Posts by Unoriginal Handle

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: 1st class flights

Indeed, I've used the same tactic. Open jaw flights and a Saturday reduced the cost to the company and ended up with me having road trips to/from the sales kick off location, mostly via Yosemite and Death Valley, or on one occasion, Vegas -> Zion -> Moab -> Denver through the Rockies. 1100 miles in 4ish days in a convertible Mustang, paid for by not having to pay for flights.

One year, the company mandated out Sunday back Thursday for everyone in Europe. Hence the doubling or more of the flights bill. Next year there was a more relaxed attitude and as long as you were at SKO for the right days and it was cheaper for the firm, not a problem.

Why Amazon hates 'human-in-the-loop' AI governance

Re: VP Eric Brandwine explains people aren't all that great, actually

Oh, I have! The only thing that stopped me was that I didn't have a taser :)

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Re: "as well received as a chilli oil enema."

Can you buy chili vaseline?

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

I worked for a ( back then ) large American manufacturer of networking kit, but on the network management side of the business, supporting said NMS. We had a lab with all sorts of kit, and a key on a small fob which we used to control access - otherwise kit would get robbed for customers despite use needing it.

The problem of the key going missing was resolved once the 6"x8" lab sign fell off the door, and was split pinned to the key. Never failed to make its way back to us reasonably quickly after that.

Like Apollo before them, ESA astronauts hone lunar landing skills in helicopters

Re: Flying bedstead

Bugger. Not this one then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedknobs_and_Broomsticks

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Re: A slight ambiguity

The people making the door noises was Airplane II, IIRC

A software-defined radio can derail a US train by slamming the brakes on remotely

Re: FRED?

Along with "Brakes Are Really Not Effective Yet" ?

Mine's the one with mammoth tusk shoehorn in the pocket ...

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: "The spars were then sent to Wroughton..."

Having been raised in Wroughton when the airfield was still active, and remembering being under Canberras on finals ... I did wonder if my advancing years had tricked me and I'd forgotten that Wroughton was involved in Airbus manufacture.

Re: Honestly

Surely there are metric diameters available ? 25.4mm pipe ?

Mine's the one with the conversion calculator in the pocket...

‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst

Re: You can't replace people

Valley Forge American Civil War, or Valley Forge Silent Running?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Forge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running

No "geek" icon, so I've chosen the coat with the VHS of the film in the pocket ...

Google Cloud goes down, takes Cloudflare and its customers with it

Re: Standards should Triumph

Ynys Môn. Because I'm a geek.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

A deaf friend used to work in an office with his colleagues, and faced the board room which had decent soundproofing but glass windows facing the open office area.

So skilled was he at lipreading that he knew what was being discussed as it was being discussed, and would share with colleagues after ...

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: No Comment!

That's bollocks.

FAA confirms it's testing Starlink, maybe for tasks Elon says Verizon is doing badly

Re: A guy who really doesn't need your money

The risk being that change isn't what everyone else thinks is right or appropriate ...

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: "This person does not work here."

Is there an abbreviation for "Antrag nach dem Informatinsfreiheitsgesetz" ? Or do Germans have to say it out loud every time they make a FOI, sorry IFG, request ...

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

I generally don't do "home IT" for folks - more trouble than it's worth. Except last night. A really nice guy I know, from my local, had asked me about helping him sync his iPhone and Mac.

Long story short - all sorted despite the fact he took a few tries to remember the right passwords and passcodes for the right phone so we could get it done. Plus he took ages to get the Touch ID working - he's a stonemason, his fingerprints are degraded to buggery.

He buys me a couple of beers for my efforts. And he mentions my efforts to another friend in the pub who butters me up with her "my phone hasn't been getting my emails since November but my iPad and laptop work fine". Delete the email account from the phone, add back in with the right password, and she's happy as Larry.

TL;DR - helped two pub friends out with IT issues, had four beers and paid only for three :)

Inquiry hears UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal

Re: But as Watson might say

There was no money stolen as a result of the Horizon failures. The sums allegedly stolen / misplaced / defrauded were ghost amounts created by the deficiencies in the software.

Where money was paid back or otherwise recovered by the Post Office from SPMs it appears to have gone, eventually, into the PO's own accounts as an element of profit.

https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/podcast-where-did-all-the-money-go/

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

One colleague at my first IT job would come back from lunch and play a golf game on their computer. To the point where his work was affected, and added to my load too.

So I added a batch file on his computer which replaced "golf.exe". It put up a warning message about unauthorised software being run and the disk would be reformatted to remove it, then it ran chkdsk in silent mode ...

He could actually move really fast to reach that power button when he wanted to ...

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Re: Eh?

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Who's been copying my lead ...

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

Re: Calling all servers "server"

The answer is South Korea Telecom.

Mine's the one with the complete Internet DNS registry printed out and bound, in the pocket ...

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Re: Best job straight out of University?

I worked for a (then) major web proxy manufacturer in the early 2000s. We had to get configs from customer appliances, and logs, and the contents were eye opening. Who in their right mind would actively search for some of that stuff!

And we had to have unfiltered internet access too - "boss, I'm looking at playboy.com because the customer says the adult URL category isn't being filtered properly ..."

Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Re: There are lies, damn lies, and statistics!

Not convinced about the deaths per passenger hour - how about deaths per passenger mile?

https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Boil some filtered water in a kettle.

Straight into a ( preferably warmed ) mug with a teabag already placed.

Leave for 4-5 minutes.

Dash of milk to taste / colour.

Remove teabag.

Drink.

*I have made tea in an insulated mug, and it's both tolerably hot and tasty after anything up to an hour or so...

From Joaquin Phoenix to Rowan Atkinson, we enjoyed your Musk movie casting calls

Ricky Gervais reprise of his role in The Office ( the original UK one). Hapless, clueless and completely unaware of the effect his words have on the world around him

Look ma, no fans: Mini PC boasts slimline solid-state active cooling system

Re: Counter productive

Isn't that just a primitive abacus?

US govt talks up $2B X-ray photobooth to check its nuke weapon sims are right

Nanosecond imaging is so old school . . .

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2023/popular-information/

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

I had this . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5ARinUHbU&ab_channel=SoundEffectsTras

BT and OneWeb deliver internet to rock in Bristol Channel – population 28

I spent 6 days on Lundy last year. 4G coverage was spotty, and only really reliable if you stood in the same place just near the pub, or at the top of the old lighthouse.

Getting to the Internet from anywhere other than near the main "settlement" was a hit and miss affair, more so at the bottom of Devil's Slide or similar on the western side of the island but by then I had other things on my mind!

Lamborghini's last remaining pure gas guzzlers are all spoken for

All well and good if there are charging points to plug into, but if there's no charging coming out of them because the real back end infrastructure isn't there - power stations - then it's a moot point?

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Some slight clarifications...

Yes it's very likely hotter on the ground than in the air, but there is almost always some wind. A prudent turbine helicopter pilot will leave the helicopter parked into the wind, or where they think the wind will be coming from when they next go to start up. That way, there's a flow of air already into the compressor and thence the combustion chamber reducing the amount of work the engine has to do to get going and reducing the chances of a hot start. And the helicopter manual details time restrictions and temperature limits between last shut down, and what the max temperature is at the time you next go to start it up.

"Full power is normally applied at start up". Not in my experience, but this may be semantics. In a Jet Ranger the throttle is kept closed until the electric starter motor has wound the thing up to a certain speed (12-15% IIRC) then fuel is introduced by moving the throttle to the idle stop, with the starter button kept depressed until the whole thing is self sustaining. Full power - or at least the power required to get into a hover then transition to forward flight - is only used when you actually want to leave the ground, and just before this stage the throttle has been gently opened to get the rotor blades to flight RPM, then the collective is raised - adds fuel to counteract increased drag and temperatures then go up accordingly.

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

Two spring to mind.

Taking flatpack cardboard boxes, unflatenning them and making a wall out of them in my boss' office so he had to dismantle it to get in.

Watching the Teutonic contingent at a company work summit all walk in together to the hotel/conference centre's auditorium, take up a row of seats, then socialise together making no attempt to mingle for the next two days. Each morning - same row of seats... Day 3, they walked in to the auditorium to find someone had asked the hotel's housekeeping for hand towels which had been draped over the row of seats they'd occupied the other two days. A moment of bemusement, then they sat down. Much amusement among the other EMEA attendees ...

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Re: What is the scope of FSD?

"Surely (assuming more or less constant speed) the only way of increasing the gap in front of you is by slowing down gently, making the distinction between the two purely semantic?"

Yes, temporarily, and it doesn't need to be by a huge amount - so the gap between you and the car in front gets bigger. Then you can add the 2mph or whatever it takes to match the vehicle in front.

Re: What is the scope of FSD?

I'd be interested in the source of that comment. As a current RoSPA ROADAR tutor I've not heard it said.

I would advocate, as another poster has said, increasing the gap in front of you (significantly) to cater for the vehicle behind if they're showing signs of impatience or being too close or some other thing. And if they want to overtake, let them.

Re: Human Versus AI Drivers

"it's even in the UK highway code" but most drivers don't read it after they pass their driving test and couldn't tell you accurately what's in it now.

There are about 43,000 road deaths in the US annually. In the UK, 1700. 330 million versus 67, give or take. If I have my maths right, if the UK figure translated to a US population size then that would be about 8,300 US road deaths - one fifth of the current toll. The standard of driving has to have an impact on that number.

Driving isn't brilliant in the UK - I've taken my continued driving education well beyond what most people think would think is rational so I have a rough idea - but 5 times fewer deaths adjusted for population?

As for "Full Self Driving" - human drivers, even given all their frailties, have a much higher intuitive awareness of their surroundings. All they now need to do is to concentrate fully and properly on the task of managing a significant chunk of metal driving down the road, plan quite a bit more ahead, and the road death toll would come down in the UK.

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

Re: The hell that

"On the plus side though it gives the janitor something different to mop up....."

Indeed...

Many years ago (early 80s) the gentleman at a bed manufacturer who, having presented flowers to the lady who jilted him a few days before proceeded to the factory floor, defeated the interlocks on the machine which turned coconut husks into matting for mattresses and put himself in.

The largest piece of him which was found was about 3/4 of a hand...and ruined a large length of mattress component.

Microwaved fish could help scientists create sustainable LEDs

Most likely accidental.

"Who left this luminescent salmon too long in the lab kitchen microwave?"

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: Sat Comm

If the hookers are big enough to play rugby on, count me out.

Coat...

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Re: Trust but verify...

A slight aside...

Colleague at a job a long time ago received a mistakenly addressed email from one brother to another, expressing in colourful terms the older brother's dismay at finding out his sibling had come out as gay.

When he replied, to let the sender know the missive hadn't reached its intended recipient, their firm's email filter rejected it due to the level of profanity contained, none of which my colleague had added to...

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: In before someone says Rust would have enforced memory safety

Nice thought. Except Rust appeared in 2010, this story is set in the 1990s.

And the winning entry for the Jumper of Windows Past is...

I got a Windows Advent calendar. Opened one window, all the others opened by themselves.

And a few minutes later they *all* closed of their own accord.

<with thanks to Gary Delaney - https://www.garydelaney.com/ )

Log4j and Omicron: Brothers in harm, mothers of invention

Re: log4j

Here's a three liner:

1. Identify systems in your environment - and prioritise Internet-facing ones - which are using Log4j.

2. Check traffic to and from those systems, and allow only communication to and from trusted IPs

3. Block outbound connectivity to LDAP and RMI-IIOP services (port if you have to, application-based of you have a new-fangled application-aware firewall).

4. (Spanish inquisition time...) Change Log4j config to mitigate the threat, or upgrade...

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Re: Tesla

Close...

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: The engineer's careers

They may not, but it's happened at least twice ( US, 2018, from the report ) so two sets of engineers...

Others may make the same mistake in the future if the little plastic insert isn't fitted by the date required by the AD.

Hubble Space Telescope may now depend on a computer that hasn't booted since 2009

Re: Shuttle!

Is that because it'll reflect the heat of re-entry?

Mine's the one with the book about reentry physics with a missing page

Poltergeist attack could leave autonomous vehicles blind to obstacles – or haunt them with new ones

Re: Automation

"many incidents weren’t the result of lack of braking capacity in the vehicle, but lack of brake pressure applied."

The overwhelming majority of car crashes are the results of decisions or the lack of well before the brake pedal is applied, however firmly.

The only way the human driver will be given an incentive to improve their own skills is if it saves them money - which in essence is insurance companies giving discounts for decent ongoing driver training a la RoSPA ROADAR or IAM schemes (these are int he UK, I'm not aware of anything else similar elsewhere in the world).

I can see the logic - sort of - from the car manufacturers' points of view. "Let's eliminate the things which cause cars to come together, like not braking in time, crossing lanes, not looking properly into blind spots". The problem is that those speccing the systems to do this are probably in the same boat as other drivers in that the passed their tests many years ago and haven't had any standards checks since then.

I say this as someone who's a tutor for the local RoADAR group and sees a ex-police advanced driving instructor at least yearly to make sure I'm still up to scratch. And before anyone passes me a pork pie hat and some string back gloves you'd need to drive with me first to see if that particular stereotype fits.

Stealthy Linux backdoor malware spotted after three years of minding your business

Re: Pretty stupid port number

You wouldn't. The C2C server is listening on port 443, but *not* using SSL/TLS to encrypt services.

The backdoored machine may be running a web server but it's talking *outbound*. Destination port = 443, source port on the victim something completely different.

Known software issue grounds Ingenuity Mars copter as it attempted fourth flight

Re: Did....

OTA ? Through a vacuum?

</pedant>

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Therium funded the litigation against the Post Office, and its probable that without that, the good work of all involved in bringing it to light wouldn't have succeeded as it has.

Therium fund stuff like this for a profit, so it's them who got the bulk of the initial settlement. I'm not keen on it, but I'm happy to be enlightened on any other way the appeal could have been funded.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476622/Why-subpostmasters-are-calling-on-the-government-to-pay-Horizon-trial-costs

iPhone XR caught fire after getting trapped in airline passenger's seat

Re: Clumsy while sleeping

From the AAIB report - "One of the cabin crew asked the passenger if she could stow the bedding whilst the passenger was away from her seat", as the aircraft was in the last 40 minutes of the flight, starting to secure the aircraft for the descent and landing.

Brit authorities could legally do an FBI and scrub malware from compromised boxen without your knowledge

Not quite. They're prosecuted for burglary, which has no monetary value attached to it.

And the monetary losses are, from my dim and distant memories as a probationer constable in the late 80s, subsidiary to the emotional distress caused by knowing a complete stranger has had free rein in your castle.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/theft-act-offences#:~:text=Section%209%20of%20the%201968,to%20inflict%20grievous%20bodily%20harm refers.