* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

NSA leaker bust gets weirder: Senator claims hacking is wider than leak revealed

Stevie

Re: Voting machines are a bad idea

Dangling Chad is also a terrible name.

Stevie

Re: Liberals - read, try to understand.

Your keyboard is sticking again Matt. You mis-spelled "Hillary".

Stevie

Re: OTT (Millennials have normal names)

Yet only a decade before we delighted to Tarquin Fintimlin Whimbimlinbim Bus-Stop F'tang F'tang Ole Biscuit Barrel, and a decade before that Screaming Lord Such.

Millennials are a boring bunch, t'would seem.

Signed:

Peter Brian Norman Scot Neigh! Frog-Gobbler Whoops Cuckoo-Cuckoo Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head Chuggata-Chuggata Bang! Smith.

Stevie

Re: don't people have normal names these days?!

I know a chap who for reasons best known to himself had his name changed from something fairly prosaic to the handle he used on various forums.

His handle?

Anon.

I'm not making that up.

Hotel guest goes broke after booking software gremlin makes her pay for strangers' rooms

Stevie

Re: Banks are not to be trusted

Err, sorry? This came as a revelation? Do the words "sub-prime" and "mortgage crisis" mean nothing to you?

You do know there's a difference between a high-street bank and an investment bank, right?

Stevie

Re: That's why I use a credit card

Nonono Version, you should have used your personal debit card and taken the hit.

That many commentards couldn't be wrong.

The umbrella protection afforded valued credit card users by the banks is only to be used by "c*ntish" morons like me.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

@Dr Syntax: in every case in my own experience it has been one (1) call on a toll-free number and a painless process, followed by a confirmation a couple of months later in writing.

It's almost like some of you are guessing how credit cards work based on some nebulous model arrived at by viewing twitter feeds.

Or, like I said, the relevant UK law has become so naff in the time since Nat West asked me to call (toll-free, transatlantic) over a fraud THEY had detected taking place in America on my UK Access card that risking your own hard-earned cash is preferable than seeking to invoke it.

I've had about a dozen instances of fraud on my cards over the years. No cost to me. No fees. No penalties. No late-payment fees. Nada.

Which is why I can't for the life of me understand the desire to use debit over credit forming in an intelligent brain.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

@Dropbear: "Fees"? Amounts in dispute are not assessed these "fees" you rant about.

Do you actually have a credit card?

Stevie

Re: Bah!

@William 3: and yet with numerous frauds attempted against cards issued to me, starting in 1984 with a UK Access Card "taken" to Atlantic City through to the latest $1500 swindle attempted on my NY Visa Card, it has cost me personally exactly nothing.

What, you thought I was just making it up, like those catastrophe stories people claim as true every Friday?

Stay away from my server room.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

@Solarflare: if so then my sentiments in the follow up are redoubled. Stay away from my computers you smug, illogical gits.

Stevie
Pint

Re: Bah!

Thank you Antron for pointing out what I thought was obvious to the Not-So Clever Young Things.

Beer for you. Bought on credit, of course.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

And amazingly, 40% of commentards think it's a better idea to have your own money on the line than the bank's.

Not sure I'd want that sort of logic engine designing my backups, switch arrays, disaster mitigation measures or even brewing a pot of coffee.

Or is it that UK credit card protection law is so unbelievably naff that having your current accout raped to bedrock is better in every way than invoking it?

Stevie

Bah!

And THIS sort of shit is why you NEVER EVER EVER use a debit card when a credit card will do.

That few days will sort itself out doublequick within a billing cycle and will be all the quicker resolved for it being the bank's money on the line.

Australia to float 'not backdoors' that behave just like backdoors to Five-Eyes meeting

Stevie

Bah!

What is needed is an international effort to get legislation passed guaranteeing ruinous monetary penalties should the Back Door Key fall into the hands of unauthorized people.

Yes your bank account was raped by Chechnyans using a key pulled from a government laptop left on a train, but now you are a multi-millionaire.

Gotta dream.

Going to Mars may give you cancer, warns doc

Stevie

Bah!

We've know this for furging yonks for flock's sake!

Scientists! Stop cribbing from old textbooks and do science!

Class clowns literally classless: Harvard axes meme-flinging morons

Stevie

Re: Bah!

"They didn't kick out the students involved - they kicked out those who had crossed whatever line they determined defined inappropriate aka stoopid behaviour."

And in doing so they opened themselves to the old "Select ten peasants and make an example of them" abuse of power charges.

Look, I'm not saying what these idiots did was acceptable. But isn't one purpose of a University to widen the student's perceptions and open them to new ideas? Including how to be adult and know when to keep schtum?

Does anyone really think anything good will come of this action? Or is it possible that now we have a group of young people convinced that they were victimized for their out-of-mainstream opinions and denied their future over it?

Look around - look what happens when such people gather together and make their voices heard at the right (or wrong) time. They may not be the only ones rubbing their hands in glee but they were part of the claque that enacted Operation Fuck-Em Where They Beathe.

There were cleverer options open to the supposedly intelligent people holding court.

Stevie

Re: Student Code of Conduct

Social Media has become The Clap of the Digital Age: no matter who initiates the interaction, everyone comes away scratching their crotch and vowing "never again".

Employers abuse their position when they scrape (there is no more appropriate verb) social media to dig up the dirt on a prospective hire.

Young would-be employees retain an idiotic naivety when it comes to using social media platforms, behaving on-line in an exaggeratedly juvenile manner, then have the nerve to act surprised when they're found out.

Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium in which juvenile behavior can be forgiven - up to a point - and employers understand that without a safety valve the boiler can blow with catastrophic results.

Bring on the EMP.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

But it isn't a right guaranteed by an old piece of parchment, more of a "let things go on until they go too far" affair. It is entirely at the discretion of those who own the platform.

Not the same thing at all.

Stevie

Bah!

While I fully applaud the effort to clean up this sewer, two points I see:

a) Kicking out the students involved was not an intelligent way to go about this. I can envisage several more onerous ways of re-indoctrinating Da Yoofs while still milking them for their fees,

2) The offended young lady who joined these fora: Did she actually post anything or was she there just to be offended?

Teaching students that Free Speech does not exist on the internet is a great thing. I support all efforts to throw a bucket of cold reality over anyone who thinks otherwise.

But semi-professional outrage is becoming tedious, and can end in such unpleasant side-effects as the election of the Clown Car Caucus to real power.

As for Kathy Griffin: Same applies. Make her sit in the unpopular corner for a bit by all means. Voting with yer feet is always an option (at least for now). But save me the fake outrage over a fake chopped-off head that looked nothing like OPOTUS. Nobody seriously thinks she has an army of people waiting to assault Mara Lago to remove anyone's head.

Well, I say that but given the utter tripe I've heard people declaring as true in the last year I suppose there might be a few dolts who do think that.

The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems… but not in the way you think

Stevie

Bah!

Religeous wars are mechanically no different from any other type - political ideology or land-grab being the two broad classifications I can immediately call to mind - in that the reason they collapse is when the money needed to prosecute them dries up.

You can talk about The Will To Win or Public Opinion, but they both boil down to sources of funding in the end.

If you think carefully there are any number of relatively recent examples of the phenomena in action.

HPE: You're rubbish at hybrid cloud – so we'll cook a NüStack to fix it

Stevie

Bah!

Anyone else read that as "nutsack"?

First-day-on-the-job dev: I accidentally nuked production database, was instantly fired

Stevie

Re: " Step away from IT for a minute - Induction 101 "

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"

Stevie

Re: Oops

Wow. 1976 and no backups.

Incredible.

Stevie

Bah!

Too many "Oops" moments in this Buster Keaton movie script.

Disbelieve.

Schiaparelli probe crash caused by excessive spin, report concludes

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Complicated???

What the fuck is complicated about defining the legal domain of an altitude calculation to be a POSITIVE INTEGER?

Or in using a violation of that to start the process of taking measures to, you know, not plough into the Martian regolith at maximum wellie?

We've known how to tell negative numbers from positive ones in code for a few years now, way before the commissioning of The Martian High-Cost, High-Speed Impacter.

My original outraged comment stands.

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

Stevie

Re: Fountain Pen

At St John Backsides Comprehensive you had to pass a handwriting test *before* you could switch from pencil to fountain pen.

Ballpoints were forbidden under pain of detention.

Stevie

Re: Giving the users what they ask for......

And then there's the one that goes "I don't understand how we did such a great job but still got outsourced".

Correlation does not imply causation. Usually.

ESA astronaut decelerates from 28,800kph to zero in first bumpy landing

Stevie

Bah!

Probably not so much that they didn't have easy access to the sea as they didn't want to risk the US getting to their spacecraft first and "helping" in the recovery.

Love bots lecture thrills room full of Reg readers

Stevie

Re: A companion in my old age, if...

In ten years? Of course! In ten years Mr Trump's enlightened policies will result in a gatrillizon dollar surplus for all the things we really need instead of vaccinations that give kids Autism and rules that slow down pharmaceutical innovation with pesky needless "tests".

Stevie

Bah!

No,no,no,no,NO! You aren't getting it!

It's the fembots that will get objectified. Real women will now be able to rest in an objectification-free world of whatever they do when not "submitting" to male advances.

In the new world of the no-guilt ready-for-action 24x7 "around the world in 80 ways" fembot, only perverts will prefer sex for fun with women.

And who said the fun will only be for hetero men anyway? Once the basics are worked out it should be eminently possible to fit out a Boytoy Bot who is hung like a horse and can go all night without farting, belching, sweating or falling asleep, brings flowers and likes long romantic talks afterward.

There is no downside to The Rise Of The Sexbot. Once they are a reality, western sex lives can normalize properly instead of being roiled in centuries of religious counter-programming and internet-induced false norms.

Actually there is a downside. I imagine the sex-worker industry will be caught up in a paradigm-shift maelstrom just like everyone else has been in the last thirty years. However, spin-off industries will arise in that field just as they have in every other, post-maelstrom.

Mine's the Cherry 2000 with the shiny, man-made textile clothing. Don't tell the missus (yet).

NHS U-turns on blanket IR35 tax crackdown

Stevie

Bah!

The problem is that the NHS thought Locums would want to be brought in under the ruling because of previous experience some years ago with British Rail Locums in which popularity increased in direct correlation with numbers opting in.

Their thinking was that once the whole thing got enough of a head of steam it would become a Locum motive.

Event horizons around black holes do exist, say astroboffins

Stevie

Bah!

Oh yeah? Prove iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Pentagon trumpets successful mock-ICBM interception test

Stevie

Bah!

Star Wars Episode 2: The Return of the Boondoggle.

Boffins spot 'faceless fish' in strange alien environment

Stevie

Bah!

The Deep One threat at abyssal depths is not great. However, the chance of crashing into a wandering Star Spawn taking a constitutional is frighteningly real.

WannaCrypt: Pwnage is a fact of life but cleanup could and should be way easier

Stevie

Bah!

And shame on the author for carefully aboiding saying that the biggest incentive to stay with XP was that the UI was pleasant and relatively easy to work with.

I used to work for a guy who downplayed Joy of Interaction in the mainframe apps we turned out. No menus because we had manuals (which no one read). Result: no one ever became proficient with our apps and everyone hated them.

Fortunately, MS have executed Plan Shred Own Foot with their bug-ugly flat-ass three color GUI so movng away from 10 should be a no-brainer.

Android apps punched out by Judy malware

Stevie

Bah!

Read as far as "JavaScript" then skimmed the rest.

JavaScript: the web attack vector of choice. Put some on your computer today.

IBM marketeers rub out chopper after visit from CEO Ginni

Stevie

Re: I was so hoping for her to demonstrate a new innovation

Back in the late 70s the Americans were experimenting with upward seat ejection for helicopters.

In the high-speed slo-mo footage I saw the helicopter in question had a four-blade rotor. Explosive bolts sheared first one opposed pair of blades from he rotor hub, then the other, then the roof was discarded before the seat rockets fired.

As I recall, "significant challenges" were faced to make all this happen reliably and in the right order and the idea was eventually shelved as Harriers were making big inroads to the military strike helicopter market.

I think, were I piloting a failing helicopter fitted with such an escape mechanism, my first thought would be to attempt any other option before chancing the complex ejector seat mechanism built on a low-bid contract.

Stingy DXC Tech tells staff to breathe in and tighten those belts

Stevie

Re: No real surprises here

I wonder if the Directorial Meetings no longer feature a roast unicorn buffet with coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a mermaid?

Scientists are counting atoms to figure out when Mars last had volcanoes

Stevie

Bah!

Dr Eccles Four million three hundred thousand and five, Four million three hundred thousand and six,

Lab Technician Bluebottle Eccles, would you like a cup of tea?

Dr Eccles Oh yeah! Nuthin' like a good cup of tea.

Lab Technician Bluebottle No, nothing like a good cup of tea.

Dr Eccles Slurrp! Nuthin' like a good cup of tea.

Lab Technician Bluebottle No, nothing like a good cup of tea.

Dr Eccles Nuthin' like a good cup of tea. Four million three hundred thousand and ... ooh!

One, two, three, ...

Sainsbury's IT glitch spoils bank holiday food orders

Stevie

Bah!

Curiously enough the same sort of thing happened to Margot Leadbetter and she and husband Jerry were forced to spend Christmas with Tom and Barbara Good as a result.

Not sure what wisdom can be drawn from this, other than there is a point where getting someone else to do your shopping for you can result in fiasco and home-made Christmas crackers sans little strip of explosive.

The barbecues in question would undoubtedly have been rained out, so no great loss.

US laptops-on-planes ban may extend to flights from ALL nations

Stevie

Bah!

Just another reason to telecomute or use private transport.

Coming soon: downswing in tres expensive business class ticket sales brings airline penury and layoffs. Trump to move aggressively to rid the nation of this onerous legislation, bring back airline jobs and Make Americas Airlines Great Again.

Or something.

Init freedom declared as systemd-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status

Stevie

Re: Bah!

I see that now.

I suppose a quip based on a mainframe-tech coincidence pun is right out?

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Do you Linux chaps really need an icon to tell you a post is a joke?

This one spun aroud the "extended support" statement.

Sweet Azathoth's nuclear nebulosity.

Stevie

Bah!

"Devuan 'Jessie' is done and will get long term support beyond the life of Debian Jessie"

So it is Linux XP then ...

Life is... pushing all the right buttons on the wrong remote control

Stevie

Bah!

Discs are better than streaming on Long Island NY because the cheapass cable company can't spare enough bandwidth to run the delivery at best-of-breed levels, resulting in stars that have clearly defined bands of light in concentric shells about them as Serenity zooms past them, explosions are ruined by pixelation as the palette overloads the pixels' ability to display it and James Bonds does the same every time he goes out at night in a black suit and the software can't figure out what's what and so runs a Gloomy Goth Pink Floyd FX lightshow over the important bits.

They also have the absolute naffest digital recorder in the world. Set it to record Jason Bourne and you get The Bourne Identity. Tell it to record what's left of Dr Who so you can switch to the news and you are odds-on to get a spiffy recording of the news you just watched when you page back to see whether the Daleks won this time.

As for remote-blote, I coped partially with this by buying the same brand disc player as my TV. I rarely need to faff about with two remotes, though getting the soundbar to wake up might require that.

What's needed is a proper API so we can blow a raspberry (Pi) at the problem once and for all.

'President Zuck' fundraiser opens for business

Stevie

Bah!

"In addition to a set of steadfast liberal principals, Mark shares (perhaps more legitimately) many of the qualities of Donald Trump that resonated with everyday Americans – a wealthy, anti-establishment outsider unbeholden to special interests."

a) Because that is working out so well.

2) Unbeholden? You're pulling my war wound mate.

þ) As for special interests, why, aren't both Trump and El Zuckface the very definition of special interests in and of themselves?

Cthulhu's Aquatic Anus, do we really have to recapitulate the 1900-1930 period before we remember why we said "never again"?

Sysadmin finds insecure printer, remotely prints 'Fix Me!' notice

Stevie

Bah!

Although I take most of these "I spotted such-and-such vulnerability and exploited it in this what-I-judge-to-be-humourous-fashion to alert the system owner" stories with a big pinch of salt, the commentor who pointed out the risk to those who are feeling clever is spot on.

Why this business seems to produce clever people with such poor impulse control beats me. I get the need to be seen to be as clever as they think they are, just not the lack of risk assessment skills.

FWIW these sorts of exploits go back into the greenscreen/mainframe days. I once discussed a simple and annoying hack possible with the old Sperry Univac editor messaging service with a colleague. Next day, yep, I was a victim. Entirely predictable, but the bright young man should have had the common sense to know that if I was telling him about this, I had a way out. Once out I (of course) turned the very same hack in such a way he sued for peace.

But in this case we were both drinking buddies and doing nothing to intrude where we didn't belong. Had we done the same to someone in the systems department to "illustrate the danger" we'd both have been fired and we knew it.

Astroboffins spot a new type of galaxy bursting with stars

Stevie

Bah!

Coo! Let's go over for a look.

What do you mean, too busy arguing about Pluto to have invented the interstellar overdrive?

So much for "science".

Google wants to track your phone and credit card through meatspace

Stevie

Bah!

So when the slutty credit card gets stolen, in addition to the inconvenience of cancelling the card and replacing it I will now also be deluged in targeted ads for state of the art video cards, SCUBA equipment and dog grooming salon supplies (all real uses others have put various cards of mine to without my permission)?

Not sure whether to be annoyed at irrelevant targeted ads (as if there were any other kind) or overjoyed at the sheer cobblers this will make of Google's $Data_Mine{$Stevie}, already half-bolloxed by my wanton and surrealistic browsing habits.

Walkers' Crisps pulls backfiring Tweet campaign that paired Gary Lineker and a bunch of nasties

Stevie

Bah!

Tsk! Marketers, eh?