* Posts by Rich 11

4575 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009

Will that old Vulcan's engines run? Bluebird jet boat team turn to Cold War bomber

Rich 11

I don't think I've been up Tattershall Castle since I was about nine years old. All I remember is that it was a long haul up the spiral staircases and there were parts of the roof either reinforced by scaffolding poles or blocked off by scaffolding poles. I hope it's in a much better state now, because it stands out magnificently against the Big Sky and deserves to be preserved.

Ah, shit, I've just googled it. It looks like the old gravel quarries have been turned into plastic holiday attractions, which will no doubt improve the view from the Castle immeasurably.

Rich 11

Watching the crew fire up the engines on Just Jane is a fantastic experience, as is walking around behind her, pulling little kids out of the blizzard of dust and sweet wrappers created when she's ramped up and starts to move!

Here's a great idea: Why don't we hardcode the same private key into all our smart home hubs?

Rich 11

Re: Like for like?

You mean replace 'easily stolen' with 'easily stolen'? I expect that insurance company will cotton on eventually -- and raise its premiums.

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Rich 11

Any sort of paradise is an oxymoron. The entire point (unless you take the original meaning of garden) is that paradise is unattainable.

Rich 11

Re: College in the 80s

one of Norton's recovery tools

Your personal hell didn't appear until about eight years after mine, sunshine. An afternoon and an evening? You had it bloody lucky. We used to have to lick gravel clean before we woke up....

Rich 11

College in the 80s

It had a Pavlovian side effect of training everybody to save their work more frequently

I learnt to save my work frequently thanks to the lack of a No Smoking rule in the computer labs and the build-up of tobacco by-products on the heads of the two 360K 5.25" drives in each PC. When I later worked there, I had the pleasant job of cleaning the interior of every PC and repainting the lab walls each summer.

What would Jesus tweet? Church of England hands down commandments for Anglicans on social media

Rich 11

Re: New 6 cyber sins

I'd find number four hard. I suppose I'd just have to stick to it with a firm hand, even if I really struggled with the issue.

Rich 11

Re: I've decided to become a Christian...

and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife!

Only one? How is that fair on the women left behind? Bloody OT misogynists!

Rich 11

Re: I've decided to become a Christian...

Not a god of war. More a volcano god who turned into a sky god.

Rich 11

Re: I've decided to become a Christian...

I'm OK, I've had the operation and there's no prawns in the freezer.

It's nowhere near as easy as that. If just once you wore a woolly jumper that had a hole sewn up with cotton, your immortal soul is doomed. Doomed, I tell ye!

Rich 11

Re: I've decided to become a Christian...

Yeah, but that's all allegorical. You're not meant to take it literally.

What parts of the Bible are you supposed to take literally? Well, stuff like this gem:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

-- Hebrews 11:1

Don't question it. And whatever you do, don't reach for a dictionary.

Observation: Slow-burn space HAL 'em up fires adventure game genre into the exosphere

Rich 11

Blast from the past

* I was six in 1993 so give me a break.

I was 29 but I still got stuck for days on end.

Drone fliers are either 'clueless, careless or criminal' says air traffic gros fromage

Rich 11

Re: Such wit

you won debates "... not by boring the audience with detail, but with jokes and ad hominem jibes."

That's how debates are meant to work. While they can be won by a razor-sharp forensic disassembly of the opponent's position, generally they are won by rhetorical tricks and a willingness to misrepresent and mischaracterise the other person.

Rich 11
Joke

Re: "The drone community"

If you feel at home describing yourself as a nutty flake, go right ahead.

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

Rich 11

Re: TL; DR

Not to mention the growing extremism across the continent?

Whereas the Brexit campaign, the referendum and all the subsequent shenanigans have been absolutely brilliant in reducing bigotry and division across the UK, and nor is a single person in Ireland worried about a return to sectarian violence.

a stagnant, mediocre polity

And every country in the world looks upon the UK and admires us for our steadfast integrity and political pragmatism, something at which we have truly shone these last three years. Most weeks you can hear on the radio and television people from other democracies telling us exactly that.

run by people who can't see past their own egos

Hi, Boris.

Rich 11

Re: TL; DR

Go on then, tell us exactly how we are fucked by being in the EU.

Rich 11

Re: Passing the buck back to Europe...

P.S. Are whelk stalls difficult to manage?

Just as long as the whelks form a tidy queue between the sea and your stall, it's not too difficult.

Bonkers British MPs rant: 5G signals cause cancer

Rich 11

Antoniazzi said: “We need to apply the precautionary principle when we look at anything.”

We could start by applying it to Parliamentary candidates. Screen the nutters out before anyone wastes a single vote on them.

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Rich 11

Re: Parenting

The STATE

No-one mentioned the state, you high IQ, law-abiding moral person.

Eggheads have found a positive link between the number of racist tweets and the number of racist hate crimes in US cities

Rich 11

Someone's Private Idaho

Montpellier is 19th lowest in terms of racist crimes, but fifth in number of racist tweets.

IIRC, Idaho is the US state described by white supremacists as being the most suitable state to be given to them as a whites-only homeland because it is already 97% white*. It sounds like there a lot of frustrated racists already there unable to properly let off steam, tweeting away their hatred but with hardly anyone around to beat up.

*See, they're not that bad after all. They only want to drive out a mere 3% of the population. Come on, Hitler chucked out more people than that, so you can't complain, right?

That's a sticky Siemens situation: Former coder blows his logic bomb guilty plea deal in court

Rich 11

Re: $42,000 to read a code listing?

and put a team of people on it, including coders and lawyers

I think I can guess where most of that $42k went.

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

Rich 11

Re: The end of biometrics

That would give an entirely new meaning to the phrase 'log in'.

BGP super-blunder: How Verizon today sparked a 'cascading catastrophic failure' that knackered Cloudflare, Amazon, etc

Rich 11

Re: whaaaaat, no...

No, no, no. Iran has always been the current enemy. China has always been the current friend.

(I could make a joke about Trump and memory holes, but it would be insulting to goldfish and the poor little orange swimmy buggers don't deserve that.)

Having bank problems? I feel bad for you son: I've got 25 million problems, but a bulk upload ain't one

Rich 11

Re: @Arthur the cat

That must have been my dad.

When I was eight he plugged me into the Xmas tree lights, just to demonstrate that electricity wasn't necessarily something to be scared of but it was something to be respected.

Rich 11

Re: 10 minutes, not a second more...

I tried my key in my colleagues padlock and it successfully opened!!

I hope that supplier didn't also bid for the locks in the nuclear missile silos.

Bloody vultures! Cheeky Spanish paraglider firm pinched El Reg's mascot

Rich 11

Re: We ripped off Van Halen

but we couldn't win the worst band contest.

Then you weren't trying hard enough.

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Rich 11

Re: Child-proof reset operation

Makes me wonder how my grandfather managed it back in the 1800s

He probably just rode the mule into the kitchen.

Rich 11

Re: Child-proof reset operation

It's when you get home and find the little fuckers have invented the jetpack that you really have to worry.

Rich 11

Re: "smarter lighting in every way"

I bet he irons his foreskin.

We knew it was coming: Bureaucratic cockup triggers '6-month' delay of age verification block on porno in the UK

Rich 11

Re: There's something I don't get

His biggest problem is that thing where he promised he'd listen to his party members and then totally ignored them

Yep, that's the one that pisses me off the most. Holding policy conventions was a damn good idea, and potentially a very good way of getting the Blairites and Corbynites to bury the hatchet because it'd let them both save face while getting some of the things each wanted and compromising on the others. We wouldn't be half as deep in this Brexit shit if he'd carried out his promise and taken a policy agreement to the 2017 party conference.

Rich 11

Re: There's something I don't get

Because there's an entirely separate law regarding the way that standards are set out. Notification is a necessary part of enabling all EU companies to tender across the single market.

Rich 11

Re: There's something I don't get

I'm lost as to why we're plowing on.

Pride. How many politicians like admitting they made a mistake? The only good thing about this whole sorry business is the impending meltdown of the Conservative party, and even then there's a risk of it being replaced by something worse. In two years' time we could find ourselves looking back to the halcyon days of John Major's Cones Hotline with a wistful tear in our collective eye.

Rich 11

Re: Don't you love the EU?

Technically, how does browsing Youtube differ from iPlayer?

One is 90% full of shit and the other is 40% full of shit.

Oh, technically? Beyond caring.

Rich 11

Removing body hair wasn't a matter of perceived beauty in Ancient Egypt but done simply to avoid infestation by lice. That's why wigs were so commonplace, which were also drenched with perfume to keep the mosquitos and sand flies away.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Rich 11

Re: 'about equal to the size of Texas'

Afghanistan: about the size of Texas, but with fewer guns.

UK's GDS head Kevin Cunnington leaves to tell world+dog how (not) to do digital

Rich 11

and overseeing a substantial increase in traffic to the GOV.UK website, which now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a week.

A quarter of the population? Each week? What on earth are they hosting, p0rn?

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

Rich 11

Re: It's *not* going to be a £4 million project

the word 'do' is superfluous

Give them their due, they're very good at spending money. Especially on big-ticket items like emergency ferries.

Rich 11

One other remote possibility

Perhaps the game shooters weren't that important so it just got done.

Or perhaps the game shooters and the people who own the land they shoot on vote Conservative.

After years of listening, we've heard not a single peep out of any aliens, say boffins. You think you can do better? OK, here's 1PB of signals

Rich 11

Re: A significant part of the problem

so we might have imagined a race on Mars communicating with us using flashing lamp semaphore signals

I'm tempted to sit down and work out the strength of optical light signal that would be required for a late-19th century telescope to pick up a message from Mars. Fortunately for our putative Martian friends, a first-approximation analysis suggests that it needn't be a nuclear explosion.

Rich 11
Alien

"they would definitely let us know"

Indeed. My masters would order them to tell us.

UK.gov whacks export ban on 'grotesque' crab made by famous Brit potter bros

Rich 11

But I'm sure your putative offspring would have been complete darlings.

Rich 11

Ia! Ia!

Cthulhu ftaghn!

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

Rich 11

Eugh! You won't know where it might have been.

Rich 11

Re: Not done with DNS

where UK netizens will need to pose as dirty furriners looking to get their mucky kicks!

I plan to brush up on my sweary Italian so that I can pass as an Italian wanker.

"Va fanculo!"

Rich 11

MindGeek's AgeID ... has said it expects 20-25 million UK adults to sign up for its service in the first month.

And how many UK children? If the offline PortesCard method can be used to register five devices at a cost of nine quid, I can see a ready market in secondary schools of 18 year olds buying one and selling access to five kids at a fiver each.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Rich 11

Re: Estimating Software Projects

My general rule of thumb was to multiply my estimate by 4 to get a believable number and then multiply by 4 again.

My general rule is to pick a number, double it and add three. I've told project managers to their faces that that's what I do. I've even said that they can pick the number and the time period that goes with it, but they can't blame me if they get it wrong. Eventually they give in and concede to the research period and proof of concept testing that I originally asked for but wasn't allowed to have until I'd agreed to the deadline dictated by manglement, while they have to go back upstairs and tell the PHBs that their beloved deadline might be a) unsupported by reason and evidence, or b) unachievable 'within the current resource framework' (or whatever this week's buzz phrase is).

Rich 11

Re: Been there, done that...

Honesty works.

Seconded. A cover-up is much more likely to get you fired.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

Rich 11

Re: What could possibly go wrong

I had a few other examples in mind, given the coherency and delusion aspects.

"A lot of the wall was, you know, I'm good at this stuff. That's what I do. We renovated a lot."

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer."

23. 712. 3. 608. 45. 89. 11. 332. 841. 255. You want more? Cloudflare and pals are streaming 'em live from new RNG API

Rich 11

Re: The best RNG so far is

Were Donald Knuth dead, he'd be spinning in his grave.

If it could be shown that he wouldn't be spinning evenly, we could use measurements of the perturbations around three axes to output a set of random numbers.

Why are fervid Googlers making ad-blocker-breaking changes to Chrome? Because they created a monster – and are fighting to secure it

Rich 11

Re: Or, simply...

Or, simply

I always worry when someone uses the word 'simply' like that*.

Defence in depth is a concept worth understanding. No single measure will catch everything forever.

*Unless it's me using it, of course ;-)