* Posts by Charles Calthrop

304 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jun 2007

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Who cracked El Chapo's encrypted chats and brought down the Mexican drug kingpin? Er, his IT manager

Charles Calthrop
Pint

"The long one, that password that you place…is this the password? "

"Yes, sir."

"What a drag! It has symbols and things."

We've all been there, every one of us.

Peak Apple: This time it's SERIOUS, Tim

Charles Calthrop

Re: Too late

I'm not doing the work for you. if you want to discover, go read it yourself. It's all in there, but not overly easy to find, but it's all in there.

AKA I did a quick cmd f, couldn't find anything, but I still know I am correct

Charles Calthrop

Re: Too late

There were maybe 20 words in my post and you still missed the point of them

Charles Calthrop

Re: Too late

Their privacy policy page is maby 3k words

https://www.apple.com/uk/legal/privacy/en-ww/

that's without following all the links which have more detail.

Have you really read it all?

Charles Calthrop

easiest thing to do is probably turn on obsolecence again

Aside from lengthening the product cycle, I can see two engineering fixes:

1) Make phones exciting again. Make week long battery. Make as huge gains as (say) between the 3 and 4 and make world class industrial design.

however, that sounds quite hard so:

2) Make obsolecence great again!

If my 3 year phone works so well I can't see the point of an upgrade, well, they can change that quite easily.

Hope they don't go for step 2. would be a lot easier though, no?

Wanted – have you seen this MAC address: f8:e0:79:af:57:eb? German cops appeal for logs in bomb probe

Charles Calthrop

Re: Amateurs!!

exactly.

Get the young woman to open google earth then get the grizzled 'cuts-corners-but-gets-results-why-are-city-hall-busting-my-balls' man to tell her to enhance. Should zoom in to just above the perp's flat.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Charles Calthrop

Re: xfer

why delete it?

I'd have created a new HDD with your 'best ofs' but left the rest. Spending ages removing things, just so you can throw out a hdd is not something I would do

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

Charles Calthrop

mmmmbop

you should be ugly like me, then you'd be safe

Charles Calthrop

Re: Hospitality sector had it coming

Big difference between mortgage brokers and travel agents, though.

People often book flghts / hotels now, so are confident in doing so. Plus, if you screw up, you've screwed up 2 weeks maximum.

When it comes to things with huge financial risk, and which are not done frequently, like mortgages, people are happy to pay 200 quid for peace of mind. Same as why I think estate agents still exist. What do they do? Take worse photos than you or i, with their iphone, apply no artistc thought to them, stick a listing on rightmove and get someone else to show you around? Yet I will probably use them if I ever move again, because, wankers that they are, I would rather use their expertise than mine

It's a lot of work, being popular: Apple, Tim Cook and the gilets jaunes

Charles Calthrop

I am an ex fanboy

I used to love Apple, Macs, specifically. Having to work with terrible Dells, with tiny trackpads, crummy software loaded on XP, cheap build quality and just an overall air of 'eh, this will do', it was a pleasure using a Mac instead. The ascthetic of the mac pleased me every time I noticed it.

Not so much nowadays. I am totally indifferent to them. I am typing this on a MacBook pro, but only because it is closer to hand than my thinkpad. The build quality is excellent, and I don't care about the price anyway, as work pays for them, but my thinkpad is also excellent, and while the touchpad isn't as good, the keyboard is better

I keep watching youtube videos about how you can use the iPad pro as your main daily driver. But they all focus on editing video. What about software development? I would love to run Apache / Sublime etc on an iPad. I can't see what Apple is doing which will impress developers. Maybe we don't matter anymore?

Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is: 1. More ad revenue, and 2. Good PR. Lots of love – Mark, aged 34½

Charles Calthrop

I disagree.

My wife uses Internet explorer. If that wasn't bad enough, to open gmail, she types in google.com, then searches for 'gmail'. Just typing that out infurirates me, but what can you do? Anyway, the point is she is most definitely not an IT user, does not care about tech news etc. But she doesn't use FB anymore because of 'this privacy stuff c4 news keep going on aboout'

I know, of course, this is anecdotal evidence. But nonetheless I do think it is having a huge effect. A final straw when you think it's full of ads and sponsored content anyway.

I think the bigger problem is neither of my teenage kids have any intention whatsoever of using it; it's for old people.

the sooner fb dies, the better. An absolute stain on humanity. Happy Christmas Mark.

Pork pulled: Plug jerked out of beacon of bacon delight

Charles Calthrop

pulled it very quickly. very rasher

Careful with this latest Microsoft release – tug too hard on the threads and it tends to unravel

Charles Calthrop

why do i like xmas jumpers so much?

why do i want that jumper in particcular?

I'd love to be all hip and cool and sneer at it but I think it is great.

what is wrong with me?

last year we had our xmas meall in a really facy restaurant and I rocked up in this bad boy

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71vZ0HO9iLL._UX679_.jpg

was a bit awkward.

It's December of 2018 and, to hell with it, just patch your stuff

Charles Calthrop

87 seems rather a lot. do they have 00s, have they a keen new testing team, or have they not patched for ages?

Dixons Carphone smarting from £440m loss as it writes down goodwill on mobile biz

Charles Calthrop

hate it. use it

I remember the days I used to buy new handsets all the time, back in the day. When new cameras and features came out. Nowadays, I find the efforts to persuade me to upgrade laughable. 'We have 4 new pixels', 'We have a new chip which makes browsing 2% faster'. Big deal. Hard luck carphone warehouse.

'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner!' US drug squad puts spycams in cleaner's kit

Charles Calthrop

Re: Errr ...

You must have hated the smoking ban!. Saying that you don't have to be that subtle these days: I was in a conference room once where the owner of the company came in, left her mobile and notepad on the table and left. Unfortunately, she had unlocked it so we could she she had called in from her office line and we were on speaker. my collegue suddenly and uncharacteristically talked in excrutiating detail about his sex life. Completely coincidentally, the owner came in about a minute later, pretended she'd 'forgotten her mobile', and left, not looking at my colleague once.

It's official. Microsoft pushes Google over the Edge, shifts browser to Chromium engine

Charles Calthrop

let the downvotes begin, but I would rather we have loads of browsers and webdevs had to do more work, than make google anymore dominant than it already is. See for instance that interesting post up there about youtube css.

Charles Calthrop

the edge is foine.

Charles Calthrop

don't get me wrong. I don't like IE, and that's putting it mildly. I was a front end dev in IE 6 days, for instance. But I do kind of think it's a shame that it's all getting steamrollered into one. Loads of standards compliant browsers would have been much better than just 1 or 2

Ooo shiny! First Visual Studio 2019 sneak peek here in time for Chrimbo

Charles Calthrop

all seem like good changes. Now lets see how the never bitter el reg commentards react.

Microsoft menaced with GDPR mega-fines in Europe for 'large scale and covert' gathering of people's info via Office

Charles Calthrop

Re: "get a CEO's head on a pike"

don't tell him!

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

Charles Calthrop

depressing

i thought the web would be this open, positive egalitarian platform. instead we're being siloed off into isolated partitions on huge multinational's platforms

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Charles Calthrop

Re: Not a good look here.

why have you never trusted the documents folder?

Oslo clever clogs craft code to scan di mavens and snare dodgy staff

Charles Calthrop

What a pun

just wanted to pay tribute to that pun. Oslo I have heard you've done better ones. I think that's a bergen legend, though.

Lyon for speed, San Francisco for money, Amsterdam for fun: the best cities to be a techie

Charles Calthrop

dutch internet speeds so hot it could be straight out the oven

Archive.org's Wayback Machine is legit legal evidence, US appeals court judges rule

Charles Calthrop

" For instance, if you want to see what The Register looked like in 1998, go right ahead."

archaic design even by early 1990s standards*, great puns, headlines about stuff I don't underst oh wait i haven't clicked that link yet

*I actually like the way you have ignored 20 years of web 'design'

Google is 20, Chrome is 10, and Microsoft would rather ignore the Nokia deal's 5th birthday

Charles Calthrop

I still think WIndows Phone had hte best UI. I was so bemused something so beautiful and functional came from microsoft. then I bought a 1020, and with every update something was removed. Bemused I was no more, and so I bought an iphone

Live tiles still haven't been copied properly. Or people, where I can see a list of my friends and get updtes from their twitter and facebook without having to use facebook's awful app. of course, MS killed that, too

Charles Calthrop

I was listening to original pirate material, which - I think - makes me the coolest el reg commentator

'you won't find us on alta vista' goaded Mike Skinner.

'too right' I thought, sadly

Microsoft sharpens its claws to cut Outlook UI excess, snip Ribbon

Charles Calthrop

software UI is bonkers.

step 1: make changes soley because otherwise v2 will look like v1

step 2 undo the changes

No need to code your webpage yourself, says Microsoft – draw it and our AI will do the rest

Charles Calthrop

Re: The return of front page

I do remember that, yes. And I still think it is a good thing.

Anything which lowers the barriers to non technical people creating content on the web is good. And, in my opinion, 1000 functional websites with awful code is better than 1 website, say, facebook, with 1000 beautfilly efficiently coded pages.

Car-crash television: 'Excuse me ma'am, do you speak English?' 'Yes I do,' replies AMD's CEO

Charles Calthrop

Do you speak English?

BOOM! Cambridge Analytica explodes following extraordinary TV expose

Charles Calthrop

I hate them and what they represent.

Microsoft's Teams lights solitary candle, hipsters don't notice

Charles Calthrop

hate it. use it

one of our managers insists we use it. awful tool. keep getting emails like 'hey you're missing all the fun'

er, no, i am not reading chat in a stupid bug fix channel.

RIP... almost: Brit high street gadget shack Maplin Electronics

Charles Calthrop

Reg readers

Lots of crying into software company fleeces from our phone on belt wearing brethren.

Stephen Elop and the fall of Nokia revisited

Charles Calthrop

wonderful article

I saw an advert for the Nokia watch on the tube the other day, and I was surprised at how sad I still felt about the decline of Nokia. The reporting of the decline and fall is perhaps El Reg's greatest legacy; I find it fascinating to read about and the details you have uncovered are still interesting.

Thanks to the authors for the PDF. A great article.

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

Charles Calthrop

Don't understand the hate for linkedin

I have got 2 ace jobs because of it. Not sure why people are so vehemently against it tbh. Its just like any other social media tool, there are costs and benefits and if you think the benefits aren't worth it, don't register. I have noticed that people who post 00s of times on this forum seem to hate any form of social media at all

Facebook have terrabytes of useless data: people checking in to restaurants or liking posts to win prices. MS have something much more valuable. I do worry about what they will be able to do with the world's CVs, but for me, the benefits outweigh this

NASA finds satellite, realises it has lost the software and kit that talk to it

Charles Calthrop

Nasa and the preservation of knowledge

A colleague was at a IA conference at NASA when some NASA bod stood up and caused some consternation by saying if they were told to fly to the moon tomorrow, they'd have to start from scratch because every appollo mission used different procedures and nothing was written down, it was all in the head of retired engineers*. The thing is, this is a known, old problem, and we have basically infinite storage and matrure solutions. It shouldn't be such a big problem.

*Mainly cos they didn't actually go in the first place .

Butcher breaks out of own freezer using black pudding

Charles Calthrop

pudding jokes aside for a minute..

he's on thin ice here. I can't devon fathom the consequences

Argy-bargy Argies barge into Starbucks Wi-Fi with alt-coin discharges

Charles Calthrop

what a headline

very good

Is Oomi the all-in-one smart home system we've been waiting for?

Charles Calthrop

how can I filter reviews on your site?

I can't find a category on the menu for them

Also, wish you used bigger photos

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

Charles Calthrop

Rooster

Who was that apple bashing user, named rooster* ?

I’d love to hear his take on this

Wizarding World of Harry Potter awaits Microsoft Office exam winners

Charles Calthrop

The verge did an article on this

I read about this a few weeks ago, here

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16152310/microsoft-office-specialist-mos-world-championship-2017

they are so much more joyous about it than you

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

Charles Calthrop

sometimes i use tabs, sometimes i use spaces

i do not give a fuck

Nokia Lumia 1020: It's an imaging BEAST... and it makes calls too

Charles Calthrop

Re: Dual boot phone?

really?

some sort of grub screen at start up?

How many people use that on their desktop PCs? Would people really want to see that on their phone?

I accept that some people would find dual boot useful but I bet most people would not.

Yahoo!: We! tried! to! protect! your! info! ... secret! court! case! will! prove! it!

Charles Calthrop

The ! after each word is so over tired

Whoever recently showed us the secret documents: Do get in touch

Charles Calthrop
Black Helicopters

Nothing to hide

what's the weather like in Cheltenham? bit cool in manchester today, but you probably already knew that

Author Iain (M) Banks falls to cancer at 59

Charles Calthrop
Pint

Strome Ferry (No Ferry)

Some fantastic books

Author of some of the best while simultaneously also some of the worst recent Scottish books. The crow road, Complicity and the wasp factory were amazing. I remember reading the wasp factory, it was like being part of this secret gang who liked this 'pretty fucked up little book' while a lot of the media railed against it. I loved the way he put all the negative reviews into the later editions.

El Reg drills into Office 365: The science of compliance

Charles Calthrop

>The US government would not need a warrant to do this,

Really? Bloody hell what a world we live in.

Apple declares WAR on Spotify: iRadio bags streaming rights

Charles Calthrop

How do you make lady gaga cry?

poker...I mean, tell her her royalties from spotify

I'm here all week 9-5

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