Posts by ma1010 937 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2012
We're very sorry for any inconvenience the outage may have caused. Well, actually, no, we're not. Frankly, we don't give a fuck one way or the other.
And, no, before any of you ask, you're not going to get an adjustment on your bills for the time we provided you with no service, nor will we compensate you for any lost revenues. The only thing we care about is that WE don't lose any revenue, so be sure to send us OUR money every month. If you don't like the way we do you business, you can try one of our twin sisters, AKA "the competition." (chuckle) You'll quickly find that they don't give a crap about your little problems, either.
Welcome to the Oligopoly, darlings. It's the way of the future. Remember the bit about a boot stamping on a human face? Well, it's not one boot. We'll ALL be putting the boot in. Suck it up, little "consumer."
IIRC, in "Cloak of Anarchy," Larry Niven wrote about a gadget called a "copseye." It floated above crowds and had a camera and a stunner. They patrolled "free parks" in which there was no law except "no violence." If violence broke out, the copseye would stun the participants.
Then a clever guy found out how to short them all out - but his attack also caused the exits to all lock, so things got a bit interesting for a while as folks got to try anarchy for real.
Where I used to work, we had a sales guy who was the infamous "last minute guy," always doing everything at the last minute. He'd be going to meet with a client and need you to work overtime to help him get his presentation crap ready because he was basically incompetent. I got tired of it and put a sign up in my office that said "YOUR LACK OF PLANNING DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN EMERGENCY TO ME." He saw the sign and enthused all over, said he absolutely loved it and was going to make one for his office. Did I mention he was REALLY thick?
@anthonyhegedus
Your experience with this particular luser reminds me of a bit from the BOFH:
The user who wanted to know why the ’follow-me’ service wasn’t working on her phone was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. It took a while for the PFY to realise she was carrying her desk phone around the building with her, but as a veteran hand at these things I expected no less.
A basic problem with corporate audits is that the company needing an audit CHOOSES and has to pay the auditors. If my corporation hired your auditing firm to do my government-required audit, and you give me a bad report, how likely am I to hire you next year? So there's a strong motivation here for auditors to give a glowing report to all their customers.
Shades of Authur Anderson and Enron.
We have the finest lawmakers money can buy. And that's what it's ALL ABOUT in Washington these days. Nobody cares about culture or the fact that extending copyright indefinitely STEALS from the common people who should be able to inexpensively enjoy works in the public domain (like the Gutenberg Project). It's one thing to protect an author during his/her lifetime and for a reasonable (maybe 20 years) period after death, but our "Corporate Congress" is only interested in benefiting their corporate buddies and themselves.
And they wonder why there are so many copyright violators around. If you make the laws REASONABLE, most people will tend to obey them because they see their benefit to society. The more ridiculous you make the laws to benefit a few megacorporations, the more people will lose respect for the law and the government that makes them.
A long time ago, I was working on a car and noticed a strange hissing sound after the engine started. After less than a minute I looked under the car and saw about a quart of oil on the ground, and more coming. Shut engine off and looked for problem. Earlier, I'd been using a screwdriver on the starter relay to "bump" the engine over, and gotten the screwdriver (sitting on the positive terminal on the relay) a little too close to the oil filter and arc welded a hole in it.
Recently, my HTC phone looked strange. It looked like the screen was bulging up in the middle a little. In a matter of days, it bulged up about 5mm in the center, but not at the ends, so the screen was actually bent. Took it in for repair, and it was the battery swelling up that caused all the problems. New battery, and it's all sorted.
I don't understand much about crypto, so have no real opinions on how to secure ID, but I'm wondering if what Estonia is doing with giving people chipped ID cards and readers as part of the ID process (I assume it also requires a password, too) would work? I've read that people there can vote, pay taxes, etc., using these cards which, apparently, are considered a secure form of ID. That might be one thing to help with the ID problem.
Paris because this is a baffling problem to solve well.
Well, the BOFH has used such weapons on occasion, so I wonder if this woman was a BOFH in the making. She got caught, though, so she clearly needs more practice in proper BOFH techniques.
And I'd add that if a despised co-irker leaves your place of employment, instead of sabotaging their "good bye" party, a better solution is you and your mates have a "good riddance" party later on down the pub without them around.
It's the culture. As long as we have all this "art" that glorifies gang activity and violence, we're going to have a problem with youth being violent. Unfortunately, there is something in this "art" that resonates with urban youth, particularly blacks, although kids of any ethnic group can be influenced by this crap. And young kids tend to be suggestible, so they act out what they are told by these "artists," hence lots of crime and violence.
What the solution is, I'm not sure. I'm not sure anybody has a good solution to this. It would be nice if some of these "artists" would talk about thinking ahead, consequences of actions and the benefit of being a useful part of society, but that doesn't seem to be on.
But people do forget. Years ago in the U.S., there was a big scandal with AIG Corporation which mainly sold insurance. They had recently bought another company, 21st Century Insurance.
When the economic crash hit and Obama was handing out bailout money, they went to Washington and said "Oh, we need money real bad because if we don't get it, we'll fail, and everyone will be out of work, think of the children on the street," etc., etc. After they got, I think, $50 million, they went out and gave their executives bit bonuses and sent them to high-dollar executive retreats (the sort of places the BOFH manages to get sent for "training"). They got caught by reporters who outed them. Congress even voted to tax their bailout at 100%, they were so mad.
AIG changed their name to 21st Century and continue in business today.
He wrote a novella called "Lungfish." In it a generation ship goes to another star. When it arrives there with just a few "Earthborn" still alive, they discover that their descendants, having been born during the trip and not knowing any other life, have no interest in leaving the ship. So much for the new colony!
It also makes me think of the idea of "Rocks" from The Culture series, asteroids that some people lived in for their permanent homes. Asteroids would make great space habitats, as you can "blow" them up[1] to create space in them, then spin them to provide "gravity." You leave the walls thick enough, and radiation from space isn't a problem. If they can solve the life support and social issues, it might well work. Add some sort of propulsion, and you've definitely got a potential starship.
[1]Larry Niven's idea was to drill a hole through the long axis, then fill it with bags of water and spin it up. You then put mirrors around it to reflect enough sunlight to heat it up to a semi-molten state, and the water converts to steam and expands inside the asteroid, causing it to expand and providing lots of space inside. Or you could just hollow out a bigger asteroid like "The Stone" in Greg Bear's novel Eon.
I wonder, if he had printed his own plain-looking labels with something like "System Restore Disk" on them, would he have been prosecuted, or lost if he were prosecuted? The thing the court seemed to object to was the labeling of the disks, implying they were created by M$, rather than the fact he was giving out what were freely available software images.
Essentially, due to the flood of spoofed crap calls, I've completely lost the use of my landline. I just turn off the ringers and use it for outgoing calls only. Nobody can ever call me on it because if I don't do the above, it rings several times a day with crap calls that just waste my time.
I can protect my cell phone better, using an app the blocks any call not in my contacts, although it does allow them to leave a voice message (for those few calls I get from stranger which I actually want).
It's too bad we can't eliminate these sort of pests. Put them all on the B Ark, I say.
It's almost as if the company is worried that if it was completely honest about what it does with its users information they would leave the service in droves.
If most people bothered to LOOK at the information that's out there - really, we all pretty much know what F*book does with people's data - sell anything they can get or infer about you to anyone at all with bugger all limits. I'm not on F*book myself, but I think anyone who can think critically and hasn't been living in a sealed bunker for the last couple of months is, at a minimum, looking into locking down whatever they can to keep their information private OR realizing that the "free" service F*book offers isn't worth its cost in lost privacy.
However, of the overall population of F*book users, how many think critically in the first place? I don't know, but I somehow doubt that Zuckerberg will be losing all that many suckers, even among those outside Europe's GDPR protection zone who should be afraid - very afraid - of what is happening to their data.
@Shadmeister
Once you get a BSOD, does Microsoft ever correct the issue in the next build, or if you are BSOD, you are permanently BSOD'd ???
Of course you aren't permanently BSOD'd! If you're hopelessly stuck using Windows, you take out the thumb drive with Clonezilla (or whatever you use) and and roll the HD back to the last more-or-less working Windows version.
If you're not hopelessly stuck using Windows, you install Linux and quit worrying about BSOD's.
Ham radio people know all about how antennas cause all sorts of non-existent problems. That's why some of us will put one up a new antenna and NOT hook it up to anything for a week or two. That gives all the local idiots time to complain about how your antenna is affecting their cable TV reception or causing messages from UFOs to come in on their fillings or whatever. Then you smile and say "Really? That's interesting because that antenna isn't hooked up to anything at all just now."
SpaceX appears to be scaling back its original plan of an open ISP for everyone in order to focus on areas with poor internet access or slow speeds i.e. target less competitive markets.
...they'll start selling broadband access to us here in the U.S.? We could use some competition because $DEITY knows we've got bugger all with the current oligopoly.
Yes, TSR's. I wrote one, too. A friend of mine who edited video wanted a calculator that would take a time and add/subtract so much time from it. I wrote him a TSR on-screen calculator app that he used along with Multimate (remember that?) on his PC. The video editing at that time was NOT done on computer - not for years, yet.
Absolutely! How many of us were going along fine with work and/or school, then someone falls into our life and we suddenly seem to spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in "reproductive activity," to the detriment of work/school?
Despite any negative effects on other aspects of life, it's still a lot of what makes life worth living in the first place!
A long time ago, when I was in college, I was a student assistant. Sometimes instructors wanted to copy passages from a book and hand them out to students. To do that, we had to first use the "thermo-fax" machine to make a copy of the page onto a spirit master, then run all the copies on the "ditto machine." They always had me do that because I was the only one there who could get legible copies out of that process.
We hope to roll out ethereal (TM) computers soon, no need for clumsy things like keyboards, mice, and screens, just run by the power of notional thought (another TM)
Steve Bong, you're back! I've been wondering where you'd gotten to. Sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea for a new catapult. We'll start organizing the funding right away.
But rather than "notional thought," wouldn't "Thinkfluence" be a better term?
-Theresa
I wonder if the building will achieve sentience before Apple Manglement?
I would expect just about all buildings to achieve sentience before manglement manages that evolutionary step. Sentient buildings, heat death of the universe, all happening before that.
Paris, because she's a natural for manglement.
@Lee D
I wish I could give you 100+. What you say is totally true.
On the PC front, that's one reason I moved to Linux, painful though the transition was for me. Having made that transition, though, I will never go back to Windows and that "forced update" nonsense. My Linux system never updates except when I tell it to, and only installs the updates I tell it to install. I can skip or defer any update I wish to.
Whatever happened to the concept that if you OWN something, YOU should control it? It's my personal computer, not Satya's. My car belongs to me, not Honda. And so on.
There should be a law that ANY updates, firmware, software, whatever, should not install without the owner's permission (take THAT, Satya!) and can be easily rolled back in the event they cause more problems than they cure, which happens all too often.
Never happen, of course. On either side of the Pond, we've got the best governments big corporate money can buy.
@AMBxx
...making sure failed updates are reversible but successful ones are not.
THIS: It's far more likely that the cars are broken by a bad update.
Exactly. What if you get a "Windows X" type update (you can't control it) that borks your car? But the update went through, so it must be "successful," right? Except for the minor detail that your car won't run now.
It all depends on how one defines "successful," I guess. Owners always need the ability to back out of a bad firmware update, whether or not it succeeded in installing itself.
Years ago in college, we worked in groups, and one of my group mates had a cat. One Sunday he was at home compiling all his hard work and watching the cat play around the computer, "Aww, how cute..."
Then the cat nosed the big, red RESET button and thrashed his work. "Get out of here, you damned thing!" Not so cute, then, apparently.
@TRT
Yes, and there's plenty of opportunity for using the word Fokker in his presentation to the board.
Reminds me of an old joke with a radio interview of a WW II fighter ace nicknamed "Swede."
ANNOUNCER: So tell us about the day you became an ace, Swede.
SWEDE: Well,I was flying patrol, and I saw this Fokker coming at me from the right and above, so I turned toward him, and just then saw another Fokker coming up from below, so...
ANNOUNCER: Swede, just let me interrupt and let the audience know that a Fokker is a type of German airplane, right?
SWEDE: Well, ya, but these Fokkers were flying Messerschmits.
It will be just like playing a video game, except lives will be at stake.
No shit, Sherlock! I live in California, and I am not at all happy with the idea of these things on the roads. There are enough idiot drivers out there endangering us all without adding half-baked "tech" like this. Good luck taking remote control over the car in an emergency in time to do any good. Even drivers actually sitting in these "self-driving" cars get bored and stop paying attention; how much worse will this be when it's all just on video?
Then likely as not, one of these "drivers" will hand the controls to an unsuspecting friend like the BOFH did to his boss. I'm sure the episode is in El Reg's archives someplace, but you can read it here.
Should our little electronic buddies begin to act like the stereotypical Hitler Youth child who informed on his parents?
Big Brother says "Yes" to that question.
I expect the U.S. Congress would, too, and probably the lawmakers in most countries, including the U.K. (see Snooper's Charter).
<sarcasm>After all, if you are not engaged in crimethink, what do you have to fear from the Ministry of Love?</sarcasm>
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