Posts by Steve Aubrey

RadioShack bankruptcy savior to file for, you guessed it, bankruptcy

100%

So, the bottom line is that - erm - due to the bottom line, the lowest-performing 100% of Radio Shack stores will close.

Ouch!

Linux kernel gets patch for 11-year-old local-root-hole security bug

SKB?

And here I thought that SKB stood for Stan Kelly-Bootle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Kelly-Bootle, author of The Devil's DP Dictionary.

downtime n. The period during which a system is error-free and immune from user input. Compare UPTIME. See also CRASH.

Paper factory fired its sysadmin. He returned via VPN and caused $1m in damage. Now jailed

Not Mom and Pop

With 200 facilities and 35K employees, they should have had their procedures down, as Alister said.

I think the defense attorney could have spun this as a non-authorized penetration test and gotten the time reduced. An impromptu disaster recovery episode, and lower the fine. A single-person red team attack.

None of that true, of course, and maybe that did happen at the trial. Perhaps the original sentence was ten years and ten million dollars.

And perhaps the yoyo should have stayed out after he got his pink slip (and on Valentine's Day? C'mon, Georgia-Pacific. That was a bit cruel).

Dead cockroaches make excellent magnets – now what are we supposed to do with this info?

Re: Has no-one thought..

Ha!

I thought you said "fridge" benefit. And that led to the Internet Of (buggy) Things - and then it went downhill real quick.

Verizon! surprisingly! OK! with! Yahoo! despite! mega-hack!

Sad me

The "follow the money" mantra leads to a rather sad place. If a billion user names and passwords are worth $250M, then I'm worth two bits to them.

But they are buying the rest for another $4.5B because -- profit??

Something doesn't add up.

Verisign probed by US Dept of Justice over $135m .web auction

Walks like a duck

The speed at which the appeal was denied is not proof of funny business - but does lend itself to the suspicion of some flavor of mutual back-scratching.

Samsung battery factory bursts into flame in touching Note 7 tribute

Recursive

Next, the fire engines are going to catch on fire.

And me without a recycling icon . . .

Big blues: IBM's remote-worker crackdown is company-wide, including its engineers

Improving morale? Eventually

Maybe in a decade or two. Once anybody who knew one of the "left behind" has retired themselves.

New measurement alerts! Badgers, great white sharks and the Lindisfarne Gospel

Re: There's something fishy about that standards page.

"Only one?"

Ya - it's early. Nobody has made a decision yet. Multiverse is pending a decision.

Tokyo 2020 Olympic medals to be made from old electronics

Re: Calling Tim Worstall

@Chris - don't you even want to give the AC a participation upvote??

Ohio bloke accused of torching own home after his pacemaker rats him out to cops

Re: The Telltale Heart

"I have this nice cask of Amontillado in the cellar.."

@Crazy - I'll see you on the other side.

GitLab.com melts down after wrong directory deleted, backups fail

Doc - agree about the possibility of being fired for asking hard questions. But maybe a blessing in disguise?

"Some redundancy should be compulsory for all professional systems."

Ya, but who's going to be the adult in this situation? Obviously one was lacking.

Regardless of how cloudy, trendy, and hipstery your company is, hire at least one adult. The one who knows the hard questions, and will ask them.

PDP-10 enthusiasts resurrect ancient MIT operating system

Believe pip (Peripheral Interchange Program) was in RSX. RSTS had a different animal (all from pre-1982 memories, so grain-of-salt time).

Texas cops lose evidence going back eight years in ransomware attack

Better than even

"We will update this article if and when we receive a response."

My money's on "if".

Oh, the things Vim could teach Silicon Valley's code slingers

cschneid: "Don't mistake stability for stagnation, activity for progress, or change for innovation."

Stolen, for my tagline file. Thank you.

Solaris 11.next plan brings continuous delivery of OS upgrades

Re: Optics

SunOS 5.0 came out in June of 1992 - almost 25 years ago.

Still want to stick with "not a major release" across a quarter century?

Weather stops SpaceX from blowing up more satellites

Just saw the launch/landing

Spectacular.

This is a great time to be alive. I'm old enough to remember when space was the future, through the glory (and then gory) days of the shuttle. Glad we're into another phase of the journey.

IBM: Hm, medical record security... security... Got it – we need blockchains

Re: Blockchain is a state machine

AC: If I have to explain my fist sentence

Let's keep it light here, boys - no fighting. But AC, thanks for leading with your chin.

Bank robber reveals identity – by using his debit card during crime

Re: Natural selection at it's finest.

"it's the trill factor"

So the guy's a singer, too??

US cops seek Amazon Echo data for murder inquiry

Re: Alexa

Which would, presumably, include Frank Zappa's "The torture never stops", from 1976's Zoot Allures.

And what was I doing back then, that I should even *know* about the song??

The Life and Times of Lester Haines

Re: Thank you

Mr. Brown, I admire your diligence.

Thank you

Thank you, El Reg, for this wonderful obit. I have been waiting for it - at the time of his demise it was promised, and now that promise has been fulfilled.

Never met him, but I feel like I knew him (even before this) better than any of the celebrities who have gotten much press this year by shuffling off this mortal coil.

I don't drink, but I understand the sentiment of a raised glass. Goodbye, Lester.

Why does Skype only show me from the chin down?

Re: Cable degradation

I used to tell people about the ones and zeroes on a disk - sometimes if it got bumped, a zero would turn up on its side and start rolling as the disk would spin. If it picked up some ones along the way, it could get too big and cause a head fly-away (opposite of a head crash, and just as terrible).

Solid State Drives have ruined my little story.

Los Angeles to extradite bloke from Nigeria after scores of city workers fall for phish scam

ROI

Ten percent return on investment - that's better than Direct Mail usually gets.

Sysadmin 'fixed' PC by hiding it on a bookshelf for a few weeks

Christmas present

"On-Call will therefore run each weekday next week"

Thank you, Simon and El Reg editors, for the early pressie. A sweet something to look forward to each day.

Japanese robot space maid will incinerate Earth's dead satellites

Re: But, but, but...

"zero guarantee as to whether it's going to land in the middle of the ocean, or on a major city"

Au contraire - I think it is definitely guaranteed to land in the middle of the ocean, or on a major city.

It's the only movie scenario that makes sense. Landing in the veldt, or the steppes, or just offshore, or in suburbia - those things are never mentioned, and probably wouldn't make the news if it did.

Reference: "Small earthquake in Chile — not many killed".

SHIFT + F10, Linux gets you Windows 10's cleartext BitLocker key

Re: Rinse and repeat 10K times. Err, no thanks.

"Hi, my name's Al, I'm from a well known vendor of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

I believe I have a cost-saving and labour-saving opportunity for you.

Call me."

My number's 867-5309. You can call me, Al.

- Jenny

We're going to have to start making changes or the adults will do it for us

Bruce, thank you for noting that the article's intent was not to start a holy war, but to move past them.

Job ad asks for 'detrimental' sysadmin

I thought a Freudian slip was when you said one thing but meant your mother . . .

RRS Sir David Attenborough construction goes full-steam ahead

I'm confused

If the pic at the top of the story shows it already travelling through frigid waters, why does the story say it won't be ready for a few more years?

'Please label things so I can tell the difference between a mouse and a microphone'

Re: Want to be cruel

I saw a personalized car license plate that was

MWNMVWM

- or something similar. If I couldn't read it at a stop light, there was no way a policeman could read it at speed.

SpaceX searches for its 'grassy knoll' of possible Falcon rocket sabotage

Re: Eliminated the obvious

Oh, we're not going to have to endure another round of this, are we?

Delete Google Maps? Go ahead, says Google, we'll still track you

". . . I'll just fetch my wooden clogs"

A saboteur, eh?

Uber lost $7m a DAY in the first half of this year

Re: Nuke all the things

Mr. AC said "If a company even starts to smell dominant it needs to be nuked."

Dangerous ground there, Mr. AC. Should we get rid of Intel, because they have such a large part of the PC chip market? And then AMD as well, since they would be the biggest remaining post-nuke company.

And let's get rid of Android on mobile phones, and Apple following them. Then we can start on Samsung as a mobe-maker, and work our way down that line, trashing Motorola and Huawei and HTC and whoever's next.

What's left afterwards - a pile of smoking, glowing rubble in every single industry?

Not for me. What we have isn't perfect, but it tends to self-correct, sometimes with a nudge.

'I found the intern curled up on the data centre floor moaning'

Re: It's a trap

Hu?

Cray profits literally go up in smoke after electrical incident

I can't decide

Which joke would be better - the firewall one, or the fire sale one?

Flame icon because - just because.

FBI won't jail future US president over private email server

Redefinition

==> concluded that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case based on the evidence

Somebody must have swapped out "no true Scotsman"

Amazon twangs its Elastic File System at on-premises filer rivals

Where?

I tried looking up their East Region location on a map, but I couldn't seem to locate North Virginia.

Gone

Re: Any command-line language?

Predictably:

Paah. Poppycock, probably.

FTC dings InMobi ad network for tracking world+dog

Penalty seems light

Sure, it's a million bucks, but that's (relative) chump change for what they did.

And every-other-year audits? That's three months to re-configure, a year and a half to do it again, and three months to scrub the database. Not saying that they will, but still isn't as stinging as it could be.

A new Habitat for applications? Chef launches open source app automation project

TOML

From the linked TOML repository:

"Latest tagged version: v0.4.0.

Be warned, this spec is still changing a lot. Until it's marked as 1.0, you should assume that it is unstable and act accordingly."

I like the idea of Habitat, but I want to see a solid framework, not smoke and mirrors, TOML and Rust.

Hatches sealed on ISS pump-up space podule

One shot

Hope they built the flaming test right - a mite difficult to try a second attempt.

"No, it's only burning a little bit - you should be fine doing EVA and turning the switch on . . ."

Not two, not four, but 10 cores in Intel's new PC powerhouse

Re: Prefixes

Decca? That's a record!

Pointless features add to browser bloat and insecurity

(I couldn't help myself)

You mean Bloaty McBloatface??

Google-backed solar electricity facility sets itself on fire

Re: Supply commitments?

They would get a Jolt out of that!

Kids these days can't even write a decent virus

Re: Kids these days can't even write a decent virus

I think the word you're looking for is "yoof".

Quickly followed by pronouncements about lawns, I think.

Label your cables: A cautionary tale from the server room

Did the consultant get compensated?

I'm curious whether the hero - for he was - got compensated in some manner for (both) his victories?

Apple, AT&T, Verizon named in $7bn VoIP patent claim

Re: Voip-Pal?

I sword what you did there . . .

Sic transit Mercury Monday

Re: By the way...

Carefully. And quickly.