* Posts by Maty

714 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2007

DOCX disaster recovery: How I rescued my wife from XM-HELL

Maty

sledgehammer meet nut

Apart from the fact that a growing number of computers don't run anything capable of handling Microsoft's document-flavour-of-the-week, in the vast majority of cases, Word adds unnecessary complexity to basic text.

I'd guess 95% of all docs written in this overblown monster of a program can and should be written on wordpad. The number of projects actually needing Word are about the same as those needing specialist graphic or CAD.

I find HTML-Kit292 best for examining docx(tm) and extracting information (such as my next dentist appointment). Open Office handles all the other perversions of the document format that Microsoft has invented over the years.

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

Maty

Re: TRAITORS

Luke 11?

Okay looking up Luke 11.9&10 gives us

'Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened.'

Spookily relevant to tapping data channels ...

Swiping your card at local greengrocers? Miscreants will swipe YOU in a minute

Maty

If they're so easily compromised, perhaps the acronym for these Point Of Sale terminals should be changed for a different computing acronym that fortunately uses the same letters.

California gives green light to test self-driving cars on public roads

Maty

Self-driving cars have been a fact of life for decades.

They're the cars that are left to drive themselves while the person behind the wheel texts, snoozes, turns round to talk to the kids in the back seat or digs under the dashboard for that elusive CD.

Indian climate boffins: Himalayan glaciers are OK, thanks

Maty

'At 0.2% (linear) the glaciers disappear in 500 years'

Here's Mark Twain on that line of thought.

'In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.

And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

- Life on the Mississippi

A real pot-boiler kicks off Reg man's quid-a-day nosh challenge

Maty

Free food

I regularly eat for less than £1 per day. Groceries come from my wife's side of the household budget, so I basically eat for free in exchange for paying the rent.

If freebies don't count, you'd better give that bone back to the butcher.

Rejoice, Russians! The annexation of Crimea is complete and legitimate – Google Maps proves it

Maty

Re: Recognise it or not, its the reality on the ground!

"Next week we explain how Mexico discriminated against Texans, and why the Alamo was justified."

I'll look forward to that. As I understand it, Mexico objected to Texans using slaves which was illegal in Mexico at that time, and Texas was part of Mexico. This led to the Alamo thing.

However, I do not have the advantage of having been educated in the USA so I'm sure someone there will explain it to me properly.

Asteroids as powerful as NUCLEAR BOMBS strike Earth TWICE YEARLY

Maty

er ... wot?

'When the earth wandered into the path of a comet.'

'Wander' means to move randomly, aimlessly and without purpose. I kind of got the impression the earth followed a set route around the sun every year. If it were to digress from, for example to visit Mercury or Neptune, asteroids would be the least of our problems.

(and yes, I know the solar system is proceeding through the galaxy too, but that's a different issue)

Innovation creates instability, you say? BLASPHEMY, you SCUM

Maty

Italian railways

'That’s what you get in First Class with First Great Western ... I’d love to see the greasy state of a knackered e-reader hanging off its loosened hinges as it falls out of a broken armrest in the glorious near-future of Italian railways.'

Um ... if near-past Italian railways are anything to go by, you'll do a lot better travelling in Italian steerage than British first class. I've always found Italian rail to be clean, comfortable and (when the union isn't on strike) punctual.

While I've travelled on worse in Zimbabwe, the trains were at least clean. For grimy, slovenly trains with staff who appear to genuinely hate their customers, I've not yet found worse than dear old Blighty. So chin up old boy. You're pretty close to the bottom of the barrel already.

'Bank couriers' who stole money from OAP cancer sufferer jailed

Maty

young offender?

Jeven Grant 20 was sentenced to a young offenders' institution.

Sorry, but age 20 means you are old enough to vote, drink alcohol, get married and join the army. It should also mean you are old enough to do time in the Big House.

Cops bang up 'drunk, naked' Virginian

Maty

Limerick competition

A lass named Maura Fussell

Had a husband locked in a cell

Wearing nothing but skin

She tried to get in

It's something Virginians do well.

Oxfam, you're full of FAIL. Leave economics to sensible bods

Maty

Re: Unless they're from the lucky sperm club they've got negative wealth

' And where has progress got us? Half the world doesn't have anything to eat and the other half are obese and want to obliterate their neighbour. '

Actually, that is indeed progress. A few centuries back almost no-one in the world had enough to eat and obesity was restricted to the few that did. You probably won't starve or freeze to death next winter. For many - even in Britain - that was a very real worry just a few generations back.

Beastie Boys settle with toy maker over Girls copyright dispute

Maty
Headmaster

Re: Who sued who?

Dogged remarked ' Fuck gender-specific toys.'

Indeed. There's an industry based on people doing just that.

(BTW; it's 'Who sued whom?' Just sayin')

Win XP holdouts storm eBay and licence brokers, hiss: Give us all your Windows 7

Maty

Re: Viruses and malware

Of course I don't browse the net as admin. That would be silly. I browse the net as root.

CIA hacked Senate PCs to delete torture reports. And Senator Feinstein is outraged

Maty

Didn't someone once say ...

...it was about 'government of the people by the people for the people'?

Given that the USA has moved pretty far from that, shouldn't those pinko commie sentiments be redacted, and history revised to show that Abe Lincoln really said 'If you have nothing to hide you have noting to fear.'

Insecure hipsters with BEARD ENVY spur facial hair transplant craze

Maty

shaving

Ah yes, I vaguely remember shaving. Something that happened between puberty and leaving school. Then I grew a beard and have kept it ever since.

I'm often bewildered by why men shave. Is it to attract women by looking more like them? It can't be because they enjoy spending time and money removing facial hair. And why do some men religiously remove the hair from their faces, but panic when it goes from the top of their heads?

Being bald with a neat(ish) grey beard, in the morning I run a wet flannel over the top of my head, and a brush through the beard, and I'm groomed for the day. Simples.

Muslim clerics issue fatwa banning the devout from Mars One 'suicide' mission

Maty

Re: This is rather sad

'If you know a bit of astronomy you'll also know that most of the major stars have Arabic names. All catalogued by Muslim scholars when most of Europe was throwing rocks at Romans.'

I'll give you Aledbaran. On the other hand, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Bootes, Betelgeuse, Antares, Canis Major, Sirius, Ursa Major and Minor, Rigel, Upsilon Andromedae, and Zeta Orionis are Greek or Latin. And Polaris too.

'A lot of minor stars' have Arabic names perhaps. But the major ones were cataloged by the classical Greeks and Romans.I may not know much astronomy, but I can catch the whiff of hyperbole.

Angela Merkel: Let US spies keep their internet. The EU will build its own

Maty

Any EU data network that includes Britain will automatically be plugged into the US spy system via the 5 Eyes agreement.

To be cynical, I'd paraphrase Angela as saying 'How dare the US spy on our citizens? We can do that for ourselves!'

Over the last decade the cold, dead hand of government has been slowly closing over the internet. This is just another brick in the wall.

Twitterers rally round #CensoredUK - to demand more porn

Maty

false assumption?

The basic assumption here is that this block is to protect the kids.

Well, 'the kids' have had pretty much unrestricted access to porn for almost 20 years now. Can anyone point to a definitive study that shows harm being done? Given that a wave of debauchery has failed to sweep the nation, I think we can safely assume this is not about protecting the kids, but about the government taking control of what we see and hear.

Two million TERRIBLE PASSWORDS stolen by malware attackers

Maty

Oh, and BTW

If your password can't be cracked in less than a million tries it SHOULD be secure.

If a site allows more than one login attempt every five seconds per account or a total of more than ten failed login attempts on that account, then the person who set up that website should be fired with extreme prejudice.

Maty

dilbert

Pointy-haired Boss: My password box just shows asterisks

Dogbert: So make your password six asterisks

Pointy-Haired Boss: I hope I can remember that ...

There's the problem in a nutshell

NSA spied on 'radicalisers' porn surfing so as to discredit them, reveals Snowden

Maty

Re: I thought the usual method was

I'll take that bet.

Neither the Romans, nor the Sassanians et al had cameras.

More to the point, Roman males happily screwed around outside marriage without public opprobrium. It was just married ladies who were meant to be good. So any Roman caught in flagrante delicto might just order a commemorative bas-relief or two with no shame at all.

Romance is dead: Part-time model slings $1.5bn SUEBALL at Match.com

Maty

Re: Slightly obvious flaw in the plan

er .... this is where the 'scammer' bit comes in. To get that first date the mugu has to pay for his/her would-be beloved's air fare from [wherever] because the scammer has a 'temporary financial problem'.

For example, there's a small industry that extracts cash from lonely American women who fondly believe they are sending it to some Tom Cruise lookalike squaddie in Afghanistan with whom they will one day be united.

If I were the lawyer, I'd focus on the fact that Match.com seems to allow profiles for women living in the USA to be set up from ips in Nigeria and Russia. This might be construed as wilful negligence. INAL but there is such a thing as a 'duty of care' to customers.

Undercover BBC man exposes Amazon worker drone's daily 11-mile trek

Maty

I knew a guy with a job like that - he worked in a records office and walked about eight miles a day. He loved it. His plan was to 'walk around the world'. He'd calculate his progress on a map, and would get books about the places he was 'walking through' and once even went on a holiday to south-eastern France because visiting it in his head had been so pleasant.

When I knew him he'd 'done' Europe and Turkey and was planning his trip through the Middle East to India.

There is no heaven or hell, but people make it so ...

Privacy warriors haul NSA into court, demand swift end to mass call snooping

Maty

"Section 215 allows authorities to collect business records if they are related to an investigation of terrorist activity."

This is what you get when you legislate in a hurry. With an intelligence agency, the reaction is 'Oh wow! Let's collect everyone's business records and investigate them for terrorist activity.'

When you get complaints that this totally subverts the original legislation, assume your investigations had a chilling effect on terrorist plans and blithely announce that your investigations 'prevented X* terrorist attacks'.

(*Where X is a random number multiplied by the number of zeros in your budget.)

Canadian Vultures shave bare for winter

Maty
Pint

Current snowfall so far today in the mountains of British Columbia: 15cm and rising. I'm keeping all my facial fur right where it is.

And that pint's a Fernie Caboose!

Galaxy is CRAMMED with EARTH-LIKE WORLDS – also ALIENS (probably)

Maty

Re: @AC

'I don't think the rest of us should have to Google words ...'

I don't think that people using 'Google' as a verb have any right to complain about neologisms. And there's definitely something ironical about 'English that is only used in the UK'?

Facebook fans fuel faggots firestorm

Maty

Try telling a German that you saw a vixen in the mist.

He will not immediately think of a rural morning.

Want to keep the users happy? Don't call them users for a start

Maty

Users lie

Because they don't want to admit they opened that dodgy email of Miley twerking, because they spilled coffee all over the keyboard when you warned them that would happen, because they *know* they shouldn't have deleted that file and now claim that the computer 'just did it', because they were meant to file that report yesterday and 'the system lost it'.

The average user (yes, they use the system so they're users. Like people who drive cars are drivers. Get over it) the average user with a problem does not think 'how can I supply the sysadmin with enough information to fix this problem?' S/he thinks 'how can I get this issue fixed so that I don't look bad or stupid?'

Nevertheless it's a good idea to be polite to the average user, because if you have arranged the system to that it's possible for one of them to actually screw up something other than their own data, you darn well should be apologizing.

Only a merciful BULLET can really save a RHINO, say Texas hunters

Maty

Re: Conclusion

'If they are willing to splash that amount of cash to destroy something animate, rare, violent, sociopathic and unique then they may as well kill each other.'

Except something unique is one of a kind. So killing 'each other' is hard to arrange without parallel universes or something.

Feline OVERLORDS ditch camera-toting human servants, film selfie vids

Maty

Catsnbirds.

I've always loved that simple cartoon that shows just a few feathers lying on the grass. The caption is 'The Early Cat'.

Getting worried, Assange? WikiLeaks spaffs out 'insurance' info

Maty
Headmaster

A really, really pedantic correction

'In the ancient world, such a tactic was known as a Parthian Shot, after the ancient Persian army's tactic of feigning retreat and then launching a volley of arrows. '

No it wasn't. A Parthian shot was one fired over the tail of the horse while the horseman was retreating. Furthermore, the army in question was Parthian (the name is a hint). The ancient Persians - Achaemenids before the Parthians, and Sassanian afterwards - didn't 'feign retreat and then launch a volley of arrows'. When fighting Romans, their light horse tended to keep out of range of the heavy infantry while firing arrows all the time.

PS Maybe you were thinking of Ovid? 'cui rugis uterum Lucina notauit, ut celer auersis utere Parthus equis. (If childbirth's seamed your belly with wrinkles, then offer a rear engagement, Parthian style.)

Ovid Ars Amatoria 3.786

Guardian lets UK spooks trash 'Snowden files' PCs to make them feel better

Maty

Still think Britain is a democracy?

British spooks seize tech from Snowden journo's boyfriend at airport

Maty

Re: He was lucky :-(

"Politicians are not born. They are excreted."

Not disagreeing with the sentiment, but I doubt Cicero said it. You'll find the quote all over the net - but never with a reference, and seldom in Latin (and with Aristotle and Zeno as alternative sources).

In Cicero's day there was no word for 'politician' - a man of a certain status did politics, but he also did jurisprudence and military command. The 'professional politician' is a product of modern toilets.

Violent Hamlet 'bard' by British Library Wi-Fi filters

Maty

I'm surprised that the BL even has wi-fi. Won't be long before someone accuses them of rotting children's brains with their evil microwaves and gets it banned altogether.

The UK is progressively 'protecting' itself into a straitjacket.

'Look, give us Snowden' - this Friday's top US-Russia talks revealed

Maty

" he should be returned to the United States as soon as possible where he will be accorded full due process and protections," press secretary Jay Carney said."

In other news Private Bradley Manning's prison sentence has been reduced to 90 years.

Is Carney stupid, or does he think the rest of the world is?

Chubby-chasing sex trolls ran me offline, says fashion blogger

Maty

Re: Isn't there an IP issue here?

'Technically yes, but unless they are making money or she can prove a loss in court there is not much that can be done.'

DMCA takedown notice doesn't just get the pic removed. If you get all legal on the hosting service, then depending on where the server is located you might get the entire site offline.

Depends how vindictive you are feeling.

Maty
Paris Hilton

Re: Welcome to the real world, kid.

Agreed, females get a lot of crap from FPS gamers. I play a lot and I've seen it.

OTOH whenever I play a new game I always start with a cute female char and a gender-neutral name. Because as a male char, if I screw up through inexperience I get a torrent of abuse as a 'fuckin noob'. My female char gets some kindly guy talking me through where I went wrong, or even mentoring me through the next level.

Once I'm up to speed on how the game works, I retire cutie and go back to the bald git I usually play. Gender in FPS works both ways.

Microsoft to Google: Please remove us from internet

Maty

Re: Comedic, as it is..

My dictionary says that when 'either' is used as a conjunction it is used before the first of two - or sometimes three or more - specified alternatives introduced by 'or'.

That's the Longman 2003 Standard English dictionary.

Can you give the source for your claim that 'either' is exclusively used with only two alternatives? Either you have a source, or you were making an unwarranted assumption, or this is plain grammar Nazi nastiness. Do let us know which.

PHWOAR! Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, Prime Minister

Maty

Really?

'Children are getting far more access to pornography than they used to, and it's not doing them any good at all. '

Really? Kids have been accessing a largely unfiltered internet for the past two decades, and I've yet to see a wave of debauchery sweeping the country.

So we have an unfalsifiable statement - i.e. hot air. I can claim with equal justification that 'Children are getting far more access to pornography than they used to, and it's doing them plenty good. ' They now know where the bits go, don't ask mum any embarrassing questions, and young teenagers can work off their frustrations on the .jpg tribe.

As for 'an impossible model of perfection' either a) you've not watched that much porn or b) you also want to ban all advertising.

From Russia with no love: Prez Putin dubs Ed Snowden 'unwanted gift'

Maty

Thing is ...

The story has become about Snowden, not the leaks. All the fuss about the messenger has detracted from the message.

In the USA at present, part of the system operates via secret legislation overseen by secret courts. Anyone telling what the secret legislation has authorized faces extreme penalties, even if that legislation is constitutionally dubious.

This is 'government by the people'? THAT'S what we should be worrying about. To some extent terrorists have already succeeded in overthrowing democracy.

PM writes ISPs' web filter ads for them - and it must say 'default on'

Maty

this isn't about protecting kids

It's about getting control of the net.

Of course the current idea won't work. But now we've accepted that our web usage should be 'filtered' (read 'censored'), the govt can 'tweak' the system till it has Chinese-style control.

Legislation has been steadily working in that direction for years.

US states: Google making ad money on illegal YouTube vids

Maty

Why just Google?

Take a look ar Scribd.com - the world's largest repository of copyright violating texts. Users put other people's material online and Scribd get a cut of every stolen text sold. I've seen hundred dollar textbooks copied and sold for $5.

You can either have unmonitored uploads, or you can profit from the material. Doing both encourages unethical behavior.

Play the Snowden flights boardgame: Avoid going directly to Jail

Maty

Re: I just listened to BBC R4 The MeeJah Show

Don't get carried away by the 'once in a decade D-notice' - many magazines and newspapers routinely inquire whether something they are considering publishing will attract a D-notice, and if advised it would, they don't publish.

Self-censorship.

Young blokes blinded by video-game addiction: THE FACTS

Maty

The difference

Real life != computer games.

For example, xBox war simulations are about killing the enemy. Real-life warfare is about finding comfortable boots.

Boffins' brilliant plan: CONCRETE COMPUTERS

Maty

However ...

Since the designs for this wonder machine remain theoretical, the concrete computer is abstract?

Windows 8 'sales' barely half as good as Microsoft claims

Maty

Re: Sporking hell

Um ... there's a reason you shouldn't call a spade a shovel. A spade is for digging stuff, a shovel is for moving it.

Care to re-think your analogy?

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Maty

Re: A few points of order

'America did not exist'. Um yes it did, it was - and is - that big rocky thing you sail into on the way to the Orient. The United States of America did not exist, but that's not the same thing.

Climate-cooling effect 'stronger than volcanoes' is looking solid

Maty

the same two questions ..

Every time this is debated, I ask the same two plaintive questions.

How much has global temperature risen in the last two decades?

How does this compare with the thermal radiation of the moon and Mars?

If the moon and Mars are reflecting more heat, then global warming is due to solar activity. If they are not and temperatures on Earth are indeed rising, then it's probably us. Yet AGW debates always seem to start without this basic information.

Veiny green 'scum' meteorite may be first visitor from Mercury

Maty

Visitor?

If this meteorite is just visiting, I'd be very interested in its plans for the return journey. Otherwise, it's an immigrant.

I for one, welcome our green scummy Mercurians, however veiny they may be,