Posts by Press any key

Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

Proper warm up still required

Thermal cycles are stressful things for engines, especially going from idle to takeoff thrust. Presumably this means that the engines will still need to be started some minimum time before reaching the runway. If HERON becomes a common thing it'll be interesting to see if there are more rejected takeoffs or engine failures and emergency landings.

Tugs are slow, the need to dispose of the tug in a place where it can easily return to the apron without causing congestion on taxiways or the runway will perhaps limit this at some airports.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: I'm ancient enough

I've no idea why the units in use in the USA cause such pearl-clutching loss of stiff-upper-lip in UK techies.

I think it's because so much of the WWW content is written by left pondians.

Looking for cooking instructions for shoulder of lamb? The oven will have °C on the dial but 9 out of 10 search results will have the temperature in °F

Looking for the ideal temperature for the bed of your 3D printer? Same problem

Looking for the best temperature for chitting potatoes? Similar problem.

This is probably an improvement opportunity for the search engines.

And don't get me started on date formats.

The only fun of it is when American colleagues visit and try to use American units while giving a presentation to European colleagues, the looks on faces they see in the audience always brings then to an entertaining halt

as they realise that they don't know their audience.

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

Can you split your comment in two so I can down-vote the first paragraph and up-vote the second.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Deleted nearly every football fan in Europe

And made the world a better place.

California sues President Tariff

Strongly worded letter

Trumps term in office will be over before the motion filing is over and this actual gets any time in court: Trump will have had time to die of natural causes before the first judgment.

They might as well just send a strongly worded letter.

Pentagon needs China's rare earths, Beijing just put them behind a permit wall. Oops

And Canada

Signalgate storm intensifies as journalist releases full secret Houthi airstrike chat

Re: They're already

Forget resigning, I'm going with a Trumpian solution

LOCK THEM UP

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: "We lose money on the hardware"

I think they're allowed to sell at any price they like as long as it's the same price and availablity for all of their customers (distributers and resellers).

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Those at HP thought this policy wouldn't become public knowledge and that there wouldn't be a big negative backlash really are incompetent.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Liars

And yet, there is a thing called misleading parliament.

The punishment is being front page news for a few days.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

The Bush branded products from Argos were far ahead of their time.

They new the day they had been purchased and were able to fail exactly one day out of warranty.

No, Broadcom did not just end VMware's flagship VCDX certification program

The VCDX program continues as usual.

Is current tense.

Broadcom's comment contains no indications of future intent to continue it.

You're buying fat new servers to save energy and make room for AI hardware, claims Dell

to save energy and make room for air

There, fixed that for them

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Good luck

The ones that went EOL in 2024 aren't just floating about, they're still for sale!

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

Does the chicken have a pulley in it?

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

The reasons are simple

The first and foremost reason to replace hardware is to be able to run software with up to date security patches. Big corps also like to have hardware that's in warranty

AI? That's not even in the equation.

The manufacturers know this, most of what these droids were saying was to try to get investors to buy more shares.

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

officers and offices

The people complaining about agile are the same people that think putting developers in open plan offices is a good idea.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Re: possible fix

Or GPT

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

I hope you're not in an area where they used PME / TNC-S. It's theoretically safe but nobody knows have many gas explosions it might have triggered by the return current being diverted along incoming gas pipes.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

I suggest you shouldn't give advice on the use of the word its as the contraction of 'it is'

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Make it look like windows 7 with proper borders on windows, a decent start menu and a control panel that isn't made mostly of empty space, then I'll fork out for new hardware to run it.

As it is, my 4th gen i7 without TPM is still running just fine although windows 10 is quite ugly.

Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations

"Although this was firmly in the middle of Oracle’s own guidance, the revenue growth missed analysts' average estimate for growth of about 7.6 percent, according to LSEG data."

So oracle was right and greedy shareholding analysts wanting to pump up the share price by over inflating expectations were wrong.

Sad I am not.

Disappointingly the greedy analyst will have sold before the price fell.

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

So properties passed will include ones like mine where in August they installed equipment on the pole that serves me but still haven't actually made FTTP available to pointer punters?

Astroboffins spot high-power 8b year old radio burst from pre-Earth event

8b years old

I know the reg has gone international but I'm sure even nations that struggle with the metric system can handle base 10 numbers.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

The source of the problem? Universities

With so many civil servants having studied PPE or PPH or classics, perhaps it's time for the universities to update their syllabuses with some STEM so that the graduates have idea of what it is.

This might actually make these graduates employable outside of the civil service and cause the civil service to actually cast the net a bit wider employ from a broader candidate base.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: QWERTZ/QWERTY.

And the on-screen keyboard too.

Bosch goes all-in on hydrogen with €2.5B investment by 2026

Re: I was expecting

Because hydrogen is easier to store in larger quantities (Vs big battery banks), energy conversion losses and transmission losses are less than for stored and transmitted electricity.

Also the pipework infrastructure is already there whereas the electricity grid simply won't cope with everyone going electric for everything.

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

Re: Support

Possibly this?

https://www.cpushack.com/2021/08/12/forgotten-italian-cpu-the-genesys-b52-mmx/

Meta facing third fine of 2023 for mishandling EU user data under GDPR

Collective action

Hopefully other countries that have enacted the GDPR, including the UK, will see this, take note, and do the same with similarly large fines. The large fines ought to be attractive to governments. Through collective action these abusers might be forced to change their ways.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

the total labor base

I'm certain that if BT used that term then the word labour would have been spelt correctly.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

Redirected misdial

I had an occasion when somebody had misdialled their fax and was trying to fax my phone at work.

After I had answered and listened to the telltale noises a few times I redirected my phone to the office fax machine.

A few minutes later the usually silent machine dutyfully started printing an purchase order that appeared to be to a builders mechants on the other side of the country.

The PO went in the floor bound round filer and I was able to remove the redirect from my phone.

Were they taken over by Wayne Kerr?

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Off datasheet appliance usage

I'll file the cooking pizza in the toaster idea with cooking rice in the kettle.

While I think about it, I wonder if popcorn in the kettle might work?

Re: pizza is the perfect food

All the ones I've seen, the toast comes out the opposite way up from how the bread went in.

Which way up do you put the pizza in?

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

European Labor resistance?

The European council needn't worry about labor resistance, labour resistance would be more of a problem in the EU.

Icon, because I'm ready for it.

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

Re: Union

I wonder how the UK left feels about train drivers

They earn plenty more than the UK average and are very strongly unionised in jobs with high barriers to entry in an industry that can't simply close its doors or move elsewhere to save money.

(Detail: the train driver's union is ASLEF, not the more well known RMT.)

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: "buttons replaced with touchscreens"

But they are cheaper for the manufacturer, who can also sell you new software features.

Then the garages can charge you for installing bug fix updates.

Then the manufacturer can sell you an entire new car when you crash your existing one because you're too busy trying to touch the correct patch of screen going through menus to drive the car itself.

It's win win win for everybody except the customers.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Re: No Excuses

It's only locked out if you put the lock on yourself and you have the only key to the lock.

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

Re: Leave my system settings alone.

Wait a couple of days and it will have magically changed to edge

Chipmakers to spend record $109b on fab machines this year

Oh the irony when the fab owners are told they can't have their new machines because of semiconductor shortages.

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

Oh look, it's ugly.

Just like windows 10 and 11

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Re: Screen bloat...

I was going to comment something similar.

The change I noticed in the screenshots is that the ribbon bar has got bigger using even more valuable vertical space than it did before.

Monitors have gone wide-screen and have got more pixels than ever but GUI designers have decided that people want this space consumed by whitespace rather than leaving it available for usability and productivity.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Re: Only half the story

It's probably a 7.5 digit meter.

It should have less uncertainty than cheaper meters although I have seen 7.5 digit meters with identical specs to 6.5 digit meters and the seventh digit is little more than a random number.

I used to automate Keysight 3458a 8.5 digit meters in a manufacturing environment, they used to sell for more than £6k, you can't buy them new in the EU these days as they don't comply with ROHS.

UK watchdog fines biz £130k for 900,000+ direct marketing calls to folk who had opted out

Re: Another ineffective fine

For this crime they should be persecuted.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

Re: Pay to Crim

Until reading this comment I had been pondering if the agencies involved had been committing fraud or conspiring to commit fraud by taking money for something that they were deliberately misrepresenting as secure.

The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software goes offline for good

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 56-year-old satellite burning up in the sky spotted by sharp school kids

Re: Dam I would have gotten away with it

One of whom's parents appears to really like cars

Microsoft puts dual-screen devices and Windows 10X in the too-hard basket

Re: Mangled language

It means the person that wrote the release has an MBA

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

At a guess, the amplifier had some capacitance between input and ground. When cable when failed it went high resistance and the two together would form a first order low pass filter.

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Re: The reason that I did not subscribe to BBC Sounds

You can indeed create a different account for every device. I have, all with made up email addresses. The BBC appears not to confirm the email address.