Posts by Korev

Will the MOAB (Mother Of all AdBlockers) finally kill advertising?

Sponsored people

Can it pick up the unlabelled adverts from sponsored athletes etc. The kind of like "I took out my new $BRAND bike today and it's amazing [Emoji hearts]".

IBM. Sigh. Revenues. Sigh. Down. Sigh. For the 20th quarter in a row

Some of their R&D is still excellent; the problem is that whenever I see their salespeople present it's all hype and hubris.

Intel loses its Lustre – Chipzilla bins own-brand HPC file system

Re: Intel bailing on programs

Chasing the HPC market isn't very profitable (there's not many super computers), but it looks like support for AI might be the thing to flog to the likes of Facebook, Google, etc.

The market for "Hyperscale" is already bigger than for HPC; I guess it's sensible for Intel to chase that market (it's painful to say this as an HPC geek).

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

Re: A Snap Election eh?

With that post it's gettin' it's gettin' it's gettin' kinda hectic

vCenter's phone-home 'customer improvement' feature opened remote code execution hole

Why are vendors so keen on this?

Time and time again, vendors (software, hardware & scientific equipment) try to push a phone home or we dial into our network when they want system and seem very surprised when we're not keen. Maybe events like this will explain to them why companies like mine regard it as a Very Bad Idea™

IDF now stands for Intel Ditches Frisco: Chipzilla axes annual tech conf

Re: Even so

Failure of Atom (a revised Pentium III?) to oust ARM from Tablets and Phones.

The whole Core family was a "revised Pentium III".

Re: Even so

Incremental developments CPU since Pentium 4, and adoption of AMD's x64.

Going from Netburst to core meant a massive improvement in performance and integrating the memory controller on chip was a huge leap forward for us in HPC.

Good job, everyone. We're making AI just as tediously racist and sexist as ourselves

Twitterati

You can even feed the AI to have some fun

Re: "be sure not to look at names or addresses on resumes"

I think that HR anonymising the CVs and performing basic screening* are very sensible things to do. If they did things like this then they'd be at risk of appearing useful so they may not want to do it...

*Basic screening only though! I had loads of problems with an HR guy not understanding the concept that I was more interested in getting the person with low qualifications with demonstrated potential than the person with a PhD who followed someone's script.

Sysadmin 'trashed old bosses' Oracle database with ticking logic bomb'

Re: WTF? Backups?

It took them about a fortnight to work out something was wrong. I guess they'd have to restore up until the 31st of March and then eliminate his "improvements" from the 1st of April and then replay all the other legitimate transactions.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

When you're too good

I used to work with someone like that. She was excellent and knew the products inside out; sadly she got dumped with all the crap, but hard problems.

Eventually someone who left talked her into applying for a job at his new place and she was most surprised how keen they were to employ her.

Prisoners built two PCs from parts, hid them in ceiling, connected to the state's network and did cybershenanigans

OS?

No mention of the os, did they run BSD? If so then the prisoners would be expert in Jails

VLC?

In addition to the above, the forensics team found "self-signed certificates, Pidgin chat accounts, Tor sites, Tor geo exit nodes, ether soft, virtual phone, pornography, videos, VideoLan, and other various software" in addition to evidence that malicious activity had been occurring within the ODRC inmate network.

I'm really not sure how videos, VLC, chat accounts are evidence of wrongdoing; there are plenty of legitimate uses.

Printer blown to bits by compressed air

Bad air compressor: League of Gentlemen (poor turtle1)

Which is nothing until you see the Medusa in the 3rd series....

Re: Air lines

Some chemistry labs have problems with solvent vapour dissolving one of the chemicals responsible for stiffening motherboards. I'm told it makes them look like Dali's The Persistence of Memory...

After having a 24-port switch destroyed when a cat vomited over it, I decided to implemet access control.

You must have been feline a bit angry when that happened...

BOFH: Defenestration, a solution to Solutions To Problems We Don't Have

Re: Seven pints

Yeah, what ever happened to the BOFH's bulk eraser?

Dieting cannibals: At last, a scientist has calculated calories for human body parts

As mr. deadlift has pointed out above, there's only one option....

I prefer lamb to be honest, especially the silent ones

Hungry?

Well, if the cannibals were hungry, then I guess it's a good thing that they had a helping hand...

Re: 65kg human?

I guess this average would include the usually lighter fairer sex too. Also, back then people would have no had the easy access to refined sugar and other crap food like we do today.

Everything's fine, says Cylance, as workers given the boot

Re: wait wut

An antivirus company might actually be useful to humanity; so a new approach could be worth investing in.

Microsoft's new hardware: eight x86 cores, 40 GPU cores

HPC workloads?

The spec is similar to a GPU server node from a couple of years ago. For workloads where you need a lot of GPUs in parallel these might work rather nicely.

Graffiti 'dying out' as kids dump spray cans for Instagram, Twitter etc

There's a nice mural covering the side of a building just outside of Basel railway station greeting people in lots of different languages; it's been ruined up until about head height by crappy graffiti.

Re: Instagram Killed The Graffiti Star

All you need for instawhatever is a smartphone which can be pretty cheap. Pretty much everyone has one these days, even the "young men of low socio-economic status [who] take risks to achieve sub-cultural kudos".

Ex-IBMer sues Google for $10bn – after his web ad for 'divine honey cancer cure' was pulled

I really hope that Google chose not to settle out of court (to avoid the hassle) and fight this one all the way. Google would like to move into Healthcare, they should demonstrate that they are prepared to do the right thing for the world's health.

Ah, breathe that fresh alpine air. And look over there, a majestic HPC Advisory Council

Re: Free?

I live in Switzerland so I'm aware of the costs!

Free?

There's a 150CHF charge payable when you register.

Manchester pulls £750 public crucifixion offer

Re: Cross

The late, great Bill Hicks' take on the matter

Cross

Reverend Canon Falak Sher telling the organisers ... that “To put people in Jesus’ place on the cross and charge them £750 to do it is blasphemous.

He sounds quite cross...

Half a million 'de-identified' patients records to be shared in Bradford

Re: So, a prize...

I temped in a paper medical records library for a bit. They kept the "interesting" files locked in the supervisor's office. "Interesting" meant people like players in the local (major) football team or a notorious criminal residing at Her Majesty's pleasure. Had the latter record ever been leaked then the tabloid press would have been all over the story...

Re: put two and two together.

I think you see something like female patient 12345, born in 1975, from surgery 6789 in SW England.

Why do any charities need to have access to data, regardless of whether it has been 'de-identified' or not?

Sue Ryder do carry out research, although their website doesn't really go into a huge amount of detail about it.

If I put my scientific data geek hat on I can see how this data could be useful in palliative care. You could investigate something like how long HIV or cancer patients live depending on which drug protocols are used or seeing if you can predict which patients suffer the most pain according to their medical history which could then alert doctors to act.

News?

I'm not sure how new this kind of data sharing is. A lot of this information is in CPRD, which has millions of anonymised* British patients' medical records in.

*you can only see that a patient is at a surgery in say the South West of England, so arguably is more anonymised than just having surgeries in the Bradford area as in the article.

It's 30 years ago: IBM's final battle with reality

Productive OS/2?

We had a productive OS/2 machine at one of our sites up until very recently. I think the only reason it was got rid of was the site being axed.

It was running a protein separation machine and had to dual into Win98 if you wanted to copy your data to the NAS. It was impressive that it lasted so long baring in mind it lived in a cold room at <5c.

Oracle and Fujitsu SPARC up M12 big iron

Re: Liquid to vapor cooling

Running on Steam? It's good to see that Steam sell more than games now...

Lochs, rifle stocks and two EPIC sea gates: Thomas Telford's Highland waterway

Love these articles

I love El Reg's geek's guides, thank you for publishing them.

A pint for the author please ->

Not slouching

Trainees would arrive at Spean Bridge railway station following a 12-plus hour journey and step off for a 11km march uphill to the castle (that is still standing, but closed to the public) while carrying 15.87kg (35lbs) of equipment.

Anyone who failed to make the march within 60 minutes was immediately returned to their unit

That's quite some pace for someone with a heavy pack!

Security co-operation unlikely to change post Brexit, despite threats

Ireland?

Britain shares a border with Ireland and there are free movement agreements predating the ones from the EU. Both countries need some kind of extradition agreement, which may or may not be possible without the EU.

Yee-hacked! Fired Texan sysadmin goes rogue, trashes boot business

Re: Amateur...

And in the future one of your colleagues maybe be asked "You used to work at $OLDCO, do you remember what $IDIOTADMIN was like?". In these situations their answer tends to be "make or break" for the candidate.

Re: "Given the boot"

Maybe these posts will spur them on...

Re: Properly designed security

Having a zillion different admin roles is good for a medium to large company; however for a smaller company with only a few admins it'd just make their job very difficult as they have to look after everything.

Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall

Re: Disappointed in El Reg

I just like seeing the Sun logo on the patent office page's Favicon :)

Netcraft suggests they're running Sun One Webserver on UPUX, which may not be strictly true!

Indian Business Machines? One-third of Big Blue staff based there and Bangladesh

Re: Bright

British technical salaries are low by Western standards already. Sadly our successive governments have found other ways to make it expensive to run businesses in the UK (rents, business rates, employers' NI raises).

IBM: Those 2 redundancy schemes? We need to 'improve margins' and right quick

Sounds like the typical user's reaction to using Lotus Notes to me...

Ofcom pressuring BT to slash wholesale prices for superfast broadband

Re: Fibre?

What is this strange fibre of which you speak?

I'd pick up some All Bran next time you're in the supermarket, it's full of fibre and will keep your expressions regular...

Re: When can I pay less for a data only line?

A couple of reasons... It's cheaper or free for people to ring you (assuming they're not geeks who'd use Skype/whatever.

A more important reason is that if you make a 999 call then the Emergency Services instantly know where you're calling from which could save time in a critical situation and ensure that the cavalry go straight to the correct place.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: IBM sheds more workers – this time, tech sales

Re: A definite recipe for success

Cutting R&D would save money today; but at the expense of future sales when the new products that would have been developed were not.

BOFH: The Boss, the floppy and the work 'experience'

No blackmail?

I was expecting that the reason why the BOFH was so cagey about his work was that it did a little bit of "detective work" and automatically created a dossier of material for blackmail gently talking round users to your point of view.

Cheap, flimsy, breakable and replaceable – yup, Ikea, you'll be right at home in the IoT world

Re: Cheap, flimsy, breakable

When I went from saying "whatever you like dear" to kitting out my bachelor pad, I bought a fair amount of furniture quickly from Ikea and some more upmarket Swiss places. The Ikea stuff has been excellent, the not cheap sofa I'm sitting on now will probably have to be replaced after only a few years.