Posts by Steve Aubrey

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: Contacts on both sides

No, people who would do that are actually lesser people. There would also be fewer of them.

Linux Lite 6.0: It's quite pretty, but 'lite' it is not

Has El Reg enabled the sarcasm font, and my browser just doesn't show it?

Ransomware the final nail in coffin for small university

Re: Having backups

"An honest politician is one who stays bought"

Same for ransomware gangs?

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

"Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare. It was written by somebody else named Shakespeare."

Blood pressure monitor won't arrive for Apple Watch before 2024 – report

Which way?

"the system was able to detect atrial fibrillation correctly about 98 percent of the time"

Wonder if the two percent were false positives or false negatives. One could be a bit of a bother. The other could turn you into a long-term coffin inspector - inside job, of course.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Fired...

I heard of a company who staged a fire drill. Once everybody was in the parking lot, the sheep were separated from the goats. Those being dismissed were escorted in to pick up their belongings.

That's evil.

Wozniak startup to share orbital space junk data

Irony

"Privateer is planning to launch its own satellites"

Anybody taking odds on whether these fly-boxes may eventually add to what needs to be tracked?

Not suggesting he'd intentionally create additional bits for his company to track - would be expensive and dumb, and he certainly ain't the latter. But it's within the realm of possibility.

And it's a serious question - no matter how well-intentioned, putting a box up there means the risk is non-zero.

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: This PR BS makes me puke

Animal Farm. All the animals were equal, but some were more equal than others.

IBM cannot kill this age-discrimination lawsuit linked to CEO

Re: Semantic alert

"The cigars were destroyed in a series of small fires"

Tonga's submarine cable reconnects to the world

"tenuously related news"

You're just stringing us along, aren't you?

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

Because they're blind?

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

Absolute gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baY3SaIhfl0 (one minute)

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

He said, she said

Without technical clarity, there is no clear way forward. Based on the frequencies shown, it would seem that the telcos hold the winning hand. The government waiting so late in the game (and going all the way back to potentially licensing something unusable) is suspect. Seems like something more than the invisible hand of capitalism is at work.

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Selective archiving

"tossing my old Creative Computing magazines"

When I last moved, I downsized my PC Magazine collection, keeping only the January issue of each year, for just this reason. Can't justify keeping everything, can't stand losing everything.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

Stolen - thanks!

Better CEO is 'taking time off' after firing 900 staff on Zoom

Worse, but not as big

I heard about a company that, when time for redundancies, created a fire drill to get everybody out of the building and into the parking lot. Then the employees were separated into the sheep and the goats, and the goats were escorted back in one at a time to clear out their desks. I imagine those staying didn't have warm feelings of confidence in management after that.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

Jake's contribution was a fact, not a denial. 8 years ain't nothing to a time traveler. Just sayin' . . .

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Re: Hands On

Now that's the scientific method . . .

Should be easy to win the rights to .tv when you're name-checked in the contract's tech reqs – right, Afilias?

Bravo

Bravo, Kieren, for some awesome digging. They were able to search-and-delete the name Afilias, but they still missed a smoking gun.

Nominet names new CEO as new chair promises real reform

Actions speak louder than words

That is all

BlackMatter ransomware gang says it's disbanding – again – after Ukraine arrests

"part of the team is no longer available"

So supply chain problems?

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

Re: For the non-programmers amongst us...

"You can write Fortran in any language . . ."

Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m

Re: Portage...

"portage" is also the package manager for Gentoo Linux, providing a very tenuous IT angle.

Want a piece of GitLab? It's going to cost you: IPO price per share settles at $77

Selling the sizzle

It's been selling today between 93 and 96. Current market cap is a shade under $13.5B. They can't keep this up forever (same as I said about BitCoin).

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

And somehow, somewhere, your name was associated with that demolition in a negative way. You just know it.

Ukrainian cops cuff two over $150m ransomware gang allegations, seize $1.3m in cryptocurrency

The times, they aren't a-changing

"ransomware criminals complaining that REvil's rentable malware was ripping them off through a secret backdoor"

Reminds me of the quote about an honest politician being one who stays bought.

No "joke" icon. It's all sad, but true.

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

Timing

Always five years away . . .

Unsure whether to add joke icon or not. I'll stop back in five years' time and check if I was right.

Scalpel! Superglue! This mouse won't fix its own ball

We had a power outage once, and I grabbed a movie DVD and a laptop, so we could watch "television" by candle-light.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: Progress?

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address - in PowerPoint

https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

(joke icon because there isn't one for crying)

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

Kudos to Gareth

Subtle, but present, humor. Sly, even.

Apple won't talk to El Reg, "so asking it to comment on this is a fruitless exercise"

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Shakespeare

Methinks he doth protest too much . . .

No insight into the person nor the situation. But a 10k word "missive"?

Digital delinquent deletes developer's database during disastrous Docker deployment, defaults damned

Re: my compliments

And noted by an author whose initial is "D". Of course he would notice!

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Monitoring is simple enough – green means everything's fine. But getting to that point can be a whole other ball game

Re: Its a partial description of your IT farm.

"Miss one system and your monitoring infrastructure is immediately invalid."

Agree with Unlocked - that isn't invalid, though it may be imperfect.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

Re: Best text editor so far

Thumbs up for Beyond Compare. Started using it multi-years ago as an internal software distribution tool.

Just one in 5 Googlers plan to swerve the office permanently after COVID-19

Re: Turn the headline around.

And some nerds don't like to commute

Visual Basic 6 returns: You've been a good developer all year. You have social distanced, you have helped your mom. Here's your reward

Re: Why not bring back REXX too!

There's something fond in my heart about Rexx (and XEdit) - simple and easy to program. Not for heavy lifting, no, but wonderful for one-off things. I may have to revisit Rexx . . .

Ex Netflix IT ops boss pocketed $500k+ in bribes before awarding millions in tech contracts

Not a politician

Or at least not an honest one.

"An honest politician is one who stays bought"

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

Re: Printers are the Devil's work

. . . reminding me of the love sent across the ocean https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html

(icon for the originators)

What is it with Facebook and screwing democracies? Now calls for Prime Minister Modi to resign censored in India

The rest of the story

"We temporarily blocked this hashtag by mistake" - and then we got caught.

Microsoft received almost 25,000 requests for consumer data from law enforcement over the past six months

My guess - IANAL - is that you'd get much less, if anything. You lack the force of the law.

Railway cables overpowered errant drone's compass and flung it back to terra firma

Re: "over localised regions of the bridge below"

Oooooh, that's low.

US govt can talk about the end of lockdown, but Silicon Valley says 'as long as it takes' – and Twitter says 'WFH forever'

Re: What is it with the VCs?

Some people are trying to recreate the old way of doing things in the "new normal". There are times where vision is important. There re many times, though, where the information is the important part, and that generally doesn't need a webcam.

I keep thinking about the world's best buggy-whip manufacturer. Yes, there's a need for the product. No, Zoom doesn't fall into that verging-on-obsolete category. But I think we're seeing a lot of hype and people playing with new toys. The novelty will wear off and it will be a tool, just not as high-profile as now.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

Aaaaah, so that's what a Fenwick is. I thought maybe it was something like a henweigh.

Asleep at the wheel: Why did it take 5 HOURS for Microsoft to acknowledge an Azure DevOps TITSUP*?

Re: Follow the sun support

That's what happened - sun went down, so single-person support closed its doors (and eyelids).

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

Re: Manufacturing?

And then there was the homeopath who drank distilled water and died of an overdose . . .

Roses are red, IBM is Big Blue. It's out of RSA Conference after coronavirus review: IBMers will not attend infosec event over 'health concerns'

Re: Overblown?

That third hand is called the "gripping hand" - cf. "The Mote in God's Eye". Thank you, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven.

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

Re: "The move was buried in documentation"

Optimist.

Cache flow problems continue for Intel: Yet more data-leaking processor design blunders discovered, patches due soon

Based on the branding icon . . .

I wouldn't worry about fixing this one soon. It's not too scary, so it must not be too serious.

It scares me to think that some people evaluate these things that way. OTOH, that's probably how some folks choose to read comments here.

Leaks point to Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra with mammoth 108MP camera and ... what? 16GB of RAM

Re: I thought

Don't forget your gold interconnect cables, that make digital signals sound so much smoother. Tight this way, just three thousand a meter - and well worth it (to somebody).