Posts by DoctorPaul 415 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jul 2018
Updated two Win10 boxes and a Win11 laptop yesterday and seem to have got away with it, glad I upgraded to a fibre connection a few months ago though!
In associated news I also received the email from M$ to say that the Win10 boxes will get ESU until October 2027. Just trying to work out whether that's good or bad news.
Edit: as of today all the forum pages are now only occupying the left third of the screen on my Android tablet, way to go with that site redesign El Reg!
Was that the software that stored animations as a "flic file"? The format that AutoDesk discontinued just before it would have been a brilliant alternative to Flash for animations on the early(ish) internet?
Still, I earned a few quid back in the day writing the FlicPlayer component for Dephi, someone from IBM even bought a copy! Happy days.
Anyone old enough to remember the Wheeltappers and Shunters Club on the telly all those years ago?
The wheeltappers would go around doing just that, in order to detect cracked wheels on the rolling stock that would cause damage to the track from the repeated hammering they gave it.
Fast forward to the brave new world of privatisation and the train companies no longer bother as "hey, we don't have to pay to maintain the track"
That chimes with my limited experience of using Dutch and Belgian trains to get to gigs by various "modern beat combos" over the years. The Dutch international railway website is pretty darn good as well.
A quick comparison of rail replacement bus services. Last time I had to use one in Kent, a bus had left just minutes before the train from London arrived and there was a wait of over half an hour until the next one turned up. It then proceeded to trundle through the countryside calling at each station on the route in turn.
A few years ago I turned up at a Dutch station to find there was no sign of my onward connection. Brief moment of panic, then a friendly platform attendant told me there was a replacement bus service and directed me to the well-signposted route out to the carpark. Standing there were individual coaches which then travelled directly to each of the stations affected by the closure. The fares are more than reasonable as well.
OMG the flashbacks!
Back in the day I had (or so I thought) a nice little gig as a freelancer for an upmarket consultancy taking the home-brewed Access databases they had developed and porting them to MySQL. Found some nice freeware conversion scripts that did a lot of the grunt work, mixed in some scripts of my own to parse various things and job's a goodun.
First three jobs or so went like a dream, scripts did 95% of the work, thought I had it nailed, quoted for the next one. That's when I found out that Access did something that MySQL couldn't. I've applied the mind bleach to the whole sorry episode but it was something like being able to use a query as a variable inside another query. Cue working right across Christmas and New Year disassembling and refactoring horrendous wizard-generated queries by hand.
We live and learn.
Upvoted to cancel the downvote.
What the Catholic Church did to the Cathars (and others) was not at all nice (massive understatement).
When Beziers fell after the siege they weren't sure who were heretics and who were ordinary Catholics. Their solution? "Kill them all, God will know his own".
On the occasions where I've unfortunately opened the door to these people I have a stock response - "I'm sorry, I'm not in the market for a new belief system, I'm perfectly happy with the one I've got." - and close the door.
That system is a sort of combination of Taoism and heresy (in a Religious Studies essay aged 12 or so I proposed that Man created God in his own image, didn't go down well) with a particular soft spot for the Cathars of the 12th century. Decided it was probably best not to debate the matter with the hard of thinking, even if it is tempting to hit them with the likes of Gnostic dualism.
Happened to look at the site on my phone instead of my tablet and I see what people mean when they say that the new design seems over-focussed on that particular format.
In the meantime, yesterday's email never arrived. Got one today (my normal way to access El Reg is read the email and click on any stories that interest me) but when I clicked on an article about Anthropic and a single click exploit I got taken to a story about Union Jacks and dog poo!
Many thanks and an upvote for that, I will be heading there as soon as I've finished wading through all these comments - there are a lot of criticisms that I want to upvote!
The new look reminds me of YouTube's "throw a load of shit at a wall and see what sticks" approach to design.
And while I'm here, it's 2pm here in the UK and the daily email is yet to land in my inbox.
Despite their many appalling failures around the issue of actually paying claims, insurance companies have literally centuries of experience in dispassionately assessing risk.
Now if they all just say "we won't cover you if you use AI" what are businesses to do?
Upvoted for recommending Qwant, they run their own index and are based in France where there seems to be a positive attitude to personal privacy. Has worked well for me for a couple of years now, just one sponsored ad at the top of each page. AI slop is available but you have to choose to use it. My default setup is Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, search set to Qwant. Oh and routed via ProtonVPN "just because".
Upvoted, MB seem to be a modern unicorn - cheap, reliable and honest. Yes, you can have all three!
I moved my handful of sites to them when my current provider (taken over once already with the accompanying reduction in quality) was subsumed into the GoDaddy empire. As well as the inevitable crash in performance, I refuse to do business with people who slaughter wild animals and post photos of them and the carcasses online.
During the transfer I had identical mailboxes with a few thousand emails open in adjacent tabs in Firefox, one on the old domain, the other on the new MB account, so I did a quick test by doing a search on each mailbox in turn. MB returned a result in about 30 seconds, the GoDaddy site span it's wheels for a couple of minutes then timed out.
I can think of a couple of examples where recruiting gamers has seemed to work:
1. I believe Ukraine have found gamers make excellent drone and robot truck controllers, not to mention anyone who was already a drone racer. Strikes me as a big improvement on, say, the Battle of Britain where your ace pilot could be blown out of the sky at any moment.
2. Sim racers often do extremely well when placed in a real racing car. Doesn't surprise me in the least, on a sim (excluding the megabuck ones that the F1 teams use) you have nothing but visual feedback with maybe a bit of sound. Take an actual car round a race track and you are working with oodles of physical feedback as well - pretty sure one guy just said "this is so fucking easy compared to a sim".
Depends on the game I guess, maybe they should try online chess players or similar?
Been using that system for decades, currently with the excellent Mythic Beasts. One mailbox with catch-all redirection, with non-existent addresses that receive spam added to a block list if they get too annoying. Using the RoundCube webmail client it's the work of moments to define an "identity" so I can reply to emails with a From: theirco@mydomain whatever that may be. All that's left is to use Thunderbird to back up the mailbox locally.
Not directly related, but a few days ago I got an email from Microshit warning me that my storage space was 80% full and did I want to upgrade?
Cue complete panic. I run just two Win10 machines (finally had to give up Win7), have never ever knowingly used OneDrive and always use a local account, just logging in once every 60 days and immediately switching back to local to maintain ESU. The idea that the bastards had slyly siphoned off my private documents at some point was not a pleasant one.
Logged into my account at microsoft.com and, huge relief, OneDrive usage was 0%. So WTF was that about?
Have to say kudos to the multimedia firm that I freelanced for in the 80s. They noticed that I had a knack of being able to explain stuff to non-teccies and ended up sending me out as "technical support" on sales visits with Sales Director. My actual role was to make sure that he didn't offer stuff we couldn't deliver.
Slight side note, it didn't end well. After a couple of years they persuaded me to become a permie. Nothing changed but I was now an employee. Three months later I was signed off sick with stress and high blood pressure, never worked as an employee again and all the happier for it.
Fond memories of working on full-screen multimedia in the 1980s using a combination of BBC Micro, add-on interface card and laserdisc player. The player was controlled from the BBC (serial link?), its output fed into the interface card and overlaid with the graphics output from the beeb.
We made titles like training applications and interactive quizzes with full-screen video, such as a maze quest where the disc contained video clips of every section of a real maze.
Being analogue made things interesting, none of this "start playing video from this precise memory location" - you told it to seek to a required track, but the head would overshoot and rebound slightly so there had to be a fudge factor in the code.
As Delain so poetically put it "Normal is not the norm, it's just a uniform".
It's been shown that if you are completely average in every way then you are actually a statistical freak or don't even exist. Examples (thanks QI) are:
1. USAF's attempt to design a universal pilot's seat for jet fighters. Measured every pilot, took the average, seat didn't fit anyone.
2. Advertising campaign in Australia to find the average Australian housewife. Crunched all the numbers, noone could be found who matched the criteria.
Now that does take me back!
I put together the Windows 3 software stack that early UK ISP Nethead used to supply to their customers. Winsock, Netscape, Eudora, an FTP client and a menu/control panel to hook it all together.
Windows 3, so it couldn't have been my favourite IDE ever, Delphi, must have been Turbo Pascal for Windows.
You do realise that you're coming across as someone with a massive axe to grind don't you? Rhetorical question of course.
I don't owe an allegiance to any particular operating system, but what gave me a nice warm feeling about the article was how friendliness and cooperation between individuals could achieve so much.
And then you had to remind us of the dark side of the "community". Just wanted to ask - did you enjoy a good flame war back in the day?
