Posts by Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

My guess further down the thread is that they were setting an unsigned int to -1. On 32-bit that would set it to 2038.

And because (unint32's -1 != unint64's -1), it wouldn't show the "never expires" text.

Well, if not MAX_INT, then -1 on an unsigned int.

If that int became 64-bit it would no longer match the date in 2038.

Ah,

My guess based on your post, they previously used MAX_INT. They updated to 64-bit and 2038 no longer matches MAX_INT.

Strange that they wouldn't use NULL to mean never expires, rather than setting a timestamp arbitrarily far into the future.

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

Re: Bully boy tactics

I was just wondering whether Linode could sue. I bet they could.

North Korea pulled in $400m in cryptocurrency heists last year – report

Re: cryptocurrency

Mixers ( aka tumblers) are considered broken.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous. Monero, Zcash, etc are.

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

Re: Just a few ideas

Bong ( As in MS Bing ).

Massive rugby ball-shaped planet emerges from scrum of space 'scope sightings

So it won't be Guinness Extra Cold?

Thank God for that.

On second thought, if it's an exoplanet it'll be Guinness Extra Cold.

Nevermind.

This is where Guinness came from. We must go there.

LAPD cops who preferred playing Pokémon Go to tackling robbery can be fired, appeals court rules

There's got the plot of a terrible heist film written all over it.

Hack into Pokemon Go servers in order to make a Pikachu (?) appear on the other side of the city while you break into the bank.

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

I am beyond outraged.

My info in this field is over a decade out of date, but the PhonePayPlus regulations - and before that OFCOM regulations - stipulated that the call must have a maximum price of £30.

That meant for a £1.50/minute call, the service had to auto-terminate at 20 minutes.

( Of course your story may pre-date my knowledge of the regulations, or may have involved a broken IVR. OFCOM and PPP don't play though so I can't imagine any IVR would stay broken in that way for long ).

At a former firm, I once part-wrote an IVR that routed callers to operators in a (necessarily) complicated way.

Due to a bug present at launch some callers were mistakenly forwarded to the emergency services because one part of the system used 999 as an undocumented error code. Oops.

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

C: It's only a grand. What's the worst case scenario? What's the best case scenario?

D: Why not cut out the middle man and stick it straight up the tramp's arm yourself?

> regularly get it utterly badly wrong on subjects you DO know about, you should expect they're equally bolloxing things up in stuff you don't know about too

And that is why I stopped watching QI.

There's an atomic clock in every PC, don't you know?

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

Re: Forget technology

There's also OpenBazar.

Re: Forget technology

I doubt this is why, but Bitcoin has a major software update coming that will address some of its biggest deficiencies.

Also Etherium has a major update coming that will apparently reduce the transaction cost to something less ludicrous.

( You're talking over a hundred dollars to convert one Etherium token to another. It's crazy. ).

That's worse in every way than what we have now.

Re: Forget technology

Smart contracts ( ie: software that executes on a trigger) sounds suspiciously like CGI as far as the user experience is concerned.

Ie: it doesn't add anything that hasn't been around for around 30 years in terms of user experience.

Overly smug article, but "Dunning-Krugerrands." was mildly amusing.

CompSci boffins claim they can recreate missing lines in log files

Alternative headline: CompSci boffins find that logs are overly verbose and duplicated.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

Re: 70's electricty

A recent study found that cats generally only catch injured birds that would probably have died anyway and that they aren't as effective at murdering as thought.

Re: Electric should be cheaper, gas more expensive

Where I live, in the north of England, we haven't had a power cut that lasted more than a few minutes since approx Christmas Day 1995.

Even that was only a few hours.

Planning your life around "what if the power goes out" isn't going to turn you into the resourceful character in an end-of-civilisation TV series.

Re: Electric should be cheaper, gas more expensive

That's how it should be done.

If you want evidence as to why: look at what a dogs dinner is being made by government over energy.

That lie is 46 years old now.

Will you people be having a party for the lie's 50th birthday?

As reliable forms of power generation are phased out in favour of "greener" ones ( ie: diesel generators located near wind turbines ), we will all get to experience such temporary unexpected cost savings on a more regular basis.

Battlefield 2042: Please don't be the death knell of the franchise, please don't be the death knell of the franchise

Re: Bah

If you aren't familiar with it at all, which I might be wrong about, here's a very basic primer:

All of these are recent COD titles, in order of release:

Modern warfare ( modern day, released 2019 ? )

Warzone ( free, ongoing, new version out this week )

Cold War (80's, released 2020)

Vanguard (ww2, released 2021)

Warzone links them all together, so at the moment we're at the end of the Cold War era, so Verdansk ( the City that Warzone happens in ) is in the 80's. Before Cold war we were modern day.

Each title has its own guns, skins, etc, and all can be used in Warzone, levelled up either in the paid title or in Warzone itself.

On Wednesday ( or Thursday for people who didn't buy Vanguard ), we're going to a brand new map in the Pacific called Caldera.

As well as Verdansk, there's a smaller map called Rebirth Island. Apparently that's going to be the only one available to non-Vanguard owners tomorrow, until Caldera becomes available on Thursday. That's not on the playlist today but it's normally there.

Re: Bah

Yes, it's free from the PS store.

I thought that, then I got hooked on Warzone. Now I only play online multiplayer ( currently Vanguard and FIFA 22 ).

Solo modes just feel scripted now.

Re: Bah

Cold War wasn't popular. I'm not a fan.

Modern Warfare and Vanguard are both good. COD Warzone is amazing ( and free ). And the new map running on the new engine is finally out on Wednesday.

Re: EA have killed battlefield

I cancelled the pre-order after the beta. I'm glad I did.

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

That's because all the competent people are too busy being in on the conspiracy to make the trains run on time

The English system works really well now, which is remarkable for a government IT project.

James Webb Space Telescope gets all shook up – launch delayed again

Re: Isn't this One of Zeno's Paradoxes?

That explains exactly why renovating my kitchen has taken so many years.

> unintended vibrations through the observatory

Isn't being hurtled into space famously vibratey?

Infosec bods: After more than a year, Sky gets round to squashing hijacking bug in 6m home broadband routers

> change the LAN's default DNS settings

Sky's routers don't let you change the DNS settings. Presumably they come from DHCP.

UK Test and Trace finding consultant habit hard to break: More contracts go to Deloitte and Accenture

"£37bn Test and Trace"

That's very misleading. That was money allocated, not spent.

And the vast, vast majority of that money went on testing. Ie: the test kits.

And given that we're testing about 6x per capita more than Germany, it's not exactly money wasted.

Do you want to become a vulture? Now's your chance to join The Register's news desk

Why is El Reg auto-playing sound when I load the page?

In the '80s, spaceflight sim Elite was nothing short of magic. The annotated source code shows how it was done

Re: 281,474,976,710,656 planets?

Only earth

O o o - o o o o o .

Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist

Re: Possible

Calm down Stan Collymore.

Chinese Communist Party official expelled for mining cryptocurrency

I wonder what he actually did.

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: Visited...

The enforcement could have been as stiff. Adequate ventilation could have made it perfectly safe.

Staffs second hand smoking was just an excuse. Ventilation meant that didn't have to be an issue.

Re: Visited...

The solution didn't have to be so drastic - ban smoking inside altogether.

Allowing pubs, etc, to setup indoor smoking areas ( with specified levels of ventilation ) would have solved the problem of whole pubs stinking of fags, as well as the very convenient second hand smoke problem. The ventilation technology was available at the time.

However it was obviously meant to be a social engineering measure - force people into quitting. Whether its moral for a government to do such a thing is one question, but it seems as though it worked at least.

Re: Visited...

To be fair, people didn't really take the smoking ban seriously back then like they do now.

Swiss lab's rooftop demo shows sunlight and air can make fuel

"Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" is a widely used nom de plume, you absolute weapon.

"The phrase "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" is a generic name used in the United Kingdom for a person with strongly conservative political views, who writes letters to newspapers or the BBC in moral outrage. Disgusted is the pseudonym of the supposed letter writer, who is a resident of the stereotypically middle-class town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent in southeast England.[1] The term may have originated with either the 1944 BBC radio programme Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, a regular writer to The Times or an editor of the letters page of a local newspaper, the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser.[2]"

Then you aren't a true Scotsman.

True "green" campaigners ( the kind that are anti-nuclear despite it being the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions ) are already saying that electric cars are bad because of the "pollution" given off by their tyres as they degrade while being driven.

Imagine if you could make petrol out of sunlight and air. The greenies would be devastated.

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Re: Some submarine!

Surely a nuclear sub doesn't just vent its excess heat to the sea - that would give away its position really obviously.