* Posts by Nick Ryan

3750 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

The latest moronic obvious bug that Microsoft have introduced is to break the "a newer response to this email is available" type functionality.

How? When composing an email, for example a reply, the email is saved to drafts periodically. This is good and very helpful for when Outlook crashes and burns, such as it does more and more now. What is not good is that when composing the email and then coming back to it a little later, a banner is now shown stating that there is a newer response in the email thread. What is this newer response? The fucking saved copy in your own draft folder of course.

Incompetence knows no bounds in Microsoft, but it's there as Microsoft deliberately introduce such moronic new bugs just to push people to use something new and "modern" (the new catch-all for "shit").

Nick Ryan Silver badge

A lot of that is down to crass incompetence in the team managing the Outlook codebase. There is nothing whatsoever stopping them from improving the existing codenbase, there was never anything stopping them from implementing things in retarded ways other than themselves. As a result, we have the shit-show that is the current Microsoft Outlook, now featuring more and more obvious bugs to try and push users onto a half-arsed, even more buggy and less feature complete mess that is "new Outlook" (but don't worry, it's "modern").

Microsoft only want to push their "modern", which in any real terms means "shite": no logging, no professional error handling, no accountability, no real usability... but "shiny". Also even more tied into whatever nonsense the marketing department want to try and foist onto users this week.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: New outlook doesn't keep replies in the same folder

Outlook Search just doesn't work properly regardless - For example, search for a term and there is a very high chance that Outlook will just not show the most recent few items which exactly match the term and instead show old stuff that is less related to the search terms instead.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: German tomfoolery

Similar shenanigans happen when the systems default to American and one has as £ in the password somewhere. Naturally this leads to lots of "it's all English, there are no problems" type response from the blinkered American developers who repeatedly struggle that they are one of only three backward countries on the planet that still use Imperial measurements and to add to this they routinely get the date format incorrect (all English speakers, apparently, prefer dates in backwards form of M/D/Y).

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

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Re: I'm thinking Microsoft need to look at their testing process

A few years ago Microsoft let the majority of their QA teams go. The impending plummet in release quality was the predicted outcome and it's getting worse - it's directly being felt in their in-house mess of Microsoft 365 infrastructure and not just the external victims.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: New version, same shit show

The exact same thing is happening to the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. All in favour of the shit-show feature-incomplete unstable and barely usable mess that is "new" Microsoft Outlook.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

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Re: Pentium IV

The irony of the current CISC x64 chipsets is that many of them use microcode, i.e. pretty much RISC, to implement the CISC instructions.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Thank you Liam

Microsoft Windows inflicted utterly incompetent shared library management (i.e. none) which resulted in the total horrors of the .net never-shared libraries which exhibit themselves as many, many copies of exactly the same damn library stored multiples times and never, ever resolvable or purgeable. The abject horrors of the Windows\WinSxS directory which may, or may not, many hundreds of thousands of files, the proportion of which are file system links to each other such that it's next to impossible for even the file system to work out the real storage space used by the damn directory.

For example, the PC I currently have at hand has 87,310 files spread throughout 300,298 directories, comprising 10.6GB of data taking 6.99GB of disk space. This is not a scenario that is remotely sane or manageable but it is the abject level of belligerent incompetence that Microsoft inflicted into their own Operating System rather than implementing shared library management in any sensible manner when they first had the opportunity or need to... i.e. around Windows 3.x time.

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Teams/Outlook users driven over the Edge

"integrated features" is pretty much equivalent to "discarding standards in favour of abusive vendor lock-in"

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Write a javascript conversion library

Doing image conversion using JavaScript is a ridiculous idea. Kind of clever, but totally and utterly pointless and in reality, quite a detriment to things. Which means that some idiot developer who has no real clue about anything will immediately include it include straight away in their already JavaScript laden abomination of a website (that breaks every accessibility and usability principle)... because it's new and shiny.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

JPEG-XL is Royalty Free - as in no patents. If you had used "your favourite search engine" before you posted you'd should have come across the following:

JPEG (the definitive holders of the specification of this format): Overview of JPEG XL

"Provides a free and open source, royalty-free JPEG XL reference implementation, also available on Github."

JPEGXL website - Why JPEG-XL

"Unlike some other modern formats, JPEG XL is not encumbered by patents nor does it require proprietary software. The reference software, libjxl, has a permissive open source license and is a production-ready library that can be (and already has been) integrated into a variety of image-related software."

Wikipedia: JPEG XL

"JPEG XL is a royalty-free raster-graphics file format that supports both lossy and lossless compression."

@anonymous coward: Given the definitive statements above, can you explain your statement about JPEG-XL being stopped because of patents? The statements above make it very clear that this is not the case whatsoever. The only "stopped because of patents" that is likely with JPEG-XL is that an industry player is blocking it because it does not use any of their patents.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Improvement?

For many "real time" purposes, Windows 3.x would be real time enough. It's not as if multi-tasking was enforced until Windows NT4 anyway and, even then, really badly. The key to programming on Windows 3.x, other than the perpetual headaches of data frame sizes and just general 16 bit horrors, was that unless the windows message queue was processed very regularly your application didn't multi-task in any meaningful way whatsoever. As a result, it was pretty real time and nothing more than a slightly prettier interface than DOS.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Re: I think that is totally false and bordering on absurd.

It's analogous to the interface in a car.

There is a wheel in front of the user that steers the car. There are three pedals, arranged in the same order of Clutch (for non-automatic gearbox vehicles), the Brake and the Accelerator. Depending on where the steering wheel is in the vehicle there will be a hand brake either to the left or to the right of the driver.

These are all standard and an individual that drives one vehicle can quite reasonably expect to be able to get into another vehicle and drive it. Very specialised vehicles will stray from these standards but usually as little as possible.

Back to computer user interfaces... we have inexperienced, clueless user interfaces developers who are pathologically unable to understand that just because the came up with a hair brained re-arrangement of standard controls and through doing this are used to them and therefore declare this "better" that they have to trash establish standards and make computers harder to use for everyone else. If these lackwits were to design a car the steering wheel would likely be replaced by a side-to-side leaver hidden under the seat, one pedal would make the car go backwards and the other would make the car go forwards but only when both were pressed at the same time. The braking system would be replaced by a unified brake wheel moved into the door of the vehicle where once a certain, impossible to determine rotation spot was reached, would apply the hand brake instead of the normal brakes.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

My guess would be an exceptionally savage and lossy audio compression compression algorithm has been configured by AT&T. They will have reduced the bandwidth down to as little as possible to save the odd bits per second on their transport infrastructure. I doubt there are any many remaining analogue phone systems out there, for years the infrastructure has been digital only.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No need for an 'upgrade'

Unfortunately Samsung do software badly... very badly. Their hardware is usually pretty good but the software is what would happen if a large room full of drunk monkeys were sat in front of computers and forced to code until whatever they banged in compiled (with compiler warnings turned off, of course). While some of Samsung's top of the line devices are supported for a passable period of time, anything other than this is supported for a fixed period that seems to start from when the marketing department first thought about the device and the things while claiming "three years of updates" in the marketing spiel will often only have a year at most left when you buy them.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

It's a maturing market and the majority of users have found that their mobile phones largely do what they need. Once a phone meets the requirements that the user has, they have no real need to replace it.

There will always be the marks in the world who need to have the latest phone and think that it's "free" because that's what the sales spiel for their £60/month contract said, and their inability to multiply 48 (months) by £60 (less the cost of a SIM only deal) to work out that they are usually paying 30-50% more for this "free" phone than if they just bought it themselves. These same people often upgrade their phones after only half of the period, often paying a lump sum to do so, and still can't do the maths for their next "free" phone.

The only place where continual churn on mobile devices is a good thing is the device manufacturers.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: It's still happening

This kind of thing looks like an attempt to work around endemic data issues where one just cannot trust the data spewed out from another part of the system. In other words, the value in sna might incorrectly come with negative values and this had to be handled. As a result the "ReverseSign" function is probably just an implementation of ABS, but if it's not then there are serious questions to be asked but as it looks like the data from other parts of the system cannot be trusted, then this is indicates much more serious problems. Because if a function might sometimes write a value as negative, but not always, this is a really serious thing as handling this stupidity has to happen consistently everywhere that value is referenced.

If it was the case of always needing to subtract the value 'sna' then

'foo = bar - ABS(sna)'

would do the job but if it's a simple case of doing the reverse of whatever the sign in then the previous poster's

'foo = bar - sna'

is the right way to do it.

EDIT: Just found the web archive reference copy of the item that Stack Overflow removed where the question was what programming language that Horizon was spewed out in - it appears to Visual Basic 5 which would explain so much as while commonly used, almost nothing of any value or reliability whatsoever was churned out using VB5. So yeah, 'foo - bar - sna' is the way to go and the code implemented was both dumb and dangerous too.

DPD chatbot blasts courier company, swears, and dabbles in awful poetry

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: "Maybe these chatbots are smarter than we thought?"

Many of them are very similar to predictive text too.

As for the chatbots being AI? Not at all. They don't have a model of knowledge and able to extrapolate and test this knowledge, it's just repeating and blending previous statements and relationships made elsewhere.

There are some quite different ML systems which are trained to find patterns or trained to find specific patterns matches, and while these can also be very useful, they are also not AI.

What makes a hard error hard? Microsoft vet tells all

Nick Ryan Silver badge

That kind of horror is due to corrupted file tables. FAT/32 is exceptionally susceptible to such things where allocated blocks on the disk are, usually due to a crash or system restart, assigned to multiple file streams. The result is that chunks in the middle of one file being overwritten by another.

NTFS is less susceptible to this, but definitely not immune to it. Immunity requires very careful and clever consideration of the file structure and the algorithms in use that manage it which is in place in other file systems, just not NTFS to the same degree. Such designs have to balance performance, which is often raw speed but also storage space, bandwidth and multithreading, with integrity and there's always some trade-offs somewhere.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Time to call

Oooh. I'd forgotten about that one: Shudders...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

However, at the same time Microsoft also perverted the meaning of error messages in some of their own applications. For example, any time that the likes of Microsoft Word or Excel failed due to random reasons, usually poor code, the exception was trapped and the modal error message "Out of memory" was shown. Not that this is much more useful than the current endemic crop of poor quality coders who do no error checking whatsoever and instead propagate everything up the exception stack so rather than a simple and useful "file X does not exist", an unintelligible low level exception is shown instead (nothing is logged, of course, which makes it even harder to work out WTF went wrong after the event).

AI investment still at the planning stage through 2024, Gartner says

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Another typically vapid Gartner statement that starts off wrong and just carries on from there. I wonder which of the AI pushing software companies paid for this "report"?

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

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Re: Some Facts revealed by the Inquiry

Errors in 0.6% of transactions is 0.6% too high. The level of incompetence is staggering.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Anybody that ever proposes storing any form of meaningful data into a free text field should be fired and removed from work immediately. It is never an acceptable way to do things.

Similarly goes for communication systems that are not transactional. There's no excuse.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: They don't

Been there, walked away. We tendered for a local government service and it was made clear that we wouldn't get the gig unless we outsourced what we were fully capable of doing in-house to their nominated sub-contractor which individuals in the selection process had significant financial interest in. We'd have been allowed to cream off a little of the contract money for ourselves, most of the money we received would have gone to this sub-contractor who always subbed it out to the cheapest knuckle draggers they could barely employ. The end result is that a piss poor job would have been done, costing more than we quoted for doing it properly, the required sub-contractor would have made a tidy profit and our company would have been blamed for a crap end result.

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: US jet engine patent that was granted this century,

Kind of, but it was more considered an interesting toy than anything useful particular as it was not setup to provide rotational power for anything other than just to rotate the steam chamber itself. [assuming that we're thinking of the same device]

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: What could go wrong...

That's how I'm reading it. Lift in aircraft is just the difference in air pressure between two surfaces, mostly the top and bottom of a wing and usually due to flow of air across the fixed part of the wing. Wing control surfaces change the flow of air across the wings resulting in more or less air pressure differential. These air jets can directly modify the air pressure differential and can therefore be used to control lift without relying so much on the flow of air across the wings. One of the key issues with modern planes, particularly those that want to go fast, is managing the amount of lift which is why we have seen variable wing aircraft and fast plane tend to have very swept back wings but through doing so, they are less good at slow speeds. Something like this could help bridge the gap between low and high speed wing profiles.

That's my non-aeronautical engineer take on it anyway

Biden urged to do something about Europe 'unfairly' targeting American tech

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Prediction

Adam Smith, the writer that many hardcore capitalists like to use to justify their nonsense such as "trick down economics" was quite clear that regulated capitalism was the way to go otherwise abuse would happen. Remove the checks and constraints and what do we get? Monopolies, abuse, a culture of bribery and corruption ("lobbying" in US political terms) and a scheme that is slowly losing more and more in the wider world. It either requires a determined revision or those very few that benefit will abuse, steal and hoard more until politically things become very unstable. From the outside, the US is already well along this path with the likes of an ex-president encouraging sedition and revolt, deciding that they cannot be held responsible for their law breaking and lies, and continuing to sow division and hatred among others for their own personal benefit.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Wait, Samsung has an Android browser ?

Some of the best value Samsung devices are those mid-low range devices where upon removing/permanently disabling the Samsung bloat and crap me-too applications the devices ran really well. Samsung hardware is usually pretty good, the software tends to be much more like what would result if a horde of mentally deficient monkeys were put in a dark room and told to hit keys randomly until the software compiled (with warnings turned off, of course)

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No imagination any more

True. Particularly annoying because then the exception would then occur on the next operation and have little real relevance to it.

Adding in sensible error handling takes time and effort, and testing, and is a little tedious but the value of putting it in place is so high. Instead we now have trash software that just fails for no discernible reason and no real way to find out what the cause was.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: No imagination any more

Ah, but testing and error checking is just something that old timers do. It's a waste of time, pointless and takes skill and effort to do. Error checking should always happen with exceptions being there as a last resort to pick up the exceptional scenarios. It's even in the name...

Take three examples of an algorithm to open a door:

1a. Open the door. Exception occurred: door failed to open. Kick this exception up the call stack.

1b. Open the door. The door was already open. Continue with the next step.

2a. Open the door. Exception occurred: door failed to open. Kick this exception up the call stack.

2b. Open the door. The door is locked. Inform the user that the door is locked and that they need a key to open it.

3a. Open the door. Exception occurred: door failed to open. Kick this exception up the call stack.

3b. Open the door. Exception occurred: door failed to open for no reasonably expected reason. Kick this exception up the call stack.

In scenario 1a, 2a and 3a a lazy, poor quality developer just raises an exception regardless. Note how the result is the same and is of no help whatsoever.

In scenario 1b and 2b error handling happens and is useful. In 1b the process could continue without failing, in 2b the process could not continue but the user is informed as to why. In scenario 3 the door fell apart when trying to open it and raising an exception in this case is quite reasonable and in 3b most scenarios the door falling apart is not an expected outcome, but at least we know that it was not due to the door being already open or being locked.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Really?

I thought most heat pumps worked on the basis of ground temperature, not air temperature? As a result they need less area because there is a lot more available heat in a given volume of ground compared to air. The trouble is having a large enough chunk of available land to do this, but when done properly it is can be very efficient but what many don't understand is that a backup boiler is still important to such systems.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

My understanding was that hydrogen to the home was to replace the gas used in boilers to heat the home, not used to generate electricity locally in the home.

Not sure how it would replace the gas used to cook things though. While electric hobs are available, I much prefer gas and hydrogen hobs does sound like a spectacularly bad idea.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: speaking of usb

From memory I didn't experience any problems beyond an occasional system reset when live swapping the plugs.

I suspect the real risk was the power from VCC winding up where it's not expected but the keyed nature of the plugs made this near impossible. The very occasional system resets that I remember were probably either a power rush failure on the motherboard triggering unstable power somewhere actually important or a device handler failure (or both). Even these happened so rarely and later systems were much more forgiving and just didn't care that when forgetting to plug the keyboard and/or mouse in, we just plugged them in anyway. Caution was still there though, therefore care was taken on production server systems.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: speaking of usb

Which was fine until you found some arse of a device manufacturer had either helpfully decided to swap the colours or to not bother with PS/2 colours at all. It didn't help that PS/2 devices are not hot swappable (there was a risk of motherboard damage if doing so, probably small but it was reported to be a risk) but usually if the damn things didn't work it was just a case of power off and swap them around.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Every single time

USB was there, but quite new. Also USB modems tended to suck balls so anyone with any sense tended to either use one connected to a serial port or, at worst, a USB serial port adaptor. Modems later started to be build in to laptops but that often brought a whole new world of pain due to some not being connected to an internal serial port and instead requiring specific, inevitably very poor quality, drivers to barf into action. Things did improve eventually, but it was painful.

Logitech's Wave Keys tries to bend ergonomics without breaking tradition

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Horrible layout

I wouldn't say that it's the worst by far. I can't see where the Insert key has been squirrelled away but other than that the big issue is the horrible determination to replace function keys with the usual arbitrary set of functions instead - these are inconsistent across every damn keyboard and vendor and make the simplest of function key presses an exercise in risk. At least they didn't put a bloody power/sleep key on the keyboard (any keyboard designer doing this needs to be summarily beaten to death with their own keyboard)

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: like video games localization

I suspect that while the larger studios are more likely to have the capacity to support Linux, their existing toolchains and in-house processes and libraries probably don't and adjusting the momentum of these is likely to be hard particularly with accountants looking at the figured.

Smaller teams are more likely to start from fresh and to want to include as many potential markets as possible from the outset rather as this is easier to do from the start.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I'm not sure that Windows 2000 suffered from USB-induced BSODs either.

What is much more recent though is Windows just being dumb with USB configuration and deciding that a device is no longer working even though it works perfectly fine. Unplug from one USB port and plug into another and Windows detects it and uses it just fine. It was the point that a good few years ago I wrote a small application to purge dead USB device entries so we'd stop running out Windows caused unusable USB ports. Hard to remember, but I think that stopped being so necessary from Windows 7 onwards.

BOFH: Groundbreaking discovery or patently obvious trolling?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: He really?

While commonly laughed at, and often for good reason, Abort, Retry, Ignore were quite a sensible set of options when attempting to read data from an testy storage medium - such as floppy disk.

Abort - just give up entirely

Retry - try getting the data again, just in case the god of magnetism and motor whirring are feeling generous today

Ignore - ignore this error knowing that the data is crap and move onto the next bit of data (and hope).

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Phased data?

Maths such as division using Roman numerals becomes rather more interesting than expected because we'd naturally try and use our modern positional number techniques and these are not transferrable to number systems with discrete values. This didn't mean that Roman mathematicians and engineers couldn't do maths, just that their techniques were different to compensate.

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

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I suspect we all have at some point. It's even more embarrassing when having just taken the screenshot, laughed about clicking on it, and then doing it again... :)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I had to work with someone who decided that a mouse should be held sideways as that was how she could use her thumb and finger to press the buttons. She had decided that she hated using computers as a result but got very defensive when shown how a mouse should be held. Just trying to use a mouse in that way was really hard (and I tried it out, of course) but amazing what humans can get used to in if necessary.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

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Re: "Replace the passwords!!!!"

Replacing the secret, changeable component in authentication with a non-secret non-changeable component is never going to improve security. Biometrics can verify identity, but that is different to authentication.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Hardware or software

However, Hollywood loves fingerprint, iris and face recognition for authentication purposes in films therefore idiots have to try and implement this in reality.

Replacing the secret and changeable component of authentication with something that is neither secret nor changeable is only ever going to reduce security.

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Good call - that would definitely work.

Europe says Adobe's $20B buy of Figma will kill competition

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Enshittification ahoy!

Precisely, combine it with this sentence from the article:

Figma has four million users, including a little under 1,000 paying customers. The vector-based graphic editor and prototyping toolmaker was founded in 2016 and has taken in around $330 million funding to date.
and we have a service that so far has cost $330 million on 1,000 paying customers - or $330,000 per paying customer. That's an insanely poor ratio and while loss leading is a standard approach for finding VC funding, this really demonstrates the ridiculous extent of this practice. It's all about persuading the VCs that "there will be big money sometime in the future, and it's will definitely, absolutely, be much higher than the ~10% (whatever) you'd make elsewhere." Then Adobe come along and validate this approach by offering $20m per paying customer...

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Seems to me that ...

Yeah true, think of all the heathens that don't pronounce gigabyte it something like Jijabyte instead...

Microsoft's Swiss army knife app hopes to cut through cloud clutter

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Yep, keeping vaguely up to date with whatever nonsense happens in the land of Microsoft's PowerShell commands is all about that...

January: Here's the new revision of the PowerShell library you now need to use. It's 50/50 as to whether or not it's entirely compatible with the previous version, sometimes just doing a search/replace on the command names is all that is required (why inflict this?) other times more disruptive changes have been applied.

September: We've deprecated this new PowerShell library and now you need to use Microsoft Graph instead. By the way, not all the functionality that was in the previous PowerShell libraries are in this new version yet.

October: We've updated that Microsoft Graph and it is now no longer available, use this new Microsoft Graph interface instead. Some functionality has been moved into one library, some into another library. Some has just disappeared entirely. Also we still haven't bothered to update the documentation and command have a 50/50 chance of either being auto-doc generated nonsense or referring to a different command entirely...

...and then if continues the same the following year.

Japan Airlines fuels up on hydrogen hype with eye on cleaner skies

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Thinking outside the box

To be fair to the highly explosive Hindenberg, a critical issue with it was the flammability of the hydrogen containers, not the hydrogen itself. Which is slightly astonishing considering how reactive hydrogen can be.