Posts by detritus 121 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2008
How very odd for me that this pops up now - I was just last night staring at a Gibraltarian £1 coin I received as change my last visit there* wondering at the text on Madge's side, confidently asserting "Elizabeth II - Queen of Gibraltar" which as technically true as it may be, made her scope sound a lot titchier, provincial and even moreso diminished than the worst fears of any good Empire-missing Briton might suffer.
* Conveniently, they're the old-style £1 coins, so utterly useless back in Blighty, except for buying condoms, lube or plastic sex-toys in motorway service stations, which I believe to be the only vendors still accepting them (not that I've tried, I simply read a notice one onesuch machine as I dried my hands at a service station, last time I drove down the M1)
Back when I ..er.. sold magic mushrooms for a living (legally, I might add), I had a couple of sets of electronic scales taken by the Police and after a few months of no actual charge (again, because it was legal) we were able to get our hands back on them.
They'd also taken some of our stock and some other bits and bobs alongside, but I had no real interest in getting back x month old thoroughly-rotten fungal matter, just the scales, which were quite good ones and not cheap.
Annoyingly, the rotting fungal matter had conspired with the batteries to thoroughly rot the contacts, so we had to throw the scales out anyway.
Can't be too annoyed - this happened early on during those few short years where fresh mushrooms were legal, and we DID just try and walk into a festival with 4 large cooler boxes full of psychedelic wares. I shouldnt've been TOO surprised to not have been greeted with warm smiles and open arms by Police-backed security.
Hey Phuzz - my first ever proper Grown Up computer (post Amiga..) was from Evesham - a 66Mhz DX2 with 64mb RAM, I think.
I was so excited! I carefully set it up, plugged it in ... and the PSU blew, dramatically. The wrong voltage had somehow been set on the wee switch.
To their credit, their return policy was quick and straightforward, but it did leave me wondering wt I was getting in to!
Or, y'know, using applications that simply don't appear on Linux.
Saying this as I should be receiving my first Win10 machine tomorrow - a laptop so I can work away in the New Year. Looking forward to the new laptop, less so to Win10. I'm hoping I can scourge much of the tracking by scouring through gitHub and that German company with the stripping-tool (name escapes me right now).
As much as not everyone uses an IDE to do all their work, not everyone's playing online games and chatting on Facebook as you so decide to condescendingly deride.
re: GDPR pop-up — this local rag's not sharing data with the most egregious quantity of innocuously-named 'vendors' as others I've happened upon since GDPRgeddon made it easy to check — only 126.
I clicked a link to some East London paper recently and was bemused to see that they'd liked to have shared my details with 416 'vendors'.
So THAT is why we have GDPR.
After my site disappeared off the front page of Google search results, screwing my new business income, I gave adWords a shot earlier this year. Complete mistake - my professional domain is not one to best attract a useful customer base via banner advertising - in fact, the opposite. Lesson learned.
Anyway, I consider myself fairly technically competent, having been an avid computer-user for nearly 35 years now, but I've got to say that I found the AdWords back-end to be one of the most incomprehensibly convoluted, labyrinthine and confusing messes of an interface I've ever used.
Is it just me?
I was quite boggled by it - I know Google suffers this in a variety of instances, but AdWords is their primary revenue stream, no? How are the great mass of unwashed schlubs supposed to make sense of it?
Thanks Baldrickk and Ledswinger for your responses.
I'm thinking perhaps I'd forgotten over the years what the intended specified role for the Eurofighter was, having read of it trialling Brimstone lobbing, etc, so perhaps had gotten used to the idea it could be a shoe-in for non-naval roles that the F-35 is laterally intended for.
Oh, to have a stealthified, modern tech update of the Buccaneer... *swoon*
Anyone from Reg or any beknowledged commentards have anything to add to this story, which is doing the rounds..?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/16/dogfight-uks-pledge-buy-american-fighter-jets-could-play-like/
"The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has so far bought 48 aircraft at a cost of £9.1 billion but is now reconsidering its pledge to buy a further 90 F-35s.
Instead, the Telegraph understands it is looking at purchasing Eurofighter jets, made by a European consortium that includes the UK. The European manufactured jets are currently, on best estimates, about half the price of an F-35"
.
I don't think Blighty needs a lot of over-specced stealth-ish craft and as much as the Typhoon might too be a bit overwrought (given the flavour of 'adversaries' we put these things up against these days), this would be a bit of a welcome break. I'd've assumed though that we were contractually obliged to buy at least a significant share of the 138 F-35s we've promised to? Obviously we need enough to make our bloody catapult-free carriers 'useful'... .
I've been using Illy and PS for over 20 years now, and loathe Adobe and its lock in Cloud scam more than ever - so, whilst i'm currently completely locked into Adobe to ensure compatability with files I receive from clients (literally the only reason I finally 'upgraded' from my bought CS4 disc to the ball-twisting irritation that is CC) I buy every Serif product, Just Because. I've barely even used them... .
Adobe needs competition; They need to be forced to open out their file; formats or at least have a significant challenger to compete with something existing and open (EPS or SVG, anyone?).
I'm not hopeful. It'll be years before their current position can be in any way threatened. A shame for me - I used to be a total Adobe fan boy, now their money-wringing business model just turns my stomach.
How is such an innocuous statement wrong, or indeed more absolutist and polarised than your reaction to it? I hold The Guardian and the Daily Mail at about the same level in terms of oral frothing, even if they're on different sides. Picking on the DM's like shitting in a barrel full of dead fish, easy enough to do but pointless and unbecoming.
I personally have perceived lots wrong with the EU, but I didn't Vote for Brexit and I have more than most Brits to lose by our leaving (partner, family, etc). Just because the Daily Mail wants us out, doesn't mean the EU's not without fault.
Personally I think we sould've stayed in - can't fix something from the outside. Oh well.
Quite - this seems to be the crux of a recent admission from the Russians in relation to their competing with SpaceX's increased launch capability...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/russia-appears-to-have-surrendered-to-spacex-in-the-global-launch-market/
"The share of launch vehicles is as small as 4 percent of the overall market of space services," Rogozin said in an interview with a Russian television station. "The 4 percent stake isn’t worth the effort to try to elbow Musk and China aside. Payloads manufacturing is where good money can be made."
(Is linking to Ars ok here after Mr Page's defection? :| )
> Democracy - only for the elite. Right?
I don't consider myself too much of an idiot, but there're plenty of subjects I feel I should have zero say in, purely because I comprehend my sheer lack of grasp of them.
If by 'elite' you mean those best placed to make specific decisions within the domain of their elitedom, then sure - pass the votes along! If you biliously spat 'elite' out when writing that, then no, I don't think I agree with that, or with you.
Given that ISRO seems keen to attract foreign launch customers and there's apparently a continual effort to drive down development costs I think making a meal of India's economic disparities is a bit disingenuous, no?
Or should Indian industry be limited to diesel tractors and mud brick factories?
I noticed that a client's website was loading slowly so downloaded it and ... oh my God, 52Mb!
Mostly over-sized images, of course, but because it was on a well-known Website-Maker, it also featured 2Mb of Javascript that did... who knows. The class definitions for the body tag alone weighed 8Kb.
It's like no one gives a shit any more.
I can set my homepage to a local file link on c:\ to the ever-evolving html file homepage I've used for over decade now, but I can't set new tabs to open up either a local file (using an extension — 'new tab overide') nor set it to 'just open whatever the goddamn homepage is set to, please'?
So I'll have to upload a neutered version to some webspace somewhere (neutered to remove telephone numbers and other useful but private things I don't want on a publicly-accessible page - no, I don't want to password protect it) so that I have one homepage open upon bootup, and then the stunted version on every new tab thereafter?
I get the logic (prevent nasty add-ons creating a feedback loop that always forces their content onto homepage and new tabs), but is there really no workaround?!
Annoying.
It's quicker, yeah, but I did spend much of yesterday swearing at a program I have open 99% of my working day. I'm sure I'll survive. It's free software, after all...
With some of the whinging on this page, one might think some of you have actually paid for this software, as you do with Chrome ("if you're not paying, you're the product.." {yes, I know FF is essentialyl free if you don't donate to Mozilla, but it is funded, so a bit of a different beast).
After a month or so on Chrome (and its playmobil interface) not long after its initial release I came back to Firefox and have stuck with it ever since, because it does the job and isn't Google or Microsoft with whatever telemetry known or unknown they've secreted within.
That latter point's really important to me.
"they just offered me some more of their cloud storage (of which I have used 0 bytes)... Yeah... Right... "
haha, that disappointed me too - the mailer distinctly looked like it was going to offer me a speed 'boost', or rather bring my incredibly dire London line up to something like 'speed', rather than something that can barely handle two simultaneous low-resolution streams at the same time.
What do I pay so much for again?
My personal suspicion over recent years has been aimed squinty-eyed at vehicle emissions — I've no doubt the wholesale abuse of neonics has an impact, but if airborne particulates are killing n-thousand macro fleshies every year, presumably they're having an impact on smaller oxygen exchange systems too?
As well as their emissions, cars encourage the absolute dissection of countries with their roads and motorways which I've again wondered at the impact of. If fields and vales are increasingly cellularised between roads, then they become like those south sea atolls which batter attempts to leave, dashing bodies across sharp coral walls, winds and waves preventing escape.
The root cause could be so many things. It probably is...
*stands*
I am Feersum Endjinn.
LOVED that book, although it got me into a lot of trouble with friends many years ago as I drunkenly tried to claim that vacuum balloons (as featured quite havily in the book, if I recall correctly?) could possibly help us get in to space, me thinking of 'space' as high up above the karman line, my friends thinking it (probably quite correctly) as orbital velocity. I still remember the pitying looks on their faces as they came to perceive previously unseen strata of my ignorance.
Must be twenty years since I last read it — time to dust it off and give it another read! :)
I've been wondering whether this would end up blowing up - certainly seems like a lot in the nerd community have been chomping popcorn in anticipation of Amazon finally getting its comeuppance where fake products are concerned. I've heard numbers like 150k fake glasses sales being bandied around, which isn't a small number where potential sueballs involving physical bodily-harm comes in to play.
On the subject - can anyone here point me in the direction of a trustworthy source for XP SPs 1 & 2 (32-bit)?
I've recently installed XP (on an air-gapped machine!) as a machine controller, but some of my more contemporary software refuses to install without SP2...
...the trouble is, I have other [more critical] software that refuses to work under SP3, which is comparatively easy to come by.
Yaay?
I took this thread as a reminder to uninstall the app from my Android phone, which I've just done. I'd read about the upgrade here on Reg before mine was automatically updated, and I wondered what all the fuss and histrionics could possibly be about — it's a chat program, how bad could it be? Less than a minute's use described to me in intimate detail why I too would have to finally abandon Skype.
I'm still running a 2015 version on my desktop here, but it's only a matter of time before forced disfunctionality will prompt an upgrade and then myself and the one other person who I still use to talk to with it will likely uninstall. My contacts bar has been an ever-greying wasteland these last few years as people jump to WhatsApp et al, roads I've no intention of going down.
Why can't we just have a stupid-simple plain-vanilla IM client witout corporate behemoths meddling or buying up to scour and deprivatise (looking at you, Facebook)? Grr.
The Buccaneer was one of Britain's most beautiful planes, in my opinion.
I know you're joking, but I've often wondered what's to stop us taking an existing successful framework and re-developing it using contemporary technology.
Heck, why not a carrier-variant of the Typhoon?
From the little I know, it appears that much of stealth's capability is over-sold.
Oh Good, yes - instead of staying resolutely on Windows 7 'til it runs out as my protest against MS's shenanigans, but so that I can keep on working in the meantime anyway - why don't I dutifully follow the standard Win Thread complaint response and install some unknown's preferred flavour of Linux?
Oh. External machine drivers.
Oh. Software.
Oh, yeah - I forgot I live in the real world, shit as it may be.
Linux wasn't even particularly suitable for my non-techie partner for a couple of years - sure, she could browse the internet, 'do' multimedia and make notes and use basic office software.. but ultimately none of it is *actually, practically* wholly interoperable with MS/Apple stuff, is it? And that kind of matters when you're dealing with the rest of the world to put bread on your table.
Or you try explaining to an Italian why she should just give up after hours of swearing at logical inconsistencies and [insert workaround fudge here] because "really, my love - this isn't worth the fight".
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