* Posts by Will Godfrey

5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

Microsoft's Edge gang pops a head above the parapet to give Linux fans a strong 'maybe'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: "stable" version?

To everyone's relief!

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

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Happy

Re: In the UK...

And BBC BASIC, left the others far behind - crammed into a 16k EPROM by the number 1 6502 coder.

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Been there, done that...

Anywhere that it doesn't, you're better off out of.

DIY with Akamai: What to do when no one sells the servers you need? You build your own

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

It seems to have a remarkably thin gas pipe too, and I can't see the flame vents either. It this some kind of new-fangled thing?

Hmmm, anyone know what all those tiny bumps are on that blue sheet thingy?

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

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Thumb Up

About time too

One down, but how many more to go?

Also it's a great shame that groklaw is no more. They would have been all over this like a rash.

We asked readers what DXC should be known for... and of course you came up with the goods

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

fried or roasted?

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

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Happy

Re: I prefer PEBMAC

I very much like the one another commentard came out with recently.

"Loose nut on the keyboard"

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Groundhog day?

Are we in some kind of loop?

The idea of running some form of Linux in Windows seems to keep coming up, and a {cough} few {cough} of us make it clear we are not interested... to put it nicely.

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Reminds me of my (never to be forgotten) introduction to inflation. As a kid I was given 3 bob to go to the newsagents to get dad's tobacco and cig papers. That came to 2s/7d, giving me 5d for sweets. Then the price jumped up to 2s/9d ha'penny but dad still only gave me 3 shillings, leaving me only 2d ha'penny for sweets.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

This works better

What on earth? Were they thinking?

Ummm. No.

2,500 years ago, these folks weren't cremated – but their funeral-goers were absolutely baked: Earliest evidence of pot smoking discovered

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Angel

See!

I said last time I didn't think 1,000 years was exceptional. I'm just waiting to hear they've found evidence of use 10,000 years ago - and wouldn't be the least bit surprised even then.

Akamai CEO: Playing games from the cloud? Seems too expensive to be viable right now

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Latency

Is that a solved problem now? For the vast majority of people I rather doubt it - and I'm not talking about the theoretical figure but the real-world value on congested networks.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

3, 2, 1

Microsoft announces an all expenses paid 'fact finding' holiday for CERNs senior bean counters.

IT pro screwed out of unused vacation pay, bonus by HPE after judge rules: The law is a mess but it's still the law

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Thumb Down

Bar Stewards

It's cold comfort, but he's better off out of there, and hopefully the publicity will act as a warning to other employees to quietly keep their eyes open, and gather as much printed information as they can about any contract changes.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

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Thumb Up

Re: Can someone explain...

Love it!

Perfect response.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

As was said a very long time ago...

Against mans' stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Microsoft pokes about in Azure's innards, whips out new Service Fabric

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Worrying

In view of the performance of other updates, the words 'chock full' give considerable cause for concern.

P.S. That '6.5' might turn out to be prophetic.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: I may have this slightly wrong

Damn. Ninja'ed

Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Should I worry?

As a person of some {cough}maturity{cough} how likely is this in the next, say, 30 years?

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

A pox on both their houses

One size does not fit all. It never did, and never will.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Alien

Don't be so hasty to dismiss the monolith

After all this time, being sentient, it probably fancied a move, and had put on weight - middle-age spread maybe.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence

Don't forget Asbestos, DDT, Thailidamide, CFCs

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: What fraction of a gram ?

It's also done for a lot of products where it's totally unnecessary, simply to reduce theft.

Bubble wrapping a pair of pliers for example.

Like using the latest version of Microsoft Office? Love Offline Files? Not for long!

Will Godfrey Silver badge
FAIL

Why is this being reported?

All us commentards knew it would happen.

Hmm, I suppose to be fair, we didn't know the exact date.

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: At home

Absolutely nothing stops lightning going where it want's to! The best you can do is give it an easy path then GTF out of the way.

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Not an explosion, just my own daftness...

I remember an occasion in the mid 1960s when a pair of 50,000u caps committed suicide. They were fitted to a seriously meaty 48V PSU. This was also at the time some of them instead of having +/- or red/black markings, had a square and triangle (I still can't remember which was supposed to be which). It's hardly surprising that one got through to final test - fortunately to a old and grey test engineer (who'd already complained that you had to reach over the kit to turn the power on).

Well, they exploded with such force, that the cans themselves shot out of their clamps and embedded themselves in the asbestos roof. Any other guy would have been killed instantly, but this old bird apparently instantly realised something was very wrong and dived under the bench.

P.S. I was the most junior of junior trainees at the time.

Court drama: Did Oracle bully its customers into the cloud? Nine insiders to blow the whistle

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: "They don't dislike the technology, they just dislike how Oracle treats them."

"Clearly Big Red's programmers were either better than the customer's (whom had taken years to develop their solution) or Big Red had been developing in parallel."

I can think of another explanation.

Uncle Sam wants to read your tweets, check out your Instagram, log your email addresses before you enter the Land of the Free on a visa

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Require Social Media?

"Trump doesn't understand"

FTFY

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

'sOK

Although I have friends there, it's long since ceased to be the sort of place I'd want to visit. This is just another reason added to the list - besides, I don't have any such accounts at all, and never have.

P.S. The first reason is I can't handle long distance air travel.

Devs slam Microsoft for injecting tech-support scam ads into their Windows Store apps

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: At jtaylor, re: Orca.

FWIW some of us try to help. I have a couple of blind friends, and ask their advice about my website and the softsynth I work on - it's possibly unique in having a full command line interface. I've also tried to promote the topic at the Linux Audio Conference for a couple of years.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: "Avoid Redmond..."

Hmm, don't know if that's possible now. There is nothing at all in my house that has any connection with Microsoft - and that's been true since the days of Windows95.

How am I supposed to avoid something I have no contact with?

Russia signs Huawei deal as Chinese premier decries 'protectionism', 'unilateral approaches'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Translation

He's a really bad guy.

That one is even badder!

So this must be a good guy.

Nope. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Worried ransomware will screw your network? You could consider swallowing your pride, opening your wallet

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

Unbelieveable

Dod the ransomware bastards manage to get a sleeper into the organisation?

Is someone high up being blackmailed?

I can't think of any other explanation. This is just totally wrong from any point of view. To say nothing of the fact it simply WON'T WORK!

Shouting? I wanted to scream it out.

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Pint

Thanks

Beers all round to El Reg journos for staying on this.

It's sad that it's necessary. I seem to (dimly) remember a time when Nominet were the good guys - for some undefined value of 'good'.

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Seems absolutely fine to me. I'm not exactly a power user, but then again neither are the vast majority of users of any document processor.

Thrown Huawei: Chinese leviathan's subsea cable biz to be flogged off

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Maybe the numpties have become so obsessed with Huawei that they are quite unable to see the wider picture.

IEEE says it may have gone about things the wrong Huawei, lifts ban after US govt clearance

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FAIL

Re: Security concerns?

Obvious troll is... ummm... obvious

Das geeks hit crowdfunding target: IBM mainframes are coming home

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Happy

Love this bit!

"with the help of Peter Vaughan, responsible adult and volunteer at the National Computing Museum"

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Re: I'll be borrowing this!

Oh Yes! Me too - really brightened my day!

It's not often that something on El reg, causes me to to reach for the screen cleaner, but this is one of those occasions.

Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let's have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Angel

A thought

I wonder who it was that came up with the term "cloud". At the time, did they recognise the possibility (or even likelihood) of rain. It really is so appropriate as to be positively spooky.

DigitalOcean drowned my startup! 'We lost everything, our servers, and one year of database backups' says biz boss

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Thank you but...

I didn't need any more reasons to avoid cloud services like the plague.

Oh, and yes I do keep off-site backups of my own data.

Refactoring whizz: Good software shouldn't cost the earth – it's actually cheaper to build

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

A voice crying in the wilderness

See title.

Gaze in awe at the first ever movie of a solar eclipse from recording long thought lost forever

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Fascinating

I wonder how many other gems like this are hidden away moldering in some dusty archive.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

I disagree. It could just as much be contemptuous malice, the "Yeah, watchacha gonna do about it!" kind. It not only gives the spooks a look at the docs, but creates trouble and uncertainty for Huawei - who are probably now wondering what stunt the USA are going to pull next.

To anyone with at least two communicating brain cells, this is a very clear provocation. So far, Huawei's response has been totally above reproach, a fact that must infuriate the USA.

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Not many users have the capacity to understand that though

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Nylon

I remember a much older issue with Nylon. It doesn't like high voltage, and degrades to a sort of brown fibrous material that is highly inflammable and falls apart at a touch.

So, it was probably not a good idea in the 1960s to use it as the insulator for the TV EHT winding and rectifier support on line output transformers.

P.S. It wasn't usually the wax impregnated ones that caused the fires!

Uber JUMPs at chance to dump load of electric bikes across Islington

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

I was born in Islington

Escaped at the ripe old age of about 2 and I've not been back since.

Nuff sed?

Maker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker, blueprints and files dumped online

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Angel

Conspiracy Theory

Could it be a new kind of advertising?

If you haven't been hacked you can't be very important, so secretly leave an exploit available, then have a chat with a few 'friends' down the local.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

A story my dad told me

His office in central London decided to remove a safe and take it to a new out of city location. I think this was in the early 1950s. The safe was on the second floor, and changes in internal access routes over the years meant the only way to get it out was by removing a window and hoicking it out with a crane.

This took several hours.

Nobody in the area had been told this was going to happen, yet nobody questioned it

AI can now animate the Mona Lisa's face or any other portrait you give it. We're not sure we're happy with this reality

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Scary stuff

They've really opened Pandora's box this time. Nothing you see or hear can be taken as real now.