Posts by David 132

Computer sprinkled with exotic chemicals produced super-problems, not super-powers

An opportunity for a Pratchett quote:

“It was still so new that the modern flat-roofed buildings, winners of several awards from the Guild of Architects, hadn’t even begun to let in water and shed window-panes in a breeze.”

Japanese scientists propose drug to regrow teeth, promise trials won't bite

I remember that too.

Is it just me, or are “miracle” tooth regrow/repair treatments a bit like nuclear fusion power - always 50 10 years away?

Or perhaps, with my tinfoil hat on and my tongue firmly in cheek, it’s like the carburetor that let cars run on water, or the everlasting filament light bulb… world-changing inventions suppressed by an evil industry cabal. In this case, dentists. Does anyone here trust the B.D.A.?

Nix forked, but over politics instead of progress

Re: A directory tree managed by software ? No.

The remorseless creep of the GUID. First it was disk partitions, then it was Registry keys... I tell you, by the end of the decade we'll all be christening our children with GUIDs.

(Albeit that'll still be less stupid than whatever heiroglyphic Musk named his kids.)

Icon because I know I am shouting angrily at clouds here.

Hey, Reddit. Quick question. All those clicks on my ads. Were they actually real?

Re: Hitch hikers Guide ....to advertising

Either that or take a tip from Futurama and grind them up into Torgo’s Executive Advertiser Powder - it has myriad uses!

Re: Obligatory.

Once, a while ago, my Pi-Hole stopped responding because my NAS was rebooting. My network devices all fell back to the DHCP-specified alternate 8.8.8.8 DNS.

Unknowing, I browsed the web on my phone.

The horror. The horror!

(rocks back and forth, sucking thumb and keening like a baby)

Re: The good clickAI

> access to lists of 16 famous people who eat spaghetti (number 9 will astound you).

Godsdammit man, you can't leave me hanging like that! Who is it? I HAVE TO KNOW!!!!

Re: Oracle??

Oh, all sorts of reasons.

Bitten at the full moon by a lycanthrope. Fell foul of a gypsy fortune-teller. Built a house on an ancient Indian burial ground. Broke a mirror.

Of course, in theory there are Oracle customers who are there of their own free will, but then, in theory there are unicorns at the bottom of my garden.

Apple crushes creativity and its reputation in new iPad ad

Speaking of creativity, I was recently rather impressed when I found this recording of Orkestra Obsolete playing New Order's "Blue Monday" on 1930s-tech instruments. Really very clever.

I tell them, “I work all day and evening, when’s a guy supposed to practice the bagpipes, huh?”

Re: accused the ad of "crushing human creativity"

Go Stick Your Head In A Pig.

Re: Correction

Ah, Muphry’s Law strikes again.

And it begins. OpenAI mulls NSFW AI model output

Re: One giant **** for mankind.

Has no-one stopped to consider the emotional cost?

Picture the scene - a few years from now, a pair of young lovers in bed.

Both completely traumatised, because to their shock and against expectations, the other person has only 5 fingers on each hand and doesn't have legs that randomly disappear and reappear as they move, nor arms that can occasionally pass through each other :)

Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI

Re: Wake up kids

If Skynet is being trained using Reg comments, or - god help us - 4chan, then we’re all well and truly boned.

iFixit hails replaceable LPCAMM2 laptop memory as a 'big deal'

Apple: “Because Screw You, That’s Why™️”

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Nuh-uh, it wasn’t diaresis that killed her, it was vomiting and malnourishment.

(Have an upvote for correctly calling it “diaresis” and not “an umlaut”!)

Re: Imagine if EU countries were this dumb

Whilst that's acute thought, losing the accents in French would be a grave matter.

whatever the "hat" and accent underneath a letter are called

FYI - Circumflex and Cedilla (pronounced "sedilla"), respectively.

Thank you Mrs Flitcroft for all those GCSE French lessons so many years ago :)

Only to his friends. Winnie the Pooh to everyone else.

Re: Does anywhere in Wales have accented letters?

I wonder how many carelessly-coded address forms & databases have been buffer-overflowed by the full spelling of Llanfair PG?

Re: BS7666

This deserves all the upvotes. Have a beer, if only because I can't get you & Binky a curry.

Re: Tail wags dog

As for so many other things, we can probably blame Michael Heseltine for that, with his 1970s zeal to "modernise" county/administrative boundaries.

Ghastly man.

Re: Tail wags dog

Such a common mistake - variously known as "the Scunthorpe Problem" or "the Clbuttic Mistake" - there's an entire Wikipedia article about it.

Re: By eck!

Indeed. That's scaling the wuthëring hëights of ridiculousness.

Re: "these characters have specific meanings in computer systems"

'Twas elsewhere on this site - the story about Nokia, in fact - that I read earlier today a comment about how early Android versions would interpret typed text as system commands. The example given was that typing "reboot" in a note or contact name would, indeed, reboot the phone.

So confusion between data and code is definitely not a solved problem. One has to imagine that the sort of programmer that would make that mistake would also stick their socks up their nose and wear their shoes on their hands whilst licking the walls and dribbling, but...

Re: I've seen worse

Curse this sans-serif font - I read that as "De ice", i.e. the process of removing frozen water. And wondered what on Earth the back story was for that one!

Not too far from me is the delightfully-named "Odge Gribble Lane". Named after a noteworthy local resident, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face.

Cheyenne supercomputer sells at auction for just $480K

Re: Wrong Cheyenne?

Or a box set of rather good 1950s TV Westerns starring Clint Walker.

Re: 28 racks

imagine the bragging rights of somebody who casually says "my computer runs Linux" and that is their computer.

"...yet it doesn't have a TPM v2.0 so doesn't meet the Windows 11 requirements."

Re: $480K

Well, there goes the business plan of using it to mine crypto…

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Re: I took the plunge into Win 11

Have a Monday afternoon beer, AC!

Thanks for that tip :)

Re: The flagship OS and its hardware requirements

Indeed. He is anispeptic, prasmodic, even compunctuous, to have caused you such pericombobulations!

(Blackadder, for those who don't get the joke.)

Relax, Google's drop in search market share in April was just an illusion

Re: My contribution ...

> (actually we need a FFS icon)

This one —-> is the best equivalent that I’ve found.

Indeed. I really wish Google would actually search for the terms I give it, rather than only searching for a subset of my terms and making me “specify” “each” “term” “individually”.

GS is far, far worse and less helpful than it used to be.

Windows users left to fend for themselves after BitLocker patch bungle

I know this is a band-aid kludge rather than an actual proper solution, but could you use a simple AutoIt script that sits in the background waiting for the error window to appear, and then instantly closes it before the user sees it?

Something like (it’s been a while since I used AutoIt so syntax may not be 100% correct)

$WindowTitle=“Error” ; COMMENT: put actual title here

$WindowText=“The function you are attempting”

While true

; COMMENT WinWait function polls every 250ms, doesn't busy-loop

WinWait($WindowTitle,$WindowText)

WinClose($WindowTitle,$WindowText)

Wend

Yeah, I know, it’s merely a workaround, but from what you say the problem is an annoyance more than a serious issue, so maybe…?

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Re: Well, yeah.

And how does "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA" make you feel?

We all have those "getting out of bed was a mistake, and frankly, I'm not even sure about the whole 'coming down from the trees' thing, either" days :)

Groucho, as so often, said it best -

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

..Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

Enterprise browser maker Island says it's now worth $3B

Re: At least one of us is confused by this

Quite probably.

It isn't even the top hit for "enterprise browser" but that could be Google fiddling the results in their preferred topic.

With my flippant hat on... Google will black-hole any searches for that term; Windows 11, on the other hand, will detect that you're searching for alternatives to the One True Browser and overlay OS-level "Please Try Edge, We're So LonelyAwesomely Great" banners over your screen.

Re: Can it defeat modern copy methods...

Does she send them in the .NORM file format?

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

Re: Uh-oh

Still better than their poetry.

Microsoft dusts off ancient MS-DOS 4.0 code for release on GitHub

Obligatory XKCD!

In the case of Windows ME, it’d be difficult for Microsoft to distribute the source, because it - along with all remaining physical media and documentation, and anyone from Marketing who worked on it - is encased in concrete, in lead barrels, under yet more concrete, somewhere deep in Yucca Mountain.

Re: Dos Versions that were significant or useful

I have very fond memories of 4DOS. The first x86 command interpreter I used that had command history and tab completion like grown-up systems. Thanks for giving me a nostalgic smile.

Re: Dos Versions that were significant or useful

:)

Actually, I thought your punchline was going to be that you'd inadvertently reformatted & installed it on a different nearby PC, not the one that happened to be physically located in front of you.

Been there, done that. KVMs and/or long keyboard cables are not to be trusted.

Encrypted email service files DMA complaint claiming it vanished from Google Search

Re: Bold of them to assume Google has control over results

I'm holding out for the Lucy-Liubots, thanks.

Actually, when you said Monroebots, the first thing I thought of was the one (7' tall, silver, crashes through walls) that Lister built from a kit in Red Dwarf. Not quite my cup of tea...

Re: I said a lot of websites take email, but refuse you if it's not gmail.

I ran into a related issue recently, when a Kickstarter campaign I’d backed (ZX Spectrum Next) was sending out emails to backers to verify their accounts on the support forum, and several of us on Gmail just weren’t receiving them. It turned out in the end that the Next forums domain didn’t have a valid DMARC record and so their mails were being rejected by Gmail.

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

Re: standard american flight bag

That's when you lift your cabin baggage down from the rack and bring out the snakes, duh.

Re: Hope he's not the only one facing charges

Yeah, as I typed it I thought to myself "...apart from people on just about every social media platform out there?"

Good (?) to know I'm not alone in my cynicism.

Re: Darien = scumbag

I thought it was Criminal 101: "Only Commit One Crime At A Time".

Trying to flee from a stalking/malicious-communication rap on a plane while carrying an illegal gun is on a par with those eejits who get stopped for speeding or tailgating on the highway, only for it to be then discovered that they're mules, running kilos of drugs from Mexico into the US...

Re: Hope he's not the only one facing charges

I was referring to the staff member, who was apparently so eager to slander Eiswert that her first instinct was to send it to a student with social media incontinence. She should have known better.

(I didn't downvote you btw.)

City council audit trail is an audit fail after disastrous Oracle ERP rollout

Re: RE: Lamborghini dealers in Birmingham

>To be fair, the worst offenders are VW Golf drivers who spent all their money on baffle free exhaust systems and can't afford to get the valve guide oil seals and piston rings sorted...

Because Halfords don't offer valve-guides or piston ring kits slathered in plastichrome and green LEDs, obviously.

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

Re: Video is rather unimpressive.

What struck me about the video was the utterly inappropriate cheery, plinky-plonky music.

Like watching the chainsaw scene in Scarface with a soundtrack of the Birdie Song.