Posts by VicMortimer

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

Re: Honestly I'm bilingual

We do use tons. 1 ton = 2000 pounds.

Re: Honestly

Still more than an American pint.

I have a "ALL big deployments happen on a Friday, unless it's a holiday, then they happen on Thursday instead" rule. Holiday weekends are preferred.

Then I schedule no non-emergency work for the following Tuesday - Thursday, with Monday being a planned "just in case troubleshooting" day. I get the weekend to handle the new stuff without annoying users bugging me, and time off when annoying users are around.

I love scheduling anything big for holidays. Gives me time to fix things. The 3rd is PERFECT this year, can pull the trigger late afternoon on the 3rd, don't have to have everything back to 100% until Monday the 7th.

I'd totally do it this year - but no big projects ready.

UK students flock to AI to help them cheat

Re: “um…?”

Had to look that up. Doesn't correspond to anything in particular on this side of the pond.

Teens used encrypted chats to recruit for 'violence as a service' murder ring, Europol says

Silly kids. Don't they know all hitmen on the internet are feds?

Apple fixes zero-click exploit underpinning Paragon spyware attacks

Re: Pwnd?

As noted in the article:

"Victims of spyware are advised to contact organizations such as Access Now, Amnesty International's Security Lab, and The Citizen Lab, which have teams dedicated to helping individuals work through their cases."

Is it running current iOS, or an older known-vulnerable version? If it's current, they'll be VERY interested in taking a look at it.

RIP: Bill Atkinson, co-creator of Apple Lisa and Mac

Re: Watching the Old Guard fade...

"[I]magine Hypercard as the whole OS".

No. No I will not. HyperCard is an absolutely brilliant program, incredibly useful, easy to use, let almost anybody create really nifty stuff. But it was NEVER going to be enough to be an entire operating system. Computers can do a lot of things, creating HyperCard Stacks was only ever going to be one part of that. And that goes to my next issue with what you're saying....

"They're so insanely hard to program only autistic geniuses can do it."

And that's inherent to a complex system. At some level, computer development is always going to be hard, because it's inherently hard. You're making a VERY complex machine do things. The autistic genius can abstract that out to get to a program like HyperCard, but at the lowest level it's always going to be taken down to the level of individual transistors being told to turn on or off. That can't be worked around by anything that could conceivably be called a digital computer. And current reality is that it has been abstracted out quite a bit, nobody is programming with machine code by flipping front panel switches any more, operating systems aren't written in machine code or even assembly any more. But it's inherent that the simpler you make the front end, the more limited it inherently has to be. Don't get me wrong, I do still bemoan modern systems not including BASIC front and center any more, but even that's a pretty clear demonstration of what I'm saying, you could do a lot of things in BASIC, but you were going to be doing some PEEKs and POKEs to do things that weren't so easy to abstract.

I won't argue with you about the garbage that is LLM. The whole concept is a disaster, and I keep hoping the idiotic bubble will pop soon. I don't like being lied to by machines, and as far as I can tell there's never going to be a way to fix that with an LLM, it's inherent to the concept. They're not going to do good things for code. But that people are doing it anyway instead of 'fixing' the way computers work is not because

But C is what it is because it has to talk to the machine at a fairly low level. And I'm not saying that as one of the autistic geniuses, I don't particularly enjoy programming so I do very, very little of it, and none at all in C.

Where I very much do agree with you is that there should be an easy way to do what HyperCard did that comes with every computer. I'm still angry with Mr. Berners-Lee for only implementing the user-facing half of HyperCard and making a royal mess of the back end. It should have been nearly as easy to create a web page as it is to view one, and that should have been there from the beginning, not left for others to do, and particularly not left for MicroSloth to try to co-opt with their horrid FrontPage abomination. HTML was a mess from the beginning, which is why I was very much in the Gopher camp.

Aussie businesses now have to fess up when they pay off ransomware crims

Re: Collect data, then decide the next move

Nope. We don't need more information. We already know that ransomware will never be stopped until paying becomes a crime.

Nowhere NEAR enough. CRIMINALIZE PAYING!

Paying ransom shouldn't just be reported, it should be a crime. CEOs need to go to prison if they pay.

It's the ONLY way ransomware is going to be stopped. End the financial incentive.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

It's so funny how we used to consider 19" a really large monitor. I was so happy when they got cheap enough I could afford one.

And now the only time I install something smaller than 27" is when it needs to fit a small space, and they're light enough to pick up with one hand.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

The readership of this site is, the general population is very definitely not.

Adapting does not always happen, even among experts. I lost a client last year, he was a computer science professor. He did not understand modern computers well at all. I have no doubt that he understood the inner workings of a PDP-7 better than I ever will. But at 92, he just couldn't quite get macOS. He was still giving it his best effort, and really didn't seem to have the kind of cognitive decline that I see in so many people younger than he was, but compared to his previous experience a GUI just never really worked for him. Yeah, he was older than a boomer, but it does carry over.

My experience with boomers has been that skill level varies from "expert" to "barely learned enough to know what to click to keep a job".

My experience with millennials has been about the same, though they usually are better at using a phone.

UK government overrules local council’s datacenter refusal on Green Belt land

Re: from????

Elmo has built a data center near Memphis that has "portable" gas turbine generators running 24/7. They've asked TVA for power, but he's not managed to bully the TVA board into approving it. And because the generators are "portable" they don't have emission controls. It's literally putting people in the hospital with the pollution.

‘How come I can’t breathe?': Musk’s data company draws a backlash in Memphis

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Re: I wonder what it is

BSOD wrong color?

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

Re: I'm not a statistician, but....

What's that in Freedom Units? (In this case, that's probably going to be in Freedom Fries per Rhode Island.)

Artist formerly known as Indian Business Machines pledges $150B for US ops, R&D

Pretty sure they made crappy computers in the '80s. Don't think they've done anything since.

Fedora 42 has the Answer, but Ubuntu's Plucky Puffin isn't far behind

I quit dual booting anything years ago. I've got enough computers that it's just not necessary, and since "old" computers that aren't really very old at all can be had for free, playing with something just means grabbing a spare laptop from the stack - or firing up one of the spare servers in the rack, or just spinning up a new VM on one of the active servers.

That reminds me, I should stick a Haiku VM on one of the servers. The Proxmox one isn't doing much yet, so probably there.

And time to update the Xubuntu play laptops I guess.

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

I'm pretty happy with my ecobee. And you can lock out the dumb, mine is set to not allow temps below 62 or above 70.

Re: Bollocks

I've been pretty happy with my ecobee. Can control directly from Apple HomeKit, so less being treated as the product.

HVAC companies are slime. Lots of price gouging by the manufacturers, and the service companies are almost all run by crooks. Throw in the EPA screwing around with refrigerants all the time, and it's a mess. Just go to hydrocarbon refrigerants already, they work well and there's not enough in the system to be a serious fire or explosion risk. (I know a guy who charged his car system with grill gas after R12 got stupid expensive - it's mostly just propane. Worked better than R12.)

Re: Bollocks

Generally yes, it's typically 24VAC for HVAC systems. Kinda dumb these days, ethernet would make more sense, but at least manufacturers can't do stupid proprietary shit with protocols on 24V. But that means "smart" thermostats don't have the ability to control variable speed compressors and blowers directly. About the most granular it gets is 2 stage cooling and 3 stage heating.

Not that I'd hesitate to play with 240V wiring, I did wire up my heat pump and EVSE, no point in paying an electrician when I can do it myself. But yeah, scares some people.

Re: Bollocks

Why would you NOT want zoned control?

It's MUCH easier to live in a house that's got every room at the appropriate temperature.

But NONE of that is inherent to heat pumps, or even related to heat pumps. Zoned gas systems are very much possible, a friend did that recently with his underfloor system, automated valves at the manifold, on demand tankless gas 'boiler' (hot water, never boils anything). Kind of silly if you ask me, i'd have ditched the hot water and put mini-split HVAC units in every room, but that's what he decided to do. He's still using window AC units.

But as far as heat pumps? Nah, utterly unrelated to the fancy controls. Had heat pump HVAC at my parents house in the early '70s. Bimetallic strip and mercury tilt switch thermostat controlling the thing.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: Years and years

Must Consult Someone Experienced.

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Re: Small nuclear reactor? That's all very well, but...

One problem you run into with road construction is that soil takes time to settle. Sure, you can compact and speed up the process somewhat, but no matter what if you build too quickly your road is going to fall apart. It varies with different soil types, but there's always going to be some "walk away and leave it alone" time with road construction, because you're virtually never taking the road subsurface all the way down to bedrock.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

I see the problem here.

The fool bought a Turdla. And bought it after we all knew how shit they are, and how much even shittier the CEO is.

I'm all in favor of electric cars, this should have been the year new ICE vehicle production was banned worldwide. But Turdlas are just plain garbage.

Heat can make Li-Ion batteries explode. Or restore their capacity, say Chinese boffins

Re: OK I have some swollen LiPo packs

Maybe you should just put that fire over there with the rest of the fire.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Re: It could...

Meanwhile, my razor from the mid '90s is working fine. I had to change the batteries once, and the cutter heads (which they still make) twice.

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

Thought y'all supposedly voted the right wing nutjobs out?

I'm starting to think this Starmer fellow is yet another Blair. What do you call the equivalent of a DINO over there, a LINO?

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: Surface Hub reboot?

They're better at hardware than they are at operating systems or word processors. Admittedly that's not saying much, but they're still better at it.

Some of their mice have actually been decent. I seem to remember a Z80 card for the Apple ][ that worked. Everything else they've ever done is utter shit.

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

Re: Are you sure?….

Nah, that's useless. To have it work, you'd have to let the fridge know what's in it, and I don't know about you, but I'm NOT gonna punch in everything I come back from the grocery with, I ignore the pointless dates on food (I have a working nose), and I'm always tired and grumpy when I get back from the grocery anyway, I'm annoyed enough at having to put the stuff in the fridge.

And I'm also not gonna punch in what I've taken out. Just way too much of a pain.

Oh, and the fridge doesn't need internet for that anyway, there's a computer just a few steps away from the fridge, if I wanted a food database I'd already have one.

Re: Are you sure?….

I can easily think of a use case - failure conditions.

"Oops, I just flooded the floor, might wanna grab the shop vac!"

"I'm dangerously warm, might want to move your food to the aux fridge now before it spoils!"

Sure, both could be handled by a separate water detector or temp probe, but why not just build them in?

Re: Introspection deficit

sudo spctl --master-disable

In macOS 15 Apple's stupid Gatekeeper pissed me off enough to finally disable it. Yes, I know I downloaded an unsigned app, and I fully intend to run it, DO NOT offer to put it in the trash, and forcing me to go a couple layers deep into System Settings to run an unsigned app was a step too far.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

Re: BSODs are still a ting?

Not running Windoze will do that for you.

Re: " maybe the “B” in “BSoD” could change from Blue to Black"

That's just how you keep Windoze from crashing.

Re: Hey Microsoft

I do too. They're powered off and sitting in the "to be recycled when I get around to it" pile.

Not sure what the problem is. As long as you don't boot it, Windoze doesn't crash at all.

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Re: Smells like panic

Empathy has been officially designated a sin by right ring evangelical christian preachers.

Re: AI trained "exclusively" on X

Nothing. If what you want is a neo-Nazi LLM.

Pretty sure that's what the elongated muskrat wants.

Feds drop bomb on Multiplan in legal war over healthcare 'price-fixing' algorithms

Re: Multiplan?

Figures they'd be using CP/M. I had the Apple ][ version.

GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility

Re: Gnome3.....Gnome4..........Ughhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Ok, I'll bite. Why Mate over Xfce?

Re: Gnome3.....Gnome4..........Ughhhhhhhhhh!!!!

Yeah, they probably count my installs - which were of course downloaded from xubuntu.org, because Gnome is horrible now. Even M$ learned that trying to make a desktop look like a halfassed tablet is a bad idea - but Gnome never did.

CDE was better. A VT220 was better.

(It's been a while since I actually used CDE, so I just looked at the screenshot on the Wikipedia page. And WOW! That's so nice and usable compared to Gnome post-2.)

Security shop pwns ransomware gang, passes insider info to authorities

Spinning wheels

NOTHING is going to stop ransomware if paying ransom continues to be legal.

If CEOs go to prison for paying, ransomware will end very quickly.

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

ShutUp

Specifically O&O ShutUp is really helpful these days if you're having to deal with Windoze.

Copooplot is only one of the things it'll disable. And it's freeware.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Nah. It's "one out of three ain't bad". And the one is always "technical nightmares".

Nope.

They have NEVER released a good OS. The best they've ever accomplished is "barely functional" and Stockholm syndroming you into thinking that was "good".

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

And never will be. Outsuck has been the WORST email client for decades, it's never going to get better.

Just use something, anything else. Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Alpine, find an old copy of Eudora, ANYTHING but Outsuck.

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: Makes sense

That's ALL versions of Windoze.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Re: Much as I’d like, not for me, not this lifetime

No need to run it on an actual Pi. Mine are running in VMs on actual servers. No SD cards or USB power bricks involved.

Re: DHCP

Tried that, had issues with DHCP on the pi-holes. Nope, separate DHCP server it is.

No, my old age brain fog won't let me remember exactly why it kept breaking, but it kept taking the network down.

My pi-holes are VMs on 2 separate servers so I've got redundant DNS on my network. And because I caught my ISP hijacking port 53, they're running a proxy that does DNS over HTTPS to get clean lookups.

The Badbox botnet is back, powered by up to a million backdoored Androids

Re: My Great Idea / No, that Probably Won't Work

And we're actively working to make corporate greed like that illegal.

Stop trying to excuse Apple's anti-consumer behavior.

Microsoft: So what if it costs 4X as much to run Windows Server in AWS, Alibaba, and Google?

If it isn't already, it definitely should be.