Posts by Roger Kynaston

319 terabits – great Scott! Boffins in Japan speed along information superhighway at new world record

using national stereotypes here

Did anyone misread "The boffins also used Raman amplification " as misusing ramen amplificatoin?

Amnesty International and French media protection org claim massive misuse of NSO spyware

I am shocked!

TLAs abuse their positions of trust. Whatever next? Good on Amnesty et al to uncover this though. Another stage in the great game of cat and mouse. Note to NSO if they ask you to keep tabs on me, mine is an aging iPhone8.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Not quite the same

A friend of mine was demonstrating the marvels of ghost for rapid deployment of multiple workstations when he had a Bill Gates moment and the PC he was cloning to dind a classic NT blue screen. We all laughed a lot, not least since I had just made the jump to supporting UNIX by then (Solaris and DEC Alpha for the nostalgic).

What is GitOps? This is the technical introduction you've been looking for

Re: For the love of...

Upvoted. I am getting ever more fed up with the way they try to spin systems administration into some funky new bullshit non term. configuration management, deployment management and all those things have always been part of our job. There are some new tools now which even make some of it easier (when used sensibly). It is still sysadmin though. We have also always had to work with the developers so that their code is deployed as it should be.

</rant>

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: Upside

Is his cloud 'wafer thin'?

UK's data watchdog probes use of private email to discuss government business at the Department of Health

open goal I should imagine

Bet there is an email address [e-mail]

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs break out of nuclear hellscape home and into people's hearts

Asterix in Japan?

I know both Uderzo and Goscinni have joined Toutatis and Belenos now but the opportunities for Obelix must be endless.

Dedicated (Local) Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service to grow almost 1000 per cent in five years

Re: Great News Suckers - On Prem Really Is Better

It was always like this. I well remember sweating blood to learn how to do Solaris containers - it looked like a good idea only for Oracle to effectively kill off any wish to own Sparc kit. Then docker and the other container technology came along that was all shiny and new.

And, what is the cloud if not a mainframe writ large?

PrintNightmare: Kicking users from Pre-Windows 2000 legacy group may thwart domain controller exploitation

lots of work for my Windows friends

I'm sure that my time will come though. CUPS must be ripe for a rce vuln?

Richard Branson plans to trump Jeff Bezos by 9 days in billionaires' space race

Re: Are one-way tickets

sold by dignitas?

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

So Hollywood got it wrong again

The film should have been teenage mutant ninja pigs

Great story and the best headline of the year!

Go to L: A man of the cloth faces keyboard conundrum

Very different clerical experience

I was doing desktop support in a University on the edge of the City of London early in my career. The Pastor was vicar at one of the Wren churches and approached my boss with a problem with viruses. I was duly despatched with a floppy disk version of McAfee.

The Vicar was using language that was a good way from the divine about some minion who thought they knew things. Anyway, I managed to disinfect it but my hopes of developing a side hustle with the Wren churches never came to anything.

--> closest to a halo.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

No all electric

If you head to the west country. You are electric as far as Newbury and then on dead shrimp juice. If you go via Bristol you get as far as Chippenham before the electric cables run out.

Monitoring is simple enough – green means everything's fine. But getting to that point can be a whole other ball game

Re: Green means everything's fine

green ticks = high levels of verdancy

yellow/amber circles = buttercups in the field

red crosses = squashed rabbits.

UK health secretary Matt Hancock follows delay to GP data grab with campaign called 'Data saves lives'

Data will be lost anyway

Isn't Dido typhoid typhoon Harding going to be holding the keys to NHS data imminently? If so, it will be 'mislaid' anyway.

Facebook granted patent for 'artificial reality' baseball cap. Repeat, an 'artificial reality' baseball cap

prior art?

Hats, including baseball caps, have been around for a good while. Wearable computing has been around for less time but is not new so why does putting some ad slinging hardware represent a new way of doing things that needs protecting by a patent?

VMs were a fad fit for the Great Recession. Containers’ time has finally come

Re: Anyone remember Mainframes?

I have long thought that from when the place I was working first put in mainframes. Oddly, it was only a couple of years after they decommissioned their ICL mainframe.

I quite look forward to booking time on the processor queue otherwise known as the cloud.

FYI: There's a human-less, AI robot Mayflower ship sailing from the UK to US right now

It will be a bit rolly at first

Sea area Sole

North 5 or 6, becoming variable 3 or 4, then southwest 5 or 6 later.

Sea state

Moderate, occasionally rough.

Weather

Showers.

Visibility

Good.

Then the high seas forecast

North 5 or 6, becoming variable 3 or 4, then southwest 5 or 6 later.

Sea state

Moderate, occasionally rough.

Weather

Showers.

Visibility

Good.

Thank you Met Office

I suppose with no one to get seasick aboard but I wonder how it's (presumably) radar based anti collision stuff deal with sea and rain clutter.

Intrepid Change.org user launches petition to make Jeff Bezos' space trip one-way

Isn't this a bit like Stark

The worlds super rich worked out that ecological armageddon was coming and blasted themselves into space to escape it.

UK spends £36m on 18 little 'bullet-proof' boats to protect Royal Navy assets

So ModPlod get new toys

I often think that the Plymouth staff must get so bored trundling up and down the Hamoaze occasionally telling a SPaD off for getting do close to the floating death and destruction.

Michigan Micro Mote works well escargot: Tiny computer makes it into the field strapped to backs of predatory snails

Re: The prophecy is true

SSTP - Simple Snail Transfer Protocol

link to paper

Could you link to the paper published by the researchers? I'm just being lazy in not searching for it.

Cool bit of ecology research though.

Prez Biden narrowly escapes cicada assassination attempt, hunkers down in Cornwall

I for one

Welcome our new cicadian overlords.

-> because we are going to need to anaethsatise ourselves.

Perseverance Mars rover sets off on its first mission, to boldly drill and return samples as no rover has drilled before

Inspirational stuff

The recent interplanetary missions have inspired me to embark on a second undergraduate degree with the OU - late in life and I think I will do astronomy and planetary science. Who knows perhaps ESA will want a retirement age geek in a few years time!

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Re: I tried to opt out

That would be a clear breach of GDPR. Test it by doing a subject access request.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Changing times

I put a notice on the street whatsupdoc group and the first comments were that the usual suspects (China and Russia) must be attacking us!

Of course we all know that it was because Bill Gates activated the chips in our vaccines thus causing an overload to the edge servers!

Just when everyone thought things might be looking up, Dido Harding admits interest in top job at NHS England

No! Just no!

There is nothing else to say really.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Re: I may have mentioned this one before...

That last paragraph deserves five upvotes on its own.

Congestion or a Christmas cock-up? A Register reader throws himself under the bus

Re: An easy $50

Sadly, it wasn't me but someone in the Off License (booze shop for those on the other side of the pond) spotted someone being a bit shifty with their card and did a call to check it. As soon as he picked up the phone the shopper legged it leaving a wallet full of plastic. The colleague collected a couple of hundred pounds as I remember from all the stolen cards.

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

BOFH and Beancounters cooperating

I knew this pandemic was serious but not that bad!

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

If Clouseau can get one

I should have thought that a non fictional person who has done real good should merit having the rules waived a bit.

Oops, says Manchester City Council after thousands of number plates exposed in parking ticket spreadsheet

Re: Will Manchester United Council be doing the same?

And that is a can of worms I have opened as a soft southerner!

My closest association with the (possible) beautiful game was living in Stoke Newington midway between White Hart Lane and Highbury

-> because Friday now.

Will Manchester United Council be doing the same?

Sorry, had to be done and I don't even like football.

For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan

Bitcoin mining?

All the spare capacity is given over to propping up Musk Ox fripperies!

James Webb Space Telescope runs one last dress rehearsal for its massive golden mirrors before heading to launchpad

I'll look forward to the Sky at Night episode

I'm sure Maggie will be delighted to be sent to Guiana assuming travel to S. America is allowed next October.

With Gelsinger back at Intel, VMware picks new CEO from within, shakes up execs

corporate crapspeak

> ... Raghu is now in position to architect VMware’s future, helping customers and partners accelerate their digital businesses in this multi-cloud world.”

Why can't these people talk like humans?

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all: El Reg takes Twitter's anti-mean algorithm for a spin

Re: Your mother .....

But did you fart in his general direction?

--> Friday

The Starship has landed. Latest SpaceX test comes back to Earth without igniting fireballs

Wunce the rockets are up who cares where they come down. That's not my department!

(Credit to Tom Lehrer)

RHEL, RHEL, RHEL, fancy that: Rocky Linux would-be CentOS replacement hits RC1 milestone

Cool

Hopefully they will have a full release in time for me to upgrade my home server from Centos 7.

File this next to Mars bars under 'things that should not be deep-fried': Marks & Spencer's Colin the Caterpillar

I actually tried a deep fried Mars bar

Appropriately enough at the other end of the (dis)United Kingdom. Plymouth to be precise. The chippie in question was on the Barbican and we were in Sutton Harbour and didn't fancy cooking so ordered Cadiz style fish with Belgian style potatoes when we saw that they also offered deep fried confectionery. The lady in the shop had never had an order for one so was quite amused to try it. Needless to say it was disgusting and we did a naughty and fed the seagulls.

Because you need one to wash the taste away -->

48 ways you can avoid file-scrambling, data-stealing miscreants – or so says the Ransomware Task Force

Re: RTF?

JFDDGI?

RTF?

Shirly they could have called themselves Ransomware Task Force Mitigation or some such.

On a more serious note, it is good to see steps being taken to combat these scumbags.

From book shop to tat bazaar to cloud behemoth to grocer, what's Amazon up to now? Augmented-reality hairstyles

Re: Smaug? How about Blofeld?

My name is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Please let me introduce you to my assistant Alexa.

But can it run Avid? The Reg hands shiny new M1 MacBook to video production pro, who beats it with Blender, Handbrake, and ... Hypercard?

This is an interesting review

I did rush out and buy one of the shiny new toys for myself. I am a newbie to fruity computing though I did use Apple IIs at school.

I am also quite a different sort of user being a systems administrator by profession (profession!!????). I had bought a second hand intel one to see how i got on with it and then decided to buy the ARM. At work I use a linux workstation so having native support for the sort of tools I use like ssh and even an IDE for ansible coding and scripting were a real attraction.

So far I am happy with it. Zsh is good and homebrew is mostly OK though they keep tweaking python which I am sure drives python developers up the wall. Battery life is amazing. I am getting used to the different keyboard layout now though it would be better for everyone to adopt a standard as I always get ~ rather than \. Libreoffice seems to be compiled for native ARM and works fine. I haven't installed MS office but I have got Visual Studio Code which works perfectly for my purposes. I don't know how true developers would get on with that.

All in all, I am pleased with it and will likely stick with fruity computers though I hope it lasts a good long time.

Sure, your app is crap, but Windows won't tell. Promise

New town name

Redmond Deadmond

Anyone for Palantir? UK.gov names gaggle of vendors to fight for contracts in £1.2bn back office application framework

Fujitsu!!

They will start prosecuting people for not paying themselves excess bonuses.

Oracle Financials would be amusing as well for that matter but in a more run of the mill way.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

misread title

I thought it was something dreamed up by Priti Vacant to interrogate refugees.

Zorin OS 16 beta claims largest built-in app library 'of any open source desktop ever'

Zorin

I hope the CEO doesn't look like Christopher Walken.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

Re: Conflicting statement....??

The HoC used to run an Exchange server but along with a lot of other Government departments they moved to O365. This was, likely driven by cost as they could outsource management of mail to our friends in Redmond. MS offered a promise that data would be hosted in the EU and so be GDPR whatevered while Google couldn't/didn't want to offer the same promises.

Don't forget the costs included the Exchange admins. Taxpayer pounds have to be saved of course.

Whether that actually makes parliamentary emails more secure or not is an interesting question. I suppose that since GCHQ is part of Five Eyes they get to share in any snooping M$ bods do.

It is 60 years since the first cosmonaut reached orbit and 40 years since the Shuttle first left the launchpad

The shuttle always makes me feel sad

I remember the first launch and the promise of routine LEO space flight. The first Bond film I properly remember (being 12 when it came out) was Moonraker.

Then, the reality of such a complex box of tricks bit. And the disasters of course.

Still, at least JPL continues to be inspirational and it is good to see other countries getting in on the landers/rover game.