Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Media editing

Yes, yes, all very well for dealing with intellectuals, but tell that to Al Capone and his ilk.

Re: More to the point

So the criminals knew Chinese and English. That could be a lot of people in the UK or USA. Both UK and USA schools produce many alumni who are a bit shakey on grammar.

As I understand it, the pollutants are oxides of nitrogen. These are produced when things are burned in air at high temperatures. This is a problem for diesel engines because of their high compression, hence high adiabatic temperature rise. This makes them thermodynamically more efficient than petrol or butane engines, so they use less fuel. So they produce less CO2, but more NO/NO2.

We have catalytic converters to turn CO to CO2; higher combustion temperatures yield more CO. But it seems there is nothing to remove the NO/NO2.

But you are right that CO2 is not a pollutant: it is plant food; and the regulations are designed by green freaks, not scientists and engineers.

Cheap food sells

Sometime in the 1970s thare was the Great Cereals Strike. Everyday ones like Corn Flakes rapidly sold out, but the fancy expensive cereals were still there after a fortnight.

It was also the time of the Great Bog Paper Strike.

Re: SMB shares

Why? I guess they use TCP/IP protocols. MSFT have made obsolete the old Netbui protocol.

Windows NT in its day used to mention that Netbui could be used for machines you did not want to be visible on the Internet.

Re: Enigma, the cipher famously cracked by Tutte's colleague Alan Turing

@Tom 7

It was Colossus that emulated the Lorenz machine; the Bombe emulated the Enigma machine. If I have correctly understood the tour guides at Bletchley and TNMOC, the aim of both machines was to find the rotor settings, i.e. the crypto key.

This was done by testing "cribs": guesses at typical message headings, date and time, etc. Colossus/Bombe used two paper tapes, one with the encrypted message and the other with the crib. C/B tested many, many key settings and displacements of the crib from the start of the message.

The original Enigma message was then transcribed on a Typex machine, a British "Enigma" modified to mimic the original Enigma. As pointed out above, there were numerous variations of the Enigma.

Equally, there was a pseudo-Lorenz machhine. The Lorenz machine was a weighty beast, fit only for a headquarters role. The Enigma was portable.

Re: 'Security' questions?

Banks use the phrase, "Know your customer". Not for real, of course; merely to fob off stroppy articles in el Reg.

Re: Same old con game

Almost any kind of management can work if the programmers can actually design and write software, and are allowed or encouraged to do that.

Re: Democracy for the majority

@spacadet66

What kind of democracy is that? Why should techies, rather than (say) religious nutters, be allowed to impose their values and standards?

Nobody should be allowed to impose. Even a democratic majority must accept some limits, but minorities should accept their minority position.

Clearly unique (?) part 2

Since it recognised my normal setup with all its fonts, I tried two small Linux systems that were a standard CD image, no further installations or changes.

1. System Rescue Disk v4.1 + Midori browser. Could not connect to site, SSH handshake failure.

2. Tiny Core Linux + Firefox v52. I am in 26 out of 10,000+ users.

So to be anonymous, use a small Linux system.

Re: Damn it NSA,

@Nolveys

Mr Snowden is not due to inherit an English lordship. Therefore he is not entitled to be addressed as "The honourable..."

@tiggity

Indeed they were. The hatchet job on Dear Old Boris must rate as one of the most vicious in history.

There was then a series of votes, eliminating the candidate with fewest votes until there were two. Even I find it hard to remember the unsuccessful names; but some will have been staking out a claim to a place in a future contest.

May versus Leadsom as the finalists; then Leadsom withdrew.

Re: News of the World

How can anyone say the News of the World was fake news? It was based on the best telephone tapping that money could buy.

Re: IBM what could have been

"...Microsoft wrote a stub to detect whether OS/2 was installed..."

Windows 95 was distributed to end users as an "update CD". It would not run unless it detected an installed Windows 3.x or was presnted with the first W3 floppy disk. It would also accept the first OS/2 Warp 3 floppy disk.

Re: Dont Tell UKIP or Britain First

There were Stone Age peoples who were wiped out by the invading Celts. Nowadays the Celts complain that their language and culture is being wiped out by the English.

Re: 768/20 = 38.4

@Borg.King

Well said, sir. The mistaken arithmetic in the article suggests that its author is a likely target for fraud.

Re: About time

@Eddy

I have tried various releases of Reactos, up to 4.4. It is still beta software at best, and is unhappy on real hardware rather than a virtual machine.

After my last attempt on real hardware I had to wipe the bios with a specialised program to restore the normal ability to manage bios settings.

Re: "Gigayears"...?

We need a word that means a thousand million. The word milliard never caught on, so we have billion.

Re: Perhaps...

@Mage

Within reason (that typically British phrase) I can live with being spied on by the authorities. What I strongly object to is being spied on by the usual suspects: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, ...

I get the impression that American preferences are the other way: they allow almost anything from corporates but not from government.

So much for the Internet uniting the world. It actually shows how divided we are.

Re: Trust your government?

As a Brit, I like our way of doing things.

THEY make the laws but WE decide whether to obey those laws.

Germans have a very different attitude. Germans have said to me, the law is the law and should be obeyed. Somehow the USA has taken up that German position rather than the English one. Revolutionary animus, perhaps.

Re: 1980s computer science

@Mage

Well said!

I partly blame modern education, which tells children to be creative rather than to check their work.

Also, nobody wants to pay for quality, and they expect bug fixes as part of the service.

In my own programming career, I saw many poorly defined interfaces that did not logically separate various aspects of the requirements. It is difficult to get a poor interface working free from bugs.

Re: No EU Discount

@phuzz

If we write that about the progeny of immigrants we can be accused of racism. If we write that about Her Majesy we can be accused of treason.

In these modern times, which is worse?

Re: "The UK should also take a look at using drones for policing, apparently."

Brexit & Trump sounds like a dodgy lawyers firm to me.