Posts by Dramoth

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

Instead of deleting...

You could just buy a cheap phone that doesn't have anything on it and use that in the US.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Easy choice Elon

I'm not allowed back on Twitter... because I got kicked off for "abusing" a homophobic right wing nut job from a far right wing political party... and I have shots at far right wing dickheads all the time.

They claim that I just create accounts to abuse people. Which isn't true. I created the extra accounts because their AI couldn't read the "" around a comment I made regarding a cartoon image. But being a pro-Russian trump chimp who wants to hang LGBTQ and POC and Jews from the nearest tree is fine according to their algorythms.

Ex-Broadcom engineer asks for house arrest over IP theft

The precedent...

just claim that you took the documents for a book you're planning on writing that they were yours anyway.

But with the way things are going... that isn't going to help the guy claiming it currently

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Moving dev into production without testing it

That would be like moving the entire development environment into production without testing it... or backing up production. And then only doing a cursory test on the production server.

And not informing the rest of the dev team you're doing this... on a Wednesday afternoon after everyone else has gone home.

And not being around the next morning when your 80 billion dollar US partners UK offices call up asking why the production server is broken.

What's even more amazing is that the culprit didn't even get the sack... just got a stern talking to from the MD of the company and sent into the devs office with instructions to fix it all ASAP!

Australia wants tech companies to let cops 'n' snoops see messages without backdoors

Dutton's attempt at making Australia into a fascist police state

Nothing to see here, move along... and give me your encryption keys while you are at it!

US citizen sues France over France-dot-com brouhaha

Re: Eh?

Sounds like he wanted way too much for the domain and the French surrender monkeys decided to say screw you and took it by force!

Trump signs 'no privacy for non-Americans' order – what does that mean for rest of us?

Re: Trump has become more deranged

Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!

Networking wonks say lousy planning, not DDOS, caused #Censusfail

It was a DDOS attack

By the Australian public... just trying to access the servers and fill out the damned forms.

The good old Liberal Government went with an new fangled IT method of collecting all our data... just to prove to the Luddites that the technology is rubbish and we should move to a 10 year collecting cycle and chopping down more trees to create all those lovely paper forms.

Tech support becomes Australia's number one scam

Tease the trolls...

Run linux and setup a virtual box running windows xp or win95 for them to play with.

Then when they try and bill you, delete the virtual box and scream down the phone telling them that they somehow managed to screw your entire computer and it just died.

Tell them that there were essential business documents you had just finished working on and hadn't backed up on that computer and now it's dead and you can't recover them and they were for billions of dollars in sales for the company that you work for. Ask them if they are going to compensate you for your losses as you were going to get a 3% commission on the whole deal.

Bet you hear dialtone before you finish asking for compensation.

Obama's budget packs HUGE tax breaks for poor widdle tech giants

hmm

Get together with all the other countries that these big corporations are using tax rules to profit shift their money around before slotting it into a bank in a tax haven somewhere and charge those corporations with tax evasion, present the banks with various warrants and seize the money from the tax haven and spread it around the countries who are owed billions in taxes.

Should pay for a couple of tridents for the UK... or another aircraft carrier for the US.

Is it humanly possible to watch Gigli and Battlefield Earth back-to-back?

I reckon that I have something...

that beats all three of those movies in the unwatchable stakes. A movie so bad that Stephan King successfully sued to have his name removed from the original title.

The Lawnmower Man... enough said

Australia's IT industries were repeatedly humiliated in 2014

Re: With one exception ....

The mining, oil and gas industries have long been telling governments in Australia what to do... along with good old Rupert and the various news corp organisations of course. These guys want shit internet in Australia because if it is so bad, people are going to go back to only perusing the .com.au websites for their news and other information and wont actually be exposed to the goodness that happens outside of Australian territorial waters.

Instead of being given a world class telecommunications infrastructure by this government, we have them trying to convince the Australian people that 25Mbps is much much better than the 24Mbps we are supposed to get from ADSL2+... and thats using the ancient copper that runs from the node to the premises.

I think that once my parents have recovered sufficiently from their operations, I might try and get them to relocate to Cyprus where they can live cheap as chips and I will go back to contracting in the UK and Ireland.

And why the beer... because you need to be pissed to believe the bullshit that the Liberal government is tossing out atm.

E-vote won't happen for next Oz election

I think that you will find that someone on the committee doesnt particularly like Teflon Tone and his bunch of luddite cronies who are currently in power and thinks that if Tone was given the chance via electronic voting would make himself 'El Presidente for life' via a rigged electronic voting system.

All hail El Presidente Abbott... say the guys standing behind you with the machine guns

Turnbull: Box-huggers are holding back cloud

I like the way that this luddite government that is doing its best to regress Australia back to the 1950s is bagging anyone who doesnt jump on this cloud thingy.

And P. Lee, you are correct... a single customer cloud is a data centre.

Ericsson to roll Ciena kit into Telstra

Less latency...

Hang on a second. How can Telescum (AKA Telstra) even consider something like this while the NLP are in power. Those luddites are trying to kill the Internet in Australia by killing the NBN and anything else that even remotely looks like high speed internet. Instead of my house being eligible for the NBN next year, I think that we are now due to get it some time in 2020.

Snowden defends mega spy blab: 'Public affairs have to be known by the public'

Re: What has changed since

Unfortunately, with the NSA/GCHQ and other intelligence agencies thinking themselves above the law, its going to be BAU for them and their surveillance methods. After all, if they can twist their laws around to assassinate one of their own citizens, they are basically free to do what they want.

Today's get-rich-quick scheme: Build your own bank

Overdrafts

The way to handle the overdrafts and loans is to use credit insurance. You would need to talk to a credit insurance broker (like one of my prior employers) and get a quote off them. That way, if the person obtaining the overdraft defaulted, you can claim the insurance and get your money back.

However, there is a premium to pay on the insurance policy and you would need to have credit insurance yourself (until such times as you had enough money in the "bank" to cover the amounts you are allowing for the overdrafts). Usually, you would pass the premium money onto the customer in the way of fees and charges on a monthly basis... plus a couple of quid extra for your time and effort in doing the paperwork.

Fuel for jets DOES grow on trees

Re: Ah, public-sector finance.

The fact that el reg has neglected to mention is that Australia is currently in the hands of a far right hard core religious wack job who thinks that Australia is for real Australians and anyone who wants to go there should just think about going somewhere else...

I mean how can this righteous Australian (born in London) be the prime minister of Australia and be wrong... after all, he has God on his side. Dont know for how long... but he has the almighty guiding his trimming knife so that he can remove all those horrible scientific thingies that tell people that God is a figment of his imagination

Only one small problem... well two actually... some arseholes in Canberra who appear to be in the pay of big oil and big coal mining and really love fracking would never allow this to come about. They wouldnt get enough of a backhander from the guys producing the oil to make this feasible.

Beer... because us Aussies need it right now...

Net neutrality foes outspent backers by over three to one – and that's just so far

Similar but slightly different

I find it interesting that some of you have mentioned the final mile. I am on the verge of leaving the UK and Ireland, where I have had great broadband for a number of years, to return to my home country of Australia... I will be living 2.5 hours southish of Perth.

Thanks to Teflon Tone and his sidekicks Firesale Joe and Turnbuckle Turnbull, they have pretty much killed the NBN which means that I could well be stuck with a very limited boardband connection (try a satellite connection). And as I am considering setting up a work from home development business, not having a reliable broadband connection could be a major issue.

People in the remote areas are going to always struggle whether there is net neutrality or not. Location doesnt matter.

Intel promises 10Gb Ethernet with Thunderbolt 2.0

4k graphics

is it just me or do other people get reminded of the old 4k scene back in the 90's when they see 4K graphics mentioned?

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

Just to be really pedantic

But the redbacks are only dangerous to small children and the elderly with heart issues. To the normal healthy adult, a redback bite will make you sick as hell for a few days but it wont kill you.

If you want spiders that will kill you... try the funnel web (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_funnel-web_spider) to really fuck you up!

Deep desert XP-ocalypse averted as Reg man returns

Re: Out of curiosity

There are a large number of outback aboriginal communities where non-indigenous are prohibited from entering. To actually enter those communities you need to apply for a permit to enter. Around Pt Hedland, where I used to live, there are approximately 5 communities where you need a permit to enter to do work out there. And they have a massive list of prohibited items you are not allowed to carry out there (mostly alcohol and drugs).

I found it interesting that the petrol was caged up. It would appear that they have had issues in the past with petrol sniffers.

Apple 'hid AUD$9 BILLION' from Australia alone: Report

Easily fixed

Put a banking transfer tax on all transactions over a certain total or if they hit a threshold frequency of transactions (to stop them hitting the certain total limit).

So if a certain corporation wanted to transfer money from Australia to Ireland (for the dodgy purchase of items). If they tried to transfer it in a lump sum, you tax them on the lump sum if it is over say 100 million... and to catch them if they decide that to try avoiding paying the lump sum tax, they would transfer 10 lots of 10 mill... and did it all on the same day or spread it out over 10 days... at the end of the period, you hand them a tax bill for the total amount transferred out over time.

Either way... the government ends up getting the tax money... and to make sure that you set the frequency transaction tax at slightly higher than the lump sum tax. So if the lump sum is 25% of the total, then the frequency transaction tax is 30%. They will get the hint sooner or later that they can no longer avoid taxation.

Tata says USA rejecting HALF of Indians' work visa requests

Nothing against our brothers from India and other 2nd and third world countries, but some of their work practices just suck.

A female friend of mine got a job as a team leader for the ATO many moons ago and was placed in charge of an Indian guy who was also quite 'senior' in terms of tenure. Apparently she had to constantly go to her boss and complain about the guy because she would ask him to do something and he would go off and do something completely different to what she asked. She would also be talking to him and he would just walk off and leave her standing there. He just wouldnt take orders from a woman. Apparently, the guy before my friend was younger than this guy and he wouldnt take orders from him either.

And then when they did actually manage to get him to do the work assigned to him, it was substandard.

I studied with a lot of Indians while I was doing my degree 18 years ago and some of them were actually quite talented and could churn out quality code. But then again, those guys were also incapable of working outside of academia and ended up going on and doing masters and PHD's in Australia. And getting jobs lecturing at the uni. The rest of them tended to get done for plagiarism for either copying each others work or for copying directly from books.

Australia puts 300 sharks on Twitter

Re: An interesting fact

@ lglethal

I take it you dont actually live in Australia do you?

There are a grand total of 51 netted beaches in Australia... all of them in NSW (and apparently most of the sharks netted are on the "inside" of the nets. QLD uses the good old fashioned and reliable drum lines (which the WA government are proposing on using) and they havent really solved the whole shark attack issue. In WA, the coast line is actually fairly straight for the length of Perth and unless you want to stretch shark netting from North Fremantle (Port Beach) to about 45km north (Yanchep) and from the other side of Fremantle harbour all the way to the other side of Mandurah (the Dawesville Cut) it just isnt feasible to do it.

Also... your idea of only swimming at patrolled beaches... I think that there are a grand total of 3 in WA... maybe going as high as 5. Some of the better beaches also double as surf beaches so there are always going to be people on boards, acting like seals, outside of the flags anyway.

While your thoughts have some merit... in practicality, they are full of shit.

An interesting fact

More people die from hippo attacks than from shark attacks.

But honestly, the West Australian (WA) government must think that the average citizen is stupid or something. What they are calling a beach safety program where they kill any shark 3m or bigger that comes within 1km (1093 yards) of the beach is nothing more than a PR program to try and resurrect the fading tourist industry. They are killing endangered species of sharks amongst those sharks. One of the major issues about this new pogrom is that they are using baited drum lines approximately 1km from shore. So those sharks that would not necessarily come within 1km of the shoreline will now come swimming in looking for that tantalising odor in the water and the government will point to the numbers of large sharks they are catching as a fear exercise to prove that their pogrom is working.

They advertise that it is for your safety when there is an average of 1.1 persons/year killed by sharks in WA. More people in WA die from cancer, heart disease, alcohol related disease and car accidents than from shark attacks, but you dont see the current government trying to stamp those things out.

There are 2.5 million people who live in WA and out of those, approximately 2 million people live within 1 hours drive of a beach. You have more chance of getting king hit in the Northbridge restaurant and nightclub area than you would have of getting attacked by a shark.

The most dangerous animal in Australia... a politician with an agenda.

OMG, like, TOTES AMAZEBALLS: Facebook made me fall into SHARK INFESTED SEAS

Sharks habitually swim past the end of St Kilda pier... quite a few years back one of them actually got lucky when a lunch pack landed right in front of it. The mobile lunch pack, better known as a human male had no idea that he was actually on the menu that afternoon and promptly expired from the surprise.

Sky rapped over PREMATURE SEXY CONDOM ad

Re: Boat based bonking?

Foster's anyone?

IT bods: Windows XP, we WON'T leave you. Migrate? Chuh! As if...

With Windows pushing me to upgrade...

my windows 8 laptop to windows 8.1 (had a couple of popups 'advising' that it would be worth my while to upgrade as it's free)... I think that I am going to grab one of my Windows 7 ultimate disks and 'downgrade' to Windows 7... or at least move to Linux in the near future!

Oz couple get jiggy in pharmacy in 'banned' condom ad

"Have they ever shown a movie that included any scenes of the beast with two heads? It would seem rather contradictory if they had!"

Are we talking about documentaries about Tasmanians having sexual relations?

Man... some of my fellow Australians are rather uptight and could use a good shag... especially those muppets in CAD... after a couple of nice relaxing beers.

Cheers

Migrating from Windows XP – Time to move on...

I can live with a migration to Windows 7. Windows 8/Server 2012 with their no-start button desktops signifies that Microsoft have broken their brains whilst trying to capture a segment of the market that they had already lost... the fondleslab and associated handheld devices.

Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 are the last windows operating systems that I will voluntarily install on a desktop. And I will also be investigating SteamOS as a viable replacement for the OS on my windows gaming machine as more games developers start to port their games to the *nix platforms.

As for productivity, I can live with openOffice or LibreOffice as my productivity suites and I can always write my own email client (sometimes it is good to be a programmer) that can communicate with a *nix based IMAP/POP3 mail server or a Microsoft Exchange server without having to resort to using a browser based application like the Mozilla based offerings.

I stopped using XP a number of years ago and the last company I worked for that was using XP on some desktops, I left nearly 2 years ago... so supporting it isnt going to be an issue.

Either way, I am not going to be too concerned about XP's imminent demise and I wont be signing up to this plug from Dell to migrate to the latest and greatest (WTF... Windows 8.1 is shite) offering from Microsoft.

No more Service Packs for Microsoft Office? HA! Think again, Ballmer!

Re: Did an office 2013/365 install the other day

I think that they wont allow it because it allows people to build streamlined installs rather than the bloated install full of redundant features.

And the hard drive manufacturers will scream blue murder because they wont have a reason to keep flogging bigger and bigger drives.

BOFH: One flew over the PFY's nest

Being stuck in Shannon... this is the best way to start the weekend... huzzah!

Apple wants $380m for patents, Samsung says $52m. Get a room, you two

Well...

This is almost as much fun as the SCO patent infringement cases...

I'll have me a beer... where is the crisps icon to go with it?

Norks EXECUTE 80 for watching DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

"and that thing about geordies shagging."

What... you want to ship the Friday and Saturday night CCTV footage of Newcastle over to the Norks?

I doubt anyone would want to live after seeing that footage.

'F-CK YOU GOOGLE+' ukelele missy scoops BIG WAD of $$ - for Google

Fuck you Google...

If I had wanted to leave comments on YouTube under my real name, I would have created an account that showed my real name. And now... you are getting me to sign into YouTube using my Google+ account which exposes my real name to the world if I want to leave comments. You also have created a whole new account for me with none of my playlists or any of my subscriptions.

Talk about fucking up completely.

SR-71 Blackbird follow-up: A new TERRIFYING Mach 6 spy-drone bomber

Huh...

They are trying to pass off a dumb arsed drone as being better than the SR71... a plane that was designed in the 1960s and was never surpassed as a THE surveillance plane in the world. You have to love tech that was designed when engineers were still using slide rules (which I learnt how to use way back when) and used to write out their calculations on a blackboard to proof them.

I dont know which world is better... the one where we invented all this shit or the modern day version where they pretend to invent shit!

Fed up with Windows? Linux too easy? Get weird, go ALTERNATIVE

Re: Emacs

Or the good old Windows CE OS... or as the IT professionals recognise it... WinCE...

Re: Floppy disk -- I've got one in the car

well played sir... well played :)

iPAD AIR WORLD DEBUT: Our Australian team gets an early fondle

Re: Should I upgrade from an iPad 1?

I am still using my ipad 1. The reason being is that it is still fit for purpose. I read a lot of books on it, I can watch videos on it, I can browse the web and check my email. I can listen to music. I play a few games and occasionally, I launch twitter on it to keep up with that.

I have an iPad mini as well... I dont tend to use that as much really but I think that I will be going forward.

But when all is said and done, I travel with so much technology anyway, whats the point in upgrading!

Big Content says Pirates of the Caribbean do their worst in Australia

Region 4 locked DVD players and DVDs and consoles used to be all the rage about 12 years ago. Then some bright spark in the retail industry stood up and announced that region locking in Australia was a restraint of trade and took the government to court over it... I think that it was originally over PS/2 games moreso than DVDs.

Since the court found in his favour, and people have discovered shopping online, region locking kit has gone the way of the dodo.

Saying that, more people are shopping online for their DVDs and Blurays makes me wonder whether the MPAA is counting those sales as being Australian sales or for sales in the country of origin (usually the USA). That trend in online buying could tend to skew the figures for sales in Australia and allow the MPAA to say that piracy is rife in Australia. If they lowered their prices and shipped stuff when the rest of the world gets it, things wouldnt be so bad in Oz...

Latvian foreign minister speaks out against giving up alleged Gozi writer to US

Re: Evidence?

Because America wants anyone who might have committed a crime against their imperial overlords (the banks and the major corporations) to stand trial in the states.

Sorry America

But no matter how important you think that you are, you are just another nation on this planet... and not a very nice one at that.

Your actions are abhorrent in that you badger and harass foreign sovereign states to submit to your will. You want everyone who commits a crime that affects Americans to be tried in the US where your record of human rights abuse in recent times is starting to sound more like those of Nazi Germany.

You have laws in place that allow the intelligence agencies to seize American citizens off the street and have them declared enemy combatants for the purposes of detaining them without trial for indefinite periods. You spy on your own citizens without warrant, another thing in common with Nazi Germany, and treat foreign dignitaries as if they were second class to your own people.

Your armed forces commit atrocities which if another countries armed forces does it gets called war crimes and they get hauled before the war crimes tribunal as war criminals but your soldiers can only be tried by the US courts, thanks to George W. Bush.

No other country in the world appointed you to be the world police but you have taken that mantle upon yourself and you continuously force yourself on other countries as the worlds law makers and you think that you know whats best for the rest of the world.

If you want to be the world police, please restrict it to that world where you have this sporting even called the World Series, where you are the only participants, and leave the running of the world to the rest of the countries in it. We can look after ourselves quite well thank you.

Please... don't call us... we'll call you!

Google SELLS OUT the INTERNET HIPPIES! AGAIN!

Re: Standard Terms and Conditions

For some reason, EE (read orange home broadband) blocks the outgoing port 25 unless it is targetted at their SMTP servers. I know this for a fact because my cheap housemate had Orange broadband and when I first tried to send emails to my external mail server, it wouldnt let me.

I'm considering getting a second line put in so that I can have my own broadband setup at home.

Screw EE...

HALF of air passengers leave phones on ... yet STILL no DEATH PLUNGE

Re: It's not the guy with the phone I worry about on a flight.

Dont worry about that, kick em in the back of the knee so that they fall over and hurdle them...

It's the morbidly obese ones who sit in the ailse seat in the same row as me thats blocking me from getting out of the plane quickly that is the person I am worrying about...

STEVE BALLMER KILLS WINDOWS

Re: Ballmer kills Windows?

I think that heading was supposed to read "Ballmer kills Microsoft"

Whats the bet that with this announcement, BillG starts dropping his remaining shares in the company onto the exchange floor as an exercise to refinancing his philanthropic activities to empower himself...

Snowden's Australian 'revelations' are old news

Pine Gap a US spy base??

Wow... I didnt know that Pine Gap was a US spy base... at least I havent known since the 70s that it was a spy base...

Who am I kidding. Most Australians of my generation, who grew up in the 70s, have known for decades that Pine Gap was a US spy base. So this 'scoop revelation' is nothing. All this sensationalist exposure in Australia is old news.

Nothing to see here... next scandal please.

IT bloke inadvertently broadcasts smut on vast public screen

Is worse than...

While I was at university there was one night when a couple of groups doing the software engineering project were in the same lab and there was one other student in there... sat in the back row, in the corner and he was apparently watching pr0n and rubbing one out when one of the distaff group members noticed it... and promptly fled the room.

Security was called and the students name was taken and he was escorted from the building and his student card was confiscated.

Apparently all the chairs in that lab got replaced, the student got expelled and much better filters got put into the schools firewall software.

So... the moral of the story is never watch pr0n while you are in a work situation.

Microsoft's murder most foul: TechNet is dead

Thank god...

I was considering getting a technet subscription last week. All I can say is thank god I didnt.