Posts by Wzrd1

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Yeah, had a few clients like that

Some, with the CEO being the obstruction.

We simply raised our $135/hour rate to the problem child $185/hour rate and for a special few, $235/hour, and one, $250/hour.

As no other peer would accept their business, yeah, it was worth the effort. With the two highest rate charged companies, I was given free hand and given that no other company would deal with them, it was priceless.

If someone doesn't know or understand, I'm patient and can educate the village idiot, but abusive and obstructive, those are folks that I explain to all listeners about that invaluable individual being a primary example of why one does not poke baby in the fontanelle - repeatedly.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Re: Great name, great beer

@JimboSmith, wrong. Spectrum reception and analysis can, with sufficient resources, defeat frequency hopping, sideband signaling tricks and a few other tricks in RF signaling.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Re: Musings from the group W bench...

At the velocities we're talking about, even the play-doh obscenity would turn thousands of objects into millions, which would stay in orbit for decades to centuries due to additive velocities for some boosting the orbit for the fragments.

Think not? We'll make a sabot with play-doh and shoot it at you at Mach 1.1. Your flesh would come apart faster than the play-doh.

Re: Elon Musk isn't helping, is he

Let’s educate you a little, or try

tr

OK, first off, lifting anything into space will never be less expensive than dragging something about in a truck. Ever. Rockets are always going to be more expensive than ground transportation, regardless of your conditioned response.

Second, earth orbit is a good second best, but putting a telescope on the moon would be far superior, but obscenely expensive.

Still, if you want to put a telescope into space, since it's as cheap as trucking the contents of a home up a mountain, announce to us all when you've paid for a space telescope by yourself. People move all the time, so it'll be a snap for you to do it.

I'll wait until proton decay, as I know how expensive space really is, as physics doesn't yield to business hype, business yields to physics or fail. Always.

BTW, I tend to take anything said by Musk with a grain of salt the size of Gibraltar. Especially given his recent antics, expressed desire to flout the law and well, the general incompetence in sending CPAP machines and calling them respirators (the old name lay people used for ventilators).

I also consider his vehicles rather interesting, given the few that have impersonated a Roman candle ever so well!

Re: Honest question....

The question is, was there a venting failure and eventual failure of the pressurized component or excessive spin? Because after those two, the next most probable cause of RUD is impact.

NASA signs deals to put a rocket under Artemis flights until 2029

Re: Artemis?

STS-51-F was the one.

QUIC, dig in: Microsoft open-sources MsQuic, its implementation of Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC

Re: the good thing about standards

Indeed. Does anyone remember MSjava?

So poorly implemented that Sun had a few words with Microsoft, who then had the nerve to tell Sun that that was how Java was supposed to be implemented. The courts had a different view on who owned Java...

Google productises its own not-a-VPN secure remote access tool

Re: BeyondCorp

Nonsense and poopycock! They'd not leave the planet to screw you that way.

That makes them Umbrella Corporation and life in general, Resident Awful.

Re: Remote Desktop

Well, security through brokenness is something.

The word excrement comes to mind...

Ah yes, another product on deathrow in a couple of years time.

More like suddenly withdrawn and abandoned.

Zoom adds Choose Your Own Routing Adventure to keep chats out of China

If so, will these same bashers ensure all their other web traffic goes no-where near China?

I can say authoritatively that the US DoD ensures that quite intensively. Of course, that doesn't stop China and Russia (at least for 99% of breaches) from using a VPN far away from their nation, then hijacking another compromised network to compromise a US DoD network.

As for purchases, everything that's purchased has a specification book and purchased products have representative samples examined in depth, destructively at times. But, most purchases aren't via Amazon or other low volume sources, as typical purchases run in size from a handful thousand units to millions.

To be warehoused, then auctioned off at the end of the fiscal year, so that they can reorder new units. Gotta justify that budget!

Re: Video voyeurism gone mad

Actually, the US DoD is in love with either Tandberg or Cisco VTC systems, where we do get the delight to share nose picking thumbnails.

I've also worked for civilian companies that used the shared video experience, because it's always wonderful to see someone working for home in their underwear.

As for voice/text messaging by cell, there's currently an investigation in the US and a couple of other countries over nonexistent N95 masks that were "for sale". The US FBI got involved when they were trying to figure out how to purloin said masks that were ordered for hospitals desperate for masks and they realized that the quantity on offer was double what 3M produced in a year.

Yeah, the FBI investigated how to steal paid for masks, then figured out that they didn't really exist, it was an international scam.

What usually happens now is, the shipment gets hijacked into US government custody and sold back to the poor saps that originally paid for them.

Re: Pinky Promise

I believe them.

But then, I also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Trump's expertise in everything.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

SCSI was and still is considered voodoo if you are putting gear from different vendors on the same bus. Thankfully, we are largely past that in this modern day and age.

Do you mean like times when something like a tape drive or CD drive would take off to the pub for a pint, holding down the entire SCSI bus until they returned and the damnable machine would finally boot?

Never saw anything at all like that - I kept my eyes closed and counted at the computer.

Re: I'm not sure why it happened

(For those not getting these jokes, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_Agnus.)

Yes, but Agnus had her resident awful replaced with Alice.

I'll just get my coat...

COVID-19 is pretty nasty but maybe this is taking social distancing too far? Universe may not be expanding equally in all directions

It's worse than that, we're exactly in the middle of that universe.

It's worse than that, really. *Everywhere* is exactly in the middle of the universe.

Meanwhile, this could be from magnetic polarization or even gravitational effects of an extremely large object/structure, the sample size is way, way, way too small.

Bose shouts down claims that it borked noise cancellation firmware to sell more headphones

Re: @EVP

The article says they found new cushions were not snapped on properly, or were 3rd party replacements that weren't as good as the originals.

The reactions tell me those who have never worked with high noise safety equipment. I'd gladly explain the differences with them in person, but having worked for their peers in the past, the conversation will have to be at a rather high volume level.

At least 50 db louder, to compensate for my hearing loss, due to such shitheads who think that they know noise suppression and protection better than professionals that work in the field day in and day out.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

Re: Despair

"What is wrong is the ridiculousness of keep using software that's so old it was invented when computers didn't have enough memory to hold the full date of the year and keep replacing the hardware while keeping using the same software."

Yet, not a damned one of the complainers wanted to pay for coders to code for more modern architecture and software languages.

Yet even more ignorantly, ignoring that IBM still sells the same general model mainframe, with much more modern circuitry, it just allows code re-use. I guess we were wrong when we accepted code that ran on an 8086 and an 80286 and stayed on the wrong path since...

Still, I'm at a quandary, if the code is so antiquated as to require replacement, whyinhell would you recompile it to run on the newer, newer, newer hardware, as was repeatedly done before, but is still deficient and not addressing the current problem?

Where is the BOFH when we need him?!

"there are also problems like the bios ending being so old it just dies even if you keep changing the battery"

I'm more worried about BIOS that was so old it says, "George Washington rejected this" in the firmware.

For example, I know for a fact that some of IBM's current gear will run COBOL that I wrote in the early 1970s unaltered.

Famous wods last heard in 1999.

Which 20 is it? 1920 or 2020? ;)

Perhaps, some minimal changes?

Most of us who worked on COBOL for Y2K weren't retired quite yet. Some of us still aren't officially retired.

No, just let go as the services are no longer needed.

To then be brought back as a consultant at 10x the rate, thereby saving money in the Twilight Zone.

Maybe I should pop by and introduce them to FORTRAN... ;)

Internet Archive justifies its vast 'copyright infringing' National Emergency Library of 1.4 million books by pointing out that libraries are closed

Re: It has been explained many times ...

A song suddenly made popular by a contemporary Hollywood film would not benefit the band.

Do let us know what that band thinks of their new found gains from within the grave, we'll wait.

Re: I'd have sympathy....

I agree - the rules are as they stand.

For many, many years, an unconscious man was still considered inviolable and being incapable of giving informed consent, could be ignored, rather than treated under the fiction of implied consent.

Is that fiction incorrect and the injured should remain untreated and unassisted if they cannot give consent in time of emergency?

As for sympathies, I lost those along with my sense of humor when copyrights became nearly immortal and because said works rights remain property of large organizations essentially into perpetuity for any living soul. A copyright version of Fahrenheit 451. Author dies, work no longer is published, the works are effectively suffering the same fate as if they were collectively burned.

Re: It has been pointed out ...

Me, I'll stick to dead trees. They don't have a habit of vanishing into thin air, and if they do the police are happy to investigate.

I've a second advantage in protecting my dead tree collection, the police only have to investigate enough to ascertain unlawful entry and the coroner collect the remains with a grand chunk of lead piercing a vital area. My state is a Castle Doctrine state, violate my hovel of a castle, find out precisely how good of a shot that I am and as a hint, the US taxpayer paid quite a bit to ensure that I never learned how to miss and two wars ensured those skills were honed to the highest caliber.

That means, if sweet Jesus himself showed up in my domicile unannounced and uninvited, he'll catch one round to the head, one round to the thorax. Should he fail to fall, I'll apologize and explain my suspicion of a burglar intent upon harm.

I'm given to understand he's a rather forgiving chap, if not, to hell with him.

Re: It has been pointed out ...

Have you ever heard an actual author complain about public libraries having their books?

Nope, not in the slightest. I'm also angry enough that each member of my family will be saving a few thousand dollars a year, which was previously misspent upon fair weather friends.

We'll read such represented works after having high tea with their peers, the dodo birds.

Re: It has been pointed out ...

John, I think it's perfectly reasonable to pay a carbon tax on burning the collective works represented by such people.

I'll be compiling a list of publishers and authors represented by these organizations and the works of said organizations and individuals are on my family blacklist, making them the only such publications in existence.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt we all have with this pandemic, now we have a new grudge list for those who insist we can't have nice things until the emergency is over.

No, once the emergency is over, their products and careers are over as far as me and mine are concerned. T

Re: It has been pointed out ...

OK, John. As the books in question are unlawful to purchase from a book store or borrow from a library during the emergency, while the populace suffers without occupation, those works no longer exist at all.

I've precisely zero tolerance for fair weather friends.

Good in times of good and plenty, but unobtainable during time of emergency to me is equal to not existing or being prohibited equally when any emergency has ended. As such are unlawful for purchase or loan while such facilities are closed, when our libraries reopen and our book sellers reopen, pile the lot of the unlawful in emergency works and have the grandest global book burning in the history of fire.

Re: Meanwhile...

I look upon it this way, as book sellers are closed by government order and libraries are also shuttered, the organizations are proclaiming to the world that their works are illegal to possess.

I concur, I shan't purchase any works represented by those fair weathered friends for the next decade, in any way, shape or format. Books are illegal and we should burn the lot of their represented works when the emergency ends.

Oh, their authors are struggling, but the populace is fine, thank you, who needs a job or money, as long as those authors are either paid or go unread.

If the associations and guilds object to that, I'll happily extend my prohibition to lifelong, it's my money, not theirs and since it's unlawful to purchase or borrow their books during the emergency, I'll consider it unethical to do so once the free market recovers from the emergency.

My home, my gold, my rules and I'll burn both of the former before I'll be forced to contaminate my existence with such people who disrespect a global emergency.

Infosys fires employee who Facebooked 'let's hold hands and share coronavirus'

Re: Background

<blockquote?Other libertarians than he --- even in the highest reaches of government --- also believe in absolute freedom of speech, not to mention negating tyrannical regulation purposed to avoid mass deaths, yet they too must be resisted.</blockquote>

Yeah, I get a chuckle out of some of those propeller hat idiots. One, who advises the maladministration went on about people suing states that enforce a quarantine.

OK, I'll bite. How much should my mother's family get in damages for being quarantined in their home over her father's TB? Sounds like in his world, I should own the entire nation!

Alas, history and case law disagrees with the tinfoil hat and propeller hat crowds.

Remember that clinical trial, promoted by President Trump, of a possible COVID-19 cure? So, so, so many questions...

Odd bootnote that's inaccurate and helpfully misleading

A husband and wife in Arizona took chloroquine phosphate, an ingredient of fish parasite killers rather than the anti-malaria medication, following the President's recommendation. The man died soon after ingesting the toxic chemical. His spouse was left in a critical condition. "Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure," she later told NBC. “Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the President says and his people ... call your doctor.”

I'm fairly certain that none will disagree that chloroquine phosphate is chloroquine phosphate, regardless of its source. Chemistry 101 and all.

Helpfully misleading in, most laypersons have no bloody clue how to create a proper dose of a drug from what is used for an aquarium for fish, due to concentration of chloroquine phosphate vs what is in a capsule/tablet and heaven knows what ingredients are considered acceptable for an aquarium, but likely wouldn't do a human very well. This debacle will hopefully discourage repetition, even if in the same time frame, someone in Africa also died of the same cause.

When I need a medicine, I consult a physician, not a doctor with a bone through his nose and not some failed real estate typhoon (sorry, but he blew away more of his properties investments than a typhoon could even manage, but he's as disastrous for investors).

But, feel free to ask my medical advise. It's always the same.

See a physician, don't ask random strangers on the internet to medically help you and never, ever, *ever* accept a politician or failed unreality TV star for medical advice.

Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet

How 2008!

As in, when a Pakistani ISP borked, via a BGP announcement, well... The internet, all to filter YouTube hosted videos talking smack about the official faith of said nation.

So, one court order to an ISP, an ISP with a minimally skilled engineer all worked together to bork a fair chunk of the internet.

And now, a borked BGP announcement managed to harm something innocuous, after all, root servers are mere accessories, we all memorize host addresses of...

Sorry, couldn't go on with that, even without a requirement to maintain a straight face.

Perhaps, we should begin to enforce a global rule. If someone borks the global intertubes, said borker shall be fired - with very real fire.

The Ghost of Windows 10 Past shrinks back as Microsoft's axeman tiptoes ever closer

Ah, but can we get

Updates that bork pre-existing drivers just before their certificates expire, or at least drivers critical to log onto the system?

Again.

Re: just Windows borking itself

Yeah, but ; it's a feature !

And a bug with seniority is a feature!

Your McDonald's demo has expired. For full functionality, please purchase a licence or try another fast-food joint

Re: Never ever ever ever install a demo version on a production box

If you wait to sort it out, the line goes down in a short period of time because it doesn't get taken care of and then you have a full compliment of staff standing around looking at screens notifying them that management has borked up something else.

Yeah, lived through that when our web filtering service license expired. Leadership was warned, foot dragging ensued, one morning all were greeted by zero internet connectivity, as if web filtering was down, regulations stated it was to fail secure, not fail insecure and endanger the entire enterprise.

Took a couple of days, the leader who dragged feet was assured that the single star he was wearing would be the only star he'd ever get to wear and only if he retired, per the chap wearing four stars for being extra good in kindergarten.

Plenty of defenses against things military, zero defense against stupidity.

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: !!!

If you think that's bad jets in the 50s/60s such as...

Please do note, that was 5x - 70 years ago.

As in, I was born in 1961, I don't need maintenance after 12 hours of work. Oddly, neither did the B-52 or F-105, both of which are 1950's aircraft. Nor did the F-16, FA-18, F-15 and oddly, the F-22.

Re: !!!

Instead of Lightning, the MOD is considering renaming it the F-35 Stormtrooper.

Nah, the upgraded name will be "Hangar Queen".

Aka: Designated Parts List.

Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it

Reminds me of back in '95.

"Microsoft Windows has detected a change in your mouse position and must restart in order to register the changes".

Or earlier:

"Not ready reading drive C:"

Abort, Retry or Panic?

If you use a start menu replacement, then this isn't so painful.

Not an option in many large enterprise environments, where even getting a driver with an unexpired certificate blessed for installation takes more effort than the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Personally, I go back to Win 3.11 and NT 3.51, so the old ways still work. A folder of common shortcuts.

Well, that and in one case, a set of scripts to launch everything I typically use in the first few hours of the day, which took so many signatures that intelligence managed to miss the Russian cultural attache's signature on a US DoD modification request form. Entirely missed was a Chinese military attache's signature, as they've been in so long it's considered normal function now.

After all, a bug with seniority is a feature...

It's hard to believe that Microsoft could have made it worse but apparently they now have."

They've not made it worse, they've "Enhanced your Windows Experience" by informing Microsoft about everything you run from the search box, as well as whatever files are important to you.

Has anyone run a sniffer to see what else is being sent with or after the query to Bing?

You know the President is able to shut down all US comms, yeah? An FCC commish wants to stop him from doing that

Oddly, there is no Congressional declaration of war.

I'll not bother discussing Trump's claims, that would seriously land me purely within the lands of insanity defense, while refuting insanity and honestly, it's not an insanity defense, it's Imperial defense.

Oddly, utilizing overall, the Chewbacca defense.

As a US citizen, knowing equality, either extortion is legal and thousands are released from prison or POTUS need to enjoy a prison.

You cannae break the laws of physics, cap'n... Boffins call BS on 'impossible' black hole, fear readings were botched

So, let's see

“We showed that the velocity of the H-alpha emission line is not changing with time - it's constant,”

Observed over how many centuries or even decades?

Meanwhile, there are other measurements to ascertain if one is observing an accretion disc or not, especially shifts toward blue or higher on a side facing our observation point.

Dopplering is also obvious, which won't be so extreme for an orbiting dwarf.

So, let the peers argue and observe, we'll see an eventual final verdict.

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

What codswallow!

"It’s not yet known if the Space Force will also adopt the new uniform the president has reportedly drawn on a big pad and colored-in really well."

What nonsense!

Total poppycock!

Everyone knows that Trump cannot color between the lines.

He barely mastered using a Sharpie, especially blunted to avoid unintentional self-harm.

Boffins find proof that yes, Carl Sagan and Joni Mitchell were right, we really are all made up of star stuff

Re: All or nothing logic

It isn't the atoms, it's the slow neutron capture that creates Palladium.

Then, it became a matter of what volatile element settled down first, based upon temperature of the molecular cloud at various locations.

Re: Dust grains

Just boiled off then.

We strained our eyes with Lenovo's monster monitor: 43.4 inches for price of five 24" screens

Just an excuse for waiting, due to production delays

Of a new GPU scheme.

After, everything will be gooder.

Or something.

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Well, it'll have a benefit

One will have to keep one's drivers up to date or one's entire enterprise will, again, go titsup.

As usual.

Like some Intel drivers, from a while back, which borked loading, due to expired certificates.

Microsoft, being ever so helpful suggested "Well, download the updated driver".

"We can't, the NIC was one of the drivers you forced offline and now the entire enterprise is down!"

"Get a new enterprise."

"Linux is looking better and better..."

"Well, if you're going to be abusive - <click>."

Contracting, I want your entire department to meet me on the 100th floor conference room - now.

Maintenance, take an early lunch, got some emergency patching to perform on the elevators...

Oh chute. Two out of three ain't bad, right? asks Boeing after soft-ish crew module landing

Re: Redundancy

"The Boeing managers say yes. The people in the capsule say "WTF?!!""

Not really, were I inside the capsule, I'd simply deadpan, "made by the lowest bidder".

"Which is why we have three!"

Nowhere near a "Houston, we have a problem". More like one engine cut out on a Saturn 5 booster, so they "burn it a little longer".

Laughably, both happened on one specific mission.

Call Windows 10 anything you like – Microsoft seems to

Let's see now...

The previous upgrade was held back for testing, still in testing for that matter, as the upgrade before fouled up authentication devices drivers, resulting in the baseline machine configuration for all users failing to be allowed to load drivers for their authentication token.

And it wasn't fixed in their newer release, as the most current drivers, despite still being vetted, aren't used until they are vetted.

Perhaps, it's time to retrain the users on a new OS and platform, as most of our utilities and primary applications are either web based or terminal based.

Leaving Microsoft minus its largest government contract.

It'll all depend upon how the release works in the testing environment. The entire leadership team isn't very fond of deleterious effects to the enterprise.

Pentagon makes case for Return of the JEDI: There's only one cloud biz that can do the job and it starts with an A (or rhymes with loft)

Re: The potential of side-effects for the civilian sector is real

AWS is global, so any mythical attack on AWS would involve a global attack on dozens of data centers around the world. So, a military attack is out of the question, leaving things to network centric attacks, which are a daily event anyway.

Re: The potential of side-effects for the civilian sector is real

3) Open borders allow the preposition of a substantial amount of munitions anywhere in the US.

Too late, we have substantial amounts of munitions in private homes all across the nation.