But are you a Lady?
Posts by Bandikoto
85 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2017
World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads
Clustered Pi Picos made to run original Transputer code
As Zoom bans spread over privacy concerns, vid-conf biz taps up Stamos as firefighter in totally-not-a-PR-stunt move
<blockquote>Overall, who really cares if a 5th form remote learning session might have some information gathered that theoretically be shared to the Chinese?</blockquote>
Sure, information gathered may seem worthless now, but you have various indicators of wealth and status as well as raw data for building psychological profiles of the persons in the "classroom" that may well prove invaluable at a later date.
Politicos freak out over facial recognition and deepfakes, Apple saves Drive.AI, and more
Re: Minor details
Shot-tracking systems are decades old. The first one I heard of used software that processed earthquake data gathered from pole-top microphones to pin-point the shots. https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1996/0096/report.pdf Of course, this public-domain work, bought and paid for by the American public has been privatized and there's a silly valley firm selling it. https://www.policeone.com/police-products/communications/articles/1800129-More-police-using-gunfire-detection-system/
FedEx fed up playing box cop, sues Uncle Sam to make it stop: 'We do transportation, not law enforcement'
Look, we've tried, but we just can't write this headline without saying boffins have probed Uranus's cold ring
Oracle's legal woes deepen: Big Red sued (again) for age and medical 'discrimination'
Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router
Cool story, brew: Utah karaoke crooners receive cold, refreshing shock as alcohol authority refuses beer licence
Sinister secret backdoor found in networking gear perfect for government espionage: The Chinese are – oh no, wait, it's Cisco again

Incompetence or Stupidity?
Given those who got rewarded at Cisco, it could be either.
Cisco has had secret backdoors into the gear for decades now. Every time one is found, they say "Oopsie daisy!" and issue a patch.
I doubt that any of the Cisco spin-offs are any better, given how incestuous those companies are.
Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper
Re: "But I never experimented on a live system again"
In CP/M and MP/M (which this likely was), numbers 0 through 15 would be user numbers. The files would all go in the same directory area, but you could hide files from others by changing the user number. User zero is where you'd likely find your executables.
Still, with the choice given, HDD numbers would make for a good guess.
How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank
Maybe not 1996 PCs, but 1987 Macs did it well
It was 1987 and although the start-up I was working for had just flamed out, the one client we had committed to deploying our system was building their new trading floor and were not about to fill it with Quotron terminals. Instead, we deployed a fleet of Macs, both color and black&white, both ethernet and localtalk, to handle the traffic. I did the transport layer, both server-side and client-side. Riding up on the train one day, inspiration hit me and I came up with a semi-reliable (reliable enough, as measurements proved) UDP broadcast protocol that solved our "TCP can't possibly handle hundreds of machines" - at that point, with the Mac II being the most powerful machine we could buy. And yes, it handled Black Monday later that year with aplomb.
Fear the Reaper: Man hospitalised after eating red hot chilli pepper

Shades of seventies/eighties tales about that suspect rock and roll guy
Leave it to a British publication to make such a serious error about American Rock and Roll. "Don't Fear the Reaper" is by Blue Öyster Cult, not the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Also, semen, even in massive amounts, doesn't cause stomach upset.
2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century
Re: Ah well, back to my PowerPoint slides
>The color-fest at the end?
That's not quite the end. That's the "intergalactic switching-station", assuming that I'm remembering the chapter title from the book correctly. <spoilers>From there, we have Bowman arriving at the habitat the monolith aliens had provided for him. He meets his aged self, not understanding that the aliens are four (more?) dimensional, settles into a routine eating the weird blue cheese stuff in familiar containers and watching years-old television broadcasts, finally he reaches the end of his life and becomes/is reborn as the Star Child. As the Star Child, he returns to Terra, visits his mother, and prevents the various blocs from setting off their orbital nuke - rather, he (if he can be said to have a gender, still) prevents them from having any actual effect.</spoilers>
I saw it as a wee lad, during a re-release, on the biggest screen in a large city. Probably in late '71 or '72, as we also saw The Andromeda Strain and THX 1138 projected in the classroom from 16mm prints.
Microsoft's Windows 7 Meltdown fixes from January, February made PCs MORE INSECURE
Apple Macs, iThings, smart watches choke on tiny Indian delicacy
Ugly, perfect ten-rated bug hits Cisco VPNs
Re: Security appliances memory errors and programming bugs
So, did the "best and brightest from the best universities" programmer fail to NULL out the pointer after he or she freed it or were there multiple copies of the pointer to the memory region in the code? Both are no-nos that were supposed to be banned in IOS more than a decade ago. Also, looks as if someone removed the "zero out a freed memory buffer" code - probably because it was "slow". Let's not forget the old "freeing freed memory" check that was in IOS.
But I know nothing.
"Our software is our crown jewels." -John Chambers
OK, Google: Why does Chromecast clobber Wi-Fi connections?
It's typical "I've been taught to code, but I don't actually understand computers and the culture/environment in which they're used". People who have no idea of the limitations of where their code will be executed — i.e. why it's unreasonable to bang out N packets all at once, rather than feed them to a rate-moderated emitter, or in this case more than N (for small values of N) is unreasonable to stuff into your for(register x=0;x<N;x++) resend_MDNS_announcement(last_index_sent+x); /* spot the errors */ loop.
What is 2,000,000 packets blasted out on your typical 802.11g network in a typical crowded urban environment, anyway?
Why, indeed, is it unreasonable for any one subsystem to be able to allocate all of the available RAM for its own use and then busy-wait while it's waiting for those 2,000,000 packets to be stuffed out the radio?
Drone crashes after operator failed to spot extra building site crane
Well, it was flying a pre-programmed flight, so it was autonomous, just not self-aware. Time for 3DS to add collision-avoidance cameras like DJI has done? Then again:
https://forum.dji.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=93915
With a helpful screen-shot of its T&Cs. This flying ace managed to fly his very expensive drone into a power line. DJI was helpful until he threatened them with his advocate.
VMware: New year, new job – you're fired
Huawei spied, US federal jury finds
FCC douses America's net neutrality in gas, tosses over a lit match
Programming bootcamp compiles $375,000 check after triggering New York AG's error handlers
Re: So...
Hush you. Without this constant stream of "programmers"/"coders", how can they effectively suppress wages fight the tech worker shortage?
I ran into some of these types here in Flyover Country, and they were claiming that their grads got jobs that paid what turns out to be half the going rate here, which is less than what the imports get, even.
Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049
Re: a flurry of branching narratives created to feed the attention span of modern Hollywood
Which is why you have the extended stupid exploding rubber doll sequences in "Total Recall". Well, that and the three-boobed mutie. (Hm, one of each hand, the other for...?) It gives the mouth-breathers something to enjoy while the rest of us are watching the story.
SanDisk man tipped off his family to Fusion-io fusion, bagged $220k in share snatch – says SEC
Ex-sperm-inate! Sam the sex-droid 'heavily soiled' in randy nerd rampage
Weird white dwarf pulsar baffles boffins as its pulsating pattern changes over decades
Re: a teaspoon ... would weigh 15 tons.
> if you use a balance calibrated for earth
Well, actually, if you use a balance and always use the same standard weights (masses - yes yes we know they're different things, especially outside of a 1g field) on one side of the balance, it will register the same weight/mass no matter where you use it.
Your bog-standard springy scale, on the other hand, is another story entirely.
Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed
Calm down, internet. Elon's Musk-see SpaceX spacesuit is a bit generic
Apple bag-search class action sueball moves to Cali supreme court
Reminds me a lot of my time at ChipzillaWannabe in the eighties
ChipzillaWannabe back in the eighties had a fellow who was former (retired?) Army Intelligence as their head of security. His trusted lieutenant was former (retired?) Army Counter-Intelligence. They had instituted bag-checks (but NOT purse-checks) as a counter-measure against theft. This included locked bank-type bags for moving chips from facility to facility, etc. Their claim was that it saved the company millions of dollars (back then, a million bucks actually bought you something) so it was justified. Of course, my co-workers and I found out about it when they wanted to start searching our luggable computer (a Network General Sniffer™), our TDR, tools, our ladders (for getting up to the big yellow hose), spare keyboards/terminals, and of course our personal backpacks. (Remember the days before everyone carried a backpack?) Their measures slowed us down at every building entrance and exit, and in the fashion of the time, the buildings were wide-spread across the valley because there was minimal traffic. Network outages were measured in minutes, so this rankled, as their measures greatly cut into our performance stats. Claiming my backpack as a purse didn't prevent the unnecessary fondling.
It all blew up in their faces when they decided to accuse our techs of time card fraud, which was proven by your correspondent to be false, as I dug through the terminal concentrator logs and showed that they were working when they said they were. Not to be one-upped, Security claimed that they were still lying because they supposedly had to first enter our building, and then travel to the building they were performing the day's tasks in.
And the chips that their anti-theft measures prevented from being stolen? Those were being manufactured overseas. Any chips we had in our building were engineering samples and in fact, our main workplace was a design (and IT) center. If I remember correctly, they had one fab there in Sunnydale, which might have been for making the 20% faster than Chipzilla's CPU chips, thus the entire brouhaha an exercise in Wang-waggling by the ex-military types.
Foot-long £1 sausage roll arrives
Cancel your summer trip to nearby Proxima b. No chance of life, room service, say boffins
Crims snatch 5.5 million social security numbers from Kansas govt box
And who is REQUIRED to make an account and post up their resume/job history there?
It's a condition of getting Kansas unemployment benefits that you make an account and put all of your info up there. So yes, 25% of Kansans have been unemployed in that period. (n.b. The real figure is slightly smaller, as it's all persons who live or have worked in Kansas and want to collect unemployment benefits from the state.)
Breathless F-35 pilots to get oxygen boost via algorithm tweak
SPO2 meters are under $20 now - why isn't the aircraft recording/monitoring the pilot's vitals?
They should at least be monitoring heartbeat, respiration, and SPO2, if not galvanic skin response. (For a proper measure of performance, some kind of pucker factor probe is indicated.) This is old tech now and should be trivial to fit into the system. WTFUSAF?
NASA whistles up electron noise from the Van Allen belt
Elon Musk reveals Mars colony rocket capable of bringing pizza joints to the red planet
Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs
Re: tabs take fewer keystrokes
>Unless your still programming in vi, I don't think you are actually typing these spaces. Of the 2 modern(ish) IDEs I've used this week, pressing enter will indent automatically to the same point on the next line.
And this is why I hate looking over someone's shoulder as they attempt to use vi. Vi has had autoident since I first encountered it in 1981. ":set autoindent" and be done. Also of use: ":set shiftwidth=MYPREFERREDINDENT" and the ^T and ^D insert mode commands, which head out to your next indent and unindent for you, respectively. In command mode, you would enjoy <MOTION and >MOTION, often used as << and >>.
Crapness of WannaCrypt coding offers hope for ransomware victims
German robo-pastor preaches the GNU Testament
Cisco cuts 250 jobs in San Jose, has 850 more pink slips to hand out
Yet the cutbacks aren't small to the people being showed the door.
How times change. The Cisco considered itself a software company (thus sayeth Rev. Chambers) in the early aughties shortly before Huawei was caught selling hardware running IOS, The Cisco's self-described "Crown Jewel" of software.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/24/cisco_sues_huawei_over_ip/
NASA duo plan Tuesday ISS spacewalk to replace the mux that sux
Code-thief pleads guilty to pinching file system to sell to China
No nudity please, we're killing ourselves: Advice to Facebook mods leaks
Do you remember all those religious nutters from the seventeenth century?
Your ancestors sent some of my ancestors to the Colonies, starting in 1620, because they were religious nutters. The Puritans might have changed - the UCC is now one of the most liberal Christian churches in America - but their blue-nosed offspring live on.