* Posts by Steve K

1456 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2008

Microsoft releases kernel for unique (but critically panned) Surface Duo phone

Steve K

You can’t polish a turd..

There’s an old saying: “You can’t polish a turd.”

But you CAN roll it in glitter

UK Home Office seeks suppliers: £25m up for grabs to build database to keep track of crimelords' ill-gotten gains

Steve K

Re: I'll do it.

If you can keep it to 2x over budget then I think you've got a decent chance here.

What a time for a TITSUP*: Santander down and out on pre-Bank Holiday payday

Steve K

Update it in Leap Years only?

"24/7/365"

Would you like to think about that for a moment?

Update it in Leap Years only?

Here's some words we never expected to write: Oracle said to offer $10bn cash, $10bn shares for TikTok US – plus profit share promise

Steve K
Coat

Re: Gee I have a bad feeling about this

They can move the infrastructure to Oracle's Cloud as they have the empty capacity that no one else is buying...

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Steve K

Re: Desperate

ads more intrusive (off-key singing, jangly music, irritating voices)

Yes, and the use of the "Waif-o-Matic" on classic songs that are not improved by this treatment. In the UK, even "Born to be Wild" has received the waify female vocal treatment for (I think) Volvo.

I doubt it can be licensing issues since they wouldn't be able to use the song at all, so I figure that the only reason must be to make you interact with the ad - albeit negatively....

Steve K

Re: Prior art?

It's going to be a bit like a JEE deployment too

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Steve K

Re: Wee radge bastard

I imagine it makes shopping for Christmas/birthday fragrances for her easy (and cheaper....) too if you can get the 1-litre containers ;-)

Steve K

Re: Wee radge bastard

phenolic disinfectant

TCP or Dettol?

Steve K

Romanes Eunt Domus?

Is this the equivalent of Romanes Eunt Domus?

Huawei mobile mast installed next to secret MI5 data centre in London has 7 years to do whatever it is Huawei does

Steve K

Re: Does this mean all MI5 could find was a 30m cable?

Put in 2 orders for 30m ones?

So... just 'Good' then? KFC pulls Finger Lickin' slogan while pandemic rumbles on

Steve K

Re: You missed

Kan't F@ckin' Cook

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Steve K

High tide and choppy conditions?

If it's close at high tide as mentioned, what's it going to be like in choppy conditions and high tide.....?

So long, Top Gun... AI software waxes US F-16 pilot's tail 5-0 during virtual dogfight drills

Steve K

Re: EMP hoax!

Or Confusion?

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Steve K

Which brand?

Which brand?

I went through a load of 2002 to 2007 vintage CD/DVDs a few months back as an exercise and for many of them the indexes/ thumbnails were fine but several of the actual files were irretrievable. I had other backups of the important files anyway, but that was a little disconcerting.

These were all kept in cases in a dark cupboard, so dye/data rot is not simply about light exposure.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

Steve K

Re: The Browser is the Operating System. Be You a Vital Cog for ITs AI or just Chaff

virtual machinery talking to humans

Which one are you...?;-)

Trump backs Oracle as potential TikTok buyer

Steve K

Re: Couldn't...

You can't blame this on Mr. Hurd unless Oracle has unexpectedly novel Cloud strategy involving harps.

He died in October 2019.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Steve K
Coat

Re: Ext4 ?

There is still some software around that runs only on Widows

A crumb of comfort for Andy Non's wife and her laptop if he pre-deceases her....

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

Steve K

Re: Out of order

Out off order

It has been mentioned in the article, from the start...

SQLite maximum database size increased to 281TB – but will anyone need one that big?

Steve K

Actually...

That's not far off what they do if you read the testing part of their website!

https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

Single-line software bug causes fledgling YAM cryptocurrency to implode just two days after launch

Steve K

Re: Who didn't bother to test their code?

They moved fast - the whole project 10 days start to finish apparently!

Steve K

Investment?

It's not as if cryptocurrency investors couldn't have seen this coming

It's not investment, but pure speculation on Yet Another Digital Tulip. It is/was a day old crypto coin that has no historical information on which to invest, and a huge implied "Beta" tag on its front door...

Huawei Matebook X Pro 2020: Nothing too crazy but at least it's more fixable and cheaper than comparable Apple wares

Steve K

Screen rotation

I agree that a MX250 is stingy at this price, but you might find that the 90 degree rotation you want for tablet-like functionality can be enabled in the nVidia driver.

Super Cali COVID count is somewhat out of focus, server crash and expired cert makes numbers quite atrocious

Steve K

Re: Mary Poppins?

If you are a left-Pondian (or were born after the 1980’s) then you may not be aware that the original was a Sun newspaper headline referring to a Scottish footballing defeat (itself inspired by an earlier 1960s original one)

El Reg has since refined this headline to an art-form, emerging Brigadoon-like at infrequent intervals.

Canon not firing on all cylinders: Fledgling cloud loses people's pics'n'vids, then 'Maze ransomware' hits

Steve K

Re: "...offers 10GB of long-term storage space for people's personal photos and videos"

Careful with BD-RE...

If they are anything like Optical DVD-R/DVD+R/CD-R etc. then after a few years they are unreadable.

You might be able to read the index, but the files may be inaccesible.

The moral of the story is have multiple backup media (physical and Cloud) spread over on and off-site....

Steve K

Re: "...offers 10GB of long-term storage space for people's personal photos and videos"

Off site backup, memory cards can get lost/broken/corrupted, house can catch fire.....

Google reveals washable phone case, plus the new midrange Pixel 4a that goes inside it

Steve K
Coat

Re: Hmmm

Obviously from a use case analysis.....

What a good eye-dea: Battery-less, grain-of-sand-sized 2.4GHz transmitter to help save your eyesight

Steve K

Re: People don't like batteries

I think that the sentiment is that batteries should be avoided due to the possibility of leakage or the fact that when exhausted, the device would have to be extracted/replaced.

I don't think that the implication here is that the reluctance is due to 5G fruitloopery.

Leaky AWS S3 buckets are so common, they're being found by the thousands now – with lots of buried secrets

Steve K

AWS Default setting is Publicly Inaccessible

As others have already said:

The AWS Default setting is Publicly Inaccessible (at least in recent times), so a deliberate effort has to be made - with lots of warnings - in order to make a bucket public.....

It's possible that an incorrect Global policy might be in place of which a Developer might not be aware, but I'd still say that you have to try quite hard to make an AWS bucket public, since AWS are fully aware of the issues arising from this kind of misconfiguration and so defaults to fail-safe.

Dutch Gateway store was kept udder wraps for centuries until refit dug up computing history

Steve K

Re: Reminds me...

I remember that one!

Was still there in 2013/2014 as I was on a project in Northampton and regularly got a taxi from the station that went past it.

Never got close enough to see the date, but instantly recognised the Apricot logo.

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

Steve K

Re: SImpler solution?

I like that idea!

You could call it "More Coffee And Sugar" or MCAS for short. You could have it switch sides on every flight so that the right and left seats get the drinks feed so that one is always hydrated!

If the pilots disagree on this then it empties the drink on the console anyway.

Steve K

Re: SImpler solution?

Fair point on hydration, definitely but coffee is not necessarily the right choice there (awaiting a study on the comparative electrical damage characteristics of tap water vs. Mineral water vs. Coffee - with/without sugar!).

However, given the degree of risk analysis and mitigation in civil aviation, (e.g. crews timing out due to flying duty hours restrictions, systems redundancy, pilots sober) i am surprised that a more robust solution has not been attempted, as it’s a fairly easy one to mitigate (although maybe introducing the hydration risk you mention).

Pilots will of course never do this on purpose, as I imagine even an incident that does not zap the controls will (ironically) lead to a meeting with the Chief Pilot with neither tea/coffee nor biccies.

Steve K

Re: Wouldn't a child's sippy cup be cheaper?

Or a drysuit?

It would keep your feet warm too for ages

Steve K

SImpler solution?

I can't help but think that there has to be a simpler solution.

With other expensive pieces of machinery, there are usually big signs warning against eating/drinking in areas where spillage would be inadvisable.

Yet here you have a $100m+ piece of equipment (potentially with hundreds of passengers also on board) that they accept that the 2 key personnel could well slosh liquid all over the critical electrical controls....

I know that pilots have to eat/drink, but they also (generally) have to leave their seat to visit the toilet, leaving one pilot flying (and presumably during a quiet part of the flight).

From a flight operational perspective, what would be the downside of banning pilots from eating/drinking while seated at the controls?

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

Steve K

Duck Duck Go

Maybe he browsed on DuckDuckGO?

Heron knows he might cormorant to the idea.

Incredible artifact – or vital component after civilization ends? Rare Nazi Enigma M4 box sells for £350,000

Steve K

Re: Super duper encrpytion device brought down by simple mistake

Interesting as well, since without the slip-up you mention, presumably the Germans would have noticed that Allied detections went down for a period of time just as the 4-rotor machines were introduced.

They would then have deduced that the Allies HAD actually cracked the 3-rotor Enigma and the door would have been closed quite rapidly after that......

Companies toiling away the most on LibreOffice code complain ecosystem is 'beyond utterly broken'

Steve K

Cash

they don't need to continuously rake in cash

I think the point that Collabora are making is that they DO need to rake in the cash as their Developers don't work for nothing...

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

Steve K

Re: SoftBank bought a goose that lays golden eggs...

Not sure if that is entirely fair for SoftBank as they have a stated 300-year mission (or is that Star Trek)

Having said that, what was Mr. Son smoking when he invested so heavily in WeWork?

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

Steve K

Re: Puntastic

Yes - an ample amount indeed

Japanese probe to land asteroid rock sample in Australia on December 6th

Steve K

Called while you were out...

“Called while you were out, please call to rearrange delivery at the next orbit.”

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Steve K

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

The WWW was all black and white then. And they turned it off at 10:30 p.m.

Steve K

Re: Switching on the "monitor stand"

I think you meant Douglas Adams or Sir Terry Pratchett?

Smile? Not bloody likely: Day 6 of wobbly services and still no hint to UK online bank's customers about what's actually wrong

Steve K

Re: Smile, a trading division of the Co-Operative Bank

Careful though as the FSCS won’t cover electronic money accounts such as Revolut (as they aren’t a bank)

If the Solar System's 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole, here's how we could detect it... wait, what?

Steve K

Russell's Teapot

This is like Russell's Teapot...

Oracle tempts users to run its cloud in their own data centres – for a mere '$6 million' commitment

Steve K

We have a winner!

We have today's winner!

<doffs hat>

Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October

Steve K

Is this a fax moment?

I wonder whether we are seeing the equivalent (at least in the UK) of what happened in the late 1980s when there was a postal strike and consequently the demand for and usage of fax machines went through the roof.

Obviously some use cases (e.g. parcels) could not be replaced by faxes, but a lot of volume in smaller letters was taken out of the postal market by the time this strike was over. Then around 10 years after that, it was the turn of faxes to be superseded (not entirely) by email.

Similarly I wonder whether remote working means that less business air travel will be needed post-COVID19. ( realise that this will be nowhere near a 100% reduction).

With this project, surely they will encounter the same issues that Concorde faced with sonic booms if their flight path is over land (whether real or whether concocted to protect incumbent aviation manufacturing interests)?

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

Steve K

Re: Star Wars chronology reference?

At least we know how this one ends!

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Steve K
Coat

Re: Pips

I heard that Apple are working on it...

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Steve K

Re: Targetted by idiots

I find your telecoms/IT cavity wall hatches sales pitch brighten up my morning every day, but I already bought the hatches I need and I'm not sure the ones you advertise are waterproof..)

They may not be waterproof, but the El Reg ones do have a sign "Beware of the leopard" on them....

Never knowingly under-digitally transformed: Retailer John Lewis outsources tech function to Wipro

Steve K

Re: So. Farewell then John Lewis

In the article it states that it is under review:

Earlier this year, White launched a "strategic review" – expected to be completed in autumn – into the business, stating in a March earnings call it planned to close three Waitrose stores and look into the suitability of the "Never knowingly undersold" price-matching pledge.