Posts by myhandler

Doctor Who theme added to national sound archive to honor innovation, longevity

Re: his composing skills, which he used to create the theme for Steptoe and Son

Ah, but the Steptoe and Son tune inspired Syd and the Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive

Re: A question of arrangement as much as attribution

No mate, it's the melody and overall structure that gets the royalty not the arrangement.

Ron G was very impressed by it.

It did. I heard it the second week and yes, halfway through the programme I hid behind the sofa.

Black and white was much more scary.

I read that Ron was astonished by what Delia had done and thought she should have half the writing credit.

Singapore to increase road capacity by tracking all vehicles with GPS

Re: Tracking people

Plenty of middle class people there have cars. They are not the preseve of the wealthy. I don't disagree with the rest of what you say.

Re: Tracking people

I worked there decades ago - even then the bus and rail transport card (years before TFL's Oyster) was widely known to be a tracking tool.

The place is a benevolent paternalist dictatorship, it won't change.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: One good sanction deserves another

US bad, Russia to the power of muchivich worse - does that help?

WordPress bans WP Engine from sponsoring or participating in user groups

A 40k project on Wordpress? Wrong platform mate.

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

I've always thought that if it can't fart, doesn't throw up when it's drunk and doesn't see friends and family die, then it's no better than a big telephone direcotry - if you remember those.

Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features

Don't blame the software people, blame the marketing droids.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

Re: Headers anyone

Fair Email is a *very* good Android client

Shows full sender address by default

Allows mulitple accounts

Has an anti tracking ethos

Has worked perfectly for me for over 5 years

Indonesia blocks 2.5 million pieces of gambling content, minister says it's not enough

Be nice to see online gambling banned here too. A scourge on society.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Um, what the hell is Cloudstrike?

Is it installed on servers or end user machines?

My PC did a BSOD yesterday but I don't have Cloudstike so must be a coincidence.

My PC has done two BSODs this year, none for years before that - it's not easy to find the cause.

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Or the absurd default 'search' - it uses stemming so if you search for 'wedding' it will return any mail with Weds in it - that widely used short version of Wednesday.

Stemming can't be disabled.

So you have to use the "control shift f" search feature and enter a load of filters before it will do a search.

The date field in those filters defaults to "Date is" whereas 99.99% of real life searches you want "Date from".

Then it has a horrible way to remove a folder or sender from your search results, so it can easily take a dozen clicks to filter down to a usable list.

It's like nobody ever at Moz has used Thunderbird to do real emailing - any long term user will tell you the search is garbage.

Smartphone is already many folks' only computer – say hi to optional desktop mode in Android 15 beta

I also use a desktop PC with no mic or camera - if I need to show my PC screen I log in to meetings twice - once on phone and once on PC

PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11

Re: I’m a Mac Emigrant

Are you sure Pagemaker ran on OSX? I think it was dead a while before that - a vile program compared to QXPress.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

I spent several years working in Singapore thirty years ago.

All the taxis had speed warning systems. Inside the vehicle a little bell would go .... ping .... ping .... ping - and a light on the roof would blink so the rozzers could stop them.

As a passenger you got used to the incessant ping, it's not a big deal really.

Hong Kong authorities halt alleged smuggler shifting 596 'high-end' CPUs to China

All your chip are belong to us.

Beijing wants more outfits like Temu teeming around the world

All your base are belong to us

-Thoughts of Chairman Winnie

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: Software is hard...

>>On the other hand, I've seen several 'impossible' projects deliver eight/nine figure returns in short time with tiny teams. Done well, with a good team, it really, really works.

Yes because a small team has very little comms and management overhead - they can talk to each other.

The top person probably also trusts the colleagues not to need constant checking.

But a team of two or three in *separate* locations exponentially multiplies the coordination required and the possibilities for misunderstandings and borkage.

Evidence mounts that Venus has multiple active volcanoes

It's also amazing they had it stored on cd-rom.

I wonder if they had backups.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: What the hell is a meter?

At last - we finally know the inspiration for Lovely Rita

Why Microsoft's Copilot will only kinda run locally on AI PCs for now

Yes me too, first ad crap spam I've had direct on screen. Still on W10. Bastards. Yes that's right, you lot at Msoft. I don't want distractions. FO

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Re: Ovine Park

Baa...rassic Park

(spent all his dosh hasn't he, he's brassic... but.. in his secret lab..)

[Boracic lint for those ignorant of the argot]

Water worries flood in as chip industry and AI models grow thirstier

Re: We have the answer!

The perfect solution is to build them on the Antarctic.

The heat from the fab will melt the ice and all that pure water will work beautifully.

As the fab sinks slowly through the ice they can watch the ice strata going past.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

Re: Secret places and maps

Or put a commercial radio station in the lower floors and everyone will think that's the only occupant.

That'll be Capital Radio and denizens of MI5 /6

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

And adding a few minutes delay to any of the theft transactions would have made zero difference.

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Re: Its not Fujitsu, its ICL

Nope. Once you buy a company you take on *all* their responsibilities.

It's called due diligence.

That Fushitsu sat there 20 years ago and did not say "you know what, we need to fix this at our own expense" shows them to be in it up to their necks.

And WTF were the Japanese board doing when reviewing their foreign ops?

I wonder if Fushitisu have a 'Corporate social responsibility" statement on their websites.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: 700 As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

There were far more than that. There were plenty of cases that never got to prosecution because the subpostmaster made up the shortfall with their own money and with it was smaller sums they would often choose to ignore after giving a warning.There were problems even with the test rollout scheme done in the late 1990s.

There is no excuse - and, dammit, the developer's job is to examine those edge cases and figure out where the hell they come from.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

The Reg should write a proper piece on the technical details of Horizon. There's plenty on www.postofficetrial.com

For the version in use till c2010 it seems the PO branches wrote to an xml file for each transaction - but a single free text field for date, time, amount, item detail - seemingly not node based.

At the end of each working day that lot of files got parsed and sent over to a central server - a system called Riposte was the intermediary, supplied by another company, Escher Group not Fushitsu.

Who needs experts.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: So what was actually wrong?

There were some cases where it showed a gain. One PO submaster was able to demonstrate this to the visiting Horizon people.

Lots more here: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

Re: music copyright cases and rights are a pain

Have you listened to Zodiac by Spirit? LZ were a support band to Spirit at the early days. Randy C reportedly told Page "yeah man you can use that bit". Then Randy's descendants thought they deserved a bit. Love and peace, love and peace.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: The possibilities are infinite

The vendor of a faulty product is only liable up to a point.

When the user carries on using it after learning it's faulty, dangerous and a potential killer the blame moves up the chain.

The PO is in fact owned by the Government trade and industry department. That's right, it's owned by the Government.

When the PO sacked the external forensic auditor - put there in the first place by a parliamentary committee - then the minister would have been informed.

He would then have told his boss of the potential shitshow - and they all looked the other way.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

My computer went tits up this week, weird errors and blue screens and then it lost the SSD, all in less than an hour.

I needed to get to the Macrium Reflect backup on my other HD but no SSD meant no Windows, so I had to reinstall from disk while realising the SSD was toast.

At least got the new install onto the SSD but I couldn't believe the flat screen monstrosity of W10 I was seeing, slidey this and that and big buttons everywhere. WTAF.

I must have made so many tweaks I have something that looks like W7 - classic shell of course - but then who knows what else I've switched off.

Realising something was still a bit iffy I opened the case and decided to wiggle all the wires and hey presto everything was working perfectly.

The Macrium Reflect back up worked and I only lost three days of email. I don't even need the spare SSD that's arrived.

I wish could get on with Linux.

Everyone wants better web search – is Perplexity's AI the answer?

Even the Google 'verbatim' button shovels crap.

I end up with the 'verbatim' setting on, then sets of words in quotes and it still shovels crap.

If only I could lock verbatim to 'on' - and yes there used to be a plug in that did that.

Whenever I try DDG it's no better. I've even tried Bing, it's not so annoying but results are even vaguer.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

You're thinking of intermissions. Film reels were about 40 minutes and change over is simply done by having two projectors and keeping an eye out for the dots in the top right corner. 8 in the gate and you're good to go.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Re: Really?

There's two completely distinct types - ground source heat pumps and air source heat pumps.

Alien rock remains found not on but deep inside the Earth

Re: Where these blobs are now :)

Great animation there. I wonder if the collision is what kicked off plate tectonics - without which I very much doubt we, or other complex life, would be here.

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

UBlock is fine so far on Firefox but it does not work on Opera where I get the lovely little countdown timer.

The timer thing is rude and patronising and I don't watch at all when they pull this stunt.

They can FO and then FO some more.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

There's a very good email client for Android called "Fair Email"

Handles multiple accounts, no ads - yes that's right no sodding ads - and it's free though I paid.

Setup is quirky but it's all there

I still use ThunderBird on the computer

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Re: Modem Mode Manifestly More Manageable

I used to have the VM router in modem mode but when I moved house I left the new kit in standard mode thinking I'd change it when I had time, but it's been fine. There's still some port forwarding oddities but my work around of 'Sleep PC / Wake PC" kicks it back into life.

Google on trial: Feds challenge deals that set your web search defaults

I hate infinite scroll on Google desktop search, I hate it with a vengeance.

There's an option to disable it but it doesn't bring back paginated results.

So I've been trying DDG and even Bing - but they aren't any better as they lack verbatim search.

Bing results are very odd too.

Done up like kippers by Google we are.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: don't forget - 2CV spark-plugs and *proper* BMWs

Lol, wow I hadn't remembered the plug change routine on the 2CV for decades. The memory flash even came along with the blue plug spanner and its jointed arm.

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

I use Firefox everyday all the time on Windows, sometimes with lots of tabs. I don't recall it crashing - maybe it does once a year?

I also use Opera for some things and that's stable, if a bit quirky. I avoid Chrome.

On Android Firefox and Brave are good.

Computer graphics pioneer John Warnock dies at 82

Nerdy comment: if you'd studied classic typography you'd know 80pt is not a regular size. After 72pt the next up would be 84pt.

I used to say it was the Mac that changed my life but really it was postscript.

Illustrator provided my revelatory moment when we needed evenly spaced lines for the background to a logo.

I thought she'd say "ok I can do that tomorrow" but she stopped what she was doing, hit some keys, and sixty seconds later a page rolled out of the printer.

(And about a year later all the photo typesetters started going out of business)

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

The article only refers to distorted text captchas being 'bottable', not the status of the ubiquitous image question things.

Haven't seen a distorted text captcha on a modern site for a long time.

Google, DeepMind accused of 'stealing the internet' to create Bard AI chatbot

Yes but are you font of ALL knowledge?

Nope, you're an average human idiot like the rest of us.

(No insult intended, no one knows everything, not even Arse Musk)

NASA 'quiet' supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight

Re: As much political as technical

It used to fly directly above my street in Twickenham on take off. Not sure how high by then but the whole damn house shook and car alarms would sometimes go off. Didn't stop me running out to see it, if I had time.

Ordinary jet noise is more annoying as there's never any quiet.

Startup that charged $1.20 a day for coworking space in nightclubs folds

Shouldn't the head line have said "Startup that charged for co-working space in nightclubs is on it's knees"?

I've seen things you wouldn't believe, like an atom about to photosynthesize

Fascinating. There's more of this, though a lot is conjecture, in Prof Nick Lane's book The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? - which looks at how life might have started.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Re: Probably time to have another look at Opera

Opera's ok but it's not great. What do you not like about Firefox?