Posts by Justin Case

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

SI units say K is for Kelvin, k is for kilo.

Uppercase for units based on people's names.

Uppercase for prefixes M and above, lowercase for prefixes k and below.

So, you were in fact mishtaken and not half as clever as you think!

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Really? I've been a somewhat regular visitor for more years than I care to remember. It's always been the irreverent nature of the content that keeps me coming back. Dabbsy and BOFH provide the anchor which draws me in every Friday. And when I'm here I will often read a few more articles. The Register, sans Dabbs or someone similar? Probably just Yet Another Tech News Site.

Hums: Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94bdMSCdw20

Google promises to adjust search algorithm to favor 'people-first content'

I thought it was just because I'm getting older...

It is comforting that Google searches are actually getting worse at finding me the answer to my many and varied queries about programming / bugs.

Could this be the beginning of the end, because right at the start of Google's journey what stood them out from their many competitors was the relevance and usefulness of their results.

It's the day before the grand opening but we need a firmware update. It'll be fine

Chalk it down to..

Bitter experience?

TskTsk: UK ISP TalkTalk told off by regulator over 'misleading' adverts promising fixed price service

And yet...

They still keep on doing it. It's almost as if they don't care. Who'd have thunk it?

Scottish National Party members found among list of names signed up to rival Alba Party after website whoopsie

Re: If the Website was specifically hacked by the Newspaper for their story

IANAL but expectations of privacy etc seem to work for certain members of the upper echelons. In any case I suppose it's hard to extrapolate purpose to subscriptions to anything. It might be a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Thousands of taxpayers' personal details potentially exposed online through councils' debt-chasing texts

Seriously indifferent

What does taking seriously mean in these cases?

I picture a room full of dour faced bureaucrats proclaiming with sombre earnestness, unleavened by any scintilla of self awareness, that their devotion to the sanctity and protection of personal data is untainted with any degree of levity or inappropriate jocular disregard. When really they mean they don't give a shit, never have and never will. Except of course when it comes to the actions of others.

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Re: Back in th eday? Still!

Quite right too. Where's the fun in not being able to bring the whole thing tumbling down with a simple typo? Life on the edge has a lot to recommend it.

Mark Zuckerberg, 36, decides that having people on his website deny the deaths of six million Jews is a bad thing

Re: One year consultation?

Marxism and getting rid of then police?

Disgraced cop, 55, spared prison term after admitting he abused police systems to snoop on his girlfriend's ex

Re: Because being a policeman should mean something

Yes, humans, but not gits who use and abuse their privileges for petty personal ends. Probably if you were on the receiving end of this sort of behaviour you'd feel different. Or not.

Because being a policeman should mean something

What he did was absolute premeditated abuse. Any cop who does something like that should be hung up to dry, ridiculed, pilloried and never be allowed to forget it.

If we can't rely on their sense of decency and propriety not to do the wrong thing then fear of being caught and punishment it has to be. Anyone who shows such basic lack of impulse control is not suited to be in a position of power over other people.

Onwards! To the airport and adventure! And this rather lachrymose Linux screen

well, obviously.

Windows is the nasty product of a nasty corporation. Linux is the epitome of civilised niceness.

'Nuff said?

Adobe yanks freebie Creative Cloud offer – now universities and colleges have to put up or shut up

Re: Just perhaps

> Universities don't just teach theory, they also teach employable skills

That's as maybe, but the danger is that they are just churning out the "trained" rather than the "educated".

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

Re: Colleges vs. Real world.

Oh! Pascal!

Still have the book on my shelf... its pages are yellowing and its spine has seen better days. A bit like me really.

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: What about

Fantastic. So the official line is the only one that gets out. What could possibly go wrong with that?

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Black hole quasar tsunamis moving at 46 million miles per hour

It pains me to be a pedant, but

>> “No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy,” said Nahum Arav

EITHER

“No other phenomenon carries more mechanical energy,” said Nahum Arav

OR

“No other phenomena carry more mechanical energy,” said Nahum Arav

Your data was 'taken without permission', customers told, after personal info accessed in O2 UK partner's database

Mother Brown (to the tune of)

These up, these up

Don't get the breeze up

These up Mother Brown

Decent, legal, honest and searchable: C'mon, Ofcom. Let us check up on the ad-slingers ourselves

Re: Putin a ban on political advertising?

I've never seen a political advert that has swayed me or made me change my stance. I'd be interested to see firm evidence, beyond the mere anecdotal, for such a sweeping statement asserted with such confidence.

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Tea leaves

We didn't have any cake either, ours was stollen...

This page is currency unavailable... Travelex scrubs UK homepage, kills services, knackers other sites amid 'software virus' infection

Nice holding page

Surely someone could have knocked up something a little more informative... these people employ competent web developers, don't they?

Intel end-of-lifing BIOS and driver downloads for dusty hardware

Re: Removal of stuff costing little

Hear hear! I'll drink to that. Letsh 'ave another one of theesh.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Oooh. Get you

>>Needless to say, these were already blocked as they provide no benefit to me

If needless to say, why did you say it?

Web body mulls halving HTTPS cert lifetimes. That screaming in the distance is HTTPS cert sellers fearing orgs will bail for Let's Encrypt

False sense of security

The greatest and most secure means of transmitting credit card numbers counts for nought if the storage and handling of said details is lacking.

It's a God-awful smell affair.... is there life on Mars? Rocks ruled out as source of mystery methane on Red Planet

Tautology alert!

>> “Using the data available, we estimated rates of erosion on the surface of Mars and how important it could be in releasing methane,”

Much more impressive if they'd used the data unavailable.

Anatomy of an attack: How Coinbase was targeted with emails booby-trapped with Firefox zero-days

Re: Just an idea

They's probably just use an unnoticed corner of some WordPress website that they'd p0wned by other means. Just like a lot of phishing attacks.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

Re: Wow.

> Now try searching for the term 'leatheroak'.

I did and all I got was pictures of trees and some furniture...

UK taxpayers funded Grand Theft Auto V maker to tune of £42m – while biz paid no corp tax and made billions

Re: Based in Scotland? What a surprise!

>> I won't hold my breath.

Don't worry, I've started holding mine.

Let me know when I should stop.

Re: The FIFTH sequel?!

Thank you. Thank you. I was just about to make the very self same point and you did it for me.

Now where did I put my PIN number?

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

Re: OMG

If you were truly old, you wouldn't remember even if you'd read it just yesterday. The fact that you have recall implies that you're nothing but a whippersnapper.

Those darn users don't know what they're doing (not like us, of course)

Re: Focus follows intent

> This calls for an old, but proven solution...

> No, no need to thank me...

But I must. Such joy. My life is now complete.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Re: Golden Rule of Audit

Also applies to clients.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Re: Childish but satisfying...

Some poor sod caught in the crossfire...

AI bots need a sense of hearing to navigate their computer world and the real world – eggheads

Well duh!

Yet more drivel from the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious. Like who'd have thunk it? Sound? Evolution could sure take a leaf out of these guys' book. Oh, wait...

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Stunning chameleon

Amazing creatures don't ya know.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Phorecast Accuracy - How Shore?

Many, many times my phone has insisted that the weather I should be experiencing is sunny rather than the sodden actuality of real life.

If we don't get a direct hit, can I at least pray for a few satellites to be taken out? Being the sort of chap who revels in the misfortunes of others I would get much glee from planes dropping out of the sky and deliveries winding up in Wokingham due to GPS failure. It the Internet were badly affected, that would be a bonus too.

Icon: because that's my state of mind, that is.

And in current affairs... Apple recalls three-prong AC adapters after some shocking behavior

Helpful illustration? No!

Like how is this story enhanced with a picture of a standard power cord? Why no pic of one of the offending articles?

Icon - because that's what this sort of journalism does to me.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Re: Folding was ever a problem

I have both the fx 450 and fx 451. The 451 works better in low light. Plus it's a bit faster calculating 69!

Those were the days. When a scientific calculator could satisfy my technological yearnings. They must be around 35 years old. Where'd the time go?

The curious case of Spamhaus, a port scanning scandal, and an apparent U-turn

Re: legitimate port scanners?

Indeed. I was under the impression that a port scan on a target that had not granted permission would be the sort of activity that could be construed as on the borderline of hacking.

I'll take care of my ports and you take care of yours. Keep your damn nose out!

Easter is approaching – and British pr0n watchers still don't know how long before age-gates come into force

Re: Once again, this is a government trumpeting its incompetence

You said

>>tools for backdoor action

Sorry.

Blundering London council emails unredacted version of notorious Gangs Matrix to 44 people. Data ends up on Snapchat

Re: Thanks for the explanation

Loving the quality of the journalism here - I am feeling better educated with every word I read.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

Re: Deja vu

If I could upvote you 20 times, I would... round and round and round it goes.

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

Re: So much with which to disagree!

Hear hear, P Lee.

The whole thing is a shit shower on both sides.

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

A Special Place in My Heart

Yes, Really!

Back in the days before I'd heard of Linux,having come up through various Sinclair and Commodore offerings and then getting a "proper" PC, I was so disappointed to find that there was no programming available. OK, so you could buy something like Microsoft Basic, but out of the box, nothing. This was before various PC mags started sticking CDs on their fronts, so not even a free sample of Delphi to play with.

Discovering a built in scripting language within a browser allowed me to scratch a programming itch for no more money. Which was important at the time. And demonstrated that there is indeed More Than One Way To Do It. With judicious use of cookies and query strings I was able to achieve what otherwise needed server side scripting which, in those days, also was charged for.

Y'know how you might look at someone and can't help but wonder if they have a genetic disorder? We've taught AI to do the same

This can only end badly

Physical appearance might be the result of genetics. It also might not be. Too much of this AI malarkey seems to be devoted to inferring one thing from another thing and then representing that as the truth rather than what it is, an educated guess.

If you've been dying to run some math on a dinky toy quantum computer, IBM may have something for you

That video explanation...

...reminds me of the Monty Python "How to" sketch.

Illuminated and enlightened I am not.

Ding dong merrily on high. In Berkeley, the bots are singeing: Self-driving college cooler droid goes up in flames

Danger UXB

I'm not altogether happy about the idea of these unmanned bomb delivery vehicles being allowed free run of our cities and everywhere. At least with left luggage there is an unaccompanied suitcase, and with a suicide bomber you have to figure in a certain commitment to a cause.

This would appear to offer potential malefactors the ability to wreak death and destruction with relative impunity. These coolers appear none too stable, even when delivering a couple of cheese and onion baps - who knows how it will all turn out when they are co-opted into delivering a cargo of Semtex and rusty nails.

I for one welcome our new self-immolating, death-dealing, super-cool,er sandwich-toting overloards.

Tesla autopilot saves driver after he fell asleep at wheel on the freeway

Re: Snark?

I guess it's because Elon Musk is such a nice guy - everybody loves him. And justifiably so.

Holy moley! The amp, kelvin and kilogram will never be the same again

There's only one way to get rid of a mole

Blow his bloody head off!

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

Re: Anti-intellectual?

Oh the irony:

>>Dumb-as-a-stump-Trump bleating ignorant tosh about climate chnage, which he can barely even spell.

UK.gov to press ahead with online smut checks (but expects £10m in legals in year 1)

Re: Are you 18 or older?

18 or Older? Yes / No? That's a bit binary. What about age fluidity?