Posts by David 132

And you thought that $999 Mac stand was dear: Steve Wozniak's Apple II doodles fetch $630,272 at auction

Re: A couple questions

Why the snide nastiness towards Jake? Did he personally piss in your Cheerios or something?

And in the season of goodwill to all, too? Lighten up and be charitable to your fellow man.

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

Re: Perhaps

You think Crapita employees are trained? Oh, sweet summer child.

This product is terrible. Can you deliver it in 20 years’ time when it becomes popular?

Re: penisillin

But it's just a little prick!

Re: "It will never catch on"

Sorry, bit of a cockup on the wine bottling front...

...and by farting loudly he could switch it to BBC Parliament?

Unsecured Azure blob exposed 500,000+ highly confidential docs from UK firm's CRM customers

Re: Pro bono

If I was suing the lead vocalist from U2, would I want my lawyer to be working pro bono?

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Dead mouse

So, you'd get Pinky in there, but not Brain.

Narf!

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

Public service non-broadcasting, shurely?

Re: Naughty step

Oh no. Adverts weren't seen. This is a terrible tragedy. I am very very upset by this.

Straight face icon -->

Snap decision: 74-year-old Florida man wrests puppy from jaws of alligator

Re: What did the dude expect, walking his pup close to the water?

My immediate reaction to that is amazement, and wanting to see a visual record.

Or more informally: “Cor! Vid?”

Re: "before taking a second to retrieve his own hand"

Unpremeditated crimes by unarmed perps usually involve whatever’s to hand.

Asus ROG Phone 3: An ugly but refreshing choice – for gaming fans only

Re: "Colours feel a bit washed out and saturated."

Thank you. Glad it's not just me. The same thought struck me but I didn't want to accidentally reveal my ignorance. More than usual, I mean.

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Re: Fail-over/Fall-over

Thank you, I now have a lovely mental image of nervously-sweating Google engineers frantically Bing/Qwant'ing for things like

- "how to reboot a server"

- "help I forgot my login password"

- "what does read error mean on floppy disk"

- "does anyone have a backup of google infrastructure"

...while managers scream at them :)

THIS WAS SO SERIOUS I HAD TO GO ROUND TO MY EIGHT-FOUR YEAR OLD NEIGHBOUR

It's alright, you're not talking to your neighbor any more, there's no need to speak so loudly while enunciating carefully.

Unfortunately, we don't have Rich Tea biscuits or Werther's Originals, sorry.

Re: “So there was no need to resort to something like Bing”

That would be an ecumenical matter.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

I don't know. I appear to have my very own anti-fanclub, someone here who fills their life with meaning, of a sort, by downvoting even my most inoffensive posts. In a way it's rather sweet, I suppose.

That is absolutely hilarious, albeit almost certainly true-in-the-Internet-sense, i.e. "not true". Thanks for the chuckle!

Re: Surely though...

Something like the clowdy version of an electric meter

It's an intriguing idea, but I'm not sure what a group of cats have to do with it.

Sorry, I'm feline somewhat picky this morning :)

Unfortunately, right now it's more likely to be "...wake up to a call from Felixstowe / Long Beach / whichever port, complaining that they're already full to the brim and you've just dropped another 2^32-1 shipping containers on them"!

Apple appears to be charging Brits £309 to replace AirPods Max batteries, while Americans need only stump up $79

Re: Apple! Earphones to make your eyes water

Are you sharing? Cos I can swap you an Opel Fruit for a Spangle, or a bite of my Marathon bar...

You’re asking us to believe two things:

1) Apple are not infallible, and

2) the battery replacement cost for Brits is markedly less than that for the US or Australia.

Hmm. This is my sceptical face.

Reading El Reg while working from home? Here's a pleasant thought: Kaspersky says 1 in 10 of you are naked right now

Sssh. Quit spoiling my attempts at subversion. And stop calling me Shirley!

Re: Wally got there first...

Sad:

1) I knew which one that was going to be before even clicking the link, and...

2) I can still quote "Kreegah! Bundalo!" verbatim after 25 years.

Re: "toiling away in the buff"

I'm in northern Oregon, currently a brisk 48°, but it doesn't bother me. SWMBO - who insists on keeping the house heated to a level that makes the wax flow out of my ears - is wintering in Palm Springs CA and is very comfortable. Not sure if that's cheaper for me than keeping the house heating at heart-of-the-sun levels all winter, but it's certainly a lot less stressful.

Re: Eurotrash

Ah, bring back Pipi and Popo. Even if that's only my phonetic guess at how their names were spelled.

As a courtesy to the cow's delicate & refined sensibilities?

I need that hot shower to open\clear my sinus' (sp?)

I'm pretty sure the plural is Sinai.

Trust me, I have a white coat and stethoscope and forceps and everything.

Japan pours millions into AI-powered dating to get its people making babies again

Re: I can't help but remember...

Definitely should have gone with "Electro-Gonorrhea - The Noisy Killer"!

You should buy a copy of Wife Trader magazine... (an oldie but goodie, but the Viz.co.uk domain is probably considered NSFW, unless you work at Viz of course)

EU Medicines Agency hacked, BioNTech-Pfizer coronavirus vaccine paperwork stolen, probe launched

Re: Other suspects?

Couldn't possibly be those nice Russians, they've had their own perfectly safe vaccine for months now.

Oh, who am I kidding. I won't be at all surprised if we now start to see "leaks" of carefully-out-of-context and distorted extracts from these Pfizer documents, spinning a story that the vaccine is unsafe, to sow doubt in target markets and discredit Pfizer, EMA, and the West in general.

Apple aptly calls its wireless over-the-ear headphones the AirPods Max – as in, maximum damage to your wallet

And who wants to take a guess as to how much these cost Apple to produce in BoM terms?

$30? $40?

Yeah yeah, "cost of research and design", shipping, overheads, etc etc. But I think even the most rabid fanboy would struggle to argue that these aren't a complete piss-take by Apple.

Court orders encrypted email biz Tutanota to build a backdoor in user's mailbox, founder says 'this is absurd'

Golly, I hope he kept record of this...

FTFA: While angry police workers reportedly threatened to attack Pfau, sending him menacing emails promising to abduct him from his home and throw him into "provisional detention" unless he obeyed their orders

Well, I hope he kept those emails. Because in a jurisdiction as obsessed with fairness, the rights of the individual, and restricting state over-reach as the EU is (yeah, I'm studiously trying to keep a straight face here) I'd say he has them bang to rights and can now sue them to Hell and back through the famously fair-minded and impartial ECJ.

Remember Ask Jeeves? It's still alive, kinda, and Google seems keen to show it the door once and for all

Resets the home page? Installs browser toolbar?

Whoa, did I fall through a time-warp back to 2003 or something?

Wireless screen in estate agent window just begging for someone to fill it with mischief

Re: Deceptively spacious ...

I can confirm this. I moved to the US a few years ago and it blew my mind how much bigger the houses are, like-for-like, compared to their equivalents in the UK.

For what my mortgage in the UK on a 3-bed semi cost me, I got a 4500-sq-ft ranch property on 10+ acres here in the Pacific Northwest. Loving it.

'We've heard the feedback...' Microsoft 365 axes per-user productivity monitoring after privacy backlash

Re: I don't understand

Honestly, when I first read about this "feature", what came to my mind was the Dilbert cartoon of a few years ago when, if my memory serves, the PHB announces that he'll be judging people based on how many questions they ask in meetings.

Cue Asok raising his hand in the next Staff and asking "Who else likes cheese?".

The Ghost of Windows Past gains spooky second wind as the October 2020 Update nears double digits

Re: 1909 was little more than jumped-up cumulative update to 1903

Well, that's entirely your own fault for being a luddite and keeping your files on your local PC. Don't you know that the Cloud is where it's at? Get with the times, Grandad / OK Boomer / etc etc.

Trollface icon, obv.

Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

Re: You were lucky

You spoilt Southern pansy. We didn’t get Thursdays when I was a lad... just Monday, Tuesday and the occasional St Nadger’s Day.

The other days didn’t arrive until metrication in, if memory serves, late in 1958. Which we knew as The Year Of The Exploding Dog. Not for cultural reasons, you understand, but just because of an unfortunate incident with our neighbour’s greyhound...

Ticketmaster: We're not liable for credit card badness because the hack straddled GDPR day

Re: Doesn't matter a fetid dingo's kidneys

© Douglas Adams originally, I believe!

Re: Ticket master

If it was total Madness then I fear you were misled by the agency and ended up at a concert by Suggs and his band. Didn't you notice?

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: Drive letter?

Real systems use at least 3 characters... df0:, df1:, dh0: and so on.

Re: Obviously ...

Yes. One rouge edit caused the system to loose all functionality.

Crooks social-engineer GoDaddy staff into handing over control of crypto-biz domain names

Re: Why can't they ever give clear information.

I think "a limited number..." (of users, accounts, services...) has now joined "...to be regretted...", "security is our top priority", "your call is important to us", and "to improve our service..." (we're raising prices/cutting service/both) in the grim lexicon of 21st century weasel-speak.

I'm sure I missed many others, but TBF my blood-pressure was dangerously elevated just by typing those ones.

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Mystic Megabyte We had a joke that he could just say "Hoose" into the the microphone and the software would know what to draw :)

Ah, similar in concept to the Look Around You music composition computer?

Police warn of bad Apples that fell off the back of a truck after highway robbery

Re: Calvados?

You've given me all the excuse I need to post this Ronnie Corbett sketch. A classic. How he & Harry Enfield managed to keep their faces (mostly) straight I'll never know.

A year of software testing appears wasted as ‘upgrade’ shutters Australian stock exchange on its debut

Re: "Strewth Sheila! Some dimkum's pom's esky'd me sheep futures in a doona!"

And the official response from the dev team was "She'll be right, no worries"?

(Why, yes. Everything I know about Australia, I learned from Monty Python and The Last Continent. How did you guess?)

America's largest radio telescope close to collapse as engineers race to fix fraying cables

Re: Frayed knot

Space ants.

Spants.

Re: Send for Jodie Foster

For England, James?

Alleged Ponzi mastermind on the run from FBI hid in lake with sea-scooter, collared after he surfaced half-hour later

Liabilities exceeded assets?

He was, most definitely, underwater.

Dell online store charges 16 million dollars for new laptop with paint job

Re: But look on the bright side

The more you buy, the more you save!!one!

Microsoft brings Trusted Platform Module functionality directly to CPUs under securo-silicon architecture Pluton

If their idea of "securing the processor"...

...is as shown in your lede photo - LGA package on a PGA socket - then we have nothing to worry about; it won't work and will fall apart instantly.

Yes, I know that's just a generic shutterstock/alamy type image. Makes me laugh though. Did someone give the (non technical) photographer a pile of PC parts and say "take some photos we can license"?