Posts by Alistair

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

Re: a flurry of branching narratives created to feed the attention span of modern Hollywood

@heyrick:

Hollywont has to feed to the masses. And sadly, the sum total intelligence on the planet is a constant.

FreeBSD gains eMMC support so … errr … watch out, Android

Re: Don't Understand....

F26 -> systemd pulseaudio -> some folks have an allergy to Poettering. And workstation comes with far too much crap for some folks. My hate for systemd is *starting* to dissipate but only because I've found some interesting functionality that makes automation and error messaging within automation somewhat informative - given a bit of creativity.

Pulse -- well -- I hate that it brought windows audio functionality to linux and I love that it brought windows audio functionality to linux. It just depends on if I'm talking about WOW on wine or trying to conf call on lync in a KVM guest windows instance.

Freebsd -> sysvinit, absolutely minimal requirements to get it off the ground and running, and the cross dependency tree for things is *much* shorter. and networking -- network network. Just try it on the same hardware -- you will understand quickly.

Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers

For the dazed and confused, all three of my kids managed to get this down before the age of 10. It isn't perfect, but it covers stuff rather well for a cartoon. I strongly recommend it for youngsters to get the idea of evolution.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9142875-evolution

Yes, there's stuff in there that there is still open debate over in the biophysics department, but it does well.

We've managed to test the idea of what the *minimum* requirements were to build the components of RNA, and we've seen that genetic evolution has a HUGE dependence on "Luck/Chance/random solar flare". What is missing are the concrete details - personally I'm satisfied that we're here based on an incredible string of random chances over an insanely long period of time. It is also what has me convinced that there are very likely many many many other planets out there with their own variation of chemical soup that has acquired self awareness. I just hope that its not the assholes of the universe that get the FTL bit down first.

As for the concrete details of what happened back then, we'll need the physicists to figure out how to use those gravity waves to bend time so we can look back there.

(Its stuff like this my mother, uncle and I end up booting around late in the evening over an open fire and makes life *really* interesting)

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

I hit the comments on this thread - there were 66 comments.

C'mon ElReg Commetariat, we can do this ... only 599 more to go...

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

Hmmm.

I heartily suggest dropping 25,000 JD flags throughout current Daesh strong holds, clearly labelled in arabic "English version of our flag". Along with many many bottles of JD. Early the next morning the entirety of Daesh can be rounded up and "rescued" from the hangover.

Drunk canoeing no longer driving offence in Canada

Re: Really? It's not a joke.

@Haefen:

You are an american of the tea party type. Please go home. And please leave the fertilizer in the farm yard.

I claim my Laurier/Spock

I as a proud canuck am horrified that this government will be allowing lazy, welfare cheating, inebriated, immigrant terrorist aquatic paddlers to place our peaceful, graceful, water dwelling wildlife at such terrible risk. I insist that the drunk kayak crazies be shot on sight.

Wont anyone think of the frogs?

<that's an especially Ontarian joke by the way>

Angst in her pants: Alleged US govt leaker Reality Winner stashed docs in her pantyhose

Re: Made Up Name Surely - Is Her Name Considered Serious (& Don't Call Me Shirley)!

@ Phuzz.

That operation has been public knowledge since the last American Presidential election.

Dildon'ts of Bluetooth: Pen test boffins sniff out Berlin's smart butt plugs

Re: Longing for the good old days

"When a real woman kick started her vibrator..."

<*cough* -- might be a tad soonish>

Apparently the Hef no longer responds to kickstarts.....

"Whale Oil Beef Hooked"

I don't think you can set your bluetooth pin to be that either.

BOFH: Come on, PFY, let's pick a Boss

/thinks a moment.

Alexa: Kill Siri.

Okay Google: Kill Alexa

Siri: kill google now.

....

18 hours later, terminator model 1?

Shock! Hackers for medieval caliphate are terrible coders

History is important when one discusses these events

Do keep in mind the *real* origins of Al Qeda, the Taliban and others of this ilk.

What has precipitated over the 30 some years since they were fired up (by western powers) is a downward spiral of rational thought, polarized religious education, misguided logic (thus utter fail). The result is eventually a combination of bad logical processing in a large portion of the population, assumption that what an individual "leader" says is always and must be the most powerful of truths, and an overwhelming fear of anything that does not equate to or parallel the guidance of the "leader".

It is rather interesting that if one looks at the summary of the 'result' it can be applied to cultures *outside* of Daesh.

Re: Bah!

@Stevie

i have a couple of shell scripts written in a fit of pique that include * both * those variables.

What's in this Monday morning storage BLT? A 12TB WD HDD, wars of words – and more

Re: 13 hours to copy a disk?

@SimonH

ZFS. (freebsd and smokes oracles crap)

Sysadmin tells user CSI-style password guessing never w– wait WTF?! It's 'PASSWORD1'!

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

"good God how do they get away with this"

It is a pension fund. The lousy security is there so that the pension fund managers can claim that they were raided by "hackers" when it is found to be bereft of funds, and just before they resign and disappear to a small south pacific islands.

Microsoft and Facebook's transatlantic cable completed

Dammit. Snack time.

Off the cornerstore for a bag of bits n' bites.

Kebab and pizza shop owner jailed for hiding £179k from the taxman

slow commetards on a friday

not one mention of HMG getting their slice of the pie.

YOU ARE ALL FIRED!!!!

You forgot that you hired me and now you're saying it's my fault?

I was *never* the AV support on any training sessions I've been to. I almost *always* however end up fixing what is wrong with the AV system. Including a presentation by a BOD member in the 350 seat theatre setup that used *gag* BLUETOOTH (Q#$%#$%^#$%) for the microphones.

(Did you know you can use a blackberry 9 series as an audio relay station in bluetooth?)

Mobe reception grief turns LTE Apple Watch 3 into – er, a dull watch

@Jonathan_27

No, not you connected to internet.

Internet must be able to see you. Find you. Hear you. See you. Track you. Sell you.

Please proceed to re-education camp.

Quebec takes mature approach to 'grilled cheese' ban

One has to understand Canadian Cheddar to truly grasp the curd here. Mes amis quebecois have been positively military in their defence of bad french. Croque monsieur would not have been unacceptable to them, but if one used the english term grilled cheese they came up with that abomination in french. But most modern quebecois still ask for fries with their grilled cheese and beer.

And sorry, done properly one uses a stainless steel pan, low heat and one butters both sides of the bread, NOT the pan, two 1/8" thick slices of *real* cheddar and some cracked black pepper.

And who in the name of ${FOODEITY} contaminates a good cheddar with eggs and oil?

If its put on a press and squashed you've killed the wonder of the chrunch/mush/goosh combination.

Now, grilled cheese, poutine and beer on the deck. Sounds like a wonderful lunch break.

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

Perhaps the solution is to *stop* creating terrorist cells to depose other political entities.

But hell, I'm not going to consider a *serious* issue with a realistic perception.

Re: How about...

"There are, no doubt, some very tech-savvy civil servants, especially at the various secret-squirrel places. "

Yes but tech-savvy swivel servants are stuck spinning in their chairs, and have gone completely nuts anyhow.

Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 is hot, but not much more than the S8+

Re: Moto G5

I'm not sure what moto is doing with the G5, but MotoG5 with RR and I can go (sometimes) three days with regular usage, but typically don't go below 60% battery on a regular day. Mind you I only have about 10 installed apps, and I throttle them *all* with ES.

Re: The single failure with all "Flagship" these phones..

I have NetFlix on my MotoG5. I keep up with my (no one else in house watches) series off NF by watching while I cook dinner. (Bluetooth headset comes in handy here, so I'm not chopping cable into the onions or summat) HD is utterly pointless on a phone. In any circumstances.

Apocalypse now: Ad biz cries foul over Apple's great AI cookie purge

Dear Advertisers

You may not use our product without appropriate licensing fees.

signed Apple.

<Hey, anyone recall ABP?>

Python explosion blamed on pandas

Re: approachable for novice programmers?

"So how exactly do you install pandas?"

Typically one gets a zoo on board about 2 to 3 years ahead of schedule, and arranges government funding to build a specialist panda enclosure, and then one writes up an agreement with the Chinese Government and the panda breeding associations. From what I've been reading of late it costs between $85,000USD to $1.1Million USD a month to host the pandas. Most of the money is supposed to go back to the breeding and protection of the species, but I've no proof of that.

<ref TorStar article "Pandas Installed at Toronto Zoo over objections from (Free speech advocacy group) >

Hubble catches a glimpse WASP-12b, an almost pitch-black exoplanet

Lets just keep an eye on that thing and make sure it's not calling Zorg any time soon.

Although, I'll happily assist Leloo if it does.

Boffin wins (Ig) Nobel prize asking if cats can be liquid

Re: NO

I just think that the Regeditors need to add a match for my preferred icon, Cranky Old Codger, with a fem bent. Perhaps a headshot of Admiral Grace would be appropos?

And yes, the icon is mislabelled Windows User.

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

Re: WEEE directive

I have five L3000's to add to the stack.

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

Re: In my experience ...

@jake

I keep all the ordinary users in the middle drawer of their own desks. Keeps things tidy around the office.

I only let the *weird* ones out.

Re: Ped-ANT-ic typo in title

@Symon

That would be Auntie Terrie.

*cough*

BOFH: We're only here because they said there would be biscuits

Rebranding exercises and websites.

Last time I dealt with a rebranding mess (being a Canuck is relevant) was "Our accents keep coming up on the english pages!"

Layup done my CSS. Calling with locale set to en_CA_fr into an i18n package that only existed in $(apacheconf). No idea how apache worked, or the point of locale or internationalization. not one clue. Why I ask(ed) would one accept application *configuration* advise from a *DESIGN* house?

AMD Ryzen beats Intel Core i7 as a heater (that's also a server)

@SRS

Data center.

Pool on roof.

Leak management - level expert! I'll bet that pool crew was in daily.

I suppose I should ask how many floors were in the building.

One of our DC's had a pool in it before it became a DC. It was sadly backfilled.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: Surely....

dear god.

the whole cpuid bit sounds like something I'd write in my scripts......

Thanks for a morning chuckle.

Re: What about "leverage" as a verb?

"Stray from the path and they'll devour you in packs."

No, no, no, not packs. We prefer our victims in sammiches or sarnies!

Bluetooth bugs bedevil billions of devices

I'm not sure what idiot suggested it or has implemented it (I've seen ads recently that indicate that it has been done) but apparently you can buy a bluetooth dongle to plug into your OBDII port so you can check your car with your phone....

El Reg is hiring an intern. Apply now before it closes

Internship application

I have three male offspring. 21 year old has a F/T job and is working on acquiring a social life. 20 year old has a P/T job and HFA, (social/spacial) but is an absolute dictionary on spelling and grammar. 11 Year old can whup anyone's ass in most PS/3 and PS/4 FPS games, but has utterly illegible handwriting. Which one should I pack up and ship over? ( I'm pretty sure I can fold any one of the three into a carton with sufficient air and water for a 3 day express post run on Fedex)

Myself, I'm too far gone in the cynical, critical, passive-agressive world of corporate politics in the average modern bureaucracy and outsourcing laden enterprise IT business to write anything for publication. Your sub-editors would be overburdened with removing blazing rips against the modern overpaid corporate executives and brain dead venture capitalists that are out there.

(yes this is *mostly* a joke. well, at least the first paragraph is)

Atlassian kills God, rebrands as a mountain, a structurally unsound 'A' or a high five

Re: Charlie Sans?

@Throatwarbler:

many thanks for that link. I've a team (or three) to send there.......

Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties

Re: People Extorting Toonies for Apes

@ TISGD

Upvoted, even if its only from another canuck

Astroboffins map 845 galaxies in glorious 3D, maybe dark matter too

potato shaped galaxies.

hmmm

Dark Matter is the pepper on the 'tatoes?

Oracle to shutter most Euro hardware support teams

@kain p.

Hookers and brown paper bags full of cash are reserved for legislative modification, not for closing sales deals. Please read the executive employee guidelines again, or your share vesting will be moved out 3 quarters.

Looking forward to Solaris 11.next this year? Whomp-whomp. Check again in 2018

Re: Oracle cares about one thing only...

Tru64 was a rock solid entity in one respect, but it suffered from a couple of bad drivers in my experience. HP took over non-stop, and most of the tru64 folks headed there.

Non-stop is a rock. *(cough)* even when you screw up the partition certs. (and if you get the reference, I know where you work)

Re: Oracle cares about one thing only...

@asdf

Sadly, hpux *can* crash. Mind you it seems to me to only have done that when the *cough* oracle database did something egregious.

42: The answer to life, the universe and how many Cisco products have Struts bugs

why assume this has bugger all to do with politics?

Trust me, media on *both* sides of the bullshit meter do this with absolutely every article.

The real issue is that people believe it is a (left wing) vs (right wing) battle and decide that they live on one or the other side.

Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus

Apple's new toy

Big flat screen, no button in the middle, faeces recognition, .... oh, nope, misread that...

(the one with the rooted android and RR, and no google apps in the pocket please)

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

I can honestly say that I didn't worry much about his politics, his ability to portray humanity in his stories was excellent. When he corroborated with Niven the results were monuments to the collision of science and society.

I always loved Chaos Manor in Byte, and can honestly say that his talent for turning out humour in the midst of (digital) chaos has polluted many of my post-mortems reports.

(And the whole thing with the coffee trader in Mote has likely driven my addiction to weird and odd coffee preparation throughout my career)

Farewell Jerry.

Scotiabank internet whizzkids screw up their HTTPS security certs

ScotiaBank IT -> IBM GDF.

Any questions?

Red Hat speed fiends celebrate automation

@Jim

While I agree the single largest issue for most SA's *was* provisioning, I'll note that the idea of 'immutable infrastructure' is *not* that the (system never changes). It is an alteration in the way one thinks of infrastructure. If one thinks of the (Physical host/VM OS, baseline services i.e. DNS, auth, mail, logging, ntpd, network, storage, FS layout) as infrastructure, they *can* become immutable.

You put the (cilent/guest/application/db/service) into its *own* box, separate from the infra box, then automation starts to be massively effective. -- no, one does not roll things out across one's prod systems without testing, but at least once one starts thinking in the context of managing 8K or more systems with only 32 people (and I'm talking Director, managers, PA's OS, platform, tools network/storage team), you learn to box things up nicely, separate what is test/dev/qa/prod, what can be handled in a herd and what needs to be snowflaked.

While it has been a while, we flipped the switch on DNS servers, migrating from an old set of hosts, to a new fancy shmancy cluster of application servers for DNS management as a single change to just over 5,900 *servers* and some 12k desktops. In about an hour, including final validations. Automation made the system changes. *and* provided the validation results.

the *testing* rollouts, executed 5 or 6 times prior, on limited targets, gave us the comfort to do that. And automation made backing out the *tests* just as easy. Total time ? about 18 hours, 11 of which were spent on the paper work and conf calls to get the change approved.

I'll guess that you've never had the opportunity as an SA to point out that a vendor is using *default dumb* in installation instructions for their application. I've found *VERY* few application vendors that have *default intelligent* installations. To make your environment manageable, as an SA you have to be an utter prick and override the "Install to root" "Run as Root" "well we have to do this because we don't know" crap. And willing to take the time to fix it so that it does work once in the box.

Top tip, hacker newbs: Don't use the same Skype ID for IoT bot herding and job ads

Hmmmm

lessseee.

13.

Implied male.

wants to hack cctv cams.

Uhhhh huh.

the little bugger can't find pr0n on t'interwebs yet, so he's going hacking for his own?

Facebook ran $100k of deliberately divisive Russian ads ahead of 2016 US election

Re: Just when you thought...

@ Richard:

Just because a media entity is not directly owned or managed by the government does not mean that it is automatically impartial. Money, the owners, have an opinion. Money, the owners, can dictate the opinion of the media entities they own. It may not be *government* propaganda, but it is still, in context, propaganda.