Posts by Rich 2

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: C H E Q U E spell after me

Why the fuck would anyone vote your post down????

An American that can’t spell, maybe?

Re: Checks?

I appreciate I have no right to be pissed off at El Reg’s move to be “American”, However, as a long time reader (20+ years)

IT REALLY PISSES ME OFF!!!!

Microsoft battles through two 365 outages in one day

Re: I despair

I have no idea what the business case was. No idea what it costs (but if it’s free then that’s still too much).

As for lost production when things go wrong, as I said, I’m lucky enough to not be too exposed to it so I couldn’t comment. Production for myself and the engineers I work with goes up when teams goes down though

I despair

We have migrated to all things MS cloudy and Teamsy over the last month or two where I work.

The explanatory email that went around from the IT department to everyone explained that this was because it was (and I’m not joking here) “best in class” plus some other comments that were cut-and-paste from the MS sales literature.

Oh the temptation to reply with a company-wide email correcting this utterly misplaced thinking…

Thankfully, I only have to use Outlook and Teams (OMFG!!!! What a heap of utter shit) so am probably spared the rest of the cloudy goodness. And quite frankly, I look forward to an outage to give myself some peace from Team’s incessant pings and popups and general bollox-ness

UK government proposes legislation to regulate umbrella companies

Re: Government creates red tape to fix IR35 mess of its own creation.

I’m no fan of the tories that have buggered up so much over the last however-many years.

However, remember that it was Blair’s government that introduced IR35 back in the day

So they are all equally culpable

Eating disorder non-profit pulls chatbot for emitting 'harmful advice'

Comical

This is a story line worthy of W1A

Just how brain-dead stupid can they be?

A - Quite a lot, apparently

IR35 costs UK Research and Innovation £36M – the same it spent funding tech projects

I don’t understand the logic of fining a publicly funded body (for whatever reason, not just IR35)!! All it does is take money away from said body so they can’t do their job as well

Your timeline is way off

“ It came into force across the economy in April 2021…”

No it didn’t!!! IR35 was introduced by Tony Blair’s government back whenever

The way it was implemented changed relatively recently, but the basic fuck-up - sorry, IDEA - has been about much longer than that.

UK told it must double low carbon investment to meet net zero targets

Re: What’s the point?

“Carbon trading” is a joke worthy of Dr. Strangelove

Re: What’s the point?

Nothing to do with catastrophe-mongering as you put it.

Species extinction is racing to the finish line - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.

We continue to poison the air we breath and the water we drink - that’s not hyperbole, it’s real.

Sealife (to take just one ecosystem) is in desperate trouble in so many ways.

While I’m pleased if you optimism keeps you happy and save, I feel it is unfounded

What’s the point?

We’re 95% the way to total ecological collapse anyway, so any further lacklustre half-arsed attempt to do anything about it (which is actually just a plot to avoid the issue completely) isn’t going to make any difference.

And yes - I AM that pessimistic - I’m very frightened for my 6 year old son!

Microsoft finally gets around to supporting rar, gz and tar files in Windows

RAR - the compression utility from hell

The ONLY use case I have ever seen for RAR file compression is to make it impossible (or at least such a pain in the arse that one gives up) to decompress anything with it.

RAR should have been strangled at birth

That Meta GDPR fine is €1.2B. Plus biz must stop sending EU data to US

That will be when they spoke/wrote proper English too then?

6 months to comply

In my mind the most ridiculous aspect of this is that Meta are being given 6 months to change their ways

So they are being granted 6 months of continuing to break the law!! Free, gratis and with the EU’s blessing!!!

Do you think if I was caught robbing a bank, I would be given 6 months to stop doing it?

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

Re: Dystopian

I have no payment method at all associated with my iPhone account. And I’m quite happy to leave it like that.

I appreciate this doesn’t work for everyone though.

Re: Dystopian

I don’t understand the excuse (if indeed there is one at all) for not implementing a global payment lock on all iPhone/iPad/Android accounts that needs a SEPARATE password to unlock!!

It’s a pretty blindingly simple solution to this problem that has been about since “smart” phones were invented.

Even for an adult, it is way too easy to accidentally buy some vapourware on one of these devices through an application

AT&T warns T-Mobile US, Starlink may disrupt terrestrial cellphones

Satellite comms over 3/4G

“… and to achieve this using standard phones.”

I’m definitely no radio expert so can someone explain how a “standard” phone signal is going to reach a satellite?

Samsung's Galaxy S23 Ultra is a worthy heir to the Note

Shrug….

I’m surprised anyone can get even vaguely excited (or even just vaguely interested) in a phone these days.

GitHub code search redesign can't find many fans

MS - king of the anti-Midas touch

I’m constantly surprised by how MS with all their enormous resources manage to turn everything they touch into utter shit.

They are doing it with GitHub. They did it with Skype, plus several hundred more applications over their long and illustrious history.

A lone Nvidia GPU speeds past the physics-straining might of a quantum computer – in these apps at least

Re: "no more than two weeks to solve"

Try this….

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs

Ignore the headline of the video (“Quantum computers will kill the internet”) - buried in it is actually one of the clearest and most useful descriptions I’ve found of how a quantum computer actually works

Weather forecasting

Weather forecasting is a non-starter application for quantum computers. It’s a chaotic system. Quantum computers cannot handle chaotic systems.

In addition, you have to be very specific about what you are asking the QC you do. What would you ask it? “Will it rain” ? Good luck coming up with a QC algorithm for that. Actually, don’t bother - it won’t work (see “chaotic system” above)

Why does weather forecasting keep being peddled out as a likely application for QC?

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

Linköping

I went for an interview at Nokia in Linköping many years ago. It was the most desolate place I’ve ever been to. I remember the taxi ride from the airport (think Postman Pat kind of scale) to the Nokia office. At one point, I wondered if I was going to be murdered as we travelled along an utterly empty road into what seemed boundless wilderness; just endless pine forests and grasslands. Eventually the Nokia office appeared in the middle of bugger-all anywhere. And I remember thinking the inside of it was just like an Ikea showroom :-)

Years later, some Swedish colleagues tried to convince me that Linköping was actually a really buzzing place. Clearly my taxi driver managed to avoid all the sights and fun!

And no, I didn’t get the job but I wouldn’t have accepted it anyway - just too isolated for me.

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

“…apparent bug in a recent release of Redmond's Chromium clone appears to be funneling URLs you visit back to the Bing API”

How they hell do you write a “big” like this by accident? Infinite monkeys?

Re: Lack of understanding

…. Because Chrome isn’t spyware at all is it?

No no no no no…..

US Supreme Court snubs that guy who wants AI recognized as patent inventors

Pointless

This is a completely pointless argument. If your computer (“AI” doesn’t exist in any meaningful way, despite the hysterical hype) works out a clever idea then just patent it yourself. Why would you want the computer to hold the patent? It’s a stupid pointless argument

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: Thunderbirds are Go!

“ Well I think it looked like a giant cock…”

I had to reply just to congratulate you on an excellent observation :-)

Thunderbirds are Go!

Am I the only one that thinks Elon’s spaceship looks like something from Thunderbirds? Or maybe Captain Scarlet?

Europe finalizes €43B Chips Act it hopes will help free it from foreign fabs

Re: another bite in the buttocks

Well the MOD failed to patent Liquid Crystal - you can add that to the list of shite British management

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

Procurement failure

One would think that whoever negotiated the purchase of all this kit for public schools would have insisted on lifespan, repairability and software update guarantees.

Wouldn’t one???

Sick of GNOME, Snap and Flatpak? You might like Linux Lite, but beware rough edges

Lite Linux

If you are looking for a “lite” Linux then you could do a lot worse than Void Linux. No system-dunce. No flapjack/snap/whatever by default. No Gnome by default. Bliss.

I’m sure there are other similar Linuxy versions too. I’m guessing?

Re: Snap free?

“… Systemd now has filesystem mounted package dependency management…”

Thank The Lord for that!!!! I was getting quite worried that System-Desirable might be falling behind the Completely Usable and Not-at-all Turd curve.

Phew!

Pentagon super-leak suspect cuffed: 21-year-old Air National Guardsman

What an idiot

I can understand it when someone is caught stealing military secrets for profit or ideology or even (like the Wikileaks fiasco) a wish to expose wrong-doing.

But from what I’ve read and the news videos I’ve seen (interview with a guy from the circle of people who saw this stuff originally). It seems that this guy was just messing about and was just sharing this stuff to stroke his ego or for “fun” or something like that - he never intended for it to “get out”.

I’ll finish where I came in - what an idiot!

Worried about the security of your code's dependencies? Try Google's Deps.dev

So now all I need to worry about…

…is Googlies stealing my personal details while using their service! Cool :-)

Are accelerators the cure to video's power problem or just an excuse to peddle GPUs?

Re: This makes no sense

I wasn’t suggesting that aiming for better video compression wasn’t a good thing. I just don’t see it as coming anywhere close to solving the issues being discussed

And forget about the car thing - it’s not important

This makes no sense

Buying very expensive GPUs to transcode your video (the article doesn’t really say transcoding from what to what) might save you some network bandwidth and storage but even using AV1, that is only going to gain you a year or two before the quantity of traffic bumps up to fill the space - a bit like the argument of “bigger roads just attract more cars”.

And the servers are still going to guzzle mega watts of power.

So yes - this sounds like a sales pitch to flog GPUs and not an even vaguely useful “solution” to the problems cited

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

Re: Doesn't take OneDrive

So Windows fucked up?

…and NOBODY was surprised

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

All the beat statistics are made up

“ On average, a typical user switches ten thousand times per month”

Assuming an 8 hour day, I make that to be over 40 times an hour. How the hell would anyone get any actual work done at that rate???

Utter utter bollox

Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug

WTF????

“the file of the cropped image still includes the cropped out portions”

I’m trying to comprehend how brain-dead moronic you need to be to code something like this. I’m struggling

Unless this behaviour was the spec given to the softie, in which case I’m struggling to comprehend how brain-dead moronic you need to be to spec this

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: Errr…. What was the question again

You are making assumptions about me

I never said whether I was outraged because the chap in question has been barred from git, or whether I was outraged because the chap in question was Russian and therefore SHOULD be barred from git.

Being outraged and “offended” is very popular these days - I was just joining in

Outraged!!!

I’m outraged!!! Outraged I tell you!!!

Let me shout and stamp my little foot and show you just how offended and appalled I am!!!

Errr…. What was the question again

Eufy security cams 'ignore cloud opt-out, store unique IDs' of anyone who walks by

Re: Disappointed

Who says you have to use https? You can use whatever protocol you like - make one up if you want and use that

Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure

Buzz words galore

“ set our vision to be a world leading quantum enabled economy by 2033 ”

Anyone got any idea what that bollox actually means?

Bueller? …..Bueller? ….

After nearly two decades of waiting, GNOME 44 brings you... image thumbnails

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

It’s in “detail” view and no - it doesn’t work. I have googled for this in the past and it is a “thing”; I’m not making it up

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

I have it in front of me right now. Yes I am sure

Re: awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

I have not used it in a long time but the Enlightenment desktop is (in my mind) a rare good example of a UI

You may or may not like it (though I don’t know what there is not to like) but it is basically the same as it was 20 odd years ago. It works. It doesn’t need to change. I think it is a shame it lost traction and is now a niche UI. Maybe it’s niche because it didn’t “progress”!?

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

Gnome is definitely following the Windows model. That is, they just can’t help messing about with something that works (from what I remember Gnome DID notionally work many years ago).

Like Windows, they change some component or other for a different one (eg GTK) for no apparent reason. They add gloop to the system in an apparent attempt to get it to consume as much memory as possible and run as slow as possible, they deliberately remove functionality that was fine in the first place and didn’t need removing (on Windows 10, you can’t even alter the width of the columns in the file explorer any more!!! Why??? Fuck knows. They haven’t even removed the function cleanly because the mouse icon still changes to suggest you can alter the width)

Why can’t these idiots just get to a point where a system works well and then sit back and have a cup of tea? Instead of embarking on an endless journey of software-writing masturbation which does nothing except break it all again?

Personally I use i3. It works. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t fuck up

Microsoft's Copilot AI to pervade the whole 365 suite

It’s nice to see MS jumping full-in on the latest bandwagon. And so quickly too! It was only a couple of months ago that nobody had even heard of Chat-Wotnot

They did the same when the Internet became a “thing” - suddenly everything in Windows wanted to talk to the Internet regardless of how un-helpful and inappropriate it was. Want to check that birthday list you kept in a text file? Hey - instead, why not search the new fangled Internet thing for “text files” or some such nonsense instead?

Microsoft: Patch this severe Outlook bug that Russian miscreants exploited

Crap Software R Us

It’s 2023 and M$ STILL can’t write an email client that isn’t a security Swiss cheese and doesn’t fuck up.

Astonishing. Utterly astonishing

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: Mir

I agree. Exactly what do you get for your one beeeelion dollars? All they have to do is press a few buttons to manoeuvre it. Even the recovery operation can’t come close to that, surely

Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies

Excellent news!!!!

Maybe this means Zuk will have to scale back his insidious cancerous anti-social network

And no, in have no sympathy for the people that have been thrown out - they are all as culpable as Zuk