* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

UK networks have 'no plans' to bring roaming fees back after Brexit

Dan 55 Silver badge

In the event of no deal or a hard Brexit, please do come back after March and tell us how you, personally, are winning.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Tell those on the NI border that...

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

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Happy

Shhh... the large empty spaces are where the adverts go.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I took a look at it when it was opt-in. The comments in the discussion were overwhelmingly against. IIRC they even said it made the mobile version worse so there goes the main reason for the change. But no, someone ?marketing, decides to go ahead anyway.

Come the Third Glorious UI Revolution where years of commentards calls for OS and website design which follow early 2000 design guides will finally heard and the sins of the Second Unholy UI Revolution (consolidated desktop and mobile versions) will be declared wicked and banished forever, this website will be weighed in the balance and found wanting unless it can find The One True Register Style in archive.org. But I digress.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: My eyes are bleeding!!!

Also my OCD keeps telling me it looks wrong because adverts don't fit exactly one or two story columns.

GDPR v2 – Gradually Diminishing Psychotic Robots: Brussels kills Terminator apocalypse

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Re: Please return to your houses

Battlefields can actually be much less complex than roads..

That depends if there's a wedding going on or not.

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

And they say that like it's a bad thing

some argued against the resolution in the European Parliament this week, warning that such a blanket ban on developing deadly weapons controlled by machine could impose unnecessary limits on artificial intelligence research

Just so I can understand this, someone stood in front of them and argued that unless an super intelligent artificial intelligence could be housed in the body of a killing machine, it would mean there would mean there would be fewer job opportunities at Cyberdyne Systems?

The grand-plus iPhone is the new normal – this is no place for paupers

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

Eff off Apple

No ideas apart from gluing it up more and raising the price every year.

You know all those movies you bought from Apple? Um, well, think different: You didn't

Dan 55 Silver badge

It does apply to Nintendo, they took down their Wii Shop Channel. Either you keep your DRM'd downloads (tied to your machine) on SD card or you lose them. If your Wii breaks or is stolen, tough luck. As the shop is closed, you can't ring Nintendo to get them to transfer your purchases to the new machine's account or a Wii U and download them again.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Music...

Of course it could. Stuff disappears off my Spotify playlists all the time. I didn't pay for it though, so that's just mildly annoying.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's a good idea to take things home with you when you buy them.

On devices within limited storage (why would we need more, it's all available in the cloud!), we are encouraged to buy, download, watch/listen/read/play, wipe, and repeat, with a UI that gives the impression these shiny trinkets which we believe we have purchased will always be there for us.

And DRM stops us from making a backup copy of what we believe we've purchased.

I guess this is commonly known as a scam.

Microsoft: You don't want to use Edge? Are you sure? Really sure?

Dan 55 Silver badge

If you mean the Edge UI is glitter and the IE engine underneath that it uses is shit, you're wrong about the glitter.

How about shit on shit?

Dan 55 Silver badge

All of this is an effort to gauge how much the frog complains about being boiled.

If the frog complains too much that piece of code will be backed out otherwise it'll stay.

It's not as if it hasn't happened before on Windows 10...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Er ... weren't the 90s-noughties browser wars fought over this shit ?

The browser choice dialog worked, when it was removed Firefox downloads dropped 63%.

(Meanwhile, Google spammed Chrome at people with Search.)

Plex plucks media cloud service, sends users scurrying to exit

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whew!

Er, Plex was originally a fork from Kodi a decade ago and it seems it hasn't moved on very much in the meantime.

I've looked at the website and I'm quite unimpressed with the Plex Perks (scroll down, click "Show me the Perks" button, click button and get told you have to have a Plex Pass to see that page, told to click "Go Premium" to see the goodies, click button and get sent back to the previous page) and the Plex Pass itself (scroll down to "Plex Features", the same feature can be explained in two or three different ways on the scrolling banner, and again can these features can be replicated with the appropriate Android app or Kodi plug-in).

Given Kodi, I really don't see why Plex is worth anything, let alone a subscription.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whew!

5 thumbs down? Surely someone can explain why...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: So what is plex pass for?

So like the TVDB/IMDB/MovieDB scrapers with the Universal Parental Control addon on Kodi then.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Whew!

Why? As far and I can tell, Plex is Kodi with a different skin, fewer addons, and the requirement to run their media server instead of using any NAS.

Safari, Edge fans: Is that really the website you think you're visiting? URL spoof bug blabbed

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Safari's broken affairs...

It does work for eBay, unlike Firefox ESR 52.9.0 where that bug will never be fixed because I'm not updating it. Ever.

(Looking at Waterfox...)

British Airways hack: Infosec experts finger third-party scripts on payment pages

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: That cookie modal

Oh, they've gone for the dark pattern of taking minutes to wipe a bunch of cookies. Always a sign of credibility.

Microsoft's next Windows 10 release creeps closer with a cluster of builds

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Re: meh?

Don't know how we'll all get it done in the 4-day week that the TUC is suggesting but that is another issue entirely. Perhaps we should just close down the internet for 3 days a week?

As opposed to now where it's closed down for two days a week you mean?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Telegram continued its support for the platform in the face of a wall of indifference from Microsoft

FTFY

It's been 5 years already, let's gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's bloodbath

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: And Nokia *had* a smooth exist strategy planned out for Symbian

For Nokia HMD to adopt Sailfish with a couple of high end phones would be the Phoenix with the middle finger raised at Microsoft.

They seem to be unable to do that due to Google's T&Cs. Hopefully the EU will sort that out.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Nokia was a phone company that couldn't make the transition

Apple is hardly a risk taker or market leader either, but in the Jobs era they knew how to reduce their product portfolio to the minimum necessary (computers: desktop, laptop, pro desktop, pro laptop, phone: one version), use newish understood technology only after the rest had gone through the development pains to make it understood, knew what to include and what to leave for later, and used software to appeal the pros and design to appeal to the masses.

Cook has done too much cannibalising and not enough of what made Apple good under Jobs.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I blame Nadella

but in the end he made the right call.

Depends if you define the right call as unveiling a Windows 10 everywhere strategy that only works if you define everywhere to be just the desktop.

There is Azure, but downtime is too high. However the CxOs who send money to Microsoft aren't that demanding, they put up with Windows, Office, and Exchange before and now they put up with Azure now.

Dan 55 Silver badge

On the other hand, the N9 was praised when it was launched.

Shame they dropped it for Windows Phone when they finally got it right.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Conspiracy theory?

We know the following:

1. The burning platform memo... no sane CEO who's in it for the long term kneecaps their current platform.

2. The N9 launch to restricted markets... no sane CEO who's in it for the long term kills their new platform.

3. In his breathless rush to dump existing and new OSes and switch to Windows Phone, he soured operator relations by insisting on Skype being bundled too.

4. As his CV shows, Elop's one and only idea before Nokia was engineering buyouts. Thus it happened with Nokia.

So, saying he was all in a fluster to get on board the Windows Phone train whatever the cost and get bought by MS is hardly a conspiracy theory. It's all on the record.

Maybe Nokia had dysfunctional internal bureaucracy, but it's no worse that Microsoft's stack ranking or any large corp I've worked in. In spite of that bureaucracy (which they themselves recognised hindered them and were trying to change) they still got good phones out like the N8, N9, E7, and N808.

Yet when they bet everything on Windows Phone, which neither end users nor operators like, they stopped being successful. What should we blame, the bureaucracy or Elop? If you're still not sure, look at his CV after Nokia.

Using Python in Visual Studio Code? Microsoft has new toys for you

Dan 55 Silver badge

ssh with remote X session...

Did you just say Linux doesn't have Eclipse?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not sure why you've singled out Linux IDEs as lacking, there are a number of cross platform IDEs which have a Linux build.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why not take it a step further..

There you go:

New Google Parent Company Drops 'Don't Be Evil' Motto

And it's not The Onion.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: WTF?

Try Duck Duck Go, the results are quite good.

There's also Start Page but I switch from that to DDG because the results weren't that good.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Why not take it a step further..

Seriously, who at Google thought this was even a remotely good idea?

They're mindlessly following Safari.

At least on Safari desktop you can turn it off.

AI biz borks US election spending data by using underpaid Amazon Mechanical Turks

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

"With Captricity’s cloud-native Data-as-a-Service platform, the FEC is able to upload scanned filing reports into designated folders securely hosted in the cloud via Amazon S3 [...] The images are then automatically extracted from each folder and uploaded to Captricity. Deep learning algorithms sort and capture the data from all of the documents quickly, securely and with 99.9 percent accuracy."

So now Deep Learning is a Perl script going through directories, calling an OCR program for each file in that directory and then sending the text file output to Mechanical Turk.

A real shot in the Arm: 3% of global workforce surplus to requirements

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

So, did anyone believe them two years ago?

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

The Japan giant has committed to “at least” a doubling of ARM’s existing UK workforce, in addition to continued investment in the country, in addition to overseas expansion over the next five years.

ARM’s UK headcount, mostly centred in Cambridge, numbers around 3,000.

Nokia reinstates 'hide the Notch' a day after 'Google required' feature kill

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: I see no notch, only display ears.

It adds more screen, it is extending the screen into where the bezel would be otherwise.

But not in any useful sense, you only get a couple of corners. Hence the perception that it takes away from the screen.

Post-silly season blues leave me bereft of autonomous robot limbs

Dan 55 Silver badge

Today’s favourite is Foodvisor, an app that counts your calorie intake by recognising a photo of what you’re eating by using “AI algorithms”. It’s meant to “help people eat healthier” – if not write grammaticallier – and they’re calling it a “Shazam for food”.

Judging by the results in the photo, they're calling it "Not Hotdog".

UK.gov's no-deal plans leave HMRC customs, VAT systems scrambling to keep up

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Re: A total waste of effort to support a transparent bluff

Of course the EU won't be around in its current form 30 years from now. It was different 30 years ago* and it will be different 30 years from now.

And if you're worried about extreme parties, I have move confidence e.g. Germany will survive them than the UK. You see a far-right demo on the news but don't see loads of other demos in town squares all around Germany. In the UK the Tories have lurched to the right following UKIP and UKIP have just lurched to the right once again. If there's no deal, the UK is going to turn into a populist hellhole.

* that was when the UK more-or-less came up the Single Market, the EC adopted it wholesale, and it became the world's biggest market.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: A total waste of effort to support a transparent bluff

By which I mean Irish Sea border. Not enough coffee...

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A total waste of effort to support a transparent bluff

Following Brexit too much as I do, I really don't know if May's plan is to turn the Chequers proposal into a EEA + CU deal at the last minute or crash out with no deal. Those are the only two options, a FTA won't fly because a North Sea border is politically impossible.

Things like May not letting MPs see the impact assessment of no deal before the final vote isn't a reason to be cheerful.

Canny Brits are nuking the phone bundle

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Odd....

I've only done it once, when CPW offered cashback after six months or so, and that covered the cost of the entire year's contract. The phone was unlockable so I could use it on Orange with an OVP Virgin tariff.

Nope, the NSA isn't sitting in front of a supercomputer hooked up to a terrorist’s hard drive

Dan 55 Silver badge

As the article says:

it’s no secret that encryption has become a problem for police. It’s not necessarily that they can’t break it at all – every system has its design weaknesses and vulnerabilities - but they can’t do it presquickly [sic] enough to conduct surveillance on enough targets for that to make a difference.

And you have to have a reasonable definition for 'enough'. They're complaining at the moment because it's not reasonable. If it were (e.g. restricted to criminal suspects), we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

Anyway judging by the current governments in US, the UK, and Australia, TPTP seem to be threatening their own wealth and power.

Do you really think crims would do that? Just go on the 'net and exploit a Windows zero-day?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Headmaster

I am affected by your 'effected'.

Thunderstruck: Azure Back in Black(out) after High Voltage causes Flick of the Switch

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Re: Texas - Europe ?

GDPR says has to be an "adequate level of data protection" for data held in non-EU countries. If AD data is replicated worldwide to many countries, that can't be guaranteed.

Dan 55 Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Texas - Europe ?

So in other words you can't populate the name, address, or contact information fields because of the way they've designed it.

Perhaps it should be renamed to Azure pretty fucking useless directory.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Texas - Europe ?

So how are you supposed to comply with GDPR if AD is sending PII all over the world?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 'This, in turn, lead to the problems that plagued Azure service users in Europe'

There's too much inter-dependency why?

Because it's Microsoft where everything depends on everything else. Did you miss the C:\Windows\System32 directory over the last two decades?

Skype can now record your 'special moments' in front of the computer

Dan 55 Silver badge
Holmes

So how does this work?

1. You hit record, everyone gets notified, everyone has to answer yes, recording starts?

2. You hit record, everyone gets notified, recording starts there and then, if they don't like it they hang up?

Sounds like the second one meaning Microsoft Don't Get Privacy (again).

Microsoft sharpens its claws to cut Outlook UI excess, snip Ribbon

Dan 55 Silver badge
Flame

Meet the Fockers

Purchasers of Office 2019 will, alas, not get the new toys because, let's face it, Microsoft would really really like you to climb aboard the Office 365 train.

There's someone in MS who knew very well what they were inflicting on the general public with the ribbon but they did it anyway.

Well I'm going to stay on local Office and learn to love the ribbon after a decade. That'll learn 'em.

Heart-stopping predictions from AI doctors could save lives

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Mushroom

AI != Machine Learning.

Software dev-turned-councillor launches rubbish* chatbot

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Trollface

No room left for doubts

However, Rouse's decision to use Facebook, rather than setting up his own app, as the MP for West Suffolk did, is perhaps a canny move, given the privacy concerns the Matt Hancock app raised when it launched.

Yes. With Matt Hancock's app you might have had privacy concerns, with Facebook Messenger you know you've got privacy concerns.