* Posts by Chairo

716 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2012

Should all Europeans be able to watch Estonian football? Consultation launched

Chairo

Re: Never mind geoblocking

Nice troll but totally ignorant.

Ok AC, not country coding - I am talking about bloody region coding. Happens to be the same name for both in my native language.

And if you think region coding products is a good thing, then you are already beyond help.

Chairo
Flame

Never mind geoblocking

First let the whole crowd of country-coders go to hell.

Can't control your channel? No problem, lock down the device and make your customer suffer.

Oh, and call him a criminal if he is pissed and capable enough to unlock the device he legally bought in order to work with the media he also legally bought somewhere else.

Geoblockers are next in line...

Swiss watch: Cuckoo-clock cops threaten Win 10 whup-ass can pop

Chairo
Trollface

Re: I guess this is what MS gets...

At least there are options to turn it all off if you bother to read

Yeah, sure, they never turned anything on that the customer actively turned off. Especially not in relation to Windows 10, right?

Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack

Chairo

Re: IoT crazy

I’m afraid that already exists. Toto's Washlet remoteW app. Unfortunately only available in the Japanese App store. I wonder why?

Anyway - guess you can change the rinsing water temperature, strength, position and focus, chose a nice background music, turn on the perfumer, the dryer, control the lid/lid temperature and cover and whatever else + of course flush the toilet.

This is all very standard for Japanese toilets nowadays. The new thing is that you can use your smartphone instead of a IR remote control. So not such a big leap ahead, really.

Btw: these toilets obviously don't work if there is no power. which can be a problem after a mayor earthquake. Shit happens.

Windows 10 market share growth slows to just ten per cent

Chairo

Re: What did they think they were doing?

we seem to be back to the bad old days of Linux distros not playing well with certain wireless technologies

It's a bit OT, but Linux distros never ceased to have trouble with certain wireless cards. Namely older adapters from broadcom are a PITA. If the wireless module is on a mini-PCIE card, it might be easy and not too expensive to swap it against something newer that is faster and has better driver support.

On the other hand, driver hell is not limited to Linux, of course. It can be a challenge to find suitable drivers under Windows, too. And then you often have the added bonus of downloading them from a dodgy third party site that might or might not be adding a few "surprises".

As for updating to windows 10, if you already have working drivers for wIndows 7 or windows 8, things should be more or less smooth. In theory, at least.

Chairo
Flame

What did they think they were doing?

winning nearly six per cent of a global market in a month is quite a feat.

I wonder if the adoption of windows 10 was actually slowed by Microsoft's aggressive pushing it on it's customers. Pushing it in a bloody skipjack of a "security" update was perhaps not such a bright idea after all. I know several people who took it so bad, that they rather wished Microsoft to hell. Not a good way to win over hearts, but sure a good way to cause heartburn. Did they think most customers will give up after deinstalling the update the second or third time? Or did they try to distract from the EULA and privacy concerns of windows 10? Kind of, if everyone talks about the nagging, the privacy issues will be overheard?

After the windows 8 disaster everyone thought windows 10 couldn't possibly be worse, but somehow Microsoft still managed to accomplish the impossible.

It's really incredible how an actually rather good product that should be an easy winner is damaged by arrogance, negligence and greed.

Flame - obviously...

Sony Xperia M4 Aqua 4G: The Android smartie that can take its drink

Chairo
Thumb Up

Overall quite a nice package

Usually I would still go for a phone with a removable battery, but I can accept a fixed battery as trade-off for the water protection.

At the moment I pack two phones, one smartphone with a data plan and a feature phone for calling. I really really would like to have a dual SIM solution, so this looks really interesting.

I hope they make the 16GB dual SIM version available. Actually for me it would be even better, if they would sell the darn thing SIM free in Japan, but this is so unlikely, that I dare not to hope for it. Guess I have to either import it from Europe or buy a Huawei or Asus here. Nothing else available SIM free here.

Nvidia's GTX 900 cards lock out open-source Linux devs yet again

Chairo
Flame

Driver woes

So you have a simple built in graphics card and a nice high end one you would like to use as CUDA computing device. Both are from Nvidia, so you just install the latest driver and are good to go, right?

Unfortunately it didn't work out like that for me. Turns out the latest driver was unstable with the chipset graphics. At the same time the older driver that worked fine there had a lousy performance with the newer card. (Unsurprisingly so).

Well, no problem, just change the monitor graphics card - ups, it's built in... At the end I gave up and deactivated the chipset graphics. Things just don't work sometimes in driver land...

Welcome to the driver hell - and you thought you would escape this kind of stuff in Linux, you fool.

Well, to be honest, it is a very limited use case and most hardware works quite well in Linux right out of the box, nowadays. If something doesn't work, just go and replace it. Even in laptops the wifi card sits usually in a standard mini-PCIE slot and is trivial to replace.

Computer Science GCSE male dominated, but geekettes are ready to rise

Chairo

Re: Sexist, but joking = Sacked

when Tim Hunt made a joke about women crying and was sacked, The Register supported the whining feminazis who did that.

The El Reg article was relatively neutral. The comments were full of ironing, pardon - irony.

iOS storing enterprise credentials in directory anyone can read

Chairo

How times have changed

... some 70 percent of Apple mobile users run outdated iOS versions even "several months" after a fix is released

Thanks to the buggy releases since IOS7, even Fanbois think twice before risking to update their hardware, nowadays.

That said - at least they have the choice...

Software update borked radar, delayed hundreds of flights, says US FAA

Chairo
Flame

A memory leak issue?

One would think they'd check such a critical software for memory leaks before rolling it out.

Where is the electric fence icon, when you need it?

Smartphone sales looking rosy for Asus, despite PC meltdown

Chairo
Facepalm

So they make a phone that people actually want

and it is selling well. What a surprise!

Perhaps HTC, Samsung and the other traditional handset makers could ask themselves the question - what did we lose that they have now?

Is it so difficult to offer a decent feature set for a reasonable price?

Well, apparently it is...

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS

Chairo
Big Brother

You thought it is yours

just because you paid for it and carried it out of the shop?

Silly you!

Typewriters suck. Yet we're infinitely richer for those irritating machines

Chairo

Does it also simulate

reflecting back keys? I had typewriter lessons in school and for homework we had to write a page each week on a mechanical typewriter. The results of this homework was part of the grade.

As our mechanical typewriter had the quirk of reflecting after a strike and causing double letters as result, I ended up with a zero grade and a lot of frustration. At the end my mother (a professional typist went to meet the teacher and told her, she wanted to see the face of the teacher, that gives 0 points in a voluntary lesson for technical reasons...

Anyway, now I'm happy I had these lessons. At the time I was the only boy in the class, though. How times changed...

Copyright troll wants to ban 'copyright troll' from its copyright troll lawsuit

Chairo
Pint

Re: If it quacks like a duck

Here all along, I thought porn was a big moneymaker..

It's a question of supply and demand. Nowadays the supply in the internet is nearly unlimited and the demand has peaked out. Means there is less and less money to make.

So they built up a nice little side business. I remember last year or so I read about a similar case in Germany where a porn producer sued in pretty much the same fashion. Turned out they even uploaded their own "productions" to trackers and seeded them. (That's how they got the IP numbers). Did anyone check where Malibu Media got their IP numbers from? Do they perhaps actively seed their own "material"?

Anyway - just wait until TPP and TTIP are being introduced. Then all the American IP trolls will be let loose on the rest of the word. We are all doomed - but I'm repeating myself.

It's Friday, let's have a beer!

Testing Motorola's Moto G third-gen mobe: Is it still king of the hill?

Chairo
Unhappy

No compass...

... is a serious omission in a smartphone nowadays. At least for people moving around in unknown cities. How often did I start walking after exiting the metro, just to realize I am moving in the wrong direction after 50m or so? No compass is a show stopper for me.

Otherwise the phone looks quite nice. Perhaps not the bargain it used to be, but certainly good value. Especially if you count the water protection.

Btw: How sensitive is the touch screen against water drops? My current phone gets unusable pretty quickly, as the screen detects touches everywhere, just not where I touch it. My Z2 tablet isn't much better, despite being waterproof. Would be interesting to know, if it still operates well in light rain.

Sengled lightbulb speakers: The best worst stereo on Earth

Chairo
Devil

IoT

Gee - you thought the T would stand for "things"? It's for "trash", obviously.

You didn't know that?

Windows 10 wipes your child safety settings if you upgrade from 7 or 8

Chairo
Stop

Windows 10 as a service

If I hear that one more time I'm sure I'm going to puke...

Linus Torvalds warns he's in no mood to be polite as Linux 4.2 drags

Chairo
Angel

Does anyone still care about 'the desktop'? Wasn't that some 90s thing?

That's what Microsoft thought, when they designed Windows 8...

Chairo
Coat

I'm not a nice person and I don't care about you

Sounds like my previous boss.

Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations stalled until November

Chairo
Mushroom

Who cares about copyright?

The treaty is being negotiated between a dozen Pacific rim nations and is thought to include harsh arrangements that would criminalise copyright breaches.

At least for Japan this is not a show stopper at all. They already criminalized copyright breaches last year. Never forget, that Japan depends on Uncle Sam to keep the Chinese army at bay.

The show stopper are the Japanese farmers, particularly the milk farmers in Hokkaido. They created a artificial scarcity of milk that not only keeps the prices up, but also makes it difficult to actually buy any butter in Japan. That doesn't fit well to having lakes of milk in Kiwi-land. It would threaten their bottom line, and they are all good voters of Abe's Liberal Democratic Party.

Wait, STOP: Are you installing Windows 10 or RANSOMWARE?

Chairo
Coat

Re: Are any of us surprised?

Dear customer, we send you this mail in order to inform you, that we will never request your PIN, address and other personal data per e-mail.

For legal reasons please confirm reception of this notification by clicking on below link and following the notification process.

<link to payload on spoofed page>

yours sincerely

your bank

Chairo
Devil

Re: Windows 10 is Ransomeware?

That's unfair its free for the life of the device.

They promised that for Windows 10, all right. But what about the Microsoft account? At the moment it is not strictly needed... yet.

My suspicion is that they will keep on herding their users into Microsoft accounts and at some point start charging for them in one way or another. It would only be logical if the account would be necessary to receive updates and if you want control about updating you have to pay for a "plus" account. Some scheme like that is more than likely.

At that point Windows 10 will indeed change into a kind of Ransomeware.

Google sneaks out new clip-on tech goggles for saddo Glassholes

Chairo

Lots of professional use cases

There are enough cases, where having hands free data projected in your field of vision is useful.

Most of them might be niche applications, but there should be quite a lot of money in it.

Google's mistake with the explorer program was that they tried to do an "Apple" and create a fashion item for the middle class. Given the general creepiness of our elites, they might have done better to sell it for a significantly higher price.

Malvertising campaign hits 10 MEELLION users in 10 days

Chairo
Joke

popular sites

Attackers made huge wins landing malicious ads on popular sites including The Drudge Report, celebrity trash mag PerezHilton, CBS Sports, Yahoo, Verizon FiOS, and eBay UK.

What? No mentioning of "The Register"? Are you disappointed?

Citrix CEO retires as activist investor Elliott snatches the wheel

Chairo
Devil

to review its operations with an eye to improving its margins, profitability, and capital structure

Oh yes, the capital structure. Always good for a short term cash drain. Let's see how it works - buy a share in some company that has lots of assets like their own offices, paid back most debts and is making a small but reasonable profit. Then convince the other stock owners, that they can make short term profits by selling all assets and renting them back, cash out all reserves that the company holds, load it with debt, stuff the channel, cash in and sell your stock and get the hell out of it, before it all crashes and burns.

It's legal, and who cares about morality if some money can be made,

Windows 10 in head-on crash with Nvidia drivers as world watches launch

Chairo

IRQ settings

Remember the early days of Plug and Play? AKA Plug and Pray...?

Oh yes - and not only on ISA. I still remember the trouble making the FAST AV master card working with some hardware. A PCI card, but It needed it's own unique interrupt vector, otherwise the system would just crash. Drivers available only for Win9x and WindowsNT... For a while I kept an old PC with Win98 around, just for keeping the card alive, but at some point analogue video editing became quite pointless.

The good/bad old days... Proprietary hardware and bad driver support are luckily a thing of the past now.

Oh, wait...

New study into lack of women in Tech: It's not the men's fault

Chairo
Devil

Aww

that's soo unfair, to counter gender studies with actual math. So boring and male! Chauvinism at it's worst!

IT in Iran: Servers sold on the grey market, and the rule of FOSS

Chairo
Happy

Been to Iran a few times, they are fine if a little suffocating (I don't do social) but I have no idea why they waste money on laptops and smartphones (and chandeliers) when they still don't have proper toilets. Priorities!

The definition of "proper toilet" varies widely. Usually I don't find them in western countries.

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Chairo

Re: Germany really doesn't believe the last 60 years

@ Pascal Monett

before the mid 2000s European banking systems were quite different and largely incompatible from country to country.. Each nation had their own entrenched payment system, that worked fine internally but made things difficult for foreigners. The French had the "card bleue", which was mainly a debit card with VISA and Mastercard contract, so it could be used abroad as a credit card. The Germans had their "EC card" system, Foreigners usually had a hard time paying with credit cards anywhere in Europe, however. I remember being in trouble around 2008 in the French Pyrenees, because I could not find any filling station that would accept a foreign credit card. I had enough cash, but it was week-end and the cash counter was closed. At the end I gave some guy cash and he let me use his CB to fill up the tank. Not sure, if British or German cards would have worked. Japanese cards certainly didn't.

Anyway - European credit cards are mostly debit cards with the payment procedure handled by some local VISA or Mastercard contractor. Unlike real credit cards, the debiting of your bank account is done either instantaneous or at most at the end of the month. Generally you need to have the cash at hand quite soon after your purchase.

Now car hackers can bust in through your motor's DAB RADIO

Chairo
Joke

but fortunately no-one dies when a system gets hacked.

The sysadmin will be hanged of course.

Choc Factory research shows users just don't get security

Chairo
Flame

Someone bit them in the past

Non-expert participants reported being reluctant to promptly install software updates, perhaps due to lack of understanding of their effectiveness or bad past experiences caused by software updates.

Now which software company has made a habit of declaring their advertising nagware as "important security update" again?

For companies with a reasonable IT budget this is not such a big deal, as they can install patches in advance on test machines and see what happens, but home users don't have this chance and they get exactly the wrong message.

Just as well, as the patches will be stuffed down their throats in the future, if they like them or not...

Embarrassed Amazon admits to actually MAKING MONEY as cloud biz blooms

Chairo
Coat

Amazon making money?

Next you'll tell us they are paying taxes...

Cyber poltergeist threat discovered in Internet of Stuff hubs

Chairo

Re: Never

I feel the same, but I have my doubts if it can be avoided.

How about the electricity/water/gas meters? And there might be legal requirements to install "smart" heating and lighting solutions, at least for new or renovated houses. What about the smoke sensors? There is a reason Google bought Nest. Will you be able to get fire insurance, if your home is not connected? And the list goes on and on.

There are a lot of big companies out there which bet a lot of money on IOT and have a lot of lobbying power. The situation is just the same as for connected vehicles. It's a security nightmare, but the push to "being connected" is strong. Too many companies bet their business on this stuff for it to fail. They'll lobby us into submission.

I'm afraid we are all doomed.

Hacking Team had RATted on Android: Trend Micro

Chairo

Re: Getting better and better

Thanks for the answer! If it is connected to the native browser, then disabling it and using a browser app like Chrome or mobile firefox, whatever, should do the job, I suppose.

Chairo
Mushroom

Getting better and better

An exploit that can survive a factory reset?

Is the source of this marvel of technology also included in the data dump?

What level of interaction is required by the user? Does he have to execute some pownme script or is just receiving a mail/SMS containing the troyan already enough?

SpaceX's blast shock delays world's MOST POWERFUL ROCKET

Chairo

Merlin engines?

So the successor should be called "Vulture", right?

OTOH looking at the success of the original Vulture engine, "Raptor" might be a better choice, so I suppose there is little chance of this happening. Pity!

Bitcoin fixes a Greek problem – but not the Greek debt problem

Chairo

Re: QE

it's the euro that won't let them out of the mess.

That, and exactly that is the problem. And you know what? Germany is trapped in this system just like all other countries as well. The effective income in Germany stagnated after the introduction of the euro while it went up nearly everywhere else. Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, ... they all had their bubbles thanks cheap euro credits. Not only their governments but also the citizens of these countries took debts. Partly for consuming, but also for investments. This never happened in Germany, so while the average South European has his own home, the average German has the pleasure to pay rent from a ever shrinking effective income.

You think they would support QE?

There is a reason Schauble has a 75% approval rate at the moment. Has there ever been any finance minister in this world with such an approval rate? I doubt it.

Oh, one more thing - if you want to see what happens to a developed nation that overuses QE, look to Japan. Highest country debt in the world, and a stagnating economy. The government now runs another QE plan, called "Abenomics". There are some interesting points about it, like forcing the pension insurance to shift their stock portfolio from Japanese stocks to foreign (mainly US) stocks. Let's see what comes out of it...

Chairo
WTF?

Re: QE

I would perhaps more gently point out that the Bundesbank hasn't quite caught up with Milton Friedman's pioneering research (this really was where he made his academic bones, along with Anna Schwartz) in A Monetary History of the United States. Umm, 1963 I think?

OK, I take the bait and the downvotes and point out that pretty every finance minister of Greece in recent history has been an economist and most of them came right out of Oxford. You can assume that all of them knew Friedmanns theories very well and all of them failed miserably.

One real life example of what went wrong - my wife had some business with the Greece embassy here in Tokyo and told me several times that she was astonishedy th about the enormous budget they had for touristic advertisements and about the receptions they held there. Sounds like good spending, if you don't take into account that there was not even a direct flight from Japan to Greece and Greece as holiday destination was effectively non existent in Japanese travel agencies. Turkey had a far smaller budget, but they used their money wisely, organized direct flights and are now quite successful as holiday destination.

But it would have certainly been more fun to work for the Greece embassy, before the bubble burst.

A small example, but it is symptomatic for what went wrong in Greece. I have yet to find someone who went there for holiday and came back satified. I know several examples of people who came back and were quite pissed about the way they have been treated there. The keywords were "expensive", "arrogant" and "unfriendly".

As for German bashing - it is always fun and popular, but personally I can understand that they are fed up with feeding Greece.

Toyota recalls 625,000 hybrids: Software bug kills engines dead with THERMAL OVERLOAD

Chairo

Re: Planetary gear transmission

@Ledswinger

Yes, adding more of the same increases cost and rarely makes sense, unless you are forced by law or for security reasons to do so. A trivial example would be bicycle brakes. Ever seen a bicycle with only a single brake?

Often enough, however you have two different systems for economic or comfort reasons that can at least partially take over each other's job and give you the chance to get home without too much trouble. Toyota's hybrid system cannot make full use of the potential redundancy of the dual propulsion system that is a necessity for hybrid vehicles. You can drive fully electric for some distance, but you always need the electric motor, even if driving only on the combustion engine. Btw: this gearbox is also the reason, why driving a Prius feels quite strange at the beginning. The combustion engine speed does not correspond to the vehicle speed in the classic way. The planetary gearbox allows to run the combustion engine always in the optimal working point, which helps keeping the consumption down.

Chairo

Planetary gear transmission

That is the one big disadvantage of Toyota's hybrid system. They use a unique planetary gearbox, where the gear ratio is set by an electrical motor. Actually it is a very elegant system (from an engineering point of view), but once the e-motor electronic is overheated, they cannot run on the combustion engine alone.

Most other parallel Hybrid car makers use a more conventional automatic or robotised transmission and can still drive home if the electric drive-train fails. Redundancy is always a good idea, isn't it?

Europe a step closer to keeping records on all passengers flying in and out of the Continent

Chairo
Devil

How about switching food orders randomly

This time kosher, next halal, some vegetarian and perhaps a child meal or two.

Just to mess up their database.

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

Chairo
Joke

Re: @ JeffyPooh - "...mockery..."

Oh, and it's "Koch". With a "ch". Rhymes with a scottish lake. Can't be that hard

Hmm, lake Lomond or lake Ness don't rhyme well.

Hmm, I better don't go to Scotland now, or they might force feed me haggis or throw with sheep.

Ford's 400,000-car recall could be the tip of an auto security iceberg

Chairo

Re: When Cars Decide to Kill - software flaws occur all the time

we have NO software safety laws

At least for vehicles that is not true (any more). Since 2011, vehicles have to be developed according ISO26262 standard, which is a legal requirement, making it effectively a worldwide software safety law for the automotive industry.

Apple to end telco iPhone sales monopoly in Britland

Chairo
Gimp

Sauronesque empire?

One phone to rule them all, One phone to find them; One phone to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

SatNad's purple haze could see Lumia 'killed'. Way to go, chief!

Chairo

So is windows phone

Now a burning platform?

It would be a shame, especially after they finally seem to get things right.

A quarter of public sector IT workers have never used the cloud

Chairo

Will someone please tell me just what the hell "using the cloud" actually MEANS?

I guess that sentence was written in the comments field of 80% of all returned questionnaires...

Brit boffins teach mere PCs to find galaxies in Hubble pics

Chairo
Thumb Up

Boinc project anyone?

Please let this become a Boinc project! It would fit exactly the scope of Boinc. Send out work packages with Hubble images and let everyone participate in analysing them for NASA.

What's not to like?

Security gurus deliver coup de grace to US govt's encryption backdoor demands

Chairo
Big Brother

Even if such a system could be implemented safely, this wouldn’t stop criminal actors, who could simply buy their technology overseas or from non-compliant companies and countries.

That would be a problem, if the surveillance target would be criminals in the first place. For better surveillance of the average citizen it'll work fine.

AMD looks at sinking sales, gulps: It's worse than we thought

Chairo

When I went to buy laptop last year the only options with AMD chips were either under powered or more expensive than identical laptops which had Intel inside

That is one of the main problems of AMD. They never really could gain a foothold in the Laptop market. And unfortunately this is where the margins are. This and of course the server chips.

For some time they had a competitive server product with the Opteron, partly thanks to Intel's Itanium stumble, but since Intel got serious on X86-64 server iron, AMD is having a hard time, indeed.

Their APUs are interesting, but I am still not sure, what market they are aiming for. People who don't care about graphics acceleration at all are probably happy with chipset integrated graphics and would rather have more computing power, and who does care about graphics power will likely buy a discrete graphics card, anyway.