Posts by Franco

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

Re: Mars Bar

A rumble of laughter did go round the cinema when I saw that, packed cinema on premiere night. We all loved that Marvel had gone to the effort of putting in a local joke.

Kevin Bridges

I feel a quote coming on. What's the difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow? If a gun goes off in Edinburgh, it's one o'clock.

Re: Mars Bar

I was at Uni in St Andrews, the chippy there used to offer deep fried Creme Eggs at Easter. Also used to work with a guy who said his daughter's favourite part of their annual trip to Stonehaven was the chippy there, which would deep fry Tunnock's Tea Cakes.

Re: Just tell 'em to

They don't have any, slang is for plebs at the other side of the country according to most Edinburghers. Too busy putting sauce on their chips for slang.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Outlook

The one that really gets me for location badgering is Outlook, specifically the calendar. Its job is to tell me where I need to be, not where I am.

Firefox 91 introduces cookie clearing, clutter-free printing, Microsoft single sign-on... so where are all the users?

"Several", not 4-5 as I stated and Chrome probably had support even before that.

Plus most people have exposure to Chrome, either because they use Android or have got it by accident via a drive-by download or it was preinstalled on their PC. IME developers and IT Pros are the only ones who want/ask for Firefox, and again often the developers only want it for testing purposes rather than using it all the time.

Exactly what I was going to say. As much as I hate Chrome, it's compliance with Group Policies mean it has been either the primary or secondary browser on pretty much every desktop refresh project I've worked on in the last 4-5 years. I can't say put Firefox on 2000 desktops if there's no automatic way to set proxies, home pages, corporate bookmarks etc.

(The primary browser has often been IE, and then only because of legacy intranets and/or LOB apps that require ActiveX plugins)

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Re: Babylon Zoo

Funnily enough I was one of the few who hated the advert music but liked the the actual song when I heard it. The pretend techno part of the song that made the advert seemed like a joke tacked on to the end.

There were plenty of other hits generated by Levis in those days though, one hit wonders like Stiltskin or Freakpower, or classics like 20th Century Boy and Should I Stay or Should I Go? getting a re-release.

UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music

Earworms galore!

Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy (In the Hall of the Mountain King)

Frak

Repton

Arcadians (little piece of music as you started the game, but not any during IIRC)

Citadel (speech welcoming you to the game and another one with a little tune as it started)

Pole Position (a wee bit of psych-up music as you prepared to qualify/race)

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Re: Water Bills

This wasn't even at the stage of going to the mortgage provider, was all down on the broker's online portal so they had all the information they needed before sending to the provider.

I had some rather stern words with them, they weren't cheap and the whole point of using a broker was to avoid the stress of applying for a mortgage as a contractor. Instead I got the stress of dealing with them.

Water Bills

Being as I am a contractor, I engaged the help of a mortgage broker who specialises in contractors when I was moving house. He was great, really knew his stuff and got me all the information I needed very quickly.

Sadly after that I got passed over to his admin team to do the actual paperwork, and they were muppets utterly unaware that not every country in the UK does things the same. My application was rejected for expired home report (had a month to go but "might" expire before application), wrong recommendation letter (they had sent me the wrong template so the wording was wrong) and water bill of £0. It took a lot of persuading to convince them that water bills are paid as part of council tax in Scotland, so I couldn't tell them exactly what I paid.

The world is chaos but my Zoom background is control-freak perfection

If there was one "good" thing about lockdown IME (very subjective I know!) it was that the hairdressers and barbers were shut too, which meant IME no one wanted to be seen. Things have of course changed now as we've started to open up again,

Again IME, the Zoom/Teams background thing degenerated in to a pissing up the wall contest of who had been on the most exotic holiday and had the pictures to prove it.

YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

It never seems to recommend to me anything like my subscriptions (mostly music, some cooking channels as well) but if I watch a video on some DIY job I've never done before I get a million recommendations of similar videos.

One of the cooking channels I subscribe to is FoodTribe (as James May is the only former Top Gear presenter I can remotely stand) but of course that generates constant recommendations for Top Gear, Grand Tour and Clarkson and Hammond videos and apparently "Clarkson is a cunt" and "Hammond is an angry little rodent" are apparently not valid reasons for not recommending more similar videos.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

The Pentagon

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Samsung commits to 5 years of Android updates... for its enterprise smartphone users at least

Haven't tried the Motorolas but the Nokia branded HMD range are all vanilla Android and there's a good range of specs. Still using my 6.1 which is probably close to end of supported life now.

Google own the OS and allowed this fractured landscape that we have which allows them to blame the OEMs. They have 100% control over the devices on the Android One program and only support them for 3 years.

This is NOT about rate of patching, this is about product lifecycles and no Android manufacturer is doing a good enough job on that.

Good on Samsung but as I've said before Google need to be taking the lead on this. They're quick enough to bug hunt in other people's software and disclose them if they aren't patched as quickly as Google think they should be, but lagging behind when it comes to product lifecycles themselves.

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

Re: LinkedIn posts

You getting work via LinkedIn is particularly amusing for me Dabbsy, because my introduction to your work had you being added randomly by Norbert Spankmonkey and Hank Waggenburger III

https://www.theregister.com/2014/06/20/dont_add_me_to_your_network_i_have_no_idea_who_you_are/

Seven year old column, and that shit still happens to me to this day. In amongst all the virtue-signalling. (not by me!)

*Rest assured, dear reader, everything is this column is the gospel Liber AL truth, as Thoth is my witness. Everything is permitted. Call me Aleister.

And that'll be Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads stuck in my head for the next few hours. No bad thing though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3LvhdFEOqs

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Marketing Division

Of course it's marketing, for all of those gushing over how great Windows 7 is/was under the hood it is Vista R2, but had to be rebranded because of the massive stigma around the Vista name and it's myriad of issues at launch. Vista is Windows 6.0 and Windows 7 is 6.1 internally, even the clusterfuck of Windows 8 is actually 6.2 internally.

Changing the name to WIndows 11 makes fuck all difference unless they are charging for upgrades from 10, because we've already had 12 versions of Windows 10.

However what Microsoft (and indeed every other OS developer on the planet) need to do is make new features such as that fucking task bar news feed opt-in rather than on by default.

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

A certain Mr William Connolly (who I often quote in this parish) always said he wanted on his tombstone (in very small test so you had to get close to read it) YOU'RE STANDING ON MY BALLS.

For my part being Scottish, I just want the word "cunt" on my tombstone, because there are so many different ways that can be interpreted and none of them are wrong or right. (you may have to be Scottish not to take cunt as being pejorative)

Tech contractor loses IR35 tribunal appeal: 'Right' to substitute didn't mean he could, say judges

Typical

A single contractor gets a £75k bill for tax and HMRC will pat themselves on the back.

Meanwhile the work that used to go to contractors like this is going offshore (where revenue is going all over the place ti minimise what's paid in the UK) or to Umbrella Company Contractors (an unregulated sector full of companies taking the piss.)

Case in point, £37m worth of "unexplained expenses" and all the guy got was a disqualification as a company director

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/11-year-ban-for-payroll-boss-in-tax-avoidance-scheme?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications&utm_source=0847b701-2435-447c-939c-c606c2d39417&utm_content=daily

The Eigiau Dam Disaster: Deluges and deceit at the dawn of hydroelectric power

I never knew until recently just how many hydroelectric schemes in the UK were originally for aluminium production.

I'm planning to do the West Highland Way this year and there's a very similar setup near Kinlochleven, the owners were in a bit of trouble lately over broken promises to the local community. It's the last remaining smelter in the UK apparently https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176329

Whatever you've been doing during lockdown, you better stop it right now

Stinky microwave breakfast. I've mentioned before on these pages going to a customers site where one of the DBAs used to eat microwaved hot bananas for breakfast, which is a truly ungodly smell (I'll mark up my own score on 3wise for that one)

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Huh, didn't know Fastly used 123-reg for their DNS.....

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

I moved house a while back (don't try this during lockdown, it's not fun) and as a result ended up having to buy some new pieces of furniture, which included a new TV unit as in my flat it was in a corner and it's now against a wall. The new unit came with an LED light package which clips on to the glass shelves at either end so you can make them look like one big light bar. So now even my TV unit has a remote! And not only that, the remote for my YouView box turns it on and changes the lighting sequence on it, often at the expense of changing the channel like it was supposed to.

Remember those wacky cyberpunk costumes in Hackers? They're on display in London this week

Re: Capsizing oil tankers via software

Yep, between IPv6 and its idea that everything in the world should have a routable addresss and the proliferation of internet access satellites being launched it won't be long before admins start to think it's a good idea to be able to remote connect to everything out of laziness. it'll start off as VPNs that shouldn't be accessible outside the company network, until someone opens a firewall for something and forgets to close it again....

Re: Soundtrack

Not seen it for a good while myself but I don't really remember any sort of command line hackery, I do recall such ridiculous things as a kaleidoscope type effect as the hackers "travelled" down the cables to their target and fancy custome splash screens on the hackers laptops as they booted up which were far beyond the capabilities of the consumer hardware of the time.

Firefox to adopt Chrome's new approach to extensions – sans the part that threatens ad blockers

Re: Forking Firefox ?

If we do go down the Fireforks route then essentially Google wins.

At the moment, despite their reliance on Google cash (which comes for making Google the default search engine in Firefox), Firefox is pretty much the only independent browser. The other options are from major companies (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari) or use the Chromium engine and so are very similar to both Chrome and Edge. The next options are probably Opera and Brave, both also Chromium based. Firefox, for all its flaws, is a trusted name and a genuine alternative to the others, which would be lost with a fork.

Whoop! Robot/human high-fives all round! Oh, my fingers have disintegrated

I see this on Youtube as well. For the most part I subscribe to bands on there, but the one anomaly is Binging with Babish because making food inspired by films and TV appeals to my nerdy side, so of course Youtube recommends me nothing but food channels, or switches to nothing but DIY channels because I watched a video to fix something that I never need to know how to do again.

As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?

Re: 5.

Agreed. Microsoft (rightly) get plenty of abuse for various things but even their OS's that no one uses (like Vista and Windows 8) got the statutory 5 years full support and 5 years extended support, and I don't know how long Apple provide support for but I'm pretty sure it's longer than the 2+1 support on the AndroidOne program.

Google really need to be leading the field here, given their tendency to bug hunt in other people's software and then publicly disclose the bug if it isn't patched quickly enough for their Google's liking.

Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence

Re: Synchronicity

Screwfix, Wilko and Argos all sell them so not obscure shops.

Synchronicity

I was at my Mum's house last weeked setting up a TV for her in a bedroom that doesn't have an aerial point, and needed an extra cable to run the standalone aerial from the window ledge to the back of the TV. Upon rummaging in the cupboard of junk (and not finding a cable, had to go out and buy one) I DID find my old VHS boxset of the Star Wars Special Edition Trilogy along with a VHS player that mercifully still works and my own TV has a SCART port to plug it in to. The remote doesn't work (batteries had been left in it and had destroyed much of the PCB) but I did still get to watch them on Star Wars day this week.

Something went wrong but we won't tell you what it is. Now, would you like to take out a premium subscription?

Re: You have not responded for two minutes...

A few years ago I claimed for my missold PPI. I got sent a 40 page form to fill out in the mail, then got a letter dated a week after the form had been sent telling me my case had been closed for lack of response, despite the forms actually arriving only 2 days before the closure letter.

Went straight to the ombudsman after that and got £50 extra on top of my refund for their nonsense, the bank also got a considerable dressing down for deliberate attempts to put off legitimate claimants.

Re: Sounds like my HR department

Do you work for the Post Office? That sounds very like Horizon (I can say that seeing as they and the Post Office got a very public smack on the bottom this morning)

Never seen the Reg's 404 page, but check the link below for what is (IMO) the best 404 I've ever seen, from the offical website of The Sisters of Mercy.

Moving on to error messages, it's actually a slight step up to see "An error has occurred" as opposed to "an unexpected error has occurred", the implication being with the latter that the software was so shit it was expecting to fail at any second and so needed to have both expected and unexpected errors.

http://www.thesistersofmercy.com/error404page.html

Huawei wins big intellectual property case in Europe – against fashion house Chanel

Hmmmm. Both of those logos look like excessively curved bananas, which is a fruit, so Apple will probably be suing them both before long, on the grounds that Chanel selling stuff at a huge markup because of their brand is their exclusive territory.

How not to apply for a new job: Apply for it on a job site

Been dealing with this myself lately. My contract ended in January and wasn't extended, I was working on a desktop refresh program that had be ended due to the lockdown. Between lockdown and now the IR35 change there are slim pickings out there for true contractors (idiots who refer to contractors as tax dodgers, please take this as a pre-emptive FUCK OFF) and whilst I am seeing a few short term gigs for getting PCs built and on desks I am far too qualified for these roles as I'm usually the one creating the image that goes on them, not deploying them and so recruiters tend to ignore or politely decline my applications.

Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years

Would hope there are some changes because everyone I know says VMware support has got worse and worse throughout the Dell years.

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

Better switch to something else for a while and get ready for the Autonomy trial verdict.

Entirely as expected though, unless a way is found to force the board out completely they'll keep doing stuff like this

How to ensure your tech predictions catch on in a flash? Do the mash

Re: Live Action Gerry Anderson

Depended on hair colour where I was. Kids with glasses and pale blonde hair were the milky bar kid. Just as kids with big foreheads (like me) were Tefal.

Growing up in the 80s Terrahawks was my introduction to Gerry Anderson, so HUDSON the talking car was an alternative to KITT except all Hudson could do that I can recall was talk and change his colour to match Kate Kestral's hair. Best part of the show was Windsor Davies's dialled up to 11 voice acting as Sgt Major Zero though.

Not usually a fan of mashups, but I always quite liked Kings of Leon vs Girls Aloud for some reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCgvTlM7VOs

Nominet ignores advice, rejects serious change despite losing CEO, chair, half its board in membership vote

Anyone who didn't see this coming? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Not that being booted out for incompetence has ever really hindered the career of people with enough connections on the old boy network, but given Nominet's intransigence on the EGM procedures and votes it was always likely they were going to do whatever they wanted until they are forced out.

Browser tracking protections won't stop tracking, warns DuckDuckGo

Re: <sigh>

And if only developers followed them....

(Not blaming the devs specifically, I know they do what they're told to by management before I get chased out of here with torches and pitchforks)

Yeah, it's definitely rights issues with the BBC as a lot of the video clips (iPlayer content plus sports highlights) are restricted to the UK. It is annoying when it happens though.

On the flipside of that there are still US based websites completely unavailable in Europe because they refuse to comply with GDPR.

I don't trust it, I'm a Firefox user, but we're almost regressing to the days of little icons saying designed for Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Chrome has such a large market share that the internet is often designed around it, so when Firefox doesn't work as expected I use Edge rather than Chrome seeing as it's Chromium based.

I've always had a strong dislike of Chrome given Google's tactics of mass drive by downloads to get it on to so many machines. Plus MS's bundled browsers have sucked donkey balls (New version of Edge is at least usable but far from "good")

However having recently been working on a desktop refresh project where Chrome is the preferred browser, I've had to use it a bit recently for testing GPOs are applying correctly, and it really is not (IMO) a good browser. Slow, clunky, and is determined to ID my country (incorrectly) by geolocation meaning I constantly have to override settings. (This is definitely the browser, because the same sites on the same PC in other browsers work fine)

Deloitte settled HPE's Autonomy lawsuit for $45m back in 2016 and agreed to cooperate with US DoJ

Re: Not quite...

Thanks for the clarification, that just makes things worse for HP though. We got a second auditor in, but ignored them, but everything is Autonomy's fault because the first auditor says so. Oh, and we didn't pay them to say that, honest.

I interpreted it as we massively overpaid for something that our CFO told us not to buy at all, the auditors that we hired did a bad job and didn't find evidence of bad practices but have admitted they did a bad job so please don't hold the fact that we never bothered to read their report anyway against us.

It's very clear from the evidence that it was going to take a lot more red flags than were found to stop Apotheker and the board from completing the purchase. Around the same time HP also massively overpaid for ArcSight and 3PAR, and also bought Palm with less than successful results.

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

Re: Protect?

Or taking pictures of your own daughter eating ice cream (this happened TEN years ago under anti-terrorism laws)

https://www.news.com.au/national/call-the-police-hes-photographing-his-daughter/news-story/5077fe084b20837f31b43993cf634f83