Posts by Nick Ryan

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: speaking of usb

From memory I didn't experience any problems beyond an occasional system reset when live swapping the plugs.

I suspect the real risk was the power from VCC winding up where it's not expected but the keyed nature of the plugs made this near impossible. The very occasional system resets that I remember were probably either a power rush failure on the motherboard triggering unstable power somewhere actually important or a device handler failure (or both). Even these happened so rarely and later systems were much more forgiving and just didn't care that when forgetting to plug the keyboard and/or mouse in, we just plugged them in anyway. Caution was still there though, therefore care was taken on production server systems.

Re: speaking of usb

Which was fine until you found some arse of a device manufacturer had either helpfully decided to swap the colours or to not bother with PS/2 colours at all. It didn't help that PS/2 devices are not hot swappable (there was a risk of motherboard damage if doing so, probably small but it was reported to be a risk) but usually if the damn things didn't work it was just a case of power off and swap them around.

Re: Every single time

USB was there, but quite new. Also USB modems tended to suck balls so anyone with any sense tended to either use one connected to a serial port or, at worst, a USB serial port adaptor. Modems later started to be build in to laptops but that often brought a whole new world of pain due to some not being connected to an internal serial port and instead requiring specific, inevitably very poor quality, drivers to barf into action. Things did improve eventually, but it was painful.

Logitech's Wave Keys tries to bend ergonomics without breaking tradition

Re: Horrible layout

I wouldn't say that it's the worst by far. I can't see where the Insert key has been squirrelled away but other than that the big issue is the horrible determination to replace function keys with the usual arbitrary set of functions instead - these are inconsistent across every damn keyboard and vendor and make the simplest of function key presses an exercise in risk. At least they didn't put a bloody power/sleep key on the keyboard (any keyboard designer doing this needs to be summarily beaten to death with their own keyboard)

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Re: like video games localization

I suspect that while the larger studios are more likely to have the capacity to support Linux, their existing toolchains and in-house processes and libraries probably don't and adjusting the momentum of these is likely to be hard particularly with accountants looking at the figured.

Smaller teams are more likely to start from fresh and to want to include as many potential markets as possible from the outset rather as this is easier to do from the start.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

I'm not sure that Windows 2000 suffered from USB-induced BSODs either.

What is much more recent though is Windows just being dumb with USB configuration and deciding that a device is no longer working even though it works perfectly fine. Unplug from one USB port and plug into another and Windows detects it and uses it just fine. It was the point that a good few years ago I wrote a small application to purge dead USB device entries so we'd stop running out Windows caused unusable USB ports. Hard to remember, but I think that stopped being so necessary from Windows 7 onwards.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Re: He really?

While commonly laughed at, and often for good reason, Abort, Retry, Ignore were quite a sensible set of options when attempting to read data from an testy storage medium - such as floppy disk.

Abort - just give up entirely

Retry - try getting the data again, just in case the god of magnetism and motor whirring are feeling generous today

Ignore - ignore this error knowing that the data is crap and move onto the next bit of data (and hope).

Re: Phased data?

Maths such as division using Roman numerals becomes rather more interesting than expected because we'd naturally try and use our modern positional number techniques and these are not transferrable to number systems with discrete values. This didn't mean that Roman mathematicians and engineers couldn't do maths, just that their techniques were different to compensate.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

I suspect we all have at some point. It's even more embarrassing when having just taken the screenshot, laughed about clicking on it, and then doing it again... :)

I had to work with someone who decided that a mouse should be held sideways as that was how she could use her thumb and finger to press the buttons. She had decided that she hated using computers as a result but got very defensive when shown how a mouse should be held. Just trying to use a mouse in that way was really hard (and I tried it out, of course) but amazing what humans can get used to in if necessary.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Re: "Replace the passwords!!!!"

Replacing the secret, changeable component in authentication with a non-secret non-changeable component is never going to improve security. Biometrics can verify identity, but that is different to authentication.

Re: Hardware or software

However, Hollywood loves fingerprint, iris and face recognition for authentication purposes in films therefore idiots have to try and implement this in reality.

Replacing the secret and changeable component of authentication with something that is neither secret nor changeable is only ever going to reduce security.

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

Good call - that would definitely work.

Donald Duck? How about Scrooge McDuck?

Although Donald Duck's habit of going incandescent with rage, spitting and frothing at the bill are pretty apt.

Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

Re: Enshittification ahoy!

Precisely, combine it with this sentence from the article:

Figma has four million users, including a little under 1,000 paying customers. The vector-based graphic editor and prototyping toolmaker was founded in 2016 and has taken in around $330 million funding to date.

and we have a service that so far has cost $330 million on 1,000 paying customers - or $330,000 per paying customer. That's an insanely poor ratio and while loss leading is a standard approach for finding VC funding, this really demonstrates the ridiculous extent of this practice. It's all about persuading the VCs that "there will be big money sometime in the future, and it's will definitely, absolutely, be much higher than the ~10% (whatever) you'd make elsewhere." Then Adobe come along and validate this approach by offering $20m per paying customer...

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Seems to me that ...

Yeah true, think of all the heathens that don't pronounce gigabyte it something like Jijabyte instead...

Microsoft's Swiss army knife app hopes to cut through cloud clutter

Yep, keeping vaguely up to date with whatever nonsense happens in the land of Microsoft's PowerShell commands is all about that...

January: Here's the new revision of the PowerShell library you now need to use. It's 50/50 as to whether or not it's entirely compatible with the previous version, sometimes just doing a search/replace on the command names is all that is required (why inflict this?) other times more disruptive changes have been applied.

September: We've deprecated this new PowerShell library and now you need to use Microsoft Graph instead. By the way, not all the functionality that was in the previous PowerShell libraries are in this new version yet.

October: We've updated that Microsoft Graph and it is now no longer available, use this new Microsoft Graph interface instead. Some functionality has been moved into one library, some into another library. Some has just disappeared entirely. Also we still haven't bothered to update the documentation and command have a 50/50 chance of either being auto-doc generated nonsense or referring to a different command entirely...

...and then if continues the same the following year.

Great. So this is the fiftieth attempt at some nonsense unification application to turn everything separate into one thing.

We already have this. It's called a bloody Operating System where we can pick and choose the appropriate and available tool for what we want to do and use our choice (rapidly diminishing) of web browser to access whatever hosted services we want to.

It's Microsoft Bob level stupidity all over again, just a different generation or marketing-tards.

Unfortunately the hosted services are often different to what we want, or only hosted when we'd rather have actual control.

Japan Airlines fuels up on hydrogen hype with eye on cleaner skies

Re: Thinking outside the box

To be fair to the highly explosive Hindenberg, a critical issue with it was the flammability of the hydrogen containers, not the hydrogen itself. Which is slightly astonishing considering how reactive hydrogen can be.

Good point. Regular fuel has high energy density without having to worry about maintaining a very low temperature and/or high pressure. By comparison it's a pretty damn stable liquid that can just be poured in where it's needed. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a pathological escape artist by way of containment and that's before temperature and pressure are considered.

Hydrogen is no solution to everything but niche applications do have value. While commercial airlines aren't exactly niche, they are highly regulated and controlled which given hydrogen is probably what is required.

It'd be interesting to learn how the efficiencies pan out between hydrogen fuel cells generating electricity to power motors compared to just directly burning hydrogen.

While I think hydrogen fuel cells are great/cool technology, the downsides of them including providing a clean enough oxygen supply, what they are made of and their waste heat are some challenges to overcome, particularly compared to the relatively very well understood process of "exploding stuff for movement" (internal combustion engine) and how the modifications to use hydrogen are relatively minor to do this. I suspect that once going the heat generated through either process would be used to warm up the cryogenically stored hydrogen so it's not going to be entirely wasted.

NASA and Boeing try to chase the contrail clouds away

Re: Don't take away my chemtrails!

Seeing as "6" is the number of the beast and the word for "6" has three letters in it, this makes the expansion of it 666G. We all know that that means don't we? It's simple, sheeples, G is the 7th letter of the alphabet meaning that the real plan will be executed with the turn on of global/flerfal 7G technology. 6G is our last chance. All poles having HD 6G wires attached to them must be immediately burnt down. Especially if these poles are attached to each other in any way, forming a network of control and manipulation.

Don't forget creationists and mud flooders too.

Oh, and some people who are so batshit insane that they think there is a parallel solar system in our solar system. Saw a "review" of one of these and it was 100% nut job material making numerology look rational.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: Wait a minute...

Oh I'd forgotten about that film. Just insane!

WhatsApp AI happily added guns to chat stickers of Palestinians, but not Israelis

An increase in population over decades is not any reason whatsoever for you to excuse for genocide.

The increase in population is also due to land grabs, as in subsuming more land, not just rampant population growth as you appear to be indirectly referring to.

You mention hate a lot, it is currently coming across that you blindly hate Palestinians with the same passion that some of the Israeli politicians are on the record have - of dehumanising them, calling them animals and so on, no matter what it takes to deflect from their actions and to try to play down their actions. These are humans too,.

As for your outrageous statement about "alleged oppression" - there is evidence of it all the time. Evidence changes it from "somebody said" to "here is the clear photographic testimony of what happened".

/sigh.

People who accuse Israel of genocide just can't stop lying to justify their hatred of Jews having equal human rights to others

It's not accusation, it's observation of the actions of the nation state of Israel both in what it has been pursuing for a while and is now openly pursuing.

Calling out the racist, apartheid and genocidal actions of the nation state of Israel is not in any way anti-Jew or anti-semetic. It is calling out the evil actions of a nation state, empowered by what-about-isms and enablers.

None of this means that the actions of the Hamas terrorist group in murdering Israeli people was in any way correct or acceptable. It's kind of understandable to see how "someone" snapped after so many years of oppression, and it should never have happened. However, the should also be responsibility for the background scenario behind this - the intentional international ignorance of the actions of the nation state of Israel over many years - this empowered and allowed them to continue pursuing this. Similar to how the international community didn't react in any meaningful way to the Russian annexation of Crimea which empowered and enabled Putin to decide on a subsequent invasion of the rest of Ukraine.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Re: The File Server kept randomly conking out

In an previous office we had cleaners who regularly plugged their vacuum cleaners into the desktop power sockets - which have a 2A fuse in them. The damn cleaner just went around the office blowing fuses until the found a socket that randomly didn't blow, as such is the variability of fuses). Similar was a member of staff that decided they were too important to use the kettle in the kitchen and brought their own kettle into the office to use on the same desktop power sockets with the inevitable fuse blowing results. Naturally, they tried hiding that they had done this...

Re: "set about installing one"

Yep, there's a difference between work that I'm happy to undertake at home compared to in the office.

Not that I'm going to compromise safety at home in any way (likely the opposite compared to many electricians) just that I'm not covered for such commercial works and the regulations are different.

What it does mean is that I have a better understanding of what needs to be done, the annoying gotchas that are typically inflicted, and also to identify when shoddy work has been done. Such as:

• Plugs fitted with exposed inner wires - apparently fitted by an electrician and signed off
• Finding 240v electrics in metal under-desk cable trays with exposed copper. I had a complete fit about this one
• Cat5e cabling which was apparently tested fully by a professional except I found all manner of non-working wires (could have fallen out over time, but unlikely if fitted properly) and a gem recently where two wires were pushed into the same connector (not something that would ever pass even the simplest of testing nor something that could have just happened over time).

Re: Not Unusual

It's the best assumption both for safety and just annoyances sake. Also when drilling or cutting into something, use a depth limiter to prevent accidental drills or cuts too far.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Probably because even the utterly racist Braverman couldn't find a way to blame the (legal) small boats for this one. Therefor it becomes a "think of the children" excuse instead, while carefully ignoring that almost all child abuse happens in the home, or by individuals who are very close to family.

Robot mistakes man for box of peppers, kills him

Re: Doubt it "mistaked him"

There definitely is, however it's still not always possible to see what is going on due to lighting conditions, the cramped or congested spaces where the actual issue is visible from. Sometimes just strapping a camera using cable ties was all that was required, although routing power and video signal was the next problem to solve.

A later generation of the same system did have a camera designed into the system to allow for better visibility. It wasn't perfect, but just being able to observe 60-70% of the issues by camera was a lot better than not being able to.

Re: Doubt it "mistaked him"

Yes, it did depend on the motor as to what was implemented. The cheaper/simpler the motor tend to just have the power pulled, stepper motors tended to use the "QuickStop" or equivalent.

For those aren't aware industrial control motors tend to have control circuit power input as well as a separate motor power input, cutting the motor input would stop the robot but momentum would continue motion and depending on the axis, gravity assisted movement could continue. Many motors also had a dedicated stop input "QuickStop" which stopped the motor movement as fast as possible, including applying brakes, reversing current, whatever it took and held the motor in place. Software control of such stop signals was an absolute no-no, these had to be hard wired into the safety circuitry.

Some of the scariest things I worked with were conveyor lifts. Just a straight up/down movement of a bucket in a chute. With a very strong motor, a lot of speed and a nice sharp edge to get a limb trapped against when they operated. Nobody sane was going to work with those without personally ensuring that the power to the motor had been removed. Checking their operation was something done from a distance, which at least being simple was easy to do. The real hazard came when something was stuck in them and the temptation was to just simply reach in and take it out. When removing the power was not a practical route, stuffing the hole of the chute with hammers, wrenches and whatever else large and solid was at hand and then grabbing what was stuck in the chute was the practical alternative. Grabbing sticks were a suitable tool to use too, should they be available.

Re: Doubt it "mistaked him"

I've worked with robotic systems, including ones that could accelerate at frankly lunatic speeds in a closed environment where there was just nowhere to dodge out of the way.

We had hand held wired dead-man kill switches for a reason and these were REQUIRED to be tied directly into the power circuit. No crappy software that could go wrong, no further checks, nothing other than us removing our finger from the trigger to stop the thing in its tracks. Momentum could still have been dangerous but nothing like the thing hitting one under power. The noise these things made when either their position sensors went astray or an operator accidentally had them manually move to the wrong spot/direction and they slammed into the end of their run and shook the entire assembly was rather loud. Some poor quality developers wanted these kill switches to be software interactive so their software could handle the shutdown in an orderly fashion: nope, not happening, never. Their crappy code had to handle the scenario gracefully, which deeply upset these poor developers who were unable to grasp the simplest elements of error handling and graceful failure. The control system was still operating, but the drive power to the motors was disabled and the kill switch trigger was easy to respond to. As long as the developer had a clue about concurrent processes, interrupts and so on (some just weren't capable of this).

Quite often we had to run the robots with some of the interlocks off, for example so we could open the door and see just what the damn thing was doing compared to what it was meant to be doing. That was a bit scary at times, and when trying to diagnose a single axis of movement we had to retain power to the entire robot. On those occasions we fitted g-cramps/clamps to the drive train as these should stop the robot accelerating, cause a positioning error and have the robot stop itself. Later we got proper shims for this but we still used the g-cramps/clamps as we liked the additional safety and level of control as we could attach these much closer to the robot itself. We also disconnected the robot from external control so we were the only ones able to make it move unexpectedly, and when on the odd occasion someone restored external control getting very narky was quite acceptable.

Essentially, in this case, there should have been a dead-man's switch wired in and in use. I do understand how using these is annoying as sometimes two hands are required, but this case demonstrates the importance of safety in the rare event that they are required. So many such operations will be undertaken without the safety in place or with it disabled because it's so much easier and faster and I've been there, done that myself. In this case not enough precautions were taken and this is the result.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Re: Ad death spiral

That's true. Good point about the devaluing of all advertising space - even the fabled Superbowl TV advert spots. The race to the bottom that has been successfully executed and it's now a case of scraping the barrel to see if there's anywhere lower to go.

Advertisers often forget that personal recommendation is the most powerful tool they have - therefore they faked these too.

Re: Chrome

Half the advantage of my media centre is that I have ripped the damn DVDs to it and as a result I don't have sit through the red-book breaking non-skippable adverts (typically Disney) and the lies about copyright violation being theft. It's not - it's copyright violation and cannot ever be theft (this doesn't mean that it's right, just that calling it "theft" is lying). The 20 minutes of adverts before the film one wanted to watch on VHS were bad enough, but abusing the DVD standard to make the damn things non-skippable is just taking it far too far.

When I want to watch a movie it starts pretty much instantly. That's the aim really. I don't start a movie to watch 20 minutes of adverts before it starts.

Re: Chrome

I used to enjoy watching F1. Then I found that what really happened was that I watched the start to how many cars stacked it into each other on the first corner and then I stopped paying any attention at all until the final couple of laps. Yeah, sometimes stuff happened somewhere in-between but not a lot really and I really found it hard to get excited by fuelling strategies and type change timings.

This doesn't stop the cars being amazing examples of engineering, just that the spectacle of the race itself just wasn't there.

Re: Cognitive dissonance

Content related advertising? Just who do you think you are, heretic. That would require effort and effort costs money. It's much cheaper to just throw lots of rubbish and hope some of it sticks - the difference between a 0.00001% click through rate and a 0.000001% click through rate isn't that much anyway. Today you will now be burned as a witch because that is what our profiling has categorised you as. Would you like legal advice or a new fat slimming pill? Get them while stocks are limited, they'll be delivered in 28 days.

Re: Cognitive dissonance

I use NoScript type extensions in this scenario. Really useless and crap websites rely on JavaScript to deliver any content but thankfully many still deliver the content with JavaScript turned off. Turn JavaScript off and there is no ad-blocker detection going on.

Re: Cognitive dissonance

Most local news sites, as in the online presence for local newspapers hit the ad death spiral years ago.

They used to be funded by print adverts, which is fine and we learned to ignore anything that we didn't care about. Which was usually most of them but occasionally such local papers had adverts in them for useful local services. It also worked for brand awareness, as one glimpsed the name of a company providing a service and while not wanting the service at the time, should one want the service that brand name would spring mind.

Therefore it was obvious to these local news sites that they needed advertising on their websites. At first, this brought in income but then the income reduced. Therefore they added more adverts. This brought in a little more income but then it reduced. Therefore they added more adverts. Being idiots they repeated this until their websites were 99.9% bullshit/scam adverts that made the content near impossible to look at or read with adverts following the reader down the page forcing page layout changes, popup content all over the content, doom scrolling and everything else bad about online advertising.

The fix is quality adverts, curated adverts. However that costs money and it's much easier just spaff as much rubbish as much as possible in the hope that some revenue happens to slide out of it. YouTube has gone this way such that without ad blockers it is nearly unusable to the level that local news sites are, just in video form. Vapid adverts that lie about whatever rubbish the are trying to sell, online game adverts for amazing games which are the same old pay-to-win crap and nothing whatsoever related to the advert, products that are plain dangerous or illegal with bogus medical claims, and so on. These play suddenly in the middle of words even, blare out at full volume and many are unskippable. Then they wonder why we use ad blockers.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Re: Dated Signage

Were 1950s coffee mugs really that dangerous?

Re: Plasma

I suspect this wouldn't work with a bare metal fuse (as in not encased in a sealed glass unit), but could it still work with a fuse in sand?

Re: That cat again...

Oh dear. Next somebody will tell me that I really should be testing small spaces which are described as "not enough space to spin a cat around in" using actual cats. I admit it's not easy, as cats are not the most cooperative creatures in the first place, and one sometimes to retire worn out cats, and cats come in different sizes, but one has to do one's best.

It was, unfortunately, a case of "shoot the messenger". Multiple messengers have been shot. We can only try :(

From observation, (of an ex-friend), the secret is to repeat the lie over and over and over again until the victim has no choice other than to accept it. Add in manipulation, psychological control over many years and whenever caught lying claim "I was only joking" and distract further. For brownie points steal money from a shared bank account for 10 years too, and lie about this and then lie about being happy that it's in the open now.

The other option is to just tell a more outrageous lie and repeat this process until the victim, or country/voter pool, is distracted by this and has forgotten about the first lie.

World leaders ink AI safety pacts while Musk and Sunak engage in awkward bromance

Re: What?

Like any other Tory, Truss has spent the time since blaming everyone and everything else for her abject failures. No responsibility whatsoever. She's enjoying the free income of course.

Re: Timescales?

I'm still waiting on AI rather than marketing branding nonsense.

What we currently have is LLM technologies that are essentially very cleverly put together instances of predictive text. Obviously rather more sophisticated than predictive text, but there is absolutely no intelligence anywhere to be had. There is no domain of knowledges being formed with propositions, tests and experimentation, just the munging together of scraped content from elsewhere which may, or may not, be accurate and is likely rather biased too. These tools are useful, but they are not and never can be "AI".

Re: Timescales?

What other people? They either don't matter or will have died of starvation, cold (energy bills) or health (it's critical to privatise all healthcare to these people - less poor people living and more money made)

Windows 11 23H2 is a Teams effort but Microsoft already spoiled the best bits

Re: Skype etc

I was with you until you got to Outlook Express. That thing deserved to be shot into the sun and removed from history (shudders) or, at best, used as an example of hundreds of ways NOT to do something.

Re: Teams is all the rage nowadays

Ah well that's where the mess of Microsoft comes in.

Skype as an amazingly useful product, peer-to-peer and provided great connectivity for millions around the world. Especially when people lived in different countries.

Microsoft bought Skype and decided to centralise it, so everything went through Microsoft's servers instead. This provided more opportunity for revenue and advertising but much worse performance for many users. At this point in time "skype" was pretty much a verb, as in you would "skype someone".

Microsoft also had the shit-show that was Lync, Microsoft's take on telephony. It was an indescribably awful product, prone to random failures, utterly annoying to try and manage and best avoided at all costs. It also the Lync client which was yet another of Microsoft's instant messaging applications (does anybody even remember MSN/M Messager now?). To ensure confusion, Microsoft renamed the Lync client Skype for Business which was lovely except for some utterly odd reason, users were confused as to why Skype and Skype for Business were not interoperable (can't think why). Through various botched updates to both, Microsoft implemented a little compatibility between the two Skypes but it was also half-arsed and almost never worked.

Then a quick hack project came up called "Teams" and Microsoft decided that rather than continue the existing strong brand of Skype that they'd call this "Teams" and use it for business use. Oh, and then decide later to foist it on non-business users which really is plumbing the depths of crap branding. One does not "teams" one's mother. Not in the civilised world, anyway. This limited hack project then had more crap added to it, hence the appalling inconsistent and very unintuitive user interface and that it took so long for it to, sort of, support more than one account.

Now we have Teams Classic, Teams Basic, Teams Professional, Teams New, Teams, Teams (embedded into Windows 11) and doubtless a few other naming horrors in the shit show that is Microsoft marketing and development. It's becoming more and more annoying to interact with external parties through Teams as when it fails, and it does, we just don't know what version they might happen to be using. Hell, ensuring a consistent version internally within an organisation is near impossible.

So with previous form, Microsoft have bought an established product/name and murdered it. Another notable one was Hotmail which at one point was quite popular, but is now "Outlook" - except when it's "office" of course!

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: No corruption here.

That's one of those old tales that's just wrong. While dust does contain some skin and hair, the much larger proportion comes from fabrics.