Posts by Nick Ryan

Without being narky... it probably wasn't tested with tattoos. I would hope that they tested with a wide a range of skin pigmentation and body fat weight ranges as they could, but even though I'm around quite a few folk with tattoos I wouldn't have considered testing directly on a tattoo. From this particular example it would appear to be a specific type of ink that caused the problem rather than any tattoo ink so Apple may have even tested on tattoos.

I'd guess that this will be included in the tests next time around and / or there would be a new option to disable the sensors that no longer work as a result of particular tattoo inks.

Re: Haven't these people heard of DBAN?

My brother-in-law worked for a company that supplied systems to the MOD, and when a HDD or a software problem surfaced the MOD returned the HDD; Wiped, smashed and shredded. Software issues were quite difficult to resolve apparently.

Re: I've got it now.

Aha. If that is the case then thanks for explaining just how this thing might be a vaguely useful exploit.

If there's a conflict of demand between the US and a country like Ireland who do you think corporations will side with?

Whichever way makes more money. More insightful companies look to the long term on this as well particularly if their US market is largely saturated and they've just noticed that there are considerably more non-Americans on the planet than Americans.

Re: No defense against willful ignorance.

If the damn Sender and Reply-To domain names don't match then it's usually a sign that something screwy is happening. This wouldn't fix every instance of phishing / spam but would resolve a lot of them and "good" bulk email senders like to ensure that an SPF record is created pointing to their systems if the client wants to keep the sender name consistent with their in-house emails.

Re: Profit not volumes

Profit = the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in buying, operating, or producing something.

Amazon make an enormous amount of money. However rather than sitting on it and admiring it or spaffing it at shareholders in great chunks they chose to continually re-invest the money.

It's basic business finance where if you record a profit the government will help themselves to a huge chunk of it (at least in the UK) therefore a good business accountant will always manage to offset the amount earned against investments, costs and other reasonable expenses to ensure that what's remaining is as low as possible. This is why international companies shift their profits to the most corporation tax friendly country as it's the difference between losing 40% of your profit to tax or considerably less, e.g. 1-2%.

As for stock market "worth" this is a total nonsense market as the perceived value of shares is usually down to pure speculation and greed rather than any particular indication of a company's value or business prospects.

Re: Thermostats

It's outstanding isn't it? Even with countless explanations, "her indoors" still thinks that in summer you should turn the damn thermostats down and that you turn them back up in winter.

Not just me either, a heating engineer who visited has the same problem where whenever his wife is cold she turns the thermostat to max, and then when she's warm she turns it way down again.

(...)or the fact that so many people in the world, (not just via this particular scam), continue to believe that there exist, 'magic' pills, potions or extracts to loose weight.

But people are lazy. And Stupid. Often stupid because they are lazy. Laziness is an inate human trait and we wouldn't be where we are now without putting so much effort into making things easier for ourselves.

Look at how many half-respectable websites have a panel with spam shit on every page. The ones listing "you wouldn't believe what happened next in these 12 amazing pictures": photoshopped tatt for anybody with a clue or "online companies hate you knowing this trick to buying iPads": preying on the greedy and desperate or "doctors hate this miracle diet pill" (with appalling mis-matched "before" and "after" shots): seeking the lazy and gullible. And this shit is repeated time and time again, everywhere - slowly reinforcing validity through repetition which is a key factor in brain washing and certain established organisation types.

There genuinely are some medical products that can drastically help with weight loss. However these have usually been found to have rather unpleasant side effects often centred around or involving serious malnutrition buy often others as well. Not even the corporate controlled drug testing processes have permitted these drugs through to market given how dangerous they are. There are some very clever investigations underway that are looking at slight twists on the theme but from what I understand, even these are quite a few years away from even approaching clinical testing - one of the complexities is that our digestive systems are pretty much unique to each individual given genetic, lifestyle, age and sex differences and the widely varying makeup of bacteria that inhabit our guts and that are critical to digestion.

Re: The Platform

Turns out that it's only been around since the beginning of March (http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/01/welcome-to-the-platform/... so I guess I haven't missed much!

Re: speed kills

In any case , the guy I saw joining the motorway at 30 miles an hour would be the safest guy on the road, instead of rammed sideways by a truck and flying into the central armco

Exactly. If the traffic on the road is moving at 60mph (assume inside lane of motorway with trucks) then the safest speed to join the motorway is 60mph. This is why these things are called "accelleration lanes", to allow the joining vehicles to get to speed so they can safely join the road.

Had an argument with the mother-in-law a few years back about how extremely dangerous it is to join a motorway at 30mph compared to 60/70mph. She just couldn't get it through her head that the gaps to join would effectively be larger and she would be less of an utter hazard to all following vehicles (who would also have to slow down to 30mph and also join dangerously). But this is the same woman who ignores all cyclists on the road and claims that "it's ok to drink and drive if you're local".

Re: Silly question .... how old is the moon?

Any Earth collision that formed the moon would have happened much, much earlier. That kind of impact would have wiped out all life except possibly for a few very resilient bacteria, and there would be very little record of anything that happened before it.

Which PC would normally be connected to the LAN via the phone...

It's quite common for VOIP phones to connect to the PC's network connector and to have a "pass-through" connector to connect the phone to the PC. These phones are effectively 3 port network switches, with the three connections being 1) the wall socket, 2) the phone and 3) the PC. These network switches are usually 100, not Gigabit ports.

While this may sound an odd thing to do, it greatly reduces the number of network ports required although many sites have a socket for the phone and a socket for the PC in place already, it just depends on whether or not the phone socket can be repurposed as a network socket or not. You'd be surprised how many can't be!

Re: so negative, wow!

But it is true, for the large majority of cases, that Google Apps are "good enough". Most users of MS Word do not write multi-column, multi-chapter index integrated tightly version controlled monster documents - for these users a PC is little more than a glorified typewriter. Some parts of the "office suite" the Google Doc editors are actually better than the Office 365 versions.

However when you need to go beyond, for example, a relatively simply structured document or letter, then you will quickly find the shortcomings of the Google Doc editors. While there are "plugins" that help to alleviate the gap in functionality, experience has shown most of them to be pretty appalling - getting better but still not very good.

Re: I want mine on a large sheet of paper

I hope you used HD paint?

Seriously, projection screens are being sold as "HD ready", "HD compatible" and similar nonsense.

Re: FORD SYNC

Yep, spotted than on new Fords. Seems to be something similar on some new Peugeot models as well.

Does anybody know if this part of the same scheme or is it a separate initiative?

Re: Seriously, every loser wins?

Glad that I'm not the only one to have read it that way.

Re: Don't stop there

In Microsoft's (partial) defence, a huge number of the problems with Windows and Sleep mode are due to device drivers and in my experience, particularly wireless network drivers but these aren't the only culprit. However one application in particular seems to often make a mess of Windows Sleep mode, sometimes even preventing it completely: Microsoft Outlook. Thanks for that MS.

Re: oh lord...

This may be something that is also intended to help non-first world Internet connection countries or regions. Just considering these situations there are a lot of instances where there will be quite a few locally networked PCs but with rather limited bandwidth - far better that the systems are patched and updated than not. Or another easy example in the first-world Internet sceneria on a HE campus of some form there will be thousands of non-domain controlled PCs downloading thousands of updates which eats a lot of bandwidth.

This is actually rather a good idea from Microsoft (as long as it's done properly, but that's true for anything really).

Re: There's also ...

The "Three" version is shite. Install a crappy app on your mobile, register it - but only when you have a good signal, and then suffer with an utterly backwards, non-integrated "phone and SMS message" system that doesn't work very well, is annoying to use, and is entirely separate to your normal phone and SMS functions.

I have a nasty feeling that the other offerings aren't much better.

Re: Memories of Microsoft Bob

I'm starting to believe Microsoft Bob to be a giant false memory; I don't believe I've ever seen Microsoft Bob, even though I feel I have.

You're lucky. Some "friends" of mine decided that it would be fun to install it on my computer when I wasn't around and then to watch me curse and swear at it. Gits.

Almost as funny as when they decided to configure a 2 minute long wav file as a windows launch sound, during which time the system hung until the audio had completed playing. Win 3.x - what a joy.

Re: Eternal problem

Was trying to remember the name of that device from the late 70s... Microwriter - the device that was interesting but useless for almost everything due to certain little functional issues. Connectivity - good luck with that. Editing - you basically can't edit until you get the text into a more conventional device.

This said, the rather more recent follow up CyKey does look vaguely interesting. It would look a bit more interesting if it was possible to connect it to any form of modern device without all kinds of nasty kludges and cables. They claim to be working on bluetooth support but are having licensing problems... which is a little strange seeing as bluetooth chips are pretty damn easy to get up and running as they are largely "commodity" systems now, but maybe the problem is more integration / configuration and power management on CyKey's side.

Still a niche product though.

Re: Sort of related question

Nest works fine for me. A much better interface to deal with than the utterly unwieldy two on, two off or some nightmarish one-off, one-on kludge during winter particularly when you have the typical interface of 4 buttons repurposed for everything in some archaic manner. You ditch the silly idea of "heating on" and "heating off" and just set the temperature that you want, when you want it. In a particularly cold winter's night you don't really want the heating "off", you just want it at a lower level than during the day when you are around and would like to feel your fingers. The temperature is set at a target value for a particular time therefore if you want 20C at 6am in the morning and your house takes 45m to warm up to that from 12C it will turn on at 5:15am. Similarly, if the temperature is 16C and it predicts only a 30m warm up period, it'll turn on at 5:30am instead. (silly temp examples, but you get the idea)

The auto-away option overrides the temperature to whatever you set as your minimum / frost-protect temperature and should spot when you are away or not in case you forget to turn it off. The remote app can turn the heating up and down or trigger the away option manually and if you expect to be home at, eg, 8pm you can tell the system to have it warm for you then.

Re: The Law on encryption passwords in the US is well established.

That actually seems like a sensible way to interpret things like data encryption. How the hell did this happen?

Re: Risk?

I'd forgotten about some of those, particularly the impossible projection watch, which even it were physically possible to somehow cram the required components into the ring (I consider it currently borderline possible but damn expensive as most would have to be custom integrated) however just the reality of basic geometry made the actual projection side impossible at the angles and targets demonstrated in the photoshopped images.

And as for Bleen... whichever fools backed that really need to watch less hollywood "sci"-fi and engage a bit with reality.

re: @MichaelMorrissey

Thanks for registering just to write unsubstantiated almost-racist rubbish.

Android users tend to be from "the third world"? Hardly: many android (and winphone) devices are often the same price or more than the apple equivalents. This doesn't equate with them being used by "poor people".

For some reference statistics, which you will doubtless enjoy manipulating and misreading to give whatever picture you want: smartphone % penetration by country..

Back to your "third world" angle: Here's a breakdown of the US's smartphones by OS. Unless you are going to now state that the USians are in fact living in a third world country, would you care to explain this?

Relating back into the first stats, here's one showing worldwide market share..

While it is interesting to note that the US has a more balanced split of Apple vs Android in it's market, the US is only 13th in overall smartphone penetration. Some "third world" countries such as Spain and Germany have rather higher OS splits in favour of Android compared to Apple.

One point to note is that in the developing markets the price paid for handsets is less than in the developed markets. This necessarily skews the market split away from Apple as other than 2nd hand or older devices, most Apple phones are priced out of the reasonable disposable income price range - food, heating, clothes, education or mobile phone? WinPhone devices are making reasonable inroads into these price constrained markets but nothing compared to feature phones and to a lesser extent "landfill" android phones. It's these phones that will be targetted by this kind of exploit, they are often unsupported, never updated by their manufacturer and often too costly for an end user to even consider the data bandwidth to peform an update and often as a result they have access to local app stores and not Google Play. However this does not mean that an app that requires Root access will work as even the landfill devices don't come with root access as standard.

Basically, it's a security scare story from an advertiser that's sole reason for existing is to sell security products.

(EDIT: some of the links may not work as the damn stat site sometimes arbitrarily requires a signin to view the stats. sorry).

Quark also shafted every user, repeatedly, through their despicable file version handling practices. Want to import a file from a version that's more than one release old? Forget it. How about save a file in a new version in an earlier format to allow somebody else to use it? Forget it. Gits. This and their dastardly unreliable configuration settings that somehow reset themselves just before a deadline or files that were saved to be unreadable... the pain just goes on.