Posts by Mint Sauce

We all scream for ice cream – so why are McDonald's machines always broken?

Shurely shome mishtake?

There's a typo in the article - surely it should say: "..Leading on the worrying statistic that 10 percent of McDonald's ice cream machines are WORKING at any given moment..."

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Bobby

Oh no, their newest member of staff was little Bobby Tables, wasn't it???

ISP's ads 'misleadingly implied' existence of 6G, says watchdog

AOL

Biz says folks know the difference between fixed and mobile broadband. Do they, though, asks ASA?

I think anyone event slightly technically minded is well aware that most people have NO idea about their internet connection. As far as they are concerned 'WiFi' is the magic thing that allows them to see pr0n and memes, regardless of how they're actually connected.

Up to £895M up for grabs in UK Emergency Services procurement

Re: Missing something

"Plus, if you have an emergency in West Wales, are you on your own?"

I mean, quite often yes. But that's more to do with the lack of emergency services coverage here rather than any communications issues. Best to make your own way to hospital here, rather than waiting for an ambulance for example (and that's not a slur on the overworked WAS staff, there's just not enough of 'em).

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Word-salad wankers

Gen X here, and I've no idea what the word-salad-wankers are on about either. Having run out of fucks to give years ago, I've no problem with telling them to start again and this time use English to explain whatever the hell it is they're on about. It's probably one reason I'm never going to get promotion :-D

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

They're just teasers

I wonder if I can cadge a lift from one?

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

I knew it!

The dancing robot was driving it after all...

Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink

Jumpers for goalposts

Ahh, I remember using RISC-OS at school on various A310/3000 machines. It was quite a shock to go to Poly and have to use Windows 3 instead - felt like somewhat of a downgrade ;-) Mind you, all my assessments etc in the first year were typed up on my Atari ST so... :-D

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

Re: Visors

Captain Cyborg! Time was he'd be popping up in the El-Reg pages on an almost weekly basis.

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Re: a black sand beach

Vulcano, near Sicily.

Ooh, that looks interesting, I'll take a walk. 30 seconds later I'm hop-skipping across the sand like some kind of lizard, heading for the cooling refuge of some concrete that was merely blisteringly hot ;-)

I suggest you wear something on your feet if you visit such a beach in the summer !

(icon for the temperature)

Shape-shifting cryptominer savages Linux endpoints and IoT

Re: Show Me The Way To Go Home.

>1, On your planet are there such things a "IoT device managers"?

Well, there used to be. But, you see, we shipped them all off in the B Ark, along with the telephone sanitisers...

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

Consequences

"...to deal with what it characterized as the security, privacy, and performance consequences."

Ah yes, Google were upset that people were using extensions to improve their OWN security, privacy and performance - at the expense of Big G's data siphoning, presumably.

Oracle staff share news of sizable layoffs

I refuse to believe...

... that "CX presales engineer" is a real job.

It is better for my mental health, I think!

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

Jumpers for goalposts

Man, those images bring back some memories. Then again I remember thinking that Suntools was pretty amazing back in the day ;-)

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

Acorn Antiques

I have very fond memories of RISC-OS at school - we had a 'wacky' computer science teacher who made everything fun and interesting (and also let us take machines apart to fit hardware etc - I seem to remember we didn't destroy the Hawk V9 hand scanner :-D )

It was a bit of a shock when I went to Poly and had to use PCs running Windows 3.0 - it seemed so janky, and only 2 mouse buttons ;-)

I wanted a RiscPC but the price was too high for an impoverished student at the time, sadly.

Now I'm wondering if there's somewhere on the web I can go and play Zarch again, good times :-)

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Re: That's a demerit

"that's a paddlin"

feel the quality

So, either the UK's latest, greatest warship uses CCTV cameras that were originally bought from Tandy... or the person filming the screen was using their Motorola Razr...

I guess they spent all their money on the software licenses for the F35. (or not, in this case)

The day has a 'y' in it, so Virgin Galactic has announced another delay

Coffee and biscuits are served every ten years...

... whilst they continue to wait for their delivery of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

Twitter's AI image-crop algo is biased towards people who look younger, skinnier, and whiter, bounty challenge at DEF CON reveals

Whenever I see stories like this, I think back to my undergrad days, and a project to write a neural network to recognise patterns. (Written in Eiffel - is that still a thing!?) Long story short, when given a pattern it ought to recognise, it always came up with the inverse of the 'right answer' as the result.

When asked why, the lecturer's response was (and I'm paraphrasing here) "Fuck knows".

In summary, nobody ever knew how any of this stuff works, and probably still doesn't ;-)

Massive 3D catzilla gets crowds purring in busy Shinjuku district of Tokyo

Jeez - imagine the size of the Roomba...

At least the streets will be cleaned... of everything.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

Well colour me dumb, but much like Aaiieeee, I've read the article and I'm really none the wiser. Perhaps someone would like to parcel up my confusion into one of these Notably Frangible Tickets, and let's get rich!

Lockdown bidder block shock: Overzealous parental filters on Virgin Media and TalkTalk break eBay for UK users

I love it!

Mrs Johnson, is that you?

We've made it: Microsoft deems El Reg relevant enough to have a play with the nerfed version of its upcoming Xbox

I'm confused

I've been searching t'webs but haven't found a straight answer anywhere. Can you actually 'buy a game' for these new consoles, or do you HAVE to subscribe to something monthly? I'm almost tempted by the cheaper one, but it stops being cheap when you're spending loads each month on subscriptions. My IT equipment is low power linux boxen, and a windows box supplied by work which is probably powerful enough for Tetris but not much else. I just want to play Just Cause 3 occasionally for the explosions and sillines ;-) (I am aware of 4, but 3 looks more fun to me)

Indeed, Emperor Drakeford releases us from lockdown on Monday... then it's 'national rules' which definitely wont turn into another lockdown, oh no sireee...

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Sympathy for the devil

As someone being run ragged by having to update systems due to covid, I have some sympathy for the developers of this app. If it's anything like my experience they'll be battling constantly changing and contradictory requirements that are generated daily by random members of a hastily assembled 'task and finish' group (barf). They will probably have spotted problems before they arise, but will either be ignored, or railroaded into releasing it yesterday, if not sooner. Of course any actual problems post-release will result in shocked pikachu faces all round by the T&F gang.. (and late nights for the developers where they get to implement what they said was needed in the first place)

Thorough testing? ahahahahaAHAHAHAHAHAHA *gasp* Yes, nice idea, you need to actually know what they want it to do, first ;-)

Having said that, I'll be seeing if I can contribute to the maintainers of utPLSQL after all this, as it has saved my bacon a few times already....

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

I still use cmd to find files

Given that windows search has been broken for SO long... I always revert to dir c:\<whatever> /s /b to find files with wildcards on my work PC. It runs almost instantly. Is there a powershell equivelant of that? I found the syntax so bizarre and verbose that I gave up with it long ago...

It *is* still handy on locked down machines though, as admins often forget it is there and leave it open.. so I heard, anyway ;-)

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Oh dear

Expect this to be scraped by a JournoBot(tm) very soon and be on all the usual news orifices as factual.. I mean.. sadly, it is certainly believable :-(

In tribute to Galaxy Note 7, BBC iPlayer support goes up in flames for some Samsung TVs

ITYM: "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is..."

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

Re: It seems to me

Updooted, as I came to say something very similar. Dir searches the disk in seconds. Windows search.. well I think it's still 'indexing'....

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

Ice Cream Van Chimes...

Each manufacturer to have an allocated chime (Yankee doodle dandy for all usa built cars of course). The faster they go, the louder ( and more distorted) the chime. In fact, speed the chime up proportional to speed too..

Absolutely no downsides to this idea at all. Nope, none! ;-)

College PRIMOS prankster wreaks havoc with sysadmin manuals

primeOS mail

Post, I think it was called? Anyway it was trivially easy to send messages FROM any user... Shout out to any OxPoly bully boarders on here. I still have lineprinter output from some of the boards in a box somewhere. Must go rummaging for old times sake :-)

Swedes grumbling about Apple Store in their park are lucky – in Toronto, Google eats all your data

Maybe a better design would be...

...a nice walled garden?

;-)

Facebook's new always-listening home appliance kit Portal doesn't do Facebook

Re: Don't forget the duct tape!

I was going to go with .303 British. Somewhat overpowered for the task, but enfields have a pretty good rate of fire in the right hands :-)

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Re: My Comments

Because these days everything MUST be 'curated' - you're not smart enough to just look at a list of things and decide for yourself what's interesting. Well, that's what just about every major website thinks these days, anwyay. <mutter> I remember when everything around here was green (screen).... gophers for goalposts... </mutter>

The Splunk that got sunk: Log-lover ends support for mobile apps

Re: I know there's always Google, but...

Came here to say the same. I still have no idea what product and/or service they sell. I was going to try to find a relevant old Dilbert to link to... But pretty much any of them will do.

Well, now Nuro: Former Waymo devs reveal cute self-driving van tech

Re: Why?

Beat me to it. Cow tipping now has a 21c upgrade!

Netflix mulls using AI to craft personalized movie trailers for viewers

Dear Netflix

Please stop trying to 'curate' my viewing, and just give me a damn index so I can easily browse through everything and discover stuff for myself.

Yeah, I know never going to happen.

Microsoft scoops Search UI out from the gaping black maw of Cortana

dir c:\*keyword*.* /s /b

Some variation of the above is now my go-to method of searching for files under Windows. Ever since the search indexer appeared the GUI search has got slower and more useless with each release.

dir is now the fastest way to find a file if you know something about the name. IME, YMMV of course ;-)

Part of me is sad that the bloated UI of windows makes this necessary. Part of me is happy it is still an option!

Drone smacks commercial passenger plane in Canada

C-units like that drone operator

Are the reason we can't have nice things ;-(

Indian call centre scammers are targeting BT customers

This was my immediate assumption too!

Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor

Re: I bet...

Son of a Diddley.

Western Digital has cloudified the NAS and shoved it in a trendy box

A massive, steaming

turd. That is my experience of the WD My Book world edition. Ess aitch one T performance & reliability.

It fought me to the end, even as I ripped it apart to re-purpose the disk. Thankfully I finally managed to reformat / repartition the b'stard and cleansing flames devoured the rest..

ok, I was not a fan ;-) Subsequently would not trust them with your data, let alone mine!

Cheers.

What's your point, caller? Oracle fiddles with major database release cycle numbers

SQL Developer

Well that explains why SQL Developer recently jumped to version 17.

Our dbas are also in the 'wait 'til R2' club. Yearly upgrades? Ha, yeah but no but, not going to happen...

Samsung stalls Bixby launch because it am English not so good

ProBirdRights

Birb? Is that you? How am then baggels?

I still haven't found what I'm malloc()ing for: U2 tops poll of music today's devs code to

I want to upvote this one meeeeleeeon times :-(

Like many I suffer management that believe that 'communication' is key, so a big noisy open-plan office with a mix of coders and people who are on the phone all day is an excellent idea.

People took the piss when I started first wearing ear defenders but before long more and more sets of headphones etc were appearing around the office.

These days I just about survive with some Bose QC headphones. As mentioned elsewere its the nearby speech that's the real distraction for a lot of people. On their own the QC's make people sound 'further away' is the best way to describe it, they do work very well but can't block out the most determined oxygen thieves.

Last year I discovered mynoise.net - I suggest checking it out and perhaps bunging the developer a few quid in appreciation if you use it (no link to him, just find the site really good). Playing a mix of background noise generators in conjunction with the noise cancelling headphones is usually enough to totally block all the office chatter.

Now don't get me started on the window wars.... (for the record, I vote 'open' ;-)

Science megablast: Comets may have brought xenon to Earth

Re: Oh thanks, now I'll have bloody Bomb the Bass stuck in my head all day!

My first job after graduating was working for Spiny Norman (post Assembly Line days, though) Good Times :-)

BBC surrenders 'linear' exclusivity to compete with binge-watch Netflix

Re: The bit that puzzles me is...

Have an upvote for for consistent use of 'series' rather than 'season' :-)

Microsoft's Edge to flush Adobe Flash in Windows 10 Creator’s Update

This would be the same MicroSoft

that force-installs flash on every Win10 machine whether you like it or not??

Add it to the tab: ICO fines another spammer as unpaid bills mount

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

My folks already have some kind of whitelist system. Known numbers get straight through and ring as normal. Unknown get diverted to a message asking who they are, and if the caller responds the system rings the landline, announces who is calling, then they have the option to accept, reject etc. If the caller doesn't respond the landline never even rings. Apparently zero marketing calls now get through. Think it's a paid service, might even be bt... Works well for them anyway.