* Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

1532 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Primus Secundus Tertius

Proper testing

"to be as dastardly as possible in testing systems!"

That's the way it ought to be done. Test the error cases, not just the one that is supposed to work.

Climate change means beer made from sewer water, says North Carolina brewery

Primus Secundus Tertius

Excrement of yeast

Beer is just the excrement of yeast. Best to distil it to whisky to remove the contaminants.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: What the hell?

@Spartacus

"Of course they're diesel-electric"

At one place I worked, a secretary was never allowed to forget her "diesel-elastic submarine".

RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Kids (and Marketers) These Days Eliminating Vowels to be "Cool"

Ancient languages, e.g. Sumerian, Akkadian, were written with only the consonants. But when you have dialects, the consonants generally sound similar but the vowels can sound very different; for example, in American English, British English, and various others.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

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Management and Jargon

The PA document is stiff with management jargon. I do realise it would be a lot longer if written in clear English, but it would be far more useful if it had been.

It is a classic example of a document written for the benefit of the authors rather than for the people who need to read it. For that reason I fear it will not help to improve future systems at Edinburgh University. It is an example of a major problem in this disaster of a project: that nobody was discussing matters frankly and clearly with the working staff who would be directly affected, in terms that those workers would understand.

One small item among its findings was close to my heart: the poor quality of the data in the preceding systems, so it took much longer to achieve a clean set of data in the new system. At various times I have had to clean up membership lists of various organisations, in which names, addresses, and dates were recorded in slightly different ways by my various predecessors. That matters little if all the list is used for is to print address labels; but when you also want to analyse membership by location, and do financial things, consistency of data is essential.

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

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High or low?

Hoch Deutsch oder platt Deutsch? Das ist die Frage.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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Petrol 1 : Electric 0.

If you believe the man-made global warning freaks, using petrol engines reduces the risk of a freezing winter.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

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Re: Its a bloody text editor!!!

I find spell checkers very useful - not because I cannot spell but because I am a poor typist. But only in a word processor, not in Notepad.

Spell checkers are also useful for OCR text or text that has been dictated or transcribed. Or indeed text from many other people.

Primus Secundus Tertius

What I need

I always wanted a facility to reduce text to basic ascii characters only: replace curly quotes with straight ascii quotes; replace en-dash, m-dash, and arithmetic minus with a plain hyphen; replace any other fancy character with a question mark.

I can use a full word processor to restore the fancy characters if I need to.

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

Primus Secundus Tertius

Natural CO2

There are of the order of a million million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Sounds a lot, but is trivial by planetary standards. Natural events have in the past meant that sometimes there is a lot more, sometimes a lot less. The first major failing of this article is that it fails to discuss those natural processes.

The second major failing of this article is that it fails to discuss the oceans. There is a thousand times as much CO2 in the oceans, dissolved or as carbonates, than there is in the atmosphere. If we did somehow withdraw 1.0E9 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, .99E9 tons would be released from the oceans to restore equilibrium.

What are those 'natural processes' I mentioned? I suggest emission from the junctions of tectonic plates, as CO2 is expelled from subducted carbonate rocks. Expelled into the ocean, where we do not directly see it, but still dwarfing any man-made emissions.

It is time to stop the hot air about CO2, and to start preparing ourselves for an inevitable further rise in sea level to a geological long term normality.

Scribbling limits in free version of Evernote set to test users' patience

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Re: No good to me

I'm glad to see someone else besides me uses One Note. It is slightly less likely that MSFT will scrap it, as they are about to scrap Wordpad.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Finally...

And finally no longer relies on a Java Runtime for half its features.

Primus Secundus Tertius

It will be the cats that rule. They will soon sort out the mice.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Debug Windows

I forecast that Microsoft will use their investment in AI to get it to produce version 12 of Windows totally free from bugs.

Euclid space 'scope's first color snaps pull back the curtain on cosmic mysteries

Primus Secundus Tertius

The universe is vast, pitiless, and godless.

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

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Re: Politicians

That is what representative democracy means. Politicians have a lot in common with ordinary people.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

It is quicker for a typist to type it than to OCR it and then apply corrections. But for a dumbfinger techie, OCR is quicker. Even for documents from 'old steam typewriters' or those printed in the 19th century or earlier.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: four decades on ...

I had to use Latex at one time in my career. I am so glad to be shot of it.

I hate being expected to remember control keys and keywords for every documentary tweak. An 'intelligent' computer should make that easy for me, and Word does that. Even Word 5 for DOS, which I have looked at out of curiosity.

French IT behemoth Atos facing calls for nationalization as it tries to restructure

Primus Secundus Tertius

X for twits

"On the site formerly known as Twitter"

It is time to refer to that site as Xitter, pronounced with an initial 'sh'.

Element users are asking for protection against government encryption busting

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Contracts must comply with laws

It is nonsense to suggest that a contractual clause will override a statutory right by government to insist on seeing the decrypt. But the point at issue is how the government can demand the key that was used for a standard encryption algorithm. If the key is provided by the comms company, the government can demand that they provide it, or drive them out of business if they do not. If the key is provided by the customer, it depends. The government cannot compel another state, or the United Nations, to cough up the key.

Windows 10's latest update issue isn't a bug but a feature – to test your patience

Primus Secundus Tertius

How old?

"Not a bug, but a feature"

I first met that nonsense with DEC software in the 1970s, but I wonder if it is even older than that.

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Primus Secundus Tertius

A bad workman blames his tools.

Can open source be saved from the EU's Cyber Resilience Act?

Primus Secundus Tertius

GB left the EU

Various commenters on el Reg have been sniffy about Britain's decision to leave the EU. This article shows how badly the EU behaves to small groups, and that attitude by the EU was a major factor in Britain's decision to leave.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

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Re: "The interview scores are stored in an Excel spreadsheet"

Every database, from a set of data cards to a spreadsheet to an SQL Monstrosity needs someone whose primary job is to keep that data in good shape. In a small office that may be just one hour per day, but it has to be done.

Primus Secundus Tertius

MS Access is only there if you use Office Pro. It is not there is the cheaper Office Business.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Excel for dodgy databases

Excel is a wonderful tool for a knowledgeable user. But it is a disaster when clerical staff are expected to use it directly from their keyboards.

At the very least there should be an Access screen, or equivalent, which will do some checking on what is typed in. Excel sheets should be in the background, after being professionally designed and at least with data-types to distinguish dates, numbers, and text.

Hell no, we won’t pay, says Microsoft as Uncle Sam sends $29B bill for back taxes

Primus Secundus Tertius

They have a long history of that: e.g. dodging import duties on tea in the 1770s.

Bennu unboxing shows ancient asteroid holds carbon and water

Primus Secundus Tertius

If bacteria tootle around the galaxy on interstellar meteorites at approximately 1/10,000 of the speed of light, they could travel the galaxy's diameter of 100,000 light years in about 10**9 years. But bacteria might not survive for more than 10**6 years, so it would take many separate steps for bacteria to span the galaxy.

Other galaxies, even Andromeda, are too far away for their bacteria to have reached us.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Tired of headlnes

We know there are plenty of simple organic molecules kicking around the galaxy, and they would have been there on early Earth. But we do not yet know how they became the intricate and precise molecules of proteins, RNA, DNA, or cellulose.

I am tired of these headlines about 'the key to life' when we are as far from ever from explaining the origins of RNA etc.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

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Re: It must be bugged.

"we are already living in a simulation created by a post-human society"

Our invisible galactic overlords will not allow us to become too self-aware. 65 million years ago they bombed the dinosaurs into extinction because some of them were getting smarter than could be allowed. But the bombing was disguised as a meteor impact.

Our overlords may be thinking that another 'zoological weeding' is due.

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

Primus Secundus Tertius

In my case

"don't believe messages from a "friend" claiming to need money and asking you to pay with crypto or gift cards"

I had such a message, apparently from one of my cousins. I checked with a mutual cousin, and that account had indeed been hacked.

Beethoven and Brahms move audience members to synchronization symphony

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Other sharing

Brahms and Liszt seem to cause a shared abandonment of coherent perception.

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Primus Secundus Tertius

It has been suggested that telescopes be built on the far side of the moon. That would dodge the army of satellites in earth orbit, but, gulp..., the expense!

DISH must pay for bungled orbit change in landmark space debris penalty

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Query enforcement

I do not see that the FCC can now force the orbit to be further changed. What they have done is punishment, not enforcement.

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

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Accuracy v. going rate?

Indeed, what is absolute time? Einstein taught us that observers who are moving, or accelerating with respect to each other, will measure different times.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Primus Secundus Tertius

Saving pages

I save web pages, such as this one, into my personal archive. Firefox generally succeeds in saving pages, but I found Internet Explorer often failed to save them. I avoid Edge because MS are so aggressive these days.

Probe reveals previously secret Israeli spyware that infects targets via ads

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How to pay

If people were willing to pay upfront for internet services, the ad industry would hardly exist.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

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Re: An amusing way to waste public money.

No politician could do a statistical analysis of said rats. Indeed, not every scientist could.

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

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Design for errors

Designing systems to cope with errors, i.e. raw user input, is difficult. To give constructive error messages you have to parse a range of inputs that include error cases, not just the perfect working case. So system design is a bigger and more expensive task, not always appreciated by techies let alone by beancounters.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Primus Secundus Tertius

Just the text

I prepare documents in Word. But sometimes, when distributing my files to friends, I run them through Wordpad to reduce their size (typically from 15KB to 4KB), and to remove the serial number of my copy of MS Office.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Primus Secundus Tertius

Disposal unit

"There's a tractor beam which draws them through the multiverse to our company."

I thought BOFHCO was a disposal unit for the people the agencies don't want on their books.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

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Re: Not a popular appointment

I have heard him speak at Tory party functions. I despair whenever I see him appointed to any government post, or indeed to anything else.

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

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

@Elongated

During WWI and WWII the police, or someone equivalent, did open letters. Not every letter, but if the suspicion was there...

These powers ceased after WWII under democratic norms which never applied to the State Security Service of East Germany.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: The Reg goes all EFF, yet again

Well said, sir. There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that. Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have.

We do need some checks and balances against the abuses of power that will inevitably happen occasionally, and against the misunderstandings of the PPE graduates in our establishment. These checks and balances need constructive negotiation, as against the dismissive whining of this and many other articles.

AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Without comment

tracert www.theregister.com

Tracing route to www.theregister.com [104.18.4.22]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 192.168.0.1

2 * * * Request timed out.

3 14 ms 16 ms 19 ms glfd-core-2a-xe-801-0.network.virginmedia.net [80.7.14.1]

4 * * * Request timed out.

5 * * * Request timed out.

6 14 ms 14 ms 15 ms tele-ic-7-ae2-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.175.34]

7 15 ms 13 ms 14 ms 2-14-250-212.static.virginm.net [212.250.14.2]

8 14 ms 14 ms 30 ms 172.71.176.4

9 41 ms 16 ms 13 ms 104.18.4.22

Trace complete.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Off topic

300 baud was adequate in the days when people communicated with grown-up text rather than childish pictures. But not so good for downloading large software packages.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Primus Secundus Tertius

No worse than the average human

One might almost think that AI writing is no worse than average human writing. Far too often we flatter ourselves.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: ...Segoe, the font of the Windows 11 system UI

Segoe script is a useful font if you are printing a document and you don't want it copied by OCR. Its joined up characters defeat all the OCR programs I have tried.

Primus Secundus Tertius

I like serifs

The traditional word processor font was Times Roman: a serif font both elegant and compact. Then people started moaning about "boring Times Roman", so in Office 2007 and 2010 the default became Cambria. The sans options were Arial with Times, and Calibri with Cambria.

Then, to my regret, the default in 2013 became Calibri.

After Germany abolished the old gothic (fraktur) fonts in 1941, Germany preferred the sans serif fonts. But Britain prefers serif fonts.

Oh spit, I guess we shall have to set up our own styles with our own preferences.

Tesla plots entry to Britain's stagnant energy market

Primus Secundus Tertius

Reminds me of China

Battery and solar cells in every household? Madness! It reminds me of Mao Tse Tung's infamous schemes for a blast furnace in every house to make steel.

The real solution for a high-energy Britain is nuclear power, lots of, and an adequate distribution grid.