* Posts by Robert Carnegie

4520 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2009

Greener, cheaper, what's not to love about a secondhand smartphone?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Mmmmmm

"due to hardware or firmware vulnerability"

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Mmmmmm

Yeah... since it's happened before, there is the possibility of an evil text message or phone network connection hitting you. But that could happen due Tom's hardware or firmware vulnerability that no software update will save you from. How far could you or a related child get by using the phone just on wi fi... extremely tightly secured wi fi...

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: This must have a long time ago...

The story makes more sense to me if the CTO's work was not creating mail server software, but configuring it. As has been commented, that can be a major script writing job on its own.

A possible variation is that the CTO compiled the software from source code and/or wrote or re-wrote an "extension" module in the program.

Or again, alternatively, the CTO compiled the software with customised properties, but then it got replaced with an un-customised update.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: There's a strategy that few people employ

If they announce a song you don't like, then you can turn off. But without malice. They don't make you listen to it.

Telling you what it is at the end after telling you at the start is redundant.

These days, "radio text" often shows what title is playing, but it didn't quite work the other day... I think it was BBC Radio 3's "Words and Music" on 10 March 2014 (no presenter) playing, I forget what, a pop pastiche of Shakespeare maybe. I decided it sounded like "Weird Al Yankovic". I looked. It was. But the music following that... the screen still said "Weird Al Yankovic", until it was over. Oh, well.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Incidental Skills

"milk round" I think, you said it was a long time ago. I think it's a metaphor about a worker calling at houses early in the morning, usually, delivering a bottled milk supply. I don't see how it goes with the job search thing. Perhaps from the companies' point of view, they are going from university to university, delivering... or collecting the empties. ;-)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Lidl

My own Google "research" indicates that at home in Germany, Lidl sounds like Liesl, or Diesel, or "LEE-dill", with no actual vowel between D and L obviously. :-) I don't know why it doesn't sound like "bis" meaning "until" and which sounds like "kiss", I thought Continental languages had this sort of thing worked out, but apparently it's that.

I found one web page which as an apparent mistake, compares it to "Leisel".

But the business in the United Kingdom apparently is happy for its "Lid" to be pronounced like mid or kid or Sid, and, as you say, to rhyme as a whole with "middle".

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I wonder if anyone who scores 150% on that test is hired, or if you're supposed to be more discreet? ;-)

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Swapping things around has a risk that some part of the equipment is faulty and is killing dead anything else that is plugged into it. So when you swap parts and test, you are multiplying the damage.

It is relatively rare for the faulty and deadly unit to be the user themself, but it's possible. For instance, there are stories of synthetic fabric clothing and carpet and static electricity. Or of protuberant anatomy interfacing with the hardware when it shouldn't. Or twitching feet under the desk kicking the power supply, which may be a special case of the previous problem. Or magnets, either worn for questionable health reasons or stuck to the side of the PC case.

PlanetScale ends free tier bid, sheds staff in profitability bid

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I think I like gratitude that is less extreme.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: All search engines, now appear to be crap.

With practice - and on a PC browser - you can swipe past the "Sponsored" results. But sometimes there are a lot. They maybe have to be there to pay for the thing. We assume that users who are less aware than we are, are deceived by these. Indeed, if they weren't, then who would pay Google for being listed in sponsored results? But by sweeping them away, you are devaluing the sponsorship model. By now I don't know if I think that is good or bad.

Or I suppose you could click on the links to Amazon and ... whatever there is besides Amazon, but then you do not buy anything. Hah! But their competitors probably already do that.

A separate problem is non-sponsored results - at least they appear to be not sponsored - which nevertheless occupy pages of search with apparent commercial product that you do not want to know about, but that is using the words of the thing that you want to know about,

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Hm.

If what you're saying is accurate, "The Catch" is and are "The Tourists", so "The Tourists" is a correct answer. Same members? Same legal identity, if any?

However, if the original story is correctly stating that Bing and its user both treated (annie lennox first band) as a question, I object. It isn't a question.

I don't know, but it's conceivable that the first band that Annie Lennox enjoyed listening to is Glen Miller.

There even may be more than one person named Annie Lennox, but probably not more than one allowed performing in commercial music. Another Annie Lennox may write about personal taste in music, however.

Regardless, if Bing presented as its own statement of fact "The first and/or only band that Annie Lennox was a member of is The Eurhythmics", that is inaccurate and unfortunate.

If they presented a link to a separate popular web site and a line from it making that assertion, that is inaccurate and unfortunate but not Bing's fault.

However, if Bing has a habit of offering inaccurate information from Web sites, more so than Google, that probably is a deficiency. Any Web search engine almost certainly should offer results in a reasonable order, and not alphabetical which just isn't very useful in this context. I'm somewhat uneasy about letting Google or Bing or internet users as a whole make decisions about "What is truth?" And so I do prefer to be offered a variety of results from one search query, and for them to be contradictory. Then I can make a decision about which claims I prefer.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I also wondered about an extra battery in a trailer you can hook up when you want. Or maybe an extra motor, which in that case probably should be in front of the car itself. In fact, don't have any motor in the car, just have it be towed all the time, using whatever technology is appropriate.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Could a garage pull out and store the ICE parts to save weight while you just drive on electric charge, and put the stuff back in when you want to drive farther? Or even build that stuff into the trailer?

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Some time ago, I got some displeasing USB sticks devices carrying the Integral brand. They were sold in a multiple-blister pack i.e. two or three USB sticks packaged on one card, they were more boxy and less sleek than my usual black rectangular Integral sticks, and their speed, specifically writing data, was slow and I think stop-and-go. Whether they were genuine Integral or not, I think it was a bad deal. Perhaps the message is to not buy USB sticks in a multi-pack if high quality of product is important to you.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Questionable resolution

I think I used a version of UNIX which routinely crashed after something like 240 days, perhaps 248. Reboot and there's no problem... for another 240 days or so.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Fuses?

As for solo operating, it was crunch time - so to speak.

Let me know if you'd like me to look up an old science fiction story after spoiling it here. A future in which space pilots are tremendously trained on their model of rocket (no computer pilots). When it is obsolete, do are they. One ex pilot sadly rides as a passenger on a slow ride to Mars. Things happen on the way and he's going to have to land the ship. But he cannot drive this model.

So he spends a lot of time taking the controls apart and rebuilding them into the control room design that he knows. There are dials that he just painted on. But he needs them to be there.

I don't remember the ending, but I think one of his landing simulations has the ship stop moving about 100 vertical meters after hitting the ground, which would not be a success.

I liked the story, before I heard about the Boeing 737 Lawndart which exists because pilots etc. can't be retrained.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: getting into trouble with cron

You could script the "sleep" command to delay work by x seconds. Though of course cron will have to launch shells on the minute.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Military IT Moves

Military service does rely quite a lot on obeying orders and not stopping to question them. Unless they're war crimes. For that matter, your commander may have a grudge against computers, so it's deliberate. But, yes, terrible things happen to innocent computing equipment. But it's probably for launching bombs or something unpleasant like that, and so the world may be a better place if that doesn't happen.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I suppose there's billions of people in the world using vapes, so I assume there are fatalities, not only from ones with cheaper chemicals added, but just from the most enthusiastic users. Second-hand vapours may be less dangerous, but still something you really have to work at producing. But not as bad as my idea that you were converting your room to a huge vape with you inside.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Hospital story

I was going to suggest old blankets vs. newer duvets, but you used the latter word as implicitly in the dust era or just after it. I think "bedding in a sack" was introduced to me as a "continental quilt" reaching Britain in the 1970s maybe. I miss blankets... I think.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

So does "hotbox" mean that you don't put the vape into your mouth, instead you turn the room into a sort of vape sauna?

Do you have any idea how many people are found dead from going that? Including other family members, and pets? I don't know if it happens at all, but it sounds likely. So I'm curious. And I expect that word goes round.

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Shameful confession time:

I don't have one, but a quick Google implies that officially or unofficially, "Raspberry Pi" is commonly abbreviated to "RPi", with a lower case i favoured, probably because it's a bit silly to abbreviate "Pi". At the moment in my head it's pronounced "are pie", but all this may be wrong.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Customers are the security liability

What I'm thinking is that as the white-hat sender of fake phishing spam, I would be requiring users to recognise and report it, not just to block it. Especially if my spam was the only phishing that they managed to block.

The enterprise should block phishing spam as far as it's practical to do that. But with that in place, white-hat phishing spam is needed so that users do expect to see messages that are timewasting or worse, and to treat them appropriately. Otherwise, any real phishing which does get through is more likely to catch victims.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: If you want phishing taken seriously

"Star Trekkin" by The Firm, first chorus for the first offence, then an increasing scale.

Make the full track available to play without misbehaviour, to avoid encouraging that.

Many of us have videophone earpiece headsets, though. But accessing the loudspeakers should be possible by pwning the machine. Or without that.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I think that's the one that my boss thought might be a virus, so instead of opening it, he forwarded it to me to ask what I thought. Fortunately I'd already heard of it, probably from The Register. I do keep old e-mails, so maybe I still have it?

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: "Forced" password change in a few month

Good heavens. Just find out his password, change it, and use his e-mail to send slightly unprofessional e-mails to several female colleagues. Or board members. Joke about the word "member" (for males). Also in the e-mail, tell everyone the old password is. Then, deny everything.

A happy memory is of my sister explaining how she used her work computer, "I type commnet commnet ...oops". Her password was also "commnet" and she'd just told me. I expect she has changed it since then. In case she has not, it wasn't actually "commnet".

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Unannounced security tests

This implies that the best way to do phishing is by posing as a phishing test service.

If you have a phishing report function, then report it. If you work with idiots, then announce it... that there is a sneaky evil e-mail, not the other thing.

Create a new separate e-mail, subject line "Suspicious E Mail - Free beer for who has the best password", as a warning that the free beer offer that you received may be not sincere. Do it quickly.

If anyone sends their password to you and demands the free beer... do whatever you dare to.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Christmas party

I wonder how many of the laptops actually came back. If I was a bar worker, this sounds like an opportunity. It's not an opportunity that I'd take, although I am thinking about a new laptop.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: A Bit Puzzled?

A CEO probably authorises anything that they like. The question I'd ask is whether anything on the network was compromised besides the CEO's own PC, if they used that for the penetration, or the outsider device plugged into the network. Arguably an outsider device should simply be not allowed to communicate, but apparently, this network wasn't that secure. If it was, you probably also need 3 months to set up a network port for a new member of staff.

Regardless, I like to imagine the internal IT staff smashing the CEO's computer with sledgehammers as instructed by our hero, in front of the CEO, keyboard and all, and THEN asking the questions. They probably didn't do that, but I like to imagine it.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Keepass

You could use an encrypted zip file at least. However, plain zip encryption is broken, insecure because defeated. Still, it discourages no -technical snoopers. Also, to deflect suspicion, be sure to disguise the file as pornography.

Fetish pornography. No one wants to see anyone else's. Bonus if your spouse resembles a hobbit anyway. Remember they are pipe smokers, including women presumably.

As others have commented, you probably meant password "copy and paste" unless you remind yourself to change a password after, say, 60 days by pasting 60 copies of it in the file to start with.

Remember to print your file of passwords in a font that lets you tell letters and numbers apart, tricky ones like l I | 8 B 5 S.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Shameful confession time:

I like passwords that can be typed, but not that one.

For instance, if use of a punctuation mark is enforced, then: mxyz comma ptlk

Although of course the password censor doesn't have a sense of humour. So that one won't pass.

Otherwise, I recommend not being imaginative with your password punctuation mark. Be imaginative, or ideally random, with the letters. A punctuation character that is even slightly exotic - that either is unfamiliar in the United States, or is in a different place on the U.S. keyboard and on yours - is liable to be misread or lost when you input it. A symbol that has a special meaning in a data file or an internet protocol, such as $ and #, also may be swallowed. Even ' risks calling up the spirit of Bobby Tables. Use this junk only if you are mandated to use the corporate password generator, and may /ˈbjɑːrnə ˈstrɒvstrʊp/; have mercy on you.

I myself use $CHAR1 whenever a password demands a punctuation mark, except for a few systems which apparently regard $CHAR1 as not a punctuation mark, and in those cases I use $CHAR2. And a box of dice which I have altered to produce numbers 0/1/2, 0/3/6, and 0/9/18, when a new password is required. (Away from home, I use a "fidget spinner" with equivalent modification. This means that setting the password is s potentially relaxing break of dome minutes from screen work, but a time of mental arithmetic instead. I suppose I could use spreadsheet software for the arithmetic.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Customers are the security liability

I'm not sure if you want to make board members nonfunctional - which seems to save money if you don't need to have a board, but it leaves you with your CEO or president without controls on their behaviour - or if you just want to airgap the board from anything technological. Then you have a manageable expense of each board person having a PA employed to print their e-mails and type their replies. But that raises again the question of whether the board members themselves are required.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Customers are the security liability

I don't know that I agree with what you've done, It is an important staff training process.

If I was running this, I'd consider validating that the fake spam reaches you and you recognise it as suspicious using your eyeballs. And I want to know if not, why not.

I also will use the same domain to organise Secret Santa.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

Afterthought: Some foreign staff may have a different alphabet at home. And they may be doctors.

It also may be worth notating your policy on names that begin with Mc and Mac and antique M', as well as O', and conceivably De. That sort of thing.

Some Mac names are not Scottish or Irish. Regardless, I think we put them all at the start of M, encoded as M*. So MacDonald comes before Maastricht. My involvement was only with capitalizing correctly. I programmed a list of exceptions, so if your name actually is MacHinery, you are out of luck with me.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

Don't consider that a challenge, unless it is, then "challenge accepted".

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

" two admin staff had to have a A4 print out of the alphabet stuck to the shelves with patient records on"

I expect it saves time and asking a colleague. Did it have the big and little letters? ;-)

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

We've got contactless ones now! Just wave your hand languidly past the thing like Sir Percy Blakeney in character as an idle British aristocrat.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I think I only confuse my screenshot for the actual software about 10 percent of the time.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Once again, I form an incorrect mental picture, in which you pause before sending your e-mail and you say aloud "Thank you" to your computer screen first. It's something else to try!

Although my first thought was that your unfortunate colleague actually had addressed all of his requests to helldesk@repository.elsewhe.re . Spot my deliberate mistake!

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

I'm imagining a clever if unnecessary pulley to turn the Apple apple 180 degrees, but perhaps you're thinking of something with a little motor. Or well placed weights. Or magnets!

I'm looking at the back of a Dell LCD monitor now and I notice that the E is positioned squint. Apparently that is on purpose.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Read for comprehension. The executive director's PA is a nice person, and is not necessarily over-rewarded. The executive director may be a waste of space and money; we do not know that. It is the way to bet.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

(Robert tries out the sideways method)

It sort-of works - if you hold the mouse somewhere away to your right (if right handed) and not in front of you. But it may not catch on. And the main button is operated by the thumb, which feels very wrong. Of course, you can swap the button actions; tell the computer that you are left handed. (Not all left handed people choose to do this.)

On a modern system, you also can connect more then one pointing device. You can use one mouse to move, and use the buttons on another one, to click.

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Ahhh...the early days. (Part 2)

XKCD also tells you what happens if an employee has an Irish name like Robert O'Tables. :-)

(yes the original XKCD version is set in a school)

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: I met a catgirl once.

My read on several "Star Trek" stories is that increasing human intelligence or abilities artificially, typically creates people who are not good to have around in-universe. Gary Mitchell. Ricardo Montalban. Reg Barclay. Is that successful advancement has to come by natural and/or gradual development, and even then, a society can destroy itself. On this principle, uplifted animal people would tend not to be happy people, as well.

In Harry Harrison's quite light-hearted story, "The Man From P.I.G.", a space migrant pig farmer has just a few animals with him, and one of the pigs was genetically altered to have higher intelligence - for a pig - and is mentally unstable. Of course, a story is not evidence that there is a problem. It is an instance of the writer thinking that there is.

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Don't.

It's morally equivalent to owning a sentient ape-slave from the "Planet of the Apes" sequel / prequels - if I got the originals straight, chimpanzee refugees from the Planet come to Earth and become the new Untouchable caste. In the remake, intelligent apes are created on Earth scientifically. Both times, it's judged that these beings have human feelings - more or less so, because they aren't human - but they don't get any kind of human rights.

I gather that starting in the original French novel in 1963, the "Planet of the Apes" gives gorillas, chimpanzees, and orang-utans specific roles in society, which is troublingly racial. It may or may not also be their class system. Wild humans survive; this planet's humans had made the apes intelligent and put them to work, which made it either practically or biologically unnecessary for humans to be intelligent as well. The apes rebelled and expelled the unintelligent humans from cities. Humans are not considered to be useful workers, although an ape experiment in space flight uses humans in a space capsule for a safety trial launch.

I'm uncomfortable with dominant-submissive relationships between humans, but if it's what people want to do, I may not have a right to criticise. But to create a creature designed only to be dominated is a step further. Of course, our existing relationships with animals can be troubling to look at; as our "companions", and as what Peter Davison was in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Shocking!

Technically, "early days of computing" is all electric "valves" instead of transistors, or perhaps the extraordinary Engines of Charles Babbage in the 19th century; hand operated, I think.

Valves had a fairly terrible rate of failure when you were using a large number of them at once, heat was a factor too, but I think you were in more danger from your valves than your valves were in danger from you.

It's often repeated that in winter during the Second World War, women's underwear was to be found beside or on the secret British electric code-breaking computer, as it was in the only warm room on the premises. It couldn't help it. I think I saw a report that in hot weather, women's underwear and not anything else was found on the women working in there, as it was still the warmest room. I expect none of this is relevant, but I find it interesting. ;-)

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Testing the alarm at a set time does mean that you know it's probably a test when that happens. You make a good point that it might not be a test.

When our alarm goes, first of all I check whether it's time for the test. If it isn't that time, then I leave the building. Otherwise, long story short, if it doesn't stop straight away then it still isn't a test. But it may be an evacuation drill.

If test time comes and the alarm doesn't ring, then that's obviously a problem.

I would like us to be e-mailed about 2 minutes before the test, so that we can be prepared for it. Or I suppose I could set a reminder alarm for myself, but it is only once a week.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: agreed. Do you hear that, Juniper Networks??????

It helps to put quotes around the search, of course. Unless one of the network routing products is called "Juniper Tree".

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: I'm curious...

Isn't the laser table thing from "Goldfinger"?

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Robert Carnegie Silver badge

Re: Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....

...No. ;-)

No, wait. It is coming back, now. Aargh!