* Posts by Cpt Blue Bear

485 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2010

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Apple's Tim Cook and Salesforce's Marc Benioff DECLARE WAR on anti-gay Indiana

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Indiana, WTF?

" Is that why they are so hate-filled, because they worry that they might carry this "predilection" within themselves?"

After literally seconds of consideration, I can only say, "yup".

People are, in general, not very good at deciphering the motives of others. Thus the tendency to accuse others of what they would do themselves in a given situation. Witness the fundamentalist obsession with sodomy...

(Cue jokes: dirty buggers, "carry within" fnah, fnah, etc)

Ford: Our latest car gizmo will CHOKE OFF your FUEL if you're speeding

Cpt Blue Bear

"They're engineers just like some of us, perhaps including you, and they get paid for this. I wonder why people reading a half-arsed article on some blog keep thinking they can do better than those who actually do the stuff for a living. Mysteries of life, I guess."

Its well documented and even has a name: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The relevant bit says that the less you know about something the easier you think it is and the better you think you are at it.

To circle back to road safety, it also contradicts the unofficial position of most Aussie police forces in opposing driver training on the assumption that unskilled drivers will be more cautious.

Data centre dangers: Killing a tree and exploding a UPS

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Many years ago..

A story I'm probably safe to tell now as the resulting insurance claim has been settled.

As some of you may be aware, a couple of years back there was a bit of a problem with rainwater run off in Brisbane. Basically the CBD was a couple of feet underneath it. A major Australian company who will remain nameless has a largish operation there. With the basement flooded an impromptu meeting at Head Office was told:

The local data centre is safe - its located on the 8th floor

The battery backups will definitely keep the whole shebang running long enough for the diesel generators to come on line if the power is cut.

These generators are on the roof, not in the basement which is flooded.

The fuel tanks on the roof have some number of hours fuel before they need to be refilled. This will almost certainly not be enough to get through an outage.

Where are the reserve tanks? In the flooded basement. Oops. Don't worry, we'll get one of the local IT bods to nip in and haul a jerry can or two up to the roof and top the tanks off. How exactly this was going to happen with the CBD effectively shut down was never explained.

As it was the question was moot because the the generators did not power the aircon and the whole thing went into thermal shutdown within 20 minutes of the mains being cut off...

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Nice lab after-hours incident...

Many years ago a client refitted one of their workshops. This involved stripping out the false ceiling, the aircon ducting above it along with thirty years of cobbled together mains wiring.

Watch yon sparky back a truck into the shop.

Watch as he climbs onto the tray.

Watch as he reaches up to cut old wiring.

Watch as he gets a boot big enough to knock him off his feet.

Turns out that the isolation switch on the distribution board was wrongly installed and only isolating one phase. Oh how we laughed. Except of course, for the poor bastard in hospital who was probably only still alive because of the rubber tyres on the truck and the fact that tray had sides.

This incident taught me to sight the licenses of tradesmen and make at least a cursory check that they understand what they are working on.

Cpt Blue Bear

"They were lucky it wasn't the 100mm waste pipe from the toilets that came apart at a joint in the comms room's false ceiling. Happened to a colleague who was called out in the middle of the night for a nasty mess slowly dripping down the modem racks."

Dear God! That brings back horrible memories.

Shared office space with a suspended ceiling. Very convenient when it comes to running cabling, but not so much when "waste" pipe from the upstairs toilets decides split at a joint. To make matters more fun the bloke on earlies was anosmic* and didn't notice anything. Cue the mid morning rush and we had a small but noisome lake on the ceiling of the toilets on our floor. The IT cave shared a wall with said dunnies and we literally had to build a dam to prevent the lake spreading until the plumber arrived.

A tip for anyone who finds themselves in a similar predicament: if you tip the outside edges of the suspended tiles up you only have to seal the gaps rather than build a complete dam.

Now strictly speaking, this happened mid morning...

* The second time I've discovered anosmia. The first involved working on a motorbike in a closed shed. "Do you smell petrol?" says I. "No, but I am a bit light headed" replies mate who's been in there for two hours with petrol running from the open fuel tap on the other side of the bike...

Australia's PM says data retention laws think of the children

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Germany

He cited a child abuse investigation in Europe, saying that in the UK around 25 per cent of suspects were convicted but in “Germany, which doesn't have metadata retention legislation, almost none of them were successfully prosecuted.”

Thus presupposing guilt on the part of those suspects...

Tony Abbott says food importers deserve help denied to telcos

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Required

Indeed. Generally its the polly who picks up the dinner tab for the lobbists, on the public dime of course. Defense Minister, David Johnson comes to mind...

C’mon Lenovo. Superfish hooked, but Pokki Start Menu still roaming free

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: You can always try YumCha

"Try checking out DansData. YumCha is his word for no-name Chinese knockoffs and generics, in fact apparently a common phrase down under"

I haven't heard the term Yum Cha in years and even then only in Melbourne. The correct Ozism for "I can't remember the brand, you've never heard of them and they'll be long gone in six months anyway" is Kung Pow. While its definitely a derogatory term, it in no way dismisses the item. It may be cheap, it may be nasty and it may work very, very well.

And thanks for the link to Dans Data.

German music moguls slammed for 'wurst ever DMCA takedown spam'

Cpt Blue Bear

Maybe we need a three strikes system: three false accusations and you are off t' internets. Sauce for the goose, etc.

Failing that, allow those in receipt of such notices to bill for time taken dealing with them if they are demonstrably false. I'm seriously of the opinion that doing this would end many of modern life's frustrations.

BOFH: The Great HellDesk geek leave seek

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: I had a company credit card too

"My most blatant one was a receipt from Asda for a dozen Durex ribbed condoms, which I insisted were PPE.

Questions were asked, but they couldn't argue with my logic..."

The Girlfriend once filed her boss's "entertaining" expense claim under "laptop servicing". Questions were indeed asked, referred to her boss, grudgingly paid and he was told not to bloody try on it again.

For pity's sake, you fool! DON'T UPGRADE it will make it worse

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: I feel your pain

"... and live in dread of the next major power outage happening during compulsory Facebook access time needing a bloody diesel genny."

You don't want a diesel genset - too slow to come online and have nasty spikes in the supply (or so my sparky tells me).

A mate has a small battery farm consisting of four old truck batteries (sourced for the cost of taking them away 'cause it costs the service shop to dispose of them) and a couple of solar panels to keep them charged. An old rack mount UPS provides the power management and fail-over is instant. Don't forget to hook the router up to it for full SWMBO Facebook service compliance.

It still leaves you with the question of where to put it, having exchanged noise and diesel fumes for a chemical hazard.

Reg hacks (and rest of 'Frisco) in LinkedIn measles contagion scare

Cpt Blue Bear

"In fact I remember being sent to play with the kids who had things like this so I would get it over and done with. Mumps wasn't pleasant but when your young you get over these things amazingly quickly."

Caught measles at school when I was seven. Two of my classmates ended up in what passed for intensive care in those days and a third died.

What your Mum was doing in exposing you like that was the third world equivalent of immunisation. You can catch the disease, suffer for a week, carry life long scars (or is that chicken pox?), risk blindness, nerve damage, death etc, or you can have the vaccination. Having gone through the former, I'll take the latter.

Unsurprising report: UK local govt sites remain totally crap

Cpt Blue Bear

Not only in the public sector

This is SOP of modern management.

If anything, making sure that the public facing bods can't even contact those actually responsible is more prevalent in the private sector. If you don't hear any complaints you can assume your customers are happy and can happily go off for a long, boozy lunch with the other inhabitants of the C-suite.

Smartphones don’t dumb you down, they DUMB you UP

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Nokia Maps?

You are not alone. Samsung offer a free version of whatever Garmin's software is called. It would be brilliant on a tablet but the !@#$ won't install without a phone service.

Carmakers DEFLATED by AIRBAG FLAW as US watchdog recalls TWO MEELLION vehicles

Cpt Blue Bear

If its anything like the dealer recalls we have in Aus...

The reason for them going off AFTER being recalled is that the dealers just didn't do the fix. My Toyota Hilux went back four times to fix a maybe, perhaps, on-some-models faulty bonnet catch. The first two times they gave the vehicle back without actually doing anything and the fourth time was to fix the damage they did to the paint work when they actually did the work on the third attempt.

Muppets.

WRT airbags: what I want is an option not to have the fucking things in the first place. Then I could have a proper dash mounted Jesus bar again...

Why so tax-shy, big tech firms? – Bank of England governor

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Common Tax Delusions

"Companies do not pay taxes, these are in every case paid in full by the end buyer" blah, blah, blah.

Speaking of disingenuous...

This tired old canard again? The same argument can be applied to me: all my taxes are paid by my employer(s). If I was taxed at a lower rate I could work for less rather than inflating the prices to the end consumer. Your argument applies to ALL taxation.

Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Hellooooo UBUNTU...

@ Adair: have another upvote for succinctly paraphrasing a rant I've been giving for a decade and a half.

A colleague once summed up the Windows vs Apple interface question thus:

"Nobody likes Windows and everybody bitches about it so MS spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying and mostly failing to make it better. Apple users love their interface so Apple haven't touched it in a decade and it fucking shows"

I'd add that the Linux / Unix crowd are too busy trying to get their sound cards to work to worry about what a GUI looks like* or the first thing they do open a terminal anyway.

* Disclaimer: I have actually never had an issue with sound under Linux - this is rhetorical hyperbole.

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Have you actually used PowerShell to automate GUI operations?

" You know that to run Windows 3.1 you typed "Windows" from the dos prompt? Hardly hacked onto it later....

Actually, the command was "win". Rather ironic since I didn't get that winning feeling when the Program Manager appeared."

Someone had probably written a batch file for him...

Brit iPad sellers feel the pain of VAT-free imports

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: 2 sides

Disties generally won't support equipment not bought through them regardless of its origin.

Refusing or charging for warranty work on "grey imports" also pisses off a lot of customers who bought equipment quite legitimately OS. You can't tell the two apart in practice and if the brand is big enough to have local representation they probably have an international warranty.

That's why most service agents just do the work.

I've only had one problem personally. That was with the local service agent for a Japanese manufacture of third party camera lenses (hint: greek letter, starts with S, rhymes with smegma) but a phone call up the chain fixed that. That was some years back.

Magic streaming beans? Sure, have my cow - music biz

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: finite time...

"Ultimately I can only listen to X mins of music/year. The industry provides 106 more than I need, or can physically use."

Nail. Head.

We have a glut of entertainment. Prices should have crashed and the weak players should have been bankrupted out of the business.

There are plenty of talented performers out there, probably more than ever before. But there are also more wannabes and hacks. If you've ever had to manage talent you'd know that the latter are much easier to deal with.

HE'S DONE IT! Malcolm Turnbull unites left and right with piracy policy

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Counterproductive ... Security Wise

"If they can make them look like utter moron's at the same time, that's just icing on the cake."

And this is why I've come to despise Bill Shorten: Labor are more interested in cheap points scoring than what is good for the country. They look more and more like the LNP every day...

I despair of government in this country. The choice is Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Even Dumber.

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Dunno about warming

"This year the rain started in March and stopped last week. "

"where do you live? Obviously not the UK."

No, south eastern Europe from his second paragraph.

The last time I was in the UK it was rather obviously not in south eastern Europe. If it had been the weather would have been better, the prices lower and the inhabitants less of a pack of miserable twats. Admittedly, I was stuck in London and crossing the M25 always makes me like England a whole lot more...

Sony sued by ex-staff over daft security, leaked privates

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Sony marketing?

Having dealth with Sony Oz for close to two decade, I'll go out on a limb and say they are quite incapable of organising such a hack. Even of themselves.

But having also dealt with marketing people (and I use the word very, very loosely), this just reeks of the sort of opportunism they think is clever.

Wikipedia won't stop BEGGING for cash - despite sitting on $60m

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Better to beg for money $3 at a time

Maybe because they want to take donations from all over the world and the Swiss can actually make that happen? Many of the same qualities that attract money launders, tax cheats and kleptocrats are also attract honest business.

Jayzus! I need to got take a shower - I'm not only defending Wikipedia but Swiss Banks...

Forget the climate: Fatties are a much bigger problem - study

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: but of course the sacred cows left untouched.

Every problem we have is ultimately caused or exacerbated by over population. But, as you say, its a sacred cow (and there's no money to be made from it)

I need a password to BRAKE? What? No! STOP! Aaaargh!

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Sorry

"IME, nothing screams 'entitled twit' like a Porsche SUV."

You've clearly never driven one. The old Cayenne Turbo S was ugly as a hat full of proverbials, but holy crap do they go!

YOU are the threat: True confessions of real-life sysadmins

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Joe

"Let's shoot for the moon: If they have computerised door locks, can we lock everyone out of the building?"

Not out. In...

NBN Co screws lid on FTTP coffin

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Do I feel lucky?

@dan1980

Its worse than that: Telstra don't want back in. They thought they had a great scheme to get rid of a massive financial liability in the form of the copper network. Their wet dream of getting out of their universal service guarantee was looking to come true. Instead we are going to have to pay to buy their dodgy network, pay to fix it and then pay to give it back to them.

Feds to auction off second tranche of Silk Road Bitcoins worth $19 MEEELLION

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Cool. The .fed is profiting from ...

Jake, all currency is virtual. Only the nature of the token changes. Did you pay for that beer with a debit card?

Got a STRAP-ON? Remember to TAKE IT OFF at WORK

Cpt Blue Bear

I hate to be the one to tell you, but if your sweat "eats through it" then its not shark skin. Similar to the the chick who can't wear gold because it leave a green stain on her skin...

Cpt Blue Bear

So can I: September 1987. That was when I bought my first self-winding Seiko.

Australia's going to need a standalone metadata retention bureau

Cpt Blue Bear

But the Lib-Nat government are against increasing the size of the public service and creating more bureaucracy. Anyway, we are supposed to be having a budget crisis so we can't afford this sort of thing if we are going to pay Boeing for a dozen jet fighters that don't meet the RAAF requirements and still don't work after ten years of development. </sarcasm>

My guess is they'll dump it on the carriers. They will do a half-arsed job and it won't serve anyone's purpose and there will be a series of screw ups, misidentifications, leaks and misuses. None of this will not be reported for national security reasons and the whole thing will be quietly dismantled somewhere down the track as a cost cutting measure.

Australia Post goes a little bit grey with parcel forwarding service

Cpt Blue Bear

Sales tax. Or lack there of.

Senators plot metadata pushback as requests keep expanding

Cpt Blue Bear

Its officially a bandwagon

Nick Xenophon has climbed aboard.

Strange tale of an angry bean counter, Comcast and a shock 'firing'

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Just for the record...

"Comcast's main products are frustration, annoyance, lies, and incorrect bills"

Looks like a telco, quacks like a telco...

Oh God the RUBBER on my SHAFT has gone wrong and is STICKING to things

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: My favorite has been mentioned!

There's a special circle of hell reserved for the person responsible for that. Waiting for him are a bunch of people like us each with a funnel in varying sizes.

'People have forgotten just how late the first iPhone arrived ...'

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: First iPhone late

An ex lost hers riding pillion. A mate following us saw it happen and picked it up. I have no idea how he managed to pull up in time 'cause we were doing well over 100km/h. For the record the bike was jelly mold CBR1000 and the phone was a Moto StarTak, which dates it nicely to the late '90s. The phone suffered a broken hinge but otherwise survived unscathed only to be drowned in suspicious circumstances a few months later.

It seems that losing and recovering phones like this wasn't as rare as I thought.

@ Richard Taylor 2: You have to remember that phones became a disposable item relatively recently. Fifteen years ago even a basic phone was over $100, and they were real dollars back then, not the Aussie Pesos we get now. Then there was the hassle of getting a new SIM. So, yes, back then you did turn around and go back for it.

[Yorkshire accent] But you tell the kids of today and they don't beleive you. [/Yorkshire accent]

MIT boffins cry havoc and let slip the ROBOT CHEETAHS of Whoa

Cpt Blue Bear

Hear that, Darl?

Meh. I miss the screaming two-stroke engines their previous efforts used.

Flaming drone batteries ground commercial flight before takeoff

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Detectors?

Of the Gods, Mate.

Rubbish WPS config sees WiFi router keys popped in seconds

Cpt Blue Bear

That's Netgear all over these days. Another once great company brought low by 'tards.

Having said that, the DGN-1000 was always a POS and I can understand why the manufacturer would rather you replaced it. Back when I dealt with domestic stuff, we took one look at the feature set compared to the 834 it replaced and started supplying Billion. I still have a pair of 1000s that we replaced in use as a point-to-point relay.

Cops baffled by riddle of CHICKEN who crossed ROAD

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: possums

"Aussies learn early to swerve round wombats, which are pretty much indestructible mobile traffic islands..."

Most Aussies learn.

I've seen the aftermath of a Holden that hit a wombat at around the tonne. It punched the passenger side upright through the fender and tore the hub clean off. The skid and scrape marks were about 300m long. Its a miracle the thing didn't roll over. That was on an old tank like HQ, not a fall-apart-if-you-look-at-it-funny Commodore.

To add insult to injury, the driver had walked all the way back and found the bloodied mound of brown fur was still breathing so he walked back to the car get something to finish it off with and by the time he'd got back to the scene the bugger had wandered off into the bush never to be seen again.

We picked the poor bastard up about an hour later.

Oz metadata retention won't include URLs: report

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Why the secrecy?

"Am I overly cynical, or what?"

No, not quite cynical enough I fear.

My first thought when I read you summary "the source of the communication but not the destination" was that this has nothing to do with terrorism or crime (what really does?) and everything to do with tracing leaks.

This is about finding and punishing whistle blowers, not security.

Intelligence blunder: You wanna be Australia's spyboss? No problem, just walk right in

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: Alternative story if it worked

This would be a problem how exactly?

Your Bitcoins aren't money – but it is barter, so we'll tax it, ta ... says Australia's taxman

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: It's all good

"Taxing something of value doesn't really make any statement about its legitimacy"

Yes it does. Its says loud and clear that the powers that be consider it has value as means of exchange. In this case, counting it for FBT purposes says it has the same legitimate value as a car, a laptop or a long liquid lunch. It says this is not a valueless mirage.

"What may be fun is when the next Bitcoin crash comes, whether people will be deducting the loss in value from their taxable income"

I don't believe you can deduct speculative losses in Aus. You would have to actually convert it into South Pacific Pesos first before you can try it on with the ATO. Capital value losses on assets would come under depreciation and is done to a specified schedule. IANATABIODWO*

* I am not a tax accountant but I occasionally drink with one. She could probably dream up a dubious tax avoidance minimisation scheme based around Bitcoins, but the same can be said for US$ or macadamia nuts.

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: It's all good

Nail, head, etc.

Recognition by the ATO legitimises the cryptocurrency circus.

Vampires and Ninjas versus the Alien Jedi Robot Pirates: It's ON

Cpt Blue Bear

I seem to recall they also made pretty short work of a certain American Werewolf in London so that's the furballs out in the first round too.

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: "Going up Camborne Hill, coming down..."

"What would happen if Chuck Norris took up Morris Dancing?"

They wouldn't have him 'cause he doesn't drink. Besides, you can't do the Stick and Bucket dance in cuban heels.

Echopraxia scores 'diamond cutter' on the sci-fi hardness scale

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: It's not unreasonable to assume the Coriolis effect is common knowledge...

I tried to read one of Wright's later novels but just couldn't get past the long political soliloquies. It was like a more coherent Ann Rand on uppers, or Terry Brooks at his worst. Except that Wright produces far better prose than Brooks' turgid rubbish. A pity, 'cause he seemed to have some interesting ideas even if they weren't terribly original (see Asimov, Clarke, Pournelle, Niven, et al). At least he seemed to be trying

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: @ Destroy All Monsters and BlueGreen

"more a serious, albeit fascinating, treatise on what exactly a person is if their memories, perceptions and abilities are all as malleable as the way they wear their hair"

Three words for you, well, two and letter actually: Phillip K Dick.

The internet just BROKE under its own weight – we explain how

Cpt Blue Bear

Re: IPv6 like OSI is far more complex than necessary

"Does anyone else remember the saying that a camel was a horse designed by a committe."

I've often thought that a horse is a camel spec'ed by management: its sleek and fast but hopelessly inefficient, flighty, doesn't cope with difficult terrain* and has to be destroyed if something breaks.

A camel on the hand, is the BSD of ruminants: it won't make you look good but it will get you there.

* The last one I had anything to do with couldn't even cope with a heavy track.

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