* Posts by Dagg

691 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2010

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Abracadabra! Tales of unexpected sysadmagic and dabbling in dark arts

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@Jack

Seen this quite a few times. Equipment that fails, open the case start fault finding and the whole thing works perfectly.

In all cases it was heat, either the object was located where it couldn't get enough air flow to cool it or one of the components was starting to be come a little heat sensitive. A can of freeze can help to sort that out.

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Facepalm

Re: Case sensor

PSU fan won't spin up unless you give it some taps to get it started

Had a similar issue except it was an old saab car. Wouldn't start, roadside assist turned up lent under the car and gave the fuel tank a hard wack with a rubber mallet and it started.

It turns out the problem was the fuel pump in the fuel tank was on its way out and one of the classic problems is it wouldn't start. Bugger.

Oz government offers privacy concessions on MyHealth Record

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Re: "Labor’s 2012 My Health Record legislation will be strengthened"

And how close is the current legislation to the original that Labor came up with?

What sort of changes did the coalition make?

Were these changes the ones that caused the privacy red flags?

If this is exactly the same as the original labor legislation then why the hell did you lot pass it?

Classic blame everyone else.

AI threatens yet more jobs – now, lab rats: Animal testing could be on the way out, thanks to machine learning

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Re: There are some things even a rat won't do

Mine are hipster rats, they will do anything for smashed avo even program in java.

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C# or Java programmers

Hey, my 5 pet rats would make perfect C# or Java programmers.

Big bad Bluetooth blunder bug battered – check for security fixes

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So who pays for the fix?

Especially when you own a car like a ford that once sold new they disown the sat nav and av system. So if there are any blue tooth security bugs in car subsystem you are stuffed.

Just like the ford gear boxes. They will just blame the driver.

Devs: This is another fine Mesh you've got us into, Microsoft

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Pint

"great developer experience"

Yea, right. On the flaky wet string 'broadband' that we have oz...

First rain storm and that's it just give up and go to the pub.

Sad Nav: How a cheap GPS spoofer gizmo can tell drivers to get lost

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Mushroom

Re: Spoofing GPS is only optional

You don't need spoofing, all you need is to own a Ford!

We found out that once you buy the car (Ford focus TDi) they disown the GPS (and AV system) and will refuse to update the GPS maps when you get it serviced.

It is possible to $ buy a one off update from a 3rd party but next year $$$ again.

For the same cost of a single update you can buy a GPS unit with lifetime updates. Bastards (ford that is).

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

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Unhappy

I don't see it as anything like a substitute for email. I see it as a chat system.

Exactly, unfortunately our pointy haired ones insist that it be used as an Email replacement and it is a pain. They all now expect instant answers and because it is now an 'email' system we have an incredible number of direct messages just to cover the 1:1 email communications.

One two three... Go: Long Pig Microsoft avoids cannibalising Surface

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Trollface

Re: Long Pig

white skinned ones tended to be excessively salty

Nah, from what I've been told you treat them like corned beef and just soak them for a while changing the water every so often and perfect.

Nice hungi bit of puha and thats it.

Forking hell. It's summer, and Windows 10 is already thinking about autumn

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Pint

Hey in Aus we're ok

It is another 6 months until summer and 3 more to autumn, so we have a whole 9 months for you poor bastards in the northern hemisphere to bed it down.

This is a good reason to be 6 months a head on seasons and at 24 hours a head on time.

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

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Re: best collective noun...

A delay of project managers

also

A confusion of BAs

Hipster horror! Slack has gone TITSUP: Total inability to support user procrastination

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Happy

Slack is down

Brilliant, I can finally get some peace and quiet to get some actual work done instead of responding time wasting drivel from the pointy haired one and the dumb BAs.

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Re: Slack is down! OMG

My inbox currently has 70k+ unread messages

Well Doh! haven't you ever heard of email rules. The one thing that email does that slack is completely incapable of is allowing you to set up filtering rules to allow you to ignore/delete/move to different folders etc. The vast majority of my email gets deleted especially notifications from slack to tell me to look in slack.

Software changed the world, then died on the first of the month

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Re: AC Totally unfair !!! :)

NOT unfair, the job of a BA is to actually understand and to determine exactly what is required.

If all the BA does is just take what the user says and write it down as the spec then that is a big fail. Never let the user define the problem.

Most important question a BA can ask is "Why?"

Little things like "Why do you need a star shaped piece of glass?" when the user is standing there with a broken window.

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Trollface

Re: @Rich 11

And got moaned at (and marks docked) for being so pedantic.

Those who can do

Those who can't teach

And those with no idea write the specs

What's all the C Plus Fuss? Bjarne Stroustrup warns of dangerous future plans for his C++

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Trollface

Re: Actually, there's more...

The Vasa didn't start out top heavy. Marketing decided they needed new features to keep up with the cutting edge of flagship design.

Sounds like they used an agile approach to warship construction.

WannaCry reverse-engineer Marcus Hutchins hit with fresh charges

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Re: Some poeple accept their duty

Intelligent people don't try to dodge it

In my experience you don't need to as soon as it is apparent that you have a functioning brain one or both of the bottom feeders lawyers will object to your inclusion on the jury.

Amazon can't or won't collect sales tax in Australia

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FAIL

Delivery from the UK has usually also been much faster than from the US

Hell, delivery from the UK is faster than I've had with delivery inside Australia when they use Australia post!

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Mushroom

Chalk this as a "win" for Gerry.

Nope, I'll be boycotting hardly normal and any associated stores.

You just can't get the same range of stuff in Australia and when you can get it it just not 10% plus postage more expensive it is 2 - 3 times more expensive.

Then you got into the local bricks and mortar places (Myer, I'm talking about you) and service is non existent.

Stuff the lot.

Waiting for 100 Mbps NBN on wireless? Errr, umm, sorry about that

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Re: They got 100Mbps wireless in Iceland (country)

What is limiting factor on 450Mhz is lack of Mhz (frequency bandwidth).

Also distance, if you are in the middle of nowhere and 50k from your base station the latency caused by that distance will limit max speed.

Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design

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Pint

Its an Uber

It only self stops to pickup passengers. Anything else is collateral damage....

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

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Re: re: conservation of momentum

Yes, it does.

So if we have a single atom of uranium traveling through a vacuum it then fissions does the momentum of all the physical components add up to the same as the original single atom?

Does this mean that the mass converted into energy appears as an increase in the physical momentum of the resulting components?

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Holmes

if someone had discovered the physical effect before we'd derived the equations that helped us find it - that would have been called bollocks too.

Actually try looking at the rotation of our galaxy, Vera Rubin did and what was measured didn't match what we thought we knew.

So we now have dark matter and dark energy as a book keeping exercise until we can actually work out what is going on.

May people consider dark matter and dark energy to be bollocks but so far nothing else fits and we don't appear to have a better explanation.

Big bimmer bummer: Bavaria's BMW buggies battered by bad bugs

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Devil

Re: Remote Local Access

go to non dealers

And you would trust the dealers! Yea right.

Microsoft programming chief to devs: Tell us where Windows hurt you

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Windows

“We want to ask developers … Give us examples of what you are trying to do.”

Some of us just make money as a jobbing MFC VC++ developer.

Keep supporting MFC and the legacy tools sets and wizards as not all of us have the chance to work on bleeding edge you beaut projects. You broke the MFC Wizard in 2017.

Hey it might not be sexy but it pays the bills....

Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata

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Facepalm

Re: Obama

Americans seem to have an alternative definition of 'liberal'

Same in Oz, here liberal means conservative, they consider liberal to mean big business and the rich are liberally allowed to do anything. The more money you have the more liberal you can be.

Birds can feel Earth's magnetic fields? Yeah, that might fly. Bioboffins find vital sense proteins

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Re: How would it feel?

I did have some trouble adapting moving from NZ to the UK.

Same here, strange thing was east west was ok, but north south swapped.

Australia joins the 'decrypt it or we'll legislate' club

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Re: @ bazza

Well you trust the phone network when you call up your bank don't you?

Err NO who would be that stupid. What I might trust is the laws around protection against fraud that may have arisen from that communication. Check you countries banking act.

UK.gov calls on the Big Man – GOD – to boost rural broadband

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Re: Good stuff but a sticking plaster fix ...

The big difference is the NZ farmers make most of the money via exports. Saudi Arabia of milk anyone..

Remember the Yorkie pizza horror? Here's who won our exclusive Reg merch...

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Re: truly a north-south thing?

It needs to be a really thick gravy, nearly as thick as ketchup, don't drown the chips and DON'T put vinegar on the chips.

Agreed! Also chips with Egg Mayo, Yum, NOT that 'orrible the crime against humanity "Salad Cream".

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

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Flame

It's called Agile

'Programming experience would be nice but not essential'

Even enough time and enough monkeys can't keep up with the changes so you just get what they could throw together as long as it looks good.

Causes of software development woes

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Re: Requirements are always a nightmare

@ disinterested observer

I don't much care. From the dev/architect point of view, what I want from a BA is basically a single UML data flow diagram and a single UML State Machine. And even the State Machine is fairly optional.

That would be luxury! Our lot have no idea about UML. None of them have any ideas about NFRs and even the FRs are full of words like "may", "could", "like".

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WTF?

Re: Requirements are always a nightmare

The correct way to do this would be to use a BA. Hire a decent business process analyst and sort out how it should work.

The problem is that BAs love agile as it means that they can just do a crap half arsed job then throw over fence to dev to get it built.

We even have the buggers having a fleshout where they don't even know what the client problems are and expect dev to tell them the problem and the solution. While the hell didn't they get off their fat arses and talk to the client!

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Mushroom

The user is not your enemy

Correct the bloody BA is the enemy!

Australia won't prescribe its national broadband network a high-fibre diet

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Mushroom

Don't have it yet

And from what I've been reading I'm not sure I want it. I've only got ADSL2+ via old copper and it is sloooow 8mbps download but it now works reliably and it is cheap.

Where I am I won't get FTTH I'll end up with FTTN and the rest in my crap copper so I can't see how that will make much of an improvement and from what I've been reading it looks like I'll be disconnected for weeks while they get their shit together cutting me over.

Idiot bloody shitty government.

Boffins closer to solving what causes weird radio bursts from space

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Alien

Interstellar Bussard ramjet

What would you see if you were behind one of these? Would it be a laser like beam? A quick blip might just mean the exhaust just flashed by. You never know....

Intel, Microsoft confess: Meltdown, Spectre may slow your servers

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Re: "8th Generation Core platforms..."

Switching to ARM devices may well be the quicker solution.

Not really as some ARM have the same problem.

FBI says it can't unlock 8,000 encrypted devices, demands backdoors for America's 'public safety'

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Pint

Re: Holy Trinity..

Spanish Inquisition

No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition!

We've heard of data gravity – we're just not sure how to defy it yet

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Mushroom

When it gets to testing you're too late. It's about getting your design right.

Sorry you can't do that, that is not AGILE that sounds like waterfall. /sarcasm

Astroboffins say our Solar System could have – wait, stop, what... the US govt found UFOs?

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Devil

Re: Alien UFO's are Real - True / False...

If I had to have a god it would be Loki

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Boffin

Re: Alien UFO's are Real - True / False...

If for example you believe in the Big Bang theory you must hold contradictory beliefs.

Ok, there is a fundamental problem with that statement. First the Big Bang theory is just that it is a THEORY. The concept of a theory is an untested idea as an explanation of something that has been observed.

You do not believe in a theory you challenge and test a theory, there is no belief.

The current (note term current) Big Bang Theory arose to explain some things that had been observed the current theory will make predictions and it is these predictions that can be tested and if they fail the theory needs to be revisited revised or thrown away.

There is no blind belief in science it is not like religion where the same "theory" is in place for 2,000 years and where you are not allowed to test or challenge it.

Irony's lost on old Pope Francis: Pontiff decrees fake news a 'serious sin'

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"Yep, journalists don't kiddy fiddle in any way like priests."

Yea, but here in Oz the vast amount of the fiddling was by the church >90% and the Catholics were 60% overall.

No percentage was supplied for writers or journalists. And considering these writers mentioned, were they just Gay or did they actually prey on young children?

Continuous Lifecycle 2018: Keynotes, speakers and earlybirds

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Re: I'm getting old

This looks like the place to get your BORG implant.

So you're 'agile', huh? I do not think it means what you think it means

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Re: The main issue are those who turned it into a sort of religion...

Agile, by definition, also mean flexible :-)

So how does this work when you have fixed 2 week sprints?

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Facepalm

Re: Someonr is getting to the reality

For Agile to truly work you need to TRUST your developers to do the right thing

It is not only the developers. The problem with agile is you can't trust the BAs, they just come up with something fuzzy, throw it over the fence and then blame the development team when the whole thing fails as what they specified wasn't want was wanted.

Note to BAs if you specify a gold plated turd then that is exactly what you will get. Be proper BA and actually do some real work. Find out what the business pain points are don't define requirements as a set of solutions spend some time on the non functionals. THEN and only then get the client to sign it off so what gets built has a chance of working.

It aint rocket science, the earlier you find the problem/issue/gap the less it costs to fix and the quicker it gets fixed.

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Re: The main issue are those who turned it into a sort of religion...

We lost our last preacher (scrum master) and things actually improved. We actually got things done instead of death by standup / sprint planning meeting etc. All BS, protocol and process no work.

We ended up calling him the scum master...

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

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Coat

This is total BS

here in OZ my ADSL connection goes via a pit in ground outside my house and it is always full of water and I have absolutely crap speed.

Trump to NASA: Fly me (or some other guys) to the Moon

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Good idea

Trump to NASA: fly me (or some other guys) to the Moon - and leave them there.

Anyone remember the book The marching morons

It's a decade since DevOps became a 'thing' – and people still don't know what it means

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Re: Having read the article

”Developers?” Yeah, it took me awhile to stop laughing at “engineer” as a term for a programmer, apparently it was because it “sounded better”. Haha, kids hey...

Wrong, as one who has worked as a software engineer we worked in a engineering environment along side the electrical, hardware and mechanical engineers on industrial process control systems. We used exactly the same processes and discipline as all the other engineers.

We needed to, our software was controlling some extremely expensive, dangerous plant.

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