Posts by PNGuinn

Administrator PwC chops Maplin staff

@Frozen Hamster

I'll see your Forrest Mims and raise you Bernard B Babani.

I think I'm beginning to get old.

UK data watchdog raids companies suspected of 11 million nuisance texts

Re: "Greater Manchester-based premises"

"I.e. a rat-infested tenement flat in Moss Side.

If they really want to end crime, they first need to end poverty."

Better idea: New orifices for OFFCON. Sort the problem for good, quick, or STAY THERE.

I wasn't aware that these scamming barstewards were poor. Nor I suspect are the parasites in OFFCON.

Half the world warned 'Chinese space station will fall on you'

Re: Typical eBay delivery from China...

Re: “highly variable” re-entry window:

1. There wouldn't be this uncertainty if it ran Linux on reentry.

2. With the BOFH in charge there would be no reentry via ANY window.

It's lunchtime - I'm pheeling filosophical.

Re: I was ranting to a friend about this today...

Slough.

That is all.

Hackers create 'ghost' traffic jam to confound smart traffic systems

Boring

The Italian Job was much more fun.

The last century called. It wants its comedy back.

123 Reg suffers deja vu: Websites restored from August 2017 backups amid storage meltdown

Re: It is safer to presume

"As much as I agree; you want to be posting that to mumsnet and places where readers don't understand that, not here where most people do."

Mmm ... some things are best just forgotten.

Are you really sure you should be posting that to mumsnet?

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

Logoes here ...

"surely every pane of glass will shortly have a giant frosted Apple logo on it, or will it need to be some sort of clever thing where the asymmetry in the chomp and leaf look correct whichever side of the window you are?"

Who cares as long as it's low enough for the large competitor's logo standing next to it to pi** all over ...

... I wonder if the big G will ever get allowed to do a street view in there?

OK, who is shooting at Apple staff buses in California? Knock it off

Re: Use the Trump solution

"A pellet gun might sting but it certainly won't blow a hole through your average meatbag."

It might, however cause something more than slight damage to said meatbag's eyeball.

Even a ricochet from an airgun pellet can blind someone. As a relative of mine found when some lads were messing about nearby.

The sooner the plod get this guy(ess) the better.

Organic battery tech could work better than a woolly hat in the cold

Re: Naphthalenetetracarboxylic

Does he sit next to little Bobby Tables?

Intellisense was off and developer learned you can't code in Canadian

Program, program, I'll say potato

Reminds me of the time many years ago when my wife, secretary in / to an electronics lab in the UK, typed a document for our resident Septic engineer:

Paraphrased from memory:

"Say, you've typed program(me) as both program and programme in this document..."

<< Q short lesson in English like wot she is spoken and writ >>

Grins all round when the story got out.

Does my boom look big in this? New universe measurements bewilder boffins

Re: You will never know the horrible truth about dark oil, err... dark matter!

Hubble constant?

That's so last bang.

Post Brexit they need a new variable yurrupean one.

How about the Bartysilli?

I think I'll patent that ...

Mobile phone dealer boss faces 12 years in director limbo

AH - perhaps THIS is the solution

So - a little VAT fraud can get you banned as a director for 12 years.

Now, all we need to do is get beanie chancellor to put something in the next budgie about a new tax to combat phone scamming ...

... implicating OFFCON for collusion if it happens ...

BBC presenter loses appeal, must pay £420k in IR35 crackdown

Re: Any news on whether the BBC pays their side of the bargain?

"If they do have to pay, it will be the public, via the television tax."

No, it'll be the tele tax paying public who will gain if this rids them of some of the overpaid celebutards they have to suffer.

Well, they can dream ...

Iran: We have defeated evil nuclear-sensing Western lizards!

"...The QuasiMoron's performance" @Voland

Y'know I never knew playing a cathedral organ was within his skillset.

Anyway, I'm going to steal that sometime. It'd make a smashing job title.

Oh, wait ...

Re: "I'm not an intelligence expert"

"I'm not an intelligence expert, but what would be learned from putting a camera onto a vulture?"

Probably an awful lot round here.

OTOH, whether you'd want to ....

Yes, Assange, we'll still nick you for skipping bail, rules court

Re: Schrödinger's Embassy @MrHungryTroll

You raise some very interesting and important questions.

Does the embassy have a cat, even a white cat?

Does Mr A spend his life stroking it.

Is this responsible for the shoulder problems?

What about the cat?

Enquiring minds etc etc ....

"The Chinese could send a hit-squad of crack ninjas in tutus to capture him"

Wow THAT'd be worth watching.

Bring it on.

Until last week, you could pwn KDE Linux desktop with a USB stick

And which bunch ...

Remind me - which bunch of idiots invented this autorun malarky in the first place?

Boffins upload worm's brain into a computer, teach it tricks

Re: In other news..@COM

Bull**it

There have been virtually no good points since Maggie.

Re: Good start.

"Repeat on a few different worms and there you have the nervous system of the brain (actually a nerve ring around the pharynx) of a nematode. Sit back and enjoy."

Now for some applied research:

1. Repeat the investigation on the nerve ring around the anus.

2. Sell research to Essex Police.

3a. Motivation.

3b Excavation.

3c Revelation.

4. PROFIT

Re: I wonder...

The worm might enjoy the pie though.

Re: I wonder... @Doggy Geezer

"Though there is no sinple comparison between digital computers and the 'wetware' of a brain, it would make more sense to say that C.Elegans has a brain comprising 302 parallel processors....."

Shhh! Don't tell Intel! They’ve got enough worms of their own already.

No sh*t, Sherlock! Bloke suspected of swallowing drug stash keeps colon schtum for 22 DAYS

Re: Easy @chivo

Er ... clean?

Re: Much more important @ Pen-y-gors

"Abuse of the English language like that, using 'result' as a passive verb, deserves at least three years with hard."

Would you be subtlety suggesting that the CPS drone was anally retentive?

>> Thanks - it's the High Vis waterproof one with the rubber gloves in the pocketses.

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

"Hey, kids, fancy some legionnaires' disease?"

In actual fact, that'd be perfectly safe. Don't know about anything else living in the water though. Anyways, wer'e talking about condensate from a compressor aircon here, aren't we - Out of the cooled air, into the bucket, not a cooling tower for an evaporative cooler?

Leigonella ingested is harmless. It's only dangerous when it's breathed in as an aerosol. - like the fine spray from a shower rose. It multiplies rapidly in warm water.

I gather that before we knew exactly what it was and exactly how to test for it the standard test was to sniff the culture in the Petri disk. Apparently it has a characteristic odour.

The beast can survive in water up to near 60 degrees C, which is why the greenie advice to turn your water cylinder stat down to 50 or 55 degrees to save energy was quietly dropped. (AFAIK no one from the greenie camp publicised that they'd dropped another Bo**ock, so there's probably lots of water cylinders running dangerously cool.)

My worry is that many condensing boiler flues can run way below 60 degrees, and if the system is not used to generate stored hot water, or the boiler stat’s wrong, or the system is a combi with hot water on demand set to well below 60 degrees (which should be safe, since any legionella in the cold main doesn’t get stored at nice cosy breeding temperatures) that flue could never get to sterilising temperatures.

The water produced when methane or propane burns, which you see as a plume of condensed water droplets from the flue of a condensing boiler, "has a ph similar to tomato juice" and has strict disposal rules - you aren't supposed to run it untreated to a fresh water drain, feed it into a cast iron system that does not have other water regularly running through it or let it contact concrete or brickwork. (The condensate can dissolve more than half an inch of mortar / pointing in a year.)

I wonder what ph is necessary to kill leigonella, and whether the bug can evolve to cope.

I've asked the question at training and assessment courses but never had a satisfactory answer. Sand, meet head.

It took us less than 30 seconds to find banned 'deepfake' AI smut on the internet

"If I draw a Celebutard with or without computer assistance I own the copyright".

Drawing a Celebutard. Hmmm. ....

Doesn't that in itself make you feel just a little bit dirty?

+1 for Celebutard BTW

Bzzzt! If you're in one of these four British cities, that was a drone

a "pie in the sky" thing

Morrisons are into this for Yorkshire pizza deliveries??

Our dad ...

"explore the public attitudes ...."

"explore the public attitudes, environmental impact, logistics and safety of drones operating in complex urban environments".

OK, How about "<< TWANG >> That'll teach you to land on my lawn"?

Or Dronegolph - played with lengths of 4x4?

Or Dronekrikket played with lengths of 4x4?

Or "Ooooh, nice shiny - me keepy.

Or - this one's for the ladies - a high altitude pi**ing contest.

The many-faced god of operational excellence, DevOps and now 'site reliability engineering'

Thanks

Thanks - I always wanted to know what DevOps was but was too bored to ask.

Now I'm no wiser.

Life is good.

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

Re: To be served with chips & curry sauce obv.

IT AINT GRAVY UNLESS YOU CAN SLICE IT WITH A KNIFE,

GOOD GRAVY ONLY HAS ONE LUMP.

@AC

cow-workers.

cow orkers. Simply an hyphen missing.

FIFY.

Re: They're copying Greggs, that's all @Jan 0

Re unix:

The Morrisons Yorkizza - The systemd of Pizza (or Yorkshire Pud)

Reckon It'd boot faster - rather get booted faster - right inter'd bin.

Now our dad ...

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

Re: The worst customers... @Tinslave_the_Frostbitten

In my local NatWest one day, usual queue, customer in front in long loud nasty rant at the cashier, finishing with "I don't come here to be insulted!"

When he had finished I said, loudly enough for everyone to hear and as sweetly as I could "Have you tried Barclays?"

The sight of three very pleasant and helpful ladies behind the counter trying not to p*ss themselves keeping a "professional" straight face ...

Re: Being offended - @Sir R

This is elReg, if you don't want to be offended - try PC World.

How long have you been coming here?

Don't want to offend, but my bridge is danker than your bridge, so there.

Julian Assange to UK court: Put an end to my unwarranted Ecuadorean couch-surf

Re: Oh do fuck off.

Or his Ecuadorian friends could apply for his extradition to his new homeland for not paying his hotel bill ...

Or the UK could deport him to his new homeland after he's served any sentence handed out to him for skipping bail ...

I wonder - has the UK got any arrangement with said country to allow him to serve his sentence there? Or even with Oz?

I mean, however desirable, a stay in on of Her Majesty's luxury hotels does cost us.

Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks away from crash

Autopilot shmaltopilot

The fact is that a driver on a public road (and in the UK that can include your private driveway) has to be alert and fully in charge of the vehicle AT ALL TIMES.

If an autopilot is simply a cruse control to maintain a set speed until the driver touches the accelerator or brake, that's fine - it's not interfering with his concentration. But when it takes over the driving to the point where the driver's immediate concentration and speed of reaction is impeded - and by definition, an emergency demands lightening reactions - It's time to ban the damn things. Things like autopark ate perhaps ok, IF you can convince the driver to keep a check on the machine. Can we honestly, in the present state of the art, trust the machine and its software to spot every animal and child and idiot?

IF, and its' a big if, the technology improves to the point that it's acceptable on the road, great. Until then, wait. The motor industry hasn't exactly got a stellar record on safety.

I can see applications for driverless cars - I'm past retirement age, and I've no idea how long I'll de able to go on driving. Dad had to give up at 82 when his eyesight started to fail. An uncle went on into his late 90s. (His memory had totally gone, but as long as he had someone to tell him "turn left an the lights, next right, left into the supermarket car park, park the car ... he was fine. Driving skills, eyesight, reactions etc. Doctor checked him out.

The sharks in the motor industry need to be freed from the "me too" pressure and made to meet very stringent standards. Preferably mandating open source software.

On the railways automation is simpler. The train is constrained by rails and the railway company owns the rights of the road. But even here, with all the automation, where there are still drivers, there are regular audible alerts to signals which the driver has to cancel, or the train stops. Train separation protocols mean that can be accomplished safely. Rail is not comparable to road.

£60m, five years late... Tag criminal tagging as a 'catastrophic waste' of taxpayers' cash

The usual suspects

See title.

How about locking THEM up for ever and throwing away the key?

Cheap at the price.

Cold calling director struck off for ‘flagrant’ breach of duties

@$ egrep -i "^p.*b$" /var/lib/dict/words

Pubbing in a prefab in the proverbial Punjab, obviously. you potherb.

It's 2018 and… wow, you're still using Firefox? All right then, patch these horrid bugs

Re: Where's the Rust?

AS Neddy Seagoon would have said "What, what, what, what?

Is this going to be the excuse that propels the 'fox into 3 figure version numbers?

Enquiring minds etc ...

TalkTalk starts offering punters choice to shift-shift to O2

The question is ...

I have (mercifully) no personal experience with Squark Squark.

Did they supply phones on contract? If so they where they unlocked, locked to O2 or locked to their MNVO. Being a cynical b**ta*d, I suspect. the latter. Anyways, since their service is effectively about to go TITSUP, shouldn't they be unlocking all the phones fully for free on request?

As far as I understand, if you're locked to O2 you can use a GiffGaff (wholly owned by O2) sim. Probably not if you're locked to a MNVO. Look at the GG deal - it might be good for you.

The only problem I have had was when my wife was staying with her dad in the sticks. The O2 mast was down the hill on the outskirts of the nearest town, signal marginal at best, worse that dodgy when it was rainy or misty.

The other problem was that the mast was overloaded - when the kids got out of school and were using their free GG to GG calls the network was unavailable. What I didn't find out was whether O2 prioritised O2 calls over GG Never had a problem anywhere else.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

re "If Linus doesn't like it why doesn't he write it himself?"

He's got a very important job to do himself. This one's Intel's pile of Dodo droppings. It's their call.

OTOH, just to be charitable, I'll give Intel a free suggestion. Why don't you ask that nice Mr Pottering for some help. If he would only take a week off from fixing Pulse Audio, I'm sure he could easily incorporate a fix into Sysyemd. The system would boot faster, run faster, crash faster, ...oops...

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

Re: "Plus, really cheap "offshore" PSU's were often a bit marginal even when not abused"

Y'mean theyr'e not now?

I always buy a cheap psu for my computers. One from a reliable manufacturer with decent specs. One that's unlikely to give me weird data errors due to spikes and noise and one with proper protection so that its unlikely to blow up random bits of the machine.

Unfortunately, they tend to be somewhat more expensive. Cheap at the price.

I can still get a new case complete with psu delivered to my address from halfway round the world by UK distie for around 25 squid. Apart from the lacerated arteries assembling the machine, what else do you think I'd get?

>> Thanks - it's the one with the unused first aid kit in the pocket.

Re: Improbable

Yeah, had to do that to prevent a meaty arc welder consuming 13 A fuses. (Bit 'o fuse wire soldered across the 13 A fuse to give it a bit more "delay".)

Worked fine until the welder developed a shorted turn. Took out the 30 A fuse for the ring in the main fuseboard rather than the one in the plug.

Remember, there's (almost) always something meater further upstream ... £30 A in the consumer unit, 80A or 100 A main service, 400A in the substation ...

As my first governor used to say "So it steams a bit."

Reminds me of back in those days in a test gear department ... One of the Test Room boys brought in a bit of kit that "didn't work". I whipped off the plug cover to discover that one of his coworkers had replaced the fuse with a 1 inch length of pot spindle - nylon pot spindle.

What do voters want? An IRL Maybot? Sure, give that a whirl

Simple choice really.

1. The risky option.* Do a Tay, Bags I get a chance to help train it.

2. Get some of the better bullsh*t generators off the net and randomly concatenate their outputs**

* Not that risky really! We all know where that one will end up.

** This is really the high risk option. Some of the brighter dimwits at Tory Central Office might think it a wizard plan to pipe that into the next Tory manifesto.

Re: The genius of Crace

"Even pot plants will struggle to get any sense out of the chat bot."

Before or after smoking themselves?

Re: Knock, Knock ....... Who's There? AI Gift Horse :-) I Kid U Not

Would it be possible, I wonder, to plug the input to the Botty into the output from amanfromMars?

Job done, Central Office happy, Voters much enlightened.

Thanks, the consultancy invoice is in the post.

>> With this icon I'm sure I can't fail.

Court throws out BT's plans to reduce pension rates

" For one thing, all pensioners in that fund retire at age 60" @ac

So, how old would you like to have to be, hanging from the top of a pole in all weathers or lying flat out on the pavement in the wind, pi**ing rain and snow over an open joint pit reconnecting the lines after the p**eys nicked the copper including the junctions?

Have three WINEs this weekend, because WINE 3.0 has landed

Re: Cautionary tale

So, create a new account for yourself, call it Wino or somesuch, and install Wine and your legacy software bits there.

Or create more that one new account and install each legacy bit in a separate "instance".

Wouldn't that narrow the risk a little?

Plus all the other usual caveats of course.

Don't panic... but our fragile world is drifting away from the Sun

PANIC! PANIC!

So, as the sun runs away from us, it'll get colder. No Global Warming, Climate Change Hype* etc etc.

Don't you realise that a whole alarmist industry is about to go down the crapper??

Pundits will starve. Parasitical Panic merchants will go mad. KITTENS WILL DIE.

Lets Party like it's a Maunder Minimum - Frost Fairs ahoy!

All aboard the Vomit Comet: Not the last train to Essex, but a modded 727 for weightless flight

Re: Reassurance?

So, bung a tank INTO the vomit comet then.

Bonus points if the tank is full of water and / or rubber ducks ...

... The tank hung in the air in much the way that bricks ...