Posts by Rameses Niblick the Third Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble?

UK government overrules local council’s datacenter refusal on Green Belt land

100% this.

In fact, I'd specify in the agreement that no work whatsoever could be started on the main project until the 'Public good' element has been all but completed.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: If only...

If only my toaster was as reliable as this!

Howdy-doodly-do! Would anyone like any toast?

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Re: Two words:

Changing the serpentine belt on my 2016 Carolla was a bitch.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that changing the serpentine belt on my 2010 Mini was relatively straightforward.

Changing the alternator however meant taking the front bumper off!

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: Make the management legally liable

Professionals by and large do not have working hours.

Arguably true, but professionals DO get paid.

Microsoft updates the Windows 11 Start Menu

Re: Ha, ha, ha! I moved to Linux Last Weekend.

But whose email address is it really?

I'm guessing it belongs to Glenn?

European biz calls for Euro tech for local people

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

In the days before the vote, Brexiteer In Chief Nigel Farage stated "In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the Remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it"

So why was a narrower margin of victory for leave not treated as "unfinished business"? Farage went on to say that a narrow win for Remain would lead to a second vote, but according to Brexit favouring voters, that would be undemocratic and against the will of the people.

It's long past time for the second vote that Farage promised us.

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

I've said it before and I'll say it again - if it's not worth your time to write it, why do you think it's worth my time to read it?

Mega council officers had no idea what they were buying ahead of Oracle fiasco

Re: Colour me surprised. Not.

As ... someone more than capable of doing 99% of their IT departments jobs

Oh really? And what are the IT departments jobs jobs at a large unitary authority? And if you're so amazing, why don't you work there?

It always amuses me that people who've never worked in the public sector assume the people who do in fact work there are simultaneously useless and get huge amounts of renumeration. If everyone there is so awful and the job is that cushy, why don't you do all you can to get a position there? Clearly the obvious choice, right?

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Re: Next Trump executive orders

USoA => Trumpistan

Just call it Trumpton and be done with it, surely?

Icon, because apparently we don't have pictures of Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble OR Grubb

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

Re: All this pressure

If anyone can point me to a How-to guide for keeping my Windows Mixed Reality (I know, the clue's in the name right?) VR headset going with Linux, than I'm there. Otherwise my Win10 gaming box will find itself firewalled from the rest of the network and anything sensitive removed

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

Re: Honesty with shareholders?

Surely the honesty need go no further than:

"Look at how much money we're making off these rubes!"

And the shareholders rejoice?

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: Idle hands - but whose?

<Vimes>

I do

</Vimes>

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Re: Not again...

"I can argue that crashing in to the fire truck is not my fault because I was using Autopilot!"

"A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One, autopilot is a poor marketing gimmick and not something any sane person would put their life in the hands of, and two, autopilot is a poor marketing gimmick and not something any sane person would put their life in the hands of. Now I realise that technically speaking that's only one flaw but I thought that it was such a big one that it was worth mentioning twice."

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Re: Embassy

Can I say at this point that if The Register was still a British publication, the Anonymous Coward posts would, for the next 48 hours, instead be posted under the name "Anonymous Cowardly Shitweasel".

Such a shame :(

Re: Embassy

So... No innocent until proven guilty then?

I'm not sure that running from the police and leaving the country in which you're accused (which had no extradition agreement with the US) for another country (which very much DOES have an extradition agreement with the US) is the best look for someone claiming innocence.

Everything he was arrested and imprisoned for in the UK was entirely his own doing (running from a European arrest warrant, breaking house arrest etc) and was very much not innocent of.

Waymo issues software fix after driverless taxi hits telephone pole

If they hit a pickup truck because it was being towed incorrectly (You're towing it wrong" sounds very like an Apple excuse mind you) does hitting a unicycle count as "it hit you because you're cycling wrong"?

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

I've been waiting for this:

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent as given to us by the sage Qui Gon Jinn twenty five years ago,

Re: Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

It'll have a very good future in politics.

I wouldn't count on it

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/12/ai_bot_wyoming/

OpenAI says natively multimodal GPT-4o eats text, visuals, sound – and emits the same

Re: > Weird, I guess it's successfully deceived me into thinking it's writing code for me.

What use are cat videos, irrelevant images and pornography to a programmer?

You've met programmers, right?

UK skies set for cheeky upgrade with hybrid airship

Re: I always thought..

They don't have planning permission yet - 20 years is still a possibility!

City of Doncaster

Or, as we like to remind them at Football matches....

You're just a small town near Sheffield!

Just a small town near Sheffield.....

....a small town near Sheeeeefffield!

You're just a small town near Sheffield....

AI is changing search, for better or for worse

Bard is like all of us who look the other way, who find AI too useful to repudiate as a product of moral compromise.

Who are these people who find AI actually useful and not just an amusing diversion?

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Re: the problem with this

If you didn't want heated seats then you'd save at least £20 in petrol / diesel by not hauling around the extra weight of heated seats during your time of ownership.

Have you ever lifted a heated car seat? They are unbelievably heavy.

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

Re: warning

Joking aside, I'm wondering why you think there was ever a need to move a 200 ton rock? Best estimates say the heaviest stone in the Great Pyramid is somewhere in the region of 80 tonnes. Large steam locomotives weigh nearly 100 tonnes, and people have been craning those around since they were first built.

The problem you have is that none of what you claim is as difficult as you make out. Plus current estimations are that each pyramid took 20 to 30 years to complete. That's literally a lifetimes work. It didn't happen quickly.

Modern day example. People were discussing the possibility of using the Saturn 5 to move large loads in to orbit once again. The problem? All the people who built, maintained and otherwise worked on them have long since retired so no-one now knows how they work. That doesn't mean they were built by aliens.

Re: warning

And we see paintings in stone-age caves that we say are just amateur images of people but maybe aliens have been visiting the Earth for the last 40,000 years? And then there are other things that we try to explain but fail ... how were the Egyptian pyramids built?....

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I've been waiting for this one!

*Ahem*

They had massive whips, Rimmer. Massive, massive whips.

Musk says he ain't going anywhere as Twitter CEO until at least late 2023

Re: Cognitive dissonance can be quite fascinating

I've just blocked Elon on Twitter, purely to see what happens

Cops chase Tesla driver 'dozing' with Autopilot on

I don't know anything about space rockets, so to listen to Elon Musk speak about them, I think he's a genius.

I don't know anything about electric cars, so to listen to Elon Musk speak about them, I think he's a genius.

I do know at least something about tech stacks, website coding and web hosting servers, so when I listen to Elon Musk speak about them, I realise he's a freaking charlatan.

As a result, I now have zero faith in his space rockets or electric cars.

Musk roundly booed on-stage at Dave Chappelle gig

Re: Technically, it was 90 percent cheers & 10 percent boos

If a person was recorded on video booing, and then viewed the recording I think they would feel the full cringe.

FYI kids don't say 'cringe' anymore since they realised the adults started using it.

Cringe got yeeted.

(And yes, I know no-one says "yeet" anymore either)

Weep for the cybercriminals who fell for online scams and lost $2.5m last year

Obligatory Discworld Quote

There is a saying, “You can’t fool an honest man,” which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim.

Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'

Interesting, I didn't get that from the headline at all:

"Creator of spec for melting RTX 4090 cables urges Nvidia, others to 'ensure user safety'"

I always thought Nvidia was the manufacturer? Sure, previous reports (listed in the article) stated that Nvidia blame end users, but from this I took it that that body who came up with the spec in the first place is telling manufacturers it's their responsibility?

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm the first to criticise the americanisation of the register (lower case all intentional), the shooing away of Dabbsy and them generally getting rid of all that made this publication unique, but in this case I think the headline is fair enough.

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

The requirements for a full flying license are also incredibly onerous, which creates a bottleneck in the supply for qualified pilots. For most European airlines, you need 1,500 hours flight time before you get a full license. Until then, you're on provisional terms and need a fully qualified pilot operating alongside you.

So coming up with a solution which eliminates the primary training opportunity (ie co-piloting) is the way to train more pilots?

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

Re: Catch-22

This was my reaction as well.

Maybe they are trying to gently get people accustomed to the idea that Twitters offices will be closed permanently, and not in the good* WFH way.

*ymmv

Twitter refugees seek asylum in an unusual place: The Matt Hancock app

Re: he is being spam voted into taking the show's most revolting challenges

When the universe is otherwise engaged, people must do what they can to assist

Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

Computer scientists affiliated with Canada's North America's University of Guelph have found that..."

FTFY

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/university_staff_and_students_voice/

University staff voice 'urgent, profound concern' as Oracle finance system delays payments

Re: Why Does El Reg Have A Picture Of The Assembly Hall Of The Church Of Scotland......

For the same reason the article starts "The UK’s University of Edinburgh. This is now a US centric publication and accuracy in or sensibility towards any other region is entirely by accident.

Oh and FYI, that noise you can hear is the crowd of angry Scots coming to complain their premier university is being lumped in with England and the rest.

Government by Gmail catches up with UK minister... who is reappointed anyway

Re: why do we accept it?

So if we want a change, all we have to do is change our voting habits. Stop electing 'these people'.

Which is exactly my point, and yet people insist on voting for these imbeciles and putting them in power, despite all previous experience. If people still want conservatives in charge in spite of the last few years, no amount of "someone I never heard of" putting their name on the ballot is going to change masochistic tendencies.

That being said I would gladly stand against them, care to lend give me the £500 it costs to do so? Unfortunately I can't afford to throw that kind of money away.

In the scheme of "UK Gov Shitshows so far in 2022", this is a non-issue.

I'm pretty sick of this kind of attitude. "Everything else is so awful, this thing that's a bit shit doesn't matter". Of course it matters, if I'd done this with sensitive company documents I wouldn't be retrained, I'd be fired for gross misconduct. The fact it was done 6 times in such a brief tenure ask Home Sec means this is not a mistake, it is a habitual way of working for her, it's just this is the first time she's been caught it's been detected.

I'm beyond the point of accepting "I know our politicians are beyond useless, but we accept it because we tell ourselves the others are just as useless". Why do we think this is OK? Why as a population do we accept it? These people are meant to be the best of us, the wisest of us and yet I wouldn't leave them alone for 5 minutes unsupervised in a room with a pair of safety scissors. The excuse "We think others are as bad" is not a reason to accept it.

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

Re: You know where you are with an omnishambles

...it's oxymoronic to be permanently in a crisis

...and yet here we are!

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

Re: Had a quick look on how to acess

"It's pathetic watching you grind away on your own day after day. It's like a dog that's missing it's masters leg. That groinal attachment's supposed to have a lifetimes guarantee, you've worn it out in nearly three weeks."

I don't think I need to add anything else.

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

Yep, short but sweet this week.

+1 for Dabbsy, mostly because my username is too long for Substack. It's like using the previous version of the Reg forums.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Re: Incorrect measurement

Johnson didn't eat any of the cake.

Or drink any of the champagne. In fact he wasn't even there. Wait, there are photos? Ok, he was there, but only for ten minutes. Well, twenty minutes. Plus the speech he gave. But he didn't realise that was a party. Or the other one. That was a work discussion. The cheese and wine were there by mistake. Why is no-one blaming the caterers for this? Really it's their fault that Boris kept accidentally finding himself at parties all through lockdown.

Actually on that last point, given as Johnsons view of home working is, and I quote "My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee and then, you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you’re doing", then it's hardly surprising he thought a cheese and wine party was work.

Also, did no-one notice that he basically admits he can't be trusted to manage his own time?

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

I suppose the saving grace is that the length of time denoted by "A Truss" (44 days) is marginally longer than "A Kwarteng" (38 days).

Seriously, how long do you actually have to hold a job to truly say you did it?

Re: Free speech, duh

Also, we're not a blog. We have offices and tea cups and a CFO. So, nerr.

Oh wow, I've not heard anyone say "So, nerr" in nearly 20 years, never mind seeing it written down! Pint and an upvote just for that!

No, no, hear us out, say boffins: Foot fungus to measure your walk

That sub-header

While the sub-header initially made me snort my coffee across my keyboard (it's not often I get a meme reference, maybe it's because it's quite an old one? Anyway...), further inspection caused me despair. Why go with the shorthanded and, dare I say it, lazy "Posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, mushroom, mushroom" when it wouldn't have been that much more effort to go the full "Posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, mushroom, mushroom".

Declining standards, I tell you! Dabbsy would never have stood for it.

Tesla faces Autopilot lawsuit alleging phantom braking

Would I rather the car stopped if in any doubt or plow on regardless until 100% certain it had hit something.

Next time you're in busy highway traffic, and for absolutely no reason whatsoever, stomp on the brake pedal as hard as you can until the vehicle has come to a complete stop and see what happens.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Unfortunately and wandering off topic....

I've just received this as well, so please feel free to off topic as much as you like. I've always been a huge fan of the SFTW column and am very sad to read this. If Bofh goes as well there will be little worth coming here for. Tech news I can get anywhere; the Reg was always light relief for me.

I find myself conflicted as to whether to up or downvote your post. Downvote for the message itself, but upvote for making it known!

Re: Missed a trick there.

Agreed, another upvote for "Ring pieces", I shall be using this in future discourse

"There's been a terrible accident," the PFY says, closing his mapping app.

A welcome return of the casual violence which I, for one, have been missing. Welcome to the weekend!

Strike days should serve as 'wake-up call' to BT's top brass, says union

Re: Maths

This argument is maintainable right up to the point where the boss gets a 32% increase, and apparently that's fine?