Posts by Tim Hines

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

Originally from "At Last the 1948 Show" with Marty Feldman.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Cleaning Printers that are full of dust

They'd become part of the matrix ...

Meta tells staff to return to office three days a week

How many people work here?

... about half...

Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson

"College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either."

Mark Twain

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Bank Accounts

Er, shouldn't that be £1.11?

£1.125 to be precise.

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

I do not think I'll ever see,

A satellite as lovely as a star.

Indeed, unless the satellites fall,

I'll never see a star at all.

Apologies to Ogden Nash....

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

Re: Virtual Friday BOFH

"... half of us will still be working ;-)"

So about the same as usual then? ;-)

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Should have got an HP calculator, that's very good at reverse Polish...

The unit of measure for fatbergs is not hippopotami, even if the operator of an Australian sewer says so

Re: Skateboarding Rhinoceri?????

https://www.theregister.com/2016/10/25/oz_trams_equivalent_to_30_skateboarding_rhinos/

Papa don't breach: UK data watchdog fines that other pizza place £10,000 over unsolicited marketing blitz

Time to join the Pizza Resistance. . .

US nuclear weapon bunker security secrets spill from online flashcards since 2013

Re: Staffing these sensitive sites with young people is also an invitation for fun

Where's the earth shattering kaboom?

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

One version is not a backup

If he's lost the data, then it implies the cloud copy wasn't a backup, but was the primary copy and that there was no backup. If it was a backup he could have just generated a new backup from the primary.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Re: Been there. Done that.

I can recommend Stardock's "Fences". Lets you group icons on the desktop into logical (and named) groups.

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Re: Insanity

The Last Trump?

It may well be...

BOFH: Their bright orange plumage warns other species, 'Back off! I'm dangerous!'

Re: So True - All of it. The HSE wonks really are that crazy... but then you all knew that anyway.

"and desire to order around people higher up the ladder."

I hope there were cones round it ...

Finally: Historic Eudora email code goes open source

Re: Still use Eudora 7

Still using it here too, and my Gmail accounts are forwarded to it as well. A good archival system that I have control of.

IT peeps, be warned: You'll soon be a museum exhibit

Re: Starting on the Museum exhibits, ending on them.

The very CDC 6600 I used to work on is on display in the Science Museum. I feel old... oh bugger I AM old.

Re: Back in the day

I remember paying £600 to upgrade the 10Mb hard drive in my "portable"* computer to a 40Mb one...

* Olivetti M21 weighing 30lbs

Fog lifts as standards bodies agree on fog compute interoperability

Low level cloud?

So is fog computing like cloud computing but at a lower level?

Fancy that! Craft which float over everything on a cushion of air

Re: I think they are very tricky to steer.

They should have used a classic game of Asteroids to practice :)

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

Re: Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking

"Yes, Brain, but where would we find a duck and a hose at this time of night?"

Super Cali goes ballistic, Uber drivers are stocious (allegedly!)

Re: Just when you think that it cannot get any worse at Uber........

Maybe "Super Cali goes ballistic, Uber drivers rat-arsed stocious."?

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority… OK, maybe second-highest… or third...

Re: Public wifi?

A few years back I was getting a coffee at a station kiosk and one of the longish list on offer was a "Lewinsky". In brackets underneath it explained that this was an Americano with a dash of cream :)

Graffiti 'dying out' as kids dump spray cans for Instagram, Twitter etc

Re: Short attention span

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/terry-pratchett-mural-in-shoreditch-complete-after-months-of-work-10279938.html amongst others.

The beast is back: Reborn ekranoplan heads for the Arctic

Skigull WIG?

Are you sure the Skigull uses ground effect? With a high and narrow wing I wouldn't have thought it would be very, er, effective.

Love lambda, love Microsoft's Graph Engine. But you fly alone

Re: From an ignorant, long-time DB designers's viewpoint...

Also from a position of profound ignorance, is this similar to the basis of the late lamented Corel InfoCentral, which effectively had nodes and connections. For example, you might have records for people with personal info, and for companies with company info and the connection between them might be the person's position and their work related numbers. A person could be connected to more than one company (e.g. somewhere they used to work, or the agent for their area). You could add your own types of entry both for the nodes and the connections, so it was very flexible (I used to track items that could be reused by different companies), although it was somewhat OTT for a simple contacts database.

It sounds as though there may be tools to create something similar - any recommendations?

Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

Re: Misleading percentages

Surely that's 2-3 (or 4-5) inclusive so no gaps.

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

It was Cix rather than uk.telecom.

Home Office is cruising for a lawsuit over police use of face recog tech

Re: feature creepy

As mentioned elsewhere there only seem to be references to the article (see also

http://www.globalresearch.ca/intelligence-led-surveillance-and-britains-police-state-the-manufacture-of-mass-surveillance-by-consent/5354494). I think it's the same Steve Connor who is now Science Editor of the Independent. He also has done articles with Duncan Campbell.

Re: feature creepy

God, it's been a long time since what I think was the first ANPR test on the Watery Lane overbridge just north of junction 5 on the M1. I remember going to have a peer through the window of the Portakabin just down the hill at the Prime minicomputer running the system. Mid 70s if I recall correctly. New Scientist had an article at the time which raised some questions about the privacy implications.

Edit: I see the article was 12th January 1984 by Steve Connor, so my memory was only a decade out!

Cameron co-opts UK mobile industry for EU Remain campaign

1987, surely

The Bonn agreement was 1987, not 1997. Coincidentally, I'd only just read that in the excellent Information Age exhibit at the Science Museum today.

Smartphone hard, dudes, like it’s the end of the world!

Er... there's South Mimms, Lakeside and Clacket Lane if you go round the east side, and Cobham if you go round the west.

HTC HD2 'pink blob' patch produced

SMS update too ...

Looks like they have put an SMS update on the website, along with a ROM upgrade:

http://www.htc.com/uk/supportdownloadlist.aspx?p_id=297&act=sd&cat=all

Bucks village repels Street View spycar

It's a bit late!

Too late, Microsoft Live has some very clear bird's eye view of Broughton Village:

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=sp7r30gy7tm6&style=o&lvl=2&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=22145223&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&where1=milton%20keynes&encType=1

Interesting parking (see top left) ...

Google Street View hits UK streets

There's Wally

That wasn't as hard as I thought it might be!

http://tinyurl.com/dk2gof

Full version:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=putney,+uk&sll=37.331663,-122.03035&sspn=45.488111,64.160156&ie=UTF8&ll=51.46386,-0.215499&spn=0.00881,0.015664&t=h&z=16&layer=c&cbll=51.463944,-0.215446&panoid=aTUlkjN4ZDh_2sWaOxjDPg&cbp=12,108.92165653818441,,1,18.931506849315052