* Posts by druck

2992 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007

European Patent Office staff rep blames prez for 'slipping quality'

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Flame

Re: Home leave ?

You might one day be happy to move out from mommy's house, but some staff have families and children in education, who can't immediately relocate to a country over 900Km away.

NASA readies its asteroid warning system for harmless flyby

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Mushroom

Being hit by an asteroid would be vastly preferable than listening to Chris Evans in the morning (or any time).

Stealthy storage startup wants to fly read-write heads closer to disks

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Re: I have some doubts here

The last drive I saw with a linear actuator and belts moving the head was a 40/80 track floppy.

Mattel's Internet-of-kiddies'-Things Aristotle canned before release

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Re: an “AI to help raise your child”.

Raising children in the modern world, is one big guilt trip. You try to spend as much time with them as possible to give them love, support and help with their learning. But with both parents having a full time job, you never feel it's enough, and then feel guilty about using other things to keep them occupied such as the TV or computers.

Russian spies used Kaspersky AV to hack NSA staffer, swipe exploit code – new claim

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Black Helicopters

Hiding in Plain Sight

What better way to perform the protracted and resource hogging task of scanning every file on the computer for something of interest, than to hide in plain sight under the guise of an anti-virus application.

Whether or not Kaspersky were responsible in this case, you can guarantee one such application is doing it somewhere.

Smart burglar alarms: Look who just tossed their hat into the ring ... It's, er, Ring

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Re: Subscriptions

There is very little difference in the IR signature of 3 cats and 1 man, or even two very hot cats after they have been chasing each other.

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Stop

Subscriptions

Non IoT alarm systems also charge an even larger subscriptions - I was quoted £49.60 a month for someone to check the picture that gets taken every time one of the cats jump on the table and sets off the movement alarm. They say should it ever be a burgler, the police will be rushing around immediately to catch them in progress. I suggested the police were more likely to phone back in two weeks with the crime number for your insurance claim, and they should carry on fitting the alarm to next door instead.

Foiled again! Brit military minds splash cash on killing satellites with... food wrapping?

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Holmes

Space Sponge

My idea is for a giant space sponge. It would need perhaps a km sphere of aerogel to capture both large pieces of junk in similar orbits, and small pieces at large crossing velocities. It would then use a small thruster to gently de-orbit, and create a nice firework display.

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Re: Currently...

I think El Reg is referring to the Chinese test of an anti-satellite missile against one of their defunct satellites, which almost doubled the amount of space junk up there. The US was also planning on downing one of their malfunctioning spy-sats, but I can't remember if they went through with that.

Google touts Babel Fish-esque in-ear real-time translators. And the usual computer stuff

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Facepalm

Re: No audio jack

paulf wrote: I accept omitting the 3.5mm jack means they have more flexibility on device thickness and have a little more space inside the unit,

There is always the option of using a 2.5mm jack, which became common when pre-touchscreen phones got really small. All existing headphones will work with an inexpensive adapter that can remain attached to the headphones.

Ignite: Microsoft drops veil on Honolulu, releases SQL Server on Linux into the wild

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Re: Difference between Bing and Windows Phone

The difference between Bing and Windows Phone is; you can force anyone using a Microsoft product to use Bing by default, but you can't force a Phone user to buy Microsoft by default.

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

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Devil

Re: Time to switch to BSD

Bah, there is only one true Daemonette!

http://www.bishopston.com/jamie/misc/bsd-daemonette/

We went to Nadella's launch of Hit Refresh so you didn't have to

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Facepalm

Re: Will it be viewed cynically as corporate propaganda?

wayne 8 wrote:

Do not pick up anyone who has fallen. They may need to be stabilized. Picking a victim up can cause further injury.

Do not try to move a victim unless there is an immediate threat of more harm if left in place.

Nadella was correct in his immediate response.

Jeezus! Does anyone on El Reg forums have children?

It was a supposed to be a baby (toddler) that had fallen over, they are learning to walk and fall over all the time without hurting themselves. They'll cry, but all you need to do is pick them up, give them a hug to reassure them, and put them back on their feet. Their parent will normally do this, but may be struggling with other children/shopping/buggies etc, and need a hand.

HPE confirms Belfast-based 3PAR engineering office to close

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Disasters

I wonder if HPe going cold on 3PAR has anything to do with the recent highly publicised disasters.

Mainframe TITSUP totals Oz tax tech, again

Let's all go down the Strand (our data centre). King's College London goes TITSUP*

Playboy founder and dressing-gown wearer Hugh Hefner dead at 91

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Holmes

1000 Women

That's only about 1 a month on average, which is I suspect less than most people imagined.

Boffins sling around entangled photons at telco wavelengths

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Unhappy

Me too, and all I can contribute is "whoosh".

Hotter than the Sun: JET – Earth’s biggest fusion reactor, in Culham

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Re: Do not press

I don't see why it's also considered necessary to come out of Euratom. After all, it was formed in 1957 and Switzerland are involved as an associate state member.
That's the point, on leaving the EU we have to cease to be a full member, but can be an associate member.

Australia commits to establish space agency with no budget, plan, name, deadline …

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Unhappy

Re: Space port (Woomera)

Britain being the only nation to launch a satellite, and then give it up.

Hurricane Maria leaves Arecibo radio telescope damaged and dark

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Unhappy

Golden Eye

Looks like the secondary dish may have ended up as it did in Golden Eye.

You lost your ballpoint pen, Slack? Why's your Linux version unsigned?

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FAIL

How long?

Red Hat have been signing their RPM's since 1999, should have been just about long enough for Slack to realise this is a good idea.

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

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Thumb Down

The Met are also refusing to fess up to how many of the 35,640 XP boxes they had 2 years ago are still being used. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41306321

Get out your specs: Java EE's headed to the Eclipse Foundation

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Meh

Sueball?

Oracle may be open sourcing it, but they are keeping the name and no doubt the right to sue anyone else using the headers for their own implementation, as they are doing with google.

Stuff the movement of celestial spheres, let's sit down and watch Bonnie Tyler on TV

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Flame

Bin Body Cams

Maybe the cameras can also catch the bin men spilling rubbish all over the street and dumping the bins randomly on the pavement outside the wrong house.

HSBC biz banking crypto: The case of the vanishing green padlock and... what domain are we on again?

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Re: The eight-character limit is pretty bad?

Think of it more of a PIN than a password, as the app only shows you what you can see on screen at a cash point.

Climate-change skeptic lined up to run NASA in this Trump timeline

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Re: I don't mine a skeptic. I prefer a skeptic in this position

Plus this one https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/.

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Re: I don't mine a skeptic. I prefer a skeptic in this position

DougS wrote: "NASA just launches the satellites that get the data, they don't do any interpretation of it so whether its director is a skeptic, a denier or a believer doesn't really matter. "

Really? So why have they been doing this https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/.

Argentina eyes up laser death cannon testbed warship

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Re: .Sarcasm, I take it?

Why not have a word with Donald, as if the US doesn't sell it to the Argies, we wont have to go to the trouble of sinking it.

Paris Hilton inflates cryptocurrency bubble some more, backs Initial Coin Offering

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Coat

PonziCoin

An Initial Coin Offering is different from ponzi scheme how?

Oracle staff report big layoffs across Solaris, SPARC teams

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Re: RIP SPARC

I knew I certain ex-Acorn staffer who lived that dream.

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Re: Timing

Maybe he couldn't wait for Christmas this year.

'Independent' gov law reviewer wants users preemptively identified before they're 'allowed' to use encryption

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Re: What?

It's quite simple; if both users of a chat app are verified, end to end encryption can be used. If one of the users is not verified, encrypted comms go via the provider's server so it can be subject to lawful interception.

Connect at mine free Wi-Fi! I would knew what I is do! I is cafe boss!

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FAIL

Re: Smart intercoms/bells are a good idea, that are usually badly implemented

They've had these "smart doorbells" for years on flats. When we first moved to Cambridgeshire it took weeks to get the management company to put my phone number in the system, so we could get deliveries. I was then plagued with doorbell calls for months after moving out, as the company refused to remove the number without an admin payment. I refused and blocked it until the next tenant was suckered in to signing up.

Airbus issues patch to prevent A350 airliner fuel tanks exploding

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Stop

Re: Do you drive a car?

@samzeman: "I don't drive except in emergencies"

Exactly the conditions you shouldn't be driving; you lack the experience of regular driving, and you are under additional stress. If only a software patch would keep you off the road in such circumstances.

Kill animals and destroy property before hurting humans, Germany tells future self-driving cars

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WTF?

Picture

Nice picture; injured or possibly dead person lying unattended in the road, while a police officer takes a statement. Presumably with a fully automated vehicle the officer wouldn't even bother attending, and just download the logs.

Bad data and new IT system bugs help knock 66% off Provident Financial share price

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Up until the crap IT system, it was supposedly working very well.

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

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Facepalm

It aint made by Nokia

People are talking about having been waiting for Nokia to bring out an Andriod phone, or they hope Nokia does this, that or the other. The phone is made by HMD, Nokia is just the letters on the front.

Taken a while but finally here's the first proper smart-home gizmo

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Re: Smart things need smart solutions!

No, the switch only has the live side of the circuit, where as the rose will have permanent live, switched live, neutral and earth. At least in civilised countries such as the UK.

World's largest private submarine in mystery sink accident

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Meh

Cruashed

Well at least if the hatches were left open when it went down, it wouldn't be crushed. Might even be salvageable.

Microsoft: We beat Google, AWS to cloudy GPU VMs in Blighty

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Re: Under-resourcing

Less of the canned press release please.

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Under-resourcing

How does this play against MS's under-resourcing of their UK data centres?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/04/microsoft_azure_capacity_woes_hit_uk_customers/

IBM adds Optane to its cloud, only as storage and without GPUs

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Unhappy

Looks like Optane could be the next Itanic.

'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary

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Go

Re: Ask her this

Banking isn't end to end between two users, one end is the service provider, i.e. bank.

Which of course is the answer; e2e unless there is a warrant, in which case encrypted messages are exchanged via the app providers servers.

Pre-order your early-bird pre-sale product today! (Oh did we mention the shipping date has slipped AGAIN?)

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Flame

Re: waiting patiently...

Exactly, pre-ordering is nothing new, companies have been taking us for a ride since the days of the home micro. Pre-ordered products were invariably extremely late, underspec'd or already obsolete. Often the best you could hope for was to cancel for a full refund with a lesson learned.

Virgin Media admits it 'fell short' in broadband speeds ahead of lashing from BBC's Watchdog

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Go

Re: You get what you pay for

An important difference between the two product isn't just the download speed, but the upload speed. It's only 9Mb/s for the 55Mb/s product, but 19Mb/s for the 76Mb/s one. That makes a lot off difference when doing things such as uploading to the cloud, RDPing in to your computers at home, or running your own VPN so your mobile devices aren't being snooped upon when using public WiFi.

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Re: You get what you pay for

Nothing wrong with PlusNet's service. Just don't expect POP3/TLS.

Marketing giant Marketo forgets to renew domain name. Hilarity ensues

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Flame

Re: Be Paranoid

Don't rely on the Registrar to remind you either. Found an old club domain had fallen off the net in June, with not a single reminder having been sent. Luckily we got it back and running again, but a shared calendar entry has now been set up, so multiple people get the message.

Alexa, why aren't you working? No – I didn't say twerking. I, oh God...

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Flame

Re: have you tried...

I think even Amazon themselves are finding Alexa a bit frustrating, given the banging coming from the floor above at One Station Square. Or they could be playing with the delivery drones in doors again.

Trump's CNN tantrum could delay $85bn AT&T-Time Warner merger

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Meh

Forget Trump...

...anyone think this merger is going to be good for the consumers?

Britain's warhead-watcher to simulate Trident nukes with Atos supercomputer

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Mushroom

Re: Hmm

@Tascam Holiday: "Yeah but we'd keep the lid on the saucepan to be really safe."

Although it could end up as the second saucepan lid in space:-

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/16/america_soviets_space_race/

New work: Algorithms to give self-driving cars 'impulsive' human 'ethics'

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Stop

In harms way

Choosing between hitting someone who has walked out in the road or swerving and hitting others on the pavement is not the right way to look at the issue, for a human or AI. The person that has stepped out in to the road has deliberately put themselves in harms way, the pedestrians on the pavement have not.

If the person stepping out is aware enough they may have a chance of getting out of the way in time, the pedestrians on the pavement will be generally unaware of what is happening on the road and will have no chance - as we've seen too often recently in both lorry accidents and terrorist attacks.