* Posts by Anonymous Cowerd

182 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2011

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Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

Anonymous Cowerd
Flame

Windows 11 is never getting installed

It doesn't work with my i7-7700.

Linux next.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Anonymous Cowerd

I wouldn’t be too sure about that

“nowadays almost everyone on iPhone uses Apple Maps”

All the iPhone users I know use Google maps.

From the Great Resignation to demand for more overtime

Anonymous Cowerd

Re: Present to my successor!

Yeah, I gave my employer a year to find a replacement. I think they thought I was joking.

No idea if they found anybody, but it’s not my problem.

The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

Re: Cynical

It isn't always the fault of the IT department.

Our IT department identified a persistent (and for us, unfixable) error in one of our [insert name of large database vendor] database's core software.

Fortunately, we had a support agreement with [large database vendor] for such eventualities, so we called up their support team. They knew of the problem, but also knew it would take a team of ten about three months to fix it, so refused to do so on the grounds of cost.

Wankers.

In IT, no good deed ever goes unpunished

Anonymous Cowerd
Unhappy

I meticulously documented my code, ensured it was easily readable and properly commented.

The end result was that it was easy to outsource the maintenance to a third party in India and I was eventually made redundant.

Doh.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Anonymous Cowerd

Horses for courses

The QL was Sinclair’s attempt to break into the business machines market. At the same time Acorn tried to compete in the games market.

Both ventures ended badly.

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

Anonymous Cowerd

NULL should never have a meaning other than "I don't know".

If you think otherwise, I don't want you coding for me.

Accidentally wiped an app's directory? Hey, just play the 'unscheduled maintenance' card. Now you're a hero

Anonymous Cowerd

Happy memories

Happy memories of joining an Oracle team as the newbie.

My "trainer" decided to show me how much authority he had by logging on to a test database and deleting a cross-reference table. As he proudly showed me how nothing would now work in the application, the phones started ringing.

As you might have guessed, he was actually in the production system.

It was passed off as a network problem while the table was restored from a backup.

NEC insists its face-recog training dataset isn't biased, but refuses to share details of Neoface system with UK court

Anonymous Cowerd
FAIL

Re: What these accuracy numbers really mean

98% accuracy will give 19998 false positives out of 100000?

Please check your maths.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Anonymous Cowerd

I couldn't care less about them having a party, but filming in HMNB is a strict no-no.

Amazon staffer based just a stone's throw away from Seattle HQ tests positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Anonymous Cowerd
Flame

Re: Respirators

"we should take comfort in the fact that ~80pct of cases will be minor"

As someone who is an a vulnerable group, that sounds very much like :

"F*** you, I'm all right Jack"

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Anonymous Cowerd

Re: Consultation is shot to pieces then

Sadly, if the "new post" is outside the EU (don't know what happens after Brexit) there's nothing you can do about it - it's perfectly legal.

I should know; I was made redundant and my old job is now being done for a quarter of the price and a quarter of the quality by somebody in Mumbai.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Anonymous Cowerd
FAIL

"an" SCSI cable?

We all know it's "a" SCSI cable.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

debris

As I see objects every couple of minutes in the clear skies of the south of England, I can only assume your figures are for deliberately launched satellites and don't include all the other crap, like discarded rocket boosters etc.

There are far more than 4000 artificial objects in orbit, currently around the 20000 mark.

Is there alien life on Earth? Maybe, says Brit 'naut. Well, where did they come from? How about this far-away cluster. Or this 'Godzilla' galaxy...

Anonymous Cowerd
Alien

"Aliens exist, there’s no two ways about it,"

Not necessarily.

Someone's got to be first. What if it's us?

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Anonymous Cowerd

Re: <rant>

I completely agree with (3).

You should be able to disable Autoplay. It's bloody annoying.

Quick question, what the Hull? City khazi is a top UK tourist destination

Anonymous Cowerd
Headmaster

Re: Pedant's corner

The Lake District only has one lake (Bassenthwaite Lake).

Otherwise, it would be called The Lakes District.

IT meltdown outfit TSB to refund all customers that fall victim to fraud in 'UK banking first'

Anonymous Cowerd
Flame

it's not retrospective

so if you got screwed over before yesterday, you're still screwed

OK, your boss allegedly called you a lazy n*****, promoted the person you trained ahead of you and paid you less, but you can't PROVE it's racism, Facebook says

Anonymous Cowerd

other civil wars are available

"also known as the American Civil War"

FIFY

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

Anonymous Cowerd
FAIL

Re: Updating to Windows 10

Win 7 told me that my machine spec was suitable for a free upgrade to Win 10.

Half an hour later I had to reinstall Win 7 as the Win 10 update bricked the PC.

Spektr-R goes quiet, Dragon splashes down and SpaceX lays off

Anonymous Cowerd

Spektr-R was only supposed to last 5 years

so it's already exceeded its lifespan...

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

huh?

Trump has closed down the government because they won't give him several billion dollars to build the wall?

I thought he said the Mexicans were going to pay for it.

Motorola: Oops, phone busted? Grab a spudger and go get 'em, champ

Anonymous Cowerd
Flame

I think the term is "planned obsolescence"

e.g. Braun electric toothbrushes

Just soldered in a new battery for £10 instead of spending £100+ on a replacement toothbrush.

They can go **** themselves.

The Reg chats with Voyager Imaging Team member Dr Garry E Hunt

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

Was it a time machine too?

"Voyager 2 would be launched first, followed by Voyager 1 a few months later in 1977"

16 days later actually.

Lo and behold, Earth's special chemical cocktail for life seems to be pretty common

Anonymous Cowerd
Boffin

Re: Fermi Paradox

see also : the Great Filter

Anonymous Cowerd
Alien

insufficient data

"Once we actually know more, we may find out that planets inhabited by living creatures are common."

Or extremely rare. Or ubiquitous. Or scattered thinly.

Until we have some more data, there's no way to know.

When's a backdoor not a backdoor? When the Oz government says it isn't

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

Re: "all intensive purposes"

My comprehension is fine, thanks. I've seen this grammatical error many times, so I seriously doubt that this is intentional; it's just wrong.

Anonymous Cowerd
Headmaster

"all intensive purposes"

LMFTFY

"all intents and purposes"

Boffins get fish drunk to prove what any bouncer already knows

Anonymous Cowerd
FAIL

"natural predator"?

Oscars come from South America.

Zebra danios ("zebrafish") come from Asia.

Natural predator my arse.

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

Anonymous Cowerd
FAIL

Re: Prepare for...

"the deluge of comments saying how it's not really stealing"

It's not really stealing.

It's really copyright infringement.

Basic bigot bait: Build big black broad bots – non-white, female 'droids get all the abuse

Anonymous Cowerd

we should feel more comfortable with the machines if they look like us

look up "uncanny valley"

Nah, it won't install: The return of the ad-blocker-blocker

Anonymous Cowerd
Happy

sites who block adblockers

do not get repeat visits from me

PC shipments just rose, thanks to Windows 10

Anonymous Cowerd

I bought mine despite Windows 10

I bought a new PC this year and put a copy of Windows 7 on it, as I already had a licensed version of it.

When my old PC attempted the free update from Win 7 to Win 10 (the OS said it would be fine and could cope with it) it bricked the machine, so I'm reluctant to let Win 10 anywhere near my lovely new hardware.

It's been 50 years since those damn dirty apes took the planet by storm

Anonymous Cowerd
Thumb Up

Bridge on the River Kwai

was also written by Pierre Boulle.

Strange but true.

So you accidentally told a million people they are going to die: What next? Your essential guide...

Anonymous Cowerd

"to be directed before he takes action"

so who directed him then?

Why did I buy a gadget I know I'll never use?

Anonymous Cowerd

Minoru 3D webcam

Red/green glasses supplied. Used once, one careful owner. Offers...

The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Anonymous Cowerd
Unhappy

Re: Everything's gone. Everything.

I turned off the update to avoid this crap.

They can take CTR from my cold dead computer.

Two drones, two crashes in two months: MoD still won't say why

Anonymous Cowerd
Facepalm

Re: MoD relies on spin and secrecy to deflect criticism

""HMS Sheffield, Falklands" MOD buys the idea of warships armor made out of materials normally associated with fireworks"

Except that contrary to aluminium-foil-hatted myth, Sheffield's superstructure was made entirely of steel.

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

Anonymous Cowerd
Mushroom

Re: The Thing?

Carpenter's was NOT a remake, any more than Polanski's Oliver Twist was a remake of David Lean.

iOS apps can read metadata revealing users' location histories

Anonymous Cowerd

Re: Android too?

I also disabled geolocation, on my iPhone.

When I post a picture of the very nice fish that I caught, I don't want to give away the position of the mark!

Itching to stuff iOS 11 on your iPhone? You may want to hold off for a bit

Anonymous Cowerd
Flame

contact the apps developer?

Tried that through the app store, but they've removed the 32-bit apps and thus the ability to contact the developer.

I won't be "upgrading", but I will be getting a different phone when my iPhone 6 eventually dies.

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

Anonymous Cowerd

less moons?

surely there'll be quite a few more, just a lot smaller

Ad blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile

Anonymous Cowerd

iOS, safari, Adblock Plus, Umbra.

Works for me.

El Reg gets schooled on why SSDs will NOT kill off the trusty hard drive

Anonymous Cowerd
Meh

warnings

One major issue with SSDs apart from price - SSDs give no warning of their impending failure. You just lose the data. At least an HDD usually gives some indication that it's dying, so you have time to get any unbacked-up data off it.

New MH370 analysis again suggests plane came down outside search area

Anonymous Cowerd
Holmes

Re: It will be found

Well of course it will be in the last place they look - when they find it, they'll stop looking.

Old Firefox add-ons get 'dead man walking' call

Anonymous Cowerd
Unhappy

Time to disable updates

I'd rather keep my Classic Theme Restorer.

Assange offers job to sacked Google diversity manifestbro

Anonymous Cowerd
Thumb Down

There's nothing like a bit of impartial journalism...

...and this is nothing like a bit of impartial journalism.

Virgin Trains dodges smack from ICO: CCTV pics of Corbyn were OK

Anonymous Cowerd
Big Brother

regardless of Corbyn

I can tell you from experience that this situation does occur, frequently, and their attempts to play it down don't fool anybody.

Ever wondered why the universe only has black holes in S or XXXL? No? Boffins have an answer

Anonymous Cowerd

Wheeler wasn't first to label them "black holes"

He just popularised the name.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bla1.htm

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Anonymous Cowerd
Devil

Has anybody mentioned Real Player yet?

That's what real hipsters use.

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