Posts by Not Enough Coffee

Onwards! To the airport and adventure! And this rather lachrymose Linux screen

lachrymose

I had to look that one up. It being in a Scottish airport I thought it was a compression of Loch Remorse.

Epic move: Judge says Apple can't revoke Unreal Engine dev tools, asks 'Where does the 30% come from?'

I was looking to tinker with a new programming language and your mention of Pythonista made me check it out. It's exactly what I want, so thank you for mentioning it! It gives you a great programming environment and loads of examples. Cheers!

We've come to wish you an unhappy birthday: Microsoft to yank services from Internet Explorer, kill off Legacy Edge by 2021

I'm waiting for U2's guitarist to sue over the name.

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

The best customer support I ever had was from the original WordPerfect. They even had a hold music DJ!

Keep it Together, Microsoft: New mode for vid-chat app Teams reminds everyone why Zoom rules the roost

Re: There are reasons

[All Microsoft software] is a pain in the arse to set up and use and does weird stuff that gets in teh way and forces itself on you by starting up everytime you boot up which just annoying.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

I'm part Polish, just letting you know it's okay to keep Reverse Polish notation.

Scottish cops dangle £6m for help understanding 160TB treasure trove of structured and unstructured data

This reminds me of some police bodies that would operate as "arrest everyone and we'll figure out what to do with them later".

Rackspace changes name to – drum-roll please – ‘Rackspace Technology’

I thought "Bitcoin" was the magic word to add to your company name to make it more profitable, or is it out of vogue now?

Pablo Escobar's big bro and former accountant sues Apple for $2.6bn over FaceTime bug

Shouldn't the lawyers expand this to a class action so all of the drug warlord families are included?

Airline-chasing lawyers leap on Easyjet for £18bn after 9m folks' data, itineraries nicked

In the States, if you don't want to make a lawyer even richer, it'd be better to use a small claims court.

AT&T tracked its own sales bods using GPS, secretly charged them $135 a month to do so, lawsuit claims

"Gunther has sued the American telco giant, and hopes to lead a class-action lawsuit against it."

I guess Gunther doesn't follow the results of class action suits, wherein the lawyers get millions and the rest get nothing. It's like getting screwed over twice.

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group

History?

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

Re: Bob

How about The Bob Squad?

In the old days I used Billshit when referring to their software.

Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service. Older coders: Who's laughing now? Turns out we're still vital

I had a love/hate relationship with COBOL.

I always thought "PLEASE" and "THANK YOU" should be a part of the syntax, just to complete its etiquette-like verbiage. Plus it would have made the compile errors more fun - "You didn't begin paragraph X with Please".

IBM fires up the big iron, Facebook hands out masks, Cisco splashes cash, and CDC gets an Azure-powered bot

"head of health at Facebook"

"Yes, you fell down the stairs, but no, i don't think your arm is broken. Keep working!"

Microsoft, Google, Slack, Zoom et al struggling to deal with a spike in remote tools thanks to coronavirus

I wonder if IBM will reverse their no remote work policy, or will they hope the virus takes out the older employees.

Maryland: Make malware possession a crime! Yes, yes, researchers get a free pass

Re: Interesting.

And does this mean bacteria can sue me for taking an antibiotic?

Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport

No no no, he should have registered his support yeast, which happens to be crated in a chilled can.

Astroboffins discover Sun is surfing on 9,000-light-year gas wave that acts as Milky Way's stellar nursery

A lot of nice links there, thanks!

My brain doesn't work in a way that lets me understand even how the Sun's diameter and mass was discovered, there's usually an explanation about triangles and projection on a wall, but you'd have to know the distance to the Sun, and that's pulled out of a hat as well. And how can you calculate the Sun's speed? Anyway, if someone knows of a web site that explains this stellar stuff I'd appreciate it. It reminds me of how explanations of electrical circuits fall apart after the analogy to water in a hose and resisters are spigots and presto here's a multi-phase circuit diagram!

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

"ripped open a whole bag of angry monkeys"

Thanks for the new phrase, love it!

ICANN demands transparency from others over .org deal. As for itself… well, not so much

It doesn't make sense to me that this new company is merely interested in domain name renewal fees. Why go through all of this shady-looking nonsense for $10 per organization per year (or even $100/org/year).

Registrars can charge all sorts of other fees, and I think this is what they are more interested in extracting from their million-odd victims.

Internet Society's Vint 'father of the 'net' Cerf dodges dot-org sell-off during public Q&A

Re: "Republican moneybags"

Er, no.

And you think I'm Republican how?

I just want politics out of articles if it's not a political article. Or if you're going to mention the political slant, do it for all sides. Otherwise you're trying to get readers riled up for your own selfishness.

"Republican moneybags"

Slanted much? I don't see similar tags for Democrat moneybags in other articles.

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

Thanks for the great article. I don't think this amount of detail will be provided elsewhere.

Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

So no one in the company subscribed to their own marketing email as an easy way to check the basic process was working?

UK ads watchdog slaps Amazon for UX dark arts after folk bought Prime subs they didn't want

Heh, class action. What you'll probably end up with is a coupon good for a free month of Prime.

Baby alert! Japan Air lets passengers book seats far away from screaming abdabs

I'd love to have flights where the oxygen is reduced enough that everyone sleeps for the duration. Exchange the seats for bunk beds.

Your ugly mug may be scanned yet again – but at least you'll be able to board faster at Gatwick

"Ah, my time to shine." - Evil Twin

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Re: A Boaty McBoatface moment

GUMP

Y'know how everyone hated it when tuition fees went up? Cutting them now could harm science, say UK Lords

Yeah, I read "the government should make up the shortfall" and immediately thought he should have said what he meant - "the taxpayer should make up the shortfall".

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

A photo that comes to mind is your WIFI-enabled dishwasher sipping a martini on a tropical beach with your bank account money piled next to it.

Anyone for unintended ChatRoulette? Zoom installs hidden Mac web server to allow auto-join video conferencing

but everyone else is doing it

Typical immature response.

I'm guessing Zoom mentions this web server in the typically lengthy license agreement? I'd want to have an option during installation to include it in the setup or not.

What do we want? Decentralised, non-siloed social media with open standards! When do we want it? Soon!

decentralised, interoperable social media platform

Usenet was kind of like this. But I doubt it would work again - I can see endless ad posts in every group.

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

Another stupid idea looking for a budget.

Ahhhhh! What year is it?! Users left without direction or clue after Google Calendar 404s

Good reminder to run an export, haven't done it in a while.

Labs are for nerds, it's simply Kaspersky now – just hold still while we cyber-immunise you

They forgot "Bitcoin". You're not a modern company without it.

Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop

Amazingly, this argument the envelopes stuffed with money appeared to hold water with elected representatives.

FTFY :)

It's an Easter Jesus miracle: MS Paint back from the dead (ish) and in Windows 10 'for now'

"34-year-old program"

Probably the remaining developer retired and no one else wanted it. Unfortunately that happens with useful but non-flashy things, it's not like someone can pad their resume with it. It's unfortunate that plain old maintenance and reliability aren't appreciated more.

As Alexa's secret human army is revealed, we ask: Who else has been listening in on you?

These companies could at least be helpful and share

Hey Google, what was that conversation I had with my accountant about interest income last year?

Hmm, did I delete that picture my brother emailed me? Let me look it up on NSA.

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

And speaking of self-service junk why is it that I'm the one who always has trouble with automated sinks and automated paper towel dispensers? I have to wave my hands around like an idiot to get them to work!

And why can I enter a long distance phone number with or without a "1" on my cell and it will figure it out but my home phone service says a 1 is required, please hang up and try again! Or better yet, saying a 1 was NOT required please hang up and try again!

And ATMs that always ask what language I'd like it in for the billionth time, why can't they store that on the ATM card!

Sorry for the rants, my caffeine wore off!

Watch out, Bali! Big Bluers set to realign their chakras at Best of IBM event in May

Just wondering - did they invite any of the older employees?

Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

"You can cancel your credit card but you cannot cancel your face."

Worthy addition to a book of quotes.

Computing boffins strip the fun out of satirical headlines

"Human–computer interactions will never be truly natural without giving users the option to say something funny and have it understood that way," the paper stated.

I don't need a computer to understand "funny". When I contact customer service it's because I already couldn't find the answer online, so it's not going to be a simple question that the AI can parse. I end up getting passed along to a human anyway, which means the AI interaction was a waste of my time. Making the AI try to be funny is only going to piss me off.

Mainframe brains-slurper sues IBM for 'age discrim', calls Ginny and biz 'morally bankrupt'

Ah, ok. That's why it's my handle!

@Nolveys My date of retirement when I start drawing a pension.

As a literal greybeard I'm fortunate to be nearing my pension date.

What's funny is that the new kids they're hiring here leave after a year or so anyway because they're a part of the floater generation - no long-term loyalty to any place of work.

Businesses will soon have no long-term knowledge of any systems and they'll have to keep spending money on new computers and software because the people they *can* hire only know the new stuff.

And as for documenting things, they tried that here as well.. Several times. But changes happen so often that documentation became low priority, and then no priority.

Ho ho ho! Washington DC sends Zuckerberg a sueball-shaped present

"cash for consumers"

Yeah right.

Postmates plans rollout of autonomous delivery robots in US

More stupid auto-delivery crap. How about developing a 3D food printer? That would take care of it all.