Posts by Fred Dibnah

USB-C iPhone, anyone? EU finalizes charging standard rule

Re: I look forward to the "UK only" versions

In hotel rooms the 13A socket at the desk is often barely above the desk height, so that a power plug with the cable exit on the bottom can’t be used.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: Ford's solution to their unsafe drivers/vehicles is for potential victims to run an app

A couple of years back Trek announced that they were working with Ford to fit beacons to their bikes, and this sounds like a development of that. At that point I crossed Trek off my list of companies I will buy a bike from.

Seems like Ford don’t understand the meaning of the word ‘autonomous’.

Musk seeks yet another excuse to get out of Twitter buyout: This time it's Mudge's severance check

Cheque

That is all.

Man wins competition with AI-generated artwork – and some people aren't happy

Re: Read this elsewhere and said

Yeah, but your submission would never make it into Pseud’s Corner ;-)

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, those flood signs will be true again some time in the future :-)

When the line painting crews go out to do their thing, I wish they had a line at the end of their job list which said ‘Take away No Road Markings signs’.

You are supposed to look out for, and read, all road signs, not just the ones outside your local area.

Re: Another great victory for Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

Like church bells, then. There’s nothing new under the sun.

UK immigration systems delayed by extra Ukraine visa work

Re: A hack

@codejunky

You can continue to reply in your patronising tone ("hard of reading" etc) if you like, but as I already said, this discussion is about people migrating of their own free will. I'm not going further down your rabbit hole.

In most respects el Reg is a much more civilised forum than Twitter, but now and again I dearly wish it had a block button.

Re: A hack

It's an article about people-trafficking and not refugees or other migrants coming here of their own free will, so it's irrelevant to this discussion.

Re: A hack

There is no 'illegal' way to travel to the UK, no matter what the mode of transport. Anyone travelling here has the right under international law to claim asylum, and only if that claim is rejected do they become an 'illegal' as you so eloquently describe them.

To pre-empt you telling us that they could claim asylum in France: under international law, someone can claim asylum in the country of their choice.

Re: A hack

Or maybe they want to live in France instead of Kent. I know I would.

Re: began in 2013 and was expected to be completed in 2017

Another excuse will be 'the previous government', despite both candidates for Tory leader --> PM having been cabinet ministers in that government.

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

"The headline talks about electrical engineers, then the article goes on to talk about electronic engineers. They are not the same thing."

Indeed, although the IET muddies the waters - I am an electronics graduate and work in electronic engineering, yet according to the IET I am a Chartered Electrical Engineer.

BT strikes to start this month, 40,000 workers to down tools

Re: Exploitation

You support everyone going on strike, or you support everyone who is going on strike?

I'm for the former!

Re: Go for it

When I sit in my office there's very little risk of someone jumping off a bridge onto my desk.

This driverless trains nonsense comes up again and again. There's a reason why they have only happened in (mostly) light rail, and that's because it's really hard to do safely in tunnels and/or at high speed. If it was easy, train companies would have done it years ago.

BT strike action is coming: Comms union to serve notice to company

Re: Register going Stateside?

It’s been going that way for a while now. The irreverence, the ironic humour and the interesting offbeat and NSFW articles have pretty much disappeared. The Register used to be an escape from the corporate style of other tech news sites, but now I find it hard to tell the difference. YMMV of course.

Re: Happy days are here again!

Because most of the media is right wing, and decades of brainwashing proves that propaganda works.

Re: Happy days are here again!

"What I'd really like to understand is why today, given that the tax take is a higher proportion of GDP than it's ever been, we can't afford to provide council houses, better benefits, uni. fees and grants, and all the other support that let me and my brother get out of benefits dependence.

Partly because one of the first things the Thatcher government did was to remove exchange controls. Most people just thought 'Great, I can take more cash on holiday', but it was done so that companies and rich people could shovel their money into offshore tax havens.

Another thing they did was to reduce the top rates of income tax and increase VAT, so the burden of taxation fell less on the wealthy and more onto everyone else.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

The aphrodisiac of £115k pa or so for life ‘allowance’ might work.

Halfords suffers a puncture in the customer details department

Re: Wassat, then?

No, they sell tyres.

As an aside, content on The Register has gone full USA recently, and the interesting, off-beat, and NSFW articles have virtually disappeared. Sad.

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Re: The mystery

If you think that people read dialogue boxes, I am sorry to disappoint you. Most will click OK just to get rid them, partly because they often don’t tell the end user anything useful.

Cf “Unexpected error”

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Agreed. Dabb’s column has lost the ‘Sir?’ from the title, presumably so no-one has to explain it to folks outside the UK.

Signatures

Shirley a signature on a fax is a scan, not an original. Harder to forge over a straight scan or photo, with all the necessary faxy noise & wibbleness, but still a copy.

IANAL but I thought emails in certain conditions can count as binding legal documents these days, in the UK anyway. That’s why I feel obliged to help that West African prince who wrote to me.

Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

Re: It is interesting to see the moves to unionise

I posted this recently on another thread, but it’s applicable here too:

Companies get the unions they deserve. In the 1970s companies such as Ford & British Leyland had terrible bullying management, & they had endless industrial disputes with their unions as a result.

If a company is run well & its employees are treated with respect, there is little or no need for the employees to form a union.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Step #1, define your terms

Hello Dave...

Hello Dave, you need to wake up

Hello Dave, you really should wake up

DAVE, WAKE UP NOW!!

Sorry Dave, you woke up too late. Dave? Dave?

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

We moved to Freesat from Sky earlier this year as we realised the only channel we watch that's not on Freesat is Sky Atlantic, and £20+ a month for one mediocre channel seemed a bit steep. We will get the cost of the Freesat box back in about 6 months of no Sky subs.

It was easy to switch too: remove Sky box, connect Freesat box. Send Sky box back to Sky with packing that they supply. Simples.

The hateful Sky Q system will darken our doors no more.

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

The fibre will be inserted with a catheter at the Penistone end.

Re: Microplastics and leached BPA...

I already have a shitty broadband connection.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Re: A quiet rant about unions

Well said, especially items 1, 2, and 3.

Re: Trickle-down economics

Companies get the unions they deserve. In the 1970s companies such as Ford & British Leyland had terrible bullying management, & they had endless industrial disputes with their unions as a result.

If a company is run well & its employees are treated with respect, there is little or no need for the employees to form a union.

Chinese rocket junk may have just smashed into Moon

Re: Gravity and mass...

At least China isn’t following the USA’s example. Rangers 7, 8, & 9, and the S-IVb stages of Apollo 13/14/15/16/17 were all deliberately crashed into the moon.

A tale of two dishwashers: Buy one, buy it again, and again

Re: Adverts

Drum albums.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Brakes on an exercise bike

Icon -->

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Re: That's obviously got no possibility for mis-use then....

It did. For them.

You might want to consider the cost of not upgrading legacy tech, UK's Department for Work and Pensions told

Re: Captain Oblivious to the rescue!

And you'll have 16 million IP addresses to play with, too!

https://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/the-uk-has-entire-unused-ipv4-8-that-is.html

(Although they might have been given up by now)

Feeling virtuous with a good old paperback? Well, don't. Switching to traditional media does not improve mood

Re: My 2c

I have a nice set of Thomas Hardy paperbacks in slip cases that I bought in the 70s, and looked after even to the nerdy extent of making sure I didn't crease the spines. The other day I decided to re-read them, but the text is so small that my aged eyes found it v. unpleasant. So I resorted to the Gutenberg Project and put them on my Kobo. It's not so nice but at least I can read them without a headache.

I suppose it's the book equivalent of owning the CD but listening to it on your <insert music streaming system of choice here>.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

<stuckrecord>

Google Maps is awful IMHO - pale grey roads with medium grey lines on pale grey backgrounds, and it's hopeless on a phone with a glossy screen in sunshine. It's OK for voice navigation when driving, but my car has satnav built-in anyway. For walking? Useless. For cycling? Almost useless.

Good things are Streetview (although I try not to spoil a visit to somewhere new by looking unless I need to), and markups for restaurants, cafes etc.

See also: Apple Maps & Bing Maps (although Bing on the desktop has OS Maps too).

For planning a trip, rather than wanting to know the quickest/shortest way from A to B, laying out a paper OS Landranger or Explorer map on the table is the way to go. And OS Maps have CONTRAST, lots of it. Google et al don't seem to know what that is.

</stuckrecord>

MPs charged with analysing Online Safety Bill say end-to-end encryption should be called out as 'specific risk factor'

Pork

The ban on pig-eating in Judaism & Islam, which probably originated from the risks of storing pork in warm climates, makes more sense than banning e2e encryption (which has no rational reasoning behind it whatsoever).

Tech Bro CEO lays off 900 people in Zoom call and makes himself the victim

Re: Bastard

I don't think you understand sarcasm.

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

Zoom meetings

As the hut is on the other side of the Moon, I don't think the 2.6 second RTT is the major issue.

Re: No, it's a hut

Sunglass Hut would be more useful for half the time.

If at first Amazon doesn't let you succeed, try, try again: Warehouse workers given second chance at union vote

Internet bazaar

Internet tat bazaar, Shirley?

China's hypersonic glider didn't just orbit Earth, it 'fired a missile' while at Mach 5

My attitude to any information about China coming from the USA’s military, and vice versa, is to read it with a bucketful of salt.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

You first.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

Re: Dud DAB

DAB & DAB+ services all use punctured convolutional coding in transmission. For MP2 DAB services Unequal Error Correction is normally used, which applies an appropriate puncture level to each part of the audio frame so that failure occurs across the frame at the same time. AAC DAB+ services can’t use UEP because the frame format is different, so they need extra RS protection to fail at a similar BER to MP2 DAB services.

Re: "lots of old folks still love their "wireless""

Section 6 of the report has a paragraph stating that there are limited other uses for the FM band, and therefore little incentive to close transmissions and sell the spectrum.

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

I've no doubt the Tories will use this as another reason to privatise Channel 4.

If you're Intel, self-driving cars look an awful lot like PCs

Re: Trickle-down effect?

Although that seems like a good idea and it would reduce the scourge of on-street car storage, er, parking, it would dramatically increase the miles driven.

Instead of driving your own car A --> B then B--> A, it will be

Depot--A--B--A--Depot,

or even D--A--B--D--B--A--D.

Granted sometimes it might go D--A--B--E--F--E--G--H--D, but not every time and hardly ever in rural areas.

Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey

Re: Regional differences.

Also: Smeg.

To some a smelly discharge, to others a brand of white goods. Plus it's an excellent sweary-type word.