Posts by Blane Bramble

The .amazon argy-bargy is STILL going on – and Uncle Sam has had enough with ICANN

.amazon was so important to Brazil and ACTO that they didn't bother applying for it.

Pentagon beams down $10bn JEDI contract to Microsoft: Windows giant beats off Bezos

Re: AWS=Amazon WEB Services

"AWS is pretty much Apache Server stitched badly onto a basement-teenager-coded middleware layer ... while Azure is an IBM Mainframe Class of Operating System and Networking infrastructure"

And you call yourself an expert?

Inside the 1TB ImageNet data set used to train the world's AI: Naked kids, drunken frat parties, porno stars, and more

Re: 445 – bikinis – rather than the bicycles in 444

Prepare for MAD

Mutually Assured De-clothing

UK culture sec hints at replacing TV licence fee, defends encryption ban proposals and her boss in Hacker House inquiry

Re: TV ownership fine

You can own a TV without paying the license fee.

There, does that help?

This fall, Ubuntu 19.10 stars as Eoan Ermine in... Dawn of the Stoats

"That said, Train does include live migration extensions,"

You mean like we've been using for the last 4-5 years?

A spot of after-hours business email does you good, apparently

Re: Employer...

"the boss between 10 and 11 and he worked through until 6 or 7 in the evening. Anybody, especially management, leaving before him was a slacker"

Seen it, but it's a sign of poor management. The response is "my guys have been here since 8. You arrived at 10. Of course they're leaving before you".

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

Re: As for ghosts (holy or otherwise) ...

So are UFOs real then?

Yes. UFO ...

Unidentified

Flying

Object

It doesn't mean "alien spaceship" you know?

Forget Brexit, ignore Trump, write off today: BT's gonna make us all 'realise the potential of tomorrow'

"BT should have point blank refused to allow other companies into its exchanges back in the 'mercury' days. "

We'd still be waiting for ADSL to be given the green light while BT protected their leased line and ISDN business.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked

Re: I have to thank ken for my passwords

"Coders should have sound proofed booths."

You'll never cope with having kids if you have that attitude to disturbances. Learn to focus.

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

You can't make people take jobs they're not interested in, and it does seem that percentage-wise males are more interested in tech jobs than females are, which means the percentage in the work force will not be the same as in the population at large. There is nothing wrong with this.

What is needed is equality of opportunity. That starts with ensuring that anyone with an interest is encouraged to pursue it, and yes, that probably does mean a shift in techy culture to make it more welcoming.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Re: Doing this in parts of the US too

Having studied the USA for many years, I believe your solution is "moar gunz".

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Re: Well that ruling has a timespan of about 30 days in the UK

"Threatening "No Deal" is going to a car dealership, and saying that if they don't sell you the car you'll steal it and torch it."

No, threatening "No Deal" is going to a car dealership and saying if you can't agree a price you'll walk away. A relatively strong bargaining position.

Removing "No Deal" from the table is going to a car dealership and telling them you have to leave with a car, no matter what. A very weak bargaining position.

It is clear a lot of people have never tried to negotiate anything in their life.

Quic! Head to the latest Chrome version and try out HTTP/3

Great, handover from one device (IP) to another (IP). The cyber criminals are going to love this when they work out how to completely steal your live session and redirect it their device.

Why do cloud leaks keep happening? Because no one has a clue how their instances are configured

New headline

"Companies think 'The Cloud' takes care of all that difficult technical stuff for you, find out it doesn't".

IBM looks to boost sales the same way it has for 65 years – yes, it's a new mainframe: The z15

Re: "In The Box"?

Ahh, but that isn't latency introduced by the network (those wires and switches and routers and stuff).

Hence. no "network" latency.

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

"This will add a free extra 25 miles driving or so on electric"

It won't be free for long, currently it's subsidised by fuel duty. Once a significant proportion of vehicles are electric the government will need to reclaim that money elsewhere. You will be paying for charging, and probably also a tax per mile travelled.

AWS celebrates Labor Day weekend by roasting customer data in US-East-1 BBQ

This sounds like EBS failed and wasn't even locally redundant though. That is a much bigger problem if true.

A challenger appears: Taiwanese devs' answer to Gemini PDA wraps a Raspberry Pi in a tablet

More interestingly, this could lead to an upgradeable tablet - year or two down the line, pop in a Pi-5 or Pi-6 compute model...

Brit couch potatoes increasingly switching off telly boxes in favour of YouTube and Netflix

Re: Brilliant?

"Top Gear does still have some of that amazing photography that Grand Tour was completely unable to match."

You might want to go back and watch a bit more of Grand Tour then, you clearly didn't see the same camera work I did.

Amazon Web Services doubled its footprint in the UK and will only get bigger, reckon analysts

@Julz

They provide a very nice and flexible tool kit that you can use to build lots of amazing things, and just like any set of tools, if you know how to use them they're great. If you don't know how to use them, you'll need to pay someone who does, or take the risk that your DIY job might turn out more expensive than you thought and still require a professional to sort it out.

Apple loses FaceTime patent appeal again. And again. And again. And again. And again... yes, it's the fifth time

Re: As much as I love bashing Apple...

There is a time and plaice for that sort of humour

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

Re: I like proper cash

You HAVE to accept cash in England, and in Scotland, you have to accept certain coins.

Not true. You have to accept legal tender for a debt, and cash is legal tender.

You don't have to accept cash for a sale.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Of course your (V32) 9600bps modem operated at 2400 baud.

Please stop regulating the dumb tubes, says Internet Society boss

Wait until they find out you can put letters and numbers in a file on your computer and bypass DNS lookups completely.

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

Re: Estimating Software Projects

Sounds a bit like a Z80 assembler course I was on, already knowing how to use it. So tasks like "write a sub routine to beep the console 3 times" became "use the most esoteric instructions and logic to beep the console 3 times" - jumps by pushing addresses on the stack and returning to them, using the index registers, that sort of thing.

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

Re: Changed the (IT) world

Or the joys of F15 Strike Eagle on the ZX Spectrum, so much engine power that you could get your wings blown off and fly back to base just by keeping the nose up.

Last year, we joked that Amazon was a cloud giant with a gift shop. Looking at these AWS figures, we were right

Re: Two day delivery?

It's two days in the USA I believe - it's quite a big place.

You know you can set Alexa to simply beep in response to a command, yes?

Great, you've moved your website or app to HTTPS. How do you test it? Here's a tool to make local TLS certs painless

Re: Lol arcane knowledge of memory management

@Zilla "Nobody ever taught memory management to anyone."

Maybe not to your generation.

Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly

"that we can't even launch without getting permission from the White House?"

Because that last bit is wrong.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel devs to fix their regressive fixing

Re: A thin line

But you previously stated: "No doubt put in there as a result of poor management. ... unfortunately nobody thought of replacing said management."

I take it they don't do sarcasm where you're from.

'A sledgehammer to crack a nut': Charities slam UK voter ID trials

Re: 44 allegations

@Loyal Commenter

But as a student your details are present on two different lists in two different polling stations.

Now do you understand the potential issue?

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Re: £120 for 4MB

First SIMMs I bought cost me £120 per MB

You. Apple. Get in here and explain these iOS slowdowns and batteries – US, French govt reps

Re: Who's next then?

@snozdop

That is what Apple claim, and they want you to think.

The US and French response is to find if this is true.

I am not sure why so many people seem to leap to Apple's defence based purely on a one-sided interpretation.

One more credit insurer abandons Maplin Electronics

Time to turn the clock back

Maplin used to be a place with a great catalogue full of electronic components I could order by post or later on on-line.

If they'd stuck with that as their business model rather than insisting they needed high-street outlets, they might not only be in better shape, they could have evolved into a UK competitor to Amazon.

Oops: LinkedIn country subdomains SSL cert just expired

"If the certificate is invalid then we have no assurance that our communications are secure. We should think of HTTPS with an invalid certificate as the same as using HTTP, anyone could see or tamper with what we're doing online."

Err, no. No it isn't.

Seldom used 'i' mangled by baffling autocorrect bug in Apple's iOS 11

A☐ see what you did there.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

Re: Can we stop calling it a Psion please?

I want one for the exact opposite reason - because it runs a standard Linux distribution. It should give me a fully loaded remote terminal/tech support machine that can fit in a jacket. Very useful when out and about for 24x7 support.

DIY music veteran SoundCloud flounders, lays off 40% of staff

Re: Well....

In fact as a first worlder, isn't London and NYC basically the most identical 2 cities you can pick across countries?

Why pick London at all, if you're trying to appeal to the concept of new music etc. surely Liverpool or Manchester would make more of a statement, and save the pennies.

Trident nuke subs are hackable, thunders Wikipedia-based report

Re: The weakest point ... ?

That is, of course, also it's strongest point.

You cannot prevent a counterstrike by "decapitating" the government.

German court set to rule on legality of IP address harvesting

This hinges on what you mean by "identify an individual".

Your netblock identifies who is responsible for the IP address.

Not who was using it.

Dungeons & Dragons finally going digital

Re: AD&D detailed rules?

See, that is where you went wrong.

(A)D&D is not supposed to be a simulation of a universe that details the rules to cover every situation.

It was intended to be a framework, with some standard rules that you could then use intelligently to cover other situations.

Interactive storytelling.

Not a computer simulation.

Up close with the 'New Psion' Gemini: Specs, pics, and genesis of this QWERTY pocketbook

Re: 18:9?

Came on to say the same thing. It's 2:1 but the general public has been fooled into "bigger numbers are better".

British military laser death ray cannon contract still awarded, MoD confirms

@James 51

The illegality is for weapons whose primary purpose is blinding, not those that are designed for another purpose but might also cause blindness when used.

Ubuntu 17.04 'Zesty Zapus'

Re: Ubuntu naming convention

Because Microsoft Windows releases never have code named, right?

https://namingschemes.com/Windows_codenames

"Hey boss, we're going to skip Longhorn and Blackcomb and are going straight to Jupiter, OK?"

NHS slaps private firm Health IQ for moving Brits' data offshore

Re: "This helps to ensure that ... data is kept safe and secure"

So what they're saying is: if it's stored in a cloud hosting provider in the UK, it's safe; if it's stored in a cloud hosting provider outside the UK, it isn't.

Except there is this thing called "The Internet" which connects all the clouds together.

No, what they are saying is that whilst it is stored in a cloud hosting provider in the UK it is subject to, and protected by UK law.

Whilst it is hosted outside the UK it is subject to, and protected by the laws of that country.

DVLA misses out on £400m in tax after scrapping paper discs

Re: just get rid of it.

The problem with this is that it penalises those who have to commute long distances - we're all told to be flexible about where we work, but then required to pay for the privilege.

Seagate in 10TB drive brand brainstorm

Re: Inflated prices...

Consumer hard disk drives have rarely been so expensive and surely not in the last 15 years or so.

I guess you're new to this IT thing aren't you? Speak to those of us who remember 10 and 20MB disks. I remember my first 32MB RLL drive. I also remember spending £500 on a second hand 500MB SCSI disk (yes, these are all MB not GB).

Disks now expensive? Get off my lawn!

What to call a £200m 15,000-tonne polar vessel – how about Boaty McBoatface?

You'd think people would know better by now. The British public can be reliably trusted to take the piss...

Brits shun nightclubs and CD-ROMs for lemons, coffee and woman’s leggings

>>while spending on acoustic guitars and power drills is relatively low

>The end of an era.

I'm old skool - bought an (electro) acoustic guitar a few weeks ago and looking at buying a new drill.