Posts by Mast1

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

What one intends to be the lifetime of a Galapagos tortoise may end up as the lifetime of a mayfly ?

I spent a short time at one company where people were often pulled off projects to do some firefighting.

South Korean satellite spots SpaceX lunar impact

Re: Hmmm

Earlier comment above "The moons gravitational field is very uneven " would impy that the probability of a strike in any one place is not uniform.

Therefore two strikes in one place are (much) more likely. Then there are other possible non-uniform factors such as direction of arrival.

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: What was there before?

".....They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot....."

Credit: Joni Mitchell, 1970.

Don't get me started on solar farms being put on prime farmland (at least in UK), with the added by product of an 'eco reserve'.

What happens when prices rise on world food markets ?

Comment in code read 'Dear future me, sorry I wrote this'

Re: When I wrote that code only God and I knew how it worked

"And now only God knows"

And in the bible, it says that if you genuinely repent of your sins, even God forgets. (Jeremiah 31, 33-34).

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Re: "The Register's home nation – England"

With the obligatory cup of hot tea ? (Hat tip to HHGTTG bistromatics)

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

Re: And YouTube too

100% agree, and I think more than "beginning to show". My recent searches produces content mainly generated within the past few months, or even days, with supposedly lots of views already. (Is that another symptom of AI eating its tail ?)

It's beginning to feel like the search for steel with low embedded background radiation levels, ie manufactured before the dawn of nuclear weapons.

User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

Re: Sounds like a battlefield promotion is in order

The trouble is that this was an office job and not a field job. There he would have needed to field marshal his skills.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Re: Not a disk, and not me

"The kicker, it is true, was laid off somewhat later, "

Sounds like a two-fold reduction in force........

Re: Not with a disk, but

I did that (briefly) with a 256kB UVEPROM, which then performed an electric-purple glow through the window, and rapid diagnosis of something amiss. Looked a bit like the colour of the eraser lamp.

The strange thing was that it still worked afterwards.

With the early power N-MOSFETS (TO3 can), I managed to destroy as much over several episodes in one week as my gross pay. But then the lab head destroyed more in one instance than my week's pay. It was a very temperamental circuit.

This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

Re: back in 1990 ish

Maestro/Montego: I seeem to remember that there was an issue with some drivers not liking the female version of the talking car: something to do with a gender bias in taking advice on technical matters.

Nowadays, the blinkenlight approach seems to be the preferred approach for giving false positives. On both a petrol and a diesel car, I have recently had the emissions warning light come on, only to disappear after just a few days (or even as soon as it turned into the garage when it appeared threatened with the diagnosis computer).

Consultant mistakenly deleted a ton of data – but reported it as a bug

Re: No good deed…

Maybe he thought he was Evan Almighty......

F-35 software delays leave UK buying time with US glide bombs

Re: 50% availability

Apologies, you appear to have missed the tongue-in-cheek approach to the maths.

Even a boat load of left boots sufficient for all the army would not allow all of the army to hop into action, since some would wear their boots out faster than others, your exact argument. (Reading around, one finds that the boot quality was also very variable, the soles often preferring to stick to the mud than remain stitched to the uppers).

50% availability

12 spares kits for 24 aircraft equates to 50%.

It seems that military supplies love this concept of 50%: in the Crimean war (1853-56) a ship load of left boots arrived for the British army.

Supposedly one of the great things admired from abroad about the British is their ability to cling to traditions.

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Re: Restored, which is good.

"And I am super extra careful... so I did it only once."

Polite suggested correction : should really be "And I am super extra careful... so I did it only once, so far".

Until one is pushing up the daisies, one can never be sure of there being no repeat. The oft quoted here Terry Pratchett meme of once in a million....

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: App with write permission.

"tmp files"

We had a project where a DOS exe had to talk two ways with a Win 95 (or 98) C++ exe (ie pre "apps"). The suggested solution was to use the glamourous Windows method inside C++ and re-write the DOS exe to use the same.

Since we had to get the project working "soon" and I did not want to start into the shifting sands of learning Windows protocols, I was looking for a Q&D way of doing the same.

Since the data transfer between the two exes was < 100 bytes at a time, handshaking via write/read/delete of a file even to spinning rust was sufficiently fast. Mutters into his beer ...times were simpler then.

Bus station display takes the Windows 10 road to nowhere

Being flightless, how could they get atop the screen........... unless there was a flood coming ?

Are you a carpenter ?

Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

Re: Maths

So what's the benefit of being a holding company of lots of subsidiaries if one small country is going to fine them based on global rather than local revenues ?

Ah yes, c-suite pay is based more on global than local revenues.

Sounds more like a potential case of "heads we win" and "tails you should lose".

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: How many excel users does it take to mark a column as numeric?

But what about external conversions of numbers read from an Excel sheet? I met one where rounding precision had left a number as something like -3e-15. This had been MANUALLY converted by A.N.Other as -3,-15.

Finance company stores DB credentials in helpfully labeled spreadsheet

Re: Multi-layered security

For legacy trees, you need axes to get access to the root(s).

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

Re "The law binds none of us unless it binds all of us"

That has a familiar ring about it........

Dev targeted by sophisticated job scam: 'I let my guard down, and ran the freaking code'

Re: Is somebody really still using "LinkedIn"?

On a (StartPage) search using the name of a convicted criminal, it threw up a link to their Linked-In profile. Seems like being detained at His Majesty's pleasure does not give one time to erase some of one's traces. The conviction was not for being a scammer.

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

Re: Surprise, surprise

SES is not usually defined by the full postcode, often just the first 4/5 digits (which will lead to some anomalies).

It is very hard to get requests for DOB past ethics applications these days since that level of precision is unnecessary (except possibly in neo-natal healthcare, which is not in this set). MOB & YOB more likely yes.

So a certain amount of fuzzing at several levels to make re-identification difficult, (but not necessarily impossible).

Re: "their access revoked"

The ANONYMISED database is available to bona fide researchers from bona fide institutions, but they have to jump through a lot of hoops to get access to it, like detailing their research plans. Even then, they only get access to the bits that are relevant to their proposal, so not necessarily the full set. Some of the data was originally collected about 20 years ago, although there have been updates in the intervening years with "bolt ons", such as genome sequencing of groups smaller in number than the 500,000. The culprit(s) should be traceable, or at least the culprit institution.

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

"...... Aldis lamp trigger.........."

Are you sure it wasn't the piezo ignition for the gas burner under the deep fryer ?

"....could show to customers...."

"....could show to customers...."

As a vacation student I was testing a complex semiconductor being driven by standard 74-series TTL. The resulting drive waveforms did not look very square due to the complex load on the electrode. I built a lumped component circuit as a dummy load out of resistors and capacitors for comparison (before SPICE etc was available). The waveforms looked a lot cleaner. My manager suggested that these latter traces should be saved for the data sheet....... I was not around long enough to know if that was ever the case.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Re: It will blow over.

Reminds me of one bit in the book of railway disasters "Red for Danger" by LTC Rolt (mid 1950s edition).

One story involved a railyard worker who got fed up with the safety valve releasing excess steam while an engine was being fired up at the start of day, so he tightened the safety valve.

He was rewarded by one of his ears being sliced off by a piece of shrapnel when the boiler case finally gave up.

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

Re: Real fun

"Commodore progammable calculator. 8 LED digits...."

Yes, a program memory limited to 72 individual keystrokes: combinations of keys such as "M(emory)1" was 2 strokes, not one, as in the posher TI machines.

"Tell the kids of today... mutter mutter".

Digression: I paid for my Commodore with money earnt manually picking potatoes off a field in the hot UK summer of '76. .(mutter...mutter).

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

"Black on black, obviously."

Another example of where Douglas Adams appears to have had a streak of the prophet in him, laptops coming along after his version of Hotblack Desiato (not the London version).

Re: Soft door closers

Why start with teenagers ?

I think there is a wider market : my offspring is 3 years off the teens, but is getting in regular practice already.

"Toshiba wireless switches are a right pain in the behind"

Yes, call me paranoid, but some of us users do not trust software switches not to be "re-manufactured" in a (usually remote) software update.

"re-manufacturing" a switch requires a physical agent to have pried it out of your cold dead hands..........

Britain turns up the heat on homegrown ceramics for hypersonic missiles

re "scatter lego bricks"

Yes, but for maximum effect you will need to persuade the opposition to take their boots off first.

I once saw a 2x2 white lego brick embedded in concrete on the roadway of a Greek island. It was the first time I had seen it used as an alternative aggregate.

Re: Homegrown ceramics

"Britain is always on the lookout for a better teacup"

For that it appears that we first have to thank a Mr Thomas Frye, the person who put another composite ceramic "on the map": bone china.

Nearly 300 years later Britain appears to have achieved a step change in performance...... (OK ignoring ceramic composite turbine blades)

I like this "white heat of technology" [0] aspect of progress. Not that a tea cup ever had had to survive 1000 C......

[0] First delivered in a party conference speech by former Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1963.

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Re: so .. er ? "Luck"

aka probability thanks to Pascal & Fermat.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re : Car salesdroids get commission on the loan contract as well as on the sale

And look where that has ended up in the UK: a new round of ambulance chasers offering to chase compensation for mis-sold loans.

A few years back, when dealing with a local family garage who were agents under a major car brand, I had to sit through while the poor salesman had to tick fill tick boxes to prove that he had tried to get me signed up to a loan.... on a 9-year old small car (30,000 miles on the clock). The salesman was very apologetic, but it appeared that he had to evidence his attempts back to his franchise manager.

They lost their franchise, but not their business. Their local reputation as fair dealers is too well established.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Re: the Board members says. "That's from Hitchhiker's Guide."

"one liners" ? More like whole concepts that have seen life repeatedly imitate the art in the intervening near 50 years.eg

Nutrimatic drinks dispenser: just earlier this week there was the report on El reg about the CES -demoe-ed barista machine with AI.

Design of the wheel #1 : I have experience of an airline responding to my feedback on just how poor the legroom was on one of their 777s (that I had nowhere to move my legs when someone spilled beer on the seat in front of me and it dripped through between the cushions all over my ankles). Their comment was how disappointed they were that I was upset: they had put so much effort into making sure the decor was lovely.

Design of the wheel #2 : a red-green colo(u)r blind acquaintance commented on the colo(u)r of the electric power lead of a lawnmower (red). The company's response was close to patronising as to his questioning: they had asked their marketing department what colo(u)r the cord should be and they said "vibrant".

I am sure there are others.

Budget smartphones will be hit hardest as memory prices rise

You can do almost anything.......

Very true and I agree. But then people think you strange that you do not immediately rely to every inane comment on your social media feeds.

Extending the carpenters mantra of "measure twice cut once", perhaps there is more mileage in "think twice, respond once"........

I am an old fogey......

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

"Best way to make sure the peas stick to the CD."

I thought that was recommended as better with honey. The pips in the jam tend to make the needle jump.

All your base are belong to us: Strava exercise app maps military sites, reveals where spies jog

Re: Collect all the data, ignore users privacy...

So tracks appear over Portsmouth harbour, but with an "aircraft carrier outline" ?

Could it be that the username was 'Simon Peter', and therefore did not need a solid surface to walk on ? Gospel of St Matthew ch 14 v 19

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

French mobile signals in Dorset

Well, historically, Dorset was a good place for doing irregular cross-channel trade with eg France and Holland. Who would want to be doing business on a UK cell with Customs & Excise snooping around ?

(Ref Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner, 1858-1932)

Re: Implausible to say the least.

What is this 14,400 you talk of ? Sounds ballistic compared to my first experience of dial-up......

London to Coventry at 300 baud with an acoustic coupler. That was 1979 or 1980.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: cold wire

A possibly apocryphal story about a certain broadcast institution that had a recognised job title of "Engineering Information Officer", otherwise abbreviated to "EIO":

One person managed to get his title extended to EIEIO". His surname was .......MacDonald.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

"The ghost in the machine".

Could that be due to all the breadcrumbs they had left lying around ?

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Expensive Lessons

True, but there seem also to be some egos that can survive that as well. And it sometimes helps to have a layer of Teflon......

Post-privacy AI glasses claim to listen to your every word

Re: STOP!

Hey, will you invest in my new bathroom safety device ?

A camera installed in the showerhead checks to see if you have slipped over in the "tub".

Image analysis will then pre-warn the paramedics as to what likely procedures they will need to administer when they arrive.

(needs a bit of additional marketing to sprinkle it with the buzzwords like IoT, 5G, AI, and 'smart').

What could possibly go wrong with that ?

Real estate agents use the power of AI to command plumbing, layout to disappear

Re: Not Just AI...

".......... that the adjoining building was a funeral director's, "

Well, at least the property details could honestly claim that it was "quiet as the grave" there.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: Let me get this straight…

Aside from moving the resolution app in nearly every iteration of thier OS, what proportion of the population understand the numbers in "change my screen resolution to 1920 x 1080" ?

When fed a diet of dramas where infinite resolution is available from the grainiest of surveillance cameras, and TV re-runs are stretched horizontally from 4:3 to fit 16:9, why bother with precise numbers or even whether a wheel should be round or elliptical ?

US Air Force holds hypersonic resupply site review amid seabird concerns

For some level of "pre-prepared landing pad"

In WW2, the second Burma expedition (beyond the Chindwin) used pre-prepared landing sites to remove wounded soldiers, and bring in supplies with (rugged) aircraft.

And that was behind (the then) enemy lines. I had the privilege of meeting someone who had been there.

Granted, drones and satellites have moved the challenge to a higher level.

'Elevated' moisture reading ignored before Heathrow-closing conflagration, says NESO

Re: Not surprised

Was it easier to see that the colour of their backside because their head was in the sand ?

UK unis to cough up to £10M on Java to keep Oracle off their backs

Re: Am I missing something?

"yes, font is a typo."

Not necessarily: a font is a sink, a fount is a source.

Depending on where your politics lie, you may see UK unis as either a source or a sink.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Errr, embarassingly similar with my (much) younger self, but nobody to see it happen.

Working on kit with a 5V 200A power supply to power a rack that I had buit from the boards upwards, and hence written the safety and instruciton manual.

"Remove jewellery".

I thought I knew better for a brief job inside the rack: no need to remove the wrist watch with stainless steel strap, I am nowhere near the bus bars.

Bzzzt..... LEDs dim, and two brown marks appear in the steel.

Fortunately the PSU had an active overload detector, so the only other damage was to my pride, but it enhanced my wisdom.