* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

Alister
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Re: Amazing...

Well ranted Lee, now go and have a lie down... :)

Code crash? Russian hackers? Nope. Good ol' broken fiber cables borked Google Cloud's networking today

Alister

Re: "Mitigation work is currently underway [..]"

To be fair, in this instance Google are indeed trying to mitigate the problem, as I doubt that they are directly involved in the cable repairs, so their efforts will be in trying to route traffic round the break.

Alister

The trouble is that even if, at the site, there are multiple cables in multiple duct routes, invariably they all go back to the same telephone exchange, which often has only one cable entry duct, so at some point all your multiple redundant routes end up in a single digger target...

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

Alister

don't update software on live systems

Right, they should have updated the backup internet first

What happens in Vegas ... will probably go through the huge bit barn Google is building in Nevada

Alister
Facepalm

Bloody Cloudflare!

Well I was just going to post a comment, and then El Reg broke, thanks to Cloudflare.

And I've forgotten what I was going to post now, but I'm sure it would have been great...

Microsoft: OK, we admit it, spring is over. Here's your Windows 10 19H2

Alister

With the UK sweltering in a heatwave

Hmm, only certain parts, here it's bloody cold and wet.

Has NASA's Mars Insight lander hit rock bottom? Heat probe struggles to penetrate Red Planet

Alister

Unprotected?

engineers have removed a protective sheath surrounding the probe

Hmm, going bareback now, eh?

It's us, only backwards. DXC registers new corporate entity: World, meet *drum roll* CXD Infrastructure Solutions

Alister
Facepalm

That'll fool 'em, nobody will ever associate CXD with DXC.

Yuge U-turn: Prez Trump walks back on Huawei ban... at least the tech sector seems to think so

Alister

So, suddenly all the rabid comments about Huawei being a clear and present danger to Americuhs security, are all fake news now?

Philips kills dependence on its Hue hub, pointing to a Bluetooth world

Alister

Re: Here's an interesting idea though:

“Step up to red alert."

"Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb."

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Alister

Re: The Bicentennial man

The Robin Williams movie Bicentennial Man

Based on the (far better) story by Isaac Asimov.

While we were raging about Putin's meddling and Kremlin hackers, Five Eyes were pwning Yandex, Russia's Google

Alister

The Bible - translation? - I have read it in the original Klingon, no translation needed.

TFTFY

Pitch of the week: Helping to stamp out e-cigarettes while removing hurdles to digital learning

Alister
Joke

Re: Young people today!

But I bet he didn't drive a diesel car, so he was probably less harmful to your health overall than a modern teacher... :)

Drone fliers are either 'clueless, careless or criminal' says air traffic gros fromage

Alister

Re: 1 out of 3

it seems drone pilots knew exactly what they were doing when they deliberately closed Gatwick for days.

That's if you subscribe to the view that there were actually any drones involved in the Gatwick closure.

Some might be more inclined to think that it was complete ineptitude on the part of the authorities...

Micron: Look, we've resumed trade with Huawei on a wee 'subset' of DRAM

Alister

The actual products or the volumes being shipped were not mentioned by the CEO

Well no, he wouldn't, otherwise Trump will make sure they are added to the list...

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Alister

My only complaint about the LEGO sets today is that they seem to contain so many more bespoke pieces, which do not readily lend themselves to use in other builds. I recently saw the Bugatti Chiron, I think it was, which contained hardly any "normal" LEGO bricks.

I recall back in the day that LEGO sets actually had suggestions for alternative things to build from the same parts, is that still the case?

Sputnik? No, comrade, this is Spunknik: Frozen sperm manages to survive zero-grav in this totally realistic test

Alister

Re: "ten samples of frozen sperm aboard a CAP10 aircraft"

My suggested DJs would be Wane Carr or for a more Europop feel, Jacques Oeuf.

Do you not remember young master (Simon) Bates on Radio One??

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

Alister

Windows Terminal now uses GPU-based text rendering (DirectWrite and DirectX), which means high quality fonts as well as emoji and so on if you want them.

Are we really now at the stage where users can't survive without pretty fonts and emojii?

FFS, it's a terminal window for typing commands and running scripts, not a fucking chat app!

We've Falcon caught it! SpaceX finally nets a fairing half after a successful Heavy launch

Alister
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Re: "the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You"

Personally I'd have gone for the GCU; Not Wanted On Voyage.

Class - never thought of that one.

Hello Moto! UK Home Office shoves comms giant another £82m to stay on Emergency Services Network gig

Alister
Facepalm

So the pie-in-the-sky idea based on infrastructure that didn't exist, and incorporating features which were not available, at the time of the proposal, is running over time and over budget.

Well I never...

Bollocks or brutal truth: Do smart-mobes make us grow skull horns? We take a closer look at boffins' startling claims

Alister

Re: "she hasn't seen phone-induced bone spurs in her practice"

Does that mean that she has seen bone spurs

Probably, they are quite a common thing.

Tech jocks tell Trump: Tariff tiff with China will not achieve what you think it will achieve

Alister

@a_yank_lurker

I'm not American, so have no skin in this game, but I think you downplay the economic factors of outsourcing manufacturing. It isn't just to "save a few pennies" as you put it, the difference in the wages payed is such that to try and make the same products in any developed country and pay developed country's wages would mean a 30 - 40% increase in unit costs.

However, added to that, there is the cost of the regulatory burden in the US particularly, where the processes of manufacture used by the low-wage countries may not even be allowed in the US, or only by putting in place very expensive monitoring or containment processes.

Yes, of course there is an element of protecting their profits, but I'm not sure consumers would be prepared to pay for the actual cost of goods manufactured in the US, as opposed to abroad.

As above, so below: El Reg haunts Scaleway's data centre catacombs 26 metres under Paris

Alister

Arnold of Birmingham, hey?

A Brummie Frenchman, now there's a thing...

:)

Parliament IT bods' fail sees server's naked OS exposed to world+dog

Alister

Re: Right click - Share C drive as read only...

@JB(nb)

That on it's own would not be sufficient, you'd still have to change file permissions and allow folder browsing, both of which are deliberate acts of mind-blowing stupidity.

Alister

Re: Right click - Share C drive as read only...

Oh yes, it would require changing a lot of the defaults to make it work, and you'd have to change the file permissions on the drive as well. Whoever did it was world class, without doubt...

Alister

Re: Right click - Share C drive as read only...

Nope, that's not what they've done.

They've set the default IIS site to point at the root of C:\ and then turned on file and folder browsing. So the whole drive is available over port 80 from the web server - which is how Google have managed to index it.

Which actually takes more concerted fail than your way...

Alister

Re: it's probably

Kudos, possibly? Or maybe you were thinking of QDOS?

But you're right, you'd really have to work quite hard at the stupid to be able to allow web browsing of the whole system drive.

Boffins' neural network can work out from your speech whether you'll develop psychosis

Alister

Re: Language?

So... Anyone who's regular vocabulary includes a high preponderance of buzzword bingo and marketing speak is likely to be psychotic?

Hmm... <glances across office at the sales team./>

What price the Moon? Tips from the past might save the present

Alister

Price of the Moon?

Better ask Delos D Harriman, he's looked into it.

Blighty's online pr0n gatekeepers are begging for a regulatory beating, says digital rights org

Alister

Re: Not done with DNS

Kids today, eh? Don't know how they're born.

TFTFY!

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Alister

We did consider that, and had they been a nicer client, we might have done it, but we thought, no, let them suffer... :)

In point of fact the domain was still in the grace period, so I don't think we would have been able to register it ourselves.

Alister

We provide web hosting for a number of clients in the rail transport industry. They generally own their own domain names and just point the A records at our servers IPs.

I was on call one weekend, and at 3AM on Saturday morning I got a pager alert that one of the client sites wasn't responding. I jumped onto the server, but the site was up, just not receiving any traffic. I checked the registration details of the domain, and sure enough the domain had lapsed.

I sent an email to the client's internal IT, and the "Digital Experience Manager", and copied in my boss and various other interested parties, explaining that there was nothing we could do, and the client needed to re-register the domain, then I went back to bed.

By 10 o'clock on Saturday morning my inbox was filling up nicely with emails from various high-ups at the client, demanding that we fix the issue, and decrying our "useless" support, questioning our SLA's and all sorts of threats. I then had a phone call from the chairman of our company, asking what the hell was going on and why we didn't fix it.

So I explained to him what the problem was, and he calmed down and told me to ignore all the flack that was flying, and enjoy my weekend...

Come Monday morning, the site is still down, the domain is still unregistered, and the client is threatening legal action if we don't do something...

We have a very shouty conference call, where again, we explain that there is nothing we can do, they are responsible for registering the domain, and only they can fix the problem. It transpires that following a number of staff layoffs, there was nobody at the client who knew the registration details of the domain, or the login for the registrar account.

It took them until about Thursday to sort it out, and they reckon they lost about 18 million in online ticket sales, but get this, they STILL tried to say we were liable for those losses!

Gonna be so cool when we finally get into space, float among the stars, work out every day, inject testosterone...

Alister

But what about the small blue furry creatures from Alpha Centauri?

They are growing bigger and more furry...

Mystery GPS glitch grounds flights, leaves passengers in the bar

Alister

No mention of TCAS

Unless I missed it, neither the article nor any commentard has mentioned that the primary reason for the grounding of aircraft is that the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (which is mandatory on all turbine powered commercial aircraft with more than 30 passengers seats) takes data from the ADS-B.

On affected aircraft using Rockwell-Collins hardware, ADS-B is no longer functional, and therefore TCAS isn't either. This is therefore a safety issue, rather than just a navigational issue, and that is why affected aircraft have been grounded.

Zorin OS 15 nods at Ubuntu and welcomes Windows escapees

Alister

Re: A View to a Kill?

Well... Max Zorin's plan A was to destroy Silicon Valley. Maybe this is Plan B, the longer version...

Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone

Alister

backward times (a pager? Really?)

Well we still use Pagers for On-call staff. Why? Because a pager only goes off if it's really meant to.

We used to hand out mobiles, but after a few times of staff being woken by Spam SMS or "Windows support" calls at silly-o'clock, we decided that pagers were much better.

Labs are for nerds, it's simply Kaspersky now – just hold still while we cyber-immunise you

Alister

Shirley you mean Blockchain

Alister

Re: Changing the wrong bit

They should have gone with "Eugene's Virus Investigation Labs", The acronym is just fine, and not Russian in any way.

Google may have taken this whole 'serverless' thing too far: Outage caused by bandwidth-killing config blunder

Alister

Re: Management Network

@Iamnumpty

Out-of-band management is a thing, and quite commonly used. However, whether that would realistically scale to the sort of requirements that Google have, I don't know. It doesn't look like it.

Musk loves his Starlink sat constellation – but astroboffins are less than dazzled by them

Alister

Whoosh!

I think most of the commentards up to now are missing the main point, it's not so much their visual interference, it's more about the fact that they are all broadcasting radio waves back in towards the planet.

For radio astronomy this is very bad, and cannot easily be countered.

Yes you can filter the frequencies used by the satellites, but the sheer strength of the signals means there will be a degradation of the ability of the radio telescope to pick up fainter signals from the cosmos.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Alister

A gramaphone, Grandad?

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Alister

@Archtech

Where on earth did you get that load of twaddle from?

Not one of your 3 points beares any resemblance to reality.

Alister

Despite the fact there here, in these very forums, so many people posted to the effect that Assange was NOT wanted by the US, without a doubt, and was a fantasist for going into hiding in the first place, was simply being paranoid or seeking to inflate his own ego or importance.

That's because, at the time that he ran away from Sweden, there was no extradition request from the US, and they showed no sign of interest. The charges that they are now wanting him for were not raised until 2018.

Again, he claimed he ran from Sweden to England to avoid extradition by the US, but in fact Sweden was always less likely to allow that to happen than the UK was.

On balance then, he still comes across as a paranoid egotistical fantasist.

Alister

Re: He's not a journalist

They dropped the case that was, let's face it, probably manufactured or embiggened in the first place.

No, they didn't drop it, it was put on hold until such time as Assange became available. And there's only conspiracy theory to say that the case was either manufactured or embiggened.

Just for a moment, consider that the case might be genuine. Why should Sweden not re-open it, and re-apply for extradition, so that Assange can answer to the charges?

The likelehood that he will be extradited from Sweden to the US is much less than from the UK, which is why his original excuse for running from Sweden to the UK so as to avoid extradition was less than believable.

NASA boffins may just carve your name on a chip and send it to Mars if you ask nicely

Alister

NASA has invited members of the public to submit their first and last names, their country of residence, postal codes and email addresses.

So that's another database which will end up on Pastebin shortly...

Programmers' Question Time: Tiptoe through the tuples

Alister

Yay! Stob!

Brilliant gardener's programmer's question time.

I'm having trouble with the Petunias in my Windows boxes, they're getting all leggy.

UK Space Agency cracks open its wallet, fishes out a paltry £2m for Brit plans to return to orbit

Alister

Re: UK spaceport?

Probably very dusty...

Tim Peake's Soyuz lands in London after jaunt around the UK

Alister

Why is it in London?

It may upset the southerners, but Britain's National Space Centre is in Leicester.

US Air Force probes targeted malware attack, blames... er, the US Navy? What?

Alister

Re: Well...

of course the RAF was far more interested in bombing German civilians than hunting the U-boats

That's a stupid statement.

The tactics, weapons, training and aircraft required to hunt and sink U-boats are completely different to those required for the mass-bombings the RAF (and USAF) carried out.

This is a sett-up! Mum catches badger feasting on contents of freezer

Alister

Re: LOL

calling one's daughter Daenerys

Chlamydia, such a lovely name for a girl...