All hail the
Nuclear-powered, laser- and x-ray- armed, self-driving, death robots.
Posts by WolfFan
1468 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2014
Page:
NASA's hefty Martian rover will use an AI brain on a robot arm to map out signs of ancient life on Red Planet
Azure DevOps Services reminds users that, yes, it really is time to pull the plug on Internet Explorer 11
We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down
Tuesday 22nd September 2020 14:43 GMT 
How in Christ’s bloody name do you build a real-world relational database without indexes and referential integrity? I didn’t even bother to read further. The damn stupid Shelly Cashman Access book has indexes in chapter 1 and ref integ in chapter 3! The ‘experts’ haven’t taken an intro course on Access... When I last looked at real database courses, as distinct from how to not access Access, indexing and ref integ were mentioned early and often. Had the ‘experts’ even been close to a class on SQL?
Monday 21st September 2020 14:58 GMT
Re: The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k
For Office, yes; try to find a retail copy of Office 2019. Go ahead, try. If you succeed, tell me where you got it so I can get a copy too. For Windows, no. Not yet, anyway, I’m sure that it’s on MS’s wish list.
Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?
Your anti-phishing test emails may be too easy to spot. NIST has a training tool for that
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply
Saturday 19th September 2020 16:23 GMT
Re: Feeding
That’s it exactly. There will be more of the cards tomorrow, or next week, or next month. I can wait. Anyone who not only can’t wait, but is willing to pay an order of magnitude over retail is an idiot. I don’t stand in line to get the latest iPhone. I don’t pay extra at fleaBay for the latest super video card. I don’t camp outside the theater or the stadium or the ticket office to get tickets for the very first showing of the new (insert franchise name here) movie or the game I can see on tv and in greater comfort, or whatever. But that’s me.
Surprise! Apple launches iOS 14 today, and developers were given just 24 hours' notice
Wednesday 16th September 2020 15:59 GMT
Nonsense
The GM is nearly identical to the last beta, and the betas have been available for months. The iPad this is being typed on got a beta back in March or April, probably April, and it was not one of the early betas. It had the last beta, and has the GM, and actual test shows very little difference between the two. In particular, several (as in about a dozen) of my favorite bugs are still in the GM. At least two of those bugs date back to iOS 6 or 7... Yes, the bugs have been reported to Apple. No, they’re not fixed, nor do I expect them to be fixed. Ever. The alleged new features work. Kinda. And have worked, kinda, for months. A dev with sense should have tested against the betas. Yes, it’s a moving target, but if the devs did that they would have something ready to roll inside of a few days of getting the GM. Certain apps had problems with the betas (CitiBank, I’m looking at _you_) but issued updates during the beta period which fixed the errors. Well, most of them, it’s Citi, there’s no way that they will ever fix all the problems... Apple itself had problems which were sorted out during the betas, notably with power management, especially on iPad Pros and iPhone 8s. (Guess how I know)
Good devs will have app updates close to ready. Bad devs will still be fixing in December. Very bad devs (Aspyr...) will take longer. There’s a reason why the the newest expansion packs for things like Civ 6 on iOS aren’t out yet, while having been available elsewhere, including Mac, for months. The Mac version of Civ 6 is perpetuated by... Aspyr. It’s not the first time that there has been significant lag on iOS... Perhaps they should hire better coders...
The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations
Wednesday 16th September 2020 20:40 GMT
Jamaica was not a dominion
IIRC it was a Crown Colony. A large number of Jamaicans did fly in the RAF, but relatively few in Fighter Command (a prominent Fighter Command pilot was a future Prime Minister of Jamaica, another a prominent journalist, and one more a prominent academic) and of those few again relatively few in the BoB. A rather considerable number were in Bomber Command, though zero in 139 (Jamaica) Squadron, 139 got the tag after the Gleaner newspaper ran an appeal and raised the money to buy enough aircraft to form a squadron. And yes, the prominent journalist noted above worked for the Gleaner. The most famous Jamaican in Bomber Command would later defend Jomo Kenyatta in court and go on to be Minister of National Security in Jamaica. He’s still a hero in Kenya, not so much in Jamaica due to certain events while he was Minister, notably when several young men from the Prime Minister’s constituency made contact with people in the Army to get serious weapons, including two General Purpose Machine Guns. The young men and the soldiers went to an Army shooting range outside Kingston, allegedly to demonstrate the weapons. They were demonstrated, alright: on the young men. Oops. The Minister remarked, on the record, that, and I quote, “No angels died” at the range. This did not go down well. The Minister was also still in charge when a prominent ‘community activist’ (a major figure in the grass roots support of the party then in opposition) was killed by police. The autopsy showed 42 bullet wounds in his body, several located in places indicating that he had had his hands up when he was killed. That didn’t go down well either.
Singapore to pay its citizens to wear Apple Watches
Wednesday 16th September 2020 16:09 GMT
Re: Think you forgot something
I have a 3 series, it was a gift, I’d never have bought one myself. It’s still supported by the last OS update. The previous generation may be supported as well, I have no idea. Older versions stopped being supported at last year’s version. The odds are that you get 3 to 5 years use before it can no longer be updated to the latest OS, plus a year or two of security updates, and then possibly another year before you can no longer have it connect to more modern iOS devices and/or Macs, and that’ll be it.
0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'
Wednesday 16th September 2020 15:31 GMT
Re: Any letter is OK
In some states the licensing authorities have updated the fonts and character settings. O is blockier than 0, Q has a prominent tail, B is flatter on the left than 8, 2 has a noticeable tip on the upper left, Z is just three straight lines, I has serifs at top and bottom, 1 has a serif at an angle at the top and is distinct from I, L has a prominent bar at the bottom. Why? There are a lot of traffic cameras, and they had problems reading old style plates. One red light camera in West Palm Beach had 97%, that’s ninety seven percent, of tickets dropped because it couldn’t read the plates....
Oracle's Java 15 rides into town, waving the 'we're number one' flag, demands 25th birthday party
When classes are online, how do you get out of school? Florida teen cuffed, charged after crashing cyber-lessons
Monday 14th September 2020 15:18 GMT
Re: Anyone else think this is odd?
Hah. Around here we have the following police forces:
1 the city cops. Their jurisdiction ends at city limits.
2 the sheriff’s office. Their jurisdiction is everywhere in the county not covered by a city police force. Several local cities have abolished their cop shops and contracted with the sheriff for policing.
2a the school cops. They are part of the sheriffs office, and have jurisdiction on every public school in the county, including those inside cities which have their own cops.
3 the state cops. They mostly are traffic enforcement on major roads. (county, state, and federal roads, interstates, the Turnpike, that kind of thing.) they also have helicopters and SWATs, and are heavy backup for the county and city cops.
3a the state fisheries and wildlife cops. They do enforcement of regulations in rural areas, hunting/fishing licenses, boating, that kind of thing. They are also the emergency team sent out after natural disasters. Famously Florida Fish & Wildlife were the first rescue force into Alabama after Hurricane Katrina, as Jeb Bush was not an idiot while the soon to be voted out governor of Alabama was. Jeb also mobilized more National Guardsmen than Alabama and Louisiana combined, when the hurricane wasn’t even headed for Florida but was going to Alabama and Louisiana. Competent government, something we don’t see much of nowadays.
3b the transport cops. They mostly operate in the same areas as normal state cops, but hunt large trucks doing something silly. They’ll usually ignore anything not a truck or at least a van, but if you annoy them they’ll go for smaller vehicles, and they levy bigger fines.
3c the National Guard. There for when the governor feels the need for serious force. Also disaster relief.
4 the federal cops. That would be border patrol, at all airports and seaports as well as at borders, federal transport cops at airports and seaports and railroads, the marshals, the FBI, the secret service (mostly hunting counterfeiters), federal fish & wildlife, and a lot more.
The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon
Paragon 'optimistic' that its NTFS driver will be accepted into the Linux Kernel
IVE HAD ENOUGH! iQuit. Jobs done. Jony cashes out at Apple to run his own design biz
'My wife tried to order some clothes tonight. When she logged in, she was in someone else's account ... Now someone's charged her card'
Thursday 27th August 2020 16:11 GMT
Re: Even Outlook
That happens when
1 someone logged in using that machine and selected ‘remain connected’
2 the web browser ‘remembers’ previously accessed pages.
Usually it also means that you logged in using the same account on the computer.
Fixes:
1 log in onto the computer using a different login ID
2 don’t let the browser remember previously used pages
3 don’t select keep connected
4 use the Outlook application instead of the web application.
Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report
Tuesday 25th August 2020 16:33 GMT
The British Army has only 200 MBTs? Are they insane? What happens if, or rather, _when_ they encounter another Michael Whittmann or a Zvi Greengold or even an Abdul Hamid? (For those who don’t know, Whittmann and two other Tiger commanders shot up a British armoured brigade in Normandy; the slaughter stopped when the Tigers ran out of ammunition and went home. Greengold killed at least 40 Syrian tanks on the Golan in 1973, using borrowed tanks, and losing four of them in the process. Yes, he lost a tank, grabbed another, lost that one, grabbed one more, and lost that one too... but destroyed a Syrian tank regiment in the process. Hamid killed at least six Pakistani tanks and was working on another, using a recoilless rifle mounted on a jeep, before being killed in action. The Pakistanis were particularly pissed because he was Muslim...) Even six tanks is a serious percentage of 200... 40+ tanks would be a major defeat. There’s _always_ a Whittmann, a Greengold, a Hamid, somewhere on one or both sides in any major conflict. Having only 200 MBTs is simply begging to have your ass handed to you if you’re up against even halfway competent opponents. As Hamid proved, they don’t even have to have tanks, just balls of steel and something halfway close to an anti-tank weapon. Hellfire, at Arnhem Bridge 2 Para held off a SS Panzer Division with rifles and PIATs, so you’d think that the British Army would know this...
A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos
CREST exam cheat-sheet scandal: New temp chairman at UK infosec body as lawyers and ex-copper get involved
Monday 24th August 2020 14:45 GMT
Won’t work. I do adjunct instruction at a local community college. I have a pool of 2095 questions, multiple choice, multiple responses, matching, short answers, and case from which the test system selects 50 at random for each test. At least three individuals have gone to the trouble of getting answers to all 2095 and attempted to sell cheat sheets. What they didn’t know was that I was listed as a student, so they tried to sell me a cheat sheet. Oops. There were a few others who weren’t quite as mercenary, but they could be detected in other ways. I’m sure that there are a few I haven’t spotted. Yet.
Oh dear, what a pity! It seems you can't join the directors at the Zoom meeting today
Canadian shipping company Canpar gets an unwanted delivery – ransomware
Monday 24th August 2020 14:26 GMT
No, they won’t. As seen above, I know someone who has had a gmail account since 2004 and who is considering bailing because he’s getting mail for people in North Carolina, South Carolina, Oregon, California, Texas, New York, and Nigeria (no, not a prince, an actual person...). All have addresses similar to his. He’s got bills from utilities and department stores and collection agencies, notes from doctors and churches and car dealerships, and a lot more. The guy in Nigeria is an Englishman who works for Shell in Port Harcourt. Guess how we know. I suspect that all kinds of data protection laws are being broken; good luck getting any action from Google or any of the ‘authorities’.
Monday 24th August 2020 14:18 GMT
Gmail has been very confused for over a decade
I no longer have Gmail accounts, as Google decided that it could not determine that I was actually me, despite my attempting to use accounts I’ve had for over a decade using my normal passwords and from my normal IPs. Gee, could it have been because I insisted on using ‘less secure’ apps like MS Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird instead of using Google spyware?
In any case, I know people who do still use Gmail, though not necessarily for much longer. They get mail addressed to [theirnamexxx] at gmail, and, worse, they _don’t_ get all of the mail addressed to their actual account, [theirname] at gmail. One person I know has got repeated mail from some idiot collection agency in Ohio about a person with an email address quite similar to his who is in Oregon. He’s in Florida. He had to actually get lawyers involved to convince the collection agency that they had the wrong guy. Google was of no help whatsoever. He’s seriously considering getting his own domain specifically to get away from gmail.
Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update
Saturday 22nd August 2020 14:56 GMT
Umm... no, your docs aren’t “all on OneDrive”. I have a ‘personal’ OneDrive; I have had it since it was called ‘SkyDrive’. Indeed, the OneDrive folder on my older systems is _still_ named SkyDrive. The Beast of Redmond changed it to OneDrive during a few Windows updates, but I always changed it back and they’ve stopped trying. There is nothing in the OneDrive that I don’t want to be there. In particular I have a lot of documents which are most definitely not in the OneDrive. One of my systems has a 4TB drive and is three-quarters full, the biggest OneDrive is 1 TB out of the box and my personal OneDrive isn’t that big. The personal OneDrive is connected to multiple personal systems.
I also have a ‘business’ OneDrive, on company systems. Items in there are not items in my personal OneDrive. And, no, there’s nothing in there that I don’t want to be there.
I also have a ‘education’ OneDrive, as I do some adjunct instruction for a local community college. Once again, there’s nothing in there that I don’t want to be there. There are machines which have all three OneDrives.
Now, if you put things into the OneDrive folder, the Beast of Redmond will tend to try to ‘save space’ by uploading them and just leaving a pointer, unless you deliberately select “keep on local”. But it will do that only with items you place in the OneDrive. And Microsoft apps will try to store everything on a OneDrive; the personal OneDrive will try to store items created with personal copies of MS software, the business one will try with business copies, and the education one with education copies. You can tell them to stuff it and save locally if you want, they’ll just whine about how ‘secure’ OneDrive is. There was a time when certain file types were not allowed on OneDrive, EXEs for example. That time is gone, now the Beast wants all files and pouts if denied. The Beast does a lot of pouting around me.
Friday 21st August 2020 15:26 GMT
Re: Adobe? Quality product? Oh yeah, that died years ago..
Around here I personally had Creative Suite 5.5 installed on one box and 5.5 and 6 on various boxes at the office. Over the years 5.5 and 6 stopped working properly, then just stopped working at all. They’ve been replaced by Affinity products and various other 3rd-party apps. I would have paid for a Creative Suite 7, but that wasn’t on offer. By going with the sharecropping crap, Adobe ensured that they got not one more penny. Meanwhile, smaller apps from smaller developers, such as Lemke’s Graphic Converter, continue to get our support. (I’ve been using GC since 1995, at home and at various workplaces. It’s no Photoshop, but what it does it does well, and Lemke keeps the price down and the support up.) GC is my primary image editor at home, now that Photoshop 5.5 is dead. Affinity is around for projects GC can’t handle, which aren’t many. I gladly pay the infrequent upgrade fees to make sure that support continues.
Taiwan turfs out video streamers run by China’s web giants
Thursday 20th August 2020 14:44 GMT
Ah, history
Just a few things...
1 Taiwan, then known as Formosa, was a Japanese possession until 1945.
2 How seriously did the Japanese take this? The code signal for the Pearl Harbor attack was “Climb Mt. Niitaka”, said mountain being the tallest in the Japanese Empire, and located on... Formosa. The initial air assault on the Philippines was launched from... Formosa. Kamikaze strikes on Allied ships around the Philippines and later Okinawa, launched from... Formosa.
3 Some Japanese naval and air force personnel either hung around or moved to Formosa and joined up with Chiang’s boys, on the principle that they hated Commies too.
China may try to take Taiwan, but it will get hurt in the process. And the Indians and Japanese (and the Russians! And the Vietnamese!) are sitting around waiting to drop the hammer on the wounded tiger.
This, of course, ignores the facts that the South China Sea is painted in big red, white, and blue letters ‘Property United States Navy’, and that the whole reason the US got into the Second World War was... the Japanese eating the Republic of China.
If China invades Taiwan, shortly thereafter there will no longer be a People’s Republic of China.
Dido 'Queen of Carnage' Harding to lead UK's Institute for Health Protection because Test and Trace went so well
Tuesday 18th August 2020 23:29 GMT
Re: Hmmmm.
Pish. The Chicago Machine is a shadow of its former glory, and has been since Calamity Jane Byrne rode a snowplow into glory. (Look up ‘snowplow’ and ‘Jane Byrne’, there’s pictures of her literally riding the damn thing...) That’s 40 years ago, now. A _woman_ as mayor... Worse, ‘ethnics’ with lots of consonants and funny letters in their names, holding actual political power. Even worse, an actual black or two or more in power... Boss Daley is still rotating in his grave.
NCC Group admits its training data was leaked online after folders full of CREST pentest certification exam notes posted to GitHub
Tuesday 11th August 2020 15:40 GMT
ET Phone Home
They put in a phone-home thingie on _files from an infosec course_? Really? Lesson 1, laddie: air gap. Or use Someone Else’s Computer (™). Or set the firewall, etc, on the home server (anyone taking infosec courses would have a home server or two, right? DHCP, DNS, RRAS, ADDS, Pi-hole, etc...). Or some combination of the three. Anyone who got caught by this should fail twice. Once for cheating, once for not taking elementary precautions.
Search for 'things of value' in a bank: Iowa cops allege this bloke broke into one and decided on ... hand sanitiser
Friday 7th August 2020 21:10 GMT
Re: "....perhaps hand sanitiser remains highly sought after in some parts of the US"
Around here, there was a severe shortage of both TP and hand sanitizer. The shelves in local supermarkets were completely bare, no paper products, not even napkins or kitchen paper towels (apparently Bounty really is a Quicker Picker Upper....) to be seen, all gone. Costco and Sam’s Club and BJ’s rationed you one package per household and still ran out. Places like Office Depot and Ace Hardware (I’m not making this up, _Ace Hardware_) got in TP and rationed one to three rolls to a customer, and still ran out. Certain people were seen to send in assorted members of the household, in relays, down to and including children, to get TP. If there was any. One local supermarket would get a big tractor-trailer full of new stock to resupply in every morning at around 9. They’d have the new TP out by 10:30 at the latest. By noon the shelves would be bare again... l couldn’t figure out where on Earth the customers were putting it all. Some people in Jamaica had some fun, taking pics of themselves standing in front of a huge pile of TP rolls with a caption of how they were sending relief supplies to America... the same jokers have apparently got several container loads of ‘Jamaican virus killer’, possibly better known as overproof white rum, ready for shipment north.
That's how we roll: OWC savagely undercuts Apple's $699 Mac Pro wheels with bargain $199 alternative
British Army does not Excel at spreadsheets: Soldiers' newly announced promotions are revoked after sorting snafu
Friday 7th August 2020 14:58 GMT
Re: Perhaps the person
Ahem. No. Whoever made that error should be promoted, and sent to be the British representative at the brand-new Canadian Armed Forces base on Baffin Island, a base set up just to park idiots from various armed forces of the Commonwealth and possibly allies. Britain would have one on South Georgia Island, and Australia one somewhere near New Guinea. The US would put theirs in the Mojave. Or possibly Montana. Every now and again they should exchange a few personnel.
US drugstore chain installed anti-shoplifter facial-recognition cameras in 200 locations – for eight years
Twitter says spear-phishing attack hooked its staff and led to celebrity account hijack
Friday 31st July 2020 16:00 GMT
Ah, phishie phishie...
I recently got an email allegedly from Amazon. It stated that I didn’t have certain items filled in on my account, notably ‘business hours’ and an associated ‘business phone’. I was supposed to click here to update the account. They needed the info to ‘ensure delivery’. I found this to be quite interesting. In the first place, while I do have a business account, the email went to my personal account. In the second place, I’ve had that account for over two decades, and have had delivery problems exactly once in that time; Amazon sent a package to a similar address two states away. If they had had ‘business hours’ and a ‘business phone’ they still would have messed that up. In the third place, my personal account has had the delivery address changed three times, the last over a decade ago, in the time I’ve had it, and I was never asked about providing a ‘business phone’ or ‘business hours’ before. And, in the fourth place, there’s that whole ‘click here’ bit.
I contacted Amazon, using the chat because it’s amazingly difficult to find a phone number for Customer Support. The guy on chat said that the email was legitimate, and that Amazon needed the info or they wouldn’t be responsible for missed deliveries. He had no idea what ‘phishing’ was. I insisted that there was a problem. He got someone to phone me. The girl on the phone had no idea what phishing was, either, insisting that the email was legitimate, but conceded that it was ‘optional’ for personal accounts.
They have not the least clue. I wonder how many others have received similar emails and just clicked here. And how many of those didn’t actually get the email from Amazon.
'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad
Friday 31st July 2020 14:56 GMT
Re: Which is why I always turn off email sigs...
That depends on the sig. seen, on a Microsoft mailing list, a long time ago:
“We are Microsoft of Borg. Where you want to go today is irrelevant. What you want to do today is irrelevant. We shall take your currency and add it to our own. Resistance is futile. Bend over right now.”
The howls from certain others on the list were things of beauty.
'I think the police are here...' Feds reveal Skype, text chats of Canadian trio charged with $8m crypto-coin fraud
Chinese ambassador to UK threatens to withdraw Huawei, £3bn investment if comms giant banned from building 5G
Microsoft wants to show enterprises that Edge means business, rather than the thing you use to download Chrome
Friday 24th July 2020 14:21 GMT
Re: Leopards and their spots
Hmm... here, I got the Edge update screen, but I was able to have Firefox remain my default web browser. New Edge is installed, yes, but it doesn’t run, I checked in various process tracker apps from Task Manager up. What is annoying is that if I try to use the web version of an Office app, usually by accident as I hate the web versions, Edge launches. If I fire up certain help items, Edge launches. Basically Edge launches when I go near most things Microsoft. I have to keep killing it, and the bumf it leaves behind. This does not endear it to me.
From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home
Friday 17th July 2020 14:41 GMT
BOAC
BOAC is really Better On A Camel. I once flew BOAC trans-Atlantic. We had to land at Gander, in Newfoundland, part way across.It seems that someone didn’t tighten a fuel tank cap or something similar, and we were losing fuel. And someone else who should have been paying attention didn’t notice until it was too late to turn back. We just barely made it to Gander. On getting back to the UK, there were tales in the newspapers about cracks in wings. Don’t know if the aircraft I was on was one of the cracked but still flying, but it wouldn’t have surprised me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
