Posts by Maximus Decimus Meridius

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Other options...

She could have turned off the dinosaur containment system.

"Its a Unix system, I know this.""

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

We have all been there

C:\>dir a:

X

X

X

{yeah, nothing there I need}

C:\>del *.*

{Oh, bugger}

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Did no one watch 2001?

They may need to have a toilet stop, stretch their legs, grab a coffee, maybe admire the view and buy some souvenirs?

Madlad builds homebrew GPU using 8,192 RISC-V chips

“No matter how hard you try, you will get rx and tx wrong on the first try,”

This is like trying to get a USB-A cable plugged in the right way. It often takes 3 or more attempts to get it right.

How dare you stop data loss – that's not your job!

Re: Nearly caused a union walkout

I think the Seamstresses Guild and Lord Vetinari may have something to say about that.

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

All very well

But does it support cowsay?

Zig creator seeks 'uncompromising perfection' before blessing 1.0

Re: Unimpressed

Bronze Swimming Certificate and Silver Swimming Certificate? Not sure how much this helps the discussion Mr Rimmer.

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

Brother all the way

I have a Brother HL-L8260CDW colour double sided laser printer I bought in 2020 for under £100 with rebate. Currently on 4841 printed pages with 2 paper jams. I recently (in the last 12 months) replaced the starter cartridges with original cartridges. It sits there and prints when I want it to.

I also have a very old (must be nearly 20 years) Samsung SCX-4200 multi-function laser printer scanner that I have refilled the toner a couple of times. Currently sitting shared on the network via a Raspberry Pi for scanning & printing.

I used to have a Deskjet 500c which was a nightmare with the inks drying out all the time. The last decent HP laser was the Laserjet 4L from the 90's (although that was a Cannon engine I think).

Git is unprepared for the AI coding tsunami

Git Origins

Git was written because Larry McVoy, developer of Bitkeeper, revoked the free licences for Linux development. He claimed Andrew Tridgell was reverse engineering the protocol between client and server in direct contravention of the licence. Andrew denied this. There was no other source control system that did what Linus wanted, so he came up with Git.

Anthropic’s Bun Rust rewrite merged at speed of AI

I wonder

What Linus would say if someone made a PR like this to the Linux kernal....

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

Re: Considering

No problem. They will use dehydrated water. That is quite a bit lighter than the regular stuff.

Would you like fries with that terminal?

Re: "nobody wants a deep-fried penguin"

They can't be that bad - when turned into biscuits they are reasonably tasty.

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

The best LPL video I ever saw was the gun safe where, by removing the recessed plastic handle used to pull the door open, you could put your hand inside and remove the gun without opening the lock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJrSWXFXvlE

Well, technically the best video was one where he got into the ex girlfriends' back door, but that is a different matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joed0P3hhbc

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Re: The Richardson Gang & The Kray Twins

I was always suspicious of what went into Hob Knobs. Thank $Deity I don't eat them.

Re: A completely rational stance for a CEO

Presumably the pitch will be "Our AI model isn't available anywhere else but from us. You could use <insert LLM name here> but it doesn't have our experience and knowledge behind it"

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

Re: Connect TRITON

At a former employer, we used planets as server names. Mercury was the email server, Saturn and Jupiter were the big file servers.

We set up a very small network at a customers and decided to use Thomas the Tank Engine characters. Which was fine apart from the lady who used the server as her machine and wasn't best pleased to be The Fat Controller. The network was so small with so few users it didn't justify a separate file server, so NT4 was fine for file and print sharing.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Re: Bad analogy

Always check the smallprint for definition of 'lifetime'. I will bet a pound to a penny that it isn't your lifetime but the lifetime of the product. At which point the warranty could read "We will warrant that the product will work. Until it stops working, at which point it is end of life and out of warranty"

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Around 2003-4 I fitted a mini-ITX PC into my car in the boot with a VGA cable and USB cable up to the dash. A small touchscreen monitor sat mounted to a bracket on the dash and ran Sat-nav and a music player which broadcast using a very low power radio signal on FM to listen via the radio - the built in radio didn't support aux input.

It was quite the thing to do back then. Car cases and power supplies that could handle the drop in voltage during cranking the engine were fairly easily available. I seem to remember that it used a 2.5" drive mounted with rubber feet, but I may be wrong. It was part of the car case.

This was before Tom-Tom's were cheap enough. And the bigger display was great.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Not quite terminal

1.21 Jigawatts

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Still Annoyed With Myself

Get a KVM switch instead? The Glinet Comet can be hooked up to a PCI card that can control the power or a fingerbot that has a small 'finger' that can touch the power button.

Currently 20% off at Amazon.

I don't have one, but reviews look good.

Insame

Presumably, this machine would have spinning rust disks. They moved a machine, a server no less, while the disks were still spinning? How far? To an adjacent building or using a car/van?

Insanity.

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

Re: Adventureland

Flashy graphics and sound on a Vic20? You were a Blue Meanies fan weren't you?

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

2 Options

1) The obvious one. Its a shuttle. It flew. Strap a couple of rocket motors to it, point it up and fly it.

2) Have Texas annex Washington DC and any state in the way - Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia gives the most direct route.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Re: Nice to See This Being Done

Loading from casette tape? You were lucky. In my day we had to to use wind up gramophones

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Who to blame?

Similar. We had a sample ink dispenser in a factory in Pittsburgh that would randomly fall over. Months of remote debugging failed to provide a solution so I got sent to the US to baby sit it. Took the better part of a week for it to fail, but ended up being an error caused by the ROUND function in Foxpro (this was many years ago). The solution was to convert the number to a string, convert it back to a number and round it again. I never did find out why, but by that point I just wanted to go home.

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

To be fair, Tesla provide online manuals for the repair and service of the entire car, free of charge and without needing a login. I would love other car manufacturers to do the same.

Linus Torvalds hints Bcachefs may get dropped from the Linux kernel

Splitter

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Re: Simple

Then feed them with flour, salt, yeast, a little sugar and water until its fixed.

Chap claims Atari 2600 'absolutely wrecked' ChatGPT at chess

Gotham did it first

Levy Rozman (GothamChess on YouTube) has run 'competitions' between lots of the AI models. All were terrible. Pieces disappearing and reappearing, new pieces materialising from nowhere, illegal moves etc.

I doubt that any could beat the ZX81 1K chess game at this point.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

The atmosphere is irrelevant. Lithium battery fires produce their own oxygen and are self sustaining - hence why they are so difficult to deal with

.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Amazon would never do this

Because if they did show duty for each item, it would be very simple to work out what they paid for it in the first place and what markup they were making.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients"

It's the reciprocating dingle arm. It's always the bl00dy reciprocating dingle arm.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/806/

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Re: The mouse doesn't work in the afternoon..

I miss Jerry Pournelle. Just checked - he died in 2017. Time flies.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

If they have leaning difficulties, probably best for them to lie down

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: Are we the baddies?

Interestingly (or not) I had to remove the FUTO keyboard as one of my banking apps (sorry - forget which one) refused to work with it installed.

It wasn't very good at error correction, so I wasn't too unhappy to remove it.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Quite the opposite experience

I used to work on an EPR system. Kim Possible of the kids animated series was our major client. Poor girl had pretty much every problem going including lots of mental health sectioning events.

Must have been the stress.

In the last few weeks I have upgraded the hard disks and memory in laptops for my sister and a female cousin, both of whom are in their 70's.

I made damn sure NOT to look what was on the disks. They booted into Windows and that was enough for me to hand them back, along with the original drives.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: Irate customers

I believe the manufacturer of Polo mints used to steal any spare holes they could find. There was the great hole shortage of '97 where they didn't have enough in stock, so ever after they had bands of hole snatchers taking them to a large warehouse in Luton. Hence why Luton is known as the biggest hole in the UK.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

I think there is something missing here from the story. "someone mentioned that they had seen one of the facilities people in town over the weekend." There must be more to it than that. Were they selling PC's or just doing some shopping?

Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

Delphi - A fantastic product let down by decades of mismanagement

I have used Delphi for 25+ years professionally (and all the way back to V1 personally). It really was a fantastic product. Unfortunately, it was owned by Borland who didn't really know what to do with it once they tried to go all Enterprisey and turned themselves into Inprise. After that, it has unfortunately stagnated. Coupled with the loss of community and 3rd party support it languishes in a backwater, used only by companies who invested heavily in it decades ago and now have huge codebases that can't easily be replaced.

Such a shame. If MS had bought Borland (or at least Delphi) when they poached Anders Hejlsburg, it would have been huge. It had its moment in the sun in the late 90's and early 00's but just ebbed away.

The joy of receiving The Delphi Magazine every month. The Saturday mornings lost to browsing what was new on Torrys Delphi Page.

I am sad now.

'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel, despite the doubters

Re: If I understand the logic, I understand the reasoning...

Will you stop being reasonable and posting balanced comments? Don't you understand you should be shouting like a toddler for one side or the other?

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Comments about BASIC

Surely these should be REM's?

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

The problem with Token Ring was if you unplugged the wrong cable at the wrong time, the token fell on the floor and was almost impossible to find. A replacement token from IBM was very expensive.

Openreach reveals latest locations facing the copper chop

Re: Pah!

Which Navy did the fluff come from?

</PedantMode>

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Conspiracy Theories

Pour encourager les autres?

Just a very unfortunate accident in my view though.

Still waiting for a Pi 500 and wondering what do this summer?

Re: Point

I bought one of these (16G, 512G version) for £98 delivered back in mid April. Installed Linux and using it as an experimental machine. Works well for me. Speed is good.

I was looking at a Pi 5 having already got Pis 1-4, but by the time I priced everything up, the N100 was cheaper and there were more options for OS's.

I am not dissing the Pi, but the N100 as a desktop machine seems better. It may be different answer if I was using the I/O or camera.

CrowdStrike hires outside security outfits to review troubled Falcon code

Zero Content File

So what was the channel file with all zeros then?

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: Really?

I can believe it. I set up an Asterisk VOIP system many years ago and 999 (UK) was a special number in the route. The idea was that in a real emergency, people forget to dial 9 or 0 for an outside line and revert to their primary instincts.

I thought the story would go the other way - someone wanted to dial the internal extension 911 and got the emergency services instead.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Re: Flintstones

Well, I'd go with Betty, but I'd be thinking of Wilma