Posts by NorthIowan

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Re: " and releases no discharge into the surrounding waterway"

The extra heat that makes hurricanes stronger.

How fast can this data center relocate to avoid a hurricane? I would assume it would be offline while it moves?

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Just another 40ish years to go.

Assuming there is still retirement then.

Makes me nervous seeing all the old people working at the grocery store now. Used to be a lot of kids in school making up at least half the crew.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

re: can you see...

For users, that would depend on how good their monitor AND eyes are.

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

Re: open all the fire hydrants

As I've heard it, it's to flush the crud out of the lines. Often accompanied by warnings not to wash light colored clothes on the days they are doing it.

And you might want to only drink bottled or filtered on those days?

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

From now on...

maybe air gap the system before you start the test?

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

Re: Too many to mention them all....

Well on my laptop the power button is right above the backspace key that is bigger so it is easier to find. It is also right next to the delete key but for me that hasn't been a problem. But I don't normally hold down the delete or backspace keys.

We had a laptop at church that put the power button on the side and near the screen hinge. That would seem to be OK, but if I needed to plug in a cable on the opposite side, I would often put my other hand on the opposite side as I pushed the cable in. It took me awhile to remember that, EVERY time.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Not with a disk, but

I'm our Church's main IT person. We had a new PC coming in the mail when the old desktop died and would not turn on. I tried a few things, like a new power cord, but nothing worked.

New laptop came the next day. So I took in my laptop and my USB to IDE/SATA drive adapter so I could recover the data. For jollies, I plugged the old PC back in and tried to turned it on. And it did turn on! That made the data transfer to the new laptop much easier.

It turned out that the power supply would only work if it was unplugged long enough, and overnight was long enough.

That an app 'Fits on a Floppy' is still a useful measure in 2026

Re: Obviously too old

I picked the 8" floppies for my OSI computer because they could hold 275K of data compared to the 90K(?) the 5" single sided drives could do. I didn't trust the new fangled dual sided drives. They were reported to be less reliable.

I wonder if the MS basic is still readable on those 8" floppies? ;-) I have the computer, but the -9V supply had gotten flaky.

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

Re: Froggy did a-wooing go.

"So, it would appear, frogs are smarter than people when it comes to creeping enshittification.

Unless their brain has been removed, of course."

So does this explain why Microsoft is pushing Co Pilot AI? As a way to make people self remove their brains?

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Analogue clocks

Made me remember trying to use my fingers to count in binary. First it's hard to do all the combination of fingers up and down. And then there is the problem of when you get to four.

Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Re: Lucy and Charlie Brown

Lucy Van Pelt

Microsoft Authenticator to nuke Entra creds on rooted and jailbroken phones

Hmm, how long before Microsoft Authenticator goofs...

and wipes a phone that is not jailbroken or rooted?

Do they save the Authenticator data in the cloud first or are they assuming no one will sue?

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

To be clear

To be clear, you have to go to F64. Right Ansel?

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

Re: Speed Of Light

If they can get a few pictures of it, along with when the picture was taken, they can get an idea of what the orbit is. Then they can send signals to it when it is at least on the earth side of mars.

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Re: No one would believe

I've used 300 baud. It was way faster, but it didn't seem so fast at the time.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

I finally recycled my two 19" monitors to our local Staples a year or two ago. I remember when I brought the one in, the "kid" working that day asked what kind of computer it was.

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Also likely, Hey, betcha can't hit that bird on the line up there...

Yup, I was right.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Re: Doesn't everyone have a pillar drill?

Ok, i had to look it up and found out it's what I call a drill press (US name?). I bought mine to make PC boards. Drilling small holes with tiny drill bits works better with a drill press. Your drill bits break less often.

And a drill press makes it easier to drill holes where you want them to be when making things out of wood or metal.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: AGI in the hope it will provide the "answer"

But we know the answer is 42. AGI just needs to figure out what the question is.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Wires will never go away

They go away in a flash, if they are small and you put way more current through them then they are rated for.

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

Re: Only the one laser?

> So, two lasers and if that fails, your on board system does the maths from reliable data, extrapolates and guesses what to do next.

Two lasers or at least a second altitude sensor, radar maybe? Something to increase your odds of getting data. And plan for dust getting kicked up.

And yes, have an on board computer plotting what it's supposed to be doing, and ready to take over quickly if the the data looks corrupt. Then it takes it's best guess of bringing it in safely.

> Crumple zones are not just for cars.

Or do it like they did on some of the Mars landings. Cover it with bouncy balls. ;-) You do have to make a ball that can handle the temperature extremes. So maybe you would need to use springs. Wait, temperature extremes problem again...

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

Raccoons help the squirrels out sometimes.

It was a clear calm day and the power company said it must be a problem with our wiring. No one else had a problem. So I check for voltage at the cartridge fuses under the meter. No voltage there so I called them back and finally got them to come out.

They noticed the fuse(/breaker?) feeding the power transformer on the pole had blown. So they used a bucket truck to get close enough to fix it and saw a hapless "red shirt" raccoon laying in the tall grass below.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Marketing

And are any planes susceptible to getting downed by this to?

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: Don't worry

If you still need the password it should ask for it often enough so you don't forget it. My phone does that.

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: pictograms

I guess MS got the hint about pictograms. I noticed a recent update to Windows 11 added text to the right click pictograms for cut, copy, paste...

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

IIRC, way back when (before my time) chemists used to have a short life expectancy because they included taste as one of the traits to classify chemicals. So they didn't do well after they got around to working with mercury.

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

Re: Given this....

So taking a page from the Windows playbook.

If they follow Windows 100%. They have to change how to turn it off with each update.

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats

Re: Starlink? sats falling out of orbit and plummeting down in flames...

It is happening right now. That was the plan all along. Otherwise LEO would get filled up.

See: spaceweatherarchive.com/2025/02/19/unprecedented-starlink-reentries/

"First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. “More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered,” says McDowell."

Apparently getting 2 or 3 coming down some days.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

New landing definition for "cratered"

Not as bad as the usual cratered, unless you are in the shadows.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: the storage packing up completely

Maybe they just need to require the laptop to have a 60TB SSD drive so there is room for the last 3 minutes of snapshots.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: notes said the RIGHT

They now try to eliminate that by marking which one they are operating on, but once in awhile they mark the wrong one.

Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability

Re: Maybe they should tell you what you're buying

I hiked to the top of Mt Washburn in Yellowstone Park this summer. Great cellphone signal as the cellphone antennas were on top of the ranger lookout station on top of the mountain. The view wasn't so good as there was a lot of smoke in the air that day.

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

Re: That sounds great for exfiltrating data.

Concrete walls usually have lots of rebar (iron rods) in them. I would think you'd have to move these links around a few inches/cm to find a good opening.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Isn't systemd great?

I guess I'm younger, or just didn't get a hard drive as soon. I spent extra money to get a 100 MB drive for my Amiga.

And now days, 100 MB wouldn't be enough RAM to boot Windows.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Asteroid 2024 MK

Is supposed to only get to within 0.8 LD of earth on June 29th. It's a "little" one that's only 162 meters (big error bars on the size estimates).

FWIW, meteor crater in the US was estimated to be 40 yards/meters. Crater is about 1/2 mile across.

I check Spaceweather.com every day and this one just showed up. So maybe enough time to figure out where it will hit. If it looked to be hitting us.

Underwater datacenters could sink to sound wave sabotage

Re: sound canceling headphones

Well design it as a noise canceling DC. Would be to too expensive to have Bose noise canceling headphone for each hard drive. And it would reduce cooling effectiveness. ;-)

Real-estate costs would up the cost of building on shore. And building on shore you have to consider hurricanes, rising ocean levels and tidal waves. All doable if you consider them early on and not after starting building.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: Extended Data Format Crashes System

So was that your first buffer overflow DOS attack?

;-)

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

Re: Hot or cold spares?

To expand on what Paul said. Satellites use old school spinning gyros to point the satellite in different directions. Saves on having to have lots of fuel to use thrusters to change direction. Especially important in an astronomy satellite that constantly changes direction to look at different things.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: identify the guys working in the server room as suspects

Yes, I remember he said they were drilling holes. I was expecting a destroyed cable in the wall.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: previous times this machine has killed a drive

I had one of those. An off brand PC that killed 3 hard drives. I decided it was time for that PC to go after the third drive failed.

NASA's Lucy probe dodges space traffic around Earth in gravity-assist flyby

Lucy in the sky with Starlinks

Glad Lucy missed all the junk in orbit.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Bill Gates

Wasn't Bill's comment that 32 MB was all you'd ever need for a hard drive?

And now you probably can't boot recent versions of Windows without more RAM than that.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Re: Quite Impressive

I have fiber optic to my house and I live in rural Iowa. About 3 miles out from a town population 760 and the next town has about 7600 people. It's a local company so that's why we have fiber here. You can get phone Internet and cable TV from them.

Not an easy to read map but it looks like they provide fiber internet in most of a roughly 14 x 11 mile area. But there is a big hole in that of 5.6 square miles. They don't provide fiber on the lake.

Australian digital driving licenses can be defaced in minutes

Re: People don't run red lights when they know there is a camera on.

But I saw a person run a red light with a police car beside or behind them.

Not sure which because I was about to turn left when the left turn arrow turned green. I was glad that I saw them in time to stop. And I was unhappy at first that two cars went through the red light. Until I saw the second car was a police car with it's light on. ;-)

I have seen it one other time. But then I'm a bit paranoid at left turns now.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: The place smelled of burned plastic...

This was my gut fealing on what was going to happen in Ellen's story.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: I've never seen (or heard of) hard-sectored floppy disks before

Kids stop it.

You're making me feel old.

I Googled it and both 8" and 5 1/4" floppies came in hard or soft sector flavors. I'm guessing IBM PCs and clones all used soft sector.

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Re: At the AC, re: Zipping Windows.

Or Macrium Reflect.

Newly released Space Force data could save life on Earth

Re: go out in the rain and watch the clouds light up

I had a bigger one come down near me in late 1992.

I was inside so I don't know if it was raining. But reports on the news said people saw the clouds light up. I just remember the big boom. Sounded like a sonic boom from a supper sonic jet.

I looked out the windows to be sure neither of the two big (yard wide) natural gas lines within a mile of the house had a giant fire raging from a leak.

I remember the year because I was changing my first born kids diaper at the time.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: Burroughs Large Systems There was never an assembler for it.

Learned a bit about the Burroughs systems after the merger with Sperry. Apparently some people had a hard time believing there wasn't an assembler.

It can take a bit of time to wrap your head around that. But hey, the compiler writers just need to know what binary to put out. Not much different then spitting out assembler code.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: Interference.

Most likely.

But valves can be sensitive to vibrations to. It would depend on how they were biased. If the logic was running in a too linear of a region they might perturbed by vibrations. And the drivers and receivers for the delay lines might well have had some linear amps.