* Posts by ITMA

1039 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2019

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

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Re: Pardon?

What rubbish.

That is precisely what you do not want in a CCTV system - the ability for people to arbitrarily disable parts or the even the whole system easily, let alone "tamper" with it.

If they can "tamper" with it that destroys its credibility as evidence.

AI agents can copy humans to get closer to artificial general intelligence, DeepMind finds

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Devil

"That said, I'd rather have a support bot with full(er) knowledge of what they are supporting than what we generally get."

I still rather have a person than a bot.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

But wait....

Then it won't be long before AI will get itself unionised and be demanding collective bargaining and threatening to down tools "everybody out" if it doesn't get it.

Not to mention maternity/paternity leave, paid holidays etc etc

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: One of the reasons it's called a "mouse"

While not exactly a PC device, I think an honourable mention must go to a ZX Spectrum peripheral for controlling "on screen movement":

The Cheetah RAT (Remote Action Transmistter).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxkUDL3Tzc

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

That's all too true.

And the wording of an email request also makes a tremendous difference.

There are some who, while nice people talking face to face, come across as arrogant obnoxious self important twats when ever they communicate via email. Then they wonder why people don't respond.

Lenovo's USB-C Power Banks pack more heat than expected

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Devil

Hmmmm

Me thinks someone at Lenovo needs to look up the proper definition of FireWire...

'Cos this ain't it!

Microsoft takes aim at on-desk, non-cloudy developers with Windows AI Studio

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Devil

Re: Pollution

It just may generate more interesting shite than the boring shite they write themselves.

Though it will still be "shite".

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

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Devil

Re: BT announce

"...didn't have enough intelligence to have a clue about what the consequences would be..."

That reminds me of the various BT "release" voluntary redundancy schemes BT have ran in the past.

Successfully "offloaded" high numbers of staff only to have to bring many of them back as highly paid "consultants" because they'd got rid of the ones with all the knowledge and experience.

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Cost centre round robin

Standard government purchasing rules:

Why buy one when you can have two for twice the price.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Insult to injury

Playing Devil's Advocate here...

What if they are not allowed to do that?

Because there may be a set process for secure disposal of IT equipment which they've not followed.

That could then be two things - theft of company equipment and putting in a false expense claim.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Insult to injury

True - but then depending on what might be on said kit, they may have a policy on safe (from a privacy point of view) disposal of IT kit, such as approved methods of wiping drives.

"Helping oneself" sounds like it probably didn't go through any such process (assuming it exists). Which is also a no no.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Insult to injury

Helping oneself to company property, even old retired kit, without something in writing (or electronic) which is effectively a "transfer of ownership", does sound an awful lot like theft.

4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Pour One Out

"...the little rover that could"

That I believe is also the title of one of the chapters in a book about the Sojourner Micro Rover by Andrew Mishkin.

Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission by A. Mishkin

ITMA Silver badge

Re: ....despite worn joints, vision issues

From a bit earlier:

bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam

Ohh,...

bam bam bam bam bam

...shit!

bam

BRIAN: Uhh.

MATTHIAS: Coming!

bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam

bam bam bam bam bam bam

MATTHIAS: My eyes are dim. I cannot see.

CENTURION: Are you Matthias?

MATTHIAS: Yes.

CENTURION: We have reason to believe you may be hiding one Brian of Nazareth, a member of the terrorist organisation, the 'People's Front of Judea'.

MATTHIAS: Me? No. I'm just a poor old man. I have no time for law-breakers. My legs are grey. My ears are gnarled. My eyes are old and bent.

ITMA Silver badge

Re: ....despite worn joints, vision issues

Bingo!

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

....despite worn joints, vision issues

I know how it feels... LOL

Queue Life of Brian Matthias quote....

FTC interrupts Copyright Office probe to flip out over potential AI fraud, abuse

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Devil

Re: Must, not, say

And is old happy about you feeling them up? LOL

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

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Devil

Re: "GCHQ to come up with something that is better"

For free!?!?!

Thanks! That saves me the £33.60 entrance fee.

As that link is for a Scottish paper, shouldn't that be Endinburgh Castle?

That's cheaper at £19.50 - not including the eye watering train fare to get there.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: "GCHQ to come up with something that is better"

Put any new proposals in a tent, I'm sure she'll ban them without even looking at them.

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

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Devil

Re: I advise all Brits to watch the movie "V for Vendetta"

Or the other V for Vendetta quote:

Patricia: You think people will buy this?

Dascombe: Well, why not? This is the BTN. Our job is to report the news, not fabricate it. That's the government's job

ITMA Silver badge

Become a right "Charlie" LOL

He wasn't too bad at being a "thorn in the side" of government when he was the "understudy". Now he's moved on to the main role he will more than likely remain silent.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

There is this thing called the "Royal Assent" by which the monach can refuse to enact a Bill thus preventing it from becomming law.

However, it being done would cause major constitutional problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_assent#:~:text=The%20only%20situation%20in%20which,the%20bill%20from%20becoming%20law.

Damn - Ken beat me to it!

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Password: ICanStillDoThis

"...prevent people with genuinely nefarious intent from encrypting their comms"

Such as... politicians...

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Politicians

"Politicians have a lot in common with ordinary people"

Since when?

Just one in ten UK orgs have significant AI investment plan

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Or maybe, like Sir Cliff Richard, they aren't interested in Artificial Insemination.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-67261414

LOL

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

After turning my ad blocker off to watch YouTube content today, I was bombarded with ads for highly offensive, sexist violent, disgusting video games glamourising such things as physically assualting homeless people, a scantilly clad mine with a dirty smile on his face as his smacked the backside of a scantilly cald women to squash an insect.

Utter awful shit YouTube are focing out as "ads".

Digusting

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

That is because the likes of YouTube are blind to what viewers want - only how many $$$ advertisers will pay to have their shit rammed down our throats.

Which, as you rightly say, is a virtually guaranteed way to ensure I will NEVER buy any of the products in the ads.

This must be a new emerging concept in online advertising - pay mega bucks to instil hated and loathing of your products and brand.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Most-Inappropriate Computer Repair Tool

Are we talking about the hammer's head or the user's?

LOL

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Most-Inappropriate Computer Repair Tool

The orange plastic ones which come with self-assembly steel racking work particularly well on balky equipment.

They work rather well on balky users to.....

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: ChopChop

"Problem was the network cable people had routed all the cables through a little hole in the top of the rack, and wired them into the back of the patch panel, meaning we simply couldn't get the patch panel out of the rack without ripping all the cables out and having to get it all re-terminated."

I'm guessing that simply walking off and demanding that the project manager "fetch the buggers back" to do the cabling job properly wasn't an option.

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: That sounds about right...

How else are you meant to get the meaning across, particular to "well educated middle/senior management" who have difficulty reading (and understanding) the words....?

Or the attention span of a goldfish.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

You are forgetting WordPerfect, WordStar to mention two.

Larry Ale-ison institute invests in Oxford pub linked to Tolkien, CS Lewis

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Devil

Re: Licensing authorities should regularly inspect it

I trust that your joint rolling technique has much improved so that it is no longer a problem?

:)

Microsoft seeks EU Digital Market Acts exemption for underdog apps like Edge

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: you cynics should try it

And how much are you paid by Redmond?

I don't have to try it - I try it whether I want to or not every bloody time Microsoft try forcing on to people for the umpteenth bloody time.

Amazon workers are in a warehouse of pain, independent report finds

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: One of the reasons

Likewise.

It is not just because of their reputation for how they treat warehouse workers - who are an invaluable part of the supply chain I should add - but also because of the way Amazon as an organisation "slopey shoulder" responsibility for anything which goes wrong with a purchase. The old retort of:

"We are just the marketplace, not the seller. That rechargeable vacuum we took your money for, shipped to you from our warehouse which blew up in your hand - nothing to do with us mate".

It's 2023, so Lenovo made a bendy smartphone concept all about hybrid cloud AI

ITMA Silver badge

Re: Minute

"The future is here!"

And for once that future is not only bright, but it is also actually ORANGE!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaZui661eDY

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

ITMA Silver badge
Angel

"It is the classic solution that is looking for a problem IMO"

It is a solution to a problem - just not the one they are claiming.

The "problems" it is a solution to are:

- allows them to implement very granular variable peak demand pricing.

- allows them to remotely cut off those who haven't paid.

- allows them to remotely switch anyone they want to a prepaid arrangement whether the customer wants it or not, or even needs it.

So-called "smart" meters have absolutely bugger all to do with saving consumers energy or money which is the claim. Especially by that God awful "Albert Einstein" advert.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

I would humbly suggest that if you have had a new gas boiler installed that you are having to try and operate via the control panel on the boiler, you hired an absolutely crap installer.

Or you put such restrictions on what you wanted him/her to do - "only change the boiler" - that you got what you asked for.

A descent/competent one would/should have looked at the system as a whole and advised what system controls would be needed for it work well and efficiently - such as a separate programmer/thermostat.

Of course for all we know they may have - but you may have refused.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: Farce

"3. "The future is electric vehicles"

The future's bright. The future's Orange!

Nope that bright orange glow is your EV going up in flames.

Indian authorities raid fake tech support rings after tipoff from Amazon and Microsoft

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Aided and abetted by companies providing phone number spoofing services.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: I'm curious...

GPIB can be used for all sort of things - as its name implies, it is a General Purpose Interface Bus.

Printers, plotters, disk drives, laboratory instruments, machine control pretty much anything.

For this application I suspect they were using it to read real time sensor data from a wind vane and anemometer.

Many of their financial decisions being critically dependant upon which way the wind is blowing and how strong.

A computerised version of "holding up a wet finger".

From chaos to cadence: Celebrating two decades of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: "making the world a little bit better. One patch at a time"

Like the latest batch for Windows 10.

One of which turned Search Box on the task bar back ON. Despite me explicitly having turned it OFF

FUCK OFF Microsoft!

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: How long?

Is it a repeating plant?

If so, by whom?

Linux fanboys or Microsoft?

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Devil

Re: Advert

Software not being one of them.

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Devil

Re: not happening

I have Rocky Linux 9 on one box at home which has GNOME GUI on it...

That seems to be becoming more widespread and God it is absolutely hideous, God damn awful.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

Re: not happening

Not to mention the most fundamental fact for virtually all businesses.

The OS is there to run APPLICATIONS. If the applications you need (or viable equivalents) are not available for a particular OS then that OS is a dead in the water for that business.

A total non-choice.

That happens to be the case with ours re. Linux.

FTC: Please stop falling for social media scams, you've given crooks at least $650M so far this year

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

I find the most serious deficiency is good old common sense.

A simple additional layer we use is that a user's username is NEVER their email address - for anything on our internal systems at least. Not their network signin nor their email accounts.

So these bogus emails with links which take you to fake (for example) Microsoft 365 login pages may get a password - if the user is too dense to NOT enter it because they haven't spotted that the sender's display name is totally incongruous with the actual sender email address, the MOST basic of checks.

But still won't have a valid username to go with it since most scam login sites assume it is their (external) email address.

ITMA Silver badge
Devil

A good question. LOL

If they did, they still have much to learn hehehehe

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

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Devil

Re: Convicted of Treason

What!

Without even having to spend £33+ (per day) on a ticket just to get in !?!?!

You lucky bastard.... :)

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

ITMA Silver badge

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

Don't forget the ability to remotely cut customers off from the electricity supply without having to bother with such things as getting a warrant to gain entry to your home.