Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Remember the days when signs were signs and operating systems didn't need constant patching?

Re: Why Windows?

It's a reference to the system resources you'll need to run Windows 11

Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems

Re: ?

~~~ Words have only one interpretation in all contexts. The dictionary is the rule book. Any other statement made by a human would be incorrect, meep morp. ~~~

Indeed, so let me quite the definition of "cavort" from several dictionaries

Chambers: cavort: to frolic, bound

Oxford Pocket: cavort: To prance, caper

American Heritage: cavort: To prance about, caper

It has negative connotations.

No, it really doesn't. It can be used in a negative way "he cavorted with his married mistress", but that's context, the word itself is not negative.

Having a look in the mirror, does not literally mean examining their own reflection, it carries the connotation of shame or remorse for one's actions

Correct, but that's because it's a metaphor, not a literal description.

?

"Cavort" just means to jump or dance around excitedly. Why do you think it means anything wrong? If you've never cavorted with a lover you've missed out on a lot of fun!

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

Not packing material, but

I once switched on a bench PSU to be greeted with the kind of loud 50Hz buzz that usually meant overload and imminent fireworks. Rapid switch off, tidy the cables, reconnect, same problem.

It was only when I lifted it down to open the lid and start investigating further that I found the heavy steel washer that had got knocked underneath. Just underneath where the PSU transformer was, in fact. When the PSU was switched on, the washer was leaping around like a mad thing under the transformer, vibrating off the case & the bench.

UK ISP TalkTalk confirms it will MullMull go-private takeover offer valuing it at £1.1bn

Nigel Farage as Marketing manager.

UK, French, Belgian blanket spying systems ruled illegal by Europe’s top court

Re: Can I say it now ?

Hmm, the World Freedom Index is a strangely anonymous thing, no details on the website. It claims to be a summary of three other indices.

I took my figures from the Cato institute "Human Freedom Index", which claims to use 76 indicators in it's calculations.

They both seem to show roughly the same general pattern, just differing in precise placings.

Re: Current cases in France

It's not quite that simple. ISPs in France are required by law to keep logs for a year. If a restaurant pays an ISP to install & run its WiFi, there's no issue. If the restaurant just gets the WiFi kit itself and signs up for an internet connection (which, lets face it, is how most restaurants and cafes do it, paying little heed to security, firewalls, QoS, etc.) the restaurant is then considered to be an ISP supplying internet to its customers, and is subject the the same laws as any other ISP.

Re: Can I say it now ?

isn't Hong Kong 3rd or 4th?

It was in 2019, I doubt it will be up there in the next report. It says "As this foreword is being written, the world watches the citizens of Hong Kong attempt to protect their freedom".

Re: Can I say it now ?

Meanwhile, it's in the EU that freedom is guaranteed the best. Justice a bit less maybe, but we're getting there.

The UK still tops most countries in world rankings of freedom (14th worldwide, 9th place among EU members in the world human freedom index) and justice (8th overall worldwide in open government) for example. It is behind the usual candidates like New Zealand, Sweden and Denmark, but well ahead of France and Italy, for example. Generally also ahead of the USA. Don't believe all you read in the tabloids.

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Re: Closest I've had to that ....

"Copper fibre"

What price your home delivery? Amazon accused of hiding real injury rate in its overworked warehouses

I'm not sure where you're based, but in places like the UK if a supervisor saw someone using an unsafe practice that was against the rules, and didn't call them on it, the supervisor would be in breach of health & safety rules.

I love my electricity company's app – but the FBI says the nuclear industry bribed politicians $60m to kill it

Exactly. The best way to make sure you save money is to switch off the stuff you aren't using.You don't need an app to tell you that.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

It also makes the trains dual-use, they can run off overhead supply where it exists, and can then continue onto non-electrified (yet) sections of the line.

NHS England awards £1.6m deal to build digital staff 'passports' in fight against coronavirus second wave

Re: "In view of the extreme urgency"

NHS spending has gone up in real terms by about 3% per year since the 1950s. It's now 7% of GDP, it was only 3% of GDP in the 1950s. It's only gone down in real terms for 5 of the last 60 years, one was under the Major government and one under the 2009-2011 coalition, other than those no Tory (or Labour) government has reduced it since 1952.

Prepare your shocked faces: Crypto-coin exchange boss laundered millions of bucks for online auction crooks

Fair enough, my mistake, but the point still stands. Who buys expensive stuff like cars from online auction sites when they know they have no comeback if the deal goes south?

bogus ads posted on Craigslist and auctions listed on eBay for flash vehicles and other top-end gear that never actually existed.

Who in their right mind would buy a flash car from Craigslist, and pay in Bitcoin? Unless perhaps those bitcoins were already proceeds from dubious sources.

At least 900 Americans were duped

Hmmm.

Airbus drone broke up in-flight because it couldn’t handle Australian weather

Curiously, French makes the distinction between aterrisage (land/terre) and amerrissage (sea/mer).

‘Zephyr’ is designed to either beam down data or spy for weeks, but lasted about 90 minutes

So, much better than a 737 MAX then?

England's COVID-tracking app finally goes live after 6 months of work – including backpedal on how to handle data

Re: United? Kingdom

No, but I can't sing anyway.

Re: Scotland

Brexit: Lorry drivers will need a permit to enter Kent after transition period

I'm sure the residents of the "Garden of England" will be delighted. They tried to stop the Eurostar because they didn't want the noisy train, getting all those lorries off the roads as well will be heaven.

Re: United? Kingdom

I struggle to understand why the UK implemented three tracing apps.

It's a point of principle. The Scottish nationalists won't accept anything from London as being good for them, and will always be able to do it better. The NI unionists might have accepted a UK-wide app, but the Nationalists won't, and if Scotland is doing something different they'll both agree to do their own as well just to justify having their own assembly.

Why doesn't Wales have its own app? (asking just for fun)

It would have to be in Welsh, maybe they couldn't find enough programmers at short notice? Give them time.

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

Re: Storing hydrogen at altitude

I need a plane that can fly non-stop to Hawaii

From where?

Re: Looks good to me

you're more likely to die in a fiery wreck using hydrogen.

Not really, it evaporates and blows away very quickly. It's likely to be far safer than a pool of burning petrol/gasoline.

Re: Storing hydrogen at altitude

Their big advantage is that they are refuelled immediately before each flight, with exactly the amount of fuel needed. That's an advantage over a car which gets filled once every few weeks but might be left sitting around for days or weeks.

Adidas now stands for All Day I'm Disconnecting All Servers as owners of 'smart' Libra scales furious over bricked kit

The people who fund these companies never learn

the revenue obtained from one-time purchases of its equipment proved insufficient to support long-term maintenance.

And does this really come as a surprise to anyone? About the only way it could work would be if it were a pyramid scheme, with ever-increasing numbers of purchasers funding the support for previous users.

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

Re: No back light on a black keyboard?

I could freak people out by turning my head to greet them whilst carrying on typing

I used to work with someone who could do that and hold a conversation on some banal issue while continuing to write code. She really freaked people out.

Re: Numeric key pad?

Does one of the IDEs they have functions mapped to the numeric keypad, like EDT did on VT terminals on DEC mini's?

I have the EDT/EVE keypad functions so ingrained in muscle memory that I still use a version of emacs hacked to implement them on every OS I've ever used.

Re: well tuned Porsche engine, and instead being treated to the noise of a backfiring tractor.

As do Lamborghini , there's an old one on a farm near us.

Ports in a storm: The Matebook 14 won't set your world on fire, but it's still a half-decent laptop

USB-C for power

USB-C port, which also doubles as the laptop’s power socket.

Why do manufacturers use such a flimsy, fragile connector for the one cable that will be constantly plugged & unplugged, almost every day? What's wrong with using a decent power connector like HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc., does it really save any money or is it just another part of the build-in obsolescence?

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Not the fault of Amazon

Amazon ducks its responsibilities to UK taxpayers by shifting profits offshore using opaque corporate structures.

Amazon's responsibility to UK taxpayers is to obey UK tax law.

governments [need] to get together and rip up the international rule book that has been in place for nearly a century, and move instead toward something called 'unitary taxation'.

Precisely. If a government wants Amazon & their ilk to pay more tax, the solution is in their own hands. Change the laws that are preventing it. Moaning that they should pay more than the law requires because it would be "fair" is never going to cut it.

We've yet to see the claw back of tax avoided in the past like we have seen in France and Italy in connection with Amazon.

Avoiding tax is perfectly legal, it's tax evasion which isn't. If a company has avoided tax by exploiting loopholes in tax law, there's not much grounds for "clawing it back". Removing the loopholes for future payments is the way to go.

Tax law is like so many other old laws, every time someone finds a loophole, a government will draw up a band-aid law to close the loophole, and that often opens others. It's a pile of warts on warts on warts.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

solution?

a little operator education was dispensed (possibly with the aid of a long, sharp stick)

I'd have just greased the corner of the VAX cabinet...

Safety driver at the wheel of self-driving Uber car that killed a pedestrian is charged with negligent homicide

Re: However

If I was sitting there in the driver's seat not actually driving the car, my attention would wander fairly quickly.

I do hope you never tke a job as an airline pilot.

Re: However

grabbing the steering and/or moving your foot onto the brake may not be physically possible within the available time

If your job is to be the safety supervisor, you should have your hands on the wheel all the time, your eyes on the road all the time, and your foot near the brake all the time. You should also be paying attention to nearly people so that you can predict what will hapen, and don't have to react at the last minute. It was why she was there.

Research into deflecting potentially world-destroying asteroids is apparently not a 'national priority' for the UK

Iceland? It'll just spout another volcano.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: And this ladies and gentlemen...

https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/96260/uk-car-number-plates-explained-rules-history-and-what-they-mean

States that O isn't used, For example the letters ‘I’, ‘O’, ‘I’ and ‘Z’ are never seen on number plates

And they have that comment immediately under a photo of a car with plate "EK16 LLO".

They're wrong anyway, my first car had a Co. Down plate beginning FOI and had a digit 1 in the number, and the letter Z is common in NI plates as well.

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: Not just dates get confused

Sadly lots of Americans think GMT means "UK time", and have no concept of BST (GMT+1) as daylight saving time. At least UTC makes them ask "WTF?".

Re: 11Oct16

monoguous?

Re: Not just dates get confused

timezones and other date miscellany are the bane of programmers the world over.

Do everything in UTC, only convert for display by using standard functions.

Re: 11Oct16

unambiguous and still reads well. It is also still easy for a machine to read.

And as long as it doesn't need to sort it chronologically.

Re: Pounds alone for bodyweight

the cargo capacity of a C5 is 281,001 lb

And absolutely not 281,002 lb?

What if the pilot had an especially big breakfast?

International Standards Organization

Nitpick, it's the International Organization for Standardization. Known in French as the Organisation internationale de normalisation, and intentionally referred to as ISO, which matches neither, because to call it IOS or OIN would be to give one language precedence over the other and probably upset the French.

And yes, it would be good if companies used standards for things like dates and phone numbers. In my experience, European businesses tend to use the standards, and US ones tend to assume everything is American (or perhaps, to be unaware that anything non-American exists). When emailing my US colleagues I always write dates out with the month by name.

'Mindset reset' contributes to £1bn extra costs and another delay – 2 years this time – for Emergency Services Network

Re: Direct Peer-to-peer communications

IoT hearing aids?

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: whoops - wrong disk

This time they changed the process so the production disk was read only.

The good old days when every disk drive had a write-protect switch, and pushing it was always the first step in any backup operation.

Oracle customers clamor for its hardware. Yup, hardware. It can't build Exadata fast enough

Entirely predicatble (and predicted):

Timesharing is dead, get your own mainframe.

Mainframes are expensive and inflexible, move to distributed mini/personal computers to solve all your problems.

Minis/PCs are hard to manage because they're distributed, move to centrally-managed servers & thin clients.

Servers are expensive and inflexible, move to cloud.

Oh, cloud looks just like timesharing.

Rinse & repeat.

I've lived through one complete cycle round the loop, time to retire before we do it all over again.

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

Re: "does this prevent people accessing it from the US? "

As The Economist's style guide says: "data are plural"

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

Re: I Suppose...

It's been updated since then, there's now RFC6214, with support for IP (Internet Pigeons?) v6:

As noted in RFC 1149, the MTU is variable, and generally increases with increased carrier age. Since the minimum link MTU allowed by RFC 2460 is 1280 octets, this means that older carriers MUST be used for IPv6.

Astronomers get more than they bargained for, as Mars probe InSight's instruments detects solar eclipses

Re: New Reg unit of inclination?

I quite like the idea of having to use units of Mega-Bugger-Alls!

I'm sorry, but the MBA is already taken as a unit of pointless education.

Re: Provided this is repeatable...

But no pubs, either.

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Re: Isnt that good?

But are we discussing house sizes, or home sizes? The article referred to says that the average UK house size is 88m², against a recommended 93m². Compare that to France where the average home size is 91m², taken from an average house size of 112m² and an average apartment of 63m². A larger proportion of the UK population lives in houses rather than apartments, which would tend toward smaller house sizes for single-person households.

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

Re: It's only money...

should threaten trump with compulsary purchase of his golf courses for £1

The phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" comes to mind. Certainly, she should be extradited, but threatening to confiscate unrelated property in an attempt to force an extra-judicial action is the sort of blackmail one might expect from China or Russia. Not the UK.