* Posts by TeeCee

9432 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for

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Re: The BOFH & PFY using ChatGPT

Remember, before going down into a dark basement that turns out to have something psychotically evil and lethally nasty in it, it's mandatory to be young, stupid, blonde, attractive and female.

It's a variation on the same rule that requires square-jawed, gung-ho, heroic types in SF to wear red shirts to give the audience fair warning not to get too attached to that character.

Let's play a game: Deepfake news anchor or a real person?

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Alert

Re: The AI Man

Then again, seeing as a large number of their staff got fucked by IBM recently, maybe it's deliberate?

Generative AI is out of control: Nothing, Forever is a Seinfeld spoof about nothing... forever

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Meh

"It's... actually kind of funny, though"

So, better than the original then?

AMD's pricy cache-packed Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs ship this month

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Alert

Hang on a moment...the world appears to have gone mad.

...Intel's parts are less expensive...

W....T.....F....?

<Head explodes>

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

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Coat

Quick!

Everyone dress up as Winnie-the-Pooh.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

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FAIL

Scientific method...

...says that it's equally likely that only those three types of behaviour are seen by humans as worth sticking on YouBoob.

Sorry lads. Your sample is so biased it's unbelievable.

Tesla's Autopilot is losing out to Ford, GM in self-driving tech

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Black Helicopters

Tesla just might be being clever here.

After all, the real prize from being first to market with full self-driving tech is being first to all the lawsuits resulting from accidents involving autonomous vehicles.

Walking in later once the dust has settled means you get to rake in the cash without the risk of being bankrupted by compo seeking chancers.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

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Holmes

Deduction.

One thing that this tells us is that the Chairthing of the Food Standards agency is a fat bastard who suffers from an almost total lack of self-control.

"Hidden" posts due to "ancestor" being deleted by a moderator

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Re: "Hidden" posts due to "ancestor" being deleted by a moderator

Going back through my old posts, it would appear that this has also applied to everything since the year dot. i.e. Everything that was visible, despite the O/P having been axed, is now hidden.

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

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Facepalm

Re: "If it's old, it's obsolete; and if it's obsolete, it needs to die."

What did you think was going to be in the afterlife? It's all put there by and for the sort of po-faced religious fascists who reckon seeing a girl's ankles leads to debauchery and mass-murder.

Chinese researchers' claimed quantum encryption crack looks unlikely

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Facepalm

"It is possible that Shor's algorithm could be implemented in the next 15 years,"

Well that's just fine then. Unless, of course, there's something being made now that's safety critical, easily accessed from teh internets, has a lifespan in excess of 15 years, which cannot easily have its computing hardware upgraded and where software updates for it stop as soon as manufacturing of that particular version ceases.

Oh look! The "connnected car"....(!)

More proof, as if it were needed, that this is a Really, Really Fucking Stupid Idea.

Here's how to remotely take over a Ferrari...account, that is

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Facepalm

Yes, but..

"The affected companies all fixed the issues within one or two days of reporting,"

Wait until these "connected" accidents looking for a place to happen are 10+ years old and try that again. Personally I'd be amazed if any get fixed at all, let alone within anything like a sensible time.

Bonus hacker points for identifying some future attack vector that cannot be fixed on the older hardware and thus will remain exploitable <reverb>FOREVER</reverb>.

The Guardian ransomware attack hits week two as staff told to work from home

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Re: Ich bin ein Berliner

Actually a Berliner is a cream bun. Looks a bit like a doughnut, but it isn't one.

Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards

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Had enough of all this?

Hire a professional Arsehole Exterminator.

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

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Re: Hacked?

What do you think his shit hits?

BOFH and the office security access upgrade

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Flame

Re: And now we know...

Really? I just assumed it was from Capita, like everything else in the public sector that's a mind-numbingly godawful sack of shite where the UI looks like it was built by a five year old with a serious ADD problem following a spec from Josef Mengele.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that's more likely to be buggy

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Coat

Re: The ins and outs of it

Know. Using eh spall chucker does knot titch yew two right butter.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

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Let's see.

Thinking about how Elon's running it, I guess we need someone with a firm hand, who slaps down any dissent at first sight and has a knack for making sure that noses are kept to the grindstone at all times.. A big plus would be the ability to get rid of anyone causing trouble permanently, while ensuring that nobody admits to noticing they're gone or talks about them.

Only one candidate: Fatty Kim. He also has a sideline in rocketry, so something to chat to the boss about by the water cooler as a bonus.

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WTF?

Re: The obvious choice

So, in other words, you're nominating Mayor McCheese?

When we asked how you crashed the system we wanted an explanation not a demonstration

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Re: A simple solution

This one came up on Scott Adams' mailing list many moons ago.

In a large industrial company that had been operating for nearly a century, the IT lads were moved into a newly refurbed office in a converted factory building. One of the features in their shiny, new home was a very large, cast metal box set into the wall next to the door, upon which was a very large red button, appropriately labelled "SHUTDOWN".

Being smart lads they brought this up with the management and were told that it was so deeply embedded in the fabric of the old building that it couldn't be easily removed, but it wasn't connected to anything. All ok then and a nice feature to have on the wall, reminding everyone of the firm's industrial heritage.

One of the correspondent's colleagues took to smashing the button firmly in passing at the end of the day on Friday and loudly stating; "I'm out of here".

While all the lads were painfully aware of this (such things tend to wear a bit thin after a few repetitions) it took the rest of the company some considerable time to work out why it was that around 5 on a Friday afternoon the entire production facility ground to a halt.

Server broke because it was invisibly designed to break

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Also counterproductive.

Anybody who opens one up to work on it without turning the power off first needs to be electrocuted before they do some real damage. At worst they probably won't do it again and at best they won't be causing any more problems.

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Headmaster

Re: A service provider that doesn't bill because their attempted fixes failed?

Depends whether that's "important software" as in the company cannot function without it, or "important software" as in somebody important can't populate his spreadsheets and produce his quarterly presentation without it.

Here's something communism is good at: Making smartphones less annoying

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Re: The phone I want doesn't exist

Still simple, but OnePlus phones don't arrive laden to the gunwales with crud anyway. You get their launcher (de rigeur since Google decided they'd keep the vanilla one for their devices), their migration utility for setup and the usual utilities. That's about it.

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Re: Communism

Just think. If the colonies still spelled words the way we told them to, we could also tell them what they were and were not allowed to put on their smartphones!

End of an era as the last 747 rolls off the production line

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Re: It's always over budget

As I have mentioned before, the standardised, modern version of this requires a Project Approval Board and has a process as follows:

1) Produce business case and plan for project that will take n months and cost x.

2) Take same to Project Approval Board.

3) Get sent away with flea in ear to improve payback / cut costs / change font / whatever.

4) Take revised version to next month's Project Approval Board.

5) Iterate 3 and 4 m times.

6) Project approved.

Presto. A project which costs x and takes n months that you now have (n - m) months to do it in and (x - ${large_random_number}) to do it with.

I've often said that a really good PM is one who can come up with valid and believable reasons for time and/or cost overrun without casting aspersions on the parentage of the Project Approval Board members.

Microsoft: (Cyber) winter is coming as DDoS attack disrupts Russian bank

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Meh

Let me fix that for them.

...originated from Russian IP addresses, which the bank noted was "of particular concernonly to be expected."

...organizing and participating in a DDoS attack is a criminal offense, when it's us getting stuffed."

Google frees nifty ML image-compression model... but it's for JPEG-XL

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Coat

Easy.

...identify which parts of an image will attract a human's attention first,...

Who needs ML for that with internet images? Do the little red bits first, then the pink bits. Fill in the rest whenever, it's not like anyone will look at those anyway.

Musk says spat with Apple over App Store ejection threat for Twitter was 'misunderstanding'

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Black Helicopters

Yes, but...

Just wait until the Apple Mind Control(tm) wears off.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

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Facepalm

Re: Remembering

No you can't. Every time I work out where the least likely place for something to be is and therefore, the last place I would look for it, it isn't there.

Why? Because that just became the first place I looked and, by definition, it isn't there.

IBM sues Micro Focus, claims it copied Big Blue mainframe software

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Meh

Re: CICS is still a thing?

Remember the London Ambulance Service fiasco[1]? That was an attempt to do serious, real world, realtime transaction processing using something other than CICS as the TPM to manage it. A highly regarded product which IBM had bought out to do the job, as "open systems" was a "must have" in the contract so they couldn't use big iron to do it properly[1].

The fix adopted was to give up on the new fangled stuff and port CICS to UNIX...

[1] Nothing really qualifies as a fiasco without quantifiable deaths.

[2] Correct lesson to learn here is: Never let some evangelical dickhead specify the hardware, no matter how on trend they are...

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

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Facepalm

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

Stop worrying and hand the problem to your grandkids?

Can we do that for this climate bollocks too?

NTT claims it can stop the noise leaking from annoying people's headphones

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Mushroom

I believe that Smith and Wesson also make a product that's very effective at alleviating this problem.

Tesla recalls 40k cars over patch that broke power steering

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Coat

...update the EPAS system "to better detect unexpected steering assist torque," instead of doing the exact opposite.

That'll teach them to hire engineers with Boeing on their CVs.

LG debuts thin malleable screens made from contact lens material

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Facepalm

Maybe if people stopped buying the bloody things by the truckload they might be arsed to change them.

Unfortunately, as long as how well they sell is governed by how gushing the tech reviews are over the panel, the UI isn't on their radar of things to worry about.

HINT: A decent panel on a top notch system beats teh wurld's bestest panel on a meh system every day. Better Down/Upscaling and streaming performance is worth the odd few-thousand nits for 90 plus percent of use cases.

Boeing's Starliner launch pushed back again... to April 2023

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Coat

Apparently their pornstar names are Quentin and Phyllis, so that career's out.

NFT vending machine appears in London

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WTF?

Re: About last night?

I'm on tenterhooks, waiting to see if drunks will outbid fools.

China reminds world shock and ore can hurt tech supply chains

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Black Helicopters

Re: Cheap is not always a bargain

Actually the real problem is that, despite being more expensive to extract due to high Thorium contamination[1], the Chinese sold their Rare Earths at a price that drove everyone else out of business.

A deliberate policy to give themselves an effective monopoly. All they need to really screw over the west is to employ a bunch of "useful idiots" to force Western governments to accelerate the rollout of electric vehicles and such to a rate where it isn't possible for them to build up supplies elsewhere and stay on schedule. Then they'll have the world by the balls.

Oh. Look at the news.... must be a coincidence....

[1] Really helps here if the workforce involved in the extraction and refining processes is disposable.

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

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Coat

Re: 2 days of free time?

You work for Tw@ter and ICMFP!

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

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Colour me uinsurprised.

See also: Vista and 8.

The majority of Win licenses are the corp desktops. They always run one and only one version and never upgrade for the sake of it. So, as every other release will do with the support cycles, that's what happens.

MS know this, so Vista, 8 and 11 are guinea pig releases, trialling new directions on the lusers where the odd massive cockup or three doesn't matter.

Tablet, Chromebook shipments come crashing down

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Meh

Oh dear.

Bubble burst has it?

I'm just amazed it took this long.

'Odor simulation' included in China's national VR plan

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Re: Who Nose What Troubles We Will See

Especially when you can tune the fart to its audience.

Anything from "vaguely miasmic hint of something rotten", through "eggy" to "Chicken Dopiaza and five pints of Kingfisher the night before". Also sound ranging from "SBD" via "mild squeak" to "full bass with reverb".

Unofficial fix emerges for Windows bug abused to infect home PCs with ransomware

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Big Game Hunting?

Victims were told to fetch a ZIP archive that contained a JavaScript file masquerading as an antivirus or Windows software update.

So, actually Gullible Fuckwit Hunting then?

Same old, same old. As long as the sort of people who'll happily download or receive anything from any old source and run it are allowed to use computers, this sort of thing will keep happening, despite the best efforts of those who can simultaneously walk and chew bubblegum to prevent it. This is no different to an email with an executable attached in the early '90s.

Hint: If the luser has the ability to allow privileged execution and will run anything you tell them to, you can easily pwn any machine, anywhere with any OS.

BOFH: I know of a small biz that could deliver nothing for a fraction of the cost

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Facepalm

I know a large company that can deliver nothing, charge a cubic fucktonne of cash for it and get rehired to do it again.

Crapita. Ripping off the taxpayer since forever.

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

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Facepalm

Anyone still running Windows 7 is just asking to be hacked unless...

Yes, but you could update the OS on that hardware without learning rocket science and jumping through hoops. It's not tied to Win7 and doesn't have a best before date.

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

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Re: IBM Engineer

IBM midrange systems were inherently RAID 0 by default since time immemorial. Of course they never referred to it as "RAID 0", as they were doing it waaaay before the RAID concept was ever dreamed of. Besides, the bloody disks were anything but "Inexpensive". Still, good old IBM were trying to wring every drop of performance out of the hardware and forcing parallel disk channel use by deliberately fragmenting the data across all the available disks was a big win.

At least by the time the '400 came out, the backup systems had evolved to the state where you could feasibly backup the access paths (indices) as well as the data. Back in the days when tape bpi was measured in three digits, on the '38, even if you could restore everything, you were then looking at a week for the thing to rebuild its access paths before it would let anyone login.

Thus finding one day that some eejit had caught a sleeve on the handle of the isolator wallbox for the disk array, causing an immediate and ungraceful shutdown of all the disks and controllers, looked like being a bit of an issue. Good old System/38. I turned the disks back on and it picked up and carried on like nothing had happened. I've never seen another machine before or since that would do that.

Chief Operator: "You mean you can turn the disks off for a few minutes and then back on and it just carries on where it left off?"

Me: "Apparently. Let's not try it again though."

India fines Google another $114 million, demands Play open to third party payments

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Flame

On a related note..

I live in hope that some regulator, somewhere will wake up and notice the change that Google made to its Ts&Cs earlier this year.

That's the one where the only place allowed to sell eBooks via an app is, er, the Google Playskool itself.

That's deliberate, monopolistic practice if ever there was.

Of course they're not evil..... like Sauron.....

Starlink decoded for use as GPS alternative – without Elon Musk's help

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Holmes

Humphreys' team wasn't interested in the customer data...

Yeah, yeah, of course none of you were actually watching the porn stream.

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Coat

Re: 30 meters?

I did come up with a cunning plan to leak the tech to the Russians, but they seem perfectly capable of shooting themselves in the foot without technological assistance.

GM: Seeing as all y'all like our electric cars, we'll double output next year

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Of course, the US is rather bigger than this place. Thus there are a heck of a lot more people for whom driving a couple of hundred miles each way on a regular basis is perfectly normal behaviour. EVs can't do that in anything like a practical manner.

At the end of the day, mass EV takeup requires two more things: Fast recharge, As in "fill the tank in under ten minutes" fast and 450-odd mile range between charges without filling the vehicle with batteries.

Both look quite possible in the near future, with the slight snag that all the charging infrastructure put in place to date will be made obsolete overnight(!!)

Windows Subsystem for Android declared ready for prime time

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Facepalm

Code that assumes touch input, for example, may not deliver a great user experience when used with mouse and keyboard.

This is something that Microsoft know very well, although actually building and shipping Windows 8 just to prove it still seems like overkill.