Posts by goblinski 357 publicly visible posts • joined 30 May 2024
...IT dont seem to know how to fix it, nor care particularly to find a solution...
Possible fix for the log on screen defaulting to a language different from the local one:
- See if you have a US keyboard layout as an alternative layout. Remove it at least temporarily
- Make sure German is currently selected
- Go to Control Panel > Region > Administrative > (You'll need admin creds to do that one) > check the checkboxes at "Welcome screen and system accounts" & "New user accounts" (if you want new user accounts to not inherit US as well
- Restart. See if it works. Re-enable US as a secondary keyboard layout if you need it
The log on screen will usually default to the language which was set when the account was created, not to the language that was chosen after.
I love me an exercise in futility as much as the next guy and I shrug off any news of yet the next revolutionary hydrogen vehicle just like said next guy, but I if I put a looooooooottt of good will into it - I could see the case for a hydrogen infrastructure in a captive fleet environment...
Still... Where are we on clean hydrogen again?
"and" negates the comma, shouldn't be used more than once in a listing and should be before the last subject listed lest it changes the meaning (separates them in two groups)
A) "Tom, Dick, jane and Harry went to the park" - Correct
B) "Tom, Dick, jane, and Harry went to the park" - Incorrect
C) "Tom and Dick and jane and Harry went to the park" - Incorrect
D) "Tom and Dick, jane, and Harry went to the park" - Correct, but changes the meaning.
One of the local Bronx customs I first saw eons ago was how to suggest people to not honk in the middle of the night.
Some guy stopped in the middle of the street at some unholly hour way past midnight, and started honking and calling a friend's name. This was back when mobile phones were not yet widespread, and I guess the driver didn't care much for doorbells. So off he went, literally glued on the horn vuvuzella-style, for minutes. Literally pressing the horn for minutes, occasionally yelling his friend's name.
As this went on, windows started to open and people started yelling, to little result.
Then a window at the top floor opened, and a hand threw down a mineral water plastic bottle. Looked quite small, not a 1.5l, something smaller. I suppose - full, with no cap on.
The thing landed on the roof of the car and splashed out with a sound that probably awoke whoever was left sleeping. Sounded like an explosion.
Zero damage on the roof of the car though. At least it looked like it for the two seconds it took the brave driver to blast away
"...As a rule of thumb, trams tend to have the right of way ..."
As a rule of thumb, hitting cars trying to make a turn and crossing the tracks was the favorite sport of the tram drivers in my neck of the woods.
Beautiful low speed, high momentum hits where the cars would typically get t-boned and then dragged, with full 110% impunity because no matter what the tram had right of way and stopping on the tracks was prohibited in all cases.
Waiting times to buy a new car were in the decades back then, so having your car totaled was an exciting experience. Ah, those were the times...
... through a minefield. In the dark. On pogo sticks...
In all fairness, a pogo stick would be the very best way to cross a minefiled in the dark.
Or a minefield - period, as dark or not shouldn't make a difference in a well laid out minefield :)
Orders of magnitude smaller contact surface, and fewer number of steps per distance covered, on the other hand...
The primary cuts, structural changes, and key leadership shifts impacting CISA include:
1. Mass Personnel & Contract Cuts:
- Red Team Terminations:
DOGE eliminated CISA’s entire core "red team" (the specialized ethical hackers who simulate cyberattacks to find network vulnerabilities) along with their support roles.
A follow-up cut eliminated a second red team doing critical work.
In total, over 100 highly skilled penetration testers and operators had their contracts abruptly ended.
- Probationary Employee Layoffs: In mid-February 2025 (during an event federal workers dubbed the "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre"), DOGE directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to slash probationary staff. This resulted in the firing of roughly 130 probationary CISA workers.
-Election Security & Disinformation Experts: The cuts heavily targeted CISA's election security advisers (the non-partisan liaison experts coordinating security with state and local governments). Concurrently, many staff members assigned to CISA’s foreign influence and disinformation teams were placed on administrative leave.
2. Major Defunding & Partner Dissolutions:
- Termination of the $10M CIS Partnership: CISA cancelled its multi-million dollar cooperative agreement with the Center for Internet Security (CIS). This effectively shut down federal funding for two major cyber-threat info-sharing hubs: the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).
- Disbanding of the Cyber Safety Review Board: The administration disbanded the Cyber Safety Review Board, pausing deep-dive federal post-mortem investigations into major corporate and governmental hacks.
3. Leadership Shakes-up:
The Exit of Jen Easterly: Longtime CISA Director Jen Easterly officially stepped down on January 20, 2025.
Nomination of Sean Plankey: To fill the vacancy, President Trump nominated Sean Plankey to become the new Director of CISA. Plankey is a Coast Guard veteran who previously served as the Navy's Deputy Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Naval Intelligence and worked on cyber policy during the first Trump administration
...Did he also name Twitter's chat AI after her weird talking doll? She claimed it was a coincidence but that may have just been a rebuff...
"grok" is a term from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in strange land way before anyone could have used it for a doll's name (incidentally, the meaning is "...a profound, intuitive, and empathetic understanding that merges the observer with the observed..., which sorta kinda groks with Grok).
As displeasant as Musk might be, not using cult sci-fi references in his naming conventions is not something you can accuse him of.
Not sure what changes were made to the site, but:
- The bookmarks that I had (painstakingly) figured out for On Call and Who, Me, no longer work. To name them:
https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Who%2C Me%3F/
https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
- A search in the website by On Call or Who, Me returns nothing.
- The different On Call and Who, Me articles are now tagged by their relevant fields (Software, Security), which makes them completely diluted in the rest of the content. For example, this one is under Networking.
If this is to stay, please comment on this, and advise on how to find older articles from these two for future reference. Thanks
Not sure what changes were made to the site, but:
- The bookmarks that I had (painstakingly) figured out for On Call and Who, Me, no longer work. To name them:
https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Who%2C Me%3F/
https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
- A search in the website by On Call or Who, Me returns nothing.
- The different On Call and Who, Me articles are now tagged by their relevant fields (Software, Security), which makes them completely diluted in the rest of the content.
If this is to stay, please comment on this, and advise on how to find older articles from these two for future reference. Thanks
...where end-users know all the help desk staff's names, voices, and faces...
This is so comically wrong at so many levels, it's cute. The good 'ole legend of the good ole humanely sized 'uge company that no longer exists because it actually never existed in the first place.
The type of end users that would fall for this also wouldn't know help desk staff's anything if you screen-burned them on their monitors, CNN logo on airport TV style.
...I pulled a laptop that I hadn't used for six months out of a drawer...
...However, I wanted to run tests on this computer, so I needed it to be completely up-to-date
It is rare that I'd take Windows' side, but some days the WTF moments are really WTF ones. WTF?!?
The car sat on jacks for six months in winter in Alaska, and you could just start it and drive away shivering, BUT you absolutely needed the cabin to be warm, and it was the car's fault it didn't do it in 30 seconds?
Windowsbash clickbait at its best. The saddest part is that it distracts from all the bona fide and well deserved and justified bashing that we could concentrate on, as Windows genuinely has plenty of that.
Can't help but remembering how genius my ZX Spectrum's keyboard was supposed to be, what with the preprogrammed BASIC commands on it, and how amazingly idiotic the one-button remote control on my RC Porsche 928 was. The one with the L/R and F/R joysticks was like 30% more expensive.
I am to this day proud I remember how the one-button remote worked. Mostly.
"... for decades I have wondered how many of these cybercrims actually work as security professionals/$bigcompany devs..."
I still vividly remember an article in a Bulgarian magazine or was it some other publication, in the very early nineties, discussing computer viruses. Back then there were like a handful of them to discuss and analyze.
His comment on the (one and only) really nasty virus in the list was something along those lines:
"...I firmly believe that the author of this virus is Bulgarian and working from Bulgaria.
Only here in Bulgaria do we have people who can combine - in one - the level of knowledge and skills, together with the absolute lack of responsibility, professional deontology and pride needed to write something like this...".
Cross-referencing with later works and info, I suspect the paper was by Vesselin Bontchev, discussing the Dark Avenger. I could be wrong about the who's who. Them were innocent times.
As for most things life-related, College Humor had that one nailed as well.
"My colleagues over in enterprise product support often get corporate customers who report that 'Your latest update broke our system'."
From my recent (past couple of years) experience with Microsoft support - I'm not sure Mr Chen is using the correct verb tense here.
Maybe there was a time MS Support was a thing that worked, nowadays it seems to be an endless string of one "engineer" taking over from another, and asking for data that was requested by and provided to the previous engineer hours earlier and is literally sitting a few paragraphs back in the reply thread, bulletpoints and all.
This - on separate cases at separate times with separate "engineers".
...analyze TheRegister's series BOFH for the last five years, and output how many times someone was killed, fired or hurt at the end of each story. Ex: on the latest one, the beancounter flies out the window...
"Based on an analysis of the roughly 120 episodes published between 2021 and early 2026, here is the breakdown of the "casualty list."
Summary Table: 5-Year Casualty Report:
Category: Hurt / Injured Frequency (Est.): ~45 times Primary Causes: Taserings, "spontaneous" combustion, falling into the Thames, lift "malfunctions."
Category: Fired / Disappeared Frequency (Est.): ~30 times Primary Causes: "Operational Hoarse Pigeon," fake HR audits, relocation to the basement.
Category: "Killed" (Implicitly) Frequency (Est.): ~15 times Primary Causes: "Flying out windows, "The Gnasher" (macerator), or "the ninja clause."
Annual Highlights (Notable Outcomes):
2025–2026: The AI & "Innosplaining" Era:
Episode 3 (2026): A Loss Adjuster discovers liability is a "two-way street" and ends up in the Thames after a core network upgrade goes wrong.
Episode 22 (2025): Darryl, a "forward-facing" AI consultant, suffers "spontaneous combustion" when the PFY aggressively empties two CO2 extinguishers on him before he even catches fire.
Episode 21 (2025): The Head Beancounter is beaten down by a monitor mount during a budget dispute.
Episode 18 (2025): An HR representative is left stalled between floors 5 and 6 indefinitely during an "ambitious relocation plan."
2023–2024: The Return to the Office:
Hot-Desking Fallout: Several middle managers were fired after Simon manipulated the booking software to show they hadn't been in the office for six months.
The Window Incident: A particularly persistent beancounter was "assisted" through a high-rise window.
The "Ninja Clause": A salesperson was physically laid out after ignoring the warning to stay away from the server room.
2021–2022: Pandemic & Remote Bastardry:
Episode 23 (2021): A manager trying to track employees' home productivity is electrocuted via a rigged "smart" device.
The Lift Shaft: At least three "Bosses" were cycled through in 2021, with the majority ending up at the bottom of the lift shaft after attempting to cut the IT coffee budget.
The Vacuum Cleaner: A "homicidal" robotic vacuum was used to clear the boardroom of unwanted leadership during the Christmas party.
PS: I think it's about time Simon squeezes in some worthy HR nemesis. Like a starry-eyed intern or something. The battle is too uneven otherwise.
...So what's the difference between a cruise missile and a "suicide drone"?...
Weeelll...
THE MISSILE KNOWS WHERE IT IS AT ALL TIMES. IT KNOWS THIS BECAUSE IT KNOWS WHERE IT ISN'T!!!
By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile FROM A POSITION WHERE IT IS TO A POSITION WHERE IT ISN'T, and arriving at a position WHERE IT WASN'T, IT NOW IS.
Consequently, THE POSITION WHERE IT IS, IS NOW THE POSITION THAT IT WASN'T, and it follows that THE POSITION THAT IT WAS, IS NOW THE POSITION THAT IT ISN'T.
In the event that THE POSITION THAT IT IS IN IS NOT THE POSITION THAT IT WASN'T, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHERE THE MISSILE IS, AND WHERE IT WASN'T.
If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was. The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, IT IS NOT SURE JUST WHERE IT IS.
HOWEVER, IT IS SURE WHERE IT ISN'T, within reason, and it knows where it was.
IT NOW SUBTRACTS WHERE IT SHOULD BE FROM WHERE IT WASN'T, OR VICE VERSA, and by differentiating this FROM THE ALGEBRAIC SUM OF WHERE IT SHOULDN'T BE, AND WHERE IT WAS, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
Whereas a suicide drone just goes "Prrrrrrrrrrrrr"...
Well, the circle is complete, or almost...
1980s: Germany's Dornier DAR (Die Drohne Antiradar) > Israel's IAI Harpy > South Africa's Kentron ARD-10 during the Border War > design data sold to Israel = all proud parents of the Shahed-131/136 (possibly spawned from either Chinese units - that Israel exported to China - or captured Israeli ones) > LUCAAASSS !!!
An application running on the server was malfunctioning," he told On Call. "The application vendor blamed the operating system. The operating system vendor suggested the hardware might be unstable. The hardware had just had a board replaced. Therefore, the man who replaced the board must be the problem.
So these two were contacted, queried, and provided relevant responses, in the time it took our guy to walk to the door to get out?
Me think the admin never intented to let him out one way or the other till all is up and running.
- Curved screen
- Not-curved edges.
The above basically boils down to the S23 Ultra.
Yes, I know, the three and a half online reviewers that seem to dictate all reviews and what users want find the curved display stupid. I don't. It looks good, and the edge tabs work for me.
Add to the dream:
- Thumb fingerprint sensor (on the side).
- Physical dual sim
- Dedicated micro sd slot
- Battery large enough.
The above was all covered by the Sony Xperia 5 Ultra. No curved screen, but good looking. Too bad it was extremely unreliable.
- Add wireless charging of any sort.
That's it. That's all I need.
My Note 20 Ultra was the last Note with an SD card.
AND the last one that can emulate a credit card's magnetic strip.
The look alone on the faces of the snarky cashiers in stores were phone payments are not accepted yet is worth it.
- "We don't accept ApplePay here"
- "It's not an Apple"
- "We don't accept any phone payments here. Won't work".
- "Ok".
BEEEP
- "?!?"
- "!!!"
"...We all know that a £9 bottle of water doesn't cost them more than 50p and a tiny bag of crisps about the same..."
Blasphemy!!!
Do you have any idea how much individually wrapped cashews cost ?!? Those are bespoke items !!! The best of the best. They have to have an order of magnitudes longer shelf life as they are never used nor replaced, yet they have to taste just as stale when perfectly fresh. They have to be sound-resistant and not crumble when a parent screams at some lost kid who unrwapped them before they could stop him, they are individually and manually infused at the factory with purified guilt...Little idea do you have of the work that goes in crafting those.
...In other words, the "hybrid" bit is fading...
We were expats in Algeria for a few years in the 80's and one of the cons was that there was no real source of meat that suited our cuisine. There was goat, sheep, you name it, but it wasn't all that.
Eventually we hooked up with a group of local hunters who were protecting the potato fields from feral pigs that were doing a number. They'd go and cull as many as possible, we'd hang around till they were done and dispatch the pigs, then share all that with the rest of the local expat group. Freezers helped greatly. The sight of our little sedan, its rear sagging to the ground under the load, with blood dripping from the flush holes, was not something I'll forget. Would have made for a nice movie.
So - these pigs were supposedly the descendants of the pig population that was released out of the French farms after the independence. The French farmers flew, the farms were nationalized, and the pig pop was partly exterminated, partly released. They then supposedly cross-bred with the local wild boars.
One way or the other - 20 years after that event, while the boar population was large enough to require culling, nothing in these animals suggested "domestic pig" in any way. They were wild boars, big, ugly and strong. Decently tasty too.
Sounds valid. However, there's the thing that the talk won't do him too much good. He's shown himself as incapable to cut short a clusterfck of red flags and went on. No one will want to invest in a startup where benefit of the doubt is given at that scale.
I'm the same, or worse, then again I own no startup and I interview no candidates.
Felt uncomfortable...Felt uneasy...Felt uncomfortable...smelled fish... went along still...
Little joke for the road:
Husband gets home drunk at two in the morning. Wife is waiting, roller pin in hand:
- Where have you been ?!?
- Errr...
- Where have you been ?!?!?!
- Errr...
- Oh, ok, I see. You had to work afterhours, then it was cold, and you had to drink to warm yourself up right ?
- Uuuuhhh...Right, right, that's what happened !
- But then WHY do you have lipstick on your collar ?!?
- Errr...
- Ok, I see, the guys at work pranked you and put that so they get you in trouble with me, right ?
- Aaaa...yep. Yep. That's what happened.
- But then WHY do you have LIPSTICK on your underwear ???
- Aaaah...
- Huh ???
- ....
- SOOO ???
- Oh come on darling, you were doing so well - figure something out !!!
