Posts by tony72

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Re: 8.3

It was relevant for a much larger period of Microsoft's history than most of the other suggestions, and you can always tell the whipper-snappers to try typing "dir /x".

Latest Microsoft 365 'wave of innovation' really just involves adding or renaming a bunch of update channels

All I want to know is ...

... how do I sign up for the "no more updates" channel? Actually can we roll back a couple of updates to before the Outlook search box mysteriously migrated to the title bar, which is aesthetically and functionally just bizarre. I can't actually remember the last time there was a new Office feature that I actually cared about.

Users of Will.i.am's Wink IoT hub ask 'Where is the love?' as they're asked to pay for a new subscription service

Predictable

"We need to get them on the tit. That's what we do." - Marty Kaan

House of Lies may have been about management consultancy, but the mantra could be pretty much the same for cloud-based products. Once you depend on that cloud service, they've got you, and while you may be disappointed when they use the power that you've given them over you, you shouldn't be surprised.

Stop us if you've heard this before: Boeing's working on 737 Max software fixes for autopilot, stabilization bugs

Cue MCAS, a dual sensor automated "bodge" system, where apparently only 1 sensor was connected, with no redundancy, that faceplants into the ground when it glitches or birds damage it (even when pilots manually fight it). Oh yes - for added fun, the LED that indicates MCAS failure (dual sensor mismatch) is an "optional sales extra".

That was hardly a no-win design challenge. Obviously they could have conected two sensors if they wanted to, they could have installed that LED as standard if they wanted to, and so for the other changes required to make the system work, then it would have been a win. It wasn't the difficulty of the design that caused their problems, it was making stupid decisions, and then doubling down on that by seemingly avoiding proper regulatory scrutiny of what they'd done.

New?

To be clear, it is said by Boeing that these two bugs, involving the autopilot and stabilization, are new and not related to the faulty MCAS system

So are these bugs new as in newly introduced regressions, or newly discovered but have been lurking for a while? I guess the latter, but the former possibility makes me wonder how scary it might be to receive a software update notification from Boeing these days.

HMD Global pokes head out of quarantine to show off 3 new Nokia mobiles

Re: ROM ?

Flash memory is technically "Flash EEPROM", i.e. it is technically a form of ROM. However nobody refers to it as ROM, so doing so is indeed liable to be confusing.

I find that less annoying than the use of the term "memory" by many non-technical types to refer to mass storage. Also technically accurate, at least as far as SSDs are concerned, but not the convention, or at least I've certainly grown up using "memory" to refer to the random access type.

SpaceX beats an engine failure to loft another 60 Starlink satellites

Figures

[...] more than five flights will be needed per booster to make the figures work.

Anyone know which figures are being referred to here? Is this saying that SpaceX can't make a profit if they only reuse their boosters five times? I was under the impression that they make a healthy profit per launch already, with the levels of reuse already achieved. Of course that only gets better if they can do a hundred launches per booster.

In case you want to flee this wretched Earth, 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI...

Dyson Swarm ftw

Axiom signs up with SpaceX to fly private astronauts to the International Space Station

What will they do?

I can't imagine you'd want to pay millions to spend a few days on the ISS just to twiddle your thumbs, and as far as I understand it the leisure facilities up there are somewhat limited thus far. Are these private astronauts going to be given tasks to perform, or take part in experiments while they are up there? I mean, taking that killer space selfie with the Earth behind you is great and all, but...

Don't Flip out or anything, but the 'flexible glass display' on Samsung's latest pholdable doesn't behave like glass

Re: inevitable byproduct of encounters with keys and coins

Honestly, did anyone think this was really glass on the screen? It's not known for being particularly flexible, unless it's a strand of optical fibre thickness...

Upvote for the first part of your post, but Samsung actually calls the stuff "Ultra Thin Glass", so ...

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: !!!

It turns out that the gun fitted to the Air Force version can't hit what it's aimed at.

Instead of Lightning, the MOD is considering renaming it the F-35 Stormtrooper.

Microsoft boffin inadvertently highlights .NET image woes by running C# on Windows 3.11

Re: VisualBasic developers are daft enough to fail to realize this

GP poster is probably running Windows 10, and trying to install a downloaded .net runtime, instead of simply ticking the box labelled ".NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0)" in "Windows Features".

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

Edgemium

Why are we not calling it Edgemium?

Hey kids! Ditch that LCD and get ready for the retro CRT world of Windows Terminal

Re: You had one job.

The text at the bottom says "Hint: Want your plain shell? Press C-o, and get back to MC with C-o again." So Midnight Commander it is.

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

Re: Sorry but...

I have to say, of the four ways I have of watching iPlayer on my TV - Samsung app, Virgin Tivo box app, HTPC, or cast from phone - the Samsung app is the slickest, and the Samsung UI seems quite slick in general to me. But I haven't owned this TV long enough to comment on things like updates and such. I had no real interest in the"smart" features of the TV when I bought it, but you can't really avoid them these days.

Nokia 2.3: HMD flings out €109 budget 'droid with a 2-day battery

Re: Should please some around here

My bad, I was sure I read that in the specs, but clearly not the case. I blame the lunchtime cider.

Should please some around here

For those people strangely obsessed with removable batteries and SD card slots - this has them, and a 3.5mm headphone jack as well. Didn't seem to be mentioned in the article.

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

Re: Printing

Nimbus Capture is a Firefox add-on I use for producing as-it-looks-on-screen captures and prints of web pages or parts thereof; maybe it will be of use to the OP.

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

Re: Oopsie

I was going to post a rant about Yodel, but I've probably done it before, and I don't want to sound like a broken record. But picture me spitting on the floor at the mere sound of their name.

Astroboffins peeved as SpaceX's Starlink sats block meteor spotting – and could make us miss a killer asteroid

Re: I wonder

Who needs a future...

Bit dramatic, don't you think? I'm personally very keen on us becoming a properly space-faring civilization, and that is bound to involve us putting more and more stuff in space, around this planet and elsewhere. I'm sure that is going to cause some issues for ground-based astronomers, but I can't see us halting all exploitation of space because of that, so we'll all just have to knuckle down and focus on mitigation and make the best of it. But it's certainly not the end of the world.

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

Occams razor

Two pilots claim to see a drone that nobody on the ground can see, even though it should be clearly visible, that isn't detected by the sophisticated drone detection system at the airport, and that shouldn't be able to fly there in the first place due to DJI's geofencing. I think we must consider the possibility that, just maybe, these pilots were mistaken.

I find it strange. It would be so simple to point something like a dash cam (in fact an actual car dash cam would probably do the job) out the windscreen of a jet, and so be able to show video confirmation of some of these drone sightings, yet recorded evidence of them remains rarer than footage of the Loch Ness Monster. As long as that's the case, I put them in the same category as all other UFO sightings; I'm sure they saw something, but what exactly it was is open to question.

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority asked drone orgs to email fliers' data in an Excel spreadsheet

Re: loophole?

Hmm, it also includes "any articles or equipment installed in or attached to the aircraft at the commencement of their flight" in that mass, scuppering my first thought that a modular drone might provide a loophole. I suppose if you attached stuff to the drone after commencement of flight somehow ...

Billionaire Bezos unveils plans to land humans on Moon, with a little help from some old friends

Re: The Future’s Bright

I suppose the silver lining is they are doing it under contract with NASA, not going the entirely lone way of Musk or Branson.

In what sense do you mean "lone way"? SpaceX takes cargo to the ISS, and will be taking astronauts to the ISS under contract to NASA, just two of the most high profile of many NASA contracts. Yes, they're planning a privately funded Mars mission, but they're also planning missions working with NASA and others. Hardly seems like a "lone way".

And Bezos is a competitor to Branson in the sub-orbital space tourism business, and he isn't working with NASA on that either, it wouldn't make any sense to do so.

Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech

Yes, we know it only has four legs, but just look at it.

A spider is still a spider if you pull four of its legs off*, is it not? So I think you get a pass on that anyway.

*which I am not advocating, before any animal rights activists get worked up, although they seem less quick to defend the rights of creepy-crawlies anyway.

First water world exoplanet spotted – and thankfully no sign of Kevin Costner, rejoice!

Re: Thank you!

To be fair, the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to, because it is so much larger than any distance we can physically experience. They probably feel that with miles, Joe Blogs will at least be able to relate to the base unit, and probably learned at school e.g. the distance from the Earth to the Sun in miles, so they have that as a yardstick. For those of us with at least a passing interest in astronomy cosmology, yes, not helpful.

OK, let's try that again: Vulture rakes a talon on Samsung's fresh attempt at the Galaxy Fold 5G

Re: How bloody much?

Yeah, I wonder what kind of warranty they're going to offer. I wouldn't buy it anyway, but I definitely wouldn't buy it without at least a 5 year warranty on that folding screen.

Full of beans? Sadly not as fellow cracks open tin at dinner to find just one

Re: density

Heinzenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Re: Sad times

I had this with NTL for almost two years, back in the day. They would send me a bill every month, so some part of their system knew I owed them money, but whenever I tried to pay it, they would say I didn't owe them anything, and the unpaid amounts vanished into the ether. I always thought that was proof of how bad NTL were; most companies somehow manage to only make mistakes in their favour, so you know it's really bad when they won't take your money at all.

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date

Re: Consumer Rights?

I'm not a lawyer, but I find it unlikely that failure to guarantee updates for ancient devices beyond six years is going to legally qualify as "do not last for a reasonable length of time". There are plenty of devices out there with vulnerabilities, new and old, and as far as I'm aware there is no legal requirement for manufacturers to meet any arbitrary standard of security, or to patch vulnerabilities in any given timeframe; the onus is on the consumer to choose manufacturers that behave responsibly, if security is a concern for them. As I say, by all means take it to Trading Standards, and do let me know how you get on.

Re: Consumer Rights?

Oh come on, it's not like it stops working after the AUE. I'd love to see you take this to Trading Standards actually, but I rather suspect you'd be given rather short shrift for complaining about a device that is working fine and hasn't lost any significant functionality.

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

Oops

I guess this was the router equivalent of a "reply all" email storm.

Clip, clip, hooray: NASA says it will send Clipper probe to Europa, will attempt no landing there

Re: We seem to be unable to adequately sterilize our spacecraft

I think the major national space agencies are pretty careful about that stuff. The tardigrades episode shows that, as space gets opened up to private entities, they may well not be so careful if they are left to police themselves.

Green search engine Ecosia thinks Google's Android auction stinks, gives bid a hard pass

Re: Good on them...

This is supposed to be a sanction to teach Google a lesson for abusing their monopoly

Not really. The sanction is the fine that was levied against Google. Giving other parties the opportunity to be included in the search choice screen is a change of the practice which led to the fine being imposed in the first place.

And if being included in the search choice screen is valuable, why should Google give it away for free? It doesn't make sense. There's a practical limit to the number of choices that can reasonably be presented to the user. If access was free, every Tom, Dick and Harry would want to be in there. The auction process seems a pretty good way of cutting down the field to serious contenders only.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: Touch screens

Totally agree about the lack of feedback on touchscreens. However it's pretty clear that this wasn't inherently a touchscreen issue. They had port and starboard throttles split between two stations, thus confusing the helmsman; you could equally do that with physical throttles as well as touchscreen ones, and it would be just as shit of a design. Ditto for the AIS laptops being hard to access. It sounds like a cobbled-together prototype lash-up that somehow ended up in the field.

They say piracy killed the Amiga. Know what else it's killing? Malware sales. Awww, diddums

Re: Piracy killed the Amiga?

That may all be true, but whatever killed the Amiga, it was Doom that put the final nails in the coffin. Doom was a big deal, and the Amiga's planar graphics model was fundamentally unsuited to Doom-type graphics engines, requiring many more writes per pixel than on a PC. I had a boosted A1200 with a mighty 50MHz processor and 8MB of memory, but even then Doom clones like Gloom were no match for the real thing, and that was pretty much it for that generation of Amigas, and they didn't have a next-generation ready to go.

They just need to get with the times - subscription models and malware-as-a-service would be the way to go, if they want to emulate the mainstream software industry's approach to protecting revenue.

Google to offer users a choice of default search engine on Android in the EU – but it's pay to play

Re: Except Google is shite (and getting shiter)

Remember back when Google search proudly proclaimed that it was an "and" search by default? Now you get to scratch your head at the irrelevant results, before noticing the tiny "Missing: <most important keyword>" bit below the results, because Google's mighty algorithms have decided that they know what you're searching for better than you do. Progress. Google is still the best general search engine IMO, but it takes more effort now to make it work properly.

Outraged Virgin slaps IP trolls over dirty movie download data demands

Re: Shome mishtake shurely?

Well it worked for Prenda Law. But I guess any client in a bittorrent swarm knows how much other members of the swarm have downloaded, because you'd need to know which blocks peers have available. So your presumably modified torrent client would probably download a torrent link, immediately pause the download, and start logging IP addresses of peers and what blocks of the torrent they have downloaded. If my rudimentary understanding of how bittorrent works is vaguely corrent anyway.

Ofcom 'fair deal' action: UK mobile networks agree to slash contract charges when lock-in ends – except Three

Re: 11 handsets - not one could I get working. Costs at repair shop

It's been a few years since I had to unlock a phone, but I bought an unlock code on eBay for I think around a fiver, and looking on eBay now, it looks like codes still cost around £2 - £10. For me, that makes it not worth the time trying to get the network to unlock a handset, you just know that's going to be a hassle. Assuming codes are available for the handset and network in question, of course, I don't know if it's as easy as buying a code in all cases.

All change at NASA while Proton launches and India's Moon dream suffers a snag

Re: Virgin Orbit

It may be boring, but maybe the same things that make them boring will also make them commercially viable, unlike, apparently, Stratolaunch. WhiteKnightTwo would have been a more interesting carrier, but I imagine Cosmic Girl is cheaper to operate, as well as having a higher load capacity.

The ISS Experience: Not visiting any time soon? Through a VR glass darkly may be next best thing

I have an Oculus Go, and I know what I'll be doing with it tonight now. Perfectly capable for this kind of thing, and really not much money at all compared to PC-based rigs. Although if I could go back in time, I'd wait and buy a Quest instead.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

I use Bing image search in addition to Google quite often these days*; Google has been determinedly dumbing down its search functionality for years, and while it will grudgingly still search for what you actually typed (once you jump through the hoops of selecting "verbatim" results or putting quotes around all your search terms) for a text search, image searches are much more of a crapshoot. I find it about 50/50 that I'll get a better result with Bing than Google quite often.

*yes, even when not searching for porn, when Google's always-on nanny mode is an obstacle ... err, so I'm told.

Last week in space: Giant aircraft, asteroid impacts and exploding satellites

Re: Stratolaunch vs Skylon??

I have a personal fondness for Skylon because it looks so freakin cool, but aesthetics aside, which is the better platform? Genuinely curious.

Not really sure how you even compare them, they're such different concepts. Stratolaunch is here now, while Skylon is almost sci-fi at the moment. Stratolaunch has little advantage over conventional launch platforms in terms of cost/kg to orbit, so it remains to be seen whether they can carve out a niche for themselves with their ability to launch in bad weather and with an ideal launch position/trajectory. Skylon claims fairly dramatic advantages in terms of cost/kg to orbit, but this far out, it's hard to have much confidence in those numbers. If the Skylon numbers actually turn out to be at all realistic, then it will be much more of a game changer than Stratolaunch, but it's going to be many, many years before we get to find that out, and other players won't be standing still in the interim either.

Bit nippy, is it? Hive smart home users find themselves tweaking thermostat BY HAND

While I agree with you about smart meters, having a cloud-dependant thermostat and other smart home stuff goes a bit beyond a simple smart meter. Nothing would stop working if you had a smart meter outage, other than the power company not being able to monitor your energy usage, at least as far as I understand the current situation.

But yeah, I have so far stayed well clear of any "smart home" gear, and if I ever did get on board, I would not buy anything that wasn't capable of working in an offline mode when called upon.

There are pictures all over the internet of a big dark spot on Uranu... Oh no, wait, it's Neptune

Re: Years

Touche :)

Years

I always feel a touch of cognitive dissonance when talking about the duration of events on other planets using unspecified years. Of course it's reasonable to say that "year" means "Earth year" unless otherwise noted, I'm not suggesting otherwise. I can just imagine the Martians getting the hump about it one day.

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Re: In Case of Emergency?

In the event of the station becoming uninhabitable an EVA suit isn't going to help you much.

You mean Gravity was all a lie?!!?

'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin

Re: pro-Buffy flame war.

Having only watched all seven seasons of Buffy three times over, I don't think I'm a sufficiently fanatical fan to step up and defend it either, but the mere fact of it having lasted for seven seasons is probably defence enough. Or the fact that we're still talking about it after all this time.

Sadly the word is this is another show who's legacy is going to be tarnished by the launch of a reboot. Is there anything they won't dig up and rehash?

Google: I don't know why you say Allo, I say goodbye

Another Google project that they got bored with and gave up on? What a surprise!

I personally like Google's approach of trying various approaches to a problem, putting stuff out there and seeing what sticks. But it's essential with that approach that you prune the stuff that doesn't stick, otherwise you'd end up with a permanent mess of overlapping, semi-redundant products.

I'm not really sure what the people that moan about this actually want. I mean, do think Google should keep supporting Allo, even though it hasn't gained much traction, and it has other products that do the same job better? Or do you just dislike Google's whole approach, and you don't want them to release products like Allo in the first place?