Posts by Antonius_Prime

Revealed: Why Windows Task Manager took a cuddlier approach to (process) death and destruction

I'd pay good money to have it narrated by Frankie Boyle, swears included, like you can get the Big Yin on certain SatNavs...

"Right, so we grabbed th'process and decided to ****in' shove a wee lengthy bit o' knife inty 'em."

After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for 'policy violations'

Oooh! Reminds me!

Articles about IRC always remind me to do my semi-annual check of bash.org

Ta!

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Anyone remembered that Epic have their own store?

On Windows. Yeah, its "only" 12% but it does have exclusives that don't appear on other storefronts (Steam, Ubi, EA, etc) so that does make their arguments about controlling the market a bit hollow...

Re: "Apple’s ironclad control of the iOS platform"

Bit of a strawman argument there.

I mean, by your reasoning, if you don't have a car, your portion of taxes shouldn't go towards maintaining the roads.

One thing this case has brought to light is that a flat fee of X% per dev is probably something that needs to be reexamined. (Remember, Google have a similar structure, as does Steam - and Epic on their own storefront.)

If I were to start developing apps for sale as a 1 man show and charge 0.99 currency per app/IAP, why should I only get .7 of it back per app if I "only" sell 100,000 apps/IAP in a year. (That figure, like all good stats is pulled directly from my ar$e... YMMV)

Contrast that with Epic or another big name like King. They sell way more than 100,000 apps/IAP per year. I'd wager that they sell an order of magnitude more than that a month.

I'll let the maths as an exercise for those interested.

Who's getting screwed more? Yeah, they're both getting 30% taken off the top, but if I expect to get 100,000 but instead 70,000 compared to Epic expecting 100,000,000 and getting 70,000,000. Who does it affect financially more? The large developer who has a diversified and stable platform or the lone dev who's on one platform starting out?

I'd said it before on one article and I'll say it again.

Epic only went after Apple for 2 reasons:

1. Visibilty (I's fashionable to dunk on and hate Apple)

2. The size of the playerbase on that platform is smaller than on Playstation, Windows and Android. It's less of a loss to them. Imagine what would happen if MS banned the Epic store app from Windows...

Not to take Apple's side on this, because the App Store model needs changes more than a newborn with diarhea, but Epic are doing this purely because they know if they make this noisey and even get it thrown out, they can strong arm Sony,. MS and Google.

If they win, they'll still strong arm them from a better position plus have money from Apple to do so.

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Wishing for BOfH-mas

We all did...

Subconciously, we need him... want him.. on the system...

(Throwback to a Few Good Bastards...)

Just one in 5 Googlers plan to swerve the office permanently after COVID-19

I managed to shout...

Bingo three times in that article alone...

If I had that old bluetooth enabled buzzword bingo aoo, my phone would've gone bang!

Day 3 of the Apple vs Epic trial: What actually is an iPhone anyway?

The real reason isn't Epic V Apple...

The reason they took on Apple isn't to tackle the App Store's policy.

It's because it's the smallest market share for Fortnite. If they can crack that, and / or set precedent, they can prise the same 30% off of MS grasp and whatever Sony charges.

(Survey is way out of date, but gives a general idea,,,)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/882135/leading-devices-used-play-fortnite/

RE: BS, BS everywhere

"Although I concede that running a text editor on a jailbroken smart toilet is not the most practical thing…"

Yes, but until someone ports DOOM to the Port-a-potty, is it really even a platform at that point? :D

(Can we get a DOOM Guy icon?)

Update on PHP source code compromise: User database leak suspected

"Or is write once, run anywhere bollocks?"

Always was. They fed us that fallacy in Uni with C, C++ and Java.

It ends up being write once, debug 7 trillion times, publish, hope t'f*** nothing breaks...

... and go again...

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

That's the most efficient way, yes.

But not one that generates a constant revenue stream...

Re: To be fair...

I see this with some work machines from time to time.

Given I'm the one that imaged / built them they seem to work if they know I'm coming.

I put it (indelicately as some once said) as they know the hand that first beat them... :D

Re: HR's Disappearing Data

Probably only one of the very few things S. Adams has said in recent years that people agree with is appropriate here:

"There is no "I" in "Team", but you can't spell "Who Cares?" without HR..."

In YouTube's world, parental supervision means: 'Everyone sign in to Google, click once, and trust we get it right'

Re: What is filtered?

Yeah, my then 3 year old started asking who Jeesis is, because he was asked to stay after the toy video to be told the gospel.

That particular channel got blocked so damn fast I near put a hole through the tablet with my finger.

Religion is a personal choice. It shouldn't be forced on people in mass media.

Or, as I once saw it masterfully put:

"Religion / Opinions is/are like a penis. Many people have them. They're all different. It's OK to be proud of yours. Just don't whip it out and start waving it in peoples' faces or shoving it down their throats. Especially childrens..."

(I state all of that as someone living in a catholic country, where the child will more than likely be brought up in that faith till he makes his own choice, by the way. Keep the grandparents on either side happy...)

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

Re: It's about time

I was looking for something along these lines.

This article is a good mix of "On Call" and "Ventblockers".

(Incidentally, I've shown the VB articles to a few people over time and any smokers or cat owners have miraculously managed to clean their acts up... Hrrmmmm... XD )

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: "Trust me - I'm an engineer."

Yeah... nah.

I'm not letting a bunch of civil, mech, electrical, process & HVAC engineers anywhere near the door to our comms rooms, let alone in them! XD

Besides, I prefer the BOfH's approach. I tell people that voltage is a great educator.

It has positives and negatives though. But HR says I have to be nice, so now I let them choose which teste / nipple will be positive and which will be negative...

Re: "Trust me - I'm an engineer."

Errrm... gonna err on the side of caution.

Mainly because I work with a lot of engineers (some of whom have issues with some things now considered to be basic PC use, but I digress..) and I don't trust many of them.

Especially since I was asked did I happen to know, offhand, the tensile & breaking strengths in Netwons per square inch; of the patch cables we had.

When I asked why, I was give an answer which chilled my (admitedly shrivelled IT) soul: "Building a desktop Trebuchet...

Where are you running off to?"

XD - icon because it really matches...

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

I do love that message.

The one thing I love even more is the memory and core dump it causes in people reading it for the first time, looking for a keyboard and generating their own "Keyboard missing" error.

I'm quite certain at this point that I may slightly get off on watching or causing cognitive dissonance events...

... which would explain why I still do Hell Desk... XD

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

We're still trialling Teams. Some regulatory, compliance and security concerns in my org about it.

It... works... for what we want (Meetings, calls, scheduled events, IM). But it's the raft of other... lets call them enthusiastic addons that are causing us to hang back.

Been 18 months of hanging back now, which tells you just how concerned we are...

That's it. It's over. It's really over. From today, Adobe Flash Player no longer works. We're free. We can just leave

Re: "Is my computer going to be fast enough to view this webpage?"

It's all those obfustcated trackers and ad tech...

Facebook rolls out full-page ads, website complaining Apple is forcing it to get consent before tracking you

Re: That tweet showing the multipage scroll is damning

Could always file an FOI request with the NSA for their own data...

XD

World+dog share in collective panic attack as Google slides off the face of the internet

Re: Try again *later*

Could call it the "Shower". I mean, that's what happens when clouds fall over in meatspace, right?

MTBS - Mean times between showers...

Could catch on...

Re: Ain't those Cloud services supposed to be up 100% of the time?

Global Warming. It's getting hotter, so the Cloud is evapourating a little...

Behold the drive-thru of the California Highway Patrol: Fry me a river, has 'CHIPS' stopped working again?

"Welcome to McBorkald's: Over 8 Billion Borked!"

Should be a headline on one of the next McBorkage's...

European Space Agency will launch giant claw that drags space junk to its doom

Re: They should have gone with the James bond scoop design

De-orbit to Luna.

That way, when we get back there, we have readily-ish available materials for building / landing sites.

And unless there's anything else up there, we won't screw up the environment there.

Bloated middle age beckons: Windows 1.0 turns 35 and is dealing with its mid-life crisis, just about

Re: Mobile

"pretty stable for me as well as long as you didn't ask too much of it"

We've an office manager like that. Not a window manager. An office manager.

Stable, until you ask too much of her. (Current stack limit: 2 items. A week.)

One does not simply shove elephants on a ballet shoe point and call it an acceptable measure of pressure

Re: Pressure

"Tons of glove-box-resident "Queen's Greatest Hits" cassettes."

Though doubtless these started their existence as something else by entirely different artists altogether...

When even a power-cycle fandango cannot save your Windows desktop

Re: Too Many Stories!

Just beat me to it! :D Have my upvote!

Re: Too Many Stories!

HP Thunderbolt Dock G2 - AKA The Whack-A-Dock

(https://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=2UK37ET&opt=ABU&sel=ACC)

Entire top is the power button. Exactly what you need when you're trying to reach in behind and plug in USB devices or network cables for the users who can design complex, complicated piping, HVAC, electrical & CAD designs but apparently basic matching sockets eludes them...

The dock is related to the icon...

Solving a big, yellow IT problem: If it's not wearing hi-vis, I don't trust it

Re: Data Entry

Counts as a warcrime, maybe...

(I have to remotely deal with Belgians and AZERTY - while on a QWERTY keyboard as the Gods of Computing intended...)

Reports of one's death have been greatly exaggerated: French radio station splurges obituary bank over interwebs

Re: Better later than sooner for the aforementioned people

"Recursivity. If it happens again, call back."

Cow-workers wondering why I'm darkly chuckling to myself...

Remember 2013? This coffee machine does: If I could turn back time – I'd reboot this PC

Re: The elephant in the room

It's been documented that my memory is abysmal before application of the Black Go Juice That Appeases The Beast, so perhaps they reckoned in their similar way "Lets give the machine as much grunt as we can, so that the users don't give as much grunt as they can..."

(In all probability, it was most likely an accounting idea. Build the machine as cheap as they can & charge through the nose. "Oh, software is slow? We can speed it up, that's an extra X a months. Cheers!" Interface is probably Java based anyway and we all know how memory efficient that is!*)

(*Nooooooooooope_Archer_Lana.jpg)

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

Simon will be *very* happy...

I mean, hasn't the BOfH been doing things remotely to elevators for years?

(In fact, this is precisely where my mind went when I read the article...)

Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access

Re: All that counselling, wasted

I wouldn't call it a repressed memory.

Argument for the Defence, perhaps...

#TheresBeenATerribleAccident

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

We are spoiled!

New BOFH and a new Dabbsy on the same day?

This is more inspirational that Dabbsy's "Today is your life's tomorrow!" (https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/sftw/)

Well...

For me anyway...

Those that think the above platitude is the way of the world may end up herding alpaca's in Patagonia, via the Ural Steppes...

From the Department of WCGW: An app-controlled polycarbonate lock with no manual override/physical key

Re: Welcome back

Last person who attempted to hunt down the BOFH hasn't been heard from.

Something about taking up Alpaca Herding in Patagonia, via the Ural Steppes...

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Re: Ever solved a silly problem, but spared the user from office-wide embarrassment (...) ?

"But if you call me out to fix a problem, I'll fix it. If you're the problem..."

Yeah, HR in my current place don't like me wandering around loudly clacking the old Ethernet Crimping Tool...

Summat about cracks about crimping... I'unno...

Is Little Timmy still enthralled by his Leapfrog tablet? Maybe check he hasn't sideloaded an unrestricted OS onto it

Re: The universe, for any engineer, is divided into to classes of stuff

I work with engineers of many, many different (and often, conflicting) stripes.

This is an absolute truism for understanding them...

Ofc, as IT, it's clear the buggers don't understand computers...

What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore

Re: Bond movie

I'll always upvote Hank Scorpio.

That episode was GENIUS.

Happy birthday to the Nokia 3310: 20 years ago, it seemed like almost everyone owned this legendary mobile

NOKIA Steeplechase events in the pub...

These were the big, everyone had them phone as we hit Uni / College. (Well the 3210's anyway)

We did notice that the vibrate function on them, when the phone was balanced to stand upright, was enough to propel the phone along a flat-ish table surface at a fair clip.

Being the enterprising students that we were, we were able to set up races between people. The covers gave a livery, and some of us (me) discovered some cheaper, lighter cases as well as what network was quickest to connect to what and kick off the phone.

Made a fair few bevvies out of that knowledge too...

(Icon related...)

Facebook apologizes to users, businesses for Apple’s monstrous efforts to protect its customers' privacy

Re: So, Apple moved fast and broke (Facebook's) things?

Only bad if FB aren't the ones moving fast and breaking things...

Zuck probably thinks 1984 & Animal Farm are morality tales - but gets the wrong lessons...

Personally, I predict that the 2nd or 3rd posty-iOS 14 update to the app will have hidden code that'll bypass the restrictions and we'll be treated to a replay of the Epic Vs Apple kerfuffle.

Might set a reminder to send an anoni-mouse email to the App Review Teams in a few weeks...

Anti-5G-vaxx pressure group sues Zuckerberg, Facebook, fact checkers for daring to suggest it might be wrong

Re: @Mark 85 Tossing their toys about

Isn't that why BBCx exists? Give them their platform. At 12 at night. On the station no one watches.

(Used to be BBC2, then 3, then 4... BBC++ didn't sit right. Infinitely incrementing BBC's is an ill-understood threat to existence...)

Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter'

Re: Good news!

These days, its less common to be on their watch lists!

In fact, these days they don't even bother with lists, they just go get your info direct from Zuck!

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

Re: Update (mis)-scheduling

"And whilst it was going on, basically all you had to work with was the phone and the coffee mug..."

If that occurred more than twice to me, my phone would... [checks BOFH excuse server] ...suffer an Unreportable Transmission Override Warning... and be unusable for the day...

Modern.Problems.Dave.Chappelle.gif

Twitter hackers busted 2FA to access accounts and then reset user passwords

However, Twitter's European HQ is located in Dublin.

And therefore very much subject to GDPR.

Our lenient tax laws do make it too good to pass up sometimes and you can get some rather large (pardon the pun) fish...

Re: The bit that leaps out for me...

"I would suggest a small number may end up being just 1 but they are trying to avoid all the crap landing in one place at the moment."

If they're trying to avoid the midden hitting the windmill for one specific person, then it suggests to me that it may have been an important person.

Not neccessarily a high up one, but more someone who gets a lot of things done, or as we've seen - has some of the Royal Keys...

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

Re: BOFH

All of us who've taken that path do - whole heartedly! :D

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Do you need a towel? :D

Consumer orgs ask world's competition watchdogs: Are you really going to let Google walk off with all Fitbit's data?

Short-sighted bit of an analogy here?

"Not everyone has a Fitbit, so the data is only useful when considering Fitbit users.

I’ve always used Garmin fitness / sport products so this purchase should have little impact on me."

You could also say:

"Not everyone's house is on fire, so the data is only useful when considering people who's house caught fire.

I’ve always used Hotels so this should have little impact on me."

It may not impact you, but there's a raft of others it will impact. And it may impact you later on, indirectly.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: I'm sure we've all done this too

"Equipment needs to know who's boss."

YES! This! A thousand, thousand, thousand times this!

I have to explain to many staff that the reason the machine starts working when I do exactly what they did is because mine was the first hand to touch it and it knows I *will* slap it if it misbehaves.

And if anyone ever starts a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Computers, they may be subject to a Terrible Accident...

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Have to love the ESO's naming conventions...

They used the Very Large Telescope

Then; "ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope planned to begin operation in 2025"

I can only hope the next one after that is the "F***ing Enourmous Telescope"...