* Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

1534 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2010

How long does it take an NHS doctor to turn on a computer?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: I still can't get my head round this one

@Terry 6

But with the Amstrad word processor, turning the monitor on/off WAS the same as turning the computer on/off.

Sugar sure was stingy with hardware quality, but he was spot on about simplicity.

FBI boss: No encryption backdoor law (but give us backdoors anyway)

Primus Secundus Tertius

The Person not the Machine

Why bother with the machine when you can go for its owner?

In the UK you can be jailed (someboody[*] was) for not telling THEM the password when they ask. Has the US not thought of that?

[*] When he realised he was going to jail, he 'remembered' it. But by then it was too late. Mind you, he deserved it.

World's oldest person scoffs daily ration of bacon

Primus Secundus Tertius

Let's hear it for chips (fries in the US).

Get the chips right and almost any meal is delicious.

NASA boffins on Pluto: We see skies of BLUE and... RED water ice

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Pictures of Pluto

At a distance of 30AU the sunlight is about 1/900 of that at Earth. So roughly 1 watt per square metre, or the lighting level of many an indoor room here. With a good camera you should be OK.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Red.

It's brownish red from nitrogen dioxide, in the exhaust of alien diesel engines.

Ten years on: Ronnie Barker, Pismonouncers Unanimous founder, remembered

Primus Secundus Tertius

Monstrous Regiment

There was also a Benny Hill sketch I remember about an army of women terrorising the menfolk.

Herbie Goes Under Investigation: German prosecutors probe ex-VW CEO Winterkorn

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: After working with people on chipset driver software

My view entirely.

I object to the phrase 'defeat device', when it is a software configuration problem.

Software that is expensive to develop and needs highly qualified staff. For most companies it would be more commercially sensible to buy in the software. So I am sure it runs on far more than a few VW engines.

Is Windows 10 slurping too much data? No, says Microsoft. Nuh-uh. Nope

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: You really want to "deliver a delightful and personalized Windows experience" to me?

@David132

I sure as hell do NOT want a 'personalised' experience when reading news bulletins or Wikipedia articles. Like Mr Gradgrind, I just want the facts, objective facts.

I do NOT want whirled news spun to the sender's satisfaction.

NEW ERA for HUMANITY? NASA says something 'major' FOUND ON MARS

Primus Secundus Tertius

Pollution

They have discovered nitrogen dioxide generated by alien diesel engines. That's why the whole planet is a brown-red colour.

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Primus Secundus Tertius

Miracles

Sure I do miracles. I can make shadows face the sun.

POLAR DINOSAURS prowled ARCTIC NIGHT, cast doubt on COLD BLOOD theory

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Warm blooded dinos

@ToddR

We are still living in the aftermath of an ice age that ended only some 20,000 year ago. For most of the time since the Cambrian era the world has been much warmer than it is now. That was especially so before Antarctica became isolated some 30 million years ago by an unbroken southern ocean.

The question is whether the world will revert to a fifth ice age (four in the last two million years) or will improve to a more historical level of warmth. It's no use asking the greenies, they don't know, nor does anybody.

You want the poor to have more money? Well, doh! Splash the cash

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Long article

@ Dan 55, Irony Deficient

Thanks for those workarounds.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Long article

TL;DR

Dear el Reg, if you want people to read 4-page aricles, bring back the "read in one page" facility.

UK terror law probe stresses 'safeguards' amid MI5 plot claims

Primus Secundus Tertius

Common law duty

It is a duty on all of us under English common law to help prevent crime. So MI5 are entitled to expect more co-operation than they actually get from Facebook etc.

As the US inherited English common law, there are similar obligations in North America with the arguable exceptions of Louisiana and Quebec. Some might argue that Alaska should respect whatever Russian equivalent there is of common law.

GCHQ wants to set your passwords. In a good way

Primus Secundus Tertius

Authenticate

The easiest authentication is on the telephone:

"Hi, its me!"

"Oh hello, you, you know who I am."

Once upon a time that was how the banks worked. Not now, except perhaps for millionaires.

Cognitive computing: What can and can’t we do, and should lipreading be banned?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: birth of AI research 60 years ago?

@Mage

In reply to your point about Google Translate, one wonders whether in fact our brains do something similar. We don't know.

People have wondered for a long time how language began, and all the early theories were waffle spiced with religion. We need an evolutionary explanation of how we got from the kind of mutual understanding among animals to the achievement of human language.

Microsoft backports data slurp to Windows 7 and 8 via patches

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Thanks for the heads-up.

@David132

"if it's all so innocent, why not be more up-front about it?"

Indeed. We the proles are always told, if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear.

Let's see that applied to the big boys.

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

Primus Secundus Tertius

Frighten them

This will frighten the dinosaurs. I do not think.

BOFH: Why, I LOVE work courses. Please tell me more, o wise one!

Primus Secundus Tertius

I like the 'leading from behind' approach. I presume it comes from the Duke of Plaza Toro, the Gilbert and Sullivan character: 'he led his regiment from behind, he found it less exciting'.

The only courses I was ever sent on were to use up the training department budget or to meet some other quota. Nothing to do with what might have been useful to me professionally.

Windows 10 climbs to 3.55 per cent market share, Win 8.1 dips

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Enough of people complaining about Windows 10's "keylogger"

I turned off the keylogger by upgrading (reverting) this machine to XP.

Windows 10 collects colossal 0.375 per cent market share in July

Primus Secundus Tertius

Bigger and bigger

I have just updated a Toshiba Satellite 650 laptop machine, by asking the MSFT website rather than waiting for my reservation to come through. Historic OS sizes are:

Win10: ca 12 Gbytes clean install

Win XP original: ca 1.5 Gbytes

Win98: ca 180 Mbyes.

Win95 1st ed: ca 35 Mbytes

Win 3.11: ca 25 Mbytes

DOS: ca 3 Mbytes.

I ask myself what have we gained from this enormous increase inOS size?

Stop forcing benefits down my throat and give me hard cash, dammit

Primus Secundus Tertius

But for students...

I agree with all the previous commenters who say Tim's proposals are out of touch with real life for poor people.

But one sector that does need the cash is student grants. If the government is serious about getting people from families with no money into university - and I do have serious doubts here - the only way to do it is cash up front. Nothing less than that will do.

Someone whose parents sent him to Eton may not worry about a debt of £30,000 or more. But if your family has no money that is just not on.

So just WHO ARE the 15 per cent of Americans still not online?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: In the UK

No, you are the one citing individual cases rather than populations. You are the one with no clue about statistics.

"my friends is" - I hope that is a typo rather than a measure of your English. I can forgive typos; as my fingers get older the keyboard dances around under them.

Primus Secundus Tertius

In the UK

My subjective impression of my country, the UK, is that about half the population just does not do reading and writing except under severe provocation, e.g. to claim governemnt benefits. Even then, they usually expect somebody to help them.

But they all have TVs and mobile phones, so who needs that stupid internet thingy, even though it has been dumbed down in an effort to get more paying customers.

Start learning parallel programming and make these supercomputers sing, Prez Obama orders

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Weather? Certainly useful but...

How does natural language work? Is it really brute force and ignorance? Will we ever get beyond the current 90% accuracy of language translations, dictation machines, style checkers, etc?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Find a coder

It is difficult enough to find good programmers for the classic von Neumann sequentail architecture, let alone designers of parallel algorithms.

The old analogue computers were essentially parallel machines.

Today's smart home devices are too dumb to succeed

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Debugging intelligence

E.g. abolish our need for vitamins: that random set of organic compounds that our cells need but cannot synthesise from plain food.

Then we could enjoy junk food and tell the diet freaks to get lost.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Debugging intelligence

It seems to me that devices will become too 'intelligent' for us to debug long before thay are 'intelligent' enough to rule the world.

Here's hoping, anyway.

YOW! Pluto STUNS boffins with HAZY, SHRINKY atmosphere

Primus Secundus Tertius

Hydrides ?

Because of the cosmic abundance of hydrogen, we find carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as their hydrides. Also, elements with odd atomic number (nitrogen) are less abundant than those of even number (carbon, oxygen).

Perhaps NASA have reasons for suggesting the ice is nitrogen rather than, say, methane. Or perhaps some mixture of methane, ammonia, and water. But please would someone give those reasons.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Bravo!

"Climate science"??

The biggest oxymoron of the current credulous era.

Microsoft sets end date on Windows 10 support. Hey, wait, WHAT?

Primus Secundus Tertius

re remote terminate

MS have just remotely terminated Security Essentials for XP, as reported in el Reg and confirmed by me personally.

If they can terminate that they can terminate anything they produce.

Russian billionaire: GET me the ALIENS ON THE PHONE. Do it NOW

Primus Secundus Tertius

Cosmic vandals

It would be cosmic vandalism for any civilisation to broadcast on the hydrogen 21cm frequency. But if they were run by accountants...

Being common is tragic, but the tragedy of the commons is still true

Primus Secundus Tertius

Big Society

So for those of us who live in cities or large towns (the great majority) voluntary solutions will not work because there are too many people.

Mr Cameron, prime minister of the UK and leader of the Conservative Party, had ideas of a Big Society that would harness the charitable instincts of people. In his own constituency, a small country town, it might sometimes work; but not for most of us.

Wicked WikiLeaks leaks considered harmful: Alert over malware lurking in dumped docs

Primus Secundus Tertius

Censorship?

Wikileaks: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Except where it has been censored to protect us, for our own good. Er, ?

Farmer mooved after reunion with two-year fugitive cow

Primus Secundus Tertius

Waltzing Matylda

Matylda went waltzing, but did not end up down udder.

Horrifying MOCK BACON ABOMINATION grown in BUBBLING VATS as ALGAE

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Grimbledon Down?

You beat me to that comment.

Let me add that the local tramp/vagrant at GD did describe Nu-Meths as "OK if you are not particular", but could not abide Nu-Food.

Linux Foundation serves up a tasty dish of BUGS

Primus Secundus Tertius

Is it CSV

The link in th Reg article claims to be a CSV but is actually an elaborate HTML file. Is there a real CSV file somewhere, that a spreadsheet can handle?

PLUTO FLYBY: Here's your IT angle, all you stargazing pedants

Primus Secundus Tertius

Close encounter

Close encounter - between Pluto and Bopeye.

Download Festival face scan: You’re right to be annoyed, said UK surveillance commish

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: "I’m told these are heavy metal acts that performed at the festival"

@Valeyard

Nonsense! 10% of the public are always guilty. That is why the Romans used to kill off 10% from time to time: decimation, they called it. Poor understanding of probability, though. If they decimated at random, that would still leave 9% for next time.

Seriously, not all the public are innocent. But in Britain we prefer the police not to make that too obvious.

US govt now says 21.5 million people exposed by OPM hack – here's what you need to know

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: I would not be surprised

Just what I was thinking.

Now why do I get all that spam email in Chinese characters?

Dormant ALIEN SLIME LIFE frozen in SPEEDING comet will AWAKEN - boffins

Primus Secundus Tertius

Creative Headlines

Give the el Reg journos a break. This headline may keep them going until the next BOFH time.

Another day, ANOTHER Windows 10 build for us Insiders

Primus Secundus Tertius

Aw c'mon. It's a damn sight easier to talk to those guys than to someone in Calais, or even Glasgow.

Github's 'Atom' text editor hits version 1.0

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: "This is no child of mine" - Emacs

It's a bit like that with a Markup processor called pandoc.

Except I did not uninstall.

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: What's next

After A_to_M I guess we have N_to_Z.

Then perhaps !to)

Or not, if you prefer EBCDIC sequencing.

BT: Let us scrap ordinary phone lines. You've all got great internet, right?

Primus Secundus Tertius

There is an option.

You can chuck out the phone line, but then you get charged for TV channels that you never watch. As I found out.

It's OK – this was an entirely NEW type of cockup, says RBS

Primus Secundus Tertius

Nobody checks

Perhaps there was a data error, then.

But nobody checks anything these days until something goes very visibly wrong. The doctrine in schools is that we must not query the creativity of the little darlings by anything so vulgar as re-reading and checking their work.

And so they become the programmers who let the customer find the faults and complain.

Hey kids, who wants to pwn a million BIOSes?

Primus Secundus Tertius

Firmware or crapware?

I guess that firmware updates are the responsibility of the computer maker, rather than Microsoft, and would rely on the manufacturer's "value added" software being present.

Unfortunately, new machines come with so much crapware that the first thing a careful owner does is a clean install minus all the crapware.

How much info did hackers steal on US spies? Try all of it

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: This is rapidly becoming a world laughing stock

@keithpeter

In the UK they just send CDs of social security data in the post. As you say, they have not admitted that anyone has actually used that information. Also they leave memory sticks in pubs and taxis, but don't admit that.

The UK Treasury clearly did not believe in spending money to protect data about UK citizens. It looks as though the USA has a similar problem.

Wall Street watchdog publishes its ultimate rules on Bitcoin biz

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: What?

No, not very old.

Only yesterday I saw XP on a machine at my local council.

It's FREE WINDOWS 10 time: 29 July is D-Day, yells Microsoft

Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: @Paul Shirley

@dogged

I seem to recall that Microsoft, or the US Government, once disabled the Windows machines owned by whichever wicked government was wickedly ruling Afghanistan in those wicked times.

True, MS are unlikely to bother a private individual who keeps himself inconspicuous, but corporations are another matter.