Posts by Stoneshop

Correction: Last month, we called Zuckerberg a moron. We apologize. In fact, he and Facebook are a fscking disgrace

Re: Warning!

could end up on the "BOLO" list.

I do not have instruments sensitive enough to measure how little I care.

Re: Wow

Something has gone seriously wrong with the moral compass directing execs of these companies.

Wrong? It's been surgically removed if it has ever been present in the first place.

Official Secrets Act alert went off after embassy hired local tech support

Re: Too many stories like that one.

Challenging expenses. My last employer tried that exactly once on me...

Working as a contractor, I had a car (leased for me by the agency. NOT the vehicle I asked for and which was agreed to, but that's another story). Cars need to be serviced, on a schedule. So one day I report at the garage, and get offered something only slightly larger than a Peel P50. I'm 1m97; the place I'm contracted out to is 75km, one way. The combination of these three factors says 'hernia'.

I manage to drive home and extract myself from the mobile soup can, put on my motorcycle gear and head off to work, passing by the garage to drop off the keys and suggesting they get a midget to collect the thing. Even at -10C the trip is much more comfortable than the 2km from the garage to my home. The end of the day I ride back, only slightly hampered by snowfall and stupid car drivers not knowing how to deal with that. Next day I need to use the motorcycle again as I was too late (see: stupid car drivers) to go to work again, and back. The next day is a Saturday and I can collect my car at leisure. So far so good.

Then, at the end of the month I get a phone call from the agency's finance department. They object to two petrol card statements showing 'Regular 95' instead of 'Diesel'. I counter by stating I'm not a philantropist, and as the vehicle I had to use to get to work runs on Regular 95, that's what I put in the tank[0]. As it's a substitute for the company car I simply use the petrol card provided to top up. "No, you were supposed to get a replacement car for the day your car was at the garage. Which the garage states was a diesel as well, so you were using your own car. Which we won't reimburse you for." "Well, how am I going to get to work if I can't frigging fit in the replacement provided? How would you like a bill for the chiropractor?" "You could be filling the tank on your own car[1] every day using the company petrol card." "Tell me, did I do that? The distance is 150k there and back, and you can see I used about eleven litres on each of those two days. That's what my motorbike uses going that distance, nothing beyond that. So shut the bloody fuck up about me using that card inappropriately."

After a few more similar incidents, and the agency forgetting to offer the company I was contracted out to a contract extension I simply cut them out of the loop and got a temp contract directly with the company

[0] I know for a fact it can run on diesel, with reduced performance.

[1] It's not a car, you twat.

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Re: From my cold, dead hands!

the most awful brouhaha

ITYM brewhaha. Especially as you mention PG Tips.

Go on, join us by the watercooler: we could use a laugh

How? 'They' took away our watercoolers, which had been installed about a year earlier at a comparatively substantial cost (additional power and cold water piping; the 'unit on the kitchenette counter' model, not the 'keg on a pillar' model), citing maintenance cost.

Soon after, they upgraded the coffee machines. I'd like to think they had to because of increased usage.

Three-quarters of crucial border IT systems at risk of failure? Bah, it's not like Brexit is *looks at watch* err... next month

Re: What possible delay?

They certainly cannot buy a delay in under a month for any sane fee.

One month? That's two Agile sprints or something, quite enough to get those vital systems done, tested and live, isn't it?

Re: We don't need any preparations...

Computer systems? Just go back to using card index systems. Those worked fine to defeat Europe during the last war!!!

I hear TNMOC has some working kit from that era, so you don't have to do it all by hand.

plans intended to save the government's bacon

Has this bacon been tested to DEFRA standards (such as they are)?

Re: Cheer up, what's the worst that could happen?

a woad decorated kilty army

First read that as 'kitty army'.

Meow! Hiss! Scratch!

Re: What possible delay?

"revoke" .nes. "delay"

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

Re: Trickle down economy?

Meanwhile, Kensington's residents may object to a cashless audit trail. Rather awkward if statements show parking charges from a quick visit to one's mistress, or master.

To that end one keeps multiple bank accounts, multiple agendas as well as multiple bookkeepers. Savings can be made by having said bookkeepers double as mistresses/masters (as applicable)

(the one with the hidden pockets with the hidden agendas in them, thanks)

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

Re: The dirtiest four-letter word...

Ask the designer sitting next to me how high my eyebrow raises whenever he says, "Can you just change...".

You're doing it wrong.

You have to lower his eyebrows. To the level of his bellybutton, and staple them in place.

Amazon Prime Air flight crashes in Texas after 6,000ft nosedive

Re: Age?

27 year-old plane design. Without knowing the tail number, you don't know when this plane was built — it could have been built last month (I believe they're still building them).

Registration: N1217A

C/n / msn: 25865/430

First flight: 1992-04-21 (26 years 10 months)

Re: Re. parcels coming loose

I'm thinking some sort of pitot tube issue but this would also be unlikely.

Pitot tubes icing up in flight (see 'cold front' comment above) can cause this, but it tends to be more problematic if the pilots don't have much in the way of external visual references. Like in the middle of the night at FL300+ over the ocean, less so at 6000 feet around noon.

Re: I'm going to speculate...

Aeronautical engineers have spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours making sure that there is no way for a single failure to crash an aircraft.

s/no way/extremely unlikely/

Just recently I came across an accident report on a China Southwest crash involving a Tupolev 154 (built in 1990, so roughly the same age as this craft). The cause was a single nut, incorrectly installed during maintenance; instead of a castle nut with locking pin, a self-locking nut was used. When it came undone it messed up the elevator trim, and the plane went into an unrecoverable stall.

This image-recognition neural net can be trained from 1.2 million pictures in the time it takes to make a cup o' tea

Re: El Reg mugs ...

As we all know, the squeaky wheel gets

identified as a mouse by a badly-trained neural net, and offered a morsel of cheese.

Re: You can't make a cup of tea in 90 seconds

What if you heat the cup directly using 512 NVidia GPUs?

Decoding the President, because someone has to: Did Trump just blow up concerted US effort to ban Chinese 5G kit?

Re: @RealFakeDonaldTrump

The line is missing any sign of the intelligence bit.

And this is different from the UK government, exactly how?

'We don't want a camera in everyone's living room' says bloke selling cameras in living rooms. Zuckerberg, you moron

Re: "Does he get that?"

if you were to take a long drive off a short pier

As long as the body is recovered and buried, I'm OK with that.

Because I want to erect a memorial latrine over the grave. And make a mint from the beer concession next to it.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

Re: Tracks nearest the centre sound worst

I've encountered at least one 12" single that had to be played starting at the inside, with the groove spiralling outwards.

Didn't go well with semi- or full-auto decks.

Re: Walkman

a tape only lasted 20 min per side

A remarkable achievement, given that the most common cassette was the C90, which at 45 minutes per side could accommodate most vinyl LPs with a couple of minutes to spare.

How about video vinyl?

Well, those and the Telefunken TP1005.

Let's bring back 8 track.....

RCA Sound Tape Cartridge, Grundig C100, Minifon, 3M Revere, Audiopak ...

Re: Not this the?...

A cassette? Too convenient. For playing vinyl elsewhere you get out your Dansette (upgraded to stereo and battery power) or an authentic portable record player like the Lesa Mody. And if you're going with magnetic tape anyway the True Hipster would not be seen with anything but a Nagra, although an Uher Report could be considered passable.

The one with the oversize pockets, thanks

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

Re: Sites need revenue

The way I read it, Patreon is more suited to ongoing fees (enlighten me if that's incorrect), where roughly half the payments I'd be enticed to make would be for accessing some piece of static information once, or maybe a few times over a short period.

Sites need revenue

Then offer me an easy way to support them. I keep hearing about micropayments, but nothing has come of that so far.

Ads I don't load, let alone look at are not going to provide that revenue.

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

No? Break.

Data centre for a telco. Needs No-break installed. Generator shed gets built, stonking big diesel genny gets carted in and the guys from Perkins (or whoever manufactured that beast) gets the thing chugging. They listen, probe, do a few adjustments, listen some more, consider it Fine, let it run some more and figure it's time to push the Engine Stop button, sign off on the job and hand it over to the sparkies to let them do their bit. Alas, the Engine Stop button didn't., as it apparently wasn't yet hooked up. "OK, maybe it's that other button".

That didnt't stop the engine either, but it did stop the computer room.

Amid polar vortex... Honeywell gets frosty reception after remote smart thermostat tech freezes up for a week

Re: IOT=Crap

With an IoT bulb it could adjust to dusk til dawn each day

A simple light sensor does that job even better, allowing for lights being on during overcast days if you set the threshold appropriately.

You got a smart speaker but you're worried about privacy. First off, why'd you buy one? Secondly, check out Project Alias

Re: NICE IDEA BUT MISSES THE POINT

I bought two Alexas, to communicate with distant Parent with dementia who can forget how phones work

Two RasPi's, each with a speaker and a microphone array, and when one of them picks up sound at a more than background level (i.e. it gets spoken to), it opens a connection to the other one and transmits the sound which then gets played. Can be implemented with standard utilities, even with some kind of voice mailbox functionality (probably most useful on your end).

"ok google navigate to X"

"OK Google, navigate to X"

"Location data for X not found, please be more specific"

"OK Google, navigate to X, $country, $region."

"Location data for X, $country, $region not found, please be more specific"

"OK Google, navigate to X, $country, $province, $region, $district."

"Location data for X, $country, $province, $region, $district not found, please be more specific"

"Oh, fucking hell"

"Calculating route to Hell, Trøndelag, Norway via Fucking, Upper Austria, Austria."

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Header pic

Argos' 3-for-a-tenner travel adapters are earthed, not that it'll help in this situation.

An unearthed Euro plug (CEE 7/16 or 7/17) will fit an earthed CEE 7/3 (Schuko ) or CEE 7/5 (French) socket, as they should, and there won't be any problem fitting them in an earthed BS1363-to-Euro adapter.

Re: Header pic

(Earthing might be less important if you have an RCD-protected supply, but I still trust a wire fuse more than I trust a chunk of complicated electronics.)

An RCD breaker is not at all a bunch of complex electronics. It's a set of coils, one per phase and one for neutral, arranged on a common core so that the fields induced by the passing currents cancel out if there's no residual leakage. If a ground fault happens, the fields don't cancel any more and the resulting magnetism pulls away a latch, releasing a spring that pushes open the breaker contacts.

Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

Cicero said it already

Ceterum censeo faciem liber esse delendam.

And salt the frigging earth where their HQ stood.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

Re: Wacky world

WeLoveThe.SS

ComeEnjoyThe.SS

Youretakingthepi.ss

Re: Political correctness running amok?

We must also ban all x86 processors.

Fully agree. Those architectural abominations should not have seen the light of day.

Three quarters of US Facebook users unaware their online behavior gets tracked

What was that Zuckerberg quote again?

Something something stupid fucks something.

Astroboffins spy a rare exoplanet evaporating before their eyes

Re: The whole point of the metric system is to make large numbers more ‘palatable’.

So, is 10,000 tonnes a second a little or a lot?

Yes.

For comparison, the Earth is about 6E21 tonnes, which at a rate of 10kton/sec would be gone in 6E17 seconds, 1.67E14 hours, 19E9 years. Slow enough to not bother me.

All the sheep in Wales would be blown away in less than two minutes.

Yeah, but where are they ending up? Inquiring minds want to know.

Postmates plans rollout of autonomous delivery robots in US

3D food printer

How about developing a 3D food printer? That would take care of it all.

Except for the bit where it needs to be supplied with ingredients.

Equifax how-it-was-mega-hacked damning dossier lands, in all of its infuriating glory

Re: Too much power

And you guys think your UK government is screwy. Hold our beer.

a) uk.gov appears to be a bit busy at the moment, trying to fsck up the already fscked-up dreckshit.

b) beer?

Godmother of word processing Evelyn Berezin dies at 93

Friden

"The cabling was the thickness of my forearm. There was no screen. The data was recorded onto two compact cassette tapes; one held the addresses, the other the letter. The Redactron merged the two. We could send out two to three hundred letters a day, compared to our competitors' 25. "

We haven't timed our Flexowriter, but as a rough estimate its speed is more like 300 letters a day than 25. It works roughly the same as the Redactron, but it's close to a decade older and driven by paper tape, reading the main letter from one tape and the names,addresses etc. from a second. You could even hook up one of their electromechanical calculators, interfaced through a big box of relays, and print out invoices and such. And while the Redactron apparently had some line-editing capabilities, with paper tape based devices you can simply copy them up to the point where the correction needs to be made, add the modified text, then continue copying after skipping the incorrect part of the original. Plus, with a bit of practice you can actually read the tape to see what's on it and whether it's correct. Try that with a compact cassette.

It's likely to be similarly noisy.

Awkward... Revealed Facebook emails show plans for data slurping, selling access to addicts' info, crafty PR spinning

First against the wall

After we're done with the environment-destroying governments and companies, so they have some time to reflect on their antisocial behaviour.

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

Re: Being fair to Marriott

Details of half a billion customer

Half a billion customer records. Though with multiple records per customer that would still amount to at least several tens of million customers.

Lush scrubs its card-processing servers squeaky clean

A pain in the arse is what it is.

You should bevel the corners then, and also wet it.

Re: what's soap?

It's what you use to get the blood off your hands when you want to approach the next luser without raising undue suspicion.

Shocker: UK smart meter rollout is crap, late and £500m over budget

Re: Reluctantly may have to get a smart meter.

Nice ideas with the mirror and camera, but I need to repeatedly push the button on the electricity meter to cycle through the display to get both the daytime and night readings.

A Raspberry Pi can easily control a servo or solenoid positioned to push that button for you, as well as run the cam. And you only need to power it up the moment you actually need to read the meter.

Re: Ca$h...

all those who didn't have a convenient roof to put some subsidised panels on.

Over here there are initiatives to let people participate in installations on other people's roofs, including public buildings.

Re: Nah.. They won't be getting a grilling..

they simply dont last anywhere as long as they claim.

We've bought a bunch of them at IKEA[0][1], various wattages and both dimmable and not, and none have failed in over at least three years; a number are approaching five, and I can probably locate two or three that were fitted when we moved in seven years ago.

[0] Cheap enough that I can't be arsed to look for even cheaper ones. That might come with probably higher failure rates anyway.

[1] Hex key not needed, therefore not included.

Excuses, excuses: Furious MPs probe banking TITSUPs*

Re: Rare Events One And All (@ tfb)(@ Stoneshop)

And also the issue of writing manuals/documentation, a job position that nowadays seems reserved for interns and low wage employees with absolute zero knowledge of the system,

... as well as the language(s) in which it should be written.