Posts by cutterman

Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth

Re: What about the operational costs?

The reactors on US Navy vessels are operated by a completely separate crew of nuclear technicians. They have nothing to do with the ordinary crew and don't associate with them.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

".....such a shame the Microdrives were utter shite and prone to chewing up."

Never had any trouble with the M-drives - I must have been lucky.

Used 2 of them ganged together with that little attach-thingy

Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel

I've been using the Paragon drivers for years without problems.

Mac

Snortical warfare: Wild boar launches amphibious assault against German beachgoers

Their bites are no joke though. They have a big mouth full of razor-edged cutting teeth and will take a big chunk out of you in a second. Much more dangerous than attack dogs, which puncture and tear. They can, and have killed people.

Mac

Microsoft has a cure for data nuked by fat fingers if you're not afraid of the command line

Re: Might be helpful but not for regular users

This is just DOS' old "Recover" [one of the most dangerous commands ever] in a pretty dress.

Recovers your files in 10,000 tiny bits - Rec0001, Rec0002, Rec0040,.....Rec9678: and it's up to you to put them in the right order.

Farking stupid

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China's silicon-self-sufficiency plan likely to miss targets due to Factories Not Present error

Africa?

Africa? Surely you jest Sir!

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Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

And what about my M.Sc. ?

Come to think of it, Slave of Science (S.Sc.) has a bit more truth in it.

But wait, there's more, someone may trigger on the SS in my S.Sci.!

Life is getting VERY difficult these days

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What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'm so angry I can't think

Yep. You would have thought that after all these years that distros would have learned to make Samba "just work". Cupertino managed it seamlessly but every Linux distro needs tinkering with or magical incantations before Samba sort of does what it was supposed to do.

Ferkin' irritating. Apart from that I just love Linux.

But Samba :-o

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Sometimes shining a light on a nuclear problem just makes things worse

Multi-years ago working with a laser-doppler flowmeter. Instead of watching a needle jumping around, fed out put thru a DA converter and wrote a program to graph and analyse results. In Sinclair Basic. Worked like a charm. Down to the real experimental work.

4mm laser head fitted into a little stick-on button that warned the skin ro 38deg C to stabilise output. Results sometimes good, sometimes bad - no consistency.

After much farting about discovered that the laser head was sensitive to rotation - turn it 90deg or more and you got different results.

Painted an indexing mark on the head and button and hey it's Christmas! The manufacturerers wre happy to find out about that and off went my long-forgotten paper.

Ah me...

Mac

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

In South Africa they wouldn't just steal the diesel, they'd steal the tanks too.

And quite possibly the genset and certainly any copper wiring lying around.

Mac

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

My old black MacBook wouldn't update beyond Snow Leopard so since there was room for another drive I put in an SSD as the System drive and a new 1TB drive for ./ users.

Runs Linux Mint like a scared cat without having to search for drivers or anything.

Lovely!

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Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none

What about the buh-buh-brilliant Max Headroom???

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PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Re: Oddly

I'm still using PPT(X) 2004 for medical lectures.

With a bit of imagination it can be made a fantastic & entertaining information conveyor.

Its the the lecturer who is dull, not the application.

I don't talk much - each set of slides tells its own story in a few trenchant words (NO charts!!!)

Mac

Ubuntu says i386 to be 86'd with Eoan 19.10 release: Ageing 32-bit x86 support will be ex-86

Re: The post is required, and must contain letters.

Mint is rather more than a re-skin of ubuntu, though it uses a lot of Ubuntu packages.

And if its a reskin then good - that turd-brown look is awful.

Mint is a polished version of Ubuntu - which proves you CAN polish a turd.

Mac

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Just smash it and buy a rebellious retro incandescent!

Mac (been there , done that)

;- }

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

The shorn lamb

Nothing to do with fleas or Egyptians or the Bible. Removing all body hair in women (and now men) is a multiBillion industry that was thought up to get even more money from the idiot population.

Then you can sell them salves, aftershaves and soothing goop for the pimples and ingrown hairs and antibiotics for the infections. Transmission of herpes and molluscum contagiosum has soared and there are other viral nasties just waiting to jump from one raw mons to the other.

When I was a lad, if it had hairs it was old enough - no wonder there are so many men fascinated by underage girls (and boys) .

Money, money, money, money - certainly not health or comfort. Bloody silly.

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Intel SGX 'safe' room easily trashed by white-hat hacking marauders: Enclave malware demo'd

The British (with a lot of help from the Poles and the French) and later the Americans cracked Enigma and most of the important Japanese diplomatic and military cypher/codes. Later in WW2 they had the help of crude analog computers that speeded up the process.

They proceeded from the premise that there was human readable sensible information in those endless series of 4 or 6 letter groups. Their task was much facilitated by operator errors - sending the same message in different codes/ciphers, using the same code pages on subsequent days, repeated phrases like, "Your Excellency" and so on and so on. Given time and enough data all codes/ciphers can be cracked - except for proper "one-time-pad" codes.

But then, how random is random? I have dozens of ways of producing pseudorandom numbers (best to start with a hardware RNG and then subject it to cycles of PRNG). A method of generating (AND conveying it securely to the recipient) genuinely random numbers is not easy. Enforcing the correct use of these numbers is virtually impossible.

But whatever you do there MUST be entropy in the message - given enough messages, enough knowledge of your adversary, the type of data likely to be communicated and enough time (and speed increases daily) that entropy is theoretically discoverable.

cutterman

You think election meddling is bad now? Buckle up for 2020, US intel chief tells Congress

Let's be careful out there

You say, "Let's be careful out there"

I sort of prefer the original ending of the briefing in the series (before they went all soft).

"Let's do it to them, before they do it to us..."

Mac :-)

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

A good HOSTS file is your friend. Many uses.

Wish someone would update and polish HostsMan.

What happened to abelhadigital???

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Think I used Carbon Copy Cloner with the SDD attached to some doodad usb connector.

Used the stuff that came with the conversion kit

Don't remember it as difficult. Just be careful removing and replacing memory modules.

SSD1 for System, /Volumes/Mac HDD1 for Data

Don't remember it as being a major hassle.

50 years ago: NASA blasts off the first humans to experience a lunar close encounter

Apollo 8

Yeah, I remember it. I've never been religious, but hearing Borman et al. read from the book of Genesis was quite a spiritual moment.

Bill Anders: "We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you."

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

Jim Lovell

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

Frank Borman

"And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

Amazing...

Mac

An AI system has just created the most realistic looking photos ever

Teeth

The adults teeth don't change.

Bloody clever otherwise

Mac

Privacy, security fears about ID cards? UK.gov's digital bod has one simple solution: 'Get over it'

ID books/cards and numbers

Why the fuss about ID books/cards and ID numbers?

I've had 'em in two of the countries I've lived in and never seen a problem.

Very useful because it makes it quite difficult for someone to impersonate you

Mac

Tumblr resorts to AI in attempt to scrub itself clean from filth

Differentiating nipples

Not too hard to difficult to differentiate male (or child) nipples from adult female.

Surprisingly it is the relative size of the papilla (that sticky-out bit in the middle of the areola) that is the most reliable differentiator. And male areolae are elliptical instead of round. Areolar size varies too much among women to be a differentiator.

Don't ask me how I know...

Mac

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Re: Push volume button to mute

And on Tigra 1.8 (Corsa in a pretty dress)

Took me a few minutes to work out...

Mac

Groundhog Day comes early as Intel Display Drivers give Windows 10 the silent treatment

"They could even consider calling the new OS 'doors' to remove the stigma of windows."

[Chorus]

This is the End

Beautiful friend

This is the End

My only friend, the End

Mac

;-)

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Re: Elastic band RAM retention

As far as I could see on the iFixit teardown, the SODIMMS clip in as normal. Those rubber bits may be to "stand-off" the peculiar screwed on metal cage that covers the chips.

The cage may be to reduce interference or (more likely) to discourage enterprising hackers from upgrading the memory themselves at prices less than Apple's $$$$$/Gb sticks.

Mac

It may be poor man's Photoshop, but GIMP casts a Long Shadow with latest update

PSP then and now

Been using JASC's PSP 6 for years - all 71MB of it - amazing what they packed in there - masks, adjustment layers, the whole megillah. Quick and (reasonably) intuitive.

GIMP too, all 967MB of it - quirky, hard to learn to use but extremely powerful. Too powerful for me except for special occasions.

Got myself Corel's PSP2019 the other day - just curious - all 1.5GB of it if you include all the weird effects that I'll never use. Can still see traces of the original PSP in the main executable - much the same as PSP6 but just harder to use with that over-complicated smorgasbord of a UI. I bet most of the original JASC code is still in there!

So what do I do when I just want to put a vector overlay on an image, blend in a highlight or use a gradient mask? Why, PSP6 of course!

Funny old world.

(Wish I could find a copy of JASC's final version of PSP, before Corel fouled it up)

Mac

Re: Forget the geeky stuff, sort out the user experience.

I'm still using PSP 6.02 (and GIMP)

Very capable package - a few limitations but not many and since I know the UI by heart, very quick.

Amazing what can be crammed into 70MB.....no license key either.

Mac

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Re: Not a good look here.

"A lot of stuff gets stored there, but I have several programs that put configuration in documents/$program_name/config or something. They usually don't give you any other option. Yes, they're bad programs, which is why I try not to use them. No, I don't have much choice not to."

Agree. I really HATE this. "MY Documents" folder should be for just that, no Appdata, which belong in the apps Program folder, not mixed up with my Documents. And no you can't change this. Fuckfuckfuck.

On all my machines I have one drive C: (for the OS and Programs (System)) and another (usually mirrored drive, usually D: ) for Data. Fucking Windows stores all sorts of its own and apps crap in "My Documents" and I fucking HATE it!

Mac

The secret history of Apple's Stacks

Unfortunately development of ClassicShell has ceased - I really like it, particularly the old-style 98 cascading menus.

StarDock's Fences are better than nothing but how in the name of @#$% do I find an app without scrolling through all the crap that I have installed.

With Classic Shell I could group stuff on the start menu (like Text Apps, or Image Apps and get to them easy) but with Fences I still have to minimize everything to see the furshlugginer damn Fences

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Declassified files reveal how pre-WW2 Brits smashed Russian crypto

Book based codes are very insecure (even if there are only two copies of the book in existence).

The underlying language structure makes such codes intrinsically non-random and provides a wedge into the code.

Only a _truly_ random sequence is _really_ secure, and surprisingly difficult to produce. Even pseudo-random numeric generators will eventually show a pattern which gives you a start, and that is all you need with a computer to do the heavy lifting.

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Trump wants to work with Russia on infosec. Security experts: lol no

Re: Tee hee. Trump is to Putin as --

Trump has massive debts to assorted Russians.

What else do you need?

A variety of mega-bankruptcies would not look good for the POTUS,

as well as exposing him to considerable expensive civil litigation.

No need for pee-girls, Putin has effectively neutered Trump.

Mac

Another data-leaking Spectre CPU flaw among Intel's dirty dozen of security bug alerts today

Most of these seem to depend on getting root as a local user.

In which case you may have more serious things to worry about...

BlackBerry KEY2: Remember buttons? Boy, does this phone sure have them

I want one.

I loved my Nokia E90 that actually allowed me to answer an email quickly without hunting and pecking and retyping or suggesting bizarre words. And why any but the most manic narcissist would want to take pictures of themselves eludes me.

I want one (and I'm gonna get one, so there!)

Mac

Apple will throw forensics cops off the iPhone Lightning port every hour

Most dictionary attacks use English, so just use an obscure language - like Finnish or Maltese.

Anyone for Marsaxloxx?

Mac

Microsoft says Windows 10 April update is fit for business rollout

T-shirts

After being trapped a few times at the office I bought a couple of T-shirts saying:

NO, I WILL NOT FIX YOUR PC!

That did it...

Mac

Great Scott! Bitcoin to consume half a per cent of the world's electricity by end of year

Money ill-spent

Invest the money that you would have paid for your mining farm/'lekky wisely (Nvidia anyone?) and you'll outperform Bitcoin by a fair amount.

Foolish (as Warren Buffett points out)

Mac

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Well, it all goes to show that de Gaulle was right to to say "Non!"

"…in his address at the Elysée Palace on that November day 50 years ago,<snip> he told his invited audience that the British view of European construction was characterised by a deep-seated hostility and that the UK would require a radical transformation if it were ever to be allowed to join the Common Market.

Eventually the UK was allowed to join, which it did, somewhat unenthusiastically, until the benefits (and burdens) of membership became apparent.

The old General must ROFL…

Mac

'Computer algo' blamed for 450k UK women failing to receive breast screening invite

Yep, and about 1730 women between 68 and 71 who had a non-progressive cancer were spared an mastectomy, chemo and RT (which have their own morbidity and mortality, particularly in this age group).

So don't bring out you hankies yet folks. At a guesstimate, probably fractionally less women died as a result of this "faulty algorithm".

And yes, I am a surgeon dealing with breast cancer patients (among other things).

See https://www.healthwatch-uk.org/20-awards/award-lectures/66-2002-prof-michael-baum.html

Windows 10 Springwatch: See the majestic Microsoft in its natural habitat, fixing stuff the last patch broke

Diagnostic Data Viewer

Checking tonight, to get the Diagnostic Data Viewer, you HAVE to enroll in the Windows Insider program and effectively become a Beta-tester for the next general-release of Windows - nice one MS!

Unfortunately I'm too busy to have to start worrying about what new stuff MS has dreamed up and whether it will bork my system. Reimaging is a pain and wastes time (of _course_ I have regular incremental images running).

To be honest, Win10 has given me little trouble and seems pretty stable, so long as you stay away from the cutting-edge. And I always have the rock-solid Mac and Linux boxen to fall back on.

So it goes…

Mac

How 'parasitic' Google's 'We're journalists!' court defence was stamped into oblivion

I use Google to search for stuff because it mostly gets me to the references I need faster. Better answers than B*ng etc., except for very specialised search engines.

Advanced search also allows me, if I so choose, to find sites with unpatched servers and other vulnerabilities.

A search engine is a search engine, for better or for worse - crippling it to weed out undesirable or "antisocial" searches is not the answer.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Re: Feeling Old...

TSRs - such fun watching them fight over the interrupts…NOT!

And the fun of trying to shoehorn a bunch into the boot sequence.

I remember that some would temporarily need a much larger chunk of memory to initialise than they eventually occupied and you had to get the loading order just right.

Not to speak of getting the interrupts hooked in the right sequence!

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Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn't default browser

Re: Fucking idiots

Yeah, and every single graphics program has its own graphics drivers - which might (or might not) work on your hardware…

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Re: Worst printer of all time

Ah what joy! Still have one and a couple of precious rolls of silver paper. Worked when I tried it out for fun about ten years ago… The pong of ozone and the sparks! Even have a couple of printouts that are semi-readable.

Eventually got some non-name RS-232 thermal printer that worked with fanfold. Fun writing a printer driver (not). Think I still have that too!

Mac

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

Ah, what a blast from the past…

Assembler, machine language, self-modifying code (to fit in that tiny memory space), peeking and poking. I got an AD/DA converter and ran lab instruments with it! The joys of the tape-recorder (not!)

One trick I used was to modify the return address on the gosub stack to give me conditional jumps to a different code segment - you could really have fun being able to talk to the bare metal of the processor.

Object-oriented code - why, all my code was OO, long before I'd even heard of it…

Happy days :-)

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Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

Yup, just exchanged 3x1280x1024 for a 3840x2164

Love the clarity of the big screen but I miss the simplicity of just snapping from one screen to another.

And if I set the screen font-size to something readable without a microscope most of my older apps get very confused…think I need to add one of the old screens back into the mix.

And Synergy1 is excellent, while Synergy2 feels like alpha-code.

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Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Been there, got the T-shirt…

Replaced the press-button switches with switches that need you to insert & turn a key.

All fine until you lose the keys…

Mac :-(

NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun

Re: We have the clueless leading the blind...

Ja, we get it. You are just DYING for an excuse, any kind of excuse, to kill someone.

People like you, who positively salivate at the thought of being able to use their beloved gun to off someone, shouldn't be allowed to own one.

Move to Utah and volunteer for the firing squad - Please!

Mac (weapons trained)

No, Windows 10 hasn’t beaten Windows 7’s market share. Not for sure, anyway

Win10/1709

Windows 10/1709 runs just fine on on a Ryzen5 with 16GB and an M.2 SDD.

Classic Shell and Winaero Tweaker restore at least some sanity to the ugly 2D UI and you can switch all the telemetry off with a bit of 'nous. Backup is unbelievably crap so I use a good 3rd party solution. Never had trouble with updates and if I do I can just reimage it all. System Restore doesn't (and never has IME). Edge is boring and I'm a longterm Opera fan. Configure the FW properly, and there's nothing like a good HOSTS file for keeping you safe & crap-free.

Much more stable than Win7, and nearly as stable as High Sierra on the Mac or the BSD box.

Linux Mint for work and everyday stuff and Win 10 for games & fooling around.

So what's the beef?

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