Posts by Roger Kynaston

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

a more heterogeneous environment might be good

I am a linux admin and a refugee from Solaris. At the time at Oracle bought Sun there seemed to be moves to make solaris fully open which, along with BSD seemed like an excellent idea. Of course Larry had other ideas though I know there are project to open source Solris - they havn’t crossed my professional path so I don’t know about them.

Linux, is a remarkable creation but it would be great to see some other FOSS OS out there. Perhaps even a non ‘ix one as well.

Two penn’rth into the void done!

Ubuntu 24.04.3: Noble Numbat point release slips out quietly

Re: What's in a name

I always wanted them to do Licentious Llama or fecund ferret.

CISA roasts unnamed critical national infrastructure body for shoddy security hygiene

Zaphod Bebblebrox

The Orange thing is Zaphod made flesh. I know that on the page he is very funny but he would be a nightmare in real life - just like the Orange thing is.

As ever, the late greats Tom Lehrer and Douglas Adams were more prophets than fiction.

Icon because it seems the best response.

Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of the Jello shot

two of his songs come to mind the most

First is Pollution though what he would make of climate change would have been interesting. The second is thanks to my Father - a lapse catholic and jazz afficionado - who would play the Vatican Rag endlessly!

RIP Tom and we can hope for someone with his talent to emerge.

Microsoft-owned GitHub: Open source needs funding. Ya think?

Mostly you are completely correct

But, to split hairs which may well not need splitting, a lot of the beach lifeguards are provided by the RNLI which is a charity that doesn’t accept any government money.

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

I misread your post

What I read was:

“Methane is more than 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the manoshpere”

I don’t know which is worse. A simple hydrocarbon gas boiling us all or farts killing off wankers.

Obvious icon but I also need the joke alert one.

Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists

turning up collder to 11

For an idea of the consequences of this I suggest you read Doughnut by Tom Holt.

Trump tariffs turn techies topsy-turvy as US braces for PC tax

distraction

The BBB/BUB is not going down very well so he needs an orangeism to make people look over there.

Tim Cook's Tim Cook stepping down from Apple

more departures

According to the tofu munching, sandal wearing mouthpiece known as the Guaridan, Linda Yaccarino is leaving the failing microblogging company.

Is there something in the air in California at the moment?

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

Bigly huge

We have the best asteroids. They aret the biggest and the best. We will (kaboom)

Icon because I plan to be wasted if one does come our way.

So we call the asteroid?

Hitty McHitFace, Explody McExplodeface, Wipeout McWipoutface?

I could go on but I have an online poll to fill out and my phone is in my pocket.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Apple

Not a iNana but an iBan. Then the banking world will sue them for confusing international money transfers.

Get the courts (us) involved

A new upstart will “find” their own new magic banana. The original discoverer of the magic banana will spend $squillions on lawywers trying to prove that the new magic banana is actually the same and so they are entitled to all the money made from the “new” magic banana - ad infinitum.

Then the growers of the magic bananas will sue both companies for stealing their musa magicali!

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

very OT HHTG observation

A couple of decades after growing up with a copy of the Hitchhikers in my school bag I walked around Camden and was delighted to see that a local estate agent was actually called Hotblack Desiato!

more OT, what is the US going to do now SpaceX is getting as reliable as Boeing at putting hardware into orbit?

Military-tech upstart Anduril pushes further into NATO with German arms maker deal

wot no grond?!

Funny how these little people choose the heroes of LOTR.

Florida man expands crypto empire with new wireless service and phone

I look forward to the security scans

Bet it has Pegasus installed by default. The real icing though would be to find it is backdoored to the Chinese TLAs.

Peep show: 40K IoT cameras worldwide stream secrets to anyone with a browser

not surprised

Quite a few years ago I was working at a local authority in London and they asked me to probe some new networked CCTV cameras they were trying. Nmap showed that port 80 was open and everyone in the team enjoyed looking at all the passers by at Fulham Broadway. The only change I expect is that it now uses https.

M&S online ordering system operational 46 days after cyber shutdown

better bring back click and collect

If I were them (thankfully I’m not though) I would have worked to bring back click and collect first as this is much better to my thinking. But them I am a woke liberal metropolitan elitist in London so what would I know.

You say Cozy Bear, I say Midnight Blizzard, Voodoo Bear, APT29 …

A different war

Over here in Blighty our leader made a speech about how he wanted to buy lots of death and destruction toys. I feel that he missed a trick when he didn’t propose to set up some serious government based defence of the situation we are in. I know governments have a, sometimes deserved, reputation for being less than efficient but this piece illustrates that the private sector is often little better and what we need here is a serious recognition of the situation we are in and some concerted effort to counteract it.

One thing that comes to my mind is to have a darpa like investigation into some protocols that have security built in to them rather than using ssl as an add on.

Also, a caveat, I am sure that the TLAs here have their own groups (would the UK one be called haveacuppa?) trying to wreak havoc on people they don’t like.

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

wait till some dev gets hold of vi/vim

It took me ages to accept the gaudy colours when I first used vi (aliased to vim) on a linux box rather than the plain old vi on Solaris. Grumpy old farts have their uses!

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Nothing like as traumatic

We were doing a major migration and this involved decommissioning a lot of old kit. The last one standing was an Ultra 1 which ran the Trade Waste system. They eventually came up with a migration with a couple of days to spare till the deadline for vacating the old computer room. I didn’t have time to run my little script that /dev/urandom over each disk in turn so brought my hammer in and proceeded to reduce the disk platters to something less useful. It was highly theurapeutic!

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

theft

Someone (hypothetically) should snatch the Rolex off his wrist and tell him it is fair use and time is a public commodity that will improve society as a whole.

For the avoidance of doubt and all that legal stuff, I am not proposing that this should be anything more than a thought experiment ;-)

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Don’t you dare!

I won’t have Kim Wilde and Bananarama dragged into this sordid affair!

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

Having tea

I hope he had it with yon laird and Penelope Fitzneatly.

Ransomware attack on food distributor spells more pain for UK supermarkets

I think I have spotted the problem.

In the library photo with the article, the trucks are clearly driving on the right. Us blightians drive on the left side of the road. So, the data flows have been the wrong way which has borked it all.

European customers report Oracle Cloud identity outage, Big Red is silent

retirement clock

/me 7 years.

I hate them too but probably less than you.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

random downvoters

I get that every time I say something about how his most excellent Muskiness is perhaps not quite the genius that he is made out to be.

Anyway, more importantly lots of these for the engineers/boffins at JPL ->

Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

When I see those Destroyers

I am always reminded of what I christened them when I first saw one in the Tamar - a Bollock of Death

OpenAI wants to build a subscription for something like an AI OS, with SDKs and APIs and 'surfaces'

drugs

The way you quoted him, whih I don’t doubt is true, make me wonder if he has been sampling some of the finest nose candy. My bullshitometer nearly exploded (again).

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: Re: Hmm @codejunky

Thank you for replying.

I am not sure that comparing a series of policies that aim to remove biases from the process of employing something is akin to Stalin’s purges or Brezhniev’s corruption. My understanding is that things like removing the details of the gender of the candidates from the information presented to the shortlist panel. Also requiring that relationships between candidates and employers are disclosed are not equivalent to sending millions of people to the gulags in Siberia.

If you can provide evidence that these polices are preventing people from employing the best candidate then please share them. My inexpert view is that they don’t of course.

On a side issue I feel we need a rule like the one for accusing people of being fascist when they liken any vaguely left of centre policy as being akin to the Soviet Union. Modesty prohibits me from suggesting that it should be called Rogers law. ;-)

Re: Hmm @codejunky

I know I shouldn’t bite but I am nothing if not weak.

I would, however, really like to know what is intrinsically wrong with the concept of DEI. The stated aim is that the best person should be recruited for the job regardless of other things about them such as skin colour, sexual orientation and so on. So, how is it that efforts ensure that only the best person is hired are a bad thing?

TIA.

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

You forgot the important bit

I will absolutely invest $300 billion but I need $100 million in seed capital to help build the bigly huge factory in Louisiana.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

Mad Widdie

Hrmm. Well there is something of the night about 4thing. But I can’t quite see her being able to find a poisoned pdf without destroying her own system.

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Anyone else remember inetd on Solaris

It was probably Solaris 8. I had a problem which seemed to have something to do with the inetd daemon and I had a look at the init.d startup script which had the immortal comment

# Why oh why did we mess with inetd

Made me chuckle at the time.

This is not just any 'cyber incident' … this is an M&S 'cyber incident'

Priceless

You had better keep that comment handy for when a certain credit card processor gets cracked.

“having your data sold on the dark web. Priceless. For everything else there is …"

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

Re: Amendment choice

Please not the 2nd. It would turn him into a martyr! Plus shooting anyone is wrong.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

No defenestration but one of the best

I should have hung onto some old grey Sun boxes and done the same thing!

Oracle says its cloud was in fact compromised

EU fines

If Mr Larry (the cat) Ellison is found to have breached GDPR all hell will break loose with license audits to pay the fine without him having so sell any yachts.

As others have said - popcorn time.

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

ditch the Bezos evil empire

I finally got fed up with the actual rainforest destroying company named after a rainforest region and started the process of deleting my account. It takes three days and you get a barrage of emails telling you what you will lose. All the videos you bought on prime cease to be yours, any books on your kindle cease to be yours, Of course, any AWS stuff you have (I don’t) goes with a glug sound, There was other stuff in the email but I don’t immediately remember it.

Of course, I am sure they aren’t really deleting all that stuff as they say you can sign up with the same email address and get all your stuff back.

Not creepy at all!

US Army’s laser obsession continues with yet another drone-zapper deal

Too Star Trek for me

Will the navy award a contract to develop proton torpedoes?

Political poker? Tariff hunger games? Trump creates havoc for PC industry

MS certainly shot themselves in the foot

I read about this on the Reg’s august pages and was mystified as to why they felt that was worth while. This article seems to say that they had a brain fart. Much like a bit more half then the populations of the UK did in 2016 and the US in 2025.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

No I won't

The world is miserable enough as it is and some command line silliness is one of the few things left.

UNIX commands like touch, finger and so on predate linux by decades.

In a different business many years ago I read about a Mercedes engineer being asked why they hadn’t named their new car something like petal or bunny instead of 190 E 2.1316V

His reply was a classic: “We make cars, not perfume.”

As others, have stated the GNU image Manipulation Program works and also allows for an immature snigger once in a while.

I know i shouldn’t rise but I can’t help myself.

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Enquiring minds

Some of us want to know if a shifty guy with a bicycle was seen last night and whether there is a large bulliion delivery due today?

Icon to make it clear. We could do with a sledgehamer one really.

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Then and now

The other space news is that the Voyager spacecraft are still, just, working as they approach 50 years. I know Xitlers toys are built using a different principle but I do wonder if the old way was better.

-> because that seems to be what is happening

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Readers of a certain age

Gawd that makes me feel old! I know my birthday has a 0 in it but still ....

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Wrong meglomaniacal squillionaire but

Shirly they will combine Bond and the X-files to create 00X.

He will discover a global elite seeking to turn us all trans with a woke mind virus and Mus...Bond will save us by having endless nookie with all the obligatory lovelies who didn't want to transition.

FreSSH bugs undiscovered for years threaten OpenSSH security

Hrmm

I'll be interested to see how quickly Tim (baked apple) Cook gets moving.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Zoot suit

Plus one for the exclamation. And the sentiment of course.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Thanks for cheering me up

OK. The serious side is clear and there are clearly issues which a functioning social services could help prevent from becoming a police issue

But ... Flatulence, Whatsapp (which is part of the massive wind farm that is Meta) and the contortionist angle make this the perfect Friday read.

I almost wet myself reading it after all while SHWMBO let rip with a very loud one but didn't record it on her phone.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

fun is right

Lots of these -> for the Nasa boffins.

I do hope that robotic missions don't get de-prioritised in the coming years.