* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

One-way Martian ticket: Pick passengers for Musk's first Mars pioneer squad

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Sending Trump and Piers Morgan would be a remarkably efficient start to terraforming. After all, the atmosphere on Mars is rather thin and cold therefore adding a lot of hot air should be a good start.

there's probably a good reason why I'm not a rocket scientist!

User couldn't open documents or turn on PC, still asked for reference as IT expert

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Re: her fault for being impatient?

No, it's rubbish PSU design. All too common.

This would have been in the age of 286s (early 1990's), when PSUs were somewhat less sophisticated and refined than they are, or should be, today.

Not that there aren't still a lot of poor PSUs these days, particularly for consumer networking kit and similar.

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

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Re: "operating system updates end up disabling the framework"

but, but, but... .net was promised as an end to DLL hell. Also, all .net versions would be forward compatible. So, DLL hell, caused by Microsoft's abject failure to do anything sensible with libraries, for example such terribly difficult to comprehend principles as a standardised version scheme built into the "open library" code, hasn't been fixed by DLL hell x 100 with added registry stupidity built in, or .net/COM as it's otherwise known which is of course the bastard descendent of ActiveX, OLE and DDE before it.

While I'm happy to criticise MS (to be fair, all IT vendors), Sage has some responsibility here as they should code their applications defensively and clearly inform users of any prerequisite failures and give them the information to deal with the problems. Checking for prequisites at install time only is not acceptable. Unfortunately from experience the quality of Sage coding has often left rather a lot to be desired but this isn't helped by Microsoft's VS environment which tends to promote hard linked dependencies without easy and graduated dependency failure handling.

Google, Dropbox the latest US tech giants to sign up to the Privacy Shield

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Tick .. tock .. tick .. tock ..

IANAL but from what I can tell "Privacy Shield" is as useless and pointless as "Safe Harbour"... it's purely a voluntary agreement with no US based legal ramifications for violation and countless get out clauses for whatever US reasons happen to crop up for accessing the data outside of this agreement.

Ordinary punters will get squat from smart meters, reckons report

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Re: The consumer pays again

...and our bills won't ever go down.

Now if the supplier said something along the lines of "pay us £150 to install a 'smart' meter in your home and we'll give you a permanent 5% reduction in your bills which will allow you to save money after X months" then maybe they'd be onto something.

However they'd never do this because this isn't price gouging the customers enough, instead it will be "take money from the government for the devices", "charge all customers more for the devices", "never drop prices" and "save money on meter readers". Even if they did promise a reduction in bills they'd offset this by upping the price elsewhere and increasing the annual price rises to counter the reduction way before the customer would make a saving.

The Great British domain name rip-off: Overcharged .uk customers help pay for cheaper .vodka

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Not expected?

New top-level domains have sold in far fewer numbers than anyone in the industry expected and have already caused a number of companies to close down.

I know this is normal marketing droid on acid fare (or just standard dumb VCs), but bidding millions for TLDs that have a very limited scope and most existing potential users within the scope already have a perfectly working existing domain name is rather dumb. Particularly as the existing domains are already out there printed on marketing materials, brochures, websites, business and all that.... and for some reason the normal person or company won't want to spend more for something pointless?

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: stop being annoying

The other extreme bit of advert related fuckery is the post-page load ads that are inserted into content after the page has "finished" loading. The kind of fuckers that as you scroll down a page slightly to view the next line of text suddenly get added above the fucking text that you're reading moving it all down a bit more. These tends to get inserted just as I try to click on a link that I want, inevitably inserting themselves under where I clicked on what I wanted.

As a result, AdBlock is essential - and anything this misses I have a local hosts file for. Java? installed on my system but not permitted anywhere near the browser. Silverlight? Never. Flash or any other Adobe provided plugin? Not on your life.

Game over: IANA power-grab block pulled from Congress funding bill

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There really, really should be something in place to deal with what can only be deliberate lies and manipulation of facts purely for political or personal campaign purposes. Something akin to contempt of court, how about contempt of the public? :) (or just contempt of reality)

2,000 year old man found dead near 2,000 year old computer

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Was he a type 2a or a type 2b?

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

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Re: US Patents - The Sitcom

There are a couple of ways to manage patent applications:

1) Rubber stamp every patent coming in, charging a nomimal fee for this, let somebody else decide (through the legal process) whether or not the patent has any merit or not. Loudly proclaim that the market is incredibly innovative because there are a lot of patents.

2) Investigate in detail every incoming patent bringing in knowledgable experts on all related subjects, charging a substantial fee for this. The patent validity will still be challenged at a later date, along with the opinions of the in-house experts and their neutrality or bias.

I suspect that there is a happier medium that can be found betweeen the two, however the shouty marketing of "lots of patents = lots of innovation" will always skew this.

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Joke

A pointless race as Lidl won it already and are currently in discussions with carbon nanotechnology experts as to how their bags are thinner than graphene sheets.

Brits: Can banks do biometric security? We'd trust them before the government

Nick Ryan Silver badge

This is an example of a good use of biometric identification. Duplicate matches will happen but because it's a controlled environment and a relatively rare process these can be dealt with.

Compared to using biometrics for authentication, which is daft because it's something that happens regularly and away from controlled environments. As a result the errors that occur generally need to either err on the side of success which naturally introduces security problems the alternative is erring on the side of failure which will piss people off and they will try and avoid the use of the technology.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Am I too cynical?

This is the same Visa that has the totally waste of time and annoying "Verified by Visa" "security" program? Quite apart from the lack of real security where the entire password is stored in plain text somewhere (otherwise asking for character 1, 2 and 3 of the password wouldn't be possible) for one of my accounts I don't think I've ever entered the password this way as it's far quicker and easier to just reset the password. This password change doesn't require any more information than an even moderate information scrape would require beyond the card details which an attacker would require at this point anyway. Then, of course, for "security" (I've yet to figure this one out) where they try to insist that adding alternative, but insecure, credentials to an account such as "mothers maiden name", "place of birth" or "first pet's name" actually adds to security rather than reducing it significantly.

Apple's tax bill: Big in Japan. Like, $120m big

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Re: Sweetheart deals

This is my understanding of it as well - the low rate was negotiated a long time ago and was an incentive to have Apple base their operations in Ireland largely to bring in jobs in the tech sector - even if it was just for an "also ran" computer company. Where it appears that Ireland fucked up badly is that this wasn't a conditional or periodically reviewed arrangement where once Apples fortunes changed (and they did, very positively) that this tax incentive was renegotiated.

Two Sundays wrecked by boss who couldn't use a calendar

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Re: "Have you been forced to do utterly pointless work?"

From a business point of view, timesheets can be invaluable however this isn't about entering what a member of staff was doing between 11:00 and 11:30 on a particular day as that's tedious, usually unnecessary and often impossible to enter as on many occasions staff will multitask to a certain extent. The key is to make it as hassle free and easy as possible therefore just recording against a particular day the number of hours that were taken up by a particular project, or an element of a project, is usually good enough.

Where timesheets can be very useful is to record the hours spent on a project, whether or not this is broken down into documentation, implementation, testing or whatever depends on the project or the degree of detail required. Why is this useful? It's not for monitoring of staff purposes as a good manager should generally know what their staff are up to, it's an important feedback loop for the costing process. For example, if a project is priced based on there being X amount of hours required but it turns out that 3 x X hours were used instead then this indicates a problem somewhere which needs to be fixed. How this is fixed depends on the cause but it quantifiably indicates a problem which needs to be investigated and could either require better (or just some) training, better resource planning, a change of staff (Staff A might be faster, better or just prefers to perform a particular task compared to Staff B) or that the sales droid is in la-la land and needs to be beaten into shape. Without this basic feedback process a business will often badly misquote projects and without it a manager doesn't have the numbers to back up their cases when reporting project issues.

Myself? I hate entering timesheets :) but enough time running a business and projects you learn the value of basic metrics.

You should install smart meters even if they're dumb, says flack

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Always buy quality LEDs, not the junk you get from supermarkets or DIY stores (including the pretty 'orrible Phillips devices). Buying the junk and getting a bad experience is what puts most people off LEDs as they believe that they are (relatively) expensive but very dim whereas the reality of decent LEDs is that they are still relatively expensive, but can be far brighter than the "equivalent" incandescent (mainly halogen these days) or CFL units. The halogens tend to blow within a short period of time and the CFLs cannot be dimmed (good LEDs can, but need good dimmers and careful planning) and the CFLs tend to be slow to start and pretty random colours.

Spoof an Ethernet adapter on USB, and you can sniff credentials from locked laptops

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Re: Oh look, there's a dongle in one of the USB ports of my laptop

You may think it's rare, but I know that a few years ago (4+?) Imperial College London was on the receiving end of USB dongle interception devices - and given the targets it was judged not to have been students behind it.

These types of devices are particularly hard to spot because if your keyboard and mouse are on your desk and the wires run to the PC under the desk, when was the last time that you checked that there wasn't another cable inserted into this arrangement?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: 13 seconds?

AFAIK it's partly because of a dumb-as USB implementation within Windows which may in part have been caused by USB device manufacturers taking shortcuts (for cost saving reasons) and failing to provide a manner to categorically identify a USB device rather than just the class/model of the device. Categorically identifying a USB device requires that it has a unique ID programmed into it somehow but this cost that the manufacturers of volume, cheap as possible devices would rather avoid. I'm not sure whether or not this unique ID is a mandatory specification or not as it's a long time since I read the specifications and these things are probably different between device classes and USB revisions.

Windows stores the device configuration against the port that the device was connected to. Merely moving a device from one port to another triggers Windows into believing that this is an entirely new device and to install fresh drivers or configuration for it. This could have been avoided if there was a unique ID to trust and that Windows trusted this, however Microsoft chose to implement a per-port configuration model. While the per-port configuration is daft it does often help because as with anything registry based the damn configuration does get corrupted (likely due to a horrible database such as the registry not being transactional and it not being possible to apply settings atomically). In this case when a device stops working when plugged into one port you can simply move it to a different port for it to start working again as it will have fresh configuration.

Pixellation popped: AI can ID you, even after PhotoShop phuzzing

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Re: What about numberplates?

Perhaps against a number plate recognition algorithm, however against a car recognition algorithm less likely to be immune. First consider the dataset, as in how many of your car (same make, body shape and colour) were produced - except for the most popular car this number will be surprisingly low. Then consider any after market modifications, such as hanging ornaments (or their absence), stickers or even the odd scrape, some of which would require a relatively high resolution image, and your car is not as generic as you might think it is and therefore it should be relatively unique.

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

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Re: Unless you are Really Big Biz this...

svchost.exe exists for both very tenous lazy developer reasons and to simultansously ensure that it's nearly impossible to adequately secure a system by controlling what has access to what network resource.

Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses

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Boffin

Pah! The daily fail and sun are pretty new and modern really, I wouldn't say that El Reg started it but El Reg has gone a long way to defining the standards:

So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? (2007)

El Reg official units of measurement: Linguine, Jubs, Hiltons and all (2012)

...and no unit of measures would be complete without an online standards converter: The Reg online standards converter

Now go wash your mouth our young man and come back when you've studied the correct units of measure.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "River"-Class?

My guess is badly. Given minaturisation, of both control systems and explosives, a relatively close launch of something distinctly unpleasant would be rather bad. On the other hand, the structure of these ships should be rather better designed to contain the damage - I doubt if they are built to deflect it in the manner of land based tanks.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

120 London buses

Kudos for applying the correct measurement scales... however is El Reg missing suitable displacement measures? Should we allow El Reg to hijack another measurement for this undeniably important unit of measurement? :)

24 knots (arg, what non-El Reg unit is this?) compared to 20 knots... that's a fair gain but being the techo-geeks we are haunting El Reg, what gave it this improvement in speed?

Also, that's one big bastard "hangar" (I don't know what it's meant to be called) where the pic is showing the ship coming out from, how does that compare to the airship hangars, particularly compared to the recent Airlander.

Damn, I'm feeling curious today!

Hacked hookup site Ashley Madison's security was laughable

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Regadless of the morals of a site such as this, what's staggering is the number of users who used their work (as in military, government or whatever) email address and not a throw away free one specifically setup for this website.

Microsoft, Lenovo cross-licensing love-in: Android mobes knocked up with... Office apps

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Word on Android

I'd rather than waste time with shit like this Microsoft actually fixed MS Word so it didn't randomly insert words when pressing keys on the on-screen keyboard. Including the bloody delete key. The stupidity of this is pretty amazing and has rendered Word on Android totally unusable for the last two months.

No other apps seem to have this problem, changing different virtual keyboards doesn't fix it, the only thing that works is to use a bluetooth keyboard.

Windows 10 needs proper privacy portal, says EFF

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Pint

Disk 1 of 2079?

On an aside, I am now going to be a gibbering wreck until it's beer o'clock.

Disk 1 of 2079? That brings back far too many painful memories of multi-disk software installation, usually failing on disk 37/38 but only on some systems and not others.

We're going to bring an asteroid fragment into Lunar orbit

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Re: Still doubtfull

Well, it'll be useful for the study of an actual asteroid - or a small bit chipped off one which may, or may not, be representative of asteroids as a whole or even that asteroid itself. It'll be useful somehow as the study of what happens to stuff up in space for such a long time and what they're made of is rather revealing. Beyond the sciency side of early solar system research, asteroid mining could be phenomenally useful either on the Earth side resources front or on the space bound raw resource requirements.

It'll also be useful for the technology required to perform the actions of chipping a bit off an asteroid, separating it from the gravity of the parent object and while attached to it securely, changing it's solar orbit such that it intercepts with Earth/Moon and finished up in an orbit around the moon.

Chip giants pelt embedded AI platforms with wads of cash

Nick Ryan Silver badge

At least this is "AI", as in a neural network based technology. A long time ago I dumped all my university modules that were meant to be AI when it turned out that they were nothing more than Logical Reasoning - i.e. extrapolated forms of "If This, Then That" and while useful this wasn't AI.

As I see it the problem with AI, as in neural networks, is that the more advanced they become the less provable they are and therefore for many purposes, the less useful. This sounds negative but for many touted AI purposes the requirement is for 100% accuracy (or as close as) which while nominally achievable, is considerably harder to prove if you can't fully test and validate each step in a process independently.

Bees bring down US stealth fighter

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Facepalm

Re: "eight pounds, or in modern numbers, 3.6 kilos."

Good man. Now all I have to do is to get the thought out of my mind: are those bee stings or "proper" jubs.

I'm leaving...

Flipping heck! Virtual machines hijacked via bit-meddling Feng Shui

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Re: Feng Shui???

In theory ECC could help here, however the description seems to suggest more than just single bit flips which ECC would struggle to deal with.

Brexit Britain: HP Sauce vs BBC.co.uk – choices that defined voters

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Remainers are all Great Wen-based hipsters?

a) What's a London Underground? Some sort of armed resistance movement?

Not sure about the resistance, but on average it has about the same number of legs as arms. It's some form of torture/mind numbing device to shove as many people in as small a physical space as possible with guaranteed heating (regardless of the weather outside) and, certainly in the evening commute, with a "fragrant" undercurrent. All while oozing sympathy for the hard done by drivers who earn £50k a year largely for pressing "start" and "stop" buttons and occasionally shouting at passengers on a tannoy.

b) Spotify, iPlayer, Twatbooki, Instagram etc...given the quality of our broadband, I think not

You must be on Virgin Broadband (at peak time - 16:00 to 20:00) as well then...

c) Nearest airports are all about 3 hours drive away so no Easyjet

Given that internal flights from where I live take 2 hours to get to (including parking at daylight robbery prices) and at least an hour to get through the security theatre for just a 45m flight I don't think you have much to complain about. Unless you're complaining about the lack of EasyJet and being forced to fly with an airline that even pretends to give a shit?

d) Nearest Virgin Train is about 2 hours away.

Even longer if you live anywhere "serviced" (hahahaha) by Southern Rail.

e) Airbnb - does that mean B & B in a field? We have lots of Yurts for hire!

Been there, done that. Should have booked a hotel. Would have been cheaper. And nicer.

'Alien megastructure' Tabby's Star: Light is definitely dimming

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: ALIENS!

Total electromagnetic silence in space apart from the clicking of quasars and the humming of stars.

Pretty much. If an alien civilisation follows the pattern of humanity in its technological progression (and there's no real reason why we're not pretty average and statistically we'd have to meet quite a few alien life forms to work out what may be a fair average) from the discovery of radio to primitive spaceflight and computers then there is only a very, very small time window that an alien civilisation will be recklessly broadcasting to the universe.

During this time window the relative power of the broadcasts will be pretty low and therefore should an observer happen to be watching at the appropriate time, the detection of the signals will be very, very hard due to their low power. After this window then efficiencies in broadcast techniques tend to make the wasteage considerably lower even as the effectiveness goes up - this is down to narrower bands and directional communications which overall require somewhat less power. We're probably not quite at the "quiet" stage of our galactic EM emission development but we're fairly close.

London's 'automatic' Tube trains suffered 750 computer failures last year

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Really?

I believe that many of the complaints revolve around the fact that most other train services (ignoring intercity routes) don't have a guard on the train. Therefore why does Southern require this where others don't?

Yes, having an additional person on the train ought to improve safety to a certain degree. Whether or not this makes any real difference is up to a lot of arguments and will naturally depend on the trains and stations involved.

West country cops ponder appearance of 40 dead pigeons on A35

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Re: Sport

We disposed of the carcasses responsibly but I'm guessing that somebody in Devon might have taken an easier route.

Ah well, this is Devon. The only "easier" route is the A30, not the "OMG, when can we get off this road?" A35.

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

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Re: That getting a coat icon

...and this is somehow inappropriate for ICANN? :)

(but yes, it does and it has been mentioned before...)

You think Donald Trump is insecure? Check out his online store

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Joke

Re: Make America Great Again

No. He'll be holding negotiations with Prince Philip.

Microsoft axes 2,850 more Windows Phone, sales staff – a week after Justin Timberlake sang on stage for them

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Re: Also a name change-

Not so. The browser OS is determined from the User Agent string. For example for Firefox this would be something like:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i586; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20130401 Firefox/31.0

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0

or Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2227.1 Safari/537.36

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2227.0 Safari/537.36

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2227.0 Safari/537.36

Pretty easy to derive the host OS from these strings.

(Examples shamelessly pulled from http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php?name=Chrome and I presume that these are fairly accurate examples).

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Setting this registry values makes sweet FA difference on Windows 10 Pro anyway.

Also, as soon as the primitive joke of an "app store" fires up it queues all manner of abject junk to be updated on the system. It doesn't matter if you immediately uninstall the rubbish, if there's an "update" queued the the PoS app store will just reinstall it regardless. Once all updates have been completed by the "app store", then it is possible to finally remove the rubbish. Resetting the app store makes no odds as the updates are already queued and in typical delightful MS fashion, entirely invisible.

None of this can't be fixed with suitable PowerShell scripts that run on login or other schedules but the rubbish apps will be there for a period of time. One other thing noting is that these junk apps are installed per user, per machine therefore a user using a system that they haven't used before will have the junk apps installed just for them regardless of whether or not other users, or local administrators, have removed them on that system.

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

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In order to offend both the Devonish and the Cornish I take care to put cream on one half of the scone, jam on the other and then ram them together and eat them like an atypical upcountryer.

Quite why you'd pollute such a delight with butter is beyond both myself and the straw poll of emigrant locals I've found to quiz on the matter.

Cyberpunks might not be crooks but they're really very rude

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Re: And I take objection to *this* article.

...and I hereby claim offense at this comment. Just because m'kay.

Why Agile is like flossing and regular sex

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Re: Yugguy A lot of postits

You're an evil, evil person. But yes, I'd have probably done the same... :)

Argos changes 150 easily guessed drop-off system passwords

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Re: Wait a minute

Argos did send a SWAT team, but Yodel delivered it to a similar-sounding address 2 streets away from where it was supposed to go.

These packages are often "signed for" by somebody who most definitely did not look like a friend of the driver but was happy to accept the parcel that was not for them and is now untraceable. And the addresses doesn't even have to be similar-sounding as from experience the average Yodel delivery minion is not required to be able to read so they don't have to have this restriction.

Lowland Scots plunged into panic by marauding ostrich family

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Re: Really?

That doubtless depends on whether or not the average Glaswegian male is in captivity.

Seagate soups up M.2 Nytro flash card

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I think they're voicing concern that as the capacity of storage devices like these goes up, and thermal output of them goes up with intensive use, that there will be a heat dissipation problem particularly where there are many of these in one enclosure.

Well, that's my guess anyway. It would be more of a real concern if the entire extent of an SSD storage medium was written to repeatedly but this isn't really likely to happen for bandwith reasons and due to the way SSDs optimise writes, even writing repeatedly to a single file or "block" isn't going to impact the same physical location on the physical SSD chips.

Apple Watch craze over before it started: Wrist-puter drags market screaming off a cliff

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Re: The thing...

I personally have an interest in the health uses of technology due to having several friends and family who are diabetic so if there was a watch that could monitor blood sugar I'd be interested to see it.

I'd be very interested in a non-invasive device that could monitor blood sugar. Unfortunately, in line with elementary scientific principles, to measure blood sugar a device has to have access to blood. The snake-oil and genuinely very dangerous apps that claim to measure blood sugar levels without access to actual blood are total and utter bullshit. Quite how they are even allowed in curated app stores given this fact is some other matter entirely...

Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of tribble dung

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Re: Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of dung

True. I had to really read between the lines to get the vague gist that perhaps, the film really wasn't very good...

UK's climate change dept abolished, but 'smart meters and all our policies strong as ever'

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A translation...

Dan Lewis, senior advisor on infrastructure at the Institute of Directors, said costs of the programme are reported to be escalating further, while the consumer benefits are falling.

costs of the programme are reported to be escalating further

trans: the costs are beginning to get near what independent analysis predicted all along

while the consumer benefits are falling

trans: we still can't think of any benefits for the consumer

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: A Proposal

"Government bill exposes your children to paedophiles and ISIS/Deash will steal your bank details"

That ticks all the fear boxs right?

Close. Although you missed out immigrants. And gays.

"Government bill exposes your children to gay immigrant paedophiles and ISIS/Deash will steal your bank details"

Smartphones aren't tiny PCs, but that's how we use them in the West

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Re: Cool... err say what?

So all I have to do is to live on slave wages, give up any ridiculous notions I may have of human dignity, the right to a fair trial or even the right to read a book of my choosing and I can use QR codes?

Welcome to the United Kingdom. We can also use NFC for payments therefore we are marginally ahead of the PRC.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: QR codes are a great way to point people at malmare

That's fine but most are shortened URLs so you still have no idea where the hell you're going to wind up...