Posts by 42656e4d203239

Ironclad OS project popping out Unix-like kernel in a unique mix of languages

Re: AMOS

>>in AMOS Basic.

Like the multi-user pacman with invisible ghosts?

If you get that specific reference you probably know who I am (or at least who I worked with/for)

/beer cos not everyone knows about AMOS Basic --->

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: "... hibernation support is a somewhat neglected area of Linux support"

I Hate to be the one to grab all the down votes but, Hibernation, for me, on an oldish ACER Inspire laptop running Manjaro with 12Gb of RAM, suitably sized swapfile and a 250Gb SSD has been mostly painless!

It used to crash the lockscreen on resume if I had a second monitor plugged in when suspending and not when resuming, but that just meant swapping to a text console and killing the lockscreen (or rebooting).

These days I don't have a problem, other than it takes a while and at abouot half way through looks like it has finished - sadly the laptop doesn't have a drive activity light so learning about how long it took was interesting - opening the lid only to have it switch off almost instantly when it should have been resuming was puzzling to begin with (never said I was a quick learner).

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

>>Windows Update or REFS

ReFS has had a regression type bug in Server 2025 since December 2024 and Microsoft, despite claiming that they are fixing it as a matter of urgency, has a "Not Fixed Before" date of December 2025.

The bug shows up when you try to delete huge files and results in the server using up all available RAM/CPU and requiring a hard (power cord) reset. If you should, for example, be using ReFS for, say, a backup repository and upgraded your server to W2025 you are in trouble. ReFS worked fine in Windows Server 2022.

So yeh - ReFS isn't ready for mainstream use, despite its name.

Oh and the least said about Windows Update the better.

/me looks around for the dried frog pills

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

>>"Grew like Topsy"

*grow'd

Original is "...I 'spect I grow'd."

/mines the one with Uncle Tom's Cabin in the pocket... you did use quotation marks after all!

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Once upon a time...

There was a remote property that had a landline installed (about 1934 iirc).

One quarter, many years later (2000s somewhere), the phonebill showed active use on the line when there was definitely no-one at the property; coincidentally the call was 30 minutes after it had been secured for winter. One of the numbers called was AOL... interesting, we thought, as there was no electricity or, indeed, electircal equipment at the property at all.

When challenged on the veracity bill, BT claimed that their billing was world leading and never made mistakes. Our position was that we weren't denying the calls were made on BTs network but that they definitley were not made from our line.

Further digging (thanks to fully itemised billing) revealed that another number dialled turned out to be a builder in Radnor, someone we had no dealings with.

The builder was contacted and asked if he had a client in the area, which he did.

BT eventually conceeded defeat, without prejudice, refunding the invoice but maintaining their innocence.

That line has now been ceased owing to the lack of electricity available to run an ONT.

This story aside, it has always amazed me how BT ever got the reputation for being a source of truth.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Re: £1.6B eh?

>>Schools are often the worst places to approach

I dunno - our LA has a (minimum)5 year replacement policy on classroom hardware and 7 years for servers. They also operate a sustainability swindle (actually not bad value) where we buy gear, with a 5Y RTB warranty, at a decent price, then pay 20% (out of our annual capitation budget) for 5 years so we have the cash available to replace it when it fails/is required. There is no "must have the latest and greatest" driver.

Much of Wales, hence many (but not all) schools, operates along similar lines.

I don't think the same thing happens in England though - it certainly used to be that the school would buy a load of the latest and greatest then, 7-10 years later, realise that it was all falling to bits and have to rush around to try to find the substantial sums of money required to update their gear...

>> Although it's rather sad the number of staff I deal with who went through school "learning" Windows

There is no "learning Windows" done in schools - it's not on the curriculum.

Anything pupils learn aboout Windows (or indeed common office packages) is by osmosis rather than training.

The number of people who use <caps lock> to get a single capital letter is way too high as is the number who use Excel as a database or Word as a spreadsheet and don't get me started on document templates/tables/layout/fonts etc.

/nurse - Dried Frog Pills STAT!

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: One letter makes all the difference

Coffee -->

That is all.

Imgur yanks Brit access to memes as parent company faces fine

Re: Yet more Starmer authoritarian stateism - Oh no it isn't

>>GDPR isn't a Tory law. It's adopted from the EU

Err I think you will find the main driver behind the GDPR (EU) was.... the UK! When we divorced our geographical neighbours we just copied the GDPR(EU) legislation into our own as an interim measure (and we all know how interim measures go)

>>is actually a pretty damn good bit of legislation

Yup. It, unusually, does what it says on the tin

>>If you can't comply with GDPR then you really shouldn't be providing web services of any sort.

Indeed.

Schools are swotting up on security yet still flunk recovery when cyberattacks strike

Re: Teachers are receiving cybersecurity training

>>What good is teacher cybersecurity training if your entire totally unified, software-defined architecture can be compromised by clicking on a malicious URL or opening a malicious email attachment.

Fair.

>>Whatever happened to restoring from last-nights tape back-ups?

Unfair. Tape infrastructure is expensive and of limited use (data egress fees apply for several Tb of data) if everything is on "someone else's computer".

>>Have the manufacturers of the devices design an OS that can't be compromised by clicking on a malicious URL or opening a malicious email attachment /s

Whilst a valid point (and one you made already) that doesn't even address the statement from the article "One in five incidents resulted from employees sending work data to personal devices" - the answer there is to stop staff from accessing school networks/resources on personal devices. Its not hard. The two big ecosystems typically used by schools can do that with a simple setting (I know its simple, I have used it sucessfully and so it must be simple!)

As an employee one should never have/access work data on a personal device. If work want you to access that data they should provide the hardware with which to do it.

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

>>Such individuals get given houses/hotels to stay in in, mobile phones & internet, food, full access to the NHS & Schools etc

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof... care to link any? (preferably UK GovLocal Authority rather than partisan sites form either side of the debate)

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Re: Groups

>>Groups in the Microsoft world are a mess.

They were pretty straight forward back in the day. Sadly they have suffered the ravages of time and software "improvements"

>>Exchange mastered groups, Entra mastered static groups, Entra mastered dynamic groups, AD mastered groups, Office 365 groups.

>>(Have I missed any?)

Yeh. InTune groups - they work worse than any of the others....

The siloing of products inside Microsoft has lead to the dog's dinner that we suffer today. Every silo has "NIH syndrome" with respect to things developed in other silos and then someone decides it should all be OneMicrosoft and here we are with sticky tape barely covering the cracks.

>>In an ideal work you'd used dynamic groups

Yeh - I would if I could define the rules based on any Entra/AD user attribute rather than just the ones Microsoft deem sensible (State or Province, Company, Department, Custom Attribute[1-15]) and also have multiple rules with definable logic for each group (like you can for (on prem)AD GPO targetting; yeh that isn't great either but that's a UI thing rather than a functionality thing). As it is I have to mangle the usage of state, company & department to not mean what they imply to get anything that vaguely fits my use case.

Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing

Yeh - Sometime people forget there are actually symbols available in charachter sets these days. Not like when I were young - we carved holes in paper tape with blunt toothpicks and had to live with 7 bit+parity character sets!

800,000 tons of mud probably just made electronics a little more expensive

Re: No big deal

>>The other thing ring mains have to have is a fuse in every plug

You say that like it's a bad thing? Can't see the problem myself.

EU starting registration of fingerprints and faces for short-stay foreigners

Re: Oh no it won't...

>>Of course I'm polite to them, which no doubt helps.

Likewise. There is nothing the person in front of you can do about whatever issue you have with the system.

Be nice - they are doing their job as efficiently as they can and they have the power to make your day go very badly indeed.

Re: Oh no it won't...

>>Could it be you?

tl;dr - could be but unlikely.

err ad hominim for what reason?

I have no trouble with border control at all - other than once in Paris (so English border officials) coming back from a week away in company with my daughter (different surname) and then girlfriend (another different surname) so they were concerned about me traffiking a 16 year old... understandable and soon sorted out. Why piss off someone who can make your journey complete hell?

The comment about customs officials muttering darkly aboout bloody "tourists" was intended as a humourous aside - I have worked in an adjacent role and such comments are commonplace after dealing with a MoP, regardless of the behaviour of the 'customer'

My issue with the automatic facial recognotion system is that it took well over 30 minutes for the poor chap at Timpsons to get the automatic system to realise he was in fact pointing the camera at my face (yes, I was relaxed, unsmiling, glasses off and no the chap wasn't a new employee unfamiliar with the UK passport system or how to work a camera). There is something the system doesn't like about, I presume, my full beard - I have no evidence that the EES facial recognition will be any worse or better but after a long life in IT I feel that EES will be no different to the UK Passport processing system... these things tend to use the same or similar algorithms to achieve their ends.... hence it is a reasonable assumption to make that EES will inevitably increase the stress involved in crossing the channel for me and, presumably, others with similar facial hair.

Oh no it won't...

>>The EU says EES will make border checks more efficient

Title says it all.

What will happen is a percentage of booths won't work at any given time for registration, a percentage of travellers will not be able to register at the booth and will need assistance, then, once registered, many travellers will fail the automatic biometric check at the border and still have to be diverted to a real customs official who will sigh deeply, curse the English under their breath, and wave them through.

Call me cynical if you like, but the trouble I had getting the UK Passport Application system to recognise me as actually looking at the camera in my photograph was immense. There is no reason at all to suuppose that the 'automatic border check' will be any better. I am not looking forward to EES in the slightest - it will just add stress to the trip.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Re: Tea..

you ask a gin and tonic!

Turns out Hayabusa2's next asteroid target isn't much bigger than the probe itself

Re: Images

>>no mammalians will be injured in this particular wild adventure

Tell that to the bowl of petunias...

ChatGPT joins human league, now solves CAPTCHAs for the right prompt

Re: I was working as a chat bot on a graphics card...

Thanks very much for the ear-worm, you glorious bastard... Have a beer --->

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: I make a zip

Real UNIX admins use tar and pipe the output to zip....

UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime

>>who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?

ESS/ParentPay? No wait, they make a basically unusable MIS in the first place so you don't notice when stuff breaks becasue of them, you just blame the crapware.

Well said sirrah!

Chapeau - its all a complete nightmare here in schools.

ESS/ParentPay/SIMS (my current bête noire) does the hosting thing exactly as you say; Just a VM running the applications on a AWS/Azure/whatever service - exactly the same as would have been running on a server in the LA DC with none of the advantages of local people being able to fix stuff when it (often) breaks.

They also have security theatre on the front end that includes sending you an email saying "We have detected a logon from a new browser or device at 01-09-2025. For privacy reasons we do not store the specific details of the device and this may have changed because your browser has updated, used a new device or logged in from a different network. If this was you then you do not need to take any further action." so expect you to decide if it was you based on 0 information other than the date!

It's all a bit shit and a great example of why vendor lock-in is bad. Unfortunately change is difficult becasue of the immense quantity of badly structured data in SIMS needing transport to a.n.other back end. Some people have made the leap and have found that whilst the grass may only be slightly greener, that little makes all the difference.

Integrated MIS vs Disparate systems

As someone who has weathered the slings and arrows of school targeted MIS systems and, in other lives, non-integrated entry/registration/contact systems, I know which I would prefer to use for anything bigger than a 3 class primary school with 9 children per year!

SIMS is the most famous of all completely rubbish School MIS systems - a victim of successive take-overs and consequent loss of touch with their customers.

As a database it was once competent but has suffered from function creep and a lack of will to actually spend nmoney on redevleopment.

SIMS Next Gen is trying to get where its competitors already are and I, personally, hope SIMS dies a death becasue it is starting so far behind.

Sadly as SIMS is embedded in the functions of many LAs and Schools, UK wide, it may twitch and jerk in its inevitable death throes but everyone has had enough of it. The lastest (last year-ish) "Oh you can only use SIMS if ESS host it. BTW you have 6 months to decide and if you go with us, hosting it will be 3 year contract" stunt by ESS/ParentPay has reduced managability and reliability massively over the LA hosted on-WAN servers. Some lucky LAs had the nerve to call ESS/ParentPay's bluff and jumped ship. Ours didn't.

The other school MIS systems - Arbor, BromCom etc. have taken the good bits of SIMS and webified it, hopefully sorting out the heinous back end. Sadly as they are (all?) cloud based, they suffer from 'it will never break' syndrome and fall mightily when it does.

/icon cos its skools innit bruv?

UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age

No AI required

Teeth have growth rings... so every inbound person must donate a tooth... this has the added benefit of being able to locate their origin fairly accurately using isotope analysis. What could possibly go wrong?

/icon just in case anyone thinks I am serious...

Hmm I wonder if you could develop a machine than can image a tooth in situ and count the rings using AI? now that might have legs...of course if the putative migrant has no teeth there might be a problem.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Floating point

>>Putting the two together, for a game like Elite, well you’d have to be extra-bright for something like that!

Absolutely the best example of concise programming ever!!11!!!11!!! (hyperbole - don'tcha love it?)

I remain in awe of Elite - the authors managed to get an open(ish) universe, deterministic, 3-D spaceflight game into 64k (or less? can't remember, it was a while ago) and it had a reasonably sophisticated profit protection system built in as well.

Beer for all the old school coders who know what they did and what they were doing ---->

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Re: Pro tip for DELETE queries

yeh this - SELECT the things you think you want to delete and see if they are the things then swap SELECT for DELETE when you are super sure you are right!

I guess thats why having a "hidden" column called "reallyDelete" is handy... so you can practice the where with update <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true where .... and check with select * from <wherever> where <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true before you "delete from <wherever> where <wherever>.reallyDelete=$true"

Yeh - what could possibly go wrong there? I definitely haven't ever had to restore tables/databases for DBAs who got it wrong even with a reallyDelete column

/mines the one with a backup tape in the pocket

Telefónica Germany offloads VMware support to Spinnaker due to high renewal costs

Re: Spinnaker *not* a recplament for VMware?

This is a total guess...

I assume they are going to "wherever" (on site KVMs, Xen, ProxMox, whatever Hypervisor is the flavour of the month or AWS/Google/Azure) for VMs and using Spinnaker for "middleware" so that the VMs are hardware host agnostic.

Telefonica should be able to say "spin up another VM" and Spinnaker just does it wherever there is resource available; I imagne that as Spinnaker is continuous delivery it will notice when it needs more VM capacity and can do the spinning up/down on its own... The end users see no difference. The backendy chaps no longer have to wrestle VMWare/Broadcom whenever the license renewal comes up and can swap physical/cloud hosts whenever by adjusting where services are provided in Spinnaker.

Everyone is happy. Except Broadcom. But we don't mind that, do we?

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: Impaired vision

>>My eyes can't cope with black text on a white background...Chromium doesn't let me....

The Chrome-ish extension DarkReader may help - you can map a key to switch on dark mode, which can either just invert everything, or take white down to a manageable grey.

I use it to have a mostly red & grey El Reg experience. It doesn't work with every website, or every element on a webpage, and certain page models seem to protect themselves from such meddling (one I came across reloads content every few seconds, undoing the changes DR made, so I noped out of there) but on average it does work and I find it helpful. YMMV.

Gone in 40 days: US drops ban on export of chip design tools to China

TACO

TACO - it's always "The Art of the Deal" that wins bigly.

Coveffe of this latest, errr, "course correction" to be found in the usual places I guess, or, more likely, not.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

>>This could be solved by a system of nets and scoops alongside the track.

You jest, however I remember a cartoon by W Heath Robinson in "Railway Ribaldry" from 1935 espousing exactly this.

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Re: Back in the day....

>>niceness levels, not priority.

Nope - not Niceness. Priority. Wasn't *nix but (Open)VMS. Very different - I knew about niceness and assumed that priority was the same.

Have looked it up, just to be sure; n was, apparently, 0 to 31, with anything above 16 being realtime.

Sigh - I remembered it wrong, but the effect still stands. Anything in the highest bracket (16-31) always gets executed.

For reference I include some OpenVMS Guidance on priority

SET PROCESS /PRIORITY=n

SET QUEUE /ENTRY=xxxx /PRIORITY=n

When real-time processes (those with priorities from 16 to 31) execute, the following conditions apply:-

They never receive a priority boost;

They do not experience automatic working set adjustments;

They do not experience quantum-based time slicing;

The system permits real-time processes to run until either they voluntarily enter a wait state or a higher priority real-time process becomes computable.

So Yeh crash and burn if you set a priority to >16 because, IIRC, not even OS processes run higher than 15 - it's the co-operative in co-operative multi tasking - everything promises to be nice and not grab the CPU for (potentially) ever.

Back in the day....

Someone let me loose on the MicroVAX console... I had little to no sysadmin experience and a fairly interesting (I have mentioned her before, regarding tape spools; this incident was before the tape spool incidents) analyst wanted her job doing at a slightly higher priority than everyone else's equally mundane tasks.

What could possibly go wrong, you may be asking... well, young and impressionable idiot me decided that, as priorities went from iirc 16 (do anything else first and if you feel like it run this job for a bit) to -16 (real time) what's wrong with -16 for a quick job?

Let me tell you, dear reader, that -16 means everything else (terminal IO, other proceesses, Swap, everything!) stops until the -16 job gets finished.

The job crashed/terminated after a few minutes and released the cpu to do other things else but it was a "learning experience" at the time and something I still remember nearly 40 years later.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Works for me

The indications on the OfCom map seem to tally with my experience in two postcodes - therefore it must work everywhere...

Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Re: It would be “arcane and trivial” if the touchpad worked

>>you only need 1 counterexample to prove that something doesn't work

No, you don't. That one example could be experimental error. You need enough counterexamples to show that the effect is real not just an artifact of measurement.

>> If touchpad doesn't work out-of-the-box for 1 user on generic hardware, then I won't waste my time trying to use it because it might affect me

Lets have a bit of my favourite, reducto ad absurdum...

If one person gets run over on road that forms the only way to work so I won't go down that road...

The probablilities are probably similar - touchpad not working to someone getting run over - so why not the approach to the issue? One would probably decide the risk of not getting to the office is low enough to make the journey anyway.

You say that one instance of a touchpad not working is definitely enough to stop you from using, say, Wayland becasue your touch pad might not work (without mucking about).

Why is getting run over less of a problem than a touchpad not working?

The outcomes are vastly different, as are the impacts. Getting run over - anything from hospital+ weeks/months of convalescence to death. Losing use of a touchpad for a while till you work out wtaf is going on - plug in a mouse or use X11 (until it stops working or you sort the touchpad issue in Wayland).

Re: It would be “arcane and trivial” if the touchpad worked

>>my mouse cursor to struggle, stutter, or lag,

My touch pad works fine, my mouse pointer tracks my finger as expected with no hints of stuttering or lagging.

Hardware is 6+ years old Acer laptop, Manjaro (whatever the current release is), Plasma 6.3, Wayland sessions (Since Plasma 6.0)

As can be seen, individual data points aren't really very useful.

Which is best? I don't actually know, but, for my use case, Wayland has been slightly more stable than X11.

KDE Plasma 6.4 ships with major usability and Wayland improvements

Re: KDE Team note: Plasma 6.4.0 will need manual intervention if you are on X11

>>That's a pleasant surprise for your update if you just don't happen to be subscribed to the arch-dev-public mailing list....

Something that many distros can't shake off is the "well you should know what you are doing before you do it" mentality when people complain that an update broke their machine... arch-dev-public is the equivalent of a locked filing cabinet in a dark room, behind a door with a sign on it saying beware of the leopard, unless you happen to be an Arch maintainer/contributor.

Microsoft brings 365 suite on-prem as part of sovereign cloud push

Re: Time is a flat circle

>>I remember when Exchange on premises was the dominant model, all that happened is companies never invested in any of the platforms so all you had was a series of increasingly out of support versions that companies refused to keep up to date.

You do of course know why they "refused to keep them up to date" don't you?

No? I will tell you (from bitter experience).

It is because the "update" process for Exchange was flakey and lengthy. The worst bit was that, at the end of the "update", you could well end up with a broken mail databse, no functioning connectors and the board of directors breathing down your neck because the only "recovery" available was a complete restore to the latest backup...

All this parlaver cause by microsoft's inexplicable, overly complicated, design of the Exchange back end and the paucity of the debugging tools available so although they told you "its broken" you couldn't see exactly why something broke.

Icon - cos that's generally what happened when one attempted an Exchange upgrade.

DARPA is testing a device soldiers can swallow to make them less stressed

Re: The British forces already have this!

>>I really shouldn't offend the hobnob fans, for they seem to be the most fanatical of the biscuit tribes.

Get them arguing about the "True Hobnob" - Plain or Milk Chocolate... sit back and enjoy the show!

I have no iron in this fire as I can't (technically shouldn't) eat oats.

Beer cos no popcorn icon

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Accessibility matters

>>Is it sufficient that accessibility is only a consideration once projects are commercialised, leaving those with accessibility requirements with fewer choices and higher costs?

The root of the DEI fuss and bother is the thought "Why should I pay for your convenience?" aka "I'm All Right, Jack". So in that context, yes, it is sufficient.

Many people hold views that amount to "I'm all right Jack" - Apparently, not as many people don't so we are where we are and society, as a whole, will, arguably, be poorer for it.

Probability of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon increases

A very comprehensive reply... only spoiled by one thing.... you failed to use El Reg units!

Where are the linguine, grapefruit and adult badgers in your units? any fule kno that El Reg units are topp!

Have a beer anyway ---->

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Nice idea

>>Perhaps you should actually read my comment - it talks specifically about getting them off the streets.

Err nicking someone does not get them off the streets. It does for about 12 hours in the worst cases. Usually far less (custody want rid so they don't have to provide meals and they need the space).

Then the (typically) druggie is out on Police bail, free to do whatever (as long as they aren't caught) until a visit to the beak. At which point, for petty theft, they will get a slap on the wrist and told not to do it again, because it has been proven many times that habitual theives are gonna theive, no matter what the punishment.

Anyway, why waste tax payer's money on putting a scrote away for a month at the cost of say £10k (it's actually more than that, IIRC, but its been a while) for a crime that did (in general) rather less than that in damage to society? more scotes off the streets = more money the tax payer has to find to look after them.

For a bit of reducto ad absurdum To save the costs associated with incarceration perhaps we should just execute anyone found guilty of anything? (nb. that was, by and large, tried over past centuries and found not to change the offence rate significantly)

I suppose it does get the copper off the streets though, with hours of paperwork, all of which is mandated to ensure the plod are doing what they are paid (or not, in the case of Specials) to do, but I am sure the criminals you want off the streets aren't, in this instance, the popo.

>>How and why should somebody else's computer be able to reach through the comms network to grab the IMEI which should be none of its business.

They don't have to reach anywhere. IMEI is available to Android/iOS (whatever the Apple equivalent is) all Google/Apple have to do is to ask what the IMEI is and the OS will send it right back.

Note that, since Android 10, third party apps on the Google Play store can't ask for the IMEI. The system calls are still there if your app has the right privs and any app that asks for those privs on the store is denied store presence (I presume... who knows if what they say should happen actually does in real life). I presume its pretty similar in Apple land.

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Why?

Why would ChatGPT be any good at chess?

Playng chess is not a problem to which general knowledge, or even basic understanding of the rules, gives a great solution.

Try training your AI model on chess game records and you would have, I suspect, a very different outcome.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Since the Felicity Ace

>> they don't generally load these vessels randomly.

Cargo ships can't (shouldn't) load randomly and unless the captain can certify that his vessel is loaded correctly he can't (shouldn't be able to) leave port.

There are careers to be made in the art & science of loading a ship - not only behind desks in Lloyd's Register (other registration authorities are available; all have similar departments) but on the decks of the vessels which enable our lives to proceed in the manner to which we have become accustomed.

/mine's the one with the LR Christmas card in the pocket.

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

>>The A30 Hog's Back near Guildford

Ahem... I'll get my coat already but I think you mean the A31 Hog's Back near Guildford

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

Re: We all know what'll happen

In general - whole hearted agreement. These days things are designed down to a price rather than up to a quality.

>>Clothes? All Temu standard now and disintegrate on the first wash

Now you are being a trifle unfair to Temu here. Some Temu clothing is quite high quality - SWMBO has several T-Shirts that have survived her use and abuse for more than a Year! - the trouble is telling 'good' from 'bad'.

OK nothing on Temu matches my well worn gig T-Shirt from 1988/89. That shirt is still almost completely intact, with the usual deliberate holes, and only one or two others. It may be a little translucent these days but has proven to be well worth the money I paid for it

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

Re: Quality of service

>>Have you ever tried using a mobile phone in Cranleigh High Street?

Yes. It was worse than here at home in the Welsh Valleys, which aren't known for their radio infrastructure or indeed the radio friendly terrain; landline is a different matter... 1Gbps FTTP? no worries OGI/Spectrum have you covered (ok its CGNAT but meh), BT/EE/Openretch not so much.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Notepad++

Title says it all.

Beer for the writer of said exceptionally nice text editor.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Snap....

You type faster than I do; have a beer (it is Friday after all) --->