Posts by Roger Kynaston

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Winking red supergiants sneezing hot gas 650 light years away

Ford! Zaphod! Don't go home.

Looks like your home planet may not be around much longer.

Apologies for the Yahoo title as well.

US govt proposes elephant showers for every American after Prez Trump says trickles dampen his haircare routine

Re: Why assume...

You owe me a new keyboard! Not for the spilt coffee but the puke!

That said, it did make me laugh a lot as well.

Time to stop the adolescent humour!

America's largest radio telescope blind after falling cable slashes 100-foot gash in reflector dish

Was Jodie Foster spotted there?

Anyway, I hope the scientists (can they be boffins?) and engineers get it fixed soon.

Steve Wozniak at 70: Here's to the bloke behind Apple who wasn't a complete... turtleneck

Happy birthday

I well remember the labs of AppleIIs in my school.

I hope he gets to enjoy a few of these ->

Brit bank Barclays probed amid claims bosses used high-tech to spy on staff, measure productivity

how to fool the system

If everyone put ice cubes in their underpants the sniffers would not detect them and the data would be useless!

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

Computer science lecturer

I was _very_ new to my first desktop support role and someone called with a problem. I visited their office in the Computer Science department and he said "The internet isn't working!" I knew that there were no problems so started learning my people diagnostic skills. I asked him what he was trying to access - web, email, gopher (yes, it was that long ago). He persisted that the internet wasn't working. Eventually he pointed at the IE3 icon. Needless to say the University approved browser was Netscape Navigator.

The intervening years mean I have forgotten if I managed to persuade him to use the approved browser. I also wonder if he has migrated to Edge yet.

Doctor, doctor, got some sad news, there's been a bad case of hacking you: UK govt investigates email fail

Re: There but for...

Spearfishing?!! My bet is that his password was liamfox123

Icon because he was a Minister of Defense once.

And it's off! NASA launches nuke-powered, laser-shooting, tank Perseverance to Mars to search for signs of life

Re: RIMFAX

This will only work for Brits but could this be Rimmer and so be a smeghead?

Two large flightless birds walk into a bar... The pub's owner was not emused *ba-dum tsh*

Wa the ghost of Rod Hull seen in the village?

I've got and am off!

If you think you've got problems, pal, spare a thought for these boffins baffled by 'oddball' meteorites

Re: POE

You are General Jack D Ripper and I claim my pure grain spirit mixed with rain water.

Top class boffinry by the scientists though.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Were they lost from a catainer in the Pacific?

Didn't a load find their way to the Atlantic by way of the Arctic Ocean back in the nineties?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

emergency BRB

I was working for a local authority a decade and a half or so ago when some workmen doing stuff to the computer room door hammered things so hard they triggered the emergency cut out. Most of it was on a UPS but some of the windows stuff fell in a heap. Ten minutes of frantic invocation of init 0 followed by a nail biting half an hour or starting it all back up again.

I wasn't in the meeting where the facts of life were explained to the workmen though the BRB was relocated after that.

China successfully launches Mars probe that packs an orbiter, lander, rover

Re: a camera capable of two-metre resolution from a height of 400kms

If they really wanted to piss of Xi Ping they should put a picture of Winnie the Pooh!

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Oh thoe russions

Ra Ra Vladsputin,

Ra Ra Vladsputin

Russias greatest hack machine!

Re: Why?

One of the problems you have here is that documents that these miscreants are likely to half inch will not be finished work but the musings along the way so will be of limited use. I know friend Vlad will want his hacker people to pass the information to his own experts so they can take credit for saving the world.

I am sure that if said academics asked nicely the boffins at Imperial etc would share their data.

As the FCC finally starts tackling its dreadful broadband maps, Georgia reveals just how bad they are

Re: Did the editor at the Register die?

There is a handy email address at the bottom.

[e-mail]

Old-school security hole perfect for worms and remote hijackings found lurking in Windows Server DNS code

Try Red Hat for size

exim, bind and selinux all being done at once.

The exim one has also led to some real pain as it is a big change on only a minor version update.

beer because I am going to need some once the patch cycle is over this month.

UK government marks 'at least' £115m for new Brexit systems against backdrop of chequered IT project history in customs and border control

Re: Brexit is coming

'It will be a loss of sovereigns - probably all we have.'

Wot, are they going to be buying up Brenda and her (grand/great grand) sprogs? Come to think of it, they could get their hands on Andy more easily then.

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

what happens to the drunk

Who can't differentiate between the bar and the urinal? Enquiring minds would like to know. Also, playmobil or it didn't happen.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Impress the senior sysadmin

Somehow I had learn't that the eject command would open the CDROM on an Ultra5 and it impressed the hell out of a senior sysadmin when I did it the first time since he hadn't seen it before. About the only time I ever got to feel smug.

Well bork me sideways: A railway ticket machine lies down for a little Windoze

I feel rather sad

I clocked that the picture was Southampton before reading the article even though I generally only go there once a year. In Paddington they have ticket machines with very large touch screens and one of those had a BSOD though I didn't have the presence of mind to photo it.

Now that's a train delay Upminster with which London travellers shall not put

Gunersbury

A bit posh for me. Brixton (though gentrifying at a rate) is much more my thing. I'm not admitting to having a relative living in Kew though. I once had an interview for the gardens as well.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

licensed sex/reproduction

There may be a precedent (not that I am advocating adopting such a strategy). It used to be, at one time, the case that you had to gain consent from the monarch to have children. When couples were given permission to procreate they would put a sign outside their door saying Fornicating Under Consent of King.

It is probably an urban (historical) myth but I like it.

NASA to send Perseverance, a new trundle bot, and Ingenuity, the first interplanetary helicopter, to sniff out life on Mars in July

314,000,000 whats?

Shirly that should be 508,000,000 odd KM or 7896071881.7747 Devon fatbergs?

Beer for two interplanetary stories in one day. I hope I live long enough to see both come to fruition.

NASA scientists mull sending a spacecraft on a 13-year mission to visit Neptune's 'bizarre' moon, Triton

73 if it takes off on time

At least I have some hope of being around for it's arrival.

The only way is bork for the UK's embattled rail travellers

sounds like pr0n to me

Probably a euphemism for this https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/13/london_rail_passengers_played_pron_noises_over_tannoy/

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

and he is becoming bald

His hair is decidedly thinner now. He will be even less use

Yet another beefy BSOD spotted lurking within the walls of US patty pusher

Wimpy

There is a Wimpy on Streatham High Road.

Why would someone want to hack Germany's PPE supply chain? We're glad you masked

tin foil hat?

Didn't a certain orange idiot try to buy a German PPE manufacturer a while back? If so could we lay this attack at Uncle Sam's door rather than the usual suspects?

If Daddy doesn't want me to touch the buttons, why did they make them so colourful?

and the son now?

One assumes he is a VMware admin now.

Travel-sick Windows needing a Systemwiederherstellung would be in Germany, right? Austria? Not necessarily

Re: You ain't seen nothing yet...

They seem to make a habit of concatenating words to make unfeasably long multi syllabic ones.

beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law

The UK's favourite lockdown cheese is Big and Red but doesn't require a stinking great audit after consumption

Je suis Le Grand Fromage

CIO/Head of IT etc.

For choice, a good slice of manchego pour moi.

Spending watchdog doubts UK is capable of managing Brexit and coronavirus info campaigns at the same time

Re: And?

I think you overestimate the plummy accented Trumpy junior's intelligence. Whenever he is confronted with proper questions he flounders and falls back on petulance and sulks.

A few latin phrases don't a genius make. I think that the same goes for his evil side kick who is not a svengali genius either but a lazy ideologue who pads out a paucity of ideas with 20000 bullshit words instead.

Both of them lack any capacity for true critical thought and to weigh up the evidence before deciding on a course of action.

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

what is really scary

The IMO is rushing towards enabling autonomous ships at the moment. I went to a talk and the person was getting all excited about how a gopro type camera can be hooked up to 'puter and will have incredible target discrimination. I envision lots of fishing/pleasure boats being mowed down.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: You supported a system...

>he's one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Did he work for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation? If so, your wish will come true as they were a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first agains the wall once the revolution came

Source - A copy of the Encyclopedia Galactica that fell through a wormhole in space.

If someone could stop hackers pwning medical systems right now, that would be cool, say Red Cross and friends

Securing/Ask People(scumbags) To Play Nice

it is easy to scoff at what the ICRC and others are trying to achieve here. Others, more conversant with the specifics of both security and medical IT have pointed out that the former is woefully inadeqate in the latter. I am sure that many in the medical world still see IT in general and security in particular as a cost centre to be minimised rather than a core part of the business. After all, good security is a pain as it stops you doing things. We can also observe that many players do not respect the international law that attacking medical facilities is not allowed. No one is immune from this. There are more egregious examples and less so but it happens all the time.

On the other hand, by making it a crime, it at least forces the bad players to try to hide it and gives a chance after the atrocity to take the neer do wells to the Hague. Everyone knows that they shouldn't do it even if they do. It is just that it is acknowledged as a bad thing which may give some people some pause before firing a rocket into a hospital or launching a bot attack on their IT systems. However useless the framework of international law may be, it is still there which is better than it was in the past.

Maybe the state players encouraging the phishing, spearphishing and outright attacks on medical bodies at the moment will, at least once in a while, think twice.

Bionic eyes to be a thing in the next decade? Possibly. Boffins mark sensor-density breakthrough

We have the technology

I wish they would remake the Six Million Dollar Man!

Windows Terminal hits the big 1.0: Fit for production?

late to the party

Others have pointed to xterm.

I remember when my Windows colleagues were getting excited about 64bit Windows. We pointed out that we had been running 64bit Solaris for years. Then along came Linux and back to 32 bit at that point. Mind you the issues with applications getting confused with /lib and /lib64 was a right pain.

Meteorite's tiny secrets reveal Solar System's sodium-rich, alkaline liquid past – a clue to formation of life

Intriguing

Top class boffinry. So have one of these though not a Molson.

IBM to GTS staff: Not volunteering to leave with a redundo cheque? We'll give you a helping hand

Re: my proudest moment

Work is something I do to pay for the boat. I don't mind it and am OK with being a lowly sys admin but I much prefer sailing - especially when I can have rum punch with Martinique rum in it. So, yes, persuading an outsourcing company that I was surplus to requirements was a proud achievement.

<pompous git>

I don't solely measure my self worth by the work I do but how I live my life

</pg>

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

IT is like HR (should be Personnel though) in some respects

Both are essential to the operation of the organisation - it is the same for both public sector and private - but are not perceived as delivering any value so are always for the chop when any cost cutting is deemed necessary. Once day the manglement will realise this but I suspect the heat death of the universe will come first.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

It may have already been suggested

There are too many to wade through to verify.

My suggestion is: Winzilla

Surprise surprise! Hostile states are hacking coronavirus vaccine research, warn UK and USA intelligence

spooks

The disconnect between fictional and real ones has always flabbered my gast.

Paris because 007. Or is she Anne Smiley?

Tom Cruise to increase in stature thanks to ISS jaunt? Now that's a mission impossible

orbital velocity

Should the documentary not be called Speed - Cruise Control?

I've got it and am off!

NASA signs deals to put a rocket under Artemis flights until 2029

Artemis?

What are they hunting for?

Also, I know that this is rocket science but weren't the Space Shuttle engines very complicated and hard to maintain?

Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app

nhsxxx

when will the pron version that collects sexual history come along?

Sometimes one can go a little too far in search of isolation

different sort of bug?

Perhaps it is an engineered bug and is sniffing out all the details people input to then allow nefarious miscreants to empty the victims bank accounts. I seem to remember something like this in The Fifth Element!

</tinfoilhat>

Travel advice for the week ahead is just: STOP

Re: Really?

Playmobil or it didn't happen

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

It didn't affect us

Though we were entertained once.

There was a furniture shop on the other side of the road to our office - back when you had computers under your office. Anyway, one day some of the local ne'er do wells had 'jacked' a car and were being pursued by the local plod. They crossed the main road at speed and parked it in the doors of the furniture shop.

I don't remember if plod picked them up straight away or whether they managed to reach the posh back streets.

My experiences with RS232 were rather mundane and I won't bore the commentariat with them.

Beer because Friday

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Ha Ha Ha...

> (even if the OS was about as stable as a deranged US president.

Is that the answer? Is President D'Orange running on an outdated MS operating system. If we just upgrade it to a newer one (linux for my preference but I don't insist) will it suddenly work like a real president?