Posts by THMONSTER

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

Well I guess by the time I get my pension sorted out I'll be many years dead and they'll still be sending letters to an address my parent grandparents owned that is now 40 feet underwater!

They joys of progress.

Australia bans kids from signing up for YouTube accounts, angering Google

Protecting the kids

Google: We want all your government info so we can, you know, protect the kids... Oh god, we didn't mean for you to protect them that much!

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Breaches

Once data starts leaking out and people start losing everything, important rich people, not us worthless scum you understand and they start being exposed for what they are, then it'll be removed and then put back in again a few months later. Then it'll happen again and again until all the bugs are wiped out and no more leaks from highly important rich people happens again. It won't matter if us poor wretches data is used and abused, if we lose everything so long as the rich are safely ring fenced from this. After all, they're important.

UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat

Trust in delivery firms?

After applying much wailing an gnashing of teeth on their social media accounts waiting and waiting for the Yodel delivery chimps to actually deign me worthy enough to actually deliver a parcel to me I now would not trust this company to hit the planet if they dropped out of the sky.

There are bad delivery firms and then there is Yodel class bad delivery firms.

Remember the 1980s? Oversized shoulder pads, Metal Mickey and... sticky keyboards?

LAN party amusement

I did a lot of LAN parties in the Leicester area years ago.

Many a time there would be beer soaked keyboards being washed out.

One incident that stuck in my mind was someone losing a laptop to a pint of beer.

Even though it was washed out straight away, that one never recovered.

A pint of vodka and orange dropping into the top case fan of my case didn't manage to kill my PC either.

I guess I just got lucky with that one though.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Re: Exactly the problem

I never realised the power that the makers of Eve Online had.

No more blockading Jita for me!

Remember the millions of fake net neutrality comments? They weren't as kosher as the FCC made out

Could this be mail/wire fraud which, I believe, is a federal crime in the USA?

These people do it because there are no consequences for their actions because those who stand to make money from this make sure there are no consequences to their actions.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Re: First radio, now light...

Make that light powerful enough and it will burn straight through any interference.

Icon: this is probably going to be the result when someone at the back of a crowded room needs to use the wifi.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: Until...

This reminds me of a monthly LAN party I used to attend in Leicester.

Power was always interesting there with people just plugging into empty sockets on 4/6 gangs as they arrived. This often lead to the power going out mid-game to howls of anguish from the participants. There were worse incidents though such as the plug melting in the socket at the end of a long line of computers, the smell of melting plastic was our first indication that something was wrong.

There were plenty of incidents of participants, drunkenly coming in from the pub at which it was hosted, tripping over the cables and again there were howls of anguish from all around the room. After one such incident, one off the guys who was on the row which went down looked more shocked than usual when this regular occurrence happened. It turned out that he thought to protect his cherished hardware with a little UPS for his PC so that he could gracefully shut down instead of the power just dying. What he did not realise is that as people arrived they just plugged into the nearest socket as usual and when the power went down, everyone on his row was relying on his UPS which lasted mere seconds, if that, before it crapped itself and also died.

There were other incidents too such as guys running in after moving their precious 21" CRTs into the hall from their cars through a rainstorm and having them go bang as soon as they plugged them in due to water in the sockets. Most of these problems were not helped at all with the events being held in the back room of the pub in which we would quaff vast amounts of ale in before deciding it was time to actually set up the PCs in a very drunken state.

As you can imagine there are lots of other stories of other participants woes, most of which you would have to know the people to see the real humour in the situation but in of themselves are still very amusing.

I do so miss those types of LAN parties but we will probably never see the likes of that one again.

Haunted disk-drive? This story will give you the chills...

Re: Static on paper

Two thirds of a belt as compared to the mighty three pinned belt you get today.

Milton Keynes: Come for roundabouts, stay for near-gigabit broadband

Re: Openreach

There will be a usage case for it once enough people have it, just as other technological limits have been raised and the potential filled. Who would have thought 10 - 20 years ago that 4k streaming via the net would have been a thing as the sizes of the data were deemed to be colossal yet here we are.

I know it is a bit of a 'if you build it, they will come' scenario but I think there will be unthought of usage cases where we will think in years to come 'why didn't I think of that?'

Brit teen pleads guilty to Minecraft-linked bomb and airline hoaxes

Re: And the worst part of it all...

There's no escape from Luton, its one way system around the town centre ensures a steady collection of cars are funnelled in and will never escape.

I think there is some sort of attempt to get enough cars to collapse themselves into a half arsed black hole so that Luton an disappear from the face of the earth forever, a worthy cause if ever I heard one.

British Airways' latest Total Inability To Support Upwardness of Planes* caused by Amadeus system outage

Re: Fish and fruit?

There was a very good documentary about that presented by a Mr Sam Jackson, very informative.

Tech support made the news after bomb squad and police showed up to 'defuse' leaky UPS

Boom!

Also have had experience of truck and forklift batteries exploding (forklift was a diesel model so not too bad, just a large 12v) in my days as a truck mechanic before I ended up slumped behind a keyboard and wall of monitors.

They certainly do go with quite a bang, one of the truck batteries went whilst jump starting it with another truck and caused a gas cloud to pour from the battery in question.

Other activities were far more dangerous at that job though, spare time and high pressure air from the compressor makes for crazy dangerous inventions.

Half inch thick bolts launched hundreds of yards were a regular occurrence!

The devil makes work for idle hands!

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

Re: RE Gearbox

As a truck mechanic years ago a group of us had one of the artics up to 50MPH at a standstill wheel spinning on ice in the yard.

It would have been interesting if the tyres would have worn through the ice, Volvo F12's were not renowned for having the strongest half shafts in the business.

US energy, nuke and aviation sectors under sustained attack

Re: "Staging targets held preexisting relationships with many of the intended targets.”"

Because the weather outside is frightful?

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

Re: I've read this book

Is the book called Dust by Charles Pellegrino?

Equifax: About those 400,000 UK records we lost? It's now 15.2M. Yes, M for MEELLLION

Re: Max ICO fine

The watchsloth will give them a vicious gumming the likes of which they have never experienced before.

ooo, stop it, that tickles...

Home Sec Amber Rudd: Yeah, I don't understand encryption. So what?

Re: The Home Office

Possibly "This is what we have got on you, this is what we can just plain make up about you and this is what you are going to say. Don't worry, just turn off your brain and we will do the hard work now repeat after me..."

Helium's for balloons and squeaky voices, not this 10TB Toshiba beast

Is Toshisba a rebranding or a sold off division for covering the costs of their American nuclear stuff?

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/submit/2017/09/27/toshisba_10tb_mg06/

Dead serious: How to haunt people after you've gone... using your smartphone

Anyone else read the software company name as WanKeCode?

Basic income after automation? That’s not how capitalism works

work work

Raise the pension age to 100 and work them to death with a damned good whipping if they get their telegram just to weed the weaker ones out.

It's the only way the country will survive.

Randall 'xkcd' Munroe. Live. You get to ask him stuff. No biggie

Re: Ugh

"Blacklibrary are charing more for some ebooks over paperback as well."

Ideal if you have money burning a hole in your pocket then!

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Nice rack.... 4U

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

A few...

Windows key +L? I laugh at your windows key + L

Who needs windows key + L?

The new McAffe anti-frape module for Total Protection was actually rather reliable!

When will ROBOTS start chatting on WhatsApp? Don't hold your breath, says co-founder

Re: Already too late

Also got a few of these, deleted the first which then was sent again, blocked the sender and deleted and it appeared again, blocked and left the third which just stayed at the top of my feed refusing to go down the messages list as other messages do even though I get a lot of messages from others in Whatsapp.

Facebook's first foray into unwanted spam on Whatsapp or some telemarketeer taking advantage of some bug?

Message has now gone though so I am siding with the latter of the two choices but am just waiting for the day that the first one becomes a reality.

Laughing gas and rubber: A recipe for suborbital flight?

Nitrous oxide?

You're having a ....

NO NO STOP IT

Is it humanly possible to watch Gigli and Battlefield Earth back-to-back?

Transformers : age of extinction

I so wanted to walk out of this movie but damn it, I had paid for the uncomfortable chair and I was going to damn well use it.

(need a burning poop icon)

MOULDY DICK: France aims to snatch EXPLODING WHALE crown from U.S.

Launch lunch to Norway?

Stick some kind of fuse in it's mouth, aim and then light it.

He presto, a quick delivery service of ready cooked blubberiness straight to the Norwegian dinner tables!

(icon - probably not safe at this stage)

UK smart meters arrive in 2020. Hackers have ALREADY found a flaw

Re: Soon you will be able to connect your own PC to your smart meter

Hear hear.

It just gets worserer.

Capita poises axe over 1,000 staff - jobs headed to India

Been through that particular mill

I personally have been through this particular mill when working for a well known credit referencing agency.

280 people were whisked away on coaches one morning to be told that only 40 of them would be required and that we were to train up our replacements.

By the end of the time for training I was still amazed that a job that took 1 guy in our department a couple of hours to resolve took the guys in India 10 days or more to do.

You might pay them 10 times less but when they take 10 times the amount of time to do the work then it does not even out.

Losses snowball as others cannot do their jobs and customers are faced with ridiculous delays.

The balance sheet does not look so great to the beancounters that propose this sort of a move after a while but ho hum - off to the next company to wreak their particular brand of 'business expertise'.

Bastards the lot of them.