Posts by Tac Eht Xilef

No ... think bigger!

> $20Mill outa cover it

You're thinking too small.

Remember, another organisation was recently given $444 million for something equally impossible (and ultimately more futile...)

"I suspect that should have been "the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7:30 Report"."

It's been just "7.30" for quite a few years now, and a lot of their promo material - on-screen graphics, twatter hashtags, etc. - skips the "."

But yes, it irritates me too... ;)

Re: I remember Eudora

From memory as well as the UTF-8 issues there were also a bunch of weirdo bugs that affected message content.

My memory of the details is hazy, but I seem to remember that one of them involved lines starting with "- f" (as in "- firstly, the ...") being turned into blank quoted lines, or something?

Re: The problem lies deeper

"The problem is that browsers now are so incredibly complex that you need a large corporation to support them."

Is a corporation with $30+ million in net assets large enough?

How about if its liabilities were only ~6% of gross assets?

How about if it styled itself as "open souce", and perpetuated the belief that most of the development work on its flagshit product was done for free by volunteer contributors?

(serendipitous typo left in ;))

"Turnball the sock puppet of the U.S."

Less "sockpuppet', more "condom"...

Re: ATSC 3.0 fixes a lot of problems with ATSC 1.0

In fact, if you look at the research both in the lab & in the field, noise & multipath rejection of 8VSB is in most cases on a par with (within a couple of dB) the 64QAM used in DVB-T, and slightly better than that found in 256QAM in DVB-T2. And, despite early concerns, they managed to retrofit SFN operation to it fairly successfully; although not used much in the US due to the market structure there, the few SFNs they do have are comparable to the largest DVB-T SFNs elsewhere.

If they really wanted to improve those factors that much, they would've adopted something similar to the ISDB-T used in Japan, etc. Better noise & mutipath rejection, more flexible SFN operation, hierarchical structure allowing for low power ESB/EW receivers, etc, etc.

In reality, it seems ATSC 1.0's near-complete lack of extendability doomed it.

Telstra Air

"(eg follow the Comcast Xfinity model of opening up home wifi hotspots to the Air/Fon network to back-fill coverage)"

Don't they do this already?

Granted, it's not compulsory - but, at least when self-installing the new DOCSIS 3 cable modems, they certainly imply that you need to create a Telstra Air account & enable it on the modem during the process.

(And yes, if it fails to register the new modem properly, the front-line support insist that you go through the whole Telstra Air setup before they'll escalate...)

Re: If you need to replace anything other than your iPhone 8's battery or display, good luck

This is the El Reg equivalent of the /. "BSD is dying" comment, isn't it?

Preferences -> Advanced -> Update -> "Never check ..."

"... means The Doctor is transgender."

Or a protandrous hermaphrodite. Like a clownfish.

Re: Aussie Judges

Speaking of trolls...

Per-capita CO2 emissions (2013, the latest available data), starting at the highest: Qatar, Trinidad & Tobago, Curacao, Kuwait, Bahrain, Sint Maarten, Brunei, Luxembourg, UAE, Saudi Arabia, United States, Australia, ...

Not that it changes the fact that GEMSA pretty much meet the definition of "patent trolls", but in Australian law there's precedent (based on the principle of international sovereignty) that, in the case of widely-disseminated material, defamation occurs where the target resides. Normally you'd expect that'd please the sort of people who believe their nation is sovereign and that "offence can only be taken, not given" - but it seems they're less pleased when it works against them...

>> As a Rogowski coil results in a time-derivative of the measured

>> current, the measured voltage has to be integrated

>That's completely doomed if there is any significant DC component

>in the load, e.g. if there are devices with half-wave rectifiers, or

>full-wave rectifiers that are asymetric in some way.

Well, yeah, but in that case since the whole point of a Rogowski coil is to respond to the rate of change of the current (dI/dT) they'll tend to _under_estimate the current in the presence of a DC component.

The flip side of that is the integrator (needed to convert the output to something proportional to current) needs a bandwidth-limited response, otherwise it'll tend towards infinite gain at DC & read all sorts of hash as load current at higher frequencies...

Re: Searching for "moz://a"

An address bar is for an address (the clue is in the name).

I think you'll find it is actually "Awesome" - like the cat (https://catmacros.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/awesome_cat_poster.jpg)

Re: Very unlikely to happen here in Ireland

Actually, it's perfectly possible to make an FM crystal set.

Using slope detection - http://solomonsmusic.net/FM_CrystalRadio.html - you can make an average performer. Using a very simple discriminator - http://electronbunker.ca/eb/FMCrystalSet.html - works much better.

You broke it, you bought it.

"Exile Poettering back to MS land or Apple-andia where he belongs."

Screw that. Linux gave birth to him, Linux can keep him.

The OSX boot process may be pretty opaque and cursed by XML - but if you spend some time there you realise it's actually still quite sensible & sane. Unlike systemd...

"Of course, but that's your opinion. In the commercial IT world you are not the customer you are the product. It's always possible to extract more money from you being there if you are the product than if you just pay."

Of course. Nothing new there. Belkin's just a particularly egregious example of it, and I choose to go out of my way to avoid the worst cases.

And maybe I just haven't gotten over some of their particularly shitty hardware & firmware tricks, including such memorable examples as "redirect a random http request to our ad servers every few hours", "let's decide not to pass zeroconf / multicast packets between local LAN ports anymore", and "Self-Healing (by silently rebooting)".

Re: Oh Joy.....

"They literally do nothing well, including sell advertising."

Which I guess makes them worthy competitors to eBay & Gumtree.

(Craigslist may be different in some places, but around here at least it's 99% drugs, used panties, and various euphemisms for same e.g. "FOUR and TWENTY pies", "garden STONEs and ROCKS", "CK with HONEYDEW", etc...)

Re: No guilt at all

"I have little guilt for using a host file based adblock however, I understand the plight of these sites. There business models are being turned upside down."

Their business models were being turned upside-down 20 years ago. The time to start working on solutions to that problem was then. The fact advertisers chose to spend the interventing time on what amounts to advertising their claims that advertising is necessary to pay for advertising so you can keep seeing advertising should tell you all you need to know about the way the industry thinks and works.

Personally, my opinon is that advertising is an insidious social cancer that hijacks human emotions (needs, desires), human constructs (organisations and companies), and much of the human environment (most of what you see and hear) in order to do nothing more than grow and reproduce itself. That's why I have no guilt at all about using an adblocker. The irony of the fact that ~7 years ago it was the slow-loading ads on The Register that lead me to first install Adblock (then Adblock Pus, then later uBlock and uBlock origin) is just the icing on the cake...

Re: Errr...

OK. If they have a concrete problem like that, maybe they should've explained it (or used plausibly similar examples) in their position statement / petition launch?

Because ther current statement reads like they're picking a fight that has nothing to do with them or their business at all...

Re: Melbourne Relocated - Official

No, you're thinking of Mozilla...

Re: Confidentiality

"... monopoly ... monopoly ... monopoly ... monopoly ..."

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: RUD

"Only Musk could come up with a nice way of saying it crashed and exploded."

Apparently not...

http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly

Re: parliament has been dissolved therefore no privilege therefore do not to be placed under seal

Catallaxy's argument aside:

- Both MHRs & Senators continue to serve - and be paid - "at Her Majesty's pleasure" after prorogation/dissolution. Although not enshrined in the constitution or law, this is the fundamental principle which allows the government to operate in 'caretaker mode'.

- The Senate is considered to be a 'continuing house', and - apart from considering bills/legislation - continues to operate after prorogation/dissolution of Parliament.

- Under long-standing Senate orders & resolutions, committees may continue to operate & meet. The right to do so has never been challenged.

(All the above can be found in Odger's Australian Senate Practice, 13th ed. No point relying on Odgers' "... Representatives ..." for that...)

On top of that:

- Presumably the documents relate to the recent "Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network". This committee concluded on May 4th, before Parliament was prorogued/dissolved.

- Parliamentary privilege is inherent to "all proceedings of Parliament" and does not need to be claimed.

- Most importantly: privilege is not restricted to parliamentarians. It can be invoked on anything presented by anybody to Parliament - documents, work product, or statements, by a politician, staffer, or Joe Public (or even on leaked documents presented by a former Senator during the course of his committee membership) - and the matter of whether it is actually subject to privilege or not is then decided by committee.

- Amusingly, while I don't think the HoR committee can meet during the interregnum, the Senate committee probably can...

Re: Utterly unacceptable

"What part of our education system fails to teach basic social skills?"

The part that operates 24hrs from ages 0-5, and ~4pm to ~8am up to the age of 17?

Re: 44,080 pounds of lead

ROHS doesn't completely disallow lead, it just sets a maximum allowable limit (1000ppm / 0.1%, by weight). And there's a few allowable exemptions e.g. ceramic components, CRTs, high-temp solders, etc.

The closest I can find to a figure for lead in iPhones is a Greenpeace report which examined the original iPhone, stating "lead and chromium were detected in a small proportion of samples and at relatively low concentrations", and "lead was found in four of the components/materials, at concentrations ranging from 10 to 80 ppm".

Without toting up to the total recyclables, thowing in an unknown chunk for non-recyclables, and figuring out the lead %, it's hard to tell - but at first glance Apple's numbers don't look terribly out of place.

"I would rather a good solid 25mb within the next 3 months (when our FTTN node goes live), rather than wait for 2020 to get the Rolls Royce solution."

And I'm in a similar, but opposite boat - inner suburbia, ADSL is 12mbps on a good day, half the local exchange area is already cutover to the NBN, my part is in the queue for rollout to commence in 3 months, and preliminary survey/remediation work has already commenced.

Well, at least that was the case in late 2013 - right before the Government changed and Abbott & Turnbull brought FTTP to a screaming halt. 2 1/2 years later, and we've seemingly been bumped off the end of the list - the NBN's website says "Not currently available. The nbn™ network rollout has not started in your area. Keep checking the website for more information".

Meanwhile, the "new, improved, FTTN / Technology Mix" NBN timetable & costing have blown out to match the original FTTP plans, and the o-side cabling around here is in such bad shape we're averaging a voice/ADSL service affecting fault every 3~4 months.

Such is the power of anecdotes - for each one, you will always find the opposite...

"And FYI it wasn't 'Microshite' who initiated the change, 'AppleShite' implemented EFI on Macs way before it was put on PCs."

Err, wrong. Gateway were the first to use it (on one of their media center PCs) in 2003/2004, several years before Apple even started using Intel processors.

(Yeah, yeah, Open Firmware / OpenBoot is essentially the same thing done differently. So why aren't you blaming Sun?)

Oh, sorry, I see now that you really meant "If".

(hint: not a fan of Mary-Sue Clara...)

Re: Explainable power dip between on and off

Well, about double that. But yeah, that was my first thought too.

What's really suspicious is that, according to the ABI presser, it actually draws more power in standby than it does when recording in 720p/360p...

Re: Re Parachutes @ x7

There is however a subtle yet definite line between "narrative imperative"/"poetic licence" and "no, that's just forkinitwe'redone stupid".

(I haven't seen it yet, though it doesn't sound like the parachute / plane bit steps over the line - but NuWho repeatedly shits all over then rubs your face in the former by opting for the latter. At a rate of about once per episode...)