Posts by Roger Kynaston

PC owners borg into the most powerful computer the world has ever known – all in the search for coronavirus cure

got to work now

Tasks: 310 total, 2 running, 250 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

%Cpu(s): 8.9 us, 9.5 sy, 65.5 ni, 16.1 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st

KiB Mem : 16005364 total, 8189480 free, 3927256 used, 3888628 buff/cache

KiB Swap: 999420 total, 999420 free, 0 used. 10942376 avail Mem

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

5623 fahclie+ 39 19 428184 173880 13548 R 292.4 1.1 11:14.56 FahCore_a7

4679 rkynast+ 20 0 2905864 283376 123000 S 25.7 1.8 11:39.29 Web Content

4504 rkynast+ 20 0 4159288 503024 207480 S 7.3 3.1 37:57.16 firefox

FYI: You can trick image-recog AI into, say, mixing up cats and dogs – by abusing scaling code to poison training data

classic GIGO

Or, at least, it looks like that.

All roads lead to Bork in Kansas as Windows puts on a show for motorists

road in Kansas

Inquiring minds want to know if the road was paved with yellow bricks.

This home working thing is getting a bit much. I'll get me coat but can't go anywhere though.

Yanking on the space supply chain: Rocket Lab goes Interplanetary with Sinclair acquisition

Sinclair

What price a spectrum? Or a C5?

Corporate VPN huffing and puffing while everyone works from home over COVID-19? You're not alone, admins

Uptick in remote S/W sales

I should imagine the likes of Cisco and others are mobilising sales teams if they are that forward looking. Will this establish a trend for much more remote working?

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: A better essay on the state of IT I have not read

Deep insight is often buried in the best humour.

You'll get your money – when this bank has upgraded Windows 7... or bought extended support

Cash machine borkage

I suspect that Sainscrap are having issues with their cash machine network. The one near my work and home have been unavailable for the week. Also, the dodgy one outside the tube station rebooted with XP as others above have noted. Is it a plot by the merchant bankers to stop us using cash by shutting down the cash machine network?

</tin foil hat?>

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

oh how things have evolved

When you think about the origins of the internet it is both amazing and depressing to see where things have gone to. Given that the ARPAnet was a military project to create a robust communications platform for when the shit hit the fan, the designers assumed it would be a trusted network. Now, it is for entirely (don't laugh) peaceful purpose that the lack of trust has exploded.

What I find infuriating is that I have no idea what the solution is. The idea of getting rid of smtp and replacing it with a secure authenticated mail relay service so you know who and what is being sent never happens. As to antisocial media - Bleurghhh!

Come kneel with us at UK's Cathedral, er, Oil Rig of the Canal: Engineering masterpiece Anderton Boat Lift

good article

just one observation - could you provide an OS six figure grid reference as well as GPS Lat/long coordinates. Us old school geographers like such archaic nerdiness.

Death and taxis: Windows has had enough of clinging to a cab rooftop in the London rain

linux version

"I had that Linux Torvalds in the back the other day. Strange geezer 'e was. Started out ever so nice but then 'e lorst it near the end. Still at least he committed it all before checking out."

BOFH: Gosh, IPv5? Why didn't I think of that? Say, how do you like the new windows in here? Take a look. Closer...

Can I propose that we skip IPv6 and implement IPv20

After all with IoT we are going to need more addresses and we don't want to be in the situation that IPv4 is in again.

That way we will be OK till the heat death of the universe.

First class BOFH though.

Pope tells his followers to log off for Lent

giving up for lent

I always give up giving up.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now: Brexit tea towel says it'll just be the gigabit broadband

hedgehogs

Shirly they would want to watch Ice Road Truckers or reruns of that I like trucking song by Not the Nine O Clock News.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

Two things

I used to work at a University and the space planning department had some ancient plotter that printed serial. My job was to replace their Windows 3.1 machine with new ones running NT4. imagine a 21" CRT monitor and how much that weighed. Amazingly, their CAD sw installed OK all we had to do was get the plotter to print room plans. I got a mate in the ops team to make up a new one and ti even worked.

Come on baby light me on fire: McDonald's to sell 'Quarter Pounder' scented candles

Mix it with one of those goop candles

I'll leave it to commentard imaginations to fill in the rest.

We need a puke icon!

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Re: Dodgy analogy

I am very hesitant to cast aspersions on the boffins doing this work but I sort of agree. What would said aliens have made of a scan of Chile though. Atacama = cold and _very_ dry. A bit further south towards Chiloe and the temperatures rise slightly but are much much wetter

Private equity ponies up £2m to help launch satellites from sunny Shetland by next year

Re: iScotland!!??

Very OT I know but I didn't know that La Sturgeon was proposing the sale of an independent country to the fruity giant.

I've got it and am off.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

Re: Les grèves sur la côte

Ah but, will the ghost of Jacques Cousteau be in said vest?

How the US-China trade war is felt stateside: Xilinx trims workforce after lucrative Huawei sales pipe blocked

Re: Isn't It Ironic?

More upvotes. Have one of these though ->

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

#!/bin/bash

me=`/bin/who`

echo "Who $me?"

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Now’s your chance. NASA wants new people for the Moon and Mars

Failed on most counts

Not a left pondian

Too old

Not an MsC

imperfect eyesight

Would a grumpy old bugger sys admin have any use on the moon when their server crashes and they need some dodgy jiggery pokery with disk labels to get it back up before they crash onto the surface of the moon?

Also in the best register tradition I would happily volunteer to study the effects of alcohol in micro and one sixth g.

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

Re: Decoded signal....

nah, they are flipping a coin for the game of intergalactic bar billiards and some tiny blue green ball is about to be potted into a black hole.

I know, I'm off.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Re: To be honest ... Bob

We can hear you without shouting.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

Bing bang bong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9IvNh4Iba8

Elon Musk shows world that he is truly awful at something

ear bleach

though perhaps simple mind bleach would work. I desperately need to unhear that though.

We need a puke icon.

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Re: When those old disk packs fail

Apart from electrocution and hearing loss it must be a while since a computer room was a hazardous environment. I remember having to unrack a Sun V880. Two of use tried to get a feel for it we could do it and decided not. Two burly lads from Estates were roped in and they started. It was most of the way out on its runners when they realised that they should have pulled the support legs out. No bones were broken but I shat a brick.

Need 32-bit Linux to run past 2038? When version 5.6 of the kernel pops, you're in for a treat

Solars 64bit

As an almost lone nixer in a Windows shop I got really cross when they got all excited about Windows x64 having been running Solaris on 64bit SPARC for years.

Still, things are so much through the looking glass now given that I am installing Powershell on my linux VMs so I can automate snapshots and I can run bash natively on a Windows workstation.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: Hypocritical

You are Darl McBride and I claim my £5 ($6.49) at todays rates.

Crossing the platforms: The Register checks in with Canonical's WSL alternative – Multipass

Re: Multipass

Damn - beat me to it but I immediately had a vision of Mila Jovovich. Hard to believe that it was 22 years ago!

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

Re: "...the equivalent of a two-bedroom terraced house in West Yorkshire on a computer"

OK, the price of a quarter of a broom cupboard in Kensington.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Re: This theory always puzzles me

So could we help stop divers from getting bent by tapping them on the head as they ascend from the depths?

Mine is the one with a regulator in the pocket.

Top class Danish boffinry

Given last nights result I think we should emigrate to Denmark. I trust that there are other beers than Carlsberg there?

Obvious icon and we have the office party today as well.

Microsoft's Teams goes to bat for the other team with preview on Linux

Just installed it

I know about the purity of FOSS and all that but they insist here. It works for messaging. I don't think it does much else yet.

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

Jolly Roger

See title.

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

Dikes, dykes & levees

How would that song sound if:

' drove my Chevy to the dyke...'

I've got it and am off.

BOFH: I'd like introduce you to a groovy little web log I call 'That's Boss'

Twitter

Don't you have to be an orange moron to use it?

Nice subtle episode. I look forward to it's development.

Friday

EFF warns of 'one-way mirror' of web surveillance by tech giants – led by Google

worthless data

Given the challenges in getting useful data out of very large data sets I would have thought that the exabytes or whatever of data that the big trackers have must be close to useless in identifying trends for an individual to make targeted ads worthwhile. The government example is trying to identify terrorists, paedophiles and other threats to civilisation from the data they hoover up. The bigger the data set the bigger the number of false positives which renders the whole exercise pointless.

You can see this in operation on Amazon which bombards you with suggestions to buy something you have just bought.

Shirly, once the people paying for Google's ads work this out they will stop paying for it and Google et al will go bust. Or am I being naive and over optimistic in assuming ad purchasers are going to make that sort of nuanced thinking?

Vote rigging, election fixing, ballot stuffing: Just another day in the life of a Register reader

Re: side issue of green beer

Maritime Inn on the Barbican. The beer wasn't off, it was just disgusting.

side issue of green beer

Not long ago I was in a pub in Plymouth (blighty side of the Atlantic) and they were selling a literal green beer to celebrate the above mentioned festival. It tasted foul but the photo reminded me though the photo seems to be confusing two festivals - on green and one in southern Germany.

Obvious icon.

That's Microsoft price: Now you can enjoy a BSOD from the comfort of your driving seat

bootnote

Someone at Asda must be reading this august journal quite closely and notified PR when the story popped up.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Re: O.R.A.C.L.E - nearly right

A. sshole since Ellison is a left pondian.

No wonder Bezos wants to move industry into orbit: In space, no one can hear you* scream

Re: re. the future of manufacturing is in space

Uber!!!???

2) cheap transport via uber "partnership"

3) no taxes AND cheap transport via uber "partnership"

I can just see Uber rockets - you hail them on an app and some clapped out repurposed SpaceX job arrives that has been fetched off the bottom of the seabed. Then the operator gives you a one star review because your payload was half a kilo more than you originally specified.

As pressure builds over .org sell-off, internet governance bodies fall back into familiar pattern: Silence

Re: Time for a new TLD

I like .gro

but as Africa is an emerging intertube presence perhaps there needs to be a .afric tld with subdomains - .org.afric, .co.afric, .gov.afric

and so on.

That should help to give the middle or two finger salute to ICANN that it needs.

London cops seeking £600m mega IT contract to knock 'towers' sprawl into 'one throat to choke'

Imagine if

They announced that they could deliver £x millions by bringing it in house!

IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme

so much change

One wonders what Mr Ballmer must be making of all this. I seem to remember him ranting about Linux being an existential threat.

I still worry that MS might be doing their classic embrace, extend and extinguish but I can't see it working now.

I also wonder what happened with the SCO litigation since Groklaw shuttered.

NASA told to get act together on commercial crew vendors as chance of US-free ISS rises

> There's one strung up from the ceiling in Kennedy Space Center if you're ever passing. A Shuttle, not an astronaut.

Perhaps they should add a Boeing and SpaceX exec or two to the display as an incentive.

High Court dismisses nameless Google Right To Be Forgotten sueball man... yes, again

Mr ABC must be loaded

Even if the defendant is having to bear their costs to date he must be giving shed loads of money to his lawyers. I do hope he gets outed at the end.

Icon because Friday and lawyers must be able to buy loads of it on the back of this little story.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Cue Essex jokes

I am in the happy position of walking to work now - Brixton to Elephant but the fried chicken on the buses is the one to bring out my inner psychopath. Beer because the consumption of such often leads to the matter under discussion.

Don't miss this patch: Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel

Re: Pah, I have Linux!

at least sendmail is easy to deal with - postfix! :-)

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

SUVs are the scary bit

Owing to their being higher up people who are hit by them are more likely to die as they will sustain injuries to the upper body rather than legs. Apart from the amount of dead dinosaurs they consume.