Posts by Anonymous John

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

Re: Any key?

Apart from Shift, Caps Lock, Num Lock, and probably others.

NASA unsure Boeing Starliner will ever be certified for human flight

"and flammability risks associated with tape used to protect internal wiring. "

It's as if the Apollo 1 fire never happened.

"and flammability risks associated with tape used to protect internal wiring. "

It's like the Apollo 1 fire never happened.

The memory crisis is getting so bad that even retro RAM prices are going to the Moon

I've got a ZX81 in the loft.

NASA management wants a word and won't say why

Why the downvotes? Concerns, which I don't share, have been expressed. Most American missions do have mixed crews.

NASA has chosen an all male crew. A rarity nowadays, and a decision that has aroused some concern.

Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

Width 9in height 5in. Simples.

UK fraudsters using AI to doctor 'evidence' in motor insurance claims

Re: "fabricated images exaggerating damage"

I'm sure they do if the other party's photos and version of events don't tally. Smartphones and dashcams are everywhere.

'Dumbass' criminal breaks the 'first rule of ransomware club'

DCG.

Disorganised Crime Group.

Blue Origin's New Glenn makes a crater-sized dent in Artemis plans

"The New Glenn was expected to launch the company's Blue Moon Mark 1 and Mark 2 lunar landers, with a Mark 1 lander scheduled to deliver NASA's VIPER rover to the Moon in 2027. A variant of the crew-capable Mark 2 lunar lander was also expected to form part of 2027's Artemis III mission."

I'd be surprised if SpaceX couldn't launch them. It's lifted payloads intended for other launch vehicles before.

"Fortunately, all personnel were accounted for, according to company kingpin"

Safety rules, not luck.

Nobody but nobody îs in the danger zone during launch or a static firing test. Well apart from astronauts of course.

AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims

Impressive. Especially as they never have to answer the door and tell them to FRO.

FAA grounds SpaceX’s Starship after another launch mishap

"It took until Wednesday for the FAA to declare the Super Heavy anomaly a formal mishap, and that means Starship is grounded while SpaceX conducts an FAA-directed investigation to determine what went wrong."

Something that SpaceX would have done (and probably had already started) in any event. I don't think it means anything much.

AMD says its $4K Ryzen AI Halo workstation practically pays for itself

It sends out scam emails?

Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage

Leaves on the line?

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Schrodinger's station

There's a station in East Sussex called Ore resulting in the seemingly incomplete announcement "Bexhill, St Leonards, Hastings and Ore."

I was waiting for my usual train to work one Monday, the clocks having just gone forward or back. The bloke who arrived to reset the analogue clock in the waiting room tried to adjust it using the arrival or departure board on the platform.

SpaceX dusts off Falcon Heavy for first flight in 18 months

Re: Mid terms coming up…

Trump threatened to dump SpaceX a few months back. A hollow threat which would mean no manned American access to the ISS. Or Lunar Lander.

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

Kid's stuff

https://www.instructables.com/Build-A-Fusion-Reactor/

NASA insiders oddly relaxed about latest budget threats

"Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade."

That's all he promised. Nothing about the knowledge or the samples brought back. I've always suspected that if he hadn't been assassinated, he'd have cancelled the project.

Three planned missions were cancelled any way, even though they would have cost relatively little. The hardware was already built and paid for.

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

"the two-person support team had gone on holiday, at the same time and together, and wouldn't be back for a fortnight!"

Reminds me of the rather useless IT team I've mentioned before. Firm believers in POETS Day, they apparently assumed the repairman they'd called was too. He wasn't, and IT hadn't bothered to tell Reception they'd called one out.

So I had to search a half empty office to find the one faulty PC out of two hundred.

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

Re: Ownership?

"Repurposing the craft for a lunar surface base is not simple."

Simpler than getting it to the surface intact. Parachute landing in the Sea of Tranquility and tow it ashore? *

* If you're reading this Donald, I'm joking.

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

He mentioned "some very interesting new physics" that he is "confident will work. It's just a question of when."

Positronic brain?

"Don't mention the Borg, R. Daneel Olivaw, Mule, hegemonizing swarms, or the soup at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land."

Can we mention Memory Alpha?

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Crashland the ISS in the Gulf of Mexico. Enough pieces may be large enough to salvage and display.

Artemis II takes a rain check on return to launch pad as NASA fixes loose wire

"The mission is scheduled for a 2027 launch to low Earth orbit to test lunar landing technologies, following a rejig of the program by new NASA"

What lunar landing technologies? No Starship has yet reached orbit, let alone the version intended to land.

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

I fixed one user's "problem" once about as quickly by toggling the insert key. Travel time 20 seconds.

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

"The first Apollo crew was launched into orbit with Apollo 7, followed by a mission around the Moon with Apollo 8. Apollo 9 checked out the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, and Apollo 10 did pretty much everything except land. The first lunar landing happened with Apollo 11. "

All that was done in less than a year as the hardware had already been built (or largely built in the case of the lunar landers). Artemis will never achieve that flight rate.

Gatwick shuttle screen suffers pre-flight nerves

"As for the screen, the message "Operating System not found" indicates that something is amiss with whatever is running the display"

No sith Sherlock.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Why pick on SpaceX?

Everyone else apart from Blue Origin is leaving their first stages to burn up as well.

Payroll pirates are conning help desks to steal workers' identities and redirect paychecks

"With this one, the big thing that really stood out is that the attackers seem to be aware of the detection strategies against them,"

Inside job?

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

I read somewhere of someone dropping a spanner on the terminals of a car battery. When everything had cooled down, he was able to pick up the battery by the spanner.

I had to bale out of car once when it caught fire. The molten carburettor dropped onto the starter motor and shorted out the solenoid. As the car was still in gear, I had to watch it, now a mass of flames, making its last (20 yardsl journey. Luckily on a country road with no parked cars.

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

"and locked down all office PCs to prevent creation of local accounts," Parker told On Call."

Standard practice from day 1 in my experience.

Kids learn computer theory with wood, cardboard, and hot glue

Re: Blue Peter

This? Something I remember from school.

https://www.cutoutfoldup.com/402-self-sorting-cards.php

Optional

Probably almost as fast as the original.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

I only ever bought one desktop machine. A shop built 386, that evolved over the years into a Pentium. Via several motherboards, hard disks, memory. CD drive, DVD drive, several Windows versions, one case, and one PSU. Oh and a replacement floppy disk drive. I kept the mains lead for continuity.

Re: Suggestions?

"About a year ago, I was called out to do field service. When I got to the lady's house and was let in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of gunpowder. The second, the double barreled 12-gauge shotgun lying on the couch. Third, the big gaping hole in the side of her computer."

www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_abuse.shtml

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Deja vu

Why does this business model remind me of Virgin Galactic?

Icon is the velocity needed to get you there.

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

13 amps is {approximately} the maximum that won't cause the fuse to overheat and damage the plug. It takes about 50 amps to blow the fuse instantly. 21 amps for 30 minutes.

Logitech macOS mouse mayhem traced to expired dev certificate

"Company says it dropped the ball

I thought that mouse balls were a thing of the past.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

"That became an issue as the year 2000 approached, because as the clock ticked over into the new year some programs would assume it was the year 1900 and malfunction … perhaps catastrophically."

And as computers didn't exist in 1900, they would simply disappear.

When the lights went out, and the shooting started, Y2K started to feel all too real

Y2.003K

The government dept I worked had a flawless Y2K. Until a software update three years later. A drop down year menu went

2004

2003

2002

2001

1900

Quite an achievement for seven year old software that used four digit years from the start.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

And if they are, that's evolution in action.

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

There's also Ethical Hacking when used against scammers. Technically illegal but the BBC Scam Interceptors programme openly admits to using one. I'm not aware of any being prosecuted. Or of any scammer complaining to the police about being hacked. Although I have baited a couple stupid enough that I wouldn't have put it past 5hem.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

"Wherever George was sent, he strung up cables and connected devices using BNC connectors, a 1940s-vintage connector that somehow survived into the early LAN age. "

That's nothing. We're still using 1/4 inch jack plugs (6.35mm), and they were invented in the 1870s.

Icon as he was alive then.

Lifeboat docks with Tiangong after cracked capsule triggers emergency rendezvous

"a repair kit for a cracked window on the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft."

Putty?

Self-destructing thumb drive can brick itself and wipe your secret files away

"However, the real standout feature of the P35S is its ability to brick itself ... permanently. "

Or brick it with a brick.

Britain's first small modular reactors to be built in Wales

Gas lighting produces CO2.

Blue Origin hopes third time's the charm for New Glenn after two scrubbed launches

I didn't see any grid fins on the descending first stage. Perhaps the Falcon 9 didn't really need them. I seem to remember them causing problems at first.

SpaceX and Musk called on to rescue China's Shenzhou-20 crew

"SpaceX fans quickly began calling for a rescue mission. "

SpaceX fans? Who don't understand that the proposal is ridiculous. Musk fans, very likely.