Posts by Raphael

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

Re: Even worse ...

ouch. My laptop SSD died a while ago. It was at 4:45pm so I lost a whole day's worth of work, I hate to think how much excrement I would have been in if I lost a whole month.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

There is a case here in NZ where a chap won a case for some very large damages against the local council, and when they refused to pay, he got the court to say he could start selling their assets

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/whangarei-district-council-to-appeal-contractors-61m-high-court-ordered-payout/ZX2SAAYAFRFALEVFR4HRLNXFXE/

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

My colleague is on the new Outlook. I am still on the old outlook. And I am still astounded at how much basic functionality is completely missing. It's barely ready for alpha testing, and is not ready for enterprise.

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

This is lining up to be the Windows Phone 7 debacle all over again.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Any metallurgists lurking?

They had an older heat shielding than Ship5 had, and also had purposefully compromised some heat shielding spots to see how that performed.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

"a version of Firefox that worked"

Firefox has been the main browser I have used for development work for the last 15 years. It works just fine.

yes I also use Edge (anything Azure related stays in there), Brave, and Opera daily (Chrome I have not had installed on my PC for the last 2 years)

Logitech Zone 305 is light on the ears and wallet, maybe a bit too light on quality?

I find that Plantronics still makes the best headsets. they're just not as easy to get anymore.

(I have on on-ear set for the office, and a Voyager Legend for on the road.)

Re: All I want for Christmas is

there is also the EXPENSIVE set of Sennheisers, wired with no mic option

https://www.sennheiser-hearing.com/en-US/p/sennheiser-he-1/

Re: Logitech & quality??

I've had a different experience.

Due to a wrist injury years ago, I have to use those split ergonomic keyboards and a Logitech trackball.

The Logitech ones last me longer than the MS ones which die in under 2 years.

SpaceX's Falcon anomaly could have serious implications for the space industry

Re: re: The insulation foil does that on every one of their launches I've watched

maybe I am mistaken and it's the toggle between different cameras but the below from previous launches is what I am referring to

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1795583341363949684/video/1

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1786156323878682779/video/1

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1774194152009568366/video/1

The icing is of course not normal.

Re: Falcon vs Shuttle

The Polaris Dawn was meant to be demonstrating that it's something they may be able to do.

The insulation foil does that on every one of their launches I've watched.

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

Re: Virtual coloured penclis?

Plywood and some whiteboard paint will also get you to whatever size you want.

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

PS: Subhead was inspired by Lester's burning Burning Man man headline.

I miss Lester Haines.

HP CEO: Printed pages are down 20% since pandemic

My home printers are an Epson EcoTank inkjet and an aging HP colour laser.

The toner for the HP is so prohibitively expensive, I will never buy another again

Samsung takes bite out of Apple over its mega marketing misstep

Apple copied a 2008 LG ad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SblMbEsMq8Q&themeRefresh=1

AWS customer faces staggering charges over S3 bucket misfire

my accidentally naming my AWS bucket the same as you name your AWS bucket shouldn't mean I can do writes to your one.

(it should be going to my bucket alone)

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

I may have told this story before. But many moons ago I was working for a largish international company (offices in NZ, Australia, the UK and Canada). An engineering intern had been allowed near the internet and read about the latest computer virus spreading around the internet.

Armed with this dangerous knowledge the intern decided he needed to warn everyone in the company. Instead of using some of the distribution lists (the memory is lacking as to whether or not he had permissions), he added every single person in the company to the To field.

This made the email about 2MB in size with all names added. Which meant the mail servers got hit with about 2GB of emails. Which they did cope with.....until a number of helpful folk hit Reply All. After which the mail servers expelled excrement and fell over taking most of the network down as they tried to handle the load.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

I work with State and Local government departments. all of them have COM add-ins that copy emails into their Electronic Document Management systems.

Even basic ones store these as a .msg file.

This could run afoul with a LOT of laws around records management.

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

Re: So what's new?

AI will end up making such homogenous lumps of films that current Hallmark Christmas movies seem like varied well thought out scripts

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: Chicago is South of Rome

And NZ's antipode is in Spain.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

We've reached out to see if the iMaker has any closer-to-Earth drop test data but haven't heard back.

The chaps at How Ridiculous did a 1000ft drop of an iPhone11, a Samsung S10 and an old Nokia 3310

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2xGzHjYCcY

Uncle Sam will pay for your big ideas to end AI voice-cloning fraud

I watched a Youtube Law stream a while ago, and the one lawyer does Family Law and was pointing out what a nightmare this is. You can relatively easily use AI to fake up a call from an ex having them say all sorts of nasty things. and you could probably get around any watermarks by using a crappy speaker to play it and then record from there. Now you have to try and prove that your client didn't say what was on the recording.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

in South Africa, the 3½-inch floppy was called a stiffy.

Musk floats idea of boat mod for Cybertruck

Clarkson, Hammond and May did cross the Channel in a ute with an outboard attached.

To infinity and ... just over the Atlantic

Re: Launch, yes. Make it to orbit, no.

I miss Lester Haynes.

Re: Worth pausing and remembering ...

Angolan, no. but there was the Zambian one in the 60's

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/zambian-space-programme

after all rolling prospective "afronauts" down a hill in an old oil drum is the best way to training them

China's SpaceX wannabe recycles a rocket after just 38 days

Re: "I" stuff

not to mention that Cisco had the iPhone years before Apple wanted the name

Ford SYNC 3 infotainment vulnerable to drive-by Wi-Fi hijacking

Re: Dumb cars...

yep, while I like some of the new features, I do miss my old Mini where everything was simple (I even fixed an electrical fault once with a small piece of wire). You just had to remember to have a plastic bag over the distributor cap to make sure no water got in.

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

Re: Which does raise the question...

the chap who made the video has apparently come forward and said that he faked it all.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lk-99-video-fraud-taken-down

UK watchdog reopens consultation on Microsoft's bid for Activision Blizzard

Re: They will get it

They would have to try really hard to be worse than Blizzard is right now.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: QWERTZ/QWERTY.

I use the MS one at home, and the nice Logitech one at work (due to a wrist injury from a fall, and 3 surgeries to try fix it, I get sore if I have to use a flat keyboard)

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

this may be one of the reasons why the US Supreme Court recently ruled against the Andy Warhol estate that Warhol's painting of a photo of Prince was a violation of the Photographer's copyright (as it was used for Financial Gain).

I am sure the copyright cases against OpenAI by Sarah Silverman et al. will be citing this case.

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

"citing The Register's March 18, 2021 special report on the subject."

Yep, you lads are never going to get replies from the MS PR department

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

"to the Galaxy Buds I recently washed (dammit) and broke"

I did the same recently to my Buds Plus. managed to get them, and the case, open cleaned and dried out and working again like a charm.

Texas judge demands lawyers declare AI-generated docs

Re: AI Judges

Don't know. I was listening to a lawyer who is also a youtube (Good Lawgic) and he asked ChapGPT to provide the legal precedents for a case he had coming up. ChatGPT cited 5 cases, and 3 didn't actually exist.

Logitech, iFixit to offer parts to stop folks binning their computer mouse

I use a Logitech MX Ergo trackball...I find the left click lasts me about 2 years (about to buy my third one) before it starts doing silly things. (double-clicking on a single click, dropping the mouse down when dragging etc).

being able to repair it would be great.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

My old high school Computer Science teacher (in the mid to late 1990's) always taught us that if a software program couldn't on a 1.44MB floppy disk it was badly written.

Boeing's first-ever crewed mission in Starliner ISS spacecraft delayed to late July

I do appreciate them taking the extra time to do the extra checks, after all, it's not exactly something you want to be a "measure once, cut twice" scenario.

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

I wonder which would make the better AI driving companion persona, KITT or GLaDOS?d

ChatGPT, write a report about database glitches that crashed you today

Is Zuckerberg essentially painting a future that will be AI personas messaging each other and carrying on without any human involvement?

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

Re: Customer pushback

using my extensive knowledge from way too many hours playing Surviving Mars.

Making the fuel is the easy part.

SOFIA observatory's last hurrah set back by damage from high winds

I saw it at the airport when I was in Christchurch last month, during that extreme weather.

Footnote: The weather played merry hell with our long-awaited holiday we were in Christchurch for. Couldn't get to some places due to blizzards and then major flooding a week later.

Microsoft: You own the best software keyboard there is. Please let us buy it

Swiftkey is still my default Android keyboard. I can't recall exactly when I bought it, but If I recall correctly I started using it on my original Galaxy S.

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Re: Love it!

I'm also on my third one (left the first on a plane, and then a couple of years later did the same with it's replacement). My kindle goes with me everywhere.

Re: No headphone jack?

I have an older pair of bluetooth headphones connected to my kindle for audio books.

Even the cheapest model of Kindle now has it.

From the studio that brought you 'Mortal Wombat' comes 'Pernicious Possum'

It's a pet named Mrs Scoby Lunchbox

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/pet-possum-mrs-scoby-lunchbox-exposed-as-the-blacks-rd-ripper/CUWNWUFLYUVFJUCXQCUS4VBEIQ/

I have a mate who used to practice his target shooting (was on the NZ air rifle team) by shooting the possums at the local golf course. He used make a fair bit of the fur (about NZ$100/kg)

Northrop Grumman throws hat in the ring to design NASA's next-gen Lunar Terrain Vehicle

don't they have a good one

There was a Top Gear while the trio were still hosting where James May test drove a lunar rover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQFdEB8jARY

It started at Pixar. Now it's the Apple-backed 3D file format viewed as HTML of metaverse

Re: The metaverse can kiss my balls*

Wasn't there an episode of Sliders where they ended up in a dystopic reality where everyone was plugged into their VR thinking things were great, but in reality were slaves living in squalor.

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

I do similar for audio cables with the Church sound setup.