Posts by Tim Jenkins

Xbox Series X: Gee thanks, Microsoft! Just what we wanted for Xmas 2020 – a Gateway tower PC

Groovy, man

That voiceover sounds like the kind of Terence McKenna ramblings that used to burble away on mid 90's psytrance....

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

Re: Please let there be Space Marines!

An annexe to the bill contains a UOR for heavy bolter, power ax (sic) and meltagun.

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: Stupid UI

- Apple had the trash icon. It seemed to work, and people understood it. -

Except for dragging the diskette icon to the Trash to eject it...

WeWork filed its IPO homework. So we had a look at its small print and... yowser. What has El Reg got itself into?

TANSTAAFL

Just wondering, how does charging for space and then giving away beer to the occupants comply with UK premises licencing?

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Clearly Kubrik didn't get the gig: he'd still have been doing reshoots of the first 'landing' by '72

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

'about equal to the size of Texas'

Typical US-centric Microsoft nonsense. The SI unit for any such comparison is, of course, Wales*.

(*20,735 km², making Afghanistan around 31.5 Wales. Or rather more in the Trump version, Whales.)

In the claws of a vulture: Nebra AnyBeam Laser Projector

Re: Uhh

"Snuggle up in a sleeping bag, project a Netflix episode of something on the side of the tent before you go to sleep."

Because camping isn't terrifying enough already? Just what you need to see, glowing in the darkness when you go for a midnight wee...

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

There's pr0n you have to pay for?

See ab0ve.

UK pr0n viewers plan to circumvent smut-block measures – survey

Re: "a large proportion – 17.7 per cent – say they will give up using online porn"

For at least a week, anyway. Well, maybe a few days. Until later this evening, certainly.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Season 23 Episode 11

https://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/lisasimpsonapple.jpg

Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is

Sunrise

"... he also gained notoriety in the late 80s for organizing raves and was known as the 'King of Acid House' at one point...."

http://www.fantazia.org.uk/Scene/players/tonycolstonhayter.htm

for a quick nostalgia trip....

Thanks to UK peers, coming to a laptop near you in 2019: Age checks for online smut

"....understanding the beginning of a relationship...."

That's the bit where the guy(s) with the moustache arrives to deliver the pizza / fix the washing machine / mow the lawn, right?

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: Home security problem

"Mind you, Mumsnet is also full of women with anxiety whose mothers are narcissists, whose children have ASD, ADHD and ODD (Bingo!) and whose husbands, sensible chaps, have long since done a runner."

I'll think you'll find you don't win Mumsnet Bingo unless your husband has changed gender and is now your best friend....

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: Man...

Ah, you've had Western Digital users too ; )

Notice how the drives are always positioned on desks within mouse-arm range?

Clunk, and the data is gone...

Activists rattle tin to take UK's pr0n block to court

Re: What could possibly go wrong,..

"...are the Govt sure their very own ministers aren't going to end up with egg on their faces here?"

That's not egg...

VMware 'pressured' hotel to shut down tech event close to VMworld, IGEL sues resort giant

So Sad

A tragic stain on the otherwise impeccable reputation of that particular city for high moral and ethical standards in all things...

Security guard cost bank millions by hitting emergency Off button

Re: Its not unusual

"...emergency power off button right next to the electronic door exit button..."

Also see server cases where the power button is ANYWHERE in the vicinity of the one for the optical drive...

Atari accuses El Reg of professional trolling and making stuff up. Welp, here's the interview tape for you to decide...

"An American version of the Spectrum reboot?"

Except with (as of today) the equivalent of £2,228,572 to burn through before evaporating.

RCL only had £512,790...

Indiegogo lawyer asks ZX Spectrum reboot firm: Where's the cash?

Re: Optimists

"...fact find missions to the Patpong area of Bangkok, looking for erm.... low cost manufactures."

Touchpads or joysticks?

Select few to watch World Cup in 4K high dynamic range colour on BBC iPlayer

I'd be willing to hazard a guess that a significant proportion of Reg readers stick the the adage that 'if it has an ethernet socket, use that*'.

(*which baffled the heck out of my Sky Q installer, and I ended up having to wait until he had spent hours faffing with wireless boosters before grudgingly accepting that my Cat 6 distribution was there for a reason).

Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?

"Kaspersky branded socks and foul-smelling aftershave"

A spritz of unidentified liquid from Russia: what could go wrong?

Australian Feds cuff woman who used BTC to buy drugs on dark web

Re: Where's the science sub-editor?

Recycled from here?

https://ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/powerful-opioid-fentanyl-poses-serious-risk-fatal-overdose

“Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more concentrated than morphine,” says Professor Farrell. “It’s very difficult for people to know just how much they are extracting from the patch and injecting."

The true victims of Brexit are poor RuneScape players

Chance to parry?

Oh, RuneScape

For a minute there I thought we were talking about RuneQuest.

Carry on.

Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian

Re: bike or not

How many people are killed every day by human drivers???

16 in the USA (and rising)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/02/28/pedestrian-fatalities/376802002/

"Although reasons for the recent rise have not been scientifically determined, experts suspect that smartphones and marijuana use are key factors in the deadly trend."

Brit retailer Currys PC World says sorry for Know How scam

Re: Bought laptop from Dell online - pre-configured with Linux

"Who the fuck shops at PC World?!"

Parents-in-law. That's who.

Who would have thought it?

The outlet famous for £9.99 USB leads added to every £40 inkjet purchase ('because there isn't one in the box, you know'), its £80 metre-long HDMI leads ('to get the best from your new TV'), and the compulsory Norton box / Office key / Extended warranty with every £299 laptop turns out to have dodgy sales practices...

Millionaire-backed science fiction church to launch Scientology TV network

Re: Sounds familiar

What kind of sick, twisted individual would be making bets with Harlan Ellison?

Oh, right, L. Ron.....

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

Who needs a battery anyway?

Anyone remember the Apple Powerbook G3s with a bay on each side for removable batteries and/or optical/Zip/floppy drive? The ones where if the user had emptied the bays to use another accessory on both sides (or just to save weight), then forgot to reinsert a battery before booting the laptop away from mains, it ate the tiny on-board NiCad and died? RTM to somewhere in Holland, as I recall, for £200 surgery...

Capita's UK military recruiting system has 'glitches' admits minister

Re: Cuts?

"Trident is largely a sunk cost "

LOLZ

Carphone Warehouse cops £400k fine after hack exposed 3 MEEELLION folks’ data

Re: £320,000

Love that there's an early payment discount, but only if you don't appeal. When did the ICO get taken over by ParkingEye?

Stop your moaning, says maker of buggy Bluetooth sex toy

Re: "We used it at a bar while playing pool"

Playmobil renactment?

Osama Bin Laden had copy of Resident Evil, smut, in compound

Re: @Khaptain

“Uh, sir, phrenology was dismissed as quackery a hundred-sixty years ago.” – Mr. Smithers

“Of course you’d say that, you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter.” – C.M. Burns

Even more warship cuts floated for the Royal Navy

"... the fighting teeth of the RN, used to ward off potentially hostile surface ships and submarines alike..."

Good to know, when we finally track the Taliban Navy to their secret Afghan port.

Web uni says it will get you a tech job or your money back. So our man Kieren signed up...

"...a good percentage of the population is not suited to programming..."

Damn right. I know I'm not. Proved it in many, many failed attempts. Fortunately there are lots of other IT-related roles which I AM good at, and I've been doing those for 30 years. Now my kids are being told they have to 'do coding' at all costs, by politicians who haven't a clue what that even means. I'd far rather they, and 99% of their fellow teens, were educated to become at least barely adequate technology USERS, and leave the 1% who actually have the brain type necessary to program WELL to get on with it in relative peace.

A todger, a 2.5kg dumbbell, the fire brigade... and the inevitable angle grinder

Re: You missed the back story...

I'm so naive.

I genuinely thought that this might have been a tragic accident, where the gentlemans gentleman had somehow become trapped between the flats of two weights, perhaps while stacking them with sweaty, post-workout hands.

Then I began to wonder why all that rescue equipment was required, and why it was necessary to shatter the disk to 'extract' him.

And then I read the above...

The Next Big Thing in Wi-Fi? Multiple access points in every home

Sky Q TV hardware certainly has its own PowerLine built-in; it's even enabled by default on the main box (the one with the satellite feeds and hard drive), but for reasons only known to themselves, it's still not officially supported on the Q Mini boxes 18 months after Q was released, and there have been some suggestions in the Q user forums that it doesn't play nicely on the same mains circuits as other PowerLine kit. Intrepid users can enable it via a 'hidden' menu, though, and in some cases it does seem to help fill in for inadequate WiFi links.

The great phone squeeze wheeze: Getting squidgy with HTC's U11

"The phone performs some dimensioning using sound waves on your skull"

It does what?

Really?

And when you put it in a trouser pocket?

Virgin Media to close flagship Oxford St store in August

Re: Virgin, Oxford Street.

Remembering happy times looking through the windows into the CD-pressing plant in the basement....

Blunder down under: self-driving Aussie cars still being thwarted by kangaroos

One for the Tesla programmers

From: THIRD WORLD DRIVING HINTS AND TIPS By P. J. O’Rourke

"Drive like hell through the goats. It’s impossible to hit a goat. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible not to hit a cow. Cows are immune to horn-honking, shouting, swats with sticks and taps on the hind quarters with the bumper. The only thing you can do to make a cow move is swerve to avoid it, which will make the cow move in front of you with lightning speed.

Actually, the most dangerous animals are the chickens. In the United States, when you see a ball roll into the street, you hit your brakes because you know the next thing you’ll see is a kid chasing it. In the Third World, it’s not balls the kids are chasing, but chickens. Are they practising punt returns with a leghorn? Dribbling it? Playing stick-hen? I don’t know. But Third Worlders are remarkably fond of their chickens and, also, their children (population problems notwithstanding). If you hit one or both, they may survive. But you will not."

UK and Ecuador working on Assange escape mechanism

Re: The worst thing in the world for Assange...

Given the nature of the original allegations in Sweden that sparked this whole sorry saga off, Assange and Trump might find they some interesting anecdotes to swap, and maybe some hair-care tips too.

Brit uni blabs students' confidential information to 298 undergrads

That's going to be

interestingly expensive for them. Nice big fine from the ICO PLUS a fair chunk of the named students reaching for personal injury lawyers, given the kind of intimate situations usually claimed as extenuating circumstances...

(We had one such claim, back in the 90s, where the student stated the University had rendered them unable to complete their coursework owing to us restricting their IT access due to their taste for late-night viewing of inter-species relationship tutorials in the PC labs)

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Re: Typo? Looks strange

Everyone should read the Rogers Commission appendix by Richard Feynman at the very least:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Re: If it got interrupted...

"IT staff rarely go near the electrical stuff, it's far too dangerous for that."

As a significant percentage of BOFH plotlines have taught us ; )

Crapness of WannaCrypt coding offers hope for ransomware victims

Re: Filepaths

I've mentioned previously in these forums my encounter with a senior member of academic staff back in the Win '98 era who kept all his folders within the Waste Basket, because "it's always where I can find it". Which didn't help me at all when I Ghosted a new image onto his PC and then found that said location was specifically excluded from the University backup regime...

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

Yay; no more DRM

"The requirement for companies to remove "electronic protection applied to ... any communications or data" was written into the Investigatory Powers Act last year"

Excellent: that should make all those DVDs so much easier to, uh, 'back up', not to mention the output from my Sky Q box. Oh, and the pesky encryption on the Sports and Movie channels too...

No laptop ban on Euro flights to US... yet

Re: Pertaining to WTF

That's OK. Neither does he.

Waiter? There's a mouse in my motherboard and this server is greasy!

Frickin' magnets

Quadriplegic brother-in-laws very expensive powered wheelchair ground to a halt one Christmas Eve. Nightmare wait until after Boxing Day, plus expensive engineer call-out, to diagnose and remove novelty Xmas decoration applied to the mouth controller by doting sister, which was holding open a vital internal relay...

Web celeb product whores told to put on the red light – or else

What they meant to say was

Teh Interweb I̶n̶s̶t̶a̶g̶r̶a̶m̶ has become a Wild West of d̶i̶s̶g̶u̶i̶s̶e̶d̶ advertising

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Re: Dangerous

"Industrial vacuum cleaners can be just as lethal, if someone was dumb enough to inspect a blocked intake too closely it could suck the air out of the chest collapsing the lungs."

To be fair, that's not the usual failure mode for human / vacuum cleaner interaction. At least, not for the male portion of humanity...

'Completely offended' Sheila calls cops over price-gouging ganja dealer

Re: This:

"that's why you breath in deeply and hold it. To capture as much "carbon" as possible. It's all very green."

Not if you're leaking methane from t'other end...

Darn you, lentil-fueled vegan tokers, darn you to heck!