Posts by WolfFan

UAV maker swipes at sponsor of opaque Qinetiq drone study

Bah.

Just fit all commercial aircraft with remote-operated gun positions (1940s tech, as seen on aircraft ranging from Me-210s and -410s to B-17s and B-29s) or with an external rail fitted with an infra-red homing missile. Paint the kill scores on the tails of the aircraft, the way the Luftwaffe did, along with the gongs awarded for those who have high scores. Who wouldn't want to fly in an Airbus emblazoned with the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords (a.k.a. the Throatache with Lettuce and Knives and Forks)? Here's Heinz Bar's Fw-190, after he got his Throatache with Lettuce and Cutlery, for making 200 kills. http://electraforge.com/brooke/misc/aces_high/paintings/0-painting-Fw-190A7-6-Staffel-II_JG1-Red-13-Heinz-Bar-WNr-431007-Germany-1944-01.jpg

New iPhone details leak: Yes, Apple is still chasing Samsung

Re: 1400$

Leave your bank details as a reply to this post and we'll see you right.

Here you go:

Prince I. Breaka Y. Legs

Account# 223109131

Access Bank

3 Alhaji Owokoniran Street

Orile Coker

Idi Oro100246, Lagos, Nigeria

Farcial Recognition

My ancient Asus laptop allegedly did facial recognition five years ago when I first bought it. It was very first thing that I turned off once I had the laptop at home.

I'm not a fan of the fingerprint readers built into too many electronic devices, either.

Re: Onanism

Never took Religious Knowledge in high school, eh? The 'Sin of Onan' was one of the things they really went to town on.

NAND that's that... Flash chip industry worth twice disk drive biz

Put bluntly, disk drives are going to be a crap commodity business stuck between SSDs (faster) and tape (cheaper). The disk drive industry, as a major storage media player, is heading towards a head crash and Seagate has no escape strategy.

Err... the big problem with SSDs is, simply, the price per gigabyte. Unless and until that price falls considerably, there will be a lot of spinning drives sold, because some people simply require lots of storage. At my location we have multiple 4 TB spinning drives in our arrays, soon to be replaced by 8 or 10 or 12 TB spinning drives. Why spinning drives? We need to store tens of TB of data for ourselves and our customers. 1 TB of spinning drive costs $50 or less; 1 TB of SSD costs $300 or more. We cannot afford to replace our current spinning rust with SSDs, much less add storage. The customers are not going to pay 6x current costs for storage. They simply aren't. It will not happen.

Now, if the price fell significantly (to, say, 2x the price of spinning rust) and we could get affordable Internet connections fast enough that the customers would notice the speed increase, then we could justify it. Problem: the price of spinning rust keeps falling. Not so long ago it was $100 for 1 TB, and not long before that it was $200 for 1 TB. Only a few years ago it was hundreds of dollars for a fraction of a TB. SSD prices are aiming at a moving target. Back in the early-mid 1990s I paid $1000 for a 1 GB drive; I'd have killed for 1 TB at only $300. But that was then, this is now.

Wake me when the price of 1 TB of SSD gets to within shouting distance of 2x that of 1 TB of spinning rust. It will happen, just not soon. Until then, spinning rust still lives.

My personal systems at home include a machine with a 1 TB SSD, but all the other systems have spinning rust, SSDs just cost too much. They are a major reason why the new, oh-so-thin, laptops from Apple and Microsoft and others cost so much and have so little storage. Those who like SSDs say that 128 GB or 256 GB is perfectly adequate, just stick your data on external drives, or on the cloud, or somewhere, anywhere, except on your hardware. Except that sooner or later you will need storage for your data. I have well over 500 GB of music, collected since the late 1980s, some of which never was released on CD, on my personal system at home. I have terabytes of movies and tv (no, not porn...) some of which was not released on DVD or if it was, was released at truly outrageous prices. They're sitting on my network along with lots of other odds and ends, and I simply wouldn't have space if I had to use SSDs. At the office we have data which is accessed perhaps once a year, if that... but when we need it, we need it right bloody now, there's no time to hunt down the backup tape (assuming that it wasn't sent off to Iron Mountain for storage) and restore the file(s), so we keep it on the system... which means that we have a lot of stuff on the system which we access rarely. We couldn't afford that with SSDs. We couldn't afford that with spinning rust, either, until the price came down; then we put stuff on tape and put up with delays. Now we don't have to. We see no reason to go back to the bad old days, and spend vast amounts to do it, just because SSDs are fashionable.

Cellphone kill switches kill cellphone snatchers

Re: Simple and effective

The Russkies have in the past made very effective deliveries using very fast drones. Well, kinda drones, anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev

The opsec blunders that landed a Russian politician's fraudster son in the clink for 27 years

Nah. Not needed. The Mango Mussolini has video of the Shirtless One and his pony.

imprisoned on Guam?

Is that because the extradition to the USA could be deemed illegal, so he's been put in a USA territory outside the regular legal system?

Guam is American territory. It has been American territory since the Spanish-American War of 1898. (The Spanish governor of Guam discovered that Spain was at war with the US when he woke up one morning to see lots of American ships in the harbor.) There was a brief interlude when Japan occupied the island, but other than that it's been American ever since. The biggest air base in the Pacific outside of Clarke AFB in the Philippines is Andersen AFB on Guam. During the Vietnam war it was a major base for B-52s and the like. Whenever things warm up in the western Pacific, Andersen gets dusted off and a few B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s plus KC-135s, KC-10s, and assorted fighters move in. The last I heard, a half-dozen B-2s from the 509th Bomb Wing were parked at Guam the better to irritate Little Kim in North Korea. (The 509th flies B-2s, and is the only unit in the world which has actual combat experience dropping nukes; as the 509th Bomb Group they were the boys who nuked Japan. The USAF sends the 509th out when they want to make an impression.)

Guam is American territory. Sorry to banish the tin-foil hat, but there it is.

Apple exits music player biz by killing iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle

Re: podcasts

Initially iTunes had DRM on music, but once Apple's hand was strong enough, Steve Jobs removed it.

Initially, iTunes had deliberately crippled DRM on music. Steve Jobs sneaked anti-DRM past the record company execs. You could burn playlists to CD, and the CDs wouldn't have DRM. If you then ripped the CDs to iTunes, you now had DRM-free music. In order to avoid quality issues you had to have the best possible quality on the original recording, but that's not a big deal.

Steve Jobs nuked DRM on music completely once Apple sold over 40% of the music in the US. He told the music industry that he was killing it, and they could like it or lump it; if they prevented music sales from Apple, they'd lose 40% of their revenue (and a lot more than 40% of their profit, given the way that it was a lot cheaper to sell digital copies than to press CDs and transport them to actual music stores). They caved.

Steve Jobs HATED DRM with the fury of 10,000 suns.

Re: At the time, most PCs did not yet have USB 2

STILL rewriting history,

not so.

The early iPods used Firewire and USB2.0 didn't really exist on ANY PC.

Err... no. Many PCs didn't ship with FireWire or USB 2, but some did, notably units from Sony and the more expensive Dells and HPs. In addition, there were PCI cards which had USB 2 and/or FireWire ports on them. I know this because I had such cards installed on my WinBoxen. I had, on older systems, USB 1, then USB 2, and/or FireWire 400 then FireWire 800 cards. By 2002 I had combo cards which had USB 2 and FireWire 400 ports. This would be around six months after the first iPods arrived. Before that, I had stand-alone FireWire 400 cards. I could have attached an iPod to a WinBox if I had so desired, which I didn't. I used FireWire on the WinBoxen for the same reasons I used FireWIre on Macs: high speed hard drives and high-end scanners.

Using iPod with Win98 was a nightmare install originally.

Not really, but YMMV.

" I repaired my iRiver by giving it a hard disk from a dead iPod"

Certainly Apple implemented some sort of DRM, so an Apple HDD couldn't be used in say an Aspire One (both use the ZIF interface).

And Apple's DRM was designed from the start to screw with the record industry. You could set up tracks as 'playlists' and then burn the playlists to CD; the system allowed you to burn them up to seven times. However, one thing that the record company execs didn't notice was that Steve Jobs hated, hated, HATED DRM, and there was a back door: if you ripped the playlist off the CD which you had just created, then you now had it on the computer or on the iPod without any DRM whatsoever. It was perfectly possible to have your entire music collection be DRM-free, you just had to have got the original tracks in high res and re-ripped them in max res. It took time, but you could just set iTunes to do it and go about your business. It was almost as if iTunes had been deliberately designed to circumvent DRM, but Steve would never do that to his 'partners', now would he?

I've no idea which revision of HDD you used.

Doesn't matter.

There was nothing innovative or clever or cheap at all about the iPod.

You keep saying this. You keep not being able to support it.

It was the iTunes and marketing that made it a success.

that certainly helped. Hmm. Perhaps iTunes might have been considered to be, oh, innovative?

Anything else is Apple propaganda. It wasn't the only player to use an HDD to get round the high cost of flash (then).

You hate Apple. We know.

DRM is what killed the Sony Net MD, and lack of any legitimate online source for content hampered all non-Apple players,

Ah, so iTunes was an important innovation...

not everyone was using illegal MP3 downloads,

didn't have any of those for a long time. I used iTunes well before I got an iPod. Hell, I never actually got an iPod, I just dumped stuff to my iPhone. I'd been using iTunes for years before that.

nor did many people know (at the start) how to rip Tape, Cassette, vinyl and CD to MP3.

iTunes made it trivial. Hmm. I guess that there was some innovation after all...

AMD shocks the world by only losing $16m

Re: 486SX 25

I bet you wish you'd spent the extra on the DX. But hey, who needs to do floating point arithmetic

Intel at first just had plain old 486 CPUs, no SX, DX. But then they had a problem in manufacturing, and some of the CPUs had problems with floating point. Actually, a lot of CPUs had problems with floating point. If Intel just scrapped the lot of them, they'd lose a lot of money... Hmm. Solution: sell 'em as 486SX CPUs, and the ones which actually worked properly as 486DXs. And put two sockets on the motherboards. Sell a 487 'math chip' which was really a 486DX with an extra pin; when you plugged the 487 into the motherboard it turned off the 486SX, so that the customer paid for two CPUs and got one which actually worked.

Marketing. I love it.

And if anyone thinks that AMD wouldn't pull that kind of crap if they thought they could get away with it, have a look at exactly why AMD sold triple-core CPUs. Hint: http://gizmodo.com/373185/amd-phenom-x3-triple-core-processors-are-crippled-quad-cores-in-disguise

Virgin Media's profanity warning triggered by chief exec's name

heh. Those who follow sports in the US might know of Dan Le Batard, of ESPN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Le_Batard

There would be a _lot_ of people with variations on 'Bastard' as their names.

Currys PC World rapped after Knowhow Cloud ad ruled to be 'misleading'

Curry's PC World idiocy

Last month I received an email in one of my other accounts. This was, allegedly, an invoice from a Curry's somewhere in the UK. According to the invoice, I owed a fairly substantial sum, dating from December last year. I contacted their customer nonservice after going to http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/contact-us-1181-theme.html and they confirmed that this was a genuine invoice, not some kind of scam. If I did not pay up 'action would be taken'. I pointed out that

1 I had not been in the UK in more than 20 years

2 I had never been within 50 miles of the alleged store where I allegedly ran up this debt

3 I am not currently in the UK

4 Curry's can fuck right off.

The customer nonservice drone countered that their records said different, that I had in fact been to the location in question and had in fact received the goods in question and that they did in fact have an address for me in the UK and that 'action would be taken'.

I wondered exactly how I was allowed to walk out of their premises carrying the goods in question, and told 'em to go right ahead and proceed to the address they had. I then hung up.

Sometime after that I got a call on my Magic Jack account, the service I'd used to call them (2.2 cents/minute to the UK) allegedly from someone in their legal department. He started to try to 'advise' me of my 'position'. I asked him to check to see what number he'd called. I then asked him if he really thought that threatening me was going to have the least effect. I repeated that I had not been in the UK for decades, and that I could prove it quite easily. I also asked how going to the address they allegedly had for me in the UK had gone. I further advised him that this call was being recorded, and that I would take legal action against Curry's, and personally against any agent of Curry's who continued the groundless harassment. I repeated that it simply was not possible that I had been in the UK on the date in question, at that time I was in Regina, Saskatchewan. (Given the temperature in Saskatchewan in December, I'd have rather been in the UK, but I wasn't... and I have the Canadian entry-exit stamps in my passport to prove it.) I then hung up. I have not yet received anything further from Curry's.

It would appear that someone at Curry's got taken in a fairly big way and whoever did the taking put my email address onto the form or whatever the hell it was, I don't know and I don't care, it's not my problem and any attempt to make it my problem will be met with extreme hostility. It also appears that Curry's notes the phone numbers of all who call customer nonservice. And it further appears that the alleged legal department (really some twit in sales pretending to be calling from the legal department, I have no doubt) is brain-dead.

I quite believe that Curry's is capable of anything, so long as it's stupid.

Beijing police quench scum allegedly behind 'Fireball' fraudware

Still, I wouldn't want to be them what their police comes a-knocking. Their cells are rumoured to be a tad uncomfortable..

Are you saying that the People's Armed Police might be a tad... zealous... about the performance of their duties? Hmm. It seems that you may be in need of some re-education through labour.

Probably hoping to operate under the same rule as the Russians seem to, don't target domestic users/organisations and then you're just a patriotic individual who got out of bed, saw the news and decided to do something.

That'll work right up until your stay-out-of-the-motherland activities happen to impinge on an account belonging to a senior member of government, or a friend or relative thereof. Then you'd best run for cover.

And God help you if your ransomware ends up on Ministry of the Interior computers.

Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store

Re: Good

I honestly don't understand why Apple doesn't include MacPaint with their OS anymore. It used to be the best app in the system.

Unfortunately MacPaint was written in 680x0 assembler and using APIs discontinued after System 7. It was never updated for PPC and System 8 to OS 9, and definitely can't run on OS X on either PPC or Intel.

MacPaint was written back when the boyz (and it was then almost all boyz) at Apple could write compact, documented, easily debugged, fast code which didn't use much RAM or disk. Those days are long gone.

Re: Can we replace Siri

With Clippy?

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20170725

<insert evil laugh>

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Re: Codex?

Not if they are on Theresa May's "Index Librorum Prohibitorum".

Errm... Every book ever written is on that index.

Burglary, robbery, kidnapping and a shoot-out over… a domain name?!

Re: If the alleged 'intermediary'..

If the alleged 'intermediary'..

..was running away, why was it lawful for him to be shot?

1 the idiot shot Our Hero first

2 the idiot was on Our Hero's property

3 the idiot was still armed

4 Iowa is a Castle Doctrine state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine This means that, yes, I can shoot you and stand a very good chance of not even being arrested much less convicted given that 1, 2, and 3 are true.

There was, for example, the case of the idiot 14-year-old who got shot after attempting a 'ring-doorbell-and-run' prank. http://globalnews.ca/news/2430524/14-year-old-boy-shot-by-homeowner-after-ringing-doorbell-prank/ and that boy's lucky. He's still alive. At least one other person was shot dead doing something similar, and again no charges were filled. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/family-boy-shot-and-killed-during-ring-and-run-prank-near-boca-may-never-see-settlement-after-shooter-files-bankruptcy/OEW4Lx3QpYbklkUKX2gw6N/ The Wild Wild West is still with us, and extends at least as far east as Florida.

HMS Frigatey Mcfrigateface given her official name

In any event, given the size of the ship, it's carry a good amount of ordnance.

Given that the Oliver Hazard Perry class only really carried a single Mk 13 launcher with a magazine capacity of 40, this ship is massively more powerful.

OHPs displaced 4200 tons. T26s have a design displacement of 6900 tons, which will grow. They'd better be better armed than OHPs.

What they have is:

48 short-ranged (less than 15 nautical mile range) AAW missiles

24 spots for _all_ ASurfW and ASubW missiles, combined

the helo is a 'modernized' version of the Lynx, but that's not the problem, the problem is the Sting Ray torpedoes the helo carries. Small, light, pitiful warhead (45 kg! yes, it's a shaped charge, but 45 kg! The Russkie air-dropped torp has a 70+ kg warhead, though Unc Sugar's Mk 50 and Mk 54 torps are even more anemic than Sting Rays, at least the Mk 54 has better sensors and a longer range. However.... The FY14 DOT&E report assessed the Mk 54 (BUG) torpedo as not operationally effective in its intended role. "During operationally challenging and realistic scenarios, the Mk 54 (BUG) demonstrated below threshold performance and exhibited many of the same failure mechanisms observed during the FY 2004 initial operational testing".) and the sensors and range stink.

A T26 can defend itself against air threats, at least if they're slow (Mach 5-6 Russkie missiles stand an excellent chance of getting past Mach 3 AAW...) and there aren't too many of them. A T26 is useless at fleet area air defence, 15 naut mile range simply isn't good enough. The Mk41 has 24 spots for all systems; ASROC would have either Sting Ray or, more probably, Mk 50 or 54 as its loadout, and Mk 54s are even more useless than Sting Ray. Unless you got a hit aft and popped the seals around the drive shafts on a sub and flooded the engine room, you'd need multiple hits to reliably kill a sub, particularly a big brute like, oh, a Russkie Oscar. (Not that an Oscar would have to get within ASROC range to shower the task force with hypersonic missiles or 650-mm carrier-killer torps...) The LRASM allegedly has a range of over 300 naut miles... but it's slow, subsonic, something like 600 knots. That means that it'd take half an hour to get to the target, during which time the target would move, and when they get to the target they have to traverse the hostile AAW. Russkies tend to have AAW which can reach out and touch inbounds at ranges exceeding 75 naut miles, and which move at Mach 5. Gee. I wonder how long the LRASMs will last... The Russkie hypersonic missiles have ranges on the order of 250 to 275 naut miles, but they're Mach 5 to Mach 6 and get to the target in a much shorter time, so that the target has a problem dodging, and because they're fast the Mach 3 AAW will have a problem engaging. The Russkies admit that they'd have a problem _finding_ a target at 200+ naut miles, and have helos specifically for target identification and tracking, a.k.a. flying suicide machines. The T26 could use a helo for that, as well... but any helo committed to long-range ASurf is a helo you can't use for ASub, and one which won't last long against even Russkie carrier air. Nah, the LRASMs would be used just the way Harpoon would be: at close range. But they're _slow_ and will be shot down in droves by Russkie (or Chinese, or Indian, or whoever) AAW. Tomahawk are even slower than LRASM (475-500 knots...) and would die even faster... and T26s could carry a max of 24 ASROC, LRSM, and Tomahawk, combined.

The things are OHPs for the early 21st Century, they are.

Please note that the USN is sufficiently hard up for ships that they're bringing the OHPs back. Jesus wept.

Oh, dear. It seems to be a British version of the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates, a.k.a. the Helen Keller class. Very short-ranged AAW systems, pitiful ASurfW systems., not particularly great ASubW systems. They should do well as escorts for the already doomed Queen Liz very large ships without aircraft.

Stop all news – it's time for us plebs to be told about BBC paycheques!

'Recently'?! Look up how Harry S Truman first got elected, starting with his very first political job, a County 'Judge', really kind of a commissioner.

Space left for discussion of Daley, father and son

More space left for Tammany Hall. Hint: Tammany Hall was started in the mid 1780s, or just after the French pried what's now the US loose from Britain.

And it's not recent in the UK, either. <cough> Rotten borough </cough>

TalkTalk posts 3% sales drop, says Openreach should walk the WalkWalk

Re: TT's TV Adverts

They also have sales reps in most supermarkets and shopping centres, they really are trying to get customers left right and centre.

I usually tell them we don't use the internet as it's the work of the devil.

Around here it's Comcast trying to sign people up, usually to Comcastic two-year contracts. They infest Best Buy and other low-life scum operations. On the few occasions that I set foot into a Best Buy and the Xfinity vultures (no relation to El Reg, I'm sure) flap around, I try to walk past politely. If they insist on 'just having a quick talk about the best Internet service' I say, loudly, "I used to have Comcast. After my last experience with Comcast's customer service, I will never again have Comcast service, even if the alternative is dial-up. Never. Again. Comcast is the single most evil company operating in North America. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They absolutely, positively, cannot be trusted. If Comcast management does not like my saying these things, they know the address, thanks to the very poor experience I had with Comcast customer service. Now please get out of my way." I say it loudly enough that all in the vicinity can hear me. The Xfinity vultures flap away and stay away. I've noticed that the same sales teams tend to go out on weekends; they now know me by sight and stay far away.

Mission accomplished.

School of card knocks: Russophone criminals offered online courses in credit card fraud

Re: Sounds great...

I tried. For some reason they didn't think that my name was really V. V. Putin (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин in Russkie.)

Discrimination, I call it. I shall complain to the authorities.

Jesus walks away after 7,000lb pipe van incident

Re: Jesus!

*rolls eyes*

He clearly meant "pronounced" and either made a typo or was helpfully auto-filled or autocorrected by his phone.

Yep. And I made a joke out of it, hoping to catch the humor-impaired. It worked.

Re: You said it, man.

Not even Mary Magdalene?

Depends on how seriously you take "Jesus Christ, Superstar". Way back when the then il Papa just about had a cow at the thought of carpenter-boy Josh banging some Asian chick. Which was one of the major reasons why I went to see the movie when it came out. Boy was the local preacher-boy pissed when he found out; he sentenced me to umpty-ump 'Hail Mary's. I told him to get stuffed. Haven't set foot inside a house of indoctrination since, other than at weddings and funerals.

<exits, singing "Don't Know How To Love Him">

Re: Jesus!

hey Zeus

Zeus is Greek, not Hispanic, and he tends to throw thunderbolts at those who make fun of his name.

Re: Jesus!

Naming your kid Jesus is not cool, think of going through school being called Jesus and the constant "Jesus" jokes as an adult.

Around here, it seems that roughly every fifth Hispanic male is named 'Jesus' (and some have 'Maria' in the mix; south Germans tend to have that, too) and every sixth Irish male and some Hispanic ones are 'Francis Xavier'. I even know a Jesus Maria Francis Xavier Suarez, though I admit that I did ask him what he did to get his mom mad with him. If you tried to rag on the assorted Jesui in school you'd undoubtedly have a close encounter with a lot of angry Hispanics. Bad idea. As for Jesus jokes at work... that's creating a hostile work environment, son, and I'm pretty sure who'd be laughing as you exit the premises with your stuff in a cardboard box.

And 'Jesus' is far from the worst possible name. I went to school with one boy who was named 'Armour of God'. Everyone called him 'Armie'. I swear I'm not making this up.

UK.gov snaps on rubber gloves, prepares for mandatory porn checks

Re: Conjours up the image ...

A picture of Theresa May smiling beautifically.

I hereby invoke Rule 34 of the Internet.

ITYM Rule 63.

Re: Restraint of trade

Although, to be fair, her trade does mostly involve restraint.

If we paid her enough (and, I know, it would have to be a lot) would she please have a go at restraining May Not and the rest of the Tories? Please?

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Re: Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city.

I bet they think all scientists wear white coats and thick bottle bottom glasses, speak with a fake German accent and occasionally invent things like flubber.

I don't speak with a fake German accent.

And you forgot to mention the evil laugh.

Re: You're being downvoted

Take Physics for example. They do not know what 90% of the Universe is made up of. They can't measure it, they can't see it.

99.9999999999(repeating)% of the universe is vacuum.

Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in

Miss Marple played by Brian Blessed

Bloody hell, what a marvelous idea! He'd have to grow the beard out a bit more to truly get into character, though.

Re: You forgot

That they need to be Transgendered as well. (LGBTQ and all that)

naughty. You left off the 'I'. LGBTQI. You will be placed in the stocks and whipped with limp spaghetti.

Re: Overstated importance of fans

Or do you live in Glasgow?

One does not 'live' in Glasgow. One merely exists, in pain and sorrow and hope for a better tomorrow.

Good news: Samsung's Tizen no longer worst code ever. Bad news: It's still pretty awful

Re: A good thread about this on TheDailyWTF

Oh. My. God.

I just sampled that (very long!) thread. The only place I've seen crap on the level of that perpetuated by Carsten Haitzler (and that just has to be a nym...) is deep, deep, DEEP in the bowels of talk.origins, when the creationist cretins get caught lying their behinds off (again) and tie themselves into (bigger) knots trying (and failing) to justify their idiocy, and even they can't quite match this. This boy can't actually be a professional coder... can he? Please tell me that he was only joking... Even Ray (No True Scotsman) Martinez isn't as bad as Haitzler, and Ray thinks that Pope Francis is an atheist 'cause El Papa's version of Christianity isn't an exact match to Ray's. (Yes, I'm serious. Ray thinks that Pope Francis is an atheist. Really. Actually, all Popes, possibly reaching as far back as Peter, are/were atheists 'cause they disagree(d) with the One True Authority on All Things Christian. Kinda like anyone who disagrees with Carsten Haitzler is a naughty programmer who should be spanked.)

How is it that Tizen just doesn't collapse of its own weight?

comparing a variable to itself isn't a problem? O-kay. I didn't make that kind of error back when I was first learning to code <mumble> years ago. Hint: I was using the then spanking new FORTRAN77 super language, though the school used punch cards as it didn't have a computer with terminals the year I started. It acquired a Prime shortly thereafter, with real terminals, and we stopped using the punch card machine. I used old cards as bookmarks for years (okay, for decades, I had a lot of the things) afterwards.

Blue Cross? Blue crass: Health insurer thought it would be a great idea to mail plans on USB sticks

Feh

I might plug a USB drive I found or was mailed to me into a computer... just not into _my_ computer. Or a computer on a network that I'm responsible for.

Mine's the one with the USB drive with stuxnet on it, thanks.

Seagate SNAFU sees Cisco servers primed for data loss

Re: That's my job, dammit.

You could get a similar job... if you have, say, pix of Vlad and his pony and the real reason why Vlad took off his shirt. I'll say no more lest there be some polonium in my future.

You two are being very sick bastards.

That's my job, dammit.

Hey, remember that monkey selfie copyright drama a few years ago? Get this – It's just hit the US appeals courts

Re: Devil's Advocate

Oh, the Patently Evil Tedious Arsenugets have shown how ethically challenged they are long, long, LONG ago, not least with how they treat 'rescued' dogs at their facilities. (Hint: the vast majority of those 'rescued' animals never walk out of said facilities.)

European Parliament keen to throw news publishers a bone

Evil thought

If i were Google I'd add a line to the Ts&Cs: if you want us to link to your publication, the price will be whatever you charge us for carrying your content, plus $1 per hit. If a story gets zero hits, then Google merely breaks even. If a story gets 1,000,000 hits, then someone owes Google a million dollars. Pay up or get hauled into court for breach of contract.

I'd add another line: should some busybody government attempt to invalidate the above, then Google will simply no longer carry your content at any price. Enjoy your right to be forgotten, boys.

I'd write to Mountain View, except I'm sure that they've already thought of this.

Dell gives world its first wireless-charging laptop if you buy $580 extra kit

Re: Regardless of the price, the idea is good

Probly find out in 20 years that the massive hysterysis field required to pass the current an inch or so from the matt to the device makes your balls drop off.

Boys who willingly use Dell hardware don't usually have to worry about that.

https://boygeniusreport.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/dell-dude-1.jpg

Ghost of NTLM still haunts Microsoft: Aged protocol hole patched

Is the rabbit European or African?

Australian.

<iHow deep do the rabbit hole actually go?</i>

Contact Nick Wilde. I'm sure he knows how deep Judy's rabbit hole goes...

http://freshfiction.tv/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/flex_tablet_zootopia_selfie_c781d089.jpeg

(Yes, it's SFW. Trust me, there are lots and lots and lots of NSFW Nick & Judy images out there. Google is your friend. And some people are very, very, very sick. Worse than me, and that's going a long way...)

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Re: but pretty close. Definitely will work

I believe that Office formatting will still change if you change the printer that you want to use.

Word definitely will. PowerPoint and Excel don't care. Access is... Access, a.k.a. the Spawn of Satan.

Re: Inspire...

have worked at a place where the contract itself stipulated Microsoft Office to be used for all documents.

So have I. LibreOffice used to screw up formatting; they've got a lot better. iWorks used to have problems (Pages hated doing borders and fills in a way that worked with Word, for example) but that is also no longer the case. Work in LibreOffice or iWorks and export to MS Office formats when you're done. They won't know the difference. In particular the senior management drones who insisted on MS Office in the first place won't know the difference. The main problem is spreadsheets. Numbers stinks, and there are a lot of add-ins for Excel which may be required. That is, in fact, the main drawback to leaving MS Office: Excel is, simply, the best spreadsheet currently available. No-one else is even close.

Then again, have also got younger relatives whose schools mandate Microsoft for doing homework, and teach MS use rather than computee use ....

If all they want is a completed file, again LibreOffice and iWorks can do most of what's needed. If you have to actually step through MS Office, then at school get a copy of Office for Education (free! but just one license, and I think it expires after 4 years) or Office University 365 ($80, two licenses, expires after 4 years) and use that. You can stick it into a VM, which would keep your main system free of MS cruft.

For everything else use LibreOffice and/or iWorks. Or, I suppose, G Suite. Never used that last one, so I don't know how well it can match MS Office output.

I'm sure they are doing this purely to stop Google (in productivity) and Apple, Google, Linux in end user OSs from picking off their customers. There are many companies out there that want Google G Suite, but also want Windows... or use Macs, but also want Office. They are attempting to say "if you want Windows... you're welcome to buy G Suite, but we are going to double your Windows prices if you don't buy the bundle... so give it a think."

I went to microsoft.com and tried to find a way to get info about Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise. I found a lot of bumf, but no real info; I went to the 'contact me' page and, after a prolonged wait, got one of their drones up on the web chat. ("unusual volume", yada-yada-yada) The drone had no clue about MS 365, but could cough up a phone number. I haven't had time to call it. I will. This should be interesting.

I have a lot of Macs. If MS 365 even looks as though it will increase my costs, and it does, I will be waving bye-bye to MS products. Every single machine will be a Mac or will run Linux, probably Ubuntu or Mint, or BSD. All of them. Any machines which need office-type things (which will not include the servers) will run iWorks from Apple or LibreOffice. I can't use LibreOffice on everything as we have some iPads, and LibreOffice is, I think, GPL3 and so ain't ever gonna be in the Apple Store. No, I'm not going to jailbreak the iPads so as to get it, either. iWorks is free, even if it simply isn't as good as MS Office in many ways (in particular Numbers stinks compared to Excel) but it's _free_.

Congrats, MS. I've been a Word (and an Excel!) user since 1985. I've used it on Macs, and Windows. I've spent lots and lots of money on licenses, and on training for new users, and all kinds of other things that go with using MS Office. Kiss goodbye to all that. And I'm sure that I won't the the only one who bails.

Yes, I'm pissed off.

So does this mean that Windows 10 will become a subscription based offering?

Yes.

Semiconductor-laced bunny eyedrops appear to nuke infections

Re: copper, the miracle element...

and it provides at least SOME armoring against cannon fire

No it doesn't. Coppering was used to:

1 stop fouling, the growth of weed and marine life such as barnacles (which you noted)

2 prevent worming; large marine worms (a clam, actually, but it looks like a worm) would eat the wood in wooden ships, and did such a good job of it that they were named 'shipworms'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_navalis

Coppering was of ZERO value against cannon-fire because:

1 it was mostly below the waterline, and the majority of shot hit above the waterline in almost all naval actions during the age of sail. The French navy in particular had a fetish for aiming high and trying to damage the rigging of enemy, usually British, ships. At the Battle of the Virginia Capes, the French were able to do sufficient damage to British rigging that the British admiral in command elected to not press the action. This had several results, not least being that Cornwallis was forced to surrender at Yorktown. The British aimed for the hull, and tried to kill the crew rather than the sails. At Trafalgar several French ships had casualties in excess of 50%, while the top British casualties was Colossus, at 35%.

2 because of the expense of coppering, only a thin layer was used. That thin layer wouldn't stop bullets, even bullets from smoothbore muskets, much less roundshot from cannon. Stopping roundshot was why warships had thick bulwarks made of lots and lots and lots of wood, typically oak. At close range even this was insufficient, and the thick bulwarks were on the sides, not the rear (where there were stern galleries with lots of glass and thin wood) or the front (where there had to be provision for the bowsprit and forward rigging) so a warship which was 'raked' by fire from directly ahead or astern was in serious trouble. At Trafalgar, the French ship of the line Redoubtable was raked repeatedly by the British liner Temeraire when Temeraire came to the rescue of Victory; at least 300 of Redoubtable's 800 or so crew were killed by roundshot and grapeshot at close range. (Note that Temeraire was named for a French ship which had been captured by the RN in an earlier war. There were three Neptunes at Trafalgar, one in each of the British, French, and Spanish navies, and a British Tonnant and a French Swiftsure.)