Posts by yetanotheraoc

Regulator says stranger entered hospital, treated a patient, took a document ... then vanished

Re: A future who me?

"And, yes, when purple are descending stairs, lights tend to be a rather good idea."

All shades of people actually.

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

No

Was (this) the guy who wrote the "echo" command code?

"yes"

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Words to live by

"You should always take a copy of your presentation on a USB stick!"

She sounds a right sort, as well as an old hand at presentations.

Re: Every single time

Good job on the politics.

"I told him he had fixed his own PC and could tell people that (which he did to other directors, his PA etc.)………….but in future if moving IT equipment please call us first. That was company policy but strangely that didn’t always apply to directors."

But you underestimate the director. In future he will just go to the patchbay and move some wires around. "Don't worry, I know what I'm doing...."

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

best comment here

Upvoted for the most succinct summary comment.

Musk can say what he likes about whomever he likes on whatever platform he likes. Tomorrow: "The unions can go fuck themselves." That doesn't make shooting off his mouth a smart business move. The advertisers, unions, crash-test dummies, etc. are not in any way forced to do business with Musk. As demonstrated, they can vote with their feet.

Server sales down 31% at HPE as enterprises hack spending

de-elongation

Poor guy. There is medication for that.

No link between internet use and poor mental health, according to Oxford boffins

Re: Oh, and by the way ...

Is that so? I thought the correct way to find a correlation is by serendipity; whereas the canonical way to find a smoking gun is to be holding it when it goes off.

Re: But, but, but....

I think you'll find less intelligent people are more likely to vote, period.

Japan's digital minister flamed and shamed for using his smartphone in Parliament

seen it

"poking at their phones and ignoring the others"

Could be texting each other!

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Re: How was it basically the VPs fault?

"When she got up to leave, she did not log out of her computer or save her work."

Not required _here_ if she has a private office, though maybe policy was different _there_. Notice she had to be persuaded to let the tech remain behind, so she was not clueless of security concerns.

Re: Can't stand IT

"And why, oh why, do companies knowingly employ incompetent people ?"

Red pill: There's not enough competent people to go around so let's not jump out of any frying pans.

Blue pill: Anybody competent gets promoted until Peter writes a book about it.

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

boring is a virtue, IMHO

Not only architecture, also the best software is boring. Things should work first and foremost, after which you can festoon it with as many spangles as don't interfere with the function. I'm from the USA, can you tell?

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

shuttle to mission control SAY AGAIN

"Setup is said to require just five minutes of effort, as users' credentials and permissions are preset before the device is dispatched."

Amazon needs the end user credentials? What kind of thin client implementation is this?

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

people can be tired too, not just stupid

"Once activated by the Euro key switch on the FES control panel..."

**Before** being activated by the Euro key switch, perhaps the buttons on the **intercom system** could announce something like, "Hi, we are the emergency buttons, the non-emergency buttons are over there."

Re: Click, click, click, nothing happens

Ha, similar but different, just recently. Brand new laptop, try to Delete a file and quickly Enter to say yes I really want to delete that file. Now the cursor changes shape and whatever right-click, left-click, keyboard magic incantations I use -- "Nothing happens." I have unsaved work, web search on the phone for solutions to unresponsive linux, no joy. Eventually in my random attempts to make progress in the dark cave, I must have used the Escape key at some point, oh it's working again. The penny dropped the *next* time I tried to Delete a file. This time I wasn't in a hurry and actually looked at the resulting dialog ... of the linux Screenshot utility! The PrintScreen|Delete keys on the new laptop correspond to the Delete|Fingerprint keys on the old one. So the *previous* time after Enter it was patiently waiting for me to grab a region from the screen....

I'd love to have seen ...

"... the communications with the complaining client" ... probably resembled the cries of a 6 year old who missed dinner.

Lenovo's USB-C Power Banks pack more heat than expected

Re: "it appears that some internal screws can loosen"

I was in a hurry.

Sam Altman set to rejoin OpenAI as CEO – seemingly with Microsoft's blessing

what could possibly go wrong

The tarot cards say there will be big money in Ghostbusters-style AI cleanup services.

OpenAI staff threaten to leave if ousted CEO Altman is not reinstated

Re: OpenAI is nothing without its people

"isn't that rather against the point of AI ?"

AI does have a pointy end. The people referred to are usually holding the other end of the spear.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Re: "If Wayland was actually feature-complete."

`Nothing is ever "feature-complete" ...`

Au contraire. You know it's feature complete when the only changes being made are pointless UI "improvements".

Net privacy wars will be with us always. Let's set some rules

Re: who it is that doesn't trust us – and why

upvoted for magnanimosity

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Regomized

Same for me, from now on. Except I will know why.

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

objects at rest tend to remain at rest

"0-60 in 2.9s"

How beefy is the tailgate? Would be a shame if some heavy load, say a cast-iron stove(*) headed for the recycle, were somehow not to keep up with the accelerating CyberTruck.

(*) Currently there is precisely this item loaded on the truck in the driveway. When I suggested to the truck- and stove-owner that we should secure the load, he declined, saying "I'm not going that far." Good, good, I'm not going with you then.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

All together now

Steven Wright: "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"

Re: It could be worse

Same here. Read/unread indicator and flagged are good enough to manage the emails. The only "organizing" I do is changing subjects like "Help please" or "Tomorrow" to something more informative.

Re: Recycle Bin is not permanent storage

"A user could figure out what was meant by thinking..."

There is a slight flaw in your sentence.

Re: Recycle Bin is not permanent storage

I regret that I have but one upvote to give for your post.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

I use e.g. '30 June 2023', and have done since my first trip to Europe four decades ago.

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

"24 folders for the hour"

I'm slightly disappointed it wasn't 12 folders for the hour and then A.M. and P.M. folders (with the periods, naturally), at the end of the hierarchy.

Microsoft investigating bug in Windows 11 File Explorer that makes the CPU hangry

Re: I think I see a basic problem

Maybe they make a lot of decoy changes to distract from the substantive changes that matter to them.

Missing Titan sub likely destroyed in implosion, no survivors

Re: A fitting epitaph

"if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed. Don't get in your car. Don't do anything," Rush told Pogue.

Many years ago my brother made this exact argument "getting out of bed is unsafe" to his wife. She was unimpressed by the logic. Men not only discount the risks in adventure scenarios, they are fatally attracted to them. _In the moment_ I tend to act just like my brother did. As a counter to this known tendency, I give extra weight to a woman's voice of caution.

"But where Cristina understands the difference between calculated and foolhardy risk, Gabriel operates without filter or boundaries. As they begin to quarrel, they mark out the difference between adventure and the kind of careless folly that endangers others as well as the self."

https://www.npr.org/2018/06/14/619515077/gabriel-and-the-mountain-explores-how-a-young-man-died-and-how-he-lived

Lawyers who cited fake cases hallucinated by ChatGPT must pay

The lesson extrapolated

"The lesson here is that you can't delegate to a _______ the things for which a ______ is responsible,"

Machine and lawyer is only one possible pair with which to irresponsibly fill the blanks.

Virgin Media email customers enter third day of inbox infuriation

About that poll

Of course we want the service restored, but we are also looking ahead to the next outage. I see three regions on the current Venn diagram. (1) They don't know what caused the outage. Time spent in this region is inversely proportional to the technical skills on staff. (2) They know what caused the outage but won't say. Some skills on staff, but too many layers of weasel management. (3) They know, and are candid about what caused it. "They're spies like us!"

Microsoft rethinks death sentence for Windows Mail and Calendar apps

Re: Think of the users, and not just corporates

"proper threading of messages"

So, not Outlook then.

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

Re: off topic, help would be appreciated

"Can I keep MFA disabled?" -- No.

"The microsoft authenticator may be problematic because all of my computers are linux." -- You can use a different authenticator, Microsoft even says so. Search for "totp linux".

"off topic, help would be appreciated" -- Not good form.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Re: Ah yes

The beloved ERR_SUCCESS value! Microsoft does this, and I have used it myself in VB. When in Rome...

Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product

Re: "compared to $25 billion in the United States"

"what are they getting out of it exactly ?"

An AI that speaks French?

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Incompetent surveillance

"the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my 'Ring doorbell'"

Doesn't Amazon own Ring? I expect if they had checked their records, they would have realised they didn't have any and therefore it was not in fact a Ring doorbell. Ergo, they didn't check, and just switched off a customer on the say-so of a driver. Be nice to your driver. Be very, very nice.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: What About The Current Resident?

"the US founders and framers of the US Constitution never seemed to imagine that someone as incredibly sociopathic as this person would ever manage to ascend to the presidency"

You're not giving them enough credit. Checks and balances were all about that.

Netherlands digital minister smacks down Big Tech over AI regs

Re: She would say that, wouldn’t she, and there’s nothing new being offered, which is so typical

I have a rule to never downvote, but for this post I happily made an exception.

Re: No it isn't

"The peddlers behind the latest fake-AI LLMs want legal immunity from being responsible for the damages that their products cause to its users or society as a whole. That's a huge difference with the car industry."

Not so different. The car industry also wants legal immunity, and they also aren't getting it. ;)

You build one car and the owner drives around scaring the horses, if they kill themselves everyone says they had it coming. If they kill the neighbor they get charged under existing laws. You build a second car and it gets into an accident with the first (*allegedly*) and pretty soon the car-specific regulations get written. In the internet age, everything is faster. The regulators have seen this script before and know better than to wait until it gets really bad.

(**) https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14958/were-there-only-two-cars-in-ohio-in-1895-and-they-managed-to-crash-into-each-ot

Election Excel blunder declared a 'low point' for Austrian social democracy

We wish it were true

"Those who cannot organize elections will also not win them."

The problem with this statement is that _none_ of the candidates could organize a bake sale, yet _one_ of them will win the election.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

wearable terminal

I remember being interested in the genre's earliest experiment: glasses that simply embedded the usual display. Since then they have been going in the wrong direction, trying to somehow "immerse" the wearer in the "experience". I don't want an experience, I want to get shit done! Their over-designed displays are way past what is needed. Make a pair of glasses that can display an 80x25 terminal, full stop. Design a bluetooth gadget that switches between mouse mode and one-handed keyboard mode (obviously not querty). One- and two-character commands will be back in style! The controller for this already exists, it's called an iPhone. Imagine being able to ssh into a server while you are standing in front of it. Other "always on" scenarios easily spring to mind.

These consumer devices will never fly, too ugly. But there is an opportunity for business devices. Ironically, the simpler business class device would be unobtrusive enough that consumers would also buy them (and misuse them).

Re: In Apple Vision Pro, where you look stays private.

And the plod, if they have a warrant.

Air Force colonel 'misspoke' when he said an AI-drone 'killed' its human operator

Re: Which Part?

To me, "simulation" means there was an actual human operating the controls of a software robot shooting at virtual things, to model what might go wrong if there were an actual physical robot shooting at real-world targets. And "thought experiment" means there was no human operator and no software robot, just somebody asking what might have gone wrong if they had bothered to do a simulation.

Edit: @Filippo was there first.

Debian 12 'Bookworm' is the excitement-free Linux you've been waiting for

Re: All this, and pipewire didn't work ?

"total inability to do some basic Windows things out of the box"

To be fair, Windows also struggles in this area.

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

Squirrel!

"Looking left or right took a virtual vehicle in the appropriate direction."

By appropriate does that mean it knows what you are looking at? When I see a pedestrian that doesn't mean I want the vehicle to move towards it. Does it drive in a circle when the driver spends all their time looking at their dash-mounted phone?

This typo sparked a Microsoft Azure outage

Oh, really?

"Azure DevOps has tests to catch such issues"

I call BS.

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

Re: Seems like the remember the important thing

@Richard 12: "Boeing really do have no idea whatsoever how to manage a project anymore."

Anonymous Coward: "this project was designed as a bailout of Boeing"

We want a space engineering firm that is optimized for making rockets fly, instead of one that is optimized for getting bailouts when the rockets don't fly.