* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

Women sue Apple claiming AirTags helped their stalkers

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Re: No iPhome ==No stalking

It also works with AirPods, and no doubt soon even expensive Apple cables and accessories - dongles, chargers, styli / pencils, keyboards, mice etc.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

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Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...

Yep. Not many appreciate the role of climate control and "seasoning" paper stocks in the environment where the press is operating. I was once asked why the Indigo room needed (1) a separate environmental control system and (2) quite so much space, for example all the paper and card stock shelves which were just doubling up on those in the main paper store.

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Re: “Not a lot of people know that.”

It's now the law that anywhere that sells batteries or toner/ink has to offer a recycling facility. The front of our Tesco Extra now has about 10% of the width of its frontage covered with recycling bins for water filters, ink jets, batteries, lightbulbs, plastic bags etc etc.

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But that's not *MY* Centronics cable, though.

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I do get some odd looks when I ask if the new PC comes with a parallel port for my Centronics cable.

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Re: Can't help feeling it's more a bottom line thing than a green thing...

I wondered about dye-subs too. I was walking through an exhibition in the natural history museum about scientific illustration, and they had a bit about printing. They also had some photomicrographs back-lit. They'd printed them on an inkjet - they looked terrible. Awful. The whole exhibition was about the art of illustrating natural sciences and the attention to detail in some parts of it was near nil. Get them printed up as transparencies for goodness sake! I don't suppose anyone really notices, but the posters on the tube are inkjet printed as well. Large format. They look awful to me. Then again, given my background that's understandable as I've spent over a decade professionally assessing print quality.

UK's Online Safety Bill drops rules forcing social media to remove 'legal but harmful' content

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Re: Social Credit Score

It's called an exception. Or sovereignty. Or both. We could get into all kinds of jurisprudential arguments here. What *IS* law? What is *Law*? Where does is come from?

Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC

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Re: Plus ca change

Daytime TV is a good place to pick up inane babble. And catchphrases. Lots and lots of catchphrases. Mind you if you take the repeated values out of the training set... you've not got that much left.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

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Re: Time is an illusion

Lunchtime is an illusion caused by the passage of beer.

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History is an illusion...

caused by the passage of time.

Time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.

*courtesy Douglas Adams.

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Re: An idea....

What's a year now?

Liquid and immersion is the new cool at Supercomputing '22

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I quite like the idea of low grade waste heat being used for, say, warming up polytunnels. Grow potatoes in there. Chip to chips.

Security firms hijack New York trees to monitor private workforce

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Re: Tree torture

Groot!

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Re: Moving?

In order to avoid being chopped down, particularly magical and semi-sentient trees might evolve a system of displaying their age in the patterning of their bark. However, this may have the unfortunate side effect of making them very attractive to the sellers of house number plaques.

*Courtesy of I think it's PTerry. I think. IIRC. Otherwise, colour me Corden.

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Re: Tree torture

I'd be having a discreet word with Treebeard.

Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

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Re: Forced reimaging

I had a similar one with a number of HP/Compaq laptops. Had a recall for bad keyboard, so I copied off the data onto two locations, security wiped the free space and sent the devices off. When they came back, I discovered that the password file had been wiped and that the browser had been used to download some pirated films - this was on two of the three - and the third one showed in the system and security log that someone had turned it on and tried to log in by guessing the password. The films that had been downloaded were dubbed in Hungarian, an Eastern European colleague informed me, and the network log showed that it had obtained an IP address somewhere in Hungary, but I couldn't tell if it was on a corporate network or not. I told HP/Compaq in the UK at the address they'd sent for the return, but I don't know what came of that. It wasn't hard to find these traces either, just files dumped in the trash without emptying, an uncleared browser history etc - I wasn't particularly looking until I thought it odd that there was suddenly no password on the account.

I thoroughly disinfected the machines, just to be sure.

I'm happy paying Twitter eight bucks a month because price isn't the same as value

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Elveston McMusky McBean?

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You know...

the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that need altering.

Musk sows more Twitter chaos, now with Official policy snafu

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Re: just dump this useless platform

Freedom isn't free?

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What was that Amy Winehouse song again?

Back in Beta?

NTT claims it can stop the noise leaking from annoying people's headphones

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Those directional speakers...

are freaky. I've encountered them in some museums. The penumbra where the sounds starts getting cancelled out makes me nauseous.

Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter

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I don't see the problem...

Give it a few weeks and that eleven-fold difference will be at parity, surely?

Swiss drone-busting eagle squadron grounded permanently

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Re: Headline creativity

Aw! You beat me to it!

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Re: Headline creativity

Koenig to Alpha... cancel Operation Exodus... all Eagles are grounded!

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Re: El Reg goes full Yankee

Will there be a similar program against unmanned aquatic vehicles then?

Tesla recalls 40k cars over patch that broke power steering

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Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

A unicyclist. They felt excluded.

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Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

Does that include the passenger load?

Just sayin'...

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Surely this is a feature?

Loss of power steering. Builds your arm muscles. It's like an in-car gym session.

BT re-enters pay talks to prevent further strikes, says union

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Well the ACP joined with the GPMU and they then joined with Unite...

Can gamers teach us anything about datacenter cooling? Lenovo seems to think so

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Re: Yet another novel round thingy...

Or making better use of low-grade waste heat. District heating for example. Agriculture.

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*IF*

It is, however, easier to sort that kind of thing out. Extra chiller units, for example. And it's easier to spot problems like that in advance, instead of getting "hot spots" in an air-cooled datacenter. It also makes your DC far less noisy by getting rid of the fans.

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I have seen a total immersion cabinet at a trade show. That was pretty impressive! Needed to keep the coolant exceptionally high resistance though - exceptionally pure. Had a massive specific heat capacity, though.

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

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Re: It's unfortunate

How much was China making on behalf of the US? Actually, not that much I expect, but indirectly... steel etc.

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Re: It's unfortunate

Who smelled it, dealt it!

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

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AMEN to that. The HMRC website has definitely done this bit right. A lovely dynamic database input system that responds beautifully by giving you only the pages which you actually need to fill in, without absolutely hiding the rest of it (for the curious), and which also gives you a "printer ready" version of the data and facts provided which you are legally required to keep for however many years (I think it's 7) because you have attested to the veracity of the information you've given (and you could end up going to jail if it's wrong or you've lied).

And you can then show said completed paper forms to even the dodderyist old fart of an accountant who will understand them in seconds because they've seen thousands of the over the years and know exactly that you have to double check that the boxes on pages 2,3 & 5 should add up to the total in box C of Page 9.

I don't know who did their move online, but I'd like to shake their hand and buy them a pint (in a tax deductible and expenses legitimate way of course).

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I tell you what though... I'd rather print out a PDF form, fill it in with a biro, scan it and send it back than try to fill in the same form sent as a word document which they expect you to TYPE into.

And that goes treble if instead of using Word's clunky form field system they've just used a mixture of tabs, spaces, underscores, underlining, paragraph marks and new line marks to create blank / ruled space on the page, whether they've used page, column and section breaks or not.

AND I expect they've inserted helpful guidance text in a light grey which you then have to overtype, but the document was sent with insert mode on because that's how everyone uses Word and setting it to overtype would just confuse 99% of the recipients who don't even know that such a mode exists.

I'm far too anal to return any kind of a Word document where filling it in destroys the pagination, and where any data so collected are going to be e.g. exported into (God forbid but as soon as you see one of these you know what's going to happen to it) an Excel spreadsheet, but NOT by exporting a separated data layer as something sensible like XML or CSV, but by copying and pasting text which may or may not include formatting and rogue characters which is THEN going to require a whole lot of data sanitation to be performed, something which Excel sucks at worse than anything.

If they've made work for themselves using such a ridiculous methodology, then I don't see why I should waste any more than the bare minimum of my time.

Give me strength!

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Ah. It's not the 90% of case that are simple that add the complexity that slows everything down... it's the 10% of cases where you have to navigate the labyrinthine tax laws that screw it all up. As I've repeatedly asked "who are they trying to kid when they use the term 'simplifying the tax system' to refer to getting rid of the additional rate tax band instead of genuinely making it less of an administrative minefield."

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Re: I don't mind PDFs

PDF is a very powerful tool indeed. It's just people don't know how to use it. Hence the "Print out the PDF, fill it in, scan it, email it back" brigade.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

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Re: Manual is optional,

I worked at a hospital which had to leave portable x-ray machines in a basement corridor that was open for general use (though not advertised!) Signs of increasing levels of frustration and anger appeared over the years instructing, warning, begging and even pleading for people NOT to mess with the controls. The last new notice I saw (which obviously was the one that worked) said "Please feel free to play with these controls - we are short of bodies for dissection classes"

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

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Re: This should make people happy

Ah, sorry. I had to go out on a job yesterday morning and it was quite involved, so I stopped checking for about an hour. When I picked it up again...

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Re: This should make people happy

Oh yes, and the bit about strikes is that they hid, and according to Liz's interview last night are still pursuing, legislation to yet again restrict civil liberties instead of addressing the issue. Stick for the strikers, carrots for the bankers. People won't go on strike (tend less to want to go on strike) if they feel they are being treated fairly, and when given the opportunity to demonstrate evenhandedness they instead go full on Prince John instead of a bit more Robin Hood. Absolutely Kwaaaaayzi man, kwayzi.

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Re: This should make people happy

Dig it out of the UK, but sell it to the highest bidder. Wherever they are.

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Re: This should make people happy

I keep checking my phone to see if she's gone yet. I should stop that. Watched kettle.

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Re: This should make people happy

I'll agree that it was the presentation... there's a budget cycle. Sometimes shit happens and you need to tweak the knobs mid-cycle.

This is what should have happened - a tweak. Not junking a previously analysed and published fiscal plan with bells and whistles added, labelled as Kwazi's Magic Growth Medicine and sending it into the bear pit wearing a propeller hat and a luncheon meat overcoat!

The nation had a number of problems, the cause seems to be very high inflation caused primarily by fuel prices resulting from the Ukraine situation. This inflation led to strikes, increasing poverty levels, decreasing health levels etc. They had the opportunity to address some of that, but they did crazy things - leaving personal allowances alone for one. The 20% to 19% change put £2 a month in the pay packet of someone age 23 working full time on minimum wage. That's way less than a monthly bus ticket has gone up. I catch a bus fairly often; it goes past a hospital - I see half a dozen nurses or care/health assistants on every trip. Someone up at the TOP of that 20% band, around £50kpa, gets around £30 a month from that percentage change. Raising the personal allowance up by £150 costs the treasury exactly the same but puts £12 a month into the pocket of everyone earning under £100k. Sounds like pants when you're on £4k a month, but that £12 means choice like do you get a cheaper bottle of wine to go with Sunday dinner, not "Well, looks like it's a choice of a bus ticket or taking lunch to work".

But of course % basic rates look sexier in the headlines than personal allowance figure which are just a blah blah string of numbers.

And don't even get me started on the pain of mortgage interest rates now... they've screwed the pooch and that doesn't get unscrewed. The damage is done.

NASA OKs spacewalks, upgrades helmets after fishbowl mishap

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Re: Surely it'd be easier....

You watched Avenue 5 as well then?

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Re: No thanks.

Just become a political dissident like your dad, and you'll soon be on the shuttle to Cygnus Alpha.

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...developed a hardware solution...

This?

Cisco's latest switch packs 32 800G ports into a pizza box

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The last time I saw that kind of capacious port density...

was in a dream I had about meeting Nelson at an Admiralty reunion dinner!

Weird robot breaks down in middle of House of Lords hearing on AI art

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Clever though...

The way they swapped the wig for a blonde one and got it to stand in for the prime minister. Or did they stick a black wig on Liz Truss and smuggle her into the Lords Chamber? It's hard to tell really.

BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2

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Re: Problems in search of solutions

I had a few of those. They turn on the accessories when the master socket is drawing more than a few watts. They all started going POP recently. I guess they have a lifespan.