Posts by Rasslin ' in the mud

If I pedal faster and feed it spinach, my robot barman might pull more pints

Re: Intense raspberry confiture

Excellent name for a Gunge Rock band!

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

Re: Oh yes...

Government Contracting 101:

A. Write the design specification exactly as requested/demanded.

B. Charge DOUBLE for every contract change order.

C. Retire

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

Re: Monolith?

b) Insulting to whom?

Pedants and other vermin?

Ericsson warns investors: This Biden fellow coming into the White House may look to resolve China trade dispute...

Re: Understandable

Principled?! Shirley you jest.

We're talking about "...the child molesting, woman groping, walking around naked with his sagging a$$ hanging out in front of Secret Service women, China-owned fraud..."

Microsoft: After we said we'll try to promote more Black people, the US govt accused us of discrimination

Re: This is just because of Trump

BZZZZZT!

What was banned is indoctrinating with the BS Critical Race Theory within the US Military and Government departments.

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

Re: Does LMDE 4 work okay on old computers?

Define "old." It works just fine on my 10 y.o. Dell Laptop.

What a terrible result from this year's Super Bowl. Can you believe it? Awful. Yes, we're talking about the tech ads

Re: Squarespace

They can call us simple but it's far better than being so stupid is to (want to) be crammed into tiny overpriced apartments, enduring hours long traffic jams, and listening to every argument your neighbors have. I endured that on both coasts for many years. Now we enjoy life near a town where gridlock is three cars at a four-way stop, where traffic jams are caused by the tourists stopping in the middle of a main street to look at elk grazing a block away, and the beating wings of the hummingbirds is the loudest noise on summer mornings while I sit on the porch drinking my morning cuppa.

All the Coasties are trying to do is pull us down to their level of unhappiness.

Steve Jobs, executives shot down top Apple engineers' plea to design their own server CPU – latest twist in legal battle over chip upstart Nuvia

Re: Foot meet gun, gun meet foot

[quote] But what I don’t get is why the company gives a damn...[/quote]

I guess you're unfamiliar with what happens when someone leaves a cult.

Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police

Re: Let's hope West Midlands Police learns something useful

I'm unfamiliar with the concept of "unsafe convictions" which appears in the first sentence of the linked Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overturned_convictions_involving_the_West_Midlands_Serious_Crime_Squad). Does that refer to a guilty verdict for someone who has the wherewithal to do harm to the judge/jurors? I figure it's a product of the British Orwellian Government Uninformed justice System (BOGUS) but my lack of familiarity with your culture forces me to ask.

Ah, night shift in the 1970s. Ciggies, hipflasks, ADVENT... and fault-prone disk drives the size of washing machines

Do Not Hire Liberal Arts Majors for Technical Work

Their malfunction report will read something like:

"As the drive span(sic) up, it stopped working."

The complete lack of awareness of cause and effect - demonstrated by moving the faulty disk pack from drive to drive - is almost as astounding as the idea the bean counters wouldn't go to General Quarters over the near simultaneous failure of several thousands of dollars worth of separate pieces of equipment.

All because Sysop Jr feared a tongue lashing for not having games ready to play? Gimme a break!

This tale smells suspiciously like Limburger Cheese gone bad.

Das Reboot: Uni forces 38,000 students, staff to queue, show their papers for password reset following 'cyber attack'

Inconveniencing the users drives home the lesson

The number one problem with modern society is lack of penalties for bad behavior. Perhaps, and only perhaps, the idiots who ignore instructions about not opening attachments in emails will get a small part of the message as a result of the uni's approach.

British bloke accused of extorting victims for 'Dark Overlord' hacker crew finally gets his free trip* to America

"...individuals like him bring down the whole profession."

The profession seems to be doing a good enough job as a group. I am tired of having to be a beta tester, at a minimum, for every product release I have paid for, sometimes substantial sums. I am aware that "management" is at the heart of the problem, what with unrealistic schedules and budgets. They, too, are members of the profession and probably most responsible for reputation damage.

IT: One label to bind them. One brush to tar them all.

Metasploit for drones? Best of luck with that, muses veteran tinkerer

Over my property...

...Drones = Skeet*

*One of the benefits of not living with neighbors close by.

Since the FCC won't act, Congress finally moves on robocalls by passing half-decent TRACED Act

Re: Reboot

Congress is doing a fine job of wasting their time and MY MONEY with their Kangaroo Court of an impeachment. Frankly, I don't know how they squeezed passing this piece of nearly useless legislation into their agenda.

Close the windows, it's coming through the walls: Copper Cthulu invades Dabbsy's living room

RE: "toothpaste doesn't come out when you squeeze them"

Trains don't run in them, either.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

It doesn't matter ...

what people are saying as long as they're talking about you. It's called publicity.

Elon Musk is no dummy despite what all you box dwellers may think. Whatever is the final form of this urban cowboy trinket - it certainly isn't designed for those of us who use our pickup trucks to earn a living - he has EVERYONE talking about it, if only for the "stunt" with the windows. It's all Free Advertising.

Questions hang over Gatwick Airport after low level drone near-miss report

I think he meant "Doesn't know how"

"You should be able to post links, I'm sure you can because I used to do." (Insert Dunce Cap icon here.)

California’s Attorney General joins the long list of people who have had it with Facebook

Re: Not All Bad

Yeah, right .[/sarcasm]

So, tell me, are you an employee or only a paid shill?

Radio nerd who sipped NHS pager messages then streamed them via webcam may have committed a crime

That this person had an Amateur Radio License ...

Downvote for making an assertion as fact about an assumption.

Are you coming to the party dressed as an IMP? ARPANET @ 50

Algore must be fuming

The self-anointed "Inventor of the Internet" received not one mention.

Samsung on fridge cert error: Someone tried to view 'unsavoury content' in middle of John Lewis

I prefer:

The article says: "At least the fridge door should be wipe-downable." I think "wipe-offalble" (not a typo) would be more fitting.

I'm leaving now.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google told: If you could cough up a decade of your internal emails, that'd be great

Another song and dance

The requests will be stonewalled.

Congress will huff and puff for as long as it takes for the inquiry to completely fade from the 24/7 news cycle. The 0.01% of the population who will pay attention will give up hope for any meaningful action before the story fades.

Some Senators and Congress Critters will be ridiculously enriched for looking away and my tax dollars will be wasted even more.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

I never got a Blue Peter badge....

If your sex life if that pathetic, why would you want a badge to announce it?

Watch as 10 cops with guns and military camo storm suspected Capital One hacker's house…

Re: Darwin Award Contender

"True, but posting her CV with your name and address on the same account she used to brag about the hack probably gave the game away..."

How would posting her CV with MY name an address give away anything useful to the investigation?

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

"You still have to be able to take over at a moment's notice though, which is presumably what FSD will be for."

Therein lies the problem. FSD does the opposite of what the marketing hype pretends. By having to monitor the performance of the supposedly autonomous system(s) as well as the actual environment, the workload on the operator/passenger is actually increased. Hypnosis By Boredom(TM) will be a contributor that isn't presently being addressed because of the blindness caused by so many shiny new objects.

Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away

"* If anyone knows the actual legal position in the hypothetical above, please let me know. My reasoning seems correct to me, but I know that the law may be completely different and would be interested to know how that would play out."

You have obviously never experienced the thrill of being the target of a horde of ambulance chasing lawyers. My experience is the "actual legal position" is dependent on what the presiding judge will allow into the lawsuit.

My example isn't automotive but it is relatable: I once was employed as a repair technician in a General Aviation Avionics Repair Station. One day, a small Cessna was flipped inverted by the wake turbulence of a departing airliner and contacted the runway with its wheels pointing skyward.

Our company was named a co-defendant in the lawsuit because we were listed in the maintenance records as having performed a repair on the aircraft - over 12 months prior to the incident we had replaced the loudspeaker for the navigation/communication radio.

Here is the way the ambulance chasers work here in the States: If your (company's) name can in any way be associated with the accident, you're going to have to spend time and money defending yourself against scurrilous and logically unfounded charges regardless of what the laws and regulations might say.

Minecraft's my Nirvana. I found it hard, it's hard to find. Oh well, whatever... Never Mined

'here be dragons...'

I conclude you're saying with the exception of replacing the quill and ink with an electronic doo-dad, not much about the human element of cartography has changed in the past 500 years: Still only the brave and adventurous travel into areas of the not so easily known. I'll have a cold one ready to greet them.

Boeing admits 737 Max sims didn't accurately reproduce what flying without MCAS was like

Re: ...What's "clusterfuck" in the Queen's English please?

"Group shag?"

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

An important question

Who calculated the near miss distance?

https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

Re: Can't stop laughing

"- some are so self centered, they talk about themselves in a post."

You mean like the headline for this post?

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

"MCAS was intended to add nose-down trim if it thought the aircraft was getting close to stalling."

MCAS is a subsystem on a commercial aircraft! It doesn't THINK, it primitively responds to sensor inputs in a pre-programmed manner! If computers are so "gee-whiz" to the author, maybe he is working for the wrong publication.

UK joins growing list of territories to ban Boeing 737 Max flights as firm says patch incoming

Re: Panic

"There have been 2 incidents." Wrong!

If you define an incident as MCAS running away, there have been at least three, still a very tiny number. The first one being on the Lion Air aircraft that crashed on a subsequent flight (the first accident) due to a seemingly identical failure. The first time, the flight crew pulled the circuit breaker on the MCAS and continued the flight.

I would love to see the System Safety Hazard Analysis to learn if the potential for these failures was (allowed to be) identified during development.

Regardless, by poo-pooing the idea that there might be a fundamental flaw in the MCAS, Boeing management has harmed the company's reputation and lost a lot of confidence from those of us that fly as passengers.

Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...

Re: More problems than skin color

"Cameras and Lidar don't work well if at all on snow covered roads or in a heavy snow storm."

Neither does the visual cortex.

HMRC: We 'rigorously tested' IR35 tax-check tool... but have almost nothing to show for it

To paraphrase an advertising meme...

What goes into CEST stays in CEST.

I'm leaving now.

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Back in the day ...

In the 1980's the large-ish company where I worked trotted out a new email system. Many members of management were unable to adapt and continued to dictate messages to their secretaries to be sent by email with a typed copy placed in a file drawer, followed by an interoffice FAX of the identical message, followed by the secretary hand carrying a printed copy of the email to the recipient's office. The behaviors improved over time, but is still amazes me the company was profitable.

Microsoft man: Internet Explorer had to go because it's garbage

Re: Well…

"...Its shocking that to date - Internet explorer doesn't work on linux or android out the box."

Were it to come to pass, such an achievement would be analogous to picking up a turd by the clean end.

Oz auditor: Number of times failed government biometric project met a milestone = None

Not enough targets

"Yet if one of my small projects ( less than £10K) goes 10% overspend I get a grilling about my budget management skills."

I note the use of first person singular in your post, and therein lies your problem. Your scapegoat population is too limited.

Encryption? This time it'll be usable, Thunderbird promises

Re: Dear TBird team

If by "screw it up" you mean changing the perfectly good and traditional names of folders like "Trash" to "Deleted," you're too late.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Re: I've seen a definite uptick in these

Recently a site at which I had registered through their "secure server" returned a clear text email with my login credentials, including my Carefully Crafted Unique Password (TM!). When I poked the site owner, he responded his IT staff said it was impossible to retrieve a password. Obviously someone was lying.

My point is many site owners are PHB's who are out of their technical depth on any matter relating to actual system operation.

Software changed the world, then died on the first of the month

Re: @Rich 11

Bzzzzt!

It is the spec writer who is responsible for understanding "the problem from the customer's point of view."

The developer/coder/programmer is responsible only for creating software which implements the "spec."

GDPR forgive us, it's been one month since you were enforced…

Re: And once again...

Acronym Dyslexia. It's abundant throughout the post.

My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

It isn't just computers!

A few decades ago, I managed a small general aviation avionics repair shop. Around that time, Cessna introduced BEIGE panels on the front of their radios because their marketing geniuses had concluded grease, oil, and dirt are never present on a flight line. We had one customer who would come in weekly to complain that the navigation receiver was out of whack and needed recalibrating. Every week we would connect the test set and every week the Nav functions were better than spec.

One week, after performing the ritual check and again finding nothing required adjusting, I noticed the BEIGE front panel was looking rather krufty. I fetched the bottle of Panel Cleaner (Windex (r)), gave it a couple of spritzes and wiped it off. A few days later, the customer came in to say how happy he was we had found the problem with his radio and it was working perfectly!

As with so many of the other anecdotes in this thread, the moral is don't spend a lot of time looking for a technical solution when psychology can accomplish so much more.

Sole Equifax security worker at fault for failed patch, says former CEO

Re: It's 2017 and NO ONE practices basic security yet.

Speaking from many years' experience with building codes and building inspectors, I assure you those aren't useful as models for how to manage anything unless you propose to cite them as bad examples.

Mappy days! Ordnance Survey offers up free map of UK greenery

On this side of the pond...

Copied from merriam-webster.com because I wasn't interested in subscribing to the OED.

"Definition of ordnance

1

a : military supplies including weapons, ammunition, combat vehicles, and maintenance tools and equipment

bombers dropped heavy concentrations of ordnance on every targeted airfield — Ron Dick

b : a service of the army charged with the procuring, distributing, and safekeeping of ordnance"

My question: Is this another color vs colour spelling mismatch or is something more sinister afoot?

To explain further (same source):

Definition of ord.i.nance

1

a : an authoritative decree or direction : order On that day the king signed three ordinances.

b : a law set forth by a governmental authority; specifically : a municipal regulation A city ordinance forbids construction work to start before 8 a.m.

2

: something ordained or decreed by fate or a deity

Let ordinance come as the gods foresay [=foretell] it. — William Shakespeare

3

: a prescribed usage, practice, or ceremony observes the ordinance of abstinence during Lent

Connectivity's value is almost erased by the costs it can impose

Re: ... and a descent into a kind of stupidity we haven’t seen in many years.

"we are moving to the realization of the neocon wet dream fast."

WTF does that mean?

Given a choice between a socialist, a candidate under investigation by the FBI, and a businessman who isn't part of the DC cesspool, I think the outcome is acceptable.

What's a "neocon".

Re: "Stupidity we haven’t seen in many years"

Certainly, The inability to distinguish between "knowledge" and "information" plays a key role.

Drunk user blow-dried laptop after dog lifted its leg over the keyboard

Rank, Ranker, Rankest

"But he had no concerns about stinking up the IT department and also, more importantly, had rank."

It generally applies when referring to management compared to people who actually perform useful work, this manager was "ranker" than the IT department. While he was in Jim's office, he was the rankest person in the room.

Deeming Facebook a 'publisher' of users' posts won't tackle paedo or terrorist content

Re: Which country's legal jurisdiction to use?

Why pick on America? It is the United Nations which wants to be the world's governing body. I think Brussels isn't far behind in that desire. Heaven help us if either succeeds.

New Windows 10 privacy controls: Just a little snooping – or the max

Is this a technical site or a hack political fake news site?

[quote]On the other hand, Microsoft – like other American tech companies – can be compelled to hand over this sort of customer information to the Feds, who are about to be under the control of a remorseless bully who loves to hold a grudge.[/quote]

Give it a rest!

Wait, wait – I got it this time, says FCC as it swings again at rip-off US TV cable boxes

We're from the government.

We're here to help.

Scares me and I'm fearless!