Posts by Anonymous Coward

Cassini data from last decade reveals insights into 'diffuse' nature of Saturn's core

Re: It's quite big isn't it?

[Saturn] is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to [Saturn]

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

I can help them to carry it on if needed...

cat /dev/urandom

Re: they are now the last known digits of Pi

"go one better and learn it to 25, or 30"

If you'd paid more attention to the subject, you might realise that "one better" than 20 is actually 21.

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Re: Not my kind of humor, but

"their IP6 address" ??? Why would you want an address just outside Ipswich?

Starliner takes off ... back to the factory and not space

Re: Tough cookies

In theory, theory and reality are the same. In reality, they're not.

SpaceX are developing starship in the 'reality' realm, not purely theoretically. The fiery disassembly is a not-entirely-unexpected result of that.

Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

Re: It's probably systemd that broke your calendars

In the world of dead-tree calendars, I can imagine an air movement device breaking a calendar. Surely not in the digital realm though??

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Eh?

Stable as in it doesn't change much.

Its inability to continue running is indeed stable.

Scientists reckon eliminating COVID-19 will be easier than polio, harder than smallpox – just buckle in for a wait

Re: What do you mean no Apocalypse?

" indicates 5000 deaths involving influenza. "

You missed the "or pneumonia" on the end of that. Many covid patients are suffering pneumonia as a result of the covid.

Re: Meaning what exactly?

This paper isn't about the science. It's basically a funding application to give them resources to come up with some (slightly) less contrived numbers.

"Give us money and we'll prove this"

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

$ tends to be before tax (which varies by state) whereas the £ price includes VAT.

VAT is very similar to the exchange rate, so the pricing looks like a direct translation.

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Re: The problem

Three-digit years? Now THAT would be confusing!

Only if the deadline was the previous Friday.

For me it tends to be a regular Friday, and the deadline is the same day.

BOFH: They say you either love it or you hate it. We can confirm you're going to hate it

Re: Eerily good

Exactly. Why wasn't the cattle-prod keyboard energised? Or the claymore connected to the power button?

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

Re: Journalist prosecution

Some more facts for you:

If the rape case was so weak, he would've done better by turning up and explaining why he did what he did. If it was as weak as you claim (it wasn't), he could've dealt with it before they could file any extradition paperwork. Running away just makes you look guilty.

Sweden dropped the case because their statute of limitations expired.

If he wanted to avoid a hypothetical extradition process, he would've been better staying in Sweden than fleeing to a country which has a famously generous extradition arrangement with the US. Or he could've gone to pretty much any other country and had less chance of being extradited. No, he chose to flee to the country most likely to hand him over to the US.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Re: Only half the story

My 2006-era dishwasher has had 2 faults in it's 15 years of frequent use.

Both in the last 18 months.

Both can be described as gunk accumulation.

One was gunk on the door seal that lead to the catch tray filling with water and tripping the float switch.

The other was gunk in the drying vent's drain that eventually stopped the flap from opening. That required a fairly extensive disassembly to access but then just needed a good clean (inside various components).

Parts cost: zero.

Earache from the Mrs, however: "well why don't you strip it down and clean it out every year so it doesn't build up"... Well, if it took 14 years to cause a problem and is now completely clean, I won't need to do it again for 14 years and even then it's a fairly easy job. No, I don't think doing it annually is worthwhile.

SSD belonging to Euro-cloud Scaleway was stolen from back of a truck, then turned up on YouTube

> One SSD stolen?

I can imagine some damaged packaging and one disk falling out in the back of the truck. Driver not noticing it until the end of the day (or several stops later) and not knowing what drop it was intended for, so just sticking it on ebay.

Bezos offers to knock $2bn off his bill to NASA to stay in the running for Moon contract

Re: It's all about Elon

Use the ambulance-chasing lawyer approach: no win, no fee.

Bezos can fund the development himself; if his solution is earlier &/or better than Elon's, he gets paid. If not, he can suck it up.

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

Re: Interview 2.0

> "How would you work out the tidal flow volume of the Thames Estuary?"

I'd use a SPL meter, but I don't see the relevance of how noisy the tide is.

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

That's exactly why, in right-pondian land, we have fuses in our extension leads (and everything else)

If you overload it, you'll blow a fuse and everything on that strip loses power.

There's still a risk that a poor joint somewhere will gradually overheat, but that risk would be the same for a single high power load vs a loaded extension lead.

Re: Hands up

I remember the cabling risers I dealt with from that era. 19 year old me would've shimmied down the riser with some cutters; they were certainly big enough. They were a little intimidating as they ran the full height of the building and I was based on the 8th floor.

Thales launches payment card with onboard fingerprint scanner

For a long time contactless cards have has a £30/£45 limit whereas phone based (fingerprint/pattern authenticated) contactless has been unlimited.

That's exactly the same difference as with this new card. It's not introducing a new method, just a new form factor.

Your first point is addressed by RTFA.

Your second point is valid but despite google/apple pay systems basically doing the same thing, I haven't heard of a spate of phone+finger thefts

Akamai Edge DNS goes down, takes a chunk of the internet with it

Re: Bad days happen to everyone

Perhaps you missed this critical piece of information: "Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince offered a "don't blame us" sympathy tweet"

The "Bad days happen to everyone" message was from a different company - not the one affected. I'm not sure what sort of information you expect one company to give you about a completely different company's procedures???

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Re: Always an important consideration

When using remote control programs, I've developed the habit of right-clicking the taskbar. That way I know which computer is going to interpret the command.

Pipe down, Jeff. You've only gone where Gus Grissom went before, 60 years ago today

Re: How Small

I saw a Soyuz capsule a few years ago. My first reaction was "that would fit in the back of a Transit van"

Our Friends Electric: A pair of alternative options for getting around town

And what about the latency in the remote control? And the controller's tiredness/inattention from looking at screens constantly.

I'm not sure that I would prefer that over a meatbag driving (from the viewpoint of another motorist, not a passenger)

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: Take an accidental knee

That's right; we uses horses for towing. Kows are for consumption only.

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

Re: Sounds Like...

If only it were that simple

Here boy! Making the Sample Fetch Rover that'll collect soil from the Red Planet

Wow

All that effort and they could just ask SpaceX to spare a few grams of transport capacity.

On current timelines, they'll be well on their way to building a base on Mars by that time.

Windows 11 still doesn't understand our complex lives – and it hurts

Re: Go email yourself

More like rsync than scp, to be fair.

Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

Re: Why an app for the upright?

@Disgusted, if you're wondering about the downvotes just re-read the subject and the first 4 words of your comment.

Why X for Z? Well, it makes sense for Y.

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

Re: Pick your poison?

But for Assange, a life of insignificance is a fate worse than death.

If he dies in prison, his followers will hail him a martyr; if he rots away they'll simply forget about him and that will be torturous for poor St Julian.

Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with 'Tenacity' name

Re: Seriously?

The place is called "The Outside of the Asylum" and it's where Wonko The Sane lives.

Biden to sign exec order calling for right-to-repair rules for farmers, maybe rest of us

Re: Can we just nuke them from orbit?

I would rather take the opposite approach:

When a product is released, an independent outfit checks it over and gives it a serviceability score (including availability/cost of spare parts). That score determines the price they're allowed to charge for service... inversely proportional.

Make it difficult to DIY service and you are only allowed to charge a minimal amount to do it. Make it really simple to DIY and you can charge what you like.

Changing a headlight bulb involves removing the engine to access it? That's a £5 job even if it takes you 10 hours.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

Re: It's always puzzled me....

Because there are ways to circumvent such defences.

Yes, a website can lock an account after x tries. But then when their database leaks and the password hashes are exposed, those can be cracked on an independent system at the attacker's leisure.

Hardware (eg phones) can have their RAM imaged and rewritten such that any counters/timers are nullified after each attempt.

Simple timers may be vulnerable to NTP/GPS/MSF spoofing.

Basically, crackers are devious.

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Driver's side

"a cable snaking up through the driver-side window"

I agree that it's the side that the driver should be sitting, but as it happened in America the driver sits on the left of the car and the pictures show the cable entering through the right-side door seal.

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

Re: Sort of, guilty as charged

Around the same time (or possibly a bit earlier), I built an out-of-office system based on procmail.

Loops were indeed known about and the advice was to include an X-loop header that can be filtered on.

Later supplanted by logging replied messages and only sending one reply per address per day.

New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional

Re: So lame

But it'll be built-in with the next version of systemd anyway.

Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

Re: So you're telling me there's a chance

It's called the Ballmer Peak.

It's a real thing, but also obviously parodied on xkcd: https://xkcd.com/323/

Bezos v Branson: Battle of the wannabe Space Barons as Virgin Galactic cleared by FAA to start flying customers

I can imagine him going for a surreptitious launch a few seconds before Bezos/Branson. And actually going to orbit.

Of course he won't have FAA permission for it (that'd give the game away), but he's not shy of sticking 2 fingers up to the authorities. It might be on the schedule as another test flight I guess.

The world has a plastics shortage, and PC makers may be responding with a little greenwashing

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

Expanded polystyrene is easy enough to recycle, but it's bulky and lightweight so it's relatively expensive to transport to the recycling plants. Meanwhile, the recycling targets are usually set in tonnes or a percentage of waste by weight, so recycling something bulky and lightweight is not attractive compared to tin cans and glass bottles.

Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions

Re: My own comment commit

But making sure that you're only correcting whole words and not strings of letters contained within other words is importanter.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Re: What gen?

In the x86 line, you had 8086,186,286,386,486, then pentium (586), pentium 2 (686 - I guess sexium was deemed unwise), pentium 3/4/...

Only after that did you get the core, core duo, then the i3/i5/i7 lines

Pull your Western Digital My Book Live NAS off the internet now if you value your files

Re: I am amazed

Because people don't think and they believe the advertising.

Something advertised as reliable; they don't question its security. They don't think about what happens if someone breaks in and steals it. They don't consider what they might do if the building caught fire.

Basically, they don't think that they need to think about these things. We know different, but they don't listen.

Bug at payments processor WorldPay swipes £2k+ per ride ticket from Brighton Pier revellers

Re: More proof that using a debit card is stupid

You're advocating separate accounts, not necessarily credit vs debit.

Credit cards have additional legal protections (chargebacks etc), but a good bank will give the same protection on debit cards too.

It's quite likely that people would notice the issue a lot sooner on a debit card.

Spacey McSpaceface: Artemis takes shape ahead of '2021' launch – but first you need to name the crash-test dummy

Re: Nostalgia

ACE is an option... which I took to be in homage to Ace Rimmer - a nice bit of nostalgia.

US Navy starts an earthquake to see how its newest carrier withstands combat conditions

Re: Dear Register

s/There/They're/

s/your/you're/

Yes, we're fully aware of what they were doing. That level of knowledge allows us to lighten the mood with some humour. I realise that most Americans lack that trait, but we're British so we are born with a full complement of it.

If you're going to call other people idiots, you had better not make incredibly basic mistakes in your comment that even a 6 year old would avoid.

s/American muppet/British humour/

The problem is that to fight a war from the air, you need somewhere for your aircraft to be based.

That means either ships like this, or bases in friendly countries.

The USA seem to be trying to get rid of the latter.

It's 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network's name can break iPhone Wi-Fi

Re: Time to try a fresh honepot

"Bathroom camera" caused a bit of concern in the university dorms...