Posts by Andy 68

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Re: My neighbour's got one

On his patio?

Well can't you just keep shouting back: "Alexa, play Devastator" ?

NASA uses occult means to spot tiny moon orbiting asteroid

Re: 3 miles? That's Clanger territory!

I was thinking The Little Prince, but yeah...

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Correction from "Rich"

Too late. I was so confused, I moved on from coffee to somewhat more volatile beverages.

Send alka seltzer and a taxi

Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

but I'm confused.

The copier techs who 'Rich' was replacing, called out a copier tech to clear a paper jam?

Moar coffee needed.

Dell and Ubuntu certify latest model of XPS 13 ultrabook

Re: I had hoped from the photo...

The UK site has the 9315 with the option to have Ubuntu pre-installed - is that the same as "certified" ?

This comment brought to by a 9310 running Mint perfectly. It used to have Ubuntu on it, but it refused to upgrade to 20.04 (or maybe 22.04... I forget), Snap kept annoying the *** out of me, and Liam's previous articles persuaded me to take the jump. I love it to bits.

I don't think Dell do the Developer version for the UK - at least I've never been able to find it. The 9320 seems to go by the name XPS 13 Plus over here, and it does look horrific ( https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops/xps-13-plus/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop )

Demand for smartphones is drying up

Re: Peak Phone

What I think you and pretty much all the commentards above are missing, is that we all are no longer the target audience.

We have two post-18 teenagers in the house, and they absolutely do want the bigger screen and faster processors for gaming and watching TikTok. They do want better cameras for selfies to be uploaded straight to IG/TikTok. They want data plans that will let them stream spotify to them constantly wherever they are.

They don't use SMS, email or the telephone - ever.

And they're going to be around for a lot longer than most of us.

First-ever James Webb Space Telescope image revealed

Re: Frustrating...

Well, ASP, but upvoted anyway

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Re: Eh?

Elementary OS has paying customers too.

Broadcom sketches out VMware ambitions that stretch from mainframe to cloud

Re: Reputation...

Genuine question..... how on earth do you let your broadband supplier dictate what runs on your machines?

My broadband supplier is there to supply me with broadband. They have no idea what is running this side of their box on the wall.

Unbelievably clever: Redbean 2 – a single-file web server that runs on six OSes

Re: Real computer science

Thanks Mike.... my head now hurts

Atos CEO resigns after board proposes splitting the company

"Age pyramid"

WTActualF? IBM 2.0

Google now requires two staff to sign off each Go change

Gerrit

I know this is not the thrust of TFA, but isn't this the logical conclusion of Gerrit?

I've only worked at one place that used it, but all I could see was a bureaucratic sludge on top of git.

It _looked_ like something designed to empower PHBs/control freaks/God coders to engage in the development process.

Genuine question - it could be either the implementation I saw, or my inability to see its strengths....

1,000-plus AI-generated LinkedIn faces uncovered

You can also cheat, I think, and use the picture name (check the url when you click) to identify the real one

FBI seizes $3.6bn in Bitcoin after New York 'tech couple' arrested over Bitfinex robbery

Re: A Real Name

The Rock....

The Hard Place....

Re: Am I a bad person...

Yes.

Because you lasted 5 seconds

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

When forgetting 2 simple characters (-r) means a long walk

Shutdown now <enter>

Oh bugger

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

IT'S NOT PRODUCTION

"IT'S NOT PRODUCTION!" he snaps back with some urgency

This... so much.

From a frazzled Tech Support

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends

Re: BBC

I read that as "pro-cake"

I'd Thumbs-Up that one....

Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status

Your analysis is correct in absolutely every particular - because it accords with my own opinion^H^H^H^H^H^Hfact.

There is no reason for argument in the comments - this matter is not up for debate, and closed.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: "a multitude of fresh qualifications counted for naught"

"how do you pass those loops over the top of a tree or telegraph pole?"

You don't - you cut the bottom off and pass the loops from the bottom

The Register speaks to one of the designers behind the latest Lego Ideas marvel: A clockwork solar system

Re: BrisBricks

Your brother-in-law, your sister-in-law and you.... three grown men.

Apart from the fact that this sounds like one of those "My brother's father is my aunt's cousin" puzzles, there is a whole host of stories underneath those few words....

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Re: Babylon Zoo

> Midge & Chris

Yes, yes, yes... alright. But it was on the tape accompanying the tour programme booklet on the Lament tour in 84, so that counts as Ultravox in my book :-)

> The Bloodied Sword.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

I had it on tape decades ago, which obviously got lost, then bought the vinyl 2nd hand last January and had it converted to MP3 a couple of months ago.

I absolutely love it.

Not heard of the Max Headroom stuff - thanks - will go searching.

Re: Babylon Zoo

Ditto the Ultravox really-really-short soundtrack to the 80s Levis "rivet" ad....

Very much a shame - I'd love a full length version of that....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXSvIrPfqV0

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

Re: You missed a tagline there

o7

Revealed: Perfect timings for creation of exemplary full English breakfast

Re: On the go ...

From the Ace to the H.

Turn up at the Ace when they open, have a fry-up.

Ride off to the H Cafe, collecting points for the most B roads and the most numbers in the road's name, in time for a bacon roll and a crappy coffee

Re: Lost me in the first paragraph.

As taught by my gran.

Of course, in those days it was the bacon fat being flipped over the yolk, as she had walked down the butchers' first thing that morning to get it

Re: Fried eggs

> the aftermath of surgery at the 4077th.

That's what wifi router firewalls are for, They get turned on until the kids have washed up.

Re: Grilled mushrooms? I don't think so

Absolutely.

From TFA:

> Try not to move them about too much as you'll release the juices and make them soggy.

Just... waht? The main reason they are there is to release their juices all over your Hovis Granary™ butter-spread toast.

Re: abbreviated, with substitutes

One word for you....

Blutwurst

Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks

Re: Actually ....

Book signings for the Covid generation.

No need for all that messy personal contact

Waymo self-driving robotaxi goes rogue with passenger inside, escapes support staff

Re: "unusual situation"

Nahhh... a remote joystick is all that's needed.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: RIP Stavros.

I always thought it came form a combination of his character on Spitting Image, and Harry Enfield's Kebab-shop-owning Stavros.

How to avoid pesky border controls: Be a robot truck driver… or insanely rich

Re: Thermodynamic Pedantry Alert

Oh yes.

I used to temp in a biscuit warehouse in Acton (for very _germanic_ biscuits)

At coffee break in the morning often came the cry:

"Which flavour of cake pallet would you like us to drop this morning, boss?"

Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

Re: But...

Ohhhh yes!

The smell of oily steam and burning paraffin tablets as my Mamond-on-Meccano contraption lumbered off down the garden path ... and invariably veered straight into the edge of the lawn and stopped dead.

Good times.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Re: Plaque

It's the sprue that the Magratheans forgot to clean up

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

Re: International Recognition

No, I think he was talking about cockney.

(Me ol' china)

Sun welcomes vampire dating website company: Arrgh! No! It burns! It buuurrrrnsss!

Getting changed

Back in the day, I had to go on customer site for something, and the boss decided he'd come along as well to glad-hand and schmooze.

Obviously we had to go in his car, because he wanted to show off the Lotus.

When I arrived at his house on the bike, he came out of his house and closed the door behind him, then was shocked at my filthy leathers. "No problem, I'll change", but he didn't want to let me in his house.

Ok - I'll strip off and change on his driveway. When he saw me take my boots off and unzip my leathers, he nervously looked around his Stepford-Wives-esque part of Basingstoke and decided to usher me into his house.

Which is how I ended up standing in my boss's hallway in my boxers when his wife came down the stairs wondering why he'd come back inside...

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

Re: 65 bus route

Absolutely.

Ealing Broadway to Chessington Zoo for a day trip. Took about an hour and a half, IIRC. Sat at the front, up top, with my Grandma.

Happy times.

We cross now live to Oracle. Mr Ellison, any thoughts? 'Autonomous self-driving computers eliminate human labor, eliminate human error'

most of my job^H^H^H career has been googling things for other people, and I'm sure that could be automated away. Funny that it hasn't been yet

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

Re: I think most people here are missing the point

> Do you think investors didn't know

If they didn't know then they were wilfully blind. *I* knew, just from reading El Reg. I have no sympathy for them at all.

> The investors say Nvidia was supposed

No. That's not what they're saying. They are saying that when the CEO was specifically asked if the bitcoiners were responsible for the huge spike in sales, he said "no".

I think most people here are missing the point

As much as I have no sympathy for the share traders who lost money, people here seem to be missing the fact that the suit is complaining that Nvidia execs *lied to the market* about their business.

CEO:

- We have 2 types of customers - Group A and Group B

- Everyone knows that the GroupB market is ephemeral and will probably implode soon

- Don't worry - 95% of our sales are to Group A so we're going to carry on making loads of money

If you read the linked pdf in the article, the quotes in the suit are quite iffy, and do sound as though the CEO is deliberately misleading, if not downright lying to, the market.

I don't think the SEC takes kindly to that sort of thing, do they? C.f. Musk et.al.

'VPs shouldn't go publicly rogue'... XML co-author Tim Bray quits AWS after Amazon fires COVID-19 whistleblowers

Re: "XML"

> The one situation where processing JSON is inconvenient is a shell script, but why on Earth would you want to do that?

jq

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/jq.1.html

House of Commons agrees to allow Zoom app in Parliament, British MPs will still have to dress smartly

Re: "a glimpse of Michael Gove in a leopard onesie"

Have an upvote - I think there are good members of the upper house, but I suspect what you say holds true for a significant number of them

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Shall we talk about Zoom?

In the Current Climate™, Mrs 68 is teaching her fitness classes over the intarwebz, and everyone is getting to learn how zoom works.

Apart from the cantankerous biddies who insist on

- "I can't see you" (when everyone else can)

- "I can't hear you" (when everyone else can)

- Refusing to heed instructions as to how to remediate the first two

- Refusing to be muted "in case"

etc. etc.

Technology eh.... who'd have it?

UK enters almost-lockdown: Brits urged to keep calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house

Re: And use food delivery services where you can.

This. Absolutely.

It's no good Boris telling us to use supermarket delivery services.

I couldn't create an account, and once we'd filled up SWMBO's shopping basket, we couldn't get a delivery date. Nor any information on when we would be able to get a date.

Captain Caveman rides to the rescue, solves a prickly PowerPoint problem with a magical solution

Re: Yesterday

"Use your wheels - it is what they are for"

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

Re: Optional?

How many were eaten?

Only the worthless ones taking up space.

Oh! You were talking about the crayons!

You want a Y2K crash? FINE! Here's a poorly computer

Re: Same as Audits

Incorrect challenge. the repetition was actually "script" - you lose a point

Infosec prophet Bruce Schneier (peace be upon him) is only as famous as half of Salt-N-Pepa

[None of us made it – Ed]

Maybe we should try and change that by googling for

Dabbs, Alistair - 101 uses for a pineapple

https://www.google.com/search?q=dabbs%2C+alistair+-+101+uses+for+a+pineapple

every time we sit at someone else's computer.

eBay eBabe enigma explained: Microsoft bug blamed after topless model slings e-souk's emails at stunned Brits

"Tit for tat"

Brilliant.... just brilliant.