Posts by Red Ted

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Brought back memories

Oh yikes, tempus fugit and all that!

His contribution to British Science and Technology should not be underestimated. The number of people he must have inspired is a significant number.

RIP “Uncle” Clive.

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

I see him…

and raise Kim Phúc.

Don't like the new Windows 11 Start or Taskbar? Don't worry – Microsoft's got your back

They deserve the car crash that is coming

This all sounds too familiar…

WEB@30: The Register pokes around historical hardware of the WWW

Colour me interested

A week at home with the kids suggests that a impromptu trip to Cambridge may be in order!

Elevating bork to a new level (if the touchscreen worked)

As the building is in the UK

I think it should be called a lift, rather than an elevator?

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

Giant Pyrography

I remember using an electron microscope and if you turned the beam current up you could write your name across the sample....

Sounds like this could allow you to write "Coca Cola" in 100 mile high letters across the surface of the planet!

Happy 60th, Sinclair Radionics: We'll remember you for your revolutionary calculators and crap watches

Sinclair MK14

Significantly there was the Sinclair MK14 in there too between the watches and the ZX80.

Will it bend? That is the question: Arm boffins boast of first flexible 32-bit chip

Re: Oh I feel old

Ah yes, perhaps it was 0.35μm, ho hum, it was a while ago now!

The second design was on 0.18μm and then the company stopped doing silicon.

Oh I feel old

The first silicon design I worked in was fabbed at 330nm, and I remember being awed when the Z80 chips I was buying some years before that were in processes measured in microns.

Hijacked, rampaging infrastructure will kill humans by 2025 – Gartner

Meanwhile…

Humans continue to kill each other by conventional means in far greater numbers than using complicated machines to do it for them.

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Re: Reliable????

bordering on the useless

No, that's just dangerous.

El Reg visits two shrines to computing history as the UK lifts coronavirus lockdown

Re: you'll have to find out for yourself.

Well done for finding it.

Traces one and two looked very wrong for a digital computer!

Hubble, Hubble, toil and trouble: NASA pores over moth-eaten manuals ahead of switch to backup hardware

Alien visitor: “Oh,I wonder what this button does?” *clang* “owww, it just hit me” as the primary cover opens past their head!

Putting out fires

The first step is always to understand is what it is that is on fire, before you try to put it out!

See icon —>>>

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Re: Not quite as high as a SR-71

SR-71 made it up to 85,000feet not kilometres.

That’s just under 26km.

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Fry the bacon

Definitely fry the bacon in a pan, not cooked in the oven.

Other than that, it was mostly what I do to cook a fry up.

BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days

Re: Damn!

In my last but one job my contract was emailed to me as a word doc for me to update with the start date, print, sign and return. I was seriously tempted to add my own "clause 85e".

I quite fancied that it would say that the company had to buy me a birthday cake every year!

The world is chaos but my Zoom background is control-freak perfection

Books arranged by colour

I saw this a little while ago, where the books on the bookcase looked like the old Penguin Book that had the sleeves different colours.

It suggested to me that they probably hadn't read any of them.

NASA readies commands to switch on Hubble's back-up hardware

Re: Duh!

Given some very clever people built it, with a level of over engineering[*] that we have seen in the Space Extender series, and there are now a number of very clever people trying to fix it, I am quite hopeful for its revival.

[*] I think “over engineering” is the wrong term as that implies waste, but what I mean is the level of engineering where you can cope with multiple simultaneous failures. Even in the days that they could send a Space Shuttle to fix it that wasn’t something you could do at the drop of a hat and it was better (and a bucket load cheaper) that you could fix it remotely.

Nvidia launches Cambridge-1, UK's most powerful supercomputer, in Arm's neighbourhood

Re: "doing its best to associate Harlow with Cambridge"

"Cambridge to London UK innovation corridor"

That sounds suspiciously like logo that one of the the Bedfordshire Councils had about being in the "Oxford - Cambridge Arc", which rather implied to me that they couldn't think of anything good to say about Bedfordshire.

The wheels come off Formula 1's notification service as fans plied with attacker's messages

Given the opportunity, what would you have said?

If you were the originator of the “foo” comment, what would you have put out instead?

I quite like the idea of contrasting the old and the new… “John Surtees was better than Lewis Hamilton because he did it on two wheels as well as four” or “Given a modern car, Fangio would win”.

Suggestions on a postcard to the usual address.

Arm chief hits out at 'ill-informed speculation' over proposed Nvidia buyout

Re: How will it not damage competition

Indeed, all to be taken with a pinch of salt.

I wonder if anyone will remember the quote “Arm will remain headquartered in the UK, and we will be able to increase our investment in UK-based talent.” in 5 years time when the NVidia board (and it will be their decision, not his) decide not to?

Battery recycling boosted by dentist-style ultrasonics, if manufacturers can cooperate

Re: Lead acid should die

The short answer is the Lead-Acid batteries are simple to make and relatively easy to recycle.

A lithium battery is significantly more expensive than the equivalent lead acid.

Five words everyone wants to hear: Microsoft has 'visually refreshed' Office

Re: Task bar positioning

Noooo! That's just mad, for all the reasons I said above!

Re: Can we get the menu back?

Menus to the left or right.

Why on earth do MS (and it’s not only them) insist on putting menus and ribbons across the top or bottom, given that we all have wide screen monitors now?

The fact that the task bar works better up the side, as you can see all the names even when it gets full, and the clock nicely shows the day and date. For a bonus you get an extra few pixels height to do your actual work in.

Hubble’s cosmic science is mind-blowing, but its soul celebrates something surprising about us

No, it was due to an error in the apparatus used to measure the mirror whilst it was being made.

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

Re: If you can't get the USB plug into the ethernet socket, you're trying the wrong end of the cable

And then there’s the RJ series of connectors.

Dell even managed to put the modem and network sockets next to each other on some of their models from about 20 years ago.

This design of connector are meant to plug in to each other in certain combinations, so your could plug the RJ11 modem cable in to the RJ45 next to it.

This results in the house telephone not working and the modem not connecting.

Unfortunately that was not one I could diagnose remotely for my father so it resulted in the expensive call out from BT.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: My thoughts

The Swiss even had the slightly mad sounding Electric Steam Locomotives in the 1940s as they were struggling to get coal for their shunting engines, but most of their network was electrified!

Priorities

They really should finish getting the mainlines (and heavily used suburban lines) electrified first.

Also the distribution of Hydrogen has its own unique problems, which isn't to say that they can't be overcome, but as a means of energy transfer there are simpler ways.

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

Re: Sometimes, I just can't believe the gullibility of some people.

Even if you have to lose 99% through the laundry, that still leaves you with $10 million.

More than I'd need for a very comfortable retirement.

It's 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network's name can break iPhone Wi-Fi

I never thought I would use the phrase…

Oh My God and really mean it!

That is just awful.

Germany's competition watchdog to investigate whether Apple's ecosystem damages other businesses

Multiple complaints from other firms

"One, from the advertising industry..."

Oh what colour irony?!

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

Re: Speaking for myself

"Learning that we're only immortal for a limited time"

Name that tune!

Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

I wish them well

But I history does not bode well for their success.

We've found another reason not to use Microsoft's Paint 3D – researchers

Paint.NET

I would thoroughly recommend Paint.NET as a great piece of software to use instead of Paint.

Artemis I core stage finally pointing in the right direction at Kennedy Space Center

Re: Vertical

Perhaps November will be one of those really long months in the same way as March 2020 want on and on until some time in July!

Mensa data spillage was due to 'unauthorised internal download'

Re: Wow

I've known people to spell their own name wrong on their PhD thesis!

We've been shown time and again that strong encryption puts crims behind bars, so why do politicos hate it?

Good point

Well made.

Keep up the good work!

The Eigiau Dam Disaster: Deluges and deceit at the dawn of hydroelectric power

Yes, very good.

It was the last dam failure in the UK, I think, although the Canal and River Trust nearly changed that in 2019 with the Toddbrook Reservoir!

I have come across Henry Jack in other bits of history of North Wales and he seems to have been a thoroughly unpleasant man.

The North Wales Power and Traction Co. Ltd. has an entertainingly turbulent history of its own. Originally they started out as promoters of a electric railway and are responsible for the "Bridge to nowhere" over the road when you enter Beddgelert from the south.

Indian Finance Minister throws Infosys under the bus as new e-tax portal fails on first day

Quelle surprise

A multinational IT company bungling a big government IT contract? Colour me surprised!

Let me guess, they’ll get paid more money to fix it?

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Perhaps Jen dropped the black box?

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Worthy successor to Programmers File Editor

I used PFE until the early 2000's and then switched to Notepad++.

A fantastic bit of software.

Twitter’s new subscription service costs the same as a cup of coffee a month – though much less stimulating

No, it’s just resting.

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

News Media Bargaining Code

This will be the interesting one to watch, especially after the threats from G and FB came to very little.

I wonder which countries will be next in having a backbone and stand up to them.

I fully expect the UK government to be at the bottom of that list.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: You have my sympathies...

Then there is the "Brownian motion" of the remotes when they are in the same place as children.

I've even found one in the bread bin once!

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

SETI saw result corruption too

The SETI project used to see work units with corrupted results and they double checked all results.

They attributed it to cosmic rays striking the micro and causing a bit flip.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: You know what

The advantage of using sodium for a heat transfer medium is that under neutron bombardment it turns in to ²⁴Na that has a half life of 15hrs when it turns in to stable ²⁴Mg. So leave it for a week and the radioactive content will have reduced to 0.04%.

Surviving eclipse season and resurrecting 25-year-old software with Windows for Workgroups 3.11: One year with Mars Express

Re: It might be a race to see what fails first

I do some times, but I try to avoid it as much as possible as the productivity is so much lower.

The startup code is often the bit I work in assembler the most, and for a high reliability systems this is a non-trivial piece of code, but for the rest I write it all in C.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

I saw it work once, so ship it!

Whoop! Robot/human high-fives all round! Oh, my fingers have disintegrated

Re: The Slaughtered Lamb

Particularly for you hang around with the very young Rik Mayall in the background there!