Posts by nichomach

Landlord quirks leave thousands of flats stuck in the broadband slow lane

Re: Give them a wayleave then....Have a virtual pint!

Thanks for posting the link; I've recently moved into a flat with copper broadband. I can punt this at my landlord and see what he says.

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges

Agreed, but...

...we need the capacity anyway (and if the coalition hadn't binned the program in 2010 we'd already have it).

Auction house Sotheby's finds its data on the block after cyberattack

"You have one hour; one of your pieces of confidential data must cost over £75, and there is my special challenge..."

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

"advice that the Shuttle's wings would need to be removed is "misinformation.""

You just remove the walls and roof of the Smithsonian instead. Easy.

Workers: Yes, RTO makes sense. No, we’re not going to do it

Clock/Calendar Blocking?

Or "being forced to block out time in your calendar to get on with your damn job without being stuck in endless pointless meetings about it". Funny how companies/management create a problem (endless redundant meetings) and then apply a pejorative label to reasonable attempts to work around it.

Microsoft insists Copilot+ PCs are 'empowering the future' – reality disagrees

So, if I've got this right:

Windows 10 EOL forces hardware purchases due to 11's hardware requirements

New Windows 11 machines have AI that no-one asked for, but they get anyway

Sales of new machines are counted as a huge win for AI

Does that about cover it?

VMware to lose 35 percent of workloads in three years – some to its friends at ‘proper clouds’

Bye, VMWare

We are not a large customer and only use VMWare for two specific use cases, but they have been such a pain to deal with post-takeover that I'm shifting those as fast as possible.

Prohibition never works, but that didn't stop the UK's Online Safety Act

"Does the UK, and I fear soon enough the US, really want to join such anti-VPN countries as Russia, Iran, and China? I don't think so."

I do.

Qilin ransomware attack on NHS supplier contributed to patient fatality

OK...

These people have attacked critical infrastructure, knowing that they risk killing people, and have now provably done so. Time to treat them the same as other terrorists - as targets.

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: I still use it, but...

And it's done it again this morning, so you can downvote me all you want, Firefox is still crap.

Re: I still use it, but...

Well, it's just done it again this morning. So please explain the meachanics of how that's a "me" problem. Or don't, because you can't.

Re: I still use it, but...

No, I'm talking about digging around in Firefox's profile files to find a sessionrestore that gets me back at least some of my tabs. And it's just done it again.

I still use it, but...

...its nasty habit of not being able to restore sessions after an update, requiring me to manually muck around finding a restore point that works is driving me to look at alternatives.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Re: Hmm

I think if people knew how little they were getting in exchange for how much they were being taxed, and how little those who could afford far more are being taxed then they would revolt.

Europe's cloud datacenter ambition 'completely crazy' says SAP CEO

"Next, I have to hope really hard that the US government is actually respecting that agreement." - This, a hundred times over. We know that the current administration has reneged on agreements, treaties, even their own constitution, with little standing in their way. To continue to trust their intentions is madness.

Booby-trapped Alpine Quest Android app geolocates Russian soldiers

Oh no! Anyway...

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

But we know, of course...

...that however hard that judge slams the stable door, the horse has not only bolted but flipped the bird to the law on its way out. That data is now irrevocably in the hands of Musk and his sturmtruppen.

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

Personally I welcome anything which allows the government to ignore the public more swiftly and efficiently.

Consult AI:

"In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.

Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

Re: A Perfect System

I've seen this movie - "we take the humans out of the loop!"

*nuclear holocaust ensues*

Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries

Re: “protecting the safety of drivers”

Including USPS, who will be legally obliged to serve the neighbourhoods that Amazon don't want to. So Amazon pocket the excess profits of charging for a service that they can't deliver, while relying upon a government regulated service to fill in the gaps? Their tax bill should DEFINITELY go up.

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

Anyone else impressed by the biblical level of chutzpah in the statement "On this particular topic, I absolutely don't trust the Post Office,"?

NASA pushes decision on bringing crew back in Starliner to the end of August

Re: Suit SL != Capsule Dragon

As in:

"We have two competing connector standards"

"Let us design a new universal connector standard to solve the problem!"

.

.

.

.

.

"We have three competing connector standards..."

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

I think there are about to be...

SO...they're claiming the right...

...to fire with insufficient notice, while sueing for being fired with insufficient notice...

Too late now for canary test updates, says pension fund suing CrowdStrike

CS: "We believe this case lacks merit"

Investors and clients: *point to millions of screen caps of goosed computers*

CS: "We believe this case lacks sufficient merit..."

Qilin: We knew our Synnovis attack would cause a healthcare crisis at London hospitals

Oh, it's a politically motivated TERRORIST attack

Fine. Treat them as hostile threat actors, find them, kill them. They're happy to kill innocent civilians, they should be fair game in return.

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Re: Laminate everything

No, silly - you laminate the USER. Solves everything.

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

Sentences you have to read twice...

...and even then they're difficult to believe: "if the door plug removal was undocumented there would be no documentation to share"

How, excuse me, the flying FUCK can a procedure like that be "undocumented"???

"We're going to take a big chunk out of the side of this plane, then plug it back in again."

"OK, where's the manual for the procedure?"

"You're new here, aren't you?"

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

At least you can rely on them to open the door for you. QUestion is at what altitude?

Palantir bags £330M NHS data bonanza despite privacy fears

Re: Follow the money

They're probably queued up for the remedial works when it all goes titsup.

Legacy comms outfit Avaya returns to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

Same

We use on-prem IP Office with SCN between a couple of sites, and it's easy to administer, easy to set up voicemail menus etc. We use the J179 handsets and they're great, as is Communicator, the softphone. Sad that a company that makes great stuff is being driven into the ground again.

On the 12th day of the Rackspace email disaster, it did not give to me …

Re: who's bollocks: Rackspace, or hosted exchange?

Hosted Exchange *should* mean an Exchange tenant in the provider's Exchange infrastructure, not a singe VM, contrary to a couple of the answers here. This means that you're getting advantages of scale (clustering, database availability groups, hopefully better backups and restores) than you might be able to afford running on-premise.

Boss installed software from behind the Iron Curtain, techies ended up Putin things back together

"I picked up this copy of Microsoft Project in Hong Kong on a market - can you install it for me?"

"Ahahha...you're a funny guy - NO!"

Cloudflare finds a way through China's network defences

"This, Chen, is the Internet!" *

* or at least an approved part of it...

HP Inc to lay off up to 6,000 staff, cut costs by $1.4 billion

Here we go again

Sounds like Apotheke mark 2 - "PCs only make 6.6% profit! We must slash them immediately!" Pardon me, sunbeam, but 6.6% profit on $44bn sales is, let me see, STILL A CHUFFING BUTTLOAD OF MONEY!

Security firms hijack New York trees to monitor private workforce

Hang on a mo'

I'm not sure of the situation in New York, but drilling into public property like that without prior authorisation in the UK would be criminal damage.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

I didn't say it was the Liberals' fault, merely stated that it was the coalition government that shelved the plan. That said, lay down with dogs, you get fleas.

Re: Lack of energy policy for 30 years, nuclear costs

In all fairness, new reactors were greenlit in 2009, but were shelved by the coalition.

Too bad, contractors: UK government reverses decision to axe IR35 tax reform

Re: Screw them

I'd agree with a lot of that *except* that Labour are offering an economic plan in so far as they can without seeing the books.

Former Uber CSO convicted for covering up massive 2016 data theft

"Kalanick has not been charged."

Well spank me silly and call me Susan, I'm SHOCKED. Well, not THAT shocked.

Serious surfer? How to browse like a pro on Firefox

At this point

I'm seriously considering ditching Firefox completely. I spent about an hour this morning trying to get my history, settings, saved passwords and everything else back after Firefox sh@t the bed during a failed update and wouldn't load my profile, forcing me to create a new one. It's ditched my add-ons as well, which is a REAL pain in the posterior.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Re: Architect Smartitect

I feel your pain. Some years ago we built an extension onto our building. Nice false floors with cable trays beneath them - really quite tidy, until the architect decided that floorboxes were aesthetically unpleasing and banned them. Cables were terminated in plastic surface mount boxes *under* the floor with grommets fitted to allow cables through the floor tiles. IT were told, basically, "You can have whatever you want as long as it's what we say". So every time we need to trace a cable, we get cut to shreds fishing around under the floor. Oh, and needless to say, it looks crap as well. Architects? Shoot on sight.

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

Had that sort of thing a few years back, only with people claiming to be from Microsoft. Got to recognize the type and forced them to admit they were a reseller. My standard response was "You started your very first conversation with me with a lie. Why would we trust you on anything else? Goodbye, and don't call again." Seemed to work, eventually.

Nadine Dorries promotes 'Brexit rewards' of proposed UK data protection law

Re: A cunning plan

Baldrick was mostly trying to be helpful. This bunch are only trying to help themselves.

Good god...

...she's an idiot. Truly it is said that Dorries is what happens when the ventriloquist dies and the dummy keeps talking.

$50m+ contract for crime-fighting IT system won by Fujitsu after no one else bid

"Won" is doing some heavy lifting here, isn't it? As others have noted the lack of any other bidders should be a HUGE red flag.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is coming: Do you have one of the older model phones that can test it?

I've got a OnePlus 3 kicking around somewhere - might well give it a try; a few bits don't work, sure, but early days....

Phishing operation hits NHS email accounts to harvest Microsoft credentials

Re: To be fare (pun intended)...

The 350m was supposed to be financed by Brexit savings, so it emphatically was not given *from the source described*. Having our taxes increased to fund increases instead was not on the side of the bus. Also, "if we include Covid funding"? Pull the other one. Covid was a national emergency; in the same way that actually fighting a war isn't in the defence budget (it's funded by contingency funding from the Treasury) neither is a pandemic in the budget for the day to day running of the NHS. That's leaving aside that billions of that funding was trousered by Tory donors through unlawful contracts - and that was so blatant that the government doesn't dare appeal the verdict.

Re: Too little, too late.

You don't get joined up thinking after a decade of balkanisation aimed at privatisation. That said, the NHS is starved of resources.

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

"Are Microsoft still patching Windows 8.1?"

Pro? Yes. Drops out of support next year.