Posts by HkraM

Simulation reveals all Japanese will have the same surname by 2531

Released on Monday eh?

So this was released on Monday 1st April? Hmmm, nothing suspicious there...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with its first-ever asteroid sample

Long term weather forecast

> People in Europe and Africa will be able to see it with the naked eye, that's how close it will get.

Weather forecast for that day: overcast

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

> You cannot, on any remote control I know of, browse a media catalogue onscreen, then tell your TV to play your selection.

As far back as 2010, I could browse Sky's catalogue on my phone via their app, then use the app to get my Sky+ box to download that program. I could browse recorded programs and tell my Sky+ box to play them on the TV.

It's not the same as this patent, but it's not a huge leap to get from what this could do in 2010 to doing it from the internet.

Tesla wins key court battle over Autopilot crash blame

Re: I have to wonder

Physical buttons are just so untidy. It doesn't take long to remember the sequence: Car settings > Lighting > Indicators > Right > Flash 3 Times > Confirm

Oh, 07734! Internet Archive debuts vintage calculator emulator

Casio fx100

I'm sure I have a memory of some old Casio scientific calculators that would produce an odd (not even) result when asked to calculate 2^32 or 2^33, which were the largest numbers in the sequence before it would go into scientific notation. Sadly my Casio fx100 was lost years ago so I can't try this again. Does anyone else remember this?

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

Re: Acronym madness

According to the CCDCOE's own website, CCDCOE = Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

The article also includes a quote by Yuriy Shchygol - but the quote does not appear on the linked page at all.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

"And I'm selling winter-tyres 185/65R15, where 185 is the width in mm, R15 is the rim size in inches, and 65 is the height above the rims in ... what exactly ?"

The 65 is the profile and is the percentage of the width, so for those tyres it's 65% of 185 mm = 120 mm.

Musk says spat with Apple over App Store ejection threat for Twitter was 'misunderstanding'

he retweeted a parody of Apple's 1984 video

"he retweeted a parody of Apple's 1984 video"

Why wasn't Musk banned from Twitter for this? Did he clearly label his account as a parody account first?

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

Re: Stop ignore the address I type

AC - Thanks but that setting makes no difference to what I'm seeing - Firefox still goes to the HTTPS site and won't go to the HTTP site.

Stop ignore the address I type

I'm starting to get increasingly annoyed with Firefox and finding I have to use Chrome.

A couple of versions back Firefox stopped me accessing HTTP sites on my local network, including my router, by ignoring the address I'd typed in and using the HTTPS version of the address instead - but that doesn't exist on some devices on the network. After changing several settings in about:config I can now get to some of them, but one or two are still being blocked by Firefox.

I just want a browser to go to the address I entered!

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: Upside down 3.5" floppies

At college, when given a blank 3.5" floppy and a sticky label, one student on finding that the label was larger than the target area, placed the sticker so it partially covered the metal shutter. When inserted into a floppy drive, which offered some resistance, it then broke the drive!

Cue an interruption to the lesson for a brief demonstration on where to place the label.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

Re: What's missing?

Or the recovery parachutes deploy at launch and we all say "staging".

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Re: Comparison

You, as a driver, may well have agreed to Tesla's Terms and Conditions (probably without reading them all) to test their beta software - but I, as a pedestrian, have NOT agreed to be part of that beta test.

So stay the fuck away from me.

Russia blows up old satellite, NASA boss 'outraged' as ISS crew shelters from debris

>and sent more people to their deaths because they couldn't be bothered to listen to engineer concerns (Discovery).

Really? Everyone who launched on Discovery returned to Earth safely. Discovery is now at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Virginia.

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

I'm waiting for the "Who, Me?" from the tech at a certain now-dead ISP in Finchley who tried to reinitialise the offline RAID array on the mail server, but entered the command on the live RAID array instead.

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

Got the T-shirt

At a previous company we once had a 7-disk RAID5 chassis fail on the main server. Ended up removing all of the HDDs from their caddies, and connecting them up with a SCSI ribbon cable on the desk and positioning a desk fan to blow some air across them. It was just a temporary fix until the chassis was replaced. I think the server stayed like that until it was retired a few years later.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

2021 rollover?

The PNC doesn't store dates as 2-digit years and then assume it's +1900 for dates above 21 does it?

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

Re: Americans are so polite

D@v3, I think it is indeed the house up by "Martins Beach Parking Lot". Checking other articles online it seems he's blocking the road at the junction with the Cabrillo Highway.

ASA tells Poundland and its teabagging elf: Enough with the smutty social ninja sh*t

I'm trying to figure out how Twinings determined it was their tea bag.

There was a Twinings box behind the Elf in the original ad. An updated version removed the box.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

Re: This one, every time

I even get Word documents containing megapixel photographs (not screenshots!) of terminal emulator windows. And it's usually TeraTerm that was being used, which has clipboard and buffer save options built in.

Don't panic, but.. ALIEN galaxies are slamming Earth with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Re: Life... Or"intelligent" life? Not the same thing.

Dolphins? And of course camels!

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

Copyright

The Babylonians knew a thing or two about copyright as well if the tablet is still protected after over 3000 years.

Fighter pilot shot down laptops with a flick of his copper-plated wrist

About 20 years ago I noticed a user from a different part of the company booting up his PC in the morning - he had to enter the date and time in when prompted. When I asked why, he said he'd been doing that for over a year, because his PC always forgot the date and time when powered off and IT couldn't find the fault - so IT had added date/time prompts into autoexec.bat.

As someone who was never afraid to do IT's job for them, especially if it had the potential to demonstrate how totally useless they were, I opened the case of this PC thinking that maybe the battery needed replacing, looked inside for less than 10 seconds, then removed the CMOS reset jumper that was still fitted. Problem fixed.

If only our British 4G were as good as, um, Albania's... UK.gov's telco tech report

OpenSignal

The report makes it clear that the data used to rank countries is based on data from OpenSignal. Their data should be taken with a truckload of salt.

I've used OpenSignal's app on four phones and two networks and it just never uploads any test results; their data still shows no coverage near where I live on my network. I don't know how they can get away with publishing data collected from such an unreliable app.

UK.gov was warned of smart meter debacle by Cabinet Office in 2012

No thanks

My current electricity supplier don't bother to ever read my meter, so I have to do it for them. This is despite the meter being on the same external wall and 6 feet from the gas meter, which they do read.

And even then I do not want a smart meter, even if it did mean they can read the damn thing remotely.

Fleeing Aussie burglar shot in arse with bow and arrow

Would the alleged burglar be charged with stealing an arrow too? Or would that be deemed a gift?

Swansong for Rosetta as it lands on the duck-shaped comet

This mission has been a great success and I've followed its progress for years. Lets hope we can have more discoveries like these.

Often forgotten is the fact that Rosetta wasn't originally going to visit 67P but comet 46P/Wirtanen instead. But after an Ariane 5 ECA self-destructed in December 2002, Rosetta's planned launch the following month was postponed and a new target had to be found; Rosetta launched over a year later than originally planned.

Narcissist Heidi Powell wants her dot-com and she wants it now, now, NOW!

let's call her Narcissist Heidi

OK, I was planning to clean my screen today anyway!

BOFH: The case of the suspicious red icon

Re: 1bs

How about the users who know they don't know something and are prepared to ask... but they think they have a photographic memory so don't take notes, and end up asking the same question again a week or two later, and yet again another two weeks later. There's no point adding pages to the support FAQ list because these users always forget that exists! One user still didn't take the hint when I just kept forwarding an email to him containing all previous answers to his question.

Android's latest patches once again remind us: It's Nexus or bust if you want decent security

If you're using the nightly builds, Cyanogenmod gets the updates very fast. My CM13 phone got the July updates within a day or two of Google releasing them; I'm expecting the August updates to be similar. I am using the nightly builds though - the last "stable" build for my phone is 9 months old.

I'll never buy a new phone that doesn't have Cyanogenmod builds available. I had enough of manufacturers refusing to release updates after less than a year. (Motorola, Samsung, Sony have all done this.)

Lester Haines: RIP

RIP

I'm lost for words. I always enjoyed reading his articles.

Condolences to his family and friends.

I'll raise a glass later in his memory.

Ultra-cool dwarf throws planetary party

"3 May 2016 at 11:20, Leicester Haines"

I see what you did there!

F-35s failed 'scramble test' because of buggy software

Re: OMG

But they won't be flying with them by the sound of it.

Four hundred MILLION vulnerable Androids are out there

Unsupported devices still under warranty

I think I've had devices by Sony, Samsung, Motorola and Asus that all got one OTA update then became unsupported before the 1 year warranty even ran out. Two of them ended up running Cyanogenmod builds.

It seems to me that the manufacturers can't even be bothered to support their devices for 1 year.

NYPD anti-crypto Twitter campaign goes about as well as you'd expect

Stealing a hashtag

"But the NYPD is also facing allegations that it stole the #unlockjustice hashtag"

Since when could you steal a hashtag?

Game of Moans: Sky coughs to BORKED set top box BALLS-UP

There's another problem with the latest firmware on some boxes that Sky know all about but still haven't fixed - after a week or two they start to forget series links, but power-cycling the box brings them all back.

BT said to have pulled patent-infringing boxes from DSL network

I'm not sure my BT line could get any slower...

Range Rover to fit trendy new SUV with FRIKKIN' LASER HUDs

Re: Call me sceptical

"But there isn't a UK speed sign that says "70" or "60""

60s are in several places, particularly in Scotland. They're on the A282 southbound at the Dartford Crossing too.

70s I've seen around too.

Ill communication delays NHS England's GP data grab for six months

Implied consent

It's somewhat hypocritical of the government to use implied consent when it suits them (care data, summary care records, ISP adult filters, etc.), but they expect everyone else to use explicit consent.

Google Glassholes, GET OFF our ROADS, thunder lawmakers in seven US states

Wearable computer

A smartwatch is wearable computer, so will these be banned too?

Hyenas FACEBOOK each other with their ARSES: FACT

Re: Fecebook!

Or it could be Shitter?