Posts by DBH

Victims of IT scandal in UK postal service will get fresh compensation

Re: "has promised to pay £900 per claimant as part of reasonable legal fees to prepare their claim"

A day.... I've seen QCs charging that for an hour

They deserve the very best representation

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

Around 2012, I did some contract work in an electronics manufacturing plant and they still had all their backups on tape

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: FileZilla and wget just broke my backups - because neither would switch back to TLSv2...

I use rsync daily between my windows machine and debian, use cygwin

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Why 17 hours?

Is this period arbitrary? What is the best period to smear over? Why can't we just smear over, say, the exact amount of time that passes between required leap seconds. Essentially just slowing down how we count a second. Then leave it alone.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: The real issue

There's also likely a lot of blog posts in the training data that were written by AI bots that were created by LaMDA... my head hurts

Google Docs crashed when fed 'And. And. And. And. And.'

Re: "Google Docs, the search giant's web-based word processing app"

Is this a serious question?

It's massively convenient

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: Formatting pc's in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1

Another favouite of mine in the world of completely unprotected display models of 90's PC shops...

Open autoexec.bat

:lol

echo I am a fish

goto lol

Then reboot and go home

Kids will be kids

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Comments?

since February 2020 I have been an in-house tool

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

Back in my day

Before vi, we used punch cards, but being a Yorkshireman we didn't waste money on machines to operate them, so we had to use really small scissors and cut the holes manually and then pass them to a guy called Nick who would use tiny magnets to write to the hard disk by hand. It was slow going but a nice milky cuppa and we were good to knuckle under and get it done

A third of you slackers out there still aren't using HTTPS by default

Re: Why force HTTPS on simple read-only pages

Switch your domain registrar to cloudflare and let them handle it. It's free and registering for a free cloudflare account is more than half the job done, should take about 2 minutes

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Waaat ?

Is that really a "top community ask" ?

I can't remember the last time I thought "I wish I had a start menu, that would be easier"

Just hit the windows key and type what you're looking for and hit enter, done

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Maybe Windows 3.1 was a sweet spot?

Wow I haven't used PSP for a long time, I used to be a big fan but haven't had any need for it in recent years. Might have to go digging just for the sake of nostalgia...

UK government gives Automated Lane Keeping Systems the green light for use on motorways

Re: 37MPH

The system is designed to work at speeds of up to 37mph, it says nothing of limiting your speed, only that above 37mph this system will be unavailable to you.

Sometimes on motorways you will drive faster, and at those times you will steer manually. Other times you will find yourself going below 37mph, then you can activate this system and sit back.

Quite simple really, surprised people have misunderstood this.

Imagine running a dating app and being told accounts could be easily hijacked. How did that feel, Grindr?

I've seen worse, much worse. I had the pleasure a few years ago of terminating the contract with an Indian SaaS provider when one of my colleagues noticed by chance that their login page was doing an ajax request to retrieve an array of all usernames and passwords (in plain text) and then simply setting a "logged in" cookie if a match was found to what you entered. Setting the cookie to any valid user ID was enough to get you full access to whatever you wanted. We stopped using the software immediately, needless to say.

Google wants to listen in to whatever you get up to in hotel rooms

Re: Okay Google:

How about a toasted teacake?

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

Upvote because I have an insatiable need to upvote any and all DA quotes, even if massively distorted

TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

Re: Simpler than I expected

If I was the kind of person to roll with conspiracy theories, I might suggest something like Mazda are getting a percentage from TomTom for the "reference", hence their apparent willingness to obfuscate matters around cancellation

Re: As I read that

I wish I could upvote this more than once. Nail on head.

Always assume the end user doesn't know what you know, if in any doubt, TELL THEM CLEARLY

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Re: Mondarin?

Chinese fakes? Insurance company? It can't be a coincidence

Did the mouse mat weigh 83 tons by any chance?

https://www.businesstoday.in/current/world/biggest-gold-fraud-busted-in-china-83-tons-of-fake-gold-bars-used-as-loan-collateral/story/408497.html

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Re: Beauty

I'm glad I scrolled before posting, was about to write the same thing. The problem we face here is for it to be included in the converter we need to find some other measures of beauty. Is it possible to measure this by counting instagram followers perhaps?

"Find yourself a caesium 133 atom. Start counting transitions: 1,2,3,... When you hit 9 192 631 770, a second has passed."

I tried this but my caesium atom kept exploding. Does anyone know if this works better if you put it in a bowl of rice?

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Re: 42??

I've chosen to alternate between 20 and 21, by changing the base every second year

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Re: it would be like a car hitting a shopping cart

It would be like a car hitting a shopping cart at 500 times the speed limit

Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google

Shouldn't be too difficult to write a custom extension for chrome, I did one for myself that removes ads from a handful of sites that I like to visit but need the ads gone to even make sense of them as they're just too intrusive. Just a handful of simple lines of javascript that strip bits of DOM out of the pages, nothing particularly clever

To catch a thief, go to Google with a geofence warrant – and it will give you all the details

Re: Nothing anywhere proves Googles data is concise or accurate.

I checked my location tracking thing one time after an email from Google invited me to have a look. I saw one day in particular I'd been at a motorsport event near the coast, I'd been in the same place all day. Except, according to Google, about an hour in the afternoon, when I jumped about 50 miles out to sea and back again. I must have not been paying attention because I definitely don't remember doing that

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

As nice an idea as it is, I'd say 64-bit timestamps more than exceed the resiliancy of your solution

Scientists use machine-learning algorithms to map out 10 billion cells from human bodies in fight against cancer

Re: Thanks, your ...

I adore how subtle and polite the insults are here. I feel Godwin's law would require the number of messages in this thread to converge on infinity to remain valid

Americans should have strong privacy-protecting encryption ...that the Feds and cops can break, say senators

Re: Missing a trick

I like your thinking. Let's collaborate. What time does the bar open? I always do better work on my algorithms when I've had a few whiskeys

Brexit bad boy Arron Banks' Twitter account hacked: Private messages put online

Re: The Streisand Effect

and if they didn't, they do now

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Happy ending

Did you ever figure out who was meant to do the task at hand?

Big Red tells crypto-coin publication: One does not simply call one's website 'OracleTimes'

Re: But of course

My significant other once made a paper boat and left it on a pond, where it sank. I'd still describe her as a full millihelen

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

The script that decided how many people would be involved with writing and checking the KPI script unfortunately had a cancellation error that resulted in the output being a random number, which by chance was usually about 1

Stalker attacks Japanese pop singer – after tracking her down using reflection in her eyes

CSI is going to have to step up it's game and start identifying someone from the reflection in the eye of a person who is themselves a reflection in the eye of the subject, we're at least 10 years from catching up with that

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

Re: Intermittent interruptions

I'm curious how you discovered the plane one?

Nominet continues milking .uk registry cash cow with 4 per cent price rise for... what exactly?

Re: Don't worry, it'll all work out

I wonder if the resulting Kingdom of England and Wales will get the .ew TLD

Nominet's new home could be auto-ren.ew

They'd make a killing

Dropbox CEO: I will make your worklife a calmer experience

Re: Using AI for this task is utter crap.

Today, yes. Come back to this thread in 10 (or 20) years and see if you still agree with yourself. Things are moving terrifyingly quickly in this field

Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway

Re: God loves idiots or He/She wouldn't have made so many of them.

Jesus promised to rid us of evil. Odin promised to rid us of ice giants. I don't see any ice giants, do you? Vote Odin!

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: Ah the old push-out-the-cd-tray trick

In my experience, sometimes the technicians forget to connect the speakers to many of the servers, in fact quite often the speakers are entirely missing

NPM today stands for Now Paging Microsoft: GitHub just launched its own software registry

Re: there's something wrong with the entire premise

I'm no expert, but I'm going to say you've had a bad Monday. It's nice out, go for a walk.

Now I do actually agree with your point, but your delivery method gave me a headache.

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

Any time I'm the last one out of the office I make my last duty to randomly swap about any wireless mice I find. They all look the same, causes chaos the next morning

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Re: "99% of the new features added in the last 10 years are useless, "

The second one sounds better

Android clampdown on calls and texts access trashes bunch of apps

Re: Call recording too.

I was also a user of ACR. My Android device is asking me regularly to update to the latest major version but I'm putting it off as long as I can so that I can still use ACR. There's absolutely no reason for them to block call recording. I'm sure I remember reading ACR's blog something about Google citing privacy compliance, but that's nonsense. It's perfectly legal for me to record any calls I want in the UK without asking permission of the person I'm talking to, so long as it's for personal use, which it is.

Microsoft decides Internet Explorer 10 has had its fun: Termination set for January 2020

Re: Browsers

Firefox Developer Edition has fine gain cookie control. I can freely add/remove/edit cookies very easily.

Currently on v65.0b12

No, you haven't gone deaf – the Large Hadron Collider has been wound down for more upgrades

When then HL-LHC gets turned on in 2026

I expect the universe to immediately vanish, then an upbeat midi track will start playing and be joined by a large illuminated banner that simply reads "Level 2"