Posts by RFC822

Re: Wise words from Chris!

It worked for most of our PPE procurement...

Re: Joining the Lib Dems

Sorry ...... don't believe you !!!

Long term Conservative voters would never do anything to 'harm' the 'Party!!!

Well, I joined the Lib Dems last night, and my membership card is in the post, so you're very welcome to pop around and see it when it arrives!

The Conservative party has changed out of all recognition - May made lots of noises about not being the nasty party and being a party for all the people, but then made the decision to move towards the extremist/lunatic right-wing fringes. A fringe populated by people with little ability and no intelligence (and I include the empty vessels like Rees-Mogg and BoJo who try to disguise their intellectual paucity with a veneer of expensively-purchased private education).

The Conservative MPs who defected to Change UK said that they had not left the party; the party had left them. I understand how they felt.

Re: Was it Kibo?

<PEDANT>

cam.misc was never actually part of Usenet (even though it was carried by many nntp feeds)

</PEDANT>

My finest hour was receiving over 1Mb of hate mail (when 1Mb was regarded as A LOT) for a joke that I posted to alt.tasteless.

I mean, who goes to the disco with their sister anyway?

You've never been to Norfolk, then?

Re: RE: TonyJ

You are always going to be somewhere in the Security/Convenience/Cost triangle - you can minimise any two, but only at the expense of the third.

I understand that the latest generation of keyless entry key fobs only transmit when movement is detected, so they are relatively immune to the amplified relay attack, especially when the keys are left on the hall table overnight. No doubt it won't take the bad guys very long to discover a new way to steal cars, though.

Re: Time

I always use my sat nav on my daily drive to and from work.

Sure I know the way already, but Mr Google has a much better knowledge of traffic conditions on any given day, and has routed me around some major hold-ups. (I know that whenever I have ignored it, and carried on with my usual route, I have always regretted it...)

Re: BANG!

It's not stupid to make a mistake - happens to all of us sometime.

Where the failing was (imho) is in not testing the socket afterwards. I have a little tester (cost a tenner on Amazon) which plugs into a socket and uses a set of LEDs to show whether the connections are correct or not. I would expect any electrician to use something similar after installing/replacing any socket, especially one with exposed metalwork...

The sooner the High Street is killed off - or at least reinvents itself - the better!

Why would I want to drag myself (during limited opening hours - most of them when I'm at work) to a dirty, noisy, crowded place where I have to pay stupid amounts to park my car, in order to get a reduced range of products at top prices? I then have to lug them back to my car - and when I get home if I find that I don't like the product, I have no right of return.

Instead I buy just about everything online, where I can do it at a time that suits me, can comparison shop (both on suitability and on price), can get it delivered next day if I really need it that quickly, and have 14 days in which to decide whether or not to keep it.

Re: How would I know if I've been compromised?

I'm running V2.19.139.

On Android.

I do hope that Apple manage to catch up one of these days.

Re: Firefox madness

I now use Waterfox, but they are too lazy to bother doing a 32 bit version.

Waterfox is the work of a single bloke, doing it in his spare time, for free. Calling him "lazy" does Alex a major disservice.

Re: Not to mention

Because it's not just a "phone" - it's a network-connected mobile computer, which also works as a camera, alarm clock, navigation device, porn viewer, news feed, social media platform, email client, music player, book reader, payment device, note taking device, etc, etc, etc

(And both my most recent set of tyres and our washing machine cost around the same as my Note 9)

* or more likely have a pre-prepared collection of hashes to run comparisons from

Rainbow Tables.

Re: Good reasonable and balanced.

LG and Sony might have the idea right. Make a controllable setup such as a TV first. A TV is not getting lugged about on the bus, and so can get use case introduction gradually.

But what on earth is the use case for a foldable TV?

The whole rationale for creating a foldable phone is that it should be as small as possible when being carried around, but as large as possible when actually being used.

Re: What happened to testing?

I'd rather not be the unwitting alpha tester of the ABS braking system.

Is that the Anti-lock Braking System Braking System?

Re: Some mistake surely !

<PEDANT>

That would only be true if no individual was ever listed in more that one contact list.

</PEDANT>

(And people still occasionally ask me why I'm not on Facebook....)

Re: Just when .eu names were making it big - in the form of spam

Who is actually using these names, and for what purpose?

I have <myname>.eu as my personal domain, mostly for email. I registered it because <myname> was already taken in all the other TLDs that I might have considered, and I'm quite happy to be regarded as a citizen of the EU.

The main use is to identify who is selling my details - for example, if I start to receive spam addressed to elreg@<myname>.eu, I'll know exactly where to point the finger.

Should the suicidally destructive nonsense that is Brexit ever comes to pass, I have access to a number of non-UK EU postal addresses that I could use for registration.

/ no "mighty redwood" icon?

Here we only have John Redwood. Who is very far from "mighty".

Re: Third world?

The US is quickly turning itself into a third world country.

Given the current level of political incompetence in the UK, can we be far behind?

Re: BOB

Why do you think that 26 years technical experience qualifies you to be a manager? Do you think that 26 years management experience would qualify somebody for a technical position?

Re: Clearly bollocks.

I KNEW you were going to say that!

Re: Switch to duckduckgo.com

Um - when did Google start producing Windows laptops and iPads????

Re: The papers said he has a license

I suspect that I'm younger than your grandmother (I'm certainly much younger than the Queen), and I hold a full, legal UK driving licence without ever having taken a driving test!

Re: So where is the new market ?

I used to use an iPod in my cars - my only ever Apple purchase.

These days I just use a 128Gb USB memory stick. Most modern cars will have no problem dealing with one (may need to format as FAT32) and the in-car controls are probably much better at accessing your music than turning that silly circle. I normally leave mine on "random play" anyway.

Re: 0161 = block

It's only a problem because your telcos haven't set up their translation tables properly - the correct way to do it is to look at the originating number (the real one, not the one presented to the callee) and the dialed number and then insert or delete leading digits as required.

Poppycock. If a number like 020 7999 1234 was misrepresented as 0207 999 1234, how would your translation table know that the 999 was the start of a 7-digit local number rather than a call to the emergency services? There's a reason why there was a differentiation between area codes (e.g. 020 for London) and local numbers.

Re: Outlook, the last bastion of weird customization hackery

You can change your theme between Colorful, Gray, White and Black

Don't know what version of Outlook you're running, but here (Office 2016) I only have a choice of Colorful, Dark Gray or White.

I'd love to have an option of Black, which work better for my (far from youthful!) eyes ... but then again, my personal preference is for yellow text on a navy background!

Re: Name > website / Phone No. > password

... in a draw....

Why would you put it in a lottery?

Re: No wireless charging?

Simple - I have wireless chargers everywhere (on my desk, in my cars, next to the TV seat, on the bedside table, etc)

When I'm not actually using my handset, it's almost always sitting on a wireless charger. I can pick it up to do something (let's be honest, it's really a "handheld computer" which occasionally is used to make phone calls) and then put it back down, safe in the knowledge that I never need to think about charging my handset - it's always fully charged (or very close to it).

Re: And once again...

(for the record: I am from Europe myself

Given the this is a UK site, I image that the vast majority of the readers are from Europe!

Re: Inktomi proxies

The ucam.* groups are, I believe, long gone.

cam.misc always inhabited a sort of grey area, where it wasn't formally part of Usenet, but was distributed as part of most news feeds.

Re: Nothing new

Rather than running Social Fixer (whatever that is), why not just delete your Facebook account?

Far more effective!

I'm in the exact same position.

I have <initial>.<initial>.<surname>@gmail.com, and I get a reasonable amount of email (including when he signed up for Netflix!) which is meant for <initial><initial><surname>@gmail.com.

I've no way of contacting him, as I don't have his other contact details, and when I try to send email to his <initial><initial><surname>@gmail.com address, it ends up in my inbox :-(

Re: The one place a paperback is better

If you drop an e-reader into the tub, it's unlikely to survive.

Isn't the (stupidly expensive) Kindle Oasis meant to be waterproof?