* Posts by Gordon 10

3872 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009

We(don't)Work: Rent-a-desk outfit cuts 2,400 staff in bid to be a functioning business

Gordon 10

See my note up thread about providing fire marshall and first aider services. You need bodies per floor for that.

Gordon 10
Flame

El Reg should check their building staffing

As WeWork staff provide the fire Marshall and first Aider service in the UK. Even when they were doing well there was barely a sign of them on the floor of our West London WeWork so gawd knows what it’s like now.

On the plus side hopefully the preachy veganism has gone away with the idiot founders. I don’t have a problem with Vegans but I couldn’t eat a whole one.

Mysterious IT snafu at British Airways causes bunch of inbound flight delays and cancellations

Gordon 10

Re: "Where's Mr Speed today?"

Maybe “courier” was just a cover?

Gordon 10
Flame

BA commentards needed urgently

The world (well El Reg) needs to know whats going on at Britains Favourite failure prone airline.

Or are you all too busy trying to put the fire out?

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

Gordon 10

Re: Quelle Surprise

Extended warrantees are generally paid for everywhere - the clue is in the name!

I think you mean Apple (in the US) charge you for any costs outside of the 1st year.

Other countries may vary.

Here's an oldie but a goodie linky :

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-eu-warranty

We're so, so, sorry you're not able to get PC chips, says Intel to everyone who hasn't gone with AMD yet

Gordon 10
IT Angle

Other foundries?

I thought intel used different manufacturing processes to the foundry players If so surely the amount of production they are going to be offload is limited?

Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation

Gordon 10

once - I believe.

Uncle Sam prepping order to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch from the UK

Gordon 10

Re: Say Hello! to the judge, Meg ...

Where have you been?

There is/was already one in progress for years from agrieved HP shareholders. This is why HP are chasing the ex-autonomy guys so hard, if they dont - they effectively provide evidence of their own complicity and incompetence.

Gordon 10

Re: Consistency Is The Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

1. Its still ongoing. think we are at the part where the judge sleeps on it for 6 months.

2. No bureaucrat suffers from embarrassment.

3. WTF is Chamberlin thinking? I would not go near the US with this hanging over me.

Ex-Capita accountant who claimed £10k bung to leave was blackmail has appeal thrown out

Gordon 10

To put this in context - that's more than what you get if fired for Misconduct.

If someone offered you £10k (plus notice period) to leave Capita would you take it? I'd be tempted.

Not sure of the full facts of the case - but an accountant not wanting to work over financial year end (usually jan/feb) should find another job. Should they get time to decompress before/afterwards - yes.

This is the bit that rang alarm bells for me. Like it or not - if you are considering quoting the Working Time Directive, things are already so bad you should be considering leaving.

*Disclaimer its a given that Crapita are pure evil, that doesnt mean that in every case they are 100% the bad guy.

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Gordon 10
FAIL

Aspect ratio very odd

Might just work for a ebook or Document. Cant see it working for video. Whats the point of these devices if they cannot replace a tablet?

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Gordon 10

Re: More importantly...

Do not fear sir! It will make you look as hip as your unfeasibly waxed moustache does, it will attracts likes and followers aplenty, and shower much VC cash upon your glorious endeavours.

Gordon 10

Re: But have they fixed

It’s a £2.5k portable computer with a claimed 10+ hr battery life. If I charge it in the morning why shouldn't it last all day - my 6 year old Macbook Air does as does the MBP 13.

Its a design flaw in the MBP 15. Maybe not the biggest but certainly a stupid oversight.

Gordon 10

But have they fixed

The stupid design decision to run on the full fat graphics every time you connect another display?

My 2018 15" has overall the worst battery life of any Mac I have owned. So gutted I went for more cores (6) over the 13.

Morrisons tells top court it's not liable for staffer who nicked payroll data of 100,000 employees

Gordon 10

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

To reply to my comment. On Fridays article on this the side bar says

"As part of that, the payroll was "uploaded from an encrypted USB onto Mr Skelton's encrypted work laptop by another Morrisons employee,"

So basically he had USB rights as part of his role for at least some time,

Gordon 10
Stop

Re: Depends if decent efforts at data security made by Morrisons

Not sure that follows. Its quite possible that as an auditor he would have an exception to any USB stick rule, they are forever tossing around spreadsheets.

Also I think the fact that he was an auditor in a privileged role is key. This wasn't some muppet arsing around this was the finance/hr equivalent of a rogue sysadmin.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Gordon 10
Mushroom

Re: Hope the hack is up to date with his TB jab

Am only the one who went to a school where the boys competed so see how hard they could punch the resulting jab site?

"Dead arm" for days.

I also seem recall my BCG blister burst in a shower of blood 3 months later. Made white school shirt look like something from Taratino. And that was without any teenage thuggery involved.

OPPO's Reno 2, aka 'Baby Shark', joins the deepening pool of high-spec midranger mobes

Gordon 10
Meh

The shitty middle ground

I dont see how this phone is anything to write home about. Too expensive for the mid-range crowd around £300 mark and not cool enough to compete with the "name" brands at the high end.

If you look at market share there are only really 2 brands with any market share that can sell top end specs for stupid money - Apple and Samsung. Huawei obviously have market share too - but its mostly low-mid range volume based I fully expect their top end share to dive off a cliff now they are at price parity with AppSung.

Full disclosure - happy owner of an Honor 10 - thats how to make a mid market phone. £280 on black friday last year. Only complaint is still waiting for Android Q (but its coming), that will make it the third and last major Android release on it. Oh and the bluetooth stack needs a reboot every once in a while. Plus its not stupidly big at 5.8". This race to make phones bigger than the average thumb-forefinger span is utter muppetry in my opinion. The missus' next phone is a secondhand iPhone X or Xs to replace her aging SE for her tiny girl hands. Seriously considering joining her.

Satya 'Karma' Nadella ignored our complaints over pay gap, thousands of Microsoft women say

Gordon 10
FAIL

@claptrap. Not that I'm convinced by your BS in any way shape or form but you've just successfully argued that Women should be paid MORE.

Have a bag of fail on all points sir.

Leeds IT bloke pleads guilty to hacking Jet2 CEO's email account

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Question for shareholders

Eerr. Fail on your part and Jet2's. I think they meant to say no Customer's personal data was accessed. By definition an email address is personal data, and at a minimum he had that for every account he hacked, and probably a lot more besides from being able to scan the mails in those in-boxes.

A breach of employee's data privacy is treated in exactly the same way as a breach of customers data privacy under GDPR - it makes no distinction between the two from a regulatory enforcement perspective - there might be different risk mitigations/justifications put forward though...

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Gordon 10

Apple still does laplink

Only they call it Migration Assistant and it needs a Thunderbolt 3 cable for maximum ommph. Faster than anything else I every used though - including cloning to a ssd in an enclosure.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Gordon 10
WTF?

WHY ARE THERE DOWNLIGHTERS UNDER THE WINDOW SILLS

What was wrong with the man! (and surely it was a man)

Never has the WTF icon been more needed.

ps sorry for shouting.

PowerPoint! Word! Excel! Lens! By your powers combined, I am Captain Mobile Office

Gordon 10

Unfortunately since the Apps aren't in Vault club they're aren't allowed to talk about Vault club.

Remember when Bezos whined about having too much money? Amazon's Q3 will help out with that

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Interest rates

I think you are conflating two completely different business models. Tesla <> Amazon.

Indeed Telsa and many of the other VC funded startups who have never/barely made a profit fall into that category, Amazon most assuredly do not.

What simultaneously sucks and doesn't? This new robot vacuum cleaner

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: You know what also sucks?

And you think complaining about it in a random comments section is going to help how?

Just a friendly reminder there were no at-the-time classified secrets on Clinton's email server. Yes, the one everyone lost their minds over

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Nobody cares

Thats a total fail. Politicians of any stripe dont want money - they want Power - which makes your entire theory null and void.

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: Ummm... missed a very big thing there

Thats a pretty silly comment imo. Since the whole of the existence of the mail server was a policy violation, why on earth would there be a requirement to put a retention tool on it?

You seem overly fixated on the tech and the only valid point you make is about the deletion of evidence which was a biggy. You should have stopped your comment there.

Any finger will do? Samsung Galaxy S10 with a screen protector reportedly easy to fool

Gordon 10

Re: No way this is limited to just Samsung

The hardware invites the same risk. The risk only materialises if Qualcomm not Sammy wrote the code that responds to the hardware wrongly. If Huawei do a separate implementation then they have a 50/50 chance of not being impacted. Rising to a 100% if they have proper code reviews and think about default error states.

Gordon 10
FAIL

I beg to differ

Its a major frikken surprise. And its a giant bag of samsung fail.

No way the addition of a protector should cause a fail to an unlocked state. It should fail to a locked state.

The flaw here is not the hardware its the software that was coded to fail to unlocked. And thats a massive fail for a piece of code dealing with security.

Its like your front door opening when you stick a lolly stick in the lock.

Careful now, UK court ruling says email signature blocks can sign binding contracts

Gordon 10
Meh

Re: Signature versus signature block

Precedent is not as black and white as you imply. Its effectively "precedent for this particular set of circumstances", and it could be argued by a Barrister that these were very narrow and dont apply to new case "Y". El Reg implys that there is plenty of other case law that argues a Signature Block is not a binding signature.

Having said that - if this is the sole outlier it does warrant an appeal.

NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings

Gordon 10

All this time we thought...

Elon wanted to be Ernst Blofeld

When it turns out that all along he wanted to be Ming the Merciless.

Obligatory "Flash ahaahhhh!" (Although it looks like he's channelling the Serials rather than the film.)

Good news: Microsoft is doubling your OneDrive storage for more than double your money

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: For private individuals, 1 TB USB Drives

Different use cases.

Having your files available on the move and effectively synced across all your devices including tablet and mobile is precisely why you would choose cloud rather than USB drives.

US lobby group calls for open standards to fight Huawei 'threat'

Gordon 10

Indeed

Maybe Huawei should offer a quid pro-quo - sharing of their standards for every 5 of those the big American firms have been hiding for years. Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco ..... the list could be endless.

Australia didn't blame China for parliament hack in case it upset trade relations – report

Gordon 10

Re: Frustrating

It's not that simple.

Very few countries are good partners with each other - not whilst one has something the other has. And frankly the Chinese have got a few hundred years to go before they match the worst excesses of the Western powers.

Gordon 10

Re: Can the "Five Eyes" be trusted with attribution

Not really relevant.

No State Actor can be trusted.

Malwarebytes back to square one as appeals court rules blocking rival antivirus maker isn't on

Gordon 10
Facepalm

Good Question

But if you find a definitive answer will you give my companies desktop team a call as they seem to think I need both McAfee and Symantec installed!

(I wish I was joking)

Fairphone 3 stripped to the modular essentials: Glue? What glue?

Gordon 10

At the risk of making myself unpopular

I rather suspect the usage of glue today is a direct result from the mainstream manufacturers wishing to eliminate warrantee returns due to things like loose USB connections.

My gut feel suggests glued phones whilst less repairable are also less prone to mechanical failures.

Loss-making $15bn hipster chat biz Slack suddenly less appetising to investors as it predicts deeper losses

Gordon 10
Mushroom

Fixing security holes

Maybe they are going to fix the one where *any user* can remove an app or addin for the *whole* workspace (company-wide!)

I removed the Webex addin 3 times in one day for everyone before I found that out... fortunately it wasn't something useful! (badum tish)

OK, let's try that again: Vulture rakes a talon on Samsung's fresh attempt at the Galaxy Fold 5G

Gordon 10

A short reminder

That cynical IT types are *never* the target audience of a v1.0 product. Thats what gullible fools users are for.

SpaceX didn't move sat out of impending smash doom because it 'didn't see ESA's messages'

Gordon 10
Pint

So....

The SpaceX space BOFH was in the pub ignoring his pager?

HPE lawyer claims key associates of Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'refuse' to testify to High Court

Gordon 10

Re: Wait a minute

I think there is some creative interpretation of "refuse" from HPE's lawyers. Just sounds like they weren't needed/material to the case.

Sounds like Lynches side have decided HPE have embarrassed themselves enough already :D

Pompey boffin bags €1.3m off EU for dark matter research – shame a no-deal Brexit looks more and more likely

Gordon 10
Unhappy

In other words like the rest of us who dont own a hedge fund or get paid £1000 per hour to be a corporate shill (sorry "consultant"), Brexit will f*ck this right up.

Gawd help any of those PHd's and post-docs if they are of European nationality - they'll probably end up with pre-settled status like half the current poor sods.

Whistleblowing saboteur costs us $167m bellows Tesla’s accountant

Gordon 10

Re: Are you f**king kidding me?

Its worth considering how much of Telsa's real world battery telemetry and its associated related IP adds to their share price. Is anyone else deploying batteries in vehicles at the same scale and length of time?

Huawei goes all Art of War on us: Switches on 'battle mode' and vows to 'dominate the world'

Gordon 10

Re: Game of Tanks

I think its less whether a backdoor exists, and more that the western Three Letter Agencies (TLA's) have been told to go take a running jump when they hinted they would like one.

Gordon 10

Re: no longer required US components

Maybe not for long if the Moron in chief holds sway. Android could be one of the biggest casualties.

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Gordon 10
FAIL

Re: That's horrible.

@Tom

So basically

1. Scout police reports every time you go out/ to a new coffee shop?

2. Dont buy nice stuff thats portable.

Do you realise what a dick suggestion you have just made?

There's sensible precautions - don't go to dodgy area at midnight, then there's victim shaming - guess which side of the fence yours falls?

Would you have posted this if he had a £2k Lenovo stolen? Or was it just a knee jerk reaction because it was Apple kit? Your "overpriced apple kit" snide remark gives you away.

Police costs for Gatwick drone fiasco double to nearly £900k – and still no one's been charged

Gordon 10

TBF to the Sussex Rozzers

£800k is a drop in the ocean to what the 3 day shutdown cost the Travel industry, so assuming there was something real* and not mass hysteria then its actually money well spent.

*Yes Im stretching a bit.

Hands up who likes gaming! Hands up who likes gaming on Macs! Er, OK. Well, Parallels has an update for you

Gordon 10

Re: "Parallels is merely a nibble"

Me too. Although I moved to VMWare Fusion. 3 seats for the same price as 1 parallels seat, with slightly fuglier integration (imo), and all the family Macs are covered.

Million times better than Virtual box.

Plot twist: Google's not spying on King's Cross with facial recognition tech, but its landlord is

Gordon 10

You are confused

It doesn't work but the cops are too fascinated with their new shiny-shiny to care.

Also it's helpfully biased towards the same certain segments of the population they are, so helps them play "stop and search snooker".

Let's not forget the average plod barely knows the laws they have to enforce on a daily basis* let alone data privacy ones.

*Like the poor sod they arrested for walking past the camera vans in Wales with his face covered, which is not actually illegal.

Gordon 10

Re: For what it's worth …

Indeed would be tempting to take a wander around there. Then bung them a SAR request with the date and time you were there.

And then a data transfer request for your biometric profile hehehe.