* Posts by Neil Barnes

6221 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007

TCL's latest e-ink tech looks good on paper, but Chinese giant will have to back up extraordinary claims

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: not particularly useful at night.

Turn on a light? That effete modern rubbish? We had to make do with an oil lamp, burning fat rendered down from our food, and we had to light it with a flint and steel...

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Thanks also for that. I shall have to investigate further; my German us still not as good as I would like but I see no mention of useful information such as battery life, any requirements to register to use it, and compatibility with Calibre. All of my books (except one, bought to see how it worked) are already unencrypted epubs and I have no intention of changing that.

But it does definitely look worth further investigation.

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I am pleased to note

that the reason I have received no begging emails from nominet is that my registrar had the good sense not to register .uk domains for me in the first place.

Rocket Lab boss Peter Beck talks to The Reg about crap weather, reusing boosters, and taking a trip to Venus

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: 15kg for the return chute?

Doh... I should have known that. It's still impressive though.

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Boffin

15kg for the return chute?

Colour me impressed - my emergency chute is over two kilos and I neither mass as much as a rocket nor (usually!) arrive at orbital speeds.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Mushroom

ads that demand excessive computation, bandwidth, or power

i.e. any ad at all.

Samsung reveals new folding stuff for people who like flaunting wads of folding stuff

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Ooh look!

It's two phones stuck together! Just what I always wanted... er...

Life with Amazon's fitness band: Upload your half-naked pics to see how fat you'll look without exercise. You now sound stressed – relax!

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Stop

It's much cheaper and simpler

to just not do any exercise and wait. That way you'll find out for free...

Just how intrusive can these assholes get?

What would you prefer: Satellite-streamed cat GIFs – or a decent early warning of an asteroid apocalypse?

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

Surely you can, er, telescope a telescope?

(just had to pack an astronomical telescope prior to moving house. Turns out you can't. Oh well...)

Neil Barnes Silver badge

If only there were some kind of paint with 99.999% absorbtion

And Anish Kapoor didn't have the rights to stop people painting things with it...

Unprotected quantum 'puters may hit 4ms brick wall, thanks to background radiation slashing qubit lifespans

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Mushroom

Sounds like those battleships are going to be even more important

y'know, the ones sunk before folk started playing with nukes and got everything all radioactive.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

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I will not stop at a hotel with this type of crap installed

Full stop.

Facebook apologizes to users, businesses for Apple’s monstrous efforts to protect its customers' privacy

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Terminator

Re: Personalised ads actually make less money

There are (allegedly) many robots who will click...

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Faintly ironic

That the trend to html or other formatted text in email was started by MS, and here we have an MS spokesbeing complaining about its effects.

Count me in the 'no html in email' crowd.

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

This'll upset the Apple cart: 1,200 iOS apps downloaded 300 million times a month include 'ad fraud' code

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Big fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite 'em

And little fleas have lesser fleas.

And so ad infinitum...

We have parasites living on the parasites...

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Thanks!

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Um... apparently not. The option to use a separate search box still - on this machine - does not stop the address bar calling up the default search engine if you type a random word/phrase in it.

Or have I misunderstood you?

I would like the address bar to return either a valid web page, or a 404 not found.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: That will leave a mark

I'm not sure stupid is the word. Ill-informed, or ill-advised, perhaps? The whole online marketing thing is designed to make it absolutely painless to purchase online - Amazon, Ebay and no doubt others want you to just click and go.

There's a psychological block, I think, about handing over five pound notes. Using plastic doesn't tend to trigger the same thoughtful response, and click to buy is an absolute menace.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Yes... leave me logged in, ask me later. No option for fuck off and never ask me again.

I use pron mode for all financial transactions to avoid auto login and recognition - though it wouldn't surprise me to learn that ebay have found a way to track me through that...

Pew, pew, pew! Our galaxy is shooting cold, gaseous 'bullets' of high-speed matter. Boffins are baffled

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Boffin

it gets more complicated the more we learn about it

That;s why we pay scientists boffins, no?

We've heard some made-up stories but this is ridiculous: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Bing erect huge skyscraper out of bad data

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: It is all about AI

There's lies, damn lies, and statistics. And then there's AI.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Intentional Error?

Perhaps the original map-maker was bored with 'Here Be Dragons' and thought an island might have a more authoritative look to it.

You *bang* will never *smash* humiliate me *whack* in front of *clang* the teen computer whizz *crunch* EVER AGAIN

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: mea culpa - always check compatibility

Consider Lithium as an Android ebook reader. So far the only issue I have found is that it doesn't do sort by author/series/whatever as Kobo does. But no adverts, no helpful selections, lovely.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

took his hammer and smashed it to very tiny pieces

A true engineer, even though it wasn't him who fixed the computer. Every engineer, irrespective of his field, owns multiple hammers.

(mine range from one weighing less than an ounce (for initial threats to clocks and watches) to a fourteen pound lump hammer (for threatening walls and/or car parts)).

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: so I never saw a need for backing up photos

Photos or any other data - if it's not on a storage device owned by you, entirely under your control, and in an open format that can be read by non-proprietory software... it's not your data.

Full stop.

(And for safety, copied in multiple places, ideally in different cities. Or planets).

That's ride on time: Lyft, Uber to continue taxi app service in Cali after appeals court hits pause on AB5 brouhaha

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Stop

So their illegally operating businesses will have to stop if the law isn't changed

And?

They're saying that they can't operate profitably without giving their employees the rights and benefits to which they are entitled by law, and that the only way they can continue to work is to continue to deny those rights?

I'm sure slave-owners had the same concerns... and the same amount of sympathy from me.

Bunch of mugs keep risking life and limb to 'crockery bomb' sad little roundabout

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I was at one of their retirement tour gigs in Camden about ten or fifteen years ago - mere decades after Alex died...

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Thumb Up

Upvoted for the SAHB reference!

While the world pushes back against COVID-19, Facebook has a pandemic of a different sort – medical misinformation

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: All about the money

The light begins to dawn. Insulated as I am by the NHS it had not occurred to me that basic life-saving inoculation was so expensive in the USA.

Nonetheless, I don't really believe that antivaxxers at the (not going to be) consumer level are necessarily making that judgement, attractive though the logic is: I think instead a lack of knowledge of the relative risks and a serious belief in 'if it wasn't true, they wouldn't be allowed to say it' is equally a driver. What I don't know and can't figure is what the people leading the campaign are getting from this... Donations? Flogging their own snake oil?

MediaTek pings Italy with '5G' Internet-of-Things data beam from geostationary satellite 35,000 kilometres up

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Usefulness

Your < bill hasn't been paid / license has expired / device is no longer supported / provider has been sold > and we're cutting off your service.

"Oh, and by the way, here's a product or two you've recently bought and therefore would be interested in replacing. And a nice lady whose rich husband was killed who needs your help to get the money out of a war zone. And would you like some Viagra? And you may already have won..."

Bluetooth SIG strives to make wearables work as COVID-19 contact-trackers

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Both totally made up products.

Shame. I like the sound of the iCough.

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

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Re: @Mark 85 Tossing their toys about

Adding a tag that says 'the contents of this post are bollocks' certainly sounds like ridicule, not censorship.

A Song of Iceland Fire: Scotland's Skyrora launches Skylark Micro rocket from volcanic viking outpost

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Pint

30km?

Kudos to the team for the demonstration.

But I am reminded that Paris achieved the same height without any rocket motor at all :)

Nonetheless, the team are probably ready for -->

Farewell to notches and hole-punches? ZTE expected to announce mobe with under-display camera next month

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: "The market is atrocious for phones and just does not understand what I want as a consumer."

Or, in short, phones have now turned into fridges. They all do the same thing, and the only practical difference for most people is price, the label, and the number of shelves.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

"The market is atrocious for phones and just does not understand what I want as a consumer."

That's because you aren't sufficiently numerous to be considered the consumer. Neither am I. Neither are probably most of the commenter on here.

The consumer is the person obsessed with documenting every aspect of their life with their phone. They are the ones who use the front camera; who don't care about replacing the battery when it dies after a couple of years because they'll just get a new phone; who are driven by feature count and fashion rather than function.

And there's billions of them out there...

Oh what a feeling: New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums based on driver behaviour

Neil Barnes Silver badge

I'm trying to remember

How many times I've gone into a car showroom and asked them to sell me something that reports my every move to some indeterminate server.

Now I don't buy new cars very often, but lemme see... ah, yes, that would be none.

The only ways this sort of rubbish is ever going to stop is if Joe Public refuses to have anything to do with companies and products that do it, or the advertisers - and believe me, the majority of this information will go to advertisers - are nuked from orbit.

Want to hear our beloved David Attenborough narrate your life? Thanks to the power of machine learning, you can

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Attenborough

One day soon, someone will work out how to put noise into the gaps between words/phrases that matches the noise generated when the robot speaks. I reckon those silences are one of the biggest giveaways at present.

But it's a bloody good impersonation, bar one or two odd pronunciations.

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Neil Barnes Silver badge

A 64kbs downlink in the early days of satellite comms to remote studios: many but not all afternoons the link would die in the Delhi office. Spent several days out there testing and trying... and eventually discovered a vulture liked to roost on the satellite dish LNB support arm, pushing it out of the focal point.

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Light sensors!

Broadcast video cassettes - Sony Umatics, mostly - used dozens of optical sensors around the lacing path. When some poor neophyte was first exposed to a broken unit, it was common to 'help him get some light on the subject' with an anglepoise lamp strategically placed. The poor little Umatic would generally decide to have some very strange behaviour, often (but not always) completely unrelated to the original fault.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Winking red supergiants sneezing hot gas 650 light years away

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Headmaster

It’s very unique.

Enough said.

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

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Joke

02:45

It's a good job radio astronomers don't have to work in the dark - someone might have been hurt!

UK.gov to propose new rules for online political campaigns after last election marred by an avalanche of fake news

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Damn, I wish there were a sarcasm flag. I'm sure you'd have applied it to your post.

Xiaomi turns 10 and celebrates by sitting down to relax in front of its new transparent television

Neil Barnes Silver badge
WTF?

Transparent TV? Ridiculuous idea...

If you really must have one, stick a camera on the back and show that...

But really, WTF? The idea of a TV is to show an image, not to show an image cluttered up with whatever is behind it. Maybe it works in some (theoretical) CEO's enormous and sparsely decorated office, if it's perched in the middle miles from anything which might be close to the focal plane - but to be honest, this sounds as useful as transparent panels on a computer desktop. Let's not see what we popped the window up to see, but with added blur, confusion, and general visual noise from whatever's behind it.

UK lockdown easing heralds the return of burgers... and bork

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Eat out to help out?

There was a brief moment of hilarity amongst the staff and customers when a party of four walked in. As they stood by the door, next the sign that announced 'Brazillian Steak House', one of the party asked if they had a vegetarian option...

Neil Barnes Silver badge

Re: Eat out to help out?

I helped out last week, at a place owned by a friend of Mrs B's - a Brazillian Rodizio. Not a burger in sight, just steaming slabs of meat arriving by sword. Yum... (and twenty quid off for the two of us, so the waiters got a very nice tip :)

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

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Re: Honestly..

It's possible that the two events will be simultaneous.

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Languages

It'll certainly make German easier (for a non-native) to learn: all those words going around having sex and agreeing with each other all the time.

Neil Barnes Silver badge
Coat

Re: What's next?

I say! Are you related to the Hertfordshire 44132EB8810As? Old friends of the family, dontcha know?

The one in hunting pink, obv. --->

That's how we roll: OWC savagely undercuts Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels with bargain $199 alternative

Neil Barnes Silver badge

And yet...

five replacement wheely chair wheels can be obtained from the bay for under a tenner, including postage.