Posts by Andrew Scott

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

red isn't all that great, just ask a matchgirl. wasn't white being used in gaza a few years ago?

Siri? Will tariffs hurt Apple? Tim Cook says brace for a $900M whack, for starters

Re: That probably means

but you'll only get one for christmas. :-(

Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers

I don't know that passkeys are that much more memorable. users have a default account for the business with a password they usually remember, but then they get a new windows machine and are asked to create a pin, when they actually need the pin they've often forgotten it. they remember the password as they took an effort to remember it but the pin was quickly chosen and as quickly forgotten. fortuanately there are many occasions when the password is required and the pin is not. maybe having everyone's data isn't enough for MS, now they want everyone's accounts. usernames/pins/passwords.

Three Brits charged over 'active shooter threats' swattings in US, Canada

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

They actually denied entry to the police academy in Connecticut because the applicant was too intelligent i believe. happened 10 or so years ago.

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

yes, easy to cooperate with the cops and still get shot around here or smothered, all a misunderstanding of course and the cops with their Kevlar vests were in fear of their lives. excuses everything.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

Don't really mandate it (office), but everyone gets a copy while they work here or are students. Even our telephone service it MS now. I do know people who use libreoffice for work and have had to translate student documents in ods format. Not often but occasionally. it used to be much more of a free for all, people randomly used xywrite, wordperfect, nota bene or whatever they liked. Used to have a program that could translate between most of these formats and more.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

wonder what the results would be if they replaced qe2 with someone who earned their position like Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi, or maybe for fun, Elizabeth Holmes?

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

with luck it will be putin down where it came from.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

BTW, should have mentioned onlyoffice. not quite as quick to open, but i like having a single window with spreadsheets and documents in separate tabs. nice feature.

Re: IOW

win 10. outlook took 4.9 seconds to open and word took 3 seconds. everything related to ms in the startup is disabled except windows security. doesn't sound like it needs to be pre-loaded. generally don't like apps loading until i want them.

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

this would be hard not to do with some of the current members of scotus.

Re: Car loans are always more expensive than loan from a bank

Credit union. think it was 5% last time i borrowed to buy a car. took the payments out of my bi-monthly deposits. Closed and merged with the boston credit union, but a lot less convenient as they are no longer on campus, and have to go through payroll to make deposits. You'd almost think the place was anti-credit union. easy to deposit, almost always paid more interest than any local banks. could get a loan without leaving campus or emergency funds if needed.

Red, white, and blew it? Trump tariffs may cost America the AI race

Re: Why is that "unfortunate"?

Seems to me that recent treatment of human rights in us are pretty horrific. Being kidnapped of the street by thugs wearing masks sounds like something from a horror movie. orange peanut is probably envious of kent state. haven't reached that point, but it certainly feels like that is around the cornet.

Chinese carmaker Chery using DeepSeek-driven humanoid robots as showroom sales staff

my first reaction is "would you buy a car from a blond?", of course if my blond niece recommended it i'd think seriously about it as she's worked for Goldman sax, Bloomberg, google, YouTube and Facebook at different times and graduated from Cornell so anything but a cliche. did get in trouble for knocking her tooth out when she was a kid. gentle underhand toss of a softball that wasn't caught.

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

Kristy "Who took the dog out" Noem. can't make this stuff up. well if trump ends up in a gravel pit we'll know why.

RSA cofounder: The world would've been better without cryptocurrencies

one time pad

anyone broken a properly used one time pad yet?

biggest financial institutions

they all got behind credit default swaps too. look how that turned out.

China now America's number one cyber threat – US must get up to speed

actually sounds like he comes from the Boston mass area. he can use wicked in a sentence properly.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Re: Could Latinise the Anglo-Saxon profanities instead of asterisks

didn't Eudora come with older version of office for the mac? Seem to remember it took a long time for the mac to get outlook. the mac version was so bad that half the users with mac's in my office ran windows in a virtual machine just so they could use the windows version of office.

Satellite slinger AST reckons newer birds won't outshine stars in night sky

it's sort of unfair, when dei is the only reason for the orange peanut to be in the white house. he certainly isn't there because of his competence.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Good old radio

charge it in your car. probably not going anywhere, be out of fuel for most vehicles trying to get somewhere with power. no pumps no chargers. power only out for 4 days? not too bad. lost power for 6 days in a halloween ice storm a number of years ago, and it was getting pretty cold. knew people with no power for a week and a half. been through some pretty big outages in 2003 and 1967. took a chunk of canada with us.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Also power-supply related

soon as he said 12 awg could see the problem. think it supports 15 amps at 120 v safely. starting up two large hp color laser printers can cause a circuit breaker to pop on a 20 amp circuit. as it is my keurig can make led house lights flicker only 40 feet from the breaker on a 15 amp circuit with 12 awg wiring.

Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key

Re: DOS? What about CP/M

Always used joe as an editor in linux. using vim would be like going back to edlin. why inflict pain on yourself?

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Been going on a long time. How did he think what he was endeavoring to do was any different from any slave holding society. carelessly broke my glass, throw him into the pool with the lampreys. that will teach and incentivize him. shows what a phd from Harvard is worth.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

my mom used to make Plumb pudding. pour brandy on it and light it up at christmas. poured extra as she'd had trouble getting it lit the previous year. lit up great, but then she couldn't put out. flame kept moving to the opposite side of where she was blowing to put the flame out. did manage to light a paper napkin on fire, but that was easy to put out. think it was the last time she made that.

Re: Sheer genius!!

Long time ago trying to diagnose memory errors on a computer being used as a server and studying the hardware manuals with a do-not-disturb sign on the door. Someone decide to heat some kind of pasta with tomato sauce in a plastic container tightly covered in plastic wrap. Exploded spraying tomato sauce all over the inside of the microwave, while i jumped about a foot.

Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers

few years ago the its department published a list of around 2200 static ip addresses. When i looked at them i realized they were mostly addresses for networked printers that had all been moved to the 10.x.x.x private network. Also had a list of the old addresses and the new private addresses which i could match to the list of static addresses they wanted to retire. don't know if they've all been retired of being used in some other way. there are probably other organizations that have lots of private ip4 addresses that they don't use. Any laptop using wifi is on the private 10 net, Only computers using ethernet, and there aren't many of those left, get public ip addresses and they're firewalled to the point that they might as well be on the private network.

Re: Inflection point?

recently turned 2.5 ghz off. only device using 2.5 was my moms phone and i had to keep changing the channel because the interference would get so bad the phone was unusable for anything. living in an area with 50 to 100 feet between my house and any neighbors but at least 30 2.5 ghz ssid's can be seen from my house. only 5 or 6 5 ghz neighbors can be seen.

Re: ip6 invented by nerdy idealists....

not when using wifi. most of the time i'm using my phone it's on wifi. only use the phone data plan when i'm driving and need maps.

India gets Google to unbundle Android and the Play Store on Smart TVs

You're putin me on! Actually pretty happy with my android phone and the software that comes with it. A lot cheaper than the alternative. I've almost always enjoyed features for half the price my relatives spent but didn't get until several years later. Not stuck with chrome if i don't want. Have always been able to use alternatives to the play store, but why?

Blue Shield says it shared health info on up to 4.7M patients with Google Ads

Re: Blue Shield should be sued into oblivion

without blue cross blue shield i'd probably be dead. they are probably one of the better medical insurance companies. It sound like you've seen "rainmaker" too many times.

Who needs phishing when your login's already in the wild?

Pc's used to be locked down, no admin for users. mac's weren't managed back then and could install anything they wanted. Now the first user of a pc is an admin and to an extent can install anything they want, but features like antivirus are locked with group policies as are printer drivers, and macs are managed automatically though users are managed admins. Some things like upgrading a mac to the latest mac os are forbidden. Still, with the current versions of windows 10 hardware specific drivers and firmware are being updated, can be a problem. I have seen MS insist on installing a usb driver for a docking station that didn't work and recently saw a video on YouTube where the uefi had been overwritten by uefi designed for a different machine. computer wouldn't boot.

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

Re: You're funny

think he actually had some good people in his first term. the problem is they didn't do what he wanted. so this time he's making sure that everyone around him can hear a dog whistle and comes rushing up with their buts wagging and their tongues hanging out, just lie he does when Putin blow his whistle. Has learned a lot since his first term.

Re: Surely

it would make him look bad. that's the reason he forbade a ship with sick passengers from docking. the number of covid infections would go up and make him look bad. better you dead than me look bad. really nice guy.

Re: "What have I missed?"

probably thinking of the story "masque of the red death". black and red are so easy to confuse, but idiots don't read poe.

Tesla's Optimus can't roll without rare earth magnets, and Beijing ain't budging yet

seems to me he self owns with ".... doesn't know what he's talking about"!

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: Dementia

the guy couldn't make a casino run profitably! Trump university was a scam from the beginning. Don't think you need to look much further than that.

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

office with 8088's, '286's and 386sx's. win 3 worked on all of them. ran it off a network drive as some of the machines were floppy only. later versions didn't update to 3.1 until everyone had a '386 machine which took a while. donation from DEC supplied '386sx's for the entire office. nice desktop machines with very complete hardware and software documentation.

UK-based self-driving car startup Wayve heads to Japan for more driving data

is lane keeping really solved? if they're using dashed or solid lines to determine if a car's position is good i can't help worrying that most of the roads i drive have lane separator lines that vanish because of construction, or deviate from the expected position to use the breakdown lane temporarily during construction while the previous lines are still clearly visible. it's not uncommon to see drivers lose track of what lane they're in under these conditions. if you can't trust the cars around you that have human and presumably alert drivers how are you going to trust a car using ai? rain and snow, not to mention salt and sand are common which can make lanes hard to see due to reflections especially at night. not sure i'd trust my life to lane keeping in a car at the current level of the technology. could be different in a state that manages the condition of it's roads better, but wouldn't trust lane keeping around here.

Bad trip coming for AI hype as humanity tools up to fight back

Re: Define 'decent.'

they probably have some degree of integrity, kindness, and goodwill, but it likely only extends to people they know personally. everyone else whom they don't know personally simply doesn't exist. to them the people they don't know are the dots at the bottom of the Ferris wheel, would you be upset if one of them disappeared? are there any decent libertarians? probably, but the ones i've listened seem to suffer from fuzzy thinking which leads to fuzzy logic. really no reasoning with fuzzy thinking.

ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations

Re: What would you do?

this is rhetorical right? you seriously don't see the inconsistencies in what you've written? this was written by a really bad ai, right? a joke?

Re: Operating Sytems and the Gullible

Of course, if it sizzles it's steak. We don't sell steak, we sell the sizzle.

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: Move MITRE & CVE to Europe

planing to move MIT also?

Microsoft Copilot shows up even when it's not wanted

Re: AI has its place

seems to be 2 "copilots" in the startup tab of task manager on windows 10. just plain "copilot", and "Microsoft 365 copilot". wouldn't be surprised if it was finding a different to startup automatically. wack-a-mole. very annoying. Currently have 21 items showing up in the startup tab of task manager that are disabled. Still 10 items that are enabled including 3 that belong to the adobe creative cloud. not sure which of them i can get away with disabling without unexpected problems.

Datacenters selling power back to the grid? Don’t bet on it, say operators

Re: Virtue

Understand that if there is a fault with a high voltage underground cable it can be very expensive to fix.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Next week :

have to wait till trumps out of office or he'll just get pardoned. think everyone in the administration should get a shingles vaccine, they all seem to have dementia.

Microsoft blames 'latent code issue' after Windows 11 upgrades sneak past admin blockades

just an old easter egg someone embedded years ago without ms noticing until now.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Re: "therefore stealing from Trump."

he's just pissed that Harvard never asked him to speak at a graduation or star with the hasty pudding or give him an honorary degree. invite him to a performance and you'll get your 2 billion back.

Trump derails Chinese H20 GPU sales, forcing Nvidia to eat $5.5B this quarter

Re: Ouch

3.5 k is more than 7 lbs. no one has that much salt. doubt the box of salt i get at the grocery is that much. sodium isn't just salt. read somewhere it's the cl that's the real problem, not the na.

Chinese snoops use stealth RAT to backdoor US orgs – still active last week

Re: A cyber arms race is looming

i'd have thought that the plant in iran was likely destroyed by someone else, not the us. Sounds more like an exploding phone or pager sort of thing.