* Posts by Chris G

6754 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

Chris G

Re: Hint

Cortina is Spanish for curtain, so I guess someone is hiding behind the Microsoft curtain.

Chris G

Need a link

Where does Simon purchase his MSDs (Manglement Sedation Device)?

I have a use for at least one.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Chris G

Re: Selective attention

I have had that for years, I learnt it from n allegedly deaf aunt. Whenever shelost interest in a conversation she would complain her hearing aid was playing up and she would withdraw from the conversation, however, it would miraculously function if something interesting came up. I can't do conversations with more than two people at s time anyway so people who know me are used to me shutting out a multi channel yak.

NASA's Christina Koch returns to Earth as the longest-serving woman astronaut – after spending 328 days in space

Chris G

Re: Question : What's more import ?

If we are to achieve anything in space, it is extremely important to understand how the rigors of long periods in space affect the female body. Particularly those of childbearing age as that impacts the potential for eventual colonisation.

That doesn't suggest that women don't have the same potential as men for space exploration, it is just a question of looking for obstacles that need to be overcome.

The first female cosmonaut, Valerie Tereshkova ( hope I spelled her name correctly) went up in 1963, she was an engineer, skydiver and went on to become a member of the Duma.

Considering even in this so called politically correct world women and ethnic minorities are still discriminated against, it is relevant to mention sex or face to demonstrate that any human has the potential to do anything.

The phrase ' Political Correctness' implies being correct for reasons of policy rather than simply believing that ALL of humanity is inherently equal.

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Chris G

Re: Positivity?

This 'positivity' sounds as though it was written by a PR wonk working for someone with a lot of satellites to launch or maybe it's just cynical old me!

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Chris G

Re: 0/10 Would Not Buy

Exactly my thinking. I wouldn't buy an airliner without cup holders with three levels of anti-spill redundancy built in, even my 125cc scooter has a cup holder inside the glove box lid.

Billionaire pulls out of reality telly show that was supposed to find him a date to take aboard Musk's space loveboat

Chris G

Exhaustive questioning

I am curious as to what the exhaust of the Skyrora consists of once the 600Kg of processed plastic waste has burnt. I know they are recycling potential landfill but there's recycling and recycling without further pollution.

Anyway aside from that it's a good thing to see Skyrora advancing steadily and achieving their goals.

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

Chris G

Re: one direction

I use the Kaspersky password manager, as it comes with the AV package I have with them.

I have however, been considering developing a rectal recognition app to open my phone, using a Bluetooth thimble to avoid having to drop my strides st inopportune moments.

Who's got the WD-40? Owners of Motorola's rebooted Razr whinge about creaky hinge

Chris G

Re: Fx: CREAK

There should be a phone assistant app for that, it would still probably spy on you but would be way cooler than Siri et al.

Chris G

Re: WD-40

Other (better) lubes are available.

Non sprayed PTFE is good for most plastics, some propellents are not plastic friendly.

Is Chrome really secretly stalking you across Google sites using per-install ID numbers? We reveal the truth

Chris G

Re: Ad flinger makes browser, ad flinger needs to track you

Ilike that the Ad-tech companies prefer the apparent abilty to reduce ad fraud over privacy.

In other words "My profits are more important than your privacy".

What a terrible result from this year's Super Bowl. Can you believe it? Awful. Yes, we're talking about the tech ads

Chris G

Feeling stuffed

At the Superbowl, the advertising is the the meat and potatoes of the whole thing, the actual ball play is only the gravy with the halftime extravaganza being the mustard on the side of the plate.

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

Chris G

Jeremy! Is that you?

iCloud hacker perv cops nearly 3 years in jail for stealing and sharing people's private, intimate pics

Chris G

Months rather than years

It does sound as though guidelines are needed for sentencing, also to determine the harms done to victims which would play a part in the sentencing.

Elon Musk shows world that he is truly awful at something

Chris G

Freeby

You can download free software that will allow you to make 'music' like this and Youtube has instructional video how tos, I think that's what muskie did.

The Grimes track just made me think of how much better watching Seven of Nine was than Grimes even without the lyrics and music.

BSOD Burgerwatch latest: Do you want fries with that plaintext password?

Chris G

Ironic

That one of te World's biggest Macs uses Windows

And if you turn to your left, you can see the walls of Amazon Web Services' vast server farm. And next to it, a gift shop and visitor center

Chris G

We've made prime delivery faster.

Not my bloody house they haven't!

The poorly paid monkies that supposedly deliver for Amazon just return to sender rather than stop to look for my easy to find house on a country road. Same for my five neighbours, Amazon delivery and customer service is only interested in easy to find urban clients but they still sell to those who live a little out of the way and then don't deliver to them.

I have watched the delivery van drive past at 90KPH several times in a day on occasion.

SF tech biz forks out $146m in fines, settlements after painkiller makers bribed it to design medical software that pushed opioids to patients

Chris G

Pharmaco/rrupt

Pharmaceutical companies are no different to any other manufacturers, their bottom line is sales.

Anything they can do to increase sales they will do, occasionally, they try not to get caught.

A good example is over the counter proprietary treatments are are carefully designed in many cases to maintain stasis in a condition rather than cure it (think athletes foot for one example) if the medication provides a rapid cure the patient will stop buying it and doctors are encouraged to prescribe in a similar manner for many non life threatening ailments.

I had an acquaintance who was a freelance drugs salesman, he worked for several large pharmacos before retiring very comfortably to a sunny beach, he had little good to say about his employers other than the money he made from them.

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

Chris G

Percussive Maintenance, is probably the oldest technicue in the engineer's toolbox, dating back to the first stick or stone picked up by a tool user.

You can adjust literally anything with a measured blow.

Google says its latest chatbot is the most human-like ever – trained on our species' best works: 341GB of social media

Chris G

Re: What's the problem?

"don't forget bad grammar and spelling errors"

Sorry you've loosed me there!

Chris G

Re: What's the problem?

Also needs to interject the word 'like' several times into every sentence.

Chris G

Wow!

The chat in the article looked just like the real chats I have seen on my wife's Whatsapp pages.

Vacuous, pointless and content free. I have met quite a few people that couldn't pass the Turing test.

In defence of my wife the chat is stuff she has shown me from people she works with.

Facebook coughs up $550m to make AI photo tagging lawsuit vanish. How ever will it survive on that $17.9bn left over?

Chris G

Facebook

Sooo, we haven't seen the back of them yet?

Difficult season: Antivirus-flinger Avast decides to 'wind down' Jumpshot

Chris G

@fnusnu

That's what I thought, and don't call me Shirley.

Chris G

AV or Marketing company?

I stopped using avast's paid for AV after they began to constantly load popups trying to flog ever more stuff to me, there was no way of opting out and it drove me nuts.

Even after deleting it there were items that were a bugger to remove from my PC.

My impression is the company has lost any ethical bosses it had and replaced them with marketing wonks.

US government grounds drone fleet (no, not the military ones with Hellfire missiles) over Chinese espionage fears

Chris G

Re: "he hoped American manufacturers would replace foreign drone suppliers over time"

The " Made in America" label only requires that assembly takes place in the US, the parts can come from anywhere.

Plus as mentioned above, made in America won't preclude the possibility of vulnerabilitues that can be exploited by bad actors so, this is an economic ploy or they don't know what they are talking about.

In case you wanna launch your boss into the Sun, good news: Earth's largest solar telescope just checked and, yeah, it's still pretty fiery

Chris G

Re: Oh really ?

When I first came to live in Spain, I took Spanish lessons, the husband of my teacher was the senior meteorologist for the region.

I told him ' when we are sailing, apart from a sorm warning printout service we have on board, the most reliable forecasting is going up on deck and looking at the sky and the sea state'.

He said that is more or less what he did before going to work each day, went up to the roof of his apartment and checked real time what was going on.

It's been one day since Blighty OK'd Huawei for parts of 5G – and US politicians haven't overreacted at all. Wait, what? Surveillance state commies?

Chris G

What makes you think Nauru is the only place that would be interested in trade with Britain, what was the second biggest economy in the EU?

Russia and China definitely would go for a deal, then there is Canada, one of the national security threats to the US with it's steel and aluminium prices. The biggest limitation to trade with the rest of the world is those countries that are already tied to the US as the yanks won't like Britain treading on their toes. As for Europe, now is the time to negotiate, it is hardly lost to the UK, they still need the UK as a market.

Chris G

Re: So we'd FSCK'd the USA?

"I wouldn't rule out some sort of punitive action in the form of delaying trade negotiations," Waldron said. "The current administration has repeatedly embraced using economic tools such as tariffs or trade deals as political signals to indicate their displeasure." ®

Yeah, well that would be a blessing, if the UK can't dive straight into a one sided trade deal with the States it will give the gov' time to explore other avenues that may be more advantageous and less tied down than a transatlantic deal would be. Europe is still the UK's closet geographic trading partner and still offers the potential of a large market, aside from Europe being out of the EU allows Britain to have a go at the rest of the World unfettered.

So feck 'em let them do their worst.

EU outlines 5G rules: You don't have to keep 'risky' vendors completely Huawei

Chris G

Re: It is all trade war.

National security for the US is the domination of as many markets as possible and to keep the dollar as the predominant means of international exchange, I doubt it was ever really about China's ability to spy on anyone as much as cornering the market on 5G to the point that it would be difficult for anyone else to compete.

As things are Huawei seems to be much further ahead in most aspects of 5G and certainly more ready for roll out than most.

The US is still trying to overcome China's dominance of the highly strategic rare earths market and has been playing catch up there for at least 5 years so 5G added to that is too much for them.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Chris G

Recycling

Perhaps some enterprising chap with access to rocketry could start a scrap business with a revamped shuttle. After all they had a load bay and an arm to load it, get it up there and leave it there, collect old sats select the good bits and launch the crap into a safe re-entry use a service system to bring more ful for sat chasing and taking back the good bits for sale, I bet even collectors would be interested in old sat bits.

Cue Steptoe & Son theme.

You spoke, we didn't listen: Ubiquiti says UniFi routers will beam performance data back to mothership automatically

Chris G

Re: Time to switch to Huawei !!!

I am not even remotely able to write software or design an app but I would imagine that anyone who could design a tool to disable or reconfigure any telemetry would be a seller.

This entire culture of stealing data that is essentially my private property is intensely annoying to say the least,I have just discovered that when I use bluetooth to read the app that runs my PV system, it automatically turns on Google location and though I can limit what it sends, I am not sure how limited that is.

You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that

Chris G

Re: It's legal

Aside from the fact that most politicians have the will to prosecute acts like the complete shut down of public communications.

Trump has set precedents for future presidents that are likely to be taken up by them, he is not only creating an unpleasant present but screwing the future too.

Remember when Europe’s entire Galileo satellite system fell over last summer? No you don’t. The official stats reveal it never happened

Chris G

A GPS system

That lacks direction.

It looks as though for any serious user, they will need the redundancy of the US system rather than rely on the alleged redundancies that Galileo may have.

I still memorise a map before going on a journey with a route that is new to me and obviously take it with me.

Ding-dong. Who's there? Any marketing outfit willing to pay: Not content with giving cops access to doorbell cams, Ring also touts personal info

Chris G

Re: GDPR?

Trouble is, it needs some complaints made to the EDPS so that they can take action.

Trouble is that most of the idiots who buy this stuff can only see out through their navels.

Over the Moon? Not quite: NASA boss has a good whinge about 'counterproductive' Authorization Bill

Chris G

Re: Wouldn't like his job

I wonder if the committee isn't being swayed by those interested in developing things a bit nearer home.

There must be a lot of things that need development and the relevant funds in order to get the Space Patrol off the ground. That would have some conflict of interest for aerospace companies who are confronted with 'We either have the money for the moon or the Space Patrol' .

Virtual reality is a bonkers fad that no one takes seriously but anyway, here's someone to tell us to worry about hackers

Chris G

Re: No one wants to see me playing beatsaber...

VR will really take off when it is possible to have a sabre of a different calibre beaten.

If the porn industry puts some effort into VR research, traditional gamers will be a minority. Then the relevant malware will kick into high gear.

Chris G

Re: The horror, the horror...

More like a dystopian future where Boris and Trump have become immortal cyberborgs leading us into an even darker future.

You're always a day Huawei: UK to decide whether to ban Chinese firm's kit from 5G networks tomorrow

Chris G

Re: Yellow Devil

You title explains a good deal.

The Chinese do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion, in fact they are officially atheist.

They are also threatening to divert a greal of much needed wealth from the top 0.1% in the West, add to that the fact that they embrace socialism, free education and healthcare and you have the devil incarnate.

FCC lines up $16 billion for broadband across entire US. Well, except New York because, screw them, right?

Chris G

Re: USA

So much to vote for and so few votes.

And not only in the US.

Windows takes a tumble in the land of the Big Mac and Bacon Double Cheeseburger

Chris G

Re: To be fair

"Bacon R Us"

If they would do a proper bacon sandwich, which is to say: slices of lovely bacon between slices of lovely bacon, instead of what you usually get, slices of bacon between slices of bread, something that is technically a bread and bacon sandwich, I would go there.

AI 'more profound than fire', Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai tells rich folks' talking shop

Chris G

Re: Internet 2.0

Considering the potential that IT and the internet held for the world in it's early days and the reality of what's actually here, I think AI will boil down to having a chat with a vending machine while buying your first coffee of the day. Probably the AI's responses will have been learned from a data set provided from 30 years of the Daily Mail.

Chris G

Re: AI impact greater than fire

"With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, we humans as a whole aren't exactly good at "responsibility"."

Certainly not if that responsibility interferes with whatever a decent profit is nowadays.

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Chris G

Re: Hmm

Based on this comment by Justice Hildyard "The judge continued, addressing HPE's legal team: "Your expert recognised that whilst it's not what he thinks he would have done, that it wasn't improper in the sense of being beyond what a reasonable auditor could have imagined, in which case, that's that, isn't it?""

I think I can see where he may be going and that he is no fool.

This episode of Black Mirror sucks: London cops boast that facial-recog creepycams will be on the streets this year

Chris G

Paramilitary

Police forces increasingly look as though crime prevention is a very secondary consideration to controlling the population.

Chris G

@Vimes

The Met has been taking the piss for a lot longer than 12 years, you need to go back to the '90s for that.

Re oversight and auditing, it will be the same as the record with all the illegally held photos they have, far from feeling the need to uphold the law and to prevent crime, the average phuzz is of the opinion that if they look hard enough they can nick anyone. British police make me more nervous than the criminals.

Beer necessities: US chap registers bevvy as emotional support animal so he can booze on public transport

Chris G
Coat

Trains and Boats and Planes

If you can have a beer or even a short on the above three (I have had a three course meal with brandy and champagne on the Orient Express and shampoo and caviar flying first class from Moscow), why not on buses and metros(tubes)?

It's not as if they would let you drive any of them anyway.

Mine's the one with the litre pockets.

Ooh, watch out Google. You've got competition. Verizon has a new 'privacy-focused' search engine

Chris G

Scorpion, meet frog

Verizon's relationship with it's customers.

Xerox names the 11 directors it hopes will oust most of HP's board and put $33bn hostile takeover to shareholders

Chris G

Interesting list

Xerox clearly doesn't think HP needs anyone new on the board of directors who has direct experience of PCs, printers and 3D printing, I wonder, does Xerox have anyone on their board who is ofay with their business?

We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer

Chris G

Re: WAR ON TERROR

"economic well-being of the United Kingdom".

Well, I suppose that would give them the scope to nick Trump or Pompeo next time they come over trying to enforce the next stage of the Americanisation of British Economic Democracy.