Posts by There's a bee in my bot net

The KILLER MUTANT FUNGUS in YOUR DISHWASHER

Nuke em?

Take of, nuke em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

Oh wait, this isn't slash dot is it...

Spielberg flung Fox from Transformers 3

RE: Dumb as a rock

I always like 'dumb as a bag of hair'. Used to describe AVRIL LAVIGNE (I'm not shouting but I did have to google her name. A copy and past later and hey presto, all shouty and I can't be arsed to change it...)

Sony preps refreshed PS3 and talks down PS4

Can't advance the technology any further?

"PlayStation 3 is really just hitting its stride... technologically, I don’t think it’s possible to provide any advancement beyond what we have."

Perhaps if you opened it to the home brew hacker community they could make it do things you never thought it could, plus it would extend the useful life of the PS3 a bit more.

After all, the original T-Mobile G1 was supposed not to be able to run Android 2 and on due to hardware constrains. That didn't stop those clever people on the XDA forums making it happen.

Oh wait, what you would rather take them to court?

A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe

Plusnet?

You didn't work for Plusnet a few years back did you?

That is exactly what happened during an email storage migration. Two console windows open to the old and new storage device. Format the new storage array, which was actually the old one. Cue angry customers, Weeks of trying to recover customers data from the old storage array by the storage array vendor and the admission that they didn't backup the storage array. The storage vendor wasn't able to recover much data.

My email now lives in the cloud, my own personal cloud, oh all right, its a little atom based server that sits on a shelf at home. This all reminds me, I must see if we have any old tape drives kicking around at work that I might be able to take home for personal use... (raid 5 plus scripted backups to another disk is the only back, but still feels safer than trusting someone else - and before someone says it - I know RAID isn't a backup - jeez you people are so critical).

Facebook value hits $100bn, to go public in Q1 2012

More like bauble...

...all shiny and attractive but intrinsically worthless.

Facebook hurls insults, punctuation at growth slump report

Vacuous, pointless drivel?

Could it be due to the fact that facebook has been taken over by the masses and it just isn't fun wading through all the inane chatter?

Neal's Yard Remedies its supply chain

IT skills shortage?

So the UK has an IT skills shortage. I know because everybody keeps banging on about it.

So companies of this size 'only bring skills in-house that add value to the end product' but have bought all the Sage modules - so who uses the Sage systems? Accountants? But they don't add value to the end product - so why not just outsource them? etc etc

Also they don't have an in-house IT staff because of all the training and 'taking care of their well fare'. Damn those IT people with their constant need to learn and their expectation to be treated like highly skilled professionals.

Ever wonder why there is a skills shortage? And if there really is such a skills shortage why are recruiters reporting that despite the number of IT vacancies going up this year, the list of applicants for these positions are 'scarily long'?

Come on kids! Train to work in IT, spend the rest of your professional life trying to keep up to speed and relevant for the job market and weep as you watch that market disappear under your feet as you are outsourced or replaced with other kids fresh out of IT training for less money and then having to take massive pay cuts just to get a job with the thousands of other ex IT bods! Yeah - who wouldn't want that kind of opportunity! IT, you know it makes sense...

<skulks off to live in a cave and sell cheese (well if the cheese selling part worked for Alex James of Blur...)>

Motorola Atrix dual-core Android smartphone

Locked boot loader

Would have liked one of these but the locked boot loader and horrible moto blur or whatever they call that abomination of an interface skin is enough to put me off...

Midlands council laughs at zombie-apocalypse threat

Laugh it off Leicester City Council...

Laugh it off. But who will be laughing come the zombie-apocalypse?

Me with my zombie proof shed and 12 month supply of tinned peaches or you with your lacklustre emergency zombie related planning?

Council fined for randomly emailing personal data

Paid the price?

"Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said the council had paid the price for failing to handle sensitive data appropriately or to have security measures in place."

He means the people who live in that borough paid the price through more cuts to their local services or increases in council tax to pay the fine right?

May's terror review reveals state of unknowns

RE Social responsibility: More than her life is worth?

The chap in question was considered violent and had been involved in a stabbing (and it wasn't one sided) hence the police escort. She isn't big enough to have tackled the chap, nor do NHS nurses wear stab vests and that doesn't take into account staffing levels and her responsibilities to her other patients.

Still with the healthcare workers as terrorist spotters?

My heart sinks when I see something that refers to the 'home secretary' as I know it is likely to contain measures that restrict or affect my personal freedoms in the real world or online. But this whole 'doctors as terrorist spotters' is just funny.

Now it reads as extending to 'healthcare worker'(s). I seriously doubt my wife (who is a nurse) will be prying into her patients personal life unless it is pertinent to their treatment or care unless they are clutching what appears to be a bomb.

It reminds me of the time a patient under the supervision of a policeman was in her care. The policeman asked her to make sure the patient didn't abscond. She told him that if her patient wanted to leave she would hold the door open and call him sir and that if he wanted to make sure that said patient didn't abscond that he should do his job himself.

Boris-Bike firm penalised by £5m over system hiccups

To cheap...

If the peons can afford it, it is too cheap.

Get your network ready for World IPv6 Day

Not that much of a risk

I don't think the risk of running an IPv6 connection for a few minutes is particularly high.

This is just a test drive right?

It isn't something I plan on leaving up until I have looked properly at the security implications for the networks involved and by then I expect to have migrated to an ISP that does support IPv6 natively...

Sure if you enable it and forget it is there then you should expect some consequences.

Tory terror changes promise moon on stick

WTF?

"Doctors will also be trained to spot patients likely to become future terrorists."

Really? Is that from the published strategy? I must have read that 5 or 6 times and then reread the whole article again as I figured that I missed the point and it was an elaborate El Reg joke.

"A specialist police unit has removed 156 pieces of material in the last 15 months, the Times reports."

I'm guessing that means the police have removed 156 sites (or part thereof) from the internet at large? Not that they have removed 156 items from the black list, or 156 bits of lint from their jumpers...

Cameron calls for ISP-level parental censorship tools

Lol - filter fail

And as a result of that post it is now blocking this article!

ID Assurance project setup costs...

Not to mention the hundred million or so that will be spend setting up commissions to work on the project and pay consultants for advice and information...

These things are really (and I hate using the phrase) win-win situations for those involved. Ministers, MPs, Civil Servants etc pay big money during the research and consultation phases of these projects and jobs seem to circulate amongst them. You only have to look at the gateway reviews for the last ID project to see how its done. Perhaps they don't even care about the outcome while they are making hay...

Content filtering...

You don't need to block sites by IP address. You can use a content filter to assess the content of a page and block or allow access based on (various) sets of pre existing rules.

Sure it isn't perfect, but it stops most users access most porn, gabling and web game sites at work as well as refusing to download files with certain extensions (unless the site is part of an exclusions list i.e. Windows updates etc). Just for shits and giggles one content filter I look after is currently blocking any site that mentions Justin Beiber.

How to get cloud skills

No... no certifications with this lot...

I did this a while back, there is no certification at the end of it.

Either way, certification or not, it hasn't furthered my career in any way shape or form. Conversely it hasn't harmed it either. I think what I am trying to say is I don't really have anything to say about the MVA... <gets coat>

Virgin IT dept shocked by donkey-shagging Taliban

Shame it wasn't titled "Taliban donkey shagging vid" then...

I mean, how would you know until it was too late?

Goatse?

Echostar HDS-600RS Freesat HD recorder

Sifi styling

I though it was one of them gimmicky branded products made specially for Battlestar Galactica uber fans...

El Reg pays by phone – mmmm, free cookies!

But in the adverts...

...for contact-less payment technology the smiling gimp on the roller coaster waving his credit card around without even having to say what he is buying manages it in seconds.

You can't mean that the marketing people have been lying to us can you? That never happens! shame on you for suggesting such a thing.

3D printer produces working house keys

Shh... stop talking about 3D printers...

...otherwise the politicians will freak out about what they are capable of, spurred on by those industry types with a vested interest in not wanting home users to be able to print spare parts for their products or outright copies. Before you know it they will be illegal to own!

Twitter forced to hand over user details to English council

Fixed that for you...

you have to question the intelligence of a professional football player.

Online tools to 'end the scandal of empty homes'

Sandbanks?

One of the most expensive strips of land in the UK? I would say about 60% of the houses and flats there are largely unoccupied as they are the beach houses/weekend retreats of the Rich. I'm sure they wouldn't mind squatters as long as they are gone on the weekends...

Is the IT Dept failing users?

Another bandwagon

I'm bored of hearing the 'IT Department must change to blah blah blah buzzword'.

On the rare occasion I am able to support users devices, I do so by providing the details for them to connect and they set it up themselves. Just because I work in IT doesn't mean I know automatically how to configure every electronic device ever manufactured (though I can usually figure most of them out). I wouldn't want to support every users personal devices. I would end up having to fix all the other 'problems' they have, likely end up trying to deal with their original suppliers for hardware problems (because users are lazy and don't want to deal with something when there is somone else they can palm stuff off too). Not to mention having to contend with the plain weird setups you have to get round on users personal devices and god forbid you ever 'fix' something that doesn't look right, you'll end up getting the blame for everything that ever goes wrong on that device from that point on.

If users aren't tech savvy enough to follow some instructions on how to setup a VPN or put in a few email settings then I wouldn't trust them with network access off site. Does that make me a BOFH? I don't think so. Otherwise you might as well just out source the lot of us...

UK.gov 'falls short' of legal obligation to enforce EC cookies Directive

Open infringement procedures...

"We will closely monitor all Member States' implementation and will open infringement procedures against any Member State that fails to notify implementing measures by the 25th May deadline,"

Am I the only one who would like to think that that meant holding politicians to account in the legal sense rather than just issuing a telling off or issuing a fine. That is to say MPs facing criminal proceedings... I know it won't happen, I'm just enjoying the mental picture. Now that's an accountable government!

Sarko to Schmidt & co: 'You can't escape' net regulation

Aaarrrrrrrgfgggghgghghghghhhhhh!!!!!!!

Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!!!!! Just fucking Aaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!

Vous et un idiot Misiour Sarkozy.

WTF is... 4G

Its all in the customers interest...

>4G in the UK

>

>Ofcom will be auctioning the LTE spectrum – 800MHz and 2.6GHz – next year, later than >originally anticipated. The reason for the delay: UK operators were keen to see how much they >can squeeze out of 3G networks before deciding how much to spend on 4G spectrum.

You mean operators wanted to squeeze as much cash out of their customers by providing them with less and less 3.5G data until they stop using their data connections?

>But punters – expecting better performance from 4G phones and seeing how many, more >advanced handsets are appearing in other parts of the world – will demand 4G handsets >here. Competition-sensitive carriers will eventually supply that demand.

Yeah, tell me about it. Galaxy Epic (The S with a hardware keyboard) was only available in the states. I've given up on the idea of the Atrix as the data package sucks (750MB a month?!? Really? I can get through that in a week on email alone).

>But not until 2015, some analysts believe, at which point the operators hope to have reached >the limits of 3G technology - especially now Ofcom has allowed the use of 2G spectrum for >3G applications - and for 4G equipment to be rather cheaper than it is now.

They won't reach the limits of 3g if they keep cutting their data tariffs. Expect 5 year contracts with 120MB a month by 2015...

Ofnuke: UK is not Japan

Reprocessing?

I thought the politicos had already accepted that? After all isn't the UK one of the worlds biggest nuke reprocessing countries?

Adam Curtis: The Rise of the Machines

Looks like you were right...

Not so much about the machines as about how we get shafted every 20 years or so by government and/or the financial system.

I also find it hard to take seriously anyone who has a single over arching philosophy (i.e. Ayn Rand), There is nothing wrong with the idea that individuals should have selfish desires but that they should be a driving force and that altruism is (seemingly from her perspective) a bad thing is bizarre. Amongst many other considerations, surely one (selfishness vs altruism) should be balanced against the other both on a personal level and as a member of a bigger society.

Sounds interesting...

will definitely be watching.

One thing that never alters in debates about utopia is people. The Greedy, the needy, the selfish, the controlling, isolationists and more, oh and lest we forget the most obvious... power hungry people... all conspire to break utopia.

Mumsnet founder: Our members are 'very keen' on PORN ...

Child friendly ISPs

I'm not sure if any still exist, but many moons ago there were several specialist ISP's that provided just such a service to schools and parents. So if these things still operate then problem solved. Switch to such a service. (Or as others have pointed out, stop being lazy and learn to use one or more of the plethora of tools available. Or as the UK apparently has an abundance of unemployed home grown techies kicking around, perhaps these mums can pay them for their time and expertise rather than asking a friend who 'knows something about computers' to set it up and then offering them a paltry sum as token payment).

Q) What would mums net pron fiends do for their pron fix once their ISP is filtering pron for them?

A) Ask their child how they would setup a proxy, VPN or Tor!

David Davis: Jobless should dig trenches for fat UK pipes

RE Missed the point

I figured Andy Fletcher was being sarcastic...

Digging trenches still requires someone (usually an engineer) to know where the existing services are so you don't accidentally dig up a 33kV mains cable or cut through some existing fibre or copper services and even that is no guarantee.

San Francisco BOFH must cough up $1.5m

Baffling...

The whole thing was a calamity on both sides. It read as though someone in management either got wind of the practices Mr Childs was employing (i.e. not documenting passwords, setting up 'access devices' or 'back doors' and implementing configuration loss on reboot of remote routers), got the wrong end of the stick and over reacted setting off the unfortunate series of events that lead to Childs being gaoled. Or they took a personal dislike to him, ultimately leading to the same fate.

The way his 'dismissal' was handled would have freaked me out. Not being told what was happening or why and ending up talking to detectives and senior representatives of the city, all without mention of being dismissed would make me clam up. That said, I have a copy of system access passwords in a sealed envelope in a work safe and I document the system configuration.

Errors were made on both sides. Mr Childs came across as an arse. His managers came across as idiots. Neither knew how to deal properly with the other and the 'city' went down the legal route with ridiculous charges and just couldn't be seen to back down despite most of the charges being dropped as ridiculous (i.e. installing 'back doors' turned out to be remote access so the remote routers et al could be configured if they had been tampered with and rebooted thus losing their configuration).

Their is a whole load of fail in this case and it makes for interesting and jaw dropping reading that it ever got so far. Yes Childs was an arse. Was he difficult to work with, by all accounts yeah, he was a weirdo. Did what he do warrant 4 years in gaol? No, I don't think so. At least not unless equally harsh treatment was metered out to those who escalated events in the first instance (which as far as I know it wasn't).

So after all that why is he now being punished again?

Vodafone chuffed with pleasing figures

So they can afford to buy more bandwidth then?

I'm sure with operating profits of £11.8 billion they can afford to invest in more bandwidth for their users rather than reducing data caps, and/or stop dragging their feet over '4G' ?

Agency worker rights should be set in comparison with staff, says gov

So short contracts then?

Would that not just mean a lot of contracts/temporary jobs will be less than the qualifying period?

ACS:Law fined for data breach

Skint Lawyer

Isn't that an oxymoron?

Spotify's music manager makeover - does it work?

Ditched premium

I ditched my premium Spotify membership a while ago. I still have a 'paid for' account as the local radio style adverts do my head in. I think I got fed up with the lack of reliable streaming over 3G and (the off line syncing took forever over wifi) also the mobile networks getting all pissy about me using their valuable bandwidth and of course the disappearing songs was getting annoying.

As for the rest of the new features, it doesn't really affect me that much. I haven't touched my ipod for over a year, don't really listen to tunes on the go much anymore and rarely buy tunes as was the point of Spotify.

More than all of the though is the different pricing that annoys me. Why is playback on a mobile device more expensive than playing back on a PC? (I expect it is down to the music industry licensing people, but I don't care what the music industry licensing people think). I just want the same service wherever, whenever.

ICO issues half-baked cookies guidance

Wild frontier

When a web developer welcomes regulation then you know the 'wild frontier' days of the internet are either dead and buried or short numbered (depending on who you talk to)...

Virgin space rocketship trials 'feather' re-entry system

A question for which I've been wanting an answer...

I've been wondering for a long time why space craft re-enter the atmosphere with such ferocity that they need all that heat shielding... and why no one has though to try taking a bit longer about it. Guess I have my answer. Cheers Lewis

DARPA, NASA look to spawn STARSHIP enterprise

C*O

Put me down for any C*O position going spare!

Motorola's laptop-dock Android phone out on Orange

Want a new phone... fed up dealing with Mobile operators...

At least the phone is 'free' if you sign your life away for 2 years... shame the data allowance sucks hairy balls. 750MB a month?

In the US you can get the phone, laptop and desktop docks for about £300... (Which is what orange want for the laptop dock alone) again on a 2 year contract but at least they give you more reasonable 4GB data a month.

Lasers set to replace spark plugs in car engines

Focused pulse laser...

Granted most/all lasers can be focused with optics, but AFAIR there is a way to mechanically focus YAG lasers without optics. I wish I could remember how it works but it was 20 years or so ago...

I was wondering the same thing myself...

Perhaps if the fuel/air mixture is really lean it will burn clean enough not to deposit by products on the laser aperture. The other possibility is using a YAG laser means that the point of ignition is a point in space away from the exit window (YAG are groovy in that they allow you to focus a large percentage of their energy on a small point at a given distance) meaning that deposits won't affect the laser output too much, in the same way that (some) CD laser(s) can read data through a moderate amount of crud as the focal point is beyond the crud. Or maybe they will be fitted with little wipers to clean the windows :-)

Nintendo blames puzzled public for 3DS sales shortfall

You're using it wrong!

That's the sort of thing I expect from Steve Jobs.

I'm loving this 'blame the customer' thing that is going on with big companies. It's a lot of fun to watch, I mean this Sony thing is particularly entertaining.

But yeah, an over priced gadget in touch economic times with a 3d feature that provides value for all of 5 mins before getting boring... why bother?

High Court squashes Digital Economy Act challenge

Download the torrent...

and email the author explaining the situation and that you would like to pay them directly rather than overpaying for something that costs less to copy and distribute than a hardback does to print.

I would use an throw away email account just in case the publisher owns the copyright rather than the author... let us know how you get on, I mean, M Banks might be a reasonable chap...

Got a buck to send M Night Shyamalan to film school?

Laughing our arses off...

My wife and I got the Last Airbender on Bluray to make up the numbers on a blockbuster rental deal so I didn't mind too much that it was awful. But we did laugh our arses off at various points throughout the film from the imortal "but then we discovered he was a bender" line to the random jump cuts and disjointed dialogue to the WTF just happen and why moments.

Not actually enjoyable as a film but provides plenty of entertainment spotting all the ways it is bad in the same way Doomsday 2012 did (It's probably not the film you think it is, read the reviews http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1132130/ )

he'll never have to work another day in his life

Let's hope so eh!

Fujitsu £2bn broadband project throttled at both ends

Because the people pulling the strings...

...went to the same school?