Posts by Mike Lewis

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: Simple Response.

My mind added a hula skirt. Sorry.

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

It would be interesting...

...to add up all the costs of the investigations.

In the old days, i.e. fifty years ago, we used to blame errors on the computer. Now that they are so common, we have to blame errors on hackers. Perhaps future AI will blame errors on us.

Lawyers hail 'superb result' in Facebook biometric privacy battle: They'll get 25% of $550m, Illinois gets the rest

Re: Fucking lawyers...

The laws won't stick until people are sent to jail. Otherwise, the fines become just another cost of doing business.

Small business loans app blamed as 500,000 financial records leak out of ... you guessed it, an open S3 bucket

Are S3 buckets insecure by default?

Woudn't it be better to make them secure by default instead?

Official: Apple debugs MacBook Air of sucky Butterfly keyboard

Who knew...

a butterfly could cause so much trouble.

US Homeland Security mistakenly seizes British ad agency's website in prostitution probe gone wrong

> signing a waiver reneging any claim against the US government for damages

Isn't that extortion?

AMD takes a bite out of Intel's PC market share across Europe amid microprocessor shortages, rising Ryzen

David Dunning quote

People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce. And then, that’s it. You don’t need a lot of smarts. You don’t have to do tensor calculus. You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.” One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

Fire Brigades Union warns of wonky IT causing dangerous delays in 999 control rooms

Stress testing

They've heard of it...

One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump

Re: Demented?

Old interviews of him on Youtube from 1980 show he was a lot more mentally competent then.

Don't Flip out or anything, but the 'flexible glass display' on Samsung's latest pholdable doesn't behave like glass

Why can't they...

Make the two flat parts of the display out of Gorilla glass and the hinge out of transparent plastic?

Game over, LAN, game over! Windows software nasty Emotet spotted spreading via brute-forced Wi-Fi networks

Virus writing teams

Somewhat OT but I wonder if virus writing teams have the same problems we do - clueless managers, impossible schedules, inadequate resources and obdurate HR but with a termination package that really means termination.

This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps

Can't they just run a defragger on it then fill in the big hole at the end?

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?

Sticking with Windows 7

I decided to stick with Windows 7 as I figure the chances of its being infected by malware are fewer than the chances of Windows 10 being disrupted by Microsoft's "ready or not, here I come" delivery of buggy updates. Also, Microsoft wants £120 for it in Australia which is a bit much.

What could go wrong? Redmond researchers release a blabbering bot trained on Reddit chats

Easier than the Turing test?

Now we have the DIALOGPT test to determine whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a Redditor.

Firefox 68 arrives with darker dark mode, redesigned extensions dashboard

Re: Back to the... past

Thank you.

Back to the... past

Just installed 68.0 ESR, doesn't handle XML files so it's back to 60.7.2 ESR and the elusive hunt for 60.8.0 ESR in GB English.

Mmm, instant Java: Visual Studio Code 1.36 brings tasty updates – unless you run 32-bit Linux

Re: Hoovering?

Not after they bought GitHub.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

When I buy an ebook, I remove the DRM with Calibre or download a pirated copy so I can keep the book and because the Moon+ Reader Pro app for Android is much better than Amazon's Kindle app.

Bill G on Microsoft's biggest blunder... Was it Bing, Internet Explorer, Vista, the antitrust row?

Looking back

Bill Gates and I are the same age and, every now and then, I wonder what went wrong. I think he was, perhaps, a little too focused, a little too determined. He didn't stop often enough to look at the view or smell the flowers along the way.

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

I never got the hang of Flight Simulator, crashing every time I tried to land. My brother is the same way. He took flying lessons. They asked him to stop.

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

The downside of vertical integration.

Auditors slam FBI for shoddy testing of facial-recog tech. But no big deal. It only has 641m images on its systems

Clark Kent

I confuse it when I wear my glasses so I have to remove them before my face gets scanned.

Ex-student, 52, suing university for AU$3m after PhD rejection destroyed 'sex drive'

Fortunately,

Mine is backed up.

Truth, Justice, and the American Huawei: Chinese tech giant tries to convince US court ban is unconstitutional

Opposite Day

So the Chinese are trying to protect the US constitution from the US government.

That magical super material Apple hopes will hit backspace on its keyboard woes? Nylon

Twitch, twitch. That reminds me of the time a junior programmer was having trouble with his keyboard, back in the days when they were too expensive to just throw away. I told him to open it up and spray it. I meant with freon, he used WD-40. He spent the rest of that morning cleaning it out.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Smashing?

A local shop was producing DVDs that were legal but still frowned on by the powers that be. They were raided by the police, accompanied by a news reporter. The syadmin ran to get the key to the server room but that wasn't spectacular enough for next morning's paper so the police smashed down the door. Nothing illegal was found, the shop closed down and moved to Amsterdam.

And the news story? Something big broke overnight and it was buried.

When the police bring reporters along on raids, I've always wondered what favours they expect in return.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully lobs another capsule beyond the edge of space

Amazon Prime Air

For packages too large for the drones.

Huawei, Huawei. Huawei, Huawei. Feeling hot, hot, hot: US threatens to cut UK from intel sharing over Chinese tech giant

Pot meet kettle

The sharing goes both ways.

Zuck it up: Facebook hit with triple whammy of legal probes, action in Canada, US, Ireland

Illegal operation

Move fast, break laws.

We've read the Mueller report. Here's what you need to know: ██ ██ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██ █████ ████████ █████

How was it redacted?

If it's a PDF file, it might be possible to find out what's under the black boxes.

Samsung's tricksy midrange teasers want your flagship catch

The A80 ditches both headphone jack...

I stopped reading at that point.

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

Not much sympathy

I lost sympathy for Assange when he went after Clinton which helped Trump get elected. Plus the whole cat thing.

US firm wins Oz-backed bid to block Huawei from subsea Pacific cables

Cisco's code is patched by the NSA.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Nokia

When I started working at the Melbourne branch of Nokia, they flew a bunch of us to Finland for training. The trip up was fine, not so much the trip back. It took me 36 hours to travel from Oulu in northern Finland to Melbourne. I finally arrived at 4:30 a.m. and the company rules said I had to be in the office by nine.

One of our programmers was told to fly to California, rent a car then drive to Petaluma. She wisely decided it was not a good idea to drive a strange car on the wrong side of the road after a 14-1/2 hour flight and at 4 a.m. her time so she spent a night in a hotel. She got into a lot of trouble for that with Melbourne and Petaluma having a pitched battlle over who was responsible for her hotel bill.

It's a hard drive ahead: Seagate hits the density problem with HAMR, WD infects MAMR with shingles

Re: But...but...

Another bubble that burst.

Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either

Re: Finally....

That's called "working from home".

Microsoft 'welcomes dialog' over HoloLens use by the military, but doesn't have to listen

Don't worry

I wouldn't worry about it. It's from Microsoft so it either

1. won't work

2. will work but not well

3. has such a bad UI that you can't get it to work

4. updates itself while you are trying to shoot someone, or

5. leaks the user's location to the enemy.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

Vic-20 BBS

In 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Commodore Vic-20 with multiple rooms (message areas), email and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. It was very popular with users spending an average of 70 minutes on it.

One of my users got me my first job as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can wrte a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty-five years later, that same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Re: Remember Y2K?

I fixed my first Y2K bug in 1988. I was looking at some air conditioning control software when I saw the bug and thought "Buildings stay up for a long time. There's a good chance this software will be running for decades."

Maybe I should have told somebody.

Microsoft’s Bing dinged: What happened, Xi Jinping?

In other words...

Bing goes bung.

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Any love for Windows 7?

I'd be happy if they put out a Windows 7 update for January that I can trust.

The D in SystemD stands for Dammmit... Security holes found in much-adored Linux toolkit

Re: what?

and logs in plain text.

Just updated Windows 7? Can't access network shares? It isn't just you

Re: (KB4480970) Also hoses Windows 7 32 bit on Tosh Lappy

Oh bother! Cue distress call from my mum in 3..2..1..

I turned on automatic updating as I thought it would make things easier for her.

FCC tosses aside rules, treats Google to a happy ending following request for handy tech

This will not end well

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

From "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.

Heard the one where the boss calls in an Oracle consultant who couldn't fix the database?

I remember being turned down for a job as a games programmer. They hired a COBOL programmer instead who didn't know what an interrupt was and didn't believe them when they tried to explain.

Stop us if you've heard this one: Facebook apologizes for bug leaking private photos

Move fast, break things, apologise later.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

Never attribute to malice...

that which can be blamed on outhouse staff.

BOFH: State of a job, eh? Roll the Endless Requests for Further Information protocol

Re: WooHoo BOFH is back

> AHahaha, I'd never do any of those things, would I?!

What do you mean? I've been taking notes.

Wow, what a lovely early Christmas present for Australians: A crypto-busting super-snoop law passes just in time

As Thijs-vr on Reddit said

Canberra is filled with a bunch of retards when it comes to anything with a current running through it.