* Posts by Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

2452 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007

Motivational speaker in the slammer after HPE applies for court order

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Colour me interested...

So what are Lorraine Thea Thorpes key skills exactly?

I'm reckoning blowjobs and spending other peoples money on handbags.

IETF 'reviewing' US event plans in the face of Trump's travel ban

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Only the second week

Muslim is not a religion. Islam is a religion. A muslim (generically speaking) is a follower of any branch of the Islamic religion in that same way that a Jew is a follower of any branch of the religion Judaism. So yes, broadly speaking it is rascist, or at the very least highly discriminatory because in its intention it is targetted directly against one particular set of ideological beliefs as well as specific geographical ethnicity. Even more so, this dragnet will also entangle people of other religions from those same countries named.

Coming to the big screen: Sci-fi epic Dune – no wait, wait, wait, this one might be good

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I watched Arrival...

And similarly to the movie The Usual Suspects, when I had finished watching it I wasn't quite sure what I had watched, or that I had even understood it. Loving that Amy Adams though.

So I've gone and bought the collection of short stories that the Arrival story is based on and hopefully it'll make some better form of sense after reading it.

Roll on Blade Runner 2049.

Dido queen of carnage steps down from TalkTalk

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Who knows...

Perhaps she'll just slide off into the sunset to record that difficult third album...

Felted! AI poker bot Libratus cleans out pros in grueling tournament, smugly trousers $1.8m

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Nice results, but...

Now put it in a chair at a World Series or Aplha 8 final table and see if you get the same result.

VPN on Android means 'Voyeuristic Peeper Network' in many cases

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I don't understand...

When taking into account the reasons for using a VPN I really don't understand the logic behind using free VPN components when it seems so blatantly obvious that it will have been compromised by design in some element of its service. Moreso when you can buy a perfectly good secure service that integrates with the OpenVPN client for absolute peanuts.

I pay 30 euros every six months for mine which if my maths is correct is approximately £4 per month at current exchange rates.

Oracle sues its own star sales rep after she wins back $200k in pay fight

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Oracle Delenda Est

Really? Really REALLY?

I've no love for Oracle but have made a lot of money over the last 20 years implementing their core enterprise and ERP solutions (SAP also) as an independent contractor. There are better (and cheaper) industry scalable alternatives to almost every single product Oracle offer.

WTF? Francis Ford Coppola crowdsources Apocalypse Now game

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Terminate... with extreme prejudice.

In Vietnam everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission... and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over... I would never want another.

The horror... the horror.

Something about snails and razor blades.

Jinn workers besiege delivery app co-founder to protest wage changes

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: I've little sympathy for him

A minor edit if I may be so bold...

A lot of these tech "entrepreneurs" seem to think normal working rules and practices don't apply to them because... "we're sooooo cool", "and it's the web innit?", "and life is so lovely in our web 2.0 force field bubble", "and because we're being disruptiv8in", "and coz we'd rather do first and ask permission l8erz... becoz Google yeah?"

"Oh yeah... and that exploiting cheap labour thing. Just don't mention the exploiting cheap labour thing ok? Ok."

Shocked, I tell you. BT to write off £530m over 'improper' Italian accounts practices

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

No doubt...

Your BT bills will all be going up again, again.

All the cool kids are doing it – BT hikes broadband and TV bills

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Where do you walk to?

They are all as bad as each other, but where I am in the South of England the actual Virgin BB service and speeds are excellent albeit I only have the basic 70mb broadband i.e. no TV service or anything like that. Their customer service is pretty bad - but I'd hazard to guess they are no worse or shonky as all the rest.

They do seemingly raise prices every 6 months or so etc. etc. but every time they have done this I've been straight onto the customer retention line and ended up on a cheaper package overall.

Best of luck.

El Reg drills into chatbot hype: The AIs that want to be your web butlers

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I was quite interested in the Echo...

So I stumped up £50 for a Dot and quickly found out that it is a pile of crap. It doesn't recognise half of what I ask it unless I talk to it like an utter simpleton, and only then if my question or request is worded in the way its algorithms are designed to process the input. Subsequently it has now been gathering dust on my kitchen shelf since before christmas - unplugged I might add.

I have better bots that respond much better and will always remain totally ad free - they are the wife and kids.

Valley techies to protest outside Palantir – Trump adviser's creepy citizen database biz

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Land of the Free?

... and the home of the scared of everyone and everything.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: But Trump said...

Which 1/16th exactly? Fingers? Lungs? Or is it a selective combo of one arm, your colon, a forefoot and an earlobe?

Did Oculus swipe blueprints from rival? Zuck takes the stand

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'd be very surprised indeed...

If neither Carmack or Palmer Luckey didn't make off with key elements of the codebase or documentation when they sold their souls to Facebook. The key part I guess is whether or not this was included in the bill of sale when the deal was done.

Opera scolds stale browsers with shocking Neon experiment

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Any attempt to get people to use a VPN is welcome...

And the Opera one is a good start (other than the lack of global endpoints) and as long as you don't want any non-browser data secured... or collected by the Chinese.

UK can be a 'world leader in 5G', you say? Er, our 4G still takes a beating from Peru

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Funny that...

Whenever our beloved Government claims that we can be a world leader in anything we actually end up as a third rate also ran. I holidayed on a tiny outlying island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean last year and it had more reliable 4g than where I am in the South of the UK, where Vodaprawn incidentally tell me I should have "amazing" coverage.

Crumbs. Exceedingly good cakes, meat dressing price hike in wake of the Brexit

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'm sure...

I'm sure that an extra 5p or so on top of my beloved 6 pack of Bakewell tarts isn't going to break the bank. Alternatively if I was really moved to do so I'd just reprioritise or do away with some of the other superflouous stuff so the impact of these cost rises are of minimal impact.

No fuss. No dramas.

NGO to crowdfund legal challenge against Investigatory Powers Act

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

£50 pledged.

Go kids go!!!!!

Cache flush: AI poker bot to compete against top players in tourney

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Hmmm....

Being a poker player myself, although preferring real cash games to internet based ones, I'd be interested in understanding what boundaries the machine AI is basing its game on. If its primary decision making logic is based on getting the maths and probabilities right based on previous betting patterns, as well as the potential number of "outs" based on cards left in the deck etc - then I'm not sure where the AI is in this AI poker bot. These elements AFAIA have already been conquered and are already in play in the internet poker world seeing as that "physical" element is removed when playing online.

If the AI is taking on board the physical inputs as well i.e. facial recognition, posture, emotional cognition etc etc then that would be very interesting to follow.

Puny galaxy packs a big punch: A gazillion joules' worth of radio bursts

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

The only plausable explanation...

So considering that in the Star Wars films it generally doesn't take anyone with a light speed equipped ship much time to jet about from spot to spot, I'd assume that that galaxy is quite small... a bit like the one in this story.

The Galaxy in this story is also far far away... and at the distance from which we are observing is it also fair to say that what we are actually observing happened a long time ago...?

I'd summise then that the star sucking death planet space station thing in The Force Awakens has been emitting its death blasts on a higher frequency than that shown on what we can now also assume to be a documentary, rather than a work of fiction.

Thankfully it was destroyed so these emissions should stop soon. But what if those Galactic empire bastards build another... only bigger?

Busted Oracle finance cloud leaves Rutgers Uni unable to foot bills

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

So...

I'm not sure how it works in the States but cutting off the power due to the non payment of a bill is the very last extreme measure taken by a supply company after they have exhausted all other remediative actions. Putting the Oracle issues aside, I draw the conclusion that Rutgers are seemingly totally inept at FO management by default if they have no manual backup process to receipt and match an invoice to make an emergency manual payment to a regular supplier for something as important as keeping the lights and power on.

As I said, maybe in the States things are different in terms of how they go about dealing with business customers in default.

Vinyl and streaming sales offset CD decline in UK music sales

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

@ It's understandable...

Hmmm perhaps. But during the recent resurgence of vinyl I've not heard that reason offered by those overpaying for their lovely albums. To me it seems that once again we have a sales channel being fanned by the flames of poeple buying vinyl because "it's retro" or by outburts of "oh, vinyl sounds so much better than CD" etc. etc. because let's not forget that those marketing types never miss a trick do they..?

I'm not arguing that either of the above propositions are correct or incorrect. But it screams of hyperbole when HMV are trying to get people to pay £20 for a 12" vinyl edition of DSOM when my 1982 pressing cost me £3 from my local 2nd hand record store.

And just for balance, yes, my remastered CD version of DSOM sounds much better.

How Rogue One's Imperial stormtroopers SAVED Star Wars and restored order

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Not seen R1 yet but...

A few things bugged me about The Force Awakens... the bratty bad dude wasn't convincing, the whole Han Solo dad & subsequent death by son seemed a bit obvious and contrived; the odd tentacly space monster things and chase took me back to that whole childish Jar Jar binks debacle, and finally the sun sucking spaceship / death planet thing seemed a bit too fantastical to sit in the Star Wars universe. I'm pretty sure that was because no-one felt they could say no to JJA.

Looking forward to seeing R1 though as even though it seems I'm in the minority, I really liked the Godzilla reboot.

Apologies for potential incorrect use of the semi-colon. Still don't know how they work.

Radical 5G rules proposed, but UK can address woeful coverage right now

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Perhaps...

Perhaps all of those *cough* industry experts, service providers, municipals, councils and .Gov will have agreed a way forward by the time 9G arrives.

Landmark EU ruling: Legality of UK's Investigatory Powers Act challenged

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

This is great news...

I was unfortunately unaware that any major challenge to this foul and rank piece of legislation was still underway. Great to see that it is still being fought on our behalf as most times I feel powerless to help with the cause.

Zuckerberg turns his home into Creepy Robot Buddy

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

It's not really AI though...

What is described in the article does not really strike me as being particularly AI though. Whilst I'm very happy to accept that it is certainly "artificial", there doesn't seem to be any "intelligence" to it at all. What is described is electronically unlocking a door based on a fairly straightforward flow diagram or decision tree which is triggered by various data feeds. Technically functional... but certainly not AI.

Non-existent sex robots already burning holes in men’s pockets

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Ex Machina

As long as they all look like Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina then I'll be quite happy to part-ex the wife in.

BT and Plusnet most moaned about broadband providers. Again

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

It's funny how much opinions vary...

I have been with (what is now) VM since the old NTL days and I've very VERY rarely had issues with either their broadband speeds or customer service. I pay for 70mb and strangely enough, seem to receive exactly that. They do have an annoying habit of regularly offering capacity/speed updates for "free", but then 3 months after it happens - putting my bill up by £5 per month. Each time this has happened though I've got straight onto their "retention" line and managed to get back to a cheaper deal.

IBM staff petition for right not to work on Trump's pet projects

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Rometty is a shill.

She has no interest in the "values" of the workforce or statements on corporate morality that were penned over 50 years ago. Just like all the rest she will pucker up and take what she can get.

MH370 hunters call for new search of extra 25,000km2

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Congratulations!

And you Sir win the needlessly pedantic comment of the week award. I'm sure someone somewhere who knows you will be very proud.

Beeb flings millions more £s at Capita for telly tax collection

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Yeah, and another thing...

I don't pay for a license either because IMHO the amount of sheer crap shovelled by the BBC far outweighs the value I get from all of the non-crap, and the amount of intra BBC adverts is f**king annoying. Clare Balding is useless, and worst of all in my view... on a rapidly increasing level, every other programme seemed to feature the presenters of other BBC shows as "prime content" which is actually tantamount to corporate incest in my view.

And if it is "my" or the "peoples" BBC, why is almost every other programme "celebrity this..." or "celebrity that..."

I can't stand them.

HPE 3PAR storage SNAFU takes Australian Tax Office offline

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

In my experience...

The HPE kit in itself is ok. The problem as always with any facet of dealing with HP (now specifically HPE) is with their own internal *cough* professional *cough* services and management people, and the multitude of various generally uninformed and unempowered subcontractors that they use to fill their own resource gaps with.

Taking that on board, then at first glance I'm not surprised at this story. But considering who the customer is - I would than also be looking hard at the client side IT management and digging further into those risk assessments, migration plans, dress rehearsals and backout tests that should have been completed and signed off.

Again, all that said... IT's complex 'innit and things do go wrong.

Men! If you want to win at board games this Christmas, turn off the rock music – scientists

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Wow...

I wish I could spend my days doing research as groundbreakingly beneficial and useful to the human race as this.

Trump's 140 characters on F-35 wipes $2bn off Lockheed Martin

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

If there is correlation between the two events...

Then it would be interesting to see who was buying the shares during the fall.

PAC chair: Who's naughty or nice? The 3 IT mega projects that had better watch out

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

You'd think...

You'd think that with all these mega projects and programmes that .Gov is running, that one of their departments, say... the OCG for example, would at the very least come up with a half decent structured methodology for managing th...

Oh...

Neo-Nazi man jailed for anti-Semitic Twitter campaign against MP

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

No issues with the sentencing, but...

It doesn't appear that either prison, detention or the supposed rehabilitiation that those facilities are supposed to provide are being much of a deterrent does it?

I feel a small island off of the coast of Siberia would be a much better place.

Brits think broadband more important than mobes, cars or savings

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

If this is true (which I doubt)...

It's a shame that Which didn't further the survey result by asking the respondents that if they felt that strongly about access to the internet, why then didn't they take more of an interest in throwing out the snoopers charter.

I guess they only survey though those certain types that they know will give them the answers in support of the headlines they want to print.

Firmware freakout sends Epson Wi-Fi printers into reboot loop

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Google... suspend.

Never have two words been paired together in such perfect and planet aligning harmony.

Information on smart meters? Yep. They're great. That works, right? – UK.gov

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

"has been informed by a range of UK and international evidence and seeks to drive uptake and support behaviour change to deliver maximum benefits for consumers from smart meters.”

International evidence from countries that have entirely different regulated and unregulated energy markets. I also like the way that the canned .Gov relating to the benefits still fails to actually state what those benefits are. This is one screwed up programme - but that's DECC and Ofgem for you.

Shhh... let's not also mention the XOSERVE gas transformation programme that is 1.5 years late and about 30m over budget.

Brit telco EE's ads banned for 'misleading' 4G speed claims

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Another pointless award... in a sea of other bland meaningless industry awards.

The ever increasing proliferation of meaningless awards given out these days by meaningless organisations is just getting tedious. The department I work in was nominated for some IT industry awards by some dull organisation recently and we decided to make better use of the time by not bothering to attend. Anyway...

"50 per cent faster than the other providers... during the defined test period."

Nice caveat at the end of that statement by the way. I'll make a fairly certain assumption that this "test" period was for approximately 10 minutes starting at 3.32am sometime over a quiet holiday period. It sounds like a similar ruse to finding the council plans in the basement, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

Tobacco giant predicts the end of smoking. Panic ensues

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Vaping isn't cool

Really?? So you'd prefer it if these ex smokers and kids stayed smoking regular cigarettes then? I have no science to hand to convince you that vaping is "cleaner" and less unhealthy than smoking 20 Marlboro lights every day, but from my personal experience I would say that it is. Very much so.

To be honest though, if a kid is going to smoke - then he's going to smoke. Whether that be analog or digital cigarettes (excuse the parlance). And surely any "less unhealthy" form of smoking is better than a "more unhealthy" form.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I think you just nailed it Andrew...

"Was their real goal saving the planet? Or did they just hate people deriving pleasure and utility from the use of cars and cheap air travel?"

I think the answer is most certainly yes to the latter. There is also a lot of free money in NGO work.

UK.gov was warned of smart meter debacle by Cabinet Office in 2012

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Not compulsory?

Agreed. But it's also not compulsory that it not be wrapped up in tin foil.

/* No tinfoil hat icon anymore? */

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Re: Benefits

Good post. Just about your "demand management" point though. There is already an annual industry "auction" process to cover this whereby large companies (or distinct parts of large companies) can bid for reduced tarriffs on large energy supplies in return for accepting the risk that they may be cut off in the event of a national energy shortage.

Smart meters play no part in smoothing out or making that process more efficient.

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'm not having a smart meter either, but...

Having worked on the programme for a major utility, one of the industry benefits sold was of having a quaint national grid of connected smart meters [in this world of uncertain energy suppliers] - to be able to analyse past energy use on a large scale, and then use that information to be able predict future demand to help inform our future oil/gas/coal demand and costs on the global energy and futures markets.

This benefit when explained, makes sense - and I kind of support it theoretically (even though it's not actually achievable practically). Funny then how it's the driver of the core benefit that one no-one from the energy companies mention, as it should directly tally to lower customer energy bills from the supply side (thereby reducing their corporate incomes), rather than by reducing the actual amount you use (for which their is no science based factual evidence to support anywhere).

This argument, if it was properly balanced totally in my favour; and if I was feeling in a utilitarian mood might convince me to even consider the question if I thought it would by any significant margin drive down my energy bills.

But it won't.

And I'm not.

UK Parliament waves through 'porn-blocking' Digital Economy Bill

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

Opera VPN and Protonmail

Hmmm... Opera VPN (similar to almost every other service Opera has integrated) is actually a really data-leaky proxy service rather than an actual VPN. It may be fine for spoofing your endpoint IP address but does nothing for protecting the rest of your privacy. It's also owned by the Chinese, does full proxy request logging and several of the endpoints resolve directly to "Five eyes" countries. Not good at all as far as I can see.

But "what about encryption" I hear you say you say???? Well, I'm sure Opera have heard of the concept.

As for Protonmail - well... all well and good I guess... except if none of your other email contacts also use Protonmail, or if you want to use a 3rd party email client such as Thunderbird. In those cases it's pretty much fucking useless.

How-to terror manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon, Waterstones

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

FTFY...

"Manuals still being sold by Apple, Amazon and Waterstones."

You are on a slippery slope El Reg if you want to start policing the internet out of fear for a few miserable sad extremists that may or may not actually exist. More importantly... I still get confused as to whether the full stop goes inside the final " or not. I thought I'd add some excitement to my day by going for the former...

UK's Universal Service voucher scheme urged to shift monopoly away from BT

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

I'm pretty sure...

A couple of years ago El Reg ran a story about a rural community that were so fed up with the lack of decent broadband that they effectively set up their ISP to service their town but were then told to turn it off after some legal challenge by BT or someone???

100k+ petition: MPs must consider debating Snoopers' Charter again

Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

From my particular view...

It's sad, but from recent obvservations it seems to me that the majority of the population don't seem to give a hoot about their privacy as long as they can take advantage of all of the shit black friday crap over the web or stream the latest vacuous piece of "entertainment" served up from the TV companies.

A quote then from Sir Bill of Hicks that even though almost 25 years old, still seems relevant to both the UK and US : "Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!"