Posts by Steve Aubrey

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Ten mil comes to 40k/day. Taxes and everything, yeah, call it 50% cost. That's still a hundred thousand a week in your pocket. I could suffer through that for a few months.

Gonna need a coat with bigger pockets.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: It happens to the best of us.

Once when we lost power for an extended period, we used a fully-charged laptop to watch a DVD by candlelight. On purpose, just to say we did.

Cybersecurity CEO accused of running malware on hospital PC blabs about it on LinkedIn

Somebody help the boy

Somebody tell the dude to stop digging. The hole's deep enough already.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Please do not all power on at once

Or the motto of the French Navy:

A l'eau! C'est l'heure!

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: This is understandable.

"exspending" - intentional?

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

And now you *know* why it won't boot :)

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

Re: "MS typically have only ever got each alternate version right"

Oh, I don't know - "The test of eternity" has a nice ring to it . . .

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: being lazy is part of his job

The three virtues of a programmer (from Larry Wall, via https://thethreevirtues.com/)

Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

Hubris - The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

Los Alamos boffins slap blinkers on satellites so we know who to blame in a crash

Obvsly

ELROI, because To Phos Tou Kosmou (Το φως του κόσμου, The Light of the World) was too long to create a backronym for.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

Re: Nah.

That sure is a fine manual you have there!

OpenAI's Operator agent wants to tackle your online chores – just don’t expect it to nail every task

quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur

'And it's said to operate under the supervision of a "monitor model" that watches for dubious behavior'

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Real programmers can change the value of 4. In FORTRAN. Unfortunately, not a joke.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Veni, vidi, visa. I came, I saw, I did a little shopping.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: Doh..

Clicking that twice gives you the Australian version of the software.

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

It's kinda Brave to hold that opinion . . .

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

Re: What we really <chirp> need........

That happened once in my apartment - soon after I left for the weekend. I was the recipient of significant grumpiness from fellow apartment dwellers for the next week or so . . .

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Borrowed:

"Every time you correct my grammar, I love you a little bit fewer"

Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions

Funny

Kernel version 3.11, also nicknamed "Linux for Workgroups". Somebody has some history, and also a sense of humor. Bravo!

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Holidays

"You don't test backups - you test restores"

That PowerShell 'fix' for your root cert 'problem' is a malware loader in disguise

Amish computer virus

We aren't terribly far from this:

You have just received the Amish virus. Since we have no electricity or computers, you are on the honor system. Please delete all of the files on your hard drive. Then forward this message to everyone in your address book.

--Thank thee

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Flash in the pan

With a name like Gordon, I was expecting the story to have some correlation to Flash - memory, drives, bang, whatever.

Happy 20th birthday Gmail, you're mostly grown up – now fix the spam

Re: Mark of the unprofessional

Appropriate technology.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

I know why they didn't discover this earlier

From the article: "intercalation science".

This is obviously a reference to INTERCAL (the "Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym"), which is notably slow. So obviously. Please.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

New name for a bug

"Unintended Feature Experience" - UFE.

Pronounced "oooof"'

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Rookies

My wife was a programmer at a company that saved disk space by using only a single digit year. While everybody else was worrying about Y2K, for her it was just another decade roll-over. Easy-peasy.

The week in weird: Check out the strangest CES tech of 2024

A square meter of air

. . . and one molecule thick?

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Oooooh, nice. I sadly sold my OSI C1P (with the upgrade to 8K). Still miss it, but prolly wouldn't use it if I had it.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

Buuuuut - who do they resign to ?

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: I need my local printer

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058812/quotes/qt0214308

Stratus ships latest batch of fault-tolerant Xeon servers

Re: interesting concept

Gotta be a niche market - not many need it, but if you need it, you need it bad.

Royal Mail wins worst April Fools' joke 2023

Re: Erm

I'm sorry you feel that way.

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

Re: Really??

But whatever includes the name is atomic. The *list* of names is not atomic.

The PNG from the original problem is atomic.

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

Re: Google issued a fix for CVE-2023-24033 affecting Pixel devices in its March security update.

If you have a supported Pixel phone, they are supposed to give it to you when you ask. Settings | System | System update | Check for update. Now I did hear that the 6/6a updates were running late, so, as always, YMMV.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

This is a big list

Products killed by Google (in case the URL didn't tip you off): https://killedbygoogle.com/

I still miss some of them.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

My support

I don't know the answer to the problem of "AI" when it isn't an improvement or a help. But I backed ClarkesWorld with a subscription, to help them weather the storm. Three bucks a month and I get benefits. Hard to lose on that one.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Re: Ouch

"old Ethernet cables" - man, are we living on internet time or what? So token-ring will be pre-history? Reminds me of:

After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, French scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors had a telephone network all those centuries ago.

Not to be outdone by the French, English scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters and shortly after headlines in the U.K. newspapers read: "English archeologists have found traces of 2,000-year-old fiber-optic cable and have concluded that their ancestors had an advanced high-tech digital communications network a thousand years earlier than the French."

One week later, Israeli newspapers reported the following: "After digging as deep as 50 meters in a Jerusalem marketplace, scientists had found absolutely nothing. They, therefore, concluded that 5,000 years ago Jews were already using wireless technology."

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: Trust wallet think they know how it happened now

From the comments to the 17-part tweet: "With all due respect, you did not explain what happened but repeated the narrative."

And I'd agree.

California toys with digital vehicle titles on private DMV blockchain

Re: Existing Computerized System (Subcontracted?) Already Error-filled

Oh, AC, I think you had the wrong part changed. You should have had the inspector transform the sedan into a Z-car. Worst case, you could have sold it (after a little speed run somewhere) and had some petrol money for the sedan you subsequently purchased.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: Are you ok?

Possibly extracted from https://www.gwern.net/docs/cs/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbons-isyoursonacomputerhacker.html - from 2001.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

Re: Contacts on both sides

No, people who would do that are actually lesser people. There would also be fewer of them.

Linux Lite 6.0: It's quite pretty, but 'lite' it is not

Has El Reg enabled the sarcasm font, and my browser just doesn't show it?

Ransomware the final nail in coffin for small university

Re: Having backups

"An honest politician is one who stays bought"

Same for ransomware gangs?

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

"Shakespeare wasn't written by Shakespeare. It was written by somebody else named Shakespeare."

Blood pressure monitor won't arrive for Apple Watch before 2024 – report

Which way?

"the system was able to detect atrial fibrillation correctly about 98 percent of the time"

Wonder if the two percent were false positives or false negatives. One could be a bit of a bother. The other could turn you into a long-term coffin inspector - inside job, of course.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

Re: Fired...

I heard of a company who staged a fire drill. Once everybody was in the parking lot, the sheep were separated from the goats. Those being dismissed were escorted in to pick up their belongings.

That's evil.

Wozniak startup to share orbital space junk data

Irony

"Privateer is planning to launch its own satellites"

Anybody taking odds on whether these fly-boxes may eventually add to what needs to be tracked?

Not suggesting he'd intentionally create additional bits for his company to track - would be expensive and dumb, and he certainly ain't the latter. But it's within the realm of possibility.

And it's a serious question - no matter how well-intentioned, putting a box up there means the risk is non-zero.

Fujitsu: Dumping older workers will wipe out quarter of forecast profit

Re: This PR BS makes me puke

Animal Farm. All the animals were equal, but some were more equal than others.

IBM cannot kill this age-discrimination lawsuit linked to CEO

Re: Semantic alert

"The cigars were destroyed in a series of small fires"

Tonga's submarine cable reconnects to the world

"tenuously related news"

You're just stringing us along, aren't you?

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Re: Step outside

Because they're blind?