* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

IT boss 'set up fake companies to charge his employers $2.4m'

Tom 7

I walked into the office one day only to be locked in an adjacent room

with the rest of the IT dept. A gleeful psycho and entourage informed us they were waiting for something to happen before they could let us out and disappeared, locking us in again, After a while they came and told us they were waiting for my boss to land from a trip to the US so he could be arrested and then they would let us go, and disappeared quickly. Eventually with some sense came in to apologise and I was able to inform him that I'd spoken to him the night before because I was very suspicious of the above psycho's behaviour which was well out of order - as was our illegal captivity. It was then they realised that he had not come through customs because he had not got on the flight having worked out from my phone call the few hundred thousand he had syphoned off through a spoof company had been sussed.

Took redundancy not long after - should have sued them for locking me up though.

Star Trek Beyond: An unwatchable steaming pile of tribble dung

Tom 7

Re: Thanks

I will put a link to this in my calender for 3 years time to prevent me accidentally watching it if it comes on the telly!

Juno's 1,300-pic Jupiter vid

Tom 7

Re: What a waste !!!

Just wait you troll!

Tom 7

Re: That video would be so boring without the music

I always turn the sound off. Space never ever sound like that.

Guess who gets hit hard by IR35 tax clampdown? Yep, IT contractors

Tom 7

Re: Oh the memories

Not really - someone else will have taken the contracts and paid up.

BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'

Tom 7

Only have one printer for every 100 employees.

We do everything 'web' based that we can. Make printing difficult and you'd be surprised how little people actually need it.

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Tom 7

Re: am i the only one resisting this

Nope - I've got a legit win7 on my old laptop. I've gone to the extreme of learning how to upgrade my Tom-Toms by hand rather than boot it up and get it screwed over. I only keep it in case there's some school shit one of the kids needs it for,

Microsoft to rip up P2P Skype, killing native Mac, Linux apps

Tom 7

Re: Skype spam

I'm guessing if you ring back then you get hit with premium rate charges somewhere.

An anniversary to remember: The world's only air-to-air nuke was fired on 19 July, 1957

Tom 7

@TonyJ re emp

for emp to work you really need to set the thing off outside the atmosphere so the pulse does not cancel itself out.

Tom 7

Re: 300 meter blast radius

I think this was a development version and in no way a 'production' piece.

The smallest bomb you can make is about 200 tonnes TNT equivalent - that what just banging a couple of sub-critical hemispheres together. To get bigger blasts you start adding a lot of weight - in 1957 I'd guess the missile that carried this also vibrated like shit and so for a demo to scare the ruskies you would produce a small light but more importantly reliable warhead that proves the point. Adding clever explosives and special detonators required to make a bigger bang would simply have been too unreliable,

This version would never have been used in actual combat - as you point out 300m is pretty useless as that's 2 second of flight for a slooooow bomber.

What you really need is Tsar Bomba - that would have cleared the skies for miles, or as Chocolate Starfish Prime showed you could use one to knock most planes out of the sky in a thousand mile radius,

BT internet outage was our fault, says Equinix

Tom 7

Just this morning?

I've been getting a few problems for a day or two that have just this afternoon seemed to clear up.

Softbank promises stronger ARM: Greater overseas reach and double the UK jobs

Tom 7

Re: Why... sell?

Once you float your company on the stock exchange and dont keep a majority share-holding its pretty much compulsory.

I can also imagine for a lot of the top engineers (who I hope own a shitload of the shares) there comes a point where you get enough money to retire on waved in your face (the shares have gone up 500% or so in 4 years ish) and yo can carry on looking at 128bit chips in 15 years or a few tweaks on the 64 bit ones but you've probably climbed most of the fences and looked over walls and there isn't really a whole lot more to give you a major-league buzz in the same field.

Tom 7

Re: Interesting- more than enough Japanese engineers

with a lifetimes experience? I think the last micro-chip that fitted in the head of one person was the Z80. I would think it would take and experienced CPU engineer a couple of years to translate their skills to ARM and another 3 or four for them to get a good feeling for how their area of the chip/architecture works with their nearest seven or eight colleagues in such a way they can make optimal improvements/customisations. I've worked with many people in my time who can be parachuted into a job and do a reasonable job in their own corner but very few who could walk the room and line all the desks up in a way that made them all more productive.

Tom 7

Re: Interesting - where to spend a wet Tuesday in February?

In my experience, and many others I know, the best place to spend a wet Tuesday in February is in the job you love, with the people you love working in, in a stable and confident work environment,

If you are doing that you love and do well you can wait for 6 weeks holiday in the sun.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

Tom 7

Re: Pulling dick moves has historically worked really well for Apple.

Apple can pull dick moves because the majority of their customers aren't buying a computing environment first and foremost, they are buying into a brand and how the brand functions is largely irrelevant. MS sell to a large number of people who are vastly more educated (despite MS sponsored training) about how the whole ecosystem functions and is paid for.

I dont think MS resents Apple, its too busy trying to work out how to stay relevant at the moment.

Brit chip biz ARM legs it to Softbank for $32bn

Tom 7

Doubling the size of the operation..

I've read that they intend to double the size of the op to 6000 developers. I think that will have a negative effect on things - dragging people away from the core (sorry) business to do customisations (presumably) will interfere with the heart of the business. I'm going to walk away with a fairly healthy wedge from this but it doesnt smell right...

Ad blockers responsible for rise in upfront TV ad sales, claims report

Tom 7

Having read this lot

I feel there is money to be made advertising all of your competitors products to put people off buying them!

Shit, no I didnt say that, stop stop...

Microsoft silently kills dev backdoor that boots Linux on locked-down Windows RT slabs

Tom 7

Does this mean RT slabs are officially netbooks now?

I wonder if you can mod it to put a Pi3 inside?

Astroboffin map 1.2m galaxies

Tom 7

Can I load it into blender

and predict the future!

Microsoft wins landmark Irish data slurp warrant case against the US

Tom 7

Re: this ain't over yet

The new PM is not going to let the US have every bit of data taken from UK citizens.

There simply isn't the bandwidth between us or computing power in the world to do anything with it.

Computers vs Ebola: Scientists use big data to predict future disease hotspots

Tom 7

Strange bat movement neat St James park.

could be worse than ebola.

Software bug costs Citigroup $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

Tom 7

Re: Fess up or keep Schtumm

I like to think some kids with Raspberry Pi's and a couple of degrees of moral compass will get jobs in places like this and actually know how to do JOINs on the odd table or two and start chucking up anomalies. If someone at the SEC notice that Citibank had noticed and fixed the problem without letting them know the $7M would look like very very very very small change.

Tom 7

Re: 10Afly, New Jersey?

Bladder control problems in insects?

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

Tom 7

But he has an MBA

that means he can only us write only memory.

Openreach boss Clive Selley wants Ofcom to wrap it up already

Tom 7

So what are you doing in the office today?

Feet up - got a Sword of Damocles to use as an excuse! You?

Brit Science Minister to probe Brexit bias against UK-based scientists

Tom 7

BoJo is going to be Foreign monster.

I think we should do the decent thing and start building a wall round ourselves.

Student Loans Company burns £50 million in IT project superfail

Tom 7

Re: £50m - why not simply pay the fees?

I see where you went wrong! When you read "robust and agile customer-centred student finance system" you very stupidly assumed the student was the customer!

The Reg Coding competition – 10 times as hard as the last one!

Tom 7

Is this an extension of yesterdays IBM article

I'm not opening a console for the prizes on offer.

Falling PC tide strands Seagate's disk drive boats. Will WDC follow?

Tom 7

Re: OT but you started it

Tide just leaves them beached - stranding is another matter

Tom 7

OT but you started it

why are those boats stranded in Aberystwyth harbour? I knew a girl from there but google doesnt seem to be helpful

IBM scraps loyal staffer gifts in favour of... a congratulatory social page

Tom 7

Re: It could be worse

"Seriously you know when a company is in trouble when they try and save pennies". I've seen a lot of incentive schemes where you save the company money and you get a cut of it. I'm guessing someone has worked out you can save a few thousand dollars a year on carriage clocks (and the storage thereof) and everyone who has ever had one thought - yeh fuckit lets save the company some money. But like everything of this ilk the visible effect on the accounts is by far exceeded by the invisible effect on morale. They are not in trouble when they start to do this but they soon will be.

Tom 7

A badge, a Pen, a crap carriage clock.

Nowadays you'd get an iWatch and have to buy your own iPhone so they can watch you when having a crap.

At home as well as work.

Tom 7

Re: Gamification of the workplace!

That white shoe management consulting firm - I think its just a bunch of pinko commies sent to destroy capitalism in the west. Everywhere I've worked and they've brought in management consultants the management team grows and productivity falls and its never there fault.

HP Inc: Double-digit bounce due on PC prices next month

Tom 7

Not just HP

been helping a couple of friends look a laptops over last couple of weeks. They've gone up around 8 or 9% over that time.

Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments

Tom 7

Its 2016 isnt it?

Old habits die hard but even most terminal text editors have syntax highlighting these days*. I'd be a bit worried if someone was using nano to develop kernel code until I knew they could handle it.

* I was doing some ARM assembler on a pi zero the other day and even that had colour 'syntax' highlighting!

Please stop working and abuse your expense account at the beach

Tom 7

I spent 4 days in Instanbull waiting for kit to clear customs

alas the boss who was present didnt want us to venture to far as the kit was always nearly ready. On the 4th day he enquired about the extra cash expense necessary to promulgate the process and two hrs later we worked two days practically non stop to get it up and working and then onto the plane,

We did get a nice dinner out one night which involved driving down a 3 lane motorway at 90mph while being randomly overtaken and cut up from every direction possible, The journey took nearly an hour and we arrived at a famous restaurant where the food tasted of fear in the knowledge it was going to happen again - being the largest I had to sit in the front and it was fucking scary.

Nice place by the looks of it!

New DNA 'hard drive' could keep files intact for millions of years

Tom 7

Re: What could go wrong?

Infinite monkeys with DNA synthesizers.

I used to enjoy a bit of prog rock in the 70's

Physicists confirm X(4140)

Tom 7
Coat

If it walks like a duck...

Sorry

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Philando Castile shooting vid: It was the police – sources

Tom 7

Re: Action Is Needed

I would guess it was still all logged in when they took it from her.

Tom 7

Re: Media is exaggerating known facts

I think its this case that it was stated that the body cameras of both police officers 'fell off before the incident"!

Rolls-Royce reckons robot cargo ships are the future of the seas

Tom 7

The staffiing costs of a large transport ship are fractional

compared with the fuel costs. But the risks of doing this are huge.

Spoiling the ship for a haporth of tars?

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

Tom 7

Re: Fair Enough

32-bir x86 may be going out of fashion but a lot of the old hardware will still work long after your new laptop dies and people like the old stuff - I've just upgraded from a 3 year old laptop to a new all singing all dancing jobie but after a couple of months I'm still typing using the wrong keys cos its still 'unfamiliar'.

My personal hope is someone will make a battery and screen that you can shove a RaspberryPi in so you can just get used to one of those and in 10 years when you can get an 8 core 4ghz, 16GB ram Pi13 for £30 you can just slide out your Pi12 (and pop that in the office cloud cluster) and pop the ssd into the new one and slide it back in the screen, sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get upgrade and you're off.

Tom 7

The foss community is not embracing a disposable future.

No-one is obliged to maintain your equipment for free!

i386 will get some support. OK it wont be for all those fancy new capabilities of multicore 64 bit machines with massive GPU's on board - but then that's not of any use to an old machine anyway is it?

Ditto massive CPU heavy desktops.

With luck a group will keep an eye on security and kernel developments and backport those to popular 32 bit distributions but FFS this is not like MS shitting on your machine with W10.

London Stock Exchange's German mega-merger: It's a go, despite Brexit

Tom 7

Re: Even with Article 50 by November...kicked into the long grass

You may find, if it is kicked into the long grass, the financial centre may be a little dysfunctional due to some un-planned outages of windows and other building parts.

Tom 7

Re: Distance matters...

But borders will matter more. No point in HFT if it costs (and it will) to get the micro-pennies back into europe.

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware goes FULL SCREEN in final push

Tom 7

Dont upgrade, sidegrade

For the price of getting the paperwork sorted for sueing ms for this clusterfuck get a Pi3.

For about £60 I'm sitting in my bean bag with wireless keyboard and a massive monitor - OK its my telly but its still pretty good.

Not as fast as my laptop but the web experience is enjoyable, I've got a full set of office and programming shit. I dont game myself but I'd bet 80% of PC owners dont.

And I can help the kids with some of their school IT stuff - now I've learned not to choke at its inanity.

All for less than your first years(months?) prescription I'd guess.

Microsoft names Cindy Rose as first first lady of UK ops

Tom 7

What was she called

before they named her Cindy Rose? I'm guessing her name was too silly to allow her to be appointed.

Trans-Pacific FASTER fibre fires first photons, finally

Tom 7

60Tbps

Coo - that's 20000 times the data rate of TAT8 I worked on 35 years ago or so! I'd guess it was nearly as fast as this one tho! Well, when in the photon phase anyway.

Lloyds Banking Group puts 640 techies and backroom bods on chopping block

Tom 7

At the risk of being in bad taste

640 techies is all anyone will ever need.

Bacon is not my vodka friend

Tom 7

Re: I tried making Bacon Vodka once

Dont use the shit they call bacon in the shops. Proper dry cured is OK ish but the best thing to do with vodka is drink it with the cured fat the Poles (and others) do such a good job of. But keep em separate until you get em near your gob.