Posts by MrBanana

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Re: Calculators

I was at that age in school where the transition from slide rules & log tables was made to electronic calculators. They were banned at first, but then gradually accepted as their cost went down and availability increased. What struck me at the time, even as a child, was the rush to accept them as the ultimate truth, without any consideration for accuracy. And by accuracy, I mean the ability of the user to operate the thing correctly, and paying heed to a result that looks a little suspicious. How many miles in 346 kilometres? - click, click, click, writes down 5536. No alarm bells ringing that the calculation might be backwards, or the decimal point is having a day off? One of the greatest skills I learned as school was the ability to make a rough, ball park approximation to the answer, before totally trusting a calculator.

M&S takes systems offline as 'cyber incident' lingers

Ground floor: Perfumery, Stationery and Leather Goods, Wigs and Haberdashery. Going up...

"The clothing, homeware, and produce purveyor..."

I think you meant knickers & bras, scented candles, and Prosecco ...

I only buy one of the above from M&S.

Fujitsu promised to sit out UK deals ... then Northern Ireland called with £125M

I've been in a couple of situations where the legal boundary declarations where for two parcels of land for a single property going back many years. Easy to sort out? No, not really. It is simply easier to do nothing, and pass it all along to the next owner. No need to worry about your conveyancer asking questions, they will claim to know nothing about property boundaries and just get you to confirm the current plans. Saves them the hassle and legal responsibility.

America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside

Boycotting the soft power of the current American "music" output is fine by me.

Re: Surely

Totally agree. They're not imbeciles, or otherwise the majority who voted for them must also be imbeciles - that can't be right. What have I missed?

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Re: We had an award

...hit <RETURN>

(should be instant): ?

(5 seconds): That's odd

(30 seconds): Oh, wait

(30.1 seconds): Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck

(31 seconds): ESC ESC ESC ESC ^C ^C ^C ^C ^\ ^\ ^\ ^\

(5 minutes): Realisation of impending doom

(6 minutes): Table locked because of transaction rollback

(7 minutes): Pull fire alarm and exit building

Signalgate chats vanish from CIA chief phone

Fully secure systems for remote meetings are already in place, no need to meetup directly. The fact was that they couldn't be arsed to go to a secure location, so just used their phone instead. Signal is secure as far as end to end encryption goes, but it cannot account for the halfwits sending the messages. Or in this case, the halfwits sending the messages and the journalist receiving them.

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

Tesla isn't a car maker

Although Tesla has some clever battery and motor technology, their ability to design, screw together the nuts and bolts that make up an actual car, and provide service maintenance seems woeful. I'd much rather have an EV from mainstream manufacturer, even if the battery technology is imperfect, than have a Tesla that will fall apart mechanically in 3 years.

Re: "because the warranty had expired and the recall didn't apply to him."

Nope, "fair wear and tear" for a suspension component would be a bad bearing, a worn bushing, or a leaking shock. Having the suspension catastrophically fail, with the fault already subject to a safety recall, is a problem for Tesla. Not the poor sod who bought the thing. It isn't a warranty issue. I had a safety recall in 2018 for my 2007 Subaru when I was the third owner, and it was well out of warranty.

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: US companies did this to us

It's not so much couldn't be bothered, but given the choice of the woeful campaign put out by the Democrats, and the shit show that was Trump, they said no thanks to both. I'm guessing that a good deal of them are regretting their decision now, and would have held their nose and gone out to vote.

Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

Italy can be picky. Sicily especially so when entering a bank. A double door lock system with a metal detector. It was January, and I had to basically strip almost down to my underwear to get it.

Yes, exactly that. I now carry other ID documents that can be used instead of a passport.

Got a customer call, problem with their (very large) database. After a brief chat, I was sure that it was a hardware issue. No, they insisted, it's your software and you need to get someone on site right now. I'd not been to Venice before, arrived early the next day, chilly in December. Got on site, and I am gleefully shown the error returned from the broken SQL query. As it came from the client software it was clearly, to them, a database problem. I asked to go to the machine room, and watched the massive wall of disk drives (a huge 4GB each) light up when the large parallel query was started set off. All the disk lights were flashing green, except one, showing hard red. It took another day to get the hardware engineer out. They refused to give me my passport back until the problem was fixed so I had to stay. Did I say a couple of days in Venice, on a customer's expense account, is very pleasant in the Winter sunshine?

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Re: Whack-a-mole

It's not just 3rd party T&Cs. Your local IT support can scupper it as well. At IBM, no sane person would want to use Sametime chat, especially Linux users. Piudgin had a sametime plugin that worked really well. Except the IBM Sametime infrastructure was very fragile, users with non-Sametime clients were blamed, scapegoated, and blacklisted. Not that it did any good - pushing users off Pidgin to force them to use the Sametime client just further overloaded the network. Not that they ever admitted it.

The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive

Brian Eno?

Really, Brian Eno? He's taken a step sideways in my estimation.

Re: Does the library feature

But it's not the main theme that is important, it's all in the Duff, Duff, Duff....

Trump thinks we can make iPhones in the US just like China. Yeah, right

Don't forget that one of the screws has to be very slightly shorter than the others so an unwitting repairer is likely to screw up (ha!) and insert a longer screw in the wrong place, shorting out the PCB.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Misread title

I saw that as "Microsoft lists seven habits of 11 highly effective Windows users" and I wondered where they found so many users.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

I'll see your 50%, and raise you 34%.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Not an Age Thing

The AI processing the CVs would be in conflict with the AI who wrote the job spec, and had hallucinated that it required 10 years experience of a product that has only existed for 8 years.

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

One job I had as a tech consultant was to visit customers with a salesman, sometimes for a presentation, other times just to ensure my colleague didn't say anything we couldn't deliver. I was quickly told off by the sales guys for wearing business outfits. Don't go as so far as shorts and sandals, but look like a technical person, not like us idiots wearing suits.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Not really a fix, but magnetic fields were involved

When a student in the 1980s my mother gave me an old industrial microwave for the student digs we had, located over a hairdressers. It was noisy as hell and not very efficient. One day I was chatting to the hairdresser and he was saying how strange it was that around about dinner time, he'd be watching TV and it would get all messed up for about 3-4 minutes at a time. Hmmm... I said, interesting. After that revelation we stopped being in the same room as "the bollock frier" without holding the wok over our privates. I do not have any children.

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: How?

The implication from the article is that he was a member of the project team directly involved with development of the software. So, in those last couple of days before leaving, would still have access to it. I assume he got caught out by monitoring software that looks for people downloading suspicious amounts of sensitive code. Even if you do have permission to access it, copying it out of a secure environment would fire an alert.

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: Very Curious

I loved my DEC Alpha workstation, but it ran the Unix based OSF/1. Really fast for the time - when you had a true 64 bit complier, and code that could make the most of it.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Re: If only..

The next phase is for someone to post an Unsubscribe message (to the whole list), followed by many people latching on to this also sending an Unsubscribe message (to the whole list). This will trigger phase three which is a group of less stupid people pointing out (to the whole list) that you can't unsubscribe from this list. A mail admin may try to send a message (to the whole list) to just STOP, but the Reply all frenzy will continue until the mail server fails on its own, or the admin shuts it down.

The best example I've encountered was "Has anyone seen Bob's chair" accidentally sent to a European email alias instead of the single office it was meant for. Lot's of "Who's Bob", then the "What's it look like" possibly from people trying to be helpful. When the "I think I seen it over by the lift" messages start to come in from the regional offices, you know all is lost.

Re: Who, me?

I don't know what the stats are, but there was a decrease in reported back pain problems which coincided with the almost universal switch from suitcases to wheelie bags.

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

For the blind

My mother is blind and could probably benefit from a voice activated assistant. But Alexa isn't it. Not so much for her security, mostly to spare anyone listening in to the GBNews fuelled rantings of a 92 year old.

Re: Not uploading

I just went with "never letting anyone in the house".

ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China

Pssst.. Do you want some secondhand EUV tech?

ASML seem to have sidestepped export restrictions on new kit by refurbing old equipment. A bit like webuyanyphotolithographyequipment.com.

Will it fly? With the Orange Toddler in the Whitehouse, who knows where tariffs, sanctions, or anything else will be headed - it is only Monday.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Re: Google free

I just installed LineageOS on my ancient OnePlus 5, because the ABN AMRO app stopped working with the old Android version. Nationwide, Halifax all work fine with Android 15. And you can choose not to install MindTheGapps if you want the most vanilla experience.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: This is the reason

Midnight commander is the devils work. It always gets nuked from any system I install.

Re: Jet lagged tired

I had an employer who didn't understand this. Travel cattle class for 10 hrs, across multiple timezones, and be expected to go straight from the airport to the customer site. Nope. Only in case of emergency, and even then, triple check everything you do, with customer sign off. And have good deodorant.

Re: - "-r" (Thankfully!)

If a Xenix system was not very busy, then it could soldier on under this kind of abuse for quite a while. Kudos for getting it all back without serious damage.

Re: Keeping a backup...

Sometimes I do this deliberately. Not exactly delete all the changes I made, just treat them as a learning experience and start again from scratch. Maybe keeping a header file of useful data structures. You can often redo 5 days of work from a clean sheet in just a day, with prior knowledge. You end up with better code than spending 6 days on something.

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

Not computer related NSFS

While in 6th form at school we had a presentation by the father of one pupil, he was an army surgeon who had been on a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. He had to deal with death and injury from both sides of the conflict had some very interesting and amusing stories to tell, and a small slide show of some of things he had to deal with. He saved the most grisly for last - a picture of an IRA bomber who was sat on a bus when the device he had on his lap exploded unexpectedly. There was most of a top half, and most of a bottom half, of a body. Just nothing much in the middle, very graphic and disturbing. The officer took his slide carousel and left. The next group in that classroom were 1st year geography, being given a slide show on cloud formations. Yeah, that last slide from the previous show, was still in the machine and now unwittingly the first slide for the wide eyed 11 year olds.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Re: Draconian laws and trust

Right now in the UK, Christian preachers are keeping their heads down, and saying very little when asked about moral judgment.

Re: What's Good For the Crooks Is Slop For The Citizens

I naively started reading Atlas Shrugged as fiction. Then it dawned on me that it was being used by millionaires as a primer for business dealings, and politicians as a blueprint for society. Burn after reading.

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Lost in translation

I've never used or even seen a non-english language

For most computer languages the grammar is quite a small set of key words, and could be trivially changed to an equivalent set in another language. For example.

while checkfile

do

sleep 10

done

Would be a simple lexical translation to Bulgarian as

докато checkfile

правя

Сън 10

Направи

To go as far as translating grammatical structure would be more problematic, but few real programming languages allow for freeform text as input. What is problematic is when trying to understand someone else's code when all the comments and all the variables are in a foreign languages - "checkfile" would become Проверетефайла. The keywords may be in English, the comments may be copious, and the variable and function names very descriptive but it takes twice as long to figure out what is going on.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Farking bastards...

I really wouldn't be using a thermal printer for anything you want to keep for more than a year, at best. Certainly not tax documents.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Listen to my quiet voice

You're at an AI business seminar. You are feeling drowsy. There is nothing in the box. There is nothing up my sleeve. It's just software. Transfer the money to this account...

SNAP - you're back in the room.

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

Re: Holy fucking stupid idiot

Yes, Dean was very generous. I guess he also had an eye on the possibility of raising the issue and the company then loosing a big contract - maybe a contract that was the major part of his own job.

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

Re: Lighter than air computer?

Looks like the photo has been flipped. Someone in the graphics department thought it better to have the logo and wording the right way up.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

Re: "a total duration of 32 minutes"

A 32 minute egg boiling contraption should be easy to add into Wallace and Grommet's breakfast procedure.

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

Our standard method for "gotta ship something, anything fast". Was to open the drive door (QIC tape or 5 1/4 floppy) while writing a few blocks of something plausible to the media. Put media in a jiffy bag, put an obvious footprint on the package and generally make it scuffed up. Post to customer. This would buy you a couple of days extra development/test time.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

It's Christmas!

One year I got picked for the 3 day Christmas on-call shift. I wasn't going anywhere, easy double money, as no one had ever called before while we all celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus. But just before noon on Christmas day, I got a call. Yikes! this must be serious. It wasn't. "I think there is a problem with the SQL statement on page XXX of your documentation". Clearly this particular customer decided it was time to fully test the 24x7 nature of their support contract. Their first disappointment was that there was someone actually taking calls. Their second disappointment, no doubt, was that I insisted on going through the whole rigmarole of checking contract entitlements, logging the call, taking detailed notes, discussing their system configuration, offering suggestions, and generally keeping them on the line for a lot longer than they bargained for. I wasn't bothered as it was a good excuse to evade the "family fun" of playing charades.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Complex system charts

I was once in a business to customer presentation, where the overall goal was well understood, the solution a basic modular approach, should have been a simple pitch. When the proposed architecture diagram was thrown on the screen, I noticeably yelped in shock. Heads turned, I'm sorry I squeaked. If we were in an IMAX theatre, with binoculars, then it might have made some sense. But it was IBM, so it didn't make sense. There were 13 product specialists in the room. They each owned 7.7% of that chart, and by god they were going to tell you about it.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

Re: It's a lack of understanding

I problem I've seen too many times is that one department, of a dozen people, ask for an additional software feature for an existing product that is really only useful to them, and not the other 1,000 employees. The procurement team will either outright deny the request because they couldn't possibly pay for +1,000 licenses of that feature, or spend a fortune on +1,000 licences because they are spending someone else's money and were too stupid in the first place to buy a product that didn't allow for flexible pricing. For option one, rely on the users without access to that needed feature to download a "free" copy of the software that only allows individual use, and breaking the no corporate use clause in the licensing agreement, and just clicked Agree.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Fake names

I used to write software documentation that need sample information to illustrate basic parts of the product - people, goods, companies etc. I was using examples such as G. Costanza from Vandelay Industries selling rubber goods, or W E Coyote buying TNT from Acme Inc. When we got bought by IBM they had strict polices about demo examples and my documentation got rejected. No pretend fake data, it had to be real fake data.

Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems

It's always the money. Tesla have decided not just to replace mirrors with cameras. They now use cameras + image recognition instead of radar/infrared sensors for parking, lane control, safe distance monitoring etc. I would never get in such a car, as driver or passenger.

Celebrating when EVs went to the Moon with a Lego Lunar Roving Vehicle build

Re: "We asked Lego why it did not create a custom part for the dish"

I'm fully onboard with the reuse of specialist parts in completely unrelated models. Though tricky to see uses for some of the bigger parts like the aircraft nosecones. And I do hate the stickers.