* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Veteran vulture Andrew Orlowski is offski after 19 years at The Register

Alister

Re: Ta ta!

(That's me wiping away the single tear that just leaked from my ocular apparatus) ->>

Somehow I'd never pictured you as quite so blonde, but then, that's the internet for you...

Alister

Very sad day.

Like others, I didn't always agree with you, but you always provoked thought and comment, and that's what a journalist should do.

Best of luck for the future.

Blame Canada! Zuckerberg subpoenaed to face Cambridge Anal. probe from Canucks

Alister

Re: @phuzz

you can call yourself 'Marmalade Fuckface' if you like,

Hmmm, strangely appeeling...

US minister invokes Maggie Thatcher, says she would have halted Huawei 5G rollout

Alister

Low blow, Pompeo, low blow.

Ah, how I wish we had a Prime Minister with some balls (of either gender) who would tell you publicly to fuck off.

CryptoQueen on the run from Feds, lawsuit after her OneCoin slammed as 'an old-school pyramid scheme on a new-school platform'

Alister

Off with her head!

According to Her Majesty Helena

Fire up the FruityLoops! Sir David Attenborough wants someone to remix Balinese field recording

Alister

Re: underground dance music niche built around Sir Dave's dulcet tones.

AAaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

I thought I'd managed to block that out, but no, you have to remind me!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElnCI1fkfFM

A day in the life of London seen through spam and weak Wi-Fi

Alister

Oh, so it's you that I keep getting email for on sodoff.com. Right!

Alister

Re: OT but

As it is in Irish:

Iarnród stáisiún

Alister

And it's "railway station" by the way.

Train station has been an acceptable substitute for many years, your pedantry (like the trains) is late.

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Alister

Re: Generations

more than half (56 per cent) of Gen Z workers say a new challenge is more important than higher salary and other benefits

They may say that now, but give them ten years, and chance to start relationships, buy property etc and I think you'll find their attitude changes rapidly.

It's May 2. Know what that means? Yep, it's the PR orgy that is World Password Day... again

Alister

Re: Honeytrap?

The problem with doing that on an email server is that if they manage to log in with a username and password, the very first thing they will be doing is trying to send 50,000 spam emails through your server.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Alister

Re: Yeah... So can I..

I've also driven a Landy - in fact many Landies - over many years, and rather than finding them terrifying, they always gave me a certain feeling of invincibility (may not be a good thing).

Once when a eurobox decided to pull out in front of me on a fast A road, the only result on the Landy was a bent front bumper, which I unbolted and hit very hard with a big hammer until it was straight again, the eurobox, conversely, was a total write-off.

Alister

Re: Yeah... So can I..

I own a Wolseley landcrab.

Cor, very jealous, that must be exceedingly rare now. My Dad had an 1800 Landcrab back in the 70s when I was learning to drive.

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

Alister

Re: Aluminum

According to that unimpeachable fount of all knowledge (Wikipedia) the original name assigned by Humphrey Davy was was 'um, but scientist Thomas Young objected and proposed that it be called 'ium to be consistent with other newly-discovered elements. This was generally accepted worldwide.

Later, in America, that nice Mr Webster and his dictionary used 'um instead.

As Bob says, it is consistent with Latin name endings, where alumina is the oxide and aluminum is the element.

Alister

Re: Aluminum

I've never really understood why the Land of the FreeTM are so insistent that it should be aluminum, when they don't do the same for magnesum, titanum, chromum and all the other 'iums in the periodic table.

I suppose it is consistent with platinum, molybdenum, lanthanum and tantalum, but there's a lot more 'iums.

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

Alister

There is of course the well know, although possibly apocryphal tale of the Boss who "didn't do email" but instead his secretary used to intercept incoming emails, print them out, and then take them in to him. Should a reply be required, the Boss would dictate it to the secretary, who would then send it from the Boss's account.

'Lightweight' UPS-style flywheels to power naval laser zappers

Alister

Re: F1 KERS flywheels

a spin-off company

Oops, lol :)

Alister

I'm curious why the emphasis on 'lightweight'?

Obviously for something ship-borne you don't want it too heavy, but on the other hand, I thought that having a heavy flywheel was the method of choice, as a heavier one performs better (has more inertia??) than a light one?

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

Alister

Re: Pilots to blame not Boeing

Hopefully the global certification will not be railroaded by the FAA/Boeing alliance by allowing it back into the sky without proper pilot simulator training.

I think it's very unlikely that the various certification authorities outside the US will allow that to happen.

Alister

Somebody should tell Muilenburg to stop digging, Boeing are in a deep enough hole already.

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

Alister

Re: "We all want to see hard proof—" No, we don't.

Sophisticated Chinese equipment—which I think includes anything with a CPU and the ability to connect to the internet—absolutely should not feature in UK infrastructure.

Ok then, what about sophisticated American equipment (built in China), or even sophisticated American equipment (built in Mexico)?

I don't see that for the UK there is much choice in the matter, whatever we use, it will (by your reckoning) be open to interference by another nation state.

Come friendly bit barns and fall on Slough: Equinix opens £90m data centre in London rust belt

Alister

Re: Slough - Greater London?

Erm, that's Berkshire... pronounced Barkshire.

FYI: Someone left 24GB of personal info on 80m US households exposed to the public internet

Alister

Re: Such data isn't as much of a privacy problem...

I tried to get my mum to change her maiden name, after my security question got leaked, but she wasn't having any of it... I mean, how hard can it be?

It's all about the returns: NetApp shutters certain EMEA offices and lays off staff

Alister
Pint

You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals

Inspired sub-heading, worth one of these at least ------>

What are we more likely to see? A smooth Windows 10 May release... or a xenon-124 decay? Oh dear, bad news, IT folks

Alister

It’s an invisible, colorless, odorless, tasteless noble gas

How do they know?

Customers furious over days-long outage as A2 Hosting scores a D- in Windows uptime

Alister

I was in a meeting with a customer, and we saw (yes, I've got witness) all my files (from my ftp area) were renamed to .lock and a message stating the area was attacked and encrypted.

Sounds remarkably Ransomeware-ish

Oops.

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

Alister

there is a place for sex in the schoolyard, and that's behind the bike sheds

Ah, memories...

We were posh though, our sex education took place behind the cricket pavilion.

I learnt a great deal there...

Alister
Coat

In the UK, certainly when I was doing the school run, the number of parents who turned up in pyjamas, onesies, shell suits (that dates me), was shocking to behold. I for one would support a dress-code for parents :)

Behold, the insides of Samsung's Galaxy Fold: The phone that tears down all on its own

Alister

Re: Pholdable?

Does that make the holder of said item a pholderee?

Complex automation won't make fleshbags obsolete, not when the end result is this dumb

Alister

Re: Artifical Intelligence...

Ran out of edit time... It was Adrian Thompson, his paper is here:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Alister

Re: Artifical Intelligence...

There is no qualitative difference between these new AI and ML technologies and the washing-machine-like technologies that have preceded them.

I'm not sure that's the case. Whilst I am the last one to ascribe AI to magical thinking, there have been well documented cases where - for neural networks in particular - the end result has no clearly defined path that even the creators of the device can follow.

I'm thinking in particular of the experiment where a neural net was tasked to design an circuit to discriminate between audio tones using multiple iterations of circuit redesign using FPGAs.

The resulting, (working) circuit had a number of components which were not electrically connected to the rest of the circuit, but whose removal stopped it working.

This non-intuitive and unpredictable result cannot be compared to the well-defined, well-understood mechanisms of washing machines and other such devices.

It's your what in a box? Here's a thing to make your bosses think about malware responses

Alister

In a speech due to be delivered to the Cyber UK conference in Glasgow later today, Lidington will inform the world:

El Reg journalists travel back in time to report on the future!

Remember Windows Media Center? Well, the SDK is now on GitHub to be poked at your leisure

Alister

It's a shame that when it was introduced, the available hardware wasn't really capable of meeting the necessary requirements of a quiet, powerful PC in a form factor that would fit under a TV unless you spent thousands on a custom build.

You certainly wouldn't want the average mini-tower PC of the time, with noisy fans and power hungry CPUs, and even the DVD drive mechanisms fitted to most PCs sounded like a Tornado MRCA on full reheat whilst playing a DVD.

I remember at the time playing with MythTV and MediaPortal as alternatives, but none of them got over that hurdle.

Nowadays, you could shove a Raspberry Pi under your TV and run a virtually silent HTPC.

UK cautiously gives Huawei the nod for 5G network gear sales

Alister

With a bit of luck, POTUS will be so pissed off that he'll cancel his state visit.

We live in hope.

Fed up with 72-hour, six-day working weeks, IT workers emit cries for help via GitHub repo

Alister

I don't recall being a gibbering wreck at any point, and I did rotating days, nights and afters for twenty years.

Alister

The absolute worst ... rotating shifts -- days this week, evenings next, early mornings the next, then back to days. That'll reduce anyone to a gibbering wreck in a month or two.

Sounds a bit wimpish...

How on earth do you think emergency services personnel manage then, who do that constantly for years?

Server at web host 1&1 Ionos decides to take unscheduled day off, sinks a bunch of sites

Alister

The firm's website says it runs 90,000 servers in 10 data centres located in Europe and the US

So which one of the 90,000 fell over then?

Absolute mad lads are teaching physics to AI because how else will it learn to solve real-world problems (like humans)

Alister

Only if you're Catholic... :)

Alister

First computer mouse, using wheels, invented 1964, publicly demonstrated at the 1968 Joint Computer Conference.

First "ball" mouse, developed by Bill English at Xerox PARC 1972

Alister

Absolute mad lads

I think it's a very sensible idea, actually, and much better than letting AI throw its weight about, without knowing what "weight" is.

So, that's cheerio the nou to Dundee Satellite Receiving Station: Over 40 years of service axed for the sake of £338,000

Alister

Let's not forget that it's not that long ago that the British Science and Technology Facilities Council were going to withdraw their funding for Jodrell Bank, which would have probably led to its closure.

It seems that whether it be the English, Scottish or Welsh governments, they really don't understand the benefits of science and technology, and only look at the short-term costs.

I mean, £338,000. It's a rounding error in an MP's expenses claim, isn't it?

It doesn't sound like the uni really tried hard to find alternative funding.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

Alister

So is this going to work like the Pirate Bay block then, in that ISPs and DNS providers will redirect or block requests to pages which don't ask for age-verification?

I can't see how this is going to be put into practice?

Ozzy app maker cancels hump day: We've tripled profits! scream slackers

Alister

Re: So let's see here

deadly spiders and dropbears

And the roos, and the crocodiles, and the snakes, and the sheep, don't forget the sheep!

:)

Alister

the firm claimed revenues have somehow grown 30 to 40 per cent and profits tripled during the year-long experiment.

If you can achieve that with just one day off in the week, think how much you could do with 2 days off!

Microsoft admits: Yes, miscreants leafed through some Hotmail, MSN, Outlook inboxes after support rep pwned

Alister

Re: I bet that...

What spelling? I can't see anything there that would be spelled differently whichever side of the Atlantic you are from?

Facebook is not going to Like this: Brit watchdog proposes crackdown on hoovering up kids' info

Alister

I think they meant to say:

"some of the most safety and privacy conscious users"

but they couldn't spell connssccciouuus

App-y now? UK health secretary spammed with pics of flowers that look like ladies' private parts

Alister

Re: Surely more appropriate...

I didn't think the Maybot had all of the necessary parts for reproducing - so backup and restore are the only options.

Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update

Alister

In this case, System Restore has been the saving grace for us, as the only way back for 20 plus machines.

A symptom of the problem which I've not seen mentioned elsewhere was that on a full boot, after CTRL-ALT-DEL no login box showed up, so users could not get into their machines at all.

Booting in safe mode, and doing a system restore to a restore point prior to the upgrade has been how we've fixed the issue.

Alister

Well thanks, I could have done with this article yesterday, instead of chasing round the office rolling back updates.

Uncle Sam charges Julian Assange with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion

Alister

So are the US going to have to wait whilst Assange sits in a UK prison for 6 months, or will they whisk him off as soon as they can?