JS was derived from Java?
Maybe vaguely inspired Java by when Netscape collaborated with Sun in the mid nineties, but not derived from it?
Posts by bpfh
1005 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2011
Document? Library? A new kind of component? Microsoft had a hard time explaining what its Fluid Framework is
Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC
Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back
The Register calls for aid, and Microsoft's Rohan Kumar will answer... our questions about SQL Edge and Azure Synapse
What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you
Forever mothballed: In memoriam Apple Butterfly Keyboard (2015-2020)
Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate
Friday 1st May 2020 18:51 GMT
Reminds me of an old story....
I believe it was with a Compaq box. Guy wanted to plat Quake I believe but the integrated cirrus logic graphic circuit did not cut the mustard. A PCI graphics card was purchased but would not run the screen. A lot of back and fourth between Compaq and the IT store asking to update drivers before it was discovered that it was impossible to add an external graphics card - the integrated graphics circuit was the one and only and would make the system ignore any cards.
After several calls to Compaq the guy came back in the store and asked if they had any updated drivers. Sales guy said it would not work, and the customer replied that the card was working fine. Someone mentioned Cirrus Logic on the Compaq hotline, and the client took a set of snips to the mobo, cutting out any chips stamped Cirrus Logic, and Lo, external card ran perfectly - to the horror of the store owners - and the Compaq field techs it was related to....
Resistance is futile: Some Cisco security appliances are ticking time bombs of fail thanks to faulty resistors
SE's baaaack: Apple flings out iPhone SE 2020, priced at £419
OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so
Linux fans thrown a bone in one Windows 10 build while Peppa Pig may fly if another is ready in time for this year
Neo4j has this great IDE-a: How about we stuff all our graph workspace, database, algorithms and visualisation wizardry in one place?
Borky shark: A deserted airport and a Raspberry Pi feeling poorly at baggage claim. Welcome to 2020
Watching you, with a Vue to a Kill: Wikimedia developers dismiss React for JavaScript makeover despite complaints
Friday 20th March 2020 17:37 GMT
Re: Front-end development is a complete mess
Tabs vs spaces, the continuing flamewar.
I still get roasted by colleagues due to me using tabs rather than spaces, but when editing in vim, I still claim that tab tab tab is superior to space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space space, but in the end, everyone to their own.
/peace.
Your data was 'taken without permission', customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner's database
Sunday 15th March 2020 09:58 GMT
Re: "partners"
Probably works when they have to manage custom & special setups that go beyond a mobile phone or a WiFi hotspot, like systems requiring 4G Cisco routers and embedded stuff, along with the corresponding vpn support that goes beyond what any customer facing telco team are able to talk about?
You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem
Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing
Monday 9th March 2020 00:21 GMT
Re: So close, yet so out of reach...
I’ve seen a couple in museums over the years, one in Somerset, 2 in Le Bourget and the Air France gate guardian at CDG airport, but I was also lucky enough in 1999 to be working for a pharmaceutical supplier based on the Châteauroux airport complex and Concorde flew down to the maintenance centre there, and we got a free tour airside, with just some steel fencing around the landing gear. The noise the next morning when it blasted off the runway was bloody epic - even from inside the office buildings. We got used to hearing wide bodies come and go, but someone turned the volume up to 11 when that bird went. As I was inside I have to rate that one as a close second to the sound of the Vulcan and Typhoon displays over Herne Bay a couple of years ago.
BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?
Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
Wednesday 26th February 2020 11:23 GMT
Re: Thank goodness we can turn it off...
Except most. browsers have a multipurpose search & address bar and have done for years and it will second guess you, unless you add a protocol such as http://n1a, then generally it will realise that you want to go to that host and not look it up in $SEARCH_ENGINE.
I will admit, mixing the search and address bars is a great boon to the general public, but I've mostly found it to be a pain :( Oh, and get off my lawn!
Yo, Imma let you finish, but for the 6,000 people still using that app on a daily basis ... we have a question: why?
Haunted by Europe's GDPR, ICANN sharpens wooden stake to finally slay the Whois vampire
Ever had a script you just can't scratch? Excel on the web now has just the thing
Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers
Saturday 8th February 2020 18:12 GMT
In 1998...
Our campus still had some 386 based IBM PS/2’s hands up who remembers the MCA bus? hanging around in some dark corners, one of which was the badge logging and timing software used by our access systems, and the PSU went TITSUP*. I pulled the short straw to get a taxi order to shuttle a “new” PSU from our parts warehouse to site and had to swap the part.
The change itself went fine, almost plug and play on the 20kg behemoth of a tower.... but every one of these beasts always had a resident spider. This one had a big bugger walking around in is warm and fluffy home.
Standard operating procedure was from there to disconnect the tower, try and manhandle the beast outside, using a fork lift if needed, crack open the case and give it a few bashes and return the resident wildlife to nature. I only ever found spiders, but mice got in a few that my colleagues had encountered - god knows how.
If you were lucky and had one of the power dusters, take it out to the service parking lot and let loose. The resulting mushroom cloud of dust looked like someone had touched off a small yield nuke...
*Totally Unable To Supply Usual Power
Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London
Colombia accused of rigging .co contract for dot-org provider Afilias – is this document a smoking gun?
The show Musk go on: Elon asks Uncle Sam to let him fly his Starship over Texas, scores fat NASA contract
Remember those infosec fellas who were cuffed while testing the physical security of a courthouse? The burglary charges have been dropped
Sunday 2nd February 2020 09:19 GMT
Re: State is not county
Why were these people in the wrong? If all the legal paperwork, signed off by what appears to be the state’s own legal mandarin seemed legit, then if laws were broken, why did the sheriff only go after the testers and ignored the rest of the chain of command that got to that point?
From the article, only the testers got time in the big house, not the DA’s office or the states judiciary who could be considered the brains - and the money - behind this conspiracy?
Brits may still be struck by Lightning, but EU lawmakers vote for bloc-wide common charging rules
Friday 31st January 2020 20:36 GMT
Re: "Mobile device"
That would fall afoul if laws obliging you to provide 2 years legal guarantee when legally sold as a homologated device that respects all the weird symbols under the battery or in the user manual. And if they refused, there are not too many operators around to lean on and tell them to boot non compliant devices odd their mobile network...
What they would do is supply the phone with whatever connecter they wanted, and a small converter, like Apple does with a lightening to 3.5 trrc jack - which I promptly lost for my jesusphone...
Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today
Wednesday 29th January 2020 13:03 GMT
Re: Recycling
Orbiting waste collection is not as easy as it sounds. Years of Star (Wars|Trek) have a shuttle rendez-vousing with some other craft, pull up along side, board, and have shootouts, but with magical fuel tanks that never need topping up - except when you are being chased by the bad guys - it's a lot easier.
Given that fuel is a big problem given how much fuel it takes to put fuel up in space, having to speed up and down, change orbits, chase something down, catch up, slow down to match it's speed, then either slow it down enough for it to fall back, or speed it up to get it to fly somewhere else far far away then rince & repeat for the next piece of junk, all keeping your own attitude stable as every action has an equal and opposite reaction and the like: kick something down, you will also be kicking your craft up, etc: it's definitely non trivial. Just going out on a spacewalk with a net, and giving whatever a small punt in the direction of the earth is not going to be enough, and all this takes a long time.
http://www.scifidoc.com/scitalk/2017/2/18/orbital-mechanics-for-dummies
No big deal, Rogers, your internal source code and keys are only on the open web. Don't hurry to take it down
Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer
Sunday 26th January 2020 09:57 GMT
This is rare and such events are few and far between
In the early 00’s, going above any beyond in helping remotely some Dutch colleagues in getting their network up for a large parcel delivery firm, come Christmas, I got a parcel delivered to home with 18 different bottles of Dutch beer, and about 4 years ago, doing the same for , funnily enough a Dutch sales director in my current company and at Christmas, a box arrived with a bottle of Jenever - think Dutch begin - arrived in my name at the office.
Moral of the story: you need to keep the Dutch contingent happy!
Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse
Saturday 11th January 2020 17:07 GMT
Re: Mice too
For wired rodents, a piece of post-it note strategically placed over the centre pins of the usb plug before carefully plugging it back in the back into the computer, isolating the 2 centre data connectors, but not the power lines on the left and right of the plug. Mouse lights up (if it’s a LED and not an IR laser), but no movement data is sent. That generally takes someone a few more minutes especially when they turn the mouse upside down, no post it and a shining red light saying all is well...
BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret
We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit
Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours
No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers
A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable
Monday 6th January 2020 16:34 GMT
This is why hex editors were made
So you can edit the msdos core files and replace “starting ms-dos...” by “sod off c***.......” or other such niceties as long as the string was the same length you could customise your victim’s machines as much as you like.... Aah, the fun days before executable signing...
Two missing digits? How about two missing employees in today's story of Y2K
BOFH: The case of the Boss's hidden USB inkjet printer
El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail
A sprinkling of Star Wars and a dash of Jedi equals a slightly underbaked Rise Of Skywalker
Londoner who tried to blackmail Apple with 300m+ iCloud account resets was reusing stale old creds
Tuesday 24th December 2019 15:45 GMT
Stale old creds...
But some of them still worked apparently. I hope Apple has some mass restore functions available to anyone who may have had their accounts squashed if he did carry out his threat. I guess saying not to reuse passwords is preaching to the choir here, but it’s still an uphill battle for the great unwashed...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
