Posts by First Light

You think the UK coronavirus outbreak was bad? Just wait till winter: Study shows test-and-trace system is failing

Re: COVID is nothing compared to being hacked to death with a machete over the last tin of beans.

That approach didn't work in Sweden, they isolated their elderly and the elderly died in vast numbers.

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Re: The thing that they do

The problem is not that MS will go out of business, but that it will buy/eat up/push aside/strangle/destroy all competition. MS was found guilty of monopoly practices in the case brought by the US Dept of Justice. So I'm not making that up. You can make profit, but it should be done legally. MS broke the law and in consequence is the behemoth that it has become today. Ditto most of the other tech companies and the Congressional hearings last week showed it.

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

Re: On helpdesk calls

But will it give the computer COVID? ;-)

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Re: As funny as this is...

Yeah but he's 76 and probably has better things to do with his time. Why should he have to do anything?

Get ready to try virtual-reality goggles, er, virtually: Another in-person event bites the dust as CES 2021 hauled online

Re: Dumb move

You forgot to add "/s".

Dear Reg: Hawaiian shirts are now "over", due to being worn by nutjob Boogaloo people. If you will admit to having any in your closet, you should dump them ASAP. You can, however, make them into face masks. I don't think the Boogalooers do face masks, so that should be safe.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

The Beeb is left-leaning? That's news to me!

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

The Foundation distracted from MS monopoly trial

Please remember as you celebrate BG, that the foundation was a response to the DOJ suing MS in 1998 for monopoly, and the terrible PR that went along with publicity around MS business practices and Gates' bitchy trial testimony. 70% of his total contributions to the foundation were during the 18 months from the start of the trial to its conclusion (MS lost, by the way). It was a PR offensive. BG *may* be doing good things now (and questions have been raised about the foundations' philanthropic practices), but the motivation is selfish, the wealth he has accrued is obscene and the product he created is still causing heartburn around the world.

Re: Gates' problem

Does the COVID experience account for your unusually not-shouty posts today? Or did you actually die and someone else took over your account? Or maybe you are actually dead but still posting?

WordPerfect was the assistant/secretary/word processors' dream product. I used Wordperfect in the 90's, and was shocked when I changed jobs and had to use MS Word. It was SUCH an inferior product, especially unstable with large docs and did weird things with margins and tables. WordPerfect was way more stable.

I seem to remember that, back then, even though you could easily open a MS Word doc in WP, you could NOT NO NEVER open a WP doc in MS Word.

I remember filing a large and important legal report in court in the early 2000s that at the last minute got a ton of errors exactly because of stupid MS Word incapacity to handle large-size docs. Had to file an errata sheet because of the software. Pffffh!

Mexican cave relics suggest humans were populating the Americas up to 17,000 years earlier than thought

Re: YDP

I don't get all the downvotes. It's always been confusing to me why evidence of settlements predating Clovis were so fiercely disregarded or invalidated. It comes across as dogma. I associate it with a white male approach to archaeology. Especially the disbelief that people could have arrived prehistorically by sea instead of land.

UK intel committee on Russia: Social media firms should remove state disinformation. What was that, MI5? ████████?

Re: Report from self-important people, etc.

"finely-honed mind" !!!! LOLOL.

When you say stuff like that, you sabotage your own argument.

UK formally abandons Europe’s Unified Patent Court, Germany plans to move forward nevertheless

Actually when I read their post here I assumed it was sarcasm. It is the leavers who have never been able to justify leaving, to give one good argument for it. If Lucrelout is serious, then it's a case of projection, since Brexit supporters have always been short on facts, logic, common sense, decent arguments for their cause, expertise, etc.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Re: In summary

No, caste came from religion.

If you believe their count is accurate, that is. I suspect many countries around the world have less-than-accurate counts.

UK government marks 'at least' £115m for new Brexit systems against backdrop of chequered IT project history in customs and border control

This gave me the best belly laugh in a while.

On Google maps it's closest neighbour is Inaccessible Island. Which couldn't be more poetically named considering that's what Britain will be pretty soon.

Re: Winter is coming

How about euros? Just for the irony . . .

Guilty: Russian miscreant who hacked LinkedIn, Dropbox, Formspring, stole 200-million-plus account records

Re: Metally fit

He'll end up in Club Fed with the other white-collar crims who have it easier than in regular federal pens.

Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar

Re: Can't abide the stuff.

My liver hurts just reading this!

Captain, the computer has identified 250 alien stars that infiltrated our galaxy – actual science, not science-fiction

Re: Upvote for E.E. 'Doc' Smith

I am new to this author, but I am particularly encouraged by the fact that he was also a food scientist who specialized in doughnuts and pastry mixes.

Shopped recently in a small online store? Check this list to see if it was one of 570 websites infected with card-skimming Magecart

Re: 40000

And in India, biotique is a national brand of body care products.

Another anti-immigrant rant goes viral in America – and this time it's by a British, er, immigrant tech CEO

Alcohol reduces people's inhibitions. This guy has probably thought those thoughts for a long time, it only came out because he's drunk. I'm not sorry for this guy, because for every guy or woman who gets in trouble for this behavior these days, millions of minorities have been discriminated against for decades, if not centuries. So the fact that it's going public is a good thing. It is a consciousness-raising exercise and apparently lots of people need their consciousnesses raised.

I don't see what this has to do with the Harper's letter, which is about preserving open reasoned debate. I don't believe the Reg should have shoehorned it into this article. The two issues do not go together, as the racist guy is just being a duck. The Harper's letter is about people expressing rational opinions and being destroyed for them because those opinions do not meet some kind of cultural litmus test. Yes, the method of trashing people's lives may be the same in both cases, but drunk racists and rational thinkers are not in the same category at all.

UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb

Re: For something one must have.... or for something some think no one should really have?

Don't forget the Orange sash!

Capita Consulting ditching more than a quarter of its workforce 45 days after consultations with consultants

Re: Crapita

Me too, but this is solely due to reading El Reg comments!

I was screwed over by Cisco managers who enforced India's caste hierarchy on me in US HQ, claims engineer

In response to various comments on this topic:

Caste was originally an organization of society by profession, with the priestly Brahmin caste at the top. Therefore, Brahmins consider themselves perfect for, and entitled to, executive positions.

Caste (and region) can be given away by name, for example Iyer or Iyengar = Tamil Brahmin, Nair is a kshatriya (warrior or ruler) caste of Kerala,and so on. Again in Kerala, the Parayas and Pulayas were slave caste names. (Hence the incentive for lower castes to convert and leave caste behind, something that drives Brahmins nuts. The lower castes should stay poor and Hindu.)

Although in the metropolitan areas of India people may socialize with each other across caste, when it comes to arranged marriages (still the norm), caste is generally a factor and people are still murdered/ostracized by their own families for marrying out of caste. Caste has been maintained through centuries by significant violence between caste groups and individuals and distribution of economic resources along caste lines.

The Indian community in the US enjoys a status as the wealthiest of immigrant groups. I blame national origin discrimination practiced by the same community. It's not just the problem of nepotism, it is discrimination in favor of Indians and against non-Indians. I have been waiting for some enterprising plaintiff's-side employment lawyers to make that argument.

Indian culture is also misogynistic, so when Satya Nadella talked about women waiting for a raise rather than asking for it, I was unsurprised.

HR departments should be highly culturally aware and conduct cross-cultural training. But after all the training is done, you will still get the Nadella-type comments and conduct because the basic prejudice is so deeply ingrained.

Beijing's tightening grip on Hong Kong could put region's future as an up-and-coming tech hub in jeopardy

Re: "we need clarity on what the laws will involve before we can decide anything"

The Hong Kong Bar Association has expressed many concerns about the new law and its consequences for judicial independence and the continuation of common law standards, as well as the specter of extradition to the Mainland. It is CLEARLY a departure of great significance for HK. You can read their press releases at hkba.org.

Stinker, emailer, trawler, spy: How an engineer stole top US chip designs, smuggled them to China to set up a rival fab

You mean Las Malvinas? ;- )

One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway

Re: Bloody Good Idea

Does Blighty include Scotland, NI or Wales?

I've never really been sure.

Re: "quantum compass technology"

I suspect the UK Navy will be increasingly LESS global as time goes on.

How is chain of command going to work with US Marines on Brit ships?

Huawei wins approval to plonk £1bn optical comms R&D facility in UK's leafy Cambridgeshire

That would be 52nd state, after D.C.

CompSci student bitten by fox after feeding it McNuggets

Wombats?

Forget foxes, wombats are the real danger.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/22/woman-attacked-by-wombat-thought-she-was-going-to-die

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

Did you forget your kid?

I want to know what your kid's response was to eating the food.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes: UK man gets 3 years for torching 4G phone mast over 5G fears

Re: He isn't all bad.

That's as close as you can get to sacrilege on here.

Indian app that deleted Chinese apps from Androids deleted from Play Store

Chairman Xi is going to the time-honoured practice of stirring up an external enemy when your internal support is suffering. What with the HK protestors continuing to stick it to the mainland, and the massive disaster that was COVID-19 which has damaged China's reputation not to mention killed untold thousands of its people, he needs a foreign adventure to wipe it all away.

Re: the common denominator in all of those disputes.

Ooh, there was me thinking it was the British, but hey, blaming Muslims always works.

I don't seem to remember much Islamic presence in Las Malvinas, however.

You're not getting Huawei that easily: Canadian judge rules CFO's extradition proceedings to US can continue

Re: Drumpf's Gulags any better than Chinas?

That's a false equivalecy.

99.9% of Chinese criminal prosecutions end in conviction.

That's not a typo or a metaphor, it's fact.

Re: Justice

Yes, the DOJ has been corrupted, but claiming she will get a "show trial" goes way too far. The judges and juries still have a say. The non-Trump judges are still good, but as time goes on the judiciary itself will weaken because of the low caliber of his appointees.

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: Simple Response.

Laugh?

More like cry, weep and gnash their teeth. Methinks it's the beginning of the end for the ol' US of A. I suspect so does Chairman Xi, hence the latest adventurist/irrendentist behavior from that corner.

BoJo buckles: UK govt to cut Huawei 5G kit use 'to zero by 2023' after pressure from Tory MPs, Uncle Sam

Re: Is it wrong to be in favour of this?

Love your analysis! It reads like an Oliver Stone script.

(I guess that dates me). And it's probably true!

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

Favours from the dogs? You mean at Towcester?

I just rewatched "Children of the Stones" from ITV on Youtube recently. I remember being scared but fascinated by it when it first came out.

Mirror mirror on the wall, why will my mouse not work at all?

Re: obvious

Back when mice had balls . . . how do they reproduce now?

(Sorry, I couldn't let it go!)

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Did part of it fall?

Any chance that a piece of this is what I saw a few nights ago that fell into the Arabian Sea? It was nighttime in India and I saw a greenish-white light fall west of where I am (on the southwest Indian coast, so into the sea probably a few hundred metres out).

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: And what about the people ...

I hate to say it but I do believe some elderly with moderate or severe Alzheimer's/dementia need microchips. I once had to call Berkeley police because some well-dressed older man got off the last bus at the last stop and sat there as if waiting for the next one. I knew he hadn't a clue what was happening.

We're not Finnished yet: Nokia chalks up €200m sales hit to 'COVID-19 issues'

Nokia also just signed a US$1 billion deal with India's Bharti Airtel to boost network capacity.

Taiwan’s tech production went boom! in March

Taiwan preference

I once interviewed a Japanese manufacturer who was applying for US visas. I can't remember what he was making. He had a factory in Taiwan, but then got many offers from China to switch manufacturing there. He did so, but ended up getting ripped off so badly with faulty products and other shenanigans that he switched back to Taiwan.

Who can we count on to slow Huawei's continuous growth? US prez Donald Trump and COVID-19

Re: With Trump & Co. still apparently on a suicide mission

Sadly, I believe the DNC is organized and successful - their boy Biden got the nom. IMO he's a terrible candidate, and I will struggle to vote for him in November, although knowing I MUST. I resent being put in this position by Establishment Dems who don't get what's going on. Bernie or Warren were my choices, preferably together on the ticket.

The bane of Spain comes mainly on the plane. Good luck Barcelona: You've bagged the MWC contract again

I saw it happen

Many years ago I saw a mugging in Barcelona with a North African group taking a German woman's bag. She and her male partner chased after the group but it was too late. There were about five in the muggers group and they all went different ways so you couldn't figure out whom to follow.

What shocked me the most as a visitor from NYC (at the time), was the utterly blase response of the local plod. They could care less. I told them I got a good look at the muggers and they didn't want to know. Just told me to put my bag in front of my body instead of behind so I wouldn't be robbed. Disappointing to hear that teh situation hasn't changed.

India allows half of IT services workers back to the office next week

Re: Good grief.

Unfortunately, one of the tests for English proficiency in India is IELTS. From what I have seen of it, IELTS is a crash course on American business jargon. It teaches idioms and cliches of the corporate American workplace. So it is not unusual to find this kind of butchered Americanism in certain Indian forums. My personal unfavorite is "prepone" as opposed to postpone, which I have often come across in customer service communications.