Posts by fedoraman

Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again

Re: Downvote magnet ...

M208?

The Open University's OO programming course originally used Smalltalk. They had switched to using Java when I did most of my programming modules with them.

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

Word on a floppy

Back around the early 1990s, there was a copy of Word 2.0e for Windows 3.11 floating around the Satellite Ground Station where I used to work. It was registered to one Toby T. Wright, of Intel Corporation. It fitted, quite comfortably, onto a single 1.44MB floppy, with room for some documents as well. It was probably slimmed-down to allow this, but it worked. I still have it, somewhere.

NASA retires Mars InSight mission after it enters ‘dead bus’ condition

Dead bus

Dead bus, as in "dead power bus"?

Windows 11 in detail: Incremental upgrade spoilt by onerous system requirements and usability mis-steps

Hmm, not sure I wholly agree. But matters of taste aside, one thing I really find hard on Windows 10 is windows that have no border. If you have one window overlaid on another, its really hard to see where one ends and others begin. The Windows calculator is a particular example of this, say when you open it to do a small calculation whilst working on a document.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Re: Want to run it?

That's the Hard Question. I can only suggest Steam, but I don't know what range of games it supports.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

With apologies to HG-

No one would have believed in the last first years of the nineteenth twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Yet across the gulf of space Sea of Japan, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

I, for one,

welcome our new porcine overlords!

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Re: LSW

Crayon?

Like "This isn't a fish license, its a dog license with "dog" crossed out and "fish" written in crayon?

Was going to be Windows 10 forever?

They skipped Windows 9, to get to Windows 10, and then it was going to be ten - forever? No more upgrade cycles, just a continuous gradual improvement? Didn't last so long, it seems.

And by the way, Windows 10 might not break, as such, but its far, far from nice. How about collecting all the scattered control options back into the Control Panel, mmmm? And maybe a consistent skinning? Its fun to see those old style (but to me, nice) dialog boxes and panels pop up from time to time. Windows 7 is not dead, its still in there, somewhere.....

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

The Easily Offended

They usually hang out on Twitter, I hear

Can a 21.5-inch iMac beat the latest-and-greatest M1 model in performance? Kinda

But...

But will it run Crysis?

Home Office slams PNC tech team: 'Inadequate testing' of new code contributed to loss of 413,000 records

Undergoing a fundamental reset

Which means :-

"Umm, we're starting again, from the beginning"

We’ve found them! Govt reinstates records previously missing from the Police National Computer

DROP TABLE CRIMS

Note to all Forces - Do Not re-arrest Little Bobby Tables.

43 years and 14 billion miles later, Voyager 1 still crunching data to reveal secrets of the interstellar medium

Re: I like to think

Wasn't there an science fiction story in which a later Earth spaceship smashed into it? Possibly by Arthur C. Clarke?

Chrome release cycle accelerated to four-weekly frenzy

Almost up to the speed at which Java releases come out!

KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME

Re: The "Problem" with Linux

Yes, I found the shock of moving from KDE 3 to 4 very abrupt too, from a mature-seeming environment that you almost didn't notice (the mark of a good GUI to me) to one where you were constantly brought up short, where things no longer worked, and KDE just got in the way of you doing your work.

However, it has slowly matured, and though I greeted the change from 4 to 5 with similar trepidation, I have to say that its good, again.

I'm now running KDE Neon, and it feels great. Its fairly quick even on a cheap Celeron/SSD laptop, looks good, and doesn't get in the damn way all the time!

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: 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.