Posts by gotes

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

It would take the best part of an afternoon to load a single web page on my 386 in the 90s.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: R.I.P.

Oh, I was hoping Jonny Dawes had got his arse out on stage during a Michael Jackson performance.

Woman accused of killing boyfriend after tracking him down with Apple AirTag

FWIW, if he was cheating on her he was asking for it

Whilst he was in the wrong, I don't think murder is an appropriate response.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Face facts

It's not Linux, though.

Tough news for Apple as EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Few devices can accept 240w of power. Earbuds certainly won't, and maybe one off brand Chinese phone will.

If you plug a 240W charger into a low power device, it won't just force 240W into it until it catches fire. They negotiate a suitable voltage & current for charging.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: Size?

I think the issue is storing it safely for the next few thousand years or so. Hopefully we'll find a way to reprocess it into something useful and/or less dangerous.

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

Re: E-sports professionals?

Bit I find odd is that people want to watch other people play video games.

Even before "e-sports" was a thing, I enjoyed watching my friends play video games. I'm not into esports btw, but I do enjoy watching other people play video games. It's far more enjoyable to me than watching a football match.

NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain

Re: which then relay that data back to Earth at between 500Kb/s to around 3Mb/s

Can't get my head around them getting data from another freaking planet as fast as I get Netflix in a western country.

If it makes you feel any better, the latency's appalling.

Spam is back with a vengeance. Luckily we can't read any of it

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

Have you tried putting "RTS - not at this address" on the envelope and sticking it in a post box? I have had some success with that method, though not 100%.

US recovers a record $15m from the 3ve ad-fraud crew

Nobody likes ads, but thanks to ads we can access a whole lot of stuff for "free". Or would you rather all web sites were paywalled?

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

Neville Coax

Re: Strong cable and connector

I've never used my TV's "smart" features, apart from a bit of messing around out of curiosity.

The useful life of my last TV was cut short at 18 months when I stumbled into it while drunk.

Don't hate on cryptomining, hate the power stations, say Bitcoin super-fans

Re: Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever

E-commerce sites and AI systems do useful things.

All of them?

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe onto PCs, is 40

Possibly the "very early" model didn't have sockets.

Star loses $500,000 NFT after crooks exploit Rarible market

Re: Working as designed

The real victim is the person who bought the stolen NFT, though I don't have much sympathy.

Russian media watchdog bans Google from advertising its services

Re: Fascism 101

drunk so much of the Putin cool aid

They should probably check it for polonium or Novichok first...

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

Enough with the virtue signalling. "A friends brother in law" hardly sounds like a close friend or family member. They agreed a price; a price that I think is pretty reasonable for a one off job.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: The Boot can be on the other foot...

If the document contains confidential or proprietary information, selling it back to them would be a very stupid thing to do.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

I enjoy a bit of crass humour (Viz comic for example) and swearing, but I don't put it into my work.

Hooking up to Starlink might be pricier than you thought

Businesses do prefer to make a profit rather than give their stuff away to customers at a loss, the greedy bastards.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

I expect the 2001 iMac would struggle to to what most people take for granted these days; stream high definition video.

One person's war is another hemisphere's developer crunch

Re: Missing <whatever> professionals? Check the education system!

I don't think the problem is a "lack of professionals". It's a lack of cheap Eastern European labour.

I work with several Ukranians and Russians (remotely). The Ukranians (mostly in Kyiv) are still working "as long as they have electricity and internet". I haven't seen any of the Russians, presumably because they can't get paid.

Reg reader rages over Virgin Media's email password policy

Considering he bothered to complain about the issue, I doubt it's an easily crackable password. I feel that there's some detail missing from the story.

Re: Virgin, bringing you the barely-adequate security from 2002

It would be nice if "Nick" could clear things up here. Though maybe he's offline due to being pwned.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: I'll see your Atari ST and raise you a Commodore PET

Ah, a knock-off iMac?

Food for thought on the return to the office

Re: What's your reason?

It's a shame many employees have to do that to get a pay rise. I suppose it's the same with car insurance, phone contracts etc.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Re: Users .... both the bane & joy of your life ... at the same time !!!

I would go one step further and suggest anyone working in tech support serves time in retail, hospitality or a non technical customer service role. Understand that despite the fact they can be very annoying and stupid, these people are your customers and they're just trying to do their job. Chances are their job is lower paid and more stressful than yours. [I am aware that some of the most annoying "customers" are senior management and directors]

It might be very annoying for a while, but once you figure out how to handle these people they'll be putty in your hands, as it were.

On my first day in my first full time tech support job (with no training, of course) I had a customer tell my boss I was "completely useless". To be fair, I was. I had no idea what I was doing. A couple of weeks later I was the only person she'd be willing to speak to for support.

I've seen too many "Roy from The IT Crowd" type characters in IT. Funny to watch, but no way to behave as a professional.

Re: Dialogs.... time for

Hah. I worked at a place that had some fancy automated quality control machines which would check things like dimensions, surface/edge defects etc. When there was a quality issue with the product, operators (or rather the shift managers) would modify the parameters so that the machines would accept the off spec product as first quality. Everything's good in production! We're meeting the requirement of at least 85% first quality product in our shift, another job well done.

Until the calls come in from customers.

SYNTAX ERROR

Working in Arm's engineering team? You're probably happy with your pay rise

Re: "our people are core to our success"

If you can't drive a locomotive then you aren't an Engineer.

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

Re: I knew this would hapoen

Can you explain how?

I thought the same thing. There's quite a difference between saying something's trivial to do, and it actually being trivial, even if it may appear so.

Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day

Re: I recognise the story

but was then (the horror) Russia!

Soviet Union.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Seems about as likely as their claim that the problem is with the satellite.

I guess Honda could have launched their own sats to supply navigation features to vehicles, but it seems like a huge waste of resources considering there are already constellations in place which do the same thing and actually know what year it is.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

I have had a similar experience. No phone/internet service, so I call the telco to get it sorted out. No issue at their end, apparently. We'll look into it.

Whilst I'm on the phone, I look out the window to see a telegraph pole being lifted out of the ground. Ah, that would explain it. Thanks for the heads up, Openreach!

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

I use the word spectacles; "Glasses" is a little ambiguous.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

acetone and an ultrasonic bath

Yes, I would have expected that to melt the keyboard.

It's your Loki day: The Reg takes Elementary OS Jólnir for a quick test drive

I think we're all fairly familiar with the underlying OS.

Re: General question

Ah, so to prevent your customers using the giant icons, the option should be removed for all Windows users? Makes sense.

China lists 100 topics citizens can't include in online vids

Re: "Discussions of extreme nationalistic politics or fascism are barred"

Because the Party says so.

Apple wins Epic court ruling: Devs will pay up for now as legal case churns on

Re: Epically wrong.

Why is Apple being punished for being the good guys again?

LOL

Is this guy for real?

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Pointless

Personally I prefer to enable dark mode wherever it's available.

Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it useless.

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: NHS Trust fund

That reminds me, at a place I used to work, for reasons unknown the CEO's office had a dedicated phone line for his fax machine. It did come in handy though, since the site was prone to power outages and the E1 that carried all the other calls was pretty useless once the UPS batteries had drained.

Re: Beancounters not on the job

One paper filled locally, photocopy sent to HQ by post.To ensure records survive a local fire.

In theory.

Re: How to look busy when the computers aren't working

If you're a senior manager you drag the whole IT department into an hour long meeting to figure out when it will be fixed.

Renting IT hardware on a subscription basis is bad for customers

Re: Confused

It not that difficult. The motion (paraphrased) is "renting is bad"

FOR - the author thinks renting is bad

AGAINST - the author thinks renting is good

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: How?

Indeed, some are much worse.

Theranos' Holmes admits she slapped Big Pharma logos on lab reports to boost her biz

"I wish I hadn't got caught"

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

Re: Not too bad

Personally I get a lot more entertainment from a single YouTube channel than I do from everything on Netflix.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Re: Ah, the halcyon days of tight hardware resources

And they're all in memory.

It's the 21st century, they'll all be in the cloud.