Posts by jollyboyspecial

Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter

Re: Stable not in the stable

I remember a guy running an ancient server for which updates were no longer available. He was adamant that it was secure as it wasn't public facing. It sat behind a firewall all of its own on the LAN. It has its very own DMZ. The corporate firewall did not know a route to the server. It was safe. He said.

Now this seemed quite an expensive solution to me. A hefty firewall and it's attendant licensing wasn't cheap and of course the licences were a recurring expense. I asked how much it would cost to update the software to run on a newer OS. He wasn't interested. He had his solution. It was safe. He said.

The firewall rules protected the server he said. Only clients on the LAN could access the server. He said. And that much was actually true.

However one day all hell broke loose. Somebody who took their laptop home suffered a zero day attack. Except it wasn't apparent. Working from home on an ADSL connection the laptop's quest to find and attack other devices on the network was not apparent. In the office however at LAN speeds the laptop's owner experienced a terrible performance hit. As did other people who's laptops and desktops got hit. The LAN switches were lit up like.a Christmas tree. Some smart arse spotted this was likely malware and started to pull the power cables on switches. It wasn't until the IT manager has funished fixing laptops and desktops with some newly updated AV software the following day that he bothered to look at the server. He b didn't bother looking at the server because it was safe. He said.

It wasn't. One of the attack vectors of the malware was a common port that was open on the firewall. The laptops and desktops were up to date as of last month. The IPS signatures on the corporate firewall were up to date so the malware couldn't get out to the internet from that. It couldn't even have got in from the internet, but it's somebody brought an unedited device into the office all bets were off. The software on that server was years out of date. The malware tore it a new one and so on day two of dealing with the infection or hero discovered that the system was no longer accessible. It wouldn't even boot.

There's safe and secure and then there's safe and secure.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: ...

Except they are not retiring copper. If you're lucky (ish) you'll get an FTTC connection which is fibre to the street cabinet (ie copper to the premises). If you're not lucky at all you won't even got that, you'll get an MPF connection which is ADSL without the PSTN. So in other words the phone will be VOIP over ADSL which will probably be horrible over a long line.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

BAU

This is nothing new. It's what we used to call "The same problems only faster"

Starlink speeds ahead in the satellite race but rivals aren't starstruck just yet

Re: Why I stopped using Starlink

As the only real use for satellite internet connectivity is in areas not served by terrestrial services it must be frustrating to find that Starlink does not provide a reliable service in such an area

Re: You can see why SpaceX doesn't want Starlink to be used by organized military

Does that mean that the internet is a "effectively a military system that's also has civilian uses"?

Speed is only part of the story. What about latency and jitter?

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

I've been in places recently where there is 3G coverage but no 4G or 5G. Does this mean EE customers will be reduced to seeing that little E for Edge logo on their phones? Or have they already switched that off?

No good offering a 4G phone to customers who don't get a 4G service

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Who?

Who actually prints anymore anyway?

Our office printer was out of action for almost a year. In that time about three people wanted to print.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

On letter difference = thousands of miles

I remember one particular callout somewhere in the southwest of England a couple of years ago. The customer decided to helpfully give our control what three words for the site as they said the postcode would take you to the wrong place. Control helpfully recorded this information and passed it on to the engineer. The engineer dutifully loaded up what three words and entered the three words and got somewhere in Asia - Kazakhstan IIRC. They tried the post code which got them to street level. They then called the customer on arrival and found the entrance to the customer site just round the corner on a side road. As such the postal address was perfectly fine to locate the address. If you don't do field work or indeed deliveries you might be surprised how often you have to call the customer when you arrive as the site entrance isn't immediately obvious from the street. It is however vanishingly rare for the postcode to be several thousand miles out.

The engineer asked about the three words and found that one word was missing it's final letter S and that was what resulted in a massive error. And right there is the problem with what three words. It's very easy to hear similar words incorrectly and the only way to ensure errors like this don't happen is to go through the spelling of all three words using the phonetic alphabet. You can get 11 metre accuracy using lat long at 4 decimal places. So generally around 12 digits. That's quicker than going through three words using the phonetic alphabet.

In other words the idea that what three words is easier than lat long or other map references is bogus. If you clearly hear the words then yes great. However how sure can you be that you've heard the words correctly? In a life and death situation you're going to want to be 100% sure and the only way to be sure is to fall back on the phonetic alphabet.

I'll stick with lat long or map references thanks all the same

US Republican party's spam filter lawsuit against Google dimissed

Fund raising emails, whether political or not, are spam. They are the very definition of spam.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

I recall when Chrome OS first appeared there was a lot of talk among Linux fanbois along the lines of "it's not a real OS" and "there will be no uptake" and of course "it will never last". Of course it's not up to those fanbois to define what is and isn't a "real" OS. However the big problem for those fanbois is that now that Chrome OS is not only the most popular desktop Linux OS but it has a bigger installed base than all other Linux desktop distros put together they can't suddenly accept it into the fold without losing face.

Post Office Horizon Inquiry calls for compensation to be brought forward

One issue that should not need an enquiry is that criminal charges need to be brought against those at the post office and fujitsu who pressed ahead with criminal charges against sub postmasters while knowing full well that no criminal offence had been committed.

There also need to be questions asked about how people were found guilty on evidence that was quite clearly false.

Network died, hard, during company Christmas party, leaving lone techie to fix it

To summarize Roy didn't plan properly and performance was piss poor? Pillock!

This AI is better than you at figuring out where a street pic was taken just by looking at it

Nothing this specific could ever be considered intelligence, artificial or otherwise. That is all.

Boris Johnson pleads ignorance, which just might work

Other Phones?

All these messages have a sender and at least one recipient yes? The conversations as far as I understand it were mostly between Johnson and ministers, advisors or civil servants? Can't the enquiry just ask for messages from every other possible participant? Sure it would take longer than just getting their hands on the Liar in Chief's phone but they'd get the messages.

Seems this enquiry is almost determined to ley the government off the hook. Not that I'm surprised by that you understand.

We will find you and we will sue you, Twitter tells 4 mystery alleged data-scrapers

Profits?

When Mush said he would make Twitter profitable nobody realised he meant he was planning to turn a profit simply by suing as many people as possible and cutting staff rather than actually improving the platform or the business.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

"A confession: I have learned that the iPhone 13's facial recognition facility can successfully identify me while I brush my teeth.

There I stand, brush protruding from a gaping jaw, foam flecked about my lips, and Apple logs me in without a moment's pause. It also identifies me in the dark, in broad daylight, and at all hours of variable brightness in between."

If it recognises you in those conditions how sure are you that it wouldn't also recognise somebody who looks a bit like you? Or somebody wearing a you mask?

Given hope many false positives police use of facial recognition has famously turned up, I wouldn't trust it to unlock my phone.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: It's either 200 bucks or....

For those who haven't seen Looker (it seems many haven't) the plot is that a corporation scams models into AI with the promise of a salary of 200K pa for as long as their image is used, but the don't actually want to pay the salary so they murder the models after they are scanned.

Don't want to worry any background actors or anything, but if the strike is successful and you subsequently become entitled to a salary for the use of your image...

Re: It's either 200 bucks or....

That was only because CGI simply want up to the job back then. Or at least not at the prices channel 4 could afford

It's either 200 bucks or....

...have you ever seen Looker?

Over 40 years old but seems quite prescient really

Methane-spotting satellite that gives true readings of industry emissions hits skies in 2024

The usual misinformation and obfuscation

The climate emergency is big news these days, but by and large the great unwashed aren't being treated to many actual facts.

It's long been known that methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However if you listen to most politicians, campaigners and self appointed "experts" in the media then you'd be forgiven for believing that carbon dioxide is the only greenhouse gas. Indeed according to most of what you read it's not carbon dioxide that's the problem, it's just plain carbon.

So what this satellite is going to do is give a lot of politicians, campaigners and "experts" a headache. They can't even differentiate between carbon dioxide and carbon so adding methane into the mix is going to make them look pretty stupid. As such I suspect they will report that the fact that methane is a greenhouse gas is a recent discovery.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Back in the eighties I worked for multinational that had it's European offices in both the UK and Germany. IT support was largely based in the UK. We supported some interesting desktops which had touch screens - well you didn't even have to touch the screen as such just put your finger near the screen. The boxes did however have keyboards, these weren't used very much, their main use was for logging on and a few other minor tasks. The rest of the time the users input data via the "touch" screens. As you may be aware Germany has it's own keyboard layout. The Y and Z are swapped from the QWERTY keyboard that is English speakers are used to.

When setting up boxes we had to set them up with the right keyboard setting for the office they were going to be deployed to. I kept German spec keyboards around for testing purposes and became fluent in using either. Some staff however forgot.

It was always fun talking a German end user through logging in with QWERTY keyboard, entering setup and changing over to a German keyboard using my long forgotten O level German.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

I have no problem as such with batteries that is can only be replaced in a workshop. What I have a problem with is manufacturers who try to prevent third party workshops replacing batteries, and of course manufacturers who charge ridiculous amounts to replace batteries.

Not so long ago I was told the useful life of a lithium ion battery should be ten years. In that basis I don't think it unreasonable to say that a failed battery within 10 years is actually a fault and while I don't mind paying for the battery I do mind paying a fortune for the labour to replace it.

The excuse from one manufacturer is that if they had to fit replaceable batteries their phones wouldn't be quite so ridiculously slim and worked cost ever so slightly more. In no other product would this be considered a reasonable excuse. Can you imagine a car manufacturer saying "if we made your tyres replacable it would make the car slightly bigger and ever so slightly more expensive. As such you'll need to buy a new car every year or two"?

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

There are so many problems with the meters that is be interested to know how many of those 58% work satisfactorily.

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

So you've tried one pair of ear buds against one pair of "old and tatty" cans and reached a conclusion of which type is better from that.

On the same basis I can confirm that the UK is always warmer than the south of France because it is warmer today. I can also confirm that all Vauxhalls drive nicer than Fords because my Vauxhall is nicer to drive than my wife's (admittedly old and tatty) Ford.

Waymo robo-car slays dog in San Francisco

Re: This is pretty terrible news

Under English law there's an interesting little wrinkle here. If you have a choice between hitting a dog or a cat which to you go for? Well apparently the law is such that hitting a dog must be reported, hitting a cat on the other hand does not. Apparently this is something to do with the fact that if you are involved in an RTI that results in damage to property you must report it. Dogs count as property, cats do not.

This presumably means that if a dog causes you to have an accident then the owner could be found liable, if on the other hand a cat causes an accident then the owner would not be liable.

So imagine a dog and cat run into the road and you have to choose between hitting one or the other. Do you choose the cat because it's not property and therefore legally hiring the dog would be worse. Or do you choose to hit the dog because the owner could then be found liable for the damage to your vehicle.

It seems that the law (in the US at least) allows the operators of autonomous vehicles do their own RTI investigation. Unsurprisingly they always seem to find that their software wasn't too blame.

Presumably these vehicles are bristling with cameras and other sensors and log absolutely everything, otherwise how would they learn and improve their software? As such it would make sense if after each and every RTI involving an autonomous vehicle all of those logs were handed over to law enforcement and indeed insurance companies.

It's a real shame that every vehicle doesn't have the same cameras and sensors and that it doesn't log all those inputs and control inputs too. It would be incredibly useful in both determining if any laws had been broken and who was liable for insurance purposes.

With the rise of autonomous vehicles I think it's important that legislators should get on this straight away and ensure that it is a legal requirement that all such evidence must be handed over complete and untampered. I suspect that would do a lot more to improve road safety than the operators and/or manufacturers carrying out their own investigations. After all if manufacturers and operators knew that they could end up being found liable then I'm sure they would make sure their software was infallible.

New York City latest to sue Hyundai and Kia claiming their cars are too easy to steal

All cars are ready to steal with the right equipment. Sometimes that equipment is a tow truck.

If a thief wants your car then they will take it. It's unfortunately as simple as that. The solution for every car owner is simply make your car less easy to steal than somebody else's similar model. That doesn't usually mean enhanced security, it's simple things like choosing your parking place.

The point being that improving security does not reduce car theft overall, if the thieves want a particular model of car they'll keep looking until they find an easy one to lift. The majority of car theft is to make money either by selling the whole car or more likely breaking the car and selling the high value parts which can't be traced.

Sometimes thieves don't even bother talking the car, they just strip it right there of high value parts likely to be damaged in a low speed shunt. And this is where manufacturers can do their bit. Maybe don't charge over a grand for a headlight unit. Firstly there is no way those units cost even nearly that much to make, secondly they could be more modular. Why force buyers to replace a complete unit to resolve a cracked cover? It's not even a lens any more just a plastic cover. A cheap plastic cover. Simple answer is to maximise profit.

Of course manufacturers aren't going to change without legislation. Individual lawsuits like this won't solve the problem.

Starlink's rocket speeds hit a 50 megabit wall for large downloads

Caveat Emptor and all that

The problem with people who whine about the service they get is that they never seem to bother to find out what they pay for.*

All of this is no different than people whining about not getting up to 8Mbps on their ADSL1 service all those years ago. Advertising "up to 8Mbps" didn't make any difference. People just saw 8Mbps and thought that's what they should be getting. Line lengths and contention ratios didn't mean squat to these people. They saw 8Mbps on the advertising and no amount of terms and conditions would convince them they shouldn't get 8Mbps all the time.

So if your service is described as "25 to 100Mb" you have no room to complain if you get 50Mbps throughput. That's very definitely somewhere between 25 and 100Mbps

*This is probably why the users of free services are always the ones whining the loudest

WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

Solid State

I always assumed that "solid state" meant that the the component was monolithic with no separate component parts or particularly moving parts. That being the case I would thing anything with vibrating membranes (ie moving parts) doesn't qualify as solid state.

Virgin Galactic flies final test before opening for business

Astronaut?

Why do they keep using the word astronaut? A brief suborbital flight as a passenger is surely not enough to qualify you as an astronaut

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: DO NOT go on the Internet with XP

The article already said that

Lightning just as frightening on Jupiter as it is on Earth

How did you not work Galileo into that headline?

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Odd thing to do

I don't understand why you'd respond by hiding the hard copy (oooerrr, obviously)

In that situation there is surely only one thing to do. March up to the CFOs office with the printouts and dump them on his desk with a cheery "here are your printouts". I suspect that might have resulted in a pay rise.

Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

We all know facial recognition is crap

Given how crap facial recognition software has proved to be in frankly amazed that anybody would use facial recognition to unlock their phone, letaline using it to allow access to any payment method

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

Re: Did I get this right?

"I think it's fair to say that by the end of this decade every property that can reasonably be connected to an FTTP network will be in a position for the owner to request it should they want it. Those that remain will be the true outliers - crofter's cottages in remote parts of the Yorkshire Dales or Bill and Jane's house that they built half way up Ben Nevis because they liked the views. There might also be a few small communities (hamlets perhaps) who don't have it by then but not many."

And I'm pretty damned sure you think wrong. Remember when the were promises from Openreach that every property would be served by fibre. There were doubters, lots of them. And the doubters were proved right when OR redefined "fibre" and said that included fibre to the cabinet. In other words DSL. You'd be amazed how many properties show as having FTTC available when the cable runs are so long and of such poor quality that the predicted speeds are no better than ADSL. I have a few properties where the "upgrade" to FTTC has resulted in a downgrade in performance.

Then there's my situation where there are two fibre enabled poles within reach of my house but Openreach have actively refused to connect me to either because their checker says FTTP is not available to my address.

Even if you offer to pay whatever it costs to be connected they're not interested. Instead you would need to order an EAD connection which is considerably more expensive than FTTP.

It's a crying shame that the government and Ofcom didn't open this up to tender on an area by area basis. And the way to do that would be to only grant the contract on the basis that every property would be covered. And you then defined the area so that each area includes low hanging fruit (ie densely populated areas that are easy to serve and therefore high profit) and more difficult to serve remote properties. And then you could impose nasty penalties should the job not be finished on time. Instead the whole damned job just got handed to Openreach. So much for this government's championing of a free market economy.

Re: Did I get this right?

Passed is a weasel word of ever I heard one. Yes fibre passes my property. There are two poles on the street behind my house and the fibre between them runs right past the end of my garden but openreach have categorically refused to connect me to either of those poles as my d-side comes in underground from the other side of the property. Having been in the industry for a long time I know that connecting me to either of those poles is simpler, practical and perfectly legal. OR's documentation shows that our street is fed underground so as far as they are concerned the poles may as well be on another planet. But I'm also willing to bet that they will class the fibre as passing my house and every other house on my side of the street.

If you don't believe that OR can be this ridiculous consider the things that can block them from visiting a premises to resolve a fault. For example we have a site with the street address 44-48 High Street. One day we reported a fault only to be told that OR couldn't dispatch an engineer due to an ORDI issue. Knowing that ORDI stands for openreach data integrity issue I asked what the problem with their database was. They came back and told me that the address on their database for the circuit was 44-48 but according to the post office there was no such address. I checked the PAF and there were 44, 46 and 48 in there but not 44-48. There was also an entry for our business but without a street number. OR had happily installed the circuit to that address but were now telling me that they couldn't dispatch an engineer to fix a fault because the address they had didn't match the address on the PAF. It took them a week to correct the issue! All they did was change the address on their systems and that took 5 working days.

Re: Did I get this right?

"We'll all have FTTP by the end of the decade?"

No.

What they mean is that they will have finished rolling out FTTP to all the premises they intend to roll it out to. That's not even close to all premises.

I've been told by Openreach that they have finished the rollout in my village, but I can't get FTTP.

OR: But we've got fibre on every pole they said.

Me: But what about all the premises (ie anything built after about 1970) that aren't fed from a pole.

OR: The rollout is just to do poles. We don't do underground fed premises on this rollout.

The more modern housing is fed underground because somebody at the post office (as it was then) decided that underground feeds were more "modern". The underground cables don't even run in ducts, they just go under roads and pavements a few inches below the surface. Cable breaks due to roadworks aren't uncommon. We've had two outages on our street this year. One when they installed some new drains that took out a couple of houses and one that took out the whole street when they were installing some new kerb stones.

Talking to one of the engineers that came to fix the latter he told me why OR weren't rolling out to premises where the d-side is underground. They simply don't have the time or the money to start digging up roads to lay in new d-sides to all the underground fed properties. And from what the engineer told me properties like that aren't included in the rollout project.

I did hear rumours that there were plans to use G.Fast to bring any properties still on copper up to 1Gbps however there are a couple of problems with that.

The first is that G.Fast might be capable of 1Gbps, but only over very short distances, probably below 100m and the loss over greater distances is much worse than with VDSL. The vast majority of cable runs from the DSLAM to the property on FTTC are well over 100m so in a nutshell G.Fast isn't going to be giving very many people anything like a Gig.

The other and more pressing problem is this: The majority of AIO street cabs deployed by OR just happen to be Huawei. GOV.UK have banned the use of Huawei kit in any solution delivering 1Gbps to the end customer. As such OR can't now use G.Fast to deliver "ultrafast" broadband to residential customers without ripping out their street cabs and replacing them with another manufacturer's kit. This might well be more expensive than doing the job right and laying copper into every premises. The best solution I can see is actually doing what they should have done in the first place and putting in poles and feeding aerially all those premises originally fed underground.

Oh and to anybody who says that fibre is irrelevant because 5G will deliver over 1Gbps I can only say have you any idea how far away we are from delivering 5G to every premises in the country? And have you any idea how many properties in the UK can't get a reliable mobile signal of any type at all?

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

The article seems to conflate motorcycles and scooters into a single group of PTWs. Which is a mistake.

It must be over thirty years ago I first heard the term PTW bandied about. It was used by some British industry group as some kind of sales/political pitch. The idea was it seems to try to convince the buying public and politicians that bikes were a lovely friendly and dull mode of transport. Convincing politicians was important as there has been a lot of anti-motorcycle legislation in the eighties mostly coming from a place of simply not liking dirty smelly motorcyclists and their dirty smelly steeds.

It was not unlike the old "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" advertising from a couple of decades before.

In some parts of the world, particularly east Asia, a scooters are pretty much a commodity. In many parts of the word a motorcycle is a luxury toy. That only comes out on sunny days. The two are very different things from the point of view of their use, even though mechanically they may be quite similar.

"Apple, however, has warned the vibrations produced by the German manufacturer's machines can damage its iPhone"

That iPhones apparently can't cope with the vibrations from two wheelers (powered or otherwise) show what a joke Apple are. Their advertising shows people enjoying an "active lifestyle" with their iProducts, but apparently not so active that it involves two wheeled vehicles.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

There are so many people moaning about MS on here while continuing to use Windows

There's a simple solution you know...

Re: @bombastic bob - pwned

"Computer is yours as you paid for it. Onto the other hand, Windows OS is not. You've only paid for the privilege of using it."

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. If you paid for Windows then you probably haven't read the contract. And if you didn't pay for for it you definitely didn't read it.

National newspaper duped into running GPT-4-written rage-click opinion piece

Re: I used to get get published in the Irish Times. This doesn't surprise me...

I was once told that half the letters in local rags and half the callers on radio call ins were from bored students. I was then later told that while they may be bored these students are actually doing it as part of their course work. Presumably you get credits for winding up Jeremy Vine.

AI isn't the issue, not even a little bit

Remember when the mainstream media used to try to work in a Titter angle to any minor story even when Twitter was only peripherally connected? AI is the new twitter.

Whether the story and byline photo were AI generated is utterly irrelevant to the main meat of this story. The primary issue here is that a major news outlet ran a piece that was utter tripe simply because they thought it would generate controversy. They didn't care a jot where it came from, they just saw it as something that would generate traffic and publicity in equal part.

The "fact" that it was AI generated is quite convenient for them. So convenient in fact that any reasonable person might wonder if the announcement it was AI generated was part of the plan. "Look lads, if we get called out on running this shoite what we do is claim we've been duped by a sophisticated AI scam. If that doesn't take the heat off we'll put Elon Musk in frame."

Intel says Friday's mystery 'security update' microcode isn't really a security update

NA

NA (rather N/A) has always meant Not Applicable in most contexts. Who decided this meant Not Available?

Cops crack gang that used bots to book and resell immigration appointments

Do they ever learn?

Remember the news story not long ago where driving test appointments were being block booked and then sold on at a huge profit?

Not only do gov.uk not learn from a technical point of view, but they don't learn from a legal point of view either. Shirley it's easy to make it a specific crime to profit from this sort of carry on. That wouldn't actually stop it from happening because there will always be somebody willing to take the risk of prosecution. What such legislation would do it make it easier, cheaper and quicker to prosecute. Which would be better for the public purse, but also more and quicker prosecution would then present more of a deterrent.

Oh and whoever mentioned event tickets earlier. The government keep on telling us they are concerned about ticket scalping but when challenged to do something about it they say it's complicated. No it isn't there's an easy start, just make selling tickets for more than their face value a crime. Oh and yes that does mean that charging an "admin fee" on the sale of tickets would be illegal. And so it fucking should be. I get tired of seeing a list price on a ticket and then learning there's several pounds "admin fee" per ticket. If you're ordering online how can there possibly be an admin fee per ticket? Maybe per sale (although I'm not even sold on that) but PER TICKET?

Again this wouldn't stop people selling on tickets at inflated prices, but making it a specific offence would make prosecution easier and therefore make it more of a deterrent.

In short legislation will never stamp out this king of shite, but it can reduce the problem

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

Except this one predates the majority...

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

"With 3.5mm jack one can listen and charge at the same time."

I've seen wired headphones for sale with a piggyback connector so you can listen and charge at the same time. I would have thought the need for that isn't all that common.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

"Is this the flip side of "we never sell those because they're always out of stock"?"

I remember once being told "sorry we don't stock those anymore because there's no demand, you're the second person I've told that today." Clearly irony detectors were out of stock as well.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

When optical mice first became popular I had a corner office manager call me up to say that on sunny days his mouse would misbehave, but whenever he had hold of it and was therefore blocking the sunlight the problems would disappear. My first thought was "and monkeys fly out of my butt". However on reaching the sun drenched office I saw the mouse cursor moving randomly even though the mouse itself wasn't moving. I picked up a pad and held it above the mouse to create a shadow and the random movement ceased.

Expecting the issue to be a faulty mouse I'd taken a spare down with me. By good fortune the new mouse was black and wasn't affected by sunlight.

I learned something that day. Not all managers are idiots.