Posts by Scott 53

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: Not quite Windows

So 'Unkown Fatal Erro' was actually a clue to the underlying issue.

Meteorite's tiny secrets reveal Solar System's sodium-rich, alkaline liquid past – a clue to formation of life

Re: sorry to be pedantic

Don't worry - it's not just you.

Framboidal

Shaped like a raspberry. Thanks for my new word of the day.

Apple owes us big time for bungled display-killing cable design in MacBook Pro kit, lawsuit claims

Re: WTF every time

"Interesting as the solution for the vanishing cursor is -- wait for it - OPEN CLOSE the laptop"

I think you're the kind of person who fixes problems by turning it on and off again.

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

Re: We've had that argument before...

I once encountered milk and sugar in the teapot. Sterilised milk. I didn't go back.

The duke of URL: Zoom meetups' info leaked out through eavesdrop hole

Headline writing

doesn't get better than this.

Boffins examine interstellar comet Borisov to find out what its home was like. Pretty unpleasant, it seems

Raman?

They always come in threes

Is this an ASP.NET Core I see before me? Where to next for Microsoft's confusing web framework...

Blazor

"Blazor" is not a combination of "Browser" and "Razor". "Brazor" would be, as would "Browzor".

Fresh cup of WTF with lunch? TeamViewer's big in Twitter's domination-as-a-service scene

"A quick squiz"

I'd check urbandictionary before you use that phrase again. Unless that's what you meant, of course.

IBM veep partly blamed Sopra Steria for collapse of £155m Co-Op Insurance Agile project

"Data, data everywhere, not any byte to drink"

That's nor any byte to drink.

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Re: you'd still struggle to get through a couple of rolls

"I got to teach the woman soon to be my wife about her own anatomy"

Mansplaining taken up a couple of notches.

Re: Buying extra bog roll understandable

Indeed. I used to cough to cover up a fart, but now I'm farting to cover up a cough, and accidents happen.

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

"binging on Homes under the hammer "

Other search engines are available, and will possibly cope better with the additional load.

Control is only an illusion, no matter what you shove on the Netware share

Re: "Or heard the sphincter-loosening words: 'What's a backup?' "

"She's a good cook and my wife"

How very modern of you.

In case you want to flee this wretched Earth, 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI...

TNOs don’t emit a lot of light

I'd suggest that they don't emit any light at all. They do, however, reflect a bit.

All the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), all the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), now put your hands up! Oh, still not many here

"Helpdesk roles are perfectly well gender-neutral... anyone can man a helpdesk."

Er...

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

Re: A backdoor ?

I think if this was some agency's cunning plan, they would have ensured it wasn't described in the documentation. Surely.

Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet

As Homer Simpson would say

D'oh

Auf wiedersehen, pet: UK Deutsche Bank contractors plan to leave rather than take 25% pay cut for IR35 – report

Re: Alternatively

Sounds like the plot of 1990 with Edward Woodward. That didn't look good.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075469/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_55

Artful prankster creates Google Maps traffic jams by walking a cartful of old phones around Berlin

Re: I don't think this does as much as people think

I as in Lisbon last year and about 30% of the people on trams and buses had Google Maps out so they knew where to get off, myself included.

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: Deleted

Is "stupidness" a word now?

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Ho Hum

Margaret Atwood covered this in 2003. It's fair to say it didn't end well.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Speed of light

299,750km/s

299,792.4574 km/s is the figure I learned.

50 years on: Apollo 12 failed at selfies but succeeded at dismantling a probe

Re: Nice article

Maybe I'd be able to spell "astronaut" properly as well.

That's audiobooks for you.

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Re: Apollo 13

well they didn't go to the Moon.

They went to the Moon, went round it and came back again. They just didn't stop there.

Boffins don bad 1980s fashion to avoid being detected by object-recognizing AI cameras

Re: I have a crazy idea

A "Little Bobby Tables" QR code?

https://www.xkcd.com/327/

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

Re: Yet more bollocks arguments

can see what we are using by the quarter hour

Meters save up the quarter hourly readings and then send them all in one go once a day. Your supplier might be able to work out when you were out after the fact, but won't get an instantaneous view of your usage.

Until they do figure it out, project the losses with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and hit you with fifteen years of unpaid bills at once.

if a problem is the utility company's fault then they can only back bill you for one year.

Japanese hotel chain sorry that hackers may have watched guests through bedside robots

Re: another thing I'll never experience

, and in the south, Toulouse

So you saw two of these conveniences?

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: 445 – bikinis – rather than the bicycles in 444

Hey Vladimir - send nukes.

I discovered the world's last video rental kiosk and it would make a great spaceship

Re: Recycling

And a great heavy chain whose purpose eludes me.

Have you not read about the Battle of the Blackwater?

Robocop needs reboot, $200m for AI research, UK govt knowingly deployed racist passport system – plus more

Re: "instead of helping her, the thing just yelled at her to “step out of the way"

Obviously they need to have a notice above the emergency alert button saying "Do NOT press this button".

The button should be labelled in black on a black background and when you press it, a small black light lights up black to let you know help is not on its way.

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Re: It is not as if Adobe has not had good notice

Flash, ah ahhhh, what did you expect?

FTFY

Windows 10 update panic: Older VMware Workstation Pro app broken

Re: "Win XP only seemed good because they finally built a desktop OS on the NT kernel"

Ah "Windows NT4 Workstation" ... I don't think I ever saw one in the wild

We had to use it at an FE college as our key application wasn't certified to work on Win 95. It worked perfectly on Win 95, but as it wasn't certified we didn't take the risk. It didn't crash often, as I recall, but it took a while to get used to pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in rather than triggering a reboot.

Tough luck, Jupiter, you've lost your crown for now: Boffins show Saturn has more moons

Or do they mean Celtic?

So we'll have moons called Billy McNeill and Jimmy Johnstone?

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Finger on the dial, eh AC? His surname is spelled Humphrys.

Boffins build a tiny nanolaser that can be inserted inside our cells

Re: That's a crazy plan

Shark-based underwater football. And you don't want that.

Oh, I do. Ian Great White and Steve Bull up front.

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs

So if your name is Roger, don't bother applying for a job at Google.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: pet peeve

"thankyou" - sorry if that's triggered anyone.

Ah, this should totally reassure Euro workers: They'll get Brexit EU settled status app on iPhones from October

Re: Priceless ...

come shit

Eewww

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

Re: Statcounter

There's no point trying to rebel against the mainstream and then going all PC.

You can get Firefox for Mac as well.

Google: All your leaked passwords are belong to us – here's a Chrome extension to find them

Re: Default password

I think Dilbert once told the PHB to change his password to five asterisks to make it easier to remember.

Re: Constants in life

Taxes are also optional...If you like the idea of going to prison...

Or if you like the idea of buying Cadburys

Poor old Jupiter has had a rough childhood after getting a massive hit from a mega-Earth

Almost a great article

until three words from the end when the errant apostrophe spoiled it.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: Pothole resistance

If you're twiddling a knob when you go over a pothole then it's no great issue

I, er, beg to differ. Depends whose which knob it is.

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Re: Yum!

Well Ra for that

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Averages

the average Brit spends over two months queuing for drinks over their lifetime. Presumably they didn't speak to teetotallers

Maybe they did. That's how averages work.

Phisherman's blues: Bogus Dell support rep extradited from Kenya, admits he conned US colleges out of $900,000

I can't help thinking that the best way to combat this sort of crime is to make stupidity a crime.

No politician is going to vote for that, except possibly Chris Grayling

When Harry met celly: NSA hoarder thrown in the clink for 9 years – after taking classified work home for decades

Credit where it's due

Top headline punditry

Grav-wave eggheads come closer to nailing down Hubble's Constant – the universe's speedy rate of expansion

The "moonie" as a unit of measure

The distance between us and the Moon varies by about 50,000km (±6.5%), so not an ideal candidate.