Posts by Roger Greenwood

Geneticists throw hands in the air, change gene naming rules to finally stop Microsoft Excel eating their data

Interesting quote

"Biologists in particular are reluctant to invest time in learning programming skills."

Of all people Biologists should know that populations that are the least adaptable are doomed....

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

Re: Afterburners

"the acceleration for take off" makes sense as it has a much faster take off speed than conventional aircraft. Runway can get used up awfully fast.....

p.s. why is it not called a Vulcan2?

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Counting the cost

For a small business or individual, the cost of an operating system is negligible to start with, but the constant upgrades and subsequent loss of time as things fall over is really annoying. No wonder many have updates turned off. Dread to think what it's like for a large business.

We have one machine running Win 10 that must be kept in version sync with the only program it runs, anything else and it fails.

Printers are also susceptible - yes this is 2020 and we can't have reliable printing. Great as long as you don't mess with them, but upgrade at your peril is my mantra.

Smoke on the Tyne: Blaze at BT exchange causes major outages across North East England

Re: Huh?

Mains transformers often have an associated RMU (Ring main unit) so maybe the reporting got a bit mixed up? If the transformer failed and was oil filled it would be quite spectacular.

Things can't go on like this. You need to get fit for the sake of your health. I'm going to write you a prescription for... an e-bike

That's certainly what it feels like, even with a map.

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

Extra flavourings

I seem to recall hearing that airline food has to be spiced up a lot to compensate for the reduced taste/smell sensation of being in a reduced pressure atmosphere. Not surprising then that consumption at sea level is a rather different experience. I wonder if they have a pressure chamber to test that on the ground? Excellent story though and glad at least some of the food is not wasted.

After IBM axed its face-recog tech, the rest of the dominoes fell like a house of cards: Amazon and now Microsoft. Checkmate

Re: What about in the UK?

They should just all up their game. With everyone wearing face masks for the foreseable (years) we need that system where you zoom up on their eyes and do a retinal scan. I'm sure I've seen that in a film so it must be true :-)

Office supplies biz owned by UK council shrugs off ransomware demand for 102 Bitcoin

Re: Email plus HTML/scripting is a disaster wating to happen

Exactly. It also means the odd spam email which gets through cannot track you. I am really surprised more folks don't do this.

REvil ransomware gang publishes 'Elexon staff's passports' after UK electrical middleman shrugs off attack

Re: Why is passport data in a company server

One possible reason is that UK companies need to be able to prove their employees have a right to live and work in the UK (new rule a few years ago). An easy way to do that is a copy of the passport etc for all applicants - ticks a lot of boxes. Keeping those details secure is another story....

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

Re: Judges names

Are you aware of this outfit?:-

https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00007zrWjyPn1lQ

(Cartoonist:- Tony Husband)

Latest NHS IT revolution is failing to learn lessons from the last £10bn car crash

Re: ANybody can do IT

"..asks the staff what they want.." has it's dangers though. If I ask 3 people their opinion I expect at least 5 answers, all conflicting.

Reminds me of an NHS project I heard about some years ago to do data entry directly for new births instead of numerous bits of paper. They used a midwife as a consultant and tester etc. Proper job. Then it went live. When a baby was whisked away by pediatrics they didn't get a weight so had to resort to paper - no option to proceed without a weight. Same if twins arrived - no option for 2nd baby. The reason was they had used a community midwife who just didn't see these things every day and nobody asked her the right questions. Ask carefully...

Re: ANybody can do IT

Giles was good wasn't he? Today we have Matt, but all you folks under about 40 should go look him up.

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

Re: Its as fucking annoying as then...

Training? No we don't do that anymore, just chuck it at the wall and see what sticks :-)

Serial killer spotted on the night train from Newcastle

M35:P1091-Plat

That's just twerk, as we say oop t'north

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

I think all the above can be summed up in one word:- MegaSoft

Data centre reveals it modeled interiors on The Hunt for Red October sets

That DC picture shows the boring bit

where the power comes in (TX) and DRUPS, not the interesting stuff. Yes I only get to visit the boring stuff (until it goes wrong, then it gets interesting).

Nervous, Adobe? It took 16 years, but open-source vector graphics editor Inkscape now works properly on macOS

"starting at £19"

£19.97 per month (annual plan) is not a trivial amount for hobbyists/amateurs. On the upside if you pay the whole year in advance you get a £1.22 discount. Inkscape does look attractive all of a sudden.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Worth a read of their website

Like this little gem:-

"The pointing accuracy of the 10-metre long XMM-Newton is 0.25 arcsec over a 10-second interval. This is the equivalent of seeing a melon from a distance of 300 kilometres, using a handheld telescope and seeing it without the slightest wobble!"

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

You had cups?

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

Re: HP printers

Thanks for the tip WolfFan **

(** Orders another 2 Brother printers...)

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

Re: Michael Jackson

Wow that's a blast from the past Ken. I went back to school 25 years ago and had to do a bit of JSP. That's also when I learnt the far more valuable JFDI...

Bad news: So much of your personal data has been hacked that lesson manuals on how to use it are the latest hot property

Re: So, basically businesses should acquire fraud guides

Pad that out a bit and you could sell it :-)

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Absolutely

Quick spray with WD-40, swap the electrolytics (re-cap) and good to go.

Google reveals the wheels almost literally fell off one of its cloudy server racks

Re: A few pounds saved often leads to a few hundreds pounds spent later

".. wheels rated to 300kg, what did you expect to happen"

I would expect 4 wheels to withstand 1200kg, unless they were not up to the job......

Appareils électroniques: Right to repair gets European Commission backing

Re: My wishlist

Whilst I agree with your sentiments, you will need to be specific and have some allowance for innovation:-

“The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

― Andrew S. Tanenbaum

UK.gov lays out COVID-19 guidance as the tech supply chain considers its own

Come on

First named Corona Virus, then Covid 19, surely this should be renamed to match what they were really trying to make:- Carousel

Mirantis gros fromage quits to start new 'private LTE' biz on open-access spectrum

Citizen band

I do hope they use 19 as the calling channel, just for old times sake.

RIP Katherine Johnson: The extraordinary NASA mathematician astronauts trusted over computers

ICYMI (from twitter):-

You know she was a proper mathemetician when she lived to 101 and died in her prime.

RIP and thank you.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

Re: Seems a bit cheap

Condolences to friends and family, I feel sure with an imagination like that he will be missed (as we still miss Lester). He got much higher than Vulture2/LOHAN, sadly he ended up rather flatter upon the earth, the good earth.

Decent, legal, honest and searchable: C'mon, Ofcom. Let us check up on the ad-slingers ourselves

Re: Toothless regulators

I think that's what he said:- "..politely pushing them shut".

Excellent article, thank you.

And they said IoT was trash: Sheffield 'smart' bins to start screaming when they haven't been emptied for a fortnight

Re: Sensors will be fun

Of course, that's exactly what they'll do. If all else fails they can send in the drone.

Sensors will be fun

I wonder how they are going to measure the fullness of a bin. Weight? Ultrasonic level? Light beam? Either way I expect tinkering and hacking if not outright theft of devices assuming these are to be retrofitted to existing bin fleets - how much will homeowners be charged in future when their bin grows legs and walks away? (used to be £25 each around here).

It is also going to make "bin day" a bit of a lottery - not all bins are near the road and need to be dragged thorugh gardens and ginnels. Perhaps this is only for businesses and city centres?

I hope I see a follow up article just over the horizon.

Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit

Re: Prior art

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that

Yahoo! hack! payout! nearly! approved! and! the! question! is! how! to! spend! 60! cents!?

In order to qualify

Don't you have to be a resident of the US as well? I thought I read that somewhere else.

Colombia accused of rigging .co contract for dot-org provider Afilias – is this document a smoking gun?

Yes minister quote:-

James Hacker:

"No, but it's never been officially denied. First rule in politics: never believe anything until it's officially denied."

Need 32-bit Linux to run past 2038? When version 5.6 of the kernel pops, you're in for a treat

Re: Can someone...

Yup - we have a machine weighing about 18 tonnes, £250k to replace running win2000 on it's local control station. Another, about £100k, runs NT on the front. The backends are PLCs (e.g. fanuc/siemens). I fully expect future generations to just reset the clocks and carry on. These sorts of machines are often sold on (2 of our old ones went overseas) for a very, very long life.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

@Nolveys Thanks. That's going to be with me all day now :-)

LastPass stores passwords so securely, not even its users can access them

It's easy to keep passwords from kids - put your notes in the fridge. In the salad tray.

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

Re: Military aircraft records

"The job's not finished until the paperwork is done"

or as we use it "if it's not written down it didn't happen"

Change to front page

Thanks for the explanation Marco,

I guess I got used to the direct link but also wondered if it was just temporary. Keep up the good work.

Change to front page

I noticed that the link to these forums at the top of the front page has disappeared. Why? Just curious. Not even sure anyone will even see this as the list of forums also appears changed.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

Just logged into my Ubuntu 2010 machine, last time was 9 months ago. Uptime 618 days. Used as an email server for an obscure email address, gets traffic every day. If it aint broke.....

Re: A repeat of XP?

Still got 2 XP in the mix of about 20 desktop machines, one 14 years old, one 12. When they break they will be replaced. No problems but also not used for general web browsing so relatively low risk. One never changed because inertia, the other is "cold dead hands" kind of reason/person. It may well come to that.

Does this mean....

... that it finally stops nagging me to install silverlight?

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

"...the equivalent of a two-bedroom terraced house in West Yorkshire on a computer"

We may live in hovels but it's worth it to be this far from London :-)

Doogee Wowser: The S40's a terrible smartphone, but a passable projectile

There was a time....

.. when teachers would launch the blackboard rubber (eraser - a lump of wood the size of a brick) at any kid reverting to ankle biting annoyance. They usually missed but it woke us up. A rugged phone sounds like it would do the same job though.

I used to look forward to history, now it's just a memory.

Take a Big Blue cheque and go: IBM settles 281 UK age discrim cases

Baccarat/baccara

Yes sir, I can boogie (1977 for the grandads). Ginni would remember that.

Space-wrecks: Elon's prototype Moon ferry Starship blows its top during fuel tank test

Sometimes a test is done to find the weak spot and where the effort should be going. This may not have been their intention, but I bet they learnt a lot.

I've been told many times that any fool can make kit unbreakable, but if you don't break something then it was overengineered :-)

Yes the lab coat please with the copy of "Ignition!" in the pocket.

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Ye Gods - back to the dark ages.

I'm conflicted. When I bought a house in the mid 80's I was treated as not worthy to own a telegraphic connection without extensive vetting, signatures and payment in advance, even though the line and phone were already installed.

But I also knew some folks who worked for the GPO/BT at the time, excellent and conscientious engineers who worked very hard and gave fantastic customer service. They were made redundant.

You're right, you can't turn back the clock.

The bigger picture

As well as all the numerous problems mentioned above, a major aim seems to be to enable the poor downtrodden consumer (you and me) to have better internet so we can stop at home and buy more stuff easier. At the same time we need to "save the high street". Have they thought this through?