Posts by Korev

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

You're not a real sysadmin if you haven't learnt the hard way to use set -u...

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Do you remember how bloody awful the mice[0] that came with those machines were.

Where's the Steve Jobs Satan icon gone? -->

[0]Imagine the smallest McDonalds hamburger

> UNTIL I noticed that the website had replaced the original single quotes with <accent-grave> and <accent-aigue>

My ipad loves putting in weird double quotes instead of normal ones which breaks the HTML links in this Esteemed Organ, I changed the default just so I can make proper links here - I hope you commentards are all grateful

The payroll team gave Denholm a corporate award and a $25 gift card. And during the ceremony at which Denholm was lauded, he said the Senior Tech Team glared at him with undisguised loathing.

Sounds like the IT Crowd didn't like him...

The first was quite a CD story...

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Re: Brill!ant

As a former cell biologist, I sometimes use the names of constructs and cell lines that I used in ancient history as they look about as random as regular expressions when written down

Re: The Generation Game

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has been a thing in biology labs for ~15 years. NGS itself may well be superseded by some other sequencing technology...

I had an accident a few years ago, I saw the amount of money the insurer paid out for my care (multiple operations, weeks in hospital and years of physiotherapy), the insurer will never make that money back.

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

Re: Give the negativity a rest, guys, this is pretty amazing stuff

Absolutely true, as it's coming up to 9AM in the UK have a breakfast pint.

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

And how exactly would they prevent them? We don't have anything in the arsenal to actually make that happen.

We absolutely do.

We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation. Also, you can lower the time a disease spreads using isolation of individuals or populations.

We also have a number of antibiotics and anti-virals that might be effective against future pathogens. We have the technology to rapidly "screen" all approved drugs against pathogens (obviously clinical trials would then be needed to check they work in the real world).

Re: PPP

In this case it involves a British company making some sequencers, this seems like a fairly sensible partnership.

The UK government supporting a company making a new form of sequencer seems to make a lot of sense. Much of today's genomic work is done using technology invented in the UK (Solexa) which got sold off and now an American company is making loads from it...

Or just make things shorter by using Excel...

Arm's royalty revenues boom, execs talk up hopes for AI bonanza

> Smartphone chip champ Arm is crowing over expanding royalty revenues

The King of England buys lots of chips, who knew?

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

Re: Goldeneye

> I heard the brits had sent their top double-o agent who caused all sorts of chaos to the telescope but he's a maverick who gets results and it's to be expected

If they'd have shaken the telescope and not stirred it then they wouldn't have these problems...

Re: Electric currents?

I for one, will not resist our new Alien Overlords

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Re: Bollox

> Find some open source e-commerce software and edit the templates. Or use Shopify.

Exactly, the majority of devs would come up with something far worse than one of these, the worst case scenario is that they'd get hacked and leak the customers' data...

Officials warn of Russia's tech-for-troops deal with North Korea amid Ukraine conflict

Re: Tech angle?

> This is just politics without any kind of meaningful relationship to IT, what gives?

Haven't you seen the NorkVPN adverts polluting Youtube?

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

Re: pi-hole

> and a real eye-opener about how much crap it stops - I’ve not really noticed until now because my laptop has all sorts of filtering on it anyway

For me I notice it when I leave Korev Towers and use my phone or tablet on other networks

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

I'm sure DEC Alphas were chips, not particles...

Re: We had

Normal For Norfolk then...

Re: Interrupt driven keyboard.

> Can we get a BOFH icon?

We used to have one. I don't know when it was taken away.

We've still got that Paris-sized gap to fill. Maybe competition time.

Fired Disney staffer accused of hacking menu to add profanity, wingdings, removes allergen info

Re: His attempts to hide his trail

That's a bit Cruella

They should have Frozen his account...

UK immigration seeks tech support, development partner for border crossing systems

Re: The official withdrawal was when?

But the uncertainty over what Brexit would have made it almost impossible to plan projects like this until the last minute. The CTA might have been one of the few certainties.

The troublesome economics of CPU-only AI

> No, you'd not be allowed to have a job as you've already proven yourselves to be disloyal to The Crown ;-)

You mean watching Amazon Prime instead of Netflix?

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Re: meanwhile over the pond...

They could have a slogan, "Phone taps and real ale on tap" and probably attract the right kind of person

For example, entry-level workers joining consumer goods giant Unilever's cyber security graduate training scheme with no commercial security experience get a base pay of £35,000 ($45,400), plus gym membership and a pension.

But wouldn't that mean living in Liverpool?

Chinese engineers wire Raspberry Pi into 600-meter railway tunnel to find any holes

The Raspberry Pi is not regarded as one of the world's more physically resilient computers, so the researchers used waterproof enclosures to protect the devices from the underground environment.

Well, if they will build computers out of pastry...

Tardigrade genes may hold secret to radiation treatments for humans

Re: "that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),"

"The third finding involves a pair of proteins generated on exposure to radiation that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy used by all living cells"

I am only an engineer, not a biologist, but I did wonder if this could become a new doping pathway for elite athletes...... (the proteins, not the radiation exposure)

Well, it's quite cheap to buy in the UK, only ATP.

I meant absorbed!

Whether a tardigrade-derived radiation treatment would be preventative or administered after exposure isn't as clear.

And also at what dose (the paper is paywalled). You can get some Betalains from Beetroot and Chard, how much would you have to eat and how much is adsorbed?

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

> if you had a Terabyte you would find a use for it. It sounded a ridiculous statement at the time

Big graphs, genome assembly, "Make on demand" chemical datasets, novel types of imaging etc

There are plenty of usecases where having a TB or more RAM can come in handy

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

Re: "sewer wear had reached 80 to 90 percent"

Well, wear have you looked?

'Open banking' rules will put your financial data back where it belongs

your financial data

This is a (still just about) British website, please make headlines like this mention that it's referring to America (or wherever the article's discussing)

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

Re: He pulled the trigger too fast

I guess you're running to the Eastwood...

I hope the network outage didn't cost his employer a packet...

Luckily for Clint this wasn't terminal for his career...

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Re: Acronym bollox

What's wrong with TLAs?

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

Me, I want to dump some Markdown in a folder and have it magically appear on the web, without anything interpreted in anything involved in between. No JS, no PHP, nothing that isn't type- and bounds-checked native code, thankyouverymuch.

Have you seen Hugo?

BOFH: The Boss pulled the plug on our AI, so we pulled the pin on him

Re: Sun

> Crikey, I'm old. I'm still supporting print queues on Sun servers

Sounds like you're a bright Sparc though...

Depends what's in the fire extinguisher, whether that matches what it says is in it on the outside, who last maintained it and whether there are any non-standard features about it.

Maybe the PFY's sideline in "safe" Halon disposal....

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

I'm not sure when the Bill went through Parlement though...

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

The Computer Misuse act was introduced in 1990 and appears (to my non-solicitor eyes) to cover what happened in the story.

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

The currency in the story was pounds, your link is to an American law

Developer pockets $2M in savings from going cloud-free

Re: So just to be clear.....

> Will their customers notice any difference?

If this kind of operation is done well then no

A beer for the sys sdmins —>

Intern allegedly messed with ByteDance's LLM training cluster

A true real life BOFH, I hope his boss doesn't go near any windows...

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

Regomiser

Wouldn't Jack be a better name for someone involved in old-school networking?

Or even cabling in general...

And as we all know, networking mistakes cost a packet...

Configuring network cards was painful in those days, one mistake and you could interrupt the entire network...

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

> "AWS might produce a sub-optimal product". Might?!

You can Chime in with that one...