* Posts by thosrtanner

215 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2013

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BOFH: We want you to know you have our full support

thosrtanner

Maybe the PFY applied the prod to himself in despair. It's so unclear.

Tech giants' payouts go to everyone but affected citizens. US Supremes now urged to sort it out

thosrtanner

Re: here's a crazy idea...

or perhaps google should pay the distribution costs as well

Nvidia reports record revenues in latest fiscal quarter

thosrtanner

This is what I love about the stock market: Huge increase in revenue and turnover. Price drops.

If they were scrabbling to make a penny and had bought in Marissa, the price would have rocketed.

No yolking matter: Google Translate cock-up gives Norwegians more than un œuf eggs

thosrtanner

Re: Good eggineering tolerances

Eggsactly

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

thosrtanner

Re: AV issues/missiing server patches - WTF

> Oh look - you can only get the MS patches if your AV vendor stops making unsupported kernel calls,

> otherwise the patch will Blue Screen your machine.

Well, duh. You dig around in the kernel and call bits of it, your code is going to be very unstable. At least MS have done something so that the users won't unexpectedly be nuked (or at least no more unexpectedly than normal). It's probably rather hard to apply subsequent patches if your system keeps blatting itself because the AV program checks the subsequent patch...

Meet R2-DILDO: 'Star Wars' sex toys? This is where the fun begins

thosrtanner

Pictures or it's not true...

More than half of GitHub is duplicate code, researchers find

thosrtanner

Re: Forking right! ?

Pretty sure they can tell the difference between a forked repo and a copy and paste. It's pretty much how github works.

Copying the whole of some javascript library into your repo rather than using sub repositories (or whatever they call them now) seems to have been pretty much standard practice. Not sure how package manager works but some things are really good at breaking APIs. And there's probably a lot of "I just need a small tweak" mentality about this copy and paste stuff.

BOFH: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

thosrtanner

Re: Oh dear

I detect a tragedy for my coffee, followed by a large laundry bill

Sex harassment scandal scoops up Silicon Valley's Slimy Scoble

thosrtanner
Unhappy

Re: One thing that bugs me in all this...

I don't see why you feel the law should come down twice as hard on someone who has been conditioned to behave in a certain way. They are victims of someone else too.

You might as well demand the punishing of someone who doesn't report someone else abusing them, because they are making it easier for the abuser to get away with it. However it is more than clear that society does exactly the opposite and people who report rape and abuse tend to at best get ignored.

Clearly abusers shouldn't be allowed to continue abuse, but heaping further abuse on them by inappropriate levels of punishment isn't really going to help. That's likely how they got into this position in the first place.

Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers

thosrtanner

Article written Sep 19th. Article appeared under Verity Stob page Oct 2nd.

Clearly someone forgot

um

What was I saying?

Downloaded CCleaner lately? Oo, awks... it was stuffed with malware

thosrtanner

only the 32 bit installer?

Well, I have a 64 bit version of windows. Yet somehow windows defender (yup, free, comes with windows) detected the malware and quarantined it (as well as the downloaded file). And detected and cleaned registry entries.

Yes, I use ccleaner because windows doesn't automatically clean your tmpdir and it ends up with tons of crap. not so impressed with the cookie/history cleaning and I treat the registry cleaning with a large pinch of salt (there are some programs that have been known to put entries in the registry that purport to be a file path, but the path doesn't exist, the program appears merely to be looking for the key), and to be honest I've hardly ever used it.

Whoosh, there it is: Toshiba bods say 14TB helium-filled disk is coming soon

thosrtanner

Re: Fuck a duck!

I remember having a 5Mb removable platter at Uni. Then in my first job, there were these 80Mb removable which were like 5 platters and quite an effort to lift and transport the platters.

Confessions of an ebook eater

thosrtanner

Re: Great article

Only for metric sizes. If you use imperial paper measurements (foolscap, quarto, elephant, double elephant (a personal favourite), etc - which, given Foyles reputation for cutting edge technology is rather more likely to be the style of paper in use there) there's no such guarantee.

No one still thinks iOS is invulnerable to malware, right? Well, knock it off

thosrtanner

Interesting this was published the same day as this https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/19/apple_patches_ios_os_x_flaws/

Sadly, as people are people, and our society is what it is, a significant amount of what is said by vendors is hype, otherwise no one would even look at their products, whether they are superb or awful.

But 47 assorted flaws is not exactly zero.

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

thosrtanner

Won't this go the way of other similar attempts at control? There will be some mosquitoes that are immune / resistant to the infection. they'll successfully breed, and their offspring will be more likely to be immune. Somewhat like the antibiotic immune bacteria.

So after some years, this'll just end up with releasing 20 million randy and ready male mosquitoes.

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

thosrtanner
Holmes

Re: Hello. Is that the help desk?

You should have learnt by now not to drink coffee whilst reading BOFH

Back to ASICs: Mellanox pumps up Ethernet speed to 400Gbps

thosrtanner

Is there a 400G standard already?

Boffins with frickin' laser beams chase universe's mysterious trihydrogen

thosrtanner

Re: Re why the interest in making H3 from hydrocarbons ?

You'd never get a job draining the Chesterfield Canal then

GitHub flub spaffs 8Tracks database, 18 million accounts leaked

thosrtanner
Unhappy

github flub?

I thought for a moment from the headline that github was leaking passwords. But it seems it's not github at all.

It's not really githubs fault that someone put things there they shouldn't have done (or at least shouldn't have done without more security). The whole point of github is for people to read and share information.

I think this article could do with a little bit of retitling / rewording.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

thosrtanner

Clearly the people writing go are doing bad things to their earning power.

Fortunately for my salary I abhor tabs, and after reading that, I shall never write in it.

Seven pet h8s: Verity is sorely vexed

thosrtanner
Unhappy

Re: Too many tools

And a bad programmer can write appalling Fortran in any language

Windows 10 Anniversary Update crashing under Avast antivirus update

thosrtanner

Re: Ahh yess

Acutally if you'd updated classic shell with their updater (i.e. from the right place rather than the nuked mirror) to the version that supported windows 10 anniversary, the anniversary update didn't complain about it one little bit.

Windows 10: Happy with Anniversary Update?

thosrtanner

Re: Not appealing at all

"It flies like a train"?

So rather slowly and only on the ground then?

URRGH! Evil app WATCHES YOU WATCHING PORN, snaps your grimace

thosrtanner

*sigh* Windows does NOT encourage users to run as admin. It throws up a box saying "this software wants to do something to your computer". And on loads and loads of websites, you see advice that tells you to

1) Switch off the access control

2) Change the permissions on <something in program files> so you can write to it

And also

3) There is still software that is released that more-or-less expects people to grant write access to places they shouldn't have to (Bethesda/Steam - Skyrim immediately comes to mind, but there are others).

With a mindset like that even with the large developers, let alone the help sites, what do you expect. If people advised you to always run as root in linux, they'd be howled down. But apparently it's Microsoft's fault that doing the same thing on windows is considered par for the course.

There are plenty of criticisms that microsoft deserves, but encouraging people to run as admin all the time is not one.

Moshtix admin account popped by party-pooper hipster-hating hacker

thosrtanner

how come

a $1000 price (as per headline) is a 1000% increase on a $355 ticket price?

Wouldn't 1000% increase be of the order of $4000 dollars?

Don't fret over SOHO routers and Heartbleed. But yeah, there's LOADS to fear on home kit

thosrtanner

How are home users meant to fix it

Do you really think upgrading the router firmware is a trivial operation for the non-technical? Even I wouldn't want to do it. If the router dies because the ISP downloaded non working software to it, that's their problem. If my firmware upgrade went wrong (and TBH I've really got no idea what the 'right' version of software is, and even if I did, the instructions are frankly scary, and omit important stuff like MD5 sum for the software), it's my problem.

And it's not one I want. Support from ISPs is bad enough with stuff *they* do, anything out of the ordinary and any information they give goes from useless to worse than useless.

So I'm not surprised that heartbleed is still there. Nor will I be until the ISPs block malformed packets downstream.

Mozilla axes HATED Firefox-ad-tab plan ... but will try again

thosrtanner

sob

OK, so I liked firefox. But they just introduced Australis which bust my user experience. The 'classic theme restore' isn't so bad, partly because I'm not totally against the curved tab markers.

But it broke at least one of the extensions I use, badly. I'm not an extension writer, so I can't tell how good/bad the code is, but it's worked more or less unchanged for ages.

So I went to palemoon which is more or less firefox without the UI changes for Australis, and everything works fine.

So why did they do this? Not to mention that the version number system is so broken resulting in everyone putting insane version ranges in their addons, and it makes the whole boiling thing useless.

Nothing's as SCARY as an overly aggressive SOFTWARE PIMP

thosrtanner
Devil

Why so many problems with windows 8?

I freely admit the UI assuming you have a touch screen tablet is a disgrace. It's not that hard to get a traditional start menu though (first thing I did was to get a replacement for that. The 2nd thing was to get a sidebar replacement).

I don't much like the way they've tried to kill off all the desktop UI. I don't particularly want to be logged into MS network to use skydrive or whatever they call it now.

But the underlying system though is much smoother and better. As soon as I got a windows 8 machine on my network, ALL the problems I had with windows homegroups went away...

All they need to do is shoot their UI department. My experience in this industry is whenever you let programmers or trendy people get involved in UIs, the usability goes down the hill faster than Sisyphus's rock. And it takes a similar effort to get it back where it was.

BTW I like the article, thank you

BEHOLD the HOLY GRAIL of TECH: The REVERSIBLE USB plug

thosrtanner
Paris Hilton

all thumbs

I have a nasty feeling I'm going to find myself unable to fit the new cables in *either* way up.

Lego is the TOOL OF SATAN, thunders Polish priest

thosrtanner

on a complete tangent

Maybe those nice polish coffin makers who do the calendar should team up with lego for next years edition and send him a copy.

El Reg's Deep Outback XP upgrade almost foiled by KILLER ARACHNIDS

thosrtanner

Those numbers are just so - it makes me feel small. But not dangerous, unlike the spiders.

Hope the install goes well, because I don't think you want another trip like that in the immediate future. Though TBH I don't think the lack of speed limit means you need to drive as fast as the car will go - I'm pretty sure the police won't have you for not having your foot flat down

The Reg's guide to cursing in Mongolian

thosrtanner

Wow. Apparently clumsy is right up there with feminine hygiene accessory. That's going to be painful.

French novel falls foul of Apple's breast inspectors

thosrtanner

Re: moral turpitude

Couldn't you have marked it as NSFW in the *title*? I have quite a tall monitor and the NSFW in the text of the article was a wee bit late as the picture had displayed by then. Fortunately there's no one on the adjacent desk at the moment.

Roll up, roll up for the Reg Readers' Ball

thosrtanner

Re: @JDX

In the states you can marry at 18 but can't drink till 21.

Beta tasting: The Elder Scrolls Online preview

thosrtanner

21G?!

I was going to try this but then I saw the download size. I didn't have 24 hours for my network connection to be maxed out in time for the weekend.

Those of us living in or near the sticks (as defined by BT, which, in my case, means "the new estate the wrong side of the railway line, where we could have put fibre as we'd already done so for the rest of the town, but why bother) can't deal with attempting to load a whole DVD, thank you.

Facebook adds 50+ gender options: Stalking your 'Friends' just got more LGBT-friendly

thosrtanner

What saddens me is not that facebook have done this - I applaud them for that, (it's about the only thing I do applaud them for admittedly) - but I just know what the reactions will be.

Technology and medicine have come a long way in the last 2000 years. It's a shame that culture and behaviour don't seem to have caught up.

Video thrills the Google ad star: Susan Wojcicki becomes YouTube chief

thosrtanner

Re: Is she related to Sergey Brin's wife...

They're sisters (according to Wikipedia, anyway)

NHS website hit by MASSIVE malware security COCKUP

thosrtanner

Re: Small problem really

So they had a load of pages with links to non-existent sites. Not non-existent because they'd recently gone off line but - never existed.

If you're looking for a security hole to exploit, that's a pretty good one. No work on your part beyond looking for pages who send requests to sites which don't exist, register site, populate site with malware, $$$$$

Some level of review and automated checking *before* these pages were pushed out to unsuspecting users would have been a good (and professional) thing.

Language-mangling Germans fling open Handygate to selfie-snapping whistleblowers

thosrtanner

Languages are good for you

Nearly had a caffeine accident when reading that translating "fake-" into idiomatic English ends up with a latin prefix

Trojan-laden FileZilla clone slurps data, sends it to the UNKNOWN

thosrtanner

Don't people check the signatures

They could easily have doctored the signature on the web page so it wouldn't help much.

Prof Stephen Hawking: 'There are NO black holes' – they're GREY!

thosrtanner

penrose

@Jemma: First I ever heard of Penrose was to do with Penrose tilings, and I think many non-scientists may have come across him from that.

UK smut filter may have sent game patch to sin-bin

thosrtanner

on the other hand it's possible that it looks for sex and then whitelists sussex, essex, wessex, middlesex. because that's the way programmers minds work :-(

Los Angeles' weather is just like Mordor, says Brit climate prof

thosrtanner

Re: As with all Climate models

If you actually look at the paper it shows the world of the second age of Arda which was used for the simulation. Of course his main commentary is going to be on Middle Earth, as that's pretty much all people know about.

Wintel must welcome Androitel and Chromtel into cosy menage – Intel

thosrtanner

They lost the plot when they didn't push itanium properly. A hairy beast designed for compiler writers, but that's not a bad thing. amd64 is yech and spit and horrible.

LG: You can stop hiding from your scary SPY TELLY quite soon now

thosrtanner

Re: Sony does similar, but without any obvious filenames being sent

So have you raised that with the Information Standards Office or whatever it is that looks at these things?

Fake X-rated Facebook scam vids of Selena Gomez: Man sued

thosrtanner

Why, whenever I see 'free-content' in an article about facebook, do I always read it as 'content-free'?

TPG flashes cheeky 'down under' CAPTCHA

thosrtanner

Re: Reg Reader -meeeehhhhh

> Are there some people on this planet that do not possess rectums, penis, vaginas, breasts, testicles etc...

I think you'll find about most of the people on the planet are missing one or more of that list.

Ye Bug List

thosrtanner

Re: Continually being asked to approve cookies

I can reproduce this consistently by clicking on the red title bar. It (re)loads the front page and immediately pops up with a request for cookie confirmation

thosrtanner
Unhappy

Re: Continually being asked to approve cookies

And it's unfixed itself today :-(

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