Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Been using Brave for years, didn't know YouTube had ads ;-)

Biz hired, and fired, a fake North Korean IT worker – then the ransom demands began

Re: Biz hired, and fired, a fake North Korean IT worker

It was a TEMU North Korean IT worker

Someone's finally taking on £10M Hull City Council ERP deal to replace Oracle

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

So maybe you need a city version, a town version and a rural one.

But I'm not sure that a Birmingham or Leeds system can't be downscaled for Newcastle or Sheffield, or that Cornwall is so different from Cumbria

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

Sure they get to put out bids and chose one, they aren't forced to use the same model from the Central People's Patriotic Tractor and Fire Engine Factory.

But at least councils generally get a working fire engine for roughly the same price as the next town over - if one of them decided to go to a company known for massive cost overruns and get a system that runs millions over budget and fails to deliver after being a decade late - you might want to ask why.

Is it just ego? It's feels more important and manager-ish to be negotiating with an Oracle or SAP, than just buying the same boring ERP as Basingstoke? Or do they believe that Bracknell has unique needs in the council tax and parking space that is unmet by any existing system and needs fundamental research in Computer Science ?

Is it to get the fact-finding trip to Oracle's reference site and golf course in Hawaii?

Or is it just like central government, and they are going to get a directorship once they get voted out?

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

It's Friday, my brain left early for the weekend - I couldn't rememebr who builds ambulances

Re: "the Council is expecting to accrue [..] £1 million [..] digital efficiency saving each year"

So why don't any of these systems get adopted nationally?

City A implements an ERP with system Y and it's all great. Then city B down the road, with presumably the same council tax/payroll/parking fines to process, goes to ORACLE/SAP/MCAFFEE and it's a disaster.

We manage it with other stuff, if one health authority buys standard fire engines from Scania and another buys standard fire engines from Vovlo - shouldn't it raise eyebrows if a 3rd NHS trust goes to Boeing and asks them for a custom project to adapt the 737MAX for use as a fire engine ?

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

Re: "Whether ESPN will learn from its third strike"

The real problem is the emergency tone. It's just government interference in ordinary people's lives.

If people wanted to know about imminent emergencies they can subscribe to new Alert-Twitter (tm) for only $9.99/month

Re: Broadcast licence?

>Fish and Wildlife could fine you for catching more than your limit, and revoke your fishing license

But if this was the 5th time you had blown up a dam and scared millions of people just to catch more fish - you might expect a fine larger than the cost of bait

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away

Re: Is it genuine?

It also allows the units to be fuelled in the factory, possibly for life. This means the user doesn't have to play with the spicy rocks. Playing with spicy rocks is difficult

>The really small SMRs seem to be a lot less successful in terms of actually getting bought by customers than the larger ones.

I think their aim is to have new customers. There is only one customer for the big ones = the government. Or worse, the integral over all the different governments during the 20 years it takes to sell and build a full size plant.

Re: Meanwhile in silicone valley…

He was doomed as soon as he said the line - "I find a computer indispensable.

Re: They can afford it, and we need them to...

So people are complaining that SV companies are making long term investments in infrastructure ?

Re: Unregulated Nuclear Generation ?

Yeah cos the EPA, DoE and the other regulatory agencies are just going to say, "Oh, you're a tech company not a utility? Well help yourself, move fast and break things - bro"

Alleged Bitcoin crook faces 5 years after SEC's X account pwned

Re: Rubbish!

If you have total control over SEC's announcements to millions of people you would think you can do more than shift BITCOIN $1000

Post Office CTO had 'nagging doubts' about Horizon system despite reliability assurances

Re: Why always 'someone else'

> Seems KPIs are an excuse for saying the numbers are OK therefore nothing is wrong

Thought that was what KPGM were for ?

Re: There wasn't any money.

Ok, That money all went back to the Post Office, ie the government, the government stealing money is OK

Re: Why always 'someone else'

So perhaps C suites of public private partnership companies should invest in a Private Eye subscription ?

Re: If there's no audit log how can there be prosecutions?

>That money was going somewhere...

There wasn't any money.

A software bug said that a small Sub Post Office in Tobermory sold £65535 worth of stamps over lunch - then the post master better have £65535 cash in the till, or they have obviously stolen it !

Re: Why always 'someone else'

His job was not to know anything, that's why he was paid so much.

Elon Musk's disaster relief promises: Should we believe the hype?

Re: may have sounded good, but really, it's not much more than a PR stunt

To be honest that would be funny. Would it be better to sell "Hebrew National" or Halal hot dogs ?

Re: tax them

Not if your're proper wealthy - not just $x00K/year wealthy.

You have $Bn in shares that would attract capital gains if you sell.

Borrow against these shares so pay no tax on the money you live on, in fact claim back the interest.

When you die your estate, and the banks, gets your shares with capital gains reset to your death = no tax on all the gains since Facebook/Amazon/MSFT/Tesla etc were founded

Re: tax them

Taxed on income. None of these billionaires have income.

Re: Don't worry about Musk

>Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Note: for external application only

UK electronics firms want government to stop taxing trash and let them fix it instead

Re: Repaired or refurbished?

Doesn't one simply have an artisan on staff to deal with such trivialities?

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right! It is the business of the wealthy man To give employment to the artisan

No problem, we just combine the other hot topic of el'reg readers.

Everyone register themselves as their own repairers under IR35

Re: Repaired or refurbished?

And repair will always be expensive compared to mass production and container shipping.

Unless we can find a way of having skilled repairers with tools and a van waiting around in $BIG CITY for your call = stop paying them.

Re: Stop it!

Obviously North Dakota is made up, they just put the "true story" line in Fargo for storytelling

Re: Repaired or refurbished?

>plus the dreaded “call out fee”,

I think I can see a whole new government policy. Combining eternal favourites 'the big society' and 'conscription(*)'

Electronic and mechanical engineers, along with Windows admins, will be rounded up encouraged to volunteer to go around to people's houses for free and fix their appliances / turn their computers off and on again.

* should the BOFHs be armed ?

Re: Stop it!

>To the majority of USAians, there is NO WORLD outside the Lower 48.

That's not entirely true.

To many of them, some of the 48 aren't real - see "Olympic tickets for New Mexico residents", "West Virginia drivers arrested for fake state on license"

Re: Industry lobbyists...

But this is also to save the planet.

Don't you love the planet ?

Re: Colour Me Cynical

Great, everything sold to consumers will be 'refurbished by manufacturer' in sealed boxes = 20% discount

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: Langley Air Force Base and Naval Station Norfolk

Well in Hawaii it would involve somebody trying to remember how to login to the email that they used for the nuclear warning password reset

Re: Langley Air Force Base and Naval Station Norfolk

>What I have a hard time swallowing is there not being a way to direct jamming signals

If course you can, you just need permission from the FCC and inform the FAA and dialogue with stakeholders and have Space Command stamp in and demand that they are in charge of anything GPS

The paperwork we had to do in order to test laser guide stars from Mauna Kea, while the Top-Secret (don't look at the big white telescope domes) USAF stuff next door on Mauna Loa had to do all that AND get permission from every level of DoD and the Boy Scouts.

Re: the most sophisticated agencies on earth could not track them once they left

Israelis "intercepting" = shooting them down with missiles

Shooting at a bunch of hobby drone with surface to air missiles over an American city = might lead to having to hire more PR agents

Re: 20 ft long and invulnerable

1, give a bunch of Americans even more guns

2, put them in a circle and give them orders to fire at anything suspicious

3, film it for youtube

4, profit ?

Re: My collection

They only sell them in packs of 48 though

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Re: Within a factor of two anyway

The advantage of district heating is that it works very well in highly dense urban centers with large numbers of apartment towers all under the control of a single central authority and clustered around a central nuclear power plant = the American suburban dream

Within a factor of two anyway

"85 MW of net electricity, which the company claims would be enough to power and heat more than 70,000 American homes."

So 1KW per American home?

Single detached family homes in the USA use 16KWh/year = 2KW average power, and that's not including any gas heating or charging EVs

Hopefully the rest of their plan for commercial fusion power is more realistic

Testing spacecraft material the Sandia way: Setting it on fire with mirrors

Not exactly rocket scientists

"energy expenditure by anywhere from 15 kilowatts to 60,000 kilowatts per test "

I'm hoping they didn't say that

What's that in firking (furlongs-per-fortnite)2

Re: Helmets but no safety shoes?

In case the sky falls on their heads !

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

>bellend equity players played pass-the-parcel with a nuclear shit-ton of mega-debt

I think that describes the global financial system since the 17th Century

Trump campaign arms up with 'unhackable' phones after Iranian intrusion

How do you validate that the operator can't later change the result?

Remember it's not the vote that counts , it's the person that count the votes !

Re: Very stable genius

You're saying Trump is Hercules ?

Re: Hmm

In fact he was probably one of the 'good' gun owners that have been so effective in preventing school shootings

Re: Hmm

If you have 1000s of people, all armed to the teeth as is their 2nd amendment right, dressed entirely in flags and Trump logo-ed clothing, carrying banners claiming migrants eat cats+dogs and/or are cannibals

How do you detect a nutjob ?

I assume there was a tip jar for any sovereign wealth funds that wanted to slip him a couple of $Bn to 'buy yourself something nice"

Windows 11 24H2 disk space hoarding a 'reporting error'

Re: Just another reason

All prime number versions of Windows are bad.

Win1,2,3 bad as were W8 and W11.

While W95, W7 and W10 were OK

(Note: Primetest performed on a 90s Pentium)

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Wait. What?

>So, it's useless.

So far, but once the lifespan is negative we predict an inflection point in security

Would banning ransomware insurance stop the scourge?

Re: Cyber Insurance?

Because the insurance industry is slow and conservative. In the past, compared to fire/flood/public-liability etc the risk/cost of cyber-attack is probably low for some random chemical plant in middle-America.

They are probably just catching up with "#metoo" liabilities

>There are literally companies that exist to do this..

Yes, they are called "banks", often with the name of the country in front of the word "Bank"

Re: Also ban cryptocurrency

You can make it very difficult to exchange crypto for USD.

Sure, I can always post $100 bills to a PO Box in the Narnia Virgin Isles and hope to get crypto. But if it's illegal to buy it then it's hard for a public company to pay $M in ransom with Bitcoin