Posts by arctic_haze

Beloved pixel pusher Paint prepares to join Notepad for updates from Microsoft Store

The think the world needs now is...

64-bit MS Paint :-)

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

I was on a flight full of Orthodox Jews who devised to make a prayer meeting in the rear of the plane. The flight attendants seemed actually worried.

Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard

Sad

Some parts of the USA are starting to behave like Russia.

As if you needed another reason not to use Visual Studio, C++ extension for Visual Studio Code is live

Re: C++

They can take VC++ 6 only from my cold dead hands.

Go Huawei, Android: Chinese telco biz claims it will spread Harmony OS for smartphone to devs come December

Re: The biggest problem

Am I the only one who sees signs of organized Kingdom of the Middle trolling here?

The biggest problem

I do not know how they plan to achieve the critical mass of apps needed to convince users to choose the OS. Obviously many users will buy it being clueless about the availability of apps but most of them will become dissatisfied soon and make a gift out of the phone to an old uncle or someone other who uses no apps.

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

Re: Not a problem at all ...

"I'm a bit puzzled by this. So the EU consists of 27 countries. The rest of the world, somewhat more, many of which have been happily trading with the EU for a few decades. Much of that trade arrives in EU-land in containers, some even with lorries attached to those. Some even gets shipped from mostly English speaking countries."

Most of the countries you can reach with a lorry from the EU are either in the EFTA (like Norway and Switzerland), are associated (like Ukraine) or have a free trade agreement (like Turkey). So the UK will need to import its app from Russia or Belarus. It may have some problems with the Cyrillic, though.

Hidden Linux kernel security fixes spotted before release – by using developer chatter as a side channel

Not a new thing

I noticed the same thing on the original Bugzilla of Firefox when they started to hide security bugs. The bugs were secret but the resultant patches could be tied to the bug numbers so it was not difficult to see what actually has been changed. This is why I actually never thought the secret bugs were a good idea.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Eudora memories

I was expected to use Eudora Professional at an American University around 2000. It was supposed to be the only mail client compatible with their server. Of course it was not and it could not even show anything outside ISO-8859-1 while I exchanging messages in a language with different character set. I quietly installed the Netscape client and everybody was happy. Except for Eudora.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: Why not in 0.5 file?

Maybe using goto is normal in the kernel but it does not change the fact that it makes reviewing the code an extremely unpleasant task.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe – because we used astrometry: A Saturn-like world hugging its star

Have they also discovered attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion?

Anyway, all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Mozilla doubles down on anti-tracking tech: It'll be tougher for wily ad-biz cookie monsters to track Firefox

Re: Wait a minute

If you have nothing to hide, please tell us your credit card number, expiry date and the three digit thingy on its back?

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Re: Hmm.

Re: #4 - they'll rename it.

They already did. The ones made for Ryanair have already "737-8200" painted on them.

Re: Hmm.

The shite list covers airlines not countries.

Twitter hack latest: Up to 36 compromised accounts had their private messages read – including a Dutch politician's

Try to hack my Twitter account, punks!

I have none.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

DMCA

Luckily the US law does not cover the whole Universe. Doesn't it?

Forget about Wipro chairman saying no one would lose their job due to COVID-19: UK staff told they're facing redundancy

They were lucky, in a way

The company "last week kicked off a 30-day consultation process with staff, which indicates that between 20 and 99 people are at risk of redundancy". It means the company did not feel panicked. If the consultation process lasted 10 days, the layoffs would be three times bigger. If they wanted to lay off everyone they would not consult anyone.

US military whips out credit card for unmanned low-Earth-orbit outpost prototype (aka a repurposed ISS cargo pod)

Shooting Star?

Is it something like Death Star Jr?

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

What it is that LibreOffice lacks?

It works fine and most of the changes I notice in new versions are making the GUI a little prettier. I could live with any version from the last five years to the end of my professional career. Well, I do remember Armstrong on the Moon...

When Apollo met Soyuz: 45 years ago, Americans and Russians played together nicely... IN SPAAAAACE

I still remember this flight

There was a lot of interest about this new-found space friendliness between the superpowers. I noticed one detail. In the Soviet version the name was Soyuz-Apollo (the other way) and the official logo was painted in a way not to offend the Russians. The ships were visible from the side of Soyuz so that the perspective hided the fact that Apollo was much bigger.

See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe

An adult lack of certificate

Is is different from a parental guidance one?

Better get Grandpa off Windows 7 because zero-day bug in Zoom allows remote code execution on vintage OS

Re: Try moving gramma to Windows 10, if you like pain.

I would not pass judgment without knowing the history of their relations.

I am the Windows 7 using grandfather

But I do videoconferencing solely from my phone. Sorry, hackers.

You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot

The AI if only serving its masters

The problem is the masters are not mundane Reptilians or Grays but psychopatic CEOs.

Spotted the ISS in the sky yet? How about pulling out some spare kit and giving it a listen?

Not where I live

I live North enough to have ISS over the horizon only for a few minutes every third day (or so). So in fact I have not yet seen it, even as I tried to.

The world's nonsense keeping you awake in middle of the night? Good news. Go outside and see this two-tail comet

So many comet flops

I waited for Kohoutek, I waited to Halley. None of them was really visible using the naked eye, except for ideal conditions far from sky-polluting city lights.

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

I believe people are afraid of a Java-type debacle

The one where you use something that is described as "open" until one day you learn you have to pay for it. And quite frankly, I would be afraid myself.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

Did they use the same competent team which deisigned the 737 MAX software?

I would like to learn the full list of projects they worked on just to be on the safe side.

Re: So what happened?

Maybe that's the problem. The Boeing cost cutting is incompatible with hiring highly paid US developers so the conditions that only Americans can work on it makes Boeing use incompetent beginners.

Captain, the computer has identified 250 alien stars that infiltrated our galaxy – actual science, not science-fiction

Could they name some of the suspects?

I would like to be sure which of our neighbors are suspicious migrants!

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.