Posts by Manolo

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: Good lord

One of my sisters in law. Degree in technical business administration. Complained her electric blanket did not reach to warm her feet. I suggested she placed it lower on the mattress, as the underside of the pillow needs no heating.

Once claimed she was financially independent, because: husband earns enough for the both of us. (Divorced now)

Claimed all the food in India was the same everywhere.

"Well, I should now, I lived there for a year" (In one city only)

'What did you eat there?'

"Our cook made potatoes, meat and vegetables"

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

KDE

And that is another reason why I've been using KDE for what, twenty, twenty five years now?

Before that WindowMaker, which I still like.

Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome

Is this Windows only?

"By default, a large Gemini button appears in the top-right area of the browser window"

No there isn't. Only in Gmail and I can't right click that.

"chrome://settings/ai/gemini"

No such entry in my settings.

Maybe this article relates to Chrome on Windows only?

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

"Regominised as Cane because he wasn't Abel?"

I was thinking Cane because his employer distilled rum?

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

I think I need to add a few domains to my Pihole blacklist...

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Still a programmer

Torvalds is a bit to modest here: he programmed Subsurface, a divelog application together with Hohndel, who is also his scuba buddy.

Fun fact:

Kernel 4 point something was called the Blurry Fish Butt edition because Torvalds is such a bad underwater photographer.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Program / Programme

In Dutch I used the word catheter, in a medical context. Word insisted I meant catheder (lectern).

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: Ghost in the Machine

Coils, electron beams?

They were laptops with CRT's?

Wouldn't want one of those on m lap.

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

Hockey stick graduation

Zze Fazzer: "When will you graduate?"

Me: "September"

Come September: "I did not say which year September".

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: The FAX is not dead yet.

You may have missed the word "however".

He is not contradicting himself.

AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

Re: quality? what is that? [Oooops !!!]

"How sheer luck made this tiny Caribbean island millions from its web address"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5xdp427veo

But fortunate enough, for holidays there is visitanguilla.com.

ChatGPT poisoning

How about the first reported case of ChatGPT induced self-poisoning?

Patient survived, otherwise it could have been a double Darwin Award.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260?ref=404media.co

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeVw1FZrSQ

US cuffs 475 at Hyundai–LG battery plant – feds tout largest single-site raid

Ask the girls in Rotherham how lazy policing worked out for them.

FBI, Dutch cops seize fake ID marketplace that sold identity docs for $9

However

"In the Netherlands, forgery, false identification, and deploying counterfeit payment instruments each carry a maximum prison sentence of six years."

But unfortunately, multiple sentences will be served concurrently and maximum sentences only rarely imposed.

I started losing my digital privacy in 1974, aged 11

Mandatory retention of medical records

Here in Clogland the Inspectorate for Healthcare suggested patient records should be kept for the lifetime of the patient, up from the current twenty years (after last contact).

There was a lot of pushback from medical professionals and nothing has been heard of it since.

After twenty years it is allowed, but not mandatory, to delete patient data. So a lot will probably also live on for half a century or more.

When I still worked in a regular pharmacy and before digitization (*), we rented a garage box to keep all our prescriptions, but yearly we threw (**) the oldest out, if only to make room for the newer ones.

And in all of my 20+ yrs career, only once did I have to visit said garage box to dig up an old prescription.

* And initially, digitized prescriptions were not allowed as substitute for the paper ones.

** Secure processing of course.

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Re: Pharmacists

I apologise for not being a native speaker.

I guess my mind was hesitating between a sentence with shelf or shelves and got stuck in the middle.

Re: Pharmacists

Isn't there a saying: in a carpenter"s house, no shelve is straight?

My workplace: tidy, but my desk and workbench at home?

Said unholy mess. But I know where everything is.

Pharmacists

"Pharmacists were especially demanding. "One of them treated me to a long diatribe about how a software update required three more keystrokes than before for one task,"

As a pharmacist: relatable. It is a profession that demands such a high level of accuracy and attention to detail, that it tends to attract a certain personality type. Slightly neurotic, some maybe even somewhat on the autism spectrum.

But also highly demanding of themselves, they are the last to catch medication errors (by pharmacy staff, or doctors) and therefore often also demanding of others.

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

The tide

Wasn't this around the same time I saw a joke on (I think it was) userfriendly.org comparing Amazon to the tide?

Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down.

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

Re: Vaccines

Yes that happens. A lot. Out of every 1.000 substances developed, only one makes it to market.

Re: Vaccines

I do not know what you mean with mRNA antigens, but if you mean mRNA vaccines: they have been developed quite some time before the Covid-19 pandemic already. They were developed for SARS and MERS, which both did not develop into a pandemic. Therefore, they were never registered or marketed, but but were extensively tested. (Also, I believe veterinary mRNA vaccines exist)

Therefore, in a way, making the Covid-19 vaccine was putting a different mRNA sequence in a known technique, a bit like putting a different letter in a complicated envelope (oversimplifying here of course).

As for the excipient, I also don't know what you mean. An excipient in pharmaceutical formulations is a filler, like cellulose or lactose in tablets and capsules or saline in injections. Maybe you mean adjuvants? Those are substances added to vaccines to enhance immune response. Adjuvants are generally considered safe and have been used in vaccines for many years.

The Pfizer vaccine Comirnaty does not use adjuvants.

The only one I know to use one is Novavax.

I am however curious, so if you could provide more detailed information, I'm keen.

Re: Just do the right thing!

I think you'll find there are dozens of legal cases that prove you wrong.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Dumb fix

And then it turns out to be a video card issue, a cable issue, a software issue... Three monitors further. Why not check the cause right away, instead of randomly replacing an expensive bit of kit in the hope that it fixes the issue?

Still sounds inefficient to me.

Dumb fix

Replacing an expensive monitor without investigating what's wrong isn't the smartest form of tech support either.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

Would that be gh as in enough, gh as in ghost, gh as in bough?

Strange how non native speakers of Dutch spout bollocks about the pronunciation of a Dutch names and even get upvotes for it.

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

No, it isn't. It's pronounced like the ch in loch.

Vincent truck Gogh

The word "van" is (almost) never capitalized in Dutch surnames, but certainly not for Vincent van Gogh.

It is Vincent van Gogh, meaning " from Gogh", which refers to the German city his ancestors hailed from.

And the -ogh is pronounced like in "loch", not like in "go".

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Catnaps

My father used to have a large CRT on his desk, which was one of the cat's favourite napping spots, with the toasty warmth of a glowing CRT gently heating the cat.

Until he replaced it with a shiny new LCD.

Cat jumps on the desk, hops on the monitor and of course immediately falls off on the other side of the now suddenly very narrow monitor.

Ah, progress. Not always a good thing when you are a cat.

Open source text editor poisoned with malware to target Uyghur users

Re: Who could possibly be behind this ...

Despite all the downvotes, there appears to be a grain of truth regarding Uyghurs fighting in the Levant.

According to Wikipedia:

"TIP (ETIM) sent the "Turkistan Brigade" (Arabic: كتيبة تركستاني, Katibat Turkistani) to take part in the Syrian Civil War,[29] most noticeably in the 2015 Jisr al-Shughur offensive"

TIP being one of the Uygur separatist movements.

As for CIA involvement, that's probably just a random conspiracy theory.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

Re: office chairs from hell

I find it's not the clothes that matter, but the shoes. The only times I get shocked is when icy or snowy conditions make me exchange my regular leather soled shoes for boots with synthetic soles.

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

So that's why!

"The multibillion-dollar purchase of Nokia, on the other hand, was on Copilot's list of mistakes"

Never knew that. So that explains why Nokia tanked.

Also relevant: the enshittification of Skype since MS acquired it.

At least they have left Swiftkey mostly alone, although I sometimes wonder what it phones home about.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

Just some quotes from a Very Important European:

"We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back."

“Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?,”

"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates"

On French referendum over EU constitution

“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue’,”

Brexit may have happened for all the wrong reasons, but it's probably still better it happened.

4-day work-week pilot due in tech land by early summer

Cloggies already doing it

Dutch software house AFAS has been doing that since the start of this year.

https://nltimes.nl/2024/06/12/700-afas-software-employees-will-move-four-day-work-week-pay

Re: Question for the downvoter

Because criticism == racism, when it's directed at someone from another culture?

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: Makes sense

I thought PE stood for Pestilence Edition.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

I don't see the difference.

"The White House wants Uncle Sam to revert to "merit-based" hiring.

This is what The Register thinks equal opportunities should be all about, though: Recruiting people with the most appropriate skills for a role irrespective of race, gender, or background."

I read these two sentences a few times and still don't see a disparity between them.

Appropriate skills equals merit, no?

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

It had five partitions, not necessarily drives:

"the PC stored five discrete databases, each written to one of five disk partitions."

So his colleague probably forgot to clone one of the five partitions to the new disk(s) before taking the old disk.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

But what is it training?

The first captcha's were used to make OCR better.

The newer ones to train image recognition algorithms.

So presumably this will be used to train autonomous fighting robots?

Where is the ROTM icon?

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Re: Not again...

Upvote for the Kryten reference.

In my mind I can hear him say it.

Social Darwinism

"Hey, I'm hurtling towards a stationary fire truck at sixty miles an hour, but it's okay, the car will eventually brake for it"

Does not sound like the type of driver I'd like to be around on the road, with or without Autopilot.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

We have an Whatsapp group for this. Anyone who is on call who runs into a problem posts the problem there and there will always be someone to help them out.

Maybe not in the middle of the night, but we're not in a line of work where nocturnal calls are common, it's mostly evenings and weekends.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: Order Order!

A machine that spouts a load of waffle, makes up random facts and says it wants to help despite doing anything but?

Talky Toaster! Now that would be a good place for Copilot.

OMG - Microsoft....

Me: How many R's are there in raspberry?

- There are two R's in the word "raspberry." One at the beginning and one towards the end.

Me: Are you sure there are only two r's in raspberry?

- Yes, I'm sure! The word "raspberry" has two R's: one at the beginning and one towards the end. It can be a bit tricky because the first R is silent when pronounced.

Me: So, if a letter is not pronounced, it does not count in writing?

- Actually, even if a letter is not pronounced, it still counts in writing. The spelling of a word includes all its letters, regardless of whether they are pronounced. For example, in "raspberry," the first R is silent, but it is still part of the correct spelling.

English can be tricky with its silent letters! Do you have any other questions about spelling or pronunciation?

Me: So, essentially, you just told me raspberry has three r's?

I see where the confusion might be! To clarify, "raspberry" has two R's in its spelling: one at the beginning and one towards the end. The silent R at the beginning is still counted in the written form, even though it's not pronounced.

So, the word "raspberry" definitely has two R's. English spelling can be quite tricky with its silent letters!

And people use this to get work done?

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Ah....backups....

Our government spent millions on renaming the Ministry of Safety and Justice to Ministry of Justice and Safety (or the other way round, can't remember, to disgusted to look it up).

Nothing as easy as spending other people's money.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Re: re: It needs it because the android API won't give it sufficient access to the radio

Somewhere I have a picture of the house I lived in in the Caribbean. Google has it geo-tagged as Ixelles, Brussels, because that's where my girlfriend and her router used to live.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Website is no more

"you can turn this stuff off and enjoy better performance"

https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ has disappeared it seems.

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Re: Not that you'd know this from experts on YouTube or most retail sites

Look for Opentherm compatible hardware.

My house already came with a Opentherm compatible heater, so I bought a simple compatible thermostat.

It doesn't have Wifi, because it's not necessary.

I bought a Opentherm gateway for thirty euros and stuck a ESP8266 on it for the Wifi.

This connects it to Domoticz running on a Raspberry Pi.

It has been working flawless for over six years now.

No account necessary, no third party server necessary and an open protocol.

I can set the temperature from my phone, my PC or on the thermostat itself, but mostly it just runs a schedule programmed in Domoticz.

If needed, I can VPN home and operate the thermostat from anywhere.

Apart from setting the temperature I can also monitor outgoing and returning water temperatures.

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

Re: What we really <chirp> need........

My father in law, who is getting quite deaf (but is in denial, it's just the rest of the world mumbling) told me he had a cricket in the scullery. I told him to change the battery in the smoke detector.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Bruce?

So it's not called Bruce?

That's gonna cause some confusion then.

I'll get me coat hat. Mine's the one with the dangly corks.