Posts by FrankeeD

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Re: mail filters

As a birdwatcher, I got an eyeful when I mistyped "bush tit" instead of the correct "bushtit" when looking up information about the bird.

An unintended show

I was working at a Japanese university in the late 1990s, teaching a language class. Using the internet for language teaching was still relatively new, so I was constantly on the lookout for good suggestions.

My class was in a computer lab that was set up so that the students sat in pairs with their own computers and in the middle between them was a monitor that could be used to mirror my computer.

I'd set them a research task and was using my computer to explore ideas for web design. I came across a site that had a list of award-winning web-design sites, so I clicked on one -- and was rewarded by a porn site full of images of naked bodies in various poses, all faithfully reproduced on the students' monitors. I quickly clicked the "close" button on the web browser and discovered -- pop-unders, cascading down the page faster than I could close them. I finally hit the button that shared my screen and ended the unintended show.

The students, mostly 20-year-old women, were highly amused at my obvious embarrassment, and I learned a valuable lesson.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Re: We have some of the old projectors still hanging there..

And they can't coherently describe what they're doing as they're doing it.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Re: Customer pushback

But if you can fix it for free, then that's cheaper and easier for them.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

"One gotcha that still catches people out of course is opening an attachment because it'll save a temporary copy. If you forget that, edit and don't save it to a new location then you can expect to lose the changes and that is crap to be honest."

I was an academic librarian for years and students losing temporary files was a constant problem. They would log into a library computer, download a project they were working on, spend an hour working on it, save it, and then discover that they couldn't find the edited document because they'd been working on the temporary file.

Usually, if the student could remember which computer they were working on, IT could recover the document, but it was always stressful for everyone. For many students it was their first encounter with networked computers and not always a happy one.

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

Pink Floyd's other recording studio?

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

George F Will's take on American Football

“Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

I'm not in IT, but . .

I was an academic librarian for years and we always got IT related questions, mainly because we were easily available and not located in a basement across campus. For a number of years we had a problem where faculty who had a laptop connected to the LAN for printing but were using wireless for internet access, couldn't access the library resources. It was a common enough problem that al the librarians knew the workaround (unplug the ethernet connection to the LAN) but not a big enough problem that IT was interested in figuring out what was happening.

One day a faculty member was in the library and stopped by to mention that he was having trouble accessing the library resources from his computer in his office. I asked him if it was a laptop or desktop computer, as it wasn't a problem with desktops. He said it was a desktop, so I told him he'd have to check with IT.

About 20 minutes later he was back to tell me that he thought perhaps he did have a laptop computer in his office. I'm assuming he thought that because it was on his desk that it was a "desktop" computer. I gave him the fix and never heard back.

Facebook rolls out full-page ads, website complaining Apple is forcing it to get consent before tracking you

Targeted Advertising is Good for a Laugh

Facebook's targeted ads regularly provide amusement. I liked a comment by my nephew where he was discussing racial differences and ended with something along the lines of "we all bleed the same colour of blood" which resulted in an ad from a blood donor clinic in my feed. I posted a 20-year-old photo of my son when he was 6 and promptly got an ad for a Montessori pre-school. The most bizarre ad came after I was looking at hiking boots on a local outdoor store's website, which for some reason resulted in the appearance in my feed of a product called "Go Girl - Pink", a device that allows women to pee standing up - interesting, but not so a pressing need.

Election security fears doused with reality: Top officials say Nov 3 'was the most secure in American history.' The end

Are "leftists/socialists/communists" competent or incompetent?

What puzzles me is that many of the people propagating these allegations of election fraud are the same ones who argue that governments, and leftist/socialist/communist governments in particular, are so incompetent that they're incapable of doing anything well and should be reduced to the bare minimum.

Yet the election fraud propagators credit these same bungling "socialists" with pulling off a massive election fraud so sophisticated, i.e., involving multiple states and counties, not to mention both Republicans and Democrats, that it's impossible to find any evidence acceptable in a court of law.

Mystery of the Chinese woman who allegedly tried to sneak into Trump's Mar-a-Lago with a USB stick of malware

'Malicious malware'

My favourite part of the description of what supposedly happened was, ""A preliminary forensic examination of the thumb drive determined it contained malicious malware," the complaint said.'

Presumably, 'malicious malware' is the evil twin of the kinder, gentler 'benevolent malware.'

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Not unlike the old Soviet GPU

In his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge relates a story where reporter Ralph Barnes interviewed a man apparently fairly high up in the Soviet GPU. He asked:

"Why is it that in the USSR innocent people get arrested? The GPU man, it seems fairly shook with laughter at this, to the point that it was quite a while before he could get his answer out. Of course we arrest innocent people, he said at last in effect; otherwise, no one would be frightened. If people are only arrested for specific misdemeanours, all the others feel safe, and so are ripe for treason. . . . By making justice subjective and arbitrary, every citizen can be plausibly arrested and charged at any time, with the result that they live in a permanent state of incipient guilt and fear."

The UK seems to be moving in the same direction.

Wow. Apple's only gone and killed off Mac, iPad, iPhone family... figures for units sold to fans

They continue to kill off the only products in which I have an interest and raise the prices to ridiculous levels on the others, so it's hard to get very excited about any of their new product offerings. The iPhone SE format - gone; iPad Mini, not gone, but there's no way I'll pay more than $400 for something containing a chip that's 4 generations old. Clearly they made a cynical calculation that they'd make as much selling old tech without any upgrade costs as they would had they given us newer internals.

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

Re: Racist?

Racist? No. But your editor reminds me of the organization for which I do some part-time online library reference support. They offered sensitivity training to prevent us from committing "microaggressions" against those using our service. Given that microagressions by definition can only be committed against a marginalized group and the fact that the reference service is totally anonymous, I declined their training offer.

'Password rules are bullsh*t!' Stackoverflow Jeff's rage overflows

Idiot rules

I use a password manager, so length and complexity are no problem. However, once I did get the following message about my new password - "Password strength: Outstanding!" and then below it a password failure message saying: "Password must contain one number or symbol."

A perfect example of what he's on about.

The hated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will soon be dead. Yay?

Doctor Syntax, I'm having a hard time imagining 35 million Canadians forcing through a trade deal that's going to disadvantage a majority of the 500 million residents of the EU. Whereas, in the TPP, the US is the clear economic power, with only Japan being anywhere near the same league.

EYE-GASMIC: Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch with Retina Display

Not appealing

I have a 2011 MBP with the 1680 x 1050 screen. Not retina, but still a very fine screen. I have the RAM maxed out to 16 GB and a 1 TB 7200 RPM drive. When prices drop on SSTs I'll probably add one of those, either in the optical bay or as a replacement for HDD. Other than the screens, I don't find the new retina machines appealing. I still use Ethernet when my wireless acts up, I need a security slot as I spend part of my day working in a public area, and SSTs are still to expensive for my taste.

Sure the new retina MBPs are faster, but when was the last time you found yourself waiting for you computer to do something because it was too slow? I rarely re-start, so the faster boot time isn't an attraction.