Posts by cosmodrome

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

Re: "What if I simply pointed Python 3 at Python 2?"

The problem with "fixing" links is not so much the fix itself as that it's not documented and therefore not reproducable. /etc/alternatives is not a bad hack in that regard.

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Papertape punch

We could only dream of cards - we just had the holes and needed to glue them together.

Re: Amateur

right, because sudo is for little girls.

Re: child process

-1 doesn't need justification. It would take all the fun out of it.

KDE bags €1.3M as Europe realizes it might need an OS of its own

Re: So...

"Betriebssytemsgrundsicherheitsregierungszugang" or if you really insist on the "windowing" bit, "Fensterbetriebssystemregierungssicherheitszugang" which is pretty silly.

Both words are "fairly long" according to DIN763408809922 Wortlängennorm.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Re: "Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space ... unless you opted out."

Things don't work that way on Linux - OTOH, since the browser runs in the user's context, it might. It can create and delete cache files, after all. So it'd be necessary to chown the empty file besides setting permissions to 0444.

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

Some of the better home routers (Fritz boxes, for example) allow you to assign permanent addresses to specific clients while keeping DHCP up for everyone else. They also allow mixing static and dynamic IPs.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

But 5/6 is the same as 1/2. Because 6-5=1 and 2-1=1.

q.e.d.

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

"Interactions"

"such as when users choose to share interactions to help train the technology. "

I wonder who in the world might choose to share that kind of "interactions". I wonder even more how this might "help train the technology". There seem to be (body) parts missing...

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Re: .....................it's already here, as a service company

Malus, meaning "bad" or "evil", the domain name malus.sh suggesting "evil shit" and the too honest to be real point about not wanting to credit anyone who works for free are certainly not without satiric qualities. Pretty dry and dark but probably satire.

Windows 11 finally hits right note: MIDI 2.0 support arrives

There's nothing well-written about MS' MIDI driver

The whole thing has been broken by design since the advent of USB-Midi. Not only will Windows reinstall any MIDI device that connects via USB as a new device wheneveit connects to a different port, it also has a completely idiotic limit of 16 devices. No operating systems except Windows does that shit. It gets even worse: some very smart person decided to give every virtuutal audio device including audio channels on HDMI-enabled monitors their own MIDI-device. Yes, they will create extra devices if reconnected to different ports on multiscreen setups. So, swap left and right screen and half of your MIDI resources are gone without having connected a single MIDI device or fired up a DAW.

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Re: Gullible!

Do you play, by any chance, a mid 1980s Charvel? Just guessing...

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Which is as pointless as hard to understand. CDs are actually containing the same data as digital releases. They even are digital releases - on a physical medium. A request to a music database should return the same results for a physical CD or a "digital release", so MS must have deliberately removed lookups for physical media.

Re: Challenge Accepted

Careful. AFAIK gnudb isn't really maintained anymore and only is working thanks to a redirection to musicbrainz. Musicbrainz is the actual way to go.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Re: Neat trick

Right. He's basically a saint. Even if he sort of killed some people, maybe, it was just for their own best.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

"assemblery". Great neologism. I've got to steal that word. If only for my cruisade against these quiche-eaters' increasing use of "assembly" instead of "assembler". "Assembly" - honestly, who in the world would deliberately chose a name like that for a programming langue?! "Assembly"... tsss!

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

32 bits were just right

They should have stayed with IPv4 - and even have reserved a few address ranges more for special purposes. Just to have them off the net where they do no good. People would think twice before dumping AI slob or demented "challenges" into the internet if there were only, say, 4096 addresses. These young people don't know the value of numbers anymore.

Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation

Conecptional Arts

putting the well known into a different context in order to induce some rethinking process. Good, work, obviously.

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.