Posts by deadlockvictim

Things can't go on like this. You need to get fit for the sake of your health. I'm going to write you a prescription for... an e-bike

eBikes

eBikes are great for those whose body needs some exercise but not too much. eBikes make the world essentially flat and a steady pace of 20Kh/h is grand.

I lowered my cholesterol level (without having to resort to medication) over the course of 18 months when I took to cycling to work (15 Kms in 45 mins). I am a fair weather cyclist, so 18 months wasn't as impressive as it sounds (4 months were winter). One of the benefits of eBikes is that you don't need to take a shower once you get to work.

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

Re: Nonsense

AC» Human beinfs beckme tribal and clannish intimes of distress.

I beg your pardon? Has your iPhone gone ga-ga?

My understanding of castes is that they are anything but fluid (except down). Am I correct in surmising that you are someone who wouldn't marry a Dalit?

AC» In the working world with Educated people no one cares what caste someone is.

The whole point of this court case is that this seems to be the case.$

AC» Your comments Reek of Brahmin bigotry...

The problem is that Brahmins have not been exemplary in setting standards of fairness. There is probably a good reason why Brahmins are hated so.

AC» Waiting to see if the moderators believe inFOE or are Hinduphobic wit an axe to grind

I think that you'll find that the moderators are more interested in maintaining the laws of what can be published. Or can we expect a suit from you against El Reg on the grounds of anti-Brahmin hatred and suppression of free speech?

What's FOE btw?

Re: Cisco's holes in their HR policies...

Not really.

The purpose of HR is to protect the company from the employees and since this isn't really the case, then HR is uninterested. I won't be surprised, however, if the lower caste guy is eventually pushed out and the upper caste guy gets promoted.

It's now safe to turn off your computer shop: Microsoft to shutter its bricks-and-mortar retail locations worldwide

Microsoft don't really what end-users want

As someone who uses Microsoft daily (SQL Server DBA), Microsoft doesn't really seem get what users want.

There are so many little things that Microsoft wants us to do online that I wouldn't mind going into a Microsoft shop and doing.

For example, I try to do one MCP exam per year. I have to order the books online and then inevitably go down to the post office to collect them. I have to order the exams online. Microsoft could easily have a test centre and the materials in their store.

Many of the books that I'd like to read have to be ordered and it would be nice if they were available there.

There are a couple of SQL Server events (not necessarily organised by Microsoft) on in various places. The Microsoft shop would again make a great venue for presentations if they wanted to do it. The Genius Bar concept from Apple could be replicated a couple of days per year with a sponsored tour from some of the MVPs. All of this costs money, to be sure, but having a central physical location that serves as the nexus of Microsoft is great for reinforcing interest in the products.

I'm thinking primarily of my parents here: courses on Excel, Word, scripting could all be offered.

They could have people there full-time who could fix, optimise, clean your Windows machine. I want to break my machine before I have to get someone to fix it and even then I I'll just wipe it and re-install everything.

In short, Microsoft could be very pro-active in help people who use their products daily to use them better.

Also, I like Microsoft keyboards and mice, more so than Logitech and especially more than Apple mice. The mice have a nice feel in the hand. Not to mention the number of xbox fans out there.

After 84 years, Japan's Olympus shutters its camera biz, flogs it to private equity – smartphones are just too good

Re: Sorry to see them go...

I agree wholeheartedly. I went with Nikon myself in the end. It is shame to see that one of consequences of our collective actions is the end of a company that makes really good stuff that brings pleasure to many.

Windows fails to reach the Finnish line as Helsinki signage pleads for help

Windows as a Service

Whom exactly does it serve?

US starts sniffing around UK spaceports – though none capable of vertical launches actually exist right now

Tunisia

What about the wretched hive of scum and villainy in Tunisia?

That's got to be a lot cheaper than the UK although Trump had better first pay Jabba back first.

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: Incumbency

disgruntled yank» As for AOC, she needs a few years before she is eligible for the office.

Does she? She was born in Oct. 1989. She will be 35 years' of age in Oct. 2024. The elections for president are in Nov. 2024 and the new president assumes office in Jan. 2025. Or have I got my sums wrong?

Re: Recumbency

There will be elections well into the future. Even Trump voters would be upset if the elections in 2024 were cancelled. Bear in mind that Trump only reigns because he is protected by the Senate Republicans. The System is too important.

A virus/war killing tens of millions of people might postpone it though.

Incumbency

The incumbent president is almost always elected. Only Bush 41 and Carter spring to mind of presidents not re-elected for a second term in the last 40 years. I expect that Trump will be narrowly re-elected for a second term. A weak Democratic candidate helps his chances. The election is Trump's to lose, as far as I can make out.

What interests me more is the 2024 election. Who will run then on either side? It will be a much more open contest with an electorate possibly tired of 8 years of Republican government and 8 years of geriatric nominations.

If a firebrand like AOC [1] takes the Democratic nomination, will the Republications match her with someone old & grey or someone more youthful, possibly even not white and possibly even female?

[1] I like the TLAs that American politicians get: FDR, JFK, MLK and so on. Is it only a Democratic thing?

Gulp! Irish Water outsources contact centres to Capita for up to €27m over 7 years

constitutional arrangements

CoN» according to its constitutional arrangements...

The U.K. has several bodies of law that is its constitution (for want of a better word).

Wales was conquered by the English king Edward I in the 1280s. Wikipedia informs me that it was legally incorporated into England with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542.

The kingdoms of Scotland & England (along with Wales) formed the United Kingdom Of Great Britain in 1707 with the Acts of Union (they had one each), although England had been ruled by a Scottish family for much of the time since 1606.

The union of kingdom of Ireland with the kingdom of Great Britain came in 1800 and a good deal of money changed hands (as is often the case). The new kingdom was the kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland and was legally brought about by the Acts of Union 1800 (one per parliament). The old parliament building in Dublin is now a bank branch.

The next significant pieces of legislation is the Home Rule Act of 1914 which turned into the Goverment of ireland Act 1920, which created Northern Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. This treaty created the kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland.

I still don't know the difference between a country and a state. A state is a legal entity, sovereign within itself and recognised by other states around the world. And a country: a part of a state that is allowed to call itself a country?

Re: "new software and digital capabilities"

One of the official names of the Republic of Ireland is Éire. It is written in the Irish Constitution. using it to refer to the Republic of Ireland is perfectly fine. Let us all remember the goddess Ériu.

However, back to the point at hand, how often do we use official names?

Most people in the U.K., when referring to the state within which they live, say 'England' (ahem) and not, 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' [1].

And to the original poster, would you not feel it strange and perhaps a tad pedantic whenever others kept referring to 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' rather than the U.K.?

[1] I know, I know, England is a country and the U.K. is a state, although what exactly the difference between a country and a state is here is anyway moot. Is Catalonia a country? My point is that in everyday discourse in England, this distinction is not made.

Facebook's cool with sharing the President's nonsense on its mega-platform – but don't you dare mention 'unionize' in its Workplace app

Re: Simple fix

I agree, use the spelling as it used in the other English-speaking countries. I'm fairly sure that the software won't recognise it.

After IBM axed its face-recog tech, the rest of the dominoes fell like a house of cards: Amazon and now Microsoft. Checkmate

Re: Re:FR for the 'Chelsea Flower Show'

I had assumed that if there was FR at the Chelsea Flower Show, that it would be there to protect the attendees and their womenfolk from the flowers.

There have been accounts of particularly vicious ones over the decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJkmGW8FYQ

Headline

Headline: After IBM axed its face-recog tech, the rest of the dominoes fell like a house of cards: Amazon and now Microsoft. Checkmate

I'm surprised that no-one has commented on the headline.

Do El Reg staff have a competition as how many metaphors can be mixed in one headline?

It did make me smile though.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Why bother?

London Police, why bother?

The various police forces in the U.S. don't.

They just find the first non-White person and shoot him.

It is cheaper than getting it wrong with facial recognition and, if you follow the U.S. model, there isn't any accountability either.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: I'll give it a go...

Since SatNad's ascent to the top, Microsoft has been pushing anything and everything into their big data-centres around the world.

My suggestion is: «Purveyors of Head-in-the-Clouds Thinking».

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

GPP

Douglas Adams and a paranoid android came to mind, not Davros.

You can blame the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation for making androids with GPP…

Snapchat domain squatter loses comedy £1m URL sellback attempt

Re: There is scum, and there are idiots

I would have taken the domain name catsnap.co.uk (snapcat.co.uk brings me to Y-Combinator), put up pictures of cats and see what happens. There may even be a market for pictures of cats in some surreal universe.

Apollo 13 set off into space 50 years ago today. An ignored change order ensured it did not make it to the Moon...

Re: Lucky 13

If you look hard enough, there are spoilers online. But without the Hans Zimmer background music.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Bring back win98 UI

Win2k had an agreeable interface. The interface that I found easiest to use, though, was from Macintosh System 7.1. Clear and not too complicated.

Rewriting the checklists: 50 years since Apollo 13 reported it 'had a problem' – and boffins saved the day

13 Minutes To The Moon podcast

It is very informative and goes into quite a fair amount of detail. It can also be repetitive too. Many of the people in mission control or in space have given interviews for the podcast.

It is amazing how much can be done with so little although NASA did have rooms filled with engineers and limitless supplies of money. That the astronauts survived Apollo 13 seems like nothing short of miracle.

I also recommend both seasons 1 & 2 of the '13 Minutes To The Moon' podcast. Season 1 (Apollo 11) can be listened to straight through. Season 2 (Apollo 13) is almost finished.

Amazon says it fired a guy for breaking pandemic rules. Same guy who organized a staff protest over a lack of coronavirus protection

Re: Catch C19

Danny 2» Don't mourn, organise.

And maintain social distancing regulations while you do so, so that the management don't have a stick to beat you with.

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

Re: Inspirational message

Have you considered plundering the works of P.G. Wodehouse for inspiring and uplifting messages? He is one of the uplifting authors I know of.

Furthermore, in the spirit of Stiffy, Chuffy et al, you can suggest nicknames in the style of Wodehouse.

I thought just the same thing.

Have an upvote.

London court tells Julian Assange: No, coronavirus is not a good reason for you to be let out of prison

Re: @DougS

MtFR» Trump is Trump. At the end of the day, he's showing he's a better POTUS than Clinton could have ever hoped to be and has reversed a lot of Obama's mistakes.

I know that I'm not supposed to feed trolls but I shall anyway.

Define 'better'. What metrics are you using? One has to be good at something. Clinton & Trump were both impeached and let off by a partisan Senate. They both have brought shame upon the office of president, lowered trust among US voters and been detrimental to the US political system. They both should have been forced to leave office and let their VPs take over.

Clinton & Obama are Democrats and Trump is nominally a Republican and one side will never, ever admit that the other is competent.

Where Clinton and Trump are polar opposites is the topic of international trade. Clinton greatly encouraged while Trump is far more protectionist.

Bad news: Coronavirus is spreading rapidly across the world. Good news: Nitrogen dioxide levels are decreasing and the air on Earth is cleaner

Two comments:

1. I had thought that Greta had been very silent on the matter. Damn, these 17-year-old Swedes are very good at concocting environmentally-friendly plagues. She must have spent months in that lab of hers [1]. And I reckon that she is a Scandy version of Batman complete with whatever her batcave is called [2]. If that doesn't get me on to Fox News (Fair and balanced), then I don't know what will;

2. This Corona virus malarkey seems to have a hint of the Black Death about it. Good for those who survive, less good for those who don't.

[1] Of course she has a lab. And an English butler from the east end of London. If she can summon a yacht out of thin air, then obviously she has a lab.

[2] Wuhan?

US prez Donald Trump declares America closed to those flying in from Schengen zone over coronavirus woes

Re: Trump should just....?

Nihongo ga muzukashii ne!

Re: Another brick in the wall

CG: Just keep building that wall Donny boy!

He prefers to see himself as 'The Don'.

Slave States

Like all good right-thinking people, I think that if Puerto Rico is to be accepted as a full state in the United States, then it needs to be balanced with a right-thinking state and I can think of no better country than Airstrip One.

Apple bans COVID-19 games and restricts virus-related apps to authoritative souces

Going Viral

Are apps in iOS still allowed to go viral though?

It is 50 years since Blighty began a homegrown and all-too-brief foray into space

I think they did the right thing

As the Nazis learnt, rocketry is hard even if you do have the best & brightest working on it [1].

The Americans learned how expensive it was send people into orbit. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, the Apollo space program cost about $150 billion dollars in modern money. I can well imagine that that there was massive resistance within the government to spending vast sums.

In the end, we got international cooperation and the ISS, which is a lot better than each country re-inventing the wheel.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUCLHzWiJo

Re: Black arrow is red and silver?

DiViDeD: And not anything else, no indeed, not at all.

Hmmm. You're probably the sort of person who thinks that we need to start penetrating the ground to discover the hidden secrets of what lies within, aren't you?

Cumulative Update 2 for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 breaks SQL Server Agent

Cloud

I can imagine this as a part of the push to get everyone onto Azure. SQL Server Agent is now only a part of Azure. Try it. You'll like it. And we'd love to have you on a subscription-basis too.

Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage

Maersk is losing its maidenhead [office] and no-one is commenting?

I'll leave the empathy to others this time. Offshoring is not nice and it is not unknown for it to be a lose-lose for all parties.

Having worked remotely with Indians in Chennai, I can say firsthand how much effort working with offshore groups are. I don't mean to be racist. They were (and surely still are) good programmers and friendly, helpful people. It was, however, primarily the cultural differences and the insistence that once a file was checked in, it couldn't be checked out for another week. It meant that the level of detail I had to put into specifications was very high and I learned a lot about the definition of 'common sense'. Added to that, the Indian company burned its way through programmers. We had new people on the team replacing others every couple of weeks and then we had to start again with getting to know to know people.

Google product boss cuffed on suspicion of murder after his Microsoft manager wife goes missing, woman's body found, during Hawaii trip

Re: Sad yes, but is this really pat of El Reg's core mission?

El Reg's core mission is the enrichment of the planet with the most groanworthy puns and cleverest wordplays in their headlines and subheads.

Alas, tech-related tragedies also play their part.

Google employees are all-too-human too.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

Les grèves sur la côte

My first thought was, 'France? That'll mean that there will be strikes there when the service is needed most.'

Jeff Bezos bungs $10bn at climate change after chump change for Oz bush fires

Amazon is our creation

We, as consumers, made Amazon what it is. We chose convenience and low price over the importance of brick-and-mortar.

Anyway, the man has pledged 10 billion dollars towards a most worthy cause and I think that he is to be congratulated on this.

To be sure, he could pay his workers a living wage and make Amazon a fine place to work for, but he hasn't, so let him be pilloried for that.

That being said, his act is a fine one and I would rather he did it than bought things for his own personal pleasure.

What's the German word for stalling technology rollouts over health fears? Cos that plus 5G equals Switzerland

Re: Rays

The crystals absorb the bad rays. *That's* the secret. I have shall to get some.

Rays

There is something funny about the Swiss and the southern Germans when it comes to things that are emit radiation or are at least perceived to do so (Strahlung in German). There are many people in both places that have lumps of crystal (quartz for example) in jugs of water or on their mantelpiece and believe in some sort of positive radiation from it. When a massive crystal was found in the Swiss alps some years' ago, it made front page news. Then, there are also many who won't use microwave ovens for any reason, presumably also because of negative rays. There is quite an amount of resistance (not measurable in ohms though) towards the humble microwave oven.

To add to this, one does hear of Swiss & Germans complaining about electrosmog although whether this is psychosomatic, I don't know. Nobody seems to mind carrying around a mobile phone in their pocket or handbag.

And lastly, there are shops [1] that sell clothing that will protect the electro-sensitive. The material has copper and silver woven into it. More details here [2].

[1] For example, in Freiburg im Breisgau you can buy clothes that will shield you: https://atelier-fuer-abschirmkleidung.jimdofree.com/abschirmprodukte-shielding-products/

[2] https://atelier-fuer-abschirmkleidung.jimdofree.com/abschirmprodukte-shielding-products/abschirmstoffe/swissshield-naturell/.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Re: To be honest ...

So true!

When Bill Clinton was being impeached, I thought the exact same thing.

To be honest the whole "trial" was a farce set up by "trial" set up by "republicans" that never accepted the results of the elections. The president was just doing what presidents always have done. It is a part of the presidential privilege and what they did was simply a partisan attack on the office.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

SCSI

Well, I, for one, am a big fan of SCSI, partly because I never had to support it professionally. I was the friend of the manager's/owner's daughter who knew about these things and generally the problem was either duplicate SCSI IDs, either taking off or putting on a terminator or unplugging the SCSI chain and putting the various devices back on again. Now I never dappled in the hard stuff (servers), just soft stuff like Macs and their often well-behaving scanners, CD-ROM, hard-drives and zip-drives.

What I really liked about SCSI was the universality of it.

First of all you had a bus that was as fast externally as it was internally. SATA & eSATA have this property too.

Secondly, you could attach all manner of devices to it. Indeed almost all peripherals (except printers) were available with SCSI ports that could be plugged into the computer.

Thirdly, they often (or usually) had a driver inside in the SCSI bus. This meant that SCSI devices were not platform specific.

Fourthly, SCSI lasted a long time (1985-2005) and there was a lot of backwards-compatibility. It also meant lots of adapters and knowing what all of the terms meant. It meant that you could stick in a 300GB U320 server HD into a lowly Macintosh SE and have obscene amounts of storage space that made for mindboggling default file sizes in HFS (Hierarchical File System — Macintosh's file system from 1985 to 1998. It has 64K allocation blocks...). It also meant that you could plug in a SCSI device from 1985 into a machine from 2002 and use it.

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

rcxb: Agreed. They should have required the men to wear a short dress and heels...

And get the men to shave their legs too. Men *never* shave their legs and it shows.

There are already Chinese components in your pocket – so why fret about 5G gear?

Re: Nokia

Now it is, but back in 2007-2008 when Apple showed the world that phones could be very different, it wasn't Android that set the world ablaze, but Apple's iPhone. I'm not saying that Android or the devices that use it are any better or worse than Apple's overpriced iPhone.

I was a Nokia user for many years and reflect on the progress Nokia made between, say, 1998 and 2008. The latter phones weren't much better (on almost every metric) than the earlier ones. Maybe I mishandled my phone, but the handsets didn't last any longer than two years. It took ages for the phones to have even a rudimentary camera built in and they were big and bulky.

Nokia

Benson's Cycle: They destroyed BlackBerry and Nokia in the phone industry

To be fair to Nokia, Nokia did a good job of doing that themselves. Nokia was in a sorry state when the iPhone came along and it was thanks to their shoddy, outdated products that the iPhone found such a welcome. I, for one, don't miss Nokia.

2015-member database floats off through breach in Royal Yachting Association's hull

For those sadly unaware of Bloom County, here is a link to the strip in question:

https://logoland.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/pirate-bloom-county.gif

*David Attenborough voice* And here we have, in the wild, a rare glimpse... of what may be... a positive IBM quarter

Well done IBM!

Ginny and her management team deserve a healthy payrise for this.

Or are substantial payrises only inversely correlated with performance?

From WordPad to WordAds: Microsoft caught sneaking nagging Office promos into venerable text editor beta

On loathing ads

I don't mind ads per se.

I do loath those that suck up bandwidth and parasitise the page.

I do loath all of the tracking that happens so that ad agencies can serve us the perfect ad.

If simple non-targeted ads, say, in the form of text-based billboards, could be incorporated into webpages and apps, then I wouldn't object to them. Bills have got to be paid.

Squirrel away a little IT budget for likely Brexit uncertainty, CIOs warned

Re: Idle thoughts on Brexit

AC» some mixed messages there.. or you don't understand how sarcasm works

I disagree with you on the first point. Your second point may very well be true.

Both the U.K. in the early 2020s and Ireland in the early 1920s are striving/strove to leave a larger economic area. Thanks to progress in the last 100 years, it has been a relatively painless process for the U.K. The Irish had a harder time of it 100 years ago.

Leaving the E.U. does seem to be to detriment of the U.K.'s economic well-being. Ireland's leaving the United Kingdom in 1921 was seen by many as an unwise economic move. The professional and educated classes tended to be of more unionist or Home Rule bent. The times were, however, very different then and the attitude of those in power towards the little people was also markedly different.

Whether the Irish would have been better off in the long run as a member of the U.K. with her devolved parliament is a debatable point. The Scots don't seem to have thrived, despite all of the oil in their waters and i don't know about the Welsh. That being said, the Irish now are little more than wannabe yanks. They have thrown off one cultural imperialism only to adapt another.

So, in conclusion, the U.K., to some extent, is following the same path as the Irish 100 years later, albeit in more agreeable times. Hopefully, the authorities in the U.K. will be able to keep a better reign on the powerful forces sweeping the populus than the Irish could. The Irish, for its shame, had rampant repressive hard-line Catholicism. Will the U.K. be able to handle its own nationalism, especially if the Kingdom does not thrive as it once did?

Idle thoughts on Brexit

Once Brexit happens, the island of Britain will enter the heady days of when Britain was Great (and not just geographically either) and incomes will verge towards the glory days of Queen Victoria's most splendid reign. I'm even expecting India to rejoin the empire. Nobody does famine quite like the Foreign Office.

I do find it fitting that the voters of the U.K. are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 with their own independence from an oppressive and overbearing empire.