Posts by hayseed

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Evolution

> “We believe it’s time to evolve,”

I know I have seen this movie before ...

It WASN'T the update, says Microsoft: Windows 7 suffers identity crisis as users hit by activation errors

Not related, Hah!!

> "The timing of this issue coincides with the release of the January updates (KB4480960 and KB4480970)

> that were released on Tuesday, January 8, 2019. These events are not related."

Conclusion: that was a WILD New Year's Party!

Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

Actually, the Airbus ceded control to the pilots, but it averaged input from the pilot and the copilot. The pilot knew what he was doing, the copilot didn't and kept yelling something about "touch-and-go" - but at the heights they were at, there is much less lift, and one does NOT tilt up the plane like in a landing exercise like at sealevel.

Microsoft Azure: It's getting hot in here, so shut down all your cores

The American South is not the UK

> At one point OneDrive for Business had also gone for some tea and biscuits.

Iced sweet tea (probably with a little lemon) and gravy biscuits (a baked bread) here.

Get orf the air over moi land Irish farmer roars at drones

Re: Drone hunting drones.

Party balloons with long strings attached near sensitive areas. May especially be effective at night. This is just a scaling-down of the "barrage balloon" idea.

"In Texas, I'd have shot them all and buried them in the desert" - Not quite as bad as that, but Texas, if I recall correctly, has a pretty uniquely loose law regarding the use of deadly force on one's property.

We've been Trumped! China's Alibaba is a 'notorious' knock-offs souk, says US watchdog

Re: "threaten America's creative industries"

I read such an article, and the people who worked in the area were aware that the plan was "Obamacare," unlike the opinionated worker who thought they didn't understand. The larger issue is that it is "coal country." Obama has issued regulations that work against coal. Understandably, it is quite possible that they are more worried about having jobs than the price of their insurance! The article I read didn't even consider that issue!

Windows 10 to grow up, turn extra enterprise-y beginning this month

Re: I'm linking rollout to a h/w refresh

Microsoft has already told people that setting the telemetry setting to "0" on the non-enterprise version is equivalent to setting it to "1", that is, it will still send basic telemetry to Microsoft. So the registry tweaks don't work any better than the formal control sets. Some people have suggested squashing some new services in articles, but better to let people discover whether some errors get logged due to this.

Whaddaya mean, No refund? But I paid in Bitcoins! Oh I see...

Re: Refunds

Yes, I think this is obvious, but the real situation is to first set up a system where you can convert from a "home" currency to a currency that the retailer will accept, and then make an electronic transaction. Bitcoin is just a special case of this, it might even be added after people are already finding the system useful to pay a cooperating retailer in (pounds, dollar, euro, "loony") from their (pounds, dollar, euro, "loony") account. It is not the currency that counts, its that you have the network of retailers set up for the transaction, and it makes sense for other currencies, not just Bitcoin. Bitcoin is merely one of the more questionable currencies one could use in this system, or is used as some sort of Pavlovian stimulus for the non-thinking investor.

5 Eyes in the Sky: The TRUTH about Flight MH370 and SPOOKSATS

Diego Garcia is British! (NM)

NM

Look at how many ways we ruin your life, Redmond boasts

Not really too impressive, as the first two were done by others. The last device was an EO Communicator, which probably could do what they showed it doing with an expensive subscription (or maybe just a promised soon feature). It was a competitor to the Newton and introduced about the same time. This is probably really mainly an ad for that, promising future features.

Red Hat and dotCloud team up on time-saving Linux container tech

Libvirt and lxc, not libvert

Your encrypted files are 'exponentially easier' to crack, warn MIT boffins

Re: Compression

I think you are missing the point. Sure, the encrypted data looks like noise. But the *unencrypted* data never looks like noise. Therefore, you can throw away all partial decrypts that look too much like noise as soon as you see it is the case. An encryption scheme is an invertible function, but much effort has been spent looking at the qualities of the right side. But one can trim the set of functions based on the qualities of the left side, also.

Comet ISON seen eructating 300,000km-long methane and CO2 BELCH

Re: how old?

Nearly certainly NOT hyperbolic, but a very elongated ellipse from an Oort cloud. You have a lot more than three bodies in the Oort cloud, where it will be traveling with lowest velocity. Indeed, it could be the first time that this object lost enough energy to take a very eccentric ellipse right by the sun, rather than a more circular ellipse out at the Oort cloud. A hyperbolic orbit is interstellar.

REVEALED: Google's GINORMOUS £650m London Choc Factory

Re: "...taken inspiration from King’s Cross and St Pancras International railway stations..."

"Cough" More Camden Yards than St. Pancras. Wanted to give a shout out to the British folks who burned my home town 200 years and one week ago.

Top Norks bone up on Hitler

Re: Novel tactics and surprise @murph

Oh yes - German tanks were marvelous weapons only when they worked..

They did steal resources from the people they conquered - little-known factoid I read once is that most tanks in the initial invasion of Russia were not German (Czechs and the French had their stuff taken).

Re: I remember seeing an documentary a while back

Not really like a free market, but a lot of political pull involved. Money thrown to people with more political connections than brains, starving the actual groups with brains of resources in some cases (hello, Heisenberg).

NSA: We COULD track you by your phone ... if we WANTED to

Re: Big deal

You would think that they'd have Slavic soundex down -jan -ian -yan -aev -ayev etc. but they didn't, so he didn't even show up using his real name!

Never mind your little brother - happy 10th birthday, H.264

Security and sports cameras should NOT use excessive blurring of objects in motion to save bandwidth!!

You want to put 3D gun designs on the web? You'll need a 2D printer

Re: re: "cro-mo titanium"

"Alloy" rims are alloys of aluminum or magnesium. They are far tougher than the original pure metals (Al or Mg) (haha, no one would even use a pure magnesium rim).

Re: @zmodem (Ugh!)

Considering that houses in the US are often painted in paints with a titanium oxide base, I don't think rarity is a consideration at all at any reasonable price level.

Re: re: "cro-mo titanium"

alloys tend to be more brittle than pure elements

Re: re: "cro-mo titanium"

And titanium is notoriously difficult to machine (saw a special on the YF-22 YF-23 competition. one of them had a little trouble with some titanium part, despite all their experience).

New NASA rover lands in frigid alien hell tomorrow

Re: Is it just me or...

800 lbs, low center-of-mass, wide tracks to counter wind forces perpendicular to the direction of the solar panels. It does look like that might have been taken into account, as mentioned by the lead scientist in the interview. I wonder about ravines, though.

Picture this: Kodak could get out of bankruptcy as early as July

Re: Hope Kodak makes It

Too Late! (Chinese camera using Kodak brand name)

http://www.43rumors.com/new-pictures-of-the-kodak-s1-mft-camera/

Re: by selling assets to its UK pension fund

I think we must thank the British again.

Red faces as Pentagon leases Chinese satellite

Re: "APT Satellite Holdings"

Foreshadowing!!

They SHOULD have some capacity/someone they can bump other than China, that's the real problem.

Fujitsu sells off microcontroller and analog chip biz to Spansion

Re: hmm

Microcontroller [integrates very low-end microprocessor + other functions], not Microprocessor

Intel supremo backs biz pal SoftBank's billion-dollar bid for Sprint

No, they're ignoring them.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Re: Fine

"Adequate Attempts" for numpty users probably won't even include looking at metadata.

Study suggests US companies use overseas workers to cut wages

Re: In other news...

Some folks think the inflexibility of the gold standard contributed.

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/12/the_gold_standa.html

Bill Gates offends Koreans after sticking hand down trousers

Re: Maybe @Chris Wareham

Lipton's makes me embarrassed to be an American sometimes..

Re: Maybe

No, not really. Bill Gates was just being a geek.

Facebook plans vast data center in Iowa

Re: can this be the start of a new cargo cult ..

Another cultural difference for-instance (Gays):

> A poll conducted in October, 2012, found that 49 percent of Iowa voters were in favor of gay marriage, up

> from 41 percent just a year earlier.

Here in Virginia, we have an attorney general who thinks he can score political capital defending an anti-sodomy law.

A big difference between the Midwest "Can't we get along" culture and the Southern "My Bible sez"

[ from someone who is familiar with both]

Re: can this be the start of a new cargo cult ..

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2004/11/State-By-State-Percentage-Of-White-Evangelicals-Catholics-And-Black-Protestants.aspx

Similar profile to Colorado and Michigan - 25% Evangelical, 23% Catholic - and with a high Lutheran population in the bulk, from Northern European populations not noted for being demonstrative on religion.

Night and day compared to the *real* Bible-belt state in which I live.

Re: can this be the start of a new cargo cult ..

Wrong culture - it is not Arkansas, in the evangelical Bible belt. See Iowa Wikipedia - biggest religious groups Lutherans and Catholics, low populations of Hispanics and other minorities. Manufacturing 21% of GDP, 6.6% unemployment, state credit rating AAA. In other words, think of a really big suburb.

Google's Page drops the A-bomb: Google Glass runs Android

Re: Stop Press

I suspect slightly higher, due to refraction + the sun not being a point source (assuming the day is over when the sun can no longer be seen)

Firefox 'death sentence' threat to TeliaSonera over gov spy claims

Re: Mmmmmm

Something that can be done now in Firefox is revoking CAs you don't trust yourself - they did this some time after a Firefox variant patched so it would not rely on certain Chinese CAs.

Antares aborted after launchpad mishap

Re: "they don't build 'em like they used to"

Aerojet (not new to the business - since the early 40s) has a license to manufacture more itself, and has been looking into follow-on designs (AJ-1000, AJ-1E6)

IBM pours $1 BEELLION into flash SSDs

Re: Just a question, but

Meeilliard

NASA-backed fusion engine could cut Mars trip down to 30 days

Re: Commercial power generation potential?

Well, that's a frontier also, getting ion drives up to reasonable thrusts (right now they are mainly used on Russian satellites for station-keeping)