Posts by A.P. Veening

Dmitry Rogozin sacked as boss of Russian space agency Roscosmos

But I guess even they can only stand so much crazy...'

It isn't the amount of crazy but the flavour.

SCOTUS judges 'doxxed' after overturning Roe v Wade

The word you meant to type is "precedent", not "president", the case is Roe v. Wade (1973), and it was the nominee's Senate hearings, not their "congressional inaugurations".

Completely correct, but the sentiment was clear.

Re: Everything here is fine

I detect sarcasm dripping into puddles on the floor.

I'm wondering when they'll start building moats around their homes

Enough sarcasm to fill those moats.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: judge it by what it's doing today

Perhaps this article is asking me to trust Microsoft: sure, just as much as Google, Amazon and Oracle. And a whole lot more than Facebook.

FTFY ;)

Re: Sometimes, it's the little things.

everyone happy until the boss learned we'd gone "non Windows" and insisted it was shifted to a cloud subscription service.

One quote later, and all of a sudden it was staying.

Let me guess, he was whistled back by a bean counter.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

This is no way to treat customers.

But it is, admittedly not what I would call a good way, but still it is a way (and lots of companies get away with similar ways of treating customers).

Re: Net zero in home automation

"they hadn't got to the extended warranty part of the script."

Didn't stop them with me. I ordered a fridge freezer from them but they cancelled my order due to supply issues. A few weeks later came a letter offering me extended warranty for the none existent appliance.

You should have accepted that offer. It would have been interesting to see how they would have solved that non-functioning fridge freezer. Non-existence shouldn't be a problem, they offered the extended warranty.

These centrifugal moon towers could be key to life off-planet

Re: Dealing with two "down" directions might be tough

In real terms that means that there is a narrow band of usable space where gravity is around 1G plus or minus a bit. You can't get further away from the center of rotation than the 'sweet spot' since at that point the tower wall/floor will be almost vertical with respect to the planet surface.

But you could have multiple of those bands above (reference to where the base of the cone is located) each other. And with extended walls (floors when it stops spinning), the crashes when it stops spinning won't be life threatening (unlike the reason for it stopping).

Meta asks line managers to identify poorly performing staff for firing

Re: Do your job or you go!

The problem mostly isn't slackers but manglement. I wonder how many manglers will be leaving because of poor performance, but I am willing to bet there won't be many (if any at all). And manglement doesn't produce anything anyway.

SpaceX Starship booster in flames after unexpected ignition

Re: Oh! Oh! Can I play too?

boss Elon Musk admitted the event was less than ideal

(3rd paragraph)

You are mistaken, Elon Musk never admits anything ;)

Russian Debian-derivative Linux slinger plans IPO

Reportedly, CEO Ilya Sivtsev owns 20 percent of the company.

I have no problem with that, but I do have a problem with the 51+% of voting stock the FSB/Putin has.

Pentester says he broke into datacenter via hidden route running behind toilets

Re: False floors too

About Exactly 2ft

FTFY, 24" is 2' is 60.96 cm.

Re: False floors too

a favored site from yesteryear had 24" raised floors with forced air

That is about 60 cm.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

What exception in the year 4,000? Every 4th year is a leap year, except every 100th year isn’t, except every 400th year is. There are no other exceptions.

The year 4,000 is not a leap year, the compounded decimals are catching up by that time. It isn't really relevant for those currently active as programmers and it isn't generally taught, but it still is there.

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Do you correct for locality? For any area controlled by England, the Julian to Gregorian calendar switch took place in 1752. Various other countries made the switch as late as 1923. The Orthodox churches still haven't converted.

You are the first one in over 30 years to even ask the question and the answer is no as it is very rare for a business system to need a date before about 1950.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

especially if they have the idea that it can lead to them looking for another job

after an extended stay in a hospital

Re: Y2K

We spent God (and accounting)-only-knows how much money on Y2K.

I am pretty sure accounting knows, I doubt God cares enough for it to matter.

And it was better to do that and avoid one needless death

AMEN! to that.

... and the consequent lawsuit.

That would have upset accounting.

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400.

Your statement is absolutely correct. However, I was not reporting about the calendar but about the date format, [year][day number].

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

I'm always amused by reports of code that could cope with the end of most centuries except for the one the code was written in. If they'd been either more or less lazy, they'd have been OK.

As long as there is no calendar reform, I guarantee my date routines for all dates between 1582-10-15 and 4000-02-28, the latter date because the year 4000 is the next "exception" in the leap year system. If my routines are still in use by that time (very well possible, written in COBOL ;) ) and need updating, they are welcome to recall me.

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

I think that's only the second one I've heard of "in the wild"! (The first being all the Perl-based web templates that rang in the new year by advancing the year from 1999 to 19100.)

It is the third I know of "in the wild", the first being a problem with the computer system of the Norwegian railroad company on the very last day of 2000. They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.

Re: Walk and talk

In the the days when we had a tea lady who would bring your usual beverage etc. ( 40 years ago), we all had to work the weekend on a major project. The senior manager came round with the tea trolley and gave us all free tea's and coffees (and biscuits!).

He said if he asked us to come in - then he should come in. He thought the most useful thing he could do was to provide us with tea and coffee! He said it also gave him a couple of minutes to meet individuals in his department (some of which he had never met). I still remember him in his little pink apron.

The long gone time of useful management. The only problem with him is that he robbed the tea lady of her overtime payment.

We also had a senior manager who would add more paper to the printer.

Not only useful but also capable at a core job.

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

Re: To be honest

I've found a fresh install of W11 uses less RAM at startup (2Gb) than 10 (3gb), and generally performs faster on my i5 desktop.

Minor advantages (40 GB of memory) and those certainly don't outweigh the disadvantages.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

And you know what? - in about 40 years' time, the millennials' grandchildren will be rounding on them too. "How could you be so stupid?", they will say. I don't know what they'll be talking about, but there'll be something so stupendous, so overwhelmingly important, so obvious that everyone should have seen it coming before. It's the way of history.

I think it will depend on the country, but for two countries I am pretty sure what that something will be, Brexit and reversal of Roe vs. Wade.

Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030

No explosion, but the crash of Kosmos 954 caused serious radioactive contamination.

Google said to be taking steps to keep political campaign emails out of Gmail spam bin

Now if only they could prevent blocked emails from actually reaching one's account instead of just dumping them in the bin.

My preference would be that those emails were returned to the nominal and actual sender without reaching my account.

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Anyway, apart from everything Freud said being essentially bollocks, who's to say it's not the OP's subconscious causing his finger to momentarily shift to the left just to prank them?

According to my ((QWERTY) keyboard, the "O" is to the right of the "I ".

Severe case of Muphry?

Re: RTFM

At least the german robots are a bit closer to english so when the manual makes no sense we can go back to the original german..(and that sometimes makes no sense either!)

That is because the original German isn't original at all but translated automatically from Chinese.

Re: Write Idiot Guides if you want to hire idiots

If I know the instructions are not very good (or even completely wrong), I usually rewrite the instructions and ask some colleagues to review the changes.

Re: Measure twice, cut once

"There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people."

There are no stupid questions ... but there are inquisitive idiots.

Re: Documentation

"I don't have time to read those long instructions"

You wasted more of my time (and your own) than if you had just read those instructions!

Re: Decent instructions...

Documentation is rarely set in stone, so you should treat anything you produce as transient.

And even if it were set in stone, stone can be broken.

Tech companies ready public stances on Roe v. Wade

Re: Privacy??

and keep any dumbphone unpowered until needed (otherwise it will ping cells to keep an active service and this could be used to locate you).

And power it off again after use until needed again. And get rid of it when you no longer need it (if you can manage, sell it to an anti-abortion activist to muddle the tracks).

Re: "reproductive rights are human rights"

Exactly, all of the states that allow abortion and kill children, right into the dustbin.

That is about all states, those that forbid abortion allow school shootings.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: No doubt it's easy to do if you know how...

If anybody knows how to get the funky I in naïve without resorting to hex codes or the aforementioned comment, I'm all ears!

Using the correct keyboard settings (US International with "dead" keys), it is just a combination of " and i.

Re: Heh. A classic.

This is not terribly well thought out.

If A has retained their copy of the exchange and knows that B has a retention period which has now expired A has B on toast if so needed. There's no way that B can ascertain for themselves whether what A presents is a true copy let alone contradict it if need be.

That is a problem for the legal eagles, not for the bean counters.

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

OK, I'm impressed that you can type Greek characters. No doubt it's easy to do if you know how, but still, I'm impressed!

Just add Greek to the languages of your computer (and include the keyboard), after that it is only a matter of switching. And as the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters compared to the 26 of the Latin alphabet, you won't even run out keys.

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

I recall looking at a list of such deleted files in a utility. MS-DOS had changed the first character of each deleted file to that lower-case Greek character which looks like an "o" with a short tail on the top, sticking out to the right (sigma?).

From your description I first thought you meant "δ" which is delta, but on second thought I think you are right with sigma ("σ").

Re: "Delete" = "Hide"

and (b) depending on time of year, you could be waiting a long time for sufficient sun so as to shred the data.

UV lamps are cheap.

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

Re: Nope.

If you lose half the engines on a quad, the ground will come up sooner than you want. They are designed to lose one engine and keep going, not two.

Not true, a fully loaded B747 freighter can handle losing two engines, even on one side, provided there is no accidental damage (as happens when the engines are forcefully separated from the plane).

Re: Nope.

Besides that, over water I still prefer planes with four engines.

ETOPS: Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Not happened to me, but

I've heard of the Khyber pass with a 'h', in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan

Isn't that pass at the border with Afghanistan?

Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first

Re: They absorb any old shit you feed into them

I've certainly encountered customer disservice agents who, in the days before chatbots, were probably human but would have failed the Turing test.

On their own they probably wouldn't have failed, but just about everybody fails the Turing test when you have to follow the script^*) without any leeway.

^*) Or should that be scripture as they religiously have to follow it?

Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

Re: Emergency credit?

No point, the card imprinters need the card details to be embossed on the card. Contemporary cards are not embossed, just printed.

That goes for bank cards, credit cards are still embossed.

Re: Emergency credit?

My bank card doesn't have any numbers on the front, so even if they, did, still a no go.

Bank cards usually don't, credit cards usually do.

Microsoft forgot to renew the certificate for its Windows Insider subdomain

Re: SaaS

Shit as a service?

I wouldn't mind if that were to be discontinued, but it seems unlikely Microsoft will comply.

Next major update of Windows 11 prepares for launch

Re: I'm surprised that it's not appeared on more ordinary people's machines

Micros~1 lost touch with customers a LONG time ago. This is just more of same.

O? When has Microsoft ever been in touch customers?

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

You're absolutely right, but bean counters don't get that, or rather don't give a damn, as they can save some money to give to the C-suite and shareholders.

It is always very satisfying to hear bean counters howling (and see them crying) when a fine big enough to wipe out the savings tenfold (or even more) comes in, especially if you warned them before they made the mistake.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

So, being male and c/b not that uncommon

There is still a large difference between not uncommon and majority. In the case of red-green colour blindness, about 8% of the males has this condition and 0.5% of the females.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

Re: Too many exclusions

I wonder what the rationale was for excluding home appliances, beyond money from lobbyists?

What other rationale would be needed?

But they will supply new novichok at fair and reasonable prices.

And they will provide the recipe for free, leaving the problem of sourcing the ingredients to the customer.