* Posts by DropBear

4733 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

US cops go all Minority Report: Google told to cough up info on anyone near a crime scene

DropBear

Re: Third World in weird a way

Being able to freely insult the powers that be is not quite useless, but it's a "comfort" so ludicrously thin it absolutely doesn't warrant an "at least". It's also quite likely an illusion, as anyone in the habit of doing it too often is likely to end up finding out, if they manage to do it to any kind of significant effect. As for the other case, see first sentence.

Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian

DropBear

Re: I wonder...

That may not help you much. An ambulance got into a fatal accident with a pedestrian just a few days ago not far from here. And it wasn't even self-driving. The pedestrian is dead regardless. And while I couldn't swear I remember the details right I'm fairly sure it was his fault - for some folks even noticing a large vehicle with strobe lights and glaring sirens is too much work when they decide to cross "right now"...

Linux Foundation backs new ‘ACRN’ hypervisor for embedded and IoT

DropBear

Re: Balony

Also, I have ABS and vacuum break-force-assist - but if the former fails it just stops intervening, if the latter fails I just have to push harder; the brake hydraulics proper couldn't care less, they just keep working.

Nest reveals the first truly connected home

DropBear

Re: Soo...

"...your car can be borrowed by a thief without your keys..."

Not that I would endorse these locks to any degree, just out of curiosity and for some perspective - could you tell me how many pins there are in your current mechanical door lock, and how many of them are security pins? Would one need anything more involved than a $5 bump key or rake to open it in a few seconds?

DropBear

"For example, Nest has put a "jumpstart" pair of contacts discreetly underneath its Yale smartlock"

You do realize that's an industry standard feature of every single e-lock of any kind that isn't a complete joke (and arguably of many that are), right? The two different ones that just happen to be on my desk right now both have it without making a fuss out of it...

Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn't default browser

DropBear
WTF?

So what else is new...? Last time I checked, all these years "start index.html" launched good ole' Internet Explorer under windows, regardless of what was nominally your system default browser or what html was normally getting opened with everywhere else in your system - so most software that had any embedded links to local html was opening that way if you were foolish enough to click on anything (or just press "F1")...

Phone-free Microsoft patents Notch-free phone

DropBear

Re: The notch is just a temporary workaround

That's quite ok, because in turn I disagree with them as well. Call it OCD or whatever you like, but if it ain't substantially symmetrical I don't want it.

Intel: Our next chips won't have data leak flaws we told you totally not to worry about

DropBear
Trollface

Mine neither, for sure. Although this is actually a superb demonstration of "correlation does not imply causation" on account of how I never had an Intel CPU...

DropBear
Trollface

Actually, that sounds like an interesting challenge - although the only immediate solution I can think off the top of my head kinda requires a supersonic hand...

DropBear
Devil

Re: So...a whole new computer?

"Keyboards last about a year max."

To each his own I suppose - mine consummated its first affair mating to a DIN-5 socket on a 386 mobo...

EDIT: I really should finish reading before posting - got ninja'd into oblivion...

I couldn't give a Greek clock about your IoT fertility tracker

DropBear
IT Angle

Re: 1901

There's nothing to be ashamed of, really - let he who never mistakenly started a 0-based loop from 1 throw the first stone... :)))

DropBear
Happy

Re: Antikythera Mechanism

Lots of Clickspring fans around here apparently...

FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!

DropBear

Re: If the police have got one...

Of course everyone knows they serve and protect. Some of us just happen to have a problem with the specifics of whom.

Kepler krunch koming: Super space 'scope's fuel tank almost empty

DropBear
Facepalm

Kepler won't burn up in Earth's atmosphere...

...because it's not orbiting Earth in the first place. While this is implied in the article, mentioning it explicitly up-front instead of deceptively throwing about a number that's meant to be referenced to the Sun, not the Earth which would be the default assumption of any casual reader, would have gone a long way towards not giving the mother of all headaches to anyone reading who isn't working at NORAD.

VPN tests reveal privacy-leaking bugs

DropBear

Frankly, nothing mentioned in the article sounded like anything any superficial, user-conducted test could have possibly revealed.

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

DropBear

Re: SSD - it (may or) may not matter much for streaming media off the Pi, but I for one would prefer a proper SATA interface for any kind of storage-oriented SBC instead of a hub-attached USB (that coincidentally also handles the network traffic)...

DropBear
WTF?

Re: Dates

For me it's "fourteenth of March" what sounds incredibly backwards, you don't write the year as "8102" so why the hell would you invert the date... Not to mention "2018-03-14" as a string or filename sorts naturally in the correct order without needing to get interpreted as a date, whereas none of the other notations do. And if I can see only a fraction of a date, "2018" is what I want to see, not "14". So how about going easy on slinging "barking mad" stuff around particularly as it points the completely wrong way around...

Mozilla wants to seduce BOFHs with button-down Firefox

DropBear

Re: Its got problems

What they're failing to grasp is that much as with OSes, the absolute best a browser can hope to do is get the hell out of the way and remain invisible. As such, the extensions are everything, the browser is nothing. The very moment they forced me to choose between them and the extensions that create my browsing environment they have instantly lost me. Firefox ESR right now for me with some Palemoon - I'm quite prepared to stick with the most up-to-date non-Australis and plugin-compatible thing I can find or FF ESR indefinitely.

Former Google X bloke's startup unveils 'self flying' electric air taxi

DropBear

Re: https://lilium.com/

I'd like to upvote but my bullshit-meter is well into the red. Yes, in spite of the (heavily edited) "first flight" video.

NASA on SpaceX's 2015 big boom: Bargain bin steel liberated your pressure vessel

DropBear
Devil

Whatever NASA might have found, it would STILL have been utterly trumped by SpaceX's willingness to find the issue, sort it out, and get the fuck back to flying WITHOUT SPENDING A DECADE OR SO shell-shocked and grounded, twiddling their thumbs hemming and hawing NASA-style.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

DropBear

Re: Waste of Space?

RTFA

DropBear

Re: "...had to rotate 180 degrees....software goof....360 degrees..."

Actually, the number of degrees seems to be of no significance - this is not the mistake you're thinking of. Rather it looks like reuse of the value of a constant in the software, which caused the attitude control thrusters to do nothing at all:

"...the timing control device gave the logical block a command to discard the side modules' covers and laser exhaust covers. Unknowingly, the same command was earlier used to open the solar panels and disengage the maneuvering thrusters. This wasn't discovered because of the logistics of the testing process and overall haste. Main thrusters engaged while the Skif kept turning, overshooting the intended 180-degree turn."

Less than half of paying ransomware targets get their files back

DropBear
Devil

No offense, but with that kind of failure record I'd start looking for the common element in those backups. And once you find it... well, I did say "no offense"...

Sneaky satellite launch raises risk of Gravity-style space collision

DropBear
Trollface

Re: I recall an incident

@rh587 au contraire - we found that gold a long time ago (well ok, not THAT long ago)...

DropBear

Re: How big are these things?

Actually, the Vantablack site FAQ covers exactly that question regarding clothing use, and their answer is that by its very nature (forest of tiny tubes) the coating performs exceedingly poorly on anything that isn't a fairly immobile, contact-free surface. As a clothing item, putting it on would already be a huge challenge and it would wear off really fast in use...

DropBear
Trollface

Launch elastic but infinitely strong nets of equal mass on exactly opposite orbits, watch them capture the mini-sats, cancel each other's velocity and just fall out of the sky. Easy-peasy...!

Oculus Rift whiffed, VR fanbois miffed

DropBear

Re: All 100 active users are outraged

Sadly, no. While I do happen to believe that in the long run fancy hardware with epic price tags will continue to stay irrelevant compared to cheap and cheerful stuff like Carboard-style phone-in-a-box-streaming-video-from-your-pc, the rest of the world seems to take the opposite view: every time any game announces any "VR support" they actually mean "it will run on either Oculus or Vive and absolutely nothing else".

FBI chief asks tech industry to build crypto-busting not-a-backdoor

DropBear

Re: I'm sure they know better

At which point the rest of the world stops using software developed in the US sighs a collective sigh of relief and copies the US in outlawing all strong encryption all of five minutes later. - Fixed

For all we know, aliens could be as careless with space junk as us

DropBear

Re: totally new take on..

That would be stars disappearing from observations, not planets, considering how Dyson spheres are supposed to work. So they should be ridiculously easy to detect even if we aren't aware of exoplanets in orbit. That said, I only remember a single instance of this being investigated recently (star going through odd luminosity changes) with the conclusion being that it's much more likely to be caused by another phenomenon, not the building of a sphere.

'Quantum supremacy will soon be ours!', says Google as it reveals 72-qubit quantum chip

DropBear

Re: @Dave 126What's the application?

So... qubits have "amplitudes" instead of probabilities...? Yeah, and Ogres have layers like onions. It's unbelievable that nobody manages to put three articulate paragraphs together on the subject without careening off into "Hilbert space" whatever that is! Screw this! Oh, Feynmann, where art thou?!?

New algorithm could help self-driving cars scout out hidden objects

DropBear

...or, perhaps, just note that there is some sort of junction ahead you cannot see around and behave as if there was something there on a collision course with you every single time; slow down to a speed that lets you stop in a shorter distance than you can see ahead. It's what I do. And more often that I feel comfortable with there actually IS something approaching that may or may not have caused trouble otherwise...

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

DropBear

Re: Still only 1080 Vertical

"...filling in all the vertical space with useless icons and menus..."

Perhaps; on the other hand, having witnessed the modern trend of trying to cram all the menus / toolbars / address-bars / tabs up into a single titlemulti-bar I concluded early on that I want nothing whatsoever to do with any such scheme, even if that means losing the upper fifth of my screen - I'd much rather see clearly what I have there and where to aim for it than have to remember where to try to unpack it from.

Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired for opposing hiring caps on white, Asian male nerds

DropBear

Exactly. I don't care what you think you need to "improve your team", if it leads to excluding people based on something that they inextricably are instead of something they learn you deserve to be in deep legal doo-doo.

DropBear

Re: time to get the frilly frock...

Sure but those high heels are _murder_ on your ankles...

DropBear

"I'll cut&paste my blog piece rather than link to it and reveal my identity too clearly."

To respect your wishes I'll address you as "Dear Anonymous Coward". Unfortunately, I have to follow with "...I hope you are aware that Googling just a few words of that identical piece of text leads straight to your blog and 'about me' page, with your full name on it". 'A' for the effort, 'F' for the execution...

Alibaba fires up a cloudy quantum computer

DropBear
Trollface

Re: Adiabatic

Yup, the progress of science is a marvellous thing to behold - back when I was in school we only had "adiabatic" too...

Gits club GitHub code tub with record-breaking 1.35Tbps DDoS drub

DropBear

Re: "Only a few minutes"

Yawn. Let me know when baddies get marks for effort instead of "EFFECTS". Everyone else is quite correctly pointing out that as long as this kind of attack is relatively easily diverted, regardless of exactly what does that take, it's not going to be very popular against "whales".

Boring. The phone business has lost the plot and Google is making it worse

DropBear

Re: PDA market?

...but it fails to handle my memos/notes, unless I'm willing to subscribe to some third party's cloud. Progress, hells yeah!

DropBear

Re: There was one cool feature I liked

That's exactly it - I don't want it lopsided hanging off somewhere from my phone, I want it BUILT IT. And definitely not for "a few hundred quid" extra - it's not gonna be free, I get it, but please do stop trying to rob me blind.

DropBear

Re: Form factors

It's not whinging. Phones really are mind-bogglingly f###ing boring in a bad way these days; it's just that I don't want my "freshness" as one more stomach-churning OS/UI revolution (boring is good there) but rather as some variety in hardware. There are a number of ways to do that without necessarily turning everything we LIKE about our phones upside down, from the dual-screen Yotaphone through larger battery options all the way to various extra keys, from a few (Nokia Xpressmusic) to full fold-out/slide-out qwerty's, and that's just a few ideas. I really miss the full-on batshit insanity of the likes of the Nokia E70 and the Motorola Aura. Unless the industry shows me something on that level, they have a reeeeeeeeealy long wait ahead of them before I even think of getting a new phone...

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: Mind the gap - in the market...

The old maxim of 'you get what you pay for' ...was never, ever true. Not even approximately. What IS true instead is that most of the time, certain premium features or level of quality requires a certain minimum price under which you can't get it, because it's not feasible to produce for less than that. Any assumption that you actually get any of that beyond the baseline features and quality whenever you pay more than the baseline price is entirely baseless, any extra you pay going straight into the pockets of the seller being infinitely more likely. Which is not to say you NEVER get anything for paying a premium price, only that you really, really, really shouldn't simply assume that you do, without some cold hard proof. Because most of the time, you're just paying for an illusion.

DropBear

Re: Stock Android

Well no, not really. A "bloat free blank canvas" would be a Stock Android WITHOUT any Google apps. Which by the way is obtainable for sure, but it's NOT what we're talking about here.

Now Europe's largest trade union squeezes Euro Patent Office's pips

DropBear

I still don't see the part with "...OR ELSE!"

Paul Allen's six-engined monster plane prepares for space deliveries

DropBear

Re: Balloons/airships ?

"...using some sort of balloon to do the heavy lifting..."

Well, yes and no. Please don't laugh... too hard... http://www.arcaspace.com/en/program_stabilo.htm

DropBear
Facepalm

Thanks for pointing this out, OP, I just came to do the same. Every time someone feels inclined to show off their superior aviation chops out comes that stupid "because Bernoulli" nonsense and I'm not quite sure what happens after that because all I see is red by that point. Fair warning: I'm one more "because upper and lower flows must meet at the end of the wing" away from a full berserker mode rampage.

Time to pay, Paypal pal Venmo! Oh no, haha, put away that wallet – just promise to be nice

DropBear
Facepalm

Re: "Venmo did not live up to the promises it made to users about the availability of their money"

The problem with that is that there are approximately infinity number of sellers and outlets who take Paypal and nothing else, exclusively, or else if they do take something else it's a major, major, major pain in the ass like inter-bank / wire transfer or similar, which tends to take your autobiography in triplicate, signed, countersigned, notarized, blessed by the Three Cave Hermits and the Delphi Oracle (to provide you with the three dozen magic numbers longer than a PGP signature - each), filed at your local bank office in person, costing no less than $50 for a $9.99 transfer.

Scientists change their minds, think water may be all over the Moon

DropBear

So, basically, we have no friggin' clue what form that water exactly takes because the boffins have none either, or is it simply due to El Reg failing to say anything about that...?

Huawei's Not Hot Dog is possibly the Worst Tech Promo Ever

DropBear
Trollface

Missed opportunity at a joke at the end, letting us see "the phone"'s perspective, utterly tripping balls on a pseudo-dog-filled sky, ground and everything else, Google deep dream style... where are you, People From The Internet...? We need you to make this happen!

EU aviation agency publishes new drone framework. Hobbyists won't like it

DropBear

Re: Home use

"you cannot legally fly a drone in the vast majority of the UK"

...and that's why the law will be universally ignored - as all laws impossible to realistically comply with always silently are - and will get enforced opportunistically, as a blunt object to throw against whoever the fuzz happens to take a dislike to, exactly as mentioned. Let's be very clear about this - IT'S NOT "IF", IT'S "WHEN". Also, I consider "go join a club if you want to fly" as nothing but an unapologetic middle finger and definitely reply in kind.

Samsung's Galaxy 9s debut, with not much other than new cameras

DropBear

Re: Still Happy

S2 high five! Oh, and the S2 does have an official extended battery version, complete with matching flat back cover - it's worth using it.