* Posts by David 132

3818 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Availability

>I ended up with a load of Levano laptops

Ah yes, the off-brand knockoff from the same people that brought you Sorny and Panaphonics hi-fi...

Apple says 2017 MacBooks don't have FlexGate defect. Aussie tribunal orders a fix anyway

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It's not hard

>it just works

Maybe it's only me, but I always read that with the alternative interpretation of "just" - i.e., "barely".

"It barely works".

Apparently as regards the screen cable on their laptops, "it's juuuuuuust long enough"?

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Apparently

I have a 27” iMac, bought new in 2010. It’s still soldiering on. I’ve upgraded the original HDD to an SSD, upgraded the RAM, and even swapped out the original socketed Core i5 processor for a faster Core i7. It’s been one of the most durable and long-lasting PCs I’ve ever bought.

I occasionally looked at getting a newer iMac, but each year they seemed to get more and more restricted. Non-upgradable storage, CPU… and on the latest ones the screen glass is bonded to the chassis in a way that positively deters disassembly. So I never bothered. These days I run Intel NUCs instead. Far more flexible and upgradeable.

Apple seem to have disappeared up their own posterior as far as the balance between style and practicality goes.

Epson says ink pad saturation behind 'end of service life' warning on inkjet printers

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Brother

Obligatory XKCD (may be NSFW)...

Meta's AI internet chatbot demo quickly starts spewing fake news and racist remarks

David 132 Silver badge
Terminator

Re: Oh bot, this is trouble

ITYM “Bite my shiny metal ass”

Court voids 34,000 unfair Fuji Xerox contracts

David 132 Silver badge

Re: "Fujifilm will invoice the customer for licensed software irrespective of delivery by Fujifilm."

Indeed.

"We licenced the software to you, so you owe us, even if you didn't want it, don't need it, and never installed it."

vs

"We licensed the OnStar service package to you, so you owe us, even if" etc etc.

Funny that this stuff is allowed, yet if - for example - you go putting books through random peoples' letterboxes and then sending them an invoice weeks later, it's rightly considered to be an unfair contract and not something you can enforce.

Ain't ongoing-X-as-a-Service, own-nothing-rent-everything great?

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

David 132 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: He made a discovery

I'm sorry, it must be the space my head is in this morning, but your story sounds like it should end with the line "...and it was at that point that I ran screaming out of the Gents' and told my mum to find a policeman"...

David 132 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Terminators and T-Pieces

I suspect that a representative of the perpetually offended Twitterati-class made a complaint, and someone at the Reg got nervous that having the Paris icon wasn't aligned with corporate diversity equity values or some such twaddle.

Tempus fugit.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: adapter

A.K.A "engineer's screwdriver number one" round these parts.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: colour me sceptical

Many, many times in the past have I wedged a Euro-type Shuko or two-pin plug into a UK socket, even on occasion using a small screwdriver in the Earth-pin hole to open the socket's internal safety shutters.

Take that, MK electrical safety engineers!

OTOH, I have here in my office now several of those extremely sketchy Chinese-made "will accept any plug from any country" power-strips, and those give me the heebie-jeebies. Arcy-sparky and wibbly-wobbly don't mix with mains voltages.

Want the very latest Windows Insider Dev Channel build? Check your disk space

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It seems to be how things are

70s?

I’m thinking 1985, myself…

Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: The whinings of a sad loser

Well they're obviously adding another one to that list... "Google Whine".

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

David 132 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Reminds one

Non-English keyboards? Be glad you get non-English character sets. In my day we had 7-bit ASCII and maybe EBCDIC. And we liked it.

Uphill, both ways, in the snow, etc etc.

(Yorkshireman icon -->)

David 132 Silver badge
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At least 20 of us, myself included, are glad you couldn't resist.

Although I suspect the young'uns around here won't have a clue as to what you're riffing on!

The sins of OneDrive as Microsoft's cloud storage service turns 15

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Probing the depths

Yeah yeah, OK, I stand corrected. Surface has a perfectly honourable tradition of enverbification.

I wrote my comment from behind a red (october?) mist of rage. What I meant to write, I think, was "Surface as a neologism for Reveal/Show/Present? Aaaaaaargh!!"

Thank you for the tactful correction.

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

I would add

4) ”Surface” as a verb? Really??? For shame, whoever wrote that.

Real-time deepfakes can be beaten by a sideways glance

David 132 Silver badge
Boffin

I wonder if an effective test for a suspected live deepfake would be to have the subject hold up a life-size photo of their “claimed” face - or even a random other face - in front of them, and see if the image jumps/distorts at all as the deepfake algorithm tries to map onto an unexpected set of reference points?

Atari Video Computer System returns in Lego form

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I had a VCS back in the 80s.

I had a VCS, although I can't remember how many switches were on it. On/Off, Black&White/Colour, and I can't remember any more than that!

But I agree completely with the author's comments about Combat. Finest game suite ever devised for total subjugation of one's younger brother. Whether at the Tanks or the Biplanes sub-games, I humiliated him in a manner that can only be described as "total pwnage", as I believe the hep young cats say these days.

How could something with a resolution of about 20x15 and a palette of migraine-inducing hues that made the ZX Spectrum look like 4K HDR, be so much fun?

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

David 132 Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: CHINA IS NOT GOING TO GO AWAY...

>1933 -79 years ago

You might want to re-check that one.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Red-line

>everyone is, as the saying goes, screwed (but starting with the letter F instead).

Fcrewed?

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Pearlman

Well, it could have been worse! Obligatory XKCD...

Microsoft's Teams goes native on Apple, retains a human touch

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Hey, Cortana...

Hey, Cortana, what's the English translation for "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Afonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu" that I just saw on a road-sign?

Computer glitches harmed 'nearly 150' patients after Oracle Cerner system go-live

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not a unique issue

> Kumar,Kumar,Kumar,Kumar

…Kameleon?

(And for that 80’s earworm, you’re welcome.)

David 132 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Unknown problems

It definitely sounds like an ideal use case for blockchain and/or AI, doesn’t it? Perhaps Oracle will be brave enough to bring us the first health records system that uses GANs to generate realistic-looking treatment plans.

China's Xiaomi teases tech to control smart homes with brain waves

David 132 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Ah.

I remember that movie. I think it was named Chrome, or Brave, or Safari, or something along those lines.

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

David 132 Silver badge
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Re: Rant

Hey, if it helps, this site's journalism gets my approval. I for one wish Andrew O and Lewis Page still wrote for the Reg, because their pieces were always well-written and thought-provoking - even when I didn't agree with the premise. I'm pretty sure AO liked to bait his readership occasionally by being deliberately contrarian, just to kick the metaphorical hornets' nest and stand back sniggering...

David 132 Silver badge

Re: From "The IT crowd"

Indeed. And to be fair, the article itself includes a link to that same video ("...And as a result, they say, the video was widely parodied.")

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

David 132 Silver badge
Boffin

Plus, doesn't "more radioactive" equate to "is radioactive and dangerous for much less time"? IANANRE but that's my understanding - that generally, you can have waste that has a long half-life and is slightly radioactive for long, long periods, or you can have waste that has a short half-life and is very radioactive, but for a manageable length of time.

Hackable hardware PineBook Pro finally starts shipping again

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

Re: No Thanks - PINE64 Community Rules and Code of Conduct

> After all these years, has "Resume from Suspend" ever been fixed on the Pinebook Pro, Pine Micro?

Well, from reading some of the comments above, I infer that Pine Micro has worked around that issue, by making the Pinebook Pro permanently woke.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

David 132 Silver badge

Re: The trick is to be the one who buys for the former and resells for the latter...

I'm reminded of the exchange between Michael Caine and Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the subject of the former's wine cellar.. something along the lines of

"At least you can drink the wine!"

"No, I couldn't drink them, they're far too valuable."

"Fine! Well sell them!"

"Oh no, I couldn't possibly do that, they mean far too much to me..."

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

Well yes, cardboard was the OEM factory solution.

The better solution for the Mini enthusiast was to take a Marigold rubber glove, cut the fingertips off, feed an HT lead through each finger-hole and ziptie the glove around each lead and the distributor. Total waterproofing.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

You've reminded me of this delightful Punch cartoon from February 1940.

David 132 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: You know you're old when...

So what you're saying is that it produced a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?

You're sure it said GOBLIN TEASMADE on the side and not NUTRI-MATIC?

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Obligatory XKCD

"Waiting for my Windows 10/11 PC to install updates that I didn't ask for, interrupting my workflow at a time that is maximally inconvenient for me, and with no way to defer or cancel the updates..."

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

> For those who are interested...the electric typewriter keyboard was basically an array of push switches on a grid - the hardware was a ribbon cable soldered to the grid

Awww... of all the ways to do it, that is the most boring and sensible one to choose.

I was hoping you'd say your company's product was a Heath-Robinson/Rube-Goldberg assemblage of actuator rods and solenoids that was clamped to the typewriter keyboard to press each key as necessary!

This world is too dull.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Sarah? Is the Moderatrix back again?

> We live in hope …

…and die in Caergwle.

Sorry, niche joke there from my family’s part of Wales. Couldn’t resist.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

I was about to say, ALL CAPS? …it sounds like you’d inadvertently created the original prototype Bombastic Bob!

(Just kidding, BB.)

Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

David 132 Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: I am surprised ...

Modified cattle prod, you say? Allow Eddie and Richie to demonstrate...

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

David 132 Silver badge

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

Well yes. And a comment along the lines of "Those are reserved for purchase by the Legal dept."

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

Replying reeeeeeeeeeeally late to this thread (because it was referenced from a July 2022 "On Call" story). Greetings to you all from the strange and futuristic world of 2022. But I digress.

Your Agnus Dei story reminds me of my favourite classical music anecdote.

There is, as some fules kno, a choral piece by the 16th-Century English composer Thomas Tallis named "Spem in Alium", which is Latin for "Hope in Any Other". It's a beautiful piece, and frequently performed by choral societies.

...Who, distressingly often, mis-spell it as "Spem in Allium".

Which would translate as "Hope in the Onion"! So if you see any confused musicians wandering round worshipping shallots...

VMware’s subscriptions start at 16 cores, prices won't be made public

David 132 Silver badge

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

Yeah, I’m sure there used to be a technology back in the olden days that would convert from images to text. But Oh Crikey Really, I can’t remember what it was called.

Apple's secret car team tosses keys to Lamborghini lead

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Exclusive Apple features

> - 20 colors of silicone bumpers to chose from

Nice, but ITYM “car will be made entirely of Gorilla Glass and magnesium alloy and will look exquisite, but will scratch and chip as soon as you drive through a light drizzle, so at a very reasonable cost Apple will sell you their own or 3rd-party silicone car-brascorsets that will protect the bodywork at the cost of making your exquisite new vehicle about 2x the size and resembling a hideous safety concept car from the 1970s”

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: After so long

I know, right? I remember the bad old days when El Reg would be scathingly sarcastic in an article such as this. It’s good to see that the site has won the victory over itself and learned to love Big Brother Apple.

David 132 Silver badge

Re: Apple Tractors

ITYM “Veblen good”. Definition for anyone who isn’t familiar with the term.

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Apple Tractors

Well, they've already sorted out how to get short-range messages to their tractor, when they added Near Field Communication to previous iPhones...

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

David 132 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Orbital Potato Gun

> who wants a moon that sounds like a Harley Davidson?

Dunno, but as for someone wanting a moon that sounds like a clock, well, that would be a lunatic.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Not Lava Tubes

No, stupid, it’s where Lord Lucan and Elvis keep Shergar in their red double-decker bus. Do try to keep up. /s

Microsoft warns Windows 10 patch broke printing for some

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Good old XP

I'm tempted to make a flippant remark along the lines of "yes, and the 30,000 black hats worldwide who have root access to your PC really appreciate the availability of the printer too..." but I won't.

Because I'm better than that. And also I'm sure you're smart enough to keep the machine air-gapped or otherwise protected.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

David 132 Silver badge

Re: That's so stupid...

And the same goes for the two farthings Baldrick thinks he's got hidden inside that mouldy potato.

David 132 Silver badge
Happy

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

Including Ten Pund notes made by Mitchell and Webb, with credit cards that improve on the originals by being made of cheese?