Posts by David 132

Ford to sell unfinished Explorers as chip shortage bites

Re: Quite frankly ...

As an aside, the Chevette was also sold here in the US under the Chevrolet badge. It remains notorious for its unreliability and penny-pinching design. The cheapest variant - the "Scooter" - had no back seat, fibreboard door cards with hanger straps rather than armrests, and no glovebox door.

Compared to which, the UK-spec Chevettes (a mate of mine had one at Uni in the early 90s) were positively sybaritic.

Mind you - and I admit I only just learned this after checking the wikipedia page to make sure my memories were correct - there was a coachbuilt, ultra-high-spec, luxury variant of the Chevrolet Chevette. It was called the Leata Cabalero, and I somehow managed to type the previous sentence with a straight face. Read about it and think what an unfair world it is that it didn't succeed.

Re: Thank god for small favors

Or better yet, and simpler - knitted/crochéted toilet seat covers.

Just the thing for every aspirational '70s homeowner. Goes beautifully with the avocado or pink bathroom suite and crinoline-lady loo roll cover.

Re: Thank god for small favors

*Unlike the ex Mrs Oncoming-Scorn, who despite the engine being cold would ram the all the heater to controls to full & complaining there wasn't any heat for the time period of up to 15 minutes for a light warm gust to start blowing out in extreme temps.

Either this is a general Wife thing, or I'm married to your ex.

In vain have I explained to Mrs David132 that if the engine is cold, there is no heat available in the system, and so setting the AC controls to anything above ambient is technically a waste of time for the first few minutes. Regardless, there is no difference between having them set to 72° or 90°, the car won't get warm any quicker.

Yet still she does it. Then, 15 minutes later, turns the temp back down to the usual setting "because I'm too hot". Grrr.

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Re: Accident? my codpiece

And nearly as tragic as poor old Archbishop Wilfred, slipping and falling backwards onto the spire of Norwich Cathedral.

Re: 'browsing for binaries'

Hey! Transputers are computers too, you bigot!

Qualcomm reveals it's not selling to Russia during Twitter spat

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

"The following neighborhood residents will not be killed by me. Ned Flanders; Maude Flanders; Homer Simpson; Marge Simpson; Lisa Simpson; that little baby Simpson.

That is all."

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

The plus side is that we can blame the other side for not noticing we've started it.

I think that of all the things that could happen without you noticing, “a nuclear war” is probably not on the list.

“Oh, was there a nuclear war? Damn. Missed it. I don’t use Facebook. Next time, try my gmail.”

Or to misquote Carl Sandburg, “suppose they gave a war and nobody Retweet’ed it”.

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Re: Commercial vehicle at a Price per View

>But, they can not have it both ways; pay for the OS and force ads onto the user.

Cable TV and its descendants have, I’m afraid, proved that assertion incorrect. People have shown that they will tolerate advertising in a product they’re paying for, so Microsoft aren’t the first.

Bastards. A pox on the lot of ‘em.

Ukraine president namechecks software giants to end support in Russia

Maybe we should start a petition?

“Dear Microsoft,

As concerned citizens of the civilized world, we call upon you to help the struggling people of Ukraine by immediately donating Teams/Sharepoint licences to the Putin regime.

Do the right thing.”

Re: They need the gas!

And that shameless Putin apologist Gerhard Schröder.

Afraid of the big bad Linux desktop? Zorin 16.1 is here

I wonder if the downvoters got your reference.

Network operating system Dent 2.0 targets smaller firms

Re: Can't wait for the Slartibartfast version :)

Disappointing though it was in some other ways, I did think there was at least one good line in the 2005 film.

Arthur: Normality, right. We can talk about "normality" till the cows come home.

Ford: What is normal...

Trillian: What's home...

Zaphod: What are "cows"??

Ah well. It made me smile.

Re: please

I heard that the first release, "Arthur", was delayed. As in, "the late Dent Arthur Dent".

"It's a sort of threat you see. I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."

Icon because you need to drink six of them. The world's about to end.

Google buys threat intel giant Mandiant for $5.4bn

Re: Boring Quibble

May I recommend this one instead? It's got Tammy Wynette in it. And now you know exactly which one I've linked to.

Deere & Co won't give out software and data needed for repairs, watchdog told

...other than stan for them?

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

Re: IBM Chatbot

Ouch. Well played!

Re: Alternate Reality?

And most FAQ pages are a blend of the stupidly obvious ("your company name is acme, how is acme spelled?"), the fawning ("Q: Do you have a wide range of financial service products? A: Yes, we do! Click here for details") and the utterly useless ("How many liters of water did your new production process save in 2017-18?").

I reserve most of my ire these days for automated telephone systems. I generally devolve to screaming at them in an attempt to get routed to a real, live, sentient human being. ("I think you want to talk about mortgage products, is that correct?" "NO! FOR HELL'S SAKE, I NEED TO REVERSE A TRANSFER! PUT ME THROUGH TO SOMEONE!" "I heard you say that you want to talk about insurance. Did I get that right?" "AAARGH!" *keels over from aneurysm*)

Oracle creates new form of free Solaris

Re: OpenIndiana

yes, Linux is hugely messy compared to a top-down controlled Solaris or Mac…

something something cathedral bazaar...

Here's why prolonged Russia-Ukraine war would be really bad for us, say chip designers

Re: Risks

>Corsair complaining they cannot work with their Russian office deserves the world's smallest violin.

Actually, Corsair have said that their R&D office is in Ukraine, not Russia. The paragraph in question could perhaps be worded more clearly, it's easy to mis-read it.

Re: "if a chip was stolen or illegally shipped to the Soviet Union, it was very visible"

Yeah at that time the Soviets were Walken all over us...

Russia scrambles to bootstrap HPC clusters with native tech

Re: Its too late for Putin

I agree with you at one level, but let's not get carried away. After the Great War, the Allied powers pretty much imposed the same conditions on Germany - no military, swingeing reparations, utter and abject economic humiliation.

That led to the insane hyperinflation of the Weimar era, and a festering sense of us-vs-the-world injustice that a certain short dictator with delusions of grandeur was able to leverage in the 1930s to disastrous effect.

In my armchair general opinion, the aim of the West should not be to humiliate and/or cripple Russia in the long term. It should be a simple binary choice for Russia - topple Putin and relinquish all claim to Ukraine (albeit with reparations to be negotiated) and be welcomed back into the modern world as respected equals, or... continue to pursue your mad claims against a Ukraine that doesn't want you and is prepared to drag you down into another Afghanistan, and remain an international pariah with no access to funding, consumer goods, or sporting accolades.

We (by which I mean the other Western countries - the Ukrainians might feel differently) can forgive, but that's not to say we must forget.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla agree on something: Make web dev lives easier

Re: Surprised nobody mentioned

Well, there's that XKCD one, but there's also so many other webcomics that lampoon the standards situation. Perhaps someone should write a new webcomic that summarizes & unites all of them, meeting every use-case?

Re: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

<marquee><blink>Why, yes it can.</blink></marquee>

(ShadowSystems - I hope your screen reader software parses this joke correctly :) )

Re: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

When I first encountered the web - so, around '94 or so - I'm pretty sure I remember reading some functional description of HTML that basically said, "HTML describes the page content, and it is up to the web-browser as to how it's rendered. So don't make any assumptions about font size or colour scheme."

Now, I might be misremembering, but I do often wish that paradigm had persisted, assuming it ever existed in the first place. Provide the content in outline, and let the endpoint make the layout/readability decisions.

Icon, because I feel like an old fart more and more these days.

(Feel free to imagine a "This comment under construction!! Check back soon!!" roadworks .GIF here)

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

Re: Putin provoking NATO

According to latest reports, Russian media is already claiming that the nuclear plant was "under the control of Russia since Feb 28", and was "attacked by Ukrainian separatists as a provocation".

I'm sure there's a few people out there - mostly in Russia, sadly - who will believe that tripe.

Rule #1 of international relations: The Russian government lies. And they know that you know they're lying. And they don't care.

Re: Evil mastermind or incompetence at work?

And I'm sure Putin is hoping that a release of radioactivity at the plant will remind Western Europe of Chernobyl, easing the pressure in Germany (and elsewhere) to prolong the life of their own nuclear plants. Even the Greens in the Berlin government have been saying, let's keep the nuclear plants going, it's the lesser of two evils.

And Putin will always be eager to fill the gap once people start to shiver. "Why, you need more gas? Well, I'd love to help, but you need to pressure your governments to ease off on their sanctions and be nice to me..."

He's an evil little paranoid shit, that's for sure.

Oracle, SAP suspend business in Russia amid invasion

Re: OK, less of a sanction then a favor isn't it?

Easy there, tiger. Let's leave the crimes-against-humanity to Vlad, shall we?

Re: OK, less of a sanction then a favor isn't it?

The Red Army versus Oracle's licence auditing division? Or to put it another way, an unstoppable, mighty, remorseless force that strikes fear into its foes, versus... the red army.

Not sure I'd want to take bets on that one.

BitConnect boss accused of $2.4bn crypto-Ponzi fraud has disappeared

Re: Is the SEC really his biggest problem?

"Satish Kumbhani? I don't know who you're talking about. My name is Randolph Stippler, and I have papers to prove it..."

"And wonderful papers they are, Mr Kumbhani."

Re: Ah, the ol' hire a hitman thing

Absolutely! Everyone with any sense knows to use Angie’s List. That way your hitman has been properly peer-reviewed. “⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ : quick, efficient, even cleaned up afterwards and cancelled the newspaper delivery so as to delay suspicion. Takes most major credit cards. Would use again.”

Switzerland's SWIFT data centre under guard after Russian banks excluded

Every data-packet trying to enter the building will be inspected, and if the header contains any backward Rs or ends with "-ski", it will be refused admission.

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Re: Not about the modems

>he'd had an American car with the numberplate PET 123, which he enjoyed driving in France because of how PET translates.

Funny, American cars are usually known for awful gas consumption, not the reverse...

> Don’t think BT thought about that scenario at the time.

Or when BT had “Friends and Family”*, a scheme whereby you could nominate a list of 5 or so frequently-called numbers and get free (or maybe it was just discounted) calls to them. Of course, it wasn’t long before the smarter home ISP users added their dialup POP numbers to the list. I recall a news quote from BT at the time, to the effect of “we didn’t think anyone would be sad enough to designate their Internet connection as a ‘friend’”!

* maybe they still do? I haven’t been in the UK, or a BT customer, for many a year…

Microsoft goes native with OneDrive on Apple Silicon

Re: If only...

I'm sure that in the fairly recent past, some marketing wonk in the tech industry presented his latest brainwave to management:

"Problem statement: What aspects of the home computing segment are left for us to monetize? We now have DLC, subscriptions and microtransactions on gaming, paywalls on websites, subscriptions on office suites... what's next?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: people will pay us every time they save a file to disk!"

(confused silence)

"No, no, run with me on this - we'll call it 'save to cloud', we'll use dark patterns to steer people towards it whether they think they want it or not, and best of all, we can hold people's data to ransom if they stop paying us! It's one more chunk of the 'Personal' Computer that we will own!"

(tumultuous applause)

(one guy at the back of the room, dressed all in red, with horns on his head and black smoke rising sinuously from him as a perpetual cloud of flies buzzes around, speaks up hesitantly)

"I don't know. It seems a bit too... evil."

OneWeb drops launches from Russia's Baikonur spaceport

Re: At least we still have Galileo.

Magnifico!

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

I smell a rat here…

Microsoft: Russia invasion of Ukraine ‘unlawful, unjustified’

>this whole war, for instance, is an act of almost unbelievable foot-shooting idiocy on Putin's part

Yes.

Now, call me paranoid, but is it too idiotic?

I mean - leaving the Ukrainian airforce at least semi-functional (MiGs and drones); leaving the comms and power networks up; neglecting to ensure that logistics keep pace with frontline units, leading to those units running out of fuel & supplies; lining up your mobile units in a "40 mile long" convoy (according to latest reports) where they're a sitting duck for aforesaid drones; dropping clusterbombs on civilian areas... surely these are what might be termed schoolboy errors? OK, with the exception of that last one, because Putin has previously shown that he doesn't give a rat's anus about the Geneva Convention or international norms.

Is Putin planning something very, very devious? Is all this just a distraction while he does the "real" stuff somewhere outside the gaze of the world's media? Is he winding the West in to his trap, waiting for the right time to say with a straight face "NATO is fighting against us in all but name, they have cornered us, this is the final battle for the Glory Of Mother Russia(TM), I am entirely justified in going nuclear"? Is he willing to tolerate making his armed forces look feeble in the short term, knowing that there will be a "payoff" that will make everyone forget the last five days' struggle?

Web devs rally to challenge Apple App Store browser rules

Re: Monocultures

Not sure if you've misinterpreted the article, or are making a larger point that has gone straight over my head, but... Alex Russell of Microsoft is not part (AFAIK) of this new OWA grouping. He's just a prominent figure in the web development space, quoted here in this article for context. Maybe the article flow could be clearer.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: ZX81

Unless (on the Spectrum) you were running Beta Basic, which - provided you could remember how to type LOAD "" in the first place, which I seem to recall was J-(symshift)P-(symshift)P - allowed you to type keywords one character at a time.

Re: Philips Maestro

Ah yes, playing "spot the item glued to the walls and spray-painted to look future-y" was always fun when watching Red Dwarf. Pretty sure I saw an Amiga keyboard or two and what was possibly the instrument cluster shroud from a Ford Escort there in many of the early episodes.

And much of the "computer" stuff was Amiga based too, such as the terminal Lister was using when Kryten's detached eyeball scuttled up his boxer shorts (long story. Watch the episode. Or "just buy a potion from Gandalf the master wizard! That's what I usually do!").

(Edit: Holy crap. That episode was 1992?? Blimey.)

Re: 1980s

I heard they had plans to ship it with a ROM-based Chinese strategy board game and its spreadsheet application too - the putative marketing slogan being "Go, Forth, and Multiply".

(sorry)

But yes, I remember the Ace. Definitely an interesting also-ran.

Re: Atari ST ?

Yes, it was a joke. I was trolling "for teh lulz" as I believe the kids say, when they're not listening to their popular beat combos and hanging out in their depraved coffee bars with their "bobby-socks".

Now, gather round and pay attention as I deign to share my opinion on the absolute superiority of vi over emacs, or was it the other way around...

Re: Size of a real keyboard?

My first "real" PC, around 1988, was a Durango F-85 (as seen here), complete with built-in daisywheel printer, dual 5¼" floppies, and keyboard. The monitor was separate, so I suppose technically it qualifies as a system-in-keyboard computer like this patent. All 6 tons of it.

Never did find a boot disk for the thing, so it just took up (a lot of) space and clicked, clunked, dimmed the room lights, whirred and displayed a flashing cursor when I powered it on. I'd been told it needed a CP/M boot disk, but reading the above link it turns out it used its own proprietary OS - I never stood a chance of obtaining one in those pre-Internet days! (OK, pedants... pre-pervasive Internet...)

Re: 1980s

And the Aquarius and Atari 400/800 (he said, reaching deeper into his recollection of obscure early-80s 8-bit home microcomputers...)

Re: Atari ST ?

Atari ST... ah yes, wasn't that the inferior knockoff clone of the Amiga 500?

(Note icon.)

Re: Size of a real keyboard?

Ah, the Spectrum+ 48K? Had one myself. Got it for Christmas '84, and ­­it cost £179.99, unless my increasingly elderly braincells mislead me.

(Edit: Just checked wikipedia. I was out by £0.04, but correct on the year - apparently, it came out in October of '84.)

Coincidentally, or not, I have backed the second release of the ZX Spectrum Next on Kickstarter. And recently bought myself an rPi 400. Guess I'm intrinsically drawn to this form-factor that Apple has just invented.

Tech world's Ukraine response mixes evacuation efforts, ad bans, free phones, infosec FUD

Re: Dear Ukraine...

Agree with the sentiment, but with a slight modification...

Russian leadership: Fuck off.

This shitshow is 100% the fault of Putin and his cronies. I don't believe the majority of the Russian people want this war, as is evident from the protests that have been taking place.

Plus, if we continue to carelessly blame Russia as a whole, we risk a siege/us-vs-the-world mentality taking hold in the Russian population, potentially leading them to hate the West more than they hate Putin. Let's be careful.

Edit: hah, while I was composing this post, the AC above made pretty much the same point. I thought of it first, honest. Am just slower at typing :)

Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

Re: Compare cars and computers

> it's constantly in the Grand Canal in Venice

Sounds a long way to go just to dip the headlights.

Fancy some new features? Try general-purpose Linux alternative Liquorix

Re: I'm confused....

Right now, sure. But we'll be seeing HURDs aaaaany day now. Real soon. Right around the corner. So close. So very, very imminent.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Re: Did you get to use the ShockyStick(TM)?

I’ve always preferred “The Clue-by-Four” aka The ClueBat.