* Posts by Tromos

1188 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2013

A Quid A Day for NOSH? Luxury!

Tromos

My printer looses connection. It then loses connection because the plug falls out.

Google throws a 180 on its plans for Dart language

Tromos
WTF?

JavaScript is too slow and the solution is a new language that compiles into JavaScript???

US threatened Berlin with intel blackout over Snowden asylum: report

Tromos
Joke

No intel?

They'll just have to settle for AMD then.

Our 4King benders are so ace we're going full OLED, says LG

Tromos

Re: Life?

About 6 years ago I got a media player with a small (about 1.8") OLED screen. 2 years ago, the blue and green had darkened considerably. Currently, the screen appears to be dark unless the room lights are turned off whereby a faint red image can be seen. No doubt the tech has improved over the intervening years, but as the sole point of these is superb picture quality, even a slight degradation after a few years is unacceptable for a TV. In the 40 Euro media player (it was priced the same as the LCD version for a limited period) I didn't mind so much, and it still plays MP3s alright although the track names can only be made out in pitch darkness.

Tromos

Re: content is king

@Ian Michael Gumby

What's not to love?

The price.

You – yes, YOU – can now 3D print your very own Paul McCartney

Tromos

What do you mean...

...now available as a desktop ornament? Since when has he been anything else?

Shock development: Darkweb drug n' gun dealers are untrustworthy

Tromos

Escrow?

E-Screw more like.

Osbo: Choose a IoT fridge. Choose spirit-crushing driverless cars

Tromos

I wouldn't object to having 100Mbps broadband.

But only if:

a) It didn't cost so much as a penny more than my current 13Mbps

b) It was truly unlimited at any time of day or night

c) It was at least as reliable and stable as my current connection

Samsung puts eight-core processor IN A WATCH

Tromos

Any Ports?

USB? SATA? HDMI? Ethernet?

German chancellor DECLARES WAR on crap rural Wi-Fi

Tromos

transparency, right of appeal and anonymity

All well known specialities of their proposed new partner, China.

UK government says goodbye sat navs, hello Xbox, e-cigs and Spotify

Tromos

About time too. No shopping basket is complete without a pair of Bleats headphones.

Honey, I shrunk the Windows footprint

Tromos

Re: Decompression is fast

As you say, the reduction in disk I/O covered the time the decompression software took, but remember that these tablets and phones are using memory not those old drives with multi-millisecond track change times.

Vodafone Pay TV launch rumoured for November

Tromos
Flame

An inevitable consequence

Yet more sodding advertising leaflets through the door at least once a week.

Attack of the Digital People: The BBC goes fully Bong

Tromos

The last people we need...

...running the country's IT education are the Apple fan club.

Forget viruses: Evil USB drive 'fries laptops with a power surge'

Tromos
Joke

-110V?

Is there a -230V version for the UK/EU market?

We've read all 400 pages of the FCC's baffling net neutrality rules – here's what YOU need to know

Tromos

Doesn't seem to be anything limiting the number of drinking straws they can sell without putting a second pint on the table.

Google MURDERS Google Code, orders everyone out to GitHub and co

Tromos

Google has a long track record of abruptly killing off many of its offerings. My advice would be to look for alternative sources for anything that you may still need next week.

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

Tromos

R.I.P. Terry...

...and may the Gods be with you (especially the small ones).

LUST for APPLE WATCH drove me to crime, says alleged meth dealer

Tromos

Sounds like he's been sampling his own wares.

$17,000 Apple Watch: Pointless bling, right? HA! You're WRONG

Tromos

How long before...

...genuine Apple gold watches are available at a quarter of the price when someone realises you can buy the 300 dollar jobbie and re-case it?

iTunes snafu: DNS fail borked Apple's app & iTunes stores for 10 HOURS

Tromos
Joke

Re: Won't cost them much...

I reckon everyone attempting to pre-order the 17k watch will have given up in disgust and drifted off to see what Argos has to offer.

Going on holiday? Mexico wants your personal data

Tromos

Do as the EU does

Mexico could drop the requirement for PNR data from the airlines and request it from the passengers themselves. As the EU requires all non-EU passengers to fill out a landing card, there cannot be any objections to the reciprocal process. For my personal convenience, just let them have the damn data, everybody who really wants it has got it anyway.

'Rowhammer' attack flips bits in memory to root Linux

Tromos

Brands

Is anybody looking into differences between RAM chip manufacturers as regards to susceptibility to this attack? I'm sure some brands will come out better than others as this essentially relies on a fundamental design flaw in the chip.

Oi. APPLE fanboi! You with the $10k and pocket on fire! Fancy a WATCH?

Tromos

If the 10k price tag is right, it sounds like they put the same percentage mark-up on the gold case as they do on iPhone RAM.

Is there a cure for cancer sitting at the back of the medicine cabinet already?

Tromos

Re: just curious

And you'll just have to remain curious. Anyone qualified to answer that question is certainly not going to post an answer in a public forum.

BILLION email address spam scam: Feds collar two blokes, hunt another

Tromos

Re: Spammers stealing from spammers

All that usually happens when you hit the 'unsubscribe' link on spam is that you are verifying that the email address is correct and currently active which then makes it much more valuable to sell on to other spammers. If the price for 10000 addresses is 5 euros, the same number of verified active ones can fetch 25 to 50.

Google creeps up on another sector: Adds car insurance to Compare

Tromos

Disrupt?

Google's deployment of driverless cars is likely to disrupt the insurance industry.

s/dis/bank/

Top Euro court ends mega ebook VAT slash in France, Luxembourg

Tromos

I suspect it is the billing address rather than the so-called downloading country that would be used. Too easy to spoof a download with a non-EU address and avoid the VAT altogether otherwise.

MEGA PATENT DUMP! Ericsson, Smartflash blitz Apple: iPhone, iPad menaced by sales block

Tromos

I bought a chip, I used a chip

The Raspberry Pi foundation seems to have a fair reason as to why I should have to pay an extra licence fee to use some hardware codecs on the chip.

Elementary, my dear penguin: It's the second beta of Freya

Tromos

Take the minimum suggested payment of $10 in conjunction with the statement "We feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement is worth funding." Generously estimate the additional lines of code and resources that have gone into this as about 0.1%. This prices each copy of the entire OS at $10000.

As Duncan Bannatyne would say - "That's a crazy valuation. I'm oot."

Google offers 'INFINITY MILLION DOLLARS' for bugs in Chrome

Tromos

Re: Google admits there are INFINITY MILLION bugs in Chrome!

Have they taken on some ex-Adobe people?

MP resigns as security committee chair amid 'cash-for-access' claims

Tromos

Not leaving the building

He has resigned the chairmanship, but is just moving to a different spot round the table. You could say 'One small step for Rifkind.' (Works better with a slight mispronunciation of his surname)

Get yourself connected: GrovePi+ Starter Kit

Tromos

Re: When I were a Lad

I had one of those Philips Electronic Engineers kits. While most of the competition used modules that plugged in, the Philips was just a means of connecting together standard electronics components. This made it easy to go 'off-piste' and do your own thing years before the solderless breadboard, as we now know it, existed.

The GrovePi+ kit reminds me more of those modular electronic kits like the Tandy/Radio Shack ones. For about half the money you can get the Philips type equivalent from Amazon including LCD display, sensors, buzzers, LEDs, servomotors, connecting wires and one of those modern solderless breadboards. It might not be as neat or quick as the GrovePi+ but I reckon the educational value and expansion potential more than makes up for this.

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Tromos

Re: Quiet news day?

Linux/iOS user cannot say anything nice about Microsoft products.

Marconi: The West of England's very own Italian wireless pioneer

Tromos

Re: Timeless wireless communication ...

Not an error, in IT numbering often starts at zero.

OLPC spin-off teases modular 'Infinity' computer

Tromos

If it's meant to last a lifetime...

...why design it to look suitable for an age range of 2 to 7?

Norton Internet Security antivirus update 'borked Internet Explorer'

Tromos

re-run Norton LiveUpdate...

...or use the alternative fix. Also has the effect of making your computer run faster and more efficiently.

Did NSA, GCHQ steal the secret key in YOUR phone SIM? It's LIKELY

Tromos

I wonder how many petabytes of "I'm on the train, it's running a bit late." they're sitting on.

HOLY SEA SNAILS! Their TEETH are strong enough to build a plane

Tromos

At the size of a human hair...

...making an F1 car is going to leave an awfully large number of toothless limpets.

Your hard drives were riddled with NSA spyware for years

Tromos

Note to Gregory Brown

We have fixed your keyboard. The biggest problem was around the 'Z' key where most of the damage was observed. Be more careful with your coffee in future.

Boffins grasp Big Knob, get ready to go ALL THE WAY at the LHC proton-punisher

Tromos

100 petabytes of additional storage

How long is that gonna take to defrag?!?

Violin-fiddling boffins learn that 'F-HOLES' are secret to Stradivarius' SUPERIOR sound

Tromos
Joke

Re: Wrong letter

They were going to be 'O's, but the centre bit kept falling out.

Lightbulb moment for visible light networking: 200 Gbps without a fibre

Tromos

I would have thought line of sight considerations would render this technology marginal. People tend to place access points and desks near to walls and, unless they are the same wall, the user's body would tend to block the straight line path. Bouncing off a mirrored ceiling might help, but this would chew into the already very limited range. I don't see this as viable beyond some niche applications.

Google cuts Microsoft and pals some slack in zero-day vuln crusade – an extra 14 days tops

Tromos

Re: More Eyes on Code

Are you missing something?

I'd say yes. Literacy and grammar for starters.

Exablox is pretty sweet - but not great for restore applications

Tromos

If I had to guess...

...what Exablox was, my pick would be a laxative. How do people come up with these names?

Elon Musk's Tesla set to unveil home storage battery

Tromos
Joke

Most houses will need four of these...

...make sure they're inserted the right way round.

Free WiFi coming to UK trains ... in two years

Tromos
Joke

Will it be...

High Speed too?

French minister: Hit Netflix, Google, Apple et al with bandwidth tax

Tromos

Re: Hey French film industry.

In my (admittedly limited) experience of the French, even they don't like French films. They much prefer a Hollywood blockbuster dubbed into French.

Cortana to form circle of life in Windows 10

Tromos

The charm offensive seems a touch light on the charm component.

Worried you got PINK EYE when you shook hands? Doctor Google will see you now

Tromos
Joke

A pint of beer every six hours

Sounds nearer to cold turkey than beefsteak to me.