Posts by Anomalous Cowshed

China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds

Beaullocks

I'm afraid that this article was...see title.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Well said about the water companies. About the storage of hydrogen, may I be so bold as to point out that you may have overlooked the small size of the hydrogen molecules which makes it able to leak out of containers particularly difficult to store...

Those "worthless pieces of paper churned out by politics" Sir, are a marvel of science, it's just that people like you are so cynical, you never bother looking into it. Why, imagine a sheet of paper that generates hot air, any amount of hot air you want, you just need to tweak the text! It could be a source of limitless energy, freedom from those passé laws of thermodynamics. A single manifesto could heat a whole neighbourhood, a whole city for the entire winter, year after year. And that's just local politics. Imagine what it could do with a few words of national politics on it. Yet people like you choose to criticise and totally overlook the benefits.

How dare you challenge the benefits of electric cars

Oooops, I thought I was clicking "report abuse" but I ended up upvoting! This is not right, the two buttons are too close together... They're not properly labelled! What do I do now? Etc.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

You propose this, and it sounds fine, but what do you propose to replace it with? How will data be organised? Accesed? Managed? Without an attractive, workable alternative system, it's hyperbole.

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Re: Red flags

The company was trusted to send strangers - its employees - into vulnerable people's homes to provide services that they needed and paid for. The company had a duty of care to safeguard these vulnerable people, who assumed that it was performing its duty of care whenever they let in one of its technicians. The company failed to abide by its duty of care, and exposed customers to employees who were dishonest, who committed crimes against them, and who constituted a potential danger to their lives; this failing culminated in one of these vulnerable people being murdered.

It strikes at the very core of the way of life we live, in which people, especially vulnerable people, depend on total strangers to provide services and repair things for them. It exposes the fallacy of all the safeguards that turn out to be merely imaginary, and it creates a serious threat of destabilisation of modern society as a result.

Against that, $ 7.3 billion is not an inordinate penalty, as its sheer size is likely to encourage other trusted service provider companies to improve their procedures and generally enhance the security of millions of people across the Western World.

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

Chinese / Cheese

Every time I hear the English word "Chinese" , as in "Chinese government" i, t reminds me of "cheese" with all the associated connotations. This doesn't happen in any other language, inly English (e. g. in French, "chinois" I has no relation with "fromage"). Is there any chance we could do something about this, like use a different word for either Chinese or cheese?

Hospitals cancel outpatient appointments as Irish health service struck by ransomware

Re: Sanctions?

A thousand upvotes for you would be too little, unfortunately I am only allowed 1

IBM says it's built the world's first 2nm semiconductor chips

Chip in vaccine

People used to say I had a chip on my shoulder, now Bill Gates wants to put it inside my arm? Is that what they call embedded technology?

Microsoft spearheads a whole new genre with installation on the side of a Lyon tunnel

No, "that utter pile of dreck has crashed again and it's starting to bust my balls".

That's rather mild. I once worked in an office in Paris where all the young trendies used to say: "Hé, mon ordinateur a craché !" For a while I thought this was a unique property of French computers.

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

I suppose that with that many employees, and a computer being a computer, after all, whether in 1969 or 2020, the performances can't have changed that much in just 51 years, they should have been able to solve the cypher. It's shocking. Absolutely shocking. That they did not. /s

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Boot of 3 cubits

My son, blessed be thy chariot and its boot of 3 cubits!

Huawei's UK code reviewers say Chinese mega-corp is still totally crap at basic software security. Bad crypto, buffer overflows, logic errors...

Silly security errors in code

= plausible deniability if someone connected with a certain Asian superpower should happen to exploit them...

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: Cola and orange juice

And tomatoes. Watch out for tomatoes

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Blue Screen

Microblue ?

MicroBSOD ?

Billionaires showered with wealth as experts say global economy set for long and deep recession

Actually, in countries like the uk, tge lion's share of the economy is not people making things, it is people buying things...so you might be surprised.

Japan would like to offer 5G firms cheap loans – because subsidies are only bad when Huawei gets them

I'm not the kind who usually goes in for dieting...

But cheap loans? Subsidies? If it also includes as much sushi and noodles as you can eat, then that's one hell of a diet. Count me in!

Vodafone chief speaks out after 5G conspiracy nuts torch phone mast serving Nightingale Hospital in Brum

Two weeks ago, feeling that something had to be done rather than just sitting around at home doing nothing, I sent out a chain letter to my friends, urging people to wear masks and to put pressure on the government to produce more test kits so that we could beat, not the virus itself, but the spread of the epidemic. I asked them to join me in volunteering to work for free for such an effort, and to forward this letter to as many people as possible.

This is what one of them sent me back in reply:

"There is a lot going on in the background which has made me very anxious.

So many factors that am not sure that I can be eloquent.

There is the rise of 5G and its introduction in Wuhan and whether there is an interaction with the virus. Either way 5G is very bad news indeed.

Bill Gates, Soros and maybe a few other billionaires with an agenda to bump off the elderly - is this part of New World Order, with open borders, Marxist, left wing dominance.

Chinese Communist Party is responsible for this virus either maliciously ie deliberately in a lab or accidentally in the crazy primitive wet markets or escaped from a lab .....in any case they suppressed info from rest of the world for 6 weeks or more thereby allowing the world to become infected.

Shanghai, Bejing etc hardly suffered at all.

China has very quickly recovered and now is buying cheap US and British shares and western economies are being decimated and personal livelihoods destroyed.

Deomcrats agenda to overthrow Trump - screwing up the economy was in their plans in January.

Thousands die every year from the flu, the numbers from this virus may be even less.

A better policy would have been to quarantine the over 70s or over 65s even plus all those younger with existing illnesses.

There is very much a left wing thinking that has been allowed to unduly influence both Boris and Trump.

Fear, panic and bullying police state has been drummed into us, unnaturally so.

There is indeed something going on ....."

Another friend said,"I've spoken to my husband, and while we would like to help you, we feel that..."

Needless to say, the chain letter didn't get very far, but at least I subsequently read that the UK government's policy is becoming increasingly aligned with my [unheard] recommendations.

UK MPs fume after Huawei posts open letter stating: 'Disrupting our involvement in the 5G rollout would do Britain a disservice'

The problem with China...

The problem with China is that they are so good at what they do, that it's making us stop doing what we do and become dependent on them. Actually, that's our problem. Just because someone can do something complicated for half the price, possibly thanks to state subsidies, doesn't mean that we should give up doing it ourselves. Just because someone can produce some plastic tat for pennies in a sweatshop on the other side of the world, doesn't mean we should buy tons of it and shower it upon our children as presents, and upon our land and seas as waste. And just because a monolithic and wanton regime has eventually become very powerful and rich on the back of all these misguided transactions, doesn't mean that we should continually kiss their arse in the hope that some pennies will fall out to fill the pockets of our politicians and businessmen.

Planet Computers has really let things slide: Firm's third real-keyboard gizmo boasts 5G, Android 10, Linux support

Re: CEO Dr Janko Mrsic-Flogel

This guy was a legend on the Sinclair QL. I used to dream of equalling his programming powers...

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Re: Flying

I agree that purely from a formal interpretation of my post, your corrections and explanations stand. But only if interpreting it from a strictly formal point of view.

I would like to answer your points as follows:

1. Safety

Does the fact that no crashes occur in a given year mean that you are safe? Or are you, effectively, "on a wing and a prayer", and betting on the statistical unlikeliness of an accident occurring, though should an accident occur, you're unlikely to survive it?

How safe, given the endless cost-cutting, do you think you are when flying in cramped conditions on a plane?

How much of a "dream" do you think you are living when you are going through the overall experience?

Conclusion: would it not be sensible to reduce the amount of times we fly in airplanes, at least a bit? The current attitude towards flying - that it is a normal part of life - is surely merely the outcome of massive marketing and advertising campaigns to induce us into adopting what some might contend are unnatural and unsustainable behaviours, in order to increase the profits of giant corporations.

Which leads me to:

2. When I refer to the civil aviation industry, I am not only addressing the airlines alone, but also the travel companies, hotels, tourism organisations, airport operators, the service providers to airlines and airports, including the providers of the security staff, suppliers of equipment, etc.

Flying

These days civil aviation has become a heavily standardised, say even industrialised process. passengers are squeezed and processed into flimsy flying tubes of aluminium wirh minimum levels of comfort and safety, in order for a chain of big corporations to achieve minimum costs and maximum profits.

There is also the dismal airport experience.

And now, this!

Is it really necessary to put ourselves through such a stressful experience on a regular basis? Or can we try to do without it, a bit?

Asteroid Bennu is flinging particles of dust and rock from its surface – and scientists can't work out why

3 m / second

That's about 11 km / hour. Not exactly stellar speed...is the thing rotating? Is something crashing into it? Is it moving through space? Then 3 m / second is a quantity that can be described as a mere error correction.

China and Russia join to battle 'illegal internet content,' which means what you fear it does

Re: A Silicon curtain is descending...

I was given a sweet recently whose wrapper has an engraving of Mr. Putin's countenance with the words "President of the Russian Federation" in English around it.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Re: conspiracy theories

Anyone can allege that something didn't happen, and people will start believing it: for instance, the Apollo Moon landings, the Holocaust.

It's difficult to debunk a conspiracy theory. You cannot simply say: "oh yes it did happen". That's just not enough. It's the equivalent of the conspiracy theorist's gambit, in reverse.

However, I believe that if you go about it rationally, you can have a shot at it.

You have to ask yourself, on the balance of probabilities, given the connected elements that are NOT CHALLENGED by the conspiracy theory (in the case of moon landings: a huge rocket as tall as a skyscraper rising up into the air with a massive fiery burst, a lack of denial of the Apollo Moon landings by even the enemies of the United States at the time and to this very day, a lack of recanting by any of the astronauts, even 50 years after the landings, lots of satellites orbiting the planet in space, lots of smaller rockets that launch satellites and that send travellers into orbit, Kepler's rules, the figures for the distance between the Earth and the Moon) and then tangential elements to establish context and scale (such as the huge number of silvery tubes with wings that fly between cities on earth at untold speeds, conveying hundreds of people over thousands of miles in a matter of hours, the incredible technologies that enable miniaturisation of electronics to the point that we can each carry the equivalent of a 1970s supercomputer in our pockets, the terrible power of atomic bombs, that can reduce entire cities to rubble, etc.), whether you think it is believable that mankind could have pulled off such a feat.

I think on the balance of probabilities, based on such an analysis, it is.

If the conspiracy theory denies ALL directly linked and tangential elements, then you have to ask yourself whether their position is realistic or constitutes bad faith or a delusion.

There's a saying that goes like this: "The more you deny reality, the more mad you are." Not necessarily wrong, but mad - i.e. imbued with an alternative interpretation of the world relative to the general world view.

Wake me up before you Gogo ... so I can jump out: Kenyan MP takes on aeroplane flatulence

Butt: Old Germanic (dialect) saying:

"Wer gut Greps und Furts, brauch kaan Urtz"*

"Whoever farts well and burps well, that person needs no doctor"

* Spelling accuracy not guaranteed

Call Windows 10 anything you like – Microsoft seems to

Re: "Naturally, all user data is wiped with this option"

"Kind of like asking a cockroach to conceive the notion of flight".

Believe me, there are places in this world where giant cockroaches HAVE come to terms with the notion of flight in a rather dramatic way. I used to live in one of these places.

I'll call it a piece of s*1t

I have a relatively new computer, and every few weeks it seems, the thing updates itself peremptorily, and every time I shudder about what the consenquences will be for the usability of my computer and my applications.

What will it do, this time? I ask myself. After the last update, which was a few weeks ago, it took smooth scrolling away from my Word for Windows 2003 program (which I keep using because of massive investment in VBA applications that would take me hundreds of hours to convert). It used to scroll properly, now it's all jittery and almost unusable in this respect.

It also has a tendency to restart on its own volition "for updating", sometimes while I am in the middle of a session, or have popped to the kitchen or bathroom, and I lose my data.

Every time I back up onto hard drives, it crashes with a BSOD, and now it doesn't just crash right after the backing up, but it *chooses* when to do so - e.g. 4 hours later, so that I am completely unprepared and lose more work.

This is a terrible OS, and, frankly, the attitude behind it feels like an insult.

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Boeing reacts cunningly to the deadly crash of the XXX airliner

The airplane crashes? People are scared to go on it? Airlines don't want to buy it as a result?

Solution:

1. recall the aircraft...in the sense of calling it by a new name = a brand new aircraft after each crash!

2. Airlines rebadge the new plane

3. Passengers relaxed.

4. Share price up, investors happy.

...

5. Profit!!!

No Huawei out: Prez Trump's game of chicken with China has serious consequences

ARM, the Japanese chip maker

Insidious and funny but inevitably true...

Other examples:

Lotus, the legendary Malaysian car marque

Jaguar, the Indian luxury car maker...

Cadburys, the famous Swiss maker of chocolate cream eggs...

What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up

Re: Now Uber is going to face the harsh reality of Wall Street

The very point of companies like uber and amazon is to use extensive capital to ransack an economic sector by pricing services below cost, in order to pump up the shares and, having redistributed wealth from the ransacked sector to the initial investors, to enrich them at everyone else's expense. It is pure greed and legal robbery.

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

statue

Oh, they can keep their statue of liberty. We have the statue of limitation. It may start with an L but it's a longer word.

Take a hike: Grab a flask of tea – South Korea is opening hiking trails in the DMZ

Why does everybody always talk about custard creams and never about bourbon creams, my favourites? Why the discrimination? Nobody has a kind word to say about these deadly but magnificent biscuits?

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

Re: I would expect a longer process for re-certification

The big problem is this: regardless of what all these companies say, safety is, at best, the last of the airlines' concerns, far behind fuel efficiency, cutting costs, being able to cram more mugs aboard each aircraft, being able to monetise more services and features previously provided free of charge and taken for granted. At worst, it is merely optional, as demonstrated by the revelations that several safety features are offered as optional extras.

And yet safety should be the main concern. By all means sell cheaper versions of aircraft with less fuel-efficient engines, or less efficient stacking of the seats in them. But let ALL the aircraft have every proven safety feature as standard. And let people, who have come to regard air travel as a kind of glorified bus service, see to their safety and clamour for it, or stop using this means of transportation. It may be touted as the safest way of travelling, but when something goes wrong, or someone decides to cut the slightest corner, which they seem to be doing rather liberally, these days, your life as a passenger is forfeit.

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

Collaborators

The worst place for this is France.

In that country, if you want to have a salaried employment, you have no choice but to be a "collaborateur"!

PC makers: Intel CPU shortages are here to stay ... for six months

Re: Pah... when I was a kid...

When I was a kid...I spent £400 on a 4 Mb module to double my Toshiba laptop's memory, and then I sent it back for a refund because the sheer cost could not be justified and there didn't seem to be any improvement in performance anyway.

Day two – and Windows 10 October 2018 Update trips over Intel audio

Re: Windows is awful

To Butonkeh: thanks, I will try what you recommended!!

Re: Windows is awful

I agree that Windows is getting worse and worse in many respects and that Windows 10 is simply a study in alienation for tech-savvy people.

But, as a near-beginner, I keep having problems working with Linux.

Every time I try to install Linux (other than in a VM), I cannot get the wifi to work. It works fine with wired internet, but nothing I do, whether by intuition, common sense or following posts on the Internet, solves the issue. It also tends to freeze half the time when recovering from sleep mode, and I have to reboot the machine. And also there seems to be no way to get some applications (Firefox, etc.) to have bigger text in their menus - the content is fine. The main application UI is all microscopic squiggles. Other than that, I would gladly work in Linux only and dunk Windows. Especially for programming purposes...

The strife of Brian: Why doomed Intel boss's ex86 may not be the real reason for his hasty exit

Re: They could have used the "He said Jehova" excuse instead

I once got slapped by a pretty girl in a foreign country after I said "Oh, thank you!"

Beardy Branson: Wacky hyperloop tube maglev cheaper than railways

Re: Usual Beardie/Virgin BS

How dare you be so critical and sarcastic on a serious publication such as this?

Britain to slash F-35 orders? Erm, no, scoffs Lockheed UK boss

“Add that to the fact that significant money has been spent on two carriers, two very large carriers - there is a very strong commitment to having those carriers available or at least one of those carriers available at all times"

> "A whole carrier available, at all times - are you sure that's feasible for only £6.5 billion?"

"OK - maybe not a whole carrier, but at least half of one of those carriers...or a quarter...or a percentage of one of those carriers comprised between the said quarter and 0%, available at all times."

> "Ah, now that sounds more realistic!"

I've got way too much cash, thinks Jeff Bezos. Hmmm, pay more tax? Pay staff more? Nah, let's just go into space

The problem is - there are a select group of nouveau-riche multi-billionnaires around whose businesses are so successful, they are despoiling all the value from local businesses in many countries, and effectively redistributing income / profits from neighbourhoods, communities, and cities, to mega-rich invididuals and powerful shareholders. Amazon (one of the best examples of a monolithic business destroying small local businesses, high streets and pushing down wages); uber (destroying the livelihood of thousands of hard-working professionals by offering cheaper services and paying rubbish wages). All these companies offer extreme convenience to the consumer, much improved over wht existed before, and therefore it is almost impossible for most people to resist the temptation to use their services. But this is like the devil's temptation: at the end of the day, most consumers must earn their living too, and such companies will eventually threaten that livelihood, and plunge them into poverty, making them unable to afford much convenience. And I have not even touched upon Google (near monopoly of online advertising, with ability to make or break struggling small businesses through 'keywords' buying, frightening perceived monopoly on truth, destroyer of libraries...) and Facebook (with its huge, illicit stores of personal data and near monopoly of human interactions among certain stratas of society - the most vulnerable ones unfortunately).

This may be termed progress, but it's happened before, and the results aren't very progressive for the vast majority of people affected.

User fired IT support company for a 'typo' that was actually a real word

"Mangler"

Manager >> Manger >> Pig at trough?

Ex-GCHQ boss: All the ways to go after Russia. Why pick cyberwar?

Unsavoury regimes

Nowadays, every regime is an unsavoury regime.

Corollary: No wonder sugar is such a problem in the modern world!

Slingshot malware uses cunning plan to find a route to sysadmins

Re: Sort of points out that winning against a multi-faceted adversary will never win

What you say is only correct because the defenders use standard processes that are predictable: "common practice". Once you depart from this predictability, an attack becomes much harder and potentially less effective.

Pharma bro Martin Shkreli to miss 2024 Paris Olympics

Re: Justice is not always as blind as it should be

Judges clever? Doling out justice? When was the last time you were in court, Sir?

'Quantum supremacy will soon be ours!', says Google as it reveals 72-qubit quantum chip

Re: @Dave 126What's the application?

Nobody will EVER give you such answers. Instead they'll refer you to pure maths papers or lectures, in which abstract mathematical concepts are discussed. But implementation? Means, methods? Practical info? No chance. After all, quantum computing is homeopathic IT.

Talk down to Siri like it's a mere servant – your safety demands it

How about...

...Don't talk to Siri, at all?

ICO probes universities accused of using private data to target donation campaigns

Re: This is nothing new.

I was once called by a student from my old UK college. She said she was part of a new programme to connect students to old alumnuses (or whatever the blighters are called) and asked me for "advice" about life, given that I was an older, more experienced man.

I took the bait like a complete mug, not realising that I was falling for a classic hook and line trick.

Here I was, waxing lyrical about the meaning of life, and she drawing me out further and further, when she turned the conversation smoothly round and said something along the lines of "you know, we want everybody to have the same opportunities as you've had. To achieve this, he college wants to build a theatre and drama centre. Can you make a contribution?".

At this point, you know you've been played a fool, and to avoid feeling ridicule, you would normally offer to make a contribution, and the call being recorded, it would be a firm commitment.

A firm commitment to an academic institution that happens to have an endowment of £250,000,000, not including the priceless grounds, buildings and possessions of the college itself. From someone struggling to make ends meet. For building a "drama centre".