Posts by oiseau 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2013
"You've not seen Andromeda Strain, have you ..."
Yes, many (many) years ago.
And I've also recently seen Daniel Espinosa's "Life"
Although a bit far fetched in quite a few aspects, it did leave me wondering about just how much thought and peer review is actually going into the handling of whatever is brought back from space.
Cheers,
"Our advice? Hold off as long as possible until the initial bugs are ironed out, and the exact feature list is cemented in forever." *
There you go.
Fixed it for you.
Cheers.
* Can't believe that after all that has happened in the past few years (~ 20+), using Windows whatever is still something to be discussed and/or talked about.
Sure ...
But not just wisdom.
Personal ethics (principles and values) are of paramount importance.
His record seems to show he had nothing of the sort.
He has been quoted (The Guardian 20180316) as saying:
“Had I done nothing, I would always have been left wondering whether the hundreds of thousands of documents that had been leaked to unknown third parties would end up costing lives, either directly or indirectly.”
My take?
Utter bullshit.
Cheers.
The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) is contributing £2.26m to enable the "two-day journey".
Hmmm ...
Lucky I was already half way though my morning espresso when I saw this ...
Almost choked and flooded my trusty Wyse keyboard.
Someone with the proper credentials should take whoever runs the said ERDF to task.
I wonder if such a person exists these days.
Really now, just what is all this bullshit about?
Ahh, yes.
It's about throwing good taxpayer money at assholes so they can be still more of an asshole.
Where has all the plain down-to-earth basic common sense gone?
Have they given it all to a PPP contractor to administer?
Absolutely unbelievable ....
PS: I have to hand it to this chap, he's pulling off a really very tidy trick and will no doubt be making a good living from it.
Hello:
From Gareth Corfield on 04/12/2017:
"Both firms specialise in making system-on-chip processors. A merger would see the consolidated company controlling a large portion of the world's silicon supply."
This is the real issue at hand.
It would be sheer stupidity to allow this to happen.
Because before you realise it, a "large portion" becomes "all".
But then, in today's world ...
Cheers.
"There may be more than than just microbes"
Hmmm ...
May well be so.
I saw a movie last year about us earthlings doing something similar:
"Life"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5442430/
Setting aside some a number of incongruencies, it was rather scary.
Not so much because of the possibilities of finding life in Mars but for how downright 'brillo pad dumb' the people in charge of the experiments were.
I enthusiastically suppose that anything dug up and analysed will be done properly and far enough from earth so as not to fuck things up more than they already are.
Cheers.
"What happened to common sense in courts...?"
It seems that in the USA common sense has been lost a very long time ago.
El Reg has published a myriad of examples by which we have been able to chuckle, laugh, grief ...
But make no mistake: this guy is up against MS and this weighs heavily.
Cheers,
"Linux doesn't spy on its users. Ubuntu does."
Exactly ...
I've sort of felt this coming on for a while, a gut feeling if you will.
After trying Ubuntu and Mint and then watching the systemd environment develop, I have temporarily settled for PCLinuxOS/Devuan combo with a VM in each install for the odd MS stuff I may need a few times a year.
But I will finally settle with anything Devuan based when it all gains some more momentum.
Cheers,
Hello:
"We just discovered a vulnerability in a raft of CPUs that dates back more than a decade and nobody had a clue."
Nobody had a clue?
Nobody?
I seriously doubt that is the case.
See the flaws in the Intel Management Engine, their implications and consequences.
It's a long albeit interesting read.
And then see if you can, with all the good faith you could possibly muster, say "nobody had a clue" again.
Cheers,
"Brown envelops for city officials or free holidays in Seattle?"
Hmmm ...
Watch out, the MS crowd will come for you.
---
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/2/2017/11/24/munich_will_spend_about_50_million_euros_on_windows_migration/
Re: €49.3m for Windows 10
Hello:
Hmmm ...
"Whether it's true or just political bollocks is another matter entirely, but since I dont know anyone ..."
Do you really *have* to know anyone at the München council to at least have a very strong suspicion that this is just a lot of pork* and not Linux related?
* Pork
Cheers,
19 thumbs up & 13 thumbs down
---
Like I said: this is all about pork, a big barrel of it.
And it will get even bigger as time goes by.
The problem is that I see this infection spreading all over: there's far too much cash involved for it not to.
Hello:
" ... since any such configuration necessarily removes functionality required in most mainstream products, Intel does not support such configurations."
I see ...
Funcionality required in mainstream products.
And exactly who was it that required that this very nice piece of buggy and undocumented hardware be in my motherboard, without the option of securely disabling it?
[rant]
Hey Intel ...
Fuck off !!!
[/rant]
Hello:
"This seems to be a very good device for doing all sorts of things that simply don't need doing.
...
Simply trading a switch on the wall for one on a phone or web interface is not my idea of progress."
Finally !!!
Some common sense.
Have one (or as many as you wish) on me.
Cheers.
Hello:
Hmmm ...
"Whether it's true or just political bollocks is another matter entirely, but since I dont know anyone ..."
Do you really *have* to know anyone at the München council to at least have a very strong suspicion that this is just a lot of pork* and not Linux related?
Cheers,
Hmmm ...
"We are watching the ramblings of a man in the early stages of senility."
Make no mistake, the man's an asshole or a dickhead or both, but he's not senile.
From what I have seen/read, he's always been like that.
It didn't matter much because, you know, it was just another AH/DH on TV.
But now, he's the official Oval Office resident.
And it *does* matter.
"It'll be a lot like hiding money in foreign bank accounts."
Hmmm ...
Yes.
Like it is not something that has been happening (at least) since the mid 1940's.
And as of late, has anyone heard of the 'Panama Papers' thing?
*Every* major transnational corporation does it (hiding money) and has been doing it for ages.
Of course, the hidden data associated to this practise is *also* hidden and/or moved around.
But, you surely understand that it's not *them* they are after.
Cheers.
I'm not a lawyer, much less a person knowledgeable in constitutional matters and could be simplifying things a bit, but ...
Isn't this an issue where just plain common sense applies?
You see, unless I missed something really important recently, Ireland is still a sovereign state.
I really cannot see what in f*cks' name the US Supreme Court has to do with respect to whatever goes on in Ireland.
Isn't it enough with the crap they deal/have dealt to their own citizens at home?
I think that if the servers are located in Ireland and belong to a company working in Ireland, under Irish law and Irish regulations, I'd say that the servers (and whatever is held inside them) fall exclusively under Irish jurisdiction.
More so if the 'whatever' held in the servers belongs to Irish citizens.
All this unless some Irish court decides otherwise (which I think is a bit of a strech) or there's already a provision in place for events such as this.
It's not impossible, strange things happen these days.
It could also be that MS backs up their overseas servers in US facilities and this is so, then it would seem to be another matter altogether.
Cheers.
You don't have to be a future telling savant to know that one of the prominent Microsoft related headlines appearing in The Register in the next few years will continue to be:
"It's 20XX... And Windows PCs can be pwned via DNS, webpages, Office docs, fonts – and some TPM keys are fscked too"
It *will* save a lot of work for the editor, mind you.
Just has to copy/paste and then replace XX with the proper number.
In any case, just like with this one headline, absolutely no one will be surprised and (uncanny beyond beief) quite a few members of the ElReg readership will be wondering why it takes so long to patch their (still) vulnerable MS install.
Cheers.
" ... the person who allowed the test version to be "customised" to look like the live version."
Hmmm ...
Not really a 'cretin'.
It would seem that this fellow just had a temporary lack of (essential) foresight.
Far too many times we tend to think of the end user as having the same type/sort/brand/flavour (if any at all) of common sense we have.
And that is a big (BIG) mistake which you usually end up paying for.
They don't, so you just have to play safe and make up for it in advance.
An option for the end user to change something/anything in the test version?
No. It should *not* have been there.
I mean, you don't allow third parties to meddle with anything in your test system, you have to have full control of it. Otherwise, how do you know what's going on?
Have a good week-end.
8^D !
"... more than 150 pounds of manure every day, and that's without access to social media."
My first and much needed laugh of the day.
And a hearty one it was!
This because I cannot upvote more than once.
Cheers.
" ... the US (or Russia) [China, etc.] probably know from military intelligence tech where the plane went down but to release that information would be to reveal their capabilities in terms of tracking all flights."
Of course.
Just because it is a huge empty strech of sea does not mean that it is not watched by satellites, albeit maybe not as closely as other, busier parts of the planet. I'm quite sure that at least the approximate whereabouts of the plane is known to them but it is not important, more important is not showing your cards.
Hello:
"While lots of people write software and freely give it to the community, it is clearly the case that authors provide precious little information on what it can do and how you can do it."
Indeed.
+1
I am and have always been very (very) grateful to those who write and then freely share their efforts with the rest of us and it is quite unfortunate that what you say is (in quite a few cases that I have encountered) true.
I guess that it's part of the deal, so to speak.
Ideally, it shouldn't be like that as I believe there's what I refer to as 'intellectual responsability' on behalf of the developer.
But then it is also true with quite a bit of non-free software, software that more often than not I have paid through the nose for and one of the most notorious examples has been MS software.
In these cases, there is not only 'intellectual' but also 'commercial' and 'ethical' responsability which most of the time went/has gone unaccounted for.
And for *that* there's no excuse whatsoever.
Do have a good week-end.
"... wonder if white hatting is just a cover job for those guys."
Wonder?
No white hatting here, it was just a matter of time for this to happen.
Or be discovered.
After all, governments and corporations of all sorts (with government's consent) screw the general public constantly and the money flows.
Why would these guys lose out on the opportunuity?
This is just *another* way screw the general public.
Cheers.
"Stay away from the USA for whatever reason, more like."
Very unfortunate that this is so.
But I'm afraid you're right.
I just would not feel at all safe travelling to a country where I stand a chance of abuse by a border guard on a whim, with no way to protect myself from his bad morning's foul humour.
Or be arrested without known cause with no available legal consel.
Cheers,
Hello:
" ... the demographic of the population that uses these devices aren't going to give them up."
I'm afraid you may well be right.
It is the same demographic of the population that makes up the hordes of assholes walking the streets of hundreds/thousands of cities these days, looking not at their surroundings or the sidewalk but idiotically staring at their new, shiny and very expensive fondleslab they just spent eight hours of their life in a queue for because they 'had' to be connected.
In very much the same way they cannot take another step without reading the last whatever that popped up on the screen, they also find it absolutely wonderful to have a microphone set up in their house 24/7.
Incredible.
Cheers.
Hello:
---
The announcement post does, however, hint at better two-way interaction between Windows and Linux with the reminder that while “Linux files are NOT accessible from Windows” Microsoft is “working to improve this scenario over time”.
---
Hmmm ...
Looks bad, sounds bad, smells bad ...
What could it possibly be?
My Linux rig boots MS (XPSP3) just a handful of times a year only to run specific software not available in Linux and in a VM without any external connections.
IMO, " ... better two-way interaction between Windows and Linux ... " is as needed as an outbreak of avian flu in the Metro.
And ... “working to improve this scenario over time” ... should be treated as a threat, no less.
I cannot believe that some Reg readers could actually consider using this a viable option.
I would not let this crap near my Linux install.
As always, YMMV.
Cheers.
"The point is, this isn't wasted money. The reason that air travel is safer than almost any other form of transport is that we put serious money into finding out what went wrong in the past ... "
Exactly.
And in the end, it's all about that: the money.
And nothing else.
The world today pumps absurd amounts of money every day into 'other' things eg: just think how much an F35 costs.
Australia has done very well.
But now the rest of those who can should pitch in to continue the search till the plane is found.
It's 'not' wasted money as there are huge benefits from plotting the ocean floor to the same degree of detail we have already done with the Moon and Mars.
That said, in a planet that is totally blanketed by satellites covering (in every possible sense and extent) much more of it than what we think/know is covered, I find it rather hard to accept that no one knows where the plane is now.
Mine's the bright yellow one.
Cheers,
"Brits, and Aussies for that matter, know how to says ass. It's just we know the difference between a donkey and a sphincter."
Indeed ...
And anyone else who speaks proper Queen's english, for that matter.
But ...
Wouldn't that be 'anus' and not 'sphincter'?
Have a good weekend.
"This means that the corporate puppet master can work academics to create and promote an issue, and then deploy fake "citizen" groups to generate the impression of popular support for its position."
Hmmm ...
Isn't this analogous to how presidential elections are won these days?
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