* Posts by bob, mon!

196 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2007

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Amazon reveals $50 Android-ish Fire tablet it will axe in two years

bob, mon!
Linux

Re: An honest question

<uninformed-opinion>I have an older Kindle Fire that was used almost exclusively for reading. It's very good for that, but my Kindle is even better (for books that don't use color/colour).

If you expect your PDF's to include color (ah, t'hell wit'it) then I expect a larger Fire would be great; in fact I might think about doing that myself... except I don't read many PDF's. Or if you just need a larger format than the Kindles offer.

</uninformed-opinion>

MYSTERIES of remote ICE WORLD PLUTO: New pics BAMBOOZLE boffins

bob, mon!

re: Who would have thought 30-40-50 years ago ...

30-40-50 years ago we dared to dream that we'd be there in person by now. Wahhhhhh.....

Much more Moore's Law, as boffins assemble atom-level transistor

bob, mon!

"what we have on the picture is not actually smaller than 10nm."

Perhaps not, but 10nm is the gate width (feature size) in 10nm technology. You've got the entire transistor in that picture.

Cool-headed boffins overcome sticky issue: Graphene-based film could turn heat down

bob, mon!

W/mK?

Watts/milli-Kelvin? That's quite a thermal conductivity.

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

bob, mon!

re: Yinz?? Is that a hyper-regional dialect like youz or yoos?

An Appalachian variation. Also spelt/pronounced "yoo-uns".

bob, mon!
Joke

Re: "...mockery..."

Pfft pfft. I can drive two days in Philadelphia and still be in Philadelphia. Friggin' traffic jams...

Glass door to the ancient past FOUND ON MARS

bob, mon!
FAIL

Love thatfirst paragraph.

"Rock-boffins have used data from satellites to scope out impact-crater glass on Mars for a glimpse into its past, based on the theory that glass formed during hypervelocity happenings can encapsulate and preserve earthly bio-signatures."

At first I thought they were claiming that glass on Mars preserved Earthly biosignatures. Say wha'???

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

bob, mon!
Black Helicopters

The Earth WAS created 4000 years ago!

But it's running on seriously overclocked hardware, so it's performed 4.5 billion years' worth of evolution in those 4000 years.

Ask Neo!

Wi-Fi was MEANT to be this way: Antennas and standards, 802.11 style

bob, mon!

Re: My favorite joke on this subject is AT&T

What's your objection to double-NAT? Just asking.

Microsoft celebrates 25 years' SOLITARY SELF-PLEASURE with GROUP SESSION

bob, mon!
Trollface

@Martin Summers

It's a SUBTLE sadistic redundancy scheme.

Attack of the possibly-Nazi clone parakeet invaders

bob, mon!
Coat

Re: I saw plenty of those

Since they have wings for forelimbs, it can't be *armed* theft...

DEEPENING MYSTERY of BRIGHT LIGHTS on dwarf world Ceres

bob, mon!
Black Helicopters

Pah.

Those're just places where the camouflaging dust and debris have worn away over time, letting the shiny hull show through.

George Lucas was wrong about the Death Star's albedo.

You’ll be the coolest guy in IT if you ain't got your ID

bob, mon!

Forgetting one's key...

...is something many people do at one time in their lives. First happened to me when I was seven.

The next time seems much less common.

Vultures victorious in virtual vote vis-à-vis virtualization views!

bob, mon!
Thumb Up

Well, VA-VA-VOOM!

HAPPY 20th Birthday MICROSOFT BOB

bob, mon!
Unhappy

Sadly this image is missing Comic Sans!

I haven't yet tried to install it, dunno if I will... but this seems a most ironic omission.

Google deal means game over for mobile payments firm Softcard

bob, mon!

Marketing deal?

The way I read it is that they really bought access to T-Mobile/ATT/Verizon customers who were previously locked out of Google Wallet in favor of Softcard. You could say the phone companies were being anti-competitive themselves.

Lenovo to customers: We only just found out about this Superfish vuln – remove it NOW

bob, mon!

lenovo and market pressure

I'll consider replacing my current workstation-grade laptop with a Lenovo - IF they clean up their act, and keep the crapware off and the build quality up. The commercial-grade thinkpads have been sinking, but are still pretty good. And I'll do a fresh OS install anyway.

Sadly, I don't believe that *any* of the vendors are lily-white in this market. If one of them gets burned enough to clean up their act, that'll have to be good enough when it comes to the next sale.

US looks at plan to hand over world's DNS – and screams blue murder

bob, mon!

What is the NTIA?

That acronym's expansion seems to have disappeared into the editing....

Never mind those touch apps, full Office 2016 is coming this year

bob, mon!
FAIL

Re: All I want to know is...

> Press ALT: see ribbons overlaid with the available short cuts. As you enter them more specific ones appear.

You ignored the point that the OP can't see. He is not "sighted" and needs "Accessibilty" support that the Ribbon isn't giving him.

Windows 10: The Microsoft rule-o-three holds, THIS time it's looking DECENT

bob, mon!
Meh

Will there be a real professional/enterprise version???

I think there's a reason MS introduced the playsumer version of Win10 first - those rental fees are where they're looking for most of their revenue. Unless they do something truly OUTSTANDING for the pro/enterprise market, companies are going to hold onto Win7 until it goes end-of-life anyway - because there's no business case for replacing something that's working well, and testing/verifying a new OS with current business procedures is a pain to be put off until necessary.

As for doing something truly outstanding, their track record at that can be seen in the evolution of MS Office (okay, I'm used to the ribbon now, but it still seems pointless to me). I have my own copy of Office 2010, work "had to" move on to Office 2013, so I can see its inferiority on a daily basis.

<where's the "crusty curmedgeon" icon?>

Wizard of Oz OFFICIALLY 'most significant movie' EVER, says PNAS

bob, mon!
Trollface

Re: Call a Doctor

Are you sure Doctor Who doesn't count as a reference to Oz?

Spavined RadioShack to file for bankruptcy next month – report

bob, mon!
WTF?

me stoopid murrican

No idea what "turps", "music tips", or "paired vice slip" mean....

Are you running a Telnet server on Windows? Oh thank God. THANK GOD

bob, mon!

Re: Please help a penguin

It probably allows some sort of attack without needing to know an account/password. Maybe a DOS (heh) or ability to install some malware.

2015 will be the Year of Linux on the, no wait, of the dot-word domain EXPLOSION

bob, mon!
Facepalm

Re: Cry me a river

Many users still think a URL starts with "www" as well.

The Wi-Fi Alliance wants to get you off Wi-Fi

bob, mon!
Unhappy

So, Invasive Ad-Hoc Mode

This sounds like a standard for malware.

Huge FOUR-winged dino SPREAD LEGS to KILL – scientists

bob, mon!

Re: Can't find it.

The graphic implies a size, showing the wee beastie overlaid on a human torso.

Google sues Mississippi Attorney General 'for doing MPAA's dirty work'

bob, mon!

Re: Only in America

From my vantage point on this side of the pond, I thought America was run by the rich for the rich? The poor are just there to make the rich richer.

Got it in one.

Is there ANOTHER UNIVERSE headed BACKWARDS IN TIME?

bob, mon!
Alien

Re: 24 the ultimate answer

> And there's me thinking that God's computer was, and is, a custom-built IBM mainframe.

A Turing machine is God's computer. And here's us, going back and forth on the tape, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth...

You don't have to be a genius to tap into Albert Einstein's BRAIN

bob, mon!
Boffin

"Digitised" in a manner of speaking

Sadly, the digitization appears to consist of digital images of documents. I was hoping for searchable text documents, but no joy.

Icon goes with Einstein's material, not my comment.

Kill off SSL 3.0 NOW: HTTPS savaged by vicious POODLE

bob, mon!
FAIL

Re: easy to perform

> Easy to fix:

> ...

> - remove javascript from existence

OH yeah! Easy-peasy!

White LED lies: It's great, but Nobel physics prize-winning great?

bob, mon!
Trollface

Re: @ scatter and @ledswinger

Dear disingenuous toad and insufferable cur,

Please trim back all the boring techinical stuff. It distracts from the namecalling.

You capitalist lackeys.

SHELLSHOCKED: Fortune 1000 outfits Bash out batches of patches

bob, mon!
WTF?

Re: Meanwhile, on a web server that was already patched twice

Why the downvotes? It looks to me like Jim 59 is just reporting that someone attempted the crack on his webserver. He says the machine's already patched....

Hackers thrash Bash Shellshock bug: World races to cover hole

bob, mon!

Re: How to check?

That's what my Kubuntu Bash shell gave after I upgraded it (in the last couple of days), so you should be safe. If you have automatic updates turned on, then you got the patch fairly quickly.

Oi! You noisy servers! Talk among yourselves and stop bothering that poor router!

bob, mon!

Re: Two observations

TCP really doesn't enter into it - they're only specifying UDP with IP.

I get the impression that this technology isn't intended for Internet-facing environments, but rather for backend stuff.

Hacker publishes tech support phone scammer slammer

bob, mon!

Re: Air Force reverse engineer?

A couple of years ago the Air Force hosted a "Reverse Engineering Workshop". I suspect the author meant "reverse engineer".

I’ve never paid for it in my life... we are talking Wi-Fi, right?

bob, mon!

must be a Europe thing?

Business-oriented hotels in the U.S. are a lot better about wi-fi than this. Airports aren't, though.

Is it an iPad? Is it a MacBook Air? No, it's a Surface Pro 3

bob, mon!
Trollface

Re: The real question is...

Will the market run to it, or away from it?

Detroit losing millions because it buys cheap batteries – report

bob, mon!

Re: But it said, "Heavy Duty"

"Dunno, over here most parking meters use solar and probably a rechargeable battery... works pretty well..."

How well do they work in cloudy/snowy/sooty environments? Detroit's not the sunniest place in the world.

Yes, we know Active Directory cloud sync is a MESS, says Microsoft

bob, mon!
Unhappy

> "Now, anybody who thinks that is a good idea REALLY needs to LEAVE the industry."

I won't be surprised if my school goes this route. We are a Windows shop by fiat --- the fiat comes from political administrators who a) aren't on-premises, and b) don't use and aren't impacted by the systems that they impose on their subordinate schools.

I'd LOVE it if they'd leave the industry, but they're not in the industry and don't care about it.

Boffins untangle why your software builds fail

bob, mon!
Meh

When more is less

In my experience a lot of Windows packages have less of a problem with missing dependencies simply because they expect their dependency to be missing, and include it (or a link to it) in the installer as well. Wireshark bringing in the winpcap package, things that tell me to install .NET version foobar, stuff like that.

Semiconductor boffin: 3D NAND don't need NO STEENKIN' TSVs

bob, mon!

silicon - substrate?

Could TSV be interpreted as Through-Substrate Via? Or am I misunderstanding them?

DOCX disaster recovery: How I rescued my wife from XM-HELL

bob, mon!
Holmes

Re: sledgehammer meet nut

For most of the word content I see, notepad would've been good enough.

Peak thumb drive is coming in 2016

bob, mon!

An exabyte here, and exabyte there...

...pretty soon you're talking real storage.

Google Maps can now tell cyclists how HIGH they will get

bob, mon!
Trollface

People in Colorado don't need this to find out how high they're getting.

They need blood tests.

Charity: Ta for the free Win 8.1, Microsoft – we'll use it to install Win 7

bob, mon!

Re: Two weeks

Just a guess - the company secretary barely interacts with the OS at all, she does most everything through Office. If she actually maintains a meaningful directory structure for her files, she's above average (regardless of age)...

USB reversible cables could become standard sooner than you think

bob, mon!
FAIL

Re: Doh..

I have at least one cable that has the USB symbol on the underside instead of the topside, and a number of cables that don't have the symbol on either side. I've taken to marking the cables with a silver-colored (exCUSE ME, "coloured") permanent marker to identify "up".

Still doesn't help when the port itself was installed upside down.

Why won't you DIE? IBM's S/360 and its legacy at 50

bob, mon!
Devil

Re: No mention of microcode?

I first met microcode by writing a routine to do addition for my company's s/370. Oddly, they wouldn't let me try it out on the production system :-)

bob, mon!
Headmaster

Also, it was RAMAC, not REMAC

As for COBOL --- Grace Hopper retired three times, and was brought back by the Navy twice, before they finally let her go as a Rear Admiral.

FCC doubles 5GHz spectrum in prep for one-gigabit Wi-Fi

bob, mon!
FAIL

Freeing up 195MHz in the 5MHz band? I don't think so.

So I can use anything from 97.5MHz down to -97.5MHz? That negative lower bound should prove interesting....

USB cuts the cord, again, with WiGig-derived wireless spec

bob, mon!
Devil

"(assuming the latter still exist after 2015)"

They won't --- all the currently existing PC kit will turn into pumpkins at midnight, 2015-12-31, per the fine print in the Windows EULA.

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