* Posts by Tom 38

4341 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009

Guess who's suffering an email outage. Go on, it's as easy as 123-Reg

Tom 38

Re: Why would you use email from 123/GoDaddy/HostPapa etc. anyway?

Compared to what you get from 123/GoDaddy, Gmail is pretty decent. Having to use it for a reasonable sized company is just painful though. Google are impossible to deal with; it is part of their SLA that if you can find someone to converse with*, that person seemingly had email explained to them that morning and it hasn't quite sunk in.

Next up is their account management tools, or rather, they should be but they aren't there. Salesdroid calls up because they've left their Out of Office auto responder on, and want you to turn it off? Either it waits for the droid to get to a desktop computer or they tell your their password over the phone...

Like most of google's stuff, they get it to a point where they can sell it or put ads on it, and then it is "good enough". Contrast with AWS (I know, not exactly like for like), every aspect of their APIs and UIs is polished.

* Via email, obviously. No phoning people up to ask why Joe from accounts' mailbox has been unavailable for 4 days without any status reports or service failure reports.

Comcast is totally down with you using a Roku to watch Xfinity cable TV – but it'll cost you extra

Tom 38

Re: Make hay while the sun shines

5g gigabit wireless internet is coming

Optimistic much?

Watch: MIT's terrifying invisible gel robo-eels snatch live fish

Tom 38
WTF?

So those arm thingies used in factory lines, also not robots?

Google's Chrome is about to get rather in-your-face about HTTPS

Tom 38

Re: Cult of useless HTTPS

Why does it make caching hard? You terminate TLS in the CDN and run a new SSL session from the CDN to the source. As a bonus you can validate the CDN cert on the source as well.

Well, yes. Doing those things is harder than doing nothing, qed caching is trickier.

Tom 38

Re: Cult of useless HTTPS

What caching problem? HTTPS pages and resources are cached like normal.

You are thinking of browser caches. HTTPS makes edge caches trickier.

IETF 'reviewing' US event plans in the face of Trump's travel ban

Tom 38

Re: an anti-intellectual and racist presidency?

The Aussies blocked the same set of immigrants who are trapped on a bunch of islands off the coast of Australia because they (Australia) recognized the threat posed by immigrants from these countries.

Do you ever say anything that is factual? Australia does not accept any refugees who arrive by boat. It has nothing to do with what country they originate from, and lots of the world disagrees with the policy.

And the call went poorly because Aussie Prez told Trump he had to honor the agreement.

The concept of "honour" must be quite alien to him... do you think he should not abide by the treaty because he doesn't like it? If Russia rolls tanks in to Latvia, can Trump decide he doesn't like NATO any more either? If Trump decides he doesn't want to keep giving money to China, do you think it OK for him to cancel their T-bills?

Wow, look out, hackers: Trump to order 60-day cybersecurity probe

Tom 38
Headmaster

Pedantry: Trump is definitely not Canute/Knut. Knut and the waves is Knut demonstrating to his sycophantic courtiers that he might be King of Denmark, England and Norway, but that his secular power is nothing compared to God/nature - he can command the tide to stop, but it will not. It is meant as a rebuke to those wielding power; even if you possess power, you cannot control events.

Tom 38

Re: Time for a Great Firewall

In 2011 Chinese government hackers got into U.S. Steel's computer systems and stole trade secrets related to a new, lightweight, high strength steel process for automobiles, military vehicles, and ships. Chinese steel makers copied these techniques and started producing identical lightweight steel products. U.S. Steel lost contracts, market share, and jobs

So, to recap, it was super cool when the US ignored international patent and copyright law to advance from an agrarian economy to an industrial one, but when China do it, it is intolerable?

Chain [sic] has been attempting to hack U.S. and U.K aircraft carriers. Of course these ships use the same internet that we do.

OHRLY? (You are wrong)

'Maker' couple asphyxiated, probably by laser cutter fumes

Tom 38

Re: This happened in Berkeley?

Because they died of carbon monoxide poisoning (CO)?

Did they? TFA says that "Police aren't confirming a cause of death until they receive autopsy results, and by January 28 (the date of the Berkeleyside report), the time of death had yet to be established." and "With cause of death still unknown, The Register will take the advice of a friend of the couple, speaking to Berkeleyside, and refrain from further speculation.".

Do you also know who the Zodiac Killer was?

I'm deadly serious about megatunnels, vows Elon Musk

Tom 38

A Transatlantic Tunnel

...run by BART? *shudder*

Doomsday Clock moves to 150 seconds before midnight. Thanks, Trump

Tom 38

Re: They've neglected Leap Seconds...

Unless I'm grasping it wrong - are we actually fucked? because thats what the clock is telling me. The furthest from doom its ever been is 17 minutes in the 90s - out of 24 HOURS??

I'm gonna assume its a 24 hour clock , seeing as they are specifying midnight rather than 12

there are 86400 seconds in a day , we are 150 from doom.

That means we are 99.82638889 % fucked

Yeah, that number seems a little low. I feel at least 99.9% fucked.

The purpose of the clock is to point out how close we are to annihilating human civilisation. In about 15 years last century we went from the worst thing a fucknut could do is kill all the people that he can get close to, which is not an existential threat, to being able to kill everyone in the world by simply by pushing a few keys. It took creating the clock to point out to a lot of people precisely how close we now are.

If you think of it another way, the clock is counting down how long is left for human civilisation. If you assume we've been going roughly 12,000 years, it's anticipating we've got around another 20-24 years at this rate.

CIA boss: Make America (a) great (big database of surveillance on citizens, foreigners) again!

Tom 38

Re: Huh!

I don't understand why people voted for a man who stated that he would repeal affordable health care.

I saw a poll after the election that said that amongst Trump voters who wanted "Obamacare" dismantled, a majority wanted to keep Affordable Care Act, which is actually what Obamacare is. They don't even know what they are voting for, just that they don't want anything that Obama has done.

The hatred of Obama is perverse; he inherited a country with profound economical difficulties - losing 800k jobs a month when he took office - that was fighting and losing two wars. He got out of Iraq and Afghanistan as best as was possible. He delivered 75 consecutive months of jobs growth, adding 10 million jobs in 8 years. S&P 500 up over 180% over his tenure. US GDP grew faster than any other NATO country during his presidency..

He should be considered an amazing success, but you have hordes of people who dislike this man so much that they cannot even type his name without it becoming OBAKA. Obummer, Odrama - and usually uppercased - as if to even utter the name Obama relies on some tourette like shout.

It seems like the conspiracy theorists have taken over, with acronyms like "MSM" and "TPTB" being blamed for anything negative about Trump - even the things he says himself!

Trumping free trade: Say 'King of Bankruptcy' Ross does end up in charge of US commerce

Tom 38

Re: Same idiocy regardless of location

Slap the tax on the imports, the corresponding end product becomes more expensive.

Sell it in USA for a lot more than it cost prior to the insane taxation and then the end buyers will suffer, not the manufacturers.

Unless you intend to import the drives, manufacture something in USA and then export the end product. [..]

I can see this working with the foreign car manufacturers, at least there is some car production still left in USA and most of the workers of the bankrupt companies are still alive and well within the working age.

Hard drives are not cars though. Car manufacturers have to sell their cars where their consumers will use them, so if they want to sell cars to americans, the cars have to be in america.

Hard drives don't necessarily have to be located where their users are using them. Obviously, hard drives in PCs/laptops etc do, but think of all the hard drives google, amazon, et al have in their datacentres; those hard drives represent a huge chunk of the market, and there is no need for the hard drives servicing americans to be located in america. You could put huge datacentres in Mexico and Canada, and put the hard drives there. There are no plans to tax bytes on the wire yet, right?*

If he does put a tariff on hard drives, then yay! This will make businesses around the world more competitive compared to american companies. If that forces hard drive manufacturers to move operations back to the US and increase costs for all of us, then there will be a bunch of empty HDD manufacturing capacity in Thailand for someone else to step in and undercut them.

* I do hope I'm not giving him ideas...

Learn to code site Code.org loses student work due to index bug

Tom 38

if you were working on “CS Principles and CS Discoveries:” courses, the outage means there's an hour of your life that you won't get back.

Well, assuming the lesson is any good, its not a wasted hour, its an hour you spent learning things. If re-doing the things you learnt in that hour takes you another hour again, you probably didn't learn it that well and the extra look should be helpful.

Welcome to the Wipe House: President Trump shreds climate change, privacy, LGBT policies on WhiteHouse.gov

Tom 38

Re: @dalethorn

All of those lies you regurgitated have been properly deconstructed in media that you don't read. Like all trolls, you have no facts - you just spew the hate rhetoric that you accuse Trump of. If you had one fact, you'd state it. Trump is a common person who mixes with boxers, football players, construction workers, wrestlers, entertainers, etc. The Clintons, when they're not raping people on the Lolita Express

It's just too delicious: you bitch about people "regurgitating lies", "having no facts" and "spew the hate rhetoric" about Trump, and then in the next 3 sentences accuse the Clintons of being paedophile rapists. I'd laugh if I could stop crying.

Trump was an abhorrent human being even before he filled his head with the politics of these alt-right nutjobs. America voted for him; you deal with him. If he fucks up the rest of the world however, forgiveness is not going to be forthcoming.

Tom 38

Re: Likely

Or it could be that POTUS was renamed to POTUS44 and a new POTUS was created which immediately garnered millions of followers so putting a lie to the hate factor. How many did the original POTUS gain in its first few hours?

Yeah, Washington took fucking ages to get a decent twitter following.

AWS offers $20 bribe to derps who buy old IoT condom-o-matic dunce dobbers

Tom 38

Re: Useful in specific circumstances

It doesn't matter how many times the button is pressed, it will only order one per day.

Jeremy Hunt pockets £14m through sale of course search website

Tom 38

Re: Cunning Hunt?

how about funding the NHS at the level the USA spends on health care.

Isn't that what he's trying to do anyway? US style costs, US style provision

Ex-Autonomy CFO pleads not guilty to charges he inflated the company's value

Tom 38

Re: What is fraud ?

This is called blaming the victim.

Yes. Caveat emptor applies, particularly in non-consumer exchanges. The only scenario in which it would not apply is if the seller has a clear information advantage that would not be removed by applying effective due diligence.

I guess this case will boil down to one side arguing that it was impossible to discern this from due diligence, and one side arguing that they did everything according to law and that due diligence was not performed effectively. The cynic in me also thinks probably that one side pays US taxes, and the other side are not citizens.

Mr Angry pays taxman with five wheelbarrows worth of loose change

Tom 38
Headmaster

He'd be shit out of luck in the UK

Pennies and tuppences are only legal tender for amounts up to 20p, precisely to stop shit like this.

Because I know you are all fascinated by this, 5p/10p are legal tender for amounts up to £5, 50p/20p are legal tender for amounts up to £10, and £1/£2/£5 are legal tender for any amount.

I did once write my university 100 cheques each for 50p once, to pay a £50 cleaning "fine" which had unilaterally been applied to each person on my floor because they couldn't work out who trashed the kitchen. It would have cost them >50p to cash each one, so they didn't...

Terry Pratchett's self-written documentary to be broadcast in 2017

Tom 38
Headmaster

Warning: This post contains pedantry

How is it a documentary, when it has someone playing the role of the person being documented?

This has to be either a dramatisation of a true story, or a reconstruction... it cannot be a documentary.

Still going to watch it :D

Customer: BT admitted it had 'mis-sold' me fibre broadband

Tom 38

Re: What are customers moaning about?

However I seem to remember from a previous reg article that the wholesale price Openreach charge for line rental is only about £8 pm. Average line rental price from all vendors is about £17-20 even paying in advance so they are making a nice mark-up on that, no wonder some of them offer 'free' broadband.

BT use the increase in line rental revenue to cross subsidise their foray into TV and especially sports broadcasting. They aren't allowed to milk the broadband aspect of things, so they make it all on the line rental.

It's scum of the earth behaviour.

Fedora 25: You've got that Wayland feelin', oh, that Wayland feelin'

Tom 38

Re: Another major change no one is asking for

I've written a boatload of programs using Xlib and various extension libraries over the years. The API isn't the best but I've seen a lot worse and anyone using higher level libraries such as gtk or qt doesn't even have to care about the quirks of X. So your point is BS.

People writing Qt or GTK or Compiz do have to care about it. X is changing precisely because the people writing X and writing the primary toolkits that use X want it to change.

No, there is no choice if the other pram has been sent to the recycle and isn't an option. Ever tried installing X from scratch? Its damn hard. And pointing out that a replacement for a major core component of linux doesn't have the same functionality as its predecessor is not "whining", its a legitimate complaint. If you think everyone who disagrees with you is whining then you're in for some big shocks in life. Do yourself a favour and grow up you dumb Millennial

Yes, I have installed X from scratch - many times. You're not required to run Wayland, its an option. You're not required to run Fedora, its an option. Wailing how all your toys have been taken away from you if you choose that option is whining like a little baby. I don't think you are whining because you disagree with me, but because how you are complaining about it is portraying you as a whining little baby.

PS: Not a millennial, personally I grew up a long time ago. One of the crowning characteristics of millennials is their excessive entitlement issues. You might not consider yourself a millennial, but you act like it.

Tom 38
Stop

Re: Another major change no one is asking for

Thing is boltar, this change isn't made for you, it is made for the people writing and maintaining X and applications using X. They don't like it. They want to do different things. They went and did different things.

This isn't revolutionary, X has been wanted to be rewritten by the people who write and maintain X since before Xorg even existed. In fact, the existence of Xorg was a necessary step before replacing the parts of X that needed replacing, splitting the monolith into smaller packages.

So, you don't need to use this new stuff. You can do almost whatever the hell you want; the one thing you can't do is wail and cry because the feature you want is not in the new stuff; the people interested in writing the new stuff are not interested in that feature. They aren't particularly interested in what you want. They rewrote it because of what they want.

You've already been annoyed by someone saying "go off and write it if you want it"; it's not necessary to go that far, simply find other people who are interested in the feature that you want and go from there. Continue using X if you so desire.

Just stop whining like a little child; your toys are still in your pram, this is a new pram that you can choose to put your toys in. Or not. Whatever. Just stop whining.

Tom 38
Headmaster

I haven't [..] had any apps that won't work.

[..]

I like to use Redshift or f.lux to tint-shift my screen at night as I find that much easier on my eyes. Neither application seems to work under Wayland

Er.

Man jailed for 3 days after Texas cops confuse cat litter for meth

Tom 38
Happy

Re: Road site test?

"Whoops, here's me accident'ly trippin' up, oo, dis is me grabbin' a statchoo for support, oh, der arm have come right off.. and what is dis white powder I sees here with my eyes accident'ly spillin' on der floor?"

He licked a finger and gingerly tasted the stuff. "Slab," he growled..

"Did I just lick dis?" he said

"Er, yes.." said Carrot

"T'ank goodness for dat, 'd hate to believe dis room was really fully of giant hairy spide.... weeble weeble sclup..."

Aaah, if only our police were still like the City Watch :/

Florida Man sues Verizon for $72m – for letting him commit identity theft

Tom 38

Re: Nice to see...

Oh do fuck off... nothing has happened yet and the biggest damage to the brit economy is from doommongers like you saying how everything is shit when strictly speaking NOTHING has happened yet.

As you say, we've actually *done* nothing so far, but that hasn't stopped things happening. Food inflation is through the roof compared to the previous 7 years, and we haven't even actually even committed to leaving yet.

The best analogy I heard is that the brexit vote was like jumping off a tall building - people are saying "This isn't so bad", but we haven't yet hit the ground.

Dotdot. Who's there? Yet another IoT app layer

Tom 38

Re: .mkv

Matroska is amazing, which is why its the gold standard for how videos are stored and delivered over the internet.....

...except it isn't, content creators/distributors tend to use one of MP4, MOV, or MPEG2 TS. The only place where matroska does have some ubiquity is in scene releases, and even there more and more things are coming in mp4.

Seems to me that ties in perfectly with xkcd; the ISO standard that specifies the MP4 file format predates the creation of the matroska spec, but there were reasons why people didn't want to use MP4 (licensing) that made creating a new standard a good idea, and now we have two standards...

Regular or premium? Intel pumps out Optane memory at CES

Tom 38

Re: I must be missing something

NAND SSD to NAND SSD copy speed was 284MBytes/sec while the OPTANE SSD to OPTANE SSD copy speed was 1.93GBytes/sec.

I suspect manufactured numbers there (by Intel), because that would be the slowest SSD I've ever seen. Good PCI-E/M2 SSDs (as they are basically the same thing) have read speeds >2 GB/s and write of 1.5 GB/s.

It would be interesting (and I guess we will see soon enough when they actually start shipping them) to see comparisons with equivalent devices; if they're saying an Optane M2 with PCI-E is faster than SSD, it should be compared against an SSD connected over M2/PCI-E.

Tom 38

Re: I must be missing something

Big fucking whoop, you can just use DRAM or an SSD for that. For this to be good, it's got to be either cheaper than SSD and available in higher capacities, or vastly faster. This is neither.

What is revolutionary/interesting about a 32GB cache module that performs at the same level as an SSD?

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Tom 38

Re: I really don't see the point

The point is that a bland, more expensive, harder to prepare, powder that must be shaken into a gloop isn't a replacement for those things. Even if you're time poor there are better choices.

More expensive? TFA says between £1.30 and £1.60 a meal. I'm about to pop out and buy a sandwich, salad or hotpot for lunch, which will cost between £4 and £8. Dinner tonight is a diet M&S ready meal and some fresh veg, £4.

Harder to prepare? Measure, pour, shake well, drink. Fetching and retrieving the sandwich takes at least 15 minutes, queuing up in M&S at least 5.

"Bland gloop" - I'll give you that one.

The main thing I have against these sorts of food replacements is that they will never be an adequate replacement for food, so eventually you will go back to a food diet. Eating this stuff will not help you develop a healthy food diet, so when you do switch back you will overeat and eat the wrong things.

Me and a friend both were trying to lose weight at the same time, we each lost between 30-50kg, me slightly more than him. He lost it by switching to SlimFast for all meals, I lost it by changing my diet to salads and low fat/low carb/low GI foods and reducing portion size. He has subsequently put everything back on after switching back to food (he literally went straight back to Greggs for breakfast and lunch..).

Web-exposed MongoDB installs wiped by bitcoin ransoming script scum

Tom 38

Re: But even a basic MongoDBA

DBA? Please, probably most of these installations were done by a single developer using the company AWS account and never looked at again.

Woo, DevOps!

Mattel's parenting takeover continues with Alexa-like dystopia

Tom 38

Marketing people who don't know cockney rhyming slang

Stick it up yer Aris!

A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

Tom 38

Re: Now now...

Let's get real. This country of mine (USA) also does influence peddling as well. Hell, we even attempt to influence elections (mostly with rhetoric, but ...).

Ahahahaahahahahahaha! You make a funny!

Tom 38

Re: legitimate/illegitimate

You missed the [2] link to the footnote in the main text.

If only he had re-read it first.

Ruh-roh! Rick Ruhl rolled out of Ham Radio Deluxe in software kill-switch aftermath

Tom 38

Re: Low blood sugar

You would have to be seriously mismanage your condition (& badly affect your health) to always be suffering out of healthy range blood sugar issues.

Well duh, he has type 2 diabetes. You don't get type 2 diabetes without your doctor first saying "Hey buddy, if you don't change your diet and start taking care of your health, in a few years time you will get type 2 diabetes".

These kind of people aren't going to be great at managing a condition via diet that they caused by being unable to manage their diet.

Eating Brotli will improve Edge's inner health says Microsoft

Tom 38

I don't know why they didn't just go with ".brötli" as the extension. We should be well past 8+3/unicode limitations, this isn't the 90s.

Strong non-backdoored encryption is vital – but the Feds should totally be able to crack it, say House committees

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: 'MURICA! FUCK YEAH! (4 Grade%)

There were Americans at Rourke's Drift?

Military timezones

Sexbots could ‘over-exert’ their human lovers, academic warns

Tom 38
Stop

In what universe does "Fucking a human to death" not come under the definition of Rule 1 - "injury through action" (or inaction, depending on position I suppose).

It's round and wobbles, but madam, it's a mouse pad, not a floppy disk

Tom 38

The first DVD movies were mainly double sided, this was back when many players (or perhaps it was manufacturing?) couldn't process dual layer, you would have double sided single layer discs, commonly called "flippers". Annoying as hell to get up and turn the disc over, plus there was very few marks on the disc itself to see what the movie was in the first place.

IT ops doesn't matter. Really?

Tom 38

Get real – it's not all about developers and DevOps

How did this sneak past QC?! This is undermining a solid year of indoctrination, quick pull it before anyone else sees.

Next you're going to be posting that HPE haven't done anything interesting in the past two hours or something actually readable about storage - enough of this craziness!

Disney sued in race row: Axed IT workers claim jobs went to H-1B hires

Tom 38

@Antron

I also hope the workers win. However:

This is not about hiring talent that's unavailable in the US. This is not about becoming more globally competitive. This is about the bottom line.

I'm sorry, but if you're a US company, you should go the extra bit to hire and train US workers, if at all possible. If you make your money of US customers, you should be hiring US workers. Firing your US staff and importing cheap H1-Bs is just giving a big middle finger to the country you make your money off of.

The country is giving this opportunity to them, it is state sponsored. Not taking advantage of it is really giving the middle finger to the country. If the country doesn't like companies using H1-Bs, then the country shouldn't give them out.

Also, companies are not people. They do not have humanity, compassion, ethical thoughts. The best you can hope for is that the people working for the company have those qualities, but never expect that a company will do so.

Companies employ entire departments of people to protect the company from its own employees, you should always expect that a company will do whatever is in it's best interest, not your own.

Linus Torvalds releases 'biggest ever' Linux 4.9, then saves Christmas

Tom 38

Re: 4.10 later than 4.9?

Because semver? Standards are useful.

Tom 38
Headmaster

Re: Since when cooking a Christmas Dinner is via a point and click interface?

Whereas with the CLI you just need to remember it's

$ sudo dinner -make -serve -washup type=xmas_lunch

You shouldn't make the dinner as root, you should make it as an unprivileged user and only switch privileges when it is time to serve it.

Privacy is theft! Dave Eggers' big-screen takedown of Google and Facebook emerges

Tom 38
Thumb Up

Re: Mix of google/facebook

I would read Iain Zombie Banks as much as I liked reading Iain M Banks

Silver screen script hacker and dox douche gets 5 years in US cooler

Tom 38
WTF?

DHS for stolen movie scripts?

$17k win for man falsely accused of a terrible crime: Downloading an Adam Sandler movie

Tom 38
Coat

Mine's the one with the asbestos lining

I actually quite like Adam Sandler movies - his last film was Waterboy, right?

Software can be more secure, says NIST, and we think we know how

Tom 38

Re: Start by actually writing your own code!

It could also be totally WRONG, which is the point. You're placing your trust in a third party; that third party can betray you, intentionally or not. Ever heard the phrase, "If you want something done right..."

Nah, BS. If you code to a library and the library is shit, you can replace it. Better still, you have a fixed interface between your code and the library code making it explicitly clear what has to be replaced.

PS:

In software development, the full phrase is "If you want something done right use the same library that everyone else uses for doing that and don't dick around re-implementing it yourself".

Google proudly regards dented shovel as Flash lies supine on the floor

Tom 38
Facepalm

A few months back, Comcast "upgraded" and "improved" Xfinity web applications, which never before had the "benefits" of Flash.

Chillax, the use of Flash is just temporary whilst they get the Silverlight version fully working.

Local TV presenter shouted 'f*cking hell' to open news bulletin

Tom 38

Disappointed

All these posts, and not one mention of "Go Fuck Yourself, San Diego".