* Posts by John 110

657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2009

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Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

John 110

Re: Collective of IT managers?

Where I live, it's a squabble of IT managers... Or sometimes a snigger of IT managers (when we gang up on somebody)

Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today

John 110

Happy...

...birthday dear Register (etc)

Great news, cask beer fans: UK shortage of CO2 menaces fizzy crap taking up tap space

John 110

Re: Bravo madam!

"...We have a left wing government..."

Wait!! What??

NASA finds more stuff suggesting Mars could have hosted life, maybe

John 110

Re: And the remnants had fled to Earth.

James Blish's Fallen Star perhaps?

Four hydrogen + eight caesium clocks = one almost-proven Einstein theory

John 110

Re: This is why science rocks

"but if you have to sully it with water at least do it the honour of using spring water and not that chemically tainted tap excretion...."

Is that spring water that you collected yourself from an actual spring (NOT downhill from a sheepdip pit!) or Spring Water that some other bugger has bottled from HIS tap just for you (and your wallet)?

Just curious.

Personally I wouldn't put anything in whisky, but if I'm forced to drink water...

John 110

Re: This is why science rocks

I find tap water much better when diluted with a malt whisky - There, fixed that for you.

AIOps they did it again, played with your heart, new acronym shame

John 110
Joke

Maybe....

....I watched too much of "the Goodies" in the 70's, but my first response to AIOps was "ecky thump"

You should find out what's going on in that neural network. Y'know they're cheating now?

John 110

Re: Such problems were known _way_ before the current hype

I think your early game was "Pangolins" and it was in the ZX Spectrum programming manual (Y/n)

Make masses carry their mobes, suggests wig in not-at-all-creepy speech

John 110
Big Brother

You said it first...

John 110

@Richard 81 "So, one day my habit of keeping the GPS of my phone off to save the battery will get me in hot water?"

I wouldn't worry about it - it only LOOKS like your GPS is off...

John 110

My phone!!

Public - "Not carry my phone! It's vital to my everyday life!! You can't expect me to do without it!!!"

Gov - "No we mandate that you MUST carry it at all times"

Public - "Sod that!!!!" (throws phone in drawer...)

45-day drone flights? You are like a little baby. How about a full YEAR?

John 110
Joke

Re: 45 days vs 365

They've got to land it to change the film cartridge (or SD card if you want to be needlessly "modern")

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

John 110
Angel

"...If you unplugged it at the server..."

Aah, the benefit of 20 years of hindsight. I wish I'd had that in my 20's...

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

John 110

Re: Although...

It's good to know I'm not alone, although I put it down to carelessness on the part of someone giving their email address. These days I just delete the emails, but I have been known to report them to abuse@ whoever sent them, and once I went the extra mile to inform a doctor's practise in California that their patient was never going to turn up for surgery... (That was hard, due to a reluctance on the part of the practise to put any contact details on the website that didn't need logged in to, and I wasn't going to phone them)

Happy 100th birthday to the Royal Air Force

John 110

Re: What about Martin Baker?

@skippybing

Interesting thread you linked to. Thanks.

Having read the first couple of pages, the reaction to the prosecution seems mixed, but the consensus seems to be that it was the right thing to do.

[disclaimer] I was too lazy^h^h^h^hbusy to read the whole thread, so opinion may have shifted towards the end.

John 110

Re: What about Martin Baker?

The same Martin Baker that knew about a technical flaw since 1990 and didn't bother to mention it?

Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

John 110

Re: BTW

"...horrors the Brits perpetrate when making/serving coffee. ;-)"

Coffee bag in a mug. Add boiling water. Risk blistered fingers by dunking it about a bit until it's cooled enough to drink. Drink slowly, leaving bag in mug to achieve a turkish level of strength by the time you get to the end.

What's wrong with that?

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

John 110

TFTFY

"Now England will pay a price for such self-serving petty politics"

I think you mean the United Kingdom. (The bit I live in voted Remain and will pay a price for England's self-serving petty politics)

Five things you need to know about Microsoft's looming Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

John 110
Windows

the 1980's called...

I miss my Amiga...

A ghoulish tale of pigs, devs and docs revived from the dead

John 110
Mushroom

Re: Lesson

Unfortunately out here somewhere, we sometimes find ourselves in the situation where the old license runs out before the replacement software is quite ready for primetime - but we have to go live anyway...

Japan's Robo-Bartenders point to a golden future

John 110
Pint

Heard in the pub I used to work in (working class - Scottish)

"Could you fit a nip in there?"

"Aye"

"Well top it up then, I asked for a Pint"

Tradition was to hand over the first pint while filling the rest, the punter would drink the first mouthful, then ask for a topup (used the honesty principle to ensure that the first mouthful wasn't pint-sized)

Ah the seventies - where did they go?

Capita contract probed after thousands of clinical letters stuffed in a drawer somewhere

John 110

Meanwhile in NHS Tayside...

The Tory MSP for NE Scotland is complaining about £100,000 worth of uneaten food in Tayside hospitals, claiming it's " further evidence of the health board’s inefficiency"

Oh - and it's not privatised...

It kinda puts a bill for £6m for sorting out a cock-up into perspective, eh.

It's 2018 and your Macs, iPhones can be pwned by playing evil music

John 110
Trollface

Everything...

...since 1975 has been evil music...

NHS OKs offshoring patient data to cloud providers stateside

John 110
Holmes

Re: Whatever next?

You know that's not funny, right?

UK drone collision study didn't show airliner window penetration

John 110
Mushroom

Re: Missing the point

"... soon it will ban burps..."

And so they bloody should! Global warming!! Greenhouse gases!!!

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

John 110

Re: Promoters culpable?

"...instead of letting the free market solve it..."

Because the free market isn't solving it, perhaps?

Google asks browser rival Vivaldi to post uninstall instructions

John 110

Re: Email?

If you go to vivaldi.net there's a wee link to webmail at the top. Once you've registered, you can use your client of choice with IMAP or POP to access the mail.

Or is that not what you mean? Are you looking for a (proper) Opera-like built in client?

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

John 110

Re: Nah. We were civilized, no rodeo in the data center.

@bob

"/me wonders where the IT angle is on this one..."

They had a light, and a plug! of course they were IT equipment!!

John 110

Re: Nah. We were civilized, no rodeo in the data center.

Not drives, but lab centrifuges. - We were taught to "balance" these by adding a tube opposite the one we were spinning containing a carefully measured (by eye) level of water. One day somebody (else) forgot... The centrifuge walked off the bench and was wandering across the floor when somebody had the presence of mind to turn it off at the wall.

And don't talk to me about ultra-centrifuges...

BOFH: The trouble with, er, windows installs

John 110

Re: Database Normalisation Warning

You've got windows!! Bastard!!!

This is peak AI: Bot to guest edit Radio 4's Today programme

John 110

I was hoping....

....for something like Max Headroom :(

We need a Max Headroom icon!

UK Home Sec thinks a Minority Report-style AI will prevent people posting bad things

John 110

Re: Count me unimpressed

"Maybe millions of housepersons watch porn whilst doing the ironing?"

I wouldn't, not near a hot iron...

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

John 110

@amused of DukeStreet

They still talk as much, but the actual information content drops the longer they talk...

Seldom used 'i' mangled by baffling autocorrect bug in Apple's iOS 11

John 110
Thumb Up

Re: After near 2 years

I think you'll find that "heid" is a perfectly good word north of the Tweed.

Usage : "awa an bile yir heid"

You're probably right about 'mangled malapropisms' unless the OP's family were trying to point out hilarious stuff that other people texted them with and inadvertently auto-corrected it to something legible...

ATM fees shake-up may push Britain towards cashless society

John 110
Unhappy

cashless

I live a cashless life as well, but not in a good way...

Robot takes the job of sitting on your arse

John 110

Re: Typical robots - half a job done

@Ledswinger -- "And sweat, it needs to exude gallons of salty, dirty, malodorous juice."

I NEVER want to sit in your car...Never!!

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

John 110

Switching cars

We switched from a Citroen to a Ford. On the first long trip we made (over Cairn o' Mount) we hit dense fog on the way back down. I confidently reached down to the right to switch on the fog lights... and the dashboard lights went out... By the time I'd actually found the fogs, we had descended out of the cloud layer.

We have a new car (Motability) every three years, and when you have certain requirements (need room in the boot for a wheelchair and room in the back for kids) you tend to stick to the newer model of what you have. Except that the buggers keep changing the control layout! At one point Ford switched the controls on the steering wheel (volume up/down, trip computer etc) over. All that carefully trained muscle memory rendered useless!

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

John 110
Angel

Re: All things considered...

"The vast majority of replies here made fun of the article."

I don't think most of the replies are actually making fun of the article.

This is the Register.

We read and comment on articles highlighting all sorts of horrendous catastrophes (and this one is terrible), it's only our sense of humour that keeps us going.

Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user

John 110

Re: use the mouse to move the pointer

It's easy to laugh at mouse stories, but I remember the "Computing in Medical Laboratories" thing that we hosted in the 80's where guys who were at the cutting edge of Labsystem development (from Norfolk if I remember correctly) were harumphing about those new-fangled mouse things.

"I would turn them over and use them as a trackball" they said...

As an aside, our current labsystem is completely mouse-free once you've clicked on it's icon to fire it up...

John 110

Re: I wonder...

When I was the technician in a medical teaching lab one of the (many) things I had to do was look after 90 microscopes. You don't want to know what atrocities students can perpetrate on microscopes. Amongst other things, we had to call in the Leitz engineer to lock the lenses in place (he actually tightened them up supertight with a pair of rubber-coated pliers) to stop the students nicking them. And these were medical students - supposedly the creme de la creme.

Ah the 70's I miss them sometimes.

Twitter: Why we silenced Rose McGowan after she slammed alleged sex pest Harvey Weinstein

John 110

Re: Not just Hollywood

ooh, you got a downvote, Teflon suit man must have read your post. Have a balancing upvote.

It's 2017... And Windows PCs can be pwned via DNS, webpages, Office docs, fonts – and some TPM keys are fscked too

John 110
Facepalm

Re: The NeverEnding Story Continues...

"I couldn’t help but wonder if we’ll still be patching Windows security issues in the year 802,701 A.D."

Of course we will, it might not be Windows, but every operating system needs patched and will do into infinity (and beyond)

Ex-Harrods IT man cleared of stealing company issued laptop

John 110

Re: Why

Because it doesn't matter how often you tell people that it's a work laptop, they still think it's theirs, just like my work desktop is "mine".

Generally though, people think that they're going to have time to clear it down before they have to hand it back.

They're not always right...

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

John 110

Re: Hollywood being moribund

Can I vote for Consider Phlebus (Iain Banks)?

Commodore 64 makes a half-sized comeback

John 110

Re: Look in the loft

"CPC was crap when it came out"

My CPC with its two ROM boxes was a brilliant wee Word processor and development environment. OK, the games suffered a bit what with being mostly direct ports from the Spectrum, but Elite played fine (what else did you need...)

US yanks staff from Cuban embassy over sonic death ray fears

John 110

The answer's simple!

Just issue them all with tinfoil hats, that'll shield 'em.

Shock: Brit capital strips Uber of its taxi licence

John 110
Flame

Re: Here's your Johnny Cab!

What are you? Some kind of idiot? If TfL had banned buses to make sure GMB members had more passengers, then you might have a point. But instead they banned a company with an abysmal track record who refused to adhere to regulations. Dick.

You forgot that you hired me and now you're saying it's my fault?

John 110
Headmaster

Re: Ah, 'booking'

@Commswonk

"because it should have been sorcery not sourcery"

"sourcerers are born the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son"

Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

John 110
Unhappy

Re: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

Yeah, I've got a pair of them boots that I inherited from a grandson that they didn't fit. They're dead comfy.

What were we talking about? Oh yes, Verity you're describing my wotsit...life... yeah.

Linux 4.14 'getting very core new functionality' says Linus Torvalds

John 110
Happy

Re: doorstops

@handleoclast

"Hey, you make sure your BIOS is up to date anyway, don't you?"

Not if everything is still working, I don't...

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