Posts by payne747

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Or every mistyped app in the start menu, or every accidental click on Bing picture of the day...

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

If JPL made Starlink...

It wouldn't be like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks!

https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html

Russia takes $13.5M bite out of Apple over in-app purchases

Well done Apple, that'll go straight onto tanks and ammo.

Why the hell did they pay it? Surely there's no enforcement options from Russia, official or otherwise that could threaten Apple.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

First thing I did when I came home at 1AM was to boot the PC, it did a false start and then completed OK. Then again, it was Windows 98, so that could have been anything.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Feature Creep much?

It's not really in the spirit of Unix philosophy to cram more and more functionality into systemd. I'm wary.

Kaspersky: Clumsy NSA leak snoop's PC was packed with malware

TL;DR

AV software automatically sent leaked NSA malware for analysis. Almost any modern AV would do this today - it just so happened this one was in Russia.

Fault is entirely with the NSA for having the worst 'take your work home with you' policy ever known to mankind.

BBC detector vans are back to spy on your home Wi-Fi – if you can believe it

Here's an idea

How about some sort of online portal, where people log in, enter maybe a username and password, associate the account with a TV license number and address. Surely that would be much cheaper then buying vans and hiring staff to sit in them all day doing nothing (because even if they do capture packets, which court would accept them?)

Would you let cops give your phone a textalyzer scan after a road crash?

Conspiracy theory time...

Me thinks the hand-held device the cops use will be doing more uploading than downloading...

Cisco's purple princesses gush workplace joy

"This just in, girl at Cisco has purple hair!"

BT blames 'faulty router' for mega outage. Did they try turning it off and on again?

Come on people

As those engineers who have been around long enough know, no amount of backup or redundancy can save you from that one massive core router that refuses to die in all the traditional senses but nevertheless still fails to do its job. That's how one router causes an outage.

Consider a device that's pingable, responds to SNMP and can even accept traffic but despite being online in every monitored way, still fails to route, drops 85% of its packets and kicks you out of the console every 10 seconds - those, my friends, are the ones that causes f**k-ups like this.

But knowing BT - what they actually mean is a cluster of primary and standby routers went "faulty" because they pushed out a duff config to it and took 5 hours to find out who did what where.

Smartphone hard, dudes, like it’s the end of the world!

Get a Nokia

Nice to know you're catching up ;)