If
it all goes TITSUP and the value of HP gets written down, will xerox be suing HP for wire fraud and dodgy accounting?
Posts by Boris the Cockroach
3427 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
Page:
Xerox hopes wining and dining HP shareholders will convince them of takeover
Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask
Sunday 16th February 2020 17:30 GMT 
Oh look
a smart thermostat, which enables you to use the internet, a phone app and someone else's cloud to turn your heating on.
Woohooo great.. if I'm late back from robot wrestling I can delay my heating coming on thus saving ... hold on 'no connection' hmmm check emails
"Dear subscriber, due to security problems , we have had to switch off our cloud server and as a result , your expensive web based thermostat no longer works. due to the design there is no fall back manual mode and thus your heating system cannot be turned on until you update our app and thermostats with supper whizzy thermostat 2. does everything that thermostat 1 did but with a cool blue logo
Needs 24/7 internet and maybe go offline when we finally go bust due to selling insecure tat under the guise of essential heating controls"
Icon.... needs no flipping remote control, cloud server, app, smartphone or wires.....
Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?
Sunday 16th February 2020 11:53 GMT
Re: Agree, Larry & Trump are quite a good fit, actually.
Quote:
I don't think Donald Trump is that bad.
He wouldn't be if his gutless party stood up to him instead of lying on the floor kissing his feet.
And I can understand the likes of larry and thesouthern rednecks voting for him.... but the christian right?
Call us immediately if your child uses Kali Linux, squawks West Mids Police
Friday 14th February 2020 18:40 GMT 
Well.. I'm a
criminal
Uses Linux (ok its mint, fedora, centOS, and whatever the hell it is that Heidenhain use on thier TNC series controls(but they're german so thats doubley dangerous))
Uses discord .. oh dear
Uses VMs on my linux box... mostly to run a windows XP snapshot to watch film 4
As for the other tools not had much call for them.
However I'll be bidding you all farewell as I'm off to hand myself in for punishment (mostly likely,... 4 yrs hard labour trying to get win 10 to talk to our machine tools using our old winxp/win 7 software (current project status: about to kick the win 10 laptop to bits))
Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea
Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash
BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer
Bada Bing, bada bork: Windows 10 is not happy, and Microsoft's search engine has something to do with it
He’s a pain in the ASCII to everybody. Now please acquit my sysadmin client over these CIA Vault 7 leaking charges
Thursday 6th February 2020 20:49 GMT
Fired
and yet still has an account on a super secret CIA computer?
Did I read that right?
yet my account at work would be locked down 5 secs after I leave the building with P45 in hand... gone over and then deleted within a week.....
Something smells here...... and it aint the content of my underpants
Former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch 'submits himself' for arrest in central London
Wednesday 5th February 2020 18:29 GMT
Re: Trade deal - test for the UK government
Cant see the US agreeing to that one.
More like there'll be a clause saying "If a US company takes over a UK company and loses money as a result, we reserve the right to imprison the guys in charge of the british company"
And as further above... where the hell were HP's auditors when they were supposed to be checking this company over?
Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages
So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance
Friday 31st January 2020 16:06 GMT 
With all these
stories of hitting stuff to get it moving... please remember the number 1 rule of hitting stuff with a hammer to get it working
never ever tell the crayon eaters what you are doing, how you a doing it and why you are doing it.
Because a light tap to free up a stuck bearing becomes a 3 day job to remove said part after the crayon muncher has twatted the thing with a 5lb lump hammer "because he saw you use a small plastic mallet to give it a light tap"
Icon.... for your expression when you see the wreckage.....
Not call, dude: UK govt says guaranteed surcharge-free EU roaming will end after Brexit transition period. Brits left at the mercy of networks
Boris celebrates taking back control of Brexit Britain's immigration – with unlimited immigration program
Tuesday 28th January 2020 19:03 GMT
Re: Conservatism
Quote:
British design and manufacturing has *always* been unmitigatedly shit, its just that we were first (arguable even there).
I'd suggest you go fsck yourself :)
I happen to work in manufacturing, and while it may have been crap years ago (rooms and rooms of horrid manual machines tended by some skilled folks and a bunch of time serving idiots), nowadays its ALL computer controlled with extra robots (the robots are stupider than the time serving idiots but at least they dont spend 30 mins in the bog and/or 3 days on strike every week)
In fact if you try running a engineering place now without a bunch of PCs, CNC machines and the skilled staff to do it, you'll go bust faster than a high street store... unless you are into bespoke hand crafted widgets with the clients that will pay 40 times over the odds for them.
We dont employ masses of people, 19 people attend where I loaf my day through(yesteryear is more like 55-60) but we still make a hell of a lot of stuff (my current project is medical parts that end up in the NHS)
Everyone loves our new desktop web search design so much – the one with ads that look like links – that we're tweaking it, says Google
Sunday 26th January 2020 10:08 GMT
Try looking for
technical manuals.
ww.manuals-r-us.com
ww.download-manuals.ru
ww.try-finding-a-manual-here.com
ww.we-have-not-got-any-real-links-to-manuals-but-have-a-virus-on-us.com
And all you're after is a link to a TNC 620 control version 23111445(which is on their website, but you cant remember the website name..or where they hid it on their website)
Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source
Saturday 25th January 2020 12:05 GMT
It wont happen
Sorry to burst your dreams and smash you back down to reality
It wont happen for 2 reasons
1. How much of "other company's" licenced code is inside windows
and more importantly
2. How much open source code has been shoveled in while ignoring the various GPL documents that come with it...
And while us linux types may dream, you'll never get rid of m$/windows because of vendor lock in, and "no one ever gets fired for buying IBM.. sorry m$"
Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer
Friday 24th January 2020 13:22 GMT
My late father
belonged to an old car club..... and I get dragged along to the meeting(mostly because he was driving, paying and it was in a pub)
Got one of the old duffers come upto me and say "You make stuff right?" , "err yes "(not wishing to admit to robot/CNC wrangling).
"Can you make me one of these?" and he holds up some well worn piece of metal
"Sure... how many do you need?"
"2"
"Ok that will be about 500 quid each"
"WHAT!!!!!!"
"I can knock them out for £5 each if you order 5000 per month"
And that was the last time anyone asked me to make anything... or get invited back to that old car club
Lucky they had one of those automated de-fib machines there.. a real life saver..
We need to make it even easier for UK terror cops to rummage about in folks' phones, says govt lawyer
Hospital hacker spared prison after plod find almost 9,000 cardiac images at his home
Who says HMRC hasn't got a sense of humour? Er, 65 million Brits
Bad news: Windows security cert SNAFU exploits are all over the web now. Also bad: Citrix gateway hole mitigations don't work for older kit
Friday 17th January 2020 12:27 GMT
Re: Hullo, NSA? Microsoft here...
Quote
They* really fucked up that one.
* they, and everyone who's job it was to check the code
CHECK the code? we cant afford to have a QA department, shove the code out the door and patch it if its got a flaw.. sheesh
Every QA person is 30 grand off my bonus ffs
Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data
Thursday 16th January 2020 18:13 GMT
Re: "the ECJ has made clear that national security concerns do not override citizens’ data privacy"
Quote
"The lack of mass activism in the UK isn't apathy, it's a recognition that it's not the right way to do things. You get lasting change through talking and agreement, not by bottles through shop windows."
Why is why the hated poll tax got binned after the riots and attempting to burn down most of London....
Although closer to the mark was the people like me who did their level best to avoid paying the thing in the first place... change of address.. yupp... every 4-6 months and told the council where I was going... if they could'nt address the bill to the right house its not my fault if I cant pay it.
We made a huge hole in council finances doing that, a hole the government could not ignore.
Hence the poll tax was binned and we went back to a tax on properties(much harder to hide those)
I did end up paying... after they finally caught up and summons me , but by then it was 20 months later and the poll tax was dead :)
Step away from that Windows 7 machine, order UK cyber-cops: It's not safe for managing your cash digitally
Tuesday 14th January 2020 18:00 GMT 
Dont use
windows 7 for online banking
Hang on... why dont we just drop the 7 from that
Dont use windows for online banking... there that reads a whole lot better.
Heck I'm so paranoid I dont HAVE online banking.... not until the banks implement 2 factor properly and they dont even do that when phoning up for a friendly chat about your finances
"Hello Boris , this is Sharon at FDUFYU bank, can you answer your security question so we know we are talking to the correct customer."
"Not until I know I'm talking to FDUFYU bank... goodbye"
What was Boeing through their heads? Emails show staff wouldn't put their families on a 737 Max over safety fears
Saturday 11th January 2020 15:56 GMT
Re: I guess
The comet was a different kind of diaster, where the engineers had next to no idea a big square window with sharp'ish corners, combined with some less than good quality machining/assembly could result in the aircraft blowing apart.
Challenger was NASA with 'rush to launch' managers, combined with Thiakol management who could only see the losses caused by the engineers recommended delay to launch.
Thiakol knew of the problem with the O rings, and went ahead on the launch even though on previous low temperature launches there had been erosion of the primary O ring.
And yet it seems that that lesson had not been learned by boeing manglement
Outsource, reduce costs , more efficiency etc etc are fine for a organisation thats producing say washing machines, but in aerospace , you cannot cut corners, and its the culture that needs to change at Boeing starting at board level and working their way down to the shop floor. with implementing a way of reporting failures, defects and faults with the design too
And my jokey icon comment reffered only to my previous comment , el-rag is free to stick whatever headline they like on their stories
Saturday 11th January 2020 10:51 GMT
I guess
Boeing never got a copy of the challenger diaster report, or read anything by the morton thiakol engineer involved in the SRB design.
We mock the phrase "the laws of physics are a harsh mistress" as if they dont apply to us, but in a competition between say the law of gravity and a badly designed computer system on an aging aircraft design, my money is on gravity winning.
But I dont think that the MCAS system is at fault or the 737 max , or the guys who were flying the thing.
The blame entirely lays with Boeing management for wanting the cheapest solution to a problem, the problem was the Airbus aircraft competing with the 737, so it was one sensor for a safety critical system , programming the MCAS to fly the 737 max as if it was a previous 737, deciding 3 hrs of tablet training was good enough for type conversion, not explaining to pilots what the MCAS did, and the airlines for saving a few pence by not installing the light that says "MCAS on"
In a few years time , I'm fairly sure the 737 max will be flying again, but the events and decisions at Boeing involving the 737 will be used in engineering courses world wide as what happens when the bean counters over rule the engineers, just as the Challenger disaster is used as an example now.
Not a subject for a jokey icon
H0LiCOW: Cosmoboffins still have no idea why universe seems to be expanding more rapidly than expected
Friday 10th January 2020 19:00 GMT
Re: Riddle me this:
It was my understanding that its spacetime getting bigger
Everything is affected by spacetime so theres a good idea that we're expanding at the same rate as the rest of the universe (maybe that explains my waistline.. burp)
Hence the the 'big rip' idea for the end of the universe, where space time has expanded so far that the forces involved in keeping stuff together are less than the force of the expanding spacetime.
Hence gravity loses its grip starting with galaxy clusters, down to galaxies and star systems, planets, then electro-magnetism loses its grip, followed by the weak force then the strong force .. at which point protons and neutrons are torn apart.
Makes a better movie than a long slow heat death of the universe I think
BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret
Friday 10th January 2020 12:33 GMT 
New year
Same old BOFH
Does anyone apart from him and the PFY survive an entire year working in the same building....
Incidently I had a boss, fresh from uni, with a toff accent, RP english and the brains of a dead sparrow that had been run over by a road roller, got the job because he was the in the same college as the owner's son......... (cue much burbled rememberings.... )
Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?
Thursday 9th January 2020 19:36 GMT
Welcome
to my world.
Where people invest 250 000 pounds in a SINGLE machine tool*, complete with a windows XP computer driving it.
The payback time is a minimum of 5 yrs, with the profits being earned for the next 10... then the scrapyard looms**
This is why the 'forced' "upgrades" as such a pain in the butt, because the drivers for the hardware may not work with the next version of windows... god knows what would have happened if we'd had a win7 installation with internet access.... hello you've upgraded to windows 1.0 sorry unknown hardware installed... unable to access machine... would you like help searching the app store?
One day I'll 'upgrade ' my home machine to windows 1.0 but only when the steam client is updated so it doesnt work on win7***
*thats a mid range tool... some of the kit we've looked at has been close to the million mark
**or its kept on
***valve did that for winxp recently... 5 yrs after EOL
Having trouble finding a job in your 40s? Study shows some bosses like job applicants... up until they see dates of birth
Tuesday 7th January 2020 20:34 GMT 
Oh look
this story has popped up again... note the word again
Cast your minds back 15-20 yrs... when a bored cockroach decided to do an OU degree in the vain hope of getting a better job (min wage stuff sucks)
Cue much malarky with smalltalk, java , Borland C++ (remember that?) .. moving swiftly onto the joys of embedded systems (and an exam that relied for 15% of its marks on a page &1/2 topic hidden inside the 5 course books), finally falling out via concurrent systems design.
Lets apply for jobs I thinks... with the ink still wet on the diploma
nope
nope
nope
nope
Ok maybe leave my age off and only list the last 10yrs of jobs
Oh an interview (nope)
Another interview (I'm the oldest applicant ... by 15yrs)
Pretty much every job wanted someone in the age range 22-30 with 15 yrs experience in tech that had only been out 6 months (not being prepared to work 160 hrs a week was also a big downer)
And then the big realisation hit.... all the agencies were using 'buzz word' matching to send CVs on to clients.. if you didnt have the buzz word, the cv went in the bin.
So for this poor min wage worker aged 40'ish wanting to change jobs... no chance... after all... why does someone aged 40 want an entry level job?
Ah well enough with the glumness, and back to wrangling those robots making medical equipment.... and just maybe one of those recruiters who brutally rejected me 15 yrs ago will end up inplanted with the only scrap part to escape inspection this week. :)
2 more degrees and it's lights out: Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix's toasty mobile bit barn
Thursday 2nd January 2020 12:04 GMT
Re: I'll never really understand...
Which is pretty much the story I've heard from a couple of people who went to work for F1 .
Only relaxing time (unless you're pit lane crew) is during the actual race itself. rest of the time you're stuck in the garage wrestling with the spanners...
And dont even think of working in the supply chain, "we make F1 parts" sounds so glamorous when going for that dream job.
Not so fun when a F1 team phone up at 4pm wanting a new design of gearbox housing made, and you know its going to take 8 hrs of solid programming to turn the model into machine code, then 20 hrs of machine time to turn the code into metal..... but the F1 team want it on the plane to god knows where at 5am the next day....
Glad I'm out of that really....
Greetings from the future where it's all pole-dancing robots and Pokemon passports
Wednesday 1st January 2020 14:11 GMT
Re: Crypto currency?
Quote
Thank you for that, I've been trying to persuade my kin that there are better investment opportunities out there. Your summary is, er, to the point.
----
There sure are, I've just invested £500 with a nigerian multi-millionaire whos having trouble unlocking his crypto-currency wallet that has $50 million in it.
With his access to the computing power of my PC , plus use of my bank account to transfer the funds once unlocked, I'll stand to make a cool $5 million when he transfers the money out of Nigeria.
AND he assures me that there are several people like him who just need our assistance and are willing to pay for it.....
Beware the Y2K task done too well, it might leave you lost in Milan
Tuesday 31st December 2019 12:45 GMT
Quote
I’m my line of work I have to declare any gifts over the price of a pen.
I’m definitely in the wrong job.
-----
Sounds like you're working for a government department.
There are ways around the petty rules such as ordering a multi-tone and harmonic noise generator(a piano for the social club in other words)
And doing the normal dirty of ordering far in excess of what you need so when the petty minded accountants and buyers cut down the order by 50% , you still have enough spares to sell on ebay.
And I'm sure there are many many other wheezes you can think up.
(Btw the story about the inflatable boat +motor being taken out of Portsmouth dockyard on top of someone's land rover is a complete lie.... it went out the harbour and the guy picked it up on southsea beach ...)
BOFH: The case of the Boss's hidden USB inkjet printer
How do you ascertain user acceptability if you keep killing off the users?
Thursday 26th December 2019 11:21 GMT
Well
you would have loved the thing gifted yesterday...
A grade 1 sprout-a-pult... specially designed for flinging said offending vegetables at your desired targets....
Mind you, the sprouts have to be cooked to perfection first.... hard enough to withstand the forces involved in launching, while being soft enough to spatter everywhere upon landing...
At leats one good thing came out of it.... I'm now banned from another pub chain at xmas
Ah well.. time to top up the festive nibbles and find where great aunt Edna hid her supply of brandy...
BOFH: 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the ransomware struck
This isn't Boeing very well... Faulty timer knackers Starliner cargo capsule on its way to International Space Station
Saturday 21st December 2019 09:58 GMT
Not a total
cockup, as if the thing had meatbags on board, they would have turned the switch maked "Auto/Man" to "Man" and flown the thing themselves
As for the clock cockup, thats how every spacecraft actually flies, because you cannot rely on ground control to send the commands at the right time..
Oh well I suspect some boeing employees are going to be handed copies of Kerbal space program and told until they can get to orbit in that , they are not going to be allowed anywhere near a real spaceship again.....
ACLU sues America's border cops: Tell us everything about these secret search teams targeting travelers
Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures
Wednesday 18th December 2019 20:39 GMT
What it looks like
is that the designers of Horizon should have first settled down to read "Concurrent systems" by Jean Bacon (One of the dreaded course books on concurrent and distributed system design used by the Open University's honours level computering courses)
Where she explains fairly well (ha) the whole logic behind designing a distributed computer system AND the steps you need to take to ensure that in financial transactions that you can make sure that the transaction goes through correctly even in the case of network or communication breakdown halfway through the transaction. ( and release any locks you've placed on the data while attempting to process said transaction very embarassing.. and cost me 10% on an assignment :) )
I wont go into the details as the people with the technical knowledge will most likely say "For god's sake , shut up about that book" and for those people without the knowledge I suggest buying your own copy (first and second editions are the better ones).... but dont say you weren't warned..
As for the actions of the post office in the matter, £10 says that the post office people behind the horizon system and the decision made that the "software could not be at fault" have all retired, or taken early retirement and thus beyond any sanction....
Although will they still have criminal liability to face anyway regardless of age/employment status?
Lynch was 'willing to lie' to High Court over Autonomy whistleblower, claims HPE
Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent
Monday 9th December 2019 18:45 GMT 
Been there
done that.
Got a job as a night shift supervisor , 10 guys working for me.... 1000's of pounds of industrial hardware..... and as the first job, I have to reset one of the machines, so lets put the super expensive all singing all dancing probe in the machine... close the door and jog it over to where it needs to measure OH <EXPLETIVE DELETED>!!!!!!
What idiots put the spindle controls next to the jog button.... said probe does not like doing 6000 rpm and came apart rapidly, spent the rest of the night sitting in the office chair writing a resignation letter and looking up new jobs....
Boss called me in next evening and said "You destroyed that probe..... you know how much they cost?" etc etc etc
He then opens his bottom drawer, points to 3 previous probes and says "you're not the first and you wont be the last, now get out there and do your job"
Actually the worst oh no second is the one where you see the thing happen, know instantly what you've done wrong and yet are completely powerless to stop the oncoming disaster....
UK parcel firm Yodel plugs tracking app's random yaps about where on map to snap up strangers' tat
Tuesday 3rd December 2019 11:18 GMT
Quote:
Was it too hard to match the number on the address with the number on the buzzer? Or was two flights of stairs too many?
The reason is very simple.... they give the delivery drivers X number of minutes to do each delivery, if the driver is running late because of traffic or any other reason, its easier to take a picture of the door and falsely claim you tried to deliver, then move onto the next address
Its not recent, the open university changed from using parcel farce to a.n.other delivery 'service' (thats hopefully gone bust), my OU package was sent... due to be delivered.... I heard the van pull up outside, got a card saying sorry you were'nt in and the van drove off within 15 secs before I'd even managed to get to the front door...... and while parcel farce were shite, at least the depot to get my parcel was within walking distance and not NORTHAMPTON.. as the card said my parcel had gone back to their main depot.
Still .. you get what you pay for.....
Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003
Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost
Tuesday 26th November 2019 18:05 GMT
The
cynic in me says that the 'fault' was at the behest of the senior manglement on the basis
"If our SSDs have no moving parts, theres very little to go wrong with them and wont need replacing every 3 years... make sure they replace the drives in that time... "
But then, that would be far too unbelievable... wouldn't it?
Totally Sardonic Bank: Well, it must be, to have a TITSUP* the same week as THAT report
Friday 22nd November 2019 18:22 GMT
Another
phrase springs to mind here
They have set extremely low standards to achieve..... and then failed to achieve them.
The solution is obvious
Keep 500 quid in each of the big 4 banks (and several smaller ones), the chances of them all falling over at the same time are extremely unlikely.. say a million to one
That code that could never run? Well, guess what. Now Windows thinks it's Batman
Friday 22nd November 2019 13:00 GMT
I
Put a handy little function into one of my programs that if ctrl and right mouse button were pressed and the mouse wheel spun, then the application background would change from a basic dull blank, to a picture of a large hunting spider.
4 months later we found out who used to sit at their PC all day just pressing stuff at random.....because they had a spider phobia too....
Wheres the clean undies needed icon?
Second time lucky: Sweden drops Julian Assange rape investigation
Email! HUH! Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing...
Interpol: Strong encryption helps online predators. Build backdoors
Monday 18th November 2019 23:03 GMT 
Build a backdoor?
My understanding of encryption is generating 2 bloody big numbers, 1 of which can be made public and the other you keep private
And the method runs like this
Type message
Encrypt using public key
Transmit
Decrypt using private key
Read message
Once its encrypted it cannot be read without the private key so its putting a weakness into the encryption program , say listening on port 45678 for a packet to arrive and tell the program to send a copy of the message to 123.567.890.123.
And how long would that last against reverse engineering? OK they could do something cleverer, but thats what it boils down to, the instant the backdoor is found it will be all over the internet.
The best way to fight this would be to point out to MPs and such that THEIR messages will be read if the backdoor ever leaks out......
Biting the hand that feeds IT
