* Posts by Terje

363 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2011

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Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic

Terje

Re: NLQ

Ahh back in the mists of time when HP printers were good, and small furry creatures from alpha centauri were small furry creatures from alpha centauri!

1.9m patient records exposed in healthcare debt collector ransomware attack

Terje

If we ignore the base issue at hand (medical debt) and focus on the company, I ask this simple question! It's a debt collector, why does it have medical history records at all?

If you're using older, vulnerable Cisco small biz routers, throw them out

Terje

Re: Throw away 3 year old, core, infrastructure?

While I wholeheartedly agree that not supporting 3 year old kit is unacceptable, it seems that the kit in question is of the cheap and cheerful variety with a price tag that is more like that of a cheap home router then anything else.

Eaton, Microsoft to outfit datacenters with 'grid-interactive' UPS tech

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Re: Caveat energiser

Unless the system is crap I hope that would not be the case, but you would certainly need significantly more battery capacity in the UPS to either be able to offload some of your demand during peak hours, or to backfeed into the grid without negatively affecting your own security.

The sad fact is that from a grid perspective most of the renewable energy is crap since it is unreliable and fluctuates to much both over shorter and longer timespans so that it becomes hard to keep the grid voltage / frequency stable.

BOFH: Something's consuming 40% of UPS capacity – and it's coming from the beancounters' office

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I was almost certain that the extra load would have been the the mining farm.

Oracle to release on-prem software usage tools to prep cloud switch

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I just fail to understand how Oracle still have a customer base to abuse, considering how long they have been going on like this. It just shows how many insane companies and institutions there are around that have not migrated away to something reasonable yet.

Apple and Intel likely the first to use TSMC’s 2nm node in 2025

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It may also be that they realize they won't have enough capacity on the new nodes for a number of years to cover what they project they will need. After all setting up and or retooling fabs to a new node is not quick.

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

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Mushroom

Re: Oof

I think that the main issue here is that no one seems to have come to the conclusion that having the (supposedly more commonly used) safe and gentle script and the nuke from orbit option in the same script makes it not a question of if but when something goes horribly wrong!

At last, Atlassian sees an end to its outage ... in two weeks

Terje

Re: Outsourced

Of course it's outsourced, see reference bellow (obligatory xkcd reference)

https://xkcd.com/908/

Terje

Yet another reason why I loath the drive for cloud, when it falls over (not if) you are fully at the mercy of cost optimised likely understaffed company to hopefully have a working backup and recovery system to sort it out at their leisure. When you have control over the system you are at the mercy of your own backup and recovery procedures which you yourself can influence.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

Terje

Re: Customer Code Reviews

mmm, 68k assembly, I get warm and fluffy memories from 68k assembly, so many registers to work with without having to do loads and stores to memory all the time!

Terje

A long time ago while at university writing a program in a functional programming language with an interpreter that was slightly less robust then a tissue paper ocean liner I had to insert a comment line with the text (translated) "If this comment line is removed the fing interpreter throws a fit and crashes!"...

Users complain of missing data in UK wills search service

Terje

Re: Special characters

Or simply allow Unicode straight off and doing it in reverse and specify prohibited characters (this should be done for logins as well) that way you are not arbitrarily limiting names and passwords to what the rather limited English alphabet.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

Terje

Re: PKZIP

Ahh, was just about to mention LHA the premium amiga compression of choice for the discerning bbs user :)

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch files judicial review that pauses extradition clock

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I find this issue so simple. Was the books in order? apparently they were ok by British standards of accounting.

If HP fail to do proper due diligence or fail to understand the reports given how is it anyone but HPs or HPs auditors fault?

Unless the accounting was actually breaking the law there is no way he can be guilty of anything but being a good salesman which then would set an interesting precedence.

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

Terje

Re: Turning it off

Or you could gut the insides and replace it with something not quite as incompetent.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

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Coat

Re: "C with a diacritic?"

Reverse polish notation is the only proper notation for a calculator!

Mine's the one with a HP48GX in the pocket

The monitor boom may have ended, says IDC

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Impressive???

What impressive monitor do you get for 300?

I'm currently working on persuading myself that I need another LG 27GN950 (that in my opinion is an impressive monitor) to replace my old 1440p second monitor so that I for the first time will have two identical matching ones!

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

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Coat

Why hydrazine?

There's one thing I fail to understand, and that is why use ordinary hydrazine and not for example udmh (unsymetric dimethyl hydrazine) or a mix instead? Hydrazine freezes at -2 degrees so it must be kept relatively warm while you want to keep the main part of the telescope cold. Wouldn't that be easier to do with udmh (freezes at -57 degrees)?

Mines the one with Ignition in the pocket

James Webb Space Telescope may actually truly launch this century, says NASA

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Flame

No, rocket science is easy! Rocket engineering on the other hand, that is hard...

Shrootless: Microsoft found a way to evade Apple's SIP macOS filesystem protection

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Re: Who found it?

If so why would they look at anything produced by apple?

Brit builders merchant Travis Perkins opts for Oracle after ERP disaster with Infor

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Joke

Re: and facing a maximum possible contractual exposure to about £65m

Personally I would opt for a lead free project for health and environmental reasons!

Total recall: Amazon faces legal action from US consumer protection group over hazardous goods

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Coat

Asbestos pyamas?

Children's pyjamas that are not fireproof...

Are they advocating for the use of asbestos cloth or possibly impregnating the pyjamas with fire retardant chemicals? I'm not sure either is to be recommended for children's clothing.

Mines the one with asbestos lined pockets.

Oracle files $7m copyright claim against NEC's US limb over 'unreported royalties' from database distribution

Terje

Re: Engineers

Of course you can't pay people, how on earth would Larry be able to afford another gold plated mega yacht if he did?

SteelSeries Apex Pro plays both sides of the mechanical keyboard fence – and wins

Terje

You will wrest my Cherry MX Brown Das keybord 4 professional from my cold dead hands...

Rocket Lab deploys Photon, er, in-house built satellite on Flight 14

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The fing starlink needs to die and do so fast before they screw up any chance to send anything into orbit for decades.

Adobe’s Flash fade may force vCenter upgrades unless you run dodgy browsers

Terje

Re: This is why

I think it's simply that going web based is just usually a bad thing to do, a native client will almost always be both better and faster, yet retarded analysts seems to think that everyone want to do everything in a fing browser

Vivaldi offers users a 'break' from browsing. No, don't switch to Chrome... don't sw..

Terje

May have some niche use

While I don't see myself using this feature a lot, i can think of reasons to use it, if you have some reference stuff you need to check once in a while on one monitor and doing something constructive on the other, I have had times when instead of a distracting second monitor with animated adds and other stuff a simple white page would be less distracting while still leaving it on top and available without finding the right minimised browser window.

Btw I do recommend Vivaldi as a browser.

UK utility Severn Trent tests the waters with £4.8m for SCADA monitoring and management in the clouds

Terje

What Fing moron think that a SCADA system has anything to do in the cloud. any scada system for critical infrastructure such as water should be standalone and preferably air gapped.

I can just see the scenario play out in front of me, "innocent" worker with his digger cuts fiberoptic cable.

In the control room:

Dave: Hey Steve, did you lose contact with the scada system right now.

Steve: Yes, I lost contact with everything and we can no longer talk directly to the systems because the firewalls reject every connection not directly from the scada system...

What could possibly go wrong

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Terje

Re: There is no problem

I beg to differ, with a detonation velocity of 2700 m/s it's clearly a supersonic shockwave.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Winking red supergiants sneezing hot gas 650 light years away

Terje

Re: Just brilliant

No no no, Betelgeuse is a polite star, the dimming is because of wearing a mask!

Captain Caveman rides to the rescue, solves a prickly PowerPoint problem with a magical solution

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Devil

Re: Yesterday

Graduate from the BOFH school of IT i see! :)

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

Terje

Re: Super slowmo

Last time I checked certificates can be revoked and as such should throw a warning if they are known to be compromised. And the required time for a CA to revoke a compromised certificate is waaaay shorter then one year. To me this smells like yet another poorly thought out idea that apple will try to force down everyones throat.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

Terje

Re: A Neural Network ?

Given the ephemeris of the asteroid and the known /estimated errors it's not that hard of a problem to just press fast forward on the simulation and see if you get a cross section with earth. I trust that method a whole lot more then I trust a random neural network.

You'll never select all and mark as read again after this tale of peril... Oh, who are we kidding? Of course you will

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Headmaster

Re: User problem: needed to be escalated.

Bad puns, I beg to disagree, they are at least average puns!

Astroboffins may have raged at Elon's emissions staining the sky, but all those satellites will be more boon than bother

Terje

Re: Missing the point

I would say that if you can't more or less constantly spot a satellite you are not making an effort as there are usually quite a few non geostationary ones i.e. moving ones in the sky at the same time.

Terje

Re: "I can't see the satellites, therefore they're not a problem"

Careful with the malt as alcohol even in low amounts negatively impact dark vision!

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

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Re: Keyboards

I tend to hang on to my mice as long as I can as well they are like a well worn set of trousers, best just before they fall apart, luckily I I have managed to keep my current one going for a good while now, had to replace the microswitches in it (ok, only the lmb switch was bad but might as well replace both when you have it apart) and have another set of fitting switches and replacement glide surfaces on standby when / if they decide to give up the ghost again.

Terje

Re: Keyboards

Mouse button microswitches always get crap, no matter who make the mouse, fortunately they are usually quite easy to replace with new ones.

Android owners – you'll want to get these latest security patches, especially for this nasty Bluetooth hijack flaw

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My Pixel 4 is on 1st January 2020 as well, so feels like they haven't pushed anything since then.

Cache flow problems continue for Intel: Yet more data-leaking processor design blunders discovered, patches due soon

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For most users this is a non issue, unless you are datacenter hosting different customers it may be an issue, but for mostly anyone else it's not. If a mitigation for these (to me) non issues cost performance I'm not interested.

Verity Stob is 'Disgusted of HG Wells': Time, gentlemen, please

Terje

I would love to see this made into a miniseries!

It promises to combine the best of Douglas Adams with a dose of Neil Gaiman and a generous pinch of Monty python!

Remember the Clipper chip? NSA's botched backdoor-for-Feds from 1993 still influences today's encryption debates

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Politicians have forgotten that it's not there job to give police etc anything they want but to tell them they can't have it and have to make do with what they have. No police force (or similar) in history have ever thought they have had enough rights and always complain that they need to be allowed to do X or that no one should be allowed to do Y because it makes it harder for them. if they are allowed anything they want we would end up with random people dragged off the street and tortured just because they maybe knows of some wrongdoing somewhere far sooner then anyone can imagine. The job of politicians is to tell them that they can't have everything they want and make sure they do get a painful smack if they step out of line.

Finally, a technology angle on the coronavirus outbreak: Semiconductor biz stocks slip amid China supply chain fears

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Those will be no good, what you need is a copy of pc-cilin

Chrome suddenly using Bing after installing Office 365 Pro Plus... Yeah, that might have been us, mumbles Microsoft

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There's a basic issue here that I fail to grasp.

If I open a browser and search for something I want the response from the search engine of choice be it bing, google, duckduckgo or something entirely different!

If I seach local files or a fileshare files I don't want to be told that amazon sells some tat for $X mixed in.

Why would anyone want things mixed up, sure there's a case for mixing local and fileshare but apart from that if you have no fing clue what you want you should probably not have access to it...

Ancient Ore Crusher or KillBot 2000? NASA gets ready to pick a name for its Mars 2020 Rover

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Opportunity is just refusing to answer!

https://xkcd.com/1504/

Make sure not to land it in the opposite side of the planet, maybe some upgrades to automatically run away from other rovers may be prudent as well!

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos

Terje

Re: All of this would have never happened ...

I don't know of a single new tld that have a reason to exist, there's probably a few hiding somewhere, but where are the good new tlds? Hmm, maybe I should try to get .boffin?

Autonomous Logistics Information System gets shoved off the F-35 gravy train in favour of ODIN

Terje

Re: Hum

I always fall into the same pit of not being jaded enough. When seen from this perspective it's obvious!

1. Put intern on cobbling together basic functionality time taken 2 weeks, cost ~$0

2. Let jaded developer make sure the software is no longer fir for purpose time taken between 200 and infinity weeks, cost giga$.

3. goto 1

Terje

It's amazing just how they manage to beep up these kind of systems, at the core it's really not complicated at all. Keep track of flight hours, part durability and flag up what needs to be done. This base functionality could be cobbled together by mostly anyone in a few days, of course it would not be a fit for release, and adding on preemptive parts ordering could add a few more days, but the basics are really simple, how they manage to bloat it to such a degree it entirely fails is beyond me.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Terje

It has nothing to do with Apple (a company that I personally would like to see bankrupt and left for the crows to pick on unfortunately this is not very likely in the foreseeable future.) screaming about support for 32 bit being removed for however long making them somehow not responsible.

They are fully responsible for most issues caused by this as there's no "good" reason they couldn't have kept the 32 bit API as Microsoft have, they didn't want to keep 32 bit support because some beancounter decided that it's not cost efficient and thus forcing people to either stay on an old os version or in the best case scenario buy new versions of software if it's even available if they have legacy software they need.

If you think it realistic that all or even most legacy code can be changed without massive investments of time even if the codebase itself is fairly well maintained you are deluding yourself. making fundamental changes like this requires massive amounts of work rewriting what is likely to be core functionality and in turn requiring changes in other parts of the system and so on. Once you have a barely working system comes the fun part of near infinite iterations of testing and fixing just to get back to an apparently working system.

In the case of some critical software it will simply be better sense to just drop it like in this case as the amount of trouble you may get in from a bug you didn't find combines with the years of work needed far outweighs any future sales you may have.

To me this is nothing but another sign to stay away from apples overpriced garbage.

Now let the down votes rain...

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