Posts by swm

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Re: Old typewriter

"we can afford to XOR something a couple million times if we want to."

This is just the same as XORing once with the appropriate pattern.

Where's the mysterious metal monolith today then? Oh look, it's atop a California mountain

Re: Technically ......

In high school I used to "burn" holes in aluminum pie plates with mercury. The mercury acts as a catalyst and allows the oxygen in the air to get to the aluminum under the oxide and oxidise it. The result is towers of aluminun oxide and, eventually, creates holes in the pie plate.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: For most folks ...

ed? works on most platforms.

Not sunshine, moonlight or good times – blame it on the buggy

Re: "It's the system"

I'll pit my 5-year-old granddaughter against your random button pushing. She can screw up a desktop faster than you can say, "NO!"

On the other hand I've learned many key combination shortcuts I would never have discovered on my own.

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: That's not the power button?

At Xerox, around 1980, some secretaries ran Interlisp for their desktop (mail, document creation, printing etc.). They never seemed to have a problem. If there was a power failure, on restarting the machine all of the icons, open documents etc. were right where she left them.

It's too bad we can't do this even with a controlled shutdown nowadays.

Re: We from the movies

Probably a divide by zero.

Re: Too Many Stories!

The campus police had a red button in their office that was plastic with a needle in the center. The police said that it drew blood frequently.

HTTPS-only mode arrives in Firefox 83 as Mozilla finds new home for Rust-y Servo engine

Re: Excuse!

I run a website on bluehost and about a year ago I discovered I could use http or https on my pages and subdomains. I also discovered some pages on my website I didn't put there but appeared to be challenge/response pages to get the certificates. I do have a "plus" account though.

Getting a free certificate apparently just requires having the ability to put up a web page to show you own/control the website.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Re: That reminds me..

When I was little I used to order electronics stuff but the bill was always off by a few cents. Once they sent a check for $.04 and when I tried to cash it they said that there was a $.10 charge for cashing a check. After much arguing I got my 4 cents.

Re: Computerized billing ...

When I was a "cute" young boy I was fascinated by phone companies. I was able to get into a dozen or so just by asking. I saw a long distance cord board, #1 crossbar, #4 crossbar, #5 crossbar, a panel office, a 60,000 subscriber step-by-step system (it was awesome and noisy), some ESS systems etc. It was fun to see the technology advance but I always loved the crossbar systems.

One more reason for Apple to dump Intel processors: Another SGX, kernel data-leak flaw unearthed by experts

Re: This is news?

Back in 1966 on the Dartmouth time sharing system there was a top-level file that was all of physical memory. It was protected. Someone thought it would be harmless to grant read access to this (pseudo) file. Someone else then discovered a simple password cracker by trying to open up a file and scanning memory for the file name and looking nearby for the password. Worked like a charm.

When I found out about it I asked, "What were you thinking?"

Don't let random people mess with stuff they don't understand.

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

US Politics

The problem with presidential elections is that neither party runs an electable candidate. We vote against someone not for someone.

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Re: Justice?

Same with the US.

Ho hum: If you're so artificially intelligent, name this song while my videos go viral

Name That Tune

I remember, in high school, the music teacher had a book of musical phrases with the name of the piece. Entries like:

CCDCFE - Happy Birthday

but mainly classical music.

Come on, Amazon: If you're going to copy open-source code for a new product, at least credit the creator

Re: Not following the spirit of the licence?

Remember J. R. R. Tolkien? He didn't copyright his trilogy and Ace books ripped it off. They did nothing illegal - just unethical.

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

Musicians need sheet music. (Although I did see a pianist playing from a tablet of some kind.)

When you're On Call, only you can hear the silence of the clicks

Re: how do i get that gig?

It is amazing how loose banks are with cash. There don't seem to be any checks for large transfers - certainly not to the degree IT uses to secure their machines.

After Trump, Congress, Supreme Court Justice hit out at tech giants' legal immunity, now FCC boss wants to stick his oar in, too

Jail

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Re: Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!

"(not including being shown hypercards years before in school)"

Ah yes - hypercards. Sort of a neat idea.

Boeing Starliner commander Christopher Ferguson bows out of first crewed mission due to family commitments

I believe that it is because he wants to attend his daughter's wedding.

IT Marie Kondo asks: Does this noisy PC spark joy? Alas, no. So under the desk it goes

Re: cold feet warm computer.

At work we used to use a tube (valve) oscilloscope to warm the office.

Microsoft: After we said we'll try to promote more Black people, the US govt accused us of discrimination

My group went through sexual harassment training where I worked. It was junk. I finally pointed out that this training was designed to defend the company against lawsuits. They had no answer for this.

A well-built male window washer claimed sexual harassment against secretaries that whistled at him while he was washing windows. I think he won.

Re: I have an idea...

Shades of Shockley.

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Re: Bizarre

Remember time sharing? All users logging in to one mainframe. One mainframe crash and all of the users idleized. This seems like a '20s version of time sharing.

Third time's still the charm: AMD touts Zen-3-based Ryzen 5000 line, says it will 'deliver absolute leadership in x86'

Go AMD. No longer second best.

FYI: Mind how you go. We're more or less oblivious to 75% of junk in geosynchronous orbits around Earth

Re: One wonders what the future of satellites and space explorations is going to be...

And what happens when the space debris hits the space tower? I believe that such a tower would intersect orbits of all of the low Earth crud.

Re: Pikies in Spaaaace

If we ever build an L4 or L5 colony this stuff could be useful.

Too many staff have privileged work accounts for no good reason, reckon IT bods

Re: .. all the access they ask for ..

Once, when I was teaching computer science, I told the head of IT that if I needed root I would just ask for it. He said he probably wouldn't give it to me. They had reasonably good security in the computer science department.

Then I was trying to debug a suid root program with dtrace or strace (I forget which one) and told the head of IT I needed root. He thought for awhile and opened up a root shell on my machine. Then I discovered that the shared file server didn't trust root credentials from a remote machine. I couldn't even access my own files from the root shell!

So I transferred the relevant files to /tmp and proceeded to successfully debug the suid root program. Good security.

First they came for chess, then Go... and now, oh for crying out loud, AI systems can beat us at curling

I'm impressed

I am very impressed with both the humans and the robot. My parents used to curl and I have tried it. It is not as easy as it looks. The strategy is complex especially with all of the uncertainties.

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

Re: FCS is not new.

Some of the stealth aircraft are so unstable that they must use fly-by-wire as the pilot's reaction time is too slow. The instability means that these aircraft can turn on a dime. If you lose the fly-by-wire you bail out.

Re: FCS is not new.

Military aircraft have different requirements but, e.g., there were bugs when some military planes crossed the equator.

Woman dies after hospital is unable to treat her during crippling ransomware infection, cops launch probe

Re: RE hospital IT

I was in the surgery department of a local hospital and the nurses were shopping on the emergency department computers!

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: Obviously not GPS jamming

I once asked about the 747's inertial guidance and the pilot said that it would drift about a mile after travelling across the Atlantic. They also had 3 inertial guidance units just to be sure. This was over 25 years ago.

Let's go space truckin': 1970s probe Voyager 1 is now 14 billion miles from home

Wow!

Elecrow CrowPi2: Neat way to get your boffins-to-be hooked on Linux from an early age and tinkering in no time

Re: "The kiddiwonks won't even know they're learning"

When I teach square dancing I use a lot of repetition. Sometimes when I think I am over doing it the dancers want more so they really learn the call.

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Static

My first computer was a "big board" Z80 computer with 16KBytes of memory (I think) with dual 8" 240KBytes floppy disks. The operating system was 512 bytes.

Oracle's Java 15 rides into town, waving the 'we're number one' flag, demands 25th birthday party

Re: so wrong

But

"xyz" == "xyz" is true.

0.0/0.0 == 0.0/0.0 is false.

etc.

Re: so wrong

LISP has 4 equality operators: eq, eql, equal, equalp.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Re: Magnetrons

"the heater was only needed to get the thing to start"

That is correct. Some of the electrons crash into the cathode and keep it warm. I have an old 1946 RADAR book from MIT that explains this.

Re: Y Service

Dresden was a reprisal.

Re: Lets hear it for the girls

I don't see any mention of the magnetron which was another British invention. The early RADAR frequency was in the OH (water) band and didn't perform as well as it could have. This is perfect for a microwave oven though. The Germans captured some magnetrons but couldn't get them to work very well because they made them perfectly symmetrical.

England also set up several "fake" radio transmitters outside of London to try to mislead the Germans.

Peek-a-boo! Windows Insiders play hide and seek with a Friday night update

Re: "...wonder if remote working has accelerated the move to a paperless future."

At Xerox, where we had all of the bells and whistles for a "paperless office," everyone printed copies of emails, reports etc. The paperless office generated more paper, even at Xerox, where it should have generated less. Oh well.

Open access journals are vanishing from the web, Internet Archive stands ready to fill in the gaps

Re: OA publishing

Actually they charge the authors for publishing with page charges.

The Honor MagicBook Pro looks nice, runs like a dream, and isn't too expensive either. What more could you want?

Re: Decimated

Then there are some that opine that a word never means the same thing twice.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

All languages have their good and bad points. Generally people favor languages that they are familiar with:

LISP - lexical closures, precise garbage collection, can mimic most other languages

JAVA - type erasure, precise garbage collection

C - "machine language" with better syntax

C++ - C + separation of algorithms and containers through iterators

HASKELL/ML - precise garbage collection, list comprehension

Your Favorite Language - stuff, more stuff

What C++ needs is a precise garbage collector although careful coding using values instead of references can eliminate most memory problems.

YMMV

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

In 1965 I had a problem and access to a real time DN-30 computer that was running the exec for the Dartmouth time sharing system. So I added some tasks to calculate some results on the DN-30. I was using a good fraction of the computer time and the blinkenlights showed an unusual pattern as a result. I got my answers and turned off the program and then realized I could get the same answers, by hand, with paper and pencil quite quickly.

Since the computer was a real time computer there wasn't any appreciable slowdown.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: I miss Eudora

I still use Eudora for my emails. Still gets the job done and is pretty virus proof if you don't download graphics.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a pair of black holes coalesced resulting in largest gravitational wave we've seen

Re: One heck of a blip!

I remember one of the first black hole collisions resulted in 3 solar masses converted to gravitational waves. If the black holes were spinning before the collision then the resulting black hole should be kicked "sideways" a small fraction of the speed of light. I wonder if this happened in this case.

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

Which is bigger - Andromeda or the Milky Way?

I've heard both. So who absorbs whom?

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: So not just about plain text email

The Xerox STAR office product was slow because the developers never used it. They used XDE that ran on the same hardware to develop the code. XDE ran like lightning.