Posts by Citizen99

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Re: Now build a few dozen more...

'Sorry, folks, you wanted wind and solar to power nations.'

Not me, pal ;-)

At least, only if/where the engineering & cost/benefit trade-offs make sense.

Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork

Being a desktop workstation user, the 64-bit version of ExeGNUlinux

http://www.exegnulinux.net/downloads/jessie/

which uses Devuan, and comes with (xfce and) Trinity, the fork of KDE3, suits me very well.

Mystery Kindle update will block readers from books after Wednesday

SUPPLEMENTARY: No communication from Amazon Kindle

I have found the instructions on the website for checking the installed software version - the latest had been installed. Whew !

Re: I got an email for my Kindle Keyboard 3G

Thanks for posting this; my Wife never got this for her Kindle Keyboard 3G , neither in email nor in account messages. Go figure (eye-roll).

No communication from Amazon Kindle

It is only thanks to today's (22nd March 2016) article here in The Register (and links in these Comments) that we learned about the software update required for the Wife's 2010 release Kindle Keyboard 3G.

She did not receive the stated email notification, nor, on checking in the Messages in the Account, is there anything there.

Time will tell whether the update has already been done 'silently'; it seems unlikely as the WiFi is normally turned off except when making a purchase. However, a book purchased two nights ago did pop up on the device today mid-morning (22 March UK time zone).

GCHQ intel used to develop Stuxnet, claims new documentary

Re: "GCHQ"? Yeah, right.

Cor blimey, Mary Poppins !!!

SCO slapped in latest round of eternal 'Who owns UNIX?' lawsuit

Reminds me of the joke about roadkill, lawyers, and the absence of skidmarks.

Re: Back to the Nineties

Around the time I was just getting involved with Linux, Caldera (before the SCO shenanigans) was quite a nice magazine-cover-giveaway-cd distro.

Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs

Re: Sigh.....

I sympathise; in my case it's me in the UK trying to support my daughter with 8.1 in Oz. Oh,and she's on mobile broadband.

(As an interim fall-back precaution in case of problems, I've sent her Live Mint on a stick.)

The fact that some people are happy with W10 on a new machine, or after a pain-free upgrade, is nice for them. But completely irrelevant to the ethical and technical risk issues of a forced upgrade.

Boeing just about gives up on the 747

Re: Cost v extra safety

"Well, apparently the Super Constellation had a bit of a reputation being 'the most reliable 3 engine plane in the world' ...

Those Curtiss-Wright Cyclones were the noisiest that I heard at the time ! A really percussive clatter - did they tend to shake themselves to bits, then ? ;-)

Microsoft’s Get Windows 10 nagware shows signs of sentience

Re: That's it - enough!

On a previous page of these comments I found a link to SolydK, which is described as a 'fork' of (apparently moribund or abandoned) LMDE. This one has the KDE desktop; drilling down further revealed SolydX to be the XFCE variant. I'm looking forward to trying these at the earliest opportunity.

http://solydxk.com/downloads/solydk/

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=solydxk

Windows for Warships? Not on our new aircraft carriers, says MoD

Re: Pedant alert

'(and it would not surprise me if that interface is still being used and the ancient analog system's valves are still glowing and its relays clicking...).'

Of course: ElectroMagneticPulse-proof ;-)

Ah, valves - as used in Colossus and in the 1950s HMV radiogram through which I am currently listening to music.

Working with Asperger's in tech: We're in this together

Re: Numbers and binary

Well, I might have done that, only because I worked in a scientific/engineering field involving binary data. Oh, wait ...

Death to DRM, we'll kill it in a decade, chants EFF

Re: Why I buy Epson printers

The Epson printer that I once had (can't remember the model off-hand) had the nozzles built in to the printer; the refills just supplied the ink. Being a low-volume home user, the nozzles blocked very quickly, and the 'cleaning' program was useless; the printer was then a 'brick'.

So it was back to HP, but with third-party refilled cartridges; occasionally one might be a dud, but over-all it worked out cheaper.

Fixing Windows 10: New build tweaks Edge, sucks in Skype

Re: I need a young priest and an old priest....

Timely to read this today; only yesterday I was trying various posted procedures to get rid of (KB3035583) the 'Get W10' applet in W7, and it's 'Whack-a-Mole' :-(

Diskicide – the death of disk

Re: feeling old...

That 'rang a bell' with me ..."...because I remember using punch cards, paper tape, mag tape and toggle switches to key in the paper tape bootloader!"

I do remember seeing "... the oscilloscope output ..." on a school trip to see the English Electric DEUCE computer in the 1950s.

"... rotary phone dial for input on an ancient mainframe ..." Love the idea :-)

Goodbye Vulcan: Blighty's nuclear bomber retires for the last time

An anecdote from an ex-RAF (Armourer) colleague when we were at BAC Bristol in the 70s ...

In the Mess at Singapore base, an Aussie crew were praising the climbing ability of their Super Sabres.

The Vulcan crew got up, walked out, took off, and climbed ... vertically.

Official: Turing's Bombe better than a Concorde plane

Re: @Peter Gathercole - HMS Belfast

Slightly pedantic topic swerve ;-) , The Hood was a battlecruiser, specified before the Admiralty had learned the downside of trading armour for speed (battle of Jutland), with, sadly, the inevitable result.

Re: Concorde ..

The Concorde engine air intakes were variable geometry, controlled by electronics, to tailor characteristics as necessary over the wide gamut of speeds from take-off via trans-sonic to supersonic and in a regime that didn't compromise pasenger comfort. In some ways this was more demanding than a military application, in any case, the experience gained fed into the military applications.

Bot attacks Linux and Mac but can't lock down its booty

A Linux client viewpoint

"But it's a well-known fact that Linux users never reboot their machines - which gives this crap a lot of time for acting out its nefarious duties."

"fact" ? "never" ? ;-) I would have thought that this is more likely to apply to server type users, which according to some posts above are less susceptible targets. For what it's worth I always close down overnight.

Lots of useful points in the thread anyway - I'm grateful for the pointer to NoScript :-) .