Posts by quxinot

How about a nice game of ... Tetris? Oxford eggheads slow PTSD onset with classic game

Re: Common sense?

Repetitive lifting of glasses has done wonders for erasing traumatic memories for me.

Unfortunately, it seems to work on atraumatic ones as well. The good with the bad, as they say....

UK gov draws driverless car test zone around M40 corridor

Re: Technology to save lives

If you want to properly use technology to save lives and ease congestion in the cities, why not spend the money on a really good broadband network and get rid of the idiotic notion that communication must be face-to-face? Some jobs will always require a physical body in the room, but I'd suspect that at least half could just telecommute. The numbers will level off the more rural you get, of course, but that countryside isn't the part where gridlock is the problem.

The other difference is that a really widespread and robust broadband infrastructure could be used for other things as well. Driverless cars, less so.

I'm not going to even begin to point out the obvious things, like allow the cars to travel at reasonable speeds and widening roads. Those are quite clearly madness to a politician.

Robo-AI jobs doomsday may, er... not actually happen, say boffins

Re: Inverting the pyramid

>Automation can give less quality variations, doesn't chuck sick days, doesn't go on strike, doesn't get all emotionally "needy" from time to time, doesn't need entire departments to administer and pay it, doesn't embezzle, doesn't need rest breaks, washrooms, canteens, pensions, doesn't need a parking space, doesn't switch company every few years taking all its tacit knowledge and skills with it, doesn't need training in safe lifting or competition law for oiks, etc<

You do realize that you just said machines don't need service, and don't break....

FYI Docs.com users: You may have leaked passwords, personal info – thousands have

Re: Weakest link

>'Which just goes to show, yet again, that the weakest link is always the fleshy meatbags behind the keyboard.'

Yes, especially the meatbags that implemented this thing.<

Thank you. I always agree entirely with the opening statement above, but the question is often which keyboard they're sitting behind.

Defence in Depth: A 'layered' strategy can repel cold attackers

Re: Major omission

My apologies, I just thought about this harder.

>Users.

Straightjacket, straightjacket, straightjacket.

And probably a roll of carpet.

Re: Major omission

>Major omission

>

>Users.

Straightjacket, cardigan, vest, overcoat.

FedEx will deliver you $5.00 just to install Flash

In a related story, UPS stock predicted to rise....

Hold 'em, don't fold 'em: How to bite Bitcoin pools

Re: house of cards question

>P.S. I'll get my coat. It's the one with the pockets full of corned beef HASH.

Dear Dave,

Keep that stuff put away.

No one wants you to flash your hash cache.

BOFH: Don't back up in anger

Re: Nice one

>Oh look, it's beer O'clock

That's what mine says too. One of these days I may have to put batteries in it, but it hasn't been wrong yet.

User jams up PC. Literally. No, we don't know which flavour

Re: Personal experience.

Trying to decide if an Acorn joke gets me downvotes or upvotes here... :D

Yes yes, that's mine, with half a PB&J in the pocket.

Big data should be 'part of UK's core national infrastructure' – Civil Service chief exec

>>There's an app that maps public toilets – how could it not be core infrastructure?

I'm depressed with everyone who has failed to thus far make a core dump joke.

Hardware 'dislodged' from HPE SAN during cable replacement

Obligatory

Someone had to.

https://xkcd.com/908/

Fire brigade called to free man's bits from titanium ring's grip

Weird. A good ring cutter isn't all that uncommon in even nursing homes, nevermind hospitals, here. They have to be the type with a bi-metal blade, which the better and newer ones have. The old ones were just steel and would have difficulty on titanium.

Anyone with a titanium ring can tell you that it's not super-hard. It's strong, but weaker than steel for a given volume (while weighing a lot less, hence the appeal). It's kind of a pain to machine not because of some mythical strength but because it chips out if the feed rates are wrong. Titanium is strong for the weight, but not as light as aluminum, which is what you use where strength matters less but weight is of the utmost importance.

Tungsten carbide is the nasty one to remove, as it cannot be cut short of a dimond blade. Those instead are simply cracked off as it's very brittle, and simple vice-grips will suffice.

I'm looking at my ring size and thinking... that poor man's partner(s).

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

It's amazing the results you get, not just with IT but any department, when you start with "Cash, flowers, alcohol, or chocolate?" :)

Pence v Clinton: Both used private email for work, one hacked, one accused of hypocrisy

Re: @Stu

>Gumby, it's Godwin, damn it!

Calling you a nazi for spelling would be in bad taste here, I think. :)

Has your spouse stayed on after Mobile World Congress? This sex doll brothel might be why

Re: Come on, not this one

> Come on, not the perennial "not in my ears" joke.

Aural sex only sounds like a good time.

COP BLOCKED: Uber app thwarted arrests of its drivers by fooling police with 'ghost cars'

Given the sheer number of rapes and sexual assaults that happen on a daily basis, blocking the cops from catching them isn't a problem--they're clearly not catching them in the first place, on the rare occasion when they are being reported (which is the bigger part of the problem).

And the punishment for the tiny fraction that are reported, caught, and then convicted? It leaves rather a lot to be desired. I would suggest that the penalty be suggested by the victim and/or their family. It'd make for the return of "headsman" as a common occupation, I suspect.

Dell kills off standalone DSSD D5, scatters remains into other gear

Re: Doublespeak and Euphemisms in Business English?

>Is this communication of pending synergy-related headcount adjustment goal?<

Wash out your mouth with soap!

VMware bumps certification exam prices, one by $2700

Gotta love the pricing changes based on where the test is taken.

I'm sure that's not a matter of just trying to squeeze as hard as the market will bear. Probably.

The weird bit is, you'd think that companies like VMWare would be interested in making their certs cheap as chips so that there would be more experienced admins out there, theoretically making it a cheaper choice on the personnel front for corporate types. (This of course would allow them to turn the screws another full revolutions on the main pricing.... let's dont get silly here!)

Firearms and feet, a dangerous combination.

Pure: We see a billion dollars in our future. No, not profits, silly!

I keep thinking the same thing. They're shuffling mucho money, but losing in the process. Making it up on volume jokes are almost too easy for the likes of these!

From an income vs profit perspective, my couch and the pocket change contained within are doing dramatically better than companies like this.

Uber loses court fight over London drivers' English language tests

Re: "dreams, hopes and ambitions"

>Odd. My dream and hope is to have a taxi driver that

Why not dream of owning a car and a liscence? Or dream and hope for a car, and a motorcycle for nice days also?

(This brings along subsegment dreams and hopes which include: the traffic will let up, and that the parking space will be open. Fair points.)

Amazon S3-izure cause: Half the web vanished because an AWS bod fat-fingered a command

It suddenly occurs to me the primary issue with cloud stuff.

Cloud is way cheaper than doing it on site. It's also comically, laughably more expensive than having it under your own roof. The differences are pretty simple: Doing it right is significantly more expensive than doing it wrong--to the point that the tools you're using aren't important. If your cloud stuff goes down because you don't have geographic failover redundant whatever etc because you cheaped out, you did it wrong. Holds precisely as true as the day the roof leaks and your rack emits a sad little pfzzt sound.

I do wish I lived in a world, or even a location, where this magical internet of perfect connectivity at wonderful speed was available, though. The last thing I want is any important data or processing being done on the other end of an unreliable, tiny, crooked straw. Someday, someday...

BlackBerry's comeback: El Reg gets its claws on the QWERTY KEYone

Nope. Sorry.

I do like the idea of a true keyboard. But I've had a phone that RIM was behind previously. Lovely ideas in theory. In practice?

Yeah. Not having another.

Pai, Pai, Mr American spy: FCC supremo rips up privacy protections for broadband punters

Re: No clean answer...

FWIW:

Obamacare and Medicare are both forms of insurance.

When in the history of ever have you known your insurance to NOT be ripping you off?

Okay, then.

Brit cops can keep millions of mugshots of innocent folks on file

Re: What a spectacularly questionable argument..

>It's like when criminals are told they must pay back stolen money, what would happen if they said "well I so would normally, but this time there's just too much of it, stored in too many places I can't keep track."<

Happens all the time, they're called CEO's. Your point being?

KCL external review blames whole IT team for mega-outage, leaves managers unshamed

Re: Executive summary

Thank you.

So a report from the manager's perspective shows the management in a good light. We're surprised somehow?

FFS, kids.

HD and SSD Prices not declining - why ?

Older tech items are cheaper than newer tech items.

The hell is wrong with you folks? Are you new?

I paid $175USD for 128mb stick of SDR awhile ago. Sure, it was 1999. But today the same product is $3 on ebay, with shipping!!!

Prices fluctuate. Over time, they go down. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's slow. This is new?

Fear not, Europe's Privacy Shield is Trump-proof – ex-FTC bigwig

Re: The problem is extrene lack of transparency...

>And the trump administration likes it that way.

Yes, blame trump. I realize that he's more than a minor douchebag, but if you think this sort of thinking in government is a new thing, perhaps you need to look back in history a bit better.

Data centre locations: In the city or up the country?

I missed it.

Why is this marked "Promo" and yet the not-infrequently found advertising junk "articles" not marked as such instead?

Motorola's modular Moto Z: A fine phone for a weekend away

Some options do that already. I've got a S4, for example, with $13 worth of chinesium battery that supposedly supplies 6200mAh, and not only makes it weighty but also reasonably thick (~14.5mm on my calipers). No reason to charge it but every fourth day or so, which is nice. There's other issues (lack of CM support with this firmware, a pinch slowish, 32gb max card size allowed, etc), but it's nice to have the option to replace a wonky battery with a larger or stock one.

Sick to death of the "as thin as possible" malarkey. Having a removable battery and an account with the usual suspects (ebay, aliwhatever, etc) means you have options, and that's great. Now if only we had even more options, such as full @#$@# control over the software....

A great phone for the weekend away needs but one feature.

"Off"

Your next PC is… your 'Droid? Remix unveils Continuum-killer

I was going to rant endlessly about phones and desktops having rather different uses and capabilities. For a given level of technology, I suspect that I really don't want to try extracting 300 watts or so of heat from a hand-held device if I value my skin lacking burns.

But you get the upvote of the day for pointing out the rather more prosiac and obvious difference. I have absolute authority over my desktop, and I say what goes. On the phone? Pffft. It's an endless pain in the backside to simply retain what little control is there.

Intel reveals Optane will need a 7th-gen core and a PC-centric launch

Re: Would have been nice if it was an AMD

>Most Intel CPUs have various artificial limits on how much memory you can put on them.

It's directly related to the MSRP of a given chip.

And irritating. Zen's been released, and it's hard to tell through the marketing malarky, but hopefully it makes Intel do something interesting with this stuff. As of yet, it looks like the big 8c/16t chips are going to be holding even with the big i7's, but at a third the price. So does that mean the boys in blue will triple (well, quadruple more likely) their storage pricing, or crash it to make the boys in red less appealing?

Don't know that I care really. Seems like for many years now, my machine(s) have been fast enough, if I'm a little cautious about what software I run on them.

A webcam is not so much a leering eye as the barrel of a gun

Why not a simple slider that not only covers the lens, but also keeps dust and debris off of it when not in use also?

Apple joins one wireless power group, the other one responds with so-happy forced grin

Re: Mis-named Wireless

>I'd call anything wireless which connects to reference device without needing plugged in. And in this case, placing a phone/tablet/watch/mouse etc on a pad (and not plugging it in) is clearly wireless.<

Years ago when phones first did this trick, the word was "cordless". Wonder what happened to that word.

'We need a new Geneva Convention to protect all citizens from snoops'

There will be pushback, it won't be legislation.

It will involve fire. Historically, the class in power needs to relearn this lesson periodically.

Roses are red, violets are blue, HMRC confirms Verify can STFU

Re: What's up ElReg

Roses are red

Violets are blue

The Reg celebrates Valentines day

And so should you!

Android Wear: The bloatware that turned into gloatware

Re: Doomed from the beginning

+1

My watch tells the time, and makes me happy each time I look at it.

My phone is constantly reminding me to do crap and asking for my time (through the people messaging me in various forms with it). My desired life neither revolves around my phone nor do I want a reminder of the myriad ways my time is wasted when I look at my wrist.

Therefore, my watch tells the time. And that's enough.

RAF pilot sent jet into 4,000ft plummet by playing with camera, court martial hears

Holy crap!

A Reg article that didn't mention Trump nor Brexit, and wasn't a thinly-disguised press release.

Rackspace unplugs 250 staff to chase hot new products

Re: What do you mean by 'utterly naive'?

>There is an assumption that anybody who runs a successful business is a ruthless psychopath who treats people like meat.

Fixed that for you. Any halfwit can run a company into the ground, and I'm not going to list examples because that's too easy. All you have to do is claim that it's to "improve shareholder value" or some nonesense.

But I'm sure these CxO's are far smarter than not just each employee, but all of their employees. I wonder what would happen if they listened and kept their best people through thick and thin? No, that's stupid, a bonus today is worth more than anything tommorrow.

For $deity's sake, smile! It's Friday! Sad coders write bad code – official

Re: It's simple neurobiology ...

Management must be terribly difficult. The ratio of truly good managers vs the number of managers approaches zero. More so than most fields, as nearly as I can tell.

'Treat your developers like creative workers – or watch them leave'

I think describing things as a cargo cult nails it.

Management's primary goal should always be to ensure that they have the people to do a given job, keep them happy enough that they continue working, and assist them in getting the tools necessary to do their job. In some environments, that may result in using an agile model, in other environments some other description may apply. What matters is that the workers are able to work freely in a way that gets the best quality work done at a reasonable pace.

Putting a name to what your workers have wound up finding works best for them, then trying to apply that style forcibly upon a completely different group of workers is not going to work, and rarely does.

If you want to know what will best improve the output of your shop, ask the people doing the work, and help create that environment for them. People are different, and the mark of a good manager is enabling their workers to do what they're paid to do.

Microsoft Germany says Windows 7 already unfit for business users

Re: Enough Whining.

>If it's so important (or frequently used), why do you have to search for it every time?

Thank you. There's an even better option here, though. It's an unfamiliar and unusual ability called "being organized". It works with files, and it works with things like the start menu. Of course in 10 this means installing ClassicShell or similar, and that causes a couple other problems.

It does strike me that the best way to judge how well a computer works for a given user is not to complain about how the appearance strikes that user's taste, but instead by how much time the user spends finding workarounds and ways to make the computer do what they want as compared to simply using it, and having the interface fade into the background.

(Posted from LMDE with Mate. Not perfect, but closer than the rest for my use.)

This goldfish and its steerable robot tank will destroy humanity

Most guns are self-propelled.

Backwards a bit, usually.

Police pull up van man engaged in dual carriageway sex act

Re: Fly-tipping

You'd think that'd be really easy to catch.

Look for the guy hitting every pothole....

Kylie withdraws from Kylie trademark fight, leaving Kylie to profit from… existing?

Re: Oh the irony, missed by the plastic one (although, she is from the US).

>What is her brand anyway, surely Dow Chemical already has branded the parts that make her "stick out" so to speak?

Best laugh I've had in days. Thanks for that!

Trumping free trade: Say 'King of Bankruptcy' Ross does end up in charge of US commerce

Re: Same idiocy regardless of location

>The best and the brightest do not do grunt work on the shop floor. Modern manufacturing requires at the very least secondary technical or technical baccalaureate.<

The best and brightest have been working out how to line their own pockets whilst screwing the poor bastards on the shop floor for many, many years.

There's very few companies willing to play the long game, because they want their bonus today. Management isn't hard, you hire good people, keep them as happy as is reasonable, give them what they need to do the work, and get out of the way!

Welcome to the Wipe House: President Trump shreds climate change, privacy, LGBT policies on WhiteHouse.gov

>"We won, and we the people now rule."

I can't believe you're stupid enough to actually believe that.<

We the people did win and do now rule, as we always have.

I mean of course, "we" in the sense of "the overwhelmingly wealthy". This isn't new. It's not been that long since people were property of other people in the US.

So let's rage against each other like good little sheep, drawing on our red and blue map and arguing about who's morally right. That should continue to buy enough time to draw attention away from our progression down the rabbit hole of repression.

As it always has been.

Can all-flash arrays, spinning disks and hybrid really live together?

Gosh.

It's almost like they are different products for different conditions. Who'd have thunk it?