Posts by DJV

No spin zone: Samsung recalls 3M EXPLODING washing machines

Re: Worried Samsung owner.

I have a Samsung fridge-freezer - I'm now worried about putting any curry ready meals in there in case they are too hot for it to handle safely!

Any questions? No, not you again at the back, please God no

although I imagine Ryanair might yet put this idea under consideration

You mean they don't do this already?

Want to spy on the boss? Try this phone-mast-in-an-HP printer

Yep

They're telling you it's time to install something like Adblock!

Aussie trams equivalent to 30 skateboarding rhinos

"120 cycling Boris Johnsons"

Shudder - one's more than enough!

Newly discovered cave-dwelling creepy-crawly is four times the man* you are

Re: 4 times the pleasure

Well, fuck me (cubed)!

"That really caught my eye"

Dangerous! Those four penises will have your eye out if you don't "watch" it!

Meet the slimeballs who are openly sabotaging Virgin Media

"Unless the snails are migrating using Virgin cabling?"

Probably, as they usually go by train.

Wow, everyone loves our drives, says Seagate sitting on a pile o' cash

Likewise

Having been burnt once, and seen too many others being burnt, I have avoided Seagate drives for years.

Windows 10 market share fell in September

Yep, mine say I'm running Lynx on a Commodore Vic-20.

Sudden explosion in reports of exploding phones

Re: Okay... let me be the first to ask...

As it was in the back pocket he might have been "clenching it wrong" instead!

Brit ISP TalkTalk scraps line rental charges

Re: Bullshitting "customer" manager

"Nothing matters more to us than our customers and doing right by them"

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Best joke I've heard in a long while!

Sage advice: Avoid the Windows 10 Anniversary Update – it knackers our accounting app

Re: Windows 10 Anniversary Edition

I hope that was sarcasm!

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/how-downgrade-windows-10-anniversary-update-before-its-too-late-1574488

How much does your kid hate exams? This lad hacked his government to skip them

Re: "I asked for a car...

And both are prone to crashing!

Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

...the strings of your heart?

'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses – just four light years away

Re: We already know what's out there...

Yes, but beware of the leopard.

Re: Stephen Baxter

Funnily enough, I'm reading Proxima right now!

Microsoft’s stealth scripting engine arrives on Android

Sod that

The last think I want on my Android phone is more MS crap. It's bad enough that there isn't an option to delete the MS bloatware that came pre-installed on it without rooting it.

Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors

ain't no lie?

Yes, it is - it's spelt "pseudo" :D

Glassdoor spaffs users' email addresses in bcc fail

Re: "We are incredibly sorry for our error"

They were obviously THIS sorry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYOZ3IzRaf4

Nope, we can't find dark matter either, says LUX team

At least...

At least they weren't trying to find something really elusive, such as integrity in a Tory or UKIP MP!

Apple kills eavesdrop bug in FaceTime

"Windows users, meanwhile, should check their PCs for updates to iTunes and iCloud"

I don't think so - unless you mean check to see if the damned things have mysteriously sneaked their way in and delete them.

Microsoft tweaks TCP stack in Windows Server and Windows 10

"faster TCP slow start"

Eh? What? How?

Head explodes...

4-day Fasthosts outage: Customers' sites go TITSUP

@alcopops

You mean you've damaged your hands trying to beat some sense into your clients until they finally saw sense and stopped using Fasthosts?

Same ole, same ole...

Given my past experience of FastHosts it's a wonder they are still in business. I've steered many an unwary soul away from their incompetent clutches over the years.

Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted

With our book...

"With our book, you are no longer dependent on a functioning internet connection to read Geek’s Guide to Britain"

Amazing! What will they think of next!

Aquaboffins sink lost Greek city theory

Re: Carbon capture

Yep, the people that built that underwater city!

Windows 10 zero day selling for $90,000

Re: Prerequisites?

Reminds me of a story about someone whose garden was plagued by caterpillars who found an advert for a kit that guaranteed it could kill 100% of them. Kit was promptly purchased and, upon arrival, was found to be 2 small blocks of wood labelled A and B, and accompanied by some simple instructions which read: "Place caterpillar on block A, hit with block B."

Urika-ka-ka-ka! Cray unveils open source big data box

"Cray Tuesday"

Is that something akin to Manic Monday, Sheffield Wednesday or Man Friday?

The Sons of Kahn and the Witch of Wookey

And these followers did hang out in GitHub and Google Plus

Wait, "Google Plus" - is that still a thing?

Google HQ evacuated

Re: Googleplex evacuated in record time

The building was still in beta, anyway...

Done making the big stuff better? The path to Apple's mid-life crisis

@404

"man... I don't know how well I'd deal with a Zombie Jobs as CEO of Apple..."

Yeah, I can see a repeat of the "You're not holding it right" episode but this time with the added Addams Family bonus of his hand falling off onto the floor and rushing off stage with said iPhone.

Don't – don't – install iOS 9.3 on your iPad 2: Upgrade bricks slabs

Not exactly trouble free...

I did mine late this afternoon (BEFORE this news broke). It wasn't exactly plain sailing but it got there in the end.

In fact, it upgraded itself twice.

I'd connected it to the Mac as it's often safer that way but, after the first update (full download, restart and update shenanigans), iTunes decided that it was still on 9.2.1 and proceeded to do the whole kit and kaboodle a second time! Well, at the moment it seems ok (as far as an iPad 2 can be on 9.x - fingers and wallet crossed).

Off to Mars this summer? Don't forget your map

Quorn?

So, not the real thing then...

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

"Easy Access" (cough, cough)

Yep, Mr Cartwright and I know EXACTLY which university that was as I was one of the students when you were there, though I am definitely innocent of any attempt to install MacWrite!

I do remember that both the Macs and PCs both used compatible* versions of MS Word. Compatible that is until you attempted to edit a document on one that had been created on the other - formatting almost inevitably went completely out the window, quite alarming when coursework was due and there was a scarcity of available machines with the "correct" architecture!

*Obviously, this was a completely new meaning of "compatible" that Microsoft had cunningly devised.

Another thing I remember from those days was that there was a lab set up with a bunch of dual-floppy-capable Macs (possibly IIfx) but they only had one actual floppy drive installed. After a short while you and your colleagues had to go around taping over the unused 2nd floppy disk drive hole because students had a habit of thinking there really was a floppy drive in there. The rewarding clunk of a floppy hitting the motherboard a few inches below would result in one of you having to pull the case apart to rescue said floppy.

Fun times!

German lodges todger in 13 steel rings

What a nob!

See title!

'Microsoft Office has been the bane of my life, while simultaneously keeping me employed'

Re: the original developer of most of it for Excel 2000

Regretfully, if someone sends you a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns then opening it in Office 97 (and possibly 2000, if I recall correctly) will just silently truncate each line at 256 columns leaving you none the wiser that there was ever any more data available.

I gave up on Office after 2000 and now use WPS or Libre as they are both less hassle.

Regular Fast Radio Burst detected outside our galaxy

Re: eight bursts on one day, two bursts on another

Obviously, the Cheela have figured out how to steer the thing...

'I bet Russian hackers weren't expecting their target to suck so epically hard as this'

Re: Timer not running

[upvoted mainly for the last (excellent) sentence]

Official: Seagate notebook drive has shingles

Well, as it's Seagate, I for one will wait until I see some independent, long-term reliability tests done on the thing (by which time SSDs will probably be closer or even lower in price, anyway).

Oracle issues emergency patch for Java on Windows

@AC

"Peeps still have anything from Oracle on their machines? In 2016?"

Yeah, I've got VirtualBox - bloody wish Oracle didn't own it, though...

When customers try to be programmers: 'I want this CHANGED TO A ZERO ASAP'

Re: What are the odds?

It's a bit like a big red button with the sign "Do not press, EVER!"

Windows 10 will now automatically download and install on PCs

@AC

So, as evidence, you show us two links from none other than Microsoft? Sheesh, pull the other one!

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Spooky

Damn, I mention "Wogan" one day and by the next, he's dead :(

I hope I am not some sort of jinx.

(Cameron, Cameron, IDS, Hunt, Cameron - just testing - Cameron)

Reminds me of something Spike Milligan once said:

Flying never killed anyone, it's the crashing that kills you.

(if I remember correctly, he said it when being interviewed on that early evening Wogan chat show)

Seagate’s triple whammy: Disk numbers, costs, and flash

Agreed. I wouldn't touch a Seagate HDD for any money nowadays. Reliability - we've heard of it.

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

Re: Acorn System 1

Between 1978 and 1980 I worked for the PCB manufacturing company that supplied the prototype boards for this, though we never got the contract for the production run. I did keep one of the bare 8K memory extension boards with the intention of expanding my CBM PET - a project that never actually happened.

This gun says you ain’t leaving until my PC is fixed

Re: In a dim and distant past.

Excellent story! (unless you were there for the 3 hours, of course)

I use to be a TV engineer for Rediffusion in Norwich back in the 1970s. We never had that specific problem though we did have one particular customer who used to swap all the valves around in his set and then call us to put them back into the correct sockets. Being quite hardy things there was (mostly) no damage done to the valves.

Lights out! Newbie IT manager's dark basement trip

Re: Brand New Column?

Your memory is almost fully functional, CDD! It was actually Network Week and I have proof of this as I have just dug out a copy of the 22nd October 1997 edition. The story I'd submitted for "This Damn War" was published on page 4 of that issue. Page 3 also had the BOFH column long before he'd taken up residence at el Reg.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

@2+2=5

Wow, you have media where you can store data OUTSIDE the disk? Like in the power cables or something?

'Powerful blast' at Glasgow City Council data centre prompts IT meltdown

@thedroog

"marsd"

Is that some sort of Unix daemon?