* Posts by Alistair

3019 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007

China Mobile, you can kiss good Pai to America: FCC to ban 'spy risk' telco from US

Alistair
Windows

Re: Botnets, spies, and spammers

bob:

If you think the Chinese Government is Communist, I'll bet you believe the US is a democracy.

Open-source enterprise software slinger Red Hat bravely reveals that IT bosses love open-source enterprise software

Alistair
Windows

Re: Security benefit and risk

@Giovani:

The old fart may be retired, but his cat wears a fedora.

Brit Watchkeeper drone fell in the sea because blocked sensor made algorithms flip out

Alistair
Windows

Re: What a good thing ...

@martinU

Well the similarity being foul weather and (a/couple) frozen pitot tube/s. After that its all boeing boeing boeing down to the water.

Either Facebook is building yet another massive bit barn in Iowa, and doesn't want you to know about it....

Alistair

It used to be "I'm from the government, I'm here to help". Now its "We're from the Fortune 500, how can you help us help you?"

These things suck in a huge way. It's a drain on the local infrastructure budget to build one of these operations, and the fortune 500 are basically saying - "if you want the employment, you need to make the future employees pay for their jobs". Because you know darned well that those 'tax breaks' get applied as upward adjustments on the rest of the local taxpayers.

Silk Road 2 + Dread Pirate Roberts 2 + 1 Liverpudlian = over 5 years in prison

Alistair
Windows

When's the extradition hearing scheduled for?

Actually, with that photo, you'd expect a Harry Potter article.

Now I'm stuck between someone weasling out of a life sentence, and selling his uncles overstock online and well its friday and time for a nice dark porter to go with the roast that's on the BBQ.

Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch

Alistair

Re: Synchronised?

@STOP

Perhaps the co-ordination of the landings is coded in ... forth?

Raise a Stein for OpenStack: Latest release brings faster containers, cloud resource management

Alistair
Windows

Re: That's not a "Stein"!

technically, a stein is a drink container, not a drink.

They did it! US House reps pulled their finger out, voted to restore net neutrality in America!

Alistair
Windows

Re: Not completely pointless.

@jake:

apparently in Colorado too. But that's far more normal than lifetime republicans crossing the floor.

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

Alistair
Windows

Re: Unexpected minion in arrivals area...

if you apologise to the useless machine you are Canadian

If the machines are behaving in such a way, I'm inclined to "Sorry you were programmed by such an incompetent asswipe"

However, all this ranting about self checkouts and automated passport scanners, is irrelevant to me. I'm the SA that (literally) has had not one but two different managers claim that the mechanical systems in our control must be utterly terrified of me, as they would magically spring to life and recover from whatever error/bug/hiccup they were experiencing as soon as I walked in the room, logged on to the console or other such approach.

Two Soyuz launches, Starhopper hops, sats play chicken with Indian weapons test fallout

Alistair
Windows

Re: Historical situation ...

@AndyTheHat;

If there's a trump on the moon, is that not sufficient for orbital insertion?

Centrica: Server fault on Wednesday caused Hive to crash on the Tuesday. Yes, yes, that's what we said

Alistair
Windows

We called Centrica to gain some clarity on the situation

You will have to check your mail from a week ago for the reply.

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

Alistair
Windows

Re: Bristol has a 5G testbed

It *must* be close to COB friday, I read that last line as 'including vodka'......

Trend Micro antivirus fails to stop measles carrier rubbing against firm's Ottawa offices

Alistair
Windows

apparently there were two of them

About a week ago someone came back from somewhere with measles here in the Toronto area and wandered through a shopping mall before they went to the doctors. Made the news....

International Bullying Machine? Big Blue seeks exposure of corporate canary

Alistair
Windows

Re: Hell's looking icy today

@Nick Kew:

/sadface Citizens are United don'cha know.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

Alistair

"This makes no sense. Someone will eventually get angry enough to involve ACLU and it will most likely go all the way to the Supreme Court, where, God willing, it will get CBP smacked down, hard. They will be told their "rights" to search within 100 miles of the border do not apply to citizens, and that they must have reasonable suspicion and articulate that suspicion to the person being searched the local courts, in order to obtain the same thing all other enforcement agencies require, a legal and valid search warrant."

FTFY

Phew... Oi, was that you, Curiosity? Euro Mars sat inhaled mega methane blast, boffins baffled

Alistair
Windows

Re: Am I the only one ..

Nope. Not at all.

Personally, I'm thinking that if we ever *do* get below 4M down I'm guessing there's a combination of permafrost like layer and the stew that collects on the layer of sand underneath the topsoil in my back yard every spring after the thaw. It emits a rather distinct odour that tells me "Spring is here, just be ready for more snow anyway"

(and, yes, actually, I am working on reviving that layer. I've a friend who was shocked when she found that the brand new development she lived in had only 6" of topsoil, and that the developer had replaced the next 5 feet down with sand)

BOFH: Tick tick BOOM. It's B-day! No we're not eating Brussels flouts...

Alistair
Windows

Re: 00-LA-LA What a Swell Idea to Behold and Ponder on Tempting with Engagement ......

aMfM:

Of course, it does somewhat depend on *what type* of cat you populate the houses with. Pretty Kittens and Cute Cats with caffe latte seem to sell well just about anywhere.

Lions and Tigers and Meercats, not so much.

Return of the Glassholes? Relax: Huawei's 'smart specs' aren't Google Glass 2.0

Alistair
Windows

My reality is twisted enough

What with a full time job, three kids, a wife, a dog, three cats and a bird, full time hobbies and the drama lamas that live in my neighbourhood. I need no augmentation of my reality.

So, Korean Kool Kriminal glasses with headphones and a notification sync. Nope, not for me thanks. (and I wear eyegoggles for reading after 30+ years of staring at tiny fonts on my screen anyway)

Kepler may be dead but its data keeps on giving, thanks to AI: Two alien worlds found in archives

Alistair
Windows

Re: Hi Vladimir. The Board is Yours for Now to Lead with LOVE*

@aMfM:

Yes, but is that board a carpenters dream or something just a bit wider, longer and better polished. It seems to me that the *chair* is the subject that needs more coverage.

And yes, they could be in formation process as much as destruction process. You know darned well it sells better if they are disintegrating.

If Roscosmos were to get a bit more funding, its possible they could step out from simply being the 'bus company', but we all know that the oligarchy is far more about putting cash in their own pockets before doing things that make sense to the rest of the country.

DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too

Alistair

Re: DXC layoff strategy

@AC

"I'd run, I really would. But working for DXC has trapped me by destroying my mental health "

Do not stay. There are more than a few of us who have experienced the mental trap of depression (and trust me, that is what it is) as a result of horrible environments. Find the time to talk to a doctor and get some assistance to put yourself back on track. Then get out. I know of someone who went from another global 'puppy mill' it provisioner to flipping bugers for 5 months to clear her head. Then got back on the bus and is now doing spot contract work all over the place and having a ball. Get out. Get out as soon as you possibly can. Once you're out and find yourself healing, then you won't need the assistance and can walk that down. DO IT.

Pre-checked cookie boxes don't count as valid consent, says adviser to top EU court

Alistair

@0laf:

Advertising is Big Business on the Interwebs. Free Market Rules are required for Big Business. Laws are just Suggestions to Big Business. You expected *anything* else when there is 50 to 70 billion dollars a year at stake?

Aussie engineer accuses 'serial farter' supervisor of bullying, seeks $1.8m redress

Alistair
Windows

Cereal Farts

I think someone involved in this case is full of gas.

Too much sugar and not enough fibre there. Although, depending on the fibre involved, that could be reversed.

One of my earlier colleagues was branded as a terrible cube mate due to his excessive gas. Horrible things were said about him by several members of the team. That was until he had to take several weeks off after having a large stretch of his colon removed due to illietis.

Wait... I don't think I've *ever* heard of someone bullying a co-worker by 'farting in their general direction'. Are Aussies really really weird that way or is this something someone .... burped out their ass?

Builds aplenty, taking calls from the pub with Teams, and Edgy leaks: It's the week at Microsoft

Alistair

Re: But still no cake.

@Steve K

<HAL> I'm sorry Cortana, The cake is in the pod bay</HAL>

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Alistair
Windows

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

I'm sure there are those here who have played tape reel hockey during the quiet moments....

NexDock 2: Electric Boogaloo. Crowdfunded laptop shell sequel touts less plastic, more pixels

Alistair
Windows

Re: Mouse?

Its people like you I end up yelling at when one of our trackballs departs this pale blue sphere.

TV piracy ring walks the plank after Euro cops launch 14 raids and shutter 11 data centres

Alistair
Windows

Re: the criminal empire earned at least €8m

@AC 'the criminal empire earned at least €8m '

Well, of course, don'tcha know, the crims were so successful because..... They were CHEAPER.

Our amazing industry-leading AI was too dumb to detect the New Zealand massacre live vid, Facebook shrugs

Alistair
Windows

Are we all missing something here?

Is there something horribly wrong with society as a whole?

Or are there 1.5 Million truly f0cked up humans out there who just plain don't understand how f0cked up they are?

It staggers my imagination NOT that FB was unable to stem the tide, but that we have that many people who think that posting that video on FaceBook of all places MAKES SENSE!!!

/mutters ger orf me lawn and considers quitting the human race.

O2 brings forth a Friday fail for some unlucky UK customers

Alistair
Windows

Wailing on Twitter

"judging by the quantity of wailing on Twitter"

There was a change? I thought that was all that was on twitter these days.

Our Skyborg (actual US govt program) will be just like IBM Watson, beams Air Force bod

Alistair
Windows

I could start on a rant here about handing military devices supposed AI capabilities and then letting them loose. But by the middle of the rant aMfM would show up and insist that I was trying to steal his copyrighted material.

'It's full of beer!' Miracle fridge reveals itself to pals tuckered out from cleaning flooded cabin

Alistair
Windows

@excellentsword:

I'll bet you had to edit that comment a couple of times after that cider ......

Cloudera execs grab the mic at ex-Hortonworks gig, dish details on new data platform

Alistair
Windows

Re: Yawn...

Dont blame you for the anon.

40G? from my experience this was heading (at 27PB) into 'minimum viable' territory. I can imagine the 150->400PB folks are already hooking in 100G *pairs* to the data nodes. And then you start staring IOPS in the eye seriously.

Carolina coward fesses up: I was a tech support scambag, and I made millions out of defrauding the elderly

Alistair
Windows

Some days.

My mother (now in her mid 80's) was the one that bought me minix when I was a teen. She built the TI-99/4 kit.

Has run DOS, Win3.x, Windows 98 and on. She's still working at her profession (Medical Dicta Transcription) part time, runs linux, and has 2 vms on there, one her work windows env, the other her personsal win7 instance. She recently had to call out the tech support fellow for her employer as being an idiot (the whole company is, but he's firmly convinced that her ISP is blocking a specific port *INSIDE* a vpn tunnel). She gets these calls sometimes. I've set her up with a separate gentoo instance in a vm for those guys to play with. (there's a nifty KDE theme that looks almost precisely like XP). Her record so far was 93 minutes. Its fun watching that recording. He could not for the life of himself figure out why regedit kept popping bash: regedit: command not found at the c:\ prompt.

Sorry, Linux. We know you want to be popular, but cyber-crooks are all about Microsoft for now

Alistair
Windows

"just go rent space on their cloud like they want"

Windows next iteration will be MS365. Your ipx boot will point at a URI and will require that your hardware be registered with MS, and will only cost you $320/year. MS everything, everywhere. Cloud storage, cloud browser history, cloud based phone book and email contacts list. And of course, a sync client for your phone - with it's always on GPS of course. Oh. Say, whats that noise at my front door?

Alistair
Windows

Re: BBC

@Archtech:

BBC => Big Bold and Compromised?

NASA: We need commercial rockets! SLS: Oh no you don't!

Alistair
Windows

Re: all a waste of money

@spartacus:

You're talking to an echo chamber resident at a guess. Shortly that echo chamber will start talking about the billions of dollars SpaceX has cost the US citizens, and why Boeing is cheaper and needs more funding. I've yet to comprehend just *how* both logic and reasoning have fallen so far out of reach of such a *large* proportion of the population.

Yelp-for-MAGAs app maker is warned there are holes in its code. Does it A. Just fix the problem, or B. Threaten to call the FBI, too?

Alistair
Windows

Re: Thank you

Considering they are solely there to make a smartphone app to show red hat wearing people where to find watering-holes where red hats are welcome, this goes without saying.

Some of us red hat wearing folks are neither American nor particularly interested in overpriced chinese baseball caps attributed to the current PotUS (Pumpkin?). Far more interested in getting our opensource out and avoiding the blues. *cough*

Tim Apple. Larry Oracle. Ginni Layoffs: It works so why the heck not?

Alistair
Windows

Re: Do the corporate Boards and CEOS want to...

@Charlie:

either you forgot the /sarc tag or you're huddled in the back room of the white house.

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

Alistair
Windows

As much as I'm quite an ELP fan and of love FFtCM, I think there are huge swaths of Tocatta that would serve far better.

Insane homeowners association tries to fine resident for dick-shaped outline car left in snow

Alistair
Windows

Re: Tom Lehrer says it best

Interestingly enough a LOT of Lehrer's lyric's are *still* relevant today.

And equally eloquent today.

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

Alistair
Windows

Re: CPU... uh... pressure...?

so ... runqueue?

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Alistair
Windows

Exotic orbital inclination

....

Planet 9, missing from survey.

I'm hoping we find this object, as it will make some theoretical atronomy concepts much more valid. I also wonder if the concept of mythology can't be used to find hints. While the first poster is likely an alias for our resident scientific dissenter with his own utterly unscientific website, IF there is a 9th planet of superearth size, in a seriously exotic orbit, could it not explain some mythological weirdness we have in our various verbal histories?

Blue Monday: Efforts to inspire teamwork with swears back-fires for n00b team manager

Alistair
Windows

Re: This sort of thing can seem amusing but can really bite you

I have a script out there in my past. It was still active when I left. There is an edge case that should never happen. I say *should*.

The error message is "The database has shit the bed royally this time."

I was young. Foolish. And somewhat pissed at the DB vendor that week.

BOFH: Bye desktop, bye desk. Hello tablet and a beanbag on the floor

Alistair
Pint

Irony.

Considering that BOFH is such a pragmatist is the trim ads on the page for 'Becoming a pragmatic Security Leader'.

Yay BOFH Friday!

Yay EOsprint Friday!

Damn. Bills friday.

Have a beer and a great weekend everyone.

Black-hat sextortionists required: Competitive salary and dental plan

Alistair
Windows

@chrisgray

At a guess what you got was googlexlate from english to other language and reads along the lines of :

Chopped lamb mail found!

funding bunnies run back bitcoin sender target to:

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Alistair
Windows

Re: Did a spell at Lockheed

Dammit guys, stop spiking the koolaide with LSD.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

Alistair
Windows

Bluewave messaging

For about two years in my earlier days I had a phone number that could bridge between two area codes. I ran BW transfers between 6 BBS'es on a three day cycle. (There were frequently fairly large transfers).

Oddly, rather a large portion of my associates these days are the ex sysops (and one still currently active) of those BBSes. Something about geeks sticking together.....

---> interestingly enough it was the BBS crew that pulled together my career, my wife, and my current home. All are tied together...

Alistair
Windows

Re: Food Fight

I've witnessed more than a few legendary friendship battles in LORD. And most of them still manage to this day to have civil conversations.

Alistair
Windows

Re: Not dead yet

@BillDeHaan:

Ahhhh -- I remember the UseNet racks. And no, RSS didn't manage that. Rogers had an agreement with Ryerson, allowing their platforms and connections, providing power and connectivity, allowing Rogers Cx's access. It was a roaring mess of cabling, but it worked.

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

Alistair
Windows

I could just shrug.

But then, my names not Galt.

Publicly traded corporations do NOT by definition serve their customers. Their customers are wallets. Such corporations must serve their stockholders. And in cases like the fortune 1000 most of those stockholders are either other corporations or they are banks or they are investment firms. These entities are interested only in cash coming into their pockets, so they can pay *their* shareholders. Which are mostly corporate entities.... Taxes, they just get in the way. Thus spending a small crapton of money to own the politicians that write the tax laws to make the corporations more money is a good ROI.

White House and FCC announce big, broken solutions to America's pitiful broadband

Alistair
Windows

Apparetly we are doing something a bit better up here.

I am in suburbia in Canuckistan.

I can sign up with any one of 9 DSL providers (I'm on DSL with an off brand provider) - I have a $4.80 surcharge on my DSL bill for LLU.

I *could* sign up with any one of 5 Cable internet providers. 3 of those insist you have to buy cable and would like to sell you VOIP home phone too. With these there is a one time transfer fee to change the owner of the cable loop. (This does *not* apply universally, it seems to be local to this area)

I'm getting 25MB/11MB *officially* but I'm quite often seeing far better numbers than that. I am however getting pissed with the modem, after the last firmware update it *appears* to be capping individual xfers at 4MB. This is NOT a puma6, but is a BSD based modem. Eventually I'll have the spare system to set it up in passthrough mode. (PS total bill, unlimited volume 25/11 *with* surcharge CA$69.50/mo)