* Posts by cream wobbly

221 publicly visible posts • joined 26 May 2015

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IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

cream wobbly

Re: Where were you 20 years ago?

Newly minted with a BSc, planning our slightly late upgrades from 6.4 to 6.5.

cream wobbly

Re: On-call???

Well if you're somewhere north of competent, you have to grow some strong nerves and thick skin, or how do you get the "quick question" people off your back to be able to do your own job instead of the one you were promoted from?

cream wobbly

Re: Overtime

I fill in a weekly time card, which is all about accurate charging. It doesn't allow me to put in more than 40 hours per week. It also complains profusely if I put in less.

A colleague at my first IT job opined that timesheets are a work of fiction.

A stranger's TV went on spending spree with my Amazon account – and web giant did nothing about it for months

cream wobbly

Re: Tie in all your services

The rest of the rhyme is particularly applicable, as a sort of mythological bait-and-switch.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, [Books! get yer luvverly books!]

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, [We do CDs and stuff now]

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, [You want handbags? Socks? Johnnies? Bikes?]

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne [I've got mine]

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. [speaking of lie...]

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all [the mall, haha] and in the darkness bind them [mushrooms...]

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. [I heard you the first time]

Remember that competition for non-hoodie hacker pics? Here's their best entries

cream wobbly

Re: Creating a politically correct stereotype proved daunting - too daunting, in fact.

"I think they will want to redesign Santa Claus next..."

You mean he shouldn't be that one-eyed God riding an eight legged horse getting all up in your dreams?

Or did you mean one of the later iterations of Lord Winter?

cream wobbly

Re: Creating a politically correct stereotype proved daunting - too daunting, in fact.

"Trying to make them "politically correct" it's obviously a task doomed to fail."

Since political correctness just means respectful behavior, what are you saying? Oh, you're saying:

"Trying to make them "respectful" it's obviously a task doomed to fail."

Can we not do this, please? Making something respectful really isn't hard.

cream wobbly

Re: "you all love to hate"

I like the concept of doing down the pub... At least my time there will be more productive than this sorry lot we were asked to look at today.

But here's the thing: The Matrix was one of the first pieces of popular culture that portrayed modern hacking with any remote semblance of accuracy. (Sure, sure, wardialling, and all that, but that was just phreaking.) It was still pretty poor but at least it wasn't a completely made-up interface. More recent examples have either been factual (Zero Day) therefore dull as beans, or trying too hard to make the act of hacking itself almost a character in itself (some BBC thing I can't remember the name of after reading about it just a few moments ago); therefore ... oh dear - also dull as beans.

So quite honestly, I don't mind if they continue using those green phosphor backwards kanji waterfalls. At least it's from an exciting movie that references something that references something something something.

But give me a break on the hoodies. I hate wearing hoodies.

cream wobbly

Re: Not a very strong lineup

Nah, the "my other computer" one is making a clever point, but it's still that kid off War Games. Can we not do the War Games / "script kiddie" reference?

The last one I have to guess was added for shaming purposes only. Disembodied feet and (what is that supposed to be? a what? okay, so disembodied black people's feet and ...) landmines! It took a genius, I guess.

cream wobbly

Re: re: As he found out they are a pain in the fucking arse.

Aren't you the party pooper?

UK Supreme Court unprorogues Parliament

cream wobbly

Re: Damning...

He would need to ask his mob owners first if he wanted to resign, and I bet he wouldn't want to go to see them anticipating a nice bit of Po tea.

cream wobbly

Re: Damning...

Yeah but can we outlaw him? (Which means remove from the protections of the law, so you could, if you were so inclined, remove certain bits without legal repercussion.)

Crunch time: It's all fun and video games until you're being pressured into working for free

cream wobbly

Re: "productivity, employee morale and retention"

There's also the fact that many of the the game dev founders, like Houser himself, started out in the bedroom dev days where they worked every waking hour with their face glued to a 14" TV, (stock still so they didn't get RAM-pack wobble).

What they don't see is that for most of their team these days, it's a job, not a lifestyle, but their only friends are also in the same lifestyle, so they don't see a problem with it. "If you don't want to live the lifestyle", they think, "you picked the wrong career".

Junior doctors work shorter hours, get paid more, and they're saving lives...

*ETA - sorry, Houser wasn't a game dev until 1999. A mere spratling.

cream wobbly

Re: "productivity, employee morale and retention"

It shows, too. I haven't bought a game in decades (plural! count 'em!), specifically because game mechanics are formulaic and offer nothing new.

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

cream wobbly

And to the point of the chap who started this thread with "my excuse", the difference is that a qualified GP will interpret the results differently from a casual googler. It's really not an excuse, it's an explanation. I'm not going to stop it because it works well.

* I peanut butter it for management with "consulting Stack Exchange", because that's where most of the useful results come from.

Fed-up graphic design outfit dangles cash to anyone who can free infosec of hoodie pics

cream wobbly
Meh

Re: A more realistic image...

See, you said "still addicted". Just as there are newer games to be addicted to, there are newer nephews to addict.

cream wobbly

Re: A more realistic image...

......fellow kids!

cream wobbly

Re: Wish I would wear a hoodie at work

1995? Is that back when he wasn't a steaming racist eugenicist? (Or at least before it was generally known...?)

Blackburn ain't big enough for the both of us: Mr Creamy and Mr Whippy at the centre of new ice-cream war

cream wobbly

Re: 30 mph?

Thing is, they don't use English measures en angleterre, they use Imperial. Americans use English units. This is why Americans have pint sized gallons, although interestingly a floz is near enough that baking recipes don't care. Both use the French billion - although they were exported at different points in history so they're off by a millionth of a milliard.

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

cream wobbly

Disappointed

The plot was good TV. The character development? Well I wish they hadn't made them all shouty and "conflict"-y. Gave me a headache, that did.

Now I'm nostalic for series 1 and 2...

Dev darling Docker embraces Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

cream wobbly

Re: "...obvious risks for the future of the Windows side"

... which pathetically, can be enumerated as follows: native AD and CIFS support, de facto office applications, iPod telephone support.

Is it worth the risk of such a broad attack surface?

Idle Computer Science skills are the Devil's playthings

cream wobbly

Re: Hire immediately

I cannot think of a single more fitting, nor more horrifying punishment.

cream wobbly

Re: Hire immediately

Mental? I'm completely off my rocker and I didn't get it.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

cream wobbly

These days? There was iLO and its ilk, there was always mounting the ISO or even the physcial media drive. This was an abject failure of telling the boss "no I work in an IT organization".

Uh-oh .io: Question mark hangs over trendy tech startup domains as UN condemns British empire hangover

cream wobbly

Because the payment has ... accpired ... I guess?

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

cream wobbly

Re: Upping your game

"Car manufacturers will be next to realize this."

Wow. Almost as though you've never heard of wonderful creations like the Land Wind X7 which seems to be all over the automotive press, or going back to earlier sweeter times, the Bamin BM1020KH.

cream wobbly

Re: SE sized devices

"as apps and websites are increasingly designed for larger screens"

No they're not. If they *need* a larger screen, that's an admission of a *failure* of design.

cream wobbly

Re: Price? Nothing to se here.

"no discernible reason"

Hey now, be fair, they're shipping them with buttonpads that work, now!

The last Mac laptop with a decent keyboard said "PowerBook" on the front. And you could replace it far easier those days - no need to undo 74 microscopic screws and unhook 9 fragile ribbon cables with four different connector types back then.

Tesla's autonomous lane changing software is worse at driving than humans, and more

cream wobbly

Re: Autopilot is itself Incomplete

<quote>Writing non-buggy software is really hard. But this is stuff that can kill or seriously injure people ... </quote>

Quite. A couple of years back, World + Dog was debating the Trolley Problem. Now it seems they were way ahead of themselves. The more basic function of "driving without hitting other things" has to be overcome before we can even get to the old Trolley Problem.

Double trouble for Lyft after share price drop sparks class action lawsuits claiming hype

cream wobbly

Re: Has someone external run the numbers

Installing the Lyft app doesn't also uninstall the Uber app, so I'm surprised the number isn't higher than 104%, tbh. I'm guessing these investor toddlers got the wrong meaning of "share" when they were in playschool.

Hands off Brock! EFF pleads with Google not to kill its Privacy Badger with its Manifest destiny

cream wobbly

Re: What a surprise

I tend to think, since the story is being covered from the aggrieved party's perspective, there's another angle to this. Google doesn't want to tell them how to do their job, because they should know better.

"There is no practical way to build a blocking extension in the activeTab model; the burden on users to grant consent for each and every site they visit would be far too great, and all but the most privacy-conscious users would uninstall the extensions."

I was finding that half the sites I was visiting were broken by PrivacyBadger, and yes I reported a good few. Also, being financial institution sites, none of them carried external ads. So actually, I would far rather have the extension request consent on each site.

Meanwhile, due to the high number of breakages in the existing model, this privacy-conscious user has uninstalled the extension.

Ex-Mozilla CTO: US border cops demanded I unlock my phone, laptop at SF airport – and I'm an American citizen

cream wobbly

Re: Don't travel to the US.

Steel crowbar? Surely Trump carries a golf club?

Amazon may finally get its hands on .amazon after world's DNS overseer loses patience

cream wobbly
Holmes

Key point

> and the fact that .amazon domain names may exist on

> the internet and be used to sell products has no actual

> impact on the Amazon or the people that live in the

> Amazonas region

This is especially true since you can't find any hardwood furniture on Amazon.dot.com, period.com, full-stop.com.

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

cream wobbly

Re: Deal...

You're asking for OS and firmware updates for 3 years *from launch*. I bought my Moto-X about 4 1/2 years ago and it hasn't been getting updates for about 3 years. Probably more. I'm ready to replace it in the next year or so, probably 2.

I shouldn't have to put up with an insecure device for most of the time I own it.

Totally with you on the big battery thing. I mean, they gave this pos a curved back so it can't lie flat. I have to hold it. Just make it rectangular! Fill the gaps with cells!

I've never had a need for the low resolution front-facing camera either. It's totally pointless. Nobody uses cyberpunk video phones anyway.

Silent Merc, holy e-car... Mflllwhmmmp! What is that terrible sound?

cream wobbly

Baffling

What on earth is this nincompoop on about?

"There is no e-sound. It has to be invented. The sound transports the emotions of a vehicle."

The emotions (e-motions?) of an electric vehicle are the hum and whine of the electric motor as you're launched forward at a frightening rate. I used to hear it on my RC-10 and imagine myself driving, and I've heard it on a Tezzler and imagined myself being driven.

Have these twits never heard a tram? or a train? or a Tezzler?

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

cream wobbly

Re: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

Startlingly, the opposite is true: there is nothing that a conformist quietly worships more than a non-conformist, apart from another conformist who refuses to veer from the current standards of conformity.

cream wobbly

Re: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

Would be fine to ask the child her own name. But then they're all called Emily, sometimes Megan, these days, so that won't help.

The infamous AI gaydar study was repeated – and, no, code can't tell if you're straight or not just from your face

cream wobbly

Re: That was my first thought....

They culled all the training data from dating sites, i.e. each photograph was selected by the subject.

They culled all the testing data from publicity photographs, i.e. each photograph was selected by the subject.

So, this is as worthless as any other self-reporting study.

cream wobbly

Re: Voyna i Mor

If you excluded those showing signs of heterosexuality from the spectrum, you'd end up with a set of zero. That's kind of the point of a spectrum...

Good news: Congress has solutions to end net neutrality brouhaha. Bad news: Two competing sets of solutions...

cream wobbly

Re: The internet has multiple layers

Another day, another car analogy! How is a road like the internet, or a store like an information service? Information isn't bogroll. (Okay, maybe it is...)

Maybe use more relevant analogies, and the confusion will evaporate.

The US telephone network (the internet) is not "Hello, Grandma, how are your piles?!" (information service), or the US library network (the internet) is not William Gibson (information service).

Latest Google+ flaw leads Chocolate Factory to shut down site early

cream wobbly

Re: Pity...

We don't know where we are going.

Pub? Hell? Slightly mad? Take your pick.

cream wobbly

Hm. "T. E. Stockwell - Cohen" is an anagram of "clench week's lotto".

cream wobbly

Re: Here's one. It's called "the pub".

You've got a pub that anyone in the world can get into instantly?? Sweet!

It's instant if you had the foresight to be there already...

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

cream wobbly

Re: Assange is a political prisoner, in the United Kingdom, end of

Queue

It's "cue". A queue is a line of people. A cue is a prompt. When you queue things up in a process, you only cue up the one thing at the front of the queue.

But you have "independent thought" so you probably don't call it "English". Carry on.

cream wobbly

Re: Yes, but you've omitted the most important bit...

"Cue the private security black ops going to take him out... and its not going to be Trump's dong."

Hilarious typo aside, you've been watching too many crap action-spy pictures. You need to watch something with nice people in it instead.

cream wobbly

Re: move on down the road a piece

"No need to move the embassy, just put his stuff out by the curb, he'll get the message."

He has stuff?

Tech support discovers users who buy the 'sh*ttest PCs known to Man' struggle with basics

cream wobbly

Re: The right attitude

"A few beers after work never hurts either."

Unless you attempt to drive home and crash into a horse. That would hurt.

Sysadmin’s plan to manage system config changes backfires spectacularly

cream wobbly

Re: Why use a revision control system?

I work with people like you, and from bitter experience, I hate you.

Yes. (From bitter experience) I'm completely the opposite to our commending friend. I'd go so far as to say that documentation, communication, is vastly more important than the config change itself. If you can't reverse it or replicate it, it's a guess, it's a hack, it's broken and there's the door.

cream wobbly

Re: Automation does have its place

A problem with automation scripts written by sysadmins is that they generally do not have a development background...

A problem with automation scripts written by developers is that they generally do not have a sysadmin background.

It's true both ways around, which is why the top role was originally called Unix Programmer. It's rare for a company to knowingly employ such a deity these days. They'll make do with mere Systems Administrators who know a bit of scripting; or even System Operators who sometimes know how to change a config without manpages.

Take my advice and stop using Rubik's Cubes to prove your intelligence

cream wobbly

Re: 1970s?

I shall always admire the Swiss and Walloons for their septante and huitante. It's funny to tease French nationals with and watch them pretend they can't understand, bunch of soixante-dix têtes. They're obvious words, and they make daily life so much simpler.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

cream wobbly

Re: Spoilers in Tech Docs!

"it's very difficult to write technical documentation that essentially boils down to a sequence of steps in a manner that does not sound robotic"

You're using a GUI. Get used to robotic-sounding instructions. If you don't like them, explain to the manufacturer that you prefer proper grown-up scripts because you don't like your instructions to sound robotic.

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