Posts by LordHighFixer

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

EIther way

succeed or fail, I suppose the swag I got for applying will be worth something someday.

I knew they would fail when they binned my application.

EE customer: Creepy ex used employee access to change my mobile number, spy on me

so, I am guessing

That my 'I read your e-mail' shirt is out of fashion these days.

FCC: Oh no, deary me. What a shame. Too bad, so sad we can't do net neutrality appeal during the US govt shutdown

well one thing

"pipe providers" shouldn't be allowed to be "content providers". A company can be either one or the other, but not both.

That is the only thing in your post I don't take issue with. I actually agree.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

Re: Why are physical checks needed?

"a computer algorithm could predict both coverage and average data speeds "

Ah, I see you have discovered the difference between the theoretical and the actual. Personally I can not connect to a network based on theoretical speeds. The actual speed seems to make a difference though.

Black Horse slowed down: Lloyds Banking Group confirms problem with 'Faster' payments

Don't they know?

You never, ever, make changes to anything on Friday.

Forget your deepest, darkest secrets, smart speakers will soon listen for sniffles and farts too

How to sell this

or any invasive monitoring tech. Make it local. We have all dreamed of the day when our homes can be an efficient butler, but we want it to keep our private stuff private, so it needs to be local, and under our complete control. No cloud based processing. It should ask me if I need it to order new trousers after it hears I have shat myself, but I should also be able to take a hammer to the basement and permanently remove all evidence should it be necessary.

A Christmas classic: Cloudera founder asks staff to stay another day

We're actively looking at ways to preserve jobs where it makes business sense to do so

And if you are in one of those positions you already know it.

Take the offer, but time it so you can also get whatever severance pittance they give you. Squeeze them and squeeze them hard. Time to start forwarding important e-mails, making copies of all your work, and all the things you would do in hindsight had you known it was coming. Because you know it is.

In a perfect world they would be giving you the whole we wish we could keep you speech, and detailing your severance the day before you are scheduled to start your new job.

UK white hats blacklisted by Cisco Talos after smart security code stumbles

Every fule nose

Black hat and White hat are direct references to "spy vs. spy" from Mad Magazine.

Oxford startup magics up metamaterials for next-gen charging

I^2 losses

I have never really understood the hype over wireless charging, or as we used to call them, air core transformers. And if you have a device so equipped, can't you just charge it anywhere there is some spare EM floating around, like a wall wart or pretty much any electrically powered device, anywhere, anytime, for free??

Apple to splash $10bn raisin' American bit barns

The new paradigm

It used to be (most recently) personal computers connecting to remote servers in data centers. With all the hype hype to go all cloudy cloudy, will the new paradigm be personal data centers connecting to remote clouds. I am just asking for a friend.

Waymo presents ChauffeurNet, a neural net designed to copy human driving

Well Duh.

They trained it on 60 days of data from a previously trained driver and it failed. Where is the revelation there? Take anyone off the street, that has never driven or been in a car, let them ride as a passenger for 60 days, then give them the car. I suspect equal failure rates. If they can train it with 10 or 20 years of driving data, they may get a little closer to success. Even after driving for around 40 years in all types of terrain and conditions I still get caught off guard now and then.

IBM is trying to throttle my age-discrimination lawsuit – axed ace cloud salesman

Why didn't he gather the information during the 3 months before he was shown the door?

Simple, while he was an employee, if he had gathered information, and taken it off premises, he would have more than likely violated a company policy, and given them cause for his termination.

MAMR Mia – it's not just WD: Toshiba's popped to the microwave too

Thats all good and all

but is 16TB of data much more than an educational exercise for HD manufacturers. Mechanical drives have their place, but at this point I believe that they should start going for diversification, or put some more money in to their R&D labs, specifically telling them they are not to try to make a better mechanical drive, just denser storage.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Here is a good question.

At this point, would anyone stop a couple of polite, non-government affiliated, visitors to the embassy, from forcibly escorting him out to the street.

US told to quit sharing data with human rights-violating surveillance regime. Which one, you ask? That'd be the UK

Re: Interesting

I noted that as well, and as far as I can tell, there would not even have to be any dirty deeds involved, just a friendly letter to any other country saying, hey, we can't really look at or for this or that, and the other country could rip through as much data as necessary, and turn it over, no fuss, no muss, no warrant. A violation of fourth amendment rights in the US tends to get a lot of people, with hidden stashes of weapons and such, cranky.

Planet Computers straps proper phone to its next Psion scion, Cosmo

Re: I'll say it one more time...

I always thought the last version of the Sharp switchblade phone (AKA, Sidekick) was cool. Still have mine, too bad no data service any longer, or I would be using it..

US draft bill moots locking up execs who lie about privacy violations

I voted for him.

I have known the Senator since he was just a puppy (over 30 years), he is a good guy with good intentions and supports the wishes of the people he represents. He is one of the few politicians that has earned my respect.

I hope this bill gets through the process as written. If not,, it should give some people something to think about, much like the GDPR has.

And for bonus points, he is not orange.

Slabs, huh, what are they are good for? Er, not quite absolutely nothing

You can only bloat so much

Once you reach a certain point there is really no need for an upgrade. Even developers, as irresponsible as they are can only up the requirements to a certain point. Most hardware purchased in the last few years should be good for at least 5 more, then it just becomes a hand me down, unless the battery is glued in, then it becomes e-waste. There is such a thing as market saturation, and as the tech improves the long tail just gets fatter and longer.

Smartphone industry is in 'recession'! Could it be possible we have *gasp* reached 'peak tech'?

not unless they die.

I have one smart phone, and a matching watch. If they die, and the watch is getting close, I will not be replacing them. I still have my flip phone. Put a new battery in it and it will be good until they deprecate the frequency it runs on.

fsck smart phones.

Seagate HAMRs out a roadmap for future hard drive recording tech

Should be interesting

I predict a number of fascinating failure types when the heating part of the rw head fails. oops, RO drive.

Should a robo-car run over a kid or a grandad? Healthy or ill person? Let's get millions of folks to decide for AI...

It's all about me (The driver)

After targeting the 'at-fault' run over what ever has the least or farthest connection to me. A busload of school age nuns from another country or my dog, smash the bus. (I don't actually have a dog, it was hit by a car).

Fed up with cloud giants ripping off its database, MongoDB forks new 'open-source license'

THere should be a way

To say, here is my source code for widget, have fun with it. If you use it for educational or bug fixes and make it better, please include the source. If you make a derivative work, and charge for it, I want royalties, if you incorporate it in to a product and make money, I want a cut.

I mean seriously, if you code a better mouse trap and give away the plans for individuals, that is ok, but if a company takes your plans and produces them en masse, or includes it their master trap program, you should get paid.

Twilio tweaks twicky twalkative bot toows to dewight devewopers: It's Autopilot for chat apps

I wonder

I have been considering taking all the comments ever posted on the reg, using them to train a Markov bot, then giving it a tech support role.

And that's now all three LTE protocol layers with annoying security flaws

Puleeeeeze

Any communications short of shielded cables between Faraday cages is subject to snooping. Even entangled photons, given enough re$ource$....

Et tu, Gentoo? Horrible gits meddle with Linux distro's GitHub code

Everything is better in the cloud?

Score one for hosting your own critical infrastructure.

Who wants to cram some BOFH skills into their brains? How about from, er, Google?

An actual BOFH cert.

I would happily pay the price of a pint and a couple of kabobs, for a reg certified BOFH certificate.

Microsoft, Google: We've found a fourth data-leaking Meltdown-Spectre CPU hole

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood....

The really truly sad part of all of this, is that there was much discussion over these types of "features" in a CPU 40 years ago. It was determined that these were a "Bad Idea". The favoured idea at the time was multiprocessing could solve the problem, if we could find a few people smart enough to write the code for the hardware we designed. ((z80/8080/68000 era)). We are still waiting. CPU design went down a path that put money in pockets now. Screw the future. Its not like this stuff will still be running when anyone notices the issues.....

Google yanks cash firehose from Lunar X Moonshot comp. The actual Moon shot one

I could have done it.

I don't know if the 30m would have covered the cost to haul the Saturn V out of the Smithsonian and NASA, but, hey, it still there, just a systems check and load of fuel..

Oracle to sue cloud sales 'whistleblower' for 'malicious prosecution'

They broke the sun

So their stock dropped $6bn. They blacked out the Sun, so fsck them.

Computer Science grads still finding it hard to get a job

Simple Questions.

I usually get called to sit in on interviews. Generally to assess an applicants skill level. I will not be working with these people generally, so why do they call me? I have a set of "hard" questions for the CS/IT crowd. The answers are generally not as important as how you answer them. Here is a little selection.

Is the netmask 255.128.255.0 valid and why?

What is x509?

On a network, where is the default gateway?

Describe the TCP handshake, how about the UDP handshake?

What is the difference between PKCS11 and PKCS12?

I Have a couple of pages of questions like that, plus a few problematic trouble shooting scenarios I walk them through. If they survive my portion of the interview they usually get an offer. It is not so much the answers, but how you answer them that count. (But if you don't hit at least 75% you can't work with me.)

Silly sysadmins ADDING Heartbleed to servers

Re: holy fuck, three hours?

@ NogginTheNog

I have a great deal more than one server, and luckily none of mine are public facing so patching the vulnerable ones was mainly an administrative exercise. However, any sysadmin worth hiring should be able to patch one or 100 servers in the same amount of time. For me, I loaded the patch into the repository, selected the patch, the targets, and pushed the "do it" button.

Shocking 'new iPhone' is also - BZZZZT!! - a Taser-like stun gun

Back in the day

We used to charge up largish value caps and drop them in lab coat pockets. One day someone dropped one in the instructors pocket. Next day no more lab coat pockets. Keep in mind that this was the same instructor that had a beautiful metallic foil gift wrapped box on his desk than contained a pendulum switch a battery and an ignition coil. It was always funny to watch the class go silent when a newcomer would show interest in the pretty box.

We used to have contests to see who could shake it the longest....

Microsoft's naughty Cortana NOT ALLOWED NEAR CHILDREN

How long before..

We get to see a vid posted of Cortana and Siri hooked up to talk to each other. Will they spiral out of control or will they run out of things to say and just be quiet...

Reg man builds smart home rig, gains SUPREME CONTROL of DOMAIN – Pics

interesting

and pretty with the little indicator LEDs.

I however have also been using X10 since before the dawn of time. Have the scripts run out of cron on the central server. In the morning the coffee starts before the lights gently raise to full brightness, then the alarm clock starts. If for some reason the alarm hasn't roused me from my dreams of vulture central the lights start flashing. Buts look great for the neighbors at 5 am. In the evening at dusk the lights in the house start on their pre-programmed routine, moving from room to room going on and off and finally warning me by doing a big blinkey dance that it is time for sleep. Motion detectors, day light detectors, light switches, dimmers, high and low power relays. It is all in there.

But I would fancy some nice shiny chrome plated wall plates ;)

Opportunity selfie: Martian winds have given the spunky ol' rover a spring cleaning

Re: Are ALL THE MATHEMATICIANS DEAD?

"60% efficiency boosted by 70% = 102%. Doesn't anyone edit this bad data?"

Now I know how all the perpetual energy nutters do their math. I hate to break it to you but when you have less than 100% of x and increase its efficiency by less than 100% you can not get over 100%. Try again.

Anatomy of OpenSSL's Heartbleed: Just four bytes trigger horror bug

Re: What is heartbeat used for?

"Is there a reason why the server should be echoing back client supplied data"

Sure, it is for a future internet distributed storage system. Or an awesome built in DDOS amplifier.

"Maybe it is for making enormous swiss cheese.

No. The beam would last for what, 15 seconds?

What good is that? -I respect you, but I graduated.

Let the engineers figure that out.

Maybe it already has a use...

...for which it's designed. "

Beat it, freetards! Dyn to shut down no-cost dynamic DNS next month

Re: $25 per year sounds really cheap to me...

When you consider that you can have up to 20 3rd level domain names pointing at your home server, the price is very reasonable. How much would it cost you to actually register 20 domain names. Sure you can register just one generic 2nd level domain name and create as many 3rd level domains as you want, but there is still that dyanmic part. And the issue of getting anyone to listen to your DNS updates from a dynamic ip address..

Apple to protect your gently roasting rear with 'iTanning' system

I thought...

that all the fanboi's were the same pasty white color as their iProducts and never actually saw the iSun. was iWrong?

SQL giant Oracle plans NoSQL standards body – top Reg sources

The funniest part is..

That people are turning to these alternate data base formats to get away from anything Oracle controlled. They would still be tuning, tweaking, and optimizing MySQL for their purposes had Oracle not been involved with it. I imaging is scares the flying monkies right out of them realizing that they are no longer the only game in town.

Technology is murdering customer service - legally

One thing I haven't tried

is entering XYZZY or "kill troll with axe" in to the phone tree system. Maybe I should have put the batteries in the torch before I started...

Rumour: Next Apple iThing to feature 65-inch screen. Four-limb multitouch, anyone?

what use?

65" screen, 4 limb multi touch? 3d HD interactive porn of course....

Google's Nest halts sales of its fire alarm – because waving your hand switches it off

Be careful what you say..

The NSA hears what you say, reports it to their google overlords (and you thought it was the other way around), google reprograms your thermostat and fire alarm. Terrible tragic accident ensues, no more complaints from you.....

'Hello, is that the space station? NASA here. Can you put us through to Moscow?'

Just put the wall back up.

Bring back the USSR. I guess parts of Europe might have an issue with that, but wasn't it a lot more fun back then? Then this whole "internal matter" would not be an issue.

New WebCL toolkit hooks browser apps into GPUs – and that's not good news for Apple

The first thing I thought

Was very cool, now we can have exploits and virii coded directly into images and videos....

Virtual reality? Two can play THAT GAME, says Sony: New headset revealed for the PS4

Match made in ....

Oculus Rift + RealTouch + Secondlife = death from dehydration.

MH370 airliner MYSTERY: The El Reg Pub/Dinner-party Guide

Ping

Certainly these pings were picked up by more than one satellite, or other receiver. If two satellites picked up the same ping, intentional or not, then we have it all sorted. Where is my prize? There is a prize right?

Battery vendors push ultracapacitor wrappers to give Li-ions more bite

Ultra?

"Capacitance from 150 - 3000 milliFarads" For the "Ultra" tag I was expecting something in the multiple Farad range..

Amazon fuses LoveFilm, subs service, calls it Prime Instant Video

ROKU

Amazon Prime + instant video streams to my roku box and tele just fine. I have purchased enough stuff thru amazon to make the prime membership worth it, so the free streaming stuff is sauce for the goose.

They have accomplished their goal with me. I shop there first, and buy my movies from them....

Facebook-for-suits biz LinkedIn shares drop on weakened 2014 outlook

Well, they are doing one thing differently

they seem to be making a profit...

Microsoft seeks patent for blade server chassis

I am pretty sure

That I have a whole datacenter full of HP and IBM stuff that has all of these features. But it has been a couple of months since I have been in there, maybe it has all been re-labeled Microsoft now....