Posts by John Brown (no body)

Some errors fill the screen. And some come from the .NET Framework

Re: Camera?

"The UK is camera mad."

Abso-bloody-lutely it is!!! There's not only an obsession with monitoring roads (cheaper than Police), but also inside shops/shopping centres (cheaper than security guards), but also anywhere you may need to interact, so if there's any kind of dispute, they have a photo and/or video as "proof".

I mean, this is a fucking parking meter with transaction in the main under £10, probably the vast majority under £5, but someone feels the need to take a picture of anyone putting money into the machine.

The real reason, of course, is the parking "fines" if you overstay your (paid for) welcome by more than a whole second. The cameras already got your car number plate, but when they issue the invoice to the vehicles registered keeper, said keeper can deny they were driving and refuse to say who was driving. Now they have a photo of the person paying for parking, which they can then match up with a DVLA driving licence request and sting you £120 for being a minute late back to your car because they can "prove" it was you (assuming you did, of course)

Yeah, that bugged me too! all those extra 10p after two hours when it's basically £1 and hour. Maybe it's to catch the Luddites still using cash and don't have the right change? I wonder what the extra percentage take is on all those "No Change Given" machines?

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Re: Will Happen #2: All goods are purchased through crowdfunding

"Now, what gets on my tits is "pre-book".

I find it easier just to say "tree".

Re: "All office chairs are gaming chairs"

"secondhand office chair which is probably pushing at least 30 years old by now.

I've tried other chairs but this one is still the most comfortable"

I suspect the first part is much of the reason for the second part. It's totally moulded to the shape of your arse :-)

Re: "All office chairs are gaming chairs"

"Aliexpress sells replacement gas rams for peanuts,"

Is that with all the usual BS and EU standards? Or do you get to sit there in constant fear of the ram going off when you least expect it?

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: sporting newspapers on tinted newsprint

Interesting, but I'm neither old enough nor live far enough south to have seen either of those.

IIRC, the ones I'm thinking of were printed at the local printing press by the local newspaper, on very cheap paper late on a Saturday afternoon and delivered to the local newsagents not long before 6'O'clock closing time, just in time to get most of the days results in, the ink barely dried!. It was the (sports) internet of the day, about as up to date as was possible. From what I remember of them, they were syndicated and localised, being printed locally. The Sunderland editions would be different to the Newcastle editions in their local content, both coming from different print works.

Dad used to send me to the local paper shop for "the pink" or "the green" some weekends. Both were sports newspapers, one mainly football the other mainly racing IIRC.

Microsoft Paint + car park touchscreen = You already know where this is going

Re: Back Rock became black rubble

"What was that about Yanks not knowing what Bacon is? "

:-)

(Yes, I do remember that you are an honorary Brit.)

Re: Back Rock became black rubble

No, not bacon, Bacon rind. That's the bit that, like chewing gum, loses it's taste while chewing but never chews down like actual bacon and crispy fat. Of course, some people may not know what bacon rind is these days as bacon is almost always sold sans rind unless you buy from a farmers market where is may still come with the rind on. The rind is the pigskin on the very outer edge of the bacon. (And by bacon, I mean proper back bacon, not the thinly sliced belly pork they call bacon in the USA :-))

Re: Back Rock became black rubble

Yes, it saves you bending down when you drop the bacon rind. You just pull it back up by the string.

No one has mentioned...

WTF is MS Paint even doing on the OS running a parking meter in the first place!!

Or is that just something that can go without saying?

Too busy feasting on meatballs, Windows struggles to update itself in IKEA

Re: Good news, bad news.

..and kick any left over bits under the rug.

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

"That's more than you can say for the majority of those who have worked in or under the houses of parliament."

It's probably not a majority, but quite a few do go there with the best of intentions, but they very quickly get absorbed into Borg Collective.

Re: The Point of November 5th

Liz Truss is in the running, apparantly. I KNOOOWWW!!!

Low on passengers, low on memory: A bad day on the London Underground

Yes.

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

' if it ain't broke don't fix it'.

But DO service it at the proper times. Not stopping to do a short service frequently leads to much longer down-time fixing/replacing the broke or worn parts that had years of life left left in them if properly maintained :-)

Re: why is it that people forget flow control?

To be fair, they probably did have flow control and monitoring of it. It was, after all, a brewery.

And as head brewer, Maud Dibb said, The Brew Must Flow!

Re: Friday rule

It sounds like they barley scrapped thought! It could have all gone fizz bang, but he kept a cool head.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

Press F1 to Continue Shirley?

"the problem here could well be a failed CMOS battery resulting in the re-entry of the time and date."

Do some systems boot into the BIOS config if the checksum doesn't match these days? My recollection is that they normally report

Time and Date Not Set

CMOS Checksum mis-match

Press F1 to Continue or F2[*] to Enter Setup

[*] other keys are available.

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

Apple and Bluetooth?

Only Apple could make it so that a standard like Bluetooth only works properly with other Apple kit without needing an app to make it work when using "foreign" devices.

FFS, The whole point of Bluetooth is that devices negotiate transmission power and device capabilities such that, no matter the OS combination and no matter the device manufactures combination, it "Just Works"

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Thanks, I wasn't aware of HWs prowess in game programming. On the other hand, I remember a few years ago, Dundee Uni shouting about their games design/programming courses as being some of the best. As you say, maybe what they do is different.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

HW does supercomputing. Dundee does game design :-)

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

"A French cache-size?"

Well, that would gave a certain caché.

NB. Just for clarification, cache and caché are different words, with different meanings and, most importantly, different pronunciations. Cache rhymes with cash! Caché does not.

(I've noticed this problem especially but not exclusively with some of our North American colleagues)

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

They were all Far-Right shoes. One per child.

Re: Is this an EU or Europe thing ?

Does Silicon Glen still exist? Or is it all just game devs coming out of Dundee Uni working on "foreign" hardware?

On Christmas night, a computer logs a call to say his user has stopped working…

Re: All I want for Crimbo

Anonymous Cowards don't get any don' need no steenkin' badges

FTFY

I read a bit of this article to my wife...

"where he pukes most of the whisky into the waste bin, pees in the sink and has a sip of water from the latrine."

She just sighed and said "not funny, seen worse. Much worse." She used to work front of desk in hotels many years ago.

Merry Christmas everyone! Especially the guys'n'gals looking after the James Webb Telescope launch on Christmas Day. Hopefully there won't be any related On Call or worse, Who, Me? stories from that event :-)

Re: ALs?

It all sounds very Metaversey to me :-)

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: Removing distraction = good

I'm on the road a lot, every day. Mainly motorways, and yes, I'd say the number of accidents I see are down quite a bit over the years. But they still happen. I've been stuck in queues due to accidents, and seen the queues on the other carriageway due to accidents. Just the other week there was one on a normal road junction, must've happened just a minute or two before I got there. Luckily, all was in hand, nothing extra I could contribute to help and I could still make a right turn and detour around it.

Despite the number of accidents on major routes, and the amount of driving I do, it's actually quite rare in those places. The worst locations are busy cities and large towns, especially the evening rush hour in Winter. People in a hurry to get home in the dark, often on wet roads. It's scary how many people don't realise they forgot to turn on their lights because the dashboard is always lit and headlamps on a wet road don't reflect back up to the driver much. Fortunately, in real terms it's a small number of people and one of they few benefits of automatic headlights.

"Teslas cost a lot, but they are quite cheaply built. Remember that a £50k Tesla is actually a £25k car wrapped around a £25k battery."

Didn't someone just set fire to their Tesla with an Elon Musk effigy inside, a la Guy Fawkes, in protest at the cost of replacing the batteries?

Re: Soft controls

Clearly you were supposed to set the volume once and then accept the auto volume level based on speed that the designers focus groups say is ideal for everyone for the perfect listening experience. How dare you disagree and want to set your own volume levels!!

Re: Removing distraction = good

Yes, you can "take a roundabout" at 60mph. The landing on the other side can be a bit damaging though :-)

Is El Reg working on an article for this Porn Industry gadget yet?

Is El Reg working on an article for this Porn Industry gadget yet?

Lickable screens so you can taste the action.

Apparently aimed at teaching cooks and sommeliers remotely, but it's clear where it's really aimed :-)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59760490

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

How serious is this really?

What class BT is it using? If Class 1, with 100metre range, it's a serious issue. If Class 2 or 3, not so much for most homes/families. On the other hand, it's still a serious faux pas on Fisher Prices part.

Re: The death of childhood summed up

"Here lies the grave of 'childhood'. Taken from us January 2000.".

Born, 1838 (or thereabouts). For most, there was little "childhood" before the Victorian era. Actually having a childhood, and education, was a great advance for the human race. Such a shame it seems to be ending.

James Webb Telescope launch delayed again, this time by weather

A good few cases...

...of beer ----------------->

..for the launch and the C&C teams, not to mention the janitors and others keeping the place clean and tidy and running smoothly so no one trips over and the people we see on our screens have a good day...on Christmas Day :-)

Although., I suggest they lay off it until after their shift is over!

AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances

Re: Elastic

Other words include naive, gullible and similar because marketing headlines. A lot of the affected people will be small businesses with little to no idea about setting up IT systems and went with AWS and/or other cloud providers because of the advertising.

Re: Elastic

"If "cloud" were truly this magic solution to flexible workload problems, wouldn't it auto-reconfigure to a different part of their network when systems go down?"

That was my takeaway from this too where AWS are quoted as suggesting people buy more than one instance/location so as not to be affected by these outages. And yet, all the AWS and other cloud providers marketing, in big headline letters, tells you how resilient they are. I suppose, in the 3pt grey on grey small print they then contradict the strong inferences in the headlines.

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

Re: Occam's razor, indeed.

Ah, missed that misspelling! Was the OP being devious and lead us (me!) into a trap? Or is the OPs subconscious simply rebelling at such a preposterous proposition?

It's also proof that the human mind will see what it expects and not what is actually there unless we remember to take care :-)

Re: Occam's razor, indeed.

"Accept that an intelligent being beyond our puny understanding created what we see and are and everything false neatly into place "

Ok. Accepted. Now, where did the "intelligent being beyond our puny understanding" come from? What did s/he/it evolve from and how?

"> But lumps of mars have made it to earth.

True: What are the chances some random rock lying on the ground would manage to rise up to space (!) and then manage to go land on a neighboring planet (!!)?"

Will, obviously. a million to one, innit!

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Re: JXL is the future of all image formats

"The source code is huge but why would anyone really care about that..."

Free-to-use, public domain code instead of patent encumbered licenced code might be part of the reason this is interesting to many.

Re: public domain

You're confusing ImageMagik with iMage eMagic, the Digital Sorcerer in charge making the internet work.

Re: No, it could be useful for the web

"most mobile users still have fixed bandwidth limits."

And on mobile, the tiny screens tend to make artefacting much less of a problem. I mean, can any human actually tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 5" screen?

Re: Colour me impressed...

Also, some image decoders can be compromised by "specially crafted image files", opening a hole through your security. Hopefully, the simplicity of this new format means this can happen here.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: The stupidity button

Many years ago, I was sent out to a customers to fix a laptop. It was so long ago it had a monochrome LCD display and ran MS-DOS. In the the end, with great embarrassment, I had to ask the user how to switch it on. "Oh, you press the yellow FN key and the SPACE bar." Yes, on close examination, there a was a standard open circle with small vertical line, about 1mm in size, printed in yellow, on the front chamfered edge of the SPACE bar. FFS!!! (Just remembered, the laptop was made (or badged) by Tulip)

Re: Not seeing the switch

My wife had that problem with our video camera, back in the days when we had such things. I showed her how to remove the lens cap :-)

"Is there a situation not covered by XKCD"

Yes, and there's a XKCD for it :-)

(don't Google it, you might break the Internet!)

Re: Ditto that

"WiFi would be more practical than tying them to an Ethernet cable (the computer not the kids)."

Needed to do some work at a customers recently that involved delving into their comms room[*}. I think they had been using it with the local school for May Pole dance practice!

* Broom cupboard, still with brooms and associated stuff in there.

I use one with OpenWRT on it. It has an option to re-boot at a specified time or at set intervals through a cron job :-)