Posts by Anonymous IV

The Register editorial job ad

Bring Back Sarah Bee!

We miss the demon Moderatrix, who presumably went on to become Maleficent in that recent movie...

Scotland's BIG question: Will independence cost me my broadband?

The new Scottish single regulator

... will presumably have to be named OffAll, or Offal for short.

GoTenna: How does this 'magic' work?

Citizens' Band

Perhaps the manufacturers could consider using this? Or did they never watch those anarchic trucking movies of yesteryear?

But maybe the operation of this would be stuffed by sunspots...

German government orders local CIA station chief to pack his bags

Sour Krauts

+1 to the sub-ed!

Indian government flings ONE HUNDRED BILLION rupees at startups

Re: Should this title not be...

No. Such usage is incredibly infantile. And stupid.

Test drive Microsoft Azure & meet Mark Russinovich

Re: page defrag

All his PageDefrag did was to combine together all fragments of the page file (usually no more than two, maybe three) into a single 'fragment'/extent. Whether than improved performance or not is arguable. Was that your actual question?

PageDefrag doesn't work on Vista+, and was last updated in November 2006. Hardly worth the bother of asking the great man, I would say.

Crusty API opened Facebook accounts to hijacking

All together now

"API days are here again..."

Brit celebs' homes VANISH from Google's Street View

Re: It's on Bing

@Pedigree-Pete

Well done! You appreciated my very amusing collective noun joke!

Re: It's on Bing

Surely a mews is where a herd of cats lives?

Re: But, but, but...

@ You have not yet created a handle

I think Tony Blair's house is the one with the precisely-formed tornado on the pavement outside. It enables all his words to be taken up to heaven, to be judged...

Alabama quadchopper hits THREE THOUSAND FEET next to AIRPORT

Re: UAV's : bigger threat to planes than carry-on kit?

> I have a distinct feeling that the US will soon be deploying Ack-Ack batteries around every airport just in case some idiot tries to fly one of these into the patch of a passenger jet.

Ack-Ack batteries to shoot down a quadcopter? Isn't that what cruise missiles were invented for?

O2 and 'leccy firm's MNVO bid flops as £25m glugs down the drain

Re: Lycra Mobile?

Probably just a Fraudian Slip...!

Royal Navy parks 470 double-decker buses on Queen Elizabeth

Bust-up

Just because you can park 470 double-decker London buses on an aircraft carrier, it doesn't mean that you should...

(Has anyone any idea of the relative purchase cost, BTW?)

Big Java security fixes on the way – but not so fast, Windows XP users

Re: Java???

Are you referring to Javascript? This is an entirely different animal from Java (the language) or the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) (what unfortunate users get to install)..

More useful will be when LibreOffice finally manages to escape from any dependency on the Java Runtime Environment.

El Reg is looking for a new London sub-editor

Re: BEEELLION

Conversely, any candidate who thinks this stupid and unnecessary neologism is appropriate should be hurled out of the door with great force.

Re: Sir

Surely journalists are showered with the 'perks' not available to IT staff?

The free lunches from fruity firms for puffing their products?

Hardware and software on test which 'doesn't need to be returned'?

The unquestioning approbation of El Reg's intelligent and perceptive readers?

(Maybe I got the first part of the last perk slightly wrong...)

Like frozen burgers, 'Bigfoot' DNA samples have a touch of horse

Obligatory final line of report

"More research is needed."

True fact: Your CAT wees ... like a racehorse

"More research is needed."

Sadly the link is only to the Abstract of the paper, so we cannot see whether this compulsory final sentence was included.

Retiring Reg hack explains how bass playing = tech reporting

Is it true?

...that you can do a bass face like Este Haim?

(I won't ask about the legs...)

BBC: Bumpkins, hobbits need fairer coverage

Re: The count wee?

I remember the quote from the BBC radio comedy programme as:

Posh blonde female undergrad: "The countryside? You mean that green thing that Daddy owns?"

Farewell Felix Dennis, deal-maker supreme of tech publishing

So what happens now to PC Pro magazine?

Will it be sold, or will it fold? It's becoming thinner and less focussed as time passes.

Own goal as World Cup Wi-Fi passwords spilled in newspaper snap

Re: I Don't Get It

It doesn't! That's the high-security feature in the password!

Who needs a ride-on mower when a ROBOT will cut your grass

So if it's robotic...

... what is the point of the two ethernet sockets at the front?

Google's too-smart-for-own-good Nest Protect alarm is back on sale

"making random hand gestures could sometimes switch the alarms off"

Did it depend on whether people were making random hand gestures, or pseudo-random ones?

How did they test that this problem doesn't still exist, after the "fix"? Have they tried all possible hand gestures, in all possible sequences?

Not convinced...

NHS slammed for MAJOR data blunders as scale of patient info sell-off is revealed

Omnishambles

How often is this word ideal for describing IT or data security as 'practised' by government or NHS.

All hail to Tony Roche and The Thick of It.

BOFH: On the contrary, we LOVE rebranding here at the IT dept

Naming conventions

Back in the olden dayes we had a gradually-increasing network of PDP11's, each with a three-letter node-name related to its location. Brighton was BRI, Salford was SAL, and Bradford was (daringly) BRA. Bristol couldn't be BRI (already taken), so it had to be BST. Under no circumstances, we were told, could it be called TIT.

Re: Nut allergy

Our financial business had a department of worthy investigative people called 'Organisation and Methods' (O&M).

A new CEO, for unknown reasons, renamed the department 'Systems and Methods'.

The staff were delighted to answer their phones with "S&M Department?"

We never found out whether the CEO was bright enough to have worked out the initials, but we suspected not.

Google's URL-hiding 'origin chip' is 'backburnered'

Re: "the origin chip work is backburnered"

Hence the American expression, "Most every noun can be verbed."

UK govt 'tearing up road laws' for Google's self-driving cars: The truth

SatNav analogy

My SatNav cannot even pronounce three- and four-digit road numbers consistently in the approved British fashion, so I can't see self-drive cars coming soon...

Ukrainian teen created in lab passes Turing Test – famous nutty prof

Post-Turing test

Determine the meaning of "However this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before". Show your working. Do not pass Go.

Report pegs Apple for October smartwatch release

Re: Sorry folks.....…..…

"...at least another four months of iWatch stories. Why?"

Because {conspiracy theory alert!} El Reg is in the pay of [ Redmond | Mountain View | Armonk | Cupertino | NSA | CIA | KGB | GCHQ ] (take your pick, or add the correct name).

Evidence of ancient WORLD SMASHER planet Theia - FOUND ON MOON

More research is needed...

It appears to be compulsory that any researcher, at the end of any article, paper, talk or interview, will employ the immortal words of the Title.

The more creative will reword them slightly, as in "further analysis of a variety of lunar rocks is required for further confirmation". Well done, Dr Mahesh Anand from The Open University. Please accept a further research grant!

TrueCrypt hooked to life support in Switzerland: 'It must not die' say pair

"Perhaps we will never know"

Quite possibly not, but that surely doesn't stop a necessary and sufficient quantity of Conspiracy Theories being hatched.

Peak thumb drive is coming in 2016

Re: Thumb drive

Since it's short for "thumb-sized drive", about the best you can say is that the term is inelegant.

Would you prefer the recursive initialism UFD = USB Flash Drive = Universal Serial Bus Flash Drive?

Charity: Ta for the free Win 8.1, Microsoft – we'll use it to install Win 7

Re: Windows Explorer in Win 7 (file manager)

"Windows Explorer (file manager) is by far the biggest weak point in sticking with Windows 7."

Which is why many people install a third-party file manager, like xplorer². I know I did.

How to catch a fraudster – using 'top cop' Benford and the power of maths

House numbers

Has anyone done any work on the distribution of digits of house numbers?

Assume that each house number in a street is made up from individual numbers, so 13 has a 1 and a 3 screwed next to each other on its gatepost.

Since streets aren't usually long enough for house numbers to go all the way up to 99 (or further!) there is going to be a bias of the distribution of the first digit towards 1 (since we don't usually number houses as 01, 02, etc) and the distribution of the second digit towards 0, since some streets will miss out on 25, 26, 27, 28 and 29, say.

What will the distribution be when multiple streets in a town are combined together? Knowing how many metal plates with zeros, ones, twos, etc, to produce must be well-known to the manufacturer of house numbers!

Not quite a Benford's Law distribution, though...

550 reasons to buy this book for your beloved: COCKROACHES of Oz

Re: Cockroach anecdote

Hence the immortal Mae West line: "Is that a cockroach in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?"!

LA air traffic meltdown: System simply 'RAN OUT OF MEMORY'

Re: LA air traffic meltdown

Very true - the US is a full-stop-obsessed (oops, period-obsessed) country. They even continue to put a full-stop/period after Mr. and Dr.. They are no fans of Open Punctuation - nor of the Metric System, either.

Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap fears for his waistline

I suppose Kwik-Save didn't actually think of stocking more of the items which were bought by the transport café owner, rather than limiting everyone? Duh?

Trolls and victims watch Supremes for definition of meaningless patents

Re: x+delta

Clearly they are unaware of the British legal maxim de minimis non curat lex (obviously no translation needed for intelligent El Reg readers!).

Tooled-up Ryobi girl takes nine-inch grinder to Asus beach babe

Ms-matched

There must be a name for a woman who wears a black bra under a white top...

Mounties always get their man: Heartbleed 'hacker', 19, CUFFED

It's in the name

Surely someone called Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes must be up to no good.

Dammit, much of his name sounds foreign!

Harrumph.

You want an IT course? Welcome to QA Training's Week of Free

That was about 10-20 years ago...

Canadian taxman says hundreds pierced by Heartbleed SSL skewer

Mumsnet hacked!

Surely this is far more important than the Canadian Revenue Agency!

[Think of the children...]

USB reversible cables could become standard sooner than you think

"USB reversible cables could become standard sooner than you think"

So it's just a matter of changing all the USB sockets first then?

The gift of Grace: COBOL's odyssey from Vietnam to the Square Mile

COBOL and Reverse Polish notation (not really!)

The joy of writing

DIVIDE 8 INTO cake GIVING slices.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

No mention of microcode?

Unless I missed it, there was no reference to microcode which was specific to each individual model of the S/360 and S/370 ranges, at least, and provided the 'common interface' for IBM Assembler op-codes. It is the rough equivalent of PC firmware. It was documented in thick A3 black folders held in two-layer trolleys (most of which held circuit diagrams, and other engineering amusements), and was interesting to read (if not understand). There you could see that the IBM Assembler op-codes each translated into tens or hundreds of microcode machine instructions. Even 0700, NO-OP, got expanded into surprisingly many machine instructions.

Re: The Naming of Parts

On the contrary; the /360 referred to 360° of coverage! The IBM reps had a lot of trouble trying to explain /370 when that series got introduced...

El Reg's Deep Outback XP upgrade almost foiled by KILLER ARACHNIDS

it's probably better to install Java, because so many online services demand it

I must have led a charmed life, since I've been uninstalling Java everywhere I've come across it, and only LibreOffice / Open Office seems to require it, and I've had no user complaints. Delighted praise is another matter...

BT Tower to be replaced by 3D printed BT Tower

Lego?

Surely there's no need for 3D printing - produce the whole thing from Lego™ bricks. Shouldn't take long.