Posts by Jiggity

See that last line in the access list? Yeah, that means you don't have an access list

Re: The difference between a good contractor and a great one

As someone once remarked to me, "If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made prolonging the problem"

BOFH: 'What's an NFT?' the Boss asks. In this case, 'not financially thoughtful'

Thank you

For providing the first actually comprehensible explanation for what NFTs are (along with a nice object lesson as to why they are a Very Stupid Idea ;-) )

Malware and Trojans, but there's only one horse the boss man wants to hear about

Foolishness + Jargon (seems to be baseline for the executive suite)

I once worked for a CEO who would proudly proclaim how "technology informed everything the company did".

He'd then come into the IT shed and "talk through some ideas" with us. This quality time with a cherished colleague occurred, without exception, at around 1645hrs on a Friday.

The requirement was invariably on the scale of inventing a new form of fusion, or creating a holographic user interface - "trivial stuff really!" - and always with the bracingly naive expectation that it would all be delivered by 0900hrs the following Monday.

"After all, there's at least 48 hours between now and then, that's basically 5 work days!" he'd burble.

Ho ho ho. We'd chuckle, with the brio of an emergency morgue in a disaster zone.

His "specifications" comprised a 10 minute monologue made up of internally contradictory jargonese. This was often assisted by some impromptu "wireframing", which typically looked like a losing round in a solo game of Pictionary.

With a final flourish of "but it's simple really; it's just a button!" he'd bolt for the door, because he was a Very Important Man With Many Important Things To Do.

We often considered creating a button that popped a dialog with 15 paragraphs of "Jargon Ipsum" on it, as "just a button" and a lot of words seemed to be the overriding requirement.

I have a sneaking suspicion it would have kept him happy for more than a few minutes too...

The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

Re: Well

Yes, more "like for like" scopes doesn't sound so impressive as one new "bigger-er" scope, however... I remember reading about a technology that allows smaller ground-based scopes to be used in concert to effect a large "virtual" mirror, using interferometry and other clever wheezes.

If we can have an earth-bound telescope with a virtual mirror that spans the globe's diameter (and I believe this is either in the works, or is already happening - it's definitely happening with radiotelescopes) then a space-based scope on the same basis (using a handful of JWSTs, or "just" Hubbles) could give provide a truly massive baseline: if the (admittedly daunting) logistics were overcome, using L4 & L5 in the sun/earth system gives a baseline that's around 260 million kilometers.

Which is probably enough to see _something_

(in fact, there are a handful of cube-sat based missions of this sort being planned, so it probably doesn't need to be JWST*n-sized budget either)

Updating in production, like a boss

Classic

"There are two types of database programmer in the world. Those who have missed a critical filter in the WHERE clause of an UPDATE, and those that will do so at some later point in their career."

This raised a rueful chuckle; I'm happy to admit that I am in the former camp (and even happier that it was not quite so mission critical...)

That said, I have personally fixed at least one such bork that was mission critical, which always serves as a useful booster vaccination against such activities!

China says its first Mars rover Zhurong has landed on the Red Planet

Re: In other news

Bring popcorn, but don't start popping it yet... a quick back-of-the-hand calculation suggests it's going to be about 4-5 years before they get close enough for the first bout to even start.

And then it will simultaneously be the most expensive, most technically advanced, and most lame Robot Wars episode *ever*

Ah, you know what? Keep your crappy space station, we're gonna try to make our own, Russia tells world

Re: It does have a finite life

> However, having a bunch of people floating around for so long isn't neither practical nor acceptable from a health perspective.

But that's also how we learn a) what the health perspectives are, and b) how to mitigate against them for when we *do* decide to leave the planet on a more permanent basis.

A lot of "space health" issues and mitigations are chicken/egg scenarios - you can't simulate the kind of bone density loss induced by extended micro-gravity in a 1g environment. Likewise, solutions to that bone density loss that might work in 1g *really* don't work in micro-gravity - they have to be tested in situ... and a vomit comet isn't a suitable platform to trial an hour-long exercise regime over the months required.

We're going to need to figure those solutions out "on the float", limiting exposure of the individual test subjects to current safe boundaries (and yet always aiming to push those boundaries).

To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user

Re: if it works...

"I'm not going to go buy some stupid IoT connected shite now to put a buggy app on my phone just so I can control the lamp from a screen. I have legs, I can get to the switch."

This. A billion times this.

(icon in Friday-afternoon-prompted solidarity)

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

This story is the corollary (ish) to the old axiom about software development being the art of introducing bugs into an empty text file (or punchcards, in this case)... he clearly hadn't eliminated the right bugs :)

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!

One of my colleagues regularly sends me phone camera screenshots, even though they have been told on several occasions about the existence of the magical [PrtScr] key on their keyboard.

(I figured that "[PrtScr] key; new email; [Ctrl]+[V]" was simpler to explain than the snipping tool... yes, some of my colleagues make the chairs they sit on look like Mensa candidates - at least the chairs have obvious utility. but I digress...)

What's even more impressive is that, somehow, this user's screenshots always appear *upside down* in the emails.

Either their phone is so old/unsmart that it doesn't know which way "up" is and thus auto-rotate the resulting picture, or (and?) they just don't know how to rotate an image.

Either way, it's additional processing that always brings an extra smile to my day, I can tell you! </drippingSarcasm>

(icon for their likely grasp of technical knowledge)

Re: Hilarious...

My mate sent me a WhatsApp message with (what turned out to be a perfectly cropped screenshot of) a video thumbnail with the play button in the middle of it.

To my shame I was mashing the screen like a bloody idiot for about 5 seconds before the 15 watt pygmy bulb slowly glimmered to a dull red glow.

Bloody git... the only thing that made me feel slightly better was that he later admitted that he'd mashed his screen for a full 15 seconds *and* rebooted the phone, thinking it had frozen, when *he* first received the image.

Who's for another trade war? Japan hits South Korea, Seoul survivor promises to retaliate

Credit where it's due

Kudos for cramming a crap pun on an excellent old-school tower defence game into the title!

(Icon chosen for game appropriateness... and general xenophobia in the world, I guess)

Complex automation won't make fleshbags obsolete, not when the end result is this dumb

This reminds me of an article in EVO car magazine ages ago; the reviewer - an accomplished driver - was discussing the (then) new Mitsubishi Evo and how jolly clever all of its driver assistance gizmos were. The reviewer was very taken with the car's ability to gather up the occasional mess that was their driving and turning it into the skills of the unholy child of Ayrton Senna and Michael Shumacher. They quickly became used to pressing on in all conditions, and the car just throwing traction control and braking down wherever it was needed to maintain forward progress.

Which was all lovely, until it wasn't; they were running late one damp winter evening, and pushed a bit too hard. At which point, physics pushed back very hard, because they were so far beyond the envelope when it all let go. Needless to say, the car was stuffed (they were shaken, but not stirred).

This was someone who spent their life driving cars, and was quite good at it. Given the driving ability of most of the chimpanzees I see driving around, there's going to be a *lot* of carnage when things break down.

Re: "We will need a new generation of workers – robot minders"

We are all Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan...

Spooky! Solar System's Planet NINE could be discovered in the next NINE years (plus one to six), say astroboffins

Excellent captioning

"Majestic ... What the Sun looks like with a tiny planet near it in this completely abstract illustration" - of course, that's not a tiny planet... it's either a vast planet (i.e. > Jupiter by some way) or it's a tiny sun, so not *terribly* accurate, but at least it's honest about its representative value.

Given examples like Sky News' reporting of the New Horizons' dash past Ultima Thule (which included a clip art graphic of a snowman, for the idiots at the back of the audience) it's refreshing to see instances where reporters admit that space looks nothing like what everyone thinks it looks like.

BOFH: Bye desktop, bye desk. Hello tablet and a beanbag on the floor

re: Dutchmen and profit

That reminds me of the old gag about the origin of copper wire: 2 Dutchmen arguing over a 1 cent coin...