Posts by Rich Harding

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

One Of The Best BOFHs Ever

...and I think I've read them all.

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Other Functional 90s Software

Count me as another who still occasionally uses a an actually paid for version of PSP 7.

The other utility still in (far more) regular use is LeechFTP. You have to be a bit careful with this one - you can't just tell people to go and grab it from the web, because most of the versions I've seen out there are bundled with stuff you, er, don't want. However I still carry around a ZIP of 1998 vintage that is happily installed on various Windows boxen, including this Win10 one, and working entirely as designed - including its occasional dialogs in German :)

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

Not only does it make like more difficult for would-be intruders in general, it also prevents people from finding out if a given e-mail address is signed up to a given site/service - which knowledge in and of itself could be potentially valuable/damaging.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: Would someone explain

Yes, and I'm given to understand that they are generally set to trigger once one second of red has elapsed, thus allowing a small amount of leeway for those who felt it "unsafe to stop on amber".

Brits shun country life over phone not-spot fears

As it happens...

...I've spent much of my time aboard my narrowboat for more than a couple of years now - without a home mooring (aka continuously cruising), and mainly in rural areas - and I've not yet encountered anywhere where I can't happily work through mobile tethering.

Rogue Somerset vulture lands at Royal Navy airbase

Re: Looking on the bright side

Salesman. Yes. It's the finest fairweather fighter on the market. You won't find a better one at the price. Or any price for that matter.

Strauss: Yes, it's very nice. But we need a plane for bombing, straffing, assault and battery, interception, ground support and reconnaissance. Not just a fairweather fighter!

Salesman: Well, that's ok. We can make some modifications. It'll cost a little extra, but it's worth it. Just look at the shape of this beauty. Look, I tell you what we'll do. We'l redesign the plane, right? And instead of just calling it the F104, we'll call it the F104G.

Strauss: G?

Salesman: Yeah, eh, Herr Minister - G. G for Germany

Strauss: G. for Germany, eh....

Kobo Glo HD vs Amazon Kindle Paperwhite: Which one's best?

Interesting use of the Kobo

It's possible to wire a GPS unit to them, so they've become hugely popular in free flight circles (pun intended!):

http://50k-or-bust.com/Kobo%20XCSoar/Kobo%20XCSoar.htm

Brace yourselves: Facebook plans MORE PHP jiggery pokery

Proof-reader gone home for the weekend? Homage to The Grauniad?

Manchester car park lock hack leads to horn-blare hoo-ha

Schiphol Airport

Try parking a motorbike (or quite a few cars, apparently) with an alarm/immobiliser at Schiphol. The bike park is very close to the main ATC comms antennas. Now, being a bike, the alarm/immobiliser will generally cut in about 30 seconds after you kill the ignition, so that bit's fine. It's when you come back and try to de-immobilise it that the fun starts. Better learn your override sequence and how to use it!

Not much fun at 1AM on a December morning, when it's -9C and you need petrol, so have to do it all again on the forecourt a couple of hundred yards away.

Google goes on the Blink in WebKit fork FURORE

Er...

"Blink, though, is unlikely to see Apple transfer. It is even less likely Microsoft, the web’s other browser maker heavyweight, would join. Rather, Microsoft will use the weakness of WebKit and uncertainty of Blink to stress the common sense and stability of sticking with its own browser roadmap rather than trusting somebody else’s."

That paragraph rather destroys the argument of the rest of the article, don't you think?

Tick-tock, TalkTalk: Users face fourth day of titsup broadband

Pay the organ grinder, not the monkey...

...as myself and others have been advising, where broadband is concerned, since broadband was introduced. In the old days of dial-up, yeah, fine, people like Demon were excellent. Broadband relies on the network, so get it from someone who actually has a network, not someone who's piggy-backing on someone else's and flogging it cheap.

Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

Re: One or the other

Remove the word "fair", upon which you've conveniently fixated, and my observation still stands.

So, to recap without the word that has derailed your logical faculties: the argument is about distribution but the graphs used do not distinguish between remuneration for "capitalist bastards" (note: author's words, not mine) and those at the other end of the scale, they lump both together and compare them with corporate profit.

One or the other

Tim, as JimC points out, you're either a cretin or you think we are. Your figures include all the money that the top nobs skim off as wages, not as profits. Whilst this is econometrically correct, it's entirely bogus when the argument is about fair distribution.

Review: Samsung Series 9 super slim notebook

Re: I have been

Another vote for the Toshiba Satellite R830-1GZ. Bought mine in late June and it's just been fantastic. I've enthused about it here before, in a way that I seldom bother to do. Yeah, the resolution's not brilliant but I run it through an HD monitor when it's on my desk. Very penguin-friendly too (Mint 13 Cinnamon works pretty much perfectly out of the box, including webcam, sound, external monitor switching and so on). In Mint I typically get seven hours out of the battery in use with wi-fi.

Acer Aspire Timeline M3 Ultra review

Toshiba Satellite R830-1GZ

1.4kg, i5, looks lovely, works even better, huge battery life, no pointless number pad reducing key size, Mint works perfectly out of the box (OK, USB stick)...

LOHAN acquires mighty igniter arsenal

Budgies in Near Space

Some of my paragliding friends are heavily involved in a loosely-related charity project to get a pair of crochet budgies into near space. I admit it's a fairly bizarre thing to want to do but the idea is that the project generates funds for a charity through sponsorship of the footage and of subsequent launches, in this case the Childrens Hospice South West (http://www.chsw.org.uk/).

The idea is to gain sponsorship for the footage so the more people who see the footage the more sponsorship they can get for the Hospice so please pass it on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0uyOcAcUkQ

Facebook, Last.fm and pals to reach deep into Ubuntu

Re: Or, alternatively

I see you've deleted your follow-up rant but, from the sounds of it, either you've never heard of Alt+Tab or you're not very good at describing bugs.

BT bags MASSIVE £425m broadband rollout deal in Wales

Short Memories

BT has, in the past, repeatedly tried to get permission to do this off its own bat (pre-election deal with Labour in '96, previously at the start of that decade) but got knocked back by the then Tory gov't because of competition concerns. So, instead of BT mainly using its existing infrastructure - ducting and so on - to do this, we were forced to endure years of mainly US companies coming over here and ripping up our streets in the interests of "competition". When they'd made their money - and their mess - they then buggered off back to the US, leaving, eventually, just one competitor for BT, Virgin Media. Which many of us have no access to.

We'd have been far better off just letting BT carry on as it wanted to in the first place.

Uni plagiarism site buckles under crush of last-minute essays

"The cause was a database issue that slowed report generation"

AKA someone ran - or the system was allowed to run - an ill-advised query.

How a tiny leap-day miscalculation trashed Microsoft Azure

Not as simple as some think...

Try coding the Monthly Expiry Dates on a Pay As You Go insurance policy ;)

Neither the "End of next month" nor the "1st March following year" approaches, mentioned in comments above, are correct. This applies to most systems where you may need to increment more than once - if you don't always add n period to the start date, you end up with the end date continually creeping forwards, which is seldom an appropriate solution.

Netizens mobilise to recover precious stolen guitar

AC 12:01

You miserable cunt.

(Apologies, Sarah, but this sort of occasion is precisely what the word's for.)

Iomega Home Media Network Cloud Edition 1TB drive

Linux?

When you say it supports Linux, could you elaborate please? I have an earlier 500GB version and, whilst it's certainly possible to make it play with Ubuntu, it's a bit of a PITA, due to the way in which it manages users between itself and clients. There was certainly no client software available for Linux in the way there is for Windows and Mac. This entails, at the very least, a knowledge of using chmod as root and a passing acquaintance with the mount command / fstab. All rather disappointing given that the box itself is linux-based. I do have various apps - Thunderbird, Firefox, Tomboy, even Dropbox after a struggle - successfully sharing data on the drive from a variety of Ubuntu, XP and Win7 boxes, but most people would have given up with most of those before getting them working.

@1st AC: @Alex Walsh is referring to the unfortunately accurate reputation these Iomega drives have for making a hell of a racket.

Artificial 'black hole' generator fashioned out of circuit boards

"terrifying yet unambiguously newsworthy apocalypse incident"

Class :)

Apple drops HTML from iPhone and iPad

iHTML

@Gordon Henderson: LOL! I read your comment I checked the name against it and thought, "Surely there aren't two people mad enough to still be using it?!" ;)

Travel agents accused of shilling for ID cards

@Pete 2

Me and my better half walked into both travel agents in an Oxfordshire market town recently - okay, it was Banbury - and basically said in so many words, "We've got a grand to spend if you can sell us a week in the sun, in Europe, by a beach, last week of September." I'm a regular traveller and book online trips all the time - even though I'm based back in the UK now, I probably still go abroad almost once a month on average - but I thought I'd see what the professionals could come up with. Not too tall an order, you'd think.

Flabberghasted. I mean the only restriction we put on them was that we didn't want to go to Turkey or Benidorm, yet one of them kind of tried to help but was actually as much use as a chocolate teapot, whereas the other one, well, we just couldn't believe it; it was like we were asking her to walk barefoot to Land's End or something. I very nearly did the Holy Grail, "Er, is there somebody else we could talk to?"

Now, what was I doing? Oh, yeah, splitting up the soundboard recording of our last jaunt (to Norway) into tracks...

Toodlepip!

Woman rings cops to decry daughter's superior BJ skills

Not Surprised

I mean I can imagine being told that wouldn't go down too well

Firefox 3.5.4 fixes critical memory flaws

@MarkOne

"The number of IE updates I get these days is much less than new Firefox releases."

And that should make people feel more secure how exactly?

BOFH: Baitin' switch

Best one in ages

LOL-funny all the way :)

Hain breaks ranks with Cabinet over McKinnon extradition

@Red Bren

The Lockerbie trial was not held in Den Haag but at Camp Zeist, over an hour away, on the other side of Utrecht. There's a fair bit of memorabilia around the place, particularly in Het Wapen (a bar) in nearby Soesterberg, if you're ever passing.

EC rejects Microsoft's browser promises

@Simon Hobson

Great post, Simon.

The majority of the rest of the contributors are either economically illiterate or doing a very good job of pretending to be.

Microsoft, Asus launch anti-Linuxbook campaign

@Nick Askew

LOL!

"It wouldn't do for us all to be the same" :D

@Nick Askew

"We need to talk..."

(Only the "right" Nick Askew is liable to get that!)

Me? I'm seriously unimpressed with Asus's behaviour here (upon one of whose excellent full laptops, originally supplied with XP but now dual-booting with Ubuntu and almost never fired into XP, I'm typing this)...

Bye bye BlackBerry mail

Close but...

Surely the headline should be "Goodbye Blackberry mail"?

BOFH: Defiling the profile

Priceless

Best for a while :)

Ryanair may charge cattle to use the bog

@Peter - not true

You're not allowed to take liquids on board in bottles larger than 100ml, sealed in a blah, blah...

The regulations do not proscribe taking empty bottles larger than 100ml through security and thence on-board. I do it all the time as I refuse to pay for bottled water on principle (nothing to do with airports, I don't ever buy bottled water).

US woman says Ubuntu can't access internet

Re: @Paul

"So? Can you strip down and re-build your cars engine?"

Er, yeah, I for one could probably still manage that - just give me the tools. In fact the first serious thing I ever did with a vehicle was replace an engine (by myself - I access to a hoist and a ramp) and soon after I became quite adept at stripping rebuilding bike engines; usually in a bathroom! And no, as with computers, I've not had one minute's formal training in vehicle mechanics either. I read up, I considered my actions before proceeding and when in doubt I found someone to ask.

The way some of the comments here read, one would think their posters are actively advocating refusing to think and learn for oneself. Some also appear to think particular skills immutable when, in reality, it's attitude and approach, not some innate aptitude, that determines one's success (or otherwise) across a huge range of skills.

Attitude Adjustment

@AC: "You all call this woman stupid (maybe she is)...but the average person still knows bugger all about computers."

Well, if they want to use one then they should f**king well learn! I don't know if she's stupid or not (although it seems fairly likely) but she damn well sure hasn't got the nous to enquire and seek out answers for herself, which means she will never, in common with the vast majority of other people, get the most that she could out of using a computer; or anything else for that matter.

Whilst I'm used to doing interface design - and don't think I'm too crappy at it whilst claiming no gold medals - there is a point at which "Helping make things intuitive for the user" has reached its limit and the only way users are going to learn more and get the full benefit of a piece of software is if they are prepared to read, experiment and find things out for themselves. I'll try and help anyone with stuff, from computers to life problems, once; maybe twice; but at the point it becomes obvious they're not prepared to help themselves then sod it, they're on their own. And that's the way it should be. Otherwise we're just encouraging the development of a race of morons.

Pandora prepares to join titsup.com club

Record Companies Really Are Fuckwits

Heaven only knows how much money I've spent on bands many of whom I'd never even heard of before Pandora served them up to me (using seemingly far better "suggestion" criteria than Last.fm which as useful as it is, largely stays within far too narrow, artificial genres for those with a more sophisticated complex of musical tastes).

Built-in browser expiry proposed to fight botnet menace

We get what we deserve

"instead of messing around with figuring out how to stop it from doing that people just turn the auto updaters off"

I'm sure I'm not the only person who long ago had enough of this attitude. If people can't be arsed to work out even the simplest things for themselves (in this case for example how to get Windows to download updates but not install them until told), they can go fornicate. I am sick to the back teeth of everything having to be dumbed down for those who just cannot be bothered. It's a corollary to the whole Health and Safety culture where those of us with a clue or maybe just more of a sense of adventure are restrained due to the incompetents.

It's no different to driving a vehicle - 30% of people on the roads shouldn't be there but because they are we all have to put up with insanity like traffic lights on roundabouts at 2AM. If you can't drive your computer responsibly, sod off somewhere you can't interfere with those who can.

Visual Studio update dents Silverlight development

Second half of the year...

...begins in June, does it? Don't fancy your software much :D

El Reg decimates English language

@The Other Steve

"Come on guys, the days of RP, Standard English and everyone on telly wearing evening dress are long behind us, and good riddance to them. There are far more interesting things to be pedantic about. Like the internet not having been designed to survive a nuclear war, or the true progression of windows version numbers :-)"

Yes, indeed. However misuse of sayings does still make some people come across as ignorant twats - I'm thinking of such as:

"Off his own back"

"One foul swoop"

"A bit of a damp squid"

and so on... The first in particular just makes me want to scream, "Bat, bat, you f*cking idiot; how many cricket runs have you seen scored off someone's back, you utter cretin!!!..." I'm not sure that's what Norman Tebbit meant though...

IE8 to follow web standards by default

I think some of you may have misread...

...particularly those of you slagging off so-called "whiners". It's not at all clear from the piece how compliant to W3C Standards IE8 Standards Mode will be. One would like to hope that it'll be a lot more compliant than IE7 and that that's why they've agreed to the change but I see no guarantees whatsoever.

It's kind of self-selecting really - anyone arguing the general drift of the well-known "Time Breakdown of Modern Web Design" graphic is on a bit of a loser convincing most of us you have the faintest clue what you're talking about.

Suicide bomb swoop bags Musharraf's merry men

@Daniel Wilkie

1. The meaning of the word "conspiracy" when used in conjunction with "theory" has been so debased by misuse anyone with a brain now ignores it and looks at the theory

2. Akbar's theory holds infinitely more water than yours

3. Your first paragraph is pretty pedantic AFAICS - "apologies for being pedantic" might have been more appropriate

4. Apologies for being pedantic but, if you're going to quote people, perhaps try copy and paste so you don't introduce spelling errors that make you look thick - never a good way to prevail in a discussion of rival theories, I find

5. The main thrust of the original story isn't about a mistake, it's about deliberate misrepresentation by The Times, so please take your straw men away, along with your last paragraph

SMBs grasp Vista nettle

Lies, damned lies and...

"As for Microsoft's Office 2007, CDW reckoned there had been a "substantial" increase in organisations upgrading from previous versions, with nearly a quarter saying they had adopted the latest software – up 18 per cent on February's figures."

Erm, so 24% have upgraded, an increase of only 5% of the potential total in a year. Yeah, that's really substantial ;)

And @Jon Green, I'm with you, particularly the last paragraph. I've had the opportunity to evaluate partner companies' Vista machines and mine won't be touching it with a bargepole.

YouTube biker clocked at 189mph

Observation

@Dave: "he's a brave (or is it stupid) bloke, that section of the A417 is a speed gun hot spot, I've been zapped on that small section of road!"

Agreed - and not having a dig at you but go back and watch it again; as many others have pointed out, this guy is quite clued up - lifesaver on the roundabout, respectfully waiting for others in front to move in in good time etc.; when he comes off the first roundabout, watch him momentarily hold his speed just over seventy until he can see the bridges :)

What on earth are you on about?

There isn't a single piece of remotely dangerous riding in the clip embedded on this page. Frankly, apart from a slight chuckle when he spun the back wheel, I was bored to tears by the entire thing. Judging by their comments, most of the posters on this page have never ridden a bike, would probably die of fright on the CBT if they did and are completely unqualified to comment.

Don't shed any tears for Pandora

Utter Bollocks

I've spent quite literally hundreds of Euros on bands I hadn't even heard of - and almost certainly never would have - before I found Pandora.

Cash-strapped NHS seeks Project Manager

I used to be in a band with a fairly senior IT Manager at an NHS Trust

Having seen the trouble he had just project managing setting up his drum kit, nothing would surprise me any more. Needless to say, very few beats arrived on schedule.

I would say he was potentially the original inspiration for the "only have to beat it once into a drum machine" joke, but that would be unfair to all the other useless drummers I've met.

New Jersey bans sex offenders from the web

@Entropy

As in, this bit?:

"However, Godwin's law itself can be abused, as a distraction or diversion, that fallaciously miscasts an opponent's argument as hyperbole, especially if the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. A 2005 Reason magazine article argued that Godwin's law is often misused to ridicule even valid comparisons."

This law is clearly an ass and (once again, up to the rather ill-advised gender diversion) Bryce Prewitt's one of several posts which amply sum up why.

Ofcom grabs reins on premium rate scams

This stuff isn't hidden, you know

It's all been planned at least since phONEday in '95 - and available in the Q&As for that for starters.

This is (formerly) OfTel's The Big Number Q&A from over 8 years ago:

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/oftel/publications/1999/consumer/qanum999.htm