Posts by Andy Mac

HPE to pursue $4B claim against estate of Mike Lynch over Autonomy acquisition

Personally, I don’t remember the last time the Mafia went to court to get a knee-capping order.

Sorry, Moxie. Blaming Agile for software stagnation puts the wrong villain in the wrong play

Re: He didn't really say it was Agile's fault

The first thing you learn with LISP is that sociopathy is a real thing.

Prior UK government planned £485M four-year budget for Palantir-based healthcare system

Re: Noddy level software purchase

A decade? My memory stretches 20 years back to the NHS Programme for IT.

They might as well just launch the money at the sun.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Re: MS Passport... There can be only one?

I always thought the biggest mistake of the Ballmer era was to label everything as Windows. It just confused and annoyed everyone that Windows Whatever didn’t run Office or your actual favourite app.

Imagine the iOS had been called Mac for Phones.

GitHub rolls back database change after breaking itself

Re: Take your bets!

You fat fingered “fat fingered”, have a beer on me

Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators

And here is the problem with signing away your data. You agree for the data to be passed to Verisk, which you unthinkingly assume is necessary for the service, if you read the fine print at all.

The kicker is that you have no agreement with Verisk on what they do with your data. But it is no longer *your* data to control. This is what really needs to change.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

I’m finally transitioning to Mint from Windows. Ad’s masquerading as emails in the new Outlook was the final straw.

Now if only I can get all my emails out of their pst file…

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

No-one got fired for choosing Oracle…

…but plenty of people have been “asked to resign”

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: Party in charge is irrelevant

I used to know someone who worked at the Department of International Development. He said he never heard the civil servants there talking about international development, only about their own careers.

Julian Assange pleads guilty, leaves courtroom a free man

Re: "certain types of journalism won't be tolerated"

Had they not heard of authorisation? Poor IT security is no excuse.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

I think they implied “with people inside”

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

If the best AI Facebook can muster is their CEO, it’s clear the technology has a long way to go…

FBI and friends get two more years of warrantless FISA Section 702 snooping

It’s heartwarming to see that bipartisanship in congress isn’t completely dead.

Happy 20th birthday Gmail, you're mostly grown up – now fix the spam

I save my gmail for people I wouldn’t even give my hotmail to.

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

“…Apple doesn't really do that so much."

So they do it a bit? Just a little bit of data slurping at the weekends? And I assume they can stop any time they want?

EU antitrust cops probe Microsoft ties between Entra ID and 365 services

I, for one, am looking forward to getting my gmail without a Google account…

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Ye mae take our freedom, but yae’ll never take our cheap meats wrapped in pastry!!!

Snowflake share price falls after revenue forecasts dip below expectations

Re: FCTLOT

I live for the day when the headline reads “Analysts fired for making wrong revenue predictions”

On-disk format change beckons for brave early adopters of Bcachefs

What is a BCA Chef anyway?

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: Built to last

IIRC, 95 = 4, XP = 5 and Vista = 6.

Australian Federal Police arrest man suspected of exploiting Optus cyberattack

The moron didn’t even use a Bitcoin wallet. If only all criminals had equal intelligence…

Apple debuts iPhone 14, Watch 8, other sparkly things

Re: Dynamic Island*

Isn’t it just “we have an area of no screen, and we make the screen around and it black sometimes to make it look bigger”?

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

Re: 200% trust in NASA

Seconded. This is, literally, rocket science. Hang on in there NASA.

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

Re: Zuck has been listening to too much Eagles

Maybe it’s the codename for his virtual world. Either that or Royston Vasey.

SAP hits 50: Entrenched, spread out and fully middle-aged

"From their perspective, among things it got right were creating a business model in which CIOs and consulting firms could benefit personally by persuading their employer and clients to buy SAP, irrespective of whether that was the right thing for the company to do.

That’s a rather long-winded way of saying “bribery”

CIA illegally harvested US citizens' data, senators assert

Land of the Free spies on its own?

<Bear enters woods>

<Flushing sound heard>

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

Can I propose the substitute picture be of a squirrel?

An example of squirrel-replacement can be found at https://what-if.xkcd.com/98/.

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Re: Pointless

The long-since-departed El Reg mobile app had dark mode. Oh, how I miss it.

TikTok no worse than Facebook for privacy, says Citizen Lab (although Chinese TikTok is a horror)

No worse than Facebook

That’s like saying I’m no worse a cook than Jeffrey Dahmer.

FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks

There ain’t no party

There ain’t no party like a Scat Club party. It doesn’t mean I want to go to one.

(Happy birthday FSF)

IR35 tax reforms for UK freelancers glide through committee stage: D-Day set for 6 April 2021

On the subject of Finance Bills...

...MPs, at least government ones, don’t read them. Passing a finance bill is central to the continuing existence of the current government so they’ll vote for it anyway.

This opinion stems from an anecdote I heard about an previous bit of egregious legislation in a Finance Bill. When it brought to the attention of a govt MP as part of a campaign, they were surprised by it. Something they surely would have voted for, if they had bothered to turn up that day of course.

Microsoft emits a colourful Windows Terminal preview

Re: it ain't json

Personally, I find the whole property-names-in-quotes thing to cause an involuntary twitch in my eye.

The virus curing the mobile industry's chronic addiction... and sparking an impressive algorithmic price experiment

Re: COVID-19

Did they really have to pick a name that sounds like it comes from a cheap disaster novel?

Are you getting it? Yes, armageddon it: Mass hysteria takes hold as the Windows 7 axe falls

Re: Ah, Git ...

Fools! Promite is the only way.

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

Given that my Unifi access points wouldn’t work without an internet connection, I always assumed they were sending something back.

It’s a sad indictment of the modern world of technology that I made that assumption.

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

Re: DES

I’m nit sure if anyone looks at the those passwords, they just script something to push all the hacked accounts at different sites to see what sticks.

As a side note, an 8 char password of lowercase letters and numbers of mine was lost as part of the Adobe hack. According to Have I Been Pwnd, it’s never been cracked.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Re: No problems here!

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest iTunes worked in the first place.

The story so far: How's that Autonomy High Court battle with HPE looking at half-time?

In this part of the world we’re basking in the winter sun. Just sayin’...

This is not the cloud you're looking for.... Oracle's JEDI mind tricks work as Trump forces $10bn IT project to drop out of warp

I hate it when you want everyone to lose.

Reach out for the healing hands... of guru Dabbs

Time Travel is Real!

Is it just me, or is Jobssy wearing an Apple Watch in that photo?

NAND down we goooo: Flash supplier revenues plunged in first quarter

Can the extra chips be converted into Intel CPUs? I hear there’s a shortage.

#waitingsixweeksformylaptopandnotatallpissedoffaboutitohno

Gee, SEC, how did that get out?! 'Leaked' Tesla email claims big boost in Model 3 production

So Lazza lost $420M? The materials haven't yet been invented to make a violin small enough.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

Re: No link for you!

Even an article about porn can be turned into a discussion on text editors.

Commentards, I salute you!

Azure thing at last: Windows Virtual Desktop takes to the cloudy stage

Anything that helps get rid of the foetid stench of Citrix from my life is most welcome.

NASA: We need commercial rockets! SLS: Oh no you don't!

"...it is also important to remember that NASA has history when it comes to racing to meet arbitrary deadlines."

To be fair they were good at it once "...before this decade is out...land a man on the moon".

But also, Apollo 1. So...yeah.

What do WLinux and Benedict Cumberbatch have in common? They're both fond of Pengwin

Re: Anglophones....

More importantly, how did Morgan Freeman say it?

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

So if USB 3.0 is now 3.2 Gen 1, what is now considered 3.0?

And will USB4.\|~> be called SuperDuperSpeed?

You know the drill: SAP has asked Joe Public to name Munich arena so go forth and be very silly

SAP in the Face

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

Re: As ever

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

If you are paying for the product, then you’re an additional revenue stream.

Serverless is awesome (if you overlook inflated costs, dislike distributed computing, love vendor lock-in), say boffins

So according to this paper, serverless is good for "this" but not for "that". Isn't that true of everything and the rest is just hype?

And if you're believing the hype... well, there probably wasn't much hope for you in the first place.