Posts by GBE

A lot of people involved in a decision in a large German corporation?

"Anyway, so they guy says there were a lot of people involved. I don't

think there are any great surprises there."

No kidding.

I've worked with a number of large German corporations, and there are _always_ a lot of people involved. In everything. I remember one specific standards meeting where I went to represent my billion-dollar corporation in one particular area of an industrial communications protocol spec. The other representatives in that sub-committee working group were all from German companies. They were all great guys and we had no problems working out details of the profile for a certain type of device. After the three days, they said "great! We will all take this back to our managers for review and approval and you do the same and then everything will be done." I told them that there was no higher level approval needed on my end -- if I said it was good, it was good.

They looked at me like I had just grown a second head.

Re: Linux BSOD on Aircraft?

"penguins can't fly..."

As others have noted, anybody who says that has never seen underwater footage of penguins. ;)

Re: Am I wrong in thinking that if ..

"However, the airplanes could be outfitted with emergency jamming devices to drop the drone out of the air."

What makes you think that jamming the control signal will cause it to "drop out of the air" rather than hover in place, or orbit at constant altitude, or fly slowly to some hard-wired home coordinates until a control signal has been re-acquired? Drones that are measured in meters and can make it to 7000ft don't just fall from the sky when they lose signal.

Re: Americans...

..be ashamed.

Oh, we are... we are.

Now, how about Boris Johnson and the that whole Brexit thing, eh?

I have to admit it was sort of a relief to have a _different_ train wreck to watch for little while....

Re: ROM?!!

"At least in the UK national lottery, the numbers are chosen by an assured chaotic physical system in plain view."

And nobody has ever scammed the "ping-pong-balls in a machine" RNGs used by lotteries.

Oh, wait...

Yes they have.

Re: And that ...

I usually wait a few weeks. Sometimes it takes a several days for more subtle borkedness to rear its head, get written about, and for me to read about it. Installing something like an iOS or Androind system update during the first 24 hours it's available is nuts. Not that I'm not grateful to all the beta-testers who _do_ install the updates without waiting a week or three.

Re: Sponsored content

Just look at El Reg. Keeps trying to sell me something called "DevOps".

Yea, someday I'll have to look up "DevOps" and find out what it is.

Or not. It's probably just another one of those fads that'll go away if you ignore it for a few years.

Re: Thanks for not abusing "begs the question"

"The Oxford Dictionary of English states that the more general usage of the phrase has arisen "over the past 100 years or so" which begs the question of when exactly you were a philosophy undergraduate."

Let's just say it's been more than 1/3 and less than 1/2 of a century.

Re: Bravo!

ITYM Brava!

No, the other "articles"

You misunderstood.

When they count "articles" they're counting words like "a" "the" and "an".

Because that's how the real pros measure journalistic output.

No danger to New Orleans

"You can launch from Texas as long as you don't mind taking out New Orleans if the launch goes wrong!"

Hardly. You don't launch from Houston. You launch over the gulf from somewhere between Corpus and Brownsville -- that way the landing pad is straight East _over_the_ocean_. New Orleans wouldn't be in any danger.

Re: how is this news?

> It was context sensitive and included samples.

And a very nice article about wombats complete with a picture which would display on graphics-capable terminals like a VT220/240.

(That may have been the help system built into one of the VMS apps -- I forget.)

Google Drive is in the OS?!?!

"I know why OS developers put this stuff in but I'd rather have it as an application than baked into the OS."

The article said it was in Nautilus. Nautilus _is_ an application.

HP _was_ test equipment!

I always prefered Tektronix scopes over HP (HP's scope controls and UI never worked well for me), but for everything else HP was was always the go-to brand. Seriiously, everthing. DC to light. Bench power supplies and multimeters, audio test equipment, RF and microwave test equipment and even LEDs and laser and optical stuff. All that PC and printer stuff was just a bunch of generic "me-too" commodity junk not really worthy of the HP logo. Then they decided to ditch what they were actually _good_ at....

Not to worry.

Bah that's just math. No worries. It's not like servo control, routing, communications, networking, and robotics requires any knowlege of basic math.

Marginal arithmetic aside, I see severial problems:

1) Segways are illegal on most sidewalks in the US, so this things got little chance.

2) A lot of suburban areas of the US don't even _have_ sidwalks.

3) How many miles per disappearance can you get out of one of these things?

Re: Just One Moment...

"So, while this little-endian feature may make little-endian purists happier about the POWER architecture, I'm mystified as to how this helps in converting higher-level language programs."

Same here. The article says something along the lines that "now all you have to do is recompile". Well, that's all you _ever_ had to do to "port" from little-endian-code to big-endian-code. It's the endianess of the _data_ that matters and sometimes requires source code changes to deal with. Like John said: as long you're not doing something stupid like writing self-modifying code, the endianess of the _code_ is irrelevant.

Re: Not so fast

"The Appeals court could easily rule differently."

IFF the prosecutor's office decides to appeal. I rather doubt they will -- their boss is elected by popular vote, and now that the prosecutor's office has gone through the proper motions so that justice has been seen to be done, the boss probably has little appetite for appearing to be the bad guy picking on some average joe who was "just thinking of the kids".

Re: Just curious,

Is this espionage, or treason?

That depends on whether Egypt is legally consider to be an "enemy" of the US and whether he actually gave aid to that "enemy". If Egypt is not considered an "enemy" then he can't be charged with treason. Also he _didn't_ actually give aid to Egypt -- he just thought he was. It's not clear to me that the constitution's narrow definition of "treason" includes _attempting_ to give aid to the enemy without actually doing so.

A treason conviction also requires two eye witnesses.

Espionage is a much broader offense which doesn't require actual aid to an actual enemy and doesn't require two eye witnesses.

It was so cold outside the computer room overheated

I remember back in the 80's when it got so cold outside (around -20F) they had to shut down all the VAX and CDC 6600 machines -- because the computer computer room overheated. The computer room was in the basement (no windows or outside doors) and was cooled by water pumped through chillers on the roof five stories above. They didn't have enough anti-freeze in the coolant water, and it froze solid in the roof-mounted chillers.

No water flowing through the exchangers in the computer room in the basement, and temps got pretty high down there...

Re: Hate RFID T-shirt passports

"You can't wear the T-shirt with them on and if you cut them off you don't know how to wash the damn thing if it requires anything a bit special..."

Really? The Reg readers wear T-shirts that require some special method of washing? And if they did own such an item of clothing (presumably it was a gift from an overly optimistic friend/relative), they woud read the laundering instructions and follow them?

Re: Primaries, caucuses....

I really don't understand your Presidential Election system at all... :-S

I do -- and sometimes wish I didn't.

It's fairly easy to explain how all the individual pieces work (though the explanations

differ from state to state). Just don't expect the "big picture" to make much sense when you put all the pieces together. There is no big picture. It's just pieces.

Re: "<whatever> – are people really this stupid?"

<whatever> – are people really this stupid?

The answer is always "yes".

Re: Another week...

Don't try to tell me batteries haven't improved drastically in the past 10-15 years. My first electric RC airplane ran on NiCd cells and could fly for 3-5 minutes if you didn't push it too hard -- and its max climb rate wasn't great. I recently upgraded that to LiPo batteries (and a slightly more efficient motor). Now it can fly for at least 4X as long, and it's so much lighter that it can climb straight up. Maybe 10-15% of that improvement was the motor. The rest is the batteries.

You do have to treat the LiPo cells with a bit more respect than you did the NiCd ones....

The first handeld cellular phone I used way back in the early 80's was the size of a large brick, weighed as much as a large brick, and had about 20 minutes of talk time. It ran off about a half-kilo of sealed lead-acid cells. IIRC, that model was sold in the UK under the Racal-Redac brand. The size of the electronics and transmit power requirements for cellular telephony have imporoved somewhat since then, but the increase in energy density of Lithium-ion over lead-acid is huge.

[The absolute first cellular phone I had before that wasn't handheld -- there was a radio unit the size of large cigar box that mounted in the car's trunk, with a cable as thick as your thumb that ran up to a control head and handset typically mounted on the transmission tunnel.]

Re: Not going to happen

"WOULD read and PROBABLY making a GOOD point if it were NOT for ALL those EVIL CAPITAL LETTERS."

His keyboard must have been out of green ink.

Re: HOW IT WORKS *

'there are no language and educational barriers"

I'm not so sure about that. I went to dinner with a bunch of people during a world-wide sales organization meeting at a corporate headquarters in Minnesota (which is where I'm from). I could understand the folks from South America, Europe and Asia a lot better than I could understand some of the folks from Louisiana.