Posts by Denarius

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Re: Let them eat rabbits

Antron, not quite. Some of the flies carry truly fearsome gastro diseases. In an Oz summer, that is deadly if not treated quickly. So yes, even our flies can kill

Once caught

Most of us shoot the damned things,caught or otherwise. Brought in by some pom major whining "farmer always dislike a gentleman's pastime" Haven't found his grave yet to spit on it. Also, judging from the airhead city dwellers I have had to work with, or worse, meet at polling booths, most of them seem to think Disneys cartoons like Bambi are nature documentaries. Much prefer the Mr Hell show parody of Lion King.

Ex-barrister reckons he has a privacy-preserving solution to Britain's smut ban plans

population bust

OK, Singapore. And for fun, DRC noting problems with age demographics from 2050 if not earlier thanks to 1 child policy, hence now 2 is OK.

What did it take for stubborn IBM to fix flaws in its Data Risk Manager security software? Someone dropping zero-days

takes me back

to AIX 3.2.5. rlogin bug 30 years ago. Lovely being able to log into any box without authentication as root user. IBM ignored warnings until finder went public. You can tell the RAs did not hit the PHB levels. Almost as entertaining as HP Bug of the Week from late lamented Kernel Panic. Some of those were as gobsmacking. Now if only MS decided all objects arriving by mail were untrusted bt default, 40 years after Morris Worm we might be getting somewhere.

Offtopic, why has concept of bastion host vanished ? Data theft is much harder if clear separation of private/internal machines is maintained, yet so many intrusions seem to work because a mere firewall, if that, is between the Interweb and the internal servers. Or am I just too old because I think internal stuff should not be accessible from outside without at least TPA and external devices being clean slated every month or less. Stuff the BYOD policy. Recipe for leakage.

Microsoft 365 and Azure outage struck Australia and New Zealand just as business rocked up for a new week

back up

my NSW stuff works at least, complete with MS advice of all is now well. The reliability and resilience of the Cloud, full failover, no need for on site IT staff etc. Not

Facebook caves to Australia's call for explanations of News Feed algo changes

futile anyway

Given most of the local media, such as it is, has no news worthy of the name, so what.

Oz media seems to be obsessed with Trumpery, (ABC mostly) fatuous CGI objects (seriously, most of the characters in reality TV series look like good CGI fakes), and entertainers babbling fashionable buzzwords of the day. Al Jazeera, El Reg and a few other internet sites have become many citizens source of news, in all adult or nearly so age groups. The general skepticism about pollies extends to news purveyors with the added comment that it is always depressing so why bother. For you Poms, commisserations. It is sad how low quality the BBC world news has become.

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

Re: to be honest, I think this is a beatup

No, not a beat up. Some seem to be insomniacs and can be seen during day.Saw one wander across a glider winch launch rope just as Take Up Slack given, which was rapidly followed by Stop Stop Stop. Time: Around noon in middle of big clear paddock, a long way from burrows. Local ones are mostly evening and early morning, not nocturnal. And given rural Ozzies being used to space, perhaps wombat got cabin fever from the lock down, like the rest of us.

Re: Wombatnado

according to local lore, wombats do attack lower leg to snap/cut archilles tendon. Why I don't know. Perhaps one of the big ones killed by climate change 20K years ago was carnivorous. Would match the Aboriginal Bunyip legend anyway

Re: Dubbo is afraid

there are such things as licensed wombat removers, so wombat worriers are a thing

Don't panic: An asteroid larger than the Empire State Building is flying past Earth this weekend but we're just fine

wot, no panic now ?

A chance to panic, scream and curse blaming someone for stuffing up and you say "Dont Panic "? What is this, Hitchhikers Guide ? You are hurting the Woke. Oh the pain, the shame

Astroboffins peering back in time with Hubble find stars may have been flickering into life even earlier than thought

Re: Unhelpful sugestion

Also, no mechanism for Pop 3 starts to form. Simply assuming cooling gas does not work, much as most theorists want it to

Re: We're special

A follower of Arp then ? Fine, but still sound a bit confused. Sure you read his papers correctly ?

Devuan Beowulf 3.0 release continues to resist the Debian fork's Grendel – systemd

Re: "It solves a problem that people have."

James, why is this a problem ? Never had it in my HPUX boxen. One script, two links for start and stop and a third option for restart which simply call the stop start functions in the script. Not hard. AIX with its init scripts services manager and a strong preference for iniitab as in other unices. /etc/inittab had stop start respawn of services also if one died. No need for any stuffing around with scripts. AIX had a group of services which was neat and clean. Being able to restart all NFS rand related network services occasionly at one site was very time saving if unusual.

Australia to refund $720m in 'debts' determined by dodgy algorithm

Re: Why single out the Aussies?

fair call. In Oz the basic reason is simple enough. The tertiary miseducated managerial wannabe elites (term used loosely) believe anything technical is simple. Most of them seem to still believe the myth of computers as magic. ie using a computer does not require the sort of thinking and planning as any other complex tasks. It just happens.

As a result, outsourcery to the smoothest talking. lowest prices vendor (perhaps with a donation here or there) and a cheap ill-trained and equipped staff take on the task with the usual results. With all the IT knowledge gone, the bureaucrats are entirely at mercy of the suppliers so they are frightened or gulled into not enforcing contract conditions. Perhaps the usual golf course conversations occur. Add in indifference and near complete lack of understanding of the consequences of wrong financial conclusions you get robodebt stuffup. That some of the Cabinet ministers were unable to grasp that 4 hours on hold demonstrated completely inadequate staff levels in Centerlink simply shows the levels of incompetence in managing the country that all major parties demonstrate in and out of power. Spent decades in the system, watching it get worse as Howard and successors like Rudd screwed the nation over.

HP Ink sales are in the red: Total revenue down 11 per cent as CEO says coronavirus knackered supply chain

wouldn't be products ?

something about borkware code in printing supplies annoying customers ?

Before IBM started axing staff, it told them Q3 2020 would be super-busy with post-lockdown catch-up jobs

did you write

IBM think about something ?? Implausible

IBM's sacking spree reaches Australia – and as staff wait to exit, they're offered AU$4k to find new workers

Re: Does IBM still exist ?

read them, hence concluding that PHB persistent mass sackings are an example of OCD.

upcoming news

<sarc> In view if IBMs move to decrease capacity, further outsourcing actions of critical Oz government IT will be immediately transferred to the efficient cost effective services of IBM. The contract will state how secure citizens data will be because its recorded on dead tree carcass. No need to specify what country it is stored in. </sarc> I wish I was going to be wrong but the PHB layer in Oz is so trusting, so naive, so confident. Yes, idiots

Does IBM still exist ?

waiting for the news article about IBM, HP[E,I] sacking 20,000 more staff than they employed so the stock price booms as company ceases to exist

Internet of Tardiness: Microsoft puts on a brave face as IoT boat prepares to set sail

so MS are using the Ignite label ?

so has HP buried HPUX completely with its bootable image for server cloning also known as Ignite ? Personally, prefer AIX mksysb as bit more configurable once one knows which files to edit. Read no recent reference to ElRegs pithy Itanic perjorative either so assumed entire post ParaRisc plan a complete failure

Apple, Google begin to spread pro-privacy, batt-friendly coronavirus contact-tracing API for phone apps

Re: It's a sad day

however, the world gets weirder by the year. Whats next ? FBI or NSA being identified as t.rr.r.sts ?

Already known to have indulged in criminal activity. That is, if anyone else did it. I await the release of M$ Linux with the APT package manager and RPM packages, requiring alien, scripted in PowerShell. Local cats and dogs already live together in harmony

IBM to GTS staff: Not volunteering to leave with a redundo cheque? We'll give you a helping hand

Re: The root cause of this issue started for IBM some years ago.. back in 2010-2012

I think it was earlier. About 1994 when an outsider CEO came in who did not understand mainframe business model and merely saw a chance for a big one of bonus. management droid bonuses seem to be the motivating force for very short term decision making. To regenerate industries bonuses should be scrapped. One should not need institutional bribery to do the job one is paid for.

for what it is worth Cringely has done many articles on IBMs slow death

Re: When they did this at...

takes me back a decade or two. CSC (remember them, I thought not) tried this at Y2K bubble burst. InHuman Remains were deluged. Call was cancelled after a day or so in Oz. Odd how the best and brightest were first in queue to go. Corporate amnesia could be an interesting study for a psych student of big organisations. The valuing of mass stupidity make anti social media look normal

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

From a Lucas joke

Vacuum since their products usually suck so much

Options, so many options

BABB Bashing Android Big Brother

BABS Boasting All Blue Screens

WILT Windows Intimidating Linux Traders

BUY Ballsed Up Yanks

A slightly more convoluted one from the huge infrastructure of support firms and individuals needed to keep MS products working roughly as hoped for

MEM Massive Ecosystem Manglers.

Perhaps a description of what usually happens in an IT monoculture.

NWD New World Disorder

I would suggest a cultural reference like a Borg derivative but it is inappropriate. Borg stuff usually works better than Federation hardware to the point the Feds copy or steal Borg technology. How about a few suggestions from the viewpoint of the Borg, referring the MS habit of being just close enough to common standards to confuse the gullible, but different enough to break the existing standards ?

NIHSI Not Invented Here, Steal It.

TMC Tomorrow Never Comes or is that a movie title already, referring the the Next Big Thing, which inevitably disappoints. Or is that IBM ?

Back to the fencing. A much more visible and useful post. Those broken wires can be seen at least. Mines the one with mud stains

There's a black hole lurking within 1,000 light years of Earth – and you can see stars circling it with the naked eye

Re: Dark Matter

@Richard: yes I remember a report ona MACHOs search concluding there are not enough massive Compact Halo Objects to be Dark Matter. Published about a decade ago. That left light stuff like neutrinos, aka WIMPS. Even they were ruled out. Where, cant recall. So we have the kludge of Dark matter and Energy to make the sums work right. I cant help feeling something is wrong with the models but no idea what . MOND does not feel right as it involves "special" conditions of a sort. But what would I know ?

Intel is offering more 14nm Skylake desktop processors, we repeat: More 14nm Skylake desktop processors

Intel has lost it

Still stuck on 14nm. Competition down to 7 nm. RISC devices much smaller again. Has Intel rewritten the Minix code running the silicon badly to mitigate design flaws leading to Spectre et al ?

Australia didn't blame China for parliament hack in case it upset trade relations – report

Re: Our happy Clappy creepy Christian PM

AC, not as chilling as a previous government noted for its materialists adoring the zombie of marxism that allowed known organised crime figures into country, then defended it with ethnic bigotry accusations. BTW what exactly is creepy about his private beliefs ?

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

history reruns

OK, back to VT340 and curses libraries. Simple, light and no Fush.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Re: Optics

RE Gekke.*

correct. In Oz after AIDs pandemic built up and mandatory testing began it was found the Navy had the lowest infection rate.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

remote diagnostics

Many years ago working for a department with overseas branches, the customers at very remote site complained that sometimes their local unix computer was slow.

Dialed in and checked sar. No load to speak of, just system processes and an idle database. I did note screen refreshes were sometimes slow. Thinking network noise I tested network with ping, steadily increasing packet sizes from 64 bytes up to 4K. At 1 Kb size 50% of all packets were being dropped. Bigger and almost all dropped. A nearby colleague had visited the site in previous years, and mentioned it was down a long dark corridor in deepest subbasement basement. I rang the site admin and suggested they check the corridor fluorescent lights. On a whim I suggested about 75% of the corridor length. Two hours later a phone came in asking how the hell I knew a light was blinking on and off in seldom used corridor. Ah, the joys of deduction and luck

similar story

All second hand but, long time ago in Sydney, an expensive minicomputer was being unloaded by specialist computer/fragile equipment specialists from truck loading lane, outside the premises where precious computer was to spend next decade. Sydney taxi in a hurry rounded corner in left lane and high speed. Collected computer and half reloaded it back into truck. Write off natch.

You have one job, Australian PM tells contact-tracing app, and that’s talking to medicos

Re: Morrison primer

and your point is ? He is a pollie, so what ? Not as scary as bad news messengers of the Green Grinches and their ilk. BTW, what has he said as an evangelical that is odd or do you have a secular sanctified belief system disguised as calm rationality that you wish to avoid defending ?

New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic

except the CEO ?

One may suppose the patients should be protected from the Cloud of Stupidity that clings to some of the PHB class. I was going to say Cloud of Unknowing, but that would offend Pommy mystics.

Australia to make Google and Facebook disclose ranking algorithms and pay for local content

odd isn't it

Oz fed gov wants mass surveillance via metadata retention, more snooping by nominally military focused chairbourne divisions but wants the hoi polloi to carry a fairly benign battery draining app to track virus infections. Meanwhile, Slurp, F*bitch and goggle have more than enough data on our movements from the Android and PC slurping built in. One would think a match made in hell. Then this morsel thrown out for News Corp. Ironically I know of no-one outside of ABC advertisements who trusts any of the mainstream media so whole issue is of little significance in long run. Unless this is cover for the slurps to quietly deliver all the required data and more to bored bureaucrats and po faced policedroids in the TLAs. Nothing like a fake fight to cover close co-operation. Or am I paranoid ?

RAND report finds that, like fusion power and Half Life 3, quantum computing is still 15 years away

what is problem with COBOL ?

who cares what language source code is written in ? As for underlying hardware, does it matter anymore outsiide of specialist cases like extreme conditions? What matters are human factors. PHB bean counters getting rewarded for cutting costs, not punished for not funding upgrades or determining if systems are still fit for purpose, secure and supportable. In short, a complete management and leadership failure. None of which matters has anything to do with languages. For the record, I like COBOL, verbose as it is but if properly written, it has three big benefits.

(a) source code is documentation if variables are rationally named. Again, human factor.

(b) Excellent control structures are mandated by language.. Again, code quality is created and maintained by humans.

(c) The DATA section forces thought and understanding of the data types. This is where so much goes wrong.

Would I use COBOL outside of business ? Probably not. C, Fortran or whatever is most suitable for problem, even if by some fluke a fashionable language might be a candidate.

Self-driving car LIDAR stalwart Velodyne sued for sacking a third of its staff claiming coronavirus was the cause

dislike taxes but

I wonder if an outsourcery tax directly on boards and senior management of companies would help pay for the social costs of exporting jobs ? Things like unemployment. Not to mention the need to have realistic and enforced standards for hardware, so that random changes to standard sensors is discouraged. The recent plethora of different light bulb types as in sockets, not technology Oz is suffering from is an example, as well as ACs comment.

Stop us if you've heard this before: Boeing's working on 737 Max software fixes for autopilot, stabilization bugs

Re: Flying less

losing jollies. hell yes. Most meetings are best efficiently avoided

Re: Flying less

yeah right. So why is Airbus's latest next gen aircraft design a ripoff of the Boeing SpanLoader flying wing concept ? Lower fuel burn, more seats because tube on wings shape is hitting limits. Materials science means higher stress shapes can be considered, such as large triangles.

Re: Flying less

@David. Not in this part of the world David. 6 hours of security theater with 3 hours in air versus 3 by 18hour days on road across Oz. Nope, I prefer to fly. Air travel releases less CO2 for seat mile than even railways. Why ? No infrastructure between destination needed. Aside from that, Oz railways have track so bad the speed limit is 15kmh. Even 120 kmh is considered fast.

Re: It can't

Boeings 777x-900 also in trouble. Engines this time so not Boeings outsourced coders. 737 air-frame has been pushed way beyond original design extensions. Pity they did not keep producing the 757 which was designed to be upgraded from start with bigger engines. Same with 767. In short, Boeing is in bigger trouble than just 737.

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

state of play

There appear to be slight evidence of concentric shells of galaxies and galactic clusters, with 2000 million light year spacing. Yes this challenges the isotropic concept. So more data analysis from whatever sky survey is relevant. Given the fudges to make Big Bang theory appear workable perhaps it is time for a new model. And no, I have no idea of what that might be. It is just a model where most of what is claimed to exist, but cant be seen or directly measured seems a kludge.

Australian state adds AI number plate readers to GPS tracking of corona-quarantine busters

Re: Isn't it funny ?

yes, NSW cops and roadside cameras do rego checks. Have done for years. Recently added phone in hand detection. That I could live with given the number white forward control vans that are always driven badly by psychopaths with at least one phone glued to side of head. Snooping has got worse. Heck, I recently was carting some sheep to an abattoir and got pulled over for a vehicle check, license check and magic tree carcass to prove I had right to move a trailer load of sheep. All in order but the urge to snoop was strong long before the latest bug started.

Upstart Americans brandish alligators at the almighty Reg Standards Soviet

Re: Obvious question for the Australian Embassy...

Roos: a high percentage are hermaphroditic. In Oz even the wildlife walks/hops on the wild side

Re: Obvious question for the Australian Embassy...

you mean eastern grey or red kangaroo? A big Red is about 2 meters tall and you need to be 2 meters away to avoid disembowling. Greys not as bad. About 1.5 meters tall and not as aggressive. At least the entagled one I let loose last month did not get excited while being freed from cord tangle. Perhaps NSW mountain wombats. Full grown the local ones hit a meter long, 0.5 meter wide and high. Usually not as wide, but local ones must go to pub more than others. There is one under part of my vege patch. And yes, they have been known to bite.

Academic showdown as boffins biff-baff over when Version 1.0 of Earth's magnetic core was released

And there was I

thinking the evidence for a Hadean period was shrinking. Earliest ( by whose measurement I dont know) suggests a cool wet world shown by old zircons. Even New Scientist published article on Hadean period belief becoming harder to sustain. Given the things that happen to rocks, assuming anything like water, pressure, temperature and enhanced radiation events seems to be guessing rather than empirical science. NOTE: tests have shown decay rates do vary under pressure and ionisation far more than expected. Bring back Poppers rule on what is science.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Re: Is that actually what they need?

legacy databases ? Luxury that! More likely C-ISAM files aka indexed files. If a DB maybe IMS. Now there is a DB that will have skill shortages. Is DB2 40 years old ? C-ISAM on inside though. Can't see why recoding is needed if the issue is workload as others have pointed out. Upgrading hardware should work and that won't be free or fast even if possible. A full migration to new hardware will mean an updated OS ($$ katching $$$) and then the incompatibilities start, despite IBM trying hard for backward compatibility. IMHO, would be better to virtualise on mainframe emulator on a decent (gag, choke, splutter, Am I really saying this ?, choke) windows cluster running Hercules using a fast storage system. Should be able to avoid recoding but get boost in CPU, IO and memory speeds. Migrating data might be entertaining.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: A point of order seems to need clarifying.

VXWorks ? You mean the OS used in Mars probes and landers that works for years on chips which are radiation hardened variants of PowerPCs originally ? That just works for years a long way from tech support ? Better coders in space work than mere aviation. Seriously, if this is been a known issue for 30+ years, why does not basic code testing get the stufup in basic acceptance testing ? A whole bunch at Boeing need to to sacked and banned from ever going near aircraft, or any other job requiring coding.

Australian state will install home surveillance hardware to make sure if you're in virus isolation, you stay there

Re: real 9/11 they always wanted.

so the conspiracy theory circulating in China that this bug was engineered to panic the idiot West into crashing their economies so the Quin dynasties could be dominant again is false ? Given Chinese economy is restarting while ours is shutting down it is almost believable.