Posts by Boris the Cockroach

Airport chaos as eGates down for the count across UK

Re: Current problems

You forgot

The online safety bill

BOFH: A security issue, you say? Activate code tangerine

And theres me

expecting the lift to have arrived, the doors open and the boss steps in........ only to find the lift is at the floor above.....

A nice code brown from the boss until he turns into a code red.

UK Online Safety Bill to become law – and encryption busting clause is still there

We promise that this legislation

will be used to protect you and your loved ones and your children from terrorists and online child abuse and other sexual abuse

And we also promise that it wont be used to spy on what you put in the recycling bins, where you send your children to school and who let their dog shit on the village green.

Dont they know that if they put a 'backdoor' in the encyrption program, the first guy with a de-compiler will find it.........

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Obligation

Quote

"All paths through the filters had to take exactly the same number of clock cycles and I achieved it with only one NOP. (How many of the younglings even know about such things?)"

I do because I had to debug an interupt servicing routine that took 65 msec to process on the longest case. bit of pisser when the interupts were coming in every 60 msec.

Then again... I'm no youngling

Having read the room, Unity goes back to drawing board on runtime fee policy

Ahhhhhhh the

Ratner moment

Of opening your mouth to place foot firmly in it

Then watching the value of your company tank and your customers bugger off

Then say "come back come back it was all a joke..........................."

Strangely enough , we have had customers who think they can alter a contract unilaterly.

The boss simply asks if they'd prefer to talk to the company lawyer or to me.*

They always prefer the lawyer.

*maybe I shouldn't rev the chainsaw so high while the boss is on the phone to them .........

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

From the archives.....

Ever wondered why the official secrets act covers so much of what the government does, and why everything done by the government is so expensive and takes so long............

I cant name the place or what we were doing, or who for....but we were young and fresh.......... and stupid.......... very very stupid.

So take 3 apprentices........ a box of large electrolytic capacitors........... yeah we know where this is going................ add some wire... a switch and a large ac power supply.

After letting out the magic smoke, we had 3 deaf apprentices, no capacitors, or power supply and a very annoyed technical bloke responsible for what we were doing.

"YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THESE THINGS COST?" was one phrase I remember being shouted at us..

We ended up at a motorhead gig that night wondering why lemmy was so quiet

Get ready to say hello to new Windows and goodbye to an old friend

I'll miss the dialog

that says

"windows has run into a problem it cant solve'

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Quote:

"Something like 75-80% of vehicles in the UK are able to be parked off road at home (RAC figures I'e quoted often here)... a good proportion of the rest will be parked at work for good portions of their life."

In this area, (UK south coast) the 2 big citys run at about 75% street parking, especially in the older areas. EV charging will be via lampost(after tearing out the lamppost and its wiring and putting in a charging point with a power cable that can supply 10 cars... we'll not worry about 30 feet of power cable trailing to every car) then theres the power load on the 11Kv substation feeds and the 240v distribution cables.... theres at least 1 fault every year on the 11Kv somewhere in the city, and several on the 240v due to the age of the cables, the extra EV load should help increase that.

But its ok , you can charge at work...... using who's power? so look forward to the payslip Gross pay, followed by deductions: Income tax, national insurance, pension, EV charging.....

And as an amusing footnote..... you know all those people with off road parking/garages, and who cheerfully fill out their insurance quotes with 'garaged/off road parking'

How many actually USE it?

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Re: Indicators?

This of course is a complete myth

BMWs do use their indicators as I saw on the motorway last night, as the BMW I was following had its right indicator on while turning left off the motorway.

And let us never forget that they use all 4 indicators at once to park anywhere they please (pedestriian crossings, double yellow lines on a blind corner, middle of a single lane road,blocking someone's driveway. etc etc.)

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

I doubt the FAA

really care about the pad destruction beyond a brief bit about how far some of the concrete chunks got(out to sea if you watch one of the replays)

I suspect the focus will be on the APUs as in why one quit at 36 seconds, and then the other at about 2 mins, followed by the FTS not actually working when the controllers realised they'd lost control when the last APU failed..

Still the flight proved starship could fly with multiple engine failures, the lost of an APU and the structure is strong enough to hang together as it fell back into the atmosphere...

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

JIT removes the need to hold stock at your manufacturing plant, thus either reducing 'useless' floor space or being able to use that floor space for more production

It also decreases cost as you only pay for whats delivered rather than 40 000 widgets on a bulk order.

It also removes the 'stock' cost and places it on your suppliers as we cant make 40 000 of your widgets all at once while keeping 4 other customers supplied with 40 000 widgets each... so we tend to batch produce them , say 10 000 per month ready for the JIT delivery which would be something like 1000 every 2 days(this is agreed in the contract.... because we cant cope with sudden changes in demand like another supplier going down and then having the delivery quanties increased to 1000 every day to make up for it.)

JIT when it works is a good system.... when it does'nt work....its chaos... as one of our customers found out when their assembly line went down, we still have a contract to fill because we have no where to store the stuff either because we're used to it flying out the door every other day.....

PS I hate some of our customers....

Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground

Re: More

Dont worry..... when labour get in all will be sweetness and light............ until they start making the stupid decisions led by a stupid idology

<<<already loading the brick cannon for labour.... run out of bricks to throw at the tories due to them buying the lot and then dropping them on their feet

Re: NATS crashed.

Missed something as simple as

Try

{

Process.nextFlightplan;

}

Catch

{

Deleteflightplan_from_list();

PrintF("Incorrect flightplan, please manually process");

}

Guess NATS will be adding a sanitation module to the code in the next week.....

Newport Wafer Fab blames UK government over 100 redundancies plan

It would be

better if things like that wafer fab were located in the city of London.

At least then tory mps would support it unconditionally, and have a 50/50 chance of finding it on a map.

Nooo... I've gone way too cynical ....

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Great job!

Quote:

"Just remember the note left by Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, when the last red rabble were booted out, "Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left"

You are aware that this is a standard treasury joke left by both parties whenever they are booted out... except the daily wail seems to think that only labour leaves it

Another quote:

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money!"

Yupp it is... especially when the banks are bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of billions, and yet an industrial company (sheffield forgings) that makes vital bits of infrastructure cant get an 80 million loan from the government for some plant investment because aforementioned banks refuse to lend the money to a company that actually does something.

And if you're all wondering why it is that so many of our 'leaders' are completely and utterly useless, look up Pournelle's law of bureaucracy

The only thing launched for Amazon's Project Kuiper is a lawsuit

Depends on the cost of building blue orgin rockets/buying ULA ones vs the cost of the proven flight design of the falcon 9

In other words... if it costs 15 billion to design/build your own launch vehicles vs 5 billion to buy space x launchers, thats 10 billion that amazone can return to the shareholders....

In any case , I bet the worry for bezosbub is that spacex adopt amazone delivery practices..... IE lob it into an orbit after getting close, then take a picture and claim it was delivered

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

I've done it too

no no not that you dirty minded buggers geezz

Shown the PFY howto do something vital for the company to work so that I can have a nice restful 4 day weekend BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING!!!!!!!! HELP!!!!!!! the system has fallen over and we cant bring it back.....

"Well my passwords in the firebox*, just use that to restart it"

"We have... and it still fell over"

After another 30 mins, it turns out the PFY did not put in the commands correctly to start with.....

Ruined the weekend as I spent the next 3 days thinking up horrible things to say/do to the PFY when I got back in.

* the firebox.... where a lot of vital secrets are stored

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

Re: I knew my keyboard was doomed

Upvote for someone getting the reference

I knew my keyboard was doomed

from the second I read this bit

"The new Boss is a complete idiot "

Seems to remind me of a previous life where they'd go through general managers like they were going out of fashion, one always struck me as 'not enhanced in the thinking department'

Especially when he demanded to know how I knew his pay package was 35K, a company car, a 6% profit related bonus and an expense account to cover out of pocket expenses when visiting customers etc

"ohhhh I cant name my sources, very bad , Boris is bad , but not that bad"

Closely followed by his inquiring with personnel/other manglers/ senior staff whether I had 'friends' in high places prepared to leak information.

Followed by being dragged into his office on pain of something or other

"Cant name my sources, not without immunity.. signed by you"

One letter extracted.... with signing

"My source is......... is..... You're not going to like it .... is............ You're really not going to like it.................is.............. The daily telegraph"

"WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"Well your job was advertised in there at 35K + car, the 6% bonus is company wide, everyone claims out of pocket expenses here ..... and we're not all knuckle dragging sun readers "

Such a wonderful mangler....... shame he only lasted another 2 months before getting fired (Please note I had nothing to with it)

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Expose

the organisation as snake oil salesmen?

At this point I thought we all knew it was a way of extracting large sums of money from people under the guise of 'religion'

Hint: The bible is free

The Koran is free

The Torah is free

The hindu sacred texts are free

Scientology charges 100's for their texts....

Pokémon Go was a 'success disaster' and Niantic is still chasing another hit

Any chance

of having an AR version of portal?

>> lab coat of course... because we're doing science

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

My money

is on AI

They introduced AI to the process, it lasted 47.23 seconds before it went nuts and terminated itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZq7fW6ftlU

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

Re: Stories from Grandad

They sure were...

Especially if you're a loathed middle mangler everyone despises and you happen to use the shredder.... and then you lean over it to flick the socket switch to 'on' and the shredder starts shredding the paper in its maw and your tie happens to get caught too.

Gave everyone in the office that day a jolly good laugh.

PS we did turn the shredder off to release him......... eventually

PPS there were a couple of votes to leave him there ... see icon

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

Re: Old El Reg quote fits here

Next day? hell the ad for your job would be out before your body reached the morgue

Uncle Sam accuses SpaceX of not considering asylees and refugees for employment

As someone

who tried to get green card status.....

This seems rather iffy.... because it was made clear that getting the green card was dependent on being able to do a job position that a US citizen could'nt fill. of course this led to the other thing.

To get that sort of a job offer was dependent on already having a green card...........

But it could have been an occupation that the US was short of, sadly manufacturing engineers were not needed as the great outsourcing to china rush was on..............

Remind me again how that went?

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

Never leave

your PC on and logged in around here

Its only inviting trouble.... especially in the form of the PFY whos only too happy to put an embarassing text message on the screen when a customer(who has a sense of humour) is about.

Although I guess its my fault for exclaiming loudly when she met her other 1/2 the other day that they looked like they were using their tongues to examine each other's vocal cords.....(no pictures of this will be provided)

Two teens were among those behind the Lapsus$ cyber-crime spree, jury finds

Re: computer intrusion, blackmail, and fraud

According to the beeb he was released on bail with conditions

One of them being no unsupervised access to the internet.

So he guessed the wifi password at the bail hostel, and logged right on in.....

On the subject of him being metally ill, the judge should make out a nice sectioning order that hes detained in a secure unit for at least 12 months for assessment plus treatment...

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

Re: A lot of people in the comments acting like someone pissed in their cereal this morning

And always remember the huge sums of money spent on NASA would keep the british health service running for about 3 months

Or the US military for about a week

Or the US welfare system for about 3 days.

As for the 'no humans on the moon we can do it better with robots' remember the mars insight lander and its struggles to get the seismic probe into the surface.... what that lander could have done with is a big fat human boot in the right place and that probe would have dug itself in just fine.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Re: Hmmm

Quote

"Having one person more intelligent than an entire HR department is going to cause resentment."

They did a film about that..... Idiocracy......

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Send this to your MP

The ascii code for the letter A is 65

Int Key = 24

Int Message = 65

Send.destination(Message*Key);

There, an encryption algorithm. illegal under the new laws as it does not have a back door

So we'll stick a back door in.

String Spies= "GCHQ";

Int Key = 24;

Int Message = 65;

If monitering==1 Send.Spies(Message);

Send.destination(Message*Key);

All looks good except when the 'bad guys' get hold of this algorithm , they will reverse engineer the code and decompile it back to the above.

And if they time the attack right they'll change the value of Spies to "FSB" or "NKVD" or even "CIA"

And thus all your secrets will be revealed. and mine. and everyone elses.

And just imagine Russia/China getting your secret messages about undermining the prime minister in order to secure your promotion to the position...

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

The distraction

in my game can be ........ expensive

As it all too easy to be deep in thought staring at the computer screen as you build the mental model of what you are doing vs the physical model of the clamps/robot arms/tooling trying to hold said mental model and some idiot demands your attention with a trivial thing that they could have solved for themselves, thus the mental model disappears while you deal with the trivial.. then with the person, and try to get your mind back to where it was.

However you've forgoten clamp B and decide to send the tool straight through it thus releasing the part from the fixture with the result the part gets stuck on the tool, spins upto 6500 rpm before making a rapid exit from said machine, flying across our carpark, into the neighbouring unit's car park and imbedding itself in their front door.....

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Re: This story and thread ...

How are they going to fit in reading this among their other studies such as

Evading the blame

Hiding bribes

Not telling the truth

dodging questions

Lining one's friends pockets

Networking the right people

Kissing the right arse

And

Suing the newspapers

I have one phrase

for you all

'London Ambulance service'

For those not in the know, they introduced a computerised system to look after the service, due to a software fault the system fell over after 3-4 months . however, the software and hardware guys who'd built the system said to themselves "It might fall over.... so lets design it to fall over to a backup server".... if only the beancounters hadn't cancelled buying the backup server because of the unneeded cost......

BOFH: Zen and the art of battery replacement

Yeah... but they dont have the same sort of impact we're looking for here...... ie 500lbs+ of batteries.......

<<<typed this 3 tymes due to beign worse for wear ... and now for the post pub fry up(where did that section go el-reg?)

Well the BoFH is an inspiration to us all.

But even I'd have a hard time getting one of the forklifts up the stairs to the meeting room, getting it through the 6'6" by 3' doorway, then driving down the the meeting room table (accidently running over the bean counter on the way) before plummetting it from a window (we're not going to worry about a dodgy catch vs a forklift right? ) on top of the claims assessor and/or his car.(the options put to him earlier was 'Are you refusing our claim or Do you want a new company car)

But please note, while I'd have a hard time... I never said it was impossible........... "Ohhhh George!!! I have another job for you.... "

<<<<off to gain an albi of 'being down the pub'

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

Quote:

" You do not design an interface without spending some time with the people who are supposed to use it and learning about how they work."

If I could upvote this 200 times, I damn well would.

But then this was jammed into my head by university while we were learning howto do application dev work (waterfall/iterive design process)

See the end users.

Ask what they want.

Build interfaces for them to try and comment on.

Then take that away and build the UI (flashy/handy stuff added at this stage)

Take it back to the endusers and get more comments.

Hooray... we have a custom comms application UI consisting of press button(1 of 7) for where the file is going, a file selector dialog, and a big button marked 'transmit'

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Re: Idiocracy

No we wouldn't

Some manglers are a blessing to their employers and to humanity in general (looks at the medical companies we supply) however most manglers and especially the 'b' ark middle manglers should be put on a plane , flown to the Amazon, and made to apolgise to the trees for wasting the oxygen they make.

And then flown 1/2 way back..........

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

The true test will

come if orange gizmo gets the nomination and then wins the presidency

And then pardons himself for anything he (and his cohorts) have done

Rather like a king would... a king... above and beyond the law. which rather goes against everything the founding fathers of the US wanted after their break with Britain

But then we had a king many many years ago who ignored the people, their representatives and believed himself above the law. we cut his head off.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: let's hope they win

Or print at all when its done the maximum number of head cleans and has to go back to canon for 'fixing'

(reality: taking the inkpad out and pressing power on and FF waiting for it to beep 3 times then release both buttons and press FF to reset the cleaning counter)

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

I wondered why one customer's CAD models came in looking like they were done in crayon.......

Or maybe he was the guy who wired up a HP pump backwards, then 'adjusted' the wiring in the cabinet to cope.

Worked really well until we happened to have a HP pump go down and we swapped it with that one.

Icon gives some idea of what happened>>>>>

Indian armed forces gives Windows its marching orders, but only for desktop warriors

Re: If you must drop Windows...

Quote

"The biggest issue with a Linux desktop isn't so much functionality (although it plays some part), it's the lack of viable/usable industrial strength desktop applications."

Roughly translated

Linux lacks m$ office

if we can run our controls on Linux, why do we need windows? because the CAD package we use wont run on anything else (no matter how much we whine to the suppliers... )

FTX crypto-clown Sam Bankman-Fried couldn't even do house arrest. Now he's in jail

Re: Does this mean he now has to change his name to Sam Bankman-Jailed?

Quote

"Cryptocurrencies are going to increase in value for ever. Therefore FTX depositors will rarely want to withdraw the. Therefore I can do what I like with them and nobody will every know. Also my parents work at Stanford and I went to MIT so I must be really clever."

At which point the banks, having turned down your application for a $300 000 loan for new equipment secured on your $10 000 000 and 30 yr old business at a 6% interest rate, invests 13 billion dollars with this crypto startup thats only been running 3 weeks.

<had a boss with a sense of humour failure friday afternoon after meeting the bank manager...

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Re: Or the really annoying

1/8 Irish on my dad's side

And a fan of father ted too

DRINK!

ARSE!

FEK!

THAT!........ would be an ecumenical matter

(to be honest I could have using zarking, then finished with 'belgium' but I would'nt stoop that low)

Or the really annoying

"Did you deliver <X> parts as promised?" from a customer that really deserves the reply

"Fek off to your fekking loading dock you lazy arse fekker and fekking well look, its like a fekking 20 fekking foot walk from your fekking office to check with your fekking dockmaster who should have handed you the fekking paperwork fekking yesterday.. "

Of course we cant say that... but roughly translated thats what our answer is

Note : please replace the work 'fekking' with a swear word of your choice

Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns

Re: "and freed them up to focus on more sophisticated tasks beyond the scope of automation"

Peeing in a bottle at amazon 'forfillment centers'* will soon be a thing of the past as the employment contracts are going to be modified for more efficiency

In other words, you'll be forced to wear a catheter and the bottle will be strapped to your leg and you'll empty at the end of your shift...... although more likely it will be a special amazon bottle that will filter/process the liquid and return drinkable(if slightly warm) water to the user so that they can take a drink break without stopping.

* that phrase is just so cave johnston

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

Re: We tried it

Tried it with Java using a simple serializable class for holding a bit of text ... failed

Tried it with some 6502 assembly code........ illegal command .

If i've got to spend ages tuning the input to chapgpt in order to get decent code out... I may as well save myself the bother and write the code myself...

We tried it

And then tried a subset of an infinite bunch of monkeys hammering at an infinite number of keyboards.

The monkeys made better code

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

Any bets on the

server having a root account of 'admin' and a password of '1234' ?

And answers as to "why wasn't this data encrypted?"

Hide and seek in outer space highlights a battle here on Earth

Science

is all about convincing someone to fund your latest project which will do some science

Then after the project is underway/completed , convincing them that the answer you found was the one you were looking for not just some random breakthrough in quantum entanglement which means all crypto is now worthless and computers 2000 times faster(except when running windows 12)