Posts by Sceptic Tank

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Hamba kahle prof. Wirth, as they say around these parts.

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Shift left, people.

8086 segmented addressing and 12-bit FAT. Them engineers in late 1970's really enjoyed pain.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Re: Blame Where Blame is NOT Due

You don't seem to read a lot here: PC Technicians are deities: they know far more than any other human alive can ever hope to achieve. Any other computer user is more stupid than a complete imbecile in the eyes of the mighty PC repairman.

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

If this isn't Big Brother stuff then I don't know what is. Someone can give me money and restrict me to spend it on Chinese-Russian dictionaries within 14 days or loose it, We're soon going back to the gold standard or trading salt among the general populace

For the longest time I've been wondering how it is legal for something like a data bundle for my smartphone to expire after a while. I paid real money for the service, why should it expire? The money that I gave them didn't expire.

Re: 16 Tons and what do you get?

I think that is where the "wrapper" comes in: the store can remove the original wrapper and wrap the sweet in a different wrapper.

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

Re: Back of a Motorcyclist?

(S)he could be employed at a circus.

This could still wing its way to you, if you have the dosh: One Concorde engine seeks new home

Money for nothing

I would have thought that the payment issue would have been a solved problem by now. Like:

(a) have an account with a reputable registered financial institution with the required funds reserved for immediate payment to the seller when the bid is closed.

or

(b) Up-front payment of a substantial deposit which will be forfeited unless full payment is made within a certain time.

Conditions of sale:

_{Goods shall remain the property of the seller until full payment is received.}

_{Funds will be disbursed to ye seller when both parties agree that the transaction was closed to their satisfaction.}

_{There's blockchain involved.}

How difficult is this to organise in 2023?

Danish techies claim they can predict your next move (and your last)

Predictable outcome

In Sicily they can give you the names of those who are going to die as well.

Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars

The wrath of Khan

Is this guy running for the oval office? I'm stumped.

FBI develops decryptor for BlackCat ransomware, seizes gang's website

Fear not for the NSA is with you.

Does the FBI truly decrypt you data, or just restore it from their backups?

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

CUI not my ... type

I find it interesting that the picture accompanying this article shows the (Linux?) top utility to trumpet the glory of CUI. But that app has a GUI for all intents and purposes even if it is text based. (Borland's Turbo Vision back in the day attempted to emulate GUIs in text mode and it worked fairly well until it got buried by Windows). I use the git CUI because [reasons], but I'm grateful that I can do my coding in Visual Studio and not have to echo, sed, awk, or COPY CON to get stuff done.

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

You struggled with the Start button? And you admit that?

Missing tomatoes ketchup with ISS crew after almost a year lost in space

tomato + rocket = space salad

How many of these radiation hardened tomatoes would I require if I wanted to turn the moon into a pizza pie? (That's amore...)

Last Vega rocket launch delayed over fuel tank vanishing act

Re: Las(t) Vega(s)?

Have an upvote. I also had to re-read that heading that looked like "Las Vegas rocket launch" and the tower in the twilight.

Ignition ========>

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

Artificial Stupidity

LINT? Good thing there's no other established tool using that name already. I would have gone for AI INT (or AINT for short).

I wonder how many people have died already from bad advice shelled out by an AI bot.

Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations

Lend them a spade.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

A Word from the Editor

What problem are they trying to solve? Put the directory of your favourite Notepad-like editor in the search path and edit text in a GUI like it's 1991, even from the command prompt. Back in those days I gave EDIT.EXE that shipped with DOS a jaundiced eye and did all my text editing in TP.EXE.

British arms dealer BAE behind F-35 electronics first in line for US CHIPS funds

BAE BAE Money

Is this the same BAE that fleeced a poor* African country? See here.

* Driven into poverty by corrupt and greedy govmint officials.

Solar wind gave Mars a breather and its magnetosphere inflated

Re: Woah there, Mercury has a magnetosphere ?

Space is a messed up place. Mars = No magnetoshpere .. no atmosphere. Venus = No magnetosphere ... but atmosphere from hell that will pop your diamond reinforced camera lenses if you're not careful. I don't live in academia, but I imagine one or two PhD papers will need some revision before publishing.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Hey bro, take it slow

I'm not going to accuse Notepad++ of being particularly fast. Paste 250 lines of text and multi-edit / multi-cursor / multi-line-edit / whatever-you-call-it and see it struggle. Slow as mud.

On the upside there's macros. Those are a life saver after Visual Studio dropped macro support because apparently nobody was using it. How does the rest of the world edit code? Don't tell me they do it the tedious way of editing line-by-line. Eeeek!

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Re: In a way it simplifies things

3300 years ago is a long time.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

1) Goooogle produces useful links on the first page for even difficult searches like "where is the Atlantic Ocean"

2) YouTube sort out their algorithm and Mr Beast and other such crap that I will never in my life click on don't appear in my feed.

MS Flight Sim replaces MS BoB as the default desktop in Windows 12.

Nostalgia for XP sells out Microsoft's 2023 'Windows Ugly Sweater'

Re: Of course sold out

Had I designed the ladies' sweaters I would have put some Start buttons on the tops of those hills.

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

Icon =======>

I can't possibly image a use for this. The rest of the world is fleeing Windows and this guy comes up with this?

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

Not shipping containers, fool!

So this is what LSD usage looks like?

The servers crashed

It's hard to predict where the Z4 technology is heading because the driver won't be able to see 50cm in front of them. Unless it's one of those self-driving jobs and you don't need to know where you're going.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

Traffic very cross

Over here the minibus taxi industry create their own traffic rules and there is extremely little law enforcement. E.g. if there are three lanes they can be left-turn lanes, right-turn lanses U-turn lanes, parking bays, whatever the occasion requires.Talk about getting cross in the traffic. I don't think these Teslas stand much of a chance under such driving conditions.

FFmpeg 6.1 drops a Heaviside dose of codec magic

Re: Version numbers are not what you think

Maybe PuTTY 0.79.1 can have a UI overhaul that doesn't make someone who codes professionally in mindfsck using punched cards on a wooden loom feel frustrated. What's the deal with that abomination? (I use PuTTY regularly).

Impatient LockBit says it's leaked 50GB of stolen Boeing files after ransom fails to land

How long before nobody wants to work in IT anymore because of the risk of having data stolen and being held accountable? It's getting somewhat ridiculous. Soon there will be no legitimate way to identify yourself because of the amount of fraudulent and stolen information out there.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Re: "set about installing one"

One could be charged with wrongful conduct.

Electrical Hazzzzard.

When I bought the house I'm in, it came with a electrical compliance certificate from a qualified electrician. The plug point for the washing machine is one of these that you would fit on an extension cord. It was connected to the oven using a length of 2 core electrical wire. Obviously there is no earth leakage. That somebody hasn't died in this house amazes me.

CEOs of crashed tech upstart Bitwise accused of swindling $100M from investors

Foreign Language

Sorry, I'm from a different country. Is "investor" the same as "fool"? I read everywhere about these investors.

China’s annual e-tail frenzy broke records – trust us, say government, Alibaba and JD.com

11.11 singles day. Why is it so much fun to ridicule single people? I would so really dearly also like to have someone to love but just have never been good enough for anyone.

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

Alt+F4

Alt+F4 will only close the window. The thing is probably running as a service. You need to Ctrl+Alt+Del, then power cycle, then smash the motherboard in halve. Nuke it from space just to be sure. And to be really sure, recycle the Milky Way in the nearest supermassive black hole into which it will fit.

Late Qualcomm cofounder teleports $200M into SETI to bankroll hunt for alien life

SETI

What have they found so far?

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

Orange Crush

My mother once noted that vegetables never killed anybody. To which my father replied that he was present in the Rotterdam harbour when a bag of cauliflower fell from a crane onto someone's head and killed him.

Failure in the humour dept.

My parents never taught me to deal with the trauma of seeing so many downvotes per post.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

Those all sound like cost centers to me. Where is the money being made?

Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past

Execution of Threads of Execution

Who am I to question the mighty Chen? But AFAIK a thread cannot kill itself; it has to call the OS to do so or exit its thread proc which should result in a great deal of garbage collection. So what is there to reap?

India's lunar landing made a mess on the Moon

Why does anybody want to go there?

Wasn't some company going to build a machine that mixes moondust with ox blood to pave a highway for the moon buggies to trundle over? It was right here in these pages. Maybe we should first terraform the moon first before we send anybody up there. Every lunanaut will be kitted out with a BustDuster (TM).

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Re: Sam Bankman Fraud

I'm hoping you're not 89 now.

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

I'm an Englishman in New York.

Anywhere we can listen to this Alien Rock?

Your ex isn't the only one stalking your social media posts. The Feds are, too

It's probably not a good thing that I have Green Day's American .... Person in my Spotify playlist. Now the only place I'll be visiting State Side is Guantanamo Bay it seems.

More X subscription tiers could spell doom for free access as biz bleeds cash

Re: We all knew it would end in tiers...

Definitely not Tiers in Heaven by the sound of this stuff.

Re: Money for nothing

How much will they pay?

That script I wrote three years ago is now doing what? How many times?

Re: Indiana immediately owned up to … absolutely nothing

I heard some movie reviewer on YouTube call it The Dial of Dysentery – it was that bad.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Wanton destruction

If there's still so much fuel on board, why don't they aim it at some random alien planet? By the time it smashes in there and ruins someones day the rest of us will be long gone. That's what I would have done.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

try ... catch AI error handling

I get so excited when I see code like this:

try

{

// Yadda

...

}

catch (...) {}

You snooze, you lose? It's not quite as simple as that

Zzzzzz

When I struggle to fall asleep I burn up my brain cycles by thinking about something remotely interesting but not terribly exciting like a plot for a book I might want to write, or how to proceed with a pet software project. Often works.

Yawn ======>