Posts by podgerama

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

I agree entirely.

Fair play to google, they do occasionally suggest some articles I'm interested in on my feed, and i do like to read them, but unless I'm at home with my pi hole helping out, the articles are near unreadable, videos that autoplay and then shift themselves into the corner and follow you down the page, a new picture displayed seemingly after every other sentence, whole screen images that you have to scroll through to continue reading.

I'm there for 2 or maybe 3 paragraphs of information, but that text has been turned into 4 pages of dross where i have to pick out the content.

None of the adverts are relevant, and they are extremely intrusive, their loading seems to take precedence over the actual content you are there for.

Good Grief! Ransomware gang has only gone and pwned the NRA – or so it claims

God Dang it BillyBob

Darn it, we had Bubba and JonnyRay walking patrols round them computerboxes 24-7!

Perhaps they needed bigger guns?

I heard the hackers came through that there innernet cable!

Nuh-uh, we got jimmy playing Call of Duty on one of them, anyone comes through the cables, he shoots them!

I beg you, please don't back up that secret directory full of photos!

My longest serving mate once asked me to fix his pc. It had been upgraded and upgraded since its inception as cyrix 6x86 machine running windows 95 up to an AMD K6II running Windows XP. His latest change of motherboard wouldn't let it boot so he left it with me, but he asked me not to look at the contents of one drive in particular. We are the kind of mates who endlessly take the p*ss out of each other, and never miss an opportunity to have a dig, so this was a red rag to a bull. I found out that he had a thing for blondes (nothing unusual there). Blondes tied to chairs. Badly Photoshopped celebrity blondes tied to chairs to be precise. As hundreds of images of women with the heads of Brtiney Spears, Melissa Joan Hart or Jenny McCarthy 'shopped onto the bodies of women were beaming back at me from my monitor. I gave him back his computer elaborately tied up with a ball of string with a cheap joke shop blonde wig attached to it, it took him a week to look me in the eye again.

The other one was the father in laws computer, he needed to be upgraded from vista to 7 to be able to run office 2013, the machine was slow so I decided to stick in an SSD, I needed to clear some space as the new drive was 240GB and his drive was 320 and almost full. A quick run of treesize found a 160GB folder named c:\apps\media. I saw one file name in there and didn't need to see any more. That directory was left out of the cloning, the original drive put into a USB caddy and handed back over when the upgrades were done. I told him that his downloaded "songs" were too large but on the original. My mrs later took me aside quietly and said "by songs you mean his porn don't you" as a statement not a question.

Pipex 'silence' condemned punters' emails to spam blackhole

Trend are a bunch of idiots who dont understand networks or the chaos they cause

They tried this a few years ago and it affected my company and all of our clients. they listed the range 194.54.0.0/16 as a source of spam. My company is a small UK ISP, and we have a range of 1024 ip addresses in that range. Trend refused to talk to us because we were not from InterCard, a German company who owns 194.54.0.0 to 194.54.3.255. Being totally unable to comprehend that the /16 range was split into lots of /22 networks or smaller Trend just blocked an arbitrary range plucked from their arses. We had over 200 clients unable to send mail.

Despite offering to send them through all the information from RIPE, they still refused to listen to the fact that intercard did not own the whole /16 range, so I emailed TheRegister, and was soon speaking with Dan Goodin. Trends defence was "you are in a bad neighbourhood on the internet" my reply was "you are allegedly a reputation service, if my neighbour has a criminal record, does that mean i must have one as well? as that is what your reputation service is insinuating with this blanket ban of addresses". After an hour or so of back and forths, someone who was in charge of the company braincell realised they screwed up and removed the block that they initially said would take a week to remove!

I will never recommend the use of Trends services to anyone for anything, i wouldnt touch them with a stolen bargepole.

Ageing Mario blamed for Nintendo's woes

Greg hit one part well on the head, shovelware. Many developers just changed a control or two to require a waggle and hey presto it must now be fun. Wii sports was brilliant for being able to pick up and play. my mother and aunt both love tennis and they took to it straight away, it was much easier for them than a tennis game on an xbox or ps3. Lazy game developers and a controller that doesn't always do what you tell it have combined to me only buying two games in the last 2 years on that platform.

As for their other cash cow, the handhelds, IOS has made a lot of people evaluate games differently. some of the games on the handhelds that you can pick up for £15 online for a ds i wouldnt even pay 69p for in the appstore.

I would not lay blame at Nintendos intellectual property, they have some of the strongest franchises in gaming. Mario, Zelda, Metroid et al are not to blame for poor sales. Gaming has changed, The online experience on any nintendo console is leagues behind microsoft, sony and even apple. The masses 3rd party shovelware make you weary of impluse buying, and compared to other platforms some games feel to expensive.

Satnav blunders blamed for £200m damages

i had a job over christmas at uni way back in the late nineties. I was installing training systems in branches of lloyds tsb bank. I was working all over the country, previously before this job the furthest i had driven from my home (i had only been driving for a few months) was 50 miles from leafy surrey to bluewater in kent.

I worked in central london, hull, leeds, newcastle and south wales over the course of this job, and i managed to navigate my way everywhere with nothing but an AA atlas.

while it is possible to get where you need to go using good old fashioned paper maps, the minute you hit a built up area you don't know, you are in trouble. Try finding somewhere legal to pull over for five minutes in london while you check your A-Z, the cctv cameras will be all over you and you will get some lovely letters through the post delightfully telling you you have won the chance to pay westminster council the princely sum of £80.

Sat navs are a great aid, and in some cases a complete god send, but as has been said, people who are stupid enough to follow them without question are..well..stupid. I have co-pilot on my smartphone, it does what i need, it gets free updates, it gives me a backup when need reassurance on a route. its no replacement for actual knowledge, but who has the time to learn all the routes they need to take ahead of time?.