Posts by apolodoro

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

Re: Pigeon Linux

Since it is a new set of daemons running on top of Hurd, you would need to call it something like Phlok - Pigeon Hurd for Lightweight Operating Kernel.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

Re: Own up to it

That documentation and change process usually appear in an organization after the disaster that it would have prevented. It's mentioned at the end of the story that the process was designed by the guy who caused the outage.

Hubble spots stellar midwife unit pumping out baby planets

Send it second class

Accoring to Holly it will get there in about 3 million years. That is about average for second class post.

Alibaba Cloud to offer custom LLMs-as-a-service

Every time I see this headline, I think it is offering MLM as a service.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Re: "We never make mistakes"

How do you record the death of someone who is already marked dead? It's no use to correct one mistake and leave an inaccurate death date in the database. You would probably have to change the death record to accept multiple dates.

This report came to mind

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brain-tiny/tiny-brain-no-obstacle-to-french-civil-servant-idUSN1930510020070720

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

One place I worked we had a development manager who thought the error messages were too confusing to the customers. He replaced the majority of the error messages with, "Error, call <company name> support." We knew what all of the old error messages meant and could help the customers and train them to help themselves. When they called with this message, we didn't have anything to go on. Every time we got this message we would head over to a developer and monopolize their time for an hour figuring out what the error really was. The change was reverted a couple of weeks later.

Moral of the story - bad, jargon filled messages are still better than none at all.

Perseverance on the rocks: Pebbles clog up the rover's Martian sample collection

Re: Surely...

If you could clear out that dirt when you are in the neighborhood, that would be great.

Years of development, millions of lines of code, and Android can't even run a toilet

Acute urinary retention can lead to uromycitisis poisoning.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Two spaces?

Is your tab 4 spaces or 8 spaces?

Sorry, Elon, your Tesla roadster won't orbit for billions of years

Re: Douglas may have been right

He's up there spending a few years dead for tax purposes.

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

To dust off an old chesnut

Can you tell the difference between this and a Monster cable?

Google adds planets and moons to Maps, but puts bits in the wrong places

Re: Bugger

They should have been able to figure out that they made a wrong turn when the wind really picked up and the car started to smell like ammonia.

BOFH: Halon is not a rad new vape flavour

Re: The BOfH hippocratic oath

I thought it was, "First, do harm."

Psst. Need some spy-on-employees tech? Ask Oriium

Straight out of the BOFH toolkit

This sounds like the sort of user re-education tool that the BOFH would use. All it needs now is a way to edit a user's mail and browser history.

Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?

Re: Now That Bernie is Out....

He does not have a hidden agenda because he has no agenda. He is the model of the politician who will say anything to get elected.

Google patents robotic 'mobile delivery receptacle'

Re: Would a...

As long as you train the dog not to mark your packages.

Woman makes app that lets people rate and review you, Yelp-style. Now SHE'S upset people are 'reviewing' her

Re: What was the business model here?

The business model is blackmail. They have to allow users to add others arbitrarily. Without this option, there is no one to rate. Once these accounts are created, person being rated has to join the site to claim the account and make sure that they can contest negative reviews. All these people are then shown all sorts of ads.