Posts by magickmark

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority asked drone orgs to email fliers' data in an Excel spreadsheet

Bobby Tables

We all know the story of Little Bobby Tables via xkcd but it now seems he even has his own website!!

https://bobby-tables.com/

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Re: Bureaucracy: Infocom text adventure

Bugger beat me to it!!!

But to add to this you can get a copy here:

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/bureaucracy-a9

And on Gethub here:

https://github.com/historicalsource/bureaucracy

IT workers: Speaking truth to douchebags since 1977

Re: Chip shop scuttlebutt

Their's a guy work down the chip shop swears he's Elvish

For Sir Pterry

Adobe results show it is still creaming those subscriptions but its share price fell – why?

Re: Old school

Well lets not get into the whole thing about punch cards!!

US government sues ex-IT guy for breaking his NDA (Yes, we mean Edward Snowden)

Re: "This is the book the government does not want you to read."

NEVER EVER READ A BOOK, TERRIBLE TERRIBLE BOOK!

D. Trump

There corrected it for you !!

Teletext Holidays a) exists and b) left 200k customer call recordings exposed in S3 bucket

Re: Teletext Holidays

Would have been cool it it had sung "Daisy, Daisy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hchUl3QlJZE

NATO sharpens its cyber-lances, prepares for war games with virtual jousting tournament

Re: Dear Moderator

hummmm, I can see your post. Try posting your "something interesting" and see what happens.

Can't dance? That's no excuse. Let a robot do it for you at this 'forced exoskeleton rave'

Re: As Bones would say.. or Scotty

I canna dowit' Capt'n... its just nooo possible!!!

I canna change the laws of physics, Captain! A've got to have thirty minutes .. ta groove in

I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I canna give her no more

I dannae thik she can take any more, Captain!

Any man who could perform such a feat, I wo'd na dare disappoint.

Also occurs to me this is in San Francisco, Starfleet's Headquarters!

UK government buys off Serco lawsuit with £10m bung. Whew. Now Capita can start running fire and rescue

Obligatory Douglas Adams quote... Again!!

Just posted this elsewhere but seems appropriate for here as well!!!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

The obligatory Douglas Adams quote

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.

Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."

Wonderful

What a wonderful story!!

Sorry for your loss of course, but a wonderful memento and memorial to Mrs Dabbs senior and a very cool artifact in its own right of course.

And now enshrined on El Reg in ad finem

You can't say Go without Google – specifically, our little logo, Chocolate Factory insists

Re: Oh Oh Oh

"Harrison was sued for plagiarism over 'My Sweet Lord' due to its similarity to the Ronnie Mack song "He's So Fine", the 1963 hit for the Chiffons.

I don't know that it was fair that Harrison lost, (I think he lost?), but I prefer the meaningless original."

He was but there is more, the publishing company that was suing he went bust, because of the case. Harrison's lawyer, Allen Klein, who had been defending him, brought the company including the copyright to "He's So Fine" and with it all litigation claims.

In litigation the Judge was so disgusted with Klein's behavior quashed the fine that had been given and awarded Harrison the the right to "He's So Fine" as well.

It is a bit more complex than that and there is a good write up on wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

Re: Glitches

"but I do know Windows 3.11 wouldn't run on top of DR-DOS..."

True but your could run Digital Research's "GEM" GUI, I remember it being on some of the early Amstrad PC's .

I recall were I worked at the time we had some Amstrads with DR-DOS and GEM and we also had some BBC Model B's. When we wanted to upgrade the BBC's we told our supplier we wanted more Amstrads with GEM but what we were supplied with were some PC's (cant remember the make now, possibly Olivetti) and they had MS-DOS (v2?) and Windows v1 if I recall. We'd never heard of it and we were told that it was just like GEM.

So there were two options:

MS-DOS => MS-Windows

RD-DOS => DR GEM

At this stage of the game Digital Research seemed to be giving M$ a run for the their money, at least in the UK .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager

Reach out for the healing hands... of guru Dabbs

Re: OMG

I take exception to that!!! And get of my grass!!! :)

OMG

I'm showing my age, I DO remember reading this the first time round!! I think I'll go hides somewhere and cry!!!!

Blackburn ain't big enough for the both of us: Mr Creamy and Mr Whippy at the centre of new ice-cream war

Re: Things are getting heated

Icy what you did there!

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Apparently you'd need a small Stanley Kubrick as well...

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1095607/NASA-moon-landing-hoax-stanley-kubrick-film-apollo-11-nasa-moon-landing-fake

Turtles All the Way Down

Great A'Tuin's brother?

"Oh my God its full of Turtles"

Honey, hive had it with this drone: Couple lived for years with thousands of bees in bedroom wall

Re: None of your beeswax, said Guerrero

ahh but you need to factor in the death rate..

Drones: about 8 weeks

Workers: 5-6 weeks in the summer or 5-6 months in the winter

Queen: 1-2 years

I'll let you work out the algorithm :D

In the words of a classic Beatles song....

Let it Bee

Re: This article....

Shirley you mean mead?

(and dont call me Shirley)

Your FREE end-of-the-world guide: What happens when a sun like ours runs out of fuel

Remember to feed the small dog the cheese sandwich on the way out !!

Re: I am Jack's complete lack of surprise...

"So assuming that you built a bunker in the centre of Mars, with really good air conditioning"

Sounds like the perfect position to listen a Disaster Area concert, shall we book them now?

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

So long and thanks for all the fish

Like so many have said already, thanks for the work you've put in and good luck with anything you do in the future.

Have a beer or two on us all!

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

Re: Bobby Tables

To quote.....

And so Sid logged into the database cluster over SSH, fired up the database client and started typing the update command. He copied the chap's email and pasted it into the console.

"To my horror a huge amount of text appeared and the admin console dutifully executed it."

As it happened, just before he was asked to update the email, Sid had been working on the main database creation scripts for the staging server.

"My clipboard was full of 'drop table' commands."

For some reason, Sid's attempt to copy the address had failed and he had, of course, pasted the drop table commands directly into the live database

Bobby Tables

We all know the story of Little Bobby Tables via xkcd but it now seems he even has his own website!!

https://bobby-tables.com/

Cool story, brew: Utah karaoke crooners receive cold, refreshing shock as alcohol authority refuses beer licence

Re: me no understand

I-- I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbO5h8Ctfs8

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Re: Japan

ahhhh - The land of the rising moon!!

Centrica: Server fault on Wednesday caused Hive to crash on the Tuesday. Yes, yes, that's what we said

Re: You're all going to die down here!

I think the leopard ate them!

Hi this is Eddy your Centrica wide computer!

Our Hive controlled Flux Capacitor went offline Wednesday morning 3rd April creating a loop in the space time continuum that caused your device to fail Tuesday 2nd April, this was finally resolved on Monday 1st April through a wormhole and all systems are now functioning within 10 decimal places of normal parameters.

Please feel free to go stick your head in a pig.

Share and Enjoy!!!

Autonomy's financial reports? I didn't even read KPMG's due-diligence, says ex-HP CEO Léo Apotheker

Who micro-manages the micro-managers?

My poor Latin would suggest "Quis minutus-administro quod minutus -administrator" but happy to stand corrected of course!

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Re: CorelDraw

And yes I agree they did indeed fuck it up!

I used to use PaintShopPro in some digital photography and photo editing courses I ran back in the day, used to love it as not only was it a great bit of software I could give the students a copy to take home. But once Corel took over it .. yeah fucked it up.

Re: CorelDraw

"you could save about 50% of the cost by purchasing an old version of another graphics program (I'll remember the name later)"

I'm not sure but I think it may have been Paint Shop Pro, which was a Shareware product that if I recall correctly they brought out?

Civil servants 'Sir Humphrey' their way through grilling on UK.gov's digital transformation

Is it just me ..

I kept reading the name 'Cunnington ' with an extra 't' which almost seems appropriate!

Ever feel like all your prayers go unheard? The Catholic Church has an app for that

Gotta have faith

One of the best definitions of faith that I have ever seen is:

"Choosing to believe in that which you know cannot be true"

Or in the words of the late great DNA:

"I refuse to prove that I exist,'" says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

Most munificent Apple killed itself with kindness. Oh. Really?

My tuppence worth

And (allegedly) factory fitted spyware sending your data right back to china.gov central

Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit

Re: Here I am ...

And the diodes all down my left side!!! I think I'll just sit in a corner and rust.

Re: good margin

The problem with PR can be, small extremist parties can hold a lot of power disproportional to their actual size. As an example look at Germany in the 1930's.

PR allowed the Nazi party to gain a toe hold in Government, the rest is history!

COPPA load of that AOL! $5m fine for targeting kids with ads

A real punishment or not?

It would be interesting to know how much income these 'billions' of ads generated and what percentage of that income the fine accounted for.

Was it a genuine loss of profit for the offender or just an acceptable 'operating cost'!

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Re: Exam question.

You beat me to it!!

I had exactly the same paper on a course many years ago when I were a lad and new to IT/Training/Support.

Hate to say it but I was the only person in the class of about 10 or so who did actually read it all the way through.

The other fun exercise we did was trying to tell someone how to strike a match from a closed box on a table between us with the person striking the match only doing exactly what you told them. And of course the instructor on the course had ensured that every box was upside down!!

Creepy or super creepy? That is the question Mozilla's throwing at IoT Christmas pressies

Rotate the Pod Door, HAL

I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

#Metoo ... please??

Paris has her eye on your ... ===================>

Damn I've never received one of these, I seem to miss out on all the fun!!!

A bit of Derek & Clive - NSFW!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DkuXBsHytE

Now I need to clean up my keyboard and screen..... coffee everywhere!!

Don't get THAT personal, says personalised cards firm Moonpig. Dick pics. They mean dick pics

"But it's all done in the best possible taste" - Cupid Stunt aka Kenny Everett

Contractors slam UK taxman's 'aggressive' IR35 tax reforms

daja vu

I had something like this happen to me about 11 years ago now.

I was working as a self employed contractor with a number of clients (one of them being my accountant), paying my taxes, NI, etc.

One of my clients was a local council, and I worked for them 2 to 3 days a week depending on what work needed to be done. No benefits at all (holidays, sick pay etc) but the tax man deemed I was employed by them so they had to start taxing me at source.

In the meantime I was still being assessed as a self employed contractor and the income from that particular source was still included in the assessment. So essentially I was paying tax twice for the same income!

My accountant did appeal it for me (and being a client/friend did not charge me to do so) but they maintained they were in the right.

So it got to the point where I just had to stop working freelance as I just could not afford to carry on.

So took a 'proper' job in the public sector and have been here ever since!

Took me quite a few years to get myself financially stable again as well, the fuckers.

Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms

Re: They should ask Torvalds to rename git.

@Jake

"We should instead use "slide in" and "slide out"."

I find the above offensive due to the sexual connotations and the implied inference of male dominance over a female partner!!

Having said that I'm fucked as to what we would call it but then that's not my problem!!!

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

Update!!!!

I for one welcome my white page space overlord!

Scam alert: No, hackers don't have webcam vids of you enjoying p0rno. Don't give them any $$s

Re: Webcam?

Tin foil helmet sounds painful !!

No big deal... Kremlin hackers 'jumped air-gapped networks' to pwn US power utilities

Re: More detail please

Ok try this:

Infect vendors networks

Conntect Laptop to network

Laptop infected

Take laptop on service call to air gaped network & plugin

Air gaped network infected

Malware delivers payload/slurps info

Passed info back to laptop

Take laptop back to vendor and plug into network

Data sent home

Simples?

IBM fired me because I'm not a millennial, says axed cloud sales star in age discrim court row

Re: Generations...

I was born 31 Dec 1963 as the New Year bells were starting to ring (yes really!!) so I'm either the last of the Boomers or the first of the Gen X or maybe some weird Gen X Boomer?

Uh-oh. Boffins say most Android apps can slurp your screen – and you wouldn't even know it

Re: Is it likely

@Solarflare

This...

"The researchers plan to investigate third-party libraries on iOS next to see what slurping may be taking place there."

Lets see what they come up with.