Posts by Little Mouse

Supermicro fired staff after probe into $2.5 billion GPUs-to-China smuggling operation

This could never happen where I work

We have a compulsory annual 30-minute "Anti Bribery & Corruption" training module. Sorted.

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

Re: Post it

My wife still works at a company where IT expect her to hand her laptop over now and then along with her password, so that they can log in as her to install updates.

I told her that was F'ing nuts and no company on the planet has done anything remotely like that since at least 2002, and anyway there's no excuse for any IT dept anywhere to ask for your password.

Their reply?

"If your husband works in IT, then he'll know about User Profiles"

Voyager 2 cheats the power budget for another year

Dumb question time

"generate enough heat to keep the spacecraft warm"

What temperature actually qualifies as "warm" in this scenario?

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: Orwell's dystopia is already here.

Some people might not appreciate that input sanitation matters and Buffer Overflow attacks are a real thing.

That poses an interesting challenge for facial recognition hacks..

A specially-shaped second nose?

Eyes all bunched up like a cartoon spider?

Regular features, but outside what would be considered "normal" size?

Something's got to break it, Shirley?

That explains their creepy TV advert then

You know the one, The one where all the staff mysteriously know your first name and keep a suspiciously friendly close eye on you from the moment you arrive at the store.

Welcome to Waynesbury's. It's a fucking Utopia don't you know.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

"this is just how MS Word works"

I cut my teeth on MS Word 2.0

Correctly spelled words getting flagged as incorrect was a particular issue for those of us living in the UK, IIRC.

It didn't speak "proper" English.

Zuck defends monitoring employees to win AI race in purported leaked audio

Re: How smart people use computers

It can't just be me that loses the inability to type even simple words without resorting to the backspace key when I know I'm being watched.

Monitoring my keystrokes would be hilarious - Any resulting AI would be utter shit*

* (Yes, yes. I am aware that most "AI" is mostly shit already...)

Security contractor blew the whistle on support crew's viral indifference

Every large office has one, usually carrying coffee and/or paperwork as they move from person to person, looking for anyone who might listen to them. I'm pretty sure there's an obligatory "Dilbert" that covers it

Re: Lazy by design.

Similar situation at a County Council - The desktop team would each just grab whatever tickets they fancied for the day. It kind of worked OK, but there would inevitably be "those" tickets that no-one fancied and would end up just gathering dust.

Eventually my boss picked the two most experienced in the team - myself and another grizzled seen-everything cynic - and tasked us solely with working backwards through the queue, oldest tickets first.

It worked surprisingly well. There was no shortage of interesting head-scratching problems to solve, and the young guns could still rush around clearing paper jams and kidding themselves that they were "IT Gurus".

Bees and hummingbirds aren't just buzzing – they're sipping trace booze

Re: Bees

Here in the UK I've mostly mastered the freezing-temperature-avoidance issue by hauling the heavy bastards in and outside as required.

But does anyone have any advice on dealing with soft-scale? I spend way too much time hunting for and squidging dead the little fuckers but can never eradicate them completely.

btw This is why I love the Reg comments. Somehow we've strayed down Gardeners' World boulevard.

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

I chose not to take either daughter into the machine room at work when they were growing up, even though I really would have loved to have shown them around.

Sadly, one would have been utterly compelled to press the forbidden buttons (and still would, as an adult) and the other would have been compelled to rub it in her sister's face if she'd been the only one allowed in.

Kids.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Desktop support in the late nineties meant sitting on all sorts of fad health devices whilst working at users' desks: Gym balls, kneeling chairs, etc.

Staying perched on top of those things was a nightmare and caused a few aches & pains.

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Re: Yes and no.

Some evil people are stupid - the maths is starting to get complicated.

Especially for stupid people.

Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026

Re: show each person content that helps them improve their lives in the ways that they want

All delivered via the MetaVerse through your personal VR headset.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

That moon regolith is nasty, sharp stuff

I don't think I'd be trusting anything inflatable on the moon to stay un-popped for very long.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

A secret cloaking device made out of gold?

This is just a teaser for the next Bond movie, right?

iPad kids are more anxious, less resilient, and slower decision makers

Re: Dopamine-driven digital crack :o

It's not just the need for "likes". It's the relentless self-censoring that takes place because they live in a world where they cannot afford to make any social faux-pas for fear of becoming the next Star Wars Kid or Greg Wallace. Thanks to social media and other people they have to be on their guard 24-7.

It's literally been etched into their growing teenage brains. They've not known any other way of thinking.

Re: 'read to your kids'

Re: "Even better::"

Everything you said, for sure, but: Reading really does matter. Do make sure the kids do that too. It doesn't have to be a binary choice.

Christ, I sound like my Dad.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

As a CS student in 1992 we learned all about the impending Y2K issue. A year in industry was also a part of the course.

I did my stint at ICI, and inherited a bunch of home-brew software modules from the guy before me. The year field had still only been allocated two digits, but the Y2K problem had been simply offset with some basic arithmetic hand-wavey programming.

IIRC, it should all collapse in a heap in 2075...

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: What's new?

Shark Wheel.

Sorry to nit-pick, but the inventors appear to be based in the southern half of California.

Re: Looks like the lovechild of...

Totally this - Because they can't actually simply be hoping to get rich by "inventing" the e-moped.

a: it's been done already

b: not that many people want them* (anecdotally from where I'm sitting anyway)

(My eldest daughter has an e-moped. It's an awesome bit of kit, and totally "green". But when she tried to sell it on after a couple of years' use she didn't get a single sniff of interest)

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Re: Methinks

"How on Earth can anyone, other than those afflicted by terminal daftness, expect a public broadcaster to explain AI etc to an effectively illiterate polloi that are barely able to use their smartphones?"

The same way they always do it:

- by getting a couple of the key characters in Eastenders to discuss it "really naturally" </sarcasm> over a cup of coffee.

The CRASH Clock is ticking as satellite congestion in low Earth orbit worsens

Crash!

" an estimate of how long it would take before a catastrophic collision occurs"

What counts as "Catastrophic"?

Presumably, two Starlink units taking each other out would qualify, and the world will keep turning. But then again, I guess it's the resulting mess that counts, not the actual loss of the individual hardware/service.

Irish Excel whiz sheets all over the competition in Vegas showdown

Re: Lotus 123?

20/20?

I don't even remember what it ran on (Presumably either DOS or VAX VMS, as that's mostly what my company used back in 1994)

I just remember my boss getting a severe bollocking when the bean counters realised he'd shelled out big bucks for a 10 year support contract for it.

(Edit: A quick Google shows it was VAX)

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Landlords!

Ditto. And in our case, her 'apartment' (a recently converted garage) also didn't have a phone line (so no ADSL either) or even a TV aerial.

Praise #deity for cheap unlimited phone tariffs, so at least she could get connected that way.

DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move

Wood burners are like mini black holes. You drop a bit of mass in them and get bathed in toasty radiation.

(And WTF is the story with those fans that people think are blowing the hot air around? They can't work, can they? Sure, it'd be nice to have the warm air forcibly propelled into the room somehow, but the blades are only spinning because the hot air is pushing on them, not the other way around, Shirley?

Can anyone correct me on that?)

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: Hmm

In a similar vein although a bit off-tangent to the article.

Not too many years ago, if anyone in my dept attended a technical training course, the non-technical boss would expect that person to email a summary of it to the rest of the team afterwards. That email had to contain only the three most important things you learned, bullet-pointed.

Because that way everyone would benefit from the new technical knowledge.

Sarcasm was absolutely not allowed.

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

Totally agree. the little things matter, especially if it's one of the first things every customer sees and looks at quite closely.

So maybe the chef can cook, but who's got their finger on the day-to-day running of the place? That shabby menu might be indicative of other corner-cutting behind the scenes - Who can tell?

You were 100% right to prioritise fixing that.

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

"Insider Canary channel"

Canaries?

As a supporter, I clicked on this link expecting to read an article about a rudderless company who publicly humiliate themselves week after week with appallingly bad displays of incompetence, cheered on by a clueless board that will blindly drag them all down the toilet if changes aren't made pretty damn soon.

Instead I got this.

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Re: Danger!

Unexploded Team?

BT promises 5G Standalone for 99% of the UK by 2030

VMO2? No Thank You.

"At the same time, another Brit telco, Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), is also rolling out massive MIMO support"

Since O2 merged with VM, their support function has disappeared down the toilet. A shame, because it was genuinely quite good 10 years ago...

So they can rollout whatever they like now - They'll never drag me back.

grumble mutter grumble...

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

EUS is available for free for a year for non business users

"With just days remaining until Microsoft discontinues free support"

The Reg appears to have chosen to ignore the fact, but Win 10 EUS updates are available to all* non-business users for another year. The only** caveat is you need to have a MS account to qualify.

* May not apply in some Regions - dunno - but Europe/UK are well served by this.

** But you may need to jump through some technical hoops if you run Win10 Home, as activating EUS requires an account with local admin rights, which could be a faff for non-techies running Win10 Home edition (No "Local Users & Groups" snap-in!)

Glazed and confused: Hole lotta highly sensitive data nicked from Krispy Kreme

"The company has never mentioned the R-word anywhere"

The R-word is forgivable. The N-word is not.

Negotiation.

ESA's XMM-Newton finds huge filament of missing matter

Sounds like the synapses between neurons that you see lighting up in CGI brain models.

Ooh. Wait.

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

Re: Nice place

Agreed. It's probably a bit too chilly.

US teen to plead guilty to extortion attack against PowerSchool

What happed to the stolen data?

It sounds like he didn't go out of his way to leak it, which is something. But is it all accounted for, or still "out there"?

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

The one I'm wearing right now crackles and pops like it's about explode when I take it off at the end of the day. And there's quite the light show if I take it off in the dark. (Strangely I get no static discharge issues whilst actually wearing it though.)

Toronto Zoo ransomware crooks snatch decades of visitor data

"data going back to 2000"

Wuh? Seriously?

With 1.2M visitors a year, this doesn't read like some "Tiger King" back-street Zoo. Yet they thought it was OK to hold onto personal data for for 25 years?

The "no need to complain" and "as we worked through this challenge together" made a nice change from the usual boilerplate response though. Nothing to see here!

Ex-NSA grandee says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

Re: Best Interests of the US

Hah - The job market for all those ex-Security/Intelligence agency staff (some of whom will likely have an axe to grind) must be a bit of a minefield. Are those vacancies real? Who could you trust?

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

Re: Stay alive!

The one thing blocking us from going full Linux at Mouse Towers is Mrs Mouse's dependency on Excel. She's a proper "power user" - someone who actually regularly uses those features that the rest of us are barely even aware of. She 100% needs it for work, but maybe less so for the home accounts etc.

So we're spending the next few weeks trialling Libre Office to see if it's good "enough" and compatible "enough". For 99% of people I'm sure it would be...

Fingers crossed we can finally cut the MS cord before the enforced Win11 shitshow begins.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

I know we're not supposed to mention him anymore, but Scott Adams' "Build a Better Life Stealing Office Supplies" came out around the same time I got my first office job and it's always made me chuckle.

How was it possible that he could know this new group of strangers that I'd only just been introduced to so well?

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

"uproot families"

Relocating is for young people with no ties.

Anyone with a family or established ties to their community is going to be far less likely to give up what they do have for a company with a famously bad culture of poor job security.

Its just IBM's ageist layoff policy - but more subtle this time.

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

No. Must have features

FTFY

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

And it's not just Apple (obviously)

My Pixel 7 smuggled a "Smart Keyboard" feature in under the radar a little while back.

The first I knew of it was when WhatsApp kept suggesting responses for me each time I got a message from someone. But I couldn't even read the message that they'd sent me because it was covered up by the inane reply that my idiot phone thought would be the perfect response, which I had to close before I could even read what had been sent to me. Every fucking time. Seriously annoying.

It took a few weeks before I realised that it was actually my phone's OS sneakily inserting the responses into the App on my behalf - and not what I had assumed was a seriously poor UI choice by WhatsApp themselves.

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

"I'd probably turn off the external lights"

I dunno - Stealth can backfire if not thought through properly.

Back in the days when getting home at 3:00am would incur the wrath of parents, a friend of mine had the bright idea of killing the car engine whilst still on the approach to the house, intending to just coast into the driveway, minus engine noise and lights.

Unfortunately he was also minus power steering, made an unholy mess of the lawn and hedge, and woke everyone up in the process.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

"capable of "neutralizing" targets at distances greater than 1 km"

And what happens to targets that are closer than 1km?

Heh.

Ransomware hangover, Putin grudge blamed for vodka maker's bankruptcy

"softened demand for hard alcohol products following the COVID-19 pandemic"

People are drinking less spirits these days? I'd assumed the opposite was true. (But then I am working from a very limited data sample..)

China starts building world's largest fully steerable radio telescope

"I expect..."

Maybe Hammond, May & Clarkson could take it on a road-trip, and "accidentally" reverse it into the Great Wall, or some-such tomfoolery.