* Posts by Paul

691 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2006

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UK Snoopers' Charter gagging order drafted for London Internet Exchange directors

Paul

https://www.linx.net/communications/press-releases/linx-response-to-article-in-the-register

Get it while it's hot: NASA's Space Poo contest winners wipe up $30k

Paul

I suppose a cork is too simple a solution?

Apple joins one wireless power group, the other one responds with so-happy forced grin

Paul

I have a Sony phone which has a magnetically attached charge coupler, much like the old Apple magcharge connector.

It's quick to connect, doesn't lose power like Qi, and the phone is still waterproof. You can still use the microUSB socket to charge if you wish.

Such a shame Sony dropped this feature, when instead it should have become a standard.

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you're on Trump's hit list

Paul

I used to go to the USA two or three times a year to visit relatives and for a holiday, spending thousands each time on a hotel, car hire, subsistence, gifts etc.

I started to cut down after "9/11" because getting into the country made me feel like a criminal, even though I am middle class white european male to the 4th generaion with a UK passport etc.

I've not been in three years now, and I estimate it's cost their economy over $15000... and counting.

I know there are many others like me. I've heard of Chinese companies trying to send people to do trade deals being turned away, and spending millions in Europe instead as they are welcomed with open arms.

Surely His Highness Donald and all his business owning buddies would want the tourists's money rather than turning them away in droves?

Paul
Coat

new TV show

Trump is a big fan of Reality TV. He clearly wants to remake an existing show but with a new twist and a new name, a program to reveal peoples' secrets, and it will be called "Stasi In Their Eyes."

I'll get my coat.

Supermicro sockets it to Skylake rivals

Paul

Skylake was so last year, Kaby Lake is here!

same socket though, so hopefully a firmware update will allow Kaby Lake CPUs to work.

President Donald Trump taken on by unlikely foe: Badass park rangers

Paul

Synopsis: When a mysterious misshapen orange troll rises to power in the near dystopian future and declares war on common sense and logic, a group of unlikely heroes rise to combat his insanity and spark rebellion.

Paul

Ah, one day they'll make a movie about this. Trump Wars Episode 1: Rise of the Park Rangers it'll be called.

Credit to my daughter who said this when we chatted about it.

One BEEELLION dollars: Apple sues Qualcomm, one of its chip designers

Paul

Re: The Forbes article on this suit

Well, yes it is. If you're a business and want things to run faster, it costs more money. You either make it faster or wider (more parallel operations). Oracle chose to charge more if you do the latter.

Samsung set a fire under battery-makers to make the Galaxy Note 7 flaming brilliant

Paul

Re: So the fires were the result of...

It's the tech bloggers masquerading as reviewers.

I'm sure many only get to keep the phone for a short while, maybe a matter of hours, so never have to live with the deficiencies, or see the beautiful device crumble or its shiny finish strip away over the a few weeks of use.

FBI let alleged pedo walk free rather than explain how they snared him

Paul

Re: Not proven

Even cartoons can be considered, legally, to be child porn

Paul

Why is it that a man who's not been convicted of a crime now has all his details plastered over the internet?

I'm all for prosecuting people who do horrible things, but the due process of the law is innocent until proven guilty.. and not trial by media.

Internet of Sh*t has an early 2017 winner – a 'smart' Wi-Fi hairbrush

Paul

Re: Fantastic!

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/06/28/spark.toilet/index.html?iref=allsearch

Paul

the smart toothbrush is far more useful!

http://connectedtoothbrush.com/

/s

Spotty battery life costs Apple's MacBook Pro its gold-star rating

Paul

it should also receive fewer stars because they're not repairable. may your deity have mercy on your wallet if you didn't buy Applecare and your mac dies.

Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

Paul

it's called an air-gap firewall. stops phishing, viruses, pr0n etc.

Privacy Commissioner, infosec boffins, call for reform of anti-hack Bill

Paul

and in other news: farm yard workers, who report that the horse already ran away whilst the owners are busy locking the stable, are to be prosecuted.

Bill Gates joins $170bn climate change investment club

Paul

I just got this pop up when running Microsoft Climate Modeller 3.6

"I can see you're trying change the planet for the better.

Access denied by process Trump

Abort/Retry/Fail ?"

Brexflation hits Lenovo's Phab2

Paul

These devices are all made in China and either flown in or come by boat in a container, probably to Rotterdam and/or Harwich.

There shouldn't really be more than 10% variation across Europe.

If you do try to buy the phab2 pro smartphone off one of the Lenovo European shops, they'll only let you enter that country as a shipping address.

HBO slaps takedown demand on 13-year-old girl's painting because it used 'Winter is coming'

Paul

I hereby declare I own the trademark to "Fuck Off HBO".

Anyone who wishes to use that phrase must pay a licence fee; the licence fee is £1 or $1, to be paid to the Cancer Research charity.

Who killed Pebble? Easy: The vulture capitalists

Paul

Re: Fancy that

I disagree. There are many environments, usually in the work place, where playing with your mobile phone would meet with frowns or worse, but discretely checking a watch is not even noticed.

Violin Memory axes staff just before Christmas, gives CFO $150k bonus

Paul

I feel sorry for Cory Sindelar, imagine having to scrape by with just $150,000 in the bank? I'm sure his family will have to cut back this christmas or something, maybe fly business instead of first.

/sarcasm

Investigatory Powers Act signed into UK law by Queen

Paul
Mushroom

Re: Here's the full list...

I've never used a Draytek vigor, apart from the simplest DSL bridges, which didn't leave me angry at their crapness.

UK Parliament waves through 'porn-blocking' Digital Economy Bill

Paul

Theresa May seems to think that all UK citizens are potential terrorists and paedophiles.

My theory is that people tend to think other people are like themselves, that they mostly share the same ethics, morals and attitudes.

What does that say about May?

Paul

http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/09/free-vpn-in-opera-browser-40/

Why I just bought a MacBook Air instead of the new Pro

Paul

Re: Solder not Socket...

May your deity give you comfort if your 2016 Macbook Pro develops a fault and you have no warranty, as you'll be throwing it away.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Touch+Bar+Teardown/73480

"Repairability 1 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)"

Post-outage King's College London orders staff to never make their own backups

Paul

this reminds me of how Toy Story2 was nearly deleted

http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/

Zuckerberg says just one per cent of news on Facebook is fake

Paul

12 percent oc statistics on the internet are entirely made up

Apple drops dongle prices to make USB-C upgrade affordable

Paul

I recall one reviewer saying the new Macbook Pro is really a Macbook Air-plus model. If they'd called it that, people would be delighted.

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

Paul

Join me, in the Campaign For Actual Real Tabs - CFART!

Paul

I think tabs, hard tabs, should be used as god indented, or intended, and stick with 8 columns. That's the default, it works, and as long as you don't f**k with your editor settings, everybody sees the same.

If you want anything else, use spaces. And again, everybody sees the same thing. A good editor can use any number of spaces for indentation, so if you're going to d**k around with the editor's configuration, use spaces and make the editor do all the work.

The worst messes I've ever seen in source code are when muitple people have used hard tabs and defined them as different shifts, but all done it differently.

Boffins turn phone into tracker by abusing pairing with – that's right – IoT kit

Paul

good guys Belkin, instead of suing the people finding these faults and thus suppress the knowledge, they fix it.

if I was in the market to buy IoT stuff, I'd be putting Belkin at or near the top of my list.

Cynical Apple gouges UK with 20 per cent price hike

Paul

Re: Win-win

Look up Veblen Good

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Digital minister Matt Hancock promises 'full fibre' eating plan for Blighty

Paul

Re: C'mon Aussie

It's just capitalism at its worst.

BT have no real competition, and inherited a truly national copper based network, they can make decent money without upgrading the infrastructure. Why should they do more than they do, it's just good business?

Of course, it sucks to be stuck with a monopoly supplier.

Some Eastern European countries have amazing national fibre infrastructures, but their phone systems were so bad they really had to start from scratch and thus leapfrogged nations like ours.

Reports: Twitter chainsaw massacre redux on the cards

Paul

I've always thought Twitter is mostly pointless. It's generally been a write-only medium, with a few exceptions of some people that others find interesting.

There's nothing on Twitter that doesn't exist on dozens of other online services.

The fact they've never been able to make it a commercial success, and nobody wants to buy them, hasn't surprised me in any way.

That said, Twitter has some pretty clever tech to handle the volume of tweets

Como–D'oh! Infosec duo exploits OCR flaw to nab a website's HTTPS cert

Paul

Here be K/Comodo dragons!

Openreach split could damage broadband investment, says BT's chief exec

Paul

If I were an ISP, I'd rather have a small share in the huge btopenreach and easy fair access to their network than try and build my own.

May blocked plans to bring in more Indian IT workers – Vince Cable

Paul

Re: We soon won't need them

We will have jobs. once all the european mainlanders go home, there will be plenty of unskilled farm jobs available, restaurant staff, cleaners and other manual labouring jobs.

It will become economical to grow food in the UK again because of the week pound hence more farm jobs.

Fuel will go up, as it's priced in dollars.

The good thing is we'll all get fitter and healthier from working outside, or because we'll be walking or cycling more. And being poorer, we'll be eating less, which is good for us

Paul

I don't see why importing the work of remote labourers shouldn't incur the same import duty as physical goods. We pay VAT/tax on insurance and eBooks and digital music.

Just as we have switched from importing physical goods for music and video to digital, and other services which incur VAT, so companies who outsource workers to other countries and then operate their business remotely should incur import duty on that imported work.

LG’s V20 may be the phone of the year. So why the fsck can’t you buy it?

Paul

Re: "a 32-bit DAC, part of a burgeoning partnership with Bang & Olufsen"

you don't need better than 16 bit DACs for playback, provided you have a variable gain headphone/speaker amp on the output so as to maintain the noise floor.

anybody who claims to hear the difference between a 24 bit DAC vs a 16 bit DAC, when fed through the same analogue amp and speakers is either a liar or an alien.

Paul

Re: LG

El Reg partially fixed it.. correcting aybe to Maybe, but still left the trailing M.

Brit ISP TalkTalk scraps line rental charges

Paul

Re: Independents such as Entanet aren't much good either anymore, bottlenecks everywhere.

I'm with Zen. That doesn't happen to me.

Ofcom: Legal separation will force Openreach to eat more fibre

Paul

I think ISPs should only be able to charge you the actually achieved line speed, not the "up to" speed. They can recover the costs from BT OpenReach for the quality of the line.

So if you have an "up to 80M" service and the line can only do 20, you pay only 25% of the normal rate, and the ISP gets a refund from BT on their costs of renting the line.

Paul

Re: For whom does OFCOM work?

I think the analogy of buying a Ferrari and complaining about the roads is a poor one, because the two aren't the same.

Perhaps a better one would be that of of buying a rail season ticket with a guaranteed seat on the non-stop express every morning, only to find the service is oversold so you don't get a seat or get bumped onto a later slower train would be better.

BT Openreach boss wants you to know that deep down, they care

Paul

How about BT stop jacking up line rental and using the money to sell their broadband cheaply and pay for sports deals, and thus make their competitors less competitive and bolster their own services?

‘Penultimate’ BlackBerry seen on 'do not publish' page as fire sale begins

Paul

Re: Innovation is needed, not more phablets !

yes, 5" is way too small for a pocket computer that can occasionally be a phone.

Paul

Snapdragon 820 is old hat

the Snapdragon 820 is old hat now, the 821 is what the cool kids run these days.

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

Paul

Re: the "bags for life" that last about 12 months at best.

"My understanding of 'bag for life' was that when the bag fails, that's it, you're ground up for lasagna."

Hopefully people are more tasty than horses?

Three outsources staff to Capita

Paul

I wonder if Capita learned anything from the last time they "helped" run a mobile phone company...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/10087909/Capita-plans-to-close-O2-call-centres-and-cut-thousands-of-jobs.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/25/capita_voluntary_redundancy_call_centres_o2/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/29/capita_o2_staff_asked_to_stick_around/

Florida Man's prized jeep cremated by exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7

Paul

Re: Always carry a fire extinguisher under the passenger seat

Whilst I agree that having a fire extinguisher is a good thing, I am fairly sure most extinguishers won't help against a Lithium fire.

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