Posts by Robert Carnegie

Green MSP calls on Scottish government to stop spending £4.7m a year with AWS after Amazon 'dumping' allegations

Re: "we do not send items to landfill in the UK"

I think "owned by a third party seller that went bust, A isn't allowed to sell it on its own account, and no one wants it back" was one formula offered for this outcome.

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

Re: Meltdown...

Nothing responds well to getting the wrong voltage applied to it.

On the other hand, a power brick naturally produces different voltage depending on the load - I think - unless designed not to. I'm currently looking for a replacement of one that does that (for TV box, not PC) and I'm just assuming that it was cheap. But won't be now.

Re: Meltdown...

s / contract / contrast /

s / will / with /

That was very confusing to read, the way that you wrote it! ;-)

On the other hand, I bought a Dell Latitude ST tablet: I still haven't forgiven them.

(It is possible that frequently freezing for 60 seconds isn't a standard feature. Neither is longer term support.)

Re: Losing my mother's marbles

The first sign is when you're trying to plug in a USB upside down. :-)

Re: Laptops are good for this

-Inside- the casing. :-)

They probably make more money selling the model-specific docks, so why make it easy to use the ports on the laptop?

I use pieces of white sticky label to annotate my PCs.

Doggy DNA database adopted by Gloucestershire cops to bring crims to heel

Re: Aren't Pet Microchips enough?

I just saw a bit on Quora about a cat which IIRC went for unsuccessful physiotherapy, X-Ray and... CAT scan?... for a limp that turned out to be its ID microchip worked into leg muscle. I think the chip was rather trickily but successfully removed, and with more physiotherapy, the cat's fine.

We've found another reason not to use Microsoft's Paint 3D – researchers

I think I remember I used to run PBRUSH.EXE. I thought that was "Paintbrush". I run PBRUSH now I get "Paint". Maybe I am misremembering "Paint 3D sounds like too much work" as "MS Paint sounds like too much work".

https://superuser.com/questions/306540/paintbrush-or-mspaint-executable-file/306542

...explains how by various tricks, trying to run PBRUSH gets you Paint, but also maintains that they are just the same thing. Hmm.

Maybe at some point in a series of Windows upgrades in place, there was an older PBRUSH and a new PAINT on the same system, from different Windows versions, and I preferred PBRUSH.

Weren't "Paint", "Paintbrush", and "Paint 3D" all different, unrelated programs? I think Wikipedia may be confused about this, or perhaps just me.

What's that hurtling down the Bifröst? Node-based network fun with Yggdrasil 0.4

Re: Prior usage

It's the tree that the Norse Gods live in or something. Seriously. Seriously ish.

Playmobil crosses the final frontier with enormous, metre-long Enterprise playset

Re: tribbles, how to remove?

Have you tried running a mower over the grass around your tree to pick the seeds up before they sprout? Or is that what broke your last mower? Does it come off the tree as fluff?

A little reading indicates your tree is indeed female and evidently on good terms with male trees nearby, so, perhaps a giant polythene tree condom would work - on your lady rather than the local toms - but fitting it on looks like quite a job, possibly involving drones. I'm not sure what other contraception may be available for trees.

Thailand bans joke cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens

Re: Just ban all crypto currencies.

My impression is that cryptocurrency is something for people to gamble on INSTEAD of the stock market. But that stock market trading is, do to speak, rigged by "the house" anyway - or rather, by fancy computer systems which do buying and selling in a tiny fraction of a second, and which make Bitcoin mining look like printing naughty "ASCII art" for money.

A BBC radio programme last week about what money even is anyway when you get down to it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wrnx

One commentator said that book credit is older than coins, mentioning clay tablets and such with accounting marks representing, and in effect being, the value of goods.

Another commentator said what makes a currency is value, like gold. That we only ever go off it briefly, and we do, should, and will go back to the "gold standard" soon. Because of the value, which is that you can wear it. It looks pretty. It looks valuable. So it is valuable, or do I mean because it is... it seems circular.

Of course you also can use gold to make... overpriced cabling.

A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?

It was a different time ;-)

But at this time, a lot of pubs and restaurants are "The Prince Edward"...

Oracle hits UK reseller with lawsuit for allegedly reselling grey market Sun hardware

Re: Did I read that right?

Not popular... How about rats, then? Rats are not popular, but I expect that an agency of creative thinkers on animal cruelty can do things to rats that you won't want to think about.

Re: Did I read that right?

I would pay an overseas agency to mistreat puppies or kittens when some people take goodwill towards non-human animals too far. Picket my grocery run? Cat golf will happen (someplace where it's legal).

I just would have to think very carefully before contracting Oracle. They probably have per-squeak licensing.

US Supreme Court gives LinkedIn another shot at stymieing web scraping

Re: Not a CFAA issue

Put all the servers that don't want their information scraped in the .scouts-honour top level domain. You literally have to send "scouts-honour" to get any access to data.

Another approach is for entry to the server initially to encounter a screen that goes "I promise not to do naughty things on this server". You have to click on "Promise" to get through. After that, it's set in a cookie.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

It all applies to Enemies of the State generally, doesn't it. Democratic politicians, journalists, Union organisers.

Is "1984* propaganda against tyranny, or propaganda for it? Spoiler if you haven't read it - the State gets you in the end. The State gets everybody.

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

I thought the standard of measurement of Bosoms was a pencil.

How many if us will it take to support your Bosoms?

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: Thermostats

When the fairly large, glass pyramid styled "St Enoch Centre" shopping mall was built in Glasgow, Scotland (opened in 1989), a newspaper cartoon portrayed a neighbour stopping by to ask how the tomatoes were growing.

A day or three later, someone reported they actually were growing some tomatoes in there.

If you're thinking it could be something else, I only heard about the tomatoes.

Re: The light..

I'm getting a flashback to something. An ISDN "modem" maybe.

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

I think that British buildings which were found to share the unfortunate feature with the notorious Grenfell Tower of being clad in candle-wax were told to get guards in to patrol through the place watching for fires, till it could be fixed. And as far as I know, they still have the guards. So... if the data centre supports human life now, then they may do that.

Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race'

Re: I think I just switched from ambivalent to actually liking Linus

COVID-19 also comes and goes, somewhat, as the weather changes. This persuaded Donald Trump to say in early 2020 that it would go away "like a miracle", and maybe persuaded televangelist Kenneth Copeland to "pray it away", you're welcome, now give me money, at around the same time. It persuaded the British government to re-open business with a colossally misplaced sigh of relief, last year. Then it turns cooler and back it comes.

Re: In a stockyard...

The difference now is that a coronavirus has pissed us off and we are calling them out.

We might not go after them in birds and bats and other critters. But we already are vaccinating badgers against tuberculosis and mosquitos against malaria, so if I was a coronavirus, I'd be scared.

I couldn't get a doctor to see me for flu in 2019. I was trying to get signed off work. So I had to go to work, but fortunately I evidently looked so close to death that my taking a week off wasn't questioned.

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

You could send a test message which is in the form of an advertisement... but that gets you into trouble as well.

Or... just send the name of the app itself, as the message.

Ohio Attorney General asks courts to declare Google a public utility

Re: Change of paradigm

When you refer to "laws passed almost exclusively for Google" - by your examples I think you mean "laws against Google", though that isn't the only way that it goes.

For instance, "the right to be forgotten" compels Google to suppress information in search results, which they did not want to do.

FBI paid renegade developer $180k for backdoored AN0M chat app that brought down drug underworld

Re: Coventry Scenario?

It was mainly Hitler I'd suppose?

Re: Just think and consider for a moment ...

I wondered about that. Would there really not be discussion of sports events or wishing the Godfather a happy birthday?

But then... if you're a practising criminal... maybe you make a point of discussing football etc on public media instead because it's suspicious if you don't.

Or, maybe all of the sport also is a criminal enterprise. A lot of it's dirty. Even violent. I think I heard if you get on the wrong side of some football clubs they take your knees.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

In this story the manager looks the IT crew in the eye and presses the "shut down the company" button.

What you should do is, without speaking, or looking at each other, all just walk unhurriedly out of the room, the building, across the car park, keep going...

Aside from the correct effect on your stupid management, when you get far enough away, you can scream loud and long, and THEN go back in and fix it.

Re: The Big Red Button

I think I've worked out that "The Stopper", used in the U.S., isn't an unbreakable shield fitted around a fire alarm box to make it impossible to use it, although it sort of is that, but actually it's a cover which you can open easily... but a loud alarm sounds straight away, so people know you've done that. It's important to understand that that is not the fire alarm, and you still need to do the fire alarm, if you were planning to.

There also are pictures of an alleged patented fire alarm box from about a hundred years ago that when you sound it, it clamps down on your hand, so that you will be found trapped there later. After the fire for instance. That's not a good idea, is it!

Re: A&E light switch

If bad things didn't happen, there wouldn't be hospitals. Technically.

For instance, if that guy you didn't vote for gets a life threatening disease, is that a bad thing - technically.

With incoming iOS 15, update refuseniks will be given choice to stay where they are while still receiving security patches

Technically they seem to be supporting iOS 12 still. But you didn't get an option to not upgrade to 13 and 14 - unless you couldn't.

Re: Not enough space

I think the storage requirement is less if you apply the update through iTunes on a PC or Mac, and it's said to be cleaner as well. It does download about 3 GB of iOS to the PC though, plus iTunes itself with its own frequent updates. iTunes or cloud also might be a way to export your naive photography exhibits.

Apple ditches support for pre-2015 MacBook Air, Pro laptops with macOS Monterey

Re: iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s are different things

I think I estimated already that since iOS 12 is hosting COVID-19 contact tracing software, it will be supported now until - if - that crisis is absolutely over. But as far as I can tell, they don't announce that to the public - but they do publicly release point updates for security and maybe other bug fixes. You just don't know when they'll stop doing that.

Global Fastly outage takes down many on the wibbly web – but El Reg remains standing

Just one dependency? ;-)

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: Notepad++ is genius

I think years ago I had a reliability problem when using it to convert file encoding type of ridiculously large text data files - but using the 32 bit version may have contributed to the trouble.

That AI scanning your X-ray for signs of COVID-19 may just be looking at your age

That film where they are about to missile the pub where brown terrorists may be, but there's a kiddy in the way. This is a comedy presumably? In real life it would be a five minute play? Including theme music.

Security is an architectural issue: Why the principles of zero trust and least privilege matter so much right now

So

You have open specifications and implementations of security, to address this.

...once you get past having government-issued security WITH government backdoor (Clipper), and treating effective security products as restricted weapons and a crime. The thing with PGP for instance. And also, knowing about any of this.

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Re: Not my sympathies...

Label them! My TV remote is visually identical to the separate Freeview remote. Except that one has labels that I put onto hilt-end and on prow saying "TV". Now I pick the right one up two times out of three.

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Re: What kind of idiot do you think I am?

"carefully prepared sarcasm" may be not exactly the right phrase for this case, but I fondly remember one Peanuts cartoon with Lucy van Pelt and her younger brother Linus. It appears to have been written before I was born.

https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1962/09/02

Re: Private equity and New York...

In that kind of office, the worker could do a lot of good before they are stopped. Not that the ends justify the means.

Re: Fix the company, or get a pen

Did you tell them to fill in an authorization form? Or just something which sounded quite like that?

Putting my own labels next to ports - and on top of the laptop, for instance, not on the sides - is one of my usability interventions.

Boeing fined $17m after fitting uncertified sensors to 737 Max and NG airliners for 4 years

Re: That’s justice!

This is s different thing from the plane crashes thing, this hasn't killed anybody. I think. Not yet.

If I follow, they fitted parts which weren't approved for that use yet. But they are approved now, so I suppose they can leave them in?

ASUS baffles customer by telling them thermal pad thickness is proprietary

Re: eh

I would claim I'm not part of the problem but I did vote for Brexit. Not necessarily this Brexit, but it's the one we're being given. My argument is that British involvement in aiding and abetting wars in the Middle East which should be none of our business is shameful and we should have our wars with neighbouring countries instead, face to face. I wasn't thinking of Ireland but France, and the collapse of the Irish situation that I predicted can be avoided but, of course, won't be.

Re: eh

So NI is in the EU single market, but it is not in the EU.

And pretty much the point of the EU is to not have checks at borders in the EU, but only on goods entering the single market area. And that's what is happening.

I expect the Good Friday Agreement to go down soon and a hard border around Northern Ireland to go up and the bombing to get louder again. They may as well get on with it. The Agreement was between two EU countries and it doesn't work without it. This time we could get rid of the curiously liberal relationship with the republic of letting its citizens come and go as if they were still British - that would make it simpler.

Hard cheese: Stilton snap shared via EncroChat leads to drug dealer's downfall

My cheese is sweating and that's all that I intend to say about it. :-)

Surprise! Developers' days ruined by interruptions and meetings, GitHub finds

Re: Two meetings a day? That's still crazy.

"The meetings will continue until morale improves" is, I find, not an original thought.

Google employee helped UK government switch from disastrous COVID-19 strategy, according to Dominic Cummings

Re: The only thing

My impression from BBC coverage at the time is that while someone was talking about "herd immunity" in front of a microphone, the government had already had it beaten into their thick skulls that it is a stupid idea. Possibly also that it doesn't work.

Re: "Understand the technicalities in a way I couldn't do"

You could tell them the story about the chessboard and the grain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

For instance, someone does a favour for, er, the government and they claim only this nominal reward... (see also "Private Finance Initiative").

OK, maybe do not give them this particular version of the problem.