Posts by DJV

UK promises big data law shake-up... while also keeping the EU happy, of course. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong?

Given the record of the current incumbents, the list of possible things that are likely to go wrong is probably endless.

Bumble fumble: Dude divines definitive location of dating app users despite disguised distances

Re: Far away

Unless you're talking about cows... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMiKyfd6hA0

Fake Apple rep amasses 620,000+ stolen iCloud pics, vids in hunt for images of nude women to trade

Re: Does he not know...

No, it's pictures of cats all the way down.

More than half of companies rethinking back-to-office plans amid variant uncertainty and vaccine mandates – survey

Re: colleagues' husband's vasectomies

He had more than one vasectomy?

Re: Simples...

You definitely get an upvote from me!

I'm currently working at the best job I've ever had. The hours are flexible, the boss is always on my side and I work from home.

After being made redundant 4 times in my life it was obvious that life was giving me a specific message to do something about avoiding getting into a situation where that could ever happen again. Yep, self-employed is the way to go! Now I'm trying to retire (officially receiving state pension since earlier this year) and still the work comes in!

Sounds like a good time to start working on updating that CV!

Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all?

Re: Missing phase

He did - he put a different posting date on it!

Cloud load balancer snafu leads to 3D printer user printing on a stranger's kit

I fully expect this story to return here as a "Who Me?" in a few years time with Kenneth Jiang's name Regomised to Shirley or something equally inappropriate!

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

"The Register wholeheartedly endorses the idea of marsupial-based media scrutiny."

Indeed, and if you don't like what they're saying you can always tell them to hop off.

LibreOffice 7.2 brings improved but still imperfect Microsoft Office compatibility

Re: incompatibility issues

"nobody ever used Microsoft Office and found incompatibility issues with their previous version of Microsoft Office"

Maybe not the "previous" version but how about when I was at University where they had the "same" version of Word on both their Windows PCs and their Macs. A document written on one platform would often find its layout completely screwed up upon opening it on the other platform. Given the usual rush for computer access students couldn't be choosy on which platform they had to use. Ok, so this was the 1990s but this was about par for the course with Microsoft back then as well - nothing changes...

The Sun is shining, the birds are singing, and Microsoft has pulled support for Internet Explorer in Microsoft 365

Goodbye

Really sad to hear the news.

You gave us some damn good laughs over the years.

.

.

.

.

.

I am, of course, referring to Sean Locke (1963-2021 - RIP)

As for Internet Exploder, bloody good riddance.

WhatsApp pulls plug on Taliban helpline, shuts down official-looking accounts

Can anyone in the FB empire even spell ethics?

It's "The only way..."

A Whopper of a bork for seekers of pre-flight nosh

Re: That type of BSOD has been around since win 8

I'm happy to oblige you so... downvoted for appalling spelling and grammar - you're welcome! :D

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

Re: Ball crud

Blimey, is it already time to mention this (https://forums.theregister.com/forum/containing/3442559) again?

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

"the mad rush to get it to market"

Ah yes, that would explain the version that was built for Windows 3.1 eating/leaking memory so badly that you had to shut Windows down after about half an hour of surfing otherwise everything crawled to a halt. I worked in IT support at the time and we'd bought licences for Netscape Navigator just before IE3 came along as a freebie.

I was offered $500k as a thank-you bounty for pilfering $600m from Poly Network, says crypto-thief

Re: Do bit coins draw interest?

Not from me!

I think the Anonymous Coward post below sums it all up rather nicely.

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Searching for a single swear word results in places where all four words are the same - though I'm not sure that spunk.spunk.spunk.spunk is actually worse sounding than the place it's located at: Huish Cleeve. There are also a lot of boobs in Semington.

Before I agree to let your app track me everywhere, I want something 'special' in return (winks)…

Re: 21st century lamp columns ... incorporating sensors that can receive and transmit

But you still look like a newt.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: "What a piece of crap"

In this particular case the PHB was the B of the entire (very small) company so he was finance as well as HR and, of course, in charge of a fair dose of complete lunacy between the ears.

Re: PC

Not actually my pictures - I just found them via a web search (though, given how rare such pics are nowadays, I did snatch a copy for my own, ahem, "records").

Re: PC

We had B21s, B25s and, I believe, one B28 and one B38 before PCs started encroaching on the CTOS empire. Also, the CTOS "command line" was a masterpiece in user friendliness compared to any other command line system I've ever come across either before or since.

There's a whole bunch of pictures/docs here for anyone interested: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/convergent/ngen/

Oh, and please write your On Call - I'd love to hear about it and I'm sure others would as well!

PC

The place where I worked from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s was Burroughs/Unisys house. The PHB decided sometime around 1989-ish when 286s were already being superseded by 386s that we needed to get into this PC malarkey thing. So, being a typical clueless PHB, and not wanting to spend money on the latest and greatest, he happened to discover that there was an auction going on somewhere not too far away and that it had some PCs in the list. Despite us programmers telling him that he needed to get something that was at least a 286 he proudly came back a couple of days later carrying what I think may have been an IBM PC or XT and was rather put out when he told him it was too old for us to use, especially as he'd paid somewhat over the odds for the thing (I think we laughed when he told us what it had cost).

I suppose nowadays it would be cleaned up, retrobrighted and displayed in one of the many retro museums around for people to gawk at!

See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

Re: My boss was a twit.

Well, at least he learned something from the experience! Many PHBs fail that last stage completely.

Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

Dated interface

"The user interface looks dated and intricate, though those familiar with it perhaps like it the way it is."

Well, thank goodness for that. If they fuck around with the interface like Mozilla have been doing for years with Firefox then the likely outcome is that Thunderbird will lose users and donations will most likely plummet.

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

Re: "A touchscreen, by itself, is not going to enhance anything"

About 20 years ago I had a "close encounter" with a breakdown. It was lunchtime and several work colleagues (about 6 or 7, I think) piled into the elevator ahead of me to go down the 2 floors to the exit. I looked at the crush of bodies, ignored their "room for one more" and decided to take the stairs instead. After coming back from lunch I discovered that the lift had broken down and my work colleagues had spent around 45 minutes stuck in the elevator between floors until the call-out engineer had arrived to free them. They were far from chuffed, and I probably sniggered just a teensy bit!

Good news: There's a slightly increased chance of asteroid Bennu hitting Earth. Bad news: It's still really slight

Right...

...I'm off to buy a harder hat...

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

Then again, Nestle are known to be one of the most unethical companies in the world. Their past track record is unenviable:

https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-children/

https://skierscribbler.com/7671/opinion/nestle-the-worlds-most-corrupt-corporation/

https://listverse.com/2018/01/03/10-outrageous-nestle-scandals/

There's also growing concern over Purina/Felix cat food (Purina are owned by Nestle) as the recipe has recently been changed and some people have found their cats becoming ill after eating the new recipe, with some even stating that it has killed their cats.

https://www.change.org/p/purina-recall-felix-as-good-as-it-looks

Apparently, it's been reported that the previous "meat" content of the food has now been replaced by something derived from crushed insects! I'm not sure exactly how true any of this is, but given Nestle's track record, nothing would surprise me about that company.

Without a trace: Baroness Dido Harding to step down as chair of NHS Improvement

She should...

...have stuck to making records.

What? Wrong Dido? Oh well, I suppose this one has made some "records" of a different sort - such as wasting the most amount of other people's money in the shortest possible time. Then again, that applies to most of the idiots she knows, so maybe even that's not a record.

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Re: Cordon Bennet ...

Yes, but the final results of eating an exquisitely decorated figurine cake are probably indistinguishable from the final results of eating a fairy cake with a badly plonked on bit of butter icing - I shit you not!

Breaking Bad or just a bad breakpoint? That feeling when your predecessor is BASIC

Re: Wait, VB applications can act as web servers?

<marvinmode>Yes, depressing isn't it.</marvinmode>

Re: This was...

Oh hell, that reminds me of a holiday cover temp job I did back in 2005 for a local web company. On my first day there they wanted me to start putting together a new site. I asked, "Where's your library of common functions/utilities?"

The response was a blank look of confusion.

I was horrified to learn that their method of building web sites was to have a graphic designer sit down with the customer and ask "What do you want the site to look like?" After the customer described it, the graphic designer would produce graphical mock ups of several key screens (one image per screen). These, once the customer had approved them, would be sent out to India where the images would be chopped up into smaller graphics and then have some HTML wrapped around them to produce individual static HTML pages. These were sent back to the web company who would then custom build hack some ASP code into each one individually to connect it through to a database. Common functional code? Not a chance.

Despite them offering me a full-time job, I buggered off as quickly as I could! They went bust about 2 years later.

Remember Google Plus? Remember its privacy blunder? Remember applying for a slice of a settlement?

Google+?

Oh yeah, I vaguely remember joining that at one point not long after it started up, as did a couple of my friends. I think I may have used it once or twice before deciding it was a pile of shit and then, of course, it got sent to the Google Graveyard to join lots of its mates.

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

Re: Didn't notice?!

Hey, they did say they were "relaxed" afterwards!

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

Sigh...

I'm sure it's worth every single penny of OUR money!

Malware and Trojans, but there's only one horse the boss man wants to hear about

Re: In a previous career

What on earth was a Dev doing making changes on what must have been a critical production server?

The Register just found 300-odd Itanium CPUs on eBay

Itanium did score plenty of decent wins, but never set the world on fire.

But Samsung had a damn good attempt with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

NFT or not to NFT: Steve Jobs' first job application auction shows physically unique beats cryptographically unique

' "My gut says the NFT will attract the highest bid," Sarah Buchanan, director of auction software house Snoofa.'

Did she use to work for Gartner?

Ex-health secretary said 'vast majority' were 'onside' with GP data grab. Consumer champion Which? reckons 20 million don't even know what it is

Re: Opt out?

Probably, but when have the Tories ever let a little thing like total llegality stop them?

Beige pencil stockists on high alert as 'Colouring Book of Retro Computers' hits the crowdfunding circuit

Good for Neil

I've been following his channel for a number of years now and it's amazing what he is putting together. One day, when all this COVID malarkey is history, I'd like to take a trip to Gloucestershire to view the Cave in person.

D'oh! Misplaced chair shuts down nuclear plant in Taiwan

Re: system was running at 6-10 per cent of operating reserve ratio.

Just checked. Murphy is obviously having a day off - the uptime results now stated as:

41 Days,09 Hours,21 Minutes,01 Seconds

Of course, I'm definitely not expecting it to stay up from now on...

Re: system was running at 6-10 per cent of operating reserve ratio.

Is it the (S)Hitron business one?

I "upgraded" my domestic account to business one as it was cheaper (no, I have no idea why either) and they swapped out my perfectly working (and boot in a couple of minutes) superhub for a pile of crap (S)Hitron one (with the 10 to 15 minutes reboot time). About 5 replacements down the line (and much swearing to VM Business) I finally had one whose admin interface didn't die after about an hour*. The faulty ones would still work ok for providing a connection to teh interwebs but the on-board web server would die so you couldn't change the settings.

* No, it died after a few months instead until a recent** automatic update revived it again.

** 40 Days,15 Hours,48 Minutes,44 Seconds ago - yay, it's still working!

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack

Yeah, but Crysis ran like a dog on them...

Remember the bloke who was told by Zen Internet to contact his MP about crap service? Yeah, it's still not fixed

Re: Write your MP

Yeah, same here in Norwich North - MP is a total waste of protoplasm. For the amount of good she does, the job could be more than adequately filled by long-dead roadkill.

The cockroach of Windows, XP, lives on in London's Victoria Coach Station

Re: Ironic

Some years ago a friend of a friend asked my advice on the secondhand laptop he wanted to buy. I took one look, saw it was Pentium 4 and said, Don't touch it with a barge pole - it will overheat and burn itself out. So, of course, as he was an idiot, he ignored my advice and bought it. Within a year it had overheated and the CPU died. I took pleasure in saying, Told you so.

Latest Windows 11 Preview a well-rounded update – literally

Re: boring, normal, usable computer

Unfortunately, I suspect that's the opposite of what MS are aiming for and, no doubt, many of the "under the hood", (cough) *improvements* (cough) are there specifically to prevent useful utilities like Winaero Tweaker and Open Shell from doing their jobs.

Will it bend? That is the question: Arm boffins boast of first flexible 32-bit chip

More to the point...

Will it blend?

Mountains on neutron stars are not even a millimetre tall due to extreme gravity

Some advice

Always make sure you are commenting on the correct story before pressing that submit button.

Re: Dragon's Egg

Seconded - I came here to post the same thing but Steve K beat me to it! (I really must get up earlier in the morning...)

Northern Train's ticketing system out to lunch as ransomware attack shuts down servers

Re: Managers?

But what do the managers manage?

Apart from passenger customer disappointment, though I suspect they don't manage to manage that either, but only manage to magnify it.