Posts by Rosie Davies

You look for the largest objects in the universe and two come along at once: Astroboffins spot mega radio galaxies dwarfing Milky Way

Re: ANcient Wisdom

Perfect! Thank you very much.

Rosie

ANcient Wisdom

So this sounds like concrete proof that the ancients were correct, just thinking too small. It's not the Earth that is a flat disk but the universe. The mega-galaxies that are so far away are squishing up close in the currents on the edge of the universal disk before dropping off into...ummm...something. Probably divine. Let's call it divine because it makes the explanation easier.

Obviously the universe is supported by turtles, all the way down.

More seriously, does anyone cleverer that me know what the amazing capabilities of MeerKAT are?

Rosie

Apple's M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there's far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone

Well...OK

I take your point. It's Apple doing what Apple does and doing it very well. I'm not convinced that writing off architectural changes to produce something that is very fast and very efficient is a complete goer though. Energy usage by a single consumer device may be inconsequential compared to energy use by a screamingly fast 4U beast but (guessing TBH, I've not checked the numbers) there are a lot more consumer devices than there are 4U beasts. Less energy used at the consumer end is less energy used overall and that's mostly a good thing.

The other bit that doesn't seem quite fair when writing this off is that it's a different approach that has been shown to give good results. That by itself is likely to cause some thinking outside of Cupertino about similar architectural changes; if only to get up the noses of Fanbois bleating on about their phone going 15 weeks between charges (not the greatest of reason for doing anything mind). Even if it is just phones and laptops at the minute there's little historical precedent within IT for anyone respecting artificial market segment boundaries when it comes to implementing good ideas. Aforementioned 4U beast only with 1/10th of the power consumption for the same performance would be a big saving for anyone's energy bill.

Yes, I know that it's more about shunting data around as quickly as possible rather than chewing through it at the moment. That's likely to change; storage, bandwidth and compute tend to jockey around playing pass the bottleneck so it'd be surprising it at some point in th next couple of decades people weren't complaining about not having enough fast enough cores to chew through the bits they're delivering. It'd be nice to have the compute side of things going screamingly fast when questum entangled transfer interfaces (that's made up BTW) are drowning them under a tsunami of data.

Rosie

The nightmare is real: 'Excel formulas are the world's most widely used programming language,' says Microsoft

Re: Access?

Access is entirely appropriate when there's some young clever clogs who looks as though they may be a threat in 10 years time. Manipulate them into believing that they must understand RDBMS and that Access is the most advanced RDBMS there is, and that to get ahead they should really spend the time gaining a thorough and in-depth knowledge of how Access does things.

Cackle evilly as they spend the first two decades of their career learning how to not do things the way Access does them.

Rosie

LibreOffice 7.1 beta boasts impressive range of features let down by a lack of polish and poor mobile efforts

Re: Whilst I agree that cloud collaboration is important these days...

Likewise only on a Cosmo. For that I use AndrOpenOffice which works well enough I even paid for it.

Rosie

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Pratchetisms

I assume the "Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border" system was named by Leonard of Quirm?

That said, having a system deployed into production 23 days before it's needed beats the usual sharp focus on delivery deadlines by about 5 days.

Rosie

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

the days when 'we made it up as we went along'?

You mean last Tuesday?

Rosie

Missing Alan Turing memorabilia to be returned to Blighty from the US, 36 years after it went walkabout

Re: And the next story will be ....

I get what you're saying but the article says 1984. By 1984 we had Frankie gos to Holloywood, Culture Club and everything. Downright progressive it was, for a given definition of progressive.

Rosie

Touchscreen holdout? This F(x)tec Pro1 X phone with sliding QWERTY keyboard might push your buttons

Physical Keyboard ++Good

Admittedly I'm a bit biased, I hate touchscreen typing. I found myself mentally editing what I wanted to say down to the fewest possible words to vaguely get across a reasonable approximation just to avoid typing any more than I absolutely had to.

I bought the Planet Gemini and it was a nice enough device to use stand-alone. I've now got the Cosmo which is a big improvement on the Gemini and sufficiently good that I'm not tempted to get the Astro - which seems to be the same form factor as this device.I can touch type on the Cosmo at speeds fairly close to what I get on a full-sized keyboard. That's important enough to me that I don't ever want anoterh phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard.

Rosie

Linux kernel's Kroah-Hartman: We're not struggling to get new coders, it's code review that's the bottleneck

Re: No surprise.

Speaking as someone who has been a sound engineer and reviewed a LOT of other people's code...it doesn't matter. There's the satisfaction of a job well done, whether that's listening to a piece of music you saved or seeing a piece of code romp through a scenario that would have choked it.

Rosie

Won't duke, duke, duke the URLs: AWS backtracks on plans to block old-style S3 paths

Ambidextrous

I am liking the new site feature for supporting both left and right hand sides of the pond, as per your fine example 30 September 30 (though possibly a th would help?)

Could I propse non-Reg units go through a similar thing? Maybe 68 Farencius 20? 20 feetres 6.1?

I didn't have anything of any value to add, no. Why do you ask?

Rosie

Lars Ulrich makes veiled threats of another Metallica album during web chat with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Re: Deluded article from a cretin

"...how would you describe The Register, a circus?"

Welcome to the circus fellow clown. Mind the pies, they have RJ45s in.

Rosie

Cosmo Communicator: More phone than the Gemini, more pocket computer than phone

Re: Got Gemini, Getting Cosmo

Guilty as charged y'honour. Planning on not repeating that particular destruction test on the Cosmo.

Rosie

Got Gemini, Getting Cosmo

I was an early back for both so have had the Gemini for a fair while now. It works well enough as standard smartphone, the main irritant being websites and apps that can't cope with landscape properly and I don't really notice the size or weight but then again it lives in my handbag when I'm not using it. The keyboard is an absolute dream to use, I'd got really fed up of constructing messages aroudn the lest number of words rather than saying what I wanted to because I find on screen keyboards an absolute PITA to work with. Touch typing means I can say what I actually want to say or witter on at superfluous length, depending on your perspective.

I backed the Cosmo mainly for the backlit keyboard and because they're a small company doing something a bit different. THe external screen and camera aren't tht important to me, at least until the thing arrives then they'll probably become an invaluable feature that I'll wonder how I ever coped without. Or something.

Do we get a proper Reg demolishes review on this one?

Rosie

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

I've made a chocolate stout (from grain with all the hassle and mess that implies) and no chocolate was used in the mix. It's due to the roating of the malt, a bit more than amber (that gives you your 'biscuit' flavours') and a bit less than black malt (_really_ astringent, too much makes your mouth hurt).

I don't know what the real brewers get up to but cocoa is much more expensive that chocolate malt and you'd need a LOT of it to get a reasonable flavour (I know, I've tried). I'd be surprised if they did this but am probably as wrong about that as I am about so many things.

Rosie

Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it

Re: Technically Do-Able

Wouldn't surprise me if I were wrong, I'm good at being wrong.

I was thinking PKI type stuff.

Keypair 1 is used to allow encryption between the two people who are having the conversation (sender's private, receivers public).

Keypair 2 for the comms data, (sender's private, $somewhere[comms_data_store] public)

Keypar 3 for the stream containing the same as keypair 1, (sender's private, $somewhere[warrant_required_data_store] public).

Access to the private key for 2 and 3 would be the bit that's subject to controls, far moreso for 3 than 2. That's also the reason I said a bit over double the traffic as I was starting from the point that there's already one encrypted stream, not one unencrypted stream.

Re: Technically Do-Able

You'd encrypt only the data, forward it $somewhere for safe storage until someone turns up with the appropriate bit of paper saying they're allowed to look at it. No need to wrap encryption in encryption in encryption, just three different sets of encrypted information each using a different key pair. Traffic goes up by a bit over 2 (two copies of the actual content plus a tiny bit for the comms data) and no need to be diddling down at the TCP layer.

I never said it was a good idea, just tht it could be done.

And you don't catch people by keyword search, at least not unless you're really stupid and believe that would work. You catch people by working out who you'd like to know more about and then set about knowing more about them and the people they talk to. Old school like.

Rosie

Technically Do-Able

At the risk of getting flamed to oblivion and with caveats that I don't necessarily think it's a good idea and that it being technically do-able doesn't consider a lot of other factors...

It is do-able using something akin to RBAC with crypto protection on various layers of access. Broad brush (without thinking about it too deeply), you'd want three sets of (PKI) credentials:

Keypair1: User keypair, what is in place in pretty much any of the secure end-to-end products already

Keypair2: Communications records keypair. Who said something to whom and when but not what was said

Keypair3: Wrong'uns keypair. Access to everything, communications. Used for reading what clowns, mime artists and other undesirables are saying to one another.

Information accessable to one key pair isn't accessible to any other key pair with KeyPair2 and 3 being subject to legal/regulatory/whatever controls.

Yeah, I know. Those controls are a right whatnot to get right.

Rosie

Google kills AdWords!

Explanation

Thank you for noticing the bold, almost child-like palette used in the new logo. It is indeed meant to remind us of our younger days, when everything was new, fresh and exciting. Like Google's new ads service!

The use of two converging lines suggests the many seemingly divergent streams that your customers follow across the web will coalesce to bring you Bigger Unexpected Google Generated Exceptional Retailing Ascendancy Lifted Levels. The use of gentle curves expresses that the subtle art of persuasion as opposed to the sharp forcefulness of compulsion will drive your business to the next level.

And after all that, erm, fertile language; I think I need a shower. Several before I even begin to feel clean.

Rosie

Hip hop-eration: Hopless Franken-beer will bring you hoppiness

Hops?

I've been making beer without hops for years. There's a fair few recipes here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Herbal-Healing-Beers-Fermentation/dp/0937381667 (which is every bit as woo-woo as the title suggests but the recipes are fun). I've also made a really good summer beer (light and refreshing) using Mugwort and lemon for flavouring. Hops were approved of because some of the other ingredients used for flavouring had some interesting* effects on the drinker whereas hops tended to calm them down. Not sure about that last bit mind (even if I have read it from multiple sources), Friday nights in most towns suggest that people will still get rowdy despite the hops.

* For a given definition of interesting

UK mobile customers face inflation-busting price hike

Re: Abuse

Last time I bothered to check I was paying £10/month (somewhere around $14/month). That gives me 1GB of data (I mostly use WiFi so that's plenty), unlimited texts and 600 minutes talk time a month (I'm an unsociable moo so rarely get anywhere near that).

It looks as though those figures compare at least reasonably with the ones you quoted.

Rosie

Ten new tech terms I learnt this summer: Do you know them all?

Re: Sublimated Ear and Gaseous Elbow.

I was impressed at the self-restraint that prevented Gaseous Arse not being used instead.

Rosie

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

On Another Note

I'm not going to get involved in a 'my language is better than your language' discussion; I've got the battle scars from too many of those already.

What did strike me as a bit strange was characterising a professional institute with a royal charter as "a technical advocacy organization". I wonder if that doesn't sell them a little short. Mad Bob the technology yogi is a technical advocacy organisation, albeit not for any technology that exists, and I'm not sure that's really comparable.

Rosie

UK.gov snaps on rubber gloves, prepares for mandatory porn checks

Just Guessing

But based on what a devious little whatnot of a teenager I was. I'd expect this will just result in the details of Mum's/Dad's/Granny's credit card being circulated all around the playground and suddenly Maud, 94, has developed all kinds of new and unexpected interests.

Rosie

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype 'from the ground up'. Instead, it should have buried it

+1 for mentioning Visio.

I used to love using it WAY back before Microsoft got their hands on it (yes, I'm old. Why do you ask?). Now I cringe ever time I have to go near it.

K.I.S.S is everything.

Rosie

What a tit! Uber CEO hijacks his staff breast-pump room to meditate

Re: El reg - the daily mail of tech

The Daily MAIL? My word this wonderful rag has gone up in the world. I remember when it barely aspired to the level of the Daily Sport.

Rosie

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

Nearly No-one

Who has:

- Ultimate responsibility for ensuring all documentation is correct?

- Ultimate responsibility for ensuring back-up work (including testing regime)?

In both cases it's the CTO's job.

If the tale had stopped before it got to the bit about the new chap being fired I'd have gone with "No-one, it was a wake-up call for everyone." Even C level folks are only human. Things can get over-looked; over-reliance on assurances from the management chain can combine with a monstrous workload to help this along.

But it didn't stop there. The actions of the CTO tend to suggest someone lacking the emotional maturity, willingness to take personal responsibility and with the primary desire of covering their own behinds at all cost to ever be trusted with that responsibility.

Rosie

UK hospital meltdown after ransomware worm uses NSA vuln to raid IT

This is the UK. We don't have the construct of first degree murder. I feel it might be quite challenging to prove that $whatever was released specifically to kill, which is what you'd need for a pre-meditated murder conviction (UK's equivalent of first degree) but causing death by being a silly bugger (AKA manslaughter) would be more likely to succeed.

Nope, I'm not a lawyer nor do I work for the police. I just work in IT so take an interest for...ummm...idle curiosity. Yes, that's it. Definitely that.

Rosie

Not the droids you're looking for – worst handsets to resell

Why Does This Matter?

I'm not really sure I understand why this is important. Who sells their phone after only one month? Even six months doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. I've still got the same HTC M8 that I got Gods only know how long ago. OK so it's got LineageOS on it so I get the weekly updates but it's still working perfectly well. Doesn't freeze up, UI responds speedily enough and the battery is easily good for a day and a half of normal usage. I've not seen anything on a new phone that's making me think "oh yes, must have that" so why do I care that it's worth pennies to the pound on what I paid for it?

Fingers crossed the next device will be a Gemini (assuming they get the thing out the door). A proper, useful keyboard on a phone would be a wonderful thing to have; and I'll probably hang on to that until the heat death of the Sun.

Rosie

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

Re: Limits of pragmatism

Oh very well done! I think that may win the prize for the most tangential insertion of the UK leaving the EU I've yet seen.

Looks, I understand you're upset. There are a lot on this side of the channel who feel the same way. I also understand the anger and abuse but you need to move past that. You might want to think about seeing a counsellor if it continues to affect you in this way.

Back on thread.

I quite like the idea of thinking of projects in terms of size/complexity (first came across this from the Robertson's categorisation of rabbit, horse and elephant). If you've few stakeholders and can turn on a sixpence then you're in a rabbit project and agile is great. If there are multiple stakeholders (especially if they're in different organisations), heavy regulatory frameworks and generally need to be pointed in the right direction then you're you're in a elephant project and waterfall/Bohm is probably a better fit.

Horses for courses (to continue the animal theme). This project has all the hallmarks of an elephant so it looks as though the rabbits have been crushed underfoot.

Rosie

It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard

Re: chris121254 - "improve online privacy"

I don't know about coffee makers but did spot this article about farm machinery a few days ago: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/farmers-using-hacked-firmware-to-bypass-john-deeres-software-stranglehold/. I'll be honest; I've not done any more research than read that article. It could be complete nonsense but is certainly in line with the 'design something that can only be removed with Ultra-Expensive Dealer-Only Doohickey Mk III' that already goes on.

Rosie

Fitbit hit on Pebble kit cost just 20 million quid? Oh s**t!

LineageOS

You can do all that sort of thing on a droid as well. Certainly if you're running LineageOS (the phoenix arisen type version of Cyanogenmod).

Plus no phone vendor/network installed nonsense that drains the battery and doesn't do anything useful. Seems stable enough on an old M8 I've had for about 4 years, I sometimes need to reboot because the wifi gets a tad confuddled. It seems to be getting better with each weekly release as well.

So I don't think the Android spying on you problem is necessarily and Android problem, more a problem to some implementations of Android. You have a choice which implementation of Android you use, which you won't get with an iPhone. Though I understand that for some the lack of choice is a Good Thing(tm), I'm a stroppy mare who doesn't like being told what to do. Certainly not by a computer.

Which is why I keep a bucket of salty water handy at all times.

Regards,

European Space Agency slaps CC licences on its pics and vids

"...a bunch of..."

Shudder, squirm, ick.

Horrible, horrible language.

Rosie

New Royal Navy Wildcat helicopters can't transmit vital data

Re: WTF?

Tsk, tsk, tsk and there was me thinking that is was the global crash triggered by the sub-prime lending racket in the US that threw a spanner in the works. What a silly girl I must be.

Rosie

Fear not, Europe's Privacy Shield is Trump-proof – ex-FTC bigwig

Re: Oh great

Have an upvote, simply for "festering bunghole of a fascist banana republic". Regardless of whether I agree or not the sentiment was wonderfully expressed.

Rosie

GDS chap: UK.gov is better off on public cloud than its own purpose-built network

Re: Out of US control

I'd imagine 5-eyes would allow access to pretty much anything that most government departments do - certainly anything that's likely to end up on a public cloud. And if 5 eyes doesn't cover it then it was never accessible via the internet anyway.

Rosie

Trumping free trade: Say 'King of Bankruptcy' Ross does end up in charge of US commerce

Umm...

I could be wrong but I feel that you are taking the article to be far more factual than it is or was meant to be. Lots of truthiness and a dash of sarcasm and a large dollop of satire.

If it turns out you're right though then yes. What you just said.

Rosie

RIP HPE's The Machine product, 2014-2016: We hardly knew ye

Re: Driving Innovation to Product

That seems a little harsh. It appears the HP were approaching The Machine as a test bed for a variety of different approaches rather than an end in itself, which seems sensible enough, prototypes and all that.

Hopefully some of what's been found out will turn out to be useful and find it's way into boxes that can be bought. HP used to be good at that sort of thing.

Rosie

More Androids carry phone-home firmware

The community version seems to be healthy enough. I thought it was only the commercial version that was having a wobble?

Rosie

Security bods find Android phoning home. Home being China

Re: Here you go, girly will help you

REAL* sysadmins do not use the command line. Real sysadmins sense the route taken from the spin of the photons flowing throughthe fibre.

Rosie

*Robotically Enhanced Advanced Lifeforms for those at the back of the class. Yes Smithers, I'm talking to you.

Top of the bots: This AI isn't a cold, cruel killing machine – it's a pop music hit machine

New Hell

Welcome to Purgatory 2.0. Your afterlife will be spent listening to AI generated slight variations on the songs of $insert_artist_here.

Forever.

Rosie

Going! going! pwned? 200! million! Yahoo! logins! leaked! allegedly!

Re: Meanwhile....

"It's private money. If the shareholders are stupid enough to give it away, it is literally in every sense their problem."

Sort of. Though pension funds and other large institutional investors like to invest in large companies such as Yahoo.Which could mean there's a chance that your pension is a few pennies a year lower because MM has been given a huge payout for driving a company into the ground.

I theory you could find out and someone'll make the argument that it's your fault for not being aware of every single investment made by every single fund manager in every single account that you have. TBH I'd question the sanity of that argument.

Rosie

Apple Watch craze over before it started: Wrist-puter drags market screaming off a cliff

Re: Really? I mean really?

+1 for the Pebble mention.

I got a Pebble Time Round about 6 months ago. Mostly because shiny but also because shiny. It's a lot more useful that I thought it would be and the 1 1/2 - 2 day charge period isn't really a problem - I'm generally near USB socket anyway.

Plus, it looks like a watch and not some hideous, pustular blister growing out your wrist.

Rosie

Tesla whacks guardrail in Montana, driver blames autopilot

Re: ... assist ...

So does "...that the bloke in the driver's seat is responsible..." mean that I can never be held responsible for anything that happens whilst I am driving a car? Because, not bloke y'see. I'm very much hoping this is the case as I have a list of names...

Rosie

Are bearded blokes more sexist?

MISOGNY!

I note that neither piece of 'research' has gathered the views of bearded ladies. Once again hirsute ladies are ignored in a blatantly sexist attempt to sideline those who don't conform to the narrow parameters of conventional beauty.

I shall be writing to the Gaurdinnan!

Rosie

P.S. no, I am not a bearded lady but that doesn't mean I don't have the right to get offended on their behalf and act as a spokesperson for their community.

Humans get 'aroused' fondling robots in their private areas – study

Re: Obligatory Futurama reference

I was thinking more along the lines of "kiss my shiny, metal..." myself.

Rosie

Gov to take axe to big IT contracts soon, will hand chunks to SMEs

Re: "No one knows exactly how much money is spent on IT across the public sectors"

We don't do cents here in the UK, we do pennies. We dropped the shillings a while ago though mostly for the look of things as we felt we needed to keep the pound.

Given the amount of petty empire building, silo based working and rigidly enforced boundaries between departments I'm not at all surprised that nothing is properly measured nor likely to be properly measured in the near future. The upside is that it saves us from a viciously efficient government, the downside that we haven't the faintest how much anything costs other than "too much".

Rosie

Spanish cops discover illegally parked flying car

Re: Rag Week?

I've lost count of the number if times I've heard either this story or one very, very like it. I wonder whether it's one of those urban legend things or whether people have a supernatural ability to detect a car carrying rugby players and know they should double park there to ensure the story's survival.

And if the latter wouldn't that make the story some kind of parasite preying off the suggestibility of the puny humans?

Rosie.

US DoJ files motion to compel Apple to obey FBI iPhone crack order

Honest Question

Because I don't know a huge amount about the workings of an iPhone. What would stop someone ghosting the storage of the phone? If that's possible then why would you not load the image into a phone emulator and try the 10(?) combinations before the ghost wiped itself then reload the image into an emulator, try the next 10...you get the idea. I'm guessing there's something that would stop that being possible because if I thought of it then I'm sure some clever whatnot in the FBI could and all the forcing Apple to do something would be about something entirely different from getting hold of the information.

Rosie

No, Agile does not 'equal' DevOps: Examining complexity and the long haul

Re: Microservices, the new DCOM/CORBA/JavaBeans components...

*> I really wonder if this stuff will work better...

It will. At least it will initially. Then it'll start running into complex interactions between components some of which belong to a third party that is supporting 100 other consumers most of which are richer than you, others that are no longer being actively developed and some in a language so old that everyone's forgotten it's name and the last compiler update is 20 years ago and full of bugs^W known issues.

Then there will be a lot of arguments, conferences will be held, books will be published. There will probably be religious wars, there usually are. Then best practice will emerge and it'll be possible to get useful work done in a reasonable time-frame with wanting to chew your own fingers off in frustration.

Then someone will start complaining about how it isn't 'docile' enough and it'll all start up again...

Rosie