* Posts by TimR

103 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2012

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Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

TimR

"In the UK if you pay £24.95 for the IQ test and score over 132, you can then pay £59.95 a year to receive a newsletter and attend events with other people who have also paid up to be in a room with people who scored highly on the same intelligence test."

And these people think they are intelligent....?

Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation

TimR

But he is a likely to repeat bail absconder...

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

TimR

"The vast majority of technology, media and telecom (TMT) companies want to monetise customer data, but are concerned about regulations such as Europe's GDPR, according to research from law firm Simmons & Simmons"

How do Simmons & Simmons make money out of stating the bleedin' obvious? Honest question

Will someone think of the taxpayer? UK.gov needs to stop burning billions on shoddy procurement, says Reform

TimR

The real cost?

"...a 20 per cent increase on predicted costs"

"...a 50 per cent increase on original cost estimates"

"Ofpro would cost between £30m and £90m a year...the think tank estimated"

So, how much would Ofpro really cost?

We read the Brexit copyright notices so you don't have to… No more IP freely, ta very much

TimR

Re: Red tape

You forgot to mention the leopard....

Aladdin Sane - OK, you beat me to it!

TimR

Re: Bonfire

And, of course, the EU made us change our passports from good old British blue to burgundy - NOT!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/22/blue-passports-taking-back-control-imposed-league-of-nations-burgundy-passport-eu

HMRC's HTTPS howler: Childcare payments site cert expired at 1am on Sunday, down for hours

TimR

Re: Its not hard

Yes, 3 cheers for PRTG. A very cost effective solution to "network monitoring"

The only thing that bugs me about it is that you can not (easily) test for non HTTP 200 Response codes in the HTTP sensor

TimR

Re: Feature Request

And consider how this probably went:

1. First user reports problem

2. Help Desk faff about with it for an hour

3. A techy happens to come across it and, within 10 mins, identifies the issue and what needs to be done

4. Manglement faff about for a few hours until someone finally authorises the expenditure

5. Change Management hold up implementation while they ask for a full risk analysis and assurances there will be no down time (!)

6. techy implements win 10 mins

Probably six hours for a 15 min job. Of course, it shouldn't have occurred in the first place, but I'd be lying if I said I'd never been party to such an oversight in the dim & distant past...

Can you download it to me – in an envelope with a stamp?

TimR

Brilliant - welcome back Mr Dabbs

Vodafone hurls sueball at Ofcom over plans to relax BT leases

TimR

"...so we’re extremely disappointed some companies have chosen to put commercial interest ahead of the national interest."

Whilst not wishing to defend any of the players, what the hell does OFCOM expect...?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moves to shut Parliament

TimR

Hmmmm... careful, that could be taken as incitement to violence by some

Personally, I interpret it as a humorous quip by some one who is fed up with this (all?) Government, but others have been castigated for similar remarks recently - something to do with MPs and acid

Will someone plz dump our shizz on the Moon, NASA begs as one of the space biz vendors drops out

TimR

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)#Design

"Improved waste-management facilities, with a miniature camping-style toilet and the unisex "relief tube" used on the Space Shuttle."

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

TimR

Re: Just FYI

@tiggity

Some windy words this morning: To fizzle, originally, was to break wind silently. The petard you may be hoisted by was a small explosive that made a loud bang: it’s from the Latin ‘pedere’, to fart. A bloviator is a speaker full of empty or inflated rhetoric: a blower of hot air.

TimR

Fascinating

Absolutely fascinating. So much has changed and yet corporate marketing/lying is just the same...

Do we get to find out what the "casting snag" at Rochester was?

All change at NASA while Proton launches and India's Moon dream suffers a snag

TimR

Re: Question

Thankyou

TimR

Question

"With its seven gold-plated mirror modules and a camera cooled to -90˚C... "

Could someone please explain why it needs to be cooled in space?

Thanks

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

TimR

Re: Cloudflare are not the only ones that have problems ...

And irony of ironies, down detector was down for a while - in UK, at least...

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

TimR

Re: What fraction of a gram ?

Duncan - whilst not disagreeing with you, the article you reference can be interpreted differently to a degree. A couple of examples:

1. you suggest that 8 million tons is negligible compared to the size of the oceans. However, the article states "More than 8 million tons of it ends up in the ocean every year. If we continue to pollute at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050."

2. you suggest that banning single use plastics in Europe will have little effect. But what proportion of the plastic from the rivers in Asia & Africa is exported waste from Europe?

Just saying issues like this are not black & white

High Court confirms the way UK banned GSM gateways was illegal

TimR

Mage - "It's a democracy, not a dictatorship or evil regime."

Augie - "well bugger me senseless I thought I was living in England..."

Oh the naivety....! (in the nicest possible way)

UK libraries dumped 11% of computers since 2010-11... everybody has one anyway, right?

TimR

Ronome

I know someone who was medically retired from an office based Civil Service job and yet passed the subsequent ESA "medical" (if that's what you can call it) as fit to work

As you say "go figure"

TimR

A Welsh Grand Slam And a 11% increase in library computers...! [Cue down votes from English & Irish rugby supporters. And a hat tip to Scotland for such a great comeback]

Seriously, "A statement from the Department for Work and Pensions argued that ... all job centres had free Wi-Fi." Great news for the UC claimants that had to sell their laptops to bridge the 6+ week wait

That's Numberwang! Google Cloud staffer breaks record for most accurate Pi calculation

TimR

We could, if there was a 31/4.....

Forget snowmageddon, it's dropageddon in Azure SQL world: Microsoft accidentally deletes customer DBs

TimR

roll forward logs

Back in the dim & distant pass when I had some contact with database administration, I seem to recall something about roll forward logs. Are these no longer a thing?

Microsoft suffers the Tuesday shakes as Exchange Online continues to be wobbly for UK users

TimR

Re: Is Daz in sales ?

"how to put myself out of a job even if everything worked 100% as I expected"

No, Daz in an "IT services Manager" - it'll be his tech engineers who will be out of a job....

Manchester man fined £1,440 after neighbours couldn't open windows for stench of dog toffee

TimR

Re: Action should be faster

A real shame it spoiled her late night parties.....

It only took Oz govt transformation bods 6 months and $700k to report that blockchain ain't worth the effort

TimR

Agreed

I wonder if Peter Alexander could be seconded to GDS for a while?

Working Apple-1 retro fossil auctioned off to mystery bidder for $375,000

TimR

OMG! Maybe this will give them ideas as to where to price the next iPhone....

Deliveroo to bike food to hungry fanbois queuing to buy iPhones

TimR

m0rt - my first reaction was just that it is very sad, but you may have a point...

If Apple can get thousands to pay to queue in the rain for the new shiny, with a bit more creative thinking, what else could they (Apple) get them to do?

A basement of broken kit, zero budget – now get the team running

TimR

Re: HMSO

A random bullsh!t bingo generator would probably do the job quite well...

Do not adjust your set, er, browser: This is our new page-one design

TimR

https://www.cbc.ca/

Please have a quick look at the above web site - what do you notice?

Hint: all the boxes within a section line up....

Please don't put adverts in one cell on a line of the grid - with an ad blocker enabled it makes the site look awful

SpaceX dodges lightning while storms keep Japan earthbound

TimR

The boffins continued to eat through their four-hour launch window

How many other people read that as "lunch"?

Excuse me, but your website's source code appears to be showing

TimR

"...two scammer/spammer accusations, and one threat to call the Canadian police."

Just goes to show that the 285th rule of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition is correct - no good deed ever goes unpunished

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

TimR

Wow, BREXIT fears are hitting our economy more than I thought

"...fined Google €4.34bn (£5bn)..."

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

TimR

Re: Bah! IBM's data is all in EBCDIC anyway...

You've just reminded me of the "fun" of managing character conversions between EBCDIC, ASCII and ICL 1900 (really!) systems. Known locally as the "Great Hash Pound Debate" - no one could ever agree on the correct mappings...

My Tibetan digital detox lasted one morning, how about yours?

TimR

Re: When "off duty" and out & about with the Wife ...

If your not as proficient as Mr & Mrs Jake with Morse code, you may find this site useful/of interest

https://morsecode.scphillips.com/translator.html

Ofcom to probe Three and Vodafone over network throttling

TimR

Re: Rules

According to the Office of National Statistics, the UK Civil Service employed 419,399 people in March 2017

There were 46,356 people employed across all EU institutions, agencies and bodies in 2015 (from theconversation.com)

But don't let facts get in the way - let's just use phrases like "...an army of European bureaucrats..."

Google: Class search results as journalism so we can dodge Right To Be Forgotten

TimR

Welcome to the party - even if a little bit late...

Only joking!

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

TimR

Re: Erm...

"Is the president of China on Twitter too?"

Nice one!

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

TimR

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

For those not aware of this site:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

Post-Brexit economy SAVED: Posh-nosh truffle thrives in Wales

TimR

Re: "there are always unknowns"

So, it was unknown to you that it was unknown to me that it was known to you all along

I now know that it was known to you all along

And, hopefully, it is now known by you that it was unknown by me that it was known to you all along

Now I know I've got a headache...

TimR

Re: "there are always unknowns"

Apologies - if I had bothered to follow the link, I would have known that you had known

TimR

Re: "there are always unknowns"

Surely that should be Donald Rumsfeld...?

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

TimR

Re: cauldrons of magic potion that Obelix fell into as a baby

Assuming that was the Crown - did wonderful grub last time I was in the area

Your data will get hacked anyway so you might as well give up protecting it

TimR

"It’ll detect when you eat a particularly spicy curry and automatically tell Alexa to order more toilet paper..."

At last, the killer app for IOT !

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

TimR

Re: A man is not dead while his name is still spoken ...

I noticed Lester when I copy/pasted it, but forgot to mention it

Looking again, we've also got BOFH & PFY

Wondering if I can get away with tinkering with our proxies now.... The only time I've done something "slightly unprofessional" like this was to use the HTTP 418 (I'm a teapot) code to flag an unusual non standard condition

TimR

Re: A man is not dead while his name is still spoken ...

"El Reg still puts out the overhead I believe."

Indeed they do

HTTP/2.0 200 OK

Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 12:45:21 GMT

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Cf-Railgun: 99375e10e7 0.41 0.145329 0030 e6be

Vary: Accept-Encoding

X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, Lester Haines

X-Reg-Bofh: PFY01

Server: cloudflare-nginx

CF-RAY: 3967d8c2dfe33822-ATL

Content-Encoding: gzip

X-Firefox-Spdy: h2

Britain's on the brink of a small-scale nuclear reactor revolution

TimR

Re: I hope they succeed ... but! Economics!

You may find this interesting - http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Sayonara North America: Insurance guy got your back when Office 365 doesn't?

TimR

Re: So...

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln

Crashed Schiaparelli lander's 'chute and shields spotted

TimR

So now we have two (or four) Schiaparelli craters on Mars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_%28Martian_crater%29

Uni students float into Hyperloop finals with levitating prototype

TimR

Re: Eric Braithewaite

Neil - sure you don't mean Laithwaite?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Laithwaite

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