Posts by onefang 1954 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Dec 2017
"OTOH, could it be an industry scheme to trickle-down a retrograde 'feature' to mid-range phones, then re-introduce normal screens back to premium models, to hike up the long term price of a normal, usable phone?"
Then several years later they'll repeat the entire scam, only this time around they'll take the left corner out of the screen. Third time around, it'll be the right corner. Then notch at the bottom, etc. They can keep this going for some time.
My first thought was to run Google AI stuff in the wings, after all it's used to running things in the clouds. The heat generated melts the ice, and Google pays for it.
Then I thought, if you want to get rid of Internal Combustion Engines on planes, you don't need AI, you need electric engines, and a lot of batteries, or solar panels.
Perhaps they mean to get rid of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from planes? Probably fairly easy outside USA, but might have some troubles doing that in USA.
I didn't know that Methamphetamine (AKA ice) was a problem for pilots, not sure AI can help much there.
Shirely it's not too hard to ban the playing of Vanilla Ice on planes?
I was gonna use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_%28disambiguation%29 for more inspiration, but I'd be here all week. They already owe me £200,000, I don't need much more this year.
"As any engineer knows, if you can't fix it by turning it off-and-on-again, then you check the manual for the correct procedure"
The place I do some volunteer work at had problems with their newly installed automatic door. I checked the manual for the correct procedure, which was to turn it off, then turn it on again. Finding the power switch was the hard part.
'Best Windows 10 pop-up I got was "Something went wrong" after a failed update.'
In the next version it'll be dumbed down even further. After a failed update you're entire screen will turn black, with just a single word on it in large white letters - "Fuck!". Then you will know that your computer is Fuck!ed, and it's time to buy a new one.
Two things.
For some odd reason, I sometimes get redirected to the mobile version of certain sites, and some of these sites don't have a "go to desktop version" button. My solution is usually to delete the "m." part from the URL, or replace it with "www." if it's being a bitch that day.
Soma FM has a radio channel / station called Groove Salad, one of my favourites. The "DJ" is a computer generated voice called "Big URL" (pronounced "Big Earl"). I don't think they'll like Google shortening that to "Big", that'll ruin the joke.
"Nice story bro. Needs more dragons though."
I live in a country where old maps used to say "Here be dragons", it doesn't say that anymore, but we still have water dragons (a local medium sized lizard that likes living near Brisbane River), and flame trees (a local medium sized tree with red leaves). If the lizards start eating the trees, we might be in trouble.
Just to add to everyone correcting you about what antimatter is, antimatter is really just something that doesn't matter. Can anything move faster than light speed, is a matter that is important. How long the fingernail on my left pinkie is, is an antimatter that isn't important.
The exact shade of green my coat is, is also antimatter, but I'll get it anyway.
'Am I the only one having difficulty parsing this? How can you be out of "unlimited minutes"? If they can run out, they're not unlimited.'
This is the telco definition of the word "unlimited", they redefine words sometimes. They also have different meanings for words like "reliable" and "coverage". It's kinda like left pond English v right pond English.
And don't get me started on thinking your date of birth is a closely guarded secret. When social media sites announce to world+dog that I was 55 yesterday, and 56 today, it's not hard to figure out.
I was registering for some web site yesterday, and was quite amused their dropdown for year of birth went all the way up to 2050. I guess they cater for time travelers? Or some web designer with delusions of longevity hadn't noticed the entire site has had major two rewrites in the last 12 months.
I think we have to differentiate private and public online nude photos. Putting nude selfies online so you can share them with your lover, they might be a problem. Putting nude selfies on a social web site that allows the sharing of nude photos to world+dog, then you obviously don't care if the wrong dog gets a copy and threatens to send them to the rest of the world.
"Outside of North America and Europe, the highest ranking city is Brisbane in Australia, coming 29th (Sydney is 46th and Melbourne 47th)."
Odd, since Melbourne only recently lost it's "Most Livable City" title, but didn't drop far. On the other hand, there's reasons I moved from Melbourne to Brisbane. Climate, that's what's important to me. No matter how well they top such lists, you wont see me moving to any place that ever gets cold enough for snow to happen regularly. I like it hot. Tropical or sub-tropical for me.
I just keep that page pinned in my main browser. No need to go search for it in some random comments section. I'm assuming you mean https://forums.theregister.co.uk/my/forums/ and not https://account.theregister.co.uk/edit/forums/simple which sucks, or http://forums.theregister.co.uk/my/posts/. Though pinning or bookmarking will work for all of them.
"If only the architects had followed best practice in securing the design of the base, things would have turned out quite differently!"
Ah but it was one of the architects that not only deliberately created that exploit, he also deliberately leaked the plans to his daughter, who turned out to be one of those non-conformists. She was quite the Rogue, that One.
And now for the sequel to my jury duty adventures.
I turned up for jury duty again today. This time I was wearing footwear. I got into the jury assembly area, where I sat for almost an hour watching the news on the big screens. Coz I was a bit early, and they where running late. Eventually they got around to telling me that because I had been excused the previous time for being barefoot, I am now excused for the rest of my three week jury duty period, no matter what I wear.
Foolish footwear fashion following fuckers don't forgive or forget, I'm flabbergasted.
"BTW you can actually buy processors which are so tightly speced and so simple in construction that you can make reasonably sure there were no malevolent actors involved. The 6502, the Z80 or the ATMega microcontrollers are prime examples for this. So if you can live with a small 8-Bit system, you can be reasonably sure it'll be safe."
That makes me wonder how much performance you can squeeze out of an 8 bit CPU running at multi GHz speeds? Or several of those tightly coupled? Cache memory tends to be bigger than those old CPUs can address, so "system RAM" could also be really fast, even if there's not much of it.
'"What's on the monitor?"
'"A flowerpot"
'o-kaaay, that we'll deal with later'
If they have a flowerpot on their monitor, I'd be worried about them watering it. Some flowerpots leak, which isn't good for the monitor under it. Pouring liquids over something on top of electronics is a bit dodgy to. Though when I'm eating or drinking at a computer in an office, I always tell any nearby non IT staff "Don't do this at home, I'm a professional.".
"Cant comment on the ads;"
It's too early on a Saturday morning, first time I read that I was thinking "We can't write comments on the ads?" It's still too early in the morning, now I'm thinking that might actually be a good idea. Let us commentards write comments about individual adverts. It could be a source of entertainment for us, might encourage some of us to whitelist El Reg in our ad blockers, more eyeballs on adverts, more money for El Reg. What could possibly go wrong?
I need brekky.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
