* Posts by Nick Ryan

3755 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

UN negotiations menaced by topless women. Or not

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: And he is....

AIUI: very, very little of any worth goes on in the public chambers. Generally anything of value happens in the side (private) rooms with smaller groups. In English, just to annoy the French.

TITANIC: Nuclear SUBMARINE cruising 'Sea of KRAKENS' may be FOUND ON icy MOON

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I thought that at one time but it's the weight that is the problem. Getting relatively light payloads as far as Titan is expensive on fuel as even with a large chunk of the journey being coasting which is likely why no orbital stages are discussed for this one. There are usually substantial course corrections (navigational changes) as they are inevitably sling shotted into place and we don't have any powerful enough engine systems which wouldn't require enormous amounts of fuel for a direct flight, even to Mars, let alone further. Lifting huge and heavy payloads into near Earth orbit is pretty much trivial in comparison to interplanetary missions.

Behind every great tech boss there’s ... who exactly?

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Joke

Behind every great tech boss there's... a wife who drains his bank account dry like a vampire in a blood bank?

:)

Why 1.6 million people will miss Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 date with fate

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Re: Rockin' hard place.

Well written software should continue to work on a later OS however the other factor is how many specific OS, or OS locked application, dependencies there are in place.

One of the more common application problems will be poorly written IIS applications or IIS applications that use features that have been deprecated or altered in a non-backwards compatible manner on later versions. I've found that on a few occasions that it's just the damn installer that has the problem, the application itself runs fine on a new instance of IIS. IIS is a particular problem here because there is no separation between the IIS application and the OS - get a new OS, get a new version of IIS, there is no choice on this.

A business problem is the challenge that in many cases the current servers continue to run fine, are reliable and haven't had a problem in the last 18 months... therefore why should they be changed now? Computers are tools and one shouldn't have to replace working tools.

Trouble comes in threes: Yet ANOTHER Flash 0-day vuln patch looming

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Re: bbc.co.uk

It's not so much iPlayer, it's all of the videos on their website. They all seem to "require" flash for some very annoying reason.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

bbc.co.uk

Are you paying attention? Please, please, get rid of the useless and annoying reliance on Flash for video.

It's the only reason I might use flash other than the odd backwards site "requiring" it for multiple file uploads.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Sizzling sag aloo

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Aloo is "classic" Indian food? Really?

Unlike various other "national" food types such as Chinese, Indian fare has rapidly taken on whatever local or new ingredients as are available. e.g. How many potato based Chinese dishes are there available in a Chinese restaurant, or Cantonese, or Japanese?

The fact that many of the Indian recipes we know of in the UK were created in the UK or Europe is another factor. Now to just educate people that "Jalfrezi" is simply as style of cooking, not an indicator of peppery hotness, similarly "korma" is not necessarily for hot-food-whimps either as they can be made deliciously hot.

BOO! Grave remote-code exec flaw in GNU C Library TERRIFIES Linux

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: re Using zero terminated strings in C didn't turn out to be the best design decision ever

C pretty much makes buffer overruns the default behaviour. Nice one K&R, nice one.

No it doesn't. Shoddy programmers who don't check length parameters are the fault here.

While the other copy functions perform the parameter checks for the programmer, checking the length parameters before calling the function and gracefully handling any problems is often a better solution than passing off the checks to the function.

Top US privacy bod: EU should STOP appeasing whiny consumers

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Safe Harbor enforceable?

hahahahahaha... what has the US "privacy" bod been reading?

The terms of Safe Harbor agreements are rather too clear: any data is only covered for the exact pre-registered purposes. If data is collected for any other purposes then a Safe Harbor agreement does not apply to the data, therefore if a US organisation claims to have signed up to the Safe Harbor agreement then an EU organisation must ensure that the registration has been filled for the exact purposes stated. For example, a US organisation has signed up to Safe Harbor for support purposes for Product A, however a customer provides data for the support of Product B, this is not covered.

The other gotcha for the Safe Harbor data is that any "official" US organisation that can demonstrate a requirement to access the data must be given access to the data and that there is no legal process to filter this. For example if a local US county decides that it requires access to the data, it must be given access and the safe harbour agreement does not extend to this organisation...

In effect, once your data is in the US, it can wind up anywhere and there's nothing that you can do about it other than not allow the data into the US in the first place.

Professor's BEAGLE lost for 10 years FOUND ON MARS

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Re: Beagle sitting there...

The martians are still looking for the Any key.

Insert 'Skeleton Key', unlock Microsoft Active Directory. Simples – hackers

Nick Ryan Silver badge

So let me get this straight... Some malware that somehow finds itself executing on a DC with sufficient local system access (not necessarily "domain admin") can alter the in-memory code of the authentication process and insert its own tweaks to let specific passwords through as well as the correct ones.

Clever but, well, duh. When a process has full access to all memory in a system it can make all kinds of interesting changes but isn't this what ALSR was meant to help to partially mitigate? ALSR can't fix this problem entirely as the executable needs to be discoverable somehow, it just makes it harder as the attacker has to put more effort into finding the correct memory location to patch. Other than this, good luck fixing as Windows isn't designed to segregate application memory space in this way when a user with local admin access is involved and continually security monitoring or reloading in-memory images is CPU intensive.

As noted previously, when a user with sufficient privelidges is compromised, you have a lot of problems and this is just an example of one. Pretty much why Best Practice dictates that no user should ever have such access on their normal account and instead have a separate admin account which they use on the occasions that they genuinely need to perform system administration. This doesn't make the problem go away, but it does help to reduce the chances.

Tesco preps for Big Data Engine dump: Laters, Clubcard dev

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Tesco have lost the plot on all of the basics of their core trade one of which, as pointed out, is elementary customer service. Sainsburys do seem to have it right though - there are two "mini" supermarkets near where I am, one a Sainsburys Local and a Budgens. From the start all staff in the Sainsbury Local have made a point of clear greetings and farewells, most of the Budgens grunt at you if that much - one rude arse just held his hand out for the money and didn't say a word. Guess which is the more pleasant place to shop? Sainsburys without a doubt. Guess which seem to have the happier staff? Sainsburys as well - just the basics of human interaction seem to be keeping the Sainsburys staff in a better mood (and overheard conversations seem to reflect this as well). It's also interesting to note that Sainsburys have audio recording at their tills which could help to enforce this as well as I suspect that it's a concerted effort from Sainsburys rather than just staff initiative.

[from inside sources] Where Tesco also fail is that their head office is an utter shambles with a lot of reportedly quality staff leaving for nicer places. The staff that seem to be sticking around are those who brown nose their way everywhere and those with no interest in anything much other than their own personal status quo. They're promoting the wrong staff into the wrong places with inexperienced (e.g. cheap) staff in critical roles (some departments are known locally as "the creche" as a result), devaluing good and / or experienced staff until they leave and the result is an impending growing mess that'll likely implode soon enough. On top of this they are also attempting to offshore as much of their core operations as possible, which as we all know works so well when you add in even cheaper staff, language and context issues and a few thousand miles of not giving a shit.

It could be that somebody with a clue has taken over at the top and is savvy enough to spot the problems and how to fix them by establishing a focus on their core business.

Hey look! Microsoft's workforce isn't all white men

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Global and local, black and white.

Too right. Although from what I can find the US's approximate ratio is 72% "white" therefore there are a disproportionally low number of white employees and with 4% of the US being Asian, their share of 29% of Microsoft's workforce is definitely out of whack. Nothing's straightforward though as around 9% of the US's population are "mixed" race therefore either of Microsoft's reported values could be out by around 9% as what is self-reported is not always the same as census demonimations.

It's much fairer to ensure that staff of equal roles are paid equally, but even this doesn't work as those employed in expensive areas where the wages are generally higher than average would expect higher wages. It is much better to employ with equal opportunities, rather than a thoroughly retarded, backwards and do-gooder-bigot-serving "equal representation" which can only lead to octeganarian male pole dancers.

Hipsters ahoy! Top Ten BOARD games for festive family fun

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Hunters and Gatherers?

Not sure about the inclusion of Hunters and Gatherers as while it's a fair game it's the one that I've seen so many times abandoned or thrown into charity shops and even my copy has been barely touched and is almost pristine. It's not a patch on the main Carcasonne game and has a few flaws that once you've sussed the tactics tend to ruin the game.

American bacon cured with AR-15 assault rifle

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Re: Hangover Cure?

An easy solution, buy from "microbreweries"... usually rather better than the commercial nat's piss that you find in every bar.

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

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Re: Exaggerating much?

@ Ivan 4 - I'm not sure you read the RSPB article...

They clearly stated that there are gaps in their knowledge regarding placement, that there will always be some trade offs but that they are committed to ensuring that the adverse effects are minimal. They even state where there have been some complete failures of placement that have had a serious impact on the local bird population and while there have been a few bad cases in the UK, they are very minor compared to the ones that they cited.

As to the effect of the RSPB's objections and whether or not they are overruled or ignored, that's a different matter.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Exaggerating much?

Agreed. Wind power has its place, but shouldn't be seen as the solution to anything in its entirity, more a possibly useful component or supplement to power generation.

As for how evil these things supposedly are, the sensible organisations have a rational, well thought out policy and approach to the matter. For example, here's the RSPB's take on wind farms: http://www.rspb.org.uk/forprofessionals/policy/windfarms/

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: This isn't about energy, it's about ideology.

Why whenever I read the word "Neoliberal" in some text on the Internet do I imagine the writer frothing at the mouth and dribbling a bit?

On the other hand, some bits of the current economic system are truly unstainable or just mythical: "perpetual growth" being the most stupid where all countries, industries, markets and everything else must be seen to be growing continually or are judged to be a failure.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – Thin plot, great CGI effects

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: one film edit

Some bits of the books did go on a bit, so cutting them out of a film where the film representation would taken even longer would not help the story. However one film seems to be most about dwarves singing, and the next morphed into tedious kung-fu / wire-floaty / unfeasible action scenes and it all felt like contrived filler particularly as it didn't even add to the film as a whole, it took away.

However having seen the first two... I'll try to avoid the last but may not be successful.

Microsoft's dodgy new Exchange 2010 update breaks Outlook clients

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Re: Exchange IMAP???

I doubt it - the similarities between standard IMAP and Microsoft's IMAP implementation in Exchange are few enough that bugger all works with it. There used to be entire websites dedicated to the topic, but I suspect they gave up as it became more and more obvious that MS didn't give a stuff about IMAP and were only interested in their in-house APIs.

Buy Your Own Device: No more shiny-shiny work mobe for you

Nick Ryan Silver badge

What utterly useless advice. Four fingers of kit kat are much more similar in shape and size to a modern mobile phone. Unfortunately kit kat wrappers no longer have the foil inner so we lose out on the shiny shiny relevance but at least the shape is near right. Sheesh. ;)

The other fun simulation is to look stupidly confused when the signal disappears, strangely around the same time the train goes through a tunnel.

Why, hello there, Foxy... BYE GOOGLE! Mozilla's browser is a video star

Nick Ryan Silver badge

For its part, Microsoft has said future releases of IE will add support for WebRTC.

Maybe I'm getting more cynical... but what's the betting that this "future release of IE" will, somehow, only be Windows 8 only? Due to "technical" reasons of course...

It was space vs boat at Orion launch. The boat won

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Re: You will not go to space today

Do you mean the Up Goer Five XKCD?

Still a great XKCD, clever and surprisingly accurate too.

Brit smut slingers shafted by UK censors' stiff new stance

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Re: hardly difficult to get around

it is now illegal, for instance, to detonate nuclear weapons in the UK.

I will sleep better in my bed knowing this. I may even write to my local government representative and thank him for pushing through such an insightful and meaningful law that will make us all feel better.

Of course those that would detonate a nuclear weapon in the UK don't give a rat's arse about UK laws. There goes my better night sleep :(

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Let your betters decide

I'm afraid that you sir, appear to be suffering from hysteria. Off to the clinic with you...

Eat FATTY FOODS to stay THIN. They might even help your heart

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Burgers are good!

Margarine is generally very bad for you compared to butter. Margarine tends to be made from hydrogenated or trans-fats and these are rather dangerous compared to any other fat type. Great for the food industry as they are far cheaper and a preservative as well, but not good for the consumer unless your sole marker is price.

Butter also taste nicer.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: colour me cynical

There's an astounding amount of FUD around the entire diet industry... if you were the type to see conspiracy everywhere you'd almost think that dieticians were more interested in keeping themselves in a career than any long term sense.

Fat in your diet: Too much, obviously bad but largely because you're likely to be eating too much unbalanced food and likely to not be doing enough exercise... and as rightly pointed out in another article on El Reg, very little of your body's energy is needed to maintain body warmth compared to even 50-75 years ago, e.g. within a generation. Certain types of fats have been proven to be very bad for you, e.g. trans-fats / hydrogenated fats and while these are great for the bulk food industry as they are very cheap and double as a preservative they are very bad for your body. Luckily there is growing awareness of this and while most governments haven't mandated clear, honest, labelling of these or banning them, this situation is improving. One very inportant point about fats in your diet is that it is far from the case that fat goes straight from your food to your own fat cells, there's a huge number of steps that the intaken fat goes through and the more steps the better as this requires more energy to process and the energy from the result tends to be eventually used more evenly throughout your day which helps to keep your hunger at bay as well. This is one of the reasons a good solid fry up keeps hunger at bay much longer than a bowl of cereal, a yoghurt and a fruit smoothie.

Refined sugars: These are best avoided as much as possible however in order to substitute for the lack of food flavour from removing fats in food the food industry has added sugar instead and this sugar is far worse for you than the fat it replaces. Refined sugar requires very little energy to process / break down and as a result produces an instant energy hit but no lasting, or spread over time, benefits. The less refined the sugar the better it is for you and the longer the period over which the sugars will be released. This is why natural fruit sugars or honey is far better for you than refined (cane or beet) sugar.

Calories: While it's useful to have some form of indicator as the nutritional value of food, there is a world of difference between a boiler and a digestive system. As a result a 100 calorie chocolate bar and a 100 calorie oat bar while having similar calorific values, produce vastly different results. The chocolate bar will be loaded with instant energy refined sugars which if you need an instant energy hit isn't a bad thing but very poor for a longer term snack and won't satisfy hunger in nearly the same way. The oat bar requires much more energy to break down and while the nominal calorific value is the same, your body will use much more energy to break it down and the results are spread over a much longer time. There is a noticeable lag between eating and your body's signals telling you that you've eaten enough, which is one of the reasons that eating slower works, similar to not eating while distracted (working, driving, watching tv) as we tend to not pay attention to our body's signals at this time.

Detox diets: These work solely due to the fact that you're cutting out the crap from your diet and eating less for a bit. There are no "super foods" or other rubbish, our bodies have had millions of years perfecting amazing detox mechanisms, eating freshly-marinated-quid-puree (or whatever today's celebrity inflicted detox diet is), doesn't help any. The other risk of a heavily calorie restricted diet is that your body goes into "starvation mode" where it hangs onto food for longer to wring out as much as it can for it (constipation often results) and then has a digestive fun day when you stop the starvation and supply enough food where it will continue to wring out more of the food... which is why the weight piles back on and the cause of yoyo dieting. If you must starve yourself, do it for a couple of days time at the most and then eat normally for the rest of the week.

Typed up while eating a nice sugary snack because it's oh so tasty... mmm... dammit.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Masala omelette

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No Bacon?

I wouldn't touch normal US bacon with a shitty stick and if I did the stick would likely grow into something else entirely given the amount of hormones and chemicals in the average US porker. US pork is one of the times when "free range" or "organic" is most definitely the only safe way to go.

Euro Parliament VOTES to BREAK UP GOOGLE. Er, OK then

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Re: 90%

a 90% market share is excessive by anyones standards

Not exactly. There are plenty of markets where one company has 90% or higher market share. It's what that company does when they have such a high market share is what's important.

If that company deliberately destroys and makes it hard for all other entrants into the market through lock-in policies, proprietry information / technology and just generally fleeces their customers that is bad. If, on the other hand, that company tries hard to stay at the top by providing better services and better prices (running at a loss is considerd unfair) than its competitors than that is good (it's also basically only of the noble aims of capitalism).

Pity the poor Windows developer: The tools for desktop development are in disarray

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Was probably put off by the earlier SDL which was a dog on many fronts. The v2 revision fixed so many annoyances that if anybody tried it before, it's worth having another look now.

World's best threat detection pwned by HOBBIT

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Re: Not relevant

Largely it's what a lot of people either don't understand or don't realise is that computer AV, much like biological immune systems, is retrospective in that it needs a sample to be able to spot it and deal with it in the future. The advantage of computer AV systems is that the initial detection can be in one location and detection patterns can be spread to others - doesn't help the first victim much but does help the rest. Of course, the longer something remains undetected, which is the aim of the game, the further the spread.

Unfortunately we're not helped when the prevalent computer system is one that was initially designed as a standalone system with a single fully trusted local user using it. However even with a fully application sand boxed operating system with a full and sensible application permission system, the weak point will be found between the chair and keyboard.

Blackpool hotel 'fines' couple £100 for crap TripAdvisor review

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Re: The damage is already done!

Those are some savage reviews... and not troll reviews in light of this recent national press notice.

What's even worse, is that many were threatening to contact Environmental Health, and at least one or two must have done this so what is Blackpool council's response to this?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Absolutely outrageous

You can put whatever you want into a contract (T's and C's) however there is a huge difference between a clause being listed and it being enforceable. The contract laws are surprisingly recognicient of the fact that most people won't understand or have the inclination to read small print on every occasion therefore unfair clauses are pretty easy to invalidate.

However this doesn't stop the scumbags trying it on with their next victim who might not complain, or complain loudly enough.

The Nokia ENIGMA THING and its SECRET, TERRIBLE purpose

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Solved it

Isn't it a bit early to be playing bullshit bingo?

Mastercard and Visa to ERADICATE password authentication

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Start with the basics

If they're really going to insist on 2FA why aren't they rolling out hardware tokens?

Don't... please don't... they'll start to insist that we use the stupid (calculator size) chip and pin devices for every purchase. Annoying enough to have to use one every damn time I go to the online banking for one of my accounts, would just give up if I had to use the thing for every purchase online.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Great...

I don't live in a village. But I can get a mobile network if I'm either:

a) standing, absolutely still, at the end of my garden with phone in the air.

b) standing by a window on the upstairs rear of the house. And feeling lucky.

Other than this, texts usually get through but can take up to three hours to arrive.

I really should change network, but I can't find one that does work here. AIUI there were some planning NIMBY issues a few years ago and as a result no signal. Which will be even more entertaining when they build another few hundred houses nearby as they'll have no signal either.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: W00h00

I don't think I've ever, once, entered my a password on the entirely pointless and annoying Verified by Visa "service". Every time, it's "forgotten password", followed by a few basic details that I can remember and yet another relatively random slew of numbers and letters for the new password.

Are there any details on how the delusional, control-freak muppets are planning the next ludicrous "security theatre" of authentication?

FALL of the MACHINES: How to KILL the Google KARATE BOT, by our expert

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Ian

Nigel. Because Nigel is a ****ing Legend.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Every time...

A maliciously placed uninsulated electric cable would do the job as well. I suspect a bucket of water or the British climate would ruin it's day as well.

Boxing clever? Amazon Fire TV is SO CLOSE to being excellent

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: is it really SO CLOSE to ebing excellent?

The interface needs a bit of tweaking to allow the filtering of paid for content and just better management of paid for content or multiple user-roles (eg. kids vs adults access).

However the interface is a world apart and beatifully smooth and usable compared to the unmitigated trash disaster zone that is VM's Tivo interface - slow, ugly, unwieldy and inconsistent.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Amazon Instant Video (Prime Instant Video) works just fine on my Nexus 7 tablet.

They had been messing around for a while, only supporting Amazon's own devices but recently have seen the light.

Samsung turns off lights on LEDs worldwide – except in South Korea

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I've been a fan of LED lights for a while, but this doesn't mean that I see them as a solution to every problem. Compared to CFL bulbs, they are rather more environmentally friendly: CFLs are rather poisonous if broken which is important to remember when one breaks on you.

Both suffer from being rather more precise on the colour gamut compared to incandescent bulbs (heaters) or halogen lamps (even hotter heaters). Both flicker, although usually impercerciptably. For CFLs this depends on the coating persistence time and for LEDs it's the circuit quality, both of which suffer when you buy budget models. Budget CFLs tend to have fairly random colour gamut unless you buy identical bulbs in a batch, have varying start up times and times to reach peak brightness. Budget LEDs tend to either have light "hot spots", more pronounced flickering or more likely are just not bright enough to be usable replacements for the bulbs they replaced, this last fact alone is why a lot of people don't like LED bulbs. Hint: don't buy your LEDs from supermarkets or DIY stores, buy them from specialists instead; This situation will likely improve at some point but not for a while. Similarly, generally, don't buy no-name (or own-brand) CFLs from supermarkets or DIY stores either; for CFLs there are brands that produce better ones than others.

For me I generally buy LED bulbs because good quality LEDs are brighter, use less power and are less environmentally damaging than CFL bulbs. Sometimes though, you just can't get an LED bulb in the required shape or light throw angle range but the winner is that LED bulbs can be dimmed but again there is a caveat in that you must use a quality dimmer control and these are somewhat more expensive than the dimmers that worked with incandescent / halogen bulbs.

Drupal SQL injection nasty leaves sites 'wide open' to attack

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: So wrong

PHP is not at fault here, this is the POS database abstraction layer in Drupal that is at fault here. It was designed by a technical advocate who AFAICT never had to use it in real situations and was (is) therefore utterly useless and unwieldly in many situations. It was a noble thought, but fatally flawed from the start.

The PHP MySQL libraries are actually quite clever when it comes to working with prepared statements and queries and optimising their use across multiple, often independent, connections.

Yahoo! dumps! thing! that! made! it! Yahoo! and! told! to! bed! AOL!

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Depends

Are you sure about their mail and weather services being of any use whatsoever?

I have a yahoo mail account and every time they update it they somehow manage to remove any remaining useful features and make it harder to use and just more stupid. It also tends to fail on more browsers and devices and they intentionally cripple the "old" version by making it as useless as possible while still nominally keeping it the same.

As for yahoo weather, I gave up looking at that even purely for laughs a long time ago. It seemed to have some form of time-displacement problem where the weather it forecast and reported often seemed to have no correlation to actual weather or what was being forecast by other services. Just to be fair and reasonable I have just checked the yahoo weather for where I am now. A mere difference of 3 degrees in the current temperature (vs met office / bbc weather) and the 5 day forecast bears little relation to the met office / bbc weather forecast. Also in typical dumb-US style (the US is one of the three remaining countries on the planet to not use metric measurements), the mouse over tips only give information in Fahrenheit and not the selected / default temperature units elsewhere on the page.

Renault Twingo: Small, sporty(ish), safe ... and it's a BACK-ENDER

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Why the love for the original twingo?

Why the love for the original twingo? I drove one, and it was a car that I'd hesitate to inflict on my most hated enemies, let alone anybody else.

The suspension was so bouncy that I suffered from travel sickness. While driving. I have never had anything like that before. Any of the smallest deviations from a perfect road surface set off a gut churning bounce.

The speedo was set so far to the left of the car that one had to take their eyes off the road, look to the left, refocus and then read the speed. Then look back to the road and refocus again. Luckily, at any speeds above 40-50 mpg the gut churning bounce came in therefore you barely needed to look at the speedo.

I give it that it had reasonable economy (but it wasn't as if you could thrash it or drive at any speed above 40-50 mph anyway), it was adequately comfortable in a spartan way buy that was the only plus point. My experience was soured even more by the fact that the stupid thing stopped working in the middle of a snow storm, as both the rev meter (placed exactly where you would expect a speedo to be placed) and the wipers were wired together with one fuse and they both gave up simultaneously when the wiper control stalk fell apart. Gah.

Not all versions (Twingo 1 is a very broad spread or models) were as bad as the one I had for a (very short) while but whoever was responsible for the model I had should have been shot. Repeatedly. Or just made to drive one, as that was possibly a worse punishment.

Hackers thrash Bash Shellshock bug: World races to cover hole

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: If you do not sanitize CGI input @DainB

Thanks for the sane explanation and example.

Does this float your boat? Dead Steve Jobs to hijack yachts from beyond the grave

Nick Ryan Silver badge

You have the idea on it's head: The tablet does not control the boat - the boat's systems control the boat. The tablet is nothing more than an interface into the boat's systems. Of course, this doesn't justify a patent but this is the US PTO...

Heads up, Chromebook: Here come the sub-$200 Windows 8.1 portables

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: 1Gb of RAM?

They are so screwed it's almost a joke. Yes, the price is good but that's their only positive factor.

16 or 32GB of storage? That has crippled them down to useless - want to install Office and maybe a windows update or two? Forget it, you'll have to uninstall everything else just to perform an OS update.

1GB of RAM? Win 8 is somewhat more efficient that its predecessors, but it's nowhere near that efficient. This is almost as useless as Microsoft's initial "minimum" requirements for Windows XP, except the truth was that if you want the OS (sans years of bloat updates) to load within the same hour and to load up another application you were fresh out of luck. These days a single application will lay claim to much of that RAM, which is a testament to how resource hungry modern applications are rather than any enhanced capabilities.

As for the display, x768 16:9 laptop displays are useless enough with many applications assuming x800 at the minimum.

Without experiencing them first hand, they sound like instant land fill.

Look out: The Far Eastern white-box boys are coming for EVERYONE

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Re: Gartner

We, as in most of the readers of el'Reg, probably won't however PHBs have a nasty habit of believing them.

Crack team weighs LOHAN's substantial box

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Another top show from the resident LOHAN boffinette, sporting her pipe as she rightly should. Puts the rest of them to shame she does. Slackers.