* Posts by qwertyuiop

259 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009

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Our Sun menaces comet 'of the century' ISON with FIERY DESTRUCTION

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: 3 Wise Men

Why three? Nowhere in the Bible does it say there were three wise men; three kinds of gift are mentioned, but not the number of people giving gifts. See Mathhew 2: 1 - 12. As a firm non-believer I find this question always peplexes those who believe in the old bloke in the sky.

Linux backdoor squirts code into SSH to keep its badness buried

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: A million eyes look at the source

This kind of thing makes me wonder about the whole "open source is inherently safe 'cos anybody can look at the code" thing.

I would question whether anybody actually does look at the code. I rather suspect that because it requires (a) a very high level of understanding and (b) a lot of time and effort, very few people (if any) actually do. How many actually download the code for the latest release, review it, and then compile it for their own machine? Doesn't everybody just dowload the latest update from a site they believe they can trust.

This is an honest question - I have no angle and am not trying to make any point. I would genuinely like to know.

First the Yanks, now us: In-flight mobe use WON'T kill us all, say Eurocrats

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: is that dark shadow...

Why is it "coming soon"? You have always been able to carry your phone, tablet, e-reader, laptop, camera, etc. onto flights. So if you wanted to create a "gadget bomb" then you could always have done it. This rare outbreak of common sense changes nothing.

HUMANITY STUNNED - Apple Retina iPad Mini arrives. A solemn moment

qwertyuiop

I'm sure this will be a great relief...

...to the poor souls in the Phillipines who survived the terrible storm and are now desperate for food, water, medicine and help to bury the estimated 10,000 dead. At least they'll be able to console themselves with their shiny new iToy.

'Shared databases are crap' Oracle reveals shared database management suite

qwertyuiop
Stop

First multi-tenant database?

Way back in 1986(ish) a project I worked on for the NHS used a multi-tenanted database that was built on ICL's (horrendous) IDMS dbms - and I certainly don't think we were the first. On that basis Oracle very definitely aren't the first.

Brazil makes it official: Gov email must be state-run and on-premises

qwertyuiop
FAIL

Re: Pretty much what I do

This may be an option for a small subset of email users, but not for the majority.

My neighbour is a very sprightly woman of 83. She's neither particularly bright nor particularly stupid; let's say "average" intelligence. With some initial help she overcame her fears of using a computer and now keeps in touch with her children, grandchildren and great grandchild who are scattered over three continents by means of email, Skype and a number of picture sharing sites.

Do you want to tell her she needs to install a Linux box and run her own email?

How to spot a coders comment

qwertyuiop
Pint

COBOL

I'm distinctly old-school - I cut lots of COBOL code in the late 70s and early 80s. I'm part of the reason you had all that fun re-writing it in 1999 ;-)

Two particular memories from having to amend programs others had written:

1. A long program (about 10,000 lines of code excluding the Data Division) which was generally well commented. The comments were brief, to the point and helpful except for THAT section. This was a chunk of about 1,000 lines of incredibly intricate code that used some of COBOL's more obscure functions in very "creative" ways. It had one single line comment at the very beginning which began with the unforgettable words "This section simply..."

2. Amending a program that had been amended and added to by three programmers before me in addition to whoever wrote it. Clearly whoever had done one of the amendments had had a bad time with whoever wrote the spec because two of the data items he had defined two were named "NEVER-MIND-WHAT-YOU-MAY-HAVE-HEARD" and "JUST-STICK-TO-THE-BLOODY-SPEC".

Ahhh... happy days!

(Beer - 'cos I wrote some of my best code after two-hour boozy lunchtimes!)

NASA, start your torrents: 622 Mbps broadband link FOUND ON MOON

qwertyuiop
Coat

Re: Too bad!

This shows that absolutely no expense was spared in faking the moon landings. Film and pictures of the landings are the obvious thing to do, but imagine thinking up an obscure little piece of corroboration like this just to add credence to the fraud!

Snowden's email provider Lavabit flows again to let users retrieve data

qwertyuiop
Black Helicopters

Paranoid? Moi?

How do we know the message genuinely is from Levison?

Amazon wrapping FireTube tellybox for Christmas – reports

qwertyuiop
FAIL

Patent?

IANAL but I don't think you can patent a name. You *can* register it as a trademark.

Payday loans firm rapped for failing to register with Info Commissioner

qwertyuiop
FAIL

Imposing fines like that is really going to be a deterrent - I mean, it's almost a day's interest!

</sarcasm>

COMET DIAMONDS from SPACE found in Libya's glass desert

qwertyuiop
Happy

I for one...

...welcome our new bling-covered overlords!

Techies with Asperger's? Yes, we are a little different...

qwertyuiop
Thumb Up

Thank you!

Thanks for a fascinating and enlightening piece. Thank you too for sharing; it takes great courage to identify yourself in the workplace as being not NT and I applaud your bravery in sharing this with employers. So many employers lack a proper understanding and usually run a mile form anybody who is in any way "different", so kudos too to your present employer for not being typical.

My own particular "thing" is that I suffer periodically from depression. Unfortunately I have yet to discover the secret of how this can be a positive. What I _have_ discovered is that employers regard it as a definite no-no which leaves me with a huge dilemma. It is part of my nature to be open and up-front with people in aspects of my life, but sadly being open and up-front about my depressive episodes is not a plus when applying for jobs. I am therefore forced to conceal it which does not sit happily with me. So, again, I hugely respect your openness and honesty with your employer.

Universal's High Fidelity Pure Audio trickles onto Blighty’s Blu-Ray hi-fis

qwertyuiop
Facepalm

Wasted on me!

As several commentators have already noted, this is only worthwhile if the listener is capable of hearing the difference. A combination of age plus 5 years spent as a roadie in the middle- late-70s means my hearing is f*cked so I would never hear the difference.

BOOGIE BALLMER: Steve Dirty Dances at tearful Microsoft leaving do

qwertyuiop
Devil

MS already chose the perfect song...

...when they licenced the Rolling Stones "Start me up" for the launch of Windows 95. To quote from the lyrics:

"You make a grown man cry"

30 years on: The day a computer glitch nearly caused World War III

qwertyuiop
Facepalm

Re: The Soviets claimed the flight was a spying mission, but it was ... off course

Trawlers used to leave Hull for the Arctic with more antennea than fish

I am not a trawlerman so please forgive me if I get this wrong, but surely this is situation normal? I mean, as I understand it, you tend to leave your home port without a catch and so you would quite likely have more antennae than fish. It's what you have aboard when you come back that matters surely?

Cisco email accidentally sent to 1000s of employees causes message list MAYHEM

qwertyuiop
Alert

Brings back memories

Many years back whilst working for another company we arrived in the office one Monday morning to find the mail servers on the floor and in need of life-saving treatment having become "full". Hours later when normal service had been restored and the full post-mortem began we discovered what had happened.

At the time we had no remote access into email so one Thursday a contractor, prior to going home for a three day weekend, set up an auto-forward rule in his mailbox to forward any incoming mail to his Hotmail account and an account with another ssupplier (can't remember who). This despite a total ban on auto-forwards to outside the company.

Everything was fine throughout Friday; emails arrived and were forwarded to his two private accounts. Unfortunately at some point on Saturday morning his Hotmail inbox became full and so the next time it received a message from his work account it replied saying that it was undeliverable because the mailbox was full.

So our system duly forwarded that to his Hotmail account...

Which replied that it was full...

Repeat this loop until some time later his other account became full...

...and started sending replies that it couldn't accept incoming messages because it was full. Which our server dutifully forwarded to BOTH accounts which BOTH replied that they were full...

And some time on Sunday our mail servers gave up because THEY were full.

Oh how we laughed! Or maybe we didn't. The contractor had his contract terminated that day.

It's the software, stupid: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch bags big apps

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Getting your imitation in first?

"Though few smartwatches feature a camera, even the Gear’s integrated 1.9MP component isn’t original: Omate is promising to build a 5MP camera into its TrueSmart watch"

I'm fascinated by your definition of originality. Samsung are first to market with a feature (camera in a smartwatch) and yet somehow they're copying a proposed feature from a watch which will only be produced if the crowdfunding works. How does that work then?

Tory think tank: Hey, civil servants! Work with startups to save £70bn

qwertyuiop

Re: Doomed to fail

It's not just the public sector that's still using IE6 though!

About 18 months ago, when I was still working for my previous employer, I became involved in the pre-contract negotiations with "a major high street bank". They were looking to buy a service from us which would have been delivered on a SaaS basis with their staff accessing the system from a browser; all of the processing was done by us and nothing would have been installed on the bank's infrastructure.

They spent several meetings grilling us on the minutiae of our implementation, particularly security, and raising "issues" about totally irrelevant points. We came to the conclusion they didn't really understand security on a web-based system.

After one particularly gruelling meeting where they'd worked us over even more than usual they concluded by asking what browsers we supported. Thinking they must be keen to have a really secure browser I was pleased to be able to list all the versions of all the major browsers that our system was compatible with only to be asked "Yes, but what about IE6?". Turns out that was the only browser that their (in-house) branch software would work with and so they couldn't use anything else.

My 34 year IT career has been split almost exactly 50/50 between public and private sectors and in my experience private sector IT has nothing to crow about. The only difference is that disasters tend to get hushed-up as much as possible to avoid "damaging the brand image".

Baffled boffins 'closer' to finding origins of extragalactic COSMIC RAYS

qwertyuiop

Re: Never mind the physics

Nah - it's too cold. All the water is frozen solid so where would you put the laser-toting sharks?

HMRC nabs 5 after £500k 'cyber attack' on tax systems

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Not completely foolproof then?

HMRC’s online systems proved extremely resilient to these attacks - they correctly identified and prevented the vast majority of false repayment attempts (my emphasis)

So they didn't block all the dodgy transactions then? Nice headline grabbing figure of £500k that they could have got away with, but how much did they actually get away with? Has it been recovered?

NSA coughs to 1000s of unlawful acts of snooping on US soil since 2008

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Meaning?

logs 2,776 incidents of "unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications"

Which particular meaning of the word "collection" is being used here?

Google: Cloud users have 'no legitimate expectation of privacy'

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: Shock! Gmail works just like Google said it would...

I'm one of those people who always reads Ts&Cs. Life is slower, but less surprising that way

Your life must move VERY slowly indeed given that, for example, the Ts&Cs for PayPal are longer than the text of "Hamlet" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22772321) which at 4,042 lines or 29,551 words is Shakespeare's longest play.

Texas students hijack superyacht with GPS-spoofing luggage

qwertyuiop
Facepalm

Re: Subeditor, hallo?! yoo-hoo!

"I read El Reg for *accurate* reportage"

I think I can see where you went wrong...

AXE-WAVING BIKER GANG SMASHES into swanky Apple UK store

qwertyuiop

Re: couple of years late

According to one report I read (BBC I think) they were caught in Tufnell Park. Now while that *IS* technically in Islington (although only just, it's on the border with Camden) upmarket, trendy Islington it is not. Alongside all the rich trendies some parts of Islington are extremely run-down and deprived.

CRINGE! Home Office wants to know whether your boss BEATS YOU

qwertyuiop

Re: It's only ridiculous....

Situations like this for example - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9392950/Traveller-family-guilty-of-forcing-homeless-men-into-slavery.html

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Held prisoner at work?

Ummm... "Are employees within your organisation free to leave the workplace after work?" isn't a totally ludicrous question.

Last year the government announced that it wanted to increase the amount of paid work prisoners did whilst serving their sentences - see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/plan-for-cheap-prison-work-may-cost-thousands-of-jobs-7815140.html. Huge benefits for the employer becuase they can pay considerably less than minimum wage.

Nicked unencrypted PC with 6,000 bank details lands council fat fine

qwertyuiop
Facepalm

Re: Genuine Question

Public sector bodies are obliged to report any data breach, there is no duty on the private sector other than some vaguely worded best practice - "organisations are able to report losses of personal data to the ICO which the ICO encourages, however reporting such losses of personal data is not compulsory". Therefore the private sector rarely reports losses, if at all. They only tend to come to light by a different route because the organisation is, for example, in a highly regulated sector such as finance and they have to report it under compliance rules..

In 30+ years of working in IT I have worked for both the public and private sectors. Where this kind of thing is concerned neither side of the divide has anything to be smug about. I have experienced data losses in both types of organisation, but in the private sector we were able to hush it up - got to think of the affect on customer confidence and the share price after all! Nobody got fired either.

Basically this is an issue that nobody wants to take seriously until after something bad has happened.

'Nothing will convince a kid that's never worn glasses to wear them'

qwertyuiop
FAIL

Re: Still waiting!

Yeah - I was aware of that kind of thing. However "...One button operation to announce time" doesn't fit what I had in mind. In my original post I quite clearly said I didn't want a watch where I had to do *ANYTHING*; it should detect me wondering what time it was and automatically tell me.

qwertyuiop
Coat

Re: In five years..

The battery will, obviously, be fitted internally somewhere in the user's body. In line with other iDevices it won't be replaceable by the user. Instead you'll have to go to an official Apple optician - or iDoctor - to replace it.

I'll get my coat...

qwertyuiop
Thumb Down

Still waiting!

I'm still waiting for a watch that will *TELL* me the time. Every watch I've ever owned has failed to do this - I always have to look at them and read the time off the face. I did briefly have a bedside clock which would speak the time if you pressed a button on it, but again that requires me to do something. I'm waiting for the watch will detect me thinking I wonder what time it is and then tell me.

Boffins cook raw numbers, hope to bake PERFECT kilogram

qwertyuiop

But since the metal Kg is de facto the "accurate one" at the moment, surely your question should be "...how inaccurate the new standard will be when compared to the existing standard"

Amazon makes BEELLIONS from British customers, pays pennies in tax

qwertyuiop

Re: jobs

And presumably they want all those people they employ to be able to read and write, count, and have other skills obtained at school? And when their employees are ill they'd like them to be able to see a doctor or go to hospital? And to be able to drive to work on a road, or get a bus which also uses the road? Presumably they'd also like some framework of laws and people to enforce those laws so that their goods don't get stolen from their warehouses, their PCs don't get stolen from their offices, etc. I could go on...

Now, who are we going to get to pay for the schools, teachers, doctors, nurses, hospitals, roads, police, judiciary, prison system etc.

Oh! I know! It could come out of taxation...

SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

qwertyuiop

Re: Great but oversold?

But when you haven't got taxpayers breathing down your neck about "wasting" their tax dollars you can just go ahead and do it. When you're the biggest single shareholder then you don't have to worry about other shareholders either.

And let's not forget that they are "standing on the shoulders of giants". Without all the (government) expenditure on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle missions (plus numerous others) to do the basic research and then turn it into reality then Musk would have needed even deeper pockets.

None of which is to diminish in any way what he has accomplished. I am in awe of his vision and all that he has achieved. As a boy I grew up watching the space race, and I sat up late to watch the Apollo 11 landing. This impresses me every bit as much.

China begins work on world-beating MEGA power cables

qwertyuiop
Happy

Re: NO FUCKING P IN HAMSTER!!!!!

...and in the right situation there *could* be an apostrophe in "1980s"

Fastest-ever hydrocarb scramjet hits Mach 8, doesn't explode

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: Pizza deliveries - New York to London

Why would you order your pizza from New York? If you want REAL pizza then you order it from its birthplace - Naples.

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

qwertyuiop

Re: Both candidates?

I totally agree, but the fact remains that there are seven candidates, not two.

</pedant>

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Both candidates?

"Londoners vote tomorrow in the capital's mayoral elections, but both candidates..."

and there was me thinking I had to choose between seven candidates! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_mayoral_election,_2012)

Apple can't agree with Australian regulator on iPad 4G

qwertyuiop
Coat

Re: Change the iPad's name?

You forgot something - "...and has rounded corners."

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

qwertyuiop
Unhappy

Re: Always the same mistake.

So how does this actually work out? We all leave our jobs and start our own companies which can never grow to any size because they can never employ anybody - because everybody has followed your advice and doesn't want to be a wage slave.

Crims fall back on old-school cons to avoid anti-fraud tech

qwertyuiop
Thumb Up

Re: Re Modern vs. Traditional crime

Oh, I totally agree. I was just making the point it was extremely naive to think the banks would ever absorb the cost themselves.

qwertyuiop

Re: Modern vs. Traditional crime

How charmingly naive!

Do you really think the banks will absorb the cost of fraud and lose a few quid off their profits? Get real! These are banks remember? Their profits won't suffer, they'll just pump up bank charges to make up for any losses to theft or they'll find a way to pass the blame, and therefore the liability, on to the customer.

Boy died after satnav fault delays ambulance

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Re: Re: Re: On the positive side...

"she was referred to as 'Ms', so clearly she is unmarried"

I'll tell that to my wife and the three other married women I know who prefer to be known as Ms.

70 London 999 calls lost due to clock-change IT glitch

qwertyuiop
FAIL

Re: Well it could have been simple

UNIX timestamps are only OK up until a date (can't recall from memory) in January 2038...

Sony 'fesses to Whitney Houston price hike 'error'

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Who made you buy it?

Whilst I agree that this is a pretty sh*tty thing to do, why is anybody surprised? This is just the basic rules of economics - when the demand for something increases then the seller can increase the price.

What I don't understand:

- if you were a big fan of Whitney Houston surely you would have her albums already?

- if you weren't such a big fan of hers that you already had the albums and it's taken her death to prompt you to buy them then what are you complaining about? You went to iTune$, saw the price AND DECIDED IT WAS A PRICE YOU WERE PREPARED TO PAY. So what's your complaint? Nobody FORCED you to buy at that price.

Did a Seagate sales bloke just say 5TB drives are coming?

qwertyuiop
FAIL

You're forgetting The Rules.

Rule number one of data storage: If you don't have your data in at least TWO places then you don't have your data.

If you stick everything that's precious on a disk of *any* size made by *any* manufacturer and don't back it up then you deserve all that you (don't) get when the disk fails. All disks will fail eventually.

I'm not being holier than thou either - it has happened to me, cost me a lot of money and time, but I've learned my lesson.

Schmidt ducks antitrust questions lobbed from Congress

qwertyuiop
WTF?

Breaking the law?

If I was a Google shareholder I think I might be consulting a lawyer. Schmidt has come out and said that Google isn't necessarily trying to maximise profits - but surely it's the legal duty of a corporation to maximise the return to its shareholders?

RIM to turn in BlackBerry-using looters after London riots

qwertyuiop
WTF?

So RIM shouldn't give out information?

A lot of people seem to think that RIM shouldn't give out information they hold which may help to solve a crime unless there is due process. Firstly, I read their statement as suggesting that there is due process, but let's assume I'm wrong. Let's see if you take the same stance in an scenario that is different in detail but the same in principle.

Imagine you're walking down the street one day and somebody leaps out of an alleyway, viciously assaults you and robs you. I happen to observe the whole crime from my window and can provide a very good description of your attacker - maybe I even managed to grab my camera and take some pictures. You are unaware that I exist, let alone that I witnessed the crime.

You call the police and they arrive. Clearly the correct thing for me to do is to stay in the house, say nothing, and wait for the police to (somehow) discover that I witnessed the crime and have valuable evidence. After all, it would be wholly wrong for me to volunteer information without due process.

Of course, I will now be shouted down by the nay-sayers who will declare that the situation is entirely different, but it isn't. RIM are "witnesses" to several crimes because they hold evidence of how they were organised. Why shouldn't they be responsible citizens and give their evidence to the police?

Cabinet Office government-by-Facebook plans probed

qwertyuiop
Facepalm

New "solution" - same old problem

I share all the concerns voiced above about the likes of Facebook being trusted with this information so I won't reiterate them.

My other concern is the same one that I had over the scrapped ID card system. Put simply, it is either impossible to guarantee the accuracy of such a system OR it's redundant.

In order to have an ID on the system I have to prove who I am. This is, apparently, impossible because allegedly we currently don't have a means of adequately proving our identities, hence the need for such a system. If no such adequate proof exists then how can I prove who I am in order to be put on the system?

On the other hand, presumably if I produce some form of existing government ID such as a passport, driving licence, etc. this will be adequate proof of my identity in order to get put onto the system - in which case the system itself is unnecessary because there is already something in existence which adequately proves who I am.

Freebie Blackhole exploit kit appears on file-sharing websites

qwertyuiop
Coat

Even better exploits!

Surely this means that exploits will now get even better? Effectively the code has now been made open source, so with lots of people reviewing it any bugs or weaknesses will be removed and it will become even better!

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