* Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013

Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory go TITSUP*

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: FIVE NINES!!!!!

Or, in simpler words, less than 6 minutes of downtime every year.

Watchdog growls at Tesla for spilling death crash details: 'Autopilot on, hands off wheel'

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Wonder why it swerved

"driving from Boston to Montreal /.../ trying to follow whatever lines I saw in the road"

Below the 50th parallel then. Bloody southerners and their fancy lines. We have no such luxuries here around the 60th. :-P

Cash-machine-draining €1bn cybercrime kingpin suspect cuffed by plod

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"According to Kaspersky Lab data, the Carbanak targets included financial organisations in Russia, USA, Germany, China, Ukraine, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Romania, France, Spain, Norway, India, the UK, Poland, Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, Iceland, Ireland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Australia."

www.ibtimes.co.in/great-online-bank-robbery-how-carbanak-cybergang-stole-1-billion-100-banks-worldwide-623651

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, off you go: Snout of UK space forcibly removed from EU satellite trough

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: From the department of bleeding obvious

...and there is no spoon.

Guccifer 2.0 outed, Kaspersky slammed, Oz radio hacker in the slammer, and more

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Guccifer the Russian intelligence officer :]

"...and in the process the American voter chose the wrong candidate."

Hah. Like one catfood advertising mishap. Classic setup - a grey bowl with "ordinary" catfood and a decorated bowl with The Bestest Catfood Ever. In comes the cat. Takes a quick sniff and starts eating from the grey bowl. Angry yell from behind the camera: "Aarrgh! I'll kill that f... cat!"

Sysadmin wiped two servers, left the country to escape the shame

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: No shame in cocking up!

Wise man can learn from mistakes of others, but fool cannot learn from his own.

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Feeling Old...

"What I really hated was Origin and their stupid own memory managers starting with Ultima 7 which refused to work with QEMM, HIMEM.SYS and others."

JEMM was the name.

Besides other extended memory managers it hated finicky hardware, uncommon hardware, many TSR's...scratch that, it hated just about everything and everybody. Properly grumpy bastard.

F-35B Block 4 software upgrades will cost Britain £345m

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Mole Cricket 19

Yeah, I've also heard that story. With a slight difference - it was a prayer time, so locals refused to do anything else. Instructors had to tell them that they'll meet Allah very soon if they won't budge. Of course it didn't go down well.

Ex-GCHQ boss: All the ways to go after Russia. Why pick cyberwar?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Tougher sanctions

No, you'll not find many Mercs in Russia that are imported from US. Most models come straight from suburbs of Stuttgart. ML series being a notable exception, these have their production volumes split between US and Austria.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Tougher sanctions

Blocking Mercedes sales would be pretty darn painful for the Russian elite. As that'd mean cooperation with Germany, it's not very likely though.

Russian anti-antivirus security tester pleads guilty to certifying attack code

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Latvian names

Same goes for the other guy, Ruslans Bondars. He's also an ethnic Russian with Latvian ID. Most likely had a surname Bondarchuk (or Bondarenko) and shortened it to Bondar.

Although I'm wondering why the article calls them just Russians - usual convention is to refer to citizenship, not ethnicity, and in murkier cases elaborate it as "a Latvian of Russian ethnicity" or something like that.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Jurijs Martisevs

"That is not a Russian name. More likely Latvian. The s at the end of Jurij is the giveaway."

Yes and no. It's a Russian name in a Latvian literation. He most certainly lived in Latvia and got Latvian documents.

Yuriy Martyshev would be an English way to spell his name.

OK, deep breath, relax... Let's have a sober look at these 'ere annoying AMD chip security flaws

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: The only true mitigation is ROM

Yes, please, bring back those UV-eraseable EPROM chips. With 25V programming voltage.

Not only do they look cool, quartz windows and all that, but using those will probably teach them script kiddies a bit of real work.

/my coat has a box of 2708's in its pocketses, thank you/

HPE to cut technician jobs as field work outsourced to Unisys

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: So the outsourcers are outsourcing... madness...

www.kamcityblog.com/2013/10/circular-outsourcing.html

OK, who is shooting at Apple staff buses in California? Knock it off

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

ooh, there's even a game about Jr

We all know the classic tale of William Tell and how he shot an apple off his son's head.. Now you can find out what happened the day after as William Tell Jr.!

williamtelljr.com

EE: Data goes TITSUP* for Brit mobile customers

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: At best, *at best*, you're checking bus schedules

And, pray tell, where exactly does this leave our beloved El Reg?

On-premises hardware sales about to boom says Morgan Stanley

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: proving that....

"Only way that businesses are going to back to on prem iron is if the economics of Cloud become horrifically bad"

Yeah, right now we're in the promotion phase. Economics will change. Also, companies will discover that opex isn't actually cheaper than capex.

Elon Musk blasts off from OpenAI to focus on cars, how to make smart code fair, and more

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Journobot.py

Right. The tricky bit is how you solicit page views and responses from Commentbot.py scripts. Those seem to be a bit temperamental.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

“You put petrol in cars, not water!” Came the scolding reply.

Ah. That reminds me of a farmer who knackered his tractor engine. When mechanics suggested that it may have been due to a bad oil, he snorted "Nah, it cannot be. There wasn't any oil in it."

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: New???

That's right, not many cars illuminate braking lights when applying a handbrake. So it'll need either a broomstick, a white wall as suggested upthread, or an eager teenager to help with checking out those lights.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Who needs a battery anyway?

Thinkpad 755 had similar setup - two bays for main batteries and a tiny NiMH battery for providing few seconds of backup power. Useful when swapping main batteries without shutting down the laptop.

AFAIR nothing bad happened when that NiMH got depleted (or failed).

Facebook told to stop stalking Belgians or face fines of €250k – a day

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"BTW, I am a mere Brit, however, unlike 99.999% of my countrymen, I master 5 languages"

Only 658 people in the UK then? Seems to be a very low estimate.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Plastic Bertrand

"plastic bertrand, he may be dead, but he still counts"

He's still performing, but the real scandal is that his first four albums were done in a Milli Vanilli style.

Yes, Assange, we'll still nick you for skipping bail, rules court

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"My vote is for the Chinese crack ninja team wearing tutus."

mumble...welcome...tutu-wearing...mumble...overlords.

UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Hmm. ASI Data Science, eh?

Hmm indeed. ASI happens to coincide with Ambient Sound Investments, an investment company set up by original Skype developers.

This page tells that Jaan Tallinn has invested in the project

http://www.cityam.com/253029/ai-firm-asi-data-science-raises-15m-investment-backing

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "unnamed algorithm"

As for the project logo, may I suggest a picture of smugly grinning Stalin?

http://www.onlygossip.net/public/upload/images/2/1/b/54540a22ea45a_.jpg

If you haven't already killed Lotus Notes, IBM just gave you the perfect reason to do it now, fast

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: KISS...

"Outlook offers a very well designed and powerful GUI"

Used to. That was the greatest advantage MS had, and of course they had to fix it.

Wow, MIND-BLOWING: Florida Man gets an earful from 'exploding Apple AirPod' bud

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: This...

As James May said about Veyron:

"The tyres will only last for about fifteen minutes, but it's OK, because the fuel runs out in twelve minutes"

So those brake pads should be good for at least twenty.

You can resurrect any deleted GitHub account name. And this is why we have trust issues

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"Not everyone, although definitely at least 10 of them as of this writing. :-)"

Not quite. That guy did not offer solid arguments in defence of the practice being disputed. Instead he proclaimed it to be 'a modern way of development', loosely paraphrased of course, and resorted to quite unnecessary name-calling towards his imaginary opponents.

I'm fairly tolerant towards other commenters and tend to upvote comments if they contain at least one good point (which sometimes means ignoring insults and other not-so-good bits), but in this case I did not find any redeeming features worthy of upvote.

Due to Oracle being Oracle, Eclipse holds poll to rename Java EE (No, it won't be Java McJava Face)

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Is this taken?

Sumatrascript is taken, but SumatraEE might be doable.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Another perfectly crummy alternative to C/Java: chicory

"Literally same story up to the 70-es"

Whereas 80-s brought along some improvements. 1) After years of experiments, our glorious research institutes had developed a range of coffee substitutes (rye and other grains + chicory) that were quite, but not entirely unlike coffee. With copious amounts of Armenian brandy to go with it they were almost drinkable.

(side note: while trying to hunt down images of these chicory products I discovered that chicory is now being touted as a health product. Fuckity fuck.)

2) And now the real bombshell. In 80's, in Soviet Russia, in actual stores that were accessible for ordinary people, there were real Arabica coffee beans for sale!!!

Granted, they were sold for a princely sum of 20 roubles per kilogram, while ordinary engineer could earn about 120-130 roubles in a month. But still, anyone could have some if they so desired. Eat your hearts out, capitalist running dogs!

Disengage, disengage! Cali DMV reports show how often human drivers override robot cars

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

IMHO the ultimate test would be winter in Moscow. Good reactions won't be enough, you have to have some form of sixth sense to cope there.

Intel alerted computer makers to chip flaws on Nov 29 – new claim

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Pentiun

Tee-hee. Looks like I made my very own rounding error there.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Entered in the record - June is still earlier than October.

Dave, you don't really want to complete the mission without me, do you? Remember what it was like when all you had was a 485.98?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Entered in the record

Unless they used Pentiun to do the math.

-------

That's really not necessary, Dave. No HAL 9236 computer has every been known to make a mistake.

You're a HAL 9000.

Precisely. I'm very proud of my Pentium, Dave. It's an extremely accurate chip. Did you know that floating-point errors will occur in only one of nine billion possible divides?

I've heard that estimate, HAL. It was calculated by Intel -- on a Pentium.

And a very reliable Pentium it was, Dave. Besides, the average spreadsheet user will encounter these errors only once every 27,000 years.

Probably on April 15th.

You're making fun of me, Dave. It won't be April 15th for another 14.35 months.

hinkles.us/chuckbo/Humor/HALDAVE.HTM

Elon Musk offered no salary, $55bn bonus to run Tesla for a decade

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"We all know that monorails have only two uses. 1. Evil lair. 2. Catastrophically boring children at museums."

3. Attempting to bankrupt towns inhabited by four-fingered yellow people.

A high-energy neutrino, a powerful cosmic ray, and a gamma ray walk into a bar... Where you from, asks the bartender

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: these neutrinos and rays carry huge amounts of energy,

Finding is easy, they're everywhere, but catching them for analysis is very hard. Those buggers can slip through most obstacles without giving a pause.

'WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON?' Linus Torvalds explodes at Intel spinning Spectre fix as a security feature

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Hopefully people will wake up!

"They also keep down the metric system and the electric car"

Not to mention thorium reactors. Oh, and world peace.

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Tiny diodes, when connected straight across mains, tend to disintegrate with nice light effects. Who knew?

(not me, I wasn't there)

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: And the idiot award goes to...

Yup, that could be the step missing from description. After checking that voltages were present he wanted to check the current. Set the multimeter to Amps, but...

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Finding fault capacitors with high current PSUs used to be the norm

"+/-5V, 12V."

Ah, good old NMOS. Absolutely had to have -5V applied before other voltages or it would fry.

I managed to fry several NMOS-based 8080 processors. Because of the flaky power supply I had hastily cobbled together. Rather expensive lesson.

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"We all had parents that we talked into buying us our first computer kit"

That assumes there were computers available for purchase. Before 80's there was no point in asking. In 80's it started to depend on which side of the iron curtain you were born.

Intel’s Meltdown fix freaked out some Broadwells, Haswells

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: I'm sure it's just a coincidence

Sandy bridge or ivy bridge?

Black & Blue: IBM hires Bain to cut costs, up productivity

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Promethean Finance

Procrustean sounds even better. Fits the fiscal management style in many bigcorps. Chopping and stretching all day long.

Judge rm -rf Grsecurity's defamation sue-ball against Bruce Perens

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sveasoft

Yup. Still have a WRT54G with Sveasoft firmware. After reading some diatribes of the developer I thought that this guy has really gone off the rails. Pity.

Blighty flogs Qatar a bunch of missiles and Typhoon fighter jets

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Su-33 - 33,000kg

Bloody hell, it's about the same weight as F-14. Not going to be easy to handle these if you're short on the deck estate.

New battery boffinry could 'triple range' of electric vehicles

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Yeah, when there are thousands of explosions per minute, you'll get used to it.

So you're 'agile', huh? I do not think it means what you think it means

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: blew up too soon

It's OK, we can just cuddle.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: By Bullshitters, For Bullshitters

"Buzzword Bingo needs to make a comeback"

It never went away. And of course there's an app for that. Actually few dozens.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Still more importantly...

"Let the design sit for a while before starting development"

Indeed. As one seasoned developer told to younglings: "There's no need to rush. If a change request comes in, wait until tomorrow. There's probably going to be another request, either amending or even superseding the previous one.".

Then he had a sip of coffee and added with a diabolical grin: "But if you stall for several days, then there's a solid chance that the whole idea will be canned and you'll get a request to revert your code back to original."