* Posts by WolfFan

1462 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2014

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: You need to use the magic words

Unfortunately, AT&T is not the worst. Comcast is worse. I used to have Adelphia, which was literally a criminal organization; the father-and-son team at the top spent time in a Federal pokey. Comcast got the Adelphia customers in my area; Roadrunner got many others. Later on, Comcast bought Roadrunner. At the time, Roadrunner was rated the #1 worst cableco in America, and Comcast was #2. They instantly got the #1 rating all to themselves and showed every intention of keeping it.

WolfFan Silver badge

You need to use the magic words

I just ‘upgraded’ my TV service from AT&T U-Verse (a.k.a. glorified DSL) to Direct TV Streaming. I had requested four units, one each for the four TVs. So… one unit had problems. It buffered endlessly. When I removed it from the TV it was on and put it on a different unit, it was dead. The little LED was dark. The TV showed a black screen with ‘no signal’. Meanwhile, the unit which had been on that TV worked just fine on the one which had been buggering. So I call AT& Useless. The support guy wanted me to go to a site, allowing him to use my phone camera to see the screen. I told him that that was not going to happen, the unit was dead. I wanted a replacement. M’man said that he could not do that. I told him to transfer me to a supervisor, or if that were not possible, in the morning, I would proceed to the local AT&Useless office and hand in the defective unit and demand that it be removed from my account… and that the agreement with AT&Useless specified that I had 14 days to ‘love’ the service or I could return it. The 14 days were not yet over. He caved and sent a replacement, which works. The dead unit is on its way back to them, using their packaging and their mailing sticker, at their expense.

If you threaten to cost them revenue, they cave. Especially if they can be certain that I really would return it, mostly because I would. Indeed, I might have just canceled Direct TV altogether and gone with Hulu or similar. Money talks.

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Something I have yet to grok...

Demonstrating that the owner has far more money than sense.

Windows 11 24H2 is coming so we can all shut up about Windows 12 for another year

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Reviewed our 30 user estate earlier this month

There are, unfortunately, some things that Excel on Windows can do that Excel on Mac can't, or can’t easily do. Ninety-odd percent of users would not have any trouble. Some would have to employ work-arounds. Some would just not need Windows.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Back in the day

The Anarchist’s Cookbook was an excellent guide to suicide. And I speak as someone who actually made nitroglycerin. Just not the way that was in the book, as that's an excellent way to blow your hands off. If you don't get dissolved in conc nitric first. One Puerto Rican nationalist did try to build bombs the Cookbook way, and did blow his hands off.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Back in the day

Back in the day, my high school chemistry text offered interesting insights in all kinds of things, as did history texts with details on black powder (flour), black powder (corned), brown powder, and guncotton, (Corned powder was made starting with flour powder, and a liquid, which when properly applied would form solid cakes which would then be ground down. Allegedly many mercenary arillerists insisted that the best liquid for the purpose was a wine drinker's urine, employer to provide the wine. No further comment.) Note that gunpowder, all forms, and guncotton, early forms, was notoriously unstable. Allegedly one French and one American battleship blew up because of problems with guncotton. (The Yankee might have had a problem with its coal which then caused the guncotton to go, but the Frog was definitely killed by guncotton.) At least three of HM Battle Cruisers blew up in large part because of their new, improved, guncotton, assisted by German naval rifles. If professional weapons guys could make battleship-killing errors, why then amateurs had best be really careful, eh?

Note that proper research could reveal how to make nitroglycerin, dynamite, two different types of plastic explosive, napalm (napalm’s easy, and relatively safe), nitrogen mustard, phosgene, and, a personal favorite, sarin. Hint: the guys who thought up sarin were looking for a new insecticide. Be advised that careless actions would have negative consequences. It is incredibly easy to blow yourself up making gunpowder, guncotton, or nitroglycerin. Not to mention that if you're playing with guncotton or nitroglycerin, you're playing with nitric acid. Go ahead. Fuck around with that stuff. In my distant youth I did. How I managed to not blow myself up or get severe acid burns is unclear to me at the present. I wouldn't be messing with it now. (You would also be playing with sulphuric acid, even better than nitric.) If you need a warning before playing with war gases, you're beyond hope. Note that one Japanese suicide cult made sarin twice, so it's easily made even by idiots; the first time they turned it loose no one noticed, so the second time they did it in a subway train. People noticed.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Amazed that FF isn't used more

The school where I do adjunct instructing is extremely locked down. FF on the desktops on one campus are all v105; the current version is 122. IT will get around to updating the image with a new version of FF sooner or later, just don't hold your breath. No, I can't do the update myself, I don't have admin privileges. I'm sure that a lot of corporate and educational sites are locked down. Mozilla simply won't see tens of thousands of FF users, they're on locked down machines.

WolfFan Silver badge

I Must Be Doing It Wrong. Highlighting and right-clicking in Hogwasher and assorted text editors, plus Mail, etc., sends me to FF. If it didn't, I would be most irate, perhaps enough to delete Safari.

Hmm. It's been a while since I last got pissed enough at Safari to delete it. I have to see if that can still be done.

WolfFan Silver badge

Hmm. That does not happen on my home systems. Firefox is the default. I click on links, in Mail, Outlook, and others, and the link opens in FF.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Amiga pedantry. Sorry.

I think that you mean 80 MB, not 80 GB. Gigabyte drives didn't exist yet. Not for desktop machines, anyway. Your friendly neighborhood Big Iron might have a gig or two or three worth of storage, but not a desktop, and most definitely not 80 GB. And it would cost several orders of magnitude more than $800.

Around that time my Mac Plus at home had a 60 MB external SCSI drive. It cost $600. I thought that I would never run out of storage. Earlier this month I got an email attachment bigger than that. Ah, the Daze of Youth!

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Case in point: Star Trek & Paramount Plus

Paramount cost itself money, in my case.

I wanted the ability to watch certain episodes of TOS, NG, DS9, and even Ent (the Mirror Universe Ent episodes are among the very few Ent episodes worth watching). Yes, I want to see The Doomsday Machine and Elan of Troyius; no, The Omega Glory and Turnabout Intruder can bugger off. Paramount wanted me to pay to stream the lot. I was willing to have a look at Lower Decks; Disco, and Pick A Card can also bugger off. I might have gone for Strange New Worlds… but Paramount hiked the subscription price, and I departed. I have the whole of TOS, NG, and DS9 ripped to MKV. I have select episodes of Ent as MKV, too. The H&I channel on my local cable runs a block of All Star Trek every night except Saturday, with every episode of TOS, NG, DS9, Ent, and Vger, in order. It was trivial to make a copy, delete the ads, and drop them onto the NAS. I could even get Vger, if I wanted, which I don't.

I have Babylon 5 and UFO and several other SF series (Captain Scarlet! Thunderbirds!) on DVD; the rights owners were not insane and the full set was priced reasonably. DRM was defeated, the original discs stored, and MKVs parked on the NAS. Paramount wants insane money ($130 for TOS, last I checked, and $80-90 for Vger) for DVDs. I could probably shop around and find them cheaper, but I’m not going to bother. Fuck them. Not a penny. If they had been reasonable, I would have bought DVDs or would still stream. They weren't. I departed at warp factor 9.5.

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

WolfFan Silver badge

Heh. I have spent a lot of time in the Caribbean. The stuff that gets to England has been cleaned up and pre-processed. That means that most of the rats, roaches, lizards, ants, etc. have been removed and some stuff converted into molasses, rum, and other sugar products… Note that Bukra Massa, in his ineffable idiocy, was deathly afraid of snakes, and imported mongooses from India. Problem one: on several islands, including Jamaica, there are no native venomous snakes. (Some vipers did make it to Jamaica, aboard inter-island shipping) There were lots of boas. On those which do have native venomous snakes, they’re mostly fer-de-lance and other pit vipers. Pit vipers are optimized to hunt small mammals. Like mongooses. Mongooses are highly resistant to cobra venom, but not at all to viper venom. Mongooses also hunt lizards and small mammals, such as rats. Lizards hunt roaches. Vipers hunt rats and, thanks to the generosity of Bukra Massa, mongooses. So there were mongoose and snake bits in the sugar as well. Sugar factories are very interesting (and smelly) places, best viewed from a distance. I found that five miles was close enough. There’s nothing like being downwind from a few thousand tons of molasses.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: "a site that was used to train drug detection dogs"

They were well-trained dogs. They only did that kind of thing on criminals… err, that is, senior superintendents and above.

OpenAI makes it official: Sam Altman is back as CEO

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: They’re all white men”

Feh. I note the distinct shortage of not-as-old-as-you-might-think Irishmen, born in British East Africa, married to Sikhs, and currently residing in Florida. I think that every Big Tech board should have at least one. Why, yes, I do have one in mind. Going cheap, too.

Irish Africans unite! Rebel against this blatant discrimination!

On a related note: when the next census arrives, I plan to fill in the African-American box. Just to screw with TPTB.

Tesla, Musk likely aware of Autopilot deficiencies behind Florida fatality, says judge

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Victim Responsibility?

Not merely a video, but allegedly a Disney animated movie.

Of course, other sources insist that it was, ahem, somewhat harder core. One persistent fellow says that it was Italian, starring a Hungarian who later became a Euro MP. And her horse. I couldn't possibly comment.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

WolfFan Silver badge

Kill it with fire

Cursing Dell is always a good idea. Not buying Dell is even better. Nuking Dell from orbit is overkill; there might be something useful (i.e., something not Dell) within the blast radius. A B-52 load of napalm should be sufficient.

Who, me, had one encounter too many with Dell crap? Whatever makes you think that?

Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: For best results, use a password generator that can give you a long, random string"

One of the places I must log in to REQUIRES:

1. 10 or more digits

2. At least one capital letter

3. At least one lowercase letter

4. At least one symbol

5. The password must be changed every 90 days

6. Old passwords can not be reused for 12 password change cycles, a.k.a. three years.

I set up a password using five characters, one a capital, then a symbol, then two numbers, then four characters, one a capital. There are three secondary passwords on the system (Single Sign On, they've heard of it ). I use the exact same password for each… except that the system gets paranoid. So I changed the symbol in the secondary log-ins. Now it's happy. Every 90 days, change one of the numbers. I'm fairly sure that this behavior is not what the administration wanted, but I don't care. I have passwords that I can remember. I don't have anything written down. I'm not using a good password, which would have to be changed every 90 days.

My passwords on systems that don’t have to be changed on a regular basis are 12 to 18 characters, typically with a capital or two or three, sometimes with a number, symbols are a pain when using many virtual keyboards, and are not reused.

The letter parts of the password would usually be derived from a non-Indo-European language. Good luck guessing which one. Good luck guessing where I deliberately misspelled something.

Boeing acknowledges cyberattack on parts and distribution biz

WolfFan Silver badge

Oh, those Russians

I came here to make a similar comment.

Exits, to Rasputin, by Boney M.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

WolfFan Silver badge

Not hamsters

They're gerbils. And they will do anything as long as they are kept far away from Richard Gere. (And Sylvester Stallone.)

Exit, stage right, in a Kia Soul.

India demands social networks 'swiftly' remove all CSAM

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Candidly

Money talks.

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Mem'ries...

I do. Vista, particularly with the service packs, was faster than XP on my hardware, a Toshiba laptop. I couldn't see what all the shouting was about.

Win 7 was better.

Win 8 was an abomination.

Lost your luggage? That's nothing – we just lost your whole flight!

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Aircraft Landing In Tokyo, All Luggage In Amsterdam

But Will It Arrive, Better Wait In Airport, and my personal favorite, Britain’s Worst Investment Abroad, was a different, though related, airline. It could have been worse. It could have been Better On A Camel.

55-inch Jamboard and app ecosystem tossed into the Google graveyard

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Another Solution In Search Of A Problem

The cheaper ones, yes. It's very useful to have something that converts my terrible handwriting into readable text. It's useful to be able to display diagrams, pictures, maps, etc., and to be able to move them around as necessary. I once had a history class taught using a smart board; animated displays of battles such as Saratoga, the Virginia Capes, Gettysburg, Hampton Roads, and Midway made it much easier for the students.

Medical-type stuff is also greatly helped by a smart board. And, of course, many IT concepts. Using a $10k board would be overkill, but a $1k board, not so much. There are a lot of $1k and under boards out there.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Another Solution In Search Of A Problem

Smartboards are very nice. I have used a few. The problem is the price. Yes, there are smartboards which cost more than $5k. However, there are also smartboards which cost under $500. They aren't as fancy as Google's things, but they work. And they have been around for over a decade.

A good smartboard makes quite a difference from a traditional whiteboard or, worse, a blackboard. (I haven't seen a black, or even a green board in decades. Lots of whiteboards, though.)

I suspect that their things didn't sell because they cost too much and didn't offer good enough functionality.

It looks like you’re a developer. Would you like help upgrading Windows 11?

WolfFan Silver badge

I once had servers running A/UX. It was beautiful. When management retired them, and replaced them with, ick, Win NT systems, I got one of them and it was my home server for years afterward.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

WolfFan Silver badge

Bah

I'd have gone for Donna Summer, before she got religion. Love to Love You. Or maybe Queen. Another One Bites the Dust.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: currently using a 2019 vintage 6.4-inch midrange Android

That would be a dinosaur.

Apple extends Qualcomm contract to 2026 as homebrew 5G chip dream still on snooze

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Translation

Probably the cheaper units, such as the SE types. I have an SE 2nd generation. I may replace it with whatever Apple has for a ‘cheap’ phone in a year or two.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Ah, the Regomiser strikes again

A balky lad from the Balkans…

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Check the power supply

Ah. The Star Trek Effect. It's such a pity that someone invented the fuse and the circuit breaker…

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

WolfFan Silver badge

Apple has a standard in macOS and a different one in iOS. Both are consistent on their respective platforms, both do scanning and printing and, on macOS, faxing. I've never tried to fax from iOS, no idea if it works. The print system is directly descended from that of early Macs. Some time along the way Macs could print directly to PDF, PostScript, and assorted image formats. Most of that isn't available on iOS, but some other features are. Note that some applications (Firefox, MS Office) would rather that you use their print systems, but will use the standards if you hit them hard enough. (Yes, you can print to PDF from inside a PDF editor, even one from Adobe.) On iOS you can use the standard, and, in some cases (Epson, Brother) there's a vendor-supplied item that is usually inferior to the standard. HP might also provide its own item, but I haven't printed to an HP device from iOS in over a decade, mostly because of HP’s shenanigans.

I have never printed anything from Android. I only had an Android device for a few months before scrapping it and going to iOS.

Windows is a glorious mess, and always has been, and probably always will be.

Ubuntu is… Ubuntu. Great when everything works. Somewhat less than great when there are problems.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

No, it is not a ‘pledge’. It's not even an actual signed document.

M’man really needs to try harder.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

That's not going to happen.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

As a direct result of Putin’s Puttering, Sweden and Finland are part of NATO. NATO is already on Russia’s border, and it's all his fault. Conquering Ukraine would have put Poland on the border… and Poland has been a member of NATO for a while now.

And, if Russia kept its little behind quiet and didn't invade other countries (hmm… Georgia…) it wouldn’t matter where NATO was. NATO is a defensive alliance, it’s there to stand against Soviet/Russian bullshit.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

So… When was this alleged pledge made? Date, please.

And… Where was this alleged pledge made? The location it was signed.

And… Who signed it? The names, and the positions in NATO/member countries and Russia.

And, finally, how about a link to said pledge? If it was, in fact, agreed to by someone in NATO, there should be at least two copies (Russian and English ) possibly three (French), and maybe others. This should be a public document, available from official NATO/Russian sources.

Do try to supply the requested information. There's a good lad/lass/whatever.

Northern Irish cops release 2 men after Terrorism Act arrests linked to data breach

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: PSNI overly optimistic

Well, of course. They’re _French_.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Terrorism?

That’s lizard people. Please try to keep up.

Remember, Queen Liz didn’t really die, she just got tired of dealing with humans and went home to Rigel. (Anyone who thinks that there really are people who think this kind of thing hasn’t been paying attention.) Pope Francis is also a lizard person. The Orange Don is a toad person, from Betelgeuse. The lizard people are a lot smarter than the toad people.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

WolfFan Silver badge

Hmm.

Amazing. No mention of Boeing products, volcanoes, or weird aliens. Someone was showing most un-Rrg-like restraint.

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Stories from Grandad

And that kind of thing is why I never wore a tie in the machine room. Still don’t. Actually, I rarely wear ties at all.

Hands up who wants a PC? Lenovo reports declining returns

WolfFan Silver badge

I have a Lenovo laptop. Soldered on, not upgradable, RAM, check. Soldered on, not upgradable, SSD, check. Soldered on, not upgradable, battery, check. It’s a single unit, obviously intended to be disposable rather than repairable, even if it did cost close to $1000. I found out after purchase; my fault, I should have looked closer before buying. The good news: it’s not a Dell or an HP. When it starts giving trouble, it will be discarded, as repairs would be… difficult. The replacement will probably not be a Lenovo, not unless the RAM, drive, and battery can be replaced/updated. Lenovo got my money… once.

Vietnam admits it has just ten percent of the infosec pros it needs

WolfFan Silver badge

Hmm

I might be available, depending on what rates they pay, whether I have to learn Vietnamese, and if I can work remotely. Working with guys who managed to beat _three_ world powers over a period of about 30 years (France, the US, and China) would be interesting. Actually having to live in Hanoi, less so. I’ve seen 3rd world tropical countries (Kenya, Jamaica, Florida) and don’t need another one.

Cyber-extortionists pillage Colorado education dept

WolfFan Silver badge

Fun times here

I’m in Deepest South Florida. Locally, a city (Riviera Beach) and a major company (Publix Supermarkets) have been hit recently. Attempts were made on the Catholic archdiocese, the county school district, and the state college. (The archdiocese had imported a graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology, who also happened to be from Goa… and was an ordained priest. The attack didn’t get far. The school district borrowed him, just in time to detect an ongoing attack and to kill it. The state college is massively paranoid; over the summer they have shut everything down twice over different weekends, to ‘improve security’, and now that school is out until the last week of August, everything is going to be again locked down starting this Friday for a week to ten days, it has to be back up again come the 21st.)

I’m sure that there’s more, these are just the incidents that I know of for certain.

China's great CPU hope – Loongson – may be only four years behind Intel

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: I shall watch with interest

Are you seriously saying that you prefer to trust the _People’s Republic of China_ to supply, and support, your computing needs? Really? The US is ‘aggressively dictatorial’ in comparison with the monsters responsible for Tiananmen Square? Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre

Note that looking this up in the PRC would result in your getting a visit from the People's Armed Police. Pooh Bear Xi https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2023/04/20/why-winnie-the-pooh-makes-xi-jinping-uncomfortable really doesn't like it when people look up that kind of thing. But it's the US which is 'aggressively dictatorial'.

Do carry on.

One weekend's TwitX chaos brings threats from Japan; indemnity promises for users; prominent account seizures

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: "I imagine it'll either be nursery school hair pulling"

Ratings gold.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

Fusion rockets could make a substantial fraction of c… but the mass ratio required would be brutal. Photon rockets would, of course, be beautiful… except for the slight thrust problem.

It’s a real pity that Bussard ramjets won’t work.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: warning

Crom doesn’t care.

But then Crom never cares.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: above

Nah. J’onn J’onzz.

Please keep open flames far away, thanks.

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: Alien UFOs

Flesh Gordon lives! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_Gordon

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

WolfFan Silver badge

Re: In jail with DJT

It’s not just the Feds. Some local jurisdictions like orange, too. One jurisdiction in Arizona famously switched from orange to pink because pink was a girlie color and the sheriff wanted to insult the inmates.

WolfFan Silver badge

Or, more likely, an IT director who sees trouble inbound and wants to not be in splatter range. “I’m sorry boss, but I can’t do that.” I seem to recall a movie with a similar line.