* Posts by Gordon 10

3872 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

Russian volcanoes fingered for Earth's largest mass extinction

Gordon 10

Re: The Ends of the World

Do we need any more why than for the simple joy of existing?

Boffins bork motion control gear with the power of applied sound

Gordon 10

Re: Gyroscopic screwdrivers?

Having only just googled what they are am I the only one who thinks they are a solution looking for a problem and also a potential RSI nightmare?

They are basically screw drivers that are activated by a twisting motion rather than a trigger.

EU tosses Nokia a small loan of €500m, tells it to go crazy with 5G R&D

Gordon 10

Re: Nokia?

@Nick Kew

Phones have very little to do with it. A little edumacation for you.

https://www.telecomlead.com/telecom-statistics/ericsson-closes-the-gap-in-mobile-infrastructure-market-share-with-huawei-82888

Don't let Google dox me on Lumen Database, nameless man begs

Gordon 10
Big Brother

thus the old adage

"He who represents himself has a fool for a client"

Kudos for getting away with it for a year though.

Internet overseer continues wall-punching legal campaign

Gordon 10

More an irredeemably stupid force.

SuperProf gets schooled after assigning weak passwords to tutors

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: How do they send out the new "secure" passwords?

I admire your security principles but that's how 99.9% of password resets that are not links are sent. Let's not be too anal eh?

As long as the passwords or accounts are expiring no harm no foul.

Samsung Galaxy Watch: A tough and classy activity tracker

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Half a Review?

And Garmins work with Strava and half a dozen other fitness apps.

A fitness watch with none of the common fitness apps is about as useful as a turd wrapped around your wrist.

Sorry Sammy I've been desperate to like your watches for the last 5 years but until you throw some cash at third party support you're a dead dog.

Also no black or silver smaller version for my spindly man wrists? Shame on you!

Wasted worker wasps wanna know – oi! – who are you looking at?

Gordon 10

Re: I don't mind wasps

Wasps like 6X? That explains a lot about Devizes. All that's missing from the angry mashed up locals is a stripey yellow and black jumper.

Gordon 10

Re: Wasps / Apple fall

Second the karcher washer or even a normal hose pipe if your water pressure is reasonable providing the nest is outside.

The wasps don't seem to realise you and the water are connected and it makes a right soggy messy of the Bastard Jasper house,

Motorola strap-on packs a 2,000mAh battery to appease the 5G gods

Gordon 10

Would be interesting to get one of these for the UK

Then go sniffing for all the 5G trial kit. Are driveby attacks over GSM kit a thing?

Gordon 10

Re: Shannon

Whilst your point is valid for a bit of information at a given frequency, there is plenty of room for improvement across frequencies as the restrictions at this point are mostly regulatory than physical.

My physics isn't up to scratch enough to understand how close mobile phone frequency quanta are to the discrete physical limits imposed by the quantum state jumps in the actual EM photons. If indeed that is actually a thing, I presume most of the non-frequency spread solutions are well tried at this point.

Internet overseer ICANN loses a THIRD time in Whois GDPR legal war

Gordon 10
Joke

Hahahahahahahaha.

Such a body does not and cannot exist. Look at FIFA, F1, and the EPO for other examples of the same failure modes.

Now if you had just said marginally better governed I would have agreed with you.

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Gordon 10

Re: As with all these cases, eveyone out for themselves, the customer comes last

Caveat emptor? The successful legal challenge against Indiegogos "orders" not withstanding presumably all the "customers" knew what they were getting into by using a crowdfunding site?

I feel sorry for them - but tempered by the fact no-one can claim they didn't know what they were getting into.

OpenAI bots thrash team of Dota 2 semi-pros, set eyes on mega-tourney

Gordon 10
Terminator

Re: I hope

Yes but. If the Libido-bot has similar restrictions in place as these OpenAI bots it will only be able to get its freak on with 18% of of the available population and only those flashing it the goods in a mac every 5 secs.

Under those conditions I think we are safe for a while yet...

Oracle tells US Supremes: Ignore Rimini Street. You don't need to review copyright case

Gordon 10

Re: Oracle will win...

I wonder if the Rimini street lawyers costs are are small enough to be being funded by interest from the potential damage payments?

How much does external counsel sufficient to handle SCOTUS level affairs cost compared to $12m? Its got to be an appreciable percentage, several million dollars I would wager.

2TB or not 2TB: Microsoft fiddles with OneDrive as competition offers twice the storage

Gordon 10

Re: So. Kicked in the crotch twice, eigh?

What the article doesn't mention is that for £6.66 a month you can get the Office Family plan. That's up to 4tb of storage across 4 users (1tb each), plus 5x4 installs of office 365 and desktop versions including Outlook across Android, iOS, Macos and Windows.

Personally it's almost enough to make me like MS!

Microsoft: We've almost dug Your Phone out behind sofa. But will it make Insiders app-y?

Gordon 10

photo uploader!!!!

You mean it does exactly the same job as the OneDrive App?

Except with that I get almost immediate sync with all my online devices iOS, Macos and Winderrz.

Why on earth did they start with such redundant functionality?

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Gordon 10
Thumb Up

Second all the comments on the A3. Its my work phone and there's very little it doesn't do well. For example the finger print sensor is faster than both my iPad Pro and my Moto Z. All for a fraction of the price.

My only niggles are the un-removal Samsung trash apps and the annoying reversal of the standard Android button layout.

Mamma Mia! UK film fans forced to Q as Vue's website craps itself

Gordon 10

Re: Queuing system WTF?

"new separate licence in the multi-£k range"

But thats only the margin on a couple of bags of popcorn! Still silly to code around licensing issues rather than hit them head-on. Its also amazing how flexible vendors can be at the end of a sales quarter or when a notice to terminate is issued.

Whole website is a UX nightmare as well. I particularly love(d?) the way that under the default filters it shows me films that aren't on yet.

Gordon 10
WTF?

Queuing system WTF?

Why waste the effort coding a queueing system rather than recoding and scaling out the bottlenecks. Talk about getting your priorities wrong.

Sounds like a PHB solution to me. The number of bookings you can handle is directly proportional to your revenue, it makes no sense to artificially limit it.

Apple laughing all the way to the bank – with profits of $5.3m per hour

Gordon 10

Re: Tax

Not entirely correct. There are bonus and share schemes that whilst pre-tax will be based in part on Gross profits.

Gordon 10

Re: Mac sales declined nine per cent over the quarter

Partially disagree. Thats your personal preference but not all of that needs to be fixed to recover sales.

Fixed batteries have been a MacBook staple for years with little discernible impact on sales.

Stick in an upgradable SSD and Memory even if it makes it 1-2mm thicker.

Produce equivalent top end MacBooks without the silly and expensive Touch Bar.

Refresh MacBook (non-pro) with a few more ports so its a good Air successor - make sure there is a <$1000 model.

Any one of those would stimulate MacBook demand.

The mid 2018 refreshes did a lot to improve things. In particular the 13" is a pocket rocket now its got 4 cores - 8 virtual as the i5 and i7 both have hyper threading.

Prof claims Lyft did a hit-and-run on his ride-sharing tech patent

Gordon 10
Mushroom

Re: Not Exactly...

He's still a patent troll who appears to have sat around with a thumb up his ass for 20 odd years.

Lets give him nothing!

British Airways' latest Total Inability To Support Upwardness of Planes* caused by Amadeus system outage

Gordon 10

Re: Eh? Amadeus Best known for

60 LCCs is quite good.

Would disagree that DC systems are outside of core GDS expertise - they are fairly closely coupled to the core GDS. I’ve worked on both.

Gordon 10

Eh? Amadeus Best known for

There was me thinking that Amadeus was best known for 40 odd years of providing Booking, reservation and ticketing services to the Travel Industry - both Agents and Operators.

I can't think of one LCC that uses them off the top of my head, I'm sure there maybe, but since they charge a transaction fee each time most of the cheaper operators refuse to use them.

Taps running dry for Capita? Southern Water pens 5-year managed service

Gordon 10
WTF?

NI WTF?

Must admit Im stumped why there was not more outrage over the NI hosepipe ban. Part of the island of Ireland running out of water is a bit like Saudi Arabia running out of sand.

Gordon 10

Re: How do they do it?

Not being a ginormous self-aware globocorp from some nightmare dystopian future, sent back in time to make sure it is created?

I call it the Crapinator.

Microsoft's 'room-scale' Ginormonitor probably not as big as a room

Gordon 10
FAIL

Possible fail

Given a either 55" Spark (cisco) or Jam (google) board is $5k and both include wireless connectivity and hdmi input one hopes that the Microsoft version hasnt screwed the pooch by just including usb c or a stupid price.

What's in a name? For Cambridge Analytica, about a quid apparently

Gordon 10

Re: Data Controller?

@Mark85

You are confusing the Administrator who is in charge of getting as much cash for the rotting corporate corpse of Cambridge Analytica and the ICO who are concerned with breaches of data protection law.

I suspect there is a gap in data protection law where a company is in liquidation or being wound up as the Administrator is merely an agent, and therefore may not be a data controller.

Some guidance here

https://blogs.lexisnexis.co.uk/randi/shining-a-light-on-the-gdpr-is-the-insolvency-profession-prepared/

Basically my reading of that is that the CA administrator could be on very dodgy ground bouncing back those Subject Access requests, depending on the terms of their insolvency contract.

Cisco's made DNA Center open enough to out-run Amazon

Gordon 10
FAIL

The idea,,,

... that Cisco has enough active developers to out compete Amazon is ludicrous. Even if we were comparing like for like (which is AWS employed devs vs. Cisco employed devs), not Cisco registered devs vs AWS registered devs, AWS numbers will be orders of magnitudes higher.

Dont forget that AWS pretty much generates 8-10 new software products per month and whilst you can criticise them for their "throw a product to the wall and hope it sticks" approach, there is zero chance of Cisco out competing even in software defined networking.

Large helping of fail please.

Apple gives MacBook Pro keyboard rubber pants

Gordon 10
Coat

I for one

Welcome our new rubber keyed overlords.

Can I "upgrade" the pre-2018 model Macbook Pro using an old ZX Spectrum keyboard membrane?

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

Gordon 10
Holmes

Its the integrations stoopid

Slacks USP is the integrations. It basically makes the hipster devs never have to leave it. It essentially becomes their comms and notification dashboard. Once you have JIRA, Jive, SNow, Confluence, Webex, Quip and half a dozen others all configured they are in happy land.

It becomes very sticky - precisely because its the glue holding the whole SDLC lifecycle apps together.

That went well – not! Broadcom’s value dives after CA biz gobble

Gordon 10

Ironically it makes sense though. Lets say you have a mortgage and want to pay it off faster.

One *possible* way to do that is buy another house and rent it out for a price that exceeds the costs to service the 2nd house by enough to cover off paying a bit more on the 1st mortgage.

Gordon 10

Re: And no wonder

Most hated? Naaa. Surely its still Oracle?

Good point on the rest though!

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

Gordon 10

Re: Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty can never have loved mankind

Nice wheezer song have an upvote.

Gordon 10
Mushroom

Re: I like Python and C

Then avoid SE. Simples!

If your code performs the same over multiple lines as a one liner then ignore them. If the one liner is more efficient then suck it up and learn the art and zen of 1 line code.

Personally I hate "short hand" code and the syntactic sugar that is introduced to support it. Its just an excuse to act elitist, make things obscure to noobs and a modern variant of not commenting your code. If it introduces new functionality or more speed or more safety then great. If its elitist ego wanking then f*ck off. </thus endeth my rant>

Azure Dev Spaces has hit public preview, so El Reg took it for a spin

Gordon 10

Re: ..."typing in BASIC listings from computer magazines in the '80s and debugging"...

Yup. Today we just copy/pasta from SE.

Insurers hurl sueball at Trustwave over 2008 Heartland megabreach

Gordon 10

Article is unclear

Trustwave had been hired to assess – but not manage – Heartland's computer security defenses.

Were they really? or assessing just PCI-DSS compliance?

If Trustwave was assessing PCI-DSS compliance afaik its is not the same as actually assessing the full suite of InfoSec activities. I bet Trustwave had no insight as to the quality of those activities, but were merely confirming the processes relevant to PCI-DSS had been followed.

Big contenders in the broadband chart this week, but who will be #1? Well, not Britain

Gordon 10

Re: I've heard of a story of FTTH in Turkey

Its Turkey - even broadband dissidents can be disappeared.

Sueball claims Apple broke hacking laws with iOS batt throttling code

Gordon 10

Re: The plaintiffs stand a decent chance of losing

The plaintiffs will lose because they are dumb. Will they be suing every time that Apple releases new functionality that performs differently to the current version? Yes - they probably will, doesn't mean the lawsuit is valid however.

Apple are trapped between a rock and hard place on this one. ALL electronic devices have a finite battery life, I for one would prefer the Apple approach to the scr*w them approach from Android.

Every one of my Androids have lasted <2 years due to battery issues, I just price that into my Android purchases, maybe if they took Apples approach they wouldn't. However since I can get a mid-high range "last years" handset for 200-300 notes I still come out ahead.

Apple is Mac-ing on enterprise: Plans strategic B2B alliance with HPE

Gordon 10
Gimp

Re: They create the kind of wonder...

And I wonder why I still want the shiny shiny things...

Euro bank regulator: Don't follow the crowd. Stay off the cloud

Gordon 10

Re: I wonder?

@Naive - I think your handle is dead on. Unless you are trolling you are very very naive.

ALL Banks offshore everything they can get their hands on but especially Ops. The only difference is the locations to which they offshore. But India is always high up the list because they all use the 4-5 big Indian IT outsourcers. The Philippines or Indonesia are other favourites due to the large proportion of staff who speak English, and whether you like it or not the international language of banking is English.

'Coding' cockup blamed for NHS cough-up of confidential info against patients' wishes

Gordon 10
Flame

Of course if the NHS Digital was interested in Privacy by Design...

...and it was an *Opt-In*, then this would not have happened. But because someone did a "think of the patients" argument it was an Opt-Out.

If they were a bit more choosy about the Type 2 stuff I would be happy to not-Opt-Out. But since Google appear* to be in that category the NHS Digital can go forth and multiply (which by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy they will do anyway).

*Actually we all know that Google are in a special category all of their own called "Here fill ya boots with all Our Data".

Now NHS Digital is going after data on private healthcare too

Gordon 10

They mean both are recent launched. GDPR went active and NHS Digital took over the former care.data opt out registration.

https://digital.nhs.uk/national-data-opt-out

HTC U12+: You said we should wait and review the retail product. Hate to break it to you, but...

Gordon 10
Megaphone

Interesting.

A quick straw poll via google seems to indicate the SPB are being universally panned.

One wonders how something so flawed made it to production. I rather suspect there is a PHB with their fingers in their ears in HTC.

Microsoft shoves US govt IT contract where ICE throws kids: Out of sight in a chain-link cage

Gordon 10

Re: Microsoft is being reminded

Nice one AC Godwin'd the second post. You must feel so proud.

Former FBI boss Comey used private email for official business – DoJ

Gordon 10
Black Helicopters

Insecure by default.

All the better to lose those mails when perps "fall down the stairs"

Relax. It's OK, folks, the US government isn't going to try to take back control of the internet

Gordon 10

Given the current omnishambles ICANN is currently presiding over on GDPR are we sure the US Government would be worse?

No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project

Gordon 10

Re: Yet another Remoaner circle-jerk on El Reg.

Seeya! Watch the door doesn't slap your arse in the way out.

Gordon 10
Joke

Well that wasnt unexpected.

Whilst I agree we've been royally hoisted on our own petards a more mischievous part of me kinda wishes that one of 2 things happen.

1. The ESA decision turns out to be illegal under the byzantine EU procurement rules.

2. We knock a new constellation up in double quick time for half the price without the need to fund the ESA pork barrel, with some help from Elons cut price rocket business.*

* Yes in my magical fairyland the UK doesnt do pork barrel politics *cough* BAE *cough*