Posts by handleoclast

Re: Webpages that crash

There is a site I use a lot. Years ago I turned off my adblocker for that site so they'd get a bit of revenue, because they deserved it. And then I noticed a peculiar thing: my browser would crash frequently when looking at pages on their site, and nowhere else. I turned my adblocker on again and the crashes stopped.

Maybe that site has better-behaved ads now. Maybe the many updates to my browser in the intervening years mean the ads that used to crash it no longer do. Maybe it's safe once more. Or maybe not. The site itself tries to cater to a wide variety and version of browsers but advertisers tend to test only on the latest Microsoft thing. I know that on the few occasions I use my mobile to browse the web it occasionally encounters crashing pages and the crashes seem to be only on sites that have the big, flashy, ads, so I'm guessing that site is still going to give me problems.

But even if it's safe to come out of the closet, the adverts are very intrusive on that site. Which I could just about live with. But the ads are also data hungry. I have a monthly limit and I don't want to waste it on adverts I don't look at for products I'd never buy anyway.

Maybe if the site had a link for donations I'd throw a little into the pot occasionally, but it doesn't have one (or it's well hidden).

No prizes for guessing which site I'm talking about.

Re: RV#2

The first Chinese Shenzhou capsule used water-saturated bamboo for the re-entry shield. And it worked.

So a re-entry shield that protects the payload is well within Kim's capabilities.

A bigger problem with re-entry shields is that if they ablate unevenly they degrade the targeting accuracy. Bamboo is probably not going to ablate evenly.

So, if Wan Kee Sok wants the biggest bang for his won an exo-atmospheric burst is the way to go. Avoids those RV design/implementation problems and does a lot more damage in the long run.

Re: Did not realize he was still alive.

Brockmyre?

I've heard of Brookmyre, but his stuff is essentially comedy built around various themes like crime, politics (a variant of crime), mystery, etc. Yeah, he did a few books that had a scientific element which debunked woo and/or fraud, but they don't really qualify as SF any more than Scooby Doo does.

That said, his Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks is one of my favourites. And there is a lot of debunking woo in it. But I still wouldn't label it SF.

Re: Yeah, right

@Wolfetone

Wileyfox pushed 7.1.1 onto my Swift months ago. Works fine (for some values of fine).

There was a horrible push feed called "Zen" that everyone screamed about until Wileyfox introduced a setting to let you disable it (which just about everyone did).

Truedialler with its annoying ads has mutated into Truephone, which is even more annoying. I have yet to find a way of totally getting rid of it short of rooting my phone (which I'm reluctant to do). However, I have managed to replace the dialler and replaced the call screening with "shouldianswer" which gives me much more control over what info about callers I choose to let the screeners have. But I still worry about Truecaller being spyware and a bloated, battery-wasting piece of shit doing fuck knows what behind my back, so I wish I could get rid of it completely.

The drawer is a big comedown. I loved the letter bar on the old drawer and the new drawer doesn't have one. But Jina is a lot better than even the original drawer, fully configurable and does everything you want except give you a BJ. You'll have to replace the Foxhole launcher with Nova in order to have Jina replace Foxhole's drawer, but Nova is a better launcher anyway.

You can't get at UI Tuner any more. Which is really annoying because I used to have cursor left-right arrows pop up on the navbar when the keyboard appeared. But you can get at UI Tuner via third-party apps and sort of get the cursor keys back. You can't tie them to keyboard activation (so they're always on) you have to supply your own icons, and things are buggy enough that the icons vanish (but the hotspots still work) after a reboot. Only fix for that (that I've found) is to go to UI Tuner again, swap two of the hotspots, save, swap them back, save.

Other than those annoyances (most introduced by Wileyfox themselves, stock Android has a better dialler, better drawer and lets you get at UI tweaks) it's all good. Android 7 is better than Android 6. Wileyfox's version of Android 7 is less so.

When Wileyfox will push out Oreo is anybody's guess.

Re: Obligatory

Rule 43a: If it exists on the intertoobz, there is an XKCD about it.

Re: Sex Aid

@The Nazz

You're right. The first thing I thought when I saw Fry holding it in that suggestive manner was that it looked suspiciously like a vibrator. And, according to El Reg, it's not a very good concept or implementation in the first place. Also, most of us have a low opinion of Fry. So El Reg missed a great opportunity for a photo caption...

Arse about to shove a load of arse up his arse

Re: seeing this child uncovered would be sexually arousing

Tell me if I've got this wrong, but didn't Mohammed (Pizza Be Upon Him) marry Aisha when she was six?

Nah, there's no need to correct me. I already know the orthodox Muslim response to that: "Mohammed married Aisha when she was six, but he didn't fuck her until she was nine. And she enjoyed it, according to her memoirs. So he wasn't a paedophile."

Re: Fail Panda

@bobajob12

You are correct. I don't have the skills to write a hypervisor. Or to draw a logo.

However, I do have the skills to install Xen. And did so, several years ago. On a spare bit of kit I had, just to see what it could do. I was really impressed with the way the VM under Xen couldn't always find one of the network interfaces after a reboot. Sometimes it could, sometimes it couldn't. There were a few other problems with it, but that's the one that really stuck in my mind as being a major, no-fucking-way-is-that-acceptable issue.

The next time I looked at Xen it had acquired that stupid panda. In many different poses. And so I lost all interest in it. Pretty branding is a sign of being more interested in marketing than engineering. I've seen a number of new projects in my time, and the ones that start out with pretty branding and shit code never seem to improve (the branding might get prettier but the code never gets better).

It may seem a foolish benchmark, but it is one that has served me well. If you have a good product your branding can be fugly and people will still use it. If you have a shitty product then you need good branding to sucker people in.

Re: In the long run

@Hollerithevo

It is amusing (for many reasons) to read the collected works of Robert Green Ingersoll. Ingersoll was a solid Republican. Back in the late 18th century he ran for various offices and worked on presidential primary campaigns. And he wrote about politics (amongst other things).

What strikes me most about his political writings, which were representative of the mainstream of Republican thought at the time, were how closely they aligned with the sort of thing Bernie Sanders says now. That and the fact that Donald Trump would fit in perfectly with the Democrats of the time, as described by Ingersoll.

As you said, parties change. The Republicans were slowly becoming as corrupt as the Democrats at the same time as the Democrats were losing their racist tendencies. The real tipping point came with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. With that the Democrats lost the old Confederate states in exchange for the black vote and the Republicans gained the Confederate states at the expense of their souls. The Republicans are now as corrupt and racist as the Democrats were 150 years ago and the Democrats are mostly free of racism but still tainted by corruption in places.

The Republicans call themselves the party of Lincoln, but he would disavow them were he alive today.

The words "Republican" and "Democrat" should be considered as the names of variables. The contents of those variables can change. They're not constants.

Re: Levitator?

Wow, that's complicated. All that kit. And LN2 that keeps boiling off. I prefer something a little more passive myself. Like this. Not only passive levitation, but it's a thing of beauty from the iridescent bismuth crystals.

For more on bismuth crystals (but without levitation) try My World Of Bismuth by Tom Leary, which shows you how to grow your own at home. Note 1: the samples he shows are giant crystals made in a dangerously scaled-up version of the apparatus he demonstrates. Note 2: there are no spoken words, only captions, so when the mood music becomes irritating (after about 10 seconds) you can turn the sound off without missing anything. Note 3: what he doesn't mention is that the tapping allows him to feel when the crystals have grown so much they're about to fuse with crystals growing up from the bottom and it's time to remove them.

Re: Slim batteries v. big batteries.

The solution turns out to be some sort of external power bank. Then the trade-off of bulk, weight and duration is in your hands. Phone manufacturers don't have to produce low-volume, fat battery phones. You choose what size of power bank you want to carry around. Or maybe two power banks, so you can be sure to have a charged one whilst the other is charging. Lighter phone means less arm strain from long phone calls. I expect you can think of other advantages to this solution.

Tesco even do an environmentally unfriendly one-shot power bank, discussed and dissected by Big Clive. Rechargeable Li ion cell, missing the circuitry that would allow it to be recharged.

Re: DuckDuckGo is the only option if they want to protect privacy

@AC

You're of the opinion duckduckgo scrapes google. Until recently, so was I. Then I found out (today, somewhat uncoincidentally) that when bing fails duckduckgo also fails.

Perhaps google ditched its own search engine and now uses bing. Although that doesn't really explain why google continued to work while bing (and also duckduckgo) were down.

So you get 10/10 for being opinionated. 0/10 for reading and comprehending the article before posting.

Re: Still, in the end...

It all boils down to using some common sense when opening stuff from any source.

FTFY.

Or are you the kind of guy who opens attachments from your pal Fred with the subject line "You'll never guess what happens next!" Faking the sender address is fairly common. Digging into the address book on a compromised machine is perhaps less common than it used to be, but still happens.

As far as I'm concerned, "only open stuff if you know who sent it" is bad advice. Well-intentioned, but incomplete enough to be dangerous.

Re: Genetics

We all have African ancestry. Every last one of us. The only difference is how far back in time our African ancestors were.

This racist idiot found out he had some African ancestry that was a little more recent than he thought it was. Oh the irony.

Re: Might not be cluelessness

+Hans 1

Sure they could turn off TLS 1.0 on dev and test. I assume they did, but whether they did or not does not affect the outcome.

The only way they could offer realistic test conditions to customers is to duplicate the production servers with all the customer data/configurations and then replicate the traffic received by production servers onto the test servers. How they check the results of that is a little problematic. Well, with some form of NAT they could possibly push the results onto an army of mechanical turks who could check what was requested against what was received, although the actual technology required would have to be far more complicated than that, and difficult to get right or prove that you have got it right.

The only realistic way you can test if customers have made the changes you've been telling them for months that they have to make is flipping the switch and seeing who complains. But I might be wrong about that, if so I eagerly await your elegant solution.

Re: What's sixze got to do with it?

Yeah, I assumed crushing would be a bigger problem the bigger the vessel. Or at least the bigger vessel would require proportionately thicker bulkheads to operate at the same depth.

No doubt somebody who actually understands these things will pop up sooner or later to give the correct answer.

Your reasoning is flawed

@Amplex

You make the assumption that Pai's objective is to stay at the helm of the FCC and be rewarded for a sinecure. With ordinary civil servants that might be the case.

Pai is beholden to the big telcos. His reward comes from them if he kills off the FCC. Neutering the FCC is worth a big payoff but killing it entirely is worth an even bigger one.

Same reason DeVos is in charge of education and Pruitt is in charge of the EPA. They're there to wreck things so the corporations can run wild.

Re: April 1st lasted forever

2017, the year April 1st started on January 20th, and will last until the Trump is impeached or indicted or starts WW III.

FTFY

Googling a URL

And yes, where the URL was known, that went into Google rather than the URL bar...

There can be semi-legitimate reasons for doing this. It may make that particular URL more likely to be favoured in search results. So the thinking goes amongst off-white hat SEO types.

Re: Welcome to your all-new "Son of AOL" internet system.

I, for one, welco...

Me too!

I plead the fifth

@Big John

There used to be something called a "fifth," which is one fifth of a gallon.

Yeah, but that's not a real gallon. It's short measure.

Re: Couldn't agree more !!!

@kain preacher

My increasingly unreliable memory just kicked in with something. I did some checking to fill in a few details.

Cyril M. Kornbluth wrote a biting satire of Mickey Mouse entitled The Advent on Channel Twelve based around the mindless adoration of "Poopy Panda" by the "Poopy Panda Pals" and the bitter feelings felt by the guy who created Poopy.

All resemblances to Mickey Mouse and the Mickey Mouse Club are purely intentional. However, Walt Disney had absolutely no regrets about having created Mickey and laughed all the way to the bank. The bitter feelings of Poopy's creator were less to do with shame at what he had wrought and more to do with the fact that control (and profits) had been taken from him.

Sadly, this Kornbluth short story is not available from Project Gutenberg.

BTW, did I tell you my memory is increasingly unreliable these days?

Poop-Poop-Poopy!