Posts by tokyo-octopus

Looming US immigration crackdown aims to weed out pre-crime of poverty. And that may be bad news for techie families

Ah yes, forgot about those.

> BTW, the NHS is *not* for people in Britiain, it is for British citizens in Britain.

Incorrect, it is for people legitimately resident in the UK, regardless of citizenship.

MacBook Pro petition begs Apple for total recall of krap keyboards

Got a 2011 MBP which is doing pretty well after 7 years of not particularly considerate use (as a mobile UNIX-based laptop), it would suck as a main computer but is still just about OK for part-time mobile use. Only major issue is the track pad, which only registers very firm clicks (workaround: use a mouse), and the battery is of course not what it once was. Dithering about a replacement, recent MacBook generations no longer appeal and I'm basically putting off the day when I bite the bullet and install Linux on something non-Apple. Though having read your post I might have a crack at repairing it, a new trackpad (or it might just be gunked up), memory upgrade and an SSD would probably keep it going for a couple more years.

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

Re: Last place I worked...

"One of the analysts working with a Prod DB ran an update query without the WHERE clause."

That analyst clearly has never heard of something called "transactions". Or he/she was working on MySQL with MyISAM tables.

Crapness of WannaCrypt coding offers hope for ransomware victims

Some days I feel down about my job...

... 'cos I work with people who are way cleverer than me (and probably you), then I remember that day I did "rm -rf ~" instead of "rm -rf ~/some-tmp-dir" and was all "meh, well if I hadn't check it into my private git repo it's probably not important". Added bonus: I get to read tickets from clients along the lines "sorry we didn't respond earlier, we were busy dealing with WannaCrypt".

UK ministers to push anti-encryption laws after election

Am I the only one wondering what a Japanese commuter train (looks like the Saikyo line in Tokyo, if anyone's taking notes) has got to do with encryption back doors?

Google wants to track your phone and credit card through meatspace

Re: We're already being asked for email addresses at the till

Then we can see a big increase in [e-mail] and similar fake ones being used.

I have a reasonably uncommon Anglo-saxon surname and managed to bag [e-mail] many years ago, and have noticed an uptick in unsolicited emails from UK retailers ("thank you for your recent purchase") in the last few months (and I don't live in the UK or do business with them).

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

I'm fully expecting Mayhem to bring in a tax on worldwide income for Brtiish expats. The cupboard is strong and stable but bare, nobody would give two fucks back in the UK, and the US does it so what's good enough for the US is good enough for the UK.

And don't we all know this will cost more in IT cockups to implement than it will ever bring in revenue?

Absolute BULLSHIT and they know it. for an example of how a very similar border works in reality with plenty or crossing points with no-one there ate all.. Look for Northern/Southern Ireland border.

In case you've been in a coma for the last year and aren't aware of recent events, the status of the Northern/Republic of Ireland border is likely to change quite radically.

Continuous Lifecycle 2017: Ten days to tell us how DevOps really works

It's 2016, throw your CDs in the container and embrace the cloud.

Put down the org chart, snowflake: Why largile's for management crybabies

The real money these days is on spring-sourced bubble-up underpinned by daily jump offs preceding goal-orientated yomps. In larger organisations a jump master is often needed as well as flares being being dropped around the target.

YANG: Coming soon to a router near you

Totally irrelevant to the content, but if anyone's wondering where the junction shown in the stock photo is, it's in the centre of Tokyo right here: https://goo.gl/maps/AbALpKn1cyR2

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Meanwhile in the real world, once again I was recently once again thwarted in my attempt to smuggle a bottle part-full of hydrogen (a major contributing factor in the Hindenburg disaster) and oxygen (as implicated in the Apollo 13 incident) in a ratio of roughly 2:1 onto a flying machine (despite being potentially in the possession of a glass bottle full of inflammable potato juice).

Toblerone's Brexit trim should be applied to bloatware

The Mrs, who is computer-illiterate, bless her, but is street-savvy enough not to upgrade to Win 10, uses a Hotmail/MSN email account thingy (she Googles "msn" to access the login page, bless her, but before you get the pitchforks out we have procreated and the offspring is mentally and physically A-grade material), and today she got an email from my father mentioning a Dr's appointment next week (suspected case of acute hypochondria), anyway the Microsoft system in its infinite wisdom decided to suggest this as a potential calendar entry for *her* and she was all "WTF is this stupid Microsoft cr*p"?

Hell Desk's 800 number was perfect for horrible heavy-breathing harassment calls

Blessed with a mildly unusual surname (they call me Mr. Mildlyunusualsurname) back in the day I snaffled [e-mail], I've got a fair amount of email for other people around the world who share the same Mildlyunusualsurname. At one point I was getting some sort of regular financial reports from the US Federal Reserve Bank intended for the Bank of Mildlyunusualsurname in Bumtweak County, Redneck State or somewhere, I did actually manage to contact someone to get that changed before I had the FBI battering down my door. I still get some lady's Barclaycard balance, unfortunately they don't provide any way of contacting them apart from a non-free hotline, so not incentivized to actionate on that.

Why Apple's adaptive Touch Bar will flop

Posting from a 2011 MacBook Pro which is holding up fine, apart from the "retina" screens on newer models I haven't seen anything which would encourage me to upgrade (and for me "retina" is nice-to-havem, not must-have).

Touch bar - pointless gimmick, I'm one of life's ESC users, moreover yet another set of ports incompatible with anything I have, meaning lots of dongles... no thanks. Yes I do use the SD card slot a lot. Next laptop will run Linux, fortunately I'm not particularly invested in Apple stuff

Self-stocking internet fridge faces a delivery come down

Energy efficiency?

A serious question - has anyone done any calculations into the likely energy efficiency of these drones vs. e.g. White Van Man? I assume for now they're powered by the excitable energy generated by disruptive venture speculatists, but presumably at some point they'll need to be powered by real electricity.

'I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer'

Parents: voluntarily upgraded to OS X around the time of the Windows 8 debacle (they were on ancient XP and Vista laptops), funnily enough the amount of "support" calls has fallen off to pretty much zilch. Father-in-law clicked "yes" by accident, I ended up downgrading it for him (only one user file went AWOL), given his usage profile I think the next upgrade will be to one of the end-user-orientated Linux distros.

Database man flown to Hong Kong to install forgotten patch spends week in pub

I once had to fly to India to reinstall Linux on a subsidiary's server which I'd remotely diagnosed as being well and truly rooted. We tried to get someone local to do the reinstall but evidently the local DVD pirates hadn't got beyond RedHat 4 (or something equally antiquated). For various reasons I ended up spending almost two weeks in Ahmedabad, which is not only vegetarian but dry.

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

Re: substantial rework

You think so? For nostalgia reasons I tried compiling an early PostgreSQL version (7.1 from around 2001 IIRC) on a modern Linux distro - no chance. Well, maybe if I'd spent a few days fixing all the various compiler, library and API incompatibilities. Ended up installing an ancient Debian version in a VM, worked fine. So I can well imagine some code well into its second decade on FreeBSD not compiling out-of-the-box.

Say oops, UPSERT your head: PostgreSQL version 9.5 has landed

Re: Is it bad design

Belay that, MySQL's MERGE thingy is a storage engine, they do have a similar-ish INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE. With the usual set of caveats about AUTO_INCREMENTS etcetera.

Re: Is it bad design

Not quite sure what you are driving at - the "UPSERT" functionality basically requires a unique constraint to function, I don't think it's leading down the path of MyISAM-style poor design. It's not a direct equivalent to MySQL's MERGE facility, and anyone wanting to port sloppy practices as-is won't have much fun with Postgres anyway.

Microsoft's 200 million 'Windows 10' 'devices' include Lumias, Xboxes

Microsoft watching you viewing your photos?

> 44.5 billion minutes spent using Microsoft's Edge browser (formerly known as Spartan),

> 82 billion photos viewed on the new OS,

> and 2.5 billion questions asked of its Cortana digital assistant.

And how, I wonder, do they get those stats? Apart from the Cortana ones, which presumably require a working connection to a MS server.

ESA: Venus probe doomed to fiery death on weird planet's surface

So the uncaptioned main image wasting space and bandwidth... is it the probe? An artist's impression of the probe? A random stock photo of a space probe?

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

So on balance, everyone's liking the redesign?

No, I thought not. What was the phrase again? Oh yes, "if it ain't broke, dont fix it".

Kneejerk reaction coming up: nuke it from low orbit, please.

After calming down and thinking rationally like an adult, I'll modify that to include "then plough it over and douse it in salt".

Please don't force me to deal with the restrictions of a device I'm *not actually using*.

Thank you.

Hinge: An app that scours Facebook friends for dates banks $12m

Re: What happened to the website?

It's the law - all websites must now maximise whitespace and minimise contrast for trendy mobile-enabled web 4.0 compatibility.

They'll be having a fixed menu bar across the top of the page which eats up 20% of the window next...

I already stopped reading TheDailyWTF because it's like trying to peer through a letterbox at designer icon vomit.

Google DoubleClick goes TITSUP. ENJOY your AD-FREE WORLD!

Serves them right for serving autoplaying music video ads

On El-Reg, earlier this morning. Viewing from Japan. Very annoying.

Google flushes out users of old browsers by serving up CLUNKY, AGED version of search

Re: Yay, usable maps again

Oh, interesting. I was finding that with SeaMonkey but put it down to it to obscure to support whatever bit of Javascript jiggerypokery was causing the glitch.

Yay, usable maps again

Dunno about anyone else, but for me the "new" maps is an annoying PITA to use (too many "helpful" information boxes which have counter-intuitive behaviour; the irritating strip of photos which pops up in street view and which keeps popping up no matter how often you click the "hide" button; the general slowness and feeling of bloat...)

I also truly hope the function which causes Google to arrogantly second-guess what you're searching for ("Hey, this user is searching for 'London', let's return results for 'Paris' because we're clever and think the user must be looking for capital cities in Europe") has been toned down a bit. (Well it's not quite that extreme but I'm sure you know what I mean).

The micro YOU used in school: The story of the Research Machines 380Z

was installing these at an adult education college when I was about 17, so in 1990 or 1991. They were surplus to requirments at my own school, where they had been used for introductory computing and wordprocessing classes (there were some not-quite-100% PC XT clones, maybe also from RM, for programming on, and when I say "programming" I mean "bootleg copies of Tetris"). Anyway it was a network setup, with - I presume - a 480Z acting as the server and 380Zs as clients. By that time they were thoroughly antiquated and I remember not being too impressed by them, but it was something like 50 quid for an afternoon's work so mustn't grumble.