Posts by Slow Joe Crow

Engineer turned a vape into a web server

Just found this from the car running on vape batteries. In a world where Doom runs on a pregnancy test this is almost mundane, but it seems like a lot of compute power for a battery and a heating element

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Re: The horror... the horror...

I just had a colleague who would install My Little Pony wallpaper,

BOFH: Nobody would be stupid enough to go live with the mirror system, surely

standby boss?

There's an old BOFH where the head of IT has an accident and the interim boss is a technical manager who's done it so often he has a second set of business cards. Apparently this manager is smart enough to ride herd on Simon and the PFY for short periods while avoiding being given the job permanently.

BOFH: Loss adjuster discovers liability is a two-way street

Re: Waterproofing your car.

That sounds even worse than Oregon which Jeff Foxworthy described as "almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction".

I live East of the Cascades so it rains less and I mark seasons by events. Fall, the irrigation canals are drained, Winter the crunch of studded tires , Spring the irrigation canals are refilled, Summer, the first hotshot crews arrive. (forest fire season). At least we get enough snow in winter for good skiing

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Which winery in Newberg? I live in Oregon and have occasionally made the rounds of Willamette Valley wineries, plus the occasional visit to the Columbia Gorge

Back in the late 90s the site I worked at had a lot of Iiyama 21" CRT monitors. These were a 2 person lift because they weighed more than 40lbs. I just had a 20" Trinitron that my co-worker claimed gave him sunburn. I also had some units with VGA, some with BNC and some NEC monitors with a VGA and an Apple specific connector ne of which was my bench monitor to run the one Mac and whatever PC needed attention

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Get the flamer, the heavy flamer

I had noticed the never to be sufficiently damned Copilot icon in Windows 11 but hadn't looked into the full horror. My company loads Notepad ++ on everything which gives all the useful stuff like syntax highlighting in various languages, line numbering, and tracking your parentheses and none of the useless "AI" junk.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

From my experience in the US during the savings and loan crisis, the most effective to way to rob a bank is to own it. The people at the top of several failed banks walked away with lots of money and no criminal charges while the government was left holding the bag.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: Good episode, but take note:

"You can't eat your cake and have it, too" Ted Kaczynski

Lego crams an ASIC in a brick to keep kids interested

What a descent from Mindstorms which was a full on microcontroller that could do something more useful than make noise

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: 44 gallon drums

A bartender once described Malört as tasting like disappointment. Fortunately I live in Oregon where the signature drinks are more palatable, fresh hopped IPA and Pinot Noir

From Georgia to Essex, AI datacenters are testing public goodwill

Re: EIGHT HUNDRED AND THIRTY ONE ACRES?!

Since my initial answer didn't post, empty stuff can be indoor MTB parks or mushroom farms. Where I live some big boxes reincarnate, the Shopko discount store is now a Winco supermarket and all the better for it. I do wonder what the empty stores down the street will become. FWIW I live in the middle of Oregon so cloud data centers have been around for years because low value agricultural land and hydro power are cheap and some of the data centers are largely air cooled.

BOFH: You know something's up when the suits want to spend money

Re: "colored pencil office"

Don't worry, most of the Pacific Northwest hates Californians too. Oregon and Washington have been overrun by Californians fleeing the consequences of bad political decisions and immediately replicating them while driving up home prices, and crowding cities.

As for spelling, several centuries of separation have simultaneously caused drift and preserved languages. Some Appalachian dialects are closer to Elizabethan English than any 20th Century UK speech and similarly Quebecois is is closer to 17th Century French than modern French. I'm still a bit surprised when Brits use American sports metaphors like "step up to the plate" or loanwords like boondocks or boonie which is Tagalog. Then again we use trek a lot, which is Boer, so I guess slang terms from colonial wars crossed the Atlantic.

Back on topic, defenestration seems like a great way to clear dead wood in both personnel and operating systems

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

I have free ESU on one PC and will probably do a couple more. Then it's Linux time since the budget doesn't support new hardware. I've already installed Linux Mint on the machine we use to stream on and it was seamless, right down to detecting my printer and installing drivers.

I have tested FlyOOBE to install on unsupported hardware but I'd rather not have Windows 11 in my house. At work I've been on 11 for almost a year and the clients are almost entirely migrated or on ESU.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

WTF?

Why would reporting be done done with write permissions. In any halfway sane system the reporting would done with read only accounts, or if you need to write using a separate DB.

Confessional time, I was working on an internal application that had never been finished so user management was done by SQL query. I accidentally forgot a WHERE and gave 30 odd people the same first name, resolved by swiftly restoring the table from backup before anyone noticed

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

dang, by 2000 the IT outsourcer I worked for had us submit timesheets online, albeit via a terminal emulator straight into a text based minicomputer application. I'm still not sure whether it was better or worse than emailing an excel file

SonicWall breach hits every cloud backup customer after 5% claim goes up in smoke

That's exactly what Sophos does with Sophos Central. When you deploy a firewall you set a master encryption key, and then a separate backup encryption password which Sophos requires you to store elsewhere. I work for an MSP so we have dozens of firewalls and we store the encryption keys in a documentation system. It seems to work fine and we can easily pull a saved configuration to apply to replacement firewalls

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

I was working a on a hardware lab fit out project one time, and a manager wanted to mount all the network panels in the ceiling instead of the back of the benches so the layout would be easier to change. He was promptly disabused of this notion, since it would make it very difficult to hook up systems on the benches, and we never changed layouts after the benches were installed

Microsoft puts last remnants of original Edge browser on life support

Cannot come soon enough

Edge wasn't that good and served only as tool to download Chrome or Firefox. The newer Webview pieces have required updating some of our client's applications but that is a small price to pay to get rid of the last vestiges of ActiveX.

End well, this won't: UK commissioner suggests govt stops kids from using VPNs

demading a technical solution to a management problem

This is the macro version of web filtering and blocking at work. We get asked to block, monitor and lock down, but users still do stuff, because management won't create and enforce policy. Legislating against kids viewing porn is useless. the only effective thing is parents educating their children. Of course keeping kids from viewing porn is a great excuse to replicate the Great Firewall of China, as a means of imposing broad censorship. This appears perfectly on brand for a UK government that expends more police time on mean tweets than rapists

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Multiple clocks might be an add on

I recall having multiple clocks on my Win 7 work PC because I dealt with people in multiple time zones. I'm pretty sure that was a separate utility, and harking to another lost feature, I had a double height taskbar so my 4 clocks were nicely arranged ans well as my may open windows.

I'd als like the one Windows 11 feature I liked reinstated. When I copied a phone number to the clipboard I used to get a popup offering to dial my soft phone which saved a few clicks.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

I'm a track point partisan too

I've always had laptops with a pointing stick, starting with a Toshiba Tecra and many ThinkPads. Even the company issue HP laptops had nubs, except for my current Probook, and I have a hard time using the touchpad

I also think black with the big chunky hinges is the right look, a ThinkPad says "serious tool" where a shiny silver MacBook says "fashion accessory" and a shiny silver Dell with one USB-C port says "fashion victim". My old T570 has a mechanical dock an RJ45 port and a full complement of USB to hook up anything. The only missing trick is the spring loaded RJ45 HP uses to allow a beveled edge.

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

Fortunately my screwups were minor

Not so much a typo as an oversight, in my first job doing real dba I left out the Where clause in a SQL Update command and gave everyone in the database the same first name. Fortunately I could restore the table from an hourly backup the users never noticed.

Open, free, and completely ignored: The strange afterlife of Symbian

Re: Ah, Symbian

I didn't have a smartphone until 2011 but in the early oughts my iPaq had IR which I could use with a Canon portable inkjet printer, and my TV set. The circa 2002 iPaq had a consumer grade IR emitter and a universal remote application. These days I can control my Roku over WiFi so I have some of the same function.

Smartphones in the doldrums due to crap demand and tariff woes

I'm completely unsurprised, I only replace phones when they break or wear out and I buy older models because they are cheap. My carrier was selling Samsung Galaxy A14s for $50 US so why should I buy a newer one.

Top sci-fi convention gets an earful from authors after using AI to screen panelists

Re: Sword and Scandals

I'd lay money Larry Correia and John Ringo would be flagged up for badthink, since both of them offend the Leftists and some one once claimed the mere presence of Larry Correia at a con mad them feel unsafe. Both are actually pretty clean living, but both are right of center and to some degree religious

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

With billions in losses and minimal sales, you have to ask how much of the budget was spent on hookers and blow?

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

I treat USB sticks as tools, not data storage

I keep an assortment of USB sticks on my desk and in my computer bag but they are almost exclusively bootable images for installation or troubleshooting. I do use a few for holding photos, to share or have printed. I also have one novelty USB shaped like Hello Kitty with Ubuntu on it so I can "boot to the head".

I don't trust the long term stability of USB sticks so everything goes on external drives, optical disk or cloud

Re: Even worse ...

So far I have only had one SSD fail, and that was in the early days of SSD. My work computer's Intel SSD up and died after less than a year .fortunately I kept very little on the machine that wasn't also on a network drive so it mostly cost time while IT replaced the drive and reinstalled everything, Since then, knock particle board the closes I've been to SSD failure is a bad controller chip on a motherboard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'

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