Posts by Just Enough

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Dangerous fix

It's a fix, but a dangerous one. If all "Bryce" did was by-pass the last developer's code to get to the original executable, he'll never know what the last guy's code was supposed to be doing. It may have been dreadful, but it wasn't there for no reason.

Chances are it was fixing, badly, a bug that will rear its head again in due course. Or adding something new that's absence will become noticed within the following year. If Bryce really wanted a gold-star, his next job would be to try to work out what the crappy code was supposed to do, and just as importantly, why.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

That page is a quintessential "How to draw an owl" instruction. It pretends its straightforward, but still manages to use terms that will scare the average computer user off the website. Even before they reach the distro specific instructions.

"distribution" - Is that a shop where I buy it?

"Flash" - Do what?

"correct keyboard combination beforehand" - Correct combination for what? Before what?

"Follow the instructions, and voilà!" - Draw the rest of the owl

Chinese carmaker Chery using DeepSeek-driven humanoid robots as showroom sales staff

Re: I think we'll find

Absolutely. These robots look weird, standing in that uncomfortable crouch, as if they were constantly on the verge of a toilet accident.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Idiotic naming

Delighted to know that I can continue to use the Windows application Remote Desktop Connection, because it is not the Windows application Remote Desktop. Otherwise for remote connections I would instead have to use the Windows application Windows App.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: If you haven't seen something you shouldn't have.

" told me it was the business setting up a brand new follow the sun support centre, a highly confidential project"

Clearly not that confidential, or he would have just told you it was confidential business, nothing to worry about.

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

Re: President Musk will not like this

President Musk's trough will be first in line when/if TikTok is carved up. X will gobble that up just nicely.

Trump's freshly minted meme coin passes $10B market cap

Re: I despair for Humanity...

Isn't this exactly how most crypto currencies work? Most of those "investing" are complicit and fully on board with the scam. They just reckon they won't be the mugs left holding the worthless bits at the end.

As for the rest of the "investors", well, a fool and his money, as they say.

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: There's no rule or law that says you actually have to listen to him.

He's a troll.

It's a rule as old as the internet that everyone seems to have forgotten; DNFTT. As long as people keep reacting, he'll keep trolling.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Slap on the wrist?

Why were the "appropriate controls" in existence if not needed?

User permission management wasn't some new concept introduced in the 90s.

Slap on the wrist?

Not sure why "Miles" got a slap on the wrist. At worst all he should have been able to do is empty his own home directory, and have no-one to blame but himself. But the error that allowed deletion of everyone else's files is entirely the sysadmin's responsibility.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: Am i old in knowing about SSADM?

Where in your imagined visit is the point where you stop staff watching, trying to guess what they need and how it might work, and talk to them?

You're not designing a cat feeder, you can actually ask the end user what would work best for them.

Re: Am i old in knowing about SSADM?

"one of the components is speaking to the people who will use the thing and ensure the system is compatible with the use case etc."

The way this ON CALL is worded it sounds like they waited until a week after the rollout before thinking to actually visit the people who would be using it. This is something they should have done right back at the very start. They probably never talked to anyone lower than management, who had never opened a box in their lives.

The true idiots here are the ones who completely failed to consult their end users at any point during development and production.

O2's AI granny knits tall tales to waste scam callers' time

Hello This is Lenny

You can have exactly that.

Google "Hello, this is Lenny" The grandfather, literally, of all chatbots. He's all over Youtube, confusing scammers and cold callers.

His third eldest, Larissa, went to University, you know.

$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club

Commas and syntax matter

"Despite USB Club's claims, this is a pint-sized SSD; we suspect it's really just a regular old flash drive."

really should be

"Despite USB Club's claims this is a pint-sized SSD, we suspect it's really just a regular old flash drive."

or even better

"Despite USB Club's claims that this is a pint-sized SSD, we suspect it's really just a regular old flash drive."

Amazon, Tesla, Meta considered harmful to democracy

Re: Well...

Billionaires laugh at your notions that they are bound by countries.

Governments who control everything, billionaires who buy or crush competition. Amounts to the same thing.

At least Governments have to live in the same country as their mess.

Re: Well...

Common myth spread by billionaire fanboys and other dim lackeys who have been fooled into thinking they could join them.

A small number of billionaires is not an effective or efficient way of providing jobs. Even if they were perfect angels, determined to do good in the world, they cannot be as effective as a society that distributes the wealth, and the job creation capabilities, among many.

On Call’s Greatest Hits, as voted for by you, the readers

is it plugged in?

One of my first calls to a support line was about a small monochrome monitor (It was that long ago, the secondary monitor allowed you to see debugging messages). It was dead, I couldn't get a thing on it.

Turns out the monitor was slightly more advanced than what I was used to, and it had a on/off switch at the back. It wasn't sufficient to just plug it in.

That was embarrassing. But it taught me a valuable lesson that anyone is capable of being an idiot occasionally.

Healthcare giant to pay $65M settlement after crooks stole and leaked nude patient pics

Re: "Healthcare company fined" = insurance pays.

Scams often rely on people who think it could never happen to them, because they're far too smart to be that stupid. Never assume it couldn't happen to you

Medical cannabis CTO says vendors would hang up when he called looking for a deal

Re: Hiding it behind "alternative medicine" is worse. Or is it a confession?

No-one said it isn't a drug. The issue is providing it from an "alternative health service". I don't know what else Alternaleaf prescribe, but if they're not flogging "alternative medicine", they're doing themselves no favours with use of the "a" word.

Cannabis is a proven drug for pain relief and other distressing symptoms. Its description as a "natural treatment" is irrelevant. Most proven medicines started out as "natural treatments", because there were no other sources apart from the "natural" world. Many proven medicines are still sourced this way. They are no better, or worse, for it and are not "alternatives". That's a word reserved for the bollocks that can't demonstrate that it actually works.

If cannabis is to be used as a real medicinal drug, then it can be called it a real medicinal drug, and provided as part of a real health service.

Elon Musk reins in Grok AI bot to stop election misinformation

Re: What is misinformation ..

What is sealioning?

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

It's how egomaniacs think

"Always, always, assume that any accusation by Trump, or any Republican politician, is a confession of guilt."

Always this. Trump has zero empathy and zero imagination. He cannot imagine himself in anyone else's' shoes, far less have any idea of what other people might think, plan, intend or be motivated by. So any time he accuses someone of doing something, it's because that's exactly what he'd do, or is doing already.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!

"Like Steve Jobs, "

Difference is that Steve Jobs was, usually, very good at what he did and understood his business. And he wasn't a Fascist.

US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data

"in it's T&C's that it will broadcast all manner of data back home,"

And the problem is that people don't care, because they do not think anything that there's anything in there that might adversely affect them. They have no idea how sophisticated the monitoring is and what can be reliably extracted from the data. The only way anyone can be made to care is if they're sat down and told exactly what complete strangers, who do not have their best interests at heart, know about them personally. Until it's served up on a plate, as a real example of how they are being manipulated with this knowledge, no-one cares.

And no-one reads the T&Cs, because they are almost always screeds of legalese that is impenetrable to all but the lawyers.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Prediction

I predicted this in this very forum a year ago.

AI generated from AI generated crap produces crap^2.

You're wrong, I'm right, and you're hiding the data that proves it

Re: Slow WAN leads to trouble

A long while back, I had a user on my network doing office temp work over the summer while a student. He reckoned he was an IT-Whiz, which he may well have been, but he also reckoned he could get up to shenanigans on my network without me knowing about it.

One evening, two weeks into his job, I nuked the GBs of god-knows-I-don't-want-to-know that he'd accumulated off some dodgy P2P service. He'd put it somewhere he thought I wouldn't notice it. I also wiped the software off his PC (which he'd taken to leaving on overnight, I wonder why) and put in some extra, just-for-him, limitations on his account.

He never said a word, and neither did I. But he knew I knew.

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

Re: Ads?

Apparently they are on this thing called "Meta". I've heard of it. It sounds awful.

Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike

Re: Is a soundalike illegal?

"It they aren't outright claiming it was her, is there really a problem?"

Yes. And people have been sued and lost millions of $ because of it. Look up Tom Waits vs Frito-Lay

Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it

Re: Alternatively...

Or, you could have both. Because life isn't always about competing alternatives.

Amazon and Epson accuse a bunch of traders of selling knockoff print ink

"Epson have made the moves first, dragging Amazon along with them"

Amazon have something like 60 times the turnover of Epson. They don't get dragged anywhere.

Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it

Massive config page

"Why isn't there a nice graphical config page with radio buttons and check boxes for every option and a paragraph of text explaining what each one does?"

Because it would be a page with a scroll bar that reached to the moon. The paragraphs would either be infuriatingly skimpy, if ever actually documented, or go on forever. Only about half of the entries would make sense as radio buttons and checkboxes. Those that used listboxes instead would require hundreds of entries, using values that are impossible to understand without full documentation. It would take half an hour to open and and an hour to save. No-one would ever go near it.

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

Re: Typical Google

When will people realise that GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ARE PERSONALISED? Sorry, I'm not shouting, I'm spelling it out.

If Google is giving you a list of vegetables as sources of iron, then that is as much a reflection of you (Or at least your browser activity and your IP) as Google. Your search results are not universal propaganda fed to everyone.

When I search on the exact same words, top of my results is a NHS list that starts with liver and red meat.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: This morning's local news

Crypto-currency disciples can't stop hyping their scam, even when prison time is staring them in the face. It's so deeply engrained in their psyche that hype is how it functions, this is what you do, that they can't see that it is not how real investments and real currencies work. The ponzi scheme at the root of it totally eludes them.

Fujitsu set to be preferred bidder in UK digital ID scheme

That's a very generous definition of NEED. Sure you don't, if you want to have no right to travel abroad, or drive, or prove your identity in dozens of situations.

You can also live in a cave and you'll never NEED a bank account, a mortgage, or a job.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: Includes sexual orientation

Same reason any organisation collects this data. Equality and Diversity monitoring. They want to be sure there is no organisational, intentional or not, discrimination happening, and can prove it.

Reddit gets a call from Nokia about patent infringement ahead of going public

Re: would you propose businesses stop other businesses immediately copying

"All they can copy is the idea, not the implementation."

I can't imagine why anyone would think this. Have you not heard of reverse engineering?

Re: The purpose of patents

"it was assumed that businesses would not succeed without some level of Government support "

And how, without Government support, would you propose businesses stop other businesses immediately copying what they've just spent years developing? Deploy a private army to burn down the competing factory? How would small-scale innovators earn a living, without their ideas being stolen by predatory multi-nationals? Complain about it on social media?

Patents are a necessary way of preventing the small being crushed by the big, and allowing people and companies to get a fair return on their work and investment.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

This is why some of these Who Me? stories, while being very amusing, I take with a pinch of salt. Any sysop faced with this situation is immediately going to identify the guys working in the server room as suspects number one, and go check the hardware.

Attempts to demolish guardrails in AI image generators blamed for lewd Taylor Swift deepfakes

Re: Will MS et al hire the 4chan'ers

You are supposing that the 4chan'ers are interested in being employed to the job, or that the skills to break something are the same as the skills to prevent it.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

a design flaw.

Any software that has a setting easily to hand, that could destroy the physical components if used, is shirley (sorry) a software with a design flaw. Level 100 should be within tolerances, or automatically cause a shutdown with a "Game Over" message.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

a further slap in the face

The entire honours system has zero credibility, so it really doesn't matter who gets given what. After yet another round of failed PMs handing out top awards to their pals, no-one cares who has what shiny medal or irrelevant letters before or after their name. The fact that some of these people get jobs for life in the Lords is just a further slap in the face to the public.

The whole setup needs binned and a better way of recognising people who actually deserve recognition replacing it.

Tech renders iconic rockers Kiss genuinely immortal

Crash grab

Gene Simmons is very much a free-market capitalist. As long as people are willing to buy, he is always willing to take their cash.

Chinese citizens feel their government is doing such a fine job with surveillance

Re: A remarkably uncritical article

Did you actually read it to end?

Amazon 'protects' against junk AI e-books by limiting author-bots to three a day

"99% of everything is crap"

We're not far off the point where AI will be getting trained by what is mostly already AI generated, producing crap^2.

If human generated crap is going to be submerged by a deluge of AI crap, where does it leave the original 1% of good stuff?

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Re: Welcome to the new corporate Register

"The public paid for the research"

The article makes it clear it is talking about textbooks, not research papers.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

What do you mean by "Liberal"?

Your poll is going to be meaningless if you don't better define your terms. I had no idea how to answer the third question "Reality has a liberal bias" because it doesn't make it clear if it was referring to "Liberal" as used in American politics or "Liberal" as used in UK politics. They're very different.

How to spot OpenAI's crawler bot and stop it slurping sites for training data

Resistence is useless

Big tech will approach the problem of copyright breach claims like they always have done. They'll ignore the legal problems until challenged, and then they'll throw unlimited lawyers and money at it until it either goes away, or they get what they want. At no point will anything get rolled back or stopped. I'm afraid that authors of books and websites are about to find this out. Their work will be ingested.

US Supreme Court snubs that guy who wants AI recognized as patent inventors

Re: Pointless

The point is to set a precedence, and garner the person taking this action attention and publicity. Being the guy who "gave AI the same rights as people" will do no harm at all to his company.

He could easily file the patents with himself as inventor, and there would be no problem. But that is not the aim of what he is doing.

FTC sues data broker for selling millions of people's 'precise' location info

Re: In the age of high tech tracking...

" but trust each other, could swap devices every couple of days"

Except that would reveal to data harvesters more information about people's relationship to each other.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: Genius

Steampunk is modelled on technology at least a century too late for JRM. The guy really has a fetish for pre-industrial life. The landed-gentry part, of course.

Other pedantry; what is up with Dabbs' spelling of "Worst Neighbor" ?

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

Re: Dear Microsoft.

Pathetic "whataboutism". Defence against things like DDOS attacks requires all agents sharing information. No one is immune or blameless. Finger-pointing like five year olds at school doesn't help anyone.