Posts by Kubla Cant

UK.gov issues internal 'ditch Oracle NOW' edict to end pricey addiction

@Hans 1

It's likely that a large part of the licensing and support costs relate to Oracle applications, rather than simply to the database. Databases are pretty much a commodity item these days, corporate systems, less so.

The Q7: Audi’s big SUV goes from tosspot to tip-top

There is no vehicle more practical than a SUV if you need to take along a lot of kit at the same time as being able to transport people out where required.

Except, possibly, an estate car. This Audi looks like it has a lot of load space, but many SUVs have a disappointingly titchy load floor when the seats are up.

Re: Boring

this is definitely a more soccer-mom looking affair

I should have thought that the population of mothers who play football would be too small to constitute a worthwhile market.

'Parent and Baby' spaces

These spaces ought to be time-limited. After bed-time they should be available for grown-ups to use.

What balls! India blocks 0.00008 per cent of web in anti-pr0n move

The Net Porn interprets censorship as damage and routes squirms around it.

Hacktivists congratulate Daily Show's Jon Stewart via Donald Trump's website

As time goes by it becomes more and more evident that the people who crave power are the least suited to be granted it. Why would anybody wholly sane want a job that consists mostly of sitting in meetings with fellow blowhards?

Assessing the power of Intel’s SSD 750 … but check your motherboard before buying

Re: A Hard Disk - on a card?

2.8" DSDD? 1Mb?

You wur lucky! We 'ad 36" single sided 'alf density disks that wur so 'eavy it took a team of three operators to mount one. T'storage capacity wer nobbut 360kb, and if you forgot to press Ctrl-C you 'ad a BDOS ERR and everybody 'ad to go 'ome for t'rest o' t'day while you rebooted t'system.

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Re: HOW IT WORKS *

@Arnaut: Language barriers are more of a perceived issue for monoglottal Brits.

More of an issue for Brits, maybe, but still an issue. In the USA, an anglophone can consider work in any state without serious linguistic barriers. For a Greek to be similarly mobile in the EZ he'd need a working knowledge of over twenty languages, from at least four different language families. Some businesses may use English as a lingua franca (ha ha), but the vast number of jobs where this isn't possible means that there's a significant language barrier. Why do so many economic migrants end up in camps at Calais? It's more likely because they have enough English to hope to work here than because we have generous welfare provisions (despite what the Daily Mail says - you wouldn't cross a continent just to get slightly higher benefits).

Yes, there are cultural and educational barriers to job mobility in the USA, but these can be discounted because they're constant for all currency unions.

Buffoon in 999 call: 'Cat ate my bacon and I want to press charges'

Re: Unfortunate timing

This is an entirely different police force in an entirely different country - or are you going to accuse the English of shooting unarmed black Americans on a weekly basis too?

Calm down. Now re-read my post and you'll see that the only thing I accused anyone of was a certain lack of tact.

The actions of US police forces have no bearing at all on what people living in the UK might expect from a British police force. The actions of a force in Yorkshire, Scotland, or any other part of the UK manifestly do. And despite the efforts of the SNP, Scotland is still part of the UK, not "an entirely different country".

Unfortunate timing

I can't help thinking that it's unfortunate timing for the plod to push a hilarious 999 timewasters story just a week or two after the distinctly less hilarious incident of the Scottish car crash that they couldn't be bothered to attend.

Giant Facebook SOLAR LASER DRONE to FEED interwebs into YOUR FACE

it can stay focused on a dime from a distance of ten or more miles away, we're told. This will enable the drones to pass information ... to ground stations.

So the drone spots coins on the ground, then sends messages back to the ground station telling somebody to go and pick them up. Impressive, but it doesn't sound like much of a revenue stream.

UK.gov wants to stop teenagers looking at tits online. No, really

Re: 5 minutes

Q: Are you over 18?

A: Yes

There's a hilarious variant on this on BBC iPlayer. If a show contains "strong language" it displays a popup asking if you're old enough to stand it. If you answer "Yes", it displays another popup asking if you want to set up parental controls.

In households with no children this is very annoying. In all other households I can't see it having any effect whatever.

I want to see age restrictions put into place or these websites will face being shut down.

That's going to work well, because of course all porn sites are based in Britain.

And on that bombshell: Top Gear's Clarkson to reappear on Amazon

Small potatoes?

The BBC sells Top Gear all over the world, so I imagine the production budget is pretty large (even if it doesn't stretch to hot food). For the same reason, car manufacturers are probably very keen to lend them cars, even for stunts like football that result in several being wrecked, or for driving a Bentley at full speed over a rally course.

Amazon Prime may be the shape of the future, but I should think the audience it delivers is nothing like as large. The resulting show may be rather small potatoes.

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

So what's the best way to down a drone?

Here in the UK, the firearm option is unavailable*, so what are the alternatives, and how legal are they?

An earlier commentard suggested a pressure hose, which sounds like fun, though I expect the range is a bit limited, and you would probably get complaints from anybody who was underneath.

Someone else suggested a defence drone that could drop stuff into the intruder's rotors.

What about electronic counter-measures? I assume traffic to and from the drone is encrypted to prevent hijacking, but would it be possible to disrupt it in some way? The attraction of this is that it would be much harder to trace the drone's "accident" back to you.

* Given the amount of willy-waving associated with firearms, I'm not sorry, though I anticipate a shoal of downvotes for saying so.

Moto fires BROADSIDE into the flagship phone's waterline with X Play and Style

Re: "Not enough posts to put in a hyperlink."

No need for copy&paste, at least in Firefox. Highlight any text that's a de facto hyperlink, right click and you can open it in a new tab or window.

Windows 10: A sysadmin speaks his brains – and says MEH

I prefer to not have to fight Microsoft to keep my computer from rebooting and annihilating all my open applications

Why does Windows do this? My Linux systems seem to install about two updates per week, and rarely have to reboot. When they do, you have the option to defer the restart. And what's the deal with Windows applications that require you to shut down other running programs before installation, and then demand a reboot afterwards?

Hurrah! Uber does work (in the broadest sense of the word) after all

Re: The purpose of licensing...

It's interesting that this discussion homes in on New York cabs. My impression is that the regime under which London's black cabs are regulated, though imperfect, pretty much achieves what these medallions are supposed to be doing.

Such scarcity as exists is caused by the application of stringent conditions, rather than artificial limitation. The result is a fleet of clean, well-maintained cabs driven by people who know what they're doing (and where they're going).

Regimes under which the price of cab licenses is high, but standards are not, are simply using the law as a source of income. It's similar to the way councils raise money from traffic cameras and parking meters.

W3C's failed Do Not Track crusade tumbles to ad-blockers' Vietnam

Re: Mobile may yet save advertising. Briefly.

Adblock is also available on Firefox for Android.

I can't help thinking that the admen's attempts to outlaw ad-blocking will be every bit as effective as the record industry's attempts to outlaw home copying, and for much the same reasons.

Ofcom wants to ease the pain of switching mobile networks. Good luck

"consumers are more concerning about Facebook and WhatsApp than receiving regular voice calls or SMS messages" [Conradi] said

Sigh. I'm desperately trying to think of a comment that expresses the utter depression induced by this quote, but I can't.

MORE Windows 10 bugs! Too many Start menu apps BREAK it

that '640K' quote that's been attributed to Bill has never ever been verified

Whether he said it or not, he evidently believed it, as Microsoft built an operating system that embodied the 640k limit.

Email apparently from Home Office warns of emails apparently from Home Office

Refunds

There's a similar irony in the new car tax (VED) system. You pay for your car tax online, and you no longer have to display a tax disc. +10 for belated arrival in the 21st century. But if you sell your car you have to apply for a refund of the remaining tax, which is sent as a cheque in the post. -10 for lack of follow-through.

I suspect that the offices of HMRC and DVLA are still like offices used to be half a century ago. For anything to do with paying out money you have to go to a cashier's office where a grumpy old geezer behind a barred window grudgingly writes out cheques using a dip pen.

("CHEQUE PAID IN A BOOTLE PAYMENT OPS" - I bet the cheque would clear quicker if it wasn't in a bottle.)

BONK! BONK! Windows 10 whack-a-mole – Microsoft still fixing bugs

Re: ?

The first para says Microsoft are "beavering away", but it's not a beaver, either. According to the image filename, it's a gopher (which I think is the same as a prairie dog).

Why does it take 8 hours for my posts to be approved?

Comparison

I think it's worth ponting out that the forums of El Reg are much more civilised, intelligent and readable than most other forums I've seen. I don't know whether it's the vigilance of the moderators or the moderation of the commentards, but the result is good.

It's a shame that the comments sections of even quality newspapers seem to be populated by mouth-foaming carpet-biters. I was looking at some book reviews in The Spectator the other day, and it was depressing to see all the personal vituperation in the comments - on book reviews! The trouble is that once a few loonies get established in a forum they attract more loonies and scare off people who have reasonable opinions they'd like to share.

It may be that the upvote/downvote button helps. When I see an opinion I disagree with, I can just click to downvote; so much easier than typing "@X: You are a malignant imbecile and anyone who agrees with you is a drivelling moron."

Invisible app ads slug smartmobes with 2GB of daily downloads

Re: @bazza The poor advertisers...

Isn't a lot of advertising deductible? So the money is going into advertising instead of taxes.

No. Advertising is tax-deductable in exactly the same way as any other cost of sale - materials, manufacturing costs, distribution costs, staff wages and so on. Advertising is a more visible irritant than any of these, but that doesn't alter the fact that it's an essential element.

Like most people, I find it annoying that the roads are full of heavy articulated trucks. But it would be idiotic for me to suggest that companies should distribute everything by canal, or to complain that the money spent on trucking is money diverted from taxes. To suggest that the abolition of advertising would increase tax revenues is equally incorrect.

Read Tim Worstall's recent article debunking the Grauniad's claim that capital allowances are a subsidy for companies for a similar case.

New study into lack of women in Tech: It's not the men's fault

warning - anecdotal evidence and small sample

In my dealings with Far Eastern IT workers I've formed the impression that the proportion of young people who choose IT because it's a good job is higher than it is in the West. Neither group is struggling to put food on the table*, but I suspect that Western schoolchildren get much more "just do whatever makes you happy" career advice. It's not a cultural difference in the kind of work you do, but in the constraints on your original choice. This may also explain differences between European countries.

* I can't help finding this amusing. "I really wanted to be a seamstress, but my family was so poor that I had to stay on at school studying study maths to A level, take a 3-year CS degree, then slave away writing computer programs all day."

Today's smart home devices are too dumb to succeed

Re: LAMP NOT BULB!

Bulbs grow, lamps glow.

So what do lightbulbs do?

It’s DEJA VU: Customer forgets to tell us about essential feature AGAIN

Office toilets

Architects who design office buildings invariably seem to delegate design of the toilets to a work-experience intern.

Just about every one I've ever used has four cubicles, four urinals, four handbasins and one or two hand driers. Under light usage this isn't a problem, but you don't have to run a Monte Carlo simulation to see that heavy usage is going to cause the room to fill up with people shaking drips off their fingers and drying their hands on their trousers.

It's even worse when the builders have decided to save money by installing Acme Economy brand hand driers, the sort that burn your hands with a feeble stream of hot air, yet never actually dry them.

Want longer battery life? Avoid the New York Times and The Grauniad

Re: JavaScript?

The JavaScript framework du jour seems to be AngularJS. Unlike JQuery, where the script is essentially driving the application in response to browser events, AngularJS seems to use some kind of continuous polling. It's a pleasure to work with: you can bind HTML tags to script variables declaratively, and see them all updated when the value changes, but I can't help wondering what kind of overhead this incurs. What's more, the preferred AngularJS architecture involves loading everything into one single-page application, so you'll have a substantial memory footprint as well as a busy processor.

Acer Revo One RL85: A pint-sized PC for the snug

Re: Moving "users" folder

I too skimmed through the MS KB article and thought "WTF?". Keeping the O/S, installed programs, and user data separate was a well-established practice back when MS-DOS was launched, but even now it still seems to be tricky and exotic for Microsoft.

On a related topic, can anybody imagine why, when MS eventually decided to implement symlinks, they made it so you need Admin privilege to create them?

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

Re: Suit'n'Tie Guy

When I see a coder wearing shirt and tie, all I think is that he's another modestly skilled type who couldn't cut it in the arena with the talented coders.

When I have to deal with someone in a suit and tie, I find myself instinctively distrusting them on sight.

I see a tie, I assume 'sales rep'.

And you're all wrong. There must be two dozen posts here that claim only casually-dressed techs are any good, you can't trust people in suits, pin-stripes are evil, and so on.

Can't you see that this is exactly the same as the mindset displayed by the HP management, the mindset that is being ridiculed here?

Smart casual

Are there any two more depressing words in the language? Back in the time when everybody had to wear a suit to work, life was simple. You got up in the morning and put on a clean shirt and the suit you didn't wear yesterday. No thought or planning required. Evenings and weekends, you could wear what you damn well wanted.

It's a fallacy to assume that the workplace was smarter as a result. When work clothing is something you only wear for work, and that under duress, you aren't going to take much care over it.

Then some management halfwit decided to "relax the dress code", but lacked the nerve to abolish it. Your evening/weekend gear doesn't fit this description, so you have to acquire an additional wardrobe of the kind of awful clothes that golfers wear. Every morning you have to assess whether your outfit is both casual enough and smart enough.

A company where I recently worked did dress-down Fridays - another stupid idea. But one week in three there would be an email cancelling the dress-down because "we have customers visiting".

Re: Stand out from the crowd

Or why not as The Great Engineer himself, Isambard Brunel?

You definitely wouldn't be allowed the cigar.

Re: Tidy Desk

I believe in Contextual Indexing. I know where something is because I can remember what I last used it for.

Maybe that should be "I would know where something is if I could remember what I last used it for".

NASA: 'Closest thing yet to ANOTHER EARTH' - FOUND

Re: [...] science being right and religion being bunkus

Religion is not "bunkus", it is a necessary tool in the construction of a society that is not based on you-got-what-I-want-give-it-or-I-kill-you.

You're reversing cause and effect. Religion, being a human construct, is an expression of innate, or at least culturally ingrained, human motivations.

Furthermore, if religion abolishes you-got-what-I-want-give-it-or-I-kill-you (which is unproven), it does so in order to substitute you-believe-something-different-convert-or-I-kill-you.

Universal Pictures finds pirated Jurassic World on own localhost, fires off a DMCA takedown

Re: Personally....

hire the most expensive lawyers to prosecute itself ... hire the next-most-expensive set of lawyers to mount a defence

If the price of lawyers is a measure of their competence, it would be safer to do it the other way round, just in case there's a custodial outcome.

The Register's resident space boffin: All you need to know about the Pluto mission

To sum up, it's called Sharon because it's named after a woman who isn't called Sharon.

Shome mishtake, shurely?

@Loyal

Interesting; I didn't know that. So presumably James Christy's surname is pronounced 'Shristy'?

Although Charon is the ferryman in Greek mythology, it seems the Romans used the same name. Apparently Virgil called him Charon in The Aeneid (I confess I haven't read it in Latin). If so, the Pluto/Charon pairing is legitimate.

A fantastic achievement, and a fascinating article.

I wish I could say the same about Monday evening's The Sky at Night on the same topic.

For some reason they repeatedly called Pluto's moon Sharon. It's news to me that the Lord of the Underworld had an Essex girl rowing the boat across the Styx. Even though they're astronomers, they surely can't be unaware of the mythical origins of the names. "Charon" starts with the Greek letter chi, which I've always assumed to be a slightly aspirated "k" sound. It's not as if there isn't a major world religion that's spelt with chi.

I have a vested interest: like many other people in the world, my given name starts with this phoneme. Am I going to have to call myself "Shris" in future?

Another couple of points. Why do TV presenters think the best way to show a picture on my TV screen is to show me their sodding tablet? If they can get the picture on the tablet, they can show it full-screen on the TV. And why does The Sky at Night have to be presented by irritating hyperactive nitwits? Doubtless highly-qualified nitwits, but the point remains.

Storage unicorns and their hyped-up horns

What is or are "proboscii"?

The singular noun is proboscis. The root of the word is Greek, but it seems to have attained its current form in Latin. Regular Latin nouns ending -is have a nominative plural ending -es, so the inflected plural would be probosces. As we're speaking and writing modern English, it might be safer to say "proboscises".

Contrary to widespread belief on the Interwebs, no Latin words are pluralised by adding "ii" to their root. This fallacy probably arises from plurals like radii, but the "i" in radius is part of the root, not the inflected ending, and it is invariant through all cases and numbers.

Even Microsoft thinks Outlook is bloated and slow

Re: Brilliant idea, Microsoft

I'm sure that the vast majority of desktop users have their email client set to start automatically when they log in. It keeps on running throughout their session. That's how they can see incoming email traffic (and get meeting reminders if they're using Outlook).

Outlook may be slow to start, but most users rarely see this happening. It's not particularly slow when composing or sending messages.

As far as I can see Microsoft's new application is something that you'll run in addition to Outlook. So their response to Outlook bloat is to add more bloat.

Re: Outlook for Phones

Lotus Notes. Bloated, slow, and with a user interface that was bang up-to-date in 1989.

NSPCC: Two nonces nailed by cops every day

Re: Nonce?

I think the original application is linguistic. "For the nonce" is an archaism meaning "for the time being". Our friends at Wikipedia say:

A nonce word (also called an occasionalism) is a lexeme created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication. The term is used because such a word is created "for the nonce".

The use of "nonce" in cryptography and security presumably derives from this.

Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they have defined the smidge

full-fat title "smidgeon", but "smidgen" or indeed "smidgin" are legit alternatives

A smidgeon is a bird, isn't it?

Windows 10 on Mobile under the scope: Flaws, confusion, and going nowhere fast

Windows 8: try to foist a tablet interface on desktop users. Result: failure.

Windows 10: try to foist a desktop interface on phone users. Watch this space...

Windows 11*: everybody gets the interface from a TV remote control.

* or 12, or 15, or 3000...

UK.gov makes total pig's ear of attempt to legalise home CD ripping

Re: Compensation for what?

If commentards had to pay a few hundred thousands of pounds for every barmy assertion, I think it would concentrate minds wonderfully.

Saucer of milk for Mr Orlowski, please.

Re: Compensation for what?

If I buy a CD (do people actually still do that?)

Yes. The CD is a useful archive copy. It's likely to stay around for much longer than most of the phones, computers, cars, USB sticks etc that I may copy the content to.

Also, availability of good quality downloads is variable. I'm certainly not going to pay money for over-compressed MP3 crap, even if that's what I listen to on portable devices.

GOOGLE GMAIL ATE MY LINUX: Gobbled email enrages Torvalds

Linux spam

Top marks to Google. I for one am sick to death of Linux spam.

Every day I get numerous emails from Nigerians offering me ten million lines of code if I'll send them my bank details. Then there are the offers of kernel patches to increase my penis size, to say nothing of the improbable emails from young women offering hot device driver action.

Reg top tip: Don't have the same name as someone else if you use Facebook's Instagram

Andrés Iniesta, a Spanish man who is not a member of FC Barcelona

I don't know much about football, but is it really so unusual not to be a member of FC Barcelona? What percentage of Spanish adult males are members?