* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Ansible dumps Van Halen product names for Led Zeppelin references

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

"....codebase which had been prone to having features bolted on without a clear cut architectural vision.”

Most places that's called "software development"......

Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox

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WTF?

Ok, so far so good.

However, once those ridiculously large number of billions of years are up and the black hole disappears, what happens to all the hairy information stored in its, now non-existant, event horizon?

This one looks like it belongs in the category of "Ridiculous answers given 'cos nobody's got the balls to say that the question's a load of cobblers."

What's going on with X.org? Desktop software body could lose domain

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Re: but....

FYI: I've usually seen that final quote attributed to Napoleon and have followed suit in the past.....

Lights out! Newbie IT manager's dark basement trip

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Happy

Re: Ah Diesel Generators

Best example of Murphy's Law in action that I ever saw was a diesel genny.

Test run every week it was. Once a month there was a full load cutover on a Sunday to prove the UPS and that the genny kicked in when required. Every six months it was fully serviced and the diesel tank was drained and refilled with fresh.

So, when there was an actual power cut do you think the sodding thing would start...........?

Time to worry about container standard's AWOL dates?

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I cannot let that pass without the obligatory XKCD reference.

'OAuth please do grow up' say IETF boffins

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Facepalm

Re: Why is oauth needed anyway?

Gosh, that's so obvious! With HTTPS we can do without authentication altogether, as anyone using a secure link will be OK to trust with access to all your shit anyway!

</sarcasm>

VW floats catalytic converter as fix for fibbing diesels

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Re: So close...

The CC's will have been omitted 'cos it's a diesel with a particulate filter.

Plumbed in upstream of the filter, they clog with particulates. Downstream they get screwed by the filter's burnoff cycles.

End result is that they suffer from short life in such applications, which is why they got left out when particulate filters[1] became mandatory. Too likely to fail within the warranty period.

Some diesels of Euro III or earlier and prior to filters have a catalytic converter. These use a more open matrix to allow the passage of particulates. It also allows the passage of most of the exhaust gases without them getting near the internal surfaces once appreciable flow rates are achieved. Still, they do a job at idle during testing.........(!!)

[1] A typically political fix. They turn larger particulates, which are known to be carcinogenic, into very small ones, which are only thought to be carcinogenic.

Planet-bonking rock hunt armed with humanity's cruellest weapon: bureaucracy

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Re: o.O

It does seem like rather a lot to spend on making sure that the tramp bloke wearing sandwich boards with "The End Of The World Is Nigh" on them has time to take the piss out of the rest of us unmercifully.

Juniper resets 'days since last rogue code incident' clock

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WTF?

Nonce?

Really?

I take it that whoever's responsible for dreaming that up is also the only SOB on the entire planet who doesn't know what it really means?

And who also doesn't double-check their neologisms with the urban dictionary to avoid nasty fuckups like this.

EU stay or leave?

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WTF?

Re: Stay

Leave.

For most of the same reasons........(!)

Standardisation. All the meaningful standards are set internationally. The EU is a turd-polishing machine at best in this area......Ok, a very expensive and highly inefficient turd-polishing machine.

Produce. The CAP is the worst example of expensive, unnecessary, bureaucratic protectionism ever seen on earth. Its main effect is to fuck over producers outside the EU by skewing prices.

Emergency Coverage. If we're not using it, we shouldn't be paying for it.

Economic negotiation. Er, bollocks, bollocks and thrice bollocks. An argument oft given by the "in" crowd but unprovable (except by leaving and testing independence in this area) at best. As trade negotiations prior to EU membership (where you substitute the USSR for China as gorilla) didn't seem to be a major stumbling block, this one's almost certainly just FUD and outright lies.

Socialism. Yes, of course. Having our electorate's selected government overruled by the oligarchy of the EU commission is such a good idea., isn't it? Then again, socialism and democracy are and always will be natural enemies, so you can see the left's point here. The NHS is actually under more threat from the EU, as everywhere else has a private / insurance system, so any EU rules are designed to fit such.

Law. (1) That human rights legislation you're so fond of is a Council of Europe thing and not the EU anyway. (2) The way most European law is structured (including that self same HR legislation) is always going to be an issue with a Common Law legal system, as it's all framed for Code Napoleon.

Travel. You have noticed we're not in Schengen, right? No change either way here then.

Defense. A real shame NATO doesn't work for us........oh......hang on. Just what purpose does EU defense policy serve (apart from making oligarchs in Brussels feel important)?

Your boss yells 'build a secure IoT gadget' and you don't know where to start. Take a look at this

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WTF?

Re: I don't get it...

Jeeps and Boeings aren't part of the IoT.

Er, why not?

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Facepalm

"If you're an engineering sage...."

You should bloody well read it anyway.

Many gaping holes are left by people who really should know better. It's the; "I know what I'm doing and I've always done it this way" effect at work.

Oddly enough, most embedded code is not written by n00bs.......

British bureaucrats are world's most social-media-tastic

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WTF?

Can't see the connection myself. One's a publicity-obsessed, self-aggrandising little prick and the other's Sir Humphrey Appleby.

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WTF?

Well that's just great!

....a community of Twitter followers that equates to roughly 4% of the domestic population.

Which, as a way of keeping in touch with the population[1] is of about the same use as a packet of spongecloths is in addressing the York flooding. It would be quite interesting to know if any of those followers are not party activists or journalists......

[1] i.e. All of it.

UK energy minister rejects 'waste of money' smart meters claim

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Facepalm

Well DUH!

Every bugger knows damned well that it'll be a pig's ear, a waste of money and that the touted energy savings associated are distilled from purest bullshit and the resulting concentrated turds polished in powerpoint.

But the EU have mandated that it be done, so we're fucked. Everything you see from the government here is a manful attempt to deflect blame from the oligarchy actually at fault, in a vain attempt to avoid a GTFON vote in 2017 and the sudden stop of a rich political gravy train.

Chinese unleash autonomous airborne taxi

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Mushroom

I see the problem. 30 seconds is not enough time to get to orbit and nuke the site.

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

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Unhappy

AHF.

Thank you. I shall add that one to my ever-lengthening list.

That's the list that means; "When you see this as a source, it means what you're reading is the rantings of small-minded, killjoy Nazis.".

Motorola cut in half! But still alive, and ready to live again

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Hmm.

Once, while chatting to an IBM engineer while we desperately tried to figure out why a System/36 point-blank refused to talk to the outside world, he related to me the tale of the oddest callout he ever went to.

While the customer had provided the IBM feature code for the faulty machine, they could not identify it on their systems. He got sent out anyway. To a butcher's shop.

The feature code was absolutely correct but as IBM had not manufactured bacon slicers for many years it was no longer in the system(!) To cap it all, on being told that they no longer did that sort of thing the customer produced the extended warranty that he'd been religiously renewing every year[1], as had his father before him(!!)

I now wonder if it had that logo on it.

[1] Apparently inflation and decimalisation had not been kind to the premium charged.

Apple buys mood sniffer AI firm Emotient. Stop rolling your eyes at me, user

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Coat

Re: Just wait...

You may think you're funny, but it gets serious when your iPhone takes a dump in your hand.

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Headmaster

Sounds like a great idea. I've often thought that some of my cables and accessories are way too heavy....

Swiss try to wind up Apple with $25k dumb-watch

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Devil

Ive actually said that?

He's gone down in my estimations from "shameless wanker" to "incompetent twat".

He quite obviously has no idea why people buy mechanical watches, which displays an almost total lack of style or appreciation of design[1]. Bit of a career issue that, given his job.

[1] Then again, I've often thought that iDesign is best characterised as "chav Ikea".

Plain cruelty: Boffins flay Linux ransomware for the third time

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Happy

Re: Hmmm

Well that depends on the advice now, doesn't it.

Note that the improvement suggested is to take the MD5 hash of the seed candidate and use that as the actual seed. That'll be the same known vulnerable MD5 function mentioned elsewhere here as something nobody in their right mind should be still using, right? Note also that the use of the known time as the seed candidate is preserved, making deriving the hash and thus the key later a somewhat trivial task.

When it comes to staying ahead of the scrotes, there's only one thing better than knowing the fuckup they made this time around and that's knowing the one they're going to make next time.........

Wi-Fi standard could make Internet of Things things even easier ... for hackers

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Stop

Wasn't it bad enough already?

We see an ever growing set of "things", all of which have one thing in common. The security's shit and the chances of regular patch updates to fix 'em is slightly lower than that of ice storms in hell.

And you'd want to connect them to your LAN why exactly? Is there a name for this particular insanity?

Longing to bin Photoshop? Rock-solid GIMP a major leap forward

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Re: Luxury!

A blunt knife? Luxury that is. We 'ad to mek hole wi' bradawl and pull out sinews wi' pliers.

IBM union: OK guys, you've beaten us down, we give in

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Facepalm

Like anyone really cared.....

Using their own figures, they've managed to get 200 members out of a current workforce of 71,000.

You can't claim to represent the views of a workforce when you can't even get a paltry 1% of them to give enough of a stuff to join you....

We're all really excited about new smartphones, laptops, tablets – said no one ever

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Meh

Slight snag.

For somewhere north of 99% of "things", connecting them to the internet doesn't actually make them any better at what they do......

The ability to turn other people's houses into ovens or freezers remotely[1] does sound like fun though.

[1] You'll almost certainly get bored with fiddling with that thermostat from your phone after a few goes but, rest assured, the bad guys will keep looking for that loophole until they find it.

Firefox will support non-standard CSS for WebKit compatibility

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Mushroom

I'm sorry.....

.....but if you're using stuff from a standard yet to be finalised in your website, please fuck off and die horribly.

You are the problem.

Ruskie rats selling Choose-Your-Own-Adventure love scams

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Correction

"....would pass the scam test for the less weary dating hopefulsthose blinded by desperation."

They'd probably do very well if there were a huge list of blokes who do all their thinking with their dicks available online for them to target.............

Brit cuffed for Kyrgyz 'horse penis' sausage quip

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Meh

Re: No big deal

Hmm, sounds more Stalinist than Fascist to me which would be more logical given their background.

Then again I can never tell the difference between the gibbering Nazis and the raving Marxists, although I believe that there are those who think one's "good" and the other's "bad" for some reason. Must be something to do with who you decide to demonise, with an option to go on and exterminate, to motivate the agitprop boot boys.....

Apple had more CVEs than any single MS product in 2015, but it doesn't really matter

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Facepalm

Flash recording 314

Which makes Adobe the undisputed kings of shite in this game IMHO.

Why? 'Cos Apple's candidates are Operating Systems, performing a wide variety of tasks with multiple points of exposure to the world.

Flash does only one thing and yet is of such appalling quality that it's got almost as many holes as most things that are an entire order of magnitude larger and more complex.

Dust off those White Space devices: New rules finalised by Ofcom

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Facepalm

Hmm.

New kit can't mess with digital TV...

Probably in exactly the same way that Powerline kit "can't" interfere with radio signals. The problem is that it can. And it will. And this time there'll be lawyers involved.

I still reckon that as bloody stupid ideas go this is likely to be seen as one of the bloodiest and most stupid once the dust settles.

Linode: Back at last after ten days of hell

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Mushroom

Re: How much does it cost an attacker these days to launch a large-scale attack?

Except, of course, that if the brainless dolt persists in allowing root/admin privilege to all and sundry when asked every OS is vulnerable. Anyone who knows slightly more than fuck-all about computers knows this, which puts you in with the dolts.

The real question here is how do we produce an OS that completely denies all admin level privilege to the end-user, also lets them do what they want, where installation / upgrade / additional software is all controlled by professionals and its health is continually monitored by same? Also how do we do this in such a way as to avoid the flaming 'tards of the internet immediately killing it with rants about corporate/government/alien sponges control?

Facebook 'Free Basics' service frozen in Egypt

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Mushroom

This isn't about Facebook's commercial interests...

Of course not. I mean that could only be true if Zuckerbitch was all about signing up as many people as possible regardless of cost...........ah.........hang on.........

I sometimes wonder if the true purpose of the internet is to provide a platform for Facebum and Tw@ter to hold their subscriptions willy-waving contest on.

Researcher criticises 'weak' crypto in Internet of Things alarm system

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Facepalm

IoV

Internet of Vulnerabilities.

That's what we're actually building here.

BBC News website takes New Year's Eve break

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Black Helicopters

Re: Erratic

Everyone's more vulnerable to a DDOS than a fuckup.

For a start, you don't get fired for being DDOS'd.

In this business, if you know of an excuse for a calamitous ballsup that gets you out of the frame and that you know everyone'll buy without question, you bloody well use it!

Flare-well, 2015 – solar storm to light up skies on New Year's Eve

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Happy

Re: Never mind the US

Easy. Once you've fallen over while walking back from the pub ratarsed and are lying on your back trying to remember how to get up, the sky is that big black thing in front of you.

Upset Microsoft stashes hard drive encryption keys in OneDrive cloud?

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

Nice obfuscation of the neat bullet points in the article there!

....throws money and time into features most people don't need and then enables them by default.

MS, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, Google, Mozilla........etc ad bloody nauseum are guilty of that one. I suspect that the idea here is twofold.

First is that they think that if they add everything including the kitchen sink, they can please all the people all the time.

Second it gives the development team something to do in the absence of any better ideas....

Microsoft in 2016: Is there any point asking SatNad what's coming?

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Paris Hilton

Re: mad, really mad

Yup. My immediate reaction was that if Ballmer thinks they're wrong, they're almost certainly right.

We can judge his record running MS with the 20/20 vision of hindsight and, let's face it, it stunk something awful.

Bah humbug. It's Andrew's Phones of the Year

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Facepalm

Re: Flagships are sinking

you can get last years Flagship on a virtually zero cost upgrade

If you're stupid enough to shell out for a premium price, long lock-in contract. Of course your network'll give you a decent upgrade in that case, it's the profit on the likes of you that gets the CEO his new Merc every year.

Hey, Santa – duck! Space shaft buzzes Earth on Christmas Eve

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Go

Re: Which?

I congratulate you and feel I have to say that it's proven to be remarkably effective, as rock-repelling tigers go.

Christmas comes early at US Patent office after massive IT outage

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Trollface

You know what this means?

They don't know that there already is such a thing as a UPS!!!

Off to file a patent and get very rich......

Riddle of cash-for-malware offer in new Raspberry Pi computers

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Alert

Hmm.

Talking of pushing users to go to dodgy websites with highly questionable content, if you hover over the letter in the article it says; "View image on Twitter"......

Robotic exoskeleton market to grow 40 per cent a year until 2025

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Coat

Re: Robotic exoskeletons are handy...

...and what was the point of everything after "France" in that?

The Police Chief's photo library mixed business, pleasure and flesh

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Facepalm

You should see what a nice, steaming hot coffee mug does to the actual disk inside a 3.5 inch floppy when the user is in the habit of using it as a coaster to protect their eye-wateringly expensive mahogany desk from the heat.......(!)

No, I didn't get the important spreadsheet data back..... although I was moved to enquire as to what it was that had led them to believe that diskettes were less vulnerable in this regard than legendarily robust hardwoods.

TeeCee Gold badge

Ah yes, spaces and phone support.

Had this one firsthand from a bloke at a software house who was called by a customer who'd installed their product (we'll call it the "XYZ" system here) to find it didn't work:

"Who were you logged in as when you ran the installation?"

"Er, me."

"Ah, that'll be the problem. It is clearly stated in the installation guide that the installation process must be run as root. Can you get the root password?"

"Yes, of course. Hang on a tick."

[a couple of minutes pass]

"Right. Got it. Shall I run the installation again?"

"Before you do that, we should probably tidy up the remains of the invalid one, just to be on the safe side. Could you cd to slash bin for me?" (yes, this is some considerable time prior to the POSIX directory merry-go-round)

"Done that."

"Great. Now type rm -rf XYZ* and press enter."

"Done that."

"Okay. Now we'll....."

"....Wait, it hasn't come back yet."

"Is it back now?"

"No...."

[cold sweaty feeling]

"Could you read back what you typed on the command line please?"

"rm minus rf XYZ star"

"Can I have that with the spaces please?"

"rm space minus rf space XYZ space star."

"Ooooooookaaaaayyyyyyy. Do you have a recent backup of the server....?"

YouTube puts T-Mobile US on naughty list for throttling all vids to 480p

TeeCee Gold badge
Meh

It's the YoiuTube problem.

YouTube are like the great granddaddy of torrent leechers. They chew on everyone else's bandwidth for their own benefit and give fuck-all back (any contribution made to backbone routing by google is of sod-all significance when it's your local loop getting the shaft).

For some reason, when we elect to block or throttle some leeching git it's a good thing, but when a provider does it for the same reasons, it's bad. One law for us I guess.....

Easy answer. If you really must have 24hr mobile access to that cat falling in the bog, don't use T-Mobile. Personally I like competition and a service where I knew that the bandwidth wasn't being shat on by drooling morons giggling at shit videos sounds very attractive.

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Facepalm

Re: Wiretapping? Interference in electronic communications?

So you reckon that playing any video in anything other than its native resolution is copyright infringement?

You are a complete spanner and ICMFP!

(Hint for the terminally thick: I reckon youtube don't put those 8k vids up purely for decoration).

No, Kim Kardashian's plump posterior's pixels did not break the App Store – just this El Reg man's mind

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Mushroom

"...things that she holds dear..."

Presumably that doughnut with the lavish, chocolate coating is how she got that fat arse in the first place.

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

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Odd really.

Nobody anywhere seems to have ever implemented the right use for this sort of tech.

The ability to look up exactly where your bike currently is[1], courtesy of the electronics embedded in the frame and remotely detonate the 1/2 lb of C4 adjacent to same.

[1] In case the scrote who nicked it is currently using it in a place where there are innocent bystanders of course. Bonus points for finding it's in "Honest Dave's Dodgy Bikes" and claiming the jackpot.

Surface Pro 4: Will you go the F**K to SLEEP?

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Facepalm

Doesn't go to sleep?

If you have Cortana set to respond to "Hey Cortana", turn it off. That often does it.

Used to work just fine, but broken as of the 1511 update in Win 10. This is probably the most annoying thing about 10, the major updates have a nasty habit of breaking as much, if not more, than they fix.