* Posts by onefang

1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017

You're alone in a room with the Windows 10 out-of-the-box apps. What do you do?

onefang

Re: Not turn them in to apps.

"then a simple ‘apt-get install mc’ will get you the best text editor available."

FTFY, you had all those extra letters in the packages name.

"I found that within Windows 10’s subsystem for Linux, Ubuntu was the most reliable."

I think that's the distro Windows 10 Linux subsystem was built around, so that's no surprise.

onefang

Re: What would I do?

"Emacs droolz, vi roolz!"

Your vi needs a spell checker.

onefang

Re: Source of Little Horrors

I'd invite Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella into my office, lock them in with the computer, and let them battle it out. The survivor gets to be Microsoft CEO. A mean green mother from outer space probably couldn't do any worse at running Microsoft than the other three.

onefang

Decimation by defenestration.

Then I'd retire and write a book about it, Decimation by Defenestration for Dummies.

onefang

Re: A/B testing

And then update everyone with the least popular.

onefang

I'd open source the little horrors.

Remember when Apple's FaceTime stopped working years ago? Yeah, that was deliberate

onefang
Trollface

Re: re: Um. Calm the f*ck down....

Do none of you know how to properly spell "fuck"?

30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days

onefang
Joke

Re: PKarc..

"Why do I have to *wait* for Microsoft Word when I am *typing*? WTF is it doing?"

Sending every keystroke to Microsofts AI servers, to be approved, (in)corrected, and recorded, before being sent back to your screen.

onefang

Re: Screens

"When I started, proper data input/coding used optical recognition cards (punched cards were expensive) - These looked like punched cards but you filled boxes in with a soft pencil."

I used those to, in high school, using APL. Sent off to the local government computer centre. I got cocky, bought a Rotring ink pen of suitable size, specifically for marking those cards. If you're gonna use a write only language, then you don't make the sort of mistakes where you have to write it again, coz then you gotta be able to read it.

onefang
Thumb Down

Re: "Ooff, that hurt. Citation please."

"developers have been brainwashed into hating Pascal"

I have an (un)reasonable hatred of any language beginning with the letter P, and I include Ruby as an honourary member of that group.

onefang

Re: Yellow and blue

White text on a black background is what this old codger likes. I read the web that way to.

iFixit engineers have an L of a time pulling apart Apple's iPhone XS

onefang
Coat

Re: Patented battery design

"I'm sure it could have been designed with a rectangular battery, but where's the fun future profit in that?"

I guess they couldn't get the patent on rectangular batteries, with rounded corners.

onefang

It's notches all the way down.

Curiosity's computer silent on science, baffling boffins

onefang

"But does Curiosity count its birthdays in Earth years or Mars years?"

Not to mention one giant leap years.

onefang

The dog ate it's homework. That's Curiosity's excuse, and it's sticking to it.

Spent your week box-ticking? It can't be as bad as the folk at this firm

onefang
Coat

Friday. Tick!

Software blunder. Tick!

Clueless manglement making things worse. Tick!

Beancounters ruining things. Tick!

Underpaid staff working too hard on pointless shit. Tick!

Well known company that shall not be named. Tick!

Ticks all my boxes, and it didn't take me all week.

Got any ecsta-sea? Boffins get octopuses high on MDMA – for science, duh

onefang

"Standard procedure for a come down is to gather round and watch BBC's Blue Planet. Dunno what the octopus equivilent would be."

Watching reality TV, with all those funny humans acting oddly.

onefang

"Some began breathing very quickly or slowly, changing colour rapidly"

They where just trying to create their own light show. Should have shipped them off to a rave, they would have been popular.

No, that Sunspot Solar Observatory didn't see aliens. It's far more grim

onefang
Black Helicopters

Re: The Register's link doesn't have the whole story

"If their goal was to allay suspicion for whatever alien conspiracy they wanted to cover up, waiting so long to explain the cover story certainly didn't help!"

Ah, but if you wait that long, lots of conspiracy theories will popup all by themselves. Then the real one can easily hide in all the noise.

onefang
Alien

"No, there weren't any green-skinned people."

How does El Reg know, have they seen the child porn in question? The janitor found a spare telescope, accidentally pointed it in the direction of some green skinned aliens bathroom, just after the alien had taken their monthly rejuvenation treatment. The poor innocent naked senior alien looked under aged, so the FBI took no chances. Don't want our new alien friends thinking we are a planet full of pedos.

What's that smell? Oh, it's Newegg cracked open by card slurpers

onefang
FAIL

Re: 2FA

"some banks do carry out ad-hoc security checks for unusual transactions, for example phoning the customer."

My bank blocks those sorts of transactions, then doesn't tell me. I know this coz it blocked a couple of my own transactions, then didn't tell me. I had to go into a nearby branch and ask WTF is going on.

Garbage collection – in SPAAACE: Net snaffles junk in first step to clean up Earth's orbiting litter

onefang

Re: Partial solution

Bruce Willis and a large broom.

onefang

Re: Getting good at littering

"(none of the OTHER animals are willing to do this, except maybe dung beetles)"

Have you not seen dogs eating cat poo?

Holy macaroni! After months of number-crunching, behold the strongest material in the universe: Nuclear pasta

onefang

Re: Nuclear pasta

That was a tasteless troll.

onefang

Re: Kilometres and parsecs

It's how many nuclear linguini's you need to eat while doing the Kessel run. That's hard work, mans gotta keep his energy levels up.

onefang

Re: Pastafarian

Finally! We have scientific proof of a religion! That makes it the One Tru religion! All the others can suck my meaty balls.

onefang

Re: Units?

Dunno, but that's gonna be damn hard to bite through.

onefang

Re: What about degenerate matter quark stars?

'"pizza with pineapple". It's roughly the same origin, but it's degenerate.'

I actually like pineapple on pizza. I even add it to meat eaters pizzas.

Oz government rushes its anti-crypto legislation into parliament

onefang

Re: Interesting take on the legislation

"There's only one possible safe option. Refuse to serve any web traffic from Australia,"

As an Aussie, there's several reasons why long ago I decided that putting my server in Europe was a good idea.

Apple hands €14.3bn in back taxes to reluctant Ireland

onefang

If Ireland doesn't want this €14.3bn, I'll be happy to take it off their hands. For a small fee.

Revealed: The billionaire baron who’ll ride Elon’s thrusting erection to the Moon and back

onefang

"So it'll either carry 100 people and the hardware to keep them alive, or just the hardware to keep them alive. Still in high level design phase?"

You missed an option, it could just carry the 100 people. They'll just have to hold their breath until they get to Mars, and maybe carry a Mars Bar in a pocket, in case they get hungry.

onefang
Coat

Re: I watched the broadcast

I dunno, musky nipples just smells bad to me.

onefang
Coat

Shirley it should be named Heart of Fucking Gold?

Who ate all the PII? Not the blockchain, thankfully

onefang

There's another way of keeping PII off any blockchain, don't put it there in the first place. Simples.

Biz! Formerly! Known! As! Yahoo! Settles! Data! Breach! Cases! To! The! Tune! Of! $47m!

onefang

Re: Is it me?

That's why they change their names, the stink stays associated with the old name. But this is an entirely different branding, er I mean company, so no stink.

onefang

Re: Altaba?

"This is actually not Yahoo. This is a company to which Yahoo used to belong, before it was sold to Verizon."

There goes my plan to suggest it should be A!taba.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. Oh, that's just the sound of compromised logins waiting to ruin your day

onefang

Re: Every time I see an article like this

That's become a staple of commentards on these articles. It's too late to lock that staple, er stable, the horse has already bolted, likely coz someone applied a battery to their sensitive bits.

I'm not so sure any of the above is correct.

onefang

Re: Optional

"The second issue is that I wouldn't be able to be certain if the fingers were cut off by themselves as part of the log-in, or by criminals trying to defeat my system."

It's early, I've not had brekky yet, or I would have thought of this on my first response.

Have the users smear a one time code onto the a nearby wall in the photo with the blood from their freshly cut off finger / toe. Their will be two codes, one represents "Some criminal cut of my finger / toe.", the other "Everything is fine, send pizza / finger food." (depending on how hungry they are).

onefang

Re: Optional

"First of all it would limit the number of possible log-ins because they'd run out of fingers to type with (and worse, it would be fewer than ten, because as the number of fingers is reduced, their typing would diminish - long before they actually run out)."

Start with their toeprints, and work up to their fingerprints. Has the advantage of lasting longer, and they can continue to type through most of it. Hospitals collect footprints of new born babies as identification, so it's a proven method.

onefang
Coat

Re: Optional

You are correct, that is totally cracked. Must be some fine crack you get in your neck of the woods.

Git it girl! Academy tries to tempt women into coding with free course

onefang

"And before we know it, teaching "IT" will be back to learning to powderpoint, werd and eggsell."

FTFY

US govt concedes that you can indeed f**k Nazis online: Domain-name swear ban lifted

onefang

Re: Bottom hidden by fog

So is it now a Four Mile Bottom, or an Eight Mile Bottom?

Euro bureaucrats tie up .eu in red tape to stop Brexit Brits snatching back their web domains

onefang

"Australia has a more reasonable approach if you have a trademark registered in Australia then you can have an Australian tld."

Been a while since I looked at the Aussie rules, but I think that only applies to .com.au, the other .au ones have different rules. Fairly sure you can't get trademark.gov.au for example, unless you are an actual government body. I seem to recall the Aussie authorities where contemplating opening up the rules a bit, so you could get trademark.au, but don't think that's possible right now. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

How an augmented reality tourist guide tried to break my balls

onefang

Re: "I had a meeting in Norwich (someone has to)."

"Perhaps he meant that his balls were of recent descent?"

I suspect Dabbsy's balls dropped some time ago.

A basement of broken kit, zero budget – now get the team running

onefang

"Let me be very clear, if anyone says there is no budget some one in the chain of command usually more than one is trying to give there boss a blow job"

Or charities that run on donations and grants.

onefang

Re: I had a sort of similar experience

"you can't legally fire someone because they're black, but you can legally fire someone because they wear their hair in a ponytail."

It's what I have been saying for some time. The bigots can't discriminate based on the old traditional reasons, being the wrong colour, the wrong religion, or the wrong gender. So now they are grasping at the straws they can discriminate against, fashion. Ponytails, not wearing a suit, being barefoot, a male having long fingernails. Though some of those end up being "the wrong gender", coz you are the wrong gender to have a pony tail, long fingernails, or to get away with not wearing a business suit.

onefang

Re: HMSO

My very first paying job. After having done a weeks work experience at the local government computer centre, they hired three of us during the school holidays. Our task was to work from the short spec handed us, write COBOL routines to validate particular input fields. Not a particular onerous task, and like someone mentioned above, I got curious about the various scripting languages available on the system, and automated it. So I generally had my days work finished in the first hour, and spent the rest of the time writing games on their hardware.

As for automating PHBs, I think the wrong question is being asked, how do you automate away a PHB? Simply automating their jobs leaves them with more time to cause more damage.

The internet – not as great as we all thought it was going to be, eh?

onefang

"As this is a very small sample set compared to the millions of people who use the internet."

I suspect the number of people who use the Internet might be closer to billions than millions.

I have no idea why someone downvoted you, have an upvote.

Kronos crims go retro, Apple builds cop portal, Swiss cheesed over Russian hack bid, etc

onefang

Or it might be a way to take control of your own Intel Management Engine, and either kill it completely, or install your own operating system on it.

onefang

"Hopefully those cops can track down the crooks charging $1,500 for a phone."

I don't think they have to search far once they are on the Apple police portal to find those crooks.