Posts by Richard 120

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Re: Elon Musk isn't helping, is he

FFS it's flies

Ministry of Justice bod jailed for stealing £1.7m with fake IT consulting contract

Re: Insert joke here

Well that's why the guy called his company that. As Sopra Steria provide consulting services to the MoJ it's a very plausible and easily overlooked thing, they'll get invoices from Sopra Steria and invoices from "Sopra Business Consuting" and probably associated one company with the other and it passed by unnoticed.

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

Think Like a Council

Step 1. Save money by having a single colour changing LED bulb instead of three different lights.

Step 2. Ensure every traffic light is fitted with a camera and the system for fining people running a light is automated.

Step 3. Offer a reduction for paying fines promptly.

Step 4. Make appeals costly and unlikely to succeed.

Step 5. Introduce a gradual colour fade from Green to Amber to Red so that nobody can be sure of when the actual cut-off point is.

Step 6. Profit!

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

No, frazzles are suitable for vegetarians.

Amazon tried to entice Latin American officials with $5m in Kindles, AWS credits for .amazon

Re: Interesting...

Apples and Pears

The S. American govts. are neither owners or occupiers of the .amazon TLD

Considering Amazon shouldn't have to pay anything to Brazil (they don't own it), or any Gov't. for the TLD I think $5m is a pretty sweet deal.

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

No brainer

To me it's a no-brainer, Google should reduce the 30% Google tax in the same way governments cut taxes for the multinationals.

UK Foreign Sec BoJo asks tech firms to save endangered species

Re: Dennis the Menace and Lord Snooty.

Stuff and Nonsense, he's just been on a trip to the Amazon doncha know?

Elon Musk wants to get into the boring business, literally

X15 Flamethrower

Comes in various colours, including -

ISIS Hunter Orange?!?

National Lottery whacked with £3m fine for suspect ticket win

What about the fraudster?

Surely to have paid out on a fraudulent ticket there had to be a fraudulent claim?

Has the claimant been prosecuted?

Investigatory Powers Act signed into UK law by Queen

Re: Here's the full list...

Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust?

Why on earth should they have the right to look at anybodies browsing history (let alone mine...)?

What's the justification? Do the Welsh ambulance services national health service trust need to check to make sure their customers haven't caught a computer virus?

Star Trek's Enterprise turns 50 and still no sign of a warp drive. Sigh

Re: How old would those naysayers be?

An elderly scientist said it's possible you would be crushed by the pressure if you tried to accelerate to near light speed because space is not a perfect vacuum.

Is that the equivalent to saying it's impossible to travel at light speed?

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

Oh Dear god!

Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!?

Sysadmin given Licence To Perve shows why you always get it in writing

Post Apocalyptic Meltdown yes

However, they did seem to cause a Barbara Streisand effect by initiating the confrontation in the manner they chose. Would it not be better to have been a bit more discreet?

BT hauled into Old Bailey after engineer's 7-metre fall broke both his ankles

Re: Re:It's ok, it's obvious you type your replies before thinking

@BurnT'offering

Very good, I see what you did there :)

Middle-aged US bloke pleads guilty to iCloud celeb nude photo hack

Re: Middle aged?

Not young, not old, therefore middle.

BOFH: This laptop has ceased to be. And it's pub o'clock soon

Ah, the boss

The answer to all your questions is "How long is a piece of string?"

Murderous necrophiliac kangaroo briefly wins nation's heart

@Fibbles

I expect I'll regret asking, but was it the chimp or the tortoise that was unfortunate?

Re: Natural behaviour

@paulf

It did occur to me that inter-species sex is probably not called bestiality when it doesn't involve a human, I was just being Daily Mail type lazy (not being a proper journalist and also being lazy) and I figured it would be understood and forgiven.

I should remember where I'm posting.

Natural behaviour

I look at this sort of thing and think about people who say "it's not natural" when describing something like homosexuality.

Behaviour in the natural world are not always things that are acceptable in human society, gang rape, paedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, the list goes on.

Then there's the marketing of products as "natural" as if it's a good thing, I think to myself deadly nightshade, that's entirely natural, why don't you go and garnish your salad with that?

What is it that sets human civilisation apart from the natural world? It's those unnatural behaviours and unnatural things. There aren't really many though, you look hard enough and you'll probably find similar behaviour in nature anyway. The best ones I keep coming back to are glasses and books, you don't find things like that outside human civilisation.

If it still works six months from now, count yourself lucky

One of the best routers if you got the right version, flash it with third party firmware it can act as a network bridge and all sorts of other cool functions.

It's a bit of a troll article to be honest eulogising apple when compared to cheap tat pre-built machines.

On a website where most of the readership will build their own kit and will be perfectly aware that you get what you pay for and some manufacturers provide better components than others.

There are also exceptions to every rule. Sometimes you get unlucky, sometimes you get lucky.

If we want to go down the route of Apple vs. Microsoft vs. A.N. Other then it entirely depends on your own abilities and tolerances.

I am not a fan of Apple because their environment is a walled garden, I can't break it in the way that I want to break it, I'm not a fan of Microsoft for similar reasons, things that I want control over are hidden in the depths of things which you can't get at without breaking something else.

I want to be allowed to at least be able to see how something is working in order to break it in a way that suits me, I want root.

Man goes to collect stolen-car court docs found in stolen car in stolen car

Re: Oxymoron List

Project Manager

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

Facebook feed

Suggested Video - The Flash trips and crashes into garbage truck

Grodd Likes This

Whitehall IT running costs creep up again to £4.6bn

Re: As an evil consultant...

There are a lot of parallels between private and public IT projects, awards for failure, pretending things didn't happen etc.

The main difference I have found is that usually in private IT the buck stops with someone, usually the person nominally in charge. In govt projects (local or central, I've done both) the buck goes to committee to be passed around endlessly.

Microsoft in Blighty reveals its 78 THOUSAND POUND Surface 3 slabloid

Bug?

I doubt that's a bug, that's going to be a data error, a value missing from a database.

It's going to be a fall back to a default value, not the programmers fault, this one's the fault of the beancounters.

BOFH: Don't go changing on Friday evenings, I don't wanna work that hard

Re: All of our updates are on a Friday

"we can spend all weekend fixing it without causing significant damage to the company processes"

You've been sucked in there.

Changes are made when people are around to notice them and people (you) are getting paid to fix them, why the hell would you spend your free time doing the corporates a favour? You can be damned sure they won't do you any.

Ubuntu daddy Mark Shuttleworth loses fight to cancel $20m bank fee

robbed at gunpoint

I'm guessing that the one's who know someone who has been robbed at gunpoint are the ones holding the guns....

EC probe into murky cross border e-commerce kicks off

Re: Why don't I buy cross border?

Deal with the euro transaction issue by getting a Metro bank account.

It uses the mastercard exchange rates and doesn't charge a foreign transaction fee for european transactions, it has saved me money on foreign holidays and importing from europe.

It won't speed up or discount delivery though, but I am very comfortable in going to foreign websites using google translate to turn them into something almost readable and buying things from them.

Apple Watch HATES tattoos: Inky pink sinks rinky-dink sensor

Re: But I don't wank with my left hand.

Give it a try, it'll feel just like someone else is doing it.

Are gathering wankstats not the primary function of the device then?

'Roly poly' soft, wobbly robot BANGS EXPLOSIVELY, leaps 0.5m in air

Re: "They're They're Scott, its just the internet, not the Times."

+1 for the sarcasm

-1 for just annoying the damned hell out of me

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH so conflicted!

ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049

I nominate

guffpulse for word of the year

Norks: We might be aggressive but we didn't hack Sony!

HotNORKdeals.com

I'm not sure what to expect from that website....

My HOUSE used to be a PUB: How to save the UK high street

Impressive

I'm amazed they managed to do that with a pair of canine carcasses.

I guess it must be technical wizardry like the kind used in doctor who & cinderella (tardis & pumpkin coach respectively)

Starship Troopers beat Aliens, Robots AND Chuck Norris to WIN in a FIGHT

@Captain DaFt

I must have watched that movie about 20 times when I was young, repeatedly borrowing it from the video store down the road.

I thought I was the only person in the world who had watched it and thought it was fantastic.

Dodgy payday loan ads make up 83% of cases probed by UK's FCA

Re: I'll just leave this here...

Don't beat yourself up about it, there are worse things to get paid for.

I used to work in sales. I'm so sorry, I need to go wash my soul now...

Don't snap SELFIES at the polls – it may screw up voting, says official

Re: Doesn't matter anyway...

@Symon

excellent, that means I can sell my vote numerous times, TYVM

Facebook, you fools! Forget Oculus, you could have bought TRON-type headsets

@David W & Sir Runcible Spoon

I don't understand your logic.

"Probably about as well as your phone does."

You could even go as far as to say

EXACTLY as well as your phone does.

No, Minister. You CAN'T de-Kindle your eBooks!

Re: Given the amount of practice they've had...

Ah you have a problem you see, it's built using a coding language that's already got bugs in it.

Judge throws out lawsuit lobbed at Facebook for using kids' pics in targeted ads

Re: Read the T&Cs of the web site

I expect he's a well paid asshole...

Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site

Re: 'If you're a millionaire, you literally can't fail'

To be honest they'd probably spend a lot of it on drinking and partying, I know I would have.

I'm not entirely sure whether or not that's actually a better deal for the taxpayer, I don't think there's that much in it.

Malaysia Airlines mystery: Click here for the TRUTH

Re: It's obvious!

Surely that's Peter Mandelson

Amazon wants me to WEAR NAPPIES?! But I'm a 40-something MAN

But, but, but

You're not buying what they want you to buy!

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

Re: ITs going backwards

Nope, I'm way too far down the chain to do that, it's only the people near the top who are allowed to do that sort of thing.

ITs going backwards

Bizarrely when our office found that their old laptops couldn't easily be upgraded to Windows 7 from XP started issuing new laptops, which have slower CPU's less memory and no DVD/CD reader let alone writer in them, that might be okay if they also provided everyone with a means to transfer information.

Working within a department that deals with govt. data means we need a secure means of transferring data between systems, this has always meant CD's or DVD's which are shredded after use.

The alternative is encrypted USB memory sticks, however these are small in capacity, relatively slow and apparently non-existent as far as the IT ordering system goes.

I lucked out by virtue of getting a fairly new laptop in the right gap between upgrades which meant that it came with windows 7 installed and was actually better than the old one, including coming with a DVDRW drive.

When I say lucky it comes with the downside of a queue of people holding blank CD's...

Hey, MoJ, we're not your Buddi: Brit firm abandons 'frustrating' crim-tagging contract

@John Smith 19

I often have the same suspicions when these things happen, that it's all backhanders and deals made on the golf course.

More often than that it's just blind incompetence from what I can gather.

Winklevoss twins say their Bitcoins will take them to SPAAAAACE

Re: Interesting...

Optimistic, I was thinking "If" instead of "When".