It's Cockney Rhyming Slang for computers
and HAL is making fun of us behind our backs!
Posts by Disko
126 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Nov 2014
Microsoft researchers smash homomorphic encryption speed barrier
Did you know ... Stephen Fry has founded a tech startup?
'Dodgy Type-C USB cable fried my laptop!'
US rapper slams Earth is Round conspiracy in Twitter marathon
You’re an IT pro working in AV? This is the show for you
You, yes YOU: DevOps' people problem
Sunday 17th January 2016 10:32 GMT
Re: Is it just me?
nope.
YOU! WRITER! You've no doubt heard of readers, and read some of those pesky little tidbits that are commonly called "Comments", that seem to want to drag you out of your comfy cubicle kicking and screaming, and pour gasoline over you to see if you go WOOSH and how fast you can run.
Let me stoop down to a slightly more condescending tone, as I tell you what you already know: words are made of letters, and require proper coordination to form useful sentences. Now that your brain has exploded in a rage of annoyance, nothing. It was just a trick to get your attention. I will not really tell you anything new, meaningful, or even funny.
I know, I know, Dear Typist: you’ve been doing this ever since writing about that AS/400; no one really needs weekly storage articles; and, of course, the favorite: “this is just the current way for lazy writers to make money.”
Now if you let me continue I will lock the door of the conference room and allow you to listen to some Metallica covers, as played by the Westboro Short Bus Marching Band and recorded over a Japanese telephone line while I skip out and breathe in some fresh winter air to clear this smell of cheap cologne and carpet glue.
Stop, look, listen: Don't be 2016's DevOps roadkill – here's how to survive
Sunday 17th January 2016 09:42 GMT 
lost me at every turn
>>an important cog in a wider business operational wheel
just made me puke in my mouth a little
some think analogies don't
others abhor the whole idea
many can't even
>>advocates of DevOps buoyed by the pace of software delivered by the
delivery pace buoys, today I learned some new physics for the
>>new age market
where I shall buy my essential DevOils and Patch-O-Li
are you trying to impress PHBs because this article just reeks of bulletpoints
tl;dr: could you not. this is drivel.
Late night server rebuild led to 'nightmares about mutilated corpses'
Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!
Thursday 14th January 2016 12:48 GMT
Now that's what you'd call...
..a dedicated server. (…)
The longest I've seen a "server" run nonstop was a machine that had been handling mailservice for over 6 years non-stop - from the day it was put into service, nobody had even touched it. I'd been called in to streamline all IT systems in this office, with most systems hanging on by a thread, some of them crashing daily and the lot being quite temperamental, but not this one. It was of all things, a PowerMac 6100 running at all of 60 MHz and sporting a whopping 16 MB of RAM, possibly one of the most underwhelming desktops Apple ever made - the codename Piltdown Man was at this point pretty appropriate.
I marveled at the longevity and stability of this heavily underspec'ed setup, but after setting up a solid backup schedule decided to just cross my fingers and leave it for the moment, since it was functional enough, and to focus on the really unstable stuff first. Sure enough it plowed along just fine, and only when the power in the whole block went out, Piltdown Man spun down for the first and last time, to be replaced by a machine with a bit more than a single memory chip, harddisk, and network port.
Dutch govt says no to backdoors, slides $540k into OpenSSL without breaking eye contact
Feeling abandoned by Adobe? Check out the video editing suites for penguins
Sanders presidential campaign accuses Democrats of dirty data tricks
Press Backspace 28 times to own unlucky Grub-by Linux boxes
Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him
Facebook one-ups Google with open hardware release
Friday 11th December 2015 19:16 GMT
Re: What a crap article, rehashed PR is not news
agreed, this reads like a press release with some editorial lines put in for easier digestion. Fine for your average tech blog site, but I"m afraid Vulture Central has spoiled us (I'd say rotten but that's hardly on El Reg)... bestowing upon us lavish servings of rapier wit and biting sarcasm.
If it had said: "Facebook, in an attempt to amp up the AI arms race, annouced a piece of concept kit to show off its rabid desire to win this particular hardware-measuring contest with The Alphabet Podpeople to all and sunder." or somesuch we would have been more entertained.
That being said, "WLL IT RUN CRYSIS IN 4K at 100 FPS?1!!|?¿!1? is still the only relevant metric...
Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre
Friday 11th December 2015 18:42 GMT
Forget about management ever taking an engineer (of whatever persuasion) seriously (the sane exception proving the rule here). And then, most IT staff isn't paid enough to take responsibility for the failure of HR/the board/company owners to hire competent management. If you would want me to fix all that, I'm now interim CEO of your outfit, with Carte Blanche to fire nitwits on sight and completely revamp the entire operation to my fancy. Short of that, you will have to make do with reports that contain technical language and require some interpretation...
Friday 11th December 2015 18:17 GMT 
An entertaining and educational tale...
I like to assume a 1 in a 100 chance of any operation NOT failing terribly.
Then the only thing that can be done to avert certain disaster, is "everything".
Treat every single element and action that is part of the project as if it were a sleeping dragon, only waiting for a minute change in the environment to begin spewing lightning and sulphuric acid into every connector it can find, to unleash catastrophic failure upon your entire operation.
Take inventory of the many many ways disaster can strike; known or unknown, worst case and best case scenarios. Management can deal with the numbers: we now have 13.768 scenarios for catastropic failure (a made up number, but realistic for a datacenter IMO.), and we only have 768 ways to stop it. Now management can break their pretty heads over the 13.000 things that can go wrong for which there is no solution, and the impossibility of preventing every possible doom-scenario, and realize the inevitable: we probably need to invest a lot more to make this work: more money, more time, more preparation, more people, and more effort on the part of management to ensure business continuity, even in the face of certain disaster. And yes, we are out of here at 5 and won't be back until wednesday.
JD Wetherspoon: A 'hacker' nicks 650,000 pub-goers' data
Sysadmin's former boss claims five years FREE support or off to court
Monday 30th November 2015 21:12 GMT
Why not
leave the phone alone when you see it's the old shop calling? Or cut the conversation to two seconds: "I can't talk right now, send me an email." forces the other party to at least create a "paper trail", and if nothing else, somewhat formulate their request and hopefully give it a semblance of coherence. If it's a meaningful issue, they can write it down: if they can write it down they can send it: if it's answerable, that is usually a doddle, but suffering someone's ramblings on the phone, for naught, simply won't do.
If all else fails, "I am in a meeting with the department of defense" also tends to resonate enough with the beeswax crowd to understand that you are really not available right now.
Finally, if they really need you, they can spare a nice paper invitation on a sheet of letterhead and a friggin' stamp.
Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too!
Apple's design 'drives up support costs, makes gadgets harder to use'
Thursday 19th November 2015 08:32 GMT 
ironically
the fastcodesign website itself uses a greyish anorexic spidery font that makes it quite hard to read.
My eyes do have almost a century between them, but by comparison I can read the Vulture Central pages just fine. Trying to zoom in on the fastco site makes the ads overlap the content, also the site somehow manages to make it impossible to easily open articles in tabs. Having headlines in the form of (hopefully rhetorical?) questions to external entities by now only ranks half a point above clickbait. So I left. Hipsters gonna hipster I guess.
Reg reader achieves bronze badge, goes directly to jail
BOFH: We're miracle workers. But you want us to fix THAT in 10 minutes?
Apple's OS X App Store downloads knackered by expired security cert
Working with Asperger's in tech: We're in this together
AMD sued: Number of Bulldozer cores in its chips is a lie, allegedly
Friday 6th November 2015 20:56 GMT
A bit of a Dickey move
to sue over what amounts to marketingspeak or at best terminology. Not too long ago FPU's were an optional co-processor, an expensive add-on, that only the most demanding users needed. So what amounts to a processor core? My i5 registers as quad-core even though it is apparently physically a dual core unit that can run two threads per core. I think people who really need the oomph generally would know how to figure out which processor they need, regardless of branding, labels or hype.
It doesn't look like AMD lied about the actual architecture of the chip, more like they marketed it as "teh shiny". A suspicious person might suspect Big Chipzilla might have had a hand in this one.
And for your third course, a platter of flash cache, object, file copy, and private cloud news
How to get the fun stuff back in your data centre
Daredevil Brit lifts off in 54-prop quinquaquadcopter
Drum roll, please .... Results are in for the collective noun for security vulns
Google robo-car suffers brain freeze after seeing hipster cyclist
LaCie to shutter Wuala cloud storage service, data deleted Nov 15
You're hosting Uncle Sam's files in the cloud. You get hacked. This is what happens next
Thursday 27th August 2015 19:24 GMT 
i lost it at
" sharing any malware ".
And how does one report to the government that one is being snooped on by same government? Does one first report to the government that is the customer, or is one supposed to report attacks on one's infrastructure straight to the FBI or Homeland Security? See, one fool can ask more questions than any government can ever answer...
Want security? Next-gen startups show how old practices don't cut it
Sunday 23rd August 2015 09:29 GMT
Also
...tasking humans with guarding high-speed equipment that pushes more information and transactions per second than same humans could process in a month, is arguably silly, and it's not like monitoring stuff and doing incident response dances is the most rewarding job. And why WOULDN'T it be better to have network security as much automated as possible? Isn't automation the whole idea of IT? And then: any disruption, partial downtime, cost or nuisance from security systems kicking in on false positives, no matter how inconvenient, imo far outweighs the real risks of infection and compromise.
Gas giant cores actually built from shedloads of gravel
Yet another Android app security bug: This time 'everything is affected'
Techies! Shadow IT means you need to up your game
Police use RIFLE AND TASER to relieve man of iPhone case
Cloud computing’s refuseniks: How long can they hold out?
Mac fans! Don't run any old guff from the web: Malware spotted exploiting OS X root bug
Wednesday 5th August 2015 06:11 GMT 
I miss Steve
and his unrelenting demand for perfection on all levels. Being unreasonably demanding seems to be a valid ingredient of leadership to run a company like Apple.
“This isn't good” just doesn't motivate the troops like “You’re fired unless otherwise indicated, if not you can bask in glory on your own time. Consider yourself destroyed if you mess up”.
(Of course this is not to say that there haven't always been issues, or that there ever won't be.)
The point that the average end-user who only walks the beaten path is still not as likely to be affected does matter - I see some irony in that most malware I've seen can only be /avoided/ by being an expert: on a Mac, one needs to be a bit of an expert to install it.
That said the excuses are just too lame, and the reaction too slow, and it seems to be the error is at a conceptual level in the approach to programming. The priority seems to be to direct users to the channel (store)
HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie
Friday 24th July 2015 12:09 GMT 
All black
demin workgear has been my standard work attire for decades now, it doesn't show toner spillage (I'm looking at you HP) and otherwise helps with being invisible behind the scenes, which I like, or I would apply for a job dealing with suits. I wear proper gentleman's attire on occasion - I reserve the right to choose which occasion- but not the polyester abominations that dominate the corporate landscape - what is the point of dressing up if you're going to look like a failed wedding cake ornament.
It's rather appalling to me that the HR department of a billion dollar technology corporation can not figure out that, well, there's different strokes for different folks, R&D is creating, and generally you want to give your creatives a healthy amount of freedom to come up with brilliant stuff - or they move on to pastures greener than yours.
Coat because, well, suits.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
