Posts by Little Mouse

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Re: Really?

Agreed. Wake me up when we can finally talk to hologram avatars of each other, Hollywood-style.

Remember that black hole just 1,000 light years from Earth? Scientists queue up to say it may not exist after all

Re: Who is stealing the stars?

Stealing the stars? Maybe it's the Tau-Ceti Imperium snuffing them out.

But that'll never happen to us, right? We've got kangaroos!

Travel-sick Windows needing a Systemwiederherstellung would be in Germany, right? Austria? Not necessarily

Re: Schoolchild giggle?

Don't tell anyone I told you, but I suspect seven of five might actually understand those words, despite claiming otherwise....

Re: Weihnachtsspecial

I know someone who was surprised to find that their new PC came boxed with a German keyboard, plus a sheet of stickers to cover the "wrong" keys.

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

"GENIUS!" he told us, modestly.

There's no need for modesty. Some instances of genius should be applauded & celebrated.

And this is one of them.

Getting a pizza the action, AS/400 style

Re: WORST. PIZZA. EVER.

It can't have been worse than the "seafood" pizza that I ordered once in Perth (Scotland).

Smoked haddock & crabsticks. On a pizza. Mmmmmm.

No joy for all you Rover McRoverface fans: NASA's next Mars bot is christened Perseverance

Re: Ok then...

I guess I'm too late (and too British) to nominate Coxy McCockface? (After the celebrity mop-topped particle physicist & Infinite Monkey Cage presenter, of course)

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Re: 3 laws for AI

I don't remember that particular gardening story, but it's true that a recurring theme of Asimov's robot series was that the three laws didn't really work all that well

Mr Raphan might have done well to actually read a few of them (or even watch the movie, heaven forfend) before suggesting that they might actually be a good idea.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Re: My version of the story

100% this.

A keen trouble-shooting mindset and some experience will enable you to isolate the causes of far more problems than pure technical knowledge could ever hope to.

Unlocking news: We decrypt those cryptic headlines about Scottish cops bypassing smartphone encryption

Re: Let me get this right

Maintaining the integrity of the data source, and being able to evidence this, is the cornerstone of digital forensics.

The CSI cliche of the investigator powering up the suspect's computer to see what they can find would likely be grounds to render any such evidence inadmissable (IANAL).

Do the kiosks create an image of the phone without changing the original? It doesn't sound like it, but some clarification would be appreciated.

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

2nd question

What's the speed of expansion in terms that I can readily comprehend?

How much would a distance of 150 million km increase over, say, 1000 years at the currently understood rate of expansion?

Riddle me this:

At what scale are the expansion effects actually happening?

Is it that the universe is getting bigger, but the physical things it contains are not, because local forces are, for example, holding my atoms together regardless of the medium around me?

Or is the space between everything getting bigger, and I am slowly expanding along with everything else, albeit at a rate that's only really measurable on a much larger scale?

'Buyer's remorse' drove HP's legal crusade to go after Lynch, High Court told

Slightly disappointed

I was hoping for a slightly more, well, American, Americanism.

"Yippee-kiyay, Motherfucker!!!"

You looking for an AI project? You love Lego? Look no further than this Reg reader's machine-learning Lego sorter

The article only makes a passing reference to the fact, but this thing is actually made of Lego.

So presumably it can put itself away tidily when it's finished...

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NASA boffins tackle Nazi alien in space – with the help of Native American tribal elders

And I guess I should add my roofbox to the bonfire.

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

An awesome tool. 20-ish years old, and functionality has stayed pretty much identical bar a few tweaks here and there. It's still my go-to choice for transferring large amounts of data from volume to volume, and holding onto the log files has definitely saved my skin more times than I can remember. ("Some of my files are missing from that data you migrated 3 months ago. They must not have got copied properly...")

But yeah - I have got burned once or twice too...

So, what's fashion going to look like on the Moon in 2024? NASA's ready to show you the goods

Orange works well. But what colour will the Lunar Penal Colony guards wear?

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

Re: Wow, what a catalog

From the petition:

"there is growing evidence of harmful effects"

Presumably of the "anecdotal" variety.

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

Re: I find it best just to ignore them

I, for one, welcome our repetitive nerd-culture spouting overlords.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

A user put in a complaint about me for doing the same thing - except I had been nowhere near the desktop, or even site, in question - and fortunately could prove it.

It turned out that one of our desktop contractors had done the deed, and on twigging that the user was none too pleased with the result, he'd told her he was me before buggering off. What a nice chap.

If you have enough of this type of gut microbe, you can get drunk for free after eating carbs

Re: OMFG...

I'm sure I read an El-Reg article not four or five years ago about an individual who generated his own gut-alcohol every time he ate.

Or did I dream it?

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Seconded. Sublime "Time Waster Letters" material, but for real.

Thanks for sharing, Dabbsy.

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

Call me a snob, but...

"Yup they was like a set you get 2 burgers 2 buns 2 cheeses slices and a sachet of the relish ."

That food sounds so processed it would probably last forever...

NASA boffins may just carve your name on a chip and send it to Mars if you ask nicely

My name's in Space already

Beamed out in Morse code more years ago now than I care to remember.

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

"Anticiptation"

A good driver spends pretty much all of their time second-guessing what unexpected crazy shit other drivers might suddenly pull out of the bag, and making sure they're in a good position to deal with it.

But if your own car is liable to behave in ways that you don't expect, how do you even begin to factor that in?

Guess what shrinks when it gets cold and then you shake it around a little? The Moon. We're talking about the Moon

I'm still not quite fully understanding just what kind of cheese it is though.

Presumably one of the softer varieties: Fairly malleable throughout, yet covered with a distinct outer "skin", such as with Brie or Camembert.

I'm no scientist though. Could the crust be artificial? Then we'd be talking Edam, or maybe even Baby Bel.

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

Re: "I won't even have to take a backup of the database"

"There is no such thing as too many backups"

There is when the backups in question are all incrementals, going back weeks and weeks, and you need to restore a tiny piece from every bastard one of them to restore the full data set.

"responsability"

You are "H" and I claim my £5.

Baffling tale of Apple shops' 'non-facial' 'facial recognition', a stolen ID, and a $1bn lawsuit after a wrongful arrest

But what about the Police?

Is it even legal to get people "wrongly" arrested?

Have the Police got nothing to say to Apple about this?

Canadian woman fined for not holding escalator handrail finally reaches the top after 10 years

More handrails

A certain imperial chemical industrial company I used to work for tried to impose similar must-use-the-handrail rules for employees going up and down stairs. Not holding onto the rail was a "yellow card" offence. (Seriously- all employees were expected to carry a yellow card around with them and shame their colleagues, referee-style, if they spotted them breaking such rules).

All well and good, but the main stairwell only had a single handrail, leaving us in a bit of a pickle if we happened to meet someone coming the other way...

Six foot blunder: UK funeral firm fined for fallacious phone calls

I just popped by to say "Thanks",

...I'll be using the word "fallacious" in my next team meeting.

Is just sounds kind of wrong, in a good way.

Apple disables iPad for 48 years after toddler runs amok

Re: Three year olds can't read

Damn - that's put me in my place.

I thought I'd done pretty well reading Watership Down when I was eight...

Boffins baffled by planet nugget whizzing round white dwarf that should have killed it

Re: Core

Heh - that's some seriously dense gas.

Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn

Genuine question - What would be the impact of simply scuttling one of these?

Mostly bad, I imagine, but how bad?

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

"...staffer breaks record for most *precise* Pi calculation"

FTFY

Watching in slow motion as you turn around and say... Take my breath Huawei (with its updated storage silo software)

Re: Can I upvote the headline?

All the UK news outlets simultaneously started pronouncing the name "Wah-way" around 4 weeks or so ago - a bit like when Princess Eugeeenie suddenly became Princess "Eu-zjhennie" overnight.

It's probably closer to the true pronunciation, but it certainly doesn't scan as well.

'God, Send Mobiles,' the industry prayed back in the '90s. This time, 5G actually has it covered

Re: One OS to rule them all...

We didn't have to learn it from Windows. Pretty much every smart device under the sun ticks that box.

We did learn from MS not to buy hardware before the requirement specs had been nailed down though. Remember those "Vista Ready" laptops?

Oldest white dwarf star catches amateur's eye – and its dusty ring leaves boffins baffled

Re: oldest white dwarfs

...or Magic!

Well Holby damned! We've caught a virus: Brit medical soap operas team up for 'cyber' episode

Re: Red shirt guy goes first

I know what you mean. It's such a shame they never got repeated.

Sussex rap fan wants statue of Easy-E from NWA in his hometown because he's a 'legend'

Re: NWA

On a recent trip to Yorkshire I was much amused to see estate agent boards displaying "NWA"in large letters.

Hope I'm not breaking site rules by mentioning that. I am in no way associated with Neil Wright Associates, nor have I ever bought/sold a house through them.

Canadians moot methods to embiggen moose monument and make Mac great again

Cheer up, Moose.

Why the long face?

It's the weekend. We're out of puns for now. Just have a gander at China's Moon lander and robo-sidekick snaps, videos

Re: Warning: Joke Alert!

Unlike Mars, the Moon just doesn't do itself any favours because it actually looks like an indoor movie set.

There's no colour to the sky and no familiar landscape features that give us a sense of scale or distance , etc.

Aussie Emergency Warning Network hacked by rank amateurs

Disappointed.

I was hoping for a device that warns me about Australians.

I'll wait.

Forget your $145m Apple patent payout, WiLAN told – it's $10m or gamble on a new trial

"WiLAN acquired those patents from Ensemble Communications"

I kind of lost all sympathy after reading that, which might be a shame given I don't know the whole story.

I've got no problem with the idea of transferring IP, but not with patent trolls. Any idea which this is?

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago

Personally I like the name.

There's something pleasing in the idea of putting a roof box on a sporty coupe.

Fun, yet practical.

Intel eggheads put bits in a spin to try to revive Moore's law

Re: Okay, we're going to be using spin now - then what ?

"but once you're down to electron spin..."

New Scientist did an interesting article on the "ultimate" computer around 25 years ago, assuming that Science & Ingenuity would always find a way around the limits of technology for speed / storage / etc, until you reached the physical properties of the atomic/subatomic particles that the thing was actually made of.

Fortunately we've still got quite a way to go yet.