Re: Shoe Event Horizon
My understanding is that most UK High Streets have passed the cellphone event horizon years ago, and are now beyond the Betting Shop, Charity Shop and even American Candy Shop event horizons!
Posts by David 132
3855 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Page:
Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market
HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies
Monday 22nd January 2024 01:22 GMT 
Re: Strange words
>...by a "manufacturer" whose company name is a randomly assigned string of 5 letters...
Ah, I see you, too, have shopped on Amazon recently.
I just searched, for example purposes, for a Thinkpad battery.
Guess which one of these isn't a "real" company name?
Ouwee, Jiazijia, Laqueena, Antiee, Jotact
Trick question! They're all purveyors of replacement "genuine" batteries with suspiciously-identical stock photography!
ZX Spectrum Next Issue 2 ships out, chip shortages be damned
Sunday 21st January 2024 00:31 GMT
Re: Everything old is new again
True! I have, leaning against the desk next to me, a Chicago Telephone Supply Company "Series" telephone from around 1905. Oak cabinet, 5-magnet generator, expansion space for a wet pile battery... now, if I can just figure out how to interface it to my PC as the world's most Steampunk Teams headset...
Friday 19th January 2024 16:44 GMT
You have yours already? Grrr. And fortunately your spoiler about the box colour got mangled in editing… please don’t correct it, I don’t want to know anything about the Next or its packaging until I receive mine :)
Re the built in power switch, the KS2 Nexts at least have an inline switch on their power cord, right?
Friday 19th January 2024 16:42 GMT
Re: SAM Coupé compatibility, anybody?
I remember riding the bus to school and coveting the Sam Coupé when it was reviewed or advertised in the Spectrum magazines. Never got round to buying one; I was able to persuade my dad to get me an Amiga 500 soon after, which in hindsight was a much better result.
Five ripped off IT giant with $7M+ in bogus work expenses, prosecutors claim
Sunday 21st January 2024 00:25 GMT
Re: Digital Equipment Corporation & Me
Fair play to you. I'm a firm believer that everyone deserves a second chance - we're all young once, we all make mistakes.
It's the third, fourth, fifth, ... ninety-second... chances that the criminal justice system seems to give people these days that, well, test my good nature a little!
Anyway, echoing the reply above - have another pint on this chilly Saturday afternoon, and give yourself a pat on the back for plowing a straight furrow in life in the end.
Sunday 21st January 2024 00:21 GMT
Re: Wait, what??
Interesting. Maybe it's a recent-ish rule change?
There's a line at the end of Johnny Cash's "The Chicken in Black" (don't judge me) where he says "Well, I don't pay any income tax... you don't pay tax on money you steal" and I'd always taken that as gospel, because if you can't trust lyrics in a spoof song about a country singer getting his brain swapped with a chicken and a bank-robber, who can you trust?
Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs
Sunday 21st January 2024 00:14 GMT
Re: build enough assembly lines to ensure there is a healthy supply of AI processors to meet demand
Honestly, considering it's Sam Altman and OpenAI, I'm surprised he's talking about building his own infrastructure, and not merely using other peoples' facilities without their permission or licensing. After all, that approach has worked just fine so far for training the AI models...
For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed
Saturday 20th January 2024 21:34 GMT
Re: First Amazon Purchase
Oh yeah, I remember Amazon, the plucky little online book-shop. Whatever became of them, I wonder?
(As an indicator of how long it was before they became the all-consuming behemoth they are now, there's an amusing bit in one of the Futurama episodes circa 2003, when one of the characters announces that with his spare 1¢ change he's going to buy 5 shares of Amazon.com. "A risk taker!" comes the approving-but-sceptical response...)
As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix
Businessman faces 20 years in prison over accusations of illicit chip exports to Russia
Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human
Friday 19th January 2024 06:40 GMT
Re: AI subscription
>According to Samsung the AI compnent will be subscription after 2025
Ah, the time-honoured drug dealer model.
"First hit's free."
I assume they're hoping that over the next 12-24 months users will get totally hooked on the AI features, such that being asked to pony up $$ each month after 2025 will seem reasonable.
WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager
Thursday 18th January 2024 05:02 GMT
“Holly, as the Esperantinos say, ’Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston, lausajne estas rano in mea bideo’… and I think we all know what that means!”
“Yeah. It means, ‘please would you send for the hall porter, there appears to be a frog in my bidet’.”
“Oh. Well, what’s the one that means ‘your mother spent all her time up against walls with sailors’?”
“I’m not going to tell you, Arnold.’
Wednesday 17th January 2024 23:07 GMT
Re: "speach"
Nah, but I had several friends who were, and you know how at that age kids - well, speaking for myself - are a sponge for new words and idioms.
For example, I remember my brother and I going through a phase - this would be early 80s - of describing anything that was really easy as "dead pimps" (cf "dead simple" etc), a coinage that alarmed and unnerved our parents... but then, isn't that the whole point of being a kid? :)
IBM overhauls rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points
Wednesday 17th January 2024 20:47 GMT
It's the IBM of the 21st century, what do you expect?
Not an engineering excellence-led company any more. Between this and their shoddy treatment of their so-called "dinobabies" - employees over the age of about 24 to you and me - I honestly don't know why anyone with any pride would still work there, much less work outside their day-job to develop IP for the company. Even the old rewards scheme sounds frankly insulting - "you developed and patented a new algorithm that'll make $millions for IBM - here's $1200, you clever little chap." What's the new one? Accrue enough BluePoints™ and get a set of lead-crystal glasses or a souvenir pen?
I feel really sorry for people who've put their heart and soul and careers into IBM. The company doesn't deserve you.
Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree
Wednesday 17th January 2024 18:00 GMT
Re: Fix copy/paste bugs in Windows 11 first
> Several times a day copy/paste stops working…
It’s probably losing connection to the Microsoft copy-paste-datamine server :)
(NB: ten years ago, everyone would have known that my comment above was ridiculous hyperbole for the purpose - whether I achieved it or not! - of humour. Now, in this era of telemetry and everything-under-the-sun being fed into rapacious LLM training sets… am I really joking?)
Wednesday 17th January 2024 17:55 GMT
Re: Caveat
Unless things have changed… last time I installed Windows 11, merely having no available network was no excuse. Setup blocked and refused to go any further until I’d connected the machine one way or another, so that it could force me into creating a Microsoft account.
I had to resort to - from memory - pressing shift+F10 to get a command prompt, killing the setup process, then restarting it with a switch to the effect of “/noMicrosoftAccount” (not actual wording, obviously), before I could continue with a local account.
Yes, it was doable and cost me only a few minutes’ effort, but the direction of travel is clear.
On the plus side, I bet Coprolith - sorry, autocorrect strikes again, I meant Copilot - will require a Microsoft account, so that’s one less thing that will be bothering me.
Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup
Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered
Patch time: Critical GitLab vulnerability exposes 2FA-less users to account takeovers
Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs
Wednesday 17th January 2024 03:57 GMT
Interesting.
My wife's diesel Disco has stop/start, but it's smart enough to enable or disable it according to how firmly you press the brake pedal. Light touch, just enough to hold the car stationary = no stop/start. Heavier press on the pedal = stop/start enabled.
Actually quite smart, because how is the car going to know for itself whether you're going to be stopped for 2 seconds, or a minute?
Her car also has a heated steering wheel, which I admit I do covet. My older Volvo has adaptive cruise control though, so I guess we're even :)
How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds
Tuesday 16th January 2024 21:54 GMT
Re: Linus Torvalds and I both enjoyed the QL
Namedropper :)
My only connection with Linus, as I learned from an article here a day or two ago, is that he too lives just outside Portland Oregon and has been affected just as I have by our widespread power outages and sub-freezing temperatures. You have me well and truly beaten.
Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi
The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128
Tuesday 16th January 2024 04:34 GMT
Re: "their substantial egos"
...and here it is:
http://www.retro8bitcomputers.co.uk/Content/downloads/manuals/zx81-basic-manual.pdf
(Incidentally, the author of that manual - Steven Vickers - had a very quirky sense of humour. Why do computer manuals nowadays not have lines like "Suddenly, your housekeeper rushes in to tell you that eggs are now 61p a dozen"? Oh, yes... there are no manuals with computers any more. Bah.)
Monday 15th January 2024 19:13 GMT
Re: Maybe
Along with a lot of other people outside the UK and EU I’m still waiting for my Spectrum Next from the Kickstarter campaign. The latest hurdle for the project team is UPS’s insistence that from a shipping point of view, there’s no difference between Li-Ion laptop batteries and the CR2032 coin-cells that the Next uses.
But when I do receive it I’m looking forward to rediscovering the joys of Speccy programming!
Reports that China's military uses Baidu's AI lead to stock plunge
Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms
Monday 15th January 2024 05:20 GMT
I sympathize with Linus.
I'm also in Oregon near Portland. We got temperatures down to 12F (-11C) yesterday, which was particularly pleasant when our power went out at 8:30AM - and with it our water. The wife and I spent the day huddled round the log fire, with a propane heater and two electric ceramic heaters running off our generator - for all the good they did, I might as well have been waving a Swan Vestas match around. The house dropped to about 40F (4C) despite our best efforts (on a brighter note, I now know that I need to re-do the draught stripping around one of the doors - its hinges on the inside were coated in ice...)
Unlike Linus I didn't have to run a kernel merge window, although I did have to keep dozens of ducks and a couple of goats alive and thawed. No I won't swap with him :)
Fortunately our power came back on unexpectedly this afternoon (thanks heroic PGE linesmen!), but looking at the 'leccy company's outage tracker I see they still have 4100 outages and about 80,000 people affected - I do hope Linus isn't one of them. This weather is brutal.
Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month
Kia crashes CES with modular electric vehicle concept
Wednesday 10th January 2024 23:45 GMT
They look stylish...
...as is de rigeur for concept vehicles. I'm sure the production models, if they ever appear, will look just as sleek and futuristic and clean, right?
(And for those who think I'm being needlessly cynical, I present Exhibit A: Harris Mann's original design sketch for the Austin Allegro.)
Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland
Wednesday 10th January 2024 15:19 GMT
Re: Pedant? moi?
I’ve just read the article and evidently it’s now been fixed.
By the way, from personal experience I can tell you that the Reg team prefer corrections to be sent via the link (at the top of each comments page) - and they’ve been known to get mildly acerbic if this process isn’t followed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
