Posts by Grey Bird

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

That reminds me of the story from the Jargon File about the switch on a PDP-10 labeled "Magic" and "More Magic"

https://jargon-i18n.com/en/magic-story.html

Re: At my last place....

The architect that designed the building I work in is one of those. First, he made the building curved, like 2 bananas back to back. So nothing is square. There's a room that is occupied 24/7/365. The bathrooms are on the other side of the building in the other banana, and it didn't have a lunch room to prepare food. There's a three story atrium with walkways on the 2nd and 3rd stories with bridges to cross from side to side and a glass ceiling with an overhang from the roof on one side that drops filth onto the glass ceiling. Oh, it also has big can lights mounted in the floor that have never been used because they would blind anyone walking there. Those can lights were also installed outside in the courtyard to light trees and bushes and flags. I think you can see where this is going... Yes, there have been issues with water leaking into the some of the light fixtures outside and filling the can until the circuit shorts out for all the outside lights. Apparently the architect didn't think about installing some kind of drainage system under the lights so any water would flow away instead of collecting. There is more, but those are the highlights.

Microsoft revives DOS-era Edit in a modern shell

See Editor

For a long time, my dad used a TUI editor called See that came with a C compiler he bought. It didn't have mouse support, but did allow you to have 2 files opened simultaneously and easily switch between them for copy paste or whatever. I remember him still using it under NT4, but don't remember whether he used it after that or not. Having used editors under CP/M and all earlier versions of DOS, he had a lot of TUI editor experience to compare it with and it was pretty slick.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

When I was in, the USN had 6 hydrofoil boats. When I asked one of the crew how fast they could go, the answer was "That's classified, but they can run circles around US carriers going at full bell." So, fast. And since they're up on foils, the speed isn't limited by hull length the same way as described earlier in the thread.

Dems look to close the barn door after top DOGE dog has bolted

The Office of the President of the United States is and always has been an officer of the united states.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

On summer break while in college, I worked for a company that made filter tow for cigarette filters. Specifically, I worked for their customer support group which had 1 of each machine their customers had to make the actual filters in a room. Sometime before I worked there, a salesman had sold them a strain gauge so they could measure from the elevated boom when the machine picked up more of the tow due to how it was packed into the box. They had abandoned the equipment, removing the machine part the salesman had installed the strain gauge on from the machine and replacing it with an identical part. They did so because they were getting nonsensical data on the computer, and asked me to determine the problem. I re-installed the part with the strain gauge on it and attached the serial cable to the PC where the associated software was installed. I then turned on the machine and saw the same nonsensical data they had seen. There were spikes in the strain gauge data the weren't associated with actual issues with the filter tow begin pulled over the boom. I looked around the room where some of the other machines were also running. Then I went into their shop and got a heat gun, plugged it in across the room where I could see the computer screen and triggered it. Sure enough, every time I triggered the heat gun there was an associated spike on the screen. I then got on a ladder and removed the electrical tape wrapping the connection from the strain gauge to the cable that went to the computer and saw that the salesman had used unshielded cabling and that the gauges shield connection was attached to nothing, making the cable a really great antenna picking up the AC spikes in the room when the many motors on the various machines started during their cycles of operation. I rewired the equipment using shielded cable readily available in their shop and the problem went away.

Judge orders Feds rehire workers falsely fired for lousy performance

Re: This place is getting worse than slashdot for uninformed comments...

Nope. The only federal employees that are At Will are Some of those directly appointed by the President. (There are exclusions, such as judicial appointments which are for life.) The reason these employees got the form letters claiming they were fired for incompetence was because it is illegal to fire them for no reason. If they were indeed At Will employees then the reason for termination in the letters would have been totally unnecessary. Its very existence in the letters show that your argument is total nonsense.

Microsoft's updated Windows battery indicator rollout runs out of juice

Re: FFS.

I don't know that there are any combinations of LEDs that won't be a problem for some variety of color blindness. (I don't know what kind you have that makes yellow and green LEDs look the same and green traffic lights sometimes look blue. There seems to be a lot of variations of vision among people both in colors they see and how well their night vision is. I can't seem to convince a friend that I can see perfectly fine in light that to him is was too dim.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

Re: Another good reason to stay with Windows 10 for now?

I recently Installed Linux on an old 2009 Macbook Pro. It went pretty smoothly once I found a 32-bit distribution to install. Now it can actually be a usable machine again!

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

What models did that? The IBM XT and AT had them separately powered.I'm pretty sure the CP/M machine I used before that were also separate. I have seen ones where the monitor plugged into the back of the computer if you had the right cable, but I only remember seeing that once or twice.

Re: Doh..

I have a Prius that had the remove bumper to change headlight instructions. I found a YouTube video that showed removing a fairly small plastic piece behind the headlight gave you _just_ enough clearance to remove the weather cover and then the headlight. ...and without blood loss too!

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

Are you thinking of Eulalyzer? it was, and apparently still is, a free Windows app that will analyze a EULA and tell you of any potentially interesting words and phrases in it. It was good for discovering if there were things in the EULA that you didn't want to accept.

Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

Re: Ob: LibreOffice

Formatting with tabs is nonsense? I've been doing that since WordPerfect was the big dog in documents, if not before. (I don't remember for sure that WordStar did that, but I'm pretty sure it did.) I haven't used Open Office or Libre Office for a while, but I thought they did that too.

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

There's an engineer (named Mark Rober) here in the states that took a different approach when his packages were stolen. He created glitter bomb packages that made the thieves sorry they took the packages as well as capturing it on video. There was not just glitter, but a foul smell sprayed at the thief. He did this for multiple years with improvements each year. The first year video is here https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo?si=JEVbAApDmyJR5EV3

MPs ask: Why is it so freakin' hard to get AI giants to pay copyright holders?

Re: Begging the question

Your attempt at a joke? aside. All the copies you described are likely authorized copies per copyright law, unless some of them were illegal printings with no compensation to the copyright holder(s). Copyright law does not forbid copying only unauthorized copying, and reselling of authorized copies has long been established as legal.

Pay to play: The hidden cost of software defined everything

Re: Not the point

The news site your talking about didn't talk about it, they gave detailed instructions on how to hack the software which isn't the same thing. Also, the car example is totally bogus, since the DCMA doesn't apply even remotely. The paper example works depending on the software you're using. Some software, like MS Word, can be told to print 2 sided on a single sided printer and it tells you when to turn the paper over and sometimes even what direction.

There are probably legitimate examples of companies suing to stop legitimate disclosures, but there aren't any in your comment and you misunderstood what happened at the Hackaday.com site. They were issued the takedown specifically because they "posted instructions for how to hack [Tektronix'] modules and thereby violate Tektronix’ copyrights" as they detailed in a later posting. The reason hackaday posted the instructions in the first place was because the security of the "key" was astoundingly unsecure and hackaday modified the post to remove the specific instructions while still reporting the actual story of the horrible security snafu that was the key.

Amazon to dig DEEPER into YOUR shopping habit BRAIN with targeted ads system

Personally, I think they should have something in your profile where you can specify if you have a gaming console and what kind, and if you have a Blu-ray player or just a DVD player and what format you'd like the suggested discs to be if you have a Blu-ray player. It doesn't make sense to me to suggest a bunch of movies in Blu-ray if you don't have one, or to keep suggesting XBox games of you don't have an XBox. I definitely agree with VinceH that suggesting different formats of the same movie as if they were completely unrelated makes no sense, and they should just suggest the movie and let you pick what format after you've evidenced interest.

Shoot-em-up: Sony Online Entertainment hit by 'large scale DDoS attack'

DRM Free Games

GOG.com has DRM free games, many older ones, some newer. I pre-purchased Witcher 3 from them as a DRM free game. Some gaming companies have realized that DRM is probably losing them customers.

Fast And Furious 6 cammer thrown in slammer for nearly three years

Semantics

I realize a lot of you are really into saying that what this person did wasn't stealing, and semantically and legally (at least in the US and apparently in the UK) that would be technically correct. However, You're just nit-picking. What illegal copying and sales/distribution of movies and music does is deprive the legitimate owner of the IP of income, and in this case, making money by selling something that doesn't belong to the seller. To me, even though the guy making and selling the copies didn't deprive the owner of the physical movie he deprived him of money that could have been made from people who wanted to see it and maybe have their own copy to watch when they wanted. That may not technically be stealing, but it's certainly a kissing cousin of stealing.

Booze and bacon sarnies: A recipe for immortality?

Re: 20g of "processed meat"

I don't know about where you are, but here "processed meat" would be things like bologna, hot dogs, and other things where bits and parts are ground up and mashed into something people will eat. So to me, bacon is _not_ processed meat. Smoking, salting, etc. doesn't constitute processing since it just improves the bacon and doesn't dilute it with lesser cuts of the pig.. Neither does just grinding, like hamburger, since it's usually particular cuts like chuck roast that are ground.

Microsoft may slash price of Windows 8.1 on cheap 'slabs

Re: Don't they listen to Darwin?

Your example of feeding sparrows is bollocks. If you put out food for birds, it isn't going to save any weak birds that would have died naturally. The stronger sparrows are going to get the majority of the food you put out, not the weak ones. If the weak one were going to lose out on food available without you, they're still going to lose out on the food you provide.

As far as "Free market" goes, a large well financed company can afford to waste money on products sometimes. That's actually part of a free market. Of course, a large well financed company with a lousy product can out market a small company with a better product and put them out of business too. That's also a part of free market theory.

Microsoft Surface slabs borked by heat-induced DIM SCREEN OF DEATH

Microsoft _Has_ Made Good Hardware

I have a gamepad that is articulated in the middle that is great fun to use, and a Trackball Explorer that is really great also. Of course, they're both discontinued with the most recent OS version the game pad can be used with being XP. So maybe they got rid of all their good hardware people and removed their products so they could start fresh! (...and screw it up without interference!!)

Swollen Reg reader recounts FALSE WIDOW spider HORROR

Re: Well

Don't forget your electric racket for killing mosquitoes and other insects. Mine is something like this one, but uses D cell bateries: http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Creations-JB5285-Electronic-Zapper/dp/B000EPPFEC/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1385757051&sr=8-6&keywords=electric+racket

Btw, to the author: puffer fish can't poison you unless you eat them. So unless you encounter one trying to suicide by becoming sushi you should be safe. :-)

How to find OS X Mavericks' 43 hidden photogenic beauties

Re: Blimey

Apple hasn't ever charged for service packs either. Service packs don't include additional functionality or applications, just fixes to the code. At least that's all I ever got for a Microsoft Service Pack.

Congratulations on having a 9 month old Android with the latest OS. :-) I'm glad you have a phone manufacturer and carrier that update their phones. I sincerely wish All Android manufacturers and carriers would do this, at least for phones capable of the OS, so people would stop going on about it. It would also help Android users to have more secure phones with the latest bug fixes.

Robot WildCat slips its leash and bounds around parking lot

Re: OK

You've done a good job describing it. Dogs and cats are digitigrade walkers (walking on their toes with their heel in the air), while people are plantigrade walkers. We're looking at this video expecting, since it has four legs, that it will walk digitigrade (or unguligrade like horses).

Possessed baby monitor shouts obscenities at Texas tot

Re: Probably not hacked

Even if he didn't see the child's name on the walls, all he would have to do is listen to the parents using the child's name. Just because a child is deaf doesn't mean the parents don't talk to her.

Facebook turns tables on profile stalkers with News Feed tweak

Re: What I'd like

Ahh, so it's not just me!

Google SELLS OUT the INTERNET HIPPIES! AGAIN!

Re: Google are behaving very retarded on this; they know better, so have no excuses!.

Yeah, so we'll be charged by how much internet we use like water and power. They'll come promptly to fix problems, like Comcast... Oh wait!?!?!

Re: This guy is a muppet...

Now why must you insult muppets?

First burger made of TEST-TUBE MEAT to be eaten on August 5

I'm not sure what you mean by saying our digestive system is designed to eat meat. Are you trying to say we're carnivores? We aren't, we're omnivores. If we were carnivores we would have a much shorter digestive track and no grinding teeth. Our long digestive track and grinding teeth are specifically designed to get nutrition from fruits and grains. (Yes, grains. Despite what you've said we have evolved to consume grains, hence the teeth we have etc.) We also need proteins, such as meat, to be healthy. You are correct that what we need is a balance of nutrients to be healthy. Meats can be a part of that, but too much meat isn't good for us any more than too many sweets (aka carbohydrates.)

If this experiment works out, it at least would give us a way to create meat that is healthier for us, without all the antibiotics that current methods seem to prefer.

Bugs in beta weather model used to trash climate science

How can so many not see the article isn't about the validity of the software?

The author of El Reg's article is pointing out how this person seized on a paper done on what is essentially beta software as part of its testing to claim that climate modeling is wrong. Song-You Hong was testing the climate modeling software looking for problems that needed fixing. Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat decided that what the paper meant was that this paper proves that climate modeling doesn't work, and some of the commenters here apparently agree with that.

Seriously people, that paper was just saying "hey look, I found a bug in your _Beta_ software." End of story.

Boffins: Dolphins call each other NAMES. Not RUDE ones!

Re: to see if the named fish responded?

No that's not right. According to your reasoning:

All humans are mammals.

All dolphins are mammals.

All dolphins are fish.

Therefore, all humans are fish.

or

All oranges are fruit, therefore all fruit are oranges.

Feds charge man in $1m 'Dr Evil' scam to blackmail Mitt Romney

Re: Actually...the non-issue (IMO) is exactly what Obama wanted..

Citation on the costs of the Goodwill tour? Also, Atlas Shrugged basically says if you're poor you deserve it and if you're rich then screw everybody else. It's basic premise is "everybody for himself/herself," and that's exactly what Mitt did when working for Bain. Look at the documentation and you see that Mitt "saved" some companies by eliminating a lot of jobs and reducing the business' productivity and just gutted others. Yeah, that's who we want to "save" our economy.

TSA: Perv scanners now fully banished from US airports

Re: Prudishness wins over Safety

They didn't provide additional safety worth the hazard of being irradiated by an undisclosed amount of X-Rays. For the machines to show as detailed images as they were, the radiation hazard was much higher than claimed. It wasn't too cool that they not only didn't provide dosimetry to the TSA manning the machines, but actually discouraged its use.

Now it gets serious: Fracking could RUIN BEER

Re: She needs to visit Colorado

Oh, yeah! Let's all go an drink some diesel! After fracking companies insisted that they no longer used diesel, a known carcinogen, fracking fluid sampled was found to contain diesel. When I see the CEOs of fracking companies drinking fracking fluids every day, I'll believe it's safe.

More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7

3rd part desktop manager/start menu

I know this will probably get a lot of downvotes but... Linux has had to use 3rd party desktop managers/start menus since it started using a gui. Xwindows, KDE, Gnome, xfce, etc. are _all_ 3rd party code and not native parts of Linux. So I don't see using a 3rd party desktop gui as a big deal. I really like DesktopX and Windowblinds! :-) That being said, I don't currently have any plans to "upgrade" to Win8 ever. If I bought a windows tablet it might be usable, but it just doesn't appeal to me. I've used Windows since 3.1, and MS-DOS before that. I've used various flavors of (maybe I should say flavours) Linux and Mac OS. Even a little bit of actual UNIX and DEC and way back, CP/M, but I just don't see the appeal of TIFKAM.

NASA on alert: International Space Station springs a leak

Ammonia, you say?

Sounds like the space station is just taking a leak. (Oh come on, you know you were thinking it!)

Why are scribes crying just 'cos Google copied their books? asks judge

Re: As a publisher, Eric Flint has already addressed this issue...

Yes, I think this is a (rather transparent, to me) move by Google to divide up the copyright holders first, so they can grind them up in court and get to copy the books. What Google is doing seems to fall pretty squarely outside of fair use. They are copying the works without the authors permission for use by others.

Fraudster gets ten years after selling fake 'ionic charge' bomb detectors

Re: I disagree with most people here. @DJO

Actually BG, it's _you_ who need to re-read the article since it pretty plainly states that higher ups (i.e. foreign gov't officials) involved in the purchases were bribed and so in on the scam. The people using them were the injured parties, perhaps literally, and so he does indeed deserve much more than the judge was able to give him.

Microsoft Xbox gaffe reveals cloudy arrogance

If they would ony do it right, it might not be completely terrible...

Just after Diablo III came out I was playing it stand-alone when my connection to their server dropped out momentarily and dumped me out of the game. If they would only store the playing info locally and use that if the server connection drops it would be so much better. Sync the info from the local machine back to the server when the connection is good again, and then the player's progress isn't lost.

Oz library finds Lance Armstrong books a new home: The fiction section

Re: Can someone please enlighten me

...and what exactly does coloured cheek makeup have to do with it? ;->

iPhone 'Do Not Disturb' bug to self-destruct on Monday

Re: "trouncing Venus and Serena Williams"

Don't call me Surely!

El Reg acquires wildly dangerous laser cannon (with lightsabre option)

Re: i want one

I don't remember ever reading about laser propulsion of space ships, but there was an actual project for using nuclear explosions to launch a spacecraft.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Project-Orion-Spaceship-1957-1965-Penguin/dp/0140277323/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351770011&sr=8-1

Re: Holograms?

I had a class where we did this in college. Made simple holograms using methods that weren't that difficult, but did require an industrial laser. (This was ~ 1991 or 1992 if I remember correctly.)

Apple pounces on Samsung doc as proof of 'slavish copy' claims

Re: Confused about what they are buying.

I wish they would grow up and quit doing this too, but I understand why Apple is doing this. I don't know about GB patent law, but from what I understand of US law if the patent owner doesn't vigorously defend a patent and it becomes ubiquitous then they essentially give up the right to the patent. Same thing with trademarks, if they don't defend them from the beginning and later decide they must because it is actually costing them money then their opponent can demonstrate that they haven't been defending and win through that argument. An example would be Xerox, the original developer of the gui, can't sue any other companies for aspects of their gui that were patented because they haven't done so for an extended time. If someone has a better handle on this, feel free to correct me as I'm not an expert on this by any definition.

Hubble finds fifth moon orbiting Pluto

Re: Moon vs really big asteroid

Actually that's still under contention. The definition you quote was made up by astronomers (those who study stars), but a lot of the the planetologists (those who study _planets_) don't agree with that new definition. See http://greatexperiments.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/what-is-a-planet-the-planetologists-speak/ There are other places out there that discuss this, I first heard about the controversy in an interview of a planetologist.

Kaspersky: Apple security is like Microsoft's in 2002

Re: WHAT!

...and exactly how do you _know_ the machines are un-infected? I had a friend a number of years ago who wasn't running updated av software or anti-spyware on his Windows machine (w2k to be exact) who thought he was doing fine. When he complained to me how his machine didn't seem to be as fast as it used to be, I recommended he run some particular av & anti-spyware programs on it and he found that he was infested with spyware & virii out the wazoo! He thought his machine was clean, until he actually checked it. So how 'bout you run some anti-spyware/av software checks on your "clean" machines and get back to us with the results. The only way they could be truly clean, without protection, is if they were never connected to the internet.

Lenovo forced to expand 'flaming' PC recall

Chinese Outsourcing To Mexico?

So apparently, Chinese company Lenovo has outsourced the construction of these machines to Mexico and gotten defective products? Another fail for outsourcing!

Exploding dinosaur theory EXPLODED

Re: Sorry to be pedantic...

Thanks for helping me to avoid it. My first thought when reading ichthyosaur was... "That's not a dinosaur!"