* Posts by Jonathon Green

514 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007

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UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

Jonathon Green
Coat

About the ‘A’ in ADSL…

Also don’t forget about the “Asymmetric” bit, it’s quite possible that a relatively slow fibre connection might give significantly more upstream bandwidth than a nominally faster ADSL option, and for some people (admittedly not your regular common or garden domestic consumer) that’s a selling point in itself.

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

Jonathon Green
Trollface

Wouldn’t it be great if…

…someone came up with a distributed computing project to generate enough fake traffic and inject enough spurious information into the datasets to make them completely valueless?

Just a daydream I know, but if it happened I’d be happy to donate a few processor cycles and a bit of bandwidth…

Juno fly-by detects lower levels of oxygen on Europa than expected

Jonathon Green
Boffin

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS…

…EXCEPT EUROPA.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Jonathon Green

I like Americans.

They’re funny!

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Jonathon Green

Facebook are welcome to monetise all of their users.

They can still sell and serve advertising, they just aren’t allowed to use non consensual intrusive data gathering to (allegedly) improve the targeting of that advertising.

Obviously they’ve so far managed to persuade advertisers that non-targeted advertising is less valuable and they might have to develop a pricing model which reflects that, but, on the basis of what the current model puts in front of me that would probably be more reflective of its actual value to the advertiser… :-)

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Jonathon Green
Pirate

Aaaaarggggh me hearties…

…’tis time to raise the black flag again and set sail on the briny deep once more in search of ad-free plunder!

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Jonathon Green

Since everybody else is doing SF references…

It’s the beginning of the Butlerian Jihad!

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Jonathon Green

Re: An aside

Probably even more fun being a candidate with Fujitsu on your CV…

Jonathon Green

Re: "We welcome Fujitsu's decision to pause bidding"

In spite of the fact that (lamentably) it took a TV show to raise the profile of this mess to a point that even the government had to take notice that wouldn’t be why they were precluding Fujitsu from bidding.

It would be because they were suspended from bidding while investigations took place into a massive failure of governance, and because an unknowable number of staff were party to a conspiracy to commit perjury on an industrial scale. Which I think probably would stand a decent chance in court…

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Jonathon Green

Re: Fushitesu

Oh come on. This mess has been in the public space for a very long time.

If people chose to associate themselves, or continue their association once it became clear that something was going very wrong at Fujitsu, and that people were being seriously harmed then at the very least they’ve been taking dirty money.

The level of culpability may vary (from “lots” to “not at all”) but complicity is still there at some level, and yeah, working for or making money out of Fujitsu is, like (voluntarily) working for or making money out of IG Farben, probably not going to be something you’d want to to bring up in dinner party conversation for a while…

Jonathon Green

Re: Fushitesu

Sine the project that eventually became Horizon apparently had its roots largely, if not entirely within the former ICL that doesn’t seem like a great argument for “innocent bystander” status…

Jonathon Green

Re: Fushitesu

Hmmmm…

How many Fujitsu staff can genuinely claim completely clean hands?

This mess has been pretty much common knowledge in the industry (and thanks to the efforts of Private Eye and the like increasing numbers of people outside the industry) for a very long time. If

were willing to keep taking the money, signing new contracts, or taking employment with an organisation under a cloud of that size and nature without asking themselves (and their management) a few questions then they’re kind of part of the problem…

Jonathon Green

Re: If government contracts with Fujitsu

Courts can only act on the basis of the evidence put before them. If prosecution witnesses are colluding to present false evidence it’s not down to the court if horrible things result.

There may be questions about the use/misuse/abuse/non-use of “expert witness” status for Fujitsu employees providing technical evidence to support the prosecutions, and I think (even before Legal Aid was hollowed out) there are huge issues around the funding of defence cases which revolve around technical questions, and where the prosecution has vastly more access to resources but that’s a different (if connected) question.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

Jonathon Green

Re: "their substantial egos"

[Shrug] Stranger things have happened. I saw a Commodore VIC-20 running a substantial chunk of Chemical engineering at an ICI site, and spent a year working on a modular interface system to allow a Commodore 64, a BBC Micro, or potentially a humble Speccy to do the sort of industrial control work previously considered the domain of DEC PDP 11s and the like…

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Jonathon Green

Re: There is a shaft of light there

“ Sunak and Co are finding out what happens when people in this country get seriously pissed off.”

They continue insisting white is black (and vice versa), banking the cash, making contacts, and adding largely unearned credibility and gravitas[1] to their resume until their positions become so completely and utterly untenable that no amount of bare faced arrogance can survive, continue in lucrative careers as non-exec board members, lobbyists, consultants, and in high profile lecturer/speaker gigs, then eventually retire as highly respected “elder statesmen” with a coterie of protégés and acolytes poised to take up their mantle next time around the cycle

Yeah. That’ll totally teach them…

[1] Note that Sunak has now managed to tick off the “ordered a military operation” box.

UK government woefully unprepared for 'catastrophic' ransomware attack

Jonathon Green
Go

Re: Same old

“A task force will be set up consisting of people with no technological knowledge whatsoever, and with meetings held in expensive venues.”

Who in turn will in time honoured fashion award a generously funded contract to a newly created company with no engineers (or any other relevant resources) owned by a close friend, family member, or business associate of a senior figure in government.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Jonathon Green
Thumb Up

Re: Pope Elanor bans Bitek

Upvoted for gratuitous Peter F. Hamilton content. :-)

Jonathon Green

Re: Toyota's plans for EVs

…and (to the boundless joy of both Mirai owners) will also announce a rollout of a national hydrogen refill point network. :-)

Jonathon Green

Re: The Register ....

…and in other news the return of both Verity Stob and The Moderatrix is announced.

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Jonathon Green
Holmes

> "This will give police additional tools to disrupt the vile criminals that target the UK public."

“Are the extra pejorative adjectives supposed to help? This just makes me question the motives of the speaker and ask what my attention is being diverted away from.”

It differentiates the targets from the nice polite criminals who went to the right schools and make donations to the right political parties and lobby groups…

From yellow cabs to sky cabs: Air taxis take a Big Apple test flight

Jonathon Green
Black Helicopters

On the bright side…

…we can all look forward to being able to star in our own personalised recreation of the opening sequence of Bladerunner!

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Jonathon Green

Re: Proof Of Concept Business

It could be worse…

Macro abuse.

Better still, nested macro abuse!

Trumps function abuse any time, not only has it left me scarred but I’m still acquiring new scars from a particularly enthusiastic practitioner of it right now in spite of the fact that he left the company almost a decade ago…

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Jonathon Green
Coat

I’ve found that a lot of the problems with WiFi in the home can be solved quickly and easily by investing in a bunch of ethernet cables for those things which don’t actually need to move around…

…but then that won’t generate any revenue for the ISP and doesn’t look great on the marketing material.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Jonathon Green
IT Angle

Re: I detect an element of extreme bias in that headline. :-0

“ It seems very strange that the headline exclusively focuses on a company that makes up a partial contributor to the issues and costs and even that may have been caused by the council and not by whowever is proving systems such as oracle‘

I dunno, could it be because El Reg is primarily an IT related publication and hence tends to focus on those bits of the story which its contributors and readership have a specific competence and/or interest in?

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

Jonathon Green
Trollface

I like Americans…

…they’re funny.

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

Jonathon Green

Re: So reading between the lines ...

Ships in the night eh…

Cigna sued for using software to deny healthcare insurance claims

Jonathon Green
Trollface

“Algorithm!”

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”

'There has never been a realistic plan' for UK's £11B Emergency Services Network

Jonathon Green
Trollface

You know, I can’t help thinking that you could buy an awful lot of prepaid SIMs and ruggedised generic mobile terminals for $11Bn and probably still have money left over when you’ve bunged the network operators a bit of cash to bring the not-spot level down to something manageable….

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

Jonathon Green

I’ve seen a couple of those conversions…

…and it wasn’t pleasant. I wouldn’t want to live in one, and I wouldn’t inflict them on anybody else, we already have plenty of shoddy, poor quality housing stock and adding to that isn’t really going to do anybody any favours.

While I’m sure it’s theoretically possible to do good quality conversions my suspicion is that the poor quality lash-up on a building which was cheaply constructed in the first place, and which just about scrapes through planning rules will always look better on the developer’s spreadsheet, and so that’s what we’ll get.

Jonathon Green

Re: I went into the office for 40 years

So did I.

And now I don’t, and I’m not going back…

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Jonathon Green
Go

Could this be…

…one of those rare and delicious cases where you can cheer on both parties in a contractual spat, and a pyrrhic victory where the lawyers walk away with all the money looks like a win for humanity.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Jonathon Green

Re: Oh the pain!

I actually have some sympathy for “solved it now guy”.

Nobody wants to go on a technical forum and admit that they made totally unrelated changes to address an unrelated problem on a system which didn’t interface with the problematical one in any obvious way, and which wasn’t even in the same time zone, the original problem went away, and that they’ve now change freezed their entire corporate infrastructure across four continents in the forlorn hope that it doesn’t recur…

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

Jonathon Green

“ This led me to my current little project, which is to create a bootable image which has busybox, dpkg and apt-get, so that I can install a system by adding, rather than subtracting, packages.”

Isn’t that pretty much what Alpine is?

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

Jonathon Green
Trollface

I like Americans. They’re funny…

Musk tried to wriggle out of Autopilot grilling by claiming past boasts may be deepfakes

Jonathon Green

“This seems unlikely to work. Folding your arms and saying, "yeah, but can you PROVE it?"

The legal equivalent of folding your arms and engaging autopilot in your Muskmobile at 80MPH?

UK PM Sunak plans to allocate just £1bn to semiconductor industry

Jonathon Green

Shipless ferry company, fabless semiconductor company. Same thing really isn’t it… :-)

CEO sorry after telling staff to 'leave pity city' over bonuses

Jonathon Green

Re: 90-second clip taken out of context and posted on social media

That’s the incident I had in mind… :-)

Jonathon Green
Trollface

Re: 90-second clip taken out of context and posted on social media

A video clip of her arrival at the airport and transfer to the venue so that we can all see that she’s downsized both the private jet *and* the helicopter?

Jonathon Green

Re: No awareness

"... and I'm getting no bonus either until you get a bonus"

Maybe she has just enough shame to draw the line at outright lying, because one way or another, sooner or later, there’s *always* a bonus to be had in the C suite…

Jonathon Green
Trollface

I’m sitting in my home office at a very nice, very large Herman Miller Abak desk to type this during a brief tea and biscuit break from my now entirely home based job.

I’m quite delighted with it, and even more delighted that having bought it at a bargain price from an office clearance specialist absolutely none of my money will have gone to the delightful Ms Owen…

European datacenters worried they can't get cheap, reliable juice

Jonathon Green
Boffin

Re: No Way!!!

I can’t believe it either.

A report commissioned, paid for, published by, and with its terms of reference set by a company who’s principal business is on-site power generation reaching conclusions suggesting that on-site power generation might be a handy thing to have…

I’m shocked I tell you, I imagine whoever at Aggreko signed off on it was on tenterhooks waiting for it to be delivered and then couldn’t put it down until the shocking, final page denouement…

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

Jonathon Green
Boffin

Re: From orbit?

“ How about a big circuit between a gas giant and the sun (angled off the ecliptic so we don't accidentally bomb ourselves).”

Big expensive (in delta-V terms) plane change[1] required to put the interceptor into an out of the ecliptic orbit and then another one to intercept an incoming threat which is most likely to be in (or close to) the ecliptic

[1] I don’t know much about orbital mechanics, but I *do* know that plane change is about the most energy intensive manoeuvre (short of actually putting something into orbit in the first place) you can do with a satellite…

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Jonathon Green
Mushroom

My money’s on a state sanctioned “false flag” operation to stir up discomfort, ramp up the paranoia, and facilitate the othering (and subsequent suppression) of more internal dissenters…

ISS rescue Soyuz launches this week, won't return crew until September

Jonathon Green
Trollface

Leaving another Russian craft in orbit for months ... what could go wrong?

Probably not as much as if it was a Boeing CST-100 Starliner…

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Jonathon Green
Trollface

Re: foreign law

I’d love to see them try to make that one stick in the civilised world…

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Jonathon Green
Linux

Does this really have some kind of chilling effect on FOSS…?

…or will does it require corporations baking FOSS components into commercial products to be a bit more grown up about it and put some investment into making sure it’s properly configured and (where appropriate) regularly updated?

On the face of it I have to say this looks more like the latter than the former. And not before time.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Jonathon Green
Trollface

Re: Don't forget

I’ve generally found that when demons are invoked (along with witchcraft, devil worship, etc, etc) it’s generally by the right, more specifically the religious right. The left generally have difficulty *actually* demonising anybody because we tend to have no truck with such superstitious nonsense… :-)

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Jonathon Green

“The sticker price is of course inflated by many EV's being covered in (un-necessary) electronics and processors whose primary role is to make the car "less reliable" and therefore require servicing.”

Have you actually bought a new(ish) car recently?

Unless you’re looking at specialist stuff or very near the bottom of the range(s) it’s actually quite hard to find something which doesn’t carry a similar level of electronic trickery (cruise control, immobiliser, ABS, stability & traction control, autonomous emergency braking, etc, etc) in the form of driver “aids”[1] and comfort features (electronically controlled climate control, remote locking, entertainment etc) to what’s in my Leaf, and the stuff required to get an ICE emissions compliant probably adds at least as much to that as you’ll find in an EV drive train…

As it goes in the [counts on fingers] 8 years since I bought my first Nissan Leaf I’ve never been to the dealer for anything other than regular “”count the wheels and make sure nothing’s fallen off” level annual servicing and one recall for a mechanical component which was nothing to do with either the drive train or the electronics, and the same is true of my wife’s (now my youngest son’s) Micra which carries a broadly similar level of electronic bells and whistles…

[1] Which, to be quite honest I’m not entirely sold on either…

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Jonathon Green
Coat

Re: What is the scope of FSD?

Surely (assuming more or less constant speed) the only way of increasing the gap in front of you is by slowing down gently, making the distinction between the two purely semantic?

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Jonathon Green
Alien

…or you could just save your money and go straight to the tinfoil hat.

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