* Posts by Alister

4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010

You live where you live ... and ex-SAP boss Bill McDermott lives in a house like this

Alister

In contemporary language the word "chintz" and "chintzy" can be used to refer to clothing or furnishings which are vulgar or florid in appearance, and commonly in informal speech, to refer to cheap, low quality, or gaudy things.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

Alister

Dunno about Bladerunner, looks like an F-117 to me.

Chancers keep buying up dot-UK company name domains: Got a problem? That'll be £750 for Nominet to rule on it

Alister

Sadly they've thought of that - registered in 2014

After 10 years, Google Cloud Print will finally be out of beta... straight into ad giant's graveyard

Alister

Re: Printing from Android tablets

wow, downvotes for telling the truth. Thanks!

Alister

Re: Printing from Android tablets

Airprint is a proprietary technology belonging to Apple, so unlikely.

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

Alister

Re: I've seen a house like that

If it was actual BT multi-pair, then each pair is twisted to minimize crosstalk.

Alister

"dem-bones" – this cable is connected to the… RIGHT speaker in bedroom 2, this cable is connected to the… LEFT rear cinema tweeter in the lounge, all hear the word of the Lord.

Thanks Alistair, made my Friday, I genuinely LOLd at that.

A short note to say I'm off: Vulture taps claws on Reg keyboard for last time

Alister
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Re: What was the leaving gift?

That's what this is for...

Alister

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Sounds like a great job, all the very best with it.

Video-editing upstart bares users' raunchy flicks to world+dog via leaky AWS bucket

Alister

Re: If something is free...

Indeed.

"the right of the people to keep and arm Bears, shall not be infringed."

Alister
Facepalm

Re: I wonder if....

Note that when I said "the former" I actually meant "the latter"

Alister

Re: I wonder if....

The former. S3 buckets have no public access by default.

The trouble is that the people who set these up cannot be arsed to spend the time correctly allowing secure connections to them, and instead just turn off all the default security.

UK public sector IT chiefs shrug off breach threats: The data we hold isn't that important

Alister

Head in the cloud(s)

The clear take away from this is that IT upper management in general have no fucking clue.

Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation

Alister

Re: Stating the obvious

Yep, I wonder if he's regretting that now. Even if he'd stayed in Sweden to face the charges and been found guilty, he would probably have been released by now.

Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...

Alister

Re: 20 Years Ago

@Ishy

What the fuck is your problem? I suppose you believe that nobody needed to do anything to fix Y2K?

NASA spanks $34bn on a disposable rocket – likely to top $50bn by 2024 moon landing

Alister

Re: Bah!

The US will go back to space in a big way the moment it looks like the other contenders look likely to become the primary presence. China would be my guess. No American president will want to be the one who "Lost Space to the <insert other nation>".

I would be curious to know if there would be the same urge if the other contenders are private corporations, and whether the US would be happy to let that happen.

Use the courts, Jeff: Amazon to contest Microsoft scooping $10bn JEDI contract

Alister

Re: Trekkies to contest The Register usage of Captain Janeway image in a Star Wars context

Do keep up, there's a good chap.

Alister

Kathryn Janeway does too.

High Court dismisses nameless Google Right To Be Forgotten sueball man... yes, again

Alister

Re: Streisland effect does work

Call me picky, but I would have thought the Streisand effect would have worked better.

Boffins harnessed the brain power of mice to build AI models that can't be fooled

Alister

AI is based on language understanding

No. Machine Learning might be, but true AI has got to be based at least in part on neuroscience.

Alister

Re: Cheese bias

You're just pandering to outdated stereotypes. Modern, forward thinking mice have put all that cheese and cats business behind them long ago.

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Alister

Re: And just *where*

He doesn't believe that the Saturn V's engines were powerful enough to get out of the gravity well, or something, so perhaps he's ignoring this story.

Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen

Alister
Headmaster

@xpz393

The Reg's domain suffix dictates that it's actually spelt "laser"

Irrespective of where you are in the world, laser is the only correct spelling.

It is an acronym of the following phrase:

Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation

There is nowhere in the world where stimulation is spelled with a Z

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Alister

What's in a name?

Apple’s senior director of Mac and iPad product marketing, Tom Boger.

pronounced "bodger"?

Boeing comes clean on parachute borkage as the ISS crew is set to shrink

Alister
Pint

Re: UK Spaceports in Cornwall and Scotland?

Well played!

Alister

Re: "Project Orion"

There are a few downsides. I mean the launch is going to be much louder than a Saturn V, and people living near the launch site may object.

But not for very long... The radiation keeps them quiet eventually.

'That roar is terrific... look at that rocket go!' It's been 52 years since first Saturn V left the pad

Alister

Re: Love watching space rockets, especially Saturn V lift off's

you may ask yourself why simple film of the world's most important achievement has been withheld by NASA?

Go on then, what's the answer?

Alister

That roar is terrific

Walter of course, being a lover of language, was using "terrific" in its proper sense - something to terrify - and not in its watered down modern meaning on a par with super, smashing, great.

Alister
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Re: Love watching space rockets, especially Saturn V lift off's

Thanks for those links. Amazing.

Ex from Hell gets six years for online stalking, revenge pics campaign against two women

Alister

Re: Why should sex or nudity be shameful?

Jesus got on fairly well with prostitutes but those parts of the gospels were never very popular in english churches

The idea that Mary Magdelene was a prostitute was an invention of Pope Gregory, and has no basis in the original gospels. Western Christianity has taken this on board, but Eastern Orthodoxy has no comparable belief.

Congress to FCC: Where’s the damn report on mobile companies selling location data?

Alister

Re: Yet another reason not to have a smart phone

It's not just smart phones. Any mobile device which uses the cell towers has the location data logged, and that's what is being sold on.

They say lightning never strikes twice, but boffins have built an AI to show where it'll come next

Alister

1,023 deaths in 69 years, definitely something needs doing to stop the appalling death rate.

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

Alister

Re: "no requirement of 'registration' for deactivated firearms"

Probably because 'deactivated' is potentially reversible.

If you read TFA it does say that if a firearm is deactivated to meet UK requirements it involves welding solid the barrel and chamber, and cutting away sections of the action, so reactivation is unlikely or improbable.

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

Alister

Re: Cloud product talks to cloud

We run our controller on a Raspberry Pi. Very happy with our Unifi installation, we picked them after trialing a number of other manufacturers solutions.

Here are some deadhead jobs any chatbot could take over right now

Alister

Scam callers

I was rung by Mike, who wanted to talk to me about the recent road accident I was involved in.

So not to disappoint him, I said "Oh yes, it was about a month ago, a fatal accident, nobody survived".

That didn't seem to put him off his script, so we carried on for a minute or two until it had sunk in, then he said "You bastard" and hung up.

Enjoy a tipple or five? You might need this AI system to tell you when it's time for a new liver

Alister

There are so many other causes of cognitive abnormalities that I can't see how you could possibly use this as a diagnostic tool unless you already know that the particular patient has cirrhosis, and can rule out any other medical problems.

What is this, 1989? Laplink is still a thing and wants to help with Windows 7 migrations

Alister

Re: Cables, CDs?

I seem to remember using it with XTree Gold

Ha! Fake news! It was XTLink that I used with XTree Gold, obviously, and my recollection is it was easier to use that than Laplink.

Alister

@katrinab

Laplink is from the days when people had no network connectivity.

Oh, and btw, Windows 7 and above disables the admin shares by default, so C$ won't work unless you first enable them.

Alister

Re: Cables, CDs?

Not if real men wanted to preserve their sanity... :)

Laplink was a lifesaver in it's day. I seem to remember using it with XTree Gold, although that could be a false memory brought on by age.

We're almost into the third decade of the 21st century and we're still grading security bugs out of 10 like kids. Why?

Alister

We're almost into the third decade of the 21st century and we're still grading security bugs out of 10 like kids. Why?

Because it gives an easy and quick method of identifying their severity. However, as Jake says above, if you only rely on the CVSS then you're doing it wrong.

NSA to Congress: Our spy programs don’t work, aren’t used, or have gone wrong – now can you permanently reauthorize them?

Alister

Re: Although I agree the NSA have not really provided a blazing list of sucesses

I also have some sympathy with the idea that spilling details of operational capabilities in public forum is also probably a very bad idea too

But that's not what was asked for. Congress simply asked for a measure of how successful the programs have been, and they refused even to answer that.

Controversies aren't Boeing away for aircraft maker amid claims of faulty oxygen systems and wobbling wings

Alister

Where did I say they shouldn't be tested?

Boeing claim they have tested all the devices on the aircraft. This is patently not the case. They may have tested some of the same device, but not the ones currently installed.

Alister

"Every passenger oxygen system installed on our airplanes is tested multiple times before delivery to ensure it is functioning properly, and must pass those tests to remain on the airplane."

This is bullshit. The part that is found to be failing is the release mechanism on the oxygen cylinders. These are a one-time-use pyrotechnic device which, by its design, cannot be tested once installed. So those particular items installed on the aircraft have never been tested. They may have tested others of the same batch, but even that is doubtful.

Leeds IT bloke pleads guilty to hacking Jet2 CEO's email account

Alister

One wonders what exactly he got out of the exercise? I see no mention that he was able to access anything other than the email accounts.

Oh chute. Two out of three ain't bad, right? asks Boeing after soft-ish crew module landing

Alister

Just to correct you, it's not the cylinders which are dodgy, it's the release valves, which are a one-time pyrotechnic device which cannot therefore be tested after installation.

Comcast-owned Brit telco Sky to hire 1,000 new staffers, half of them engineers

Alister

Re: They are not engineers

This is a very recent elitism. You don't have to have a university degree to be called an engineer.

Telephone installers in the UK have been called engineers for over a century, indeed the whole telephone side of the Post Office in the UK was called the engineering division at one time.

And locomotive drivers in the US have also been known as engineers for over a century.

There are many other trades requiring hands on work with tools to which the term engineer could be applied.

The term software engineer needs to die though.

Phew! All that competition in the US mobile industry was exhausting. Thank God for the FCC, am I right?

Alister

Re: Just reposting what I put on the other article's comment

So, on the basis of one article, you think El Reg was supporting the incoming administration?

And yet, strangely, they have always highlighted the idiocy of Pai, and of Trump.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Alister

Re: Seems fine to me

Lead sheathed. The conductors were still copper, with rubber insulation.

Alister

I positively won't entertain a living room without underfloor cable trays and 32Amp IP44 outlets, so sorry, it's not for me.

Tech and mobile companies want to monetise your data ... but are scared of GDPR

Alister
Headmaster

Re: Good!

paralyzed...