Posts by Yet Another Hierachial Anonynmous Coward

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Re: Claim to fame

> Lunch was good though.

Thoroughly cooked I assume. Did the kitchens have their own ovens, or did they, you know, heat it somewhere else ?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: a random character

Marge?

Are you sure she wasn't Flora?

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: I really can't see them taking off (at least not in the UK)

The dog would probably cock a leg against it and short the battery though.....

And a laser equipped dog would be far more exciting than machines guns.

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Re: Is it just me ? (Vacuum cleaning)

Just checked and my Vax is working fine. Might need a new storage module soon, but I have a bag of 10 of those under the kitchen sink.

Uncle Sam's new power plan will plug AI farms into the grid faster

Re: On currents of stolen light ..

I have no idea if you wrote that, based it on something else, or created it with AI. But well done. It was good.

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Ping

Yes, some real pings there. Ping generally being an acoustic response to a sudden disturbance, or something like that. Our ICMP ping of course was mutilated from submarine/sonar "pings" when a remote object returns a ping. Not sure if that is real or just in the movies....

But emails do not go ping. Messages do not go ping, and mobile phones/masts do not go ping (unless hit with a hammer). I'm sure some of our readers can enlighten us on the real technical term and process for the latter, I would regard it as being network enquiry/registration and network acknowledgement. I spent a lot of my early career working with protocols that revolved around <enq> and <ack> of remote devices. We had not heard of ping in those days.

Ping

Ping has a very specific meaning in our world, and it has slowly worked into other nearby worlds where people try and use it in a technical context, as if they know what they are talking about....

Ping me an email.

A phone pings the phone mast.

I'll ping a message to the users.

etc, etc.

argggh !

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

I'm not a statistician, but....

"The chances of it striking a person are vanishingly small and in the order of one in several thousand. But not zero."

"One in several thousand" sounds pretty scary, bearing in mind there are 7 billion or so of us crawling around planet earth. In fact there are more than several thousand people in my town..... Does that mean that a few of my near neighbours are about to get bonked on the head?

Come on El Reg, please be more accurate in your STEM reporting. It is why you exist, and why we come here after all.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

one mandatory parameter for format is the drive letter

IIRC - early versions of format (DOS1, 2) didn't need the drive letter. Entering format would just go ahead and format the default drive regardless. No questions asked. Eventually common sense prevailed at microsoft (never thought I would be saying that) and you had to specify drive letter.

A Tandy SX1000 was my first PC. Bought as a student back in 1988 (?) after I had spent the summer job working extensively with PC's and fancied one myself. I seem to recall the local Tandy were selling it cheap, last one in stock, as it was end of line. I was first one in our course to have a PC at home - helped me excel (bad pun) at computing and open up a career trajectory. I think it is still up in my loft.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Why the fracas?

Many years ago I was restoring some vintage electronic equipment. I needed a non invasive way of cleaning some brass/copper parts. I tried the various cleaning solvents, plus the usual oddities, such as dipping in coca cola, vinegar, etc. Eventually I tried submersing in a jar of HP Brown Sauce. Voila! After 2 days, Nice shiny new metal parts and contacts glistening in the light! I posted this result onto one of the related forums and received several replies stating that they were unaware that Hewlett Packard made brown sauce!

Having seen what the brown sauce did to dirty old metal, I have avoided any dietary contact with it ever since.

I've also avoided the other HP too for years. I recently ran out of printer paper and with no time to order online popped into my local stationary shop, expecting to pay 2-3 time the price for a pack. They only had HP branded paper available, which I declined to buy. I explained to the lady behind the counter what my aversion was to HP, and she was somewhat bemused as she had obviously never had anyone decline to buy paper before, but she then added "I've had several HP printers at home, and they never seem to last very long". I recommended she should look for other brands, maybe more expensive to buy outright, but a lot cheaper and more reliable over time.

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

Re: Solar / EMP events

In O2's case, it just needs an expired certificate to take the network offline for 2 days...... No flares required.

I wouldn't have thought that mobile radio comms is IBM's area of expertise, but, heck, what do I know, after 40-ish years in the radiocomms business. Maybe they want to fit every police car with a system360.

And in reply to earlier post, yes, Airwave was maintained by a fairly dedicated workforce, who could go to extra lengths to pull out the stops during a crisis event. But, relying on a public network, maintained at minimum cost, with little backup.or resilience...... What could go wrong?

TikTok ban could escalate US-China trade war, ex-White House CIO tells The Reg

Re: Who will actually lose out

how I wish I could upvote you 1000 times......

Portrait mode video. "the 4 inchers" (that's a great term - thanks for introducing it to me)

I just assume those who use portrait mode to show video are narrowminded and stupid. Too stupid to realise that our eyes (and every other creature on earth*) are side by side for a reason -to give us wider perspective of what is going on around us (ie. incoming threats on the horizon, in ye olde days). In this day and age a wider perspective is just as important as ever. Too stupid to realise TV screens are horizontal for a good reason too - we need more definition in the horizontal direction than vertical - very few objects are perfectly horizontal to fall in between scan lines, but lots of edges are properly vertical and need definition.

* I can't think of any that have vertically stacked eyes, not even those to whom height is important. ie birds.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: Burned Cow Bones

...was sneezing it out for a week. That resembles my experience after using London Underground.

That resembles any experience of visiting London upto the 90's. Either I'm used to it now, or those pollution controls have actually made a difference.

UK tax agency's digital services not good enough to take strain off phone lines

over an hoour

Over the last couple of months my business partner and I have needed to call HMRC about half a dozen time, mostly because they have messed things up with VAT and tax codes and company registrations. On several occasions we have each had to wait on hold for over an hour, and reckon the quickest response was around 50 minutes. All the time you are bombarded by claptrap messages about using their website and going online. Does it not occur to these f*ckwits, that if I could do it online I would not be wasted an hour of my precious time on hold, waiting for them to answer. I still need to find out how I can bill them £100 p/h for the lost time and income I have had to lose, just to get them to fix their own mistake......

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

Re: 54 year old DC power supply

Ah, proper H(ewlett) P(ackard) engineering. Note Hewlett-Packard, not consumer HP.

Wait until it nags you to update it's drivers, bricks itself, insists on a subscription to keep running, then declares itself obsolete and in need of replacement.

There's a reason why HP gained a worldwide reputation for quality, and it had nothing to do with inkjet printers.

Your PSU will still be working fine when everything that leaves HP's warehouses today is decomposing landfill.

Look after it. It was around when men walked on the moon.

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

The questions we all want to ask....

Can it now explain why it goes round sniffing the butt of other dogs?

Or why it licks its bollocks in front of everyone when you have visitors round? (other than "because it can")

Scientists spot startlingly close black holes in Hyades star cluster

Re: "we'd probably already be dead"

> if Earth gets ejected, we're all on a timer to the deepest freeze we will ever know.

But, on a positive note, that will mitigate global warming.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: It's an impressive sight

Same if you drive up the M3 or M4 in the morning - if they are landing in the East-West direction, you can often see 4 or 5 stacked up behind each other with their landing lights on, all coming down one after the other. As soon as the bottom one goes out of view, another appears at the top.

A beer to those who manage and handle these things on a daily basis, and a beer to whoever was "on call" on a holiday monday. Looks like you had a bad day.

Getting meshy: BAE scores £89m deal with MoD to build new battlefield network

Re: A network by another name would be as lucrative

My preference would be Automatic Routing Protocol for Army. It could be the start of great things.

Shall we share the £89 mil ?

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

In the dock?

If a couple of 16 years olds can access BT/EE servers alongside other multinational tech companies, and help themselves to secure data, then surely someone else should be in the dock?

Exactly who is in charge of security at those organisations?

The article does not mention whether these kids did it alone, or whether they were just mules for some more sophisticated masterminds, though.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Re: Real Sanitizers

Back around the time of the incident of this article (aka mid 80's) I worked in a large office block - about 700 folks, and had our own PBX.

One monday morning we got about 50 folks calling to say their phones were all muzzled and no-one could hear them talk. Took our building maintenance man all day to go round with new phones to fix them, and almost depleted the stores of new phones.,

Next Monday morning, same again, dozens more complaints of fuzzy phones. Cue more replacements and urgent order for new stocks.

And again next Monday.

Cue heated manglement discussions about failure rates, etc, as all the handsets had been replaced when the PBX had been upgraded a couple of years earlier. Conversations started with PBX supplier as they had supplied the handsets......

Turns out....... Cleaning contract company had been given new contract. Every Friday night, after hours, c. 8 pm or something, cleaning staff were going round with some telephone sanitizer spray, and vigourously squirting it into the mouthpiece and earpiece of each handset and giving it a good wipe, all ready for the workforce to return on Monday morning to a nice hygienically clean phone with suitably bunged up and and wet mouthpiece.

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Flashes of light.....

Every time i look at (not into!) a fibre optic, I cannot but wonder at all those pulses/flashes of light.

Not 1,000,0000 pulses per second, not 1000,000,000 pulses, but 40,000,000,000 or even 100,000,000,000 pulses per second. And every single one one of those pulses counts. It means something to someone. Something completely and utterly different than the previous or subsequent pulse. They have all been assembled in a precise order, and at the far end of the glass strand, all get dis-assembled and added into new streams of hundreds of thousands of millions of pulses per second all precisely ordered and going in multiple different directions. And in an instant, that happens multiple times, and those flashes get propagated around the planet and end up exactly where they were intended to be,

And then the pulses get precisely disassembled from that fibre, reconstructed into a binary sequence, which in turns gets reconstructed into words, or a picture, a song or a video or details of a medical procedure or drug that saves someones life.......

It's just amazing. Gobsmacking. Imagine trying to explain how it works it to your grandmother, or great-great grandmother.

And humanity has achieved this in just 60 years. Unbelievable. Thank you to the visionaries who thought it out and made it possible. Humanity owes you more than you will ever know. And i and fellow commentards owe you our entire careers.

And everyone else takes it for granted, whinges when it doesn't work, and owes you Facebook. Oh well.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Unique keys

And there is Dumbarton, the principal town of Dunbartonshire. Either or both frequently mispooled.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Don't know what you've lost till it's gone.....

I find cheques are still one of the best and easiest ways to exchange money with people. Call me an old fart, but the less people I have to give my bank details to in order for them to transfer money to me, the more secure I feel. Similar if I owe money to people - I don't want to be the custodian and responsible for safekeeping their sortcode and account details.

I certainly will not give any humongous corporate entity (gas, 'leccy, etc) the ability to direct debit from my account any amount the want whenever they want. Those companies could not care less about accuracy or what they do. I have friends who have erroneously had thousands of pounds direct debit from their account and then spent months trying to get it back, evenm after they have got companies to admit it was an error.

The only reason why cheques are being dropped is because the banks and big companies cannot be arsed doing something that takes effort - in a similar way to having real branches. They must save millions per year by closing a branch, yet none of that money comes back to customers.

Software rollout failure led to Devon & Cornwall cops recording zero crime for 3 months

Unable to Upload data/stats?

Have they never heard of Excel? It's very good for passing data and statistics between non-communicating systems.

Might need a human at each end, but I'm sure the civil service have plenty of those.

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Re: A 'bang' or a 'whimper'?

A blinding light. As predicted many times before, but particularly well back in 1980. It will happen on the 8th Day.

Never thought I would see it in my lifetime though.....

http://www.songlyrics.com/hazel-o-connor/eighth-day-lyrics/

Microsoft offers electrical engineers a lifeline as it pursues custom cloud silicon

WTF?

What the heck does an electrical engineer have to do with chip and processor design? Other than a few electrons?

It's hard to think of two engineering disciplines that are further removed from each other.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

DB9-to-SCART

Not that unusual.

DB9 was used on the original IBM CGA graphics adaptor for the monitor interface.

A long time ago now, but I think the RGB were 0-5V digital signals, and the H and V sync on separate pins, but with a few resistors and maybe a couple of diodes (plenty of room inside a SCART plug) I connected my first PC (Tandy (Radio Shack) SX1000) from it's CGA port to the SCART input of my TV, and had a 21inch monitor years before anyone else on a PC. Only 240 x 480 resolution IIRC, with all of 16 colours, but heck, it was 1988 (?). I seem to recall there was a setting in the bios to switch the CGA from 525 line to 625 line mode (480/60 to 576/50) too.

The PC is still in the bottom of a wardrobe, but I think the TV is long gone.......

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Re: The existing ones don't even meet the spec

Even on the hard shoulder you are supposed to leave the car and get behind the barrier. No one suggests anyone should stay in the car when it is broken down on a motorway. I have no idea what you are supposed to do if you are disabled, limited mobility, etc.

And does anyone in the UK other than a few lorries ever use the left lane anyway? It seems to be an inbuilt psyche of almost everyone that you are supposed to drive in the middle lane utterly unaware of anything going on around or behind you.. I even know of some people who passed their test and their instructor told them to "just get in the middle lane and stay there until you need to turn off". If you ever drive somewhere like Holland, Belgium or Germany, where folks seem to know how to overtake and pull back in (even BMW's!) it's quite eye opening to come back to the UK and see just how lazy and sloppy folks are. If you are in any of the above countries, within 100 miles or so of one of the ports, and you see a car ahead sitting in the middle or third lane it is almost a always a UK registered car.

I'm fairly sure we can easily increase the capacity and throughput of UK motorways if we actually taught/encouraged people to use them properly.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

>Calls cost more per minute then than they do now, even before adjusting for inflation.

Calls cost more per minute then, than they cost per hour or more now.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Re: Ouch

Cats......

I've never tried it personally, but apparently the cure is to go to the local zoo and get a bucket of lion (or tiger) dung and spread that around your garden.

It pongs for a bit, but the smell is apparently enough to give all the neighbourhood cats a serious fright and they assume that Mr F Big Cat owns that territory and they avoid the place like no tomorrow.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

Microwave...

Bought mine when I bought my first flat, age 21. That was August 1989.

Still works fine 33 1/3 years later.

My other half has had 3, maybe 4, in the 14 years I've known her.

Mixing an invisible laser and a fire alarm made for a disastrous demo

Re: Loss of an eye is not a joke

A thumbs up for the above comment. Not because I enjoyed reading your sufference, but because it is a cautionary and poignant tale.

A thumbs up can have two meanings. Just like when a family death was posted on Facebook and received multiple thumbs-up. Not because people were happy to read about the death, but there is no button for "thank you for letting us know".

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: "... they serve their makers more than they help users"

" Even though I have enough spare parts, I realise that I will eventually not be able to use my Blackberry 9320 3G so I may have no choice to eventually get one unless the market provides a reasonable alternative.

eg: a 4G flip-phone with great battery range, signal strength, no camera and a good way to sync the address book to it's own application, preferably compatible with Linux."

If you come across one, make sure you let us all know here on Reg Central, and make sure you post a review of it too !!

Victims of IT scandal in UK postal service will get fresh compensation

Why BEIS ?

So, is this money for compensation coming from BEIS (ie public purse) or somewhere else?

The only place it should be from is the upper echelons of the post office and Fujitsu. The entire senior management and legal team of the PO and Fujitsu knowingly involved in this should be in court - have their assets seized, nice houses and cars impounded, etc,. and made to pay compensation and publically disgraced, like the sub-PM's were. Then they should be jailed where due, barred from holding any senior public body figure again, and Fujitsu barred from undertaking any public sector work. Ever. The only ones who should be spared should be a few whistle blowers who may have stood up and said "hang on, instead of all our employees being crooks, maybe there is something wrong with the system?"

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Bathroom vent fan

I've seen a few of those over the years, trying to cool equipment......

One - they are not designed for 24/7 operation and may have a short life.

Two - in order to suck hot air out, there has to be an inlet to allow cooler air in. Something that "designers" or builders do not seem to understand.

FCC taps 13 providers to manage 6GHz band access for new Wi-Fi standards

Seriously?

Seriously, someone in the FCC thought that AFC was a good TLA to use for Automatic Frequency Co-ordination ?

Presumably they have no idea of radio technology, or even looked up the most basic of tech dictionaries to see if the term had already been in use for the past 100 odd years.

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

Sacking is not enough

Another clueless dipshit idiot in charge of the country. As if hashtags Rudd was not bad enough. What was she thinking? All that training, signing the OSA (I presume she must have done that to become home secretary), constant briefings on cyber terrorism, knowledge of auditing and traceability, and she still does something like this 6 times? And on a gmail account of all things. Now big brother google knows more about our government policies than the government.

Surely when you become a senior government minster, someone from somewhere tells you to close all your personal "publicly hosted" free email accounts, and only use a personal email account that is hosted in a suitably secure environment.? Aside from anything else, the ability to get malware through a public account like that is just not worth any risk. No doubt Liz trusses hacked phone suffered similar.

In any commercial organisation distributing internal classified information would be a sackable offence. It needs to be in this case too. And properly sacked. Not just removed from the cabinet, but sacked as an MP for misconduct in public office and a by-election called. Then people (and her cronies) would actually start to question and understand what she has done.

US orders safety recall of Tesla Cyberquad-for-kids ATV

Seriously?

" it's either disable the vehicle for a refund – or don't, honestly."

I clicked that link out of curiosity..... Are they serious?

Why do I suddenly detect a load of RPi's and/or Arduinos and some big MOSFETS becoming popular....

And if you did return the controller for a refund, what the heck are you supposed to do with and dispose of the rest of the bike and it's battery?

How to watch NASA Jupiter probe's flyby of Earth

Astounding...

A beer to all those who measure and calculate all the influences on a mission like this - slinging it into orbit around the sun a few times, letting fly back towards earth, missing by a few hairs width, then back to the sun and finally arrive at Jupiter, exactly where it is. Not arrive a day or two early or late, to find the planet has moved in its orbit and the probe goes hurtling past into the blackness. Considering that barely 100 years ago we could hardly cross an ocean or fly a plane over land and arrive within a few miles of our expected landing, we have come a long way in a very short time.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Quite Impressive

I set up a Starlink terminal for client on a remote site in the UK a month or so back.

Took it out of the box, sat it on a patio using the included stand, plugged it all in, connected my computer, then sat to think about how to get it working (ie. use 4G to connect to find some instructions as there were none included in the box - I should point out the unit had previously been used elsewhere by the same client).

Before I had a chance to think too much, the thing started moving and tilting itself much to my surprise. I had only just got the 4G connected and had not downloaded any instructions, so I connected to the Starlinks wi-fi instead to see if I could find it's own web status page or something, and as I fired up the browser, it promptly loaded all my previous pages. I double checked the 4G was disconnected (it was) so did a bit of surfing and fired up a speed test page. It confirmed I had a Starlink Ip address, and indicated I had around 120mb/s down and 10mb/s up. Amazing. Less than 5 minutes from opening the box.

You get a local/CGNAT (10.x.y.z) network address rather than a proper address, so it's a bit like a 4G connection in that respect. However I plugged a Draytek router into the ethernet port of the Starlink and the Draytek happily established it's VPN connection back to main office and all devices on the remote site were then as visible from HQ as we expected.

It ran quite happily and without a glitch for 2 -3 weeks until we finally got the gigabit fibre installed.

9.5 out of 10. I never thought I could say anything like that about a Musk product.

Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners

Re: Err because MS...

Caix? Do you mean cakes? Yes, I accept cakes as part payment on account. Bottles of beer also.

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

Re: 240 volts?

I don't have a Hoover.

I have a Vax.

Still trying to figure out how to boot it to VMS.

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Re: MAAS

Actually very useful.

On the beach, on a nice sunny day and the tide is coming in and the beach quickly disappearing....

NASA's Psyche mission: 2022 launch is off after software arrives late

Beta Launch

Can they not launch with a Beta version, and just do a few updates and patches en-route to fix the bugs that become apparent?

Seems to be the norm for almost all software projects these days.

Newport Wafer Fab could be sold to US consortium – report

Tunnocks

Ye gods I hope not. The thought of a caramel wafer or snowball filled with Cadburys slime is disgusting.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Re: WordPerfect

Windows 10 still creaks......

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

Re: I used to have a 6.6 lb laptop

Presumably a CRT monitor, up and down the fire escape?

Youngsters today.....

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

The one thing I remember is that it had plenty of comprehensive manuals. By the shelffull, or even the roomful. Documentation galore. There must have been a impressive team churning out and updating all that documentation.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Re: Firefox 100 also detects if your OS is set to a different language

I think the "bitter sarcasm" tag was unrecognised by your browser too.