Posts by Natalie Gritpants Jr

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

Plenty of Kpop acts do this already, and a couple haven't even bothered with the meat-sack stage. Apoki have done one for the pronouns by identifying as a rabbit astronaut.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Re: Does a garden office count?

Would it survive being showered with burning debris from your house?

Top Ukrainian cyber officials fired after allegedly pocketing kickbacks from govt IT deals

Being fired is getting off lightly if your country is at war and you are the cyber security boss. The next article on the Reg is about Capita getting another large govt contract, so I wonder if we do any better with or without corruption givern there are so few companies willing to take on these contracts.

Rocket Lab mission lost in the Paschen of the moment

Has anyone seen "We will never desert you"?

Apple Private Wi-Fi hasn't worked for the past three years

Re: Nobody apparently cared?

Now you know how many people who care about privacy use Apple devices.

Clippy-like AI at forefront of Windows update previews

Wish they'd unfuck the taskbar. I don't have admin on this work laptop and the lack of toolbars and only having grouped window icons is driving me nuts.

Martin Goetz, recipient of the first software patent, logs off at 93

Because it is easy to rewrite an algorithm to avoid copyright

Japan cruises ahead with drive-thru EV charging trial

Re: Wow

Well, it's probably safer than having 440V prongs coming out of the tarmac and trying to find a suitable receptacle on the wet metal underside of your car. Will keep your bicycle handlebars warm too.

Silicon Valley billionaires secretly buy up land for new California city

Re: Something tells me...

More like the Bournville Estate in Weston-super-Mare. Try Street view on that and remove all the greenery.

Zoom CEO reportedly tells staff: Workers can't build trust or collaborate... on Zoom

What a great resignation letter

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

Can we come up with a better acronym for "X (formerly Twitter)"?

TAFKAP worked well for Prince, but I can't come up with anything better than X-TSHFKAT (The shit hole formerly known as Twitter)

Boffins say they can turn typing sounds into text with 95% accuracy

Just drink enough coffee that you get the shakes

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

ZZ

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Bet you enjoy cleaning your vinyl before warming up your tube amp. Me, I'd rather not faff if I don't have to. If I want to meditate, I have a snooze and let my brain clear out the fluff.

Have you thought of wood turning? Great hobby for guys of a certain age.

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

"orthogonal layers of beech placed under extreme pressure"

Pah! - that's just plywood, I'm renovating my gables and am replacing the split and rotten pine with Tricoya. It's guaranteed for 25 years in the ground without any protection. At £300 per 2.4x1.2 m sheet it's a bit pricey, but I'm planning on not going up there again. It's very un-resonant when you tap it. I might build a speaker cabinet out of the offcuts.

Number of pensioners hurt by DWP legacy system error actually 165,000

Sounds like every government run computer system has had so much shit shovelled into the spec by politicians and lobbyists that no-one wanted to build it, and now even fewer people want to maintain it. Maybe that's what I'll do when I no longer understand what the clever kids are asking for and just want a quiet life buggering up Cobol.

Australia's 'great example of government using technology' found to be 'crude and cruel'. And literally lethal to citizens

I'd start at the top and fire anyone who couldn't explain why the algorithm is wrong. If you're dealing with money, you have to be able to do the maths behind it, or you're just guessing and parroting

Boss such a tyrant you need a job quitting agent? It works in Japan

Might be easier to fake your own death

California man's business is frustrating telemarketing scammers with chatbots

Re: Definitely a good use for chatbots

Struggling to think if I could distinguish that situation from a visit to some of my real life friends

Crook who stole $23m+ in YouTube song royalties gets five years behind bars

So if he hadn't collected the royalty money, where would it have gone? Straight into the pockets of the streaming services, I guess. Not sure how the accountants would have hidden that as they won't want it to say "Royalties that weren't claimed, and we didn't try to deliver".

Maybe the streamers should refuse to play songs they don't have the royalty recipient of. Pretty sure they would find the royalty owners that way.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Fancy pants surname

Is that you Mr D'Arcy-wet-shirt?

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

Re: Always found offshore outsourcing / modern day slavery

"Why do we have more scams originating from offshore?"

Maybe because 99% of the population is offshore.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

Marvellous success

The government and energy companies can pretend to be doing something, while not actually finding a cheaper energy source

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

You could just weigh the person with all their baggage, no need to display it to anyone, just use it to update the aircraft load.

IR35 costs UK Research and Innovation £36M – the same it spent funding tech projects

So the tax owed by the monitoring and assessment officers is equal to the amount spent on actually doing what the department is meant to do. Okay it's for two years, but unless they are all paying more than 50% tax/NI it means their wage bill is greater than the amount they are monitoring and assessing. And now it's even larger.

You may as well give the money out as a lottery among companies less than a year old.

Virgin Orbit-uary: Beardy Branson's satellite launch biz shutters

Not having enough in the bank for a couple of launch failures was naive, or arrogant.

SambaNova injects a little AI mojo into US supercomputer lab's nuke sims

Not there will be anyone around to compare the simulations against the actual performance.

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

Stupid idea to use a playlist as an alarm. So many things that could go wrong and stop it altogether. It relies on: a working internet connection; a working spotify account; a working route to spotify; a playlist that has songs that will wake you up instead of carrying on sleeping; your spotify app not having lost its credentials; a working spotify server; a working setting in the alarm app to launch spotify.

There are probably more ways to fail than this, but just pick an alarm sound that is on the phone.

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

I'm all for it

Should be a great way to demonstrate how Blockchain can scale to millions of transactions per hour every morning when the trains arrive.

First attempt by Japan's ispace biz to land on Moon ends in awkward silence

It's not lost either, it's on the moon, probably close to where it was meant to land, possibly at lower altitude.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Re: Why would anyone leave these turned on?

I'm leaving mine on to see if it actually works. After that I'll wait and see if it's abused or over used. There's a small chance of compo if it causes panic or accidents.

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Re: Unfortunately, all of the funds I stored with FTX were worthless

Yes.

Kind regards,

Amy.

Google to kill Dropcam, Nest Secure hardware next year

Re: Why would anyone with half a brain buy anything from Google?

You mean something like Home Assistant? https://www.home-assistant.io/

Open-source, self-hosted with lots of devices supported. Or, you can pay for a packaged, managed one if opening a router port is too much.

British Prime Minister Sunak’s plans for UK NFT on ice

Worse than pointless

If the government were to issue something of value, they would have a duty to support it until no-one had any trace of it left. E.g. they still accept old money. Given that no-one knows how long digital stuff will last, you are looking at a potentially infinite support cost.

Lebanon's IT folks face double trouble as leaders delayed Daylight Savings Time

Re: Can the whole world...

True, but most people would like to know what time to get up to start work when their colleagues do. Cows don't care, they need milking when their u**ers are full.

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Re: "On average, a typical user switches ten thousand times per month"

10,000 / 20 / 8 = 62.5

Do they really think the typical user is switching teams view every minute continuously? I guess some poor souls are having to have multiple chats and copy-pasting between as their job (PHB), but I thought that was the point of popping out chats.

Student satellite demonstrates drag sail to de-orbit old hardware

This should be mandatory

As well as having the spring-loaded deployment being triggered by lack of power (bit like those fire doors being held open as long as there is power to the magnets)

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Suspect it's 16:9 like a normal HD screen. Having non-square pixels is just asking for trouble. You might get away with it on a laptop screen, as you can't sensibly rotate the screen.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: RSS

I got here from my own tt-rss installation. No-one else knows what feed I'm subscribed to.

Article written by an idiot

They spend most of the article describing why RSS was a good thing, then call the people still using it "technically stubborn".

Yes, Samsung 'fakes' its smartphone Moon photos – who cares?

Disappointed

I bought this camera to go dogging and all I get is the same picture of the moon.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: pizza is the perfect food

If it's last nights pizza, it doesn't matter

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

Re: If violence doesn't work

On the scale of energy used to create the asteroid in the first place, this was a light brushing with a feather. Besides, can you do violence to an inanimate object. We changed it, but I don't think we "damaged" it. It's just a rock that will float around in nothingness until it hits something.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

They'll have to add some ability for the car to put its wheels back on and get down from the bricks.

Puri.sm puts out LapDock for its Librem 5 smartphone

Re: And how much?

lapdock - $339.

Not having to deal with patch Tuesday - priceless.

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

Re: What's it called ?

SSSSSHHHHHH, don't give the PHBs any wriggle room

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Tax could be a lot simpler

Just charge 0.1% on every payment into a UK bank account (personal and business). Ignore cash, as it's only used by poor people. Let the banks collect it (they know exactly where all the money is and has been). The big businesses who will use offshore accounts are already dodging tax, so you could probably add 0.01% on every transfer of money overseas.

Might upset the rich and the financial industry, but that would indicate you're doing it right.

Re: Customer?

There is a free service. I used until I went inside IR35. https://www.vat.direct/ (The website looks retro, but is in fact highly functional)

There's no place like... KDE: Plasma 5.27 is out and GNOME 44 hits beta

Figuring if a monitor is off is hard for a graphics output. The EDID data from the monitor is meant to be powered from the graphics card, so unless the EDID data has the field for monitor power included ther may be no way to tell. Some monitors do this but others don't and it's not something you find in many review tests.

Many monitors can be switched between several inputs. Do you want your computer to think it's off when it's on but switched to another source?

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

"rizz, bussin, fr, cap, ong, slay, bet, sus, vibing, glow-up, Stan, slaps, W, L, simp, tea"

slay & bet - ancient words

Stan - from Stan by Eminem - worth watching the video

tea - 2 lumps please