Posts by Joe W

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

Re: Clueless users

Yeah, I suggest they learn SQL. Which is not hard, dammit! It is not harder than the crazy Excel stuff people do. It is quicker. It is less error prone.

My pet peeve: Excel translates the macro names, though I think not all of them. So instead of "=AVG( A1:A3)" you need to write "MITTELWERT(A1:A3)" or whatever the translation is, it should be "ARITHMETISCHESMITTEL", IMNSHO, because that would actually distinguish between that and the geometric mean (for example). Plus, the English macro names are in many cases abbreviations and thus shorter and similar to the names used in e.g. SQL, SSRS, or real programming languages (like, say, Fortran).

Wearables sales slacken as the novelty wears off

Re: An $800 watch

.. and a projected total lifetime of very few years...

Paying that much for something that ends up in a landfill rather sooner than later? Nah, I'll pass. Same with the ridiculous smartphone prices. No, a phone that costs 500 quid is not "mid range" (ok, technically it is, if the top notch phone costs 1000 quid - a phone that does nothing vastly better than the less expensive one, I might add).

US border cops harvest info from citizens' phones, build massive database

Re: Travel to or through the US?

Well, this has been going on for years, so nothing new. And no, I do not really plan to go to the US, though I miss my friends there, and I would really love to see some of the national parks. I dislike, however, the way the country went under the past administration, and I am deeply worried about some developments - but let's not get political here. I usually had my laptop with limited personal data on it, and ditto a pretty clean cell phone (still do that, it is not running my life, thank you), though that is not always an option.

I did travel to the US quite often in my past job (so much I usually messed up the "when were you last in the US?" first question when entering - dude, you are looking at the stamps, there's a bunch, I'm a regular visitor, as should be noted in your computer as well). I have usually been treated very professionally, so I won't say anything against the people I interacted with. They have also been very helpful when we did have a very tight connection (due to delays), opening a fast line for those passengers.

Only once, when I was traveling through the US to Canada, and had to make a connecting flight, and was still a student on a student visum, I was questioned in a small room. I'd say it was still respectful enough, and I did make the connection. But actually it was none of their business - I was going to Canada after all. I guess it was because I'm a physicist, had a pilot (for real planes, i.e. gliders, no engine to cover your mistakes) license, and it was September 2002...

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

Re: That's how Airbus started

How about Junkers? The Ju 52 was (is!) iconic.

One month after Black Hat disclosure, HP's enterprise kit still unpatched

Once upon a time...

.... HP had engineers. I fondly remember lengthy discussions with one of them about some things we tried to do with a programmable function generator, which worked out.... ok-ish (not the engineer's fault, but rather a limitation of the function generator - and we did not have the funds to buy another one). Then this part of HP got spun out as "Agilent" (who continued doing great stuff - not sure about right now, I am no longer in that field).

Same with printers. The old Laserjets were monsters - and reliable. The newer ones? We had a colour Laserjet where the toner cassettes were installed one atop the other on the side of the printer. Every 6 to 8 months we had to take that toner stack apart and thoroughly clean it - dust from the upper cassettes ended up un the lower ones, seriously messing up the colours. Not fun. And messy (though one of my mates / colleagues had all sorts of tricks and could do that really quite fast).

And likely the same with laptops etc.

And UEFI is a bloody mess anyways. Always has been. Complexity is the enemy of a robust and easy to fix system - but complexity caused by the requirements (yeah, I get the idea behind UEFI etc. - doesn't mean I must like it).

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C₈H₁₀N₄O₂

Re: Java installation

All is forgiven (or should be), as

- they did react correctly

and (more importantly)

- it was their first coffee, I guess. Mitigating circumstances, right? (... please...)

Hybrid work not working? Try building an 'intraverse' to fix it, says Gartner

I did throw up a bit into my mouth when I read the Gartner statement. It is... well... yeah, I would not want to work for a company that implements this "intraverse" thingy, whatever they think of it.

Good grief!

But then I would be happy for a job that involves mostly console (I like usign vim, yeah, I'm weird) work (and making some nice graphs). Oh, and having people who respect my expertise. I guess that last point is it what we all want. Introducing some "intraverse" or whatever is like ... calling me a "human ressource" and having an "employee of the month" program to show how much they don't care is not what I'm into.

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: Intelligence?

Intel has an acronym-dictionary? Well... so do we...

Yes. I know.

----> need that

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: RAM removal

Well... since "non-masonry" (and in masonry I include for the sake of the argument concrete and such things) covers a negelgible percentage[*] of houses over here, I see no problem...

[*] ok, not true, probably, since we have an abundance of timber frame buildings, especially in many villages. "Ladeling" your way out through the wattle and daub (I think it is called) infills might be possible, though the stuff does dry pretty hard. Of course you are out of luck if the infill has been done with bricks...

Re: RAM removal

At my uni a security guard stole a number of lab PCs. The PCs were not a big deal - the high speed data acquisition cards were. Those likely ended up in landfill somewhere, because noone needs those. Those did cost an order of magnitude more than the rest of the PC, so that was quite problematic for the institute.

And in a place I used to live, our basement storage compartment was forced open. They made off with two cases of bottled water (I guess ~€5 deposit each), fixing the door cost ~€60 or so. Eejits.

No, Apple, you may not sell iPhones without chargers

Re: The rest

Wires fraying out? My phone chargers for the last... 20 years or so (after I had to say goodbye to my rugged Siemens and bought my first smart phone) consisted of a little box you plug into a wall socket with a USB port on the side or top, into which you enter the USB cable of your choice (ok, the choice of the phone's / tablet's / mp3 player's manufacturer).

Yes, I broke one or more of those cables, mostly out of sheer stupidity (knocking the device off a table bent a connector, driving an office chair over a cable, these things), but the actual chargers have soldiered on. Sure, the old ones are not doing "fast" charging, but if I just plug in the phone / bluetoothe headset /tablet/ e-reader over night I care f-all.

It's still nice to have two or three newer wall-warts in strategic locations around the house.

Microsoft: The deadline to get off Basic Auth is approaching

Even I...

... don't fault MS. This time.

Seriously. While I did not see the blog entries and all the other suff, my Outlook mail account (from when I had a windows phone, which I still miss) did complain when installing a new machine (and cell phone app). The (non-MS) mail readers did offer me a quick new setup, and it just... works. Good job everyone (also the programmers for the email software), have one!

Microsoft mistakenly rated Chromium, Electron as malware

and the bootloader problematic?

I fond a quick note that apparently some linux bootloaders' UEFI certificates are no longer valid. I have no real way to install those updates anyway, since I do not really want to boot the windows installation (why would I need it, like at all? It is sort of still lingering around, maybe I need it for some.... dunno... stuff).

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

People told me "imperial and US units are sooo easy"

And then this: "has dimensions of 87.1" x 50" x 4.5", meaning it surpasses 7 feet in width while standing over 4 feet tall"

We-ell. So easy to understand what 87" means that it needs to be converted into feet so people have an idea of how big that is (I still don't, 7ft is about 2m and a bit, I guess, and 4'2" is about... yeah, a metre and a half-ish, or so? Meh. Not that I care...

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Anecdote

Got a name common as muck. Had two guys in my army unit with very similar names. Fortunately we had different ranks...

Re: Doctors!

Not here. You do not need to have a medical doctorate degree, which is a joke anyway (and not accepted generally e.g. in Switzerland) in order to be a GP or a specialised... uh... medical practicioner... person. You still have done all the same exams, had the special training in whatever your field is. I generally like that. It means they are more focused.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Re: This work has already been done

Ah. BMJ. That one is hours of fun studies. Or used to be. Like couples in an CT scanner...

Well... Illiad had made some really poor decisions, as you might recall....

I think that it means they are not taking their job seriously - ElReg has always covered the serious side as well as the silly. Looking back, it might have started when they stopped mocking phablets (ffs, they are too big for regular trouser pockets, I'm not wearing cargo trousers / army surplus every day!)...

And as written in the BOFH "he is upset that it always chooses the American way of spelling..."

So, what now? I hate looking for a new website with that balance, and the other IT news site I sort of frequented has a forum that frankly sucks. Too many trolls and too few IT literate people. And no BOFH or SFTW either. Oh, and the articles are... dry as Norwegian stockfish.

$50m+ contract for crime-fighting IT system won by Fujitsu after no one else bid

Re: No worries.

You could say the same about IBM mainframes and it would be equally wrong.

Re: You could not make it up.....

They offer the system as a guest inside a XEN virtual machine. Works for us (though we are trying to migrate away from it)

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

Re: FFS!!!

... and ElReg used to be more enthusiastic about this stuff.

(but really, US units in an article aimed at an international [i.e. from many countries that do use SI units, and if you are scientifically inclined you probably know your way around in SI, even if you are from the US] readership of geeks? I can sort of visualise inches and feet up to human size, but with pounds I'm never sure if there is only one system, you know, like stones, pints and gallons)

Twitter savaged by former security boss Mudge in whistleblower complaint

I like the acronym DAU

.. in German it would be "dümmste anzunehmender User" (stupidest imaginable user, pretty close the GAU (größter anzunehmender Unfall, basically nuclear meltdown in a power plant). I would rather use the M (for Mega) rather than a milli-DAU, though...

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

Re: Leaver whining!

Well, it had always been the plan to get a political union[*], the first agreemets drafted up by Germany and France had some ideas along those lines. There was opposition against the UK joining the EC over exactly that: the UK has always been against a political union (or so it was perceived), as far as I recall reading about the EU and its history. There are also currently unfortunately many parties (and thus leaders of countries) trying to explode the whole union, drifting more and more away from a common position (the one you referenced, also the country lead by the duck brothers, which makes me sad).

Anyway, I would have preferred the UK to use the (non binding...) referendum as a lever to reform the EU. I also felt that the UK was much closer to the German position in many cases. Ah well, no hjelp to cry over spilt melk.

[*] fat chance of that happening with the high number of member states

OK... well, technically you are right. The UK has Gibraltar, which in fact is on the mainland. Most of the UK is on islands, don't you think?

Re: Reap what you sow

Oh, right. So you can now spend all that money on your own scientific programs and the NHS. That's great news! Congrats on that one. So stop complaining and get to that!

Re: Reap what you sow

Well, them politicians enjoy their money - regardless whether they have any success in turning the UK into the dream country they were promising.

The scientists, especially the younger scientists who are our hope for the future, I met lots of bright lads and lasses in my time, are out of funds, out of jobs (and will thus quit science). This hits all the wrong people, even if I think that the whole Brexit thing was a stupid idea (and that the UK are doing their best not to maintain the peace in NI, and that they are in fact in breach of contract - but let's not argue about that).

Probably the younger now ex-scientists will find good jobs in investment banking, insureances or whatever (the bright ones quite often do), what a loss for the scientific community (and the UK).

That was fast: MetaGuard emerges as an 'incognito mode' for the metaverse

Re: "Coincidentally, VRChat has its own premium subscription ..."

I'm pretty sure they don't (from the wording of the rest of the article)...

Russian military uses Chinese drones and bots in combat, over manufacturers' protests

There's a reason for the statement

"DJI has only ever made products for civilian use; they are not designed for military applications,"

'cause if it was for military use, paid for by a governemnt (any govm't), the price would go up tenfold (at least, likely quite a bit more) for the same product...

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

Re: MS 365 Personal

Why? I used to be able to buy a home version of office. Now I have to rent it. Why is that a good thing?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Re: "the default Windows user all too often must run as the all-powerful PC administrator"

My experience is that Ms Office (well, Word) breaks formatting between machines in the same damn company. So there's that. We are also averse to moving everything to Azure, as some stuff would not be allowed to. Then, Microsoft is now actively disabling stuff on-prem, since all and everything have to be in the cloud. Which sucks. A lot. Let's see if this provides us with the needed push.

On the other hand, most of our production machines / servers are Linux (SLES? I think....), apart from the stuff I have to work with (stupid SSRS etc.). So why not the desktop as well? I would also gladly trade in the MS SQL server for something else. Only problem is, I have a few colleagues who are learning resistent...

let me think of what I use every day, that would be problematic on Linux.... apart from the tSQL centric stuff? Nothing. LibreOffice is plenty good for what most of us do. Oh, but I have to admit that maybe outlook might be hard to replace. The whole integration of calendars, group mall boxes, etc. is pretty good (though it crashes too often on my machine). But then I have not looked too much into alternatives (evolution?).

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

emoji

can apparently have quite different meaning depending on cultural background. The "thumb up" could be something very rude (and I recall being told so by a foreign former colleague).

I always wonder about the free speech argument, and I'm pretty sure it does not apply there, I thought it applied to government trying to hinder free expression of thought. Also, "it might be not strictly illegal" is a pretty weak defense.

Yeah, I'll get downvoted for that observation, even though I did not condone Microsoft's behaviour. Weird what people read into text.

Claims of AI sentience branded 'pure clickbait'

Re: Terrence Howard?

Do you know the Tom Lehrer song 'sociology'?

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: It's not just the OS...

Another Linux user here - with the same gripes. I really loved my small and cheap and very usable Nokia Windows phone...

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

Re: Pearlman

I hope google has to cough up. Why, I hear you cry!

Well, google (and Apple) make a big deal out of how they offer such a great service with their app store, and how their 30% cut of all moneys going through their ecosystem is just fair, because it pays for that service. You know, them makeing sure we don't fall victim to fake apps, apps with malware, trojans, the stuff.

So, yeah, I'm all for Google being held responsible for allowing a f'ing fake app, delaying the removal process, dragging their feet, and not offering this great service they keep gushing about.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

Re: Incredible...

... and they sparkle?

*ducks*

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Reminds me of the old joke: "What's serial?" - "Something the Brits have for breakfast."

---->

Make mine a bitter...

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/27/charter_spectrum_murder_damages/

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Re: I'm not saying it was aliens...

Yeah, "those are not pits, those are exhaust pipes / collapsed access tunnels / airlocks..."

(because we all know that this is no moon, etc....)

Martin Shkreli, out of prison for running a Ponzi scheme, now pushes Web3 thing

Re: Am I the only one who tuned into the snark from professor mustache wax at the end?

Yup, that was a nice nasty remark, wasn't it?

In my experience especially those two journals have a tendency to publish controversial stuff as well - it generates more articles ("comments on...." and "replies to ...") and tons of citations (beginning with the words "in contrast to the work done by....", driving up the impact factor). They also have a higher number of retracted publications than other journals, if I remember that correctly.

"There's no science in Nature and no nature in Science", as people put it.

Yes, both journals publish some really cool stuff, but there are also some less great articles (cold fusion, memory of water...) in there. It is a bit of a prestige thing to publish there (I know a bunch of people who did and still do publish there, but those are in my opinion often not the best articles they wrote).

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Re: $7.3 billion for one murder

... especially if the murderer was actually employed by the govm't...

Re: Zero customer complaints

Yes, it was 100 calls with no complaints.

And then apparently quite a few where he robbed elderly customers who then complained. But that was only a low percentage, wasn't it?

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

Ooh, separate home or not. My problem is that if the distros come with different software versions there is no guarantee that the files stored in /home/$USER are actually compatible. In fact I recall trashing some things. I prefer to have a /userdata partition that contains the, well, data that is not reliant to software versions. Getting everything set up correctly can be quite a faff, but ~/.config and the like are then distribution dependent, which feels quite a bit safer.

I do second the /srv partition. Helps a ton.

(and I find flatpak and snap a horrible solution and tend to avoid them)

Re: Old linux person here....do not understand......

I just got a new machine, some not-quite-brand-spanking-new Thinkpad. I put in a 1 TB SSD and it was not too stupidly expensive. There would be a ton of space on the SSD it came with - except I'm now ripping all my CDs to flac, and since my NAS is not yet up and running I have everything on the new machine...

I will keep the Windooze installation for now - though I do not expect I'll ever need it.

Cruise self-driving cars stopped and clogged up San Francisco for hours

Re: How do they ensure sensor is in middle of the Ball?

[ ] you understand offside

[x] your prediction of that AI-thingy causing more problem than it solves is likely correct (adn I share that sentiment)

The position of the ball has not too much to do with it. It is the position of the players you need to care about. And yes, that can be a matter of a few 2.5cm. The position of the ball matters when it comes to scoring not-goals (*cough* Wembley).

Intel’s first discrete GPUs won't be a home run

Re: 3060

It's like a €400 / $400 smartphone being "entry level"...

I'd rather buy a couple of those --->

(and @John Robson can have one too)

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

Re: Celsius has, right now, a $1.19 billion deficit on its balance sheet

Yes and no. The crypto market is "free" as its supporters always argue, and should remain free from oversight, as this just stifles innovation... (yeah, and all of the things that happened in the crypto world did happen in the banking world before there was regulation, and this is why we do have all of these pesky rules "that just serve to stifle innovation").

The point is that it was not registered as a bank and the world of crypto-whatevers is not under the regulations that cover real financial institutions. Should the same rules apply? I would think so. Laws need to be written and / or extended to cover these cases as well. Ultimately it is up to the legislative to do so. Until then it is unregulated. Anybody investing in that stuff has to remember that, and be aware that you can lose everything, like when gambling with trade options. When you do lose everything it is no bloody use crying, you had it coming.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Limited length of program code?

Not only in Sharepoint, but also for the stored procedure sp_execute_external_script (for calling stuff like R or python from within SQL). Took me a while to figure that out. The implementation is a pig's breakfast anyway...

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Too old and eyesight is too bad

Even worse when pasting code into a chat window. I did send colleagues all sorts of smileys, thankfully it was clear from the context that I was not hitting on them...

CAPSTONE mission is Moon-bound, after less rocketry than expected

The article in "BILD"

Well... that taboid might occasionally and accidnetally contain a grain of truth (the football results from the weekend, I guess), but here I find it more likely that they got their statement from NASA administrator Bill Nelson's dog, and maybe not the dog's mouth... I'd take that with a grain of salt and a fistfull of chilli powder.