Posts by Roger Kynaston

Senior IBMer hit with £290k demand from Big Blue in separate case as unfair dismissal claim rolls on

An excellent look for a recruiter

Come work for us. We'll sue for money we have paid you. Remind me not to work for them. Irregardless of the merits or not of this case.

Icon because they are clearly toxic.

Yes, of course there's now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Microsoft! Leave our Linux alone!!!

We don't need no WSL.

Just another binary in the wall

it is too long since I listened to that so I cannot remember the words.

UK Cabinet Office calls off its search for a 'partner' in Whitehall SaaS ERP migration

Any sight of Larry

Near No 10?

G7 countries outgun UK in worldwide broadband speed test

I'm not surprised

They built a block of flats behind our house. Openreach ran a load of fibre for them and put the hole in the pavement at the bottom of our path but we do not qualify for it and still have to rely on a bit of copper from a telegraph pole as do the rest of the houses. Some company dug up the neighbouring road early this year but no word on when they will dig up our road or when it will be connected.

The magic TUPE roundabout: Council, Wipro, Northgate all deny employing Unix admins in outsourcing muddle

Re: Street Sign

Swindon. It is known as the magic roundabout.

click here

RAF chief: Our Reaper drones (sorry, SkyGuardians) stand ready to help British councils

Mrs Miggins?

Does she provide a slap up lunch in her pie shop?

Music festivals are back in the UK. So is the background bork

Squid

Who are they proxying?

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Re: I'm lovin it

Last time I was in one was April 2014 in Fort de France, Martinique. They were the only place with decent wifi and it was worth the cost of a pretend milkshake and ersatz fishy thing.

I'm lovin it

Their words not mine.

In Search of Lost Time: GNU Grep 3.7 released with fix for 'extreme performance degradation'

Re: grep, sed & awk

Hrmm. grep yes. I am less sure of sed and awk.

Little Jonny the sysadmin had a problem. Little Jonny thought he could solve it with sed and awk. Little Jonny had three problems.

More seriously, I find sed and awk fine for simple substitutions and variable outputs from a string but not after that.,

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

I expect Simon the PFY to split the proceeds

I assume that the SD card wasn't actually corrupt and they will now sell the pictures as NFTs to the idiots that buy such things as SCO licenses. As an aside, I hope that Pamela reads this.

Electrocution? All part of the service, sir!

I don't have mains on my boat

But for those who do have a shore based mains and an inverter you have a very spectacular way of converting your boat into a liquid asset by connecting both shore power and inverter/generator.

Icon though I doubt it would mange to reach those proportions most of the time.

LOL ;-) UK govt 2 pay £39m 4 txt msgs 4 less thn 2 yrs

money for old rope with a muppet thrown in

Just spin up some kermit instances in AWS and charge the muppets £40M

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

Wasn't this in one of the Brosnan Bond films?

It might be cool if it really can be made to work though. There would have to be oversight about noting it into a death ray. Joking aside - I wonder how much would be lost in the microwave beam till it reaches the earth. I know next to nothing about any of this so it is pure speculation.

UK chancellor: Getting back to the altar of corporate dreams (the office) will boost young folks' careers

freudian misread

I saw this:

"...government's first effort at getting people to return to the office..."

and read:

" governments first effort at getting rid of people ..."

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Nothing new

Back in the fifties or sixties my Father worked for Morris Motors for a while. They took the spares price list for a Morris Minor and worked out that building a new car from spares would cost something around £1500 when a new one was about £150. At least you could build it from spares then but repair has always been a way of exploiting the great unwashed and trading them up.

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!