Posts by PRR

Claude Code returns blank thinking blocks, but reasoning still costs you

Divided by common language

> "It may simply be an artefact..." Readers who fear that TheRegister has gone all USA-ian spelling should note that this is "mainly UK spelling" even in Cambridge Dictionary.

Mozilla revokes Firefox signing key after unencrypted copy lands in GitHub

Can GitHub etc repositories detect and flag PGP crypto-keys and similar? Either refuse to accept them without an additional "Are you sure?" or shunt them to a folder behind additional security?

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

Re: Providing Negative Incentives and then Clutching Pearls: However could this have been avoided ?

> what the first line of the Torah {is}

Same as the Jewish and Christian bible.

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: "design is complete when there's nothing more that can be removed"

> back in the 1970s when I was a trainee TV engineer

That story (there's truth behind it) has been call Muntzing, for Earl 'Mad Man' Muntz. Started in used cars but had picked-up electronics in back alleys and pool halls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

Bob Pease https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/industrial/boards/article/21771148/whats-all-this-muntzing-stuff-anyhow

in TIME 1953 - https://time.com/archive/6609072/corporations-dig-that-crazy-man/

30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage

Re: MSN

> Staggeringly, MSN still exists as a DUN provider

And @worldnet.att.net is still a valid mailbox. Altho actually operated by Yahoo, and free for legacy accounts. We've had one since like 1997. Gonna be 30 years........Soon be older than my .EDU cherished address. Both closed their dial-up servers.

Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

Re: Noise cancelling headphones

> ....wouldn't set foot on a plane without a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

Oh you kids. I've flown 30 miles in an old B-17 (not remotely made for comfort) and in a DC-3 (not bad for a short hop); 1,000 miles in a tired original Boeing 707 (w/737 shades and all rivets loose) shortly before that era ended; 2,800 miles in a tri-tail Constellation (very nice ride!).

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

Re: Oops

> that now-ubiqutious modern wonder of transportation, the monorail) in 1962?

Ubiqutious? A couple amusement parks and a few airports? I am fairly sure there is no monorail in my state or the next few states. I have seen Newark Airport and Disney Florida but they didn't take over.

Also: The 'Hotchkiss Bicycle Railroad' was a purpose-built monorail on which a matching bicycle could be ridden. Four examples in the 1890s.There is another vintage monorail with steam engine still run as a tourist fun-ride, name forgotten.

Millions of California-bought cars can be hijacked via Bluetooth

Re: Dealers butchering cars

> {monstrous and would be hard to reverse.} ..some hack's wiring job. It's usually not done very neatly.

I did wiring for 40 years. In my experience, car mechanics can't splice wires any good. It took me weeks to un-do the splices in a Thunderbird's aftermarket AM/FM/8Tr/Cass/CB17/CB23 radio stack so I could get the traffic report more than 10 miles out the city. I spent half of each winter diagnosing a plow-truck engine's electrical repairs. We just took a loss on a pre-used minivan with too many electric doors problems to contemplate.

Even when un-activated, this tomfoolery must seriously compromise the car's reliability.

Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

Re: ultra-filtered milk

> What are Coca-cola doing with milk?

What is Coke's core business? Not fizzy cola! They go into EVERY supermarket and quickie-mart in the land, about every day. With heavy liquids. Their sales staff are well organized and disciplined. Their advertising depts are usually sharp and effective. The actual pee in the bottles is a tertiary detail. It could be hyped-up milk products.

'The bots are alive!' Jailbroken Gemini spun up new C2 server for Russian fraudster in just 6 minutes

Re: Journalism?

> ....the register{sic} find it necessary to mention that the individual in question has command of the Russian language?

From TFA: “But the Russians are more likely to burn your house down,”

That seems like a gross over-generalization, but within the context and logic of TFA it "IS" necessary to mention.

If you don't like a magazine's writings, you can buy the publisher and post writing policies you prefer, or read a different newspaper/ magazine/ program/ website/ blog.

Engineer shoves Linux peg through Sega 32X-shaped hole

> PS/2 ...keyboard to transmit data ......interaction is limited to the TTL UART pins, which, considering the feat of getting Linux booting at all, is fair enough.

PS/2 too new. IIRC, the IBM PC/XT keyboard WAS a TTL hack. Maybe on a UART, memory fades. I'm not saying it will be easy, and finding a clean Hardware Manual for the IBM may be the first hurdle.

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

Re: Losing the H in HTTP.

>...when MS thought using port 80 for the MS SQL widget was a clever idea. Was NIMDA the resulting virus?

NIMDA was one of the things which exploited Windows' folder traversal bug. Throw enough slashes (or back slashes, IIS didn't care?) and you could navigate anywhere on the server, far outside the intended HTTP folders. I changed server software that week.

[theReg] Ten years on from Nimda: Worm author still at large

https://www.theregister.com/security/2011/09/17/ten-years-on-from-nimda-worm-author-still-at-large/499329

[SANS] The Nimda Worm: An Overview

https://www.sans.org/white-papers/95

Slothful summer app lets you scroll simply by tilting your head

> move up and down a document without taking his hands off the keyboard

Arrow keys?

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

> ...coming from a parent company that got its start distributing OSes by floppy discs.

That's one way to look at it.

Another is to note Mr Gates' early stand on piracy, focusing on ROM media (all those pre-PC game machines) and linking IBM-DOS licenses to sales of BASIC in ROM. The first WinNT that I got, seemed like "13 diskettes was enough for anybody". (My next flop-based O/S was a Linux on 23 three-inch diskettes, but there was no better way at the time....)

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

Re: PC LOAD LETTER

> PC LOAD LETTER WTF DOES THAT MEAN??

It even has a wiki page:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

Re: "There are Open and Save As dialogs. Font selection. Even printing"

> What's wrong with Courier?

Too fancy.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: "Shipping Damage"

> no idea what happened

Kicked/slid off the truck. Gives a 90deg rotation and crushed end. A friend worked for a shipping company.

Re: i486

You can put a V-20 in backward and live.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: CYA

> AAA Battery Installation Service.

Less so today, but usta be when you looked in a Telephone Book there were a LOT of "AA Bail Bonds", "AAA Termite Fumigators", and "AAAA Towing", to get to the top of their respective section or alpha ordering.

Microsoft accidentally kills epic Outlook email threads

> forcing users to think about what they actually need to include is no bad thing

"Think"??? Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V is low-thought.

Tensordyne makes a big bet on log math to beat Nvidia

TFA: "In conventional computing, addition is cheap, and multiplication is expensive. Logarithms flip this on its head."

Not new news. The oldest folk here did it with sticks. Every real engineer had a LogLogDeciTrig on his belt. I keep a 10-inch Acu-Design by the PC. From the Wiki: "Logarithms were introduced by John Napier in 1614 as a means of simplifying calculations. They were rapidly adopted by navigators, scientists, engineers, surveyors, and others to perform high-accuracy computations more easily."

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

>....would end up owning a tablet it couldn’t use, for just $60.

Happened to me last week. There is doubt about my blood pressure. I ordered one of the higher-price better-reviewed models, like $80. It was worse than cheaper ones! How did they have so many good reviews?? I posted an honest review except I gave it three stars instead of the <1 it deserved. The seller sent a *POSTCARD* offering $20 gift card to take down my review. I did, they didn't, they said there was a problem with gift cards. I'd say the name except I think they will change name to avoid the shame.

AI and brain-computer interface allow speechless ALS patient to work a full-time job

> It's the US.

Obviously. In this UK-roots publication. Eyebrows raised.

Lou Gehrig is a minor hero in baseball. His farewell speech reverberates through the ages. In US (maybe Canada?) culture. In the UK it is MND and ALS (closely related, laymen needn't care).

Linux Lite 8.0 sheds Chrome, slims down, and finds its name fits better than ever

Re: Hamburgers killed the WIMPy bar

>"Hamburgers killed the WIMPy bar" (Sad but true, and all the old-time "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" authors...)

Wimpy's Bar is still in business. Just up the road here a piece. US Highway Route 1, Hancock, ME

https://www.ruthandwimpys.com --- https://www.ruthandwimpys.com/menu

Wimpy himself has stepped back from the grill but his staff has his knack.

"Meet Wilbur, our 11-foot lobster The 11-foot fiberglass monster ...Wilbur has been featured in many publications."

Excellent hamburgers, and of course lobster.

I bought a copy of Apple's UI guide and am astonished that it has gone out of print.

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

Re: A dozen tubes of KY lube

> seals that need a little motion lotion

I use that on the O-rings in my water filter housing. (Carefully... some rings with some lubes cause undesired swelling...)

> What’s the dodgiest item you’ve ever...

Not 'expensed' but certainly fruity......

At the end of the school year, coworker J-- brought in a watermelon. And left it in a storage closet. All summer. A particularly hot summer. And the summer they had to shut down the coolers for repair. People came back in the fall. There was a smell. There were fat flies.

Steam Deck prices go through the roof as Valve blames component shortages

What, again?

> Dell COO Jeff Clarke called the situation "unprecedented."

Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell remembers many previous-RAM crunch precedents.

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

Re: running on two 360 kB floppy drives

> The original IBM PC had two full-height floppy drives, but I don't remember....

Nominally there was a zero floppies option. Booting from cassette tape was fairly routine in games-world, cuz hundreds of bucks cheaper than even single flop.

A possibility not widely known is that a 5150 PC would boot from keyboard. Well from something to stuff bytes in the keyboard port. Say a ROM and a counter. This was used on the assembly line to run tests. (Yes ROM BIOS POST but ROM in these machines was tiny, 16K or less.) And of course it would fall-thru to ROM BASIC.

On PC -or- XT:

Switch block 1, near center of board:

Switch 1

off = Boot from floppy

ON = Don't boot from floppy (goes to Cassette BASIC in ROM)

Switch 7,8

ON,ON = 1 floppy drive

off,ON = 2 flops

ON,off = 3 flops

off,off = 4 flops

No, I do not remember how to jumper for zero flops. I suspect you jumpered for one and ignored the error.

Fits on 360K? I had DOS, an editor (NOT EDLIN!), a hypertext signboard and details of a semester's worth of events on one flop and it was not even tight.

Company CEO flooded file share with smut, called for help after he deleted it

At a university, it was policy to not question or censor internet use. But professors filling-up their laptop with images outside their reasonable research field were deemed to have misused university equipment. 25+ years ago one professor I will call Prof flew to other universities to present papers. Just before such a trip he panicked b/c his presentation wouldn't work, Disk Full. He brought the laptop to me. Some "interesting" folder and image file names, hmmmm. As long as Prof could do his academic work (what the machine was bought for), OK; but it was fubar just before a major international academic conference. Then I looked to see if the filenames were true to their contents. If anything the names were understated, Prof had a shorthand naming scheme. While the images were legal here, in other places they would be scandalous. And I did not want to see our university's name (or Prof's name, or mine!) in headlines "SMUT confiscated at airport". I fixed the immediate problem by noting many duplicate files and deduping. But I also reported the collection to department head. Prof left the next year (and took the dirty laptop with him). Which was notable b/c he had full Tenure (yes, this was a while ago) and could only be fired for "moral turpitude". Which would reflect on the university too. I'm glad I was not in those meetings.

Feds unwittingly leak pilots' pre-crash conversation

Spectrogram or FFT is not even essential. 50 years ago I knew people who could watch a simple oscilloscope of speech and get some of the words and most of the meaning just from raw waves.Takes practice but is no more miraculous than your ear getting something out of raw sound. Somebody in the NTSC knows this; I guess not the press liaison.

No captain, my captain: Navantia floats crewless warship

> we were puzzled by the apparent lack of funnels for engine exhaust

Diesel exhausts for quite large powers can be slim and inconspicuous. Near me they run the CAT high-speed ferry and I don't see smoke or stacks on the current version except little blips of black as the engines spool-up. Up to a point, Diesels hardly smoke. (Past that point they make the glorious black clouds of a Texas truck, but that's bad economics.)

Microsoft remembers that taskbars used to move

> Microsoft had all this in earlier versions of Windows, and it's taken half a decade

I have Windows XP, 2002, installed on upstairs netbook. 2012 hardware. So verified: 8GB PATA SSD has 5GB used, MovieMaker etc and a light dose of porn installed.1GB RAM never full. Easily sets taskbar to top bottom left right. So this functionality was there 25 years ago.

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

Re: Time to give Windows

> "get by quite handsomely with 200MB disk space"

My first HDD was 30Meg cuz the price was not that much more than a 20Meg, the PC industry default of the day. I know this one was infested with Windows late in life. On top of a heap of MS-DOS programs.

My second HD was 13 Meg full height (3.5") pre-owned.

Grad-to-be turns graduation cap into Rust-powered light show

I teched commencement ceremonies for 30 years, often 3 or 4 each year. Has he tried this in BRIGHT light? We used to get the stage really bright, for drama, and cuz in those days cameras liked light. Parents' cameras (who really pays for many degrees) and sometimes video camera for overflow crowd in another room.

DRAM drought to dog AMD's chips this year

Re: Prediction

> nobody predicted they will get caught short in memory department.

Nobody and no AI predicted this.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

I have seen far worse. As a 20 year update it is quite mild.

I am strictly 1920 1080 monitor and windows at 60%-80% of monitor real estate. More "no surprise" than "gee golly kewl!

I find the same headline in all three columns. Item-pick routine needs more random salt.

The top-bar text-menu is wider than the red top-bar or my screen.

https://i.postimg.cc/5Xz4HDNZ/IBMdedtab.gif

Loud, power hungry – opposition grows to datacenters as Maine passes bit barn ban

Re: Maine has had Data Center Proposals

> Many people in Maine are opposed to them because the cost of our electricity here is some of the highest in the nation.

Downeaster too. 15 years ago it wasn't so bad. Recent years, arggh! A marginal operator pays young men to go door-to-door for sign-ups to 'discount electricity'. 5 years ago I laughed them off my land. This year it sounds better (probably still a sucker play).

Most folks are opposed (also to the unrelated but similar project to pipe Quebec electricity to Boston). However Governor Janet is hesitant to ban megadata cuz "jobs". After the initial building and server setting, what jobs? She may be confused with other projects where high equipment costs "imply" high local labor costs (payrolls). But I'm sure the servers will be remotely managed. Maybe one/two $15/hr 'guards'? I like Janet, but if she loses her job, a gal has to think about retirement funding.

Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user

Re: Age-old problem

> ...did not check that the 'username' field ....actually contained anything!

Another modem pool, shortly before the spread of AOL diskettes (so dial-up still slightly precious). Floyd had a problem in email so I asked him to log in. He typed his username normally, then got past the password prompt much too quick. He had discovered that a blank password worked fine. And had been that way for years!

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

Better?

> Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better.

Well, not much. I didn't Mac for over a decade, and when I came back to Mac it hadn't changed much. Windows, OTOH, from W98 through the set-up slog of W11, got suckier every edition and most updates.

Microsoft tells crusty old kernel drivers to get with the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program

Re: Detection tools?

> detect and identify such drivers

Task Manager?

Taskman

Processes

RightClick on a process

Properties

Digital Signatures

{example} Ultraedit 22 is signed IDM Computer... Nov 2015 --- countersigned Starfield Services (eaten by Amazon 2016}

{example} Thunderbird signed Mozilla Corporation Dec 24 --- countersign DigiCert Timestamp 2024

This is in Win7 and yes it gets VERY tedious.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

> I had to read that title 3 times

I had to buy it. Is good read.

BOFH: Are you ready to raise our expense account limits now?

Re: #1974Cortina$$

> "...rebranded quicker than stolen horses."

I'm stealing that one. But out here in the sticks, the power company and the telephone company have been re-branding faster than IT companies.

> Using a coveted old car ....I may have some accompanying complementary domain names,...

I had the domain "YellowCougar.com" for a while. Variant are now very common.

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

Re: Is it time to ditch FireFox?

> slowly) when I use Google Street View for too long (2secs to several minutes, it varies).

Yes, G-Street really thrashes some kinda cache or history log. However I have spent long times moving in Street in FF on that old Win7 machine. About once a month it bogs. I have wondered if my constant 'movement' is thrashing the database, or if Google Maps is just overloaded, but who can know?

Re: I don't see that behavior at all

> I don't see that behavior at all

Me too. This Win7 PC with 8GB RAM has uptime of 178 days as of tonight.(*) Yes, I close FF almost every day because: why not? FF has bookmarks. And FF has memory leaks older than my dog. Shutting down overnite keeps total RAM in use below 8GB, at the moment below 5GB. This isn't hand-desk-checked assembly code, but years of hasty hacks. And who wants every slop-script-writer on the WWW chewing on your memory? The Web looks speedy and stable to me. uBlock Origin helps.

(*) Not in the class of Novell Netware 3.11, but shows Windows can run for more than 30 or 90 days.

Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life

> are Dells still being sold in that awful silver finish that rubs off in no time?

The laptop keyboard, if you have fingernails, rubs-off in months. We just retired a Dell cuz the keys were blankish, and the new one has the SAME weakness.

FWIW, *some* Dell desktop keyboards last and last-- this old one I am typing on (b/c a new and trendy and pricey 'mechanical' KB was skipping some keystoke and adding others) the serial number has rubbed off but the keytops are flawless.

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.

> At least "Learning(s) as a noun does have some historical usage.

>> Learning is an adjective.

Dictionaries (US and UK) say Noun.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/learning

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/learning

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

In the British Navy (as in many others in the old days), insubordination was a flogging offense.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Re: it happens within companies too

> X-ray to make sure the rifle-shaped thing was... errr... a weapon?

I fooled them. On X-ray it looked like a shortened shotgun. I had to unpack the bag to show tubular wind-chimes.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

I first heard of tri-state (in this sense) from my father in (IIRC) the late 1960s. He said G.E. had built one in the early 1960s. And when it got all working, it wasn't enough simpler or faster than binary. He also hinted that it was rumored that the Russians were working on trinary; if the Russkies thought it worth study, then the US "had" to get into it. But by the late 1960s, IBM had sucked all the big profit out of computers, so interest waned.