Posts by TopCat62

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Who gives a flying fark what they've done with Notepad, unless they've also crippled NP++ to force people to use their own crock of putrid festering rectal emissions?

Windows 10 2004 is nearing the end of the road. Time for a Windows 11 upgrade?

Re: I upgraded last night

So you didn't run two monitors with the taskbar docked to the right of one of them then.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

From the article... "and it was redesigned (as was Windows 8) by taking inspiration from smartphones,"

This is the fundamental problem. A PC isn't a fucking smartphone. It's a device used by people that want to do actual work.

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

There was the time I broke the Marks and Spencer Christmas ordering system in the early 90s. I was asked to run custom SQL reports against the production database (as you do) to provide up to the minute reporting for the buying department.

One of these reports took a little while to run, so having tested it in dev I went off for a quick lunch. I came back to find my query still running, but the online ordering system completely down, and a lot of senior managers and execs running around like headless chickens. As you can imagine, losing the whole ordering system in the run up to Christmas was a bit of an issue.

Turned out that my query was such a monster that it slowed the whole mainframe down just enough for the CICS-COBOL ordering system to run out of threads, so sessions were just dropping out all over the place and the more that queued up, the worse it got.

The funniest thing about it was that my query finished eventually, provided some really useful information to the buying department, and I got a shout out from their exec for front-line service to the business, and a promotion at my appraisal a short while later. Ops were less than impressed, it has to be said, and I was the butt of much piss-taking for a long time.

Someone must be bricking it: UK govt website for first-time home buyers snapped up for £40,000 after left to expire

Very good, but it's actually spelled 'oxymoron'.

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

The most disappointing thing about this article is that the Reg obviously thinks its readers are complete f***witted morons.

Thanks, but you didn't need to put the asterisk in and actually tell us that "Stealth Anti-Tracing Intelligence Remote Exfiltration" was an acronym for 'satire'. I mean really???

Seriously, this sh!t again? 24m medical records, 700m+ scan pics casually left online

No one has mentioned Muphry's Law yet.

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

Re: The meek shall inherit a larger bill.

Fleece the sheep - agree. If the regulator enforces a 'lowest price available' policy on the providers, then I will end up paying more, as the provider will have to put prices up to compensate. Why should I subsidise people too lazy to ask for a lower price? Of course this only works if there is competition - when each company has an effective monopoly the consumer is screwed.

Satellites with lasers and machine guns coming! China's new plans? Trump's Space Force? Nope, the French

And there are those that wonder about the Fermi Paradox...

The thing about a technology-capable species, is that it doesn't have to be smart. It only has to be just barely less dumb than would render it unable to invent technology at all. It absolutely doesn't have to be smart enough also to figure out how to use technology sensibly.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all if the reason we haven't found ET yet is because they all get smart enough to invent tech, yet are still too dumb not to destroy themselves with it, as humanity seems to be hell-bent on.

Getting smarter still, and having a chance of lasting millions of years, may be less likely than eukaryotes evolving from single-celled life. The dinosaurs only lasted so long probably, because of their silly little arms. If they'd had opposable thumbs, they'd have wiped themselves out long before the Chicxulub meteor did them in.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

Bring back Richard Feynman.

If you hear podcasting star Joe Rogan say something dumb, it may not be his fault – an AI has cloned his voice

And not just audio...

It's not just audio... it's going to be video as well.

https://www.ted.com/talks/doug_roble_digital_humans_that_look_just_like_us

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Boeing have obviously learned nothing from the Challenger disaster investigation all those years ago.

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

The anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers will be along shortly...

... to tell us that we're all going to get cancer from wireless earphones, so who cares about recycling anyway.

Microsoft's .NET Core 3 is almost here, which means time to move on from .NET Framework

OMG This ^^. So much this.

Smartphone industry is in 'recession'! Could it be possible we have *gasp* reached 'peak tech'?

My S5 died, after four years. So I got an S9. Looking forward to the S13 in 2022.

Ironically, S5 now fixed. If I'd been less impatient, I could have saved almost 500 quid. My 83 year old dad is about to get his first smartphone....

Take-off crash 'n' burn didn't kill the Concorde, it was just too bloody expensive to maintain

The first BA Concorde passenger flight after the Paris crash was on September 11, 2001. I saw it on the approach to land, about 4 miles from touchdown around lunchtime.

The reason I remember is I was out with the dog, and my brother phoned me, saying "Have you seen what's happening?" I replied, "Yes, it's fantastic to see Concorde back in the air again". He said "Er, no... go home and put the TV on...."

Wanna work for El Reg? Developers needed for headline-writing AI bots

A happy April 1st to you too!

Sorry, Elon, your Tesla roadster won't orbit for billions of years

I'd feel a lot less worried about collisions if they'd painted it pink....

Is it the beginning of the end for Visual Basic? Microsoft to focus on 'core scenarios'

I started .NET with C# during the v1 beta. But the auto-complete and precompiler were much inferior to VB.NET's.

So we went with VB.NET (Option Strict and Explicit On!). Over a quarter of million lines of code later, with a commercial application that's still being intensively enhanced with new features and the deadlines that come with them, taking time out for a C# rewrite isn't practical. So we stuck with VB.NET and still find it far more readable. Auto-complete and intellisense make verbosity simply a non-issue.

I'm sure C# is intrinsically a superior language, though - tell me again how in the 21st century a language should still be using semi-colons as statement delimiters and nested blocks of curly braces that the IDE often can't even indent right...

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

Yep. Pretty much hate everything they do to Skype. It used to be great. Now it's dreadful. The new "designed for Windows 10, would you like to try it" version was the worst ever. Thank god it let you roll it back. When I'm forced to use it, I'm out.

Internet of Sh*t has an early 2017 winner – a 'smart' Wi-Fi hairbrush

It's the B Ark for the designers, and the buyers.

If your smart home gear hasn't updated recently, throw it in the trash

Re: Throw i(o)t in the trash? - There's an app for that

I wonder if their product is any better than their typo-ridden web site.

Married man arrives at A&E with wedding ring stuck on todger

Re: A wedding ring...

53mm?

That's circumference, right?

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

How about "It used to be bloody cold here"

Actually I also like "Name of vessel", as in the pic.

Pilot posts detailed MS Flight Sim video of how to land Boeing 737

As a PPL with approaching 1000 hours in light singles, I have a mate who flies A320s for BA, and he invited me to join him for a sim session (a proper sim, not on a PC). I flew a few visual approaches, initially using the ILS and the PAPIs for orientation, and did Ok - although smacking it down pretty hard the first couple of times, I would have failed to kill anyone.

But don't underestimate the difficulty. I already knew what to do in principle, and I've done it over 1000 times in small aeroplanes, but it was still hard not to over control. A big jet has a lot of momentum, and if it gets away from you, you just have to go around and try again.

The aircraft may have been entirely simulated, but the adrenaline was entirely real.

Tor Project: Anonymity ain't free, folks. Pony up

Re: old fashioned check

No, Muphry's Law is a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

Excellent. Just in time for the Chinese to buy Micron.

Plusnet customers SWAMPED by spam but BT-owned ISP dismisses data breach claims

Re: Guessing email addresses is trivial for spammers

Well I've been getting spam for the last couple of months sent to [e-mail]

Guess how I know I haven't given it to anyone but Plusnet?