Posts by Vincent Ballard

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Fooled me.

I have long held that Starbucks doesn't sell coffee: it sells milk and ice.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Unless you're using something like quail's eggs, I'm curious about the keyboard layout which allows you to mistype either 60 or 70 as 20. (According to the box of eggs I have in the kitchen, "large" eggs are 63 to 73g, and that particular box averages 66.5g).

Re: Before boiling

I keep my eggs in the fridge in summer, but not in winter. Same with butter. Where I live, summer temperatures are mid-30s and winter temperatures are low teens.

Cyberattack on NHS causes hospitals to miss cancer care targets

Re: Pick Your Poison.............

The US' disruptor is an individual acting for his own private benefit without any thought of the general public, so if you have any coherent point at all it's hard to work out what it is.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

Re: Christmas party

Easy mistake to make given that the previous "board" was miswritten.

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Bluffing

> Have you ever found a fix despite not being an expert in the troubled tech you were asked to tend?

I've maintained code in languages I don't know, and in one case I didn't even know what the language was, but generally it's possible to reverse engineer the syntax by looking at the rest of the program. It only becomes a major problem when you need to know the type system.

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Re: I agree.

That's pig slaughtering. Turning a dead pig into manageable chunks is a lot more work.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: Not bad...

I'm at the opposite extreme. Back when I was a cub scout, we had a trip to the library in the nearest town and the librarians wanted to demonstrate their computer system, so they asked whether any of us had a library card. I did, so they tried to find my account by searching on my first and last name. Then they asked whether I had a middle name. They managed to find me on the fourth page of results of people living in the same county who shared my first, middle and surname. I can hide by being a tree in a very large forest.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

You comment about Kim is on point, but Putin didn't self-build. He was a mid-flier in the Leningrad KGB (whose career was helped by the purge following the exfiltration of a defector, Oleg Gordievsky, by the SIS) whose superiors gave him permission to change tracks to politics. He's managed to consolidate power quite effectively, but previous generations set up his empire for him and helped him on his way.

AI hiring bias? Men with Anglo-Saxon names score lower in tech interviews

I hadn't noticed that, and you're right that it seems weird, but there are scenarios where it's not as weird as it seems. Maybe she's a mature student doing a second undergrad degree because she's the rare marketer who actually wants to understand the product they're selling. Actually, correct the end of my first sentence to "weird in a different way".

(On the question of undergrad theses in general: at my university it was called a dissertation and it didn't have to be novel research, but the end-of-course project was a substantial paper, on the order of 10000 words.)

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

$QATOOLS/bin, $QATOOLS/etc, $QATOOLS/incl, $QATOOLS/var

Everything beyond this point was superfluous, because we could all tell exactly what was going to happen.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Doesn't the UK celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the 4th July? With double reason nowadays...

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

Re: Disney villain act.

It probably can't qualify as attempted murder without a specific target victim, but there will be some equivalent to reckless endangerment.

He did.

That song's really twisted. You hear the title and the upbeat tune and you think it's about growing as a person by not holding onto resentment, but when you look at the full lyrics it's really about growing as a villain by not suppressing your destructive desires.

Homing pigeon missiles, dead trout swimming, butt breathing honored with Ig Nobel Prize

I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: 'larger than life' characters with a low center of gravity, ginger beard, and spectacles.

Some quick Googling brings up pages which suggest that ginger hair has the lowest density of strands per unit area and that darker hair has thicker strands, so ginger beards probably weigh less than other colours after correction for beard length.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Re: "at least one screen on our network that looks like this for a few seconds"

In-bus displays seem to be particularly prone to problems. My latest photo in this collection is a blue screen of "your computer needs recovery" from Schippol taken 10 days ago, although since it was taken with the camera of a cheap phone it's not worth sending in.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

My biology teacher claimed that the shape of the rubber plant leaves was due to damage from thrown board rubbers.

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Coincidence or what !!!

Probably not water nymphs, but Palermo's not too far from where Charybdis used to hang out, as related in the Odyssey.

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

Re: The scissor graphic...

I don't think they're scissors at all. That's a single blade with no hinge. It's a very impractical dagger with a knuckleduster-style grip.

Re: The ghost of 9/11 casts a long shadow

A friend had a job as a security trainer for our regional airline in about 2010. His comment on the theatre of the knife ban was that there was a fire axe in the cabin crew equipment.

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

Re: "This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue"

I interpreted her intent as "social media is a great industry", and thought that she'd misplaced the "stain".

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

Re: "We will not be able to delay revocation beyond that date and time."

They're afraid that if they delay more than 24 hours, the browsers will implement official policy and remove their root certificates from the browsers' trusted list, causing all of their certificates (and not merely the 0.4% at issue) to become worthless for interactions involving anything other than wget/curl/equivalent.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Strange policemen

In English law they had just assaulted the shop worker by threatening to batter them. Assault doesn't require contact: just the "apprehension of immediate unlawful violence".

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Peter Kay has a routine on mondegreens. My favourite is Duffy's "Begging you for birdseed".

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

I have an A/S in electronics and a degree in computer science, but I never build my own machines because I'm not confident in my ability to correctly install the CPU's heat-sink. I spec them out (IMO pre-designed ones always skimp on RAM) and get a local shop to build them.

BOFH: It's not generative AI at all, it's degenerate AI

Three?

Who's the third human? And how long before she quits because she finds the BofH and PFY too creepy?

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

"Welding" and "soldering" is the same word in Spanish, and I wouldn't be surprised if English is the only language that distingushes them, due to its tendency to take a Germanic word and its equivalent French word and give them subtly different meanings.

US Space Force wanted $77M to reinforce GPS – and Congress shot it down

Re: Sees a great idea

The point that the committee is making seems to be that they're only asking for $77M now for the next proof of concept, but the whole thing would be $1000M. If they're not willing to splurge the billion, there's no point paying for the PoC.

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

For sacrifices when installing Windows updates on the domain controller?

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: Input validation

My bank has an automated system to use it for authentication when you phone them, before they connect you to an operator. The bank also switched from numeric-only passwords to alphanumeric ones. But, and it's a big one, although you can enter numbers by dialling, for letters you have to use voice recognition, and the voice recognition fails spectacularly for me. The last time I tried it I made six attempts on the phone and then gave up and went across town to visit "my" branch.

Re: I've seen worse

Even more fun in bilingual regions / countries. Google Maps seems to select the language to show at random independently for each section of the same road.

In Spain a moderate number of roads are named after the dates of significant events. Or, at least, events which the councillors at the time deemed significant. I have no idea which of the many events of Spanish history which occurred on the 2nd of April is behind the naming of the street C/ 2 de abril in my city.

Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5,000/night hotel room

Re: failed meeting

The best mistaken city story I've heard, which may be apocryphal but I hope that it's true, involved the delivery of a large dragon prop/costume for a performance of Wagner's Ring cycle in his home town of Bayreuth. My source for the story didn't explicitly mention telephones, but the address must have been dictated rather than provided in writing, because the merchandise was sent instead to Beirut.

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Don't follow the instructions

Sometimes the documentation was written second, but the system has changed underneath it. I've got a document which explains how to do a fairly complex sequence of steps in the Azure Portal, and every time I use it I discover that the Portal's UI has changed.

Sleuths who cracked Zodiac Killer's cipher thank the crowd

No, I'm not making this up

It's known as Muphry's Law.

Security pioneer Ross Anderson dies at 67

Re: Retiremant Age

Before reading your post I had been thinking that I recall various professors emeriti floating around, still enjoying themselves and probably making useful contributions, so I was unsure that retirement from official administrative responsibilities would have much effect, but the issue you raise about grants more than clarifies that uncertainly. Thank you.

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

Re: That headline

Isn't it "I take full responsibility, which is why I've fired the person who was to blame"?

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

I'm not saying that the meme is correct: just trying to save other people who had the same idle curiosity as me a bit of searching.

And desserts.

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

Apparently the first McD's in Argentina opened in 1986, so 4 years postbellum.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Re: Zoozve orbit

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/524522_Zoozve

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Curious 6000kva?

Here in Spain there aren't many pubs, but there are plenty of bars and cognac for breakfast is not unheard-of in the heading-for-retirement generation and above.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: Compensation?

I think you're misparsing that. It would be "I will tell the truth now if you give me immunity for having not told the truth earlier".

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Re: Dye Houses

The warmth? I accidentally filled my parents' bathroom with ladybirds a couple of years ago when visiting them at Christmas. I opened the window slightly before showering, to avoid steaming the room up, unaware that there were dozens of ladybirds enjoying the warmth and possibly humidity escaping through the cracks in the frame.

Privacy crusaders accuse X of ad-targeting that flouts EU rules

In Spain it's Xitter, where X in Iberian languages is pronounced like sh in English.

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Re: More Beria than BOFH.

I don't think it was quite that easy to buy your way out of the Lubyanka Square basement. Probably still isn't, although the FSB does seem to have adopted defenestration as an alternative, so maybe they're learning from the BOFH.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Re: Yearly tasks....

The CAB have pretty much killed off certificates with multi-year validity, but since getting bitten by a certificate expiry I have a weekly task which sends me a report of certificates that are expiring in the next few weeks. Now the only way that certificates cause me support headaches are the users in third world countries who use 10-year-old Android phones whose root certificate lists need updating, and we only get one or two of those a year.

And the winner of the horrible Microsoft Paint sweater is ...

Re: In my best Trump voice...

Mmm, marzipan.

Spanish media sues Meta for ignoring GDPR and harvesting data

Re: Mmmm.....

El Mundo and La Vanguardia maybe, but El País is at most about as far right as Tony Blair.