Posts by Miss Config

Part Of Football Today

It's all part of the Magic of The ( FA ) Cup.

Over the weekend on TV showing games in the 4th Round, half-time ads showed a lot of

'Microsoft Cloud'

Cinnamon Stable ?

Will the new version of Cinnamon still keep going as long as Linux Mint itself is up and running ?

My problem is that every few days Cinnamon crashes and although it's easy enough to restart, it is still annoying when it happens.

They DID Warn You

The warning was in the news last week : UK bank will be hacked in 2017 :

BBC : Bank Hack Warning

Then again, beware all the fake news nowadays

"Windows 10 could let users pause automatic updates"

According to at least one blogger ( Winaero ).

It's in the latest preview build for Insiders. Stop an update for 35 days anyway.

The old ones are the best

Computer fraud is as old as computers. Take computer fraud to mean the illegal moving of money through bank accounts via a computer's overnight jobs and the processing of individual computer records ( as happened in this case ).

The 'original' computer fraud job goes back to the time when rounding was a new idea in computing terms ( COBOL ? ). The question about this story is whether it actually happened or is it an urban myth ?

Seems a programmer rewrote a bank system so that any rounding done by the system benefitted him personally. So interest is calculated for an account and if said interest includes a fraction of a penny then that is NOT added to the account in question but sent to the programmer's account.

So the calculation says the interest is £31.735p but the account only receives £31.73p with the extra ha'penny credited to the programmer's account. A trivial sum, even back then, but when it happens literally tens of thousands of times then the money stolen does add up.

Put it in a box first

Obviously this 'dung dumper' completely lacks class.

If you MUST send someone a load of crap, then be absolutely stylish about it like

the queen of this trade, Sharon Osborne, and first buy a box from a jeweller :

Sharon Style

I have seen the Fuschia and it works

Default Attitude : Do NOT read that email

As a general rule people are stupid about how many of their emails they actually read

whether at work or at home. And that includes CEOs.

Ideally people should not open an email at all unless they absolutely positively MUST.

And for their own financial sake companies should teach their staff to do that.

A carrot and stick policy could work : in extreme cases getting fired for opening too many dodgy emails

and bonuses for avoiding them ( and warning cow-orkers about the latest dodgy subject lines).

Space Archeology ?

Am I the only ignoramus who has never heard of the field of Space Archeology ?

Does the Reg at least have a sub-folder for it in Science ?

Found Out The Rule The Hard Way

That rules says that any data that does not exist IN THREE SEPARATE PLACES

does not exist full stop.

Paper And Toilets

I distinctly remember this argument back in 1990, well before the interweb.

The question was :

When will we have the paperless office ?

and the reporter answered : about the same time we have the paperless toilet.

( And I actually found that amusing at the time. )

Finding Rings ( Using a Computer. )

It had been known since 1977 that there were rings around Uranus

A story in itself. I seem to remember reading at the time how accidental the discovery was.

Something about punch cards etc. left in a box and only when they actually bothered to process them

...... 'Wow ! Look ! A ring system.'

If you don't know whether to laugh or cry, then just laugh. Like the joke in the current Private Eye showing two women walking past their gym :

Woman 1 : OMG! My Ashley Madison details were hacked !

Woman 2 : You poor thing, honestly you just cannot trust anyone these days !

Bloke at BBC tested Cortana as shown on the BBC News today.

At 1:19 here he asks out loud for a London weather forecast

and Cortana speaks back :

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33689332

Klondike Solitaire

First, I'm always amused when people ask whether a user is into gaming, with the basis being how much computing power the user might actually need for a prospective laptop, for example. For me, the short answer is 'no'. I DO play Solitaire, but that is trivial in terms of computing power needed.

Windows Solitaire was, I must admit, a guilty pleasure. But it used drive me mad, first, with the frequecy with which there would be two IDENTICAL cards ( such as BOTH red sevens, say ) after the initial deal. Usually I asked it to deal AGAIN ( and got another identical pair ). Then I'd get to a stage in the game where although I thought I was losing, I thought there was SOMETHING I might be able to do. However Windows refused to help me.

( btw, it kept my 'score' as winning 13% of the time. Which was nice. )

That brought me to the Linux version which is something called KPatience which has several card games, the version most like Windows Solitaire being called Klondike. This is infinitely preferable to Windows' version. It holds your hand all the way and gives a running commentary. It says 'this game is winnable'; 'this game is lost' etc.

What is frustrating is when I make several good moves and THEN it says 'this game is lost'.

It even has a 'Hint' button that can say exactly where to move certain cards. It regularly tells me half a dozen card moves that I would otherwise manage to miss and in effect wins the game for me.

Updated Law

The number of electronics engineers who no longer believes in Moore's Law doubles every year

Chinese And Hitler ? Wong

Any query about Chinese knowledge of the Nazis is answered by the fact that there is a Chinese actor named Hitler Wong. I shit you not :

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120894/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

Unpin that PIN

So they STILL insist that enter a PIN at login or restarting from sleep ?

Goodness knows how many of us asked them to remove that 'facility'.

( Microsoft are certainly not telling. )

You know the drill

For me the most memorable thing about Beagle 2 was that it gave a whole new meaning to the phrase 'sending out for a Chinese'. Seriously. When it arrived at Mars obviously Beagle would start drilling. But where exactly would they get a drill ? They looked in the Yellow Pages and found this Chinese bloke who was great with DENTAL drills. Whatever he cobbled together was fitted onto Beagle.

Make it up ? Not even Monty Python could have.

People are goin' ....

So here I am, planning my first trip to the Bay Area and what happens ?

And I was even going to put some flowers in my hair, on the advice of a song I heard on the radio.

But The Reg, as per, rained on my parade. Literally.

And The President is ............?

What I want to know is whether 'George W. Bush', US President at launch of New Horizon,

is carved somewhere on it ?

That would make him immortal, especially if the proverbial little green women find New Horizon

one million years from now.

FORTRAN Lives

Actually FORTRAN is the very opposite of your proverbial dead parrot :

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/

Some examples are atmospheric modeling and weather prediction carried out by the National Center for Atmospheric Research; classified nuclear weapons and laser fusion codes at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Labs; NASA models of global climate change; and an international consortium of Quantum Chromodynamics researchers, calculating the behavior of quarks, the constituents of protons and neutrons. These projects are just a few random examples from a large computational universe, but all use some version of Fortran as the main language.

Windows with Tiles

My own original 'error' regarding Windows 8 is a symptom of the disaster it became.

There was a time after the initial release when part of Microsoft's sales patter

was about how big a deal this new idea of 'tiles' was.

( Were windows themselves going to become '20th century technology' ? )

So I wondered in all seriousness how soon before 'Windows 8'

would ALSO be known as 'Tiles 1' ?

The more ridiculous that idea seems now, the bigger the failure of Windows 8.

David Cameron can’t help the No campaign – he’s less popular in Scotland than Windows 8

W8 ( finally ? ) 'jumps the shark' to hatred by non-techies. The point about this title/headline in The Guardian is that it was written by Charlie Brooker, not a member of Tech staff. ( And if you want to get pedantic, it was ALSO written by the subeditor who actually put it in the headline. )

btw, what s the technical term for a Windows 8 hater ? An 8er ( geddit ? )

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/08/scottish-independence-david-cameron-no-campaign-windows-8

Will We Take Away The Chinese OS ?

As soon as we consume one Chinese OS, how soon before we want another ?

LINUS Penzlien ?

Just to be 100% clear his name is NOT Linux.

QR Menu ?

Why can't they extend this to the 'other end' and allow menus and choices therefrom be keyed in via smartphone ?

Buzzwords

I hope the interview process will involve a strong examination of El Reg buzzword bingo :

• boffin

• sueball

• slurp

etc., plus the correct terms for the various companies subject to regular El Reg reports

( 'online tat bazaar ebay' being my personal favourite ).

And This Whisky Is A Scotch

How long before brands of Scotch whisky use '.scot' ?

For 'authenticity', obviously.

Glenlivet.scot, f'rinstance.

And what lurgy's That ?

So exactly what lurgy is it you do have ?

And can you swear on your mother's life/grave that when introduced to a doctor at a party you have NEVER started discussing your then current medical problems ?

So doctors and computers nerds share an occupational hazard.

( But at least if you're lucky, nobody will treat you as if you are a character out of The IT Crowd. )

Touch Office ? ==> Touch OS ?

If you have to touch the Office windows, that suggests, surely, that the OS must ALSO be touchy, shirley ?

Now THERE'S a gap in the market that Microsoft could try to plug !!!

'online tat bazaar'

'online tat bazaar' is precisely the kind of thing I come to El Reg for.

It even negates any whinges about 'boffins'

( which I previously only gave a grudging aceptance with the 'irony' card ).

Up with that sort of thing. ( The phrasing, not the concept. )