Posts by tokyo-octopus

Some days I feel down about my job...

... 'cos I work with people who are way cleverer than me (and probably you), then I remember that day I did "rm -rf ~" instead of "rm -rf ~/some-tmp-dir" and was all "meh, well if I hadn't check it into my private git repo it's probably not important". Added bonus: I get to read tickets from clients along the lines "sorry we didn't respond earlier, we were busy dealing with WannaCrypt".

Am I the only one wondering what a Japanese commuter train (looks like the Saikyo line in Tokyo, if anyone's taking notes) has got to do with encryption back doors?

It's 2016, throw your CDs in the container and embrace the cloud.

The real money these days is on spring-sourced bubble-up underpinned by daily jump offs preceding goal-orientated yomps. In larger organisations a jump master is often needed as well as flares being being dropped around the target.

Totally irrelevant to the content, but if anyone's wondering where the junction shown in the stock photo is, it's in the centre of Tokyo right here: https://goo.gl/maps/AbALpKn1cyR2

Meanwhile in the real world, once again I was recently once again thwarted in my attempt to smuggle a bottle part-full of hydrogen (a major contributing factor in the Hindenburg disaster) and oxygen (as implicated in the Apollo 13 incident) in a ratio of roughly 2:1 onto a flying machine (despite being potentially in the possession of a glass bottle full of inflammable potato juice).

The Mrs, who is computer-illiterate, bless her, but is street-savvy enough not to upgrade to Win 10, uses a Hotmail/MSN email account thingy (she Googles "msn" to access the login page, bless her, but before you get the pitchforks out we have procreated and the offspring is mentally and physically A-grade material), and today she got an email from my father mentioning a Dr's appointment next week (suspected case of acute hypochondria), anyway the Microsoft system in its infinite wisdom decided to suggest this as a potential calendar entry for *her* and she was all "WTF is this stupid Microsoft cr*p"?

Posting from a 2011 MacBook Pro which is holding up fine, apart from the "retina" screens on newer models I haven't seen anything which would encourage me to upgrade (and for me "retina" is nice-to-havem, not must-have).

Touch bar - pointless gimmick, I'm one of life's ESC users, moreover yet another set of ports incompatible with anything I have, meaning lots of dongles... no thanks. Yes I do use the SD card slot a lot. Next laptop will run Linux, fortunately I'm not particularly invested in Apple stuff

Energy efficiency?

A serious question - has anyone done any calculations into the likely energy efficiency of these drones vs. e.g. White Van Man? I assume for now they're powered by the excitable energy generated by disruptive venture speculatists, but presumably at some point they'll need to be powered by real electricity.

Parents: voluntarily upgraded to OS X around the time of the Windows 8 debacle (they were on ancient XP and Vista laptops), funnily enough the amount of "support" calls has fallen off to pretty much zilch. Father-in-law clicked "yes" by accident, I ended up downgrading it for him (only one user file went AWOL), given his usage profile I think the next upgrade will be to one of the end-user-orientated Linux distros.

I once had to fly to India to reinstall Linux on a subsidiary's server which I'd remotely diagnosed as being well and truly rooted. We tried to get someone local to do the reinstall but evidently the local DVD pirates hadn't got beyond RedHat 4 (or something equally antiquated). For various reasons I ended up spending almost two weeks in Ahmedabad, which is not only vegetarian but dry.

Microsoft watching you viewing your photos?

> 44.5 billion minutes spent using Microsoft's Edge browser (formerly known as Spartan),

> 82 billion photos viewed on the new OS,

> and 2.5 billion questions asked of its Cortana digital assistant.

And how, I wonder, do they get those stats? Apart from the Cortana ones, which presumably require a working connection to a MS server.

So the uncaptioned main image wasting space and bandwidth... is it the probe? An artist's impression of the probe? A random stock photo of a space probe?

Serves them right for serving autoplaying music video ads

On El-Reg, earlier this morning. Viewing from Japan. Very annoying.

was installing these at an adult education college when I was about 17, so in 1990 or 1991. They were surplus to requirments at my own school, where they had been used for introductory computing and wordprocessing classes (there were some not-quite-100% PC XT clones, maybe also from RM, for programming on, and when I say "programming" I mean "bootleg copies of Tetris"). Anyway it was a network setup, with - I presume - a 480Z acting as the server and 380Zs as clients. By that time they were thoroughly antiquated and I remember not being too impressed by them, but it was something like 50 quid for an afternoon's work so mustn't grumble.