Posts by Chris 69

First crew launch in US since 2011 could happen by May, 34 more OneWeb sats, and astros share their top isolation tips

Re: First crew launch in US since 2011

If you were already up there, would you open the door?

To avoid that Titanic feeling, boffins create an unsinkable hydrophobic metal with laser power

Could this reduce friction?

Maybe a reduction in fuel used for ships.... ?

War is over, if you want it: W3C, WHATWG agree to work towards single spec for HTML and DOM

Re: Why not save the planet at the same time?

I agree that parsing isn't necessarily the biggest problem.. but my point is that small efficiency changes have large ecological impact simply because of the numbers involved. If we could save just a few percent its still a shit load of fossil fuel.

Agree banning cryptocurrency would be a good move too!

As for backward compatibility... I didn't suggest removing the existing stuff, merely that it be allowed to die gracefully like Flash, Applets, Silverlight, Gopher, etc etc etc. i.e. Design a better thing from the ground up and not try and morph the old stuff into an even bigger compromise.

Re: Why not save the planet at the same time?

Dear downvoters.... I'd love to hear your reasons. Thanks for reading anyway.

Why not save the planet at the same time?

Obviously we owe a huge debt to the people who invented this stuff the first time around, BUT....

Nobody realised that there would soon be billions of computers involved in creating HTML, passing it around and interpreting it at the other end.

Surely now we all need to be considerate of the environmental impact of so much unnecessary processing in terms of electricity consumption and hardware waste.

(and yes Shirley, I mean you too)

It's not difficult to imagine an HTML replacement that is much more concise and significantly simpler to process. Same goes for HTTP headers, XML etc etc. (I shudder to imagine how many billions of tons of CO2 have been released by the algorithm to convert just the HTTP date header from human readable to numeric..)

AND it offers the chance to design out all the duplication, ambiguity, hacks and backward compatibility that plagues the existing specifications. Believe me, aggressive simplification is an addictive game and it's amazing how many other areas of IT development can benefit from it (don't get me started on that rant!)

Yes, the migration will be painful, but we can no longer hide behind "difficult" to avoid making changes to save the planet.

Anyway, it cant be more difficult than the migration from fossil fuels.

Wanted: Big iron geeks to help restore IBM 360 mainframe rescued from defunct German factory by other big iron geeks

And the only lap big enough for it ..

would have been Lapland...

Just before I get my coat... Seriously though, it would be interesting to also work out the physical size of such a beast and the power requirement

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: Big disconnect

I've also been very pleasantly surprised by good Airbnb places in several countries.

As for hotels... Well this week I visited one that was such a filthy shit-hole, and broke multiple fire regulations by propping open fire doors, not locking "keep locked" doors, storing clutter in fire corridors and having a fire exit that was capable of being locked from the outside!

I didn't stay and I'm working on getting my money back before getting them shut down, hung, drawn and quartered.

I can hear the light! Boffins beam audio into ears with freakin' lasers

Damn!

I wish I'd thought of that. Seriously cynical old git that I am.

EU wants one phone plug to rule them all. But we've got a better idea.

It's all moot anyway

Once all your faux-green neighbours have plugged in their move-my-pollution-elsewhere cars there won't be enough electricity left to charge anything so mundane as a phone.

In any case, surely Paris has cornered the market in universal sockets. Err...

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

a year and a half on, the service is still not available to sign up to

So there was an up-side to this after all.

One Windows? How does that work... and WTF is a Universal App?

So you think apps are dead...just use the browser... LOL

FFS how did we ever get to the crappy situation we have where simple stuff we took for granted 20 years ago on all kinds of desktop apps still can't be done now because the browser writers have spent so much time pissing on each other instead of innovating. (e.g Writing an email or document and just pasting screen clips in-line from the clipboard)

The fashion for ramming everything through the most unreliable, insecure, undocumented, poorly-specified, cruft-ridden and functionally limited front end - only to present the end user with yet another gratuitously different and incomprehensible UI experience, needs to be taken out and shot.

Had we universally adopted Applets, or Flash or Silverlight (or anything similar) and worked together as an industry to produce a SINGLE solution it would have been brilliant for the end users, and the CUSTOMERS (ie whoever is paying you to develop stuff) but no... we have all been sacrificed on the alter of that false god "competition".

Tesla: YES – We'll build a network of free Superchargers in Oz

You trust them?

To build the charging stations AFTER you have parted with your hard earned cash and before your battery reaches it's end of life or gets bricked?

And what if you're second or third in the queue when you get to the charging station on a busy day?

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

Not exactly an innuendo..

But I do recall a very successful, high price, international product (still in use today) that in the early 80's accidentally shipped with an error message saying "Type the fucking date you twat!"

Re: Everything is an innuendo

Lemonentry my dear Watson!

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

You can sit in cockpits at Bournemouth too.

Well worth a visit just to scare yourself by how small a lightning cockpit is!

Two in five Brits cough up for CryptoLocker ransomware's demands

If the NSA, GHCHQ and their ilk are so damn clever..

How come they cant use all that expertise to nuke all the ransomeware peddlers, spammers, phishers and trolls...

Roses are #f00, violets are #00f. This witty code is a boffinry breakthrough

There was a programmer

There was a programmer so bright,

That his code ran much faster than light,

He debugged it one day

In a Relative way

But it crashed on the previous night.

BOFH: Don't be afraid - we won't hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

Re: Just sayin..........

Well you've obviously never been to Japan where you will find paperless toilets...

The answer to your next question is Yes...

The answer to the one after that is "Not tellin"!

The Girl on the power driven lid..

Now as I recall, we had a mainframe printer that had a power drivel hood that had quite enough extra strength to lift the pretty, mini-skirted operator (this was the mid 70s after all) high in the air... the rest I leave to your imagination.. and no I don't have pictures , strangely it was before the ubiquity of phone cameras!

Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

Whats all this crap about looms and music boxes being digital?

Well I looked at my musical box and, yes there is either a pin or not a pin... BUT the distance between the pins is part of the stored data and that distance is ANALOG!

I'm taking a guess that a loom might be similar but I don't happen to have one lying around.

Microsoft issues manual on Brits to Cambridge exports

Just give them Verity Stob's book

She provided a very good glossary at the end.

(oh, and it's a really great book too!)

Top Firefox OS bloke flames Opera for WebKit surrender

Re: What an idiot -Lazy Developers

It's nothing to do with Lazy... development time has to be PAID for and companies all over the world are having to pay huge amounts every day just to cope with the crap pushed on them by the browser makers and the W3C.

It's all good money for web devs but the situation is appalling for the actual customers who have to pay for their services.

If we hadn't spent all those years arguing about interop and the interpretation of poorly specified standards, just think, we might even have a rich-text input box in HTML that included the ability to inline paste pictures and all that other stuff THAT HAS BEEN COMMON IN OTHER PROGS FOR DECADES!

Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats

Ceiling light!

I'm sure there are much better ways of making the ceiling go round and round...

Apple drops 'thermonuclear' patent bombshell

Good laugh but..

BMW still do this stuff best...

"Its a car gym, but not as we know it"

Katie Price's teasing 'strapline reveal' avoids bust

Full Credit is due

To the author of the heading

"KATIE PRICE'S TEASING 'STRAPLINE REVEAL' AVOIDS BUST"

Truly worthy of El Reg.

Otherwise I couldn't give a toss... but that's just a personal problem I'm trying to come to terms with.

PCIe flashers bash storage networks

No Shit Sherlock.....

And the news is....?

(OK Happy New Year anyway.)

Elon Musk's private Dragon ship to dock with ISS in Feb

Easily find level area

It doesn't need to be large.. on the later Apollo flights they had to stop parking the aircraft carrier at exactly the planned touchdown point for fear of being hit... Nowadays with gps and all that stuff they could surely land something within a few inches... e.g. right on top of a nice soft panda..

Microsoft slips out Silverlight 5

It's not for everyone

I agree it's not that useful for public websites (and of course neither is Flash) but for bespoke business applications that need to run online/offline, Silverlight is pretty awesome and I'd rather be programming in XAML/C# than HTML/CSS/JavaScript thank you very much.

UK's first stealth jumpjet rolls off line – but we don't want it

No...he didnt

Thats a big barn-door thing which covers up the vertical landing engine air intake... or a sun shade for when the pilot get's hot. Take your pick!

Swedish college girls now twice as slutty as in 2001

Time was...

In the 70's the mere mention of the word "Sweden" was sufficient to conjure up an image of pneumatic blondes who were just aching to share their new found sexual freedom with whoever caught them naked on the beach......

Now all I get is the thought of a bad back from screwing together all those bloody Ikea wardrobes....

How times change...

PS ... if there are any Swedish students out there who would like to massage my aching back (Not You Sven!)

NASA tells Voyager 2 to save its strength

Fuel Line!

OK so I understand the atomic generator thingie but I would be fascinated to hear about the thruster fuel.. like how much did it take with it, how much is left and what's the MPG on that then!

Fantastic achievement, i doubt the original designers ever got the rewards they deserved, other than an immense sense of pride of course.

Before the PC: IBM invents virtualisation

Fascinating Stuff

You can read a load more, and beautifully written if I recall correctly, about the history of CP/CMS and VM if you google for "melinda varian"

London Olympics shop in Union Jack outrage

XXX Olympics

At least that's something we could come first in...

... no medals there then.

Feeling heat from Macs, Microsoft sells PCs sans crapware

Acrobat Bloat

Personally I use Foxit instead of Acrobat and it works just fine.

BTW I hate the way every acrobat update shoves another bloody shortcut onto the desktop!

Oracle gives 21 (new) reasons to uninstall Java

Don't blame Java for all it's Ills

I've been doing Java for a number of years and IMHO there's not much wrong with Java per-se, but I have a HUGE issue with the way it has been taken up by the "lets just use someone else's framework" camps: Apache, Spring, Hibernate and so on, I'm looking at you!

I'm currently having to fix someone else's code that uses Hibernate and guess what:

- Something that should take one simple insert issues nearly FIFTEEN THOUSAND unnecessary select statements and then does an insert and an update just because it couldn't get the insert right the first time.

- Their code can't run side by side with another web application because of jar incompatibilities and conflicts which everyone just says "oh you just delete the xxx.jar file from Jboss " but they ignore the fact that the server will then crash all the other applications it's running.

-When things go wrong the stack traces show a call sequence so deep that the logging cuts it off with "... and 150 others.." and those 150 include the line in your code so you cant see why it happened.

- And you cant turn on the logging because the frameworks all expect different incompatible logging APIs (BlazeDS anyone)

- And I now have to write 20 lines of meaningless XML instead of one line of Java...

It seems to me that all the anti-Microsoft bigots tied themselves to the Java camp and set about destroying it by reinventing the mistakes Microsoft had made in the past (DLL Hell) instead of doing it better.

.... oh don't get me started ...after 40 years programming, there's a lot more where that came from!

So basically... Java is screwed and it's the Java fans that are to blame! When it finally bites the dust, just hope they don't move in on your favourite environment and do the same.

Mine's the one with an 80 column punch card in the pocket

China announces Skype ban to protect telco revenues

Serves you right AC

You (ok maybe your owners) shaft a bunch of UK programmers and maybe pocket their redundancy money while paying peanuts for off-shore programmers....

I'm so choked for you.

Looks to me like the Chinese Government has done UK developers a big favour... India next ?

Atlantis spacewalkers snapped through shuttle windows

Not so silly calculators

Don't forget the Shuttle was designed about the time the first calculators came out... and then it takes about 2000 years to get flight certification for a toilet seat, never mind anything complex like a pencil.

I did attend a speech by a shuttle astronaut in the 80's (or early 90's i dont recall) and he admitted that they used a "laptop" (as in big black thing mains-only crush-your-knees ) propped up on the dashboard to show them a map of the world and where they were over it. (even saw a photo)

Anyway, the things that look like calculators are probably there to warn the astronauts when to change the lead on the pencil.

Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android

Of course they don't go after IBM, Apple, Oracle et al

All the big players will inevitably be crossing each other's patents and there's no point trying to create a mutually destructive patent war. No point

It is pretty obvious that the patent system is so badly busted that nobody can develop anything without falling over some bizarre patent owned by someone else. I once worked for a company which was attacked on a hugely wide-ranging (I think they had patented something like "managing stuff by using a computer") patent recently granted to another even though we could demonstrate that I personally had been using the technique for 10 years before the patent was applied for (and I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely original then. I probably "borrowed" the idea from somewhere else.).

So folks... keep amusing that cat with a laser pen and someone will be coming to get you!