Posts by Unicornpiss

Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive

Re: Loopy.

"Sadly, the trailing plug meant to go in the wall socket was also plugged into the extension block."

I too have experienced that with a UPS that I found plugged into itself. A perpetual motion machine it was not.

Amazon, LG Electronics turned my vape into an exploding bomb, says burned bloke in lawsuit

Modded?

" It was in an e-cig. Big, fat, hairy deal. Not relevant."

Hard to say... if the batteries were installed in an unmodified eCig device, I think he may have a case, or at least a chance at a settlement.

If the batteries were loose in his pocket with keys, etc., then he's a dumbass.

If he had modified his vaping device to be "sub ohm" for faster response and more vapor, you're basically placing a direct short for all intents and purposes on the batteries, and even a lousy 9V alkaline can get hot enough to possibly burn you in that case.

I suspect that if the batteries were installed in his device, that it got turned on or the button depressed for some time, which would definitely overheat the batteries pretty quickly.

Motorola Z² Force: This one's for the butterfingered Android lovers

Glad to see..

..that it has an SD card slot. Motorola's 'new' phones at the time not having one was what drove me to Samsung. I also applaud Motorola for mostly sticking with the (already good) stock Android interface instead of the gimmicky overlays and bundled crap that other manufacturers think you want.

For me, the deal breakers are the high price and lack of water resistance. I simply can't understand why a phone marketed as being rugged doesn't include this. That, and with a drawer full of accessories, my OCD self would probably stand there too long trying to decide which one to take with me.

It's US Tax Day, so of course the IRS's servers have taken a swan dive

Re: I'm sure they got encryption

"I'm filing my taxes via USPS priority mail, same way I pretty much always do"

What if it gets lost in the mail...

Data exfiltrators send info over PCs' power supply cables

Re: Meh

In a previous job, we twice received (from a security vendor no less) a PC meant to control and DVR a camera system, that was infected with several pieces of malware.

So, yeah, you're already "pre-screwed" sometimes before you even open the box.

Re: Seeing the light

"I remember reading an article about this a few years ago, and some pc/mobo manufacturers alleviated this by randomising the flashing when the HDD was being used."

Dell took it a step further in all their Ultrabooks---they removed all of the useful indicators from the machine. You have a generic white LED that is on when the laptop is powered up. No charge indicator, HDD activity, wireless, or any other lights except for Caps Lock. It's actually really annoying having no idea what's going on, especially when Windows updates appear to be stuck.

Re: Not really

I would think just a decent power supply with some big capacitors would tend to blur any usable data or reduce the bitrate so much that no one would bother. Or leave some HD video playing on your other monitor. "Really, it's for security!"

Airbus plans beds in passenger plane cargo holds

Done before..

Didn't propeller passenger planes of the 40s and 50s have sleeping berths for overseas flights? A journey on a prop plane might take 30-50% longer than on a next-generation jet.

I don't have anything against it, but I doubt it will catch on in these times due to the less revenue for airlines with precious space taken up with beds. Maybe just more spacious, comfortable seats would be a solution? That and hotels already disgust me--what kind of hygienic conditions can you expect when you're practically hot bunking with the previous passenger on your flight?

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

Re: Show hidden / system files

"Now I'm going to have to email my first love and drink a bottle of whisky."

That's the spirit... but you have the order of events wrong :)

Re: life extension - file extension

One of my peeves with Windows is in the search--and other places, you can select "details" for your view as many times as you want, but it will never save your prefs. Apparently Microsoft knows what's best for you when it comes to how you want to view your files. And apparently we all must suffer big, blocky icons as the default view for so many things.

Cool beans..

The best part has to be it not nagging you to use the cloud for storing everything.

For those that want a nice file manager for Windows with some extra features, Explorer++ is pretty decent, and also portable. It can be a bit crashy when you ask it for things like displaying the size of huge network folders though.

2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

Star Trek well written... some of it

Well, City on the Edge of Forever did win a Hugo award. Star Trek is also credited with the first TV interracial kiss. (Uhura and KIrk in Plato's Stepchildren)

There was a lot of cheese, for sure, but some other good episodes that come to mind:

The Naked Time

The Paradise Syndrome

Miri

Shore Leave

A Taste of Armageddon

For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky

Re: meanwhile, back at the film

It still pisses me off that the girl he should have been with (not the bitchy one) died in that..

Re: Siri/Google != HAL

I can't speak for Siri (no pun intended) having not used Siri very much, but Google certainly uses some heuristics, even though there is no consciousness there. When I do a voice search, say, for a beer I've not had and am not sure I'm even pronouncing correctly, you can see Google parse what was said when I've butchered the name, then refine it, then match it. It's actually pretty uncanny to watch, and seems to get it right much more often than not.

Say what you will about Google being evil or not, but IMHO, no one has better voice recognition, search algorithms, and heuristics. Since HAL was short for "Heuristic Algorithmic", it seems relevant. (and perhaps Google has the same <lack of> moral character as well)

Taking sci-fi seriously..

'Star Wars creator Lucas described 2001 as "the first time people really took science-fiction seriously".'

With a nod to efforts like Forbidden Planet that was mentioned, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, I'd have to say that for the mainstream, Star Trek was probably the first accessible and generally well written Science Fiction that most people grew up on, even if the effects were very cheesy compared to 2001.

That said, 2001 was an incredible effort to capture the reality and isolation of a space journey (no one does isolation as well as Kubrick did) in an era before we'd even traveled to to the moon.

And Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary satellites, the PDA, virtual reality, free or nearly-free global communications and a lot of other things we take for granted, as far back as the 1950s in his novels. And there are a few more gems there that will probably eventually come to pass.

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

Even if it comes to pass..

..the Concorde was faster. (and just plain cooler)

Linux 4.16 arrives, keeps melting Meltdown, preps to axe eight CPUs

In other IT news..

..Microsoft added 8 more apps that you'll never use and that can't easily be removed to its 'Start' menu, the total update weighing in at only 500MB and taking a mere 1-2 hours to install, and added a "Use middle finger and swipe to reboot" option for tablet users..

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Allow me to be the 1,000,000th person..

..to say from the heart: "Fuck you, Microsoft."

Sysadmin wiped two servers, left the country to escape the shame

Break a mirror? 7 y bad luck?

I remember one of my first IT jobs where I supported POS systems. (in both senses of the acronym) Discovering early into the job that there were tape drives but only a few, filthy, incomplete backup tape sets, and no meaningful backups being done, I pushed the CIO to let me buy backup tape sets for all locations. Over $6K worth of tapes were bought. Subsequently I had some system failures and discovered that even with new tapes and perfectly working drives, I could only recover data about 1 in 5 times. (and this was when the closing store manager remembered to type "backup" at the login prompt before leaving)

Add to that the daily backup process also mirrored the primary drive to the inert secondary (that was only used when the primary failed) in the wee hours of the morning. It would cheerfully mirror a failing, corrupted drive, and wipe out the last night's perfectly good backup on the secondary. To change the drive involved swapping drives and setting jumpers, then relicensing the software, which was tied to the drive's serial number. I drove 100 miles through a blizzard at least once to perform this asinine, 15-minute process.

Hip hop-eration: Hopless Franken-beer will bring you hoppiness

Bitterness (without hops) -mostly bitter people

I live in the USA, and have been a beer aficionado for many years. Long before you could get decent beer in most places in the US, and choices at bars were mostly limited to "Bud", "Swiller", or some Canadian brew that while slightly better, would leave you with a pounding headache the next day if you had more than a couple. Currently I'm drinking a beer from one of my favorite local brewpubs that is made with heather instead of hops for a bit of bitterness, and it is delicious. Another favorite actually grows their own hops in the summer, weather permitting.

"Craft" beer has come a long way in a short time (thankfully), but like any fool that can hang a shingle out that says "Mechanic" without being certified in anything, anyone can brew with various degrees of success. That said, some of the best diagnostic mechanics I've known were not certified, some of the most clueless IT folks I've known have had an MCSE, and some of the best beer I've had has been from tiny little places without much exposure.

Re: Whatever next?

Yeast-free sex might be okay...

We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap

Re: Space oddity?

"I wouldn't say that it's odd or uncommon - I know a lot of middle and occasionally senior managers in charge of projects that they know absolutely nothing about beyond the fancy PowerPoint buzzwords and maybe the title."

I'd have to agree. Often the person drafted for these gigs aren't the people that have a clue about the project or any prior history, but someone that a self-serving manager "trusts" to not crap themselves in public or in any way demean their 'superiors' regardless of their actual skill set or how lackluster the presentation will be.

Re: Reliable Atari

"Come on now, I think you'll find that Commodore could out-incompetent Atari any day of the week."

Only the management. The Engineering dept. was actually very sound and extremely under appreciated.

Re. Screw the whole thing..

Custer's Revenge anyone?

BOFH: Give me a lever long enough and a fool, I mean a fulcrum and ....

Re: Twatspotting

Sounds like something you'd want a maxi-pad for...

Doing the needful..

Whenever I hear the phrase "Do the needful" I either picture:

-A charity-driven prostitution program

-A 70s-era disco dance (sing along to "Do the Hustle!")

Re: bossplains is my favorite new term

Bossplains sounds a bit like what might happen if you dropped a overripe melon from about 5 storeys high onto tarmac.

Decruitment..

It gladdened my heart (incremented my joy quotient) that Simon and the PFY leveraged the suit's lifespan reduction action plan. (de-twatified the situation) I hope enough lime or a suitable recycling site was acquired so the remains don't gameify.

Five things you need to know about Microsoft's looming Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

@ibmalone

I'm actually surprised that no one has used "Antikythera" to title their OS release/revision yet.

Things to be thankful for.. (or for which to be thankful)

-Windows 10 Enterprise doesn't get such nonsense unless you let it happen

-Linux is free and good

-Craft beer

Office junior had one job: Tearing perforated bits off tractor-feed dot matrix printer paper

Re: DECwriter

I still somewhere have a printout from when I was a kid, happily playing Zork I on a university mainframe (PDP-11/40 or 11/70 I think) using a DECwriter as a terminal. One of my first exposures to computers and definitely to computer gaming.

Secret printer

I was well over a year into a tech support job when I got a call to 'check accounting's greenbar printer'. After being puzzled by this (I didn't know what they were talking about), and wondering if it was truly at our facility, I became one of the initiates that was shown a closet labeled "Storage". Upon unlocking the door, I found a room that did contain some storage racks, but at the very back of a long narrow room, was a (silent) line printer plugged into power and a network jack, with a massive box of paper feeding it, and another massive box taking the output.

It soon became apparent that the problem was a simple network issue, which I was able to quickly resolve, restoring the printer to life. It had a sound-deadening cabinet, but was still pretty loud in the room. With the door to "storage" shut though, the noise was barely noticeable. (I'd never noticed it before) And it was near a busy restroom, so those noises masked the remaining output. No one listens too hard near a restroom.

I had several dealings with this beast over the next few years, and finally with a $2,500 estimate to repair it that no one wanted to cover, we pulled the plug on it. It apparently wasn't very essential as no one ever complained, and the last box of printout gathered dust on the shelf with its fellows for another couple of years after we'd recycled the printer, until another department commandeered the storage room for their own purposes.

Developer mistakenly deleted data - so thoroughly nobody could pin it on him!

Stress..

Not as bad as some of these stories, but after hours I remotely rebooted a SCO UNIX server that a large call center ran on. It had been acting increasingly strange and I felt a reboot might do it good.

The call center was about 200 miles away and after issuing the command to reboot, I waited for the machine to begin responding to pings again so I could log back in. And waited.. and waited.. and waited..

Finally, with a sick feeling in my stomach I began leaving messages for the only other person with a key to the dinky server room and resigned myself to a long early morning drive. I didn't sleep very well that night.

Fortunately for me, the other key holder had gotten my message and being an early riser herself, had gotten there and saw that the console was stuck at some minor error with "Press Y to continue.", which she did, and which was the only thing required to restore normal operation.

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

Computing as a vacation..

Running Windows is like taking a vacation at a crappy theme park, with crowds, trash, noise, marketing, deep-fried nasty food, long lines, guided tours, and $4 bottles of water.

Running Linux is like taking your vacation by a peaceful lake, next to a beautiful forest, and near a sleepy little hamlet, where you do things at your own pace, and no one bothers you at all, but make sure you brought most everything you need with you.

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

Meh..

Nice monitor, but a couple of our CAD guys have DUAL 39" 4K TVs as their displays and sit about 3 feet from them. They always look a little bug-eyed to me when they deign to leave their desks..

AI racks up insane high scores after finding bug in ancient video game

Re: What the f*ck

Don't call me Shirley..

Atari 2600..

So it took a mere 400 modern CPUs, using no doubt many gigs or even terabytes of memory and storage many hours to find and exploit a flaw in a 35+ year old video game. A mediocre port of an arcade game that runs on a stripped-down version of the venerable 6502 CPU in under 4KB memory space. Impressive.

Not to totally minimize the achievement, as this technology is in its infancy, and it did find something that apparently generations of old school gamers hadn't found. Based on this, maybe this tech would be great for finding software bugs. Let it play with the next gen MS Office suite for a week or so before Microsoft releases it. Pretty Please.

Cryptocurrencies kill people and may kill again, says Bill Gates

Re: Worst argument ever

"Not true. Each bill has a unique serial number which can be traced back to where you got it from, be that an ATM, or a bank teller, or a supermarket cash-back or whatever."

Does anyone record the serial numbers of bills that go into ATMs? Where I live, whoever stocks the ATMs with cash can't even be bothered to have all the bills facing the same way.

I would personally think that both currencies are somewhat traceable, but in different ways. Eg, you rob a bank, it's likely the bank has the serial numbers recorded, but money used to do nefarious things is intentionally off the record. With cryptocurrency, while the end result is probably hard to trace, someone had to dump in enough seed money from a bank account, credit card, etc. to generate their BitCoin or whatever, and that is certainly going to be a noticeable red flag.

NRA gives FCC boss Ajit Pai a gun as reward for killing net neutrality. Yeah, an actual gun

Re: Missing the point..

"Pellet guns and small calibers are not AR-15 rifles with high-power ammunition and large magazines. The damages you can inflict in a few minutes with military grade weapons are much larger than with far less powerful ones. "

My point was that kids just didn't kill people a few decades ago, with isolated exceptions of course. While I would not have a problem with banning most assault weapons, or at least making them a lot harder to get, you can do nearly the same damage with a pair of 1911 Colts, even if you'd need a few more clips and to reload more often. And I don't know the answer. Restricting access to the most deadly weapons may help, but I'm not sure how you fix a broken conscience or missing empathy, or instill a voice of reason asking "Do I really want to do this?" I'd be a hypocrite if I said I've never wished harm on someone, or been in a mood where I've wished someone would start something, but there's a difference between that and deciding to go on a killing spree.

Missing the point..

You're never going to be able to eliminate guns in the US. There are just too many in circulation. That said, when I was a kid, every boy child carried a pocket knife, and a lot of us had pellet guns and .22 rifles, and had families with shotguns and other arms. It never would have occurred to me to take one to school unless it was for show and tell, which probably would have actually been allowed if you cleared it with the teacher first. Or to use my pocketknife to stab someone. There were fistfights and bullying (which is not okay), but no one really considered actually killing their classmates. There weren't any mass shootings that I can recall before Columbine.

What changed in these decades? Were mass shootings just a meme, an idea whose time had come? Did the first one somehow make it "okay" for others to do the same? I don't know. One thing I do know is that our sanitized, politically-correct society allows resentment and anger to fester and build without a safety valve, and parenting skills are at an all-time low. And I believe that information being freely available is a wonderful thing, but I would have to admit that letting your kids view uncensored violence and destruction with no supervision does desensitize them. We also seem to think that kids are equal to adults and responsible for their own actions in the same way, while they are often still way too immature to realize the consequences of their actions or deal with heady emotions that they're feeling for the first time.

So what is the answer? I don't know. Banning everything in life that can be misused is not it though. This is the equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and singing "LaLaLaLa" to tune out something you don't want to hear. And arming teachers is ridiculous. If there is any solution IMHO, it is giving kids more education than what they get in Algebra class. Kids need to be raised to value their own lives and that of others, and when warning signs present themselves, the answer isn't to lock them up forever, but to work with them to salvage their troubled psyches before they become truly lost.

Billionaire's Babylon beach ban battle barrels toward Supreme Court

Here is a man..

..who desperately needs to be forced to subsist on a job flipping burgers for a few years, or until it instills a sense of humility, if possible.

I get that he wants a private beach. Who wouldn't? But there have to be plenty of places he could own a private beach without screwing over the local populace.

Developer recovered deleted data with his face – his Poker face

Kind of like..

..a flight attendant calmly asking "Is there anyone on board that knows how to fly a plane?"

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Re: Still a sweet resolution...

A little off the subject, but some years ago colleague of mine was imaging 6 or so Precision workstations simultaneously on the same circuit, actually even plugged into the same power strip. These workstations have 1300W power supplies, though they're obviously not using a lot of horsepower when an image is being applied. Still, with dual Xeons and hefty video cards, they draw a lot at all times.

The power strip was an old one that had apparently seen some shop floor use, as it was battered and filthy. It also lacked a circuit breaker. I noticed what he was doing, saw that the imaging job on all (Ghost) was over 90% complete, then touched the power strip, which was alarmingly warm. I opened my mouth to say something and the room's breaker (20A) tripped audibly, ending the imaging job, to my colleague's chagrin, and expressing the thought that was on my mind more eloquently than I could have done with mere speech.

Six things I learned from using the iPad Pro for Real Work™

Re: Android has come on leaps and bounds,

"Apple are generally less shitty than the rest, more or less.

Why didn't you use the joke icon for your post?

Re: tangent

"Can you just pop the Citrix or RDP client on their iPad and let them access it that way?"

Yeah, after you port all the myriad apps they will claim to need to a VM or publish them in Citrix. Seems like a lot of work to accommodate a small minority.

If you must have a tablet..

..Then why not check out one of the better offerings from Dell, Asus and the like? Or if you hate Windows and you're not that into Apple, one of the Android offerings? Either of these will give you a ton of functionality, actual access to the file system, and either a better version of Office or good freeware alternatives. And you can pocket the difference in cash and use it to buy whatever keyboard you want. You also will have USB ports. (well, at least one anyway)

Home taping revisited: A mic in each hand, pointing at speakers

Tape longevity

I still have a BASF audiocassette of an elementary school Christmas program that I sang in back in 1977, painstakingly recorded in the school gymnasium by my father using an even older monaural SoundDesign cassette deck and a handheld mike, complete with my parents' comments and fidgeting.

It still plays fine, and the sound quality is probably about the same as it ever was. This is one of the few things that has survived from a much more innocent, hopeful time in my life, and is precious as gold. Somehow it doesn't even seem right to make an MP3 or other recording of it, though I probably should someday for safety's sake.

It's amazing how old analog media like this is so durable, when not mistreated, similar to actual paper books, while a (supposedly forever) digital stream or recording can apparently be so easily corrupted or lost. Not the least of reasons for this is that analog equipment doesn't recognize errors but will just reproduce what you have, for better or worse. It may degrade in time, but there will still be something there. The power of digital is how easily you can make an infinite number of copies, even it they're much more ephemeral on an individual basis. I also have a wire recording made by my father when he was in the service in WWII and I have little doubt that it would be playable, if I had anything to play it on.

Yeah, the old days kind of sucked in many ways, but it makes me a little sad that current generations won't know the rite of passage that was making a mix tape (or even CD) to give to the person you had a crush on.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

GPS

Actually Elon had nothing to do with it. The driver was simply trying to get to Albuquerque and blindly following his GPS..

Hey Mac, you can't park that there!

"Any aliens who encounter it along the way will no doubt conclude that humans are crazy."

Simply finding an automobile in orbit is pretty much the equivalent of noticing someone wore 2 mismatched socks compared to the big crazy some dozen miles below. I mean standing naked in the rain painted purple strumming a cheese grater and screaming "F you and the atom bomb too!" crazy down below....

BTW, shouldn't he have launched the Supercharger station first?

Nunes FBI memo: Yep, it's every bit as terrible as you imagined

Superbowl..

"You don't think politics is a sport? Aren't there people that root for their political party the same way others root for their team?"

Yeah, but the Superbowl's halftime commercials are way better than the political ads. Maybe if the same effort and spirit were applied to political ads in an election year the whole process would make me somewhat less nauseous.