* Posts by Press any key

31 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2019

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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I suggest you shouldn't give advice on the use of the word its as the contraction of 'it is'

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

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Make it look like windows 7 with proper borders on windows, a decent start menu and a control panel that isn't made mostly of empty space, then I'll fork out for new hardware to run it.

As it is, my 4th gen i7 without TPM is still running just fine although windows 10 is quite ugly.

Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations

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"Although this was firmly in the middle of Oracle’s own guidance, the revenue growth missed analysts' average estimate for growth of about 7.6 percent, according to LSEG data."

So oracle was right and greedy shareholding analysts wanting to pump up the share price by over inflating expectations were wrong.

Sad I am not.

Disappointingly the greedy analyst will have sold before the price fell.

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

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So properties passed will include ones like mine where in August they installed equipment on the pole that serves me but still haven't actually made FTTP available to pointer punters?

Astroboffins spot high-power 8b year old radio burst from pre-Earth event

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8b years old

I know the reg has gone international but I'm sure even nations that struggle with the metric system can handle base 10 numbers.

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

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The source of the problem? Universities

With so many civil servants having studied PPE or PPH or classics, perhaps it's time for the universities to update their syllabuses with some STEM so that the graduates have idea of what it is.

This might actually make these graduates employable outside of the civil service and cause the civil service to actually cast the net a bit wider employ from a broader candidate base.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

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Re: QWERTZ/QWERTY.

And the on-screen keyboard too.

Bosch goes all-in on hydrogen with €2.5B investment by 2026

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Re: I was expecting

Because hydrogen is easier to store in larger quantities (Vs big battery banks), energy conversion losses and transmission losses are less than for stored and transmitted electricity.

Also the pipework infrastructure is already there whereas the electricity grid simply won't cope with everyone going electric for everything.

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

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Re: Support

Possibly this?

https://www.cpushack.com/2021/08/12/forgotten-italian-cpu-the-genesys-b52-mmx/

Meta facing third fine of 2023 for mishandling EU user data under GDPR

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Collective action

Hopefully other countries that have enacted the GDPR, including the UK, will see this, take note, and do the same with similarly large fines. The large fines ought to be attractive to governments. Through collective action these abusers might be forced to change their ways.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

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the total labor base

I'm certain that if BT used that term then the word labour would have been spelt correctly.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

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Redirected misdial

I had an occasion when somebody had misdialled their fax and was trying to fax my phone at work.

After I had answered and listened to the telltale noises a few times I redirected my phone to the office fax machine.

A few minutes later the usually silent machine dutyfully started printing an purchase order that appeared to be to a builders mechants on the other side of the country.

The PO went in the floor bound round filer and I was able to remove the redirect from my phone.

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Coat

Were they taken over by Wayne Kerr?

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

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Off datasheet appliance usage

I'll file the cooking pizza in the toaster idea with cooking rice in the kettle.

While I think about it, I wonder if popcorn in the kettle might work?

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Re: pizza is the perfect food

All the ones I've seen, the toast comes out the opposite way up from how the bread went in.

Which way up do you put the pizza in?

Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid

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Flame

European Labor resistance?

The European council needn't worry about labor resistance, labour resistance would be more of a problem in the EU.

Icon, because I'm ready for it.

Ex-Twitter Brits launch legal challenge against dismissal

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Re: Union

I wonder how the UK left feels about train drivers

They earn plenty more than the UK average and are very strongly unionised in jobs with high barriers to entry in an industry that can't simply close its doors or move elsewhere to save money.

(Detail: the train driver's union is ASLEF, not the more well known RMT.)

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

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Re: "buttons replaced with touchscreens"

But they are cheaper for the manufacturer, who can also sell you new software features.

Then the garages can charge you for installing bug fix updates.

Then the manufacturer can sell you an entire new car when you crash your existing one because you're too busy trying to touch the correct patch of screen going through menus to drive the car itself.

It's win win win for everybody except the customers.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

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Re: No Excuses

It's only locked out if you put the lock on yourself and you have the only key to the lock.

Firefox 106 will let you type directly into browser PDFs

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Re: Leave my system settings alone.

Wait a couple of days and it will have magically changed to edge

Chipmakers to spend record $109b on fab machines this year

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Oh the irony when the fab owners are told they can't have their new machines because of semiconductor shortages.

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

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Oh look, it's ugly.

Just like windows 10 and 11

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

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Re: Screen bloat...

I was going to comment something similar.

The change I noticed in the screenshots is that the ribbon bar has got bigger using even more valuable vertical space than it did before.

Monitors have gone wide-screen and have got more pixels than ever but GUI designers have decided that people want this space consumed by whitespace rather than leaving it available for usability and productivity.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

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Re: Only half the story

It's probably a 7.5 digit meter.

It should have less uncertainty than cheaper meters although I have seen 7.5 digit meters with identical specs to 6.5 digit meters and the seventh digit is little more than a random number.

I used to automate Keysight 3458a 8.5 digit meters in a manufacturing environment, they used to sell for more than £6k, you can't buy them new in the EU these days as they don't comply with ROHS.

UK watchdog fines biz £130k for 900,000+ direct marketing calls to folk who had opted out

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Re: Another ineffective fine

For this crime they should be persecuted.

Australian cops, FBI created backdoored chat app, told crims it was secure – then snooped on 9,000 users' plots

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Re: Pay to Crim

Until reading this comment I had been pondering if the agencies involved had been committing fraud or conspiring to commit fraud by taking money for something that they were deliberately misrepresenting as secure.

The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software goes offline for good

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So long, and thanks for all the fish

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a 56-year-old satellite burning up in the sky spotted by sharp school kids

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Re: Dam I would have gotten away with it

One of whom's parents appears to really like cars

Microsoft puts dual-screen devices and Windows 10X in the too-hard basket

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Re: Mangled language

It means the person that wrote the release has an MBA

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

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Re: Seen in the wild

At a guess, the amplifier had some capacitance between input and ground. When cable when failed it went high resistance and the two together would form a first order low pass filter.

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

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Re: The reason that I did not subscribe to BBC Sounds

You can indeed create a different account for every device. I have, all with made up email addresses. The BBC appears not to confirm the email address.