Posts by Kubla Cant

Re: How did they give Steve Jobs tickets?

Jobs also infamously parked his cars in disabled parking spaces, so in my book he deserved every penny he was fined. No refunds for Dead Steve!

To be fair, being dead is about as disabled as it gets.

Re: language

Seems odd that all the tabs in in English yet he's a German.

Boring answer: "GRATIS" suggests that the xHamster tab isn't in English, else it would probably say "FREE". The other tabs were probably launched from xHamster and show the titles of the videos. I don't think porn video suppliers are big on localisation.

Did they also measure the same response for the death of a spouse/child/parent? No?

I don't think you'd find many volunteers for a study that involved killing a subject's spouse/child/parent just to measure how much stress it causes.

Re: I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but...

Why does every mad concept car have to have gull-wing doors?

Re: Sigh. Dwarves, not hobbits.

That's Princess S White to you.

Re: Pornography Legal Definition?

If you're not sure whether it's porn or not, you should try another site.

Re: Those damn Martians....

OS hasn't been taxpayer funded for years.

Does that mean that in the event of invasion the Ordnance will have to go down to W H Smith and buy some maps? Or do they aim their guns using Google these days?

Re: If only that was effective against homeopaths and the chemtrail loons

I'd take the piss out of your last sentence too if it made sense!

Makes sense to me. Have you been taking homeopathic brain medicine?

At the risk of starting a small war, how's third party driver support in Linux these days?

Not great, in my experience, and I speak as a Linux enthusiast who uses it at work and at home.

I recently upgraded my "grandfather's axe" home workstation. I decided to use a processor with Intel integrated graphics because all the reviews said it's now perfectly adequate for anything except gaming. Big mistake.

The latest version of Mint displays a horrible fuzzy screen along with a warning that it's using software emulation for graphics. Intel only provide drivers for Fedora and Ubuntu, but it seems Mint is based on an older (LTS) version of Ubuntu, for which Intel appear to have stopped distributing drivers.

I like Mint, but the hand-knitted screen look isn't acceptable, so I back everything up and install the latest Kubuntu. The screen almost looks good enough to justify the grief of switching to a new UI. Then I try playing video files, and I find it's impossible to re-size the playback, something that was always possible with my previous, now obsolete, Nvidia graphics.

What on earth are Intel up to? I'd guess that about 80% of Intel-based computers sold today use integrated graphics, but their driver support is limited to two distros and even then the drivers don't work properly.

Re: Weight.

I'm not qualified to comment on most of these weights, but 2kg of webbing seems remarkable.

Re: What does to deep mean?

The expression to "deep six" has a long, if not honourable history. In All the President's Men Woodward and Bernstein learn that one of Nixon's henchmen has suggested somebody should deep six a briefcase (IIRC). They're horrified that members of the US government talk like gangsters. Nowadays it might be less surprising.

Re: Cruel and viscious.

Well, yes, El Reg is cruel and vicious. That's what's good about it.

And so was Fry's portrayal of the various incarnations of Melchett. That's what's good about him.

Re: Dutch computer words

As far as I know "cookie" is an anglicised spelling of a Dutch word.

Re: How about a /working/ demo?

C:\Users\Peter>docker pull gaetan/dockercraft

To execute docker pull you need to have installed Docker and to issue commands in the Bash shell that's installed with it.

Docker doesn't seem to live very comfortably on Windows. Not only do you have to use the shell (which annoyingly seems to have replaced the Bash shell that comes with git) but it seems to work with a very memory-hungry VirtualBox VM.

The Minecraft thing looks like a gimmick. Anyone doing the kind of job that requires Docker should be able to understand it without recourse to a game that really has nothing to do with it.

Re: Tokenised?

@Tony S: Thanks for the link - I didn't know about tokenisation. If the token is generated by the card company and is specific to the merchant, then it's obviously of limited value if stolen.

absolute nitwits that allow LinkedIn access to their email to forage for contacts

I fear I was that nitwit. I've accessed LinkedIn via the browser for years, and never allowed it to access any address book. Then I unwisely allowed myself to be persuaded to install the phone app. Suddenly my phone contacts list is gobbled into LinkedIn and it's asking me if I want to connect with people from it. I guess they sneaked in permission to access the contacts list when the app installed.

Re: From the kind of shop that'll sell you....

Superb! A $10,000 directional Ethernet cable. You've made my day.

a sintered racing clutch[3] with all of 2mm travel between "out" and "fully engaged"

I think you're wrong about the clutch. I drove a 911 SC for six years. It was a 1981 model, so well inside the "lethal Porsche" era. The clutch had plenty of travel and was reasonably light. It used to be commonly said at the time that anyone of either sex could easily drive a 911 in traffic.

In other respects, I mostly agree with your comments.

Re: A pedant writes...

The aeroplane doesn't "stall"; its engine does.

Wrong.

"A stall is a condition in aerodynamics and aviation wherein the angle of attack increases beyond a certain point such that the lift begins to decrease." [Wikipedia, I'm afraid]

Stalling of an engine is a different phenomenon entirely.

Re: Ahh the screeching chirrup

... followed by "GBoing-GBoing". I'm sure there was a technical reason why the faster modems made this cartoon-ish sound.

Re: A Lot of People..

The Dyson Airblade is an interesting hand drier.

It's a typical Dyson pseudo-invention. All other hand dryers, from the feeble things you find in the toilets of Oriental restaurants, to the high-powered ones that you can hear in the next room, work faster when the user rubs his/her hands together during the drying. The Dyson proposition seems to be that he can "scrape" the water off with a "blade" of hot air. The result is a drier design that prevents hand-rubbing.

Re: So What?

Interviewing known terrorists like ISIS in order to manufacture a contrarian viewpoint shouldn't warrant any protection for these so called "journalists". Even giving a voice to these criminals makes me suspect the news outlets intentions.

I'm confused. If a reporter for Newsnight is a 'so called "journalist"', who qualifies as a real journalist? To judge from this post, nobody but the fête correspondent of the Church Times.

Re: cart before horse

Rather than put the 'cleverness' into the bulb, why not put it into the wall switch?

Exactly. I can't be the only person who thinks a room looks better if it's only lit by table lamps. But it's a pain to walk round the room turning them on individually.

I have two rooms where the wall switch is wired to 5 amp wall sockets. It should be simple to create similar functionality with a wall switch that communicates via wireless or powerline with smart plugs in standard 13 amp outlets, so anything can be activated from the wall switch by the door.

The fond childhood memories of sneaking into the garage and nicking a swig... then instantly spitting it back into the jug.

I can't be the only one who has student memories* along the lines of "if we keep fermenting this as long as possible, we get free alcohol". The result was a sinister, almost still beverage with a strong taste and good deal of sediment. The effects were generally everything we expected.

* I can remember brewing the stuff, but as with concussion, there's a blank patch after we started drinking it.

REST has delivered a lot, but there's always a lurking sense that you're using a screwdriver as a chisel (or maybe vice versa). It's also plagued with religious disputes and doubts. Should this be POST or PUT? Am I allowed to invoke a procedure with GET? Does this value belong in the request body, the header or the URL and if so where?

I think REST triumphed over SOAP by cutting down on the WSDL bureaucracy, and SOAP displaced its predecessors by using a go-anywhere network protocol. gRPC is going to have to deliver a major benefit to be the Next Big Thing.

Re: Bobby Tables, 15, cuffed by TalkTalk hacking probe cops

If you qualified with a degree in politics & economics, well, go do that. You didn't qualify with a degree in software engineering. If you qualified with a degree in accountancy, well, guess what? You are not a coder.

@LucreLout: You appear to believe that acquiring a degree in something is the way to learn how to do it professionally. I'm afraid I have unwelcome news for you.

Re: They have left an open door for the competition

I know plusnet store passwords either as plain text or using easily reversible encryption, their support people can tell you what your password is.

BT too.

We won the battle, but who won the war (not us).

The problem seems to have been that the mediæval military machines and the economies behind them simply lacked the resources for complete conquest. A king might be fabulously rich by comparison with most of his subjects, but he wasn't rich enough to pay for a standing army. The taxation system of the time was primitive and inefficient and the economies being taxed weren't very large.