Posts by Disk0

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

It’s all about

The legroom, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine there could potentially be room for an entite basketball league. Or 100 more Ohioans.

46 years after the UN proclaimed the right to join a union, Microsoft sort of agrees

Re: Why companies feel the need to setup and join trade and lobbying associations...

problem

Where union bosses end up being on the same payroll as lobbyists

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

No mention of EU?

With similar regulations in the works. We don’t import that many vehicles and appliances (from the US) but millions of digital devices (grom US companies) it’s becoming worthwhile for manufacturers to offer at least some level of repairability. Which is good for everybody.

World’s smallest remote-controlled robots are smaller than a flea

Imagine

The gripping terror in the microrganisms encountering human creations from the robocop universe…

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Rates? Schmates!

How much time have you done jack-all on the clock? You, too, should be paid only for the time you actually produce something, best give the company a refund for all that downtime you sat out being all incompetent and petulent and unproactive instead of using that time to secure your data. Does HR know about you?

1000 includes the price of an attorney to brush you off with the fine print when you start complaining.

IcedID malware, in the hijacked email thread, with the insecure Exchange servers

The remedy

of course, is not using any MS products

Taekwindow: Time to make your middle mouse button earn its keep

Multitouch. Drag & Drop. That is all.

Second Trojan asteroid confirmed to be leading our planet around the Sun

Santa’s reward

That is all.

Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis

Re: Watson

Apple had Sherlock, a universal search engine that got decent results and grew to become Spotlight and Siri. IBM built Watson, thinking they would be able to analyse, not just search, any data. But just like in the stories, Watson remained clueless while Sherlock kept finding crucial information.

ISO.org outage hits day 3: Still in the dark as the important matter of bunk bed standards enters discussion

According to

Gartner, a three day outage spells the end of your operations. Mine’s the one with the slide rule in the inside pocket.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

Re: [social media] ... what you just posted on is part of it.

Search for the “Driekusman” video to see the original clogbangers in action

UK data watchdog slaps Ministry of Justice with Enforcement Notice for breaking GDPR law

Rules

Are for the ruled, not the rulers…

Autonomy founder's anti-extradition case is like saying Moon made of cheese, US govt tells UK court

Buyers’ remorse

“I bought an HP printer and it turns out they hiked the price by a massive margin and now I am stuck with expensive supplies and a shoddy hackable printer that leaks data”They got played at their own game - was this Fiorina?

A lightbulb moment comes too late to save a mainframe engineer's blushes

How far we’ve come

Nowadays it’s Windows Dozen locking up because it can’t find the printer. For backwards compatibility…

Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

Re: Addicts

Agreed the job is to facilitate not restrict

Euro watchdog will try to extract $900m from Amazon for breaking data privacy laws

Re: Hmm

The amount isn’t even a blip on the EU economy, anyone who thinks we could fund an entire continent this way could do worse than learn about orders of magnitude…

Re: "complaint by [..] a French privacy group"

did you just pull the the apologist centrist looking to mythologize racism card? “Too many people voted for Brexit because they are racist, and they are mostly Tories” isn’t that much of a stretch, and does not imply any and all. But hey, totally call out anyone observing this reality.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

Best practice suggestion for keeping credentials secure: Chonk56£#*%$!

Register all your accounts with overly complex, randomly typed paragraph-length passwords. Do not store or note the passwords in any format whatsever.

Instead, in order to log in to whatever online service you want to access, simply press the [Forgot Password] button.

Scream once you realize you can not access the emailaccount the password reset email was sent to because that is the very emailaccount that you are trying to reset the password to.

Revert to using the cat's name age in human years and your favorite swear word in the age-appropriate pound-hash-asterisk-percent-dollarsign-exclamation point format as your password for any and all services.

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

Re: 16GB should be enough for anybody...

I sm willing to bet an expired itunes coupon that Mr. Dabbsy’s thoughts qualify as “priceless” and therefore, are worth every kilobyte.

My basement would like a word

Re: Right to repair?

Just throw a magnet at it and label it unfit for duty.

Always a pleasure

After a busy week. Reading on my iPhone 7 with taped up broken glass - but it is paid off so essentially free and therefore i shall squeeze every last byte out of it before I replace it with the newest cheapest last year’s marvel that I won’t even use to 10% capacity. Again.

How hot is it right now? 'Water park catching fire and burning down' hot

Rebrand

to “Maximum Anxiety”. Add crocodiles for effect.

How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works? Ah, thought so: nothing

Re: Lockdown

I propose the term HOLI - Having missed Out on Lockdown self Improvement, with the alternating capitals appropriately forming a four-letter word that bears a resemblance to, but isn’t quite, an english word, however suggestiviely and capriciously holding some impossibly ephemeral middle ground between being a religious trope, a designation of constructive imperfection, not quite an Americana-infused meme substitute, and pop-art, while simultaneously and with equal probability being the utterance of an intensely constipated pseudo-bureaucratic but selfproclaimed creatively expressive mind, or equally likely the intersected brainchild of a console addict and your father-in-law’s imaginary version of 1337speak. Or maybe both.

Re: How much would you pay me to develop a COVID tracking app that actually works

That sounds suspiciously like one of the core Vogon philosophical tenets.

Fire up that Macintosh II: Retro techhead gives the web a Netscape 1.1 makeover

Wonderful

I really enjoy the retro feel of using FrogFind, it brings back fond memories of screeching modems and flickering screens with grainy images.

It turns out that however that interactive nonsense now makes up nearly all of the content, so you can visit a website vie FrogFind, but not quite view the content. A bit like being able to drive to any shop, but remaining confined to the parking lot...

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

Ashes to letters

At one time about a quater century ago I was requested to tag along - being an “expert “ in all things related to graphic design because of actually owning several Adobe products that I acquired at a firesale - to a lettering company in the heart of my city. My role was relatively simple: translate whatever jargon would be thrown around from each side, make sure the good folks there understood the requirements, and that output would be acceptable. I had already assisted with formatting the Illustrator file appropriately, copying the resulting EPS to a Zip disk, and printing a hardcopy just to make sure, as was the custom in thise days. I though I had left nothing to chance. It promised to be a breezy little outing. Once at the lettering company, that looked more like a garage than a serious graphics outfit, we were sent upstairs to “the chief”s lair. Chief was a stout fellow with artistic hair dressed in corduroy, and generated enough smoke from an obviously cheap cigar ( expensive ones smell way better...) to compete with a medium sized factory. His messy, dark nook of an office overlooked the canal but was otherwise bereft of any grandeur. “What the heck is that?” the chief blurted out, pointing at the Zip disk. “Kind of the standard exchange doohicky for graphics files” I responded, since my companion was already sorely taken aback with the whole situation. “Wahaha no we don’t do any of that. Just give me that hardcopy!” Chief replied. After some deliberation, we decided to go along - after all, this was The Leading and Reknowned Lettering company, and there wasn’t really another option. Chief proceeded to pop open the ginormous Agfa flatbed scanner, and rested the smouldering stump of his cigar on the edge of the plastic casing - that had onbviously been subjected to this level of abuse ever since it had first been deployed. The edge was marked with black, ashy, molten indentations. I couldn’t help but be aghast. He noticed and laughed “that doesn’t hurt anything!” I decided it wasn’t my money, and somehow mustered a “Do you mind if I smoke?” which was shot down immediately and harshly. “No cigarettes!”. He proceeded to fire up some arcane text-driven software, frantically tweaking parameters and cursing every moment of it, apparently setting up althe scanned file to send to the plotter. “Can we see the result?” My companion asked, concerned about the costly operation’s output. “This does not have graphics, what do you think, we’re not NASA here! You will see when we make it. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine! Just go choose your colour with the lad downstairs, it will be ready tomorrow.” So we did, pick the colour of film that was the clostest match to the desired Pantone tint to match the house style, crossed our fingers and left - ie. got yelled at to get the hell out because they had work to do. The output turned out fine, but the events stuck with me because of the utterly incomprehensible process, and the poor scanner being abused so heavily by this man’s cigars...

Facebook and Apple are toying with us, and it's scarcely believable

Last I looked

Your lords are still running the show

FortressIQ just comes out and says it: To really understand business processes, feed your staff's screen activity to an AI

Alternatively

Design your applications to fit the workflow, the workflow to fit the process, the process to fit the reality of production, and the production environment so that it suits humans.

How Apple's M1 uses high-bandwidth memory to run like the clappers

I for one

welcome our artificially intelligent SoC's.

Progress is a beautiful thing. This old ad comes to mind: <https://tinyurl.com/y2cwjryr> ...Now featuring butterfly wings!...

And I very much like that this is a significantly different architecture.

We've been stuck with the x86 monoculture for too long.

I am also looking forward to some form of multicore high-performance Raspberry Pi to power laptops - it can't be long now.

Let's see who can make the lightest, most efficient and most performant architecture. We will all win, and I want them all.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Putin lost

that is all.

...letting someone else carry the can...

Much like Cameron called the referendum and then walked away from the steaming pile of mayhem he just unleashed...

Facebook is leaky, creepy, and trashy. Now it wants to host some of your customer data

Re: Am I the only one still sane?

no, insisting on oral synchronous communication for matters that can be settled in writing without any of the hassle is insane.

The perils of building a career on YouTube: Guitar teacher's channel nearly deleted after music publisher complains

How about

Streaming platforms pay a “blanket” license fee to cover all reproduced content, not unlike e.g. radio stations and shops do, and basically charge that to the advertisers, who are the ones actually benefitting from all the content. The licensing fee could simply be calculated as a factor of the number of views, or logged time. Or, and here's a novel idea, sue the advertisers who profit from having their advert for plaid shirts pop up whenever someone mentions "the boss".

Capita Consulting ditching more than a quarter of its workforce 45 days after consultations with consultants

Well well well

Let the schadenfreude begin. Suggested lines of conversation with the laid off include:

"Having trouble keeping a job guv?"

"Aren't you ashamed, to be dissappointing your manager like this"

"So I guess that means you're not economically viable then"

"Didn't give it a 110% then eh"

"Your career is going great I see"

"Maybe next time try being motivated"

"So what is your excuse to be asking for handouts?"

"You know, you should have been adding value to the company."

"Jobhopping is like, so over"

"Have you considered learning a skill?"

And of course "Why did you get yourself fired?"

AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box

Sneakernet 2.0

Nuff said.

Windows spotted flashing its unmentionables in a Chicago clothier

bugs

are in season, right?

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: A cautionary tale ...

shhhh

Re: Who'd have thought

Have you gone completely chocolate because I can't make bananas out of what you are saying...

So it's ALL the telly's fault then

Mine's the one with the neighbour's clicker in the left pocket...

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: Cynical is what an optimist calls a realist...

Continuity engineer: The glass is not even half the size it needs to be, and we need several more.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Re: Not a good idea

Nothing to fear huh.

'Ethical' hackers say: It's just hacker. To be one is no longer a bad thing

It’s 2019 and

Carbon meatbag units can still be easily compromised by misuse of technical vocabulary. It seems super-flu-ooze that any of this would need explaining in the vulture’s domain, heck I’m just a dorking cracker harkening to uncorker knackered croakers, and farked fruitarian fanware out of Cork, if possible esthaetically, which is very much metrically and morally snuberior to pan testing and makes for better copy.

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Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Re: There is of course a new approach here

You're not supposed to eat them I don't think.

Obligatory tuppence

First of all there is a HAL joke somewhere in there but I can't quite figure it out. Something along the lines of "I can't let you open the door Dave" but your name isn't Dave, so I gave up.

Second of all unauthorized residential valuable movers are not picky when it comes to avenues of entry, what for doors often being locked so forcing an alternatives entrance generally doesn't seem to big of a deal in the profession, especially since they do not worry about when the glazer will have time to stop by, or if their insurance premium will get hiked because of claimed break-in damage.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Feed that into your hypertext preprocessor and you'll find a

|fitter|smoker|dreamer

and of course the mythological

|r(πd)

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Let him have it!

But no POTUS speech privileges - he'd need to abide by the same terms and conditions as the citizenry he so fervently claims to be a part of all of a sudden. I haven't read the T&C of the Tweetverse at length but from what I've read generally stuff like inciting violence, blatant racism, and purposeful misinformation with the intent to harm entire populations might gives cause to take restrictive action on offending accounts. If nothing else, they could suspend the whole thing indefinitely for "suspicious acticity" "Failure to monetize" "Flagged as troll, bot or spam account" "Reported as a landing page for botfarmers." "Tweeting too much without following enough people" or the old "Please reset your password for security reasons and set up two factor authentication." loop. If he complains, the response is simply: you wanted this. Yes, /should/, but wouldn't it be fun to see his reaction when he gets the book dropped on him?

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: "nobody moved to stop a thief"

You're telling us to assume criminals in the US are mostly unarmed? And we are supposed to believe this, becaus ethere are no actual statistics of gun homicides is the US versus any other country in the world.

Do remember, killing somoene with a gun is generally against the law even in the USA, so doing so automatically makes someone a criminal, even if they weren't after y'alls pruppaty.