Posts by Disk0

How hot is it right now? 'Water park catching fire and burning down' hot

Rebrand

to “Maximum Anxiety”. Add crocodiles for effect.

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

Re: Lockdown

I propose the term HOLI - Having missed Out on Lockdown self Improvement, with the alternating capitals appropriately forming a four-letter word that bears a resemblance to, but isn’t quite, an english word, however suggestiviely and capriciously holding some impossibly ephemeral middle ground between being a religious trope, a designation of constructive imperfection, not quite an Americana-infused meme substitute, and pop-art, while simultaneously and with equal probability being the utterance of an intensely constipated pseudo-bureaucratic but selfproclaimed creatively expressive mind, or equally likely the intersected brainchild of a console addict and your father-in-law’s imaginary version of 1337speak. Or maybe both.

Re: How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works

That sounds suspiciously like one of the core Vogon philosophical tenets.

Fire up that Macintosh II: Retro techhead gives the web a Netscape 1.1 makeover

Wonderful

I really enjoy the retro feel of using FrogFind, it brings back fond memories of screeching modems and flickering screens with grainy images.

It turns out that however that interactive nonsense now makes up nearly all of the content, so you can visit a website vie FrogFind, but not quite view the content. A bit like being able to drive to any shop, but remaining confined to the parking lot...

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

Ashes to letters

At one time about a quater century ago I was requested to tag along - being an “expert “ in all things related to graphic design because of actually owning several Adobe products that I acquired at a firesale - to a lettering company in the heart of my city. My role was relatively simple: translate whatever jargon would be thrown around from each side, make sure the good folks there understood the requirements, and that output would be acceptable. I had already assisted with formatting the Illustrator file appropriately, copying the resulting EPS to a Zip disk, and printing a hardcopy just to make sure, as was the custom in thise days. I though I had left nothing to chance. It promised to be a breezy little outing. Once at the lettering company, that looked more like a garage than a serious graphics outfit, we were sent upstairs to “the chief”s lair. Chief was a stout fellow with artistic hair dressed in corduroy, and generated enough smoke from an obviously cheap cigar ( expensive ones smell way better...) to compete with a medium sized factory. His messy, dark nook of an office overlooked the canal but was otherwise bereft of any grandeur. “What the heck is that?” the chief blurted out, pointing at the Zip disk. “Kind of the standard exchange doohicky for graphics files” I responded, since my companion was already sorely taken aback with the whole situation. “Wahaha no we don’t do any of that. Just give me that hardcopy!” Chief replied. After some deliberation, we decided to go along - after all, this was The Leading and Reknowned Lettering company, and there wasn’t really another option. Chief proceeded to pop open the ginormous Agfa flatbed scanner, and rested the smouldering stump of his cigar on the edge of the plastic casing - that had onbviously been subjected to this level of abuse ever since it had first been deployed. The edge was marked with black, ashy, molten indentations. I couldn’t help but be aghast. He noticed and laughed “that doesn’t hurt anything!” I decided it wasn’t my money, and somehow mustered a “Do you mind if I smoke?” which was shot down immediately and harshly. “No cigarettes!”. He proceeded to fire up some arcane text-driven software, frantically tweaking parameters and cursing every moment of it, apparently setting up althe scanned file to send to the plotter. “Can we see the result?” My companion asked, concerned about the costly operation’s output. “This does not have graphics, what do you think, we’re not NASA here! You will see when we make it. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine! Just go choose your colour with the lad downstairs, it will be ready tomorrow.” So we did, pick the colour of film that was the clostest match to the desired Pantone tint to match the house style, crossed our fingers and left - ie. got yelled at to get the hell out because they had work to do. The output turned out fine, but the events stuck with me because of the utterly incomprehensible process, and the poor scanner being abused so heavily by this man’s cigars...

Facebook and Apple are toying with us, and it's scarcely believable

Last I looked

Your lords are still running the show

FortressIQ just comes out and says it: To really understand business processes, feed your staff's screen activity to an AI

Alternatively

Design your applications to fit the workflow, the workflow to fit the process, the process to fit the reality of production, and the production environment so that it suits humans.

How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers

I for one

welcome our artificially intelligent SoC's.

Progress is a beautiful thing. This old ad comes to mind: <https://tinyurl.com/y2cwjryr> ...Now featuring butterfly wings!...

And I very much like that this is a significantly different architecture.

We've been stuck with the x86 monoculture for too long.

I am also looking forward to some form of multicore high-performance Raspberry Pi to power laptops - it can't be long now.

Let's see who can make the lightest, most efficient and most performant architecture. We will all win, and I want them all.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Putin lost

that is all.

...letting someone else carry the can...

Much like Cameron called the referendum and then walked away from the steaming pile of mayhem he just unleashed...

Facebook is leaky, creepy, and trashy. Now it wants to host some of your customer data

Re: Am I the only one still sane?

no, insisting on oral synchronous communication for matters that can be settled in writing without any of the hassle is insane.

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

How about

Streaming platforms pay a “blanket” license fee to cover all reproduced content, not unlike e.g. radio stations and shops do, and basically charge that to the advertisers, who are the ones actually benefitting from all the content. The licensing fee could simply be calculated as a factor of the number of views, or logged time. Or, and here's a novel idea, sue the advertisers who profit from having their advert for plaid shirts pop up whenever someone mentions "the boss".

Capita Consulting ditching more than a quarter of its workforce 45 days after consultations with consultants

Well well well

Let the schadenfreude begin. Suggested lines of conversation with the laid off include:

"Having trouble keeping a job guv?"

"Aren't you ashamed, to be dissappointing your manager like this"

"So I guess that means you're not economically viable then"

"Didn't give it a 110% then eh"

"Your career is going great I see"

"Maybe next time try being motivated"

"So what is your excuse to be asking for handouts?"

"You know, you should have been adding value to the company."

"Jobhopping is like, so over"

"Have you considered learning a skill?"

And of course "Why did you get yourself fired?"

AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box

Sneakernet 2.0

Nuff said.

Windows spotted flashing its unmentionables in a Chicago clothier

bugs

are in season, right?

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: A cautionary tale ...

shhhh

Re: Who'd have thought

Have you gone completely chocolate because I can't make bananas out of what you are saying...

So it's ALL the telly's fault then

Mine's the one with the neighbour's clicker in the left pocket...

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: Cynical is what an optimist calls a realist...

Continuity engineer: The glass is not even half the size it needs to be, and we need several more.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Re: Not a good idea

Nothing to fear huh.

'Ethical' hackers say: It's just hacker. To be one is no longer a bad thing

It’s 2019 and

Carbon meatbag units can still be easily compromised by misuse of technical vocabulary. It seems super-flu-ooze that any of this would need explaining in the vulture’s domain, heck I’m just a dorking cracker harkening to uncorker knackered croakers, and farked fruitarian fanware out of Cork, if possible esthaetically, which is very much metrically and morally snuberior to pan testing and makes for better copy.

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Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Re: There is of course a new approach here

You're not supposed to eat them I don't think.

Obligatory tuppence

First of all there is a HAL joke somewhere in there but I can't quite figure it out. Something along the lines of "I can't let you open the door Dave" but your name isn't Dave, so I gave up.

Second of all unauthorized residential valuable movers are not picky when it comes to avenues of entry, what for doors often being locked so forcing an alternatives entrance generally doesn't seem to big of a deal in the profession, especially since they do not worry about when the glazer will have time to stop by, or if their insurance premium will get hiked because of claimed break-in damage.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Feed that into your hypertext preprocessor and you'll find a

|fitter|smoker|dreamer

and of course the mythological

|r(πd)

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Let him have it!

But no POTUS speech privileges - he'd need to abide by the same terms and conditions as the citizenry he so fervently claims to be a part of all of a sudden. I haven't read the T&C of the Tweetverse at length but from what I've read generally stuff like inciting violence, blatant racism, and purposeful misinformation with the intent to harm entire populations might gives cause to take restrictive action on offending accounts. If nothing else, they could suspend the whole thing indefinitely for "suspicious acticity" "Failure to monetize" "Flagged as troll, bot or spam account" "Reported as a landing page for botfarmers." "Tweeting too much without following enough people" or the old "Please reset your password for security reasons and set up two factor authentication." loop. If he complains, the response is simply: you wanted this. Yes, /should/, but wouldn't it be fun to see his reaction when he gets the book dropped on him?

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: "nobody moved to stop a thief"

You're telling us to assume criminals in the US are mostly unarmed? And we are supposed to believe this, becaus ethere are no actual statistics of gun homicides is the US versus any other country in the world.

Do remember, killing somoene with a gun is generally against the law even in the USA, so doing so automatically makes someone a criminal, even if they weren't after y'alls pruppaty.

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Re: Talk about solving a problem that doesn't exist

You forgot 0: Why the hell would anyone want to spend another minute in this crappy establishment where they don't serve me my favourite drink stat?

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: Tracking...

Yes it's called Bogchain.

Mine's the one with the rollll

Giffgaff goody-baddy-bag billing faff: Ofcom fines operator £1.4m for overcharging folks by almost £3m

The fine is not a deterrent then

Just taking a cut. Got it.

Dutch cheesed off at Microsoft, call for Rexit from Office Online, Mobile apps over Redmond data slurping

Vinger in de dijk [ATTN: Title is not in english. Translation may be needed.]

This might be a quirky local cultural thing, but our representative government has indeed set forth that when dealing with technology providers it is reasonable to consider how much spying they do for themselves, their government and 3d parties, especially when there is an increasingly dodgy regime in said technology providrer’s home country, a regime which has no regard for its own citizen’s privacy, let alone the privacy of forners in rando Euro-Shitholes cuz dems not even real gummints, there all like socialisms ’n shit and there are no good golf courses there anyway. Bless. So, it may be somewhat of a nuisance to have metadata about our citizens being used for marketing purposes, but a foreign, compromised entity guaranteed to lose, leak, sell or hand over metadata of government workers is a serious breach. I guess a vast majority of the viewers here can totally live without a sequel to the “Cosy Bear” reality TV show, it was boring and scary.

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: I had the reverse situation

Found the NiceGuy.

GM Cruise holds off on self-driving taxis for this year, says it needs more testing time to be safe

Still not flying either

They should call the whole self-deluding car fantasy "Maybe After Tomorrow Or Sometime In A Far Far Future", or MATOSIAFFF for short.

Instead just hang some fuzzy dice on your tv, use the pedalbin from the washroom to keep your foot busy and remember you are always commuting to the future in real time.

Mine's the one that looks like a housecoat, because why go outside? There's lunatics there!

Apple fakes intimacy in our dead-eyed digital world with software fix

On the upside

We can all go back to looking at whatever while on the phone, without feeling obligated to attempt to maintain eye contact with whoever is on the other side. Sure you can call me on FaceTime, just don't expect me to stop bingewatching reruns of The Avengers*.

*) no, not the comic superheroes - the ones with miss Rigg doing high kicks. Now there's marvels!

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

Require govermnet-issued ID to sign up

...so much better when there is a leak, to know that your actual ID is now up for grabs, instead of having to guess how much of your identity was compromised and which accounts to reset.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Re: Re Director of Security

How about “company information must be stored on designated servers in order to ensure access, compliance oversight, information security and data integrity protection.”

Any encryption key would have to be a part of the backup and restore procedures. All other encrypted files are assumed to be either malware or illicit content and will be quarantained until a key is provided, and the files are verified to be safe and legal, as per security regulations.

Re: My fav

“Help my computer is broken and has a virus! Word is scrolling uncontrollably! I can’t stop t!”

“Ok here is what you do. Pick up the binder that is in front of you on the desk”

“But what does the binder have to do with anything!?!? ....Oh.”

“In order to complete this call, I will take that as a confirmation that the binder was resting on the Enter key. I will be closing this ticket now”

...

Re: Dolt

No amount of monetary compensation could entice me to overlook that a “team leader” is unaware of the existence and appearance of a spellchecker. The only justifiable course of action is to set their keyboard to an Icelandic Dvorak layout, and to put a sticky note over the offending screen area (..the text box...).

Re: Dolt

“Let’s see your screen.” Tends to go a long way...

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Users repeatedly changing things (we wrongly assume they know what they change and understand what they did) without telling support (we wrongly assume they would tell us anything relevant) and then complaining about something unrelated (we wrongly assume the complaint is about the actual problem) and never remembering what they actually did (we wrongly assume sanity on the user's part), is one of those instances that tech support procedure may not neccesarily account for. We assume /some/ level of creedence to a user's claims, or we should just hand them a Ubuntu Live CD.

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

To open a ticket...

... provide a description of the problem, steps taken to remedy it, and the #number of the asset concerned. If a function test by qualified staff confirms the issue, you’re on. Otherwise: sorry, we are not allowed to process incomplete tickets. Go ask the beancounters.

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Re: TV Timing

Back in the day yuo could tell when there was a match on, who watched cable TV vs. aerial broadcast - there was a distinct gap in the roaring of the stadium audience when one of the millionaires in shorts rolled over or managed to shuffle the dead cow balloon between the poles...

Apple iPhone sales down by double digits, Mac sales knifed by Intel CPU 'constraints'

The Next Big Thing

will drive sales much more than specs or price. Of course the crucial point is: what is the next big thing? Secure communications are somewhere on the list, as is a a personal assistant that is actively useful, lightfield or 3d photography would draw some attention, waterproof is going to be the norm soon - what else can we think of? AR glasses that actually work and don't make you look like an asshole maybe...but right now we already have 007-level tech in our pocket, and it seems only an upgrade to Sci-Fi level gadgets would get anyone excited. Stuff like cameras looking through walls, hoverphones that fly next to your head, 4K contact lenses and ion propulsion to cut daily commutes from hours to seconds.

Thank you, your DNA data will help secure your… oh dear, we've lost that too

Re: Alistair Dabbs

found the sour bouncer

Re: Hotel Security

"It would be really nice " Who the hell do you think you are demanding elevator technology to advance? Just be a good citizen, keep quiet and leave it to the experts to install an unresponsive, foggy touchscreen with an out of order message - now that's progress!

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

My HP Lovecraft "Collection of Horrors" tshirt

...that most adults do a double take on before backing away with a pinched face as if someone is abupot to pop a can of soda in their face, barely incited a inaudible grunt at my kid's school.

They've been using the Internet longer than some of their teachers. By now it is safe to assume that the average 9-year old probably already has seen everything, if even just in videogames.

And how about htis: if you want your school to prepare for real society, that includes the view you will have as a WalMart greeter - because that is most of these kids' future anyway.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Chain Hotels

Like Casinos, are designed exclusively by people with certification from the Minos Institute of Architecture, best known for it's labyrinthine structures specifically designed to keep subjugated mutant cattle from leaving....

As to the aging conundrum, I like to take the high ground and blame cheapskate corporations for under-engineering their shiny and overpromising the impossible, whenever I fail to deliver on completing the simplest tasks, like operating a supposed coffeebrewing device that seems to me like it was designed by and for podpeople. Invariably I end up with either several half-brews or one scalding overflowing styrofoam volcano. Even if it was me having a moment, by now technical difficulties of some sort are so commonplace that all you need is a bofh-style excuse-calendar. Something along the lines of: if it's Monday, whatever difficulty I have, I straight up blame on something Microsoft; since they have their finger in just about everything, this makes them a perfect candidate for shifting blame. Tuesdays? must be the evil telecoms having it out for me. The words "This celltower is sending micro-aggressions to my phone" by now resonates with a broad audience. The idea is to pick a random everyday technicality to blame, take a few minutes for percussive maintenance, and take it from the top with the affairs du jour. Hopefully I'm then able to regain my composure, find the damn information I need, or come up with some semi-believable narrative to convince people I am not, in fact, an old fogey.

'It's like painting with atoms'... Watch how boffins form armies of simple micron-sized bots from a silicon wafer

...

One-legged metal spiders Dave. They're everywhere inside you now.

...

BOFH: Bye desktop, bye desk. Hello 'slab and a beanbag on the floor

selling freezers to people living in Lapland...

Think about it, they have summers too, and where else are you going to store your PHB until the tacotruck comes to pick up his remains.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Reuse, repurpose, recycle

Let's just call it Ultra-Fast Doublewide MultiMedia-USB 40.000

mine's the one with the 68-pun terminator in the left pocket...