Posts by Doctor Evil

Yay, more 'STEM' grads! You're using your maths degree to do ... what?

No need for Euclidean geometry?

I once worked with an assistant on a software development project. Part of her responsibility was to write the routines to graphically depict the configuration of the thing we were modelling. Unfortunately, both her high school education (which, admittedly, was obtained in a third-world country) and post-secondary education precluded geometry, and she was hopelessly at sea with it. In the end, I wrote out the formulas for everything she needed to calculate, she programmed them without a glimmer of understanding, and we got through it. Just don't go telling me that Euclidean geometry "is only a 'basic' mathematical skill for a subset of STEM disciplines"; that's a crock.

Firefox 42 ... answer to the ultimate question of life, security bugs and fully private browsing?

Zippy!

They've done some good work in v42.0 to speed up window display and tab rendering. Much faster than previously. Very nice!

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

Re: Some clarifications

Someone above wrote -- and I'll repeat it here for your edification, Mr. David Boggs:

"When you are an a-hole, you should stop digging."

Aussies' distinctive Strine down to drunk forefathers

Re: The Aus accent really grates...

Thank you for remembering us. And sorry, but we have no accent. Other distinctive mannerisms, yes, but no accent.

Re: Snigger

"Wait.. Which American accent? You lot got broken out into Scottish, British, and Welsh; couldn't USAliens at least get South, New England, Texas and Mid-West?"

And Californian, dude -- don't forget Californian. That is one bodacious accent!

El Reg celebrates Back to the Future Day

Have another coffee, son. Listen, there's something I want to talk to you about: first impressions. Has anyone ever discussed dressing for success with you?

Nice tie, Dad!

Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under

Utter bollocks!

Change itself has a significant cost in terms of lost productivity. Change for the sake of change is ridiculous.

Consider the lowly ribbon in MS Office. People who hadn't used Office previously didn't face nearly as much of a hurdle as did those who were used to the old way of doing things, which was suddenly ripped away from them, and for what? So that you could ... continue doing the things you used to do, but in a different way. So that you could hunt for things you knew exactly where to find previously. So that you could click on shiny colourful icons instead of using the keyboard shortcuts you were used to.

And spare us that vapid "wielded like a blade, cutting a swath through markets and competitors" horseshit, Mark Pesce. I venture to bet that you've never produced anything of any real significance yourself.

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

prize-winners!

I hereby nominate Cordray and McCullough for an Ig Nobel prize in the field of Social Sciences, for their brilliant demonstration of social darwinism in action.

I also want them both included on the passenger manifest for Ark Fleet Ship B.

Re: What would really be ironic...

"Still it's a horrible idea. I can't tell if they're really that stupid or if they're just trolling everyone with feigned naivety."

They're from Calgary, Canada. We're so proud.

Microsoft names September 22nd as the date for Office party

foot ... gun

Microsoft's failure to abuse enterprise users sufficiently in the compulsory Windows 10 download debacle must have left them feeling neglected. This should rectify that issue.

Windows 10: A sysadmin speaks his brains – and says MEH

WiFi Sense

Will rising CO2 damage the world's oceans? Not so much

Re: Is it an indication...

Beat me to it. Acidification is/will be the problem, not the dissolved fraction of CO2 in the water.

Ex-Goldman Sachs programmer found guilty of code theft … again

Re: *Whose* code?

Whoops, sorry - Subversion, not Github.

Re: *Whose* code?

Um, my understanding is that the code he uploaded to Github was code that he'd originally obtained from there under GNU GPL licensing ... or, in other words, open source.

One of the conditions of the GPL, as you doubtless well know, is that you are enjoined to publish your own modifications to that code freely for the benefit of others. Which the bank, of course, blithely ignored in claiming "ownership" of the code.

Why should I learn by ORAL tradition? Where's the DOCUMENTATION?

Re: Catch-22

And -- occasionally -- the very best training courses are given by the individual who actually developed the software ... PROVIDED that s/he is also fairly knowledgeable, perhaps even expert, in the underlying technologies and is capable of cobbling a coherent sentence together and presenting him/herself at least somewhat personably in front of an audience. That's a rare confluence of circumstances, but it does happen. Occasionally.

Russian censor warns against meme 'misuse'

translation

"Note: translation is tricky, so Vulture South is going to skip trying to say exactly what that lyric means."

Google Translate didn't work too well for you either, eh?

Quantum computers have failed. So now for the science

Re: 4 pages ?!

Weird. It was collapsed to a single page when I looked at it.

Superfish: Lenovo ditches adware, but that doesn't fix SSL megavuln – researcher

Re: @Halverflake

Joe Public is buying tablets these days. Laptops are still being bought by a more knowledgeable crowd with long memories for misdeeds like this.

No Lenovo for me.

HP breaks for Xmas week - aka 'staff hols' - source

Re: Slow news week

"Not much happening in the El Reg office either, is there?"

But there should be! There's a website/UI to rework because there are still bloody clip-art pictures eclipsing useful text all over it!

You have a 'simple question'? Well, the answer is NO

Re: says:

"The one which I have the hardest time explaining is, "why does the writing have to be so small?"

Sure, it's trivial to increase the font size but the UI elements don't scale well. Or maybe the heavens align and they do scale but now you've got a jumble of nicely scaled fonts and UI elements cramped and overlapping in a window which hasn't changed size.

While I understand how the underlying clusterfuck came to be but explaining why it is and, more importantly, why it hasn't been fixed is just too dizzying."

Ah, you've switched your attention to the new El Reg interface now. That discussion is actually over here (or here)

Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit

Re: TSG is not SCO

I think everybody should get an award, just for showing up. It's been a great show! (Not too sure about the encore though.)

The sequel is never as good as the original.

The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4

Better!

Definitely an improvement!

Now restore the Print icon and lose the clip art site decoration and you've nailed it.

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Re: hOLY cRAP

Hugh paid good money so they'd use his font. Vanity thing. You could do the same if there's such a beast as an Ascompltd font.

Please revert

Most of us come here to read, not to see the pretty pictures. The old design was

- compact

- information-dense

- eminently readable

A site redesign should build on these virtues. You haven't.

Also, please restore the print icon. If the functionality still underlies the site, hiding it makes as little sense as the rest of the redesign.

Software firms are over-valued, says Huawei

Re: You can do...

All their value's really in their first-mover advantage, market share and any dubious software patents they have to chuck under the wheels of a competitor.

Aye, there's the rub.

Good grief! Have you seen BlackBerry's square smartphone?

But will it ...

Will it bend? Hardly.

But will it Blend™? Yes indeed!

Come to Oz for sun, surf, ratting on co-workers and surveillance

He's a what?

"[George Brandis] also reiterated his belief that Edward Snowden is not a whistle-blower, but a traitor."

He's not a traitor; he's a bleedin' hero, you silly nong!

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Re: Only half?

You spell-checked your post in Word, didn't you?

GitHub probes worker's claims of hostile, sexist office culture

I just wanted to point out, since some people seem confused on this point, that she is not alleging sexual harassment

Nope, she is.

Reference the interaction with a GitHub employee who professed his love for her, was sent packing, and subsequently began to "disappear" her code changes (TechCrunch story, search for "awkward, almost aggressive encounter").

I believe that falls under the definition.

Facebook TEENS EXPOSED to entire WORLD

Well now, there you go, saying something inflammatory about the Interwebs just to draw attention to yourself, Piro, you karma-whoring publicity hound!

Microsoft's Windows 8.1 secrets REVEALED ... sort of

Flying ... toasters?

"For starters, you'll now be able to show a slideshow of your pictures on your PC's lock screen when you're not using it, either from your local drive or streamed from SkyDrive. As far as we can tell, however, there will not be an option to replace this slideshow with an animation of flying toasters."

I'll settle for flying chairs.

Judge hands copyright troll an epic smack-down

Re: The IRS...

King of the who???

Psst, wanna block nuisance calls? BT'll do it... for a price

Re: DO NOT CALL lists Do Work - especially with a large FINE!

Ah ha ha, I see you missed the headlines in Canada last year when it came out that overseas spammers were actually scooping the entire DNC database and using that as their call list -- because the contents are pretty much all guaranteed to be live numbers. And there's not a thing the CRTC could then or can now do about that; they're rather toothless outside of Canada.

We are still plagued by these nuisance calls in Canada -- but you're much better off NOT registering your number on the national DNC list.

Re: some ideas

Except ... happy or not, you ARE still a customer.

And they've gotten their revenue.