* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

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

Alister

UK Space Agency cracks open its wallet...

You can just imagine some grey-haired, stooped, bespectacled civil servant in the Treasury grudgingly opening a small leather shovel-purse, blowing away the dust and cobwebs, and slowly counting out 2M quid in tarnished pennies and tuppences.

Oh 4G, I'm speechless: EE network outage smacks rare breed of customer that talks into their mobile phone

Alister
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BT's EE, which called it quits on the Everything Everywhere branding in 2012, possibly because it made life too easy for The Register subs desk...

I larfed.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

Alister

They need a bigger shovel, the hole just keeps getting deeper.

Shove this in your orafce: Microsoft fiddles with cloudy databases as Build 2019 recedes

Alister

Re: Orafce

It really is sad how few people can detect sarcasm nowadays.

Alister

Orafce

Can't they spell?

British Army down thousands of soldiers after outsourcing recruitment IT to Capita

Alister

I stand corrected.

Thanks for the info.

Alister

So are they trying to suggest that people are not able to join up simply because the Capita recruitment system was crappy?

Have they considered that fewer people might be interested in joining the Armed Services anyway?

Polygraph knows all: You've been using our user feedback form

Alister

Re: Ctrl-C Ctrl-V

I run a piece of software called synergy, which allows me to control multiple machines from one keyboard and mouse, but different screens.

It also allows me to do copy/paste between machines, whether they be Linux, Windows or Mac, which is very useful.

Wine? No, posh noshery in high spirits despite giving away £4,500 bottle of Bordeaux

Alister

Re: That's nothing.

OMFG there are some seriously sad people out there...

"Brilliant Pebbles addresses specific resonance control and RFI/EMI absorption problems associated with audio electronics, speakers and cables, as well as acoustic wave problems associated with the listening room boundaries and the 3-dimensional space within the boundaries. Brilliant Pebbles comprises a number of precious and semi-precious stones (crystals) selected for their effectiveness. The original glass bottles for Brilliant Pebbles have been replaced by clear zip lock bags, which have a more linear response than glass."

So for $59.00 you can tape a ziplock bag full of stone chippings to your audio line-in and it will magically improve your sound...

Alister

Can I interest you in tuning your NAS drives to give more subtle tones to your music?

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm

It's about the same as a £4,500 Bordeaux

Let's check in with our friends in England and, oh good, bloke fined after hiding face from police mug-recog cam

Alister

Mind you blood pressure...

Alister

Re: What the heck

As I understand it

You misunderstand. He was fined for disorderly behavior because he swore at a police officer.

Had he kept his temper, that wouldn't have happened, they would have had to get him for walking on the cracks in the pavement or being in possesion of an offensive wife...

Breaking news: Bank-card-slurping malware sneaks into Forbes' mag subscription website

Alister

Re: Should not be allowed

You are not correct

Really? All the websites I manage that use Verifone, Atos or Worldpay to process our credit card sales must be doing it wrong. Thanks for the heads-up.

Alister

Re: Should not be allowed

Maybe I'm missing something,

Err yep...

but when you pay by credit card you don't pay directly the seller, you are redirected to the bank site which processes the payment.

That's not normally how it works. You enter your card details into the vendor site, which then passes those details to a payment verification gateway. The payment verification gateway either approves or declines the payment, based on cardholder details, card number and CVV.

If the payment verification is successful then at this point in the transaction, there optionally may also be a call to the bank's card verification process. Successful payments receive a token which is stored in the vendor database against the transaction ID to action refunds or repeat purchases.

Why are they allowed to store in their DBs the credit card numbers?

They aren't. Some cowboy outfits may do, but it's not common. If it's a vendor where you register an account, the vendor may store the last four digits of the card alongside the transaction token and user details, just so you can re-use the card for future transactions, but the four digits are simply there to display to the user so he/she can identify the saved card, not for use in transactions.

If you're ever lost on the Moon, Ordnance Survey now has you covered for Apollo 11 anniversary

Alister

Re: You are but a child.

I could drink a gallon of larger

Ah, I could only manage small beer...

:)

Alister

It's my recollection that the moon buggy tyres are already full of holes, so you'd need more than an air pump to fix a flat...

Banhammer Republic: Trump declares national emergency, starts ball rolling to boot Huawei out of ALL US networks

Alister

Re: Who are we?

If the former head of MI6 described it as a risk too far

then we should consider how biased they might be...

Alister

Re: Who are we?

Would we install the same if it was Russian or Iranian, to name but two?

If it's a choice between those and American kit, then yes, definitely.

Guess what shrinks when it gets cold and then you shake it around a little? The Moon. We're talking about the Moon

Alister

Re: Fascinating stuff

I'm a skeptic and am pointing out that there is no evidence that they went and much evidence that they didn't go.

There is a large body of evidence that they went, it's just that you and others of your ilk count it all as false. By comparison, the "evidence" that they didn't go is based on conjecture and conspiracy theories.

Your faux scientific claims and insistence that you know more than anyone else are really quite pitiful.

Alister

Re: Fascinating stuff

Ah I see, you are reframing me as a DENIER!!!

Ah, I see you neatly sidestepped the question.

Do you claim that none of the Apollo missions happened as described?

Alister

Re: Fascinating stuff

So are you claiming that none of the Saturn 5 missions were able to reach orbit or get to the moon?

So you deny all of the Apollo missions, including the flybys, not just the landings, is that right?

And you also deny that a Saturn 5 launched Skylab? Maybe you are claiming Skylab was a hoax as well?

What about the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, was that a hoax perpetrated by both the Soviet Union and America on the rest of the world?

Or are all these "strawmen"?

Alister

Re: Fascinating stuff

All I can see in your post are insults, you address none of the points I made.

That's because none of the points you raised are even worthy of discussing.

Alister

Re: Fascinating stuff

@MrReal

What a curious name to pick given your delusional posts about the moon landings.

Why are you so quick to try and deny the achievement? Does it feel good to rubbish the years of hard work, and the lives that were sacrificed? Does it inflate your ego to believe that man wasn't able to go to the moon?

Do you really believe that America managed to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax against the rest of the world, and keep it a secret to the present day?

You are a fuckwit of the first order, you really are.

Alister
Pint

Re: Cause?

@Crisp

Well played sir!

Legal bombs fall on TurboTax maker Intuit for 'hiding' free service from search engines

Alister

Re: A lot of commies in here

Requiring commercial parties to help people pay their taxes is not compatible with good government (e.g. ensuring the public understands the laws that apply to them)

You wouldn't like to talk to our HMRC would you, they seem to think it's a good idea...

Alister

Re: Not being an American

In case you missed it, this is being introduced in the UK too.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-tax-digital/overview-of-making-tax-digital

Quote:

VAT-registered businesses with a taxable turnover above the VAT threshold are now required to use the Making Tax Digital service to keep records digitally and use software to submit their VAT returns for VAT periods that started on or after 1 April 2019.

San Francisco votes no to facial-recognition tech for cops, govt – while its denizens create it

Alister
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Re: At the risk of being cynical...

Thanks

NASA wheels out Habitation prototypes while SpaceX encounters problems with parachutes

Alister

Re: Cost?

It's not just about the exploration though, is it. The goal is to get a permanent / semi-permanent human foothold on a different bit of the solar system, both for surviveability of the species, and as a stepping stone to further, more wide-ranging exploration and colonisation.

It's 2019 so now security vulnerabilities are branded using emojis: Meet Thrangrycat, a Cisco router secure boot flaw

Alister

Re: "flapping your flesh to produce sounds"

moving backwards along evolution lines...

Opposable thumbs, that's what you need for holding a smartphone and texting. That's the evolutionary imperative, right there...

NASA rattles the tin for an extra $1.6bn to keep 2024 lunar hopes alive

Alister

Still, the mission does now have a name. Bridenstine announced it would be Artemis

Could be pretty fowl...

Get in line, USA: Sweden reopens Assange rape allegations probe

Alister

Re: statue

@Steve Knox

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The Anomolous Cowherd was commenting on the fact that the article erroneously used statue of limitations, instead of statute of limitations.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin unveils 'Blue Moon' lander, making it way too easy for manchild Elon Musk to take the piss

Alister

Re: Asimov obviously didn't read Clarke...

So did Clarke predict O'Neil?

Not really predict. O'Neill effectively used two Ramas with contra-rotation for his cylinders, but O'Neill's other designs were based on spheres.

Alister

Re: Musk just hates it when someone else gets attention

BO... Such an unfortunate initialism...

Timely Trump tariffs tax tech totally: 25 per cent levy on modems, fiber optics, networking gear, semiconductors…

Alister

Re: What is it with Trump and Taxes?

Ask yourself this: WHAT would have happened if Republicans had treated Obama "that way" ???

Bob, you really need to reach out and get a grasp on reality as it flashes past.

Republicans regularly attacked Obama with questions about his place of birth, his race, his religion etc.

They couldn't go after him about his tax records, because like every other recent President, he'd made them public.

Baltimore hit with more ransomware, ChinaMobile gets the boot in the US, and another (mild) Systemd system-d'oh!

Alister

Re: Penny Wise Pound Foolish

Nice to see that Baltimore overhauled their security in the light of the 2018 attack... Oh, wait...

It woz ransomware wot did it: ConnectWise spills beans on cause for day-long outage

Alister

It's snapshots all the way down...

Essex named sexiest British accent followed closely by, um, Glaswegian

Alister

I think that that's an over generalisation, I can only think of Scotty, and all the various homages and lampoons, certainly Geordie and B'Elanna weren't in anyway Scots.

Don't forget Star Trek (the original) was written in the early sixties, and was very much based on Naval practice, and it is a fact that a lot of ship's engineers throughout the war and after were of Scottish descent.

Alister

Re: They've kinda missed abit...

The Yorkshire accent is pretty much North Yorkshire

Beg to differ, South Yorkshire is very distinctive, but quite different to North or West Yorkshire.

Home Office cops an earful for emergency network feck-ups - £3bn overbudget and 3 years late

Alister

Re: Shambolic

@YAAC,

I really hope you are being sarcastic, unfortunately my sarcasmometer isn't functioning on your post.

But just in case you really believe what you wrote, can I point out that an incident only has to combine a power cut and one of either fire, police or ambulance for it to become a problem.

Oh, and power cuts are likely to become more and more common, in the future. Already, in rural areas, there can be one every couple of months.

Alister

The Airwave mast sites - and previously the VHF / UHF repeater sites - used by emergency services used to have minimum requirements for resilience in the case of a power failure with battery backup and even generator backup in some cases.

As far as I know, there is no such requirement for the cellular masts they are proposing to use for ESN.

Alister

project is likely to be three years late

Originally due to be switched on in 2017, it is now hoped to be ready to go live in December 2022.

Friday morning maths?

What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up

Alister

I would be more impressed if it tumbled to 5% of the crazy valuation.

Give it time, I reckon Monday will see a nice ski-slope developing.

Oracle's legal woes deepen: Big Red sued (again) for age and medical 'discrimination'

Alister
Alister

Re: What happened between The Register and Oracle ?

The level of stalking and attention given to Oracle and lack of attention to every other corporation doing exactly the same is worrying.

You must have missed the coverage of IBM then?

For instance: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/27/new_bim_lawsuit/

or

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/ibm_langley_age_discrimination/

No?

Key to success: Tenants finally get physical keys after suing landlords for fitting Bluetooth smart-lock to front door

Alister

Re: Key? No thank you.

the most convenient would be that the key for your flat also opens the front door.

Except that if you think that through, that would mean all the flat keys would be the same as the front door, and each other...

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

Alister

Re: Outdated Documentation

If there's company confidential or personal information on those servers, you may want to become an anonymous coward real fast

Nope, we removed all of the data before we terminated them.

Alister
Facepalm

Outdated Documentation

Not quite on the same subject, but we received a notification email to our admin address the other week, from a server which we thought had been retired 7 years ago.

Turns out that the hosting provider where we had a private cloud set up had never turned off the hosts and Vms after we terminated the contract, and the servers have been sitting there since 2012.

Double-sided printing data ballsup leaves insurance giant Chubb with egg on its face

Alister

Re: They ought to teach this in schools.

Exactly my point, if learnt like the Lord's Prayer, nearly everyone can mumble along, but hardly anybody says it with any sincerity.

Alister

They ought to teach this in schools.

At one time, we all had to learn the Lord's Prayer by rote. Maybe nowadays schoolkids should learn the following prayer:

Our Customers, who art worldwide,

We take the protection of your personal data very seriously,

and we are committed to protecting the privacy and security of all the data entrusted to us,

For ever and ever,

Amen

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Alister
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Lush:- purveyor of shopping mall smells.

Excellent summation, Mr Dabbs.