* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Bah!

I worked for a short time at a company where the director's choice of font was one where the the number one, lower case "L" and uppercase "i" were all identical. As were the number zero and the uppercase "O".

This was a finance company and it was impossible to read anything reliably.

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Re: word doc != artwork

What I can't understand is those outfits which obviously have a graphics department because my request for 2560×640 pixels comes back with something at exactly the correct aspect ratio, but completely the wrong numbers of pixels - often something huge like 12800×3200.

I'd be happy to receive an oversized image. Nothing really wrong with that and I can always scale it down.

What really gets to me is when asking for a particular (high) resolution what the sender does is to take an appalling version of the image, one that looks like it may have been printed and photocopied at least twice, then scanned, enlarged, taken a screen shot of using a crap mobile phone, then saved wown to jpeg with a quality of something under 50% followed by being enlarged to the requested resolution.

Extra points if they can screw up the aspect ratio multiple times as well or make it look like they have converted the image to 256 colours at one point too.

Bill to protect UK against harmful foreign investment becomes law

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The government has always had the powers to block foreign ownership of UK companies. It's profiteering and short-termism that let things go through.

The fact that many of the UK companies have been bought using extensive loans which are then immediately transferred to the bought company is yet another endemic problem with the corruptness of it all.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

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There are a few historical anomalies in UK law where non-government organisations have the ability to set and prosecute laws (byelaws?). IANL but I think the UK railways had this right from the Regulation of Railways Act 1889 so these things have been around for a while and I suspect unpicking the mess of laws and incorporating and aligning them with mainstream law would be a length and therefore costly business and so I suspect that it's a case of "too expensive, ignore it".

George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user

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Re: Am I Old?

This was typical of the (crap) PC developers at the time to assume that the game would be played on the exact same CPU that it was developed on. This was almost forgiveable seeing as many of the developers would have started developing on fixed specification 8 bit home computers but any system beyond these needed to have real timing considered. This wasn't limited to just PC developers of course, the early 16 bit computers were all (largely) fixed specification however the better developers quickly realised that some real clock timing was needed compared to just running at full speed frame refresh all the time.

Maybe I was weird but even on the C64 I timed things to the vertical sync (raster line interrrupts) to ensure smooth animation as not all IRQs were maskable and therefore some timing interruptions happened and that's before there were "too many" objects on the screen to worry about and do the tweening of the animation.

We seem to have materialized in a universe in which Barney the Purple Dinosaur is designing iPhones for Apple

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Re: Ooh, Shiny

I didn't say that it was always appropriate design, but the quality of the mechanical design and manufacturing is, in general, very good.

I'd forgotten about the glass back silliness, but then I'd also blotted out the stupid curved back phone which needed the smallest of taps to send it skidding and spinning across a table (and onto the floor).

Nick Ryan Silver badge

M1 Processor

The M1 processor is really quite good, however those that know about such things in more detail have stated that while good it's nowhere near the potential and it's very much a first-gen processor and they are expecting much better for the M2 processor.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Ooh, Shiny

This is far too true. It must be particularly annoying for the hardware developers, as bar the odd total screw up (edge antenna) the iPhones have been mechanically superbly designed and manufactured. With substantial sub-mm tolerances and good design aiming for the slimmest body as possible... all to be wrapped up in a huge, ugly as hell case.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

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Re: Protecting children?

The manufacturers of baby monitoring cameras or nursery monitoring cameras are way ahead on this front. Security? Encryption? Passwords? Pah!

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Re: nobody's fooled by this now

Well that's the job of the press. In particular the vile hate mongering press where it's all about exposing the latest bogeyman to keep people distracted.

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Thumb Up

Re: Child protection

You may be onto something there! Ban children and then there will be no paedophilia.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Child protection

Seeing as most child abuse happens within the family or involving others who are so close as to almost be family... would Priti (useless) Patel care to claim hust how protesting E2E encryption going to help with this... compared to the complete destruction of social care services and outreach services that she has personally overseen?

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

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Re: Is this a flash in the pan

Set based data manipulation is quite different to procedural based data manipulation. This difference alone, and the fact that many don't even know or comprehend the difference, is the problem behind so much database code...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Seeing as many databases appear to have been "designed" by a squadron of badly behaved monkeys who just weren't good enough to produce the works of shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on a keyboard, it doesn't matter what querying language is used as the usage and performance will be awful.

But then this utter lack of even the remotest bit of skill and technique in even passable database design seems to be the motivator behind most "no-SQL" movements, the majority of whose datasets could be expressed far better and more efficiently in a structured dataset. As for what falls out the end of most "entity" coding generated database and storage systems, it couldn't be get much worse really...

Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years

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Blah blah blah blah... both organisations profitable and could very easily continue to be profitable. Therefore this just feels like the investors/board/shareholders are cashing in on the transaction, particularly with the way that Dell debt is essentially being transferred to VMWare and with VMWare subsequently being ejected from Dell.

Laptops will continue to sell as they are now a staple part of home working, add in monitors and to a much lessser degree other peripherals and Dell should continue being profitable in this space (assuming that they work out how to deliver laptops that don't have a 40% failure rate on delivery). Dell Enterprise products, on the other hand, seem to continue to be quite well regarded and are usually solid and stable and while the balance of infrastructure is changing, they should have less to fear than slow moving unwieldy behemoths such as Cisco who are just trying to bleed hardware owners dry with their move to a "rental" model as part of their core business. The move of the major cloud providers to designing and manufacturing their own hardware and often their own software stacks too is not a positive front on the enterprise business model, but there should always be a market for good and real hybrid solutions which can take advantage of both the benefits of cloud and local resources... rather than the braindead "stick absolutely everything onto someone else's servers and then wonder why it's suddenly slower and more expensive" which is a high risk for larger or more developed organisations - smaller organisations can benefit from a lot of cloud provisions though.

Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Or just let them post their complaints anyway and be laughed at? Everything is open to criticism here. The more ridiculous and contradictory the better. In this instance the senator is a renowned joke, and while the concept of ensuring better protection against monopolies are a good thing, the suggested implementation demonstrates a complete lack of serious thought about the matter.

Also: Different authors have different slants on things, that's always going to be true and it's one of the reasons why the author or articles are clearly listed.

NSA helps out Microsoft with critical Exchange Server vulnerability disclosures in an April shower of patches

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: So many vulnerabilities

Seems mighty suspicious Microsoft programmers are really that bad? Did they fire all the good ones?

Possibly a legacy of the incredibly destructive "stack ranking" scheme that Microsoft operated for many years.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: I, for one ...

I'm just happy enough that with Microsoft running Microsoft Exchange servers themselves that they are directly enjoying the shit show horror that Microsoft Exchange server management has always been.

Neural networks give astronomers huge boost in identifying galaxies: 27 million done, 600 million to come

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They hope that their work can help the wider scientific community figure out how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe
Controversial and unpopular thought... but maybe, just maybe, relying on something that cannot be seen or detected to fill in the gaps to make models work might mean that there are more fundamental issues with the models themselves?

I am not a physicist or astronomer but Occams Razor? Whenever other models have been found to be lacking it's been the model that has been at fault and adding hypothetical things to a model to bludgeon it into mostly working just doesn't feel right.

W3C Technical Architecture Group slaps down Google's proposal to treat multiple domains as same origin

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Re: Evolution

We already had Internet Explorer screwing over standards and even the most basic elements of security all in the name of Microsoft's crap ActiveX toolchain. Might as well repeat the same mistake...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay

From my understanding a site could declare whatever it wants, however the site that it declares domain equivalence with must also declare the same in return. Therefore while your website could declare facebook.com to be a part of your domain, facebook.com would also have to declare your website to be a part of your domain for the equivalence to hold. Quite a lot of cross-domain requests could stem from such an implementation and if not careful it could be relatively easy to abuse, which is where the problems start

Beloved pixel pusher Paint prepares to join Notepad for updates from Microsoft Store

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: MS Paint has never been so bad

Yes, but that has to be installed. MS-Paint is (was) available on every damn Windows system with a desktop. Therefore while basic it did the basics of what was needed for a screenshot and often given idiotic non-copy and pasteable error message dialogs this is just what is necessary.

British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

There are also other types of gambling industrues... banking and insurance being two of the ones that first come to mind. Both with a very large amount of money and a very large amount of influence as a result that has stacked the legal side towards them very heavily, to the point that while both the banking and insurance industries are heavily into gambling, they have done their best to make it impossible to lose.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

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Re: Where’s the effing handbrake!?

To be fair to many users, once the brightness control was set and they were using the monitor they didn't need to know that it was there. Particularly if the monitor wasn't new to them.

I've had the odd panicked call that someone had moved their monitor, often to clean or just to adjust the comfort of their desk and when turning their PC on not seeing a picture. Their first instict was to check the power cable (OK), green light on monitor (OK) followed by "argh, I only moved it and I've now broken it" type of panic. Typically when picking up the monitor they would sensibly pick it up around the edges and inadventently change the brightness setting when doing so.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

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Re: The zombie rises again

Then all the telephone sanitizers....

Sitting comfortably? Then it's probably time to patch, as critical flaw uncovered in npm's netmask package

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I strongly suspect that this particular flaw is not remotely easily detectable using automated code scanning tools.

You put Marmite where? Google unveils its latest AI wizardry: A cake made of Maltesers and the pungent black tar

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Re: Blancmange

I actually liked blancmange. I even liked it cold, because it was like flavoured custard.

I'll admit that I have not tried it since childhood. I suspect it's sensible to keep it that way.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

The Reg, for one, will not be welcoming our new machine overlords if this is what the future holds.
You will sit at the table and you will not leave the table until you have finished eating. Pah! Young vultures these days...

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: A near weekly occurrence

Not just teachers, often Board and similar meetings too. It took a lot of repeated grief, sometimes more publicly than they would like, for people to learn to book the meeting rooms for at least half an hour before the meeting and to call for assistance at the beginning of that half hour if they were having problems. It got to the point that for particularly important meetings they would call me in, pretty much book me, at the start of their prep time just in case there were problems. I had no problem with that, it was sensible and those meetings started professionally and smoothly.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I've had similar calling my ISP (Virgin Media at the time), to report that their DNS servers were down.

Blah, blah, reboot PC (I just waited 30s and said that I had), blah, blah, reboot router (did it, again, just because), blah, blah, cable modem test shows that it's fine. I know, but the Internet connection is not fully working because your DNS servers are not responding. Blah, blah, but the cable modem test shows an Internet connection. At this point it's like talking to a parrot, a particularly stupid parrot. Eventually I get escalated and put through to the next line who go through all the same stupid process, with the same stupid responses. After getting through to them that I really would like to speak to someone competent I eventually get passed through to someone who had a clue... Naturally, they had to follow the script but bored of this, I just cut them short and told them that I'd done this multiple times with their previous support staff and nothing that I can do from my end will fix their DNS server issues. I finally got a sensible response back... how do you know that it's a DNS issue? Simple, I say, your DNS servers are not responding on the network (no PING or DNS check response), which tends to make Internet connections routed through Virgin Media not work very well. I know that it was just a DNS issue because changing the local DNS on my PC to an alternative DNS server, 8.8.8.8, fixed everything therefore it's a Virgin Media issue with their DNS servers. The tech support made a few quick checks and confirmed that they indeed were not working, apologised for the time taken to report it and promised to report it internally and get them working ASAP. We had a little laugh about how stupid the scripts are but that they had to follow them anyway, and that was that. I kept my DNS settings on 8.8.8.8 and had a lovely high speed Internet all to myself for the next hour or so... it was obvious when they had fixed it the speed took a noticeable drop due to the high contention ratio for domestic connections.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Scammers and time wasters do blacklist people...

I had an "entertaining" conversation about what the lion would eat. After, all when the lion lies down next to the lamb, as their pamphlet clearly stated in words and pictures, surely it's going to eat the lamb? Oh, the lion has become a vegetarian? Does that mean that we all have to become vegetarians, and are they? How much of a vegetarian are they, do they consume any animal products at all? Fish are animals, disprove this. And of course, the lion doesn't have a digestive tract that can survive on plant matter, just look at the ridiculous panda bear (a carnivore so stupid that it deserves to be extinct), and while they could change and have much longer digestive trats, wouldn't that make them a bit round and silly looking and unless their legs grew they'd just roll around, give them longer legs and would they even still be lions? So how wrong is the picture?

Well, I entertained myself by throwing absolutely simple logic at them... I didn't let them leave either, despite their subtle hints. :) I understand that they might not even be allowed to leave on their own accord which possibly explained a different occasions when they stuck around for hours when they rudely woke up the human debris (myself included) the morning after a large house party.

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: HR Experience with big companies

Unfair Dismissal and Constructive Dismissal are different things. The former is where the employer dismisses an employee for unfair reasons or against the terms of the employment contract or overriding law (when there is a conflict, the law overrides whatever garbage is written in an employment contract), the latter is where the employee resigns, usually due to the conduct of the employer.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson reluctant to reveal his involvement in the OneWeb deal

Nick Ryan Silver badge

If the son of god was PM, you would still find something to bleat on about.

I'll freely admit that some aspects of the PM role, particularly during covid, are near impossible without offending someone however given that he's a proven liar, a proven racist, a proven sexist, a proven narcissist and lots of other things, he's going to be criticised for much more than someone that is none of these things. Add to this he's surrounded himself with a cabinet whose main skills are saying "yes" to him rather than any particular competence in anything whatsoever, and many of these have lost previous roles through lying, breaking the ministerial code or just being incompetent.

Politicians are human and mistakes, I'm fine with that. I don't really care too much about their personal lives as long as it's legal and doesn't impact on their ability to do what they are meant to do. One of the things that they are meant to do is to lead by example because they are in positions of authority and this is where, unfortunately, their personal lives can be problematic particularly with the rabid tatt chasing "news" that everyone insists on.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Professional charlatan?

Global tat supply line clogged as Suez Canal authorities come to aid of wedged 18-brontosaurus container ship

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Mushroom

Shocking! Most disappointed

Dear Register Vulture,

I would like to raise in the strongest possible terms, my abject level of disappointment, nay horror, that you did not provide the windspeed using the correct units:

Those winds at the 151km mark also reportedly played a role in the blocking of the waterway by the vessel

The velocity of the wind in the correct units is 0.0014% of the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum. I expect much better from this esteemed publication and such travesties could cause me to run out of dried frog pills.

Yours,

Angry from Aberdeenshireerryireish

Chairman, CEO of Nominet ousted as member rebellion drives .uk registry back to non-commercial roots

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Re: Excellent news!

Yep, pretty much "thank fuck for that". Hopefully some sanity can now descend.

Ministry of Defence tells contractors not to answer certain UK census questions over security fears

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Re: pretty damn sure that I won't be finding some additional person to stay overnight on Sunday.

Well, for starters I'd wonder who put my information into whatever holiday or private letting app they were using. People really should check things properly before just turning up.

Also, as soon as Mary started to claim "immaculate conception" I'd suggest that it would be much better for her relationship with Joseph that either she slept around a bit, or the both of them really need to go to a sex therapist or use working contraceptive if they are unaware how babies happen. Kids these days.... just why aren't the schools and parents teaching sex education? It's not like my days where we looked forward to having the afternoon off and got to stare at a really bad VHS copy of some info-documentary on a screen that was a long way away and on some form of wheeled trolley...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Important census-related questions for the commentariat

You don't have to complete it on Sunday. You may complete it any time after receiving it as long as the information that you provide will be the same as you expect it to be on Sunday. I completed mine last week... pretty damn sure that I won't be finding some additional person to stay overnight on Sunday.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Census data

I've heard quite a lot of genealogists complain about the "professional" genealogists from the US who when going through their client's USAian's UK genealogy always seem to somehow relate the family to royalty or the landed gentry somewhere. It makes a complete mess of whole family trees and requires so much double checking of the records.

Partial beer print horror as Microsoft's printer bug fix, er, doesn't

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Re: Move Fast and Break Things,

Probably not an unfair observation that a lot of this is down to the shocking quality of the print drivers. (I may be eying HP in particular at this point, but they are not the only ones). On the other hand, when the print drivers are delivered through Windows Update or are Microsoft Certified drivers then they damn well should only use the approved APIs and should be tested and should not break. They definitely should not cause a BSOD.

Big problem: Nominet members won't know how many votes they're casting in decision to oust CEO, chair

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Become notable donors to political parties?

With Nominet’s board-culling vote just days away, we speak to one man who will publicly support the management

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Re: All I want is a registry that just works.

Did he really or was it the case that nobody dated to question otherwise?

Millimetre-sized masses: Physics boffins measure smallest known gravitational field (so far)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: General relativity

I should have made it clear that I understand that gravitional waves propogate at C, it's just one of those things that when added to the melting pot of concepts produces quite a headache.

Good description of the mass-energy equivalence in a sphere and that external measuring would produce the same value. In the end it's no different to removing a quantity of matter and then measuring the new gravity.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: From which we can conclude

Are you referring to Eric? Who could be termed as half-a-bee?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Gravity as ratio

Please define "stationary".

Stationary is relative to the observer. The Earth spins on its axis, the Earth wobbles on its axis, the Earth and Moon orbit around a point that's not quite the center of the Earth, the Earth (and moon) orbit our sun in a mostly elliptical orbit, the sun is moving relative to other local stars, these are moving relative to the centre of our galaxy, our galaxy is whizzing through space. If you manged to find a particle and somehow, somehow, make it "stationary", relatively speaking it would piss off into the distance at such speed that you'd never ever be able to take a second observation.

As for the other stuff, yes some things are observable oscillations. These are usually called "waves" and the duality of waves and point particles is a whole field of study in itself - particularly as it is not possible to have a partial wave because for something to be a wave it must traverse the whole wave path, as in up and down, which imposes a certain limit to division. One can measure a fraction of the wave, however the wave itself is always complete - although overlaid waves do produce some useful patterns. Magnets clump with each because they are trying to move to a zero energy state (usually failing spectacularly), therefore this has nothing to do with gravitational attraction, without which we could not exist.

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Coat

Gravity is not a particularly weak force, it's the density and scale that matters. What tends to let it down is that in most instances atoms by and large are mostly not there and therefore there's not a lot of mass in the space of your average atom to exert much gravity. If one was to find a way to stick lots of them next to each other somehow, I suspect gravity would be considered slightly more useful.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: General relativity

...and what is the medium of force transfer? How fast is the effect of gravity felt? It is possible to convert energy to matter and vice-versa gravity and therefore local gravity should be directly alterable. And thus the real headaches begin. While it's possible to visualise a 3D deformation of a 2D plane, doing the same for 3D space is much harder.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: From which we can conclude

Shhhh... you give the flat earthers or even hollow eathers ideas... Ideas borne out of absolutely no logic and impossible to hold up to the most basic of trigonometric scrutiny, but nothing like that has stopped these kind intellectually challenged believers. These people would lose an intellectual argument with a fruit fly if they ever stopped frothing at the mouth long enough to listen.

My sincerest apologies to fruit flies and this unfair intellectual comparison.

Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Is there a "standard" Linguine stored in stable conditions somewhere in the vaults deep below Reg central ?
This is El'Reg... of course it is. It's stored in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'. Do not look at what is at the bottom of this cabinet.

UK to introduce new laws and a code of practice for police wanting to rifle through mobile phone messages

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Since then, including Clinton and Obama, they have used the same old lines

Hitler's speeches weren't all original to him either. If something works, use it. But then this is what happened to the Nazi party in Germany. Previously a well respect socialist movement, however was taken over (as it was there) and the end results were plain to see. Likewise, the Eagle and Swastika were symbols that were taken over and (ab)used and now seen as bad. Hitler was a master of manipulation therefore of course he was going to use phrases and words that others used previously, it's called learning. Modern leaders using similar phrases and words isn't necessarily a bad thing, however it does depend on context.

On the other hand where politicians are proven criminals and repeated liars, that's really bad. From Trump's apologists who carefully ignore that almost every time he opens his mouth he lies about something and/or attempts to sow division, to those that see BoJo as "just a harmless, slightly eccentric buffoon" and also carefully ignore that he is also a repeated proven liar.