Posts by Diogenes

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

Get help

We dont bring Trump up on every single discussion thread whether the story has anything to do Trump or not. Getting sick of it

Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

How productive if everybody does it?

During kung flu I had to teach from home. It was fantastic for me, and I was so productive. I had plenty of time to plan and generate resources for 3 new syllabus we were handed to start the next year. Reports were done early. Marking turnaround was within 24 hours , for the first time in 10 years I felt on top of everything. I'm now retired for health reasons ( I have a die with, not of cancer) had I been able to WFH I would still be working.

The parents whose kids I taught were complaining they couldn't get anything done because they had to do the classroom management stuff that was time wasting and draining. ( Johnny get off your phone. Have you done these exercises etc etc)

'Workforce rebalancing' comes for Kyndryl, and delivery teams are in the firing line

As a past victim if IBM GS rebalancing

I can only sympathise and empathise. On the positive side, it forced a career change to teaching which I loved until I had to give that up due to treatment a chronic blood cancer ( if treated will die with , rather than of type cancer)

Diogenes

( IBM GSA bloodbath starting October 2003).

Google explains how it will infuse ads into AI answers

The only time I use google search, is for images and reverse image search if I am looking for something very very specific as it really beats Bing/DDG.

Gemini accused of 30,000-line code purge and fake recovery report

Re: Can you tell what it is yet?

I love watching the Baumgartner Restorations YouTube channel undoing those changes.

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

Re: The usual misleading headline and buried useful informatiom

Emails... Occasionally microslop as part of ITS 2FA process wants to email a code. Press the send email, 30 minutes later nothing, press send email again, no email arrives after 15 minutes, rinse and repeat several times, give up. Emails never arrived!

Banners, obviously they are logging in, but never saw the notifications, so obviously they weren't prominent enough.

Surprise! Big Tech has been a bit rubbish at enforcing Australia’s kids social media ban

I still stay in touch with some of my former colleagues after retiring from high school teaching. As the ban was implemented during the 1st week of the school holidays, it took a couple of weeks back at school for life to go on virtually unchanged as kids shared workarounds when back at school.

From 3 of the schools I taught at, each had a different set of favoured replacements for the apps they were blocked from. Different VPNs were popular at the different schools.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: The junior kept his job.

Sadly the comment is true for how the "Fairwork" Commission operates.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Worked well in OZ

Our e-karen crows that 4.7million accounts were cancelled on the 10 social media sites that were on the naughty list.

It has been reported in our media that kids have taken 1 or more of 4 approaches; using VPNS, downloading different SM apps that are not on the naughty list,some have got around the ban by changing their birthyear to show they are 17, drawing on moustaches, wearing masks, or just using photos to fool the AI facial recognition, or, they have created new accounts that show they are 17 (facial recog has difficulty distinguishing between 15yos and 17yos).

Next week when school goes back I will check in with my teacher ex-collegues, as the ban came in during the first week of our summer (long) holidays to see what has actually happened

Great success here in OZ

Our e-Karen crows that 4.7 million SM accounts held by u16s on the 10 platforms on the naughty list have been closed, so massive success - job done woohoo !

Meanwhile downloads for other SM apps which are not on the naughty list are rocketing, as have downloads of VPNs. There have been reports that under 16s have fooled the age face checking AI by drawing on moustaches (girls included!), or used photos of their grandparents. One of our friend's granddaughter's used a V for Vendetta mask to fool the AI

I will touch base with my teacher ex-collegues when school goes back next week to see if it has actually had any real life effect.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Penalised for not spending budget

I was then working as a PM for a large IT outsourcer. I had a portfolio of 35 small systems that had been developed by users to solve particular problems they had, and which were while not corporate mission critical, were section mission critical .

My team of 3 had the task of reverse engineering them, documenting and then making them maintainable. As part of that process we had started changing dates to 4 digits from 1995, so come the great panic of 1999 we had already done 9

9% of the work.

1999 roles around, I request a 150k budget for Y2K, mainly so I could charge the meetings and travel to meetings, and to pay my team time to prepare information for the numerous audits. To my surprise I was given $5 million solely for Y2K remediation. Some beancounter saw I was managing n klocs of code and his formula said X $ per kloc and I ended up with $5million, which was twice my normal annual budget.

We passed every audit, turning around requests for information usually same day , but always within 24 hours instead of 5 working days that was rwquested, we were ready and could easily prove it, and didn't have a single issue.

Come to my performance review at the end of January, every millstone and performance objectives hit, except that pesky budget +- 10%. My team only billed $148 K for Y2K remediation, and I had only spent 95% of my normal budget, so spot on what I had estimated, but no I had underspent by 4.8million Arguing that I never requested 5 million, and only requested 150k , with documentation, fell on deaf ears. So I missed out out on quite a substantial bonus.

I spent the rollover in a "war room" , ran the tests I had to run, and left for home at 1am. Was up at 4am to take favourite no1 son to to where his choir was performing I still call Australia home to greet the dawn on tv.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: Y1999 Problem

Or using 99 as a guard condition

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

Old enough to have played Star Trek on an IBM Mainframe in the 80s. Also remember the Hobbit on the C64.

I am having a great time with Chatgpt at the moment. Now that I have retired I am trying to get my scanned model rail magazine collection under control and decided I was going to build a plex/jellyfin type application to do it. I have never built a server type app for windows , nor have I written anything using react. It has taken a week interuppted by festive week activities and I am 90% there. I have learnt do one small thing at a time and ask it to explian its answer. I wouldn't trust myself to write a react app from scratch , but I know enough to work out the code I am being given.

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

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

I often found that with kids at school. It became a thing where I would "lay hands" on the computer, and tell it it was healed, and got the kid to do it again, amazingly 9/10 it worked.

When I was doing my first practicum ( career change after 30 years developing software) , at a country school which wasnt big enough for a qualified ICT teacher, I showed staff how to identify when kids were running a JavaScript script that popped up a message saying access was forbidden or the more enterprising kids that used VB to create professional looking error messages that they cycled through

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

Re: Microsoft

I had no problem finding the classic plan. It was offered when I started cancelling my subscription.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

More accurate indicator of trust , how much are you allowed to write-off?

I remember a commander of a Light Horse Regiment ( mounted in M113A1 APC), complaining he could only write off AUD500, he could requisition for new tracks valued in 100s of K.

Australia to let Big Tech choose its own adventure to enact kids social media ban

Re: Smokescreen

Have you forgotten the Mis/Disinformation bill?

Hack to school: Parents told to keep their little script kiddies in line

When I was doing my first teaching practicum, one of the students at the school got out of lessons because his shiny federal govt provided laptop ( the so called Rudd laptops) kept throwing errors. I took one look pretended it was a kosher error, but passed the word to his teachers that it was a script he was running and just press the ESC key to fix his machine( javascript prompt() )

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: VAT

In mediaeval times swans were classified as fish and thus able to eaten on Fridays and during Lent.

Word to autosave new docs to the cloud before you can even hit Ctrl+S

What was even more fun was even if you were religiously saving, every 2nd or 3rd crash would delete the document as if it had never been.

Microsoft eventually realized the world isn't just the Northern Hemisphere

Indigenous deasons

In parts of Australia the indigenous have 6 seasons, in others, 8. These are very much related to nature, eg when this species begins to flower, when this insect appears. Try computer using that!

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Manuals...

I remember when we got our first IBM 3800-3 laser printer. Got the obligatory shelf of manuals for that Was tasked with creating some graphs for manglement, so was issued the shelf of GDDM manuals.

They all cross referenced each other across both products and multiple volumes in the set, but no clear starting point, and I ended up in a loop. I photocopied the relevant pages and put them in order, then rotating the point I started until it worked.

Then, our SE gave us a copy of the super secret red book which listed all the commands that the AFP generated, and I coded the graphs using those commands. Much simpler

If you're forced to use Windows 11, here's how to steal some of your time back

Re: Nonsense!

While technically not operating system updates:

Every Edge updates it turns on copilot.

Every time I update office copilot gets turned on

Every time I update vs code copilot gets turned on again

Fired US govt workers, Uncle Xi wants you! – to apply for this fake consulting gig

Re: "How to spot a fake"

Kyndryl anyone?

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: "Blackcurrants" or "Currants, Black"?

I had a similar experience, but with the design of a a new invoice. I printed a sample invoice , with every message that could possibly be printed on it so that the prioritisation could be checked, and they could see how each message appeared Spent the rest of the day being told why a residential customer could not possibly get message 123 because that was for university customers only, and message 124 was only for bulk users and ...

James Webb Space Telescope to size up asteroid 2024 YR4 before it rocks our world

Doomed!

Clint Eastwood is in his 90s and Bruce Willis has dementia - who will save us from this deadly peril?

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: Windows 11 Bluetooth...

I gave up on my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard ages ago.

24h2 broke my sound, I am using an ordinary headphones jack. Unplugging it and plugging it back in got it working again.

iFixit to the rescue: McDonald's workers can rescue their own ice cream machines

Re: For sale - Strange Electronic Device

Sell from OS and don't allow orders from the US.

The clever know how to work around it.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

I had a female student try the same. She had very well developed Bulgarian Funbags for a 15 year old. Every time I roused on her, magically another butoon on he shirt would pop open. Luckily I had a female aide in teh room with me and asked her to have a chat with the young lady - had I said something it would have been "whey are you even looking at my funbags you dirty old pervert"

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

According to Mentour Pilot, they have been able to track MH370 using WSPR, references in the description

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5K9HBiJpuk&ab_channel=MentourPilot

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

Re: A good manager

I was used as the troubleshooting Project Manager. You know the one who gets called in after project has turned to manure and the original PM has been sacrificed to appease the customer.

Account manager "I want twice daily status updates" Me "Give me 3 days to work out where we are at and come up with a plan to finish as soon as possible, if I am doing twice daily updates all I will be doing is status updates.

Every single firetrucking time for 5 years.

Enterprise browser maker Island says it's now worth $3B

Re: At least one of us is confused by this

As a teacher, I can see a use case for this in schools. On the plus side, students will actually read the text and reproduce in their own words rather than cutnpaste. On the other hand, the amount of gibberish we have to read will increase.

Workday abandons new-build Dublin office project

There are the substantial changeover costs which need to factored in. In Australia you pay the government a large tax ( stamp duty) when you purchase your new home, eg for a 1 million house (median price in much of Brisbane), you give the government over 30k. Add 20 k for real estate commission and moving expense and you are looking at a 50k changeover cost.

Australia secures takedown order for terror videos, which Elon Musk wants to fight

Re: Australian jurisdiction, Australian rules

Twitter geoblocked the video so Australians could not watch it, which is fair, Australia's circus, Australia's monkeys. He is objecting to a world wide takedown order, Aussie law says that the Ministry of Truth can request such an order, but then again according to a former PM Aussie Law also overrides the laws of Mathematics :-)

I get that people don't like Musk. Try this for a mind exercise - a Russian court ordered a world wide takedown of all videos of the Ukrainian conflict or any video that praise/mentions the Ukrainian President as they are illegal under Russian law. Twitter needs to comply?

Wing Commander III changed how the copy hotkey works in Windows 95

C,X,V Predates computing

I still rember editing hand typewriter produced documents with my mum, an EA, bracket around text put a C or X then an arrow to a v where you want that text to go instead. She was taught this in 1948 when she went to school.

Qt Ubuntu 24.04 betas show that there's room to innovate

Re: You're not alone, Mr. McMurtrie.

adjectives and conjunctions and then spit out all the verbs right at the end.

I am classed as a native German speaker, and I still have nightmares about reading Kleist short stories... 10 paperback

pages of clauses, sub clauses, sub sub sub sub sub sub clauses, then the verb.

IBM accused of cheating its own executive assistants out of overtime pay

Forgot one of the golden rules of business

Never, ever, ever annoy the PA/EA

Roku makes 2FA mandatory for all after nearly 600K accounts pwned

Re: Credential stuffing and password spraying

I saw a cartoon that I can no longer find...

Imagine an office with 2people standing looking over a programmers shoulder. The code they are looking at is a function called something like stopBruteForceAttacks...

The code is

if (correct password && first attempt) then

display message "Incorrect Password - please try again"

One of the 2 exclaims "you cunning bastard!"

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

Re: And I thought I had it good.

This is before Covid.

There used to be several senior lawyers who lived on the Gold Coast, and flew to work in Sydney (1 hour) or Melbourne(1.5 hours) and return every day. Business class natch. A stewardess friend told us settlement terms for some massive lawsuits were hammered out on these flights.

SoftIron rolls its own server virt stack to join the 'let's get VMware' crowd

they make sure that it is vegan, organic, and has low food miles

Australian techie jailed for accessing museum's accounting system and buying himself stuff

Re: Circular reasoning

However it is illegal to prefer a candidate on this basis, they must simply be eligible for clearance. But we all know what happens in the real world.

I didn't mention the fact the fact that I had a clearance when applying for an IT job, but they knew anyway as I was then still an officer in the ARES which they knew from my resume. Still had to apply for a new clearance, but it only took a few days not months like the initial one did when I was commissioned.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Re: The ultimate test

Or the English or Humanities faculties in a High School.

Don't ask how I know this.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Re: My last meal at McDs

There is a special place in hell reserved for those who invented the bamboo cutlery and the inventors of the paper straws that become unusable before you have finished half your drink that Maccas uses.

Nissan to let 100,000 Aussies and Kiwis know their data was stolen in cyberattack

The more pertinent question is, why would they need to retain this information after the loan approval process has been completed?

When the inevitable " you shouldn't have given me this loan which I can obviously can't afford" lawsuit, Financial ombudsma, Royal Commissionn etc complaints come in

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

Re: Heading off after completion of a task

I teach ICT. Its amazing how many 'faults' are solved by me just laying hands on the machine.

Australian spy chief fears sabotage of critical infrastructure

There are a few contenders, 2 ex-PMs and an ex Foreign Minister being among them.

A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value

ACS - was once part of the solution

In the early 80s they were part of the solution, I got my start in the ACS run "Computer Industry Training Program". My then employer paid my ACS dues, but, being neither a golfer or "yachtie" I got little for value.

Microsoft posts another set of bumper results. Market's response? Meh

Re: "In 2025, it will be the year to execute."

Anybody else remember the Japanese reaction to IBM's "Win Execute Team"?

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

Libel/Slander?

Given the damages order made against "orange man - bad!" for slander/libel, surely this already exists as a potential remedy.