Posts by TeeCee

Finally, a technology angle on the coronavirus outbreak: Semiconductor biz stocks slip amid China supply chain fears

"...the eruption of SARS..."

The only eruption related to SARS was the scaremongering FUD in the press.

The actual disease was more of a damp squib.

Anyone up for a bet on what the next "pandemic" non-event will be?

Low code? Low usage, more like: Add G Suite's App Maker to the Google graveyard, it's switching off next year

Re: For an advertising company...

Cloud Print?

Because Monday mornings just aren't annoying enough: Google Drive takes a dive and knocks out G Suite

Re: Hands up...

As I've said before, it's not about reliability.

If something of yours gives up, it'll be one of your somethings and TPTB will be looking for someone to blame.

If you've stuck everything in a cloud when, not if, it goes titsup.com your entire business will be on the floor and TPTB will be looking for someone to sack.

In deepest darkest Surrey, an on-prem SAP system running 17-year-old software is about to die....

The SaaS system would be good value...

Er, no. It doesn't matter how much bullshit you apply after this, still no.

Remember that "locked in with limited change options[1]" contract that dropped you in this pile of shit in the first place? Same thing.

[1] Unless you pay at "got you by the balls and we're going to squeeze really hard" rates.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

...but the TCP/IP stack stubbornly failed to LOADHIGH resulting in even crapper PC performance."

There was a hack for that sort of thing that I used to dine out on at the time. Chuck whatever monolithic pile of shite ${network} had foisted on you as a client in the bin. Chuck on the Novell card driver for your hardware and the link support layer from the ODI stack. Then load the Novell client for your network onto the LSL[1]. Even if the (now much smaller) client wouldn't LOADHIGH, the fact that the heavy lifting bit would took the edge off.

Also the Novell drivers and LSL were bloody bulletproof, whereas whatever ${third_party} had provided to talk to the wire invariably wasn't. If you were running more than one network protocol this was a "must have" solution as the alternative was a teetering pile of shims on one of the aforementioned shite monoliths and a "one down, all down" effect.

[1] In this particular case, I have to suspect that Novell's TCP/IP implementation might have been a better call.

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

KillBot?

That would imply it's armed. In which case its first task should be to find the Mysteron base and attack it.

No reason, we don't need provocation here.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Meanwhile...

Anyone who bought a mobile phone, Smart TV, Tablet, etc ad nauseum, looks at how Sonos users got five full years of full operation, updates and compatibility with current devices and says; "You lucky, lucky bastards".

Leave your admin interface's TLS cert and private key in your router firmware in 2020? Just Netgear things

I think the blame ought to go to the browser lads for making their products go: "OMFG IS END OF WORLD PANIC PANIC PANIC PANIC" on sight of anything going on over plain old HTTP (even admin shit on your internal LAN), forcing Netgear and their ilk to play silly buggers to get around it.

It's either that or go batshit insane listening to Joe Public wingeing at them '"cos Crom sez iz danger and Crom is right 'cos Google haz kitten pix.".

How a Kaggle Grandmaster cheated in $25,000 AI contest with hidden code – and was fired from dream SV job

Kaggle

...used by more than a million netizens...

How many more are required to hit the threshold where Google decide to shut it down?

Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits

I guess the web monkeys here haven't mastered linked lists yet...

EU declares it'll Make USB-C Great Again™. You hear that, Apple?

Well, there are two competing fast charge "standards". Qualcomm's Fast Charge and Oppo's VOOC. The first is more widely adopted in devices, the second kicks its arse royally. The chargers are incompatible, as the first just stuffs a massive current into the battery (brute force and ignorance) whereas the second uses variable potential difference and parallel cell charging (elegant and builds on many years of known working and reliable tech).

My guess would be that the ever-useless fonctionnaires of the EU will choose a third to avoid having to make an actual decision.

This will stifle innovation, but is teh enviromunt yes and is have to be do sumfing.

China tells America, with a straight face, it will absolutely crack down on hacking and copyright, tech blueprint theft

Yeah yeah.

Well believe it when they stop ripping off Winnie the Pooh and using him to run the country.

H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected

Re: Differences

Well done, that fixed it. Let's move on.

AMD rips covers off 64-core Threadripper desktop monster, plus laptop chips, leaving Intel gesturing vaguely at 2021

Just out of interest, why is "fast as fuck for multithreaded workloads" windows specific?

Ryzen != Threadripper.

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Fixed it.

It's all right now, Boeing have shipped a patch.

Instead of going blank, the screens display; "Oops, something went wrong.".

Re: ...

Or that Quantas A380. Fan blades don't get any larger than the ones on the RR Trent and one of them severed all the hydraulic circuits at once, leaving the pilots with an aircraft where the control system was dying on its arse.

We won't CU later: New Ofcom broadband proposals mull killing off old copper network

Re: No,no, thrice times no!

Dunno why.

FLugzeugAbwehrKanone. Where's the "C" supposed to come from?

The Six Million Dollar Scam: London cops probe Travelex cyber-ransacking amid reports of £m ransomware demand, wide-open VPN server holes

Re: ICO hints that GDPR appears to be optional

...given that the travelex is probably THE story...

Strawman argument. I rather suspect that, outside of specialist technical circles, the level of interest in this peaked at "yeah...…...whatever".

NB: "trending on tw@ter" does not count, as a very small minority of self-selecting people is, by definition, not representative of the population as a whole.

Lenovo intros choose-your-own-adventure Yoga Slim 7: Ryzen spend $360 less on shiny or take a dip in Intel's Ice Lake?

Re: Nice premium

Worse than that. Checking the vanilla LibreOffice site, there is no official version for WinARM, so fuck knows what you're getting there!

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Re: idiot

It definitely should be there for the majority of use cases.

You try finding that document written by Fred Blogs about fish sometime last year without it, when your users just dump everything in the same shared store and ignore the naming conventions.

I know that the internet is populated by raving paranoids, but 99 times out of 100 there actually isn't an evil corporate plot as the reason for XYZ.

It's always DNS, especially when you're on holiday with nothing but a phone on GPRS

I recall my phone going off at an inopportune time and being sure I was toast, as it was sure to be noticed I was ratarsed.

Turned out that the on-call bloke at ${site} had had his wife walk out on him that day, had buggered off to the pub at lunchtime and had never returned. He was in a worse state than I was.

We both spoke fluent drunken idiot and resolved the issue in short order, agreeing between us to never let anyone know the unimportant details....

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

Re: The Year 2038 problem is less than two decades away...

I had to fix something that went titsup for Y2K in the early 90s.

99 months considered "permanent". Not actually so as the purge process has no coding for same, but it is a long time. Most purges operated on calculating the duration in months between start date and now, then comparing same to the specified duration.

One of my colleagues decided to be clever, calculate the end date and compare that to now.....(!)

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Actually, the problem was that they didn't build one. They just gave the Cosmonauts on Mir a joystick and monitor and told them to drive it themselves.

Anyone who's ever flown a radio controlled model helicopter knows what happens the first time you fly "nose in" in anger.

'Supporting Internet Explorer is hell': Web developers identify top needs – new survey

"especially the aged IE11"

Anyone who thinks supporting that is hard should ask somebody over 16 what it was like supporting IE6.

"Aged"? Some of my T-shirts are older than IE11.

Hold my Bose, we can do premium: Sennheiser chucks pricey wireless cans at travellers

"...the longest of ultra-long-haul flights..."

I'll just point out that the BA I took from Sydney to Heathrow with a touch-and-go in Bangkok took considerably longer than 17 hours.

When you're talking about duration, the flight with the longest single flight leg isn't necessarily the longest overall.

Das Reboot: Uni forces 38,000 students, staff to queue, show their papers for password reset following 'cyber attack'

Re: Expensive

No, that's a SubWay qualification. McDonalds still want Media Studies grads, although they'll take anything from the LSE or SOAS if pushed.

British bloke accused of extorting victims for 'Dark Overlord' hacker crew finally gets his free trip* to America

'Cos we're the poor sods who have to clean up after the worthless, parasitic shits and live with the reputational damage?

Where's our data, Google? Chrome 79 update 'a catastrophe' for Android devs with WebView apps

"We have asked Google how the problem made it into production..."

It went into production? You mean there's a Google product that doesn't say "beta" on it?

Google are great believers in large scale beta testing to ensure production versions are thoroughly stable. The fact that the pace of change means no version completes beta before being superseded isn't their problem.

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

Re: If there's a guarantee for Silicon Valley residents,

Some years ago, a colleague of mine had his car broken into. He had a fancy stereo with a removable faceplate. The plod were already in attendance, the car park had been done.

He had the faceplate on him in its little box, but they'd smashed a window to get into his glovebox ("most people put them there sir"). Then they'd crowbarred open the boot ("that's where everyone else leaves them sir").

The cost of fixing the damage to the rear of the car was waaaayyyy more than a new stereo.

$13m+ Swiss Army Knife of blenders biz collapses to fury of 20,000 unfulfilled punters

...with a built-in blender, phone charger, wheels, speakers and more.

Aha. Design by committee. That always works out well.

Did it also have a tool for removing stones from horses'camels' hooves?

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

Re: Anywhat?

Presumably the library can port along with the runtime environment.

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

The water tank for the building's fire suppression system is bad enough. When a seam splits on that you really know about it.

Also there's nothing like claiming for flood damage on the 1st floor to make an insurance company start asking difficult questions.

NPM swats path traversal bug that lets evil packages modify, steal files. That's bad for JavaScript crypto-wallets

...Facebook-spawned open-source alternative client...

If there were a Bingo card for fuckups, that's a house right there.

100 mysterious blinking lights in the night sky could be evidence of alien life... or something weird, say boffins

Re: Need a version of this icon with half-a-pint of foaming goodness in the container...

We of the League of Sentients would like to complain about the use of "Kardashian" and "Civilisation" together. Please try not to do that, as it reflects badly on the rest of us.

HPE to Mike Lynch: You told either El Reg or High Court the right version of why former Autonomy execs won't testify

Re: Someone Might Have Said

... the reporter's "understand" something to be true.

That's journo-speak for; "I have this directly from a source, but off the record".

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

Re: Not really "laws", you know...

Which, since C.S. Lewis was a barking religious nut even unto being a raving creationist, is hardly surprising.

Oi, Queenslander who downloaded 26.8TB in June alone – we see you

Re: Consumer hardware

...and of course the little punched-out circles gradually accumulating in a plastic bag.

Come the hot weather, empty the results into the fresh air intake of the boss's car. When he starts it and the climate control goes into overdrive, presto! Instant snow globe.[1]

There are other uses[2] but that was funniest.

[1] Handily, when punched tape was around, pollen filters weren't.

[2] Someone I know tipped a whole black dustbin liner full over the balcony in an old skool cinema during a playing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". The air didn't clear before the film finished.

Managing the Linux kernel at AWS: 'A large team of security experts' dealing with fallout from Spectre, Meltdown flaws

Translation:

"There's a known, sound fix for this critical issue and it's easy to apply. However, applying it would cost us a lot of money so we're not going to do it."

WebAssembly gets nod from W3C and, most likely, an embrace from cryptojackers online

Re: I will not use this

It's basically the same as the Javascript (ECMAScript) permissions...

That's actually not very reassuring...

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

Poorly located switches.

My award goes to the IBM System 38. When using the console on the machine itself, any pause for thought inevitably results in the operator leaning on the thing with hands on the raised sections either side of the keyboard. Look at any '38 and you'll see two patches worn down to the metal in the appropriate places.

In this position, the fingers of your right hand inevitably find their way into a perfectly placed recess on the side of the machine. This in turn prompts you to idly investigate said recess while you're busy thinking about something else. This action inevitably results in a click and the machine running its shutdown cycle.

Elon Musk gets thumbs up from jury for use of 'pedo guy' in cave diver defamation lawsuit

Re: Sigh

It's worse than that. The UK courts have a long history of awarding libel damages for publishing stuff that is, er, true.

Anyone touting the UK's legal system as the way libel should be handled is a prize berk of the highest order, as here it really is all about who's got the most cash to spend on lawyers. The finest libel verdicts that money can buy.

SAP bet the house on S/4HANA but most users aren't ready to move

Other news.

When asked any question about SAP, 42% of users cited "cost".

Xerox: Prepare to say cyan-ara, HP Inc. We're no paper tiger. We're really very serious about that hostile takeover

“Your refusal to engage in mutual due diligence..."

Very weird, particularly as HP should have the in-house expertise required to make the books say whatever they want to a potential buyer. <cough>Autonomy<cough>.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Re: you never know when your SSD might be used in a time machine.

in early machines

The As/400IBM i series still does it and it's inherent in EBCDIC[1] systems. I also used to think it was an "old" thing, until I found out that INFORMIX stores its decimal data types the same way.

Subsequent investigation showed that this is still a common storage method where fixed numeric precision is critical. That's pretty much anywhere where the numbers represent money.

[1] Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code

PSA: You are now in the timeline where Facebook and pals are torn a new one by, er, Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen

Re: not quite

The key there is "held accountable".

You try getting a print published journal in a different jurisdiction to print your shit with your identity disguised.

Also, if you are the Daily Mail or Gruaniad, you try mobilising public opinion in support of not disclosing some rabble-rousing fuck's identity when presented with a court order. For some reason[1] the web lads seem to have this sewn up.

[1] The sad fact that "web freedom" activism is the exclusive province of blinkered, childish twats has to be top of the list.

Found on Mars: Alien insects... or whatever the hell this smudge is supposed to be, anyway

Wait and see.

Not to find out if it's true, it's obvious cobblers, but whether there are still conspiracy loons moaning about the cover up in fifty years' time.

I think that "faked moon landings" is still the yardstick by which tinfoil-hatted arsehattery is measured.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Aston Lagonda

Austin Princess

Triumph TR7/8

Pretty much everything from the 1970s Harris Mann school of design.

That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman

Re: Assume the worst

Hmm. Anyone know Bill Gates' mobile number?

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

Re: Bitrates and broadcast media.

Yup, many of the stations are in mono FFS!

It's also fscking useless in a moving vehicle. A bit of interference when passing through poor signal areas is tolerable. Repeatedly cutting out is not.