Posts by cream wobbly

Re: Pity...

We don't know where we are going.

Pub? Hell? Slightly mad? Take your pick.

Re: Assange is a political prisoner, in the United Kingdom, end of

Queue

It's "cue". A queue is a line of people. A cue is a prompt. When you queue things up in a process, you only cue up the one thing at the front of the queue.

But you have "independent thought" so you probably don't call it "English". Carry on.

Re: The right attitude

"A few beers after work never hurts either."

Unless you attempt to drive home and crash into a horse. That would hurt.

Re: Why use a revision control system?

I work with people like you, and from bitter experience, I hate you.

Yes. (From bitter experience) I'm completely the opposite to our commending friend. I'd go so far as to say that documentation, communication, is vastly more important than the config change itself. If you can't reverse it or replicate it, it's a guess, it's a hack, it's broken and there's the door.

Re: 1970s?

I shall always admire the Swiss and Walloons for their septante and huitante. It's funny to tease French nationals with and watch them pretend they can't understand, bunch of soixante-dix têtes. They're obvious words, and they make daily life so much simpler.

Re: I know it's unlikely

Yeah, I'm wavering between her being incompetent, and her being bullied.

Then there's the other old saying, "why not both?" Maybe she's incompetent and someone took it upon themselves to "constructively dismiss" her. With that model applied to the back-and-forth above, she might not be able to effectively support her accusation, but have sufficient knowledge to make the accusation in the first place.

The typical "jokey" English work environment? Modern equivalent of striped paint, long stand, etc.? Honestly wouldn't be surprised. Bullies are rife.

Re: Spoilers in Tech Docs!

"it's very difficult to write technical documentation that essentially boils down to a sequence of steps in a manner that does not sound robotic"

You're using a GUI. Get used to robotic-sounding instructions. If you don't like them, explain to the manufacturer that you prefer proper grown-up scripts because you don't like your instructions to sound robotic.

"There's still a lot that Adobe Flash can do which HTML 5 can't"

Such as entirely hand over your computing resources to Russian-occupied Ukraine, North Korea, and China? Sure. That's what they're trying to fix. Do keep up.

Re: Oh dear

Huh. Interesting. When it's Blighty, or the Yanks, or them upsidedown cobbers, when a list of "possible suspects" for cyberwarfare attacks are characterized as "naughty colonialist types" and it's the attackers' faults. When it's Pakistan with a massive list of suspects, it's their own fault?

Says more about you than it does them, mate.

Re: SecureBoot Bites Again

Yeah, I never could get the ZX81 ROM to work on my Commodore 64.

If you don't want a Mac, don't buy a Mac. You're very welcome.

Re: Fake news or not...

...which since these are relatively low-skilled, relatively low-paid contractor positions, explains that kind of voter [Steven, Brian, and Christopher] in a nutshell.

If you're a low-paid contractor, you're either desperate or you're in the way.

Re: Bring back the old Linus

lol - nothing wrong?

Abusive and disrespectful behavior is a clear sign of weakness, not strength. Authoritarianism doesn't belong outside Rome (the empire, or the church -- your choice). It does not work in business, and certainly doesn't belong in any place of education.

Re: "lucky few who have managed to avoid hearing about the boiling cesspit ....

"political liberalism"

You mean respectful behaviour. People (I use the word lightly) like Bannon aren't reacting to "political liberalism"; they're reacting to being told to be respectful, if they want to participate in society. Society is a big mix of differences, not just in what people think and prefer, but who they essentially are, as people. It's not "political liberalism" to say that people who are essentially different from the majority should be extended equal treatment and equal opportunity; and that those who think different(ly) should be leashed when they try to prevent equality, equivalence, and equity.

Re: Beware of rogue programmers...

Belgium

Re: Or the fourth option...

Funnily enough, I use the googly calendar because my family does. They can see events I create.

I can't see events I create. On my own calendar. On the same app I created them in.

Google Maps is fine for the rare occasions I use it.

Gmail is just where the spam arrives.

Chrome plays spam movies, because the control for not autoplaying videos doesn't work. It's generally crap, but so is the web now, so it's the best tool for the job and the backend is already installed by default anyway.

Everything that's broken has been broken for as long as I've been using Android. It basically reduces my phone to... well, a phone. And a camera. A crap, grainy, non-focusing one that doesn't even come with a lens cap so it gets all smudgy! Can you believe it? A camera. Without a lens cap. And people actually buy this crap for it having a camera!

Re: Would have been nice to target the right manufacturers El Reg

perhaps Tesla should have checked what they were buying more carefully.

praps, aye. "disruptive" and all that, see above

Re: Any Reg readers living in Amsterdam right now?

Never have so many known so little about their own country.

I wouldn't say that. It's certainly true that the English are pretty ignorant, and always have been; but Yanks are giving them a run for their ... lack of self awareness. Other nationalities susceptible to similar behaviour include the Iberians, Russians, probably Italians, and very much the Danish. I'll wait for you to make the connection between those nations attitudes to foreigners and their recent history of politics. (Here's a hint: the Germans have climbed down in the last century, so don't feature on the list.)

Re: Not the root problem

Security by obscurity. How well does that work? In war, which is what the Wild, Wild West of the Internet most resembles these days, you must always incorporate "The Enemy" being able to see everything you have and do if you want to win, if not to survive. The same logic applies to every other bit of code and data you are relying on. This is as true about competitors as about hackers/crackers, too.

Sure, just make it easy for them.

Another principle of "war" is knowing who your enemies are. You don't just leave everything open to everyone without having them clear some obstacle.

Re: resentment of Clippy

Clearly that's Soviet Russia Clippy. Клипливо?

Re: Why still a phone line on it??

If fax is "dinosaur" technology, what the math are ballpoint pens? or pencils? Or heck, (electronic versions of) the slates my grandma used to write on at school?

Re: Power hungry, low coverage, and heavier.

Now if only they'd make 3G phones last almost a full working day before they run out of battery. That'd be nice.

Re: What we need

The C64 also benefited from the SID audio synth-on-a-chip. Unlike "chip music" from other 8-bit micros which typically waggled a DAC around to make PWM noise, the C64 was actually playing music on a viable musical instrument via simple digital registers. The most notable technical thing about it is that once you started playing a note, you didn't have to tie up the CPU to keep on playing it; ... like you did on the Speccy. Another reason why Spectrum games tended not to have in-game music but C64 games did.

Another aside: the SID was used in a couple of real synths; although their makers were always desperate for supply.

The "my CPU is better than your CPU" debate is really irrelevant when your CPU is doing everything and mine is just asking other parts of the architecture to do stuff. The same applies to Firewire vs USB.

Re: good lord; is this not a techie site?

"The last time one person could know all science and technology was centuries ago."

Oh go on with you. The article is about something called WireGuard. If you don't know what it is, don't comment about it, or Google it and then comment. The person you're responding to is specifically calling out others on their inability to comprehend bloat, external modules, and precompiled modules; particular the difference between using dkms and not.

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

I quite often advise other sysadmins to reboot the box instead of clicking about trying to "find root cause", much to their horror. In my eyes, a 30 day uptime is a prime contributor to root cause, and because of failure to patch, an increasing security risk. (Or if it's Windows, 7 days.)

You can do your analysis after you've rebooted. But I know they won't.

If you think that's too harsh, have a word with yourself.

Re: @AC ... The cat is pretty well out of the bag already

In the US, there's a concept called the 'Castle Doctrine'

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Uh, since there are no actual real castles in the US, where do you suppose they got the idea?

I'll wait for you to catch up. You get an extra day off next week to think about it, and there's even a helpful clue in the name of the holiday!

Re: Rubbish in, rubbish out...

"My own impression of Dutch is that it is one third English, one third German, and one third that I cannot make out."

All three are common descendants of Proto-Germanic. English is built on the same structure as Dutch, but has a ton of Scandinavian influence in spelling, and a lorry load of Romance vocabulary and idioms added. Dutch has Gothic and Spanish to thank for its whack pronunciation. German grammar was reformed multiple times so it would be taken seriously like Latin.

Re: The biggest problem

If someone else connects it, then you don't have to worry about it being yours.

Re: Data format parsing

Yeah, this is a bugbear of mine, too: credit card numbers, dates, and phone numbers without any delimiters. Just let me enter them, and run my input through your implementation's version of "tr -dc [:digit:]".

CNDVFS it is then!

Beware of the Leopard?

Not really feeling it, are you?

In computing jargon, erasure is as simple as unlinking. The data's still there, but there's no direct path to its retrieval. It's the electronic version of 'in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”'

In legal jargon, erasure has a very definite meaning, closer to the common sense concept of erasure: the data's gone. This type of erasure in computing jargon means scrubbing; whether that's overwriting with zeroes, or "dd </dev/urandom >/that/guy" in a loop fifteen times with an upside-down chicken on your left elbow.

Of course if you scrub something, you should log it...