Posts by dvd

Re: Hmm

I've not found a compelling reason to upgrade since 19.2 - and why would I when it's so stable?

Re: Wow. What an impressive record.

They still have customers because they buy over other companies such as Domain Monster.

My domains have been in forced migration for a year now.

So where is this brilliant burglar who can make a key from a photo with a snot printer, when Timpson can't reliably make one with £10000 of kit and the ACTUAL KEY in their hands?

I'll go to him in future.

Re: Yes, but ...

No, if that's a viable business model then it just means that your customer is overpaying for the item without the firmware crippling in it (I used to work for a company thread did this shit too.)

Re: Lack of polish?

My wife sent me to the supermarket for some Brasso the other day.

One of the aisles had a massive sign above it saying "POLISH".

Brilliant, I thought. That was easy, and a whole aisle's worth to choose from.

Er, nope....

Re: It's not just our business

After the release of the "Ford Escort" and "Ford Fiesta" I was looking forward to the release of the "Ford Reader's Wives" but Ford sadly abandoned their policy of naming their cars after British Wank mags.

Re: That reminds me..

As someone who has written both firmware and software for cheque processing machines, I can advise that the magnetic properties of the ink were for reading reliability rather than for fraud prevention.

And the back room staff that did data entry and correction were paid by throughput rather than fraud detection so they'd just enter the data manually if it were to fail to read; there was no incentive for data entry staff to spot fraud.

A lot of places wouldn't even check signatures; there was little incentive to even do that until a customer complained whereupon the returns process would unravel the payments until it hit the initial acceptor of the cheque, who was then supposed to track down the writer of the cheque and get their money back. Good luck with that.

To commit cheque fraud the cheques only needed to be good enough to fool the retailer; hence not very good.

So the person out of pocket would be the account holder unless they noticed the fraud, then the retailer. There was little incentive for any bank to spot fraud. The only limited protection for the retailer was if a cheque guarantee card was also presented (remember them)?

Re: Location location location

I worked in Michigan for a while, in a tornado hot spot. The hardened area of the factory was also the toilet. When a tornado warning went off the entire factory staff had to crowd into the bogs.

Re: These point scoring things....

I missed a review and ended up doing it a year late retrospectively to keep the paperwork in order.

Naturally I put my targets as things that I had actually done in the past year.

My manager still marked my score down for not achieving some of my targets.

Re: The need for speed

"it had some double throttle flap thing in the carb"

vacuum secondary ;)

Fuel starvation.

Left hand corner causes fuel to slosh away from fuel tank fuel outlet.

Common in racing cars which usually have baffles in the tank to fix the problem.

Re: Afterburners

I was at the Reading Rock Festival in '81 when Concorde flew over.

Couldn't hear it...

Re: Skin tones

Well exactly. The narrative is that he's black but the truth is that he's pretty light. AOC is basically as white as me; the features that make her look Hispanic are pretty slight and are gone in the pixellated photos.

The real story here is that some people just want to make everything about race.

Re: Training data?

I suspect that it's spotting criminals from the row of numbers underneath the mug shot.

Re: For the last 45ish years ...

Well yes, that's completely true. These monocultures are basically tree ghettos. But it's also true that reducing paper usage isn't dancing the world's trees.

Re: I Remember...

When I was at Newcastle in first year they taught us in Algol W. In second year they decided that Pascal was now the tits and we all had to use that instead. Everybody just kept writing their programs in Algol and fixed the syntax errors.

That was possible in the second year as we had data entry terminals, unlike in the first year when we had fucking awful punch card data entry :-|

Re: NMNMN

If you're a touch typist and a hot desker you can 'reserve' your favourite desk by swapping the key tops on the keyboard at that desk.

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

There's an expression that I've not heard in 40 years since I moved away from Newcastle. In Scotland it's generally Tesco's car park that's reserved for the arse displays.

Re: Good for data-less phone plans

Yep. My mum doesn't have a smartphone and neither do a lot of her pals.

Re: Paris...

> Afterwards people were saying, "Paris, how lucky you are!" Business travel ain't glamorous.

One place where I worked we engineers had to travel a lot - it was absolutely hellish. Long hours, travelling cattle class, getting berated by customers, plus the inevitable extension to the trip length by at least a week. Totally shit. But nobody back home would believe it. Including the top management and the admin staff. They assumed that it was a paid holiday with a little light work on the side.

Expenses worked by getting an advance in travellers cheques and cash and interminable form filling on return. There was a big problem with engineers not having time / inclination to do the admin on return, so there was always a backlog of expenses to fill in.

The management / admin came up with a brilliant plan to clear the backlog of expenses. They announced that no trip would be approved for an engineer if that engineer had not done all their previous expenses.

The inevitable happened. Not one engineer in the company filled in an expenses form. Not one. Business trips for engineers came to a dead halt. Not a single customer visit happened for a couple of months. Management and admin were baffled; they could not understand why their cunning plan failed.

Re: Current copyright terms ignored... the world keeps turning

In my opinion there should be a use it or lose it clause. If I can't buy a copy then the copyright is lost.

Re: Dunfermline

They were starting to make inroads into Scotland but recently they have been closing their branches and have been maintaining a faux presence by keeping a lonely atm open in a few scottish towns.

Yeah they were - they were like nuclear bunkers. We couldn't understand it either, but there you go. Eight floors up in our rooms and the signal for radio 4 sucked balls. But practically underground surrounded by (presumably metal framed) buildings it was great.

Re: Package Disabler Pro

All the crapware is basically why I abandoned Samsung. It was just intolerable.

Re: Let me get this right

McVities Digestive, you barbarian!

Re: "Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly?"

I had burglars steal my reel-to-reel player and leave the rest of my hi-fi. They carefully stacked up the bits that they didn't want and they even disconnected it all properly. It was almost hard to be cross at them.

Yep, I did a free upgrade from windows 7 to 10 just last week. It worked fine. Microsoft haven't stopped allowing it, they have just stopped advertising it.

Re: Chorded keyboards

I had one of these - I hoped that it might help my RSI, but in fact it made it about a million times worse.

It's sill in my box of bits somewhere.

Re: Dido Harding

Read her Wikipedia page. Her career is a tale of failing upward from one failed company to another.

Re: "the backlash is a wee bit overdone"

I would have said that The Register's position on climate change is 'nuanced', accepting that it is happening while at the same time not accepting the greenwash and political posturing around the issue which is so common these days.

While you'd think that this is just intellectually honest, it seems to put you straight into the denier camp in a lot of people's eyes.

Re: Back in the day...

I worked on machines that had power keys exactly at knee height.

It was quite common to come across people with legs akimbo trying to maintain pressure on the power button with their knees while trying to finish up their work and initiate an orderly shutdown before leg cramps enforced a disorderly one.

Re: "Art"

I first heard stiffy in South Africa too.

From then on I made a point of using the term as much as possible.

Re: Filtering by browser is a throwback

I use Firefox on Linux Mint and the Barclays site works fine...

Seemingly some people were persuaded to plead guilty to lesser charges in return for shorter sentences.

Re: Not on the wall socket

One of the tests at one place I worked passed a 110V site transformer with a hole in the side big enough to get your whole hand inside..........

Re: This is inevitable

Well done, you've just invented kodi on raspberry pi ;)

Re: SASE

My recollection of the CAA was that they hated private pilots of all types.