* Posts by Gnoitall

60 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2011

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BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Gnoitall
Pint

Re: Cynicism? It's just another word for experience

"I'm not a cynic. I'm a realist."

A pint to you and a round for all who keep fighting, even knowing how futile is all can be.

Disk stuck in the drive? Don't dilly-Dali – get IT on the case!

Gnoitall
Trollface

Let's not over-egg it, shall we?

Starship bloopers: Watch Elon Musk's Mars ferry prototype explode on the pad during liquid nitrogen test

Gnoitall
Facepalm

Re: Wasn't planned

He missed the trick, then.

"That. Uh. That was totally supposed to happen. Totally. Planned test to destruction. Success!"

There's very good precedent. NASA did it with SLS.

https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/nasa-engineers-break-sls-test-tank-on-purpose-to-test-extreme-limits.html

Game over, man: Microsoft test engineer who laundered stolen Xbox credits into $10m guilty of fraud

Gnoitall
Coat

> Microsoft's Fraud Investigation Strike Team (FIST)

Also known as the Microsoft 501st Legion, Lord Nadella's Fist.

Mine's the one with the lightsaber in the pocket.

Your McDonald's demo has expired. For full functionality, please purchase a licence or try another fast-food joint

Gnoitall

That's my theory. Franchisees are supposed to do everything the "McDonald's Way", but enforcement is variable. Maybe the franchise's management thought they could skate on a demo version (not listening to any professional IT support they may have had).

Franchise operators are notorious for pushing the envelope in favor of profits in ways that company stores are never allowed to even think about.

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Gnoitall
Trollface

Re: Bought one a few weeks ago

The other way to know is if you can't power the thing using the USB-C power supply of your choice. Which is a useful fallback test if you can't power the thing to muck around with /proc.

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Gnoitall
Facepalm

Not as severe as "rm -rf", but I rebooted the production server thinking it was the test server.

I was at the test server console. But I was reusing a terminal window that I didn't realize was SSH'd to the prod server. First inkling I had a problem is when the test server didn't shut down its display. SSH closing was the second. The dismayed phone calls from the prod server's user community was the last.

Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches

Gnoitall
Facepalm

The court-mandated back pay will be a nice bump to the final paychecks of all of those soon-to-be-ex-employees who foolishly choose personal gain over loyalty to their Fruit-themed Overlords.

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

Gnoitall
Happy

Removing the stairs was a necessary step in assuring that the leopard stayed in the basement.

Microsoft ups the ante with fix-fixing patch that leaves some Windows Server 2008 machines unable to boot

Gnoitall
FAIL

It's all turning very Monty Python, with all the fixing and the fix-fixing and the fix-fixing-fixing.

I'll wait for the llamas before I install that update.

Hey GitLab, the 1970s called and want their sexism back: Saleswomen told to wear short skirts, heels and 'step it up'

Gnoitall
Trollface

"Core Values"

Never forget, the core is the part you throw away after consuming all the good stuff.

Checks out.

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

Gnoitall
Boffin

There is an international standard, though

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) Recommended Standard 702.1-B-1 IP Over CCSDS Space Links (https://public.ccsds.org/Pubs/702x1b1c1.pdf)

Supports IPv4 and IPv6 over existing uplink/downlink/crosslink communications protocols. Which SpaceX will have to use if they're not going to roll up their own ground facility network. Existing teleport facilities and COTS use CCSDS protocols.

Hey, ICANN, if you need good reasons to halt the .org super-sell-off, here are two: Higher fees, more website downtime

Gnoitall
Facepalm

There's a consistent weakness in this kind of argumentation

Techies usually argue technical characteristics. Which is great, if you're arguing with fellow techies.

Beancounters, executives and politicians, though? None of those downsides affect any thing they care about, and you're not going to be able to make them care. And the argument they don't care about is the one they'll ignore, and get mad at the techie if they persist.

Space Force is go, go, go! Because we have a child as President of the United States

Gnoitall
FAIL

Why didn't we get to vote for Branson? He built a spaceport and got the Mexicans to pay for it!

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Gnoitall
Devil

A Fine Old Legal Adage Explains Oracle's Strategy

"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table"

Oracle is furiously pounding on the table.

Ye olde Blue Screen of Death is back – this time, a bad Symantec update is to blame

Gnoitall
Devil

Re: The irony is strong in this one

> Endpoint Protection Client. Yeah.

The endpoint that can't boot is the endpoint which can't be attacked or compromised. Mission Accomplished.

> This kind of situation is always hilarious - when you're not among the ones affected, that is.

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” -- Mel Brooks

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Gnoitall
Devil

The phrase "User Experience" is misleading

People expect it to mean "Good, desirable, enjoyable User Experience."

None of those qualifiers are actually present. Only in the heads of the unenlightened and irrationally optimistic.

Bad User Experience? Still "User Experience".

"Hellish, Kafkaesque, want-to-slit-my-wrists User Experience?" Yup, still counts.

So yes, it's all well-designed User Experience. After all, if it puts you off from bothering Customer Service, the costs of Customer Service goes down. Mission Accomplished. The best Customer Service department is the one that costs absolutely nothing to operate because no one can figure out how to Experience it as a User. It's just more subtle than "Go Away And Stop Bothering Us" User Experience.

Working as designed.

Remember the FBI's promise it wasn’t abusing the NSA’s data on US peeps? Well, guess what…

Gnoitall
Black Helicopters

We're living in Blade Runner now, except for the flying cars

You know the score, pal! If you're not cop, you're little people.

And rules are for little people.

When the satellite network has literally gone glacial, it's vital you snow your enemy

Gnoitall
Alert

Re: Ah, those laser links....

The critter was just testing fallback to RFC1149 transport.

Weather forecasters are STILL banging on about 5G clashing with their sensors. As if climate change is a big deal

Gnoitall
Boffin

Re: And in the UK and Europe...

Most likely, but specific testimony in this case wouldn't be about European networks, since FCC rulemaking and bandwidth allocation has nothing to do with Europe.

Assuming 5G uses the same spectrum world 'round, EUMETSAT's Meteosat family have downlink frequencies in the same place as NOAA's satellites (in the frequency band under discussion or immediately adjacent), used for the same reasons. So same problem as NOAA's rightfully complaining about.

Not just weather sats, though: all current satellite navigation systems use adjacent frequencies in this same frequency band, so if 5G gets deployed big expect GPS/GALILEO/GLONASS to get harder to use or slower to lock.

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Gnoitall
Childcatcher

Re: Great post

I remember discovering this as a kid doing my own little electrolysis experiment.

Wires for electrode, 9v battery, a couple of test tubes from my chemistry set, nice glass of water to be electrolyzed.

I couldn't find the box of baking soda (as recommended by the directions I was reading) to make the water conductive at 9v, but I figured table salt would work.

It did, brilliantly, but when I did the "glowing splint in the anode gas" test (ember should have flared into flame in the concentrated oxygen), it extinguished instantly and then I got a diluted whiff of chlorine gas. That was an eye-watering wakeup.

Now banks of batteries off-gassing elemental chlorine into an enclosed metal tube full of sailors... that would be really unpleasant.

Kids can be so crurl: Lead dev unchuffed with Google's plan to remake curl in its own image

Gnoitall
Angel

Google is the new Apple

Apple used to be famous for "we invented it first and best, even if someone invented it before us." They've exhibited that attitude less lately, probably due to the gradual erosion of the RDF since the ascension of Saint Steven of Cupertino.

Now we know where that arrogance went: 9 miles down the road, to Mountain View.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Gnoitall
Trollface

C'mon, it's like you're barley trying!

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Gnoitall
Facepalm

Re: @Dave 126 ... you know someone

The main green credentials Apple is interested in is the color of hundred-dollar bills.

Boeing nowhere fast: Starliner space taxi schedule slips once again to August

Gnoitall
Alert

Re: BS

I'm just amazed ULA is allowing itself to be scapegoated* for schedule problems caused by Boeing's development issues.

*I mean, the last I looked ULA hasn't pushed back. Maybe they think "it'll all be worth it when they pay us, and we don't want SpaceX getting this business just because we objected out loud and made the customer look bad."

iFixit surgeons tut at iPad mini 5 X-ray: Looks like a mild case of pain-in-the-arse-to-repair

Gnoitall
Holmes

Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.

We all know Apple is living in the Bravest of New Worlds.

Lip-reading smart speakers: Just what no one always wanted

Gnoitall
Big Brother

The Sweet, Sweet '80s

Cheers, Dabbsy, for all the wonderous 1980s memories.

Except for that one unfortunate year.

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.”

How'd your servers get that baby-smooth look? Dutch and Brit cool kids dunk Supermicro systems in synthetic oil

Gnoitall
Flame

May be more than just magic smoke

Jokes about the computer working hot enough to catch fire won't be that funny when the coolant ignites.

Russian sailors maroon themselves in Bristol Channel after drunken dinghy ride goes awry

Gnoitall
Facepalm

Wait. Flat Holm has a lighthouse. And sailors know that a lighthouse means "don't come here, you'll run aground".

And they ran aground there??

What kind of sailors were these? I hope "Russian" isn't a sufficient explanation for such incompetent basic seamanship.

Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k

Gnoitall
Gimp

I keep filtering this story through the BOFH's eyes

If a hell-desk minion rotated into my perfectly stable work ticket queue and disrupted it by actually fixing a harmless luser issue... well, I know that Simon's and PFY's response would involve a roll of carpet and a dumpster, not impotent fuming.

From MySpace to MyFreeDiskSpace: 12 years of music – 50m songs – blackholed amid mystery server move

Gnoitall
Devil

The Truth Would Have Served Better

The PR spin is predictably disingenuous.

Still, the best defense is a strong offense. They should have been blunt.

Why, yes. We did "lose" those files. Over a year ago. And you only just now noticed. Obviously, not very important to you, were they?

Facebook blames 'server config change' for 14-hour outage. Someone run that through the universal liar translator

Gnoitall
Devil

Re: Facebook was down?

If Facebook were a little more honest (or, more realistically, a little more arrogant), they'd borrow a line from Lily Tomlin's "Ernestine" character: "We're Facebook. We don't care. We don't have to."

BOFH: Bye desktop, bye desk. Hello tablet and a beanbag on the floor

Gnoitall
Unhappy

Simply Brilliant, of course

but sometimes it makes me sad that BOFH actually has to explain his warnings to the thickest of PHBs.

A joke you have to explain is very sad. A threat you have to explain is even sadder, even if (given the dim-wittedness of the target)it's likely.

Roses are red, this is sublime: We fed OpenAI's latest chat bot a classic Reg headline

Gnoitall
Trollface

GPT-2 can't hold a candle to amanfromMars.

Because GPT-2 doesn't have hands.

Head of Apple's insider trading program charged with… you guessed it... insider trading

Gnoitall

Awkward Conversation

"My job is to make sure no one else does any insider trading."

"Wait, what? Your job is to make sure no one at all does any insider trading, including you."

" wat... ಠ_ಠ "

World's favourite open-source PDF interpreter needs patching (again)

Gnoitall

Re: Hardly surprising.

PDF is an extension of PostScript, although I have a sense that their threat surfaces are not 100% congruent. Still, it takes very little imagination to envision a core PostScript attack that is also viable in PDF's "PostScript at the bottom" nature.

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

Gnoitall
Trollface

They're GREAT!

"They changed the caption on all the software's acknowledgement buttons from the stolidly neutral "OK" to the inappropriately Tiggerish "GREAT!". It is not GREAT! when I am forced to admit to yet another rout. Nor is it GREAT! that I have completed the challenge to get a Bronze Mystery Box and special badge, or the other ridiculous trinkets now annoyingly added to the game."

I heard every single one of those "GREAT!"s in the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft, AKA Tony the Tiger.

Cool fact: Thurl Ravenscroft was from the US "Midlands": Norfolk, Nebraska.

Houston, we've had a problem: NASA fears internal server hacked, staff personal info swiped by miscreants

Gnoitall

Deeply Ironic "News"

United States Space Command already existed, from 1995 to 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Command

It was stood down because it was redundant. The mission itself was being accomplished by other commands and agencies, including US Strategic Command. Which inherited the space mission after USSPACE was disestablished.

This isn't even a proper half-measure to a "Space Force." This is just a feeble excuse to bump up the number of general officer billets.

Autonomous vehicle claims are just a load of hot air… and here's why

Gnoitall
Devil

Correcting tea misinformation

Quoth Dabbsy:

My immediate conclusion is that Koreans are as bad as the French at making tea. As anyone in the civilised world knows, tea must be prepared using boiling water

As anyone in the civilized world knows, tea must be prepared using water approximately 25 degrees below boiling. One does not boil civilized tea. (I.e., green tea. Thus saith the civilizations that invented the stuff, including the Koreans.)

Only poseurs pretend wilted oxidized tea is better.

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Gnoitall

Chekhov's PDU

“They looked fairly sturdy,” The PFY sighs.

“Oh yeah, you could beat someone to death with them but you wouldn’t want to use one,” Dave blurts.

Not cool, dude: Brit web host Hotchilli Internet freezes itself for good

Gnoitall

Closed to serve you better

And not at all ironic

BOFH: We want you to know you have our full support

Gnoitall
Pint

Simon will look back on this

with a degree of gratitude to PFY. When you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss reaches up and drags you into it. It really sounded like Simon had fallen into a fugue state, mentally trapped in the Support Maze. And PFY retrieved him, yanked him back into reality, with the best tool for the job.

'Course, Simon will also zap PFY when he's not expecting it (any more), because you don't get away with that kind of s**t without consequences.

CPU bug patch saga: Antivirus tools caught with their hands in the Windows cookie jar

Gnoitall

What the AV tools have been doing

An AV tool that can't accept the Meltdown patch is an AV tool which has been silently exploiting the Meltdown vulnerability for as long as it's been "drill[ing] deep into the kernel's internals in order to keep tabs on the system."

In other words, the AV software have been the exploiting malware we've all been worrying about, and have been for years.

Firefox 57's been quietly delaying tracking scripts

Gnoitall
Trollface

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

"The feature won't behave perfectly in every case – but that, Bambas wrote, is because some pages are simply badly written. An ill-designed page that uses Google's Page-Hiding Snippet, for example, might load as blank for a few seconds, and if a developer is sufficiently inept to refer an API of an async tracking script from a sync script, a race condition is set up."

Never ascribe to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by greed. If malvertisers can hold content hostage behind tracking and advertising, don't you think they will? Prioritizing content on the browser-side conflicts with prioritizing monetization in the page design, and guess which wins? (Unless the browser user is sane and uses anti-malvertising technology like uBlock.)

Seagate: Happy Xmas, staff – thanks for everyth... um, you 500. Can we have a word?

Gnoitall
Devil

Mighty Seagate Warriors! Good work! Congratulations on Delivering!

You've earned some time off. So take some time off. Take as much as you'd like, or until you need money again.

BOFH: Oh dear. Did someone get lost on the Audit Trail?

Gnoitall
Alert

I hope Simon is taking proper caution about depending on PFY

He has been properly treacherous when opportunity arose. Promotion in the IT department is by assassination, like in all proper hierarchies.

Trusting PFY to tidy up BOFH's audit trail as well as his own can't possibly be the only plan. I really hope there's a devastatingly good Plan B, like past experience has shown. It's critical to my conception of The Man that he's thinking at least three moves ahead of every other player.

Q. Why's Oracle so two-faced over open source? A. Moolah, wonga, dosh

Gnoitall
Devil

Claiming Oracle is "Anti Open-Source" misses the critical point

They're not Anti Open-Source.

They're Anti-competition. They're against Open Source when they think they'll be competing with it. They're completely in favor of it when they can use it to lower their internal costs or enhance their offerings. (Like as the underpinnings of their dedicated DBMS hardware.) The kind of thing that allows them to sell (and make money) while reducing the money they have to spend.

It's not about for-or-against Open Source. It's about for-or-against Oracle.

Vodafone won't pay employee expenses for cups of coffee

Gnoitall
Trollface

I'll just leave this here.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-08-24

FreeNAS sheds storage skin, tries on sexier hyperconverged garb

Gnoitall
Stop

Increased capability comes at a cost

Even if FreeNAS whatever continues to be free-as-in-beer and more or less free-as-in-freedom (BSD license and all), the extra capability -- unneeded in most current use cases -- increases complexity and correspondingly decreases reliability. If the VM or Container capability is useless to you (because it's just a NAS, dammit), that's still X thousands of lines of code that can knock down the machine unless you brutally and thoroughly neuter it from the installed configuration.

Extra unneeded capability is not a benefit, no matter what iXSystem's roadmap says.

Congratulations IBM for 'inventing' out-of-office email. You win Stupid Patent of the Month

Gnoitall
Trollface

@tekHedd

" And a person must be responsible for the consequences of her actions. There you go."

Alas, the Patent Office Corporation Person would be a Government Person, and therefore damn near immune to the consequence of its (official) actions. (Per sovereign immunity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States). If the PTO was acting in accordance with their official policy and direction, they're untouchable.

Must be nice to be a Corporate Government Person.

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