Posts by VonDutch

It will never be safe to turn off your computer: Prankster harnesses the power of Windows 95 to torment fellow students

It is now safe to turn on your computer...

I remember being so conditioned by Win95 to push the power button after the PC had shut down.

When we got our first Win98 PC (with a newfangled soft latch power button) it would briefly flash up the "safe to turn off" screen before cutting its own power.

For months I'd go to "turn it off" then have to wait for it to do its boot cycle (ah the old RAM check...) before I could shut it down again. Eventually learned I could hold the power button to force it off.

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

It's a town in Slovakia.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Re: OMG!

It needs to take 5 seconds and not involve a spudger.

Re: Quality Control

You have purchased a prestige product manufactured by a Chinese sweatshop worker.

Why wouldn't you take it to a back street repair shop? They normally have a better idea about how to fix these things.

Microsoft spreads the Cortana love to more Insiders with new Windows 10 preview

"The underlying assistant technology will, of course, find its way into Office."

Did they not learn anything from Clippy?!

Top 5 greatest anime crossovers: Samsung deploys Microsoft at Note 10 hootenanny

Just rebrand it as the Galaxy Fold mini.

Screen probably has the same resistance to bending as the Fold review units did.

Re: fingerprint senson on the front

Sensor on the back is great when holding your phone but a real pain when it's sat on your desk and you don't want to have to pick it up to quickly reply to a message.

Sensor on front is great if phone is on a desk or (depending on size of phone) got both hands free.

German privacy probe orders Google to stop listening in on voice recordings for 3 months

Re: Fundamental to the product

Isn't that just surgery?

Stab someone until they get better.

Meet ELIoT – the EU project that wants to commercialize Internet-over-lightbulb

Re: IrDA

Ah, the halcyon days of IrDA on a Nokia 7650. Share your GPRS connection with another device as long as it's within a couple of centimetres and nothing moves.

Give the option of using it as a TV remote too!

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: I'm confused.

Could have been a basic computer and a couple of Mac Pro monitor stands...

It's so hot, UK needs to start naming heatwaves like we do when it's a bit windy – climate boffins

I wouldn't mind not having to buy shoes or socks again, but it would be a shame to be two feet shorter

Re: what's so difficult about Q, U, X, Y and Z?

Funnily enough that and Fifi Trixibelle both came to mind as I was posting.

You didn't say take the socks back out of the freezer before wearing...

Re: what's so difficult about Q, U, X, Y and Z?

Anything is a name if you're the offspring of a celebrity

2019 set to be the worst year yet for smartphone market as lack of worthy upgrades dents demand

Re: 5G around the corner and nothing very compelling to upgrade to.

It's not quite like the old days of nokias where you could pop the battery off in half a second and have the new fully charged spare on in the same amount of time. The longest part of the process was the phone booting back up again.

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Re: Keyboard short cuts....

Until someone thinks they've mastered the print shortcut but keeps forgetting to hold down ctrl .

Then saves the template document with lots of random P's in it.

Re: As it is traditional to pick apart these stories

I had user training for a new piece of warehouse management software last year.

It consisted of someone coming in saying "it's a bit like the old software", me pointing out I'd never used the old software (cost per user licence and very low chance of me actually needing it).

He then promptly clicked through some unintelligible things on screen, declared that to be training and left.

I didn't have to worry about the poor training though because the implementation of the new software was so bad and buggy that they stopped trying to use it after 2 days. When I left 8 months later they still hadn't got it up and running.

London cop illegally used police database to monitor investigation into himself

Needed more evidence?

Can you trust Huawei... or any other networks supplier for that matter?

Re: "he doesn't think it is possible to rank them"

You forgot cost...

All too often left with insufficient or impractical kit because there's an accountant along the procurement route.

Not all heroes wear capes: Contractor grills DXC globo veep on pay rises, offshoring, and cuts to healthcare help

I can totally understand the "hang on to get your pound of flesh" out of the previous employer. I was moving jobs and a combination of timing and sheer bloody mindedness meant that I wanted to get my bonus from the previous employer even though I'd be earning twice as much at the new place. I didn't believe they deserved to hold on to my bonus money. They wouldn't re-invest it in the business or employees, it would just go towards the director's annual Bentley upgrade.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Re: Can someone explain...

But PAGE was a rite of passage for undergrad biosciences!

Having to remind the poor stupid darlings not to keep prodding the nice squidgy gel with a bare finger because it was still laced with un polymerised cumulative neurotoxin...

Was more fun doing large 2D SDS-PAGE protein separations because we'd wash the gel plates in hot water and detergent then, while still hot, rinse them down with ethanol. Wouldn't actually cast the gel until the next day so we had time to sober up again. 2D-LC makes the proteins far more recoverable but it takes the fun out of things a bit.

Re: iPhone?

I met an ex-vegan last year that said at one point he wouldn't even eat broccoli because he believed it had too much of a developed nervous system.

Re: iPhone?

Oh what a relief. I thought you were about to announce you were vegan!

Re: iPhone?

I thought announcing iPhone ownership was standard practice in any conversation (no matter how unrelated to the topic).

Mystery GPS glitch grounds flights, leaves passengers in the bar

Re: Time

I turn mine on even on well known routes so that I have something to argue with about directions when I don't have a passenger.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Re: Watch this!

A case of de-gloving happened at my school in the late 90s. Ring caught as he climbed over the fence around the astroturf.

The term still makes me shudder.

In the living room, can Google Home hear you SCREAM? Well, that's what you'll need to do

"Go stick your head in a pig"

FTFY

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

Re: The whole point of a PhD ...

^This

An original, significant contribution to knowledge.

Plenty of PhD colleagues that got to the end of 3 years and had stacks and stacks of results that showed that something doesn't work, but have still improved understanding of a topic.

There's a good movement to have research papers that document test methods that don't work (but are theoretically sound) because people don't normally talk about that part. Helps prevent a dozen groups working in the same field all trying the same wrong things wasting time and money.

Ikea hopes to spare shoppers the one-way Helvete of its stores with ÅR app overhaul

Re: Billy Bookcase

Probably uses your existing Billy Bookcase to calibrate the environment for the AR overlay

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

Yes, when there's a month+ lead time on getting the thing you find a lot of ways to work around such simple problems.

Re: British 3-pin plug

Painful enough that you notice and learn from your mistake but chunky enough that it probably won't pierce the skin...

Rather walk on lego than stand on a 3-pin plug again.

Re: Which is why most stuff has auto ranging power supplies now

I get annoyed with the over supply of regional power cords with things now.

You have to hang on to things in case you need to send the whole lot back but invariably end up with a cupboard and multiple drawers full of various european and american ended cables that a manager says you should probably hold on to just in case.

During an annual spring clean they normally find their way to an appropriate waste stream and off site.

I may change my opinion on this soon though as I'm working in a country that uses the British 3 pin and european 2 pin plugs pretty much interchangeably and I never know what kind of plug socket I'm going to encounter next.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: Changing Wallpaper can have career enhancing effects

Screenshot wallpaper, rotate 180 degrees, set as desktop, screen rotation 180 degrees, hide all icons.

a lot of confusion when the mouse is going the wrong way

Polygraph knows all: You've been using our user feedback form

Re: Ctrl-C Ctrl-V

KVM switch on 2 desktops, forgetting I wasn't switching desktops on the same PC

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

Re: ALL my calls from shouty men

Another good one:

"I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed"

Unnecessary Donkey will be the title of my second book.

Now I just need ideas and the inclination to write books.

Want a good Android smartphone without the $1,000+ price tag? Then buy Google's Pixel 3a

Re: So

Google give me products and services, I invite it in to my life.

Facebook I don't want interaction with but it is bundled on my work phone. You can't get rid of it* and yet: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/22/facebook_data_leak_no_account/

I have no idea what information they are collecting in a shadow profile for me.

* (I can if I root/do my own thing but not going to do that with a work supplied device)

Re: So

It's great! I hand all of my data over to Google and they give me nice products and services. They know where I am and where I need to be, make sure I arrive on time for meetings, flights, restaurant bookings (which may be suggestions based on my previous dining trends). Produce pretty collages reminding me of things I did on this day X years ago that I may have forgotten. They're pretty good at identifying my dog in my pictures (and manage to exclude pictures of other very similar looking black dogs). They have all my emails and attachments indexed so with their search mastery I can find an obscure email from a decade ago. Good calls on my music tastes, amusing videos I might like to watch on YouTube and they've stopped trying to inject sport stories in to my news feed.

They know me better than my ex did after 10 years.

And by handing my money direct to them for these phones it also means it has never had Facebook or Instagram or any other (un)social media installed on it. Not even as a factory loaded thing where you can only uninstall updates (but it somehow still snoops on you).

San Francisco votes no to facial-recognition tech for cops, govt – while its denizens create it

Re: At the risk of being cynical...

Until they have to do the standard press release because they forked up:

Our Customers, who art worldwide,

We take the protection of your personal data very seriously,

and we are committed to protecting the privacy and security of all the data entrusted to us,

For ever and ever,

Amen

(Credit to Alister)

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Tell sales and marketing nothing!

I was in a meeting with a colleague when the marketing department revealed that "next month we are excited to be launching 3 new products!". It was news to us as the R&D chemists that would normally make such products.

It turns out a careless conversation between one of our managers and a sales person had escalated and resulted in 3 theoretical products being put to market.

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

Re: Television

iPlayer content is neither BBFC rated R18 nor contains the percentage of material to make any of this law apply to it.

Likewise All4 and the Channel5 streaming services with their occasional titillating documentaries about the adult industry, wouldn't make up the required amount of content to have an impact.

Europol takes down Wall Street market: No, the other cesspool of dark international financial skullduggery

So

That's where the elderly couple in Australia got the 20kg of methamphetamine from then!

Then realise they're gonna get busted so hand it over and the deets for the website owners to cut a deal. Genius!

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Sexing up the good old CV

I've helped with vetting CVs to select who to put forward for interviews in the past.

We would let a few of the obvious BSers through because we wanted to hear how they performed in the interview (sometimes testing practical skills in the lab).

Frequently they were fresh graduates and therefore "experts" on everything they've heard about at Uni but have no practical experience.

Would that be the Dunning-Kruger effect?