Posts by cosmodrome

Soup king Campbell’s parts ways with IT VP after ‘3D-printed chicken’ remarks

The answer lies within the scrolls of printq. Your quest shall be to find them, my son.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

That was token ring. BNC based ethernet just needed to be terminated with 50Ω resistors on both ends, no ring required (or allowed). The BNC connector and coax cable just was the state of the art connection for high frequencies. It still is, btw, in many cases as BNC still is quite alive everywhere where you're dealing with word clocks (digital audio) oscilloscopes etc.

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

Re: What reporting system...

...and using the database as a key-value store. Not only storing any junk in there that crosses their minds but also altering values in creative ways. When asked if they'd ever heard about reference integrity or normalization they'll give you blank stares.

Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

Re: R

Rerl ond Rascal used to be not that bad.

Germany slams brakes on EU's Chat Control device-scanning snoopfest

Re: Thank you Germany!

Vee prefer taking orders anyway, Jawohl! BEFEHL IST BEFEHL! Oh ze joy! Excuse me, I suddenly feel ze need to run circles in lockstep...

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

1234567! maybe?

Away from Oktoberfest, Munich's museums also serve science on tap

Z3?

I wonder why you didn't mention the fully operational Zuse Z3 there. It was, after all, the first freely programmable computer in history.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Re: DEC Alpha and LN03 laser printer so could do rudimentary word processing

Make that 25 years plus. Back then the only alternative on Linux was an alpha version of abiword, IIRC. In 2005 there already was a Linux port of Star Office 5, distributed, IIRC, by SUN. Star Office then mutated to OpenOffice and when SUN got bought by Orkle, LibreOffice was created as a fork.

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Re: Aiming, how quaint

I wonder very much what might be the use for a tool like a gun in urban America. Shoot the lights out? Hold the TV at bay? Repair fiber lines!

Aluminium parts are usually produced where cheap energy is to be found. That is somewhere you can run your own hydroelectric plant. Manudfactoring like end assembly is usually positioned where you've got lots of space, good transportation facilities and not as many resources. These facilities aren'r just positioned willy-nilly or for strictly political reasons. Not everything is a conspiration or caused by stupidity.

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

Re: HUH!

Equals 500k US dollars.

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Neither Word nor Excel are layout applications. Sure, people use them for layout all the time. That doesn't change the fact that Word and Excel are the completely wrong tools for the job. But millions of users can't be wrong, wasting hours and hours of their lifetime layouting documents using Office and inevitably producing abolutely terrible documents? Someone certainly would tell them - not Microsoft, maybe, but somebody would. And they'd certainly believe that person and... Uh, oh...

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Wearing an INCOMPLETE UNIFORM? You must be out of your mind. Obviously you haven't served or you'd know better than coming up with such unthinkable, civilian insubordinace. When will you pacifsts ever learn?

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Why no love for XFS?

Because unlike ext4 it can't shrink existent filesystems? For me, relying massively on LVM, that's a knock-out point. Unfortunately, since I had been running XFS since the days of IRIX, but with linited sparse capacity and the need to replace drives plus the resulting need to resize partitions ext4 clearly beats XFS despite its' reliability and performance.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

Two octane

It used to be two SGI Octanes that were placed in the cabinet of CT scanners, IIRC.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

YOU SLEEP. THEY LIVE.

WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN WHO YOU ARE. WE SEE EVERYTHING. WE HEAR EVERYTHING. WE KNOW EVERYTHING.

Rampant emoji use suggests crypto-stealing NPM package was written by AI

Attribution now easy?

What does "UTC-5 malware upload time" even mean? Time zone of the uploader? If the server where the upload happened actually knows the timezone where the uploader was located why doesn't it seem to know the uploader's IP? Attribution -which used to be next to impossible back in the old, non post-factual days- seems to be a standard procediure, nowadays because pretty much every threat, malware or attack is immediately attributed on disclosure - usually to asia where the state-backed evil lives. Might have to do with investors, shareholders and the general public happily accepting sloppy security as long as scary-state-backed hackers did it.

Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit

Re: Getting stung by a radioactive wasp...

>Wasphulk?

Isn'r he the new German foreign minister?

Good Contamination, Bad Contamination

The wasps became radioactive from the ionizating radiation from the nuclear waste, not from the nuclear waste itself. So everything is fine there's, no danger from nucleat waste. We should focus instead on the real hazards like these bird eating, environment destroying wind mills in Europe, before it's too late. Think of the children!

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Expansion

Steel will expand 1/1000*K. That one millimeter per K and meter. For a backplane, maybe 20cm at the longest side, room temperature to assumed -10°C for a not unusually cold winter morning we've got about 30K difference. 30*0.2m makes an interesting difference of 6mm. Should be enough to disconnect something that should remain connected.

Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations

No, they're just so used to distorting reality in a way that turns anything they don't like into a disaster for everyone else that they are completely failing to see that they'll lose any credibility overdoing it. Still, people enough will believe them on face value because even an absolute minimum of critical thinking is hard.

I totally love them. I just can't help. Political ads are the greatest thing ever. So smooth and tasty. Truly addictive. They also make you smart and successful, beutiful and rich, Hey, can I have another political ad, please?

OpenAI deputizes ChatGPT to serve as an agent that uses your computer

Late to the party

If I'd wanted fancy reports and burn money I'd just buy something from Oracle...

PUTTY.ORG nothing to do with PuTTY – and now it's spouting pandemic piffle

www., mail, imap,ntp...

I guess, you've never configured virtual hosts on Apache > 2.0. The "forward 'hostname.tld' to 'www.hostname.tld' policy has to be active. It's not something god-given. Even if certain browsers used to "complete" requests automatically without being asked to.

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

Re: Scandinavia

They obviously questioned the right people to get the answers they wanted.

Re: Encryption?

But... but, encryption! Doesn't anyone ever think of the children?

There you see!

All the evil in the world is caused by ENCRYPTION. Teens (your kids?) are turned into murderous criminals by the Reefer cypher - ENCRYPTION! Good that we have been warned just in time. Before our children might be infected by ENCRYPTION or encrypted files from the internets.

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: POS Systems

Yes. Good old eight bit machines, all of them even in the early 2000s. If you had programmed just one of them -some odd student's jobs for the tedious and technically skilled came from that- you'd never have to look up an ASCII table in your life. Burned into your grey matter EPROM for ever.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: Schedule a effing downtime!

I guess, that's why the newer SUNs would disconnect the power when you opened the case. No need to discuss with customers or management if to shut down or not - you just couldn't service them while powered up.

ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations

Operating Sytems and the Gullible

Now I get the idea why the newly elected German chancellor was phantasizing about an "operating system" that would allow the police to basically stop crime once and forever, keep terrorists out of the country, pick cats from trees and guarantee sunny wheather every day after they closed an expensive deal with Palantir. I was quite amazed to hear the term "operating system" out of the mout of someone unable to tell the difference between an OS, open source and an operation amplifier in suspiciouis context. Guess I know who put that flea in his ear...

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Damage done

...and, of course, because it is the most illogical, stupid and harmful thing to do. As I said above: stupidity always wins.

Re: It is so refreshing and hopeful to see some people with integrity and a backbone.

I don't see much chance for him. As we all should know by now, stupidity always wins. I'm afraid we're on evolution's bad leg.

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

So?

So they'll buy the data from some other data broker. Supposed the don't have them already. It's not that there's a shortage of shady data traders, specifically in the US. You can't eat the data and have it.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Re: Why not make a reason for a call-out?

> Made a good doorstop...

...for a caterpillar shed.

Re: Fake tickets raised in malice?

In defense of the design, let's assume that changes in the construction plans, which usually come from a central office, had to be available on site ASAP. This is the only good reason to deploy a client-server solution over ~500km I could think of without knowing further details. So engineers are obvlously limited to on screen views which is highly unpleasant - but have you ever seen an industry grade A0 laser plotter, even by today's standards? These things are double wardrobe sized monsters and due to the paper size (A0) they're not going to shrink - and they're just as expensive as they're huge. I've spent enough time in the projects department of a very big firm selling devices that require their own buildings to know about these problems. OTOH I was more than once travelling with a cradle of construction plans in order to "for heaven's sake be on site with the *correct* version, before..."

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Filling hydroflouric acid in a lightbulb (or trying to do so) is quite an ugly way of killing yourself. Basically anything meddling with HF is. The good news is that you won't feel any pain because the HF will dissolve your nerve cells first when it washes the tissue from your bones. (bones take a few seconds longer to dissolve).

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

Mercury isn't that dangerous and eyegoggles or breathing mask would make no sense if you're handling mercury one single time. Mercury is dangerous if it sinks for example into cracks in the floor of a room that is permanently inhabited because the very little bit of it that will vaporize will accumulate in the air and finally in the bodies of it's inhabitants over the years.

Pure mercury doesn't chemically react with anything in your metabolism so you could swallow a teaspoon (if you manage to get that heavy mass down) it would go out in the same condition as it got in. The toxic stuff are mecury phosphates or other organic compounds that will accumulate in maritime life in mercury-contaminated water. These metallo-organic compounds are dangerous as fuck but are a very different matter as pure elemenal Me-metal in the way that pure oxygen or hydrogen are different from water.

Re: staying awake

I did that using my pocket calculator as a "remote" for the chemistry teacher.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

If you don't have a unified fornat or set of formats for your graphics as well as a consistent layout to integrate text and graphics (usually in form of a set of page templates) you'll never end up with a consistent or even acceptable layout. This is one of the iron rules of layout. The other one is always to set readability as the first priotity.

Re: Just use Serif Publisher

If you're seriously intending to use a spreadsheet for layouting, MS Office is just the right tool for you. You had it coming for even thinking of it....

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

The swiss cheese approach indeed. Supposed you're intending to catch all the holes and let the cheese pass. Referrer and user agent filtering were well established practices on 1990s porn sites. Never failed to annoy -strictly scientific- visitors and doing little to stop content scrapers. But maybe it's working better nowadays - if in doubt, just throw "AI" at it.

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: I couldn't give a monkeys

Squid has been doing that (and lots of other useful things) since forever. If you don't mind setting up and using Loonix and a proxy on a Raspberry Pie or similar hardware you can log, block, filter, trap and report any HTTP(S) request and response for, to and against anything you can think of.

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

Re: Pipewire!

You're aware that you don't need either? Just run jack on plain ALSA. Unless you're trying to watch Youtube vids and stream whatever at the same time. Which you just shouldn't - and if you really think you must then don't run it on the same audio device as your production apps. If you run all this shit through pipewire on the same interface you'll inevitably end up with internal software resampling, mashing x different sample rates from y different sources to an awful stream of mud. Maybe that's OK for you - it won' be for anyone else on a different setup. Before you call me an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about: I've produced title tracks for international cinema productions (one even got a golden palm in Cannes), jingles for ads and radio stations, played live radio shows and gigs - all besides releasing my own stuff.

In one thing, however, you make a point: the same kind of people aggressively supporting systemd are the loudest supporters of pipewire.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

I've seen the same with 3½" floppies. I didn't even realize why these "copies" were made and put into a ring binder at the time. (I was a young and naive apprentice back then, assuming every professional would be at least rudimentarily competent.) It came to me years later when I read one of the many anecdotes on the net about "copied disks".

Automated backups, verified, tested and...

...worst expectable desaster after an actual headcrash. How did I do it? Verified and tested my automated backups, tweaked comfiguration files until everything was perfect and then - relied on my perfect, tried, rock solid and daily performed backups. For too long. So I didn't realise that my backups had all been exactly 0 bytes long for six months until a head crash took down a complete volume group. I had changed compression algorithms to one I firmly believed to be supported. Which it wasn't. Unfortunately the error within the compression algo did not escalate to the main backup process and I got my daily "backup completed successfully" notice. No need to look into the details ("0 files and 0 directories backed up...") because everything was fine, wasn't it?

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Sometimes...

Thinking about their mechanical base and the shitload of trouble it causes to users I am surprised about the relative low rate of violence against printers. Really, I'd have all sorts of understanding if not sympathy to people throwing printers out of office windows, setting them on fire out just kicking their evil mechanical souls out of them. The only decent tool to repair a printer, IMHO, is a blunt, heavy one.

Re: When managers get involved in technical stuff - beware!

Why didn't you let a professional print shop do the printing of the letterheads? Maybe the same one that printed your business cards - you didn't print those on ink jets, did you? If you order a thousand of letterheaded sheets they'll not only be cheaper than self-made ones, they'll also still be the same color after three weeks when your ink jet color will be faded to something unrecogniseable. They'll also deal with Pantone or RAL colors by mixing up real colors for printing and cut a couple of raster screens so you don't have to worry about fonts or anything graphical.

Actually the designers should have given you a very technical piece of documentation, called a CI that you might have given directly to the printers and asked for a bidding for the number of letter heads, business cards, etc. you had in mind. But you decided to DYI the job, which worked out as DIY uses to do compared to professional work.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Re: Disk is cheap

Specifically other people's disk.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: So true to life

Look for the guitar player among the staff and you've got your suspect. We can't help swapping cables in audio mixers. Not even in those that are perfectly in order or even in those we've set up ourselves. And then there's the curse of the gaffer tape. It gets limp and immediately loses it's stickiness as soon as it sees one of us...

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Millions of gouvernment money and an enforced usership? That's about what Microsoft gets in almost every country. Doesn't seem to help much if MS has to bother their users with advertising nevertheless.