Posts by Lt.Kije

Identifying planets with machine learning, dirty AI searches, and OpenAI scholarships

Pathetic

What an effable waste of time.

Android P will hear no evil, see no evil, support evil notches

To The Register's mind,

"To The Register's mind..."

And here was I thinking El Reg was an undifferentiated bundle of nerve endings optimized for Pavlovian knee jerks.

Hawaii governor: I wanted to tell everyone nuke alert was fake – I just forgot my password

Twitter?????

So they saying Radio doesn't work?

Nor TV?

Neither cops nor National Guard on the street?

Laughable if not so desperately serious.

Storage Christmas cracker: My band is called 1023MB. We haven't had a gig yet

Retired

Christ, my retirement didn't come a day too soon.

Good luck with that lot.

IBM asks remaining staff to take career advice from HR-bot

Loathing

I'd love to tell you how much I loathe these types initiatives and bots, but I don't have strong enough powers of invective.

It starts with anything that begins with the cringe-worthy "my", as in "my likkle pony". Obsequious, condescending, profoundly insincere and utterly self serving. This is the IBM that Apple railed against and subsequently became.

There isn't one example of these bots that comes close to even the most incompetent customer service rep (Google support has come close though).

Dystopia is this running on on Watson.

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

Re: Playmobil

The pocket money account ran at a deficit for a longtime.

Re: Playmobil

Ah, the awesome jetex.

In my impatience to fire up my new Payloader, I hung it from a washing line strung inside the greenhouse, lit the fuse and retired to a not quite safe distance. It quickly became a blurred into a disc around the washing line before achieving escape velocity.

It smashed a neighbour's window before the shattered greenhouse glass had hit the ground.

Self-driving bus in crash just 2 hours after entering public service

Why is this even news redux

What has this to do with the Self Driving Vehicle (SDV®)?

May as well report every fender bender

(At least the news would be less depressing to read)

Donald, YOU'RE FIRED: Rogue Twitter worker quits, deletes President Trump's account

Re: Interresting question: Do people have a right to a twitter account?

Seems to me that POTUS has singlehandedly rescued Twitter from Wall Street's trash can.

FCC: Take your spam and shove it, slacktivists!

Have I stumbled into alt-Register wherein our puerile organ is become all responsible like? Have you hired a grown up version of Glenn Greenwald??

Spot on indeed.

Sysadmin 'trashed old bosses' Oracle database with ticking logic bomb'

Re: Proof?

Exactly. The article describes circumstantial evidence only, no hard proof at all.

They might him as a terrorists though because, you know, he got one them thar Asian names.

Judge issues search warrant for anyone who Googled a victim's name

Fishing?

I don't see the problem with this.

It is a clearly defined search for a specific case.

They may not get a usable result, but it's a good start, and they (should) have the sent-from fax number.

Good on the cops for taking it on.

Hold 'em, don't fold 'em: How to bite Bitcoin pools

QiBitCoin

One wonders how the arrival of quantum computing will upset these crypto-currencies.

An initial price collapse, short term over supply then mining controlled by a very small number of firms.

IBM's stock is looking better.

Your future boss? An employee-interrogating bot – it's an open-source gift from Dropbox

Affirmations

"Affirmations" such as Great! Awesome!! & "Good Job"!!! make my skin crawl. May their inventors and promulgators rot in hell, right next to the snowflakes who insist on "Reaching Out!!!"

Yuk.

RIP Eugene Cernan: Last man on the Moon dies aged 82

You morons. Can we now not even depend on El Reg to tell it how it is?

The man died.

He didn't "pass". You think he is a turd or something. Get a grip lads

Revealed: How a weather forecast in 1967 stopped nuclear war

Makes you wonder how things went in Russia that day.

LinkedIn plays down '117 million users' breach data sale

LinkedIn? It was a kinda nice idea, but was becoming another rat's nest of faux friends and dubious come-ons. Who needs it. I'll take care of my network myself, so Bye Bye Guys.

Dad who shot 'snooping vid drone' out of the sky is cleared of charges

Can't wait for someone to take out an FBI or local cop's drone.

Aircon biz fined $1.3m after boss set up attack websites slamming critical punters

The really sad thing is that it took so long to shut him down.

... justice delayed and all that.

Super Cali grabs its big stick, beats Uber 'cos it's odious

Nice try on the headline

Bit of a stretch tho'

Another death in Apple's 'Mordor' – its Foxconn Chinese assembly plant

suicide-prevention program

"It also says it has introduced suicide-prevention programs at its factories."

That would be safety nets around he edge of the roof, no?

US yoinks six Nigerians to Mississippi on '419 scam' charges

How Quaint

Wot? Extradition!

That is extraordinarily polite for 21st century America. I thought they just went in and helped themselves these days.

'Backronym' crowdfunds itself into Oxford English Dictionary

Re: For all those pedantic bastards out there....

Hmm.

Maybe we should start charging you foreigners royalties. You have been freeloading on our intellectual property for far too long.

FCC to crack down on robocall spammers' beloved loophole

The Robocallers and dial-for-dollars crowd just dont give a tinker's cuss.

The telco's couldn't care less since they are getting paid to put the calls through and no amount of bleating from the punters has made any difference whatsoever. Most of the calls to me (I get about six a day on my home phone in he US) come with spoofed caller-ids.

This would all stop pretty quick if the punters were allowed to sue the telco's for putting through junk calls, to numbers that ar on the Do Not Call lists. I do not believe for one second that the telco's don't know who these clowns are.

Hell, it would be easy enough to give the telco's my white list - if the caller is not on it, straight to voice mail - when I don't pick up they very seldom leave a message, and when they do it usually some dumb ass saying "hello? hello?" then hang-up.

It's just not that hard!!

Grooveshark faces $750 MEELLION piracy payout

Yeah, right

I wouldn't mind these high and mighty self righteous copyright monkeys so much if they made an effort to pay the artists, including the old timers that were essentially conned out of their income and whose music makes up the best of what heard these days.

Professor's BEAGLE lost for 10 years FOUND ON MARS

British eggface lander's resting place ...

Jees, come on chaps, credit where it due. Near misses count for something in this game.

Want the EU to work on making cloud snoop-proof? Speak up, my good 'stakeholder'

How??

Wot?? No Link??

How can I drive this stake that I hold into the heart of this privacy sucking vampire??

How??

Wot? No Link!!

How can I drive this stake that I hold into the heart of this privacy sucking vampire?

Nuts to your poncey hipster coffees, I want a TESLA ELECTRO-CAFE

Tesla Cafe? Hell yes!

Start with old PO Tower, it not been doing much recently.

New twist in China Apple hardware ban riddle: THE TRUTH at last?

Can't understand what the Americans are getting all huffy about.

They have a long, long history of putting up regulatory hurdles designed to keep competitors products out their markets.

Users should PAY for their piracy says Turnbull

So T'Govmint's gettin snotty about Pirates?

Funny.

I'll pay for mine when they pay for theirs.

How IT bosses turned the tables on our cushy consultancy gigs

Too True

I had a long life as a consultant / contractor in the US and UK. Always chose the better money for what I knew than less money for to get experience in new technologies.

In my thirties, went back to Uni for an MBA. Pretty much the kiss of death for tech positions.

Did pursue new tech on my own time but they are a very tough to sell to employers.

Employers will always take the kid out of school over the old hand. They are cheaper, much more likely to do what they are told (regardless of whether it is right or not) and regardless of whether they know what they are doing. (Um, that's how we all got started, right??)

Ended up doing databases for marketing companies (talk about going back to the Stone Age) and rode that for a while.

Am now basically retired (on the corporate scrap heap).

So, lessons for you cocksure young 'uns?

1) Don't grow old.

2) Never miss an opportunity to add content to your CV, collect acronyms as if they were gollie badges (or Pokémon cards, if that’s your thing).

3) Always, without fail, whenever you leave a gig or project, put everything in your CV. You can always cook it down later.

4) Get physical reference letters from you bosses and coworkers. Get them signed, yes sonny, on paper; even if it means printing linked-in endorsements and bringing it to them with a pen. Make scanned copies available. Bring the originals to interviews.

5) Actively solicit Linked-In connections and endorsements. If you are too shy to this, you are in the wrong line of work.

6) Don’t grow old; and if you must, don’t show it.

If I had my time again, I would never leave tech (you can never return from the Dark Side), and would have kept the tech skills sharp. I ended up in senior non-tech positions. Management is a thankless treadmill where you work a lot of unpaid hours, you will lose your personal life and lose your perspective. When the company spits you out and you recover your free time, it is like waking up from sleep walking.

Sorry for the rant, I could write volumes.