* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Edward Snowden skips into Russia as Putin grants him asylum

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Unless a Latin American country grants him assylum, I doubt we'll hear anything more from him. Russia has made it clear that they expect him to keep his mouth shut, and at present he doesn't have any other offers of a safe home. Sad. It appears that there is no longer anywhere even slightly civilised that allows one to say things that the USA government doesn't want you to say.

If Russia allows him freedom to travel and an exit visa, it is now at least possible for him to reach Latin America without passing through US allies' territory. (Travelling Eastwards through Russia and then across the Pacific).

Happy 20th birthday, Windows NT 3.1: Microsoft's server outrider

Nigel 11

Misleading

Windows NT 3.1 was the biggest remake of the Windows family until Windows 8 came along

True, if you are looking "under the hood" i.e. at the kernel. (But note, the Win 8 kernel is still derived from NT). However, the kernel is not the first place most Windows users look. The other revolution was replacement of the Windows 3.1 GUI by the Windows 95 / 98 / 2000 / XP GUI, which pretty much defined a (small-w) windows desktop until Windows 8 was dumped on us.

NT 3.5 (at the time it shipped) was unbelievably stable, but still ran the 3.1 desktop. (It was basically NT 3.1 with most of the bugs fixed). NT 4.0 ran the newer desktop, which had required driving a coach and horses through the carefully designed VMS-like security model of NT 3.x. The system's architect, David Cutler, formerly architect of VMS at Digital, left Microsoft around the NT 4.0 release, possibly because of Microsoft putting image above security considerations. Microsoft has probably been paying the price ever since!

How did Microsoft get to be a $1.2bn phone player? Hint: NOT Windows Phone

Nigel 11
Devil

Re: Extortion - time for the oft to get involved in the UK?

Ten dollars, or even fifteen, per smartphone, is hardly serious distortion of a market where customers pay twice that per month.

The far greater Microsoft monopoly abuse scandal is the way they have made it all but impossible, for very many years, to buy a PC and reclaim the full cost of the Microsoft Windows license which isn't wanted by people who run Linux. Yes, it' s possible to buy a PC without Windows in a few places, but it's hardly ever any cheaper, let alone as much cheaper as the known cost of a Windows OEM license! £50 per £400 PC is a far greater "tax" than $15 on a phone, and has far less justification.

Panasonic claims world's first ReRAM-equipped product

Nigel 11

Memristor rewrite-ability is effective infinity. It's targetted at replacing RAM, i.e. word addressable, with the added benefit of being non-volatile.

Price per Gbyte will start high and fall as the technology and semiconductor processes are prefected. It'll probably replace Flash within a decade unless there's some problem that hasn't yet surfaced in the labs. The more interesting thing is whether it'll ever be able to replace big disks. (i.e. multi-terabyte for under £100)

Jurors start stretch in the cooler for Facebooking, Googling the accused

Nigel 11

Re: Guilty by accusation

And you have eleven who think he deserves a fair trial. Or six. Or three. If as few as three won't convict, he's re-tried or acquitted.

One person who argues for an acquittal based on the evidence rather than prejudice is likely to be enough. Fiction, but a great classic movie: "Twelve Angry Men" has this plot.

Nigel 11

Wouldn't the standard of critical thought on evidence here terrify you?

No, because it would have to be 10/12 of the jury like that before it made any difference. This case proves that the system works. The "bad apple" on the jury has ended up in the dock.

Nigel 11

Re: Worrying

Not worried.

This is why you are tried by twelve jurors, not one or three. You'd have to be extremely unlucky to have ten out of twelve such idiots on your jury. Fewer means, at worst, a mis-trial. More likely, one good (wo)man and true on your jury will denounce the idiot(s) to the judge as soon as (s)he becomes aware of them.

There's a case to be made for ensuring that a minority of a jury are technically competent (for example, accountants in fraud trials; scientists where forensic evidence is complex). Maybe 4/12 of them. Never a majority, let alone all. Selecting such a group is likely to select for correlated prejudice.

BOFH: Don't be afraid - we won't hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Re: Are ink jets that difficult?

Never buy a cheap ink-jet printer. With these it's true that they are made to sell expensive ink cartridges.

I have good experience of HP Officejets in the £80 - £120 bracket. I have several K550, K5400, 8000 models with 25,000 pages printed - some over 50,000 pages. Average print-out at time scrapped probably 35,000 pages.That's a per-page cost of 0.4p down to 0.2p, which is small compared to the ink cost, which in turn is lower than the running cost of any colour laser printer I know of. Plus colour quality is higher. Minus operating speed in duplex mode is slower, because of delay for ink to dry on one side of page before the other is printed. Latest HP8100 looks good though it'll be a couple of years before I can be sure.

Although not cheap ink-jets, they are cheap enough to treat as consumable when they do eventually fail. You can't say that of any colour laser printer that has comparable running costs.

No experience of other makes, so read nothing except their relative hostility to Linux into that omission.

WD: Enjoying our $630m, Seagate? Let's ruin your day with our results

Nigel 11
Meh

YMMV

And I've just finished recovering a server that crashed overnight when a WD RAID edition disk turned into a brick "just like that".

I don't hold this against WD. I do wonder whether Seagate are more honest in revealing SMART data that encourages one to replace a drive BEFORE it becomes a brick. Or maybe they are less reliable. Not enough data.

Unless one is Google with tens of thousands of drives to draw conclusions from, it's pure speculation. Also every drive one ever buys is in effect a prototype. By the time five years have passed and it's proven itself as reliable as you'd have wished, it's also long-obsolete, and I very much doubt whether the reliability performance of (say) WD1600AAJS drives tells you anything at all about the ones they are shipping today. I work on the assumption that every manufacturer is likely to ship bad batches from time to time, and to design "lemons" with poor endurance from time to time. Concentrate on the backups. It's data that's valuable, the disks are cheap in comparison.

Divers nearly DEVOURED by HUNGRY SEA BEASTS

Nigel 11
Headmaster

Re: Whales knew they were there ...

I'll accept the literal meaning of translucent is light-specific. I thought extending it to how a whale's sensorium probably depicts a man was obvious. I was going to say "transparent" but that implies close to "invisible", which is completely wrong.

Nigel 11
Happy

Whales knew they were there ...

Whales and other cetaceans see by sonar, so they surely knew that the divers were there.

In sonar, you are translucent. So the whales can see your internal organs working. If they're intelligent enough, they probably have you pegged as a funny sort of dolphin with a hard thing on your back. If they have a sense of fun, they can see exactly how much they've startled / scared you by how much your heart speeds up.

My guess, those whales knew *exactly* what they were doing!

MYSTERY of 19th-century DEAD WALRUS found in London graveyard

Nigel 11

non-Lovecraftian explanation?

London Zoo had asked for a very large grave to bury a walrus in. The gravediggers didn't know what a walrus was, except one who said it "you know, grey skin, long tusks". So they dug an elephant-sized grave. Lots of space left when they found out what a walrus was, so they gave a day's worth of paupers a free burial at London zoo's expense. Man with hole in head? He'd fallen off a fourth floor scaffolding onto the cast-iron railings below.

Royston cops' ANPR 'ring of steel' BREAKS LAW, snarls watchdog

Nigel 11

I can't see any justification for the police recording *any* ANPR data long-term, whether they are recording all routes out of an area, or just one. (Short-term capture, to check against a database so un-taxed or un-insured drivers can be stopped a mile up the road, is fine by me. Longer than a day, is not! )

Bear in mind that a criminal with something to hide, can clone the plates of another car of the same make, model and colour. For the same reason, recorded ANPR data can't be used as evidence. It proves what letters were on a plate, not what car the plate was attached to.

WAR ON PORN: UK flicks switch on 'I am a pervert' web filters

Nigel 11
Boffin

Re: I like how they state .....

Yes, they don't have a clue about the difference between correlation and causation. In the 1950s correlation famously "proved" (not!) that watching TV caused lung cancer. TV sets of that epoch gave out quite a lot of X-rays, percentage of households with a TV was rising fast, lung cancer was rising fast, so not a silly suggestion. But the real culprit was increasing affluence causing increasing cigarette consumption as well as increased TV sales.

With porn there is not even any correlation. The availability of porn has surely risen at least tenfold in the last decade. The incidence of ghastly assaults on children has not. Probably it has not increased at all, once one allows for increased reporting. The same is likely true of rape. So this appears to be evidence that perverts are NOT created by watching porn, and that the money which is about to be wasted by ISPs would be much better used to increase funding for child protection and victim support agencies.

UK gov's smart meter dream unplugged: A 'colossal waste of cash'

Nigel 11
Alert

Re: Lets do maths

Each meter costs £265. There are 53 million households according to the article which need to be fitted. so the total is £265 x 53,000,000 = £14 Billion.

How much electricity is this going to save?

Lots. You and I, the energy consumers, are going to be paying for the meters, through higher electricirty prices. Those who are having trouble paying their bills, will have to cut back on something, and that something may well include electricity usage. Also it gives them the ability to cut off anyone who is in arrears with their bills far more easily. Also it gives them the ability to inflict a power cut on most of us, without the opprobium that goes with inflicting one on those for whom a power cut might be life-threatening.

Probably not the answer you wanted? What, me, a cynic?

Curiosity team: Massive collision may have killed Red Planet

Nigel 11

Impact? Isn't lower G and solid core sufficient?

Mars is less massive than Earth. Mars has a negligible magnetic field compared to Earth. If the latter has been true for a long time, isn't that sufficient to explain how the sun's solar wind stripped all the water from Mars? Note, water vapour is the lightest gas in the atmosphere. Methane (a likely major component of Earth's early atmosphere) is even lighter.

So do they really need to postulate a catastrophe? (Other than the freezing of whatever liquid/magnetic core Mars might once have had, which would have been a catastrophe for Mars life when taking the long view).

Nigel 11

Re: Gussie

Out of interest is there a simple proof that you couldn't make an achiral protein-building system? Is there a level of complexity of carbon chemistry at which chirality is unavoidable and below which there's an insufficient range of possible structures?

Sort of, and yes. A chiral molecule is any molecule with four non-identical sub-groups bonded to one Carbon atom. (There are also lots of other sources of chirality, but that one will do to start with). So, almost any complex carbon-based molecule will have a non-identical mirror-imaged form.

The more interesting question is whether mirror-life is likely to have evolved elsewhere in the universe. Life based on much the same building blocks as ours, but all components the mirror image of ours. Classical chemistry provides no reason why not. Quantum physics reveals that the weak nuclear force is itself chiral, and that there's a tiny difference in stability between Earthlife amino acids and their mirror-world alternatives. It's only about one part in 10^24, but there's a tipping-point in that L bonds stably with L, D bonds stably with D, and mixxed amino-acid polymers are much less stable than pure-L or pure-D ones. Ours is the mort stable. Evolutionary coin-toss, or inevitability?.

All speculation until we find some other instances of life. May be a long wait.

Former CIA and NSA head says Huawei spies for China

Nigel 11

Re: "How do I know China would use their major telecomms mfg as a trojan horse into systems"

Trouble is that even if you are using open-source software, the hardware is closed. For a one-household linux router, maybe there's not enough space in the hardware to hide a backdoor. But in a corporate backbone hub, there's plenty.

Apple patents touch display that KNOWS YOU by your fingers

Nigel 11

Re: What if you don't have fingerprints?

Canadian oilfield workers can lose their fingerprints permanently. It's caused by repeatedly getting frostbitten fingertips, in turn caused by removing gloves in winter to do something fiddly, and accidentally touching a metal surface onto which one's finger-tip will instantly freeze.

Criminals have been known to attempt the same using a freezer. I suspect a freezer isn't as cold as outdoors in a Canadian winter.

Nigel 11

Re: Amputating fingers

did they have it stuffed and put it on a key fob?

Gruesome thought! Maybe some bad guys do just that. More likely they use the amputated digit to drive the car to the criminals garage, where the car is dismantled for spares.

Life is cheap in SA(*). People count themselves lucky if a carjacker leaves them alive, instead of shooting them dead for a more certain getaway.

(*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

Firearm-homicide rate UK 0.04 USA 3.6 SA 17.0

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

Re: Not that bad

Mercedes briefly marketed a car that you unlocked with your fingers (in SA). That was until carjackers started amputating the driver's finger when they robbed him of his car ....

I am never going to allow a part of my body to be a key to an object of value!

Why data storage technology is pretty much PERFECT

Nigel 11
Boffin

Re: Make those bits work harder?

Analog recording is very much working against that fundamental property of the media, not in harmony with it.

To the extent that analogue tape recorders are in fact very crude digital recorders. The record head is fed with an ultrasonic signal that generates a stream of 1 and 0 bits on the tape. The Analog signal modulates this signal so that the 1 bits become wider or narrower on the tape compared to the 0 bits. The read head averages out the magnetisation of a few "bits" worth of tape, to retrieve the audio. A filter in the subsequent amplifier removes what little remains of the ultrasonic carrier after averaging.

The very earliest magnetic tape recorders didn't use the ultrasonic carrier. The technique was discovered accidentally, whem a component failure caused a parasitic oscillation to develop in the recording amplifier, and the fidelity of the recording became spectacularly better as a result!

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Re: Error correction isn't good enough nowadays.

So if you really don't ever want to lose data, you have to write and read the entire medium before you use it for real.

Amen to that.

Nigel 11

Re: Error correction isn't good enough nowadays.

HDD systems typically fail from mechanical failures but the underlying data is maintained and you can usually get someone to haul the data off the platters for enough money.

If "spend enough money" is not an option, always give ddrescue a chance! In my experience many drives fail soft: they report so many errors to an operating system that they look dead, but a utility that tries and tries over and over again in an intelligent way (as ddrescue does) will eventually retrieve all the data, or all but a very small fraction of the data.

Of course, you need backup, for the times that the drive does turn into a brick, just like that.

Also always keep an eye on the drives' SMART counters. In my experience many failures are flagged a long time in advance by an exponentially increasing number of reallocated blocks. I pre-emptively replace such drives, long before the error count hits the SMART failure threshold. It's the rate of increase that's the give-away, not the absolute number. I have one drive with a few hundred reallocated blocks from the first time it was written to, but that number hasn't increased by as much as one since then.

Nigel 11

Re: Error correction isn't good enough nowadays.

This is why you put extra checksums in things that really matter.

ZFS, for example, does end-to-end checksumming, so it'll spot when a disk drive has corrupted data, and recover using redundantly recorded data where that is available (always, for metadata). Because the ZFS checksums are done at the CPU, it'll also spot errors between the disk drives and the CPU ( a failing disk drive controller, a flaky memory controller).

If your filestore can't be relied upon to protect you, store SHA256 sums of the data in your files. You can't correct using an SHA256, but the chances of a data error getting past it is truly infinitessimal.

Brazilians strip Amazon of brazen .amazon gTLD grab bid

Nigel 11
WTF?

But why bother? Why should they care?

I guess there may be some ingnoramuses out there that think the best place to find information is by guessing domain names. (Good luck to them, they need all they can get.) The rest of us type the key words into Google etc. and in instants find (for example) http://heylady.net/2010/08/06/why-i-hate-amazon-and-will-never-ever-ever-buy-from-them-again/

Except for one thing, the internet could easily dispense with names and go back to numeric addresses. That one thing is the extra level of indirection, the advantages of which I don't need to explain to technical readers. Heck, if domain names were just a dressed-up integer incremented by seven for each new one, domain-mistype-squatting would become impossible as a pleasant side-effect. Tinyurl.com proves (by existing) that many people actually prefer to use short if meaningless names.

Nigel 11

Why on earth does amazon think a .amazon domain is even worth arguing about?

I type "amaz" into my browser and it auto-completes. (Like "ther" for this site, "goo" for google, etc.) And if I don't know a web address, "goo" will find it for me pdq.

Microsoft admits it's '18 months behind' with Windows 8 slabs

Nigel 11

Re: What took them so long?

And want to do SERIOUS serious work - get a desktop. (25 inch screen, or maybe two, proper full-depth keyboard).

Intel flogging Atoms for belated push into mobile market

Nigel 11

Re: Even holding market share is not enough

There's nothing stopping Intel from taking out an ARM License. Their process technology would mean that Intel-fabbed Arm would be the best of class.

However, they'd regard that as losing because they'd have to split the profit with ARM. They'd rather keep 100% of the profit, if they can.

It's a VHS / Betamax battle on a far greater scale. I don't care to pick a winner at present.

ACLU warns of mass tracking of US drivers by government spycams

Nigel 11

Re: The easy solution

No, they'd just give police cars a new number-plate on a weekly basis. Or give the police permission to clone someone else's plates, like they've been caught cloning dead babies' identities.

Nigel 11
FAIL

Bad guys break the rules!

What's really stupid is the assumption that criminals will obey the rules. In this case, that they'll display the valid number plate for the car in which they are travelling.

Those with something to hide will clone a plate from another car of the same make, model and colour. Or they'll register the car to a fake identity at a fake address. Or they'll buy a hire-car company so that they can travel in a "borrowed" hire-car and create a false paper trail after the event should they need to.

So mining the data won't catch anyone that we really want caught, unless they're stupid, in which case it'll just be an "evolutionary" pressure to breed smarter criminals. Yet the data is still stored, waiting for a malign individual to use it for criminal purposes, or for a malign government to use it for genocide.

Ad man: Mozilla 'radicals' and 'extremists' want to wreck internet economy

Nigel 11
Flame

Re: Ok holier-than-thou smartarses.

Plan B. Stop all intrusive advertizing. Work with Google so if I want to find out about your product, I can. Work on your product, so happy customers will recommend you to their friends. In particular, make sure that your post-sales sustomer support is A1. Nothing makes me more likely to buy than hearing from a trusted third party that when something went wrong, it was put right with an absolute minimum of hassle!

My philosophy is always to be a buyer, never to be a sellee. Any attempt to pressurize me into buying just annoys me. Charities that employ chuggers get written out of my will, if they were ever mentioned. Spam of any sort gets your organisation added to my buy-last list. And so on. You ought to be happy I can use Adblock-plus. If I had to mentally filter those adverts, a lot more of you would be on my mental do-not-touch-with-a-bargepole list!

I can think of an organisation that espouses most if not all of the above. It's called John Lewis. It's rather successful.

Nigel 11
Flame

Re: If Only...

""anti-business value system". I rather think he means open-source. If Adblock-plus didn't exist, I'd have to write it. If Mozilla didn't support plug-ins, I'd have to fork it.

If someone pasted adverts on your garden wall, you'd be right to be annoyed and the fly-poster would be breaking the law. Why is pasting adverts all over my screen any different? (Apart from some of them being malware-insertion attempts ... akin to pasting with toxin-laced glue? )

Once, someone wrote an app to sign up a spammer's home address to every source of physical junk snail-mail the algorithm could find. About a hundredweight per day! Not sure about the legalities, but burying the bastard in his own effluent is a lovely thought.

JPL wants to fire a laser at MARS!

Nigel 11

Re: Wow.

Light isn't really so fast. Old electronic engineering approximation is a foot per nanosecond (or 30cm). So for a 100GHz clock, that's 0.3mm per clock.

In practice with things like this you don't normally measure the exact arrival time of a pulse, you measure the phase of a modulation of a carrier wave. As someone noted above, this scheme has a lot in common with GPS and might be a very interesting way to observe and test general relativity.

BTW is Mars the best place for such an experiment? I would have thought that the (cold) dark side of Mercury might be more useful, because it's deeper in the Sun's gravity well and moving a lot faster. Maybe Mercury next?

Chinese police probe iPhone user's death by electrocution

Nigel 11

The other missing precaution

The other basic safety precaution that must have been lacking, was a mains supply wired though an RCCB!

Suggestion to the UK gomernment: that they scrap all the absurd PAT testing regulations for anything other than appliances that are ported on a frequent basis (vacuum cleaners etc). IF (and only if) all mains outlets in the area are wired through RCCBs. Or even make them compulsory, in exchange for scrapping the vastly more wasteful business of PAT testing every PC, printer, wall-wart PSU, charger, mains cable ....

STEVE BALLMER KILLS WINDOWS

Nigel 11

Re: "most of the places it's "selling" to are "downgrading" as soon as they unpack the hardware"

I'm sure someone in Microsoft has Windows activation statistics. Although it does appear as if the top-level management is refusing to look at them.

In days of yore, the couriers drew straws to decide who would bring the latest bad news to the attention of the tyrant. It was a dangerous job. In those days the messenger might well be literally shot or otherwise executed. The worst that can happen these days is rather less, but losing your job for being accurate about the Emperor's new clothes is still a possibility under the worst sort of management. Safer to stay quiet until asked?

(Lu-Tze quote about leaders, which applies equally to managers. "The second-best leader is respected, and the third-best is feared. The worst is hated. When the best leader's job is done, the people say 'we did it ourselves' " ).

Nigel 11

Re: Microsoft FAIL

There's a good chance that if YOU wrote it, you can run it under WINE on Linux. WINE has improved of late. Certainly worth a test. The problems seem to arise with things written by MS, or by big software houses with privileged access to interfaces that MS doesn't publish.

Nigel 11

Re: Workstations

The question should be "how is content going to be created ...."

That's things as humble as pages of text, web pages, spreadsheets, entering the data to a 'base.. You don't do any of those things well with a tablet. If your employer insists, you'll soon be visiting your doctor with RSI and hiring a lawyer.

Putting an interface optimised for tablets (I'm being charitable) on desktop computers cannot but reduce productivity. Then there's the retraining costs. Why are they surprised it's not selling well, and that most of the places it's "selling" to are "downgrading" as soon as they unpack the hardware?

Nigel 11
Thumb Up

Re: ...or anything resembling an argument.

And the thing to add to that, is that as a person experienced in using both Windows XP/7 and Linux, I can move quite easily and not unhappily to an Apple iMac. It's about as easy as moving from one conventionally operated car to another. A bit of initial irritation with the minor controls, but nothing completely infuriating and no need for a formal re-education.

Nigel 11

Re: But HOW to kill Steve Ballmer?

That's the board's job. Or the shareholders'. I doubt they'll do the deed until it's too late to make any difference. They're all PHBs like him (apart from the PH, anyway). I'd guess about a year after they've ceased supporting Windows 7, i.e. two years too late.

IBM, if you still want revenge for OS/2, your time to move is fast approaching.

Nigel 11

Re: New lipstick

Or "the names and the faces change, but the assholes stay the same".

Chromebooks now the fastest-growing segment of PC market

Nigel 11
WTF?

Re: Chromebooks sneak past MS police

Hobbling?

If it was Win 8, I'd agree. The right Linux distro and UI is quite sprightly on a truly ancient PC, so I'd expect it to run happily on a Chromebook. ISTRR Linus uses a Linux'ed Chromebook!

Nigel 11

Re: UseFUL cheap NOT junk

Netbooks also weren't helped by the fact that we had to stick with the same 1024x600 resolution and 1GB RAM spec for years.

That's part of how Microsoft killed them. It had to have that spec, or Microsoft wouldn't allow it to be sold with Windows XP (after XP stopped being generally available). I think SSDs were also banned by MS.

Windows 7 was too much of a resource hog to run on less than 4Gb, and Atom CPUs were architecturally limited to 2Gb. So there was a period during which a Windows 7 Netbook was impossible - low-power i3 CPUs were too expensive. By the time the tech advanced at the low end (courtesy of AMD), Windows 8 was about to become the only retail chioce.

I once (for fun) installed Win 7 on an Eee PC upgraded to 2Gb RAM and an SSD. It was usable, if a bit "sticky". Biggest problem was that the Win 7 UI really wants 1366x768 minimum.

Nigel 11

UseFUL cheap NOT junk

Netbooks sold like hot cakes before Microsoft found ways to kill the format, because they were cheap enough and light enough to cart around without worrying yourself about theft or damage, and good enough to do most of what you wanted to do on the move.

Microsoft killed the Netbook but the market niche never went away. Now the Chromebook is filling the niche. Quelle surprise. Another Microsoft own goal.

BTW you can get cheap Android tablets for the same price and some of them are doubtless occupying the same niche. But for many purposes, you really do want a keyboard!

Apple builds flagship store on top of PLAGUE HOSPITAL

Nigel 11

Flea-brained gadget? Pea-brained gadget? Any connection?

Nigel 11
IT Angle

Plague ....

So is it not actually true that the plague bacillus can survive many centuries to infect someone who digs up a plague-pit? (Bubonic / Pneumonic Plague is a bacillus, not a virus, though some of the plagues might not really have been Plague. The symptoms also match a killer flu like the 1919 one, so far as one can tell from such contemporary medical description as has survived).

I had read that plague graves were best undisturbed for milennia. That should someone accidentally dig one up, they should immediately re-bury it, cease work, keep a VERY close watch on their health for the next couple of weeks, and change the building plans.

Daddy-o, you're all wet... baffled by your own kids on the web - survey

Nigel 11

Re: English acronyms ... only 26 letters

After you've exhausted the TLAs move on to the ETLAs and the GBFLAs.

Microsoft: Still using Office installed on a PC? Gosh, you squares

Nigel 11

Re: Office 2000

Your best upgrade is LibreOffice, before anyone retrains themselves to use ribbons and tiles and all the other crap that Microsoft has stuffed into the releases after 2003.

Nigel 11

Re: Can you say LibreOffice?

Openoffice / Libreoffice? It's less of a fork than Office 2003 to Office 2007 was / is.

Anyway, now Oracle have got out of the way, there's a chance that the fork will be re-joined over the next year or two.

Euro GPS Galileo gets ready for nuclear missile use

Nigel 11

Re: Subscription

When there's 3 GPS systems: believe the two that agree?