Posts by GrumpyKiwi

Panasonic Toughbooks are so tough they can smoke

I once worked for a place that used Toughbooks. One of the sales spods decided to move himself up in the queue for a newer model and "accidentally" drove over his. It got a hairline crack in the chassis, but otherwise carried on working just fine for the 2 years he still had to keep it.

Met Police wants to keep billions of number plate scans after cutoff date

Of course they want to keep the data. It's the modus operandi of the modern era bureaucrat.

"Waaaah, doing our job properly is hard. It cuts seriously into our 14 tea breaks, surfing for porn and stealing office supplies time. We demand the law be amended to make it easier for us to be a bunch of lazy bastards".

Hence the demands for keeping every bit of data created ever and for being able to snoop on anything we do on the say so of a senior officer without all that hassle of convincing a judge and getting a warrant.

US taxmen borked in computer cockup riddle

Just so long as the computer they use to erase any hard disks with information too embarrassing to be released under FOI requests is working. If that fails then we know it's a massive problem.

Plan B hoovers up NZ-based cloud outfit ICONZ

Yes, thanks for putting up that incredibly ugly piece of group thinking from a marketing firm pimping our butter.

No, George Brandis, telcos still don't want you taking the console in their networks

Hmmm. Haven't all previous Australian governments taken care to stack the deck in favour of their chosen child Telstra anyway? This is just giving them a new excuse to make sure that the goose keeps delivering those golden eggs without having to worry too much about competition.

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

Re: "The WANG that would not die"

It's still sitting in the old server room as the prospect of a hernia trying to get it into a skip didn't appeal.

I found some old documents for it the other day relating to the NZ$30,000 spent upgrading the amount of RAM to 32MB.

Stop the music! Booby-trapped song carjacked vehicles – security prof

Question: Who still listens to CD's in their car? It's been at least 7 years since I last had a CD in any car, it's all been via the phone and Bluetooth or a clapped out old iPod and an AUX port.

Scandal-smashed OPM will no longer do govt's background checks – for obvious reasons

I have yet to encounter a government department who's response to failure was "lets not do that again" as opposed to the normal response of "lets do it again, only this time spend twice as much money on it".

So it'll be in the same building and with the same organisation and the same people who *****d up previously, but with a new acronym. That should work nicely.

IRS 'inadvertently' wiped hard drive Microsoft demanded in audit row

Yeah try using the "we accidentally wiped the hard disk with the information you want" when the IRS come fishing and see how far you get.

Kiwi hackers crack crap algo, showcase 40c-a-litre DIY fuel discounts

Re: Just back from NZ

BP certainly can take the p*** all right. The station by the Waterview off-ramp is consistently $0.10 per litre more expensive than any other station I regularly pass - including other BP stations. The BP I used to use in New Lynn (yes I'm a Westie) was consistently the cheapest in the area on the other hand.

Re: Just back from NZ

It depends upon where you were buying from geographically more than which company. If you were buying up north (around Whangarei where the refinery is) then you could easily pay $0.20 - 0.30 per litre less than if you were buying somewhere down south. It could cost even more if you buy from one of the small country service stations.

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

The WANG that would not die

In 2014 we finally decommissioned the WANG "server" we'd been running since 1992. Had to be decommissioned despite all the grumblings from the Grognards as the guy who looked after it was retiring and moving to the Gold Coast and there was no-one left anywhere else who knew how to look after one.

Can't say that I shed any tears.

Kiwi judge rules Kim Dotcom can be extradited to USA

Re: Southern? Cross?

You are aware of just how long the legal principle of extradition had been around right? This is not some completely new interpretation made up in the basement of the FBI's Washington DC headquarters just to get DotCom and Assange™. Even once he's in the US there is still the small matter of actually proving beyond reasonable doubt before the courts and a jury.

People get extradited all the time to face all kinds of charges to places all over the world. An Australian got extradited back here the other month to face historic kiddie molesting charges. Australians don't go ranting about Kiwi's taking over Australia's legal jurisdiction over that and rightly so.

What will keep me entertained over the next years mostly won't be the continuing legal dramas, but the frothing of fanbois who think this is unique in history.

It's a perfectly cromulant decision. The hearing isn't to determine if he's guilty or not, but if there is a sufficiency of evidence for him to face trial.

Now we (as in NZ) get two or three more years of entertainment out of this as it gets appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. I look forward to more IANAL bleatings on how unfair it is.

US Navy's newest ship sets sail with Captain James Kirk at the bridge

Down the memory hole

Ah I see that the worst of the derp has now been removed from the article - without of course any acknowledgement that it ever existed or was ever detected. Has El'Reg been taking lessons from government PR flaks?

Get rid of amateur hour and bring back Lewis. Or stop posting articles on defence matters altogether, you're just making yourselves look silly.

(Big Brother because of retrospective history fixing)

So this is the quality of the defence articles we get on The Reg now that Lewis Page is banished. I'm only hanging around for the BOFH and to roll my eyes and this sort of guff.

Kim Dotcom slams 'dirty ugly bully' Uncle Sam as extradition hearing ends

The only reason this has dragged on for so long is that our plod and the CPS did a (typically) amateurish job in drawing up the search warrant and an equally amateurish job in executing it. I'm just hoping he'll be handcuffed and on a plane to US in short order.

Here is a clue for you Kim: Claiming poverty and then bankrolling a political party you set up just to block your extradition to the tune of NZ$4 million doesn't work.

Releasing a really crappy album at the same time as not paying your household staff is a really bad look too.

Optus to provide comms to Australia's offshore detention centres

If this install is anything like the current Optus installs I'm suffering through at the moment, then I expect that maybe - just maybe - there might be a single 2MB connection to Christmas Island by the year 2020 with a 80% or so uptime. But no-one in Optus will be able to tell you where exactly it terminates or whether the traffic management blocks SIP or not.

Dev to Mozilla: Please dump ancient Windows install processes

Re: And what about applications that install themselves outside <program files>?

F******g Spotify does that too. You should have heard the whining coming out of the Australian office after I GP banned executables from any of %temp% and Spotify stopped working. You'd think it was a mission critical application.

CSC, NetCracker IT staff worked on US military telecoms 'without govt security clearance'

Well it was the late 1990's and maybe things were different then. I don't remember 'supervision' either. Just told, here is your list of remote sites. Make Arcserve (ugggh, Arcserve) back them all up. And while you're at it, look after our Groupwise server (ugggh, Groupwise).

When I contracted at the British MoD it took 6+ months to get your security clearance - if you were lucky that is and your paperwork didn't get lost or have tea spilled on it or get mistaken for a completely different contractors.

None of which stopped you from working (or not working for that matter and spending 50% of your time at the local).

GCHQ starts hunt for tech-savvy apprentices

17 thousand quid to help betray your fellow citizens? And there was I thinking the going rate was 30 pieces of silver.

‘Insufficient evidence’ makes Brit cops drop revenge porn probes

No doubt police investigations take about 3 minutes. Before being closed as no longer interested and needing a cigarette break/cup of tea.

Microsoft previews less buggy OneDrive for Business client

Static Links

It would be nice if they could sort out their issue with no longer giving static links to your files. Instead I get a dynamic link that becomes obsolete within a couple of hours. Makes it pretty bloody useless for hosting files I want to link clients etc. to.

I can see why some people might want that, and even why it could be the default, but for FSM's sake give me the option.

Find shaving a chore? Why not BLAST your BEARD off with a RAYGUN

Re: There's only two types

There's only two types of men who grow beards. Filthy hipsters and those that can't be trusted with a blade.

Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl and other Games Workshop table-to-screen delights

WFB Balanced

I disagree with this bit: "Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the miniatures game, isn’t known for its balance".

The meta for the 8th edition is that it was the best balanced of all Warhammer versions with no one army being better than the others. However due to its (not surprising for GW) emphasis on fielding ever larger blocks of infantry, it was also the most expensive.

Fire because them fire wizards in Altdorf are scary.

Kim Dotcom Dotcan remain on bail, despite Fed protests

He blew about $4 million on funding a political party with the explicit goal of preventing his deportation. A bunch of left-wing political mercenaries showed up, drank all his money and didn't get elected - even in a country where you need only 5% of the vote to get elected.

More was blown on launching the lamest album of the past 20 years.

The rest of his cash is in trusts or held by his ex-wife who (conveniently) divorced him as soon as it was hinted that the government et. al. might be going after his money.

This would all have been over and done with and Dotcom in the US on trial if only our dozy police and prosecutions services had paid more attention to doing the paperwork properly and less to looking cool and using a black helicopter to do a raid and get them on TV.

Kim Dotcom quits Mega to head new political party, fight extradition

Re: Not a NZ Citizen = not an MP

Mostly it's a fail because if people were going to vote for his party, they'd be voting for him. Once it's made clear that they won't be getting him as an MP, the likelihood is very high that they'll fail to crack the 5%.

Added to that, they're likely to cannibalise votes from the Greens, the only other party with a credible stand on the right to privacy.

Not a NZ Citizen = not an MP

You have to be a citizen to become an MP in NZ - which DotCom is not (and given his relationship with the government is unlikely to be able to become).

While he can found a party, he won't be an MP anytime soon.

US Marine Corps misses target, finds and bombs Nemo

Re: Dropped exactly where they were meant to

I guess the RAAF must have imagined the bombing range they've been using for over 50 years.

The RAAF and Australian army have been dropping stuff and blowing stuff up "within" the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park for years, especially off Townsville.

Like I said, a mere 2 minutes of fact checking could have found this out.

Re: Dropped exactly where they were meant to

Dropped where emergency jettison bombs have always been dropped since the inception of the Townsend Island Bombing Range. The place where they were dropped is just one of a number of such zones nearby the bombing range. Not in the slightest bit unusual.

If they'd dropped them outside of such areas, then you may have cause for concern.

This on the other hand is just an example of people who aren't aware of the full story gettting excited over something unexciting. It also reeks of the "churnalism" that the Register was crowing about not doing only a few weeks ago. From el' Reg I expect something other than a repost of the press release.

Dropped exactly where they were meant to

The area the bombs were jettisoned in was one of the areas that is always designated for such in the vicinity of the Townsend Island Bombing Range

This has been substantiated by Defence's existing Environmental Impact Assessment plans, by the GBRMPA, by existing and previous notices to mariners and by subsequent clarification by both Defence and the USN.

In other words, a compelete non-story as soon as the facts have been checked. You may wish to try this in future.