* Posts by Boris the Cockroach

3404 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008

Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Sounds like a power issue alright..... in their regional routing place

I keep losing connection to game servers as my packets go AWOL.

I'd call their helpline....... but since my vermin media phone seems to only work for 5 days after an engineer has tried fixing it again..... I cant be bothered

Just wish there was an alternative beyond crappy open retch 'fibre broadband' around here

Bloodhound Super-Sonic-Car lacks Super-Sonic-Cashflow

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: What this project has really done...

Quote

Or 10,000s of children have learnt that STEM is just about fast cars and rockets and jet fighters and so is just for boys that want to make lots of noise and kill things, so not for them.

Wow nice trolling.

STEM actually makes................ pretty much everything on your desk, under your desk and indeed the thing you are sitting on.

We always see the same old comments whenever anyone tries something new, blah blah blah what point is it, how much is it going to waste, nothing good will come of it.

R & D into a project like this is never wasted, I bet theres 10 kids out there that have taken part in the various bloodhound programs and they have ideas....... and every so often , people like that come up with the humdinger of an idea that will change the world, and I'd far rather see that 25 million wasted on bloodhound if it can inspire the next generation of designers and technical types to actually take up a STEM related profession instead of sitting in an office for 40 years double checking benefit form 5634/B/56C

Cabinet Office: Forget about Verify – look at our 3,000 designers (and 56 meetups)

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

3000 designers?

Sounds like the proud boast that our fair city has 50 town planners..

The drawback being not one of them knows the other 49 exist and all of them live in a different city....

AI's next battlefield is literally the battlefield: In 20 years, bots will fight our wars – Army boffin

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Terminator

And

how long until the AI decides that far from the enemy being the major threat to its existence, the human controllers are the REAL threat.

helllo skynet .....

NASA's Chandra probe suddenly becomes an EX-ray space telescope (for now, anyway)

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

And never listen to the engineers when they say it will take 4 hrs to fix this thing....... because we all know it will actually take 10 mins and a 3hr 50 min tea break......

Microsoft Windows 10 October update giving HP users BSOD

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Barton Gellman defended auto-updates, arguing they do more good than harm

The above is all well and good if you're running a business

But if you are Mr Average HP owner running win10 home edition and suddenly your laptop is hosed.... what are you going to do about it?

Apart from have to pay someone to fix it.

Maybe thats why m$ dont do as much QC work to their software.. because they get a kickback from every mom and pop computer store for fixing 1000s of pcs when auto update hoses them...

Oracle? On my server? I must have been hacked! *Penny drops* Oh sh-

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

Re: 1200 baud down, 75 baud up

1s and 0s... back in my day we had to use flags.....

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Re: Now do the same...

Lets wait 7 years and make sure hes dead first shall we....

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

No

wonder they made win 10 free.....

What has happened to m$?, we used to deride their products for being a bit staid and behind modern tech

the occasional showstopper bug/flaw , but at least they had some quality control...

And now..... if you upgrade you have a chance of losing your files? who came up with the design for the upgrade that went into 'my documents' anyway? what the hell is it doing there?

Its almost as if m$ have subbed out creating win10 to the lowest bidding code shop they could find and then throwing it out the door without even checking it...

Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: There wouldn't be any fallout

Check out some of the pictures of underground nuclear explosions where they manged to get a camera into the cavity created.

Even for a 20kiloton nuke its not very big , now stand that off about 50 feet behind your pusher plate, while making sure the damper system between the pusher plate and the main body of the spacecraft is working.

And away you go..... also it helps to have a pusher plate that weighs about 6000 tons.....

The only drawback for launching a 25000 ton spacecraft is..... who wants to ride the first one into orbit.....

Robot Operating System gets the Microsoft treatment

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Coat

Speaking as a

professional robot wrangler

Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god!!!

I can imagine the line first thing Monday when we power on.... sorry your robot is updating....... 3hrs later.. update failed , rebooting... re-applying update.....

As for 'more aware of the people and hazards".... that means another cage around the original cage just in case .....

Getting my coat... to run off and retire early

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Alternativly

Leave the smart phone at home and get lost the old fashioned way.

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

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Big Brother

Instead of

concentrating on "Is the iphone better than google?" and "who had the better ui?"

Why not lead with the question I used when dumping my old S2 phone that had finally decided to roll over and die

"How much is the S7 per month and how much is the iPhone a month?"

And when the sales droid told me the S7 was 9 pounds a month cheaper (or whatever it was) that decided between the 2.

And for many many many consumers THAT is the deciding factor.

Unless you're a sad loser who likes spending too much money on stuff just to look 'hip' at a coffee bar

Icon.... because they all spy on you anyway

As one Microsoft Windows product hauls itself out of the grave, others tumble in

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Windows

Re: schrodinger's browser...

Quote : What if it's one of those wonderful tabs that, when they crash, manage to take the browser or, if they're ambitious, the entire OS, down with them? Is that what quantum entanglement is like?

No, sounds typical M$ browser behaviour over the past 20 odd years to me..... especially when it takes down the OS too

Buried in the hype, one little detail: Amazon's Alexa-on-a-chip could steal smart home market

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

6 months

from now..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

HP Ink should cough up $1.5m for bricking printers using unofficial cartridges – lawsuit

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Lexmark next

Add to the list Canon.

I had a nice little inkjet for university work, cost about 120 quid, and the ink cartridges were a reasonable price so I could avoid all the "40 quid printer and 30 quid for ink" nonsense plaguing the market along with non-canon ink/refills.

Imagine my surprise on switching it on one day and it lets out 13 beeps.

Hmm.. maunual... only goes to 12.

Internet...... nothing... search more .. still nothing.... f. it lets open her up and see if somethings jammed/broken.

1 hammer later... its broken...

Another search suddenly turns up this nugget of info

"13 beeps means that the printer has completed 'n' head cleaning cycles and needs to have this reset by pressing paper feed, head cleaning and power on after changing the ink blotter in the bottom of the printer, canon prefers to sell a new printer than publish this info"

So I bought a cheap epson.

30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Judging by

some of the failures in programs I've seen floating about

I think the modern method of creating stuff is not

"Google, click, Stack Overflow, copy, paste, compile, try it, coffee"

But more like

"Google, click, Stack Overflow, copy, paste, compile, throw it out the door and maybe patch it later if you're still in business"

And we're still using green text of black screens for the robot controls......... although sadly , they're being slowly phased out in favour of new fangled LCD screens

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Programming

Quote

I truly believe programming makes you mad.

I'm as sane as the previous occupant of my seat who got himself sectioned for wearing his underpants on his head and sticking 2 pencils up his nose.

My boss told me "I'm not falling for that one again... get back to work"

<<currently thinking about unbolting the robots from the floor and programming them to drag themselves towards the manglement offices.....

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Linux

I can understand

Why he loses his temper sometimes

Imagine you're in charge of a very large codebase, with contributions from all over

You get some bad code and you write the following e.mail to him/her

Dear contributor

Thank you for the code submission of 20-09-18.

However in attempting to integrate your code with the rest, one or 2 failures became apparent.

1. you exceeded your memory bounds

2. you exceded your stack allocation

Please resubmit your code with the 2 above flaws corrected

Yours

The head honcho

After 250 of these on a monday morning, number 251 lands in your e.mail

And without a moments thought you write back

"FOR FUCKS SAKE WILL YOU PEOPLE IMPLEMENT SOME FUCKING BOUNDS CHECKING!!!"

And number 251 replies with "Whaaaaaaaaaa he hurt my feelings"

Microsoft: Like the Borg, we want to absorb all the world's biz computers

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
FAIL

Or worse still

After 2025, m$ decided since the success of this service , that everyones PCs should work like this.

And thus the age of the mainframe is reborn........ right upto the point where the data center with multiple protection against disconnection runs all the cables down a 4 inch pipe and across the carpark to be split off to various destinations.......... and theres a 16 yr old work experience kid with a digger.....

A basement of broken kit, zero budget – now get the team running

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Bad managers are like knotweed

Quote:

I'd be interested if anyone has a notion to explain this ....

Its simple really, when you are an officer/NCO in the forces, you are expected to be able to lead as well as manage stuff.

Whereas in civvie street, so long as you have the right bit of paper and a slimy attitude, you can be a manager.... but unless you can lead... you'll never be a good manager.

Microsoft accidentally let encrypted Windows 10 out into the world

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Joke

Microsoft

..... Putting the K in Kwality since 1981.....

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

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Thumb Up

Its ok

Seems more of a case of "lets fix it" even if it aint broken to me

But then so long as we can read the content without 6 billion popups everywhere... its ok with me

First it was hashtags – now Amber Rudd gives us Brits knowledge on national ID cards

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Use my NHS number?

Well as a regular customer of the NHS..... I haven't a f'ing clue WHAT my number is.

The way they identify me down at the GP office/Cardiac consultants/ A&E is to ask my name, my address , then my date of birth

And lo.... as if by magic my medical record appears, and a doc pokes me to see if I'm not dead yet(and calls my next of kin if I dont thump him/her one for poking me).

NHS number...... no chance mate

Microsoft's next Windows 10 release creeps closer with a cluster of builds

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Meh here too

Just waiting for it to be generally released.. installed on the works PCs and find out what its reset, changed, and fucked up this time.....

Come on m$ give us something we all want to see (apart from you going bust) ....

Windows classic UI... just like win7 had....

Post-silly season blues leave me bereft of autonomous robot limbs

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Or you could visit your local electrical appliance shop for a new washing machine

"This one comes with internet connectivity"

"Ok... how do I load it with washing over the internet?"

Activists raise alarm over insidious creep of surveillance in the UK

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Quote: "With the rise of the far right, organisations which bear a good deal of resemblance to the extremists of Weimar Germany"

And who defines what is "far right"?

Is it far right to campaign for incoming migrants to conform to the local culture?

Is it far right to campaign for democratic control of a county's future?

The moment you start criminalising political thought IS the moment that the far right (and left) crawl out of the wood work and say "Those in control fear us.. join us to over throw those in control"

And thats the moment both sides of the extremist movements get mass support.

Go Pester someone else: TSB ditches CEO over bank's IT meltdown

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

Well

I guess if hes looking for a new job, Craptia are always on the look out for staff......

Microsoft gives Windows 10 a name, throws folks a bone

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Joke

Looking at el-regs

coding skills.

There are plenty of opportunities for you in coding the next craptia delivered government IT project...

Joke icon............... but I dont think its a joke....

Windows 95 roars once more in the Microsoft round-up

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Re: Windows 95?

Does it contain the authethic .dll hell where you can overwrite any .dll file with anything else until your system dies a horrible death...

And that STILL an improvement on win10

Techie's test lab lands him in hot water with top tech news site

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

I wonder

if the downtime was any longer that el-reg would have set the BOFH on 'victor'

Lift shaft accident or fell out of the window...... the world must know

Windows 10 Linux Distribution Overload? We have just the thing

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: I have a big question

Why 2 thumbs down?

Dont tell me the only 2 people who like the win10 gui are on this website.......

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Linux

I have a big question

Can the linux subsystems run their own desktops? thus replacing the abomination that is the current win10 gui

What happens to your online accounts when you die?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Huh?? (Off Topic)

Quote

Life is shit.

Its when you get a message from the states that a friend has passed away, and he was 9 months older than me that the above phrase hits home.

I still have all the chats we had regarding life, the universe and everything stored away, even asked his widow if she wanted them.

She had to do the 'jump through 7 hoops of hell' thing because he'd only made a will leaving everything to her and had the no idea about all the digital stuff left behind, because at 52, you dont plan for that sort of thing, unless you have to.

Hence my will also has a copy of my FB and steam passwords stored in it (updated at 3 month intervals)

And as for the banks et al wanting 17 copies of death certificates and probate certificates.... yes they do and they do run a post deaths service

"Hi my mother has died, can I have access to her accounts?"

"we need death and probate certificates..... hmmm its odd.... your father died recently too...before probate completed transferring his assets to your mother... we're not going to do a thing until we see legal copies of everything ... and even then we're gonna drag everything out for nine months just to add further suffering and heartache"

"You heartless bastards. we're setting the family lawyer on you... good luck in your next job"

(this above conversation is a seriously abridged version of what happened when ma and pa died within 4 months of each other)

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal biz gets £35k legal costs delayed

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Horace goes to Epping forest

with some dodgy characters

Wasted worker wasps wanna know – oi! – who are you looking at?

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FAIL

Wasps, must die

Awww poor waspies what have they ever done to you apart from be annoying stripey bastards who want your beer.

Tri-Chloro-ethane... thats the stuff for wasps..... one squirt and wasp go arrrghhhh <thud> ..... trouble is.. too much and the human goes arrgh <thud> too

You won't believe this but... everyone hates their cable company: Bombshell study lands

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Well, I...

Damn canadians..... next you'll be listing how much coverage the health care system there gives... :)

<<Stuck with vermin media, but at least its cheaper than the US cable companies

Creased Lightning: Profits wobble at Virgin Media while fibre project stays sluggish

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

Vermin media

.... if only they offered the new customer deals to THOSE OF US STUCK WITH VERMIN MEDIA.....

I'm only with them because of the fibre broadband...... that NyNex built , went bust, sold to NTL, merged with telewest, branded by Vergin and bought out by liberty.

At least thats what was that was the company names painted out on the guy's overall when he came to fix my phone............ which worked for 10 days before goign 'phhtt' again.....

UK.gov to tech industry: Hands up who can help cut teachers' admin

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Its a bit rich

complaining about teacher's admin loads when its the fucking politicians who demand that admin load in the first place

Anyway.. makes no difference.

The contract will goto crapita, an MP will get a directorship, the product will be late and at 3 times the bid price and still wont work adding more shite to the teacher's workload to cope with

In fact if we follow the projected graph of adminwork vs teaching for teachers , in about 15 years time , teacher will only be filling out forms and doing admin work

While min wage classroom assistants try to entertain 40 bored 10 yr olds......

Greybeard greebos do runner from care home to attend world's largest heavy metal fest Wacken

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Devil

Re: "Dazed and confused", surely?

Maybe they were hoping Sabbath were on, children of the grave and all that

Oi, clickbait cop bot, jam this in your neural net: Hot new AI threatens to DESTROY web journos

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Happy

Re: Free of news content

You can do that with politician's speeches too

Every time the mouth moves up and down you can ignore the sound coming out as it has nothing to do with what the politicians actually does

Amazon meets the incredible SHRINKING UK taxman

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Re: Just remember

Amazon dont pay VAT... they collect it from sales and pass it along to custom and excise

Amazon dont pay income tax.. that deducted from employee pay by amazon under the PAYE scheme, then passed along to the inland scu err revenue

Just try not doing the above 2 things when you're an employer and see what happens......

hello auditors.... and court cases .. and baliffs... and no business.

Unless you're a multi-nationational who can do a deal with inland revenue like google did and only pay a % of money owing...

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Just remember

For every pound successfully avoided by Amazon et al, YOUR tax rate has to go up to cover the loss in income.

This is great reality for today, that as corporate tax income has declined thanks to the clever avoiding devices , then personal taxation has had to go up to cover this.

But in the end, Amazon are using our roads, and facilities built with taxpayers money for their own enrichment without paying for it.

And whats worse... a small company like the one I work at cannot avoid the tax as its based in the UK not luxemburg/wherever it could get a sweetheart tax deal.

Get drinking! Abstinence just as bad for you as getting bladdered

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Pint

The most important

thing to remember is that even if you follow all the health advice, eat well, drink moderately, do exercise etc etc etc you can still end up in a cardiac ward with the doc waving the angiogram pictures in your face going 'I cant believe you're still alive'

And in most cases of what I had.. you wont be alive....

Oh and good luck to the poster with the LVAD

Brit comms providers told: You must tell people when their cheap contract's about to end

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Unhappy

I'd be happy

with making companies like vermin media and bt openretch offer the same sort of deals to long term customers as they do to new ones.

vermin are currently offering my deal (tv/bb/phone) for 30 quid a month while I'm stuck at 60

(and dont ask about switching.... openretch around here is shite )

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: Why are people getting their news from from Social Media?

Quote :

Because it tells them the "news" they want to hear.

Unlike the mail and express and torygraph which tell people the news the tories want them to know (and a dose of 2 minute "hate the socialist" too )

And then news like "Charline married Damien in eastenderstreet last night " along with "Chelsea beat Liverpool" will keep about 60% of the population happy.....

Ecuador's Prez talking to UK about Assange's six-year London Embassy stay – reports

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

Is that the one where the preditors need a human host to grow aliens to hunt?

Seriously though, the guy cost his supporters a f.ton of money(about a million wasn't it?) when he skipped bail.

Throw him in jail for 12 months for skipping bail, then ask the Swedes if they want him, if not, deport him back to Australia....

Windows 10 Insiders see double as new builds hit the deck – with promises to end Update Rage

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
Facepalm

Whats wrong with

"Your windows PC needs updating.

please schedule a day and time within the next 7 days to download and update your PC

<open time and day manager window>

Failure to select a time and day will result in windows downloading and updating now."

Or is this far too complicated for the big brains at m$?

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

As previously

noted when Airbus went "whaa whaa whaa " about closing down the wing making operation in North Wales, this is more about Amazon protecting its profits than caring if brexit happens , doesn't happen, or happens with a one off trade deal.

Because if we lose access to the single market, Amazon WILL have to setup a british HQ and channel all the UKs profits through there subjecting them to corporation tax.(finally) with the inland theives (i mean revenue) lookign at them very carefully for dodgey things like IP transfer pricing that just so happens to match the entire years profits.. and the same the following year for an entirely different amount that just so happened to match that years profits too.

And for a lot of remainers who wittle on about the EU 'protecting our rights' , just remember the the EU as currently setup is the a neo-liberal multi-national corporatists wet dream made flesh.

How much do you think Cisco's paying erstwhile Brit PM David Cameron?

Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
IT Angle

Re: Whatever his fee is...

And into a nice off shore tax free account provide by his dad no doubt.... alledgedly