Re: "Change your network settings to metered and the power source to battery."
It only works on Wi-Fi or mobile data as well.
If your using a LAN connection, e.g. Ethernet to a desktop etc. Then the 'metered connection' option is missing :-/
Posts by Boothy
1232 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2011
Reminder: How to get a grip on your files, data that Windows 10 phones home to Microsoft
Google goes over the top with RCS
Tuesday 23rd February 2016 13:13 GMT
Where is the users carrot?
Unless I'm reading it wrong, I don't see any mention of what benefit this offers the end users?
It's a standard that only seems to run on one platform (Android).
It will cost users money to use, i.e. the same model as SMS/MMS, so needs funding somehow.
It doesn't seem to provide any tangible benefit over current SMS, which works everywhere on all phones, universally.
It seems to be worse than existing messaging apps. as it removes a layer of privacy.
LG’s modular G5 stunner shuns the Lego aesthetic
Monday 22nd February 2016 16:49 GMT
Standard, standard, standard
Quote: "an alliance of vendors who can agree to standardise on an expansion slot"
This * ∞
Without an agreed standard, by at least a good chunk of the major players, it's not going to last long.
It also needs to be free to use, preferable an fully open standard, that then gets adopted as an ISO standard, that any phone or peripheral producer can use.
Although personally, I don't think this should be classed as a modular phone, it's a phone with an expansion port.
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Thursday 18th February 2016 17:56 GMT
Forgotten what it was called now, but I had a snapshot type device that dumped the Spectrum memory to the Sinclair microdrive.
As this could work at any point in time, it meant you could also save your game progress, as you just hit a button, and it froze the system. You could then dump the memory state to the microdrive at that point in time, mid game, and reload again later.
Hmm, it's going to bug me what the thing was called now!! Anyone any ideas?
It was a small box, plugged into the rear expansion, and had a single red button on the top. Hit that and the speccy froze, and you got an on-screen menu that let you peek and poke memory, save/load to/from the microdrive, and various other bits.
Thursday 18th February 2016 17:31 GMT
I was 13 when the Spectrum 48k came out.
I was a bit of an electronics tinker back then.
At 14, I worked out what frequencies were used on the tapes, and built an in-line multi frequency band pass filter to try and remove background noise between the tape player and recorder.
Took a while to sort it out, but once done, made perfect 'backup' copies of games :-)
Happy days, although Manic Miner background music still haunts me to this day!
Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car
Thursday 18th February 2016 16:45 GMT
Hybrids are a stop gap, and should vanish as tech improves.
But I suspect most everyday cars, e.g. under 30 miles a day, nip to the shops, local office etc. will be electric. That way most car users can simply charge at home, and never need to visit a refuelling station/garage.
I see hydrogen being used for high mileage users, (sales reps, HGVs, intercity buses etc), and those that need to be driving for most of the day, such as local public transport etc.
Eventually though, I think private ownership will diminish, and you'll just use an Uber style app to call a car appropriate to your specific journey.
Google to snatch control of Android updates from mobe makers – analyst
Thursday 18th February 2016 12:40 GMT
Re: Definitely a good idea
I always thought Hangouts was a bit odd, not one friend ever used it, and I thought it was horrible as an SMS client.
So on my Nexus 5, it's disable.
But that still doesn't stop it from using over 23MB of space, and crashing in the background occasionally. (How can a disabled app still crash!!).
Thursday 18th February 2016 12:31 GMT
Re: Mixed feelings
Out of curiosity, what do people use root for these days? i.e. Why do people feel the need to root your phones?
Genuine question, not trolling.
I've been a user of Android since the original HTC Hero, which I rooted at the time, and did the same to several phones after that point.
But I haven't bothered rooting for a while now, as all the things I'd used root for previously, are possible now in a non rooted device.
For example, firewalls and granular app permissions, work without root these days.
So what other things do people feel they need to do on their phones, that requires root access?
For reference, I use Nexus devices these days, so don't have to deal with the cruft installed by the various manufacturers. So this likely also plays into the no root needed for me.
Samsung now pushing Marshmallows into the Galaxy S6, Edge
Tuesday 16th February 2016 10:51 GMT
Re: Get your act together
This could be fixed if they could mandate that all OS related updates be managed centrally, regardless of manufacturer or carrier.
The manufacturers/carrier could still do their customising, to help differentiate their products, but this aught to be as extensions to the OS (e.g. drivers, custom controls for non standard buttons etc) and via standard app installs.
Tuesday 16th February 2016 10:44 GMT
Re: And tablets?
Think yourself lucky, I've had an LG G Pad 8.3, for about a year, (was a freeby give-away when I bought an LG TV).
It's still stuck on 4.4, despite 5.1 coming out on it in other regions in the middle of last year! :-/
How much effort is needed to create a new regional version?
I'm in UK also.
Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016
Monday 15th February 2016 14:07 GMT
Indeed, 4GB is pitiful these days.
I've little running on my (work) laptop atm, and it's still used >5GB of RAM.
4GB single stick is around £15, a full 8GB kit (2 x 4GB) is about £31, and that's from a main online retailer.
Yet buy an 8GB laptop, and you'll add £50+ onto the price!.
You're better of checking to see if the 4GB laptop has a free slot, and just buy and fit the extra stick yourself.
Why does the VR industry think 2016 is its year? It's the hardware, stupid
Thursday 11th February 2016 14:23 GMT
Re: "we've come a hell of a long way"
These are just the initial costs, early adopter pricing. Which is the norm for emerging technologies.
For comparison, early tablets, like the Galaxy tab were over $700 dollars back in 2010. A far more capable current device is under $300, even sub $100 budget devices are more capable now, than the $700 devices were back in 2010.
The market for VR will be smaller than the tablet market, I just chose it as a fairly recent 'new tech'. So I suspect prices will not drop as far, or as fast, as they did for tablets, but it will happen.
2016 will be for early adopters, those that already have $600+ GFX cards fitted in desktop gaming rigs, or have $1,500+ gaming laptops (You can get a GTX 980 in a laptop/notebook form factor).
By 2017 we'll have v2 retail kit out, and perhaps even some more VR produces, so more competition. The market will have matured as well, so more VR content, and the costs will come down.
Plus of course by next year, you'll have 2nd hand first gen gear available on ebay etc. Just like you can buy the DK2 gear now.
Wednesday 10th February 2016 18:14 GMT
Re: "we've come a hell of a long way"
From what I've read, Braben had a hands on with an early Oculus, and basically went "Wow, this is the future of gaming".
He then went back to the Frontier studio and got the developers to redesigned the in game UI to be fully immersive and VR friendly. So ever since early Alpha, the Elite game has had a focused on VR.
Wednesday 10th February 2016 14:25 GMT
Re: Dirt cheap, but good enough
Quote: <em"The main obstacle right now seems to be making it easy (and cheap) to create the content. Cost of a rig and hardware capable of managing the post processing in a reasonable time are obstacles which will stop all but the most determined from becoming content producers for now."</em>
Isn't that dependant on the content that's being created?
If your talking about games producers, which is where I'd suspect most of the content is going to come from, at least initially, then those people will likely already have all the equipment needed for creation anyway, and might only need a software update to their chosen 3D engine. (They might need to by a headset to test though). All major game engines now have VR support, even the free Unity engine, which lots of people now seem to be using (even a recent AAA PC game used it), has included VR support for some time at no cost.
Producing VR videos/movies/TV, or VR scanning of real world locations etc, that's going to need investment, but I can't see this side of things taking off for a while yet, until VR at home becomes more common.
Wednesday 10th February 2016 14:06 GMT
Re: "we've come a hell of a long way"
Why pick Gears Of War?
It's a 3rd person game, and personally I don't think 3rd person is all that suitable for VR immersion, at least not without some major change to how the games are produced/shot etc.
I've always thought 3rd person games are less immersive anyway, as to me it just looks like your controlling something on screen, rather than actually being there in the action like you are (or at least seem to be) in a 1st person game.
VR will be best suited to driving/flying type games, where you are in the cockpit/drivers seat, or standard 1st person games.
Although you could still be right on the need for a bucket, at least for FPS games (driving/pilot games don't really have this issue, even with the current dev kits).
Hopefully the retail versions of at least the high end devices (Oculus and the HTC/Valve Vive) should resolved most of this for the FPS type games (where it shows up the worse). Although I can't see the Gear VR being able to cope with FPS games all that well, although it will probably do driving/flying/movies etc without issue.
For reference, I've played Elite Dangerous on a DK2 for several hours without any issues.
Building automation systems are so bad IBM hacked one for free
Thursday 11th February 2016 11:46 GMT
1) Enforce passwords rules out if the box, including an expiry period.
2) Don't have any default passwords in the system. Forcing the installer to set a new password on first login.
3) Next time the building/system manager/admin logs in, it's likely to be after the password expiry date, so force another password change.
4) Implement a hardware only recovery option, in case the password is lost/forgotten, that requires someone to be physically on site. (i.e. a jumper inside the device).
The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads
Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 13:50 GMT
I had the same roll-back issue with Win updates no longer working.
I was on Win 7 64bit, updated to Win 10 (just to see what it was like really). Has lots of issues, So I rolled back to Win 7 after about 2 weeks of trying to fix things.
It took me a little while to realise that Windows Update was no longer checking for updates.
I then noticed that adding new music files to the Music folder, wasn't being added to the music library in Windows Media Player, my AV was no longer running scheduled checks, and my system backup had stopped auto running etc. etc.
It turns out anything that used Windows Task Scheduler was no longer working :-/
It seems restoring to your previous OS, messes up the scheduler, which is what was running all the above, now failing, processes!
You can confirm this is the issue, by going into 'Task Scheduler', selecting the scheduler library, then trying to view any task from the list. You'll get an error if it's corrupt.
Seems the format changed in Win 10, and it doesn't recover the earlier Win 7 tasks on roll-back!
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 13:29 GMT
Re: My systems are setup to automatically
If you're on Win 7, get rid of KB2952664, KB3083710, KB2999226 & KB3112343 as well.
My Win update is working fine, although of course in manual install mode these days.
You just have to make sure none of the above turn up again (including the KB3035583 one you mention).
Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment
Monday 1st February 2016 10:34 GMT
Re: Haven't they heard
If it can be scaled, the net affect should be a reduction in energy usage, and so 'should' help the environment.
Water (liquid) cooling is much more efficient than air cooling, as used in traditional data-centres etc. Make the cooling more efficient, and you reduce the energy wasted spinning fans, cooling air etc.
Bear in mind, if the servers were not in this tin box in the water, then they'd be sat in some other data-centre anyway.
Back to the Future's DeLorean is coming back to the future
Microsoft struggles against self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage
Police Scotland will have direct access to disabled parking badge database
Tuesday 26th January 2016 13:36 GMT
Shame you can't just put a notice up stating it's open season on all none blue badged cars found in a disabled space.
Follow this up with a sign from the local police, stating that damage done to illegally parked cars, will not be considered as criminal damage, and therefore cannot be reported to them as a crime.
This would also mean no crime number, so insurance companies would likely not pay out for the damages without it removing any no claims etc.
'No safe level' booze guidelines? Nonsense, thunder stats profs
Monday 25th January 2016 12:54 GMT
Re: University of Sheffield
Quote: "And yet Sheffield has so many nice pubs".
Especially round the Kelham island area. Fat Cat, Riverside, the Kelham Island Tavern itself etc etc.
I've spent quite a few pleasant Friday afternoons with friends wandering from pub to pub, usually talking absolute bollocks, as you do.
How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?
Friday 22nd January 2016 16:22 GMT
Re: Can't click any of the things on the screen
Quote: Hmm. I sense a business opportunity involving the production of widescreen mouse mats.
Don't forget to brand them as HD Ready.
You can then get them to upgrade to the True HD version later on, and then even later still, to the Ultra HD version. :-)
Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016
Friday 22nd January 2016 14:48 GMT
Same for me. Unpredictable finish times.
Some (all?) of the IoT type heating systems, can be tied to one or more mobile devices (as well as local movement detection etc).
If no one is near, or currently approaching home, heating stays off. If it detects you heading towards home, it works out your ETA, and from past data, knows how long it takes to get the house up to temp, and so switches the heating on at the optimal point.
Likewise, if you leave the house and forget to turn the heating off, it can do it for you.
I kind of like that, the system would likely pay for itself within a year or two with the fuel savings.
Friday 22nd January 2016 14:39 GMT
Re: Please not VR...again...
The difference this time round is that many people will have a device at home capable of supporting VR. (PC, PS4), or via the cheaper options, such as Google Cardboard and rivals, that use an existing smart phone.
Previous attempts at VR were too costly, only available in locations like arcades, tech shows etc. and of poor quality.
I'm not saying this will be the year of VR, but I think this will be the year for early adopters, and as the market grows, which I'm certain it will, more VR developers will jump on board with more interesting applications.
By 2017, economies of scale will mean the 2nd generation VR devices will be cheaper and more capable, and so will more from early adoption, to more mainstream.
3D was a gimmick, VR is actually immersive, when done right.
Samsung sued over 'lackadaisical' Android security updates
Asda slammed for letting vulns fester on its cyber shelves
Thursday 21st January 2016 13:14 GMT
Mandatory security certification for all retailer/bank web sites
It's about time some form of mandatory security certification was implemented for all web sites hosting retailers, financial institutes, basically anyone that handles money or holds personal details.
Something simple to understand, along the lines of the food and hygiene certificates you get in places that sell food, with a simple 0-5 rating.
All the web sites would be required to show the rating in a consistent manner, in the same location on at least the home page, and the order processing pages.
Rather than hosting the certificate as an image, the actual web site code/html could be a simple bit of common code, used by all sites, using some unique company and/or site specific key, that generates the info-graphic dynamically (a vector format, rather than bitmap to keep the size down).
Clicking on the info-graphic on the page, would take you to a centrally hosted official (gov?) site, that holds all the records, and could give more details, such as the companies security history over the last 12 months or more.
Testing of sites should be a scripted/automatic [*] process that is updated regularly to keep pace, and performed say once per month, which automatically updates the rating if it changes, and notifies the site owners of these same changes, in case they need to do anything to fix issues etc.
You could implement a grace period, i.e. rating goes down by 1 point, so site has 1 week to fix the issues and re-evaluate before the info-graphic on the page is downgraded. If the rating goes down 2 points, they have 3 days to fix etc.
If they don't fix in time, their rating goes down, and won't go back up until the next monthly check, therefore basically shaming them for a month, and likely impacting their sales for that period.
Funding of the service should come from business taxes.
* You might not be able to automate everything, so a % of the rating might be based on other information, which might need to be captured via other means (ISO audit etc.).
Thursday 21st January 2016 12:44 GMT
Re: horrible sign up process
Quote: "The had disabled copy/paste in the password fields so that my usual habit of using a password generator and then copy/pasting the password in was difficult."
I also use a password manager, and that's also one of my pet peeves.
If you're using Chrome (other browsers are available), there is an extension called "Don't f##k with paste" which seems to fix most of these issues.
The planets really will be in alignment for the next month
Wednesday 20th January 2016 15:15 GMT
Re: Red thing?
I had a backpacking trip to South America a few years back, various countries, lots of highlights, and also included a few days up in the Atacama Desert.
I'm not one for emotional outbursts (my gf reckons I'm a Vulcan), but the night sky views really did take my breath away (the lack of oxygen up their not withstanding).
If you really enjoy your star gazing, that's the place to visit!
Facebook Messenger: All your numbers are belong to us
Trojan-filled Chrome extensions for Steam boil off gamers' assets
Wednesday 20th January 2016 13:15 GMT
Re: making virtual crap worth actual money
I'm a Steam user, it's my primary gaming portal. But, I never got the point of the trading cards!
What benefit do they give me? By that I mean tangible benefits, i.e. will it give me something in game (a new gun, vehicle etc), will it give me early access, or unlock something not normally available?
If not, then what is their point? Why do they exists? Do people collect these just for the sake of it?
Genuine question, really, what are they for?
Video game retailer GAME in email marketing FAIL
Friday 15th January 2016 16:37 GMT
Re: The real fun starts...
We had someone do that with an internal email just yesterday, an email that had its very first line stating "DO NOT REPLY TO ALL", so they either didn't read, or didn't absorb that little bit of info!
A double fail really, since the original author of the email, also neglected to use BCC: !
Luckily there was only the one reply yesterday, but I've seen these run and run for hours before now!
It's like a mild IT version of the Darwin awards.
The Day Netflix Blocked My VPN is the world's new most-hated show
Friday 15th January 2016 15:43 GMT
Re: Thus Ends the Reign of Netflix
They could be throttling on traffic type, or by destination.
Both of which are, as far as I know, hidden by using a VPN. With VPN, the ISP just sees the connection to the VPN servers, they can't see what it's being used for or where the other end of the VPN is being connected to.
Late night server rebuild led to 'nightmares about mutilated corpses'
No escape: Microsoft injects 'Get Windows 10' nagware into biz PCs
Thursday 14th January 2016 17:50 GMT
Re: I had another update unhide itself
KB whack-a-mole, I know it well :-/
From what I understand, they keep tweaking the existing patches rather than release a new one, so it pops up in WU again!
I guess at least that way, you start to recognise the KB numbers, without the need to reference your stick-it note again!
BBC risks wrath of android rights activists with Robot Wars reboot
Wednesday 13th January 2016 15:44 GMT
I imagine the main controls, will as mentioned, just be a remote control device, although perhaps via clicking on a touch screen, rather than via direct forward/backwards/turn type controls.
But I can imagine with the throw away costs of things like the pi zero and similar boards, these will likely have lots of sensors and automated or semi-automated processing.
Which would allow for things like automatic firing of weapons (or defences).
Confirmed: How to stop Windows 10 forcing itself onto PCs – your essential guide
Friday 8th January 2016 17:34 GMT
Re: Just my two penn'orth
@ Jedipadawan
Quote: "Did you code in Z80 'cause the BASIC and 1K couldn't do anything!!"
Short answer, yes.
Longer answer....
The ZX80 was a hand-me-down from a family friend who got a ZX81 in 1981. They knew I was interested in computers (well anything electronic really!). So gave me the ZX80 to play with.
I was 12 at the time and had no hands on experience with computers at the time, but they fascinated me,
As well as the ZX80, I was given some books on assemble language, including some samples, so started with those. (The Hex is strong in this one ;-)
I got myself a Zilog Z80 reference book, and some other reference materials, and just started to mess around.
By the time I got the Spectrum a year later in 1982, I was writing small games in assembly language, the largest one I wrote, being a sort of mining game, digging tunnels for gold (points) and being chased by ghosts (lost a life) etc.
I wrote a custom tape loader routine for the Spectrum, that avoided the need for the little BASIC loader that most other commercial games seemed to use at the time (which I'd figured out how to circumvent some time before). I could load my game into memory, without executing the code, load a graphical screen (load screen) to the display, and then dump the entire memory contents to tape in one burst of data. If you then loaded the tape on a newly started machine, it loaded the graphics to screen first (very badly drawn, I was never much of an artist!), and then it continued loaded the game in one continues screech of noise, automatically executing it once loaded.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), by the time I got to 14/15 my interests moved onto other things (girls/music) and so I never really moved into the 16bit side, other than being a consumer.
I still love playing games now, but I haven't tried to write anything since the good old days of 8 bit computing.
Wow, sorry for the length everyone, got carried away reminiscing! Happy days :-)
Friday 8th January 2016 13:17 GMT
Re: Just my two penn'orth
Similar to me.
Cut my teeth on ZX80, Spectrum 48 and 128, Amiga 500, 1200 and a 4000 (which I still have).
First Windows was an Me (yuc), quickly replaced the OS with 98 SE, then moved to XP. Jumped passed Vista to Win 7, which I've stuck with since.
I have tried Win 10, installed it on an i7 system, that had been running Win 7 64bit without issue. No blue screens, no stability issues of any sort, rock solid.
Win 10 on the same device was flaky at best. Would randomly decide to take 10 minutes or more to shut down, would sometimes start itself again immediately after being shut down for no apparent reason! General stability issues, control panels refusing to open, or taking way longer to open than they should have done, driver issues (despite all the HW being fairly new) etc etc etc. All in all a poor experience. So put Win 7 back on.
I'm a keen gamer, so need to stick with Win 7 (for now anyway), but I have just bought a new 512GB SSD, which I'll be installing in the same i7 box above, and be putting some form of Linux on as a dual-boot system. Not decided on flavour yet, but Debian is probably the top runner atm.
Chinese unleash autonomous airborne taxi
Friday 8th January 2016 16:47 GMT 
Wouldn't putting the blade arms at the top rather than the bottom be a better idea?
It would improve stability (more weight below rather than above the blades), and also means you're less likely to clip a blade on the ground etc if the thing shifted during takeoff or landing (i.e. gust of wind etc). Plus you'd have a better view as a passenger.
But otherwise, kudos to the designers, much more palatable that most of the previous attempts at a flying car.
Bloke sues dad who shot down his drone – and why it may decide who owns the skies
The new Huawei is the world's fastest phone
Thursday 7th January 2016 14:22 GMT
Re: Faster charging?
It will still charge at 5v, just slower. So doesn't the 'commitment' you mention (which is voluntary anyway). Many tablets have been doing this for years, so it's nothing new.
Although it is a shame they are not just using an updated USB Power Delivery Specification, as this allows for up to 20 Volts at 5 Amps, so no need to do something custom.
They seem to be using a micro connector and USB 2.0, when for a new device, I'd expect USB 3.1, and a Type-C connector.
We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever
Wednesday 6th January 2016 13:29 GMT
Quote "The slowdown in the consumer technology market is irrefutable, serious and global,"
...and easily predictable, especially this last year.
There hasn't really been anything new to buy that has a real wide appeal, it's mostly just been minor improvements to things people already have, like Tablets, TVs, Mobile phones, Laptops etc. etc. People will already have those, and the new improvements are just not worth shelling out again for most people, especially if your current <device> still works fine.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
