Posts by Alistair Dabbs

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

You have to educate your kids to love metal

Having a taste for metal is not incompatible with having a young family. You have to teach the little ones to appreciate it - gradually. What you do is find out what shit they're obliged to say they like as a result of peer pressure at school, then plot a route to steer them away.

For example, when my daughter was little at the turn of the century, she was obliged to "like" the Spice Girls. So over time I bought her CDs by girl bands with an increasingly rougher edge (and better songs). I think we started with B*Witched, then Pink, and so on. As she entered her tweens we moved her on to Linkin Park, then Korn, and she took over from that point.

For my son, it was easier. I started with easy-listening stuff such as Queen, then AC/DC, and then took him to a Wolfmother concert, after which he was away on his own journey.

Best wishes to my friends on the Reg, BTW.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

slash file retrieve

In my first job at a publisher of computer magazines in 1987, I ended up slaving over a hot Lotus 1-2-3 to process the monthly management accounts. Since the Qubie IBM clone they lent me at work had only a 20MB hard disk, I had to keep each month's accounts on 5.25in floppies otherwise the squeaky hard disk would have been full after a few months. The macros I wrote to produce the month-on-month, year-on-year and YTD reports (and print them out with graphs and charts) also prompted me to remove and replace one floppy after another throughout the calculation process.

I remain fond of that version of 1-2-3 on DOS, whichever it was. We even published a monthly magazine for Lotus users, which also covered a lot of stuff about Symphony, its corporate integrated package that everyone seems to forget about.

My view is that Lotus wasted too much time buggering around trying to make its so-called "3D" version of 1-2-3 run in under 1MB of RAM under DOS – when it finally launched, it ran like a slug on my PC at work - when it ought to have paid attention to what MS was up to and thrown itself into the Windows dev programme much earlier.

I feel a column coming on. [obligatory sexual double-entendre intended]

French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country

Re: Fine French fiber

>> A definite false flag

Maybe. I noticed that the graffiti calling for New Caledonian independence was misspelt. One might have opinions about "extreme-left" activists (i.e. fascists who want everyone to do as they say, or else) but generally speaking those seeking independence for their country know how to spell it.

Re: Fine French fiber

"Co-ordinated attack" does sound rather un-French. The winners of the recent parliamentary elections can't even co-ordinate between themselves to agree on a leader. Usually it's the losers who fight like rats in a sack. Here in France it's the winners.

Investigators are having trouble determining the culprits and motive for the nationwide SNCF and fibre optic cable-cutting spree because multiple conflicting pieces of "evidence" are being left for them to "discover". At one particular site where fibre cables were sawn, graffiti left by the perpetrators indicated their unhappiness with the Olympic Games, objection to buying nuclear waste, and support for New Caledonian independence. Yeah, and why not "Just Stop Oil", "Swifties Unite" and "Drag Queens for Gaza" while they're at it?

Earlier last week, the French police arrested some fool who believed himself to be working for Russian intelligence, planning a series of attacks on French soil while the world's media was focused on Paris for the Olympics. The guy comes across as a bit of a tit but it's not unfeasible that a secret service hoping to cause distractive uproar in a foreign country might persuade a variety of local deadheads with chips on their shoulders to turn to coordinated vandalism as a means of raising awareness of whatever interest groups they happen to support.

Google will pump more than $100B into AI, says DeepMind boss

IP

...and not a penny will be spent on copyright fees due to those whose source material is stolen to feed its LLMs.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

Was nostalgia better in the old days?

https://www.theregister.com/2012/04/27/something_for_the_weekend_computer_nostalgia_is_bollocks/

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

B word

"There's a word for describing going it alone against huge rivals, starts with a B..."

Buggering off?

Amazon Ring, Alexa accused of every nightmare IoT security fail you can imagine

"sloppily designed internet-of-things"

Anyone else spot the deliberate tautology?

Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

Huawei

My old Huawei handsets did this: just hold a printed photo in front of them and face-recognition would let anyone in. It was an after-dinner party trick, with the added James Bond-like thrills of knowing that each time you did it, your photo would be sent to the Chair of the Chinese Communist Party.

Gone in 120 seconds: Tesla Model 3 child's play for hackers

Elon's response

What was Elon's response? Call Synacktiv a bunch of pedos?

No more rockstars, say Billy Idol, Joan Jett in Workday Super Bowl ad

Rupert Goodwins and the Ziff-Davis connection

Perhaps not rock but one of Rupert's colleagues of the 1990s, PC Direct magazine's reviews editor Adrian Sutton, went on to write the original stage score for 'Warhorse' and 'Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' - a couple of crowd-pleasers that some readers might have heard of.

Iran crew stole Charlie Hebdo database, says Microsoft

Re: Where was the DB stolen from?

The online shop for CH's subscriptions was run by a third party. It was this third party that got hacked, not CH's servers or its social media or its modest website.

Still, it's quite exciting to know that I am now on Iranian nutters' hitlists. It certainly explains why I receive 10 unsolicited phone calls a day from people with Arabic accents trying to sell me shit.

Musky scent? Billionaire launches fragrance: Burnt Hair

Why no Michael Jackson joke?

Still too soon?

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

IoT privacy

It certainly makes you want to double-check the data-sharing T&Cs on your Smart Toilet.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: You are doing it wrong.

This does sound a bit like that magic wand, you know.

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Re: Karens

The Evernote forums are full of hissy-fitters like this. Rather than ask for help, they type furious posts about how terrible Evernote has become and that they are leaving for Notepad or some other shite.

I try to respond with "Thanks for letting us know" every time but I can't catch them all.

Burger King just sent spam receipts to customers

Re: Romaine calm

Until then, they're in a bit of a pickle.

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

Re: As an application developer ...

This ^^^

I've experienced this as an app developer. People are so inundated with shitty little marketing messages and ads masquerading as notification prompts, not least when they land on mobile web pages, that users are accustomed to dimissing them without reading them. So when you send out a notification that actually means something, it gets lost among the slurry spray of all the rest.

"his "neighborhood" is in America"

We use north American house style at The Register. Donc mon quartier serait "my neighborhood" tout de même.

In France, the government changes the speed limits regularly on a whim. Obviously it is not practical or affordable to change all the road signs every time the speed limit is changed. So they change some of them and leave the rest where they are and you just have to know what the legal speed limit currently is - by catching it on the news, for example.

Not so long ago, the national road speed limit was lowered to 80km/h, so whenever you see a signpost marked 90 you are supposed to drive at 80. Just recently, the government relaxed the restriction, allowing a number of regional governments to allow the speed limit to return to 90km/h.

Some did, some didn't.

So now if you drive around France, the national road speed limit is either 80 or 90km/h depending upon which département you are in at the time. You may see a sign marked 80 but the limit is 90, and vice versa. Just possibly, if you're a really lucky, the speed limit marked on the road will actually be the real speed limit.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Intellectual property

>> can i claim money for every storage medium sold as well as it might be used to store a copy of my software?

You could do unless...

1. You were employed when you wrote the code, in which case your employer owns the copyright.

2.You invoiced under a 'work for hire' arrangement, accepting a fixed fee that precludes any royalties.

Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye

I'm not sure you can say this without freaking out the moderators.

Re: You know you're old when...

Who wouldn't want to be awoken by a goblin teasmaid?

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: The Crash?

My fault: I made an old-fashioned joke about accents but forgot to warn the sub-editor. I'd written "The Crash" and "The Porice", and had Kim Jon-Un saying "Huh, more eighties clap". I find accents funny.

Re: When In France ...

I refuse to stream music. It's worse than priacy: it steals money from artists and give it to some nobhead in charge of a company that has a bank of servers.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Ah no, hang on, I get what the question is now. Can you be declared dead and then go on to commit a crime with impunity?

I wonder if Paul McCartney did anything naughty after Abbey Road came out? "It wasn't me, luv, I was barefoot in Heaven at the time."

The Queen has been erroneously declared dead so often, she could have offed hundreds by now.

Re: Musical choice?

By all accounts, a fine estate agent: https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/

They did it with Martin Boorman, I think.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: We're not all British

Sir Percy Blakeney, like Bertie Wooster, is a literary fictional character. I understand how Americans wouldn't have heard of the "Jeeves and Wooster" books but I thought the Scarlet Pimpernel was generally well-known. Theakston's Old Pec is dark beer that tastes as if someone put half a kilo of sugar in it.

A kilo is a unit of measurement.

>> bookings of meeting rooms has been a problem ever since there were meetings rooms to book

I was contracting at a national newspaper once when we turned up to our booked meeting room to find that someone else had double-booked it. Instead of provoking an argument, the office manager simply upgraded us to the 6th floor corporate meeting room used by the chief executives.

We spent the meeting lounging around on the sofas, feet up on the vast mahogany desk, helping ourselves to the soft drinks fridge and fiddling with a remote control that magically 'frosted' and 'unfrosted' the glass walls.

Talk about being upgraded to First Class...

Re: Genius

>> Worst Neighbor

Reg house style is now North American.

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

How could you forget about Max Headroom? Why he is not doing TED talks and gaining billions of views remains a mystery.

Re: magnificent

Thanks. I am saving them up for tonight: I will be watching Montpellier (hopefully) beat Castres to win the Top 14 Rugby and be crowned champion de France. To this end, my town Hall is putting up a big screen by the river and offering a free apératif to get us started.

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: Shotgun...

>> deer slugs

These do terrible things to your cabbages.

No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust

Re: "some of the daylight that the sun carelessly drops in our direction and is just going to waste"

>> The 'daylight' would otherwise fall on the surfaces that the PV panels cover up, warming them, and even causing plants to grow.

If the solar panels on my roof prevent plants from growing on it, all the better.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

Re: Cynical

>> moderator closing the question as fixed.

I had a similar experience recently on a user forum. I insisted the moderator unmark her own response as "Correct Answer" as it was neither correct nor answered my question. To her credit, she did so.

Re: $55 a month

Well spotted. Now guess which app launches directly into Not Responding mode every time.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: "Pole Emploi"

By phone. Always a prerecorded message.

Failed gambler? How about an algorithm that predicts the future

Re: Where there’s AI Will there are Myriad New Ways to Skin Dead Bouncing Cats*

I'm intrigued. Is that an actual quote or a bunch of paragraphs produced by a word randomizer?

Re: Coffee is good for health!

That was fun, thanks.

Re: We need this

In the early days, autocorrect would routinely replace 'Alistair' with 'Alligator'. This was annoying when it happened but amusing when I failed to notice.

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

Re: Effect as a verb

"So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to effect a permanent change."

--> "So what you’re telling us is that you were unable to change it.".

Re: Effect as a verb

Ears, ears. (Prince Charles accent)

Re: Oh. My. God.

Then you will want to watch this.

Re: Effect as a verb

As I think I mentioned in my column. But only a posho or someone showing off on LinkedIn would use "effect" as a verb these days, and there is no real-world use for it in a UI Just imagine a word processor with a Search/Replace dialog that instead of having a REPLACE button had one that read EFFECT THE REPLACEMENT. Like I said, Lord effing Grantham.

Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference

Re: Barbecue with stereo iSummers

The best cover version of that Twisted Sister song - arguably even better than the original - was this one by Spongebob Squarepants.

If your MacBook is jumbling the locations of your open windows between attached displays when awaking from sleep, there is something wrong with the displays or there is a corrupted file in macOS. My M1 MacBook doesn't give me this problem, nor did my previous Intel one, so I doubt it's intrinsic to macOS or Apple hardware.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

Re: Come Into My Dull Meeting Metaverse

In my original draft of this week's column, I had all the Mikes stopping what they were doing, turning to face me and saying "Mr Andersonnnnnnnn" but I decided I couldn't be arsed to come up with a funny reposte and, besides, I'd already made that metaverse-Matrix connection last week.

Robots are creepy. Why trust AIs that are even creepier?

Re: Max Headroom

There were US versions of the TV movie pilot and series, but the original Max Headroom film was a Channel 4 production in the UK. The head of C4 at the time, who gave it the green light despite the story being nuts, is now head of OFCOM.

Re: Pitchforks

Modern mobs reduce their carbon footprint by braying during the hours of daylight.