Posts by Anonymous Coward

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Certainly the earliest ones, yes. It's described as "mechanical turk".

There's an Amazon division for it.

Re: Good episode, but take note:

I always figured that the "proof" in the pudding refers to alcohol content.

Seems a waste of alcohol, but does explain the nice puddings

Congress ctrl-Zs bulk of proposed cuts to NASA science

Re: Stall tactics

Attacking a NATO member, as Trump has mooted, could well result in mushroom clouds.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Good

Am I the only person to read this and think "good"?

I run an email service and I'm sick of clueless users adding a perfectly good account to gmail in that way, then complaining when it doesn't behave properly.

Add the account to the gmail app on your phone if you feel that you have to, but don't get gmail servers to collect directly.

My servers support IMAP(s) and POP3(s) natively and if you can't handle those there's a webmail interface as well. No need to pull anything through a third party.

Brit lands invite-only Aussie visa after uncovering vuln in government systems

Re: Government wishful thinking

Also an Olympic medallist will bring useful knowledge with them, which they can use to train the next generation of medallists.

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

as "the AC poster above" (not actually AC), I agree with you on that point. They need a table number*, food choice and payment. Anything else is mission creep.

* table number can be omitted if it's a counter collection, in which case they return a token number instead.

The digital menu screens are fine. It's the people who configure them to switch/animate in a way that makes them hard to read that are the problem.

Having the signs update to strike out anything that is no longer available has saved quite a lot of time, in my experience.

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

No, a lot of the time I prefer to not have to interact with people, so give us the choice.

If I do the order myself, it won't be transcribed badly, nor bits forgotten. Or at least if that does happen I can't blame someone else.

Fine dining is a different matter, but airport dining should be as transactional as possible in my opinion.

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

That's only because it's a preview feature at this stage

Japan loses another H3 launcher, plus the satnav bird it carried

> How do you, repeatedly, misplace 500 tons of rocket?

Generally by firing it towards space and then having an engine go "off nominal"

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: TSR

Happy?? Your memory obviously isn't as good as mine

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

Re: 12 is not A.M. or P.M.

12 is not A.M or P.M. it is just M - meridiem - meri diem - middle of the day.

Which makes me question why some people use it to refer to the middle of the night as well.

Re: Give "us" an approximation...

I must admit that I read that as "less than four point eight microseconds clock error. That's about four microseconds" and thought "huh?"

I guess the mu symbol (μ) that should be there was too difficult to find and thus it had to be explained, badly.

Re: Give "us" an approximation...

No, it is less than 4.8 microseconds. There is no 'slightly' about it.

Re: Please help with with those weird times...

Local time includes a defined timezone - which in many places will be different for DST, so the mapping can still be one-to-one.

Weird behaviours around leap-seconds excepted. But anything depending on powershell won't care about the odd second here or there.

Re: NTP

But also someone who has experienced UPS faults, hence not all of them using local backup.

DC power fails, there are servers powered from local UPS. Local UPS fails, there are servers powered from the DC.

Diversification is useful!

Re: NTP — remind me what the N stands for…

Personally, I would hope that remote admin had been disabled on such infrastructure. Stuff that absolutely mustn't be adjusted has no reason to be remotely adjustable.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

In fairness, I've seen a huge number of "x hasn't worked since y was installed" when x and y are completely unrelated pieces of kit... that turns out to be that when the engineer installed y they dislodged a cable that goes to x, or generates RF interference, or blocks a signal.

You can declare it unlikely and it can be technically/logically impossible, but never rule it out until you've confirmed it.

I've learned that people don't react well to being told outright that they're wrong. I've become quite diplomatic with it. I'll often go with: "we have a saying in the IT world: trust, but verify. In the same way as an electrician will trust that you've turned the switch off but will still check that the circuit isn't live, I'd just like to confirm ..."

In the article's case that would probably be followed up with "the connection was loose at the other end, so was probably intermittent. I've re-terminated it so should be OK now" - gives them an element of them being right when we know that they were spewing bullshit.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: Live and learn

I can advise that amongst the athletic population it's usually the less well-endowed gender that requires nipple protection. They chafe on the inside of a shirt/vest, particularly in cold/wet conditions. The more well-endowed tend to wear a sports bra to hold everything in place and thus don't experience the same chafing.

The problem with Devon pasties is that they adorn them in the wrong order

Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco, contributing to two deaths

Re: Handsets?

And specifically the phone needs to know what constitutes an emergency call, so it needs to know that 000 is the local emergency number.

A very old (think late 90s) hack, that I most certainly did not perform, allowed you to configure what numbers the phone treated that way. It didn't take the networks long to block 'emergency' calls to non-emergency numbers.

NASA tries savin' MAVEN as Mars probe loses contact with Earth

The car is 116,505,913 miles (187,498,150 km, 1.253 AU, 10.42 light minutes) from Mars, moving toward the planet at a speed of 10,901 mi/h (17,543 km/h, 4.87 km/s).

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Re: Backup, back up, back up

Why not on someone else's machine someplace?

As long as it's not your only copy and it's suitably encrypted, it's fine.

Actually it's the easiest way to have an off-site backup - rent a machine somewhere online to use as a backup destination; just don't count on that particular one being available when you need to access a backup. It's not a substitute for a hard disk stored unpowered in your parent/child's safe, but it's still useful.

Basically: backup on RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Destinations ;-)

Re: Tasmania-based evangelist

Wasn't there a cautionary biblical tale about the dangers of apples, especially those sold to you by a snake???

Roomba maker iRobot gets cleaned out in Chapter 11

... and you eventually married her anyway??

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: Vimes' Law

If you're the sort of government that likes to monitor citizens, you're probably best setting up a VPN service undercutting commercial ones in your local currency. That way you can directly monitor the traffic of people who want extra privacy for whatever they're doing.

Re: Vimes' Law

The other way to attack tor would be to do what the USA did: host enough nodes yourself to be able to correlate traffic.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Error message

All they'll do then is reboot the computer. Or turn the screen off and leave.

These days it's far better to log the issue directly. Certainly save log files so it can be diagnosed later.

Error message

In some bespoke software I'd written there was a should-never-happen scenario which produced an error message along the lines of "phone Anonymous Coward and tell them this number: 168702342" (there were several such messages each with different numbers) - this was a debug build intended to pinpoint the conditions that led to the should-never-happen happening.

I took such a call, stating "I was using the software and an error popped up saying I should call you and give you a number" "OK, what was the number?" "I don't know, I've closed the window now"

Unofficial IETF draft calls for grant of five nonillion IPv6 addresses to ham radio operators

I fully support the idea of giving a bunch of technical experimenters the resources to experiment with, but the scale seems wildly excessive. Are they wanting to assign an IP address to every Hz in the spectrum?

The whole "IPv6 has 340 undecillion addresses" argument is moot if you're dishing them out in blocks of 5 nonillion - we'll run out eventually, and a lot sooner than people think.

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

I assumed it was not a UK based story, given the statement "valued at more than $50,000" along with the example domains being .com and referring to 'cart' (In the UK at that time it was all baskets)

There's a footnote on the article:

"*It's the one that grew out of a bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain and has a name that sounds like a law firm, not the one named after a river"

So presumably Barnes & Noble

Aviation delays ease as airlines complete Airbus software rollback

Re: Something doesn't add up

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."

Re: Something doesn't add up

The equivalent of switch debouncing: wait until the data is in a stable state before acting on it.

Then someone comes along and "optimises" the code - "why are we waiting here? Delete"

That's my experience anyway... I'll leave it to you to work out whether I was the one who wrote the initial code, or the one who sped it up.

UK gov blames budget leak on misconfigured WordPress plugin, server

Re: Embargoed content

With a proper web server you just schedule (using `at`) to move the file into the appropriate place at the appropriate time. (it's stored outside the DocumentRoot until then)

But they're using a hosted wordpress, so obviously not a proper web server.

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

Re: Stopper failure

They'll be rewarded with a free flying lesson.

Re: Not really

The backup plan is to leave astronauts up there for a bit longer. There's (IIRC) about 6 months of reserve food etc on the ISS, so why rush?

Butch and Suni where fully trained astronauts and happy to stay up there doing useful work, which gave NASA and Boeing a chance to check out the calamity capsule properly before deorbiting it. Doing that meant they couldn't park another dragon, so no point launching one early.

Of course they can't publicly state this while His Orangeness is in power as that would contravene his declarations and therefore lead to massive budget cuts.

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

Well, the sun is shining while things are raining down...

Rosalind Franklin rover catches a break as NASA reaffirms commitment

Re: Or...

Haven't you heard? The Donald needs a new throne.

(in the euphemistic sense or otherwise)

Google links Android’s Quick Share to Apple’s AirDrop, without Cupertino’s help

Re: Why bother?

There are standards. OBEX - either OBEX Push or OBEX FTP

From phone I can hit share, select bluetooth. From PC right-click on bluetooth and select 'receive file'. Very similar process the other way around.

As the article states, this was a protocol built for InfraRed and ported to bluetooth, which gives you an idea as to how old it is.

Re: Why bother?

> "The free LocalSend app allows me to quickly and easily share files wirelessly between devices running Android, macOS, iOS, Linux, and Windows"

Yes, and basically every bluetooth implementation I've come across in the last 20 years will also do all of that. But using Quick Share or AirDrop will be easier and more secure.

Why apple refuse interoperability is beyond me though.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Those were the innocent days...

The kernel handles the networking side, so if there's a vulnerability in socket handling or similar, it's not the mail daemon that needs updating. Kernel update basically requires a reboot.

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

Lugging that heavy UPS around, I expect he was a hotmail

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Re: How can this work?

It'll be powered by a big nuclear reactor, some distance away, with wireless power transfer.

Might not be the most efficient use of the available fusion material, but that power is in abundance at those altitudes, so shouldn't cause an issue.

You can now put your US passport into Apple Wallet for domestic travel

Re: If the TSA agent knows

I assume that deportees are ascribed a negative value, so deporting to Heard & McDonald will only increase the trade deficit. Up the tariffs!!!

VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

Re: Errrrr

The article quite succinctly stated that.

It also stated "VLC is now a recursive acronym, officially short for "VLC Media Player."" - that doesn't meet not my definition of recursive.

My definition of recursive it, naturally, "something that is recursive"

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

I particularly liked the way he concealed absolutely nothing until after the robot had been hauled off stage.

AI slop hits new high as fake country artist goes to #1 on Billboard digital songs chart

Re: Breaking Rust

We should tell AI to FO.

Sorry, FeO