Posts by Dvon of Edzore

Russia returns to space tourism and offers a first citizen spacewalk

Re: "becoming the first private citizen in history to experience open space"

Not exactly. US Air Force Colonel and NASA Astronaut, according to the official bio.

https://www.nasa.gov/astronauts/biographies/robert-l-behnken/biography

CSI: Amazon.com coming soon to a screen near you

Re: whitewash

Amazon is too busy dealing with real reviews that complain of blatant counterfeiting (by cancelling them) to look at fake reviews. Maybe that's what the 8,000 fraud and abuse staff are doing -- covering up fraud and abuse.

Internet Society, remember your embarrassing .org flub? The actual internet society would like to talk about it

Re: Hmm

I'm pretty sure the many violations of policy we just witnessed will stamp Null and Void all over that so called agreement.

Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops

Alright, lock the lawyers up too. Everyone happy now?

Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two

You don't need to call them

because the Redmonster is already there, eating your brains, your cash, your screen, your soul...

In colossal surprise, Intel says new vPro processors are quite a bit better than the old ones

Does that statistic come with an asterisk?

Are those benchmarks with or without the Spectre/Meltdown et al mitigations? ISTR a wee performance hit was involved. 'Tis why my next build shall include the sound of many threads being rent asunder by bus number 4.0.

Nine in ten biz applications harbor out-of-date, unsupported, insecure open-source code, study shows

And this so-called study was sponsored by who, exactly? No maintenance activity for a year could also mean the code is stable and properly implements a standard function. I doubt there are a lot of new features that need to be added to the quicksort algorithm, for example.

I'd instead argue that too much churn in the product is a sign of instability such that it should not be relied upon by third parties. Consider the multiple versions of Microsoft .Net libraries found on any system in productive use for more than a week. Are all those being maintained or merely deprecated.

The point of containers is they aren't VMs, yet Microsoft licenses SQL Server in containers as if they were VMs

Re: Yeah, smells like "embrace, extend, ..." of Oracle's bullshit VM policies...

The new Redmonster creed includes "Extort" in the triplet. Much better for performance reports, both individual and corporate, and no pesky kids government investigations because they like taxes too.

Ex-Microsoft Office chief reflects on early malware and the 'global attack on the new Windows PC infrastructure'

Corporate blind spot

The real solution, totally preventing executable content in documents, was apparently never considered. There's a reason we never heard of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 viruses - and market share isn't it. Each was king until MS dirty tricks deposed them in favor of the Office cabal.

US small biz loan system bans software robots. The lesson? Make sure IT knows about any automation projects

Did something similar, with same answer. Needed to query a supplier's massive order system to see if preferred product was now available to replace less-preferred items in parts order. In theory there was a built-in function to do this but it was run during off hours so items might sell out before the batch ran. Had to write a terminal emulator and screen scraper to handle odd formats built for human use, matching up available inventory with list of preferred and unacceptable choices. Fullscreen pages were often drawn somewhat randomly, not line by line, so had to maintain a virtual screen in order to read the result. (Before you ask, the only API was for their suppliers, not customers, and expected to talk mainframe to mainframe. Everyone else pretended to be, or actually was, a teletype.) Successfully simulated the fingers on the keyboard and received no complaints from big supplier. The program ground away happily until merger with biggest rival ended a lot of things.

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

Re: When will Starlink become operational?

Outside the US, talk to your government. Inside the US it will start testing with SpaceX and Tesla employees later this year.

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

Retro Progress

25-May-1961 US President John F Kennedy challenges America to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before 1970.

24-July-1969 Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong return safely to Earth after two of them land on the Moon.

Time to accomplish this feat: about 8 years and 2 months.

8-Jul-2011 NASA retires its sole means of human access to low earth orbit.

27-May-2020 NASA plans to return to low earth orbit.

Time to accomplish this feat: about 8 years and 11 months.

Truly the opposite of progress is Congress.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

A HAZMAT incident.

Ethernet standards group leaves its name in the dust as it details new 800Gbps spec

Re: Actual performance?

I doubt the group expects even next-gen bleeding-edge processors to suck on a full pipe. This seems more like a way to get data from a particle physics experiment through a forest of successive aggregating routers to the humongous array of godawful expensive storage located a "safe" distance away. Those gigabytes per nanosecond can add up, ya know.

Hmmm... How much impact on climate change will this link have when it gets applied to transcontinental ocean cables?

First crew launch in US since 2011 could happen by May, 34 more OneWeb sats, and astros share their top isolation tips

"shoehorned into the Crew Dragon"? Hardly. More like rattle around in a space can meant for seven but de-rated to four plus extra luggage. Messrs. B & H can even keep social distance in this 4 metre deluxe railway compartment with en suite WC.

What's inside a tech freelancer's backpack? That's right, EVERYTHING

Interesting how most of the comments here...

are about not carrying enough with the balance being suggestions about different. The portable office is indeed universal to the tech trade, and I suspect we're all hoping for a Bag of Holding before our joints give way.

Western Digital hands chief exec seat to boss of Cisco's networking and security biz

Re: "Cisco" & "Security" in the same sentence?

So that's a Strong Buy recommendation on Seagate, Samsung, and Crucial/Micron stock?

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Re: Take a lesson from railways

Example from Japan. I recall Shinkansen cab videos where the driver must regularly check the status of the two braking systems, as there aren't many signals to point at on the high-speed lines. Looks something like doing The Macarena, but I suppose it keeps one alert.

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

"Less well supported"?

This is Microsoft we're talking about - the Comcast of software pushers. Just yesterday I was looking for the real meaning of one of their typically unhelpful error messages. Several MS employees and graybeard-equivalent experts on the Microsoft forums would lead the seeker-of-truth down many twisty passages which didn't help. A third-party expert-ish site identified the true cause, but claimed the setting that corrected it was tricky to get to. A brief comment to that article, by someone with no letters after their name, showed the three-click method of finding and fixing that troublesome setting.

By removing the useless Microsoft shills from the pool, I'd claim that Windows 7 is now better supported than a month ago.

Cache flow problems continue for Intel: Yet more data-leaking processor design blunders discovered, patches due soon

Won't someone think of the Reviewers!

Every recent Intel review was just invalidated because the new microcode will certainly hurt performance, yet again. One can no longer trust comparisons made between new chips and those tested previously unless the reviewer re-tests each example with the current microcode and OS patch sets. Of course the same applies to the weekly release of new game-optimized video drivers. Welcome to "interesting times."

Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans

Lawyers going for the Big Money as usual

Yeah, don't go after the ones who actually manufactured the devices and chose to put the suspect software on them - go after the Big Company and claim Big Damages to enlarge your Big Law Office because Alphabet was dumb enough to release Android as Free/Open software that anyone can use for any purpose without paying the Apple tax. How very Prenda of you!

Cheque out my mad metal frisbee skillz... oops. Lights out!

Re: Nice to read this

[Old person alert]

People, yes indeed. At one point in my early career I was admitted to the exchange processing room, located behind a nondescript door on an upper floor of a bank building, which is now a lovely hotel. Within that room all checks received in the region were sorted and balanced between the respective institutions so at the end of the day the net funds could be transferred between the banks involved. This was done by trusted persons seated at custom wooden tables a bit more than a yard wide with low back and side walls to keep things from falling off the edge, and a motorized mechanical adding machine with printed paper tape for storing the numbers. The stacks of sorted paper instruments were then bundled into sacks to forward to their respective institutions. All told the business of the twentieth-largest city in the US was handled every day by fewer than a dozen individuals.

This was around 1980, and I was there to install their first electronic computer - a machine with less power than the original Raspberry Pi and costing as much as a luxury automobile. (Frankly I trusted the adding machines more but that wasn't my call.)

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: Why is this news?

Incorrect.

Raspberry Pi 4 specifications

Please scroll down to the line that reads: "2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE"

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

I've been happy with the Zyxel USG-40 and USG-60W in some offices I shepherd. Good wireless range in the 60W (skip the 2.4-only 40W) and multiple port-based LANs on all USG models allow segregating traffic by sensitivity of content, keeping guest WiFi, payment card services, and protected identity info on separate subnets. (Yes I know what a VLAN is. The Zyxel way isn't as flexible but also isn't as prone to erorr after a long night installing and configuring.)

Can save money if you avoid the annual license for the security services and reporting. Haven't tried their cloud products and likely won't because cloud.

Jerks caught being jerks.

I had already stopped looking at new Ubiquiti equipment due to their consistent failure to get tested for commercial use (OSHA law in the US) and overheating, dropped out of their forums after they spent their resources to make the forum "pretty" instead of something radical like getting the long-promised IPv6 support out of beta, and now this. The two pieces I had (gateway and one access point) were promptly disconnected and software uninstalled; replaced with a Netgear WiFi router I had in reserve. It will be replaced with a more industrial choice soonish, but it gets me to El Reg until then.

Expect a flood of Brand U on flea-bay in time for Xmas.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Re: Roaming profiles?!?

Line of business software for my biggest client specifically prohibits roaming profiles or Terminal Server. As the vendor also sells support, giving up a revenue stream like that corroborates your story.

Find out you skipped an important item and the old machine and all the backup tapes are at the e-waste recyclers. Hope they're hiring.

My preference is to keep old copies until the end-of-year paperwork is final -- around next Halloween. If it hasn't been missed by then, it will likely never be wanted.

Still around, actually works, mostly.

Yes I used it in the days of the blue and yellow cables. Recently had to move a small office (5 workstations) to new Win10 boxen and took Microsoft's "recommendation" to use the new LL instead of the suddenly-missing Migration Assistant. Handled the transport of licensed applications, HP printer drivers, and change from local to domain account quite nicely. Balked at one single-machine license for an old Office, but client had the cash for a fresh copy so no huhu.

'Tis a tad pricey in singles, but multi-set licenses from the big river are tolerable. Enterprises can get the red shirt discounts.

Consider the icon as meaning: "I am moderately happy and wish to express my amazement."

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

Easy fix, hard to get enacted

A pair of two-word phrases would cure such nonsense: Strict Liability and Treble Damages. If companies that handle transactions were held to this simple standard of care, the problem would vanish overnight. Not even a bozo wants to be paying three times the disputed amounts, plus attorneys fees if they dispute it. Arbitration clauses be damned, you screw up and don't 'fess up, you get smacked down harder.

Move over Ceres! There's a new, smaller dwarf planet in town called Hygiea

Re: Carbon-rich: role of VDW forces instead of gravity

So it's not dustless like its namesake?

DIXON-TICONDEROGA-COMPANY-HYGIEIA-DUSTLESS

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

... I don't think IoT security is at the top of the list for kitchen hardware manufacturers.

FTFY

Gasp! Google Chrome kills uBlock, Adblock ad filters – grab the pitchfo- no wait, it's OK: They were evil fraud clones

Legitimate apps update through the app store, which also updates the signature. Sneaky apps update themselves through sneaky channels (that's what sideload means) to bypass any app store checks, and would not update the official signature.

Everyone remembers their first time: ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation'

Dodgy Excuses

It should also be noted the Starlink birds fly in an orbit considered too low for most scientific and commercial uses, as it is in the upper fringes of the atmosphere and will decay without continuous attention like an old Star Trek plot. This is by intent, to solve the "dead stuff being a space hazard" problem as the things naturally fall back to earth in a few years if the guidance or propulsion fails.

What the ESA is really doing in such a low orbit is up for speculation.

Security gone in 600 seconds: Make-me-admin hole found in Lenovo Windows laptop crapware. Delete it now

I see pointing fingers in your future

"____________ started it!!"

Fill in the blank with your choice of tech vendors and proclaim in the voice of an aggrieved child. Yep, AC, the marketplace has supplanted the bazaar of excellence with the sandbox of short term thinking. Forget California's Prop. 65 warning, the whole industry needs to be marked Adult Supervision Required.

Tor pedos torpedoed again, this time Feds torpedo four Tor pedos – and keep how they unmasked dark-web scumbags under wraps

Re: Using limited resources to maximum effect

So you missed this part in the third paragraph: "As administrator, Falte required users to upload images or footage of children being sexually abused to the site before getting access to the forum." For the reading impaired, that means each user had to also contribute something to the collection. Chances are copies of the same old nudegirl.gif wouldn't be good enough.

Linux Journal runs shutdown -h now for a second time: Mag editor fires parting shot at proprietary software

Re: Seems unnecessarily pessimistic

Ob. "then you haven't seen our mosquitoes!"

(Or why do you think The Elon is in such a hurry to get the flying not-a-flamethrowers built in Texas and Florida?)

Seagate spins off a bit of cash from slowing disk drive business

Re: Dwindling Market for HDDs but still kicking - in part thanks to the Cloud Configurations

"... because of a high level of fault tolerance, they are also replacing traditional backup."

No, they aren't. RAID is still a mortal object created and used by imperfect mortal beings. The maintenance job that purges the most recent 30 days of transactions instead of the most ancient, the malware that scrambles the master customer table everything else is keyed to, the server update that (oopsie!) deletes the emails subpoenaed by the government-agency-you-fear-most - your fancy new storage system will quickly, reliably, and permanently propagate those changes to the far corners of your empire as faithfully as it does the latest self-congratulatory missive from CEO Wonderful.

The RAID too big to fail because it's too big to backup is simply too big. 3-2-1 is not just an old TV show, and you'll find the Nile crocodiles a lot friendlier than the enraged multitudes who come looking for a scapegoat when the backup you were told isn't needed is suddenly needed.

My philosophy is, any disaster small enough to leave someone to inherit the company should leave enough backups to rebuild the IT part of the company.

Waiting for Amos: SpaceX delays satellite launch as it tries hard not to blow this one up

Re: I miss the days when The Register had a space program.

Just a few more subscribers and your friendly neighborhood Vulture can afford to book that trip with Spaceflight or another rocket-share broker; putting the Beak Signal back in the Heavens.

Although I'd wait for the RasPi 4 Mk. II, just to be safe.

Microsoft snubs Hololens loyalists by already ending feature updates – even though version 2 isn't out yet

Business as Usual

So it's back to waiting for version 3.1 before we take any Microsoft product seriously? Or should we wait for Hololens for Workgroups?

(Icon represents the vapourware they're marketing.)

Dot-org price-cap scrap latest: Now ICANN accused of snubbing registrars with 'sham' public comment process

Re: Difficult solution

No, the real solution is to fork and replace ICANN. That this is impossible, given the competing and generally self-serving major interests which would need to come together to do so, is what gives ICANN the boldness to raise the Jolly Roger in this and many other decisions.

SpaceX Dragon flies British science into orbit, while stubby 'watertower' hops around Texas

Re: Landing rockets has been going on for awhile

Yeah, it was on TV about 50 years ago, I think.

Marketing is probably right but...

From all evidence the successor to "Grasshopper" should be called "Grassburner" as any vegetation in the vicinity will be rendered luminous during testing. Experience from further north in McGregor, Texas, has not equipped SpaceX for how fast things grow down south after a little rain falls or someone uses a big hose to put out the previous fire.

Icon because it's a hot topic and I can't have two. (Exits abruptly through trapdoor.)

Dutch cops collar fella accused of crafting and flogging Office macro nasties to cyber-crooks

There are always two

So they got the Student, but the Master who put the Sith Powers into the macro language remains at large somewhere near Seattle. Just hope we don't have to wait 16 years for the sequel.

Icon as a close approximation to licensed content (c) WaltsDeadnow.

Symantec share price nose dives after rumored Broadcom biz gobble taken off the menu

Re: bounce-bounce-bounce

Welcome to my world. Have one on the house.

bounce-bounce-bounce

[Cue 4th movement, Beethoven's 9th Symphony]

Freude, Freude, Schadenfreude,

Tochter der Gemütlichkeit...

Gone in 120 seconds: Arianespace aims for stars, misses, as UAE satellite launch fails

No boom today

Most likely a "Remove before Launch" ignition safety was missed in the hurry to get off. Probably lost the orange warning tape when it was put back in after the failed attempt earlier, and Jacques thought "I'll fix that after a quick one at the local."

Marriott's got 99 million problems and the ICO's one: Starwood hack mega-fine looms over

Collateral damage in the Cyberwar

So the company is targeted by a State-sponsored entity in a cyberwar skirmish between superpowers, and yet it is supposed to fall on its sword for being the victim? Perhaps you will pay all your neighbors when your house is burglarized because you made their insurance rates go up?

What will $15.5bn buy you? For Broadcom, it could nab itself a whole Symantec

Yeah, Broadcom, don't do that.

But if you can string Symantec along until more bad news comes out, nobody wants it, and you can buy the name for 15 million and bury it in an unmarked grave, that would be great.

Suspected dark-web meth dealers caught by, er, 'using real address' when buying stamps

Sigh. Please read the whole story. It wasn't pretty little anonymous pictures distributed by a former Federal agency, it was Internet-based postage meter labels that contain the purchaser's account number printed on each to demonstrate the Postal Service got its pound of flesh before attempting to deliver the goods. A quick chat with the online service provider translated that number into the artillery coordinates for the SWAT team. No weasel-protecting needed.