Posts by IHateWearingATie

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

Re: Fucks sake

Er, no. There are plenty of use cases for multiple authors where your suggested solutions add time and complexity - technical architecture docs, proposals for large IT projects being written against a deadline to submit to a client, cutover approaches are three examples from just my recent work where multiple people need to work on a single section.

Of course, that would be if the tech can handle it. Which MS stuff frequently cannot. On at least one occasion we have resorted to working separately on individual sections because MS Word on OneDrive craps out, and a right pain in the arse it was too.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Many moons ago I worked on some software for an HMRC call centre - they deliberately added several layers to the IVR (I seem to remember we recommended no more than 2 layers, I think they chose 5) to keep people off the call waiting queue stats, and potentially hope they will give up and abandon the call. Seems others have learnt from their example!

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

According to Oracle, there is only underpayment they can prove, and underpayment they are currently unable to prove (don't worry, they will at some point).

What is the 'overpayment' you speak of?

Re: Auto-Account Deletion

I should try this with my next annual performance review

Lorum ipsum I deserve a one hundred percent payrise dolor sit amet

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Re: £5 a month saving

I was involved with all this when I was a civil servant (2010 I think it was - based in 55 Whitehall as there wasn't room in the main DECC building ). The savings were assumed to be based on:

- Showing you what your energy consumption was live on a little screen, so you'd think more about what you are spending and switch more things off

- Making load shifting tarriffs widely available where they were not with a basic analogue meter (I know there were some economy 7 meters out there, but not that many)

- Enabling more 'smart' stuff - for example, your washing machine could be loaded and then set to run when the leccy price was low, triggered by your supplier.

Now, I didn't write the business case, I was merely the recipient of it to try and get a programme running to implement it. I thought it sounded a bit ridiculous as well.

As for the tech, I can't quite remember why the transmission supplier wasn't doing it. I remember Italy has a similar system to France, not sure why the transmission supplier wasn't just asked to do that (powerline data transfer type stuff). I may need to dig out my notes.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Sounds similar to the science sites in south Oxfordshire - particularly Harwell when they had the plutonium research facility there in building 220 (long since gone). Special training for that fire crew was particularly special - you'd never summon external emergency services, you'd speak to the on site ones and they would work out whether extra help was required.

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

Re: The fly in this ointment is...

The fly in the ointment I;ve found with Uber is that often the drivers accept the ride, then cancel it when they get a better offer from a different app like Lyft. At times I've found it unusable as multiple drivers accept then cancel the job. Or accept then just drive off to another job on another app.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

BA IT systems

This particular issue might not be the fault of BA, but their systems and app are so unreliable that I've given up travelling with them. In the last year or so I;ve been travelling a lot for business and their app is so buggy I can't rely on whether I can use it for my boarding pass, check in, gate number etc. Yes, there are other back up options (check in when I get to the airport etc), but given how awful their app is, the manual backup options are used more than the convenient options, to the point where I just give up even trying.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

"simple, low-cost"

Not usually words one associates with Oracle, unless words like 'never' are put in front of them

Lords of May-hem: Seven signs it is Oracle's year end

Re: The defense against this BS is..

“Online/Cloud apps a bit trickier but if you've got a 100 employees, and every single one of them has a laptop then that's max 200 seats”

That sounds like someone who hasn’t had to negotiate the byzantine set of rules that Oracle sets up in its licencing agreements.

A company I worked with a few years ago got stung by an Oracle licence audit because they had bought the wrong type of cloud licence. The conversation could be boiled down to:

“But we bought a cloud licence for this database? Look, it says ‘cloud’ on the box”

“Ah, but when we said cloud, what we really meant was cloud, not cloud cloud. When you read the utterly ambiguous statements in the contract written in cuniform and so small you need a scanning electron microscope, you’ll see why you were wrong and now owe us $$$$”

“But we explained in minute detail what our needs were, and the sales rep recommended this licence specifically for our purpose?”

“Ah, but you also didn’t read the clause that says all our sales reps have room temperature IQs and cannot be trusted with anything sharper than a spoon, let alone be relied upon to recommend the right licence. Your problem, your liability.”

Suffice to say, Oracle are on my ‘don’t touch with a 10 foot bargepole” list permanently.

Rear-end crashes prompt probe into Amazon's Zoox self-driving cars

Re: Easily solved

You're not an economist are you? :)

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

I worked with a guy who used afrikans swearwords in his error messages (not user facing, only in the logs techs look at). T'was an education :)

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

My suggestion.....

The suggested products from Amazon actually turn out to be useful, and not just more versions of the things that I have bought already.

"You recently bought a table - here's a list of other tables that you might like. We would suggest some chairs, but that would be too useful."

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

I have learnt over many years to leave things well enough alone. Merely the act of checking on something can cause a system that had been working perfectly to break.

Blissful ignorance is my happy place

Goodbye Azure AD, Entra the drag on your time and money

Re: Time to rename it and make it just part of the Entra brand

You're mistaken. Marketers are droids. Licensers are devils or demons.

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

Re: Reviews are pretty pointless these days

Oh my word - I haven't had a phone with that for ages!

I loved messing with the TV at the in-laws as they wondered what's going on.

Without competition, TCS wins back UK pensions body in £1.5B mega-deal

Let's be honest

I've been involved in loads of these kinds of tenders, public and private sector. All the usual suspects are about the same, it depends on who's fielded the biggest liar .... sorry, best salesman in the process. TCS, Atos.... it'll all be much of a muchness.

Intel to rebrand client chips once Meteor Lake splashes down

Re: Marketing: Intel Core Super Wolf Blood Moon 7 XIII

Shut up and take my money. More than a blood moon, its a super wolf blood moon!

I assume it can run Crysis?

James Webb Space Telescope suffers another hitch: Instrument down

I think L2 is 4 times further away than we've ever managed to send humans from earth and bring them back alive. Volunteers for a one way trip to fix something anyone?

Accenture announces 'Accenture Song' – not a tune, but a rebrand

There was an unofficial song...

.... I seem to remember a very ambitious manager in the USA created something and tried to get it to be officially adopted. It was doing the rounds in the early 2000s - I suspect in the USA as a serious thing, in the UK it was sent as a joke.

Don't have a copy of it unfortunately, but it was as bad as you imagine

Openness of Oracle licensing and audit tools questioned

Because no one ever gets fired for choosing Oracle.

Until, of course, the bill from the licencing compliance people comes in.

I've built up a small list of companies I never want to do business with again over the course of my career. Oracle are at the top of that list.

Offering Patreon subs in sterling or euros means you can be sued under GDPR, says Court of Appeal

Re: On the other hand...the corollary

US courts tend to take a very wide view of what is in their territorial jurisdiction. The best assumption you can make is that if you have a map with the USA marked on it in your house, or know what the capital of the USA is, their courts will assume they own your ass.

Ooh, an update. Let's install it. What could possibly go wro-

Re: Netware? Less than 20 years ago? Where was he working - Jurassic Park?

Hah! I can well imagine that was the case. Lucky is the techie who hasn't worked at an org that isn't so much behind the curve as using a telescope to see the curve accelerating away from them.

In 2001 at a certain public sector organisation I was still coding updates for a user interface running on Windows 3.11. I bet they thought of Netware still as newfangled technology.

Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Re: Who is This Guy?

@Captain Scarlet

Don't worry, I've taken up the mantle temporarily. Down vote registered!

*runs away cackling*

Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC

Re: Temporary hacks aren't.

"[0] Just to cut the usual pack of idiots putting words into my mouth off at the socks, no, I didn't write the whole stack. That's why I said "part of". It was only about 120 lines of C in total."

Dammit, I was looking forward to that bun fight.

Spoilsport.

This feels like it was a missed opportunity for an ..... enhanced...... redundancy package, as well as a lucrative ongoing support contract.

The BOFH would never have let this one slide.

James Webb Space Telescope penciled in for launch this century. Yes, Dec 18, 2021

I seem to remember a mate's Dad had been working on one of the satellites in that famous Ariane failure for 10 years. Think its one of the few times he cried in public!

Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU

Re: This seems like a real legal loophole

I seem to remember from my dim and distant contract law lectures that the original case law on this is from the late 1800s and relates to a price being wrong on a watch in the shop window.

Invitation to treat, offer, acceptance I think are the three stages. Prices on a website are generally held in the T&Cs to be an invitation to treat.

AWS growing so fast its revenue makes it bigger than Cisco or HP

Currently working at a client that for various reasons has to run its own server farm rather than use AWS or others for the first time in a while. It's reminded me why AWS and other cloud services are just sooooo much easier than running it yourself.

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

So, closed while the delivery continued, at which point you can choose to wait a bit for the delivery to complete and it opens again or try elsewhere if you have enough fuel. As opposed to broken charge points that aren't likely to be mended that day (or even that week).

When was the last time you got to a petrol station and found that it was closed / broken so you had to go somewhere else (as opposed to just having to wait longer as a couple of the pumps are broken) ?

My main car won't be replaced with an electric one until reliability of charging points is such that them being broken is really rare. My mate has a Tesla, and his experience is that it would be a real pain running an electric car without the excellent Tesla only charging network.

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

I expect Google are doing the sums right not to see if the cost of paying media firms in France is more than the fine will be. My guess is that its close at around $329m per year in fines

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

A car???? I'd have been CIO within a month if that had been me!

Ethics, I've heard of them. They sound expensive.

Bitcoin doomed as a payment system and its novelty will fade, says Federal Reserve Board of Governors member

Useless for day to day transactions

In my day to day transactions (e.g. getting paid by my employer, buying groceries etc) I have no use for a currency whose value can vary in such a large way day to day and week to week. Does inflation devalue my currency? Definitely, but its not Venezuelan proportions where I could lose half the value of my wage a week after being paid it.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Obligatory quote...

I feel a Terry Pratchett quote coming on....

"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."

Nvidia refreshes GeForce RTX GPUs: More CUDA cores, crippled crypto mining

I was thinking about replacing my 1080Ti with a 3070Ti, and with UK pricing around the £5-600 mark that matched what I paid for the old card. However, the likelihood of getting a card is close to zero without a serious investment in time, and probably bots.

Protip: If Joe Public reports that your kit is broken, maybe check that it is actually broken

Re: "Either that, or they fib and say "of course I have, I'm not stupid"."

Jail for an axe in the face, definitely.

A 'tickle' with an electric cattle prod..... well that's a bit more understandable

Bank of England ponders minting 'Britcoin' to sit alongside the Pound

Re: Great idea!

So, am I going to need a new wallet to fit the Canon cartridges in ? Or do I bring a small bottle and pipette to measure it out when paying?

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 now includes AMD options for biz customers, boasts up to 19 hours of battery life

No 15 inch or AMD option in the UK MS store yet. 13 inch and Intel only :(

From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams

Re: Not on-call, but...

You *admitted* that it was your code? Fool!

It's always the code that they guy who just left wrote. Unless he left as he's been promoted above you. Then it's clearly a Microsoft OS bug.

I remember my wife telling me about the awkward conversation with a client about a "customs charge" for some product they were trying to get in to Turkey (this was way before the advent of the bribery act). Trying to avoid the use of the word bribe in the conversation, the client took ages to realise what she was on about, arguing that that particular class of products should be immune to customs charges under Turkish law. The conversation mostly focused on the wide latitude that customs agents had in Turkey to apply 'additional customs charges' that had to be paid in cash to secure an 'expedited customs release'.

Just when you thought it was safe to enjoy a beer: Beware the downloaded patch applied in haste

Re: I haven't seen a good game of Reply-to-All Tennis in years

I was working at a giant global company when that happened (2013 I think). The number of idiots doing a reply-all (to all 150,000 employees) saying "Please remove me from this list" or "Please don't reply all" was amazing.

It started at around 5pm UK time and took till 8.30pm before IT pulled the plug on the mail list.

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

I have duct tape (or gaffer tape) over a switch under my desk for the very same reason. That only got applied after the third unexpected power off incident, as I overestimated my ability to not kick my feet around under my desk when I read some stupid email that's arrived!

Negative Trustpilot review of law firm Summerfield Browne cost aggrieved Briton £28k

So, reading the story it was actually the "scam solicitor" bit that meant he was lost?

Otherwise he might have won. That's nearly £10k cost per word!

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

I guess I could help increase the average speed, but see little point

Currently on a Virgin Media 200/20Mb package - I could upgrade to the 500/35Mb but really don't see the point.

Early lockdown with both me and my wife working from home and the sprogs doing their schoolwork didn't tax it too much, so don't see the point in anything faster for me at the moment. I'm sure that will change in the future, but for now I'm not doing my best to help the overall average speed increase.

Tim Cook 'killed' TV project about the one website Apple hates more than The Register

El Reg worse than Gizmodo?

Just how naughty have you been El Reg, when Gizmodo buying a stolen phone and writing about it only gets them a 2 year Apple Ban, when you are in the perma-banned category?

Did you stamp on St Steve's kitten or something? Tell Tim C he was holding the phone wrong in a press interview? Suggest that some Apple products might be a tiny bit overpriced?

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Inside joke?

I've never worked out who thought that calling a firm of solicitors "Wright Hassel" was a good idea. I know its the names of the founding partners, but really?

(They're based in Leamington Spa should you want to look them up)

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

Guide to religion

Vim = the one true way

Vi = heresy

Emacs = apostasy

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

Hen screwed up Wikipedia so Maw Broon gave him a clip round the ear.

Used to get the Sunday Post every week as a kid, loved those cartoons

"Any other shit cliches you want to wheel out while you're logged in? Maybe something about haggis or .."

Ah, haud yer wheesh as mah mither used tae say.

No really, she did. Apparently I moaned quite a bit as a kid. Now a parent myself, I must say its a very useful saying.

Looking at some of the pages, its like that editor read some Broons cartoons in the Sunday Post and decided that they could speak Scots.