Oldskool laptops have case screws under the battery, so the motherboard will always be unpowered when opening the case. We'll depending on the charger socket interfering with opening I guess but that can be achieved. I wonder if there is any legitimate need for the laptop to stay on while open, or should the machine have a simple switch that powers it off when you open the box?

Taiwan trumpets Apple planting next-gen monitor plant in local science park

Sebastian Brosig

lockdown?

I have many colleagues and friends in Hsinchu, and they tell me that life is more or less normal there, much more so than over here anyway. No wonder that's where they are planning a new factory.

House of Commons agrees to allow Zoom app in Parliament, British MPs will still have to dress smartly

Sebastian Brosig

Maybe they should stay in London (or some other place when Palace of Westminster gets the builders in) but really they should have a kind of "MP Hostel", a barracks in a relatively cheap neighbourhood, where each gets a room, complete with shuttle bus to cart them into work. Should be cheaper than funding each MP's own pad inc. duck house etc.

Honor MagicBook 14: Nice keyboard and ports aplenty – but with a webcam forever fixed on all of your chins

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

Camera Angle

It's OK they have Software Nose Hair Removal

Taiwan to develop military exoskeleton because it's not like these things are open-sourced or one-size-fits-all

Sebastian Brosig
Gimp

Surely it's the TSMCnsformer no wait he's UMCndrew Martin

Microsoft expands AI features in Office, but are they any good? Mixed, according to our vulture

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

that's gender biased, you should say "servers and serviettes"

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Sebastian Brosig
Devil

F35

Vulture central,

if your coverage of the F35 goes on to be so negative, you will be blacklisted by Lockheed-Martin just like Apple, and you'll never be invited to the swish conferences, or be sent gratis review samples of the latest jets!

A bit more positive coverage surely wouldn't harm, no?

Oracle leaves its heart in San Francisco – or it would do if, you know, Oracle had a heart

Sebastian Brosig

Smell of urine...

At least some of that can be attributed to the city appointing people to clear up after its homeless residents. I think I read it here in the vulture's own pages that a poop-a-scooper job is worth $150k in SF.

If they did the decent thing and built some public toilets instead it would probably be cheaper but hey that would actually be humane, so no.

Microsoft's Teams goes to bat for the other team with preview on Linux

Sebastian Brosig

Skype against Business

Well that is great and all, can't wait until my organisation switches from the buggy mess that is skype for business, bad enough in itself but for me working on a Linux desktop half the time it's the one "killer app" that's missing. Outlook Web app is great but it's Skype component is horrible.

There's no getting Huawei from 5G – Chinese giant joins Qualcomm, Samsung in bunging high-speed comms in mobe brains

Sebastian Brosig

added convenience

It does the thinking for you so you don't have to! Biggest USP of modern phone.

Seriously, it's logic circuitry optimised for executing those "deep learning" algorithms that do all the clever stuff people aren't clever enough to code, so they ask a computer to learn the task instead. Face/voice recognition are the most obvious applications on a phone these days.

Back to school with El Reg - how about a chunky Lenovo for the student in your life?

Sebastian Brosig

Re: Careless Youth

probably flogged the screens on ebay with a "trade-in" offer for broken panels!

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Sebastian Brosig
Black Helicopters

Apple

Apples legal team now sub-contracts SF lowlifes to take their kit out of known associates of TheRegister. Stepping it up from un-inviting you from all press events and not sending review devices!

Lenovo ThinkPad X390: A trusty workhorse that means business but it's not without a few flaws

Sebastian Brosig

Re: 17.6 hours

gone are the days of the "dual battery" Thinkpads. Which gave you "infinite" run time if you carry spares. Or send PFY home to re-charge one while you are on your 36 hour Starbucks coding binge..

My daughter is running one of those.. because I'm a stingy bastard I shop on eBay for an X240 rather than Curry's latest HP or Dell consumer laptop. And just as well.. she does give the machine a hard time and I think a lesser machine would have bitten the dust already.

'Hey Google, remind Greg the locks have been changed, and he should find a new place to live. Maybe ask his mistress?'

Sebastian Brosig

Smart reply

On the topic of google "Smart Reply": while away on business in Asia the other week i received a brief note from the better half on the not unexpected, but still sad, imminent demise of her mother:

"Re: Granny / Really at the end now. Could be hours or days..."

Gmail's helpful suggestions for an appropriate reply were "I know!", "Wow!" and "Love it!"

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

Sebastian Brosig

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

> Every level adds one bit of information per cell

Hmm is that so? To encode 4 bits you need 16 distinct voltage levels, no?

In that sense the L in QLC is is not a "distinct voltage level" but more than that. If you only had 4, say, 0, 0.33, 0.66 and 1, you could encode 2 bits. Just like the old NeXT monochrome looked good with 2-bit graphics, showing black, white, light grey, and dark grey.

Some Things just aren't meant to be (on Internet of Things networks). But we can work around that

Sebastian Brosig
Boffin

Electrons?

...accepting connections from anything that wants to throw electrons at them

Photons. It's electromagnetic waves, that's really limp photons but lots of them.

Sebastian Brosig

Electrons?

...accepting connections from anything that wants to throw electrons at them

Photons. It's electromagnetic waves, that's really limp photons but lots of them.

I think I'm a clone now: Chinese AMD Epyc-like server chips appear in China. What gives?

Sebastian Brosig
Black Helicopters

Backdoors

We need a free open standard for chip design back doors: that way the NSA and the Chinese secret service can both leverage the common architecture and benefit from development speed ups do deliver complete citizen transparency at a greatly reduced cost.

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

Sebastian Brosig

CR-LF

>Windows "does it right", in theory.

yeah right I was thinking about that just then when i was in the brew room making a cuppa... but then, I thought, even a mechanical typewriter (yes we had one of those at home I am of a certain age) has some sort of "automation" that combines carriage return and line feed into one operation for the user, only prehistoric line printers don't want that feature: they alternate between printing backwards and forwards to be a bit faster.

Huawei P20 Pro: Triple-lens shooter promises the Earth ...

Sebastian Brosig

weird two-tone paint

Does anybody other than puerile car nuts actually find that strange angle-dependent colour attractive?

To me it looks resplendent in the colours of putrefaction.

I remember first seeing a car like (on show in Liverpool airport) that and I immediately exclaimed "Christ that's ugly". But then it was a new "Mini" twatmobile so that may have played a role also.

Ghost in the DCL shell: OpenVMS, touted as ultra reliable, had a local root hole for 30 years

Sebastian Brosig

newsgroups

whyever not?

newsgroups were awesome, and there is no reason why they're not_still_ awesome if they are used by the right people. People sharing news. It's lack of discipline, spam etc, that ruins a medium like that.

Half a terabyte in your smartmobe? Yup. That's possible now

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

Re: Easily.

Dear Prst. V.Jeltz, here is a 0.5TB microSD for you. Please fill it with your finest poetry.

Lap-slabtop-mobes with Snapdragon Arm CPUs running Windows 10: We had a quick gander

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

Now you'll have to get the ee-PC lady out of retirement and send her on her beach assignment again, for the photo accompanying every article remotely related to one of these new old netbooks.

Mozilla releases voice dataset and transcription engine

Sebastian Brosig

Re: If it can do transcription of more than 1 sec in 1 sec of processing it'd goind alright.

I say it's doing all right if _that_ doesn't make _any_ sense to the AI.

DNS resolver 9.9.9.9 will check requests against IBM threat database

Sebastian Brosig

as long as it can resolve goatse.cx it's good enough for me...

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

Sebastian Brosig

Gee, that takes me back to 1999, when some joker came up with http://pudge.net/jesux/, suggesting we get rid of abominations such as "chmod 666", demons, and sendmail ("written by a prominent homosexual")

Oracle promises SLAs that halve Amazon's cloud costs

Sebastian Brosig

Oracle DBAs demand a high salary because of the bizarre and unusual installation and maintenance practices necessary to run their products, and they love it because it keeps them on the gravy train. In turn, they do their best to keept their employers locked into Big Red.

Seems like Larry is now biting the hand that feeds it!

So, Nokia. What makes you think the world wants your phones?

Sebastian Brosig

They should put a skin on the OS that emulates the S60 look and feel... for us old fogies.

Why do you cry when chopping onions? No, it's not crippling anxiety, it's this weird chemical

Sebastian Brosig
Facepalm

i chop a lot of onions

It's because I like them. Sharp knives - yes. Scuba kit, chopping under water? Hell no. The first is impractical (will get fogged up or greasy in the kitchen) the second will leave you with wet onions, and who wants that?

I think the main thing is just getting used to it. Yes tears will flow but that's it: no harm done. besides, it wears off, as I first experienced after chopping a few kg for an onion tart for a biggish crowd.

'SambaCry' malware scum return with a Windows encore

Sebastian Brosig

Re: Autoupdate?

you left out the obligatory "Paris because..." section

Speaking in Tech: What is a Windows 10 licence worth these days?

Sebastian Brosig

Mainframe in 20 years

Wow... i'm going to start a crowdfunding project to connect a Ouija board directly to the IBM/360 architecture.

Speaking in Tech: Rock your body now, Java's back...All Right!

Sebastian Brosig

MS Paint

Digital Lomography. Popular with 4chan artists.

Boffins' five eyes surprise: Bees correct colour for ambient light

Sebastian Brosig

Short-sighted?

I keep bees, and while they don't talk to me about their eyesight specifically, I must assume they possess pretty good at-a-distance vision as well as short-range, they find their own hive with amazing accuracy, and they do that by sight. If you were move the bee hive by a couple of feet then most of them wouldn't find it their way home any more.

US voter info stored on wide-open cloud box, thanks to bungling Republican contractor

Sebastian Brosig
Black Helicopters

Data mining & El Reg's ad customers

Does anyone else find the NetApp ad eerily matching the context?

... in a storage instance that had been misconfigured to leave public access open

<ad> Millions of data points. A singular vision. NetApp. </ad>

Not the first time I've found that.

Microsoft founder Paul Allen reveals world's biggest-ever plane

Sebastian Brosig

LOHAN

So it's basically LOHAN with a plane instead of a balloon?

HTC's 2017 flagship U11 woos audiophiles and bundles Alexa

Sebastian Brosig
Coat

iridescent

That two-tone paint is horrible - you see it on some cars too, mostly BMW "twatmobile" minis parked in airport departure lounges for the purpose of free viral selfie advertising.

Just as pretty as oil on a wet road.

De gustibus and all that - OK I'll get my coat

(You can't) buy one now! The flying car makes its perennial return

Sebastian Brosig

in related news...

this one is not requiring a pilots license for anyone because it's an autonomous drone with human cargo.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39661299

Lap(top) of luxury: Porsche Design revs up 2-in-1 Windows 10 slab

Sebastian Brosig

Those "inspired by sports car gearbox" gear hinges look kinda cool but look to me like it would pick up pocket fluff and crap like that at an alarming rate. I know, they could use something inspired by a sorts car's cam timing chain, that would solve this problem. Oh wait, it would look like the watch strap thing on the yoga900 or MS surface. Damn. Well fuck it we're going with inferior functinality but we're damned if we're not different.

Google caps punch-yourself-in-the-face malicious charger hack

Sebastian Brosig

no-data usb cable

maybe it's time to make a usb charge cable with no data lines... I don't charge my phone outside home or work but if i did maybe i'd make myself one:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-USB-no-data-charger-cable/

Building IoT: First keynote speaker announced

Sebastian Brosig

TLD

is there a top-level domain .iot yet?

I should register domain "id" really

UK Home Office slurps 1,500 schoolkids' records per month

Sebastian Brosig

It's about contribution to the economy,stupid!

Hey, OK maybe they don't pay taxes but illegal immigrants still work hard and do low-paid jobs so that's good, say the ministry types.

Even better if they are too scared to send their kids to school (lest they may be found by home office enforcers) and instead send them to do... even lower-paid jobs!

German regulators won't let Tesla use the name 'Autopilot'

Sebastian Brosig
Facepalm

Potztausend! Maybe we should not call it an automobile, German "Auto" either, lest someone thinks "auto" means it works without a driver, rather than just without horses pulling it.

Intel fabs to churn out 10nm ARM chips for LG smartphones next year

Sebastian Brosig
FAIL

Nose out

> Bunny suit ... An Intel Custom Foundry worker in the fab

Is the intel worker complying with the clean room procedure? he has his nose out. When I worked in a clean room (before our UK fab was shut) that was a no-no, though certain individuals did it anyway of course.

Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe

Sebastian Brosig
Flame

Maybe it was me wot broke it. I logged in late last night and then a minute later tried to access another account, then it all went belly up and neither account worked any more. Lolz.

NERDS KICK PUPPY 'bot in brutal attack

Sebastian Brosig

Re: What's the power source?

Yes it is running on batteries, the question is "How long?", the answer, presumabily, being "Not very long."

Helium HDD prices rise way above air-filled spinning rust

Sebastian Brosig
Boffin

HE6

It's pricey because they use extremely exotic Helium-6, not only expensive but also it decays into Lithium with a half-life of about 800ms. Ordinary He4 would do for me.

Britain's HUMAN DNA-strewing Moon mission rakes in £200k

Sebastian Brosig

obscene vanity

having one's hair sent to the moon should attract a stiff "lunar littering" fine

GOD particle MAY NOT BE GOD particle: Scientists in shock claim

Sebastian Brosig

still holding out

for the Higgs First Mate, at least, if not the Higgs Captain

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