Posts by Jos V

Re: No Support Stnadard there?

Hm. Google has "about 4,690 results (0.47 seconds) " on that one. Who is t5r4e3w2q1?

Anyway, password faults sound great, but, since people now use multiple devices (smartphone, laptop, home PC, work PC/laptop), and want to access all their accounts from each, to update their facebook pages and tweets with useless information, read their emails, do some banking, this is never going to work.

I just rely on Microsoft Lync to screw up my password randomly and lock me out, so I have to reset it it so frequently I'm secure no matter how many billions of guesses a second you throw at me.

Re: Newz

Not only that, when you zoom in on the downdetector map on the "hotspots" the outage gets less and less dense, and when you zoom out to complete NAR, the US is a giant red blurb of outage. I guess the algorithm they use is # of reports per pixels.

Re: We are in Stephen King's Room 1408. Deal with it!

Destroy. Not really my workday. That part is my tranquility zone. It's more like the part that starts after getting home :-p

Roo. I'm not sure if 3.1x was the same, but W95 would crash after running for 49.7 days, due to a timing algorithm problem. At the time MS release a fix, but I had to apply for it by sending a request to them. It was not send automatically as an update.

I guess they never expected anyone to run W95 for that long...

Good man

Sure they work. Trust me. Now, if you send me $29,95 I will send you a quick study guide called "How to detect scams in 2 easy steps."

Re: If you played the original X-COM game

" New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.

Pratchettium? At least he was a science-fiction-ist. And was knighted. And he lived too short.

Re: Add-on compatibility - Facebook purity

"FB purity"... Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Not too bothered though. All FB related links are sent to 127.0.0.1 on this here laptop.

Be careful now... You might be in line for some flaming, unless everybody stays nice and explains that anything other than MS file system is case-sensitive, accepting that not everyone knows everything. Hey-ho. I'm not down voting you.

Re: The, ahem, marvellous variety of the human race

Pascal, it being Ireland, the landlord probably would have preferred whiskey, not whisky.

Weekend pedantry and all.

Re: Scottish vernacular

Olaf, since you asked for it: Puggy: Derived from an old word for 'monkey' and originally applied to an organ-grinder's instrument ('puggy machine'). Thence used for fruit machines but now applied to bank machines. 'Ah'd buy a round but the puggy's f***ed'

spacecadet, I think as a west-pondian, you would call these smoke houses, wildly available in your southern states for most of the part I think. Originally used for food preservation, but becoming more popular again.

Numbers...

Alright, doing some quick and dirty calculations here. I'm going to take a Golf Mk5 here. Weight around 1300kg, aerodynamic surface area of 0.7m2. I'll take this car from standstill to 100km/h first.

This will take E=1/2 m x v^2, or 473850J of energy. Diesel has 35.8MJ/l, so I just burned 0.013l of fuel.

Now at 100km/h, the car will need to plow through air drag (I'm taking everything else out for now). For this we use F=1/2 x Rho x A x v^2. Rho (air density) on ground level is 1.225kg/m^3, so we get to 312N of force the car needs to constantly push over 100km. Ignore the 300m I used to accelerate.

W=F x s, so the car consumes 312 x 100000, or 31200000J of energy. Which translates to 0.87l of diesel. In total, that was 0.88 liters of fuel then. Or about 115km/l (270MPG for those in the US).

That is, if your car turns all the diesel-stored energy into forward movement, which is obviously never going to happen, but the EPA might be wishing for. So the engine won't be emitting heat to any engine component, or through the exhaust, or by creating nasty stuff in inefficient chemical processes, or have tire friction, or.. or... well you can figure yourself.

Now, consider that diesel is about 86% carbon, and the C needs O2 to combust properly, for every liter of diesel, you need almost 2kg of O, to burn 0.7kg of C, so rounding it down a bit, 2.5kg of CO2 is produced. The EU limits are currently set at 130g/km. So take the 0.88l, I just burned 2.2kg of CO2 out of my exhaust. That's 2200g/100km, or 22g/km.

Still in my perfect car.

So how realistic are the regulations? And how will manufacturers meet them without cheating? I don't know...

Re: wsusoffline - win

Agreed. Fuck the cloud. It might be an option if you live and work in a nicely connected first-world country, but not when you live and work in a developing country, as I do now, where having no proper internet connection is kind of expected, and having one is a commodity. Maybe google's loon balloons will actually work here, but I wouldn't rely on any proper cloud services to run reliably through it. MS must think the entire world has access to decent connections.

And still. Now sitting in my MS update pending list (set not to download, nor install automatically), with some added notes from my searches:

kb2952664 Win10 nagware

KB2999226 is a nonsecurity patch for Windows 8.1 that, according to the KB article, sticks a new Universal C Runtime on Windows 8.1 machines. The new Universal C Runtime is needed when programmers use the new Windows 10 Software Development Kit to build Universal/Metro apps and you try to run them on Windows 8.1. It's a mammoth patch, first issued for both Win 7 and Win 8.1 on Sept. 15, then issued for Vista on Sept. 29. There's no indication that the patch has been modified in any other way.

KB3035583: Ed Bott posted a very thorough analysis of KB 3035583 in his ZDNet report, "Get Windows 10: Microsoft's hidden roadmap for the biggest software upgrade in history." Bott has a less-conspiratorial take on the evidence:

I have a hard time seeing this as adware. It is, instead, perfectly targeted advertising, offering a free upgrade to a product currently running on the system where the ad is being displayed. There are no hidden costs (aside from those incurred by the download itself) and the upgrade isn't going to be installed without your explicit consent. It can't, because there's at least one license agreement (and probably several) you're going to have to click through.

KB 3068708:

KB 3022345, since replaced by KB 3068708, says, "By applying this service, you can add benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet been upgraded." That looks like a lightning bolt to any tinfoil hat. Read further, though, and Microsoft says the patch "collects diagnostics about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program," which is a horse of a very different color.

KB 3075249, however, doesn't mention anything about CEIP. It's billed as an update that "adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels

KB3080149, This package updates the Diagnostics and Telemetry tracking service to existing devices. This service provides benefits from the latest version of Windows to systems that have not yet upgraded. The update also supports applications that are subscribed to Visual Studio Application Insights.

kb3092627, update to fix an update kb3076895, fixing XML core service.

My private laptop runs Mint already (Win7 in VM). My work laptop, which unfortunately has to run applications that don't run in WINE, and a VPN, plus a couple of corporate sites that only run in IE (yeah, really), runs on Win7-pro. With Mint running in VM.

Fuck MS.

I'm kind of lucky still, with my MiFi box over LTE giving me 12Mbps peak where I roam around. Fixed internet at my workplace stops at 2Mbps if it is working at all.

Re: Something is going to kill all of us

Vegetarian hamburger? Diet Coke? Organic chicken? Beef bacon? Low fat salt? Diet mayo?

Oh well. All those labels just make it easier for me to chose what not to buy.

Re: Eh. what?

Hey Keef. Let me venture an attempt at this.

There is a wild pro/anti Russian argument going on on the internet about the shapes of the puncture holes in the aircraft. The pro-Russian stance is that all the holes are cube shaped and there is no "bow-tie" shaped holes, which would indicate an older type of buk missile that Russia has long stopped using, and the Ukrainians had (but claim to have sold off to Serbia, but pro-Russian Ukrainians/Seperatists have apparently snatched a couple, another part of the pro/anti thing, so take your pick). The Russian side agrees that since no bow-tie holes are found, it must have been Ukrainian, as they have only the bow-tie version.

The anti Russian side of things, is where Russia seems to have shot themselves in the foot with the former statement.

The Dutch transportation safety report says that there were bow-tie shaped fragments (including in the captain's body), as well as the cubed and filler forms, and pictures are included in the report.

Then again, the pro-side defends this by saying the evidence was rigged, and the objects in the picture were planted by the Dutch investigators.

So there, a nice conspiracy theory, and as usual you can google your answers straight to where/who you want to point your finger at.

Re: Moto G

Same here for my Moto G. Got upgraded to 5.1 (Virgin Mobile Canada).

One week ago stagefright detector (free from the app store) upgraded to add CVE-2015-3876 and 6602. It's telling me now it's vulnerable for those two.

Re: "We only found out about the problems in the last board meeting, shortly before the media"

Yup:

Glyme's Formula For Success: The secret of success is sincerity. Once you

can fake that, you've got it made.

Re: Ah, nostalgia...

sudo apt-get install bsdgames

adventure

....

Oh well. Memories..

Re: El Reg agenda

Maybe a KIA... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKjs-RXF2U

The only reason bloody AM is still in the news is because Chuck going back in time and kicking all of the admins in the face hasn't entered our timeline yet.

Re: Some exclusive features

Arnaut, very correct. The number of Mpixels are there for one purpose, and one only. Marketing. End-off.

I still have my Canon 10D, with 6.4MP 24mm CCD, and it will beat any 12MP phone camera hands-down, using a lot of it's pixels for noise reduction (I think effectively 5.7MP are actually used for the pictures).

Having a 12MP camera, and then lossy compress the crap out of it to a 2MB or so picture and even more so to your average 200KB cat/lunch/drunken_friend facefart post content is. Just. Marketing. I think El Reg had an article about this, but I can't be bothered to search for it. Things like light wavelength, noise, and size of CCDs and stuff. Actual technical details.

Oh, wait, this is about the new iPhone. Rejoice. By the way, wasn't there a version of that thing that was not to be named "iPhone <insert number><insert optional S>", but was to be named "the New iPhone". What happened to that?

Re: Apps not the only way

mjoyce, in the last sentence on page 2 there is link (PDF) to the original study.

Makes interesting reading, for me more so, as I live in a developing country offering me the mcoin stuff. Which I will stay away from for now..

Re: Drugs for morning sickness...

R Callan, I think you should do a quick search for "leprosy armadillo".

Be careful when you try to shoot'em dead too.

Oh, but there are a lot of things that w3c has implemented. Not wanting to go over them all, you can see the list here:

www.w3.org/standards/techs/js#w3c_all

Battery status is just one of them.

Re: It's all in the Congo??!?!!!??!?

Worstall will be delighted to tell you though, as he has stated in his articles:

Tantalum is also produced in Thailand and Malaysia as a by-product of the tin mining there.

During gravitational separation of the ores from placer deposits, not only is Cassiterite (SnO2) found, but a small percentage of tantalite also included. The slag from the tin smelters then contains economically useful amounts of tantalum, which is leached from the slag. Future sources of supply of tantalum, in order of estimated size, are being explored in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greenland, China, Mozambique, Canada, Australia, the United States, Finland, and Brazil.

(From wiki)

Tantalizing that.

Re: hmmm

Hey zen1. Statistics on what percentage of traffic is email seem hard to find, but I think where you recall your number from is that it's the rough percentage of email that is considered spam. So you I think you meant to so (or recall) 75% of all email is/was spam.

Re: Nokia had it first...

Yeah, Nokia Sensor (2005-ish). Also google had something like this, Dodgeball.

Re: Au contraire. mon brave, have an upvote...

While you're at it... In Tokyo we'd head for the local Ramen shop and get a huge bowl (yes, there is pork involved, so it's hardly veggy), spiced up to the brink of internal spontanious combustion, but it works.

Still one of my favourites anywhere I am...