Posts by File Not Found

Microsoft tastes the unexpected consequences of tariffs on time

Re: The modern fad for making a 10 minute video

…and the old Horizon didn’t need a perpetual orchestra in the background making the whole thing so irritating that you switch it off.

Amazon fined in Europe for screwing shoppers with underhand dark patterns

Never mind the ads - I gave up Az prime after the frustration of no closed captions on 99% of their video finally wore me down (I’m deaf-ish).

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

And don’t even think about how to navigate the alphabetical order in Bangla….or the agglutinated individual symbols for eg ngk or cch in that lovely language.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Re: I think I can safely say ...

Absolutely my experience too - I was able to sneak some automation, batch processes and simple analytical tools into the NHS in the 1990s (as a result of hobbyist Basic skills from the previous decade), while NHS central concentrated on the perpetual widening of the drain it poured its IT development funding into.

SpaceX tries to de-orbit Amazon's request for a satellite broadband shortcut

Re: Good, very good!

Oh no it’s not. Keep all this pointless space junk on the ground and leave some dark sky for the rest of us.

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Re: Credit where it's due

Exclude the ‘bean counters’? Of course. That will make sure they are kept in the dark, uninformed and unable to either support or understand the work being carried out. And what you want in a well-run organisation are uninformed, excluded and ignorant people to provide and manage your budgets, don’t you? I’ve worked as an IT budget holder in those sorts of firms/orgs, and in the other more enlightened variety, and I know which works better (in both company and personal outcomes). Lay off this ‘bean counter’ bollocks.

$900bn coronavirus stimulus bill includes $600 for most Americans, $50 in monthly internet subsidies, $1.9bn to help rid the US of Huawei kit

Outraged of Suffolk

That should be ‘..two million subscribers or FEWER..’, of course. This poor grammar thing is spreading like a disease.

WannaCry ransomware attack on NHS could have triggered NATO reaction, says German cybergeneral

Re: NATO response

You mean ‘imply’ not ‘infer’, so I haven’t bothered with the rest of your rant.

Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!)

Re: Guilty Secret

BT have been telling me for 6 years that I am being transferred from BT Yahoo to BT Mail, on dates that varied on a weekly basis until they petered out. My experience of the BT Yahoo mix has been indescribably bad, and BT’s customer service is easily the worst I’ve ever suffered. Today’ s ‘temporary error code 15’ is finally the last last straw, so heave ho, out with the BT router and in with..... err...??

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

Re: Error Messages

Why has everybody starting saying ‘multiple’ when they mean ‘many’? Odd.

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Re: College in the 80s

Yep - well, nearly. Amstrad, 1990, wrote the code myself, cabinet full of 5.25 floppies. At least I found out whilst *testing* the non-functioning back-up crud-code after a month or so, not in a real crisis. My amateur code just backed up the name of the file multiply enough to make the size of the outcome look like a real file...

The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI 'dark patterns' that trick you into buying stuff

Re: A Prime example

YMOV (where O=obviously) if you think Amazon’s returns policy is more friendly than anything at all - my experience is that it was invented by the devil and is managed by brain-damaged cyborgs using one-finger typing on reconditioned Amstrads, under zero-hours contracts that limit their ‘operating’ hours to ten minutes a week on alternate Mondays. Harrumph.

*Spits out coffee* £4m for a database of drone fliers, UK.gov? Defra did game shooters for £300k

Re: Deranged?

It often occurs to me, as one of the least qualified users of this site, that the rest of you should (I mean this in the really nicest and most encouraging sense, truly) put up or shut up - and here’s a perfect example to put that into action . I can get a simple company structure set up for say 25 of the top posters on this topic by the end of the week; you experts can clearly get the solution scoped, timed, risk-assessed and option-rich by say Friday week, and we can approach one of our MPs with a career-enhancing and risk-free proposal before the next PM is elected. By the sound of your comments here the work will be 100% simple and straightforward, so the profit element can be trivially small - but reputationally redemptive, shall we say. Any reason not to do this?

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Re: final straw?

Have a look at Andrew O’Hagan’s piece in the London Review of Books, March 2014 - comprehensive and revealing and definitive.

Turn me up some: Smart speaker outfit Sonos blasted in complaint to UK privacy watchdog

In effect they do - I use one of their Play5s (8 years old now) via line-in as a dumb speaker for my cinemainashed, with the advantage that I can wirelessly connect a stereo pair....On the whole I agree that hifi it’s not, but the system works well and is handily mobile, and their customer support for occasionally challenged elderly nontech users is brilliant, even if their PR/dataslurp dept is obviously industry standard.

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Quite right

Thanks for a good, solid, straightforward argument that sets it out simply. Just get this done, Fb and the rest of you....

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

Out in the wild

MFA which relies on a steady cellphone signal - not available out here in rural Suffolk UK, and already causing some gritting of the teeth, as these little details seem to escape MFA activists. Just sayin.

In Windows 10 Update land, nobody can hear you scream

Re: Gross Negligence at it's finest

Fair enough. Only problem I have with this attitude is that I can’t actually remember when I last actually paid for a MSft product - 10 years ago? 15? So demanding damages etc seems a little over the top. You get what you pay for.....

Spent your week box-ticking? It can't be as bad as the folk at this firm

Re: “were quoted a ridiculous price and told it would take four months”.

Well invented!

We need to talk, Brit Parliamentary committee tells Mark Zuckerberg

Worst case is that Zuck does actually appear, allowing the pompous knownothings on the Ctee to make the same fools of themselves as they usually do.

Here is how Google handles Right To Be Forgotten requests

Re: Billed hourly rate

...and then there’s Jackie Mason - ‘They used to use rats here in California for medical research. Now we use use lawyers - there’s more of them, and the emotional engagement is less..’

Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired for opposing hiring caps on white, Asian male nerds

Re: Political correctness BS

It turns out that the best way to avoid unconscious bias (if your firm is big enough) is to hire in groups of ten or so - this apparently helps your subconscious take the ‘risk’ that a new hire from a less familiar background won’t fit in with the existing team.