Posts by PhilipN

As above, so below: El Reg haunts Scaleway's data centre catacombs 26 metres under Paris

As above, so below

An extraordinarily arcane, not to mention her(m)etical, epithet.

Ahhhhh! What year is it?! Users left without direction or clue after Google Calendar 404s

Today’s note to self

Switch on brain

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

Re: Agreed - Why black

Preferably to be a black, blind, deaf, tall, epileptic, ex-convict in her late ‘50’s

(With apologies to NTNON : https://youtu.be/q8JEybbei60)

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Even easier than that - some/most of the time

Slight tangent but I blindly double clicked on a docx document on a machine running the new macOS developer beta and the OS took it upon itself to open the document in good old Textedit. The compatibility, at least for that document with moderate formatting, was at such a level I did not even realise it had not opened under MS Word.

Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let's have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage

Re: Didn't notice...

I do not think that was his sentiment, Louis S. The context did not support your interpretation. The vast majority of Regitards are generous, not spiteful.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Youtube link - NOT "Edinburgh, Scotland", thank you.

Just "Edinburgh". WE know where it is.

SD Card

Already doing its own “Not SD” card :

https://consumer.huawei.com/uk/accessories/nm-card/

AI can now animate the Mona Lisa's face or any other portrait you give it. We're not sure we're happy with this reality

Not just creepy: plain wrong

One observer surmised the reason for Mona Lisa’s so-called “enigmatic smile” was because she was accustomed to hiding what must have been a very bad set of teeth.

Fact is, despite all humans using the same basic facial gestures, every single one of us uses his features in different and unique ways - some subtle; some blatant. Good example, captured well, is Jeff Bridges playing an alien in Starman.

Ergo it would be a very disturbing experience for me to find my wife’s face moving and her thereby suddenly expressing herself differently. Nothing to do with the size of her nose etc.

Recall some uni some years ago suggested communication is only about 37 per cent words.

Pushed around and kicked around, always a lonely boy: Run Huawei, Google Play, turns away, from Huawei... turns away

100 years and its the Yellow Peril* all over again!

*coined by Kaiser Wilhelm and we all know what happened to him.

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Re: Shouty men...

There's a limit. Usually some dickhead comes off a period of fast driving into slow to moderate traffic and thinks he is still going round Brands Hatch*. Sits on your bumper as if he could shoot past, or through, you any opportunity, This is dangerous and - do they still force you to learn "braking distances" to pass the test? - the only safe way (in traffic you cannot just move to the side and let him pass; conversely I am not preventing him from moving to another lane) is to slow down.

Even if not an outright danger to life and limb, which means slow, I choose not to be rear-ended by said dickhead, thank you, which means slower.

Agreed if this creates a tailback it is impeding flow etc but then I stick religiously to the speed limit. Most times the dickhead gets the message and, frankly, I have done him a favour.

* = Daytona?

Essex named sexiest British accent followed closely by, um, Glaswegian

Re: No accent?

According to my Gran, the way the Beatles talked was “Liverpool Irish”. The other variant - true Liverpudlian, closer to Lancashire generally - has vowels which are quite flat. Think Anthony Booth.

Crap band sues crap beer maker: Hair-metal rockers have an Axl to grind over Guns N' Rosé

Re: Axl should be happy someone remembers them.

The music biz loves tossing out big numbers. All part of the hype.

Anyone remember the 60 million quid deal Robbie Williams did with EMI?

"Robbie who?"

Tractors, not phones, will (maybe) get America a right-to-repair law at this rate: Bernie slams 'truly insane' situation

Pah! Tractors are so last century

Open the border for fresh farm labour!

(Ducks for cover)

Now you can officially dox Scrabble players, thanks to the new dictionary definitions

Not OK

Thought OK was (1) an abbreviation of Orl Korrect which was (2) misspelled (3) slang.

So a definite no - no - no.

Great disturbance in the Force as Star Wars' 'big walking carpet' is laid to rest

RIP Peter

Left a permanent legacy without any dialogue and doing almost nothing but by just being there.

What a meth: Elderly Melbourne couple sign for 20kg shipment of drugs, say cops

delivered to a pasty

With lots of tanning cream?

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

16M quid?

More than 2M quid a year?

I would have stood guard outside the Embassy 24/7 for half that. One of those little tents they use for roadworks for “private functions”. Job done.

A copy-paste of Europe and a '5G' hotel: El Reg's Adventures in Huawei Land were fairly wacky

Re: Ummm - guess someone fell asleep...

Tch! Tch! Spreading knowledge about (a tiny part of) China, when many (including or even especially those who know Harrods now has Putonghua-speaking shop assistants) prefer the wishful thinking of China as the Fairy Kingdom where be dragons. Better to leave them (with no apologies for another gratuitous archetype) to their whippets and brass bands.

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Re: Working fine for me

Continuing the theme of Lessons Learned at Dad's Workbench : the start of every job is to prime and sharpen your tools; the end is to clean, oil and store them.

Not another pro-Brexit demo... though easy to confuse: Each Union Jack marks a pile of poo

Re: Times change

When I wor a lad there wuz still the occasional rag ‘n’ bone man plying his trade throughout London with horse and cart. Time before that such conveyances were ubiquitous : milk, beer etc

Residents didn’t mind. Shovel at the ready to give their tomatoes and beans a dollop of organic goodness.

‘Course, back then most everyone grew vegetables in the back garden.

To give perspective one of my uncles kept chickens - yes, in a residential area of London - just after WWII. I don’t think their detritus qualified as fertiliser.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Remember those (2)

The original Google phone with a keyboard which folded out kinda sideways. I may still have mine in a drawer somewhere. I feel so ... far away.

Since when we have got used to phones which are virtually indestructible with normal everyday use such as keeping them in the back pocket while seated, tossing them carelessly onto the desk etc.

Ergo phones with moving bits do not stand a chance, although I shall be intrigued to find out whether Huawei have cracked it (so to speak).

Bloke faces up to 20 years in the clink after gun held to dot-com owner's head in robbery

He was at "a" university?

How did he get in?

Oh I know : First stop, Target. Then the Admissions Office carrying a brown bag...

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

the exact template that lawyers use - FTFY

Case in point : a certain WH lawyer on camera stating "I have no direct knowledge.." of a certain defalcation by an earlier POTUS. Which just means - "DIRECT knowledge", note - he was not standing in the corridor observing Party A giving Party B a BJ. But he knew. Everybody did.

Microsoft president: We said no to Cali cops' face-recog tech – and we won't craft killer robots

I wish

"Microsoft president Brad Smith has revealed that the company turned down an order from California cops for any of its software over human rights concerns".

Enough about me, why do you hate Kaspersky so much? Revealed: Insp Clouseau-esque bid to smear critics as shills

Re: Lucas Lambert

The name itself is a dead giveaway

What's long, hard, and full of seamen? The US Navy's latest cybersecurity war gaming classes

Hardy perennial

I mean the “play on words” in the title.

At the risk of lowering the tone - well, too late - the graffiti on the wall at my law school’s toilets began with “She was only an admiral’s daughter but her room was full of discharged seamen” and went downhill from there.

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

Wembley

Guess sports field technology has advanced in 50 years so we should never see a water-logged pitch for Important Games.

Different when Leeds lost an FA Cup final. The ground staff spent all morning working sand into a wet pitch as a result of which it was like playing on soft moss. As a result also they lost when the ball, expected as per normal physics to bounce straight into the arms of Gary Sprake, who was positioned exactly right and ready, just went plop and almost dribbled underneath him into the goal.

Edinburgh-based rocket botherer seeks UK or overseas launch location for fun times, maybe more

Simple Physics

Belize is still part of the Commonwealth and is close to the Equator?

Prepare yourselves for Windows 10 May-hem. Or is it June, no, July?

Surprised this wasn’t the norm

Yup pre-testing testing. Easy and effective.*

Engineering mate of mine used to help build or buy fancy business-orientated consumer devices (e.g. one of the earliest standalone internet radios) for his boss’s far-flung corporate empire. He’d get a handful of them and fling one at his secretary, one at the boss’s grandma, the cook etc. etc. with the request that they play with it and rate it as Crap or Cloud 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 and why. Only when the first samples passed this test would he even bother moving to the next step.

*Also free, and nobody got fired if the consensus was “crap”.

Just the small matter of the bill for scrapping Blighty's old nuclear submarines: It's £7.5bn

Re: Russian Civil War

Believe it was Zhukov who wrote in his memoirs that they interpreted the appeasement of Hitler by other Western powers a la Munich was in reality part of a strategy to persuade Germany to attack Russia.

Long memories

We do not realise it today but the Communist takeover in Russia 100 some years ago was as welcome to most other countries as was the rise of Isis in the Middle East a couple of years ago. The reaction to “wipe them out” was fairly universal, tempered only by the military realities of the times. Russia has indeed an inescapable sense of being under threat. The West is not doing much to reassure them but I agree with above poster that it would be mad for NATO to become the outright aggressor.

Apple redesigns wireless AirPower charger to be world's smallest, thinnest, lightest, cheapest, invisible... OK, it doesn't exist anymore

Yawn

1) Low margin item - and I do not mean cheap : low margin in proportion to the resources needed and likely sales, which leads to >

AND 2) it could have made perfect sense (and I do not believe they could not have solved the engineering issues) if Apple were brave enough to eliminate all ports from a future generation phone, lightning, USB-C, everything (which would have been interesting). But if there is always going to be a physical port of some kind why spend valuable resources on a fancy dongle (which others are doing nicely at, thank you).

Finally, like many here I have cupboards full of plugs, adapters, chargers and cables going all the way back to the first iPod, as well as many other devices. WTF am I supposed to do with that bloody lot (alongside the crates full of other cables and ... I’m gonna stop here to protect my blood pressure).

Debate around Huawei espionage fears in UK about as clear as those darn Brexit negotiations

I don't know enough Chinese people

Obviously.

Croydon school rolling in toilet roll after Brexit gift deemed unfit for the Queen's Anus Horribilis

Bowing and Scraping

No that's the Queen's violinist.

Loo stuff is handled by the Master of the Rolls

Who is also her chauffeur

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Excellent article

Thanks El Reg and KMcC. With a name like that there’s a chance you may even have relatives in NZ however remote. None of them would have been in those mosques but that’s not the point. NZ is such a decent welcoming orderly and assimilated place that, and this is going to appear a little trite, today we are all Kiwis.

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

Re: 31.4 trillion? Rubbish

Agreed. I am going for the record the proper way using pencil and paper. Gotta go. In a rush to get this done before the End of Time.

Oh - will pi and other universal constants still be relevant then?

Bugger!

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Re: Not sure the comparison is valid

But instructive. The (supposed) 99.99% uptime feature of phone systems allows possibly down time in a year of..... oh I can't be arsed..... it is a Very Short Period.

Holy sh*tsnacks! Danger zone! Edinburgh Uni's Archer 2 super 'puter will cost a cool £79m

Next steps : (1) reinforce Hadrian's Wall

and cast iron immigration policy to keep out the Sassenachs fixating on Br*****

Then (2) give citizenship to all overseas Scots and their descendants. Result : Most dynamic country on the planet!

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

"Politicians" and "got their act together"

Naah. Don't belong in the same sentence.

But then I started noticing politics way back when politicians were soft and cuddly and weren't actually supposed to do anything,

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Many thanks for the above AC and EI.

So are you saying that for example with the way commercial aeronautics are going :

Sully could not have landed on the Hudson? or

The 747 which crashed in Japan some years ago, after the pilot had lost control of the tail, or the tail itself (I forget which), but managed to manoeuvre for some time on engine power alone (an incredible feat), that also could not happen now?

If so - God almighty!

Re: The reason that the Max series need MCAS

Some years ago a mate of mine, regular visitor to South Africa, said that after a perfect landing in a 747 in Jo'burg the second officer announced gleefully and with much respect and admiration for his boss that it was the final landing by the captain, due to retire after a long commercial flying career, and done entirely manually i.e. without the electronic whiz-bangs.

Question from a non-pilot : Don't they train pilots to fly in an emergency without the technology these days?

Airlines in Asia, Africa ground Boeing 737 Max 8s after second death crash in four-ish months

Human vs. Machine vs. Software Error

The original Spiderman from many years ago, when climbing up the sides of buildings on the end of a rope, wanted blokes on the other end of the rope, not machines.

The main way I can think of to rationalise this is there is only one potential point of failure. And one which has a brain.

Transcript leak: Inside Facebook's secret crisis meeting, where Zuck and Sheryl race to save social network's rep

Privacy-focused

Usual blah-bedi-blah straight from the Microsoft Manual of P.R. Speak.

Privacy-focused is categorically not "private".

The whole "note" is full of such weasel words. "Reducing permanence". What does that even mean? Until one hour before Judgement Day?

I am starting to feel sick.

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

None of the above

I vote for a bloke with a red flag leading the vehicle on foot.

AND can we address the real problem* by reserving a particularly nasty part of the prison system for those select few (but too many) drivers of 'leccy vehicles who think they are doing the world a favour and believe they are entitled to drive like twats!

* I accept though what people say above about pedestrians charging unthinkingly into traffic. Seen it twice. Both times youngish girls somewhat pre-occupied. The first one, the bus (!) driver reacted instantly and she was left with a badly bruised shoulder. Damn lucky. Just imagine if he had been checking the mirror at that instant.

The second walked through a (pedestrian) red light and was left unconscious on the ground by a motor bike. Not his fault at all and he was not going particularly fast - he stopped barely yards away - but he would have had a nasty time of it from the local fuzz. Regardless of what happened to the poor girl none of us wants that.

If at first you don't succeed, you may be trying to install that Slow Ring Windows 10 build

Re: Brown Ring of Quality

Thought that was Tom Arnold to Billy Crystal ripping off a wire/ mic in Analyze That?

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

Forgot to check whether this is Bootnotes, but anyway :

Carpet tiles! Corners rucked up by clumsy cleaners. Fraying. Stretching, shrinking and moving. Ugh!

Now - Lino! (That is short for linoleum, youngsters).

Lasts many decades if properly cared for.

Then in the late '60's early '70's some new-fangled rubber or vinyl (anyway something beginning with "poly" I suppose) came along and every newly-decorated office in the land stank like a plastic bag caught on the exhaust pipe.

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

"Half" truths?

We have all reached the tipping point, more often than we would like, when, not naturally being aggressively judgemental, we eventually realise somebody we have known for a while is a pathological liar. Or at least has a poor average when it comes to honesty.

After that you cannot believe a single thing (s)he says. Ever again.

In the business world it applies to individuals as well as corporations - a strange, anthropomorphic phenomenon, but I digress.

I could be referring to any number of public figures but ......

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Re: Racist bastards!

I don't need to look it up. I went to skule!

Re: Racist bastards!

Nor me. Brit born and bred from a long line of Brits and I think I can just about qualify as lightly dirty grey/pink.

Definitely not white.

Watching in slow motion as you turn around and say... Take my breath Huawei (with its updated storage silo software)

Re: Can I upvote the headline?

Agreed. I thought the same when (s)he channelled both AC/DC and a certain Hollywood musical (!) within 24 hours.

Careful though. Senior journos may throw a hissy fit when a sub-editor writes better copy than theirs.

(Just teasing, guys)