Posts by bag o' spanners

Sysadmin Day free give away

I gave up accepting invites to tech "events" because they were almost invariably just trying to capture commissioning bods with the power to sign cheques. Anyone withoutout that great powah was therefore shunted to the cheap buffet to endlessly discuss geek trivia with public sector triviatards (quelle joie!) So good on you for even attempting to change the format and legitimise the art of asking tricky questions. I've lost count of the number of PR wonks and sales zealots I've pissed off by pointing to the elephants in their rooms.

Sysadmin is not really my field, except when the logical fails are coming thick and fast, so I'll continue to sabotage the apple cart on those rare occasions when the venue/swag/free lunch is worth the damage to my will to live.

Hope it goes shwimmingly.

Google staffing boss: Our old hiring procedures were 'worthless'

I noticed that some interviewers lack social skills, basic common sense, and any desire to probe beyond "can you repeat this question word for word in your answer?" Public sector interview structures involve pressganging unwilling managers into the process, and then ignoring their input. Good luck to anyone who ever has to sit through a dozen agency temp staff interviews. From the egg-stained tie to the complete set of nervous tics, it's all designed to sap your will to live.

A week in place is enough to work out if someone is capable and hasn't fibbed their arse off in their cookie cutter cv.

Pussy galore: Bubble-bath webcam spy outrage

"Can you straighten the camera a bit? I'm getting an awful crick in my neck, and it's playing havoc with my fapteknik"

Number of cops abusing Police National Computer access on the rise

the most terrifying thing about this database is the computer-illiterate halfwits who input the data

Boffins build headless robo-kitties

A saucer of WD40

Skynet loves its fluffy kittens. With their glittering lazer eyes.

Sony allows hacking of its unloved SmartWatch

Bawbees and geegaws.

I wanted a Jimmy Olsen smartwatch when I was ten. Then I grew up.

Sony should have made it in conjunction with Swatch. They have a huge fanbase of colourblind taste-free fashion victims to market to in perpetuity.

NSA: We COULD track you by your phone ... if we WANTED to

elementary , my dear Watson

300 people? Go tell it to the Spartans.

At #guardiancoffee, we can now taste the future through a PRISM!

Jemima Kiss was last seen gushing effusively and noddyshotting in the offices of Gubmint Digital Strategy/Service last week. In-depth reporting with the razor teeth of a Gummi Bear. When Francis Maude appears more likeable than the reporter, you know something's rotten in the dreamstate of Shoreditch.

Reg hack prepares to live off wondergloop Soylent

Get Sharty

I'd like to know the gauge of straw that it can exit through. (Purely for educational purposes)

REVEALED: The gizmo leaker Snowden used to smuggle out NSA files

"I'm taking the Cray home this weekend. I need to finish this project before Monday"

Apple dangles Spangles while Dabbsy's cables rankle

In the tragic hipster sector of Hoxton clublife, there's no shortage of mirth-inducing cable malfunctions, because of the misplaced assumption that "everyone" djs with iProducts. It never seems to cut much ice with the sound bods.

NSA PRISM deepthroat VANISHES as pole-dance lover cries into keyboard

To further contort the "trust" analogy, if the US gubmint was a doctor, they'd probably be a proctologist.

Apple at WWDC: Sleek new iOS, death of the big cats, pint-sized Mac Pro

Designed and assembled in California, but the components are all from Asia. Wave that flag, Mr Timmy.

Waving an Eye-of-Sauron pulsating mock cock? Stop immediately

I can't see Ann Summers threatening Hitachi's market dominance with that cheap and nasty contraption. Having to stop for a recharge is a real passion killer.

US chief spook: Look, we only want to spy on 6.66 billion of you

Never miss an opportunity to casually insult Merkin spooks when chatting general bollox on teh interwebs. Paranoid wankers, the loddofem.

My default assumption is that all comms are being monitored all the time, either on "public order" or "national security" grounds. As if a judge is going to say no to the plod or security services when they ask for a tap warrant.

They don't get appointed if they don't toe the line.

Given the driftnet nature of badly written law, which inevitably gets abused for purposes of political advantage, if your name bobs to the surface due to clerical incompetence (see any report on police IT skills) or pisspoor intelligence gathering, you're well and truly fucked. The more politically motivated halfwits you give access to huge piles of data and smart mining tools, the more false positives you'll get.

Help! I’m trapped inside the Chamber of Hollers

Pop round to Studiospares and grab a couple of acoustic tiles. Place one on each side of your cubicle, around ear height, and marvel at how you can't hear sharp , annoying treble unless it reflects off something.

The invoice is in the post.

Mine's the one with a copy of Psychoacoustic Weekly in the pocket.

My bleak tech reality: You can't trust anyone or anything, anymore

I'm terminally paranoid about my passwords, because I value my privacy. So I don't store useful pws on a web enabled machine, and certainly not on a US based cloud.. The few that have real value sit safely in my noggin, and are seared into my neuronet by mnemonics that take absurdity to the limit.

I've seen how lax security is on the wider web, so I don't have much faith in organisations who are barely one sniff away from being hacked. I'd include most public sector organisations and large banks in that particular Venn circle.

If your clients are desperate to be cloudy, then they should be made fully aware of the risks involved, and the true cost of rock-solid security. Cheapskating on thin ice usually ends in tears, but it doesn't seem to deter the cheapskates.

Kinky? You're mentally healthier than 'vanilla' bonkers

Bend over....I'll drive.

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

Those read receipts are a handy weapon in the world of records management, because their 30 day document retention review window plops open the instant they read the email with the offending spreadsheet attached. And slams shut exactly 30 days later, whereby anything that hasn't been reviewed is presumed to be worthless, and fit only for landfill.

The panic that ensues when the 28th day reminder goes out is priceless. Gotta be cruel to be kind when dealing with lemmings. Red carpet to the cliff edge.

BBC suspends CTO after £100m is wasted on doomed IT system

All hail to the commissioning process.

I often wonder at the largesse involved in public sector IT contracts. Doing stuff on the cheap never quite turns out to be cheaper over the course of a badly written contract for an amorphous, badly planned system. Oversight only seems to kick in once the press get wind of the huge volumes of cash being flushed down the khazi. I'm fairly certain that none of the contractors minded being paid a fortune to deliver fool's gold.

Very few of the people who sanction these massive ballsups appear to have a clue about the speed of evolution across the entire sector ("just show me the headline figures, Carruthers"). Better to spend half a million quid talking to tech companies and software developers, to see where their R&D is likely to be leading them, than build an obsolete, unworkable proprietary dustbin.

Prenda lawyers miss sanctions deadline

Re: Better confiscate their passports.

Having seen how the US federal law enforcement bods do their business, my guess is that they'll be invited to meet some dubious moneyed characters in a posh hotel with all exes paid, and find themselves entrapped by "Glenn" and "Mahmud".

Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

I think the step that Google are looking for is the introduction of lucidity into the Graph. As far as I can make out from my convos with devs, the ability to see through bullshit is the Holy Grail. A sort of cold reader bot, that has a very high percentage of correct guesses first time round. When lucid logic can run believable probability indexing, it may require no more than a cynical smartarse with a spreadsheet to sift the weirdly anomalous results and grade them according to accuracy over time, then backtrack through the logs when it hits an unexpected bullseye..

It won't be the wingnut press who start bleating when a robo-savant oracle starts hypothesising too accurately about the various Emperors' new wardrobes. It'll be their tailors.

Yahoo! to 'share something special' in New York on Monday

Yahoo Groups was the mutts nuts back in the day. It was like a slightly less cock-obsessed MSN Groups. YM was full of toxic ASL bellends trying to find the last surviving single female on the interwebs..The chatty thing on the Groups was nice and private and you could use the banhammer to get rid of the dickheads. Then Yahoo pissed it all away with 360, which didn't work properly for three months, alienated the dweebs with prissy rules and broken code, and then vanished into the ether. Rubbish direction crapped from a great height on their socmedia roots. I wish them only pain.

Murdoch Facebook gloat: You're like my $580m, 'CRAPPY' MySpace

Myspace reinvented itself when Rupert sold up. It's a fairly useable musician's directory these days. Not wonderful enough to want an account, but useful for those who want to viralise their musical output. Kids these days, eh?

Fuddyduddy old bellends like the Dirty Digger are happily using social media to bitch about social media, blithely unaware of the inherent irony.

Yes! It's the NFC phone-bonk doorbell app AT LAST

Re: Use Case?

Total agreement. I have a non-working bell on my door. Anyone who turns up uninvited can ring it till their brain implodes. Invited friends know that they should just call me when they're local, to give me time to finish being tekky and put the kettle on.

Snoopers' charter rests in shallow grave - likely to rise again

This reminds me of plodsworths stopping people taking architectural photos in London and elsewhere on bogus "national security" pretences. I carry a netbook, and introduce them to Google Streetview, and ask them when they're going to plug this huge threat to our "national security". I also voice record them in case they take violent exception to logic.. The inevitable conclusion is that the results-based law enforcement bunnies will be able to claim that they're doing a great job preventing bad things, while still being useless gumflappers who haven't got a clue.

Judge hands copyright troll an epic smack-down

In lawyerspeak, this definitely qualifies as "hearse chasing"

TV gesture patent bombshell: El Reg punts tech into public domain

Re: I really don't like the idea of gesture TV

I'd use the cardboard box disguise to fool greedybastards.com. And straightjackets to prevent the less enthusiastic audience members from subversively channel hopping during Eggs Factorz.

Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack enters the final furlong

I tip my hat to you, sir. A week off the booze should ensure that you get plenty of bang for your buck when you return to your local hostelry.

Apple: You thought Google dodged taxes? Get a load of THIS

What happens if Apple stock rediscovers its nosediving capabilities after another innovation-free year? Will St Steve convene a Ouija Board meeting to re-activate the company's hype glands?

IIRC, investor confidence is one of those volatile commodities that can easily burst a bubble. If Samsung and their SE Asian cohorts continue to innovate relentlessly, with OLED and fancy shared memory chips, for instance, will that whittle away at current "certainties"? Comparing R&D budgets might offer a more accurate image of the future than the gloop provided by Wall Street hyenas.

Opportunity rover stuck in standby mode after Martian blackout

Mr Garibaldi dunnit.

Not cool, Adobe: Give the Ninite guys a job, not the middle finger

When Flash autonukes itself on a 64bit system, it seems to have a blast radius far exceeding its usefulness. I use NoScript to muzzle it.

Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack forms foraging party

Should be able to find ink caps and puffballs on flatter ground if it's reasonably cold and damp. Garlic grows wild in southern Europe, as do spring onions. There might also be girolle and pied de mouton mushrooms if cep can be found that easily.

Quid-a-day nosh challenge hack in bullet-hard chickpea drama

Beanfarts: The horrible truth.

I eat a fair amount of pulses, grains, and beans, and being veggie, they flush through my digestive system smoothly in about 12-18 hours, as the stomach acids aren't "busting a gut" to break them down into energy.. This means that my fartstench index is remarkably low, and only goes up a few notches if I partake of ales.

The foulest farts tend to be due to a combo of sugary lager and junk fried chicken. I once shared an office with someone whose diet consisted entirely of those two items, plus large amounts of high-fructose cola. His inability to fart outside the confines of a small office was matched by his inability to think, work, or wash.. His sacking saved us the effort of digging a shallow grave.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

I save all of my RAW files. If I publicly post photos to social media sites, they're tagged. If someone wishes to remove my tag, and make *commercial* use of a photo, then I will gladly go to court for redress and damages.

The cost of archiving the original RAW files is trifling. Once a few negligent/dishonest ad agencies have had their nuts dragged across a cheesegrater in court, the benefits of due diligence may well become apparent.

This botched legislation is a piss poor attempt to distort "fair usage" into a legal right to steal copyright. The only way to fight such legislation is to publicly inflict some serious financial damage on a high profile IP abuser in corporate clothing.

The copyright lawyers will be rubbing their hands in anticipation of some expensive lunches. Exemplary damages tend to concentrate minds. Ignorance/incompetence/negligence is not the best legal defence in civil proceedings.

The likely result, after a few hefty hits on corporate and public sector wallets, will be some Cabinet Office "best practice" bumph, to prevent civil servants throwing taxpayers money to the wolves by doing stupid things with other people's IP.

Meanwhile, in the real world, printable quality photos will continue to be used and credited by reputable agencies, because badly optimised Instagram phonepix look dated within a few minutes, especially on the web. If a client is paying top dollar for their campaign, they're not expecting a copyright shitstorm to erupt around their brand.

The quality of photos on socmedia platforms is limited by b/w constraints. A 35meg RAW image, squished down to a 100-200kb jpeg is not going to be quite the same thing. So for anyone getting a rage on about "the man" dredging digital landfill for nefarious purposes, the more likely IP infringers are going to be the knockoff merchants who plague online sales sites like Ebay and Etsy. Takedown notices on Ebay seem to be taken quite seriously when original EXIF data is shown to exist. A phonecall and a supporting email, and woof!, culprit no longer has an account.

My designer friends routinely search for copies of their work, using Tineye quite effectively to find copyrighted photos from original collection shoots. They also keep a list of knockoff merchants, which is available through the specialist boards where these things are a hot topic.

Sensible search terms are useful on Google image searches, so the guff posted about the obscurity of the Vulture logo in the first few replies is a bit of a straw man. An image search for "the register logo" isn't rocket science. Trebles all round!

Reg hack to starve on £1 a day for science

Re: This is a flawed test

In punkier times, it was somehow possible to live on brown rice with marmite, and wholemeal chapatis. Frequently, for weeks or months at a time.. Fruit and veg scavenging on the bigger markets added a bit of much needed variety. A veggie diet is unlikely to break anyone's bank, unless they're into overpriced fad foods from exotic places.

Day 1: Value style pot noodle x 2

Day 2: Value spaghetti with tomato puree and a hint of pot noodle sauce.

Day 3: Value mushy peas and a baked potato with a hint of tomato..

Day 4: Value spaghetti with tomato puree and pea/potato sauce.

Day 5: Microwave Lidl egg fried rice. (properjob luxury!)

Breakfast toast for the week from a 50p Lidl large wholemeal loaf. Think of the fibre.

Asda Value teabags at 20p for 80 ought to slake the caffeine thirst (four to a cup), and a scout through the supermarket bins should turn up a past-its-sell-by pud or two. Just peel off the blue bits.

Place a sneaky £1 bet on yourself at 200/1 against, and you'll still have 30p left over to celebrate your good fortune.

Master Beats: Why doesn't audio quality matter these days?

The thing about listening on headphones is that it's personal, not social, industrial or political. No two sets of ears have the same frequency response across the entire spectrum, so it's all subjective. For someone whose eardrums have taken a pounding from close proximity square waves, most audiomush sounds fine if it's really fookin' loud. For someone who wants detail, and doesn't need their head stoving in with loudness, a pair of ye olde Quad Electrostatic headphones might be closer to ambrosia. And gloriously fragile.

Myself, I monitor on a cheap-ass active Sumvision pc speaker thing when I don't want to annoy my neighbours. Otherwise it's ATC SCM10s and a couple of A&R Cambridge IC blocks from the waybackwhen. Not exactly audiophile, but they're nicely matched. I've got a pro line driver stuck in front of them, and the feed for that comes from a fancy DAC in a TC Konnekt 48. It works for me.

I use two sets of cans for checking the consumer reality. Closed Sennheiser HD 570s for the warm woolly tube sound, and open HD480s for the brutal dj monitoring experience. If I'm compressing wavs to mp3, i strip out the very low subs <50hz, and push the resonant bass frequencies around 250Hz. I leave 0.3db of headroom to stop it squeaking on tiny low quality DACs, using an Ultramaximiser plugin to give it a sweet dynamic optimisation, that doesn't trade off clarity and warmth for loudness (other costly plugins are available). Then I crunch the wav down to 320VBR, and it sounds rather sweet, even on my Sony phone with soft earbuds.. You could use any cheap headphones to listen to properly mastered music, and it would refuse to sound crap (psychoacoustically), because it's designed for a wide range of kit, from budget to unaffordable..

The Beats headphones are heavily biased to the budget bass end, which, in a closed space, reduces the available headroom for the rest of the signal. When punter X cranks up the volume in order to hear the top end, it's kinda obvious that it'll sound awesomely bassy, but it's just turbulence in a teacup if you like a warm balanced sound.

Some of the encoding on the interweb just baffles me. A mindless dork murders a fabulous 70s funk track by optimising it to death, a few hundred more give it the gushing thumbs up, and nobody seems to notice the vile whistling artefact that makes it unlistenable to anyone who's ever heard the vinyl. Beats headphones are sold into that blissful ignorance market..The same market that thinks having a 500W PMP subwoofer in your boot equates to sound quality, when all you can hear is panels and fixtures rattling.

Apple fanbois get one last chance to see spectre of Steve Jobs

Re: Downward share price

/\ "reporting live from Weatherspoons for Fox News" /\

Re: Downward share price

In the real world, quite possibly, but in the paranoid triplethink trading universe, it could be seen as a dyke-plugging exercise to stop all the value being drained out of the stock. Perceptions may vary, according to quality and quantity of the marching powder deployed by brokers. The only real event that takes place is a diminution of Apple's cashpile, with the amount spent being replaced by stocks, which may well go tits up faster than the dollar.

This might be seen as a risky strategy, when a company bets on its own share price to stave off downward market pressure. Apple can afford to lose a few billion here and there, but another 100 bux off the share price will see bodies falling from the executive floors. The dividend payout works on a similar principle. It's a sweetener for shareholders who've just seen a huge chunk of their virtual cashpile go south. Bubbles burst, haircuts go viral.

Bogus gov online test tells people on dole they're just SO employable

placeboh!

I want one of those there placebo bomb detectors "our brave boys" use in Iraq.. Gubmint approved, so they must be good.

Review: Nokia Lumia 720

Phones are rapidly mutating into lifestyle statements, which allows brand junkies to state their opinions as fact, in the belief that other brand junkies/haters will rally round the flag.

The "best" phone, until the next "best" phone comes out next week, is surely the one that meets your personal needs for form, function, and value. Beyond that, it's as silly as going to war over matters of taste. I'd rather waste my energy in the pub.

Ten Windows 8 Ultrabooks

I'm quite happy with the hybrid drive on my clapped out core 2 duo laptop. Seeing as a 32bit OS can't see more than 4gb of ram, I doubt that I'll be adding four more anytime soon. I'd have been interested to find out how many of these top o' the line gizmos are running a 64bit version of Win8, and more importantly for business users, how many films they're good for in twoo HD during an arduous train journey to company outpost X in the low wage hinterlands. One simply can't abide an executive laptop leaving one in battery fail limbo just as that nice Mr Bourne/Bond is tearing someone's leg off with his pinky.

ICO probes Home Office refusal to reveal Snooper's Charter details

As Orwell might never have said "They danced around the MayPol"

I'd be more concerned for my sanity if May and her securitech lobbyist acolytes weren't such a bunch of useless wasters. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they've only spent ten quid creating a consultation document, and the rest has gone on team building exercises and lunches at Jamie's.

Chinese firm deluged with applications for e-smut appraising job

This is a job for....[gnarly fanfare]...Tubgirl!

Gov.uk named THE BEST THING Britain has made all year

only took them three months to get the login page working...briefly

Movie review: Oblivion

Tom Cruise: A narrow-eyed glare that's looking a bit past its sell-by.

Vinyl sales reach 15 year high, Blighty becomes No. 3 music buyer

I like vinyl. Call me a luddite if you will, but my US import 12"s on big fat virgin vinyl that you could drive a tractor over without scratching them, still sound rather good today. Never really bought much in the way of recycled vinyl pressings, for the reasons mentioned above. Still playing the occasional dnb set off vinyl, and loving the fact that I'm not relying on a robosampler to match the beats. Course, it does mean that I don't get as much time to pump my fist in the air, or look at my facebook feed on a mobe, but hey, that's showbiz.

One of my hobbies is digitising and restoring old 78s and 45s from the days of yore, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how many of them are still in pretty good nick, after 50-60 years of existence. Shellac is very fragile, so the fact that it's still playable is a testament to the loving care afforded these historical documents by their owners. Compare that to the way cds magically accumulate pizza grease and scuffmarks. Maybe vinyl just feels less "disposable" than cds, so people treat it more gently, as befits its age..