Posts by David 132

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

And the Glaswegian translation model will just be a simple regexp to replace all nouns, verbs and adjectives with the ‘C’ word.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

Re: No real surprise

"You were given a wall? Lucky Southern bugger. We 'ad to chisel the ones and zeroes into our own feet. Wi' blunt ferrets."

Re: No real surprise

Careful there, you're emitting the siren sound of the Four Yorkshiremen attractant call... we'll be inundated with "80MB? Pah! I remember when you were lucky to get 1 sector of a 360KB floppy AND had to share that with the entire faculty!" and the like before you know it :)

Re: No real surprise

A particular quirk of AT&T here in Left Pond Land is that when it drops words, it does so consistently on the same words every time, to cause maximum annoyance.

In a call with my wife, for example,

"I'll be home at ___ o'clock"

"Sorry? What time will you be home? You dropped out there."

"I said, I'll be home at ___ o'clock."

"Err, you dropped out again. Sorry. Repeat?"

"Oh FFS, I really hate AT&T, can't they even get simple phone calls right? This is ridiculous. I said, for the third time, I WILL BE HOME AT ____ O'CLOCK."

"What o'clock?"

...and so on, ad nauseam. It's really quite impressively clever, and must have taken years of R&D work to make a network so infuriatingly yet selectively glitchy.

Re: Shoe Event Horizon

My understanding is that most UK High Streets have passed the cellphone event horizon years ago, and are now beyond the Betting Shop, Charity Shop and even American Candy Shop event horizons!

Re: Secondary phone retailers are hungry for inventory ass

It’s not a typo, it’s a sign that the market has bottom-ed out.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: not just software

>Usually it's either Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. In Outlook, one of those two will just send the message, ready or not. Are you feeling lucky, punk?

Aaargh. This.

A trick that seasoned Outlook users adopt is... when composing a mail, fill in the recipient address(es) last. Any inadvertent attempt to send the mail - whether by misremembered keypress or accidental clicking on a Send button that has been redesigned in this version and is now a picture of a paperclip because some UI designer thought it looked cool - will thus fail, allowing you to curse Outlook in private without embarrassing yourself to others.

Re: Unix shell and web browsing

>Not to mention vision-impaired users

Speaking of... has anyone heard from our friend and vision-impaired fellow commentard ShadowSystems recently?

Your remark just made me realise that I don't recall seeing any posts from him for a while.

I do hope he's OK.

Intuit ordered to use the word 'free' less freely in its ads

Screw Intuit

This is the company that lobbied for years to shut down any attempt by the IRS to offer its own free online filing system.

Nail Intuit to the proverbial door. Couldn't happen to a more deserving company.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: Strange words

>...by a "manufacturer" whose company name is a randomly assigned string of 5 letters...

Ah, I see you, too, have shopped on Amazon recently.

I just searched, for example purposes, for a Thinkpad battery.

Guess which one of these isn't a "real" company name?

Ouwee, Jiazijia, Laqueena, Antiee, Jotact

Trick question! They're all purveyors of replacement "genuine" batteries with suspiciously-identical stock photography!

ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 ships out, chip shortages be damned

Re: Everything old is new again

True! I have, leaning against the desk next to me, a Chicago Telephone Supply Company "Series" telephone from around 1905. Oak cabinet, 5-magnet generator, expansion space for a wet pile battery... now, if I can just figure out how to interface it to my PC as the world's most Steampunk Teams headset...

You have yours already? Grrr. And fortunately your spoiler about the box colour got mangled in editing… please don’t correct it, I don’t want to know anything about the Next or its packaging until I receive mine :)

Re the built in power switch, the KS2 Nexts at least have an inline switch on their power cord, right?

Re: SAM Coupé compatibility, anybody?

I remember riding the bus to school and coveting the Sam Coupé when it was reviewed or advertised in the Spectrum magazines. Never got round to buying one; I was able to persuade my dad to get me an Amiga 500 soon after, which in hindsight was a much better result.

Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim

Re: Digital Equipment Corporation & Me

Fair play to you. I'm a firm believer that everyone deserves a second chance - we're all young once, we all make mistakes.

It's the third, fourth, fifth, ... ninety-second... chances that the criminal justice system seems to give people these days that, well, test my good nature a little!

Anyway, echoing the reply above - have another pint on this chilly Saturday afternoon, and give yourself a pat on the back for plowing a straight furrow in life in the end.

Re: Wait, what??

Interesting. Maybe it's a recent-ish rule change?

There's a line at the end of Johnny Cash's "The Chicken in Black" (don't judge me) where he says "Well, I don't pay any income tax... you don't pay tax on money you steal" and I'd always taken that as gospel, because if you can't trust lyrics in a spoof song about a country singer getting his brain swapped with a chicken and a bank-robber, who can you trust?

Re: Lashings

Honestly, I'm a little disconcerted that my memory was able to haul the names "Uncle Quentin" and "Kirrin Island", unprompted and without recourse to google, from a memory pit 40+ years deep.

And yet I still can't remember my nieces' birthdays.

Bah :)

Instead of holidays with Uncle Quentin at Kirrin Island and lashings of ginger beer, it's now limo rides to cigar bars and gentlemen's clubs!

Why do they always feel the need to update childhood classics for an "edgy" modern audience???

Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs

Re: build enough assembly lines to ensure there is a healthy supply of AI processors to meet demand

Honestly, considering it's Sam Altman and OpenAI, I'm surprised he's talking about building his own infrastructure, and not merely using other peoples' facilities without their permission or licensing. After all, that approach has worked just fine so far for training the AI models...

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Re: First Amazon Purchase

Oh yeah, I remember Amazon, the plucky little online book-shop. Whatever became of them, I wonder?

(As an indicator of how long it was before they became the all-consuming behemoth they are now, there's an amusing bit in one of the Futurama episodes circa 2003, when one of the characters announces that with his spare 1¢ change he's going to buy 5 shares of Amazon.com. "A risk taker!" comes the approving-but-sceptical response...)

As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix

Re: Stock hits an all-time high today

Yes, but to be fair, Wall Street would be happy if Broadcom were boiling down the VMWare employees and selling them as Soylent Green - reducing headcount overheads and bringing in a new revenue stream!

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any NUCs that allow 3 SSDs - two M.2 sticks, or an M.2 and a 2.5” drive on the older ones, is your limit. Maybe use a JBOD box over Thunderbolt or USB-C?

…and blinking in what seems to be the morse code for “H-E-L-P”?

Businessman faces 20 years in prison over accusations of illicit chip exports to Russia

Re: KAAAAHHHHNNN !

You’re just voicing what we’re all thinking.

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

Re: It a wonder why this happens

Ed Davey has adopted the exact same defence.

“They TOLD me it was all tickety-boo, and I trusted them. It’s not like my job as Post Office Minister required me to hold them to account or scrutinize them or anything…”

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Re: AI subscription

>According to Samsung the AI compnent will be subscription after 2025

Ah, the time-honoured drug dealer model.

"First hit's free."

I assume they're hoping that over the next 12-24 months users will get totally hooked on the AI features, such that being asked to pony up $$ each month after 2025 will seem reasonable.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

“Holly, as the Esperantinos say, ’Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano in mea bideo’… and I think we all know what that means!”

“Yeah. It means, ‘please would you send for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet’.”

“Oh. Well, what’s the one that means ‘your mother spent all her time up against walls with sailors’?”

“I’m not going to tell you, Arnold.’

Re: "speach"

Nah, but I had several friends who were, and you know how at that age kids - well, speaking for myself - are a sponge for new words and idioms.

For example, I remember my brother and I going through a phase - this would be early 80s - of describing anything that was really easy as "dead pimps" (cf "dead simple" etc), a coinage that alarmed and unnerved our parents... but then, isn't that the whole point of being a kid? :)

Re: "speach"

They were called "Jaspers" when I were a lad... shortly after the late middle ages, admittedly.

Allow me to introduce you, if you haven't already heard of it, to Muphry's [sic] Law!

Re: Did the error message contain the word "Belgium"?

Oh, I say.

*faints*

Re: Dictionaries

Heh. I once had to sprint round to my boss’s cube to scream at him to hit “Recall” in Outlook. He’d cc’ed me on a mail to a customer, beginning his missive with “Dear Angus…”

Except that he’d left out the G. And Recall failed.

The customer, fortunately, was amused.

Re: "speach"

Such a beautiful, concise language. The English word for wasp is “nasty evil black and yellow fucker”.

IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points

It's the IBM of the 21st century, what do you expect?

Not an engineering excellence-led company any more. Between this and their shoddy treatment of their so-called "dinobabies" - employees over the age of about 24 to you and me - I honestly don't know why anyone with any pride would still work there, much less work outside their day-job to develop IP for the company. Even the old rewards scheme sounds frankly insulting - "you developed and patented a new algorithm that'll make $millions for IBM - here's $1200, you clever little chap." What's the new one? Accrue enough BluePoints™ and get a set of lead-crystal glasses or a souvenir pen?

I feel really sorry for people who've put their heart and soul and careers into IBM. The company doesn't deserve you.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Re: Fix copy/paste bugs in Windows 11 first

> Several times a day copy/paste stops working…

It’s probably losing connection to the Microsoft copy-paste-datamine server :)

(NB: ten years ago, everyone would have known that my comment above was ridiculous hyperbole for the purpose - whether I achieved it or not! - of humour. Now, in this era of telemetry and everything-under-the-sun being fed into rapacious LLM training sets… am I really joking?)

Re: Caveat

Unless things have changed… last time I installed Windows 11, merely having no available network was no excuse. Setup blocked and refused to go any further until I’d connected the machine one way or another, so that it could force me into creating a Microsoft account.

I had to resort to - from memory - pressing shift+F10 to get a command prompt, killing the setup process, then restarting it with a switch to the effect of “/noMicrosoftAccount” (not actual wording, obviously), before I could continue with a local account.

Yes, it was doable and cost me only a few minutes’ effort, but the direction of travel is clear.

On the plus side, I bet Coprolith - sorry, autocorrect strikes again, I meant Copilot - will require a Microsoft account, so that’s one less thing that will be bothering me.

Re: Why?

For some reason I now have a mental image of Terry Wogan and Pudsey Bear.

“Call us now. This year’s BBC Children in Need is aiming to raise £60 billion, to double the net income of these hard-working Microsoft executives…”

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

Re: Put AI Where it Belongs...

To quote Futurama, as they’re flinging a toilet with twin joysticks into an e-waste dumpster:

“Sorry, overly complicated Japanese toilet… you know too much!”

“Please, no! I give you… happy poopy time!”

Careful now. Down with this sort of thing.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

> Some of those postmasters were calling the helpline hundreds of times each

…and all being told, according to reports, “you’re the only person who’s seeing this behaviour”.

The whole thing stinks.

Patch time: Critical GitLab vulnerability exposes 2FA-less users to account takeovers

Re: A convoluted amalgamation of techno-gibberish

You're, uh, new here, right?

AMFM1 is our resident Markov Chain-based bot - or if not, a very, very peculiar human. I just ignore him/it.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Interesting.

My wife's diesel Disco has stop/start, but it's smart enough to enable or disable it according to how firmly you press the brake pedal. Light touch, just enough to hold the car stationary = no stop/start. Heavier press on the pedal = stop/start enabled.

Actually quite smart, because how is the car going to know for itself whether you're going to be stopped for 2 seconds, or a minute?

Her car also has a heated steering wheel, which I admit I do covet. My older Volvo has adaptive cruise control though, so I guess we're even :)

Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

Time for Roman Hypocaust technology again?

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: Linus Torvalds and I both enjoyed the QL

Namedropper :)

My only connection with Linus, as I learned from an article here a day or two ago, is that he too lives just outside Portland Oregon and has been affected just as I have by our widespread power outages and sub-freezing temperatures. You have me well and truly beaten.

Re: "Outshined" ?

Don't loose your temper, Liam. The Internet's full of rouge spelling mistakes.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: I must be young.

Lots of things were orange in the 70s. Wallpaper, trousers, the Bond Bug…

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Re: Maybe

Hey, as someone who used to work alongside Intel's marketing department, and even had "marketing" in my job title, I take exception to that :)

Anyway, moot point now. No more NUCs from Intel - with or without chirpy little musical packaging - alas :(

Re: "their substantial egos"

...and here it is:

http://www.retro8bitcomputers.co.uk/Content/downloads/manuals/zx81-basic-manual.pdf

(Incidentally, the author of that manual - Steven Vickers - had a very quirky sense of humour. Why do computer manuals nowadays not have lines like "Suddenly, your housekeeper rushes in to tell you that eggs are now 61p a dozen"? Oh, yes... there are no manuals with computers any more. Bah.)

So did Beta BASIC, the third-party upgraded programming language for it.

Grrrrr.

(See my comment above. Still waiting for my Next.)

Reports that China's military uses Baidu's AI lead to stock plunge

Thrown, if memory serves, by Two-Ton Ted from Teddington - that dastardly agent of the Chinese PLA!