Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: Cat litter plant

Ooh, look at all the thumbs down from nonces hiding in rural shitholes.

Re: Cat litter plant

"I've always wondered why he wasted away in an illiterate backwater shithole."

Usually the reason is because in places like that these types can get away with nonce-ing, or similar vileness.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

Re: Data

Is it working properly yet? No. Clearly it's improving, but nowhere near where they want it to get to. But it's still early days, obviously. Give it another couple of decades and I'm sure they'll be doing a lot better.

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Faraday's famous riposte when asked what use the new discovery of electricity could be: 'Of what use, sir, is a newborn baby?'

Re: Chromebook total success for me

I didn't miss it, it's pebcak nonsense. Google where to find the default language setting, and change it.

Re: Chromebook total success for me

"last Friday I discovered that Microsoft can't even set a default language for new documents in Word for the Web for spell check (proofing), it is always US, same for Powerpoint and Excel, cmon it is 2023, what a joke."

Word has had that setting for about a quarter of a century.

Re: Data

As I said, pure TFH nuttiness. Google's reason for existence is to show you fewer, higher value, well-targeted ads. A single really well targeted ad is worth more than all the untargeted spam you see in a year - and because it is well-targeted, isn't even annoying, because it's letting you know about an alternative you didn't know about to something you're planning to or would like to buy.

Basically, you're doing the same thing as people who complain that virus-scanning their emails is 'reading' them. It's an irrational view of something based on a misunderstanding of how it works.

This article is complete drivel. Plenty of older PCs out there still running - they need 8gb of ram to be any real use these days, but as long as they have it, they're fine. You may need to add a module if you want to run Win 11, but Win 10 is still being supported for _at least_ 2 years, and there's every chance that MS will decide they have to prolong support since so many people won't be upgrading. My 60 quid's worth of secondhand SFF desktop that sits in the living room is still more than adequate for web browsing, sending 4k streams to the TV, etc. It'll run any office suite without trouble, along with pretty much anything except fairly new games. It's already roughly 10 years old, and I don't see it needing replacement any time particularly soon.

Re: Data

"What could Google do with that information that is so heinous?"

Make it easier to find what you're looking for, show you fewer ads, etc. It's just the tinfoilhat brigade who somehow imagine something nefarious here.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

How the hell can you suggest that working to end civilisation as we know it should be tolerated? We have known for over a century that pineapple on pizza is an abomination. That's why, for example, the Geneva Convention applies to all combatants in uniform, except those who put pineapple on pizza - on whom the use of chemical and biological weapons is not just permitted, but encouraged.

Re: I don't understand...

If you are a pervert, people will point out you're a disgusting pervert. Why complain? You know it's wrong, just as well as we do.

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Musk's Master Plan

Yes, the Nazis have no sense of humour and sound quite different.

Re: Musk's Master Plan

There are lots of people on here who are alt-right at best. But that was obviously an ironic comment. The last line makes it abundantly clear it's a piss-take.

Re: PT-73?

"the minor detail that Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding Company and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal own 4% of Xitter."

This is rapidly becoming a catch-all conspiracy theory. The Saudi wealth fund owns about 4% of pretty much everything, by now. It's usually just the result of diversified investment of a lot of money - though Twitterx might be an exception, where there is a desire for influence involved, that does rather assume that what Twitterx users think about the importance of Twitterx is mirrored by what everyone else thinks, rather than being the exact opposite.

Re: Musk's Master Plan

You can't really be in any doubt, can you? If so, that's entirely on you.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

I once worked with a skeptical scientific-minded techie who told me he didn't want his home wifi router in his bedroom, despite it being the best location in his house for it, because of the EM radiation it emitted causing him to sleep badly. He had me going for quite a while before I realised the EM radiation in question was from the flashing leds.

Re: Draws them through the Multiverse

They're quite good, but I never got over the irony that the author, who coined the phrase 'the problem is people who don't see other people as people' - paraphrased, it's been a while - then decided to write a book where the core concept was that the Holocaust was actually an exercise in death-magic.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

Re: Hunter?

I'd debunk your Trump-fanboy nuttiness, but it'd be like shooting fash in a barrel...

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

Yes, the Norwich union is a lot like the Basildon bond...

East of England is a lot more than just East Anglia. It includes Beds, Herts, and Essex, and goes all the way to the Thames Estuary - basically everything east of the M1 and outside the M25. Most of those areas have the normal average number of grandparents per person. Not Basildon, obviously. But mostly.

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

Re: This project must not be allowed to happen

Another example of the rule that there is literally nothing that the commentariat here can't turn into a conspiracy theory.

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Re: Failover backup redlining

If everything is a conspiracy to you, the problem isn't with the world...

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Re: Musk would only stand a chance of winning ..

He learnt Icky All Over instead:

https://youtu.be/8agnfXz1y4M

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Re: vehicle detectors

"if you have to carry a 20-pound chain to keep your 20-pound (9-ish kg?) bike from getting stolen, you might as well ride a 40-pound bike."

But you still need the 10 kg chain to stop the heavy bike being stolen. Even if it's a cheap bike-shaped object, it'll still get nicked and you'll still have to walk.

If you're talking about the same incidents I heard about, there was a backup manual door release that the occupants didn't know about, but they were too dumb to read the manual, so had to pay for new windows after they were smashed so they could get out.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

So?

"they reached through the doors, pushed the button for the desired floor, and sprinted up the stairs to meet it"

I've repeatedly seen neighbours do this while moving in and out of apartments. Every time I have asked why they didn't just walk to the destination floor and call the lift, I've been met by silent glares.

With limited space for tourist attractions, Singapore bets on augmented reality

Re: God, I just love the place...

I imagine he got the downvotes for the insane Singaporean government propaganda he posted, not for anything about VR. It's a racist, fascist state built on exploitation of near-slaves, and he was pretending it has 'equality'.

Ironic, since Singapore's official statistics have been 'augmented reality' for decades. No idea why this fascist hellhole gets so much positive coverage.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

Re: They want to delay as long as possible ...

" they were in no way to blame for the scandal"

TBC, 'they' there meaning the company as a whole. Obviously the employees mentioned in the previous phrase were very much to blame!

PrEye jumped on the bandwagon right at the end and pretended to have done something significant - pretty much their MO these days. When did they become such scum?

Victims dying doesn't remove any liabilities. Your conspiracy theory is insane and stupid enough that you might be Paula Vennells.

Re: 'Justice'

That's not what happened. What happened is worse, and much stupider. Within reason, the Horizon procurement was a success. The system mostly worked ok - there were a relatively small number of manual corrections required (but a large absolute number due to the sheer volume involved). It appears that some complete idiot high up in the PO somehow understood that corrections of (say) £1m were not corrections of accounting errors, but were actually costing the PO £1m, and tried to put a stop to them. It's ridiculously stupid, when that is understood.

If the idiot mandate to stop/minimise corrections hadn't been handed down from on high, the PO would have muddled along with a pretty-much-working system involving the odd manual intervention to fix not-particularly-common errors that cropped up at a reasonably low rate. The only cost would have been a few extra support staff. That it turned into the persecution of many innocent postmasters is insane, and all stems from the mistaken belief handed down from on high that these 'errors' needed to be stopped. Most of the people involved on the PO side didn't discover until much later that the orders they were given were based on something so stupid, and so had no reason to believe they weren't dealing with fraud.

You can't learn the lessons from this debacle without acknowledging what actually happened, which includes understanding that there were only a tiny handful of bad actors - prior to the coverup, at least.

Re: They want to delay as long as possible ...

"post masters will start dying off further reducing what has to be paid out"

Nonsense. That doesn't reduce what has to be paid out. The estates of the deceased are entitled to exactly the same compensation. It's purely and simply immense incompetence, at this point.

Re: They want to delay as long as possible ...

Some Fujitsu employees apparently gave in to PO pressure to lie about what was going on, but they were in no way to blame for the scandal (except very nebulously, having not produced a very good system). The actual issue was that some nut high up in the PO saw all the corrections being made, and somehow concluded that when an error was corrected, that was a loss of money that the PO would otherwise have had. Almost all the blame should be put on a very small handful of PO senior managers.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: Recycle Bin is not permanent storage

I've never seen a computer that deleted disk space permanently when you deleted files. Well, not one that did it intentionally, anyway.

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Because that wasn't the only thing they did, and because... how it works is in the google results.

Nope, not how it works.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+prions+cross+the+blood+brain+barrier

BSE spread because cows 'kiss' other cows, and other similar things like licking the same surfaces.

You eat your sausages raw?!

Re: It's hard to make fun of AI

This isn't making fun of AI, it's making fun of people like the lawyer. Congratulations, you also lost the battle of wits with the plants.

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

Other way around. Openreach makes the same amount either way, usually. The reseller gets a smallish commission plus payment for administering the account, which is not a big earner.

Re: Bunch?

Traditionally the collective noun is a purgatory of arseholes.

It's not a competitor. Both are clients of Openreach. Openreach got paid twice, thanks to your solution. Incentives like that explain the issues we all know about.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Re: Years ago....

We had an arsehole who tried that and also deleted all the dictation files, and, more seriously, various recordings we were statutorily obliged to keep for 7 years.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: 1s 6d

Reminds me of the Neal Stephenson quote:

--

She proceeded to do something quite astonishing with ten inches of knotted sheepgut. Not that he needed ten inches; but she was generous with it, perhaps to show him a kind of respect.

"Does this mean it is not actually coitus?" Daniel asked hopefully. "Since I am not really touching you?" Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

"It is very common for men of your religion to say so," Tess said. "Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it."

"And what do you say?"

"I say that we are not touching, and not having sex, if it makes you feel better," Tess said. "Though, when all is finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep."

--

Re: farm supplies

I bought a new silencer for my 1980s Toyota a couple of years ago. The owner of a fairly large parts chain came out of his office 'to see who had finally bought that'. Apparently it had been in stock for a couple of decades. I'm impressed they had it correctly inventoried and listed on Ebay (or wherever it was sold through) after all that time. Sadly it wasn't still at a 1980s price, though not that far off given the reductions from 'list' price.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: would resist any change to get it removed,

You might want to re-read the comment you replied to, and see if you can understand it this time. Your reply isn't to anything I wrote.

Re: would resist any change to get it removed,

You were doing so well until the last sentence. What you're missing is that they're _right_. It's IT's job to make life easier for people, not harder for them so it's easier for IT.

"from their point of view all you are doing is making their lives more difficult for no good reason"

They're the ones doing the things that actually earn the money that pays for IT to support them to do the things that earn the money to...

Do what they say is easier for them, not what makes _your_ life easier. Within reason, of course.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Re: Its always the simple things

Of course racism can be based on nationality - as enshrined in multiple legislated definitions around the world, among other things. Incorrect semantic quibbles are the last resort of a racist scoundrel.

Re: Its always the simple things

What don't you understand? The local holocaust denier made a racist comment again. 'Spanish practices' is a racist phrase that no-one except far right idiots would use anymore.

Re: Its always the simple things

No, racist terms are not based on facts, they're based on prejudice.

No surprise to see you at it again.