Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Parliamentary 'puters made 30k tries to procure pr0nz last year

Re: off topic

directorships

IRTA: "Dictatorships". Which is probably more applicable for their end-state desires..

Your connection is not Brexit... we mean private: UK Tory party lets security cert expire

Re: Leading by example?

Boris Johnson was not available for comment

And no information of value[1] was lost.

[1] Except maybe a mumbled treatise on post-Byzantium politics in Eastern Europe..

Re: "Your connection is not private."

tories as it doesn't in any way show up their cluelessness and stupidity when it comes to all tech related policy matters

To be fair they are not exactly alone in that regard amongst political parties

Re: Err, no

Unless your truck doubles as a plane

Any truck can fly. Getting it to fly any more than a very short distance in a downward direction is slightly more of a problem..

because you want to sell me some buggy SSL

And for giggles, you could liberally sprinkle the words "LetsEncrypt" throughout your response..

Least realistic New Year’s resolution ever: Fix Facebook in 365 days

Re: New Year challenge

Janet and John build a web site.

Presumably in the Terry Wogan style? That I would have given good money to listen to..

any attempt to do so will lose users so

Or to put it another way - fixing Facebook will cost them lots of money because it'll reduce the amount of data that they can sell.

Re: Facebook is a reflection of society...

Not weird, but sane and free-thinking

We recently rescued a stray cat (kitten really - only about 4 months old) and took her to the vets so that they could check to see if she was chipped (she wasn't - something we got rectified last weekend..).

The vet nurse suggested that we post about her on Facebook.. When I said that we didn't do Facebook she looked at us like we were serial axe murderers.

Bah humbug.

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

Why is it that I could predict these things happening back when Win 10 with forced updates was introduced, but MS couldn't?

Because you don't make vast wedges of cash from selling user-data to advertisers? It's remarkable how making money off something seems to switch off self-critisism..

Re: athlon

Please don't tell me people *still* think you need secure boot to run Win10

Indeed. As my Parallels Windows 10 (formerly Boot Camp) VM can testify.

If Australian animals don't poison you or eat you, they'll BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE

Re: Australian wildlife

How could you leave out the cassowary? The closest thing alive today to a velociraptor.

Well - you have to remember that birds are just dinosaurs with better PR..

Re: But how do they spread fires?

What do they use for other species?

Bigger flamethrowers.

You should see the size of the ones they have for kangaroo!

Qualcomm joins Intel, Apple, Arm, AMD in confirming its CPUs suffer hack bugs, too

Re: The same bug.

It's hard to envisage any selection pressure to converge on an error.

Except that all[1] the designers are using the same assumptions and design philosophy so that, even though the design details differ that overall design is functionally equivalent.

[1] Where 'all' == those working for the big processor manufacturers. The fact that AMD is less vulnerable than Intel seems to come down to the number of speedup shortcuts taken by Intel.

US border cops told to stop copying people's files just for the hell of it

or the copy time becomes a practical problem for the inspectors

I'm assuming that you have no objection to spending a week in an airport cell..

Here come the lawyers! Intel slapped with three Meltdown bug lawsuits

Re: Optimistic me...

hopes that maybe this will make intel learn their lesson

Nah. They'll just learn to hide it better in future.

</cynical mode>

Re: timing attacks

but it boils down to the fact that nothing is simple any more

The only people that still think that things are simple are children and politicians. The former because they don't yet know any better and the latter because it hides the fact that they don't know anything about what they are talking about..

Game of Thrones author's space horror Nightflyers hitting telly

I'd always wanted Richard Margan's Takashi Kovacks trilogy to get made and I found

Likewise with Bernard Cornwell. I much enjoyed his "Last Kingdom" series and was quite nervous about the BBC production. Fortunately, while it does lack a little on the dialogue front, it does a very, very good job of showing both the series of books and the time period that it's set in.

Even if they do insist on all the Viking characters wearing too much eye makeup..

Re: I'm confused

Shakespeare is dead? Citation please.

He can't be. Why, I saw him on TV recently in a biopic entitled "Upstart Crow"..

Re: Bah!

The Lankhmar novels of Fritz Leiber

Oh please, no. They were tedious enough to try and read (and as a 12-year old in the '70s I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on, thanks to a very understanding librarian in our local library..) so I don't imagine that they would translate well to film.

Cities in Flight quadrilogy by James Blish

That, however, could be really, really good - especially as we now have the CGI capabilities needed to do it justice.

Re: Bah!

Dragonflight Anne McCaffery

They would just turn it into some low-budget carp for the "ooohhh.. dragons" teen crowd and miss the whole point. (Yes - that series was one of my favourites (along with the Darkover books) when I was much, much younger than I am now..)

Forever War Joe Haldeman They would just do the same thing as they did with Starship Troopers - turn a book that portrays the waste and futility of war into a gorefest with lots of gratuitous explosions.

Heliconia Spring, Summer, Winter Brian Aldiss One of the more unreadable of Brians series :-(

As you can see, I'm full of the positive joys of the New Year today. Either that or I'm fully aware of how badly the 'Entertainment' industry will screw up some really, really good books.

(And if I thought they would do a good job (hah!), I'd nominate the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. Not bad considering he steals plotlines wholesale from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.. Likewise, the Miles Vorkosigan books by M Bujold - really, really good sci-fi and extremely well-written. Which doubtless would be screwed up by being made as "GoT in Spaaaace")

Wait! Before you fire up that HP lappy, check the battery

Re: HP Laptops - this isn't really that big a deal...

so the number that remain in actual use is triflingly small

Sadly, we only buy HP at $ORKPLACE so, even if I beat this one to death with a live mains cable the replacement will also be HP[1]. And, knowing my luck, probably the one used by the heavy smoker with a penchant for eating cheese-on-toast while using the laptop..

[1] Unless I somehow reach the rarified heights where I get one of the few Microsoft Surface Pro 4's floating about. It's more likely that Trump will suddenly resign on the basis that he has suddenly realised that he's not really capable of the job..

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

Re: Simplify

Mechanical Aversion to Gits In Cardigans?

Oi! Don't diss the might cardigan!

Re: Opposite effect

I knew a guy at university with the opposite effect

My Dad was very much the opposite with any watch that contained electronics. After about 3 weeks wear they would all die - no matter how well sealed or how expensive they were.

Mechanical watches however - they would last and last..

Re: Very much this

Mechanical things, on the other hand, respond to kind words and pleading

I seem to recall a Ford Cortina that very much gives a counter-example to that..

(Split-pin at the bottom of the distributor-rotor had sheared and so the distributor didn't. Took me ages to find that problem - spent ages taking off the carbs & cleaning them, replacing the coil and varous other bits. In desperation I finally took off the distributor cap to see if the timing had shifted, only to discover that the rotor rotated freely.. Mind you, that car was pre-disastered by a number of previous owners - much like the Honda C70 that I ended up with after all 3 of my older brothers had had it..)

Sacrificing a chicken over the keyboard

Some people apparently prefer a goat to be the sacrifice. Although, at least with a chicken the resultant meat is edible..

(Goat tastes entirely too much like lamb for my liking. The only time I've managed to eat lamb/goat without retching is when sufficient masking flavours[1] are applied).

[1] Mint sauce for lamb. And no, curried goat doesn't contain enough other flavours to disguise the taste of goat..

Re: IICBTIMAF

*read the thing in front of them*

My first port of call is always "What does it actually say on the screen" because (a lot of the time) the programme isn't responding because the user has been asked a question and is waiting for an answer before doing *anything* else.

And it gets bonus points if it manages to pop up the dialog box behind everything else.

Jocks in shock as Irn-Bru set to slash sugar and girder content

Re: sachet of sugar... do the trick.

It'll be fun when the government eventually realise artificial sweeter is linked to dementia

Which artifical sweetener? There are hundreds in use today.. (and very few people use saccarin nowadays).

Re: sachet of sugar... do the trick.

some godawful artificial sweetener

What - like xylitol? (Oooh - it's an 'ol', it must be artificial and really, really bad for you[1]!).

First made from boiling down birch bark when the Scandanavians couldn't get sugar during WW2.

[1] Well - it is bad for you if you are a dog. In humans it causes virtually no insulin-response. In canines, it produces a very large insulin response - enough to send the dog into a fatal diabetic coma. Which is why we don't use it any more..

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

This is certainly a Homeland backdoor, no?

Never impute to malice what can be explained by stupidity..

Re: Windows 7 Patch ?

How many companies are still using windows 7

Quite a lot

will that be patched ?

Yes.

Re: Dont for get supporting hardware..

the embedded processors shouldn't be exposed to random stuff off the net

I wouldn't be so sure - how many of the IoT gubbins are using a vulnerable processor?

Re: Maybe we dodged a bullet?

more emphasis on patching than popping open the fizzy wine

Live a little and do both. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

Re: Lead time on new CPUs?

When will Intel be shipping CPUs without these vulnerabilities

Don't hold your breath. First, they will have to negotiate *again* with AMD for the rights to the architecture...

Re: Has the collective IQ of the tech world hit rock bottom?

u think it's said "money is the root of all..."

Actually - the original phrase is "the *love* of money is the root of all kinds of evil". Money itself is just a tool and a means to an end[1] and is, of itself, not bad.

Doing anything and everything to gain money, on the other hand, is a Bad Thing[TM].

As with (pretty much) everything, *why* you do things is as important as what you do.

[1] The end being "buying stuff that I need to survive - stuff like food, shelter and cats".

Re: Has the collective IQ of the tech world hit rock bottom?

That would imply the IQ test administered was flawed? There are countries exceeding a 100

The only thing that IQ tests measure is how good you are at doing IQ tests..

(I speak as a once-and-former member of MENSA who took the test as a teenager, specifically to check if I was brighter than my brother. I was - according to MENSA. However, he has a first-class honours degree, a masters and a PhD (in mathematics) whereas I have year 1 of an HND..)

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

Re: Daily Telegraph hackette on the BBC World Service this morning @Archtech

Has the "@amanfromMars 1" bot been re-written to do proper language parsing and construction? That's two posts now that appear to be in actual English :-)

Re: Daily Telegraph hackette on the BBC World Service this morning

Anybody at all "on the BBC" is likely to display utter ignorance

T'missus already has a finely-tuned filter for me griping about technology journalism..

Re: Daily Telegraph hackette on the BBC World Service this morning

displayed utter ignorance

I've yet to see a mass-media[1] 'technology' journalist that actually knew anything about actual technology. As far as I can see, most of them are just breathlessly regurgitating manufacturer press-releases..

[1] El-Reg doesn't count as 'mass media'..

Re: Old is new again?

Positive, he's the only person running it :-)

Nah. We have a couple of old[1] SPARC-based E450's in the computer room doing old[2] Oracley stuff. Fortunately, one of them just got supplanted by a system upgrade so I'll be able to switch it off soon.

[1] Can anyone else remember when the E450's were new and oooh-shiny? I can..

[2] As in 'written last century' old. Or as we like to call it "johnny-come-lately new fangled stuff"

Fetch calls Uber's bluff: See you in court, bros!

Re: A truly sad reality

But the system isn't broken. Au Contraire, they have the best systems

..that money can buy. The more money, the best-er the system.

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

Re: Glastonbury have one answer

n this selfie obsessed world

There are still pockets of sensible people that have never taken a selfie in their lives. My desk is currently occupied by one[1]..

[1] Unless you count the profile picture that my Apple store account uses - one of the user-registration workflows on a previous version of OS X included the use of the built-in webcam to take a profile picture. Now since replaced by a proper picture (of a cat, naturally. Specifically, senior male ginger-and-white cat, sticking his tongue out..).

Re: decent seat

wait - who sits down at gigs??? :-)

Me. If I can - which isn't very often at most prog gigs. Which is why my attendance at said gigs has dropped considerably.

Arthritis is a bummer.

You Wreck Me, Spotify: Tom Petty, Neil Young publisher launches $1.6bn copyright sueball

Re: I'm not so sure about that

The whole thing is 64GB and has 7,881 items in it

That's not that big - my iTunes library (likewise bought and/or ripped) is about 120GB and that's after trimming out the old prog that I no longer listen to..

From memory it's about 12K tracks. Being a mixture of prog/jazz/classical/rock/folk I suspect that the average track length is somewhere about 5 minutes.

I have a database table of songs

I have a relationship where song is linked to a license

Which is fine for an initial position. Now, who updates the table when licensing details change? This happenes all the time and, if the details are not up to date then payments go to the wrong person and you get sued by the new license-holder. And don't forget, that process has a cost (verification and validation for one) that someone has to pay.

It's not quite as simple as you suggest.

Re: Music Licensing

I can't, off the top of my head, think of any way it could be enforced

Here's how:

Music license quango hears a bit of music in a show or on the radio.

Music quango sends the producer a bill.

Producers says "I wrote that bit of music".

Quango says "prove it".

Music producer has to go to lots of effort to prove that they originated a bit of music.

In short, the licensing bodies have a policy of "demand first, check later". Amusingly, there is a YooToobe video of 60 minutes of white noise that's already got 5 DMCA claims against it..

And by "Licensing Body" I mean the legions of ticks that infest the music business and try to leech every bit of money they can off the people actually making music[1] while adding nothing themselves except confusion and misery.

[1] Who I have a great deal of sympathy with[2]. Especially the people *actually* doing the work to create original music rather than the marketing-friendly faces that the big labels slap in front of tunes churned out like regurgitated pap.

[2] Especially people like Marillion who, having been shafted by the music business repeatedly, got into crowd-sourcing the cost of making new music by pre-selling to fans and only use the established labels to distribute the music. Which they could do because they were an established band with a large and loyal following (of which I'm one).

This nice big hefty red number keeps the company unprofitable for a good few years after the fact, even if their bank balance is technically growing

So - much like Hollywood accounting then? As used by the film and music industry..

A pox on all their houses.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: Class Action Lawsuit Please

There should be a class action lawsuit seeking compensation

Which will net the consumers 12 1/2p (plus two part-sucked gobstoppers) in compensation while the lawyers get to buy a nice new island each..

Re: no news

and professionals may notice

And *all* the big cloud providers will now need to buy 25-30% more hardware to meet the expected capacity plan. I don't imagine that Google/Amazon/Microsoft are going to be too chuffed with Intel right now. And since they (with Apple/Twitter/Facebook et. al) are probably the biggest buyers with the most clout their voice is going to count.

If they all switch to buying AMD (assuming AMD has the capacity to build that many processors) or re-tool for ARM then Intel sales are going to nosedive.

It could be an expensive repair

Yup. Cheaper by far to replace the whole motherboard in one go. Unless your SSD is also soldered on. In which case it's a tad more complex.

And would you trust your data to a hardware replacement company? Let alone having a problem with a Bitlocker or APFS-encrypted drive where the local key is in the TPM locker.

I forsee that it could get very expensive for Intel, very, very quickly.

Intel has been the Gold standard in processors

Not for those of us that remember all the errors they have made in the past (and the fact that you could heat your house off some of the pentium range of chips..).