Posts by Anonymous IV

Shhhhh! If you're quiet, Linus Torvalds might release a new Linux

Re: Odd use of terminology

One could say that Linus is getting more and more RC...

Barnet Council: Outsourcing deal with Capita has 'performance issues'

Re: Pity the poor ratepayer

It's that sort of mild-mannered lily-livered wishy-washy semi-approval that keeps Barnet Council going...

User needed 40-minute lesson in turning it off and turning it on again

Re: The mouse that never worked in the afternoon..

Much the same problem occurred with the mighty Amstrad PCW8512 word processing box! If afternoon/evening sunlight got in at the right angle on the diskette drives, all sorts of unhappiness used to occur.

Solution: interpose yourself between the sun and the drives.

KCL staff offered emotional support, clergy chat to help get over data loss

Re: Always back up your data!

I always thought the saying was,

"If it [data] moves, back it up."

And back it up even if it doesn't move...

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

"CroydonPractices"

Surely not a distribution list but rather a collection of indictable offences?

Robot solves Rubik's Cubes in 637 milliseconds

The World Cube Association

What a fascinating organisation name!

Nowhere near as pretentious as The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists...

Fleeing Aussie burglar shot in arse with bow and arrow

An arrowing experience

Compulsory pun, sorry!

Teen in the dock on terror apologist charge for naming Wi-Fi network 'Daesh 21'

Re: Daeshed Hopes

Very worryingly, quite close to GCHQ in Cheltenham this morning I saw a coach bearing the title:

Daish Holidays

I don't dare make any comment...

Donald Trump running insecure email servers

Re: TrumpOrg.com why not trump.org

Why not trump.org? Because someone else [Registrant Name: chris puchowicz] got there first!

And it says:

"Vote NO to Trump

He wasn’t even organized enough to purchase this domain (or www.trump.tv) at public auction, and he wants to run the U.S.A.?

Days after I won this domain at public auction I received a letter from Trump attorney’s threatening to sue me for trademark infringement for purchasing this domain.

Guess who still owns the domain… not that guy."

Pair programming – you'll never guess what happens next!

Obvious question on pair programming

What would Verity Stob do?

Pivot3 produces ROBO Edge Office

Ambiguation

Why couldn't they call it something other than Office, which is a quite-well-known Microsoft suite of programs?

Yes, I know Microsoft has already put its foot in it with outlook.com and Outlook, but that's no reason to add to the confusion.

Linus Torvalds admits 'buggy crap' made it into Linux 4.8

Surely all the stuff and nonsense would never happen if Linus did all the work on the kernel himself?

An intergalactic super-hero and the world's most fabulous man* should find this quite straightforward!

* grovelling apologies to Captain Kremmen.

And Carla...

Edinburgh University to flog its supercomputer for £0.0369 per core hour

Edinburgh gets in quick before the Met Office!

One is expecting to see the Met Office in Exeter doing something similar in Spring 2017, when its contract with the BBC (mostly) finishes, leaving ITV still using the Met Office for weather guessing forecasting.

‘Andromeda’ will be Google’s Windows NT

RFOS

Will Andromeda be a rant-free operating system (RFOS)?

Please say it is so!

Londoners react with horror to Tube Chat initiative

Re: It's easy to stop people wanting to talk ..

> take along a durian

That will be Yet Another Linux Distro. one supposes...

Rather more intelligible than Pregnant Pangolin or Weedy Walrus.

Re: Ah, the French... Ou est le chat?

It's amazing that the French cannot speak/understand their own language!

I once asked a French teacher, "Comme êtes-vous ce matin?", and she didn't have a clue about what I was on...

Crusty Cat 5e/6 cables just magically sped up to 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps

Re: Dictionary

Yes, sped. "past and past participle of speed", says OED.

Smelly toilets, smokers and the Kardashians. Virgin Media staff grill top brass

Smelly toilets, smokers and the Kardishians

Surely the headline is wrong, and should read: Smelly toilets, smokers and the Kardoshians ?

(used in the sense: "British, informal [mass noun] Money.")

Microsoft deletes Windows 10 nagware from Windows 7 and 8

> Or "whenever the fuck they feel like it" in other words.

More precisely, when they feel there is a need for it. Do you think Microsoft produces updates just to keep their programmers busy? Sheesh.

Victoria Police warn of malware-laden USB sticks in letterboxes

Re: Why the fuck...

Because it seemed like a pretty neat idea.

At the time.

Before any risk assessment was carried out...

BT's Wi-Fi Extender works great – at extending your password to hackers

> ...the hacker won't know where you live...

Really?

A surprising number of the SSIDs round where I live are of the form "23 Railway Cuttings" or "Joe and Josie Bloggs". Even an unintelligent hacker might take these as significant clues as to the location of the routers...

Two Sundays wrecked by boss who couldn't use a calendar

Re: "Have you been forced to do utterly pointless work?"

We actually had a time sheet category named "Filling in Time Sheets" - but we weren't allowed to charge more than 15 minutes per week to it!

35,000 ARRIS cable modems at risk from firmware dumper bot

Compulsory pun

May I be the first to say that they don't know their ARRIS from their elbow?

And to repeat a statement I lifted from a much-earlier comment:

"Virgin Media SuperHub:

Warning! Device might be at least 80% less super than advertised..."

Sophos Windows users face black screens after false positive snafu

From the blurb about Graham Cluley in the linked article:

"Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s."

No mention of the fact that those security companies included, for several years, Sophos itself!

'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down'

Re: It's not quite a BSOD...

The scrolling matrix signs in the waiting areas outside most of the departments of my local hospital show the current time.

This is exactly an hour out for at least a week following the change to or from BST, or until some IT bod notices (whichever is the longer)

I do hope that the doctors and surgeons do not rely on this time source...

Robot babies fail in role as teenage sex deterrents

This research study cannot be any good...

... because it didn't include the obligatory final sentence:

More research is needed.

Irish Olympics' officials digital devices seized in Rio

Re: Irish hospitality: A thousand welcomes (at the same mark-up)

I do hope you meant "some dodgy practices"!

"Doggy practices" would be an entirely different charge...

Password strength meters promote piss-poor paswords

@phuzz

"I was trying to configure our Virgin Superhub* 3 the other day...

* (actual hub may be 60% less super than advertised) "

Your comment made me laugh - but I think your percentage is too low...!

More gums than Jaws: Greenland super-sharks live past 400 years old

The Greenland shark [...] can grow to over 400 years old

<pedant>

A year is not a unit of growth. Strewth.

</pedant>

Looks like the Reg sub-editors have been given the day off.

Nobody expects... a surprise haemorrhoid operation

Re: *urph*

> We left chocolates, doughnuts and coffee for the nurses after 5 days in maternity.

Those poor nurses, having to spend all that time in the maternity ward.

And then to be faced with doughnuts and chocolates.

Classic Shell, Audacity downloads infected with retro MBR nuke nasty

Re: A good example

You also forgot to finish with

© 2016 Dido Harding

Jacob Appelbaum is a bullying sex pest, says ex-employer Tor Project

Re: Takeover of TOR

It is probably new to everyone except the author, but it's an incomprehensible neologism.

Must Try Harder...

Washed out summer? Fear ye not: DVDs for DevOps droogs

And there was me thinking that line numbers related to rows, not columns!

You learn something new every day...

IT boss 'set up fake companies to charge his employers $2.4m'

Re: I walked into the office one day only to be locked in an adjacent room

You make no mention of your arrest and conviction for tipping him off (probably for perverting the course of justice) ! At least you will have had a Redundancy Package enhanced by your former boss...

@david bates

> I've always had to do regular money laundering training as well as bribery and corruption training.

So you're now a fully-qualified money launderer, briber and corrupter, then?

I remember a secondary-school teacher friend of mine, looking in The Guradian at an advert whose headline was "Could you put together a Youth Offending Team?"

His response was, "Yes, quite easily. Give me about 20 minutes..."

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Malchronism

> > When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!

> I assume you meant there weren't any computers at your school. Unless you were in sixth form over seventy five years ago! :-)

Seeing as the IBM PC didn't come out in the US until November 1981*, and in the UK the next year, I fear that your date calculations have a very large rounding error.

* I had the edition of Byte to prove it, but it got nicked...

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

Punctilious

Remarkably apposite word in this circumstance!

In faraway days long, long ago, when IBM used to provide to customers the code of their mainframe DOS/VS operating system on microfiche, and people actually used to read it, there was a complaint from a shocked and horrified manager who objected to the comment "Loop 1000 times, just for the hell of it". The next version of the OS showed a change to "Loop 1000 times".

Microsoft's cringey 'Hey bae <3' recruiter email translated by El Reg

Re: <3

<pedant>

Surely 'bae' is not a derivative of 'baby' but a truncation thereof? "Contraction" is a less-precise possibility.

</pedant>

waifu Japanese version of "English wife", or (fandom slang) A fictional character (generally female) from non-live-action visual media.

Sociology student gets a First for dissertation on Kardashians

Printed on university toilet paper

"Sociology degrees - please take one."

Man sues YET AGAIN for chance to marry his computer

"You may now kiss the C:\ drive"

Dear, oh dear, oh dear!

<pedant>

C:\ is the root directory of the C: drive.

</pedant>

Sack the marriage officiant!

Bank tech boss: Where we're going, we don't need mainframes

Re: Utter drivel

Newcastle University was running the Michigan Terminal System on an IBM 360/67 doing time-sharing for ever so many students and staff in 1972, and probably a good deal earlier.

Still - what good is history and facts to a "bank tech boss"?

Thief dresses as Apple Store drone, walks off with $16,000 in iGear

Re: Nice phone if you can get it repaired

> But if owners know the providence of the phone will take it elsewhere...

That would be Provenance, Rhode Island, I presume?

NHS e-prescription service goes TITSUP: Problems since Monday

Re: Paper saver

> The electronic system now also requires me to sign the form at the pharmacy. Not sure why.

It is supposedly to indicate that you have received the prescribed items.

The member of staff who gives them to me just does a squiggle on the form, ever since I found out from Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) a few years ago that my signature is not required, and thus refused to sign it.

Gotta be a rebel in your old age!

Hobbits really did exist – and endured erectus shrinkage, say boffins

"More excavations are needed..."

That's a new variant on the compulsory final sentence of any technical report: "More research is needed..."

Our CompSci exam was full of 'typos', admits Scottish exam board

Verity Stob has been here before

She took an Open University course, and one of the TMAs was gibberish.

Andrew Orlowski took up cudgels on her behalf...

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

"Solar electricity facility sets itself on fire"

And they say that Americans don't understand irony...!

The Sons of Kahn and the Witch of Wookey

National Treasure

I would aver (and often do) that Verity's limpid prose is the nearest thing to a National Treasure that UK programming possesses, paralleled only by Lucy Kellaway's acerbic views of management incompetence.

Brit polar vessel christened RRS Sir David Attenborough

Origin of 'Boaty McBoatFace' construct

Having Googled unsuccessfully, I cannot find whether this name (and thus the generic '---Mc---Face') was an original invention of James Hands, or derives from somewhere else.

"Hands confessed that the proposal was not even new. He suggested it last year in a contest to name a new boat for Condor Ferries operating between Poole and the Channel Islands. The eventual winner in that case was the more sober Liberation."

Does anyone have any knowledge about the origin of the construct?