Posts by fluffybunnyuk

Rule number 1 has always been to view unsecured messages in a plain text viewer, with alternating hex,bin,text views.

It sounds good but the London living wage is recalculated in November, and if it goes up like last year then it could stand at £10.60-£10.70.

So it'd still be less then what they calculate you realistically need to earn as a minimum in London.

So plenty of spin, not so much providing whats really required.

not as much fun as using a dos pc as a 3270 mainframe terminal.

Try sending "Attn" using a microsoft keyboard and see how far you get...

@A@Q if i remember right....

Dont worry youngsters, you'll never have to worry about the wierd n wonderful stuff on old keyboards like "Refresh" :)

Theres nothing like the 2001 Space Odyssey connection.

Would Dr Poole have come to his vacuum packed end if HAL had stopped for a Windows Update or BSOD.

Maybe HAL was psychotic because in his past lay Microsofts ROS. That'd drive any AI to sing Daisy Daisy I'd imagine.

its the hope that kills you.

*sigh* more AI bollocks. Machine learning et al isn't bad or good.It is what it is.

Its the fuckwits leveraging it that are {bad, badder,baddest or good} usually.

Its a good thing nadine dorries isn't on this forum to explain it, or i feel sure we'd be hearing how robocop ED-209s will be guarding the irish border next year.

Can the last skype user turn the light out when they leave please.

On the other hand the allegorical dentist beams proudly over a complete set of teeth extraction process. Not to mention all the backhanders for such a job well done.

A legend, who knew how to tell a story in a way that captivated people. Changed my wallpaper to Bagpuss for the forseeable.

always had a soft spot for suse. Back in the 90s they used to do this really chunky manual when others had moved to pdfs. The 5 disc box set was worth it just for the manual. I still have it, and use it once in a while for the odd reference.

Hated microfocus taking it over. Always used to rely on SuSE for a stable back-patched distro.

Microsoft Git. The G is voiced as "sh".

Too little, too late for advertisers

The problem is always abuse. Advertising companies have been abusing and spamming for years. Its like an arms race i.e. how can we abuse/spam more. Now its reached a tipping point and people are rebelling.

At the moment on el reg website im blocking dpmsrv,google-analytics,gstatic,googletagservices ie anything that isnt theregister.co.uk .

If El Reg dumped the crappy scripts tomorrow and said ok we're going to serve up ads straight, minimally, and not interfering in the direct page flow, i would whitelist them in a second.

On a side note, any advertising i see, i make a mental note NOT to buy their product. I rationalise it as if they need to advertise it then it cant be much good as a product.

I remember the day i browsed the entire www in one hour (start of the 1990s). I dont recall any advertising then. I dont recall people moaning about how much it costs to run a web server.

I do remember the mid to late 90s advert creep when advertisers "discovered" the internet, and i used to add them to my firewall block list. Since then ive had an ad free internet.

Slurp VFS so everyone knows what it will do.

File under : Does a bear s*** in the woods.

For me the knotty problem has always been how to make crypto useable to the average joe. Operating parameters for optimal use are rarely followed, sometimes even blatantly ignored at step 1.

Decryption should never be automatic, and use of a secure viewer technically isolated from other viewers(like a general email viewer) is highly recommended.

The obvious solution seems to me to allow a browser window to open in what i use as a plain text viewer, and on completion of load , store the windowed document as a jpeg.

Well if personal data is passed to 3rd parties without given consent that constitutes a breach of GDPR and a 4% smack of a fine. Facebook isnt going to be able to take too many of those before it decides to secure personal data better.

So i'm more than happy that companies will concentrate on spamming us citizens in america rather than those in Europe.

talk about over-engineering something. It reminds me of the recent smart wine bottle failure.

How many men does it take to design this system or screw in a lightbulb? 50 so far.

We already have a beer fetching and deliver unit , its called a MAN.

If you talk to it slowly, and keep the commands short and simple it usually grasps what is required of it.

You know when its functioning usually from the burps and farts it emits. And it doubles as a place to warm my feet when the weather turns cold.

I went to get a copy of SUSE Enterprise Server for a testbed for our operations a few years ago. With MicroF***up above being the provider of support. Turns out it needed registering with a serial number.

It was a first for me needing to register a linux distro to get security patches in 22 years... Anyway it turned out their nice registration system was screwed, and wouldnt recognize the serials. 1 warning sign is cautionary, That being the 2nd said get me to the redhat site...

One redhat install later, and a month of uptime with no faults working seamlessly , we rolled out redhat. No Microf***up in sight.

I ended up speaking to the director of operations i think it was who told me he'd look into the problem, I still assume he's still looking. It was clear from our conversation the company was a basket case then.

I think the main problem is a lack of general IT education in the general population, and unfamiliarity with choice in IT as opposed to proprietary one size fits all.

If you dont like something change it, get involved and alter packages. I've lost count long ago of all the diffs ive pushed, and all the changes ive made that trickle through to people. Thats just as a hobby not a day job.

Personally speaking I wouldnt touch Ubuntu with a barge pole, but thats not to say that within linux for other people its a perfectly valid choice.

One advantage of choice in an open platform are amongst others competition. Without competition competing ideas stagnate, ie there is no reason to develop...which is probably why Microsoft is where it is, without any need or reason to innovate beyond animated emojis.

Linux isnt the be all and end all. Its written in C *yuck*, its got a tyrant for a kernel developer. It lacks the gloss and polish that a big company could bring to it, and for that I DO admire Ubuntu in its attempts to make it more marketable.

However it IS on a path to a future we want, where we the people control the code, where we can subject the code to analysis, where we have debate over the path and direction of computing, and that it isnt spoonfed or decided for us.

In all I'm for it until something better comes along like a truely parallel compiler,secure and verifiable common programming language that becomes popular to underwrite the os. And the other 50 gazillion things and the easter bunny too.

But crikey linux doesnt half try my patience, and I wonder still how many decades before we get where we want to go.

I put my order in today to another electronics components retailer for £150 worth of parts (about 400 pieces). Was still £72 cheaper than Maplin after clearance discount was applied.Sad

I miss the electronics specialist who used to say things like "if you use this 8-pin DIL rather than that one you'll get a better result..."

Its amazed me that the more electronics has become a fabric of our culture, the less stores are commonly available. Maybe this goes hand in hand with the dumbing down in society, and the lack of desire to understand how things work.

A great man. His legacy, and ideas will not be soon forgotten.

His Brief history of time got me into CPT theory, and superstrings.