* Posts by Dan 55

15337 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

BT: We're stocking warehouses with kit ahead of Brexit to avoid shortages

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: import from America or else where?

There are still customs controls between the EU and Israel, although there might be agreements to speed them up.

Look at the EEA states which have their own trade agreements. They still have their own free trade area and need their own customs controls with the EU, precisely because they have their own trade agreements.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why not import from America or else where?

How long does it take to train a customs drone?

Quite a bit.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Because Brexit

Businesses inside the UK aren't investing until they know what's going to happen in five months time, foreign investment to the UK is at a standstill until investors know what's going to happen in five months time, businesses outside the UK are finding non-UK suppliers. What would you call it instead of Brexit?

'Privacy is a human right': Big cheese Sat-Nad lays out Microsoft's stall at Future Decoded

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Microsoft efforts in privacy

That bodes well for the SWIFT-on-Azure move.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Hypocrite

That is all...

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

Dan 55 Silver badge
Megaphone

Re: Anti-intellectual?

Now that everyone has a voice, opinion is treated the same as fact, division is treated as news, and weight of numbers decides who's won. Even sockpuppet trolls working for a hostile power half-way round the world count.

Also there's a religion-shaped hole left behind in the human soul, and that hole has been filled with popularism. Just like religion, it requires no real sacrifice apart from obedience, has easy answers to any problem, and has easily defined external evil things to blame.

So that's my 2p (value not guaranteed due to plummeting exchange rates).

Wow. Apple's only gone and killed off Mac, iPad, iPhone family... figures for units sold to fans

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Revenue up, units down

Cook is a beancounter. Removing features, making things harder to fix and upgrade, selling fewer units, and raising prices on those units are what he's all about.

Transformers: Robots... at least it tries: Watch boffins' Optimus Dime rearrange on the fly

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

Currently the library components are designed by people, but we can harness different optimization and machine learning approaches to create new candidate shapes and controls

The only explanation I have for a quote like this is robots from the future disguised as humans have travelled back in time to bring about the robot apocalypse.

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Yep

Choice, eh? We don't want any of that where we're from.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Befuddled

It survives because it's as practically an in-house Red Hat product... sort of like systemd (which is an in-house Red Hat product) which also survives despite everyone hating it.

Mourning Apple's war against sockets? The 2018 Mac mini should be your first port of call

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Said I would, and I did

Before checking if it's upgradable, unlike the 2014 Mac Mini?

Brave decision...

Dan 55 Silver badge
Windows

Re: re. I had a front-row seat in 2005 when the Mac mini was launched*

Whatever happened to Front Row, eh? It was perfect for a Mac Mini so of course Apple got rid of it.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

There's no reason for a Mac Mini to not have held its price since the 2005 launch

Compare and contrast with Intel NUCs and similar.

If they're hoping that people will buy a Mac Mini because of its operating system, they could at least put some effort into that as well. So far all that seems to change is an extra 0.5 GB of RAM required per major release.

But given that NUCs and Macs have similar hardware, NUCs are easily Hackintoshable.

Carlo has a head for apps and a body (tag) for rendering: Google takes on Electron with JS desktop app toolset

Dan 55 Silver badge

XULRunner, years ago

Mozilla, what did you decide to do with this?

Oh, you never provided official releases, never documented it properly, and then abandoned it at the side of the road.

UK and EU crawling towards post-Brexit data exchange deal – reports

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I'm confused

The EU are willing to overlook things like security services mass slurping every piece of data that travels inside a member state's networks, less so for non-member states.

They also need a dispute resolution scheme in case of future divergence, this is usually the ECJ, one of Mayhem's red lines.

This one weird trick turns your Google Home Hub into a doorstop

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Google being rather disingenous

Project Zero seems to be more concerned with the specks of sawdust in others' eyes rather than the plank in its own.

US Republicans bash UK for tech tax plan

Dan 55 Silver badge

Rebuilding society tax

Can we have that as well if they start getting upperty?

Just to learn 'em a bit more.

Bomb squad descends on suspicious package to find something much more dangerous – a Journey cassette

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Not the story I was expecting

Younger people know what tapes are. They've seen them on Guardians of the Galaxy and everything.

Microsoft claims Office 364 back to business as usual. Oh no it isn't, say suffering sysadmins

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Office 364?

They downgrade you automatically from time to time but it's not any cheaper.

EU Android latest: Critics diss Google's money-spinning 'cure'

Dan 55 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Amazon

Surely the average intelligence is always 100.

It is, but it won't flag up a problem if everybody's turned stupid.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Amazon

The problem is that Google are restricting competition by moving as much as possible into Play Services (as mentioned just above) and not documenting APIs.

Remember the EU antitrust case involving Microsoft and SMB? The remedy that the EU should impose on Play Services should be similar to that, i.e. it should be optional and fully documented.

Shift-work: Keyboards heaped in a field push North Yorks council's fly-tipping buttons

Dan 55 Silver badge

Put them on eBay

There'll be a buyer, council makes some money.

Unless form 4412-B needs to be filled in in triplicate and there's no designated product code for this, of course.

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Pocket Rocket

Look at iFixit for a 2018 MPB to see how things have changed.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Pocket Rocket

So, you've never even needed to upgrade/swap out the hard drive, memory, or battery and can never see a need for doing that?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Pocket Rocket

Can you repair it/replace parts or is it the same glued-up shite as everything else Apple make these days?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Future ARM laptops

At the rate Apple are going, they're just going to be an iPad in a MacBook case.

Unsure why you can't log into Office 365? So is Microsoft

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's Aglie

Windows 10, Exchange, and now this.

Never mind the testing, feel the Agile.

Mac users burned after Nuance drops Dragon speech to text software

Dan 55 Silver badge
Stop

Re: At least it's mutual ...

Such are the joys of rapid release, if your platform is a moving target every year then you don't have control and your software requires constant maintenance.

And Windows is no better as that changes every six months.

I guess Nuance couldn't keep up with both of them and chose the platform which had the most customers.

An OS's TTS API should be complete and as set in stone as possible, anything else is remiss.

Budget 2018: UK goes it alone on digital sales tax for tech giants

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: There will be £10m for a scheme to identify ways to keep physics and maths teachers in schools

That's easy, the hostile environment will be rejigged so designated key workers won't be able to get a job anywhere else.

Pain in the brain! Kaspersky warns of hackable brain implants

Dan 55 Silver badge

Britain's rail ticket-booking systems go TITSUP*

Dan 55 Silver badge
Mushroom

What's Trainline doing stuck in there...

... when train operating company backends can just as easily point to the National Reservation Service which does exactly the same as Trainline does without their cut?

Icon is burning money...

Apple might be 'collateral damage' in US and China trade dust-up

Dan 55 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Not just Apple

I notice nobody is particularly worried about Surface.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: At least is isnt oracle or M$

But guess who Oracle gets its Linux from...

Linux isn't done until Oracle Forms won't run.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: At least is isnt oracle or M$

So what's next, MS hasn't got its UNIX yet. SUSE or Canonical?

British Airways: If you're feeling left out of our 380,000 passenger hack, then you may be one of another 185,000 victims

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: This is why I like virtual cards

My bank doesn't offer it as presumably it'd be too complicated for the little customers to wrap their heads around so I'm reduced to trusting PayPal when buying online.

Small online stores' lack of security coupled with banks' inability to ask customers to do anything which might require half a braincell means behemoths like PayPal and Amazon get created.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Close call?

Why the former team? It could easily be the present team...

The 'roid in Spain drills mainly on the plain: Plucky Brit Mars robot laps up sun, sand and, er, simulated science

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: One thing Brexit won't hurt

British civil servants are still gold-plating EU directives even just before Brexit. Here's a quote from a story I read a few months back:

The Package Travel Regulations – designed to protect travellers who book flights and hotels online – will mean that B&Bs and hotels need extra insurance if they want to reserve guests a table at the hotel’s own restaurant or book them a taxi to a local pub. [...] The regulations, based on an EU directive, were intended to offer travellers the protection they would have if they booked through a travel agency. But the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy extended the rules to cover any service not part of the room rate – something no other EU country has done

And while searching for this one, another one came up although this one was from 2004:

Alone among EU countries, according to mountain sports companies, Britain is extending a Brussels directive on safety-at-height to leisure climbing, as well as the originally intended target of builders, steeplejacks and window cleaners.

Perhaps people's ire should be directed at Whitehall instead of the EU?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: One thing Brexit won't hurt

What does this even mean?

It means the EU are willing to offer a solution so that international treaties like the Good Friday Agreement can be upheld (e.g. put NI and the single market and customs union), but they won't allow say, a giant hole in the customs union border because the UK buys lots of prosecco and Mercedes and Audis and "they need us more than we need them" as that is in breach of other international treaties like the EU's own trade agreements with other countries and WTO rules.

So if the UK wants a FTA with the EU or WTO or no deal, that means huge border problems, if the UK wants EEA then that will also mean huge border problems as the EEA is another free trade area, and if the UK wants SM + CU then that means no border problems. Those are the only options available for the UK as those are the rules.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: One thing Brexit won't hurt

If you don't understand by now that the EU is a rules-based union, you're never going to understand it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

One thing Brexit won't hurt

I'm not sure, will you be able to rock up with a Mars rover to do some testing in the desert just like that after no deal, FTA Brexit, or EEA without Customs Union Brexit?

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Old is good

I can't imagine any of the BSDs wanting such a thing.

I think Poettering knows he wouldn't survive Theo de Raadt bollocking him every other week, that's why he won't allow it to be ported to BSD.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Meh

I despise systemd with a passion, but this one is more an IPv6 problem in general.

Not really, systemd has its tentacles everywhere and runs as root. Exploits which affect systemd therefore give you the keys to the kingdom.

Jeez, not now, Iran... Facebook catches Mid East nation running trolly US, UK politics ads

Dan 55 Silver badge

More useless Silly Valley algorithm crap

You can set the paid by tag to be anything so what's the point of it?

Facebook and the rest are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into having real people sell and validate political advertising. I don't think that's going too happen under the current regime.

China tells Trump to use a Huawei phone to avoid eavesdroppers

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Where he tweets from?

Where did I say there weren't any other kinds of racists?

But thank you for reminding the commentariat. If you weren't there to keep us on our toes I don't know what we'd do.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Where he tweets from?

All an SS7 exploit needs is a phone number, so racist grandpa's gone and given his to his best pals Putin and Kim Jong-un and spends all day every day on Twitter. What could possibly go wrong?

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Dan 55 Silver badge

Or if for some reason you don't want to ditch Skype you can use 2FA.

Belgium: Oi, Brits, explain why Belgacom hack IPs pointed at you and your GCHQ

Dan 55 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Go El Reg!

GCHQ has a long-standing policy of refusing to comment on its actions, though a sample of the meaningless boilerplate it issues on all such occasions can be read towards the end of this 2014 article.

If they just use the opportunity to reinforce the NLP du jour (e.g. strong and stable), they don't deserve a place in the article.

Our brave El Reg vulture sat through four days of Oracle OpenWorld to write this cracking summary just for you

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Oracle will lose

Not sure if they will lose, they'll just do what Adobe and Microsoft have already done successfully - raise costs for on-premises software which you purchase outright, make cloud and rented software cheaper, stop developing the on-premises software, and then start boiling the flog.

Uncool: Google won't be setting up shop in disused Berlin electrical substation

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Dan 55

New businesses don't have the money Google would have passed to them to helped pay for stuff. Uncreated new businesses will remain uncreated because the centre that would have helped them with their ideas is somewhere else and helping someone else with their ideas instead.

Perhaps this search can help show there are alternatives to Google.

Not a Google search, to show there are alternatives to Google...

Microsoft promises a fix for Windows 10 zip file woes. In November

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Windows Search

Give us back the little dog on the left with actual, logical, commonly used options. Windows sucks shamelessly.

That's the first thing I disabled on XP to get the 2000-style search. I do hope one day people won't think Windows 10 as it is now is good...