* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

Londoners will be trialling driverless cars in pedestrianised area

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Get ready for a surprise!

OK... Red wire or black... *Clickety* You've emailed the schematic? Yes, got it! It's opening. And... WHAT? NO!

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Re: Finland

Finland Finland. The country where I'd quite like to be.

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Re: Wi-Fi

True that. I had a friend with no WiFi, so I did a frequency analysis of WiFi in the area. A neighbour was blasting out on every channel over 2.4GHz, and it must have been genuine WiFi as there was a proper structure to the signal. I set her up with a network of 5GHz access points, which took a few due to the crap range.

At home, I get 26 competing signals in the 2.4GHz band, and 6 in the 5GHz, but I've invested in a proper business class access point and firewall/VPN, and it seems to work just fine. I've got line speed to all my handhelds, 75Mbps, and it only starts dropping off in the toilet which is the room with the most walls between me and the AP.

I wonder if the neighbours have good WiFi? Or have I wiped them out?

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I find that...

most of my work desktop connectivity issues are 14 second outages caused by ISE. And some weird DNS issue that kicks in a few times each day. Along with some sort of throttling on the firewall I suspect. Very annoying actually, and it must surely be 100% down to the new network design here. It's only the last 6 months it's been so bad, which coincides with when they started arseing around with the wired network and merging it with the wireless address space.

It's sometimes faster to work from home where my download speed is now approaching that I get from being on JANET.

Pong, anyone? How about Pong on a vintage oscilloscope?

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Re: Awesome

Close, but I don't think these sisters are trans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJIZ9jICxM.

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That's so awesome!

But the thought of all that soldering...

Does anyone have a SPICE file so I can run it as a simulation, please?

Mac Pro update: Apple promises another pricey thing it will no doubt abandon after a year

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Apple, so disappointing now.

Once upon a time, you couldn't get a PC of equivalent spec as a Mac Pro for the price of a Mac Pro.

Once upon a time, you couldn't get a 1u server with the power of the Xserve, well, at all.

Once upon a time, you could buy a pre-configured 24 node bioinformatics hardware/software HPC bundle running UNIX, plug and play, from a single vendor, including rack.

Once upon a time, you could buy a nonlinear editing system, music composition system, CGI workstation, or digital compositing powerhouse as a 15" laptop.

Once upon a time, Apple gave a shit about the professional market.

Once upon a time, Apple broke new ground, created new opportunities for creatives, scientists, creative scientists, etc.

BOFH: The Boss, the floppy and the work 'experience'

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... my sole output for two months a couple of years ago is in fact just over 500 lines of code - the majority of which was cut-and-pasted from a web example. I think I knocked the whole thing off in one afternoon ...

This. I didn't think I had it in me to become a BOFH, but ... this.

Also, I think they've employed the same security system on the DevOps here. AGILE seems to be, somehow, the wrong word.

Uber wasn't to blame for robo-ride crash – or was it? Witness said car tried to 'beat the lights'

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Microsoft wants screaming Windows fans, not just users

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Flame

Screaming fans?

Have they visited our server room recently?

Nuns left in limbo after phone line transfer hell

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Re: Ave Maria!!!

I couldn't find a video link to that clip, which is comedy gold.

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Re: We need a Father Ted icon

That would be an ecumenical matter.

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Re: I'm surprised they needed to go to court...

Well I blessed my system folder and it all started working properly again.

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Ave Maria!!!

I'll just pop you on hold for a moment there, so I will.

As of today, iThings are even harder for police to probe

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Re: Is bit-rot a real phenomena? - SHOULD

I thought it was every 15 minutes for an hour, then every hour for a day? Or something like that.

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Re: No Siri, I said 'googly'

I've reservations about this...

Upon first witnessing the glory and splendor of the infinite reaches of the Universe, Siri casually and rather whimsically, decided "It'll have to go".

DevOps hype? Sometimes a pizza really is just a pizza

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So... really... you want it plain and simple.

Ah! You're asking for a Margherita then. Excellent. Well, if you take the 9" you can get a second one for half price. Or opt for a 12" for £7 but that's collect only. Unless you take The Works (tm) and then use the customise option to delete the peppers, olives, pepperoni etc. That could work out a little more though.

Brit telcos will waive early termination fees for military personnel

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Re: It is a win-win for the telco's

Not to mention the call charges to the South Atlantic...

UK Home Sec: Give us a snoop-around for WhatApp encryption. Don't worry, we won't go into the cloud

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Re: Fooooolsss! You cannot kill what doesss not liiive!

If it bleeds, we can kill it.

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How many dead in gang related violence so far this year? The police and security services have done a pretty good job in stopping the organised attacks so far, I reckon. Without all the tools Herr Rudd would have them, err, tooled up with as well!

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Re: What if. ..

I suppose he could have sent a message in morse code, by bumping up and down the kerb...

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Re: Colour me surprised

Well, as the private key is presumably held within the WhatsApp application within Bob's phone, then WhatsApp have the power to have that key copied to them given some order from a judge or court or something. I'm not saying it's an acceptable way to behave, it's just all this talk of over-egging the pudding with multiple encryption etc etc when all they need to do is send a command message to the client app to shove the private key back up the pipe, no? I've never trusted any end-to-end encryption to be secure and I wouldn't ever expect it to be for exactly that reason.You need to decrypt it somewhere, and there's absolutely nothing to stop the app writer copying the key used to decrypt it to somewhere else, or to copy the decrypted message somewhere. Now, if it dumped the message into a file on the local storage in a sandboxed directory and I had a second app which held the keys... But even then I'm relying on the integrity of the author of the second app.

UK digital minister Matt Hancock praises 'crucial role' of encryption

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Of course...

this whole "We must have the keys to WhatsApp" thing might be just a bluff because they already have them but they want terrorists etc to keep using it rather than home brewing their own cyber security which might be far harder to get around.

Boffins name 12 new types of cloud in first Cloud Atlas since 1986

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You can use a second byte...

to depict the colour of the lining. Mine's the one with ±10% tolerance.

Robo-Uber T-boned, rolls onto side, self-driving rides halted

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Re: Bizarre response

Accidentally inserted the DVD-ROM for Simpson's Road Rage instead of Über-drive v0.8.

Disney plotting 15 more years of Star Wars

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Re: And just to add to the confusion...

Star Wars: Milking the Bantha

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And just to add to the confusion...

Star Wars: The Next Generation.

Star Wars: Voyages.

Star Wars: Death Star Nine.

And finally

Falcon.

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Rogue 10

You'll be forced to watch it whether you want to or not. The first two weeks you walk past the cinema and they try to coax you inside, "no" will mean "no". Then they'll subtly change the way the pavement works so that putting one foot in front of the other will still lead you into the foyer where heading for the door labelled "Exit" will actually lead you into the theatre. You should have faked an asthma attack and been carried out by an ambulance crew.

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Re: those unfortunate rumours

Unfortunate because they weren't true.

Good news, everyone! Two pints a day keep heart problems at bay

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Re: Cider!

What does Buckfast count as?

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Murder in space: NASA orders astronauts to KILL cripples – then fire bodies back to Earth

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Re: Confession

Centipedes.

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Re: More research needed

They'll repeat the experiment with rats...

Staring out into the cold, dark, endless void of space, two pinholes of bright blue reflected back from the cupola window. A skeletal horse whinnied in impatience and stamped on the outside of the capsule; the shockwave broke the fragile wire holding the leg together, sending a foreleg spinning gently off into the cold infinity. Death sighed. "HUMANITY REALLY OUGHT TO LEARN TO KEEP ITS FEET ON THE GROUND" he muttered. His flesh and blood horse, Binky, would certainly perish on a job like this. Death knew about that sort of thing - it was, after all, his area of expertise.

A voice like fingernails on a blackboard, floated up from floor level, wherever that might be in this gravity less environment and interrupted his train of thought.

"SQUEAK?"

"DONE? GOOD. YES WE CAN GO NOW."

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One has to admire their subtlety. What better way to test mankind's progress than by suddenly developing a broken leg, spontaneously regenerating a limb, coming back to life during the descent phase. The cumulative effect must be enormous.

NASA to fire 1Gbps laser 'Wi-Fi' ... into spaaaaace

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I thought that "Netflix and chill" was fashioned in the same form as "coffee and sex"? And coffee isn't a verb.

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

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Re: Nah

The Cloud is more bullet resilient than bullet proof. In that what would normally kill outright just leaves little holes everywhere. Mind you, if it heart bleeds, we can kill it.

Adobe buddies up with Microsoft for new ways to mine your data

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Their SaaS model...

was just the 'get ready' light on the road to Microsoftdom then?

Outgoing HPE workers stripped of gym cards and cushy remnants

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They can relax...

by telling El Reg journos the true story behind the various 3PAR failures of late.

DNS lookups can reveal every web page you visit, says German boffin

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Re: Simple fix

And I suppose one could also spread the DNS loading out to different servers across many vendors as a software function in the client or the client's trusted (local) DNS relay. No one DNS gets the whole of the fingerprint.

'Sorry, I've forgotten my decryption password' is contempt of court, pal – US appeal judges

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To be honest...

I can't remember half my passwords nowadays. But I have them on a keychain in a computer which I do know the encryption code for, and which is keyed into a fingerprint as well as a password/key.

Beijing deploys facial scanners to counter public toilet abuse

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Have they initiated...

an Office of Bottom Inspection?

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Re: _

Nah mate. Brillo pad on a stick for me.

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Re: six squares ?

I think mine was under the impression that if she collected enough tokens, she could claim a free puppy.

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Re: "some kind of retinal scan might be quicker"

Rectinal scan was that?

BOFH: Don't back up in anger

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Re: British Standard recovery

That's what I call a prophylactic response.

Dr Hannah Fry: We need to be wary of algorithms behind closed doors

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The most obvious one for me...

would be in the stock market. Trying to predict all those volatile markets based on news reports and quarterly data and the way other brokers are buying and selling. And the speed with which it can all happen too. Wipe out money equivalent to the GDP of a country like Luxembourg within a few milliseconds.

A router with a fear of heights? Yup. It's a thing

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Re: Less air to insulate a PSU

I thought we'd be talking about hundreds of kilovolts here... unlikely to be present in a router's power supply.

Norfolk County Council sent filing cabinet filled with kids' info to a second-hand shop

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Re: Ha ha ha!

Hah! Yeah. The skip. That's better.