Posts by Just A Quick Comment

Steam-powered computers: Retro cool or old and busted?

Re: Magic Roundabout

That's the brilliance of the Swindon Magic Roundabout. You can go around it either way.

Anyone still using cash? British £50 banknote honouring Alan Turing arrives

Too little, too late, but better than nothing...

I agree with the above. However, at least he is now being honoured, which is better than NOT being honoured, and it will help preserve the memory/name of a remarkable man.

Windows 11: Meet the new OS, same as the old OS (or close enough)

Memories

Ahhh, WordPerfect 5.1...! Now THERE was a word processor worth having...

Emergency mode? Bah! It takes a Microsoft product to really break a digital sign

Interesting choice of words

So Microsoft prefers "bugcheck" to 'death'-type words/descriptions. That's playing loose with the English language - something MS are very good at - but I prefer 'crashed' or 'knackered' as a description. They're not offensive words and are more descriptive of the problem compared to "bugcheck" which is another MS non-word.

I'm sure others can come up with other synonyms...

If HAL did digital signage. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that...

Yeah, but what horrors would you find in Southampton?!

Still, could be worse. Could be Swindon...

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?

We need Firefox to keep going

I use Brave on Android and Firefox on Windows/Linux, and see no reason to change. What with Google's casual attitude to ad-blocking (i.e. not much) I'm avoiding Chrome and recommending others to do the same.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? Detroit waits for my order, you'd better make amends

Re: Sometimes though....

Thanks for the link. Will prank/terrorise SOME of my customers with these nostalgic sounds in the next few days...

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

Readable? Concise?

"Still nothing quite so logical and readable as COBOL"

Finnegans Wake?

Report on Probability A?

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

Obsolete unit?

How many Jelly Babies are there in a Gummy Bear? Yes, I know, it depends on how hungry the bear is...

Hero to Jezero: Perseverance, NASA's most advanced geologist rover, lands on Mars, beams back first pics

They've done it again!

Congratulations to the NASA team responsible for this.

In these troubled times any good news is most welcome.

Remember life on Venus? One of the telescopes had 'an undesirable side effect' that could kill off the whole idea

Re: Captain, we have recalibrated the sensors and it seems we were in error

Knowing the conditions there is one thing - that's relatively easy to find out. It's making a craft that can survive them - now that's difficult!

O2 cuts ribbon on UK's first commercial driverless car lab where it'll blend satellite and 5G signal to stay on the road

Why go to the shops?

The next step is macro programming your car to go to the shops for you (emailing your shopping list to the shop) or, even better, order your shopping online and have someone else deliver it to you.

More time for you at Beer o'clock, while the technology does what it's always promised to do/deliver - which is great until the adverts (that will inevitably appear in the system, just like Smart TVs) mean your car will detour to get some Free Samples You May Like and then runs out of fuel a mile or two from home because of its abysmal range.

Behold the Bloo Screen of Death: Bathroom borkage stops spray play

I live in Southport - the one in England

Which pub in Southport is this? I wish to visit before we all suffer from Lockdown (again).

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

No monopoly on stupidity

I thought us Brits and certain US states had the monopoly on idiotic politicians - I happily stand corrected! Where do these people come from, and what are they using for brains?

ZX Spectrum reboot promising – steady now – 28MHz of sizzling Speccy speed now boasts improved Wi-Fi

These retro computers are fun - and that's the point

Yes, these retro computers aren't up to much compared to a good PC and a good graphics card etc, but they're fun; simple, nostalgic fun.

Also it's nice to have a computer that doesn't need an anti-virus or some complex OS to boot it. Yes, I know the Pi is almost that, but my The C64 and the Next (oh so tempting) behave in a different, and simpler, way. If you're interested in just playing a few games, get an emulator, but for the whole physical experience a solid machine you can touch (and even "ooh" over - oh, hang on, that sounds rude and even... um, ewh!) and appreciate (like an LP compared to a download music track) knocks emulation into a cocked hat.

Plus, for the average IT worker, £300 isn't much - it's a round of drinks, a filling up of the Porsche's tank, a weekend away for drinking and sex, or even... Well, hopefully you get my humorous point :-)

What happens when holes perfect for spyware are found in the engine room of millions of Qualcomm-based phones? Let's find out

Why do us customers bother?

More bloody security issues - don't people have procedures in place to catch this sort of thing?

Plus, considering the piecemeal Android updates (often, none at all) these vulnerabilities will last the life of the product. It's like footballers in an Aberdeen bar all over again...!

Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol

Oh, the days when things lasted more than a year...

If only washing machines, phones, TVs etc were as well made today...! Well done to NASA and all concerned.

You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot

Oh dear...

We are SO screwed...!

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

This has been handled badly, but it's not beyond hope.

We need software like LibreOffice, partly to try and help keep M$ honest (note I used 'try' and 'help' - I don't have a lot of faith). If I didn't need MS Publisher to handle my homemade booklets (I just don't get on with PagePlus) then I wouldn't pay good money for my Office subscription, plus I need to know the basics of Word, Outlook etc to have a chance of teaching/helping others - it's what I sometimes do...

I still advise them to get free (and Free) software, when it's of good quality and suitable, so stuff like Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice (plus Avast) are always high on my Recommended list.

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree

Old languages

Yes, not only do we need to remember the old languages just to prove they existed but, also, to learn from them that sometimes the old ways can have merit.

Voyager suffers a power wobble as boffins start the final countdown for Spitzer

Or it may bounce back from the rigid shell which contains our 'universe' (whatever that is) and may come heading back to Earth, beautifully synchronised so it enters a parking orbit, and can be collected and put on display.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Smell? What smell?

All these comments make me glad I don't have a sense of smell. Never have had. Farts at school were, to me, just funny noises.

MAMR Mia! Western Digital's 18TB and 20TB microwave-energy hard drives out soon

Well, how big is YOUR head?

With 20TB drives a reality, and larger in the pipeline, how long until you can backup an adult human brain - and how big would the backup need to be?

After outrage over Chrome ad-block block plan, Google backs away from crippling web advert, content filters

So, basically, no change there

So Google on Android will still allow all the annoying adverts we know and hate, just because advertisers are more important then web page viewers. Follow the money trail...

Crispest image yet of Ultima Thule arrives on Earth, but grab a coffee while the rest downloads

Re: Silly

ET torrent home...

NASA's Chandra probe suddenly becomes an EX-ray space telescope (for now, anyway)

Same with washing machines and TVs. They could build to last but that doesn't create turnover in the profit and loss account, so we have to cough up for 'newer and better' every five to ten ytears...

'007' code helps stop Spectre exploits before they exist

Android update are slow?

Sorry, but stating that Android updates dribble out slowly is being generous! The fragmented update scene is more like an army of snails, all with a severe limp, advancing towards the besieged and vulnerable phones and tablets. Most won't make it, and those that do will be too late; the war will be over and the device will either have been hacked, rooted or bunged in the bin.

Say what you will about Microsoft's attitudes concerning updates, but at least you can get them (whether you want them or not). Google's method of giving updates to manufacturers instead of directly may result in better update testing but can result in vast delays and in a lot of cases no updates being issued at all for even slightly older devices.

I don't know the solution to this, but then again what do my views matter? I'm just a user. I'm not making £millions.

Not OK Google: Massive outage turns smart home kit utterly dumb

A simple solution

A simple mantra to be recited when dealing with this stuff:- "Avoid, avoid, avoid."

Relive your misspent, 8-bit youth on the BBC's reopened Micro archive

Assemblers added to the fun

Having an assembler built-in to the basic machine was a bonus, such as the BBC and Commodore 16/Plus 4. OK, so a purchased one, especially with a good manual, was also grand, but having one in ROM meant fewer re-loading hassles - so long as you saved before running of course!

It's April 2018 – and Patch Tuesday shows Windows security is still foiled by fiendish fonts

Time to really say goodbye to flash?

If you haven't surely it's time to remove Flash from your system, if you can. OK so some old programs may still use it, but it's just a security liability these days, and these programs should be retired as well, or at least updated/re-written not to include Flash.

...and as for Microsoft saying Edge is secure - well, patch after patch after patch suggests otherwise...

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Could this form of censorship be applied retrospectively?

I've written stories, using Word and Publisher, that contained naughty/adult words in the past. Have Microsoft been spying on me and my stories all this time?

So, is it tin hats at twenty paces, or (and more simply) switch to LibreOffice?

Recording Industry Ass. says vinyl and CD sales beat digital downloads

Hypocritical industry whining about stuff despite ripping off punters and artists alike

My main moan is the continual re-release (often with 'extras' that you may listen to once and then never again) of old stuff. I have Rumours by Fleetwood Man on CD, vinyl and SACD. Now why should I have to pay for a high resolution download? I've contributed enough to FM's Peruvian Marching Powder Fund over the years I think!

It's similar with Kraftwerk's 3D Blu-ray box set - no high resolution digital download voucher; I'm expected to pay again to hear the same music on my high res music player (a Fiio X3 2nd Gen which plays just about everything). Well, how many Blu-ray players have either phono outs or headphone sockets? Talk about milking the customer who feeds you and making them/squeezing them pay until there is nothing left. OK, so having Rumours more than once suggests I need therapy, I can't argue too much with that...!

However, I still have physical media because it doesn't need the internet (with its ways, means and general other quirks) to authorise my playing of the music that I paid for.

Morrisons launches bizarre Yorkshire Pudding pizza thing

For the sexist voyeurs amongst us - including me...

I'd lovingly bake the Yorkypizza in the over until lightly golden brown, then I'd get one of those lovely ex-F1 grid girls to lie naked for me on the kitchen table while I place it on her belly (on a heat-retardant mat - I'm not a monster!), and then we (she and I) would slowly and lovingly devourer it - with some Mayo and a bit of tomato ketchup on the side, just for that extra spicy and stylish touch.

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

Re: Why we need faster MEMORY!

A nice idea, but what happens if we get a bug like this in the DRAM processor? Hopefully this DRAM/CPU hybrid would be as cheap as chips and being socketed it would be easy to update/replace.

Also, what CPU architecture would you use in the DRAM CPU? Something based on a current chip or some wonderful new architecture? Oh the design teams would have fun - a completely new design blank sheet! Then there's the design time, followed by the debugging time, and the bugs discovered after releasing the new wonder CPU. Me cynical? Nah...

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Re: Google security...is a joke

Good grief! This sort of thing is exactly why only a few have advanced security! It's too complicated or too involving or too long winded or simply 'what?' for the average non-technical user. No, there has to be a better way then faffing about with a bloody mobile (no, I'm not in a cell) and getting a resend because the first one hasn't arrived. The tech just isn't good enough yet.

And as for reporting stuff to the tech giants - again why bother? It almost certainly doesn't get read, let alone acted upon, especially if you're outside the US. No, unless you're reporting from some whizzbang tech company in California you're just used as fodder to help pad out numbers for the advertisers to read; they don't really care about you.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Well done NASA!

Once again incredible engineering from NASA. Imagine anything made today lasting that long, thanks to the throwaway society and planned obsolescence. Make you proud to be a human being...

PC repair chap lets tech support scammer log on to his PC. His Linux PC

What is a computer?

I told one scammer I was using my Xbox One, and was promptly told that was not a computer! Hello? It has Win 10 on it, and a browser. Is my Samsung TV a computer? It has a browser as well.

Too advanced for these script-reading idiots!