Posts by Roger Kynaston

To avoid that Titanic feeling, boffins create an unsinkable hydrophobic metal with laser power

Re: antifoul

No. Antifoul paint contains a cocktail of biocides in it. Most these days are based on copper but, back in the day, were based on tri-butyl tin (TBT) it was incredibly effective but also killed lots of other stuff and persists for a very long time. I have heard it said that you can follow the shipping lanes across the North Sea by following the areas bereft of life on the sea bed.

My bottom is truly copper bottomed. It uses powdered metallic copper in an epoxy substrate. The copper oxidises to cuprous oxide which is the active ingredient. This then further decays to cupric oxide which ablates off to expose another layer of copper and so on. it has lasted ten years now but probably needs a new application now.

Beer cos Friday but not too much as I am driving down to said boat tomorrow.

antifoul

A while ago a friend of my Brother's based in Ireland developed a nano etched surface that repelled weed. Given that all boats and ships have to paint their bottoms (snigger) with some sort of toxic paint to stop weed growing this might have an application there. seaweed wouldn't grow in air. I see that it is the inner surfaces of this that trap the air but with further development.

I would love to not have to apply some evil toxic goop to my bottom!

Hyphens of mass destruction: When a clumsy finger meant the end for hundreds of jobs

Re: SCO Unix

There will be lots of stories like this from the *nix types.

Mine was on a solaris box in my early sysadmin days.

I was adding some disk capacity and in the process of putting a file system on typed newfs /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 rather than c1t0d0s3 and so watched my /usr go down the plughole. Fortunately it was not yet in production but it was an interesting experience watching it slowly fall in a heap before I rebuilt it.

I learn't to use disksuite after that.

California’s Attorney General joins the long list of people who have had it with Facebook

how to kill off antisocial networks

All the data they collect is perceived to be very valuable and allows for effective advertising which is why said advertisers are prepared to pay for it. All we have to do is get some decent evidence that such squillions of gigabytes of data is actually not worth the disk space it is saved on and advertisers will abandon them. The Zuck and other sociopaths then find themselves on the dole queue and the problem goes away.

I read an chapter in Ben Goldacre's book about the use and abuse of big data. He was writing about governments using it to spot terrorists and such like but the same weaknesses will be just as present when mining the data for commercially or politically nefarious purposes.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

plane juice

new keyboard needed for that one.

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: Is anybody surprised?

So, to follow that analogy, when Amazon goes bust we will be in a hurricane.

Mine is the one with a laptop with links to nhc.noaa.gov in the bookmarks.

Antarctic researchers send an SOS to the world: Who wrote this message in a bottle?

and I thought I was bonkers

for having ideas of sailing to the Kerguelen isles.

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

not quite 20 years ago

I was working for an outsourced Council IT whose Revs & Bens server used a common product from a well known shit software supplier. This one used an Ingres DB. I had the task of getting a so called DR box to work. I did teach myself a bit of Ingres in the process and got labelled at the Ingres expert. Another council contract then rang me asking for help with their production system. That was very nerve wracking.

US Air Force inks deal with Raytheon on Windows 10 (and other) support for ARSE

UK MOD procurement buys

AMRAAM Support System.

Happy Friday.

Google goes full Anti-Flash-ist, boots Adobe's insecure monstrosity out of web search index

Frog in a Blender

And the gerbil in the microwave fed my childish humour even though I was nominally a grownup (aged in my thirties). Back when you could share attachments without risking stuff. Then I love you came along and kiboshed it. More innocent times.

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

Re: Something missing.

Bet he re-releases Mistletoe and Wine this year. Get the ear bleach ready!

OT I know but hey.

Orange you happy to be a customer? Spammy sextortion malware only targeted French ISP

sting?

Could it be aimed at a specific person (perhaps high up in French govt) and they have stopped as they have caught their mark now?

I'll put my tinfoil hat on with my coat.

Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech

ICON!?

So long as it isn't a long forgotten soviet nuclear missile platform.

YouTube thinkfluencer Siraj Raval admits he plagiarized boffins' neural qubit papers – as ESA axes his workshop

turnitin

Universities routinely check student work for plagiarism. Shirly this could be applied quickly and easily to other areas.

Robocop needs reboot, $200m for AI research, UK govt knowingly deployed racist passport system – plus more

facial recognition

I wish the Borders Agency (and other bits of government) weren't so keen on getting rid of the humans. Perhaps because I loathe the things but the new gates never seem to be able to match me with my passport where a human would have no problem. I am a typical fat, balding Brit while my Wife has no problem and her parents arrived here at the tail end of the Windrush era. Go figure.

Re: "they start doubting the truth"

In principle I like your idea of trust but verify. The trouble is how do you verify. Rightly or wrongly outlets such as the BBC and major newspapers were the main way we would verify our news in the past when someone said something had happened.

Now, "someone" on facefail says that something has happened. Do we still trust The Guardian or Telegraph to confirm that the thing has happened. I personally can't travel to Syria to verify that the reported atrocity has or hasn't happened.

I wish I had an answer but I don't.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Desktop folders

Back in the NT desktop days there was a folder called my briefcase. I think it was for moving files between PCs - frankly, I don't remember now but one user with whom I was friends cheerfully announced that she used it for storing files. Another support guy (quite well lubricated) got into a massive argument with her about how dreadful it was to use this. I steered well clear as my friend was not one to brook dissent gracefully.

2001 fiction set to be science fact? NASA boffin mulls artificial intelligence to watch over the lunar Gateway

Buzzword Bingo

I am not sure what Aldrin would think about being reduced to that.

I've got it. I'm leaving now!

Not very Suprema: Biometric access biz bares 27 million records and plaintext admin creds

This is becoming a bit mundane which is the really scary bit

It feels as if every week there is some horror story about unencrypted data being exposed all over the intertubes or a cache of such data has been found on the dark web etc.

We here on the Reg forums and reg hacks fume about poor decision making and design catastrophes but it continues nonetheless.

Perhaps GDPR will help but ...

As ever, I have no answers of course being just the lowly sysadmin who still puts his faith in the shadow file

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

Why do people mess with menus

One of the reasons for abanoning the beast of Redmond's office offering was the ribbon. I loved it that LibreOffice stuck with menus and tool bars. So long as I cna retain them I will be happy.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Heart of Gold

It is really the infinite improbability drive and Zaphod will emerge from the crater.

It's official! The Register is fake news… according to .uk overlord Nominet. Just a few problems with that claim, though

Re: essentially, the blog confirms your claims

Winchester - he probably thought she was a gun.

Re: .uk was an awful decision

I've always wanted to see mercedes.gmbh.de

Maker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker, blueprints and files dumped online

Re: "thumbs down"

You are another incarnation of AmanFromMars and I claim my £5

Whisky business: Microsoft's spirited attempt to develop hooch with AI

Whisky??!!

Methinks you mean Whiskey if it is Swedish based.

Mine is the tartan one even though I am a Londoner

It's 2019 and a WhatsApp call can hack a phone: Zero-day exploit infects mobes with spyware

Re: How would I know if I've been compromised?

ditto. I updated first this morning and then reading this and I checked again this afternoon. Looks like Apple were a bit asleep.

</serious>

Not that I am admitting to having it installed on _my_ phone at all. No, never! I am not a sheeple!

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Electric Monk

Would said monk shoot off at some software mogul? Will this be the Zucks end?

+1 for the Holistic reference.

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

Re: Ah c'mon

Plus one for that. We got a PC for my In-laws. He refused to look at this new fangled stuff. She still struggles with correlating the mouse movement with the cursor on the screen. Also, as a home help she never used a typewriter so really struggles with a keyboard as well. We get very few emails from Jamaica!

Astroboffins may have cracked the mystery of where the photons from weird gamma ray bursts come from

Hokusai BigWaterfall system at RIKEN.

Shirly they have adopted agile now. Waterfall supercomputers are so old hat now!

Easy-to-hack combat systems, years-old flaws and a massive bill – yup, that's America's F-35

port 80 or 443?

>(ALIS) – a network of on-board gear, and ground-based web-browser-accessed systems

That said any death tech that doesn't work means it won't be used for killing anyone which is a bit of a plus really.

Facebook's at it again: Internal emails show it knew about Cambridge Analytica abuse 'months' before news broke

I have tried

I deleted my FB profile in the wake of the CA scandal. It was only rubbish anyway and circular arguments about Brexit.

However, I have since been bounced into whatsapp now. I didn't used to have it and then I joined an evening class and there was a whatsapp group. I tried to get them on slack (is that any better btw?) and met with stonewalling and, the best one, what is slack questions.

How to I stay clear of the evil internet big corps?

Eggheads want YOU to name Jupiter's five newly found moons ‒ and yeah, not so fast with Moony McMoonface

shirly

Jaglan Beta, Krikkit, Magrathea, Preliumtarn and Ursa Minor Beta

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Kill switches

Two incidents come to mind. Once, at the local authority where I worked, we had building work going on in our computer room. I was working upstairs when all went dead. I rushed down with others to find that the builders had been hammering so hard on the door that they had triggered the emergency kill switch near it. Half an hour of doing the headless chicken dance and all was back with the world. In those pre outsourced, pre SLA, pre critical indident days there was a bit of a meeting which involved reading the riot act to the builders and all went back to normal. I dread to think what would happen now.

Second was at the same authority but a different computer room. We had to shut down for weekend electrical work. I was doing the Sun boxes while colleagues were doing the Windows stuff. The facilities guy was there to turn off the power when we were done. I had just got the payroll DB server to the OK prompt and typed the words power off when the facilities guy hit the off button at the exact same moment that I hit return. Cue silence and a lot of swearing from the Windows people who had only got half way through their shutdowns.

Beer cos it is Friday.

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

Re: Wow

I agree. I only downvoted for the Brexit bit specifically. :-)

I'll keep my views on that "debate" off this forum.

Have an electronic Belgian beer as I shall be in Bruges in a couple of weeks.

Re: Wow

Downvoted for the Brexit reference. We are all fed up with it.

Cray will realise 'substantial' loss. But Shasta minute, folks, big iron market will pick up

Shasta!?

Presumably their next big toy will be called Cor. Apologies to the shade of CS Lewis of course.

Google CEO tells US Congress Chocolate Factory will unleash Dragonfly in China

In other news

an actual chocolate factory in Germany poured a ton of the stuff into the street.

Deck the halls with ... oh, no. DXC tells staff they may not have a job in the New Year

I have no idea what this means

"Within Deliver in the UKIIMEA* Region we are continuing the rolling programme of transforming our operating model and structure to better align and optimise to support our client base on the digital journey.

OK. so they always use bullshit bingo as much as possible when doing something evil so I get that there is something nasty about to happen but:how on earth can they think that aligning and optimising can be done without doing it to something. My bullshitometer needs recalibrating as it keeps exploding these days. Poor buggers at DXC though.

Bordeaux-no! Wine guzzling at UK.gov events rises 20%

tricky

I am emphatically not an expert except in transferring contents of bottle to glass and then to stomach. There is certainly an argument that 'old world' wines have traded on their reputation for quite a while. I am not so sure though. As I am almost certainly never going to be able to afford a premier cru I am not going to be able to compare it with an equally expensive Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon. I have had some god awful plonk with fancyish european labels and some exquisite new world wine that cost less. Most recently though the best wines I have tried were a Mas de la Plana from Penedes and a Bulgarian red the name of which has slipped my mind.

With regard to the question of civil servants getting pissed on the taxpayers money - I suppose that if they are they should have the opportunity to do so with decent plonk. Decent plonk being defined as being good value for money of course.

Microsoft has signed up to the Open Invention Network. We repeat. Microsoft has signed up to the OIN

chairs

I was just wondering if Steve Ballmer threw any when he heard the news.

The Register translates VMware's VMworld Europe 2018 news into plain English – our free guide for every reader

you missed the REALLY important bit

They managed to get blockchain in there. I head the words but utterly failed to understand what they meant (likely nothing?)

mines the one with the free glass of Cava in it.

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

Astrology??!!

Me thinks you mean that Newton was a pioneer in Astronomy.

Pirate radio = drug dealing and municipal broadband is anti-competitive censorship

Re: I swear to Cthulhu, Michael O'Rielly is fekkin' insane.

Upvoted and have a beer (electronic one only I am afraid).

Since the orange strumpet is so keen on building walls why shouldn't he have one build round Washington DC?

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

another buy out of my bread and butter

I used to be a Solaris admin. Now I am a linux admin in a red hat shop. Sun was bought by Oracle and more or less died a death. Will the same happen now? I know that Sun and RH are _very_ differeht beasts but I am thinking that now is the time to stop playing on the merry go round called systems administration.

Californian chap sets his folks' home on fire by successfully taking out spiders with blowtorch

Re: Merkins, eh ?

OT but I used to call our West Pond brethren this until a friend explained what it was. This friend knew a young lady who suffered from alopceia of the nether regions and resorted to a merkin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

Pikiwedia because it must be true.

Science: Broke brats glued to the web while silk-stocking scions have better things to do

This is a case of youngsters being what the world is coming to

Every group of young people are what the world is coming to. We are of course all doomed - to be grumpy old gits who go on about how it was much better "when I were young. blah blah blah'. I write this as an IT professional who doesn't get this social media stuff.

Erm... what did you say again, dear reader?

Dinsdale

Look for someone with a table nailed to their head!

DWP CIO and chief digi officer Mayank Prakash quits

Re: Who offered him a job?

ATOS?

Just thinkin.

Bouncing robots land on asteroid 180m miles away amid mission to fetch sample for Earth

Re: Bouncers

You had better not hope that. They will evolve into a charming whimsical bunch of raving psychopaths who will seek to wipe out all life in the universe as it doesn't fit in their view.

Beer (best Sapporo) for the boffins though.

Holy macaroni! After months of number-crunching, behold the strongest material in the universe: Nuclear pasta

Kilometres and parsecs

"So nuclear pasta is in another league compared to our planet's materials. It's like comparing parsecs to kilometres."

So how does this relate the Kessel run?

Mine is the one that will make .5 past light speed. And, sorry, it had to be done.