Because management types tend to frown on expensive kit being lifted up and dropped, the maintenance logs at work had this practice entered as: "Controlled squarewave deceleration test".
Posts by Tromos
1188 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2013
DIYers rejoice: Hitting stuff to make it work even works in space
TSB meltdown latest: Facepalming reaches critical mass as Brits get strangers' bank letters
Doctor, doctor! My NHS Patient Access app has gone TITSUP*
Open justice FTW! El Reg fought the law – and El Reg won
German IKEA trip fracas assembles over trolley right of way
Yay, you've won your Fitbit lawsuit, folks. But, lawyers, about those filet mignon expenses...
625 million claimants?
Even taking the lawyers demand from the 33 million awarded, it would still leave 25 million dollars, which makes 625 million lots of 4 cents. Sounds an awful lot to me.
Anyway, there must be a better way to deal with distribution of large awards when the individual shares are too small to economically handle. Why not have a lottery with, say, a hundred thousand prizes of 250 dollars? This way at least a few claimants would benefit from the win.
Bloke fruit flies enjoy ejaculating, turn to booze when starved of sexy times
Nominet drains mug of tea, leans back, calmly explains how to make Whois GDPR-compliant
Cryptocoin investors sue Chase Bank for sky-high credit card charges
Case dismissed
Just this once I'm siding with the bank. Maybe they should have made it clear that buying cryptocurrency follows the same rules as buying any other form of currency or placing a bet (which is probably a closer match). This should have been clear from the outset, and I suspect the reason he got away with it initially was that the purchases were just treated as a transaction with some firm called 'Coinbase'. When Chase discovered that this was a cryptocurrency transaction the cash advance rules were applied. This explains Chase blaming Coinbase. Deceptively? I don't think so.
Boffins pull off quantum leap in true random number generation
How do you get drones talking to air traffic controllers? Pretty easily, says Brit startup
Facebook admits: Apps were given users' permission to go into their inboxes
@fnusnu
You might be fine with making your contacts list public and it being shared, but how about all the people listed on it? Or photographs - do you ask permission from everybody included in the picture before sharing? I have never used facebook, but I know from friends who do use it that my phone number, email address and several photographs that include me are there. When you add in the likes of Apple, Google and all the rest, I suspect that the number of people who have my contact details is mainly made up of people I don't know.
$0.75 – about how much Cambridge Analytica paid per voter in bid to micro-target their minds, internal docs reveal
Brit Lords start peer-to-peer wrangling over regulating the internet
10Mbps for world+dog, hoots UK.gov, and here is how we're doing it
Software gremlin robs Formula 1 world champ of season's first win
What robbed Hamilton was the decision to use virtual safety car rather than deploy the real safety car which they had to do anyway. Most of the time the virtual safety car is useless as cars are spread out all over the track and don't allow easy and safe access. The real safety car bunches up the field and gives a window of a couple of minutes after the last car has passed until they come round again.
This would have been to Hamilton's advantage as he would then have closed up on Vettel who would then drop behind by around 23 seconds when he pitted. As it stood the virtual safety car cut the pit time loss to around 10 seconds as the car in the pit lane entry and exit could go faster than the ones on track, and although limited in the pit lane itself, the cars on track are going much slower than normal.
I just long for the days when the lead changed hands on track rather than via the pit lane, currently all the excitement tends to be for the single digit points places where there is some racing rather than a procession.
Corking story: Idiotic smart wine bottle idea falls over, passes out
My solution
As someone who occasionally would like just one or two glasses of wine, I maintain a reasonable stock of half (350ml) and quarter (175ml) bottles of various wines. Purchasing in bulk (I usually order 60 bottles at a time), the discount eliminates the price premium that the smaller bottles would otherwise carry. Also works nicely when making up a packed lunch as a small bottle adds little weight but provides a civilized touch to the meal.
Cheers.
UK watchdog finally gets search warrant for Cambridge Analytica's totally not empty offices
Mozilla pulls ads from Facebook after spat over privacy controls
Re: If you want privacy...
I've never had a Facebook account either. And yet, Facebook has my name, address, phone number, photograph and a whole load of other data. If you have friends who are on Facebook, their contact lists and snaps are all slurped up by the likes of Facebook and Google despite the lack of consent from the third parties involved. Short of becoming a total recluse, I don't really see a way round this.
Cambridge Analytica CEO suspended – and that's not even the worst news for them today
Nest reveals the first truly connected home
One in three Android Wear owners also uses ... an iPhone
FYI: There's a cop tool called GrayKey that force unlocks iPhones. Let's hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands!
Fun fact of the day: Voice recognition tech is naturally sexist
Sneaky satellite launch raises risk of Gravity-style space collision
We need baby Googles, say search specialists… and one surprising VC
Desktop PC shipments dip below 100m/year
Since the days of the original IBM PC, I have regularly renewed desktops every 3 years or so until recently. The current desktop and laptop have made it past 5 years and I see no reason to upgrade as long as they still function. The desktop has had a couple of HDDs added, but is otherwise unchanged, the laptop battery isn't capable of more than about an hour of usage, but it's very rare that I need mobile access that can't be catered for by a lower powered device.
Show me a compelling reason to upgrade similar to the step from a 386 to a 486 CPU and I'll consider a new machine soon. Otherwise, barring a major failure the current setup will be maintained for at least a couple more years.
Got that itchy GandCrab feeling? Ransomware decryptor offers relief
Ubuntu wants to slurp PCs' vital statistics – even location – with new desktop installs
Ongoing telemetry
To those saying it is just a one-off at install time. Did you fail to spot "the data-recorder would also install Popcon, to spot trends in package usage..."?
I would have no problem with a one-off install time hardware/configuration report if it was placed in a text file that I could examine/edit at leisure and then decide if it could be sent.
Happy Mint user here. Should I get unhappy, Ubuntu is now even further down the list of distros I'd consider switching to.
Stop us if you've heard this one before: Tokyo crypto-cash exchange 'hacked' for half a billion bucks
Re: Convenient notes for criminals.
The 500 Euro note has not been withdrawn. There are still plenty around and they are still accepted and will continue to be accepted for the foreseeable future according to the European Central Bank.
What has happened is that no new ones are being printed and banks are no longer handing them out like they used to.
Crypto-cash exchange BitConnect pulls plug amid Bitcoin bloodbath
NASA is pretty pleased with its pulsar-sniffing intergalactic GPS tech
Game of Thrones author's space horror Nightflyers hitting telly
Re: Bah!
Mostly agree with that list. Would like to append:
The Lankhmar novels of Fritz Leiber
The Dumarest Saga by E.C.Tubb
Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony
Cities in Flight quadrilogy by James Blish
Plenty of scope in the first three of the above for the fighting and bonking that attracts many to GoT, backed up by some good SF.
Now that's sticker shock: Sticky labels make image-recog AI go bananas for toasters
Oh good. Transport for London gives Capita £80m for WAN, LAN and Wi-Fi
Get ready for laptop-tab-smartphone threesomes from Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Qualcomm
Huawei Mate 10 Pro: The unfashionable estate car wants to go to town
Report: Underwater net cables are prime targets for terrorists and Russia
Ads watchdog to BT: We say your itsy bitsy, teeny weeny Ts&Cs too small for screeny
Useless toothless ASA
Yet again an advertising campaign that finished months ago is banned from being repeated in the same form. BT (and the rest of them) just move on to the next crock of shit in the next campaign.
Ban them from all advertising for 3 months initially, doubling the length for each infraction thereafter.
UK.gov told to tread carefully with transfer of data sets to NHS Digital
Insufficient anonymization
I will not grant consent for any of my medical data to be shared while a full postcode is part of the data. I understand location is useful for certain things such as tracing spread of infection, but a postal sector (postcode without last two characters) is more than sufficient for this. Given full postcode, gender and age decade, anonimity has largely gone down the plughole.
Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...
I'll give it a go
I will dig out my venerable Acer netbook this evening and give Q4OS a spin. The netbook has been gathering dust for a while as it had W10 installed for me to try out and make decisions on future OS direction. The decision arrived at was to maintain W7 on all systems and slowly move to dual-boot with Mint, with a view to totally moving across before end of life for W7. Q4OS sounds like it may prove to be another contender especially on some of the older hardware (this is why the netbook is such a good testbed, W10 was struggling, if Q4OS runs reasonably well on this, it should be fine on anything else that I haven't chucked out).
Credit insurance tightens for geek shack Maplin Electronics
Re: Electronics Today International (ETI)
The Henrys catalogue was a gem. Costing 7shillings and six pence and containing five 2 shilling vouchers each redeemable when spending a pound. I remember going into the Edgware road shop and asking for an Akai 4000DS tape deck and 18 catalogues, which would have got me just over two pounds discount (and a lot of couponless catalogues to give away outside the shop). In the end I was given a fiver off and just the one catalogue. To put that in perspective, that fiver would then have (and probably did!) purchased more than 25 pints of beer.
HMRC's switch to AWS killed a small UK cloud business
£9 million funding
I don't care about the vulture capitalist, but I'm incensed (see icon) to hear that local authority money is going into things like this. What right have they to gamble with ratepayer's cash while reducing refuse collections, closing libraries and generally not providing the services they're meant to?
Sick burn, yo: Google's latest Pixel 2 XL suffers old-skool screen singe
Google and Intel cook AI chips, neural network exchanges – and more
Vodafone, EE and Three overcharging customers after contracts expire
Vermin Media
While chatting with an elderly neighbour, she told me that she had come to the end of her contract with Virgin Media and worried about being cut off she went to a shopping centre where she knew they usually set up a stand. She didn't want a new phone, it had taken her most of the contract period to learn how to use the one she had. She came away re-assured and grateful that all she had to do was to carry on paying and she would be allowed to continue using the old phone and would keep the same number.
Next time she goes to that shopping centre I've offered to go with her and I reckon I can get twenty quid a month off for her. Either that or a PAC to switch to a fiver a month GiffGaff which would be more than adequate for her requirements.