Posts by jelabarre59

Re: So, turn the Internet upside-down over this?

try it when every bus has its own wifi, its a big PITA when you are not on one or your at the back of one bus and you jump to the hospot on the one beside or behind as they pass....

But we've used that on vacation, shadowing some tour bus while on the interstate, so we could hop on their wifi...

Someone needs to patent "patent trolling".

For a brief time there were credit cards that provided the capability of using one-use credit card numbers. I'm pretty certain it was the very same companies that love to auto-bill people who put pressure on them to eliminate the capability.

Re: Not quite a bereavement..

On a trip to the far reaches of Canada some years back, my dad witnessed the unfortunate demise of a pedestrian on the street when a log fell off a log truck and decapitated her. He had stopped to assist the police and emergency services, and had covered her body with a blanket.

The rescue squad person came by and was all worked up that no one had done any triage on the victim. Dad says "her body's there, her head is over there. I think that was triage enough."

Re: Accounts names

Or when someone called what had once been our grandmother's number (we had taken it over), and dad was visiting that week. When the caller said "could I speak to Mrs <grandma name>?" Dad says "You'll have to yell loud..."

"Oh, why is that?"

"She's in <cemetery name>".

That was enough to throw them off. Probably wouldn't work with the Indian call centers though.

Re: Accounts names

She opened with broom and cloth in hands to find Jehovah witnesses ready to spill their speech

There was the friend whose daughter, upon finding Jehova's Witnesses at the door, picked up the family's black cat, and said "oh, we're Satanists. This is my familiar, Lucifer..."

Then there was the time some JW decided to play lone-wolf, and proselytize at a local motel. Only to find the local Baptist minister having a meeting with a travelling Baptist evangelist who was at our church for a week's seminars.

Re: Bwah hah ha ha ha!

It’s not that it’s impossible, just that the people trying aren’t smart enough to pull it off. Like fusion, I eagerly await its arrival in 20 years.

Ah, so shortly before ReactOS reaches full MSWin XP compatibility...

Re: "as we prepare to welcome our 14th Doctor"

Nah, if you want to see Dr Who as an anime, this was a brilliant example done in classic late-80s/early-90's style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt3qZYUPi2Y

But if you're picking Asian replacements, why not an entirely computer-generated one like Hatsune Miku? (or Kaito, Meiko or Gumi?)

Re: Guilty Secret

My own yahoo email account dates back to before the turn of the century. I still use it as my main email address for Stuff That Matters; for other stuff I have a selection of others elsewhere for commercial junk etc).

Originally I ended up with a Yahoo account when Yahoo bought eGroups (which had previously merged with Onelist) and I was forced to create an account (Onelist had our Festiva Owners maillist).

Had been so miffed I had to create a new account, I created an account with the name <ISP username>at<ISP>dotnet@yahoo.com. Yes, all spelled out as one long word.

Re: Reminds me...

Or perhaps Heaven 17 and The Human League going on tour together...

Re: Confused

* aside: Oh what fun if you've bought a second hand mac and you don't have the version of the OS it ships with tied to your iCloud account.

I don't know, I did exactly that. Picked up a used mid-2010 MBP, immediately wiped the HDD because I wanted to start the system out fresh (and whatever the former owners had on it was none of MY business). First tested it out with a Mint live-DVD to see it was functional (and that was when I wiped the disk). Figured I'd have to order a reinstall disk, or have a colleague with a Mac pull down a reinstall image. Then I found out about the internet reinstall option. It *did* take 3 or 4 retries until it started doing the install, but surprisingly it worked.

Now if only Apple's hardware hadn't turned to shit in the past 8 years.

Re: "Naturally, all user data is wiped with this option"

I guess the old school is losing talent to places like Google and Amazon now.

Amazon maybe, I wouldn't be so sure about Google. Unless Google is only hiring the BOFHs, and they're screwing the system up 'just because'...

Re: Quality?

Let me just say that I like Dell equipment, but their laptop quality has been abysmal for the last year or two on their Latitude line.

It's the case on their All-in-One systems as well (although, looking at the system boards on them, they're pretty much "laptop" machines anyway, just with bigger screens and external keyboards). The in-laws just "upgraded" their 4-yr old Dell AiO to a current Inspiron AiO (funny, it didn't 'inspire" me once I was configuring/decrappifying it for them) and it runs just as bad (or worse) than the machine they were replacing.

If, as another commenter here says, HP & Dell are coming off the same line, perhaps they should be considering Lenovo next time around.

Re: What if ...

The main problem is that the left hand often doesn't know what the right is doing...

I think the line from "The Rutles Story" was "...didn't know WHO the right hand was doing..."

Re: What if ...

Back when MS first came out with exFAT, I thought it would have been a smarter idea for the various consumer electronics manufacturers to get together and decide on an open spec like EXT4, or something else that was already capable of handling larger storage capacities. MSWin already had it's IFS (Installable Filesystem) support, so all a manufacturer would have to do is include the driver disk with the device (along with the shit-ton of other crap they usually bundle, withe added advantage taht once it was available for one device, it would be available for ALL of them.

But that would have required them to NOT be a bunch of lazy, chickenshit bunch of cowardly lemmings.

Re: An easy way to save power...

I remember some 20 years ago, working on IBM's HotMedia project (a java "rich media" player) that we were specifically looking at loading times, as well as caching the couple of player-files the applet used, to make it as efficient as possible. Of course, being meant for commerce websites, it was expected that a site could become heavy with HM applets, so efficient use of bandwidth (especially in the dial-up days) was critical.

If the management had been better at pushing the project, we'd all be complaining about HM-heavy webpages, and Flash would be long-forgotten Macromedia Director derivative.

Re: Paranoia

Sounds like something from "This is the Happiness and Peace of Mind Committee" (you have to read the subtitles to get it though).

Re: The Register has asked Google to comment...

A month later, MS sent him the "Hi, we've noticed your app in the app store hasn't had any hits recently, is there anything we can do?" email again.

The proper answer then would be "You can START by extracting your head from your bumhole..."

Re: Things that weren't mentioned by most news about this

Me in particular, sometimes prefer watching youtube videos using a web browser rather than using the phone app because I can skip ads using the web browsers ad-blocking feature.

I've been finding that too. Especially with YouTube's insistence on the pop-over "another video you might want to watch" ABOMINATIONS. Seriously, I'm watching *THIS* video, I'll get to the next one **when I'm done**. And all too often some specific bit you're trying to watch in that video has now been obscured by that fecking "next video" card.

If Huawei doesn't make an alternative YT player, SOMEONE needs to. Maybe make it SJW-relevant and call it "MeToo(b) Player".