Posts by David 132

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Considering

I'm sure the architect has thought of that, and written "Do not use Heavy Water" on the plans.

Re: Not an easy building to alter...

Groan.

Get out, and take your coat with you :)

Re: Do you remember when...

Eh, we're talking about a country that has roadsigns pointing to SECRET NUCLEAR BUNKER*, so I can well believe it.

*yeah yeah, I know, now tourist attractions

Re: Not an easy building to alter...

I prefer Randall Munroe's solution, albeit it might take a little longer.

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power

Re: I see no issues

Well, it worked for Napoleon

Do you mean Nelson?

Napoleon is better known for "Not tonight, Josephine" - when she asked him if his IBM Cloud services were online.

Re: Finally

"Joop! You fool! You've shut down the Do Not Smoulder server! Everything's now igniting!

Re: Yo, you're cloud is on fire!

Let's hope the Rolling Stones have a mobile data centre nearby.

We've only gone and done it: Changed what you're used to

Allowing comments on the Blocks & Files or DevClass partner sites would be a huge step forward. Is it unnecessarily cruel/suspicious/mean of me to suggest that the reason for disallowing comments is so as not to upset the sponsors?

Disappearing Comments links?

I was initially hostile to the new layout, then learned to accept it, but logging on tonight - Firefox, with uBlock Origin and NoScript disabled, I add - none of the stories seem to have a link to their Comments at either the top or bottom of the page. Even stories that I was commenting on earlier today.

A temporary glitch?

Mercifully, I remembered the direct address https://forums.theregister.com so was able to come here!

Firefox integrates an ad-blocker, but not to block ads

Re: Pot calling kettle black

Well, I might need to temper my earlier optimism.

As I write this, the front-page story related to this one, Mozilla boasts Mythos boosted Firefox bug cull , doesn't have a link to its comments, whether at the top or the bottom of the article. Now, it's possible that comments have been consciously disabled on that story, I suppose, but if so then a clearer indication would be nice.

Re: Pot calling kettle black

Firefox with UBO and NoScript and sundry other privacy-focussed plugins here, and I see the "bubble" icon just fine. It's also visible at the bottom of each article, next to the relevant tags (e.g. [IBM] [OFF-PREM] ❑). Perhaps the Reg web team's tweaked the code since your comment?

"The overal consensus is, the new format sucks donkey balls, none of your viewers, ie customers, like it and we all want you to change it back to the old format and fonts. And, slap whoever came up with this with a monkfish, left out in the sun a couple of weeks."

"...but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"

Re: What are the extra advertisements it finds?

As I understand it, PiHole is purely a DNS white/blacklist filter. So it'll remove ad content that's pulled from a separate domain, purely by 404'ing (or 523'ing?) any requests to ads.sitename.com, but it can't remove content that appears (by DNS trickery or whatever other dark arts) to come from the first-party site.

Re: Design?

"compound that stupidity with leaving them where they used to be on the comments pages"

That just suggests that they haven't got around to applying the new styling to the comments pages yet. Brace for impact!

Re: Design?

Amen.

You'd think the Reg team, being aware that their readership are technical, crotchety, and strongly opinionated (and I don't mean those pejoratively) would at least have piloted the new layout for a period first ("new.theregister.com" / "old.theregister.com" à la Reddit, for example).

Don't know how much is down to my innate neophobia, but my initial reaction to the new layout is that I hate it. Too many images, seemingly random article placement (a few minutes ago I clicked on an interesting-looking story that was prominent on the front page, only to notice that it actually dates from 3 months ago) and the font-choice is jarring.

Grumble, grumble.

State-backed hackers hammer Palo Alto firewall zero-day before patch lands

Re: I like the new layout.

For what it's worth, I've just e-mailed them using the Corrections link at the top of the page to highlight that "Add Section Name Here" glitch.

Re: I like the new layout.

Reminiscent of the Amiga magazine (Amiga Format?) in days of yore - about '91 or so - that went to press with the page that described the cover disk's contents bearing the immortal placeholder words "Type Some Shit In Here Please".

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Where in their motto did it ever say, "Don't Download Evil", hmm?

Re: Just

Lynx is for weenies who can't handle just telnetting to port 80.

(Note icon. And spare me your quibbling about https, please.)

Re: Especially fun for terminalservers...

Would a server-side filesystem with deduplication not take care of that? It's the same .bin file in every case, right?

(No, I'm not excusing Google's behavior.)

And now you've subliminally motivated me to cue up an early 90s choonz playlist on my Musicbee while I work. Things like

The Prodigy - Out of Space; The Shamen - Ebeneezer Goode / LSI / Boss Drum; Urban Cookie Collective - The Key The Secret; Urban Hype - A Trip To Trumpton; KLF - Justified and Ancient; Stereo MC's - Connected; Happy Mondays - Step On

Ah, happier times. In the immortal words of Jarvis Cocker,

"and you want to call your mother and say / Mother, I can never come home again / cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere / somewhere in a field in Hampshire."

(Edit: perhaps, as part of their technical overhaul, the Reg team will fix the bug that inserts all the extra linebreaks in comments? I had to put the tracklist onto one line, because otherwise it

looked

like

this)

Re: Hoist by their own petard

Business 301 (advanced, PhD-level) - if you can't create the need by healthier means, lobby Government to get legislation passed that mandates your need as an obligation.

$250M crypto-robbing gang’s dirty work guy sentenced to 6.5 years behind bars

Re: They never learn..

Or start a religion.

The network password was a key plot point in one of the most famous movies of all time

Re: whatever you do

Back in the day when one of the default Windows wallpapers was named Bliss.jpg or something, I needed a copy of it from a Linux machine and searched for (IIRC) "Bliss wallpaper", but making the mistake of having Safe Search turned off.

My word.

So very many young ladies enjoying themselves en plein air.*

(*I emphasize that this was many years ago back when the Web was wild and untamed, not the morally-pure sanitised corporate sandbox it is now, so don't bother searching. I'm sure such naughty images are no longer to be found... :/ )

Re: World Password Day

That's OK, with the Reg's new layout and its propensity to surface (ugh, sorry) really, really old articles on the front page, I just assumed that you were correct and I was reading a story from last month. Then I saw that your comment was only a few hours old and got really confused as to what date it is.

I knew I should have put more potato-peelings into the Mr Fusion :)

IBM tried to kill Tab navigation. Microsoft told it Bill Gates' mother wasn't interested

Re: PTSD

*Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity intensifies*

Re: PTSD

I once sat through an hour-long meeting to discuss a Powerpoint presentation that a senior exec was going to give at an industry conference, containing technical data sourced from my group. 58 of those minutes were spent listening to the verbal masturbation of his TA deliberating whether or not to move a text-box 10 pixels to the left and enlarge its font size by 2 points.

It made the Schleswig-Holstein Question or Jarndyce v. Jarndyce look like "what colour socks shall I wear today".

And in the final insult to Dr Hook, even Bill Gates has made it onto the cover of "Rolling Stone".

CYA run rampant. Companies prattle about "empowering employees to take risks" but when something goes wrong, do the senior management say "well, it was a calculated risk, but it didn't pan out"? Do they say "we empowered this employee to make the call, so it's our responsibility that it went wrong"? Or do they say, "this employee made the decision without appropriate risk analysis, it's all his fault"?

Clue: it's rarely (a) or (b).

And so in too many large enterprises, you get North Korean levels of risk aversion and upwards-buck-passing.

Mars rover hits rocky snag with power tool

Re: No One Would Have Believed That In....

I hope NASA remembered the "more than two shakes means you're playing with it" mantra.

Anyway, more seriously, a bit of Polyfilla/Spackle in the hole and it'll be good as new.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Re: Wrong woman

Pandora's Jar-Jar... meesa worried!

Qué?

Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw

Re: The timeline on this one was a bit ungentlemanly imo

These days, a lot of security researchers seem to be more focused on giving their newly-discovered vulnerability a cool name and logo; who has time for responsible disclosure?

Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop

Re: Ah, progress

I can't decide whether you haven't noticed that the Pi Zero 2W has 512MB not KB, or you think there is some humorous significance to adding 128 kilobytes to 512 megabytes. "512-and-one-eighth megabytes should be enough for anyone"?

Re: Done Before ... -ish

Anyone who's ever done PC repair for a heavy smoker can empathise, not to mention shudder with vicarious disgust.

Icon? What else -->

Re: Ah, progress

Did you perhaps mean 128MB, if you're riffing on that old 640 joke?

Or have I just been, as da kids say, whooshed?

(Addendum to my earlier comment above - full disclosure, "1979 me" would have actually said something like "brbrbrbrbrbbbrbrb wanna wanna teddy wanna teddy NOW", as I was still in nappies. I was precocious, yes, but not that precocious.)

Ah, progress

FTA: "...and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W - a low-power board with 512 MB of RAM - meaning it can't do too much..."

2026 me to 1979 me: "We have a self-contained computer with 4x 1GHz cores, 512MB RAM, a touch-capable 1280x400 full colour LCD screen, and wireless networking in the megabits-per-second speed range. Oh, and the motherboard costs the equivalent to you of £2.40. But we won't be able to 'do too much with it'."

1979 me: "Errr...."

Real estate giant confirms vishing incident as ShinyHunters and Qilin both come knocking

"People looking for a quick profit from the elderly care sector want the facilities to be built quickly and cheaply so that they can be stuffed with wrinkly cash-cows and the returns can start flowing"

"Uhhh... boss, that's commendably forthright and accurate, but may I suggest that we run it through Claude to be re-written into a more, um, fluffy form?"

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

Re: Time is the problem

I'm ashamed - no, dammit, proud - that my first action on reading the news of this 5.0 release was to download the Amiga binary, and run it on my old A4000/040 desktop (albeit under WinUAE emulation, the original hardware being somewhere deep, deep in my garage). Yes, I could have just downloaded the native Windows binary but where's the fun in that?

It works perfectly and is just as addictive as I remember.

Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port

I must admit that when I read the initial coverage last week, I incorrectly (but naturally) assumed that this was an official port from the Notepad++ creator.

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

Don't forget "Consignia".

And "Abrdn" (th invstmnt cmpny tht cnt ffrd vwls).

Thirded.

In terms of communicating information, it's about as efficient as searching the web for "how to do X" and being offered those youtube videos that take 10 minutes HEY GUYS REMEMBER TO LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE to communicate a perfectly simple FIRST A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS! point that could be explained in 5 lines of text & a diagram.

Bah, ignore me, I am just grumpy today.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Re: Explorer bug fixes

Or the longstanding bug whereby if it can't resolve a shared network drive or location, Windows Explorer hangs for ~30s when opening the "My Computer" window or a file dialog.

> As distributed it doesn't need to contain ANY AI at all. just a link to a download of the appropriate bits, for both of the people who want it.

But surely both Pavan Davuluri and Satya Nadella already have it?

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

Re: disturbing timing

It's clearly a distraction attack to allow them, or an allied crew, to do something nefarious in the Ubuntu repos while everyone's panicking about Copy Fail.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

I've always felt that a promising TV detective plot device would involve a German witness to a British crime, and hinge on the disparity between how times involving half-hours are expressed in those two languages; "half 8 / halb acht" is interpreted by the former as being 0730, and the latter as 0830...

Re: musical notation was probably one of the oldest programming languages .....

One might even say a C# comment.

UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender

Re: warrant?

Another lovely thing we can thank Blair for.

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Re: Oh well . . .

Ugh. Your dry humour did indeed fly right over my head. My bad. With some chagrin, I've converted my spittle-flecked irate downvote to a fluffy & supportive upvote accordingly!

Re: Just say no?

The Prompt API, as Google describes it, "gives web pages the ability to directly prompt a browser-provided language model."

"What fresh hell is this?" - Dorothy Parker. Wit, author, and AI cynic avant-la-lettre.

Do not want.