* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Unpaid tech contractor: 'I have to support my family. I have no money for medicines'

Stevie

Bah!

What a bunch of mealy-mouthed, victim-blaming gits post to this forum sometimes.

My sympathies are with those who for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance of their duties are now confronted with poverty.

Republicans go all Braveheart again with anti-net neutrality bill

Stevie

Bah!

Republicans slap the word "freedom" on stuff the way repressive regimes slap the word "democratic" on their country names.

And it produces the same effect in this observer's brain. "Hooray for Opposite Day!"

Forgetful ZX Spectrum reboot firm loses control of its web domains

Stevie

Bah!

Is anyone in doubt of what is going on here?

It's another Peachy Printer.

Welsh Linux Mint terror nerd jailed for 8 years

Stevie
Pint

URe: Suicide Tractor

Pint for you.

It's a question worth asking: Why is the FCC boss being such a jerk?

Stevie

less government = more freedom for the citizens

No, that doesn't follow. Less government (in your terms) usually means less access to drinkable water, breathable air, affordable, well, anything really. At least, historically it has meant that in the USA. The oligarchs who run big businesses have historically gouged the ordinary "folks" (a term certain types of well-bought and paid for politician uses that they think makes them seem more like you'n'me but actually makes them look smarmy and is a dead giveaway for who's pockets are lining their own) until the outcry has threatened to reach Red October levels, at which point some savvy politico steps up to the plate and engineers an "enough is enough" Hail Mary pass and saves the day.

I was particularly impressed by how certain types of politicians kept a straight face while claiming in public that a more expensive, less inclusive "replacement" for the ACA was actually better as it offered people "more freedom".

Need the toilet? Wanna watch a video ad about erectile dysfunction?

Stevie

Bah!

"It's bad enough having to stare at the same old poster ads for travel cases, incontinence pants and erectile dysfunction while you have a slash. Now I'm going to be forced to watch a video of all three while drying off."

Another use for Duct Tape, the universal fix-it.

Can also be used to fix a leaking tank, improvise cushioned seating, replace missing hinges and provide a method of holding the door closed when the lock has been "misplaced".

Always carry a reel when you go to the bog, in the bag with your industrial strength antiseptic spray with bleach, emergency soap, emergency bog paper, emergency paper towels and basic emergency plumbing tools (collapsible plunger, Stilson's self-adjusting pliers, universal flap valve kit etc).

'I feel violated': Engineer who pointed out traffic signals flaw fined for 'unlicensed engineering'

Stevie

Re: Toyota? Brakes, or "uncommanded acceleration"?

Yeah, I remember these stories, along with the elaborate, cruiser-wrecking "rescues" the NY police forces enacted.

I always found myself asking "Why didn't anyone suggest turning off the ignition?" but then realized that in some cars that can cause the steering lock to be engaged (some cars have the "aux power" key position AFTER the "lock steering" one - something which should have been fixed by engineers or by law years ago).

Superdeluxemobiles have a push-button ignition switch so that is no longer a concern (or is it? I dunno).

Stevie

paying your fees

Fees paid to professional organisations both in the UK and America go towards all sorts of things besides coffee and donuts for the admin staff.

I'd talk about lobbying efforts and legal work to defend the rights and roles of the membership but I'd be wasting my breath.

I mean, how do you think old boy's get networked FFS?

Stevie

Re: Hold up ...

No, that was a HHGTTG thing.

Also, it wasn't Descartes who said "I am what I am". That was Popeye the Sailorman.

Stevie

Re: design a train whistle (4 Kiwi)

You need to turn your "said while keeping a straight face" detector on.

Don't listen to the doomsayers – DRM is headed for the historical dustbin, says Doctorow

Stevie

Re: the recycled crap hellyweird is pumping out

I look forward to a renaissance of British Film in the post-Brexit world then.

Sneaky 'fileless' malware flung at Israeli targets via booby-trapped Word docs

Stevie

Re: resides solely in memory

Yes, but you have to spot it before it encrypts your SAN.

Waiter? There's a mouse in my motherboard and this server is greasy!

Stevie

Re: Frog

Real unboned raw dead frog?

Irish Stripe techie denied entry to US – for having wrong stamp in passport

Stevie

Re: HR = House of Representatives.

It does?

I always assumed it stood for "Horribly Rong".

Stevie

Re: Charity by numbers (4 AC)

" Every country I've been to has its own tipping etiquette."

And in every one you'll hear an Englishman complaining loudly about the raping of his wallet.

"Secondly, despite all its warts, the UK is still a democracy."

One in which about 50% of the electorate is arsed enough to vote on any given issue.

"saying that your voice can't infuence anything is just plain ridiculous." (sic)

I didn't say that, you did.

"As far as the article 50 is concerned, it ain't over until the fat lady sings. "

Who's in denial now?

Stevie

Re: Charity by numbers

a) Per capita? Since most of the English people I've met are tighter than a crab* I doubt this is a worthwhile statistic. It's the intent that matters, not the forcible removal of tax monies sans polling for opinion of the taxpayers.

2) You can't cite the EU to support a UKcentric point any more. You are in denial of article 50 mate.

* before you scream and leap, ask yourself the last time an Englishman DIDN'T complain loudly about tipping when abroad, even when they aren't themselves abroad. Many examples exist in these very comment pages. **

** I am English. I cringe whenever I'm in a restaurant with an outraged Englishman defending the sanctity of his wallet against the rapacious waitresses of Aulde New Yorke and their unreasonable "demands". I also worked in the restaurant biz in the UK, which is why I don't any more. The true humour in English jokes about the tight-fistedness of the Scots is in the unrecognized irony. If you want to see something frighteningly funny, say "free bar" in the hearing of some Englishmen and watch the fun. Just don't be the poor sods behind the bar.

Stevie

Re: serves him right

How did the old UK Army parody go?

"Go to interesting places, meet interesting people and kill them."

To this we add:

"But for god's sake don't feed them."

Stevie

Bah!

Two passports.

This is what the UK Consulate suggested back in the late 70s/Early 80s when travelling in Africa, since seeing the wrong stamp in you passport could get you shot at some borders.

They also gave you a list of at which borders to show which passport. You didn't want to get this wrong either.

Peace in our time! Symantec says it can end Google cert spat

Stevie

Re: No.

I stand corrected then.

Stevie

Re: No.

The Carlisle deal closed? There's nothing saying so on the website that I can see.

More to he point, the Veritas acquisition news realease lists the "investors" contact point at symantec.com

Stevie

Re: No.

You understand that this is more of a problem outside the small world of NAV right?

This is a bigger deal for users of Veritas products in the enterprise, the volume manager and cluster management software for example.

It's paydaygeddon! NatWest account transfers 'disappearing' (not really)

Stevie

Cobol

Doubt it. Static linked Cobol systems just work. They get blamed for all sorts of problems, but if you track those problems far enough you'll find a stalled RFP to toss the baby out with the bathwater.

Besides, Cobol isn't about databases. Databases of the same despised era are CODASYL compliant, a slightly different thing.

Turns out you need to know a bit more about the Cobol stuff before you rewrite it. There was an awful mess back in the first George Bush era when a bunch of new financial software was put in place of some older nasty Cobol stuff and it transpired that the bright young things didn't bother to understand what they were tossing out.

This is a widespread issue of course, and undoubtedly the reason so many corporations are decidely unhappy at the thought of replacing applications that work for the dodgy world of hackable buggy replacement systems.

Nope, I don't do Cobol any more, but I have years of experince with it and could make a decent living doing so should the need arise. I'm also unafraid of computer language grammars that don't resemble Cobol and have a number of them under my belt.

Most of my younger colleagues with still-shiny CS degrees get the shakes if asked to look at anything that doesn't look like C to the point that their shell scripting skills are appalling. Hell, there are a bunch of them who can't get puppet to work and they had a bleeding training course on the bugger.

What was the question?

Just how screwed is IT at the Home Office?

Stevie

Bah!

Oh dear. Time for another dip into the bottomless tax-money bucket.

FTC urged to probe easily penetrated telly-enabled teledildonic toy

Stevie
Pint

Re: The Steely Dan IoT

An e-pint for the WB reference.

Stevie

Bah!

This should be something Pai can grab with both hands. He could propose stiff fines, and stiffer ones if satisfaction is not provided in a suitable time.

Republicans want IT bloke to take fall for Clinton email brouhaha

Stevie

Bah!

Irrespectiveless of whether the email thing is anyone's fault, I'm agin it because I don't like the congressman's wikipedia page content.

According to it, he is a complete and utter bought-and-paid-for coalshill and has abused his office to bully those who dare to challenge his view that climate change is made up.

I could forgive that (a lie; I couldn't) but it also says he retweeted a Breitbart article denying climate change and though I've never read a Breitbart article, everyone but Fox News says they are bad and that's good enough for me.

LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!

TalkTalk HackHack DuoDuo PleadPlead GuiltyGuiltyGuiltyGuilty

Stevie

Bah!

I'm shocked and appalled atvthis story.

Not one of the defendants suffers from Asperger's?

iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war

Stevie

Bah!

Personally, I've always been confused when seeing the Apple logo, unsure whether I'm looking at an iPad, a Beatles compilation album or a vibrator from an Ann Summers shop.

So I for one welcome this altruistic attempt by Applelaw to clarify the confusing mess that trademarks have become.

Drone maker DJI quietly made large chunks of Iraq, Syria no-fly zones

Stevie

Bah!

Good.

Don't stop me! Why Microsoft's inevitable browser irrelevance isn't

Stevie

Re: Bah!

You need to re-read my post. I'm not using Flash. I would like to be able to use Java. You know, that most popular language in the world according to some (rather un-credible) citations.

I understand why the plug-ins are disabled. I just find it rather annoyingly ironic that Firefox, once a bastion of opinion on the subject of forcing choices on the user, should choose to lock out Java (with no way of unlocking it) but retain Flash (as "on" by default).

Stevie

Bah!

Well Firefox used to be my jack of all sites, but a recent upgrade forbade the use of the java plugin I absolutely must have for remote connecting to my workplace after hours citing "security concerns" (curiously it left the Flash plugin in place; gofigger), offering me no way to adjust that behavior Team Firefox made on my behalf, so now I have to use IE and the alternative Active X plugin.

WaytergoTeam Firefox!

TVs are now tablet computers without a touchscreen

Stevie

Bah!

Yes, I'm aware that a flatscreen TV is a tablet because the last pre-Xmas El Reg TV comparison fluff piece had the author frothing over idiotic digital computer specs and four- and five-starring each set on that basis before finishing with an offhand remark that the TV performance of each subject was dubious in some way.

This same thinking is how we end up with smart phones that can render a movie in 4k HD and play it with dolby 15.314159 surround-sound but can't let me hear a person calling from half a mile away in any intelligible way.

Brit behind Titanium Stresser DDoS malware sent to chokey

Stevie

Re: At least he has been properly and fairly convicted and sentenced under UK law

Straw man.

I suspect that were he to have walked through a military server you'd be right though.

Northrop Grumman can make a stealth bomber – but can't protect its workers' W-2 tax forms

Stevie

Bah!

Azathoth on a Very Large Bike! Grumman did the telemetry on the Apollo moonshots FFS!

IT error at Great Western Railway charging £10k for 63-mile journey ticket

Stevie

Re: Is it the fare or the journey that doesn't exist?

A good question, as it addresses a likely error in the class hierarchies from which the software is built.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0

Stevie

Bah!

Did they do so while riding hoverboards?

Risk-free Friday evenings, thanks to Office 365 license management

Stevie

Bah!

The worst user experience I've personally had outside of a certain application software company's products from the mid nineties.

Bug ugly flat GUI interface with lousy color schemes. Makes my eyes water after a couple of hours wrestling with it.

Makes sharing documents with non-users a terrific pain in the fundament with it's "lets encode everything and require people to go to a website to get a key so they can read whatever it is" methodology.

Hogs bandwidth that isn't there.

And (All Together Now) requires a persistent internet connection.

All that, and the mail client can't provide a fraction of the features I get with thunderbird, which in turn means I cannot properly automate to deal with idiots who hijack mail threads without changing subject lines and therefore miss "important" things people write in the bewildering expectation that I will read their e-dribble in real-time.

Subpostmasters prepare to fight Post Office over wrongful theft and false accounting accusations

Stevie

Re: Horizon, I know it well! (Well did, and bits of it)

"I suspect whoever in the PO specified the original platform, was an ex Mainframe person!"

Spoken like a true toy computer programmer.

We mainframe Cobol types have enjoyed the freedom of variable length records since, well, forever really. Comes from a backing store technology based on Magnetic Tape and adapted to johnny-come-lately drum and disc devices (which enforce a much less flexible space usage regimen on one).

No, I think (with as much evidence behind me as the "mainframe" poster had) that this will be found to be some C++ or Java twonk's bad thinking, possibly forced on them by the cheap minitat the clients have to run on. Didn't someone mention Windows NT?

I'll bet there are some floating point idiocies lurking in the shadows too. So few college grads seem to grasp the difference between FP and scaled decimal when it comes to doing money sums after the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

Still, never mind. It's not like anyone died is it? Oh, hang on ...

Stevie

Re:Thieving Tory Bastards

Doubly redundant statement.

Amazingly, one can remove any two of the words and still know who's being described.

Stevie

Re: We make word speak good

Hodor!

Forensic accountants appointed to pore over Post Office IT scandal

Stevie

Bah!

Who wrote the code?

Who reviewed the code?

Who signed off on the QA testing?

Doctor Who-inspired proxy transmogrifies politically sensitive web to avoid gov censorship

Stevie

Bah!

So the content of a document now no longer has anything to do with the metadata sent with it?

Excellent! I see no downside.

Hang on, what's this bit in the Constitution of the United States that talks about the opiate of the masses?

We're 'heartbroken' we got caught selling your email records to Uber, says Unroll.me boss

Stevie

Re: If something is free...

Haven't you noticed your sidebar content? Or tried to use the El Reg app with it's eyeblinding banners that contravene everything El Reg says good advertisers should do when formatting such banner ads?

I rather thought that went a long way to paying for El Reg.

Stevie

Bah!

How did everyone think this service got paid for?

Azathoth's Starry Scrotum, I despair of my fellow humans sometimes.

Teen charged with 'cyberstalking' in bomb hoax case

Stevie

Re: "Asperger's Defence"

I was waiting to see how long it would be before this was trotted out.

Swiss Army Excuse.

Stevie

Bah!

So incarcerate the tumor. He can have it hacked out or serve the time with it.

Odd how the tumor can excuse a complex series of deliberate actions requiring detailed knowlege and hours of work to hide his tracks.

I guess Reiser really was innocent.

Russian hacker arrested in Spain for bot-herding not election-fiddling

Stevie

Bah!

"Seleznev" is now known as King's Knight and is awaiting the right moment for an exchange of pieces as the game progresses.

Would you believe it? The Museum of Failure contains quite a few pieces of technology

Stevie

Bah!

The Kodak point and shoot digital cameras were actually very good, with twice the internal memory of all of the other comparable products by other digital camera manufacturers. Mine started to get twitchy after someone dropped a harvey wallbanger all over it, and my wife killed one by leaving it on the driveway in a rainstorm and then reversing her car over it, but mine still works and she got a replacement.

Not sure why they failed, but bad product ain't the reason.

Cuffing Assange a 'priority' for the USA says attorney-general

Stevie

Re: novel approach to debt.

I think if you pry into the first quarter of the second century of Great Britain as an Empire nation you might also find some pretty nasty ideas on the subject too.

Young empires are built on agression. They mature into tolerance, then fall apart either through apathy or the inabililty of the infrastructure to deal with a wide-reaching catastrophe. Charlemagne died and his empire was pulled apart by his kids. Comms lag did for the Romans. In a way it did for us British too, though complacency was a big factor.

And though I live in the USA and will probably die here, I still harbour a secret wish that Britannia would find some way of rising ascendant again to become a world leader in some tangible way other than by weight of history, though how that can be acheived via Brexit is a bit of a puzzler I have to admit.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Stevie

What "sensitive data"? You mean the manager's porn stash?

Why is everyone assuming with no facts in evidence that there was anything worthwhile on this machine to recover?

I have managers who get premium kit who are never allowed near anything worh stealing. Don't you?

The subtext I get from this tale, which has been edited I point out, is that there was nothing worth the trouble likely to be lurking in that lappy. It is also possible that the damage inflicted by the first "repair" also extended to the moving parts.