Posts by Citizen99

Buckminsterfullerene sounds like the next UK Prime Minister but trust us, it's in fact the largest molecule yet found in interstellar space

"The thing about carbon - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black."

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds ;-)

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Re: Yeah

Absolutely. Only the other day I was trying to checkout from Amazon without Prime AND IT WENT TO PRIME CHECKOUT JUST FROM MOUSE MOVEMENT - NO CLICK - whilst I was trying to navigate (that I had done successfully in the past). GRRR.

Remember that crypto-exchange boss who mysteriously died after his customers' coins disappeared? Of course he totally stole them

Re: Maybe MOSSAD could help ?

"They are *very* good at tracking down "dead" people ..."

...and rectifying the anomaly.

Obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide

Mr.Desiato is currently dead, for tax reasons.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Re: Nah.

Good idea. But makes my brain ache.

The difference between October and May? About 16GB, says Microsoft: Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB of space

Re: Looks like the end for me

I've experimented with some of those tablets, including the Linx 810 and 820, and Ubuntu. Be prepared to use a very fine-point stylus and perhaps reading glasses, and the single USB port is a PITA.

I got an 820 which it seems had been 'bricked' by a W10 update.

Xubuntu 19.04 re-spun by Linuxium's isorespin.sh VERSION 8.2.8 works in my Linx 820.

I've run earlier re-spun Ubuntus on the Linx 810 from a Live USB.

BT Tower broadcasts error message to the nation as Windows displays admin's shame

"A metaphor for Brexit ..."

The customary EUnerd irrelevance.

Sigh.

Edinburgh-based rocket botherer seeks UK or overseas launch location for fun times, maybe more

Re: Simple Physics

Simple physics - an Equatorial launch site is best for Geostationary orbits. Like communications satellites.

Simple physics - a far-North (or far-South) launch site is OK for Polar orbits. The Earth rotates below the orbit giving wide scan coverage.

There's a lot of interesting science to be done near the Poles - Earth's magnetic field interaction with the Solar Wind - think the Aurora Borealis.

BTW For decades there were hundreds of the UK-produced original Skylark rocket launches for research - not necessarily Polar, depending on the mission.

We don't know whether 737 Max MCAS update is coming or Boeing: Anti-stall safety fix delayed

Re: I'd fly in one today.

A bad design should not be excused because some, not all, human pilots managed to overcome its deficiencies.

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

... walked into a bar

According to the Friday Torygraph it was the Dutch Captain, the Russian 1st Mate, and the Philippino crewman. Somewhere else I saw a suggestion Estonian/Russian.

Well done chaps and rescuers anyway.

Bored bloke takes control of British Army 'psyops' unit's Twitter

Re: So...

Must use that one; have a beer Sir.

If Harold hadn't had to deal with two invasions at once (Norwegians up t'North) the result at Hastings might have been different.

Cops looking for mum marauding uni campus asking students if they fancy dating her son

Re: Poor boy!

On a bit of a loser there, if I remember

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Frozen in time

"...aimed at demonstrating that while Office 2019 is frozen in time,...."

And the problem with that is ... ?

Windows Defender update: So secure, it wouldn't let Secure-Boot Windows PCs, er, boot

There is an upside, if you're a Linux user looking for decent quality hardware cheap with bricked-up windows ...

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

'ow much ?!

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Pembroke - Cork ferry 1979. bar at the blunt end of the ship, well up&down. Couple of pints Guiness - slept like a baby :)

Forget DeepFakes. This robo-Rembrandt with AI for brains is not bad at knocking off paintings

But, can it reproduce the The Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies ???

We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE

Re: Yep

I like Trinity (the fork from KDE3), not least for the not-crippled Konqueror in particular, and the clarity and richness of the desktop tools in general.

I've never had a problem installing it on Debian, and now Devuan, although I can't speak for other varieties. It runs happily enough for me even on low-end Atom class notebooks.

Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?

Re: Forsooth!

I've read suggestions that, being from Warwickshire, his accent might have been Proto-Brummie.

Cops called after pair enter Canadian home and give it a good clean

Re: Milk in Bags?

Are the bags re-cyclable when worn out, I wonder ?

Only this morning we had an email from our dairy that they are discontinuing plastic bottles and going totally to glass (which we already select anyway).

Back in the '40s at my Grandma's house (UK) the milkman came to the door with a portable churn , and a pint measure ladle with which he dispensed the milk into your jug.

Microsoft yanks the document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Re: "were made available for other OS"

"were made available for other OS"

"... Desktop development for Linux is a minefield - and Linux UIs really lag behind Windows and macOS. ..."

In what respect does the UI 'lag' ? It depends what you're looking for in your UI. Admittedly, you have to choose the desktop that suits you from a large number of available choices.

I like a 'rock-solid' traditional UI that looks crisp and presentable without a lot of arty-farty eye-candy. Trinity Desk Environment (a fork of KDE 3.5) does that for me, and provides a huge range of GUI tools and applications. Other tastes may vary.

Not having to run 'badly-written' corporate applications, as mentioned by previous posters, most of the Windows-only applications that I need run perfectly on Wine. A VM of W7 or XP takes care of most of the rest.

National Museum of Computing to hold live Enigma code-breaking demo with a Bombe

Editorial @ElReg

Not Block H for the Enigma message demo. Also see YAAC's posting above and others.

We visited Bletchley Park the day before yesterday (18 Sep 2018). In Block H were the 'Heath Robinson' and 'Colossus' re-builds, the machines that were used against the 'Tunny' high-level traffic. No sign of any 'Bombe', the machines thet were used to crack the 'tactical' level Enigma traffic. The National Museum Of Computing room was closed; peering through the glass window in the door we couldn't see past the more modern stuff to see if any Bombe was lurking in there.

Microsoft tells volume customers they can stay on Windows 7... for a bit longer... for a fee

Another 'gotcha'

(Although I am not a volume customer, just a retired user), only yesterday I fired up my 'canary in the coal-mine' Win7pro virtual machine.

The CDROM drive disappeared - driver fault - after catching up on the Windows updates.

Guess what happened next ?

Windows then reported that it needed to be re-activated due to a detected hardware change.

Not a problem operationally, as I had a known-good backup saved before recent updates.

No more updates will be allowed, ever. (I only use my VMs as test-beds or where a program won't run on Wine).

And where I can use an XP VM, I do that as it is less harassed ...

Experimental 'insult bot' gets out of hand during unsupervised weekend

The customary El-Reg reference: Adams, Airplane, Dilbert, Pratchett, Python,,,

Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged.

Use Debian? Want Intel's latest CPU patch? Small print sparks big problem

Re: Shrug

" I'd rather listen to vogon poetry than watch Debian do the 'silly walk' like that. "

It's poetry, Jim but not as we know it.

Re: Shrug

"I think this thread has now hit the unwritten El Reg rule that "if it goes on long enough it is imperative that someone must include at least one Monty Python/Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett/Airplane* reference." "

Shirley not !

On Android, US antitrust can go where nervous EU fears to tread

... QUOTE

This isn't insurmountable though - there are approaches like WINE or Blackberry's just in time shimming to run Android apps on BB 10.

/QUOTE ...

If only :( . As BB10 was when Blackberry abandoned it, it could only run a few Android apps, whether natively or 'shimmed' as the case might be.

'Moore's Revenge' is upon us and will make the world weird

Would you like some toast ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnN4eUiei4

A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash

"- Code which has been written to demonstrate how well the developer knows the language, at the expense of readability and reliability - developer arrogance"

I may have posted this on El Reg before many years ago, but anyway ... In my comparative youth my boss mentioned an anecdote, whereby the Chairman of the Gas Board promulgated the Edict "Sack all clever programmers ! " :D

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

I nominate Zaphod Beeblebrox to steal the drive

Blighty's super-duper F-35B fighter jets are due to arrive in a few weeks

Re: Perfect for the job?

" Perfect for the job?

If it had been perfect for the job they'd have been able reliably to find and hit their targets and we probably wouldn't have lost more than 200 of them in the last full month of the war in Europe."

Eh ?

The 'Perfect for the job' item under discussion was the special improvised bomb-sight for the dams raid.

Nothing to do with finding other targets.

Glibc 'abortion joke' diff tiff leaves Richard Stallman miffed

"The Blob" extending it's tentacles into yet another area ...

Windows 10 Springwatch: See the majestic Microsoft in its natural habitat, fixing stuff the last patch broke

Only yesterday I was at a talk with laptop slide & movie presentation. 3/4 way through, up came Windows 10 ... updates ... reboot now or later. The latter was efficiently and rapidly selected.

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

For a while I was involved with the (Concorde Air Intakes) Control Unit Test Equipment.

It was CUTE.

On a non-related project (1970s), a bunch of us visited an air museum near the Cape in Florida one weekend. There was a prototype of the US SST there. For display purposes it was wearing engines that looked as if they might have come off a 707 or similar.

Re: Concorde & SR-71

@ Norman Nescio

Sir, you are a scholar and a gentleman. Have a pint :)

This story also appeared on El Reg recently, found it again here -

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread978233/pg1

Windows 10 S to become a 'mode', not a discrete product

Re: Lockdown has already happened including & in coperation with Ubuntu Linux

'Linux Ubuntu comes from Debian, i am not sure if systemd is built into that one, it'd be a shame if Debian had sold out too.'

Yes, Debian uses systemd now.

Devuan is a non-systemd fork of Debian.

UK.gov: Psst. Belgium. Buy these Typhoon fighter jets from us, will you?

'English policy is to be allies with the French against the Spanish, the Germans against the French, the Germans against the French (and Americans), the French against the Americans, the French against the Germans part II, the Americans against the French ....... '

As Sir Humphrey explains ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFBgQpz_E80

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

Re: Is KDE still a thing?

Have you tried Trinity (the fork of KDE 3.5) ? Preserves the 'traditional' setup, still with the nice utilities.

LISA Pathfinder sniffed out gravitational signals down to micro-Hertz

Re: "gas molecules bouncing around inside the satellite were sufficient to register as noise. "

'plus the random atoms and other doodads getting back in of course - given that space isn't a perfect vacuum.'

Where's Maxwell's Demon when you need it, eh.

Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted – take that, Kepler fatigue!

Re: "Unbound planet"

The scatterings from a game of Interplanetary Billiards.

F-35 flight tests are being delayed by onboard software snafus

Re: C++?

Decades ago I was on a project where the use of ADA was mooted (to my relief nothing came of it - we didn't have the infrastructure for it, and btw I'm not a s/w specialist). Anyway I was at at conference where a professor of computing piped up from the front row to say (I paraphrase from memory) that in the long run everything would be written in C ; I assume by that he included C++ .

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

"... Or you can use OCaml. It generates C directly. ..."

Doesn't that belong in this thread ? https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2018/01/24/saudi_camels_disqualified_from_beauty_context_for_using_botox/

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

Re: Improbable

"... And that's why the first thing my A Level Physics tutor told me to forget everything I had learnt at GCSE because it was either a lie or an over simplification.

I was then told exactly the same thing at degree level, seems a perverse way to teach to simplify things to the point they are factually incorrect and then have to "correct" that knowledge at a later date. ..."

One of our degree lecturers said it thus: "We teach you by diminishing deceptions" .

I thought it was fair enough, *if made explicit*, for e.g. starting with Newton, which is practicable enough for some purposes, before moving on to Einstein.

With you on pointless, ambiguous or not-even-right-or-wrong questions ;-)

Re: Improbable

"I teach physics, and one common GCSE question is "What is the mains voltage?" The "correct" answer is 230V, if you write 240V you'll lose the mark. Few kids are interested in why it's changed, so I just warn them to ignore their parents if they use the "wrong" value."

Is that a 'Physics' question these days ? ... and there was I trying to be open-minded about the dumbing-down of exams ...

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

Re: Sounds perfectly normal

Back in the '80s we had as part of test equipment a Honeywell with the run-time system only. This was only run when the contractor involved was on site. Thanks to the front panel register switches it was possible to enter programs manually in machine code. Took a bit of time, mind, for anything bigger than 'Hello world" ;-) .

Cloud-building alien space rays altered Earth's climate – boffins

I'm currently reading

"Searching for the Catastrophe Signal"

"The origin of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change"

by Bernie Lewin

This describes the history of successive environmental concerns, from the policy over-reaction to the damage caused by saturation use of DDT (loss of public health benefits particularly in the 'third world'), emissions by SuperSonic Transport, CFCs and the ozone layer, and so on ...

As one issue loses traction over time, for whatever reason, the next one comes along.

The book contains plenty of detail.

Fresh bit o' Linux to spruce up that ancient Windows Vista box? Why not, we say...

A bit of a historical aside; it is sometimes implied, or 'accused', that KDE was inspired by Windows. The inspiration of early KDE in fact goes back well before 21st century Windows; desktops with that flavour were to be seen on 'grown-up' systems such as the Unixes, Digital Equipment Company's VMS ....