Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre

Re: So what does Cholesterol do in the body that's so important the genes are unchanged in

It's also the precursor to many hormones, transporters and such, but these roles are believed to be evolutionnary secondary -due to the abundance of the stuff- and in fact vary quite a bit across the animal realm.

Re: So what does Cholesterol do in the body that's so important the genes are unchanged in

It's essential for the cells' lipidic membranes properties, including mechanical but also signal sensing and transducing -receptors and "transducers" organisation- and ion exchanges (channels regulation), basically the cell's "life support" systems. So, yeah, pretty darn important.

On an unrelated note, claiming that "many of" ancient species -or even groups- still live today as the article does is a gross misunderstanding. At best you could claim that many groups still have living representants.

Re: Hearts & minds propaganda, courtesy of MoD

> development started in 1957

Also missing (quite understandably) is the combat perfs. The gap would have been easy to cover but that's what you get for bailing out of the Rafale program - the reasons for this being, again, quite understandable, but directly in contradiction with the latter decision to switch to the American program. Politics is almost entirely about doing the exact opposite of what the previous administration did, just to prove how wrong they were. With the same result on costs and effectiveness, again and again. *SIGH*

(surely that vertical thing is mostly a gimmick, given how even the F35 program almost gave up on it in favor of the "short landing" option when it became evident that fans can't possibly compete with wings in terms of lift; feel very free to prove me wrong)

Obvious design fail

Designing it "roomy" was asking for trouble. If there is spare space in a non-client-visible part of a building, it WILL be used as storage space until the room is no longer usable. You're lucky that you didn't end up hosting the cleaning staff's wheelie cart as well. I for one have never seen any place where that did not happen, and I've seen quite a few places on several continents. It's just a basic law of the Universe. If you want a garbage-free environment, design it with enough space for operation, but barely (of course that doesn't apply to client-visible places such as lobbies, where hundreds square meters of empty, wasted space seem to be desirable).

Wine?

Why wouldn't it, but more importantly why would you want to do that?

In any case, it will not be a big change for me, I've been running GnuRoot Debian on my stock Android for ages, to do some network management and other offsite stuff. Better at local file management, too. Pretty much the only thing it can't use is the phone function, but who still uses that, amiright?

Re: easier way

He mistakenly invoked the vi :x command for file encryption.

OK I'll bite

[escape]

:x

[random text relevant to the file being edited, and that will be taken as the keyword]

[Enter]

:w

:q

During all this, including the saving and closing, you need to not have looked at your monitor even once to check that your input is correct. That's at the very least 7 keystrikes not accounting for the keyword, so a very minimum of 8 keystrikes for a 1-character keyword (OK, seven if you condense the last 2 commands) if you do it purposedly. If you didn't mean to do exactly that, the random text is likely to be longer than 1 char, hence my "dozen".

Unless of course you were just hammering away in a tool that you don't undertand, in which case it's similar to hitting "by mistake" ctrl-a delete ctrl-s [enter] in, say, MSWord. All without looking. Only harder in Vi. While there is is no such thing as "probability zero", Vi users tend to have chosen the tool, and thus understand that command mode is meant to issue commands. That's why I was impressed by the level of gormlessness involved in the scenario.

Re: Oh noes

migration of legacy Z/OS keyboard driven dumb terminals onto NT4 as late as 2005. Besides everything that is wrong with that statement

*chuckles* here, have an upvote from a fellow hopeless old fart deadwood experienced professional.

Re: easier way

In emacs its just C-z M-e M-Tab, followed by your keyword.

And Enter, presumably ? I'm not very familiar with Emacs, but it's similar in Vi, and I stand by my words; please feel free to fire up Emacs and actually try it -from edit mode- in fewer that a dozen strikes (assuming here that you don't use a single-character keyword) and without hitting a key that you wouldn't use in normal non-command typing. I'd be happy to see the answer, as that would be yet another reason to say that Vi is superior to Emacs (which is obvious to begin with but heh :P )

I would try it myself but for some reason I am a bit reluctant. Wasting a few hundred MB of valuable disk space to install an inferior editor* just to make a point in El Reg comments does not rank very high in my to-do list. Not until I get (more) seriously bored anyway :D

* prflblblblblblb also yo momma's so fat she could install Emacs on her underbelly without anyone noticing.

Re: Oh noes

it involves either pressing them with the palm of your hand (damned near impossible to operate a two-button mouse correctly that way) or taking your hand off the mouse to use them.

No, it involves moving the mouse with your fingertips, with your palm on the desk (in our colleague's case, at least. Can't speak for the user mentioned in the article). Actually given how we get told to use trackballs instead of mice because RSI, it might be better, come to think of it.

Re: Oh noes

Left and right click must be odd if you use the mouse backwards no?

Nopes, she's used to it. The wheel isn't a problem either, as more and more people are used to scrolling the "wrong" way due to touchscreens. No, the weirdest thing (to me) is the direction of the moves. I mean, OK you can train yourself to move right to go left but she's equally fine with touchpads, which go in the "right" direction. Oh well. As long as the works gets done, there's no wrong way to use your tools, I suppose.

Re: Oh noes

I'd suggest that any user unable to tell which end of the mouse to hold is unqualified to use a computer in the first place

As I said, we have someone here who only uses the mouse in an upside-down fashion. Doesn't complain that the cursor is moving the wrong way though, that's just how they've been told and always have used it.

Re: Now it can be told...

For desktops, a bluetooth dongle on the back connected to a wireless mouse (or keyboard) can be hours of fun, too. Days even, if you're careful enough not to get caught.

Re: Every day's a school day

In fact we have a person here on the team who uses the mouse "upside-down". That's how they were told to do many, many years ago and can't use it any other way. That's a bit weird to witness but they do seem to manage.

Also, the rotated camera is a classic. Formerly in charge of the imaging pool of a lab, that's something I witnessed too many times to count. Heck, that's even a trick I (and others) have used repeteadly to avoid (some) image post-processing. When you have a preferred orientation in mind and the imaged object seems to have a different idea in mind, rotating the camera so that all images are oriented the same way is often the best solution.

Well, TBH I'm not entirely sure that Google or Apple are securing their streams in any such way. You know, like when their default soft keyboards send home litterally everything you type. Before I switched to Hacker Keyboard, Google keyboard was frequently the app which used the most mobile data on my phone... which tells a lot about both mobile OS vendors and my level of secludedness !

Re: Really? It's not a joke.

" Canada, a sovereign nation with no Royal Family or legal colonial connection to any Nation ruled by Royality" except for Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, you mean ? Yeah, appart from her, no connection to a monarch whatsoever.