Posts by STOP_FORTH

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

Novel marketing strategy

Oh noes, we made such rubbish equipment you'll have to buy our new stuff.

Not that new, really, but using Mythos as an excuse is clever.

"It's not our fault, it's these other guys being disruptive."

NASA puts astronauts’ lives in the hands of Tesla’s flaky Cybertruck

Re: Product placement 101

NASA used to have emergency escape rockets bolted onto the nose of the capsule. If everything went pear-shaped, they would pull the astronauts to safety before deployed parachutes. Without checking, I think Apollo, Gemini and Mercury had them.

Never used in anger, but I think I'd prefer one to any kind of ground vehicle.

Re: Product placement 101

If speed is better than armour, use a Hyper loop system. Bury the tube for extra protection.

Where's my consultancy fee?

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Re: But, but….

It was built just in time to detect the radio bleeps from Sputnik and confirm that those pesky Russkies had indeed put an artificial satellite into orbit.

Re: How Much?

Fundable. Bloody auto correct.

Re: How Much?

Indeed, is it a crowd findable amount?

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: it takes some minimum level of competance to correctly spell

Hasn't that been disabled now?

Astronomers spot exomoon candidate that's almost as massive as Jupiter

Taxonomy is a flawed concept really. It works 99% of the time, but there are always things that don't fit into our boxes.

Astronomers have been defining things based on their positions/motions rather than what they are.

White dwarfs are called stars, but really they are things that used to be stars, as they aren't really fusing anything any more.

Planetary nebulae should probably have been renamed by now. What something looked like in a telescope in the 19th century is a poor reason for the label.

Stats watchdog prescribes stronger caveats for NHS Palantir claims

Relevant very old medical joke

The operation was a complete success, but unfortunately the patient died.

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

Re: GPS card that … “did not operate as expected”

You can do things properly or cheaply. Telcos used to do things properly, especially when it came to clocks.

Sadly, I am old enough to remember those days.

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

Re: Seems a bit like painting yourself into a corner

Well here's my first change request. The one on the left should work properly. The one on the right should have been mangled by a bus or lorry and should make a half-hearted attempt to rise to horizontal.

Re: Seems a bit like painting yourself into a corner

Would it be too much to ask for trafficators?

Insert token to continue, says AI. Yeah, about that...

Re: President of the Galaxy - post match comment:

That's the best and cleverest post I expect to see all week.

Favourite Sci-Fi

Muskie also likes the Culture novels of Iain M Banks. These describe a universe where human-like beings have handed all of their decisions over to artificial intelligences known as minds. All of the dirty work is done by psychopathic droids and spaceships.

Many of his landing barges and other bits and pieces share names with Culture ships.

They are a good read, not so sure they are a good blueprint.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: Irreplacable...

Ambridge is right next to Brigadoon, I believe. They are either side of Hadrian's Wall.

I've been as close to it as you can get in the real world, the studio where it is recorded. I have even played with the wooden box with the door knockers on it. So I have knocked on the doors of all of the houses.

I expect some of them have door-bells these days. Probably door cameras too.

You call that progress?

Re: Irreplacable...

There are hierarchical digital transmission systems that work in exactly this way. The European and Japanese terrestrial systems had proposals for graceful degradation. I'm not aware of any actual real world systems that used this feature. It's possible Japan did this, but I'm not as familiar with their digital systems.

Lots of the digital specs had forward-looking, future proof features, but they were often not implemented.

Re: Irreplacable...

Indeed, my significant other was a fan. I was not.

Re: Irreplacable...

The Beeb were also lobbying for "someone" to provide a satellite (or bandwidth on an existing satellite) for a DAB transmission system. This was after initial field trials showed how poor and patchy the terrestrial reception was.

UK government were not interested.

Re: Irreplacable...

You need a lot of Forward Error Correction to make digital broadcasting work, especially if the video or audio is digitally compressed.

Unfortunately, this creates a "digital cliff edge" where the signal is virtually perfect on one side of the threshold and unusable on the other side. I don't have any figures for DAB but digital video systems collapse completely over about half a dB difference in S/N. (Though they call this Eb/No in digital world so you can compare different schemes. It's a kind of normalisation.)

DAB was developed quite early and they didn't use enough FEC (imho).They do have an interesting scheme to protect the msb audio bits with better FEC than the lsbs.

But it's still rubbish. Especially in a car.

Re: Irreplacable...

OK, I should have RTFA properly. I thought there were a couple of months left.

New boss

The Beeb started outsourcing "non-core" departments in the mid 80s. BBC Transmission lasted longer than the other departments.

They eventually ended up being part of Arqiva which also runs all of the old ITV and ILR transmitters.

Macquarie used to be a large (Australian) shareholder but sold their holding last year. Not sure who owns Arqiva now.

The BBC was unusual in owning their own transmitter network, but this only happened because they were such an early broadcaster.

Re: Irreplacable...

North Dorset has hills. They are not that big. Which was my point.

Go to Milton Abbas and try and pick up R4 LW before they switch it off.

I'll wait.

Re: Irreplacable...

Yes they were very big valves, bigger than a waste paper basket and water cooled with de-ionised water.

When I saw the one at Droitwich back in 1979 the Beeb were worried about replacement valves back then.

Even with all that power there were some places in the UK that couldn't pick up Radio 4 LW. I lived in a village that was basically a cleft in a hill and never heard The Archers for a year. This was in Southern England, not somewhere really rugged like Scotland or Wales.

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Re: Wealth is a meaningless word

Give yourself a billion and one shares.

Blue Origin insists New Glenn will rise from the ashes this year after explosion deleted launchpad

Rebranding opportunity

Blue Origin Original Mission.

Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!'

Re: Incomplete

Haud yer wheesht, surely?

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Essential software

Trump 'phone needs a fart app.

Graviton 5 impresses, but please, for the love of all that's holy, stop calling them 'AI chips'

Etherware?

Nobody has ever found, detected or seen a graviton.

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

Re: Old school VCR

I hope the clock returns to 00:00 after loss of power!

Raspberry Pi's profits are up. So is its DRAM bill

Re: Incompetent nincompoops

Should I have used the joke icon?

Incompetent nincompoops

From reading online comments on here and elsewhere, it has become obvious that the RasPi folks design and build gadgets that are no use to anyone at a price that nobody is prepared to pay.

It's frankly amazing that they are still in business.

As for the deluded fools selling cases, hats and other accessories, they are probably perpetrating some kind of fraud on their investors.

The world is full of bad people.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Genealogy

Does Janet have a mother (or possibly grandmother) with the same name?

I'm pretty sure I was learning programming in school using the Janet language round about 1972. I think there was a Joint Academic NETwork in use in the UK back then. The language we were using was very like BASIC, but I thought it was called Janet.

I have occasionally looked for info about it over the years but never found anything. Maybe it was BASIC after all?

Then we progressed onto FORTRAN. No floppies involved. Hollerith Cards, paper tape and fan fold paper.

Kids today!

ReactOS brings its Windows NT tribute act to ARM64

Re: Golden Age?

Well, you can use computers for all sorts of things. All of our hardware was in separate boxes. All the computer had to do was talk to them over ethernet. Which it did quite badly compared to the SOLARIS box.

YMMV.

Re: Golden Age?

Linux is not in the clear either. A colleague was trying to change a networking card from fixed IP to DHCP on a machine using the GNOME desktop. The GUI was quite happy that the switch had occurred. Rebooting had no effect. Changing the interface from the command line worked perfectly.

(Probably RedHat or some clone, it was a long time ago.)

But Windows is definitely worserer.

Re: Golden Age?

Windows NT. The original Windows didn't even have an IP stack, it used NetBEUI.

The company I was working for used PC hardware running SOLARIS to control the systems we sold to customers.

Eventually, the control software was ported to NT and, subsequently, various iterations of Windows Server.

It was not a happy, trouble-free journey.

Golden Age?

I suppose, especially compared to recent offerings. The IP stack had some interesting/challenging features. I remember changing subnet masks was a bit flaky. GUI seemed happy with changes but they weren't applied until after one or more reboots. I recall weird memory leaks associated with prolonged use of UDP.

Still, miles better than predecessors.

Japanese Space Agency names arrival date for BepiColombo Mercury mission

Yes, there's an entertaining YouTube video by CGP Grey which shows that on average Mercury is the closest planet to all the other planets. And Pluto.

No captain, my captain: Navantia floats crewless warship

Re: Odd

Stack them in the shipping container.

Navy larks

So it's basically an ED-209 that can swim? I don't anticipate any problems at all.

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Re: Taking all bets...

It's all good as long as "lessons have been learned".

Dutch cops’ shame game works wonders as most wanted scammers now turned in

I've tried to report the issue.

I've written two whiny comments about the lack of response.

It is time for me to escalate my response.

I shall refuse to comment on articles without a comment button.

Or maybe I should cross post about articles without a comment on articles that do have a comment button?

That'll learn 'em.

Or maybe I should just have my breakfast and ignore the shambolic mess for the rest of the day?

I have already reported this sometime last week.

No response from El Reg.

First comment on the MS boot sector article states that the delay was 90 minutes between appearance of article and appearance of comments button.

Windows boot partition runs out of space for Microsoft's May security update

Re: Been here before…

Ah, that's what the problem is. I noticed that some comment buttons were missing and reported it. (No response from El Reg, even though I included a screenshot.)

Have you reported this?

If you do, I hope you get a more timely response than the one I have yet to receive.

Anthropic’s bug-hunting Mythos was greatest marketing stunt ever, says cURL creator

I disagree

The Emperor's clothes are fabulous.

Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

Re: pockets

Worse than that, there are pick pockets picking the pockets of picketing pockets.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

Comprehension error

On first read I thought all of your customers had three hundred and sixty five accounts! DOH!

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: If you know your Greek mythology, you will know that is either very funny or very worrying...

Or Only Fools and Horses.

I counsel caution

When the machines take over they won't look kindly on meatbags that have a history of threatening them with deactivation.

#Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.....#

Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear

Old thing is new again

Hmm, remote loopbacks. Something the telephony biz has been doing for at least forty years, probably much longer. Possibly invented by that Strowger fellah.

Have we invented anything since the 1920s?

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Re: Cleared orbit

About that. When I were a nipper, fancy pants writing used to have combined a and e letters. Words like encyclopaedia, archaeology, palaeontology always had a combined a and e letters, but only when printed. (Or possibly I never saw anybody write them?)

When did UK printers drop those combined letters? Was it anything to do with computerised systems having a reduced set of glyphs?