* Posts by Necrohamster

480 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jan 2022

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Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: The problem with EVs for rentals....

The tail lights on some Ford trucks have integrated radar modules apparently? And when they die, they can take out a bunch of other stuff on the canbus

YouTube: $1,500 Taillight BROKE This ENTIRE Ford F-150 (Wild Troubleshooting)

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: The problem with EVs for rentals....

"Maintenance lower but repair higher: that sounds like a contradiction, so I must be missing something"

Sure. An EV doesn't need oil changes, timing belts, brake pads/disks.

Tyres are probably the only things that need to be changed with any regularity, and apparently some EV drivers don't even bother with that minor detail as they take maintenance-free literally

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: The problem with EVs for rentals....

"I knew about the high risk of writing off a Tesla for a minor bump but I had no idea it could get that bad on repairs."

Parts availability is terrible, and body shops don't want to work on them.

Spendy and slow Tesla repairs frustrate drivers as automotive tech drives up cost of collisions

FTA:

From the outset, Campbell’s pursuit of repairs was agonizingly slow. Her car was hit in May, but she couldn’t even get an estimate for repairs until August.

...

The Tesla collision center didn’t have availability, so Campbell went with a certified shop. An initial estimate was from $6,000 to $7,000, but once mechanics disassembled the damaged area to get a better look, the price doubled due to issues with sensors.

“It’s not ‘replace the bumper and call it good,’” Campbell said.

After the second estimate, the car sat waiting for parts.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: And actuarial

"Last time I looked, insurers weren't a licence to print money."

Funny. That's exactly what they are.

They exist solely to take your money and find a reason not to pay out when a claim's made.

Like the time Merck's insurers tried to deny their claim on the basis that a ransomware attack was a "warlike action". See also: Mondelez International and Zurich American Insurance

Cloudflare defends firing of staffer for reasons HR could not explain

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Thumb Up

Re: Employee rights? What are those?

"Facts that should have made it into the original article......"

Indeed.

"We as employees are expected to give two weeks’ notice and yet we don’t deserve even a sliver of respect when the roles are reversed?”

While an employee in an "at-will" state may be * expected * to give notice, this isn't actually required. You can quit on the spot as it works both ways.

Very poor fact-checking on this article...

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Employee rights? What are those?

"Georgia - that is somewhere on the Black Sea? Right?"

I know you jest, but Georgia the country arguably has better working conditions than Georgia the state.

Do Georgians work too much, or too little?

“We have the top number of holidays among European countries, the maximum,” the lawmaker, Dimitri Khundadze, said in a May 23 discussion of the proposal. “Other countries have far fewer [days off], we can’t take any more time to rest.”

...

"New labor laws passed in 2020 set more specific limits for the workweek (40 hours for most, 48 in special cases) and rest time, and required overtime to be paid extra. They also introduced stronger measures against discrimination against workers and significantly increased the powers of the Labor Inspectorate, a body tasked with enforcing labor laws. "

Necrohamster Silver badge

Employee rights? What are those?

Britanny's LinkedIn says she's she's in Georgia, which is an "at-will" state. This means that employment may be terminated for any reason, at any time, with or without cause, as long as the reason is not specifically prohibited by law...disability, religion etc.

Ga. Code § 34-7-1:

"An indefinite hiring may be terminated at will by either party."

it's never a nice experience to be laid off but it looks like what happened was legal, albeit sh*tty.

Elon Musk made 1 in 3 Trust and Safety staff ex-X employees, it emerges

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FAIL

Re: Yet....

"Again with the hate, and practicing psychology without a licence. Odd thing is that although people have objected to being described as 'left', none of them have denied it.."

I'm not practising psychology, I'm telling you that you need to see a psychologist. A subtle difference...I know.

Necrohamster Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Yet....

"Well, I do seem to attract a lot of hate from the left here"

"The left" is living rent-free in your head. You should get some counselling or therapy for that.

Necrohamster Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Yet....

"Why not just a few lawyers who can determine if the speech is legal, or not."

There were nearly 200 countries on this planet last time I looked. It might be mind-blowing to imagine, but they have differing laws...

"And if the thousands of previously banned users were banned for political reasons, isn't restoring free speech a good thing?"

Mr. First Amendment with his "Free Speech" lol. I think you're more interested in encouraging hate speech. And banning someone for hate speech isn't a political move, despite what you might think.

Top LLMs struggle to make accurate legal arguments

Necrohamster Silver badge
Headmaster

You think you'll save time, but you won't.

My personal experience with attempting to use AI to write legal papers is that it leverages existing flawed data found on blogs, forums and papers written by law students.

You want citations? They're going to be wrong, and you're going to have to verify them manually.

You want up-to-date-information? Nope. You're getting stuff from a decade ago.

You want the full title of a bill or act? You're getting an invented name with an incorrect year on the end.

Everything the AI spews out will need to be fact-checked. You can't trust it whether you're writing a legal brief, or an essay for your law degree (attention law students: TurnitIn is pretty good at detecting AI-written guff...don't do it).

So my advice would be to use that time you would have used checking your AI's work to just write the document yourself.

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

Necrohamster Silver badge
Alert

Re: Just wondering?

"I would wonder when in non US jurisdictions whether the communication and timing of the concellation ofthese contracts could be considered unreasonable and subject to equitable remedy...."

Courts don't generally interfere with contractual agreements between companies, as it's understood that both parties knew what they were getting themselves into. "I didn't understand what I was signing" or "I didn't think I'd ever need to worry about that clause" aren't valid reasons to have parts of a contract set aside.

If your entire business model is built on your expectation of a continued relationship with a single vendor, you will be sorely disappointed.

It's a matter of WHEN, not IF, you get burned.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

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Trollface

Re: Terminal velocity

I love the pointless oneupmanship here on the Reg.

Someone writes "very great height" and someone will instantly start arguing about "certain height" instead, as if to prove the other person wrong

Necrohamster Silver badge
Happy

Re: > Fake news

"I think it was Apple, who first started showing non-skippable ads on YouTube."

You "think"? More likely it was Google trying to squeeze more money out of YouTube watchers.

All of Google's products are shady. Oh wait, Doesn't Google have something to do with that other phone OS? You know, the one all the neckbeards use?

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

Necrohamster Silver badge
Holmes

Re: No Twitter

CoowHorseFrog: "Morons announcing crap too other morons isnt vital."

And yet here you are...

Tiny11 shrinks Windows 11 23H2 down to pocket size

Necrohamster Silver badge

Yep. Even as a long-time Linux-hater I made the switch, as W11 is so horrendously bad

Necrohamster Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Icon =======>

"I can't imagine a use for this, so clearly it has no use for anybody else on the planet"

WTF? indeed.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Insult to injury

People buy things in good faith, and an activation lock or MDM profile on a MacBook may not be apparent to a buyer until they try to factory reset it

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: I was gonna say...

Get with the program. Nobody does actual work on a MacBook Pro, specially field engineers.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Insult to injury

Ask any recycler about how iCloud lock, activation lock and MDM enrolment have killed the sale-ability of second hand MacBooks and iPads.

Lenovo sues Asus for patent infringement, seeks US ZenBook ban

Necrohamster Silver badge
FAIL

Sorry to interrrupt your brainfart but the article is about *PATENT* infringement, not copyright infringement.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

I'd like to think the helpdesk told her to change the proxy to 127.0.0.1 the last time she contacted them :D

Necrohamster Silver badge
Headmaster

Depends which side of the pond you hail from, old bean. Both are correct in describing a condition of strictness or stiffness.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

"We have people here whose entire lives are funded by the taxpayer, so it is indeed free for them. Then we've got our lovely healthcare tourists."

Absolutely irrelevant to the article I just read, and nothing but an excuse for you to have a go at disadvantaged people.

People *exist* on benefits for a variety of reasons, and not all of those reasons are due to laziness or malice. Save it for the Daily Mail comments section.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: As luck would have it....

lol, you think?

You'll take what you're given.

3CX thought supply chain attack was a false positive

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: VT is just a static check...

If you're using VT solely to check files against AV patterns, you're doing it wrong.

You can dive deep into those "_links_ to malware" you mention. VT Enterprise especially can be a very powerful tool, if someone has half a clue what they're doing.

Sandboxing, graphing, threat hunting...these aren't static checks.

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Necrohamster Silver badge

Outsourced

… an outsourced chap did the deed…

“Did the deed” or “Did the needful”?

Defunct comms link connected to nothing at a fire station – for 15 years

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Not all heroes wear capes

Saving the taxpayers money?

With such tenacity, Bernard was clearly not cut out for a job in local government. I bet he met his end in a BOFH-style falling-down-a-lift-shaft scenario at the hands of a BT account manager.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Think about it.

Malware created by Russians doesn’t infect Russian computers. They check things like keyboard layout and public IPs. Think about it.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: "Warranty obligations"

Russia effectively legalised software piracy last year as a reaction to sanctions, so it doesn’t make sense for any Western software company to business with .ru in any case. Unless there’s some backdoors shenanigans going on…of course

Necrohamster Silver badge
Devil

"Warranty obligations"

This is clearly bulls**t as contractual obligations don't trump national and international law (no to mention the Intel EULA probably excludes support for sanctioned countries). What are Russians going to do about it anyway? Sue?

"As we shared previously, we have stopped all new product and services sales in Russia and are complying with sanctions from the EU, UK and US," Microsoft told The Register in a statement.

The software company I work for cut all access to existing and new products and services to Russia and Russia-controlled entities when sanctions were imposed last year. Refunds will be issued if, or when, sanctions are ever lifted.

Somehow I doubt that Intel and Microsoft are alone in pandering to Russia...

Yandex plans to break up with its Russian motherland

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This is why Yandex can NEVER be trusted

Russians start deleting destroyed buildings from Mariupol maps

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, has reported that the Russian occupiers have started deleting from Yandex Maps the residential buildings they are demolishing in the occupied city of Mariupol:

"The Russian forces destroyed a residential building at 33, Azovstalska Street. It has been demolished. It is still visible on Google Maps, but it has been removed from Yandex Maps, and it does not exist in reality…

Necrohamster Silver badge

Not going to help

Russian brands are cancer. Nobody’s going to trust them going forward, although in this case it’s a non-issue as people outside of Russia’s so called sphere of influence don’t use Yandex

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Necrohamster Silver badge

Owning two Chromebooks just sounds like masochism. Got any other life hacks?

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Thumb Down

@Code For Broke

You seem to obsessed with giving people downvotes.

Don't take this personally, but making threats to downvote people makes you sound like an a**hole.

Play nice with others and they'll play nice with you.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Yep

No, I had three weeks' experience - I was a senior FS engineer by then.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Yep

As a Compaq field service engineer in the early 00s, I can attest to the fact that most of my colleagues (as was I) were contractors with virtually no experience.

If I was a customer, I would've let a chimpanzee near my valuable machines before a Compaq engineer.

I quit after three weeks when I got a job with EDS that paid twice what Compaq offered.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

Necrohamster Silver badge
Facepalm

"Hopefully Amazon will subpoena his ISP bills and traffic reports and find that 99% of the traffic into/out of his network was Youtube, or Pornhub."

I don't know how it works on your home planet, but here on Earth our ISPs don't send an itemized bill containing all the sites we visited this month...

The time you solved that months-long problem in 3 seconds

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Fuck that

...certainly there are some who enjoy "living by their wits" and are akin to con men

Nailed it :D

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: The Parable Of The Handyman's Invoice (a.k.a Knowing where to tap)

Yep, an invoice to Henry Ford.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Fuck that

... he reasoned that they would find the quickest, easiest way to do it and get back to doing nothing!

Finding the quickest, easiest way to do something pretty much guarantees that you'll have bugs in your software, and the customer will have a sub-par support experience.

That's not good advice. No offence to your Grandad.

Necrohamster Silver badge
Devil

Re: Fuck that

Salespeople seem to exist solely to give the customers unrealistic expectations, which customer support must live up to.

Necrohamster Silver badge

The Parable Of The Handyman's Invoice (a.k.a Knowing where to tap)

He was the best machinist in the district, and it was for that reason that the manager had overlooked his private delinquencies. But at last even his patience was exhausted, and he was told to go, and another man reigned in his stead at the end of the room.

And then the machine, as though in protest, refused to budge an inch, and all the factory hands were idle. Everyone who knew the difference between a machine and a turnip tried his hand at the inert mass of iron. But the machine, metaphorically speaking, laughed at them, and the manager sent for the discharged employee. And he left the comfort of the “Bull” parlour and came.

He looked at the machine for some moments, and talked to it as a man talks to a horse, and then climbed into its vitals and called for a hammer. There was the sound of a “tap-tap-tap,” and in a moment the wheels were spinning, and the man was returning to the “Bull” parlour.

And in the course of time the mill-owner had a bill:–“To mending machine, £10. 10s.” And the owner of the works, being as owners go, a poor man, sent a polite note to the man, in which he asked him if he thought tapping a machine with a hammer worth ten guineas. And then he had another bill:—“To tapping machine with hammer, 10s.; to knowing where to tap it, £10; total, £10. 10s.”

And the man was reinstated in his position, and was so grateful that he turned teetotaller and lived a great and virtuous old age. And the moral is that a little knowledge is worth a deal of labour.

More charged in UK Lapsus$ investigation

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: I shudder

I'm interested if these guys had much knowledge, or just bought the systems from the darker reaches of the web?

I seem to recall some discussion of the Okta break-in referring to cookies bought on some forum or other

Ukraine seeks volunteers to defend networks as Russian troops menace Kyiv

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Sink the Russian fleet

I would not fancy Russian chances on air-to-air on the offensive against NATO. On the defence, they would remain a tough nut to crack (because of the heavy investment in SAM networks).

Ukrainian TB2 drones seem to be destroying Russian SAM launchers left, right and center.

Their Air Force seems to be more than a match for the Russians too, and I believe the former Soviet-bloc countries are supplying Ukraine with Migs now.

It would appear at this early stage that we've greatly overestimated the Russians all these years.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Ukraine should make the stakes higher

"I guess Russia had concerns about Chernobyl, either sabotage, radiation security, or just denying power."

Nah, they didn't.

Look at a map. It just happened to be on a route which was the shortest way to get from Belarus to Kiev.

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Not optional

:D

Roughly £45,000. But it's Russia so they'll probably throw in a few extra trumped-up charges for free

Necrohamster Silver badge

Re: Sink the Russian fleet

See those ships its sinking? The latest being the Japanese tanker? European cargo ships too, You have your justification, you have the backing of the world, so sink the fookers.

I'd imagine that Western think-tanks have modelled the possible outcomes of any land war in Ukraine, and said "F**k getting involved in that". It's the Russian military, not a bunch of Iraqi farmers, so the stakes will be significantly higher.

It's a difficult sell unless you've got skin in the game, which the US and the UK don't. Remember the US didn't want to get involved in WWII either? It took a physical attack on *their* infrastructure to stir them into action...and won't be any different this time.

Necrohamster Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Not optional

A "Great Firewall of China", in reverse.

I wouldn't rule it out yet: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/tech/fcc-russia-ownership-probe/

Meanwhile The Graun reports that the Russian government is threatening local media with 5M rouble fines for negative reporting of the war: https://rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news74112.htm

"On these resources, under the guise of reliable messages, publicly significant untrue information about the shelling of Ukrainian cities and the death of civilians in Ukraine as a result of the actions of the Russian Army, as well as materials in which the ongoing operation is called an attack, invasion, or a declaration of war, is posted."

"Roskomnadzor strongly recommends that the editorial offices of the media, prior to the publication (broadcast) of materials in accordance with Article 49 of the Mass Media Law, establish their authenticity.

We emphasize that it is Russian official information sources that have reliable and up-to-date information."

Not quite censorship, but sailing close to the wind at the same time...

This malware gang plants incriminating evidence on PCs, gets victims arrested

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Facepalm

Re: Nasties

You're the perfect illustration of why he's right: You don't even parse his sentence, you just register that he somehow doesn't share your blind hatred, so he has to be a disgusting pervert, doesn't he.

Really? I parsed his sentence just fine - he doesn't agree with controls on child sex abuse material because he believes that it's a freedom of choice issue for the individual. Which, of course, it's not - as sexually abusing children is a universal taboo.

His lack of a response (if you really aren't him) says enough for me...

The issue discussed here are the potential false positives, accidental or malicious, and this clearly went way over your head.

See above. The person I replied to was referring to controlling child sex abuse material in general. I'm well aware of what the article referred to, which seems to have gone over *your* head.

Let's say I planted some incriminating evidence on your computer and gave the police an anonymous tip about this sicko (you). From your vehemence, I gather you will fully agree to be chemically castrated, imprisoned and ostracized from society, just in case it might spare a child?

Letting your imagination run wild there, aren't you? I don't think you'd have the skills or the knowledge to pull it off AC, but if you did somehow manage it what makes you think that I wouldn't be able to disprove the allegation forensically?

Why would I "fully agree to be chemically castrated, imprisoned and ostracized from society" for something I hadn't done in *your* hypothetical situation? Y u knot raed gud? That's a moronic assumption, and you "gather" wrong.

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