Posts by Fred Dibnah

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Re: what do you call 700 varieties of cheese?

France

Labour: Free British broadband for country if we win general election

Re: Erm

Perhaps the MPs didn't think that what they were offered was a sensible compromise. May's deal didn't include staying in the SM or CU.

Re: Paranoid, moi?

Its base are all longing to us, or something. Bot needs its batteries changed.

'Sophisticated' cyber attack on UK Labour Party platforms was probably just a DDoS, says official

Re: Developing story?

I expect most IT people are incredibly thick on how to lead an organisation or be a politician, too. Horses for courses innit.

Teachers: Make your pupils' parents buy them an iPad to use at school. Oh and did you pack sunglasses for the Apple-funded jolly?

Re: University

I gave mine a few-years-old Thinkpad, a docking station with a key, and a Kensington cable to tie it to the radiator in his room. Everyone else in his student house left their shiny Macbooks lying around all over the place. When the house was burgled, his was the only laptop that didn't get nicked.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Re: Your list

The Greggs operatives also are able to smile and be generally more human.

Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data ... but are scared of GDPR

Re: Quite...

It’s milk and a set of spanners for me.

Re: Quite...

If you haven’t got any stands you could use a few tins of beans instead.

Comcast-owned Brit telco Sky to hire 1,000 new staffers, half of them engineers

Re: They are not engineers

Have a dozen upvotes.

Just take a look at the carnage on Notepad++'s GitHub: 'Free Uyghur' release sparks spam tsunami by pro-Chinese

As I write this you have three downvotes. Someone must have used MS Notepad by mistake.

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Re: Been there, done that

When I'd seen first hand at what they were doing to put independent bookshops out of business, I cancelled my Amazon account. It was some years ago, and I had to write a real, hard-copy, snail mail cancellation letter and post it to them, no emails allowed. Despite this being an obvious ploy to deter people I did it anyway, and sent it recorded delivery - ha. Apparently the rule now (from the EU I guess) is that they have to offer an online cancellation method, although it sounds like they are pushing that to its limits as well.

I haven't missed them one tiny bit.

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Re: Not got much hope

They do want to spend it....on houses, yachts, holidays, cars....

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: The system is designed around failure and blame

Upvoted for the inverted commas.

Plan to strip post-Brexit Brits of .EU domains now on hold: Registry waves white flag amid political madness

Re: Self inflicted thrashing

No.

Hell hath GNOME fury: Linux desktop org swings ax at patent troll's infringement claim

Re: A money-grubbing Rothschild?

"The actual Rothschilds had no need to grub money like this."

True - they had already made a fair bit from slavery, both financing its operation and financing its abolition. That's pretty grubby even for a banker.

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

Re: Charities are a fraud

Some charities, including by the sound of it the RSPCA, are given grants by the government because they have decided the work they do is important. Cancer research is another example.

You could probably include private schools too, given that their charitable status means they don't pay business rates or VAT on their fees and therefore effectively receive a government subsidy.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Ups and downs

Seeing the big upvote and downvote scores on this thread pretty much sums up how polarising brexit* is.

* I haven't used a capital b, because brexit isn't a proper noun. Downvote that, bastards.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Green doesn't just mean 'go'.

UK Highway Code: "GREEN means you may go on if the way is clear. Take special care if you intend to turn left or right and give way to pedestrians who are crossing"

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

I think you’ll find that most of the CRT TVs have already been switched off. Switched off, unplugged, taken to the dump, and smashed up.

Criminalise British drone fliers, snarl MPs amid crackdown demands

Re: I can sense the ghost ...

The Highway Code applies to all road users, but responsibility isn't equally apportioned because different users have different potentials to cause harm. That's why the rules and responsibilities for drivers are more stringent than for pedestrians, cyclists, horse riders, etc.

If cyclists & pedestrians ever start killing 1700+ people every year I'd accept a HWC re-write.

Re: Make it like owning a vehicle

And make drone pilots wear high viz and polystyrene helmets.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Re: "To simply go and come back and say that we've been there again is highly unsatisfactory,"

The first landing test of the Apollo lunar module was when it was landed by Neil Armstrong.

Tetraplegic patient can now move his four limbs with the help of a badass neuroprosthetic suit

Re: Is it worth it?

If they ever become mass-market most of the Arctic will already have melted. Get the suit with floats and flippers.

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Re: <rant>

You could, and should, have stopped at 3.

Dropbox reinvents itself as a collaborative workspace – no, not the WeWork kind (phew)

Oh do fuck off with the ‘collaborative workplace’ bollocks. Dropbox is just somewhere to backup some of my shit.

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

Re: Ignorantia juris non excusat

80's men's fashion was terrible, I agree - all mullets and suit jackets with the sleeves pulled up. But ladies' fashion was great - big hair, leg warmers and chunky jumpers, a la Stephanie Beacham and Emma Samms.

Or maybe I just remember it that way because I was getting laid a fair bit.

In the bag: Serco 'delighted' to grab £450m ferry and freight deal between Scotland and Northern Isles

Minister in charge of ferries

Paul Wheelhouse.

'Ridiculous, rubbish, outrageous, complete bollocks': Just some reviews for Amazon's corporate contribution to Blighty's coffers

The state of public services suggests to me that there isn’t enough money to pay for them. Sure there are inefficiencies, but in my experience no more than in the private sector. You can run a library or youth service efficiently, but when there isn’t enough money to keep the service going at all it doesn’t matter how ‘efficient’ you are.

The total tax take has fallen for 40 years and we now see the result. Funnily enough the biggest fall has been from the wealthy and corporations. Who’d have thought it?

700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run

They're an ergonomic disaster...

...but for the manufacturers, an economic miracle.

Re: Is anyone planning for this?

Yes.

The Electric Nation project, which ran until recently, provided usage info so the power companies could see what impact charging will have on the grid at larger scale. They provided free home chargers to EV owners, with internet connectivity to allow them to monitor and control the charging. I had a phone app which showed me the charging rate, and it was set to give a low priority slow charge but with the option to request a faster charge if I wanted to fill up in a hurry. IRL that would incur a higher price per kW, and for the project they used the 'carrot' of Amazon vouchers instead. Once the project finished the internet connection was removed so now I charge at full speed, although I could delay and/or reduce the rate via the car itself if I wanted to.

Since July 1st all new home charger installations have to have the ability to be 'smart' (ha) and allow the charging rate to be controlled remotely, in the same way mine was. This, of course, also allows the usage to be monitored and taxed, as it surely will be to replace the fuel duty that will be lost from ICE cars. I'm hanging on to my dumb charger, thanks :-)

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

Re: 30m quid on removing greenhouse gases?

Try Tibshelf services on the M1. There are Ecotricity chargers but no CCS. Several other MSAs are the same.

Re: A load of ignorance about charging etc in the article and comments

The difference between the dawn of motor cars and today is that the number of ICE cars slowly increased as the price dropped, and the refuelling network grew alongside it to meet demand. If the government wants to encourage a rapid conversion to EVs it has to enable/encourage/force the charging infrastructure to be built at an equally rapid rate.

You're right about reliability, though. My EV is the first car that's completely failed to start in about 40 years of driving.

@Jimmy Re: 30m quid on removing greenhouse gases?

You're right, although someone should be factoring in the number of people who can charge at home or at work, as they won't be using public chargers so much. If anyone has stats for the number of people who drive long distances (which for a typical EV is over 100 miles), that would determine roughly how many rapid chargers are needed.

But yes, woeful is the right word to describe the current so-called charging "network".

Re: So many comfort breaks.

Personally I only use service stations for the toilets. I'm not going to waste any money I 'save' using an EV by spaffing it at the likes of Costa and Starbucks.

Apple's making some announcements! Quick, lay off 435 Uber workers

Too early, need coffee

I read the headline as Apple announcing they are laying off Uber employees.

Mine's the one with a double shot flat white in the pocket.

A peeling solution to pothole has split the community... Yeah, they stuck a banana tree in it

Re: Council..

I recently spend time working in the Chilterns. With its gated mansions, massive black SUVs, and crumbling roads, I felt like I was in a 1970s banana republic.

D-Link, Comba network gear leave passwords open for potentially whole world to see

Re: "they eventually simply stopped responding entirely"

It's not their first PR scandal. This is from 2006:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/13/d-link_time_row_escelates/

I've warned people off D-Link ever since.

Huawei thanks Uncle Sam for returning its seized comms kit ... two years later, ya jerks

Re: Did they drop the kit on the floor

It took them a while to load up the necessary back doors. Best thing to do with that kit is crush it, then crush it again.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

A strange policy, yes, but also dirt cheap. For the cost of a few blue pedestrian/cyclist signs on lampposts, the council can tick a box marked 'sustainable transport' and to hell with the consequences.

Re: At werdsmith.

A bad cyclist doesn’t give all cyclists a bad name, any more than one stupid driver gives all drivers a bad name. There’s no collective guilt, just individual fuckwittery.

I think something is wrong with my DNS this morning. When I type register.co.uk I keep getting the Daily Mail website.

Trade union club calls on UK.gov to extend flexible working to all staff from day one

Re: employment rights

Corbyn doesn't come over well in the HoC, possibly because it's a bear pit based on a private school debating society, and he's not good at dealing with the braying from the other side. IMHO his public speeches are generally very good.

Re: Very general...

Flexible working also covers job sharing and part-time working, and production lines can certainly accommodate those.

Re: Less of the rather dismissive "Trade union club", please

IANAL but I understood that redundancy applies to the position, not the person. Therefore if you were made 'redundant' and the position was still open, you would have a case to take to a tribunal for unfair dismissal.

Again, IANAL.

Re: Less of the rather dismissive "Trade union club", please

Hear, hear, OP. I've always said that companies get the unions they deserve (think British Leyland and their dreadful industrial relations). If managers treated employees with respect and decency there would be little need to organise in a trade union.

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 50 miles???

And petrol pumps don't get blocked by dickheads parking where they shouldn't, either.

Most of those 9300 chargers are slow chargers which are OK for overnight and/or destination charging but useless for en-route charging on long journeys. There are currently 2049 rapid chargers, but even then not all the chargers have all types of connector. For example there are only 1780 rapids with CCS connectors, and a lot of the Electric Highway ones at motorway services are u/s.

I've had a EV for three years and the car is great, but in that time the charging network has improved very little.

Data cops order Ireland to delete 3.2m records after ID card wheeze ruled to be 'unlawful'

Re: Just outsource it to Zuck

The Circle is supposed to be fiction, not a manual b

Truckers, prepare to lose your jobs as UPS buys into self-driving tech

Re: Doomed to failure

Driving the trains on the Victoria Line was automated from the start, back in the late 60s. There was (is?) a 'driver' in the cab to open & close the doors and assist the public in an emergency.

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

Re: Delivery drivers do more than just drive

"How are they planning on getting the parcels out of the truck and actually to the destination?"

By fitting a trebuchet on the back of the van, allowing parcels to be thrown over the wall as normal.

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

Re: You definitely need to see

Hey, in the 1980s that was my local! We used to pop the Sunday roast in the oven then pop in for a few Director's, nipping back home to check the meat between pints. Glad it's still going.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

If MS went back to the pay-to-buy model I would guess that they'd simply shorten the product support duration to get more renewal sales.