Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: Why?

And why would you bother folding a screen, with all the challenges that creates, instead of the simpler rolling it up?

Re: It would have been useful

I was given mis-information about pricing of other providers

I see GiffGaff now only compare their PAYG offer with EE and Vodafone. "3" was dropped the moment their 3-2-1 tariff launched, O2 more recently - I believe because they now compete with "3".

Competition, they've all heard of it and struggle hard to avoid it.

Shareholders are the owners, the company is their asset.

sanmigueelbeer" I think the home analogue phone will not be replaced. At the exchange shift will be done to logically connect the analogue "lines" to VoIP."

That's how the system has worked since system x was introduced decades ago, over BTs network not the public internet. The announcement can only mean VoIP from the premises or cabinet. A move to purely fibre requires something that looks like VoIP so they might as well just use the existing standards.

Broadband modems sometimes have phone support built in already, virgin have it disabled in their Superhub, haven't checked BT recently but they used to have some sort of support in their modems. The hardware for adapters is cheap enough that a backup battery will be most of the cost!

Re: Non-story?

I don't follow it but people I do follow keep retweeting the local JDW drinking barn output. It's little more than announcing what's on the bar or what's coming soon. Experience taught me long ago the beer usually won't actually be there if I did make the trip, won't taste right anyway and the pubs I actually drink in keep tweeting much better beer lists that really will be on the bar, served by people I know.

JDW dropping social media will be completely forgotten within a week.

Re: I hope that HMRC...

Hard to trust an organisation that can't even migrate my decades old self employment registration so I can use the online system at all. The page that offers to do it actually makes you register all over again, using information i forgot 30 years ago, with no confirmation I won't end up with 2 different accounts and a world of doubled hmrc aggravation. Muppets.

Re: Rebuilt my sister's machine

My brother bought a cheap laptop running Vista, despite being warned to avoid it. It took so long booting he just gave up after 10-20min and powered it off every time. Told him to just leave it for a couple of hours to get whatever it was doing done but that just gave a machine running incredibly slowly. Unusably slowly.

I still remember the pain waiting minutes for settings to open after the POS finally started, and the horror of disabling indexing not quite fixing the problem. Never got boot below 5min and it still ran sluggish. Vista was bad all by itself but certifying totally incapable machines for it was just criminal negligence. He never got far enough to break it.

Re: cant win

To be fair I've not had any misbehavior from Win10 today. I expect that to change rapidly when I get out of bed and fire up the PC, like every other day to date.

Re: A little bit too late to matter

I can understand 3 letter agencies running false flag ops on social media, could believe they would interfere in brexit (for different reasons than russia and not *before Trump*), can't work or why they would support Trump though.

Re: I've seen this before

The easiest way to discourage visits to abusive sites is to force them into deploying abusive countermeasures. Even the terminally stupid or ridiculously uncaring about privacy will respond to sites becoming a pia to use. You have a modicum of proactive choice about visiting these sites, unlike spam and anything forcing visits is going to get stomped on hard.

Countermeasures from abusers are part of the solution!

Re: Redlining memory? Buhahahaha! Not a chance.

Or the cooling has degraded over a couple of months and the overclock headroom shrank with it.

Re: Collapse of Facebook

AC:"there's a good chance that the ICO will be instructed by the UK government to really take them (where "them" = Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and literally anyone else who might be doing anything like this) to pieces on this one."

There's a better chance a sitting brexiteer UK gov will find not revealing details of the Leave campaigns use of CA is more important than exposing the truth and any demolition will be purely superficial.

Re: Cognito ergo universi?

Too many make the error of assuming an observer has to be intelligent or conscious. A cloud of gas will also observe anything it bumps into, whether you believe observation creates something or just discovers it. Anthropic arguments just constrain the sorts of universe intelligence can exist in to be observers.

Re: AA rechargeable batteries were always good value

"especially at Christmas, there is no real comparison between a 2800mAh rechargeable and a cheap multipack of Duracells from the discount shop."

My experience is there was no real comparison between a Maplin 2800mAh rechargeable and a rechargeable with 2800mAh capacity after the 1st cycle. Probably not even before then.

Re: It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway

While being able to install unsigned firmware has it's uses, on a device with supposed security features it's always a fault. Hacking clocks on a gpu is a different from the potential to expose keys on a CPU.

Re: Basic maths?

If you believe the "usual suspects" rants about the BBC, getting more than 20% to pay anything would be a challenge.

Re: I've never quite understood

Used to alias common things like color-colour but when auto completion appeared in programmers editors it became just pointless extra work. Can't remember if we ever 'corrected' Sony's hilarious MargePrim to the intended MergePrim in the PSX devkit... Sony never did.

Re: Easy

It would leak seconds after informing government.

Re: It doesn't help

Start by observing vanishingly few ordinary users have any need for FTTP performance, won't have that need for years and stop trying to sell it hard. A lot of users have a need for a better connection than the wet string BT gives them. FTTP has a place renewing tired old infrastructure, quietly without the hype.

I suppose if you haven't used a coffee shop, pub/bar during daylight hours or train, watched very little TV, only watched 20+ year old films you might just have missed seeing a laptop in use. We'd probably be too busy wondering how you accidentally fell into our century to deride anything ;)

Re: Exploding chips - not fun

Modern silicon does seem a little more fragile than old TTL. Many years ago a miswired quad gate package explosively delidded exposing the chip glowing red. Still worked after cooling down.

Re: Don't buy a new Intel based system for a while?

"AMD when eBPF JIT is turned on"

While running interpreted out of bound access will be checked and speculative execution will be in the interpreter, not an attacker controlled address. Turning on JIT allows an attacker to craft code that will be compiled to machine code to run potentially without checks. It's a way of weaponising an otherwise unusable kernel exploit.

If enabling JIT does make AMD vulnerable then AMD is vulnerable in that test and you read too much into this. I believe the only test they succeeded with was user to user snooping which is expected to work. The more frightening user to kernel Meltdown blocking claim hasn't been disproved yet.

Re: Hmmm...

"If the kernal is in the same address space as user code and using the same pipe then nothing changes. Either a seperate CPU/cache for kernal code and without speculative execution or scrap the whole model.\"

Even in user space page permissions exist. There's nothing intrinsic to a flat, shared address space that stops a CPU enforcing all permissions at the thread/page/exe page level, all the way down to prefetch and cache access. Separate cache/memory systems per ring is a high price to pay to replace access control logic in the memory system. Dumping cache state is an even higher price to pay for not having that logic.

Re: It will matter

Threatening to become an offshore tax haven may not have been the best negotiating tactic.

Re: TruePlay sounds like another method of data mining Win10's users

The last thing you want is 3rd parties messing around in the OS to detect hacking. If they can do it then they can hack it and we know how bad they are at resisting that temptation. It's exalting the right place to detect tampering and as an occasional online gamer I'll welcome it along with other anti cheat systems. It's no fun playing against cheats.

They just need to resist using this on single player gaming.

Re: Oh noes

I'm right handed but switched to using left handed keyboards 15+ years ago, with the keypad on the left the mouse sits closer to the centre and that was enough to stop my mouse RSI. Wish I'd bought more of the keyboards, down to just 1 spare and changing keyboards is a chore, especially ones with different layout.

Re: unique mathematical hash

It's the risk of corruption by accident, playing Russian roulette with your data. However many chambers your gun has, 1 still has a bullet.

Though a hacker could weaponise knowledge of that flaw for mischief.

A single pixel width of shadow or light is enough to break flatness. Unless you're using a single line display screen size is no reason to flatten things.