Posts by The Dark Side Of The Mind (TDSOTM)

Google dumps 12,000 employees after project probe

Re: Working from Home might have a big advantage

The advantage might be less than one expects, as office buildings often have more efficient HVAC and lighting than average household can afford these days. Also, a lot of trades involve expensive specialized equipment that can't be easily and/or securely lugged to employee's home.

Sure, for plain administrative tasks, working from home *can* be an option, but the reduction on emissions argument must factor in the impact of energy consumption and utilities at the residential level. That would make an interesting study.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_ite_domum

Re: Bit ridiculous

"1. Isn't God female"

Helloween stated that about that same time...

https://youtu.be/15G7Lpbidos?t=22

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Re: cattle-prod category

Cattle-prod category: users that went through lecture, visual and practical training and still miss-report what they actually did when complaining that the product/system doesn't work.

Sadly, you have cattle-prod category users almost everywhere, with slightly elevated chances to find them in middle to upper manglement.

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Re: It's often an IT decision made to save IT $$$

It's often an upper manglement decision made to save $$$ to improve the bottom line after talking with a M$ trained $ale$per$on... IT receives a note that their budget was reduced by 30% (or more).

Zero-day vuln in Microsoft Office: 'Follina' will work even when macros are disabled

Nice one. Our "creative" marketing and "digital" departments might be a bit ruffled by that, though.

Given the fact that the alternative is dire, I might not care this time about the "business' views".

Have a cold one on my tab :)

Ransomware encrypts files, demands three good deeds to restore data

Re: I couldn't have said it better myself...

... but I could:

Just wipe the disk and install BSD/Linux... No need to "uninstall".

Supercomputer to train 176-billion-parameter open-source AI language model

Re: I reckon the first 40 years are the worst.

Only the years from 5th to 20th are to be feared. First 5 are giggles and obsessive care, then after 20 they usually get more or less independent... and less of a nuisance. Also, everything that you do (or don't do) in the 5-20 interval will be used at least once against you at some point more than once (if they survive the first time).

I'm a terrible parent, probably. Time will tell. The same goes with all training models (time and telling), albeit seemingly a bit faster.

Cisco inferno: Networking giant reveals three 10/10 rated critical router bugs

Re: Here is a bug fix....

Meraki is all nice and cozy until you get the bill(s). And they get you by the ovoids with licensing their dashboard... at least yearly.

Research finds consumer-grade IoT devices showing up... on corporate networks

Re: Depends what else is in the dishwasher

Fingers from undisclosed owner, stuck in RJ-45 ports.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: I'll continue to use good grammar whenever I can.

Good grammar deserves a pint.

In space, no one can hear cyber security professionals scream

Re: "If it asks whether you want to play a game, may I recommend you select 'no'"

If you accidentally select 'yes', then make sure you choose to play 'tic-tac-toe' instead of 'Go' or 'Chess'.

Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware

Re: disable the TPM in the bios?

Most mid to big corps are making heavy use of TPM (mostly for Bitlocker, but not only).

Right to repair shouldn't exist – not because it's wrong but because it's so obviously right

Re: I've lost my google mojo.

Just don't google it. Many others did and lost too much time sifting through advertising and youtube links.

Re: Consumption

Most of EU (if not all) states have VAT.

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

Of all the names...

"Nicolas Papernot, co-author of the paper and an AI security researcher"

Paper NOT Nicolas?

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

Re: Don't recycle that display yet

"You only have one????"

I have only one now because I was giving the other ones away as gifts to some techie friends... But that was around 10-12 years ago.

Autoforwarding in Exchange Online falls over due to a problematic spam rule deployment

Re: Yeah

With only 5 years to catch up with yours and noticing that today is Friday... have a cold one from me.

At least we can glimpse more bearable days ahead of us.

Boffins improve on tech that extracts DC power from ambient Wi-Fi

Re: Proof of concept

Oh, Casio... The devices they make are so underrated... I love their reliability and (often apparent) simplicity.

Your private data has been nabbed: Please update your life as soon as possible while we deflect responsibility

Re: Fake PII FTW.

Even better, make it that of their competitor's MKTG/HR/CEO.

Scientists stumped by strange X-rays from Uranus

Re: Not to be confused with ...

Uranus, black holes, auroras and sunshine... What a funny sounding weekend!

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: Simplified English

Engrish

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Re: DIY bidet installation kits

Yeah, plenty of those in my area, at ~40 EUR and change. Made in China, obviously.

The major drawback is they have to be powered somehow from the wall socket and their User Manual is mostly useless. They can vary the pressure, the temperature and the spread of the jets trhough a control panel akin to the remote control of a small toy helicopter.

Installin such a device in a household with kids can provide endless joy...

Re: That sounds like ...

"That sounds like a haired brain idea."

FTFY

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

Re: a better quality of idiot. maybe.

Nope. They were just fewer and more contained/confined.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Re: Surprisingly ...

I gather you watched enough of them to get immunized. So did I.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Re: freezers

The freezers work best for worn-out bearings in (relatively) fast spinning drives, while in the XT era the "stiction" (from "static friction") was caused by the heads getting stuck on the platters... In that case, freezing would do only worse.

Doogee Wowser: The S40's a terrible smartphone, but a passable projectile

Re: Usefulness

"That might defeat the purpose of a cold room, though"

Or would blow the HVAC budget.

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

Re: The big red button

I once had an "internal" UPS on ISA bus with a lead-acid battery (industry standard by then) stuck inside the mid-tower PC case and secured with 2-sided adhesive tape... It ran flawlessly for almost 6 years until the electrolyte dried a few weeks before a power outage... And it had almost no monitoring capabilities (more than 20 years ago)... That piece got to rest a while in a "spare" equipment for 2 more years before some beancounter decided that the residual value was NIL.

Re: The big red button

Have a pint, you brave soul. Hercules on WfW 3.11 was a nice trick to do back then, more so without proper documentation.

Google promises to be good with Knative as it releases Cloud Run serverless containers

Re: Google to the Rescue !

... feeding a bit more to the bottom line in the process of "not controlling outcomes".

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

Re: Hmmmm...

What? A 400x mag of the thing upscaled to 4k?

Microsoft explains self-serve Power platform's bypassing of Office 365 admins to cries of 'are you completely insane?'

Re: Many moons ago

"The business only approaches IT when they forget how incompetent it(self) is"

FTFY

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Off topic

I just used the full-sized GPT-2 from https://talktotransformer.com/ on the opening paragraph... the result made me chuckle a bit.

"Buying a house is a major ordeal. You go from door to door, months zip past and something's never quite right... then you find it, "the one". A five-bedroom home in Pinner, Harrow, northwest London. It's exactly the size you had hoped and dreamt it would be. The price? £1,395,000. You're a good man - you've made it.

Or is it? The only way to find out is to buy it.

The first thing you see when you knock on the front door is a man holding a broom handle in one hand.

This is the house's "landlady", and she greets you with a smile as you step inside. But that smile is broken when you realise she's wearing a wig and a dress and you're wondering why she's so happy.

Inside, everything is perfectly normal. It's a family home, but the children are not. In fact, they're probably all dead.

And the family has left their home in a different part of London - the one you live in now.

This is one of the most incredible real estate deals."

Daaa-aaad. She took my coding robot. No, I had it first

Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that.

Do they come with the flamethrower option?

...

The power axe option, then?

You're flowing it wrong: Bad network route between Microsoft, Apple blamed for Azure, O365 MFA outage

Re: Design, we've heard of it

Microsoft is pretty adept at ignoring trends. MSFT ignored the commercial Internet and spun out their own dubious and vague Microsoft Network that almost nobody used, only to rush to patch up a lot later in the game and doing a mess in the process. MSFT also ignored the clear and open standards for the web and birthed the most despised lineage of browsers ever. They also missed the start on mobile connected devices (even though their WinCE worked surprisingly well in many cases) only to shoot themselves in the foot with Windows 8/RT and enslavement of Nokia to the Evil Empire. They mocked the Open Source movement and achievements for decades only to embrace them towards the end of the second decade of this century...

They are changing their coats those years, but the nasty habbits are still there. They have enough glamour and business prowess to attract some brilliant people from time to time, though (Sysinternals comes to mind first, but for sure there are many unsung heroes in the pot).

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: I go bang!

Like 50 times per second... and for a loooong while.

Apple: Ok, ok, we'll stop listening in on your Siri conversations. For now, but maybe in the future

Re: Salt the data ?

This might work if privacy would have the same meme potential and media coverage as Area 51. Until that happens there can only be a bunch of geeks playing pranks on phones, like it was in the (not so distant) past...

Literally braking news: Two people hurt as not one but two self-driving space-age buses go awry

Re: Physics will still be applied

They'll get used to getting off one stop earlier after a few trips and a few pounds less on their bathroom scale.

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Re: Skeletons

Funny enough, but I think the size is attributable to the complexity of lies that it has to serve to the frontal lobes. Consider only the saccades...

Edge-lords crack down on trackers as Microsoft effortlessly kills off PBX phone system, and what's this? Windows Calculator on iOS?

Re: Our company has never had phones

I've seen that countless times...

But Skype still suck.

ENCODE’s ‘junk DNA’ claims spark biological bunfight

@ Field Marshal Von Krakenfart

You've got me at "And who would have thought that a dangling pointer could be so much fun." ROTFL

"However I doubt if $DEITY is a programmer". Well, I think (s)he is the ultimate mathematician, as Quantum Mechanics might suggest.