NaN == Not a Nan?
Posts by skswales
82 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2013
Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever
User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?
UK ICO not happy with Google's plans to allow device fingerprinting
I love YouTube ads. Last year they were pushing me a commuter yacht to get from my private island to fleet of Maseratis to whisk me to my fractional ownership jet. Oh, and the ThermoFisher-equipped biolab (2 1/2 mins!). I have also been recommended to purchase super-modern infantry fighting vehicles, to attend a military satellite exhibition, and a Finance Conference in Doha. And buy cat food, of course (zero cats at last count).
Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI
D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify
Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework
BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun
Happy birthday, Putin – you've been pwned
Tesla Cybertruck recalled again. This time, a software fix for backup camera glitch
Windows: Insecure by design
Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, literally, something else
Microsoft confirms spike in NTLM authentication traffic after Windows Server patch
Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell
Our company had the misfortune to purchase one of their systems. Trying to fix said system on receipt, got through and was put in what I can only describe as a conference call with around six other folk support were trying to help at the same time. Support were so useless some of the callers got their fixes from the other callers.
My issue was hardware related. Monitor was poorly focused. Support's solution was to only run it in VGA mode. It was a 21" monitor.
Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books
UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters
Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure
Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner
Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing
Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12
Tesla admits it was asked to hand over Autopilot, Full Self-Driving docs to investigators
Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up
Re: Hmmmmmmm
I've had one of the 'speed sign recognition' cars as a courtesy car. Wrong far too much of the time. And GPS maps can't know what's right. I updated my satnav just before the car went out of warranty and quite a lot of the speed limits were wrong even then.
Up here a load of 20 mph signs were dropped seemingly permanently in place early on during COVID as the local council wanted to encourage people to walk locally on the roads without pavements. Of course the temporary speed order for these signs lapsed over six months ago but the council can't be bothered to remove them (I checked with them)...
GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form
Re: Acorn ARX and Modula-2
I still have my Acorn-issued M2 book from the days when EVERYTHING was going to be written in M2.
Even just before Arthur 1.2 came out, Acron manglement were still talking of the OS being written in M2, just that we were 'still working on device drivers in assembler' - or rather that was the lie that they were being fed!
The code generated by M2 was 'interesting'. For some reason it seemed to avoid using R6. In the early days of Arthur, one of us had fouled up something sitting on TickerV with the result that R6 was being corrupted at 100Hz. BASIC went TITSUP almost immediately but AAsm happily kept going. Found it never ever referenced R6.
University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments
Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF
Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable
'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left
A refined Apple desktop debuts ahead of Wednesday’s big iThing launch
Re: If only desktop environments...
Other fun fact - clicking in the scroll bar with the right button scrolled the contents of the window in the opposite direction, so it was easy to quickly scroll back a page, look at something, keep scrolling forward without moving the mouse to opposite ends of the scroll bar. And here we are in 2022...
The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it
California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave
Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'
You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups
When I make payments on a business account, it attempts to verify the sort code and account number with the payee's name given. Somewhat amusingly, given GDPR, Data Protection and all that, it most often gives me the person's full name, which I was usually unaware of before. Some people do have very interesting middle names!
Re: Hardly on topic
When school got an RM 380Z with a floppy drive, our head of maths (isn't it always) was convinced that CP/M only allowed single letter filenames. His SOP was to have one floppy disc per class, and assign a letter to each pupil. Some pupils had to share their letter, with predictable results... He thought it was wizardry when I showed him what was possible. Didn't ever change though, as it was written down.
Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025
Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'
NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe
Toyota, Subaru recall EVs because tires might literally fall off
Original Acorn Arthur project lead explains RISC OS genesis
BOFH: The Geek's Countergambit – outwitted at an electronics store
AWS power failure in US-EAST-1 region killed some hardware and instances
Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere
Bought a Panasonic last year specifically for Freeview catchup over t'Internet. Which doesn't work unless it's plugged into the TV aerial, which I don't have. That one went back, and I got its cheaper sibling without this feature. Curiously this one regularly tries to find a software update, indicated by blinkenlight, which is quite difficult for it as the set has zero networking capability.
RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81
Re: Memories (not RAM)
My Sinclair Cambridge calculator no longer works, but my 1975 Sinclair Oxford Scientific does. Only quibble was the cheap deg/rad switch: had to send it back for repair under warranty three times - the final time they resolved it by replacing the switch with a much meatier one. Thanks to my dad for that - it was probably what he took home in a week.