Posts by Patched Out

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: calling someone's accent British makes little sense.

Hugh Grant for evil British villain? Hardly. For British evil villain, I think more of a Peter Cushing accent. He did blow up the entire planet of Alderaan after all.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Re: Oy!

But hasn't Florida's governor effectively made the Orange Boil on Everyone's Butt an honorary Florida Man?

Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

Re: Wonder if the redactors ever learn

Or maybe not so young and knew exactly what they were doing ...

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

Spoof the Spoofers

At least in the U.S., there seem to be some "hacktivists" that like to change the spoofed caller ID for some of these scam callers. I once received a call with the Caller ID of "Illegal Scam". And more recently my wife received a call with the Caller ID of "Probably Fraud".

A small thing, for sure, but gives me just a little joy when I see these.

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

At least for non-orthodox denominations, Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. I'm not kidding.

Facebook granted patent for 'artificial reality' baseball cap. Repeat, an 'artificial reality' baseball cap

Better get my patent in now then.

I'm going to patent the FAR Cap Cooler. A spinning propeller on top of the cap to cool the electronics. I think I'll call it "iBeanie".

Google employee helped UK government switch from disastrous COVID-19 strategy, according to Dominic Cummings

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we still have influential politicians and pundits claiming the whole COVID-19 thing is a conspiracy and that it is/was no worse than the the common flu!

At least it appears that the UK is having an honest discourse over the government's response so maybe, just maybe, they will do better the next time this happens.

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

Yawn...

Wake me when you have achieved mass production of 7nm CPUs/GPUs. You know, like your main competitor has for over two years now?

Borkem ipsum: Supermarket gifts Thailand a tech fail that will echo down the millennia – and probably choke a turtle

Irony avoided

At least, should someone have discovered the error, they didn't just throw out the entire lot of bags. That would have been just a little too ironic!

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: Lies

I did do not believe it was the cable that blew up. My guess is that the whiteboard in question was designed to only work at 110V (perhaps someone ordered the wrong one). Someone realized that at some earlier point and took the power cable so that it could not be accidentally plugged in to the 220V socket. Our regimized hero inadvertently bypassed that safety measure when he used his own cable.

My only question - Do South Korean 220V wall sockets have the same form factor as American 110V sockets?

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

These kinds of devices must be stomped on!

Windows 10 October 2020 Update arrives: Nothing that will drop your jaw, but we've had enough of 2020's fun surprises anyway

Re: Please God nooooo...

"...cooking my mince naked...". That's a euphemism I'm not familiar with.

Oh Mi: Xiaomi shows off 80W wireless charging, claims battery fully fat again in under 20 minutes

Capacitance Units

In reference to SI prefixes: As an interesting aside - for some reason, U.S. electrical engineers have traditionally not used the "nanoFarad" as a unit of measurement for capacitance. The common units are microFarads and picoFarads. So it is not uncommon to see a 1,000 pF capacitor next to a 0.01uF capacitor on a schematic. I'm wondering if it is because a sloppily written u could look like an n or vice versa (back when most schematics were hand drawn).

The perils of building a career on YouTube: Guitar teacher's channel nearly deleted after music publisher complains

Re: How about

In a similar vein, venues where live music is played also typically pay a blanket licensing fee to allow bands playing there to cover other artist's music. This would be the sensible approach, which means YouTube would never adapt it!

Bad boys bad boys, what you gonna do? Los Angeles Police Department found fibbing about facial recognition use

Youtube taking cues from "A Clockwork Orange"?

"Younger teens or children trying to access a particular video via a third-party website will be directed to the platform and be forced to watch it."

Now to research if they have somehow patented virtual toothpicks to hold their eyes open ...

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

What does the sex organ of a plant have to do with anything? I think you must mean "low gluten flour".

Muphry's Law and all that ...

Edit: Ah, beat me to the punch against your own post!

She was praised by the CEO and promoted. After her brother and mom died, she returned from compassionate leave. IBM laid her off

Re: This IBM is still weird to me.

I would never have called my dad, stodgy, but he was one of those IBM-for-lifer's who joined IBM in his early 20's and was with them over 30 years when he retired. At the time, instead of laying off older workers, they would offer nice early retirement packages. My dad took one of those packages and had a happy retirement spanning more years than he worked there.

He got out just in time, just as the Harvard MBAs were taking over. That's what happened to IBM.

Bad apples: US customs seize OnePlus earbuds thinking they're knock-off AirPods

I had ear buds once. An anti-fungal cream was prescribed.

'A guy in a jetpack' seen flying at 3,000ft within few hundred yards of passenger jet landing at LA airport

Super Dave

Maybe it was Super Dave Osborne! RIP, Bob Einstein.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGos7T0RKn8

Someone made an AI that predicted gender from email addresses, usernames. It went about as well as expected

Yes, with only one race, "Human", they still would have gotten it wrong!

See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe

Re: Red triangle programs

Funny you should mention that. I just re-watched that particular episode of BBC's "Sherlock".

51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home

Re: Alternative fakery

@AC: "We know they never went to the moon anyway, so what's the big deal?"

I sincerely hope you are kidding.

The Devil's in the details: Church of Satan forced to clarify that no unholy rituals taking place in SoCal forest

Re: Its in California where..........

Well if someone were to suggest that mountain lions and bears contain agents suspected of causing cancer ... (Ed., written only for humorous purposes, I say leave the mountain lions and bears alone)

LOL, we visited California a couple years ago and did get a chuckle out of those ridiculous Prop 65 signs everywhere. Even Disneyland has to have them posted. Maybe you could turn it into a tourist activity - find all the Prop 65 signs. Maybe make a Pokeman Go type of app to track them (once the pandemic has eased to a sane level, of course).

Fancy some fishy-chips? Just order one of these sensors: Research shines light on suspect component sources

Re: Not counterfeit, not stolen

The "DS" in DS18B20 is for Dallas Semiconductor, now Maxim.

The "NE" in NE555 is for Signetics, now part of Texas Instruments.

There is also an LM555 which is National Semiconductors' version, now part of Linear Technology Corp.

These are not generic part numbers.

From off-prem to just off: IBM Cloud goes down planet-wide so hard even the status page didn't work

Time to roll out my acronym again

C.L.O.U.D. - Customer Loses Own Use of Data

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: Never understood this

I can attest to this. I saw that sign at Disneyland as well and took a picture of it. Even coffee vendors in California have to have a Prop 65 warning sign.

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

When we achieve the 5th Dimension in transportation

will we call it the Age of Aquarius?

Mine's the one with the flower power patches on it.

Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses iPad Pro as a desktop*

I knew it!

This explains everything! Sinofsky was secretly working for Apple when he lead the development of the Windows 8 UI. How better to cripple your competitor!

COVID-19 sparks new wearables to push the pandemic away

Re: Lightsabers.

Electric cattle prod with extension handle works for me.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Borkmongers

Or variants:

Borkage Mongers

Purveyors of Borkage

Snapchat domain squatter loses comedy £1m URL sellback attempt

Re: Trademarks

Not to mention the trademark dispute between Apple Corps, the Beatles' record label, and Apple Computer. As I recall, the dispute was resolved when Apple Computer agreed not to have anything to do with creating, publishing, or distributing music.

Oh wait ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon

Roland Reagan was the president - In StargateSg7's alternate reality!

The black helicopter is for StargateSg7, because if what he said is true, he just revealed top secret information and they will be coming for him.

Upstart Americans brandish alligators at the almighty Reg Standards Soviet

Re: Remember...

To be perfectly accurate shouldn't this measurement be a prone Osman? Unless this fellow is very wide ... or is it with his arms stretched out?

Apple creates face shield for health workers, resists the temptation to call it the 'iMask'

Re: iMask was taken

Yes, but you need an Apple iGadget to read the assembly instructions. </SNARK>

Still waiting for your Atari retro gaming console? You're not alone: Its architect has just sued the biz for 'non-payment'

Atari VCS is an appropriate name for it

Venture Capital Scam

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Mandelbrot

I taught myself Turbo Pascal back in the early 90's using the book "Fractal Programming in Turbo Pascal". I created my own Mandelbrot set generating program, but because I only had a 286 computer without a co-processor, calculations could take days. When I created the program, I had the foresight to modify the header of the graphic format used to store the image to include all of the image generating parameters and an index of the last pixel calculated. If I had to shut off the computer before an image was complete, opening the image in my program at a later time would result in it restarting right where it left off.

Lobsters given seats on coronavirus rescue flights... although they're probably not in a rush for a boiling bath

Re: Haha that's not a lobster.. THIS is a lobster !

Paw. It doesn't even have claws! Now THIS is a proper, Maine Lobster:

https://www.wmtw.com/article/giant-lobster-claws-way-to-top-of-maine-restaurant/20150071

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

DIY bidet installation kits

see title

Copper foil

It is well known that copper has natural anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties. So I will be using copper.

.... No! On my head, you dolt!

Boeing didn't run end-to-end test on Calamity Capsule, DSCOVR up and running, and NASA buys a Falcon Heavy

Re: Separate component testing

Funny you should say that, because Boeing's earlier landing test of the capsule had an "anomaly" where 1 of the 3 parachutes failed to deploy. The test was deemed a success because the remaining two chutes successfully brought the capsule down without damage. It was later determined that “The root cause was a lack of secure connection between the pilot chute and the main chute lanyard,”

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/11/07/boeing-identifies-cause-of-chute-malfunction-continues-preps-for-first-starliner-launch/

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Re: Is this a joke

Bedford, New Hampshire - the town speed limit is 35 MPH for most roads. Signs are on just about every road.

Actually, in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine, I have seen signs in every 5 MPH increment from 10 MPH up to 70 MPH.

Ring of fired: Amazon axes multiple workers who secretly snooped on netizens' surveillance camera footage

Re: Data not that innocuous

Even worse, Ring may have started with a video doorbell, but they also sell general security cameras which can be placed inside the home. There is no way I would own one.

The black helicopter icon is because commercial companies have more of them than the governments!

Re: Why did they do it?

Ring makes more than video door bells. They also make security cameras which could be viewing the inside of the home, obviously.

Re: Could be worse

You mean like a cell phone? Most houses have multiple.

Train-knackering software design blunder discovered after lightning sparked Thameslink megadelay

Re: Genuine question

I'm not a locomotive expert, but do know something about power electronics, so I'm going out on a limb here - the electrical motors that drive the wheels are like electrical transformers. As the AC frequency goes down, the current (amperage) goes up to deliver the same amount of power (electrical or motive power). It is probably a protective measure to keep the motors from burning out.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Pantone Classic Blue

Thank you for providing a color patch for Pantone Classic Blue and telling me this is what it looks like. Unfortunately since my monitor has not been calibrated or certified to properly present the color space required, I can only imagine what Pantone Classic Blue actually looks like.

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

CD/Boombox upgrade

I can do you one better. I still have an AM/FM/Cassette boombox from around 1980 that I have "upgraded" by tapping into the cassette playback circuit with a 1/8" stereo jack with which I can plug in my MP3 Player / Tablet / Smartphone (sorry, no iPhones unless they still have a headphone jack).

All the cassette mechanics are removed except for the door, which makes a handy holder for the aforementioned music player of choice.

It works great. I also did this on my daughter's AM/FM/CD/Cassette boombox for her use.

We're so, so, sorry you're not able to get PC chips, says Intel to everyone who hasn't gone with AMD yet

AMD all the way!

In my 20+ years of building my own computers (and friends' and relatives' computers) I have always used AMD. I just couldn't justify the cost premium with Intel processors. The AMD processors have been rock solid. The only processor that I was ever not fully satisfied with was the FX 8350 which did not outperform the Athlon II x4 that it replaced. My latest build is a Ryzen 7 2600x which benchmarks at about twice the CPU score of the FX 8350. And yes, I am staking my claim for the AMD FX processor settlement ...

The Ryzen architecture is a real game changer.