Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: Business partner porn...

"I later found links to an organisation who were *helping* him to overcome his addiction"

A helping hand, so to speak?

Re: going passive-aggressive on a petty tyrant

I remember a similar sale for another big multinational that went bang at around the same time. Everyone was hoping to pick up bits of electronic kit on the cheap, and of course bid each other through the roof. No-one had any interest in the very nice c-suite furniture that was up for grabs, though, and it sold (mostly to me) at prices that weren't even close to a whole penny in the £ - in most cases I paid more for the fees to bring stuff down to the loading dock. I ended up hiring a Luton box to collect my swag, selling most of it off for about 100x what I paid, and keeping a few particularly nice pieces for myself.

AdTech CEO whose products detected fraud jailed for financial fraud

Only one company here "improperly recognized [the payment] as revenue". It is unclear from the justice dept's statement whether the other party was the whistleblower, or whether someone there was happy to enable Kubient's fraud, but did not do the same thing at the other end.

I would note that if the other party is indeed Zeta, that is a much bigger company with much more scope for someone relatively low down the food chain to do something the company did not approve of. A plausible explanation for everything you mention is that someone tried to boost their department's revenues via this circular fraud, but failed to get it past Zeta's accountants, who excluded it from the accounts and notified the SEC of the shenanigans. Alternatively, someone tried to help out a crony at Kubient, never tried to include the transaction in the accounts, but it still came to light and Zeta informed the SEC. Explanations along those lines are far more plausible than that there is a large-scale fraud at Zeta the authorities are ignoring.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: Serious OOPS!

Having done large scale pc deployments, people _seriously_ underestimate the cost of offering multiple options. Despite laptops being somewhat more costly than desktops, it's much cheaper to give everyone laptops than to give almost everyone laptops, and a few people desktops.

BOFH: HR's AI hiring tool is perfectly unbiased – as long as you're us

Re: Customizations

"What colourise do I have?"

Pirate Bay financier and far-right activist Carl Lundström dies in plane crash

Shame about the plane. M20s are pretty.

As Elon Musk makes thousands of federal workers jobless, tycoon pushes for $56B Tesla pay deal

Re: Found the Tesla owner

I'm weirdly fascinated to learn where you believe the colon is in the human body.

Re: Found the Tesla owner

Colon? He has his head up Musk's arse?

"there's no reason to get confused between them"

There's every reason to confuse them - less so in terms of appearance, more so in terms of their actions and claims.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Re: Compiling a list of assets

These days it would be borne on a USB.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: Bats..

Baseball pre-dates the documented existence of rounders. It's more likely rounders is a simplified version of baseball.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

Re: CAPTCHA's days are numbered? PROMISE???

All it's doing is comparing your responses to other people's, so if you aren't sure what it's looking for, ask yourself what the average idiot in a hurry would do.

BOFH: Printer's festive bips herald a merry mystery for the Boss's budget

Yes, it's easy to take a handful of legitimate payments. Hard to take illegitimate ones and get away with it.

And my anti-tiger powder keeps the tigers away. That's why I sprinkle it everywhere I go...

Re: Christmas party

You should try going to a supermarket where they don't expect most of their customers to shoplift, and so let you scan your stuff as you walk around. Infinitely preferable to queuing up at the till behind some oldie who questions every scanned item, and then gets surprised at the end when they're asked to pay.

Re: Christmas party

"There was certainly no "Ho Ho Ho" from the staff member I asked!"

You don't say.

'Hi, I'm Caver_Dave, and I inflict terrible old jokes on minimum wage retail staff at their busiest time of year, and expect them to laugh'...

Because that isn't the end with the security. The payment processor will notice the suspicious transactions and block pay-outs. Even with less obviously suspicious transactions, it's unlikely you'd be able to get enough to be worthwhile, there's a fairly lengthy delay before pay-out which would give people a chance to notice they've been charged (at which point, multiple complaints of fraud will result in the whole account being blocked until it's resolved), and this all has to be done having given the payment processor some very good proof of ID.

So, basically, if you're ever in a position to do it and get away with the money - say, having stolen a terminal and the account details for a legit business - you'd be in a position to do some much more lucrative stuff without even needing the card terminal.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

This is obviously true, and even something energy companies are required to do, but that won't stop the tinfoil hatters coming up with conspiracy theories about the you-know-whos.

Re: If I was in charge

Not a true one, though.

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

One of the few really valuable lessons I learnt from working for idiots is that you don't have to be good at running a small business to have a successful small business: you just have to be good enough at bringing in new clients faster than you lose old ones. The key skill is sales.

Judge decides not to block Musk's $1M election giveaway

Re: So Musk really *can* buy an election

The only thing I disagree with there is that Cobain _would_ have put them out if they were on fire, because that's what decent people do, even when the person on fire isn't even close to a decent human being.

...and that's why you voted for Trump. Because that's what far-right tinfoilhatters do.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: World record?

https://www.loweringthebar.net/category/civil/enormous-demands

It might be the biggest penalty awarded by a 'court', but it isn't the biggest load of nonsense claimed in a lawsuit. It has about as much weight as the others mentioned there, so it bears comparison.

BOFH: Boss's quest for AI-generated program ends where it should've begun

Re: NS>AI

I was once tasked with writing idiot-proof documentation for new starters at a big 3 accountancy firm to follow to set up their accounts with a well known provider of accountancy training. One of my co-workers had brought her ~6 year old son into the office that day, and he was sitting quietly playing with crayons, so I borrowed him to test the how-to. Some of the users were still unable to follow the instructions, so the training provider complained to my manager, who asked me about whether the instructions were tested, and I said 'come on, a 6 year old could follow them'. A bit later, I got to say 'no, literally a six year old followed them successfully'.

I was not allowed to suggest to the ultimate client that this would be useful in winnowing out unsuitable applicants.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

"so we then asked her to swap the power cables between the monitor and the computer, she'd already done that too"

We used to ask the idiots to tell us which cable was longer. They'd have to unplug them to compare.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: "In fact, I've helped a number of people take that first step into the space program."

Clearly an internal promotion - soon to become an external demotion.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Re: Very Simply

Absolutely cuckoo. It basically put an end to the fake-contractor scams. No-one in their right mind insists on going to court (or tribunal) over what they know to be a scam, so all the chancers and liars and tax evaders simply stopped, rather than fight. There were, as before IR35's introduction, a handful of borderline cases requiring adjudication.

Re: Very Simply

Or without the conspiracy theory, it was a clampdown by the taxman on fake contractors, which didn't involve any actual change in the rules, just in the enforcement.

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: Bo(e)ing?

What a daft thing to say. The 707 had many more incidents when new. The newer plane is a couple of orders of magnitude safer.

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Every office has one.

I think you've misunderstood my comment - which is ironic, given the definition I presented of 'correct English' - if you think I said countable/uncountable nouns don't exist. I said that the distinction between fewer and less is not countable v uncountable. And that the distinction is language-elitist nonsense, which I'll stand by unless anyone can present an example of somewhere ambiguity would be introduced by using one instead of the other.

Incidentally, you aren't wrong about billions. When I was a kid there were still plenty of older books around which said it was 10^12. But it was already being superseded by the common-sense international standard version.

No, all of them will stick semi-permanently if left too long - with different kinds of tape it can be anywhere from a day or two (in direct sunlight) to a couple of weeks. But in IT there's always a bottle of isoprop around to remove the residue.

No reason except being the best in the world, you mean?

Re: Every office has one.

Countable/uncountable is definitely wrong. Plural/singular at least makes some sense.

But...

English only has one rule: your usage is correct if it leads the people you are attempting to communicate with to understand what you intended them to understand. Fewer/less is a difference manufactured by prescriptivists, which has become somewhat established over many, many years - mainly as a form of elitism. Can anyone suggest any example(s) where using one word or the other actually makes something ambiguous or otherwise hard to understand?

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

I take it that by 'all got sorted tidily and quickly' you mean she admitted (nonexistent) fault and pled guilty to a charge of obstruction of a public road? If you're going to claim the police accepted the blame, we'll all know you're making it up...

Glass rain, supersonic winds, and Eau de Rotten Egg – just another day on HD 189733 b

Re: nice trip

Only if you're a postal worker.

Re: It always amazes me...

Cuckoo!

Any information like that will be worked out on the basis of the observations that can be made and what we know about physics. It'll have been written up and published so it can be checked by everyone else working in the field.

You could have just googled it to find out how they worked out the wind speed, but no, better pull that tinfoilhat on tight.

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/5400mph-winds-discovered-hurtling-around-planet-outside-solar-system/

"try taking an infrared measurement off of a speck of dust drifting in front of a raging fire, from a mile away."

Without an atmosphere in the way, that's a technical challenge, but not impossible at all. With, say, 10,000x magnification*, that's like taking a picture of something 10x the size of a dust particle (so, say, 0.1-1mm across), from 5 feet away. Obviously, with an infrared filter on the camera, a picture _is_ a temperature measurement, so all you need to do is then look how bright those pixels are on your image.

[*This is not actually how space telescopes work. But it's good enough for the purposes of debunking that nonsense.]

Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing to swerve courtroom over 737 Max crashes

This is complete nonsense. The reason to build the plane as it was built was that - even factoring in the MCAS problems - it was much safer than it would have been if pilots had to retrain and re-accrue experience.

Re: I blame Yurope

On the contrary, I have read the reports, and you won't find any respectable source saying anything else.

The simple fact is there were many MCAS incidents for every one that led to a crash. The linking factor between the crashes was that the pilots were inexperienced and overworked. Experienced pilots managed to deal with MCAS problems even without any specific training. Those are the actual facts here.

That's an absurd (far right) conspiracy theory, not borne out in any way by the facts. MCAS incidents had nothing to do with saving money.

Re: I blame Yurope

Boeing didn't 'game the regulatory system', though people clearly fucked up the implementation. The idea was sound: there should be (and were) fewer incidents with a plane that flies like an old one than there would be when pilots have to learn and qualify on a whole new plane.

It should be noted that the stuff Boeing is being fined for had no impact on the crashes. Those were down to inexperienced, overworked pilots at corner-cutting regional airlines in parts of the world with a non-Western approach to safety standards. None of the other MCAS incidents led to crashes. Unfortunately in all the Boeing-bashing, that is being overlooked, and it's by far the bigger safety issue here. There have been several more crashes (of all kinds of planes) since due to the same practices.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

Yes, and still better than Le Pen is. I'll take the people who won't admit to themselves that they're Nazis over the people who lie about what they are to others, because at least the ones lying to themselves accept that it's vile - so if, maybe through some method reminiscent of Clockwork Orange, you could get them to understand what it is they actually believe, they might stop. But, like I said, it's 'choose your favourite from the Bristol Stool Scale' stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_stool_scale

Re: @jospanner

And yet, 'austerity' is still just Tory propaganda; money was spent that wasn't allocated to those areas. If you're calling for a bigger increase, be honest about it.

I have no problem saying more money should have been spent on things. I have a problem with 'austerity' bullshit. It was Tory propaganda, and Labour decided it was more beneficial to them to go along with the narrative than to challenge it; this is a tactic that has been empirically proven not to work. It's much better to dispute the narrative and attack the Tories for profligacy and waste, and/or to state clearly that NHS funding requires increased borrowing, if that's what you mean.

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

Of course Jewish people are just as capable of believing antisemitic things as non-Jews. It's pretty normal that in any oppressed group some of the members come to believe that the oppression is justified by the group's alleged misbehaviour.

"things have become so politicised that any criticism of the Israeli government gets the dog-whistle of antisemitism"

The idea that Jewish people make false allegations of antisemitism for political ends is itself an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The reality is that some people perceive racism where there is none, but that much more commonly the victims of racism are better placed to spot it than those who are not involved. Speaking specifically about 'criticism of the Israeli government', it's sometimes not antisemitic per se, but usually comes from people who are antisemitic and have said many other antisemitic things; mostly, though, it's just plain old antisemitic. It's notable that despite Israel having a fucked-up government at the moment, most of the criticism purporting to be of it is not based on reality, but on Iranian propaganda.

Re: @jospanner

Yes. I provided a link earlier to the actual facts. Whatever Paul Krugman says - there are two types of Krugman articles, the ones where he speaks about economics, and the ones where he tackles social issues as an amateur - the facts are that the UK spent more every year, not less, and it was the deficit spending he approved of.

There is of course an argument to be made that the UK should have spent even more, but calling not doing so 'austerity' is falling into the Tory propaganda trap.

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

Vanishingly few of the people pretending to be pro-Palestine have ever said anything that is actually about helping Palestinians. They are anti-Israel (and mostly, let's be honest, overtly antisemitic). Ironically moderate Zionists - those who believe in Israel's right to exist, and even military action against Hamas, but don't support the current government - are pretty much the only people who ever express any actual concern for Palestinians, or do anything to support them.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: bad German

*whoosh*

Re: 440V live steelwork

Is it only me that's bothered that it's bad German? It should be 'keine gefingerpoken'.

Re: Ouch!!

That doesn't sound like what I'd call 'small'! I've had a shock from mains wiring that was about like banging your funny bone, which seems more the kind of thing to lead idiots to think mains voltage can't really hurt you.

Then again, there are lots of idiots out there. I've seen someone trip a breaker - but fortunately not get hurt - working on a bathroom extractor fan, which, of course, has both switched and unswitched live, after turning off the light switch 'so there's no power to it'. I've also seen an electrician strip live wires with his teeth; he claimed that a good electrician can taste the difference between phases :)

Re: Ouch!!

Places like that _used_ to sell them. They are strongly discouraged in the UK by safety bodies, because UK sockets are safer without them. They're bendy enough to make it much easier to retract the shutters on L and N than any other way short of poking a screwdriver (or similar) into the earth.

Re: Ouch!!

"I genuinely think people fail to understand how dangerous mains electricity is because you cannot see or hear it unlike gas and water."

I think part of it is that lots of people - especially the kind of bodgers we're talking about here - have at some point experienced a small mains-voltage shock, and think that's as bad as it can get.