Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

No they had no idea what an error message meant but were all too embarrassed to ask and so were doing interviews until a candidate could explain it to them

Re: Interview 2.0

> He answered he wanted to 'see how I thought'.

I would hire a team of consultants while I embarked on an extensive fact finding trip of other major estuaries in sunny regions noted for their excellent local cuisine

Many many years ago I cancelled an interview at BAe.

They still called me on the morning of the interview and asked where I was, I explained that I thought the project they were working on was a fiasco that would obviously be cancelled and they would be shut down.

Many Many billions of £/$ later the project obviously is a fiasco but strangely hasn't been cancelled.

Re: Missing type

Over here the quality of the coffee machine is the main recruitment feature.

If the dev lead can't do fancy latte art when they offer you a coffee then they have no chance of recruiting prime talent.

Although there are enough Indians employed that you can usually also get a decent cup of tea if you haven't gone native.

Re: I hold no brief for SOAS graduates, but …

If we hire you, how much notice will your village need to find a replacement idiot ?

Re: That Meme

Half our dev team are Israeli - and so ex-IDF

They are also devs so literal minded when it comes to questions

So visiting the USA and asked - have you ever been involved in espionage or sabotage activities ?

Not easy from the other side of the desk

Our current interview process:

Do you know optical design?

Have you used (main optical design package)?

Do you have a pulse?

We are prepared to be flexible on the pulse thing

Re: That Meme

Why do you want this job?

I need money to obtain food and shelter

What's your greatest weakness?

Without food and shelter, I die

South Korea reports export boom in silicon, wireless comms, and instant noodles

From the West Coast

The Noodles with Korean writing are generally better than the ones with Chinese writing - if they have more than one spice packet be warned.

Avoid the Japanese ones - their flavo(u)r department has a sense of humo(u)r. Wasabi kitkat anybody ?

Russia's Pirs ISS module scheduled to fall away, much like Moscow's interest in the space station

Re: Maybe it's time

There speaks somebody who has never done corporate IT

Re: With a whimper, not a bang

>After the decades of positivity and science that the ISS has brought humanity

The ISS was built to tide Boeing over between the end of the cold war and the start of the forever war against the ever changing acronym. And to ensure that all the USSR's rocket scientists didn't all go IR35 for a bunch of middle eastern countries.

The science has largely been of the: grade school science fair to encourage kids in science type of science.

BOFH: You say goodbye and I say halon

Re: I'm curious

IIRC it's a big problem in firefighting. Room on fire uses up all the oxygen, somebody opens the door, fresh air flows in = bad day for all concerned

Hole blasted in Guntrader: UK firearms sales website's CRM database breached, 111,000 users' info spilled online

Re: only private owners

There is a guy that drives a pink tank around London as a pride thing.

IIRC since the gun is smooth bore (rather than rifled) it only needed a shotgun licence - apparently they don't care that it's a 120mm "shotgun"

We've seen things you people wouldn't believe. An exoplanet building its own moons

Re: This is A-Moon-zing!!!

30years ago we took the first resolved visible images of another star, now we are imaging moons around planets around other stars (admittedly in radio which is a bit easier)

Intel: 'Another one to two years before the industry is able to completely catch up with demand'

Re: Hopefully....

If you think TSMC are building fabs in Taiwan because they need fab engineers to work for a $/day.

Don't worry there will be $Bn of taxpayer dollars given to Intel to build fabs in the USA for server CPUs.

The fabs will close as soon as the tax benefits run out.

Then tarrifs on imports of the industrial electronics that Intel doesn't make - so your car and washing machine will cost more.

Re: Close

And Intel's response is to build "cutting edge" 10nm that are a generation behind the cutting edge - but will do nothing to help the shortage of 130nm industrial parts

UKRI denies pulling funding from Newport Wafer Fab over Chinese ownership concerns

But these are British chips and so better whatever the numbers say.

Anyway you can't believe numbers unless they are written on the side of a bus

Russia's ISS Multipurpose Laboratory Module launches after years sitting on a shelf, immediately runs into issues

Re: Ahem

>Drinking Hypergolic fuel. What could possibly go wrong

May I remind you - Russians

Re: "Nauka" = "neukъ" ?

> instead of "science" it should be "disoriented".

There's a difference ?

Re: Strange

Assuming that the factory remembered to fill them and nobody drained them to drink the stuff

Mountains on neutron stars are not even a millimetre tall due to extreme gravity

Re: No!

>You know that to an astrophysicist, lithium is a "metal"?

I think Lithium is a metal to everyone.

To an astronomer a metal is anything that's not Hydrogen or Helium - there is so little of it that it's not worth distinguishing

NSO Group 'will no longer be responding to inquiries' about misuse of its software

Re: NSO is a weapons manufacturer

You mean bribe fund via a bunch of deniable PACs, politicians to start wars and then give directorships to the DoD officials that negotiated the prices for their weapons?

While claiming anybody that objects to the "Ninja 2000 InstaKill child-seeking cluster bomb" is a no good commie hippie peacenik

They sold software that other people, mostly government agencies, used to spy on people.

What are they guilty of that any other government contractor isn't ?

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch loses first stage in fight against extradition to US

It's only fair

Heads of US corporations are regularly extradited to foreign countries to face trials about their tax arrangements or employment conditions

Cranes soar over Lone Star State as Texas Instruments pushes to get new fabs online

A new definition of operational

. "That's when the shell will be completed, and then we will be deploying equipment there by the second half of 2022."

I'm assuming that for a semiconductor fab the tricky part is the shell - the lithography equipment, installation, calibration, testing etc are trivial ?

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

Re: There's also the antenna technology.

The clever bit is that these phased arrays are tracking moving satelites.

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: swatting

>It should be described as premeditated murder :

Perhaps if interactions with US law enforcement didn't automatically always end in civilians being killed ?

Although it could lead to savings in police budgets. Have one centrally mounted naval gun per town and a website for you to enter the coordinates of an address and the freedom gun applies 16inch freedom shells to the address.

Cut us some Slack: $27bn+ later, collab tool officially belongs to Salesforce

Teams, bringing the user experience of an Amstrad emailer to a desktop near you

Pipe down, Jeff. You've only gone where Gus Grissom went before, 60 years ago today

Re: Do allow Bezos his moment of glory

But with cost-plus contracts the managers at Boeing used to have a Gulfstream IV. Now they've had to sell it and get a Gulfstream III because people like Musk chose to make launches cheap.

The Gulfstream III doesn't even have a remote control for its surround-sound DVD system. Still think reusable rockets are no big deal?

Re: Do allow Bezos his moment of glory

If your kid outsourced the writing of the program, it only printed "Hello" and the kid went on global media to explain how he had reimagined the dynamic of programming innovation for a new future - then yes the kid needs a slap

Hijacked, rampaging infrastructure will kill humans by 2025 – Gartner

Re: Hi Skynet here

I thought we already did in the 60s with that Soviet gas pipeline that the USA 'modified' the components for ?

Chip-making equipment maker ASML boasts of record orders, predicts a $1 trillion market by 2030

Everyone relies on ASML

We are one bout of food poisoning at a company BBQ away from the dark ages

Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04

Re: Linux phone

You typed the Hayes codes ?

some of us just whistled the tones into the handset

Linux phone

I want a proper Linux phone with a bash shell and command line calling, and my contacts in a text file

Tomorrow's wireless world will be fatter, faster, and creepier

Re: I'm starting to feel like we've long passed CD levels in wireless standards

>4G already covers most use cases for the average consumer, you can watch full HD videos while walking like a zombie on the street if you're so inclined

Yes, now have a 1000 people in the same street all doing it.

5G isn't just about max bandwidth for a single link

Re: "and using light instead of wireless"

But because none of them were interchangeable in terms of optics - there wasn't much advantage in the light having a common 802.11 encoding

Good news: Jeff Bezos went to space. Bad news: He's back

Without wishing to be a fanboy of the MuskTwat: These two are spending their money to get to space, he was trying to make money by going to space = a small difference

Re: Executive Summary

Musk: Sorry you only want to launch from Earth? Losers !

Tencent to acquire Brit games developer Sumo Group

Re: "Chinese games developers"

Which country was it that banned games that showed violence against police ?

Was it the land of the free ?

Re: The future

So all these computer games that were destroying our children's minds and turning them into violent zombies - are now vital national resources that must be protected at all costs?

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

Remember you have to think what an evil version of Priti Patel / Chief Inspector Savage would use it for.

It's not what it could be used for - it's what they think it will be used for.

I was pitching a database tool to the police force of a certain UK capital city 20 years ago. A senior plod (with lots of silver braid on his shoulders) was 'explaining' to me how this new DNA technology would give them a picture of the suspect from a sample at a crime scene. He had obviously been sold the idea by some consultant that DNA = everything about a person and so could generate a mug shot.

Re: Consequences

>If they just grabbed the data anyway, then what would be the consequences?

It only works once and screws the chance of future 'cooperation'

It works for police/immigration but not for well paying commercial customers.

If I'm an insurance company in the future looking for prime customers - having partial data from a grab 10 years ago with no updates isn't that much use to me.

Re: Why can’t it be opt-in?

Because the data would be useless, it would be like Facebook planning their capacity based on people who respond to Gartner questionaires

IBM's 3% sales growth may not seem like much but it's the biggest it's had in three years

Re: What IBM did next

Layoff 10% of your staff for 3% growth - now if they can only keep doing this another 30 times they could double their growth with no staff.

UK and chums call out Chinese Ministry of State Security for Hafnium Microsoft Exchange Server attacks

>Stalin was good at that.

But he also had bad points

Where on Gartner's Hype Cycle is Gartner's Hype Cycle?

>Seems to be something young people are into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAP_(song)

Is that the new marker of greyboeard-ness?

If you think WAP means mobile phone pre-internet?

Like if you know why the save icon looks like that, or why it's called a radiobutton

Re: Useful idiots

We've bought their stuff to present to investors to show how we are riding along on the crest of a wave into the sunny future.

We know they are lying, the investors (unless they are total morons) know they are lying, presumably Gartner know they are lying - but we all paid up

Amnesty International and French media protection org claim massive misuse of NSO spyware

Re: I am shocked!

But it's nice that after millennia of only state level actors being able to spy on masses of peasants the free market has now allowed any young hacker to dream of having this power, and making money from it.

Re: And in other news...

Is it still PR if your PRs reputation is so bad that hiring that PR means you are evil ?

A bit like hiring OJ's lawyer for your defence team = I'm guilty