Posts by KarMann

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Re: Musk Ambition

Yep, gotta love that 3/5 compromise, amirite?

John Deere accused of being full of manure with its right-to-repair promises

Re: There are some typos I believe…

Also also, the PIRG or the PRIG?

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

But I'll still insist on "its use". It's 'its', not 'it's', as I like to say.

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Re: Missing detail

At least in the US Midwest, in roughly the early 2000s timeframe, the usual form of end-user caller ID was a separate little box that plugged into your phone line, with a pass-thru for the phone of course. Had its own little display, so your phone didn't have to.

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Bo(e)ing?

So he took the flight – on a vintage 707 that provided a few scary moments…

Well, having worked on the military equivalent of the Boeing 707 myself, I'd feel much more confident flying on one of their 'vintage' products than their more recent fare, if it's all the same with you.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

Would you prefer 'we'll be taking off presently'?

Re: Simple rule

Burnt Umber? When did Crayola start making gouache?

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Re: DAT - a technology we're sure few remember fondly

Is this a different click of death? The one I think I remember was conventional hard drive heads, maybe specific to a generation of WD HDDs; I don't remember one associated with ZIP drives, as I think you're saying here, although I never used ZIP myself, only the later Jazz drives.

Kamala Harris's $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan

I don't think you get what the 'of' means in 'government of the people'.

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

Bad Attitude

"Then we'll get a chance to look at the helium leak rates and verify that the system is stable."

This seems to me a sign that they aren't really doing the 'safety culture' thing anymore. Otherwise, they'd talk about verifying whether the system is stable, not that it is, which conveys an implicit assumption that it's stable by default. Why did Feynman even bother?

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: Motorola brick

It must've been a Fluke.

Re: Strange policemen

I think you've misunderstood? Unless I'm mistaken, CountCadaver meant that it's the police trying to avoid work by downplaying the assault, so that they don't have to follow up on it. Not that either the assaulter or the assaultee is avoiding work by it, which is how I think you've taken it.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: Dropping the phone while gardening

It was on its way to go bite my sister.

CrowdStrike update blunder may cost world billions – and insurance ain't covering it all

Re: Y2K24?

Parametrix and CyberCube also seem to be completely ignoring the medical sector that took a big hit.

TFA: …and an estimated over three billion dollars was destroyed between the banking and healthcare sectors.

Do go on.

Uncle Sam opens probe into CrowdStrike turbulence at Delta Air Lines

Great timing

Two years ago, I missed going back to the States for the first time in 6 years for my mum's 80th birthday, because of the Home Office dragging its feet (think 'hostile environment').

Now, we're finally set to go again, so I should be back for the first time in 8 years, but… we're booked on Delta. Nothing actually cancelled yet, but we're dreading the day.

Second NHS IT system confirmed to be affected by CrowdStrike issues

Completely innocent, I say!

CrowdStrike said the incident is not malicious in nature – it's not a cyberattack.

Well, of course they would say that. To suggest otherwise would be to suggest that they're amongst the cyber-criminals, and we couldn't have people thinking like that, could we?

EU officials say X’s paid-for blue check deceives users and breaks law

Re: The European Commission is an executive branch

Side note: The US cabinet has Secretaries, not ministers. That is all.

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

A nice intro

When I was considering joining the AF (of the US variety, though I did end up at a base of the R variety eventually), and going to visit the base and shop where I might be serving, my visit happened to be scheduled on a day they were doing just such wargames, unbeknownst to me (but beknownst to us). As I tended to a rather iconoclastic, gothy mode of dress back then, and still had very long hair (and was/am male), the SPs (I think they already weren't called APs, Air Police, back then) thought it just had to be some of the wargame planners taking the piss, and I found myself prone in a ditch with one or two aforementioned SPs keeping their guns on me. It didn't take too long for them to sort out that I was supposed to be there, probably only about three years, or that's what it felt like.

And as for the IT angle, it isn't clear whether Lyle was at an RAF, USAF, or other-AF base, but we were cursed with a system known as Banyan Vines, which I rather loathed. Almost put me off the whole IT thing right then & there. I'm glad I did find out it could be better, eventually. But I'll give Lyle the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wasn't personally responsible for that.

Europe blasts back into the heavy launch biz with first Ariane 6 flight

Re: For a massive multi-national cost-plus programme

To be fair, they didn't restart the engine in Europe this time, either.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: Ouch!!

Until you can see and hear it, and that's when the real excitement begins.

Former Fujitsu engineer apologizes for role in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Possibly controversial opinion...

There's a Freudian slip with the "we" in your comment.

Twice. Though, to be fair, it does look like a bit of copy-paste recycling there.

Re: Where were the tests?

Testing should be verifying that the design and implementation is sound, not simply trying to catch errors. You can't use testing to improve quality on a case by case basis. Yes, testing will discover errors - but then the important thing is "how did this error occur" and how widespread might other errors be as a result of the cause. Only if you address these causes and review system elements in light of a known source of errors can you meaningfully address quality.

Have you tried explaining this to Boeing?

US lawmakers wave red flags over Chinese drone dominance

Point of order

FYI, the 'stars and bars' refers to the first actual Confederate flag (not the one popularised by modern white supremacists et al.). You might have done that on purpose, and if so, it's a fair cop, considering how the USA is trending lately, but if not, you're probably confusing it with the 'stars and stripes', which does refer to the US flag.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Re: Can't really predict impact accurately fourteen years out

Almost right. But we can usually get the hour of impact, if any, quite accurately. After all, if it doesn't hit within about 4 minutes of H-hour, the Earth will have moved another radius along by then, and it'll be a clean miss. Unless it's in an orbit trying to parallel park with us; if it's moving in almost the same direction, at almost the same speed, as Earth, then it has a much bigger window of when it might tip into our Hill sphere and come for us. On the bright (?) side, that kind of scenario also gives the lowest impact speeds, just a little bit more than Earth's escape speed.

But yeah, 11.2 km/s is still going to leave a mark.

ETA: And to clarify, that's why you are quite right about the place being so hard to predict. If the time is off by two minutes, then, again, the Earth has moved on about half a radius, and the impact point has suddenly jumped something like 4,000 km (allowing for the projection of the trajectory move onto a sphere). And that's why you might get a belt of possible impact as described in the NASA scenario in TFA, as those parts of the Earth move along through the target zone with its orbital motion.

Stop

Hammer time.

(Those who know, know.)

BT chief blames regulations for UK lagging in next-gen network rollout

Re: The colour of money

Maybe that explains the Fybogel shortage of late.

Mine's the brown one. -->

Re: The colour of money

No wonder there's been a Fybogel shortage of late.

It's the brown one. -->

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

Re: Nope

…the generators would be wincghear at the ground station…

I'm sorry, I can't for the life of me figure out what was typoed here. It looks like 'windshear', and that broadly fits the context, but doesn't fit that sentence grammatically. What was it supposed to be?

ETA: Ah, you do mention 'winchgear' further down, which still doesn't quite fit grammatically, but is close enough that I'll assume it was intended.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

My first thought was to New Year's Eve, called Sylvester there and in Germany. But then, I probably have some slight cognitive biases in this regard, being employed in Vienna (sort of, long story), and that being my birthday.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Are you sure it's not the screw gnomes?

• 1. Collect screws
• 2. ?
• 3. Profit!

Multi-day DDoS storm batters Internet Archive

Previous AC (who may or may not have been you) specified 'conventional lending libraries', which I took to be a reference to dead-tree libraries. Licensed digital works are a whole different kettle of fish, yeah.

Please, do tell me more about this 'agreement... conventional lending libraries have.' I'd be fascinated to hear about it, and how it is completely necessary for a library to negotiate with each and every publisher, and how first-sale doctrine doesn't apply here (given that we're probably talking about an American jurisdiction in this case).

Evidence mounts that Venus has multiple active volcanoes

Per RHCP...

Perhaps they ought to be trying a subway there, instead.

--> Hot peppers!

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

See also: Death Race 2000

You mean your score.

Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have

Not exactly

Because clearly the world's biggest problem was not having computers capable of rolling their eyes and saying, "Yeah, right."

Well, there's your problem right there. Obviously, you've been trying to make your car go by pushing the speedometer needle, haven't you? That's not how any of this works.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Re: Osman unit of measurement

You are Procrustes, and I claim my 100 shillings.

Return to office mandates had senior employees jumping ship

One wonders whether…

Additionally, the study finds that the mandate eroded the average experience level among the longest tenured employees by a month or two, a further indication of the number and quality of departing workers.

…someone savvy in marketing might have been amongst those who left Apple. Say, someone who might have nixed the idea of crushing all the things for the sake of an iPad advert.

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

Re: Extended Data Format Crashes System

It's always pan-galactic-gargle-blaster-o'clock somewhere! Just think how many different time zones there are across the galaxy….

Re: Extended Data Format Crashes System

…and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri!

Tesla devotee tests Cybertruck safety with his own finger – and fails

Re: Bonnet. Buh-on-et.

Didn't Volkswagen owners sort this out well over half a century ago? This isn't exactly new tech in that regard.

Also, a tip of the bonnet for the Firefly reference. Mine's the brown one. -->

Techie's enthusiasm for decluttering fails to spark joy

Re: Political systems

Well, how do you become King of the World, then?

Ex-Space Shuttle boss corrects the record on Hubble upgrade mission

Re: No Challenger mention

But Pascal's comment, to which AC was replying, starts off, 'No, not a happy read, but a clear indicator of why we got the Challenger disaster.' So why are you giving AC a hard time about that?

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Re: It goes the wrong way!

When I first started doing PCs with mice, I had a pre-existing desk with drawers on the left side of the user's legs, and therefore plenty of desktop space to the left, not so much to the right. So, for the first decade or so of my mouse use, I used the mouse on my left even though I was (well, and remain) right-handed. I used the approach of switching the left & right buttons as soon as I found it, rather than training myself to use the 'wrong' fingers. This persisted into my trackball use, when the trackballs were symmetrical. It doesn't work so well with the ergonomic fitted right-hand trackballs, of course.

Cybercriminals threaten to leak all 5 million records from stolen database of high-risk individuals

Re: But ...

Thinking it through even a bit further, even a judge who hadn't been corrupted, might be made more vulnerable to corruption by the kind of info in this breach. So no, not good at all.

(This was to be an ETA, but I ran out of time to edit just as I was finishing typing it.)

Re: But ...

But it's not just 'bad people', it's also what are known as 'Politically Exposed Persons', including such as the judges mentioned. They, for example, aren't just judges on the take, but any judge who might be a target for bribery. And whilst many may have a lower opinion of politicians as a class, for the most part, they aren't the sort that should be barred from banking just for being a politician.

Mars helicopter sends final message, but will keep collecting data

Obligatory XKCD

Do I get to come home? Guys?

Stupid Martian dust in my eyes.

US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels

Re: enlightened

It would be useful to see a cellphone contract version next....

-- OP

The labels are required for both wired and wireless services....

-- TFA

That is all.

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

Ha! It's not just me! Back about 30 years ago, I found a couple of those street sweeper tines broken off on the street, and realised they might come in handy for just this kind of thing. I took one to work and polished it up (I worked in a jewellery shop at the time), shaped it a bit, and found that it fit in my Swiss Army knife in the slot for the plastic toothpick, which I'd almost never used anyway. I still have that knife, but the tine may have gone astray sometime in the past couple of decades. But, it's good to find some supporting evidence that I was on to something back then.

Microsoft, OpenAI may be dreaming of $100B 5GW AI 'Stargate' supercomputer

Re: Correction

What's your favourite band?

Madness,

Takes its toll.

Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare

If I somehow find myself boarding a Boeing product anytime soon, I'll definitely be visually inspecting the rivets along the way.