Posts by arctic_haze

NASA renames dark-energy telescope after its first Chief of Astronomy and Mother of Hubble: Nancy Grace Roman

Re: What have the Romans ever done for us?

I actually wondered if the name will not be shortened to Roman Telescope in most non-official contexts.

Re: "The Coronagraphic Instrument is an exoplanet hunter"

Actually, coronaviruses took their name in the 1960s from the Solar corona someone thought they are similar to..

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

Re: User education

I noticed the same today. I informed the IT guys that I have myself solved the problem I had asked them to look into and got a reply "Does it work now?"

Thought you were done after Tuesday's 115-fix day? Not yet: Microsoft emits SMBv3 worm-cure crisis patch

SMB

This service is something that's need switched off / blocked / firewalled as soon as a new Windows computer is first switched on.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

I have seen the green flash many times in California and twice in Europe.

Hey, Brits. Your Google data is leaving the EU before you are: Hoard to be shipped from Ireland to US next month

Am I a Brit in the Goolge's mind?

I do have a Google account which lists English (UK) as default, I gave them no address. Does it make the account British?

Microsoft Teams starts February with a good, old-fashioned TITSUP*

Another expired certificate?

Microsoft mastered forgetting about that. It became a sort of tradition.

Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program

Re: Good, good.

Democracy? Except for Scotland where 2/3 voters opted to stay.

Remember that 2024 Moon thing? How about Mars in 2033? Authorization bill moots 2028 for more lunar footprints

At the current rate, NASA will return to the Moon during the lifetime of Jean Luc Picard in the 24th century.

Ever wondered what Microsoft really thought about the iPad? Ex-Windows boss spills beans

Win95 didn't really work for them. It wasn't until Win98 OSR2 that it worked somewhat properly.

What you mean is stability. But not financial success. People were buying Windows 95 like crazy. Yes, ordinary people who actually queued for it.

*David Attenborough voice* And here we have, in the wild, a rare glimpse... of what may be... a positive IBM quarter

Bloat

No matter how many employees they will fire, I think they still have too many. I once tried to buy an IBM server. The employees I talked to on the phone were absolutely incompetent. The website listing their partners was horrendously out of date. Finally I asked to be connected with someone competent, for a change (I really did phrase it this way!). Surprisingly, I got that person. I learned who really sells the servers in my area. However their partner sold me... a Lenovo server after asking me "Do you really want to overpay?"

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

Nothing has changed this January for me

I gave up on Windows 7 updates when the Meltdown/Spectre patches created more harm than the threat itself. I see I have been 100% correct about their quality.

Tea tipplers are more likely to live longer, healthier lives than you triple venti pumpkin-syrup soy-milk latte-swilling fiends

Re: Yep.

That experiment has already been done willy-nilly in Samoa. The results were not good.

Y2K? How about Y2.02K as Lloyds suffers its second TITSUP* of the year

The 2020 Microsoft scourge

Causing the Windows 7 end of life.

'Supporting Internet Explorer is hell': Web developers identify top needs – new survey

Supporting Internet Explorer?

I would think nuking it from the orbit is a much better decision.

Das Reboot: Uni forces 38,000 students, staff to queue, show their papers for password reset following 'cyber attack'

Das reboot

Kudos for the choice of the illustrations. This guy was my favourite Das Boot character.

FYI: FBI raiding NSA's global wiretap database to probe US peeps is probably illegal, unconstitutional, court says

Re: Read the 14th amendment

It is like saying that white people are protected by the First Amendment. It is technically true but also misleading and possibly racist.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

So The Register crew would be sent to Gitmo?

That would be a sad outcome. And you are hearing this from a boffin!

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Doomed?

I've seen opinions by real pilots that 737 MAX will never be allowed to fly again as a passenger plane. After reading now that without MCAS the plane would not be certified at all, I start to understand why.

Will the solution be Pentagon buying the 400 machines as cargo planes or something? I do not say a wise solution but just a way of helping Boeing by Uncle Sam.

I don't want to go on the cart! Windows 10 Mobile hauls itself from the grave one last time

The end of Ballmer's dream

You know. The one about world domination on the mobile market.

Amazon Germany faces Christmas strikes from elf stackers, packers and dispatchers

They do work today

I know that because I've just received an email from Amazon.de that the toys I ordered are on the way. So most of the elves must actually toil relentlessly as shown in the Disney movies.

Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?

Will portable nuclear reacotors solve aor energy problem?

And other fairy tales.

OpenBSD bugs, Microsoft's bad update, a new Nork hacking crew, and more

Today is December 8

An update for the database tool, released on November 12 borks the database. Now, you tell me???

Seriously, I would never use a Microsoft database for anything important.

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

I got used to download a new version of CustomCSSforFx after FF upgrades.

BTW, use tabs_below_navigation_toolbar_fx65_v2.css if you do not want borderless tabs.

Few legitimate uses of VPN?

I dare to disagree. I use VPN to read many US news web pages which show a finger to Europeans. I do not think it breaks any laws on either side of the pond (a newspaper policy is not law).

Also it helps you to avoid broken cloud servers. If I see the web page showing the local cloud server cannot be accessed, I try the VPN IP address in another country. This works more often than I expected.

Re: Privacy?

There are add-ons for that. I use CookieAutoDelete which allows you choose which cookies are kept after the tab is closed.

Boffins believe it was volcanoes, not just life, that made Earth what it is today – oxygen rich

A big misunderstanding

Sadly, the journalist did not get everything right. No formaldehyde was produced. The reaction on the first page of the paper was supposed to symbolize photosynthesis. Usually people multiply everything by 6 to make the reaction produce glucose which makes more sense. The reason oxygen concentration increased was the same as every other geological time it did. Namely, atmosphere gets richer in oxygen when organic carbon is buried. There is no other way (with the exception of pyrite burying but let's not be too anal).

I am surprised because all one needs to understood the mechanism is the abstract which says:

"we demonstrate that about 2.5 billion years ago a tectonic transition that resulted in increased volcanic CO2 emissions could have led to increased deposition of both carbonates and organic carbon (organic C) via enhanced weathering and nutrient delivery to oceans. Increased burial of carbonates and organic C would have allowed the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen while also increasing the delivery of carbon to subduction zones.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Fail

The problem is not even that they used a short integer. The problem is they allowed an overflow to kill the drive.

Google goes full Anti-Flash-ist, boots Adobe's insecure monstrosity out of web search index

Re: This is about

"Then update, browser, Quicktime, Flash, Shockwave, Java and maybe Realplayer (ugh!)."

And what about Silverlight?

NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders

Re: Space is big

New Horizon did not discover this snowman. Hubble Space Telescope did when they were looking for a second target for this mission.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Cables, CDs?

Real men migrate their PCs using floppies!

Not just adhesive, but alcohol-resistant adhesive: Well done, Apple. Airpods Pro repairability is a zero

Right to repairability

This goes directly against the new "right of repairability" EU directive which enters into force in 2021.

Not that is much solace for the UK readers...

Hubble grabs first snap of interstellar comet... or at least that's what we hope this smudge is

Re: Couple of things

What's wrong with calling him Ukrainian? The Russians have a long history of telling people they are Russian. Some times ago it were the Finns and Poles, not it is the Belorussians and Ukrainians.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

Good

Such a database is the wet-dream of Putin's Kremlin as it would allow mass blackmailing of British politicians, businessmen, journalists, judges etc. etc.

Assuming of course that it would not be too easy to circumvent, making the whole thing a moot, even if expensive, point.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Things like that do happen

I have a similar difference in results many years ago when I ran a C++ written Monte Carlo code on Windows and Linux. The culprit turned out to be the random number generator. It was a lesson I learned and since then I've been using an OS-independent random number generator function embedded in the code.

The OS is 'no longer' important to Microsoft, and yet new Surface kit has 3 Windows flavours

Re: Windows becoming less profitable

The Windows 10 business model seems to be sucking users' personal data and selling the to advertisers.

Microsoft has made an Android phone. Repeat, Microsoft has made an Android phone. A dual-screen foldable mobe not due until late 2020

Re: burning about $10bn+ of shareholder value (???)

The shareholder value increase after Microsoft gave up on this Ballier-started mobile crusade. Maybe in part because of that.

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

I wonder how much they actually secured

Does anyone know how long it took to break into the bunker?

DoH! Mozilla assures UK minister that DNS-over-HTTPS won't be default in Firefox for Britons

Default off in the UK but on in the US

So the solution seems as easy as downloading the en_US binary version (not to mention clicking one box in Options -> General -> Network Settings).

It's possible to reverse-engineer AI chatbots to spout nonsense, smut or sensitive information

I wonder

What would I need to say to the AI chat-box to make it answer "Down with Emperor Palpatine"?

Pushing Verify in Brexit plans more about saving troubled project

Re: the best possible experience when they access GOV.UK services

So the irony will be that it will start working (somehow) just after Labour returns too power...

Opal Fruits, Princess Diana and... PowerToys? Microsoft is dragging Windows 10 back to '95

To be fair, most desktops don't cope well with them.

Have you tried Linux ones?

Can't bear to part with that well-worn copy of Windows 7? Microsoft might let you keep it updated an extra year

No convenient registry setting this time?

Just asking...

Uncle Sam is asking Americans if they could refrain from slapping guns on their drones

The end of freedom?

The Founding Fathers obviously had killer drones in mind when they wrote about "well organized militia" in the constitution. didn't they?

RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81

Flat Earth Society?

I do hope this was a joke and not a side effect of the Parkinson disease.

Otherwise from that, we have really lost one of the giants who created the net we all use.

Data cops order Ireland to delete 3.2m records after ID card wheeze ruled to be 'unlawful'

Re: Does the UK government know Ireland is independent?

Imagine the outcry if a German official made a similar mistake.

Does the UK government know Ireland is independent?

I've recently listened to a UK government official telling us in a meeting how the UK is focused on the organization that called the meeting (unlike the EU, apparently). Suddenly I hear murmurs in the room: "Ireland, Ireland". I look up at his slide. Yes, he did illustrate that statement with a map of UK which... included all of Ireland.

Anatomy of an attack: How Coinbase was targeted with emails booby-trapped with Firefox zero-days

Re: Discovered 'simoultaneosly', or leaked?

The commits are public but the security bug pages with developer discussion are not. Which makes it difficult (although not impossible) to guess which commits are for not yet announced vulnerabilities.

Pentagon makes case for Return of the JEDI: There's only one cloud biz that can do the job and it starts with an A (or rhymes with loft)

What would a Jedy say??

These aren't the clouds you are looking for!

Waiting for Amos: SpaceX delays satellite launch as it tries hard not to blow this one up

God speed Chandrajaan!

It is good that more and more nations take part in the space exploration. And not even because the flat earth bunch will need to add one more apace agency to its conspiracy theory. Rather because of the effect on science progress of our Earth-bound civilization.