Posts by Vometia has insomnia. Again.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Sounds just like DEC

Yeah. I worked for them when Greasy Bob took over. What joy. :|

Oracle's $130M-plus payday still looms on horizon for Larry and Safra

"Comprised of"

Is that another part of the former El Reg's Americanisationness?

Unity apologizes, tweaks runtime install fees after gaming world outrage

Yeah, Riccitiello in particular has made his career from nickel-and-diming gamers; not the exact phrase I would normally use myself but I've seen it so many times over the years when people talk about the chaos and annoyance he causes.

Data breach reveals distressing info: People who order pineapple on pizza

Re: Having grown up in Hawaii

Only if I can have it with chips.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

Trouble is the C-suite culprits just walk straight into a new job with another corporation and continue to do the same thing. Until someone makes them walk into a prison cell instead, it's never going to change.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Re: CEO contempt of users ends badly as predicted

The very idea of charging per install is lunacy.

It's Riccitiello, so it's just business as usual really. Not sure anyone really believed his "how do you do, fellow gamers" shtick when he was trying to bolster EA's coffers by blatantly ripping off its customers.

UK government hurt by delays in legacy tech upgrades, skills shortages

Re: The Register Is Complicit......

Why is The Register complicit in this sort of misdirection ?

I'm wondering the same thing. I'm becoming weary of hearing "legacy systems bad, cloudy devops good" when the reverse is frequently the case. I've worked on one of those legacy systems and the culture was very different to the inevitable failures of the big outsourcers: the government department, developer and independent consultants worked very closely together for the duration and produced something that actually exceeded their expectations. Nowadays it would be farmed out to some secondary or tertiary bottom-rung dev sweatshop without any proper decision-making, communication or other useful process.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the culture sucked, especially the inclination of certain individuals within HMG to start pointing fingers in lieu of anything actually going wrong, but at least said individuals were identified and "managed".

Re: 'twas ever thus

That all sounds very familiar. I've had cause to complain several times over the years and they always use the same procedures to try to derail the complaint. If you still insist they just refuse to communicate any further beyond "go cry to the ombudsman if it's so important to you" knowing perfectly well the ombudsman does the same thing.

The only way to have any hope of getting anywhere is through the courts.

Re: 'twas ever thus

Yeah. My partner died recently due to said incompetent or malicious staff killing people; it's taken them two months just to get the investigation going, and the coroner's so resigned to dealing with the sauntering unimportance they give even the most serious cases that they've had to add a six month delay to the inquest date in the hope that they actually produce something by then. There's been essentially no contact from the hospital managers at all, their only action was to hide the worst culprit elsewhere before the investigation started (even though it won't be apportioning blame).

On the rare occasions the press does pick up on it e.g. with Lucy Letby they're all "how could this possibly happen?!" Well this is how, and it happens far more often than people realise.

22 million Brits suffer broadband outage blues and are paying a premium for it

We were all set to have decent infrastructure over 30 years ago that they'd been developing since the '70s; but as with so much other stuff, Thatcher intervened because it would upset the free markets or some such crap so we're still largely stuck with shitty infrastructure to this day.

And yeah, I know the sad Tory gits will downvote me for criticising their precious neoliberalism like they always do. Never known such a bunch of perpetually butthurt snowflakes.

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Umm. Mainframe?

I'd argue that the larger Vaxes (IOW some of the 8000 series) were mainframes, but it was largely marketing gimmickry anyway. Fair point, tho', the AS/400 wasn't, not even the old beige water-cooled ones.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Question

I thought Priti Vacant was the pinnacle of evil stupid until Bra Vermin came along and comprehensively outdid her on both counts.

Wasn't he the one who did the awful "more pennies for beer and bingo, because we know what working class people want" shtick? I suppose at least he didn't go full Cameron and try to rebrand them as "hardworking class".

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Re: A great way to waste morning tea time!

trn was the best. Still much better at organising and browsing discussions than nearly all web-based software I've seen in the years since.

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: Full circle?

It was the case with IBM's VM, at least sometimes. One example is MUSIC which could run directly on the hardware, but it required VM if you wanted any networking; and I think IBM's Unix-for-S/370 needed it for various other "VM assists" too. Plus various other mainframe OSs just ran better under VM than they did on native hardware because it did the paging and stuff that they didn't bother with themselves.

Re: VM vs Process

Back in the ICL days, VME called what is nowadays usually referred to as a process as a VM, and its idea of a process is what's now termed a thread; not sure if the latter was widely used (or used at all) back then, though. But AFAIK that's just a terminology difference rather than any equivalence of functionality regarding a "microVM".

Re: The bubble has burst

FreeBSD already has a decent version of qsort in its kernel so I'm not sure why the bubble sort is there. I guess it might just be one of those "this'll do for now, I'll come back to it later" things that ends up being overlooked for years.

Uncle Sam accuses SpaceX of not considering asylees and refugees for employment

One of my "favourites" has to be the horrible non-word "accurized". *shudder*

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

Make it out of headphone cables, they can snag anything.

Apple, Samsung, and Intel to invest in Arm IPO, and emerge with some control: report

Yep. IIRC it took less than a week from her becoming PM and promising to protect the UK's most important assets from multinational predation to fall back to Osbornesque "Bwitain is open for business!" tomfoolery.

Apple demands app makers explain use of sensitive APIs

Really?

"Apple, Google, and others have taken steps to improve privacy on the web and in native apps"

Did you actually manage to write that with a straight face?

If you mean their efforts at maintaining a monopoly on collecting users' data, that doesn't really count, for obvious reasons.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Re: Why? Really, why?

I think that's PR more than anything; it doesn't really resemble VMS. I know Cutler was involved but he's often given too much credit.

OECD finds 27% of jobs are under threat from AI

argh

Stop the hype train, I want to get off.

Tech execs turn to drink and drugs as job losses mount

Re: ADHD

Yeah, I take it* on prescription; it makes me a bit less dysfunctional, though admittedly that latter thing was for the most part burn-out from trying to cure my social awkwardness by choosing to work in the City of London for a few years. Turns out my approach to exposure therapy wasn't very sensible. Er anyway, ADHD seems to be more of an altered state of attention rather than a lack of it, and that hyperfocus could make me pretty good at what I did, albeit at the cost of sometimes being somewhat brittle to be around if someone kept interrupting my concentration...

* "it" being lisdexamphetamine for the curious, which I find somewhat easier going as it doesn't make me crash every 2-3 hours.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Re: Audit? We don't want no audit.

Quite. Based on the ones I have read in full, I now just expect that most if not all EULAs are (often substantially) less than the legal minimum anyway. And the longer they are, the more dishonest they are.

"It's Oracle's IP, and they have a right to monetize it the way they see fit, and every customer who uses it has an obligation to be in compliance."

Big corporations have rights, customers have obligations. That about sums up everything that is wrong with business today.

Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%

Re: " Now that you've all tried it ... "

I played with ELIZA for about a minute back in the '80s. That was enough to satisfy my curiosity.

RAM-ramming Rowhammer is back – to uniquely fingerprint devices

Re: Everyone remember when you could turn a core bright red by flipping its state?

I've heard that some of the PDP-10 cabs could get rather warm; supposedly warm enough to cause quite serious discomfort, according to the possibly apocryphal story of an idiot boss who was told to not lean on them and did so anyway, as was his habit. I have no experience of them in person other than as a user, my college still running a pair of 10s during my time there in the late '80s, but I only saw the actual beasties themselves in photos (which also revealed the 109x to live in a curious arrangement of DECSYSTEM-20-style cabinets, albeit a fairly long row of them).

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

I should hope not. I was given some MS code to trawl through at a previous employer and it was bloody awful, among the worst I've seen. Seemed to mostly consist of functions calling other functions while adding little (if any) value of their own.

Wind tunnels for fluid dynamics boffins among UKRI's £72M funding

Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

The contraptions in the photos have lots of tubes and... things. I dunno what they're for, though. I tried reading his notes and they just made my head hurt; something to do with making spicy rocks faster, I think. I'm going to have to steal that phrase too.

Re: Wind tunnesl aside, what's going on with the picture that goes with this article?

I dunno, I have photos of my father-in-law in a similar environment with nice big single-glazed windows where he's doing things with nuclear stuff and not even with the lab-coat. This was in the '70s, mind you.

Mega-data platform worth half a billion will suck in info from family doctors

Re: ENGLAND ENGLAND ENGLAND

tbh I got the same thing when I lived in the Home Counties. A lot of people were at best vague about the differences between northern England (where I'm from) and Scotland and got annoyed if you pointed it out.

Me: "Hello."

Them: "Why can't you talk properly?! Where are you from?!"

Me: "Newcastle."

Them: "Och aye the noo!" (said in a sort of Welsh/Indian accent)

Sigh.

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

Re: 123-Reg still have customers?

Another recommendation for Mythic Beasts here. You actually get to deal with real people who are helpful, knowledgeable and generally lovely.

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

Re: I can't stand...

My parents used my grant to pay for foreign holidays for themselves and my sister (I wasn't invited). I still believe that grants are a good idea but they come with the same problem as everything that presumes your parents will actually support you.

Music bosses go after Twitter's unlicensed soundtrack to the tune of $250M

Re: "copacetic"

I'm starting to get flashbacks to reading the NME 30+ years ago. Too many gig and record reviews were used as platforms by its contributors to show off how supposedly erudite they were but little useful information was conveyed. One guy in particular (I forget his name now) made a thesaurus a requirement just to observe that he had nothing to say. At the other end of the scale you had the likes of Julie Burchill who reckoned she could manage the same feat by just using the word "smorgasbord" as often as possible: "i's exo'ick!" etc.

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Re: *twitches*

One of my all time favourites has to be the huge and very heavy keyboard attached to an IBM 5250(? I think; the older twinax thing, anyway). Just in case there was any risk of you not hearing it going clunkity-clunk from the beam-springs, which were already loud enough, it had a floor-shaking solenoid too. Daft layout but other than that it was lovely to use. And back in the day, one of those fugly terminals would probably cost more than your car...

Re: *twitches*

I guess it depends; I always preferred concave keyboards, so from more modern offerings I like IBM/Unicomp Model Ms or Cherry MX switches with SA keycaps on them, and one of the things I disliked about my Dragon's keyboard is that it wasn't concave (though it was still stepped); which incidentally felt exactly the same as the BBC's keyboard (at least the ones with the Futaba switches) in spite of what the snobs used to claim. Some people hate concave stuff, though, which is why the e.g. DCS family for Cherry remains so popular, as much as I may not understand it.

Re: How times have changed..

Even ~40 years later I'm still astonished by the cost, tho'. I'd never seen an Apple in the flesh until 1983/84 when I spied one in a computer store with a price tag of £650 for the most basic Apple II, minimum memory and no extras. At the time the price of everything else was either tumbling, or in the case of Acorn they were bundling in more and more stuff on top of a spec that was way ahead of that enormously expensive Apple in every respect. I guess I'm reminded of the (almost) contemporary Stella Artois "reassuringly expensive" ads.

Re: How times have changed..

Yep. As much as I really admired the spec, build quality and cleverness of the e.g. Acorn equivalents, £300 for a BBC Model A was out of reach for many people. And while the ZX81's infamous Wobbly RamPak™ was wobbly, it was also affordable.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Re: Mixed Feelings

Yeah, autistic people are really well known for our inclination to follow all the latest trends and not being at all stubborn.

Re: Mixed Feelings

Autism doesn't mean someone is unable to make decisions about their life; on the contrary, those decisions are likely to be more thoroughly considered. I'm a bit tired of being told that, as an autistic person, I'm basically too stupid to make my own life choices. The main problem autistic people face isn't autism, it's other people.

As for the rest, AGP & social contagion don't exist outside the imaginations of some very disturbing people, tomboys aren't dying out, and while I dare say some "transtrenders" exist I doubt many people are willingly choosing to put themselves in the firing line given the amount of unpleasantness nowadays.

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Re: That explains why productivity has fallen off a cliff due to "W"FH.

This was in the UK, though it was DEC and their horrid SAMS timesheet system was a company-wide thing I think. Even where it is necessary, my opinion is that it's really a managerial task to keep track of what their staff are doing...

Re: That explains why productivity has fallen off a cliff due to "W"FH.

I always questioned why I needed to do timesheets, especially in such detail, considering I always had some manager breathing down my neck. If they had no idea what I was doing, what use were they? And if they had no idea what I was doing when we were both in the office, how would it make a difference if I was working from home? The answer is it didn't, except for the benefits of not being interrupted and micromanaged. Another advantage of not being seen was no requirement to wear such uncomfortable clothes and shoes that the workplace stipulated back then, though once my WFH days ended and I was back in the office I just started wearing whatever I felt like anyway.

Re: Interesting

I'm reminded of some of the lads I was at school with many years ago who turned up one day with a bag containing their collection they were so proud to show the teacher: it was full of flush pedals they'd collected from numerous trains.

Girls never did that sort of thing of course. Well, not flush pedals, anyway.

Re: That explains why productivity has fallen off a cliff due to "W"FH.

That's BS. In fact, there is tons of evidence that WFH has, in fact, increased productivity.

That was my experience of WFH in the '90s; and I was told it wasn't exactly a recent discovery then either, it was well known that tech employees like me were typically a lot more productive and the problem was the risk of over-work. But every company I've worked for since, even those who promised they'd give it "serious consideration" in the interview, would immediately renege on the offer using the same tired old arguments we're still seeing today. And that resistance always comes from the same old middle-manager types, the ones I've tried to figure out exactly what it is they do other than micromanaging and making everyone's life harder, and decades later I still have no idea.

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Re: Teaching an old dog new bugs

I did, but it irritated me for some reason. Weird, considering I'm fine with them in Cygwin, my normal Windows environment; maybe it's just that standard Micros~1 thing where "working as intended" means broken. Fortunately I only use Windows for games and modding.

Teaching an old dog new bugs

Is there any chance they've fixed the decades old "Windows Explorer is not responding" bug? Still have vaguely irritated memories from the '90s of half the PCs still being powered on come Monday morning with the usual dialogue box asking if you want to shutdown anyway. They finally kludged Windows' shutdown to do so regardless but it does make me wonder how much ancient code still lurks in "brand new" versions of it. It's also be nice if it would differentiate between jpeg, png etc files without having to turn file extension visibility for all files: dunno whose bright idea it was to group them all by preferred application with no further hint.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: They still exist?

Sounds a bit like SMTP for money.

Re: They still exist?

I'd forgotten they existed: IIRC my debit card also did the job of a cheque guarantee card since probably the late '80s. I vaguely remember them making a big deal about it being "three-in-one"; not sure of the other, at a guess probably cash machines (with all the cheque/check carry on part of me wanted to write "cache machine"... sigh).

Re: Cheques

I'm reminded of the twilight years of Byte; or the unexcitement of Computer Weekly turning up at work. :|