Posts by EVP

Janet Jackson music video declared a cybersecurity exploit

Re: Unbelievable

"they're [sic] are no moving parts on your processor"

Electrons?

I don't think that Janet can reach electrons' wave frequency, though.

General Motors charging mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Never.

n.t.

Meta privacy red team lead: Does your business know its privacy adversaries?

Re: "a holistic privacy program"

”Does your business know its privacy adversaries?”

Meta a.k.a Faecesbook?

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: Does your neighbour have kids?

Perhaps they wished that someone heard and stole it?

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Re: The burning question

Robots will take over in factories -> people will be out of work -> only robots will have money to buy cars… oh, wait!

Scientist shares spicy pic of 'James Webb' discovery

Re: Black Hole

Next, full moon and black hole aligning…

Absolutely at its finest! This kind of stuff not only gives good laughs, but long warm chuckles too.

Where can I downvote your downvoter?

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Private Libraries?

Yes indeed. We should collect them all into a library. /etc/potd, anyone?

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And now, throw in the electrical cars!

No, the NHS will get extra 350 MWh - per week. Or that’s what I’ve heard…

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Re: Do not piss about in prod!

Cut off index fingers first. No more two-fingered typing. That’ll teach ‘em.

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Re: hot botty

Driving a recent JD and nobody could not be bothered to come and fix your aircon? I hope not…

Sorry to hear about your trouble.

”Same thing, but so much more on trend (do people still say that?) don't you think?”

I’m so out of the loop*, surge prising of course! I definitely need some help before I approach** Beemer with my*** devilish innovations. Come along to be my advisor? We’ll split licensing fees and laugh together on our way to bank.

* I got that right, didn’t I? Oh wait, that’s so noughties…

** Reach?

*** Stolen, er, borrowed from El Reg.

On a second thought, hey are even stupider than I first considered: sell heated seats off-switch subscription instead. Everybody would subscribe.

Hey, Beemer if you are reading, I’d have some more bastard ideas for you. I’ll license them to you.

Re: No economic sense

BMW will introduce an upgradeable go-faster engine next. It’ll be called Wanker.

Re: Raise the Jolly Roger!

“ I read a novel set in the near future where characters chose old cars”

I live in a future where people already do that.

Yeah, and they are stupid too: they should have implemented demand based gouging: summertime $1/mo, winter $49.99/mo, below -10 C $149.99/mo. What a wasted opportunity.

They are probably crying bitterly that seat belts, headlights and wipers are required in MOT. But wait, there is always lobbying…

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Re: Ouija Board

One needs an OUIJA 10646 compliant board these days.

Behind Big Tech's big privacy heist: Deliberate obfuscation

Re: who gets the fines?

”Or are the fines just treated as a business expense?”

Yes - and it shows that how low one can go. It’s not a new practice, though.

All-AMD US Frontier supercomputer ousts Japan's Fugaku as No. 1 in Top500

Re: Know southern BC well, there is something in the water..

” Although I might add, I have never really trusted BC Hydro. The only electric utility that ever had negative electricity prices.”

I’d fully trust an utility with negative prices. Where can subcribe to BC Hydro?

NASA's 161-second helicopter tour of Martian terrain

Re: which then relay that data back to Earth at between 500Kb/s to around 3Mb/s

OK, saving energy is better explanation than lack of suitable sensor, and so is bandwidth sharing too. Thanks.

Re: which then relay that data back to Earth at between 500Kb/s to around 3Mb/s

The data rate is quite an achievement indeed.

But why is video quality so bad, then? A 137 € mobile phone records better video. Uplink data rate is not a limiting factor. Maybe they just didn't have a better radiation/shock/$ENVIRONMENTAL_HOSTILITY-hardened image sensor available at the time of build. This is a genuine question, not to put NASA down.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Dogs

The man leaves the dog without any food. The dog dies. The man (factory owner's nephew, probably) is free to fiddle with every knob and button. Fail.

An upgraded version: The dog is so big and hungry, that it has to be fed all the time. Otherwise, it bites the man. Works as planned.*

*) Well, almost. The dog should be trained to bite any member of manglement who came nearby. The feature will be released in version 3, at an additional cost.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

Re: Bee-sting ?

“Vampire tap” reminded me of “Vampire bat, vampire bat” by W. Willis. Haven’t listened to the song for ages, thanks.

"it's the idiots that stand out and get remembered."

Maybe that's why they get promoted all too often.

My apologies if someone got the impression that I think all sparkies are thick. I myself might have something to do with the trade, too. There are dumb sparkies, bright sparkies (pun intented), and the ones who sit comfortably on top of the bell curve. Like people in all walks of life.

A pair of thick sparkies were working on thicknet cable. How appropriate. Next decade, they did some twisted pair work.

Infusion of $3.5bn not enough to revive Terra's 'stablecoin'

But isn’t it in a half-stable and stable state at the same time? Quantum physics is weird enough, but this not-a-quantum-horse buggers the mind.

On a side note, consider how fried vegetables exhibit quantum properties: healthy and yet unhealthy.

Arthur's horse? Not in, not out, but somewhere in between. If you watch it, it's bound collapse into a state.

Re: The only downside

"But, but, but... somebody's got to do something!"

Burn baby, burn.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

Re: At long last...

Congratulations, you've won a special Illuminati surprise treatment! Report immediately to your nearest Illuminati office to claim it. Hurry up, our offer never expires!

Re: Figured out what THAT meant

FBR would've been a better way to arrange the words Big Fine Router.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

Re: Saw that coming

> (**) Probably the world's least useful bug report.

Probably the most common one, too.

My favorite is ”nothing works”

Auctioneer puts Space Shuttle CPUs under the hammer

Re: Important question

Elite. I hope the deck comes with sound support.

Re: Instruction set architecture from IBM's mainframe System/360

License price must be sky high.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Double standards

A classy answer, in a way.

Re: MWC Coherent

CDC Wren IV manual is a thing of beauty too… and IBM 5162 Technical Reference, and many others from the halcyon days.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Hahaa, well done! Especially the part where the reviewers noticed it, but you escaped scot free xD

I don't do that either. The reason being that I couldn't ever recall what **** is supposed to hold, or what ******(***, *******) is going to do. Respect to Brad that he could do it.

Swearing at my sources... well, that's a whole other thing.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: Ahh Yes the "We have stopped supporting your device mid sub"

Which came first: the monotreme, or the egg? Enquiring minds want to know.

Re: At Semtex451, re: managers.

Now you've gone and insulted gin-sodden taxi drivers.

Re: At Semtex451, re: managers.

I propose using acronyms. In fact, use acronyms only. Throw in an occasional '2' between the letters and they'll eat out of your hand.

Help, my IT team has no admin access to their own systems

Re: Forget the turtles...

1. Place fire safe in a regular safe.

2. Place fire safe key in a fire resistant box (without lock) in the regular safe as well.

3. The place burns down and melts down the regular safe.

4. When things have cooled down, recover the fire safe key.

5. Open the fire safe.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

That's OK, if you promise to never troll a dice.

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: In before someone says Rust would have enforced memory safety

"Except Rust appeared in 2010, this story is set in the 1990s."

Yeah, but it took some 15-20 years to rust.

Re: Site Acceptance Test

Haha, super! (Though not when it happened...)

A smarter alternative to password recognition could be right in front of us: Unique, invisible, maybe even deadly

Re: On a related topic...

Hahaa, covid-era version of ‘goes around like a fart inside lederhosen’ is ‘…inside your facemask’ now!

Nextgen mask to fight Omicron —>

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: A hard power off is a good test

Particularly if the server in question is equipped with spinning rust. Disks which have been running continuously for years after their best before date may need to be persuaded hard to start spinning again after power down.

We had a license server (a SPARCserver) which have been on for >10 years. Nobody wanted to touch its power switch, but then it had to be moved physically. It was a rush job to keep the disks from cooling down too much. Fortunately, it came back alive and was still running when I heard about it seven or eight years ago. I don’t think it’s running anymore, but tough little bugger it was with more than 20 years of service.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

Re: It’s deeply shocking this is built into the base Windows OS

25? I understand that shafting customers has been going on since day one.

Otherwise you got it right.

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

Re: Reductio ad absurdum

Lucky you. We didn’t have 1s, but only 0s.