Posts by richardcox13

Pakistan's Punjab province tells citizens to get jabbed or have their SIM card blocked

Re: Momento mori

> 30% of the delta variant deaths in England last week were fully vaccinated people ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57441677 )

You've miss-read the article.

There are:

- People without any vaccination

- People are partially vaccinated

- People who are fully vaccinated

If almost two thirds of people who... are in the first group, it does not follow the remainder are in the third. It was been widely stated that those in the second group have relatively little protection against delta, so likely most of the third remaining are in that group.

And remember maximum protection occurs 2–3 weeks after the second does.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

A put down that is highly informative! Have an e-one on me!

Six years in the making, Vivaldi Mail arrives alongside version 4.0 of the company's browser

The Vivaldi team was born out of the ashes of the Opera team...

Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android

Vivaldi

This would be anything to do with Vivaldi adding support (in preview) over the last few updates?

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

Re: This is all rather confusing

> For a start, there's nothing (in principle) you can do with WebAssembly that you can't do with Javascript

True of any Turing complete language: they are all theoretically as capable as each other. However I'll leave wearing a hair-shirt for the masochists. JavaScript is not a good choice where significant numeric processing is needed (eg. decoding a media stream).

Train operator phlunks phishing test by teasing employees with non-existent COVID bonus

Re: But isn't this what (real) criminals would do?

From the article,

> The deliberately inauthentic email first thanked staff[…]

So they did fall for it, and clicked through because their "too good to be true so it isn't" check failed.

Re: But isn't this what (real) criminals would do?

Stock and stock options are a different matter.

As, you found, the benefit can be limited.

And, there are potentially a whole load of tax implications that a cash bonus (given PAYE in the UK) does not imply.

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

VB5 and 6 did keep me busy for several years. By writing C++ to get around VB's very restricted subset of COM and using the much more powerful debugger to debug things that the VB6 debugger couldn't help with.

One of the latter cases was the first bug I used the internet to help solve... using Lynx (no GUI browser for me!) to find the offset of the reference count in VB6 UI components.

And thus work out which set of components were stuck with circular references (app worked fine in the VB6 IDE, but the built version would crash on exit every time).

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

> You pick the right typeface for the purpose.

That would mean people knowing the first thing about typography. Which clearly they don't. I suspect that 99% of all documents use whatever is`the default in the application used to initially create the document.

And this applies to every spreadsheet, presentation, etc. as well.

Re: Skeena is the least worst?

> 'e' in Bierstadt

And now cannot un-see... they're all compromised in one way or another so not an easy call to have only one.

I need to fine a long doc I need to read, and try different paragraphs in different options to check out readability at smaller sizes. As the default we'll end up see a lot of text top read in whatever the choice is.

Re: Copyright

IANAL: Copyright only applies to the names of fonts, not the letter shapes.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: Bunch of wusses

That's easy.

Expert level is approaching a contra-rotating roundabout (in my case Hemel Hempstead when I used to live ther) and choosing which way to go around based on current traffic levels (generally anti-clockwise was a bit quicker as anyone unfamiliar with the junction would tend to default to clockwise).

Watch this: Ingenuity – Earth's first aircraft to fly on another planet – take off on Mars

Making travel to Mars cheap and routine

Now airport code JZRO has been assigned. How long before Ryanair et al realise it is a cheaper alternative to more local airports (tax free!)?

Return seat for £10, plus optional extras of £100b for little things like life support.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

When trying to get out of a hole...

... stop digging,

But this seems to be more of a case of an inwardly facing organisation doubling down on its approach and keeping the internal echo chamber going.

UK government opens vaccine floodgates to over-45s, NHS website predictably falls over

Re: over 45s - over 50s

When I (over 50 that I am) started using the internet, the introductory document started "The Internet is not just Usenet".

Where's my coat, it's the one with the Gopher RFCs in the pocket.

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

Re: Upto 6TB of Ram....

I wish I could afford to accept that challenge!

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: Your starter for 10...

Based on his re-tweeting: No.

Alongside others of "I created something (possibly trivial) and my descendants should live off that IP for eternity" brigade.

The ruling certainly opens up more potential for "fair use" claims, but I suspect far less than the some of the hyperbole currently going around would suggest.

Chrome 90 goes HTTPS by default while Firefox injects substitute scripts to foil tracking tech

Re: No, this is wrong

"Default to https" does not mean "caa not do http".

You'll just have to type "http://" at the start of the URL yourself. A useful reminder that any communication is subject to interception and man in the middle attacks.

Google looks at bypass in Chromium's ASLR security defense, throws hands up, won't patch garbage issue

Re: Anything unfixable isn't a bug, it's a feature.

I've never seen anyone claim ASLR is anything more than a road bump: making the attackers job harder, not impossible.

Which makes this decision by Google doubly poor. Making attackers harder is still making attacks harder.

Project Bicep: Microsoft muscles in on Terraform's territory to manage Azure resources with code

Bicep generates ARM templates, and those templates are idempotent.

Big Tech workers prefer 3 days at home, 2 in the office. We ask Reg readers: What's your home-office balance?

Re: work from home does not work

> Give me thumbs down guys

Indeed. There you go.

It works for me. Really well,. I was already usually having calls remotely from the office because teams were distributed across offices anyway. So while I do miss office chats a bit, they were mostly the casual kind. The time (and cost) saving from not commuting more than makes up for any destress time coming home (and once the light and weather improves a daily walk as I finish works even better than the drive for that decompression).

The benefit of not having other people wandering around across my eyeline (whoever through open plan feeds creativity clearly never worked in a role requiring focused mental effort) is enormous (alerts from Teams far less so). Plus, despite the machine in the office, my home coffee is more to my taste.

All of that said, that is me. And I am not everyone (thankfully).

A Microsoft bork at the heart of The Oracle? Whatever next?

> The enmity between Microsoft and Oracle

Given, a little east of The Oracle (shopping centre) Oracle and Microsoft's offices face each other in a business park.

(A bit like Dell and HP in Bracknell.)

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Re: Test Cricket and the Linux Kernel

But India Business Machines?

Admittedly the Indian's prefer the limit overs versions, but still they do plat tests.

Microsoft delays disabling Basic Authentication for several Exchange Online protocols 'until further notice'

Re: Standards?

> Microsith don't get to set internet standards, only the IETF can do that

W3C would like a word.

Anyone can set a "standard", the question is whether anyone will follow that standard. (National standards bodies and ISO are different: based on statute and inter-governmental treaties.)

Smells like Teams spirit: New platform Viva builds in all the tools Microsoft thinks staff need to succeed

Internal portals tend to be either created by one group to suit their immediate needs which are unlikely to meet even their needs in the future. Or defined my management based on their idea of what their staff want. This second option only beats the first by being unless for everyone.

Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks

Re: Tab stacks are a poor man's solution

The previous update changed the way tab stacks operate, which did makes things significantly better. Two level... we'll see.

Re: Some people

> I know a few who have 40 or 50 tabs open at any time. Now they can have 80-100!

80–100 seems quite normal to me. Maybe with this I can push towards 200!

I know I can reduce the number, but that takes effort. I can give up when ever I want to, but I don't want to. Give me more tabs, I need more...

"Nurse!"

Stack Overflow 2019 hack was guided by advice from none other than... Stack Overflow

"One does not simple break into Stack Overflow without constantly looking up how to do so on Stack Overflow"

Recursive attack!

Google's Alphabet sticks a pin in its Loon internet broadband service

Re: Why am I not surprised?

In large scale disaster cases, as soon as a runway is available the relief agencies start by flying in the support infrastructure to enable the logistics of the relief effort.

The first things delivered are likely to be communications etc. to set up a temporary replacement control tower (radios, generators, shelter, radar, ….). A StaLlink[1] base station to provide WiFi/GSM in the local area isn't much of a stretch.

[1] One of the use cases for StarLink is a community connection, costs and bandwidth shared. Not everyone can afford, or needs, their own dedicated link.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

Re: Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Please go back and re-read.

At the start: looking for scientific certainty (which doesn't exist) and not include others in policy process.

In the middle not asking for scientific advice at all.

Ie. the government looks for scientific advice when it wants someone to blame when having to make unpopular choices. But when they make popular choices they don't check if it is a good idea.

UK finally signs off on Square Kilometre Array Observatory Convention

Re: Nasty hot places?

Having the HQ in Cheshire will help balance that out. If a staff member is too hot they take a turn at HQ and shortly they will dream of hot and dry!

Not just Microsoft: Auth turns out to be a point of failure for Google's cloud, too

Re: Redundancy

No way to do that for things like Docs and Gmail (or any other file store or mailbox) without adding a lot of complexity.

Adding some sort of synchronisation between providers on top of a third party services has a serious possibility of making the whole thing less reliable.

For things that naturally scale out it is different, but those are special cases.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

https://twitter.com/internetofshit has had a busy time...

Re: Raining again?

Except when it comes to summer... and all the gardeners start moaning after 30min of hot weather.

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

> Just to be a pedant, don't you mean that it could Fluoridate oxygen?

No. The reaction is a oxidation-reduction reaction. The oxidiser is reduced while the other reactants are oxidised.

Multiple elements, generally on the upper right hand side of the periodic table (but not the noble gases) can act as oxidisers; chlorine is a common example.

Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

> Liquid Oxygen, non-flammable = technically true

Note true. Fluorine can oxidise oxygen.

Messing with oxygen-fluorine compounds needs to be left to experts who have suicidal tendencies (such compounds tend to be explosively hypergolic with almost anything else).

(My coat... the one with "Ignition!" in the pocket.)

SpaceX Starship blows up on landing, Elon Musk says it's the data that matters and that landed just fine

Re: Minor correction

See Scott saying that...

Re: Minor correction

Oxygen in a high energy environment is such fun: will react with almost anything...

Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?

Chips Have no Implication of Potato Starch

So much processing applied that there is little remaining link to the original ingredients.

UK coronavirus tier postcode-searching tool yanked offline as desperate Britons hunt for latest lockdown details

Re: This is easy to scale... or should be

Exactly, with less that 3000 this could be done client side: just have the current list be a static file on a CDN (with suitable – few hours – cache). Then do the filtering on the client.

Re: Managed to look up mine

Tier is not based on local infection rates or changes in them. Likely set as easy to describe verbally.

For how much local situation does not match up to the tiers see https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1331961271323942915.

This is easy to scale... or should be

A complete list of postcodes, with a tier number is thousands of small entries. Just put it in memory sorted, and binary search. Nothing changes, so no need for anything clever with multi-threading.

But this is gov.uk so it will be something massively complex and not easily scalable.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

No.

It is a measure.

Eg. gauge pins used for measuring gaps in machining. Or a gauge theory in physicas in one based on a measure (eg.likelihood this point in space is an electron).

Canadian uni blames users, 'isolated technical problems' as new Workday system fails to pay 700 temps on time

Re: Dear Devs.

Developers rarely get to choose the UI.

I've had to develop some terrible UIs, but that's what the customer wants. One can only ask "are you sure?" so many times before being rude.

NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024

Re: Purely on grounds of practicality

> monoliths

Soup dragons are more of an immediate issue. And NASA has previously been beaten back by the Clangers.

UK govt advert encouraging re-skilling for cyber jobs implodes spectacularly

Some improved versios online

https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1315621064039424000

The replies are perhaps even better.

Square Kilometre Array signs off on construction plans – UK last holdout before building phase begins

Re: "a pair of supercomputers mightier than any currently in existence"

I don't think these will be quite up to that level (it seems unlikely either singly or together they could persuade a legless Arcturan Megadonkey to go for a walk).

So perhaps The Great Hyperlobic Omnicognate Neutron Wrangler and the Millard Gargantubrain? After all, relatively speaking, this is packet calculator stuff.

(Mine's the one with the radio scripts in the pocket.)

Amazon makes 850,000m² bet that its people will get off the kitchen table and back to an office

Re: Why offices?

In big organisations where middle management is heavily about office politics: a significant proportion.

There are plenty of exceptions, but remember for many a step into management mostly shows it was a misstep, but organisational culture makes management the only route to senioriy.

Bored binge-watchers bork beleaguered broadband by blasting bandwidth: Global average speeds down 6.31%

There is alliteration, and there are El Reg headlines.

+1 for the subeditor (or to whomever is to blame).

Firefox 79: A thin release for regular users, but plenty for developers to devour

Re: Focus on developer tools

I find myself increasingly using FF, and the DevTools are definitely much improved.

Often use Chrome by default because I don't use it as either my primary or secondary browser so no issue with non-dev use interfering. But each use of FF makes it more likely that'll become my initial target when developing.