Posts by DJV

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.

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Of course, what we really need...

...is a common standard that all VC systems use. What could possibly go wrong?!

https://xkcd.com/927/

Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it

Re: Brownouts (fnarr fnarr)

Yeah, a friend of mine did that whilst reaching around the back for a "reset switch that didn't exist" - that was only one of three computers she managed to kill (using different methods) within 12 months.

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

Re: everything is "fixed" by releasing an update

Apart from people themselves - if only...

123 Bork? Six-day DNS record-edit outage at domain name flinger 123 Reg enrages users

Go on, spill the beans!

Ah, go on, go on, go on. Spill the beans on which companies you've done this to, including all the juicy details! I'd love to see that list!

Re: pretty good for the 10+ years I've been using them

Hmm, in that case I suggest you absolutely refrain from doing a search for Fasthosts here on El Reg as you might find things are not quite as rosy as you assume:

https://search.theregister.com/?q=fasthosts

You can now pepper your Windows 10 desktop with Android apps... if you have a Samsung phone, that is

Re: Microsoft's answer to Apple's

Don't give 'em any ideas or we'll end up with horizontal sliders that require swiping up and down to move, and 10-state radio buttons where the state you actually want is the one where you have to circle around the button with your finger for exactly 359 degrees and then tap it precisely 57 microseconds later for it to actually register (which it will do by turning bright pink on a bright red background).

The day I took down the data centre- I mean, the day I saved the day. Right, boss?

Re: That's interesting

Maybe it needs an "Are you sure you really want to fuck the network completely? (y/N)" prompt before running at that setting, followed by an "Ok, on your head be it! Commencing to fuck the network NOW!" response should the person enter Y and hit return.

Ransomware crims read our bank balance and demanded the lot, reveals Scotland's Dundee and Angus College

RTFA!

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: compared to Trump he's an elder statesman

Compared to Trump either of my cats would make a better president -at least they only shit in a litter tray... (fill in the rest yourself...)

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

Re: Maplin catalogue

Oh yes, and I still have in my possession a vintage one from early 1975 full of circuit diagrams and projects at the back, along with note saying that all prices exclude 8% VAT!

Deloitte's 'Test your Hacker IQ' site fails itself after exposing database user name, password in config file

Re: Ffs

"I was going to post a comment but just don't have the words. I mean REALLY!"

I'm glad you were totally able to restrain yourself from posting your comment.

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

Now I'm confused...

My initial scepticism is tempered by the fact that a Gartner consultant also thinks the idea is complete pants. And we all know how their predictions tend to turn out...

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

Re: No pics?

Plenty of online reviews if you look for them - here's a couple:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1E5xszQqV8&t=615s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nopc7mJUDkM

Did I or did I not ask you to double-check that the socket was on? Now I've driven 15 miles, what have we found?

Re: I have never had a socket switch fail

Some people are convinced that if the socket switch is left on with no appliance plugged in then electricity seeps out onto the floor. I just go along with it - it's easier than arguing.

Researchers made an OpenAI GPT-3 medical chatbot as an experiment. It told a mock patient to kill themselves

Re: Artificial Stupidy - as predicted 35 years ago!

Not seen that before - thanks.

Hmmm, I think AGGREPOST morphed into something orange.

SNAFU: Clairvoyant train brings warning of what was coming down the line for 2020

Re: SBB CFF FFS

I use some rather useful software called FreeFileSync (yeah, FFS!) - when you save a batch file is calls it NAME.ffs_gui which always amuses me.

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

Re: Linux and more

Indeed!

The "best" one I ever came across was a whole bunch of impenetrable and almost undocumented Perl. There was just a single comment against one piece of the code, which "very helpfully" announced:

// This is a skanky hack!