Posts by Mayhem

Children are like idiot savants. The moment you think something is child or idiot proof, it isn't.

My friend's standard technique for getting stuck cds out of the factory car stereo system is to leave the four year old near it for 15 min or so, and he frequently succeeds by hitting the right secret random combination of buttons. It's depressingly reliable.

Re: Local Data

And how does your remote office print?

Particularly if you have a temporary setup in serviced offices while the main building is constructed and your WAN links don't exist yet.

One problem we had recently was that a lot of the modern thin clients run their own custom linux OS, which doesn't translate well between the windows, Xen and the local printer. The only effective workaround was using a PC as a local print server, and that was pretty awful.

Granted that was probably exacerbated because our cloud provider was crap, but then most are once you've been onboard a while.

Re: How about adding the penalty of......

"Please do not look into laser with remaining eye"

Re: Typo tracking

The typos are probably a double blind - the real canary trap will be a legalese synonym dictionary making every copy unique. Correcting the typos will be a way to catch out lazy journalists who copy and paste instead of transliterating the text.

Re: speculative invoicing

A better reversal of the original

Hollywood Litigants: And what Law are you basing this argument on?

Federal Court Judge: The Law of bloody common sense!

Re: Cape York

Firstly, PNG is independent of Australia, has been since 1975.

Secondly, the broken PPC1 cable in question that Australia uses to connect to Guam is also connected to PNG, via the Solomon Sea. Cables don't go overland in PNG - nothing does. It's bloody tough country, with over 4000m mountains in the middle.

Most of the connections go via the Sunda Straight to Jakarta and Singapore, because that's the easiest and cheapest way to tap into the big asian pipelines, and has the least exposure to the really complicated and fairly shallow seafloor between Kalimantan and PNG which is full of volcanic activity.

They are very vulnerable to a big bang from Krakatoa, but the costs of rebuilding are probably less than running new cables to Sri Lanka.

Lastly, NZ has a *really* active plate boundary running along the east coast, which is why the Southern Cross is the only cable to be routed that way, and it runs up to Hawaii parallel to the boundary to avoid the trenches. Every other link goes via Australia and the Tasman Sea is geologically stable.

Epidemic of idiots?

Well, it does help to know when you are outside your area of expertise.

I'm quite happy to ring my mechanic and say My Car Doesn't Work. He'll ask a few basic questions, and then usually ask if we can get the car to his garage. Which is exactly the same as IT collecting a faulty PC and checking it in their office. He sometimes has a loan car, but usually it's shanks pony time.

I'm highly technical, but I'd much rather someone who knows what they are doing fixes the damn thing, it's quicker and much much cleaner. Especially CV boots. Moly grease is a right pain to deal with.

For a friend of mine though who collects and races classic cars, his mechanic is willing to jump on a plane and fly down to wherever he is in order to get it running again if they can't diagnose the fault over the phone to where my friend can fix it. Costs a fair bit more than my guy, but then he can easily afford it.

Re: One Swedish Charge left

There is no chance that the FO will give a confirmed fugitive from justice a free pass

Ahh, but if he is granted Diplomatic Immunity, then he is automatically ineligible for prosecution for any and all crimes. Which means he isn't a fugitive any more. The most they can then do is declare him Persona Non Grata and expel him, at which point he is stuck in the embassy again.

The Foreign Office has covered up far far worse in the past when prosecution has been deemed not in the countries best interest, particularly if weapons sales are involved. Slavery and murder have been more frequent of late, particularly involving Indian diplomats or Middle Eastern princelings.

Floppy drives?

The big one these days is a USB drive plugged in overnight so the pc doesn't boot the next day.

On lenovos all you see is a black screen with white blinking cursor.

Trivial to fix once you know about it, but with USB drives getting tinier, can be easy to overlook on a quick glance at the box. It's one of my top questions for checking out novice techies.

Re: Bottom line. GCHQ *must* have more money.

Damned Grey Aliens coming here and probing our fine native squirrels.

Re: As an expat Kiwi many things tug the heartstrings

Oh god yes. Being able to walk into the average cave and *not* see long feelers waving at head height is a nice change. Cave wetas might be small, but they really know how to advertise in low light conditions. Bloody heart attack material.

Re: What is driving this?

An ID card and a passport are different things.

An ID card is proof of identity as an individual within a state or organisation. A passport is an internationally standardised proof of identity and citizenship between states.

I have no problem with ID cards if they are used as a proof of identity for access to government services. For example the Estonian state uses a card with two factor backup that identifies holders to a middleware service that provides proven identity data to the other services - driver licencing, voting, utility billing, banking etc. The card number itself isn't necessarily recorded in those foreign databases, only in the identity system.

Where I do have a problem is where they try and make the card itself hold all the specifics of a person - addresses for example, so if you move you have to get a new card *cough* UK driver licence. I also strongly disagree with the idea of smushing all the data together into a wonderful all seeing database, because I don't trust the people running it not to look at the data when they shouldn't. Multiple independant databases linked by middleware with tightly defined access protocols are inherently safer from both attack and malicious snooping.

Re: Needle in an database stack

Not to mention that any inappropriate access was clearly done by an individual, working alone and solely responsible for that access. After all, if it was sanctioned there would be a record, but there isn't, so it wasn't.

Re: This Zucks.

@AC.

Yes, the common contacts is obvious. But I only use Linkedin for professional connections. Where Linkedin often surprises me is "you might know" and gives me a name of someone I haven't spoken to in 20 years, have no connections in common with, and knew in a totally different context to my industry. Like my parent's friends' children.

And yes, I do know them, but how the hell Linkedin knows I do is cleverer than simply looking at email addresses or common friends.

Re: Blimey - Easyjet sponsoring Bedfordshire Police?

"Any trips you do take will be used in evidence against you in the court of public opinion..."

Re: What's the vector, Victor?

If you have no backup of the data - you have no choice - your business goes down the toilet.

£20K worth of business or £500 ransom, you decide.

This particular attack disproportionately hits small businesses the worst, probably because they are the most likely to be vulnerable. It also charges a very specific sum - large enough to make lotsa money, but small enough that it isn't worth Interpol chasing them down.

Large corporates have the technical skill to segregate the network traffic and restore from backup while cleaning back up the line.

Small businesses generally have one guy who knows how to reboot the router, and a sales contact for more hard disk space. Since this thing knows to traverse network drive mappings, it encrypts all the usual backups as well as what is on the system.

Re: Respect

Don't forget the traders who consider Excel an operating system.

Re: Kiddies!

My favourite quote today is the Head of MI5 complaining that Terrorism is a greater risk than at any point in his career. Which based on his age includes when the IRA was actively blowing up parts of London on a regular basis.

Damn immigrants, coming over here and stealing our home grown terrorist jobs.

Re: QoS != Net neutrality

100 times yes.

QoS is perfectly fine on any network. Separating out priority traffic from low priority traffic is part and parcel of what network management does.

Net neutrality means you can't charge itunes more than netflix for the same bandwidth on the same network channel. Or make Google's emails arrive faster than Hotmail. It's all about removing barriers to entry from new competitors, and the one thing all the internet giants want is to stifle any potential competition.

Was going to say the same thing - the cunning troops tried a different currency to slip it under the belt of the regulators.

Re: Labour... now unelectable

"Nuclear waste is tiny almost negligible compared to other ways."

It really isn't - The UK inventory as of 2013 is 1770 cubic Metres of High Level Waste, and 95,600 cubic Metres of Intermediate Level Waste. Pretty much the entire reactor building and containment, and processing facilities also become nuclear waste at the end of their useful life. Hence the vast costs. See http://www.nda.gov.uk/ukinventory/the-2013-inventory/2013-uk-data/

Or to put that in perspective, a roughly 12mx12mx12m pile of High Level waste and a roughly 45mx45mx45m pile of Intermediate Waste.

Ok, there needs to be a substantial amount of containment, and you can't exactly pile it all together without wondering if Stuff Will Go Wrong, but we're really not talking about a lot of physical material here. The UK is very geologically stable, being in the middle of a plate, and it should be straightforward to find a nice big chunk of granite to entomb it in. Not politically easy, but straightforward. The low level and Very Low Level waste is probably ideal to use to fill up a few old deep coal mines. It's certainly cleaner than a bunch of the waste tailings from the mining operations in the first place.

When did that happen? The moment that the directors decided they wanted an iThing for working on.

If enough directors want something, then it is already "enterprise ready", no matter how badly it breaks common sense or usability.

Re: Auto Rip

So a standard rule of thumb for professional copy editing and proofreading is 10 pages per hour, @£22-24 per hour.

Which makes the average potboiler of 350 pages around £1700 for both.

Pay an intern minimum wage to OCR the book and feed it into the process, and you're probably talking about £3000-4000 per book at the end of the day. Add cover design from a freelancer, which is another £500 minimum, unless you negotiate reuse of the dead tree version, which could be significantly more for a named artist.

And those are sunk costs, ignoring any royalties etc.

Which explains why Amazon has done a quick and dirty job on a bunch of popular books from the past, and is only now working with publishers to do the less popular or out of print runs.

It also explains the profusion of OCR artifacts in many of the initial works.

Re: Real vs Fake

Agreed - the addition of wood chips is invariably a sign of someone trying to disguise a cheap distillate, generally from extractive industrial 4 column stills. cough *panama* cough.

On the other hand, a company in California by the name of Lost Spirits has succeeded in producing some superb aged spirits ... equivalent to 20yr rums ... in six days.

And I mean they won industry awards, and gained recognition from a lot of the big names before they revealed their process. See http://www.wired.com/2015/04/lost-spirits/ for a good writeup after the reveal.

They do around 550L per run, but to be fair their spirits don't always mix well in cocktails - they've been engineered to be a specific flavour profile, and adulterating the mix can lead to unpredictable results.

Re: How much?

So are you suggesting Lucy should be El Reg's official Page 3 girl now?

Re: How about construction then?

The mining companies did a *lot* of trials and analysis, and found that men in general are heavier on the throttle, which puts more wear on the tyres. Since the main cost associated with the big mining trucks is tyre wear, the hiring companies were instructed to pick the candidates with the lighter touch, which was predominantly the females in each intake. If you're only picking 3-5 candidates, and there are 60 applicants, even if only 10% are female, you'll get a lot more coming through the system.

Yes, a driver might earn $100,000/yr, but each tyre on a big caterpillar is currently costing between $90-150,000 and you need 6 on a truck.

Apparently underinflation also burns up to 15% of tyre life - it's something they *really* pay close attention to.

Re: Torrent is as Torrent Does...

Yep, it'll certainly be interesting in Australasia, where the vast majority of connections are still data capped. Usually with $2/GB for bandwidth beyond that.

Microsoft really doesn't understand that not everywhere is permanently online yet.

Still, the p2p distribution could be good for small businesses, that tend to have half a dozen machines in a workgroup. Only one would need to physically download each update.

Turbo Tournament

Turbo Tournament was my go to drug, with the extra two ports built into the cart in case you didn't have a 4 way play adapter. Utter carnage in front of the TV.

My favourite tracks were the initial desk with the power drills blocking the track occasionally, and the awesome dragsters three laps around a toilet seat.

Plus you forgot to mention the best part of Head to Head racing ... the carefully timed nudge of the opposition to send them flying into a wall and rebounding backwards off the screen!

Re: But will it work in real life?

Of course it will work - because there is no physical difference between a Greek Euro and a German Euro. There are problems with the exchange actually getting the Greek funds - with the limits to bank withdrawals the traditional suitcase full of cash has fallen out of favour - but the benefit of Bitcoin is that the Greek government isn't blocking trade in it yet, though it has implemented controls on exchange between Euro and foreign currencies within Greece.

As another commentator mentioned, the larger problem is having a foreign account to deposit the funds into, but that's what the Greek Diaspora is for.

There is probably a good income to be made in the short term by acting as a bitcoin broker for all those independently wealthy contractors that want to move their funds out of Greece - especially since you could turn it from a Greek Euro to a bitcoin and back into a German Euro via a cousin living in Bonn and it will only cost you commission...

Rockets for the win!

Yep, they're the ski equipped LC130s, usually operating out of McMurdo to the outlying stations.

They use the rocket packs when taking off from unprepared runways - usually icefields in the middle of nowhere to minimise crevasse risk.

If you're lucky when you fly south and the McMurdo ice runway is solid, it's a 5hr flight on a C17. If you're unlucky, its an 8hr flight on a C130, If you're really unlucky and the runway has softened, its a 10hr flight on the ski equipped ones to Williams Field.

All three flight options have a roughly 40% chance of having to abort and turn around if the weather is too bad to land by the time you get there. A friend did two 20hr loops in a row before finally landing back in 2005. He was utterly wrecked for two days after.

Re: Hubris.

I'm not sure whether to be impressed or depressed that Amanfrommars has a blog.

Mind you, it probably drags the average clarity and comprehensibility of the blogosphere up by a fractional percentage.

Re: Removing the KB is not the enough?

Don't need to remove the KB - just kill the GWX process, then rename the GWX folder in C:\Windows\system32 out of the way, which stops it running again.

We have a lot of small businesses that we support that have a handful of pcs in a workgroup and this nicely gets rid of the icon and halts the process.