* Posts by the spectacularly refined chap

1246 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Dec 2008

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Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: "if the door plug removal was undocumented"

"With respect to documentation, if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share," added the aerospace giant.

Kryten: Shh. Listen, can anyone hear anything?

Cat: No

Kryten: Exactly, no one can hear anything, and do you know why we can't hear anything?

Rimmer: (annoyed) Why?

Kryten: (in a spooky voice) Because there are no sounds to hear!

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: A fool and his money

I don't see what is the issue myself - this is at least transparent and upfront: you are not buying a printer, you are not buying ink, you are buying print as a service. If the numbers work out for you then why shouldn't you have that option.

It has a lot more integrity than the model used over the last few years, namely selling you (and charging you for) a printer outright, and then claiming some divine right to dictate whose inks you can use in your own printer, in complete defiance of the first sale doctrine.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

the spectacularly refined chap

Yeah, it's funny how the bean counting department never gets outsourced!

I take it you've never read of any of the scandals that regularly affect E&Y, KPMG, PwC etc. Nor indeed the effective corporate death penalty that was applied to Arthur Andersen in the wake of Enron?

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

Almost nothing anyone says or does will change the fact that the number of days in a year is not an integer; that is to say, the Earth does not rotate around its own axis a whole number of times in the time it takes to complete a full turn around the Sun.

No, that's one of the other myths about timekeeping. A day is the (average) period from one noon until the next. For the Sun to return to its highest point the Earth has to rotate slightly more than once, since it has moved around its orbit in the interim. A sidereal day (a single rotation) is about 4 minutes shorter.

Uncle Sam explores satellites that can create propellant out of thin air

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Researchers at the federal lab and GWU are currently trying to effectively neutralize...

...or perhaps they do know what they are doing. There is a reason existing designs use noble gases generally (reduces induced dipoles by orders of magnitude) and xenon in particular (high molar mass).

But once again, an anonymous El Reg commentard knows better than those spending their entire careers in sector.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: In the absence of files...

How do you differentiate between the zillions of pages of deathless prose you have composed, and scratch notes that can be deleted? How can one generate a file with one program and open it with another?

Very easily as it happens, I would suggest trying one of the systems instead instead of dismissing something out of hand because it is different to what you are used to. Documents still have labels and can usually be tagged, often multiple times which the file and directory model doesn't really accommodate - e.g. does that record of the Project Alpha budget belong with the Project Alpha stuff or the financial stuff - why, it's both.

Indeed with the true OO platforms the very concept of an "app" frequently disappears, new software allows you to manipulate a new document type or enhances the capability to deal with a existing type. On the Newton is was sometimes surprising just how far the built in Notes app could be extended with custom "stationery", at the simplest level these could be simple data acquisition forms but it was frequently extended to full DB like operations, and yes, images and audio too.

Microsoft adds more AI to Photos in Windows 10 and 11

the spectacularly refined chap

I've had enough of Microsoft's pretty pictures...

... given they pushed out a photo to the lock/login screen a few weeks back that automatically turned all the prompts into Thai.

Since this was Windows you automatically assume it is some malware, but no, just another MS balls up.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: The downside is?

A world without Alphabet/Google/Youtube etc, Amazon, Meta/Facebook etc, X, Tiktok, etc etc doesn't look too bad to me.

Amazon weren't too bad when they stayed on books. I still have nightmares of reading the "Computer Books" catalogue, printed on the same paper and in a similar size font to the phone book, only the prices in the catalogue made telephone numbers look cheap.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

the spectacularly refined chap

I don't think they launch actual "used" missiles (ones that have been carried around). Though I could be wrong about this. I believe that when a sub goes in for a major refit, they sail to Kings Bay in Georgia and get a test missile from the stock - so they can then test the whole system. It's possible that they get new/re-conditioned ones for their other tubes as well, which I guess would then be mated with warheads back in the UK.

The missiles are cycled through deployment, stockpile and servicing. When they go in for servicing they are held in a common stock between Britain and the US, one goes in and another one comes out, irrespective of which country previously had it. It's then shipped over to Blighty, rearmed as desired and loaded on one of the subs.

Missiles intended for test purposes are not identified is advance of fitting the warheads, it wouldn't be a very good "test" if everyone in production and maintenance knew which the test ones were would it?

Similarly it would severely compromise the independence of the UK deterrent if the US knew which were going to be tested and which used in anger. Contrary to the conspiracy theories the MOD do go to great lengths to ensure our capability is genuinely independent and can't be overridden by the US.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

An individual segment was up to 64K and used 16 bit addressing but the segment register was also 16 bit. To compute an effective address the segment was left shifted four bits and then added to the offset address. Thus segments could begin on any 16 byte boundary meaning there were multiple segment:offset combinations that could access the same physical address.

You'd find this plenty of times in the assembler guides of the time, different sources would use seemingly different addresses to refer to the same hardware register.

As an aside although the 386 was limited to 4GB physical memory it did have a 64GB logical address space using a similar segmentation system. However the undeniable simplicity of a flat 4GB address space was such that people seem to attach some kind of mysticism to segmented models now.

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

ISTR the 386 was actually designed before the 286 but once designed it was simply too complex for the fab facilities of the time. That would certainly fit in with the rest of the industry that were at the time beginning the transition to 32 bit, mostly skipping 16 bit as Intel had a jump on the rest of the industry there.

The 286 was essentially a stopgap until fab processes matured, and effectively ensured the mass market stayed on 16 bit all the way until Windows 95.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Not *everything* is a file

Unfortunately, things like sockets on top of IP don't have names.

That's the way things have evolved, AT&T Research Unix introduced Streams which worked well both as a generalisation and allowing for some neat tricks. It would probably have taken off had it been five years earlier, but by then the sockets model was too engrained thanks to the BSDs and Sun in particular.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Linux's moment

One thing I've noticed is that Samba's performance is utterly terrible. This is long standing across versions, platforms, Windows version and so on. If I copy a 20GB file from Windows to a Samba mount I'll get reasonable speed, e.g. 60-70MB/s over gigabit. If that same 20GB is instead 10,000 files I'll be lucky to average 5.

It was enough I was convinced there must be something wrong with my installation, until I talked to people who use Samba extensively and the response comes back "Oh, no, that doesn't happen". Until you demonstrate exactly the same issue on their systems. Windows<->Windows doesn't seem anywhere near as bad, nor does either Windows or Unix<->Unix over NFS.

I'm open to suggestions, but no I really do suspect it is that people accept shit as par for the course.

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: 69 megajoules

Not quite as simple as even that. The diference is that for an internal combustion engine the primary starting input is momentum, the primary output is momentum via the same channel, thus the whole cycle naturally repeats - ignore fuel pumps and spark ingnition, or argue we're talking about a two stroke diesel.

A fusion reactor requires a large electical input, among other things to power those magnets, but delivers its output as heat. That isn't the same funamentally self-sustaining property, and conversion from heat to anything else is generally inefficient even 200 years after Carnot.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

the spectacularly refined chap

They were running benchmarks on the soon to be released next gen systems and up to their neck with both hardware and software issues needing to be fixed before anything would run successfully. His WTF moment happend when the CEO passed him in the corridor and said 'I hear you are getting great benchmark numbers on the new systems'

Sometimes it's simply a different, legitimate perspective. I recall five or six years ago I was charged with developing a new process to be rolled out in about six months time. Had enough control to be able to manage it effectively, business processes and IT were both under me. Learning and Development were handling training but on details from me, with my sign off and me gatecrashing the first couple of training sessions.

Of course this nirvana couldn't last, two months in the timescale changed from "in four months" to "next week". Made for a very scrappy week getting ready in those conditions but we rolled out on the day. A couple of hours late admittedly for some last minute training, but the right day.

At perhaps 2:30pm the ops manager ultimately responsible for the area walks in and asks how is it going? Response from the rank and file: it's complete chaos. My response: it's going relatively smoothly. The team leaders involved thought much the same.

The concerns of rank and file were they didn't know what they were doing. I'd expected that, in most cases it was simply underlining the relevant part of their training if they hit a snag, there was only one area where I'd noted the training itself could be improved to say "In these cases (and that includes THOSE cases)..."

The other was the "Process doesn't work" pile. Obviously you'd rather not have those but it's hardly unexpected. Quoted some figures: we've processed 3000 cases today, the mystery box has about 20 cases in it. Of those about half are Welsh indicating a particular issue, I haven't had chance to fully investigate the others yet while I support the end users...

He went away absolutely delighted, sure a few teething issues but as smooth a roll out as you could hope for. Same situation, just a different perspective.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Future use??

Why would individual routers' firmware be set up to ignore 240/4 addresses? If anyone mistakenly sends requests to any such address they would simply time out just like a normal wrong address.

That may or may not be the end result depending on the set up of the routers involved in the the process, the other is an ICMP unknown/unreachable message. Regardless of the result the end user sees an awful lot of work is being wasted.

Without a filter in place your router will simply send the entire packet to it's default route (generally your ISP). If the receiving router is also configured in the same way then it then forwards the entire packet to it's default route until it reaches a level deep in the network core that has a true global routing table: i.e. there is no "default" route, it has a specific route for any address. Those routers are big, expensive and highly loaded, they typically have 100,000+ separate routes to manage even after summarisation.

It would only be at that level the decision can then be taken "sorry, can't send to that address" after wasting a lot of time and bandwidth in the process.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

the spectacularly refined chap

In other news...

... the gamers paying a premium for memory with colourful "heat spreaders" glued on top are being ripped off left, right and centre. It's really quite effective at disguising the provenance of chips and you don't even need a packaging facility or laser etching facitilies to do it.

This is the kind of thing thats as old as the hills.

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

Sounds like an lbolt bug, if I've done my sums correctly that would be after 497 days (assuming HZ is 100 which was pretty much universal on anything except Windows 9x back then). It shouldn't have affected Solaris at all but third party drivers may have had an issue.

It one of those things well known to the grey beards of the time or those that spent proper time with them to soak up their knowledge. Most of the grey beards I knew are dead now.

Japanese government finally bids sayonara to the 3.5" floppy disk

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: But I have a box of hollerith cards with my tax statements on them --- woe is me!

It's less than 20 years since what was then the Inland Revenue stopped accepting data on open reel tape. It's probably only slightly over 20 years since they stopped supplying it in that format.

TSMC finds its green chips are highly sought after... the edible ones

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Where do you get the newspaper?

You're not supposed to eat the newspaper.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

the spectacularly refined chap

I also learned that writing system software for a paged memory map and no MMU is as much fun as root canal work via nostril. Don’t ask.

But it's still the reality for anyone who's ever worked with a Microchip PIC. It's principal 8-bit competitor these days is the 8051 copies. They are arguably even odder with no less than four address spaces, but a lot more comfortable to work with in practice.

Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special

the spectacularly refined chap

I'm sure Rufus would have approved of AI generated Bill & Ted.

NASA's VIPER is half-built, with launch plans for this year

the spectacularly refined chap

I'm sure they would be happy to do so if you send them a cheque to cover the cost.

Otherwise this mission has been designed with particular goals in mind. Replicating the same test package six times does not get six times the science done.

the spectacularly refined chap

How many have to cope with extreme vibration at launch, operating temperatures varying over several hundred celsius and lunar regolith that is both incredibly fine and extremely abrasive?

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Robots.txt

I'm pretty sure Google respects robots.txt*, but indeed there's nothing that can force everybody else from doing the same. The greatest strength and greatest weakness of robots.txt files is that they are not enforced legally.

It is also an inversion of the legal position. Anything I create and post on my own website is mine and has automatic copyright protection. I don't need to explicitly slap an effective "hands off!" notice for that to be the case. That is the underlying logic of robots.txt - essentially it states "don't do x, y or z". If it was the other way around - "You are free to do a, b, or c" that would hold water, but statue law is not overridden by a standard cooked up by someone on the internet with a vested interest.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

the spectacularly refined chap

Sadly the Crays of the era used a constant amount of electricity regardless of workload and were described as looking like a "big resistor" as far as the building's electrical schematics were concerned.

Depends on which era we're talking about. That was certainly the case with the early ECL Crays, later they moved on to CMOS (much later than the rest of the industry). Probably early '90s or thereabouts.

the spectacularly refined chap

1.0 kA DC is insane - I vaguely recall that most of the current is adjacent (under) the conductor's surface so what must the current densities (V/m2) be?

That's the skin effect and it applies to signals, getting progresively worse as frequency increases. It's a non issue for DC power supplies that are not supposed to vary in voltage.

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

the spectacularly refined chap

There have been several attempts over the years. WinFS is a prominent recent example. The main historical one would be Pick which still has a few niche users. There are other examples e.g. Apple NewtonOS comes to mind with its "soups" and "stationery".

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Blast from the Past

Most recent truly fundmental advance in my view would be skip lists whoch were 1990 if memory serves. Prior to that public key encryption. I'm trying to think of anything more recent, but no even most networking and synchronisation algorithms are a lot older than you might think. It's interesting at times to look at how quickly the true fundamentals in place - by the end of the 50s mosts of the classic data structures and algorithms were in place barely 10 years after the Baby first ran.

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

the spectacularly refined chap

James Hacker : What's an official reply?

Bernard Woolley : It just says "The Minister has asked me to thank you for your letter"; then we say something like "The matter is under consideration", or even, if we feel so inclined, "under active consideration."

James Hacker : What's the difference?

Bernard Woolley : Well, 'under consideration' means we've lost the file; 'under active consideration' means we're trying to find it.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: No imagination any more

I've had that recently only with MS Teams. I ran the new version, to be honest I didn't really notice any difference. I switched back to Classic because I got fed up of the "You've been using New Teams, do you want to keep it.." nag box coming up at startup each and every time. The old version has no such foolishness.

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Demise

They were killed on sight by many servers, not always just for local users but also for mirroring to other nodes. I used them briefly until I realised a sizable portion of the readership on many groups never saw my posts.

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Google has decided [the modern internet] doesn't need Usenet anymore.

What killed newgroups _was_ Google. Firstly they did not implement an interface that wrapped lines as was/is the established convention meaning reading anything from GG was a ballache and/or impossible.

Next, they did absolutely _nothing_ to control spam to the extent many people simply resorted to dicarding _anything_ from Google which has the inevitable effect of fragmenting the community.

It's a shame really since there are still a few good groups with valuable content, if only you can filter out all the GG spam.

Edit: Dammit. El Reg is smart enough to wrap text even with < code > or < pre > tags.

British arms dealer BAE behind F-35 electronics first in line for US CHIPS funds

the spectacularly refined chap

The difference here is that the F35 "really is" all that. The stealth capability and situational awareness are purportedly on a whole other level to anything else. Gripen flies well, has a good radar and weapons suite, but is not nearly as capable on the low observables front; which means it isn't the offensive capability that the F35 is. As an interceptor, it's fine. But taking the fight into enemy territory? Gripen is as vulnerable as anything from the 1980s.

The same can be said of the Typhoon, a very 1980's jet that really only entered service in the late 90's.

This strikes me as being after drinking too much of the military industrial kool aid. The US arms industry in particular like to portray their latest toys as the ultimate superweapon and anything else is hopelessly obsolete. In reality a lot of the time the latest developments are fringe benefits applicable in limited cases.

In this case you portray stealth as the be all and end all. It isn't. It's expensive for a start so a given budget gives you fewer jets. Stealth also severely compromises the weapons load, sometimes as much as 10:1, so you actually need more jets to do the same job. This is for a benefit of limited value - if you have air superiority you don't need it. Even if you don't (at least initially) Desert Storm showed that radar jamming effectively blinds the enemy and radar homing missiles made many SAM crews reluctant to even turn on their radar in the first place.

Then there's the simple maintainabilty - have those criticisms about the sheer number of F35s out of service at any one time passed you by? Even the US Air Force struggles to maintain it, and even in peacetime. Yes, it's a hugely complex aircraft but stealth especially is a detractor in anything other than the first wave of battle conditions - it's a lot easier to repair a bullethole in an aluminium panel than it is in its radar cross-section friendly carbon fibre equivalent.

One other reflection from Desert Storm - the US military made much PR of the Nighthawk and onboard camera foootage. In retrospect it was British/German/Saudi Tornados that did the bulk of the heavy lifting on account of their longer range. What good is stealth if what you actually need is a bigger fuel tank?

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

the spectacularly refined chap

The most outlandish and/or batshit crazy prediction made here will still be more accurate than anything from Gartner.

Do we really need another non-open source available license?

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Financialisation versus origination

No, you are completely wrong my friend.

Refer to Richard Stallman, “Four Freedoms”.

There is nothing about commercial use.

It's right there, in the very first clause of your own reference. "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose." In other tracts he has expanded on this, he really means what that implies. Personal, academic or, yes, commercial, use? Fine. Military or polictical use? Also fine. I don't recall him expanding further but if you actually read his arguments it's clear it goes equally for either side of the abortion debate, fighting for human rights or enforcing an opressive regime, Big Oil, Tobacco or Pharma or indeed anything else of which you might disapprove. In Stallman's view the use of free software must be completely unrestricted as a first principle, it is free for all as a common good.

Stallman's talked a lot of crap over the years and I don't agree with his position on many things, but that's no excuse for misrepresentation.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

the spectacularly refined chap

Back when I was a Civil Servant we had a Vax 11/780 that was described on the purchase as a "PDP11 Compatible Data Collection Device" since all "computers" had to be ICL. I'm not sure what trick they'd used to get it's predecessor PDP 11/45 through but we had to keep that as part of the fiddle even though it was never turned on.

It's probably an urban legend but that is supposedly how the PDP name came about. At the time computers were perceived as incredibly expensive and needing a large technical team. The PDP moniker was specifically to avoid the term "computer", after all, it's not a computer, it's a Programmed Data Processor.

the spectacularly refined chap

I remember the shenaghans I had in the civil service trying to get a marking pencil ordered on the stationery budget.

It was enough hassle that when I needed refills I simply ordered a new pencil at £5 a time, containing a single refill, instead of a pack of 12 refils at £8. The pencil was by now already approved, the refills would mean repeating the entire process...

Wanted: Driver for rocket-powered Bloodhound Land Speed Record car

the spectacularly refined chap

you could say the longer the record stands, the better value it is, and that it would be bad value if you had to do it every few years

But it carries a hell of a lot of prestige. In terms of sporting records it's up there with the men's 100m and... err, is there anything else?

the spectacularly refined chap

The need for funding remains a hallmark of the project, but it would be churlish not to wish the best of luck to those behind the car.

It's not just this project, it's the hallmark of the LSR as a whole, it's simply gotten too rich for anyone.

Back in the 60s the LSR was traded often several times a year until 1970 when Blue Flame held the record for almost 13 years. It was followed by Thrust2 which held it for almost 14, then by ThrustSSC which has now held it for 26 years and counting.[1] That's a long time. If I compare it to my own life I was in the first year of Uni when ThrustSSC took the record. I wasn't even in primary school when Thrust2 did.

It's simply been cranked up that high now that any attampt to match yet alone beat it is a massive undertaking, in terms of technology and engineering, funding, business and project management. There have been many attempts to take it on. All have failed. Mostly down to funding but also the death of Jessi Combs and possibly others, this is not a casual pleasure drive after all.

Going forward it'll probably end up purely as a vanity project for the likes of Elon Musk and Arab oil sheiks. It's very difficult to identify any practical applications or payback for anything developed.

[1] Yes I'm aware that technically the record belongs to the driver and not the car, but it's not what people remember.

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

the spectacularly refined chap

Commodification of people

I just hate this trend of treating people as if they were property to do with as you will.

rentahitman.com?

It's hire! Hire!

hireahitman.com

GhostBSD makes FreeBSD a little less frightening for the Linux loyal

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: I've Used GhostBSD

Was it a multithreaded app? Malloc() implementations tend not to do much in the way of memory checking, that is the place where Purify, valgrind, ElectricFence etc earn their keep.

OTOH Linux assigns each thread a grow-on-demand stack that is only ultimately limited to 8MB by default. POSIX threads require you to either allocate a (fixed) stack at the time of thread creation or take an (equally fixed) 2KB default allocation. That default allocation is not very big if there are deeply nested or highly recursive functions at play and is easily breached.

Linux is the outlier for mostly historical reasons now. To get something close to POSIX threads they implemented the clone() system call and each thread ran as a separate process. Quick and easy to implement but had side effects, such as each stack having grow on demand semantics, also it meant threads were no lighter weight than processes. It was very late in the day Linux got true threads, from memory 2010 or thereabouts. However, the previous behaviour was maintained for compatibility.

If you come across that it's generally a good indication of naive programmers. Sure you can say "We've coded this for Linux" but more often it is an unstated assumption, lying on wait to catch someone who doesn't happen to be a developer of the project.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

the spectacularly refined chap

The secret to successful lying to to make yourself look at complete idiot.

If you're late in to work you could try saying the bus was late/that car broke down etc. No one lends it any credence.

On the other hand, if you say "I crapped myself! I had to go home to clean myself up and get changed!" no one will ever question it.

UK convinces nations to sign Bletchley Declaration in bid for AI safety

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Turing had nothing to do with Colossus!

It's a bit more than that, he did contribute some of the actual methods used in breaking Fish. Just looked it on Wiki, it was the "wheel breaking" stage. In essence, what to do but not how to do it. "Co-designer" is a bit of a stretch but yes it was more than a bit part.

The general trend that popular science loves its heroes, particularly if they have an interesting back story, certainly holds though. Stephen Hawking is probably the most notable recent example - his actual contributions probably wouldn't put him in the top twenty or thirty physicists of the late 20th century.

Even Einstein - Maxwell took 2-300 years of research into electromagnetism and wrapped it all up in a single set of equations. When it was noted these contradicted Newton's laws of motion Relativity resolved the issues within a generation. When you look at those timescales, what was the hard part, exactly?

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Fascinating stuff

When I first read xkcd 913 the feeling was oddly familiar.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: what about my fax machine?

ISTR reading perhaps a year back they were trying to get fax removed from the universal service obligation for precisely this reason.

Ah yes, here it is.

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: Wonderful episode once again!

Going to have to remember that one.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

the spectacularly refined chap

Electron volts measure energy, i.e. one is a tiny fraction of a joule. One eV is the work done moving one electron across a potential difference of one volt.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: So let me recap...

also found a couple of mags in a HST vestibule area.

The Hubble has a front porch?

Not surprised about the magazines, we all know what telescopes are really for.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

the spectacularly refined chap

Re: It's a bloody word in our bloody language!

Microsoft have always struck me as being in a "Having your cake and eat it" positionwhen it comes to trademarks. This is a company that claims a trademark of "Windows" for windowing systems and "Word" for word processors but has claimed "Internet Explorer" is a generic term and thus not trademarkable.

In the case that is the subject of the article though it seems the (original) site owner is on solid ground: it it long established that trademark protection does not extend to cases where such use is necessary to refer to a company or its products. That is why a site like The Register does not need permission for Microsoft, Apple or indeed ARM to refer to those companies whenever they publish articles critical of them. I suspect this is lawyers simply trying it on knowing there is no real case. They know people are scared of getting involved in expensive legal cases, especially when they are acting simply as intermediaries such as the hosting provider here. The article is lacking in specifics but this is particularly true in the US where each party generally pays its own costs which inevitably favours those with the deepest pockets.

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