Posts by innominatus

Data loss prevention emergency tactic: keep your finger on the power button for the foreseeable future

Pencil to the rescue

Our solution when this happened during a long and involved test session was to sellotape a pencil across the still depressed switch

Japanese boffins build solar-powered, remote-controlled cyborg cockroach

Re: umm

or a small explosive charge? already been thought about for drones

Microsoft highlights 'productivity paranoia' in remote work research

Fire the middle managers?

"there's a disconnect between employers PHBs and employees" FTFY

Boeing to pay SEC $200m to settle charges it misled investors over 737 MAX safety

Re: Outrageous

Indeed. The final quote at the end of the article could perhaps do with clarifying: "resolve outstanding legal matters related to the 737 MAX accidents in a manner that serves the best interests of our shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders including our money-grabbing, scumbag CEO and Board who couldn't give a flying f@&# about people's lives if it put their share options at risk" FTFY

The secret to Sparrow, DeepMind's latest Q&A chatbot: Human feedback

Re: The Register has asked DeepMind for further comment

Shirley The Register should have asked Sparrow itself?

BT's emergency call handlers will join pay strikes

Say what now?

"lives are at risk because a company's top brass won't listen to workers" is an interesting spin when the union itself chose to make no exemption for emergency services centre staff. Who is it that's setting out who's going on strike again?

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

Mug's game

In many ways working is like being a hamster in a wheel regardless of the need to commute. Not just "traveling to work to be able to afford traveling to work" but add in working to pay for childcare in order to go to work. And paying more for a place to live from which to commute to work. No time wasted commuting helps families, and working from anywhere could reduce housing pressures in cities and suburbs...

iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple's learning on repairs

Slight pruning of the money tree?

"It's not going to advertise giving up a major profit center for the biz"

Shhh - You're Disclosing It Wrong

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Nice try but

Maybe slow speed incidents? I've seen a kid's bike run over by a reversing car (luckily no kid on it at the time) but then how many little kids have a BLE-enabled phone on them all the time?

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

Thanks for the PTSD!

I worked in a team with someone who peeled a nice big juicy orange at the desk every lunchtime. I had to use that workstation one day and could barely read the screen, while typing was made nigh on impossible as my fingers were sticking to the keys.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: "The OS companies have insulated themselves from user pain"

Only today I had cause to curse the inventor of the Office ribbon as I wasted valuable minutes I won't get back searching for an option I knew existed but didn't know the stupid little icon it was hidden behind. Text menus may be passé but I speak English better than pictograms and hieroglyphics!

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

Re: Criminal classes

An important Australian scientific study concluded "The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened."

Your AI-generated digital artwork may not be protected by US copyright

Indeed. Include in that the filters applied, red eye removal, bokeh emulation, etc. and the percentage of human versus machine input into the final image is tipping towards machine. I'd still like to kid myself that it is my image

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Re: I have one

I hope your ceiling joists are up to supporting the weight!

Our software is perfect. If something has gone wrong, it must be YOUR fault

Re: Quite contrary!

Worked for me too...

It'll be your P(r)oxy Server maybe ;)

Northrop Grumman to use Firefly Aerospace tech in its de-Russianized Antares

Elmer's Glue All

I've got a decades old 4 FL OZ Elmer's Glue All that's still doing a great job sticking stuff today. So they should be ok with their choice of glue. (Watch those ATK-Thiokol rubber seals and the cold though?)

Also "Firefly" - great TV series (not bad film)...

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

Young people of today

(Risking of a flood of Monty Python Yorkshiremen gags but...) It was hard in them olden days. Package managers? Pah! Graphical UI? Nope. IDEs? No such luxury... edit, make, run, repeat

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What, no nukes?

Time to re-brand and re-issue those Skylab Protective Helmets again? Can even be made in China...

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

Re: 17C

Up here in Bonny Scotland 17C is a scorcher of a summer's day. Taps Aff!

Also, "direct-to-Earth communications" suggests it it time to properly register and open up tld .moon (currently claimed by the Lunar Embassy?)

Culture shock: Ransomware gang sacks arts orgs' email lists

Naïve art?

Hmmm - surely only arts people could say "the exported data was not sensitive in nature and largely consisted of names and email addresses" and believe it.

Perhaps some high profile arts patrons will be receiving phishing emails very shortly?

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Now 100,000kg smaller

Painting the Forth Bridge used to be the never ending task exemplar, now no longer so. Who knows? I'm an ocean half empty kind of person...

Amazon buys US healthcare chain One Medical for $3.9bn

It now owns your store, your doctor, and your shopping history. What's next?

... you are the product

Re: Expectant mothers...

Have you checked out our Amazon Prime Delivery options?

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

Whose yacht? Larry Ellison's maybe?

It was the right shade of red...

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

Re: The title is no longer required.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be? I remember two of us working on a single 16-bit box with muti-user CP/M (MP/M). Concurrent editing was fine but only the wearer of the Compiler Hat could fire up the C compiler, the other had to make the tea.

IT departments often regret technology buying decisions

Re: Glaringly obvious

Exact.

Even then in $BIGCORP the business team and IT have conspired to jointly select and inflict some of the most universally hated SaaS abominations on the rest of the organisation. (Looking at you latest HR platform, finance system and other minor demons.)

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Hobnobs - invented for mans pleasure

Where are the antipodeans in this chat? A colleague introduced me to the Tim Tam and the Tim Tam Slam. After DDG-ing you can substitute a Penguin or Cadbury Chocolate Fingers. Not in polite company though...

Never fear, the White House is here to tackle web trolls

More than a US problem?

Why should "attempting to participate in society" mean using Fessebook or Twatter (other cesspools of humanity are available). Don't go there in the first place?

Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup

Re: What's faster than the speed of light?

A lie? (can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on)

Apple may have to cough up $1bn to Brits in latest iPhone Batterygate claim

Re: "We have never – and would never"

Nowadays Putinesque or Lavrovian, Shirley?

US must adopt USB-C charging standard like EU, senators urge

You're charging it wrong.

UK competition watchdog seeks to make mobile browsers, cloud gaming and payments more competitive

Re: "Apple and Google have substantial and entrenched market power in mobile operating systems"

First mover advantage? But Netscape -> Internet Explorer -> Chrome and Safari / WebKit? Market share allowing proprietary standards and barriers to competition?

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

Re: The man with the golden gun...

Alien kids with a BB gun?

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Digital transmission?

Older, earlier 1960s / 1970s vinyl was better quality than later lighter weight plastic pressings

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

Elon Musk's acquisition?

Initially I read the headline the wrong way round. As if Twitter were buying Elon Musk. But if they could and then close him down that would be most appreciated.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

Yes. It is surprisingly difficult to explain over the phone how to use multi-key combinations to inexperienced users. Curse you last millennium Windows with your Ctrl/Alt/Del

TomTom to chop 10% of workforce, blames automation tech

Re: "Lifetime Updates"

Yeah, and my "Bag for Life" wore out so I guess I'm living on borrowed time now

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

Natural Stupidity

What about all those patents that came from pure dumb luck like velcro and teflon? Patented by the Goddess of Luck?

Drone ship carrying yet more drones launches in China

ROTM

And so it begins? Autonomous, military technology to intercept and expel targets... Do Yunzhou do a line in shark-mounted lasers for good measure?

Workday nearly doubles losses as waves of deals pushed back

Agree with others' views about their crappy web UI. But just floored by the additional comment "One or two days is a good amount" - what happened to all this BS about wellbeing then?

Cloud security unicorn cuts 20% of staff after raising $1.3b

But Lacework is full of holes?

Declassified and released: More secret files on US govt's emergency doomsday powers

Biggest takeaway?

That there is a George W. Bush Presidential Library

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

"15 Gigabits per second" but latency... anyway any fule kno no cloud on the moon, not enough water

Boeing's Starliner CST-100 on its way to the ISS 2 years late

De-orbit plan?

"Starliner is carrying over 500 pounds of supplies to the ISS and will return with 600 pounds", so just need to keep that up and there'll be nothing left to dump in the Pacific?

Apple to replace future iPhone Lightning port with USB-C next year, this guy claims

Re: Apple did not respond to The Register's request for comment. ®

Just stick ADNRTTRRFC at the end of any Apple story? (Could it be auto-inserted if Apple appears in the article?)

Mystery of industry-targeting backdoored NPM JavaScript packages solved

"unclear how Code White got hold of internal packages names" - strings?

Pictured: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

More bagel/beigel than doughnut/donut shaped?

How ICE became a $2.8b domestic surveillance agency

T&Cs

The cheek of it. They've not even asked the data subjects to sign up to thousands of words policy statements to give away their rights in the first place. Unlike those nice tech giants

IBM's autonomous Mayflower ship breaks down in second transatlantic attempt

When they go fetch the Mayflower do they find the AI in a little lifeboat having abandoned ship?

IBM: Give us three years to solve quantum computing scaling

Crossed my mind too. Perhaps 4,096 of them are for Quantum Error Correction? (But that only leaves 62 for actual computing so maybe not.)