* Posts by Joe W

1578 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2018

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Sounds like one of my former bosses. He gave me admin access to our production system (because I needed it), along with a few pointers:

- try not to be stupid

- if in doubt, check with somebody more experienced

- trust your own experience - we hired you because you do know stuff, no need to get on my bloody nerves for everything

- if you mess up, own up

- we have backups that we can actually recover from (thankfully we never needed to).

- I will cover my team's actions

And that's exactly what I tell my young colleagues.

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Joe W Silver badge

Re: 800MB

1. tell systemd to rotate its lovemaking logs and limit the total size or retention time.

2. If you run docker, theres lots of data in /var/libs/docker (all the file system data of your containers in fact). Whoever decided to put this into /var/lib.... dunno. Tell docker in its main setting json (too lazy to look it up now, sorry) to store that somewhere else. Copy all files there, restart docker...

Those two are the main problems on my smaller systems.

Joe W Silver badge

Re: No way-land

Also terminating all user processes just because you log out is kind of heavy handed. I hate it when systems believe they are smarter than me, and decide things. If there's a process I put in the background there's a reason for that.

And I lovemaking hate the "logs" of systemd, and the whole thing as it is implemented now. I understand the idea of the init part, it is welcome. I hate that it now is needed for everything (why should the display manager or the desktop environment depend on it?). But I digress.

Oh, and speaking of the systemd logs, why on earth does the install not limit the size of the logs by default to a sensible value? Why does it not rotate them? Instead it just fills up the root partition with rather cryptic files...

I'm too old for this.

Linux for older phones postmarketOS changes its init system

Joe W Silver badge

Re: proof

Yes. And all of those greybeards who said exactly that were ignored. Those are just 'haters', they said...

Linux 6.9 will be the first to top ten million Git objects

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Git object

Is it the whole git archive having 10^7 objects, or are those the actual objects for the single version kernel? The article headline seems to indicate the latter, Linus' quote states the former.

So before any of the "bloatware" crying fraternity show up: nothing to see, move along. This is not the issue you are looking for.

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

Joe W Silver badge

An error message I once received was

"A TrueType font has caused a general protection failure in module setup.exe"

That was when trying to install windows, I guess about 25 years ago. That was unexpected and felt quite stupid.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Heading off after completion of a task

I appreciate the use of bra-ket notation. What is missing is the operator that collapses the state... but the margin of this book is too narrow for me to write it down... (i.e. I'm too lazy)

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Confused...Again!!

We were talking about computer hardware, weren't we? I guess having open source drivers for your blue ray player is not really that important / widespread ....

Joe W Silver badge

Re: DisplayPort works

I found USB to generally tell you that,mostly...

Joe W Silver badge

Re: I was amazed…

I forgot about those issues... Thanks for bringing that up. I now need a beer to bury my earlier HDMI experiences... (I'm not saying DP is better, just my experience has been better and more reliable, and it is less of an egg-laying-wool-milk-pig - thanks to ze Tschermans and Tom Scott's Lateral Thinking podcast)

Joe W Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Confused...Again!!

My Laptops (plural!) don't

Please explain why I should use HDMI....

Electronic Arts frags hundreds of workers 'to grow fandom'

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Carry on regardless

Open world != grind (at least it should not be that way)

Other than that - you are spot on.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

I.... hate you

(brilliant comment, I mean)

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

Came to say exactly that about the libraries.

Let's face it, people quite intelligent and capable have thought about that problem, solved it, tested it, refined the edge cases. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, it will come out triangular.

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

Joe W Silver badge

Wtf?

OK, home devices. Let's talk about these.

Why on earth do they have ports exposed to the outside? Why should they? And even my pos telco-supplied router has a random-ish default password.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Joe W Silver badge

Re: That's not what he said

Ah, yes.

You are correct.

Just soooo many people confuse the two. I assumed that ... id-ten-T was one of them (still 90% certain)

The academics are not programmers. The academics are more theoretical and do get the algorithm part of computing science. They are not at fault for the bajillion different languages. And, to me, all languages in a certain group are same-ish. C, FORTRAN, R, Basic, Pascal all are procedureal. Then there's object oriented, and finally the weird Lisp stuff. Most things that divide languages in a group is syntax and some details (like row major / column major, pass by value / pass by reference, which is important, of course, but not enough to make them oooh so different).

Joe W Silver badge

Computer Science is not (only) programming. And judging from ML generated output so far, I don't think we should just trust the system to give us correct results. I would say that journalists (who hopefully do check sources!), developers (and that includes much more than just writing code, ffs) and scientists so far are pretty safe.

Learning to think has never been a bad thing. I don't write(a lot of) code any more, but it certainly gives you an insight on how to break problems into smaller pieces while not losing sight of the bigger picture. Same with hand tool (woodworking is most accessible) skills and needlework. Learn a bit of both. It is not only fun, but does challenge your brain in a wonderful way. My kids can sew and saw in a straight line.

Microsoft trying to stop Copilot generating fake Putin comments on Navalny's death

Joe W Silver badge

Autonomous cars and other road users

I don't know how it is in other places, but I often rely on actual eye contact with other road users (car drivers, cyclists and pedestrians... ) to judge their intent, make them aware of what I'm trying to do, and reach some sort of mutual understanding or let's call it a consensus. This is needed especially at intersections in residential areas. Not sure how we will achieve that when killer auto cars are out there. I guess walking and cycling will be outlawed... (tbh I can sort of see that happening in the good ole USofA).

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Joe W Silver badge

Basically everything is trying to kill you there...

(I actually enjoyed my trip, nothing scary, sketchy, etc. )

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Re: You have to know the obscure rules ....

It's only obscure if you don't know them... :p

I'm altering the rules, pray I don't alter them further.

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

also: Rockstars

Unless you are a "Rockstar Physicist", (Dr. B. May) or a legimate Rockstar developer (developing in the language Rockstar).

Intuitive Machines' Odysseus prepares for Moon landing

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Re: Success?

Well, they got data back. From an apparently intact lander, at least it is still working well enough to talk to them.

I would call that a success already.

But I do get what you mean. We all do hope not too many things broke!

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Joe W Silver badge

Interesting

For me at least the airframe sounds interesting. The only thing is, over here it would (if it were an airplane, i.e. with a pilot on board) be classified as a multi engine airplane. The current regulations are a bit old fashined I guess.

Now, if it were a bit lighter, you might be able to get this as "experiemental / ultra light", though this comes with other baggage (my friend who is building his own plane in his garage told me).

At least it serves as an innovation platform for conventional aircraft ...

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

...

I totally agree with all of the suggestions, my parents and my... second degree cousin(? whatever. ) have at least a document about medical treatments. Those are placed in a certain desk drawer, us kids know about them and these contain much of what was suggested (like us making decisions about treatment, and also about lines they do not want to cross. Ever. Come back as a ghost to haunt you.).

...

Dementia (any form) is tough. Especially for the relatives. It is, excuse my French, really fucked up. There are glimpses, and, as one of my cousins remarked about my grandma (who had dementia) "she [could] be happy like a little girl", Embrace these moments.

Good luck.

Microsoft 'retires' Azure IoT Central in platform rethink

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Repeat after me....

"Cloud is just somebody else's computer."

And this, of course, means, that you rely on their "vision" (I know about "visions"... substance abuse is one explanation) for their product. Unfortunately, our manglement does not see this.... I'll get me on of these --->

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Joe W Silver badge

Remeber "start me up"?

Love the song in that context. Especially as it continues with "you make a grown man cry"...

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Joe W Silver badge

users?

It requires a good relationship with some colleagues, who are more than 10 years my junior and are more of a COF than I am. They also seem to be wed to every single line of code they ever wrote, and treat the stuff some ... lovemaking lovechild of a cowboy mad (spotted that typo, refuse to fix it) up before I joined the company as gospel.

Sheesh, kids these days. But then the grad I just hired seems to be good material, (finally!) telling the boss (me) when he messes up code / gui / general stuff. Promising. The new one also seems to cope well with criticism and is quite open about new ideas.

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Re: Less than a minute?

Take that, Lenovo, for making the laptops easy to repair.

(I actually really appreciate it!)

Think tank funded by Big Tech argues AI’s climate impact is nothing to worry about

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Sure Jan

Did they? The study funded by Shell in the 70s was not too bad...

I'm pretty angry about the "yeah, in future training the same model will be cheaper and faster" while completely forgetting that people will use all resources available, either through bigger or more advanced models, more training data or just less efficient code.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Joe W Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Unsurprising....

Yup. Lock them in a room, give all of them half a brick each.

What do you mean, "and". The room is locked... "the keys"? What do you mean? Nah, sorry, cannot help you there.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Joe W Silver badge

We actually and actively do plan for exactly that. We will sit in stairwells[1] etc. and then take a sick day, because of inadequate work place conditions and the back ache we now have. We still have about enough office space for everybody, but... Yeah, contingency planning from our side.

We currently have 60/40 (office/home office), though that's not that... strictly enforced. We currently discuss 20/80, which is about what I would like, as long as I get the rest of my team coming in on the same day, say, once a month, it's good to see them and chat... (but that's my opinion).

[1] bonus points for tripping a "manager" who voted for return to office,and selling of buildings, and making life very miserable....

Joe W Silver badge

Ah, well, they don't learn...

There was a study, I seem to recall, that showed that this is a bad idea. Wasn't it covered in ElReg, just last week?

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Joe W Silver badge

if you, as a "middle manager"

... cannot justify your role, because you don't, well, manage, then we can get rid of you. And should.

I'm a team lead and process manager. If I don't lead the team and manage the process I should do something else. Simples. Take a new job or a different (more suitable) role in the company.

The management layer above me exist to shield me from crap coming from above. And to shield the above from some of the crap we do. They are necessary, and I do not want their job (and fortunately, so far they work as intended, and don't interfere with my daily work as long as progress is visible).

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Joe W Silver badge

Re: A wasted trip

What's not to like? Except he should have brought his skis as well ;) then it would have been a good trip. Ski down the mountain, see how many runs you can do before the equipment arrives. And Saturday is a good day for skiing as well, fresh snow etc.

(I never managed to land that job at WSL, pity, though I'm more for "going on ski" rather than "standing on ski" as the Norwegians say...)

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Re: Ouch!

Ah, joy of joys, the self taught rsync users and their (i.e. my!) self written backup scripts...

"teehing troubles"... right?

Meh. Long time ago. And storage _was_ a premium, my time wasn't. I need a drink, I think. Too early, though, and have some things that are not compatible with day time drinking. Not like that time when we had some time to kill after a conference, and we went on a tapas tour in the late morning (until the evening, when we had to head to the airport...) in Honululu, eating small dishes and drinking Mai Tais...

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

I use....

.hadschihalefomarbenhadschiabulabbasibnhadschidavudhalgossarah

(sorry to all who now have that shitty song stuck in their head! have one of these and numb your pain ---->)

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Pointless if potless

Not true, or basically wrong. I think.... Technology Connections did a test, kettles work in the US. (if I recall correctly)

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Sports Futility Vehicle

It's a "soft roader".... :D

Ok, honest question: don't they have separate motors on each wheel? I thought at least some of the electric vehicles did that... I certainly would do that on an offroad vehicle, put a motor on every single wheel. Electronics are (despite what people say, and iff designed correctly) more sturdy and way more flexible than a mechanical solution (though I really do like ingenious mechanical devices). Then the computer can do the work of distributing power to the wheels.

Seoul restores smartphone subsidies because premium handsets are apparently essential

Joe W Silver badge

Good grief...

I mean, really? The article states that "..the cost of smartphones has climbed as manufacturers pack in more features". I really wouldnot call "moar pixels" and "moar cores" (and RAM) real "features". They are purely incremental. Most low-ish smartphones have enough of all of that, they have mostof the sensors[1]. The recent addition of "AI" is (maybe) a "feature" inasmuch as it adds something new - though AI is not a feature of the phone but the software and should run on mid tier new-ish handsets.

And who believes "subsidised" phone contracts? Don't people do the math? If you have a 24 month contract, the difference of you monthly payment for a contract with a phone to a SiM only adds up to more than the new handset price over these 24 months (usually, and when I still looked at that stuff). There are cheaper consumer credit programs, even Paypal had a zero percent interest rate payment plan[2] if you would have preferred to stretch out the payments over a longer period of time.

Ah, well. I consider it a tax on people who are bad at math, just like with lottery taxing those who are bad at statistics[3]

[1] but why do they cheap out on the compass - the sensor is likely there, just not connected. And I do not think thattis is the killer feature people are willing to pay more for.

[2] not sure if they still have it - they used to push it in a what I considered too aggressive manner. Since I have no recollection of still seeing it when I last purchased stuff using Paypl it is either gone or my brain has learned to ignore it.

[3] and state-run lottery basically fleeces the less educated to sponsor the middle class[4] lifestyle - the gamblers only get half of the money in returns, the rest pays the staff, the ads, and some of it pays for public infrastructure like libraries and pools. I'm not saying poor pople don't use these at all, but from my experience you can see a correlation between education and the kids' ability to read without using their index finger and swim[5]

[4] whoever that is... this is not really a thing in many places I used to live, and I am sort of oblivious to these things, sure, maybe I'm insensitive (and apparently my brother and I are "intellectual snobs" - we just cannot get it that some people don't know certain basic things)

[5] Apparently (i.e. I read it somewhere and cannot find the refernce, i.e. I'm too lazy to look it up) one of the nasty things a Roman could say about somebody else was that they could "neither read nor swim". Things don't change.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Joe W Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Curious 6000kva?

It probably has a lid on top to pur in heavy water, and a dial to retract the carbon rods...

Can I go to the pub now?

(drat, they don't open that early, this side of the channel the "pub lunch" is not a thing...)

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Re: Precious

At least they did not use Heavy Metal Umlauts :D

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Seven years of support

Ahh, phone size. My hands are of a I guess average size, but trouser pockets are indeed limited in capacity. The current phone is as big as can fit (actually a tad too big for some trousers, drat!). It was the smallest non-crap-phone I actually could buy at that time. New "flagship phones" are simply too big (not big if you want to find a spot to land a light aircraft...).

My forst thought on the "handles punctuation" feature was that sometimes it does indeed matter, example:

Let's eat, grandpa!

Let's eat grandpa!

(and I am not willing to spend that mouch money (1.6k€? WTF?!) on a phone. I would rather buy a decent sized band saw.... or upgrade one of my bikes, or go on holidays in Switzerland - but hey, I'm not judging, I'm not in the target audience, I'm not wondering about what tat my favourite "influencer" is trying to push, so - meh)

Combination of cheap .cloud domains and fake Shark Tank news fuel unhealthy wellness scams

Joe W Silver badge

Aahh... yeah.

Like the spamvertising on YouTube - which they are of course not doing anything about, as these do pay (whatever miniscule) a fee...

Linus Torvalds postpones Linux 6.8 merge window after being taken offline by storms

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær!

Spent a year in S'toon, we had -50 (yeah, -50°C, I guess that's -60F? at some point you stop caring for the units, it's bloody cold, that's what it is) for a week (and when I arrived in late summer it was still a nice +35°C, or thereabouts) - did not really matter, people can work with that ( I also lived in Norway, so I second your comment title).

GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered

Joe W Silver badge

Yeah?

" it is a modification: for instance, a near-identical copy that contains only semantically insignificant variations of the original Licensed Materials"

So changing the variable names removes any and all copyright? Good to know... I was under the impression that me porting code e.g. from Matlab to R would be minor enough changes to retain the original license. And now they tell me I can just rename variables and switch to tab indentations and I'm in the clear?

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Joe W Silver badge
Pint

Modules...

I sort of expected the company to pay for pron when the module was called fans-only...

Joe W Silver badge

Tea and coffee

Our workplace has no tea and shite coffee. Make of that what you will.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Joe W Silver badge

most nutritious food program

Yeah... nuts et c. are really high calory food.

Cannot do that diet and neither can I read his stuff, 'cause I'm allergic to nuts... (citation needed: the PFY - go and find the BOFH episode yourself).

Latest tech layoffs: Twitch, Duolingo, Citrix parent ditch hundreds of workers

Joe W Silver badge

Re: Enshittification continues

Oooh... "si, amigo". As a user of Duolingo I can totally confirm that effect. Shoddy sentences, along with their inability to recognise proper English (sorry, we did learn proper English, with the proper words - "pants" are underwear, you usually mean "trousers", in school - and I can assure you my spelling in my native tounge is as shoddy as in English, not sorry, schools not to blame on this) has bothered me for a while - but the last year had an increase in shoddy sentences and inconsitently applied rules (you can use that word here but not there, even if the sentences are essentially the same, you can omit ther personal pronoun here but not in the exactly same sentence structure there (like you can in Portuguese or in Japanese)). They leave it to the users to flag problems, they also removed the "discussion" pages - but those had been littered by people trying to be funny rather than discussing problems with the exercise.

They do agressively try to put you on the paid tier, but I sort of understand that - they probably do not make that much from ads, and somehow they have to pay people. I do not use it often enough to 1) properly learn any language and 2) justify spending money on it. Some friends use it, and apparently it can serve as a nice additional source of materials when taking a language class.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

Joe W Silver badge

Re: “ the $3 million, which is the statutory maximum for the six felony offenses”

Nope, it was one offender - eBay - the others have been charged separately (from my understanding of reading the article). Also note that this was not the case that determines how much eBay has to cough up in damages to the Steiners, that one is still ongoing (last paragraph in the article, or thereabouts).