Posts by ITMA

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: Third world.

"Fear then leads to hatred..."

And then you turn to the Dark Side.

Even though Darth (Tony) Blair has gone.... LOL

Re: At 1515 the organization said that it had "identified and remedied" the technical issue

Their "fail over" fell over and failed.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

Re: No WiFi 7 on Win 10?

Because in most ways WiFi is crap.

It sovles ONE problem - not being able to connect to the network using a cable. In situations where you really need that, it is the solution.

In virtually every other way it is crap.

Around our main office there are 50+ OTHER WiFi networks. Not devices, NETWORKS, all within range. It is crowded... VERY crowded. That massively impacts performance and reliability.

On the consumer side when you see all those TV ads (such as BT retail) where people are complaing about "the internet is playing up". Bollocks. Most of the time it is NOT their internet, it is their WiFi which is the problem.

When there were 3 maybe 4 houses in a street which used WiFi it could be great. Now EVERY house has multiple WiFi devices all trying to shout each other down. Flats are much worse.

Re: Windows 11 is still an upgrade

"It has some decent improvements over Windows 10"

But you just can't get past that God awful user interface and making so many things which were not hard (if not excactly always "easy" in Windows 10) into a bloody nightmare.

And where has the option to completely turn of this "focussed session" shit gone?

India's Moon mission continues to triumph, Japan's waits for better weather

Re: [party face emoji]

Maybe Luna 25 was a practise run for Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane.

Why these cloud-connected 3D printers started making junk all by themselves

We use a bunch of "hobbyist" 3D printers (Prusa etc) for in house manufacture of an assortment of bespoke "widgets" for use internally.

Remote - across a network - monitoring of jobs complete with webcam view of the build area are very useful.

Simple solution - a bunch of Raspberry Pi 3B+ running OctoPi (suitably locked down), one for each printer.

And if we need to keep an eye on a many hour print job, connect in securely via VPN.

No cloud needed.

Re: Sounds like this cloud thing was programmed as if it was a local server

That reminds me of when the internet was a new thing and lots of drivers etc were downloaded from manufacturers' dial up BBS.

We had a bank of USR Courier 56K modems connected to a Netware Comms Server to "network" them.

Used to have great fun - at a colleague's expense - sitting at my desk in the IT office a few feet from the "target", using terminal software to connect to one of the modems (which were in the server room) and repeatedly dial his desk phone.

The hard part was keeping a straight face while watching him progress through puzzlement, irritation, annoyance, frustration to slamming phone down anger.

When the penny finally dropped what was happening, it was still very hard for me and the 3rd person in the IT office (who was in on it) to not laugh as the "target" loudly demonstrated his extensive knowledge of swear words and repeatedly questioned my parentage LOL.

Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?

I don't think the makers of this one received that memo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TJEzdqtXlQ

I love BigClive's channel.. ;)

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

"Westminster Abbey (the UK parliament building next to Big Ben) needs major renovations"

The Palace of Westminster is where Parliament is and Big Ben is the bell which chimes the hour.

The iconic tower was originally called the The Clock Tower then recently renamed The Elizabeth Tower.

Westminster Abbey is over the road from the Palace of Westminster, although the major parts of the Palace of Westminster (the House of Commons and the House of Lords) are both in need of serious renovation - and that is just their inept decrepit occupants.

AIs can produce 'dangerous' content about eating disorders when prompted

Re: The real Skynet

And that is not the only risk.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-66514287

This is how the likes of ChatGPT gets "trained" and it appears to be causing real damage to real people.

Is AI worth it?

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: What comes around….

When I did a PostScript programming course BITD the guy running it put it this way:

"Printing is a side effect of executing a PostScript program".

Plus:

"A PostScript program is not 'run' or 'compiled' but 'consumed' by the printer".

Which is true.

My "demo page", which was only 20 or 30 lines of (condensed) handwritten PostScript, selected a font, then scalled that font vertically using a sine wave (plus an offset) and output text along the lines of "Oki OL-480 Genuine PostScript" with the height modulated by the sine wave. On the next line the text was slightly offset and the sine wave shifted in phase by 270 degrees. It then filled the page before doing the final showpage.command.

Getting used to the stack orientated RPN was hard.

I still have the book we were given on the course:

PostScript Language Refence Manual, Second Edition.

ISBN 0201181274

Re: What comes around….

Most of that cost was I believe the cost of licensing both the PostScript interpreter and the RIP board it ran on. Both horrendously expensive from Adobe.

Oki got around this on their Oki DOC-IT multifunction devices by using TruImage (a PostScript clone) and putting the RIP and rest of the printer's "brains" on a full size ISA card with an Intel i860 RISC processor.

I did some handcrafted PostScript to do a fancy demo page while working for Oki. It worked perfectly on their genuine PostScript printers but broke TruImage LOL

Re: I ditched HP printers

I've came across those pieces of utter shite.

You can't even change the settings on a LOCAL printer connected via USB without using an effing online account. And if that account doesn't work, as one company I came across found, you are fucked.

My advice to anyone who has one - phone HP and tell them you want an full refund as it is "unfit for purpose". There is no bloody way a printer or scanner needs an effing online account to work.

Total shit.

"I remember back when someone got the bright idea to use software in the driver to replace some of the logic that was previously done in dedicated silicon and thought that was probably about as low as companies could go. What a sweet summer child I was."

You are describing "Windows" or "GDI" printers. Known in the (PC printer) industry as "brain dead printers" because that is litterally what they are.

They are a bare print engine with all the rasterising done on the host PC. An (old) example being the OkiPage 4w.

Crap printers. Always were and always will be.

Re: "an HP support agent told a user"

There is a fundamental truth here that is not being said outright:

Inkjet printers are not sold to print. They are sold to sell more ink.

That is the top and bottom of it.

I've worked for two (Japanese) printer manufacturers and injkets "printers" where litterally a loss making "carcass" to sell very profitable ink cartridges.

Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns

Re: get consent from the staffers

"I rather suspect 'consent' will be a case of 'agree or find yourself another employer' "

I get exactly that attitude from my cat :(

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

Re: Woah there !

" 'do not stop blade with hands' written on a chainsaw product warning"

So THAT is what I've been doing wrong (via dictation mode)

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Re: Cook's Tour...

"Dungeon is just a fancy name for basement after all"

But basements lack the wall manacles, damp walls (sometimes) and other "toys of persuasion".

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

Must be some strange foreign concept.

AWS is running a 96-core, 192-thread, custom Xeon server

The important question...

I just have to ask...

THE question which was asked about all new computing hardware BITD - Does it play Space Invaders? :) LOL

Brit healthcare body rapped for WhatsApp chat sharing patient data

Re: Unintentional adversaries

" the old BYOD problem writ large.."

As I've always referred BYOD to - Bring Your Own Disaster

Feds want to rewrite rules for competition-crushing merger probes

One of Microsoft''s key strategies:

If you can't beat it - buy it then bury it.

Sadly they are far from alone in the IT industry.

LG to offer subscriptions for appliances and televisions

Re: Rent seeking

And Samsung's customer support is truly dreadful.

That is when you can through their awful "live chat bot" to a supposed "knowledgable" person who usually known bugger all.

Phoning them is even worse.

Best option is don't buy anything labelled as "smart" especially a TV. Get a TV with the resolution you want (HD, 4K etc) with plenty of HDMI sockets and plug in a Now TV, Amazon Fire or similar TV "stick".

Re: Rent seeking

Certain manufacturers are notorious for things like launching "smart" TVs and within a few months most of the "apps" have been pulled from it and either replaced with crap or not replaced at all.

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

"...and then where would the world be?"

The Twilight Zone....

Re: "address concerns of being replaced by AI"

"where a bunch of famous actors find themselves resurrected in the future inside artifical bodies"

Babylon 5, Season 4, Episode 22: "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars"

Act III

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/The_Deconstruction_of_Falling_Stars

Already been done. LOL

And the AI turns on their creators in that too! In a spectacularly rewarding way :)

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Poor design in my opinion

"Gold plated ones are a con"

Nowhere near as much of a con a gold plated TosLink optical "cables".... WTF???

Re: Worth more in the wrapper

And which part did Ivy's company actually design?

That is what always gets me when designs of electronic products are attributed to thos who have "styled" it and not those who have designed the bits that actually make it work.

Do they know anything about audio and designing audio products (beyond designing their "appearance")?

Ex-Amazon manager jailed for stealing $10M using fake vendor invoices

Re: "more crimes while on release after posting bond"

Someone I used to know many years ago got caught defrauding their employer out of something like £50K.

Being a young "underling" in the accounts department allowed them a certain level of access. From that they stumbled across what the company did with payments it received from customers (mainly B2B) which they weren't able to link to a customer's account. This was back when everything was BACS or cheque.

Basically, they put these "orphan" payments into a "holding account" (aka "slush fund") and this person found a way of writing checks to their "friends" (who didn't work there) from that account - a bit too obvious writing them out to themselves.

Occasionally one would get queried but they were always around to make up an appropriate plausible excuse.

That went on for a while, not making the cheques too big or too often.

Then they took some time off and one was queried internally while they were away.

Not being around to cover, the end result was a rapid progression through an internal investigation of all the "payments" they had been involved with, fired, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and prison. (young offenders institute as they were called then).

A couple of the "friends" they had been making the cheques out to also ended up with suspended sentences.

And of course all of them were fired from the jobs they had.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Re: big slurps

Think more Blue Whale:

"Blue whales capture krill through lunge feeding, they swim towards them at high speeds as they open their mouths up to 80°. They may engulf 220 metric tons (220 long tons; 240 short tons) of water at one time."

Re: "Other Data"

"our ICO has long been a chocolate teapot."

Ah, there IS a difference. Chocolate teapots at least can be eaten and taste nice.

Not so the ICO (I imagine)

Microsoft puts out Outlook fire, says everything's fine with Teams malware flaw

They did another one yesterday with Outlook.com where you had a pup-up dialogue appear to select advertising preferences.

Clicking on "Reject All" then Save did nothing. If you did a refresh (F5 for example) it came back again. Absolutely no way was I going to select "Enagle All".

If you went into "Manage Settings" you couldn't save them.

It went away this morning, except when I checked the advertising privacy settings Microsh*te had turned them ALL on WITHOUT my permission. At least I was able to turn them all off.

Another great security and GDPR fiasco....

"The people who suggested this change, approved the change, and made this change, should be killed."

There's a long queue of those at Microsoft - with the ones who imposed Metro on Windows Server 2012 r2 at the front.

It's 2023 and memory overwrite bugs are not just a thing, they're still number one

Re: Buffer overrun? still?

"Yep, not just the copy-and-paste stuff on Stack Overflow but also examples on instructional websites and videos."

Dare I say it - codes spewed out by ChatGPT et al?

UK government to set deadline for removal of Chinese surveillance cams

An now the BBC are the US "lapdog"

This wonderful piece of rubbish appeared on the BBC News website, plugging a Panorama programme this evening:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65975446

Two paragraphs immediately scream "setup/con job":

First:

"Panorama worked with US-based IPVM, one of the world's leading authorities on surveillance technology, to test whether it was possible to hack a Hikvision camera. IPVM supplied the one that was installed in a BBC studio."

So the BBC let the US company supply the camera the very same company were then going to "hack". Did the BBC have the camera independently checked to ensure it had not been "tampered" with?

What's the bet the answer to that is "NO".

Second:

"Panorama could not run the camera on a BBC network for security reasons - so it was put on a test network where there is no firewall and little protection."

That is a great real world test of how such cameras are going to be used by competent businesses and organisations.... NOT.

So this entire programme is based on a "hack" perpertrated by an American company against a camera THEY have supplied while it is connected to a totally unsecured network.

What a pile of unrealistic shite.

The BBC really have scrapped the bottom of the toilet bowl for this crap.

Microsoft investigating bug in Windows 11 File Explorer that makes the CPU hangry

If I was a CPU running Windows 11 File Explorer, I'd be hangry about it too!

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: "These men were true explorers "

Also very interesting that "passengers" were described as "Mission Specialists".

That is how Hamish Harding described his (mis)adventure.

Re: "craft's carbon fiber hull"

"If I might predict what happened, it was a telescopic compression of the 'people tank', starting at a point of stress that had been cycled too many times going to and from the Titanic wreck."

So essentially you are saying that the weak point (possibly where the repair was done) buckled slightly. That then effectively crippled the longitudinal structural strength of the cylinder and the sea crushed it in a fraction of a second.

A bit like, if you are careful, you can stand on an empty Coke can stood on its end. Put a very slight dent in the side and try the same thing and it will collapse.

At over 3,000m the carbon fibre "can" didn't so much collapse - it was more like putting an empty Coke can (with a slight dent in the side) standing on its end and letting some giant (the Atlantic Ocean) stamp on it hard.

Re: A fitting epitaph

Some places make the report, and Feynman's appendix to the report, required reading.

Rightly so.

Re: A fitting epitaph

Interesting that you brought the Challenger disaster into the conversation.

Another classic example of management putting schedules and money before safety:

"It is too cold to launch according to the launch rules based on our experience base".

Management - "Change the f*cking rules then!!!! LAUNCH!"

Richard Feynman put it beautifully succinctly: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"

The deep ocean is far less forgiving than space, and aerospace is a very poor role model for how to design deep sea submersibles. Totally different environments.

One person's trash is another's 'trashware' – the art of refurbing old computers

Re: Can they do anything for my Microsoft Surface Tablet

"Can they do anything for my Microsoft Surface Tablet"

How about a Surface RT? LOL

I actually have one of those sitting on my desk - and NO we DID NOT BUY IT.

Far better and cheaper door wedges are available.

Re: "Bring Me to Life", as the nice lady once sang

Exceopt the article doesn't specifically mention "laptops".

Re: "Bring Me to Life", as the nice lady once sang

"One of the good things about Linux is that you can use it to give an old laptop a ‘second life’ and extend its usefulness beyond its ‘normal’ lifespan."

Not as true as you would like it to be.

Many Linux distros dropped a raft of RAID controller support (PERC 4i for example) quite a while ago which consigned a lot of otherwise perfectly servicable hardware to the bin.

Let's not kid ourselves that Linux is any greener.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

A very valid point.

How evenly that same principle has been applied in other instances of "peril at sea" - for example:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65925558

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65942426

Again, a situation where "politics" appears to take precedence.

I also think that whatever the outcome, Ocean Gateway will almost certainly have some serious lawsuits to answer.

Apparently, according to one person who has been on a trip in Titan, the method of dropping the ballast to return to the surface is....

Get everyone inside to move side to side, making the submersible rock, so that the "construction poles" (scaffolding poles to everyone else) fall of "a shelf".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65957709

What happens if it is sitting on the bottom and they just can't get it to rock enought to drop them?

Why not use the more standard method of a big container of lead shot which by electrical means (with mechanical backup) you open to drop the lead shot onto the sea bed?

And, if they are rescued, are they going to be asked to pay for the cost? After all they are all "rich" and got into it knowing full well the risks.

Why should tax payers pay for it?

I'm sure this won't be a popular point of view - but then just look at the poverty in Canada and the USA and yet God knows how much is being spent of trying to rescue just 5 people who got into something of their own free will knowing it was a potential death trap

Lenovo's Yoga 9 is flexible at home, but stretches the friendship at work

Re: I genuinely don't understand

BYOD - Bring Your Own Disaster

June Patch Tuesday: VMware vuln under attack by Chinese spies, Microsoft kinda meh

Re: Can someone tell your article-writing AI...

More like the dreaded autocorrect screwing up "uneventful"

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Re: Well...

Not to mention the "wobbly RAM pack" LOL

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

What has Gitmo ever done to you to deserve such an insult - being lumbered with the Tango Tanned Toupee?

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

Re: Not this again

Any landing whch you can walk away from is a good landing.