Posts by MrBanana

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Re: Never mind tinned fruit, defund the BBC, NOW...

No need for the bread base. Make it a full English toad in the hole, and I'm in.

Marmite and cheese on a properly toasted (top side only) crumpet, is the food of gods.

Re: I don't understand...

Curry sauce as a condiment is the devil's spunk.

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Blame the French

Apparently the cause is being put down to a bad flight plan filed by a French airline. Seriously, what?

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Not holding my breath

The location data is definitely logged and analysed. I know a young driver who had a black box fitted, and enjoyed cheaper premiums. Then he got a girlfriend, and the insurance company noticed that he was no longer spending any time where he had declared his domicile, car registration and overnight parking. They didn't much like that and hiked the cost.

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

I'm not sure Jevon' paradox is applicable here, as it doesn't clearly say "you've been sold a pup[". And I don't know how you've got the idea that others have said 3G was a good thing. Only thing I see is that it was better than what went before.

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Home office space

I sold up in the pandemic, and the house had a very large upstairs space that was previously sold to us as an opportunity to create more bedrooms. We didn't bother, and made an office space that could have easily accommodated 4 people working from home, or a small business. Took less than a week before we had a lot of interest, siting the office space as key.

Re: We have expensive real estate.

Perhaps part of the space could be turned into a cage fighting arena. If there is a management / employee dispute then settle it there. Bad luck if you want to try your luck against Zuck or Elon - they can't even figure out a time to fight each other.

Re: We have expensive real estate.

When I worked at IBM there was a recognition that the 8 layers of management between a lowly worker and a C exec was probably too much. Next up, hire a bunch of consultants to write a report on how to change this. Note, I didn't say "fix this". The result was just a bunch of reshuffling ending up with fewer layers, but the same number of managers. Genius.

Re: We have expensive real estate.

Years ago when I did go to an open plan office (fighting with a 9600 BAUD modem was the home worker alternative) I had a number of people ask me how I was able to get all my work done in the 9-5 office hours. I noticed that they would ask me this, and other questions, and then flit to another cubicle to ask another bunch of questions to someone else, and then .... Their own cubicle presence must have been about %30 of the day, and they wondered why they needed extra time to get their work done.

Internet Archive sued by record labels as battle with book publishers intensifies

Re: and the booby prize is ...

Posthumously? Every week they're adding Post-It notes recording his copyright payments to the outside of the cryogenic chamber holding his head.

Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc

A well reasoned argument, thank you. I'm not a Taylor Swift fan, but her rerecording of her early albums to regain control is a great "stuff you" finger to the record industry. I note that the owners of the first recordings hasn't seen fit to raise any objection. I wonder how many artists who have sold off their back catalogue (Dylan, Justin Bieber’, Dr. Dre, ...) will come to regret it when they have no control over their music, and hear it being used for a haemorrhoids commercial every 15 minutes.

Re: "artists such as Frank Sinatra .." etc

You may want to check out something called Autotune. Streaming services are not always serving up original recordings. Ignoring the fidelity of the digital transfer of old, physical recordings, some streaming services have decided to "enhance" the sounds for those listeners they consider too enfeebled to appreciate an original recording. Add in a good dose of compression, and it is no wonder visitors to my vinyl listening lounge say "oh, it doesn't sound like that on Spotify".

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: Why?

You have answered you own question.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

In the first term at Uni we were only allowed to use the teletype terminals. But there were two types, the one everyone wanted had a type head that dropped down after printing so you could see what was being printed. The other type required a manual press of a button to raise the carriage to see anything - very annoying. We quickly found out the magic runes required to get the CRT terminals to route through the Gandalf box to get a usable connection to the PDP-11 - perhaps that was part of the first year test.

Fed-up Torvalds suggests disabling AMD’s 'stupid' performance-killing fTPM RNG

Cleaning products

Careful, I had a few raised eyebrows just this weekend when I suggested a passing fancy for the Shake n' Vac lady in the 1980s.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

I'm dyslexic and cannot write anything legible in cursive script. I can only use capitals for written communication, except my signature (also illegible). Anything approaching a cursive/serif script is panful for me to read. I don't hear of anyone complaining that sans serif is unreadable to them.

Re: I like serifs

I'm dyslexic, and I find Serif fonts very hard to process. Also, a lot of my work with computer documentation means that I am continually working with fixed width Courier, which I am very happy with. Proportional spacing is for the highfalutin nobs of this world.

[ Note to El Reg editors - very disappointed that there was no effort to have every paragraph in a different font. ]

Barts NHS hack leaves folks on tenterhooks over extortion

The random demands on personal data seem to get ever more absurd and intrusive. I'm just buying a pair of lawn chairs, why on earth do you need to know my date of birth, are they rated PG13 or... what? My DoB is of course the Unix epoch 1970-01-01, telephone number is 01234 567890 - I've given this number over the phone and, if you use the right cadence, I've not been questioned. Even when I ask them to repeat it back to me.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

My Crimson Elektrik 610 pre-amp from the mid 1980s was originally powered with a pair of hefty PP9 lamp batteries. Later, they were powered from the matching power amp, or from an external wallwart. Certainly the noise floor seemed to be lower on battery power.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: PC Engineers...

One coworker of mine was barely a PC user, and unfortunately got sent to a customer site that had a problem with their Univac system. This was purely for putting someone onsite to fulfil our contracted support obligations. Under no circumstances was he to do anything without explicit instructions. He managed to get logged onto the system, and diagnosed the problem as an out of space issue - this bit was actually correct. Unfortunately, as root, he took it upon himself to "tidy up" the system, and generate some free space, "/vmunix - that looks big....". After the inevitable crash, there was precious little of the system file space to enable the poor beast to boot, and we had to reinstall the OS from scratch.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Park ranger Joy Sullivan holds the record for surviving 7 lightning strikes, so he says.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

Re: The big secret is this: your scroll wheel is also a button.

Obvious for decades. Even a super cheap PoundLand mouse has this feature, see BigClive for tear down details.

And for those Linux users without a mouse wheel, and can't afford a quid, then simultaneous LeftButton + RightButton usually does the trick.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: COP/EOD

Have a beer, and 27 upvotes.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: What About The Current Resident?

You are Donald Rumsfeld, and a claim my 5 quid.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

Re: Using the right tool for the job..

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Thank you for that. I thought it was Allegros, but it says Ambassador at the end. Still at the shitty end of British Leyland output, but there was very little above it. My dad's Jaag had appalling build quality and started falling apart after 6 months.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

Re: Game on

There is a correlation between your height and the width of your head? Who knew.

Re: Old school here

Last couple of long haul flights I've been on had an option in the infotainment system that allowed you flag that you were not to be disturbed. There wasn't an option to say if the bloke in the seat next to me didn't want his meal then I would have it. But given the appalling state of todays inflight meals, that's probably a good thing.

Yup, my cheapskate choice of noise cancelling headphones. I wonder how many people look at the DeWalt name, and think it must be some specialist audiophile company.

Oh Snap... Desktop Ubuntu Core to arrive in 2024

Snap rhymes with crap

That's all you need to know. It is the new systemd.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Re: Over the years ...

I've been on a high pressure trading floor, I've seen the multiple screens, the state of the art CPUs these guys demand, the very latest software, must have microsecond network latency. I've also seen them sat in a chair for 10 minutes getting their shoes polished.

Line of site can be a curse. I used to live in a house that was, literally, actually, no joking, 10m from a TV transmission tower. But it was a local repeater for only 18 broadcast stations, swamping everything else. Took a while to get the correct aerial alignment, TV configuration, and shouting from the roof "can you see it Grandad" to get everything worked out for a solid connection to Crystal Palace.

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Re: Noise??

I think they would like you to say a lot of cold air.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: as a lovably chubby guy myself

Happy to have you on board in the case of a crash. In-flight meals only last for so long.

Maybe you don't get out much. Sophisticated body scanners have been a thing in Europe for years. My local airport is Schiphol, where you don't have to faff about with taking your laptop out, or even bother about taking a water bottle through. Usually not queued for more than 5 minutes.

I agree that it is a good safety measure. But making it voluntary is going to skew the results. Maybe it would be possible to add a weighing function to the security scan where you stand still in the round booth, while the scanner spins it should be enough time to get a half decent weight measure. No need to tell anyone, just collect the average over a day.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: With two-faced "friends" like Dyson, Britain doesn't need enemies

At first I thought that it was great that there was a big supply of Dyson parts for repairing them. Then, after working on my own, family devices, and at a repair cafe, I suddenly figured it out. There is a large supply of parts because the friggin' things are so shite. Very happy now with a Henry in the workshop, and a Sebo for in the house. Much better performance than a Dyson, and they don't break!

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

Re: Washing Machine Fix

When we had to clear out the belongings of my great uncle we had to tackle the sheds in the garden. We knew there were two, joined as one building split across the boundary with the next door cottage which he also owned. In the dense undergrowth we found another shed, then another, then ... There were 7 in all. His modus operandi was to fill a shed with mostly useless junk, then build another shed for the next load. Each shed was more ramshackle than the previous one. We could tell the time line of how they grew by the random things wrapped in newspapers that dated back to the 1950s. That took a load of time to clear out. Some of it was at least interesting junk, there was a 1940s BSA bicycle that had paraffin lamps with light restrictors from the second world war, a full set of coopering tools, my great granddad's tool chest from when he was an engineer in the merchant navy, and the local police were good enough to call an amnesty on the shotgun.

Sadly, I don't think I'm much better regarding old tech gear. All those routers from changing providers every two years in the last couple of decades will be useful sometime, won't they?

Elizabeth Holmes is not going to prison – for the moment

You have probably said too much.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: Upside down images

One poor noob got treated to a "keyboard issue". We remapped a couple of common keys on his keyboard to be swapped, but also physically switched the key caps. He never paid much attention to the key swap, until using any other keyboard - some head scratching. Then we started unswapping the key map in certain applications. He then started trying, and rejecting, 3 other "broken" keyboards before we told him.

The current state of policing seems pretty dire as reported by the media, but these stories are mostly from a time past where most cops were good cops. So I don't immediately see this story as a lie. Unless you have proof to the opposite?

Here's how the data we feed AI determines the results

AI vs Captchas

"I think AIs might be rather better than real humans at solving CAPTCHAs"

This is my dream. I never want to look at nine possible pictures of a fire hydrant, bus, shady politician, bicycle, disheveled actor's hairpiece, another bus, avocado pit, split crotch panties, or traffic light ever again.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: Static

As much fun as mega KV stories can go, I think we all need a bit more detail on your high heeled friend in silk panties.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

Volvos are really dull

Yes, Volvos can be dull. I have a petrol 2.0L V60. Can't get much more dull than that. Oh wait, it's supercharged, and turbocharged, and with a hybrid electric motor. 0-60 in 4.6 seconds you say? - sure, that is dull.

Re: They should have called...

And read on... The work on the trench was finished in January, they just couldn't be arsed to properly finish it until "some months in the future". Arnie came back from that future to get the work done now. A bit of publicity prompted them to fix it in a sensible time frame.

Re: Acceptance

Arsehole. That wasn't meant as a rebuke, just an alternative serving suggestion.

Re: Volvo drivers don't get a serve too?

It's a Swedish car, the lights are always on. On my old SAAB I would have to pull a jumper out of the wiring loom to turn them off.

Wrong time to weaken encryption, UK IT chartered institute tells government

Terrorist, or any other Government label

I didn't think the Eurostar went to Rwanda.

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

Re: They've tried calling me before

The Windows key on my Linux laptop isn't mapped to anything they expect, so that's a few minutes of fun. They do now understand that you may be on a Mac, but I haven't been down that branch of the Q&A flow chart. If I have the time, I'll string them along - hopefully to save someone less savy from their crap. It's amusing when they escalate the call to their manager, who gets more and more enraged the more stupid I act. "which key is control", "I'll just reboot", "that's someone at the door" - my record is 54 minutes. Strangely enough, their threat to shut off my internet didn't actually happen.