Posts by jonathan keith

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Re: We had the inverse issue

I never knew Rod Hull had a town named in his honour. Every day is a learning day at The Reg!

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: He isn't all bad.

Just goes to show that, very occasionally, someone can be right for *all* the wrong reasons...

Ardour goes harder: v6.0 brings 'huge engineering changes' to open-source digital audio workstation

Reaper

Never used Ardour, but if anyone's looking for a DAW I cannot recommend Reaper highly enough.

Reaper.fm

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

Runners and riders

They're hardly out of the gate and already it looks like we have a winner here, Dave. Surely this one's Micros~1's to lose?

That's right, Jim, but Micros-1 has form for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with new projects. This could well go all the way to the line.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Metro

In honour of their greatest achievement, how about The Organisation Formerly Known As Microsoft, which conveniently reduces down to the handy acronym TOFKAM?

Gmail and Outlook sitting in a tree, not t-a-l-k-i-n-g to me or thee

Er, what?

I'm honestly at a loss here trying to understand what's so bad about - for example - using the Outlook desktop client to handle email from an Exchange account, and both my Fastmail account and a Clook account via IMAP.

Or is the problem just that I'm not down with the cool kids?

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

Re: Practice, don't preach

So "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" was in fact their second choice then.

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

Re: This needs some thought

Multiple SNAFUs are always multiplicative, never additive. It therefore doesn't take much to blow past the FUBAR threshold.

Australia to make Google and Facebook disclose ranking algorithms and pay for local content

Re: too few Australian eyes

They're probably stealing Australian children - all that content doesn't just dig itself out of the mines, you know.

Frankly, Google needs to be broken up.

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Re: Proper lash up

It's a racing certainty that two days after being renamed "Permanent Overpass" the whole thing will disintegrate into dust.

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Re: Cables with labels on

Same here. I was tested by my optician when I was about 14 / 15 years old as part of the whole 'careers advice' thing.

At the end of the test, he handed me a document (three A4 pages, single-spaced print on both sides) that listed all the jobs that colour-deficient vision disqualified me from ever doing, with Military / Commercial Pilot on the first line.

This was at the bottom of page six:

Careers where colour blindness may be beneficial

Camouflage detection

Obviously I'm unable to discuss any subsequent work for Military Intelligence.

UK govt probes Brit chip biz Imagination after growing Chinese ownership sparks national security fears

Re: Um...

Damn it! Does that mean the Chinese will have to scrap their plan to move the buildings, brick by brick, to Shenzen? I bet they're furious.

ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close

Re: Opportunity Knocks

Everything is politics.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Witchcraft

obviously. Or 'technomancy' if you want to be all modern about it.

Signal sends smoke, er, signal: If Congress cripples anonymous speech with EARN IT Act, we'll shut US ops

Re: I think it would be rather splendid

3. US citizens shrug, go about their normal daily activities

4. Profit for data miners, brokers, lobbyists

Alternatively, this one ==>

(Substitute Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker for Montana mountain bunker complex.)

Re: "a political body that devotes a lot of attention to national security"

It was actually the FBI who flagged that up. When the FBI asked the CIA if they had info in their files about any of the names on the FBI's list of arabs attending US flight schools, the CIA hid the fact that two people on the FBI's list were known al-Qaeda members.

Still waiting for your Atari retro gaming console? You're not alone: Its architect has just sued the biz for 'non-payment'

RCL

So when's David Levy going to be suing Atari for maliciously ripping off his business model?

Time to brush up on current affairs. Because we're predicting Li-ion batt lifetimes using impedance and AI

Re: Sounds nice

... and it has a USB-C connector allowing testing of phones and laptops.

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Well done.

Blimey! Is it that time already?

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

GDPR?

The 'percentage of turnover' fine is..? Anybody?

Microsoft expands AI features in Office, but are they any good? Mixed, according to our vulture

Office365 SKUs

All well and good for admins of the corporate moneybags lot with their swanky Pro Plus* subscriptions, but what about those of us having to make do on (and I use the term very relatively) cheap Business Premium or Business Essentials subs?

* Pro Plus might have some more fully-featured admin tools, but bizarrely costs £2 a month more per user (+VAT) and doesn't include any of Microsoft's cloudy service goodness like SharePoint, Teams or even Exchange.

Lost in translation and adrift in cloud storage

Re: Apparently, "beheerder" means "administrator".

Throughout the whole article I was reading it as "beeherder", and thinking "I know those Dutch are crazy, but WTF?"

More caffeine required.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: "arsehole manager"

They are a very rare breed but they do exist.

One common factor seems to be the lack of an MBA.

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

Re: Very worthy

Added my Ryzen 3700 rig into the mix. Go Vultures! Awk! Awk! Awk!

Thought you'd go online to buy better laptop for home working? Too bad, UK. So did everyone. Laptops, monitors and WLANs fly off shelves

The Lenovo laptop I bought two weeks ago for £320 is now £150 more expensive, and it seems you can't buy a webcam less than £300 for love nor money.

Apple updates iPad Pro with a trackpad, faster processor. Is it a real computer now?

The one accessory the new iPad is missing is a mounting adapter for the (£950) Pro Stand.

Zoom goes boom, Teams tears at seams: Technology stumbles at the first hurdle for this homeworking malarkey

Important question: UK or US pants?

Latest bendy phone effort from coke empire spinoff Escobar Inc is a tinfoil-plated Samsung Galaxy Fold 'scam'

Re: Fools and their money

A splendid idea! Now, if you'll just follow me over here, I have a very new, ever so shiny gizmo that I know you are just going to fall in love with, and which I guarantee will make you the envy of your friends...

Budget 2020 in tech: UK.gov splashes cash on broadband and R&D while trying to limit impact of COVID-19 outbreak

Let [category] {VAT rate} = 0

Invoice sent separately.

Australian privacy watchdog sues Facebook for *checks notes* up to £266bn

Re: What to do with all the money

If 'Straya's too politically correct then many of the rest of us have long since blown past some sort of 'woke' event horizon.

Don't be fooled, experts warn, America's anti-child-abuse EARN IT Act could burn encryption to the ground

Re: I don't have a problem with this

Tell me again that you don't have a problem with it once your bank account has been emptied after their now-insecure systems are penetrated by (well-funded, organised) criminals. Or when your medical records are dumped online and - entirely coincidentally - your insurance premiums triple overnight.

Breaking end-to-end encryption is not a cure for society's ills. (Proper) Education is the cure for society's ills, but the problem there is that it's a) very expensive and b) encourages critical thinking, which is the last thing that a government wants.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: Makes me wonder

I'd love to see what previous items the seller's offered!

You could pick up "garanty orthentic" Olimpus engines three for ten dollars on any Hong Kong street corner back in the day.

Well, I say pick up...

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

Best. Theme tune. Ever.

Computer, deactivate self-destruct system requirement, says Sonos... were it on a starship in space, and not a smart-speaker slinger

Re: Surprised Sonos survive?

Slightly less slurp?

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

Re: I just want to know ...

+++ Analysing facial recognition scan +++

+++ Facemask detected, beginning detailed analysis +++

+++ Graphene facemask detected +++

+++ Alerting Armed Response units +++

Re: Manufacturing?

Isn't graphene production still very manual-intensive and a bit hit-and-miss?

Only if you want it to be used to actually do something.

I get more of a sort of oily, greasy feel from it.

Likewise with the super-rich. Almost literally impossible to spend all the money they have, so money simply becomes another scoreboard in the Billionaires' Dick-Swinging Contest, alongside the larger-than-yours mega-motorboats (which most certainly are not yachts), ultra-short-run hypercars and all the rest of the monstrously vulgar geegaws they acquire in place of friends.

Re: has not said quite how its cosmetic face masks will benefit from graphene

Graphene blockchains, I hope?

'Unfixable' boot ROM security flaw in millions of Intel chips could spell 'utter chaos' for DRM, file encryption, etc

Re: An infinite number of typewriters gets you every time

Don't forget the human sacrifices. Very important part of the End Of Days.

It is 50 years since Blighty began a homegrown and all-too-brief foray into space

Re: Rainbow codenames

All part of the Ministry of Defence's long and illustrious history. Blue Circle was also the name given to the concrete ballast that filled Tornado F.2 nosecones in place of the (hugely delayed) Foxhunter radar system.

Re: Thunderbird 1

OR IS IT?

... The photo certainly has that Gerry Anderson style. And if you look closely enough you can see the strings.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Re: Bash gets the extend, embrace, extinguish treatment

I believe the appropriate phrase is "I hope you've learnt a valuable lesson."

Bloodhound gang handles the pan again to get back to Hakskeenpan

Re: Crowdfunding?

That's an excellent idea!

Re: Slightly Inept

The age of the blipvert has finally dawned!

Crowdfunding?

Seemingly according to their website their only funding stream seems to be sponsorship, and sponsorship packages start at £25k. Is it beyond the wit of the Bloodhound SSC team to set up a GoFundMe page or similar? Crowdfunding isn't going to raise anywhere near £8m but I'm sure they'd get something from it. I'd be happy to chuck them ten or twenty quid right now if I could find any way to do so, and I'm fairly sure I'm not alone.

All I could find was this now-defunct campaign from 2017, on a site called crowdfunder.co.uk that I'd never even heard of until five minutes ago.

They could even just set up a direct payment page on their own site... Anything, just as long as there's a link to a payment page that can be included in stories like this. Because hyperlinks, the WWW... y'know?

Microsoft's latest cloud innovation: Printing

Re: Lord, no

There's a reason why I disable Web Services on all our printers.