Posts by Diogenes

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: I guess someone had to...

No - 'the pits' is a 707 on what was supposed to be Sydney-Singapore-Bangkok-New Delhi-Athens-Rome-Frankfurt flight.

Well, it was a 707 as far as Athens where we deplaned as the pilots refused to fly the plane further because of the stench despite an hours' worth of cleaning*. Passengers for Rome went with other flights, and we went straight to Frankfurt. As I was travelling as an unaccompanied minor, I sat very close to the stewardesses and they were saying while it was a semi regular occurrence for the plane on that segment to need a deep clean, this was the worst they had ever seen.

A year later I had a DC9 for my flight home. My memory is that it was a much nicer plane.

*Naive, one week shy of my 11th birthday, me, wondered why they had instructions to sit on the toilet seat and not squat.

Uncle Sam warns deepfakes are coming for your brand and bank account

We have a passphrase because of the "Hi mum" scam

Because of this technology the kids & us have a phrase that we have agreed on to verify that it is us if we make a "we need monies" call. We did this at the start of last year. SWMBO has done the same with her siblings, as I have with my brother.

Both SWMBO & I have in just the last 3 weeks received a couple of very good fake calls purporting to be from our son, but without the phrase we just hang up, and then phone him just to be sure.

Bit harder to do in a corporate environment.

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

I miss WFH

I was actually able to teach & provide 1:1 assistance than waste more than 50% of my time on classroom managementcrowd control. I had generous "office hours", because in some households the kids only had access to one computer, because mum or dad needed it for work, and they were only able to log on between 6 & 7pm, in return I could 'disappear' for a few hours during the day - approved by the Principal as I had data as to when kids were actually logging in & retrieving material or starting teams chats with me.

Without continual interruptions (SWMBO excepted, but she knew closed door meant I was "on class") I rewrote units of work & resources in no time, and actually had time to think about and investigate alternate approaches.

The printout may be dead but that beast of a print queue lives on

Re: Based in Royston Vasey?

You are Anastasia Palazu,, Palush.. Palace.. Pileofshit, Premier of Qld. I claim my $5 dollars

Musk's X caught throttling outbound links to websites he doesn't like

Re: Mr unlimited free speech strikes again

Well regulated militia" bit i

...Have a look at 10 US Code S 246...

(a)The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b)The classes of the militia are—

(1)the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2)the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

Perhaps AI is going to take away coding jobs – of those who trust this tech too much

Not AI but SI ?

Where SI stands for Simulated Intelligence

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

Re: "Facial Recognition" is no worse than any other kind.

You might want a word with my 2yo grandson. He saw a cartoon gorilla in a book, and proudly proclaimed "Opa"(granddad) - I don't think like I look anything like the gorilla in the cartoon.

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

What about the monorail?

Was the silly question I asked when one of IBMs 3800-3 lasers was due to be delivered. There was a large cargo door on our floor together with a heavy-duty crane on the roof to allow delivery of heavy kit straight into the floor.

Since the last delivery of kit, a monorail had been gifted to the people of Sydney to mark the bicentenary of settlement, and construction had been finished for several months. They though to test for radio interference when they were testing the monorail, but nobody looked at the position of the track and the door.

I have no idea how it ended up being delivered.

Barts NHS hack leaves folks on tenterhooks over extortion

Re: How would I go about having my confidential records removed from NHS computers?

When I was last at my GP he was surprised he couldn't access "my health record" (Aust) - I must have blocked him. "No I have opted not have one". He seemed very surprised. He asked the receptionist to run a report on those who don't have one, and it seems I am one of only 3 in the practice who don't, funnily enough we are all ex IT. The vampires and radiologists always comment that I tick the box "don't send to MyHealth Record." on the referral form. When asked why I said 2 reasons "What a honeypot - security needs to be right 100%,, hackers need to get lucky once.", the second is since when has any data the govt collected on anything not come back to bite us on the arse at some point in the future.

Australia's 'great example of government using technology' found to be 'crude and cruel'. And literally lethal to citizens

Re: seems quite sensible

Say you are unemployed in Jan & Feb properly and honestly declare 0 income & receive a govt payment of, say, 2K.

Then in March you get a job as a senior dev earning 100k pa and are payed some 83K for Mar-Dec when you did work.

Satanlink do the match and calculate that you MUST have been payed 13k (this 2/12 of what you were paid for the year) for those 2 months and you now owe the govt the 2k as you are a dirty rotten welfare cheat.

Re: Oz just like UK

While not disagreeing ...others call the ALP the Liars Party "There will be no carbon tax in any government I lead," "No child will live in poverty", "I am a fiscal conservative" "We will reduce power prices by $250 by 2025" (good luck with that last one one), are just some easy ones.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Re: Reminds me of an old (early '80s) AI koan ...

Its amazing how many student computers start behaving themselves when I "lay hands" on the computer :-0 .

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

Re: You had replacement parts for TWO lightning strikes?

Yes. Mid 1980s. I was working on contract at place and we had the production AS400 that was fried by lightening. It was replaced by IBM well within the Service Delivery contract time (the warehouse was literally at the other end of the street).

IBM loaded the OS and we were right to go with the restore, blank tape, last weeks backup, blank tape etc etc

Luckily I had been in on teh weekend and taken a full copy of the data as we needed to some performance testing on the software for the next stage we were releasing.

Come in around lunchtime & people are running around like headless chickens - I reach into my bottom drawer and grab my backup which is then loaded (I knew it worked as I had installed the data on the performance testing machine). I was taken out for a very long, free lunch.

It was a totally unimportant application - it held enrolments and marks for the year 12 exit exams (UK = A levels, USA think SAT)

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

I was visiting our office a few years ago to do some stuff in the workshop

When I was young and stupid I was in the Army Reserve and was visiting Sydney's Victoria Barracks to get a pay issue sorted. Fire alarm goes off for an unannounced drill, and to make the drill more realistic smoke grenades were let off to mimic the lack of visibility if there was a real fire.

They discovered the hard way that things were placed where they shouldn't be, doors were blocked, walkways that should have remined clear weren't etc. I believe the final tally was a broken leg, a broken ankle , a broken elbow, and many many many grazes and bruises from falls and colliding with furniture.

Edict came out - never ever do that again !

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Bouncing checks

Never forget the headline "Cash bounces dud Czech" when Pat Cash won Wimbledon beating Ivan Lendl.

Re: Checks?

Gregorys is that antiquated book of maps you used to use to navigate a city.

Only in Sinny. In Melboring its Melways, in Brisbane its a Refidex.

Fraudulent ‘popunder’ Google Ad campaign generated millions of dollars

Re: Anyone remember an industry ad from yesteryear ?

Myself literally agrees with you !

I would like to download less bytes.

note the icon

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

And also, sitting down is bad for you.

And falling down can be even worse for you.

The last time I used a VR headset, I was so disoriented that I fell off the chair I was sitting on, I had to sit down because I nearly fell over trying to use them while standing.

Wearing 3d glasses makes me nauseous, so I suspect that had I not fallen I would have needed the iBucket

Microsoft Windows latest: Cortana app out, adverts in

Re: Microsoft Still Up to the Usual Antics

Apparently the advertisers have discovered that we hate advertising so much that we are willing to go way out of our way to get rid of it ... and yet the fuckers seem to think that their message is so fucking important that they HAVE to make certain we see it. Which typically brings the comment "Well, THERE'S something I'll never spend money on!".

Mrs D has trouble sleeping, so we tried some sleep/relaxation playlists on Spotify. I pay so we do not ads. Mrs D is complaining that there is 1-2 hours of sound/music that puts her to sleep, but every single time she woken as it ends by a f'ing ad the streamer, not Spotify has inserted. No longer pay for or use Spotify!

EU tells Twitter 'you can run but you can't hide' from disinformation policy

Re: Erm

Disinformation is anything the "experten*" don't agree with.

Once the "experten" have spoken all discussion must cease because they are "experten", even if it is blindingly obvious, they are speaking out of their a**e.

How does one one become an "experten" ? I wish I knew, but it seems they are anointed by some authority who decides.

*I use the term "experten" deliberately, as "experten"-worship seems particularly strong in Germany.

Ads for lucrative jobs in Asia fail to mention chance of slavery as crypto-scammer

Scambodia

Is what my son called it after a week at Ankor Wat.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Drawer of redundant tech

Or the cable is an inch (@25mm) too short. Really annoying when it is 5m, and the next size is 10m.

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Re: Bit puzzled for a moment

I have seen 3d prints of photographs for the blind. A teacher I used to known created them for the photographer who was blind from birth.

clogs to clogs

Lets see how this pans out...

Gen 1 Keith Murdoch,

Gen 2 Rupert Murdoch,

Gen 3 Lachlan , James, Elisabeth Murdoch

It worked that way for the Packers, for the non antipodeans, James (Gen 3) is otherwise known for being engaged for a time to Mariah Carey.

Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted

Let 100 flowers bloom

Adjusts tinfoil hat

Has anybody considered this is a deliberate strategy... "Feel free to criticise use naughty words, wrongthink " etc, then when the 2030 Plan comes to fruition... "sorry you have been a very naughty boy! No travel, banking services, house for you

Misinformation tracker warns 'new generation' of AI-scribed content farms on the rise

Students doing this as well.

Some are obviously the product of AI as they contain sentences such as "I am not capable of producing 1500 words…

We have had 3 incidents at school where the student submits a variation of "I am sorry I can write this assignment for you. You may, however, expand on the following points ...:"

They wonder why they got caught for plagiarism.

Crooks don't need ChatGPT to social-engineer victims, as they're more than happy to demonstrate

Because of this we a have agreed on a phrase for our kids, or us for that matter, to use if it is a genuine emergency. It is something very family specific.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Re: Nobody in the UK has a cellphone.

It persists in German

My Oma taught me German, and I could read German long before I could read English (school policies discouraged teaching reading at home) in the 1960s.

Fast forward to last year, and I had 2 German exchange students in my class, they did not know that I spoke German. They were using German to discuss one of lads in the class .All I can say is lucky boy if he had known what they would like him to do them, but I digress. When I spoke to them in German , after the looks of horror (he understood everything we said etc) we started just chatting generally and on of the girls remarked that I spoke a very old fashioned German as I still used the subjunctive and I hadn't acquired the 'beziehungsweise' verbal tick. One outcome was that I ended up helping a lot of the dozen or so German & Austrian exchange students we had. Even nicer was one of the girls was still attending the school in Germany I went to in 1971/2 to do grade 6 (Max Planck Gymnasium in Ludwigshafen am Rhein).

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

When I was the Assistant Adjutant for the battalion I remember having the CO (LtCol) lament he was only able to write off AUD50. All our more savvy NCOs had secret stashes of bayonets and BFAs that were picked up in exercise areas to replace the items lost by their diggers. That was until a certain PM outlawed guns, the definition of which included bayonets and bfas. The CQMS then became the holder of found kit and kept his secret stash out of the hands of the RQMS somewhere in our depot.

Re: Keepers of...

He was obviously trained by our RQMS !

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

Re: Aaaaargh!

When I worked for a large blue company, they decided to have a "wellness" push, and decided to issue pedometers and reward individuals and teams with the highest number of steps.

Some ultra competitive teams had members walking at lunch time, stopping every hour and doing aps of the office etc. My team had all the lazy bastards, so we had our pedometers set up on metronomes, and one another rigged a mechano mechanism to create a thrusting motion, and we put all our pedometers on it. We won hands down.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Re: Ah.

IBM didn't change their name after selling equipment and consulting services to the Nazis during WWII

They did, it was the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag), not IBM that sold to the Nazis

Microsoft to cap daily Bing AI queries to stop the bot delivering daft responses

Death of <insert profession> may be exaggerated

People can easily produce realistic renderings of houses, buildings, and rooms with text descriptions only, reducing the need to get architects to draw and model their designs. Leach said these tools do make architects more productive, but if workers can do more work in less time will companies still hire as many people?

Wasn't this sort of thing the rationale for COBOL that was supposed to let business people write their own code and get rid of professional programmers?

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Check your privilege

For equity everybody should be in the office.

An awful lot of people don't get an option at all, eg Amazons warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

Twitter gives up fight against COVID-19 misinformation

Re: Irony alert

why the deaths at the peaks of cases in 2020 are so much higher than in 2021

Oh oh pick me pick me!

Covid has mutated into a much less serious form.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Jobs have been spreading bugs for centuries.

Try being a teacher !

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

The Babylon Bee is having its revenge

Search youtube for "Fired Twitter Employee Applies For First Real Job" .

Re: world's richest

Unlike 'People's Democratic Republic of Korea' which is 75% lie

Its obvious you haven't read Marx, or Lenin or Rosa Luxembourg, or even the toothbrush moustached one(he said he was a socialist often enough, and there is evidence he was a communist in 1919/1920, so I will take him at his word). Socialists have their own particular definition of "Democracy" which is purer form of government - what we would consider democracy is dismissed as mere "Parliamentarianism".

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

Re: First things first

Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance was premiered in the US because they were sick of the way the Septics ripped of HMS Pinafore.

NHS tech chief dismisses concerns over loss of statutory power to protect patient data

Re: Not sure NHS really gets digital

see literal mountains of patient records in stacks from floor to ceiling

But they contains thousands of digits , all lovingingly crafted by peoples digits.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: Converse - omitted steps

I have a vacuum/mop robot.

First use of the vacuum/mop - has difficulty mapping the room, so I consult FAQ, Dr Google and finally ring tech support. "It says quite clearly to clean the lidar before you use it" - "mate I am looking at the paper and a pdf version of the manual on your website - I have done a search for lidar and gone to each reference, could you point to the exact page and line where I am told to do this and the instructions for doing same?" -

tappity tap tap tap, "er, um , er - look er open up the manual for the window cleaner model xxxx it uses the same lidar setup".

Perform cleaning step & all good

KFC bot urges Germans to mark Kristallnacht with cheesy chicken

Same thoughtlessness that Big Blue's "Win, Execute, Team" had in Japan where there is only one meaning for execute.

Australia to 'stand up and punch back' against cyber crims

Re: In other words

You missed the obvious... lots of nice OS conferences, meetings and liason trips all paid for by we mug punters.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Re: Now ask me why ...

In the 80s I was on train from Paris back to Germany, it was the night draftees were heading to Strassbourg for the initial training. I speack English, and am fluent in German but schoolboy French, a big variety of French accents, very little English or German. As I had my slouch hat they correctly identified me as Australian and a serving soldier(Reserve).

By the time we finished my snake bite medicine(rum, to be taken before being bit), and their various bottles of moonshine were were making perfect sense by the end of the evening.

Feel Luckey, punk? Oculus designer builds VR murder headset

New goldrush ?

Lots of patents that take prior art and say "on a headset" .Goodness this has already been done "on a a phone" (Israelis rigged a handset to blow a bombmakers head off)

All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing

Re: You don't hack the count

ach vote has to be in an envelope and that envelope is not only tied to the voter -- individual address and bar code -- but the signature on the envelop has to match the record on file.

So that is why Fetterman is suing to have unsigned and undated ballots counted?

https://www.newspressnow.com/news/national_news/politics/fetterman-sues-to-have-mail-in-ballots-counted-even-if-not-signed-with-valid-date/article_19b1dac0-daa5-5f7c-8842-dbe082dc4717.html

Re: In my opinion

So you would be happy if your country did elections Brazilian style?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/11/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

Re: Why do tax cuts have to be funded?

but generally, they don't want to or they pick something you don't want them to.

The late great Thomas Sowell described this beautifully back in 2013 when discussing US Budget cuts with an analogy...

Assume a govt department has 2 functions, 1) provide medication to dying kids and 2) erect statues of Benedict Arnold. A budget cut is proposed, obviously they should stop erecting statues of Benedict Arnold, but they will propose cutting services to dying kids in order to maintain the budget.

He says the example is extreme, but you can see the same pattern everywhere.

The whole article is here https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/03/13/budget-politics

Re: You know where you are with an omnishambles

The word "crisis" itself has been drastically devalued

As has its related word "hero" - as in "hero 5 year old saves mum by dialling 000" (911 , 112 for non Aussies)

Learnt a new word

I have not seen sportswashing, but I am familiar with greenwashing and its cousin pinkwashing (pink = breast cancer in case that doesn't translate outside Aus).