Posts by Anonymous Coward

Microsoft takes tweaking tongs to Windows 10's Start Menu once again

Re: Clearly I've missed something but

Whenever I want to change something in Win10, my muscle memory goes straight to: Win+R, c o n t r o l [enter]

White elephants in the mist: Google's upcoming Pixel 4A may ship without Soli motion recognition, per FCC filing

Re: So

Presumably with the camera

Beware the fresh Windows XP install: Failure awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth

Laptop power cable chewed by parrot.

Rat skeleton behind bookcase when installing phone cabling; customer response "ah, that's what the smell was last summer"

Cat knocking book off shelf onto laptop; smashed screen & ruined keyboard. This was when basic laptops started to drop below £1000, so quite a pricey cat toy.

Spiders clogging up the inside of computers; had to remember to wipe away the cobwebs before installing expansion cards.

Puppy chewing network cable under desk.

Usual rats chewing Cat5 in the most inaccessible places - made more inaccessible by the amount of droppings left behind.

And most recently... triggering mouse traps while installing cabling near electrical switchgear. Certainly made me jump!

I may have been in this game too long.

Skype for Windows 10 and Skype for Desktop duke it out: Only Electron left standing

Re: Classic

They're just copying Apple

Korean boffins build COVID-bot to shove a swab right up your hooter

Re: Slightly overengineered

Don't forget the decontamination after it has been breathed upon by the potentially contagious. I'm sure a disposable gown and gloves is far simpler and cost-effective.

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Re: British football pitches

If we're talking football, that means we're talking about football.

A simple game where a foot is used to act upon a ball.

If you're despairing at staff sharing admin passwords, look on the bright side. That's CIA-grade security

Re: There's a dangerous assumption here.

In an organisation where everyone probably thinks that passwords are trivial to crack or bypass, they're not going to put any effort into devising strong password practices. What's the point in having a strong password that nobody can remember when the users would be able to bypass it anyway.

A bit like in Windows 98 when you could just press 'cancel' on the login screen and get to the desktop...

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

Well obviously you don't wear lycra; for off-roading rule 18 of the velominati applies:

Rule #18 // Know what to wear. Don’t suffer kit confusion.No baggy shorts and jerseys while riding the road bike. No lycra when riding the mountain bike (unless racing XC). Skin suits only for cyclocross.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Re: I like colors

and that fact that approximately 10% of the population can't discern one from the other.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Entirely legal

You are always perfectly entitled to repair your own kit. Or even modify it (subject to electrical code, etc).

The issue arises if you later wish to claim warranty service on said item, or install manufacturer-provided updates (for example).

EU aviation wonks give all-electric training aeroplane the green light – but noob pilots only have 50 mins before they have to land it

Re: Boost from Solar?

A lot of expense and a bit of added weight and complexity, for at most 2kW boost. That's less than 10% of the battery capacity (for 1 hour), so could maybe extend that 50 minutes to 55 minutes. I doubt it would be worth it.

Covering the airfield/buildings in solar panels to charge the planes on the ground however...

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

I heard that an injection of bleach protects against stupid....

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

Re: Thanks Rasmus!

Wordpress code is an absolute nightmare!

Don't panic: An asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is flying past Earth this weekend but we're just fine

Re: Or....

Isn't 1WTC rather shorter than 541m now?

Re: bigger than the empire state building...

Don't confuse length with bigness.

For everything else, refer to the definitive guide - The Reg standards converter

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

It's not really that 'different' though. Fundamentally it is a few more digits. Actually quite a few - 96.

For better human recognition, the expanded address range is usually represented in hex rather than decimal, but IPv4 addresses can be shown in hex and vice versa.

Given that network stacks need to be rewritten to accommodate this expanded address range (eg allocating more RAM for addressing and thus packet headers...), it's useful to change the display convention so people can differentiate between legacy and updated versions.

Given that that's all happening, you may as well add the other extra features that IPv6 provides.

Change the thinking around... another option would've been to make each byte bigger - say 10 bits, which would increase the address space 256-fold (IPv4 address being 4 bytes this would be going from 32 bits to 40 bits). How simple would that solution be???

Have I Been Pwned breach report email pwned entire firm's helldesk ticket system

Re: Wow that is so meta

Have I been Have-I-been-pwned pwned?

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

Re: Compulsory El Reg commentary moan

Nobody claimed that it was a closed system or that you could recover 100% of the energy.

The simple fact remains that an electric motor being spun from an external force generates electricity, so a plane descending can recover some charge (maybe 10%, but that's still 10% that doesn't need topping up on the ground)

An ICE cannot generate more fuel under any circumstances (oil seeping through into the fuel doesn't count!)

Re: Compulsory El Reg commentary moan

Which hints at the big advantage of electric propulsion... when you don't need to push, you can run the system in reverse and generate electricity to (partially) recharge the batteries. With combustion fuels you don't stand much chance of creating more fuel. (Except possibly hydrogen...)

'Beyond stupid': Linus Torvalds trashes 5.8 Linux kernel patch over opt-in Intel CPU bug mitigation

Re: There must be a simpler fix...

So instead of writing a series of zeroes to the cache, you intend to read the cache, run it through an encryption algorithm and write it back.

Which do you think would be quicker? And even the quick solution is too slow for context switching.

Building society caught in middle of high street sharing a little too much on TeamViewer

Re: TeamViewer....

TeamViewer's biggest use (I thought anyway) is to allow a technician to access a user's PC... from experience, any additional "and now you need to click on this button" is enough to fluster users to the point of not being able to provide the info that you need.

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

Re: This is a driver assist not an autopilot !

Autopilot is exactly a driver/pilot assist technology. No more, no less.

In aviation terms, an autopilot will follow a heading at a set altitude until it is told otherwise (whether direct pilot input or a trigger from a pre-planned route). Aviation autopilots will also happily fly into another plane in their path if there is one (unless augmented with other systems, but it's then not just an autopilot).

I'm sure they would also fly straight into an overturned truck floating in their flight path.

Re: Radar does have issues with recognizing stationary things

Equally a bridge/flyover going over the road that you're on, especially when your road dips to go under it. To a human it's quite clear that you're not going to smash into the bridge but to radar/lidar it's not so clear.

That's why they generally ignore big stationary objects.

SpaceX Crew Dragon docks at International Space Station

Re: Correct me if I’m wrong

I'm sure many have been designed in that time; it's just that very few have actually been built, even fewer tested and just this one actually used.

Re: this is only half the trip

Landing is MUCH easier.

Going up involves controlling a massive explosion and directing it appropriately. Coming down has gravity doing most of the work and they just have to control the direction.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

Re: Ah, customers.

Those who can, do.

Those who can't, teach.

Those who can't teach, teach PE.

Re: Load?

Test two of them at the same time, connected to each other, out of phase.

Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't

Re: Oh. Again?

Which is exactly why they're looking at Newquay in Cornwall.

Sticking 500kg on a train to Cornwall vs the risks associated with launching near London; the train will win. Airport fees will likely be considerably cheaper too, and easier to schedule.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Come on Twitter

In other words: you're free to speak, but I'm free to ignore you and not repeat it for you.

If someone could stop hackers pwning medical systems right now, that would be cool, say Red Cross and friends

Re: The obvious solution to the obvious problem

Medical devices, like their remote access server? You know, that think that facilitates working from home for a significant proportion of the staff; those doing admin things such as ordering meds, PPE, etc or completing other 'paper'work.

Yeah, I can see how they shouldn't have any form of internet connection for that.

Record-breaking Aussie boffins send 44.2 terabits a second screaming down 75km of fiber from single chip

Re: DWDM on a chip

Left nostril

Runaway Latvian drone found meditating in tree after shutting down nation's skies

A couple of starting points:

Aerial arborialist.

Unmanned tree detector.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Seriously though...

I suspect you've been in this game a similar amount of time to me.

I've taken to darkening most of the image, just leaving the target item bright. so instructions that say 'click this button' will highlight the button and dull the context.

Users really are dumb sometimes.

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Unless they were sufficiently spaced that the localised magnetic field deviated enough between them to register a difference.

But I agree, it wouldn't have saved the craft; better software could have done.

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

Re: One software manager to rule them all!

Shared libraries are not about minimising disk space.

When a vulnerability is discovered in a library (say, jpeg parsing) you can update that library once and be done rather than having to wait for every app vendor to update their app and then installing each and every one of those. Better not miss one or you'll still be vulnerable.

OnePlus to disable camera colour feature with pervy tendencies in latest flagship smartphone

Re: Some materials are see through in infrared

That's the difference between near-IR and far-IR... which is why an IR camera is a very different beast (and price) to a thermal camera.

No, it won't make any significant difference.

Attorney General: We didn't need Apple to crack terrorist's iPhones – tho we still want iGiant to do it in future

Re: Exactly.

ROT14 with an extended alphabet - say an extra 2 glyphs?

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: Only way

I never had a problem with STARTing the shutdown sequence. I then leave the computer to complete it. With the advent of ACPI, it will even power itself off (well, near enough)

"Still, better than pitching up in person, glimpsing a browser history"

Sister in law. Midget porn collection.

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

Re: Micros~1

I thought Micro~1 was Microshaft and Micro~2 was Microsoft ???

Mad dash for webcams with surge in videoconferencing has turned out rather nicely for Logitech

I'm currently using a ~11 year old Pro 2400 set. Some of the legends are wearing off and the wrist-rest is shiny, but otherwise it has been flawless. Keyboard batteries last 12 months, mouse ones 6.

I haven't installed the logitech software though - distant memories remind me that it's annoying and experience says that it's not needed anyway.

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Re: Huh?

My current car has such a bracket, but my previous car had such a discreet arrangement that I didn't notice for about 2 years - the fuel cap had a couple of notches in the side, allowing it to perch atop the flap. It was also tethered so couldn't be removed entirely. A brilliant bit of design, masked by the fact that nobody knew about it - I told several other owners of similar cars who all responded with "wow, never knew that!"

Prior to that car though, there was no such arrangement. The cap either got placed on the pump, or on the car roof. I never had a problem with that either.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: Yes the users are bad

I often get "and then some numbers"

Yes, those numbers are the error code and will point me at the exact error. That's the only really useful bit of the message, not something to be skipped over.

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

Re: Bad Solution

If it's that important to send the original message, use the BCC field. That's what it's there for.

Tesla sued over Tokyo biker's death in 'dozing driver' Autopilot crash

GunsTeslas don't kill people, people kill people.

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

Firing lasers at the ISS?? I sure hope they've set them to 'stun' otherwise they might blow it up.

Vodafone issues a stay of execution for Demon domain hold-outs

Re: Blast from the past

Threaten them with GDPR to get them to remove all traces of your old number. It's amazing what they can discover when faced with such legislation!

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Re: Sure...

He is such a major flight risk that he cannot be released on furlough or similar.

But if he's that worried about contracting covid-19, there's another way to keep him safe... solitary confinement. If he has zero contact with any other living creature, the risk of contracting it are significantly reduced to the point of elimination.

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

Re: This may be a really obvious question.

"monthly bills on this link are going to be pretty high"

The word you're looking for is "astronomical"

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: "Hopefully he also added a bit of text along the lines"

And this is why I have $? as part of my shell prompt. Knowing the return code (roughly similar to errorlevel for you DOS-junkies) is incredibly useful.