Posts by heyrick

Ring glitch results in global ding dong ditch: Doorbell bling flings out random pings but they're not the real thing

Re: No expiry timer?

I came to write the exact same thing. A "ring" as much as thirty seconds late is as useful as a bicycle is to a fish. And piling them up to ring in a row some time later? That's an obvious design flaw.

Google adopts ‘value-neutral’ language to make selfies less about ‘beauty’

Snowflakes?

I swear, not a one of them would have survived the average school playground of the eighties.

[it pretty much makes one bomb proof against the stupidity of others; go on, insult me if you disagree, I can assure you I've heard worse...]

Russia and China's 'digital authoritarianism' means we need to better arm our cyber troops, warns top UK general

First step, please replace this guy. I mean, who in 2020 that has the slightest clue what they're talking about uses the word "cyber"?

YouTube axes crowdsourced captioning: Use our buggy speech-to-subtitle code or pay an approved third party

It's not as if YouTube cares much about subtitles

I try to subtitle some of my videos (but it's a tedious process) because southern English accent and slang words means the automatic transcription is sometimes comically bad.. I create srt files in Biftaku Subtitle Editor and upload them to YouTube.

But, wait, via the Studio or YouTube app? No, the app is only useful for setting the description and thumbnail. Google should be utterly shamed by how lousy the YouTube Studio app is.

No, I have to fire up the browser, sign in, go to the studio.youtube.com, get my list of videos, call up the stuff to edit it. Fiddle around because of Chrome's shitty resize-everything-for-some-reason breaking the layout and pushing stuff on-screen. Go to the other pageful of settings, find the bit about captioning. Long-tap to open it in a new tab (if you don't, it'll get claimed by the YouTube app that can't handle the URL). Then, finally, poke around to get to the bit where a dialogue box asks me to pick a file.

What a bloody palaver.

That D&D woman...

If I understand it, a content creator can upload their own subtitles. So what's to stop her getting her friend to do the subs, to send to her to upload?

The perils of building a career on YouTube: Guitar teacher's channel nearly deleted after music publisher complains

At least they had a potentially valid complaint this time.

It's when a big corp (or their automated representative) fires off successful infringement claims against original compositions that you realise how horribly the system is broken, and how hard it tries to appease The Man by screwing over those with little in the way of power to do anything about it.

Proposed US fix for Boeing 737 Max software woes does not address Ethiopian crash scenario, UK pilot union warns

Re: Time to kill Boeing

"Boeing seem to be quite good at making aircraft that kill people"

Now all they need are kamikaze pilots to fly the things. Job done.

Re: Making bricks fly

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-killer-camel-sopwith-camel.html

Re: Making bricks fly

"to passengers will speak out against this abomination."

If I ever fly again, the booking request will be simple. Not a Boeing.

Why not have some sort of ratchet mechanism where you crank a handle up and down to force that bugger to move? Expecting the pilot (or in this case both of them) to do the impossible in the middle of what may well be an emergency situation is taking the piss.

Re: What might be harder to ignore...

Maybe not so much polarised as being dealt with by the half of the legislature that is attempting to maintain some semblance of a functional government.

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

not precise enough to get an address

If you live urban, no.

If you like on the outskirts of a town, perhaps.

If you live rural, definitely.

500m around me is... fields. Maize, the odd wild boar, the trees that the sociopathic neighbour farmer hasn't yet cut down, and some kittens.

But however you look at it, a GPS coordinate with a half kilometre accuracy will identify one property. And from that, an address. Which can lead to a name. Me.

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

"my keyboard layout isn't AZERTY eh?"

I live in France. First thing I do when I buy a new keyboard is send off for a set of replacement keyboard labels.

My muscle memory works with both QWERTY and AZERTY. But I've never encountered such a programmer unfriendly layout in my life. That "@" is a three finger salute is ridiculous. That an entire key appears to be ` is ridiculous.

"where it always should have been"

My mother's gripe, ever since desktops had computers, is the habit of sticking a modifier that does many weird and wonderful things where the Caps Lock should have been.

I didn't grow up with typewriters, so it wasn't really a problem for me, but I did note when using a typewriter that the editing facilities sucked.

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

Re: Similar thing happened near me

From the linked article: The cause was a custom, man-made device inside a resident’s home

I'd have been inclined to word it as, perhaps, "a custom device built by an electronics enthusiast" or something... Or does Cleveland suffer from devices built by, oh I dunno, extra-terrestrial waterfowl?

an AM radio can detect SHINE-emitting kit

Like all those smart meters spewing their periodic data up the line to the gizmo that collects the information and sends it to the provider via the mobile network...

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Re: The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k

"even bloody Microsoft send out fixes each month. Free."

Uh, aren't people expected to pay a monthly subscription these days?

Re: Financial software - Money extraction

"I could switch on whatever I liked"

Video recorders were a bit like that in the end. I opened mine up to clean the heads (with isopropyl) and noticed a set of links, some made, some not.

I removed them all and installed a bank of DIP switches. Then I fiddled.

And ended up with a video recorder that could do NICAM stereo and long play.

It seems it was cheaper to make identical units and choose features by links, than to make actually different models.

Re: An ex employer did that too.

"because of said idiotic wanker waving"

You are reporting this as if it is something somehow unusual. When you have more than one level of management involved, it all goes to shit and it's usually your fault (even though THEY are the flamin' "management").

It's pretty much why I no longer do IT for pay, and looking around at what happens at work (both in and out of IT), it seems as if the entire point of management is to line up and disagree with what the other one said.

F'em all. Give me my red stapler....

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: Authenticity v. Accuracy

Anvil, because I want to make an impact.

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Re: Monumental Stupidity Always Costs and Pays an Exorbitant Price

Whoa, dude, that actually read (mostly) coherently.

Have we touched a nerve, or are you losing your touch?

Re: Corporate Sponsored Industrial Sabotage

Not defending, but as a Brit I could list exactly zero Chinese agencies. I have no idea what or who does the spying, and the large majority of Chinese media simply doesn't make it to the west...just some really over the top films like Wandering Earth.

Now for the Americans. How many agencies would you like me to list? Would you like to me to tell you where they're headquartered? All without popping over to Wikipedia.

So it might be something as simple as China being a nebulous black box, while we at least have some idea of where to point the finger when it comes to America.

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

Me, for two.

I've heard of Blackpool and might even manage to point to the right bit of the country (give or take a hundred miles).

But Southport? Sounds like one of those forgettable places that line the coast between Portsmouth and Brighton... (special shout out to Bugger Bognor)

Safety driver at the wheel of self-driving Uber car that killed a pedestrian is charged with negligent homicide

Re: I've seen the video many times

This video is interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Up9Ph_a0Y

The guy in the driver's seat is a trained safety driver, and the robocar is followed by another vehicle. That's how it ought to be done, not by cheaping out and hiring some random person and then letting the vehicle loose on public roads.

Fighting an insurer over lockdown payout? UK policyholders just won an important COVID-19 test case

I can imagine this will ultimately be a phyrric victory

Yes, you'll get cover.

And yes, your policies will cost twice as much next year (and they'll probably sneak in wording to discount such an event in the future).

Research into deflecting potentially world-destroying asteroids is apparently not a 'national priority' for the UK

regarding asteroid defence as not a national priority

We're already screwed. So really, one could say that Brexit would have been fine if it wasn't for [ remainers | the EU | the French | COVID | a bloody great lump of rock from outer space ] (delete as applicable)

Court hearing on election security is zoombombed on 9/11 anniversary with porn, swastikas, pics of WTC attacks

A malicious prank, or a practical demonstration of how easy it is to subvert software and processes?

Apart from embarrassment and upsetting delicate sensibilities, there was no "damage" here. Now consider if one finds a way to alter the stored choices of which candidate people have voted for...

Howdy, er, neighbor – mind if we join you? Potential sign of life spotted in Venus's atmosphere

From penguin poop?

That means only one thing...

...Venus runs Linux.

Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

Re: Stock?

" is because Coronavirus is intentionally being spread"

...by fucking morons, inept leaders, and people not completely understanding the gravity of the situation and doing dumb things like working from home for the afternoon (having spent the morning in the office).

There. Fixed that for you.

Still don't see what it really has to do with Nvidia and ARM though.

Vinyl sales top CDs for the first time in decades in America, streaming rules

Re: Proper

Well, I guess the RIAA messes with the sound enough that it doesn't matter about the particular frequency response of valves.

Re: Isn't it odd...

"Soon there'll be nothing to bequeath to our descendents"

Oh, because they'd absolutely love CDs of Boyzone, Spice Girls, Ricky Martin, Beiber, and.........

"Radio used to be the primary means of new music discovery"

Radio is still around, although more in a streaming form these days. Not that that's a bad thing, I'm currently listening to PPN Radio (a lot of symphonic metal from somewhere in California, I think). I knew Nightwish and Within Temptation. Now I know a whole lot of other bands.

There are adverts (usually the same ones about "lock up your guns" and "don't drive when 'buzzed'"), but I consider them a necessary evil for the station existing. I take that as a good time to leg it into the kitchen and flick the kettle on...

Re: You are all thieves

There was stereo 8 track. It used two tracks in tandem. There was also a quadrophonic version as well, believe it or not. I used to have a player, along with some obscure stuff from the 70s (sounded like a cross between Abba and Queen, only not as good as either) recorded with four channels, but the player died and I never managed to locate another.

Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay, and a nuked payroll system

Re: Ah Arcserve

"Always test backups"

I was distantly involved in an update in a business who went from a bespoke DOS system to using MS Office (Win95?), with their stock in the... what was it called, Access?

They were religious about backing up. Every day they inserted a floppy disc (colour coded for the day of the week) and ran the backup batch file that had been written to copy the important files to disc.

Fast forward a year or two, a harddisc failure took the machine out. No worries, they got a new harddisc, reinstalled Windows, installed the Office suite.

It was about then that they discovered that their backup was essentially useless. In order to keep the screen "tidy", echo was turned off and all output sent to null. The script failed to copy several megabytes of data to a single disc, instead only copying across some of the index and meta files.

Customer data? Gone. Stock inventory? Gone. Traceability of who was renting what? Gone. Details of payments made and owed? Gone. Scans of all sorts of things? Gone.

The company basically had to start from scratch using the small amount of paperwork they had (they believed in shredding, too). I think they hobbled along for a few months before throwing in the towel.

Re: Typical '80s IT: Good idea leads to additional duties, without extra training or pay

"It happens *all the time*"

Oh, yes.

Any idea one has that is considered a good idea is:

A, appropriated by a boss who claims they thought of it

B, now an expected part of one's job

C, with no increase in respect or salary

And:

D, utterly one's fault if it all goes tits in the air (said boss will suffer convenient amnesia regarding their previous claims)

I've found it's simply much more peaceful to make and refine plans in my head, whilst doing exactly nothing.

Go Huawei, Android: Chinese telco biz claims it will spread Harmony OS for smartphone to devs come December

Re: Maybe

Turn your iPad or whatever over. Notice the tiny little label telling you it was proudly designed in California and made in China.

Re: Against all odds

Given that China's population is the same as America and the EU added together, then doubled... I don't think that's going to worry too many people right now. Their local market is potentially massive.

Adobe Illustrator's open source rival Inkscape delivers v1.0.1 - with experimental Scribus PDF export

Re: Shooting themselves in the foot to save their hand

"but one can't from the short name of GIMP"

I haven't looked it up, but... Graphical Image Manipulation Program? Something like that?

US senators propose yet another problematic Section 230 shakeup: As long as someone says it on the web, you can't hide it away

not worse and more confused

Of course, the problem comes when it is the lawmakers themselves that are peddling misinformation. It is to their obvious benefit to create legislation that tries to prevent bullshit being labelled as bullshit, or worse, removed.

Tech ambitions said to lie at heart of Britain’s bonkers crash-and-burn Brexit plan

Re: "Little countries tend to get bossed around by superpowers "

Wait... Joke alert? I think you picked the wrong icon there.

Here, try the Sherlock Holmes icon, because clearly once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Re: The next U-Turn?

"BoJo will take us out without a deal then he'll quit as PM"

Well, be did get voted in on the promise to "get Brexit done", so I guess crashing out, breaking the country, and making it a global laughing stock is technically getting Brexit done...even if it's about as useful as tidying the garden by flamethrowing it...

Probably already been said...

...but WAY too many posts to read whilst on break (at work).

Anyway, somebody might like to remind Cummings that little old Blighty had, and lost, their big tech success story... ARM.

Google Chrome calculates your autoplay settings so you don't have to - others disagree

Hmm. I don't make any "income" from my website. I have a job that pays the bills. Stuff on my site is, well, it's a hobby. It's what I do for fun. I have no obligations, I don't have to make arbitrary quotas, and a sure as hell wouldn't ever pollute it with random unknown third party crap trying to hawk other people's wares.

So please, adblock the hell out of me. It won't change much, nor will I care. In fact, I'd salute your efforts in trying to curb the amount of utter dross that gets included with content these days...

Re: Google, you suck donkey balls

Firefox on Android (am older one that, like, works) and UBlock Origin. Drops placeholders for every image over 256K. Works with fancy JavaScript image manipulation too.

Sure, it breaks some sites (like online shopping) but there's an option to allow images for that site upon my discretion.

So there's absolutely no technical reason why it can't be done. Simply a matter of an advertising company creating a browser that makes it easier to provide intrusive adverting. Duh, whodathunkit?

Google, you suck donkey balls

This is, logically, the same dick waving rubbish that has Google Play Services update when it wants, including on mobile data when you've told it to only update on WiFi.

You know, some people pay for their data allocation. So disabling autoplay makes sense, and as for that pitiful excuse about animated GIF, sorry but if you actually cared about users, you'd have an option to simply not fetch media content that is over X kilobytes (say about 256 or 360?) unless the user taps its placeholder.

Clearly pandering to advertisers is more important than a safe, stable, reliable user experience.

Brexit border-line issues: Would you want to still be 'testing' software designed to stop Kent becoming a massive lorry park come 31 December?

Re: @Cederic - Stockpile your popcorn

"The Conservative Government supported staying in the EU"

Oh, I'm sorry. My mistake. It must have been some Labour twat driving around in a big bus with rubbish written on the side. Likewise, the ERG, they're LibDems, right?

Face it - the Conservatives did not "support the EU". Some did, and we're in this mess because of what is basically a conflict between the moderates and the hardliners (with no useful Opposition to temper the chaos).

"You're trying to rewrite history?"

Not at all. Certainly not like you lot will be when it all goes tits up and you try to blame "the French" or, well, anybody else.

Again.

"Stop gaslighting me."

Stop bullshitting me. You've had four years. Either deliver on all those promises made, or admit that it's a huge delusion of a former colonial power that hasn't yet understood it's increasing irrelevance in the modern world.

Re: @Cederic - Stockpile your popcorn

"Stop believing the EU."

Conveniently, stop believing in the options of those whose narrative is contrary to the effluent spewed by the current bunch of wankers pretending to run the country.

How about you stop believing the Tories instead? After all, their numerous U-turns indicate that even if they should happen to say something that makes sense, they'll disagree with it shortly afterwards. You know, like the so-called Withdrawal Agreement.

Re: Err...

"At the moment we don't know what the rules will be for Eu drivers in the UK."

They can continue driving on the right?

Re: Time to stockpile tar and feathers. There'll be a need for them on Jan 1st.

You forgot the feckless scrounging unemployed that don't even have the decency to get themselves zero hour contacts so they don't get counted as unemployed any more even though they're probably not actually working.

Scum, the lot of them. Brexit is their fault. Covid too...

Re: we don't need to frikking deal

"cummings never shall be laid!!!"

See icon ->