Posts by arctic_haze

A great idea

That's where I'll wait all night for the Windows 10 Creators Update!

Oh, the 2038 Unix end-of-time problem

Is it already time to put "The end is nigh" signs on the lawn?

After the Brexit

If data stops flowing, I will miss the Reg.

Frivolous?

Every company started by someone named McDonald and named after the owner could have a similar pass at suing the ubiquitous fast food company for trademark infringement. However, a quick Google search showed me that most of the time it was the global company which (successfully) sued local companies over name similarity.

As Elop would say...

Now we know what it means to have a burning platform.

An artifact from the peak of our civilisation

The plane was built when men still walked on the Moon!

A summary for policymakers

Move along, nothing to see here.

That was a big leak!

Until it happened, one had a clue that IT techs from India awere part of the Game of Thrones storyline.

The guy should fell lucky he is still alive

This really reads like some Darwin Prize stuff.

Let's buy some MSFT stock

I was thinking about how much Microsoft profits depend on people choosing to pay money for MS Office instead of using free alternatives. People have to notice sooner or later that MS Office offers nothing except for lock-in and even that is eroded by how well other software opens Microsoft proprietary file formats. People can make reasonable choices, after all. They're not stupid.

And then I remembered Brexit and Trump...

IT security and politics

In Russia everything is political so it would be an aberration if a big IT security company was not involved in politics.

It is a sad thing that the democracies are also sliding into this kind of pit...

It seems almost inevitable

Creating stars in pairs solves the problem of where to take the needed angular momentum from!

She has to sue

The hotel company showed so much bad will that the compensation needs to be much bigger than allowed by the suit imagination. Angry jury is what the corporations needs to face.

A very narrow-minded bureaucratic point of view

Only an American could come with a 1/4 page slot for listing travel of the previous 15 years. As scientist and a citizen of a UE country traveling often both on business an privately I do not think I would fit the info in four pages (if there was a way to reconstruct it all). And I am lucky to live 200 km from the border of the next EU country. I know people who live 1 km from one (they would need 40 or more pages to list just the shopping trips across the border).

And what they mean by the source of funding? Would naming my employer be enough if 75% of the trip was funded by a EU scientific grant and 25% by a national one? And what if I get travel money from the inviting party? Do I need to know the source of their money they used to fund my trip?

Also the definition of the "social media" [any websites or applications you have used to create or share content (photos, videos, status updates, etc.)] makes me wonder what should I list. Certainly ResearchGate and Academia but should I also provide the publishers of scientific journals I published in within the last 5 years (like Elsevier or European Geophysical Union)? Just going to a EGU conference makes me share the abstract on their website. And what about my University website where I share my photo, CV and published papers - are those status updates?

It has obviously been done by someone who traveled abroad once or twice in his lifetime (as most Americans do because their country is a continent) and his idea of the websites you publish things on is Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The knights who say Ni

Such knights are sometimes needed. If the companies gave all our data to anyone who wants to have them, privacy would be... a dead parrot.

I'm relieved to hear that

What happens in the black hole stays in the black hole.

Out of the frying-pan into the fire

I have no idea how this idiom would sound in Russian. However I know that with Windows 10 all may data go to Redmont (and presumably to Washington), while adding Kaspersky Labs creates the possibility that the renamed KGB will also laugh reading the jokes I type.

Something fishy about this bug

I'm not a fan of Windows but somehow I cannot believe this is not fake news. What is the CVE number of this bug? It is nowhere to find! What is the Bugzilla bug number of the relevant Firefox bug? I've checked: there is none. Not even a closed INVALID bug.

So why should I believe it is a real bug?

Dark matter would not be dark if the coupling between whatever it is and electromagnetism were not extremely weak.

European Arrest Warrant?

Does it meant that the hard Brexit will solve his British problems within less than 2 years?

A question about "experts"

If one needs a quote saying "Apple is doomed" or "iOS is doomed", she phones Rob Enderle. That's simple.

But whom one should ask for a good "Android is doomed" quote?

Fail ship has arrived

It is a long time since The Register had an article as misguided as this one.

It's a trap!

At least that is what Hari Pulapka's surname means in Polish.

Take home message

We'll always have LibreOffice.

The photo

Isn't it Jenna Coleman?

A colour photo, please

or it did not happen!

A real hacker

I talked once to a guy on a J1 visa. He was a foreign security expert. He said his job description on the visa was actually HACKER. Because someone disbelieved him, he brought the actual paperwork. Yes, he has been invited officially to the US to do a hacker job. And from what I know, he was getting paid quite well.