* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Pirate MEP: Microsoft's walled garden is no consumer pleasure park

Stevie

Bah!

Looks like Redmond is moving out of the PC business and into the Great Big Tabletop Tablet market.

Problem for me is that I use my laptop as an authoring tool and as a testbed as well as a media consumption device. I don't "do" Facebook or Youtube (well, at the end of my billing cycle I might view a couple of "Truck Crashes" videos because who can resist the lure of crazy Russian truck driving habits?) so for me the "media consumption" side is pretty much minimal.

Given that, allowing anyone to lock down the device to their ideas of what I should be able to do is madness.

So I shall be going Linux I suppose. What a pain. I'll have to re-acquire much of what I've bought and some of the stuff only exists as Windows, Mac and "You're on your own" Linux builds with long lists of known bugs. Running make every time I need a new tool is not my idea of fun. I don't want to hand cut spanners when I work on engines or wind the armature of a drill when I do carpentry. Some enjoy that aspect of using computers. I do that for a living and would rather get to the nitty gritty in my own time.

Oh well.

Well done Microsoft. You've enhanced things until they stopped working (for me, at any rate). This was a phenomenon well-known when I started in the trade back before Unix. Nice to see that some things don't change over time, even if the semiconductors used to do them have.

US Air Force: 'Loose tweets destroy fleets'

Stevie

I think they can be regarded as an air force.

I double dog dare you to tell a fleet air arm pilot he/she flies for the Air Force.

Stevie

Yes they do........

Half of those are (or were) owned by the Fleet Air Arm. Otherwise known as The Navy.

Stevie

Bah!

But doesn't this slogan only work for the navy and Hertz?

Air forces don't have fleets. They have Squadrons.

Which means the Air Force can only go after the folks at the LHC for sucking money out of NATO budgets.

"Loose hadrons defund squadrons".

Boffins dump the fluids to build solid state lithium battery

Stevie

Re: Another week...

Agree. Prediction: Military use for ten years then cripple with "safety circuitry" so you have to replace them bout every two years.

Donald Trump dumps on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Stevie

Bah!

"Requirement to hire American workers first"

When I applied for my H1-B that was indeed the requirement. It had to be demonstrated that no American who was qualified for the job was willing to do it before I could be hired.

Of course, I was working on what eventually boiled down - via a series of subcontractors - to a Government contract, where the rules are often tighter. Hell, I had to undergo an FBI background check to get a building pass.

Hacktivists congratulate Daily Show's Jon Stewart via Donald Trump's website

Stevie

Re: how much the developers [got paid]

Er, do interns get paid anything?

Stevie

Bah!

The real danger here is that his strategy might be to align the Loony Right under his banner, then concede and publicly support A.N. Othercandidate, defusing any urge in his supporters to just sit at home with the shotgun and the beer instead of wasting time voting for liberals.

Stevie

Re: First, anyone who is an US Citizen

First, anyone who is a US Citizen by birth etc etc blitherdrooldrone

FTFY.

Otherwise we could look forward to Arnold the Presidentinator.

Parrot drone pwned (and possibly killed) with Wi-Fi log-in

Stevie

Bah!

Clean miss by the whitehats there. Should've taken control of one in the wild, used it to "attack" the owner repeatedly and then sat back and watched Twitter light up with hashtag skynet tweets.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

Stevie

Re: Honeywell Bull error code

I bet they did.

Stevie

Bah!

There's no better environment for releasing one's inner Benny Hill than a COBOL program.

Pick a few data names with an eye on what the future might bring, add some suggestive 88 levels for good measure, override the OS's facilities management and be creative with your internal procedure names and you are good to go.

And good for a visit from the extremely militant head of the all-female punchroom staff on account of the fact that your program was punched by one girl and verified by each of the others who wanted to get a look at it. As I recall she stood over me on the first run with a clenched fist aimed at my hurtybits should it not prove to be "a proper program".

On the plus side, first program ever with no punch errors.

I met a consultant years later, after I had gone freelance, who told me he'd worked on the thing as part of an ICL to UNIVAC conversion. He'd gotten into the most dreadful trouble because he assumed the thing was a joke and so rather than converting it he simply elaborated the story told in the procedure division and sent it back to the chief programmer.

Testing times as NASA rattles Mississippi with mighty motor burn

Stevie

4 Lars

"I wonder how much lake water was needed to cut the sound and cool it down."

None to cool the engine. Rocket engines like this are of a regenerative design. The parts that need cooling are cooled by passing unburned fuel through them. Same as the fuel pump for the TR6.

'We've got the sanitation problem solved', says world's richest poop drinker

Stevie

Bah!

I know the Register is taking a perverse glee in Bill Gates' water project but if you think for a bit you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that we've all drunk "potty water" for years.

Now I feel sick. Your work here is done.

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

Stevie

Bah!

So a proud tax avoider wants to tell the powers that be how tax money should be collected?

How American.

You gotta be in it to win it: The Register presents its official Programming Competition

Stevie

Bah!

Dilbert would simply craft a new language in which the program text would be:

task();

ANIMALS being CUT UP to make Apple Watch straps

Stevie

Bah!

It occurs to me that if you used the Ostrich's neck for a strap you could deploy your iWatch as a belt or bandolier and really stand out from the iCrowd.

Stevie

Too soon?

Not unless it came with ivory accents.

Stevie

But how do you farm sharks?

I dunno. Prise 'em off an Australian surfer's leg?

Stevie

Bah!

"ANIMALS being CUT UP to make Apple Watch straps".

Er ... good?

It's not just antivirus downloads that have export control screening

Stevie

Re: Not DriveThruRPG by any chance? Just had a very similar message from them.

Oh yes me old beauty, I should say so.

Stevie
Unhappy

Bah!

So you are supposed to park your birth certificate on some publicly accessible website?

Hmm, can't see a down side to that.

In other news, a web-vendor I use for PDFs has just informed me I need to destroy my credit card, phone my bank and start watching my statements because they were infiltrated by sneaky hackers doing something clever to capture incoming purchase orders (I imagine this was on the order of running stdin through tee).

No connection between the two stories. Just thought I'd mention it.

Assange™ is 'upset' that he WON'T be prosecuted for rape, giggles lawyer

Stevie

man up

"I also figured it was related to "are you a man or a mouse?""

It's actually basketball court slang. Or was before it was co-opted for general use by street gangs and then used Fungus The Bogeyman style by ordinary people who "assumed" a meaning (without actually checking and without confirming the listener was using a compatible understanding of the phrase's meaning themselves).

ZUCK OFF: Facebook nixes internship after student embarrasses firm

Stevie

Though when asking him to take it down

I thought one of the issues with facebook was that it is impossible to take anything down once you've posted it.

Dossiers on US spies, military snatched in 'SECOND govt data leak'

Stevie

spear-fishing attempts at some (if not all) of the UK providers of health care records

These are probably the desperate attempts of British people trying to access their own information, the user API's being the last thing built on any system and the Health Care IT projects never getting past the "aborted trial roll-out and massive lawsuit issuance" stage according to stories on El Reg.

Stevie

Bah!

No problem. All the *really* dangerous secret stuff was on Hillary's e-mail server, which - as of today's intel - hasn't been hacked.

'WOMAN FOUND ON MARS' – now obvious men are from Venus

Stevie

Bah!

This is why we need people on Mars and not robot golf carts with a go-pro bolted on.

Also, it would seem highly likely that pareidolia is simply what the brain does. Otherwise how does language arise? I'd argue that the mind is just recursive pattern-recognition on steroids.

Hillary Clinton kept top-secret SIGINT emails on her home email server

Stevie

Bah!

a) Said emails were probably more secure on that server than on the one sitting with the rest of the thoroughly rooted to Heckenbach machines in the various server rooms paid for by the American People every Republican seems to be so concerned about.

2) Said emails are probably sitting in a number of unauthorized inboxes in various countries after the aforementioned rooting, since those emails likely hopped and skipped their way around many, many American People owned servers to get to Mrs Clinton's. Top Secret you say?

Rise up against Oracle class stupidity and join the infosec strike

Stevie

Bah!

"Our jobs?"

Oracle pulls CSO's BONKERS anti-bug bounty and infosec rant

Stevie

Without any intelligence at all, Tigranes sat while war was already blazing around him

Who would have thought that George W Bush was such a student of ancient history?

Jail incompetent council folk who leak our data, thunders furious BBW

Stevie

Just start with the person

Not against the principle of the Bubble Sort Blame Allocation Method but I predict it will almost always time-out in 3-way+ deadlocks when you step up the ladder, only to be caught in a Lateral Blame Shift Deadlock.

From Office Space: "I have eight bosses. If I do anything wrong, eight people are lining up etc etc".

Personally, I have three or four bosses, depending on how "hands on" one of them wants to get in a given issue. Contradictory policy directives are not unknown.

All hail Ikabai-Sital! Destroyer of worlds and mender of toilets

Stevie

Re: Gary Larson: early plumbers

A favorite of mine, that one. Our department has more than one person who speaks Larson Caveman when under duress "This not look good".

Stevie

Re: Bah!

"Run that by me again. Because I called in a plumber on my household appliance insurance, I am unfit to write about IT security? Oh-kayyyy."

Read again. That is nowhere close to what I wrote, which - to paraphrase - went like this:

"Sir: You have been known to ridicule those who cannot secure their computers in the past. This requires knowledge of things that happen invisibly in complex equipment built using advanced principles of physics.

Paradoxically, you avowedly cannot fix a leaky toilet, something involving one moving part (the ball-cock/valve) derived from a principle known to the ancient Greeks, and water, the operation of which happens in front of your eyes if you take the precaution of opening them and not attempting to observe the device's operation with a bag over your head.

I find your position, regarding the computer unsavvy being less-then intelligent for not possessing information normally disclosed in a university course or specialist press, to be no longer tenable owing to the extreme engineering lameness displayed by your good self when it comes to a simple piece of plumbing - that is in every home and that has remained essentially unchanged for your lifetime to date - which has been leaking all over your bathroom floor for weeks."

Stevie

Bah!

Seriously? You couldn't figure out how a toilet worked just by looking at it?

I never want to read a disparaging article by you about some aspect of other people not getting computer security. That is rocket science compared to the works of a toilet.

What in Azathoth's name were they teaching in the schools twenty mumble years ago? CSE physics covered the necessary theory when I were a lad. After that all you have to know is how to work an adjustable spanner (one moving part) and a screwdriver.

Christ on a bike.

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

Stevie

not have to do it too kamakazi

Pfft! Here on Long Island, NY we have semi-circular "fishhook" entrances and exits from the high speed parkways that are arranged so that traffic leaving the highway needs to do combat with traffic trying to get onto it. Said onramp traffic can only be doing about 30 MPH owing to the tight radius of the curve of the fishhook.

Those leaving the highway need the extra screaming-and-stamping-on-the-brakes time anyway because leaving the highway at highway speeds per ingrained UK motorway habits will end up with you sitting on a grass verge, optionally wrapped around a tree, owing to the tight radius of the off-ramp fishhook and sometimes innovative ideas on road camber employed. Been there, done that, spoiled the trousers.

On the Long Island Expressway they dealt with the problems of traffic getting stranded on the more sensible straight-ish onramps during rush hour (because of gittish behavior when it comes to "letting people enter the highway") not by reconfiguring the roads to be more traffic friendly but by installing stop lights on the on-ramp. This ensures that no-one can get up to enough speed to merge safely even if the traffic is moving. Luckily most Long Islanders have no idea how to enter a freeway and will obliviously pull out at thirty into a stream of traffic doing fifty five anyway.

I almost rear-ended someone yesterday while entering the LIE because she, with clear road ahead, to the side and behind, motored up the onramp at forty then stamped on the brake before merging into empty space. I was foolishly checking my mirror for speeding trucks when she braked, and had assumed she was aware that the minimum speed limit on the freeway was forty miles an hour so was unprepared for her novel Unnecessary Speed Reduction ploy. Well played, madam. Well played.

Stevie

Bah!

"So we could (in a very rough and ready fashion) say that the automation of farming allowed us to have a health care system."

We could, if we didn't mind people screaming "Correlation does not imply causation!" from the cheap seats.

And on that bombshell: Top Gear's Clarkson to reappear on Amazon

Stevie

4 Michael Wojcik

"The last I looked, there were a grand total of 5 series of Top Gear available on Netflix - about 60 episodes. A rather small portion of the total, in other words. And they're not recent ones."

I see. Could you point me toward an exact definition of the formerly useful large number estimation phrase "umptytump" then? I would normally presume 60 as being well within that classification, but stand ready to appreciate some new ISO definition pinning the exact parameters down.

"And many cable subscribers don't get BBC America. We used to, but our carrier dropped it when they raised the price."

Are you telling me you can't wave more money at your cable TV supplier to put it back again? If you are indeed in America and this is the case you must have been the only person watching BBC America via your carrier. You need to get more cosmopolitan neighbours. Moving house would seem to be in order.

Live somewhere better, man. Live somewhere better.

Cher tells HTC: If I could turn back time ... if I could find a way (to not lose $250m in a quarter)

Stevie

Re: Cher and 'Believe'

Hated that effect within three microseconds of my being introduced to it. It remains one of the few special effects that will make me change the radio channel to anything else by reflex.

Stevie

Bah!

Wang are still in business? I thought they folded their tents yonks ago. Learn summat every day.

Germans in ‘brains off, just follow orders' hospital data centre gaff

Stevie

Bah!

Is the author trying to tell me that he or she seriously believes it is the place of the janiotorial staff to interpret work orders? Am I being asked to believe that this would have gone any differently in Captain Mainwaring's patch?

Surely the story should have been about who it was that made the f*cktarded decision to remove the A/C in the first place, as should the headline.

I call shenanigans.

(It has just occurred to me that this very story from that angle may have run in another venue where it earned a T-shirt for the author, and so had to be adjusted for emphasis to hide the double dipping.)

Aussie bloaters gorging on junk food 'each and every day'

Stevie

Bah!

Yes, a return to traditional Aussie food is called for: Meat Pie Floaters and Witchety Grubs.

Sane people, I BEG you: Stop the software defined moronocalypse

Stevie

Re: 35 decades

Blast this iPad and it's never-to-be-sufficiently-damned auto-correction fetaure!

Stevie

Bah!

Do you really think the problem is morons coding in the workplace? Because I don't.

*I* think the problem is the culture that has arisen in which Google is cheaper than training, and experience is seen as too expensive compared to new graduate hires.

And *I* think that anyone who enjoys their job even a tiny bit would rather do it well than be found to be doing it badly. *Everyone* takes pride in what they enjoy doing. That's what *I* think after thirty-five decades in IT.

And I think the security issues we see are more the result of lack of knowledge in the front-line troops than advice offered and rejected by middle management, though I'm sure elements of that pollute the waters too.

See, it's my experience that upper management gets the message "why pay for the cow when the milk is free" just as well as your average teenaged freetard does, if not better. They also have been educated in a three decade period when the value of the intangible assets like experience of the enterprise information systems is as near zero as to be indistinguishable from the financial statistical noise.

Gotta love what the MBA has done for Big Business, eh?

ROBO-TENTACLE with mind of its own wields deadly electrical power – turns on Tesla car

Stevie

Is "Why are you not buying a hydrogen car?" one of them?

Not for me. The prospect of opening my metal garage door, causing a small spark and hearing the neighbours scream "Oh the humanity!" as I fly through the air sans eyebrows is a disincentive.

That and the lack of Hydrogen pumps in my area.

Junior defence staffer on trial for 'posting secret dossier to 4chan'

Stevie

"Julian Assange is my hero.”

Which is why I did not post this trove of vauable intelligence to his anonymous document publication service, buit sent it to 4Chan so it could be properly appraised by their resident loon council instead.

Who then raised the fiasco quotient by declaring it "fake and like that".

*Cue theme tune to Laurel and Hardy short*

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

Stevie

Re: Bollocks

"Most of what he says here is not "a broad statement of physics","

Agreed. It can't be physics. It doesn't have any quantums in it.

Stevie

novelty clock

Yes, but I believe that the ePad comes with two sets of paint sponges and a bottle of Ox-E-Wipes if you order NOW using the toll-free number. Just pay three hundred quid P&P.

Hey, FBI. Wanna track someone by cellphone? Get a proper warrant, says US appeals court

Stevie

Bah!

Stupid Bill of Rights.

Now the terrorists win.

Why did the authors hate America?

Court KOs irate Apple iMessenger woman's bid for class-action face off

Stevie

Bah!

But the judge didn't say there was no case to answer, just that the defendant could not meet the requirements of a Class Action.

Pentagon email hacked, Russia already blamed

Stevie

Bah!

The only surprise here is that there is no attempt to blame The Thief -B-a-g-g-i-n-s Snowden for the break-in.