Posts by Blane Bramble

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe onto PCs, is 40

I upgraded ours by buying the chips and plugging them into the already-present sockets - not sure why you had to solder yours?

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

They're in the javascript file.

UKCloud acquired: Public sector specialist finally bags investment from current chair and private equity after reporting steep losses

Not necessarily - that assumes both the capacity and expertise to do so, which is not a given. Sometimes it is better to let an expert manage something on your behalf.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

What part of his posting do you think is incorrect?

Microsoft engineer fixes enterprise-level Chromium bug students could exploit to cheat in online tests

It seems that "never trust the client" has been forgotten.

Here comes the blob: Asia's top 'net boffin thinks 'shapeless services' could replace the Internet

Re: Seems to be mixing up the internet with services running atop it

I think it's another case of someone thinking the World Wide Web and The Internet are the same thing.

Judging by the way your face lit up, my inbox just got more attractive

Re: a certain Konohagakure ninja

You cannot be serious!

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

Why are you clicking multiple times with menus?

Click and hold on menu, drag to option required, release.

VMware imagines 'memory servers' – a new source of shared software-defined RAM

I thought virtual memory had already been invented?

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

Re: Scratching my head a little

Yes, some of those tax havens are signatories.

Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps'

Re: Netflix should not pay

SK Broadband want Netflix to contribute to that because the surge is caused by Netflix commercial traffic

Wrong. The surge was caused by SK Broadband customers. They could all have been watching different shows on Netflix, they could all have been watching different shows on a whole slew of other video providers, or all surfing the net hitting random websites.

The problem is SK Broadband don't have enough capacity for their customers. Netflix have exposed the problem, but they didn't cause it.

US watchdog opens probe into Tesla's Autopilot driver assist system after spate of crashes

"Tesla refused to describe to investigators how the system operated."

That, right there, should be enough to get the system banned and cars recalled.

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

Expensive mistakes (in IT terms) are usually only made once.

If you get rid of the person you:

a) get rid of someone who has just had expensive 'training', and

b) quite probably employ someone who hasn't and might make the same mistake.

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

Re: "the company must be run on a commercial basis"

Also "Nominet: Firm is 'run consistently with its articles of association'"

Which of course is not a denial of the accusation, but misdirection.

10 years later, Chrome OS starts to look like a proper OS with hardware diagnostics and the ability to scan documents

You reverse the polarity.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

Two thoughts:

1. If the cloud software is too expensive to run, create installable software.

2. They presumably sell consumables (blades, media, etc). So there is no reason they shouldn't have a regular income to pay for the cloud service.

Regarding point 2, that makes them either greedy or incompetent.

Raspberry Pi Foundation boss waves off listing rumours, says biz discussions may have been 'over-interpreted'

Softbank it is then.

Nominet vows to freeze wages and prices, boost donations, and be more open. For many members, it’s too little, too late

Re: Pay

"Oh shit guys, we got caught with our hands in the till, what do we do?"

"I've got an idea, let's promise to be good for 2 years, after that the proles will have forgotten and we can carry on".

"Great idea, let's do it".

Momentum builds behind campaign to fire Nominet CEO, board – though success still far from certain

Nominet used to be a shining star on how to be a well run, responsive, responsible registry that served all of it's members and was technically excellent.

That ceased to be years ago, and it has become apparent the current management have no interest but their big corporate customers and expanding their business reach into as many pies as possible while giving nothing back.

And you thought that $999 Mac stand was dear: Steve Wozniak's Apple II doodles fetch $630,272 at auction

Re: Interesting comment...the lawyers will love this

Not really, I believe HP were offered the rights and declined, which gave Woz the right to do what he wanted.

Remember when the keyboard was the computer? You can now relive those heady days with the Raspberry Pi 400

Affordable?

The Bank of England inflation calculator reckons £100 in 2019 is about £28 in 1982, so much more affortable than the early days of home computing.

Oh Mi: Xiaomi shows off 80W wireless charging, claims battery fully fat again in under 20 minutes

Re: Wtf?

Your DeWalt 5Ah battery is probably 18v not 3v or 5v though.

A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong

Re: spreadsheets!

Because they wanted the count to be accurate ...

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

Re: No cursor keys

Using a Tyrfing here. Great little keyboard.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Re: The war is over, the empire is gone

Only a fool ignores history, good or bad.

UK Home Office dishes out contracts to 999 control room vendors after wasting cash on network tech it abandoned

Re: Why is it the same suspects everytime

Everyone else is "too small".

You wouldn't want to sign a contract with a small company would you? No, this is a big project for a big organisation, it needs a big consultancy.

We give up, Progressive Web Apps can track you, says W3C: After 5 years, it decides privacy is too much bother

Re: Optional

Which breaks things such as:

www.mysite.com/my-pwa-app1

www.mysite.com/my-pwa-app2

etc.

We're no longer helping UK Post Office persecute postal workers with our shonky system, says Fujitsu

Standard practise going on here:

PO bod: "We had no reason not to trust the system, we relied on Fujitsu and they said it was all good"

Fujitsu bod: "We only supplied raw data as we were asked to do, we're not responsible for the conclusions"

Jail the lot of them.

Surge in Zoom support requests was 'unexpected', says tool team as it turns taps down

Re: Not surprised

Settings -> Audio -> Microphone

Works for me without being in a meeting.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

the five agencies “are increasingly unable to rely on local police forces to investigate crimes on their behalf,”

So fix the actual problem, don't give them powers they shouldn't need.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Well I'm glad it's not just me

It's uniform but not washed out. You could also change all the element colours individually to customise the look. Try to do that with Win10.

ZX Spectrum prototype ROM is now available for download courtesy of boffins at the UK's Centre for Computing History

Re: 16KB

"Jupiter Ace had 1 K RAM and could run Pacman written in Forth on that. I had one and even got a 2nd for work to control some test gear."

You are confusing your ROM and RAM.

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

Had one (of many) SSL certificates affected. Read the email, forced renewal, ran a script to put the updated certs where they are needed. Restarted a service.

OK, a bit more notice would have been nice, but it took all of 5 minutes.

Mirantis gros fromage quits to start new 'private LTE' biz on open-access spectrum

Shouldn't they be called WiFreedom not FreedomFi?

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Re: Forget the 'Osborne Effect':focus on the "Upton Effect".

And yet the R-Pi is hugely successful.

Maybe it's not about you.

Microsoft to bravely defend US democracy for a slack handful of voters in Fulton, Wisconsin

Re: Anonymity?

"Why would that ever be needed in a true democracy? Oh..."

If the vote is completely anonymous, you cannot verify or audit it, making it vulnerable to fixing.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Re: Did they change the meaning of an acronym again?

"Soon the acronym will be so long it may as just have a "-" to say who isn't in the club"

You might be on to something there. Perhaps we should just refer to the "!S" community.

RIP FTP? File Transfer Protocol switched off by default in Chrome 80

Re: File Transfer Potocol

"One of the biggest drawbacks with FTPS is that encrypting the control channel prevents firewalls from eavesdropping on data port commands, which breaks dynamic ACL/NAT logic for those secondary connections."

The usage of data port is one of the biggest flaws in FTP, why you would want to encourage the use is beyond me. The concept was used back when there was a serious limit on the number of socket connections to a specific port, often limited by the size of the bit mask for the select call. This is no longer a restriction. When a web server can handle thousands of connections over a single destination port, why does a file transfer protocol need to change ports on the fly, just use the well-known port like a sensible protocol.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Re: AI with worker drones

"Preferably tarmacced rather than a rolling collection of patched patches."

Good luck with that!

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: Seen in the wild

IBM PS/2

10483 error

'nuff said

What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears

Re: Re-branding exercise

Cherry Max

Max Lite

Max Max?

'Buyer's remorse' drove HP's legal crusade to go after Lynch, High Court told

Re: Buyer's remorse?

I think they did, but the problem is they did receive the goods, so now they're trying to complain it wasn't as described.

Yeah but, no, but... 'Overpaid' Boeing snaps back at NASA's watchdog

"During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value."

Or as they say, it's not the fall that kills you but the sudden deceleration at the end.

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

Re: Point defense?

Carefully

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Re: Selective deafness

"I use Apple computers; they work fine for me and I'm reminded every time I have to fight with my son's plasticky Dell"

You should have bought him a better Dell then. Apple are not the only people who make slim, light laptops, and they did not invent them.

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

.amazon was so important to Brazil and ACTO that they didn't bother applying for it.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: AWS=Amazon WEB Services

"AWS is pretty much Apache Server stitched badly onto a basement-teenager-coded middleware layer ... while Azure is an IBM Mainframe Class of Operating System and Networking infrastructure"

And you call yourself an expert?

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: 445 – bikinis – rather than the bicycles in 444

Prepare for MAD

Mutually Assured De-clothing

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

Re: TV ownership fine

You can own a TV without paying the license fee.

There, does that help?

This fall, Ubuntu 19.10 stars as Eoan Ermine in... Dawn of the Stoats

"That said, Train does include live migration extensions,"

You mean like we've been using for the last 4-5 years?