Posts by Doctor Huh?

Ex-eBay security execs among six charged with harassing, threatening bloggers who dared criticize web tat souk

Streisand Effect, now with Federal Agents!!

Thank you, eBay, for putting to lie the myth that Silicon Valley hires the best and brightest!

I cannot fathom the stupidity of committing federal felonies in trying to intimidate into silence the Mom & Pop proprietors of an almost-completely-unknown blog, thereby bringing the blog to prominence. But what the article casually mentions is that these masters of intimidation and intrigue were talking about going after the Wall Street Journal next. I really wish the feds had left them alone long enough for that to happen. Watching the National Enquirer take on Jeff Bezos and "ruin" him by exposing him as a wealthy man who schtups beautiful women with a schlong so big that his shorts can't contain it was priceless entertainment. One wonders what geniuses like this could do with the Murdochs.

HPE loses second key exec in as many weeks

How Sad

Could you not have included one "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Itanic" reference for old times' sake?

India's peak IT body tells outsourcers to check contract cancellation fine print while Coronavirus reigns

Contingency plans

"We are also putting a robust business continuity plan – powered by next-generation technologies – in place to combat the situation, while ensuring safety of all."

I can translate this into current American vernacular:

"We have a beautiful plan. A strong plan. The best plan."

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

I think we need a new acronym... POS is doubly accurate...

After a lifetime of slinging software, I didn't blink at all when I saw "POS" in the story. It did take a few seconds to realize that, in this context, it meant "point of sale." Perhaps "point of purchase" might be used instead, leading to "That POP package is a real POS."

Ever dream of being an astronaut? Now’s your chance. NASA wants new people for the Moon and Mars

The Problem...

The best-case scenario is that you are chosen for the program and you have to relocate to... Houston.

So once again, television has lied to me. Astronauts don't get to live in Cocoa Beach, FL. They probably don't even get their own Jeannie anymore.

Meet Clippy 9000: Microsoft brags about building Earth's largest AI language model, refuses to let it out of the lab

Clipinator C-800

As one who has heaped scorn on Clippy over the years, I am uneasy. The marriage of machine learning, a bullied and scorned Clippy, social media, and the Internet of Things can only result in the oft-foretold, dreaded cyborg death machine. Think of something on the order of Carrie at the prom or Rambo being busted for vagrancy. This cannot end well for the human race, and all because we couldn't accept the assistance of a well-intentioned, albeit incredibly annoying, helpful animated paperclip.

Vendor-bender LibreOffice kicks out 6.4: Community project feel, though now with added auto-█████ tool

Re: Understatement

"You are supposed to launch it full screen and it becomes your desktop and gives you access to all the applications you every need."

I remember when EMACS embodied this philosophy. Of course, in an era pre-dating shell history, integrated applications, etc., running everything through EMACS represented a huge improvement in productivity and in the user experience.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Re: Not a good idea

"IIRC, Volkswagen has been doing it for decades. Via their internal union I believe. Arguably quite successfully.'"

It depends on your definition of success and what value employee representation is intended to provide. If direct contact between employee representatives and those responsible for corporate governance is intended to produce greater transparency to prevent unfortunate occurrences such as a far-reaching engineering scandal to cheat emissions standards world-wide that would cost the company billions of dollars and some of its reputation, then one could argue that VW hardly constitutes an example of success.

If the purpose of employee representation is to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page as the corporation pillages the world, then I suppose a hearty "Well done, VW!" is in order.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: Testing?

--For values of "minority interest" that includes "used by millions of actual human beings (if not tens of millions) each and every day".--

Well, that's the funny thing about numbers, even large ones. Mark Zuckerberg was in front of the US Congress decrying the failure of the banking system, because over a billion people don't have access to bank accounts. There are 7.7 billion (say it like Dr. Evil, folks) people on the planet. That means that the banking system covers about 87% of the people on the planet. To me, that seems like a pretty rousing success story. It isn't perfect, and the access isn't very evenly distributed, but... 87%!

So it is perfectly possible to have millions or tens of millions of devoted followers and still be a niche product when compared against products that are distributed to billions.

Just a friendly reminder there were no at-the-time classified secrets on Clinton's email server. Yes, the one everyone lost their minds over

Re: Top Secret- NOFORN

I've been on the Internet too long.

I mis-read that title as "Top Secret - NOPORN", a classification which would preclude any Trumpian watersports videos, thankfully.

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

Market Inefficiencies

It is best to remember that when a Unicorn service claims that its "innovative" approach to market disruption is to drive out market inefficiencies, safety and security for customers, workers, and just about anyone except the owners are among those "inefficiencies." There isn't anything particularly innovative about that approach. The "muckrakers" in the US documented the approach and its effects over a century ago. Applications of that approach well over a century and a half ago prompted Karl Marx to start musing about economics.

Justice served: There is no escape from the long server log of the law

Re: Speak for yourself

"I used to be vain but now I'm perfect ;)"

You're so vain, you probably think this post is about you.

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

Call and chat volumes down? Indicator of product's quality or of support's lack thereof

"Over the last three years one of our key indicators of product quality – customer service call and chat volumes – has steadily dropped even as the number of machines running Windows 10 increased,"

Perhaps decreasing numbers of requests for support are an indication of the increasing quality of Microsoft's products, but from my personal experience, it is more likely an indicator of the pain, frustration, and lack of helpfulness of Microsoft's support organization. The members of the support team with whom I've spoken are uniformly polite, almost to an irksome degree. But as a native of New Jersey, I would be more than willing to trade politeness for the ability to solve problems.

"Now listen here, ya stupid jag-off. Right click on file while pressing the f'ing shift key to activate the secret menu. Then select 'Repair Files', let it work for 10 minutes, and then don't ever do anything stupid like that again! Capeesh?"

Another sign of the End Times: Free software guru Richard Stallman speaks at Microsoft HQ

Re: "RMS isn't opposed to money or profits or charging for sorftware -"

The stunning ignorance of history in the original post makes me wonder if it isn't intended as flame-bait.

This sentence alone is just so stunningly incorrect as to be almost Trumpian:

"Not surprisingly Stalman doesn't write code but take advantage of other people's work."

It is sad, because the original motivations behind the free software movement (God, I wish there were a better terse description than "free as in freedom, not as in beer") have never been more pertinent in an era where Apple produces products that are almost impossible for third parties to repair legally and where one could prevent a machine from running unsanctioned operating systems.

You're not Boeing to believe this, but... Another deadly 737 Max control bug found

HCF is once again real

Halt-and-catch-fire takes on a whole new context, as does the use of the term "crash", when dealing with avionics...

Mystery Git ransomware appears to blank commits, demands Bitcoin to rescue code

"if your business model depends on secrets your business model is broken from the start"

Tell that to Coca-Cola or Colonel Sanders...

America's anti-hacking laws are so loose, even Donald Trump Jr broke them. So, what do we do about it?

You are just calling Don Jr. a "weapons grade moron"...

so that he can't be exported from the US...

Well played!

I've had it with these mother-fscking slaps on this mother-fscking plane: Flight fight sparks legal brouhaha over mid-air co-ords

Re: Here have a can of worms...

David Suchet, but only because THE proper choice has gone to the Great Gig in the Sky. RIP, Alan Rickman.

Be wary, traveller: There is no going back if you step over the Windows 10 20H1 threshold

Ugh. Sooooo very glad I'm running MacOS and Linux

I'm so glad that Windows 8 finally pushed me over the edge to abandon this crap.

National Enquirer's big Pecker tried to shaft me – but I wouldn't give him an inch, says Jeff Bezos after dick pic leak threat

I don't think this is how you blackmail...

Is anyone else thinking about that scene in the Dark Knight where Morgan Freeman incredulously asks Joshua Harto if his plan really is to blackmail one of the richest, most powerful men in the world -- https://youtu.be/1z6o1GIEsQE

Also, let's face it -- if your semi-saluting manhood is poking out all over the place and making noticeable bulges, is being exposed as someone who is incredibly wealthy, dates attractive women, and has a large schlong really much of a threat. There are men who PAY to get that kind of PR.

IBM to kill off Watson... Workspace from end of February

And the root of the problem...

"A Power9 desktop at sensible price (say £1000) would have me jump like a shot off X86."

Precisely. IBM isn't capable of functioning in a low-margin, high-volume environment, so IBM cannot take advantage of such opportunities. IBM functions best in markets like the one for the Mainframe -- one where there are very specific requirements that only a specific product can meet, where cost is not a critical concern, and where being locked in to a particular vendor is not a problem. There aren't many markets where customers are willing to let their vendors grab them by the tallywags and squeeze until wallets pop open, and there are fewer such markets with each passing year.

IBM insists it's not deliberately axing older staff. Internal secret docs state otherwise...

Amused that IBM thinks its the geezers repelling the Millennials

Yes, IBM. Rest assured that it is the grey hair that repels Millennials and not anything else about the company.

For giggles, I turned to the Millennial next to me and asked. His response: "I have friends who work for Google and Facebook. I know those companies and their products. I can't think of anything IBM makes that I can buy or want to buy."

I'm thinking the kid has managed to put his finger on the problem (he is a bright guy with a great future in front of him).

OK Google, why was your web traffic hijacked and routed through China, Russia today?

Random Kevin Bacon Reference

The incidents goes to show that a USA telco like ATT, VZ, etc (the ones which Google "peers" with) will accept anything China telecom feeds them and say "thank you, with pleasure".

I believe the phrase you are looking for is "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

https://youtu.be/bIZoVO8ZyyQ

Google logins make JavaScript mandatory, Huawei China spy shock, Mac malware, Iran gets new Stuxnet, and more

Heroic Horny Geologist Does Favor for Fans of Solo Sex

I'm shocked that there are 8,999 safe porn sites. The USGS might recoup some of its costs by publishing the list.

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

2 words: Potemkin Village

1 acronym: IBM

On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others

Drax the Destroyer comments...

It's not April 1st, is it?

Look up "hagiography" in the dictionary and this article will be the definition.

"Nothing goes over my head! My reflexes are too fast; I would catch it!" -- Drax

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiah5GB4vbdAhXydN8KHeXlB8kQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftenor.com%2Fview%2Fdrax-the-destroyer-dave-bautista-metaphor-guardians-of-the-galaxy-over-my-head-gif-3613490&psig=AOvVaw2yuPcRbpxa-g26PoLcFaZY&ust=1539085389794735

Apple leaks rekindle some hope for iPhone 'supercycle' this year

Re: Apple will end up like Nokia

Symbian's problems with hardware were basically limited to dealing with chips wtih bugs (TI, ST, etc.).

Huh? For those of us who have been involved in porting/adapting an OS to new hardware, "chips with bugs" == "chips". They all have bugs.

Your Twitter app stopped working? Here's why

Twitter: Everything Wrong with Humanity and the Internet in a Single Service

Why does Twitter exist? It showcases the absolute worst in humanity with very little real benefit. Its business model is straight out of South Park:

1. Give every clod a 144 (now 288!) character megaphone.

2. ???

3. Profit!

At what point to investors finally realize that there is no path to "monetization" and that they own a piece of the next MySpace? While other services are at least paying lip-service to addressing cyberbullying and propaganda distribution, Twitter is cautiously playing footsie. Why? Because most of the "problems" with Twitter are actually its features and are the reasons it is attractive for many people.

Well, this makes scents: Kotlin code quality smells better than Java

Re: Fewer lines of code == fewer bugs?

You can argue that boiler-plate patterns ought to be incorporated into the language. Any case where the IDE could automatically generate code (Java bean pattern, for example), could be made a case for a language extension that would allow the compiler to generate the code.

So that code DOES offer an opportunity for bugs, but they are only likely to occur if the meatsack at the keyboard messes with the generated code.

I choke at the notion of counting lines as a measure of conciseness, but I'm from a time where the size of the input file mattered, so readability would be sacrificed to the Great God of the 180K Floppy Disk. I much prefer readability. I _like_ if statements that take up 3 or more lines, with one of them devoted solely to the closing bracket. I _like_ always using brackets for clauses, even where they are optional. It vastly increases readability and decreases screw-ups.

Often concise code uses obscure or infrequently-used features of the language. You may be a bad-ass C programmer who can go 5 levels deep into ?: constructs with multiple comma operators and fit 50 lines' worth of if statements in a single line, but if you are lucky, in any given country the number of people who can make sense of such a line might fit into a single bathroom stall. If you are very lucky, YOU still might be eligible for the stall 6 months after having written that monstrosity.

Facebook deletes 17 accounts, dusts off hands, beams: We've saved the 2018 elections

Re: Moron!

Facebook is NOT a source for information!

It is when you don't trust the media or your source is people like Alex Jones .

Information doesn't work like that. Pizza and beer don't become health foods just because your normal diet consists of Cool Ranch Doritos by the pound,

Indiegogo grants ZX Spectrum reboot firm another two weeks to send a console

Is this really a surprise?

Yes, I understand that crowdfunding is the new, hot trend, and the spin put on it is that crowdfunding is the democracy of capital in action. What it amounts to in practice is that no single party has enough money in the game to make it worth hiring a lawyer to go after anyone for non-performance. In theory, one might expect the crowdfunding sponsor, who takes a cut of the investment, to police the funded projects. That expectation ignores the central fact that crowdfunded projects are, almost by definition, too dodgy to receive conventional funding. A lot of conventionally funded ventures fail for various reasons in various ways, and those ventures were carefully vetted and usually have a sensible business plan, participants with experience in business and in the relevant aspects of their project (logistics, manufacturing, etc.). The real shock is that there are a non-negligible number of crowdfunded projects that succeed and deliver product.

Real fake scam offers crypto-coin to replace frequent flier points

So the cryptocurrency is a scam, but the points aren't? Hmmmm

I'm all in favor of the SEC actually regulating the scam-filled Wild West that is "the market." I'd encourage them to do more. As the article notes, the loyalty points are a "pseudo-currency," and the rules, such as they are, favor the issuer far more than the recipient. It would be nice to see some adjustment in that area, but that is asking a bit much from a Republican Congress and from a President who has dabbled in scams himself from time to time.

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

Is IBM anything but a bellwether for business-crippling mistakes?

When you find your company making the same sad business decisions that IBM makes, it is time to pull the handle on the ejector seat and punch out of there. IBM is your stoner friend who lies on the sofa all day watching Netflix and eating brownies -- when you even accidentally find yourself making any choice that he would make, you need to immediately reconsider.

Equifax reveals full horror of that monstrous cyber-heist of its servers

Why on Earth are the clowns still in business?

This really should be a complete deal-breaker for anyone. It should be the end of the company. I keep hearing how litigious Americans are, and yet these incompetent morons haven't been sued into oblivion!?!?!

If only personally identifying information were guarded as closely as the Coca-Cola formula or the Colonel's fried chicken recipe (although the original gravy recipe is the true gem).

Admin needed server fast, skipped factory config … then bricked it

80186 elusive?

Hah!

Standard equipment on both the HP 200-LX and HP 100-LX.

They were brilliant machines that gave me pocketable work-from-a-cafe capabilities in 1994 that I didn't achieve again until Wi-Fi, smartphones, and netbooks became widespread in around 2010. Being old-school HP devices, they both still function perfectly.

Pentagon sticks to its guns: Yep, we're going with a single cloud services provider

JEDI Cloud?!?

Please, please tell me that the governing body for this project is called the JEDI Council!

Stop us if you've heard this one: Job cuts at IBM

So, Just Another Friday at IBM, Then?

At this point, the best-working IBM technology is whatever they are using to select RA candidates. Is Watson now The Terminator?

IBM thinks Notes and Domino can rise again

Is this an improvement on IBM's usual business strategy?

I can't tell if IBM has learned anything here. It smacks of the usual IBM mess -- throw good money after bad, by deluding yourself about the problem.

The fundamental problem with Notes is that for all the talk of it being collaboration software, 80-95% of its use is as an E-mail client, and it is a bloated, slow, generally horrid E-mail client. It sucks at the one function its users will employ every single dreary day of their lives as office drones.

But IBM has turned it over to HCL, so they aren't rolling the dice with their own money anymore. That seems to be something of an improvement. They've moved on to ruining other companies' businesses rather than merely their own. That has to count for something. But the story is still dismally familiar.

IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

Get Agile, OR ELSE!

How will the spam all the employees with the endless barrage of aren't we great emails that consume the 120Mb quota and kill productivity as you wade through them daily?

You've clearly never used Slack. It is more than up to the task of killing what little productivity one could achieve in a Big Blue environment.

I used Slack in Big Blue. It was brilliant -- you could bother a single person through Notes, Sametime, Slack, and telephone almost simultaneously. You get extra points if you criticize a person for not responding on all 4 channels. Add in a few holdouts using IRC, and you really had a lovely mess.

Careful with the 'virtual hugs' says new FreeBSD Code of Conduct

Not to start a FreeBSD vs Linux flame war

But can anyone even try to picture Linus sending a "*hug*" or a "*backrub*" without pissing him/her-self laughing?

IBM's chief diversity officer knows too much and must be stopped!

Plans? IBM Has Plans?

Seriously, shouldn't IBM have to demonstrate an actual plan to claim that someone has knowledge of their plans.

I think the working "plan" right now is:

1. Word cloud of buzzwords involving "Cloud", "AI", and "blockchain

2. ?????

3. Profit!

IBM lifts its 22-quarter shrinking sales curse: Finally, a whole 1% uptick

Re: One thing missing...

Visionaries may be overrated. Execution is underrated.

The big virtue that AWS and Azure share is success in keeping the blinky lights blinking. Their always-on-infrastructure isn't perfect, but it is close enough that outages constitute major international news. IIRC, IBM has been accused of writing its contracts and terms of service such that the penalties for failing to provide the contracted level of service are less than the cost of providing the contracted level of service, hence the predominance of mostly-on-infrastructure. It turns out that there isn't much of a market for high-priced, mostly-on-infrastructure.

Re: Idiots the lot of them

"I have to work with them and they never cease to amaze me how they can invent new ways to fail."

So THAT'S what Watson is doing -- business strategy generation! I'm glad something worthy is replacing those old Dungeons and Dragons dice.

Woo-yay, Meltdown CPU fixes are here. Now, Spectre flaws will haunt tech industry for years

Itanic didn't hit this iceberg!

Really, this is all just an Intel plot to breathe life back into the Itanium architecture!

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

Back to my childhood...

Does anyone else think that this looks like the lifting-body craft whose crash turned Steve Austin into the Six Million Dollar Man???

"Flight call, I can't hold it! She's breaking up! She's breaking up!"

Firefox bookmark saving add-on gives users that sync-ing feeling

Sigh

And this plugin _could_ have been architected so well... Bookmarks could have been saved as an encrypted git/CVS repository for full version history and retrievability. The thing could have been architected to blast the encrypted blob to the Cloud file storage of your choice -- Dropbox, AWS, Google, or even one of those WD DIY Cloud drives. Local backups/caches could have been preserved (here is where a git repository would work VERY nicely). Multiple Cloud copies could have been accommodated and synchronized.

But there is no profit in that approach -- only personal satisfaction for the designer/implementer. It would have been all free with no "mium" to be had...

IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer

Innovative!!

The usual metaphor for this sort of thing is "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic," however I feel IBM has innovated in this area. Re-naming and re-branding every few months seems like less effort than moving physical chairs. I'd love to come up with a suitable Titanic-based metaphor, but I think "re-branding the IBM Cloud" will become the metaphor everyone uses in the future for a futile, lackluster effort that ultimately promises no significant change.

IBM's Phase Change Memory computer can tell you if it's raining

Re: Computronium!

I'm glad I'm not the only one who came up with this, ahem, connection.

The basic idea of moving the computation to the data has been around for decades and pops up frequently. My most recent favorite is the Netezza appliance, which essentially implemented smart disk storage using FPGAs and hard drives. SSD storage would have solved the low MBTF of the mechanical devices. But, 2 factors have put that technology on life support:

1. About 5 years ago, Hadoop became the shiny new thing (now it's Spark, and tomorrow it will be...?), and interest in dedicated appliances waned as interest in on-demand Cloud-based Hadoop grew.

2. IBM bought Netezza. IBM buying your company is a more effective kiss of death than the one Michael Corleone gave Fredo, because IBM doesn't wait for Mom to die before putting out the hit.

I can see Seth MacFarlane doing a whole bit on how this memory chip is an improvement in rain detection over the "weather rock" present in so many places.

Go on IBMers, tell us what you really think

The picture says it all -- IBM Confidential

That is what I remember most about my IBM days -- "IBM Confidential" plastered over just about everything, whether it really applied or not. IBM was like a kid with a new label maker.

It was amazing how many "IBM Confidential" things escaped into the open. It was astonishing how many lunch menus or conference agendas were "IBM Confidential."