* Posts by MyffyW

2013 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

Meta, Google learn the art of the quiet layoff

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: An old trick in the US

The UK is perfectly capable of maintaining standards outside the EU.

Yes, but will it maintain labour protection standards with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg at the reins?

San Francisco cops can use private cameras to live-monitor 'significant events'

MyffyW Silver badge

Dreamforce

Is it just me who finds it funny that news of SF police over-reach is on the same day Salesforce take over San Francisco for their cartoon-furry trade-fest.

Just leave Astro alone, you b'stards!

Excel's comedy of errors needs a new script, not new scripting

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Brilliant article

One of my peers saw me reading El Reg the other day and sneered "You don't still read that do you?" as if a couple of rungs up the corporate hierarchy should cure me of this bad habit. Well yes, I still do, and guess what? That's why I'm better informed than said colleague :-)

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: ta ta Liz

Was surprisingly moved to hear she'd passed away. Her Maj will always be The Queen in my book.

UK tech sector facing structural difficulties, says analyst firm

MyffyW Silver badge
Coat

Re: Merkinisation?

You make some interesting points, but I'm struggling to work out what pubic wigs have to do with this?

(mine is the one with the stars and stripes on it)

Bye bye BoJo: Liz Truss named new UK prime minister

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Opinion polls are looking good.....

Conservative and Unionist Party - clue is in the name, guard your watch and check you change

MyffyW Silver badge
Coat

Re: Lol...

I, for one, welcome our new ... just kidding :-)

Liz is so crap only 57% of the Tories could bear to vote for her. Quiet Man Ian Duncan-Smith got more. Cameron the pig-shagger got more. Boris "I promoted a sex pest" Johnson got more.

Dear god! The world just keeps getting less rooted in reality.

Cloudflare stops services to 'revolting' hate site

MyffyW Silver badge

@ChoHag

maybe El Reg decided it had little of merit to report beyond that fact. Journalists don't have to give equal column inches to both sides when one plainly is deluded.

NASA scrubs Artemis mission yet again because SLS just can't handle the pressure

MyffyW Silver badge

obsolete by design

Unfair to other obsolete designs - this one is actually a retrograde step in that they are throwing away previously re-usable* engines :-)

[I mean re-usable in the sense of take-the-whole-thing-apart-put-it-back-together-again sense of the word]

Astronaut blood reveals genetic mutations for cancer and heart disease

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: I believe ....

@KittenHuffer as the only woman on that flight I felt like I was invisible.

California asks people not to charge EVs during heatwave

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Har Har

In fairness I think the El Reg article represents all of the arguments well. Yes, charging your EV between 4pm and 9pm would present further problems to the grid. But most EV users would be happy to charge between 10pm and 6am (and indeed pay less for their leccy).

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Har Har

@VoiceOfTruth probably true, but of course both statements can simultaneously be true. I'm personally wealthier than I was when I was 18 but also have significantly more loans.

Xiaomi could be 'adversely affected' by tax allegations in India

MyffyW Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Is there a national security angle?

China and Pakistan have a long history of cooperation. India could plausibly be a rival super-power in the coming century. Is the stand off starting with cheap mobile phones?

Coffee stains because maybe I've had too much already :-)

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Honesty kills

Don't take your toys to school work, they will only get broken or stolen

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Honesty kills

When dealing with complex engineering the value of "Percussive Maintenance" should not be under-estimated - whether it is delivered by a workshop implement, a Dr Martens boot or the flat of your hand.

Infosys reduces employee bonuses after execs promised better profit margins

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: I think I found the problem!

Of my ex-Wipro colleagues from six years ago just a tiny fraction still work for them, whilst most work for the wider constellation of Indian offices of global tech or TCS, HCL, Infosys et al

I confidently expect "staff attrition rate of 28.4 percent for the previous twelve months" to be a low, not a high water mark :-)

US Army drone crashes hours ahead of breaking flight duration record

MyffyW Silver badge

@Bluester, you just know it wouldn't have made it past 30 days and a patch Tuesday :-)

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

MyffyW Silver badge

Royston Vasey

...but we didn't burn them

NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Correction !

@Miss_Config you need a silver badge to access the html goodies. I am told the requirements are:

"minimum of one year membership of Reg forums, at least 100 comments made using your handle in the previous 12 months and 2000 upvotes."

Keep posting and have an upvote from me to help you on your way.

Tesla expands Powerwall-to-grid program to cover most of California

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: $2/kwh is a lot of money

I remember Professor Ian Fells telling us of the perils of the "dash for gas" back in the early '90s, with particular reference to the unstable parts of the world we would be dependent on for our fossil fuels. Only surprised it's taken this long for the wildfowl to return.

Would I want the clusterfsck that is Dounreay or Windscale in my backyard? Not especially. But I'd be quite happy to have a reactor complex of proven design, with multiple levels of resilience rather than risk global catastrophe.

That was fast: MetaGuard emerges as an 'incognito mode' for the metaverse

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: I don't get the metaverse thing

It's gone in my vocab book too ...

Attention Microsoft-oriented Linux devs: .NET 6 is on Ubuntu 22.04

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Nice one Cyril

When MS starts wearing my grandmas clothes, I'll be worried. Not least because she's been dead since 2003.

(No analogies should be drawn with the moribund state of MS :-)

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Reap what you sow

OK - most of the UK inflation is not due to:

- Printing money (though we have done quite a bit of of that, you will note we've stopped)

- High Taxes (that's deflationary)

- People working from home (please play nicely with the other public servants, Jacob)

- The economy restarting after COVID (although I'll concede that probably has made money chase scarce goods)

It is largely due to:

1) The absolutely effing enormous jump in the cost of fossil fuels after a bare-chested, oil-soaked dictator decided to do a reverse-Barbarossa. This is the big one.

2) The slide of the pound in relation to most currencies that matter, which started, curiously enough just as soon as the money-markets realised just shy of 50% of the UK electorate had lost their marbles

Apple to compel workers to spend '3 days a week' in the office

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: That's fine.

I also like how the "Team Manager" gets to choose the 3rd day ... so much better than leaving that to personal discretion

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted...

@TheMeerkat I don't hate Boris Johnson. In all fairness I find him quite amusing. But I'm not quite so impressed with him as leader of these fair islands.

As for people who "talk politics for no reason", I resemble that remark. Maybe it's because I see politics as one way (there are others) to make the world a better place.

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: IPad, MacBook and iPhone

Yeah - I'll definitely make my next home office purchase a non-Apple product

NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Did someone..

In fairness, you had the 13th planet already, bombed the living shite of the other 12, bred with one of those you'd made homeless and then bred that hybrid with the pre-historic humans creating this humanity's mitochondrial eve.

Still, not bad for a fracking toaster :-)

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Did someone..

I'm too busy saying "c-o-m-p-u-t-e-r chips in spaaaace!"

(although perhaps I'm a little too fond of indulging my inner Miss Piggy)

DARPA seeks a few good AI coders to help America find its own rare minerals

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: And the answer is..

And our local landfill is accumulating rare earths, wonder at what point it would be worth mining it?

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

MyffyW Silver badge

I have no great love of the beautiful game, and a scant understanding of the rules, but Elon Musk is only the answer if the question was "what could be worse than the Glazer's"

Dinobabies latest: IBM settles with widow of exec who killed himself after layoff

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Funnily enough...

Well some of my C-suite now look like young pups to me. However, nothing seems likely to convince them that a cost of living payrise has merit, even as they vote themselves 150% "long-term incentive plans" every year.

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

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: The good old days

Had some fun overclocking the Athlon XP down the years, managing to wring 10 years of useful life out of a 1800+. Had to give up when I realised the Intel Atom was outperforming it though.

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

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Brother

Inkjets are the work of the devil

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Brother

You mean you didn't delete those pictures? Blushes

When will the UK take another giant leap into space?

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: What is the benefit?

That intangible lift in the heart that comes from feeling connected to the wider universe and inspires boys and girls to study tech? Hard to put a price on it... but it's there

Artemis I will get 3 launch attempts after termination system extension agreed

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: If you do have an abort mode...

One of the fears for Apollo was they'd land safely, roam around and then the ascent module would fail to launch. Imagine staring at the distant Earth with your last remaining oxygen. Doesn't bear thinking about.

World record for strongest steady magnetic field 'broken' by Chinese team

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Dumb question time...

Maybe they used magnets from old spinning rust hard drives? Those feckers are way more powerful than my "F*** the Tories" fridge magnet

Virgin Orbit trims losses, eyes two final launches for the year

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Purpose

Knowledge is Ignorance

It's 2022 and there are still thousands of public systems using password-less VNC

MyffyW Silver badge

Ah yes, but have you war-gamed what will happen if a packet hits a pocket on the socket of a port?

Reckon Russian spies are lurking in your inbox? Check for these IOCs, Microsoft says

MyffyW Silver badge

I, for one, welcome the pivot from blaming scammers in Nigeria to hackers in Russia. Seems so a la mode

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

MyffyW Silver badge

It's on my Christmas list

Ryugu asteroid: It came from the outer solar system, say scientists

MyffyW Silver badge

Given where it went cleanliness was the least of my concerns.

Digital Ocean dumps Mailchimp after attack leaked customer email addresses

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Crypto key

In one of my fuller-figured moments an acquaintance once described me as the 600lb gorilla of Laura Ashley. I never stopped to ask if he appreciated the floral pattern on my Doc Martens.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

Dark Age? No Thanks.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: “here”

Just here. No the other way, yes, that's right, next to whatchamacallit ... thud

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

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Cave-dwelling

@AC, is that you Arthur?

MyffyW Silver badge

Cave-dwelling

I will admit there is something quite odd about going to all the trouble of getting out of Earth's gravity well only to live in a cave.

... but I've still got a hankering to do it.

Chinese smartphone sales sink to levels not seen since 2012

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Sharing

Possibly, although in fairness there are fascistic tendencies and digital big-brother moves rather nearer to home

I'm looking at you, Nadine

NYC issues super upbeat PSA for surviving the nuclear apocalypse

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Update

If we are facing a Threads style attack then I - like many here - would sooner go in the first flash. If however we are talking about a limited exchange (and God forbid even that should happen), then some sound advice is worth heading.

https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout

In short, staying indoors could make a very big difference to your life expectancy.

Researchers find evidence that stress does turn your hair grey, and it can be reversed – you just need a holiday

MyffyW Silver badge

Re: Its not the colour that's the problem

Maybe by the 23rd century people had moved on from the narcistic beauty industry?