* Posts by Slow Joe Crow

91 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2011

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Police arrest suspect in murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO, with grainy pics the only tech involved

Slow Joe Crow
Headmaster

Re: I wonder

Ballistics doesn't work as well as it used to. The basic theory is that cut rifling leaves a unique set of tool marks in the gun barrel which in turn transfer to the bullet. This falls apart with modern industrial production with cold hammer forged barrels and polygonal rifling. At that point the best you could say is the bullet came from a Glock, and matches 5000 barrels forged on a specific mandrel. The police would be happy to charge based on that but the defense could tear it apart. Even with older rifling methods ballistic doesn't work as well as it does on TV. The State of Maryland used to require a fired bullet and case from every pistol registered to allow matching ballistics, but quit doing when they realized they had never actually used this warehouse full of evidence in a prosecution.

Both KDE and GNOME to offer official distros

Slow Joe Crow
Linux

Let them fight

I used to care but I've been using XFCE for years.

A new city springs from the rainforest to become Indonesia's tech hub

Slow Joe Crow

Adam Something video in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Building a city in the middle of nowhere is a bit of a feat. Granted Myanmar just did it recently but this feels like one of those Arab Sheikh pipe dreams like Neom but in the jungle. I suppose it could become a Canberra or Brasilia. The tech promises make it sound more like Neom.

America's drinking water systems have a hard-to-swallow cybersecurity problem

Slow Joe Crow

SCADA systems are known to be vulnerable, partly due to lazy configuration, and partly due to insecure design. I guess the only comfort is that my water company is very small and supplies untreated well water so hacking the treatment plant is a non-starter

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Slow Joe Crow

I don't recall much of Windows 95 setup, although the OS was only 12 or 13 floppies because my job had the images on the Novell network. Personally I liked Windows NT 4 better once I had a machine powerful enough and never looked back after Windows 2000. For everyday work it was stable and reliable where 95, 98 and ME would crash a lot,

The trippiest setup experience was installing Red Hat over a serial console. I was familiar with the curses based installer but this was pure text with a bit of ASCII art.

Judges not impressed by Amazon, SpaceX's attempt to have NLRB declared unconstitutional

Slow Joe Crow

I'm glad they ruled this way but "administrative law judges" should go away. I am pro labor but very much against the administrative state. I think we need the NLRB and other agencies as a guard rail against rapacious capital but we need a guard rail again bureaucrats as well. I saw striking down Chevron as a good thing. I think questions of rule making and application of rules should not be left to bureaucrats but should be decided by actual Article III judges in open court. This would obviously require more district and circuit judges but would rein in stuff like the EPA declaring a flooded field a federally protected wetland and the ATF's rule by whim.

Amazon and SpaceX are behaving like Uber and should stop this BS and accept the unions

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

Slow Joe Crow
FAIL

This is why you have a good offboarding policy

The first rule of employee offboarding is deactivate all credentials immediately. If Disney fired the guy, and left a credential active the Disney IT screwed the pooch and allowed a hacking attack that could have been prevented. Rewriting menus with wingdings is pretty funny though.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Can't recall the mechanism

Something like that happened in the US. After the 2008 crash Bank of America tried to foreclose on a house that was owned free and clear and had never had a mortgage with B of A. The justifiably angry homeowners sued for their costs, and got ignored by the bank. So one day they showed up at the nearest ranch with an armed Sheriff's Deputy and a truck and started seizing furniture and computers. This resulted in the manager immediately paying the judgement.

Musk claims Cybertruck has become profitable at last

Slow Joe Crow
Pint

The Cybertruck waiting list is cleared

You can get several versions of the wank panzer immediately which indicates Tesla has either ramped production or more likely exhausted the supply of CyberCucks willing to spend $100,000 on the vehicular equivalent of a clown nose. I live in Oregon and the Rivian R1T handily outnumbers CyberTrucks, although I'm seeing more of the angular monstrosities. People in mid life crisis would be better off going the traditional route and buying a Corvette while people who want an electric pickup are better served by Rivian or Ford. FWIW I did see one towing a camper trailer

Slow Joe Crow

Based on previous videos they do poorly, but may have improved. Of course this depends heavily on whether they have proper snow tires or not. A set of Blizzaks makes even a family hatchback good on ice. A wank panzer on stock all terrain tires will be either all over the place or spinning all 4 wheels.

Tesla trounces shareholders who alleged Autopilot was all share-pumping lies

Slow Joe Crow

Full Self Crashing

After all the articles by Jason Torchinsky on Jalopnik and the Autopian I've been referring to Tesla's ADAS products as Semi-Autopilot and Partial Self Driving ut lately I've redesignated their SAE Level II product "Full Self Crashing" due to its propensity for ramming emergency vehicles.

Remote ID verification tech is often biased, bungling, and no good on its own

Slow Joe Crow
FAIL

used. one service and hated it

I have had to use id.me, the subject of several articles about how lousy it is , to deal with the IRS and while it worked for me I hated every second of it.

I'm not sure how much was the third party ID company and how much was dealing with the tax man

Feds urge 3D printing industry to end DIY machine guns

Slow Joe Crow

Glock Switches are more a status symbol among gang members than anything practical. If anything the availability of cheap semi-auto pistols in the US makes crime less dangerous since elsewhere the baddies go straight to home made machine pistols and spray and pray. This more of a moral panic than areal issue outside urban no go areas and the ATF needs something they go after since pistol braces, home made firearms and bump stocks are off the table

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Tax / Restrict Ammo?

Been there, done that, rationing/taxing ammunition also violates the 2A as does restricting magazines, it's an integral part of the "arm". California tried it and it's been a shit show that makes lawful users jump through hoops and get denied on false positive background checks while doing nothing to reduce crime rates. Seattle also tried a punitive tax which simply drove gun dealers out of King County. Heck I know people who have stockpiles of thousands of rounds. for that matter I have quite a bit of ammo and reloading components. Also worst case there a rea a lot of cap and ball revolvers out there which are unregulated out side of New Jersey. There's always a a way, One of Luty's articles was making .38 pistol ammunition from scratch.

AT&T sues Broadcom for 'breaking' VMware support extension contract

Slow Joe Crow
Mushroom

Re: I've seen this sales play somewhere before, but where..?

Let it burn, in the US cell numbers port just as quickly so I ditched AT&T for Straight Talk years ago and I have gone from running lots of VMware to running none. My current SMB IT gig is all Hyper V and I'll be dusting off my KVM knowledge when time permits.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Slow Joe Crow

I wonder if Microsoft ever had a "Project Bloodaxe" ? I vaguely recall that name appearing in a DIlbert cartoon and jokingly suggested using it for years while at Intel. The closest I got was a manager who named projects after swords.

Survey finds that four in five enterprise endpoints could run Windows 11

Slow Joe Crow

The problem is the Windows 11 UX is so much worse than Win 10 so users are resistant. We've still got users pining for Win 7. Also from an admin standpoint Windows 11 is laden with Microsoft spyware so I'm migrating my personal systems to Linux. I expect my work machine to be Win 11 and our clients will grudgingly migrate.

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

Slow Joe Crow

New cars are expensive

My first objection to both BEV and hybrid cars is cost. My budget has no room for a bigger car payment at a time when I'm counting the days until I am free of my current modest payment. I do own a house and can install a charger but again that's more money. Also I live in the US where distances are greater and chargers are sparser. In April I was in Lake County Oregon, which has no public EV chargers whatsoever and had to drive 60 miles to the supermarket. I also routinely have to drive 2-300 miles to get anywhere and I like rural areas where chargers are scarce. A further issue is the dearth of cheap EVs and even plug in hybrids in the US. Chevy has killed both the Bolt and the Volt and I want nothing to do with Kia or Hyundai due to their legendarily scummy dealers. I'd certainly consider a cheap EV for local use since I rarely leave the city during the week but the only options are worn out ones

Early MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off the open source database

Slow Joe Crow

This feels like what they did to Java. It's been a while since I worked with MySQL and it looks like it may turn into never.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Excellent!

That was definitely apocryphal, most fleets of sufficient size have private fuel pumps on site or use a commercial cardlock fueling company rather than a retail gas station. For reference cardlock stations like Pacific Pride use a company credit card to operate an unmanned self service gas station, Until recently these were the only self serve gas pumps in the state of Oregon.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Slow Joe Crow

An excellent example of "to err is human, to truly screw things up requires a computer"

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Slow Joe Crow
Mushroom

Java Delenda Est!

Oracle deserves to lose on this. In my part of the IT world Java is dead anyway since none of the mainstream browsers support it. Mercifully the only thing we usually needed it for was check scanners. I think a few ancient HP network switches used Java in their web UI but that's an excellent reason to bin them.

For a few old apps we do supply one of the free java run times to avoid dealing with Oracle. I'm disappointed because the run anywhere JVM had such promise and then failed

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Slow Joe Crow

Re: DOS Box didn't help

A microprocessor validation lab at an old job still had a Windows 3.1 machine hooked up to a very expensive ion beam device circa 2015. The vendor never bothered to upgrade/rewrite the software so it sat in a room with no network connectivity while everything else ran Windows 7/Server 2008

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Evil,..... moi?

Sometimes that stuff backfires like the legendary USAF tale of a young airman sent to fetch 100 yards of flight line. Our hero stumbled upon some Navy Seabees who seized an opportunity to put one over on the Air Force by lending him a truck full of Marston Mat temporary runway.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Black start

With the right gear it's probably doable. In 1945 the RN converted several Captain Class frigates into generator ships with cabling and switch gear to use their turbine electric or diesel electric plans as portable generators.

BOFH: You'll find there's a company asset tag right here, underneath the monstrously heavy arcade machine

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Espressway to hell

On the background issue, the Dire Straits song is Expresso Love, but I generally call it espresso from having lived in and around Italian neighborhoods, and because that's what Cafe Bustelo is labeled as

BOFH: Don't be nervous, Mr Consultant. Come right this way …

Slow Joe Crow

Re: What? You wanted History loaded?

I feel some of your pain, as a client has asked me to import more 10 year old stuff from the old Sage 100 they said was no longer needed into newer Sage 100. At least both are on the same Windows server and there's a slow but reliable tool

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Slow Joe Crow

Regarding shocks, back in art school we had equipment to make neon signs, which operate at very high voltage but fortunately very low amperage. During set up for a band, the student made neon tubes we screwed to the ceiling managed to shock 4 people standing in a group near the transformer, in a a piece of comedy fo those note getting zapped. By the time I got into IT I knew enough about capacitors and flyback transformers to avoid any shocking experiences.

I've personally done in an HDMI cable like that, when I first started streaming TV instead of cable I used a laptop connected to a very long HDMI cable and one day I tripped on the cable and broke the connector, then I discovered a Roku box was cheaper than a new cable. Ironically our cable TV now uses a streaming box made by Tivo.

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Mandatory tech support

In the mid oughts, ThinkPads starting having keyboards with sealed switches and a drain channel to direct spills away from the main board. Before that I semi seriously suggested issuing managers with Panasonic Toughbooks because they actually could be rinsed under a cold tap.

IceWM reaches version 3 after a mere 25 years

Slow Joe Crow

I've used ICEWM but only in lightweight distros where I was doing a specific task. I could probably run it for general use since I typically only need a web browser, some office apps and a terminal or two. That's pretty much what I did when I was working in Linux daily, although the company standard was FVWM because it ran on anything and there were still a bunch of AIX and Solaris machines with the odd bit of HP-UX alongside the thousands of Linux boxes and VMs.

You can get by with very little in the way of window managers, I've even used the ultra basic TWM that was the default with VNC on Ubuntu. I've disliked Gnome since the days of Spatial Nautilus and never took to KDE4 so my current choice is XFCE because I'm OK with the UI and file manager

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

Slow Joe Crow
Mushroom

This will affect purchase decisions

I have one client using one Atlassian product, Bitbucket, which they are forcing into the cloud. We have already been unable to remediate Log4J because Atlassian won't sell a license so we install a patched version so I will recommend dropping it in favor of vanilla Git. We have a lot of stuff in the cloud and we have been selling a lot of backup products for Microsoft 365 and G Suite lately.

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Experience is the best teacher

Been there, done that, restored from the hourly backup before anyone noticed.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Slow Joe Crow

Netware and timing

One of my first IT jobs had a Netware 4 server and a laser printer. Out of misplaced frugality they would power of the printer at night. This led to the occasional weirdness because if you sent a print job to the Netware server while the printer was powered off, powering on the printer would result in the laser printer spewing out several pages of PostScript source code rather than your actual print job.

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

Slow Joe Crow

Firewalls and servers

I had something like this at a client site once where after a power outage they couldn't connect to the SQL server. After a bit of poking around I discovered the SQL server thought it was on a public network instead of a domain network and Windows Firewall was in full lockdown mode. The problem was that the SQL server VM booted before the domain controller, the fix was to disable Windows firewall since a server VM was hardly going to be taken to the coffee shop and connected to WiFi

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Not just in exotic places

I ran into a similar issue at a large tech company in early 1998 or so. One night some clever thieves who were almost certainly employees went through two floors of a building stealing every one of the then new 100Mhz frontside bus Pentium II chips and every stick of 100Mhz memory they could grab while leaving behind the older 66Mhz parts and all the cases drives and AFAIK graphics cards. For several years after that desktop PCs had a steal strap padlocked around the case.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Slow Joe Crow

I like trackpoints

As a long time ThinkPad user I prefer the stick and the three buttons across the top of touchpad, that are there for the stick. That third button is very useful scroll function and I hate the imprecision of the touchpad. I also prefer the old school ThinkPads that had a second set of physical button below the pad for those rare occasions I used it. My current work unit is a T440S and I'm not thrilled about the "updated" buttons, but at least it has the stick. Higher end HPs and Toshibas used to have them but Lenovo seems to be the last holdout.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

Slow Joe Crow

I'm reminded of my ears days as SQL Server admin dealing with an in house application where the user management had neve been written so all adds and changes involved ad hoc SQL queries. I was asked to change a user's name and forgot to put a WHERE in the SQL update query, giving all 40 odd users the samw first name. Fortunately it was a lightly used system so I just restored the users table form the hourly backup.

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Computerized billing ...

Back in the early 70s my father would take me to the train station to watch the trains and I got a tour of the cab of an FL9 locomotive and "drove" an EMU set a few yards down the platform. I also got to sit in the pilot's seat of a 747 when our flight was stuck on the ground for several hours due to a flooded runway at our destination. One of the more interesting things was the little ball and crosshairs gadget between the windshields that was used to adjust the seat to the optimum position.

BOFH: Rome, I have been thy soldier 40 years... give me a staff of honour for mine age

Slow Joe Crow
Thumb Up

Chapeau, George had a scheme so clever even SImon was in awe.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Slow Joe Crow

When I worked in a system validation group we had on e tech nicknamed "the human corner case" for his magical ability to break stuff. My wife carries on that tradition, even with tech as simple as a car's HVAC controls.

Also regarding expected inputs, a friend followed family tradition of giving all male children the same first name and using their middle names. This created havoc at the doctor's office since the medical records software made the staff think it was duplicate records.

Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses iPad Pro as a desktop*

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Expensive to be a fanboi in general

You can also be cheapskate with mid range ThinkPad for $1000 or so and not have to faff around with touch screens or flaky Microsoft hardware. FWIW HP does a very good alternative to a Surface for those who insist on a Windows fondleslab

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Sounds to me like ...

The makers eventually got smarter, I had some cards that were made 1/2 height and shipped with two brackets so you could install in a full or half height chassis with a screwdriver instead of a hacksaw

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

Slow Joe Crow
FAIL

Back when I repaired power tools I had a similar issue. A circular saw crossed my bench with the complaint "trips breaker" per SOP I put it on the Sotcher electrical tester and it passed, then I opened the handle and found the fine line between stupid and clever. The power cord had been replaced, badly. The tool was double insulated so it used a two wire cord and the owner had replaced it with a 3 wire cord and since ther were only two terminals he wrapped the end of the ground wire around the hot wire so plugging in the tool created an immediate short to ground. I swapped the cord for the proper two wire part. This was typical of life with the construction trades where things were "fixed" every which way but right.

Boffins find proof that yes, Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were right, we really are all made up of star stuff

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Don't forget about Moby

That was my first reaction too

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Editing Docs from Email

Microsoft eventually figured this out and from Outlook 2013 on you can only edit an attachment after it was saved to disk. This caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among clients upgrading from Outlook 2007 and 2010. Then again we also had a lot of wailing over migrating to Windows 10 and separating the bitter clingers from Windows XP usually required either a crowbar, or a threat to terminate their support agreement.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Surely...

I had an example of #3. When I trained as a Compaq tech one of my tools was an ankh shaped piece of plastic used to defeat the open lid sensor on server chassis so we could power them on with side panel off.

Ohm my God: If you let anyone other than Apple replace your recent iPhone's battery, expect to be nagged by iOS

Slow Joe Crow

BMW already makes you go to a dealer whenever you replace the battery so it can be "blessed" by the ECU causing much grousing.

I'm glad my phone is a Motorola and "official" DIY battery kits are $40 from ifixit.

BOFH: On a sunny day like this one, the concrete dries so much more quickly

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Ugh, this is all so familiar.

I've had that work twice, I've also swapped the circuit board off of a good drive to get data off a failed drive. fortunately the machine had two identical Quantum SCSI drives

Mods I have known, Mods I have loved, Mods I have hated: Motorola's failed experiment is now a savvy techie's dream

Slow Joe Crow

Re: Phones for the 0.1%

A surprising number of "serious" photographers admit to using phones for photography. For example the proprietor of Leicaphilia.com uses his iPhone regularly http://leicaphilia.com/a-day-in-paris/.

If I had an add on module like the Hasselblad mod I'd seriously consider a phone add on to replace my Panasonic Lumix point and shoot. That said, I would prefer a Fuji or Ricoh module since they are less pretentious and more technically astute than Hasselblad.

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

Slow Joe Crow

Re: You'd have thought...

This is why some newer cars have dual zone AC, the driver and front passenger can set different temperatures. Same deal with cars designed to be chauffeur driven, the back gets separate AC controls and ducts. Heck even a Mazda5 has rear AC controls

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