Posts by Long John Brass

New UK Home Sec invokes infosec nerd rage by calling for an end to end-to-end encryption

Summoning Cthulu won't help you know.

He's already employed by MI5

/Paris Icon Cuz, she is the only eldritch horror icon we have!

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Re: It's not too difficult to find new floppy hardware

That should I think still work; The loop-back driver is different and separate from the floppy driver

Darkest Dungeon: Lovecraftian PTSD simulator will cause your own mask to slip

Re: Those crawling horrors of which we dare not speak...

But it has to be said: a lot of things he found "unspeakable" generally wouldn't phase anyone these days - for instance, Stranger Things is essentially the Hardy Boys (or Famous Five, if you want to use the British equivalent) taking on some Lovecraftian nightmares.

The old comic User-Friendly had Cthulu show up. He was most miffed that the eldritch horror shtick no longer worked on people. He blamed video games :)

Might re-watch From Beyond tonight in honour

France seeks science-fiction writers to help futureproof its military against science-fact

Re: French Space Farce

You are probably aware; But just in case...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092610/

Re: French Space Farce

Thats in rather bad taste :)

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Re: Maglev first stage

It's called a launch loop or Lofstrom loop

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

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Good news everyone

If it's on eBay it won't be going anywhere, the postage will be astronomical.

Nah; That one is "free" delivery

Chrome on, baby, don't fear The Reaper: Plugin sends CPU-hogging browser processes to hell where they belong

Re: Full fat or skimmed

I remember years ago talking (e-mail) with one of the KDE devs (Kde3?). Parts of the system were gobbling up huge amounts of RAM (for the time)

He mentioned that one of the problems is C++ and the way it has to build the VirtualTable crap for each and every class function/method pointer; This leads to the VTable blowing out to HUGE dimensions.

So for even relatively simple libraries you end up in this O^2 situation as each library loads for each thread. It's not that the library has to load twice or more(It's a shared page); it's that it has to build a unique set of VTables each time for each thread. This means the the VTables ended up many time the size of the code itself

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, where to go? Navigation satellite signals flip from degraded to full TITSUP* over span of four days

Re: Huzzah!

I hear-by nominate the "nanoBen" as the new ElReg time keeping unit!

That being the time it takes for light to travel one double-decker night bus at last bell.

Hayabusa2 stirs up rubble on surface of Ryugu, pokes asteroid with sampling horn

Re: Uneasy

The older documentary "The Andromeda Strain" was also good.

Usenet file-swapping was acceptable in the '80s – but not so much now: Pirate pair sent down for 66 months

Re: Mods, and ScreamTracker files... good times.

Gopher and FIDO didn't make it,

Both are still around; Although pale shadows of their former glory...

/me Ex Maximus BBS+FiDo+Doors, No DL ratios here! SysOP

Ahhh, I loved the smell of zone mail hour in the morning; And the mail tossers running (BlueWave?)

/OldFart Icon because, well, errrmmm

300,000 edgy folk pledge themselves on Facebook to storming supposedly UFO-tastic Area 51

Evil idea

If google et al set their maps app to divert people to a carefully prepared alternate "Area51", complete with spaceships, aliens etc...

Watch the Internet collectively shit its pants :)

YouTube mystery ban on hacking videos has content creators puzzled

Re: YouTorrent?

BitChute already does this as does a few others

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

Am I the only one who...

Finds all the pearl clutching, tutting and harrumphing about these sorts of things a little tedious? Lets face it; An AI can now do automatically what used to take a skilled photoshoppe Artisan hours to do by hand!

Sure; I can understand finding a photo of yourself neekid and on the te-interwebs more than a little disturbing. But surely at some stage we collectively need to say "Meh; I *wish* my boobs/dick (delete as approp) was that big".

Wake me up when deep fake/nude can be run in real time and the headline is...

Twitter thot making millions from pay piggies, turns out to be a 120KG trucker from Birmingham called Dave.

*THEN* you will have a headline :)

We as a species need to become a heluva lot more cynical about the things we see via photos & video

Deepfake 3.0 (beta), the bad news: This AI can turn ONE photo of you into a talking head. Good news: There is none

Re: Perhaps a good thing?

I was thinking even further than that; Maybe it's time people learned to stop listening to what our fearless leaders say and start watching what they actually do.

Has incomes gone up or down

Has spending power gone up or down

are there really more good jobs or more shit minimum wage

Is crime actually up or down

etc etc etc

Re: Only trust high quality video sources

Thats just a matter of CPU/GPU grunt... There will always be more horse power cheaper in the future; And if you are well heeled then the sky is the limit.

How about *EVERY* digital camera still or video with a crypto chip that signs the incoming bit-stream and stores that as frame metadata somewhere?

Perhaps a good thing?

People will have to learn to see what our fearless leaders *actually* do and not what they say?

Lets be honest, it's not like these people don't lie for a living :/

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Put the developers on the maiden flight.

Can we add the Politicians and bureaucrats that ok this idea on those flights as well?

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

I said open the door!

Not blow the bloody doors off!

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Well said Don!

The moral, according to Don, is: "When you cock up, own it: admit the mistake and then work out what you need to do in order to fix it."

I *wish* more people knew/did this!

Re: I never made a century

Had one project; Later did the math... We averaged ~14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 months solid.

Go live started 6am on a Thursday morning.... I walked out of the office very late the next Monday night. I was a broken sack of human meat by the end. Never ever again. Got way too used to driving home trying see around the big black dots in my vision.

I was young and stupid. I only survived that one because I was young and stupid.

Never

Ever

Again

Re: Estimating Software Projects

Spent some time with a "newbie" PM when she asked me for some advice

Told her the following...

Techies tend to underestimate the time taken to do a thing (So add extra time to the ETA)

Techies tend to procrastinate (So don't tell them they have the time you've allocated)

Management always thinks things are quicker, easier then they really are (Convince them early on an extended timeline)

If a given task is completed earlier than expected; Don't shrink the timeline (you will need it later)

Things *WILL* go wrong eating into your timeline (Use the slack from above)

Techies can be bribed with food :)

Every project I worked on with her as a PM, came in either on-time or early and usually under budget

It helped that she was detail oriented and fastidious about keeping shit organised, kind of person.

A true joy to work for/with

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Re: School kids microsoft basic

OSI SuperBoard II for me :)

The machine itself got turfed out many moons ago (not my fault, I let my SO talk me into it)

Replaced recently with a SB-III from Vince Briel :)

Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook in crosshairs: Politicos stick monopoly probe into Silicon Valley

A missed ooportunity

Head line should have been

"Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook in crosshairs: Politicos stick monopoly probe up Silicon Valley"

Yeah yeah, I'll get my coat; No need to push

Sex and drugs and auto-tune: What motivates a millennial perp?

Re: Some studio did a xxx parody remake of Barbarella

Zardoz was pure awesome. For certain values of pure and certain value of awesome.

You mileage may vary and settle during transit.

Mines the one with the Cherry2000 disk in the pocket

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

To get the PHD you have to have your BS. So, he has a BS and works at 7/11?

Worse looks like he has a BA (Bachelor of Arts/Bugger All). Just how bad do you have to be to fail Lesbian Dance Therapy(Social Sciences)?

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

The scary OPs team

Back when I was a wet behind the ears PFY (When iron dinosaurs ruled the earth). The DC I had to visit had the OPs pen right next to the Machine room access doors. Card swipe access the whole nine yards. I never had a card so I had to be let in by one of the OPs team. Great people; Very ummmm interesting crowd. They included...

* Tall tattooed, pierced(Rare at the time) Heavy metal tweaker dude (OPs team leader)

* Disco hippy - Nice guy, awful taste in music

* Thug - the tape monkey

* "Barbie" - the scantily clad OPs gal. Very nice, very smart and my goto when I couldn't figure out how one system talked to another

* Suspiciously normal girl - The other OPs gal.

Had the privileged of watching the new GM of the company (After trying and failing to access the machine room with some other suits in tow) trying to explain to the Head OPs dude that he needed access to the machine room to do a tour for the other two suits.

Head OPs dude looks him in the eye and says; Never seen you before, don't know who you are and I'm not letting you in. If you want in, talk to my boss.

GM then scuttles off and comes back later with the aforementioned manager in tow :)

Great crowd; Loved hanging out with them. I guess with lights out DCs being the norm these days; they aren't really a thing anymore :(

Your FREE end-of-the-world guide: What happens when a sun like ours runs out of fuel

Easy fix for dear old Sol

Star-Lifting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting)

Given that our Sun is 99.8% of *all* the mass in our solar system; If we can extract elements heavier than Hydrogen, we have all the building materials we need and we can then feed the hydrogen back into the sun extending it's life!

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Re: JavaScript

Less than a Meg? Yoof of today, don't even know you've been born.

My first machine came with a Whopping 1K (1024 bytes). It was a grand day indeed when I could afford to upgrade the beast to a monumental 8KB (8192 bytes)

Essex named sexiest British accent followed closely by, um, Glaswegian

Re: Relative accents?

Perhaps it's because I've lived in so many different places

It weird isn't it; Once you lived and travelled in a few places far from the lands of your youth, It gets harder and harder to differentiate accents. After a while living in London and living south of the Thames; I found I could no longer tell the difference between the Ozzie and Kiwi Accents anymore.

That said I rate accents on the following scale, How happy would you be listening to your SO telling you off for something (Getting yelled at); I decided on Scots, Welsh, Irish and then French.

Age verification biz claims no-payment model for 40% of Brits ahead of July pr0n ban

I suppose it's one way to...

Teach the general public about the joys of VPNs :)

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Re: Impossible to answer

I just tell people I'm a scumbag contractor :)

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

Re: Tea time

faggots are a bundle of sticks or stick like objects.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: The stupids have started already

TECO forever!!!!!!!!!

Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks over Ecuador embassy bail-jumping

Yes, the Romans called it decimation.

Nope decimation was AFAIK something different; If your Legion didn't perform or needed punishment they would execute 1 out of every 10 legionaries. Hence the Deci in decimation.

America's anti-hacking laws are so loose, even Donald Trump Jr broke them. So, what do we do about it?

Sony CD root-kit anyone?

So when are the Sony execs responsible for that little farce going to face the music?

Starz, meet the Streisand Effect. Cable telly giant apologizes for demented DMCA Twitter takedown spree

Tell it to the lawyers

"That was never our intention and we apologise to those who were incorrectly targeted..."

During the class action lawsuit. Nuke em from orbit, it's the only way they'll learn :(

Russian parliament waves through powers for internet iron curtain

Hate to break it to you Mr Bomastic

The Russians are just playing catch-up on this front; The rest of the "free" world is already way ahead on this front. Don't believe me? We've all seen the rumblings from the powers that be; about internet harms and "hate" speech :(

Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch

Re: a complete copy of Wikipedia, the Torah, the declaration of Israeli independence

You want Cthulu? Because that's how you get Cthulu

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

Re: Poptarts & Hot Pockets: food of the gods.

I think you may have confused broccoli with Brussels sprouts

Prince Harry takes a stand against poverty, injustice, inequality? Er, no, Fortnite

Everything old is new again.

Jack Thompson called and wants his murder simulators back.

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

speed of light = C

The radiation being gamma rays, is of course travelling at the speed of light, being light. The ionised gas...

Thats only a *maximum* AFAIK; Light can go slower for example in water. Don't know what the speed of light in a mostly hydrogen plasma is though.

Maybe the GRB is some fancy pants version of Cherenkov radiation?

What bugs me the most? World+dog just accepts crap software resilience

It is far too often used to justify terrible engineering practices and decisions

I like that adage; I see too often teams and people not wanting to make a move on a problem area as they don't yet have the "perfect" solution. Implement a *good* solution then iterate on is a great way to break that deadlock.

Note: That doesn't mean implement the first piece of crap that comes to hand. :)

FAANGs for the memories: Breaking up big tech's biggest isn't a matter of if, but of when

Will the old skool media giants also get broken up?

The current incentives for large corporations are largely driven by tax structures. If governments said OK; Dividends are taxed at say 5%-10%, then the current stupid charge for "growth" would abate, that would in turn mean that the drive to grow ever larger & dominate ever more sections of a market space would in theory abate.

Who pressured WHO to put gaming on a par with drug addiction to help silence political dissent? Oh hi there, China

Kerbal Space Program

To be fair; KSP is a horrifically addictive "game". I easily lost 6 months to it and still loose a day or two every time I pick it up again.

5 stars; Would recommend!

Meet games-streaming Stadia, yet another thing Google will axe in two years

Google may be many things but stupid isn't one of them

Citation needed please?

Given Google recent behaviour I would strongly suggest that many in the Google-plex dev centre are Candy-Crush playing Crayon munching morons.... But Hey; I'm just a grumpy old man.

A problem with developers now...

It's not just now; This has *always* been the case

And before you start you screaming; I was a dev at one point in the dim dark distant past

Who the hell would trust this...

Pay for games & hardware that might get dropped at any time?

Pay for games that might get yanked off the service or censored at any time?

Sorry but no, a NetFlix style service for games and a really bad idea IMHO.

If I can't buy physical media or download the installer to run on my hardware I'm not interested.

IBM servers crashed in Q4 – just sales, not the mother of all outages

Growth...

Read something a short while ago discussing why modern companies are so obsessed with growth; The argument was the way that taxes were calculated for Dividends .vs Capital gains. Maybe it's time to rethink tax structures such that this idiotic driver for ever bigger ever faster growth in share value gets taken behind the wood-shed...

Back to ASICs: Nvidia coughs GPU-uge $6.9bn to scoff Mellanox

What marketroid came up this this little lot

<marketing_wank>Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant data centre-scale compute engine.</marketing_wank>

Wow; Just wow.

/Mines the one with the large shit shovel next to it