Posts by DJV

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Re: Touch screen emergency shut off?

Reminds me of one of my favourite Gary Larson cartoons - "Wings stay on, Wings fall off" one:

https://i.imgur.com/LR0VWP9.png

Re: It's a simple point and click

It's a simple point and crash.

FTFY

Dratted 'housekeeping', eh? 150k+ records deleted off UK’s Police National Computer database

Re: Vendor

Ah Fujitsu - the same lovely people whose faulty Horizon software resulted in postmasters losing their jobs and being jailed for financial crimes they didn't commit...

This chip lark is child's play: Intel gives us the lowdown on Lakefield in language of Lego

Re: "capable of typing a comment but are not able to read"

Tahts neva me affected!

Fujitsu opens door, invites '200 to 250' staff from UK Delivery team to walk out

Re: vacancy

I see what you did there and wish I could upvote you far, far more than just the one allowed!

Re: It worked so well for IBM

...which then makes in customers pissed-off by the lowering of support/service standards so they take their business elsewhere resulting in lower sales, resulting in lower staff requirements, resulting in a whole new raft of redundancies, ad inifinitum (well, until the last person there turns out the light)

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

Attaching a tractor-fed Epson LX-80 dot matrix impact printer was the height of luxury

My first Epson was the FX-80, which was attached to my Commdore PET 2001-8 (yes, the one with the chiclet keyboard) via an IEEE-488 to parallel interface box. Worked fine for about 3 years and then blew its internal power regulators up requiring a quite expensive repair. The FX-80 limped on for another couple of years before it got traded in for an HP DeskJet Plus - this was back in the days when HP printers were still good workhorses and not just crappy devices for marketing ink at gold bullion prices. Nowadays I wouldn't touch either Epson or HP printers having been stung by their more recent (i.e. anything post 2000) pieces of utter shite!

Gloucestershire IT pro faces court over £30k Amazon voucher theft allegations

Re: The Cotswolds

But their stone walls are extremely pretty!

Unauthorised RAC staffer harvested customer details then sold them to accident claims management company

When they ask you how seriously you were injured tell them something like "I was decapitated" and see how long the pause is before they continue their speil (which they will).

Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off

"crowdfunder for a book of T. Rex lyrics"

As someone whose 16th year coincided with Mr Bolan's heights of popularity, that absolutely cracked me up! Cheers for brightening up my Friday, Mr Dabbs!

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

The schematic can be found only...

Hey, I found it! But there was a warning on it that said "Beware of the Leopard."

double the intelligence

But double fuck all is still fuck all!

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

"still using Vtech toys for the most part"

I'd be surprised if any of them have grown out of their Etch-A-Sketches!

(I'd put a link to a certain Dilbert strip here, but I'm sure you all already know which one I mean)

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

'And now I know what "mews" means'

Never owned a cat then! :D

Tech angle? Lying on it while I type.

Ah, the best tech "angle" - 90 degrees from the vertical!

All I want for Christmas is cash: Welsh ATMs are unbeatable. Or unbootable. Something like that

Answer the phone if it rings

And did it ring?

Yes, Microsoft Access was a recalcitrant beast, but the first step is to turn the computer on

Re: Yep

Also, I bet they had no idea how long those things took to go from power up to being able to serve files if they had large disks!

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

Re: Training

That sounds like it was a "dead" end job!

Let the chips fall where they may: US Commerce dept whacks Middle Kingdom firm SMIC on naughty list

Battery Staple!

Oops, sorry. Wrong conversation!

Stony-faced Google drags Android Things behind the cowshed. Two shots ring out

Re: Comprelx mircos

Yeah, I tried those as well - never understood what they were talking about, though.

Re: Google doesn't say much about continuity

Absolutely, and here's the proof: https://killedbygoogle.com/

This product is terrible. Can you deliver it in 20 years’ time when it becomes popular?

Re: Silicone conform spray

Is it sad that I knew exactly what you'd linked to before clicking the link?

HP bows to pressure, reinstates free monthly ink plan... for existing customers

Re: How to trust HP now?

Expect other manufacturers of printers to see an upturn in sales and HP's sales diminish.

Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

Fully agree...

I've also reported to them that Guest Editions no longer upgrade on anything older than XP since the 6.1 upgrade. You have to uninstall them and then do a clean install EVERY time. Ticket 19875: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19875

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Re: The hard part…

A school local to me found out the hard way that their electronic door locks (the only type they had on them at first) were "fail safe". When they did have a power outage, they discovered (to their surprise), that all and sundry could just walk in and out of the school with no problem. They rapidly "downgraded" to proper old fashioned locks after that.

As reported by the BBC, a guy on Twitter said: "I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now."

And THAT is why I don't have anything essential in my house controlled via the internet in any form or fashion. But you just can't tell people that - they have to experience the downsides for themselves before they get the clue!

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Ah, never underestimate the depths of stupidity that can be exhibited by members of the human race.

Re: Staff reduction...

As soon as I read "Non system disk or disk error" I thought, "Oh, bet it's a floppy left in the drive." Been there, done that...

FCC mulls booting China Telecom from US networks over its ties with Beijing

China Telecom has ties with Beijing?

Wow, who'da thunk it!

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Wally got there first...

https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-12-03

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Re: Just ask

Even the LockPickingLawyer won't get into these files!

Users complain iOS 14.2 causes some older iPhones to overheat, rapidly lose charge

Re: SE 2016 rendered useless

I'm running i(Pad)OS 13.something on my iPad Gen 7 and will be sticking with that until I see green signals everywhere for a 14.x update, by which time, no doubt, 15.x will be out and the whole merry-go-round will start again!

Channel Isles cop sacked after abusing police database to track down women drivers for Instagram 'comic' page

Re: Worst Choice

Carrots, definitely! Can't stand 'em!

Microsoft pokes Cortana's corpse to give her telepathic abilities on Windows 10

if signed in using a Microsoft account

Well, a big 'nope' right there...

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Re: Mixed feelings

Whoosh!

Supreme Court mulls whether a cop looking up a license plate for cash is equivalent to watching Instagram at work

Re: " led the case all the way up the Supremes"

Yep, all the way up the ladder to the roof...

The Ghost of Windows Past gains spooky second wind as the October 2020 Update nears double digits

1909 was little more than jumped-up cumulative update to 1903

It was also the end for the File Explorer built in search actually working properly to find files modified in a specified date range... sigh... I've just tried it and it still doesn't work right.

Italian competition watchdog slaps Apple with €10m fine over allegedly misleading iPhone waterproofing claims

write it in Wingdings...

...in white on a white background.

Gartner: You think Huawei's sales figures are bad now? Wait till you see next year's

Re: Well...

I came here to say exactly the same thing!

Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?

Company Has Inadequately Paid Staff

With thanks to Derek who came up with the above back in the 1980s when we both worked for a company called CHIPS which, at the time, stood for something like Computer Harmony & Information Processing Services (I might be wrong but it was a long time ago). We all thought it was a bit naff so there was an in-house "competition" to think up a new bunch of words for it. Once Derek's suggestion was submitted, the whole thing was dropped like a hot potato (sorry!).

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

"they don't give a shit"

Giving a shit only occurs after some major disaster has befallen them, whether it's ransomware, disk failure, phishing attack, virus infection or the secretary watering the houseplants plants on top of the "hard disk". Then they will do a bit of (but probably not enough) shit giving, though many of them will almost certainly try to find a scapegoat to blame first.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Yes, I vaguely remember that there were circuit diagrams for the light pen reader so you could build it for yourself. I did build a light pen reader for my Commodore PET at some point, it worked though it was pretty useless for anything practical. Ah, but those were the days...

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

?

If the webserver is configured to not pass the files to the relevant language processor then it doesn't matter which language it is, whether it's PHP, Perl, Python, ASP or any of them. Your total lack of understanding is the real eye-opener here.

Linus Torvalds worried Linux kernel might get messy around Christmas

Not sure rolling on the vaccine works. I think you have to stick inside you via needle or something like that.

CodeWeavers' CrossOver ran 32-bit Windows Intel binary on macOS on Arm CPU emulating x86 – and nobody died

I'm waiting for them to...

...run a 16-bit Windows 2 program on Windows 3.1, which is installed on top of DOS 6 that is running in a DOS emulator running inside the Amiga emulator, WinUAE, on a 32-bit Windows 10 install that is, itself, running on the 32-to-64 bridge in Wine/CrossOver on top of macOS Big Sur, on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86.

Or is that a bit ambitious?

Hard to believe but Congress just approved an IoT security law and it doesn't totally suck

It looked good until...

...I saw the bit that said " it will now move to the President’s desk".

What's he going to do with it? Eat it? Turn it into a paper airplane? Scribble across it in crayon?

Or can we live in hope that he won't notice it until Biden takes over?

Test and Trace chief Dido Harding prompted to self-isolate by NHS COVID-19 app

Re: Fun phone call

Hello boss? You can't come in to work today, you're sick.

FTFY

Re: I have my doubts about the anonymity

Hopefully, he's figured out how to reset her isolation day count back to 14 whenever it reaches 1 or 2.