Posts by David 132 5507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
256 bits? Frankly, he would have a higher chance of gaining access to his wallet if he just started ploughing through the possible 2^256 permutations.
Either is as staggeringly unlikely as the other.
Unless he pulled a President Skroob and set his private key combination to 1-2-3-4-5, of course :)
I misread it as "Canyon channel", which in a MIDI context, for Windows users of a certain age, brings back Proustian memories!
Gah, yes, few things raise my blood pressure as much as the depressingly- and inappropriately-cheerful "$crapware_X Just Got Installed! Check It Out!" popup appearing in Windows. That's a setting that gets nuked from orbit very first thing after I acquire a new Windows PC, no matter how misleadingly-named it is in Settings. "Occasionally show Suggestions" sounds so helpful, doesn't it?
> Many see the problem is that Win11 is pointlessly rearranging the furniture and breaking things people use
I first read the comment below back at the time of the Windows 8 launch - it remains topical. I wish I could remember who first wrote it to give them fair credit!
"What we wanted, Microsoft, was familiar ways to do unfamiliar things. What you've given us is unfamiliar ways to do familiar things."
If I remember correctly, my first ADSL, circa 1999, was 512Kbit. Which was unbelievably fast - web pages appeared in an instant, a memory that just reinforces my beliefs about the bloat of the Web these days.
It was as fast, in fact, as my first hard drive's 20 megabyte capacity [*unformatted] was capacious.
Now I am lost in nostalgia and have made myself sad.
Upvoted. Also The Brass Bottle had the always-wonderful Burl Ives (RIP) in it, as the Genie - "Fakrash", if memory serves.
If I may be permitted a more recent cultural reference, likening current "AI" to a magic carpet brings to mind the scene in Disney's Aladdin where Robin Williams points out the flying carpet's emergency exits. "The exits hallucinations are here, here, hereherehereherehereherehereherehere and here..."
I may have mentioned this before but waaaay back several decades ago, in a Physics class at my school near Chester, we were learning about capacitors, and had been given the standard educational selection of electrolytics with which to perform the assigned experiments. The teacher was talking to us - a whole class full of shiny-faced, attentive schoolboys. Except for one kid on the very back row of the benches, who was amusing himself by clandestinely daisy-chaining as many capacitors as he could, and charging them all from the 12V bench supply.
Clandestine, that is, until there was a very loud "BANG", and we all spun around... to see our classmate doing his very best to look innocent, as white snowflakes of electrolytic material drifted down onto him like dandruff.
...until Microsoft decides to "accidentally" or otherwise (depending on how blatant they're feeling) ignore that registry key.
I am still bitter about their killing off of all the 3rd-party tweaks that removed the completely obnoxious "Microsoft Points / Use Edge / Use OneDrive" banner from the Settings app. "You WILL be confronted by this every time you open Settings..."
Whoever imposed the sanctions clearly hadn't read Asimov's Foundation. Wherein, if I recall - it's been years - the exiled scientists, forced to work with very limited resources, made ultra-miniaturized power cells and other devices, to the wonderment of another civilisation. Who, rich in resources, had power cells that filled an entire room rather than fit in a hand.
As I opined recently when Broadcom announced the same tactic with VMWare, do these companies who drop all-but-their-largest customers not consider the ramifications vis-à-vis the power dynamic?
If you have thousands of customers, you can antagonize one or even several of them and it’s NBD. But if you’re reliant on a handful of whales, and you do something that one of them doesn’t like - you EOL the product they’re using, say, or push them into a new subscription contract - they have much more leverage, and the potential to make a big dent in your revenue numbers.
Ah, once again my anecdotage gland is triggered.
Some years ago, in my former life at a large tech company, I had need of being able to remotely trigger a BSOD on a Windows machine - for demo purposes, I hasten to add.
Remote, meaning that the debug trick involving a registry edit and the Scroll Lock key or whatever it is wouldn't cut it.
So I wrote a little application that would, running as Administrator, traverse the process list and kill -9 everything it could, which invariably brought the OS down in very short order - mission accomplished.
Our sales teams loved the demo, because they could show customers a system crash on demand, and our product's ability to recover from it.
Except that someone in Redmond clearly didn't like it, because a few months later, I got a polite request from Very Senior Management to stop offering that demo. Apparently, in their market segment share battle with Chromebooks and Macs, Microsoft didn't appreciate potential customers being reminded that Windows does actually crash (and to be faaaaiiiirrrr, it doesn't do so as often now as, say, Windows 95 or even 2K).
So IIRC I changed the demo so that it triggered a fake-but-convincing "Ransomware"* alert on the screen, allowing the sales folks to use that as a hook for our product.
(* I first typed "Randomware", which would be something else entirely. A Randomware infection presumably and unpredictably puts a picture of a shoe, or a halibut, or the face of Pope Pius XX on your screen?)
I have a Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro as my primary keyboard at home; after 25 years of daily use it's still - knock on wood! - going strong and I haven't found anything else I like as much.
An updated version of this that replaced the unpowered USB1.1 hub with modern USB 3 or C ports would be great.
I'd describe it as "panglossian" myself, or even "pollyannaish".
Bit like saying "yes I broke my arm falling into a vat of slurry but it gave me the most wonderful opportunity to witness the wonders of the modern US/UK [delete as applicable] healthcare system and also to try out lots of amazing scented soaps!"
>Besides, it's accounting. How much has that changed in 200 years?
Not an accountant, so can't comment with any authority, but depending on how broad your definition of "accounting" is, of course tax rules for deductibles and exemptions etc have changed a lot (in fact about every 5 minutes in the UK/US it seems!).
Still, I'm not criticising. I still play a particular PC game daily that is 20+ years old, and a family member asked me for help recently getting AutoCAD 2006 - i.e. similar vintage! - running for him. The neophilia of our industry is both a blessing and a curse.
"Windows for Penne Computing"?
Windows Search, if I search for a file named "report-july.docx": "gee I can't find anything on your system but look, even though you didn't ask, here's a Bing result for report-july.docx and here's shopping results for report-july.docx and here's a weather forecast for July... and hey, why don't you switch to Edge and sign up for OneDrive as well, they're really great! ...wait, why did you just put your fist straight through your screen?"
Command prompt, dir /s report-july.docx: 07/26/2024 12:50 PM 9,468,975 report-july.docx (after a negligible delay)
So, yeah. I completely agree.
(The icon is for Windows Search btw, not for your comment)
Is that for Clem personally, or shared among a team?
$11.5K a month doesn't go as far as it used to, believe it or not.
Anyway, you've guilt-tripped me into making a donation. As an unemployed duck-herder (no, really) I didn't have much in the way of spare coins until lately, just lots of bills.
Downvoted with great satisfaction, for being quite unnecessarily rude, pompous, supercilious, and also highly abusive to Liam, who isn't contractually obligated to produce articles for you, you know, unless of course you're paying a subscription to read this site? No? Thought not.
Oh, and the icing on the shit-sandwich of your comment is that you're apparently guilty of errors yourself, going by Liam's (admirably restrained, in the circumstances) response to you.
Yes, it's possible to disagree with an article, or an author. It's possible to have greater knowledge on a subject, and wish to offer an alternative viewpoint.
But those of us who are mature adults understand that disagreements and corrections can be - and should be - polite and respectful.
*plonk*, into my (virtual, alas) killfile you go.
*shudder*
Repressed memories from years of doing tech support for friends and family!
If you’re lucky, they haul out a dusty diary/Filofax/paper-notepad and start flicking through it.. “hmm, administrator password you say? is it… no, that’s my Ocado password… maybe… no, that’s my Hotmail login…
The horror. The horror!
> (16A is roughly 12 miles per hour of charging)
Considering that according to the GLA* the average traffic speed in Inner London is 12mph, there’s a pleasing symmetry to that!
(*I hope that link backs up my assertion. Google’s preview assured me that it does, but when I tried to visit it it trapped me in an infinite loop of “prove you’re a human” captchas. How very apt as a metaphor for London’s governance.)
> Oh, wait, schoolkids were sharing porn on removable drives back when the year started with a 1. So this legislation's already been out of date for a quarter century.
A quarter century? Tch! Kids today.
Me and my schoolchums were sharing ASCII, Mode 7/Teletext, and low-res bitmap porn on Acorn BBC 5¼" floppy - i.e. removeable! - disks in the early-mid 80s. It came as a great shock to me in adulthood to discover that areolae weren't actually bright magenta in colour :-P
And I'm sure after they read this, another commentard will pitch in with memories of sharing porn on Jacquard loom punched cards in even earlier decades :)
(For some reason, I don't recall ever having porn on my Spectrum. Perhaps the colour-clash was too much of a buzzkill.)
The icon is a fair representation of the condition of the keyboards in our school's computer room at the time.
