* Posts by Terje

351 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2011

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Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Terje
Pint

Re: I'd bet good money he was also a pain in the ass to work for.

Homicides? My good man that is slander! There have never been any evidence of wrongdoing from this upstanding member of society, pillar of the community and pride of administrators everywhere!

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

Terje
Terje

Ahh, that would explain it, better make sure we never try to target an object that may end up in a position we potentially can't handle!

Terje

I had to think a while on how the declination rather then resulting altitude would be a problem, but figured out the spectrograph must have been at nazmyth focus and rotating with the dec axis?

What's really going on with Chrome's June crackdown on extensions – and why your ad blocker may or may not work

Terje

Re: Just use Firefox

Using Vivaldi almost exclusively at work for quite some years now, and it's been a very painless experience, well worth recommending.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Terje

Using a clamp requires you to have access to the just one of the cables in the cable since if you measure both the "supply and return" the net current will be zero unless you suffer from an earth fault in the equipment. And I guess that having the outer insulation on the cables stripped to reveal the internal cablers would make the customer ask annoying questions...

BOFH: Adventures in overenthusiastic automation

Terje
Devil

Given previous data points I'm surprised they didn't sprout arms and chainsaws! Not even the ability to sling supersonic ball bearings, what's the world coming to...

iFixit pries open Google Pixel 8 Pro with clamps and picks

Terje

I have had a pixel 4 and 7 and after an unfortunate encounter with gravity now a 8. My opinion is the reverse to your, they are the best phones I have used, without the additional crud and bloat that most other manufacturers add on to android.

Edit: This sounds a bit to evangelical, but they have worked very well for me.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Terje

Re: No corruption here.

The Energy meters are accurate as to the accuracy class they are specified to be, for domestic usually 0.5 or 0.2%

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Terje

Unless my memory fails me (which it very well may, it's Friday after all) One of the main issues was that the documented operational procedures for the reactor were ignored during the tests, when the energy output got to low you had to shut the reactor down and restart from scratch, the director didn't want that and when trying to bring power up it caused a hotspot and follow on bad things.

Canon claims its nanoimprint litho machines capable of 5nm chip production

Terje
Joke

Re: Bit of an Aside, But ...

I'm not quite sure what 30 pico Hz would qualify as, supposedly it's radio all the way down, but I think that would be stretching it for something with that long wavelength...

BOFH: We've made a big mesh, Boss. That's what you wanted, right?

Terje

Ahh, A generous dose of BOFH was just what the doctor ordered for me today!

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Terje

Re: Amiga hard disk partitioning

Always back up before doing something dangerous! Always keep the reaction mixture properly cooled.

Both of those are likely to be ignored by those that should head them :)

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Terje

Re: A phrase to remember

I still have my fully functional hp-48gx, the fools that haven't seen the superiority of a stack based reverse polish notation calculator are just fools!

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Terje
Devil

Re: I wonder

You have to use the right chicken for the sacrifice, not any old chicken works, from my personal experience a black cockerel is the best! and then you have all the options for the ritual circle and sacrificial dagger to consider. No wonder the amateurs so rarely get it right!

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Terje
Mushroom

Sometimes you need to do stupid things to get your brain to learn to avoid similar things in the future. In my case me and a colleague was doing some troubleshooting, and I decided to check that the 230V supply really was 230V and we didn't have a dodgy cable or something. Grabbing the multimeter, setting it to 300V and doing a quick measurement phase to neutral. after pulling my head out of the roof after setting a new record height for a standing jump I realised that it would have been a good idea to check that the cables were in the sockets for voltage and not current measurements... No harm was done apart from vaporising the probe tips, blowing the multimeter fuze and one of the office fuzes. To this day I have a printout of the resulting transient on my wall to remind me not to do something like that again. Unfortunately the measurement bottomed out at 86A, would have been fun to know what the actual short circuit current was. As a fun note, the actual short circuit lasted for about 1/100 second but that and a couple of hundred amps was enough to vaporize something like 5mm of probe tips. Nowadays I always double check that the multimeter cables are correctly connected.

Tesla is looking for people to build '1st of its kind Data Centers'

Terje

Re: Rather a grab-bag of degrees

Sounds to me like they may be eying immersion cooling.

Obscure internet boutique Amazon sues EU for calling it a Very Large Online Platform

Terje

When two boxes collide they turn into an expanding cloud of different boxes that in turn can turn into other boxes. By carefully analysing the resulting shower of boxes we can learn things about the makeup of the original boxes and even figure out the contents of them. with enough box collisions we may even find new heretofore unknown boxes and deduce the underlying principles of all boxes and possibly finding new delivery methods that will extend the standard modes of delivery! There are models that predict an entire new family of delivery methods similar to the normal ones but transposed to higher altitudes. Propositions of an even larger box flinger to probe these possibilities have so far met with resistance from the community.

InfluxData apologizes for deleting cloud regions without performing 'scream test'

Terje

I find that even if everyone had received the information when first sent, it's very little time to a find a replacement service, plan and execute a move.

Tesla ordered to cough up data for Autopilot probe or face heavy fines

Terje

Re: Someone who has driven one

Makes me feel a little better as I have had some serious trouble ending up in the middle of parking spaces in my 1 month old model 3.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Terje

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

While I personally would like to kill anyone who install a server in something else but English, and exclusively use English for my own computers, I fail to see why any sane person would force a us keyboard on anyone. For many languages it's functionally unusable and since all the common users of said keyboard are used to whatever local version they have you lose productivity as well. One thing that absolutely needs to be sorted out in some smart fashion is sql collations though since I have no small amount of hate for different collations colliding, while at the same time don't want to see å, ä, ö treated as a and o or whatever else the collation of choice of the perpetrator deems correct.

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

Terje

Re: Poor Project Planning

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a freight train packed with (insert storage medium of choice here)!

The future of digital healthcare could be a two-metre USB cable

Terje

Re: Luddite tech

I would say this is indicative of the general development around at least our so called western civilization that a larger population suffering the same number of injuries / illnesses per capita is treated by fewer and fewer people.

Toyota's bungling of customer privacy is becoming a pattern

Terje

I don't see that they would object to much over this seeing as doing so would be equivalent to telling the EU it's fine to do the same in response, and the US is way more happy to fine European companies and individuals then the other way around.

An important system on project [REDACTED] was all [REDACTED] up

Terje

Reminds me of one of the first versions of internet explorer for solaris (yes there was such a thing) that could only set the cache in % disk space and minimum of 1% which on a quota based unix system was not such a good idea when 1% was way more disk then you had quota for... It was promptly banned...

Two Microsoft Windows bugs under attack, one in Secure Boot with a manual fix

Terje

What I'm reading is that in reality there won't patch for an actively exploited issue for 9ish months? What could possibly go wrong in the meantime...

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Terje

Re: Marketing: why do we need it again

Just make sure to keep some phone cleaners around!

Swedish datacenter operator wants to go nuclear

Terje

Re: Screw datacenters ...

GM are slow, they should have produced the first commercial fusion engine by now!

Suspect in Finnish psychotherapy center blackmail hack arrested

Terje

My guess, is that this is one step up from an arrest, and has probably passed by a judge that have ordered the suspect to be detained during the investigation

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Terje
Devil

Re: Procedure update

Accounting is obviously magic so for some arcane reason only the first printing works for use in the blood sacrifices!

I always wonder what went wrong in the upbringing of a person who decide to become an accountant...

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Terje

Re: We have some of the old projectors still hanging there..

The first rule of any kind of support is that they never ever follow instructions... They may read through the instructions that tell them explicitly to do things in order A,B,C and the more critical it is to do things in the correct order for it to work, the less likely they are to actually do it in said order...

Laser-wielding boffins bend lightning to their will

Terje

So correct me if my laser physics fundamentals are a bit shaky, but if it's a problem with mW continuous lasers pointed in the sky around airports and such, I have to admit that I fail to see how a TW infrared pulse laser would not be significantly bigger hazard?

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Terje

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

From my point of view we will still have a lot of ICE powered vehicles for a long time, what will change is what fuel they use. In many areas an electric car is simply not an option for many people, due to distances and environment (temperature) if an EV manufacturer tells you it will give you 300km range but you have an outside temperature of -15C and crap weather you will be very very lucky if you get half of that on the other side heat will lower your range since AC requires a lot of energy as well.

Boss installed software from behind the Iron Curtain, techies ended up Putin things back together

Terje

I'm not to sure, the lack of concrete pours seems to have reduced the amount of bosses that decide to move to another country without telling anyone about it and ever contacting anyone again to decrease to the point that adequate fear may be lost from both bosses and HR!

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Terje

Re: We've just swapped all our lasers for Epson ink-jets

So how do those prints react to water, do they smear in the same horrible way that the usual inkprints do, if so I would think long and hard before I put anything printed on them in an envelope and mail out...

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

Terje

I believe the boss may be subject of experiments in carbon sequestering after this (burry the charred remains in a landfill) after something like this...

Hurricane Ian blows NASA Artemis Moon launch into October or November

Terje

Re: Probably closer to Nevember than November

You gracefully forget that the Apollo program was totally new designs and breaking new grounds, the Artemis program was supposed to be based on supposedly proven "off the shelf" parts slightly modified and were supposed to be cheap, fast and easy... Anyone with an ounce of sanity left and not working at one of the plants on life support by the project should be able to see that it has been neither cheap fast or easy...

Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Terje

Re: NLQ

Ahh back in the mists of time when HP printers were good, and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were small furry creatures from alpha centauri!

1.9m patient records exposed in healthcare debt collector ransomware attack

Terje

If we ignore the base issue at hand (medical debt) and focus on the company, I ask this simple question! It's a debt collector, why does it have medical history records at all?

If you're using older, vulnerable Cisco small biz routers, throw them out

Terje

Re: Throw away 3 year old, core, infrastructure?

While I wholeheartedly agree that not supporting 3 year old kit is unacceptable, it seems that the kit in question is of the cheap and cheerful variety with a price tag that is more like that of a cheap home router then anything else.

Eaton, Microsoft to outfit datacenters with 'grid-interactive' UPS tech

Terje

Re: Caveat energiser

Unless the system is crap I hope that would not be the case, but you would certainly need significantly more battery capacity in the UPS to either be able to offload some of your demand during peak hours, or to backfeed into the grid without negatively affecting your own security.

The sad fact is that from a grid perspective most of the renewable energy is crap since it is unreliable and fluctuates to much both over shorter and longer timespans so that it becomes hard to keep the grid voltage / frequency stable.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

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I was almost certain that the extra load would have been the the mining farm.

Oracle to release on-prem software usage tools to prep cloud switch

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I just fail to understand how Oracle still have a customer base to abuse, considering how long they have been going on like this. It just shows how many insane companies and institutions there are around that have not migrated away to something reasonable yet.

Apple and Intel likely the first to use TSMC’s 2nm node in 2025

Terje

It may also be that they realize they won't have enough capacity on the new nodes for a number of years to cover what they project they will need. After all setting up and or retooling fabs to a new node is not quick.

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

Terje
Mushroom

Re: Oof

I think that the main issue here is that no one seems to have come to the conclusion that having the (supposedly more commonly used) safe and gentle script and the nuke from orbit option in the same script makes it not a question of if but when something goes horribly wrong!

At last, Atlassian sees an end to its outage ... in two weeks

Terje

Re: Outsourced

Of course it's outsourced, see reference bellow (obligatory xkcd reference)

https://xkcd.com/908/

Terje

Yet another reason why I loath the drive for cloud, when it falls over (not if) you are fully at the mercy of cost optimised likely understaffed company to hopefully have a working backup and recovery system to sort it out at their leisure. When you have control over the system you are at the mercy of your own backup and recovery procedures which you yourself can influence.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Terje

Re: Customer Code Reviews

mmm, 68k assembly, I get warm and fluffy memories from 68k assembly, so many registers to work with without having to do loads and stores to memory all the time!

Terje

A long time ago while at university writing a program in a functional programming language with an interpreter that was slightly less robust then a tissue paper ocean liner I had to insert a comment line with the text (translated) "If this comment line is removed the fing interpreter throws a fit and crashes!"...

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