* Posts by spamspamspam

12 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2011

Crysis creeps: Our ransomware locks network drives and PCs. Bargain

spamspamspam

When you write these sort of attention-grabbing sky-is-falling articles could you put in which platforms/os are known to be affected please?

Ta

Hacked in a public space? Thanks, HTTPS

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Feck me. The final stacked up trick in there is deviously clever. You wouldn't have to be "stupid" at all, in fact I can't see how you'd spot it unless you're manually checking the certificate. Scary stuff.

Apparently we have to give customers the warm fuzzies ... How the heck do we do that?

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Buzzword bingo managment b*****ks

Firstly, any "story" which quotes Gartner turns me right off. How did their stupid quadrant get acceptance as something "magical" outside of the 3-6 year age range?

Secondly, how the hell is the fact that people like to easy to use websites & dislike hard to use ones not obvious to everyone? Is someone really going to read this and go "ah, THAT's one tiny trick"? Surely the problem's deeper than that? I tried to use First Great Western's mobile site the other day to buy a ticket - a "user story" which you'd think might have been tested - to find that that was apparently not possible. So you're right at least about the customer only caring about their last transaction, cause another company got my business & I won't be using them again.

Hope that's at least ranty enough to be entertaining, [smiley face]

Falcon 9 fireworks display grounds SpaceX

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Re: The question nobody is asking...

Because it makes the system lighter: the pressure in the outer tank reduces the differential pressure the inner tank has to support, & hence it can be thinner-walled.

People do think about this stuff you know.

I, for one, welcome the rise of the Infrastructure Endgame Machines

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So why do DevOps survive as an internal function?

Smartphones don’t dumb you down, they DUMB you UP

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Re: GPS maps are not the same

People who actually use GPS for anything important have known that since, well, GPS was invented I guess. Did you read the manual?

Brit telcos warn Scots that voting Yes could lead to hefty bills

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Re: If they say yes...

JP your 2nd para is brilliant! Mind if I quote it elsewhere?

Barnes & Noble: Swallow a Samsung Nook tablet, please ... pretty please

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Nook Simple Touch is great: all the benefits of an e-ink screen mentioned above, cost me about £20, & when rooted runs the Kindle app perfectly, as well as Gmail & Calendar very usably & Opera if you're desperate :-)

Ye Bug List

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New mobile layout

(Posting in here as I don't seem to be able to create a new thread?)

What's going on with the new mobile view? Complaints are:

- It at least *feels* like it loads slower

- The spinny Vulture icon covering the page while its loading is annoying/really disruptive - what's wrong with just letting the browser do what it normally does when loading a page?

- You can't tell which stories you've read as links and visited links are the same colour

- The comments button after a story appears to dump you randomly into the middle of the comments page, and the number of comments shown on the button doesn't appear to be right

- Long comments pages break Chrome's UI a bit; normally you can just drag up & down a bit to show the brower's bar, but on those pages you have to scroll almost all the way to the top of the page before you can see it for some reason.

- The icons at the top right look a bit blurry and hence budget.

Is this picky? I know no-one really likes change but honestly I can't see any obvious improvements in the new layout!

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself

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I wish our IT department would google stuff, generally I have to tell them exactly what I want by looking at their vendor's catalogue, then they charge me 10% more that that & I have to help them install & configure it. The idea of IT being able to actually help me do my job better seems frankly laughable from here...

Tax dodging? It's harder to do - and rarer - than you think

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More to the point, why the hell is the aim to MAXIMISE the tax take?! That is completely arse-about-face. Surely the aim should be to raise the NECESSARY amount in the most efficient way possible?

Revealed: Full specs on Mars rover's nuclear laser heat ray

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Facepalm

@ Thomas Martin

That's impressive that in a 3.5 line comment you've revealed that you neither read the article nor know what you're talking about!

1) It's got a NUCLEAR powersource charging BATTERIES - there are no solar panels

2) "Odd to think that ..." yes it would be odd to think that, cause it's never happened! Reduction in power due to dust accumulation was expected for the MER's (Spirit & Opportunity) - it was a design decision to live with that / design for it given the limited lifespan expected for other reasons rather than put in some probably easily-breakable, not very effective cleaning system.