Posts by Martin

Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks

Re: Hmmm.

Yes, but isn't it funny how they all, every last one of them, charged 39.9% ? You'd have thought with competition, there would have been some variation?

Surely there couldn't have been collusion? Naah - that wouldn't happen - it's illegal.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

And to this day HP drivers still cause grief...

On Windows, yes. Fantastic bloatware.

But they are the best printers to use on Linux, without a doubt.

hp-setup on linux just works - no matter what your HP printer is, or where it is on the network.

(They also support Chromebooks!)

Well, well, well. Internet-of-Things speaker biz Sonos to continue some software support for legacy kit after all

I still use well-over-ten-year-old Squeezeboxen with my amp and speakers.

Sonos has always seemed an expensive solution for what it actually does.

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

Re: The obvious get-out phrase...

There is a story that Mark Twain wanted to borrow a neighbour's book, but the neighbour said "You can read it, but you have to read it in my library. I make it a rule not to let books out of my house."

A couple of days later, the neighbour asked MT if he could borrow his lawnmower. "Certainly," said MT. "But you have to use it in my garden. You know I make it a rule."

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Microsoft Win10 Specs

""In order to run Windows 10, PCs must have a 1GHz processor, 16GB of hard drive space, and 1GB of RAM memory.""

Bollocks. I have a 32G hard disk on my machine and it RUNS Windows 10. It's complaining that I need to update it to the latest version. But if I try to upgrade it to the latest version, it fails for lack of disk space.

I don't believe 16G is anywhere near enough.

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

Re: When I were a lad...

A good opportunity to retell one of my favourite jokes.

A freelance Cobol programmer had made so much money by August 1999 fixing Y2K bugs, he decided to spend some of it. So he got himself cryogenically frozen, to be woken up in 2015, when, he hoped, any Y2K issues would be well fixed and the world would be a better place to live.

He work up...and looked round. He was in a hovering bed with robots looking after him. He was massively impressed by the level of the technology. Suddenly a voice spoke to him, saying "How are you feeling?"

"Fine" he said. "But I'm amazed by the technology you'd managed to get to by 2015".

"Ah" said the voice. "Actually, it's 2096, and we're a bit concerned about a possible Y2.1K bug. So we've woken you up as you're the only Cobol programmer we can find."

Your duckface better be flawless: Huawei's Nova 6 mobe has a needlessly powerful selfie camera

Duckface?

A shade off-topic, but am I the only person in the world that thinks this duckface pose just makes good looking women look stupid and unattractive?

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Re: Eggs on a train?

A Darlek has boarded the train...

Dalek. Sigh.

Not eggsactly eggsellent spelling.

I'm still not that Gary, says US email mixup bloke who hasn't even seen Dartford Crossing

Re: Capital One

Nice thing is with post, you can "absent-mindedly" open someone else's letter in among your own. It's perfectly understandably and no-one could easily accuse you of malice.

But if you're getting someone else's email, you can't legally "absent-mindedly" log into their account, do a password reset and cause mayhem.

I still get emails from Amazon (US) which are for someone else's account. I assume he only uses his phone number to log in.

Beardy biologist's withering takedown of creationism fetches $564,500 at auction

Re: Darwin, top bloke.

Best summary I know is the very last paragraph of the book. It's also a beautiful bit of writing.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Re: Trying to report when people sign up with my addresses is painful

I cancelled the hotel booking some dumb cluck made using my email address...

I was a bit kinder than that. The booking included his home address, so I sent him a letter explaining what he'd done. Bit old-fashioned, but it worked.

He emailed me back, very apologetic!

Re: "...they take my personal data and privacy very seriously."

+1 for the Cream quote (though I see from a quick Google that they in fact covered the song).

But you're showing your age a bit....

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

Re: Snow...

All these comments about the use of "separated" rather than "connected", jokes about four buildings rather than two - but no-one has been picky about the spelling error?

Well, I'll do it then. It's not "seperated", it's "separated".

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

Re: Maybe it is past time to call Trading Standards.

Actually, both my wife and I wrote to our MP, by email, complaining about the suspension of Parliament.

My wife wrote quite a rant. I wrote a more restrained email.

I got a very polite reply, by letter. My wife did not.

I suspect that he thinks that I might be persuaded to vote for him, but my wife certainly wouldn't - so why waste a reply on her?

The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Re: BAUD

To my UK Southern, pretty well RP accent, "paw", "pour" and "poor" are all quite clearly homophones. What accent are you, and which of these three quite short words has more that a single syllable?

Re: BAUD

Well, I've always pronounced it to rhyme with "toad"....

Presumably that means I deserve ---------------------------->

Generous Google gives Chrome users Inbox Zero: Sign-in outage boots own browser out of webmail, services

Re: dumbing down error messages

"Error #0068410B" - really?

There is surely something between "Something happened", which is so vague it's pointless, and "Error #0068410B" which is massively precise but also basically useless. Yes, you can Google it, but why not give us something more useful?

I remember when I was having trouble updating a PC to the latest Windows 10, I had a collection of several different magic numbers. But they all basically meant "You haven't got enough disk space". Would it have been so hard for Microsoft to say that?

'Hey Google, remind Greg the locks have been changed, and he should find a new place to live. Maybe ask his mistress?'

Re: Smart reply

Which is why I switched those "helpful suggestions" off as soon as I could work out how to do so.

(And it wasn't that straightforward, either).

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

Re: The invisible button

Indeed.

I sometimes wonder when I had time to actually go to work.

When I retired, I was given a mug which said "The problem with retirement is that you get no days off."

Y2K, Windows NT4 Server and Notes. It's a 1990s Who, Me? special

Re: All hash prompts look the same

And, as always, the question has to be asked - why did he even have a remote root prompt into a server, rather than using sudo? Especially if it was a production server?

Even at home on my own linux box, I never never use a root prompt, unless I can find no other way of doing it. Just too easy to make a mistake.

GDS, what is it good for? According to a UK parliamentary committee: 'Increasingly unclear'

"...they kept LOSING long-term funding..."

Sigh.

Poetic justice: Mum funnels £100 into claw machine to win single Dumbo teddy for her kid

Re: Did she learn nothing?

All my team decided to play together and I just joined them because I didn't want to be the one stuck at that shite job if those sodders ever won it!

I once saw where a manager of a small firm had written to the financial advice section of a national paper, saying his team had formed a lottery syndicate - could he take out insurance against the risk of them winning and all resigning? They said that, no, you can't get insurance. They then suggested that the best thing to do was to join the syndicate...

The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Re: DEC Engineer

Pah! only ONE server?

A friend of mine (really!) was once decommissioning an array of servers in a machine room. He'd carefully shut them all down, and then went into the data centre, and walked along a row of server racks, powering off each server in the rack with the switch on the front.

Only it was the wrong row....

Cyber-IOU notes. Voucher hell on wheels. However you want to define Facebook's Libra, the most ridiculous part is its privacy promise

Re: Just because I noticed it ...

"One wonders at the overall intelligence level of those "YES" votes ..."

I'm surprised it's as low as 5% YES, from a country who voted for Donald Trump as their President.

One man went to mow a meadow, hoping Trump would spot giant grass snake under flightpath

Re: childish

"...whilst taking jabs at his appearance..."

It was your president that said that Sadiq Khan was as incompetent as the NY mayor, only half the height.

If he feels it is reasonable political discourse to attack people based on their appearance, he can't complain when it happens to him.

It's 50 years to the day since Apollo 10 blasted off: America's lunar landing 'dress rehearsal'

Re: 50 years since men first landed on the moon

And America has not been able to replicate it since 1972.

What's really tragic is not that the US has not been able to replicate it, it's that no-one has even tried to do so. With 50 years of improved technology, there ought, by now, to have been a regular scheduled flight to the moon, and people living up there permanently. By now, the first children born on the moon should have been growing up.

And all we've done is doubled our population, and basically fucked our planet.

That's the truly epic fail.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Re: Am I the only person in the world left who wants a SMALL SCREEN?

Due to smaller bezels and a different aspect ratio, they're not much wider despite the diagonal screen measurement being much bigger.

The ZX compact is right on the edge of being able to use with one (quite small) hand. Anything "not much wider" is still going to be too big.

(And what's with the two downvotes? Is it SO unreasonable not to want to carry around something that, only a few years ago, would have been considered to be ridiculously huge?)

Am I the only person in the world left who wants a SMALL SCREEN?

I use a Sony ZX Experia compact. 4.5" screen. I can use it one-handed.

Sony's new "compact" phone has a 5.3" screen, and it's about as small as you can get these days.

Come on Google. Do a Pixel 3a compact, with a smaller (and not quite so high quality) screen, at, say £349. Watch it FLY off the shelves.

Sigh.

Re: more convenient that having it on the front.

Well, I use a Sony ZX Experia compact, and the fingerprint sensor is on the side, on the power button. Really elegant - I like it a lot.

So Sony have decided to follow the crowd and put a sensor on the back instead on their latest phone :(

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

There was the shouty man who once rang me to ask what was wrong with the system I supported at a large US bank. I started to explain, and he interrupted me to say "I'm a Managing Director - what grade are you?" I told him I was a lowly VP, and he shouted "I want a Managing Director to ring me back and tell me what is wrong!"

I might have tried to find one for him (it would have had to have been my boss's boss, I think, and he wouldn't have had a clue what was wrong), but he slammed down the phone and hadn't told me his name or number....

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: <|<|

Thanks to both of you. Should have thought of that, really.

But what's with the person who downoted the question? It wasn't THAT stupid a question, and it was asked in good faith.

It was first discovered in 2004 by a team of astronomers working at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, United States.

They only managed to observe it for two days, however, due to technical problems and poor weather conditions. The faraway visitor remained lost to astronomers until another group at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, caught a glimpse of it.

This time they were able to piece together its trajectory.

How do they know that these two were the same lump of rock, given they couldn't work out it's trajectory until they saw it the second time?

(We really need a "?" icon for when you're actually asking a question.)

Internet industry freaks out over proposed unlimited price hikes on .org domain names

And what about .info?

I have two .info sites, which are (blimey!) information sites about two of my favourite authors and their books. They are not official sites (though in both cases, I have been told that they are happy for me to run them), so I don't feel right using the ".com" moniker (or .co.uk or similar). ".info" seems right.

I'm happy to pay a few quid a year for each of them. But it's a labour of love. If I have to pay more than a few quid a year, I'll just shut them down - and two useful resources will vanish from the internet.

Is that a stiffy disk in your drive... or something else entirely?

I have seen people plug a VGA cable in the wrong way round.

I'm embarrassed to admit I managed that, on my first PC. As it was my own personal computer, and it had cost me a lot of money, I spend a long time carefully straightening the pins with needle-nosed pliers. Plugged it back in, kept my fingers crossed - and it worked! I screwed it in firmly and never unplugged it again.

(Well, I suppose I must have done eventually, as I no longer have it...)

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

Re: You should have been sacked

Best bit of optimization I did was to speed up a shell script which produced loads of configuration files from a large flat file of data which took over half an hour to run.

I converted it to perl. I got it working with some small amount of test data, then I ran it with the full data set.

It took three seconds. It took me a few attempts to convince myself that I had improved the speed by a factor of over 600...

I did enjoy demonstrating that. I told them it was a bit quicker, and that I thought they'd be pleased, and then ran it. The expression on their faces was a picture to behold.

Bit nippy, is it? Hive smart home users find themselves tweaking thermostat BY HAND

Re: Smart heating systems do have their uses.

I have room thermostats, but also a simple timed thermostat which overrides everything. It sets to either 20 degrees when I want it on, or 12 degrees when I want it "off". So the house never gets colder than 12 degrees, which means (a) no chance of burst pipes and (b) quicker to get to temperature.

The boiler time switch is on all the time; the timed thermostat is the one that does most of the work.

Lip-reading smart speakers: Just what no one always wanted

Pedantic mode on

Base - support for something

Bass - low frequency notes

Netflix wants to choose its own adventure where Bandersnatch trademark case magically vanishes

Re: Cursed name...

Well, call me old fashioned, but the first thing that comes into my mind is "...frumious Bandersnatch" from Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that scratch!

Beware the Jub-jub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

Re: @codejunky

What benefits to you expect from Brexit? Please please tell me there is one that you are certain will actually happen.

1) Blue passports.

2) Take Back Control.

3) Errrr.......

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

On a smaller scale...

A friend of mine was once working on a PDP-11 machine, typing in a lot of code using TECO.

Someone else in the office came over and started playing with the front switches on the PDP-11. For no reason, you understand - he was just fiddling for the sake of it. It probably wasn't going to do any harm, but not unreasonably my mate asked him to stop playing with the switches in case something went wrong. "Oh, look, it won't do any harm", says the other guy, "but if it makes you happy, I'll turn the keyswitch to lock so that the keys CAN'T do anything."

So he reached for the keyswitch, and turned it the wrong way - which switched off the PDP-11....

Re: Not Unique...

Bit off-topic, but what the heck, it's Sunday...and we were talking about cats dealing with mice.

Many MANY moons ago when I was about six or seven, we had a toy cupboard with rather a lot of old paper in the bottom. Judging by the rustling, we were pretty sure that there was a mouse in there. So we got the cat up, who looked very interested at the rustling. We then poked around with a broomstick, and after a while a mouse shot out of the toy cupboard and across the room. On spotting the mouse, the cat howled piteously, jumped into the air and shot off down the stairs and out of the house. Didn't see him for hours.

No idea what happened to the mouse.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

Re: MiniDisk? Bah!

Or the Blue Peter flower-pot - warm them up, and push them round a vase. Voila - an "interesting" flower-pot, complete with a hole in the bottom for drainage.

Use an 8-char Windows NTLM password? Don't. Every single one can be cracked in under 2.5hrs

Re: Maximum Password length

Also sites (usually financial institutions) which ask for specific characters from your password, thereby betraying that they actually store your password in plain text.

That's a thought that had literally never crossed my mind before. You surely must be right - I can't see how else they could do it. But it's a hell of a stupid thing to do.

El Reg - why don't you ask First Direct and Santander (two that I know of who do indeed ask for specific characters) to comment on this? No point in a normal customer asking the question, we'd just be fobbed off.

Well, that was exactly the question that I was going to ask. Thanks to the very clear answers above.

Time to go through my LastPass list and change the 8 char passwords that still exist (and there aren't many left now) to 12 char passwords.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – and I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

Re: I have some questions

They'll claim "freedom of the press"...

If they'd just printed the photos, they could claim "freedom of the press". But when they say "If you don't do what we want, we'll print these photos" it's difficult to argue that this is anything other than blackmail. And yes, I hope that the blackmailing scum goes to prison for a long time.

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Re: Remember Y2K?

If you wan to save memory space, you use a byte for the year.

But then you need a bit of software that runs every time you need to use the date. Like I said, old microprocessors don't have a lot of space to keep these conversion functions....and also, it's going to slow things down, on a processor that is probably already running flat out.

Re: Remember Y2K?

To be fair, the two bytes that you saved by only using two digit years was frequently important in the early days of microprocessors and memory sizes of 4K (including OS).

Yay, we got a B for maths. Literally, a bee: Little nosy nectar nerds smart enough to add, abstract numbers

Re: Geometry too

I think they make those hexagons by instincive bee-hive-iour.

Using WhatsApp for your business comms? It's either that or reinstall Lotus Notes

Re: Oh deary dear...

"... expectation that Kids Today are permanently glued to their smartphones"

It's not an expectation, they really are glued to them.

Not just kids. My 21-year-old daughter regularly pulls me up for not paying attention because I've absent-mindedly started scrolling through my phone :)