Posts by John Brown (no body)

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of 'Advanced Night Repair' skin cream helping NASA to commercialise space

Re: !..?

Well, you saw the designer spacesuits for the Crew Dragon, yes? Makeup is just the next step.

Oracle Zooms past rivals to run TikTok’s cloud, take stake alongside WalMart and ByteDance investors

Re: Still, why anybody outside US should trust a US company handle their privacty?

"Probably EU must ban TikTok until it's sold to SAP"

I came here to say something very similar, the EU needs to force a sale of this new Tik-Oracle-Tok entities EU operations to Crapita or similar and keep the data safe;y in the EU!!!11!!1!One!

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

Wot?

"At 150.6 Astronomical Units (AU) from Earth and 150.5 AU from the Sun,"

Erm, what? If 1 AU is the distance from earth to Sun, how come Voyagers distance from Earth is only 0.1AU larger than it's distance from the sun?

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

Not only that, but with the much longer mandatory warranty period, that is also factored into the price. I'm surprised we aren't yet seeing items where the number of £s is more than the number of $s.

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: I blame the following, in this order...

"Oooooh, no it isn't!"

(It's nearly Panto season and this might be as close as get to Puss In Boots this year!)

Re: Obviously not GPS jamming

I wonder how they were supposed to carry out the original mission they were designed for?

Reseller gives Brits Insight into value webcam shipments of the future-ture-ture-ture

Will they honour the price...

....if I "But It Now!"

Allowing for inflation, that could be quite the bargain!

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

Re: While I think about it...

If we're talking about Blackpool, I think this is more fun. Especially when you listen for all the double entendres :-)

Re: it "wasn't exactly the nicest of pubs," noted our correspondent

"And I thought I had seen most everything."

A computer over a urinal in a pub toilet. Caption? "click to enlarge" Fnarr Fnarr!

An old girlfriend, from the USA, said when I took her there "This is like mini Las Vegas!"

That's a ... tacky ... endorsement :-)

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Re: There is a possible way of getting tax out of them.

After the end of this year, import duties!

As we stand on the precipice of science fiction into science fact, people say: Hell yeah, I want to augment my eyesight!

Re: Difficult to know what "augmentation" means

Been reading almost two full pages of comments before I finally found a comment about Bulgarian Airbags :-)

Additionally, people get all sort of "enhancements" in terms plastic surgery. Lip implants, buttock implants etc.

Re: On second thoughts...

"Also that nose production would vastly improve GDP!"

What makes you think there'd be a export market? It'd be like adopting leaves a national currency!

Re: The Six Million Dollar Man

The downside of PAYG healthcare instead of "free at the point of use"

Re: CSIR Mk 1

"If I could have my brain augmented to improve my memory I'd do it (as long as it supported an ad blocker). I suspect many aging technophiles would as well."

Ageing technophiles are the least likely to consider it, I'd have thought, without being sure proper safeguards are in place. Looking at the internet nowadays, implementing and using those safeguards might negate the advantages. Young technophiles, on the other hand....

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: The need for speed

"a dude by the name of Cerf,"

In California? Yeah, must be a gnarley Cerfer Dude.

Re: Wheeled office chairs

Yeah, they got sick of people quoting "let them eat cake".

Feeling bad about your last security audit? Check out what just happened to the US Department of Interior

Re: Parks and Recreation

"For example, that department sometimes does controlled fires as part of their forest fire control strategy"

Surely not! The esteemed President Trump has quite clearly stated that the forest fires are caused by the States not looking after their 3% of forest. It's nothing whatsoever to do with the 50% or so the Feds are charged with looking after or the privately owned forest land run for profit by businessmen like President Trump and properly and safely managed.

Re: You get what you pay for

"When you take your car to the garage for a new fan belt, do they change the exhaust too free of charge without asking you?"

No, but they'll usually, for free, cast an eye over the rest of the car and tell if they think other work needs doing. Reputable ones will even be mostly honest about it too.

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Re: Monumental Stupidity Always Costs and Pays an Exorbitant Price

No, but the AI has reached version 3.11, which as we all know is the version that actually works :-)

AManFromMarsForWorkgroups.

Re: "The hardcoded password is a deliberate backdoor."

"We all know chipsets get used in multiple hardware projects from different companies and they often use the same badly written software one company wrote which often has vulnerabilities. Think IP cameras/DVR's for example."

No one seems to have looked, or at least reported on looking, for any identifying text inside the binary code. Most seems to have some sort of copyright or similar embedded these days

How do you solve 'disruption' at the UK border after Brexit? Let's call Peter Thiel! AI biz Palantir – you're hired

Re: GDPR?

But the sovereign state is sub-contracting to a private, US company.

GCHQ agency 'strongly urges' Brit universities, colleges to protect themselves after spike in ransomware infections

Re: Ban "writing down" passwords....

"P _ _ _ _ Y _ _ _ _ _ B _ _ _ _"

PimplYfacedBogie?

Relics of the past to be found in Oxford: A medieval friary, a Saxon wall, and... Windows 7

Re: Westgate

"Being of Italian extraction, family originating just outside Rome, I would prefer the Priory to be razed and my Great-great-great-great Grandfather's villa be restored."

Have you prostrated yourself yet for the sins of your GGGG-grandfather? He took my GGGG-grandfather and sold him into slavery.

Oracle hosting TikTok US data. '25,000' moderators hired. Code reviews. Trump getting his cut... It's the season finale

Re: My head hurts

"President fears TikTok will make him look bad"

That already happened is probably what kicked this all off in the first place.

Re: My head hurts

I thought it was Dubya Clinton, not B Clinton.

Re: My head hurts

Confused? You will be after this weeks episode of.....Soap!

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

The solution to that is ticket machines which require you to enter your full reg number. Oddly, they are much more expensive machine than the ones that simply issue a parking receipt/ticket. On the other hand, ticket machines capable of giving change are seen as too expensive, so it does seem a little odd that they suddenly have the extra money for a different type of expensive machine.

Net neutrality lives... in Europe, anyway: Top court supports open internet rules, snubs telcos and ISPs

"You mean the Cu?"

Is that the New Technology, or NT version?

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Re: you could read that two ways...

"Apparently the Germans practised tank manoeuvres on bicycles which I thought was an impressive act, considering the USSR churned out much better tanks with much better armour and still lost to panzers."

Large amounts of German logistics was carried out by man and horse power too, but their press and propaganda were under very strict instructions to never show this.

Re: Jingoistic Juices are flowing

"Wow, this piece should get the gammon chests puffing."

Why? Do you say the same when we get worldwide coverage from the US on 4th July? Bastille Day in France? Any other countries independence days or celebrations of defeating an attacker?

Re: Y Service

"But its just another example of quite how high tech WW2 became vs WW1."

Oh, I dunno. Think of the horse drawn vehicles, and mounted cavalry of the start of WWi compared to the tanks, fighter aircraft and heavy bombers by the end.

Re: Y Service

"So lets hear it for the boys and girls of Y!"

I'm just imagining them singing and dancing :-)

Re: The war is over, the empire is gone

"For rather loose values of 'give', as that verb is not commonly associated with armed conflict against independence movements."

You're right, it wasn't given back. Nor was it taken away. It was both. And other reasons too. There was also huge pressure from the USA too as they were feeling a bit adventurous after WW2 and didn't want the competition.

At the very last Moment.js: Time-and-date JavaScript library fetched 12 million times a week ends development

Re: I suspect Goodhart's law applies here

"Once library size becomes the target I can see lots of libraries becoming nothing but a plugin framework, replacing an 80kb library with a 10kb library and 100kb of extensions."

If I'm understanding the article correctly, that's what this "shake the tree" thing is about. Modern JS libraries should be able to be pared down on the fly as required so your web page/app only downloads the code it needs, not the entire library.

Tesco self-service separates innocent Reg reader from beer after collapsing into heap of Windows dialog boxes

Surely touching the screens is what de-sanitises you?

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: Bring back VMS Standard Date/Time...

"This is because there is nowhere in the world that has ever used YYYY-DD-MM as a date format."

Some USAian will almost certainly think it's just a "proper" date written backwards for some weird reason and read it mm-dd-yyyy :-)

Re: International Organization for Standardization

The moderatrix left for pastures new many years ago. Standards (international or otherwise) have been slipping ever since.

The moderatrix ---------------->

Howdy, er, neighbor – mind if we join you? Potential sign of life spotted in Venus's atmosphere

Re: And Venus was her name

"Quick someone start a new religion to cover its existence"

Already done. Just look at some of the film from the USA in the 50s and 60s of UFO cults.

Bad apples: US customs seize OnePlus earbuds thinking they're knock-off AirPods

...and the "maybe" is redundant.

Re: How can we be sure

"How can we be sure that this is the real Register?"

I've been reading theregister.co.uk for years. Now I'm reading theregister.com. It's looks similar, but I can't really be sure.

Brit mobile network EE follows O2 by ending trading relations with retailer Dixons Carphone

I'm actually a little surprised

I'm no financial whiz or even a wannbe Gordon Gecko, but I'd have thought a reduction in phone sales would be all the more reason to consolidate into one seller, not to take your products out of one shop and open more shops to sell only your own product.

I can only imagine that their thinking is that once a potential customer walks into your shop, the hope is that you can hard sell/bamboozle them into not shopping elsewhere. Except those customers may never get to your shop because they popped into one of the other 6 phone shops on the street, all in a neat row next to each other, and got hard sold/bamboozled there first. It all sounds like a recipe for even greater churn where the only number they look at is new sign-ups.

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: These old stories are fascinating

What's a computer? Oh, riiiight! Yeah, we can't afford those.

Infor pays UK construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m settlement following cancelled upgrade of 'Sellotape and elastic bands' ERP system

"The original system would still run runs around either of its two replacements if it was still with us :-("

I wonder what it cost to design, develop, install, commission and support, adjusted for inflation, compared with the budget for the new system?

Re: "did not include functional specifications"

"First you identify the system limitations that are being worked around in laborious ways, THEN you work out how you're prefer thing to be done, THEN you go back and see if what you've come up with actually makes sense or if there are other things elsewhere which are causing the entire broken chain you just devised a fix for that could be fixed and make the whole thing redundant."

THAT used to be the job of the Systems Analyst. But that's no longer hip and cool.

UK and Japan agree to free trade deal that excludes data localisation requirements

Re: 2nd?

"The EU is not a single economy. Though people like to pretend it is for convenience or for show."

You could say the same thing about the USA, Canada, or anywhere else that is a confederation of states with some level of autonomy from their federal government. Germany and Italy, while being part of the EU are relatively new countries with some very independent-minded states/regions. The EU is not a federated nation (yet!) but is effectively so in many respects.

Re: Didn't...

Although the "free flow" of data between the UK and Japan might have ramifications with any future EU trade agreement.

Re: Cheese

"£80k for being an MP + £80k for being secretary of trade?"

And she still can't afford Public Speaking lessons!

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

Re: Isn't it odd...

Yeah, That's my take away from the story too. $4.8bn of rental fees with nothing to show for it other than a few fleeting moments of pleasure interspersed with a lot of "meh!". Nothing to pass on to your kids. I still have most of my dads record collection. All ripped to HDD of course after being carefully and lovingly cleaned. Some might even have a some monetary value these days.

Unlikely to be available (or if it is, not for long) in jurisdictions like the UK where broadcasters pay royalties per aitplay. Many of the internet "radio" stations I used to enjoy are either not available here or have adverts every few minutes.