Posts by David Haworth 1

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

Re: 886 cans of spam

695 000 000 cans of Spam on the wall

695 000 000 cans of Spam

Take one down, smash it into the Earth

694 999 999 cans of Spam

Mine's the overcoat with the nuclear-powered tin-opener in the pocket.

Re: Astroid Catastrophe Monitoring Equipment

You could try hiding in the Atlas mountains.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Don't forget 386BSD!

The statement that *BSD predates Linux is questionable.

When I first started dabbling with Unixy OSes on my home PC, I installed a copy of 386BSD. That was in the early '90s. IIRC, it was before Linux appeared on the scene - or before Linux appeared as a "product" to buy.

The main problem with 386BSD was getting the X server to work with the graphics card in my PC. I eventually gave up and replaced 386BSD with one of the first iterations of Slackware, and I've had Linux on the desktop ever since. But perhaps I should consider using *BSD on my servers. Diversity is always good, and servers don't need graphics.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

A few minor corrections:

* in the Unix philosophy, each little "app" is a *master* of one trade, not a jack

* all of the little apps are at most an "apt install" or equivalent away - no subscription needed

Conclusion: iOs and Android need a command line and all the usual stuff (sort, uniq, grep, sed etc.)

If that were available, I might even consider investing in a so-called "smart" phone.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Funny - Teams for Linux does sharing perfectly well on mine (debian unstable). Maybe not the whole screen, but who wants that anyway? Can't comment on the video though.

Re: Standup

Next time, ask who's going to put the ball in.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Re: terminal: dte; GUI: Cudatext

No meta key? Well, that's interesting, because the first time I fired up tilde (after reading the article and installing it to take a look) it informed me that I could use Meta+<letter> to access the menus. Or Esc <letter>.

Another interesting thing (referring back to my earlier comment): After Esc F neither Q nor ctrl-Q work. Is that another useful feature of CUA?

Not for me, thanks

It demands that my fingers do interesting gymnastics for even the simplest tasks.

Two features that I use a great deal appear to be missing:

* ability to pipe a range of lines through an arbitrary pipeline of commands

* multiple copy/paste buffers

They might be available, but there's nothing behind the help menu except "About", so I can't find out how to do it. Even modern vi clones have decent help behind the :help command.

Another minor niggle - the hotkeys stop working when a menu is open. So, for example, Quit is CTRL-Q, but if I can't remember it I can use ALT-F to open the File menu, and there I can see that the hotkey is CTRL-Q. But at this point it's no longer CTRL-Q but Q. Unless you press CTRL-Q first :-(

Disclaimer: I recognise that choice of editor is a very personal thing. I've been using vi in various forms for so long that my fingers type the commands without me having to think about it. Elvis for preference; vim is OK (and essential for utf8 support.)

Darmstadt, we have a problem – ESA reveals its INTEGRAL space telescope was three hours from likely death

Re: "unexpected explosive events in the Universe".

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." -- Vroomfondel (HHGTTG)

Brexit? HP Inc laughs in the face of Brexit! Hard or soft, PC maker claims it's 'no significant risk'

Douglas Adams knew why ...

The clue is in the company name: HP Inc.

A US-based global conglomerate. In its world view, the UK is an insignificant dot on an insignificant dot. The HP offices in the UK may thrive or die, but the effect won't be noticed and the company as a whole wouldn't notice either way.

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Re: Error Messages

"Water detected in drive A. Starting spin cycle" is an old MS-DOS joke program. I've probably got a copy of it lying around somewhere - if the floppy disk still works, that is.

It was harmless - just made a vaguely washing-machine noise sound using the old one-bit internal speaker driver and then terminated.

Re: Error Messages

Re: Error 999 ...

A long time ago I had to debug a relative of this error. "Error 999: unknown error caused by previous errors" in the compilation of a quite large pascal program. It was the only error in the compilation

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

Re: Scaper?

A new word for me too, but unfortunately doesn't fit here. There would have to be a 3rd criminal (the scaper), but only two perpetrators are mentioned.

I suspect it's supposed to be "this caper". Perhaps the story was dictated and mis-typed.

Coventry: Once a 'Ghost Town', soon to be UK City of Culture

Re: Must have known...

Quoth Teiwaz:

> The UK government must have known this...

Haha. Not sure the current gov't knows anything.

BTW: East of the Foyle? Yes - Lancastrian born and bred. :-)

*** untitled ***

Quoth J. R. Hartley

> *Derry

Quite. "Londonderry" is a bit of an imperial anachronism. Unless you're talking about the Londonderry Air (aka. "Danny Boy").

P.S. When's your new fishing book coming out?

Apropos Monty Python ...

One MPFC sketch lampooned Coventry City for never having won the F.A. cup.

But they've even manged that since the sketch was aired, IIRC.

Coventry is also the home of Warwick University, which is well renowned in several subjects. It's also David Davis's alma mater, but we all make mistakes (said the Dalek as it climbed off the dustbin).

YouTuber cements head inside microwave oven

Re: Tuber for a brain?

You beat me to the post.

There's a way to dodge Fasthosts' up-to-160% domain renewal hike but you're not gonna like it

Re: www.easily.co.uk

Quoth the AC:

> That url is too close to ww.weasily.co.uk for my liking... :-)

No it isn't. It's stoatily different.

Dyson backs Britain plc with $2.5bn AI and robotics investment

Re: Import duties

The new site will be an R&D site, not manufacturing.

Dyson gear is manufactured in Malaysia and Singapore. They'll just import all the EU-bound good directly via some holding company in Luxemburg (if they don't already). Tariffs between UK and EU won't be an issue.

Edinburgh University to flog its supercomputer for £0.0369 per core hour

Obligatory outdated Slashdot meme

Wow! A 36-core processor!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!

Should Computer Misuse Act offences committed in UK be prosecuted in UK?

Re: How?

Quoth Squander Two:

"And indeed Brexit wasn't an option without the express consent of the EU, as the EU only created the sainted Article 50 quite recently -- until they did, there was no mechanism for leaving."

IIRC Art. 50 was added to the Lisbon Treaty to appease the UK. Without the article there was no agreed mechanism for leaving. But that doesn't say that leaving the EU wasn't possible. In fact, it would probably have been less messy, avoiding the need for two years of blah that won't start until the intent to leave has been formally declared using some unspecified "constitutional" method.

Without Art. 50 you'd just have to repeal the domestic legislation that ratifies the treaty. Then it's "so long and thanks for all the fish." That means in its simplest form a "hard brexit". Art. 50 also allows the remainder of the EU to stonewall until the official invocation. Without it, negotiations could take place under an informal non-binding declaration of intent to leave.

Brit network O2 hands out free Windows virus with USB pens

Re: Some sympathy

Quoth David Roberts: If you ordered 10,000 USB sticks with a custom tacky logo from a supposedly reputable supplier, would you then employ someone to virus test every single one?

No. I'd probably create and test a single image then write the whole lot over the USB stick. Saves an awful lot of trouble, and may even be faster.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Windows Vista?

Quoth eJ2095: I thought it was the virus ;-0

Failed virus. It didn't spread very well after all.

Brexit threatens Cornish pasty's racial purity

Re: Swings and Roundabouts.

@TeeCee Can you explain why the fresh-ish fruit and veg I buy in Aldi always has the country of origin on the label?

Perhaps it's a case of over-zealous interpretation of EU directives by British politicians and civil servants.

Or maybe it's another case of "the EU made me do it" to divert the blame for unpopular laws.

(I live in Germany, by the way)

Your comms metadata is super-revealing but the law doesn't protect it

Metadata? Schmetadata!

All that's really needed is for internet communcations to be afforded the same privacy protection as other forms of communication.

In the good ol' days, the number that I phoned may have been fair game, but any conversation I held once the connection was made was considered to be private. Even if I asked the person at the other end of the line to pass the information on to other people.

In the good ol' days, the address on the envelope may have been fair game, but the content of the envelope was considered to be private. Even if the envelope contained a message and an instruction to send a copy of the message (in a similarly sealed envelope of course) to each of my friends.

So the principle appears to have been: any information that is needed by the communication service provider in order to correctly connect or route the communication is fair game, but the information thus communicated is private. Even if it contained further communication instructions for other service providers such as mail distribution services.

Unfortunately it seems to have become the unchallenged norm that internet communications are not subject to the same privacy principles. If they were, then the only "fair game" part of the protocol would be the TCP/IP headers - IP addresses, port numbers, etc. The contents of the frames (be it IMAP, SMTP, HTTP or whatever) is part of the information content of the communication and (under the good ol' principles) should be considered private. It is not (or at least should not) be used by the communication provider in order to connect or route the communication.

So we don't really need any new definitions of privacy and whatever. All we really need is that the law observes the old principles correctly.

One of the interesting effects of universal encryption of communication is that it enforces the same level of privacy that's applied to other forms of communication. We need to point out to law enforcements and lawmakers that the use of encryption does not conceal anything that would not have been concealed in traditional communication.

Irish data cops kick Max Schrems' latest Facebook complaint up to EU Court

thoroughly and diligently

I've never seen an infinitive that's been so thoroughly and diligently split as that one.

'Shut down the parts of internet used by Islamic State masterminds'

Re: Well that's a good solution (Off topic)

> This is the same country wherein one of its states once tried to make Pi=4 by law.

... whereas it's quite easy to make Pi=4 using mathematics.

Consider the metric space where distance between two points is the greater of the x-distance and the y-distance. This is actually quite well-defined.

A circle is the set of all points that are at the same distance from another point known as the centre.

In our metric space the lines x = 1 and x = -1 (-1 <= y <= 1) and the lines y = 1 and y = -1 (-1 <= x <= 1) are all the points at a distance of 1 from the origin. Therefore they form a circle of radius 1. The diameter is 2, the circumference is 8. Pi is defined as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter, i.e. 4

The area of this circle is 2x2 = 4. The area of a circle of unit radius is Pi - also giving a value of 4 for Pi.

Boffins teach Wi-Fi routers to dance to the same tune

Oh great ...

Now we'll all need telly licences for our routers.

(Not sure about UK any more, but in DE you need a license for a radio too)

TalkTalk attack: 'No legal obligation to encrypt customer bank details', says chief

Re: Encryption Regulation

Nobody would consider ROT13 to be effective (I hope).

It would have to be at least Double-ROT13.

Euro privacy warriors: You've got until January to fix safe harbor mess – or we unleash hell

Re: Encryption keys

They can have my encryption keys any time they like. They're publicly available on one or two keyservers.

The decryption keys, on the other hand ...

Big biz bosses bellow at Euro politicians over safe harbor smackdown

Re: Uncertainty. What uncertainty?

> Do we really defeat them by destroying those values ourselves?

Well, that's one way.

Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more

Re: Scientists

Dyson sphere? Isn't that some kind of Hoover?

Pluto's moon SPLIT OPEN by ancient FROZEN OCEAN

Latest news

Major depoists of Araldite found on Charon.

Noobs can pwn world's most popular BIOSes in two minutes

Re: Maybe the operating system shouldn't use the BIOS.

@ Primus Secundus Tertius

I trust neither of them.

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

Re: The BBC is really starting to piss me off.

They changed to a new satellite recently, and guess what? I can't get BBC any more here in Bavaria. Nor ITV, Channel 4 and a whole collection of other channels.

Hubble 'scope snaps 600-LIGHT-YEAR-wide pic of star-spawning nebula

grammar chequer?

s/peak/peek/

OHM MY GOD! Move over graphene, here comes '100% PERFECT' stanene

Re: @Stanene Inside

Quoth John Brown: "If we make a Klein bottle out of this stuff and apply a voltage would it turn the universe inside out?"

Some would argue that this has already happened.

Murdoch calls for world+dog to 'expose' Google

Re: robots.txt???

And there I was thinking that robots.txt was just a Project Gutenberg e-text of a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov.

Silly me.

Curiosity keeps on trucking despite government shutdown

Re: Forget NASA, what about the NSA?

Forget NASA? How can I forget NASA? I'm already missing my APOD

(apod.nasa.gov if/when it comes back on line)

Want to meddle with IP rights? Use the law, not amended regulations

Hypocrites

I didn't hear them complaining when extensions to copyright laws were being enacted by means of Statutory Instruments.

6 Acts of Parliament and 120 Statutory Instruments.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/title/copyright

Bah!

Microsoft scrapes Windows Azure name off cloudy kit

They finally worked it out.

So they finally worked out that Azure is a word that many people will associate with blue skies.

Not a cloud in sight.

Mine's the raincoat with the telescopic umbrella in the pocket. Not that I'll need it with Microsoft clouds.

Google flight search engine lifts off

Same old ...

And it's just as useless as all the other flight search engines. What I'd really like to see is a search for flights from/to a particular area, country or state.

Example: I live in Germany and want to fly to the UK. I might consider MUC, NUE, FRA or maybe another German airport for departure and one of several UK airports as destination, depending on price, availability, convenience etc. With ALL the current search engines I have to ask for each pair individually, which is very time-consuming. Yeah, I know Germany and UK aren't supported at the mo, but the engine still only accepts specific start and destination airports.

Oddly, there are specific entries for "all airports" for some cities, but no way to select all airports that are "near" a given location.

Has UK gov lost the census to Lulzsec?

A request...

Dear Mr. LulzSec, while you're about it, please could you get the data for the other censuses from 1841 onwards. A lot of amateur genealogists would be very interested.

Mine's the coat-of-arms ...

Facebook fails webmail tests

Re: Which? run by Idiots

> £1 for the trial subscription, I might as well have shoved it up my ass.

Didn't you see the special report: "Which? Suppository"

Archos 32 Android media player

What? No SDHC slot?

What use is a media player without a card slot for my media?

Steve Jobs: 'Pad? That's my word'

Re "in whole or in part"

Mr. Jobs appears to demand that developers use one of their trademarks "in part". APP is part of APPLE after all

Re: Incontinence pads

Perhaps that's what the "i" in "iPad" stands for.

Brussels data watchdog cries foul over secret copyright talks

AM I missing something?

Why is everyone banging on (only) about the right to privacy and data protection? Whatever happened to presumption of innocence, a fair trial and the right to confront one's accusers?

Give me a trial by a jury of my peers - and don't forget this is a peer-to-peer network (*groan*)

A decade to forget - how Microsoft lost its mojo

Azure? Not a cloud in sight...

"Azure" is the colour often associated with a cloudless sky. Strange that MS should decide to use it to describe their "cloud-computing" offering.

Or is it another round from the MS-Footgun (TM)?

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

Re: [LuMan] Hors d'oevres

Where I come from it's pronounced "Horses' Doofers". 'nuff said.