Posts by Howard Hanek

Going Dutch: The Bakker Elkhuizen UltraBoard 950 Wireless... because looks aren't everything

Made in China?

Is it?

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

IBMs Munchkin Land

Are the Munchkins celebrating? How flat did the house falling on her make Rommety? Is Krishna wearing the ruby slippers in the spirit of diversity....or just old fashioned perversity? Did the house fall from the CLOUD?

Windows 7 back in black as holdouts report wallpaper-stripping shenanigans

Redmond's New Name

Fukushima

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

Data Streams

It's that huge illegal emigrant data stream.....

Isn't THAT Their Standard Development Model

You know, pulling the rug s-l-o-w-l-y out from under projects until their final phaseout?

Let's see what the sweet, kind, new Microsoft that everyone loves is up to. Ah yes, forcing more Office home users into annual subscriptions

Micromaniacsoft

Well, actually Macromaniacsoft really should stop listening to those 'voices'. There can be such a thing as a mentally ill organization. Take IBM for example.....

Researchers peer into crystal ball to see future where everyone's ID is tied to their smartphone

Inconspicuous

A word that will thoroughly lose its meaning in the future......

As many as 100,000 IBM staff axed in recent years as Big Blue battles to reinvent itself from IT's 'old fuddy duddy'

IBM Infrastructure

I imagine a giant moving walkway operating at a glacial pace. In go the young.....out go the middle aged carrying a cardboard box containing their personals...........

Dutch cheesed off at Microsoft, call for Rexit from Office Online, Mobile apps over Redmond data slurping

Sherlock Was Forever Telling Watson He Was Wrong

Sir Arthur perhaps had a glimpse of the future?

Braking bad? Van with £112m worth of crystal meth in back hits cop car at police station

A Golden Opportunity

The felon should be sentenced to twenty years in a medical research facility in order to identify his 'stupid' genes.

Learn Bluespeak with IBM: Internal buzzword-bingo memo schools staff on this newfangled thing called The Cloud

Print vs Speech

It's difficult to print the inflection that Marketers and the Media use when they reference the Cloud. Those breathless, rapturous, bedazzled, eye rolling inflections we see and hear that frightens children and disturbs those not prepared for them.

Big Purple Hat is on as IBM closes acquisition of enterprise Linux firm

It's NOT a Fairy Tale

It seems wicked Queens still cast spells and hand out poison apples.....

Got an 'old' Tesla? Musk promises 'self-driving' upgrade chip ship by end of 2019

Tesla Clothing Line

Tesla really needs to add a NOMEX based clothing line to add to the driving experience.

Oz watchdog claims Samsung's leak-proof phones ad campaign doesn't hold water

I Gotta

....get me one o' dem samsunk phones.

Think about this. A battery powered waterproof phone with a replaceable battery?

RIP Netezza, IBM’s FPGA-powered data warehousing dream

It Was More Like a Fog

.... a very dense fog.

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

Searching, searching. Always searching

...for that masterPIECE.

2001: Linux is cancer, says Microsoft. 2019: Hey friends, ah, can we join the official linux-distros mailing list, plz?

They Will Never Touch 'Us'

Think of Microsoft as that strain of Ebola that keeps erupting in Central Africa.

DeepNude deep-nuked: AI photo app stripped clothes from women to render them naked. Now, it's stripped from web

Anti 'Creative'

I would have thought this immune under the concept of 'artisitic license'. They are merely 'struggling' toward that 'masterPIECE'.

Out of Steam? Wine draining away? Ubuntu's 64-bit-only x86 decision is causing migraines

More Important Than They Think

One of its best features is the ability to run legacy Windows apps in Wine. There's still a tremendous number of businesses and users who depend upon those legacy apps. Much more than the 'experts' realize and mitigation is not just some 'whim'.

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

And then what?

The 'Snowfall' screen saver kicks in and covers it up?

Black Hat USA axes anti-abortion congressman as keynote speaker after outcry – and more news from infosec land

Future Reference

When America finally gets around to burning the books they'll throw him on the pyre too and anyone else they don't 'like'.

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

Physics

The Laws of Aerodynamics are not easily mastered. Most people who play this game have absolutely no clue what they are and how they work.

Lift, drag, thrust. The venturi principle that makes wings lift. A/C specs, center of balance, stall speeds, the stresses aerobatics place on the a/c.

In real life what causes most crashes are not pilot error but mechanical and system failures.

Money laundering and crypto-coin legislation could hurt open-source ecosystem – activists

You Mean It's NOT Money Laundering?

That's certainly a relief. I would think that money launderers would be begging for people to organize and front Bitcoin operations and run a gigantic Ponzi scheme at the same time.

Please be aliens, please be aliens, please be aliens... Boffins discover mystery mass beneath Moon's biggest crater

Does ANYONE Expect the Truth?

I know! Let's ask Fox Mulder!

Really do you expect the government to permit mass alien hysteria to grip the earth, I mean besides their own particular brand of mass hysteria?

IBM raising axe for 'significant workforce balancing in Europe', says staffer rep council

The Unbalanced Desire 'Balance'

Truly IBM's management haven't been 'balanced' for quite some time. I doubt they display ANY observable human characteristics.

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

Escargot

Such a mouth watering snail. I saw such snails in Algeria and they were delicious. They formed the 'Labor' portion of the eco-system. You know, the part that couldn't get out of its own way. Yes, let's not waste bandwidth on them.

IBM accused of pumping staff retirement funds into a tanking stock... IBM's to be exact

Diversity Recruitment

....right after they served their sentences for pension fraud.

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

Elastic Accounting 'Principles'

Easily explained as the difference between actual sales for cash and 'accounting entries' in 'anticipation' of 'actual' sales based on 'historical' numbers.

I like 'historical' numbers and collect as many as possible.

Fixes for Windows 10 arrive (for Insiders, soz) and covers are pulled from Edge for macOS

On Top of Spaghetti....

....where's the cheese? I really did lose my poor meatball when the developers sneezed.....in chorus.

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

Planned Obsolescence

This was, at its root, just a 'minor' miscalculation in the spirit of Road Runner/Wiley Coyote. Except no one laughed.

Uncle Sam to blow millions on mind-control weapon tech that can be fitted without surgery

Suppositions

Predicated upon the supposition that everyone HAS a functioning mind to control. I foresee it will fail with a sizable portion of the populace. Take the people who work at any DMV for instance.....

Tesla big cheese Elon Musk warns staffers to tighten their belts in bid to cut expenses (again)

Collect Belts and Shoelaces

...so they won't hang themselves before the end.

Talk about a ticket to ride... London rail passengers hear pr0n grunts over PA system

Engines Noises?

Are they coupling male and female locomotives together or are they having gay sex?

Tech giants get antsy in Northern Virginia: Give us renewable power, there's a planet to save... and PR to harvest

Also

...and millions of birds to kill.

EU lumbers towards Apple probe as Spotify cries foul over App Store's 30% cut

The Walrus and the Carpenter

As Lewis Carol expressed it in Through the Looking Glass....

I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

AI can now generate fake human bodies and faces, OpenAI to share a larger GPT-2 model, and more

What's Next?

Oh? Do they also vote early and often?

Eggheads confirm it's not a bug – the universe really is expanding 9% faster than expected

Oh Thank You Eggheads

This is also the reason we're ALL getting fatter. It's NOT our fault at all.

The peelable, foldable phone has become the great white whale of tech

Gypsies

Millenia ago Gypsies tried that and finally settled on a crystal ball. They still haven't fixed the brightness problem. It's often too dim to see clearly.

Disco Dingo fever: Ubuntu 19.04 has an infrastructure bent, snappier GNOME and another stupid name

Migration

I've been urging my Windows clients to migrate for years. It can do much more than Windows, is easier to maintain and more stable.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Kenny Rogers

'The Gambler' singing '.....know when to fold 'em.....' keeps reverberating over and over......

Want to hang out with criminals but can't be bothered to download Tor? Try Facebook

Recidvism

They've done this before. This is NOT the first time and........following in the path of all career criminals they go back because.......'it's for our own good' they say.

They're a 'victim' or something say their lawyers.....

Prepare yourselves for Windows 10 May-hem. Or is it June, no, July?

'Features'

Right. Like vultures are a 'feature' of the African Serengetti Plain. They at least clean up after themselves.

Microsoft reckons the accursed Windows 10 October 2018 Update is finally fit for business

Another Guiness Record

....for the number of software engineers working the longest to create a mudpie.

Super-crook admits he nicked $122m from Facebook, Google by sending staff fake invoices for tech kit

Rimasauskas

Sounds like a Polish/German sexual activity......

Q&A: Crypto-guru Bruce Schneier on teaching tech to lawmakers, plus privacy failures – and a call to techies to act

They Won't Listen

Anyone who has subscribed to his newsletter knows the breadth of his knowledge and the scope of his vision........

He is foremost among the opposition to our culture's 'security theater'.

They're BAAACK: Windows 10 nagware team loads trebuchet with annoying reminders to GTFO Windows 7

Expiration Dates

My support for Microsoft expired on 12/31/2017. I sent them several notification prior to that but, no, they refused to pay me the stated fee to continue my support.

SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

The Billboards Are Coming

Will they grace my morning commute? Will I suddenly start seeing commercials issuing life threatening dire warnings of personal bankruptcy, indictments for pedophilia and divorce papers in my future unless you buy our 'fix'?

...and pity those running for public office......

Musk is in contempt of court, screams SEC after Tesla boss brags about car production rates

Mumpet's

I'm reminded every time I hear anything Tesla of the Mumpet's, "Pigs in Space' skits. Why is that I wonder? That captioned picture does make him look a little like Miss Piggy doesn't it?

Who needs malware? IBM says most hackers just PowerShell through boxes now, leaving little in the way of footprints

Protected System Ring

Windows doesn't have one and so.........their scripting language is THE shortcut to anything and everything. Restricting applications from writing directly to the system would make a better world.