* Posts by No Yb

23 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2019

I heard somebody say: Burn baby, burn – server inferno!

No Yb

Re: Snark .....

Perhaps finding a local museum curator/archivist to talk about the issues would help. Someone who can be a "neutral third party" might get more response.

You'll never select all and mark as read again after this tale of peril... Oh, who are we kidding? Of course you will

No Yb

Re: and it was said to rip the keys from your trousers.

NMR and MRI are the same technology. They removed "Nuclear" from the name because patients kept thinking (ionizing) radiation was involved.

Brave, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla gather together to talk web privacy... and why we all shouldn't get too much of it

No Yb

Re: They do work, as much as it pains me to admit it

Amazon still keeps asking me how old my child is. I have no children.

No Yb
WTF?

Re: "Microsoft Loves the Web"

I gave up on the advertising "social contract" you're talking about, once things like malicious ads started showing up on otherwise reputable websites. Ones that look like they're dialog boxes, error messages, blink like crazy, claim that 'OMG you have a virus'... or that install malicious software if you happen to click with an un-secured browser. Friend clicked on one, wound up calling into one of those fake tech support companies and getting his computer locked down enough for me to have to come fix it.

All of those things exist. I'm not making it up. Ad sellers did not do a very good job preventing any of these sorts of ads from showing up.

If you want to pretend there's some sort of social contract, I'm not sure why you think it should be as one sided as "view this ad to see this content", and not "view this safe ad that's not ridiculously intrusive and not targeted directly at you with data collected from everywhere you visited... to see this content".

A Notepad nightmare leaves sysadmin with something totally unprintable

No Yb

Re: Aye. Back in the day.

Just remembering back to the time I found out that the color of the Blue Screen Of Death could be changed. I could then claim "My computer doesn't blue screen any more" without lying.

No Yb

Re: Printer drivers: still cruddy after all these years

Still have my copy of OS/2 that came on approx 40 floppies.

Newly born Firefox 71 emerges from its den – with its own VPN and some privacy tricks

No Yb

Re: inviting US users of the Firefox desktop browser with Firefox Accounts

Quite disappointed when they stopped doing firefox sync with no registration required. Enter about 14 letters to match those shown by your main browser, and then they'd link with no account information required. Supposedly encrypted on the server, too.

Now it's "login to Firefox to sync, so we know where you are."

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

No Yb

Re: Interesting problem

Collapsing the waveform to determine "vacant or occupied" clearly required the presence of an observer.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

No Yb

Re: There is of course a new approach here

I particularly enjoyed the smart lock that could be opened with a screwdriver.

Halfords invents radio signals that don't travel at the speed of light

No Yb

Re: Radio, not just FM, is outdated

I'm guessing the people you recommend podcasts to would rather just read.

Absolutely smashing: Musk shows off Tesla's 'bulletproof' low-poly pickup, hilarity ensues

No Yb
Linux

Re: Turns out it was inspired...

I'm just guessing here, but maybe the "hardened steel" is very hard to bend in complex ways.

We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

No Yb

Dunno about Porsche or BMW, but Ford went with a composite ("plastic") intake manifold on some trucks. There's a fairly large 3rd party market for metal-reinforced replacements.

'Literally a paperweight': Bose users fume at firmware update that 'doesn't fix issues'

No Yb

Bose isn't the only one breaking their products. Every HP printer "security update" is very likely to stop you from using third-party ink cartridges, until the ink cartridge vendors find a new way around it. They do this quite regularly now.

Thanks to this method of security, and the abilities of 3rd party ink hackers, I will never use HP ink in an HP printer aside from the required "setup cartridges".

The silence of the racks is deafening, production gear has gone dark – so which wire do we cut?

No Yb
Facepalm

Re: The big red button

I liked the http://www.cpspowertech.com/about.html page claiming California, but showing pictures of factories in (probably) China.

When the IT department speaks, users listen. Or face the consequences

No Yb

Rock solid, unless the previous IT guy makes the mistake of putting all the drives in the same array with enough redundancy to handle 2 bad drives.

Due to the nature of "MTBF" across 28 or so drives, we could count on approximately one or two drive failures per month, possibly stopping the whole array (and most work) until we could get another drive in. Rock solid, for soft sandstone values of rock.

Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit

No Yb
Thumb Up

Re: Static

One department put a neon bulb on the light switch plate, as touching that would light the bulb briefly instead of give a painful shock from the long walk down the carpeted corridor.

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

No Yb
Happy

Re: chortle

In my 49 years of life, I've seen exactly ONE of something similar to that.

The LCD part of the display was on a cable, and could be easily removed(!) from the laptop to put it on the OHP.

MSRP was about $8-10K at the time I saw it back in the 90s.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

No Yb
Thumb Up

Re: @You're still not spartacus:Mice are not particularly intuitive

You're not alone... I find it easier to write backwards with my left hand.

Customer: We fancy changing a 25-year-old installation. C'mon, it's just one extra valve... Only wafer thin...

No Yb

Re: Valves!?

I believe the Chinese may have something close enough...

A bluetooth connected tube amp.

https://www.banggood.com/PJ_MIAOLAI-M8-6J8-Tube-bluetooth-2x50W-Amplifier-Integrated-ES9023-DAC-p-1449968.html

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

No Yb

Re: Not "documents" as such...

Big Corporate IT departments frequently have a transparent proxy with logging built in. Sometimes the log is available to anyone who knows about it.

The number of people browsing porn online at work was easily checked.

No Yb

Re: Finally forced to get a new work laptop

Thanks to a version control system (check out entire source onto a different network drive), when one of our network drives failed completely, we could just restore it from backup. When devs checked the changes back in, all the previous changes were "automatically" included because they had the full sources. No work lost, just some change history missing for a few days.

This seems much more sensible than relying on just one network drive for the whole business.

I couldn't possibly tell you the computer's ID over the phone, I've been on A Course™

No Yb

Re: He should be proud that of that guy

Worked for a company once that had an internal phone system for a particular department. Pick up one phone, and the other 4 automatically rang. Useful if you know you're usually going to be calling particular areas. They were also the oldest-looking phones in the place.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

No Yb

Re: Printer cheaper than ink

Nope. The cartridge's DRM chip doesn't actually know how much ink is in the cartridge. It estimates when it is empty, and stops the printer from using the cartridge once the "number of dot equivalents remaining" counter decrements to 0.

There are no sensors on the newer cartridges to tell how much ink is actually left in the cart.

Thanks to HP's over-reliance on DRM to sell expensive supplies, I only buy 3rd party ink.