* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

Tim Berners-Lee says regulation of the web may be needed

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He dared to suggest that there could be another way to keep servers up other than advertising (that bit wasn't mentioned in El Reg). There's got to be merit to that.

UK digi minister Hancock suggests Facebook and pals give your kids a time-out

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Flame

Re: PIcking Holes In This Idea

He's not thinking of the children. He's just making COPPA part of UK law, as if any better alternative weren't possible.

A smartphone recession is coming and animated poo emojis can't stop it

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Re: Umm.... wtf?

Assuming maths has anything to do with programming, which is a big assumption to make. Logic is more of an IT thing.

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Re: "Phone makers had banked they could compensate for slowing volume by pushing up prices"

I have yet to see any evidence that cheap-shit phones are subsidised. They're not sold at a loss, phone manufacturers aren't NGOs.

Defra to MPs: There's no way Brexit IT can be as crap as rural payments

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Re: quite the contrary

Yup. Leaving the Eurozone would help with that too. But as you point out the short term pain may be too scary for a long term remedy.

Italy would just do what it always did, devalue and carry on as before, until it's time to devalue again.

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They're probably right

Any farming subsidy after Brexit would be easily managed with an Excel spreadsheet with Her Maj, families of MPs, and some overseas billionaires.

The Ataribox lives, as a prototype, supposedly

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Re: Problems all around

Make the games' 2 player option work multiplayer over the net and they'd probably end up selling quite a bit.

It's rumoured Nintendo will do this with the Switch.

Slack cuts ties to IRC and XMPP, cos they don't speak Emoji

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Facepalm

Re: Slack? IRC?

Our money has already moved to MS Teams / SfB. If you use O365 it's a no brainer.

The no-brainers are the company behind these pair of ridiculous products. I thought nothing could out-crap Lync (SfB), but then I saw Teams.

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Re: Accessibility

He should write something which sounds legal and threatening with liberal use of the word Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, copying to Twitter. You'll see how fast they row back.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

"Good luck meeting that deadline, Slackers"

You can cut stuff that people depend on because you don't like it and it's the agile thing to do. The people who paid you for your product and have to pick up the pieces who are also using agile will implement half a fix, test half of that, put the rest in Jira tickets, and close them in a year or two due to age.

Got some broken tech? Super Cali's trinket fix-it law brought into focus

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Facepalm

Re: "Apple is the only poster child for destructive repair monopolies"

Strange obsession with not having to pay whatever the manufacturer wants, or declare it unfixable and your only solution is a new one, or destroying the environment with an avalanche of landfill? You're right, it's madness.

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Re: Hoorah !

Unless it mandates a repairable design then it's all for naught.

Getting out the heat gun to peel the screen off and dismantle half the innards to change the battery takes quite a while if you don't want to leave the phone looking like a mess, which makes the repair uneconomical.

Android P will hear no evil, see no evil, support evil notches

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Big Brother

"Simultaneous use of multiple cameras at once"

Any phone with hardware which can do that already has the Camera app to do that. What they mean is Play Services slurping the precious images.

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

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So, in other words, you can have a knobbled and restricted version of windows called S Mode, for the same cost as the regular more flexible standard issue Windows 10?

That's what it looks like to you. Let's see what OEMs have to pay.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Which settings screen will S mode be buried in?

Will it explain what S mode is?

And will it be more or less predominant than the error message you get leading you to Windows Store if you try to install Libre Office or Steam in S mode?

Administrator PwC chops Maplin staff

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Diode ones are the best.

Sci-tech wants skilled worker cap on PhD and shortage jobs scrapped

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So nice you joined today just to post that. Or is it you're embarrassed to associate such twaddle with your regular handle?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: happy Brexiteers, surely ?

I voted for Brexit because I want the UK to be free to sign its own trade deals

You're right, after Brexit negotiations with countries like China and the US will finish much quicker. Only the UK won't be signing trade deals, it'll be signing its own death warrant.

Oracle UK's profits have more than halved

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Re: If only they could hear me crying...

Do you remember Fantastic Voyage?

Well they got a master craftsman to make a smallest miniature violin he could, shrank it down to subatomic size, and injected it into his SQL.

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

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Thumb Up

Re: Worse to come

Lego wins. Flawless victory.

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Re: Worse to come

Anyone who sings the praises of those Wilko bricks has never seen them in action.

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Re: The cost!!

The compatible sets from Wilko are pretty bollocks. They're not that compatible and whatever it is you're building is usually badly designed so it falls apart easily.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Creator sets have pieces to build three different things, Classic sets are the big box of bricks you remember.

Windows 10 S to become a 'mode', not a discrete product

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Devil

So this is how it's going to work

All Windows 10 will be 10 S, unless a) the OEM has paid MS to remove the S and passed the extra cost onto you or b) you pay.

Welcome to Windows as a Service. Frog boiling level ++.

FBI chief asks tech industry to build crypto-busting not-a-backdoor

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Re: Sauce for the Goose

Or replace "all other government agencies" with "all other governments' agencies"...

UK.gov: Name a more iconic duo than 'culture' and 'digital'. We'll wait

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Where we're going wrong

In the week where we also had the articles about the ZX81 and Trevor Bayliss, this highlights what the problem is. There's no support for people who invent things and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of support if you can chain some buzzwords together.

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Re: More iconic due

I'll go for Politicians and Bullshit.

What took you so long, BlackBerry? Facebook BBM suit is way overdue

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"WhatsApp didn't add read receipts until its fifth birthday late in 2014"

And E-mail beat them all.

There are too many patents for something + "on a mobile device" as it is.

UK takes first step towards criminalising driverless car hackers

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Re: The number of laws we have...

Whatever laws we come up with, nothing will apply to hackers in North Korea or Russia.

And as we take back control, it's going to be more difficult to go after those ones in the EU too.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: A simple solution ..

That would require someone in government who knows about software testing. As we've already seen, they can't even get emissions testing right.

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

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Re: Thank You Mr Chester...

Admit it, his name was Richard, but you all called him Dick...

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Re: The best thing about the ZX81...

The Spectrum's inspiration was Cloud City, but the ZX81's was Tron before Tron was released.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Mine was a 16K Speccy which later had the memory expansion and then the Plus keyboard added.

If you'd told people then that 40 years later you'd be expected to throw the whole lot away and buy a new one each time you wanted to upgrade, they'd have thought you were off your rocker.

La, la, la, I can't hear you! Apple to challenge Bose's noise-proof cans

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Going for the customers who previously purchased gold-plated ethernet cables?

Apple already competes in the active noise-cancelling category with its £299/$349 Beats Studio3, which incorporate Apple's low-power W1 chip. Cupertino now thinks there's room for an upmarket Apple-branded sibling.

How much more upmarket (ridiculously expensive) do you need to get for headphones? I doubt I've spent more than a tenner on a pair.

Apple's new 'spaceship' HQ brings the pane for unobservant workers

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Re: Apple FAIL

Perhaps they could stop gluing up their iDevices and computers next.

Dan 55 Silver badge

One day, about a month later than you'd have thought, huge lorries loaded with glass panes will arrive. Employees will be told to leave the building and stand around outside. A large tasteful off-white tarpaulin will then be raised to cover the building, then every single glass pane in the building will be replaced with a new glass pane which looks exactly the same as the old glass pane except for the addition of a fancy Apple logo. As this process takes a while, the employees will start to wonder if something has gone wrong, but they will then hear a bong sound and the tasteful off-white tarpaulin will then be lowered and taken away and the employees they will re-enter the building. Apple will never talk about what work was carried out and any questions about the new glass panes will be met with silence.

Suggestions that their software update team were in placed charge of this process is just a vicious rumour.

UK data watchdog's inaugural tech strategy was written with... *drumroll* Word 2010

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Thumb Up

UK's data watchdog has its priorities right

After Office 2010, Office started to become cloudy.

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Re: in fairness

There'll be an AC along in a moment with a huge block of copy-pasted text to say how awesome the registry is, for some reason.

News lobsters demand to be let back into the Facebook boiling pot

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It's like one of those strange ecosystems

Toxic bacteria spring up in places where you least expect and end up thriving.

Clickbait publishers and advertisers realised they'd wither away and die without Facebook and I guess Facebook realised pretty quickly they'd wither away and die without clickbait publishers and advertisers. No change is going to happen unless governments bring laws, which is a slippery slope.

I guess Facebook and clickbait publishers and advertisers would have to be dealt with by each country's equivalent to the IPSO.

Facebook regrets asking whether it's OK to let adult men ask underage girls for smut pix

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Devil

Billions of dollars a year

Is still not enough to afford a moral compass, it seems.

Swiss see Telly Tax as a Big Plus, vote against scrapping it

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In the digital age, anyone can in principle commission shows from production companies and distribute them online

They could, but like anything else on the Internet stuff gravitates to the big providers.

MIT gives one-star review to Lyft, Uber over abysmal '$3.37/hr' pay

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Re: Sadiq Kahn was right

Indicating that something's wrong with the system if a majority doing Uber gigs are from ethnic minorities?

@AC: Oh dear oh dear.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Judge by what people do, not what they say they want.

Worstall, if he thought he could get away with it, would argue people are happiest and most well off when they earn a bowl of rice a day as wages, and big government meddling in the free market is preventing them achieve that.

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

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Devil

And then you open a TIFKAM app

And it covers the entire monitor.

Boring. The phone business has lost the plot and Google is making it worse

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Re: Hardware design choices

They break easily, they don't work with headphones which have in-line mics, and they stop the phone being charged at the same time.

I make no comment about whether the twat is the person who wants a tried and tested technology or the person who is happy to have an adaptor hanging off their phone all the time with the aforementioned problems.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Hardware design choices

Why were you downvoted? Presumably someone here likes expensive headphones, being tied to a vendor's cloud storage, generating landfill, and wasting money.

Spotify wants to go public but can't find Ed Sheeran (to pay him)

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I'd have thought that the first thing you think before hitting play the first time on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, Virgin, or Sky is it's all being logged. Even the BBC are at it these days (unless you use Kodi with an iPlayer plugin).

Another day, another meeting, another £191bn down the pan

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Alert

Yes. And you know what happened as a result? More meetings.

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Re: Flee for your lives!

Meeting governance technology is the the chairman* of the bored.

* or woman.

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You don't know how many people are reading this in a meeting, and agreeing with every single world.