* Posts by Gene Cash

5697 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

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All these bad punners should be grounded.

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Re: and basically impossible to test for.

> My application of tests for obvious boundary conditions

"STOP BREAKING OUR CODE!"

"Um, that's what testing is **for**!"

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

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Re: .NET 4.0.30319

I use port 22 as a sacrificial chicken. Password authentication is completely disabled, so anything trying to log in that way can be instantly banned by Fail2Ban for a year or so.

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Re: I remember Travelex

Oddly, there's a station selling $7/gallon gas just north of the Orlando In'tl airport.

They were rather put out when I started taking pictures of the gas pump prices.

I seem to see a pattern.

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

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> anything other than a boneheaded decision

Actually, the change was to fix boneheaded design decisions in the original language, and Guido Van Rossum basically stated it as such. There wasn't a good way to do it w/o breaking backward compatibility, so as another poster said, they "grasped that nettle and moved forward"

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Re: More lazyness than anything

> fully integrated unicode support turned up a lot of latent user application bugs

Can I have a "oh fuck yeah" upvote button please?

However, the "EVERYTHING'S UNICODE" mindset does make it a lot more difficult to write out bytes to things like image files and embedded devices.

NASA's monster rocket inches towards testing while India plots return to the Moon

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Re: SLS....

> the SLS may never make 11 flights anyway

My money is it'll never fly 3 times. I'll be surprised if it flies twice.

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Re: We're still catching up to the NASA of the 1960s in many ways

>> first moment when the Empire Star Destroyer flew over the camera vantage point in the original Star Wars back in the day.

> "As impressive as the CGI in Star Wars." Not sure I'd take that as a compliment.

Pedantic bit... that moment was most definitely not CGI. It was filmed with a large model and some of the first computer-motion-controlled cameras.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

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Nokia 9000

My boss tried for the longest time (here in the US) to get someone to sell him a Nokia 9000. Nope. No such luck. He had to wait for real smartphones.

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Re: No Service

Ahhhh... the number of people I've caused to lose their shit when they proudly announce "I'm living off the grid!!!111oneoneone" and I reply "wot? like the Amish?"

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Re: It was a quiet Friday night and I wasn't on call,

> The Ops team had a list of names and numbers for the different application suites

That's the way it should work: the people responsible for the code are the ones that get bothered.

It's amazing how quickly the code gets fixed when that procedure is followed.

Today's budget for application improvements is brought to you by the letters "Y", "K" and the number "2"

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Windows

40 years...

I got my TRS-80 Model I on Christmas, 1979, which makes it just over 40 years ago.

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

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Re: Saved our bacon Y2K did.

> where if something shows up that "shouldn't exist", the reaction is to make reality match the paperwork, no matter how critical the equipment might actually be

You'd be looking for the "offog" and and Eric Frank Russell was looking for one in 1955:

https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133476/1439133476___3.htm

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

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Re: Back in the day...

> that could cause someone else some problems

IBM PS/2s could reconfig the keyboard with ANSI sequences.

This. in addition to the movable keycaps, was the cause of much hilarity in the university student lab.

How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?

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ObXKCD

https://xkcd.com/2241/

(Brussels sprouts have actually gotten pretty tasty)

Want to live long and prosper? Avoid pirated, malware-laden Star Wars free vid streams – and pay to watch instead

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Re: Kudos

That's absolutely hilarious. That site reminds me of ThinkGeek in the pre-2005 era.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

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Re: I already have an IoT standard

I made a useful IoT device, with a Wi-Fi-capable Arduino board and a high precision temperature sensor board from Sparkfun. It's housed in a Stevenson Screen I 3D-printed.

I have a cron job poll it every 5 minutes and stick the info into a sqlite3 database. A Python script using matplotlib makes pretty pictures. I already have an Apache instance running for other things.

However, the basic reason for its existence is to help me decide what to wear on the motorcycle to work. I got tired of squinting at shitty thermometers, and the nearest weather.gov sites are 15 miles away and only updated once an hour.

I was NOT going to pay $150 for an inaccurate "weather station" piece-of-shit from Acurite or Lacrosse. Those c*nts have captured the market here, and they suck.

So it's "genuinely useful to me" and serves my purpose.

Xbox Series X: Gee thanks, Microsoft! Just what we wanted for Xmas 2020 – a Gateway tower PC

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Mushroom

Re: What is interesting.

> lack of platform-exclusive content

F*ck it, as long as it's got something with the word "HALO" in it... I'm happy!

(Icon for anywhere Master Chief goes...)

US and China wave white flags, hit pause button on trade war

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The Democrats have completely played into Trump's big orange hands, and made total fools of themselves. They've jumped up and down and yelled, then come up with really weak charges.

You want to know how people like Trump get elected? Because the other party is, amazingly enough, even stupider. With the Democratic party infighting and general idiocy, I expect there will be no one to gather enough of the splintered votes to oppose him. :-(

These are the droids you're looking for: Softbank launches Japan cafe staffed by bots

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Works for me

I go to McDonald's solely because they have a *working* self-order screen. (as opposed to the useless broken shit at places like Wendy's)

Finally I can order without explaining it 4 times to someone that doesn't speak English as a first language and still getting it wrong 50% of the time. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a language barrier when I've got to get something to eat is not welcome... the language barrier is partly my fault as well, due to my rough Southern accent)

I certainly don't go there for the food, but they've got my business because of the technology.

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

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Re: And All Who Sail In Her

> The_Great_Nebraska_Sea

Damn it. That sounds like an excellent book, and I'll never be able to find a copy.

OpenBSD bugs, Microsoft's bad update, a new Nork hacking crew, and more

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They won't serve more than 4 years, I'll bet, with time off for good behavior and other things.

That's why US sentences are longer. Crims rarely spend half their sentence in jail.

Your duckface better be flawless: Huawei's Nova 6 mobe has a needlessly powerful selfie camera

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> Mastercard and my bank know where I spend money

Pffh. I wish. My bank has no fucking clue, and still questions when I buy motorcycle apparel and equipment, despite the fact I've done so for the past 35 years.

We know this sounds weird but in future we could ask fiber optic cables: Did the earth move for you... literally?

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Re: Microphones made from glass

> As a side note, will any of the equipment you have purchased this year still work and be in daily operation 65ish years from now?

Hell, as a side note, how much of the data you have now will be readable 20-25 years from now?

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

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Privacy?

If they really gave a shit, they'd reinstate fine-grained cookie control. This was the feature where you could individually veto/approve domains allowed to set cookies.

Stand back, we're going in: The Register rips a 7th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon apart. Literally

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No "do not remove" sticker present

That's because those stickers are illegal on this side of the pond:

"FTC Gives Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo 30 Days to Get Rid of Illegal Warranty-Void-if-Removed Stickers"

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw7b3z/warranty-void-if-removed-stickers-sony-microsoft-nintendo-ftc-letters

One of the extremely few places we're slightly better than European consumer practices.

ESA toasts 10% budget boost by stretching ISS support out to 2030

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So jealous

> Unlike NASA, which operates on a year-to-year basis (albeit with a much bigger budget), ESA's budget gives the agency five years, which makes planning a tad easier.

That's a corker. NASA has been not-so-royally f*cked by the space mission du jour "planning" where we just do robotics go to the Moon Mars Lunar Gateway Moon is it still the Moon?

The president tells NASA to do something, mainly for a sound bite, NASA dutifully spends a couple hundred million planning, then get told to trash all that and do something else.

So our future in space comes down to wacknuts like Musk and Bezos spending their personal fortunes. Then some fruitcake goes "but that needs to be spent here on Earth for the poor!"

Apple's latest keyboard travels back in time to when they weren't crap

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"new Apple more responsive to demands from customers"

It's a new Apple more responsive to class-action lawsuits, more likely.

Anomaly-free SpaceX fires up SuperDracos, ISS astros go iFixit in orbit, and Buran turns 31

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WTF? Not serviceable in 2011? After all of Hubble's Troubles?

That just really is a shocker. ANYTHING mounted to ISS should be astronaut-serviceable. That's a no-brainer.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

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Re: More guns = safer for everyone

> 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides

Well, I bought my gun only for the moment I realize I have Alzheimer's or something similar.

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

If you were stupid enough to buy a Makerbot, that is...

The much better Prusa i3 Mk3 is about US$1,000.

Don't miss this patch: Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel

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Pah, I have Linux!

I have holes in systemd and sendmail to worry about...

Astroboffins capture video of Mercury passing across the Sun's surface

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Earth does transits too!

You just have to be on Mars to see it...

Are you as handy with privacy certs as you are with a screwdriver? Ikea has the perfect vacancy

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Security certs

They can also apply to Brighthouse Cable on this side of the pond, whose website certs expired today, and their payment system isn't working either.

40 million emoji-addicted keyboard app users left with $18m bill – after malware sneaks into Play Store yet again

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Re: No saved payment

> Would be so much nicer if the one-use credit card number systems had gained popularity

Oh hell yeah. I wonder if El Reg could dig in and find out why that died? It seems to be a great anti-fraud technique.

Gene Cash Silver badge

Re: Why?

Because the standard word-prediction logic in the standard keyboard is shit, and there's much better available elsewhere.

Plus I like my keyboard with arrow keys, and keys designed to make selection/copy/paste much easier.

Plus there are indeed specialized keyboards, such as ones designed to work with ssh terminal apps like ConnectBot.

The eagle has handed.... scientists a serious text message bill after flying through Iran, Pakistan

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Re: Global roaming charges are evil

Hindsight is 20/20 though... it does sound like this was something that was never considered.

Time to check who left their database open and leaked 7.5m customer records: Hi there, Adobe Creative Cloud!

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Re: Only amateurs use cloud editing software

Only the download and subscriptions checks are in the cloud

Yup. Meaning the applications "installed and running locally" tell you to piss off when your network connection is down and it can't contact the Adobe license server. So it's "network's down? artists are down"

Amazon fails to stop ex-sales staffer winging it to Google Cloud

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Re: In California, U.S.A....

If you look at the history of Silicon Valley firms, especially the early days of semiconductor firms like Intel and Fairchild, you'll see this is a big part of what caused it to grow. People didn't like their current job, they were free to get another one, or even start a new company.

Mark Hurd is dead

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Sucks when your biggest achievement in life is "I put two of the most respected Silicon Valley firms into a death spiral"

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Or ex-Oracle folks either.

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Ramblin' Man or Woman? Maybe brush up on your cartography

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Re: Huh!

Ahhh... the 'ol "Compiles On My Machine" badge of quality.

Nominet continues milking .uk registry cash cow with 4 per cent price rise for... what exactly?

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Re: Not-for-profit, right ?

Probably just piss off the taxman sufficiently?

WeWork, but We don't IPO: Self-styled techie boarding house calls off cursed stock offering

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Go

"VC cash furnace"

Thanks, El Reg, for yet another concise and brilliant description.

Pro tip: Plug in your Tesla S when clocking off, lest you run out of juice mid hot pursuit

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> This is the unfortunate weakness of battery operated devices.

Which is why I insist all my tools have cords. I'm tired of reaching for a drill or saw and the battery's dead.

Every dog has its day – and this one belongs to Boston Dynamic's four-legged good boy Spot

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DUCK!!

I want one of these to chase the annoying ducks that clutter my yard in packs of up to a dozen. That would be an absolute blast.

Chef melts under heat, will 86 future deals with family-separating US immigration agencies

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Re: Screw Chef

> Stop blaming law enforcement for doing their job.

So it's ok to harass the f*ck out of US citizens like me, and demand things like unfettered access to my electronic devices, and the passwords to my social media?

That doesn't sound like any definition of doing their job.

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

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Thanks, El Reg

Even though I will probably never cross the pond, I put a Google Maps star on each site and hope.

These articles are fascinating. Please keep the "Geek's Guide" going for as long as possible.

NASA's lunar spy looks for hide-and-seek champ Vikram, Starliner test success, and more

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Designed to land on land

Crew Dragon was designed to land on land as well... since Mars is distinctly lacking in oceans. That's why it's got the great big SuperDraco thrusters.

It's NASA that got cold feet and forced them to use parachutes, which forced them to use a water landing.

Linux 5.3 kernel bundles new, cuddlier, swear-free Torvalds with AMD Radeon Navi graphics support

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Re: Double-plus good

> will cause PulseAudio [to] core dump.

Wot! But Lennart Poettering's code is PERFECT! It would never core dump!