* Posts by Dave 126

10643 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

USB-C is now wired for sound, just like Sir Cliff Richard

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: How does it work?

A DAC. And often an ADC, too, for microphones (stereo now as easy as the existing mono allowed by 3.5m TRRS)

Dave 126 Silver badge

>Great another fricking adapter. Just what we are missing in our lives.

If you buy a 5-pack of adaptors from China, you can just leave one on the end of each of your headphone cables and forget about it. As a bonus, your £0.99 adaptor will take the mechanical strain, instead of the cable on your £30 headphones.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Consumers..

>Consumers.. Who are buying devices not made by apple have the ability to shop elsewhere.

An observation: People collectively spend shitloads on headphones. New models are released all the time, at prices far higher than 'more than good enough' (i.e some Sennheisers reduced to £30). A great number of headphones sold already come in an (old 3.5mm) iPhone specific version, or with a swappable iPhone specific cable (the mic and and remote controls differ from various Android OEM implementations).

3.5mm is great but not perfect; a 'snap-off' magnetic connector would be better, and would have saved me money since I have damaged headphone cables be catching them on things.

Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Musk seems to be losing it

>Average temperature -55C, atmosphere almost 100% CO2.

That's all right, I know of a few people happy to spend their days inside... wait, what that? Netflix takes ages to buffer? Noooooo!

British bloke bailed after 'hacker plunders Pippa Middleton's iCloud'

Dave 126 Silver badge

Why, is Pippa's fiance an attractive fella? I having been keeping up on royal affairs.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Indeed. Since he presumably obtained the photos by taking advantage of someone's poor security (I'm guessing a guessable password), it seems very odd he didn't take more care in his own security.

Apple to crunch iOS 10 local backup password brute force hole

Dave 126 Silver badge

>Who is this Afonin bloke? IOS 10 is secure even after he himself found that the backups were easier to break into for finding passwords than in previous IOS releases. To me, that make it [iOS 10] insecure.

The attack wasn't against iOS - it was against the user's local (iTunes) backup.

Apple smartphones are secure. iOS is also secure, and gets tougher with each subsequent generation. ...

This leaves us to logical acquisition. Forcing an iPhone or iPad to produce an offline backup and analyzing resulting data is one of the very few acquisition options available for devices running iOS 10. Local backups are easy to produce if the iPhone is unlocked. However, you may be able to produce a local backup even if the phone is locked by using a pairing record extracted from a trusted computer.

- http://blog.elcomsoft.com/2016/09/ios-10-security-weakness-discovered-backup-passwords-much-easier-to-break/

Jeremy Clarkson and Co. rise to top for Great British Bake Off replacements

Dave 126 Silver badge

On the question of the Stig's identity:

.... "my friend thinks it's Clarkson, Hammond and May, primarily because 'Stig' is an anagram of 'gits'''

- The Thick of It (a British political satire, though the Thick of IT could have been an alternate title for The IT Crowd)

Oi, Apple fanbois. Your beloved Jesus Phones are pisspoor for disabled users

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Apple - not as smart as they think they are

The Lightning > 3.5mm adaptor works in 'Airplane' (all radios off) mode. That you can't use wireless headphones on planes is already an issue that affects buyers of wireless headphones from Sennheiser, Bowers and Wilkens, Bose, Sony... anyone who makes wireless headphones, in facSome models will work as wired cans, but only with an extra cable, obviously, a solution no different to a dongle.

As an Android user, it doesn't affect me... and it doesn't affect you either.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "Take your sim out of old phone, put it into new phone. Job done."

>If only everything was routed over IP, it would be easy to swap from phone to phone (and carrier to carrier) according to need.

>>Really? Take your sim out of old phone, put it into new phone. Job done.

That really is a sub-optimal solution. A better situation would be being able to just grab whichever phone is most suitable for your activity as you leave your house - a cheap simple phone for drunken night out or walk in the woods, a bigger screened phone for a long train journey so you can pass the time reading TheReg, a lightweight simple phone for jogging.

What you outline is akin to having assorted footwear, but only a single pair of laces that need to swapped between your walking boots, your trainers and your black Oxfords every time you go out.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: *shakes head*

>It honestly beggers belief that some are so darn brainwashed by brands like Apple that they are prepared to buy something that doesn't fill their needs (they are of course inteligent enough to check first, right?) then complain.

Eh? It is clear that for this user, the iPhone does things an Android can't, else he would be using an Android phone. The reason he is railing at Apple to provide a feature found on Android phones - instead of railing at Google et al to provide features found in iPhones - is that iPhones work well with his Mac (as he said).

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Have you seen how you set up an Apple iPad?

>And the women with fingernails find it almost impossible to get on the exact date.

Aha! Let's design and market some fake acrylic fingernails incorporating a conductive layer/filaments so that they can work on capacitive screens!

Dang! I wrote the above before I googled for the existance of such things.... it turns out they've already been invented:

http://www.cultofmac.com/210391/your-long-fingernails-can-now-be-transformed-into-touchscreen-styluses/

But yeah, the use of skeuomorphic sliders or dials for entering numerical data (alarm clock settings, current date etc) instead of a virtual numberpad in Android is irritating (can't speak for iOS).

ARM emits Cortex-R52

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Can't drive a car

You could well be on the right track; you mention reliability, and there is also security to be considered.

This got my attention the other day:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160920-formal-verification-creates-hacker-proof-code/

The gist is that by some effort, code can be formally verified as secure, akin to a mathematical proof, as opposed to testing the code against a sample of possible inputs (you can obviously never test every combination of input). More complex systems can constructed from 'building blocks' of code that is proven to be secure.

Asian hornets are HERE... those honey bee murdering BASTARDS

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: @Steven Roper

The hornets are able to fly - or be carried by wind - over the English Channel, according a fella on Radio 4's World at One today.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Stings like a bullet

>I somehow doubt you have ever seen people that have been "shot with a rifle".

Is that an African or European rifle? Laden or unladen? Air rifle or powder based? Lead slug or plastic?

tl;dr Too many variables

Dave 126 Silver badge

1. Please don't kill any of our native hornets (and generally, any black and yellow buzzy thing won't sting you if you don't take swipes at it

2. What happened to that Mosquito-killing laser turret (made cheaply from bits of scanners, cameras and DVD players) from Ted Talks?

Edit: It's the laser from a BluRay player. https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria/transcript?language=en

Apple guilty in iPhone ringtone patent rip-off battle with Sony, Nokia

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Patent madness

>HOW THE BLINKERED FUCK CAN YOU PATENT A SOUND?!

How the hell can you not have realised that Reg articles tend to skimp on the details, and that it is not a sound that has been patented?

An abstract of the patent in question, filed by Motorola in 1993, is worth reading for the typos (or rather dodgy OCR transcription, I assume):

"This invention shag be designed to be independent of the flap position... ...The sohare [software] shall scan the MUTE key while the tlap is closed, which was not done previously. This invention shag also work while the flap is open since the keypad scan shall scan the full keypad as normal."[sic]

http://priorart.ip.com/IPCOM/000006958

Robot overlords? Pshaw! I ain't afraid of no AI – researchers

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Joanna Bryson is a woman

Noted! It seems the commenter (or commentard, as we are all known here for reason you might now be able to guess) may have skim read the article. Either that, or the name 'Bryson' is so associated with an avuncular, self depreciating American travel writer that his puny human grey matter returned the wrong mental image. :)

Curiously, the sex of the other two experts in the article are trickier (Zoubin Ghahramani) or impossible (Leslie Smith) from their forename alone.

Dave 126 Silver badge

> as Donald Rumsfeld would say Known Knowns and Known Unknowns, whilst not knowing about Unknown Knowns and Unknown Unknowns.

Rumsfeld never mentioned 'Unknown Knowns', for reasons I hope you'll find obvious upon reflection! :) However, 'Unkown Knowns' did feature in the title of a documentary about him.

I'm not commenting on the man's policies or politics, please note, just his correct use of English.

We live in a world where a 'Hamdog' burger hybrid is patented

Dave 126 Silver badge

More recipes here:

http://thatiswhyyourefat.tumblr.com/

Including my favourite*, the Turtle Burger ( 5 sausages to creates the legs and head, burger for the body, whole lot wrapped in cheese and bacon (to emulate the texture of the shell) and deep fried.

*favourite in principal, I haven't replicated such a work of genius.

Opera debuts free VPN built into desktop browser

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: If you're not paying for the product...

>Naah, they would never sell user data. Browsing habits, on the other hand...

Browsing habits is user data, data about users. Users' data', data belonging to users, is jpg of holiday, txt of a to-do list from ten years ago, odf when they toyed with writing a letter, dat of a savegame from a title than hasn't been played since XP, wav when they tested the mic inputs on a then-new soundcard... and possibly even some useful stuff somewhere amongst the zoo of files they have kicking around. :)

FBI overpaid $999,900 to crack San Bernardino iPhone 5c password

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: The should have just tried

Hard to do when your only available inputs are: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9. :)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Built in Obsolescence

>Gordon861

There is no motive for Apple to hobble the lifespan of the NAND to promote sales... the finite lifespan of the battery already does that.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Not really comparable

>"When you desolder the chip that holds all the memory of the device from the board, there is a huge risk that you damage the chip beyond repair"

>>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... You're not much into electronics, are you... wait, don't bother answering that.

@DropBear The researcher himself acknowledges the risk of damaging the chip when desoldering it. He mentions this under 'Future Work' in his PDF. The magnitude of 'risk' is a function of the consequences, as well as probability.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Not really comparable

He wasn't an amateur. However, his own PDF does note that removing the NAND still carries a risk of data loss (Presumably a risk that can be made smaller by practice and refinement of technique):

"It would be beneficial to develop a safer way of removing the NAND Flash chip from the main board, or a

way of reading out the NAND Flash contents without the need to physically remove it."

Dave 126 Silver badge

>The drift of the article seems to be that the cost of developing the attack, which evidently took Skorobogatov quite a few man hours of what seems to be highly skilled analysis and electronic technician work should be ignored

Nah, the gist of the article wasn't that the cost be ignored, but that it wasn't $1,000,000. Four months of part time work by the skilled technician would be in the tens of thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: So probably known to TLA's within a week of it's launch?

Eh? Wouldn't the possible bug in the wear levelling algorithm be a reliability issue, not a security issue?

I know that it isn't in the nature of conspiracy-minded folk to read the source material closely, but still...

iPhone 7's Qualcomm, Intel soap opera dumps a carrier lock-out on us

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: i5 and ARM are similar in performance?

> True i7 can only be had in MBP. Any of these processors will smoke A10 in just about any task.

For sure, but let's remember that a lot of the heavy lifting in traditional Mac productivity apps is done by GPUs (or more specialised silicon via Thunderbolt in the case of raw 4K streams, for example). If ARM is just dandy for web and office, and Adobe Creative Suite leans on the GPU, there's no insurmountable hurdle.

We've seen this in PC gaming too - TomsHardware for ages has suggested that most games don't benefit from anything faster than an i5 CPU

Idris Elba thrashes Night Manager Hiddleston for James Bond job vacancy

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: T'was I...

Unable was I, to compose a palindrome containing SBBAD...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: What the?

@muddysteve

You are quite right! There is indeed confusion, but it appears to be on the part of the game's developers:

-He is the shortest character in the game, despite Oddjob as he appeared in the original film being about average height. It seems likely that he was confused with the actually diminutive Nick Nack from The Man with the Golden Gun.

-Due to his short height, he cannot be hit by the normal auto-aim gunfire (which simply shoots above his -head). Instead the other player must stop moving to use the precise aim crosshairs to aim downward and deliberately at him. Because of this, Oddjob gives his user an unfair advantage and his use is often looked down upon.

- http://goldeneye.wikia.com/wiki/Oddjob

Dave 126 Silver badge

Credit to...

'quattroprorocked'

According to the Reg Forums search tool, quattroprorocked was the first of us here to support Idris Elba as Bond, though fellow commentards had previously suggested him for Dr Who.

(You have to search for just 'Idris' - if you use his full name then you'll be given the wrong idea that I was the first commentard to support Mr Elba as 007)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: What the?

Well, Odd Job was the toughest playable character in GoldenEye multiplayer on the N64 (because he presented a smaller target).

Peter Dinklage has done plenty of womanising and drinking in Game of Thrones.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: No.

>The only reason he would get the role would be as a token gesture... ...to put a tick in some "diversity" checklist.

There are other check boxes, 007 traits, that Elba has ticks in:

- Very attractive to women

- Physically imposing

- Has driven a Bentley very fast

- British

So whilst I'm not saying that tokenism is completely absent, to say that it is the only factor is going a bit far.

Supporting links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNQl2Ii0H-I (Pacfic Rim- Elba's character dressing down a subordinate)

http://www.bentleymotors.com/en/world-of-bentley/our-story/news/2015/idris-elba-breaks-historic-flying-mile-speed-record-.html

http://www.heart.co.uk/photos/celebrity-photos/top-25-sexiest-men/idris-elba-covers-maxim-magazine/

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Hiddleston and Swift Break-Up

>For those wishing to know what's really going on with Taylor Swift's love life,

... websites more suitable than TheRegister exist. :)

Rise of the Machines at Sea: The British firm building robot boats

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Submarine tracker

>So I'd guess the mass of a large ICBM submarine even at say a kilometre would still be quite detectable.

It would if the submarine hadn't displaced a volume of water of equal mass to itself. Gravimeters are used to detect underground hollows or other areas of low density.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Submarine tracker

If your roboats are small and use passive sonar, the submarine captain may have trouble distinguishing from harmless flotsam. Also, the act of taking out a small vessel is likely to draw the very attention he wishes to avoid.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Submarine tracker

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/us_military_drone_submarine_hunter/

DARPA have gone with one 140 ton boat, instead of a herd of smaller ones. I don't know enough to know why... maybe one big powerful sonar system is better than several smaller ones. Maybe it just has a greater range (drag is proportional to cross section, a square power, whereas fuel capacity is proportional to volume, a cube power). Maybe they thought they'd build and test one prototype before making a few more.

My assumption would be that a team of several sensor platforms would offer greater performance than the sum of its elements, since having distance between the sensors allows for triangulation of signals. But hey, I'm not a weapon designer, dolphin or acoustic engineer. :)

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: "ASV is working steadily towards true artificial intelligence (AI) on its boats"

It could be a limited AI, which is not the same as Strong AI, General AI or Artificial Sentience or Consciousness.

Intelligence is generally described as the ability to perceive information, and retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviours within an environment or context. Whilst there are other definitions of intelligence, there is no problem in using 'AI' to describe some existing problem solving machines.

>Pattern recognition and pathfinding is not AI for fuck's sake.

Not individually, but how the boat reacts to these inputs (along with weather forecasts, goals, local sensors etc) could be. The article is a bit scant on details, but it seems ASV's work parallels that of autonomous cars, which are classed as AI.

Teenage noughties protocol BitTorrent reinvents itself again

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: why would the network obey a law

>why would the network obey a law that was never written for it.

Because maybe there is a correlation with how cheap stuff is and how much of it people buy?

The number of connected devices in a household of four today can easily be: - 4 laptops - 1 desktop - 3 tablets - 5 phones - 1 television - 1 PVR - 1 printer - 2 Chromecasts - 1 router - 2 WiFi range extenders - 1 games console.

Ten years ago it would have just been the laptops and router.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Rsync

I dunno, but before I implemented such a scheme I would weigh up the power consumption costs.

You do raise a good point though - many new PCs have oodles of unused storage, and many folk never fill it up even after years (though the emergence of SSDs has made people rethink stuff... "Instead of a slow 500GB HDD of which I use very little, maybe a fast 128GB SSD would suit me better, especially if I'm using network storage and/or archive media")

EU ends anonymity and rules open Wi-Fi hotspots need passwords

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Must be fun...

That's an interesting observation, HailAJ. However, it is a US publication. As far as the UK is concerned (if my 30 seconds of Googling are to believed), legal definitions are taken from a variety of sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, Stroud's Judicial Dictionary of Words and Phrases (provides details of where words have been judicially defined by the court), and Words and Phrases Legally Defined (provides details of where words have been defined within legislation).

- https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/dictionary

I remember reading that Private Eye, who having used for years the phrase 'tired and emotional' as a euphemism for drunkenness, lost a libel case. The effective outcome is that 'tired and emotional' now means 'drunk'.

HP doorsteps Apple shoppers at the altar of dreams

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: X3

Are MacBooks not stable?

Speed and lightness are merely factors in how comfortable a laptop is to own and use.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Hey, we still innovate!

HP do innovate, but that doesn't seem to get them many column inches in the press. Take the HP Sprout (yes, that really is its name) for example - a desktop PC incorporating a projector and 3D scanning and hand tracking gear:

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-mac-desktops/hp-sprout-review-1284768/review

I'm not saying its a perfect machine, but it seems a step in the right direction, a direction in which we can only advance if stuff like this gets more coverage.

In the laptop space, it is Lenovo that have produced some of the more usefully innovative kit in recent years.

HP Ink buys Samsung's printer business for a BILLION dollars

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Printing?

Laser at home. For photographs, I use a machine in a high-street chemists - more likely to get good results than a cheaper home inkjet - and if it doesn't print properly, I won't pay for the paper or dye.

Tesla to stop killing drivers: Software update beamed to leccy cars

Dave 126 Silver badge

>In other words, what's the business plan?

Ask Uber.

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Drone drivers?

I always raced around Nascar Racing tracks the wrong way round with the indestructibility option set to ON. Meaning, my car was indestructible, the computer controlled cars were very susceptible to damage! Happy days.... a null modem cable, a 486 and the 386DX it replaced...

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: Mansfield bars

>took off via a "ramp" and landed nose first in a field after going up to about 25m high - http://bgr.com/2016/05/08/tesla-model-s-accident/ - they all survived.

Do you have another link? The link you posted only says "the car flew 25 meters (82 feet) in the air, and rolled over at least once after crashing in a field at full speed." That's distance, not height. The photos show the car to be about 25M away from the road, on flat terrain, with no ramp or bank to be seen.

The article is also suspect because is first says the occupants escaped unharmed, then goes on to quote a copper who said they had 'serious but non life-threatening injuries'.

Your point remains though: The front of the car is totalled smashed (no big lump of engine, naturally), the cabin is intact - which is what you would want if you crashed.

Delete Google Maps? Go ahead, says Google, we'll still track you

Dave 126 Silver badge

The article doesn't make it clear, but it isn't the Google Play Store app, but Google Play Services - a part of Google's Android that provides APIs (including location) to other apps.

ALSO: Some phones can start getting warm and depleting their battery very quickly, and upon Settings> Battery> you'll see Google Play Services at the top of the list (instead of 'Screen', as is usual). This probably means Google Play Services is being called upon by some rogue 3rd party app.

The next Bond – Basildon or Bass-Ass? YOU decide

Dave 126 Silver badge

John McAfee?

That's if he isn't too busy running for President of the USA, obviously.

/ not sure if serious

Dave 126 Silver badge

Re: In the absence of a poll…

>Why do people keep banging on about Idris Elba? It's like you all think he's the only black, british actor out there.

Elba has come top in quite a few "World's Sexiest Men" polls by various magazines - and being irresistible to women is a core Bond characteristic. Of the two gentlemen you cite, Gyasi looks too good natured - though does wear a suit well - and the other looks too youthfully cheerful.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is more eligible, though he himself has suggested an American of Mexican descent, Micheal Pena - though perhaps just to throw the journalist off the question (can't blame him). I'm not sure that a franchise character is Ejiofor's cup of tea, either.

There is an element of 007's character that suits his being non-white (or non-English): His feeling of never quite being a part of the establishment he serves.