Posts by David 132

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

Re: Destination Host Unreachable

That's less typical than the front falling off, I'd just like to make that point.

"Paging Charles Atlas... Charles Atlas to the white courtesy phone"

...

"No, the white phone"

Microsoft leaks 6.5TB in Bing search data via unsecured Elastic server. *Insert 'Wow... that much?' joke here*

Re: Really?

Like an old oak table...

Re: I was unaware

You could both be onto something there. Maybe that's Dido Harding's new, "world beating" strategy for NHS track-and-trace.. multiple Bing searches?

"Does Aaron A. Aaronson have COVID?"

"Does Aaron A. Abraham have COVID?"

"Does Aaron A. Acheson have COVID?"

(repeat for the next 5000+ pages of the telephone directory... by next June, funding and further gongs/peerages permitting, she hopes to have moved on to the B's...)

Here's a snippet

At great personal cost, the bribery of several Eastern European border guards, a death-defying sprint across the North Korean DMZ, and ultimately when all else had failed, two hours in a squelchy field shifting marker pegs a few but occultly incredibly significant metres, I can present an extract from the leaked data, showing people's searches:

"How to uninstall siri"

"how to uninstall siri"

"stop edge taking over as my default browser"

"help I can't uninstall Siri"

"comment à désinstaller Siri"

"how do I get Windows 7 back"

"www.google.com"

Re: Must be all of Bing data?

I wonder what fraction of the searches are for things like "freec", "word", "handbra" etc... the only time I've ever Bing searched is inadvertently, when I type the first few letters of a program name into the Win10 start/search box, and the braindead OS searches the web for it instead of, you know, the local hard drive.

And the necessary hacks/voodoo to disable web search get trickier and trickier with each new build of Windows.

GNOME alone: FOSS desktop folk to start counting in whole numbers again

Re: "especially from an engagement and marketing perspective"

Mariners looking at control boards deep under the ocean waves?

He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended

Re: Rather than...

Or Raymond Luxury-Yacht (pronounced, Throatwarbler-Mangrove)

Apple made a big thing of the fact that every Mac came with Fire Wire...

I knew what that was going to be before I even clicked it!

Woman dies after hospital is unable to treat her during crippling ransomware infection, cops launch probe

Re: Analogous to “Because I saw you tie your shoe laces, I ran over that kid”.

Don't rise to the bait, don't feed the troll. It thrives on it.

Have a pint instead, it's Friday. -->

Apple takes another swing at Epic, says Unreal Engine could be a 'trojan horse' threatening security

Re: "Apple would face incalculable harm"

Upvoted, but for the record I approve of your sarcasm, NOT the concept of government ID *shudder*

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: Doesn't add up...

They must think we’re stupid. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!one!

.UK overlord Nominet tells everyone not to worry about 'distorted' vote allocations in its board elections

Re: Nominet has lost its way

That was a fine Dad joke.

Now get back to your cocoa, Pops.

Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone

Re: "whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams"

Crowley, building on his glorious success with the M25 and Manchester.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

Re: Where did the money go

Yes, it's funny isn't it that these errors only ever work in the authority's favour.

"So sorry - you paid a fee for a vehicle that never actually used the facility, so here's your refund"... yeah, right, never going to happen.

'Work is an activity not a place' got tired on LinkedIn about three months ago, but Citrix just based its new logo on the idea

Re: Greatly impressed I am not ...

Your Röckdöt poem made me pout,

For surely it's called the "Metal Umlaut"?

Regardless, something about this article's wrong,

Not one mention of the word "whalesong".

Yes, my attempt at verse could be better,

What were you expecting - iambic pentameter?

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

Re: Though that one is easier to fix

Graze Anatomy --> between consenting adults only

IBM made ‘top-down’ efforts to fire older workers, says US employment discrimination watchdog

Re: Oh no, not the meetings!

No-one expects that!

Bad apples: US customs seize OnePlus earbuds thinking they're knock-off AirPods

Re: How can we be sure

How can we be sure that this is the real Register?

This brings my whole perception of reality into question.

Don't pay the ransom, mate. Don't even fix a price, say Australia's cyber security bods

Re: Don't pay the ransom.

As did I, but you were just a little faster than I. Traveller, did you get here from Ship to Shore, or by Spanish Train?

Microsoft to charge $200 for 32 GPU cores, sliver of CPU clockspeed, 6GB RAM, 512GB SSD... and a Blu-Ray player

Thag and Gurk laying out twigs, stones and saber tooth tiger bones in the dust to form each individual frame of a game.

Uphill. Both ways. In the snow.

I win.

Unexpected risks of using Apple ID: 'Sign in with Apple' will be blocked for Epic Games

Re: Bad decision

It’s the latter. Neither company has covered itself with glory in this whole saga, but this latest development is Apple being rather petty.

They might have shot themselves in the foot here; technically they’re entitled to withdraw AppleID support from any party with whom they’re in legal dispute, but it’s not going to reassure all the other companies/sites that use the service.

What next Apple, a patch for Safari so that it will refuse to load the Epic Games homepage?

China’s UK embassy calls for probe into 'hack of Ambassador’s Twitter account'

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”

AT&T’s CEO has a solution to US broadband woes despite billions sunk into the problem. You’ll never guess what it is

“Geographic Precision”

’...argues Stankey in his piece. “First, we need to identify where broadband is unavailable with geographic precision.”’

Oh, you mean as in, “we offer service to one person in this zipcode/census block, so we can record it as being available to everyone else therein”??

Duplicitous, disgraceful shyster.

Upside down, you turn me, you're giving bork instinctively: Firefox flips as a train connection is missed

Oh, you... I see what you did there, touché!

˙˙˙ǝɯ oʇ ǝuᴉɟ sʞool

Here's a sprite idea: PC pokers push pixels to LED displays with Microsoft's new platform for non-verbal comms

Re: Four bits, 15 colours

and, of course, the wonderful combination of Black and Dark Black.

If you question the usefulness of that pairing, you’ve obviously never been tasked with designing either a spaceship for Disaster Area, or an album cover for Spïnal Tap!

I just thought it was a crypt-ic joke.

TCL notices lockdown has made tablet market a thing again, tosses out pair of cheapish 'droid fondleslabs

“TABMAX”?

Well, it’s a better name than “Maxipad” I suppose.

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

Naughty, naughty, verrry naughty...

TCL's latest e-ink tech looks good on paper, but Chinese giant will have to back up extraordinary claims

Re: Can you fold it or cut it?

No, but you can bind many pages of it together and hold it over your head to keep yourself dry in the rain. It’s the Pac-a-Macbook.

Party like it's 2004: Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Just an idea - maybe install a VNC server on the machine, or enable Remote Desktop, so that after 2004 borks the USB mouse & keyboard you can connect remotely and attempt to fix it? I suspect that removing and re-installing the devices from Device Manager, or updating the Intel USB drivers, would resolve it, but I freely admit I'm speculating.

Microsoft reprieves SHA-1 deprecation in Edge 85 security baseline

Re: Enterprise

Starfleet was never the same again after the Vogons joined the Federation.

RIP: NetApp Advanced Technology Group shuffles off this mortal coil

Short-termism will bite them

Shutting down R&D to save a few bucks always works so well in the long term.

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: Was it W95 came with an episode of Happy Days?

Not "Happy Days" but the video for Buddy Holly by Weezer, which (pretty seamlessly) merged video of the band with original Happy Days footage. Similar to the conceit employed by Star Trek DS9 in the "Trouble with Tribbles" episode, albeit less sophisticated.

Here's the video, thanks to da yootoobs.

Here's the Bill Plympton video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CQBHPZD0nw

Re: Rebuilding

Oh yes, indeed. As relevant now as it was almost two decades ago.

"Cruft Force 1. New. Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun.

Twice, the mouse cursor has done that poltergeist trick where, with the actual mouse stationary, it drifts three inches due east and then stops. For no reason at all. Works fine afterwards though. Brrrrrrr."

Ah, if it was a 4000/40 then you almost certainly noticed a drop in performance.

I still have my old Mod/Med/OctaMED file collection and play it occasionally. VLC’s talents know no bounds.

Perhaps it’s a subtle allusion to the fact that Windows is a colostomy of an operating system...

Edit: Until I posted this, the article had exactly 95 comments. I hang my head.

It was “Good Times”, I believe, and I’m pretty sure it was on the Plus! Pack which was an add-on for 95. Also had a Bill Plympton animation on it and the aforementioned Weezer “Buddy Holly” video.

Re: Happy memories

Around that time, I had a not-very-profitable sideline building PCs for family and friends. I put 95 on them, then 95OSR2 (which inched towards USB support), then 98 and 98SE. Each new OS and version just got better and better. Carried away by this enthusiasm, I’m afraid that I may have unthinkingly put Windows ME on a few PCs before I realized the terrible, terrible thing I was doing.

I’d like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to the innocent victims of my enthusiasm who had ME inflicted on them. It’s been 20 years now and I hope they’ve forgiven me.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: Keep stupid out

Seem to have struck a nerve though ;)

Well, yes. Assuming you're the OP AC, you did indeed "strike a nerve".

You'd have gotten the same reaction if you'd walked into a room and started scooping faeces out of your underpants and flinging them at people.

Doesn't mean it's anything to feel proud of.

Re: Absolutely.

Whilst composing my post I actually thought of animated emojis (Mr. Hankey to be specific) but discarded the idea as over the top.

Err, surely Mr Hankey is under the Bottom.

"Go Stick Your Head In A Pig"

Re: No that's not how it works

the Linux kernel should switch to Microsoft Project for feature tracking.

I like the way you think, though personally I feel Project is too lightweight for such an important task, and MSFT should push for the use of Sharepoint/Teams for the Linux Kernel development process. (Trollface icon)

But I’m sure they’ll be a bit more subtle about it and encourage Mr L. Poettering to step up to the plate instead. Why, at this very moment he’s probably beavering away on a LinuxKernelTrackerD add-in for SystemD...

Adobe yanks freebie Creative Cloud offer – now universities and colleges have to put up or shut up

Re: Short, shameful confession

Unfortunately, that doesn’t so much “stick it to Adobe”, as “help perpetuate their monoculture in the creative and design fields”.

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Thank you for once again proving PG Wodehouse's dictum about it never being difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Re: I heard that everything in Australia will kill you.

Your comment confused me for a moment there until I realized you were talking about Bruce, not Bruce, Bruce or Bruce...