Posts by STOP_FORTH

Space telescopes are being photobombed by satellites, and the problem is slated to get much worse

Have a vote

Kitten videos or galaxies?

Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever

Not a peak, more of a hillock

Windows Task Manager on XP SP2.

Rust on the Moon? Far-side dirt says yes, actually

Bloody Rust

It's everywhere!

Ubuntu 25.10's Rusty sudo holes quickly welded shut

Sudo is not required

Come over to the reckless side.

In Puppy Linux (and it's many derivatives/relatives) you are always root!

Retail giant Kingfisher rejects SAP ERP upgrade plan

Anecdote, that may be true

I used to work for a biggish (20,000+) outfit and am still in touch with some ex-colleagues. When SAP came a-calling (this was after I left) their negotiating position was interesting and straightforward. It amounted to them being able to supply a vanilla system at reasonable cost to which they could add widgets to customise the system to your particular requirements.

If the widget had already been developed for another customer, you got it for free (or cheap - I wasn't there, this is second hand knowledge).

If the widget was a brand new one or an existing one that needed alteration, you paid an arm and a leg for it.

Biggish Outfit negotiators realised they were being stiffed when they were asked to pay for e.g. a widget that dealt with people working 9 to 5 on weekdays.

In fact, every single feature they asked for was a brand new widget that would require extensive/expensive development billable hours.

After some pushback the initial price dropped substantially.

Either they have very stupid and/or greedy salesmen or they are in the third stage of company lifecycle, where they are run by accountants. (Not surprising, considering that ERP is basically a tool for accountants.)

All of the above info came from an e-mail from an unreliable narrator so is obviously only allegedly true.

Mind you I used their product at Even Bigger Co (120,000+) and it was absolute shite. Though that may have been a poor implementation of a perfect software tool/system. Or not.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Easy to pinpoint

They should never have killed off Bob, Rover and Clippy.

The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all

You are in a maze of twisty little passages...

Welcome to the Internet. It used to bear some resemblance to a badly organised library.

The books have been hidden. The Dewey Decimal labels have been removed. The card indexes have been shredded. Your only hope of finding anything useful is a dusty microfiche viewer.

You switch it on. It displays the ramblings of the latest AI.

Probably best to switch off your computer and step outside for a while.

Re: "Is AI really intelligent?"

Technically, moonshine IS produced by the transformation of atoms.

Re: Appropriate (From EWD 898)

They can sink!

Re: Useful tool

Exquisitely crafted simile. Quite unlike wot AI produces.

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

Re: hydrogen silsesquioxane

Or a paper bag.

Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong

Facts are good.

I think he's letting them off a bit easily, though.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Gerry Anderson - space visionary

Fireball XL5 solved this problem in 1962 (or was it 2062?).

The only remaining issue is supplying long enough string.

US gov shutdown leaves IT projects hanging, security defenders a skeleton crew

Save APOD!

I'll admit to having a morbid fascination with the current state of US politics. Since none of these events affect me personally, I just shake my head in amazement before moving on to something else.

Come on guys, update the APOD website, it's one of the more wholesome and interesting things you guys have given to ROTW.

UK may already be at war with Russia, ex-MI5 head suggests

Re: Spy vs. Spy

Harsh but fair assessment.

Spy vs. Spy

If you have seen the documentary series called "Slow Horses", you'd realise that MI5 is at war with itself.

Turns out Hayabusa2's next asteroid target isn't much bigger than the probe itself

Re: Images

Land at one of the poles?

How and why Linux has thrived after three decades in Kernelland

Re: significant mitigation

Is it the one at Hammersmith? I gather it's not used that much these days.

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: I have countless transcripts

He missed WikipediaGPT

However

Explain to me why I have never, ever heard a Doctor ever say "I don't know".

Applies to medical doctors and all of the PhD bearers I have worked with.

Icon: Hallucinating boffin.

Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power – just ask Larry Ellison

Old shaggy dog story punchline

"Of course they're off. These are not eating fish, these are buying and selling fish."

Can be applied to any over-valued, over-hyped, over-VCed, pump and dump shares anywhere.

I believe South Sea share certificates are worth something again. You frame them and hang them on your wall, so you can marvel at human folly.

Also, a guy down the pub said "buy tulips, you can't go wrong"!

Indian court stops streaming hearings on social media to protect lawyers from mean memes

Legal advice

Maybe they should also stop The Register from reporting on the Registry.

IANAL.

Icon: Looking for my briefs.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: We need to go back to an unbloated OS.

Sorry, I did anticipate that my post might cause some confusion but I was too lazy to type "OS"!

Nice Haiku.

Re: We need to go back to an unbloated OS.

Haiku?

Kilopixel creator kills livestream switch before woodblock display hits Crysis point

Re: In other news

Phew! That's alright then.

Re: I was pondering...

I dunno. Maybe they could sell them to the 7,650,000,000 people who live outside the USA?

I'd buy one.

Teletext graphics mode

Six times the resolution and four times the colour space.

Just saying.

In other news

The above was my thousandth post.

It referred to the Kilo pixel!

What are the odds of that happening?

Waterloo Station needs this, but bigger

They got rid of the lovely, noisy, Italian-designed flic-flac displays which you could see from almost anywhere in the station.

They replaced them with markedly inferior electronic jobbies which my tired old eyes can barely read.

This may be partly the fault of my eyes.

Yes, I know the other meaning of jobbies, most of my family are Glaswegian.

Make a bigger one and put it above platforms 1 to 12.

Make it out of Rubik cubes if you like.

Icon: I know I have my ticket somewhere.

Programmers: you have to watch your weight, too

Binary advice

Use more "ones", they weigh less than "zeroes" especially when printed.

EchoStar sells off its spectrum for more than its total market cap

Puzzling

I didn't even know that they owned Captain Scarlet.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

Pension schemes and salary computers

These are the systems to worry about.

Also household insurance.

No more Blocktoberfest? German court throws book at ad blockers

Re: What if the ads fell into a hole before they got to my computer?

But how do you start your fires now?

Asmi Linux 13 Debian Edition debuts: Xfce desktop never looked so good

Re: Yet aNoThEr Linux distribution?

I like the example in your link to a definition of snarky.

Re: Yet aNoThEr Linux distribution?

Why not? Nobody is forcing you to use it. You don't even have to read about it, you chose to click on the article.

One might as well ask whether the Internet needs another snarky comment from an anonymous coward.

Lunar Trailblazer trails off as NASA loses probe to the void

Nostalgia

This isn't the old, original Register.

Those guys would have had a fleet of solar sails (made from tin foil from ciggie packets and KitKat wrappers) dropping thousands of lunar rovers/crawlers/hoppers communicating via an Open Source mesh network.

They'd probably have turned up a few dinosaur fossils by now.

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Ruh-roh

SCOOBE snacks.

I really am very sorry for wasting your time.

Unlike Win 11.

NASA veteran warns Hubble faces death by a hundred cuts

Re: For God's sake just rename it the Trump Interstellar Telescope

Velcro

It's there in the name

The first A stands for Aeronautics.

It's not just rockets in a hard vacuum.

Unfortunately, once you start measuring surface sea temperatures and air temperatures and composition at different heights you may upset vested interests down on the ground.

No more balloons, Jumbo Jets and low altitude rockets for you!

NASA hacked hardware of camera orbiting Jupiter – and fixed it

Re: Making the best of a bad job

I believe the Senator was right too.

I have been visiting the APOD site virtually since it started.

It is probably one the most successful marketing ploys NASA ever came up with albeit in a low-key way.

I realise that the US public's perception of the Administration's

usefulness is key to it's continued funding.

I still feel justified in pointing out the Texas Sharpshooter aspect of their press releases.

Juno isn't doing what it was supposed to do. Fixing an afterthought camera from afar is impressive, but not part of the original mission.

The Hubble space telescope didn't pin down the Hubble Constant once and for all.

Apollo 13 didn't land two astronauts on the Moon.

Painting circles round bullet holes is only fooling yourself.

Making the best of a bad job

I have the greatest respect for NASA's many scientific achievements.

That being said, I think there is a certain amount of historical revisionism going on here.

Originally the Juno mission was supposed to visit Jupiter and investigate it's magnetic field. It was to have entered an elliptical orbit where it dipped down into the magnetosphere before returning to relative safety. The orbit was to be modified so that it went deeper and deeper into the magnetosphere until destruction.

Something went wrong with a thruster so it is now stuck in its original, relatively safe, orbit.

Originally there was no camera on the craft until a Congressman/Senator (can't be bothered to check which/who) made a fuss and said that NASA must provide pretty pictures.

Don't get me wrong, I have gawped at and enjoyed all of the images/timelapses from Juno as much as the next armchair astronomer. When politicians are redesigning your spacecraft five minutes before takeoff something has gone seriously wrong. (May have been more than five minutes, this is an exaggeration.)

To summarise, Juno should have been irradiated to death many months/years ago.

There shouldn't even have been a camera in the first place.

Some of this may be on Wikipedia, I haven't looked.

Let the downvotes commence.

Marketing has always been at war with the truth.

NASA Goddard Center Director quits as agency staffers issue dissent letter

Self imposed brain drain

What a time to be alive.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Re: how LLMs work

Yes.

A balanced perspective and sanity?

Don't play stupid games, don't win stupid prizes!

Also, avoid any game involving squid.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: Isn't Colossal Biosciences the outfit that ...

Can't fly or swim, yet. I know nothing about the Pacific Ocean, but if it's less than a metre deep they could just paddle.

I counsel caution.

Not just Moas

Didn't they have a colossal eagle in New Zealand? Not making a Hobbit/LOTR reference here, they really had giant eagles, bring some of them back too!

(Actually, ISTR there were giant penguins not too far from Kiwiland, hence the icon. Bring them back too!)

Shiny object syndrome spells doom for many AI projects, warns EPA CIO

Re: "I wish I could lash our CEO"

Take a lesson from Homer (not that one!)

When the Sirens of new technology come a-calling, lash the CEO to a chair AND fill his ears with wax. Not quite the same as the original, but it will do.

Also applies to the crayon munchers in marketing.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: Manual?

Err, handbrake surely? Or are we thinking of different models?Had a nifty little release trigger inside the "spade handle". If you were in the left hand seat, the trigger was conveniently placed for the forefinger of your right hand.

If you were driving the UK model the trigger was under the pinkie finger of your left hand, unless you twisted your hand through 180 which felt awkward.

If it was parked for more than about ten minutes, you couldn't put a Denver Boot on it!

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Au contraire

I have not looked up the relevant RFCs (and, in any case, they may not contain the information required).

RFCs were often written by (or anonymously sponsored by) the original inventors/proposers.

A long time ago (last millennium!) somebody told me that MS invented DHCP to manage IP addresses in large networks.

I have no idea if this is actually true.

If it is true, their implementation is obviously the best because it works exactly as they envisioned it, and not the way some Godless, Commie, bearded, sandal-wearing script kiddie implemented it.

You idiots!

You're all NetBEUIng it wrong.