Posts by Chris Hance

You seem to be having signal attenuation issues.

Are your El Reg posts coming through your satellites? Perhaps you forgot to "super rad harden" the Ascii capitalization bit?

@TechnicalBen Re: "Why wouldn't they build some sort of deadman switch"

Ok, now I just need to write a program to tell me whether class ever ends.

Re: I'm going to suggest (@Cederic)

Pretty sure US Navy vessels still get wet. Sometimes in rather more places than the manufacturer recommends.

Though from what I read here, the Royal Navy may soon have to resort to canoes. Probably with a BAE contract to supply them for roughly 60 million pounds each, plus maintenance. And paddles.

Re: Rattlesnake in a pinata... @jMcPhee

"Boss, why are you asking me to break a pinata, instead of just telling me about my performance results?"

Re: Really??

It was a transcription error. The drone is resistant to Hackers, the movie. It spends its idle time posting to Twitter and reddit with derogatory comments about the film.

Still not sure about the app-controlled part...

Re the Netgear router. "Ok, I'm using my phone to power cycle my router, and being a phone app, of course they route all traffic through their servers. Great, sending the off command now. Let's wait 10 seconds. ... And now to send the on command... huh, 'cannot reach your IoT gateway. Check that it is plugged into your network.'"

Re: They would solve three problems at once

I'm a little lost on who "they" are.

I was under the impression that "makeshift options that mainly appear to fix the issue but which will either get defunded soon or allowed to wither away" were collectiively called "legislation", and therefore the exclusive provenance of one's government.

Acronym is almost there

C'mon, reg, it's obviously a Security-Handicapped Internet Thing.

And yeah, routers aren't exactly IoT in that they're supposed to defend against this kind of thong, not be vulnerable to it. But odds are they're going to use the same chips, if they don't already. "Hey, we can save ten pence per unit if we switch to this other chip that's being produced in volume for IoT devices. Sure it only has half the memory, but we can just leave out the firewall and hard-code the admin password to save space."

@Baldy50

How long did it take to mix the tracks for all the overlapping categories? I can't imagine "mother/father, other family, friends, clients/ customers and fuckwits" are all mutually exclusive groups.

Re: And? @Smooth Newt

But if all consumer routers have the same score, we're back to picking based on color. "Per government regulation, we are permitted to assert that our routers' color scheme reflects light at a higher frequency than the competition." "We use multiple colors to achieve spread spectrum light reflection."

Re: Exactly anonymous!

For a moment, I took your title as a suggestion: let Anonymous run IANA.

I'm not entirely convinced this would be a worse solution than either a US or UN backed organization. It probably would lead to Balkanization when Anon plays with IP assignments "for the lulz", or just removes a domain of whoever some subset of Anon doesn't like today instead of using LOIC. But Balkanization is likely to happen anyway, and I doubt Anon would keep its shenanigans secret, unlike the US government.

Entirely too much thought into a ridiculous proposition, but when the "serious" answers are a joke, sometimes one must take a joke seriously.

Re: @Ian Michael Gumby

The US record on human rights is spotless. You merely have to accept the government's current definition of "human". And perhaps "rights" as well.

And we may as well define "record" to include only the information intentionally released to the public while we're at it.

Re: ITU @Irony Deficient

"no contract would be binding on it"... I thought that was the entire point of having corporate lawyers.

Re: Is that a fingerprint on the lens...

To be fair, it's hard not to get shallow depth of field in macro shots like that. On a 100 mm lens, f/8 at a 30 centimeters from the sensor gives you less than 0.2 cm DOF. Drop it to f/22 and you get a whopping 0.52 cm in focus.

Re: That's odd

@AC 16:12

Was that irony? Sorry, I'm American, so I couldn't tell.

@UncleSiggy

Impossible. One is readable, and the other doesn't generally exist until after the project is done. And then only as "not this".

@Wombling_Free: Well, yes.

His is the one with the oxygen in it.

See, it's just like the Cold War.

By your spelling, this legal battle is obviously taking place in a "hard-to-pronounce country".

Well, you could intercept.

I'd suggest calling the probe "Plecia nearctica" for all the members of that species that I have to scrape off my car's windshield every spring. Granted, it might not be in terribly useful condition after the impact.

That's ok, because they did reverse the polarity; it "switches polarity when an electric field is applied to it." We'll have to wait and see if they change the intermix ratio, and where tachyon emissions fit into it.

It's not the weight.

It's the luggage. We need an entire SUV to carry our kit for a weekend trip to the beach, nevermind into space.

Chrome frame

If the user is conditioned to accept all plug-in installation requests (or anything witha Yes/No dialog), the computer probably already has Chrome frame installed. So the penetration may be close to IE levels.

Of course, nobody ever targeted ActiveX when it meant their stuff only runs on IE. Right?

XML facilitates blame.

When you're trying to exchange data in the corporate world, where data = money, and your data exchange doesn't work, XML saves the day.

With JSON or binary data, you better have a solid, unambiguous document describing what elements and data types go where, capitalization and all. I've spent hours hunting down issues, even when I wrote both the sender and the recipient. Multi-language debugathons are a great way to spend an afternoon.

With XML, if the data validates against the agreed-upon schema, it's the recipient's fault. If it doesn't, it's the sender's fault.

And knowing [who to blame] is half the battle.

Given their respective track records?

Did the developer have anything to do with Vista? Yes? Ok, give me a minute, I'm still trying to decide.

Apparently 2 bankers read El Reg

And I'm just as shocked as you are.

Clueless or clever?

I'm trying to figure out whether you missed the irony, or are just playing along. I believe you'll find Amazon's service uses "American". But being an American, I doubt any of the English speakers here will be able to read this post.

In that case, definitely don't cross the streams.

Somehow a high-volume water discharge meeting a high-voltage electric field doesn't strike me as the safest plan for all involved.

except that RAID-5 writes in parallel

If you're striping, you really want all the drives to be as close to identical as possible, so you're distribuitng the writes evenly. If one has a faster sustained write, but another has a faster seek time, but a third has the highest data density... I think my RAID controller just preemptively let out the magic smoke.

Hence

the blue... oh, it said bells. Nevermind.

But his statement is entirely truthful.

Improper personal gain is a problem. Improper corporate gain is SOP.