Posts by PerlyKing

'Hyperscale customer' to take massive datacenter site near London

Re: Another one?

That sounds like a sensible move. It'll be at least two years before they'll be able to break ground on their new project, so why not get a bit of income if they can?

Another one?

Google have already started on one near Waltham Cross, and want to build another at North Weald. Are they trying to surround London?

SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission completes first commercial spacewalk

Off the top of my head:

* Deep sea diving is a compression problem; hard vacuum is a tension problem

* Deep sea temperature regulation is over a range of maybe 20C? Space is a much wider range

* Mass isn't such a problem with a diving suit: make it as heavy as you like and buoyancy will help; space suits have to fit into the mass budget of the launcher

Have SpaceX managed to solve the problem of visor fogging? The last I heard that was still a problem with the ISS suits.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Recycling at the supermarket

what's the probability of my saving all the wrappers from the Kitkats and other products so I can take back to a supermarket?

Low, from the sound of it.

Top tip: we put our "recycle at the supermarket" bags into one of the reusable shopping bags which we take to the supermarket, which are kept near the bin. At the end of a shopping trip we walk the 5-10 steps from the checkout to the recycling cage and drop them in.

Google says replacing C/C++ in firmware with Rust is easy

Re: Wanna give some examples?

So all that we have to do is to write perfect C and/or C++. Gotcha.

Brace for glitches and GRUB grumbles as Ubuntu 24.04.1 lands

Re: needs an external dongle for RJ45

Not a ThinkPad by any chance?

Serious question: why have a specific port and dongle instead of adding a USB port? Is it just a money grab or is it some obscure but standard miniature network port?

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: they might bang their head on the floor and die!

This sounds like the instructing style of a flying instructor I once knew. Any time the student made a mistake he'd launch into "and now we're going to die because <long and unlikely chain of events>".

Microsoft pushing, pushing, pushing Edge in Defender slammed as a 'dark pattern'

I gave it a chance...

New job, Edge is the default browser, I figured I'd give it a go. Until it decided that one of the internal web sites has to be rendered in "IE mode", which doesn't work and there's no way to override it. Numpties.

Getting up close and personal with Concorde, Concordski, and Buran

Re: Wonderful!

Well if we're doing recommendations, IWM Duxford near Cambridge (UK) is a pretty good day out. There are two or three hangars full of working vintage aircraft including a B17 and a Catalina plus loads of old fighters, more non-working exhibits, and a USAF building with a B52, SR71 "and many more". And usually joyrides in a Dragon Rapide are available if you're feeling flush.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Re: Stollen election

I'd vote for a stollen cake over Trump :-D

<homer>Mmmm, stollen</homer>

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: the one she'd failed to kill with red wine

Was the second event white wine? Was she trying to clean up the red?

Mozilla Thunderbird finally gets system tray notifications

Re: How hard can it be to do tray notifications?

As you say, apparently very hard. Too hard for me anyway; I wanted to add them to a personal project and tried at least two different approaches neither of which worked properly. Or if they did during development, they didn't after setting it up as a systemd service. Thinking about it, maybe the tray notifications aren't my real problem....

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: wait a few days for others to test

While this is more sensible than just letting it happen, it doesn't sound like a rock-solid security strategy.

Firefox 128 bumps system requirements for old boxes

Re: Windows updates

if you keep your device powered on 24/7, as we do in my office, you'll find that you almost *never* have to deal with updates yourself thanks to Windows auto scheduling of applying updates after business hours.

I haven't worked anywhere in the last 20 years at least that let its PCs update themselves directly. I'm no Windows admin but I understand that Windows for Corporations is centrally managed and updated are tested internally before being rolled out, leading to a more stable experience for end users.

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.

—Grissom, after his Gemini mission, March 1965

Telegram CEO calls out rival Signal, claiming it has ties to US government

I usually use rot13, or rot26 if I want to be *really* secure ;-)

End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box

Re: Article 8 of the ECHR

Is this the same ECHR that the UK government is so keen on leaving?

NASA plasma propulsion project promises Mars in a flash

Re: "Rammer"

See also Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War".

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

Re: Weird is as weird does

It must have been just before that that someone said "we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway" :-)

KDE 6 misses boat to make it into Kubuntu 24.04

Wait, what?

Did I understand that correctly? KDE 5 is EOL before KDE 6 is available? That sounds like poor planning.

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

Re: Up to maybe 1930 or so, anyone with an aptitude [...] could go about constructing an aircraft

That's Christmas sorted then ;-)

Thanks!

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: emacs for mail reading is wonderful!

No, you'd use viper for that :-)

Google introduces phone-shaped housing for its AI tech

TLAs

I appear to be a bit out of date with my TLAs - what do "Octa PD", "Quad PD" and "Dual PD" mean? Eight, four and two of what?

Scandium-based nuclear clocks promise punctuality for next 300 billion years

Re: one clock

The clock in my car is fairly accurate unless I tick the "synchronise to GPS" option, in which case it runs six minutes fast!?

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

Re: A better alternative

I believe that it's actually pretty tricky (and expensive) to get something into an orbit which intersects the sun. For a start you have to cancel your orbital speed, which at Earth's distance is a little under 30km/s. For comparison, escape velocity (from the Solar system) from Earth's orbit is just under 17km/s. So it would be easier and cheaper (but arguably less responsible) to send something out into the universe than into the sun. Cheaper than both is to lower the orbit enough for Earth's atmosphere to finish the job.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Re: Mopeds

The last time I checked (which was a while ago; I'm lazy) the legal definition of a moped included a top speed of under 30mph (might have been "up to").

Scientists trace tiny moonquakes to Apollo 17 lander – left over from 1972

Re: El Reg comparators for temperature?

I was in an Indian restaurant once where the spiciness scale went up to "very extra hot" :-D

Linux distros drop their feelgood hits of the summer

The feel good hit of the summer

Is this a Fun Lovin' Criminals reference I see before me?

UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'

Re: Functional spec

So what you're saying is that it might have thrown a YouCantGetThereFromHereException ?

Re: Resiliency – we've heard of it

Flight plans can be quite complex documents and doing a thorough input sanitation early on may not be feasible.

As complex as 800MB+ XML documents that can be validated against a schema? That sounds unlikely.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

Re: The real problem with Concorde.....

It could outdrag virtually all the jet fighters. I'll give you the three hours thing ;-)

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: "Now if I could just get LO to install without throwing repeated 2503/2504 errors."

I think it's a reference to Apollo 11's repeated computer errors (1201/1202?) during the descent from lunar orbit to the surface, which were (probably?) caused by the crew turning on the rendezvous radar in case they needed to abort back to lunar orbit. I think this was a last-minute (untested?) addition to the flight plan, and the extra computational load caused the aforementioned errors.

Sort of snarky, sort of a nerdy in-joke.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: It is no more the duty of Facebook etc to police messages

I used to think along those lines, but there are a few key differences between a phone service and social media, including but not limited to:

* Phone calls are usually direct, one-to-one connections

* Phone services are fungible - if I don't like the one I'm with it's easy to change to another provider and I can still call all my friends no matter who they're with

The big one as far as I'm concerned is motivation: my phone company is (I hope) motivated to keep my custom by providing a good service so that I keep paying them. A social media company running on the business model of providing a "free" service which is paid for by advertising is motivated to put as many ads in front of me as possible. They do this by showing me things which will keep me engaged with the platform. This in turn means that they are not an impartial service provider, but they are actively deciding what to show me. Which means, to my mind, that they bear some responsibility for that content.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Bring back OS/2

The only experience that I remember with OS/2 was deleting the mouse driver. I can't remember how, or if, I fixed it, but I vividly remember how I deleted it: having selected the icon on the screen I intended to press Return (or Enter, whatever), but instead I managed to fat-finger Delete followed a split-second later by Return. Just enough time to form the memory of the "Are you sure you want to delete this?" dialog, with the default being "Yes" X-(

China succeeds where Elon Musk has failed with first methalox rocket

Re: Ignition out of print

It's not out of print at the moment. Probably available elsewhere too.

I do wonder whether the Audible version has sound effects :-)

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Reproduction

All I can add to the discussion is Flanders & Swann's Song of Reproduction

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

I, a UK citizen, once went on holiday to Mexico via California. Flying back from Mexico to California there were two immigration lines: one for US citizens and one for Mexican citizens. So I chose the shorter one and had a short chat with a nonplussed customs officer who had never seen a British passport before. This was in the mid 90s, so it was an amusing incident rather than a harrowing ordeal.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Re: Poetic Justice?

Tragedy? Isn't that when you feel sorry for the company that comes to a sticky end?

Is it a drone? Is it a balloon? Whatever it is the US warns locals not to let them fly in Iran

Re: Airborne Diesels? New breed of Zeppelin?

Diesel fuel, but not the Diesel cycle.

Re: Airborne Diesels? New breed of Zeppelin?

the last "successful" class of aircraft to use Diesel engines were Zeppelins

Does this mean the end of the horse-drawn Zeppelin?!

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

Re: Old school here

If the yellow foam earplugs do it for you, go for it!

Over years as a biker I could never find anything off the shelf that worked for long, so I ended up with custom made earplugs for about £80. Which last for years and may end up cheaper than disposable ones. As long as you don't lose them....

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

Re: Ubuntu Cinnamon is better looking than Kubuntu

Stop holding back Liam, tell us what you really think! :-D

It's nice to have a reasoned critique, with examples. Maybe I'll have another look at Xfce.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: Tempt fate

Derek & Clive?

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Vi vs Emacs

It's definitely emacs :-p

SpaceX feels the pressure, scraps first orbital launch of Starship

T-0

As the official countdown says for T-0: excitement guaranteed!

Boffins claim discovery of the first piezoelectric liquid

Electrowetting

Are you sure you're not thinking of electrowetting?

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Aaaaargh!

At one place I worked, the helldesk boosted their stats with this little wheeze: any time I had to chase them about a job that was taking longer than expected (like getting me the access I needed to do my job when I first joined), they would open a ticket for my enquiry (about the first ticket, I hope you're keeping up with this) and then close it as successfully completed as soon as I hung up the phone. Well, they had successfully answered my question hadn't they? Even if the answer was "we have no idea" ten days in a row!

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

ThinkPad pricing

I think you may be missing a zero from the ThinkPad price....

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

Re: Do not disturb

You must be so proud.

Re: you are breaking the law by stealing the car

Define "steal". In English law the definition includes the intention to permanently deprive the owner of their property. I may have got the wording wrong, but the consequence is that joyriding (where the vehicle is abandoned at the end of the ride) is not theft, and a new offence of "taking without owner's consent" had to be created.