* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Alister

Re: When the chick hits the pan

Chicken soup used to be an oft prescribed remedy for colds and flu...

Alister

Re: Copper foil

Don't get taken in:

https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/fake-covid19-coronavirus-cure-treatment-fda-warning/

Alister

Re: you'd still struggle to get through a couple of rolls

figure out the "extra" usage issues.

Yes, I get what you're saying, but going by the debris following a visit from my daughter, the primary uses of toilet roll seem to be for removing mascara, nail-varnish, blusher and face cream, blowing her nose, wrapping up old chewing gum...

Alister

Re: you'd still struggle to get through a couple of rolls

Was going to say the same thing. In normal times (I live by myself), I get through at most a roll a week - and probably less than that.

When my daughter returns from University for a weekend, I suddenly have to go and buy another pack, as it seems she uses a roll every few hours!

Borklays soz for the ailing ATMs but won't say if fix involved a Microsoft invoice

Alister

Does misspelling something over and over and again make it correct?

well apparently...

Certainly if you judge the amount of abuse I routinely get for pointing out that LOOSE is not the same word as LOSE.

Alister

Both PIN number and ATM machine are accepted deviations from the rule, simply by reason of constant abuse.

BT CEO tests positive for coronavirus, goes into self-isolation after meeting fellow bosses from Vodafone UK, Three, O2 plus govt officials

Alister

Jansen added today: "Given my symptoms seem relatively mild, I will continue to lead BT but work with my team remotely over the coming week." He said will be "no disruption to business".

He makes it sound like he'll take his share of first-line support, and do the odd remote-shell to a borked telecoms switch.

Actually, if he was to disappear for a month without trace, I doubt anyone would be the wiser...

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Alister

And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer.

I tried to read that, recently, but I gave up.

Whereas Douglas' humour always felt natural and part of the narrative flow, Colfer's felt forced and at times deliberately overt, as if screaming "look at how funny I am!"

You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem

Alister

I also had a little utility called nuke.com, built in Borland Turbo Basic if I remember rightly but compiled to a single file. It wiped the MBR and then did an fdisk and format of a single partition.

Axiom signs up with SpaceX to fly private astronauts to the International Space Station

Alister

They were a bit of a let down, really...

All the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), all the IT ladies (all the IT ladies), now put your hands up! Oh, still not many here

Alister

Dealing with shite (literally) is much more common in the caring professions, where women are over-represented.

Your opinion does matter to this Jordanian telco... only it's experiencing some technical difficulties right now

Alister

There is a link at the bottom of the article

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Alister

I'm just surprised there's anyone left for him to defenestrate

There is an endless supply of fresh MBAs to deal with.

Honeywell, I blew up the qubits: Thermostat maker to offer cloud access to 'world's most powerful quantum computer' within months

Alister

Honeywell International, a business known to most folks mainly for its thermostats

Some of us remember when they made proper computers.

The Honeywell 516 and later the 316 were used as Interface Message Processors (think grandfather of routers) for the ARPANET.

Scottish biz raided, fined £500k for making 193 million automated calls

Alister

Paul was terminated as director in December and replaced by a Stephen Foot.

Closely followed by Gerard Hand, and then Elliott Nose. It's only a matter of time before they are superseded by Ms Helen Eyebrow.

Our 'solution is killing us in a number of areas' IBM said about doomed £175m Co-Op Insurance project

Alister

You must be confused...

Alister

insurance aggregator websites (you can go compare these through your search engine of choice

Sneaky... Very Sneaky...

Fancy a bit of Opera?

Quantum compute boffins called up to get national UK centre organised for some NISQy business

Alister

Have the NQQC spoken to Ron Rivest recently, I wonder?

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

Alister

or am i missing something ?

Yes.

Aww, a cute mini-moon is orbiting Earth right now. But like all good things, it too will abandon us at some point

Alister

Thanks for all the replies, I thought it would be something to do with an unstable orbit.

Alister

I know I could probably Google this, but just out of curiosity, once an asteroid is captured in Earth orbit, how does it manage to break free again?

Breaker one-nine, this trucker's rubber ducked, facing a year in the slammer for Acer laptop thefts

Alister

Re: 1 year imprisonment?

being found in a forest while disguised

Robin Hood, men in tights...?

Departing MI5 chief: Break chat app crypto for us, kthxbai

Alister

Re: Dear Home Secretary...

Oh come on Camilla, she's going to want to ban Linux now, as well...

Alister

Re: OK, so lets...

Yeah, except that normally, when Scotty says that, he then goes on to do it anyway...

This is the trouble with confusing fact and fiction, something politicians and civil servants appear to have a problem with.

Rotherwood Healthcare AWS bucket security fail left elderly patients' DNR choices freely readable online

Alister

There is no excuse in this day and age for AWS buckets to be left unsecured. Amazon provides tools for detecting and closing off inappropriately opened buckets...

You still miss the point, El reg. There is no such thing as an AWS bucket being "left unsecured". It takes a fair amount of active work on behalf of a user to make an AWS bucket insecure, by default they are completely locked down.

Alister

I see they've replaced the Lorem ipsum too.

London's top cop dismisses 'highly inaccurate or ill informed' facial-recognition critics, possibly ironically

Alister

It's a good thing she wasn't in the army, she could have been a Private Dick...

Your McDonald's demo has expired. For full functionality, please purchase a licence or try another fast-food joint

Alister

Re: I think we need a new acronym... POS is doubly accurate...

POP is already a multi-user acronym - Post Office Protocol and Point of Presence to name but two.

No Huawei gear in vital 5G project to bring virtual-reality Robin Hood to Sherwood Forest

Alister

how a virtual-reality Robin Hood represents a core network function

Well let's not quarrel about it. They've got another string to their bow.

London's Metropolitan Police flip the switch: Smile, fellow citizens... you're undergoing Live Facial Recognition

Alister

To be fair, the gentleman in Romford was arrested and fined for threatening to kick the living shit out of a Police Officer, although said Officer did originally accost him about hiding from the cameras.

Galileo got it wrong – official: Jupiter actually wet, not super-dry: 'No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet'

Alister

Interesting that Wiktionary and Merriam-Webster claim it as American, and define it as snatching or grabbing, with a secondary definition of "sticking to".

In British English my understanding of the word has been closer to "cadging" or "borrowing by begging", and I'm sure that is true of the passage you quote above.

Alister

NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT CAN STAY THESE MESENGERS ABOT THEIR DUTY

The great big open-source census: Most-used libraries revealed – plus 10 things developers should be doing to keep their code secure

Alister

Re: Something's missing in the Top 10s

Try 501 passes...

Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it

Alister

Re: flame on

Are you trying to suggest that GUIs are not "Computer Science" then?

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

Alister

Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

By cutting out the 46 levels of duplication

IT IS NOT DUPLICATION!

It is necessary replication. Economic efficiencies do not necessarily lead to better service. This has been proven time and again with the NHS.

Alister

Re: Maybe the FBU shouldn't have sabotaged FiReControl then

But the bleating FBU were dead set against the utterly sensible and rational project

Centralised regional control centres for emergency services are neither sensible or rational. They lead to dispatch errors due to mis-identification of locations or lack of local knowledge.

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

Alister
Facepalm

That blanked out username looks suspiciously like "User"...

Judge Vulcan-nerve pinches JEDI deal after Amazon forks out $42m to pause Microsoft's military machinations

Alister

Re: Size 40's

EU size 40 is US size 7 or 7.5, so quite small for a man.

Alister

Re: It was the end of history....

@Notas Badoff

You are suffering from WHOOOOOSH!

It is deliberate trolling by El Reg, and has been the same for every article about the JEDI deal.

25 years of Delphi and no Oracle in sight: Not a Visual Basic killer but hard to kill

Alister

Re: Still use Delphi

Where are you getting that extra 150KB from?

Umm, all the code that actually does stuff, over and above the basic required for a functional console app.

Looking at another release we've got, there's a complete windows service, which is 253KB plus the same 5MB odd for libraries, so a standalone service (that doesn't do data access or logging) written in C# is significantly smaller than 600KB.

No it isn't, it's 5MB larger. For a natively compiled Win32 app, there's no reason to account for the libraries, as they are already loaded by the OS, but for any bytecode-compiled language you have the extra overhead of the abstraction layer.

Alister

Still use Delphi

I still use Delphi at work to produce Windows service applications.

I can build a complete free-standing Windows Service in about 600KB which doesn't need the horrible fucking kludge that is the .NET Framework.

For instance, we have an internally built syslog server which runs as a windows service and the fully compiled executable is 628KB. A separate freestanding GUI application to manage the service and view logs is 1.4MB.

Try to produce the same thing in C# and it will be a couple of GB of code, and still need run-time compillation.

Alister

Re: Progman Error

Program manager was still a part of Windows NT4 and Windows 95 if you wanted it to be.

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

Alister

@Alistair

You are an ambulance.

That is all.

What's the German word for stalling technology rollouts over health fears? Cos that plus 5G equals Switzerland

Alister

Re: Plenty of evidence to prove it is safe!

@Licenced_Radio_Nerd

I also agree with your basic premise, and have mucked around with millimetre band radio in the past, but I take issue with your statement that the human body cannot detect electromagnetic radiation - it is accepted that many people can tell if a thunderstorm is brewing, with symptoms of headaches etc.

Alister

There is no evidence non-ionizing radiation is safe

It is very hard to prove a negative.

However, you might also like to consider "there is no evidence that non-ionising radiation is dangerous"

Crypto-upstart subpoenas Glassdoor to unmask ex-staff believed to be behind negative reviews. EFF joins the fray

Alister

Re: Kraken Crypto?

it's a Pirates of the Caribbean reference right?

No.

It's an Alfred Tennyson reference, or a John Wyndham reference, or a Herman Melville reference, or a Scandinavian folk-tale reference...

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

Alister

My Dad's working collies, whilst able to quell a flock of sheep with a look, are in mortal fear of his geese. They'm bad bastards....

B-but it doesn't get viruses! Not so, Apple fanbois: Mac malware is growing faster than nasties going for Windows

Alister

Re: Technically...

and certainly you can have malware that isn't a virus.

That's exactly what I said...

Alister

Re: Technically...

Malware isn't a virus, and a virus isn't malware.

You talk shit.

Malware is an all-encompassing term for any malicious software. A virus is malicious software, so a virus is malware. A trojan (software pretending it's something it isn't) is also malware.

Voyager 2 gets back to sciencing while 'unstoppable' Iran promises world more 'Great Iranian Satellites'

Alister

Re: "Far be it from us to nitpick"

Ok, our three favourite things are... Oh forget it, I'll come in again...