Posts by hoofie2002

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

"fresher, modern narratives aligned with AI"

There are times when to be honest the elimination of Marketing Consultants, along with the telephone sanitisers, from the surface of the planet would be a positive move.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

An oldie but goodie.

From the days when people used to leave phone messages on postit notes on peoples desks.

1) Pick your victim

2) Leave a post-it message for them to call "Mr C. Lyon" urgently from Company X with a number written down

3) Person sees message, calls number and asks for Mr C.Lyon or Mr Lion

4) Bemused person at the other end of the phone politely [if you are lucky] informs the caller that they have reached the local zoo.

5) Cue much tittering from the assembled minions

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Oz...

Xmas in July is a thing in Australia.

Have an Xmas dinner when the weather is cold and miserable [yes it can be cold and wet in Australia].

It's meant to reflective of a real Xmas rather than the usual Australian Christmas where it's 45 degrees outside.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

I used to work for a legal publishers where we sent out approx 50,00 emails every night to paying subscribers in the early 2000s. To be fair customers paid a huge amount for service subscriptions and since everyone was a high-end lawyer, many were somewhat touchy, argumentative and convinced of their superiority over near mortals.

Every. Single. Morning.: The relevant Manager who was very blue blood and posh but not the sharpest tool in the box complained that some subscribers had not received their email.

Every. Single. Morning.: Me searching through the transmission logs to send him the entry of the outbound mail that had been sent to a specific address.

Every. Single. Morning.: Me explaining to him that email was NOT guaranteed to arrive in someone's inbox due to spam filters etc. etc. etc.

Every. Single. Morning: Repeat the same F***ing process as the day before.

He really was a bellend.

Give Europe some space! 3 companies join forces to reach for the stars

The smell of panic in the European Satellite and Space business is real and palpable. The US companies are pulling further and further ahead. Look at the trainwreck which is Ariane 6; 13 years in the making and it's 2 for 3 so far. Needless to say it's lack of reusability makes it obsolete now and very few commercial customers outside Europe will touch it. There are a handful of non-EU customers slated for launch but I will lay money most of them won't happen.

The answer in the EU, as always, is more bureaucracy and more money. Ariane 6 gets 340 million Euros PER YEAR over it's launch cycle.

IBM's z17 mainframe – now with 7.5x more AI performance

Re: Because you want to do work

It's just the usual morons who are just clueless on anything beyond a desktop.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: Beyond satire, beyond parody

What a stupid comment. If you have huge fleet of devices and applications, moving to Mac or Linux is not an option.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: There were different levels of lockdown

WA and especially Perth was it's own little bubble of normality whilst entry in and out of the state via Aircraft, Train or Car was severely restricted with a 2 week isolation stay as your prize.

It was weird going to work and the shops as normal whilst everywhere else was in full lockdown.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: What was so embarrassing about six?

Sex in Kiwi is what potatoes are delivered in

Birthday message

In about 1994/1995 I worked for a market research company then in Epsom who specialised in reporting on pharmacy medication dispensing.

There was an Oracle DB and some reports that ran off it written in C. When I joined the outfit I had to review some of the code.

The twat who wrote it originally put "Happy Birthday to me" messages on all the report outputs if they were run on the appropriate date. Luckily it had not been triggered yet so I cut it out asap.

Apparently he only got the job because his Mum was a Director and my colleagues despised so if he is reading this - you are a huge twat and sue me please.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: Are they are two separate cages?

Compared to Murchison, Area 51 is downtown Las Vegas. Muchison really is very little in the middle of a lot of f-all and it's a major trip through f-all to get to the beginning of f-all

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Any links ? Sounds like a good use to be honest. Or as a WSPR source but that might be asking a bit much of it

Everybody needs good neighbors – especially ones who sell you solar energy

Re: Racket

Australia is moving to 5 min metering across the country so it tracks spot prices closer.

Also unspoken is the remote command disconnect of solar generation [it runs through a separate contactor on the meter] plus the ability to take you instantly offline completely if you don't pay your bill.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Re: Can't afford to offer it for free...

Student properties are a development goldmine.

In Glasgow, beautiful Victorian buildings which give the city so much of it's streetscape, suddenly go on fire and burn down. You are guaranteed the replacement will be "student accommodation" - some ugly slab-sided collection of rabbit hutches designed to house the full-fee paying overseas students that the Universities now rely on.

The city is being hollowed out from within to the point now that people no longer visit Glasgow City Centre unless they have no other option.

Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

Re: While we shouldn't litter space with junk

It's shown in the oft-repeated image of the earth surrounded by a cloud of space junk. What it does not properly represent is the hundreds of cubic kilometres of empty space around each one.

Microsoft leaves Pakistan but promises customers won't notice the change

The only thing Pakistan has that is of any interest to China is warm water ports on the Gulf and the ability to needle India, Chinas biggest regional worry.

Anyone with a brain in Pakistan is seeking a work visa to the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand etc.

No Money

There is zero money for Microsoft in Pakistan.

Fraud and piracy are endemic.

Corruption is endemic.

You cannot run a data center as the power grid is busted and unreliable.

The Government interferes in everything.

Any Research and Development will immediately be stolen and sold to the Chinese.

Any staff you recruit will leverage your training to get a visa for anywhere else but Pakistan and disappear.

Physical security is terrible; as a US company you have a huge target on your back and your management are targets for extortion, kidnap or even murder.

Australian airline Qantas reveals data theft impacting six million customers

Re: Ahhh, the old third party trick eh?

It's much easier to punt it an outsourcer who will cut their throat for a deal hoping to make it up on project work, variances etc.

Qantas don't have to carry any liabilities or headcount on their books and just pay a fee every month on a 3-5 year contract.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Not surprised

Maintenance costs money and affects the bottom line.

Let's just sweat the assets longer and make it someone else's problem in the future.

Stupid UK Senior Management at it's finest.

Although it doesn't help that incentivization is almost always based around financial results rather than things like reliability

Maintenance

In a nutshell - known issue, flagged for maintenance and nothing done about it.

Years later - boom.

Sums the UK and it's infrastructure up in a nutshell.

Decades of lack of investment coming home to roost.

Microsoft kicks off new fiscal year with more layoffs

Re: Parasite

If you take a job with Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM etc. or any of these mammoth IT organisations you know exactly what you are getting into.

Rend your garments all you like when you get binned but it is not as if you could not see it coming.

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Re: Missing info...

If you are suspended, 99% of the time you are out the door.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: I was a little later...

A long time ago I worked in an office full of ladies most of them older. I once ended up under a desk trying to fix a cable issue for one and said the immortal words "can I do anything else for you while I am down here"? Cue much laughter from the lady in question who whilst a good 20 years older than me was quite attractive and I suspect no stranger to male company. My face was a beetroot in embarrassment.

Now it would be a oneway trip to HR but 30 years ago was a different time. Some of the conversations in that office were not for my sensitive ears.

[The worst was the production floor of a Silicon Fab full of women from the rough end of Greenock and Port Glasgow. As a young Engineering student I was fresh meat to the lions there!]

Re: Baud

Quadrature Encoding and all that jazz. You can't get past the fact that the phone line is good for about 3khz tops in bandwidth on a very good day so you needed all sorts of clever tricks to pack more information into that thin pipe.

Intel reportedly chips away at fab workforce – but hey, maybe there's a tax break coming

No Sympathy

I have zero sympathy for US Chip manufacturers. They were happy to completely gut their Fab capabilities in the US and Europe and move everything to Asia. Now they have been caught out by that they go crying to the US Government for money.

Screw them.

Wanted: IT manager for UK government agency – £60k

I agree about Glasgow etc. - I was there in Jan and it was an absolute slum. I don't recognise the city I was born in and grew up in - empty shops and roads that look like the surface of the moon. At one point driving around at night I could not even make out the road markings with car headlights they were so worn out at a major junction on the M8. Glasgow City Centre has been destroyed by the anti-car sentiment of the Council and is now a city where historic buildings have a sudden tendency to catch fire so student accommodation blocks can be built which is a nice money earner.

Range Rovers must be really cheap to lease in the UK also I've never seen so many despite living in an Australian State which is awash with mining money and disposable income [my office is next to a long term storage lot which is rammed with "offroad" caravans at 50,000 quid a pop; we don't have Pikeys here yet so if you buy a caravan you have a good chance of actually getting to use it rather than providing free accommodation to your local traveller site one night].

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Absolute Shite

When back in Scotland from Australia, my daughter dragged me into a Starbucks in Paisley [we only have one or two in Perth].

Their coffee without a doubt absolutely tasteless muck. As I sit in my office, the tiny takeaway place round the corner in the middle of a suburban lot of Furniture Shops serves coffee that is light years better.

How an absolutely huge business manages to make so much money selling garbage like that is something I will never understand.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

Re: software in a radio ?

Radios have moved to software defined. Every new HF amateur radio is Software Defined now including ones that reach into VHF and UHF.

You only have to build a core architecture once and you can then leverage across a huge range of products. ICOM is a good example of this.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Re: But when you start them...

Wrong - there is a transformer somewhere and until it saturates and sets up the magnetic field it is a short circuit - electronic theory 101

Swedish authorities probe Oracle Cerner health record rollout

Re: A cursed project

Same in Australia - US hospital management systems do not translate well at all elsewhere as Europe, Australia use very different care, funding and management approaches.

Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets

Plenty of Power

The comparison of the transmitter power to a charger is meaningless as we are talking about RF power.

Amateurs trying to operate this satellite will be using directional yagi antennas which focus the beam to an extent and since it's in low earth orbit and in the sky there are no obstructions.

You don't need a lot of power to work it; a 5W handheld with a good yagi can get through.

The pain in the backside is you need to track it across the sky as it will whizz across it in about 10-20 mins depending on the pass

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

Re: RIF ye not...

From a documentary a few years ago, Voyager is run on a shoestring if you ignore the DSN support aspect. All of the original support engineers and team are either long retired or in the ground. 12 full time people at the moment.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

I would suggest the police bimble round some of locations where habitual caravan-life aficionados dwell.

They are known to have an affinity for things, especially those things currently in the possession of someone else at the time.

However I suspect they are busy kicking in the doors of those who type hurty words on Twitter or FB.

The horror that is VHS revived for horror movie release

No idea

Was this written by someone who never owned a VCR ?

PAL was much better than NTSC [never the same colour twice] and I can remember getting videos with full hi-fi FM encoded stereo sound even with dolby pro logic encoding. I had a really good sound system with full surround in 1993 for my video pleasure.

Geico tells El Reg, no, it's not canceling all Cybertruck insurance

Re: Geico thinks that some CT Owners are Renting the Vehicle Out Under the Table

At one point last year I was running and insuring 5 cars:

Wife's new car

Wife's old car

Daughter's car

My MX5

My beater XR5

Now done to 4 thank god

However 8 for one person if they aren't used by family members is a bit nuts unless you are a collector.

Uncle Sam accuses Aussie AI startup boss of financial fakery that duped investors

It sounds like he has buggered off back to Melbourne.

Unfortunately that won't protect him and I suspect the Vic police or Feds will be banging on his door very soon.

If he has another citizenship [his surname is Indian] I would imagine he will be off there asap

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

The thing is - smart metering is not hard. It's been done all over the world and there are multiple technologies available depending on the geography, population density etc.

The logical approach would have been to roll out a common vendor with common technology [the transmission approach either Mesh, 3g etc would be the variable]. You could have hammered the price down this way

No - lets implement different technologies and different vendors across the country creating a mess.

Valves are still used in some high power RF applications as they are cheaper than silicon replacements and are much tolerant of load impedance variations which would instantly fry silicon amplifiers.

Ancient US air traffic control systems won't get a tech refresh before 2030

Seems a common issue with US infrastructure

It seems to be a common issue for many, many years in the US, no matter who is in charge, of under-investment in general infrastructure.

Many of its major bridges are overdue for replacement thanks to last of investment on replacement and repair.

US railways because they are privately owned suffer from track quality that is a joke compared to Europe.

US Airports are old and poorly designed compared especially to Asia and the major hubs in the Middle East - again is this due to the localised operational model where no-one wants to spend money rebuilding?

It always disappoints me that such an advanced and wealthy economy puts up with public infrastructure that is seriously sub-par.

Or is it just that the US voters and taxpayers don't see why they should pay for this - an argument which is pretty well moot in other economies, the idea being that in general voters and taxpayers understand that the Government invests in infrastructure [not always wisely though e.g. HS2]

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Colour and the PET

I used to lust over images of the Microtan especially when it was all-up in the Vero rack case

I would sell a kidney to get my hands on one now but I have found they are as rare hens teeth on Ebay etc

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

It's France - if you piss off or come onto the radar of the French State it's not going to be pleasant.

Liberte, Egalitie and Fraternite go out the window when you upset the elegantly tailored mandarins at the Elysee Palace

The months and days before and after CrowdStrike's fatal Friday

Nailed It

Hammer on Nail interface. We did a security exercise a few days before where we asked some business units what they would do if we got hit and they lost some of their compute resources. Cue blank looks and fidgeting. Not encouraging.

Fujitsu to shutter operations in Republic of Ireland

Not Fair

I appreciate your point but that is unfair.

I work for a mob that has been in the press a fair bit getting lots of flak and pissing off customers because of a COVID and supply chain collapse but also the decision to take on too much work.

It's a large company yet colleagues have been verbally abused and even spat on in public because of it. They had absolutely nothing to do with any of that decision or its implementation so why should they cop the abuse?

Boeing's Starliner finds yet another way to not reach space

Re: What was the fault?

Read the article - they required ALL 3 redundant supplies to be running at a certain point in the countdown. One failed so they aborted.

I presume if they go past a certain point they will continue even if one fails.

Samsung workers treated for exposure to radiation in South Korea

Nasty Places

I worked in a wafer fab in the mid 80s. Some seriously nasty acids and gases that would kill you if you got a whiff of them. And that is before I mention the diffusion furnaces where the hydrogen and oxygen used to grow oxides would sometimes go 'pop' blasting the quartz endcap across the bay at high speed.

Nasty Places

I worked in a wafer fab in the mid 80s - some seriously nasty acids and gases knocking around. And that's before we include the diffusion furnaces where sometimes the hydrogen and oxygen in the quartz tubes would go 'pop' and send the end cap hurtling across the bay at high speed.

Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7

I've had a bit of experience with Smart Streetlights. You put a smart controller into the standard photocell socket on the top of the light unit which then communicates on top of the electricity radio metering network back to base. It allows you to time schedule on/off, scheduled dimming [dimming lights at 3am etc saves money] and tells you how long the lamp has illuminated, its power use [useful for billing and energy management] and if something is wrong. Note this is designed for LED lights.

Now you can do it properly with the big industry players like Itron. It is not cheap but they very, very focussed on security.

Or you can do it cheap with some chinese junk and get owned.

A cheeky intern nearly turned MS-DOS into NSFW-DOS

Re: This is fairly common...

The company I worked for in Perth in the 2000s employed an individual in an IT Support role - I knew him when he worked there.

Said individual had some bother later on with the Feds after finding religion: https://thewest.com.au/news/perth-mans-journey-from-druggie-to-tinnie-terrorist-ng-ya-298722

Starlink clashes with Telecom Italia over frequency data sharing

National Governments have form for screwing around when it comes to Frequencies.

A few years ago Thales tried to muscle their way into the 2m band for drone communication use which is heavily used by Radio Amateurs for VHF Communication, satellites and lots of other uses. The French Government needless to say backed them to the hilt and tried to get the ITU to roll over and give them access to it which would have severely buggered amateur use.

In this case the ITU told them to do one and go away thanks to Amateurs getting themselves organised and fighting back.

I do suspect thought as usual Starlink don't give tuppence for national or regional frequency allocations and are trying their luck.