Posts by fedoraman

After IBM axed its face-recog tech, the rest of the dominoes fell like a house of cards: Amazon and now Microsoft. Checkmate

What about in the UK?

How much is FR used in the UK, does anyone know?

I saw a story recently about how the Met police said that the wearing of facemasks in public would interfere with their FR technology.

Gone in 9 seconds: Virgin Orbit's maiden rocket flight went perfectly until it didn't

Re: Oh. Again?

Yeah - but the "replacement bus" part of the journey might prove a tad awkward

Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works

Re: Neill Young

As does Chuck Norris!

Chuck Norris does not sleep ... he waits

It's official: In May, Microsoft will close the door, lock the vault, brick over the entrance of dreaded Windows 10 1809

Re: Not Downgrading to Windows 10 ... Ever !!!

On modern hardware WfW absolutely flies!

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Re: A new book: "Systemd (feat. Linux)"

In the same way that emacs is an excellent OS, lacking only a decent editor?

Long-term Linux Mint: 19.3 release unchains the Gimp, adds HiDPI, is kind to your older, less-beefy kit

Re: Gimp

Gimp seems to typify an concept of software design that says "All software must be as hard as possible to use", and "we wrote it, now its up to YOU to figure out how to use it". Never got on with it. Only today have I learned that you can't create images in it. Well, that might explain a lot of the trouble I had, then.

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

Write once, run everywhere*

*For small values of "everywhere"

Engineer grumbles and user gripes do little to slow down Nadella's trillion-dollar Microsoft

Why.....

Its the random switching between modes that gets me, TIFKAM still lurks not far beneath the surface, and when it reappears its horribly jarring. And why must the "File" menu on Office applications look so fucking shite? Its awful! And why can't windows have borders anymore, you have to hunt really hard to see where your window edge stops and the desktop begins. Yes, I'm an old fart. In my day, windows had visual clues as to where they began and ended, it really saved the cognitive load in trying to work out what the hell you were looking at!

Ahem.

</rant>

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

Re: Outsourced

" Share and Enjoy! "

Frustrated Brits can dump mobile providers by text as of today

How about for broadband providers?

With BT having hiked their prices (again) - how about this for switching broadband providers?

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Re: Child-proof reset operation

Middle o' t' road? -- You were lucky!

We used to dreeeeeaaaammmmm of livin' in middle o' t' road!

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Re: Its the updates

Really? There are package managers that will handle the dependencies for you, automatically. True, they do sometimes encounter problems, but mostly work really well.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Re: EAT a fruitcake?

And with a wedge of Wensleydale!

Need a Ferranti Pegasus board in your life? Brit computing history could be yours for four figures

HHHHHHMMMMMMmmmmmmm.......

Switches it on....

"What is this great purpose for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in all of time and space, have been called into existence to perform?"

Go, go, Gadgets Boy! 'Influencer' testing 5G for Vodafone finds it to be slower than 4G

Not using Gigabit ethernet, clearly

Hmmm, sounds like someone used a very old router, and it saturated at 100Mbit/sec.

No, nobody would be that careless, shurely?

Secret mic in Nest gear wasn't supposed to be a secret, says Google, we just forgot to tell anyone

Re: Don't be........

Is that an anti-surveillance measure --

-- or just a fun thing to do?

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Multiple drones/operators/battery packs?

Look for someone charging up multiple drone battery packs from an airport terminal wall socket?

Doom at 25: The FPS that wowed players, gummed up servers, and enraged admins

Flickering fluorescent lights

I can't see a flickering fluorescent light now, without getting flashbacks.

And that door-opening sound? Haunts my dreams, er, nightmares!

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Acronyms

FFS (For F£$k Sake) expand your acronyms the first time you use them!

I've got better things to do on a Friday mid-morning than work out whether M2M means made to measure, machine-to-machine, or some defunct Norwegian pop duo!

Well, slightly better, I mean - reading the Reg ......

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

Re: You're born that way, you die that way...

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked I will depart.^[a]

^aOr will return there

NIV translation, anyway.

OM5G... Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip for phones: The 855 with a fingerprint Sonic Screwdriver, er, Sensor

Re: signals can't travel very far nor penetrate walls and fog

DON’T ASK US ABOUT:

rocks

troll’s with sticks

battery drain

All sorts of dragons

Mrs. Cake

Huje green things with teeth

Any kinds of black dogs with orange eyebrows

Rains of spaniel’s.

fog.

Mrs. Cake

CubeSat buddies, like those sent to track Mars InSight landing, can be used in future missions

Lifetimes?

For how long are the cubesats expected to function? Cannot find any more mention of the things.

NASA has Mars InSight as latest lander due to arrive today

Dusty

Does the robotic arm have a duster attachment, to dust the solar panels?

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Re: LOL Reddit (Marmite Lasers)

I've always wanted to ask this - how do you get the population inversion with these things?

Sorry, but NASA says Mars signal wasn't Opportunity knocking

Re: agreed

a bit like the "de-mud" mode, in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

If Shadow Home Sec Diane Abbott can be reeled in by phishers, truly no one is safe

Re: Eh?

Where to? What's the weather like?

Re: Eh?

I make that - ANBNOCE.

Shome mishtake, shurely?

Windows XP? Pfff! Parts of the Royal Navy are running Win ME

I think you'll find that everything up to WinXP didn't use an activation server. The product key was simply checked to see if it was legitimate. I don't know for sure, but expect, that there was some way to transform the key and see if it belonged to the group of allowable keys for that product. I remember that keygens were available for many bits of software, once the valid-key-generating algorithm was reverse-engineered.

Haunted disk-drive? This story will give you the chills...

Re: Put a heater in the safe then ?

Fill it with a propane/air mixture of the right proportions, then insert an igniter. Kind of like the crude cashpoint-opening method.

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

Re: Eight times brighter than the Moon?

And have big teeth!

In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream

Rigorously Tested

This stuff gets tested via the Windows Insider program, yes? Or did I read that a lot of this update skipped that step?

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

Re: "sunsetting" ... lol!

If it was Works, then you're probably thinking of Microsoft.

I'll get me coat....

Why waste away in a cubicle when you could be a goddamn infosec neuromancer on £50k*?

Re: neurodiverse ?

Yo ginga!

Bouncing robots land on asteroid 180m miles away amid mission to fetch sample for Earth

Re: Easy to do

Didn't Magnus Pyke(1) conduct a series of experiments on this?

I recall his book, entitled "Butter side up!"

(1) A UK Scientist, was a great science TV personality in the 70s, appeared on Tomorrow's World along with James Burke and Raymond Baxter.

Flying to Mars will be so rad, dude: Year-long trip may dump 60% lifetime dose of radiation on you

Re: Artificial magnetosphere

"of the single researcher with optimistic claims"

Hah! If I had a cold fusion reactor for every one of those I've heard of, I'd be laughing!

Leeds hospital launches campaign to 'axe the fax'

.....and in 2020, we're rolling out

Prestel!

Nope, the NSA isn't sitting in front of a supercomputer hooked up to a terrorist’s hard drive

What does that word mean?

It’s not necessarily that they can’t break it at all – every system has its design weaknesses and vulnerabilities - but they can’t do it presquickly enough to conduct surveillance on enough targets for that to make a difference.

Mmm?

Microsoft Azure: It's getting hot in here, so shut down all your cores

Blue Sky Thinking

It always amused me to think that you get most Azure (i.e. clear blue sky), when there are *no* clouds

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

Red Hat reading

So, did Redhat read the license and not care, or just not read the license?

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

Re: Shrug

Splitter!

Heads up: Fujitsu tips its hand to reveal exascale Arm supercomputer processor – the A64FX

Why no ARM servers?

I still don't understand why no-one is making ARM-based servers. Can anyone explain this to me, please?

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Re: They suck you up

They suck you up, your Apple and Google,

They certainly mean to, and they do

They harvest your location data

And everything you search for, too

(with apologies to P. Larkin)

Imagine Python fan fiction written in C, read with a Lisp: Code lingo Nim gets cash injection

Re: Why?

I dunno. Its just a thing. Like carving your initials on the great edifice of Comp Sci. Who cares if it gets dropped in a year, in favour of the Next Big Thing?

Re: Interesting but ugly

Indeed. Saying that case insensitivity is good because Pascal, Ada, FORTRAN and Basic have is, well, a bit of a weak argument.

Wrong order

I think that should read "It combines the readability of Lisp, with the speed of Python and the extensibility of C"

The age of hard drives is over as Samsung cranks out consumer QLC SSDs

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

"Everything is analogue if you go down far enough - the point is where the analogue values come from. The relative levels of amplitude, phasing or frequency compared to the carrier signal strength of a radio signal will always be the same as its actively generated. The hardware in an SSD however is fixed and so maximum voltage levels in the cells will decline as they age, but more to the point - not uniformly between them. So the firmware can't simply adjust its voltage level parameters to account for it."

So maybe they'll do a really slow refresh of cells, like DRAM with a really long refresh cycle?

Re: No story here

I didn't even know that it was sick!

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Re: This should not go unnoticed:

But, given that smartphones tend to be used in the hand much more than up to the ear, shouldn't there be a large increase in cancers of the hand and related areas?

Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle

Re: Those cubicle things

That's cos everyone else is on this thread!

Re: Those cubicle things

Have you seen "The Incredibles"? Excellent example of what happens when someone snaps. And still The Best Superhero Movie Ever(TM).