Posts by Disk0

Mac hinge may change

metal injection

My only question, will that be Megadeath or Motörhead....

BOFH: Sure, I could make your cheapo printer perform miracles

drag the typewriter off the table...

good for a month of sickleave when the Selectric fractures several bones in your foot, although chances are you'll never walk the same...

"If a mistake doesn't hurt the user, "

Mistakes not hurting the user definitely qualifies as a configuration error...

Pint for your victorious submission of the challenge that is Huebleed Paincart.

Didn't she know printing in volume is all the rage with the cubicle crowd these days?

Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things

Thread wouldn't be complete without a Yankee Screwdriver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZD8iVpZPKk

Adobe preps emergency Flash patch for bug hackers are exploiting

Strictly speaking

Adobe did not invent Flash, they acquired FutureSplash and turned it into the stumbling, leaky, payload spewing travesty that it is now. PDFs are useful though.

Your pointy-haired boss 'bought a cloud' with his credit card. Now what?

(Unnamed Body)

(480V|roll of carpet|bag of lye|landfill)

Tay talks back: What made you think you beat me?

"expecting a punchline, but there was none" there's AI for ya

at least on irc there's the /ignore comman...

Stopped reading at...

..."I thought". Any AI worth its two cents would know it is incapable of that murky, illogical and chaotic process we call thought...

Pint because I'll be sitting this one out, watching the Internet burn from over yonder >

Call the Cable Guy: Wireless just won't cut it

Still have two of each of those in the toolcase, along with a whole bunch of other obsolete and wonderfully dysfunctional stuff like AAUI gender changers, an fd power cable adapter, and fax splitters. Anything smaller than a box of matches is allowed to hang around in the bottom corners...

I have this nagging voice in my head telling me that the day I get rid of any of it, will be the day before I end up needing it at a client's site...

Is Microsoft's chatty bot platform just Clippy Mark 2?

Joke's on them

I've been a bot for two decades now.

Seagate intros Innov8: A USB-powered 8TB external hard drive

No brick to lose/store/break

seems ideal for archiving. Safe space is expensive...

When should you bin that old mainframe? Infrastructure 101

Some good suggestions

I particularly liked the point about the lowly office switch possibly deserving of it's own support scheme. All kinds of minor equipment can be a single point of failure, and might just be deserving of its own support scheme. Another thing, no matter how luxurious an outside support contract may be, all of it still depends on someone with the right knowledge and the right equipment/parts being available at the precise moment you need them, a dream that doesn't always come true.

Re: In previous lives

to get in, try starting the LC with the shift key pressed, this will boot the system with just the bare necessities.

...shut down of the spares.(?)

Spares would generally not be operating under (full) load until pulled into deployment, they may even be idling altogether, so they're not likely to burn out as quickly as the system they are a spare for.

Switching off an arguably essential system makes it harder to manage, and you never know if it is going to act as expected once (if) it is booted. There are many things that can go wrong even with a system that is powered down - what if a network cable comes unstuck, a port fails, some rust refuses to spin, the internal clock drifts or a configuration file doesn't load properly...? Now you're troubleshooting the very system that should be making your life easier. Shouldn't any system that is part of your critical infrastructure be available at all times?

Software automation and AI in DevOps aren't the fast track to Skynet

In the future

We'll just be busboys...cleaning up dirty tables, leftover containers, and destroyed platters...

Mine's the one with the towel in the outside pocket...

Glum, depressed ... and addicted to Facebook, Twitter? There's a link, say medical eggheads

Anti-social media

cheer me up no end, however. Keep at it ElReg!

Wait... who broke that? Things you need to do to make your world diagnosable

...required the mag lock to be powered to open

...would be a beautiful example of failing design logic if it wasn't such a horrific blunder...

Google puts a gun to the head of IT middlemen – the ops teams

Teach your machene

to produces actionable information and send pointy-haired spokespeople the way of gas-station attendants...

echo kthxbye

Ever heard of 'multi-cloud'? Get with cool kids – it's the New Big Thing™

next up...

The "Nimbus Cloud" (Not Involving My Business Use Case)

The "Strato Cloud" (Shit That Really Arsed The Operation)

The "Vapor Cloud" (Virtually All Providers Out Randomly)

And of course a cloud of smoke when it all burns to the ground...

Mine's the one with the smelly briar in the left pocket....

Re: Bulsshit as a service

Gave me a chuckle, especially since in these parts "Baas" is what we call the Boss, so spot on.

Computer says: Stop using MacWrite II, human!

I miss those simple programs

All those neat little pieces of software, MacWrite, MacDraw, MacPaint, and later ClarisWorks, bring back fond memories of endless reboots because of corrupt fonts, interfering libraries, conflicting extensions and random stalling when you tried to paste too much formatted text.

Oh and of having simple, consistent tools for just about any basic task, instead of having to fire up some behemoth of an application suite that needs to update itself at every launch, just to rotate an image or type some text.

In the day, if you bought a Mac, usually at least some of the programs would be included as a promotion, and since there was indeed no copy protection or registration just about anybody with a Mac would have at least some of the "MacApps" installed. I don't think Apple ever really cared, they made their money selling hardware, and the programs were a bit of a showcase/teaser to get people started, and as examples of "this is what Macintosh software is supposed to be about".

I beg you, please don't back up that secret directory full of photos!

There's the unknown...

...and then there's the "who cares to know it", the stuff that can't be unseen, the kind of files that reflect the gruesome reality of the real life of people - like health records, financial statements, and message logs.

The stuff that makes me work on other people's computers in Stevie Wonder mode - because if it's not some kind of contrived anime or real world accident videos one might stumble upon, there's trade secrets, confidential information and personal exchanges, stuff anyone who values their sanity should avoid as much as Scientology, growing an ironic beard or the notion that in Medieval times we were all better off. Whatever it is you have on your computer, I didn't see shit, I didn't look, I have no idea and I will never ever want to know. I will gladly do whatever I can to get your hardware to boot an operating system, load applications and get on a network, but for the love of all that is good and useful in this world don't ask me to look at your files.

Interesting though how easily many otherwise professional and conscientious folks hand over their laptop or phone, with their entire life on there, to a "lowly" tech worker with about as much hesitation as a seagull spotting a shrimp at low tide. Either they assume we've seen it all anyway, or they inherently trust us to be the information professional we like to imagine ourselves to be....

How the FBI will lose its iPhone fight, thanks to 'West Coast Law'

Re: Hyperbole

Even if the phone gets broken into on Mars, the FBI will insist - with whatever force necessary - on putting people there to oversee the process.

FBI will require intimate access to at least parts of the technology (the "firmware hack" or whatever is needed), in order to "safeguard national interests". Once they have an OK, these kind of things are rather hard to avoid.

Said FBI people will inevitably be competent enough to compromise the whole situation by "accidentally"... picking up signals...with an airgap device that was inadvertently left activated in one of their pockets, similar to Google "accidentally" mapping private wifi hotspots with some custom code. No Biggie, only we just recorded everything and stored it somewhere secret.

Of course, nothing will prevent said agent to pull an Oopsy McFumblefingers at a local Dunkin' Donuts, by "accidentally" uploading the contents of their device to ATSC who now sells it to all and sunder in a secret sting operation designed to "trace terrorists and disruptive technology operatives" with the predictable Fast and Furious - style escalation into a tsunami of low-grade manure....Said agent gets a fat promotion for doing exactly what they were told in their classified instructions - make sure iPhone gets broken, forever. To add to the overall entertainment value the agent's actual name is Said.

Did I miss something? And will this fit in a 22 minute CSI format or does it have to be an Onion video...

Hackers aren't so interested in your credit card data these days. That's bad news

Log on and deliver...

...your money or your life...

Soon enough the crooks will be after our DNA as well, to replicate the world's population as a more docile and productive variety, replacing us all one by one with what they affectionately refer to as "Pod People"...