* Posts by Gaius

183 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007

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Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Gaius

nobody wants to compile architecture-specific code to utilise the new functionality

No-one needs to do that. As long as the maths libs on your system are up to date, any existing code that links against them will pick up routines that are compiled for it.

Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS

Gaius

Re: Puzzled

> At the time, XFS was immature

At the time the Linux XFS implementation was immature yes, but the original XFS was (and is) rock solid

Google Cloud started running its servers for an extra year, still loses billions

Gaius

Ironically the option of skipping a year or two to save money isn't available to cloud customers - stop paying even for a month and you will be switched off. This tactic is only available to those who stayed with on-prem.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

Gaius

I never thought I’d see the day

Perl changes dev's permaban for 'unacceptable' behaviour to a year-long lockout after community response

Gaius

Re: Very.Big.Sigh

There is none of this constant infighting and factionalism in the FORTRAN community. I don’t know about COBOL but I suspect not there either.

Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'

Gaius

Re: Sigh...

During the pandemic one of the local businesses that we support has gone online and unfortunately chosen Wix, the amount of user-hostile JS they cram into their site is incredible. And they have written it in such a way that blocking tracking renders the site non-functional. In other words they know perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong.

I'm not going to boycott a small business over making a bad technical choice, but I do only access their site in a separate browser process!

Mimecast bins SolarWinds and compromised servers alike in wake of supply chain hack

Gaius

Cisco's ESA product is in direct competition with Mimecast, so this is a curious choice. Having said that Cisco Stealthwatch is a decent product, if that's what they mean by Netflow.

Ex-asylum seeker with infosec degree loses discrimination claim against UK cyber range provider after storming out

Gaius

Re: Hanging my head in shame

It’s a room set up so a red team (hackers) and a blue team (sysadmins) can directly compete in real time with their activities displayed for observers to critique, hence the big screens on the wall referenced in the article. The name is meant to evoke a firing range.

Man arrested after UK school finds wiped hard drives on devices connected to network

Gaius

Re: Back in my day

> They just used to nick the balls out of the mice

I remember, then you would need to boil an egg to get a new one. Good times.

Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

Gaius

It definitely did start on Friday, not Saturday, a full day before they acknowledged it

No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too

Gaius

Was this not obvious to everyone from the start? How did you think any provider would commoditise their service and still make money?

As Amazon pulls union-buster job ads, workers describe a 'Mad Max' atmosphere – unsafe, bullying, abusive

Gaius

If I remember correctly it was Jack Welch at GE who popularised it it, sacking the bottom 10% every year.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

Gaius

The problem is...

... that this is not a featurephone. It's an Android phone merely pretending to be one. So you have all the privacy and security problems of Android and none of the upside.

What the punters really want is the old Nokias, with modern batteries and ability to connect to modern 3 and 4G networks, and that's it. No apps, no telemetry, nothing else.

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

Gaius

It's crazy to think how long the 747 has been in service, especially when compared to the A380.

Brit retailer John Lewis to catapult 111 tech bods over to Capgemini weeks after dumping 244 on Wipro

Gaius

Re: Howdy Partner

... and that’s why the quality of their own-brand products has taken a nosedive.

Gaius

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.johnlewis.com

The old John Lewis is long gone, I'm sorry to say

Bad news: So much of your personal data has been hacked that lesson manuals on how to use it are the latest hot property

Gaius

Re: So, basically businesses should acquire fraud guides

This is a guide on how to exploit information that has already been negligently mishandled by various companies, not one that will assist in preventing such negligence in one's own company.

Thought you'd go online to buy better laptop for home working? Too bad, UK. So did everyone. Laptops, monitors and WLANs fly off shelves

Gaius

the pressure and temperature circumstances would be the same for both

The cargo hold is pressurised but not heated

UK Defence Committee probe into national security threat of Huawei sure to uncover lots of new and original insights

Gaius

the usual crop of bad practices and sloppy coding

Any competently written backdoor is indistinguishable from a bug.

But you’re right, it’s not as if we even have the option of making it ourselves any more. It’s Huawei or the highway.

GlaxoSmithKline ditches IR35 contractors: Go PAYE or go home

Gaius

Sometimes internal people just don't have the skill-set (and the company may not need that design skill in future - much)

Cost of a contractor vs cost of a training course and having those skills on tap if they are ever needed again. Should be simple maths.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Gaius

Re: Sounds a typical

Sounds familiar.

In a previous job, the thing I had been warning for months would happen, happened, to within a few days of when I predicted. Had all the email I’d sent about it as evidence.

The moronic manager who should have acted and didn’t blamed me anyway. Said I hadn’t made the case strongly enough!

That company no longer exists and said manager went on to have a successful career at one of the outsourcing companies that’s always appearing in El Reg. Successful for him, not any of his clients, naturally.

In a world of infosec rockstars, shutting down sexual harassment is hard work for victims

Gaius

Re: A problem of the basic paranoid and secretive nature of cybersec

Sounds like the harrassers are highly skilled And talented and simply need to be offered a opportunity

No. A fundamental personality trait of anyone working in security is that you can trust them to follow the rules/do the right thing, even if they think no one is watching. You watch them anyway, obv.

Azure Arc: Redmond's tool to wrangle services wherever they are – on-premises, cloud, your basement, in the pub...

Gaius

This is pretty cool, you could already extend Azure Security Centre to on-prem and other clouds, so this just rounds it out.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Gaius

Re: Production machine?

If your business is say video production, then the desktop macs are production machines. Or if you use them for DTP, CAD, or anything similar.

We, Wall, we, Wall, Raku: Perl creator blesses new name for version 6 of text-wrangling lingo

Gaius

Perl is the stupid programmers idea of a clever programming language.

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Gaius

Re: Freedom-hating assholes

“Comments are disabled”

Of course they are.

Chef roasted for tech contract with family-separating US immigration, forks up attempt to quash protest

Gaius

it can't be automatically and easily installed by the Ruby toolchain

Yes it can, with a one line change to a config file.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Gaius

Re: No more double-dip?

You aren’t “on the clock” with these companies, you are paid on a job-by-job basis. Workers clocked in are paid hourly even if there’s nothing for them to do. No driver is getting hourly pay from Uber just for having the app open.

Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism

Gaius

such systems should be equipped with a wide variety available voices

Siri comes with male/female voices with English, American, Irish and Australian accents. Strongly suspect that critics of Siri being female aren't actually users of it, or they would know this.

I have mine set to Australian because it sounds the most natural. Or maybe Australians just sound robotic, that's why.

In Hemel Hempstead, cycling is as bad as taking a leak in the middle of the street

Gaius

Re: Banning Cyclists

There is zero enforcement on cyclists as it is - when did you ever hear of the police arresting one for failing to stop at a red light, or riding on the pavement? Cyclists act as if the law doesn't apply to them, because it doesn't in practice!

Auditors bemoan time it takes for privatised RAF pilot training to produce combat-ready aviators

Gaius

Re: "Auditors bemoan time it takes"

Remember that the RAF has shrunk from 75000 people in 1990 to 35000 today (on paper, actually probably much less).

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

Gaius
Thumb Up

This sort of “picking winners” strategy gave us the mighty British Leyland

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

Gaius

Re: Which is it?

It’ll be a firmware problem. Apple had the same thing on the latest MBP.

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Gaius

The Register: lol, you can pwn Windows through unpatched software

Also The Register: omg Microsoft is EEEEVIL for forcing people onto continuous updates

Can’t win, can they?

This is not the cloud you're looking for.... Oracle's JEDI mind tricks work as Trump forces $10bn IT project to drop out of warp

Gaius

Amusingly Oracle pitch it as an advantage that you can buy at entire stack from them, from that hardware (inherited from Sun) all the way up to the apps, via OS and database. “One throat to choke” if anything goes wrong, their salesmen would say.

Now they are upset that someone is taking that advice and going for a single supplier... just not them!

Operation Desert Sh!tstorm: Routine test shoots down military's top-secret internets

Gaius

Re: don't wait 20 mins !

In that case you also have to arrange the right number of vehicles in series as well.

They could have used a tank regiment, on a military base!

Oracle told to warp 9 out of court: Judge photon-torpedoes Big Red's Pentagon JEDI dream

Gaius

Literal LOL at Oracle describing anything else as “legacy”

Congrats, Nvidia and Google: You're still the best (out of five) at training neural networks

Gaius

I read that as ML Perl for a second *shudder*

Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away: Partner boss explains yanking of free licences

Gaius

Re: Small Business

Yes and no. Microsoft ‘s goal is small business == Azure. On-prem is for consumers and enterprise.

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

Gaius

Re: Both sets of wings?

Yes, usually a left wing, a right wing, and one long wing across the top. It needs all of them tho’.

Meet the Great Duke of... DLL: Microsoft shines light on Astaroth, a devilishly sneaky strain of fileless malware

Gaius

Re: And this ..

A typical Linux installation technique these days is curl|bash as root. Think that’s any better?

Gaius

Re: Fileless?

You need to check again then. A DLL can be downloaded from a remote server, buffered in memory, and be injected into an existing process all without ever touching the disk.

It’s easy enough to do this in Linux too - you can try it yourself with GDB. Other tools are available.

Note: the technique of loading code from the network without ever touching the disk is nothing new. In fact it was one of the major features of Java back in the mid 90’s...

Gaius

... and airlines...

2001: Linux is cancer, says Microsoft. 2019: Hey friends, ah, can we join the official linux-distros mailing list, plz?

Gaius

Yep all those eyes did a great job with Heartbleed!

Gaius

Inside info like... source code? Cool theory!

Hey China, while you're in all our servers, can you fix these support tickets? IBM, HPE, Tata CS, Fujitsu, NTT and their customers pwned

Gaius

Re: Huawei

Cloud absolutely was a thing in 2010. AWS launched SQS to the general public in 2004!

Gaius

Didn’t DXC just lay off all their security guys? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/24/dxc_technology_axe_security_division/

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