Posts by Yes Me

American sales in China

Not true. China has been a major market for Cisco, for example, for many years, although in the last two years they have been losing sales, mainly because of tRump's stupid tariff war.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-systems-results-idUSKCN1V424I

Re: In a past far far away - targetted ads

"the NZ IRD would achive better result by engaging some local talent, like the Piranha Brothers"

Even better, they could have launched a worldwide pandemic and closed the NZ border to everybody except returning expats, many of whom might regard paying back their student loan as better than dying in an overcrowded NHS hospital.

(Needed an icon for "Sick Joke Alert")

Re: National security?

"Are you comfortable with the Chinese government having ready access to the personal calls of our politicians? Of OUR intelligence agents?"

Who is "our"? El Reg is not a US publication to my knowledge. Just play with the variables here, e.g. "are you comfortable with the Swedes having access...?" If you're British, "are you comfortable with the Americans having access...?".

All this has nothing to do with security; that's smoke and mirrors designed to conceal a good old-fashioned trade war.

Re: You can do that much more efficiently in C

Once upon a time in a country far far away, I had my hands on a network and an interpreted language that could send bits of code to be executed in another computer. For example, a bit of code that printed HELLO on the console and then picked another computer at random and send itself off there. Made quite an interesting concert on the various DECwriters around the room. Amusingly hard to stop.

Motivations

"The sanctions are not politically motivated. They are financially motivated."

There's no distinction between the two in the tRumpian view of the universe, which has apparently infected the party formerly known as Conservative. This is an incredibly stupid move that will come back to bite the UK both politically and financially, when the revitalised Chinese high-tech industry takes over in 5 or so years from now. (We all know that technically and from a security viewpoint, the Huawei kit is just as good as anybody else's.)

Re: But

Ironically enough, the largest distributed processing system in the Eastern USA appears to be a single point of failure. One of the benefits of virtualisation!

Re: Anyone who ever dabbles in vi

I think it's time somebody mentioned TECO.

Failed Turing test?

Well, I tried that on jabberwacky.com, and I have to agree it didn't go too well:

Who are you?

John goes into a restaurant.

You should try escargot.

He orders lobster.

Lobsters aren't that cool.

He pays his bill and leaves.

But dave is a statue.

Now, what did John eat?

I can't tell you - spies are everywhere.

Re: Too Many Stories!

Speaking of conveyor belts (well, not really) I once heard from a purported eyewitness of a safety person investigating how a worker had managed to seriously staple her finger with a heavy-duty industrial stapler, despite its safety guard. "How did it happen?" asked the safety person. "Like this!" said the worker's supervisor, before they rushed him off to hospital. (This was decades ago, in a factory in a city in the East Midlands.)

Re: FCC

Some of those tweets (including the first one, of course) are truly hilarious. It isn't even worth trying to work out which are trolls. Just a bucket of laughs.

Those crazy Canucks

"wonder WTF the canucks were thinking when they decided to go for a re-run of this with Miss Huawei"

Actually they were just following orders from south of the border: Canada border agent says he received unusual FBI phone call in Huawei CFO U.S. extradition case | Reuters

Trump's great gift to China

Yes. There's no doubt that Trump has given China (not just Huawei) the strongest possible motivation for developing a complete chip supply chain. It will take them a few years, but it will definitely Make China Great Again. About the worst possible thing Trump could have done for American hi-tech.

Socket switches seem like a weird idea...

My grandmother (who was brought up when gas was available in Burnley, but not electricity) didn't agree. She thought that just like you need a gas tap on every outlet, you also need an electricity tap. When the plug-in electric clock (a present to my grandfather from grateful parishioners) finally broke and was thrown away, she saw that there was no switch on its specially installed round 2-pin socket over the mantelpiece. (This was years before 13 amp sockets were installed.) So she sealed off the escaping electricity by Selotaping an aluminium milk bottle top over the socket. (This was years before home milk deliveries stopped.)

Fortunately the short circuit that readers are no doubt hoping for did not occur, and she survived for many more years. The next time we visited, my father ripped off the aluminium, but I'm pretty sure Grandma insisted on a stout cardboard replacement. You don't want electricity leaking into the room.

Re: Can never work

Yes. This could just be the boost that true peer-to-peer encrypted messaging has been wasiting for.

Your lawnmower is obsolete

You just wait until you start to see ads telling you that your lawnmower is 5 years old and must need replacing soon. (I need to patent that idea, it's a clear money-spinner.)

Re: "But cozying up to the US definitely is."

"since Suez"

Much longer. Since mid-1940 when the UK ran out of gold and was saved by the US lend-lease program(me). Suez was just a reminder.

Re: At what point do you pull the plug?

"Its just the same as PIR trying to sell off .org but at least that was blocked."

No, it isn't. It may be hard for Kieren's fans to believe, but .org was always going to be operated under constraints placed by Kieren's arch-fiend known as ICANN. The .org registrants wouldn't have noticed much difference.

The .uk situation is completely different because the ultimate authority is the UK government. We'd be much better off with the registry run by civil servants than the corporate animal that is Nominet. It's being going downhill for years and now it seems to have reached rock bottom: not fit for purpose.

Re: I don't want to stereotype doctors as arrogant...

Your problem there is that you need to make them wait far longer than 10 minutes for their call to be answered. And make the music really horrible.

Fixed it for you.