* Posts by Horridbloke

439 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007

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Quarter of polled Americans say they use AI to make them hotter in online dating

Horridbloke
WTF?

What I don't understand is...

... why was McAfee asking about this and why the blazes did anyone answer?

Look ma, no fans: Mini PC boasts slimline solid-state active cooling system

Horridbloke
Boffin

Re: Counter productive

Not exactly, that's a random number generator coprocessor for abacus systems.

Patches to make WINE work on Wayland display server protocol are being merged

Horridbloke

Sounds like this generation's SCSI.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Horridbloke

Re: Are you ok?

They should change it to "XNU is Now Unix" then.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Horridbloke

Just one question...

Is it inflatable?

India's Mars Orbiter Mission loses contact, burns all fuel, deemed 'non-recoverable'

Horridbloke

@yorkshire pudding

I see no problem with this.

This credit card-sized PC board can use an Intel Core i7

Horridbloke

Re: Fahrenheit?

Freedom Fermal Scale

Buy 'em by the punnet: Raspberry Pi offers RP2040 chips in bulk

Horridbloke

Re: Brilliant little devices.

Wouldn't that be a LER?

Canon: Chip supplies are so bad that our ink cartridges will look as though they're fakes

Horridbloke

Re: Interesting ...

Could you try fitting a cheap replacement pickup roller from $ONLINE_TAT_BAZAAR? I got my 14-year-old laser printer working again recently using a £3.33 part and a youtube tutorial, though an a3 printer might be harder to source bits for. If the alternative is binning it then might as well have a go...

Intel offers Loihi 2 to boffins: A 7nm chip with more than 1m programmable neurons

Horridbloke

Re: Will it mimic my desire to...

No, this chip plays Crysis.

Age discrimination case against IBM leaks emails, docs via bad redaction

Horridbloke
Pint

Re: The old tricks

Probably not down the pub, IBM used to be a bit funny about employees and alcohol. Back in the nineties some college friends of mine applying for industrial placement years with IBM were expected to supply information about their drinking habits.

Icon because I don't work for IBM and hope never to have to.

Someone defeated the anti-crypto-coin-mining protection for Nvidia's 'gamers only' RTX 3060 ... It was Nvidia

Horridbloke

Re: Gamers also have to contend with bots and scalpers looking to make a profit

It was the CRT monitors that tripped the fuses wasn't it?

Humble Apple Pie: Cupertino sweetens pot to get its DTK prototype machines returned after developer backlash

Horridbloke
Windows

Re: Since it only costs $99 to be a developer

"1: Develop and market a product that Apple would like to be available on their platform"

"3: Profit"

(I don't speak for Apple but I don't think a fart app would cut it.)

Horridbloke

Free Apples

Apple absolutely have handed out free machines in the past. Our company received a bunch of macs around 2003/2005-ish because Apple wanted us to port our product to their platform. They all mysteriously vanished before they reached the devs. We think some of them ended up in a bar in town that someone in the office was involved with. Good times (not really).

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Horridbloke

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

"are poorly targeted"

That's good, it means your blocking regime works and the ad network doesn't recognise you.

AMD's latest top-end RX 6900 XT GPUs vacuumed up in minutes... maybe even by some actual gamers

Horridbloke
Unhappy

Nostalgia

I really miss being able to order a nice graphics card for a reasonable or semi-reasonable price and have it delivered a couple of days later.

(Still using a 780GTX)

Software engineer leaked UK missile system secrets and refused to hand cops his passwords, Old Bailey told

Horridbloke
Gimp

re: one assumes

"One assumes this guy is the full quid when it comes to intelligence or he wouldn't be a BAE engineer."

This is not a sound assumption.

LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade, tells rival project to 'do the right thing' and die

Horridbloke

Re: THIS IS AN EX-PROJECT!

It turned me into a newt!??!!

There ain't no problem that can't be solved with the help of American horsepower – even yanking on a coax cable

Horridbloke

Re: The other side to IBM cables.

There is no subfloor. It's just cables all the way down...

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

Horridbloke

Re: Ads for things I might like to watch

I have a low-end 2019 43" Samsung with the same stupid content-suggester thing on the home ribbon. It can effectively be disabled by putting a PIN lock on it. Sure, I would rather have the option to take it off the home ribbon altogether but since locking it last November I had genuinely forgotten it existed until I read these comments, so that's an effective mitigation.

(But yeah... the software on this is riddled with bad choices.)

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply

Horridbloke
Gimp

Re: GeForce RTX 3080

I think Crytek themselves have said nothing should be capable of running it well in "can it run crysis" mode for the time-being. That's kind of the point.

Competitive techies almost bring distributed disaster upon themselves – and they didn't even find any aliens

Horridbloke

Re: Pringles can?

Nice.. is that using the sieve as a parabolic reflector? I've heard good things about woks used in such a manner.

Horridbloke

Pringles can?

Pah! We used a metal toilet brush holder. It worked really well.

(Don't worry, we bought it new).

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Horridbloke
Boffin

We're too careful...

At our place we've all been in the position of being asked by our PHB to apply an untested tweak to a critical live system. It happens approximately once per project. Those of us with an ounce of professionalism and self respect decline to do so, stating our reasons in writing.

The PHB then works their down the chain until they find somebody who does what they're told. The live database or whatever is then destroyed, as per instructions. The rest of us then hear about the problem, recall the dodgy instruction we declined to carry out the previous day and see what can be done about recovery.

My favourite was the utter disappearance of the data files for an Oracle instance. It turned out a couple of entries had been removed from /etc/fstab, because for reasons we never got to the bottom of the PHB wanted those entries removed from that file and didn't want backchat about it. At least that one was a quick recovery.

Brit police's use of facial-recognition tech is lawful, no need to question us, cops' lawyer tells Court of Appeal

Horridbloke
Unhappy

Re: Mask

They probably already contain RFID chips.

Better late than never... Google Chrome to kill off 'tiny' number of mobile web ads that gobble battery, CPU power

Horridbloke

Re: Look at the size of those thresholds!

It gets better... I think those thresholds are for a single ad. So presumably a page containing a dozen of these, requiring say 40MB of network data and completely choking the CPU for several minutes would be tolerated?

Nah. My data quota, phone battery life and my actual life is worth more than that.

AMD rips covers off 64-core Threadripper desktop monster, plus laptop chips, leaving Intel gesturing vaguely at 2021

Horridbloke
Gimp

Yes but...

... can it run the Crysis remaster?

BT's Wi-Fi Disc ads banned because there's no evidence the things work

Horridbloke

Re: Standby for downvotes!

We just ditched Vodafone. Their routers are amazing, they last about six months on average. I just took a big bag of the ones we killed to the recycling centre.

(I wanted to just buy a good router and swap it in but the person whose name is on the bill wouldn't let me.)

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Horridbloke

Not quite IT...

... but many years ago I successly coaxed the Student Union's dead VCR back to life by dropping it about a foot into a table. I explained to the people who needed it that there wasn't really anything to lose by trying it.

Ents rule.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

Horridbloke

Re: last time an MS Office product crashed at random?

This morning. Excel 2010. Twice.

Horridbloke

Re: Understatement

"There are several different ways to start this office suite and our users find this really confusing! Let's give them another one!".

Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia accused of hacking Jeff Bezos' phone with malware-laden WhatsApp message

Horridbloke

@unfettered access

TO be fair the US investigators probably already have unfettered access.

The Nokia 3.2 is a phone your nan will love: One camera's more than enough, darling

Horridbloke

Re: Sorry, this doesn't change my mind

If smartphones are annoying you that badly then why wait? Just buy one of the many dumb phones available and use that instead. You could probably sort it out during this week's grocery shop.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Horridbloke

Re: FLIRC case especially for the Pi4

Do you have a link for that case? I haven't found it at the obvious sites.

Neptune-sized oddball baffles astroboffins: It has a good atmosphere despite star-lashing

Horridbloke
Happy

Oh what an atmosphere

I love a planet with a happy atmosphere.

The difference between October and May? About 16GB, says Microsoft: Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB of space

Horridbloke

Re: what I am curious about...

"... is MS hereby committing..."

No.

Idiot admits destroying scores of college PCs using USB Killer gizmo, filming himself doing it

Horridbloke

Not equivalent

This isn't equivalent to ransomware. There's no potential gain, no cleverness involved.It's pure vandalism, like putting bricks into a few dozen car windscreens.

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

Horridbloke

Re: Who bears the cost ?

You've got it.

Historically industries have often benefited from "externalised costs", i.e. costs paid for by someone other than themselves. Some decades ago in the west this might have been the factory that dumped nasties into the nearby river and didn't worry about the people downstream. More recent examples include web companies who can't be bothered to secure their customers' details. Many classes of overt crime are simply taking the externalised costs thing to an extreme.

The answer is to identify externalised costs and re-internalise them through regulation. This can be a whole spectrum of measures but should definintely include scope for criminal charges because otherwise most players will continue not to care.

I'm not sure who will still want to write software though. I prefer to do good work but I haven't always had that option and the day I'm held legally responsible for the quality of code I write I'll be quitting.

NexDock 2: Electric Boogaloo. Crowdfunded laptop shell sequel touts less plastic, more pixels

Horridbloke

Re: Server room tool

Peripherally McPeripheralface?

Security storm brewing for Oracle Java-powered smart cards: More than a dirty dozen flaws found, fixes... er, any fixes?

Horridbloke

Re: your card

The card issuers are generally pretty clear about it remaining their card.

Horridbloke

Re: update sim card???

Last time my provider needed to do that (for reasons that weren't entirely clear) they sent me a new sim in the post (notifying me beforehand by sms so I knew to expect it). Quite simple really.

Don't have a heart attack but your implanted defibrillator can be hacked over the air (by someone who really wants you dead)

Horridbloke
Unhappy

The workaround...

... is to not get sick.

You've been dying to know. Here's the answer: The Milky Way tips the cosmic scales at '1.5tr' times mass of the Sun

Horridbloke

I can't be the only one...

... who read that article in the voice of Eric Idle.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

Horridbloke

Re: New name needed

"so what will "Bosonics" bring ?"

Hopefully a new era of vinegar.

Horridbloke

Re: New name needed

Collidey McColliderface

IBM insists it's not deliberately axing older staff. Internal secret docs state otherwise...

Horridbloke
Big Brother

Re: So Ginni should watch out.

If that happens they'll almost certainly be paid off in return for signing a compromise agreement.

Ready for Glasto-net? Cheap, local low-power networks up for grabs in the UK

Horridbloke
Pint

I attended some sort of festival in August. It was near Gloucester.

We all got a badge that was also a phone (no, really) plus a sim card. There was an intention to provide a site-wide cell network. The conference organisers said they'd bought the necessary license from a bloke in a pub.

Sadly the network didn't work. It was a noble failure though.

Android Phones are 10: For once, Google won fair and square

Horridbloke

Re: Define "win"

"... that there were no developers to attract by the time Microsoft entered the game."

What are you on about? Microsoft had been in the game, through various Windows CE monstrosities, long before Google set to work. They just weren't very good at it.

Teardown chaps strip away magic from Magic Leap's nerd goggles

Horridbloke

Re: Missing parts

The unicorns are the glue surrounding the batteries.

Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

Horridbloke

Re: Common trick

"how to screw a network in 30 seconds".

A schoolfriend of mine apparently took out the network (which was only one large classroom / computer lab due to it being the eighties) by buying a 3.5mm-jack-to-BNC adaptor from Tandy and plugging his Sony Walkman into the network.

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