* Posts by Jet Set Willy

53 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2007

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Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Jet Set Willy

Re: Aaron?

Not far off my real name. I can tell you it is not always fun to be first in line for stuff.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Jet Set Willy

Re: "Cost and maintenance are also an issue"

Why would the parking spot have to be immediately in front of the cabinet? Sureley you will already need to add some sort of connection/payment terminal which you can run a cable to a short distance away, and bury the cables. Not cheap, but cheaper than getting the power cables laid in the first place, and a terminal will be reqiuired either way.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

Jet Set Willy

I remember them in some old Sci-Fi books of short stories (Asimov?) of my Dads. They go it wrong though - The Ads were on much thicker, higher quality paper in full colour so they were easily ignored.

IBM-led advertising X-odus gains steam as more flee Musk's platform

Jet Set Willy

Marketing = prefessional bullsheit

In other news...

Bears defecate in arboreal areas

Popes tend to be of the non-protestant but still Chritian faith

Elon Musk is a cunt

carry on

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

Jet Set Willy

How about a 50th birthday party?

With luck they can both attend, albeit remotely

Outlook's clingy 'reopen last session' prompt gets the boot

Jet Set Willy

Is it just me...

I like this feature. I mean, it's just a single popup you can say "no" to right? Hopefully it's not gone, just reduced to a setting with the default changed.

I get so many queries for different directions all day so I leave the relevant email open so I can get back to it when I've finished the task(s) in hand. This could be days later so updates/crashed don't mess with my system. It's not the best system, but it's the one I employ.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Jet Set Willy

Re: "......the mine had closed."

I believe that's csalled ecenonoics. I don't agree, I'm just saying as much

Jet Set Willy

I see your tyre factory and raise you....

...a Slaughterhouse. Not the office but the middle of slaughterhouse floor (actually a platform 2 metres up) where animals were killed, bled, beheaded, skinned, split and hung. It was used to connect to the Meat Hygiene Service to register the approvals and had sat there for some years without issues, amazingly. I worked there a few times between university terms in the late 90s.

One day it stopped working and being fairly au fait with PCs I said I'd take a look. I put in a floppy boot disk, powered it up and the disk was immediately chewed up beyond repair. Apparently, the read heads had an unspeakable amount of crud condensed and congealed on them (the room was pretty hot and humid). I gave up and said it was one for the professionals. There was no way I was taking the cover off that thing.

Boffins are studying Martian clouds to avoid another Opportunity episode

Jet Set Willy
Coat

Please correct the glaring inaccuracy

"a beautiful blue marble containing all the life we know of"

Not so. There are a number of things alive on the ISS some way above Earth, plus some yeast cells on their way to the Moon.

(this is highly pedantic, even for me, hence ----->)

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Jet Set Willy

Re: Just checking.

Pretty sure the electrical switch and refrigeration are 19th Century - physical locks considerably earlier.

Your point stands. If it ain't broke, don't fix.

France says Google Analytics breaches GDPR when it sends data to US

Jet Set Willy

NoScript is your friend

Amongst many other tracking scripts, google-analytics.com shall not pass. Firefox, natch.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Jet Set Willy

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

I'm not allowed to approve my own progamming changes and my company makes shoes FFS

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Jet Set Willy

Re: Rule 1 for SAP

"you don't try to fit SAP to your business... you fit your business to SAP"

That is certainly true now, especially with SAP S/$... Sorry S/4, but in the olden days of R/3 3rd party implementors were more than happy to customise SAP to do whatever you asked. Lots of lovely technical debt and future support money that way.

UK privacy watchdog may fine selfie-hoarding Clearview AI £17m... eventually, perhaps

Jet Set Willy

Not a problem for me but...

I'm not on any (anti)social media platform and have never felt the urge to join one. However, should I commit a crime and the plod use Clearview AI to match my countenance, Louis Theroux will be in deep shit.

NASA picks spot at Moon's South Pole to perform first ice-drilling experiment

Jet Set Willy

Ominous

Sounds to me like a precursor mission to the film "Moon" becoming a reality

Zoom-o-cracy: Wales MP misses vote, allowing COVID-passport rule change, blames the IT dept

Jet Set Willy

I have logs. In fact I created the logging system. Your move.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Jet Set Willy

Re: Last sentence ...

"4) we aren't giving these pigs colonoscopies and MRIs to determine what is actually happening inside them -- they may be quite sick, we just can't tell. Or there may be multi-generational problems."

No, they won't receive any preventative medical care but I suspect they are getting some very detailed autopsies. The conclusion of which will almost always be "bullet trauma".

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Jet Set Willy

Re: Is that all you've got?

My MBR was royally fucked. The partition was fine and, believe me, I tried everything to recover it. The only way I was going to fix it was manual manipulation of Grub - something I'm not prepared to get in to.

Windows does not present me with these problems. For good or ill, it is the gentlemens/idiots choice.

Jet Set Willy

Re: My personal rant about all Linux variants

My experience entirely.

This ˅˅˅˅˅˅˅

"I don't consider myself a newbie, but I am not prepared to commit many months to learning the details of Unix/Linux/Ubuntu, I have a life and a real job!."

Spare me the pious Linux/Unix purists.

Jet Set Willy

I've recently got fucked hard by Ubuntu - messed up my master boot record so bad that I had to reinstall Win10 pro. Linux is still the domain of the high-functioning user, but Windows is still required for many things. Can't we just get along?

Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans

Jet Set Willy

Re: Not just cheap phones it seems...

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that the "Wireless Update" app specified was the one that popped up during the most recent (and first) Cosmo update.

As an early Indiegogo backer I was one of the first to receive a Cosmo so I'm expecting many further updates to what is, essentially, a perpetual work-in-progress.

Up until now, I've had no complaints.

Jet Set Willy

Not just cheap phones it seems...

I just checked my (not cheap) Cosmo Communicator and it also seems to harbour the "Wireless Update":"PUP.Riskware.Autoins.Fota.fbcvd" application.

Not sure what to make of this as I don't want to switch off updates.

Twitter: No, really, we're very sorry we sold your security info for a boatload of cash

Jet Set Willy

Re: Sorreee, sorreee!

"...in a very real, and leagally binding sense".

Jet Set Willy

Re: GDPR

This is a nailed-on GDPR violation compounded by their non-disclosure. They should be fined heavily for their "oopsie".

Unfortunately Twitter are Media Darlings because it means news outlets don't have to spend shoe-leather doing any real journalism these days. Slap on the wrist is the most we can expect.

EE-k, a hundred grand! BT's mobile arm slapped for sending 2.5m+ unwanted texts

Jet Set Willy

So that's all right then

You seem to have missed the "So that's all right then" phrase at the end.

Big Baboon ain't gibbon up: SAP, HP accused of aping software squirt's e-commerce patent

Jet Set Willy
Stop

utter horseshit

I've been writing interfaces like this for 30 years. How can this be possibly patentable?

Fancy owning a two-seat Second World War Messerschmitt fighter?

Jet Set Willy

Hawker Typhoon for me - would love to see one of those flying, even though they are/were big noisy bastards (apparently). However, a Mosquito flying near me would legitimately make me blub if I saw one. I once worked with a baker who was an engineer on them. You would not believe the stories about fixing up a mostly wooden plane to go back to war!

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

Jet Set Willy

Re: I wonder...

BURN THE HERETIC!

The batteries of JOBS will Forever Be Charg'ed!

REPLACEMENTS are the Workings Of The DEVIL and must be PURGED from the minds of the PEOPLE! Lest they consume us in the FIRE of Lithium-Ion RUNAWAY!

Q: How do you test future driverless car tech? A: Slurp a ton of real-world driving data

Jet Set Willy

This is new?

I had assumed this sort of thing has been happening for years.

I hope there is a serious expansion of the type of roads they test. While it is certain that autonomous vehicles will be seen first in city/town environments, there are a lots of rural roads in the Western world, let alone elsewhere. Where I am in the Dorset/Somerset area just getting from one town to another involves travelling on roads that are (sparsely) signed at the national speed limit - 60mph in a car - but driving at that speed would be suicide. Not to mention that road markings, cat's-eyes, etc. are in many cases in poor repair, and in others simply non-existent.

Scares the shit out of some city types when I give them lifts. For them it is inconceivable that the nearest train station is a 30 minute drive and the lines point north/south, not directly at London.

Facebook fined €1.2m by Spain for… you'll never guess what

Jet Set Willy

Owt or N'owt?

I think "Done owt wrong" means "Done something wrong" in Northern English vernacular - "N'owt" means nothing.

Not speaking from personal knowledge - I'm a Midlander brought up in the South so could very well be wrong. Just remembering back to my Uni days when I shared a house with a couple of Northish types.

Your top five dreadful people the Google manifesto has pulled out of the woodwork

Jet Set Willy

Re: You might have also looked up "Social Darwinism"

*Rear Admiral* Grace Hopper, if you don't mind.

Tech can do a lot, Prime Minister, but it can't save the NHS

Jet Set Willy

"some hospital buildings dating back to the Second World War"

As modern as that? I'm pretty sure that one or two of the places I've visited were older - Victorian by my (layman's) estimation of the architecture. Obviously the facilities were not.

SAP is now hosting VMs in its cloud. Just don't call it HANA

Jet Set Willy

SAP S for Hana?

I believe it is branded as SAP S/4 HANA, not "S for", although it is pronounced the same way.

This follows the major SAP re-engineering nomenclature: S/2 (before my time), S/3 (what most people are using today for SAP ERP, although also called many other things) and S/4 (SAP ERP on in-memory).

Of course, as the article notes, the marketing bods at SAP have great fun changing version names all of the time - I could well be out of date myself. I just develop on it and sometimes an upgrade gives us new toys to play with.

How Google Spanner's easing our distributed SQL database woes

Jet Set Willy

Massively off topic but why is there a spanner in this picture? At this point of threading you use your fingers, Spanners (for US readers, Wrenches) are for tightening/untightening when you can't do it by hand.

Is Apple's software getting worse or what?

Jet Set Willy

Re: Preview

Have you ever met anyone who is not on the autistic spectrum? This kind for file keeping is beyond almost everyone, as well as not taking in to account sync errors and branch versions created on a whim.

Technically you are correct. In the real world it aint gonna happen because humans tend to have human foibles.

Air-to-ground rocket men flog top-secret mobe-crypto to Brad in accounts

Jet Set Willy
Black Helicopters

Realy?

"When the phone is in standard mode the screen is edged in green, and while it's in secure mode it has a red border"

Better hope none of their operatives are red/green colour blind then.

NZ bloke gets eel stuck up jacksie

Jet Set Willy
FAIL

Re: 'This has to be a first', admits hospital insider

Pretty sure I read about this happening to a guy in China some years ago - in Private Eye's "Funny Old World" section (so may not be true).

However, the circumstances were a bit different. He was a cook and had got massively drunk with his "buddies". After he passed out they thought it would be a jolly jape to stick a spare live eel up his fundament. Unfortunately this eel was bigger than the one in NZ and had teeth. Neither eel nor human survived.

Ten iPhone 5 challengers

Jet Set Willy

No Galaxy Note II?

Ah well... I guess the release is a bit far off (Oct?) and for some reason people want to call the Notes "Phablets".

It seems to me that the Note is about as big as you can get and still put it in your pocket so, to me, they are phones - although maybe I have big pockets. I'm saving all my pennies for the Note II.

Tried the iPhone but too limited for me (and pisspoor at making/receiving calls in my rural setting).

Curiosity's new OS upgrade ready to go live

Jet Set Willy

Tourist?

"Martian robot tourist" - more like "Martian robot immigrant" because it ain't coming back.

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

Jet Set Willy
Happy

Reminds me of my HP-3000 days...

...they had a 4 digit hex display on the front showing the system status in red characters. "Everything's fine" was 61695 whicn in hex is "F0FF".

Did your iPhone 'just stop working' - or did you drop it in your BEER?

Jet Set Willy
WTF?

Eh?

Not just Apple - surely everyone's been doing this for ages. I had a mid range Nokia die due to excessive baby slobber (she liked playing with it as it cycled through ringtones and vibration settings) and after returning it I was told "No refund, failure due to water damage". I was even sent a picture of the main board with water detectors highlighted. Said baby is now gone 7 so this must have been 6.5 years ago.

Steel-woven wallet pledges to keep RFID credit cards safe

Jet Set Willy
Coat

20,000 super-fine strands of stainless steel?

Wouldn't tinfoil be a more appropriate medium?

Mines the one weighing 20 kilos with the rust marks.

Mitsubishi iMiEV five-door e-car

Jet Set Willy
Happy

I want one!

Never thought I'd say it but I'd take one of these today if I had the cash. Not bothered by the "green" credentials, just interested in the acceleration, handling, decent amount of meatspace and low-low-low cost per mile. I'm guessing that maintenance is going to be significantly easier/cheaper as well with moving parts being 10 times less than in the petrol version.

My commute is a 30 mile roundtrip through twisty Somerset roads so I would really enjoy the ride and not spare the electrons.

Jupiter takes a serious knock

Jet Set Willy

@Planetry defence types

I'm pretty sure that Jupiter's gravity may have something to do with why it gets hit by stuff fairly often. I think I read something like "The solar system can be considered to contain the Sun, Jupiter and miscellaneous space debris" somewhere.

Having said that I'm also pretty sure I read that we are due a big strike any day now (in geologic terms) and there's pretty much nothing we could do abount it but kiss our backsides goodbye.

SAP pays Sun to keep Java on NetWeaver alive

Jet Set Willy

@AC - Hang in there

Some of your criticisms of SAP are true. The documentation is often non-existent (in English anyway), the support can be terrible and many consultants couldn't find their arse with an altlas. If you started the implementation is 2007 you are only at the early stages. You probably have about another 2 years of pain to endure before you get to the level you were already at before you started implementing SAP.

However...

After all the pain, stress, misery you will finally get an integrated system which has some really neat features. SAP certainly isn't perfect but as the experience of using it, configuring it and developing it grows you will eventually see some real benefits. Assuming you company is still in business by then.

La Cie's quiet fans

Jet Set Willy
Coat

We're doomed!!

From Monty Python's Life of Brian...

"For the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners"

Mines the anorak with "Romanes Eunt Domus" on the back.

Hutton robs forces, pours MoD cash into UK arms biz

Jet Set Willy
Black Helicopters

Slight correction...

Yeovil is in Somerset, not Dorset. Otherwise the article is spot-on. Even though a number of my friends were relying on the Future Lynx being approved it is obvious even to them that its a waste of money (and even then just a posponement of the next Westlands crisis).

Mashed up Met Police crime maps go online

Jet Set Willy

Hows about...

"Bonkers" Boris Johnson.

or "Barmy"

or "Buffoon"

they don't rhyme but they are fairly accurate monikers.

Apple iPhone 3G

Jet Set Willy

How ironic

I can't view the review on my iPhone!

Apple really needs to add Flash support to truly offer the full web to mobile peeps. Great product though - I only bought because I came in to some money at the right time. New tariffs finally make it sellable.

On another note, I thought I'd try my arm at getting a 3G iPhone on Friday but there were 7 male 40 somethings in front of me and the O2 shop (in a sleepy Somerset market town) only had 5 to dish out. No great loss. I can wait and round here 3G really doesn't mean much but my wife wants my old one.

RAF strafes Next in pirated duvet copyright rumpus

Jet Set Willy

Really?

That appears to be a red maple leaf at the centre of the roundel. Can't be sure because of the low res image but bears a resemblance to the one on the vertical stabiliser.

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