Posts by Yes Me

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: "a large US-based aircraft company"

Oh yes. It meant that a problem reported on leg N would never be reported on leg N+1 and would therefore likely be disregarded by pilots and maintenance staff as a fluke, unless they studied the log in depth.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Re: It's potentially worse than described here.

"an increasingly protectionist US" is not really so new; the USA has long had the mistaken belief that it's the only country that matters and that "fairness" means "beneficial to the USA". Trump is an outlier, and will be gone in a few years, but the underlying belief system hasn't changed.

However, a pause in the mad rush of technology for a few years, until China catches up (or captures and operates the Taiwan fabs) really wouldn't do any harm to society. A sudden shortfall of chips for crypto mining and AI would be a wonderful thing, in fact.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Re: Neat trick

"Funny thing, I’ve never met somebody else in my industry that reads Simon’s writing"

Unless, of course, they were lying for some reason.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

It was real back in Year 100...

"“Mark” told us he spent Y2K eve in New Zealand, and was supposed to inform his boss in Australia – where the time was two hours in the past – of any problems."

Hmm. If he'd been trying to check on a flight to Oz early on January 1st, the Auckland Airport web site at http://www.auckland-airport.co.nz would have told him it was "1 Jan 100". I have documentary proof but only on paper.

Similarly, http://www.hp.com/year2000/index.html said "January 1, *** DATE INVALID ***" just above "HP ready to Assist Customers Through Y2K Rollover"

It wasn't really a non-event. I'm looking forward to the Unix date rollover... only 12 years to go.

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Optional

For various reasons I didn't see this story sooner, so I expect nobody will ever read this comment, but:

1. IPv6 didn't turn 30 in 2025; the IPv6 decision was announced in July 1994 at the IETF in Toronto.

2. Since Google sees more than 49% of its users connecting via IPv6, and that doesn't include China, it's more of a success than a failure. We expected from the very beginning that v4 and v6 would coexist for many years. That's a feature, not a bug.

3. There is no grey market in IPv6 addresses. That in itself should be a pretty convincing argument. There are half as many IPv4 addresses as there are living people. How silly!

IPv6 rules.

Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner passes, aged 83

Re: Necessary chan

As I noted in another comment, "shareholder value" was the beginning of the end, and Palmisano was its agent.

Re: Do typographical 'letters' have carbon footprints?

It also carries the bizarre implication that he "passed" to somewhere else, whereas in fact his thought processes simply stopped, as did all his other biological processes. That is indeed called "dying" in English. But American is a different language.

Humbug!

Gerstner didn't fail. The Chicago School economists won; the IBM Board became obsessed with "shareholder value" and picked a successor (Sam Palmisano) who was basically a glorified accountant rather than a technologist. Palmisano set IBM on course to the disaster that it has now become, and his successors have been even worse.

In reality, Gerstner did teach the elephant to dance, and even to pivot. But his successors blew it. A great pity.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Bastards

What did the bastards expect you to actually do if the world ended? (But at least in that case they wouldn't have owed you a day off.)

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

Re: Other legends of heritage

Ritchie wrote a paper "The Development of the C Language" if you want details.

It's in the archive.

early DOS developers

Shame they got \ and / mixed up.

China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET

Eyes not opened

"His presentation about CENI is an eye-opener"

Not. It contains good advertising copy, but no actual technical information, except a passing reference to network coding and detnet (deterministic networking, an IETF work item). And network coding is not a recent Chinese invention, as a quick glance at Wikipedia will show you.

They built a high speed network. Good, but so did everybody else.

United Nations agrees to persist with multi-stakeholder internet governance

Jaw-jaw

What Churchill actually said was "Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war" and despite being Churchill, he wasn't wrong.

Especially if the jawing keeps the politicians and their acolytes busy and away from the actual physical real world. Fortunately that is the exact effect of the self-named "Internet Governance Forum" to date, and in that sense it has been an indisputable success and has achieved absolutely nothing, despite some incremental climate damage due to pointless travel to pointless meetings.

Sir Humphrey would be proud.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Solicitors...

But... but... why not ask ChatGPT to explain why its report is wrong? It's generally very obliging, I find.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Lost for words

"Do applications ever store confidential information in temporary files?"

I notice that nobody answered that question, presumably because the answer is rather obvious.

ICANN distances itself from radical proposal – which it funded – to give nations a role in internet governance

Re: governments like the EU often just impose policy without really considering the implicatons

"The European Commission is setting up a Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Internet Standards Deployment"

What a horrible idea. At least it's only a Forum, i.e. another talking shop, so it will mainly contribute hot air to global warming.

Re: RIR behavour/control

"Downside is Internet governance is kinda split"

No, that's an important upside. It's one of the reasons why transborder and international regulation of the Internet has repeatedly failed to happen over the last 30 years or so. Long may this remain the case!

Unfortunately nation states do have the ability to restrict or stop Internet usage in their countries, and we can't ever stop that, whether it's North Korea, Sudan, Russia, Ukraine, or wherever you happen to live.

The real surprise in this story is that ICANN started this effort in the first place. Just another of their political blunders, I guess.

Eleven years after Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server biz, profits are still elusive

Re: Lenovo makes servers?

Exactly. IBM isn't stupid, whatever else it may be.

Problem: ThinkPad future profitability looks terrible?

Solution: Sell the ThinkPad brand to China.

Problem: x86 server future profitability looks terrible?

Solution: Sell the x86 server line to the same idiots in China.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

Re: How do you create a single point of failure for a chunk of the net?

When you happen to be pointed by a search engine to a far distant site that doesn't pay for a CDN, you soon know it. So the question isn't why sites pay for CDN service, it's why Cloudflare has such a large share of the CDN market. And the answer to that question is simple: unregulated capitalism. I believe that Dr Marx and Mr Engels pointed this out some years ago.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

Andy learned that at CERN, where "Bicycle on line" and "Jumbo jet on line" were the modes of moving mag tapes around (on site and off site, respectively).

Earlier than that, apparently the local customs post was fine with people driving between the Swiss and French CERN sites transporting used punch cards (ones with holes in them), but balked at unused punch cards, which had commercial value.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Not a work prank...

Worth noting that when I grew up in England many yonks ago (before there was Windows, before there was DOS, long before...) I never saw a St George flag. It just wasn't a thing. Its gradual rise to become a political emblem is definitely unhealthy. Funny thing is that St George actually came from... Georgia, and not the one glued onto Florida.

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Collusion?

Also profit for the hardware vendors, who love the artificial obsolescence that MS has created.

Re: Bloat like never seen before

That will work until they take Task Manager away because customers shouldn't be worrying their little heads about such matters.

Re: No need or rush to upgrade

No need or rush to upgrade

Neither of my Win10 capable PCs are signed up for the free ESU, so I'm doing nothing. Everything is fine. The machines are getting a bit elderly, so I do face the dilemma of either taming the Win11 machine that is sitting idle, or planning a complete switch to Linux Mint.

I do feel sorry for corporate IT managers who have no way to thumb their noses at MS.

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: IPv6 solution...

"The definition of a wide adoption of IPv6 seems to be when all popular website have AAAA records."

Not really. The Google measurement, for example, is how many users actually use IPv6 to reach Google servers.

Anyway, the new game in town now, given the general progress, is running your enterprise network as an IPv6-mostly network, where IPv6 is used except when it really can't be, because the remote host only has an A record, in which case you use 464LAT. Then the local infrastructure can be 100% IPv6-only and the OPEX goes down.

Re: IPv6 solution...

I've been using IPv6 without a tunnel for over a decade. It's a done deal.

Re: IPv6 solution...

Sorry mate, your world view is OBE. Yes, IPv6 took a lot longer to reach critical mass than it should have done. (If TimBL had invented the web a few years later, large scale NAT would never have happened, and the Web would have been deployed over IPv6 from day one.) But now v6 is way past critical mass and IPv4 is rapidly being pushed into a legacy role. Fifteen years too late, which is a highly unfortunate reality.

Re: IPv6 solution...

I think that the global IPv6 adoption (as measured by Google) will exceed 50% in the last week of 2025, if not before. The reason is that IPv6 usage peaks at weekends (because more private subscribers use IPv6 than workplace subscribers) and because private usage peaks during the end-of-year holidays.

Also the Google estimate for China is meaningless; actual usage in China is 77% (China Daily, 2025-10-31). So if Google could measure China properly, they would already show more than 50% worldwide adoption.

It's about time for the IPv6 naysayers to shut up.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

You still have a Post Office? My nearest one is now a trendy Pilates place.

Where's the grumpy old fart icon???

Re: "The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day"

If AI says the word is "tenant", the word is "tenant".

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Wrong problem

But why on earth would I want to do that?

Is there a site on how to downgrade Windows 11 to the newly stable Windows 10, which no longer suffers from pesky updates?

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

I have a question

Windows 11? Is that some kind of operating system?

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: Get out while you can

Keeping up one's false image of perfection is part of the Executive Game

Even more true of politicians.

Optional

Well yes. That's what happened when I retired - the fun parts of my job (including remaining well informed by carefully studying "Who, me?" every week) became my hobby. The other stuff, not so much.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

Re: No, your email is automatically deleted

"email then phone two minutes later"

Why did he wait so long?

Apparently, when you tell people that their email is being automatically deleted, they get terribly annoyed and send many angry emails. Fortunately, this doesn't matter.

AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane

Re: This isn't com[lexity.

"Why would no-one been able to realise that there was single point of failure?"

There is always a single point of failure in a complex system*. The trick is finding it.

*Yes, there is, really, however much redundancy is provided. That's a theorem.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Solicitors

Email to Telex gateways were a thing for a while to get round this sort of idiocy. I think there was even a supported product on IBM mainframes. That dates it. And me.

Where did I leave my coat?

New Zealand’s Institute of IT Professionals collapses

Re: Wait, What?

It turns out that nobody was auditing the accounts. Utterly bizarre.

Bored developers accidentally turned their watercooler into a bootleg brewery

Re: They forgot to add the right fungi

Why a _votive_ candle? Does it only work for Catholics?

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Is it too soon...

...to point out that this was a tragic 000PS ?

It's the final countdown: Windows 10 hits end of support in less than 30 days

Windows 10 for ever!

It will be pretty nice when all those updates stop coming. I haven't seen any evidence that any of them ever actually protected me.

'At the 2015 Ignite conference, Microsoft employee Jerry Nixon stated that Windows 10 would be the "last version of Windows"'

That's clear enough for me....

Microsoft readies Windows 11 25H2 while Windows 10 circles the drain

Drain? What drain?

I'm looking forward to the "end of support". No more annoying updates.

Huawei counts cost of Western bans as UK business withers

Re: I wonder what the cost to the UK was

Too right. And judging by the downvotes, a majority of Register readers have fallen for the anti-Chinese rhetoric and lies. (E.g. Huawei isn't run by the CCP; of course it takes notice of Chinese law and political pressure, just as British companies take notice of UK law and politics, and as so many US companies have taken a Trumpian turn.)

Disengaging with China will prove to be a blunder of historical dimensions.

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: How did you get in here?

I visited <big company> in <big city> in <big country> where I was strongly advised to leave my laptop outside, because if I took it in, the reception desk people would fill all its USB sockets with epoxy.

DNS security is important but DNSSEC may be a failed experiment

Re: Ask Google to make it a page rank criterium

I'm pretty sure that page ranking is already overtaken by events. Evidence? The discrepancies between Google's AI summaries and the URLs that Google actually list are getting greater (and weirder) every day.

Yes, I wrote a very expensive bug. In my defense I was only seven years old at the time

Re: PigeonNet

RFC6214 is much more modern.

Re: Today..

Yes. People used to ask me (back when I was a guru) "Who pays for the Internet?", and my answer was always "You do." Always true, usually because the person was a taxpayer.

ChatGPT creates phisher’s paradise by recommending the wrong URLs for major companies

AI summarises lies

In the Internet tech realm, Google's "AI summary" doesn't know the difference between an Internet-Draft and an RFC. (The first is a draft in discussion and the majority of drafts never become RFCs. Even if they do, the drafts are still only drafts.) This can lead to radically false AI summaries, not to mention failing to point to the actual RFC that the user might have been looking for.

I have no doubt the same problem arises in every other realm of information too. It really should be against the law.

I asked Google about this (publishing lies) and it said "Lack of harm or intent: If the lies don't cause any harm or injury to individuals or public interest, and there is no intent to deceive or defraud, it's unlikely to be a crime."

There's plenty of scope for harm or injury in the sort of lies that Google tells these days.

China just two years behind USA on chip design, says White House tech Czar

Somebody will fix it for you

I believe that the fool in the Oval Office is arranging to fix the Harvard problem and let in a 9th Chinese university. (Although #11 curently is "Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Germany".)

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: .doc and .xls also at the funeral parlour

And there are millions (I mean that) of historical documents in the old formats on obscure, and less obscure, web sites. Not to mention .ppt. These formats will never, ever go away. Thank heavens for LibreOffice, indeed. I haven't bothered with the MS apps for at least ten years.