Posts by The Organ Grinder's Monkey

Windows XP was released to manufacturing a quarter of a century ago

Re: "Apparently it's NOT Brian Eno who composed this, but Stan LePard"

When they should of course be eating your face?

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Re: You'd have to be absolutely sure

Mosquitos have a passing interest in me until my other half is within reach, at which point they lose all interest in me & pile in on her. She reacts really badly to them too, giant red lumps form which stay itchy for days. She is ludicrously exothermic though, so it's her own fault, obviously :)

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Re: It’s mystery payments that annoy me.

Known hereabouts as "the beer scooter"

Stopping a cyberattack while walking your dog - defensive AI security CEO says it's not ruff to do

Re: [Corma] gets its name from the Elven word for “ring.”

Upvote for "Shitegeist"

Smooth-talking fraudsters clone contactless cards, authorize payments in just 13 minutes

Will they be in black & white?

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

Re: Stupidity plus arrogance

I was at college with a lad that played in the front row at U21 rugby for the county. He had a story of playing hooker one day as a stand in, & once the scrum was formed, feeling a hairy forearm reaching into his shirt collar, down his back, & taking a firm grip on the back of his jockstrap. Then the pulling began.

By the time the scrum collapsed the waistband had reached the nape of his neck & he was left on the floor crying with his knees pulled up under his chin while all the other members of the scrum ran off to resume open play...

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

Re: Providing Negative Incentives and then Clutching Pearls: However could this have been avoided ?

Ref XKCD link,

Non-techy Luser here, sorry.

I've always been puzzled by the way that the "Horse Battery Staple" thing splits the words which feels to me like turning a 30-something character problem into several much smaller (& therefore more easily solved) problems. Presumably the answer is "hashes"? & I should just nod, smile sweetly and accept what those who understand such things tell me, & not cling onto my Bletchley Park-vintage concepts of code-breaking?

What steps does your SA bank take to prevent this system from being fooled by a photograph. I assume that this is also the unstated objection of your downvoter (which wasn't me, ftr.)

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

The ghosts of Jochen Rindt & Graham Hill might have a "contrasting" opinion?

Keeping yesterday's computers ticking takes more than nostalgia

Ref "Always one hand behind your back, kids, when probing live AC!"

Specifically the left hand, (unless you're dextrocardic, obviously) to keep the direct path from right hand to earth from going directly across the heart. Left handed? Unlucky...

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

"A spokesperson told us the company was happy with its multi-brand strategy and had no plans to change the VodafoneThree name or drop Three, VOXI, SMARTY, or Talkmobile."

I tried to put that horseshit into Google Translate, but if didn't offer "Business Bullshit" as an input language.

If your job depends on any of those brands, I reckon you've got 3 months...

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

My understanding of the white stick suggestioln was that it's a widely recognised symbol of limited vision, & the bus drivers would be less stroppy if they could see in advance what was going on.

Flock cameras go up in flames as cops hunt suspected firebugs

Re: Writer at The Drive website Flocked over Range Rover plate mixup.

Maybe when the outcome of police / public interactions stops having race as such a clear determinant, people will stop mentioning it.

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

My other half spent her first year at college in Sheffield sharing a place with a girl who had had a somewhat sheltered upbringing.

She was observed, whilst cooking bacon under the eye-level grille, pulling the grille out every few minutes & snipping at the bacon before sliding it back under the heat.

"On the instructions it clearly says "snip at intervals"

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

Re: So its back to WW II technology

Ref Bosnia, the news story at the time said that they were choosing their targets from the CIA's world book of facts. Possibly an out of date edition, can't remember.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Other monitor manufacturers exist.

A home-cinema obsessed friend told me a long time ago that LG stands for "Low Grade."

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

My only reliable way of telling Aussies & Kiwis apart is to ask them to say "Ed"

Australians can, but Kiwis say "idd".

Re: "this is just how MS Word works"

I went to a fairly posh school, & not all of the kids were there on merit, shall we say.

A particular example was a Chinese lad who was very much Tim-nice-but-dim in Asian form. A thoroughly decent lad, but not likely to author any world-changing research in the foreseeable future. His dad owned a bank in Hong-Kong, though (this was all well pre handover) so he didn't need to.

The school did offer lessons in other languages than the usual French & German as an after-school activity, & it occurred to him that as the Mandarin Chinese classes offered an O-level exam at the end it might be his best chance of leaving school with something to show for his time there. Sadly not. It was the wrong sort of Mandarin apparently.

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: I used to carry around...

Likewise my beloved Motorola 8500s. Batteries were each about the size of a feature phone, needed three to get a full day. 99 number memory, but no alphanumeric capability so they were just stored in sequence & you had to remember which memory slot contained the desired number, or recognise it as you scrolled through. Kids of today, etc...

Re: Have some sympathy for the user

I replace dying batteries in my devices routinely, but every time the problem is trying to source batteries of anything near the quality of the original ones. I did my Phillips razor a couple of years ago, the original batteries were a couple of tagged NiMh AAs. Best I could do was spot-weld tags to a brand new pair of Panasonic rechargeables. It still works, but the charging has gone mad. Charge light goes out after about an hour, (used to be maybe 4 hours) & if you unplug it at that point it only gives 2 or 3 shaves. Leave it on the charger for a few days & it'll give maybe 7 or 8 uses.

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

Re: The real challenge is regulation

A good proportion of those will have been by choice, sadly.

My best mate's landlord during his apprenticeship in Coventry was a gang leader on the permanent way, & was completely inured to finding stray body parts on the line as part of his daily endeavours. He was firmly of the opinion that Britain's missing persons lists could be greatly shortened if those random limbs could be identified. This was in the mid 80s, so maybe they are now DNA tested, but he was doubtful that there was much follow up at the time.

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

Took me a moment to persuade ElReg's unpredictable search function to cough it up, & was beginning to think that I was hallucinating, but Poettering left MS at the beginning of the year "to prove that SystemD is trustworthy" according to the article:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/29/systemd-daddy-departs-microsoft-for-linux-startup/4437009

You're right about the rest though.

US auto regulators want to kill robotaxi brake pedals

Re: What are you doing ?

As far as I can see all the down voters have missed the key point. They're all saying that their brakes are stronger than their engines, & quoting example situations where they've taken their foot off the accelerator pedal, so their engine is only making idle power, regardless of road speed, ie a normal braking situation, & not at all the situation that I was describing.

I was referring to TFA wherein commenters are asking for a brake pedal to stop a runaway robotaxi, which will still have its foot down on the accelerator. I illustrated that clearly with reference to the Toyota / Lexus stuck throttle "auto-acceleration" fiasco 10 or 15 years ago. Those that turned the key back one position to shut off engine power lived. Those that tried to stop the car with the brakes against engine power mostly didn't.

If you try to stop a car with a throttle stuck wide open with the brakes, the brakes will slow initially but the brakes will soon become overheated (known as faded) & become ineffective, & you'll still be travelling at speed & possibly accelerating depending on the position that the throttle is stuck at.

To those that believe that applying the brakes somehow closes the throttle automatically, maybe on the modern, software-controlled stuff it does, but none of the Saab & Volvos I did my 20 workshop years on had such a feature, nor any other make or modelfor that matter. To be clear I'm not talking about cruise control disengageing when the brake is touched, that's an entirely separate system.

I'm puzzled that everyone commenting here seems to believe that pushing the brake pedal will stop the car. It absolutely won't if the drive isn't also disconnected or the throttle closed, neither of which a conventional mechanical brake will do.

All that would happen is that the brakes get hotter & hotter until they are completely faded (& in extremis catch fire). Any robotaxi would likely compensate for the increasing drag by increasing throttle, unless there's a signalling connection between brake system & engine management, & then you're back to relying on already failed software to respond appropriately? Remember the problem that Lexus had a decade or two ago with alleged spontaneous acceleration? So many clueless drivers rather than turning the ignition key back one position just tried to stop the car with the brakes. Didn't work then, wouldn't work now.

There isn't a solution to this. Safety drivers get bored & distracted, the software provably can't be trusted. Driverless vehicles would be a wonderful innovation if they could be made at least as safe as ordinary human drivers, but I can't see how it can ever be done without an array of sensors so ungainly & expensive that it'll never be viable.

Samsung floats 2028 launch for seaborne datacenter

Re: Sooo...

"> It's not all that bad rocking wise.

One question: Is the rocking better or worse than it is on land?"

I'd guess that it doesn't have to be better than it is on land, it just has to be good enough not to harm the servers. Gentle swaying back & forth will likely (very slightly) increase wear on spinning rust bearings as they'll now be dealing with the gyroscopic effect of the plattens wanting to stay level while the drive moves around them, but in practice how much gyroscopic effect would the stack of discs actually muster, & could the bearings in the drives not be specified appropriately. We already have hdd specified for particular purposes, eg 24/7 write on cctv, is this going to be insurmountably different?

More concerning is the idea of powering these barges with on board power. If that means the same big marine diesels burning the crudest of heavy oil then that's an environmental fail, if the filth that comes out of visiting cruise ships when they can't / won't use shore power due to "incompatible standards" in shore power connections is any guide.

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

Re: I like to automate

You work in an Amazon fulfillment centre & I claim my £5.

Re: Some clarifications

Uncontrollable temptation here to start a "No! I'm Kara!" string of responses culminating (I assume) in a "No! I'm Kara & so is my wife!"

New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

A former workmate had a simple chant that summarised his aspirations when evaluating a potential new girlfriend:

Can she cook, can she f**k, can she do the washing up?

He'd likely be a customer, if it weren't for the fact that he was observably a fanny magnet, couldn't beat them away with a shitty stick. Woman can be their own worst enemies.

So that they look familiar to their customer demographic.

Raspberry Pi OS gets a new kernel but apparently not a new version number

Is that sadistic? Sounds masochistic to me.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

Re: New boss

Ah, Macquarie, that explains it. Nothing survives long after they've been involved. See also several British water companies.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Once upon a re-org...

There's a lovely Mail-online-comments-style "it's the only lesson they understand" feel about that...

(For the avoidance of doubt, no, I don't think that anything about the Daily Bigot is lovely.)

Small island nation tries bold tech education strategy

Re: Sobering…

"The fix is to stop voting stupid people into positions of power"

That's be lovely, but here in the UK it's been a while since we had an election where anyone on the ballot wasn't firmly in the stupid category. It's the biggest single driver of political disengagement amongst the voting public (I think.)

From here it looks much the same in the US too, but with an attempt at disenfranchisement to help the process along?

Lessons from the VMwars – nothing virtual about the Broadcom vs Tesco slugfest

How long before Tesco's IT dep't is offering a one-stop "we'll get you off VM Ware" managed migration service to corporate clients, possibly with a "& we'll sue Broadcom for you so they end up paying for it" from their legal dep't?

Popcorn, anyone? It's in the aisle with the crisps...

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

There's an old joke about not letting women measure up for carpets as they're required to believe that 6" is 10".

Next stop, C:\ ... Paris Metro screen goes off the tracks

Re: Choo choo

Owner of a 29 year old daily driver rwd Volvo here. Still on the flat bit of the bathtub, but there are slight signs that there's a slight gradient ahead. Still not the vertical cliff that all my early adopter friends in their SDVs (Software Definited Vehicles) seem to spend their time clinging to, though. Horses for courses...

LLMs are closer to religion than they appear. Watch out for those who like it that way

Re: Fostering friendship

"philosophers is because they don't have a centrally organised body"

The Philosophers' Guild would like a quiet word...

Leo (Lyons Electronic Office) outputs in Latin? That must have made life needlessly difficult for the people working with it.

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Re: And they're Surprised?

Ref Excused Boots

About 40 years ago a mate living in a small town in Essex, UK, was plagued with visits by JWs. His mum had lived in the house before him, & was tolerant of all people (but would have had no time for the JW message, just too polite to tell them so bluntly.)

After the umpteenth visit in a few weeks he solved the problem once & for all by answering the door naked, with an inverted crucifix hanging round his neck, & wearing the best thousand-yard-stare that he could muster. Probably didn't hurt that he was usefully over six feet tall & had a haircut best described as mostly jet black mohecan.

The JWs made their excuses & left, almost tripping over each other in their haste to get away, & never darkened his door again, or his street as far as he could tell.

So, if YOU are troubled with JWs & you don't have a can of "JW-be-gone" halfwit repellent to hand, you could always try that.

Researchers find all big-name bots bomb EU compliance tests

Re: Well duh

"We don't ban kitchen knives because in theory you could stab someone with them, we ban stabbing people."

"guns don't kill people, rappers do" (GLC)

No captain, my captain: Navantia floats crewless warship

Re: Autonomous and armed

Human in the sloop?

Feds unwittingly leak pilots' pre-crash conversation

Re: There but for the grace of God and so on

Or the RAF instructor, who, on an early morning training flight, realising that his trainee had just done something unrecoverable whilst close to the ground had the presence of mind to transmit "cancel two breakfasts" before impact.

AI to infest eight in ten premium phones within two years

Found this obliquely pertinent zombie website just yesterday. Funny how this survives when so many still relevant 'sites have disappeared.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

(beware, contains some quite strongly held, & forthrightly expressed, opinions.)

Re: My bullshit-o-meter just exploded

Not your "safe word"?

FCC walks back router update ban before it bricked America's network security

Re: The world needs to block the USA

I used to think that Viz was a silly, humourous comic, but everytime I see anything about US ICE types I'm reminded of the "S.W.A.N.T" (Special Weapons And No Tactics) strips where a severely over-armed militaristic force burst out of their vehicles, guns blazing, as a response to any & all situations, eg kitten stuck in tree. Viz now looks increasingly like a reliable prediction of the now from 30 years ago.

(See also Mr Logic's haircut from the same era, if further proof were needed.)

This browser add-in doesn't just hide ads, it tells you to OBEY

Re: Ads

I've never been sure that it's the recent purchase that triggers those adverts, or the Googled research that precedes that purchase, which seems more likely? It is irritating, though, no doubt about that.

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: "the board was of the Solari split-flap type"

I've always suspected that a larger number of loudspeakers all set to a lower volume & all spread about more evenly would make things clearer, but we'll never know for the same reason, money.

Re: Title change to London transport?

People forget that a good percentage of Britain's railway lines & stations weren't sited to benefit the polloi, they were put there to benefit producers wanting to get their goods to market. Often these producers were gentlemen farmers, which explains the rural stations.

Re: Schrödinger trains

Ladies & gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you today the first in The Register's new "Formal Definitions" to sit alongside our internationally recognised weights & measures.

Mr Yet Another Anonymous Coward has stumbled upon the absolute definition of the lowest of "Low Bars".