* Posts by jfw25

18 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2015

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

jfw25

> On the other end, if the lamps were impersonated by 2 men wearing a suite nobody would have said a word.

To quote the excellent documentary "Spinal Tap", on a surprisingly related subject:

There's a fine line between clever and stupid...

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

jfw25

Re: Good news for those admins

Did he offer any recommendations about whether it is better to protect customers by pushing them downstairs, or shoving?

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

jfw25

Re: Strange words

I can definitely reassure HP that they need not worry in the slightest about wasting any of their investment capital on me. I will not, at any time, ever be buying an HP printer.

And that's despite the fact that I usually do buy the manufacturer's ink for printers, because I just don't trust what random crap has been put into a cartridge by a "manufacturer" whose company name is a randomly assigned string of 5 letters...

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

jfw25

Re: Automatic "upgrades"?

Many printers accept print requests from a local area network -- in fact, a printer that doesn't would be useless in many environments.

Given the unnecessary complexity of network protocols and print request protocols, that's a continual minefield of bugs to get incrementally fixed.

So yeah, a printer likely needs to upgrade its software. Deliberate sabotage by the manufacturer, on the other hand, should be entirely optional.

FTC accuses DNA testing company of lying about dumping samples

jfw25

Interpreting the official response:

"a small number of customer files" == "Have you seen TREE(3)? Now *that*'s a large number!"

"There is no evidence these customer files were improperly accessed." == "They were publicly accessible! Any access was, by definition, proper!"

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

jfw25

Re: Not this again

Generally you at least want to be able to re-use the pilot.

Pegasus-pusher NSO gets new owner keen on the commercial spyware biz

jfw25

"The lenders are currently in a process of restructuring the shareholders."

Is that what the intelligence services are calling it these days?

Goddard Space Flight Center's new boss swears in on holy Pale Blue Dot

jfw25

The most obvious choice from my collection would have to be the Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Or, as we referred to it back when I was a physics student, The Rubber Bible.

(Ah, shows how old I am -- they now just call themselves CRC...)

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

jfw25

Re: air CON

"higher than 90 F because the staff fro the telemarketing company would raise the temperature to ridicules levels"

Well, if they were telemarketers, they were probably more used to boiling sulfur...

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

jfw25

Re: Hiring engineers to shovel snow

"Drafting software that their mechanical engineers wrote"

There are two sides to that coin.

Having been intimately involved with software written by hardware engineers, and constantly astonished at how the resulting code even manages to pretend to work at all, the idea of mechanical engineers (with no training in the craft of writing software) writing 3D drafting software fills me with dread.

But having been intimately involved with every other kind of software, in particularly elegantly structured software using sensible, modern principles of software structure and design -- yet which was so completely unusable for the actual task at hand because the software engineers in question clearly had no concept whatsoever of what problem was actually to be solved -- the idea of software engineers writing software also fills me with dread. (Including the software that I am currently writing :-) )

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

jfw25

The superior version

"Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's site will remain available and arguably be superior to the App Store offering, because that version will include Java."

Arguably the App Store offering will be superior to the free download, because that version will _not_ include Java...

Roscomos: We know all about how the hole in the Soyuz went down, but we're not telling you

jfw25

Re: Success rate

But what about all of the fuel which got the orbiter there? By weight, the mission is probably way over 99% successful...

Larry Ellison tiers Amazon a new one: Oracle cloud gets 'always' free offer, plus something about Linux

jfw25

"And when you eliminate labor, you eliminate human error."

Just open the pod bay doors, HAL.

Northrop Grumman has nozzle nightmare, Soyuz brushes off lightning, and updates on Crew Dragon 'anomaly' probe

jfw25
Trollface

I don't see the problem with the Northrop test.

It's an exit cone. It exited. What else did they expect?

I see you're writing a résumé?!.. LinkedIn parked in MS Word

jfw25

"This is where Microsoft says its AI projects come into play."

"I'm sorry, Dave; I can't let you apply for that job."

Uni student cuffed for 'hacking professor's PC to change his grades'

jfw25

"a business major with a concentration in finance"

Oh, this is exactly the kind of fine, upstanding young man we need more of in finance.

Ofcom wants you to thank it for resurrecting the spectre of BT's 1980s monopoly

jfw25

"sole broadband wholesaler"

I managed to misread that as "sole broadband molester", and I'm trying to figure out if that means that I need more coffee this morning or if I have had exactly enough...

Love-rat fanboi left bobbing for Apples in tiny Japanese bath

jfw25

Re: his beloved collection of overpriced blahware

> I'd like to see you try running Windows on a PowerBook,

I had no trouble at all running Windows on my Bondi Blue iMac, back in the days when Apple laptops were branded as "Powerbook"... (Courtesy of VirtualPC, of course. I was even able to use it to test a kernel-mode network driver I was working on...)