* Posts by Steve the Cynic

1028 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2009

As it turns out, no, you can't just run an unlicensed Bitcoin money exchange

Steve the Cynic

Re: "No, you can't just run an unlicensed Bitcoin money exchange"

You're wrong, and the article explains it

You've fallen foul of the difference between "you can't" and "you may not". It most certainly is *possible* to run such a thing. The law doesn't *permit* it, but that doesn't make it impossible.

What happens to your online accounts when you die?

Steve the Cynic

Re: IMHO

If I have paid for a product, which has supplied a physical media or downloadable copy of content (that I can store).. then I own that particular copy of that product. In which case, upon my death, I will hand ownership of that, to whoever I please.

Be aware that if it's an Apple app store buy, they will absolutely NOT transfer the purchase from the deceased's account to a living person's, not even if you can produce the relevant death certificate. YMMV with Google Play.

Steve the Cynic

Re: Scam

However rational you are, the insensitivity of scammers will not likely be a comfort to you. If you are like me, it will only fuel your pessimism about the future of humanity.

In my case it was the insensitivity of ordinary sites that, after I asked to no longer pay the monthly charge for the product for my late wife (and said why), sent a "Please come back" plea to her email address. I was coldly polite about it (including pointing out that I had my own subscription to their service and therefore didn't need to use hers, and got an apologetic and understanding email from an actual human, and nothing further from them to Mrs Cynic's email.

The worst was Elsevier, the scientific journal publisher. It took me ages and ages to convince them to stop sending stuff, since any one "unsubscribe" unsubscribed from only that one thing.

And I already have a surfeit of pessimism about the future of humanity, thanks.

Drama as boffins claim to reach the Holy Grail of superconductivity

Steve the Cynic

Re: It's dead, Jim, but not as we know it

The answer is half it's length times by two.

More simply, "About that long."

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

Steve the Cynic

Re: What we need

And only putting three registers on the 6502 was just dumbfuckery of the highest order.

It's my understanding that the 6502's original target market was controlling microwave ovens, for which its capabilities (notably the 256-byte machine stack) are just fine.

But yeah, the Z-80 was a far more sophisticated processor than the 6502. If you compare it to a 6809, well, them's fightin' words...

Sitting pretty in IPv4 land? Look, you're gonna have to talk to IPv6 at some stage

Steve the Cynic

Different countries' ISPs have different priorities regarding IPv6 roadmaps :/

You're not wrong. My ISP is the "incumbent" in France (although I'm guessing you knew the "in France" part), France Telecom (that bought Orange and then took Orange's name for itself). They had a reputation (among French ISPs) for dragging their heels on IPv6 (and I believe that on ADSL lines they still are, somewhat), but on their new fibre network (full FTTP, thanks), they hand out /56 prefixes.

Steve the Cynic

Re: NAT

Or has all this changed or I misunderstood?

It hasn't changed, and you have misunderstood. I think.

At home, my router is given a fixed IPv6 prefix, 2a01:stuff::/56, by my ISP. That doesn't change, even though the public IPv4 of its WAN interface changes every time anything reboots or disconnect/reconnects the router. (The key point, I think, is that that prefix belongs to the LAN interfaces of the router, not the WAN interface.)

The router then distributes this prefix to the machines in my local network that need it(1). Being a 2a01 prefix, it's globally valid, not ULA, and there is no IPv6 NAT needed.(2)

And yes, there's a firewall in there. A UTM, more specifically, which does a substantial amount of intrusion prevention and stateful inspection (and is even configured to tolerate this and that and the other alarm-raising behaviour ONLY from that small list of external addresses. (Some wacky behaviour on the part of the Steam store CDN, mostly.)

(1) The Windows 2000 VM that I boot up occasionally does not have IPv6 configured, so it doesn't have any need of this stuff.

(2) That's almost true, but the IPv6 NAT that's needed is done by the UTM/IPS firewall to redirect DNS requests that are supposedly going to the WAN routerbox to instead go to an RPi that's running an Active Directory DC on Samba 4+ and Samba's internal DNS support. Windows 10 seems to behave very oddly if you configure automatic addressing and a forced DNS server address. Internet access *works* just fine, but the "you have Internet connectivity" detector thinks you're not connected.

Steve the Cynic

since my "business" ISP is utterly unable to give me a native IPv6 connection.

And yet my consumer ISP switched me to fibre from ADSL a couple of years ago, and fully native IPv6 came with it (and just worked).

Steve the Cynic
Pint

*COUGH*

dig AAAA theregister.co.uk

....

Still nothing. Coming on to 8 years of me saying this now. It only took 6 years to get SSL'd, though.

I came to the comments page expecting some snark about El Reg's lack of AAAA, and the very first post totally failed to disappoint. See icon as congratulations.

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Steve the Cynic

Simple solution: don't buy it; buy something else without the logo.

The last time I went shopping for new clothes, I spent some time carefully searching the racks of T-shirts for something with an interesting design but where the company's logo wasn't prominently displayed. It's harder than you might think to actually find such a thing. At one shop which shall remain nameless because it's nobody's business but mine that I shop there(0), I eventually bought one that still had the logo, but the logo is *below* my belt-line, and therefore not visible(1).

(0) Why do you think I'm spending so much effort to not have a visible logo?

(1) I'm not one of these scruffy youfs who think It's OK to go around with their T-shirt hanging out of their trousers. Now get off my lawn!

Some of you really don't want Windows 10's April 2018 update on your rigs

Steve the Cynic

Re: Stop breaking stuff

high resolution ( 1920*1080, cough)

I'm a teeny tiny bit torn about this juxtaposition. At home I have a pair of 4K screens, so my machine is running on a 7680x2160 desktop - thus, 1920x1080 is NOT high resolution.

But I also remember my first PC, with a CGA-compatible graphics card that could do 640x200 in two colours or 320x200 in four.

Or my first computer of any sort with pixel-addressable graphics, a TRS-80 Colour Computer, whose highest resolution was 256x192 in two colours.

Thus, 1920x1080, regardless of colour depth(1), is monstrously high resolution.

Hum. The march of Time does some odd things to our perceptions.

(1) It's noteworthy that the CoCo's highest resolution mode, 256x192x2, consumed 6144 bytes of memory for the whole frame buffer, which is less than the 7680 consumed by just one row of pixels in a 1920x1080 24-bits-in-32 display.

No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?

Steve the Cynic

Dabbsy has one detail wrong.

I live in northern France, near the border with [REDACTED](1), and I have to say, having watched people around me, that he has one important bit wrong in his analysis of people using the ends of the phone.

There are many around me who speak into the end where the speaker is, with the microphone pointing away from them, and then switch ends to listen to the microphone.

(It is sometimes not obvious, but sometimes they hold the phone far enough away from horizontal that the home button can be clearly seen on the end away from their mouth when they speak, and/or on the end near their ear when they listen.)

(1) Douglas Adams assured me that the name of this other country is, in fact, a very rude word, so I thought it would be polite to spare your collective blushes.

Sysadmin cracked military PC’s security by reading the manual

Steve the Cynic

Re: About 10 minutes later I was "cracking" some of the locks and interchanging them around.

There are stories of students taking a car apart and reassembling it in the owner's room. Usually a kit car like a Lotus 7.

The times I've heard that one it was a Mini or a VW Beetle.

ZX Spectrum reboot firm boss delays director vote date again

Steve the Cynic

Re: Dramas like these...

Are only possible on the UK.

Where the "We're too busy following all the rules to pay attention to the fire" is 100% doable.

This made me think of an article I found a few years ago, when I was doing some local history research. It was in an issue of the local newspaper in Christchurch (Dorset), dated in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

A dead dog had been floating in the river, stuck on something, for the previous *month* because everybody who could possibly be responsible for removing it denied that it was their job, and nobody was willing to step forward and do it anyway, lest it *become* their job in the future.

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

Steve the Cynic

Re: Virtualisation made it irrelevant

Dual-booting solved a lot of problems but virtualisation made Wine irrelevant for anyone wanting to do serious work with Windows programs from within a non-Windows environment.

The downside of that theory is that you still need a Windows license for the guest OS. If the goal is to NOT run Windows at all, then virtualisation fails as a method.

Uncle Sam is shocked, SHOCKED to find dark-web bazaars trading drugs, weapons, etc

Steve the Cynic

Meanwhile, the DEA drug crackdown has the medical profession so terrorized (yes, really), that prescriptions of pain-killing medication is not going to happen

For contrast... Here in France, Mrs Cynic had a terminal kidney cancer, metastatic and all that. Bad scene, but there was no problem getting morphine in the hospitals and high-end opioid painkillers on prescription for home use. The doctors had to use the special tripartite hand-written prescription forms and the pharmacists had to do all manner of extra verification, but I could walk out of the pharmacie with very high-potency stuff.(1)

(1) After she passed, I still had a big ol' pile of this stuff(2) and less than no wish to use it for anything at all. I asked the pharmacist what I should do with it, and they said to bring it in to them and they would take care of disposing of it correctly, and so I did and that was that.

(2) It's the sort of thing where, really, one pill left in one of those encapsulation sheets would count as a big ol' pile as far as I'm concerned, but it was enough for a couple of weeks even at the level she needed to take it. And enough paracetamol (acetaminophen) to kill a small army.

Reality Winner, liberty loser: NSA leaker faces 63 months in the cooler

Steve the Cynic

It's trivially easy to change your name in the US.

Compared to changing your name in England, pretty much anywhere in the US counts as at least moderately difficult.

Go to a solicitor who is also a notary, and swear a statutory declaration. Cost 50 quid and a small amount of time for them to fill in the blanks on the form. The late Mrs Cynic was fond of doing it every now and then, which caused us ... difficulties ... later, when dealing with the French bureaucracy.

There are other ways, but the most widely accepted is the statutory declaration. In particular, of note for our Left-Pondian readers who *reside* in Right-Pondia, the US Embassy in London does not accept the other ways of doing it. (Mrs Cynic was not only Left-Pondian, but in fact Texan in origin, which is how I know about the US Embassy's preferences.)

Steve the Cynic

Re: Guilty?

blackmail because they have access and someone knows about something in their past

The authorities will get you coming and going if that's the case, for the espionage and for falsifying your background on the clearance checks.

The late Mrs Cynic was, before I met her, a teletype maintenance technician for the US Air Force, part of AFCC ("Air Force Communications Command", less formally known as "Alcohol First, Communications Considered"), and as such she had to have a Top Secret clearance with an SCI authorisation on top.

She told me about the process of getting the clearance - it seems monstrously nosy and intrusive, but the aim of them gathering the information from the subject and then doing follow-up investigations is quite simple. All that stuff allows the authorities to know all those dark secrets, so that the cleared individual cannot be blackmailed about them. ("Get us this information, or we'll make sure the Air Force hears about Indiscretion X." "Doesn't worry me. They already know all about it, and Y, Z and W as well.")

In general, the Air Force didn't care what those things were, so long as you told them what was what. I say "in general", but of course there were exceptions. One woman in the same group as the future Mrs Cynic had something really bad in her past, because the Air Force SPs took her away and handed her over to civilian police.

'No questions asked' Windows code cert slingers 'fuel trade' in digitally signed malware

Steve the Cynic

With HTTPS, you are at the absolute whims of "authorities" which can quite possibly be full of absolute idiots. I do not put my digital security trust in a bunch of idiots.

This problem is more general than just HTTPS, and it's not a total problem. HTTPS, after all, is "HTTP over SSL" in origin, although these days it's over TLS, and the certificate stuff is part of SSL/TLS.

And there is a little-known and monstrously impractical alternative to those authorities, called certificate pinning. You obtain the "public" certificate of the server you want to contact, and you get your software to use that certificate to verify that the server is the server you think it is.

I can't imagine trying to use certificate pinning for general HTTPS web browsing(1), but for contexts where *knowing* *absolutely* that the certificate presented by the server is the right one is important, it's the only way. (Example: automatic upgrades downloaded by upgrader modules.)

(1) Try to imagine the conversations you'd have with receptionists when you show up unannounced to obtain each company's public server certificates for your pinned browsing. If you think this is remotely practical, well, frankly, you're weird.

SUSE Linux Enterprise turns 15: Look, Ma! A common code base

Steve the Cynic

Re: not uncommon

But what happens more and more is the opposite, ghettos of non-integrated immigrants that import their uncommon lifestyles.

More and more? What? No. It has always been like that. Why do you think that districts like "Chinatown" and "Little Italy" get their names?

Cops: Autonomous Uber driver may have been streaming The Voice before death crash

Steve the Cynic

As software reaches the point of actually and visibly killing people

You are sadly behind the times. Bugs in the firmware of the Therac-25 killed three people in the mid-80s, more than thirty years ago.

Oracle Linux now supported on 64-bit Armv8 processors

Steve the Cynic

Re: Where is the Oracle Instant client for ARM ?

Still no download available for generic Linux / ARM systems

It was on this very journal that I read stories about Linus T's enswearified rants about ARM devices and non-discoverable buses. I'm guessing that nothing yet has changed in the world of ARM SoCs to change that state of affairs.

Whatever its faults, PCI is discoverable. You can interrogate it to find out what devices are where on the bus, and what resources they expect and so on. Many ARM SoCs have devices that aren't available like that, and you have to infer them from the fact that you have SoC type X, therefore you have devices A, B, C. That's a major obstruction to the construction of a generic ARM kernel for any OS.

NASA eggheads draw up blueprints for spotting, surviving asteroid hits

Steve the Cynic

NASA reckons there are more than 300,000 objects bigger than 40 metres that could be hazardous to Earth. It is estimated that 25,000 NEAs are at least 140 metres in size. Despite the large sizes of NEOs, they’re difficult to detect more than a few days in advance of a possible impact.

Although the *consequences* of a 40 metre rock hitting the Earth are substantial, on the scale of space, 40 metres is actually pretty small, and that smallness is what makes them hard to detect. Even 140 metres is hard to spot when it's way over there.

Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here's the interview tape for you to decide...

Steve the Cynic

Re: Poor Mike

Pfft. You can't do Tempest right on a raster display anyway.

Both I and the late Mrs Cynic liked the original vector-CRT arcade Tempest machines a lot, although I think she might have been better at it than me.

How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

Steve the Cynic

Re: PDF has its uses I suppose

Even trying to edit a PDF is a series of unpleasant workarounds unless, I suppose, you bought a full copy of Acrobat.

Thanks for reminding me that I need to migrate my copy of Acrobat 8 to my new PC. (The reasons that I have one are, today, entirely invalid, and, on reflection, probably were *always* entirely invalid, but they seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Oh, and yes, I own a printer. And when it went so far EOL that I couldn't get ink cartridges any more, I bought different one to replace it. So I guess I own *two* printers, at least until I get around to taking the old one to the tip.

JURI's out, Euro copyright votes in: Whoa, did the EU just 'break the internet'?

Steve the Cynic

Re: Hand Off My Internet

It is not theirs to regulate

If you look carefully at the original intent and sponsors, yes, it very much *is* theirs to regulate.

Hint: the Internet is the spiritual inheritor of the ARPANet, and the ownership, or at least sponsorship, of that is clear in its name. ARPA. Now called DARPA. A governmental tentacle if ever there was one.

Oh, and I very much don't care how many downvotes I get for this.

Virtual reality meets commercial reality as headset sales plunge

Steve the Cynic

nausea is caused by the lack of accurate frame of reference

Not quite. Motion sickness nausea is caused by a mismatch between what the eyes are saying about the movement of the world and what the ears and other parts of the body(1) are saying. AR is less bad because we still see at least some of the real world, so that mismatch isn't there.

(1) Even without introducing "ESP" and similar, there are more than five senses. The five "classic" senses - sight, sound, touch, taste, smell - are supplemented by a couple of different "kinesthetic" senses that allow us to locate our body parts relative to our heads (that is, we know where our hands and feet are without looking at them)(2), and the sense of balance allows us to orient ourselves correctly.

(2) The in-brain processing necessary to make this stuff work as well as it does is substantial - it keeps about a quarter of your brain busy, while an octopus doesn't have enough brain power to track its arms in this way, and must watch them if it needs to know where the ends are.

And that is definitively that ... for now. 5G's carrier features frozen

Steve the Cynic

Re: The wonderful world of TLAs

It does, and it does not.

Just like SDLC does, and does not, mean Synchronous Data Link Control.

How to stealthily poison neural network chips in the supply chain

Steve the Cynic

Re: You can call me Mr Thickie here, but ...

I believe the usual figure cited for getting someone to spill commercial secrets belonging to his employer is on the order of five times salary.(1) Offer someone five times his normal salary, and most people will spill the beans. I'd guess that sabotaging your company's products is probably similar in price.

(1) There are a few people who won't at all, or who will demand substantially more, or who will take it as an invitation to be a double agent, i.e. take it immediately to the boss: "Company X offered me Y dollareuropounds to spill secrets. How can we creatively misinform them, ((and what bonus will you offer me to do so))?"

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

Steve the Cynic

Re: Progressivism Pumping Powerful Memes.

You give cynicism a bad name.

I thought that was my job.

Apple will throw forensics cops off the iPhone Lightning port every hour

Steve the Cynic

Re: Easy good passwords, here I go again...

However it's a random string of letters that real people can actually remember and use

Real people who can spell.

Those are becoming rarer these days.

Microsoft tries cutting the Ribbon in Office UI upgrade

Steve the Cynic

People don't like because it pretty much destroyed their acquired keyboard shortcuts habit which allowed them to breeze through complex operations that they were used to doing.

That happened at every new version before the Ribbon as well. Am I the only one who remembers when "Page Setup..." was on the Format menu where it belongs(1)?

(1) If you think about what it is doing, "Page Setup..." absolutely does not belong on the "File" menu. The changes you make in its dialog box affect the formatting of the document (especially in Word) rather than anything that belongs in the File menu.

Steve the Cynic

Re: Come back Clippy

I must admit that when I saw the description of "zero query search", my first thought was "Clippy! Buddy!(1) You're back!"

(1) No. Not really. "Buddy" is about the last word I'd use here.

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

Steve the Cynic

Re: Pedant Alert

Some "A" roads are of a sufficiently high standard that some call them "Motorways" even though they are not.

The sections of the A1 called "A1(M)" are of sufficiently motorway-like character that the law treats them as motorways (e.g. no stopping, no bicycles, no L plates except HGVs, etc.)

Have to use SMB 1.0? Windows 10 April 2018 Update says NO

Steve the Cynic

Re: FFS microsoft

you wait for the big wigs to finish approving the migration to the new cloud based ERP which keeps getting pushed back month by month no matter how often you tell them what smb1 is and why MS keep trying to kill it and how that should fast track the new ERP approval

I don't see any mention in there of the thing you should be telling them.

>>>> NOT doing the migration costs X amount of money in lost productivity etc. every single month.

Speak their language: Quantify the cost of not doing it.

PETA calls for fish friendly Swedish street signage

Steve the Cynic

Re: "vegan fish"

cats are pure carnivores.

The pedantic technical term is "obligate carnivores" - they *must* include meat in their diets - rather than "pure" carnivores (which would mean they can't eat anything else).

Worst. Birthday. Ever. IPv6's party falls flat

Steve the Cynic

Re: Follow the $

Yeah that is really annoying. There is really no excuse not to statically allocate IPv6 prefixes to home users.

I'm on Orange (France) fibre, and I have a /56 that hasn't changed once in the more than 18 months that I've had the service. The public IPv4 has changed several times after Livebox reboots, but the IPv6 prefix is the same as it ever was. It basically just works.

Tech rookie put decimal point in wrong place, cost insurer zillions

Steve the Cynic

Re: Lira?

so heavily automated that it employs far fewer people than it did before

This, in large part. In 1994 I worked for a company that made industrial process automation equipment. Not PLCs as such, but loop controllers and process supervision machines, the sort of thing we might call SCADA today. (Some of it was SCADA, but other parts were much closer to the process.

Anyway, I had to go on-site at a British Steel (as it was then) plant at Port Talbot in South Wales, and during that trip, I got to talking with my company's guys in the local office up there. They both had formerly worked at the Port Talbot plant, and they remarked on how at its height, the plant had employed 27000 people(1), and when I went there, it was just 8000.

(1) The site was big enough that I drove in one entrance to the main site offices, from there to the actual building where the problem devices were, and from there to the exit at the other end of the plant, and clocked up eight miles of driving.

Don’t talk to the ATM, young man, it’s just a machine and there’s nobody inside

Steve the Cynic

Re: A sort of "MTM" => Manual Teller Machine

You mean the drive-up window.

Where I heard the explanation of the older usage, no, a walk-up microbranch in a kiosk. (I've used - once - an American drive-up bank window, in the second half of the 1980s. BayBank.(1) Ugh.)

(1) The bay in question is one of the many on the coast of Massachusetts, but a quick search didn't show up any indication of which one.

Steve the Cynic

Re: "Don't talk to the ATM..."

This whole sequence makes me think of the film Point Blank. It's a highly surreal presentation of a guy (played by Lee Marvin) taking his revenge on a crime syndicate.

Anyway, it was made in the early 60s, well before there were any ATMs anywhere. Side note: it has been reasonably common in the US to refer to an ATM as a "hole in the wall".

At one point, Walker (Lee Marvin's character) confronts Brewster, one of the syndicate's bosses, about the money they owe him, and the guy says, "You know, I can't just go to a hole in the wall and get out that kind of money." Today, we kind of accept this without challenging it, because somebody in the same situation might say exactly those words.

But what was Brewster talking about if the film was made (and set) before the existence of ATMs?

Well, what he meant was a sort of "kiosk" microbranch with a single cashier inside, a bunch of money, and a bank window facing the street. A sort of "MTM" => Manual Teller Machine, as it were. The concept of why you'd go to such a thing was the same as today, and the only real difference was the replacement of a human teller/cashier by a machine.

No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull

Steve the Cynic

Re: How large of a tide would that have been?

About 9 times large than today. But it would be 80 times fainter - because the light it reflects, which hasn't changed, is now spread out out over a much larger "area". My fag packet suggests the full moon would only be about as bright as Sirius. So it wouldn't be visible in the day. Eclipses would be far more common, though.

You need a new fag packet. At night, the moon reflects(1) light from the *Sun*, and that light, per square metre of lunar surface is just as bright with a close-in moon as with a far-out moon.

(1) No, it *scatters* it. The difference is important, because although the scattering isn't uniform, it is roughly inverse-square in perceived intensity.

So there are several effects going on...

* The light hitting the moon is neither brighter nor dimmer.

* The light that we would see in a particular circular milliarc-second is increased by the decreased distance, on an inverse-square basis.

* The light that we would see in a particular circular milliarc-second is decreased by the decreased number of square metres in the circular milliarc-second, on a positive-square basis.

* The above two effects cancel out, so the circular milliarc-second would look neither brighter nor dimmer than today.

* The moon would occupy many, many more circular milliarc-seconds of sky, so it would overall be much brighter.

Send printer ink, please. More again please, and fast. Now send it faster

Steve the Cynic

Since it had been through the printer process, the surface of the paper had been altered and things were slipping when the printer tried to pick up a sheet.

The heat of a laser printer is more than enough to drive off some water from the paper and thereby alter its handling properties. (It's less of a problem for photocopiers because in general they aren't as hot inside.)

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

Steve the Cynic

Re: One evening about ten year ago...

2. The tow truck was there promptly, and they weren't very gentile.

Autocorrect is your enemy.

Trio indicted after police SWAT prank call leads to cops killing bloke

Steve the Cynic

Re: Yank Culture Issues

plenty of non-fatal alternatives

The correct term is "less lethal"(1). Rubber bullets (no matter that these days the term often refers to other things) are known for being able to hospitalise, maim, or even kill people. Tasers aren't likely to cause maiming injury, but can kill.

Even a water cannon ("fire hose") can kill people - some people have weak spots in their skulls, and if they fall just wrong, they can receive fatal head injuries. Even people without such spots can get serious, even fatal, head injuries.

But although you can't justify calling those things "non-fatal", they *are* less lethal.

(1) A curious example of what sounds at first like a euphemism being in fact a more accurate description. These things aren't "non-fatal" because they *can* kill, but they *are* less lethal than actual bullets.

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

Steve the Cynic

My 45 year old car has zero sensors

None at all? Not even;:

* Coolant temperature

* Oil level

* Oil pressure

* Speed

* Distance travelled ("odometer")

* Battery charge/discharge current

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

Steve the Cynic

Re: There are plenty of reasons NOT to use IP

pretty much all mobile handsets support IPv6 today

Indeed. As an example, it's several years since Apple mandated that all apps in the App Store *must* function correctly in an environment that has only IPv6.

Das blinkenlights are back thanks to RPi revival of the PDP-11

Steve the Cynic

Re: Basic skill of slide rule

The "old fossil" gave me the slide rule and I used it for years

This made me think of the best slide rule I ever saw. Cue: 1977. I'm about to start secondary school, and it's the end of the previous academic year (last at primary school). They sent us to the Comprehensive down the road for a tour, and hanging on the wall in one of the maths classrooms was a slide rule.

"Hanging on the wall"? Sure. It was six feet long, for teaching slide rule technique.

Steve the Cynic

Re: How noisy are the cooling fans?

Back in the late 1960s many programmers were young women. When they wanted to start a family it would previously have been expected that they would leave work for many years.

Early 60s as well. My mother was one of them. And yes, when she started a family (her first-born was someone who might just post here as Steve the Cynic), she left work, the 60s being what they were.

But she reached the level of Chief Programmer at LEO.

Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets

Steve the Cynic

Re: I can't believe y'all are still falling for this

I have a different interpretation, inspired not by Scott Adams, but by Douglas Adams.

I'm starting to think that maybe he's the "visible" president in a Zaphod Beeblebrox situation, even if he only has one head and two arms. All that remains is to find out who he's a smoke-screen for...

MPs petition for legally binding target of 95% 4G coverage across UK

Steve the Cynic

Re: Imagine

how much simpler life would be if roaming between networks was allowed? Seems to work for other bulk suppliers - water, gas, electricity...

Depends on how you define "roam between networks" for water, gas, and electricity. In general, you don't migrate between distributors ("grids") of electricity/water/gas, but between *suppliers*. That is, your electricity still arrives via the National Grid, but you can pay different generating companies as you "migrate" or "roam" between them.

Compare this to the (mobile) phone system - you have one set of distribution hardware (masts and their backhauls) PER supplier (Voda, EE, etc.)(1) so the concept of roaming actually applies, even if it isn't currently enabled, but is more or less the opposite of migrating energy suppliers.

(1) Sorry, I'm more familiar with my local (French) suppliers: Orange(2), Free, SFR, Bouygues, etc.

(2) Before you say it, Orange bloody well is French, now. It is the name of the organisation that was formerly France Telecom.