Posts by Pirate Dave

Heads up from Internet of S*!# land: Best Buy's Insignia 'smart' home gear will become very dumb this Wednesday

Re: We shouldn't have skipped the time when it was the Intranet of Things

"DAMN! I wish *MINE* was that reliable..."

Depends on how big of a boot you use. ;)

Re: We shouldn't have skipped the time when it was the Intranet of Things

I still have that remote capability. It's primarily executed by calling the moody teen who stays home in his room, and telling him to go turn the lights on/off, turn on the oven, shut the fridge door, do we need any milk/eggs/butter, etc. It's not a cheap system, considering how much he eats and wants to wear nice clothes, but it has worked out pretty well so far. Only had to reboot it a twice in the past 5 or 6 years.

Microsoft sees sense, will give Office 365 admins veto rights on self-service Power tools

Not the first time

So apparently this isn't Microsoft's first foray into this corporate Self-Service universe. I was searching around for the magical Powershell command to disable this, and found that Microsoft has already gone through this back in September with their Dynamics 365 self-service.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-business-central-manage-selfservice-signups

Funny how on that page, Microsoft is fairly straight-forward about it, they aren't acting like a kicked puppy the way they are with the Power Apps self-service fiasco.

Linux kernel is getting more reliable, says Linus Torvalds. Plus: What do you need to do to be him?

Yeah, I looked and thought "Where's Linus, and why is Bill Maher in this photo?"

Microsoft explains self-serve Power platform's bypassing of Office 365 admins to cries of 'are you completely insane?'

I guess MS is out of "good" dumb-ideas, so they are floating one from the "bad" dumb-ideas list.

I fail to see how this will make things better for corporate users or admins. Looks like it will just be a big PITA from the get-go. Because, you know, some damn VP will get the email and decide it's a BRILLIANT idea, and then hit corporate IT for support when he gets himself into a mess. Why should he have to talk to "Frank" in India for support when the company has an entire IT department? Isn't that what they're for? Oh, and God help if it's a small shop with only a few IT bods who know NOTHING about the POWER crap when this VP needs help. Will MS Support work with the company's IT folks, even though the licenses are in the VP's name?

BOFH: Judge us not by the size of our database, but the size of our augmented reality

Re: Performance a little choppy ...

Wasn't the robot part of the BoFH vs PFY Wars from a few years ago?

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Paypal - where the motto of the Customer Service drones is "Sorry, I can't help you with that!".

Years ago, I got a new credit card specifically to use with PayPal. Something on PayPal's end screwed up as I was trying to get the card registered, and the card number wound up in limbo within their system. Called their "customer service" and was basically told there was nothing they could do about it that I'd have to use another card. Stellar customer service there.

Not to mention the ridiculous amount they skim off when you use them as an Ebay seller. After PP and Ebay take their cuts, it's not even worth the time to use Ebay to sell old low-priced network gear.

Chemists bitten by Python scripts: How different OSes produced different results during test number-crunching

Re: Stating the bleeding obvious part #261

98SE was good once you got all the non-Plug-n-Pray interrupts worked out, and assuming you weren't using a soft-modem with a flaky driver.

And I thought the big problem with ME was that MS had ripped out all of the "enterprise" networking stuff like their Novell Client and NT domain stuff, in an attempt to make it more "consumer" focused.

GNU means GNU's Not U: Stallman insists he's still Chief GNUisance while 18 maintainers want him out as leader

"The successor of Doom was Quake."

Could've also been zDoom or one of the other forks after id released the Doom source code in the 'Naughties. And I only say that because I would think someone who knew what Doom was, would know that the successor was Quake, but might not remember the names of the Doom forks.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

“Automatic news comment generation is beneficial for real applications but has not attracted enough attention from the research community,"

The most "beneficial" thing I see is the ability to covertly bury forum discussions about how badly your latest service pack/version of Windows sucks.

Ever own a Galaxy S4? Congrats, you're $10 richer as Samsung agrees payout over dodgy speed tests

Re: Settlement fund

They're probably doing their settlement math using Equifax's payout calculator...

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

Good cable

"The unnamed company actually coughed £42.32 for the cable, which represented a 12,347 per cent markup on the supplier's cost, "

But it will give them the lowest 0's possible, and all of the previously subdued nuances of the 1's will now shine through, just like the artist originally intended.

macOS? More like mac-woe-ess: Google Chrome slip-up trips up SIP-less Apple Macs

Re: SIPping

"can't see why everything needs an acronym though."

SENACA - Surely Everything Needs A Clever Acronym.

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

Re: It's probably intended...

Poettering is involved, the "why" doesn't matter, only the "fuck you, I'm smarter" matters.

IBM cuts ribbon on quantum computing centre wherein a 53-qubit monster lurks

Forgive my ignorance

But I thought useful quantum computers were still some ways off on the horizon, and were currently squarely in the realm of Mad Scientists. No? Or are these IBM machines still considered "experimental" and not really available to the general public? Or is it marketing hype? We had this story back in December https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/06/quantum_computing_slow/ where Uncle Sam was saying quantum was still years away. I admit, I am a tad confused.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you: Biz sneaks out Friday night rule change

So basically

Equifax is a conniving piece of shit, and the FTC is their shit-eating dog. Or have I got that backwards?

Handcranked HTML and JPEG japes. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Hand cranked code?

"We had fun configuring those on Linux back in the day!"

Not ALL of us had fun doing that... I seem to recall that was a bit of a pain in the ass to get working. But if memory serves, the Linux modules from ReadyToRun were more solid than the "native" ones for Windows. In fact, I think if you've got $$$ burning a hole in your pocket, RTR is still in business and still providing FPSE for Linux and Windows.

Personally, I was OK with the drag-and-drop page creation in FP - it was pretty cool in 2000, and faster than hand coding. I just never liked the messy, messy HTML that it generated. Obviously the FrontPage guys (I forget who they were) didn't care much for line breaks or indenting, just fling it all in the file as a long, twisted string of text. Nobody's ever gonna see it, right?

SpaceX didn't move sat out of impending smash doom because it 'didn't see ESA's messages'

Re: PhD in mathematics typically has no relevance to code quality

As my CompSci Prof used to ask us "Would you trust your code to run an automated circumcision machine?" (or something like that)

He was a mathematics PhD, and made bank moonlighting and doing the hard, formal proof of correctness for local software companies. But even he said it was impractical to completely and totally prove the correctness of even a modest program - it took a long, long time, and cost a bundle.

Allowlist, not whitelist. Blocklist, not blacklist. Goodbye, wtf. Microsoft scans Chromium code, lops off offensive words

Re: This is stupid

"Also, what exactly are "software blueprints"?"

Wouldn't that be flowcharts (that no one creates anymore during the design phase)?

Wait a minute, we're supposed to haggle! ISPs want folk to bargain over broadband

"In a poll of 1,000 broadband customers asked why they do not haggle,..."

I'm guessing the remaining 43 percent didn't even know that haggling was in the cards?

Canonical adds ZFS on root as experimental install option in Ubuntu

Wow

Considering the eye-watering memory recommendations that FreeNAS makes regarding using their software on a headless server, it's surprising that anyone would use it as the boot FS for a full-graphical workstation. I mean, it does really cool stuff, but most of that seems like overkill for a workstation. And even if Canonical is turning-off or turning-down a lot of the high-flying stuff in ZFS, it's still gotta be gobbling RAM like it's Christmas morning.

Ransomware attackers have gone from 'spray and pray' to 'slayin' prey'

Re: Weird Behaviour

"The cultural challenge is to get people to behave at work as they do at home - cautious when opening unknown emails, clicking random links etc."

If you can figure out how to do that, you'll make $BEEEELLIONS$...

Disabled by default: Microsoft ups the ante in its war against VBScript on Internet Explorer

Same here. We've got an ancient Intranet site built on Sharepoint running on WinServer 2003 that steadfastly refuses to work on the Firefox or Google line of browsers, but opens right up in IE 11.

And we're back live with the state of the smartphone market in 2019. Any hope? Yeah, nah

Could have to do with

Verizon (and perhaps others) not subsidizing their phones as heavily as they did in the past. Used to be, you could get a decent phone for $100-200 if you signed up for a 2-year contract. Now, they charge closer to retail, but allow you to spread the cost over 2 years. When my Samsung is paid off in another year, I'm going to keep using it until it just can't be used any longer (which, knowing Samsung, won't be long). Upgrading just to have new shiny-shiny is no longer the low-cost option it used to be.

Low Barr: Don't give me that crap about security, just put the backdoors in the encryption, roars US Attorney General

No worries - I didn't take it as hostile.

I thought the same thing. Then read his following paragraph justifying it. If that is his take on it, it's a very scary world he wants to build...

Re: Wyden for POTUS?

'Many still feel politicians and Governments work for them."

My wife is one of those. In her words "the government is there to take care of us". Needless to say, we have (very) differing opinions on that.

Re: Wyden for POTUS?

You make me very sad. Damn you and your dystopian visions of the money trail...

Re: Juniper and Cisco spyware

"Citation very definitely needed on that one."

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 springs to mind.

Stones, meet glass house: Mind behind Windows 8 GUI disses Windows 10 over leak

As such, the company admits it might call it "Office for the web", or perhaps "...on the web", or maybe "...in a browser".

Those are stupid names. They should just tack an "e" on the front of it and call it "eOffice" to differentiate it from regular Office. Then it would have a modern, cutting edge name.

New old Windows bug emerges, your 'strong' password is anything but, plus plenty more

Telemetry

Relax, it's fine. Really, it's nothing to worry about. Microsoft has said it's nothing to worry about, so there's nothing to worry about. Besides, everybody is doing it now, so it's fine, there's nothing to worry about. So stop worrying, because Microsoft says it's fine.

Guy is booted out of IT amid outsourcing, wipes databases, deletes emails... goes straight to jail for two-plus years

"Don't you just love being asked to contract for the company that made you redundant."

I told mine to go fuck themselves with a red-hot poker, because I may not be vindictive, but I am certainly a bastard. That was right after I told them it would take me about 5 minutes to fix the problem that their new Indian engineers had been unsuccessfully working on for the past 2 weeks. Outsource the guy who built the system, and you can fucking well take care of it yourself, starting immediately.

Imagine an Upside Down world where a vastly inferior OS went on to dominate... Stranger Things have happened

Re: ForeWarned is ForeArmed. IT and AI don't take Prisoners

"Does not everyone think about everything all of the time? Or are we to be led to believe there are prepared pigeon holes available to restrict and/or block further free future thought?"

The great koans are the vehicles to enlightenment, but are not the journey itself. The Master can't choose which the students remember or comprehend, yet that is no reflection on the Master himself.

Re: What's Not to Like in LOVE ..... Live Operational Virtual Environments

Welcome back, AMFM! Things have gotten entirely too predictable and intelligible around here lately. Good to see you back in fine form, giving us acolytes something to think about, if only for a little while.

Meet the Great Duke of... DLL: Microsoft shines light on Astaroth, a devilishly sneaky strain of fileless malware

Re: "it is the undisciplined/disorganized installation ..."

"Apps that get installed into a users profile don't go anywhere near the system32 folder."

EXEs that get installed into %AppData% are often blocked because that is/was an attack vector for several ransomware variants. And that blocking rule causes great grief throughout the land as many, MANY, small apps (*cough* SPOTIFY *cough*) think that %AppData% is the perfect place to put their EXEs, even though it's intended to be a DATA area, not an EXECUTABLE area (hint: it's in the name...).

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Scanner

I vaguely remember setting up an old scanner in the mid-90's (even then, it was an "old" scanner), and the software disks for it installed a stripped-down version of Windows 2.0, along with the driver for the scanner, scanning software, and some sort of viewer. I can't remember who made the scanner, seems like it was one of the big Japanese companies. It worked pretty well, for the time, and made nice scans. But the stripped-down version of Windows couldn't do much else, iirc.

Facebook celebrates Independence Day by lighting up American outage maps

Been a bad week

to be in the telecomm industry.

I got 502 problems, and Cloudflare sure is one: Outage interrupts your El Reg-reading pleasure for almost half an hour

You might know...

it fell over for me right as I clicked the link to go to the Comments section for the Deep Nudes story. At first I thought the company webfilter was gonna squeal about so many semi-naughty words on a page, then realized the 502 message was coming from Cloudflare. Phew, that was close...

Not that I read El Reg for fun at work. It's "Industry News", not leisure reading. Yeah...

Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

"I'm quite happy with Lazarus / Free Pascal on Windows and Linux, even the Raspberry Pi."

It runs on Mac, too. Was one of the first things I went looking for when I got an old Mac to bang around with 3 or 4 years ago. FPK worked fine, Lazarus seemed to struggle on the older hardware.

Re: I'll always have a soft spot for Borland

I remember in the early 90's Borland put out a "Student" version of TP 6 for $50 or so. I already had a sneaker-net copy of regular TP 6 from my college, and used it well and often. I did buy the full version of Delphi (maybe version 3) in the late 90's/early 2000's. Never did get on much with it, but was comparing it to VB 6 at the time, and VB 6 was enough for my simple Windows-programming needs, whereas Delphi had a bit of a learning curve, iirc. Now, as an admin instead of a programmer, everything is Powershell, which if you close one eye and look at it in a mirror, it almost ALMOST looks like a programming language, just don't look too closely or you'll lose your mind.

2001: Linux is cancer, says Microsoft. 2019: Hey friends, ah, can we join the official linux-distros mailing list, plz?

Awww

Isn't that cute - Microsoft holding hands and singing Kumbyah with the unshaven Penguinistas. Such a heartwarming moment that we've waited decades for. It's almost like watching warm and fuzzy videos of cute puppies playing in a bright green field. Puppies that unknowingly have cancer and rabies, but they're so cute to watch. So sweet and innocent. Awww. We should EMBRACE those puppies and show them all the love they deserve. They'll grow up so fast...

Must watch: GE's smart light bulb reset process is a masterpiece... of modern techno-insanity

Reminds me...

This reminds me of some old external print servers we had back in the late 90's/early 2000's. I can't remember if they were Intel or TrendNet. If they were powered on and off in a certain sequence, they took that as a signal to reset to factory defaults. Oh, the fun we had after Summer storms...

Hate your IT job? Sick of computers? Good news: An electronics-frying Sun superflare may hit 'in next 100 years'

Re: Yeah let's frrrryyyyyyy

"You need to build a new wood burning stove before baking the cake. How do you do that? How to you run the machines to mine and process the metal? How do you make a stove in an age that no longer uses steam?"

Eh, didn't our earlier space aliens overlords originally teach us to make our stoves out of dried, and possibly baked, mud? Mud which was often, if memory serves, in the shape of bricks.

Just saying, a wood burning stove could be made out of bricks, which are immune to solar flares, and will be in plentiful supply once the post-apocalyptic loonies start dismantling civilization.

Want to train a dragon? You'll need 500 million files, 730TB of data, 54,000 CPU cores...

Files

Million or billion? The headline says 500 million, the article says 500 billion. That's a lot of files either way (for a 2 hour movie that would have a max of 172,800 individual frames at 24FPS), but one seems a whole order of magnitude greater than the other.

How much open source is too much when it's in Microsoft's clutches? Eclipse Foundation boss sounds note of alarm

"But wouldn't it be ironic if all paths used by open-source developers lead to Microsoft?"

Microsoft is buying Emacs and GCC from the FSF? Or did I read that wrong?

Buffer the Intel flayer: Chipzilla, Microsoft, Linux world, etc emit fixes for yet more data-leaking processor flaws

Ya gotta think...

that at some point our fire-breathing computers are going to fall back to 25 MHz 80386 performance levels because of the cumulative "small performance hit" from all the hacks and microcode patches and kernel kludges piled on top of each other to prevent Spectre-like flaws.

Hi! It looks like you're working on a marketing strategy for a product nowhere near release! Would you like help?

Yep

"I happened to be in the marketing department, talking to one of the marketing bods..."

I think I see the start of the problem right there. Normally such an activity is best left to a professionals such as nuclear spill technicians or snake charmers. And never stare into their eyes...

NASA fingers the cause of two bungled satellite launches, $700m in losses, years of science crashing and burning...

Re: maybe it's a latin thing

Wait til Biggus Phallius heaws of this.

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

What about...

us quiet guys who stay in the server room and keep all the shit running so these "High Flyers","Curios Collaborators", and the rest can play out their soap-opera lives in their shiny corner offices full of windows? Some of us are in this because we were/are deeply enchanted by how all this techno stuff works, and have the social skills of a fountain pen.