Indeed, a venerable classic.
Posts by Will Godfrey
6574 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
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Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark
House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16
Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble
Wednesday 21st January 2026 15:13 GMT 
The real reason it was banned in the USA
... was because it wasn't American, and they had nothing like it. It's a shame they were taken out of service, but financially they just weren't viable. The crash in France was the last nail in the coffin.
On a related point I watched the last flight of the Vulcan Bomber at Headcorn Aerodrome. One of the things that gets you is how slowly it could fly at low level flight, almost defying gravity. I looked around and could see the smiles on a few faces as the nose poked up. Next second there shocked gasps from the crowd at the roar of the afterburners and it shot up in the air.
P.S. I've got one of the mugs that were on sale at the time.
Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack
Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure
China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware
Cloudflare CEO threatens to make the Winter Olympics a political football after Italy slugs it with a fine
Trump administration sets GPU export rules that put Chinese buyers at the back of the queue
Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause
Monday 12th January 2026 14:17 GMT
Don't remind me!
We've had to scramble to get our project back in operation as three libraries we depend on made changes that were incompatible with their previous versions around the same time - one of which still isn't properly sorted out, so our only recourse has been to rewrite our code to use an alternative route.
Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech
UK government exempting itself from flagship cyber law inspires little confidence
Debian goes retro with a spatial desktop that time forgot
Friday 9th January 2026 17:20 GMT
Not bad
Very much in favour of remembering location and size of windows. Tiling window managers(manglers) totally destroy muscle memory and fail miserably on things like Software synthesiser displays. Who wants oval volume controls or sliders that either become fat and stubby or elongated and too thin to get a grip on... to say nothing of messing up waveform displays?
Oh, and just repositioning objects in a window is just as bad, as then you can never find anything!
Tech that helps people outshone overhyped AI at CES 2026
GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger
Wednesday 7th January 2026 22:24 GMT 
Gnome? Oh yes I dimly remember that.
The first Linux desktop I had used Gnome window manager - I hated it and switched first to KDE, then quite a bit later moved to Open Box, and have stayed with it ever since. A few of the desktop programs I use rely on gtk and their gnome-ness is apparent but not entirelyt insufferable.
Earlier Horizon rollout could widen net for quashed Post Office convictions
Thursday 8th January 2026 09:26 GMT 
The post office have always been arrogant shits.
In 1962 my dad was second in command of the new Prudential Assurance data processing department, and we relocated to just outside reading where the new department building was. It was pretty much essential that they could contact him at home by telephone in emergencies, so he contacted the post office to organise this. They claimed there was no service in the area and wouldn't be for at least 18 months.
Dad took a photo of the street, showing a post directly opposite our house with a couple of lines to other houses, which they flatly denied was our street. However, dad sent a copy of the photo and their denial to the London Prudential head office... We got our telephone.
EU won't scrap tech regs just because Washington dislikes them
Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage
iPad kids are more anxious, less resilient, and slower decision makers
Thursday 1st January 2026 14:16 GMT
Re: 'read to your kids'
That's very similar to my experience.
On one occasion in primary school a teacher complained to my parents that I was reading a book that was too difficult for a kid my age - it was "King Solomon's Mines", so in front of the teacher dad asked me several questions about the story, which I answered correctly.
NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be
BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct
IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project
Friday 26th December 2025 18:01 GMT
Re: Y2K - Learning to be Paranoid
I remember working though the logic to implement a full calendar program in C on a very primitive machine, with just a basic CLI only interface. It worked and managed Y2K, but I never want to do that again!
P.S. It dove a factory throughput per shift display system... and was deeply unpopular with the worker bees.
Pen testers accused of 'blackmail' after reporting Eurostar chatbot flaws
Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth
Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030
What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows
New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good
Monday 22nd December 2025 10:17 GMT
Back in the mid 1960s
We had a manager for all us trainees, in a rather up-and-coming company of that time. He was also a test/trouble shooter engineer and spent much of the time skulking at a bench in the corner of the main open-plan factory. He had a favourite china pint mug - white with big blue spots on it - which was always prominently visible on the bench.
The first prank we played on him was to put about an inch of water in the bottom of the mug, then drop some white silicon rubber solution on top forming a thin film. Once this had set it was punctured and air syringed in forcing out the water, finally the holes were sealed with a couple more of drops of silicon rubber. At a glance this quite invisibly blended in to the shape and colour of the mug.
The tea lady comes round with the urn on a trolley, and fills the cup. Poor Brian then observes it slowly rising in the cup as the air heats up and tea eventually spills over, with a final mini-explosion as the silicon rubber breaks.
The second (and last) prank was when somebody accidentally knocked the mug off the bench and it broke on the concrete floor. The mug was then glued together with a water-soluble adhesive. We expected it to just fall apart a short while after it was filled with hot tea, but it actually worked out even better. It stayed together until Brian picked it up when he was left holding just a bit of the cup attached to the handle. However, we did present him with a new similar mug, but with blue rings rather than spots!
The reason this was the last prank is a story in itself but after all these years I think it's safe to mention it.
the factory had it's own very posh research and development offices, and one day a particularly arrogant guy rocks up and drops some paperwork on Brian's bench and says "Build this, now it's urgent" then disappears. Apparently it was a particularly complicated high frequency power transformer. Brian, as usual, checks the details, and then phones the research dept, to say there appears to be an error in the calculations. One of the other trainees was in earshot when said arrogant numpty verbally lays into Brian and demands he does what he's told.
The next thing we hear is that said transformer failed spectacularly and Brian disappears. We all thought he'd been thrown under a bus, but the whole story eventually filtered back to us. The big bosses had the transformer examined by a completely independent company, who took it apart, and was able to confirm that Brian had been right - there was a factor of ten error in some of the windings. Numpty was dismissed, and Brian not only exonerated, but also transferred to research with corresponding salary and benefits.
I don't know if he kept his mug there :)
The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years
Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful
US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row
No, SoundCloud hasn’t started tuning out VPNs. It’s mopping up after a cyberattack
Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card
Home Office staff still leaning on 25-year-old asylum case management system
Welcome to America - now show us your last five years of social media posts
US extradites Ukrainian woman accused of hacking meat processing plant for Russia
Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner
Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security
We'll beat China to the Moon, NASA nominee declares
NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece
KDE Plasma sets date to dump X11 as Wayland push accelerates
Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:27 GMT 
It's destructive
The software I work with, by necessity, uses multiple windows which have title bars that give real information such as which instance and subsection you are looking at. It also allows you to resize these to suit your workflow while keeping them completely in scale. The windows also remember their size and position on the screen when last seen. Optionally, the most significant ones will reopen at the same size and position next time the program is run.
I don't have a spare machine to try wayland here, but the information I've been given is that it breaks most of this catastrophically.
Apply here to win a Microsoft Ugly Sweater. It's uglier than ever
Wednesday 3rd December 2025 10:05 GMT 
It's a trick question!
It hasn't been reached yet. They are still piling on more crap and will continue to do so until it becomes a singularity, when it will collapse under it's own weight sucking in the entire universe with it.
Unfortunately at that point there will be nobody left to collect the sweater... maybe that's just as well
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
