Posts by VinceH

Re: Has anybody actually tested this?

"I'll let you mix your phone with the gease, salt and food particles...."

Not a problem. Put the phone in something else before it goes in the crisp packets. A (clean) sandwich bag will do the trick.

Re: Not just a memory...

"@VinceH - I've got the evidence of drawers full of the extra cables that came with everything, because there was 'one of each' in the box, I used the one I needed, and stored the rest for all those occasions when I would need the alternative."

Ditto. :)

YMMV, but I do occasionally end up searching those drawers (actually now plastic containers in the shed) for odd cables for people. (And sometimes I even find them!)

However, that should be less of a problem now with everything pretty much standardised on a comparatively small set of cables/connectors. Back in the day a VCR might have come with a host of leads for the different types of connections that could be made from it (the one you'd use would depend on which connection is available from the multitude on your TV), these days there should be much less of that.

Instead, there is this problem you mentioned instead:

"because there are two cables that appear interchangeable but have different capabilities,"

This is again easily solved. Instead of the details of the cable being printed in a dark colour on the dark cable itself, they could put a decent label around the cables to state - in more easily readable colours, such as black on white - what the cable is and what it is for.

Re: Simple rules

Sites that follow those rules will have their adverts appear on my screen (if I visit them) without any effort on my part: I don't run an ad blocker, I run noscript - so they simply won't be blocked.

Re: Until we can breed more clueful users...

"If you remove empowerment from their hands, people aren't going to magically learn on their own before you give it back to them. It just means there's no need to learn."

^ This.

Also, the sort of person who does stupid (searching for regularly visited sites instead of bookmarking* etc) is the sort of person who will develop a blind spot for notifications popped up by Firefox, and just click them away.

^{* Pet bloody hate - especially when they do that for important sites such as their bank. GAH!}

Re: 2FA on emails

Given that he apparently said that because "nearly everyone's email addresses are available on the dark web" I'm not entirely sure he himself knows what it means. If nearly everyone's email log-ins were available, that would be a different matter. (Though he may be right for anyone that uses ABCD1234 (etc) as their password).

However, that's based purely on El Reg's reporting; there's no link to a transcript of the speech. A quick search suggests the Parliament and Internet Conference referred to is taking place today - so it's probably something he said today, with no transcript available online yet.

Re: Rip off on car sales ...

"The double-tax sale month is indeed a scam."

Yes, and it almost certainly means the numbers presented in the article don't give us the complete picture. As well as the amount of revenue lost due to unlicensed vehicles, how much was gained due to the one month's double taxation of any vehicles transferred?

Re: Ah, human desire for convenience.

"On a separate note: splell chex on this window appears to flag non-Brit splellings: neighbor is flagged, neighbour is not. Color and colour likewise. Is this new? Has El Reg gone all King George III on us poor cross-pondians?"

I would imagine your browser is doing the spell checking - so if you are in Overpuddle and it's flagging up spellings that are right for you, and wrong for us, that suggests the browser's language is set up wrongly.

Or as an afterthought, what with a significant new version of Firefox having been released very recently, is it possible the developers have tried to be super clever (and in so doing, possibly given themselves need of a facepalm) and are trying to base the language on the site/TLD?

Re: Spineless of them to give in

Rich 11 replying to flatpackhamster's comment that "Attacking Christianity in Britain is like kicking a child in a wheelchair."

"Rubbish. A child in a wheelchair is a human being and has the same value as you and I. Christianity is a religion, a man-made concept which is open to question and criticism however much a number of people might value their belief in some particular one."

I may be wrong, but I think you're actually making the same point flatpackhamster was, rather than countering it. I don't think he was likening the two different things, but making a point about the attitudes of the sort of people who complain about a sausage roll in a nativity scene.

Re: So is Alexa now the.....

Actually, no - my bad (memory).

I thought the line was "Get in the car if you want to live" - but it isn't, it's "Come with me if you want to live" and I've been misremembering it for a while.

"My other half has this annoying habit of saying less words than she needs to describe a problem, for example it won’t work."

Someone I know has a broadly similar, but not quite the same annoyance. When asking for help with a problem over the phone, I tell him to read out what it says on screen, but he'll skip bits. So I tell him to read it exactly and he'll re-read it, and now the skipped bits become "blah blah".

The words he's skipping are usually the important ones that'll give me a clue - he's skipping them because they're the ones he understands least.

Re: May I introduce you to...

"It's English, how many rules do you want?"

It's English - there can never be too many rules.

Re: Sounds fishy

"If he was blind, how did he know there was no one in the driver's seat? The driver could have been mute."

If you switch out mute and replace it with deaf, I think I've seen that documentary.

"The rest of us go camping to get away from the hi-tech world for a little while"

Stay away from camp sites and try a little wild camping* - you're then less likely to encounter other campers, let alone other campers with gadgets like this.

* Though these days I'd rather opt for hotels and nice beds.

A quick bit of searching, and the figures come from a PPRO blog post titled The UK is going cashless - which mentions those stats, but doesn't link to any published results of the survey.

If wandered to their contact page and sent them this:

In your blog post dated 10th August 2017 - titled "The UK is going cashless" at https://www.ppro.com/blog/uk-going-cashless/ - you state that 26% of us would never choose to pay cash.

According to my maths, that means there are 74% that gave a different answer. I've had a brief search for the results of the survey itself that you refer to in that blog post, but can't find it (and you don't appear to link to any published results) - could you either tell me where it is, or provide me with the full results for that question?

Similarly with the associated statistic - that 26.35% find it irritating to pay by cash. How does the remaining 73.65% breakdown in terms of the actual question asked and options given? And was a similar question asked to determine how many people find it irritating if they have to pay by card?

As it stands, it looks as though you have cherry picked some results for the purposes of your blog post and to back your own position, but without the full results those statistics are, to be blunt, meaningless.

They'll probably think I'm some kind of internet crackpot and ignore me, but you never know.

Re: You Seppos really need

"We'll get right on that ... as soon as you fix your government."

I think both may be way beyond repair by this stage.

Re: CallCredit Noddle are terrible too.

I keep reading 'Noddle' as Noddie - which, mis-spelling of Big Ears' mate's name aside, sounds like it could be right.

Re: "that particular director is on holiday - so the perpetrator knows that much"

That's always possible - I know that director is on Facebook. It sometimes happens when another director is away as well, and I expect he's also on Facebook.

However, the opening wording of the email I received this week is making me think the knowledge is coming from meatspace. I'm not there every day, but most of the time my days are fairly regular - except the last couple of weeks when I've been there very infrequently.

The email opened up with "Are you available".

I doubt if the director has mentioned my schedule on Facebook, so my sneaking suspicion is that it may be someone working on the same trading estate who sees me coming and going, and isn't sure when I am/am not going to be there.

Re: I lost track somewhere

So when you see someone taking a picture of their left shoe (or whatever) you know now that when you mug them and steal their phone, you also need to steal their shoe.

Or if they're taking a picture of something less practical to steal, such as their right ear (the 2FA image may include the surrounding hair, so just lopping it off won't be good enough), take a photo of it with your own phone while you're mugging them. You can then show the picture to their phone.

Yup. This is a really good idea, and completely without any potential flaws. Sign me up.

"As for eBay, I've lost count of the number of times I've asked for a VAT invoice from a seller, and been fobbed off with all sorts of crap."

This is also a problem on Amazon. I don't use eBay much, but I expected it would be the same problem. This particular problem is completely separate from the one the article is about - but it is one that could easily be solved.

Marketplace providers such as Amazon and eBay ought to be legally obliged to provide an invoicing system on behalf of VAT registered traders. Ordered something on Amazon from a third party seller? You get the invoice in the same way you get the Amazon invoice - go to the order and just print the invoice from there. After all, they should have the seller's details - including their VAT number.

Re: Every day's a school day

"

"rotated the mouse 180 degrees, so the 'tail' could point away from her"

In all my time I've never heard this one before. Yay for Fridays."

I sort of have in that I encountered someone who decided that the mouse lead going towards the back of the desk was impractical. If it came towards the front, she figured she could take the mouse off the desk and put it on top of the PC (that was underneath) when not in use.

I pointed out to her how the mouse would work if she did that - but she only finally accepted what I said when she actually tried it, and promptly put it back how it was before.

"Why are the details of 700,000 non-US "customers" included in along with test data?"

Because Equifax fucked up - this data was stored in the US in error; the result of a "process failure."

Equifax knew they'd fucked up - this process failure was supposedly corrected in 2016.

But Equifax have clearly fucked up the correction of the fuck up, given that the data was still there to be hacked in May 2017.

And, of course, they also fucked up by not keeping up with patches, resulting in that hack.

Re: Complex licensing

"I have to say, for this reason, when people who don't work in IT talk to me about IT and are so keen to tell me that they've just moved over to SAP, or Oracle, or whatever, I shake my head and walk away. Some day it will come back to hurt them. Many of them don't even know what it is and certainly don't work in a company large enough to justify it, they've just heard that other bigger people do, so they end up on the same things."

^This.

The subject is very timely because where I am today, one of the front-office guys said to me last week that "we need SAP." Knowing eff all about it, I looked it up, and decided that we don't - but asking the guy for more details (such as which SAP product specifically), he wasn't able to give me any, other than "a potential customer uses it, but they can't use us unless we do too."

Unsurprisingly, that sounds like utter nonsense to me - if true, it would surely means no SAP-using business can use the services of any non-SAP-using business; the logical progression if that claim were true is that if we used this (unspecified) SAP product, our suppliers would have to as well - and would the same problem occur the other way? Would our customers also therefore need to use it?

So his reason was probably down to his not having a clue about it (as per what Lee says above), or whoever he's spoken to at this potential customer not having a clue about it (ditto) - or both.

Does she come from the planet Z'k$ty92##gq5^, like my mum?