Posts by David 132

Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments

Re: A better approach

Would be to murder the top 1500 people at Google, burn their houses down and exile their families to Antarctica

Oh great. Another wishy-washy, soft-on-crime, bleeding-heart liberal.

Do it. It's super easy. Just a cheap low-cost RPi or Intel NUC, and configure your DHCP server to point to it as your DNS server. Game-changing.

Re: Why do people stil pay attention to anything Google says

Like politicians or public servants.

Don't pay any attention to what they say.

Watch what they do.

Re: /etc/hosts

Indeed. To use a relevant analogy, why hard-code your page appearance in HTML? It's not 1998 any more. Use style-sheets.

(Yeah, I know. I am the Bergholt Stuttley Johnson of coming up with analogies.)

Re: I usually use Firefox.

Although of course, Firefox pushing DNS-over-HTTPS has nothing to do with stymieing DNS-based adblocking, and is all about user privacy. Yup.

I've found that most of my frequently-used sites are fine without JS. The awkward exceptions are Allmusic.com and TheTVDB.com (which, since its last redesign, seems to deliberately load its content from the sketchiest-sounding domains possible).

Ironically, even the bay that is piratey seems to work better without JS (and with uBlock Origin, NoScript and Pi-Hole all in force) than those two above.

Re: deal breaker

Seconded for Pi-Hole. It's a game-changer and much more powerful than the /etc/hosts solution.

I lost power at my home earlier this morning and for a while my Pi-Hole DNS box was down along with the rest of my network. Browsiing on my phone over cellular was miserable. So many adverts!

Re: Mozilla, so careful

It's a good browser despite Mozilla's best efforts, not because of them, alas.

Don't make an iOS of yourself – Apple's patched its OSes, you know the drill

Frankly, I plan for my last words(*) to be something along the lines of "...and please look after my bullion and artwork, it's all stored at... *gack* *splutter* *gurgle*"

(*- assuming my actual last words aren't something along the lines of "don't be daft, you don't get poisonous snakes around here, of course I can pick it u.....")

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

NT's demands for CPU performance, memory and disk space always reminded me of that scene in Smokey and the Bandit where Little Enos is giving the Bandit money.

"I'm going to need a new car..."

(doles out a few hundred dollar bills)

"A speedy car..."

(doles out more bills)

"..speedier than that..."

(with a look of disgust, hands over even more money)

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Re: From the late, great Sir Terry, preceded by the late great Douglas.

I’ll just leave this here.

AWS DocumentDB not MongoDB-compatible, says MongoDB Inc

Re: Mark Porter makes good points, but

Nope. "Pale", unless you're making some clever allusion to buckets that has gone straight over my sleep-deprived head.

Helios-NG: An open-source cluster OS that links the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga

Showing its Amiga influence there. "Memory Protection" was an alien concept in AmigaDOS (to be fair, there was no MMU on the original 68K processor if I recall correctly).

Re: Oooo ... transputers :-)

even if it meant buying the worst value book in history "The Occam Programming Manual" by Inmos which had multiple pages inscribed with the phrase "this page is intentionally left blank".

So what you're saying is that the Occam book had been shaved to be as simple as possible.

How very apt.

Battlefield 2042: Please don't be the death knell of the franchise, please don't be the death knell of the franchise

Re: Miss it

Flying over a semi dessert map where there was a canyon down the centre

Yes, that was a trifle difficult.

I still play BF1942. Co-op maps, against 6-12 bots, with a couple of friends on my home LAN, all of us in the same room - great fun. Sadly, that's a mode of game-play that no-one seems to create any more. As noted in the article, playing against "foul mouthed tweenagers" is my idea of Hell.

I really, really wish there were more local LAN co-op-versus-bot games out there. Right now I have Age of Mythology (2003), BF1942 (ditto) and Grim Dawn (2020) - and that's basically it :(

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

Re: All to be superseded

And floor-wax! And dessert topping!

All to be superseded

I’m just waiting for the Systemd package manager and file-system re-organizer. Only a matter of time.

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

Re: Ah, frustratingly short

Yeah, but it ended on a high note… a Prodigy video (RIP Keith), from their Fat of the Land pomp no less! Who could ask for more, esp. as it’s POETS day now?

Icon is very much a Firestarter —->

Amazon Appstore melts over Android 12 'Snow Cone'

Re: Testing? Amazon hasn't heard of it

Ah, but here I spot the flaw in your argument. Google never has a product stage beyond “beta”.

The Google product lifecycle goes

Marketing Presentation —> Beta release —-> cancelled due to “ooh look, squirrel!” ADHD

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... a coding puzzle and it's a doozy

Re: I challenge you to use a better language...

Oooh, la-de-dah, look at Mister Fancy here with his 128KB of memory.

Pass me that blu-tack, will you, my ZX RAMpack is wobbling again…

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

Re: Rocket science

As is my custom on Reg articles concerning rocketry, allow me to highlight Ignition! by John D Clark. It’s one of the finest, most informative, and, yes, laugh-out-loud funny books ever written on the early history of rocketry up to the 1970s or so. Albeit that isn’t a very crowded field of literature, I’ll admit. But it’s very much worth a read.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Re: Not is such a tiny word

It was a surprise that the whole film is not on YouTube.

Checking in a few days later to say that I have happily been able to locate a copy of it, by a means that rhymes with "litwarrant". There was, it seems, one and only one person kind enough to be sharing it. Now there are two. I shall enjoy watching it!

Re: What was I thinking?

Obligatory SMBC cartoon.

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

I was about to say, " 'OnesSQL', or otherwise known as 'Charles'..."

Re: The best typos, of course...

By jove, was that incident 13 years ago already? Wow.

If you'd asked me, I'd have sworn it was only 3 or 4 years ago that it happened.

Now I feel old.

"...and then I had to look up some US regulatory information, so tried to get to what I thought would be the official site for the White House..."

Re: What was I thinking?

As I recall, in the sequel book Maskerade, in which King Verence had finally succeeded in buying the actual Marital Arts publication, Nanny Ogg had wandered into the royal bedchamber and spent an amusing half-hour drawing spectacles and moustaches on all the illustrations.

Verence was subsequently heard to have been enquiring of his courtiers where he might obtain a false moustache...

I think we may have wandered off-topic a little here.

Re: Not is such a tiny word

I can imagine that would cause a fuss itself.. a Nigel Farrago, if you will...

Re: Doesn't compare, but...

Ah yes. Reminiscent of the old joke about the “dyslexic pimp who bought a warehouse”.

Re: Regards

You’ve just made me realize that a good April Fool’s joke would be to install a font where (for example) the T and G glyph appearances are swapped. Would drive the victim mad wondering why those two keys on their keyboard have apparently switched places, not to mention the hilarity when others quesgion ghe weirdly-spelg email messates…

Re: Draft copies..

For some reason I found myself reading “pissnet wanklink” in the voice of Arthur Bostrom. I’ve been binge-watching ‘Allo ‘Allo lately.

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

Then there's the VISIO-like diagramming software called... "dia"

Presumably the users’ group is called diatribe, and the custom integrated silicon for linking installations together is dianetICs?

Yes, I’ll get my coat, those puns were awful even by my own low standards.

Re: What was I thinking?

Actually, as I recall, the customer in question was very good-natured about it, as it wasn’t the first time he’d been inadvertently addressed that way by other parties. The relationship with the customer, having sunk to the bottom, recovered. My boss did not have to commit ritual seppuku with his red Swingline stapler, and learned a valuable lesson about spell-checkers (“just because it doesn’t have a red squiggly line under it, doesn’t mean it’s the right word…”)

Re: Not is such a tiny word

Ooh, thanks for the recommendation. As a fan of Eric Sykes’ “The Plank” and similar films, I’ll have to seek that one out.

Edit: now watching AHOYO from your link. Is that a very young Ronnie Barker I see? Awesome.

Re: Not is such a tiny word

Indeed, and my sainted grandmother, God rest her soul, would embarrass my mother by loudly and obliviously asking in shops for that shade of shoe-polish well into the 1990s.

On a related note, I saw recently that a certain type of birdseed here has been renamed to "Nijer" seeds, to avoid linguistic confusion.

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

"If you say it's your thermometer I'll have to believe you but it's a funny place to put it."

(from the titles of Carry On Again Doctor)

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

Or as her fond parents nicknamed her, Little Bobbie Tables?

Re: A small percentage of the blame should go to the other RDBMS creators...

....and now I have "there's Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, scrape them off Jim!" running round and round my head. Thanks a bunch.

Re: What was I thinking?

Haha I can still remember that advert, and the kid's "Accrington Stanley? Who are they?"

Re: What was I thinking?

A former boss of mine many years ago sent an email to a customer, CC'ing me, that began "Dear Angus..."

Except he fumble-fingered it and left out the 'g'.

I sprinted round to his cube and panted out as quick as I could "Recall! You need to recall that mail!"

"Why?"

"Look at how you addressed him!"

Cue boss (who was, in fact, an awesome guy) turning a very pale colour and frantically trying to locate the Outlook "recall mail" button...

Apple sues 'amoral 21st century mercenaries' NSO for infecting iPhones with Pegasus spyware

Re: But .. Isn't U.S 4 letter agencies and allies doing exactly the same stuff as NSO ?

No, you're trolling for your masters in Beijing/Moscow/Tehran, and doing a pretty piss-poor job at it. No 50 cent payment for you.

Replaced several times but still live and kicking: Windows Forms updated for .NET 6.0

Re: Code like it's 1992!

<blink>Yes it was!</blink>

**This Comment Best Viewed Using Internet Explorer 4.0 At 800x600 and 256 Colours*

Ford taking control of chip supply in Globalfoundries deal

No, you weren't the only one. My own response was full Marvin - "Sounds ghastly."

A tiny island nation has put the rights to .tv up for grabs – but what’s this? Problematic contract clauses? Again?

Re: go underwater

“Applicants must have good coding proficiency, including high C level understanding”

Intel audio drivers give Windows 11 the blues and Microsoft Installer borked following security update

Re: I'm confused...

fixall

You mis-spelled "pointless and irrelevant suggestion for the so-called 'experts' on Microsoft's support forums, who will invariably suggest it as their first/only response, as they flail desperately trying to conceal their utter inability to be actually helpful"

Thousands of Firefox users accidentally commit login cookies on GitHub

Re: a consequence of committing code from one's Linux home directory

You insensitive bastard. I do all my development under MS-DOS 1.0, and cannot create subdirectories.

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Re: Ah, the halcyon days of tight hardware resources

>It's the 21st century, they'll all be in the cloud.

...and you won't be able to buy the game, just subscribe to it at a very reasonable £9.99 a month.

OVHcloud to share its OpenStack automation for use in on-prem clouds

OVH logo

I'm sorry, but whatever this article was trying to say, I was distracted by the accompanying photo on the front page, which at time of writing this is of an OVH building with the company name/logo "artfully" painted on the side in such a way that the top half of the letters is chopped off.

All I can think of now is this:

"Share and Enjoy is, of course, the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to show a consistent profit in recent years.

The motto stands—or stood—in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax: Share and Enjoy. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives—now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read “Go stick your head in a pig”, and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration..."

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

At some point you would have to consider which would be more costly: An army of Oracle consultants incrementally "upgrading" the system, or A tragic 'accident' involving the core mainframe and its entire disk array.

I've been reading too many BOFH columns because my first thought was, "a tragic accident whereby the core mainframe and entire disc array fell out of the 20th storey window onto an army of Oracle consultants".