Posts by englishr

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

Re: ...but does it really "matter" given the state of Humanity?

> Finally you need to assume that intellectuals have less children than average.

I suspect that intellectuals have fewer children than average.

How generous of GitHub to slash prices and make all its core features free. So what gives? Oh right, GitLab

Re: Open Source != Public

Public certainly doesn't imply FOSS, but if the public can download the source then surely that's the definition of OSS ?

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

Re: One of the larger problems with the FAA proposal

The article may have been updated since your post, but it currently says "for drones weighing 0.55lb (0.25kg) or more". 250g is definitely in the "toy" range.

Yo, sysadmins! Thought Patch Tuesday was big? Oracle says 'hold my Java' with huge 334 security flaw fix bundle

Re: Eh?

Oracle databases have an optional embedded JVM, which is necessarily Oracle Java. The embedded JVM allows stored procedures, triggers, etc. to be written in Java rather than PL/SQL - and alas, if the vendor of your ERP platform requires an Oracle RDBMS with embedded Java, then you just have to suck it up.

Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally

Re: Upgrade from Windows 7

I just updated my mother in law and next door neighbour from Win 7 Pro (OEM) to Windows 10 Pro, simply by doing a clean Win10 install and typing in the Win7 Pro product code. Worked like a charm.

I did hit a temporary snag though - one of the motherboards had a USB port failure, so I swapped it out for a replacement. Win10 said "hmm - this looks like a new computer" and de-activated itself, and nothing I could do would convince it to behave - other than "wait a few days". I left if off for four days (didn't have time to deal with it), and when I turned it back on ready to humbly call Microsoft customner serice, cap in hand, it magically reactivated by itself.

Hundreds of millions of Broadcom-based cable modems at risk of remote hijacking, eggheads fear

I could care less ... but not much.

When I was in primary school (Wales, 1970s), it was quite common to here the expression "I could care less, but not much!" (with heavy emphasis on the "could"). I've always assumed that "I could care less" was a shortened version, with "but not much" being implied.

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

Re: The tine of a forklift wielded like a scalpel

In the mid-90s I once received a $1000 video card where the outer packing box had a mysterious triangular hole (roughly 20mm per side) on both sides. Upon opening the box, the video card retail packaging also had a 20mm triangular hole on both side.

You will be unsurprised to hear that the video card exhibited the same defect; it looked like a pretty clean cut, and where the hole intersected chips, the chips were neatly sheared. Needless to say, I returned the card without actually testing it's function.

I have no idea what might have punched such a hole - any thoughts?

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Bureaucracy: Infocom text adventure

I can highly recommend the classic text adventure Bureaucracy (written by Douglas Adams) where the goal of the game is to have your bank recognise your change of address without having an aneurysm from elevated blood pressure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy_(video_game)

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Re: Linux.

I remember downloading Slackware 1.0 (kernel 0.98) in August 1993, packaged as 24 x 1.44mb floppy disk images, using a 2400 baud modem. Once I had it installed, and with a custom compiled kernel (took 6 hours to compile!) it was absolutely brilliant :-)

Boffins discover new dust clouds in the Solar System, Mercury has a surprisingly filthy ring

Re: Make Pluto great again

Thank you for the link, but my reading of the page is that it is contrary to your understanding. Could you draw attention to the parts that support your argument that orbital velocity in a solar orbit is a function of the mass of the orbiting body?

From the web page referenced:

So does the mass of the planet have a significant impact upon its orbital period (or orbital speed) about some star? Given that planets are by definition almost always much less massive than the stars they orbit, the practical answer is "NO."

In a galaxy far, far away, aliens may have eight-letter DNA – like the kind NASA-backed boffins just crafted

...the Sun might be a life-form ...

An idea explored by the great Frank Herbert in his 1970 novel, "Whipping Star", the prequel to my favourite Herbert Novel, "The Dosadi Experiment".

Court sees Morissette Meter flip out as Oracle assumes anti-arbitration stance in pay dispute

Morissette Meter

It's a meter for measuring irony levels, named after Alanis Morissette, on account of her song "Ironic", which lists a series of unfortunate events, none of which are ironic.

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Zimos?

Can't help thinking that Zimos from Saints Row III should be their spokesman; now that's a big purple hat!

Police block roads to stop tech support chap 'robbing a bank'

Unintentionally silent alarm

While working for a software startup in the mid-90s, about a month after the company moved to new offices in a refurbished brick and poured concrete industrial building, I was hacking away at some code at about 9:00pm when the (locked) main office door burst open with an enormous crash.

Four burly firemen charged in, axes, oxygen tanks, full-face breathing masks - the works. They rapidly went office to office, checking for anyone still there - seeing me, one yells "You! Get out now! Can't you hear the alarm?" Now that the main door was open into the central stairwell / lift area, I could hear a very faint "ding, ding, ding...". I shakily beat a retreat (not enough blood in my adrenaline stream) out of the building, to find multiple police cars and fire engines in the parking lot.

Turned out to be a false alarm.

Astronaut took camera on spacewalk, but forgot SD memory card

@regbadgerer "a spacewalk is a very high-pressure environment"

Surely it's the very definition of a low-pressure environment?

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

Re: It's not rocket science...

> Late 90s USB sticks?

> Did they even exist?

Indeed they did; I am the proud owner of an 8MB (yes, MB) IBM branded USB stick, that wouldn't be recognised by Windows until you installed the device driver off the provided floppy...

Drone 'swarm' buzzed off FBI surveillance bods, says tech bloke

@Ivan 4: "let the drone wars begin"

Oh, come on - it's Star Wars Day...

The drone wars - begun, they have!

The new Black: Western Dig doubles capacity on slimmed-down flasher

Re: Controller?

It’s a WD home grown controller.

Boffins stalk house-hunting bees, find colony behaves kind of like a human brain

Frank Herbert's "The Green Brain"

Reminds me of Frank Herbert's "The Green Brain" from the the mid 60's

I'm going to have to dig it out and re-read it now!

Intel: Our next chips won't have data leak flaws we told you totally not to worry about

Re: So...a whole new computer?

"Keyboards last about a year max."

Dang, you're hard on your keyboards; I'm typing this on an IBM buckling-spring keyboard manufactured in 1996, and used 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I have the same thing at home, used for extensive gaming, and still going strong.

Maybe you should try one (I've no affiliation with UniComp)?

https://www.pckeyboard.com/

Good luck saying 'Sorry I'm late, I had to update my car's firmware'

Re: OTA Updates for Cars

"Exactly. What if you get a "Windows X" type update (you can't control it) that borks your car?"

Presumably function can be restored by careful editing of /etc/X11/xorg.conf ?

Revealed: How Libratus bot felted poker pros – and now it has cyber-security in its sights

Re: What would be the result

> if two instances of Libratus were to play each other?

A STRANGE GAME

THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS

NOT TO PLAY

Erase 2017 from your brain. Face ID never happened. The Notch is an illusion

Re: Old fashioned?

> by which time I had added an additional finger.

Doesn't that make it hard to buy gloves?

Facebook let advertisers target 'Jew-haters'

Re: How about some balance?

> Facebook Active Users: 2 Billion

> Number if people in this study: 2,300

> % people that are shown as Anti-Semitic: 0.00000115%

Your arithmetic is off by two orders of magnitude.

Stack Clash flaws blow local root holes in loads of top Linux programs

Re: sudont

@Herby

My most common sudo use case is to allow users to become another non-root user in a logged shell, e.g.

%dba ALL=/usr/bin/rootsh -i -u oracle

So, the DBAs can become the oracle user, but the session is logged. If you have a better way to achieve this, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

Re: My code won't run but the spaces are great

"Those who give any kind of meaning to white-space in source code other than to separate one word from another is a heretic and has to be cleansed!"

But...but...what about the awesome programming language 'whitespace' ??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

Voyager 1 passes another milestone: It's now 138AU from home

Re: Not sure what they used...

"which may have used things like the TI 7400"

A quad two-input nand chip?

IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni

Re: Just something to think about...

"You forgot the cost for the accountant to figure out all of that, the auditor to make sure it's right, the executive review to change it, the accountant's time to revise..."

...and the printing costs of the 1000-page report, with 10% of pages marked "This page intentionally left blank".

Effort to fire Euro Patent Office president beaten back – again

Re: Not taken for granted

'If "rejected = filled - granted", then rejected patents count grew by 12% in 6 years.'

Since we're looking for a measure of efficiency, you need to include "waiting to be processed"

rejected = filled - (granted + waiting)

Re: Not taken for granted

"In 6 years, numbers of fillings grew by 25%, granted patents grew by 65%. If EPO is such a mess, why does it work better in term of results?"

Granting patents is easy - it's rejecting patents that's hard.

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

Re: Two Rules Apply

"And yes, I did once take an axe to a particularly recalcitrant PC many years ago :)"

I have 20+ years of accumulated hard disk drives in my basement (MFM, RLL, narrow SCSI, wide SCSI - you get the picture), which I'm always going to take to the electronics recycling once (paraphrasing Zaphod Beeblebrox) "I've found a very large pickaxe to reprogramme them with". Never seem to get around to it though...

Who do you want to be Who? VOTE for the BBC's next Time Lord

"Why not Richard Ayoade"

Too tnetennbulous?

Cassini sends back best ring-shots yet en route to self-destruct dive

Happier xkcd about machines with souls...

https://xkcd.com/413/

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

Re: What's the source?

@Zippy's Sausage Factory

"£11 million was our entire IT budget, including staff, Oracle licences,..."

Ah, so the Oracle 11-user license then. Nice.

Apple's Faulty Powers moment: iPad Pro slabs 'temporarily bricked' during recharge

Re: "temporarily bricked"?

"And, bringing up the rear, we have Busticated."

No - that would be bring up the front.

Bringing up the rear would be arseticated.

Robot vacuum cleaner EATS WOMAN

It's a roboflowbee!

http://www.flowbee.com/

Lenovo system update flaws plugged, security world not impressed

"I'd bet they have people working 24/7/365, "

Gadzooks - working 365 weeks a year! No wonder they're so productive.

GitHub jammed by injected JavaScript, servers whacked by DDoS

@ Michael H

"The injected script looks like this, once unscrambled:"

I suspect you overlooked the "once unscrambled:"

Windows 10 heralds the Minecraft-isation of Microsoft

Re: Dungeons and Dragons

"But... I thought that's what 3d printers were for...!"

Frame rate is too low :-(

Zoinks! Is that Mystery Machine Apple's SELF-DRIVING FAMILY WAGON? You decide

Re: Looks like it has differential GPS...

"So it'll know where it's going (accurate heading when stationary) as well as where it is."

Heisenberg may disagree.

What kind of generation doesn't stick it to the Man, but to Taylor Swift instead?

Re: It's not complicated at all

"If you desire someone's artistic works, you pay for it or go to jail like any other crim."

Thought crime? I'm doomed!

REVEALED: Apple fanbois are 'MENTALLY UNSTABLE' - iShop staff

Re: Hold the presses...

"He said he found academia, not middle-management!"

Uh oh. I'm middle management in academia :-(

Banking apps: Handy, can grab all your money... and RIDDLED with coding flaws

"Why do coders fail to code for input validation

First rule - assume users are idiots and expect them to do stupid things (even by accident)."

That's a good start, but doesn't go nearly far enough.

Assume that users are evil geniuses with access to the source code and have embarked on a personal vendetta against you, and code to handle input of that nature!

Hacker claims PayPal loophole generates FREE MONEY

Re: Virtual credit cards

They do still exist, and I use them for almost all on-line purchases.

Mine is through Bank of America, and the product name is 'ShopSafe' (acquired when they purchased MBNA)

The cute things they say

Me calling Gateway 2000 technical support after taking delivery of a ludicrously expensive 17" Trinitron monitor (mid 90s): I just plugged in the new monitor, it made a loud pop and some smoke came out the back.

Gateway support: Uhhh - I don't know much about monitors. I'm going to transfer you to my manager.

Me: Hello - I just plugged in this new monitor, it made a loud pop and some smoke came out the back.

Manager: I don't know why you're talking to me! I'll ship a new one out today, and you should have it tomorrow.