Posts by FlippingGerman

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Only if centuries is a long time to you.

YouTube's 'Ad blockers not allowed' pop-up scares the bejesus out of netizens

Price

I’m currently in YT Premium’s free trial. I will not be continuing, because it’s inordinately expensive. I don’t care about access to YT Music - I just want no adverts.

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: "English has more words than any other language, , by a factor of two or three"

Or, presumably, sit, if you lack the ability to stand. Not that I wish to imply that only those requiring wheelchairs are disabled.

I’m being silly but the example in the article make about as much sense to me as this - if you take away everything but literal language then you destroy a languages character.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: foreign law

It's *not* Texas, that's the issue!

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Three questions

As far as I know, the DOD *asks* the relevant tribe if they're OK with it before naming helicopters after them.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Tonight's Headline

If you look at Przewodow on a map, it's plausible that a missile could alunch from within Ukraine, be on course to intercept a missile inbound from Russia (or more likely Belarus), miss, and fall into Poland. Last-minute terminal manoeuvring in particular could suddenly throw its course westward.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Facilities 'so called' experts

10/10 good rant, especially the last paragraph got nice and ranty, please post more.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: Physical media is still the best

I just discovered Google offers something called “Takeout” - lets you download all the data they have in you (yeah, right…). I haven’t looked through it yet, but it’s ~150GB, which is a hell of a lot more than my Gmail and Drive.

Re: Dubbed Content

You’re not nearly ambitious enough.

Subscription cars are coming. Subscription *everything* is coming, whether you like it or not. I suspect not.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

I used to keep a local copy of English Wikipedia a few years ago. Used it too, out of necessity.

Start your engines: Windows 11 ready for broad deployment

Re: Don't give a monkey's about rounded corners but....

I found out fairly quickly that you can tell every one of those stupid boxes to fuck right off, and end up with nothing but a list of programs. Makes the Start Menu nice and thin too.

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

Re: Not only Sainsbury's

You can just disable JS on a per-site basis (in Chrome). Even used to be possible straight from the website, now you have to go to settings…

BOFH: Pass the sugar, Asmodeus, and let the meeting of the Fellowship of Bastards … commence

Re: The weedy bloke

Why spend 50 quid when you can spend three weeks coding it?

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Re: Oi - Merkins

I said that word to refer to the Leftpondians for a while, then, by coincidence (honest!) I came across this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

Israeli firm Bright Data named as enabler of Philippines government DDOS attacks on opposition groups

Israel

I don't know why, but there seem to be a lot of these "Israeli cybersecutiy firms" doing really dodgy things, although it's quite possible I get that impression because NSO Group comes up so often, and the rest is confirmation bias.

Leaked Guntrader firearms data file shared. Worst case scenario? Criminals plot UK gun owners' home addresses in Google Earth

Re: Consequences

Breech.

Et tu, Samsung? Electronics giant accused of quietly switching SSD components

Re: Is it such a big problem in this case?

Starlink is made just for people like you (and NOT for people in towns).

What's the top programming language? It's not JavaScript but Python, says IEEE survey

Definition problem

"Most popular language" does not to me seem a well-defined concept. Number of man-hours spent writing? CPU-hours spent running it? Projects completed? Most people considering it their favourite language? All of these have problems.

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: they are now the last known digits of Pi

Normies think pi is cool and weird, and so this stuff gets headlines, which (hopefully) gets grant money for other stuff. I imagine the development of the processing algorithms are genuinely useful.

Apple's iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely

iPhone

I was leaning very heavily towards replacing my current phone with an iPhone. I'm now leaning so far the other way that I have a concussion.

This all makes me very sad. Just when I was starting to trust that actually, maybe Tim Apple really cared, bam, only joking, we're gonna check through your private stuff to make sure you're not a paedo.

Tired: What3Words. Wired: A clone location-tracking service based on FOUR words – and they are all extremely rude

Bloody stupid idea anyway

Their adverts are inane, "um I'm in a forest, I don't know where I am". If your phone knows where you are THEN USE BLOODY GOOGLE MAPS! Either get coordinates (heard of those?) or send someone a fucking Google link, it's brilliant, you can then go straight to directions!

Fuckers. Stupid solution for a solved problem for stupid people.

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

Re: See through

From where I'm looking, someone earning 100k is rich. Not fabulously, but given that they probably own their own property too, and by over 50 have likely paid off their mortgage, they have many times the disposable income that I and the majority of the population do.

Do you want to become a vulture? Now's your chance to join The Register's news desk

Re: Tempting

Doesn't the "_" indicate italics?

Tech contractor loses IR35 tribunal appeal: 'Right' to substitute didn't mean he could, say judges

Re: Yet another push for us to all go work at Tesco

I like paying income tax, because I live in a society and appreciate the benefits that come from that. I expect others to do their bit too.

FTC approves $61.7m settlement with Amazon for pocketing driver tips

Stealing

How come no one gets put in prison for stealing massive amounts of money?

Open-source JavaScript project Babel 'running out of money' after employing paid maintainers, sponsors pull out

Holy shit

11k per month gets it across rather better than 130k per year. Holy shit that's a lot of money, what do people even spend that on?

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

Six months pay to find a new job?

After having been there for three (or more) years? Sure! I cannot state how horrified I am at the new workplace rules, and feel obliged to leave!

Researchers say objects can hide from computer vision by seeking out unusual company that trips correlation bias

Re: There may be regional differences to consider...

We should get married (or at least, eat cream teas together) - I eat mine without cream.

Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably

Harlem

Anyone feel like letting me know what was said there in decades past?

Patch alert for Apple fans: Cybercrooks have already been exploiting this flaw in iPhones, iPads, and watches

Re: Is it just me ..

Isn't more patches good? The bugs are there anyway, this just means they're finding and fixing them.

Android, iOS beam telemetry to Google, Apple even when you tell them not to – study

Re: Most of the data

All those are excellent uses for telemetry. None of them are justifications for sending telemetry when it has been disabled, and without informing the owner (not "user") of the device.

Backblaze on the back foot after 'inadvertently' beaming customer data to Facebook

Hey

Hey Backblaze, what the fuck? Stop it, and own up to what was happening. I was a happy customer, now I'm an unhappy customer, if you keep it up I won't be a customer.

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: Foreign travel

I was in the Eiffel quite possibly in 2003, and also went to a bell foundry! But I would have been six, so I don't exactly remember the year.

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Brontosaurus

I'm confused as to how a brontosaurus can be half the length of an aircraft carrier, generally several hundred metres long.

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Re: Who, me?

I turned on an old PC at work recently. Being young, I had no idea that was a thing, and apparently it was set to 115V. It went bang, and the magic smoke came out. Now I know.

Blind man sues Dell over inaccessible website

Harder

"harder for visually impaired people to interact with Dell's platforms than it is for sighted users" - well, yes. Being visually impaired makes things harder, that's why it's classed as a disability, so I'm not sure why he bothered saying this.

But they have a legal and social responsibility to make their site usable for visually impaired people too, so I wish him the best of luck.

That said, Dell's website is simply hard to use in general, and I'm pretty sure that's at least partly by design. And ever since LinusTechTips recent video, where they try to buy a PC and are actually scammed by their sales team, I've been pretty unimpressed by Dell.

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

Unlimited fun

They really shouldn't use the "unlimited term" - if you can't handle the extreme users, you're not really offering it.

I use Backblaze, which unfortunately uses the same word, and I'm at about 2TB, which is unlikely to grow. Decent company, it seems, but I'd quite like them to stop saying that. I wonder if saying "up to 5TB" makes people want the ability to pay less for less storage?

HP loses attempt to deny colossal commission to star sales staffer

Re: Despicable

You have a thpellling mithtake.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

WTF?

Do these people have no sense of decency? No one thought about this for a millisecond and said "nah, that would be too fucking creepy"? Apparently not.

We imagine this maths professor's lecture was fascinating – sadly he was muted for two hours

"debug their hard drive"

Flew right by me, and I clicked the link in curiosity. Ew.

Nominet boardroom battle may already be over as campaign to oust management hits critical milestone

FUCK YES

An end to a disgustingly horrible period, hopefully. Thanks for all you've done for this, El Reg.

Better battery, LTE and a removable SSD in Microsoft's Surface Pro 7+

MS hours

Are not the same as normal hours. My SP4 was advertised as having “8 hour” battery life; it had nothing of the sort. They just make up the numbers. The number then was for streaming video on WiFi, I generally got about 4 hours. To their credit, Edge had rather lower battery use than Chrome, although it made up for that by being horrible, and Chrome quickly caught up.

Travel agent leaked customer data by – this is embarrassing – giving it away in a hackathon

Re: Postcodes [in the UK] can be personal too

Excellent point, although in many countries the postcode is basically the whole town, so it might be fine. I don't know how Australia's work.

Elon Musk's ancient April Fools' gag about 'Tesla Tequila' made real in lightning-shaped bottle

Colouring book

Colouring, you say? How about the colouring book for A10 pilots, a guide on how best to kill Soviet tanks?

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/cold-war-coloring-book-taught-a-10-pilots-to-kill-soviet-tanks-a26385113bf0

Straighten up the tie pin, dear! Razer slaps on a suit with its totally-not-gaming laptops

That marketing

is vomit-inducing. No thanks. I'm not the intended customer anyway, but if I were I still wouldn't - nice design, but they keep screwing up software. LinusTechTips once gave all their employees (perhaps 20 at the time) Razor Blades, and a almost all of them had problems of some sort.

We've made it: Microsoft deems El Reg relevant enough to have a play with the nerfed version of its upcoming Xbox

Re: I don't get the "exclusives" idea...

It just pisses me off. I'm not going to buy a console just for your game (or indeed at all). I will happily pay devs for games, as long as they don't allow themselves to be paid off by console makers.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Throw him in prison

but not in the USA. Extraditing people to for crimes they didn't commit there is insanity.

And yes, I know it's the Internet, and it has a global impact, and the victim was in the USA. So what? If I post something online sitting in Blighty that makes fun of Kim Jung Un, should I be sent there to be tried for that?

Seeing as real 5G isn't even here yet, you could just get a OnePlus instead of an iPhone 12 and save loadsamoney

Cheaper phone, bigger battery

WHY??

And it's not just them, either, lots of phones are like this. A shame - if reviews one the Nord or even more expensive phones had said "amazing battery life" I'd probably have bought it, instead of sticking with what I have.

Honey, I shrunk the battery: Something's gotta give as iPhone 12's logic board swells to accommodate 5G chippery

Re: Just curious

I just made a similar comment on the OnePlus 8T article. 99% means about 3 days a year you'll run out or have to charge. That sounds great.

OnePlus 8T: Solid performance and a great screen make this 5G sub-flagship a delight

Battery

It doesn't matter how fast it can charge if I don't have a socket. Fast charging is not a replacement for decent battery life. And yes, it gets "all-day" battery life (which is a bit meaningless - it hasn't died at the end of the (working?) day?) but how much have you used it? Many days all my phone does is a bit of browsing and playing music over BT. Sometimes a lot more. Having it be fine if I forget to plug in at night is a necessity - it wakes me up in the morning, it has to be alive. Only charging every few days means the long-term life is much better.