Bah. Must have been downvoted by Queeg.
Posts by David 132
4453 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
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It's not all watching transparent TV from a voice-commanded bidet. CES has work stuff too
Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections
Tuesday 9th January 2024 20:32 GMT 
I rather liked today’s Matt cartoon in the Telegraph…
(Apologies if paywalled.)
Tuesday 9th January 2024 18:59 GMT
Re: Makes me feel better about my work
> I'm sure I made some typos but I cant find them....
“Boing”, while pleasingly onomatopoeic of things bouncing off the ground, is not the company’s name :)
Oh and just to be an irritating over-pedantic wiener, I’ll also point out “cant” :)
Upvoted you anyway for a cogent and informative comment.
Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight
Tuesday 9th January 2024 08:20 GMT
Re: 16000ft iPhone drop test
Am in Oregon (in January). Can confirm.
When my house was built, people said the guy was daft to build it here, it'd sink. But he built it anyway. It sank. He built a second one. That sank.
He built a third one. That caught fire, burned down, and sank. So he built a fourth one.
That one stayed up, and I'm living in it.
Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot
New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster
Tuesday 9th January 2024 06:37 GMT
Part of the Amiga quirkiness. Early models had various B52s song titles etched onto the motherboards - Rock Lobster and so on - because the designers were fans of that band.
The Guru Meditation was essentially the equivalent of a Windows BSOD - once you saw it, that was it, game over, nothing you could do other than reboot - but yes, it was arguably more stylish.
And due to the lack of hardware memory protection on the Amiga, you'd see the Guru quite frequently.
Later versions of the Kickstart ROM introduced the yellow Guru Meditation, which in theory was recoverable, but in my experience - nah. Just a different tint to accompany your reboot :)
Monday 8th January 2024 22:01 GMT
Re: About box Easter Eggs
ISTR that in Windows 3.x, if you clicked repeatedly on the Windows Flag logo in the About box, it would eventually switch to a bitmap picture of Bill Gates instead and a scrolling list of the developers.
And let's not forget the Wolfenstein-alike hidden in Excel 95, or the entire flight-sim that came with Excel '97. That latter was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back, and caused - given that the business world at the time was waking up to code security issues in general - the total clampdown on Easter Eggs at Microsoft and beyond.
Monday 8th January 2024 21:48 GMT
Re: Amiga pedantry. Sorry.
> Gigabyte drives didn't exist yet.
Indeed. I remember when in the 2nd year of University, a friend got a 1GB 3.5" IDE drive for his PC - this would have been around '94.
We were all incredibly impressed at how humungous it was and, of course as is the Sacred Tradition, doubtful about how he'd ever fill it. To quote Blackadder, "More capacious than an elephant's scrotum".
I had a 60MB-ish drive in my Amiga A1200 at the time and thought THAT was pretty huge.
Monday 8th January 2024 21:42 GMT
Re: Out in the fields
Ah, yes. Back in my day working at $LargeTechCorporation, we were frequently called on to do demos of our latest & greatest at CES, Microsoft TechEd and similar all-comers trade shows.
The marketing people could never understand why I always put my foot down with a firm hand :) and insisted on cabled Ethernet for demos wherever possible.
"But the cables look so ugly! With WiFi $latestversion we can get just as much performance and it'll support our work-anywhere, truly-mobile marketing message!"
Yes, Chuckles. And Wifi worked perfectly in the lab.
But in the Moscone Center, or Olympia/ExCel, with hundreds of other companies' demo networks, and (tens of) thousands of attendees' devices... it would always crash and burn. How's your 4K video streaming demo NOW, Mr Marketing Know-it-All?
Monday 8th January 2024 19:46 GMT
Re: Jack and Irving
But did you also spot the blooper in the article, which erroneously describes the Amiga 2000 as having a 68020?
Probably the author meant A1200. The B2000 had, as standard, the same 68000 as the 1500, 500 and 1000 before it, thanks to Commodore’s glacial pace of hardware development.
Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail
Tuesday 9th January 2024 02:41 GMT
Re: Could have been worse
Sorry to be boringly pedantic and technically accurate (the best kind of accurate, obv.) but that one's been debunked by the Mythbusters. Quoting from the MB Wiki: "Even modifying a rifle to shoot a penny at supersonic speeds failed to cause a penetration."
This reality sucks.
What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?
Saturday 6th January 2024 03:04 GMT
>XP did not "helpfully" turn options back on "for a better user experience".
Oh god, triggered I am.
"You can turn Windows Defender off, but we'll turn it back on again later for your protection"
How about "no, f*ck off, if I turn my AV off that is my decision and my risk and I don't need to be patronized or hand-held"...
Per the icon, I am currently sitting here with a pint of Crux Fermentation's finest Porter, so my comments might be less coherent than usual (hush at the back there, what do you mean "than usual"??)
Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time
Saturday 6th January 2024 21:37 GMT
Re: Wrong
"It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
'We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!' "
Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud
Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS
How the Xbox Series X fridge chilled our holiday spirits
Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor
Friday 5th January 2024 19:53 GMT
Re: It's all crap
If you’ve figured out a way to remove the annoying “Microsoft Points” and “Use a Microsoft Account” nags from the main Settings window on 10/11, do let me know. There used to be a method using Vivetool but Microsoft conveniently “broke” that a couple of years ago, quite by accident of course.
Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?
Windows boss takes on taskbar turmoil, pledges to 'make Start menu great again'
Microsoft kills off Windows app installation from the web, again
Thursday 4th January 2024 00:20 GMT 
To be fair to Microsoft…
…no-one, absolutely no-one, could have foreseen that a mechanism for allowing arbitrary web pages to silently and automatically install applications on user PCs might be abused. That would call into question the integrity of the world’s CAs, and if you can’t trust CAs, who can you trust?
Oh, sorry, forgot my <sarcasm> tags there.
While you holidayed, Microsoft brought Copilot to mobile devices, again
Tuesday 2nd January 2024 22:41 GMT
"...and from here in the commentary box I see that the dinosaur has bowled a maiden over, and also eaten several others too. Can you recall a similar thing happening previously, Blowers?"
"Well, yes, Aggers, I well remember the first game of the '81 Test, where a Chesterfield sofa carrying two men appeared suddenly on the infield and the ground was invaded by those cricket-bat wielding robots, but of course that was overshadowed by the quite magnificent performance by the Windies later that same match..."
Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10
CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results
Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January
Friday 29th December 2023 23:07 GMT
Re: No comment on how this has been received by Prime members?
You have to realize how marketing executives think.
“Here is a good thing that people like. It makes money. It will make more money if we add adverts to it. Therefore we will add adverts.”
It’s literally on that level. Screw what the viewers want, there’s revenue targets to meet!
Europe classifies three adult sites as worthy of its toughest internet regulations
Thursday 21st December 2023 18:35 GMT
Re: Now would be the perfect time ....
That spokesman's comment that you quote: "We do not publicly disclose our prosecution policy in relation to specific offences as to do so may allow offenders to adapt or restrict their behaviour to conduct which falls short of our prosecution threshold."
...has just made me irrationally angry (and yes I know, I'm 13 years late).
Isn't it tantamount to saying "we won't say what constitutes an offence, because then people will stop doing the illegal stuff to avoid prosecution"?
And in a sane world (yeah, yeah) isn't that the primary objective of a new law - to stop the "bad" behaviour? Presumably the spokesman only considers it a successful law if it results in lots of prosecutions?
Bah.
Four in five Apache Struts 2 downloads are for versions featuring critical flaw
This could still wing its way to you, if you have the dosh: One Concorde engine seeks new home
Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come
Pakistani politician deepfakes himself to deliver a speech from behind bars
Tuesday 19th December 2023 06:20 GMT
Re: AI-synthesized stump speech?
Well, he didn't get out on bail... so he had to prepare his pitch another way.
More seriously though, I do hope he's realized that if he can use AI to deliver a convincing-enough "Imran Khan" speech... so can his opponents. Putting words into rivals' mouths in 3, 2, 1...
You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned
China’s e-commerce players commit to broaden overseas
Saturday 16th December 2023 01:13 GMT
Oh, goody.
More generic tat on Amazon from companies with names that look like players' letter racks in a game of Scrabble.
"Hmm, do I buy this "geniune Leenovo" laptop battery from HWUIVOZ, or from EWRTERO, or from JIKCVUL? So hard to choose..."
Hey, Amazon, how about you focus on improving product quality and employee conditions, rather than funnelling as much Chinesium crap as you can into our homes?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
