Posts by JassMan

Class move, Java. Coding language slips to third place behind Python in latest popularity contest

Re: I Wonder...

I think that Javascript has a big following because it is so well integrated with markup languages such as qml and html. This makes it easy to quickly produce a working app which looks reasonably aesthetic without having to spend low level effort on controls and animations. Producing a graphics heavy app with Python + Glade is serious effort compared to getting the same result in Qml+Javascript. The balance only tips the other way when you need to interface to hardware other than timers and basic mobilephone sensors such as accellerometers.

Not-so-paltry towers to float: Vodafone reveals IPO plans for mega European masts biz

Who thinks up these company names?

Separately, Vodafone also plans to merge its Greek tower business with that of local telco Wind Hellas. This combined tower infrastructure company would be called Vantage Towers Greece, with ownership split between Vodafone and Wind Hellas parent Crystal Almond 62/38 respectively.

Maybe I should put in for crowd funding for "Sapphire Sh!te" and "Diamond D!ck Cheese" and bid for a slice of the action.

Butterfingers who don't bother with phone cases, rejoice: New Gorilla Glass 'Victus' tipped to survive 6ft drops

Re: Is that what the marketing department were after? @AC

Depends on whether they intended it as a noun or a participle.

Noun

vīctus m (genitive vīctūs); fourth declension

1. living, way of life, lifestyle

2. nourishment, provision, diet, that which sustains life

3. (Late Latin, law) necessaries of life

Participle

victus (feminine victa, neuter victum); first/second-declension participle

conquered, subdued, having been conquered.

Re: Is dropping your phone common? @Joe W

Are you sure you haven't had one too many drinks already? Or do you have a strange keyboard with the V and Z swapped. Most phones with edge protection for the screen have a bezel, which may or may not have a bevel (flat chamfer).

Sorry, just couldn't resist being a grammar nazi having just downed a few glasses of "Saint Thaur" Picpoul de Pinet to celebrate living to see another Friday. Just as good as the Ormarine Black label but only half the price.

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

I haven't chuckled so loud in ages

I feel guilty about the schadenfreude but I really enjoyed this one. I think that reading the Reg should be part of the employment contract for everyone who works in the industry, so that there would be less of these clangers. No wait, I want more because more laughter makes you live longer. Oh, I don't know or care as long as all the good stories appear here.

Visa fraud charges: Uncle Sam accuses four Chinese eggheads of covering up their true ties to China's military

Re: Visa fraud charges

Must admit, I also read the entire article thinking it was clever of the authorities to use the fact the Chinese had been card skimming to find evidence of their other nefarious activities. It was only when I got to the end that I realised the students hadn't been so stupid after all and had just been unlucky in getting caught at not ticking all the boxes on a visa application. I guess if you do tick the box, your visa is automatically refused, but at least you don't end up in a prison cell.

ReactOS hits a milestone – actually hiring a full-time developer. And we've got our talons on the latest build to see what needs fixing

Re: It's interesting...

Totally agree. Until they get the install process sorted they aren't ever going to get a user base. I wasted severaldays trying to get it it to even boot the installer on my 2 remaining BIOS PCs having discovered that UEFI was no go. I don't understand why they haven't used GRUB2 instead of rewriting their own

Is it Patch Blues-day for Outlook? Microsoft's email client breaks worldwide, leaves everyone stumped

Re: So much for QA testing.

I have just realised how ironic it would be if they only tested it on PCs running with WSL enabled 'cos you know that linux stuff is so flaky and if it runs on a PC setup like that, it will run on anything because Windows core is so reliable.

So much for QA testing.

If they didn't test it on more than 1 pc to check that it actually ran at all, how do they know the 123 fixes have actually worked?

If yhey did actualy manage to get it running on more than 1 pc why don't they publish a recommended configuration for users to try before rolling back. As the article says, a number of the fixes are security critical and you don't really want to open up your system to crackers by reverting to a version with known attack vectors.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: We have drones now...

I think that in a discussion about precision of language being diluted, when that discussion is about binary naming, introducing an ambiguous analogy is unhelpful.

Pilot-controller wrt drones can mean either controller of pilots (ATC/ drone control room comander), or controller of the drone. The drones themselves maybe directly controlled or semi-autonymous, so drone controll may be a chain of command thing not just a binary choice.

In case you are wondering I didn't vote either way, but I am surprised you garnered any upvotes.

Pilot-controller, pilot, drone-controller, drone. This analogy could be even worse because sometimes drones have co-pilots who standin while the pilot is otherwise engaged.

China’s preferred Linux distro trumpets Arm benchmark results

Re: Remind me

Replying to myself here since it appears that some readers didn't realise that I was being facaetios in not stating explicitly that ARM holdings should havebeen treated as strategically important to national security. I also didn't realise that so many would have forgotten that ARM China is semi-independant of ARM as owned by Softbank who we all know are Japanese.

For those who seem to have forgotten, ARM Chima is only 49% owned by Softbank. The rest is owned by China Investment Corporation, the State owned sovereign wealth fund.

Re: Remind me

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-06-11/softbanks-arm-ltd-says-china-ceo-fired-for-serious-irregularities-101565410.html

Yes the parent group is owned by the Japanese but I believe that ARM China is a semi autonymous company. Something that many of the people who keep downvoting me seem to have conveniently forgotten. All chips licenced by chinese companies are designed in one of the ARM China design centres in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzen. If the Chinese gov doesn't have any influence in those centres then the downvoters must be living in an alternate reality where Beijing has granted independence to HongKong

Re: Remind me

My argument is that once everything from hardware to a modified version of the OS, is controlled by a dictatorship, the possibility to wreak havok far exceeds anything M$haft could have dreamed of. Who knows how much "telemetry" MS capture. That is just for financial gain. How much more would a goverment want? Even the UK government would like to see everything we look at on the internet, and they would if they could have their magic backdoor to HTTPS. They just don't think big enough to grab all the data from a device over which they can control the hardware and software before it gets encrypted.

Re: Remind me

Yes I do mean ARM. Our government could have decided that chip design was a national asset and blocked the sale. ARM was a effectively an open source design that all manufacturers were happy to pay around 50p on licencing costs for ARM to continue developing. We are now in the situation where the design is under the control of the Chinese government. If we are worried about Huawei and 5G we should be far more worried about the market being flooded With high powered phone chipsets being sold as desktops but totally controlled by a government who have no qualms about monitoring their own population for no financial gain. The opportunity to clean out the bank accounts of the rest of the world once they decide the time is right, is a very strong incentive for them to sell powerful PCs at below cost.

I have a number of Chinese friends and they are all very nice people. However, not one of them would choose to return their homeland and live in a country where you can't even trust your neighbour, never mind those in control.

Remind me

Why did our Conservative government decide that control of processor design wasn't a strategic asset? After so many false starts of this being the year of the Linux Desktop, it will now be coming quicker than a lot of people would like.

I for one will be replacing the linux provided but once China has total control of the PC design from hardware upwards how will we know we have installed a new OS and not have an underlying boot loader telling us there are no invisible partitions, no hidden processing cores watching our every keystroke, no trojans bypassing our firewall when the Chinese want to make the worlds biggest bot array.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

The small shiny bits that make up tinsel and other decorations are inside out compared to your understanding. The plastic which provides the base colour and physical strength is on the inside. Aluminium is then sputter coated on the outside in an almost mono-molecular layer, thus making it almost transparent. The result is as you have noticed, reasonably conductive at higher voltages.

Details of Beijing's new Hong Kong security law signal end to more than two decades of autonomy

Someone has a serious lack of sense of irony.

Inciting hatred of China's central government and Hong Kong's regional government are now offences under Article 29

Whoever decided this clause was a good idea has just made the case for the government to arrest itself. It is this law which is causing hatred of the government, not innocent HK people making chance remarks which can be twisted by secret police to make them guilty of thought crime.

Oops, I guess I will now be arrested if I ever go to HK.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

"stupid students. I love feeding wild animals"

Stupid AC - kangaroos are herbivores. They should never be given possums which are made of meat even if served with a side order of peach stones which are also toxic (being full of prussic acid.)

How do you run a military court over Zoom? With 28 bullet points and a ceremonial laptop flunkey, of course!

@Allan George Dyer

Not one of those biscuits has passed my lips since the day (at the age of 6) my uncle told me they were squashed fly biscuits. My father not only agreed with him but said "look, bite the end off, and you can even see the little legs". They they then continued to regale me with stories of Australian Aborigines eating witchety grubs (a very large underground caterpillar which you have to swallow whole) and Africans eating grasshoppers. It only took a week or so to realise it was a ploy to make sure the grown-ups had more biscuits for themselves but the damage was done, and I have never had the courage to taste one again.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: @ Iglethat & "since hes proven that hes a gullible idiot"

@veti

Not much research required, just answer 2 simple questions.

1. If any object with gravity more than 10% of earth could exist why are all planets and stars visibly round? ie. not displayed as the edge of a disc.

2. list the countries the countries you can fly to where everyone and every thing is visibly leaning (Pisa excepted) because gravity always acts on the centre of gravity and for a disc that is the centre.

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: Makes you wonder about Dragon.

My argument is that there are orders of magnitude more satelites outside the ISS than there are inside. Ie. the ISS is in an orbit which is low even for LEO. It is so low that it needs boosting every year to ensure it doesn't fall back down because of the drag of the atmosohere. VLEO has only been in general use since 2017 because of the problems with drag.

You also say that navigating to the moon is no more complicated but it relies on an automated system being able to do astral navigation (by taking sightings and comparing to starmaps) rather than just using GPS which is how Dragon knows where it is.

I have to assume most of the downvotes are because of stupid word prediction on my phone putting toast in the middle of minimal and screwing up the spelling of trajectories.

Makes you wonder about Dragon.

It may have had an event free journey journey to the ISS, it may be excellent at minimatoasttl fuel trajectpries to an orbiting target, but I'm guessing that if another satelite crosses its path - it will be toast.

I know there are not that many other things whizzing round at such a LEO and space is a big place but things will be bit more complicated when Dragon's big brother takes a trip to the moon.

Blight the power: Jamming attack cripples wireless signals using clever reflective technology

Maybe something has been lost in translation.

I think the use of passive and even the word power are taken as some sort of shorthand. I haven't read the original paper so I'm guessing that the IRS is an analog of a LED or paperInk at RF. It consumes minimal power the control reflection/transmission . Even if it remains in a given state once confgured it will still take power (possibly down in milliwatts) to change. Statefullness may also explain the use of 'passive'.

It sounds like a useful material but they need to sort out their terminology.

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

Re: Dislexia Lures KO

I am pretty sure the original quip from the days before the internet (you know like when stuff was printed on dead trees) was

Dyxlesia lures KO

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Time for a law on fairness.

You write some software, and bigcorp use it and distribute it to millions of others and they can do so for free. Bigcorp writes some software which you wouldn't touch with a bargepole but have to use because some other unenlightened company depends on bigcorps OS, and if you don't pay for the OS, they sue you into penury.

By all means, the bigcorps should be allowed to charge what they like for code which is not essential for everything else to work, but the basic OS should always be free.

NASA renames dark-energy telescope after its first Chief of Astronomy and Mother of Hubble: Nancy Grace Roman

Are they now saying dark energy isn't dark?

The fact that it has an IR telescope to look for it implies they think it is bright but just in another part of the spectrum. Is it just another misnomer like dark side of the moon? Do they know they are going to see dark energy or do they need a new detector that can view negative frequencies.

The thing about dark energy is that it does your head in just as badly as solving Boltzman equations and finding that half of your RF sidebands are negative frequencies. Does that mean they go backwards intime and arrive at your reciever before you know you want to look for them? Maybe they will never see anything because all the dark energy being emitted now has already zipped past us billions of years ago.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

@phogan

totally agree. The mistake made by WPL was to not set up a shell company to buy the software copy before realising they could do the job a lot better themselves. Presumably they originally had no intention of bothering to write their own.

This is always a problem with software. You never know have poorly it lives up to expectations until you try to use it, and by then it is too late. You can't even rely on online reviews 'cos most of the time they are just copypasted from the publishers own blurb otherwise its a journalist who sees it runs on his own pc, that it has some pretty screens and doesn't crash within the first hour of prodding. By definition they don't have access to terrabytes of easily transformed data to push in, in order to test the software to destruction.

The big difference difference between the EU and the US is that European laws are designed to protect the customer and to create level playing fields. US laws are written to protect the vendor and help those who have the deepest pockets. OK massive overgeneralisation but most articles about legal stuff end up giving this impression.

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

Re: Australian Gov legal team can not read it seems

There is only one thing more stupid than plagiarism and that is telling everyone your software is based on that by another author, then removing the original license, not crediting the original author, then putting in your own license.

Actually there is one thing more stupid and that is to set the archive flag so that when you get taken to court, you cannot erase the evidence of theft.

I expect the coffers of the Singapore Gov, the FSF, and possibly GNU will be swelling nicely.

The terms of GPL V3 are very simply stated with lots of info about the purpose and use of the license. The Ozzy lawyers are either shysters or the most illiterate people on the planet.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: The wolf enrobed in penguin feathers.

OK Slightly shorter:

the Penguin feathered Beast of EEE.

This brings in the fact they are trying to appeal to penguinistas, but underneath they are more like the ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal and that their philosophy is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Re: The wolf enrobed in penguin feathers.

Tux Munchers Inc.

Re: The wolf enrobed in penguin feathers.

On a tangent:

BloatMeisters R Us

The wolf enrobed in penguin feathers.

Just liks the wolf in sheeps clothing: a means to infiltrate, then consume.

Buying GitHub was just the start.

Non-human Microsoft Office users get their own special licences

All your data are berong to us

You have been pwned.

Once enough companies sign up to this there will be a tiny change to the licence which points out that since the bot has been using MS APIs to insert the aggregated data, you have agreed to allow MS non-exclusive use of any derivative document for any purpose they wish. Much in the same way photographers are shafted by publishing their pics on most of the popular socialmedia.

Presumably the reason MS have created this licence is 'cos their office telemetry told them that the software was in use 24/7 in some companies and someone twiganyone couldn't be a human working those hours. Their argument for the above change of licence will be that since the data was not aggregated by a human it has no owner, ergo MS might as well own the copyright as anyone.

Just wait

Once they have established a precedent for the bot needing a licence, they will quietly add another mini-licence for every single data source.

Quickly followed by a name change from Micro$haft to Mega$haft. You certainly will have been if the lawyers can make this stick.

Quick Q: Er, why is the Moon emitting carbon? And does this mean it wasn't formed from Theia hitting Earth?

And in a rarebit of non-science, pundits have decided that Wales is actually a piece of moon which fell back to earth. You need to tread Caerphilly amongst cheesy puns on this site.

Hard cheddar if AC has no sense of pun. Probably no sense of irony either.

Australian contact-tracing app sent no data to contact-tracers for at least ten days after hurried launch

@The Central Scrutinizer

You can't be as smug as TouchPhone users. We can't even run the stupid app until the SourceCode is published. Hopefully we can roll in the Sinpore fixes before compiling and packaging.

Re: You know they are bullshitting you when they say:

They had better be publishin the source code pretty soon as well. The original code they copied is published under GPL V3. Not even governments are allowed to break contracts.

If you want to take social distancing to the next level, and go to the Moon, take this: A complete lunar geology map

The mad paintball warrior strikes again.

It looks like the moon has been involved in a paintball fight and lost bigtime. Either that or its been flour bombed with coloured chalk dust.

on a more serious note, this looks someone has put in a lot of effort to make a seriously useful map.I just hope we get back there someday and that space exploration does 't suffer from big budget cuts because of covid19.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: The Modern UI/UX

Yup. I think UBports (Ununtu)Touch would have a wider acceptance if wasn't for its Suru theme. It is very nearly a direct take from HHTGG with black buttons on a black background which light up black to tell you it has been pressed. OK it is actually light grey on mid grey with dark grey ”highlights”, but combined with extremely tiny fonts, it does result in serious eyestrain.

@AC

Never forget the string so you can pull it back onboard without leaving the car with no brakes at all. Especially, if you have an automatic.

Flippin' Dell! Texan giant wins single seat on £1bn direct NHS tech framework

Wot - no Crapita, IBM,ATA etc?

What is the world coming to. Surely a Goverment agency hasn't finally learnt from history!!!

Iran military manages to keep a straight face while waggling miracle widget that 'can detect coronavirus from 100m away'

Re: Perhaps it detects 5G signals

Don't foget that by correlation of David Icke's pronouncement, if you find the 5G you are guaranteed to find the virus. Ergo the device can't fail to work.

By his own pronouncement David is «son of thegodhead» so everything he says must be true.

Re: you may laugh

Maybe it's a state sponsored April fool's joke. They just failed to notice that the joke is only a joke if launched on the 1st.

You have to remember that the Iranian government and religious leaders are famed for their sense of humour.

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

Satelite designers missed a trick

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but if all satelites had been equipped with an ISO standard gas connector, the MEV could have been equipped with a second arm to fondle the satelites nipple and do a full refuel. It then wouldn't need to remain attached for the next few years before finding another satelite to act as a tug for.

Presumably the MEV has a preplanned mission so could be fitted withall the different connectors it is likely to encounter. 4 or 5 connectors could be mounted on a ball turret much like a lathe toolhead.

Consumer reviewer Which? finds CAN bus ports on Ford and VW, starts yelling 'Security! We have a problem...'

Who needs access to CAN to change tyre status

My peugeot regularly tells me I have a flat tyre. Usually after clipping a pothole. You stop and measure all 4 and find they are identical to within .05 bar. The one time I needed it to tell me a tyre was flat, it didn't make a peep. At car park speeds it didn't affect handling but by the time I had stopped (about 35 m), it had completely shredded the tyre inside - the outside still looked ok, just flat. I actually stopped because the noise it made was exactly the same as having previously dragged a small wind blown branch in the wheel arch.

French pensioner ejected from fighter jet after accidentally grabbing bang seat* handle

Re: Where on earth is that handle?

Presumably, the caption saying 4 lives saved with that particular suit includes the old geezer, in spite of the fact his life wasn't in danger till he pulled the handle.

Things that go crump in the night: Watch Musk's mighty missile go foom

Re: I'm guessing they were trying to simulate a payload.

This means figuring out how to keep those tanks stiffened until then.

Fill it with politicians. All the hot air will pressurise the boil-off and prevent the vacuum from forming.

Re: Vacuum

Not so much FOOM. More like Mooffff...pfft

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: A point of order seems to need clarifying.

Just as well its not Windoze otherwise it would bring a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death.

Re: Windows Server 2000

The real reason no one noticed was because it was impossible to run any version of windows until XP for 49 days without getting the dreaded BSoD. Reboot and the timer starts again - end of rollover.