Posts by the spectacularly refined chap

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Re: Parents

You would hope most parents would. However there is only a window of two months to make secondary applications and four and a half for primaries. Those periods are spelled out in law and we can't change them. In year applications such as when moving into the area work differently since clearly they can happen at any point.

In practice you'll have three basic categories of parent - perhaps a quarter will be eager and looking into this as soon as they are out of the maternity ward, half will need a reminder that it is time to put an application in and the remaining quarter need prodding and poking all the way. As a county we still have hundreds of children not in school and even prosecution doesn't always help.

So you would rather we continue to spend council tax money on local radio advertising, which surveys from previous years have shown to be almost completely ineffective?

Can't speak about Xitter specifically, but we did conduct a survey after the online application. One question asked how they knew it was time to apply. Of 368 responses 30 stated social media. Nowhere near the top response (communications from schools) but a good chunk nevertheless.

Don't you think they do that? As well as sending sending letters through the post? Getting schools (and health visitors etc) to communicate with their parents? But there's a very real problem first: where do you get the email addresses from?

We have contact details for parents of children that are already in school and can identify children who need a secondary application made, but there is no guarantee those details are up to date - the county council education department isn't someone who you might instantly think of if your address, email or phone number changes, and it's of zero help from primary applications. There are various fragmentary sources we can use to mop up large numbers of parents but none are comprehensive.

Remember that any time there is a proposal for a centralised national identity scheme it gets shouted down and with good reasons. But it also means there isn't a single source of authoritiative data. Various government departments will have large peices of the jigsaw - the NHS, Child Benefit etc but that doesn't mean we can start idly rooting through their records. Ultimately there comes a point where the parent needs to make initial contact with us for us to become aware of them. That's want the publicity drives are for.

You have to put these things into context. I'm in local government and one of our big publicity drives over the last few months has been around getting parents to apply before the secondary and primary school deadlines for this September.

Every year there are dozens of appeals triggered by parents missing the deadline and thus going to the back of the queue. Given how tight school capacity is in large parts of the county the general result is a less than desirable offer.

I'm not aware of us having spent money with X specifically but each admission appeal costs well over £100 to handle. If it costs a few pence to get the message in front of a parent in advance and so they meet the deadline that's a difficult expense to argue against.

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

"double the productivity and impact of US research and development within a decade."

Relatively easy to do. All you need is 7.2% inflation over that period and in dollar terms your objective is met.

A trade war against the world and undermining the Fed's independence are great ways of ensuring that.

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

The primary motivation for lower voltage was cooling rather than signal effects. The original Pentium-60 and -66 at 5V were well known for running particularly hot. The Pentium-90 was the first at 3.3V and was a lot cooler. ISTR many (if not all) DX4-100 and (AMD) DX4-120s were 3.3V for the same reason.

I picked up a Series 5 a couple of months back with some nice extras, good collectors example.

I'll probably move it on, display is terrible. Contrast is poor and the backlight so weak you often can't decide if the minor difference with it on is worse than with it on. I only saw a couple of them when current but remember the display being much better, presumably age-related degradation.

Had a Newton MP2000 at the time myself, great machine. Backlight again faded over time but an aftermarket white backlight made it better than new. Pity I can't remember where I put it, it's the only machine I've ever had that can replace pen and paper and improve on them.

I never saw one IRL, but was shocked learning the first Apple Macintosh had a 9inch monitor.

I have a couple here, an SE/30 and a Classic II. The SE/30 is the fastest of the compact Macs even though the Classic II is more recent. With enough RAM and an ethernet adapter it makes a nice enough machine especially on A/UX which was pretty nifty for its time.

The built in tube with a 1 bit 512x342 resolution was low even for the time but at least was pin sharp compared to anything using a TV, especially with an RF modulator. In some ways black and white was actually preferable, since there were no issues over questionable dot pitch between colour sub-pixels.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Re: ransom fees and copper cables

why can't I keep using my modern one, that works absolutely fine

You can, and probably will, carry on doing so. The media have done a good job of getting this back to front - the copper is staying for now and it'll probably be many decades before everything is fibre. What is changing is the equipment on either end, the same copper line will now carry a digital signal rather than an analogue POTS one.

They'll replace the copper at some point in the future as part of a local refresh but the equipment in the exchange is being updated over a much shorter timescale. Putting everyone on digital simplifies the equipment there and potentially allows greater speed over those same lines in the medium term, as backwards compatibility with POTS equipment and signalling does not need to be considered.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Re: A reminder

You can have as many username/credential pairs aliased to UID 0 as you like.

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

Re: De-intellectualisation?

No, not craters.

Just a gas leak that caused an estimated 16,000 deaths. Yes, Union Carbide is part of Dow now.

Fortunately they were Indian and thus apparently don't matter.

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Sounds like the lyrics to a Weird Al song.

Yes, that's AL, not AI.

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

Re: The only banking app that didn't accept payments

Payments out? Still website only.

It's 2026 ffs.

That sounds ideal to me. I hate those words "you can use our app for this..."

Particularly when it is functionality that works fine on the desktop website but is mysteriously not possible on the mobile site. Yes I may be using a phone instead of a desktop today but that isn't an excuse: if you demand I install an app I am forced to conclude it is for nefarious purposes that my web browser would block for security reasons.

It's 2026? Yes, that's exactly why I maintain the above.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

It's a well known saying...

Those that can, do.

Those that can't, teach.

Those that can't teach, teach teachers

Anthropic writes 23,000-word 'constitution' for Claude, suggests it may have feelings

Re: an ‘entity’ that probably has something like emotions

It's a glorified pattern matcher. It can't be insulted.

Then why do my computers start behaving when I threaten them?

I say thank you to cash machines and have done for 30 years. I think it started sarcastically when NatWest machines would routinely freeze for three minutes or so before ejecting your card and dispensing your cash. Now it's automatic but I realise the irony every time.

eBay updates legalese to ban AI-powered shop-bots

Yes those seem to be caught up too. If everyone was rational and shill bidding was taken seriously it wouldn't make any difference. However neither of those is true. People do get carried away and bid more than they originally intended and blatant shills and bid retractions do not get actioned even when reported.

Another use is for bid groups - I want an X, here's eight current listings - bid up to £a on that one, £b on that, £c on that one until you win one for me. Incredibly useful and avoids you getting carried away on individual auctions when there are plenty of options available.

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

Re: It's a good thing that in New Outlook, save to OneDrive is the only option then

Time to quote Michael Elkins on Mutt...

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Hasta la vista! Microsoft finally ends extended updates for ancient Windows version

Re: 10 years after

Whoopie doo!

"My stuff is easy to migrate on account of it being simple and boring. Sod anyone else."

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

I love this feature. It is the fastest way to copy paste with mouse selection.

Of course it is, because it pastes the text al opposed to the text+formatting which when taken from another source will almost certainly not match the document you are writing.

Presumably whoever decided that would be the default will end up in the same part of hell as the chap proposing this new misfeature.

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Re: I used to like

It would also frequently blow on onboard fuse if you did attempt to hot plug it, generally meaning a new mobo.

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Re: There would be plenty of budget available for NASA ...

They favor military spending because our constitution allows them to do that. Feeding, clothing or educating aren't really things that our constitution intended for them to do.

The US Founding Fathers were against the establishment of a standing army, indeed they observed that most coups against established civil power either originated in or are contingent on the military. This is why there is a constitutional bar on defence appropriations for more than two years at a time, but not for any other form of spending - the government can raise an army as needed, but it wasn't intended to be on an ongoing basis.

It is also where those second amendment rights to arms come from. In a country without a regular army the ability to raise a militia for the protection of the state becomes a sensible safeguard. It was not as frequently portrayed for protection from the state, which is the goal of all the other clauses in the constitution.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

NET SEND

It was always good for creating paranoia.

"I know who you are."

"Yes, I can see you..."

"You're wearing a blue shirt..."

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: Calculators

If you want a nice HP calculator go to Swissmicros. The "real" HP calcs are distinctly average algebraic types these days.

Re: RIP

Keysight still make some nice test equipment. Of course since it was decent gear they had to spin it off. Then the spin off had to do the same

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Have We Reached "Do No Good" Yet?

What? No "Beware of the leopard" sign?

Brit lands invite-only Aussie visa after uncovering vuln in government systems

Reading too fast again...

Just scanning through the headlines I thought we were going to get rid of Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Sadly he's of no use to anybody so wouldn't qualify.

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner passes, aged 83

Arguably the split went ahead At the beginning of the 90s IBM were a one stop shop - You could have an IBM base unit coupled to an IBM monitor and IBM printer. Inside the base unit was an IBM processor and an IBM hard drive, and it was running an IBM OS. They don't do any of that now, bits have been split off as new entities (Lexmark) or sold off as unprofitable (HGST, Lenovo). IBM is now a services company with a sideline in big iron, they are a shadow of what they were.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Don't they have GPS as a backup, then direct the ntp daemons to use that, configured as stratum 2 just in case, until the primary reference is up again?

Be careful, it's turtles all the way down.

Where do you think the GPS clocks are synced to?

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

I thought of that too, and also it's amazing you can design something to make the BMW C1 look stylish.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Nice try.

It has to be linked...

GitHub walks back plan to charge for self-hosted runners

Hmm?

What the hell is a runner? It's clearly not Seb Coe; some kind of equivalent to a trigger in a DB?

I neither know nor care about git, I'm still on CVS and staying there thank you, but this article did nothing to put itself into context.

Browser 'privacy' extensions have eye on your AI, log all your chats

I'm OK

I went on a website that told me I had 1,465 viruses and gave me a link to download something.

I installed that and it hasn't reported anything since.

It's £79.99 a month but what price piece of mind?

Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts

Re: Pulling out the old foot-gun?

That is merely channelling George W. His great priority was The War Against Tourism, when he wasn't busy being proud of being a merkin.

Porsche panic in Russia as pricey status symbols forget how to car

Re: More cloudybollocks

That only really works for the joyriders.

A professional thief won't give a Ferrari, Bentley or whatever a second glance, they are far too niche and attract far too much attention.

Much better to grab something mass market and anonymous, much easier to pass off under a cloned identity, or break up and shift as parts.

Judge hints Vizio TV buyers may have rights to source code licensed under GPL

Re: A few things will always be missing

Please, please, go away and read up about what you wish to pontificate about.

The Tivoization controversy has absolutely nothing to do with aggregation as even 30 seconds of research would have shown you. Rather it was about digital signing. An executable image for the device needs to be signed with a secret key. Without the key you can't correctly sign the image and the hardware will refuse to run it.

Thus, no you can't create your own valid executable and yes, GPL2 does nothing to prohibit that.

Re: A few things will always be missing

No it is something allowed, not when creating the executable but when allowing it to be installed or executed.

Since you are clearly keen on spouting the terms of the GPL try reading it, and also the surrounding controversy around "Tivoization" when GPL3 was being drafted. The text is there in black and white and does not change according to what you want it to say.

Take you coat and come back when you have a clue.

Space telescopes are being photobombed by satellites, and the problem is slated to get much worse

Re: How do "long exposures" work for Hubble?

Essentially yes. Readout noise is a thing when the exposure ends as is quantisation error when the exposure is digitised.

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

It is not well known that Linux has a hard dependency on GNU code via GNU bison etc.

I will freely admit I'm not overly well versed in modern Linux but I'm struggling to think of anywhere a Unix-style kernel could make use of a parser generator, whether that be Bison or a generic Yacc. The shell and various other interpreters and compilers forming part of the distribution, sure, but not the kernel itself which you specifically restricted this to.

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Re: AI - Security

I read the security element as "We screwed up the first time round, exposed you to vulnerabilities for years, and now expect you to pay up for our mistakes."

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

Re: "... as invaluable as the 1-port network switch, a marzipan heatsink, or write-only memory!"

To get a high power port.

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

From the film version of Kon-Tiki:

"Why are you throwing tomato soup into the sea?”

"It's the shark repellent the Americans gave us!"

"No, that's tomato soup.”

"So where's the shark repellent?”

"Who knows? We must have eaten it."

Re: Ooer!

It was the one thing that really ruined Alien for me. This is a commercial cargo towing ship. Why would you fit it with a self-destruct? You just know someone is going to get drunk and trigger it for shits and giggles.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

It's already a thing and government mandated at that. Most states impose a monthly per line fee on phone service specifically to pay for 911 provision.

It's one of the line items that generally get lumped under fees and taxes.

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

The Internet is not a big truck...

...it's a series of tubes.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Migrate Windows to Linux

It'd be easier than you think. There is no such thing as a "native" Windows app, ever since the first release of NT you have been on top of one subsystem or another, historically DOS, OS/2, and Win16, now mainly Win32 and Win64.

The kernel system call layer has never been publicly documented, only the subsystem APIs, but it is believed to be more in keeping with the Unix model of a few hundred syscalls as opposed to the tens of thousands of Windows API calls.

It wouldn't be impossible to code a translation layer between those system call schemes (a la lxrun for non-Linux Unices) or indeed recode those subsystems to use native Linux calls.

Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks

Re: Mobile networks have too much spectrum already

we're close to an airport here which means that we're effectively limited to a couple of channels on 5 GHz to avoid being dumped by the radar stations. A little more care when deciding which services should use which frequencies could help reduce problems related to contention and concentration on unlicensed spectrum for nakedly commercial services.

That is an inversion of the the regulatory view. The primary purpose of those bands is the high power stuff: radar, welding, microwave ovens and various other applications. The ability to use them for communications is a secondary permission as the primary purpose must already be tolerant of interference.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: "The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day"

I had to read the destructions last time I fitted a light switch...

...no, that isn't a joke, just a reflection on dimmable LEDs. Had to go through a sequence of high pitched beeps to put the dimmer into the correct operating mode.