Posts by David 132 5507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Yep. Seagate have been on my "avoid where possible" list ever since the event of putting a 60MB 2.5" EIDE drive into my Amiga 1200, only to have it go clunk-clunk-death about a week later. Every so often in the years since, I've tried their drives again - with depressingly consistent results.
Ditto Western Digital for very similar reasons.
They're obviously not putting saltpeter in the potatoes anymore.
I always heard it phrased as putting "bromide in the tea". My first thought is that saltpeter in the potatoes, far from suppressing amorous urges, would instead result in a corps of men who would explode upon hiccuping. Sort of like the reputed effects of Wow-Wow sauce.
What? Are you provided with an off-road bike then, because most road bikes would be bloody dangerous at anything more than 5mph off road
From context (albeit with no actual knowledge of the regs) I assumed it meant "off [the public] road", i.e. pootling round the test-centre carpark. Forcing neophyte bikers to take a Goldwing up Mount Snowdon would be considerably more entertaining tho :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFlFbXo94Tk
Lauri Say and the Island Folk's 1968 paean to the IOW hovercraft. Nostalgia ahoy!
My first thought on reading your comment was, "that sounds like one of the An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman jokes I used to know as a kid...". Then I felt the hot flush of social stigma as I realized it's not 1980 any more and that sort of thing is Not Acceptable. If anyone needs me, I'll be in room 101 for re-education.
@Dave126 (no relation) "It would be nice if the Reg commissioned a guest article about Product Design and hardware development. Firstly, it would be an interesting diversion, and secondly it would dispel a few oft-repeated myths."
That's actually a really good idea. Something along the lines of "So you have an idea for a world-changing technology product? Here's the process you will go through to take it from fever-dream to boxed product sitting on customers' desks", with guidance as to timelines, typical partners (fundraising, manufacturing, design, certification, distribution...)
I'd read that.
An ordinary mousetrap, humane or deadly and something like an Amazon button (£5) pressed when the trap closes would do pretty much exactly the same for a significantly lower cost.
"Honey! We caught another mouse in the trap yesterday!"
"How do you know?"
"Another box of Andrex has just been delivered to the front door."
@Geoffrey W - good question. I've just tested the Telegraph site in Safari (9.1.3), to make a meaningful comparison vs. the example I quoted earlier - FF on my OSX 10.9 Mac.
Despite having to load adverts, Safari scrolled the page smoothly and CPU load never went above 49%.
Whereas in FF, like I said, it reaches 120%+, and indeed the whole FF UI thread seems to bog down - if I attempt to load another address from bookmarks into the same tab, the "page loading" spinner is slow, and the initial DNS resolution / page load process for the new site is slow, until - I speculate - whatever thread is busy-looping for the Telegraph is finally terminated.
(this comment typed late at night, so forgive me if it's less than coherent)
It seems to me that when the Firefox devs talk about "making FF faster" they mean: "hey, look, we completely re-wrote the engine and now we score 1.2% faster on Sunspider!!1!!"
Whereas when users talk about "making FF faster" they mean: "I really hate the way it drags like a slug through treacle as I scroll down certain web-pages."
To quote a specific example: I use FF on Windows 7 & 10, Mint Linux, and OSX 10.9.5. For 90% of the sites I visit, it's perfectly fast enough. But there's a couple - Jalopnik.com and the Telegraph.co.uk main page - that bring the browser to a crawl (for reference, I just loaded the latter on my Mac. Firefox's CPU load in Activity Monitor went from 4% to 105% as the page loaded, then settled down. When I scrolled down to the "Gallery" section of the main page, CPU usage went through the roof - 120%+, and the whole page juddered like I was running a 486). And that's with NoScript, cookie blocking, and so on. I couldn't give a fig whether the browser beats Chrome in <benchmarkX>.
As long as devs & users continue to have completely ideas of what "more speed" means, and the devs continue to arse around with the UI for no good reason, FF will continue to haemorrage users.
There is a fix... but that requires intervention at the PC, and with machines at more than a hundred sites, that's going to take our techs a while...
AC, you might want to take a(-nother) look at Intel vPro, if your machines are suitably equipped. Once you switch on the AMT hardware management, it gives you over-the-network power/boot control and a hardware-based VNC server - really useful for this type of scenario, because it pretty much means that you can do anything to a PC remotely that you'd do to it locally (well, OK, apart from upgrading/replacing hardware).
Something like this then becomes a case of selecting the collection of target machines in SCCM then using AMT to take control of the machines or boot them from a patching ISO, even if they won't boot or log into Windows.
[IOT "smart" lifts, fridges, doors] + [app stores in everything] + [the existing precedent of downloadable "celebrity" voices for your GPS]
equals... white goods with "Genuine People Personalities™". And we thought that was just absurd fiction that would never come to pass.
Although I have to admit... having a fridge/thermostat/lightbulb with the personality of Brian Blessed does appeal to me somewhat, in a shouty beardy sort of way.
Blitheringeejit At least I think that's what the diagram indicates.
Really? All I ascertained from the diagram was that if I have a Citizen Swift dot-matrix printer hooked up to an Escom 486 with 12" CRT monitor, my print-jobs are at risk from headless quadruple-amputee sheep.
JEEEZ that's bad clip-art.
Nifty Tsk, wonder if I should leave this grubby software industry and run a nice clean brothel instead.
To paraphrase the old joke:
Teacher asks class of kindergartners to tell everyone what their mummy/daddy do at work.
Timmy stands up: "My daddy's a fireman!"
Alice stands up: "My mommy's a carpenter!"
Bobby stands up: "My daddy plays piano in a brothel!"
Teacher is outraged, and that very night storms round to Bobby's parents' house to confront them. Bobby's dad answers the front door, and tries to explain: "Well, really, I'm a salesman for Oracle. But honestly, how do you explain something like that to an innocent child??"
No, it's like a license agreement. You agree you owe them everything and they agree they owe f*&k all. The abitrator didn't understand this basic tenant of Oracle law.
Upvoted, but I have to be that guy and point out that the word you're looking for is tenet, as in "basic tenet of Oracle law". Unless we're talking about a lodger ("lodger-ing an appeal"? ahaha), in which case "tenant" might be appropriate after all.
The very concept of Batman v Superman is dumb; when you first heard about it, you thought "This is going to suck", didn't you?
Indeed. I haven't seen the film; the title itself killed any interest I might have had.
"We're going to take two of your childhood hero good-guys and pit them against each other". No thanks. Why not finish the job of ruining my childhood by giving me a "Father Christmas vs. The Easter Bunny" movie while you're at it?
And from the general tone of comments here, I deduce that I haven't missed out on much.
It all sounds so easy until you realize that the port number is a fixed field in the IPv4 header and changing it would break backwards compatibility and that would have most of the same deployment issues that IPv6 has.
So just implement lossy compression of port numbers, duh!
I'm a genius.
Responding to my own (well, Chris Addison's) wallpaper anecdote above - if anyone's in the slightest bit interested, the comedy program in question was "The Ape That Got Lucky", first aired 25th August 2005. Very, very funny indeed, with surreal tales of bubble-wrapping penguins, academic rivalry, and how "little dolphin" tattoos morph into Moby Dick as the tattoo-ee ages. I've just listened to it again and it's still laugh-out-loud fresh over a decade later.
It doesn't seem to be on iPlayer or YouTube any more, unfortunately, but I'm sure there are copies around for those that seek it.
I think that's because he was, by all accounts, genuinely a nice, decent person.
All too often we hear that the real person behind a famous persona has feet of clay - "oh, in person he's actually kind of an asshole", or "that charm is just an act, she's actually a mean so-and-so". But I can't recall, in any interviews/programs/comments, ever hearing someone with a bad word to say about Terry Pratchett. In my own tiny encounter with him as recalled earlier in this thread, he was tact and kindness itself - he gracefully covered for my gauche flub without making me feel small in any way. A lesser or crueller man might have taken the cheap laughs option and ridiculed me for not knowing that book dedications typically don't include the surname.
@A K Stiles A PINT of scumble???!!
S'alright, I took the precaution of putting a lining on my stomach with mutton & clootie dumplings (with slumpie), first. Should protect against anything up to and including scumble.
Also. Multiple exclamation marks... you do recall what that's a sign of, hmm?
@Michael Hoffmann The second time (in Australia), he remembered me, where we were the first time (Silicon Valley), what we were doing (I bought him sushi lunch because his publisher agent was a useless c*nt and wouldn't get him anything, and then took him to a Fry's for gadget shopping).
I am genuinely in awe. Your interaction with him was far more noteworthy than mine.
'Twas a bookstore (Waterstones?) in Chester, somewhere around 1995. He was on a signing tour. A gangly, pimply bean-sprout of a student who had no social abilities whatsoever hesitatingly put a copy of the book in front of the Great Man and stammered out his name "David <Surname>".. to which came the gentle, oh-so-tactful reproof, "Just 'David', surely?". Cue GPBSS exiting stage Right, having a fit of conniptions at having interacted and made a fool of himself with so exalted a person.
Twenty+ years and much therapy later I can bear to remember it.
Lost the signed copy, of course. Lent it to a "friend" and never got it back, the barsteward. You Know Who You Are (but I don't).
Years ago I was hanging wallpaper in my house,
Slightly OT, but you reminded me of something I heard on a Radio 2 Chris Addison show years ago:
"...that's why the first thing we do, when we move into a new house, is to take the previous idiot's wallpaper down and put ours up - we're marking our territory.
Now, here's a little tip. Take the idiot's wallpaper down, but before you put yours up - go to Homebase, buy a tin of blood-red paint, and write on your wall with the paint "I WILL KILL AGAIN". Wait for it to dry, then put your wallpaper up.
Now... you never actually get to see the punchline of this joke, but you do get a lovely warm feeling in about 5 years time when you hand the keys over..."
Good Omens - at least, certain editions of it* - contains a set of interviews with TP and Neil Gaiman, in which they describe how they came to meet & collaborate. It's almost as funny as the book itself and well worth reading if you haven't already. A hat is involved.
(The icon is a pint of scumble, foolishly poured into a rapidly-dissolving glass.) -->
*As is typical - and actually mentioned by TP and NG in their interviews - I have owned at least 4 editions, 3 of which have been loaned out to people and never returned. My first few copies of the book didn't include the interviews and additional material, but the last one I purchased (in Oregon) did. Maybe only in the recent US editions?
@Triggerfish New laptop unfortunately so warranty issues.
Nil desperandum - many laptops have the wifi card accessible from a hatch on the underside, and it's considered a user-accessible upgrade much like adding extra RAM & therefore wouldn't void the warranty. You might take a quick look.
I must admit it irritates me when my screen freezes up too
I got that quite frequently on my NAS-slash-media-box system, which is Skylake on a Jetway NF-592 board running (at the time) Mint 18.. mostly when browsing the web on Firefox. Certain sites would do it every time.
I updated to the latest video drivers from 01.org (which involves editing a config file to trick the Intel installer into thinking you run Ubuntu rather than Mint) and Mint 18.1 - no problems now. But I couldn't tell you which change actually made the difference.
Well, the next-but-one version of Swift will deprecate conditional operators (you know, to show "courage"); the version after that will remove loop constructions ("a brave, trend-setting move to show market leadership") and the version after that will have only no instructions, only allowing your code to contain comments.
But they'll be beautifully formatted comments, with a choice of the finest fonts available and the ability to mix formats and colour schemes (from a pre-chosen, tasteful palette) within your code.
And people will rave about how quickly the code runs, and how gorgeous it looks. So courageous!
...that whether it's Apple, Microsoft, Google or any other tech company, they always have to find the most achingly hip, you've-probably-never-heard-of-it musician to include in their screenshots?
"Kakoi Miku is a humanoid persona voiced by a singing synthesizer application..."
Christ on a fucking bike. Could these twats be any more achingly, self-consciously hipster if they tried?
Once, just once, I'd like to see someone at a tech company show a sense of humour and send out a screenshot showing something utterly naff. Des O'Connor. Middle Of The Road. Renée and Renato. Captain and Tenille.
...you get the idea. Instead we get stuff like "Sir, this Mongolian throat-yodelling group has put out 2 records in the last twenty years..." "GTFO, far too mainstream."
but you have to wonder what twisted fun these laser-wielding morons think they are having.
I suspect that if you asked one of these mouth-breathing chavs, you'd get that perennial answer/excuse:
"Well, it's a laff, innit?"
I'm afraid that on matters of social recidivism such as this, I'm of the hanging-drawing-and-quartering's-too-good-for-'em persuasion.
The most telling quote of your entire article:
Instead of the handful of I/O technologies directly protected by SGX – most of which have to do with DRM rather than user security
What, you're saying that this is designed to benefit content providers rather than the user? That "trusted" in this case means the PC can be trusted to deny its user any control?
Gee. I am totally surprised. My world is a lie.
