* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Kepler may be dead but its data keeps on giving, thanks to AI: Two alien worlds found in archives

Stevie

Bah!

TEN YEARS?

Ten years and it's dead?

I hardly call that space-age telescoping.

Return of the Glassholes? Relax: Huawei's 'smart specs' aren't Google Glass 2.0

Stevie

Bah!

Here's a design plan for smart glasses that are actually worthwhile:

Flexible lenses in a frame, lenses that can be configured to any desired focal length while retaining the astigmatic correction of the prescription, controlled by a touch-sensitive "slider" in the arms.

I'm fucking sick of these fixed- focal length stone-age "progressive lenses" that are almost right for nearly everything some of the time.

I want a prescription where, at will, I can use the whole lens for reading or looking at stuff, not just some of my visual field. Slide a finger along the arm (right in my case, but configurable please for southpaws) and I can read stuff in the underground without tipping my head so far back everyone gets to see up my nose, or watch TV while slumped in a recliner without perching the glasses on the tip of my nose.

A quick double-tap on the arm to revert to default progressive trifocal.

Smart glasses with an actual, real-world application.

Data-slurping biz Palantir scoops US Army contract worth up to $800m – reports

Stevie

Bah!

Fancy naming a data mining thingy after a magical communications device subverted by the epitome of ultimate evil to spy on it's minions ...

Oh.

Right.

Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets

Stevie

Bah!

Very amusing tale, but why tell it in that dreadful Irish brogue?

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Stevie

Re: Two keys

How about replacing the button with a keypad that can shut down the power when the ISO standard code 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3 is dialed?

Stevie

Re: but it's never a bad time to listen to radiolab

Nowt wrong with NPR. It has some of the best programming you can get over the air in your car.

Radioblab just in't one of those programs. Even when they have interesting and believable stuff as the theme, they fuck it up by treading all over the people they've invited to speak on the subject. I would understand if they were covering for inarticulate glooks, buy most of their guests are very articulate and gifted with talking science to the masses. The value of the Two Amigos blabbing over the answers they asked the expert of the day for is dubious at best and annoying all the time.

Stevie

Re: but it's never a bad time to listen to radiolab

You mean "Radioblab". The presenters never let their experts explain, but immediately start talking over the recorded soundtrack, often just blabbing the same stuff the guest is trying to say over the guests voice.

And the "blue" show was the stupidest steaming pile of stupid I ever heard.

Thesis: "Until the Egyptians invented blue dyes, no one could see the color"

Evidence: "Homer talks about wine dark seas and skies, not blue ones."

My refutation: "I guess no-one in those days saw clover flowers, irises, lupins or lapis lazuli. Odd that the tin and copper miners of the bronze age never mentioned Copper Sulphate too."

Stupid with a capital stupe.

Stevie

Re: Be careful about differentiating by colour

In my youth I did some youth hosteling in Wales. After spending a week in Corris, climbing slate faces and hillwalking, it would take me a day back in city life to be able to see colours other than green and grey with any vividness. All there was in Corris was grass and slate. Everything was made of slate and if you left anything alone for a few days, grass and moss grew on it on account of the damp. Anywhere you let your eyes rest, grey and/or green.

Stevie

Re: The same problem every time

Remember that some people are red/green colour-blind.

Vile creatures, mutants from the very pits of hell. Red, green, it doesn't matter what shade of grey we make the buttons, this fifth column lurking hidden in plain sight will be a constant menace to the chromaware unless we adopt the very sensible "special shape" idea Doctor Syntax hints at - but doesn't dare to elucidate.

I suggest a skull and crossed-bones shaped button, with prominent comic eyeballs over-etched with big Xs, and make this the universal sign of a killswitch by ISO code.

Just to be sure people only press it when they mean to shut down the computer, we should cover it with a shroud and put 50 000 inescapable volts on it. Also, the lifting of the shroud should trigger a three-second delay followed by the opening of the trapdoors over the pit o' snakes positioned in front of the button.

Stevie

Re: Be careful about differentiating by colour

After mowing over my lawnmower's power lead

Which is why you need a gasoline powered mower.

DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too

Stevie

Re: Bah!

You mean: allocate overtime to check the ticket and modify it, bill taxpayers for said overtime and pad timesheet with non-critical test system mods?

Well I would, but I still retain a smidge of ethics, I don't subscribe to off-hours monitoring of non-production systems and but for a witless SA whose actions generated the task, this could have waited until Monday, which was quiet, would have me seated before my workstation instead of connected to it via the worlds cheapest remote hookup, and I would be happy to monitor emails when I was not too busy working.

Today, in a SNOW CAB I had to make the point that asking for "overnight coverage" did not mean the requestors could simply send an email at 3am and expect a response, and that an actual phone call is required to elicit said coverage.

I wouldn't have bothered to do this except that very thing has happened, as detailed in a previous thread somewhere, with an indignant thicko pounding the table next day and yelling that no-one read his 0-dark thirty email. When asked why on Earth he hadn't called, he replied that he had sent an email and wasn't going to call anyone. Twit.

Stevie

Bah!

RSN:DNTRF*

* Read ServiceNow: Didn't Need To Read Further

Real convo:

WHY DIDN'T YOU UPDATE AND CLOSE THE SNOW TICKET FOR SATURDAY.

I forgot that I opened the change two weeks ago (built in SNOW process latency, not work requirement) and was expecting Barney to assign me a task. The work was done.

WHY DIDN'T YOU READ THE EMAILS FROM SNOW?

I did. No task, no email.

YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO ASSIGN YOURSELF THE TASK AND CLOSE IT.

And I did, just not on Saturday when I did the work.

WHY DIDN'T YOU USE THE SNOW DASHBOARD TO CHECK YOUR TICKETS?

Because it was the weekend, the work was trivial and could have been performed on Monday but for Barney setting the task date to Saturday and I have other demands on my time that take precedence over enabling automated SNOW document flow for a NON-PRODUCTION SYSTEM.

Intel gets court order telling former engineer to return confidential docs in Micron row

Stevie

Bah!

CCleaner might indicate he removed a copy of McAffee. You need digital bleach to get the fugging McAffee nagware out of a system once it has been installed (in about eight hundred different ways and places).

Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know

Stevie

Bah!

But this miracle laser thing could, in theory, scan foreign airliners as they approach Stanstead, agilely dodging the usual squadrons of drones, to see if anyone is smuggling radioactives.

A quick sweep of the mighty laser across the airframe as it makes its approach and ... haaaang on. I think I see a problem.

Facebook's at it again: Internal emails show it knew about Cambridge Analytica abuse 'months' before news broke

Stevie

Bah!

What a festering pile of steaming [REDACTED].

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

Stevie

Bah!

I was getting no respect. I had finally transferred into an SA department - my dream job - but the two managers in charge rubber-roomed me. One day, one of them told a story from twenty years before in which I had refused to let him and the other manager use my laser printer. I looked puzzled and told him that I had never, in any of the many different departments I had worked for had a personal laser printer assigned to me. I had a think and remembered that there *was* a large laserjet in my general area, but it was owned by a different set of Unix SAs and they wouldn't share with *anyone*. I began to see why I was getting no respect. So I got mad, then even.

We were all called into a vendor meeting a week later when the vendor re-staffed. I usually responded to the "round-the-table intro" with "I'm Stevie, I work for Barney." Not this time. I gave them the unabridged history of Stevie in that enterprise, starting with my recruitment by Grumman Data Systems ("the same guys who did the telemetry on the moon shots") as a DBA consultant, my head-hunting by government organization A two years in, my brief move into bleeding edge internet start-up territory five years after that when I got bored and they tried to demote me in a "restructuring", my re-recruitment by well-known and well-loved by all colleague ("what would it take to get you to come back"), my subsequent consultant work in mainframe O/S configuration and maintenance, and my transference to government organization B. I finished up by saying that the original reason for my being there was to build out the infrastructure that got us the annual Federal monies we needed to continue operations, and that in a very real sense, everyone round that table owed the bread they put on their kitchen tables each day to code I wrote in 1984 that was still powering the business model 35 years on.

You should have seen the bugged-out eyeballs and gaping mouths.

And the next day there was a palpable change in attitude from my snotty young co-workers and the two "printer story" managers. Shortly after I went to the director (who was also in the room the day before) and asked for a transfer, and got one.

Apple bestows first hardware upgrades in years upon neglected iPad Mini and Air lines

Stevie

Re: Slipping

Oh no, your chosen hard case deforms the mint-thin phone and makes it drop its data connection (at best).

Oh no, the elastomers in your rubbery case react with the styrene-based plastic back on your phone and turn both case and phone back into chewing gum.

I could go on.

Stevie

Re: Issues

I guess Apple don't want people playing movies that haven't been bought from their store in their specific codec then.

If you search back to the introduction of the iPad in these pages you'll see that point made, to furious outrage of the iFans.

Stevie

Re: Slipping

A very American viewpoint.

Hear any American touting anything as increasing "freedom of choice" and you know two things:

a) you are going to have to become an expert in whatever it is to exercise that choice

2) it is going to end up costing more than it should before you can "enjoy" whatever it is.

Ransomware drops the Lillehammer on Norsk Hydro: Aluminium giant forced into manual mode after systems scrambled

Stevie

Re: Ransomware outbreak hits Norwegian ‘computers’

We aren't talking about home users or desktops, we are talking about control servers for vital national infrastructure.

I see no problem with airgapping such equipment, enabling one-way push to VERY locked down reporting servers for the shiny-brigade and requiring someone be on site to push in the moderator rods with their own fair hands (suitably gloved).

Stevie

Re: Ransomware outbreak hits Norwegian ‘computers’

This may have been the case in the past but these days many departments within an organisation need access to data from the process control systems for their day-to-day duties.

Eee, it meks y' wunder 'ow we did it before we filled t' place wi' computers, dunnit?

Stevie

Bah!

Air gap for the win.

Why anyone would have persistent internet connections to control infrastructure is a mystery to me. Hack waiting to happen.

Vengeful sacked IT bod destroyed ex-employer's AWS cloud accounts. Now he'll spent rest of 2019 in the clink

Stevie

Re: BOFH?

Not so much BOFH as VFFM*.

* Vengeful Fuckwit From Manchester.

So about that Atari reboot console... you might want to sit down. It's going to be late, OK?

Stevie

Bah!

Oh dear ...

Hey, US taxpayers. Filed your taxes? Good, good. $500m of it is going on an Intel-Cray exascale boffinry supercomputer

Stevie

Re: Second chance for Intel?

Personal experience is that the hardware is up and sucking amps in days. Any promised "solutions" to run on said hardware though ...

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

Stevie

Re: cast the first stone

All my colleagues use Putty for ssh connections into the enterprise farm. I use Attachmate Reflections which the department will supply on demand. Typically we each have several sessions open at a time to both dev and prod servers.

I have a tool that can assign pre-set color profiles to any session. They have pre-set profiles that they can never remember how to use.

Guess who *doesn't* get confused between production (black text on whit b/g - usually unless I feel like a change), dev (green text on black b/g, or black text on a yellow b/g, or green text on purple b/g*) and AWOOGA! EMERGENCY NEEDS SORTING NOW! (White text on red b/g or red text on white b/g depending on how tired I am and how late in the day it is)?

Not only that but my Reflections keyboard can be mapped to save much wear and tear on the old fingers and make zipping back and forth over the filesystems of machines easy, especially over a slow and sometimes glitchy remote connection.

But my terminal emulator isn't "cool" and lacks street cred or something.

* I call this one "chainsaw" after one such device I saw in Home Despot sporting this virulent color scheme.

Stevie

Re: To err is human

It's all too easy to screw up... if you don't plan and test.

Well where's the fun in that?

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Stevie

Re: The network is the computer

"Fear and paranoia"?

I think when it comes to Big Data one can use the term "reasonable expectation". I don't think anyone older than 14 gets afraid or paranoid about Facebook being unavailable. I am a happy member of the "never used it, never will" club and against all expectation it hasn't ruined my life. It did make my Twitter* feed a bit puzzling with people I follow retweeting comments that - sans the knowledge that Facebook was AWOL - made no sense whatsoever, but then, you can say that about 90% of what people write in the context-free world of Twitter feed blither-grabs.

* - Which I use as a news aggregator, outlet for my occasional urge to perpetrate smart-arse one-liners and mechanism for disseminating the words of Lord Buckethead to anyone too slow to get out of the way

Stevie

Re: re: downvotes

I miss being able to backdial.

Ask yer grandad.

Never thought we'd ever utter these words, but... can anyone recommend a spin doctor for NASA?

Stevie

Re: Incoming...

Launch Hammerheads!

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

Stevie

Bah!

My theory (which is mine): AHEM!

The real reason that these giant stars burn out so much more quickly than our own Sun is that while our local star utilizes the as-yet poorly understood processes of gravitational collapse to provide the initiation energy needed for the fission/fusion ballet of elemental transmutation of protons into Iron, a process that can take millennia to complete via myriad intermediate transmutation stages of matter, supergiant stars run on nutty slack using a process that can best be described as coal => ash.

Uber driver drove sleeping woman miles away from home to 'up the fare'. Now he's facing years in the clink for kidnapping, fraud

Stevie

Re: it's virtually impossible to commit any crime without also being guilty of wire fraud

Just as it used to be impossible to be at fault in an accident and not get slapped with a "without DC&A" citation as well as whatever else the Bow St Runners could bang you dead to rights for.

I have no problem with wire/mail fraud being tacked onto other charges brought against alleged criminals.

Hapless engineers leave UK cable landing station gate open, couple of journos waltz right in

Stevie

Bah!

Nonononono. Closing doors and locking them would be "security by obscurity", which as all young engineers know is a Bad Thing.

The engineers vilified in this story are actually practicing "open systems" philosophy, are security geniuses, and should be richly rewarded for their care and attention to detail.

What happens when security devices are insecure? Choose the nuclear option

Stevie

Bah!

Ben Gazzara? I remember him from The Big Lebowski and Run For Your Life.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Stevie

Bah!

Real conversation with a bean counter about an expense claim for a two week training course in which I was not allowed to stay over the intervening weekend but had to travel up on Sunday and back on Friday for each week:

"I'm calling about my expense claim for my two week training course."

"Yes"

"You rejected my claim for my second trip back to NY"

"The train ticket wasn't attached to the claim"

"It was when I sent it in!"

"Well, it must've become detached en route. Sorry"

"Wait a minute! You agree that I was in Albany for those two weeks because you've accepted the claim for lunches."

"Yes, the receipts were accepted"

"So you *know* I was in Albany for both those weeks."

"Yes"

"And you have the tickets to show I went, came back to New York and Went again"

"Yes"

"And I am speaking to you from NY so you accept that I actually did return"

"Yes"

"And isn't it true that if I drove to Albany I could claim the gas without receipts?"

"Yes, but we only reimburse the price of a return train ticket in that event"

"The same return train ticket I actually bought and used?"

"Yeeees ..."

"So you don't care *how* I make the journey, just that if I do I either submit the train tickets or tell you I drove and let you assume a train ticket was used instead?"

"Yeeees ..."

"And you don't actually *have* to have a train ticket if I drive?"

"No ..."

"So then. Why don't we say I rode the train up and drove back and you can send the train fare for the ticket that got lost with an easy mind?"

"Okay."

Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond

Stevie

Re: "Alexa... what caused the outage today?"

"Alexa! Play The Sounds of Silence"

The rest is history.

Stevie

Re: Emergency control device

Have you tried finesse?

I named my lump hammer "Finesse" for just this sort of occasion.

Stevie

Meine Echo dots sind down, der Plus nicht?!?!!!

So "der Plus nicht" is German for "the crapper" then?

Learn summat every day.

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

Stevie

Bah!

It was a non-starter without a wireless-tethered shoulder-surfing selfie-drone anyway.

TalkTalk kept my email account active for 8 years after I left – now it's spamming my mates

Stevie

Bah!

This all boils down to "Rule One: so many previous mistakes that no latitude whatsoever is allowed to staff below a certain level" (and good for them for that - would that my bank representative had not had the latitude to allow A. Person to change my mother's maiden name on my account some years back) and "Rule Two: no-one at the right level is to be bothered by piffling ex-customer problems" which is where the wheels fall off.

Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Tank tops would be turrets?

My word the fashion world is confusing.

Stevie

Bah!

I thought hipsters were a kind of ladies trousers.

Now I’m just confused.

From hard drive to over-heard drive: Boffins convert spinning rust into eavesdropping mic

Stevie

Bah!

So an internal speaker mounted on one's hdd playing, say, "Hey Mickey" quietly inside the case would be called for?

Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf

Stevie

Orange Scourge

That's scrounge!

MPs tear 'naive' British Army a new one over Capita recruitment farce

Stevie

Re: COBOL not Cobol.

Only if you wrote it on a card punch or coding sheet.

You never actually needed to write it to use it of course. The word doesn't appear in an actual program.

Another way to look at Amazon's counterfeit-busting Project Zero: Making merchants cough up protection money

Stevie

Re: There used to be a way to report a listing

I'm not blaming anyone. I left that to the others here.

What I *wrote* was that I could understand the reluctance of Amazon to put too much weight behind unsubstantiated claims of counterfeiting.

As for arbitration, Amazon prime customers (which includes me) get free returns, a service I've made infrequent but repeated use of.

If someone buys cheap from a third party vendor who doesn't offer a return policy, then that is their own affair.

I do say that expecting to pay bottom dollar for top shelf is dumb. That's not a matter of blame, but intelligence.

Stevie

Re: There used to be a way to report a listing

And the way the hysterical Amazon community throw around the term "counterfeit" I for one am not surprised.

Your merch arrived in "hassle-free" packaging (because you didn't change the option when you bought)? "COUNTERFEIT!"

Your merch doesn't behave the exact way you thought it would (even though the rebus destructions tell you that the way it does behave is in fact correct)? "COUNTERFEIT!"

And let's not forget those who have nothing better to do all day than trawl through the more witless reviews so they can add a "COUNTERFEIT!" comment, even when it is plain that the reviewer is dumber than a bag of hammers and put the batteries in the wrong way round.

And that's before we get into those people who think they can buy a state-of-the-art electronic device at a fraction of what all the big names are asking for "the same thing", and not get a knock-off. "I bought a 5 terabyte USB 3 stick ($10 from Happy Dragon) and it caught fire when I plugged it into my laptop even though I followed the instructions exactly. I think I might have got a counterfeit."

The counterfeiting problem is real (encountered examples of it myself) and Azathoth knows that Amazon make reporting problems traceable to bad actors (or their own incompetent IT staff) damn near impossible. But I can understand why they aren't especially responsive to cries of "COUNTERFEIT!" from the masses any more.

'They took away our Cup-a-Soup!' Share your tales of bleak breakout areas with us

Stevie

Re: Massive Belt off a Doorknob

The cure for this is to carry a coin in your pocket, the larger the better. Before touching anything grounded, do so with the coin, grasped firmly. The ouch of the belt comes from the point discharge. Widening the area of contact lessens the ouchy to the point you may not even feel it.

Alternatively touch a seated colleague on the ear before grasping the door handle. It'll still hurt, but it will hurt the colleague too and pain shared is pain halved, so they say.

Stevie

Re:Tea bags?! No thank you.

Yeah, I used to be that way until I found out from a tea importer that "morern tea" is formulated to be quick brewing with or without a bag.

Seems that in the late 80s there was research done to get rid of that tedious mucking about with rolling, boiling water and five minutes brewing alchemy in favour of tea that would "brew" in the saem timescale that coffee could be made.

Whether in bag form or loose.

Sorry to burst yer bubble.

Can't get the decent teas any more anyway. I used to have a six foot shelf full of 1/4 lb caddies, each with a different tea in 'em. I've still got some of the caddies with tea in them, but the cans have rusted. Oh well.

I had to stop drinking Earl Grey when Jackson's of Piccadilly were wound up. Every other brand tastes like someone dripped Fairy Liquid in the PG Tips.

Always liked Fortnum & Mason's Royal Blend too. Last time I saw it was in "England" in Epcot's World Showcase.

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

Stevie

Bah!

Interesting that the tales of money wastage "by government" in these comments all boil down to gouging by the private sector when doing business with the government.

Same Ole Say "Mole".