Posts by Jay 2

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

The spiderbot form ~2076

I am somewhat reminded of the Liberator bots from Fallout 76 (yes I'm the one still playing). Look here if you don't know what that is.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Flashback

I believe that was the Pentium 60 and 66 (I ran recall the uproar at the time). The 75 onwards was OK.

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

Hmm, am somewhat reminded of one of the latest BoFH...

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Was talking to a colleague today about his new kitchen. The hob and extractor can be controller via an app on a suitably WiFi-connected device.

I was immediately thinking of either what happens when they invariably get bricked by a firmware update, or when they get hacked due to a lack of a firmware update (as I don't think IoT security is at the top of the list for kitchen hardware manufacturers).

Sudo? More like Su-doh: There's a fun bug that gives restricted sudoers root access (if your config is non-standard)

Re: As a ex sys-admin....

A server not infested with systemd then possibly? So instead of systemctl use whatever command your distro provides for service manipulation.

Android dev complains of 'Orwellian' treatment as account banned after 6 years on Play store

Re: Wind 'em up

Makes sense, as Renault (as was, aka Team Enstone) have had the odd liquidity problem in recent years, Plus Toyota's F1 setup was in Germany.

Have you been Thomas Crooked? Watch out for cybercrims slinging holiday-themed fakes

Life's a beach

I misread the first line as "Thomas Cook's former beach detection contractor"

Baby alert! Japan Air lets passengers book seats far away from screaming abdabs

Re: Solution to the problem

One of the worst flights I've ever had was partly due to someone else's sprog. It was an overnight flight, and wasn't helped by the lights being off foir a short while whilst the cabin crew attempted to flog stuff either side. In amongst all this every time I had just about drifted off to sleep the sprog next to me would move for some reason and bump into me and I'd wake up. The result being I didn't get much sleep. To add insult to injury when we landed the sprog was out for the count.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

What DO you do?

My brother told me of this conversation...

My Nephew: What does uncle Jay2 do for a job?

My Brother: He works with computers.

My Nephew: Wow, he gets to play games all day!

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Once upom a time we had the QA/dev boxes for a global project set up in the UK. To which someone named them kennedy and nixon (before we had a proper naming convention. At some point the latter was changed to clinton as appearently there was a chance of someone left-pondian being upset.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: Next NetworkManager

Yep me too. I know what I want my network interfaces to do and how to configure them so that they do. I don't need some wanky daemon trying to second guess what I'm up to and try and do it for me.

On a side note that's also why I hate Apple email clients (and why I use alternatives) as there's no shiboleet way to break out of the wizard and just type the config in, so you have to wait for it to try and ultimately fail so you can just get on and configure the damn thing.

"I want my own laptop finally secure so I can suspend. I want these problems to be solved, finally, because we never could solve them," he said.

Fine, fuck up your own laptop for your own particular needs and let the rest of us live and work in peace! I understand the need for security, but there are differences to what he needs to do in a coffee shop on his precious laptop and what a large amount of us want to do on multitudes of enterprise servers.

And I'll have to put the obligitory systemd rant in too. I can understand the problem the problem it was attempting to solve and I understard how (using modules/dependancies) it intened to do it. But unfortunately the implementation leaves a lot to be desired...

Emergency button saves gamers from sudden death... of starvation

Re: Almost there

Am now reminded of the South Park episode of Make Love Not Warcraft (I think it was).

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

Even now we have to try and smack it into our devs' heads that constatly pulling stuff from t'interwebs is really not a good idea. Fortunately I think we're slowly winning the battle with locking down the proxies and provding a Nexus hub/cache/thingy.

Now if only we could get them to stop writing app stuff for prod where it has a dependancy on pulling/pushing from/to the local git repo as part of it's daily running (opposed to a proper upgrade).

Open-source companies gather to gripe: Cloud giants sell our code as a service – and we get the square root of nothing

Re: Conference Theme Tune

A pedant writes... Barrett Strong performed the original. So The Beatles' version was a cover too.

Geo-boffins drill into dino-killing asteroid crater, discover extinction involves bad smells, chilly weather, no broadband internet...

Re: It was the cyber an freighter

I blame Adric...

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

Re: Deliberately obnoxious

Reminds me of a school ski trip to France many years ago. A snippet of the conversation went like so (please excuse my bad attempt at writing French, can't be bothered to look it up):

My friend (in best French he could muster): Tois timbres pour Angleterre s'il vous plait

French post bloke: Three stamps then?

Raspberry Pi head honcho Eben Upton talks thermals, stores and who's buying the kit

Yay for the Pi!

Handy little thing. I run the RasPi Thin Client Project on mine http://rpitc.blogspot.com/. Good for using VM Horizon and Citirx for remote access. One day I should do some more useful things like Pi-hole or Picade!

US soldier cleared of taking armoured vehicle out for joyride – because he's insane, court says

Re: So...

I read it years ago and still have a copy somewhere. Enjoyed the recent TV series, but from refreshing my memory via Wiki they appear to have left a lot out.

I've also got Spike's war memoirs and read the condensed omnibus version of the first few many, many times. It's only quite recently I've read the full versions and the last two. Greatly enjoyable, though whilst they start out quite jolly, it's obvious it all really took quite a toll on him.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: That's horrible.

I found the IBM product placement in Goldeneye to be some of the most jarring. More so than the BMW, Omega, or Parker pen (I think) in the same film.

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Re: Myth Busting

I recall Solaris DiskSuite being one of the very few applications where it was significantly easier to use the command line to do something opposed to the GUI.

Microsoft spreads the Cortana love to more Insiders with new Windows 10 preview

I spend all day messing about with Linux boxes and some time back I decided that when I get home I just want something that works, doesn't require constant reboots and will not entice me to start messing with stuff.

So as a result I use MacOS. Windows got the heave-ho long ago as I was fed up with all the updates/reboots and the deliberately not supporting older stuff on Vista thing. Nowadays I could almost get away with running Linux, but there's still a few things missing and as aluded to above at some point I may be tempted to go off on a tangent and "improve/fix/etc" something.

New British Army psyops unit fires rebrandogun, smoke clears to reveal... I'm sorry, Dave...

Re: Ring of Fail?

When that strip first appeared AT&T were spinning out Bell Labs. This, of course, got a new logo... which just happened to be a redish-brown ring. Though it didn't look like a coffee stain, more like a dog turd. So we then referred to Lucent as Dog Turd Technologies.

What's the last piece of software you'd expect to spy on you? Maybe your enterprise security suite? Bad news

Re: Stop spying on me!

Yeah, I think the general line here is don't have anything in your email that you'd rather not have read out in court. Unlikely to happen, but you never know.

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Re: Pricey

I had 928, much fun. Most of it (and other bits) still live at my parents' house, where my nephew plays with it. At one point I built a similar spacecraft (also with buggy in back) which nephew was very impressed with.

Akamai CEO: Playing games from the cloud? Seems too expensive to be viable right now

...until Google take their ball and go home

I mean, what are the chances of Google waking up one day and then shutting the service down?

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

Re: True story...

Guild politics? This wasn't Aston Uni was it?

What's in store for Microsoft's US pop-up shops? Not much, they're being closed

Re: What would you buy?

I had an MS Sidewinder joystick many years ago and even when I flogged it on fleaBay not quite as many years ago it went fo a suitably nice amount. That was a good stick, only replaced it with a Saitek X52 as I wanted more buttons etc to play Elite Dangerous.

Re: What would you buy?

I've got some 10+ year old MS mice on the RasPi and Mac (can't stand the MagicMouse) at home. They work fine, no complaints there. The RasPi currently has a similarly aged MS keyboard on too, which also works fine. So at some point they did make something useful!

Supra smart TVs aren't so super smart: Hole lets hackers go all Max Headroom on e-tellies

Re: Not impressed with so called smart TVs full stop.

Rarely do I have to use my Sony TV as anything other than something that displays whatever the AV Reciever is thowing out. But when I do... it is an exercise in frustration. Mainly as a combo of input lag on a s-l-o-w front end. It's horrible to use and usually forces me to deploy my non-trivial full range of expletives in doing so.

Maybe I need to power cycle it every so often just in case. A pox on Sony for this one.

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

Well, makes a change from Spanish Fly I suppose...

Swedish prosecutors request Assange detention: First step to European arrest warrant

That's a bit of a tough one for someone to sort out. US extradition request vs (re-submitted?) EAW from Sweden. I'd be interesred to see the working as to how this gets resolved.

It's not chicken feed: Million-dollar meal deal for livestock sabotaged by hackers... and, er, exchange rates

Re: Hacking

Yes, I'm of the thought that a lot of "hacking" (as per typical tabloid reporting would call it) nowadays leans more on the social engineering side than the technical.

Freed whistleblower Chelsea Manning back in jail for refusing to testify before secret grand jury

Re: Hmm ...

Yes. I'm sure there's a some-time acquaintence of Manning's also currently locked up who could learn something from that.

Russian bots are just for rigging US elections? They hit home, too: Kid stripped of crown in TV contest vote-fix scandal

Re: This is why Assange and Manning are in prison, pending phony charges

Hmm, it was his bellend that caused the chain of events that led to him currently serving time and pondering where he'll potentially be serving more time...

Silence of the vans: Uber adds 'Plz STFU, driver' button to app for posh passengers using Black

Re: Sigh.. if that floats your goat...

I saw some sort of documentary many years back about the trials and tribulations of people wanting to become cabbies in NYC. Two scenes that stick in my mind:

- A passenger saying to cabbie "You know in England the cabbies know where everything is?"

- Another passenger offering to drive as the cabbie didn't seem to have a clue of where they needed to go.

AI bots need a sense of hearing to navigate their computer world and the real world – eggheads

Re: Well duh!

I guess it depends on what the AI has to do. It was only yesterday I way playing Fallout 76 (yes, one of the ever dwindling numbers it seems, but I like it) and the music to signify an arse kicking (one way or another) was playing before any visual threat. So I had enough of a heads up to expect a visit from something that was not going to be friendly.

So if AI bot just has to get from A to B, then mood music is not so important. But if it has to potentially expect nasties and deal with them on a (semi-)random basis then it could give an inkling of warning. Though that's a bit of a fudge which could be game specific. At least it should listen out for nasties stomping around like a pregnant concrete elephant whilst also mutterihng/groaning/etc...

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

Re: My stock answer to "Can you do a five minute job?" ...

Similarly I'm using security/audit to force though what I need to do and to deter (batshit insane) requests that would cause more work/grief.

On a slightly more serious note there is now a big onus on cyber security and all it entails, so it's not just me enjoying being a BOFH and saying no a lot.

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

Use biometric authentication on mobile phone apps ?

Erm, I always thought that use biometics for security was a bad idea as they're not the easiest things to change, and you can be (physically) coerced into using them.

Re: Spackle?

Off the top of my head I can't quite remember if it's what leftpondians call grout or pollyfilla.

Come friendly bit barns and fall on Slough: Equinix opens £90m data centre in London rust belt

Re: Short-sighted IMHO

The BATS/CHIX/CBOE exchnage has its kit there (LD4 I think), so if you want to trade with them, then being more-or-less next door is the place to be for zippy access.

Apple, Samsung feel the pain as smartphone market slumps to lowest shipments in 5 YEARS

Snap! My 6S also had the battery upgrade late last year. With the lack of 3.5mm headphone socket and loss of the home button, the later models really don't appeal to me at all. Not that I feel the need to upgrade at the moment.

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

I'm somewhat satisfied that he'll be off to be detained for jumping bail, which is probably the only clear-cut case he'll have attached to him for a while. As for now on, I suspect there'll be a lot of arguing and happy lawyers.

Micron's new 9300 SSDs are bigger, faster and simpler... which is nice

Re: 16 TB. And if it fails?

Now everybody repeat after me "RAID is not backup".

On a more serious note it obvioulsy depends on if you want to cater for a (single) device failure or something a bit more catastrophic. If the data is that important then both RAID and (potentially offsite) backup are what you're after. Though all that comes at a price, but how much do you value your data?

Tesla touts totally safe, not at all worrying self-driving cars – this time using custom chips

I wonder whilst doing its moonlighting job it it will also clean up the puke which possibly may be liberally spread round the inside of the car?

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Popcorn time!

This should be fun, pass the popcorn please! It'll be interesting to see what happens now. I'd like to think it'll be a swift trip to court and then prison for jumping bail. I'm not too up on what Sweden's position is with him now. Are they still interested and can they still extradidted?

Amazon woes and wins, IBM thinks it's solved employee happiness and Duplex phony phone calls everywhere!

Re: How sophisticated can the IBM AI really be?

That's exactly what I thought when I read the article!

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

Re: Scary people in IT

Everyone makes mistakes, and *when* they do it'll usually be pretty big!

No so long ago we had a network contractor who (with a straight face) said he never made mistakes. That didn't last long as he somewhow scheduled some work using CET and not UK time. Cue some systems doing down unexpectedly at the end of the trading day...

Here's to you: UK.gov praises Reg-reading techies for keeping on top of cybersecurity

Required IT reading

I find reading El Reg helps keep me somewhat aware of what computer-based nasties are about. Also the comments can offer some very useful tips and resources. Now that's all the serious stuff taken care of there's also the more fun stuff; BOFH, On Call/Who Me, Dabbs, Bootnotes...

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

Re: On the plus side..

Indeed, I was thinking just that. The greater the level of drunkeness, the greater the chance of missing the intended target...