Posts by AK565

90-second Newark blackout exposes parlous state of US air traffic control

It's always been around, but seems to have become much more pervasive in the past 20 years or so. It's pretty much everywhere you look.

- Workers who leave aren't replaced. The workload of those who stay increases with no corresponding increases in pay.

- Funding for upkeep in real terms drops a percentage point or two every year.

- Quality/quantity of output drops. Eventually there's some major fuck-up.

- Everybody stands around and acts surprised.

- Major reforms are promised with about one percent actually happening.

- At some subsequent point people wonder why fewer and fewer people go into that field

- Rinse and repeat after nauseum.

A friend is flying Newark to Paris Sunday. He is not amused.

Resellers may be sitting on costly pile of regret after US smartphone shopping spree

The thing is, he's displayed multiple symptoms consistent with cognitive and language disorders since the 80's. His record as a businessman points in the same general direction.

His behaviors then and now match strategies people employ to hide the fact that they're missing large swaths of what's actually going on around them.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Fiver

I think dialect might be involved to some extent. I grew up in SE New England where 'merry', 'marry', & 'Mary' have different pronunciations. Also, 'party' and 'potty' have VERY different pronunciations. Yet people from other parts of the US will insist the trio are pronounced the same as are the pair. In some places 'pin' and 'pen' sound the same. So I've no problem envisioning people getting numbers confused.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Re: Hmmmmm

It's always pretty much the same group of states. Health, education, income, GDP per capita, Covid vax rates, brain drain, dollars paid to the federal gov't vs funds received. It doesn't much matter the metric or how it's measured. The same group of states come out in the bottom 10 or 15. If you made a Venn Diagram there'd be tremendous overlap. There's no surprise on this list.

Totally coincidentally, these states are usually Red.

I know. It was a total surprise to me as well/s

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

Re: Unsurprising

Good point. I started in my field 30 years ago by audition as I had zero credentials. Now? I've that experience plus a whole bunch of credentials..... And in real terms I make about US$5.00 more per hour than I did back then.

Bosses failing to offer hybrid work lose out in recruitment

I doubt many companies requiring a physical presence will change. The jobs will simply go unfilled. Meanwhile the hiring people will just say, "I did what I was sppposed to do."

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Re: When turn off/turn on fails

I've encountered several laptops that have a completely separate, physical, on/off switch hidden somewhere on the OUTside of the computer. NOTHING in the software makes any reference to it. One simply has to know of its existenc and location and make it part of your checklist for wifi mysteriously not functioning.

Ship stranded in Suez Canal shifts, but not before spawning some choice tech memes

Re: Hold my beer moment?

Exactly. A certain state in the US decided to save $$ by firing all its interpreters. So instead of paying a local interpreter to spend his day doing local jobs, they paid people like me 4 hours travel time plus the 2hr minimum for each job. A local college apparently got wind of this scheme, fired its staff interpreters, and hired through an agency. Bottom line: A class formerly covered 3 man hours of staff was replaced 8 man hours of higher cost agency interpreters. But different budget lines were used so money was "saved". I'm sure someone got a huge bonus in both cases.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: When you say "pants",

Lenovo X220s and a T431s.

Dell E6510. That's as new as I go.

House Republicans introduce legislation for outright ban on municipal broadband in the US

You should see when Republican congressmen have to actually explain or debate something. More often than not it's clear in two minutes they know nothing about the topic in question. TBH, the Dems often aren't much better. However, that ' not much' is usually enough to make them look stunningly well informed in comparison.

Re: Republicans

Part of the problem is that the Republicans know that they can say almost anything and it won't be questioned. As in, they don't even have to make any sense or be factually accurate. OTOH, the Dems are saddled with having to make at least a modicum of sense and some degree of coherence to sell themselves/their platform to their electorate. Republicans have no such worries.

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

Re: Still using my Samsung Galaxy S5

Agreed, my BBerry 9900 had 3G service almoat literally everywhere until 4G showed up. Then I started finding weak signals and dead zones. A year or two after that all these mysterious problems made an appearance.

I had a Razr M until the third or fourth upgrade which caused battery life to go from 2 days to half a day, if that. Judging from the uproar it appeared to happen to almost everyone. Motorola never acknowledged it.

Same here. I'd still be using my Q20 otherwise. What I REALLY want is my old 9900 with a slightly longer screen and upgraded internals. I FLEW on that keyboard..... Almost as fast as I did on the previous phone with SureType.

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Agreed. Lack of Band 13 in any phone automatically makes it a no go for me.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Re: Misses the point

Exactly! If I use the free version I expect to see adverts. But when I pay for a subscription I expect to see on mbre than one static ad per page but much, much more importantly I expect not to be asked, told, or offered anything! Leave me the fuck alone if I'm paying a subscription for your services!

Re: Keep on AdBlocking

Opera was my browser back in the days it was a Norwegian product. It was so superior to the other available browsers I happily paid US$38/year for it.

Re: Nothing wrong with ads ...

May I add one?

Movement. I'll be reading a largely text screen and this random advert that was a still, becomes a vid. It completely halts my flow. More often than not I simply nuke the page and move on.

Re: In a past far far away

I have a gay, Greek Orthodox aquaintance whose bi-lingual Greek&English FB page is constantly bombarded with adverts for "real muslim brides".

Japan pours millions into AI-powered dating to get its people making babies again

According to my college roommate from Tokyo, the ideal was Japanese features that showed western influence. Like 2/3 Japanese 1/3 western in appearance. But your point still stands.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Enigma Cracked by Poland

... late December, 1932, actually.

https://scienceinpoland.pap.pl/en/news/news%2C78071%2C80-years-ago-polish-intelligence-handed-over-enigma-code-french-and-british-allies

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

You know, I'll never look at 'm^3' the same way ever again thanks to the readers of El Reg.

Re: Local knowledge vs auto translation...

In the early 80's I took summer classes in Poland. Our childhood language models left Poland nearly 100 years before. One big language change: the word for a peck on the cheek you gave your grandmother now means a lover's kiss not on the lips.

Re: 'Analysis by sex"

Upvote for 'truncatory'.

Re: Inside joke?

S&M can also mean 'Standing & Modelling'. It's used to describe a gay bar or event at which most of the patrons are neither drinking, dancing, nor attempting to pick each other up. I first heard that on Fire Island years ago.

Re: Wang Care

There's a general prudishness that's taken hold of the USA in recent years. From what my younger colleagues say, most gentlemen don't shower in locker rooms unless there are private stalls. The 'towel dance' (look it up; it's actually a thing) is employed lest anyone find out that the dancer has the same equipment as everyone else in the room. The list goes on...

Re: Wang Care

I grew up outside of Boston. We all knew what wank(er) meant, just as we knew lift and torch. We never used it but everyone knew it whsn they heard it.

Work life balance? We've heard of it. Pandemic means 9-5 shifts are a thing of the past for many

I'm in almost the exact same situation. One job is 10a-2p required +5hrs admin work when convenient. 2nd job runs roughly 3-7p. In a few weeks will start a 3rd which consists of my being on standby while I do my own thing at home. The 15hrs/week saved in commuting makes up for anything I might've lost.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

So if we use the Bard as our cutoff point, we're essentially left with Everyman to work with, unless we want to go back to Chaucer. Alternatively, we could look to Yola and Fingalian. A third possibility is is going the Aenglisc/Anglish route and eliminating all words and syntax of Latin origin. This last might be the easiest as many have already made inroads.

Re: Sadly... this is the beginning of the end

Oh, I can answer that. ;-)

Trump doing those things totally matches his established behaviour patterns. Give him enough time and he'll claim he invented it.

Is Little Timmy still enthralled by his Leapfrog tablet? Maybe check he hasn't sideloaded an unrestricted OS onto it

Re: kid's toy turned into a proper tablet computer

5 or 10 years ago there was a span of time when I had access to Macs almost daily. Memory's fuzzy.... While many things impressed me, I recall distinctly that any 'right click' functions were torturously complicated.

The iPhone really blows my mind. I can tell you that whoever designed all the functions related to document and photo handling never had to do either for work. It took me an inexcusably long time to figure out how to turn off picture sharing suggestions.... As in I'd unlock my phone and a random pic from my porn stash would be front and center.

Ever found yourself praying to whatever deity runs Microsoft Teams? You're not alone

Re: Teams on Linux

Zoom links almost never work. If I manually type in the meeting and access codes it works on the #irst try 99% of the time. Teams does not work at all with Firefox on Ubuntu. But Teams is fine with Chromium on Ubuntu. I just found out today the school where I'll be working a few hours daily uses Google Classroom which I'd never even heard of. Another agency was all gung ho on their proprietary version of Zoom until I asked a few basic tech quertions... I suddenly didn't need to use it any more and was told to use whatever the school uses.

Yeah, education on line is quite interesting.

With no viable alternatives, big names flock to Adobe's cloudy wares amid global pandemic

Fill & Sign?

Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

"... the right are too stupid and selfish to care until it happens to them."

It's a little more complicated, at least in the US. There's a disturbingly large % of the population for whom an event is only real if it affects them in some way. Friends in property management guess it's 1/4 - 1/3 the population and it seems fairly evenly distributed among the population irrespective of demographics.

Re: I get I'm in a microscopically small minority, but...

Some people do work best thay way: Start Monday with a list of what must be finished by Friday 5pm and then do it where and when they please. Boss doesn't know or care....fly off to a beach if you want. Just get it done on time. Last week was brutal, physically. But I got all my work done because I spent Friday on my couch with my tablet.

Re: I would hate to own commercial real estate

At present I'm scheduled to full time WFH within two weeks. I'll save 15hrs/week in commuting time and close to US$1000/month in work related costs. Factoring in the above time savings, my new work week will be 10hrs/week longer but for 1/3 of that I'll be on standby, during which time I can literally do whatever I want as long as I can get to my laptop in under a minute.

WFH drastically decreases the wear-and-tear on my body, thereby increasing my chances of working more years and not needing Social Security until age 70. That delay will gain me nearly $1000/month more for the rest of my life. I fail to see a downside here.

Ireland unfriends Facebook: Oh Zucky Boy, the pipes, the pipes are closing…from glen to US, and through the EU-side

Frankly, I'm curious as to how so many people have the discretionary time and energy to spend on FB. Since Covid19 hit 90% of my time has been spent on keeping afloat financially. It literally took until a few hour's ago to sort that all out. I anticipate having some discretionary time in the very near future and I'll certainly not be spending it on FB.

Re: About time too

At this point I don't think I actively refuse to engage with entities that insist on FB log-in. I suspect I just ignore them without the FB log-in consciously registering as the reason.

Mozilla have come out with a FB "bucket" that supposedly markedly reduces the amount of data FB can slurp without your permission. I haven't had the chance to check it out but wonder if there's any truth to the claim.

There’s no new normal coming for PC sales, just the boring old normal of a long, slow decline

Agreed. Even with job moving entirely online, all of my 10+ yr old laptops seem to be up to the task.

Mate, it's the '90s. You don't need to be reachable every minute of every hour. Your operating system can't cope

Re: My first major upgrade

After 56k, I discovered a modem used two phone lines. One was the 'dedicated' computer line that have you 56k. The second line was the 'house' line. When the house line was not in use the modem would use that to double speed. When a call came in or someone made a call the modem would disconnect from it.

This was mid 90's. I don't recall details beyond getting a noticeable speed bump.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

The problem with this way of thinking is that changing the label doesn't change the thing. Calling the master password 'primary'doesn't do anything. One could easily make an argument that 'primary'is just as '-ist' as the word 'Master' is.

'Whore' used to be the PC word for 'lady of the evening' Languahes change.

Re: Thought I missed something!

+10,000!!!

That's my single biggest gripe with tho iPhone. All the UI's for text, editing, doc handling, etc. seem to have been designed by people who never had to work with documents.

Re: An alternative?

"It would be a shame if Mozilla went the way of so many other developers and unilaterally decided that they know what is best for their users."

Exactly. They think they know best yet are nearly always wrong. It makes me wonder how well I'm actually being tracked, lol. Features I use disappear and those I don't are 'enhanced'. I don't bother any more. I just switch to an alternative or I drop it all together. One of the main reasons Facebook lost me was that they kept undoing all my tweaks.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

I'm on my first iProduct. I cam tell you that it was made very clear to me that unless I deliberately pick and delete a photo, every single photo is both on my phone and in iCloud so it is automatically backed up and I don't need to think on it any further. I'm not saying that's necessarily true. I'm saying that's what I was told numerous times by numerous people. I'm not much of a photographer so I really don't care, but if i were i'd make sure to save my pics in third place.

In the same vein, my laptop's keyboard just crapped out. But that's OK. I backed it up on a separate disk just a few days earlier. I needed some files from two weeks ago. No problem, right? When I tried to restore the latest restore date offered me was May 22nd.... And I do weekly backups! Ihavent had time to tackle that fiasco.... I have a list.

Shocking no one, not enough foreigners applied for H-1B visas this year so US govt ran a second lottery

Re: Pay *should* be equal...

"Some of these jobs are in places that no one wants to live in like, Nebraska or somewhere."

This is another issue on top of everthing else. It's been going on for years but has hit the media as a result of Covid. Many white collar workers in both tech and non-tech fields have no interest in living in areas where science (aka reality) is treated as a liberal conspiracy and schools teach that cave men and dinosaurs coexisted in a world that is only 6,000 years old. No, it's not happening, no matter how much money a company might offer. Full stop.

Re: 'Murica first!

Not only there. I've heard from friends and colleagues that the same is happening in other major cities. Offices currently renting 30,000 sq. ft. are renewing their leases for 10,000 as many white collar workers are doing some or all their work remotely.

Re: You'd have to be mad -- or desperate -- to come here on an H1B

And those of us of a certain age and from certain parts of the English-speaking world will recall there was a time when the phrase "mentally retarded" was the Politically Correct way to refer to a person with cognitive disabilities.

Re: You'd have to be mad -- or desperate -- to come here on an H1B

Generally speaking, getting a work visa depends on one's education/skill set/credentials vs need in given areas. If one's a widget painter and areas A,B, & C in Canada have a shortage of widget painter it's supposedly easy to get a work visa if you agree to go to one of those areas and work there for a specified time period. If one's dead set on moving to non-shortage area, it is decidedly more difficult. The website made quite clear that if one first moves to shortage area A and hates it, one is free to move to shortage area B without restriction.

Strangely, in spite of all the emphasis on this, there seemed to be no way to type in one's credentials and get a list of current shortage areas. Go figure.

I can tell you that in metro NYC that unemployment insurance WITH the recently ended $600/week bonus does NOT provide incentive to remain unemployed.

I could quibble over a few details, but your overall point is dead center correct, IMO.

Regarding US workers being 'uneducated': I do agree that an ever increasing % of people successfully holding down intellectually demanding jobs become completely flummoxed by the slightest derivation of the routine. If you take them out of their zone/world their IQ seems to drop by 20 points. No argument from me.

My point is that even if you ARE a person who can handle changes in routine and who meets your standard of 'educated', you are just as likely to be in the aforementioned 70% than those who are 'uneducated'. Being 'educated' doesn't provide nearly as much a safeguard as it used to to avoid living paycheck to paycheck.

It's a constant refrain among white-collar workers of all types in the US: How is it the numbers on my paycheck keep going up yet I have to keep cutting back to make ends meet?

Re: Oh NOSSSSSS!

Perfectly logical so I upvoted you. However many companies aren't willing to pay competitive wages to those workers who are educated and there are some. So while your point is certainly valid, the situation exists separately from the issues discussed here.