Posts by Robert Carnegie

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Why

I just realised I was thinking of "Blazing Saddles"... which raises other issues...

Japan makes online insults a crime that can earn a year in jail

Re: I approve

I suppose they can't do the apocryphal, "This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God", in American public schools, either.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Oi! Big ears...

I think I could fit a USB-C plug into my ear... I also think I shouldn't.

Re: Optional Chargers

Loosely, I think USB-C brings "USB Power Delivery" so that your phone or whatever can make a deal with the charger to get more voltage or current. If I have this straight, it's a replacement for one-manufacturer fast charging standards. "Dumb charging" gets a basic rate, 5 volts 1 amp (?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Delivery mentions "USB PD 2.0" and "3.1".

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

But comms may have to go most of the way around the world, and back. And practically, at somewhat less than the speed of light.

Microsoft: You own the best software keyboard there is. Please let us buy it

Wiktionary thinks that "dont" is a recorded misspelling, and "wont" is a different word from "won't". It quotes Lewis Carroll using "wo'n't", but Lewis Carroll admitted that he was being peculiar, here:

https://www.hoboes.com/FireBlade/Fiction/Carroll/Sylvie/Concluded/preface/

Re: What am I missing here?

I expect all these desirable keyboard features are patented though. By Swift and Swype.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

Maybe that was there, just not mentioned in the story.

Did any programmer try to do: "Phone (Support) on number NNNNNN", but NNNNNN is a different phone number for each error? So the number that you're called on is the error code.

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

Re: 4GB???

You don't have to buy the 4 GB model if it's not what you want.

Your boss will choose it for you.

Anyway... a touchscreen? And shaped 3:2? That equates to 15:10, so narrower than 16:9 or 16:10. But wider than 4:3.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: cloned disks....same DECNet address

Or someone exactly like them.

Re: nice story

The Thames is supposed to be a lot better since Joseph Bazalgette.

Re: Next time

I want to know if I've seen the first scene done by Aardman Animations. I don't think I saw the second.

Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16

Re: Under a minute?

Well, your CRT had to "warm up". Was it doing that literally? I think it needs to heat the electrons or something...

GitHub saved plaintext passwords of npm users in log files, post mortem reveals

Re: This vindicates…

Though at least once a week you type something else's password into a thing, anyway. Well, I do.

Re: GitHub stored a number of plaintext user credentials

Well, they didn't store them, they logged them. Useful because... actually I'm not sure how. Maybe to see when a user is typing the correct password but still not getting in somehow.

Declassified and released: More secret files on US govt's emergency doomsday powers

Re: long ago

Did they have any bits obviously missing? e.g. arm, leg, ear, etc.

Re: Presumbly the UK has similar plans

Odds on Liz Truss accidentally starting a trade war with Russia? It might actually do good these days.

Ransomware encrypts files, demands three good deeds to restore data

I wonder what they extort from you once you've done the good deeds, given them access to your social media accounts, and downloaded and run their so-called decrypter. Maybe that's enough and they use the social media accounts to spread Russian government propaganda. I hear it pays well. Hackers are criminals, they criminate.

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

I think the article describes using Clonezilla and then using gparted from the other distro called "System Rescue CD" to make your 125 GB partition bigger, but I haven't touched this stuff for a while. And when I looked last, Windows apparently wanted to put dozens of partitions onto any disk drive for no reason I could understand. Like, you want three partitions to use, you get I don't know fifteen so that they have plenty of friends.

New audio server Pipewire coming to next version of Ubuntu

I thought that reading the article. That a version number lower than 1.0 means "don't use for important stuff".

But if it means that this is a video player where the video doesn't work, I can see that.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: From the domestic side

My sister's house has one wall switch box with three switches for I think stair, landing, and bathroom light. I must ask sometime why the switches aren't labelled. I play a sort of Monty Hall game with them every time I visit.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

That's not a swimming pool, it's a bird bath.

I imagin that you can dtrmin that somthing may b wrong with my kyboard? :-)

What if your rich guy owns a high quality music radio station...

Appeals court unleashes Texas's anti-Big-Tech content-no-moderation law

But

What if the AR-15 that you bought at Walmart is defective?

They did stop selling 'em in 2015. I don't know if they started again. There are reports that they also stopped selling the ammunition.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Re: BFR

Like the story that George Stephenson was asked by a Parliamentary committee in 1825, "Suppose, now, one of these engines to be going along a railroad at the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, and that a cow were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the engine; would not that, think you, be a very awkward circumstance?" "Yes," replied the witness, with a twinkle in his eye, "very awkward -for the cow."

https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Lives_of_George_and_Robert_Stephenson_by_Samuel_Smiles:_Part_2:_Chapter_10

Re: Typing is not a good idea.

Of course not, you'll summon Loki.

(I think at work today someone did)

Re: Typing is not a good idea.

I stick to random lower case letters, and spaces, which I can input without substitution. I suspect, I don't know, that some of our past or present systems translate one password differently from different input interfaces.

I don't escape your point that if the outcome is setting your password to "nrealy egnilsh wrods" then your fingers are still going to not want to type it correctly.

iOS, Android stores host more than 1.5 million 'abandoned' apps

Re: 12 months?

Please enrol me too in the Foundation for Finishing Software. How to you feel about T-shirts?

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

I suppose it would stop people calling him a silly name when he already had one.

On the other hand, I still think that Britain might be a very different place today if Ed Balls had changed his name. Even to Ed Cock. Though I suppose the headline "Stop Cock" would get a lot of use.

Re: Full names please.......

"Wean" is Scots for a child, "wee one". There may still be a parenting requisites shop aboot Glesca that goes by "Weans World".

Re: Full names please.......

* sees nothing odd in the name "Susan Flay". For quite a long time. *

Oh!

Re: Full names please.......

I worked under a George Prescott. Nothing remarkable about that, and I think we didn't actually send out spell checked letters that called him Garage Prosecute. And that isn't offensive, just very odd and slightly alarming.

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

Re: Alarming, fired.

Or when they make more money -with- problems.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: Love "Duh!" moments! It's the techie life that chose me!

...and recently I had so much trouble finding a recording device (or a colleague) that I could make read out a list of place names to check against the version that I'd typed. My PC has one but it doesn't work. Then I tried to leave a voice message to myself on Microsoft Teams. Nope.

It's only just occurred to me that I could have got a machine to read out what I'd typed, to compare to what I should have typed. But I'm in Scotland, so that would be something of an auchtermuchty for me and for the computer.

Re: Love "Duh!" moments! It's the techie life that chose me!

That, or you type in the program data bytes and also the checksum byte, line by line.

Data on old media is probably "known unto God" if that's your belief. I've got loads... that won't, even if I was going to try.

Re: Such memories...

I wonder what she'd do for no you're right. Sorry. :-)

Re: Closest I've seen...

It didn't say "Do not unplug", did it? ;-)

Re: his mouse would occasionally move erratically across the screen

I wondered where your story was going. https://www.snopes.com/ap/2021/03/18/tv-anchors-storms-video/ is a now-abbreviated copy of a news report of a TV studio whose weather presenter got to report that a storm with tornado flavoring was about to hit THEM. Or to come way too close, anyway.

You "just" had a giant arrow flying across the sky. :-)

For a while, BBC1 television had idents where a hot air balloon with a world globe design flew over various parts of the country, including the famous Forth Bridge. So any other time that I saw the bridge, I had the urge to look around for the balloon.

Re: Closest I've seen...

But, wireless? And useless.

Europe twists YouTube's arm to get better cookie consent popups

The Vivaldi browser has a cookie dialog suppression feature, apparently. I'm not clear if it rejects all the cookies or accepts them all.

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

Re: And this, kids,

US correspondents tell me that in most states you can be fired instantly because your boss has indigestion and you have no remedy. (For the firing, I don't mean the indigestion.) Some are pleased to see the faction that legislated this principle copping it themselves. A few are oddly proud of it.

You just can't be legally fired for reason of what they call race, but there would be proving it.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Re: death spiral

We do still have a worldwide shortage of microprocessors...?

I thought it rang a bell. Including "each small device on the wafer self tests at power up and disables itself if faulty".

Windows speech recognition has been "standard" since Windows XP Tablet Edition, which wasn't quite standard, and was built-in in Windows Vista and ever since. You could also get it with Microsoft Office. Windows XP Tablets weren't especially powerful, though.

You do have to find it, activate it, and train it, and avoid being steered into using the cloud-processing version if you prefer not to. The first part is "key Win+U then select Speech" as of Windows 10.

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Thank you, actually Jeremy Hardy did it once on BBC's "News Quiz", but he's dead alas and won't be drinking. Cheers!

It was one of the misprints and odd stories that they used to include - listeners sent them and the team could bring or, it's been alleged, write their own. And I used to write them down, but I lost the file... all I think I remember is that local people or police were worried about rug pushers showing up in their neighbourhood peddling their evil wares. Maybe with a "think of the children" angle.

As a genuine mistake, there are a few other cases online. Along with some who do it deliberately.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Pest control

You are, so to speak, twisted.

Re: Seems ok

I was waiting for that to come up.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: How do we know he changed the comments?

Perhaps the comments were good but cunningly displaced from where they should be.

Or perhaps Dick had s peculiar comment style that he thought was normal.

For instance, say what a line of assembler does... a space and a line below the actual code. That would confuse me.