Posts by Joe W

One of our IT Security guys did that. He's now retired, a well deserved retirement, mind you!

He also sometimes left chocolate at desks with locked screens.

Re: Nice to see the old ways are not forgotten

It's good sense, you work people until they drop dead, which makes retirement funds and caring for the elderly unnecessary. It also creates new job openings...

Re: 42% less unix philosophy

The same author also made quite a mess with pulseaudio, so... yeah.

Re: Firewall or AI

That's the beauty: The Dream works system agnostic and is indeed truely scalable and can be deployed through an agile CI/CD process, making full use of the containerisation (the containers are likely... card board boxes full of the bovine output).

Re: Time to do the right thing and kick the habit.

The only game I cared about in the last decade was Dwarf Fortress... and that works

Re: The cream always rises to the top

according to the villagers in "Holy Grail" I recall other things swimming on top....

Re: The other side....

My wife's boss once told somebody who treated his employees badly that only he had the right to shout at them, after all, he does pay them. Customers are free to shout at him (they pay him), at which point he might rethink doing business with them.

Note that he does not shout (as this is not the correct way to treat people).

Re: Now there's a real rocket scientist

Most scientists and engineers working in roles close to science (like at NASA, ESA, university labs etc.) really enjoy their jobs. I know I did, but the job opportunities are getting more scarce as you move up the ladder in your qulifications and work experience. Many positions are fixed term (one to four years), and then you have to move on. There are tenured positions, but those are basically through a dead man's (or woman's) shoes... You need to be pretty good as a scientist and brilliant in getting research funds (yes, that order) and of course bloody lucky.

WFH? You wish...

The companies that do this kind of ... shite ... are thsoe that want to see backs in the office, butts on chairs.

I can read ElReg at work just as well as in the home office. As the BOFH remarked at home there was (in the olden times with a single income family) at least the possibility that those slackers would get trouble from their wife when she finds out they are just slacking off.

On the other hand "thankfully, a snipped of code that redirects users clicking on the 'about us' link to a random porn site looks 'just like the matrix'..." (also BOFH)

Re: I had no idea

Thanks for posting this.

I have nothing else to add...

Re: AI uses - writing emails, transcribing meetings, managing files... wtf?

And this happens:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/21/new_york_times_lawyers_openai/

"The bot ate my homework."

Re: Anglo-Saxon names?

Ha! Well spotted! To be fair, weren't those the names in the article (which did not put them in a biblical background)?

Re: In this case

Well... this was not (openly) about "vote republican", bat rather "support this and that thingy", so no need to vote for Trump to be (allegedly) elegible - but of course you never were elegble, and that is the problem.

Still, yes, you get the eejits in charge you voted for, and their cronies who you absolutely knew about, and they will see the country similarly as the governor of Korsika did in the Asterix comic book. They even said so. And still you voted for them. Pity for the rest of the world, but sorry, you do get what you apparently wanted so badly. Just sucks to be poor, coloured, female, have a non-traditional lifestyle (in any way, family, sexuality, personality, or whatever they will target now), work in science (unless you develop big weapons), or are not a billionaire.

Yes, over where I am people vote for eejits as well, though so far we have been spared the worst idiots - until the next election at least.

Re: The study is behind a paywall

Somebody has to pay for which costs exactly? As a peer reviewer I work for free....

Yes, there's typesetting and general manuscript wrangling, and I really enjoyed the times when I got some motivated typesetter who did actually catch an inconsistent notation in the maths (vectors should look like this, tensors should be that, use upper case greek for these things... ). We had some disagreement about points, but in the end it was a good process. So there (an open access journal) things went very well. The university did cough up the publication costs, they had a special grant to make things open access. So, yes, there are some costs, and those need to be covered somehow.

Re: Not quite the range...

Nah, not here.... paperwork in overpopulated Europe is a nightmare. I have friends in Canada who indeed have a light aircraft on their farm.

About the "land clear", it's that plus 600m above the highest point in 2km radius, but both are unless you are taking off or landing (which you would be in this case). IFR rules are maybe different, not sure what "automated remote operation" falls under. The closest city is almost completely under D, plus C is at 1500ft MSL for the rest (my home inlcuded) due to $(big_international_airport). Some of my friends and club mates are CVFR (and some IFR) certified, and they sometimes do midfield crossings at the above-mentioned airport and buzz the city on slow days, just to do some sightseeing :) (I stick to real flying, i.e. gliders, no FNC (fuel to noise converters) for me... and alas no sightseeing ;) ).

To be honest, I thought there'd be a space sneaking in between the variable name and the "/bin"...

Re: 8.5 seconds...

Oooh, yes!

I got bitten by this as well. Somehow my Bitlocker-Password didn't work :D - imagine my amazement when I told it to show me what I typed in...

Now the stupid thing is that the "num lock" is persistent after reboot, which is annoying if you use a full sized keyboard at the office and the laptop without a keyboard on the road / at the dinner table.

You surely meant to write:

Don't forget that the media is controlled by billionnaire assholes, but that is politely ignored, and those people like to help each other.

(unless you felt that by mentioning only one aspect of the two you stated in the above sentence did imply those)

Re: not IFixIt

Are they legal? They need to disable the software locks to make the machine great again...

My guess is they either don't offer the same features as the iFixit one, making a full diagnose and repair unnecessarily difficult, or they are illegal....

Re: There's no such thing as "daylight saving time" in the UK

It saves no daylight.

It is the clock setting we have in summer.

Which one is more descriptive?

Back when regular travelling was neccessary for my job I was really fond of netbook-sized machines. A 14" screen is almost too big for my then usecase. It was always fun to see guys struggle with their ginormous laptops (>14" screens), which were impossible to work on in the cheap seats of an airplane :D

I had a Samsung netbook and later a small 14" Lenovo. The Samsung was perfectly sized, the Lenovo almost too big. Battery life was ok (Samsung >10 hrs! Lenovo only... 8-ish), which is the second constraint I had.

I was also commuting >3hrs / day to one of my jobs, and the netbooks worked very well for that purpose.

Nowadays I care sweet FA, I only travel nationally by train, and my employer springs fro 1st class - ample space for me. And you can order your beer to your seat.

The US have aircraft carriers and F35s (and also some planes that actually do work) - not sure if $(south-east-asian-reviewfarm) has them as well...

What they are going after is US companies that buy reviews for their products. Every little bit helps. No, it won't help us on the other side of the pond.

Re: Semantics

That.

My current workplace has datacentres. We provide applications and data to our distributed user base. I wonder what we are "missing" by not "moving to the coud" - i.e. replacing our datacentres with that of a third party... Sorry, cannot see the point.

Using AI, which is know to halluzinate and return wrong answers, is clearly the way to do any kind of research. Much like Wikipedia - several things are pretty good, other things are written by people with no clue or those trying to push their version of the story. And no, you just cannot correct the pages, as the old state will be restored within a short period of time.

Re: sounds par for the course.

Proof: Redmond is an obvious contraction of red (the colour) and Mond = German für moon, so red moon, which is as commie as you can get a place name without calling it Commie Mc Commieville....

Interesting (and, unfortunately) sound reasoning.

I'd still like to have it. I like having a wireless headset...

Now I need to dust off one of my old laptops and give it a try. On that machine, bluetooth has never been working for me (not reliably, that is), so nothing really lost...

Re: What time do you mean

I'd take that information in any time zone, provided it is clearly communicated. Preferrably with (UTC +2) or somesuch (this one would be CEST, which is not "Central Eastern Standard Time" if such a thing exists, which is why "common names" should not be used.)

Of couse I would prefer a string like 20241021Z0920, which even TSQL should interprete correctly....

Re: There are already tasks in Jira

"Then maybe Atlassian could start fixing the huge pile of bugs issues in Jira.

TFTFY