Posts by Tim99

HP to Xerox: Nope, your $33.5bn bid falls short of our valuation

For...

one hundred billion dollars!

5G SIM-swap attacks could be even worse for industrial IoT than now

Re: I seem to recall

Nah, SP3 at the very least - SP1 will be a panicked emergency patch to fix something really bad. After the patch it has been out for a while, SP2 will fix something bad that was caused by SP1. SP3 will fix that one. SP4 will offer additional functionality, which will probably have some regressive code from the original version, including that which caused the first breach.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

I took out a block of 20+ residential units with a cheap domestic level Potato Clock that had a built in block of domestic power outlets. I was tidying up our home office and thought that it would be a good idea to plug my mobile phone charger into the UPS to give me a spare power point above the desk. The charger was faulty - The resulting bang temporarily deafened me, tripped the house power board, blew the 50A fuse to the house, and took out the main circuit breaker for the site. Our electrical contractor fixed everything past the breaker in less than half an hour but we still had no electricity as the main breaker was dead. He called the power company. We had to wait for another 2 hours because the power company engineer did not have a spare breaker so he had to go back to base. I admitted what had happened, but I don’t think the engineer believed me until he saw what was left of the phone charger.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

The (apocryphal?) BOFH statement

Luser: I can’t do my job properly because of the nasty computer. Fix it now!

BOFH: Go away before I replace your job with a 12 line script...

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

Re: A modern update

Yes, medicos can be like that - Lawyers seem to be even worse.

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

Re: You could get into a room?

The last were "modern" hotels, so little to do with climbin' down t'pit shaft using only hands and feet.

The first hotel was in an apartment block, so reception was on the 5th floor, my room was on the 9th. After the previous lift incident, when I eventually got into the room the "room service menu" was a list of local take-aways with highlights of their "meals" - Charges excluded delivery, which was about the same amount as a "meal", with an additional charge if I wanted the delivery taken up to my room.

You could get into a room?

In my last 4 check-ins the keycard did not work 3 times and had to be replaced/reprogrammed. The last 2 wouldn’t even let me use the lift.

Samsung SpaceSelfie Galaxy-bearing balloon photobombs Michigan home the hard way

Compensation

I wondered if Samsung ought to compensate the residents by giving them an S10 each, but then I realized that they had suffered enough from the power outage...

Amazon is saying nothing about the DDoS attack that took down AWS, but others are

Re: The trouble with clouds

Not so fast. If we assume that a typical white fluffy cumulus cloud weighs about 500 tons (it does) or ~120 KiloJubs (~1 LINQ Hotel Recycling unit), it is pretty massive, but the mass is in a volume of about a cubic mile (normal size cloud). A bigger cloud could be ~2 cubic miles (or 1000 tons).

I don't think that the existing Reg Standard Units give a suitably intuitive measure of large volumes with relatively low densities - Could I suggest the "FluffyCloud" for larger nebulous/amorphous masses i.e. I FluffyCloud = 500 tons/cubic mile - The standard volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool is ~1.4 million to a cubic mile so the FluffyCloud is roughly 0.088 Jubs/Olympic-sized swimming pool (m/v)?

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

Re: Red tape

Red tape is a very British thing - Its colour is actually pink - A bit like hunting pink (coats) are actually red...

ATTK of the Pwns: Trend Micro's antivirus tools 'will run malware – if its filename is cmd.exe'

But

I thought that regedit and cmd were viruses?

IBM: Why yes, Red Hat is doing great. Thanks for asking. The rest of Big Blue? Sure, wait – someone's at the door...

Re: We are planning a quick migration strategy

I think you forgot the joke icon >>======>

A History of (Computer) Violence: Wait. Before you whack it again, try caressing the mouse

Re: Percussive maintenance in the car

In the 80s I bought a new FIAT which turned out to be like many Italian cars of that time, great to drive but not very well built. Things really did come off in your hand when driving, window winders, gear-lever top, driver’s mirror... The next car, a Volvo, was an overcompensation - Totally reliable, built like a tank, but dull to drive.

That lithium-ion battery in your phone or car? It has just won three chemists the Nobel Prize

Re: Isn't Chemistry, Physics?

And Curie’s Nobel Prizes were in both Chemistry and Physics, and Rutherford’s was in Chemistry. The physics prize was given to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, an allotrope of carbon...

BBC said it'll pull radio streams from TuneIn to slurp more of your data but nobody noticed till Amazon put its foot in it

Re: No.

Thanks AC for link. I found that putting http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_6music_mf_p into VLC [Open Network] [Open Source] [Network] works on an Apple Mac...

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Re: you've never tried to connect wifi/bluetooth to devices

It’ll just try to connect to HDMI3...

Sussex Police gives up on £790k Gatwick drone shutdown probe

So

nearly as many sightings as Nessie then?

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

Re: If the EM sensitivity thing is real..

In the 1960s my father had a 240v fluorescent strip light in the garage that was under the main power wire to the house from a pole in the pavement outside. If you went into the garage in the dark you could see from the faint glow from the fluorescent before you turned it on. My father, a pragmatic man, said that as it was before the meter and he wasn’t getting billed for it why fix it...

Re: Electro-sensitivy

Activities other than sleeping?

Re: Do you have something to tell us?

Metal mesh? What heresy is that, unless you like your brew bitter? Paper tends to sorb (bitter) polyphenols.

Class-action sueball over refurbed iThings will ask Apple what 'as good as new' means

Irony?

Not sure about replacement parts, but if the whole device is replaced with “refurbished” kit, it is often more reliable, as returns/repairs are usually soak tested and individually checked - Whereas much (even expensive) kit comes off the production line without checking. Some manufacturers discovered a long time ago that QA/QC was expensive and not always indicative of problems, so they just ship the kit and wait for the customer to complain.

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

Black - pffft

"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"...

The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it....

"Look at this," said Ford, "look at the interior of this ship."...

"It's black," said Ford, "Everything in it is just totally black ..."

..."It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me," said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?"

The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats - which were rudimentary since the only important trip this ship was designed for was supposed to be unmanned - were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black.

"Perhaps whoever designed it had eyes that responded to different wavelengths," offered Trillian.

"Or didn't have much imagination," muttered Arthur.

"Perhaps," said Marvin, "he was feeling very depressed."

Handcranked HTML and JPEG japes. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Hmmm..

Not Miss Lemon?

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

Not just flying

After privatised RAF training had been running for a while, I was talking to a (recently retired from active duty as a Weapon Systems Officer) Flt Lt who was the liaison officer for a well known front line RAF station. He was of the opinion that not only was training people to do the flying bit taking too long, with a poor pass rate - He was having to do their "knife and fork course" training, and teaching other basic skills like receiving a salute, discipline and marching (OK the marching bit might not be that important). He said that the whole exercise was a disaster, but that "someone" had made a lot of money out of providing a much worse system than the RAF had when they did all of it in-house.

OK this was fixed-wing training, not helicopters, but it's the closest icon >>=====>

Apple's WebKit techs declare privacy circumvention to be a security issue

Re: Pet peeve

Have you tried the FireFox Focus Browser App? You can use its content Blocker in Safari, it can be a bit aggressive though, so you may need to use the "Reload Without Content Blockers" reload option - I also use Purify from the AppStore, and find it to be well worth the $1.99 it costs.

iOS 13 has new features including "Added support for aborting Fetch requests".

On the Mac, Safari Preferences has "Websites">"Autoplay" defaults of: Allow All-Autoplay/Stop Media with Sound/Never Autoplay - You can set these options individually for each website.

Now you see them... IBM made over 800 UK jobs vanish in 2018 despite improving fortunes

Re: Who's left?

"... It's almost like employees expect to work for free there."

A few in service industries actually pay their "employer" for the privilege to earn tips (e.g. a maitre d' in some posh restaurants).

Psst. Hey. Hey you. We have to whisper this in case the cool kidz hear, but... it's OK to pull your data back from the cloud

Yes, by all means

Put your data in the Cloud, if you don't need access to it to run your business is the primary rule of outsourcing. So its probably all right if whatever you outsource is fungible like office cleaning, routine printing, etc. - Look in the Yellow Pages, if there are lots of local companies doing "whatever", consider outsourcing?

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

Re: External memory

I thought you meant colander, or is that something that tells you what the date is?

Pwn an iPhone to bank $1m and Check Point gripes about WhatsApp privacy again

Re: Its good that they upped the bounties

Yes, but someone would have to kill you...

Phisherman's blues: Bogus Dell support rep extradited from Kenya, admits he conned US colleges out of $900,000

Re: What’s the difference?

In the longer term, the genuine scammer costs you less?

AMD stands for Another Monetary Decline, while Apple continues to sell enough pricey kit to keep Wall Street happy

Stocks

Don't you just love "Analysts". Set up a short position on a stock that usually does well, then doom and gloom the stocks until just before the results are announced - Profit. Then use the shorted profits to ride the stocks back up after the announcement - Sell and then repeat (allegedly).

Apple techies analyzing Siri recordings may have heard you unzipping and bonking – plus more

Re: "Just the sound of someone undoing a zip can activate..."

I admit it, it was me. The paid version included the ability to customise the dialog box; and create a self-extractor.

Summer vacations put an end to rampant desktop crimewave

Re: Not here...

Most of mine are from aged care providers and retirement homes...

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Re: How does he propose to give "lawful access" to secrets stored in my head?

Apposite xkcd...

How does UK.gov fsck up IT projects? Let us count the ways

Problem with article's basic premise

The main purpose of very large government projects it to transfer very large amounts of taxpayers’ monies to the "right people". The projects' stated purposes just need to sound feasible enough to enable them to get approved.

When you play the game of Big Spendy Thrones, nobody wins – your crap chair just goes missing

Re: Chair related injuries

Dangerous things chairs. A work colleague broke her back when a five-wheel chair broke whilst she was sitting on it; she was sitting on the front edge when it collapsed, shooting backwards, dumping her on the floor. I’d guess she weighed about 60kg, so not normally a candidate for a FB Chair. She recovered and returned after nearly six months.

'I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH THIS SH*T' Mike Lynch raged at salesmen

"the Oracle guy (Larry, his name slips my mind for a second).

One Real Arsehole Called Larry Ellison? Allegedly.

Microsoft tells resellers: 'We listened to you, and we have acted' (PS: Plz keep making us money)

Re: Maybe

Why the downvotes. I was running a consulting/software business then, and it was certainly true...

'Is this Microsoft trying to be cool? Want to go to the Apple Store?' We checked out London's new retail extravaganza

Re: Pavement Plodder

I started in professional computing writing FORTRAN applications in 1971 - As somebody who is a volunteer teacher for the "over fifties" at our purpose built local government centre with nearly 2000 members, I can tell you that our pupils generally have less trouble with iPads and iPhones than they do with Android devices. We have almost given up teaching “PCs" because of the long and steep learning curve, and the lack of demand. We do still spend a fair bit of time helping existing Windows users sort out problems, rather than them having to use a "professional" at >£100.

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Partner boss explains yanking of free licences

The rot set in

when MS crippled their Small Business Server. It was included in the DAP.

Many small/medium consulting/software businesses, including mine, used it themselves and and sold it to our customers. It was normally cheaper for the punter with 25 users to buy SBS than to buy the base Server and SQL Server, and they got Exchange and a number of other goodies thrown in too.

I realized then that MS were moving towards the "Enterprise" and "home users" as separate businesses, and that they didn't much care about the large SMB base that had helped drive their business to the then current levels of ubiquity. It was just after this that I saw the big Enterprise boys sell a small charity with 20 seats separate PDC, SDC, Exchange, SQL, and Back-Up servers (yes, really, 5 servers for 20 users) Needless to say it hardly worked, and the charity had to rely on personal mail for 4 weeks when the Exchange Server didn't have a big enough (mirrored) disk to run eseutil/move/export after it had grown to nearly fill the disk in 3 months.

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

The backup bit is easy. It's the restore that's troublesome.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself

To be fair it was written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products who ”did it" as QDOS before Microsoft bought the rights to sell it.

White House mulls just banning strong end-to-end crypto. Plus: More bad stuff in infosec land

Re: The question is how to enforce it, of course

It’s nothing to do with criminals or terrorism. All established governments know that their biggest threat is from their own citizens, so whenever they say "we can protect you/your children from terrorists/criminals" they actually mean "we want to protect ourselves from you".

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

Re: Mainframe???

Er, the (not very successful) 9000 series? Although a VAXcluster of smaller VAXen minis could act a very good facsimile of a “proper mainframe”.

IVE HAD ENOUGH! iQuit. Jobs done. Jony cashes out at Apple to run his own design biz

Re: Little will really change

He’s been saying he wanted to return to the UK for some years now, so that might be the main reason?

Re: Hmm,

or a thin aluminium notebook?

Hmm,

and how many posts here were written on a Samsung phone or tablet?

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

systemd

"Open-source fans will be pleased to hear that the foundation is making progress in whittling down the amount of closed source software it uses."

Now, if only the Poettering/Red Hat spawn was removed too...

Chrome ad-blocker crackdown preview due late July. Here's a half-dozen reasons why add-on devs are still upset

Re: The performance concern is real

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can: Zawinski's law: Wikipedia.

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

Please, stop trying to break the Internet

Dear Google,

I know that you have to monetarize everything to do with internet traffic to leech advertising revenue of everybody that goes online, but, please, just stop.

I will continue to type in curl -O <url> through my VPN for as long as I can.

I remain, Sir, Disgusted Old Fart of the proper Internet.