* Posts by DJV

2378 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

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Re: Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Can someone ask NASA to take a look at Elon Musk next? Or is he now a totally lost cause?

Palantir wins US Army contract for battlefield AI

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They'll probably cross-leak the data from the UK NHS patient data and decide that these are the names and addresses of targets. Then they'll bomb the f*** out of the entire UK!

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

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Re: I'm thinking Microsoft need to look at their testing process

I'm thinking Microsoft need to look FOR their testing process - it's got AWOL!

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Re: It's mostly blank pages

And comes in approximately 100 sheets per roll.

Boss at one of Microsoft's largest resellers quits, admits secret share deals

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So, Neil Murphy's name is now mud. Or is Sam Mudd's name mud? I'm getting confused!

City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment

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What a choice!

Ugh, Oracle or SAP. It's like deciding which of your own hands you'd prefer to cut off.

Virgin Media to stand up rival network operator to BT Openreach

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IPv6

Hmmm, I wonder what happens if the other telcos want to use IPv6 on Virgin Media's network... something that VM themselves seem to have great difficulty in implementing.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

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Re: Cover them all

Hmmm, I wonder if your downvoter used to be a Chinese student...

Apple and Samsung tussle over whose gizmos are hardest to fix

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Re: Electronics isn't what it used to be

Fully agree, Martin.

I worked in TV/Audio repair between 1973 and 1984. In that time I went from working on large wooden-box chassis TVs where pretty much everything could be replaced (valves (tubes for leftpondians) in sockets, several modular boards that were still individually repairable, testing and replacing individual components etc.) - to, one day, taking the back off a plastic-cased 14" portable TV and wondering where the hell they'd managed to hide the main PCB! In this case, it was a tiny thing mounted high up on the left-hand side and almost completely out of sight.

Around the same time (1984) a TV came into the workshop. Two of its main characteristics were that it had one great big chip on a long, narrow and rather flimsy PCB. The other was that it had a mains transformer mounted on a bracket that stuck out of the back of the main plastic front casing instead of somewhere else within the casing itself. Later on, I found out why. If you removed the transformer (sometimes needed to get at and remove the PCB), the whole TV fell flat on its face as the centre of gravity of the rest of the set (including the picture tube) was further forward than the front feet!

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

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Here it is in full - it's called "The Plan"

https://funnyshit.com.au/the_plan.html

It should be essential reading for all levels from the lowest worker to the CEO!

Ivanti devices hit by wave of exploits for latest security hole

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Maybe a change of name is required

How about Ivanti Connect Insecure and Ivanti Policy Insecure?

Google flushes cached search results forever

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Re: Taking the ...

The Internet Archive should charge Google per click-through.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

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1938 Tube Stock - retired in 2021?

Hah, no - they still had some running a few specials last year! See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8tGQr1fSXM

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

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Happy

Waiting for the Geordie translation to be added!

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Trollface

Re: Motif?

Or, indeed, code...

I am beginning to suspect it's just monkeys and typewriters all the way down...

NASA lost contact with Mars helicopter Ingenuity, then managed to find it again

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Measurements

"It's so much water that the ESA said the ice deposits could fill the Earth's Red Sea."

What's that Olympic-sized swimming pools? Or in Wales to the depth of Snowdon?

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

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Re: when it's already basically the same as Chrome

Yeah, that's the problem. Thank goodness for CustomCSSforFx which means it's possible to make it look like it did around version 50 with a properly usable interface!

It's a preview party at Microsoft, but do you really want an invite?

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Re: Acronym Meaning (or maybe a Father Ted/Jack moment?)

G = Girls

A = Arse (yes, NOT Ass)

That means we are only missing the F!

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

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Re: Your most often-used shortcuts should be pnned into the Taskbar

My most often used shortcuts are pinned to my Quick Start toolbar, which has a much greater capacity for icons than the restricted taskbar. Even though MS tried to remove Quicj Start in W7, too many programs relied on it being there and, until W11, it was always possible to resurrect it easily. Under W11 it can still be added but it takes a few extra hacks. The taskbar is just for the RUNNING programs, like in W95 to XP, which is how I want to use my computer.

How the tech toy century has troubled Santa's sack

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"the microscopic memory of a politician's WhatsApp message cache"

Thanks for that - gave me a big Christmas Guffaw*!

(* which is less painful than a Gruffalo after the Christmas sprouts!)

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

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You were lucky.

We had to chisel zeros and ones into stone tablets...

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

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Re: Bullshit?

Don't you mean horseshit?

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

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Re: irate BOFH filling in squares

No, a true BOFH would make sure ALL error messages appearing on screens would be QR images and then supply graph paper for people to report errors to him (refusing to accept any other kind - photos of said screen being automatically rejected). But, of course, the QR code on screen would have some subtle code running behind it so that it would flip the occasional square at random intervals making sure that the pattern copied by the user would never match the one on the screen, thus rendering all the error codes invalid due to, ahem, "user copying error".

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

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Happy

2024 prediction

El Reg adds some simple global code to its website to check if a user is coming from the UK. If so, it performs on-the-fly translation of Americanised words back into proper English in order to stop annoying its British readers!

(Ducks for cover awaiting all the downvotes.)

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

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Kryten would be happy...

...if they start preaching about Silicon Heaven...

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

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Re: Take responsibility

Having gone through several cloudy services, I'm currently using a combination of the following: OneDrive, DropBox and Filen.io (yes, these three will all work on the same computer at the same time).

The latter is by far the fastest for uploads and, so far, hasn't glitched on me. My requirements are modest so I've been only using the free versions of all three. However, Filen.io's prices do look very reasonable with a €35.99 lifetime payment currently for 200GB (this is a Black Friday deal).

Others I've tried in the past include Box but their free space remaining has a habit of not recalculating after you delete files and you "run out of space" when, in reality, you should have plenty free; iceDrive but this doesn't play nice with the excellent FreeFileSync program that I use a lot; nextCloud which had various issues that I couldn't get resolved; and pCloud, which also had issues which meant that backups would randomly fail to sync.

I've never tried Google Drive but that's mainly because I loath them as a company!

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

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Re: Search disaster

I gave up with Windows Search after that disastrous update a few years back when they ripped out the search that almost worked and replaced it with the current mess.

Try using "Everything" from Void Tools - far superior.

https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

Windows Server 2022 update gave ESXi host VMs the blue screen blues

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"Users expressed disbelief that Microsoft would send an update out into the world that resulted in such carnage"

Really? Unfortunately, this seems pretty normal for Microsoft nowadays. And I speak from personal experience having suffered from their Windows Defender update earlier in the year that wiped icons and then programs without warning!

Right-to-repair fight going national as FTC asked to lay down the law

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Re: " they have a clear incentive to keep iPhones working"

Yup, keep believing that as opposed to more obvious: "they have a clear incentive to keep making more profit."

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

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Mushroom

Donald Trump!

Just look at the similarities:

Has the right physique for cage fights (well, I expect he probably thinks so).

Had a similar privileged upbringing.

Frittered most of his money away on bad business ideas (but claims they were all successes).

Enjoys being sued by lots of people.

And is also a great actor (what do you mean, he's not acting?)

UK signals legal changes to self-driving vehicle liabilities

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"Potholes"

Given the state of some of the UK's roads, the potholes that I find I have to regularly negotiate locally will definitely scupper many a robo-taxi!

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

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Excellent, except that I find that last sentence rather hard to believe!

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

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Re: trust them to deliver the goods after you paid them

I trust them* to deliver the goods somewhere - but, given the stories about them over the years, I don't necessarily trust them to actually deliver the goods to the designated address.

* them being Amazon, or any company that uses Evri/Hermes (or whatever they're called this week) or any similar so-called delivery service whose drivers have difficulty knowing how to find their own arses upon far too many occasions.

Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past

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Facepalm

You B******ds!

Now I've got that damned song incessantly going around my head!

Date night from hell looms for Apple as Netherlands says: 'It's not me, it's you'

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Re: At least AI...

How long will it be before it will just be AI apps talking to AI apps with no human beings involved at all?

World checks it's not April 1 as Apple signals support for full US right-to-repair rule

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Oh Deere...

Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough

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OMG!

Has Hell frozen over? Has a politician been caught NOT lying?

No, but - shock horror - Apple have spoken to El Reg!!!!

"In a statement provided to The Register, Apple said it'd begun rolling out new subscription pricing "in the US and select international markets.""

Oh yeah, and they've jacked their prices up as well.

LinkedIn lays off nearly 700 staff, engineers to suffer the most

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the cuts will range across engineering, product, talent, and finance teams

Wait, are you telling me they employ people with TALENT? Obviously, none of them ever reached management level.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

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Re: Fork lift trucks

Yes, for safety reasons, you definitely need to be a properly licenced fork-lift truck driver, as is demonstrated in this 'extremely serious' YouTube video.

Australia threatens X with fine, warns Google, for failure to comply with child abuse handling report regs

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Re: X/Twitter "failed to provide any response" to some questions, and in some instances "provided a response that was otherwise incomplete and/or inaccurate."

You mean that all they received from Musk was yet another poo emoji.

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

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HR Department

"Where there's a particularly dense mass – like the lift well, the services risers, or our HR department"

Yeah, I've worked in places that had HR Departments like that. Any denser and they would have become singularities.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

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Re: Makes you proud

The one that gets me is when you find and fix a long-standing bug in some code and wonder how in hell it managed to keep going in its original state for so many years!

From chaos to cadence: Celebrating two decades of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

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Re: "making the world a little bit better. One patch at a time"

Yeah, happened to me as well. How do they get it so wrong?

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"making the world a little bit better. One patch at a time"

Well, given the quality of the patches*, that's a matter of opinion!

* Like many, I was clobbered by the icon/program deleting patch of earlier this year that required a complete reinstall of Windows.

Astronomers spot collision between two exoplanets, both feared vaporized

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Did they exchange insurance information at the time of the crash?

Apple antique aficionados can boot to the future with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

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Re: Yep, it works

Indeed, my 2009 iMac is currently running macOS 12/Monterey, though I haven't moved it up to Ventura as yet. After it became sluggish running High Sierra (officially the last available version for that model) I upgraded to an SSD and took OCLP for a spin at the same time. The detailed instructions provided by YouTuber Mr. Macintosh on how to successfully install and use OCLP should always be your first port of call.

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

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Re: Apparently the government have a plan to do something about it

Yes, they plan to burn down all the chicken coops or something similar and just as relevant...

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

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Location?

At a Business Link office I once had to work in, the server room was the 'Gents'.

Admittedly, it was no longer still in use for its original purpose, and they had at least removed the, um, seats, but the cubicles were still there as the partitions were brick built.

Tweaked Space Shuttle Main Engine gets ready for final testing

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