Posts by Mark 110

No, no, let's hear this out, says judge waving away Apple's attempt to kill MacBook Pro Flexgate lawsuit

"Apple declined to comment."

No shit . . . sherlock

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Re: Wah Wah Wah! Oracle! They don't like the ruling!

Oh and last time I looked Oracle don't provide you with an automated way to deal with your Oracle licensing. They just let you screw up and come along for the money later.

Things may have changed in the 7 years since I last had to deal with the c<nts.

The thing that really grated at the time was that alot of the companies exposure to the audit was being overlicensed in Prod environments. Paying for Enterprise when Standard fitted the bill, etc. Given that Oracle where embedded in the projects that implemented those systems and never called out the wrong licenses and then turned up 5 years later to claim their $$$$$$$s . . I think I will never buy anything off them or deal with them if its my decision to take.

Re: Wah Wah Wah! Oracle! They don't like the ruling!

Just because what Suns managment did or didn't do wasn't great . . . - that doesn't make what Oracle do good.

The two things aren't connected.

Sun was a bunch of genius techies with little business sense.

Oracle was, and is, a corporate behemoth intent on extracting all your licence obligations and if you drop the ball they will turn up and audit and hit you with a £500k bill for your non-prods and devs you didn't know needed a license. That wasn't in your budget and you are fired!!

Scottish Environment Protection Agency refuses to pay ransomware crooks over 1.2GB of stolen data

Not sure turning it off and on again unencrypts files. Bet they tried it though.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Re: AWS now liable?

But you are allowed to say no to things which are against the law. Calling for violent overthrow of the elected government is against the law - even in the USA I think.

Failed insurrection aside, Biden is going to be president in two weeks. What does it mean for tech policy?

Re: Rent a mob

UK - we have our own set of delusional fantasists on both left and right. The ones on the left get very few votes. The ones on the right seem to have got into power. But like the US we also have a broken electoral FPTP system which means the majority of the population are governed by someone they didn't vote for.

Re: Old tech

He does sound increasingly confused and irrational everytime he opens his mouth.

Re: Harry Truman

And he'd been a politician for a very very long time without getting incredibly rich before he got to be president.

Re: Rent a mob

"Look at net worth for each upon entering, look at their relatively small salary, then look at their net worth every 2, 4 or 6 years. They are all either brilliant investors or grifters. My money is on the latter."

Not sure Biden will have a deal of time left to increase his net worth after this gig.

Re: Rent a mob

Two wrongs don't make a right. Saying we can riot cos they did is an imbecilic position.

BLM were rioting about clear racist police brutality leading to numerous unnecessary deaths of black men over the last few years. And it was a very small proportion of the movement on a very small number of occasions where it got out of control. We have had race riots in this country for similar police brutality and general subjugation and deprivation of sectors of society.

Comparing those riots to ones incited by the President to try and force people to believe, through violence and insurrection, unsubstantiated claims of election fraud seems slightly bonkers.

The American right just look like a bunch of bonkers fantasists to us over here, not withstanding things like visible KKK tatoos on some of the leading rioters.

Trump silenced online: Facebook, Twitter etc balk at insurrection, shut the door after horse bolts and nearly burns down the stable

Re: Not his finest hour

Number 16: Denouncing US soldiers that died in action as 'losers'.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: So much spin I'm getting dizzy

Of course its about getting people to pay for stuff.

I guess they would tell you to fork it and maintain it yourself for free for everyone if you don't like it. We are are a very young industry in real terms. We need to knock the kinks out of this stuff and if a FOSS commnity wants to keep stuff FOSS they may need to continue to fork stuff to keep it in FOSS space whenever a capitalist tries to take ownership of it.

Damn - I sound like Cory Doctorow - read one of his novels once . . hmmm

Trump administration says Russia behind SolarWinds hack. Trump himself begs to differ

He also hates China. He never passes up an opportunity to paint China as a menace/threat regardless of what intelligence he has. He has done this several times through his presidency where he just lists all the countries he wants US citizens to be afraid of as suspects in everything bad.

Most of the world needs to be much more afraid of the US than Russia or China.

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Sorry, but HTML counts

HTML is not a programming language. It formats a webpage. You can't write an IF THEN ELSE in it. You can in Excel.

Re: Shouldn't that be "a horde of spreadsheets"?

Many Excel users will use an IF THEN and stack them to get an ELSE. Its coding of a sort.

I use Excel to quickly solve basic data analysis tasks within an hour or two - if I waited on Devs I would wait 6 months to get on the roadmap for next year. Agree with all that enterprise solutions based on Excel are unwise but Excel is great for those 'need to understand this dataset today' problems that you do about 10 times a year and you don't have access to, or never learnt to use, better tools like Power BI, etc.

Tablets and Chromebooks are hot, towers and desktops are not: El Reg combs through Q3 PC numbers

Re: Who NEEDS a desktop?

I think maybe the workstation figures are slightly misleading. For the following reasons:

- if you have an old laptop then you have to buy a new laptop to upgrade

- if you have an old desktop them buying new ram / graphics / cpu is trivial and cheap - even upgrading motherboard isn't that hard though probably unnecessary

My laptop died last year so have upgraded my old gaming rig which is 10 years old. It sings now.

I use a chromebook I got free on an offer for portabile internet. But usually manage with my phone.

So the point is that just because NEW desktops aren't getting sold doesn't mean they aren't getting used. Just people are replacing bits rather than binning a perfectly good bit of kit that just needs components swapping out now and then.

More evidence your work/life balance has gone to $%£*: Atlassian says user-interface interactions show hours tacked on to workday

I'm with you on this one. Due to the nasty nature of my commute pre-Covid (Liverpool <> Knutsford) my day used to be:

6am Alarm

7am Leave House

8-8.30am Logon

20 min lunch

4-4.30 Leave desk

5.30-6.30 (Depending on whether anyone had decided to break one of the motorway junctions by playing bumper cars) Get home

Now its a lot lot easier but I log on before 7often and am sometimes still logged on at 6.

But I take 'a-Rhodesian-Ridgeback-is-for-life-not-just-for-Covid' out for the best part of an hour once the sun is coming up and again for 90 mins before the sun goes down.

And my weekends are now free of laundry and housework.

I do not miss the motorways. At all. Much better to be having fun in the park with my pup.

Not one to be outdone by Microsoft, Apple's cloud fell over too. Unlike Microsoft, it hasn't said what happened

Re: it did not respond

https://www.theregister.com/2016/11/28/howto_terro_manuals_still_on_sale_by_apple_amazon_and_waterstones/

""To protect freedom of speech and avoid censorship, unless a title is illegal we tend not to remove it from the iBooks Store," a representative at Apple told The Register."

Last time I saw a response from Apple on these pages . . . Mon 28 Nov 2016

Google and Facebook abandon Hong Kong landing of new submarine cable

Re: Routing

Safe to assume the politicians don't understand the tech. But this is about politics. Fairly sure someone told them internet traffic gets to china regardless of a fast pipe. It just goes the long way around.

How to have a more positive 'outage experience' according to Microsoft: Please don't rely on the Azure Status page

Re: What a great way to blame the customer for problems

"when you sell at five nines"

They sell at 3 9's.

Re: Isn't the whole point of 'the cloud'

Microsoft provide a 99.9% availability SLA for most services (not all). So they can be down 8 unplanned hours a year without penalties. You need to go in eyes open. If you are expecting 100% then you don't have a contract for that.

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Re: Cut the blue wire

Hmmmmm - anonymising the wrong FTSE100 investment management database . . . That wasn't me. Innocent bystander.

Bit of DHCP downtime nothing to 48 hours downtime and a lot of sweating as to whether all the squillion trillions would still exist or not . . .

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

My current employer - global bank - has cancelled all restructuring that wasn't already a done deal til at least September/October. Fair play. The right thing to do.

As a contractor I remain nervous and trying my best to be indispensible . .

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

Re: The Azure Behemoth

Azgard?

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: Dammit BOFH....

Best in ages. And so so true.

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

Re: Old Codger Talks about the "old days"

"Once upon a time, software selection was done by writing a requirements document."

Oh ,my dear god. I remember those days. Now I get asked to sort the requirements out once the project is already in production. Its agile apparently . .

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

Re: Had a recent train trip myself

"What bugs me the most is the increasing number of cyclists who cannot understand that the right place for their two-wheel monstrosities is in the carriage with the fricking BIKE RACK,"

Given that the bike rack tends to be full of one of:

- people who can't get a seat and look at me blankly when I suggest they let me put my bike in the rack

- push chairs

- luggage

- other bikes

I find I generally have to make do with what ever space I can find and try andd stay out of peoples way as best as I can.

And its not a monstrosity.

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

Re: Biff, bash, boom

Shouldn't you be playing 'Pacific Rim'. More their culture . . .

Re: Opium Wars..

Ta - always wondered.

GCHQ have equipment handily placed in Telcos network cores. Thats what they do.

Re: Manufacturing

But anyone can examine a network device and read the packet headers going in and see if theres unusual packet headers coming out. Beyond my technical capability but academically I know thats how a network device works. Shouldn't be too hard to monitor.

Re: those concerns might also edge towards paranoia

Ban cars and roads. People are dying everyday.

Ban food. People might eat too much and need care & support.

You can't just ban stuff cos risk. Good article. Just ensure source code access and nothing iis being slipped in via a blob.

Theres no domestic telecoms industry because Marconi made all the wrong decisions.

Dixons Carphone to London Stock Exchange: Yay, we grew 2% in the festive quarter. Oh, hang on, no we didn't

Re: They've upped their game

I am in central Liverpool.

So I used to use Maplins for that need it right now stuff. Then Carphones/Doxons made a cheaper alternative.

Maplins have gone out of business.

Carphones/Dixons have closed their Liverpool store now.

World of pain next tiime I need something right now. Hour round trip drive out to out of town Dixons in Speke.

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

TLDs - I am confused

I am a bit confused.

In my day back when I was small TLDs were for:

- Companies (.com; .co.uk, etc)

- Countries (.uk;.es;etc)

- Organisations (.org)

Probably some other stuff I forggot cos I am now old.

So when they said "OK lets open up TLDs to more" I didn't think they meant to then sell any old TLD to anyone. I didn't thinnk they meant Amazon could have .amazon or IBM could have .ibm. It breaks the old model. Sure . . . .sex or .dating or .homefurnishings or .cars. But handing out a TLD to a company whose name happpens to coincide with a geographical region just seems like weird and not what th TLD structure is for. Its not for individual organisations. Its to give logical organisational entititties a TLD home.

Its for logic. It probably shouldn't havee been done anyway as the old logic worked and all they have done is given organisations an infinite number of TLDs thyy now need to buy to protect themselves from scammers.

First question on any IT project. Why?

The answer in this case seems to be "To make more money for ICANN"

Whirlybird-driving infosec boss fined after ranty Blackpool Airport air traffic control antics

Re: Just a fine?

I think it said his liceense is suspended.

CES la vie: Shrunken Ultrabooks, muted mobiles and Segway's adult prams at world's biggest consumer tech show

Re: Ultrabook?

My 5 years old Yoga does thatt. Not quite on the battery life maybe, but I don't go far from plugs.

UK political parties fall over themselves to win tech contractor vote by pledging to review IR35

Re: So why'd you do it then? @Rich 2

Given us contractors pay a shit load off tax, then making us all go permie is going to make it a smaller poo . .

Re: More nonsense

I am really not a fake contractor. 10 contracts in last 15 years makes me outsidee IR35 afaik.

I know some faake contractors that have been with the same firm for 5+ years but its not the majority by any stretch.

Regardless off IR35 status they are choosing to work without employment rights so choosing to tax them as if they had employment rights is a bit on its head.

Think your VMware snapshots are all good? Guess again if you're on Windows Server 2019

Re: Snapshots shouldn't be used as only backup for db workloads

Snaps good for app servers. Bad for business data.

Re: Remember DR DOS? Word Perfect...?

When I was at Unilever 10+ years ago they were hyper-v-ing their whole estate and ditching oracledb for db2

Most backups haven't been thought through. But it's relatively cheap to send tapes somewhere and feel warm and cosy even though if you thought it through you are just making tapes and paying people to handle them. They don't do anything.

I was at a FTSE top 50 savings investment org a few years ago overseeing service assurance for a data centre migration transformation. Anyway.

Techies proposed losing tape. Made sense. Business managers got diarrea cos they thought 6 years of tape backup covered their asses.

On investigation the app guy Jerry could remember one occasion in 20 years where he had gone yeah ok I will get a tape and have a look if what the business want is there. It wasn't.

Microsoft Surface Pro X: Windows on Arm usable at long last – but, boy, are you gonna pay for it

Apple have spent alot of money on marketing and corners to develop a perception of luxury. Good products, nice corners, big marketing spend.

Microsoft are targeting differently. Not sure quite what. It feels like they are trying to make better tech but without the confidence to become a fmcg manufacturer like apple.

Ms are a software company after all whereas apple have made all their money from hardware.

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

Directors and DR

Directors should not be allowed anywhere near DR planning. As all they do is say we want these apps back in this order.

It doesn't work like that. Though I guess we could pretend the active - active stuff wasn't still working so it looked like their pet apps came back first.

Re: Disaster

I feel that pain.

Nothing like a power outage to expose your power contractors IQ.

Wow. What a fuckwit. Hope he got sacked.

Business managers / directors kinda glaze over when I try and explain DR. They think the techies have a magic failover / fail back button not realising that you might be a year getting everything back to production if you really really really failed everything over.

Critical systems (bank mainframes for example) get failed back and forward regularly. Everything else relies on the big SRM button you hope will work when you need it.

Not a good look, Google: Pixel 4 mobes can be face-unlocked even if you're asleep... or dead?

I will report back

I have ordered one

Should get delivered next week. I will just turn the face unlock off if its a worry.

Anyway I will report back seems a bit weird they would drop the ball given all the debate when apple went down this rabbit hole

BOFH: We must... have... beer! Only... cure... for... electromagnetic fields

Re: Were you bugging the office I worked in 20 years ago?

Those stats are weird as was highlighted on 'More or Less' thhe other day. The stats are based on permie salaries. But I doubt many good structural engineers work a permie salary. I imagine most big infra projects are hiring engineers on £500 - £2000k per day for the hard stuff.

Bit of a guess. But if I am earning £450 a day to overseee IT Service Management of an outsourced managed service thingy project malarkey then a guy that can build a bridge over the Mersey must be earning twice . . . please they must. Surely.

Re: EM gives me headaches

That is fucking genius. If anyone ever complains to me about the EM from machines I will rightly point out the sun!!

(why didn't I think of this . . . getting old)

Hacker House shoved under UK Parliament's spotlight following Boris Johnson funding allegs

Re: Because of her personal relationship...

Boris's love life history seeems to involve, getting married, fucking other women then lying about it. And having the odd child that he denies existance of. Not a hundred percent sure why these women find him attractive but lets face it I would do Jo Brand for an £100k grant . . . .