Posts by crediblywitless

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Not-very-self-effacing author never used JumpStation, then? Google's problem has always been that it gives in to the Marketing department.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

The Department Of Goverment Efficiency is going to have two bosses. Irony is over.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

You'd've thought that people who make films and TV would've got the hang of this, and - when they need a fake IP address - just start with something >=240.

Microsoft cancels universal Recall release in favor of Windows Insider preview

The two examples "what was that website last week?" and "where is that email?" are already pretty comprehensively solved anyway.

UK may not hit goal of 95% mobile coverage, commons committee warns

The providers should never have been allowed to quote "population coverage" in the first place.

When red flags are just office decoration: Edinburgh Uni's Oracle IT disaster

No surprise there, then

University's senior management not consulting the staff actually doing the job, not paying attention to them when they volunteer input, and going ahead with something that's a poorly-implemented bad idea? Absolutely unprecedented, eh

Big Cloud deploys thousands of GPUs for AI – yet most appear under-utilized

The horrific cost of renting time on a cloud GPU might just possibly have something to do with it

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

"Black box" isn't derogatory. A "black box" is something you don't have to worry about because it just does the right thing, forgettably well

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

They don't even tell us what the words in the "fireable-offense list" are. I guess we'll only know when we're fired.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Spookily, a milliTruss turns out to be "about an hour"

Microsoft and Meta promise facehugger PCs piping cloud desktops into VR headsets

I had to Google "spruiked"

China says it has photographed all of Mars from orbit

Can we see Cydonia this way, perhaps? Pyramids, The Face, etc?

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

A cupboard full of a run of live thicknet I discovered after some years of successful operation showed me that the minimum bending radius wasn't a big deal. The black marks didn't tell you where you could tap, they just told you the minimum distance between taps.

Microsoft slices Windows 11 update size by 40% (no, not by cutting hardware support)

What could possibly go wrong?

CityFibre scores extra £1bn+ of funding to plumb in up to 8 million British homes by 2025

I have a Cityfibre cab 20 feet from my front door. I had an installation appointment with Vodafone for Thursday 19th March 2020. I still have the router they sent. This appointment was postponed on Mon 16th March 2020 citing "cabling problems". After first lockdown, in September 2020, I went back to Vodafone to find out the score, and they'd cancelled my installation, closed my account, and apparently weren't able to offer me _any_ broadband service. I've since asked everyone I can think of about the issue (Vodafone, Cityfibre, local authority promoting "Gigabit City") and I get nothing. If I use Cityfibre's service-checker, it tells me "your landlord hasn't agreed to the installation yet". I don't have a landlord; I have a mortgage. Utterly useless, and getting on for two years since we were first told it was happening. I don't know why they bother, and I certainly don't know why anyone would invest.

Call Windows 10 anything you like – Microsoft seems to

If there's a release next March, it'll presumably be Windows 2003.

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

In whose world is this "Julian date format"?

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

I just hope they write it up. Some quite large organisations have tried to do this in the past and had to give in.

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

If manufacturers haven't learned lessons from the last time this happened, then... I guess I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. The way modern Tomtom kit handles UK postcodes, for example, compared with how the equivalent Tomtom kit from a dozen or more years ago did it, suggests that remembering lessons of history is not something these people do.

If you have inner peace, it's probably 'cos your broadband works: Zen Internet least whinged-about Brit ISP – survey

Mostly troublefree, yes, but when Zen does screw up it can do it impressively. A week without any service after a service change they said I'd ordered, but I hadn't, and then being told "ooh, well, we have to wait 48 hours until we can raise a call" and "ooh, well, we have to wait 48 hours for a response", etc., and then towards the end of the week cancelling my service "as you requested", except I didn't. Zen definitely used to be much better, and they may well still be the best there is, but I get a "lackadaisical" impression when I have to make contact, these days.

Still a Zen customer, but wary.

Brit mobe operator O2 asks cut-off customers: Have you tried turning it on and off again?

Total Inability To Support Ubiquitous Phonecalls?

Ah, um, let's see. Yup... Fortnite CEO is still mad at Google for revealing security hole early

"malice of forethought"? I suspect you meant "malice aforethought".

Sur-Pies! Google shocks world with sudden Android 9 Pixel push

Can this collection of largely-idiotic second-guessing be turned off? I'm reasonably well aware of the options available to me to get to work.

Facebook invents new unit of time to measure modern attention spans: 1/705,600,000 of a sec

There are pi seconds in a nanocentury. To a rough approximation.

WD My Cloud NAS devices have hard-wired backdoor

Successfully updated a MyCloud EX4 just now. This was made more awkward by the fact that the device expects to be able to download the firmware update into user-data space - so if you've deliberately created an ISCSI target that uses _all_ of that space, it has nowhere to put the update. Take your service disks out, put a scratch disk in, let it set that up, update the firmware, take the scratch out, put your service disks back, and click 'OK' when it asks you if you want to 'integrate the roaming RAID partition'.... And relax.

So, there's a programmer who works at D-Link somewhere named Briony, is there? Her surname starts with G? Good grief...

World Vasectomy Day: 15k men line up for live vent-blocking

Still the cleverest thing I ever did, 21 years on...

MongoDB update plugs security hole and sets sights on the enterprise

A more appropriate fix would have been to default to turning some sort of security on, at installation time.

Robot granted Saudi citizenship has more rights than Saudi women

Ugh. very, very deep in Uncanny Valley, there.

Three words: Synthetic gene circuit. Self-assembling bacteria build pressure sensor

"You said his team could do more work to improve the fabrication process's robustness..." I did? Who's on first?

Database biz MongoDB files to go public, hopes to raise a cool $100m

Mostly, I'd like a new name (what were they thinking?), a 'create database' operation (confidence-building), and some sort of explanation of the security model.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Remember the time AT&T tried to declare 'Unix' an adjective?

Users shop cold-calling telco to ICO: 'She said she was from Openreach'

The notion of Openreach ever actually talking to an ordinary human being should have been a bit of a giveaway.

Puny galaxy packs a big punch: A gazillion joules' worth of radio bursts

Interstellar war. All over now. Move along, nothing else to see...

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

There's an episode of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" about this.

Linux-loving lecturer 'lost' email, was actually confused by Outlook

"Files/folders/email has disappeared and it's your fault!" - except it isn't - is a weekly occurrence, on average.

Take that, gender pay gap! Atos to offshore hundreds of BBC roles

Believing the opposite of what James Purnell says and doing the opposite of what he wants strike me as generally good rules of thumb.

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

It's entirely possible that the database concerned was one of countless that are left installed "open to the skies" as discovered in the MongoDB trouble in January. Database systems often tend to be unsecured by default, on installation, and if no-one gets around to adding it, that's what's going to happen. Presumably that introductory document dates back to when there were only five people working there in the same room?

New Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters can't transmit vital data

A "kinetic effect in a littoral situation" is "blowing things up on a beach".

Hold the phone! Crap customer service cost telcos £2.9 BEEEELLION in 2016

"By putting consumers at the heart of what they do, businesses can prevent customers from taking their custom elsewhere, which is good for consumers and good for business". Wrong. If the awkward customers - the ones who bother to complain - go elsewhere, and the straightforward customers stay, _that's_ good for business. Churn is OK; there's always another customer coming.

Trump's cyber-guru Giuliani runs ancient 'easily hackable website'

Maybe it's a honeytrap?

Printer security is so bad HP Inc will sell you services to fix it

They're sorting out printer security problems already? But it's only been about 20 years.

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

John "Red" Comyn, stabbed by Robert the Bruce at the altar of Greyfriars kirk in Dumfries, Feruary 1306, was responsible for Hillary Clinton losing the election? Boggle.

Despite best efforts, fewer and fewer women are working in tech

I've been saying "the best year for women going into graduate CS/IT jobs was 1984" for 30 years now. All of the "women into IT" initiatives since then have achieved Absolutely Nothing.

One-quarter of UK police websites lack a secure connection

How much trouble does a non-HTTPS website actually cause? Statistics are available, I take it?

The server's down. At 3AM. On Christmas. You're drunk. So you put a disk in the freezer

Sometimes it takes the boss looking destruction in the face? It _always_ takes the boss looking destruction in the face, to consider spending money on backup.

Want a Windows 10 update? Don't go to Microsoft ... please

Even if it works perfectly, there's still the question of how much Microsoft will pay Windows 10 users to rent storage from them.

Zen loses its chill: UK biz ISP falls offline for four hours and counting

I've been a Zen customer for teens of years now. My area code is on the list mentioned in the first fault. I experienced no loss of service whatsoever. You characterise this as some sort of total failure, and it clearly wasn't.

Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of tribble dung

This is a terrible review of a perfectly reasonable film. I'm going to guess that the writer is a born-again TNG fan. I shall be paying attention to what he writes for The Register in future, because that's highly likely to be total bullshit as well, if this is anything to go by. There isn't a single hint of anything that relates to the film I watched yesterday that makes any sense. Get him to actually think about stuff before he writes, rather than just vomiting on his touch screen and leaving it to the subs.

Boffins decipher manual for 2,000-year-old Ancient Greek computer

/* you are not expected to understand this */

But then, the manual is going to be appallingly bad Greek translated from Babylonian by a Sumerian.

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Can I just say "one point thirty-two gigawatts?" More than enough to run a time machine.