* Posts by ssharwood

176 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2012

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Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

ssharwood

Re: If NFL...

It’s been a while since I saw rugby union flow for more than 15 seconds.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

ssharwood

Re: Professional kit vs non-professional kit

Hmmm ... we noticed a change that Synology has not publicly disclosed - at a time it is pumping out a ShinyHappy press release about how great its new NAS are and the fact it has shiny new disks, too.

The story therefore provides information not available elsewhere. Not sure that's me being overwrought even if the practice of requiring certain disks is not uncommon.

In the old days, coups started by seizing TV and radio stations. Now they crimp the internet at 3am

ssharwood

Re: Sad

John Scalzi's epithet - 'Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit' - has the same effect with fewer words IMHO.

NASA building network cables that can survive supersonic flight - could this finally deliver unbreakable RJ45 latching tabs?

ssharwood

Re: Not so much a red herring as a pink sprat

Fair cop. I saw NASA's odd mention of networking, though to myself what's the most vulnerable part of a cable and tried to turn that into something amusing. Sorry if it ended up a little frustrating instead. FWIW I did look for the contract notice that would offer that detail (and maybe a $10k toilet kind of angle), but it was nowhere to be found - presumably either below the spend threshold for notification or not a new award.

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

ssharwood
Thumb Up

Re: "This offering will fill that market need and is destined to take off."

Indeed. Michael was a very good sport to do this.

ssharwood

Re: Australia's most-polluted waterway: Alexandra Canal

Before... but you raise a good point

Anyone using Alibaba or other Chinese clouds?

ssharwood

Anyone using Alibaba or other Chinese clouds?

Hi readers,

Simon here at Vulture East.

I'm doing a piece on China's clouds: they're here, they're big, they're expanding like crazy.

But are they any good?

Can any of you help me answer the last question? If you've used the likes of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei, China Mobile or others, I'd love to know what the experience was like.

Do they match the likes of AWS and Azure for features? For resilience? For support? For an ecosystem?

Feel free to leave a comment here or ping me on the Reg mail-o-tronic page that connects me https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/Email/SSharwood

DBA locked in police-guarded COVID-19-quarantine hotel for the last week shares his story with The Register

ssharwood

Re: How far away is home?

12 hour drive, one hour flight.

Singapore's corona-crushing superhero squad grounded by football fans

ssharwood

Re: change.org petition found 900 Liverpool fans willing to sign up

In their defence, they may have SFA else to do

Boss regrets pointing finger at chilled out techie who finished upgrade early

ssharwood

Re: Porn Fest

No

ssharwood

Classic

Classic On-Call. Great to see Rebecca nailing it

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

ssharwood

Re: Plot twist? What plot twist?

I've got it. Previous occupants ran a pottery studio and kiln in the shed out the back. Gently slope was a bastard to cover with a floating floor ...

Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions

ssharwood

Re: Admit it

Damn. You saw straight thru me

Rackspace starts renting its rack space

ssharwood

I reckon Rackspace will take anything you'll pay for

Machines learned to assemble IKEA’s semi-disposable furniture

ssharwood

Real men?

All this talk of real men reminds me that I worked at IKEA as a student and had so much assembly practice that I could assemble a BILLY bookcase in 6 minutes.

Top that you lot. And I also defy you to come up with a better definition of true masculinity.

Are meta, self-referential or recursive science-fiction films doomed?

ssharwood

Seveneves bad, Anathem good

Seveneves is a weird, weird, weird choice for a movie. It just sprawls so much and - spoiler alert - has a big, big pivot.

Anathem might be filmable. I hope it is. Probably Stephenson's best work. And I say that as a drooling Stephenson fanboi.

Sysadmin wiped two servers, left the country to escape the shame

ssharwood

Re: Down under

I'll tell you as soon as I can ride my Kangaroo to the office, wrestle the crocs out of the way to get into the data centre and smoke the snakes out of the aircon. Once I'm done I'll drink a slab of Fosters (assuming it still exists) and tamper with a cricket ball.

ssharwood

Did you buy another or splice?

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

ssharwood

Re: Going Dutch?

Yeah I did think of that but couldn't remember which dike would get me in trouble

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

ssharwood

Re: "I was able to get all my junk on the desk"

You're very naughty. Just the way we like our commentors

Intel's announced PCs packing 5G, and that's just plain wrong

ssharwood

Source for the 25%

Oracle open-sources DTrace under the GPL

ssharwood

Re: old "news"

Yup, happened a while back. But has gone unnoticed for quite some time. As other comments here show, the news seems not to have traveled too far

Microsoft reveals 'limitations of apps and experiences on Arm' – then deletes from view

ssharwood

Re: Seriously?

WTF? No hate from me. Just poining out what looks to be a rather odd reversal

If you don't like what IBM is pitching, blame Watson: It's generating sales 'solutions' now

ssharwood

Re: It can't be worse than

Queensland health wasn't mostly IBM's fault - it was given a very tough brief that kept changing. Government admitted it managed the project very poorly. IBM did, however, get its foot in the door with - ahem - interesting behaviour.

Game of Thrones showrunners to make Star Wars flicks

ssharwood

Re: Charles Stross

We scour the net so you only have to read footnotes in clickbait to stay on top of things

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

ssharwood

Yes. Water plus electricity. And the bonking news emerged over time

Are you taking the peacock? United Airlines deny flight to 'emotional support' bird

ssharwood

Rather cruel to the peacock IMHO. Bad enough for a human to fly United.

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

ssharwood

Re: Hmmm ...

Well FWIW traffic and comment counts have been pretty good for the first two columns. I reckon it will take a while for the column to find a groove. And obviously there's only so many "i forgot to backup" stories worthy of being told. But I'm optimistic we'll get something rolling here.

Laggard Cisco stumbles over, puffing: 'HyperFlex now supports Hyper-V'

ssharwood

Re: Question the regurgitation

Latency. Metro clusters are tricky enough. Wide area clusters just gwt too hard

Oracle says SPARCv9 has Spectre CPU bug, patches coming soon

ssharwood

Re: Confused, SPARC vulnerable or not?

Oracle keeps saying 'no comment' on its own OS. Expect it has less than that to say about BSD

Engineer named Jason told to re-write the calendar

ssharwood

Re: Productivity slump ahead?

As if anybody was going to be at their best next week anyway!

At Christmas, do you give peas a chance? Go cold turkey? What is the perfect festive feast?

ssharwood

Feel like I gotta add the Australian perspective.

To quote Tim Minchin, Christmas is all about white wine in the sun. My family usually nips down to the beach for an early swim at about 0700. The roads are empty and there's nearly always a beach-related gift under the tree.

Lotsa seafood. Prawns are a must. I usually queue at a local wholesale fishmonger at about 5AM on Christmas Eve to buy a coupla kilos of prawns. There's then a nice moment when the best prawn-peelers in the family don aprons and get 'em ready to cook.

The prawns kick things off and there's usually a big roast something too. If possible we get it done on the BBQ with the lid down, to keep the heat outside rather than cooking the kitchen.

By mid afternoon it's best to keep drinking - stop and the heat means you get a 4PM hangover

IBM asks remaining staff to take career advice from HR-bot

ssharwood

Tell you what - explain to us how this bot helps you as a manager, helps IBM staff and helps IBM.

Give us an example of better outcomes it delivers.

Asking cos the IBM staff who pointed it out to us feel it's just more impersonal but insincere "we care about you" stuff in the wake of relocations, resource actions that strip the company of skills needed on live projects and drop remaining colleagues in it, attempts to reduce benefits and a bifurcation of the company in which those who work on the strategic initiatives are valued and the rest just aren't.

ssharwood

Re: So basically, management are admiting IBM's failed as a company?

I'd love to hear from IBM. But it doesn't even send press releases. Local people here in oz know nuh-think. So we rely on other sources

Lord of the Rings TV show shopped around Hollywood

ssharwood

Re: Why hasn't anyone done a Thomas Covenant series/film?

It would be a fine alternative to Gitmo, but with worse torture

ssharwood

Re: Why hasn't anyone done a Thomas Covenant series/film?

Because the niche for an endlessly self-loathing protagonist is occupied by BoJack Horseman.

And because they're boring.

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

ssharwood

Re: Did anyone else expect something else?

Something smutty? Tut tut. We're not that kind of site. Snigger

Sysadmin tells user CSI-style password guessing never w– wait WTF?! It's 'PASSWORD1'!

ssharwood

Re: "They looked for the password on the CD . . ."

I recently opened a bank account and was told - by a teller who could see my password in plaintext - that my password was too long and complex. She suggested I pick a simpler password intsead to avoid forgetting my properly complex password. This is why we can't have nice things.

Monkey selfie case settles for a quarter of future royalties

ssharwood

Re: I see a simple solution

Or until the super intelligent monkey from the labs gets out and starts an ape army ...

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

ssharwood

Re: See where it says " Tips and corrections" at the bottom of the article?

Speaking as the author, a gentle ribbing is fine. Sometimes readers sent rather mean and rude notes as if to say we simply should not ever err.

FWIW the SFO and LON offices have a production desk to check for mistakes. Here in Oz we just try our very hardest.

S.

ssharwood

Re: Ped-ANT-ic typo in title

Damn. Busy day and I missed it. [Slaps self sharply, slinks into corner]

Bombastic boss gave insane instructions to sensible sysadmin, with client on speakerphone

ssharwood

Re: Staff?

Back to sub-editing school for me, then :-(

Major Oracle E-business suite upgrade coming in 2019. Or maybe 2020

ssharwood

Re: Headline should be Oracle admits "expensive licences have no new functionality for on prem"

IMHO plenty of readers found that between the lines ...

User filed fake trouble tickets to take helpful sysadmin to lunches

ssharwood

Re: No lunch for me

Well played IMHO

ssharwood

Re: Not an apology

And?????

Not that we expect readers will kiss and tell, but ...

User left unable to type passwords after 'tropical island stress therapy'

ssharwood

Re: Last Friday your correspondent snorkeled on a tropical island

Back to the island? Ok. Off I go then. I could get two bars from the bar there. If I absolutely must work there and snorkel on my coffee breaks, then I will to satisfy commentards.

Hot news! Combustible Galaxy Note 7 to return as 'Galaxy Note FE'

ssharwood

Re: Facile Emanations

It's a followup story. One I felt was worth doing for the sake of completeness. It offered a chance for some fun. Seriously - what is Samsung doing having anything that alludes to its problems in this new name.

Anyway if you didn't like it I'll try for better puns next time. Or I could point you in the direction of our many recent scoops.

IBM asks contractors to take a pay cut

ssharwood

Will signal suffice? My number is on the contacts page

Horse named 'Cloud Computing' finds burst of speed to beat 'Classic Empire' in actual race

ssharwood

Re: But...

There once was a horse named 'hoof-hearted'. Made for interesting race calls

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