Posts by Anonymous IV

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.

Passport PIN tech could have SAVED MH370 ID fraudsters

Re: Lost or stolen (or dead)

Shush! You'll give those undercover cops ideas!

Inmarsat: Doppler effect helped 'locate' MH370

Re: Truly astonishing amount of information stored

I would imagine that one ping per hour per aircraft is not going to require NSA-quantities of storage?

Got a Netgear router from Virgin Media? Change your admin password NOW

"what kind of moron leaves the wifi enabled on a superhub anyway?"

All Virgin Media Business customer morons, because Modem Mode is not available on the business firmware on the Super Hub 1.

And no Super Hub 2 yet for business customers, who just get a refurbished Super Hub 1.

Getty offers 35 MILLION images for free – if you jump (em)bed with it

Terms & Conditions

The Terms & Conditions are a snappy just-less-than-4000 words.

I need to install additional Will-To-Live just to read them.

Google kills copycat TfL congestion charge payment ads

Re: ITunes too

So you did click on the correct link, then!

Retiring greybeards force firms to retrain Java, .NET bods as mainframe sysadmins

It shouldn't take more than a couple of days...

"What does Richards suggest CIOs should do to address the shortage in a more coordinated manner? First, profile your IT people by age, skills and the applications and systems they are responsible for. Next, capture and record their knowledge so it can be passed on to new people..."

So years and decades of mainframe experience can be captured and recorded, in a sort of rapid "job handover" process? Mr Richards, you have found the secret of the universe.

Virgin Media sales flat: Firm bags fewer winter sign-ups than last year

Re: Everyone can't gain market share every year

Possibly many/most commentingpersons are too young to remember the Equity Funding financial scandal in the US, where they had to 'sell' (that is, invent) more and more life assurance policies each year to keep the rate of growth up, and the share price high. When the whole thing collapsed, someone calculated that if the 'fraudulent' growth had continued, then in only a few years' time every single person in the US would have had one of their policies!

CCTV warning notices NOT compliant with data protection laws – ICO

Re: How do you read a QR code in a car?

Curiously both spellings of stationary/stationery could be correct here!

Barclays Bank probes 'client data sold to rogue City traders' breach

'Initial investigations' suggest 'data from 2008 or earlier'

Phew! That's all right, then!

Virgin Media's flaky broadband network turns Bolton off

"Virgin Media finally fixed the flaky service just hours after the Reg contacted the ISP. "

Only time will show whether the fault has been finally fixed, as El Reg undoubtedly knows.

Adobe goes out of band to fix frightful Flash flaw

Out-of-band Flash update?

Flash updates seem to come about twice a week, about as frequently as Adobe Reader updates.

How easy it is to hate Adobe...

Fujitsu launches lappie for oldies

Really annoying...

... that the article made no comment about the deeply-patronising term Silver Surfers, so my spleen remains unvented.

BT scratches its head over MYSTERY Home Hub disconnections

Re: Virgin "Super" hub

Modem mode on the Virgin Media Super Hub 1 is all jolly fine if you're an ordinary consumer, but the business firmware is crippled and cannot be put into modem mode. So we have a TP Link wireless access point which gives a better signal through five brick walls than the Super Hub through two.

It's big, it's expensive and it's an audiophile's dream: The Sonos Sub

Re: Virtual purchase

I bow in admiration of your wallet, then, if not necessarily your lifestyle choices!

Virtual purchase

"The damn thing costs the best part of six hundred quid and we've had to save up our pennies."

Are you seriously suggesting that you actually bought this thing, and that it wasn't the usual journalistic freebie?

Nominet goes titsup after update to WHOIS tool

Offline for roughly 10 minutes, only?

I think some major banks will soon be contacting Nominet to see how they do things...

UK picks Open Document Format for all government files

Re: "...Adobe make all the best software for creating PDFs"

I do like the incisive, logical and carefully-argued responses that some commenting-people come up with!

Murdoch's BSkyB stares down Microsoft: Redmond renames SkyDrive to OneDrive

Progression?

SkyDrive -> OneDrive -> 1Drive -> iDrive -> lawsuit...

Apple: That 'white screen of death' nightmare? We'll fix it... AT SOME POINT

Re: Not reboots as such

Oh! Well, that's all right then...

French drug dealers regretfully announce 'temporary closure'

Re: Allô ?

It must surely be compulsory in this context to quote the (alleged, but entirely fake) statement of George W Bush: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur..."