Posts by Antony Shepherd

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Had to check the date

No really, it is November, not April. It seems the birth rate is approximately 60 per hour, and fools and their money are soon parted.

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

There was an article in The Guardian about this guy recently and about how he wanted to "hasten the coming of Christ's return".

These people are genuinely nuts.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

I remember reading about Vulcan pilots who all knew that if they ever had to set off 'for real' then even if they managed to get back there'd be nothing to come back to.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Idle so&so

I always figured that Johnson's columns in the Mail that net him a million quid a year weren't written by him.

I'd always reckoned that he just went to ChatGPT and told it to write however many words on whatever subject in the style of Boris Johnson, then posted the result into the Mail before opening his second pint of champagne of the day.

So I wasn't surprised to find out that he uses it and loves it because it calls him brilliant.

He'd probably shag it if he could.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Spam in a can. That's not got the right stuff.

Re: Gerry Anderson - space visionary

I always wonder what happened to Fireball XL1, XL2, XL3 and XL4...

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Re: Share and Enjoy…

D'oh! Of course it's the Marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation who were first against the wall when the revolution came.

Rookie error on my part and I used to edit the fan club magazine back in the day so I ought to be ashamed of myself!

It's been a long, long time since I last read, listened to, or watched The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Maybe it's time to re-read/listen/watch!

Share and Enjoy…

We are getting closer and closer to “Your Plastic Pal who’s Fun to be with”, aren’t we.

Maybe Microsoft should remember what happened to the SIrius Cybernetics Corporation’s complaints division?

British spreadsheet wizard will take mad skillz to Vegas after taking national Excel crown

When they make the movie of this they could call it an "Excel Saga".

Mine's the one with "Hail Ilpalazzo!" written on the back.

Everyone needs an AI phone. No, don't hang up, it's true

Re: In the words of the late great Douglas Adams

I'm glad I'm not the only person who immediately thought of that!

Space Command gets Trumped out of Colorado, voting conspiracy cited

What's in a name?

Tommy Tuberville sounds like the name of a sentient potato in a pre-school cartoon series made to encourage small children to eat their vegetables.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

My first BASIC

10K Microsoft Basic on the 6502 based Tangerine Microtan 65 was the first version of BASIC I ever coded in.

Press 'A' at the 'Memory Size?' prompt and it displayed "Written by Weiland and Gates"

Wasn't the first programming I ever did (the first being in 6502 machine code), but the first 'high level' language.

Haven't written a single word of BASIC in decades now.

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

"The moment you put them on, you can answer literally any question," Nguyen told us in an interview.

Ask them "WHY?" and they'll self-destruct. It worked for Patrick McGoohan.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Atari ST

I had an Atari ST. I even had the special black and white monitor for it that earned it the name "Jackintosh".

But looking back I've often thought that maybe I made the wrong decision there.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

No Internet Please, We're British

So this government is just as stupid as the last government, they've had a big smackdown from Apple and the US Government on trying to put a backdoor in encryption, because surprise surprise the UK doesn't rule the internet.

But they're clearly not done with outright stupidity decided by people who do not have a clue about what they're doing.

Gove's "had enough of experts" line still echoes through this government, it seems.

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

There's always a boom tomorrow.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Maybe rather than spending time and money adding lots of new functionality that nobody wants, they should be concentrating on two things

1. Make the software work reliably.

2. Make the software more efficient.

Of course this will never happen. If they make the software more reliable, they can't sell "Newer! Better!" versions all the time.

If they make the software more efficient, the hardware manufacturers will go nuts.

Reckon you can put a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

Give me a bunch of Eagle transporters and building a nuclear reactor on the moon should be a doddle. Then we can store all the nuclear waste on the far side of the moon, no problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

UK expands police facial recognition rollout with 10 new vans heading to a town near you

Re: "10 new vans heading to a town near you"

Alan Moore was being very optimistic thinking it'd take a nuclear war to plunge England into fascism.

Looks like all it took was the BBC promoting Farage at every available opportunity followed by the right-wing press.

Your CV is not fit for the 21st century – time to get it up to scratch

Re: Ultimately it's all BS

Yeah, right. Last place I worked, all unsolicited CVs, whether sent through the post, later by email, or occasionally delivered by hand, went in the bin (real or virtual, depending). Some of them might have been passed around for a laugh, but they were all trashed.

Pretty damn sure the days of going around banging on doors are dead and gone.

Unsolicited callers getting into office blocks past security? Good luck with that.

A few years ago when I was unemployed my Universal Credit work coach told me to go to a particular company with a CV and ask about jobs.

So I did, and when I asked I was told "No, we don't take CVs, we only take applications from our website".

Which is pretty much what I expected given we're in the 21st century CE these days.

UCWCs to my experience have all been totally useless.

Fortunately this year my work pension kicked in a year before the state pension did and I've now left the world of work behind me, because the lack of human contact (my last four interviews were all pre-recorded video interviews. Watch a clip, record and upload a reply) was annoying.

GitHub CEO: Future devs will not code, they will manage AI

No room for ingenuity.

The post follows one from March when Dohmke repeated Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's assertion that "in a short time, 90-100 percent of all code will be written by AI."

AI cannot create, it can only rehash.

Where are the new ideas going to come from?

Where are the sudden breakthroughs when someone thinks "But what if we did THIS?"

That's kind of depressing.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

Re: What's a "bento box"?

Now you're just being potty.

And I'm dating myself too.

Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess

Re: Battle chess

The best part of the robot football match was when one of the robots took a dive in the penalty area!

So realistic!

OpenDylan sheds some parentheses in 2025.1 update

Re: Name Parsing Ambiguity

You mean it wasn't named after the hippy rabbit in The Magic Roundabout?

Swiz!

Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere

"Improved windowing and multitasking is coming to iPadOS 26. watchOS 26 will allow users to mute incoming calls, silence timers, and dismiss notifications with the Wrist Flick gesture."

Well, there's one 'wrist flick' gesture which springs immediately to mind here.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

Back in the days of 3.5” floppy disks, a colleague of mine came over to my desk and asked “Do you have a stiffy?”

Fortunately I was aware of the fact that the 3.5” disk, due to its hard casing, was known as a ‘stiffy’ in parts of the world including South Africa where she was from, so an awkward situation was avoided.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

Spinal Tap got there first with the album cover which was none more black.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: IMaybe not a piano

Your comment reminds me of the old BBC panel game TV show called "Face the Music".

This had a round where the presenter would play a piece of music on a dummy keyboard - a piano keyboard with no mechanism behind it.

Panellists would then have to try and work out what he was playing based purely on the rhythm of the clattering and the movement of his hands.

Re: 1980s keyboards

The full keyboard for the Tangerine Microtan 65 system of the early 80s was a pretty nice keyboard.

How sticky notes saved 'the single biggest digital program in the world'

Re: "assumptions don't turn out to be what humans look like when you hit them"

Please, do not let the fuckers get away with it. Make them justify their decision. It will also make them think twice before sanctioning you again

I once had mine stopped because they thought I'd been paid money by a company I'd never heard of.

I looked into this and discovered it was a building firm in Oldham.

I complained vehemently that this was a complete nonsense. One, I'd never heard of this company who was supposed to have paid me money, two, I've never even been to Oldham and besides I live in Croydon, and three, here is my latest bank statement showing no such payment occurred at the time they said it had,

So I got the money, eventually, although had I not had a bit of money left in the bank my first three bill direct debits would have bounced.

The whole sanctioning thing is to make people live in fear. Nothing less. A governmental belief that unemployment is a sin which must be punished.

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

Re: Wish I knew what kind....

The Das Keyboard has keys with little black lights that light up black when you press them?

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

That's a simple one. You draw the line by saying transphobia is NOT and is NEVER a 'legitimate view'.

Neither are homophobia, racism or sexism.

That is where you draw the line. Simple!

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Well at least it's not a million to one chance

Because if Terry Pratchett taught me anything it was that million to one chances happen nine times out of ten.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Extensions to extensions to extensions

It was the top floor and the meeting room had a skylight. SO the boss bought a petrol (or diesel?) generator and built a box around it to try and cut the noise down, and had a big pipe attached to the exhaust with the idea being this would hang out the window. What he'd forgotten was that engines need air intake to run and he'd not allowed. So the box had to come off. The pipe didn't fit that well either, and even with the meeting room door closed as much as it could be with a wire running out I'm not entirely sure whether it was the noise or the carbon monoxide that meant we all went home feeling horrible with splitting headaches but probably both.

We only did that the once.

Extensions to extensions to extensions

I used to work for a company which when I started was based on the fifth floor of an office block in City Road (London). Several times during roadworks outside we'd lose all power, although offices on the other side of the block were on a different circuit and still had power.

One day this happened, my boss went into the empty office opposite which still had power, switched the power on, and plugged a four socket extension cable in, then ran it through into our office, and plugged four more four socket extension cables into the first cable. Then four more cables into the second set of cables. and so on until all 'mission critical' systems in the office were running off one power socket in another office.

Someone tried to move the first cable a bit. It was hot to the touch.

We did this a couple of times and it was a wonder the cable didn't catch fire.

After a few power cuts the boss decided to have a backup generator instead. But that's a whole different horrifying story.

I know their slogan was "Wang Cares"

The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive

The best sound of Windows 95

Surely an award should go to the bright sparks who decided to use the Rolling Stones' "Start me up" in the knowledge that the suits would go "Aha, like in the Start button!" and agree it, but never listen to the actual song as far as the line which says "You make a grown man cry".

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Agree with you on that. Microsoft used to make better mice than Apple have ever made!

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: they were "hovering" it a few mm above the surface.

I once needed to get some files off a friend's computer while they were out.

Moving the mouse pointer just a small distance required repeated movements of the mouse across the entire width of the desk, then picking it up and going back.

So I popped open the mouse and discovered that the area around the mouse ball was ABSOLUTELY STUFFED with fluff.

I cleaned out the fluff, scraped the rollers clean, and reassembled. Mouse working properly.

Then the friend came back and started to use his machine. He wondered what the hell was up with the mouse as he was used to just how hard to use it had been stuffed with fluff.

The demise of the mouse ball was a big improvement.

GCC 15 is close: COBOL and Itanium are in, but ALGOL is out

Lords of COBOL

It's easy to forget that COBOL is still a thing.

I wrote one COBOL program back in the mid-80s. I was doing HNC Computer Studies at Barnsley College, using a Honeywell Bull DPS6.

Fast-forward to 2015 when I was going through stuff in my Dad's house prior to its sale, and I came across a listing of that program on wide green-lined fanfold.

I was very tempted to take it with me, but thought better of it.

Apart from 'something to do with divisions' I've pretty much forgotten everything I ever knew about COBOL, or Jackson Structured Programming, for that matter, as I never had to use either again!

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Mmmm, pi.....

I've been using a pi-hole for a while, running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. As a rule it's blocking about a third of all accesses.

The Zero W also serves as a streaming radio receiver using Mopidy, and an Airplay receiver using Shairport Sync.

Plan is to update that to a Zero W 2 as occasionally the current one is worked a bit hard and the 2 will have more grunt.

Upgrading my current pi-hole to 6 caused me a bit of an issue where the service was running but the web interface wasn't, due to complaining about unsupported OS.

I disabled lighttpd using "sudo systemctl stop lighttpd.service" and "sudo systemctl disable lighttpd.service"

Then I had to run the upgrade again using the command "sudo PIHOLE_SKIP_OS_CHECK=true pihole -r" and that fixed it up so now it's all good.

It's an invaluable addition to your network!

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Apologies to Tom Lehrer

The rockets blow up

Who cares what they land on.

That's not my department

Said Musk, Elon.

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

Re: Flying Wing

From a structural viewpoint it would be better to do away with windows in the passenger compartment completely, using small wing-mounted cameras and internal screens to give the illusion of windows.

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

There's a simple solution to all this.

Give the guy a shovel and tell him to start digging.

If nothing else it'll give everyone a good laugh to see an idiot in an advanced stage of denial covered in filth trying to dig his way to a hard disk that even if he finds it it'll be stinky and corroded beyond any recovery. He might even learn an important lesson?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.