Posts by handleoclast 1287 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2012
You can't be Welsh if you could contemplate the idea of a suicide tractor.
I've visited Wales. More importantly, I've been in newsagents in Wales.
Top shelf of a newsagent in Wales: 50% wank mags, 50% tractor mags. And the wank mags are only there for tourists. The Welsh have an unhealthy obsession with tractors.
Dim ysmygu ar y bws, diolch.
This makes no sense to me. Which means there are two basic possibilities:
1) It's a great idea and I'm too thick to understand why.
2) It's based on something Donald Trump tweeted at 3 in the morning after he'd been smoking crystal meth.
If I were forced to place a bet, I'd go for the latter.
Damn you for posting that link. I'd managed to forget that video. Now it's back in my head and I don't have any mind bleach.
If I had a body that looked like that, the last thing I'd do would be to make a spectacle on stage drawing people's attention to it. Hmmmm, I do have a body like that, which is why I avoid running around whooping like a loon drawing attention to myself.
On the intertubes, nobody knows you look like Ballmer.
Doctorow wants no DRM on tractors. Or cars.
I can sympathise, to a degree. Pay big bucks for something, you don't want to be tied to a monopoly when it needs fixing. If you are then that monopoly can push prices to insane levels because there is no competition.
But then I think it through. When a mechanical part breaks or needs repairs or servicing, you can go to a qualified mechanic, or you can go to a back-street mechanic, or you can do it yourself. But most of us do not have the machine tools to manufacture new parts or do anything but trivial repair/replacement. Software is different. Open it up and any fucktard can mess with it.
Somebody tinkers with the mechanical bits in his engine to give his car more oomph and the engine blows up: that's sad for him and a good laugh for us. Somebody tinkers with the software to remove the speed limiter that is there only so the manufacturer can charge for an "upgrade" (yes, this really happens, at least in commercial vehicles, and it's on a par with Windows 10 home edition having everything that the business edition does but registry keys disable the business edition stuff) and it also buggers up the steering and the brakes under certain conditions: that's fucking dangerous.
So while I hate the idea of businesses using DRM to create a monopoly, I really hate the idea of the average fucktard being able to hook up his smartphone to his car, run a dodgy app, and play with stuff beyond his comprehension. That's because I know one fucktard who wanted to bypass the speed limiter on the commercial vehicle he drives. His boss would be happy for him to do it because the boss wants faster vehicles but without paying for the upgrade. This fucktard has, in the past, had mismatched wheels on his car. Not mismatched tyres, mismatched wheels. The odd one out wasn't very secure either. He got done for it. Drove to court to pay his fine in that same vehicle with mismatched wheels. He often has at least one bald tyre. I really, really, really don't want anybody like him having the ability to tinker with his car's software.
Tractors are another matter as they spend most of their time off-road. Somebody damages his printer without DRM by using a dodgy cartridge, that's hilarious. Cars are dangerous.
There are places with unisex bogs. No urinals, just a bog-standard toilet. Some of those places with unibogs require male staff to put the seat down after use. Even if there are several men and only one woman (who comes in part time on random days) so that far more people are inconvenienced and discommoded by the requirement than are commoded by it. I'm not making that up, because I've worked in such a place.
It's always the women who complain if the seat is not in the right position for them. Men (in general) are capable of noticing the position of the seat, figuring out what they want to do and then adjusting the seat accordingly (and without complaint). Women apparently are not, going by the number of times I've read of women complaining that not only was the seat left up but that they did not notice and ended up sitting on cold porcelain. How brain-dead do you have to be not to notice? I could make a sexist joke here, but I'll refrain. I'll wait until the next paragraph to make a different and better one.
Anyway, women always complain about men and the toilet seat. There's no pleasing them. They complain when you leave the toilet seat up. They complain when you put the toilet seat down and piss all over it.
'I do wonder what constitutes "non-conventional".'
Sodomy, for starters. Which is insertion of the penis into any orifice other than a vagina. Yes, sodomy does legally include BJs.
However, titty-fucks do not consist of penetration of an orifice, so do not constitute sodomy. That's why they're classed as gomorrahy (which is similar to sodomy but in a different place). Definitely non-conventional. Even if you're married to Dolly Parton.
Since MPs created the law, their behaviour must define what is classed as conventional. So having sex with your own wife is also non-conventional.
And, by anybody's standards, watching grumble flicks of Donald J Trump being pissed on by Russian hookers is non-conventional squared. Getting turned on by watching it is non-conventional cubed.
Apropos of nothing at all, I had to laugh a year or two back when Tesco sold a yellow climbing rose called "Golden Showers." You can get them from the Royal Horticultural Society (amongst many other places) for only £14.99. I have no idea why I just thought of that.
Bring in Ian Duncan Smith. I'm serious.
He's delusional (looking for work should be a full-time job). He constantly fucked the IT side of Universal Credit with his micromanagement. - see many previous Reg articles for details. It's no coincidence that the IT side of UC showed signs of becoming deliverable after the IDS was deleted from the system.
So bring in IDS. He'll fuck the whole Home Office IT so comprehensively that it can never be resurrected. So it will be abandoned and they'll stop chucking money at it.
Bringing in just about anybody else (who is acceptable to those in power) will achieve the same end. It's just that IDS can do it quicker because he's so good at it.
One thing they didn't mention has an upon profitability.
Youtube screwed content creators. Bigly (as an orange fucktard would say). Demonetized many existing videos from some creators. Which led to many creators I watch quickly putting up videos begging people to support them on patreon or the amount of content they could produce would go down. They weren't using it as an excuse to get extra money. Several of them had given up jobs to produce content full time, living on youtube advertising revenue. They were fucked.
One guy (you probably know who I mean whether you love him or hate him buys scientific kit in order to make educational (ish) videos. He's long been with patreon and is buying serious kit like extra high speed cameras to film stuff in extra slow-mo, but decreased youtube revenue still affected him. Why would his videos be demonetized? Well, he also criticises creationists and SJWs, so there are a lot of complaints.
I have yet to see any of them saying youtube has remonetized any of their videos. So youtube wins bigly. People are still creating content (if they can get enough support via patreon) and youtube aren't paying them as much for doing it.
Of course, most of the content I watch can be labelled contentious. It promotes atheism or promotes science (or both), either of which alone tends to upset the US Talebangelicals. I expect the oh-so-tedious "look at me teaching you how to apply make-up", "look at my inane life" and "look at my 'pranks' that are hilarious if you're on serious amounts of recreational pharmaceuticals but fucking twuntish if not" content producers haven't suffered to the same extent, so maybe youtube's savings by demonetizing videos aren't that great.
At least Google aren't as bad as Microsoft. Yet.
Correct.
That is an offence under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 (as revised). Actually, several offences.
Section 1: Unauthorized access to computer material. Check.
Section 2: Unauthorised access with intent to commit or facilitate commission of further offences. Check.
Section 3a: Making, supplying or obtaining articles for use in offence under section 1, 3 or 3ZA. Possibly, if they wrote (or found) a script or other automation tool in order to gain access. Difficult to justify, even then, since they had only one target. But. you never know.
Section 1 gets you up to six months and/or a hefty fine. Section 2 gets you up to five years and/or a hefty fine. Section 3a gets you up to ten years and/or an unlimited fine.
So definitely not theft/stealing. No intent to permanently deprive, nor did they permanently deprive TalkTalk of anything. Breaching customers' privacy may be coverable by some privacy legislation somewhere, I dunno. Gaining credit card details with intent to defraud is definitely chargeable under fraud legislation and possibly the selling on of card details gains them a bonus conspiracy charge. Absolutely CMA offences. But not stealing.
IANAL.
1. If legislation can be abused then sooner or later it will be abused.
Doesn't matter if it's tax law where people spot loopholes and avoid paying tax or snooping legislation (for use against terrorists only) which ends up being deployed against people who put recyclable waste in the wrong wheelie bin. Sooner or later somebody who can gain advantage by exploiting the loophole will spot that said loophole exists.
2. The abuse will most likely occur sooner rather than later.
Pretty obvious, really.
3. The "abuse" was probably intended all along.
"Oh. It appears some of my rich friends spotted a loophole in some legislation I helped draft and now they're making shitloads of money from it. Obviously, that was never my intent." Yeah, right.
Ummm, look again at what you quoted from the article:
Webroot's security tools went berserk today, mislabeling key Microsoft Windows system files as malicious and temporarily removing them
See that word "temporarily"? It might have been doing a better job than other AV s/w but then it screwed up by not removing the files permanently.
"The core ideals of openness, community, and transparency are prerequisites for solving cybersecurity challenges. Metron was a great fit in Apache because the ASF shares those core ideals. It really does take a village to solve the really hard problems,"
Apache demonstrated their new project, Apache BuzzWord. Artificial Inanity neural nets can now mimic a real-life Pointy-Haired Twat so convincingly that you might almost think an incredibly stupid marketroid had written it.
"the actual implementation language used should have no bearing on the overall objectives."
So, teach it in befunge, or brainfuck, or intercal, or malbolge, right? They're all Turing-complete.
Hint: one of the overall objectives is that a large percentage of students complete the course knowing how to program.
As far as young offenders are concerned, it's peer pressure of a sort. Being horny adolescents they're desperate to get laid. If they're weak and nerdy they're not going to impress the girls with their non-existent fighting skills. So instead they try to impress by cybercrime. Look at me! I'm an 3771 h4x0R!!!1!
The cheapest, quickest and easiest way of deterring such people from cybercrime is to pay for them to have a session with a prostitute. After they've been laid once, the desperate need goes away and they're more amenable to thinking with their big brain rather than their little one.
For the true criminals, of course, money is the reward. They're much harder to discourage.
You want alternative facts? I'll give you alternative facts...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORLomtdXlDQ
A catchy tune (the music kicks in at 18s) ripping the piss out of Trump and co. using their own words (mostly). Uses a DSP app to turn speech into singing, so it's a good idea to turn on closed captions (especially if your hearing is a bit iffy or you have problems with Merkin accents).
Contains a couple of NSFW words. But the extra-NSFW one isn't really audible so you have only the captions to worry about if you're at work.
Actually, I'd say that the problem in some common scenarios is that data replication does give you RPO 0. The problem is that you needed RPO -1 because you want to get back to the data you used to have before some idiot accidentally deleted an important file.
Well, as you and I both said, the problem isn't RPO 0 per se it's not having backups as well. RPO 0 serves an important purpose, but it's no substitute for having backups.
Yes, there are business scenarios where only RPO 0 will do and backups aren't enough. And many more scenarios where RPO 0 is no good (malware, etc.) and only backups can help you. And a few fantastic scenarios where having both still won't help.
On the whole, though, and for many common business models, and given the likelihood of various possibilities (nuclear strike and fat finger, for instance) I'd put a good backup system in place first and RPO 0 (if needed) second. Optimize for the common case...
Sure, RPO 0 is a good idea. I did something approaching that several years ago using DRBD on Linux to provide a HA Samba share. Same building, but storage at opposite ends of the building with a dedicated link between them. The objective was as much RTO 0 as RPO 0. Some people losing an hour's work is bad, but everyone being unable to do anything else for several hours would be worse. With DRBD failover took place within 10 to 20 seconds. All data saved to the Samba share immediately prior to the hardware failure would be available.
But that was no protection against somebody accidentally deleting an important file. Or making an edit that removed a big chunk of a file. Or slow ransomware encrypting old files so you don't notice a problem until it's screwed most of your data. Etc. Which is why backups are essential, even with RPO 0.
I used rsync for nightly backups. It gives what is effectively a full backup with a data transfer only slightly larger than an incremental backup, so can be (and was, in this case) used to backup to a remote site as well as a local machine. With suitable options, rsync also saves a copy of any file that has been changed or deleted. So for the price of daily incremental backups I had a full backup offsite that was no more than 24-hours old, plus several months of changes. Not quite as good as could be achieved with the hypothetical AI-controlled backups, but good enough.
I don't know if rsync is available in the latest Windows bits-of-linux-addon but it's long been available in the Cygwin package and works quite well on Windows. Especially if you figure out all the shadow volume stuff so you can back up the files that Windows keeps open all the time, such as Exchange data.
If this patch becomes popular, Microsoft will take note and start releasing updates that fuck things up if you run them on old CPU architectures. They told those architectures were not supported but you chose to hack your OS to run them so it's all your fault.
Yeah, it's a shame that due to the time it took you to resolve the problem by purshasing new computers and restoring data from backup (you do have backups, don't you?) that your business went bust. But it's your own fault. Thank you for using Microsoft.
The designers who should have been excluded are the ones that like to disguise links so they look indistinguishable from ordinary text. They should be killed slowly and painfully.
Almost as bad are the sites where links are distinguishable from ordinary text but visited links look just the same as unvisited links. This is unforgiveable, especially on news aggregator sites. Even the BBC news site does it in places - in individual articles visited links look like unvisited links so you end up clicking on links you've already seen. Severe clue-batting should be applied.
As for the ones that insist on a design that works only on their browser only at the screen resolution they're using and looks shitty or is unuseable on anything else... Use a cheese grater to remove their skin, douse them with vinegar, then sprinkle them with salt. Then really hurt them.
Too few clients realize that the website should be optimized for their clients, not for themselves.
Too many web designers choose to pander to their clients' requests rather than explain to the client that unless their customers like the site, it doesn't matter how fantastic they themselves think it.
Remember the vogue for Shockwave (as it was then) Flash for navigation? I always called it Flush because any website that used it for navigation had gone down the shitter.
Going by Oracle's past behaviour with software acquisitions, Wercker's stuff is going to get completely fucked.
MySQL: fucked. Use MariaDB instead.
Open Office: fucked. Use Libre Office instead.
Solaris: fucked. Use Linux instead.
Java: well on its way to being fucked, although I never thought that much of it anyway. Use anything but Java instead.
Realize your party has fucked up very badly so run away to leave the other party to clean up the shit. With any luck they'll have so much difficulty cleaning up the shit that your party will get back into power, at which point you can blame the other party for creating the shit in the first place.
My analogy DID specify a hypothetical "what IF somebody found a way of distributing free copies of Linux?" An extreme case. So implausible as to be almost impossible. Yet it was based on what Microsoft has done in the past to stuff it sees as impeding its profits. Microsoft has done a lot worse than that, such as stealing the code to Stacker, and releasing it as DoubleSpace (which had a tendency to corrupt your disk drive) just because it didn't like a third party making money by selling stuff that corrected Microsoft deficiencies.
You're right, Open Source licences mean Red Hat MUST make the sources available. Doesn't mean RH has to make things easy. When RHEL 5 came out, the tool chain available with RHEL 4 could not be used to build RHEL 5 from source. Bit of a bootstrapping problem there. The CentOS guys incrementally added patches to the RHEL 4 tool chain until they got something that could build the RHEL 5 tool chain. It wasn't easy. Buying RHEL 5 to get the tool chain would have been a lot easier (but required spending money and might have led to worries about breaching a Chinese wall).
To get back to my original point, Red Hat didn't have to hire the CentOS guys. Outside of Open Source it would be a crazy thing to do. Even inside Open Source not many would have considered it (at least, not without RH's example). But they did, and as a consequence you, or I, or anybody can have RHEL-in-all-but-name for free.
As you say, the lines between CentOS and Red Hat are a little blurred. Technically CentOS is downstream of Red Hat, but probably not as far downstream as anybody else. As far as bug reports go, the CentOS team is effectively acting as a first-level filter, so anything they pass upstream is probably worth quicker attention.
In actual fact, CentOS is valuable to Red Hat for other reasons. It ports to h/w architectures RH don't support. It releases upgraded/additional s/w that can be used by people with "real" RHEL. So for some things Red Hat is downstream of CentOS.
Just to reiterate my main point, if you like RHEL (as opposed to Ubuntu or whatever) but can't afford it for home use, there's CentOS which is RHEL in all but name. Well, you don't get a support contract, but if you want RHEL for home use because you're familiar with it from work, that's not a problem.
You can have a FREE Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
It's called CentOS. http://www.centos.org
It's RHEL in all but name and various bits of branding (logos and stuff like that).
Scared Red Hat will go after CentOS and shut it down? That's how Microsoft would handle a similar situation, if somebody found a legal way of distributing free Windows.. Microsoft would start with threats of legal action. If that didn't work, parallel attacks:
1) Actual legal action, starting off with a restraining order stopping the distribution (if they could get it). Even if Microsoft had no chance of winning the case on legal merits, they'd take legal action simply because with deep enough pockets you can force the other guy to throw in a winning hand.
2) Bribing/blackmailing governments to get the law changed to remove the loophole that was being exploited.
3) Attempt to hire the guys behind it with a contract that stopped them redistributing Windows for free. If Microsoft can get away with suitable wording in the contract that bars them from ever redistributing free Windows if they no longer work for Microsoft, fire them shortly after hiring them.
How did Red Hat deal with CentOS? They hired the guys behind it. Hired them to continue doing it. CentOS (free RHEL in all but name) is supported financially by Red Hat. Red Hat are paying people to give away RHEL-in-all-but-name.
Crazy? Nope. Apart from getting mega kudos out of it, RH benefit in another way. CentOS gets RHEL onto home desktops. Initially desktops of techies who have some old hardware and like playing with stuff just for the hell of it. From there it spreads to the friends and relatives of those techies. And from all those it can gain workplace acceptance: techies tell bosses there's an alternative to Microsoft; non-techies inform bosses they know how to use those alternatives. Bosses then pay for RHEL because they like the warm, comfortable feeling that comes from support and Red Hat are the people best able to support RHEL.
Red Hat is not a software company that also offers support, it's a support company that also offers software it knows how to support. CentOS is a loss leader, a marketing strategy. A strategy Red Hat stumbled over rather than planned, but they've embraced it anyway. Get ordinary people using CentOS and eventually companies will pay for RHEL.
Got an old machine that's gathering dust? Give CentOS a try. Or Ubuntu. Or Debian. Or whichever Linux distro takes your fancy. On really old h/w you might need CentOS 6 (still supported and being updated). With CentOS 7 you'll probably want to install Mate or Cinnamon because CentOS 7 comes with Gnome 3, which bears too many similarities to Windows 8 for comfort.
If I'd written something like this four or five years ago, there would have been many nasty replies and near-infinite down-thumbs. These days it will get a better reception (I hope). And the reason opinions have changed is Microsoft themselves. Vista, Win 8, spyware OS, shitty licensing, forcing updates on people who don't want them, tricking people into updating by perverting the way dialogue boxes behave, etc. Microsoft's bad behaviour has become so egregious and so blatant that even former enthusiasts have turned against them.
You are both £250 in credit and £103 overdrawn simultaneously. You don't know which until you use a cash machine.
Ooops! Your bank account was quantum entangled with that of a Nigerian prince. He just collapsed your account's waveform by making a withdrawal from his account.
Quantum computing for bank acounts. SRSLY?
Oh, I just figured it out. The ramifications of hedge funds and dodgy mortgages are so incredibly difficult to figure out that only quantum computers can consider all the possibilities before the heat death of the universe. Only problem is, figuring out what's going to happen triggers a collapse of the entire economy.
Or maybe it's to figure out all of Trump's tax avoidance/evasion schemes.
Or maybe it's to figure out in what parallel universe this becomes a remotely sensible idea.
With a staff of 30 you must be selling a hell of a lot of dogs, so you're obviously running a puppy farm.
A lot of people get upset by puppy farms. I've never understood why. Surely it's better for Korean restaurants to buy their meat from a farm than to steal people's pets off the street.
Mine's the one that somebody has inexplicably put dog shit in the pocket of.
Is Branson stupid enough to want a spaceport in the UK?
I know there is an active proposal for a spaceport at Prestwick airport, but does anyone take it seriously?
There's a damned good reason the US has its spaceport in Florida. It's the same reason Arianespace launch facilities are in French Guiana. It's the same reason Russia has its spaceport in Kazakhstan, despite not liking Muslims. They're all near the equator.
There's a big savings in rocket fuel if you launch from the equator. Or, to put it another way, there's a big cost in rocket fuel if you launch far from the equator. Or, to put it another way, you limit the size of payload you can carry on a given design of rocket if you launch far from the equator.
I don't think Branson is stupid enough to try for one. I doubt the people behind the Prestwick proposal are stupid enough to think it's feasible to operate a UK spaceport, but they could be hoping the UK gov't is stupid enough to give them lots of money to build something that will never be used.
It was Vista that caused me to think of Windows in terms of sandwiches. Specifically, the pre-packed ones from supermarkets. The ones where you're not entirely sure how appetising they are until you open them.
For a baseline, XP was a BLT. Not haute cuisine, but tasty and filling. Those capable of working out how to customize it could discard the lettuce (an evil foodstuff) and enhance with brown sauce and/or ketchup. Not filet mignon with all the trimmings (even if it was priced the same), but by Microsoft standards (95, 95, ME) it was good.
Vista was a dog egg sandwich, heavily marketed by the supermarket. Since dogs don't lay eggs, you figured it was a novelty name. Sorta like toad in the hole, which isn't made with toads (or holes). Sorta like spotted dick, which isn't made with diseased sexual organs. Sorta like hot dogs, which aren't made with dogs (except in Korea). Like everybody else, you wanted to try the new, overly-hyped flavour. You got it home, eagerly opened it, then realized that dogs DO lay eggs: they squat, lay the egg, then the owner has to bag it and bin it or risk being fined. Puts you off sandwiches for a long time afterwards.
Win 7 is BLT + mayo. Harder to discard the lettuce without things getting messy, and horrible if you don't like mayo, and tastes a bit weird when you add brown sauce, but otherwise tolerable.
Win 8 is a double-decker dog egg sandwich made with mouldy bread. So vile it made you wish for Vista's dog egg with non-mouldy bread.
Win 10 is BLT with a smear of dog egg (because they had a lot left over from the Win 8 fiasco). Oh, and they'll soon be wanting you to pay a support fee for each minute it stays in your digestive system, because sandwich-as-a-service.
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How hard is it to have a #ifdef (or moral equivalent) wrapping ALL development code/fiddles/backdoors and ALSO wrapping all device identification strings? So that if you've #defined DEV then the device identifies itself as "Development" (rather than TP-Link or Cisco or whatever) on all web pages, CLI prompts, etc.
It's not rocket surgery.
According to the article, "In 2007, Steve Jobs described Apple TV as a “hobby” when the company first unveiled the fledgling product, but ten years on, little seems to have changed in his absence."
Absence???? He's coming back? When?
I know he did it once, but the circumstances were slightly different. The first time he was effectively forced out. This time he's dead. I doubt that, however much Apple wish for his return, he's going to come back. And if he did, he'd probably want braaaaaiiiins.
Terry 6: "The sheer number of cases is enough to demonstrate that the problem is in the system. Either that or the Post Office has been recruiting postmasters from outside (or inside) the gates of Pentonville."
If they've been recruiting ex-cons then the problem is STILL in the system. The Personnel Dept rather than IT, but still a system problem.
"Deutschland über alles" doesn't mean what a lot of people take it to mean. It's not "Germany rules everybody" but more like "Think of Germany before anything else". Or, more idiomatically, and with a shift of country: "America first."
Just sayin...
You're right, only a few MPs would vote against their whip.
That leaves Labour and Lib Dems and a few others. Which would only need a few Tories to go against their whips.
But if enough Tories see it and realize it's true, they might have words with Amber behind the scenes. Point out to her what a truly stupid idea she has. Point out all the people who can be told of this video on youtube and realize what a stupid idea it is. Many of them her own constituents.
Still only a small chance of dissuading Rudd. But that's a lot better than doing nothing.
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