Posts by Roger Greenwood

COVID-19 cases surge as do sales of fake vaccination cards – around $100 for something you could get free

Re: A long way still to go

I'm sure I heard that one country was doing exactly that but not seen any reporting since. I wonder how it's going?

Elevating bork to a new level (if the touchscreen worked)

Re: No need for any fancy tech

"Mind you, on the down side we had several students who disappeared over the top of the mechanism and were never seen again..."

That's definitely a feature not a bug.

Your Computer Is On Fire, but it will take much more than this book to put it out

Re: Not Read Yet

Mar Hicks previous book is also very readable for any youngsters out there (under 50!) and contains many fascinating (and tragic) insights for us old folks (>60). The picture of Ann Moffatt from 1966 also appears in it, with toddler.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/programmed-inequality

Leeds City Council swallows the Gartner glossary and orders up 'post-modern' ERP in £44m SAP replacement

I should add an IT angle that during the fiasco of the poll tax Kirklees was running 4 different billing systems in parallel to try and manage the various local taxing/rates systems. I assume all the other councils (many others just in West Yorkshire) were in a similar position. All duplicating work, all with their own PHBs. etc.

It's going to be a wild ride - the various councils within West Yorkshire (some large, some small) all seem to hate each other. Local rivalry or something but there appears to be very little co-operation and co-ordination between them on the ground. That's before you add South and North to the mix, not forgetting Humberside who couldn't even keep "East" in the name.

If in doubt rename it - try and find Kirklees town centre on a map. That was an attempt to unify various smaller towns but seems to have ended up alienating a lot of old grumps. Leeds as the unifying force would work as it is the gorilla but is being hugely resisted.

Northern Powerhouse? We've heard of it. So yes prepare for change as that is the only constant.

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: I foresee several

"12 cars off each lamp post"

If each car only takes 7kW (30A), and all plugged in at the same time, that's around 350A (as most lamp posts are only given a single phase @ 240V). Current fuse would last seconds.

Obviously that may not be enough anyway, but it highlights the effects.

I predict your road is going to need to be dug up for new cabling as well, and copper is expensive.

Clever scheduling is going to be required to mitigate the worst of this, either in the vehicles or the charge points. Obviously possible and available but not yet talked about much.

Nail meet head:- "all of the parking spaces need to be charging points".

If you could add 500 miles range in a minute or so, then yes service stations are the answer. But they can't so every parking place needs to be a charge point, adoption is easy and service stations are top up in transit.

The last UK hotel I stayed at a couple of weeks ago had spaces for hundreds of cars but no chargers - that has to change.

Once every car park space has a charge point your car just gets charged on schedule, simples.

Every house has a 60A to 100A supply, luckily we are not all cooking at the same time so charge scheduling is the answer (and yes, the grid will still need reinforcing but not as much as the worst predictions).

UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music

Captain Pugwash theme was the best

and now that is going to haunt me for the rest of the day....

For a true display of wealth, dab printer ink behind your ears instead of Chanel No. 5

Re: Mebbe

Printing the pice per litre would use too much ink....

UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, 'underperforming' government IT projects

Re: small proportion of permanent secretarieshave first-hand experience of digital business change

I know latin:-

"Sumus semper in excretum sed alta variat"

Exsparko-destructus! What happens when wand waving meets extremely poor wiring

Re: Hands up

You are John McClane and I claim my £5

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Try this:-

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/

I can stop anytime......

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

To quote a well known phrase...

The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

I hope all the flights go well and everyone returns safely to the earth. Maybe having briefly slipped the surly bonds of earth a brush with the face of god will change them a little....

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

So, thinking ahead...

I fully expect Windows 11 to invite an errant process to move towards, and indeed cross over, the rainbow bridge. Awww....

Roger Waters tells Facebook CEO to Zuck off after 'huge' song rights request

Re: Not Now John

I'm sure he weighed up the pros and cons....

Stob treks back across the decades to review the greatest TV sci-fi in the light of recent experience

You know all will be right with the world...

...as long as we have VS and Tim Hunkin

Brit IT firms wound up by court order after fooling folk into paying for 'support' over fake computer errors

Re: Whack-a-mole.

Vogon poetry is a bit harsh

.

.

.

no, you're right, full vogon, it's the only way to be sure.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Re: Two possibilities

Both, along with the monthly subscription?

There was me, almost ready to move to Win10.....

Do you come from a land Down Under? Where diesel's low and techies blunder

Re: Happened to me as well!

Generators that run all the time are easy, standby ones need care. I love how it is called "polishing" the diesel.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

Re: Network Speeds

Asking the same question without changing anything is also a good way to smoke out troublemakers and hypochondriacs....

Japan to send ‘transforming robot’ to the Moon in 2022

I read the headline as terraforming...

those folks lack ambition :-)

Google employee helped UK government switch from disastrous COVID-19 strategy, according to Dominic Cummings

Hang on

It took over a week to realise that a doubling of cases every few days was going to be big trouble, given what was going on in Italy at the time? You didn't have to be a genius (or even a data scientist) to spot that one. Changing national policy/direction was always going to be difficult though, fair play to those who did the persuading.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

Airfix

also deserves a mention (other model kits are available).

Parliament demands to know the score with Fujitsu as Post Office Horizon scandal gets inquiry with legal teeth

I wonder how far this will go?

Those who were prosecuted are the obvious ones to feel aggrieved. Then there are many others (thousands?) who were audited, came up short and had to pay it back out of their own money (or face sacking/prosecution).

No doubt there are crooks everywhere, but surely very few amongst those many who ran post offices for decades. I hope they get it returned, even though it can't fix the wrong it would be the right thing to do.

Copper load of this: Openreach outlines 77 new locations where it'll stop selling legacy phone and broadband products

Re: They're sitting on a gold, umm, copper mine

Have you seen the price of steel recently? Also going up rapidly and easy to find just lying about.....

(Also copper wires are hard to strip, speaking as that apprentice so tasked many years ago).

43 years and 14 billion miles later, Voyager 1 still crunching data to reveal secrets of the interstellar medium

"Born nearly two decades after the spacecrafts launched"

Respect to those engineers and scientists who built it, and those who continue to push the boundaries (from someone born nearly 2 decades before they launched!)

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

I have a couple of old Sun monitors here, the only reason they are not in a skip is because they are the size of a skip :-)

Vivaldi update unleashes the 'Cookie Crumbler' to simply block any services asking for consent (sites may break)

Choose your paranoia level:-

1 - 1 device, 1 browser for everything (don't care/no money/clueless/life is too short)

2 - many devices, 1 browser for everything (still don't care but has money)

3 - many devices, different browsers for different tasks (care a bit)

4 - different device per task (overpaid/overthinking/properly cautious)

I think I am generally level 3 with a bit of level 4 for some tasks....

University of Hertfordshire pulls the plug on, well, everything after cyber attack

Re: Learning without a computer

What's a book?

(I fear this will cease to be a joke in another generation...)

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

Re: "Doesn't at all make me want to use them"

They are called influencers because they have a measurable effect on many of below average intelligence or those with "low frequency thinking".

By definition that is half any population....

Vegas, baby! A Register reader gambles his software will beat the manual system

Reminds me...

... of the time we offered to pre-punch certain parts for one of our customers, like we did for most projects which always had extras in. The parts were going through our machines anyway specifically for them, all we had to do was add a tiny bit of time (seconds), provided they gave us the details. It would save them hours and hours every time.

The boss told us:- "Oh no, we can't do that. The lads come in on a Sunday to do the punching, they wouldn't be happy".

The customer is always right so we stopped arguing.

Partial beer print horror as Microsoft's printer bug fix, er, doesn't

Printing

Some in the tech industry seem to think printing is optional, but many of us in the real world use it to convey information to those without a screen in front of them (as an example our welding bays are a pretty hostile environment for electronics). If we could stop printing easily we would.

My colleague was about to skip a perfectly good canon printer because his new computer (win10) won't talk to it anymore. Canon is the problem here, of course (drivers), but MS are not helping by changing things so fast.

Capita: We're creating a 'Portfolio' division to house all the stuff we don't want

Re: Probably a typo... maybe...

made me chuckle as well

Hacking is not a crime – and the media should stop using 'hacker' as a pejorative

Re: Todger?

You may find that already used elsewhere but please run it up the flagpole and see who salutes....

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

It's about time

we had another ventblockers article on here.

Microsoft spearheads a whole new genre with installation on the side of a Lyon tunnel

Do they call it le sacre bleu moniteur de mort?

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

Re: Double keying already used in some banking applications

Anyone studying data processing would have learnt about double entry/double keying decades ago. I am surprised it isn't used more for high value systems/transactions, after all the comparisons will be automatic. We do it for our wages system as folks get very fed up if they aren't paid ( < 50 people)....

Hero to Jezero: Perseverance, NASA's most advanced geologist rover, lands on Mars, beams back first pics

Re: What is amanfrommars1?

he was reconstituted from RNA extracted from Eldon

Microsoft kills broad entry-level IT certifications, replaces them with all-Microsoft curriculum

I'm not an expert but

studying for a specific Microsoft product exam, without some fundamentals, seems like learning to tune the twin carburettor of a Ford Cortina 1600e without doing any engineering. It's useful life may be somewhat limted.

UK watchdog fines two firms £270k for cold-calling 531,000 people who had opted out

Re: The scams will continue until things change....

Yes, thanks for the tip, but the penalty for breaking the terms of disqualification is only UP TO 2 years in prison (6 months then?) if they get caught. Probably not enough of a deterrent to those already intent on breaking other rules.

Re: The scams will continue until things change....

If the company doesn't pay (for whatever reason), I hope the directors are banned for a suitable period - a century should do it.

We imagine this maths professor's lecture was fascinating – sadly he was muted for two hours

Re: I'll be honest...

On a recent H&S training course every single video the trainer wanted to play failed. Fastest course ever - would recommend.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Re: Can you change your date of birth?

Some years ago now, on visiting the local swimming pool I was asked how old I was. I told them to then learn I was eligible for OAP membership i.e. half price membership upgrade.

Win for me.

A few years on and again I was asked how old I was. "You're not old enough to get half price!". I told them to change it back then - "We can't".

Still winning, still not old enough. Pity the pools are closed....

Ads in comments

Re: Ads in comments

Thanks, keep up the good work.

Ads in comments

I see that ads are now appearing within the comments list. Not complaining, but wondered if there are plans to allow comments to also include images? Obviously you will have considered this idea many times over, and hopefully rejected it.....

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

Watching users run out of desk trying to use a mouse is one of the funniest things ever. Those were the days.....

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

Re: B, H

But the alternatives proposed are also well known, R = Resistance and Q = charge. Lets face it most of the Roman and Greek alphabet is already taken multiple times so go with the funny as it will be easier to remember.

Consultants bag £375m for their role in developing the UK's faltering COVID-19 Test and Trace system

Re: In context

Our local council has announced that they are now only doing testing if you are a key worker, so that should help bring the numbers down........

Chuck Yeager, sound barrier pioneer pilot, dies at 97

Re: ?

There is a film being made (involving the family) of some of his earlier exploits including being shot down in WWII, evading capture etc. I am sure you could find the crowdfunder and chip a few quid in, if you felt so inclined.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

It would be cheaper (and possibly quicker) to trade in and upgrade the kid....