* Posts by Will Godfrey

5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

OK, let's try that again: Vulture rakes a talon on Samsung's fresh attempt at the Galaxy Fold 5G

Will Godfrey Silver badge

It's a stupid idea

Anything which has a narrow flexing region has a built in high stress point and absolutely will fail at that point - and that's without rough handling. Also, over mmmfty mmmmf years of both industrial and domestic experience I've found the failure always seems to give little advance warning, is very rapid once it starts, and quickly becomes catastrophic.

Now it's Terrance Dicks' turn to regenerate: Golden-age Doctor Who mainstay dies aged 84

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Sad that we've lost him

And I agree that the writing in the modern episodes leaves quite a bit ti be desired.

RIP Terrance

Big bang theory: Was mystery explosion over New York caused by a meteor? Dunno. By a military jet? Maybe...

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Sorry

It was me. I accidentally crossed the streams. Won't do it again. Promise.

Tesla Autopilot crash driver may have been eating a bagel at the time, was lucky not to get schmeared on road

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Boffin

Maybe, Maybe not

To be fair, that's not always the case. You can successfully negotiate a series of complex junctions in a town, then 5 minutes later on the open road can't remember any of it at all - especially if it's something you do every day. Your brain has the ability to decide which events are important enough to move from RAM to 'storage'.

Having said that, the guy was indeed a plonker.

HPE lawyer claims key associates of Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'refuse' to testify to High Court

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Why don't they just give up?

They are making themselves look more stupid with every move.

Divert the power to the shields. 'I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain!'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

Excellent! So you had a failsafe emergency backup and warning system. You should patent it.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

It'll never happen

Servicing schedules are rarely implemented, and even if they are, they're the very first things that get the chop, once the bean counters find out about them.

It seems quite impossible to get people to realise that that these are not a cost, but a prevention of far greater cost - and that's quite apart from the reputation loss.

For Foxit's sake: PDF editor biz breached, users' passwords among stolen data

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

It won't make any difference

Large numbers of numpties will use exactly 8 characters. The first will be a capital, the seventh will be an underscore or hyphen, and the last will be zero or one.

TfL inks £6.5m deal with Sopra Steria to build traffic data-munching and control system

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: AI Traffic lights

Traffic lights on roundabouts are the ones that are especially brain-dead. There are quite a lot round my way, and every time I've seen them out of action the traffic flows much more smoothly and with shorter queues.

Last one out, hit the lights: UK energy supplier SSE to axe 115 bodies from tech department

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Energy saving light bulbs

And with a fixed colour spectrum regardless of voltage, and how long they've been on.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Divide and rule

Oh, you must mean the born-again-fundamentist that knows more than the entire school.

I knew that {undefined gender} well :(

Dixons hits back at McAfee's £30m antivirus sueball: Your AV didn't work on Windows 10S

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

PC World

{or whatever they call themselves this week}

I still remember the infamous e-machine that an inexperienced friend bought - it was crap in every respect.

GDPR...rrrse! Mass-mail fail as German biz asks UK resellers for consent to use their dealer data

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Some email programs do

See title

Git the news here! Code quality doesn't count for much when it comes to pull requests

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Coat

A hard choice

Should we expect a review of the quality of this research, or just accept it on the basis of reputation.

Harvard freshman kicked out of US over OTHER people's posts on his social media

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

It's a disease

A virulent one that unfortunately seems to be spreading across the world.

HPE may as well have stayed at home in bed: Biz turns non-profit as sales fall, costs rise

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Form over function?

This is what happens when a company run by the {cough} elite {cough} focuses on image instead of products.

Android PDF app with just 100m downloads caught sneaking malware into mobes

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: "The Register has reached out to CamScanner's developer"

Absolutely!

I always read that expression as retched - which is exactly what it makes me want to do.

Yes, TfL asked people to write down their Oyster passwords – but don't worry, they didn't inhale

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: I've got a little list

The others being even more crap doesn't make TfL look any better. Besides, I've not yet heard about any of them pulling a stunt like this.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
FAIL

I've got a little list

(and they'll none of them be missed)

I've long held the people behind TfL in utter contempt. I can't think of a single thing they've done that shows the remotest sign of intelligent planning.

Google touts managed Linux, gets cosy with Dell in Chromebook Enterprise push

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Down

Two words

"Google", "managed". Either of those would be enough to put me off. Combined leaves me running for the hills.

Eight-hour comms lags and shock discoveries: 30 years after Voyager 2 visited gas giant Neptune

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Up

Thanks for this

I stand in awe at the far-sightedness of the people who designed, built and continue to track these craft.

They are in dramatic contrast to the so-called leaders we have.

Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it

Will Godfrey Silver badge
FAIL

Excuse me sir,

There is a lady on the phone who would like to talk to you. Her name? Barbra.

Google bans politics, aka embarrassing stuff that gets leaked, from internal message boards

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

Not much doubt

It was pretty clear to me that google had become an aggressive nightmare organisation. This just puts the tin hat on.

GitHub upgrades two-factor authentication with WebAuthn support

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Down

Oh dear

Well I suppose it's nice that we have a choice as to which engine pulls the train as it comes off the rails.

Sueball claims Tesla solar panels are so effective, they started fires at Walmart stores

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Hmmm

Were they Tesla's contractors or Walmarts?

I've been on jobs where the customer has insisted on supplying their own fitters, then tried to screw over our people when the inevitable disaster happened. On one occasion where I had a personal interest (as I designed the kit), I kept a very detailed diary of events. It ran for two years! When it came to legal threats, I mentioned it to our solicitor. She took one look at it and quite literally danced round the room.

Devs invited to bake 'Run on Google Cloud' button into git repos... By Google, of course

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: "easy deployment of containers to a managed service"

Indeed. How many ways can you spell "MUG"?

The Joy of Six... critical security patches: Cisco small biz switches open to hijacking via web UI

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Joke

Only 6?

Maybe they're saving some for later.

Makes me wonder why they don't scrap the lot and start again, without TLA 'help' this time.

Joke icon, 'cos they really are one.

Overseas investors eat the UK tech sector for Brexit: More cash flung about in 7 months than the whole of last year

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Wouldn't you say . .

Well, he already has property in France, and wasn't there something about him having French ancestry and getting a French passport not so long ago. Purely for convenience you understand.

Welcome to Hollywood, Claranet-style: You've (not) got mail, or hosted sites for that matter

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: "Apologies for any disruption"

Ninja'd - exactly what I thought when I saw the headline.

Brits are sitting on a time bomb of 40m old electronic devices that ought to be recycled

Will Godfrey Silver badge
FAIL

It does what I want

I'll replace when it doesn't. I don't buy anything as a fashion statement - in fact, I never did. That's it. End of story.

There once was a biz called Bitbucket, that told Mercurial to suck it. Now devs are dejected, their code soon ejected

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

A latecomer to version control

The project I work on was already on git (some 6 years ago) so I never really got to see any alternatives. There's an element of not missing what I don't know of course, but in the main git seems to be OK, However, I have fallen foul of messed up merges, and 6 months ago ended up having to do a complete tear down and rebuild (three merges from different contributors).

Prolly using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but now if something looks like being at all contentious I make a backup of the complete repository, and the plan is that if it goes Total Inability To Supply Uncorrupted Project I just drag the backup over the mess.

P.S. not actually had to do that... yet!

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Witchhunt time?

They'll have to find the {cough} single rogue engineer {cough} and do nasty things to him/her, then they can all forget it.

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Stop

Back to the bad old days?

With world+dog sniffing round chrome, are we heading for monoculture browser again - but this time with much more access into the underlying OS.

You monsters: Screen time murders your kid's imaginary friend – until they reach school age

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

I feel cheated

When I was a kid there was no such thing as 'social media', and I didn't have any imaginary friends either. I missed out big-time.

RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Bittersweet

Not a bad age, for anyone, but a truly horrible way to go - to slowly lose physical control while still being fully alert.

R.I.P indeed.

Canadian ISP Telus launches novel solution to deal with excess email: Crash your servers and wipe it all

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Vultures are so cruel

{snigger}

Four more years! Four more years! Svelte Linux desktop Xfce gets first big update since 2015

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

My second choice

My fave. is Openbox with RoxFiler, but I can't remember the last time either of those was updated. I'm dreading the day either of them breaks!

Subcontractor's track record under spotlight as London Mayoral e-counting costs spiral

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

This has to be a scam

At multiple levels. There is no benefit at all to voting integrity, and no shortage of costs (of every type).

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Indeed

Permanently, when it overheats and goes into meltdown.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: 400MHz = normal power saving?

It says a lot when you consider in the mid '90s the Acorn RiscPC 600 ran very happily at 30MHz.

Dropbox would rather write code twice than try to make C++ work on both iOS and Android

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Obligatory...

https://xkcd.com/927/

Security? We've heard of it! But why be a party pooper when there's printing to be done

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Crazy

All these reported situations are so mind numbingly ridiculous that...

They must be completely true!

Police costs for Gatwick drone fiasco double to nearly £900k – and still no one's been charged

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Angel

But... But...

These weren't ordinary drones. They were 'everyone knows' drones, so nobody actually needed to see them to know they were there.

We're not going Huawei even if you ban our 5G kit, Chinese firm tells UK

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Will be interesting to see how the U.K. navigates...

"One or two of the networks will just happen not to buy Chinese equipment, and all government, military, spy business and so on will go to those networks."

... and as a result will not be slurped by China.

Ummm, just the rest of the world.

Poor old Jupiter has had a rough childhood after getting a massive hit from a mega-Earth

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

Yeah, good old Saturn. Jupiter didn't realise the gravity of it's situation.

Hang on mate, I'm coming along too.

How dodgy browser plugins, web scripts can silently rewrite that URL you were about to hit – and throw you into an internet wormhole

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: The common root case?

Absolutely this! Really REALLY pisses me off.

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

I guess they're off the Christmas list now

The worrying thing is that all these exposures (apart from making the expose-ees unpopular) don't seem to do anything. They don't make the slightest dent in the shitsorm of unsecured data.

You're all set for your long summer vacation. Suddenly a text arrives. It's the CEO. 'Data strategy by Friday plz'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

A new idea?

Although the content of the article seems good, I seem to remember the Boy Scouts had the motto "Be Prepared". This seems to be padding on the same concept.

Oh and if my holiday included a one-off event my answer would be a flat 'No'. It would also be a 'No' if they weren't prepared to give a written offer to fully reimburse my costs, and arrange (at their expense) a similar holiday within a reasonable time frame.

P.S.

But then that's prolly why cheapskates firm only employs kids they can lean on.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

I would say I was surprised

... but I prefer to tell the truth.

Unfortunately I'm the only one in my entire extended family not caught in the Microsoft headlights. You know they are lost when they refer to this as the official office software.

Researchers peer into crystal ball to see future where everyone's ID is tied to their smartphone

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Down

Secure?

Will these be the same smart{spit}phones that only the gubbermint will be able to 'supervise'?