Posts by Spanners

International Criminal Court blames spies for 'targeted and sophisticated attack'

There will never be any evidence that Netanyahu engineered the whole thing.

No genuine evidence. I would not put it past certain criminal groups to manufacture some though..

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

Re: Who’s Jon Stewart

He is a minor TV personality in an insignificant country far away from the developed world.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Fusion waste?

You mean Helium?

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Cost overruns.

The good news is, that in comparison to HS2, this project does not carry the same risks of cost growth. However this power gets to us, it does not go through leafy Conservative constituencies requiring it to be re-routed in as expensive a way as possible.

Neither Devon or Morocco are represented by old Etonians, members of the blue rinse brigade or even dodgy landowners.

If someone wants to chain themselves to undersea rocks, that is up to them. If Devon is having a few blue MPs at present, they should have replaced them with adults by the time the project gets there.

San Francisco mayor suggests police drones and CCTV can cure city's crime woes

Re: The name is fitting

"prohibition stops almost nothing"

It's worse than that. Prohibition creates and increases crime.

In 1918 USA, how many gangsters made a living from alcohol? How many were doing so 10 years later? It created crimes.

I would be interested to see how many drug kingpins there are in Portugal right now. Banning things makes them desirable to people. Illegal things are profitable. People get involved in illegal trade and push it.

Banning stuff does not lower the problem. It makes it bigger and more dangerous.

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

Re: Techies get drug tests in the US

Drunk/stoned techies very often save the day

Conservative and corporate organisations (you know, the big state) still like to work under the pretences that the 18th amendment still applies and that we are winning the "war on drugs".

I remember a film that summed it up.

"You have a beer at the end of your day. You have a drink problem!"

"No. You are a Mormon. You have a problem with drink."

Europe mulls open sourcing TETRA emergency services' encryption algorithms

"used in Europe, the UK, and other countries"

We may have "left" the EU but we have not actually moved the physical location of the UK.

We are in Europe.

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

Re: Battery safety

Back when you could pop open the cover and put a new battery in

I preferred it when the battery wasn't inside.

There was a sliding catch at each side underneath and the battery could just be lifted off. Total time for replacement was between 15 and 20 seconds!

@Ozan

The more Apple-y it is, the less I want it anyway!

Re: Thinner laptops?

Did many people really want them much thinner?

I have never cared about thickness. I like them lighter but that has nothing to do with weight.

With phones I definitely dislike them getting thinner. The first thing I do when getting a new one is to buy a "wallet case". This has the advantages of making them easier to hold, protecting them and somewhere to put my driving licence & library card.

No. Making kit ever thinner is from marketing departments who misunderstand the actual point of what they are interfering with!

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

Chrysler has never had anything to do with GM

I never said they did. Although openly US made vehicles are uncommon, we have a few Chryslers and, more recently, Tesla's. We have certainly heard how they as well made as other US engineering products...

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

Have you heard of an obscure brand called "Vauxhall"?

I said openly. This was a boardroom/financier led thing. The Vauxhalls we got were not made in the USA or even to US engineering "standards".

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

"General Motors which then overtook Ford"

Maybe in boardrooms but outside the USA nobody knows of any cars openly made by GM.

I have seen a few Chryslers, but, they are not regarded well by petrolheads I know. They tend to have a worse opinion of US engineering than me.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Landscape/portrait

right in the middle of the screen with "always on top"

I could have done with that setting many years ago. Our hospital had a software update forced on us by Mr Blair and a couple of civil servants happily redesigning things one weekend.

This was in the days before network driven updates for everything and we designed the system update ourselves. It finished with the user having to do a reboot. We found that users would click on the message telling them to reboot without reading it and so we would get a lot of calls saying "this new thing doesn't work".

Using my recently acquired VB "skills" I made a small app that went full screen, red with white writing, "This computer has been updated. Please restart it." I removed the screen furniture so they couldn't minimise or close it. They did what it asked.

A few months later, we used the same purpose for yet another upgrade. In the meantime, our crafty users had found that <alt>+<Tab> could get the annoying message to go away. When we got the call that the application was broken, we would go to the PC and swop the message back to full screen and point to it.

If I had been able to force it to stay on top, it would have helped (Until they discovered <alt>+<F4> anyway.)

Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe

"trying to replace the EU legislation"

If our government manages to rush in something before the next election, would it be possible to dump these changes and reinstate the current rules again?

NYC rights groups say no to grocery store spycams and snooping landlords

Doing anything else is silly.

At some point in the future, hopefully, next year if the tabloids allow it, there will be an election that throws the current lot out and we get adults back in charge. That will set us on course to undo much of the damage caused by Brexit. Any kicking out of EU regulations to put in lobbyist-friendly ones will be reversed.

Dutch consumer groups sue Google over its entire business model

Re: Attack the advertisers to get results

I like to think that adverts don't work well on me.

I rarely notice them. If ever one becomes annoyingly hard to ignore or it reminds me of inappropriate behaviour on their part, I will just put them on my "try not to do business with this lot" mental list.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: Paperless office

... the paperless office...

I remember hearing about that being imminent, when I was at college in the late 70's/early 80's!

I still don't have a flying car either!

My first question

Is this going to be a way to make printers only work with the latest version of Windows?

I see this as a way to

1. Punish all the people who don't jump to the latest shiny version of Windows quickly enough. and

2. Make anyone who wants to sell a Windows-compatible device have to make it everything else incompatible.

Someone will mark this down as it is paranoid. It's not. It is based on Microsoft's actions in the past.

I have a Laserjet Pro MFP. I had to install drivers for Windows. My Chromebook and Android phone, saw it on the network and just added it. I prefer that to adding drivers. If MS can follow this example, that will be nice.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Enter Password

That reminds me of...

"I just had an error message"

"What did it say please"

"error"

"What did the error say?"

"ERROR!"

"I'll come round. "

5 minutes later...

"Your password has expired and must be changed"

"See! I told you it was an error message"

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

@gauge symmetry

I suspect that after they have got rid of the invaders, that will be on the list.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

And Nato didn't move. Countries on its edge moved themselves in.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

NATOs borders have never been "pushed" anywhere.

They have been pulled in by the people in much of the former Soviet Empire - Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary and even Czechoslovakia as was. Those countries asked to join. This was not a case of some special forces pushing into a country and setting up airfields.

This is in comparison with how all those countries above formerly ended up in what became the "Warsaw Pact". Russian soldiers would have come in in the process of kicking Nazis out - fair enough. They would send in their spooks (like Putin) to make sure that their supporters got into power and anyone against them ended up dead or abroad.

What happened if they wanted out? Hungary in 1956 is a good example. If Hungary freely decides to leave NATO, we will move our tanks out of the country, not reinforce them!

Re: WTF?

Except that it made no difference to the possibility of nuclear war.

It just allowed the Russians to continue having weapons that they are using to kill Ukrainians. If they did not have those weapons, they could kill fewer people, blow up fewer blocks of flats, fire less cruise missiles into burger bars and schools.

Theirs is the blood on Musks hands!

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Because MS has not yet released the documentation about the latest changes?

Re: I miss ClarisWorks

developers of Pandas

Fiat Pandas? My mum had one of those.

Re: Missing functionality

"We know better than you do how you should work."

I find the attitude something that Microsoft learnt from Apple and it is yet another reason why I would prefer to avoid both of them!

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Re: Conflict

It all depends on what you call "right wing".

What everyone except the US considers moderate and central, they see as very left wing. These US, right-wing nutters do not consider themselves as such.

If the owners and senior management of Google and Microsoft consider themselves left wing, they are probably, like US Democrats, "center-right".

Not really

Wouldn't that be balanced out by their increasing age?

When I left school in 1978, I would have been conservative because of the type of school it had been.

With age, and hopefully maturity, I drifted to the centre (I have several LibDem family members), and then, maybe left of that.

I have seen the harm that "the right" has done in this country and several more elsewhere.

No, increasing age has not moved me to the right as described in a US saying. Reality has moved me leftwards.

You're not seeing double – yet another UK copshop is confessing to a data leak

Re: Online Safety Bill

I'm sure there was a Dilbert to that effect.

Pity it is no longer available.

Where's next?

I suspect that Scotland will be next. Their very existence a a single item betrays huge political fiddling. It will then be something else that they can blame the former 1st minister for.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

Re: I'll assume this was America

These "favourite" chains would be originally from the US as well would they? Whilst they will probably get away in the UK as our current government looks across the pond in admiration of everything from consumer rights (much less than us) to healthcare (which they don't have), they wouldn't in more civilised places like France or Germany!. The fact that our employees are supposed to have rights is an error that they have spent the last 13 years trying to fix.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Re: Remote sensors

Mine didn't even trigger half the car drivers in Glasgow!

This was the 1980s and if the russians had invaded us on motor bikes, they would have been in Inverness before anyone actually saw them!

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

Re: If you

That's still not far away enough from London for me. I am currently in Coventry and that is too close.

I come from Orkney There is high-speed broadband going past what was my parents' house. That is far enough.

RE: asynchronous

I have noticed that most people around me use Teams asynchronously. That is, you note where/who it is from and reply when it is convenient.

I know that this is not what Manglement or M$ want you to do. It is just the result of having work to do - and a life!

"cow-orkers"

I thought it was cow irkers?

Re: I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom

Grot.com says it is a personal email domain and to go away.

Grot.co.uk did not exist when I looked. I will look in an hour and see if it does by then.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

I can think of several

smoking kills

smoking is expensive

smoking makes you smelly

I bet there are plenty other values in giving up...

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

That is tecnically known as "non-warranty damage". I have read enough from www.notalwaysright.com to realise that there are often enough incompetent managers around to give them what they want though.

Re: functionality

You don't need MS Office to provide the office functionality that users want.

At both School and university, my daughter was lied to about that. She was repeatedly told that Whatever Open Office, or anything else, said Word documents and Excel spreadsheets could ONLY be made by genuine MS Office. Use of anything else would be obvious and would result in a fail.

As was no doubt intended by Microsoft, this has resulted in her having her own 365 account and she will be paying them far more money than is reasonable. I do pay Google a monthly cstorage fee - £1.59 for cloudspace. Their, perfectly cromulent, suite is free.

If you are doing anything remotely confidential, none of them are remotely adequate. The only satisfactory means is encrypted and physical in a secure building with thermite autodestructs with every HDD. Google gets to see my holiday trips, bad poetry and any books that I might be writing. If it was possible to make any money from that, I already would have. They just don't get so much of my money or to lock me into their system.

Deutsche Bahn stands to lose €400M if it has to do Huawei with Chinese kit

Let's be clear

Despite all sorts of official statements, there is no more proof of Chinese state interference than there is of US governmental interference in their industries...

The actual reason for all of this is the US seeking some ways of harming Chinese businesses without falling foul of free trade rules. If any government wants firms in their country to join in this scam to placate the USA, they need to pay the companies for this.

I am more concerned about being monitored by big businesses, especially US ones, than Chinese spooks.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

If we changed to a 4 day week?

If we changed to all working Monday to Thursday, would this result in all the errors being moved to Thursdays?

Or if 20% of us got any one day off, would that spread the errors more evenly across the week?

Even before I had (semi) retired, I had announced that I will not be working Mondays or Fridays. Now, part-time, I am less worried about my errors!

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Change over time

I was just telling a younger colleague about how things had shrunk over the years. When I started where I am now, it was CRT monitors and tower PCs but they still had plenty of bigger stuff.

In a previous job, customers had "minicomputers" that now the uninformed take one look and ask if that's a mainframe! PCs have gone down to objects not that differently sized to a nice block of cheese (a new Reg measurement?). Screens shrank when they went flat but we are now using such big screens for wall displays that they must be nearly as heavy.

Server sizes seem to have stabilised at 19" rack ones but the 4-6U or bigger units seem rarer.

I can now happily carry a desktop PC, screen, mouse, KB, etc but these dinky toy computers now need a power block as well. Still a lot less for my ageing back...

"fire brigade keys"

Are they like the big red keys I have seen used by the police for early morning visits?

Orkney islands look to drones to streamline mail deliveries

Re: Yeah, bad weather is a problem

but getting stuff to/from the mainland NO!

In Orkney, the "mainland" is the biggest island - the one Stromness is actually on. From there, the ferry to Scotland takes about two hours. That long with windspeeds gusting up to 190kph is going to be a stretch even for the best drones in the world (Ukrainian ones?).

Re: Yeah, bad weather is a problem

In Orkney, there are "tidal races". Basically, you can stand on the shore and watch the sea moving past you like a broad, very fast, river. The only thing I have seen going through it is a car ferry with its engines flat out. Think of the whitewater canoeing you sometimes see on the TV but without so many rocks (when away from the edge).

My parent's house had stone walls over 1m thick. Newer houses don't but I bet they are fairly well put together all the same.

A story I am not sure if I got from my father or grandfather is that, after WWII, the Met Office decided to spread weather stations around the UK and decided to put one in the airport near Kirkwall. Then they frequently rejected the figures sent to them. Eventually, to prove a point, someone was sent from London to show people what they were doing wrong because they were reporting higher wind speeds than are actually possible in the UK.

This person brought new equipment and set it up. They immediately saw wind speeds far higher than could possibly exist in this country! I believe that they now accept the figures. This station will be nice and automated anyway.

Google Street View car careens into creek after 100mph cop chase

We need to see the pictures!

I doubt they will end up on Google maps but they should be made public. Is that something US courts do?

Meta says it'll ask Euro peeps nicely before hitting them with personalized ads

"Personalized" ads

I tend to turn these down wherever offered. It makes no difference to whether the ads are annoying or not. My mental filters tend to screen them out anyway.

However, most of the time, my browser screens them out before I need to. I know that we hear how this feature will be disabled. Then I will frequent sites with less/no ads.

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Apple does not invent stuff

So... this patent is either to get money out of someone else's work or to discourage someone else again from innovating.

Which is it?

NATO probes hacktivist crew's boasts of stolen portal data

Re: "for their attacks on human rights"

Which attacks ? On which rights ?

I suspect that it may be the NATO encouragement of countries to return fire. There is a, non-NATO, country that repeatedly gets bad press for shooting back and this group may be part of the movement to try and stop that behaviour spreading.