* Posts by Borg.King

218 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Apr 2011

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First satellite to be launched from European soil leaves Cornwall tonight

Borg.King

Goonhilly / Telstar

A former lecturer of mine at college in the 1980s once told me that the very first US to UK transmission involved a US generator and a US TV set hooked up to the incoming signal, and a UK TV camera pointed at said TV set, whose brightness was fully turned up to get enough persistence on the phosphors for the camera to even /see/ anything.

I believe he had been a GPO engineer during the period.

Borg.King

Re: Nope

That's what I saw too. The gimbal feedback was all over the place at one point, and the altitude dropped steadily from 500k feet to 244k feet before everything froze.

My guess (and it's only that) is the fairing over the payload did not properly release and the second stage + payload was off balance.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Borg.King

1 Bannon

4 months is about 121.6 days, so 1 Bannon is approximately 2.75 Truss

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

Borg.King

S.O.P.

A decade ago I was contracting at a largish corporation not too distant from me here in the sunny north-west of this left pondian country.

Contractors were given what I can only describe as the best of the unused machines, usually the discarded PC of the person who had just left and you were replacing. Other unwanted machines were placed in the corridors outside offices, and in the corners of the buildings etc. ready to be 'recycled'. It was standard operating procedure to scavenge whatever improvements you could get to enhance the machine you'd been allocated.

Okta says Lapsus$ incident was actually a brilliant zero trust demonstration

Borg.King

Due diligence

Perhaps Okta could have conducted a little more research into Sitel's security before they hired them in the first place.

Heineken says there’s no free beer, warns of phishing scam

Borg.King
Joke

Making love in a canoe

As I'm stateside, and I attest that there are many other 'beers' here that are much closer to gnat's piss than Heineken.

Wordle recreated in Pascal for the Multics operating system

Borg.King

Performant?

I used Multics when at Brunel University in the early 80s, however its performance dropped off a cliff when a half dozen emacs sessions were started.

Once a few VAX systems were installed elsewhere on campus though, the Multics system was no longer the golden child, and as less people used it, the fun factor increased many fold.

Google tests battery backups, aims to ditch emergency datacenter diesel

Borg.King

Re: Can someone do the math for me please?

How do you pour a few gallons of electricity into a battery?

You bring in a portable generator. Power companies have been utilizing just such truck mounted portable generators to cover times when a major part of the distribution grid requires maintenance or replacement. The largest of these are powered by jet engines, which presumably could even be run on biofuels these days.

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

Borg.King

Swings and roundabouts

Last time I paid a tax preparer to file my taxes cost me $350 about 3 years ago, and he missed a huge double income entry that would have cost me $50k in extra tax if I hadn't spotted it.

TurboTax cost me ~$150 this year, but I have about 10 more forms beyond the 1040, so I'm not unduly disturbed by that fee.

U.S. Tax needs to be overhauled. All the statements you get (W2, 1099's etc.) need just two boxes

1: Income,

2: Deductions/Already paid.

Enter all the box 1's and 2's into a website, or an app, it does the straightforward math (verifiable by a nice simple step by step help document), and send a check, or get a refund. It doesn't matter what the amounts are for.

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Borg.King
WTF?

Careful with that Google TV

I have two Sony TV's that run a Google OS. If Google starts putting ads over the top of shows I'm watching, those TV's will be history in extremely short order.

FPGA now means Finally, PRC Grants Approval: China OKs AMD's $35bn Xilinx buy

Borg.King

Re: hurdles <= hurdles - 1;

I think this is trying to tell us that there's one less hurdle.

Guess this was written by the same folks who brought us Microsoft's New Year message generator.

How to polish the bottom line? Microsoft makes it really hard to claim expenses, say staffers

Borg.King

Frequent traveler tip

If you can swing business class for short trips, you can avoid the extra baggage fees, and use the airline lounge to get free food and coffee, and the extra cost overall might only be a few quid. Saves having to file those receipts for separate purchases at the airport. Your in-flight meal and drinks are unlikely to be extra cost options in business class too.

Likewise if your hotel includes WiFi and breakfast in the room rate, two fewer expense claims to file afterwards as well.

50 US airports to be surrounded by 5G C-band-free zones

Borg.King
Unhappy

Billing credit?

I live on the flight path into the two major airports listed in Seattle - do you think Verizon will give me a credit for not having full 5G service in my location?

Oh, Comcast. An Xfinity customer and working from home? Maybe not this morning

Borg.King

Xfinity drops me regularly

5 minutes every 2 or 3 days.

Just long enough to have all my remote desktops log me out.

Ancient with a dash of modern: We joined the Royal Navy to find there's little new in naval navigation

Borg.King

Thank you Gareth

for these extremely interesting and informative posts.

Also Thank You to the members of the RN and the RFA, and all the services, for their dedication and commitment to our safety and freedom.

FTC carpet bombs industry with letters warning that fake reviews will be punished

Borg.King

Re: The Register is an amazing website

"What tremendous value TheRegister is. I wish all the critics would stop whining about it. I would willingly pay £400 a year to support TheRegister."

"£32 for TheRegister, it's far too low. The excellent service TheRegister provides, it should be at least £400"

"TheRegister is quite magnificent. It justifies the fee on it's own. Personally I think the fee is too low. I would willingly sell my house and all its contents to help TheRegister".

(I might have paraphrased a bit.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lzS8yW8INA

Unpatched flaw 'weaponises' Apple AirTags to turn them into the phisherman's friend

Borg.King
Facepalm

Save $29.99

And stick a label with your phone number onto the item you're wanting someone else to recover for you.

Hacking the computer with wirewraps and soldering irons: Just fix the issues as they come up, right?

Borg.King
Pint

Re: Anyone

EPROM burner with a hex keyboard, you 'ad it lucky.

I had to build my own EPROM burner from Veroboard and stick it into the back of a Commodore 64, AND write the burner program, in BASIC, AND create the EPROM contents as DATA statements in the burner program.

<Beer, because after all that, I needed one, or 0x02>

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Borg.King

Re: Good

Where there's muck, there's brass.

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Borg.King

Re: I wonder...

My thoughts too. I'm pretty sure PFY and BOFH swapped out the real wonga for some facsimiles hastily run off the super high quality laser printer that the company just had to buy last week.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Borg.King
Pint

Name game

Shaggy McShagPalace

(Beer icon for all the German lager and French wine that'll be consumed on the tub.)

Flatcar Linux takes the 520, drives up to Redmond: Microsoft acquires Kinvolk

Borg.King

Right image, wrong direction.

The picture on the home page is definitely SR 520, but it's looking out towards the floating bridge over Lake Washington, towards Seattle, and away from Redmond.

BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service

Borg.King

Re: Still laughing..

I collect vintage computers...

Anyone on here who doesn't?

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Borg.King
Facepalm

Won't nobody think of the test cases?

I'm guessing there was either no test cases, or the calculations made on the list of passengers in the test case repeated the same error.

Mac OS X at 20: A rocky start, but it got the fundamentals right for a macOS future

Borg.King
Mushroom

Magnesium

Was the NeXT cube's material, aluminum does spark as well when pulled along the street behind a car.

Report: Microsoft is thinking about splashing $10bn on Discord to slot it next to Skype, Mixer...

Borg.King

Discord might improve sufficiently

to compete with Teams.

Better buy it and kill it, and have its brilliant, and now wealthy, creators sign a commitment to not create a competitor to any MSFT product ever again.

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Borg.King

Jollies (sp. jollys ?)

Once had a week in Malta on a C++ training course. First day there was the world cup final, which I happily watched from a beachfront pizza and beer joint.

Second one was a day trip to give some training in Germany, flight out of LGW at 6am, back at 6pm. Not much to in the way of excitement, and a buffet lunch in the conference room, but the trainees were nice people and it's a day out.

Do half a dozen Apple WWDC's in San Francisco count?

OVH says burned data centre’s UPS, batteries, fuses in the hands of insurers and police

Borg.King

23kVA at my house

My panel here in my house in Seattle has two 115 volt lines, 180° out of phase, and 100A per line, for a total possible 23kVA.

My water heater, tumble dryer and oven are all connected across the phases, applying 230V to their respective heating elements. This is fairly typical for a modern home in the U.S.

In my (wood) workshop, I have a single phase 230V dust collector connected via a 1:1 isolation transformer wired across the phases. This is not typical.

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Borg.King

Re: At Joe W, re: intelligence vs wisdom.

successfully selling a tomato-based fruit salad

Salsa

European Commission redacts AstraZeneca vaccine contract – but forgets to wipe the bookmarks tab

Borg.King
Facepalm

Null and void

The EU appears to have broken the confidentiality clause in the contract, I would encourage Astra-Zeneca to claim a contract violation and not honour any of it.

There's plenty of countries who'll buy all the vaccine they can make.

Boeing confirms last 747 to roll off production line in 2022

Borg.King

747's will be missed

Have flown many 747s from SFO, LAX and SEA to LHR, AMS & CDG and will miss the slightly shorter journey times as 747s fly about 80 knots faster than 777s and 787s.

Only flew once in first class, on a Singapore 747-400(?) from Mumbai to LHR back in 1991. Great airline, plane, and exceptional service from the cabin crew - a true memory to savor for many years.

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Borg.King
Facepalm

5cm x 5cm != 5 cm²

5 x 5 = 25

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Borg.King

Re: How to avoid nearly all of the harsh bits.

// Pleasethankmeformyeffortinwritingthispost. Iwillletyoucleanitupandresubmit.

// Thanks.

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

Borg.King
Mushroom

Waiting for a Li-ion battery overload

I'm waiting to see when someone decides their home battery backup system can be wired up to power their cooker.

A Li-ion battery fire is nothing to be triffled with.

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

Borg.King
Coat

Re: 2038

Sunday 4th December

Yay! double the hourly rate then for a Sunday callout.

Apple tipped to go full wireless by 2021, and you're all still grumbling about a headphone jack

Borg.King

Re: Car Play

I’m sure Lexus isn’t updating old cars

Actually they are. My 2018 LC500 did not have Apple Carplay when I first bought it, but my Lexus dealer upgraded the ICE unit with new software last year, and yay! Carplay.

Any finger will do? Samsung Galaxy S10 with a screen protector reportedly easy to fool

Borg.King

Have you asked Apple if 'protected' fingerprints fail for them too?

I'm sure they're jumping up and down with glee in Cupertino. Perhaps El Reg should ask them if they would like to decline to comment.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Borg.King
Coat

SMEG

..as Dave Lister would no doubt opine.

5 million years in stasis and not a single expired cert on Red Dwarf.

(Mine's the one with the hard light drive in the pocket.)

Holy smokes! Ex-IT admin gets two years prison for trashing Army chaplains' servers

Borg.King

how old does that make me?

George Best in my day.

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

Borg.King

Re: One line in your script, like I do

I do not like that the box that's displaying these commands in the article has

rm -rf

on a single line, and the bundle specifier on the next.

Someone is going to find these instructions and think they need to hit enter after each line.

D'aw! They still have hope! Interns make a song and dance of their summer at Microsoft

Borg.King
Joke

Re: Production values

And what the hell is an "Explorer Intern"?

Two options come to mind:

1) An intern working on the team that maintains the file explorer windows,

2) An intern sent to look for building 7.

Beware the developer with time on his hands and dreams of Disney

Borg.King

Re: Why yes, yes I have...

company with an all nude policy

Was that the same company that had a chap in a giant bunny suit jumping around behind a topless newsreader?

Marriott's got 99 million problems and the ICO's one: Starwood hack mega-fine looms over

Borg.King
Alert

Re: A bit of honesty

clearly we failed so we think the punishment is appropriate

An admission of guilt opens up a plethora of routes to losing court battles for compensation.

Philips kills dependence on its Hue hub, pointing to a Bluetooth world

Borg.King

But I want my mechanical cupboard!!

I've plans to build my own little cupboard full of little toys with blinken lights.

Cable Modem, MoCA ethernet, Gigabit switch, Cable TV amp and distribution hub, Networked HD, security system DVR, Philips Hue Hub (probably two), Time Machine HD, and the control unit for my irrigation system.

And a UPS.

Philips, please don't deprive me of my dream.

Scumbags can program vulnerable MedTronic insulin pumps over the air to murder diabetics – insecure kit recalled

Borg.King

Manual mode

They expect the patients to revert to repeatedly checking their blood sugar levels throughout the day, and injecting the appropriate amount of insulin as a result.

BOFH: What's Near Field Implementation? Oh, you'll see. Turn left here

Borg.King

Re: Blackadder reference?

Wibble.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Borg.King
Mushroom

$0.10 fuse saved

Many times a 10 cent fuse is saved by the selfless suicide of a thousand dollar PSU.

Apple strips clips of WWDC devs booing that $999 monitor stand from the web using copyright claims. Fear not, you can listen again here...

Borg.King

10% may have bought the stand

Anyone buying these overpriced monitors is almost certainly going to have some production desk setup, with high quality arms already installed supporting the VESA mount.

I would estimate that only a few would want Apple's stand anyway, and that few has now diminished significantly. Apple may make a few thousand of them. The $199 VESA adaptor is a rip off too.

Third party opportunity if ever there was one.

Headsup for those managing Windows 10 boxen: Microsoft has tweaked patching rules

Borg.King
Coat

We have...

Then we were enticed to work for Microsoft with promises of changing the world. Sadly that reality never materialized and we left to go back into the real world.

Microsoft has many smart people working for it, and almost all of them are as perplexed as you as to why they cannot produce products that reflect their abilities.

(Mines the one with the deactivated blue badge in the pocket)

Big Tech leapt on the blockchain bandwagon but its applications are stuck in cryptocurrency

Borg.King

Coffee chain

I heard this morning that Starbucks are using Blockchain tech, in a joint venture with MSFT to track the coffee bean from the tree to your cup.

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