Posts by Jonathan Richards 1

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: The rumored traditional IBM script for that...

vi traditional_script

s/eraser./eraser. Now clean *inside* the power socket with a nail file./

:wq

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

External combustion Stirling engines would be great, but they're really hard to come by.

Imagine a small engine for your bicycle, canoe, or campside generator that is as quiet as a sewing machine. Its exhaust flue gases are nonpoisonous, nonpolluting and practically odorless. It starts easily, and should run without repair for many hundreds of hours, burning less than one-half liter of kerosene per hour.

Such an engine was developed 40 years ago and incorporated into a small generator set by the Philips company of Holland; it is the modern stirling air engine.

Unfortunately, only about 100 of these units were made before Philips suspended production, having concluded the 200 watt output was inadequate for commercial success in the world market at that time.

Source: MakingStirlingEngines.pdf, by Andy Ross, download link here

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

Needles! I can look at a packet of steel sewing needles and ponder how hard it would be to make something that good from scratch. Consequently I have just such a packet in my emergency bag.

Tesla swerves liability in Autopilot death lawsuit

Re: Self Drive

> dropping from 70 to 30 mph for no apparent reason

I believe that the speed limit detection is a mixture of "reading" speed limit signs [Captcha: Tick all pictures with a 30 mph sign] and a GPS database. If the "reading" output is below some reliability threshold, I guess the GPS takes priority, and then where the (motor|free)way takes a flyover crossing a lower speed limit, maybe it momentarily switches down? In the UK, at least, there are probably many more motorways going *under* slower roads.

It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Ain't got time for that

> Just wait until {SF pipe dream}

How long shall we have to wait, d'ye think?

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Lost the plot

> anyone here remember netbooks?

You must be new. Around here we remember bare boards that you programmed in machine code with switches.

I have a working Samsung N210 running Linux Mint/XFCE very effectively, with Win10 as a dual boot.

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

Re: Wow

> Which one?

Costa Concordia, I guess.

There is a technical report linked from this page [gov.it].

Free software pioneer Richard Stallman is battling cancer

+1

What is it with the downvotes? Can't be personal animus, because: AC. The post consists of a personal anecdote, a statement of personal feeling, and a well-phrased expression of hope for the future. I fail to see the reason, or purpose, of downvoting without the downvoter expressing itself more clearly.

Ukraine accuses Russian spies of hunting for war-crime info on its servers

Re: Court procedures

Sure, defence teams should be given access to prosecution information. That occurs at the point that an accused person is brought before a court, and the defendant and their lawyer are passed the evidence bundle. It isn't proper for a possible future defendant to go hacking into other people's databases in order to find out what they might know, and then perhaps take the opportunity to obscure that evidence, or even to interfere with witnesses.

I'll note that any court dealing with war crimes in the current context is unlikely to be in Ukraine - it's much more likely to be the International Criminal Court.

Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Re: Still need a copy editor...

>> we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive

> It's two separate clauses separated by the "and"

In which case the grammatical dissonance comes from the change of tense between the clauses, "we have added" is past perfect, and "[we] rewrote" is past tense. Replacing "rewrote" with "rewritten" would allow the second clause to benefit from the unspoken elision, so it would read as "we have added {noun phrase} and we have rewritten {different noun phrase}".

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

Witty names

ROFL! Hahaha... but of course if I want to search for more information *about* the technology, what do you think the raw hit count for "ROFL" is? A.: 19.2 million. Alright, "ROFL" "font delivery" cuts that down to 5 with a 100% precision, but still.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Traditional etiquette, or new-fangled poor etiquette?

> Email etiquette says to include the logo at the bottom of your external emails adding a few kb to the size

No, proper email etiquette is to send Plain Text.

OK, OK, let's not start that again.

Re: Tools for end users

Can we have a part number for that Extra-Sensory Perception chip?

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

Explaining a joke causes it to collapse into, er, a non-joke. Pedants will point out that it should then have been twenty-odd hyphenated women (digits in written language being frowned upon), and then we would have laughed. Maybe, but probably not.

Token prison sentence for first convicted NFT insider trader

Re: Too bad. . .

Philo jests; they awfy nice Scots willnae take offence (sp) at scot-free, because scot is a sort of tax. See also scot and lot

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

Post-pub fry-up

>where did that section go el-reg?

Sadly, very sadly, I think that it went the way of the late lamented Lester of this parish, whose enthusiasm for such may have proved unsustainable.

Curiosity finds evidence of wet and dry seasons on ancient Mars

Re: Nobody is visiting anybody

@ergot

Having been alerted to a joke, I looked in vain for it. You want to lay off the moldy rye.

Northern Ireland police may have endangered its own officers by posting details online in error

Re: A modest proposal

Without any evidence whatsoever, I'm going to assume that there was a spreadsheet page with some sort of analysis (?pivot table) which was responsive to the FoI request, and another with all the source data, which the releasing officer didn't see, look at or understand (perm. any two from three).

The moral of this sorry tale is not (as Arthur proposes) to make Excel™ users into putative terrorists (though I upvoted!) but NOT TO USE EXCEL TO RESPOND TO FOI REQUESTS!1! What is wrong with looking at that responsive analysis, approving it and sending it to a printer. Then you can send the printout in the post, job done. Oh, someone needs to check that the printer was loaded with blank paper, it seems.

Author discovers fake, likely AI-generated books written under her name

Re: Your dystopia preview is ready

School board drone: Which of the books in our catalog have sexual content and stuff?

Alleged Intelligence: 'Genesis, Unknown author, no date' looks like it should go, I mean, just look at Chapter 38.

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Whataboutism↓

+1, I wanted to say the same thing. "Yabbut, what about..." is a pervasive tactic in all sorts of political debate everywhere these days, the participants seeming never to have grown out of the phase in their lives where it sort of worked, i.e. the primary school playground. The grown-ups would usually say "Two wrongs don't make a right".

Can you raise $100M+ from AI investors with no product? SEC says yes

What's the difference...?

I thought "multi-level marketing plan" and "pyramid scheme" were synonymous...

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Re: Curious

It doesn't seem to be a rotation. On this machine, a derivative of Ubuntu 22.04, I think, /usr/bin/vim is a symbolic link:

/usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim

Then that is a further symbolic link to vim.basic which is the executable:

/etc/alternatives/vim -> /usr/bin/vim.basic

vim.basic is also at the end of a similar two-link chain from usr/bin/vi. In checking that out, I find that there is also a vim.tiny, which is less than half the size of vim.basic.

RIP Bram Moolenaar

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

afraid to stop

If you're any colo(u)r at all, and you've just barrelled past a school and a police officer, doing a hundred mph, then you're going to be afraid that it's turning out to be a bad day. Doubling down and trying to run is pretty dumb. See icon =>

Re: For readers outside the US

>from cops attending my church

What sort of church has to call the cops?

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Mojeek operators

Now with properly formatted HTML...

A Guide to Mojeek Operators

Re: In short yes, there are reasons

I'm not sure that I'm following your logic here. Is the strategy that you're suggesting along the lines of pointing searchers towards specialized repositories, a bit like a librarian pointing you towards the History of Medicine shelves if you're interested in penicillin? Because although you could then browse the [books | resources] there, you wouldn't be that much closer to whatever particular aspect of penicillin you were curious about. A really good librarian will help you find the right index term in the Universal Decimal Classification, or Dewey (depending on the library, of course).

What I hope you're NOT suggesting is that a significant majority of what any particular search is about is to be found in a handful of web sites. That cannot be the case, and goes against every concept of distributed knowledge and the World Wide Web, which even in its entirety is not the Sum of Human Knowledge.

If you're looking only to index [1] a sub-set of the Web, how do you identify that sub-set? Seems to me that you'd have to index the whole thing to find out.

[1] Indexing used to be a skilled job, where someone with subject matter expertise would assign index terms from a controlled vocabulary to a document, so that it could be retrieved with precision later on. Sometimes the terms were filed on index cards, and then we started using computers. I know, I know, I'm old. Nowadays, Google et. al. don't have an index in that sense, at all. They have a searchable concordance, and the precision of the search results depends directly on whether the set of words in the document tell you what the document is about. Generally, it does not, and then there is all the SEO and "algorithm" finagling on top of that.

Re: Google search

> technical or advanced search options

Yes, this. If one learned searching long enough ago then a search term like "(BOFH OR PHY) AND (QUICKLIME OR SHALLOW)" comes naturally. The Fine Article gets a +1 from me for the mention of Mojeek, which had flown under my radar until now. It *does* offer a number of useful search operators, see <a href="https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/08/mojeek-operators-a-guide.html>A Guide to Mojeek Operators</a>

Two US Navy sailors charged with giving Chinese spies secret military info

Re: Security clearance and pay grade

> anything unlocked in the office and the contents of the bin

Which is why last officer leaving the room signs to say that everything is locked, and the bin contains only shreddings. Interview without coffee follows swiftly if those things turn out not to be the case during nightly rounds - please refrain from asking me how I know.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Don't tell me, show me.

14:50

Stands the clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

Re: Millions of Parsecs

Critically, you also need a strong source of Brownian motion... like a really nice hot cup of tea.

Anyone using M-DISC to archive snaps?

Re: Solves only the easy problem

Hurrah, a reply seven years later! Just a note to update the new home for dvdisaster, which now (25-Jul-2023) resides at this developer site. DVDs may rot, but El Reg he laughs at link-rot.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

I clicked on Upvote, but as I did so I saw that you had 42 upvotes already. Can't break that total, sorry.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: Installfest

There's another hidden benefit, too. It's much tougher for "Brian from Microsoft Security" who cold calls your Gran from Mumbai with frighteners about a virus. Good luck using the scam script to talk her through installing TeamViewer on Linux Mint.

"Now please to press the Vindows key and the R key at the same time, please".

Uncle Sam to put Aurora supercomputer to work on catalyst conundrums

Re: "what exactly makes them so deadly to microbial life has proven illusive"

> write in US English

Yabbut, this isn't an ax/axe color/colour issue, nor even an elevator/lift one. "Elusive" and "Illusive" are different words with usefully different meanings (although almost exactly the same correct pronunciation).

Elusive a. 1719. That eludes or seeks to elude; also fig.

Illusive a. 1679. That tends to illude; productive of illusion or false impression; deceptive; illusory.

Elusive things are good at evading and escaping, illusive things are productive of wrong conclusions. In this context, i.e. the cicada wings, the wrong adjective is very wrong.

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

Kermit FTW!

The Kermit File Transfer Protocol [PDF]

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: When do people understand that cash rules?

* Georg Ohm has left the chat

* Gustav Kirchoff is typing ... ... ...

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

Thanks for the well-argued rebuttal, and I agree that (a) a test which tests knowledge not taught is not useful, and (b) that any 'open-ended' test should not be simply made open-ended by quantity, driving the 'guess-all-the-answers-quickly' strategy. I guess that there's a difference between testing mathematics, where there is a definitely right answer, and testing language comprehension/criticism (which I believe was what the recent SATS kerfuffle was all about). A mathematics paper ought to be capable of completion with 100% success, and just adding a question asking for a counter-example to some current conjecture would be pointless. However, we ought to be able to derive open-ended tests for many educational goals that aren't as rigorous as maths?

As far as the Real Life analogies go, I would sometimes ask job candidates what they would do if their boss made impossible demands on their time or resources. The answer I was hoping for would be something along the lines of 'ask my boss for guidance on prioritization', (though any well-reasoned response would have been acceptable!) but more often the candidate would say 'oh, work harder 'til it's done' or 'bear down harder on my own staff'. I once had a young lady tell me that she would be able to cope with impossible demands, because she was female and 'we can multi-task'.

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

I expect that we shall not get an El Reg article about the SATS, so I'll just hang this thought here. There is a place, perhaps, for tests that are well beyond the capabilities of any student to complete and score 100%. If that was the norm, then no child would be upset that they hadn't completed everything perfectly, (because that would not be expected) and there would be a scale for determining relative capabilities and progress all the way to the top.

This is reminiscent of the old marking scheme: "Clears high walls with a single bound" (the criterion for a Principal Scientific Officer) and "Leaves perceptible dents high on walls", relevant to Senior S.O.s

Icon only for the last bit!

Re: Acronym-Ignorant

Thank you for the gracious explanation of a seemingly baffling question. I *have* shamefacedly withdrawn my somewhat sarcastic response, and I didn't downvote you in any case!

Britain's largest private pension scheme reveals scale of Capita break-in

Re: Can't wait...

> pension fund holds the pensions of every lecturer and every member of staff of every classic uni ...

Dead right. I paid into a pension administered by FSSU, (USS predecessor) and I've never been a university staff member (lucky escape for tertiary education).

Re: It's the humans that are insecure here

Indeed, I came to ask if anyone knew how, if Hartlink was not breached, that USS members' data had been compromised? I'm pretty sure that dumping/exporting from a secure database will constitute a breach of the contract that USS has with Capita which, you know, might specify how the data are guarded in line with the GDPR? I think I can hear the sound of knocking on m'learned friends' office door even now.

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

Re: Value to users

> Does anyone have *any* use-case

I love it when I click on Post a comment and find that someone has already said, rather eloquently in this case, just exactly what I wanted to put in MY comment!

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

Wossa beta, then?

Disclaimer: I'm not a serious GitHub user. However, the quote carried by TFA indicates that these, umm, revisions were the subject of a "public beta". And here's me thinking that the entire purpose of a beta release is to determine the issues, prioritize them all the way from show-stopper to won't-fix, and then address that priority list until one has a decent release candidate, instead of doing the release anyway, and then "working through the issues". Maybe someone's bonus was on the line.

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Re: And don't forget TPU and Eve.

TPU/EVE was a great asset. Around 1989 I wrote a set of routines to take marked-up output from a bibliographic database (CAIRS) and transform it into pretty two-column output which could be printed, superseding the previous arrangements which were much uglier, and involved scissors and glue. Cut'n'paste, only for real!

Baidu sues Apple and anyone else in sight over ERNIE chatbot fakes

Whoosh!

ERNIE

Would you like to install this app what I wrote?

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Great lines

Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that...

Twitter users complain 'private' Circle posts aren't

Corporate uses

For a while I've thought that corporate users of Twitter, and maybe especially media organizations, were running a bit of a reputational risk by operating Twitter accounts. Now it seems they might even be running a security risk, if they can't rely on the advertised features of the platform. I know that Twitter is a huge part of engagement with customers, but it can't be indispensable. The graveyards are full of the Indispensable.

Cops cuff teenage 'Robin Hood hacker' suspected of peddling stolen info

Re: The lost art of punctuation

Well, maybe. 300,000 coins each with a value of €1 would weigh 2.25 metric tons, which is a pretty heavy heist. €2 coins are 13% heavier.