Posts by Mast1

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Undiscussed hidden costs

The problem reported seems to be silo-ed into a discussion about the impact on the school and its reaction.

As a society we all need to have resilience against this sort of attack.

Sending kids home for a couple of days appears an easy solution compared to planning for failure mentioned above, but it has massive knock-on costs, and not just financial.

My wife is a hospital doctor, and were I not able to work from home to supervise my children during such closures, her clinics would be cancelled: a further 15-20 people disappointed every day.

What about those people being paid piece-rate having to stay at home and losing income ?

Shoving our personal failure to plan as a cost onto everyone else turns out to be a cost back on us. We need to learn to work better to face these issues as a co-operative society.

I leave how one does that as "an exericse for the student".

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

True, but at my British school, well back in the last millenium, the teachers only allowed around half the population to play the game : girls.

So there is a "reason" for possible ignorance, at least among a certain demographic. Similar logic was applied to "British Basketball".

The culture has moved on a bit since then, fortunately.

For those right ponders, I think it translates as that they were coming to knock Rufus for 6.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

The tragic thing about declining mental faculties is that it is the short-term memory that goes first.

Long-term memory is often well preserved.

And having had a close relative decline due to a slow dementia, it is especially not something I would joke about.

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Re: Honestly, it's fine.

"Names influence strongy how humans think about a fact, thing or situation, even themselves."

Yes, but something else has been lost in this renaming : just how devastating it often is to the victims.

So could aspects of "romance baiting" be interpreted as a variant on "Play it mean to keep them keen" and play down the harm ?

Just trying to widen the considerations.

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

Re: Head of Feed Relevance

Head of Feed Relevance : ie a hay merchant, supplier to those out standing in their field, such as horse, cow, sheep or alapaca. (See above)

Re: Is it self referential

Out standing in its field.........

So what is it, a horse, a cow, a sheep or an alpaca ?

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

A First World War left wing political mantra was similar to "a bayonet is a tool with a worker at both ends".

So, with a worker at one end and a box at the other, I think the answer to the OP's " it's technically a bayonet" comment is "no".

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Gandalf the Grey

No, not an Alpha male until after he had turned white......

It's the sting in the tale that did it.

Hack Nintendo's alarm clock to show cat pics? Let's-a-go!

Re: cat retribution

"Thinking outside the box...."

Ours just goes for stinking outside the box.

Itonly puts one type allowed inside the box, the rest goes somewhere else. Fortunately we have a tiled floor, so easy to clean.

Tardigrade genes may hold secret to radiation treatments for humans

"that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP),"

"The third finding involves a pair of proteins generated on exposure to radiation that speed up the generation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy used by all living cells"

I am only an engineer, not a biologist, but I did wonder if this could become a new doping pathway for elite athletes...... (the proteins, not the radiation exposure)

Preparing to be shot down in 3.....2.....1......

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Re: Abrilliant article that I will reference in future

"What do you think elbows and noses are for?"OP:

While I do have 2 elbows, what are these "noses" you talk about. Last time I looked, I only had one.

Have I been missing something all these years ?

Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed

Yes, the story I heard was that it was Sylvia's hand.

"Laughed so hard". You would have been laughing even more if it had been a puppet hand doing the reaching: it was unable to grasp an object.

It worked for me as a nipper. It was "slow", but better than all the ADHD-inducing animation we get nowadays.YMMV.

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Re: Many cores on power-limited package = poor single-thread performance?

"It depends on how you define 'stupid'."

Agreed. Many years ago I was optimising code for an in-PC DSP card running on real-time audio (when DSP chips out-performed x86).

The code ran standard library routines with glue logic written by me. Near the end I profiled the runtime, and found that it was only spending about 8% of the time in the library code, and the rest in my glue logic (hand-optimised assembler). The biggest culprit was in the branching. With block-based processing, the sledge-hammer approach, ie compute for all cases, was more efficient to enable the code to complete on time than putting in conditionals for edge cases, the otherwise "logical" way to save time.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

When one door closes.....

.... at least he had left the Window(s) open.

Personalized pop-up was funny for about a second, until it felt like stalking

Judging by the relative count of upvotes between you & me on this topic, I think I have to concede defeat. The average Reg commentard appears to prefer not to grow up.

OK, perhaps I can now categorise the (minimum) mental age of the OP.

My 8-year old lad mentioned doing this just last week, at a schoolfriend's house.

Their 'sophistication' was to get Alexa to also vary the tone- quality of aforesaid item.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Archimedes

One time when the end user was not trying to avoid riscs.

Re: Boat?

Well maybe we could change the rules for you........

How about "making obscure lack-of-links".

Why, when we had a very successful cruiser (aka 'ship'), called HMS Belfast, do we have a domestic fitting called a 'Belfast sink'.

OK, not giving up the day job just yet.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: Sizing

Apologies missing detail from above re lift with two doors. Lift was so old that there was only manual opening of the doors....... hence prospect of getting stuck on wrong side of equipment.

Re: Sizing

In a prevoius life, we had several of that size, but with a bit more muscle than adipose tissue. Affectionately, they were known as the "sweat and groan" brigade, and they were great at doing odd jobs.

There was one time when they were moving a large bit of equipment in a lift with doors on opposite sides. Once they loaded then followed the equipment in, it was realised that they could not get out again around the equipment when at the other end of travel which would have required use of the other doors. In the interests of H&S they were requested not to travel in the lift and take the stairs.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Recurrence

Is that with or without the packaging ? (countryside)

Before or after mastication ? (kerbside)

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

"You're not using it right........."

Slightly more recently than this story, in the days when the UK mains voltage had not harmonised with Europe, so was still 240 V (later to become a nominal 220 V).

As a tech person, I worked in a non-tech department of a well-known university. Being the most computerised of the groups in the department, we had bought two UPS to support a small UNIX cluster.

After a few years, as more groups acquired more mains-powered devices, come around 11 am when the kettles went on, the UPS switch in and start beeping, but mains feed is still "live". We check with the manual. which states that trip is set at 209 V.

I found a consumer socket in the room close to the incoming feeder: yup 240 V, but 3 floors up 208 V (My reading of the then-applicable wiring regs allowed for maximum 8% voltage drop in feeders).

I sent a report to a committee to suggest we needed re-wiring, and soon. Report rejected.

Feedback received along the lines of "This person does not know how to use a UPS".

It took a few more years before it was re-wired, in the meantime we had a regular alarm clock for the morning break. UPS capacity was sufficient to cover the surge.

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

Agreed with you, especially "If everyone could reduce their fossil fuel usage by 2/3's whilst not requiring a fully built-out and economical public charging infrastructure then we'd be well on our way.".

But that sensible approach hits HMRC in the pocket (and already has). Watch out for the creative replacement revenue stream.

Re: No doubt cost and lack of charging infrastructure are central...

Yes, apologies, slightly mis-remembered, because it was a 2002 car bought by me before 2006. But the point still stands. The car was end of line in 2002, so effectively being punished for design decisions taken long before the tax was mooted (at least publicly) (hence also my use of the word "retrospective" rather than "regressive, which it also was). As the OP points out with the dates, moving the goalposts again while the car still had useful life. And the obsession with concentrating on CO2 to drive design decisions lead to the favouring of diesel ICE, and look where that took us. At the time we were well aware of the risks with PM2.5 emissions.

Re: No doubt cost and lack of charging infrastructure are central...

The irony is as to how brands of politicians in the UK, who are supposedly on the side of the poor, introduce taxes that are retrospective in effect, and a form of regressive taxation on the poor.

I bought a second-hand car back in 2002, with a 1600 cc engine, that was low to midsize, and fairly economical for the range available at the time. After purchase, the then chancellor introduced a new form of car taxation based on the relatively new "fairer" concept of tailpipe CO2 emissions. Rather than introduce this on all cars manufactured after a certain date, hence a market signalling and forewarning, this new set of rates applied on all cars, irrespective of age. My car just fell into an upper category of emission, so I ended up paying more tax than previously.

Although I am not "poor", it did strike me as to how the tradesman/night worker often uses a second-hand vehicle to perform his/her job, and was caught by this.

A strange definition of "fairer".

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

The form over function battle with the Sharpie..........

Many years ago, a group of us were overnighting at a friend's house. One was looking for a socket to plug in his cassette player (yes, it was that long ago).

Finding a seemingly "useless" plug, he removed it, and left it out overnight.

It was the greenhouse heater (other side of wall) , supposedly protecting a crop of that year's geraniums from a very chilly night.

A very glum look was on the face of the friend's mum later the next day.

Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

Re: BSOD has been rare since Windows 7

Why does a robotically-voiced "share and enjoy" start running around in my head in response to this comment ?

Boeing's Q2 nosedive buoyed by appointment of new CEO

Translation of an abbreviation........

".........to recover from a series of devastating engineering failures"

Apologies for being a bit wordy, but isn't that a bit of shorthand for:

".........to recover from a series of management failures which manifested as devastating engineering failures". ?

It is 60 years since a US spacecraft first took a close-up of the Moon

Re: My first thought was

A few years later than that I worked in another UK semiconductor (attempt at) manufacturing lab.

The story I heard there was that, years before, one of the more senior members of the lab had increased the yield of his germanium transistors by taking them over the public corridor to wash them in the "washrooms" in between processing stages. Date undefined, but you could call it an early "clean room" (because everywhere else was "dirty" in comparison).

Europe blasts back into the heavy launch biz with first Ariane 6 flight

"... homophone......"

Does that mean that Ariane 7 will be set to work ?

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: 100Amp

Is that why we call them "bangers" in the UK ?

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Re: Keep your feet warm

The old Tektronix valve oscilloscopes near-doubled for that as well, as a room heater, ca 1980.

Re: Could have been worse

Can only be called an HUD if they got to see it coming.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: Sounds like ...

Given the Regonym, does this imply that broken glass was a not very INTELligent thing to use ?

Student's flimsy bin bags blamed for latest NHS data breach

Re: Inexcusable

Don't feed it to the students; think of the poor starving dogs, for whom their supply of "homework to go" will be dried up ?

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Crows

Yes, let the crows squabble over the shiny.

I too see the cast-offs as usually "shiny enough": it means that no-one wants to come and nick them off you.

Then you can get on with your real work unimpeded.

Two big computer vision papers boost prospect of safer self-driving vehicles

Re: Naples, anyone?

Agree about Kampala Uganda.

Was there a few years back with a charity and using the same local taxi driver for repeat visits. On the first visit it was found that his eyesight was way below legal for UK driving. Spectacles were sufficient to bring him up to legal. On the repeat visit it was amazing how he usually won the scrums with other taxi drivers by driving closer to them than they would to him. I wondered if the other drivers had uncorrected vision and so were less confident of the proximity of their vehicle to others.

Fortunately they were only low-speed scrums in Kampala.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

The 1984 meme

"hurling a hammer through a giant glowering Big Brother video screen lecturing a gray, thuggish audience"

But surely the recent advert was just carrying on that "1984" meme: unfortunately they hopped into the audience.

Were they intimating that, like Winston Smith's job, they could destroy the historic record at will and re-write it in their imagining ?

(Then, like WS, they would have to keep on re-writing it. Result: a job/market for life.)

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Alternative uses for hotels

Within the past few years two female co-employees went to London and used the company's (contracted out) travel booking system for a hotel.

Fortunately it was only for a night. It turned out the hotel doubled as a knocking shop. Too late to hunt for an alternative

They did not venture out of their rooms after 10 pm.

On their return to base they were strongly urged to file a complaint with our company.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

"...... delays since its inception in 2012,....."

Am I the only who, while speed reading, missed the 'c' in "inception".

I almost went to the dictionary to look up the meaning, but reading the rest of the article saved the effort,

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Those were peak 'fix by reinstall' days

Ah, are you hinting that we have progressed from something like "fish food" releases to "dog food" ?

Want to keep Windows 10 secure? This is how much Microsoft will charge you

Sorry to be a pedant but over 3 years it is (1+2+4)*61 = $427

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

Re: The Hollywood script writes itself

So the sequels to "Snakes on a plane" could be :

"Bugs on a Truck" or "The Caterpillar worm"

This children's rhyme is a pretty good summary;

Iggy-Wiggy was a worm

Iggy-Wigy learnt to squirm

Iggy-Wigy crossed the road

Ooey-gooey

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: Out in the fields

"Nobody uses [hard-copy] maps anymore!"

.......because, at least in the UK, when their phones/tablet devices have got water-logged, they whistle up the local mountain rescue team.

UK PM promises faster justice for Post Office Horizon victims

Re: No Justice

OBE: that would be a poor reward for his efforts.

What is your definition of a Middle-Age "knight" ? (non Hollywood)

How about a person who fought to protect the weak, who fought for justice and for truth ?

My vote would be for Alan to be called a true knight. And it is another "going" for which previous recipients have had to hand theirs back when some of the consequences of their actions came to public light.

Unfortunately, after 20 years of campaigning, Alan is no longer middle-aged.....

Facebook, Instagram now mine web links you visit to fuel targeted ads

Re: Nothing more annoying

The first time I met "targetted" adverts was with a friend who was in the early stages of pregnancy, and searching for the usual preparations.

She commented how, months later, she was still receiving adverts for baby products.

Fortunately she carried it to term, but others are less fortunate, and the results are very distressing.

Does one really want to receive regular reminders of a distressing incident ?

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Have they tried

Isn't there a scale that tops out at "Hard Reset", depending on footwear?

Eg

Hard Reset = "Totectors"

Power cycle = "cycling shoes"

Soft Reset = "sneakers"

Google teases AlphaCode 2 – a code-generating AI revamped with Gemini

Re: Viva la coding gibberish!

And does it leave the code well documented so that in 40 years time the same functionality/algorithm can be ported to a new platform or programming language, and verified?

It would save having to keep COBOL programmers in suspended animation.......

Government and the latest tech don't mix, says UK civil servant of £11B ESN mess

Re: Hot Air

With Cameron before one election (2010?) having said that he saw himself as the "heir to Blair", and this past weekend we have had Starmer implying that he sees himself as the heir to Thatcher, then the comment above has quite a lot of mileage.