Re: Whaaaa?
Would there be a sign involved saying "Beware of the leopard"?
Posts by KittenHuffer
798 posts • joined 10 Dec 2018
Equifax software bug messed up credit score calculations for weeks
Data brokers amass profiles of pregnant women – and, of course, it's all up for sale
Tuesday 2nd August 2022 06:46 GMT 
In my youth ....
.... whenever I was approached (normally on some high street) by some religious person trying to 'sell' me their fantasy of an invisible sky friend I would quite happily stand there for half an hour or more trying to convince them that their invisible sky friend didn't exist. I would even describe myself as a proselytizing atheist. I don't think I ever convinced one of them to reconsider their position, but then they never convinced me either. So I guess it was a no score draw in the end.
And it was actually that lack of success, and my time becoming more valuable to me, that changed my tactics to either ignoring them, or in the few cases that seemed to deserve it being downright offensive.
I have sinced become convinced by the argh-uments of a new group whose invisible sky friend has noodley appendages. And I now consider myself a member of the church of the FSM.
---------> I was torn between this one and the 'spawn of satan'!
Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens
Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked
Friday 29th July 2022 13:04 GMT
Re: Ebay
In that case you're one of the people that feeds the fleaBay trade in 'empty' boxes!
People who buy the brand new 'shiny' have found that instead of throwing the box away they can get £10, £20, £30, or more for the empty box on fleaBay. Unfortunately there is a real chance that the person buying is only doing so to convince people such as yourself that the stolen good they are trying to sell are legit.
Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area
A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day
Monday 25th July 2022 09:17 GMT
Not final day antics ....
.... but I have supported a PDP11/73 that was holding up a garage. A daily task for which was to run the backup setting script on the console. Unfortunately the script required the date and time for the backup to start to be typed in, and if this produced a date/time that was in the past the backup would kick in immediately! And the first task of the backup was to logout any terminals that remained logged in. Not good when this happened about once a quarter.
So I ended up teaching myself RSTSE (in the pre-internet era) to tweak both scripts. The backup run scripts to give 10 minutes of warnings that a backup was going to start, so that I had time to finish my fag before sauntering back to the console to cancel that script. And then the backup setting script so that hitting enter twice would use todays date and 10pm as the date/time to start the next backup.
I was loved (not literally [well I did end up marrying one of them!]) by the ladies in the office who would argue over who's turn it was to set the backup before those changes were made.
Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger
DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything
Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told
NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe
Friday 1st July 2022 08:57 GMT
Back whilst incarcerated with the NHS ....
.... I visited one of our satellite offices to set up some serial terminal remote connection over WAN software, mainly so that that office could still operate during the frequent serial network failures that were out of our control.
Whilst there I was asked to look at a couple of other issues, and resolved a printer not working (the network lead was missing) and a PC that would crash the network after it was move from one office to another (the make before break thinnet wall socket was upside down). My boss called me in when I got back to the main office to pass on the praise from the manager of the satellite office. Only for me to let loose on the fact that one of my cow-orker and our third party support company had been out to both of these issues on several occasions, and had successfully failed to resolve them.
Apple lets devs in South Korea switch payment providers – with a lot of legwork
Friday 1st July 2022 06:59 GMT 
So ....
.... instead of paying 30% to Apple you get to do all the coding, deal with any payment issues, and have to provide for auditing as well ...... and all that saves you 4%?!?
Doesn't that mean that Apple are saying that their contribution for doing all of those things is 4%?
So isn't this Apple admitting that they should only be charging 4% for payments that go through them?
Is it possible that SK might come to the same conclusion and tell Apple that they have to lower their cut on payments to 4% instead?
Chinese boffins suggest launching nuclear Neptune orbiter in 2030
First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?
Friday 24th June 2022 12:23 GMT
Re: I Used To Hate That!
I know exactly what you mean. I had the 360 degree bad review a couple of years ago, without being told what I had done wrong. It seems that my attitude has 'improved' since then .... according to whomever.
The reality is that I tend to get these 'bad attitude' reviews early during my time in an employment, when my enthusiasm for doing a good job rubs someone up the wrong way. Then when they have killed off any enthusiasm or drive I have, and I'm only marking time until they p*ss me off enough to find something else, that's when my reviews seem to markedly improve.
The good reviews I'm getting at the moment tell me that it might be time to blow the dust off my CV again!
BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft
Friday 24th June 2022 12:40 GMT
Re: Unicycle test
I'll join you. When you start Kite Buggy Jumping the question is not 'Will I get hurt?' it is 'When will I get hurt?'
The one thing you learn is that Mother Nature IS a bitch that is just out to kill you in interesting ways!
The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups
Friday 24th June 2022 09:21 GMT 
I once did ...
... some forensic auditing at a garage, following parts being ordered from suppliers, to receipt, and booking out to workshop or bodyshop jobs. And then proving that the parts were not for the make/model of vehicle in the workshop/bodyshop. This was then used in the court case of the mid-management employee that was ordering/stealing the parts to order.
The system was old enough that it printed out an audit trail of transactions at the end of each day, so the actual w**k was wading through stacks of printouts taller than the PFY that I was.
Eliminating the impossible! ----------->
Yodel becomes the latest victim of a cyber 'incident'
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 09:46 GMT
With apologies to Luther!
To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
And to run where the brave dare not go
.
To right the unrightable wrong
And to love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are to weary
To trace the untraceable parcel
.
This is my quest
To follow that parcel
Ooh, no matter how hopeless
No matter how far
To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march, march into hell
For that heavenly cause
.
And I know
If I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart
Will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
.
And the world will be better for this
Oh, that one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strong with his last ounce of courage
To trace the untraceable, the untraceable
The untraceable parcel
.
Yeah, and I'll always dream
The impossible dream
Yes, and I'll trace
The untraceable parcel
Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 07:37 GMT
Re: It never ceases to amaze me ...
I did upvote you, cos I remember those times as well.
The problem is that I remember that the evidence brought out to support that argument was normally along the lines of "Just look at steam engines! Still around after more than 100 years!"
But there was no consideration that the 90% of steam engines that were not built to last are long gone, and that even those that remain represent a small fraction of a percent of the total of that make/model that were built. Statistically there is no evidence that they were built to last any better than modern cars. About the only advantage they have is bulk, in that they take longer to rust away due to the mass of metal involved.
In 100 years, I'm sure there will still be a number of antique petrol powered cars around, and people will be saying that the newer battery/fusion/flatulence powered models just aren't built to last!
Password recovery from beyond the grave
Leave that sentient AI alone a mo and fix those racist chatbots first
Friday 17th June 2022 12:58 GMT
Re: Do androids dream of electric sheep again?
Ultimately mankind's one legacy in this Universe may be to spawn AI, or a race (or set) of AI, that then live on long after mankind has successfully erased themselves from existence.
This may be the answer to the Drake equation. The AI's can't be bothered to talk to meat bags of mainly water!
Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada
Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits
AI to help study first images from James Webb Space Telescope
Thursday 9th June 2022 09:09 GMT
Dark matter isn't required just to make one theory work ....
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/five-reasons-we-think-dark-matter-exists-a122bd606ba8
It's pretty much needed as soon as you start looking at the amount of mass required for the Universe to look the way it does. That article was from 2014, but things have moved on a bit since then.
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-why-dark-energy-must-exist-despite-recent-reports-to-the-contrary-fd2b484f3305
I believe it has reached the point where it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and very few scientists are still arguing that it isn't a duck!
Five Eyes alliance’s top cop says techies are the future of law enforcement
Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids
Tuesday 7th June 2022 14:21 GMT
Re: A statistician would argue ....
Humanity will not be around on those sort of timescales, or at least not as anything we would recognise. We're fast approaching the point where (if we don't make ourselves extinction) we will start modifying ourselves into some uber-post-homo-sapien species where we tinker with ourselves genetically or cybernetically according to our needs.
How about the antifreeze-like blood of the wood frog. That might be a shortcut to cryo sleep, allowing us to build slow boats to other solar systems.
Or the regeneration from starfish, allowing limbs to be regrown.
Or the water handling capability of a camel, allowing you to survive for weeks without access to water.
One thing I'm sure of is that much of the human genome is redundant code, and when we truly start to understand it we should be able to rip out all of that junk dna to come up with a human 2.0.
.
But then all I really said was that the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have an advanced enough space industry. I never said that I thought that humans had a better long term survival strategy than them.
I think that when you compare humanity to the dinosaurs we will be the candle that burns twice as bright, but burns for half as long. I'm just glad to be alive at a time when I can have this sort of discussion with someone who may be on the other side of the planet!
Tuesday 7th June 2022 13:26 GMT
Re: A statistician would argue ....
I suppose I should have said a gambler rather than a statistician.
A gambler would take that sample of one and say that the chances of life evolving around a star are greater than zero. Then they would multiply that value by the 400+ billion stars in our (medium sized) galaxy. And then by the 100-200 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. He'll then realise that if the chances of life evolving are even 1 in 1020 then there should be another half dozen examples of life out there somewhere. And they would quite happily go all in on odds like that.
Tuesday 7th June 2022 10:02 GMT
Re: A statistician would argue ....
Not disagreeing with that at all. But technologically advanced lifeforms will be several orders of magnitude easier for us to spot, or for them to spot us.
And in the long run not having technology is a sure fire way to extinction as well. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Tuesday 7th June 2022 09:57 GMT
Re: But then the free thinker / crank / conspiracy theorist would argue ....
One of the probable effects of being in a simulation would be that when you start looking at extremely small/large interval/scales/movements, in fact most measurable values, you are going to run into upper and lower limits beyond which it is impossible to measure. And these are likely to be the limits of the stored values for position, velocity, charge, etc. for the system that is being used to run the simulation.
Due to this you are likely to observe differences in the laws of a simulated Universe at very small/large scales, increasing the closer you get to the limits of the stored values.
I'm just glad that we don't see such effects in our own Uni ..... Oh! Did someone mention the Planck Scale? And I think someone else is muttering about Quantum Mechanics! And I'm sure I heard time dilation in there somewhere!
Tuesday 7th June 2022 07:40 GMT
But then the free thinker / crank / conspiracy theorist would argue ....
.... alternatively, if we are living in a simulation (aka The Matrix), then the fact that the nearest solar system is (currently) beyond our reach and that we have not observed life outside of our solar system may just be devices employed by the programmer of the simulation to simplify things so that they don’t have to expend much computing power beyond our solar system.
This means that we could just be some school science project!
Tuesday 7th June 2022 07:37 GMT
A statistician would argue ....
.... that there is life elsewhere in the Universe. The only questions are how much, how evolved, and how far.
Our best guess is that intelligent, technically advanced life is rare enough that the nearest is far enough away that they haven’t noticed us, or their reply has not arrived yet, both depend on the speed of light and the inverse square law.
It is possible that we might find non-intelligent life within our solar system, but as a previous poster implied there are a limited number of places left that we believe might harbour it.
That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity
Amazon puts 'creepy' AI cameras in UK delivery vans
Tuesday 24th May 2022 07:28 GMT 
Isn't there a law ....
.... that you can have any AI decision reviewed by human beings? In which case the footage that was used by the AI to make the decision would need to be available. And since this is not just limited to the 'bad' AI decisions I think ALL of the drivers should request ALL of the footage of their driving EVERY month that the AI is being used to make decisions concerning their pay. I'm sure it wouldn't take long before the big A decided that the cost of having to hand out exabytes of video each month would far exceed the 'savings' made by screwing their serfs out of small change.
Obv! ------------>
Edit: Yup, it's law in the UK! But it's under review by the UK Gummin't!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/right_to_contest_automated_ai_uk_consult/
