Re: Windmill blade delivery
My reaction to that video was... FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!
Posts by DJV
2542 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout
Apple's macOS Gatekeeper asleep on the job: Exploited flaw put users 'at grave risk' of malware infection
Words to strike fear into admins' hearts: One in five workers consider themselves 'digital experts' these days
Tuesday 27th April 2021 11:35 GMT 
Yeah, I've met some of these "experts"!
One who thought using a word processor meant she was "programming" the computer.
Another who managed to wreck 3 computers in one year. One of the three was where that "reset" switch on the back certainly reset the computer from (nearly) working to a heap of smoking junk when the PSU was unexpectedly switched from 220/240 to 110 volts! I managed to rescue some of the data from the hard disk.
The guy (back in the mid 1990s) who, despite being told not to, upgraded Internet Explorer 3 to an early version of IE4 (with that new-fangled and decidedly shonky Active Desktop stuff fully enabled), requiring his PC to be rebuilt... TWICE!
PCs continue to sell like hot cakes and industry can barely keep up with demand – analyst
We've finally hit Peak Bork: Microsoft man reveals home-grown welcome back BSOD at Redmond HQ
George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user
BOFH: Postman BOFH's Special Delivery Service
Watch this: Ingenuity – Earth's first aircraft to fly on another planet – take off on Mars
To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user
Friday 16th April 2021 13:42 GMT
Re: Copy Protection Blues
Yes, a lot of Commodore 64 protection was done in a similar way. Make a straight disk copy, run a program to corrupt a specific sector which the loader then checked for and would bomb out if it didn't encounter it.
I once had some copy protection that used a bit psychological warfare on the user in that, at one point about 3 or 4 levels in, the entire program was ORed with a string of characters that read "THIS COPY PROTECTION IS 50 LEVELS DEEP" (or something similar). It wasn't actually that deep at all.
University of Hertfordshire pulls the plug on, well, everything after cyber attack
Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands
UK watchdog blesses Virgin Media and O2's union, says there's no risk of market distortion or competition loss
The COVID-19 pandemic is still going – and so is the PC buying spree: Shipments up 55% on the Before Times
For blinkenlights sake.... RTFM! Yes. Read The Front of the Machine
Friday 9th April 2021 09:32 GMT
Re: Broke my little toe...
I tell people I once dislocated my toe playing Monopoly...
Well, it was actually more due to getting the Monopoly box from off the top of a tall wardrobe in a bedroom. I wasn't wearing shoes and the box was just out of reach. So I jumped up, grabbed the box successfully and landed. It was only when I started walking away that I realised something was wrong and discovered that the second toe on my left foot was pointing straight upwards at the second joint. I clicked it back into place and then had to suffer a swollen toe and limping for several days. What fun!
(And, no, I can't even remember whether or not I won the game of Monopoly.)
How to ensure your tech predictions catch on in a flash? Do the mash
Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'
Post Office awards Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension for the IT system behind wrongful subpostmaster prosecutions
How big might IT spending get in 2021? Gartner: How about $4 trillion. And no, you can't have a new MacBook
We finally get to spot a burnt-out comet and what is it covered in? Talcum powder
Easily distracted by too many apps, too many meetings, and too much asparagus
Saturday 3rd April 2021 11:01 GMT
Re: April fool video
Regarding that "convert a black-and-white television into a colour set using nylon stockings" video. As I don't speak Swedish I turned the subtitles on whereupon much merriment was discovered as YouTube tries to take spoken Swedish and generate English subtitles from the sounds - try it and laugh at such delights as "sucks one holotape you see lemon a little were technical" and "so many Celicia genitals I stooped addressed unto me van of a fighter voluminous problem man". Fantastic, and may give us a clue as to where amanfrommars sources his material!
In a devastating blow to all eight of you, Microsoft pulls the plug on Cortana's Android, iOS apps
AI recommendations fail fans who like hard rock and hip hop – official science
Wednesday 31st March 2021 19:39 GMT
Re: "music taste is exceedingly personal"
Absolutely! And it reminds me of back in the 1980s listening to the Radio 1 John Peel show late one night when in between the "usual" stuff that daytime radio wouldn't go near, he played Sheena Easton's Nine-To-Five - explaining that he couldn't understand at all why he liked it, but he did, so he played it!
South Korean regulator recommends Apple be prosecuted for hampering fair trade probe
The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans
Tuesday 23rd March 2021 13:26 GMT
"another similarity to being an author"
Indeed, they are very close (I should know as I do both). However, upgrading a paperback book to a new version because of a missed typo isn't quite as easy for the end user as downloading an update for a software program. E-books are definitely a closer match, though.
Tuesday 23rd March 2021 13:21 GMT
Re: In other words Office 365 is not the same as Python or C++
I know what you mean. Back in the 1980s when I was a Pascal and C programmer at a small software house, I had to carefully explain to a member of staff that using a wordprocessor to type letters and documents was NOT programming, despite what she claimed!
Remember Apple's disastrous butterfly keyboards? These lawsuits against the iGiant just formed a super class action
Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles
Friday 19th March 2021 16:06 GMT
Saw them coming...
There's a gullible idiot born every minute! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVvcD4Czx4Y
Desperate Nominet chairman claims member vote to fire him would spark British government intervention
Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke
Google emits data-leaking proof-of-concept Spectre exploit for Intel CPUs to really get everyone's attention
Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected encoding patent past skeptical examiners
Google and Microsoft's public squabble over who's the worst is giving us life right now, not gonna lie
The stench of progress: Sweat may power your personal tech in the not-so-distant future
Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness
How Facebook uses public videos to train, deploy machine-learning models and harvest those eyeballs
A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it
Wednesday 10th March 2021 12:24 GMT
Re: high qubit quantum computing and artifical general intelligence
Yes, this ^^^ absolutely!
Recently, I've been looking into web-based page turning/flipping code. Most of the available options seem to come as black boxes that hauled in God-knows how many extra libaries (and all the unknown cruft that comes with them) and each one looks like it probably only does 95% of what I want (but each does a DIFFERENT 95%) - but adding the extra necessary 5% is probably impossible without weeks of work.
Two weeks ago I found a simple piece of code that was about 7 years old and, while it was buggy and partly relied on the abandoned CSS Regions proposal that only Chrome implemented for a short while, I managed to pick it apart myself, gained a full understanding of how it worked and fixed it up so that it now works properly in a modern browser (all in a couple of days). I now have a usable tool that stands alone, has a tiny footprint, and can be maintained and improved by myself as necessary.
University of the Highlands and Islands shuts down campuses as it deals with 'ongoing cyber incident'
The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL
Monday 8th March 2021 13:05 GMT
"if Microsoft did things well"
I am still using a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro - it's well over 20 years old (had the keycaps replaced once from the similar non-Pro version so that I can now see letters on the top of the keycaps once more). This device is probably one of the best things they've ever made!
Unfortunately, it may be the ONLY best thing they've ever made - when it comes to their software - all they seem to build is absolute shite of the highest shiteness!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
