* Posts by defiler

1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

defiler

Re: '...targeting the price would help cut down on the unsafe levels of consumption.'

I do worry that it's a sign of mental health issues. I'll put my hand up and say that I've used it as a coping mechanism for stress and anxiety in the past. Price goes up? Fuck it - I'm drinking it anyway because it's the thing that numbs me against the daily pressures.

Then there are the actual alcoholics who'll find a way to get their booze, whatever it takes. It's a real eye-opener having an alcoholic (addict, rather than heavy-drinker) describe the lengths they'll go to to acquire a drink.

I'd be interested in seeing relative charts of alcohol consumption vs affluence vs mental health across the UK.

Sod it, it's Friday. I'm pretty-much coasting and doing maintenance jobs today because our customers are almost all on holiday, and I'll be having a nice wee tipple of wine tonight regardless of the monetary cost.

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

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Re: Next up "Harms"

child only version of the Net

Some people would like that. And not the people you'd want in there. :-/

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Re: More than 1/3rd of the website is pron ??

It was indeed Delft - I remember it well. Was quite the eye-opener.

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There's no definition of porn that works, which makes legislating against it tricky.

Of course there is! I know it when I see it.

Come on, guys - let's legislate!

Google Fiber experiment ends with Choc Factory paying Louisville $3.8m to clean up its mess

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Re: Rural does not mean poor internet access

My office, in a City Centre, in a very popular area has no FTTC or FTTP at all, and we're only able to get ADSL2+ unless we pay for fibre ethernet ourselves.

Yep. Entirely.

We have a customer with a few offices, both a walk away from the city-centre stations. In Edinburgh they can get ADSL2+ or Virgin Media (who seem to think that it's just fine and dandy to schedule a 6-hour maintenance window during the working day time after time after time on a "Business Broadband" contract). The exchange is upgraded to FTTC but not the cabinet and Openreach have decided to ditch the whole thing in favour of starting again with FTTP.

In Manchester they can get ADSL2+ or dialup. And the DSL connections are crap at the best of times but shit themselves completely if there's rain. Guess how often it rains in Manchester... Again, Openreach binned an active FTTC rollout in favour of FTTP before they were hooked up.

These are both city-centre offices. Virgin will have to do in Edinburgh for now (although they may bail on that one for a dedicated fibre link), and in Manchester they had to have Deansgate dug up to run a dedicated fibre link at significant cost. Oh, and a rat chewed through that.

Honestly, you get a better connection at Tan Hill Inn.

Microsoft admits: Yes, miscreants leafed through some Hotmail, MSN, Outlook inboxes after support rep pwned

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Remember the time?

Remember when Hotmail had an authentication flaw where you could log into your own Hotmail account, and then simply change the URL and go scouring through any other Hotmail mailbox if you had the address? Back in those days you could pretty much laugh it off with a "whoops - we'll get that sorted". Changed days.

Israeli Moon probe crashes at the last minute but SpaceX scores with Falcon Heavy launch

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To me, this is the critical factor. They "borrowed" some space, and pushing back the deadline for further testing would have lost this slot. They may not have been able to "borrow" more.

(For values of "borrow" that will likely have involved an exchange of money for goods and services.)

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

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Oh, I agree that Joe is correct, "by the book". I just think that "the book" is wrong in this case.

As I say, I'm not out to force everyone to change. I'm just pointing out that a small change in wording makes a large difference in intent. Clearly my old Artificial Intelligence lectures from 25+ years ago have stuck in my head. That and having to explain so many things to people who may as well be children when I'm at work...

I'll be very happy if people take "unless" and run with it. I'll not be upset if they stick with "until".

(Also, not sure why the downvotes. If its due to my inaccuracy per the accepted wording, I've explained that. But I'm certainly not offering an opinion on Assange's guilt - I think the bail jumping is pretty cut-and-dried, but the rest will have to be decided at trial.)

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Wait, what?

This finally happened and I read about if first on Newsthump.

That's about as well as the rest of my day is staying on the tracks...

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I prefer "unless" proven guilty. "Until" assumes it's a foregone conclusion.

I know I'm swimming against the tide on this one, but I prefer the clarity. Not wanting to pee in anyone's ice cream over it though.

Town admits 'a poor decision was made' after baseball field set on fire to 'dry' it more quickly

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Re: Missing the obvious method

Ted! Don't forget to wind your watch!

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Fast times at Ridgefield High?

Come on guys - it's been a whole day, and nobody's come up with that one?

Make America Infringe Again: Trump campaign video pulled over Batman copyright

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I love the exclamation mark - is that part of the title? "America!" would be much more exciting than "America". Bit like "Airplane!"

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Mushroom

Re: maybe Batman

I can see it already. There's a bomb set to destroy Gotham (again...), and the "stop" button on the timer is in an indestructible box with a small hole over the button.

Commissioner Gordon: We need someone with small hands! A child, perhaps!

Police lackey: But sir, all the children have been evacuated. It's hopeless!

[Batman swoops down dramatically from the rooftops.]

Batman: I hear you gentlemen are having a small handful of trouble?

[Batman reaches his curiously small hands into the box and presses the button, cancelling the timer and simultaneously revealing his secret identity.]

Police lackey: [gasp] It's Bruce J Wayne!

Batman: Commisioner Gordon, I need this man sent away to an internment camp immediately.

Commissioner Gordon: Right away, Batman. And thank you.

[Brief scene of Catwoman poledancing while Bruce goes around grabbing all the dancers in a strip bar. Music rises. Fade to black.]

This movie stuff is easy! I believe it's time to give up my day-job! Icon for the bomb in the box.

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

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Re: She was a good ship

In my home computer*, DOS6.22 was fine, Win95, OSR2, Win98, 98SE, NT4, 2000, XP x64, Win7, Win10, Slackware (2?), Xubuntu 12, OS/2 Warp 3 were all fine.

Windows ME wouldn't boot unless I took out my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 (not exactly an obscure card). ME was different enough to break for me. :-/

*My computer's like Trigger's brush. It's had the motherboad and CPU changed 8 times, the case changed 3 times and the hard discs changed 6 times, but it's still the same PC I've had for over 25 years!

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Re: She was a good ship

Sssh - we don't talk about the time that Vista finally became worthwhile. Mostly because we'd all moved on or back by that point.

I heard that it you stand in front of a mirror, close your eyes, and say "Windows Vista Ultimate" five times, it appears behind you, nagging for a license key.

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Re: Hardware requirements

Linux is fine for running an astonishing amount of the Internet.

There's no reason why you couldn't run a POS system on Linux. None at all. It's a tool for a job, like a Ford next to a Vauxhall. You get them set up right, you can use either for racing, towing a caravan or getting laid.

And if a company offers a POS system on Linux, it's up to them to support it on a Saturday. And if you don't have a helpline for your POS, you're not doing it right.

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Re: She was a good ship

Well, yeah. That goes without saying.

Like NT4 before SP3.

Like Win95 before OSR2.

Like Win98 before SE.

Like WinME before we all burned it and danced on its ashes.

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She was a good ship

Very dated nowadays, but brought a sea change in the security of Windows. And you could use it as your daily driver, even if you played lots of games (I ran XP x64, and it never skipped a beat).

Ethiopia sits on 737 Max report but says pilots followed Boeing drills

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Re: Ralph Nader's niece

Really?

Sometimes planes crash.

Sometimes bad maintenance causes it, sometimes mistakes by ground crew, sometimes pilot error, usually pilot error, sometimes a pilot's deliberate actions. One plane crashing is an anomaly, sure, but there were 15 fatal airliner crashes in 2018, two of them on climb-out.

By your criterion, we should have grounded:

* Antonov An-148-100B

* ATR 72-212

* De Havilland Dash-8

* Boeing 737-7

* Cessna Grand Caravan (twice)

* Boeing 737-200

* Let L-410 (twice)

* Convair CV-340

* Junkers Ju-52(!)

* Boeing 737-8

* Boeing 737 MAX 8

* Boeing 757

* Antonov An-26

Well done. You've just stranded most of the world's Boeing 737s, between the -200, -7, -8 and MAX 8. You've stopped a huger percentage of air travel, and put thousands (not even at Boeing) out of work.

Sometimes planes crash, and until you have reasonable certainty, in an impartial and rigorous investigation (not hearsay and rants), you can't just go grounding entire fleets.

Now, if all of the MAX 8 pilots who went off ranting in bars and pilot forums had submitted formal complaints about the aircraft to their appropriate regulatory bodies, then we might have grounds to suspend the model on the first crash. Maybe.

And, to be facetious for a moment, we do do it better now - it "only" took two crashes this time.

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Re: Birds

And before you damn Boeing too much. Better think about how air travel was changed under this company, and how many innovations were created by Boeing

I've had to deal with a lot of stupid shit this week, but this ranks well up there. Sorry, Aodhhan, but this ranks up there with "before you go bad-mouthing Pol Pot, think of all the good he did for the environment by promoting organic farming".

The bottom line here is that 300 people paid (indirectly) Boeing to be carried safely to their destination. Boeing have a duty of care to ensure that their aircraft are safe. It's looking increasingly likely that Boeing failed in this. It's looking increasingly likely that Boeing failed in a way that's spectacularly reckless, even to observers outside the aircraft industry.

(Yes, the 747 changed the world. No, Boeing had no real love for it until the 2707 was canned. Yes, it flew stably without having to be constantly trimmed by computer.)

defiler

Re: Ralph Nader's niece

Yeah - sounds like one of those USA legal oddities where the defendant can scream "unfair!" if you've not rounded everyone up against the wall. It may also be a bit early to be legally pointing the finger at one party, and the superfluous suits may be dropped if it's proven they acted without fault.

I agree that Ethiopian Airlines don't (at least initially) appear to be to blame here. It sounds like they were [misled / duped / misinformed] by the Boeing.

As for Rosemount, no hardware is perfect. That's why servers, in particular, are built so that breaking hardware components don't normally take down the whole computer. This is no mystery, so I don't see that Rosemount can be expected to shoulder the blame alone. Perhaps the sensor failed woefully early, and there may be an angle there, but anyone experienced in aviation (or critical systems of any kind) should be able to tear down that line of reasoning.

It's still looking like Boeing's can to carry, if you ask me.

As an aside, somebody on the radio this morning was demanding to know why it took two fatal crashes and the deaths of 300 people to reveal what was at fault. Not sure what her point was, as a single crash can be attributed to anything - especially when the crash report for Lion Air isn't ready yet. One crash is an accident. Two in the same way is a problem. The de Havilland Comet took 3 fatal crashes before they grounded the things, and the only reason they didn't kill 300 people in that time is that they could only carry 40-odd passengers.

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

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Re: Scary people in IT

I used to keep pet rats. It was fascinating watching them learn from each others mistakes.

Smart little rodents. Smarter than many people I've worked with.

/me looks in mailbox and learns that giving the new web hosts line-by-line CLI instructions to install the certificate has, in fact, worked. Unlike expecting them to do their damn jobs.

As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view

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Re: Pointless

But then so is .com. Of course, how many companies in the USA have a .us domain?

Hello, tech support? Yes, I've run out of desk... Yes, DESK... space

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My son drew a troll-face on a bit of paper and taped it to my mouse. 9 years old. Wee bugger...

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Re: A modern twist

A dozen upvotes so far. I've worked with Windows servers since 1996, and I had to look up how to shutdown Server 2012 - much the same thing.

Stupid "charms"... It was so intuitive that they did away with it for 2012R2.

Prince Harry takes a stand against poverty, injustice, inequality? Er, no, Fortnite

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"he and his wife launched an Instagram account earlier this week amid great fanfare"

...and apparently swiped some poor bugger's Instagram handle without so much as a by-your-leave.

Not exactly any skin off my nose, but that one seemed rather rude.

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

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Re: Testing in the real world

Well, obviously you have to have multiple tests, with the conditions as similar as possible, so you'll need a bunch of drunken mates around the same size, and a number of new, undamaged vests.

Then you need a control group to test if it was actually the vest that stopped the bullet.

Finally, after years of dunking on Magic Leap, El Reg's Kieren tries out the techno hype goggles. And the verdict...

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I'm glad this article came out on the 2nd

I wouldn't have believed the headline on Monday.

Bit nippy, is it? Hive smart home users find themselves tweaking thermostat BY HAND

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Adjust the thermostat BY HAND??

Like some kind of SAVAGE??!

I'd rather freeze.

Ignore the noise about a scary hidden backdoor in Intel processors: It's a fascinating debug port

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Re: Apple 4K DRM broken

Maybe they should upgrade from an SDTV then...

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

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Poor quality stiffies. There's a pill for that.

Or it could be late in the lifespan of the floppy when drives were made shoddily badly and the head alignment was a bit "variable", but that timescale doesn't easily line up with your 1.2MB discs.

But we hired a consultant, cries UK pensions biz as it swallows £40k fine for 2 million spam emails

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Re: "hired a marketeer to use third party email providers"

So you had a massive list of honeypot mailboxes? Doesn't seem much use... :)

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

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Re: minor in comparison

Hasn't everyone put the wrong RS232 cable into an APC UPS? Ah - the good old days before we all started putting NICs into our UPSs...

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Be careful about differentiating by colour

There are many people who are red/green colourblind. Not going to do them a whole lot of good.

I say go with the shroud.

We fought through the crowds to try Oculus's new VR goggles so you don't have to bother (and frankly, you shouldn't)

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Gimp

Re: Been waiting...

If you can't have fun strapping something on, are you even trying?

Brit Parliament online orifice overwhelmed by Brexit bashers

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Re: The only conspiracy

That'll be like the time a mate and I mixed up the rules for Star Wars drinking game and took a swig every time R2D2 beeped. Little bastard doesn't shut up for the first 45 minutes at least! I remember the two of us muttering "a presence I've not felt sinsssssss" and falling off the sofa giggling.

Ouch.

Brexit text-it wrecks it: Vote Leave fined £40k for spamming 200k msgs ahead of EU referendum

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Re: Dodgy behavior by Vote Leave? @Snowy, Joe W

I was trying to suggest to my dad that we should have a second referendum, with all of the clear factors laid out in a yes/no fashion:

Do you want free trade?

Do you want open borders?

Do you want common standards for products?

etc etc.

Anything that gets over 50% will then be a part of the Government's attempted deal. If nothing gets over 50% we drop out with no deal and start from scratch.

He (a Brexiteer, but supporter of the European Common Market) decided that that was arse-backwards and we should plummet out and negotiate our way into the bits we want, rather than negotiating out of the bits we don't just now. So it seems that you literally can't please everyone.

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Re: Dodgy behavior by Vote Leave?

The Prime Minister stating publically and directly that the result would be implemented

And he had no right to do so. For a referendum to be binding takes an act of Parliament. That's why, after the referendum, Parliament then had to vote on whether to actually implement it. But no - it was a power-play within the Tory Party which was such a sure thing that the PM promised to deliver whatever the result was*, and didn't set a sensible threshold to permit total upheaval of the country.

*In retrospect, we should all have scored out the options and written "free ice cream" instead.

Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes

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Re: MCAS is more like lane keeping technology and auto braking

I've read 50kg needed to be applied to counter the effect of MCAS. I tell you what - you try pulling back 50kg, just to straighten your dive, and then more to try to pull out.

Even if you can split this load between both yokes, that's still a hell of a load to try to sustain. From the sound of things, this looks like what Boeing is going to address. By limiting MCAS to 1/4 authority that 50kg can be dropped to 12.5kg, plus additional input to raise the nose. That's doable for a while in an emergency.

What it doesn't do, though, is address the one-input issue.

The knives are out for cloud gaming as Nvidia flashes blade-based box packing 40 RTX GPUs

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Re: Hard to say how that flies

That's what I was thinking. What's the latency on this. I mean, a Steam Link into the living room is one thing with <1ms lag on the network. Then you just have the encoding/decoding lag. But is you stick a broadband link in there?

Given how much people have moaned about HDMI latency and "Game Mode" on their tellies, I'm honestly not feeling it. Also, we're back to the pay-every-month model.

IBM servers crashed in Q4 – just sales, not the mother of all outages

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Pint

Re: There's just no reason to buy IBM

Yeah - just realised you're quite right. I'd forgotten it had all gone over to Lenovo.

Still, I'm not going to let that get in the way of a good IBM moan. Especially when these affected servers were all IBM-badged.

Lunch-beers. That's what'll sort it!

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There's just no reason to buy IBM

We have a fleet of x3550 m<something I can't remember right now>, and the hardware is no better than the HPs or Dells I've used in the past. And when I had to raise a high-priority support call regarding overheating CPUs, apparently our 8-hour response was 8 "working" hours, despite the fact that we had 24x7 maintenance on them. Then nobody actually attended the machine for a week! I'd shoved it into VMware Maintenance Mode, so so damage done there, but we were down a resource for all that time.

Guy turned up. Inadequate thermal paste from the factory. He also said the other CPU was looking a bit light. He fixed it and went in its way, with much cooler temperature readings.

The end of the story? Not likely! Next time I was in the datacentre, I was performing CPU upgrades on a couple of machines, and saw first-hand the inadequate thermal paste on the machines I was working on. So that was sorted out during the replacement. I then went through the remaining machines and re-pasted them all. Finally got to the one that had been "fixed", Decided I might as well, and opened it up. Then spent about 30 minutes cleaning out thermal paste that looked like it had been applied with a shovel.

Do our fleet of IBM servers work? Yes.

Do they work as well as the HP or Dell equivalent? Yes, I reckon so.

Would I buy IBM in the future? Hell, no.

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

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Group Policy is your friend.

Redirect My Documents etc. Hide the C/D/E drives. Map a home drive to hold their crap. Do this early before they start filling the local drive with pish.

On the other hand, fixing these little loopholes just means that the user find something even more ludicrous and obscure to trip up over.

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Drive mirroring.

Yeah, you know the old one. Replace the dud drive in a mirror set and accidentally mirror the new drive onto the existing data...

Never did it myself, but in my NetWare days, my boss did it. To the backup tapes!

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

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Re: "While you're here, could you just..."

Actually, literally bleeding air out of the radiators.

Also rewiring plugs, setting clocks, changing labels on the entryphone, moving furniture and clearing out cupboards.

Basically the crap jobs that everyone else thought they were too good for.

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Re: "While you're here, could you just..."

Entirely this. Bleeding radiators turned into IT's (my) responsibility in a previous job.

The HeirPod? Samsung Galaxy Buds teardown finds tiny wireless cans 'surprisingly repairable'

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Re: Wireless?

being hit from behind isn't as likely to result in your untimely exit from this plane of existence

The fuck?! If you're getting hit from behind it's because some arsehole has driven into you, whilst you've gradually filled more and more of their windscreen as they took aim. I appreciate that this argument isn't really going to change things at your inquest, but still - if that's what you're hanging your reasoning on it's pretty tenuous.

1) Sometimes I wear my isolating earphones on my motorbike. I can still hear more than I can in the car unless I turn them up too loud.

2) Sometimes I do turn them up too loud. Yeah - sorry about that.

3) The last time somebody nearly drove into the back of me I was on the M42 and had to wring the throttle to rapidly vacate the space that the tool was racing into. Mirrors (and paying attention to them) saved my arse that day. Even without music on, I'd never have heard that white van.

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

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But isn't that all the time.

Bat people??!

Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches

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Re: "US, Canada finally ground 737 Max jets..."

I wonder who is writing the software for this aircraft system.

Software people. They tend to rely on the hardware world being perfect, because the hardware people tent to spend a lot of time and effort masking the imperfections of the hardware world. See ECC and RAID for everyday examples. If they've been told that "this input is correct", they'll trust that the hardware group have dealt with inconsistencies outside their box.

Seriously, should this problem have not been found before these crashes?

Well, it's easy to rack up a hundred hours on a new model. Or two hundred. But a lot of these fringe problems occur so rarely, or after so many flight hours, that they'll only crop up in the wild after the testing is complete.

And what does that say about the testing process?

It is, by necessity, limited. What it says about the project overview, though, is that somebody slipped up with insufficient inputs to the flight computer, insufficient alerts for the pilots, or both. That or somebody was utterly negligent.

Most people can't (or won't) think in terms of "how can this fail". They don't want it to, so they don't think about it. The people who design these systems tend to be in the group who say "but what if" until everyone else gets bored and goes home. Somewhere, somebody didn't say "but what if" on this. Or (more likely in my opinion) they were overruled by somebody higher up who needed to ship and isn't of the paranoid mindset to consider just how badly things might go.

In other words:

Could it be a case of "Get it out the door, marketing is making a fuss."? - could be.