Posts by DJV

India says its brains saved the world from the last colosso-crisis – cough, Y2K – proving it can become self-reliant

Re: "...we have the best talent in the world"

Well, at least he didn't spout "Make India Great Again!".

Incredible how you can steal data via Thunderbolt once you've taken the PC apart, attached a flash programmer, rewritten the firmware...

Re: Apple Kit Safe?

Or if the attacker has been keeping up to date with iFixit teardowns.

Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it

Re: it's Martian life we worry about!

1) The chances of anything coming from living on Mars are a million to one.

2) But million to one chances crop up nine times o... etc. etc. (GNU PTerry)

3) And it's 2020 so...

HELP!!!

There's a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn

Re: My theory

Yep, and the murder hornets live next door* on Jupiter.

(* well, only "next door" when the planets are at their closest, of course.)

Edit: Damn, Doctor Syntax beat me to it by seconds...

Back of the net! Norfolk County Council kicks off £18m Oracle cloud ERP deal

What do you think of the pedestrianisation of Norwich City Centre?

I think it started in the 1960s and shows no sign of abating - that's what I think.

The expected go-live is in October 2021

No, it shouldn't be "expected" - the exact date should be specified and written in blood, along with clauses that dictate increasing daily penalties for Oracle for every day they fail to deliver a workng system past that date until the amount payable per day bankrupts them.

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

Back in the 1970s I was working for Rediffusion as a TV engineer. Once, while out repairing TVs in one of the company supplied vans, I stopped off at a petrol station for a fill-up. Then, after driving off, I was flashed and beeped at a couple of times by a car driving behind me. I stopped and so did he in order to point out that, as I'd driven around a roundabout, the van had chucked out rather a lot of fuel over the road. I looked on the roof of the van to find the petrol cap still sitting there! Oops!

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Re: solar system sized CRT

And didn't George O Smith do something similar in his Venus Equilateral stories? If you haven't read them then they were written in the late 1940s and, while he had spaceships and space stations, all the electronics was based on valve technology (tubes, for left pondians).

Re: Why is making them perforated the great breakthrough?

Well, it worked for teabags...

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: Customers

You forgot the Old Bill, who need bribing have tickets to their annual Policeman's Ball for sale.

Re: Customers

No, be fair. An attempt was definitely made to place one apostrophe in there - you can easily spot it if you concentrate on all the words that shouldn't have an apostrophe in them.

Re: Customers

Ah, the lack of correct apostrophe placement is strong in this one.

Go on, hit Reply All. We dare you. We double dare you. Because Office 365 will defeat your server-slamming ways

Re: It won't help.

Yes, but we really do need to learn to stop voting the idiots into power (and that applies to both sides of the Atlantic).

Non-human Microsoft Office users get their own special licences

Re: Coming soon...

Oh God yes! I do remember those. I wonder if they ever considered additional licences for each RAM module! Then again, as they always crippled the Home versions by limiting the amount of RAM they could access, I suppose it could be argued that they did, sort of!

Coming soon...

Microsoft licences for:

* cats (who happen to be in the same room as someone using MS software)

* houseflies (because these, like many of Microsoft's bugs, are really 'features')

* doors (because they are like windows, sort of, maybe... oh well, let's try it and see if anyone falls for it)

* breathing (or is that one already in use by Ryanair as an extra option on their flights?)

Serial killer spotted on the night train from Newcastle

Our new local trains didn't play properly with level crossing gates at first. The nearest crossing to me had a couple of near misses!

https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/greater-anglia-near-miss-at-level-crossing-video-1-6449119

Prepare to have your shonky password hygiene shamed by Firefox 76

Firefox has sought to arrest its slide in the rankings

How about they stop trying to chase Chrome and give users the ability to easily turn off all the annoying crap they keep inflicting upon us?

For example, the "revamped" megabar bollocks - I've got FF set to use a separate search field so I DON'T want search and shonky suggestions added to the address bar when all I'm trying to do is enter an address myself!

I'm already using PaleMoon for more and more regular browsing - Mozilla are beginning to push me fully in that direction.

Sigh...

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

southern hemisphere required

Am I safe if I'm wearing trousers around my southern hemisphere?

Microsoft puts dual-screen devices and Windows 10X in the too-hard basket

Re: WTAF does that mean?

It means it's time for bullshit bingo, I'd say!

"the one man doing that job is currently furloughed"

I think you overestimated the staffing level of that department by one.

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Re: Saws

I used to be a TV engineer for Rediffusion back then. We had a customer who was, shall we say, several valves short of a full set. We often had to go to his place to "repair" the TV as he'd taken the back off yet again and rearranged the valves into different sockets.

Where were you in drought season? Interstellar comet 2I/Borisov dumped 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through Solar System

Food for thought

More like "drink for thought" in this case!

Sometimes one can go a little too far in search of isolation

Re: For what it's worth

A few months ago I had a live one wandering around between the layers - very annoying until I noticed that lightly tapping near it made it walk in the opposite direction. It finally disappeared off the visible part of the screen, thank goodness. I have no idea whether or not it's still in there!

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

it fell apart en route

Ah, it's being delivered by Yodel, then...

Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon

Because then you'd see it and we they would have to kill you!

(or do a MIB mind wipe at the very least!)

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

@Cederic

Whoosh! Go find a dictionary and look up the word "sarcasm". You might learn something (oh, sorry, I retract my last sentence because, with you being a Trump supporter, you are incapable of learning).

"he and anyone near him is being tested frequently"

Just not tested for intelligence, obviously!

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Is someone at Google a bully?

I thought it was a job requirement.

The Adobe Flash Farewell Tour 2020: LibreOffice to axe export support for .SWF in version 7

LibreOffice has Flash/SWF support?

They* say you should learn something new every day! Well, LibreOffice having Flash/SWF support was something I'd never realised until reading this article and nor was it anything I'd ever wanted.

* No, I don't know who "they" are, either. Sometimes I wish they'd just shut up!

Australia to make Google and Facebook disclose ranking algorithms and pay for local content

Re: Fishing

Totally agree.

My local newspaper company (Archant) has almost the same attitude to checking things as the Grauniad has with typos. Their website labours under the strain of far too many 3rd party junk adverts and the search facility seem intent on finding anything OTHER than what you're searching for, even if the news item you're seraching for was from less than a week ago and the keywords you've entered are the most logical.

Even with an ad-blocker running (turning it off means that the site can barely haul itself out of bed to do anything) the site is still an absolutely terrible experience.

Hana-hana-hana: No it's not your dad trying to start a motorboat... It's Northern Gas, renewing its SAP software

it's a job for life

Yep, sell 2 or 3 successful contracts and you can probably retire before you're 30!

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

Re: ISP -> Internet Service Provider

I'm with Virgin - often the "S" means Shit!

Hi, Google Duplex here, trying to book a haircut for a socially inept human. Sorry, 'COVID-19'?... DOES NOT COMPUTE

Re: It's like the unwanted Internet connected fridge

And that's definitely too much to swallow!

We could all do with a bit of empathy in our systems, says Mozilla as it ships Firefox 75 in the thick of global pandemic

I wish they'd stop messing with things that don't need "fixing"!

Version 75 certainly made a mess of the address bar on my PC! Not sure if that's because I use the Custom CSS fixes from https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx to put Firefox back the way I prefer it or something else.

If you are having the same issues or just prefer the way it used to work then try this which disables the new address bar settings:

Put about:config into the address bar and press return to get at the internal Firefox settings (click past the warning). Then search for the following four settings and double click each one to change it from "true" to "false":

browser.urlbar.openViewOnFocus

browser.urlbar.update1

browser.urlbar.update1.interventions

browser.urlbar.update1. searchTips

You may need to close and restart FF in order to make it all work.

(Disclosure: I found this on Ars Technica where lots of people were complaining about the "new address bar goodness" - when will they learn - sigh!)

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

"But do you seriously trust the government to draft and execute such an elaborate plot?"

Well, as we have a government filled with morons and complete idiots, I think they're doing a splendid job!

Four new bugs? You shouldn't have: Microsoft celebrates 45 years with dollop of borkage on Windows Insider Fast Ring

Cake

It was probably baked by someone called Bob and, like a Christmas pudding, contains a surprise* inside.

* Not a silver sixpence but probably a paperclippy that will get wedged between your molars requiring emergency dental treatment.

Automatic for the People: Pandemic-fueled rush to robo-moderation will be disastrous – there must be oversight

@SVV

Why is your post empty?

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Re: "and rather bury"

Ooh, nice typo!

Or was it deliberate?

UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Oooh!

Popcorn time!

Welcome to the telco, we've got fun and games: BT inks 5-year deal to outsource mainframe management to IBM

What IBM do brilliantly...

...has already been covered by the Register here.

Microsoft expands AI features in Office, but are they any good? Mixed, according to our vulture

"when you use Microsoft Editor, your content is sent to Microsoft's servers for analysis"

NO, NO, NO! Not going there, EVER!

LibreOffice for me.

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Mine went stratospeheric and kept on going - I think it waved to the people on the ISS as it went past!

Lost in translation and adrift in cloud storage

Re: The problem is not beheerder

Yes, though there are still too many people who are perfectly happy to do this!

Icon: my wife's opinion of cats

Your wife's opinion of cats looks pretty anony-mouse!

Brits swarm Dixons Carphone for laptops, printers, games consoles, fridges, freezers to weather out COVID-19 storm

Re: Advice saught please.

No, obviously you use them to barricade your doors and windows for when the (extremely spaced out*) mob find out where you live!

* as in distance, not magic mushrooms.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Re: The emergency regulations...

I've been trying to keep as much distance between myself and Boris Johnson for years!

Huawei P40 Pro: Camera setup really captures the misery of an empty world foods aisle

Re: Er, this is why I read El Reg?

Well, I only read it to check up on the tax/MOT status of cars they happen to photograph!

And, just so you know, that red Alfa Romeo is fully legal until 1 September 2020 and, with the MOT not needed until 29 January 2021, the owner shouldn't need to take advantage of the 6 month extension announced the other day!

Short of tech talent to deal with novel coronavirus surge? Let us help – with free job ads on The Register

"off"

First impressions count when the world is taken by surprise by an exciting new (macro) virus

@jake

I'd offer to send you a shovel but you seem to getting on fine digging that pit even deeper!

Re: Why would you leave bootnotes?

Simple, one note has a big L and the other a big R.