Posts by Champ

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

When you're ubiquitous...

...you get kicked

I know we're all professionals here, but I find it almost impossible to imagine what the world would have been like *without* Microsoft (free downvote for first person to say "better"). Sure some stuff was bad (my personal nadir is Win8), but some stuff was incredible. Visual Studio was pretty revolutionary, to name just one.

But over and above individual 'good' or 'bad' products, they went a long way to inventing the modern software industry. They realised that having a strong application ecology would be mutually beneficial to them and countless small (some becoming huge) software producers. And they never thought to take a slice of that income (I'm looking at you Apple - still seems unbelievable to me that Apple take 30% of every iPhone app sale)

Full disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years. They were exactly how you'd imagine a huge international company - some amazing and brilliant bits, some terrible and mad bits)

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Nostalgia wallow

Enjoyed skimming all these "I remember..." comments, so time to add mine...

I was a developer on a VMS app in the 80s (the whole thing in VAX BASIC) and have fond memories of DCL - Digital Command Line. And I was blown away when I found it was extensible, and you could write your own command line interface for your own app, piggy-backing on the underlying system capability.

I still much much prefer typing (abbreviated) commands to clicking a mouse

America's National Science Foundation workers fired in bulk by Trump now reinstated

"Don't believe big media" says the anonymous coward who only watches Fox

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Real world test results - not great

I had a play with Perplexity myself yesterday. I'm unconvinced

Elsewhere on the internet, someone referred to "Chemical Igor". Typing that into DuckDuckGo gave a first page of hits about General Igor Kirillov (assassinated by Ukrainian forces).

Asking Perplexity "Who is Chemical Igor?" yesterday only gave results about chemists called Igor. But this morning it does identify Kirillov first.

Asking a factual question about myself also gave a wrong answer, even though the right answer was immediately visible on the source it said it had used

NASA's Europa Clipper leaves for Jupiter's moon atop Falcon Heavy

Space is big..

"The mission will then go into a quiet cruise period until the Europa Clipper arrives at the Jupiter system on April 11, 2030."

Douglas Adams said many useful things, but "Space is big" is right up there. Nearly six years just to get across our own galactic back yard!

Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy

A proof reader writes...

I suspect there's a missing 'not' from 'It's rocket science that's powered this, it's silicon.'

Wells Fargo fires employees accused of faking keyboard activity to pretend to work

Whatever happened to measuring output?

This is a really depressing story. Surely these employees were employed to actually produce something, which no amount of fake mouse jiggling is going to replicate. Can Wells Fargo really not tell when staff aren't producing the output that they're employed for?

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon is pounced upon by fast-acting admins

>...why I won't trust Mastodon, running on any number of servers run by who knows what kind of monkeys

What, like email, yeah?

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Pascal as a teaching language

Really? Wow! I started the Comp Sci course at Imperial in Oct 1981 too! Unfortunately I flunked the exams at the end of the first year, and at to figure out how to make my way in the world...

... which started with BASIC on a CP/M machine, and then morphed to Turbo Pascal on DOS quite quickly. And the Pascal (and associated skills) I'd learnt in that single year did come in useful

Late Qualcomm cofounder teleports $200M into SETI to bankroll hunt for alien life

Rich guy does good thing

Nice to read about an addition to the credit column of humanity's ledger

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: rec.motorcycles, AKA Reeky

Yep, UKRM is still moderately healthy, although a world a way from its 100-posts-a-day heyday.

There's a few of us old regulars still on there. Aren't there, Eddie?

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

No mention of Duck Duck Go?

I've been using Duck Duck Go for a couple of years now. Doesn't track you. I like it

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Absolutely peerless reporting from El Reg

Not one mention by name of the Florida man. This is how he should be reported from now on.

Personally, I'm just going to refer to him as "the frequent golfer" (another gem)

Boffins say their protective satellite paint job could harvest power from the Sun

Why so snide?

Para 10:

"This extends to self-reconfiguration in orbit, if the report can be believed,..."

The "if the report can be believed" seems a bit unnecessary, even for El Reg

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Sticking with Media Center

Under my telly is the PC I built 10 years ago, in a hifi style case, which records TV for me, has all my music, a library of 100s of films, etc

I'm probably one of the last hold outs still running media centre, but I like it and there's no obvious replacement that does everything I want, so I'll be sticking with it, and Windows 7, for a while yet

UK's Guardian newspaper breaks news of ransomware attack on itself

Snide, or am I missing something?

"tears in the quinoa". Really?

Why would a keyboard pack a GPU and run Unreal Engine? To show animations beneath the clear keys, natch

2 reactions

1 What a stupid and impractical idea

2 I really want one

Twitter begs some staff to come back, says they were laid off accidentally

Re: Modest proposal.

Mastodon

It's where all the Twitter refuseniks are heading. Me included

US Army drone crashes hours ahead of breaking flight duration record

Wait....what?

Record set in 1959...by 2 guys in a Cessna.... refuelling from *a moving truck* !?!?!?

Wtf?!?!

Glad someone posted a link to *that* story...

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Just looked in...

...to check out how many dinosaur "of course Micro$oft is evil" posts, and wasn't disappointed

I worked them for a few years in the SatNad era, and they're just another big corporate. No evil to be seen

I'm way way more suspicious, and in some cases genuinely scared, of Amazon and Facebook nowadays.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

Yes, I re-use my password - what of it

There are a gazillion shitty websites that I've had to create an account on over the last 20+ years. Of course I'm not going to use a different password for each [1]. On precisely none of these do I care if my details get hacked. Say the crims find I bought some questionable furniture from Ikea last year - so what? Even sites that persist credit card details still need the CVV to complete the txn.

For anyone with any sort of online life, the only options seem to be password re-use, or use a password manager [2]

[1] and, yes, I have tried password managers. Haven't found one that gives me a compelling use case yet

[2] see [1]

UK space firm Skyrora opens rocket testing site in Scotland

Bit far from the equator?

I had understood that it was best to launch from as close to the equator as possible. Has that changed?

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Re: Continuing the trend

Do you mind - your tinfoil hat is catching the light

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

Re: Deal done

Can you list any of these "rafts of EU bureaucracy and Brussels red tape", please? Compared to the now well-understood red tape involved in shipping anything from the UK to the EU?

It's not unusual for large multi-nationals to seek subsidies to set up in a particular jurisdiction. If the UK were still in the EU, it might well have benefited from such an EU subsidy for Intel to build a fab in the UK

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: If Marvel taught us anything

> Yup, we'll have flying pigs before flying cars.

Pigs on the Wing?

Re: Three words:

> Go Go Godzilla!

Oh no, there goes Tokyo!

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Re: Another snowflake

>I, like the OP above am getting a little wary of what's >happening to the El Reg, it has never been so impartial... >And that means it is becoming an echo chamber, just like >Twitter, Parler and FB....

You might want to check the meaning of impartial, before you make yourself look silly

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

YouTube Music is not available in your area

Looks like I'm not going to be migrating my music to YouTube, then...

I found Play Music very convenient; I ripped new CDs I bought [1] my CDs via a desktop to my NAS, and then uploaded them to Play Music, which made them available on my phone and other portable devices. And I could 'pin' favourite albums to the phone, so could play them when I had no connection.

<sigh> So now more research and tech implementation required

[1] I'm definitely of the generation that buys, not rents, its music. Spotify? Fuck off

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: I didn't know of the triangle badges in the prison camps

Seriously? You think this sort of tragic trolling will work here?

You should probably go back to plying this shit on Facebook

The girl with the dragnet tattoo: How a TV news clip, Insta snaps, a glimpse of a tat and a T-shirt sold on Etsy led FBI to alleged cop car arsonist

Re: Thoroughly deserved

So you're anti-antifa? Which make you pro-fa, yes?

You do know what the 'fa' stands for, don't you?

Repair store faces hefty legal bill after losing David and Goliath fight with Apple over replacement iPhone screens

<shrug>

Just one more reason not to buy Apple. But I already had plenty of those

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Re: Very worthy

Just joined :-)

Your Agile-built IT platform was 'terrible', Co-Op Insurance chief complained to High Court

Re: Erm

As in this feature, Agile is mostly the current whipping boy for stuff going wrong.

Firstly, "Agile" is a catch-all term for multiple working practices. These can be used brilliantly to deliver high quality, useful systems. But they are no guarantee, and you can definitely produce garbage with them too.

If this project had been run under Prince 2, would anyone be blaming the methodology?

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Re: Promises, promises...

So, not Barnier, then. Not even Brussels, in fact.

Just Greece maintaining its entirely justifiable position of wanting back its stuff that the british stole.

Re: Promises, promises...

> Barnier is increasing his demands. In the last 3 months he has demanded access to UK fishing waters just to start negotiations, plus the Elgin Marbles.

Really? Barnier has demanded the Elgin Marbles? Care to cite a reference for that?

Australia down for scheduled maintenance: No talking to Voyager 2 for 11 months

The Dish

Is this the same dish that we the title star in the movie, er, "The Dish", starring Sam Neill?

Quite a nice little picture, that

Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Re: And the most unintelligible article title award goes to....

Really?

It was pretty damn obvious to me. Which is why I clicked on it from the daily headlines email

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Re: Who are you and what have you done with Microsoft?

>But Microsoft isn't a normal company. All evidence suggests they haven't listened to what their customers actually want[0] in a couple of decades.

As a former Microsoftie, I really marvel at comments like this. In 35 years in the industry, with 3 at Microsoft, I never worked *anywhere* that paid half as much attention to its customers and what they wanted than Microsoft.

But, I guess it's easier to just keep slagging off the old big bad wolf rather than realise the world might have turned a little.

In case you wanna launch your boss into the Sun, good news: Earth's largest solar telescope just checked and, yeah, it's still pretty fiery

Re: Reg units

> I expect the Aussies use Tasmania.

Do you have a map?

IT contractor has £240k bill torn up after IR35 win against UK taxman

Re: I cannot understand why HMRC pursues contractors so much.

> Amazon pay every penny they owe

In Luxembourg

There, fixed that for you

Scientist, war hero and gay icon Alan Turing is new face of the £50 note

Re: "Cue gags regarding this note being more bent than a 9 bob note"

Can you please list the parliamentary powers which you claim were ceded to the EU?

Take your time.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Re: "if Europe agrees to a Brexit transition period"

Where "Leave win #1" was a pretty finely balanced 52:48

Where "Leave win #2" was the UK electorate gaming the UKs FPTP electoral system to deny May the very mandate she went to the country to seek.

Where "Leave win #3" resulted in Remain advocating parties getting a bigger share of the popular vote than Farage the Fascist.

How's those lessons in counting coming along?

I am just a mapper: Solar drones take to the skies above Blighty

Just because you're paranoid...

...doesn't mean they're not out to get you. I started typing this as a joke, but now it sounds a bit too believable.

The OS story is a cover. These devices are really so the authorities can track and respond to the brexit riots

Treaty of Roam: No-deal Brexit mobile bill shock

Re: So predictable !

Of all the places for the "technological means" unicorn to rear it's head - not the Reg! Nooo! Here the forums are full of people who actually understand IT, and what it can, and more importantly, can't do.

I'm now very depressed that even here, amongst "my people", someone should seriously promote this nonsense

Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral

Yes to Media Center going open source!

There are still quite a few of us running a Win7 box and Media Center to drive our TVs. I'd love it to go open source, so that it might have a future

Microsoft delivers a second preview of Visual Studio 2019 (a Redmond thing we actually like)

>> Those hair-shirted individuals who like their code to be of the C++ variety

> No women code in C++? Not very inclusive from pro-SJW El-Reg!

Not sure why you think women can't also wear a hair-shirt.

Influential cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist Tim May dies aged 67

Photo correction

I must be bored, and it's just before Christmas, but I've just uploaded a correct photo to the wiki. It's been "sent to moderation" apparently

Google internal revolt grows as search-engine Spartacuses prepare strike over China

Re: My advice to Google employees

Maybe it's because I'm in the UK, or maybe because I've just never been that important, but I've never had any problems with criticising my employers.

ICO poised to fine Leave campaign and Arron Banks’ insurance biz £135,000

Re: Will of the people my arse

>those who supported remain and the ever closer political union, with the

>ceding of sovereignty to un-elected officials

It's my experience that those who most play the 'but sovereignty!' card least understand it.

The only way to be completely sovereign is to be completely isolated. Like North Korea. Otherwise...

- want to join the WTO? Need to abide by rules, that limit sovereignty

- want to join the UN? Need to abide by rules, that limit sovereignty

- want an FTA with <country>? Need to abide by rules, that limit sovereignty

The EU is really about pooling sovereignty, not ceding it.

Goodnight Kepler! NASA scientists lay the exoplanet expert to rest as it runs out of fuel

Fuel? Why no solar panels?

I didn't think spacecraft were generally powered by a few gallons of 4 star? Why did Kepler use (exhaustible) on-board fuel, rather than (inexhaustible) sunshine?