Posts by teebie

The Pentagon has the worst IT helpdesk in the US govt

Re: Not surprising

Does it count as conflict of interest if you are a fire marshal and your interest is not having the building you work in catch fire?

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

Re: On that one

That's very much the interpretation I took from the statement.

"These geeks are sooo rude. They keep pointing out how unworkable my policies are"

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

Re: "radically alter the workflow of medical professionals, without their input"

"I recently deletd Microsoft Office in favour of Ashampoo Office - cos it is simpler and cleaner (Timotei!)"

You went from a real poo to a sham poo?

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Re: "The kids learned a valuable lesson about cops that might save their lives one day"

Also, as we have seen, if they stay in their homes while 8 months pregnant, that is going to attract the attention of police.

Lawyer sees almost 1,000 complainants sign up to Capita breach class action

"Megabuyte pointed out that reputational damage [to Capita] will be far greater."

How? Capita couldn't damage their reputation any further if they changed their name to Hermes.

Or Chernobyl.

Former Twitter employees accuse it of holding up 891 arbitrations

'Twitter now "refuses to pay the full arbitration fees for these cases,"'

So...arbitration has failed and employees can now use civil courts?

Artificial General Intelligence remains a distant dream despite LLM boom

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Experts in marketing things that they claim are AI

Miscreants leak texts and info siphoned by Android stalkerware app LetMeSpy

"one security researcher, Maia Arson Crimew"

You don't hear much about portmanteau nominative determinism. I wonder if she every worked with Jeff Larcenyucky.

Restaurant hired 'priest' to extract workplace confessions from staff

Re: Simple folk abused

"Simple folk abused By religion."

Simple folks abused by business *using* religion in this case, surely? This was done to benefit the employer, not the church.

Astroscale wants to be the world's friendly neighborhood space garbage collector

I was going to suggest a katamari solution, but I remember them being hard to control

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

If he works with Azure in any way the getting paid relies on buying into the whole cloud connected BS.

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

"The way that smart meters save money for consumers is because you get away from "estimates" and terrible metering policies, they can't profit from the interest on your held credit"

As far as I can tell, for most tariffs, the energy company makes an 'honest' estimate of your yearly usage, divides it by 12, then charges that fixed amount every month.

Somehow this always results in them profiting from the interest on your held credit.

" Manually reading a meter and entering the readings is really not something that belongs in this day and age."

This sentence is giving me 'man in an advert who cannot wind up a vacuum cleaner cord' vibes.

AWS experiment with Lambda in cloudless configuration fails to impress

Re: 4 outages in 3 years

Lambda was the root cause, anything that uses lambda was affected. Including the aws console, which ,for some, is the way to administer all of their aws products.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

MAGA stands for 'my attorneys got arrested'

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Re: "Sprints"

I too work with a fibonacci wanker. He doesn't seem to be able to express what problem this solution solves.

Users accuse Intuit of 'heavy-handed' support changes on QuickBooks for Desktop

"The move away from Desktop ensures customers stay compliant and can benefit from the updates available through QuickBooks Online"

Shouldn't "compliant" be followed by what the customers have to stay compliant with? So it doesn't look like deliberate scaremongering.

EU legislates disclosure of copyright data used to train AI

I thought that was going to be a link to the ad with some dimwits in a sunny fields chanting "daisy daisy, daisy daisy, daisy, daisy. Daisy", and wondered how that would help.

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

Re: What is deemed harmful to kids ?

"I know it when I see it"

How does Atlassian hope to actually improve Confluence and Jira? AI, of course!

"Our product is less helpful for productivity than scribbling on paper. Or shouting. We should add AI"

Just because on-prem is cheaper doesn’t make the cloud a money pit

There have been a few "cloud isn't always shit" articles recently, which shows the way the wind is blowing.

The cloud isn't always shit, it makes sense for stuff everyone uses, like emails, or stuff almost nobody uses, like a hyper-specialist product that only one company can supply. But there are so many uses cases where it's the wrong solution.

British Prime Minister Sunak’s plans for UK NFT on ice

Re: Worse than pointless

That's not true, try paying for something with a 6-pence coins

Some countries support all old money, the UK doesn't.

Google says it did not train its AI chatbot Bard on your private emails

"Netizens have taken to Microsoft's Bing more since the company launched its new GPT-4-powered internet search chatbot, increasing its web page visits by 15.8 percent."

That's a bigger increase than you would expect from morbid curiosity alone, but I'm sure it contributes to the figure.

First-known interstellar Solar System visitor 'Oumuamua a comet in disguise – research

Is my reading comprehension off today, or does this article hint that Oumuamua is a comet from our solar system? The abstract of the paper explains how it could be an extra-solar comet-like object.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

"If they were parasites nobody would use them"

That's...not how parasites work?

The UK's bad encryption law can't withstand global contempt

Re: If they cared about children...

Alfred the great did a lot of good in peacetime - at the time literacy rates in 'England' were terrible, he invited scholars from other parts of Europe, established a school to encourage reading, and had various works translated from latin to english.

£2B in UK taxpayer cash later, and still no Emergency Services Network

Re: Better never than late

Half?

Greedy dog, go to your bed.

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Re: Video on Ring's servers is the problem

Less secure against a burglar stealing the footage though.

Havana Syndrome definitely (maybe) not caused by brain-scrambling energy weapons

Re: What a relief

American football is a game where most of the time time is spent not playing the sport (60 minutes spread over 3 and a bit hours), and the players have more padding than the Michelin Man.

They should have called it American Cricket,

Ring system discovered around dwarf planet Quaoar leaves astronomers puzzled

"Astronomers are now puzzled at how such a ring system can survive so far from its parent planet."

At this point, how do we know that it does survive for an appreciable length of time? Maybe it has only been around for a few decades, and will be gone in a few decades more.

Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause

Re: Mental

They do look warm

Jellyfish watches for the sting of developer bottlenecks

"How long did you spend refining this" "about an hour"

Shot down: Google's grand fancy plan for pro-privacy targeted ads

"a Google spokesperson suggested Topics is a better alternative than either the paywalls that would inevitably cordon off the web in the absence of content-funding interest-based ads or than the privacy-harming cookie substitutes other marketers would no doubt propose."

Interest-based ads? Like contextual advertising? With no need for any tracking?

Nice smart device – how long does it get software updates?

Re: IoS

"If you have regular working hours, probably programmable thermostats would be enough, they don't have to be connected ones."

And if you have irregular hours, take your coat off a bit later after you get home.

(And set the night time temperature to 5 degrees celsius so the pipes don't freeze)

FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty on eight charges

Say it out loud

How many banks has Samuel Bankman-Fried freed if Samuel Bankman-Fried can free banks?

(His name isn't pronounced the way it is spelled)

Musk bans private-plane-tracking @Elonjet on Twitter, threatens legal action

I think it's pronounced 'Kyle'

The X at the starts of the name represents the greek letter χ (chi). And there are 2-3 other bits of bullshit that go into the name.

You get the internet you deserve

Re: Google has lost already

"Hi guys, welcome to my youtube channel. Today I'm going to tell you what to do if your stopcock shears off. There's a long introduction, but I'm not going to let you know how long"

"ffs, give me the info I need before I drown"

Ever wondered how the AWS leviathan develops software?

Is this why the UI for configuring aws is so inconsistent?

The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat

" It does everything I need a telephone in that location to do, except DTMF"

Urban dictionary tells me what DTF is. No idea what the M stands for.

Apple perfects vendor lock-in with home security kit

"How is this different to all the "traditional" door locks out there which don't function if you've lost/left your keys somewhere"

Locksmiths?

Amazon hit with $1bn claim that secretive Buy Box algorithm screws shoppers

"more than half of all physical product sales on our UK store are from independent selling partners"

And what proportion of them are independent selling partners with Pro Merchant accounts? Which are part of what is being complained about.

UK regulator proposes price cap on Motorola as supplier of Airwave network

Re: So what happens if...

"our competition watchdog hasn't been doing its job very well"

That depends on whether their job is to prevent monopolies (which they haven't done in this case), or to ensure that is there is a monopoly then it does no harm (which it is trying to do here - arguably too late)

Looking at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/competition-and-markets-authority/about I'm not sure which they are supposed to focus on

The Metaverse is the internet no one wants

Re: UI elements annoying Oi

For cookie selection its a dark pattern designed to make you go 'sod it, they can have my cookies'

You sound like you are in the market for a browser extension like consent-o-matic, which will fill in them forms for you.

Re: No second life for Second Life?

I think it was Dara Ó Briain that explained why VR headset porn won't catch on - nobody is sufficiently confident that nobody else can walk into their home to give it a go.

SAP's German-speaking heartlands still struggling with ERP vendor's cloud vision

" They should be prepared to say goodbye to modifications made to on-premises systems. "That's not how the cloud works,"

'Use our product, it's less good than not using our product' is a bold marketing strategy.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Live Printer

It was a gas

Wait, what are we doing here?

Uber, Lyft stock decimated as US aims to classify gig workers as staff

"The largest share of workers with IC income are those in the top quartile of earnings who primarily receive wage income."

This is meant to imply that independent contractors are doing well, but looks like a desperate attempt to twist some figures.

Is it that those on wage income, as opposed to salaried, tend to be poorly paid, so that if you have waged income topped up by independent contracting then you are somewhat well-paid compared to other poorly-paid people?

UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant

"I got a new site for the plant: [Jacob Reese-Mogg's] head; it's certainly empty enough!"

It's a Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, not a Pencil-Shaped Tokamak for Energy Production

Founder of cybersecurity firm Acronis is afraid of his own vacuum cleaner

" the vacuum cleaner is connected to the internet"

Why is the vacuum cleaner connected to the internet?

Fake vibrating teeth could make great hearing aids

I prefer to just take this at face value and ask no further questions.