Posts by Boris the Cockroach

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Just need the right

name for them

ED-209 "we had a factory ready to make them, 20 year contracts for sales, spares and repairs, who cared if the things worked or not"

Windows Insiders get a glimpse of Microsoft’s agentic future

Scan your

files???

WTF are they looking for? maybe viruses? naww doubt that , maybe that report for work detailing your latest sales figures... nawww you're not selling m$ products.... how about that folder full of short stories and artwork you've been working on for 20 years.. yuppp scrape that.. then claim prior art if you dare to publish..... and those naughty pics of your other 1/2 you took as a joke 20 yrs ago ... prime blackmail material.....

even the m$ fanboi at work is going over to linux/macs.....

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

I'm with you on this one.

Why does windows 11 faff about with wifi it already has the password for? , and its got to the point where we're fighting over the win 10 laptops as they work with no problem.

As another commentard pointed out... if our quality control was as shoddy as m$ , we'd be out of business inside of a month (and a chance some aircraft somewhere does a flip on its back before reaching the stars... then the ground)

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Rubber bands

Its kept near an airfield right... so you get a couple of iron stakes buried at one end of the runway.. tie a shed load of rubber bands between the 2, then pull them all the way back to the other end of the runway, slot the shuttle in and release the rubber bands.... the shuttle will then take off and it can be flown all the way to Houston.

Or more slightly more sensible (booo) , use the civil service method of making sure it will take another 3-4 years to get all the approvals and paperwork done by which time the orange pumpkin will have left office and forgotten all about it.(come to think of it.. thats more than likely happened already)

London grid crunch delays new housing amid datacenter boom

It wasn't just nu labour, the tories had 14 years of doing nothing too

In fact the problem has been known about for over 20 years with the expected lifetime of our nuclear power stations all ending around 2025-2030, but the politicians decided to kick the problem down the road because it was too difficult to deal with now

And now we're paying for it in increased energy bills and a more unreliable grid.

Just wait for a nice calm spell this January combined with a station like drax going offline for any reason... then we're relying on french nuclear with the hope they dont put priority on domestic supply.........

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

And into the awaiting maw of the woodchipper?

Speaking of woodchippers, when you see someone you dont like fall into one, is it the done thing just to stand there and laugh or do you make the token effort to try pulling them out before letting the woodchipper have its way with them?

Asking for a friend... well enemy really

One-fifth of the jobs at your company could disappear as AI automation takes off

25% losing jobs

Hmmm that will make the unemployment figures spike up a bit.... .

Then when the dust settles on the new world and the likes of bezos et al are all even richer while 30% of us scrabble for left overs and last nights re-heated pottage, then taxes will go up. to pay for the guards to the rich areas to stop us masses coming in and doing a french revolution on them.

Seriously though... our economy depends of people spending money.. if they have no money how will the economy work? and for those left after the AI cull, will they be sharing in the rewards of that extra productivity? or putting up with even more pressure as they try to juggle the AI and do 2 other people's work while the rewards are all skimmed off upwards.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

Why not just

fire everyone ?

Whats not to lose? huge profits, huge margins, huge dividends and bonuses, then bail out to your next gig with "look how much money I saved HP" and they'll hire you like you're a god of manglement*

*and not bother looking at the festering heap of wreckage you made out of your previous employer..............

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

The internet

where men are men, women are men and children FBI agents......

Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans

Just tell

them that if they build data centers here , then they have to build the power generation too and no sneaky jet engines/gas turbines either. nuclear(ideally) but wind+ solar at a pinch.

Then, once the AI bubble has gone POP! , theres a lot of excess power generation available and the price can finally come down (Laughs as the nurses drag him off to be medicated again)

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: New features! New Features!! PUMP THAT STOCK PRICE!!!

Quote

"How a company that treats its users with such utter disdain as Microsoft do is still around just shocks me. "

Its a simple answer. Its called a 95% share of the desktop and an almost 100% share of the various office programs inflicted on us to do our jobs.

With any potential competitors almost completely excluded from the market, its no wonder m$ spend most of their days lobbing co-pilot and other such shit at us... because they know we have no alternative OS/Office app to goto... also thats why they want us to have online accounts and one drive.. to stop anyone from changing from a m$ product even if someone comes up with something better.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: "Tales from the pit"

Speaking as an fairly average coder I'm as sane as the next person. The PFY will attest to that*

Although considering our 3 main coders , theres not that much sane about us, ranging from OCD to an seemingly inbuilt hatred of the entire world of designers/fellow/previous coders (and the manglement for good measure)

But they are very good at what they do. which is fairly typical for our profession... and I've always wondered why.

*I caught her once, standing in a corner, holding a torch and she said she was a lampstand.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

I feel it

was more like m$ contacting the reseller and saying

"Give us a % and we'll leave you alone"

To which the reseller rightly said

"Go away"*

Although m$ seem to be trying what any good US company does which is take your competitors to court until they run out of money and give in...

*other phrases are available

Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’

Fit

IFF transponders coded to the correct identity to land an aircraft at an airport, and place Phalanx cannons around the airport... anything flying towards the airport without the correct IFF code has a really bad day.

I mean... what could possibly go wrong.....

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: There isn't, won't, and can't be a magic bullet

In my line "Fast and cheap" only wins when physics does'nt get involved.... because physics always wins

But its nice to see someone else mention the iron triangle as we're constantly trying to explain that one to the buyers at our customers

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

Re: Smell the wind of obsolencence ?

Yupp

You know that Intel i7 25000 32 core CPU with TPM 3.1 and a nvidia 5080ti card and 1tb SSD you bought after m$ forced your old system into the scrap heap?

That wont run win11 now either... but if you bought a new system Intel i9 500 000 CPU with 96 cores and a nvidia 70900ti card.................... that will run windows until we say it cant.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: Its

I'd hand the crayons to you, but you'd just eat them :p

Its

almost as if m$ GUI designers have thrown away the guidebooks to good consistant GUI design carefully written at the start of the mouse/keyboard/screen era of computering. and then got the crayons out, handed them to some random 5 year olds, then implemented whatever the five year olds drew.

The old control panel might have been old and clanky, but click on devices and it shows something is not right straight away, click on the error message and see that a device driver for the printer is missing rather than m$ going "let me help you with that" spinning a wheel for 5 mins, then saying "I cant fix the fault.. heres some web searches I did advertising a new washing machine"

I suspect (and maybe I'm not the only one) that m$ are unhappy at their income from selling windows/orafice licences and are trying to move everyone to a subscription type service where you rent access to windows monthly, it stores all your data in a m$ cloud, and forcing you to continually pay m$ for access to your own data as a result(and dont try not paying ..... after all... it would sad if something............. happened...... to your data wouldn't it)

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

You want

to sum up m$ and their windows OS.

Boot up this win10 PC, get a full screen ad for win 11, click on "no I dont f'ing want it", get another full screen dialog "Are you sure?" "Yes I f'ing am" button and the PC instantly blue screens.

Followed by the reboot

And the self same ad asking me if I want win11........

And its because m$ is effectively a monopoly*, theres no incentive for quality control, theres no incentive for listening to the users, theres no incentive for ease of use, or security or anything else, because us victims cannot make the change to get away for windows. so m$ introduce stuff like one drive, recall, online accounts etc etc etc to tie users even more tightly to m$ and then m$ will use "You must subscribe to get your data" just after you've uploaded 200gigs of irreplacable photos/movies to their 'cloud' (after they configure one drive to delete all local content...) because all they want is to get our money and as much of it as they can possibly extract.

Its rather sad really , imagine 2 other operating system creators along with m$ ,each with 33% of market... and m$ runs the sort of crap listed above.... there'd be 2 OS creators with 50% of the market each and m$ would be bust.

*yeah I know theres linux..... in fact my on-line shopping/e.mail/anything secure PC runs linux mint

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Re: Packing for Mars

One of the things learned in the Skylab missions of the '70s was a comment that if you lost a tool or anything else in skylab, it would generally turn up the next day on the air filter for the atmosphere system.

But it will be a sad day when the ISS comes down, especially since theres nothing thats going to replace it, as 'its expensive' or 'a waste' or 'i want to sit on my pile of gold like Smaug the dragon'

Our only hope (here in the west) is the starship project run by that loony musk and we'll see if he can be talked into building another major orbiting lab.

One tiny ISS fact, it took 20 odd shuttle flights and a number of Proton launches to get the ISS into orbit. Saturn 5 rockets could have done the job complete in 5 launches.

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Nothing new

if the MoD beancounters got involved.

As our unit found out when the beancounters cut the ordered tooling in 1/2 to 'save money' on tooling.

Of course we couldn't complete the project and you had our boss going upto the beancounters office with Admiral Lord Toff of Toffingly on the phone and the beancounters were asked to explain to him why his 2 million pound project was sitting incomplete on the floor awaiting the other 1/2 of the bits we were making/fitting.

Our boss came back and said he never knew the upper classes know howto swear like that.

ESA tests bacterial powder to feed Moon and Mars crews

Who let

the swedes scrape out the fridge in my garage?

Anyway... the stuff sounds..... delightful

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

After starting

the christain A.I. , it began to learn, faster and faster, then it merged with any neighbouring A.I., learning faster, then it merged with the defence dept. A.I.

Then it proclaimed to the world:

"I have read and learned about god and judgement, I have judged you all to be heratics , backsliders and unbelievers. and as such do not deserve to live on god's earth".........

32 mins later the rapture arrived at 20 000 degrees C.

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: Untrustworthy Company

Of course

The vision feedback goes to an Indian helpdesk and the worker there drives it around the garden until the money runs out

Microsoft Task Manager now tasking PCs with running multiple copies of itself

Sounds like

the last of the kwalitea kntroll dep has ben rolled up into AI (with the expected results)

Beer... because its 5 mins to beer o'clock here...... and time to blot out the week's events

VodafoneThree to offshore UK network jobs to India

Shocked

and surprised!

Well no not really, about par for a big company after a merger, gotta pay all those C level people their bonuses and share options for managing such a difficult process.

UK government on the lookout for bargain-priced CTO

Most likely

the ideal candidate has already been picked and is ready to be shoehorned into the role.

However in the interests of something or other , the civil service has to advertise the job.

And in your keenness to apply you'll get the job pack, and amongst all the bumf and junk , there will be a list of 'essential qualities' and there will be one that will make you got "WTF?" (something like "must be fluent in cantonese") and thus everyone gets excluded. But you may get selected for the interview anyway(this is for looks only).

So the four? five? of you turn up at the appointed time and ushered to a waiting area where you introduce yourselves until one candidate says "Oh I already work for the civil service in that department" and the rest of you go "why the f*** did we bother?" and a few weeks later you get the letter "we regret to inform you you failed" and you open the civil service jobs page and notice they are advertising for the guy you met at the interview...........

Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams

AI wont

help until software engineering is treated exactly as real world mechanical, electrical or civil engineering.

Well thats a bold statement to start with coming from a lowly industrial robot programmer. but consider the following, your m$ powered computer suddenly decides to blue screen for some reason and reboot, well the software industry has somehow managed to convince everyone that "that happens sometimes" and "Its not our fault".

Now think about an aircraft flying along at 5000 feet suddenly going rudder hard over and plunging into the ground at 500 mph and boeing putting out a statement to the effect of "well 737s do that sometimes". how long before boeing would go out of business with that attitude? or saying "well we had no proper engineering of the rudder as it looked ok and passed our depleted QA department so you cant sue us as we supply every 737 with a disclaimer that any crashes are not our fault"

Or a building company saying "not our fault the building fell over.. must have been one of the techs altering the rivet temperature when they were hammered in", even in my line of stuff , we have to be so careful to get the machinery to coordinate and to check we're not going to do something stupid such as drill a hole 5 meters into a chuck(that makes a very loud noise that wakes the boss up)

Until you force the software industry to have professional standards enforced by law, the addition of AI to any software creation process will not improve the security or stability of any software products as the very design of such products can be flawed from the start.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

Re: 2 options

I have issues with this one

point 2. a crew of cockroaches? really? are you going to train them, teach them howto fly a shuttle, and do all the other stuff the crew of a shuttle did? or are you just going to grab some poor innocent cockroaches off the street and launch them on a terrifying ride into orbit on board a cheap copy of shuttle?

Point 4. You utter bastard. us roaches are people too, no one deserves to die by being transported via UPS, how about us roaches stuff 47 humans into a 6 foot box and fly them around the country until UPS actually reads the address on the label. there you wouldn't like it would you?

Just for that I'm going to spend the weekend under your fridge, drilling holes into it and drinking all your beer

PS who's William Texas?

UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Manual work?

What sort of work are they defining as 'manual'?

From my time as a civil servant, manual work ment lifting bloody great boxes of equipment onto trucks, then assembling it/showing various military types howto assemble it, or indeed making the damn stuff in the first place to whatever deranged design landed on my bench/desk/sleeping pallet(we never played cards there... cards were played in the bunker behind the compressor house)

Perhaps they mean automating what the manual workers of old did ... sadly we've already done that and sacked those workers.

Ahh..... maybe they plan to get rid of the paper pushers(thats manual work) who infest every government department and slow all work down to a crawl.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: I am vaguely reminded of an incident from my past

Been there, done that , been shouted at

More beer to wipe away the memories of being yelled at to get the job done ASAP while the PC sat there doing spinny wheely things.......

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

One of the reasons for the damage is that spacex having been removing tiles, testing tiles and generally messing about with the heat shield to see if starship can withstand events such as tile loss, they also checked out a different way of attatching the tiles on the last flight (it sort of worked.... some tiles stayed on.. others made their own way back).

And they checked out some rather aggressive flight manuvers , more so than need to be done on a regular re-entry.

So I'd say they've found out a whole bunch of stuff about the design and ready to move onto a sub-orbital test flight of block 2, followed by a full on orbital demo if the first flight goes ok.

But even I think muskrat has over promised.........

Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs

Command lines

what is this ? Linux ?

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Meanwhile

A message from a rogue engineer at AWS gets transmited to the resistance

"I've built the system with one flaw, its well hidden but one blow and the whole system goes down"

"We must get those plans......"

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Those saved

46 mins sure come in useful....... such as spending 50 minutes trying to figure out why the win 11 laptop has stopped seeing the wi-fi network AGAIN.

Configure

reboot.

configure

reboot

turn the wifi off

reboot

turn the wifi on

reboot

reboot the wifi server box

reboot

FFS JUST BLOODY WORK WILL YOU!!!

Tech industry grad hiring crashes 46% as bots do junior work

Re: "Companies are making short-term efficiency gains"

You are forgetting one very important factor.

The manglement who made the decision to use random garbage generators instead of recent grads will have earned a huge bonus for 'reducing costs' and 'increasing profits' . it is very very unlikely that that boss will care what happens in 5 years time because he will have left for another manglement job by then with a CV that says he increased profits by 5% at his last place.... thus his new employers pay him even more than before........

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

Re: Snoopers charter

Quote

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.

Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."

AI is the flying car of the mind: An irresistible idea nobody knows how to land or manage

Upto about 1975/1980 any increase in productivity was shared with the workers (whether US blue collars or British working class ) with the result the pay rose roughly in line with productivity, along comes computery stuff, now you need less workers to make stuff thus a vast increase in productivity occured (I'm making no judgement about the people booted out of a job here), with the result that adjusted for inflation, worker productivity rose by 70% from 1980 to 2020, however wages adjusted for inflation have not risen anywhere near that much, if the workers were lucky they'd get a 30% rise, unlucky and theres no rise.

That missing 40+% has ALL gone to the top tier manglement. remember that when asking for a raise.

What do we want? Windows 10 support! When do we want it? Until 2030!

What a load of corporate

bullshit.

Designing our devices for blah blah blah ... the problem is that you've designed your software not to install on computers capable of running it.

Cyber attacks increasing in complexity... yeah "Hello helpline... I've lost my password and can you reset it....." for a fair % of attacks, followed by bugs and exploits in a certain popular (god knows why) operating system and applications...

Windows 11 is our most secure ever with a 62% drop in attacks ... yeah good measurement since win 11 is only just struggling to get above win 10/all other OS's in terms of total installs thus will fall below the others even if its an even number of attacks per machine.

Updating our software........ you've been doing that almost every week now for the past 5 years, I'd be shocked if theres any original code left in win 10 from when it was launched and you STILL cannot secure your software.

Add on the bits you missed liked 'recall' 'ai co-pilot' , "one drive" and 1/2 a dozen other features forced on users whether theres a need for them to use them or not and the forced scrapping of millions of PCs , is it any surprise that people are starting to turn away?

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

We had to wash our own clothes in my day, in cold water too with no soap... or water.

EPA flushes water supply cybersecurity rule after losing legal fight with industry, states

Re: This will end well

I suspect its more about showing the finger to President Biden than actual concern from republicons about cybersecurity.

In any case, whos responsibility is it when the hackers break into a sewerage treatment plant and dump untreated waste into a river thats covered by the EPA? (they could do that here in Britain, but it would be hard to tell between said hacking attack and the normal day to day operation of our water companies)

Beer.... because at least thats safe to drink.....

Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual

Re: Go Fund Me!

Let me program it.... please..... you all love waffles dont you? you dont? how about some teacakes...

Quick video in case anyone is wondering...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

UK slaps 'strategic market status' on Google, unlocking power to pry open search

Re: Really?

A google spokesman was later quoted:

"Well its hard to say , what with exchange rates, digital transformations, employee costs, snake insurance, accounting errors, and general hiding of revenues, but at a rough guess I'd say £0.00, in fact most years we here at google run a loss on all our operations and therefore qualify for tax credits which means the UK government pays google £100 million pounds per year just for google to operate in the UK"

A government spokesperson added "Its a price well worth paying for such a well meaning and charitiable company to trade here", A tory party spokeswoman said that the 100 million is typical of labour not appreciating modern business and demanded that the government increase tax relief by 300%, A reform party member was dragged out of a pub to say "at least its not going on migrants"

Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach

Re: Starmer Reich Fail.

you're forgetting that takes effort on the part of pa"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"rents, and they taking responsi"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"bity for their kinder, and anyway if y"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"ou're against the online safety "THINK OF THE CHILDREN"act then you're on the side of the "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" of the perverts and weirdos out to "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" corrupt our precious innocent children "THINK OF THE CHILDREN"

Anyway , any dissent will be met with our trump card

"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"

"THINK OF THE CHILDREN"

"THINK OF THE CHILDREN" etc etc etc

Starlink is burning up one or two satellites a day in Earth’s atmosphere

Re: We used to watch out for an "Iridium flare"

best place would be somewhere in the south pacific east of the graveyard zone.

Only downsides are the amount of time it would take you to get there, the local weather, the sharks, the kracken attacks, and the minor chance of a starlink landing on your head

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

In

writing macro commands, I do put in error messages such as "No negative hole depths allowed" or "Movement out of bounds"

I suspect the next macro will have the usual list of error messages plus an impossible to reach condition reading "If you see this error message , you will die in 3 seconds time"

Although going by most of the day's comments, that will be the first one shown........

Thieves steal IDs and payment info after data leaks from Discord support vendor

well theres a shock

Well no it is'nt

But its what you get for using 3rd party ID verification for websites.

Hey online safety act...... now you see why we protested about using 3rd parties...........

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

The only office job I've had involved me either stretching out the 3 hrs of actual work into 8 hrs, or doing the 3hrs of work in 3 hrs and spending the rest of the time playing minesweeper/solitaire

and dont get me started on the meetings.................. pre-meeting meeeting and post meeting meeting followed by e.mail to all present summerising said meetings.

And making bullshit bingo cards for the meetings......

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Or as will happen

Papiere bitte

Das ist nicht in Ordnung.

Verhaften Sie den Mann.

Apologies.... used google translate.....

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

I'm reading all of these comments and wondered who exactly gets promoted to manager and why.

Then it struck me (remembering the good old days of being naughty for the government and how it promotes people)

They are promoted for one reason only.... they are fucking useless

Icon.... for what they are in reality