Posts by A.A.Hamilton

Amazon lays off another 9,000, because why not?

"Amazon ... shared news of the upcoming layoffs in a letter to employees Monday," I've read it a few times: it still doesn't make sense. Is there an apostrophe missing from the word 'employees' ? Not that that would improve understanding: I have no idea what an employee's Monday is. Should I understand it to mean 'employees named Monday'? But no, there can't be 9,000 of them, surely? Or could it mean that El Reg needs to wake up to itself and abandon this irritating headlong rush to the bottom in its American abuse of the English language?

Here's something communism is good at: Making smartphones less annoying

Re: What's in a name?

"Neither the USA nor the UK are very United..."

It's just a typo; correct name is Untied Kingdom.

Asus' latest single-board computer packs a 12-core, 4.5Ghz Intel i7

In English, please...

"The company Wednesday unveiled a..."

FFS, come on - this is a British publication known (AFAIR) for the quality of its writing. The quoted opening, a grating example of left pond gobbledegook, is simply not good enough. The Company in question is ASUS, not Wednesday.

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Re: 365

No, they are saying "Excrement".

IBM to book $5.9b non-cash charge to transfer its pension liabilities

What are the implications for retired UK employees ?

MX Linux 21.2: Middleweight Debian-based distro is well worth a look

Thanks for this analysis. In the last few months, on my 2008 vintage Thinkpad, I have moved from (previously long-term) Mint XFCE to Zorin OS lite to Linux Lite and now, on the basis of your article, I have just installed MX Linux 21. My impression, after an hour or so of playing, is that this distro meets my needs better than all the previous installations. I am most assuredly not a Linux technical expert, but MX linux installed in a most straight forward way on my dual boot Thinkpad with no glitches apparent so far. Yours was, for me, an excellent recommendation.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

Re: Measurement creep

This style of rejoinder is the driving reason for the Daily Headlines being the first thing I read at my desk each day.

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

Re: What's a "category"?

"... discriminate between an image of 17 Railway Cuttings and 17 Railway Sidings."

Using 54 year-old traces of humour (at genius level), melancholia, alcoholism, self-loathing, lovability, sensitivity, as key discriminating factors,I assume?

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: started in Jeopardy

I have to strongly endorse this view: for historical reasons, I have been trying to have an in-depth conversation with my GP for more than a year - but I have found it impossible to contact her. The GP practice phone number has a recorded message which directs me to use an on-line system. That system does not allow me to send a message to my GP. I have taken to hand-delivering letters to a letter box in the wall of my GP practice building - I cannot get in the building because the door is never unlocked. 3 letters so far have produced no result. I think that my next step is to take legal advice. What a sorry, ineffectual state the NHS is now in.

Open-source RAW image editor Darktable releases major update to version 3.6 – and it's very accessible

Re: Image processors and pixel editors

Having recently made the journey from Lightroom to darktable, and having found nothing that would cause me to revert, I am not at all clear what I have lost in the way of DAM capability by making this switch. I have made not one single change to the organisation and naming of my image assets. With the 3.6 version of darktable I no longer need to use Photomechanic (Windows) or Rapid Photo Downloader (Linux). My impression is that almost everybody could and should make the switch from Lightroom to darktable.

Buggy chkdsk in Windows update that caused boot failures and damaged file systems has been fixed

Re: And where is the fix?

Could somebody please explain, for us dumb users, why there has been no response to user bdg2's very relevant question ?

China's Chang'e-5 lands on the Moon to scratch surface

Re: NASA's finest hour

Yes, it IS a great achievement, notwithstanding the possibly inappropriate comparisons with others nations. What I don't understand, or like, at all, is the deliberate use of the wholly unnecessary snide verb verb 'trumpeting' in the original article. The men and women whose efforts lead to this achievement are just as 'good' as any from the west and are deserving of accolades irrespective of what we have been taught to think about their government and its officers.

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

Re: At Chris G, re: Lycranthropist.

Shum misteak, Shirley?

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

Not to forget the technique known as the 'floor sort':

During the (Queensland) summer of of 1963/64 I wrote a programme in FORTRAN for the optimal design of liquid/liquid heat exchangers, At that time the availability of mechanical punches was about zero so I had to hand punch the cards. There were 3 trays, each about 80 to 100 cms long, so I was not going to advance that wretched hand punch all the way to column 73 to add the sequence numbers. On my first entry to the newly built computer room I discovered that a freshly washed floor is very slippery and that a floor sort completes very quickly. I commend the lesson to those with long enough memories.

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Re: Best Photo Editing Software.....

"Try it, you'll love it,..."

You sure ? Even though my camera has an X-Trans sensor? No, thought not.

Just in case you were expecting 10Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 hits 700Mbps in real-world download tests

"...good example of the restrictions on thought and understanding that a linguistic or cultural paradigm can create."

This statement should be engraved in the minds of every person (especially male ones) with aspirations to be some sort of leader, in business, politics or military activity, before those aspirations get out of control.

Former UK PM Tony Blair urges governments to sort out online ID

Re: Yeuch...

Illuminating analysis; shame about the spelling, grammar and punctuation.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

Don't know why so many people down-voted this. Seems like good advice - tough, but good advice. You need to be tough because those brain damaged individuals out there who create malware don't give a shit about you or the damage they cause.

Seagate punts external PS4 drive at the millions who uninstalled their game libraries to fit Red Dead Redemption 2

Re: Shhhhh.....

"Indeed, this is Exactly how apple sell iPhones to similar idiots."

How dare you call me a 'similar idiot' ... I am unique.

Adobe Flash zero-day exploit... leveraging ActiveX… embedded in Office Doc... BINGO!

Re: Flash, ActiveX, Office doc embedding/scripting - should already be DISABLED

Thanks for this very stark warning. As an 'adviser' to foreign students studying at UK Universities, I have become used to receiving significant volumes of MS Word documents, like theses, containing multiple media types. Is there a practical alternative? If not, what effective precautions can be taken?

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

Dudes. Blockchain.

Forgive me, I'm laowai so I speak English only. I know, but don't much care, what a Blockchain is. But what in Ada's name is a 'Dude'? It looks like a typo: should it not be 'Dud' ? If not, how is it pronounced? 'Dudee' ? It's used here in The Register, so it must be an IT term of some sort - with an obscure origin, like 'byte', perhaps. Somebody explain why I should understand and use this word in my work.

Job ad for designer proves its point with MS Paint shocker

Re: Polygraph Examiner

I'm going to report this as 'abuse' on the basis that it makes me feel totally ignorant.

Hawaiian fake nukes alert caused by fat-fingered fumble of garbage GUI

Re: Confirmation checkbox needed

Is that signs which are complete (define 'complete') or just a part of a street sign? How much constitutes 'part'? I typically have about 5 to 9 attempts at these security tests; is it just me?

Re: Confirmation checkbox needed

With the certain result that, when there the threat is real, somebody suffering a panic attack will type "The first 20 digits of pi" and then be completely frozen while trying to understand why the message was not sent.

First iPhone X fondlers struggle to admit that Face ID sort of sucks

Re: Do you know what works better than Face ID and Touch ID?

3.1415926..... for example?

Indian call centre scammers are targeting BT customers

Re: I ain't Spartacus

"that Verified by Visa non-security web pisstake thingy"

sums it all up beautifully. What an ergonomic and functional waste of space it is.

Science fiction great Brian Aldiss, 92, dies at his Oxford home

Re: The Greats have gone

Without hesitation I would add Iain M Banks to the list of those who have passed but find hope for the future in the writings of Liu Cixin. His trilogy (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End) are philosophically challenging, educational, moving and quite topical.

Russia and China bombard Blighty with 188 cyberattacks in 3 months

re "Sadly, I call "lack of knowledge.""

Why downvote this post? The author made reasonable points, rebutted the previous post and all in a temperate way. Has the intolerance and belligerence of Brexiters infect us here too?

Microsoft quietly emits patch to undo its earlier patch that broke Windows 10 networking

Re: ,So there's an online fix for not being able to get online?

Ah that's all fixed then, isn't it? You did validate the assumption that the large number of users* who are well past the age of geek-ness fully understand " run "ipconfig /release" and "ipconfig /renew" to get back online" - didn't you?

* btw you do FULLY appreciate the difference between a user and a subject matter expert, yes?

How STEVE JOBS saved Apple's bacon with an outstretched ARM

How do ARM protect this IP?

I found the article interesting and entertaining but the question of IP protection and security nagged at me constantly as I read it.

Bearing in mind that cyber crime is now one of the really profitable on-line enterprises of today (thank you Microsoft), surely there must be continuous attempts by states, groups and individuals to access ARM's IP through unlicensed means? And we have seen enough notable successes by such criminals in recent years to make me think that no means of protection via security is fool proof. So what can ARM do? Is operating their R&D processes completely off-line (physically and logically) either sensible or possible?

However an even bigger risk is to ARM's IP after it has been transferred to a partner. Those partners are, on average, going to be slightly less motivated than ARM itself to protect that IP. Worse, as the number of parters increases so does the risk of one of them shooting themselves in the foot accidentally or, depending on personal cupidity, on purpose.

The ownership of the IP cannot be protected through legal processes. The most likely source for cyber criminals for this sort of prize is going to be Russia or China, where IP protection is in practice impossible depending on how well connected the relevant government official is and how much he might be able to enrich his life.

What's ARM's strategy here?

IBM, Accenture play blame game over $1bn project blowout

Re: "Ledswinger: unsuccessful bidder Accenture"

I protest; vigorously: Queensland is NOT in the middle of nowhere; it's well to the right of it, both geographically and politically. And I'll also endorse the Health System there: good care in Princess Alexandra hospital 55 years ago means I'm still well, physically......

MIT takes battery-powered robot cheetah for a gallop

Strange motion

Why no change of gait like other quadrupeds?

Who's riddling Windows PCs with gaping holes? It's your crApps

The numbers are misleading

Although I buy into one of the central messages of this article (apps. are as much a source of vulnerability as the underlying OS), the numbers are misleading: they refer only to known issues. What the total number is (i.e. including the actual, but as yet unknown, issues) is anybody's guess. And anybody does have a habit of guessing, doesn't he?

Ask Google this impossible question, get web filth as a reward

Completely contradictory result

Typing the first of these search arguments into my version of LInux Chrome, with Google as default engine, produces a majority of hits as quotes from the the Bible: Jonah, Proverbs, John, Judges, 1st Peter, James, Matthew, Moses, 1st John and so on. Not a naughty bit among them.

'Doomsday' asteroid Apophis more massive than first thought

Oh you daft bugger: it's just simple arithmetic: look how far it has got to go and what speed it's travelling at. It's bound to take a year (it's along way).

Gawd, young people these days -... no common sense, etc etc

[exits stage left to an asymptotically decreasing level of grumble]

Ten affordable mid-sized Full HD monitors

Re: 24 inches..? Is that all?

2nd para. of review starts with the words "...TN display...". Enough said.

Microsoft really is watching us from above

The whole concept is off-putting

I don't have any great concern about the technology MS is using or how they deploy it - for this application. What immediately turns me off this article is the use of the word 'Bing'.

Come on you chaps out there with the highly developed sense of, well, something: what possible justification can there be for the use of this utterly inane word here in quasi-literate UK? What possible connection does it have to IT? In fact. to anything?

It looks like crap; it reads like crap; it feels like crap; it must be crap - yes?

Thanks ever so much Java, for that biz-wide rootkit infection

A comment from the unknowing

I don't know enough about the need for Java and hence the risk implied by this article. Is 'Java' the same as 'Java script'? What is 'java in the browser' and how do I eliminate it if I need, at the same time, to retain 'java' on Windows (various generations) and LInux to run some applications?

Basic guidance would be appreciated.

Wikipedia collapses threatening the very fabric of civilisation

You can't have one without the other....

..."leaflets about benefits and STDs...."

Welcome, friend, to Metroland

Re: 'A gruesome picture of my lunch'

Rather overdoing the soy sauce, aren't you?

Not a fititng reward for a most inventive piece - for which my profuse thanks.

Chinese boffins build nuclear-powered deep-sea station

Re: The last remaining domain

Surely you meaknt '... kokntiknually kokntribute koukntless kommeknts ... koknknaisaknce' ?

Re: The last remaining domain

I kuite koknkur with your sekntimeknts, Khaptaikn, my Khaptaikn.

'Inexperienced' RBS tech operative's blunder led to banking meltdown

Re: Have they tried turning it off and on again?

Well, I went to the downloadmoreram web-site - and find that I have to download 4GB of RA via my browser. You would have thought that they could at least have made a torrent available, hmmm? Or at least they could have made RAM into rar, probably halving the download traffic.

That's quite important with VirginMedia: the zeroes are often too round for the fibre-optic cable; you could rotate them 90 degrees around their vertical axis of symmetry, but then they would like too much like ones. It's my I bet the ones would come down the wire quicker if they were also rotated 90 degreees, to look like hyphens.

RBS should use advance critical thinking skills like this. Oh, wait....

Gigapixel camera heralds new world of snoopery

Re: You need more "everything"- NOT

Thanks for this comment - especially the link to gigapan. That's just wasted half a morning for me!

I have 50+ years of photographic experience, sadly this is actuallly about 100 times 6 months of the same novice experience; your comment has explained, in one simple paragraph, what I have failed to unerstand in all that time and why my Nikon D80 delivers such poor images [poor operator (80%) + poor lens (20%)].

World+dog discovers hi-res aerial maps, thanks to Google and Apple

"...it's my house..."

...which proves to me I was always in the wrong career in the wrong place. Damn, too late now.

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Re: Math error

I opened the url you quoted. The very first thing I see is a large image carrying the words "...serving 14 million customers...."

This changes the argument a little, doesn't it?

Further, the volume you quote seems to be the total supplied by Thames; the original article is suggesting desalination as an adjunct to the existing sources of supply - not a total replacement.

I would also question the unit cost that Thames Water might have to pay - 6p. This doesn't allow for off-peak units being cheaper, and Thames bargaining power being far greater than ours. We are the domestic 'prey' of the electricity supply companies, whose greed is un-constrained, even by their main supporters club - the appointed Government regulator.

The additional cost might be no more than £1 per week per household - which is not an unreasonable price to pay for the additional benefit that would be enjoyed.

Tech City hailed as saviour of THE ENTIRE PLANET

Re: Who is the other man?......

He'sjust reacting to having heard the expression 'get-go'.

FFS Reg. can we leave out these blatant 'west of the Atlantic' expressions for ever, from now on? We are, after all, talking about a region of London - you know, London, UK (good grief, how many really significant ciites called 'Paris' are there, aside from that in France?) <sign>

Four CEOs better than one as Huawei profits slump

Re: 3 CEO's

Well, possibly.

Your prediction seems reasonably believable from our wesern perspective - but that might be the mistake in our thinking. The word you used - harmony - has such a powerful meaning in China. Chinese culture imbues their entrepreneurs with a sense of competition that is far more visceral than you find here in the West. They treat each other under the maxim that 'business is war'. But, paradoxically, they are also supremely effective at working together in the national interest - because of another outstanding cultural characteristic: nationalism. In the Chinese view there are only 2 types of people in the world: Chinese and foreign.

So let's wait a while and see the results before we judge them. At least it is an innovative approach.

btw El Reg. can you please make it clear whether you are reporting Chinese personal names in the UK format (First name, Last name) or in (reverse) Chinese format.

Google cools data center with bathtubs, dishwashers

True believers

If Google really believes their discharge is cleaner than their intake then they should be happy to discharge upstream from their intake. This is not what the diagram shows.