Posts by perlcat

Ich nicht bin Charlie: Facebook must crack down on racists, says Germany's Merkel

Says it all:

"When people stir up sedition under their real name on social networks..."

Well, just don't do that.

'Walter Mitty' IT manager admits to buying gun on dark web

Re: Surprised it doesn't happen more often

My cynical take on the "Darknet" is that it's more like the Ashley Madison site, with maybe 6 or 7 actual sellers that didn't get the memo, hundreds of dumbasses that think they can actually buy, tens of thousands of "lookers", and any remaining "seller" or "buyer" is a government front or someone looking to entrap.

A lot like the scene on "Office Space", where they looked up "money laundering" in the encyclopedia. If you want the term to describe these things in general, I suggest: "dumbasserie", and this in specific: "Dumbassnet".

West's only rare earth mine closes. Yet Chinese monopoly fears are baseless

There's another mine in Elk Creek, Nebraska -- operated by NioCorp. Haven't gotten anything out of the ground yet, though.

BOFH: An architect and his own entirely avoidable downfall

Re: Going soft

It's not pity. If there were no survivors, then how would people know to not trifle with the BOFH?

Antiques in spaaaaace! Retired space shuttles cannibalised for parts

I'm calling BS on this one.

I think that space exploration is a major priority. However, this smacks of budget-time theatrics where they say "Look what you forced us to do. Since we failed to plan ahead and remove non-viewable internal parts when we *gave* these away to museums, we now want to appear in the headlines. Give us money. "

If they'd have planned ahead,any usable parts would already have been removed and stored, and using them would be a mere inventory adjustment. It was either a failure to plan ahead (which isn't a phrase you should use to describe people bulding great big, explosive rockets), or just more kabuki.

This lack of planning is ironic; the reason that NASA is lacking for funds is because they are unable to come up with a plan for future exploration that resonates. Instead, they prefer to keep funding their bureaucracy, which is about as uninspiring as you can get. A more active NASA would have no problems getting funded. What they are doing now is the equivalent of an oil drilling company drilling dry holes in order to preserve their lease. If you doubt me, ask yourself -- we used to use the term "space-aged" to describe the technological offshoots of the space program. How long has it been since there have been significant 'space-aged' offshoots from the current program? It certainly couldn't have been from the national embarrassment* that was the Space Shuttle (the B52 of space exploration). Why did they have to reverse engineer the Saturn V engines? Surely they could have gone and used the blueprints and research data? Losing that information, so fundamental to their purpose, was way beyond criminal.

The enormous bureacracy that is NASA was created as a *side effect* of the moon project, not the end goal. I think they may be unclear on that. As much as it pains me, I think that NASA should be eliminated, and a different agency created from the ground up. They've squandered enough technology to get us to Mars and back a dozen times.

Read this and weep: it is not a triumphant story about a technological advance, but instead a sad reminder of how pathetically mismanaged NASA was and is: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/ -- I dont think claiming a "technological advance" as a result of *duplicating* what I saw on a museum trip is anything resembling truthful. It's a "recovery of lost technology". Ask yourself who lost it, and why are we paying these idiots money to squander the resources they are in charge of.

*It wasn't an embarrassment when it was new, but why didn't they replace it when it first became obsolete?

Secret US-Pacific trade pact leak exposes power of the copyright lobby

I do not envy dairy farmers of any sort, they lead a difficult life.

Re: They seem to have a lot to hide...

Why, yes, yes, they do.

Re: I'm not subject to secret laws

I don't think so. It certainly doesn't apply to the politicians that vote for it.

Clueless do-gooders make Africa's conflict mineral mines even more dangerous

Re: Bandit theory

Precisely. The implication that there is a causal relationship between a bloated government and a well-to-do society is laughable. If anything, the causality flows the other way. Like Willie Sutton, old-time bank robber, they go there because that's where the money is. No more, no less.

Re: As usual.

I disagree. The crucial difference is that the nuImperialist has no interest in actually keeping said primitive brown people alive. They're simply engaged in the societal mutual masturbation exercise of "doing the 'right' thing", regardless of the actual consequences. Since they feel so gosh-darned *good* about themselves, they're happily able to ignore a democide or two of their own creation, or, even better, blame it on the people that have the gall to oppose them.

The old Imperialist may have had serfs, but dead serfs can't work mines.

Intel doubles its bounty for women and ethnic minorities

Re: Questions

They do, however, flock to the Maori studies and women's studies courses - neither of which is any use for employment. Which pretty much says it all. There's more money/satisfaction to be made in being outraged, offended, and discriminated against than in actually performing work for pay. Reminds me of a conversation I recently had:

Outrageist: "There aren't enough women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math professions."

Me: "What was your major?"

Outrageist: "Womyn's Studies"

Me: "..."

In a normal world, I'd have asked her why she wasn't in such a major -- but I'd like to keep my job, and so freedom of speech went right down the old crapper.

Your voter-trolling autodialer is illegal: The cringey moment the FCC spanks a congresscritter

Re: Wait!

It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of assholes. erm, "guys".

Pope loses grip on Antarctica: Clergy withdraw from austral landmass

Re: Ah....

Yes, they singlehandedly got a grip on their needs.

NSA: We'll move your metadata into /dev/null when you stop suing us

but of course!

It's a good faith deletion, and you can rest assured that it will be most thoroughly deleted from the place where you know it to be.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

Re: Tidy Desk

Fix your nomenclature. It isn't an 'untidy desk'; your desk is a 'Horizontal Filing System', and the issues you are dealing with are fragmentation and indexing. Just remember, some FS's are better than others at coping with it. You may or may not need a wetware update, but if retrieval is acceptable, the correct resolution to the issue is to ignore it as in all probability, you have other issues that demand more attention, which may include getting a higher score in nethack.

This from a tech who told a manager "I'll be happy to give your issue all the attention it deserves". I hung up the phone, and we were both happy -- for different reasons, of course.

Jeep breach: Scared? You should be, it could be you next

Re: CAN Bus

That's reassuring. I had thought that the builders of trucks and airplanes were more sane than auto manufacturers. My faith in universal corporate stupidity has been restored! Now I can sleep at night. Wait a minute...

Are you a Tory-voting IT contractor? Congrats! Osborne is hiking your taxes

Re: "At which point, believe it or not, the government will get less tax, not more"

Not exactly. In a just and well-run world, they'd shut off services that yield marginal benefits, are excessively expensive, or that haven't been proved to actually work.

I kill me, I really do. If your politics work like they do in the US, shutting off those sorts of things would stop the flow of cash to their pockets or their crony's pockets. They'll just take the page out of the 0bama playbook, threaten to shut down all sorts of essential services, and hire new sentries in order to block the public from using facilities that don't cost anything to erect, and cost nothing to maintain. After all, being a heel pays big dividends and with the press in your back pocket, unlikely to generate a backlash.

Don't believe me? Google 'obama blocks world war 2 memorial'.

Why the USS NetApp is a doomed ship

Yep, and thanks to the powers that be

now our Marines need to hitch rides on other nation's ships. Embarrassing, really.

As the US realises it's been PWNED, when will OPM heads roll?

Re: Peter principle

You'll have to excuse me while I laugh and mock the statement: "... there is no reason that a political appointee, if supported by competent and experienced civil service executives, cannot be quite successful as director."

In other words, competence and experience isn't a requirement for a job that's essentially a payoff. If the job is truly a sinecure, wholly redundant, then she shouldn't have been given enough power to get into trouble. While the realist in me understands that she was placed there to oversee the ideological purge, in a sane universe, she shouldn't also purge the competent and experienced employees in order to preserve her pathetic and incompetent ass. She's been hoist by her own petard, and man, is that funny.

Re: Peter principle

In other words, a political hack of such imbecility that basic IT behavior like the "extreme measures" mentioned are actually viewed as extreme measures.

Given that most of the Administration didn't have a problem with the Secretary of State using her own personal email server until it was politically advantageous, not a surprise. The only surprise I have is that there isn't more of this. They're too ignorant to know they've been hacked. Surprised they haven't retaliated on the people that found and reported the pwnage.

My guess is that security firm will never work in DC again.

Re: Ha

Thanks to our fine government, solving imaginary problems by replacing them with real ones since the start.

Get your WELLIES to MARS: Red Planet reveals its FROZEN BOTTOM

Re: "Earth" is a frequency!

I propose the length of time to be in 'KardshianMarriages" -- that's a reasonably long period when talking about seasons.

Naked cyclists take a hard line on 'aroused' protest participant

The opposition to this activity is oddly stiffer than anticipated.

I'll go away now.

Re: Cycling normally works the other way

Wrong saddle.

Why voice and apps sometimes don't beat an old-fashioned knob

UI changes are not always bad.

However, part of the workflow for changing them should involve a life-threatening beating for the 5 top officers/wage earners in the company. If the need surpasses their unwillingness to be beat within an inch of their life, then the change is necessary and should go in.

Insurer tells hospitals: You let hackers in, we're not bailing you out

Nice try, but I doubt that they will learn the lesson. Not when they can socialize the costs and privatize the profits.

BOFH: Never mind that old brick, look at this ink-stained BEAUTY

Re: says:

Using the Gateway 2000 AnyKey keyboard. A thing of programmable beauty, good for many fun pranks when I worked for the CowCompany.

Woman caught on CCTV performing drunken BJ blew right to privacy

Wow.

Truly disgusting. Sadly, in the US, we can't claim any moral distinction, given that we have the Kardashians on TV, whose only difference between this utter scum and themselves is that they have enough animal cunning to parley what should be utter humiliation into a fortune. Yeccch.

Tor de farce: NSA fails to decrypt anonymised network

Re: I'm feeling a bit ambivalent this morning...

Better calm down, Walter. You're lathering again.

BOFH: Capo di tutti capi, bah. I'm having CHICKEN JALFREZI

BOFH will neither win nor lose this one.

Gina transcends evil. This is setting up to be an epic mugging of the Company.

Boffins cure BONING PROBLEMS in 'virtual lab'

The solution to this is simple.

Anyone that wishes to stop animal testing should either volunteer to be a test subject, or be called out for the hypocrite they are..

Boffins: We have found a way to unlock the MYSTERIES OF SHEEP from old parchments

Re: Welly boots

Lends a whole new layer to the term "trigger foods".

IGMC

BOFH: Santa, bloody Santa

I used to think that Gina was a perfect match for the BOFH.

Now I know she's the One for me.

Pity that I'm already married and all.

BOFH: WHERE did this 'fax-enabled' printer UPGRADE come from?

Re: CFH Gina?

I want more of her, as well. She was brilliant. Evil, too. Bastard needs this to keep him in line.

Useless 'computer engineer' Barbie fired in three-way fsck row

You guys got it all wrong.

I want Barbie to do my laptop servicing.

BOFH: An UNHOLY MATCH forged amid the sweet smell of bullsh*t

Re: Swoons

You are not the only one. She slams my doors, too.

What kind of generation doesn't stick it to the Man, but to Taylor Swift instead?

Re: If you want to make a million from playing music...

Excellent advice. People have to understand that if a record company made an artist a millionaire, it's because they made themselves billionaires.

Wrong.

That's how "crony capitalism" works. Crony capitalism works by taking money and power from the people in order to award it to the politically connected. If you understand that pattern, you may find that your politics may be challenged.

BOFH: SOOO... You want to sell us some antivirus software?

@Peter2

I love your sweeping generalisation that all exe's are bad. I work as a sysadmin, and trolls like you are why I have to first zip exe's using weird compression, rename them to .tiff, open with a hex editor and insert 1029 bytes of tiff file information at the top, just so I can transfer a file, remove the 1029 bytes, rename to whatever zip format and uncompress them and do my job. Pray to whatever gods you believe in that I never discover what kind of car you drive, where you eat, or where you sleep. Revenge is a dish best served totally unbeknownst to the target.

Feeling safe in your executive hotel suite, Mr CEO? Well, DON'T

Re: Consider the target

For most of the executroids I know of, the definition of a "zero day exploit" is any and all zero day exploits ranging back to Jan 1, 1970. Power hath its privileges, but is certainly unaffected by the learning curve.

Dating website for damaged-stiffy sufferers suffers stiff damage: £10m bill for leak

Re: "These profiles were shared with up to 1,000 individual websites"

I can't believe you actually put these words in a sentence: "politicians are left with no choice but to do the right thing."

The only way politicians will do that is if you hold a gun to their head.

HUGE SHARK as big as a WWII SUBMARINE died out, allowing whales to exist

Their "simulation" is simply not science.

In other news, similar logic has determined the length of the Chinese emperor's nose. http://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm

*REAL* scientists measure stuff. This is just another entry for the dictionary in the "bullshitology" section.

Short movie explaining what it's like to SysAdmin

Short movie explaining what it's like to SysAdmin

http://vimeo.com/105788896

Ada Lovelace Day: Meet the 6 women who gave you the 'computer'

That's not "Hedley"

ObBlazingSaddlesJoke.

@ Marina

You and I look at the same thing and see two different things. Yes, I have no doubt that your contributions are ignored, and even that they claim it is because you're female. There's a lot that goes into that sort of workplace idiocy, and drawing the conclusion that it's really, truly because of your feminine genitalia is self-defeating. It actually hands the tools to defeat your spirit to the people most likely to use them to take advantage of you.

The same jerks that ignore your contributions are ignoring the Pakistani guy because of his skin color, the Indian guy because of his accent, and the self-educated person from a poor family because "he's not one of us", as Eleanor Roosevelt put it so well. I'd say that a business that actually respects its IT talent is a one-in-a-million thing.

What you're really saying when you express frustration with the way things are, is that you want to live in a world without assholes. No kidding. Me, too! Some days, it's schadenfreude that gets me to go to work, other days, it's my morbid curiosity, and frequently, it's a combination of both.

There's no reason to leave IT because you've struck asshole -- if you went elsewhere, I can assure you that you will find assholes there as well. Just study the situation, learn from it, and remember, that until you are in charge, you have to abide by the idiosyncrasies of the people that are. Also remember, that being "in charge" doesn't mean "management" -- team members are often even stupider.

Re: Gender parity == hogwash. @ThomH

Well, nobody said life was fair. At least the newly un-hobbled man has a chance that didn't exist before.

The problem is how or whether to "fix" unfairness. Using governmental intervention to fix unfairness isn't a slippery slope; it's a precipice. Sure, things like affirmative action opened doors in many places for many people -- but the problem is that once outside forces start to dictate winners and losers, the system gets perverted and abused.

Gender parity == hogwash.

First off; the concept "there aren't enough women in computing, so we must do something about it" has its foundation in the (erroneous) concept that women are somehow inferior in their ability to seek and obtain IT work, and therefore need "help" getting into it. I have tried for years to get my daughters into IT -- despite the attractions of it, they don't want to. Never mind that they are currently working for peanuts -- they just aren't attracted to the field. This in spite of the fact that I have connections that can get them into a well-compensated part of the biz.

It isn't a lack of a desire for joining the anorak set -- the multiple "just so" explanations that a programmer has to be some pimply-faced basement-dweller seem ludicrous in this situation. They just don't want to.

Word to the "feminists" out there -- the moment you state that legislation/external encouragement is needed in order to bring "parity" to the number of women in IT is the moment that you have stated that women as a whole* are not able to fairly compete in an equal marketplace, and are insulting the brilliant women who have proven their skills before you. An equal opportunity hire, IMO, is an Orwellian term for "incompetent, but we hired her because it looks nice", dilutes the amount of salary available for men and women with actual skills, and demeans the women in IT who are actually talented.

* note: I would never make that statement. Some are, some aren't. It all depends upon the individual.

Origins of SEXUAL INTERCOURSE fished out of SCOTTISH LAKE

...so *that's* what's under the kilts.

It's even worse than I'd imagined.

Sysadmin with EBOLA? Gartner's issued advice to debug your biz

Re: How do I "horde" something?

Every time I read where someone wants me to "horde" something, I print it, and save it with my stash of such things. I'm preserving a large collection of them. A "hoard", if you will.

Dairy Queen cuts the waffle, says bank cards creamed in 395 eateries

@tnovelli

Exactly. The entire identity theft industry is predicated on the stunning negligence in using someone else's numbering system as a financial identity. (It began as stunning ignorance, but morphed into stunning negligence as people became aware of all the places it is being misused.) In a sane world, the only thing a social security number thief should be able to do is collect your benefit and pay your taxes.

Not sure how you could avoid using a credit card number for financial purpose, though.