Posts by A.P. Veening

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: No TV

You can add Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Japan to that list.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

There used to be a plane that was rather notorious for not being able to take off with full fuel tanks.

Re: I would have thought...

Thanks for the info, glad Boeing doesn't design or make tires.

If memory serves (and it usually does), India became independent from Great Britain about 73 years ago (in 1948). Canada comes a bit closer to that century mark.

Re: Not necessarily.

Too heavy for aviation ;)

Re: I would have thought...

I sure hope the tire speed limit is a nice margin above Vr, otherwise take off will be with burst tires, which will result in a not so smooth landing.

Re: "the company ignored that question"

(Also "Cardinal" in the past, but I think that has meant adult since the invention of air travel.)

Since some time before already, as long as you just limit it to physical adulthood.

Re: 11 stone..

The really dumb one is the one outsourcing to those programmers.

Re: 11 stone..

don't ask me what happens to someone whose 16th birthday is while in the air

Age at boarding (and take off) on departure is used (and there are very few flights that board before midnight and take off after, so in case there is a discrepancy, the passenger gets the benefit and congratulations).

They were rightly worrying as that one being has lately developed a tendency not to pick up that hot line (or any other line for that matter). As I understand it, the chances are slightly better when you call the secretariat, she was last reliably known to pick it up about a century ago for some children near Fatima, Portugal.

Obviously the programmers were actually German, not those icky brown skinned types the writer was attempting to blame.

Highly unlikely the programmers were German as those are thorough enough not to take a title as indication of age, especially not in the presence of other indicators as ticket class (child tickets) and date of birth. Besides that, Germans have a tendency to err on the side of caution.

Down vote for "icky brown skinned types".

Re: Not necessarily.

Yep, Oceania, where Polynesian and Petite do not go in the same sentence.

You seem to have managed just fine ;)

Re: Huh?

There is a slight snag in that reasoning as it doesn't take the weight of the fuel into account. The weight of the fuel added to fill up the tanks is accurate enough, but unless the tanks are topped off (rarely, unnecessary weight most of the time), it is pretty hard to know the exact weight of the fuel left over at engines off.

Re: here's an idea

Or is there some engineering reason why weighing a plane using its wheels is not practical or accurate enough?

Fuel weight comes into play and especially how much fuel was left over in the tanks after engines off, added fuel is accurate enough.

For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine

Re: late nineties

When I returned to the office, one of the managers state proudly that the call was his doing. They knew at which hotel I was staying, but the desk knew of nobody by my name. The manager then looked up my wife's name in the files and called back.

I sure hope you hit him with a double overtime, starting at the moment you woke up due to the telephone call to the start of normal office hours.

Re: late nineties

I prefer flexibility as well, but if possible I prefer to be at my desk by 6 AM, not because I enjoy getting up that early, but to avoid commuter traffic jams (both ways).

Re: Think

And yes, he is the sort of man who'd call staff up 1/2 way through their mom's funeral service and say "You gonna be long there?"

Correct reply to that is that after your mother's funeral is over, you will have another, his.

How long did you have to wait for the return flight?

Re: late nineties

"work-life balance? work *is* life"

Any "boss" who says that to me will quickly find himself without work (being a multiple B*FH does help) after which I will tell him to keep his word and to terminate his life.

Re: Blinkenlights ... they are not just for looks.

Do you have that one on copy/paste? I've read it before.

Re: late nineties

The office manager lives round the corner from the office, so I phoned her and got her to look through the phone bills and find a St Albans number, and it was dialled from your extension

Fair bit of detective work and it was urgent and work related. Nowadays it won't work as just about everybody uses a cell phone for private business. On the other hand, nowadays he probably would have had that number already, so less (chance of) strain on the relationship.

Asahi Linux devs merge effort to run Linux on Apple M1 silicon into kernel

Re: A nice idea

This article and the post you replied to both refer to the new M1, not old Macs.

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

Apple refuses to acknowledge The Register and usually there is a line like "Apple refused to comment", which was and is missing from the article.

I notice Apple wasn't approached for comment ;)

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Re: Are you really sure there's no paperwork when trading within the EU?

For other countries I don't know for sure, but for the Netherlands I can tell you exactly. All companies are required to supply all kinds of information to the Central Office for Statistics (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, aka CBS). I imagine most other European countries have something similar.

Re: Similar situation

Auditors ...

Those who can, do.

Those who can't, teach.

Those who flunk that, manage.

Those who can't manage that, audit.

So take the ferry to Belgium or the Netherlands (or from Ireland to France), no French customs involved that way.

Re: re: Welcome to the information age!

That isn't quite as close as a grad student at an American university came. He was the first to have a paper graded "T" (for Top Secret), he even had the explosives and detonation correct.

There is no paperwork or customs between EU countries. That’s kind of the point.

Only between the Schengen area countries, with the rest there still is but minimal compared to non-EU countries like the UK.

Yep, the 'Who owns Linux?' case is back from the dead

Re: Free Software billyclub

Where is the fun in that, let them retry again in another 25-30 years ;)

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: When the bully fights the bully

While I agree with the sentiment, a charge of barratry isn't in the cards, I don't believe any of these lawyers are commissioned officers. The only reasonably well known case of barratry in history was the "mutiny" on the Bounty, led by the first officer and that case resulted in some changes in law regarding what a captain could and couldn't do plus some regulations under which a captain can be forcibly replaced without breaking the law.

LG Electronics finally gives up cellphone business

Re: Shame

For now I found a way out, when my last LG needed replacement, I couldn't find another LG and got an OPPO. And when my son needed a replacement for his LG, I couldn't find another LG either and he got an Huawei. Both do what they must and work satisfactory without the Samsung bloat.

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Re: Remind me again

On which planet do these Nominet board members live?

Does it really matter? If they keep this up, they might find themselves unable to continue (living that is).

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: They are legion

Is your pay cheque sufficient for that?

It is for energy saving when a fully vision impaired person with a braille pad is using it. I know, it would be easier to disconnect the monitor and/or not turn it on, but a lot of PCs refuse to boot without an attached monitor.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

Users of that type are slow on even the fastest computer as they and their (lack of) knowledge are the limiting factor.

Re: ran out of ram

Now you are making the (faulty) assumption bean counters have balls.

Re: (Can't...stop...the... voices....)

Her sheer refusal to simply take the time to learn on Windows those extra little tricks that she knew on a Mac...

To put the icing on the cake, she didn't know them on a Mac either as demonstrated by her decreased productivity.

Dutch watchdog fines Booking.com €475k after it kept customer data thefts quiet for more than 3 weeks

Re: OnlineWhatsit.com

The reason to use these third parties is that it is often cheaper. I've tried to do as you suggested and it just didn't work out.

One nice example: I was staying in a hotel in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and wanted to extend one night. Using the same website as the original booking (not booking.com), I got one price. When I walked up to the desk for a direct booking, I was quoted nearly double. I was a bit surprised about that and learned a certain number of rooms were already sold for a fixed price to that website and the hotel got paid for them whether occupied or not. I ended up booking through the website.

Re: One Good Thing

The regulations are there at least in the other 26 EU countries. Unfortunately, those regulations aren't always followed. And I think California has similar regulations as well.

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

Re: <sigh>

If only there were some sort of standard...

The nice thing about standards is the choice, there are so many of them ;)

If you are trying to send someone else to a particular article, just send the link.

And Pi-Hole, one of the blocked domains, showing up in the logs is "www.google-analytics.com", another is "www.googletagmanager.com".

Island in the Stream: AlmaLinux project issues first stable release of CentOS replacement

Nice in theory, but what about a board member accepting a lucrative job offer from Red Hat.... IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon etc etc etc?

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

Re: Karma.

The payroll department got what they needed in the end.

Most definitely as it was run by bean counters.

Re: Print Union

We made the klaxon very very loud.

I do hope you made it so loud, the unions started complaining. At which point you could implement a (steeply rising) penalty for every second unnecessary delay between the alarm and hitting the stop button, starting at ten seconds. Keep squeezing until the unions agree to connect it.

Re: You don't need to be from Vagas

From here Hollywood and Vegas are just about next door to each other.

Microsoft pivots on Pivot, admits that yanking touch control from WinUI 3 toolset 'was obviously poor judgment'

Re: we removed it because we want to evolve the product

No, it is a typo, it should begin with a "D" (rest remains) and it is functionally equivalent with the third "E".

Ship stranded in Suez Canal shifts, but not before spawning some choice tech memes

Re: Dual redundant canal jokes?

"Can I please have that in black on white?".

Sadly, the catastrophic impact with Apophis asteroid isn't going to happen in 2068

Re: the European Space Station.

Read again: "the European Space Agency."