Posts by lglethal

Yeah Elon was for the 2010's, I think we can give the 20's to Altman...

If he lasts the decade, of course...

Re: Dumbf*cks!

Hey we are at least beginning to watch for asteroids in the sky. And there's even been the odd mission to test out deflection technologies (see DART).

So we ARE learning from the dinosaurs mistakes...

Re: Air-o-space

No that was the shitty piece of Russian quality control on a Russian segment. Nothing to do with Boeing.

There's enough actual shit to be hitting Boeing with at the moment (the Calamity Capsule, for example), no need to make up fake bollocks.

And if you truly believe an astronaut would drill a hole in their own spaceship, then you Sir, are a moron...

Re: Corporate Culture

Our IT department does quite a lot of phishing awareness trainings, and for a while they have been sending out emails to try and trick people. They've upped the ante in the last month by sending messages purporting to come from people within your department or to whom you are in regular contact.

Now I should preface this by saying that I work in Germany, but I am not German, and my German grammar is atrocious. (I blame that on German grammar being a dog's dinner, but that's neither here nor there)... A colleague received one of these phishing emails purporting to come from me. He claims he knew instantly that the email hadn't come from me - the grammar was too good!

Considering all the phishing emails I've had from Nigerian Princes and their atrocious grammar, I'm not quite sure how to feel that my bad grammar identifies my emails as legitimate instead... :P

OK and now reframe it so that, even though you enjoy your job, it carries a significant risk of you being imprisoned for your work for the next 10-20 years, at any time and without any warning.

Still happy to keep working at that job? Or perhaps you'd move to one, paying less, but doing something similar, but which doesnt carry a risk of imprisonment? No? Still happy to keep risking prison for more money? I call bollocks...

Allow the Telcos to continue to charge for the cost of the Robo calls without ever delivering them. Everyone wins! (Except for the scum making the robocalls, of course. Which is a definite bonus, no?).

Re: FFS.

It's a lovely idea to airgap, but the reality is rather less convenient.

Take a simple example, a patient wants to make an appointment to see a specific specialist. In the air-gapped system, they send an email to the secretary on the internet connected system who responds, booking the appointment on the internet connected system.

They then need to move to the air-gapped system, and enter the details (with the inherent risk of copying details wrongly), into the air-gapped system, and book the relevant appointment. But what if in the meantime, someone on the internal air-gapped system has already booked that appointment slot?

Now they have to move back to the internet connected system, recontact the patient, propose a new time, and go through the whole rigamarole again. Massive time lost, that the secretary could be doing other things, or dealing with other patients.

Airgapping is great in certain environments, but in a public hospital where patients need to make appointments, doctors need to access medical records (likely from external sources), as well as access results from internal testing, and bring that data together into one coherent report, as well as all the other work that goes on in a hospital computer network, it is neither practical or possible to create an airgapped system to protect all patient data.

The best you can do is try and lock the system down as much as possible, with proper access levels, etc. and keep monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...

Re: Linus being shouty is not really news

Your right, Jake I dont have a clue about the specifics of Linux. It's never interested me. I DO know about volunteering though, and I guarantee that if you start abusing volunteers in a normal setup then you quickly lose those volunteers.

What Doctor Syntax below wrote about most of the contributors now being paid by their firms to contribute, goes a long way to explaining a lot, about why people may be willing to put up with it. People will put up with a lot of sh%te when they're paid too.

I also stand by my comment that shouting in the workplace is completely unprofessional and counterproductive.

You can disagree with my comments specifically about Linux, perhaps I should have left out the last line in my first comment. But I was mainly answering Khaptain's comments that getting to shouting matches at work is fine. I disagree. Strongly.

Re: "Suffered no loss"?

I believe it would be more along the lines of if NSO starts selling new or continues to sell existing rootkits for Apple devices, then Apple would bring more cases. Such cases would likely be very quick due to the injunction (I'm assuming Apple win of course). And such cases of breaking an Injunction willfully, usually involve massive fines, and often actually hold upper management personally responsible and in contempt of court.

Whilst there's nothing to stop NSO shutting down and reopening under a new name. It would likely prove pretty easy to show it's the same firm, the same directors, owners, managers, etc. and judges as a rule dont generally like having the pi$$ taken. So whilst it would take a bit longer, the hammer would likely still come down pretty damn hard...

Re: Have you ever seen the ra.......hololens?

I dont think Hololens is sold to consumers. It's designed and marketed for firms (and defence). I've known of a few firms who have used it (and rated it highly) for things like Inspections, where the glasses can show what the routing should look like, whilst the inspectors checks what it looks like in reality. I've also heard of it being used in training applications.

Various reports say it has sold enough copies for Microsoft to keep happily working on it, which in the realm of AR/VR counts as a rip roaring success.

But judging the success by what you see "in the wild" is not particularly useful for a non-consumer grade product. I dont often see Chiron 5 axis CNC machines in the wild, but that doesnt mean they're not a wildly successful brand after all... ;)

Re: Got to love the USA...

IR35 was in theory a good thing, as far too many firms were abusing it. However, the implementation was a complete shitshow, and has killed off huge numbers of contracting jobs, and hurt government agencies more than probably anyone else. It is something that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but that's not likely< to happen anytime soon.

However, there's a lot of people who are or were contractors caught up in this mess that like to try to shove their complaints into any forum they can, whether they're relevant to the discussion at hand or not. I'd suggest ignoring them on any article not actually related to IR35. It is absolutely not relevant here...

Re: Way too little

Remind me never to go to Texas, or those states like it.

So that rules out the entirety of the USA...

A friend of mine told me about a time at his old company. A new boss came in, and banned all overtime pay. If you wanted, it had to be approved a week in advance, and signed off by the new Boss himself. And this was rigorously enforced. If you worked extra, you did not get paid for it...

My friend worked in Concessions. i.e the poor bastards who when production makes a mistake, work out if the part can still be used, what mods are needed to make it work, and sign off on the changes.

A very important manufactured piece that was due to be delivered the next day to the customer and had just been finished at 4pm and a mistake had been discovered. My friend's boss came to him as he was putting his coat on, and said "I need you to work this concession." my friend shrugged "Will I get paid Overtime." His Boss umm and ahhd and ended up admitting probably not because the big Boss had already sloped off home and so wouldnt be able to approve the Overtime in advance. He politely told his Boss "No Pay, No stay!" put on his coat and walked out.

The piece didnt get delivered, and there was a huge delivery penalty. The upper levels of the company exploded with indignation. The next day he was called into the Big Bosses office to get a telling off. My friend simply handed him a print out of the company policy the Big Boss had written about No overtime being allowed. Apparently, the Big Boss turned so red everyone though he was having a heartattack kicked my mate out of the office and that was the end of it.

My mate left for brighter pastures about 3 months later. The writing was clearly on the wall at that point...

Re: Tea and coffee

My colleagues had a Jura Machine in the office. Paid for by the company. My colleagues filled it with the cheapest, nastiest, Aldi Coffee they could buy. I could never understand it. Eventually they ditrched the Jura because it was apparently too much effort to clean. They now have a crappy filter machine, and still fill it with the crappiest, cheapest coffee they can buy.

Some people just have no sense of taste...

I buy my coffee from a nice coffeeshop just down from the office, in a travel mug and drink that throughout the day...(and if needed go back for refills during my breaks)..

Re: Steam retain the ability to stop you using a paid-for game without compensation.

You dont seem to know quite what you're talking about here. First Steam have stopped supporting Win 7. What that means is no more updates to Steam on a Win 7 machine. Ok that might bring security problems, but considering that Windows no longer supports Windows 7 either, Steam's security holes are probably the least of the worries.

As to Steam checking every game on their platform - perhaps you would like to know that there was 14,534 new games added to Steam last year (according to Steam DB). Considering that some of them have play times running in the 100's of hours or more (for example if you wanted to see EVERYTHING in Baldurs Gate 3, you're looking at probably 300+ hours), how on Earth are you going to check everything?

Checks are run when a game is uploaded to Steam. They look for Malware, things that will damage machines, or other nasties, but for content, mostly they have to go on what the descriptions are, and what players report. Some games are played a bit based on the descriptions and comments from the developers, but that's only a very small minority. You just couldnt do it otherwise...

Re: Sucked?

Actually No. It was sucked out of the plane. It's called Explosive Decompression. The Aircraft interior is pressurised to remain comfortable for the Meat sacks inside. When the Plug let go (apparently due to the Bolts not being tightened correctly!), the low pressure outside sucked the door and everything else in the vicinity out of the Aircraft. This is naturally, not a good thing.

They are extremely lucky that this happened at only 16,000 ft and not a higher cruising altitude (typically between 33,000 and 42,000 ft). They are also extremely lucky that everyone in the direct vicinity was still wearing seatbelts. The forces from Explosive Decompression are nothing to be sneered at...

Certainly sounds like they're management material...

Why wait for answers when you can be the first to fling a rock?

Re: PostIt Note Security

Assuming your a firm with locked premises and we're not taking areas where customers/suppliers/or the competition regularly walk through, I dont really have a problem with using Post-it note reminders. Maybe not the entire password but if it's something like "B_101" to remind them of their 15 digit password, than that's fine. Also usernames should not be on the Post-it at the same time obviously.

If someone is in your premise, and with enough time alone to take note of passwords on post-it notes then you have bigger security problems than just having the odd password stolen...

Re: NASA, again, proves its worth

Not to disagree with what you wrote. But Mars Express is an ESA Spacecraft.

So it's not just NASA that can achieve awesome space results.

When you get people who are passionate about their work, and are given enough leeway to actually make it work, and have management who realise what is actually needed for success, you can achieve amazing things...

"May as well just randomly scrape images off random sources."

Welcome to the World of AI Training Datasets...

Funnily enough, anytime someone of a political persuasion opens their mouth, I get that temptation. Even before the words come out...

How do you know a Politician is lying? Their mouth is moving...