It was all Yellow: Mass email about a Coldplay CD breaks the internet Monday mornings are your time to grimace with other Reg readers over their technical mishaps in our weekly column – Who, Me? This week, we hear from “John”, who was working for one of the biggest retailers in the UK back in the days when the spectre of the EU's GeDPR hadn’t scared companies into data protection compliance, and …
This reminds me of the time where someone did something to an email server that causes a 19 hour outage over at America Online in the late 1990s. But in this case, can the retailer be blamed for instigating a DDoS attack on the payment gateway?
Now I'm going to grab my jacket and exit stage left.
"Can I have that in writing, please?"
Preferably with some kind of rider acknowledging that they had been warned. In cases like this, the first instinct for anyone in John's place should be to cover their ass.
Edit: All posts on April Fool's day come with a "posted by a forum troll" icon? Really, El Reg?
It's a repeat of an old joke. First time round I loved it for its wider effect, and described it as audacious and imaginative.
... But the ingenious thing is that this applies not just to the feeble joke article, but every article, through the history of El Reg. Suddenly the Reg every day is April 1st tradition really comes into its own, as tall stories like yesterday’s one about World Backup Day display all grinning trolls.
And suddenly the seeds of doubt are sown over all the serious stories. This is surreal, and turns it into a brilliant new twist on an old tradition!
Icon in waiting for when we revert.
Don't know about the rerun here, but the people at stackexchange/ askubuntu are also having a (April fools) day which makes old farts feel more at home...
MARQUEE!
BLINK!
GUESTBOOK!
Proudly built in Notepad. Best viewed in Netscape
...and you just have to love the cursor trail... Oh, is that just me..?
Be honest, there are some funny ones out there today...
Devuan is hacked, rerouted to gopher
Apple will use Brexit to launch it's own Raspi, the ApplePie
Dave at EEVblog has been etching pcp's with water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGL8X8FS4eQ
I couldn't even tell you if an annoying noise happened to be that particular perpetrator. Speaking as someone who does love music, I avoid pop in general: I concluded at age about 13 or so[1] I'd heard it (the generic pop formula) enough for one lifetime. Pop is for people who don't like music, because if you try to listen to it as music the total inanity will soon drive you up the wall.
Damn, where's the Reg icon for soapbox?
[1] About a year, give or take, after my mother acquired a radio and started playing Radio 2 - the BBC's monument to mindlessness. To her credit, she too later got fed up with it, and moved to real music.
because if you try to listen to it as music the total inanity will soon drive you up the wall
Speaking as a confirmed Priog-head (from a *very* early age - my parents thought that pretty any much music made after 1890 was an abomination so I was entirely free to discover my own music) I don't object to Pop - it fills a niche for people who want simple repetitive music to dance to or seduce people to.
It doesn't have any longer-lasting appeal and isn't designed to - it's designed to be throwaway music, made for people who don't appreciate the complexity of real[1] music. And that's fine - it's what they want, mostly because that's all they have ever known.
It's a bit like the difference between a burger from a well-known franchise outlet - it seems tasty for a little while but then you realise that it's left a horrible taste in your mouth and you are about to die from clogged arteries - and a proper 3-4 course meal at a good restaurant. One gives you depth and complexity, the other gives you a bloated sugar/fat rush.
[1] The only form of music that I *really* can't stand is opera[2] - lots of screeching and warbling destroying the hard work of the orchestra. So, while most of my collection is Prog of one sort or another, I also have folk, jazz (modern, big band and trad), classical. rock and even one or two rap/pop tracks.
[2] There are a couple I like. But not Wagner - that needs to be consigned to the lowest circle of hell to torment the damned.
"Never understood the Coldplay hate."
Simple, they got popular. People hate bands that get popular (partly I think because shitty radio stations constantly play the same two songs until everyone is fed up), mainly because it's cool to hate the mainstream.
Any of their contemporaries would have had the same reception if they'd not mostly slipped into blameless obscurity.
It's nothing to do with being popular, although the ubiquity of Chris Martin's whiny tones didn't do anything to lessen the level of aggravation caused by hearing them.
My personal dislike for them stems from the combination of their bland monotony, and the fact that their front-man is an unbearably smug git with a Jesus complex.
Thing is U2 is much more of a rock band, rather than a pop band. Not all of their stuff, but a lot of the older catalog is proper dance around the room music*.
The biggest issue (IMHO) with U2 is that some prat is singing over an otherwise perfectly good song. Not that Bono should STFU all the timea, he should just stick with ballads, and STFU on the rocking tracks :)
Used to play U2 tunes (without vocals) and they are proper tasty. AC/DC are fun too, but they essentially only do three songs :D
* my four year old refers to rock as "guitar music" when he wants us to dance to it
"There music is much of a muchness with that of their contemporaries."
That's pretty much it. They're a bland, safe mainstream take on that sort of music.
I remember when Coldplay hit it big and were being hyped up by the alleged critics. First time I heard "Yellow", I was like "This is what all the fuss is about?!"
This- along with the hype for Damien Rice's bathetic "Cannonball"- was what finally stopped me caring about what the mainstream media deemed The Next Big Thing.
Someone put their finger on Coldplay- at least in their early days- when they described them as an A&R man's version of Radiohead using "High and Dry" (#) as the basis for their career. (And- one assumes- not going on to record "difficult" albums like Kid A instead).
Of course, they've moved on with musical trends since then, jumping on with a conservative take on what will keep them popular (e.g. increased number of collaboration/featuring tracks in recents years as has become common in chart music).
A safe, commercially-friendly take on musical trends. The "Next" of rock bands.
(#) One of the most commercial, but also weakest songs from "The Bends"- even they don't like it, apparently.
Never understood the Coldplay hate.
Same. They did a couple of enjoyable tracks, and some not-too-bad stuff, and a pile of utter shite - but much the same as many other bands out there, and probably better than the average craptrack played ad-infinitum on the radio.
Even my favourite bands are at least 25% stuff I only hear because they needed a certain amount of tracks on the album, and one or two good songs per album (Except for Rez's XX - but that was a concert album after 20 years of hard work, when they'd really improved their game. Then again, several of their other albums have at least 3 or 4 really good songs on them)
Never understood the Coldplay hate.
It's similar to Phil Collins hate - successfuly musicians, made lots of dosh without being lary or in-your-face.
I'm no fan of Coldplay but even I'd admit they work hard - even if Chris Martins' voice makes me want to stab needles in my eardrums..
PC is a whole other woven container of piscines - he was an incredible drummer, great singer and (especially with Genesis) a great songwriter. Sure, he's had more wives than I've had hot meals but he's hardly unique in that - compare and contrast with the animated mummy known as Mick Jagger.
My local has various piss take items on their menu. They do a decent English and Irish breakfast.
So the breakfast menu also has the Canadian breakfast: a pat on the back, two paracetamol and a pint of tap water
They have a cocktail called "Coldplay's greatest hits".
It's a pint of tap water.
Can we please stop calling it music? It's the whiny sound a 14 year old boy makes after their first break up accompanied with the sound of someone stepping on a cat passed through a filter to make it sound even more miserable if that's even possible.
Not to mention that all dynamics that might make it mildly interesting are squeezed out of it, because, you know, loud songs are better.
"Loud songs are better" is not the reason. In general audio tracks are compressed for two reasons:
One company I was for (in my first job) at the end of the 80's had a lot of stuff connected up their Vax that handled the local applications + email.
Said company had Vax wired up to the x29 network as it was (the joys of accessing yellow pages over x29, was amazing)
Also, to the point, the Vax was also connected to the Telex network, so by generating an email with a certain address, you could send and receive telexes
Telex terminals prohibited the use of certain character strings which were just not possible to type, not so the case of the text of an email sent out.
So it came to pass that someone (manager) sending a telex via email on a Vax for some reason used a certain set of characters (unbeknown to anyone internally), that initiated a shutdown of the telex network in the south of England.
BT tracked it back to us and were rather angry, we were also given a list of things that under no circumstances must be typed and sent via this method.
Fun days!
There was a time at the start of the 80's when telex (along with all other telecommunications) was still firmly under the thumb of those sensitive, versatile people at no-longer-GPO-but-still-bloody-useless-BT. Some bright spark in the USA invented a thing that might have been called "mail-drop" where you could modem into some central service location, identify your clatter box to the system and get all your messages printed expeditiously right in front of you. According to the article that described this, the hapless engineer charged with getting it to operate in the UK came up against all the usual jobsworths, chinless wonders, nitwits and ignoramuses. Apparently they didn't understand the "bodes".
The punchline was that the US people had to figure out how to make it work over telex.
The real question is, how well would modern systems deal with ~10 million concurrent visitors?
Our company setup is not doing web trading beyond handing out quotes and is just hosted with 1&1, but I suspect that it wouldn't deal with more than a few thousand concurrent users before dying very horribly. Do we have any admins here for really large scale systems? And if so, how much load can you take on your systems?
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