* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'

Alister

Re: Loads are available to buy

55 pages with 12 items per page it seems to me not that difficult to find.

But a lot of duplicates, and not all of the many books are available.

Which was his point.

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Alister

Re: Lying Liberace

For example: "The president currently has no power to shut down law-abiding websites in the US just because he disagrees with their speech."

Was this ever suggested by Trump?

Yes:

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen."

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Alister

Re: Wow. What a whiny ass little b**ch.

Jake, merkin has been used as a synonym for Americans since usenet days, despite it's other meanings.

Alister

Re: So, the country that created the Marketplace for Ideas

Truth is not an absolute defence against Criminal Libel.

There's no such statute any more in the UK.

Alister

Re: Not so sure it will be ineffective...

The steps president Trump took are appropriate.

Hahahahahaha!

You're funny.

Unmanned drones to slash NHS delivery times to one-fifth of road 'n' rail transport

Alister

Re: I'm curious to know what it has by way of sensing other aircraft

Last time I was on Mull, I had the bejesus scared out of me by a Lockheed Hercules appearing round the edge of a hill at 0 feet (or that's what it felt like).

Alister

Re: Seems to me

I don't recollect a road 'n rail connection to the mentioned location

Unless you include the CalMac ferry in the road bit there isn't either a road or rail connection to Craignure from Oban. Maybe they should build a tunnel instead...

Raspberry Pi Foundation serves up an 8GB slice of mini-computing goodness

Alister

Re: 640K

Whooooooosh!

After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe's 'missing matter' – using fast radio bursts

Alister

Re: Astroboffins. Really?

@AScott

Well done for collecting so many downvotes on your first ever post. That is itself a triumph.

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

Alister

Re: At times I despair.

Reply) They are taking out 5G masts. Not every single existing mast that rather shockingly can actually still be used to make calls. I know. Crazy right?

Except they are not, actually. Quite a proportion of the masts that have been targeted so far do not have any 5G provision.

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Alister

Re: Not quite right

Depends whether you view a centrally directed economy as left wing, or believe that an authoritarian regime must be right wing

Or maybe, you could accept that authoritarian regimes can be of any political stripe, and thus Fascists and Communists are the polar opposites.

Alister

Re: Not quite right

Internet allows anybody and his friends to attempt to change history with a few clicks

If I might draw your attention to the comments section of this post:

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2020/05/20/uk_contact_tracing_protections/

It would appear that a significant proportion of Americans now believe that the Nazi Party was a Left-wing political organisation. Now that's a triumph of the internet over history if ever there was one.

The Last J-Freighter: HTV-9 arrives at the ISS as ESA inks a deal for a third Moon-bound service module

Alister

Re: Space is big

Absolutely. My personal interpretation of "deep space" is outside the solar system - i.e. beyond the orbit of the outermost known body which orbits the sun. However, this may not be the accepted definition.

I believe the ITU defines it as more than 2 million kilometres from Earth's surface, which is quite a way beyond the Moon's orbit, but still within Mars' orbit.

Alister

That first launch will not feature a crew. The second will, if all goes to plan, send astronauts into deep space.

Hmm, not really deep space, orbiting the moon, is it?

The second mission is supposed to be to establish the Deep Space Gateway, which will allow a jumping off point from lunar orbit, but it in itself isn't in deep space.

Former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman calls on UK govt to legally protect data from contact-tracing apps

Alister

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

There is fair reasoning. Nazi and commie were fighting for the same left wing voters of Germany. The Nazi policies cleaned up of Aryan talk pass fine with Labour voters in the UK.

What complete bullshit. The Labour voters and socialists were vehemently opposed to the Fascist policies of the Nazis, and many of them went to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the Communist side in an effort to win against the Nazi-backed Nationalists under Franco.

Alister

Re: Oh what a tangled web we weave!

they called themselves a national socialist party, the socialist part specifically to appeal to left- wing voters.

And the national part to appeal to the right-wing voters. So the Nazi party was centrist, who knew?

It doesn't matter what they called themselves, they were a far right-wing party. This is accepted fact wherever you get your information from, except perhaps you and your sources...

Runaway Latvian drone found meditating in tree after shutting down nation's skies

Alister

It's obviously searching for its prey.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

Alister

At least he knew what colour it should be...

India opens its space industry to private companies

Alister

You and Hasi D appear to be the same person?

NASA launches guide to Lunar etiquette now that private operators will share the Moon with governments

Alister
Headmaster

such as end-of-life spacecrafts.

You do know that the word spacecraft can be singular or plural, don't you?

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Alister

few have seen their boss nonchalantly strolling through the office, critical piece of infrastructure under their blissfully ignorant arm.

Not quite that, but had a boss who occasionally had a fit of OCD. On one such occasion, he decided to clear out "unused" ethernet and power cables in the racks as they were untidy... He managed to disconnect or unplug two DCs, an ESXi Host with about 20 VMs on it, and the PRTG monitoring server before we could stop him.

Alister

Re: Labels people, and read them!

a big organisation should have had more than 1 DHCP server

But not on the same subnet, otherwise arguments happen.

Tom Cruise to increase in stature thanks to ISS jaunt? Now that's a mission impossible

Alister

Re: Well that'll be a first in the film industry

He will have to take his shirt off at some point though, that's contractual...

Now we know what the P really stands for in PwC: X-rated ads plastered over derelict corner of accountants' website

Alister

Re: I don’t understand...

Hope that clears things up for you.

Not really. You don't, as a rule, "register" subdomains in any way, and therefore they can't expire or lapse unless the root domain does.

You register a domain with a Registrar, and then you create subdomains by adding A (or AAAA) records in the DNS.

the accountancy goliath let its amyca-dev-node subdomain expire or lapse, allowing a miscreant to register it

This bit is total bollocks.

Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation's skies

Alister

But why are you all talking about civilian airport RADAR?

Surely Latvia has some military RADAR which does work under 600ft AGL

Alister

I take it Latvia don't own any RADAR then?

I mean it's not small, it's the size of a light aircraft.

Academics demand answers from NHS over potential data timebomb ticking inside new UK contact-tracing app

Alister

Slurp everyone's details and you create a hugely valuable hacker target

Surely not, such information would be securely protected like... oh I don't know, ANPR data?

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

Alister

You just can't get reliable comets these days.

When I were a lad, they were built like... umm... like... err... big lumps of rock, but these modern ones, they just fall apart.

This hurts a ton-80: British darts champ knocked out of home tourney by lousy internet connection

Alister

Re: Unlucky, Mr darts neighbour

I'm currently enjoying 250mbps down and 450mbps up from one of them.

Really, are you sure?

Why is your download half the speed of your upload?

Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position

Alister

Surely you mean "five by nine" and not "five by five". S5 is only moderately strong.

Depends if you're using the US RST convention or the QSA QRK convention.

QSA QRK are both out of 5, so 5 by 5 is perfect signal, perfect readability.

Google Cloud's AI recog code 'biased' against black people – and more from ML land

Alister

Re: Photographic Quality

I disagree. If you only use studio quality photographs as your training set, then the AI's performance when faced with real world photos - from CCTV for instance - will be even more error prone.

Hi, Google Duplex here, trying to book a haircut for a socially inept human. Sorry, 'COVID-19'?... DOES NOT COMPUTE

Alister

Re: 24hr clock

Good point, well made.

However, booking a haircut for 22:10 is unlikely, I'm not aware of any 24 hour hairdressers...

:)

Consumer reviewer Which? finds CAN bus ports on Ford and VW, starts yelling 'Security! We have a problem...'

Alister

Most drivers are probably not capable of noticing if one or more tyres is flat or running on the wheel rim, El Reg suggests

TFTFY

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Alister

Re: NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Um...

Whoooooooosh?

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

Alister

Re: I thought it was

E for brick

I thought it was R for brick

Alister

The conventional method of transmitting characters by voice is to use the NATO phonetic alphabet: Sierra Tango Oscar Foxtrot, that sort of thing.

Oh come on, why was that not Sierra Tango Oscar Bravo?

Really...

Official: Office 365 Personal, Home axed next month... and replaced by Microsoft 365 cloud subscriptions

Alister

An evolution of Office 365, Microsoft 365 builds on the foundation of Office infusing new artificial intelligence (AI), rich content and templates, and cloud-powered experiences to empower you to become a better writer, presenter, designer, manager of your finances, and deepen your connection to the people in your life

My Bullshit-O-Meter just exploded!

Pandemic impact: Two-thirds of polled Reg readers say it's business as usual in the IT dept, one in ten panicking

Alister

Got away with it!

We completed a migration to a new fibre leased-line into our office a week before the lockdown. This also entailed switching from using Cisco ASA as the boundary firewalls and VPN endpoint, to using pfSense appliances by NetGate.

We've been pleasantly surprised at how easy the pfSense firewalls are to configure, and the migration to OpenVPN clients, instead of Cisco AnyConnect, for all our workers has been almost painless.

I shudder to think what fun we would have had if we'd left it a week later!

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

Alister

Re: Policing by consent

I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. The reason the Derbyshire Police are doing this, is because literally thousands of people are STILL driving out from Sheffield into the Peak District, parking next to each other and wandering off across the various beauty spots.

I had to drive over Curbar Edge this morning, and the road was crammed with cars wherever they could abandon them.

Fucking imbeciles, STAY AT HOME!

Don't believe the hype: Today's AI unlikely to best actual doctors at diagnosing patients from medical scans

Alister

Re: co-author of the study and CEO of Cera Care, a startup

Gee, what an almighty coincidence. Nice of you to degrade the concept of academic computer science research papers into unproven advetorials for the business you're trying to hype.

I'm not sure where you are getting that from?

If you can't or won't show your workings, it's not science.

Yes, that's the point that he's making, a majority of the studies claiming equivalent performance to human doctors are not replicatable, and cannot or will not show their data.

Planning a trip to space to escape COVID-19? Tough. Arianespace shuts up shop while SpaceX sputters

Alister

since astronauts might be riding the thing as soon as May.

Unlikely now, I would have thought, due to Covid-19 restrictions.

IBM puts 1,248 frontline techies at risk of redundo, warns of data centre closures

Alister

"Infrastructure Services continue to be challenged by our margin improvement target, with our current trajectory not showing the growth we need"

Hmm, well maybe you should consider revising that target, instead of trying to attain the impossible.

Azure admins' cold sweat likely caused by a 'isolated' power problems that browned out West Central USA region

Alister

We could see a bit of a meltdown

Already started for Teams, see https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/16/microsoft_teams_wobble

Alister

If the network infrastructure went down that supports the cloud, we would loose everything !

AAAAAAAARGH!

It's LOSE ffs

Microsoft Teams gets off to a wobbly start as the world and its cat starts working from home

Alister

Lol yep, you are me...

And now it's borked completely, not been able to send at all since about 14:00 GMT

Alister

First day of working from home for our office, and Teams decides to ignore us...

Thankfully not every message, just random ones in the middle of a conversation, which made things interesting.

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Alister

Re: Bob?

Was Bob also running MS Bob by chance?

Nah, don't be daft, that was Fred.

Alister

Re: Urban Legend? It's not always the cleaner

In the UK, JCB is a generic term for any make of construction machine with a backhoe and frontloader - just as Hoover is any make of vacuum cleaner.

Alister

Re: The cleaner did it.

That reminds me that a certain well known PC peripherals company used to sell 5 1/4 floppy holders that fitted over a CRT monitor like saddle-bags. Possibly one of the stupidest ideas ever.

Alister

Re: The cleaner did it.

Not always...

This reminds me of a time a colleague and I were setting up a Windows 2000 Domain for a further education college. We had a single 30U rack cabinet on wheels which had two DCs, a file server, some switches and a UPS.

The idea was that we could wheel this into any one of four IT classrooms and connect it up, and the students could learn about the joys of joining workstations to the domain, doing RIS deployments and all that lovely MCP goodness.

So we'd set up the DC's and everything, and were shutting the rack down, prior to disconnecting and moving it to another room. At the exact moment that my friend unplugged the UPS from the mains, the whole college suffered an unrelated power outage...

The look on his face, as he stood there with the plug in his hand whilst all the lights went out, was priceless.