Posts by keith_w

One person's harmless japery can be another's night of LaserJet Lego

But no user would ever try and shove a pound coin into the openings of a LaserJet. Would they?

Probably into the font cartridge slot.

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Re: Eh?

"Power circuits in the kitchen/high power areas in the houses are 32A, at 240V this is 7680W, useful for electric showers, aircon etc."

Electric shower? Shocking I tell you, shocking!

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

Re: Coding under the influence

The listeners probably thought you sounded better after a beer or two as well, even if you hadn't had one.

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: About two billion years ago ...

That's not even an N1 - 2000 lines per minute at full speed. I recall the first and last time I stacked paper on top of the printer, just as it ran out and the power hood automatically opened, dumping the paper on the floor. It's a good thing that fanfold paper is easy to sort

Re: Let's face it, who amongst us hasn't lost a tie to the...

Although I have never done it, the first thing I thought of was having watched a fellow get his tie eaten by a shredder in 1973 or 4 when I worked a world famous tea company's offices here in Canada.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Re: Why is there a choice?

"The technician has now begun the process of installating from floppies, 432 of them, but is unable to find the spacebar..."

I suppose that is better than not being able to find the "any" key.

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

I now carry my wallet either in my jacket or my front pocket if not wearing a jacket because it's a pain in the sacroiliac to carry it in my back pocket.

Icon for obvious reasons.

Re: Can this inform the 5G debate?

hey, people die from inhalation of Dihydrogen Monoxide - we need to regulate it's use - and did you know that there are people on this forum, yes, this very forum who are addicted to Dihydrogen Monoxide - and that they will die in c. 3 days if they don't get any?

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Actually, not saving a file did work. It was the user's expectations that were incorrect.

And this appears to be the default, as it is also set in mine and I haven't set it.

RTFM: Wireless Broadband Alliance squeezes out 40-page ode to the joy of Wi-Fi 6

Lots of places restrict copying to portable devices.

Lots of places still use POE IP phones which (AFAIK) still require a desktop connection - and provide an additional connection for a computer. It will be a long time before this all goes away.

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

It has to be a good design to be counterfeited in China?

Oz watchdog claims Samsung's leak-proof phones ad campaign doesn't hold water

if you take it with you while you are swimming it can't be stolen from your stuff on the beach/public pool deck.

Metropolitan Police's facial recognition tech not only crap, but also of dubious legality – report

Re: It's in its infancy, but it will improve

* You have a personal tracing device in your pocket RIGHT NOW (your phone).

Do.

* You have listening devices in your home RIGHT NOW (Smart TV, digital assistant, games console...)

Do Not

* You have behaviour monitoring devices RIGHT NOW (activity tracker, internet connect fridge, home automation...)

Do Not

* You are using facial recognition RIGHT NOW (Facebook, Windows, Apple...)

Do Not

* You are happy to be tracked RIGHT NOW (advertising)

Am Not

I do need the cell phone, so I put up with that. I do not need any of the other things, so I do not and will not have them in the house. And I am not happy to be tracked for advertising. Please do not assign to me your attitudes towards any of this stuff or anything else for that matter.

Here's a great idea: Why don't we hardcode the same private key into all our smart home hubs?

'aren't and most'

That would be 3 words by my count.

Stop using that MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW, says Uncle Sam: Loyalists suffer burns, smoke inhalation and worse – those crappy keyboards

Re: Customer service?

My Canadian Ford has been through 7 Canadian winters which I am sure are much tougher on cars than UK winters without rusting out. I am sure it will be good for another several years before succumbing to rust.

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Re: "maybe the bleeding stops after a minute or two"

My doctor has me on Zarelto. I stab myself in the finger every morning and the bleeding stops almost immediately,

Good news! We may be past peak Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Re: Selection process

the machine I am writing this on and another are running 1803, the third one is running 1809. This one is presently downloading the 1803 cumulative update preparing for installation.

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

Re: VT52 and VT100

And before that the 12 line VT50

Imagine being charged to take a lunch break... even if you didn't. Welcome to the world of these electronics assembly line workers

Re: "the cost of which would be automatically taken from their wages"

It didn't sound as though they were "opting out" of taking their lunch break, more that the supervisors were not permitting them to take their lunch break. I just finished a contract for Dell which requires you to deduct your lunch break from your hours. I absolutely made certain that I took that break.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Re: Dolt

It could have been a fan beside a CRT, at least until the error was reproduced by the help desk.

Re: Dolt

I used to get screen shots in Excel spreadsheets. That was all the user used, she had never launched Word.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Are you still not using W10? W10 each monitor gets a task bar. I have seen it refuse to move the icons to my chosen primary screen. I fixed the issue but don't remember how.

Re: BS

I've been imaging a lot of Dell 7291 laptops recently and they come up pretty dark as well but at least the FN + brightness button works right away.

Gaze in awe at the first ever movie of a solar eclipse from recording long thought lost forever

Re: Fascinating

The earliest surviving one is from 1896, so you can be sure that there were earlier ones.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: Use the same tactic to steal cars

When searching for my car, I usually press the "lock" button twice to have the car honk the horn. If the horn doesn't honk, I am too far away for the signal to be detected.

Re: remote access but not able to map a drive or send a copy of the cd rom as an iso?

It may be that the IT company made money sending him to the site, due to charge backs to the hiring company.

Re: no one is being forced to join the Euro

It was part of Belgium - Wallonia I believe.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Re: *pure*

Does it matter which mercaptan as long as 1) you can detect it's presence nasally 2) it is an unpleasant odour you wish to be rid off with all possible haste and 3) it doesn't poison you? Icon, to indicate the undetected presence of large accumulations of natural gas in the appropriate ratio to air.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Door Locks

We also had a printout counter that could be hopped over. We also had a door with a 5 button combo (pre-scan card days). My supervisor changed the combo and said "now let's see that red-headed woodpecker" (one of the programmers) get in. 2 minutes later, turned around and there the red headed woodpecker was. "How'd you get in" I asked, "we changed the combo". "I just guessed" he said. I also managed to lock myself out of the building on an overnight shift when I forgot my building key when going out for a smoke. I managed to get back in by dropping a piece of heavy string between the double doors and through the emergency exit crash bar, fishing it out the bottom and triggering the crash bar to open the door.

Microsoft Windows 10 'Burger King' build 1903: Have it your way... and it may still leave a nasty taste in your mouth

Re: Tells us a lot....attitude

My first thought when I read that was "What? you can't install the default MS Apps?" Then I realized that it meant that you could remove them.

Wanted: Big iron geeks to help restore IBM 360 mainframe rescued from defunct German factory by other big iron geeks

My first job

My first job was working as an operator on a 360/20, with the magnificent Multi-Function Card Machine (MFCM, Mother-fisking card mangler), a printer which had it's characters in groups of 5 on a bar that moved left and right while printing, and 4 Telex 2319(?) disk drives. We sorted using the MFCM (2 input, 4 output hoppers) and fed thousands of cards per day through it until we got a tape drive which didn't have vacuum columns but did have a tilted face that you threaded the tape across on various rollers when we switched from card punches to tape input system. I remember the address knobs, the IPL button and the "I/O multi-tasking" switch.

The RJ2780 remote input/output unit was based on the same frame.

Giga-hurts radio: Terrorists build Wi-Fi bombs to dodge cops' cellphone jammers

Re: WiFi Routers can be anywhere; cell towers are generally in fixed locations

Spent a week in the US at a place that had its own canteen. Every day I ordered chips and the b******s kept giving me crisps.

A lot of places what you are going to get in any case is chips/crisps rather than fries/chips anyway.

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

I find it amazing that those who cost NASA 2 satellites, and the insurance company $700 Million get a few years in jail and a fine, but those involved in the university bribery scandal are looking at 20 years in lockup.

Strong-willed field support op holds it together during painful customer call

Re: Seriously?

that happened my first week on the job programming a PDP-11. The service tech was in the night before and had reset the boot address to 0s. The operator, a very nice lady, but not a trained IT person, was at a complete loss as to how to proceed. I managed to set the address switches based on the hardware manual - it was my first introduction to PDPs and got it up an running in an hour or 2.

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

Re: Big drinkers?

yeah, tends to give you a wavy willie. :)

Cut open a tauntaun, this JEDI is frozen! US court halts lawsuit over biggest military cloud deal since the Death Star

Re: Common APIs are not everything

"I believe there is a requirement that the entire operation should be air-gapped"

How do you air gap a web application?

Amazon triples profit to $11.2bn, pays ZERO DOLLARS in corp tax – instead we pay it $129m

Re: "That makes me smart"

Dividends are usually taxed in the hands of the payees, so unless you are planning to tax dividends as they are paid out by the company, they will be taxed by the destination country, not the sending one.

ALL taxes are paid by the end user. The name of the tax indicates WHEN the tax is paid.

I won't bother hunting and reporting more Sony zero-days, because all I'd get is a lousy t-shirt

Re: A little shortsighted

If there is a bug-bounty program of any sort, even swag, then you are asking someone to step up to your car and tell you what is wrong with it.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Re: Header pic

"A ring makes a lot of assumptions about loads being relatively evenly spread and if you concentrate all the loads in the kitchen, which might be close to one end of the ring, it can run a tad warm."

The ring has an end? I thought the point of a ring was that it was a complete loop, ending where it started. (North American here, no UK electrical standard knowledge)

Six Flags fingerprinted my son without consent, says mom. Y'know, this biometric case has teeth, say state supremes...

Re: So I gather

When I took my kids to Canada's Wonderland 20+ years ago, they did photos on cards.

Re: So I gather

WRT the part about getting the photo on the card - yes they still need to see you to produce the card - but so do they need to see you to obtain your fingerprint.

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Re: Not from the Midlands...

Having read Verity over the years, for some reason I had the impression that she was a person of the female persuasion. It I am in error, I apologize.

I used to be a dull John Doe. Thanks to Huawei, I'm now James Bond!

Radio Commercials

According to radio commercials in Canada, it is pronounced Wah-Way.

Iran satellite fails: ICBM test drive or microsat test? Opinion is divided...

I am fairly certain that Iran is aware of the location of Israel and Riyadh.

What's the fate of our Solar System? Boffins peer into giant crystal ball – ah, no, wait, that's our Sun in 10bn years

Chrystal Stars

Would the continued existence qualify as "Shine on you crazy Diamond"?

Amazon exec tells UK peers: No, we don't want to be dominant. Also, we don't fancy being taxed on revenues

Re: HIgh streets

How do you tax dividends that are paid to citizens of a different country - if, in fact, they are even paid? Lots of companies don't pay dividends, the shareholders make their money from increases in the share price.

Microsoft vows to destroy Office, er, offices: Campus to be demolished and rebuilt

Re: Didn't Apple do this when they moved HQ?

Shouldn't that be "Apple Genius"?