* Posts by Mage

9262 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

So I’ve scripted a life-saving routine. Pah. What really matters is the icon I give it

Mage Silver badge

Re: who was world-famous throughout France

Not to be confused with USA Word Series sports.

But I've heard of Halliday, though not heard him sing. I've heard other French singers.

Aside:

Baseball was invented in England, in 18th English literature and Rounders is later. The Americans pretended they invented it.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

you wouldn't believe me if I just described it in words

Oh I would, especially from you Dabbsey.

As far as tribute statues go it's not too bad.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Mage Silver badge

Re: Back to their old tricks

t makes more sense to run a VM with Windows (when you need windows) on LOCAL HW running Linux natively.

Windows and especially Azure is worst at Security.

1998 and MS lies about Linux.

It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Bonkers

The problem isn't passwords, but bad password management.

You walk in with a plan. You leave with GPS-tracking Nordic hiking poles. The same old story, eh?

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: gripping very small moles

Curiously either Aldi or Lidl was selling Mole Traps in the UK. Sensibly not in the Irish stores.

But oddly they were in the Northern Ireland stores. Even Unionist gardens don't have moles, at least not the furry kind underground. Other moles AKA grasses can end up underground.

Mage Silver badge

Re: recommend Witch? magazine

In Norn Iron Which and Witch have different pronunciation.

It's always the 5mm Hex key that goes missing.

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Corona beer, it seems there are those who link it with the Plague

I heard the local murder of rooks are urging the Corvids Association to sue the WHO.

Corvids Press may not be amused. https://www.corvidspress.com/fiction/otherworld-series/

WhatsApp to offer end-to-end encrypted backups in iCloud, Google Drive with user-managed keys

Mage Silver badge
Big Brother

But

Doesn't Facebook own WhatsApp?

No thanks.

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Not absolutely no means.

There was a big pub demolished by a developer illegally. The court made them rebuild exactly as it had been. Which would certainly have been horrendously expensive compared to any modern build. A sort real life "Batteries Not Included" without magic aliens.

Of course a favourite ploy is to secretly damage the roof, have inadequate security on the empty property and a few years later a Council will condemn the listed building.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

The folly!

Always have an undo procedure, a disclaimer.

A ctrl-Z

Also why can ONE person "click". Shouldn't it need the clicks of two confirming witnesses. Sounds like the original paper method wasn't understood by the software implementers.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Tunbridge Wells?

Any angry letters yet?

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: COVID challenges?

Sainsburys

Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Why not just ask Boeing?

Depends on the batteries, flight sensors and software deployed?

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Disgrace

"Winter is coming"

Patents, trademarks and copyright enforcement is out of control.

And the USPTO makes it worse with their approach to issuing Patents, Design Patents (=UK Registered Designs) and Trademarks.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: **allowed** to choose.

No, it's just a particular ancient IDE method. IDE/PATA will still work.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

Mage Silver badge

use a microsoft account

Been true for home editions on the GUI for ages. But open a console and the net user command can create local users.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/cc771865(v=ws.11)

Variations of it since NT 3.1 and I wrote a VB program in late 1990s for NT 4.0 to add hundreds of users from a csv file using "net use"

Totally abusive behaviour to remove GUI elements from settings and sell the crippled home editions. There should be only workstation and server editions. Absolute greed.

Mage Silver badge

Re: And W11 has lost the the ability to move task bar to SIDE of screen

I had taskbar & start on the side of the screen on XP.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Basically all UI changes could be rolled back..

I used NT 3.51 with the Explorer Shell Preview. That's what every NT since should have been like. A win9x desktop, no graphics or print drivers in the Kernel.

Also install of programs written by people clueless about NT security should have been blocked. Programs that needed you to be logged in as an Administrator. Part of the reason was because Win9x was really no more a real 32 bit OS than Windows for Workgroups with Win32s, 32 bit MS TCP/IP (option on both) and all the 32 bit disc & media stuff wrapped up. So no named pipes on Win9x or Wim3.1. No local security or concept of Administrator on Win9x or Win3.x, the log on was only for network resources.

Win9x essentially broke NT 4.0, Win2K and XP installations resulting in the later UAC kludge by making it hard for IT to setup NT users without Admin rights for programs like accounts and payroll.

Me should never have happened. A broken version of Win98 SE

Win9x should never ever have been sold to businesses. It was designed with porting DOS games in mind, so originally no OpenGL. It NEVER had any security features. It ran DOS and Win16 programs natively (NT used NTVDM and Win16-32 ApI Thunk) so killed the Pentium Pro.

The marketing, install base and win applications with no security programming crippled NT. They blocked release of NT4.0 USB drivers to boost NT 5.0 = Win2000 sales.

XP was really the finished version of Win2K (NT 5.1).

Then they totally lost the plot with Vista design. It got so big and complex that the "unseen" design improvements got scrapped in favour of Eye Candy. But at least you could turn off junk on Win2K, XP, 2003 and Vista and have a Win9x/Win2K GUI.

Since FOREVER (NT 3.1 to Win10) they by default have too many services running instead of install time silent admin options and a suitable wizard for manual install.

Also too easy to end up with USA keyboard, Letter Size paper etc. No suggestion based on Timezone?

So the Win9x success sowed the seeds of NT destruction and "artistic" people and marketing and stupid arrogance (Ribbon, menu item hiding, unified GUI for phones, tablets and Desktop) ignored the usability research from 70s to 90s, though there wasn't that much GUI change from 1970s Xerox, 1980s GEM, Amiga, Risc-OS, Apple Lisa and Mac to the Win9x.

Win10 is the worst GUI since 1993. Win 11 sounds worse. But Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Android are all going backwards on GUI.

WinCE was stupid in the opposite direction, a Win9x GUI on as little as 320 x 200 in many cases.

Even Win7 had some really stupid changes in Explorer, even though it should have been free to Vista Users as it's really a Vista SP.

Win8 was only suitable as WinCE replacement for phones (and tablets with no keyboard or mouse).

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Office Ribbon

Ribbon so terrible I found a Classic Menu plugin for Office 2007 (works on Excel and Office at least. There are far better tools than Access and Powerpoint). Makes it about as usuable as Office XP or Office 2003. Still available recently.

Mage Silver badge
FAIL

research showed people. . .

Either MS ignores usability research, or asks the wrong people or has rotten researchers. Going backwards since about 2002.

When everyone else is on vacation, it's time to whip out the tiny screwdrivers

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Why does Dune dress women?

Both UI's are poor. Also why is the model plugged into the mains?

Use one of those big trays vans have loaves of bread on, or else a smaller traditional 1960s style tray with walls. And marge tubs or small jars with lids. Not an open compartmentalised tray, which invariably gets a knock from the apparatus and sprays the room.

A store UI designer needing opinions from random strangers is inept. But almost all Web, mobile app & OS, desktop OS & programs and physical UI are now terrible. Both arrow buttons and a rotary encoder are bad choices for volume controls, except on tablet and phone edges. Touch buttons and buttons without clear labels are fail on TVs and monitors as is having to access an onscreen menu to select channel, volume, bright or input. Car radios are now terrible.

Voice control is good if you have no limbs, but not suitable in a noisy enviromment or with multiple people.

Oh the humanity: McDonald's out of milkshakes across Great Britain

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Why would <company> need <item>

What is proportion of milk in a McD shake compared to homemade? And how much potato or other non-dairy bulking additives?

Razer ponders how to fix installer that grants admin powers if you plug in a mouse

Mage Silver badge
Windows

Re: absolutely primarily a Microsoft issue

Since USB was added to a later release of Win 95 and then Win 2K. NT 4.0 didn't officially have USB and neither did initial Win95 release. HID is a problem.

I've no idea what the Mac OS and Linux do when a USB HID device is plugged in. This might be a problem for ANYTHING.

Mage Silver badge
Linux

Re: Razer went full evil back in about 2013 or so

I buy a Trust mouse (Dutch brand, but made in China) for about €10 in the local shops. When the left click wears out you can't be waiting for the online order. I don't go to a local computer (or related) shop.

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: Windows at fault?

The underlying issue since USB was added to Win95 AFTER initial release is USB HID.

Some years ago someone added a CPU and Flash to a stock mouse and proved plugging in a USB mouse could silently install a trojan.

Probably a €10 Trust brand USB mouse from a random local shop is safer than a gift delivered by post/courier.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

USB HID

Variations of this are well known.

HID devices silently install, or at most there is an alert USB Mouse/keyboard etc installed.

Security experts (and I) have been saying for YEARS that the design of USB-HID protocol (used for keyboards, mice, touch pads,. graphics tablets and maybe joysticks) is a disaster as it lets an evil mouse gift sent to Finance Director install stuff to capture everything. Hence a Lenovo min PC box recently has no USB. It has PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard.

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Mage Silver badge

Re: really strange languages

Maybe these are not strange but rare? I used QUBAL, then 15 years later translated CHILL to Z80 assembler and played with Occam.

Jupiter Ace with Forth has got to be the tiniest thing I used till JAL on the PIC family.

Mage Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: text version of Star Trek

Maybe EGA Trek for DOS works on DOSbox? It kept us amused though that's a later era.

Mage Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: RM 380Z

I hated repairing those. Or adding the wire so the parallel port IC 8th bit got to the connector so you could print graphics and extended ASCII on an Epson MX-80.

Terrible design. A metal "shoe box" with the bus along the top of the cards as a ribbon cable. It can't have saved much money compared with a proper but simple motherboard bus in the bottom of the case. Also why when the port I/O used an octal chip anyway did they only wire 7 bits to the parallel port?

Intel, Qualcomm win deal to design 7nm silicon for US defense agencies

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Seems a strange choice.

Intel seems to have lost Process mojo during 22nm to 10nm transition period. They bought Altera but have been failing at design (Cable modem chips and failure of Atom as an alternative to ARM for mobile). The debacle of the non-volatile alternative to Flash.

Qualcomm have bought in a lot of expertise and true in house designs are a narrow field. They prefer income from royalties where they double dip.

I'd have thought that some other US companies such as ADI, Xilinx and TI are better chip designers.

What exactly do they need 7nm for outside of memories, gpus, FPGAs and cpus? Also a custom military memory, gpu, FPGA or cpu is a failed idea. Only a few ASICs would be of value, perhaps prototyped with a Xilinx FPGA with an ARM core.

AI or satellite Image processing is better done with existing commodity HW and put effort into better SW.

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: Its not really AI, is it?

Indeed Machine Learning is a misnomer. Machines can't learn and AI today is a marketing term, nothing to do with AI as envisaged up to the early 1980s.

It's all human curated input (hopefully properly curated) stored in a specialist kind of distributed data-flow type database and then pattern matching. AI, Machine Learning and Neural Networks are all terms invented to make it sound cleverer and more accurate than it really is.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/22/in_brief_ai/

Such circumstantial evidence isn't good enough to put down a stray mongrel, and link includes idiot with total lack of understanding what unmoderated random people might do with a so called AI Images from Text generator. A bonkers idea.

AI medical diagnostics rely on human experts at the start curating a massive amount of data. The performance is exaggerated to get the data, really for ulterior motives (Google's medical subsidiary) or to sell a big system (IBM's system that didn't work and only shared a brand name with the Jeopardy winning system, which also wasn't actually AI, but a party trick more useful for Alexa, Siri etc, which are not AIs).

And if Medical AI did really work, who would be competent to "train" the systems in the next generation? A dead end solution.

UK's competition regulator fires red flare over Nvidia's $40bn Arm takeover deal

Mage Silver badge

Re: USA stops foreign ownership of companies

Murdoch became American to buy USA Media.

Marconi was forced out of what became RCA by the USA Government. RCA died either 1976 or 1986, I forget which, and Thomson bought the labels.

You often have to spend USA "aid" on USA Military gear and support.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Mage Silver badge
Holmes

MS Office Compatibility?

Which MS office and which application in it?

Also long standing bugs in MS Office

It's only an issue if you are sending documents back and forwards between people that use different versions. Also there is the issue of incorrect column or cell types on Excel and lack of use of Styles in Word and stupid VBA or macros.

See also https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/64_bit_microsoft_vba_bug/

It's not been a real issue for 10 years or more for most people.

UK's Newport Wafer Fab now under Chinese ownership

Mage Silver badge

Re: persuade the majority of those who voted

30 years of Media and Westminster lies and xenophobia.

Vote Leave's huge lies now admitted by Cummings.

Also a process that didn't meet any democratic standards after the mismanaged advisory Referendum. Ask the Swiss about Referendums.

It's not 5 years. It's 8 months and most of the damaged claimed to be pandemic is Brexit. No shortage of fruit pickers, mushroom harvesters, truck drivers in EU and even NI has no empty Shelves, due to Irish Truck drivers, local production and EU imports via Ireland. CF Holyhead with Larne.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: No one will remember.....the list is far too long......

Mullard was Dutch owned from 1928.

Ferranti & Plessey relied too much on UK gov funded stuff and abandoned consumer electronics in the 1950s.

Yes, Inmos was deliberately sold off by Thatcher.

Acorn computers were doomed because not IBMs, but they became ARM. Only recently bought up.

UK Consumer Electronics was dying in the 1960s, largely due to poor quality.

The UK Competition authority partially killed Ever Ready by blocking their take over of Mallory (later Duracell), but real damage was refusal to modernise and too late adoption of Alkaline. Asset stripped by Hanson Trust and sold eventually to USA Eveready (Energiser) by then themselves owned by a pet food company.

UK has NEVER had an Industrial strategy. The only money making strategy is to use City of London to funnel money to UK Overseas and Crown dependencies (IoM, Channel Is, Cayman, Bermuda, BVI), as offshore havens. That's why Brexit. The tighter EU laws implemented in 2019 and 2020 and adopted even by Switzerland were agreed in 2016. UK has refused to implement them for Overseas and Crown territories.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Mage Silver badge

Re: Random numbers

Probably less electricity than bitcoin mining. Stupid design.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Maybe Windows 3.1 was a sweet spot?

Daggerfall only needs DOSbox (nearly every OS) and the maker offers it as free download with DOSbox instructions. Needs rather less CPU etc than Oblivion or Morrowind.

Mage Silver badge
Pint

Re: Jasc's Paint Shop Pro v7.x

Last decent version. Corel bought it?

Daughter moved to The GIMP on Win7 as PSP7 wouldn't go.

I moved from XP -> Linux and then The Gimp. I have the old laptop & PSP7 on a VM for the odd native layered image I didn't Save As in Photoshop format for The GIMP, There is a PSP plug-in for the GIMP, but doesn't work for my PSP files.

Mage Silver badge

It was done right from the start

Rubbish.

No consideration at all for security.

No consideration for privacy. Either Website operator or infrastructure.

Stupidly scroll based instead of page based with scroll view as an option, see mobi, kf8, kfx, epub2 and epub3, all of which are HTML based.

Needed cookies because stateless.

Similarly, email was wrong from the start. Worse than telegrams and telex for knowing who a message was really from. In the old days you were supposed to provide proof of ID at the P.O. when sending.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

Mage Silver badge

Re: a brief period of time

I blinked and missed those.

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: leaving each end welded

Car batteries can do the welding spanner bit. Doesn't vapourise Sometimes the case shatters

Mage Silver badge

Stealing

Entire class room of PCs faulty.

Someone stole all the RAM.

Mage Silver badge

Re: the switch built in and self-detecting

No, there is no switch. It's simply a wider range SMPSU.

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: systematically check any new PSU

I also check old stuff bought off eBay or donated by friends. I've seen stuff that had the rotary plug type setting set to 200 or 210.

Some stuff is 220V only and very occasionally has underspec'ed mains transformers so needs a series resistor even for our 230 V.

Electricity (before Brexit) was harmonised across the EU to 220V. But actually they just gave everyone new tolerance limits and the UK had the biggest + limit as the UK nominal 240V can be 245 V.

Modern SMPSUs can work maybe 80V to 260V, though labelled 110V - 240V. They might even try to run at an even lower voltage. But if it's 500W the 2.1A at about 235V to 245V becomes maybe 5A during a brown-out. SMPSUs are a different problem to old AC/DC gear that half wave rectified the direct mains, or tube lamps with no PF correction cap to the Electricity Grid, as reducing the supply voltage a little increases the current load.

Safety googles.

THX Onyx: A do-it-all DAC for the travelling audiophile

Mage Silver badge
Coat

How long did a 78 play for?

Examples from the 1890s will still work. A diamond stylus for 78 and pitch control is recommended as a range of speeds where used then. So the answer is 130 years or a typically a bit less than 3 minutes per side.

300 Ohms headphones will work fine on any headphone socket labelled 8 Ohms to 100 Ohms.

Some vintage headsets are 600 Ohms. The level may be a bit lower.

Very vintage moving iron headphones are 1000 to 4000 Ohms. They will work too, though level may be low. What you can't do is plug 8 Ohm to 300 Ohm headphones into a connection meant for 1000 to 4000 Ohms and that might even be between a 45V to 250V HT and a valve anode.

This article reads like most HiFi Magazines since the late 1980s. Even a 48 KHz 16 bit DAC is good enough and better than bluetooth.

Disclaimer, I'm a retired electronics design engineer and programmer, I've also worked in the BBC and also installed studios as well has having done sound recording and learning the theory.

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

Mage Silver badge
Flame

No cylindrical beam

It's stupid and expensive compared to desert power generation. Big mirrors and steam might even beat photovoltalic.

Then make synthetic LPG with waste carbon.

Um, plot of Sahara?

The beam is a real issue. At best it's a cone with a huge spot on the ground. To avoid a massive dish in space you need maybe 100 Ghz to 400 GHz. Atmospheric adsorption is a problem. It's not scaleable to any sensibly small beam or big power. The power loss in generation of the microwaves is significant. A solar plant on the ground and big optical mirror in space is more sensible than this. This something for an SF story or a game like Sim City.

SF stories are NOT blueprints for future technology. Ursula Le Guin said they are entertainment, though some can have social comment or a warning.

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Mage Silver badge
Alert

It was never a law

It was an observation and in real terms probably dead nearly 20 years ago.

15nm is not a 9th of 45 nm process which is not really 4x a 90nm process (by area for same number of transistors or x9 devices or x4 devices per same size chip). They are now fudging it to mean smallest feature rather than typical size. Also in usability for spreadsheet, wordprocessor, email and a web page how much better is an i9 with win10 today vs 2.2 GHz P4 portable with 1600x1200 screen and XP in summer 2002?

But 1981 to 2001 saw massive increases every 6 months to a year. Even 1995 vs 2002 was a huge difference. I had computers since 1979 but no laptop till 1998. My next was in 2000 and massively outclassed by the 2002 model which I used till November 2016, though it had DVD drive, WiFi card, HDD, RAM and GPU card all updated over the 14 years.

Clock rates haven't just stalled due to cooling. Obvious computing is all portable. Not just laptops, but phones, ereaders and tablets. But also now lightbulbs, washing machines, routers, TV sets, BD players, Consoles, microwaves, toys, streaming sticks etc all have cpus.

There is no point in faster clocks and more chip power consumption, that is the x86 dead end. Even in the 1970s and 1980s it was clear that eventually there would be no point to faster clocks, and physical limits to clock speed and per transistor shrinking. Multiprocessing, wafer scale integration and transputers were discussed. By 2007 Samsung was layering ARM CPU, Flash and RAM in one package to save board area, reduce i/o pads and simplify PCB design. Not possible with x86. Intel tried downscaling back to a PIII style design with the Atom for netbooks and tablets. The performance compared to regular power hungry intel CPUs or ARM was abysmal.

There are also issues with yield as you increase the number of devices per chip and reliability decreasing geometry and increasing clock.

Europe mulls anonymous crypto-wallet ban, rules to make transfers more traceable

Mage Silver badge

Re: Inevitable

Always been the big issue for kidnapping, blackmail and now ransom-ware was getting paid. You can only do the trick of the trash can over the secret tunnel once. With GPS and spread spectrum bugs, tagged cash and surveillance the cash drop hasn't been viable for years.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Inevitable

And Crypto and Blockchain ONLY "solves" the issue of a bad government controlling a Fiat Currency. In every other respect it's worse:

1) Environmentally damaging

2) Unstable

3) No sensible control of supply, the "Mining" is the stupidest part.

4) Transactions don't scale.

5) Transactions are 1000s of times more costly in time and computers and energy than IBAN.

6) The only reason for Blockchain is to decentralise, have no control and enable a degree of anonymity. All naive and stupid design decisions.

7) It looks like a Pyramid scam

8) It is purely speculative in value.

9) Not actually a currency.

Most existing currencies are also digital.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Mage Silver badge

Free Satellite TV

It will have some free channels, no matter which satellite it's pointing at. It might need a new LNB (cheap). It's not impossible to point it at a different satellite, but time consuming without decent test gear. The Satellites are about 36,000 km away spaced around an imaginary line above the Equator.

A box with an HDMI out is about €45. I use one on the TV that has dual sat tuners because the Android TV is such a rubbish GUI for actual Terrestrial or Sat TV. It's designed for someone using a screen sitting at desk using Internet services and Apps.

I have 5 LNBs in an arc on a bar in front of a 1m dish for 28E, 23E, 19E, 13E and 9E approximately and a box that that takes four Quattro LNBs. I sacrifice one port on 23E (a 1/4 approximately) to have the 9E which only provides one band and polarisation.

I use it also to listen to TSF Jazz, here in Ireland. The magic box in the shed under the dish has 12 outlets (an earlier one had 16). I use little €6 FM transmitters intended for phones or mp3 players to car radios on 3 satellite boxes, powered by the USB port (the boxes have two and work a USB HDD fine for timed recording). So I have three extra FM channels derived from Satellite, though I've nearly stopped listening to BBC R4. The FM radios in house, workshop, phone etc get good stereo.

I set the boxes to only store the free TV & Radio at install. Cancelled Sky nearly 15 years ago. Wife watches free tennis on BBC and German Eurosport and uses timer on the €45 box to record on the SATA HDD, from a scrapped laptop put in a €8 USB case. Unlike the Sony TV it doesn't want to reformat and encrypt the disk.

About 2,500 free radio stations and about 1800 free TV. Both mostly either garbage, or in languages I don't know or both.