* Posts by Antony Shepherd

138 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2008

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You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Antony Shepherd

Re: Feh!

Pretty certain I had a demo disc of Microsoft Bob once.

We used to joke that it was named Bob after the evil entity in Twin Peaks.

Only it was more evil.

Then again I'd not be surprised at Microsoft Bob II - now with AI!

Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X chip targets $600 Copilot+ PCs

Antony Shepherd

I hate to be that guy, but...

...can you run Linux on it?

Avoid all that Copilot malarkey?

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

Antony Shepherd

Re: America has gone down the toilet

I'm reminded of Bill Hicks' routine about the president's first day in office.

Roll the film.

https://youtu.be/bIiCjhCBDaM?si=6w-W-Qd0NvGdWgyg

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Antony Shepherd

First BASIC I used

The 10K Microsoft Basic roms which you plugged into the TANEX expansion card for the Tangerine Microtan 65 was the first BASIC I used.

If at the "MEMORY SIZE?" prompt you typed A it said "WRITTEN BY WEILAND AND GATES".

No idea who Weiland was.

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Antony Shepherd

Re: Don't forget the Oric !

As a Tangerine user I was always dismayed that Tangerine hadn't had the licence for the BBC Micro.

Antony Shepherd

Re: Douglas Adams was one of the smartest people any of us has had the pleasure of knowing...

I always found it sad he'd not been around to see the iPad. As he was an Apple fan anyway that would have had him thrilled to bits.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Antony Shepherd

Surely Herr Fahrenheit is a bit too foreign for Nige’s nasties. They’d prefer a temperature measurement that’s British. So Kelvin it is then!

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Antony Shepherd

pew pew lasors!

This is all very well, but when do we get the sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads?

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

Antony Shepherd

Your plastic pal who’s fun to be with.

Microsoft seem more and more like they’re trying to be the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. And we all know what happened to their complaints department.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Antony Shepherd

I recognise this naming scheme

Surely Wubuntu is to Ubuntu as Wario is to Mario?

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Antony Shepherd

Re: Oh, this is about Andrew Tate

(To the tune of Colonel Bogey)

Farage, has only got one ball...

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Antony Shepherd

Re: Learning Experience

Or you could just write "FUCK OFF" 100 times, that'd work.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Antony Shepherd

Re: multiple incompatible versions they termed "street BASIC,"

First coding I ever did was 6502 on a Microtan 65, followed by the 10K Microsoft Basic after I'd bought the Tanex expansion card with its ginormous 7K of RAM.

Antony Shepherd

I do love how the LGP-30 brochure describes it as Small, and Mobile (presumably because it was on castors)!

Like a lot of people out there of a certain age, BASIC was where we cut our programming teeth as the first high level language we used, mostly because it was on pretty much every home micro by default.(Unless you were one of those people who had a Jupiter Ace!)

All made possible by Kurtz and Kemeny's decision to make the language public domain rather than controlling it.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

Antony Shepherd

So what question do we have to ask Copilot to make all the servers blow themselves up in a shower of sparks and white smoke?

Worked for Kirk!

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Antony Shepherd

No, Mr Bond. I expect you to open the box!

You mean they didn't soup up the lasers to open the box? I am disappointed. Surely that would have been a true tech solution?

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Antony Shepherd

Re: SPV

Remember. Captain Scarlet is indestructible, you are not.

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Antony Shepherd

Lock it up in a box...

In a previous job, all the server passwords were written down on small cards and placed inside one of those little cashboxes that was kept in the bottom drawer of my desk.

It was locked, obviously, but nothing a good screwdriver couldn't break open.

The reasoning of the person who suggested this was if ne'er-do-wells could get to the box it was already a security fail.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Antony Shepherd

Important Intelligence!

I'm not entirely sure what the benefits of information gleaned from an air fryer would be. Are there two guys in Beijing going "Oh look, Mr Smith at 37 Acacia Avenue Croydon is having chips again"?

Anyway, MY air fryer just has two knobs and a light. One knob to set the timer, one knob to set the temperature, and a light to show you it's heating up. What more do you need?

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Antony Shepherd

Nonexistent Jobs

Even on UKGov's own 'Find a Job' website I've seen dodgy looking jobs which I'm pretty damn sure do not exist.

For example , the same job title and summary description appearing in a row with different company names and no real job descriptions, just a link to send CV and covering letter.

Look up the company names and you find websites which look for all the world like they were run up from one of those website sample templates, with poor spelling. Websites for both companies had the same postal address, but the only jobs in the careers section were in Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Neither of which are in London UK.

"Yeah right", I thought. "Those aren't real jobs, they're just fishing for CVs and contact info for dubious reasons"

This kind of thing needs vetting.

Apple throws shade on pokey AI PCs, claims its maxed out M4 chips are 4x faster

Antony Shepherd

Re: WTAF?

Probably the same designers who put the mouse charging port on the underside of the mouse.

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

Antony Shepherd

Simple solution

Give him a shovel. Tell him to start digging. Surely if it’s worth that much he won’t mind wading through stinky rubbish to find a small rusty hard drive?

10 nasty software bugs put thousands of fuel storage tanks at risk of cyberattacks

Antony Shepherd

Going in Cagney style...

"Made it Ma, top of the world!"

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Antony Shepherd

The Atari ST was the last pre-PC computer I had. I even had the fancy special black and white monitor that let you use the high-res (for its day) 640x400 mode.Think it was probably the BW monitor that helped a lot with the 'Jackintosh' nickname.

After that it was just a bunch of generic beige box PCs until I switched to Macs in the early noughties with the G4 'dome' iMac.

Some days I really miss the excitement and diversity in the olden days before everything became so homogenized.

Some days I wish something other than Windows had become the mainstream standard.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Antony Shepherd

Re: Much the same here, but using SWTPC kit rather than Commodore

I had a 6809 machine running Flex once. A "Mandarin IP68" which kind of spun off from people who'd made stuff for the 6502 based Microtan. Had 2 5.25" floppies. I had it hooked up to a Televideo 925 terminal. Good stuff. Learning 6809 came in handy some years later at Uni when I had a 68000 project and realised just how similar the coding was!

Antony Shepherd

Re: Colour and the PET

Nobody has ever called me a 'Cool Kid' before!

Microtan 65 owner here, first computer I ever had.

Antony Shepherd

Oric-1 and its serial attributes

I'm reminded that the Oric-1 (and Atmos) used serial colour attributes. So you could have colours at a single pixel row high, but 8 pixels wide. However the attribute occupied the byte of video ram before the actual pixels you wanted to have those foreground/background colours. An awful lot of Oric games had objects which were very stripy!

You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft

Antony Shepherd

Let the fun begin!

AI 'Hallucinations' in the balance sheets of large companies who have sacked their accountants because the AI can do that now.

What larks!

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

Antony Shepherd

Re: "select the languages, and chat away"

But the Babel Fish also caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in history.

The Reg builds official Lego Artemis and Milky Way sets

Antony Shepherd

Re: Peak Grumpy Old Fart

I don't think these sorts of things are aimed at 'Kids'.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

Antony Shepherd

Here's a thought...

What about teaching the kids about basics of online security and not to give away their details to random people?

Might be better than some knee-jerk reaction of "The kids are using these things which didn't exist when we were their age! It must be banned!!" which is bullshit.

Venerable ICQ messaging service to end operations in June

Antony Shepherd

ICQ was still a thing???

This is a bit like when a famous person dies and you hadn't been aware they had still been alive.

I mean, I had an ICQ account many many many years ago, well over two decades, and it's entirely possible the account might still exist except I stopped using it, forgot the number, almost certainly forgot the password, and it was linked to my old Demon email address so even if I'd wanted to I couldn't have used it.

Totally surprised it had lasted that long.

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Antony Shepherd

Re: Tail wags dog

There were similar problems with Penistone.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Antony Shepherd

Crafting config.sys files to make different things work was a real skill. DR-DOS made that a lot simpler by allowing you to set up a boot menu for all the different settings you need for different games and Windows.

Wing Commander 3 was the one with the video clips featuring Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell slumming it, right?

Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else

Antony Shepherd

Oh dang, I have a rPi 3 sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do with it, might have to give this a try if only for the heck of it.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Antony Shepherd

Re: Wow

Admittedly it's a long long time since i last had to use a mechanical mouse. Though I do remember the time I saw a friend having to move his mouse across his desk, lift it and move it back to the other side, then move it across the desk again, and so on. I popped off the bottom and the entire inside of the mouse was stuffed with crud. Picked it all out, cleaned the rollers, and all was good. Apart from he'd been using his mouse like that for so long he took a while to adjust back to using it normally!

I did have a mouse once which had a small scroll-ball in the top for scrolling around a page in all directions. Fine, but that soon crudded up to the point where it became unusable and was hard to get at to clean where the little connection film snapped.

Future Roku TVs may inject tailored ads into anything and everything when you pause

Antony Shepherd

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing...

This sort of thing increasingly reminds me of the late Bill Hicks' comments on people who work in advertising and marketing.

"Smart" televisions were a mistake.

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

Antony Shepherd

With apologies to Mr. Lehrer

" The rocket goes up

Who cares what it lands on?

That's not my department

Said Mr. Elon."

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Antony Shepherd

Re: Re You forgot

Didn't Wang once use the slogan "Wang Cares".

That would have made for a shocking bad hat!

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Antony Shepherd

I had no intention of working for those guys so I decided to have fun

So back in about 2014 I was doing a bit of jobhunting on the side and a recruitment agency called me to set me up for an online test for a company called Phorm.

"That name sounds familiar" I thought and looked them up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm

Having looked them up I decided I had no intention of working for them but I'd do the online test for practice.

Then I got a phone interview. Again, I had no intention of working for that company but hey, interview practice and it might be fun..

The interview consisted mostly of the interviewer trying to persuade me that the company wasn't bad really and I shouldn't believe everything i read on the internet about them.

He sounded increasingly desperate as the interview went on and if it hadn't been a phone interview I would have been laughing in his face.

The even more fun thing about this was Phorm ceased trading a full three years before the company I was working for did.

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

Antony Shepherd

What could possibly go worng?

Dowden is a useless idiot they send out to pathetically push the party line. I wouldn't trust his views on this one bit.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Antony Shepherd

Eddie the shipboard computer. Or worse, Eddie the shipboard computer's back-up personality!

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

Antony Shepherd

revolting restaurant more like

So long as they don't get Butlins in again to run the restaurant like they did originally.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Antony Shepherd

I was writing a paper, on the PC

Ermagawd! I watched that ad and I was irresistibly reminded of this classic AMV reversioning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdqOIju4lL4

RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire

Antony Shepherd

Re: Kids (and Marketers) These Days Eliminating Vowels to be "Cool"

That reminds me of those old adverts you used to see saying something like "if u cn rd ths u cn bcm a scrty & gt a gd jb"

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Antony Shepherd

HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Antony Shepherd

I reckon an awful lot of the idiots who thought vaccines would let Bill Gates put his 5G chips in their (tiny) brains will be queuing round the block to get the MuskChip.

Top Linux distros drop fresh beats

Antony Shepherd

What fresh hell is this?

After having my Ubuntu installation demand I signed up to Ubuntu Pro just to complete the update I was doing, and making me jump through bloody hoops in order to do that I'm rather less keen on that than I used to be, so I'm looking at other distros right now. Was thinking of going to Mint which I last tried in late 2022, but wanted to check out other things first.

Some of the comments here have been quite informative in terms of what not to try!

UK Civil Aviation Authority ponders vertiports for flying taxis

Antony Shepherd

Flying cars???

Flying cars are the least of two words - drives better than a Cessna, flies better than a Buick, as they said.

Surprised nobody's thought of bringing back Fairey Rotodynes from Battersea Heliport!

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Antony Shepherd

Re: making an unbeatably cheap business computer

British Science Fiction Fandom also pretty much ran on Amstrad PCWs. I know people who still rave about them!

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