Posts by Rafael #872397

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Astronomers are more mature...

..and use sextractor without issues.

Stop sniggering at the back!

Dry patch? Have you considered peppering your flirts with emojis?

Re: Why can't we use emojis when...

And don't call us Shirley. We're a different demographic.

If at first you don't succeed, Fold? Nope. Samsung redesigns bendy screen for fresh launch in September

"apparent that it is an integral part of the display structure and not meant to be removed"

Add an easily removable protective film OVER the protection layer with something like "OK, you can remove this, but please don't remove the next one under it".

If this does not work, consider adding more easily removable protective film layers, and so on.

Pull up your SoCs: Samsung smartphones to get AMD Radeon graphics

Dare On?

Dear, No!

A mobe with obnoxious teen karaoke app TikTok built in?! Wow, thanks ByteDance, sign us up

Why not?

Twitter Peek was also a huge success!

Time to reformat the old wallet and embiggen your smartmobe: The 1TB microSD is here

Ugh, the names.

Extreme. Extreme Pro. Extreme Ultra.

Extreme Extra. Extreme Expert. Extreme Extreme. Extreme Galaxy Pro.

Extreme Egg Bacon Sausage Spam.

Lovely Extreme! Wonderful Extreme!

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Re: Next!

The flying car.

Microsoft flings the Windows Calculator source at GitHub

Working on that now!

I'll add "paste results to Facebook" and "click here to pay monthly fees" buttons.

Two in five 'AI startups' essentially have no AI, mega-survey of nearly 3,000 upstarts finds

Nobody cards me anymore :-(

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

Re: Of course not, you need the whole team

Shirley you mean Robert Duvall?

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Re: Planet 9 is not believed to be on the elliptic plane that the orbits of other planets follow.

Nah, it wasn't discovered because it is flat and on it side, being very narrow from our point of view.

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

Re: Screw Your Rules

Moony McMoonface won't be allowed. ... But it's not the name of one of Jupiter's or Zeus' lovers or spawn.

How do you know? That guy was a horn dog!

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

10203

Feh! Visicalc rules.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Header pic

Damn -- I was reading this at home and my 14-year old kid came to see what was so funny. And started laughing. He already though about studying engineering, this just added to his resolve.

Thanks are in order, I guess?

As netizens, devs scream bloody murder over Chrome ad-block block, Googlers insist: It's not set in stone (yet)

Re: "Not set in stone yet"

You're right -- I recall that there were three stones with 15 commandments but one of those broke.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

Re: old 70's song

I see your Player and raise you Leslie, Kelly & John Ford Coley's "Come Back to Me":

Do you think of me. Do you feel the cold? Or is somebody keeping you warm. Like I used to do?

I wish that you knew that I want you back here in my arms.

And if this foolishness ends... Do you think you could love me again?

My hoard of obsolete hardware might be useful… one day

Computer Archaeology

I work in the CS department of a university in a large, coffee-and-samba oriented country that shall remain unnamed.

Some of the grad students used to have a large metal cabinet as a divisor in their shared office. Besides being festooned with stickers and year-old notes nobody had they keys for it -- they just assumed it was a convenient piece of metal used to hid their screens from others' views.

When we changed offices we had to move it, and nobody claimed ownership. Being curious and irresponsible, I decided to apply the adequate amount of force to open the doors. Inside there were a bunch of SCSI cables and terminators, 8mm tape drives for a backup driver, a huge box of SIMMs (total amount of memory: < 2gb), random pieces of SUN gear, lots of ZIP disks and drives and a box of 8-inch floppy disks.

Shame on me, I kept it all. The 8-inch floppy disks are a funny conversation starter (hey, babe, want to see my 8-incher) and also a embarrassing conversation stopper (either "huh...." or "how old are you again?")

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

Re: The silver lining

And in at least two Simpsons' episodes?

Finally. The palm-sized Palm phone is back. And it will, er, save you from your real smartphone

Re: Nothing like trashing a product

Ah. El Reg Commentards. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

Re: Worship the Holy Potato! Give thanks for it's Mighty Deliciousity!

ALL HAIL THE HOLY POTATO.

Not a big fan of the vegetable, but a sucker for pseudo-religious fake frenzy.

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

Re: You're making the common mistake of thinking others think like you do.

Upbeered.

Data apocalypse is coming unless you buy AI, declares AI biz

Re: Can someone explain exactly what is "Intelligent" about these A.I. Systems?

They're organic, and gluten-free. Lot's of fiber on those AI, yessir. And DevOps!

Microsoft bids adieu to inky fingers with whiteboard app

Re:But how will Office 365 facilitate this beveration?

You'ved misspelered 'bomination.

Buttonless and port-free: Expect the next iPhone to be as smooth as a baby's bum

..charging without ever removing the phone from your pocket...

Comin' up next on The Violence Channel: An all-new "Ow, My Balls!"

Oracle's new Java SE subs: Code and support for $25/processor/month

Re: Thank god we migrated...

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

Shatner's solar-powered Bitcoin gambit wouldn't power a deflector shield

...has graciously put aside his well-documented disdain of cryptocurrencies...

So, either "promote us or we cut your salary" or "we will pay more to do that"?

Picard would never do this!

(run for cover)

Machine learning for dummies: You needn't go back to uni to use it

This is no doubt a noble calling, but is it what industry actually needs?

I guess most of the professors and researchers ("the noble calling") are not really concerned about what the industry actually needs.

Weird, huh?

There are plenty of blogs, videos, tutorials, relentlessly advertised conferences that seems to happen all the time (cough cough) that will teach "just what the industry needs", with different levels of abstraction/details/dumbing down/uselessness caused by choosing a single language or platform which API already changed in two months. Pick one, or several. And let academia do what academia ought to be doing: expanding the frontiers.

Agile development exposed as techie superstition

Re: Agile is b*llocks. Any non-idiot knows this.

Utter brilliant; I'll definitely be ripping off your comment and will randomly throwing it into polite conversation.

Great idea!

Nice sermon, Reverend, but 'using the cloud' is nothing more than putting your balls in someone else's vice and hoping they know which way to twist the handle.

Sorry.

Microsoft reckons devs would like an AI Clippy to help them write code

Re: #Nostalgia

This is more than 10 years old and it still deserves a chuckle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUvcYP859fg

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

@The Oncoming Scorn

You have at this moment 42 upvotes. I cannot dare to add another, so here's something else:

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

effectively flooding their databases with garbage

From what I see in FaceBook and Twitter, it is working already!

There's more to blockchain than dodgy cryptocurrencies

There's more to blockchain than dodgy cryptocurrencies

There are CryptoKitties.

Google powers up latest app it'll cancel in two years: Hangouts Chat

Re: "Hangouts chat"

diversity-providing people -- thanks!

Look out, Wiki-geeks. Now Google trains AI to write Wikipedia articles

It’s impossible to read and keep up with everything.

Why would we want to keep up with everything? I used to read at least the headers of several online news sites, then noticed that except for op-eds most are copied from each other. Same with cats' memes.

You dopes! US state's pot dealer database pwned after security goes up in smoke

Re: Serves them right

Dude. Mellow out, like. Duuuuuuuuude!

It's been 50 years since those damn dirty apes took the planet by storm

Spoof

Aw, come ON!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOeUXEpxzcc

South Wales cops crow about facial recognition arrests on social media

Suspect was armed and dangerous

Watch out, he has a Nokia on his pocket!

Boffins foresee most software written by machines in 2040

Re: In 20 years' time it'll be 20 years in the future too.

I predict that in 20 years' time whoever is making money out of predictions will still be making money out of predictions.

AI taught to beat Sudoku puzzles. Now how about a time machine to 2005?

Re: Product of the AI hype

@Cowboy Bob: awesome! Have an upvote.

Re: Been there done that

Same here -- used Sudoku to learn how to use a constraint programming library. Also used neural networks to classify images and time series. Can't see the advantage in using neural networks to solve Sudokus unless the purpose is to brag about "using neural networks to solve Sudokus".

I also seem to recall that either a Sudoku is solvable with 100% "accuracy" or it has more than one solution. It is possible to devise Sudokus that have only one solution and as few clues as possible (17: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426554/mathematicians-solve-minimum-sudoku-problem/)

Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

"news"

Doesn't this also show the current trend regarding 'news' as nothing more than rehashing gossip and hear-say?

And posting tweets of random users as source of news? At least El Reg stopped doing that (right?). CNN, on the other hand...

Amazon to make multiple Lord of the Rings prequel TV series

Re: second highest-selling fantasy series

Harry Potter? Just buy it and create a mix fantasy+magic+fake reality TV show. Just retcon the hell out of it to make the characters more relatable to certain audiences.

Next week:

Ron: Snape is such a bastard!

Hermione: I totally saw him spitting in your potions.

(camera shows Harry scratching his back with his wand)

US judge orders Sci-Hub be excised from the internet

Re: I am wondering just how much it costs to publish a scientific journal

So you need a web server with some backup strategy, a couple of high level editors, and someone to liaise with the peer reviewers.

You don't really need all this. Publish or perish allowed all this to happen, and I don't see a fix.

Another day, another cryptocurrency miner lurking in a Google Chrome extension

Re: As long as I am asked

AND I agree to the terms.

Let's not think that, as the article says, ...There's nothing intrinsically malicious with software harvesting spare CPU cycles for stuff... -- it is my CPU.

Star Wars: Big Euro cinema group can't handle demand for tickets to new flick

Re: spoilerific

There's a new character that appears to be pasted from the Raving Rabbids games.

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

Re: "watched" hundreds of video ads

You're lucky. For some reason I've "watched" hundred times the same two ads.

I wonder if the criminals that does this kind of "watch this video to get to the next level" ad had ever watched them. Even if the ad worked on the first time and I rushed to buy the "product", seeing the same damn video afterwards for forty times in a row is sort of annoying.

Twitter to upgrade from micro-blogging to milli-blogging with 280 chars

...Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character...

I don't think you understand how languages (or different alphabets/character sets) work.

あほ。

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

Re: rotating key switch and flip up cover?

Feh! Use punch cards. Insert them in several openings of the computer until they disconnect a wire or catch fire.

I *demand* a "get off my lawn" icon, and a nap.

Would you get in a one-man quadcopter air taxi?

...get into the drone when it arrives,...

Just out of curiosity, will it arrive in the middle of the street? At the sidewalk? At the nearest helipad or airport? Will it let me out where I want to be or at the "nearest convenient location", several kilometers away?

Your boss asks you to run the 'cloud project': Ever-changing wish lists, packs of 'ideas'... and 1 deadline

Re: molest lampposts in their off hours

Damn you!