Posts by UCAP

FBI prevails over convicted fraudster in $345M destroyed Bitcoin dispute

Re: At a time when so much news is negative

Definitely 7 cylinders short of a V8.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: Ohnosecond

It's also the smallest measurable unit of time.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!

Or you find yourself in front of the Gates of Hell and Old Nick turns around and says "Can you install Windows ME on these PCs ..."

Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

Re: My kettle uses that much!

My kettle pulls a lot more that 1.2 kW.

But I'll join you in that cuppa.

UK government's £45B AI savings pitch built on broad-brush guesswork, MPs told

AI

A perfect solution for all of those problems that don't actually exist.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: 5 year old database?

OMG, I remember watching Space 1999 when it was first broadcast and I was a young teenager. Happy days! I know which episode was being referred to.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: aaaaarrrgh

Dammit - you owe me a new keyboard

UK government says digital ID won't be compulsory – honest

Still too many words: "Palantir will decide to screw it up"

Re: Breathing

... but it helps to keep the heart beating.

New Zealand’s Institute of IT Professionals collapses

Re: Wait, What?

Ahhh ... but we are only in Act 1 of that play, wait for the final denouement in Act 3.

Meta will listen into AI conversations to personalize ads

Re: “There’s no opt out”

Simple way - don't use Meta.

Hold on ...

WhatsApp is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted; how can Meta listen in to those conversations unless they have established a back door into the system?

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Good times!

Clippy was a user experience. No-one said that it had to a good user experience.

Firewall upgrade linked to three deaths after Australian telco cut off emergency calls

Re: Is it too soon...

This "humour" is in very bad taste given that people probably died as a direct consequence of this incident.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Wilma ...

... where's Fred?

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Managers do have souls - sucked out from from their minions (thinking Delores from "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" here).

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

They know they have been promoted above their abilities ...

Often referred to as "Being Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence".

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

He did not say the tea bags were being used to make tea! Most likely they were being used to repair potholes in the road outside.

(I've had factory tea once - never again <shudder>).

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Popcorn futures are looking like a good investment right now

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

Re: Treating managers as toddlers

I originally read the heading as "Training managers as toddlers". It made perfect sense to me given the state of some manglement.

I've seen this so many times - everyone throwing blame at everyone else without first checking that you are standing on firm ground. It never ends well for someone.

Supermarket giant Tesco sues VMware, warns lack of support could disrupt food supply

This is beginning to sound a bit cheesy.

Re: [..] why Broadcom isn't automatically forced to honour the existing VMware contracts

There is a UK equivalent to US class actions (its got an odd name that I cannot remember), but it is a lot harder to get a case turned into one, and I suspect that Tesco won't qualify at the best of times.

To be clear, IANAL.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Our current Mondeo has never given us a problem since we brought it 7 years ago. We often refer to it as the "Ford Perfect".

DOGE accused of duplicating critical Social Security database on unsecured cloud

Re: Payback when the fascists go under

Vance is just as mendacious and rapacious, but doesn't have a brain that is only firing on half its cylinders.

There. fixed it for you.

Re: Is this the right prefix?

Personally, I think the correct prefix is "a**hole"

Trump threatens extra tariffs, tech export bans, for any nation that dares to regulate Big Tech

Re: The bloke's a twat

And a convicted sexual offender and fraudster.

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: he's not enough of an idiot to wander too close to a full-height window that opens out ...

Intelligent life has to start from somewhere?

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

Re: Fun at the DTI

Official Secrets Act is probably a good starting point. You'd be surprised what they can classify as "secret".

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

Re: X is just a swastika with the dashes missing

Not all of von Braun's rockets landed on London, just some of those developed from the A4 experimental series. Hos later designs missed London by a wide margin, which in the case of the Saturn-V was probably a very good thing!

(dammit - no rocket icon)

Torvalds blasts tardy kernel dev: Your 'garbage' RISC-V patches are 'making the world worse'

Re: Dislike the delivery

I once said a whole lot worse to a supportably experienced software engineer who tried to deliver some over-complicated and totally uncommented code that would only run without crashing on the very limited test cases they used to "prove that it conforms to specification". I was, however, restrained - I delivered my opinion in a private office with the door closed, and not in the open-plan office space in which I first saw the code submission.

Apollo 13 hero Jim Lovell has taken his final orbit

Apollo 13 oxygen tank failure

The failure of the oxygen tank is a bit more complicated than was stated in the article. The tank had (as where all oxygen tanks) been subjected to a rigorous series of tests on the ground before being installed into the Service Module. However, the tests for this particular tank had not been performed correctly which meant that the tank's heaters had been subjected to a massive over-voltage during the tests. There was a certain amount of post-test arse covering, during which it was decided that since the heaters still *seemed* to work, they tank should be OK to be used. In fact, it is thought that the heaters had been damaged, leading to the in-flight failure. There was no way of checking the heaters using Mk 1 eyeballs since they were sealed inside the tank, and getting them out would have destroyed the tank.

This all came out during the post-mission investigations and two things happened: (1) the people concerned where given an official kicking, and (2) procedures where changed so that any "glitches" like that would result in the relevant component being scrapped, regardless of cost. An expensive way to learn a lesson, but it could have been a whole lot worse.

RIP Jim Lovell. Its time to take your final flight.

Mars says hello as NASA's Europa Clipper warms up radar

Re: God Speed Little One.

Tickets for the B-Ark are on sale now, but have all been brought up by politicians and billionaires

Oh dear, so sad, what a shame.

Servers hated Mondays until techie quit quaffing coffee in their company

Re: Condensation

ESTEC (the European Space Technology & Research Centre - one of the ESA establishments) used to have environmental chamber for test satellites. During one test sequence the satellite would be heated to about +200C on one side, while being cooled to -150C on the other side - AT THE SAME TIME.

Apparently the chamber cost a bomb to construct, but earned its cost back many time over in robust satellite design/builds.

Datacenter lobby blows a fuse over EU efficiency proposals

Re: Translation

You forgot "... and to whoever we please"

Problem PC had graybeards stumped until trainee rummaged through trash

Was his name ...

... Sherlock? Seems to have had the same deductive skills.

Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists

Re: Existential crisis

Sounds like me after a particularly good session in the pub.

Re: Might

Just strange

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Antarctica is the one place where you can both chill out and be really cool

Re: Not just Moas

You are Gandalf the Grey, and I claim my Hobbit.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Re: The future of AI

Do you really want the list?

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

The UK part of Astro scale will probably win the bid since they have already developed the base technology. There's not enough money in the pot to develop it from scratch.

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Re: All sounds very well ...

SCOYUS has no authority over the Brosdcom's Dutch subsidiary, and neither does TACO.

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

At last. MS has managed to eliminate the Blue Screen of Death ...

... hold on, wait a minute!

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: The Banana Wars

Ook!

With apologies to all Librarians anywhere and anywhen. Now please stop hitting me.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

The Curse of the Demo. Strikes every time!

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Optimisation?

Ah, would that be the epitome of the agile development management process?

As in manglement running as fast as they can in the hope of avoiding the debris fallout.

Brit space sector struggles to compete with £90K graduate banking salaries

As someone who has worked in the space industry as an engineer and consultant for well over 3 decades, I have to say that this article pretty much hits the nail on the head. The sort of people who are needed in the space industry (intelligent, pragmatic, capable of looking at problems and coming up with simple, well engineered and workable solutions) are also precisely the the sort of people who are wanted in other industries, and sadly there are few who cam compete with banks and management consultancies in the salary game. I tend to find that the people who come into the space industry and stay in it tend to be motivated more by the engineering challenges than the salaries that they can command elsewhere.

I case to note: I was once offered a job in the banking industry that would have nearly tripled my salary, I turned it down because i knew it would not challenge me and i would be bored within 6 months.