Posts by Chronos

Conspiracy

Is it not possible that Hillary's e-mail spillary is ancillary and the grillery is artillery from the deep south Conservative hillbillary?

Looking forward to the Storm

Swift's all very good (if you're not as fussy as me, get one) but I want a real back/home/menu button set, not something stealing a goodly bit of my screen. 128GB SD and 1080p (for the occasional VR headset use) are nice to have, too.

I will be on the list when the Storm launches, no doubt about it. That fixed battery isn't really a problem if it's like the one in the Moto G - changing that is a five minute job. I just hope the build finds its way into the public Cyanogenmod repo but, as long as I can get root and fastboot access, I don't care enough for it to be a blocker issue.

While we're on the subject of CyanogenMod, please note that CyanogenOS and CyanogenMod are two very different things. The former does take a lot from the latter but there's no guarantee that the CyanogenOS devices will be backported or that a CyanogenOS device will be CM-like in the things you can do to it, eg bootloader and custom recovery. cyngn.com is a commercial entity, cyanogenmod.org is a community site.

Bastard! T|N>K

Usually, BOfH leaves me nodding sagely in agreement. This time it's full on belly laugh - and I have a lot of belly ;-)

You owe me a new bloody K120 and a pot of screen wipes from Poundland.

Bloody ads again.

Perhaps when you have to defend your business model every ten minutes, it may just be that your business model is a parasitic nuisance.

I know people, myself included, who will not buy anything advertised aggressively on principle. If your ad makes it harder for me to find the information I wanted (specs on a 'phone, a schematic, some code snippet with a common name) then not only am I never going to touch that product or the site pushing it with a ten foot pole, I'm going to actively ask others to avoid them as well. It's why StartPage and DDG are doing so well right now.

I don't particularly care about positioning of ads because, patently, anyone serving them has a pecuniary interest in people seeing them anyway. Arguing over rankings is just splitting hairs. For those of us who use the web for research there is nothing more annoying and dispiriting than trying to find something and every promising link for information turns out to be another bloody digital salesweasel trying to pry open your wallet.

So no, Google, not everyone universally adores your ads. A lot of us think that they, and you, suck.

Bloat

I think we need to remember that, along with new features and shiny bling, MS have had to put up with "my stone-age application, cavepaint 22B.C., must work, dammit!" from all comers. It's this backwards compatibility that has caused a lot of the beer gut Windows currently has.

I'm not for one second saying MS is blameless for the lardy arse-cheeks dangling pendulous over the edge of the platters in your HDD, just that they have been, on occasion, unfairly criticised for bloat when it's in response to customer demands for legacy code not to break - without the ability to recompile it against newer libraries. It's a bit like the stick Pirelli is currently getting for crap tyres that don't last 31 laps after F1 management asked them for crap tyres that won't last 31 laps...

Icon: Devil's advocate, natch.

Moto G 3rd gen LTE

Available for £149.07 on Jeff's own tat emporium. So the natural order is thus restored.

Must say I am tempted by the 128GB capacity of its SD slot, though. If Cyanogen ever becomes available for the Aqua it would then be a no-brainer.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

If that relies on the browser being truthful, good luck with those figures being accurate. Mine, for example, will identify as Firefox 39 on Windows 7 on every mechanism, not just user agent. It even fools Google, the de-facto kings of analytics - I get an e-mail on the rare occasions I actually use my (utterly fictitious) login to watch something Ogle has decided is age-restricted on the 'tube like vaping vids with "New sign-in from Windows 7" as the subject. That it isn't what it is pretending to be is a given.

I know, I'm an arsehole and I'm deliberately making my OS look less popular than it is. If you check with the EFF's Panopticlick, you'll discover why I do this. A *nix browser is just far too easy to track for comfort. Even with my settings, it's still one in 2.9 million.

Just so you know...

This, and the other start replacements, will not stop Cortana running in the background. Task mangler will reveal TSDB still watching your every move. There is only one way to stop TSDB running and that's remove her from C:\Windows\System Apps\ - you have to kill her process and quickly move the whole folder out of the path before, true to her gaming roots, she respawns, at which point the WinX start menu breaks spectacularly so you must have an alternative loaded and enabled. I'm fairly sure she'll come back with an eventual Windows Update, so keep an eye on task mangler.

Me? Sod this malarkey, I'm sticking with something that doesn't treat me as the product.

Why did you drive your business off a cliff?

"The SatNad told us to!"

The answer is simple...

...and it's there as soon as you boot into the shiny, new OS: MS are playing catch-up with Google and moving into the targeted ads backed by profiling biz. Check out the number of "privacy" controls in Win 10 and pay particular attention to the names of the bits that they flip. We'll flip them but the Twitfacespacebookerati will probably remain blithely ignorant to their existence as long as they can still watch funny cat videos on Youtube.

Cortana (hereinafter referred to as TSDB: That Spying Digital Bitch), Edge[ofReason], modern apps, they're all gateways for the flow of preference data from you and ingress portals to your eyeballs. Just like these free newspapers we used to get shoved through the door that lined the bottom of the budgie's cage, circulation is everything. That's why they're "giving away" Win 10 and it's also why corporates ain't getting it - because they generally have sysadmins who will come down on this sort of network traffic like a slightly manic, misanthropic ton of bricks.

I do wonder whether the IT media's skirting around this simplest of explanations is due to the fact that most of it is ad supported anyway and Windows' taking revenue right on the desktop is seen as a little bit of a threat. Well, it isn't. It's more like using an H-bomb to open a bag of crisps given MS' market share and, like primitive people trying to avoid mentioning the devil just in case it appears, they're a bit afraid to look at the possible outcome.

Once you get rid of all this dross by adding Classic Shell and Winaero tweaker then ripping out the spyware such as TSDB and OneDrive[sYouMad], it ends up looking remarkably like? Yep, Windows 7.

The underlying OS isn't too bad, as far as I can see with my limited testing. However, don't mistake "free-as-in-beer" with "without cost." The bill hasn't dropped yet and, when it does, it may well turn out to be less of a bargain than we thought.

And that's before we start on the cost to personal privacy.

Priorities. They've heard of them.

Surely these days people have more stuff to worry about than Sue coming to work in a Grateful Dead T-shirt? Fair enough if the employee is customer-facing and fronting the corporate image but R&D geeks? The whole point of employing such people is that they think differently and are about as individual as it is possible to get. Shoe-horning them into a corporate drone shell is just going to piss them off and make them leave - or rebel and, believe me, you do not want creative people to have any reason to make your life more difficult because they will, in many new, interesting, hard to detect and quite possibly brilliant ways.

Temperature

Quite aside from the detection issue and the auto-suppression systems not working with lithium fires, there's a very good reason that decent branded Li-Ion cells come with warnings not to charge below 0C (32F in old money). If you charge a cell below this temperature, it may precipitate lithium metal onto the anode and can short the cell, which is a Bad Thing. At even lower temperatures I suspect it doesn't even need to be charging for the cell to short.

Remind me again one of the reasons why stowaways don't survive in the wheel wells/cargo holds of planes?

Of course, bunging Li-Ion cells into the plane's own control systems outside the controlled environment of the cabin is also a Very Bad Idea, so all of you calling kettle|pot are quite correct.

Bloody hell!

Please ensure you turn off prefetch in your browser when looking at the Full Disclosure article. Security mailing lists usually obfuscate exploit URLs by using things like hxxp:// but this article seems to not only have failed to do so but also made them hyperlinks. If you have a vulnerable device and your browser takes it into its empty head to prefetch those links despite the rel="nofollow" attribute - well, let's just say possible unintended consequences, shall we?

A Transmission Called Malice

Nefarious purposes? Not so fast.

Firstly the front end of the receivers in these modern cars are so wide a simple 5W signal anywhere in the vicinity reasonably close to 433.92MHz will de-sense them. There used to be a repeater on the Winter Hill TV transmitter site until everyone who worked there bought a Land Rover, at which point the output at 433.3MHz de-sensed the receivers of their keyless entry systems to the point nobody could unlock their vehicles when the repeater was open. $DEITY forbid they should use the actual key.

Secondly the FM capture effect means someone with a broken, always on keyfob could potentially jam a whole car park if it is sufficiently more powerful than everyone else's.

Thirdly it could just be someone cocking around with a Baofeng (£25) with no malice aforethought apart from showing up these halfwits who are incapable of using a physical key. It may even have been a rent-a-copper's comms blocking the receivers if said car park was attached to one of those fancy, overpriced shopping centres they have around there. Sounds to me like yet another case of herd stupid.

It's highly unlikely anyone would have been deliberately stopping this lot from locking their cars so they could go through the crisp packets, old car park stickers and chocolate bar wrappers in the door pockets or rifle through the Starbucks cups in the passenger floorwell. You'd have to be pretty desperate...

Kumquat

In this case, the Kumquat Takeaway. Datsun has two roles: Firstly it produces the GT-R, as pure a driver's car as was ever made and secondly it produces its other models specifically to allow normal road users to know where all the bellends and school-run scrapers are so they can be avoided. They should put Nissan badges on the wings so you know it's going to pull out on you at the junction and you can take evasive action and do all the driving for them. Again.

Audi performs a similar function. Audis also have the patented spatial expansion windscreens that allow the driver to think they're obeying the two second rule while actually being a fag paper from your trumpet. Detecting the four rings of no confidence in your rear-view camera and flashing up a warning well in advance would be a useful addition for motorway driving...

Okay, I'm generalising, but it's Sunday. Have you been out there today? Christ, it's like the annual general meeting of the blind halfwit bodywork-benders society.