* Posts by STOP_FORTH

765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2018

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Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

STOP_FORTH
Happy

Re: Nomenclature

It was a joke based on the fact that many people use hoi polloi to mean the exact opposite of it's original meaning.

Jokes don't really work if you have to explain them to people.

I can't use "the"?

Prescriptivist? Moi?

STOP_FORTH
Headmaster

Nomenclature

Fonts or typefaces?

When most people say "font" they really mean "typeface".

So if that's the majority use, is that the actual meaning now?

In, other words, do the hoi polloi define the meanings of words, or should we heed the hoi polloi?

Australian spy chief fears sabotage of critical infrastructure

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Happy

Odd adjective

Anglicised? Ozzified, surely.

No bush hat with corks icon?

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

STOP_FORTH

Re: Outdated phraseology

JWM here. Usually booting Puppy from a CD or USB stick. Why install anything?

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Linux

Outdated phraseology

"Linux on the Desktop" is starting to sound like "Linux on the Mainframe" to my ears.

Linux on the Laptop is what the conversation should be about.

Or, possibly, when will there be a decent desktop for Linux?

Flying car biz Alef claims 3K preorders, still hasn't done a proper demo

STOP_FORTH

Re: A good investment

I keep them in my Bitcoin wallet. I think it's down the back of the settee.

Thanks again.

STOP_FORTH
Thumb Down

Re: A good investment

I'm selling all of my Theranos and Magic Leap shares and investing right away.

Thanks for the tip.

Where do I sign?

The batteries on Odysseus, the hero private Moon lander, have run out

STOP_FORTH
Go

Re: Clearly Nobody Watched Robot Wars

Well the JAXA SLIM was supposed to approach the Moon and perform a 90 degree flip before landing. Which didn't happen.

Shape it like a Gomboc. Wait till it stops rolling. Poke some legs out.

Job's a good'un.

Anything I don't understand can't be difficult, as the MBAs say.

STOP_FORTH
Terminator

Re: Clearly Nobody Watched Robot Wars

Make it six times heavier and put solar panels, antennae, thrusters etc on each face. Plus a leg sticking out from each corner.

Or a weeble.

What puzzles me is what combination of mass distribution and landing angle caused it to tip?

You'd think five legs should still keep it on the level, assuming they are strong enough.

Icon for robot wars, you didn't say who they were at war with.

STOP_FORTH

Topologists demand an answer

If we covered you in small mirrors would you be equivalent to one of those small elephant toys they sell in Thailand or a glitterbal?

STOP_FORTH

There's nothing new in this world, or on the Moon!

You've just reinvented Telstar.

STOP_FORTH

Different bloke

When he returned home he was suddenly lame from a childhood injury.

He didn't have six legs, though.

Maybe Homer left that out to keep The Odyssey at a reasonable length?

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Rocket scientist, what do they know?

Switch off Waze guys, no wonder your battery is flat.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

STOP_FORTH

Wrong link

Yes.

It was a joke.

URL article does not mention Minix?

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Happy

Some mistake, surely?

Shouldn't Tiny Core use a microkernel?

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

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Mushroom

Just the one?

Aren't they planning to deorbit about a hundred of the things because of an unfixable fault?

I imagine that would do the trick nicely.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Alien

A modest proposal

All computer time systems and clocks should use MJD and UTC internally.

Convert to local solar/lunar calendar and timezone for the meatsacks.

You know you coding monkeys can't really cope with non-integers.

STOP_FORTH

Interview question

Try asking them about microcode!

Maybe everyone should be forced to code in something low-level for a year or two.

START _FORTH!

STOP_FORTH

It's more complicated than that

At least two countries (South Korea is one, can't recall the other) have some companies that pay monthly paid employees 1/13 of their annual salary for January to November. You then get 2/13 of your salary to help out with end of year expenditure.

STOP_FORTH

Re: post 100 times to a junk thread over in the user forums

Too easy!

STOP_FORTH

Re: Temporary temporal problem

Well, that would be cheating! I worked quite hard at getting Silver in the shortest possible time. (Didn't quite manage, took over a year.)

Thanks, I'll have a think about it.

Only 98 posts to go now.

STOP_FORTH

Temporary temporal problem

In about 4 million years leap days will no longer be necessary.

Actually, I only came here to complain about you stripping me of my silver status.

Can anyone suggest an unpopular sport for me to try at the next Olympics? Obviously, if there are fewer competitors I'll have more chance of winning, given that there isn't much time left for me to train. Gold would be good, but I'd settle for Silver.

It's a shame that posting snarky comments on the Internet isn't an Olympic sport yet.

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

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Re: I'm more interested in the source

He has a cousin in Notre Dame called Hatchback.

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Happy

Re: 65 bus route

It's all we have left! We're interested in railways, underground railways, traction engines, steam ships, clippers and omnibuses because we were instrumental in developing most of them when the rest of the world were using horses.

Aeroplanes (US), hot air balloons (France), Zeppelins (Germany), motor cars (Germany), rockets (Russia/Germany), monocars (Russia), autogyros (Spain), helicopters (Russia) are passing fads which will never catch on. Consequently, they are of no interest to us.

STOP_FORTH
Happy

65 bus route

Back in the day when Red Ken simplified bus ticket prices by introducing zones, you could probably travel further on a 65 than any other bus and stay in one zone.

I don't know why anyone would want to know this.

Happy days, travelling from Kingston to Ealing for a pint or two.

Facebook to save US users from ads bought by foreign state-controlled media

STOP_FORTH

Pandora's box

Look in the corner, guys. I'm sure I saw something in there.

Astroboffins peering back in time with Hubble find stars may have been flickering into life even earlier than thought

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Trollface

Unhelpful sugestion

Or, just maybe, there never were any Population III stars and loads of "metallic" elements came spewing out of the Big Bang?

STOP_FORTH
Boffin

Telescope nomenclature

We really need a Super Duper Telescope if we are to make any progress in our endeavour to understand the Universe.

Got $50k spare? Then you can crack SHA-1 – so OpenSSH is deprecating flawed hashing algo in a 'near-future release'

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Re: Two hashes are better than one

That doesn't really address the point. Even if two different hashes are compromised, using them both as separate hashes still gives some measure of assurance that the file has not been tampered with. If only one is compromised file integrity is guaranteed by the other. If both are compromised it may still be extremely difficult to find a hash collision for both.

I was merely using MD5 as an example.

My question really is - are two hashes more secure than one?

STOP_FORTH
Linux

Two hashes are better than one

Some time ago I noticed that some Linux ISOs were being signed with two different types of hash - usually an MD5 and some type of SHA. Whilst I realise that this is not really applicable to OpenSSH, surely this is still a reasonable defence against hash collisions?

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

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Happy

Re: Watch Out USA...

Narwhal tusks.

Worried about the magnetic North Pole sprinting towards Russia? Don't be, boffins say, it'll be back sooner or later

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Happy

Why have the lying, fake, mainstream media not mentioned this?

Donald Trump extends ban on Huawei, ZTE telecoms kit in US companies to May 2021

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Ooh, sneaky!

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

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Alien

Down withYankee imperialist running dogs!

Star Wars? Really?

That is Fireball XL5. It's the new model without the strings.

Kids today!

Now go and watch Nebula-75 on Youtube before I have to chastise you a second time.

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

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They had to destroy all those razor blades somehow.

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Happy

Re: Nice technology

If you exclude every fibre-optic link on the planet, I suppose laser communication is quite rare.

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Happy

What can possibly go wrong?

As long as ICANN and all the usual gang are administering everything we should be fine. I bet Disney will get the .plu domain. I'd like .ear and .moo if that's alright with everybody else? .eur will automatically 404!

Fright at the museum: Bored curators play spooky Top Trumps on Twitter over who has the creepiest object

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Trollface

Re: Salzburg

They were all too big to go into a packet of salt and vinegar.

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Unhappy

Salzburg

The museum in Salzburg has a pretty grisly collection of pickled things in jars.

How's your night sky looking? The Reg chats to astroboffin Mark McCaughrean about Starlink and leaving a mark

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Holmes

When they give you lemons

I'm not trying to minimise the inconvenience these things cause to astro-photographers but.....

Since there are going to be lots of them and we know their shape, size, altitude, velocity and position at any given time (OK, last one is less certain, they're LEOs)....

Could they be used for transit/occultation studies?

Unlike asteroids, they are not all whizzing around the ecliptic.

Vivaldi browser to perform a symphony of ad and tracker blocking with version 3.0

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Headmaster

Re: I'll be watching out for this

Lord Thomson said it first.

Somewhere, way out there, two black holes, one large and one small, merged. And here on Earth, we detected the gravitational wave blast

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Mushroom

Stupid question

I'm quite happy for all the tech sites to refer to the higher frequency as an "overtone" but none of them answer the important question.

Is it an even harmonic or an odd harmonic?

Black holes are very old, so my guess is they are driven by valves.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

STOP_FORTH

Re: Out of the frying pan into the fire?

VxWorks doesn't like clock rollovers either. Why have they never fixed this or does it only affect older versions?

(Have personal experience of a horrible 248 day bug, luckily it was only crashing broadcast systems.)

Dot-com price rises on their way over the next four years: ICANN approves Verisign contract, walks off with $20m

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Pirate

Broken beyond repair

Create a parallel internet. Decentralised, poison-proof DNS, new address space, tunnel everything through IP4 and IP6, non-spoofable From address for e-mail.

That's what we could do. Pigyback on everybody else's fat tubes.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

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Advice

A friendly IT guy told me that the best thing to do was reply all with a 10 MB attachment and read receipts enabled. (We'd had two of these events - with more recipients.)

Linus Torvalds ponders: Is Linux 5.6 going well because it's bug-free, or thanks to that other bug?

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Linux

Title

Emperor Penguin surely?

(Funniest Wiki-vandalism I ever saw was on the penguin page. Someone had modified the binomial name so it read "Emperor Penguin (Penguiness Biggus)".)

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

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Happy

Irrelevant comment here

I know nothing about this case or local councils generally.

Just came here to say that the Llangollen canal is delightful and passes over the stunning Pontcysyllte aqueduct.

Broadcom sues Netflix for its success: You’re stopping us making a fortune from set-top boxes, moans chip designer

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Re: FRAND

387 and 663 cover error correction. There may be some merit in these, but a few companies tried patenting Turbo codes for broadcasting some years ago and got their fingers burnt. (That clever bloke from Cambridge who wrote the alternative energy report showed that all Turbo codes were a subset of an existing error correcting scheme.)

283 seems to be a way of efficiently transmitting video encoding data. This may actually be novel.

The rest look rather over-broad, basically how do you get high bandwidth, time-critical stuff over a network. (DVD bitstreams? What?)

Look like typical US patents to me. Not sure this would fly in Europe. DVB standards are all FRAND based. Compression standards are a bit more confusing, because of the sheer number of researchers, overlapping ideas and not everybody agrees to licence stuff as FRAND.

Edit David MacKay was the prof. He showed that LDPC codes (invented/discovered by Gallager in 1960) were a superset of all Turbo codes. This wiped out a promising business model/technical blackmail scam overnight.

Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy

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Trollface

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

I don't have to answer your "one question". I don't live in a theocracy, you don't get to frame compulsory questions, or burn to death anyone who refuses to answer or who gives the wrong answer.

Your time is over. Take your absurd death cult with you. You are not forgiven.

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Trollface

Re: Would you like to be fried with that?

I'm glad He understands predator/prey cycles. If His solution is the same as that produced by millions of years of evolution it just comes down to deciding which is the most likely explanation. Then we just have to decide which of the thousands of gods is the correct one.

They all seem pretty unconvincing to me, what is special about yours?

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