Posts by Nick Kew

Re: Watch out for geological samples

There was a story floating around in the 1970s about a consignment of luminous watches that was due to be disposed of at Windscale/Sellafield, before someone pointed out that the radiation levels were higher than they could legally handle. They had to be sent to Aldermaston instead.

Around that time my schoolboy self inherited a luminous watch from my grandfather. On dark nights, it could be the brightest thing around, and occasionally served as a torch on the country lanes where for a mad year or two I used to jog.

Re: This is really very easy

Have you read the actual Amazon figures? I haven't: I've only read the story here.

El Reg clearly call the number a profit. The one use of the words "net income" is very loose, and I wouldn't read anything into it unless I had some external reason to suppose it was not in fact a profit as reported.

As for investing sufficient to avoid tax, I've done that myself for quite a few years. Not on Amazon's scale of course, but I've had some big tax rebates (the biggest in five figures UK£) and my tax-free dividend income roughly speaking pays the rent.

Re: turtle-fodder

That's a slander! Why on Earthin Space would Great A'tuin home in on a dunghill?

Re: We found an easy solution...

Mastiffs are far too friendly, even when very hungry.

But then, perhaps that's just what I see. I interact with real animals, not virtual ones, when out and about.

Re: The private sector ? Act with fairness ? Have you heard of Facebook ?

Seems to me that what is at issue here is that the liberal elite are getting all huffed up that somebody other than their political organisations might be able to influence.

Agreed, this is democratisation they're worrying about. Echoes of the Establishment reaction to Gutenberg, and many other historic events.

But I'm not convinced by your describing the likes of Rupert Murdoch as a "Liberal" elite!

Re: Iomega

Guess I was fortunate my iomega drive died before it had acquired anything more than a bit of test data.

What a total waste of money. Or in this context, what a rip-off.

Re: Looking at the source code is nice and all

Bugs can lurk.

But would you try to slip something deliberate in to an open codebase where every commit goes out immediately to a bunch of active developers, as well as of course being on public display to security researchers and AI tools? That's an altogether different proposition!

Compare the amount of (hostile) scrutiny Huawei is getting to any of its rivals, and tell us which is the safer bet?

With (say) Cisco, you have all the same risks as Huawei, plus the additional risk that someone is smuggling in a backdoor (NSA made them an offer they can't refuse) invisible to anyone outside a small team within the company. That makes the hurdles to finding it thousands of times higher: you need a Snowden instead.

Re: So Lynch lied

Evidence previously reported on El Reg tells us at least two existing-or-former HP directors were among those to say the deal was mad and vastly overpriced.

As did others, like Oracle.

I think I said at the time, this looks like an ill-judged MeToo from HP, trying to play with IBM and Oracle (who had recently acquired hardware capability in the form of Sun) in high-end enterprise stuff.

Turtles all the way down

Who decides what is 'terrorist' ...

Well, if they view the material to make that decision, then they won't want to incriminate themselves. So they'll have to make it in complete ignorance.

Unless we outsource it outside plod's jurisdiction? Have Kim Jong Trump's minions decide?

Re: Kasperskaya and ruexit

Indeed, but being cut off from (one imagines) a big part of the team would surely hurt. They'd no doubt make ruexit provisions - probably without even the kind of fiasco we've seen with non-ferry-companies or lorry parks - but that might not be how a sufficiently-bitter divorcee thinks about it.

Other Russian-centred projects - like nginx - are of course heavily reliant on connectivity, as much as Russian users of worldwide stuff.

By assaulting a sales office when support is bad, you are punishing the wrong people.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

You're also putting pressure on the company, by what may be the only means available to you. Especially when a company has gone to great lengths to make it impossible to contact support.

Prisons are full, don't want more inmates.

You have to do something really bad, like say the wrong thing to a snowflake[1], to get put away.

[1] Of any age. I don't believe snowflake is a generational thing, except insofar as some in our universities nurture it.

Re: What about IMAP?

Imap accesses individual accounts. So

(a) you need credentials to access an account.

(b) you're accessing something personally identifiable and private.

Well and truly out of any kind of grey area of using a corpus for, say, linguistic research.

Re: utterly evil corporation MS was 20 years ago

You may have a point. But noone forces you to use windoze 10: indeed, I haven't used any windoze since about 2000.

What I meant with Utterly Evil was their actions that blighted the 'net as a whole, not just their own users. As in, breaking MIME, thus releasing the first wave of email viruses (Melissa, Lovebug) on their own users, but also breaking standards-compliant systems and stifling innovation on the 'net.

One casualty of that was my own web-based office software (think google docs for the idea), that relied on MIME standards and broke in MSIE. Mail-by-web where MSIE would do its own random thing with attachments, and miscellaneous documents that MSIE might try to load in $random-app.

Re: But wait!

Article 11: The link 'previews' that are usually generated on the 'aggregators' are set by the publisher in their web page meta tags.

Where does that come from?

I included that feature in the original WebÞing back in 1995. A couple of years later, spam started to become a problem, and it became clear that it was only fit for a closed system whose participants shared a reasonable level of mutual trust. A general-purpose search engine like google would just be handing itself to spammers if it used those.

Re: What did you expect?

It's a fluffy bit of guidance written by some junior with an arts degree

Sounds a lot more promising than anything coming from Chris Grayling.

Re: "eye-wateringly high per-minute rates demanded by telcos back in the early 2000s"

@LDS - It's a long time since I had a phone with an Italian SIM (and telco), but I imagine any significant operator, like Vodafone, there as here will offer a choice of different deals. A contract costing several € per minute to phone abroad is for people who don't anticipate phoning such countries.

Re: About those dark hints of 'classified information'

Making their own units under their own name is one thing: Lenovo has done that for years.

Could it be that Huawei's crime is to ship products that are not merely competitive with, but ahead of, their Western counterparts. Especially Cisco.

Re: RE: Alister

Gah. Must correct myself.

Larry's soundtrack was just a melodic beep, but bearing in mind that limitation, it was probably as great a soundtrack as any game has ever had. And entirely appropriate to the character of the game.

Much more memorable than the green-on-black (as I saw it) graphics.

Re: Is that all?

Arthur, methinks you misunderstand the whole jury system.

It's not about justice or rationality. It's about having enough dupes to have a strong statistical chance of being convinced by whoever is the best lawyer.

Re: Design deficiencies

The basement is where the lowest in the pecking order are put.

Students, for instance.