* Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013

You 'posted' a 'letter' with Outlook... No, NO, that's the MONITOR

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Noting error messages....Let's be fair here...

"So when I get an emailed screenshot, it's from someone who ought to know better."

Nobody's perfect. I had an e-mail from a very sensible IT person, who had, for some unfathomable reasons, decided to wrap the screenshot inside the .docx file. Oh dear. It took a lot of willpower to overcome the urge for vengeance - like sending a handwritten reply in .djvu format.

Dead letter office: ancient smallpox sample turns up in old US lab

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

You must be referring to the Pajarito:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pajarito_accident

It looks like a pure reflex. During criticality, there is not that much time to contemplate. Then again, an experienced person may well be able to suppress the instincts and do the right thing.

Unexpected Termination Error at Year of Code: Chief dumps venture for other UK.gov riches

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Null pointer

dereferenced

Yes. App that lets you say 'Yo' raises 1 MEEELLION DOLLARS

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"communicating with 0 characters seems Orwellian"

Hmm. There is a peculiar, almost Tao-like appeal in it. Communication without communication.

I, for one, welcome our non-communicating overlords. May they keep quiet evermore.

USA! USA! ... Aw, screw it. Motorola to close Texas smartphone plant

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Great Thinking

"Now unlike planned stubborn economics, like socialism, capitalism is based on reality"

Decades ago it may have been the case, but modern oligopolies are wildly different beasts. It's exactly these 'planned stubborn economics' at play, hidden under layers of rhetorics and bullshit. Reality is heavily frowned upon, because it invariably interferes with the most precious plans and processes.

Previous poster was quite right - Politburo is back with the vengeance.

Still using e-mail? Marketers say you're part of DARK SOCIAL

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "Dark" , "Off the grid" , "Underbelly"

Yes, time of the subtle hints is over. Social equals modern, progressive people are actively using social & mobile, usage is skyrocketing, yada yada yada.

Now we're into the second phase - casting shadows on those who still refuse to get the message. Language is getting stronger and darker. Effectively a public smear campaign.

Watch: Kids slam Apple as 'BORING, the whole thing is BORING'

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Who taught these children ??

"1001 Wonderful Things"

Thanks. Seems like it's still a good book for the young & curious. But rare.

For more amusement, try "Victorian Inventions" by Leonard de Vries.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Who taught these children ??

"they have no experience of other forms of control-input, which a modern keyboard on Windows/KDE/etc isn't"

Mostly true. But I have a hilarious counterexample - a twelve-year-old, who discovered an IBM Model M keyboard at about ten. He promptly seized it for himself and chucked other input devices away. Complaints about the clacker noise are usually met with a shrug and a terse reply "oh, but you can close the door then".

Last time I checked, he had found a PC version of Elite and was quite annoyed. No, not at Elite, mind you. At those modern games - all eyecandy and no content to speak of.

There's a geek born every minute, I tells ya.

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR? New leccy BMWs have flimsy password security – researcher

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"BMWs have special glass which has a layer of plastic film"

Otherwise known as triplex, or laminated glass. Everybody, not just BMW, uses it for the windscreens. On the side windows it's very rare. And not a good idea either.

overlawyered.com/2005/05/laminated-glass-in-car-windows/

Pirate Party runs aground in European Parliamentary elections

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Dear Europe

"It might appeal to the sort of voter who thought it was cool to vote pirate last time" + "Your friendly kiwis"

You really thought it was a friendly thing to say?

OK, no upside-down jokes today. Pirate parties got a lot of protest votes, because disappointment with the mainstream political parties runs deep. This should be quite familiar feeling for the people all over the world. Nothing to sneer at.

China to become world's No 1 economy. And we still can't see why

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Delusions and Dreams. An Economic Know-Nothings in the FT

Not so sure about that. Similar rationalizations were once flowing around about Soviets. No, they cannot be pissing money away just like that, they have to have a master plan. Being brilliant chess players and all. Of course they weren't short of the long view, they had lots of 5-year and longer plans to justify all those monumental projects ^W^W sorely needed infrastructure projects. Only the time could show what utter bollocks these plans really were.

Is it different with China? Who knows. Little birds are singing that an alarmingly big portion of the Chinese govt projects are just show-offs with mostly symbolic value. Pork-barreling isn't that uncommon either.

Look, pal, it’s YOUR password so it’s YOUR fault that it's gone AWOL

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Website policy stupidity

Around here, major banks are doing a bit of community service, and are providing website authentication services on very amicable terms. Authorization tokens from the online banks are accepted by most utilities and e-tailers.

Bank credentials have to be guarded with utmost care, obviously, but the password hell is neatly avoided.

Space hackers prepare to reactivate antiquated spacecraft

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Where have you been?

Obligatory Douglas Adams quote

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

Russia to suspend US GPS stations in tit-for-tat spat

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Black and White

"He who battles monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster."

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Cloud computing is FAIL and here’s why

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Rants vs. Reporting and Analysis

It's a new paradigm, you know. RaaS aka "Rant as a service". Delivered to us every Friday (occasional hiccups notwithstanding), just before pub'o'clock. And quite a popular service it is.

Stop whining and get on with the times.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "Cloud computing is shite."

It should have been marked with an adult rating. Coarse language, wicked humour, multitude of other sins. Glad you got out of it, and not a moment too soon.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: turn chaos into clockwork

Not just any clockwork. A Clockwork Orange. For the cloud users, life is never boring.

Everything you always wanted to know about VDI but were afraid to ask (no, it's not an STD)

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Trollface

Re: Pretty good reading

Of course. Trolls have always been lazy and stoopid. Waiting for somebody to show up, somebody worth trolling. Nowadays we're even lazier. "Hey, you! Cum here! I'll scare your pants off or sumthing!"

Wouldn't want to break ancient traditions, no sir.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Pretty good reading

"With the demise of DOS-based Ghost"

Sad indeed. It had less quirks than other image tools. With all those "smart" tools you just cannot be sure whether your image is any good.

Few years back, I finally had enough, and decided to take a path of brute force: dd + gzip. Storage space is cheaper than time. For the time not spent on troubleshooting mysterious restore errors (like 0x80070057), I can buy a fucking crate of disks. Or tapes.

</offtopic>

<brownie mode>

Excellent article. Well-rounded. Which, sadly, does not leave much room for commenting. How are we supposed to live without flamebaits?

</brownie mode>

Victory for Microsoft as Supremes decline to hear Novell's WordPerfect whine

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Good

"Sorry, but it was Excel getting MS Office on most PCs, bringing Word with him"

That's Excel 5.0 you are talking about, not 4.0. They are worlds apart.

Which makes both assessments correct - 5.0 was indeed a killer, but 4.0 was very much a dead duck.

"Excel was the first to include Visual Basic For Applications, and it made its programming capabilities far more advanced than simple "macros"."

Here's a little refresher:

blogs.office.com/2010/02/16/migrating-excel-4-macros-to-vba/

Brain surgery? Would sir care for a CHOC-ICE with that?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Pint

Re: A very informative headline.

For the people, who are not well versed in antology (ha!), it is far too easy to commit a heinous crime of missing a cultural reference or two. Having seen far too many cultures coming and going doesn't exactly help either.

But I'd guess there's not much to do. That's one of the subtle hazards of the Wild Wild Web, which has existed since its inception, and probably even before.

Have a pint, good Sir, and an upvote or two.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Flame

Re: A very informative headline.

Ugh. Lots of mandatory "education" that is served these days is far worse than ridicule. An outright insult to a reasonable level of intelligence. Not to mention the time wasted.

/icon: a tall stake of pointless certificates is merrily burning/

Vladimir Putin says internet is a 'CIA project'

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: some 80%

It's 146%, as any fule kno.

95 floors in 43 SECONDS: Hitachi's new ultra-high-speed lift

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: WTF???

"everyone should be equal" + "not being true to their Communist ideals"

Well, cry me a river. Practical attempts at Communism have always meant that everybody is equal, some are just more equal than others.

May the gods have mercy and save you from actually living in a society with Communist ambitions.

Happy 40th Playmobil: Reg looks back at small, rude world of our favourite tiny toys

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: population growth

I, for one, welcome our new plastic overlords.

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

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Pint

Re: So what happened to the coder

"Almost the entirety of the source code universe is a total mess"

Why, the entire universe is a total mess. Entropy is one of the most fundamental qualities of it, and an important driving force. It would be folly to hope that our puny sources would be unaffected by the Almighty Mess.

Excellent comment, though.

The gift of Grace: COBOL's odyssey from Vietnam to the Square Mile

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Real Programmers *and* Mythical Man Month?

Great indeed, but Real Programmer canon is not complete without Mel.

cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

Microsoft: We've got HUNDREDS of patents on Android tech

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Is this why some Android devices don't take SD cards?

"what's the pro these days?"

There's one more, admittedly a variant of sneakernet. SD is a relatively easy way to salvage data, when the device becomes an ex-device.

In three hours, Microsoft gave the Windows-verse everything it needed

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: None of this changes anything

"Only Microsoft.. well, perhaps Microsoft and Canonical.. have an idea of how it will all fit together five or ten years down the road."

Oh, why settle on five, when they're aiming for 500. It's got Electrolytes!

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: None of this changes anything

"AFAIK [DLL] versioning got better years ago"

WinSxS provides...ahem...wildly fluctuating values of $better.

Nothing's as SCARY as an overly aggressive SOFTWARE PIMP

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: reminds me of a poster

Ahem. Now let us read another passage from The Fine Book.

And thus was it spoken in Murphy 4:4

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Raised £350bn in crowdsourced funding? Tell me about it (not)

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: FruitExpert Launches Free* Online course in lemon see-sawing!

Coming soon:

- Mushroom Milling

- Pearshaping

- [redacted] Polishing

No Notch niche: Minecraft man in rift with Oculus after Facebook gobble

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

re: Facebook Effect

It may be a variant of Reverse Midas Touch, something that's characteristic for most bigcorps. But FB learned it surprisingly quickly. Zuck is a quick learner, he talks like a true PHB now.

Windows 8 BREAKS ITSELF after system restores

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Is Windows 8 fundamentally broken?

"People just need to get their 'finger' out and adapt."

Oh, great. It's the bloody Church of Change at work. Again.

Embrace the Change, children. Change is goood. You must not fear, you must not doubt, let us Change together. All hail the Change!

But if you don't...we'll mock you until you do.

/disclaimer: all my lame jokes and sweeping generalizations are brought to you by a modern touchy-feely device, as those are the genres that are truly well suited to the touchscreens/

Stop fiddling with your VMAX knobs or I'll chop your fingers off

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ex storage admin, here

"Who needs to rebuild a RAID group anyway ? This needs to be planned at installation time"

Requirements may change, usage patterns may change.

If you do not like that kind of control, fine, don't use it then, but please do not petition for removing it altogether. OMG, admin can break a LUN! What a shock.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ridiculous comparison

"You need to abstract out complexity for any technology"

Yes and no. Definitely not out - that results in a dumbed-down technology, which in turn helps to dumb down people. High level languages (hello Java!) have done a lot of harm here.

Better way is to hide the complexity from the average Joe, but leave the knobs and levers accessible to the people who are able to use them. Behind another access level, if necessary. Start with good defaults and good configuration templates. That'll avoid most of the problems - sensible admin does not fiddle with sensible defaults.

The plot to kill Google cloud: We'll rename Windows Azure to MICROSOFT Azure

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ah the wisdom of nerds

Marketing is a form of propaganda. If done well, it serves as a useful communication vehicle, and doesn't anger people very much, but it's the abuses that are the problem. Geeks just happen to be quite sensitive towards the abusal.

Oh, and the most evil characteristic of bad propaganda - it polarizes people, turns them against each other.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Attempting to give a damn...

"Is it really going to be called Microsoft Azure tomorrow?"

Oh, yes. That leaves room for the next rebranding effort after a year or two. Most likely it will be Microsoft Cloud, or The Microsoft Network. Unless they'll have one of those rare hip'n'dandy moments and name it Ding or Fuzzy.

/damn, those corporate bingo sessions are making people way too cynical/

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Attempting to give a damn...

An error has occurred while giving a damn. Please tell Microsoft about this problem. /.../

You know the drill, don't you.

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: oscilloscope

Oi, when I were a lad, we used to dream about oscilloscopes. Had to make do with a logic tester, built into the discarded felt pen. Syringe needle, bunch of wires, two crappy LEDs and one 7400.

Aargh. Shouldn't have mentioned 7400! Those bastards had zillions of 74LS chips to play with, and all they managed to do with them was to turn them into a PCJr!

/fakes a stroke and slumbers off the soapbox/

Planes fail to find 'credible' candidate for flight MH370 wreckage

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Alien

Re: aliens

We need no steenking reasons to bring in aliens. They're an universal factor, like deus ex machina or Finnegans Finagling Factor.

'Arrogant' Snowden putting lives at risk, says NSA's deputy spyboss

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Facepalm

Excellent PR

"He claimed the agency only slurped the communications of targeted individuals"

And vice versa, if your comms are slurped, it means you're a target. Let's hope that the actual scale of slurping never becomes public... oh, bugger.

"and said that the vast majority of people who weren't on the target list had nothing to fear from his spies."

Whereas the remaining minority who weren't on the target list...

Oh dear. What a way to dig themselves out of the hole. They must be half way to China by now.

RIP Full Disclosure: Security world reacts to key mailing list's death

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

So long, and thanks for all the bugs.

It's hard for the lone admin to fend off the trolls. Once they've gained enough presence, the whole place starts to stink.

Mozilla takes Windows 8-friendly Firefox out back ... two shots heard

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
Windows

Re: The silly thing is

"Microsoft can abuse the power of the default"

Well put. And not just this particular default. There is a long-running joke that in order to use MS products properly, you have to start by reversing all MS defaults you can find. An overstatement, yes, but quite humourous.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: 1000 Users!

Hmh. There is a fine line between a thought-provoking post, and just provoking, it's so delicate and so easy to cross.

Have an upvote, though. For the previous posts, which would have deserved several upvotes instead of the one they got.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: no surprise here

"Every show shows someone tapping on a rectangle to launch something"

It all started with a hospital scene in "Idiocracy". That touchscreen from the year 2505 was simply irresistible...

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

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ultra?

With 1mm layer around the battery surface it looks quite possible. Maybe a half mm will do.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ultra?

That's because it has to endure higher voltages and higher currents.

1F at 5V can be much smaller.

cpc.farnell.com/1/3/1f-capacitor

Millions of unloved iPhone 5Cs gather dust in warehouses – report

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: @Don Jefe: Concrete railroad cross ties

Seems like this bit needs repeating (or reinforcing, har har)

"That 'steel reinforced' bit is the key. None of the major US trials of concrete freight rail cross ties have been sufficiently reinforced"

Concrete is able to stand tremendous weights, but breaks easily when twisted or pulled. Which is exactly what happens on the railroad - weight of the train is pushing the tracks apart, applying the wrong kind of force to the cross ties. It is up to the steel carcass to hold them together. And that concrete+steel combination has to be good, really good, to surpass the wooden ancestor.

How AGILE DIPLOMACY will spike PUTIN'S GUNS

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Let me describe how it feels being a Ukrainian

Truly sorry about that. Although El Reg seems to make a serious effort of ignoring the world politics (unless there is an IT angle to it), so this site is still relatively Putin-free.

Hang on there, and please try to keep the blinkenlights working, no matter what is coming through the gates. Because that is what we do.