Posts by Jay 2

How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas

Re: Interesting

Oh yes. I once had a fairly standard grocery delivery charge declined, even though something similar happened every few weeks. Meanwhile a one off several grand payment for a holiday I made sailed through...

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

Once upon a time an office or two back, some enlightened soul* decided to heat up some pizza in one of the microwaves. So far so normal you may think. But it was still in a box. The box was placed on the revolving dish, the microwave started, and the person involved decided they'd go somewhere else for many minutes. But the box was suitably big enough to get jammed in place when the dish span. This resulted with part of the box being expertly zapped by all those helpful microwaves. After a few minutes of this, someone near the kitchen asked a slightly rhetorical question (as the answer was obvious) "Is something burning?". The answer was a most definite yes. The box was burning. Took a while for the smell to dissipate.

Similarly, but not etched in my memory as well, was an occurrence of some fish-based offering getting a good blast in a microwave and then spreading its rather interesting aroma around for longer than we'd have liked.

* Sorry, I meant to say complete moron

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

Many, many years ago I was a Solaris admin (after going via NCR UNIX and HP-UX) and Linux was becoming a thing. So I started looking around what was then Red Hat AS 2 (I think) and I wasn't overly impressed. Kind of reminded me of NCR UNIX 10 years before.

However progress marches on, so I learnt more and also went on a very useful Solaris to RedHat conversion course. I didn't find the transition so bad, but on that course was an ex-Sun engineer and he really had problems getting to grips with the changes. I guess he was a little too stuck in his mindset.

I know the feeling. At university when I was fast learning that I would never make a good programmer I was having enough of a problem learning Modula-2, so trying trying to write Ada (which was pretty similar) was tough for me.

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Given that the Apple mail clients (for iOS and macOS) are both dogshit I'm slighty not surprised. OK, maybe it's just me, but the way they try to second guess your mail config drives me insane. I know what my email server settings are, why can't I just type them in? Apple says no. So I have to go along with a forced route whilst it thinks it knows best, wait for it to fail, then go and change the settings to what I know is going to work.

Admittedly it's been a while since I've touched either as they don't do my blood pressure any good! Generally I use Thunderbird on macOS and Spark on iOS. And somewhere I have the Outlook app for iPhone/iPad but that's for some old Hotmail account I've still got lurking about.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Every time I hear something along the lines of "why don't you look online" when on hold on a phone call my instant reaction is always:

"IF I COULD SOLVE MY PROBLEM BY LOOKING ONLINE I WOULD HAVE DONE SO, THAT'S WHY I"M FUCKING CALLING YOU!"

We meet the protesters who want to ban Artificial General Intelligence before it even exists

Are we becoming the Culture?

"But even if you could build a superintelligence or an AGI, and it did everything for us and like, no one had a job, but everyone was just provided a universal basic income from the output of this superintelligence, and everyone could just kind of party 24/7 and not have to work"

Sounds like the citizens of the Culture. And if they get bored they can go and get a job at Contact or Special Circumstances!

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Rather ironically my own PSU magic smoke story is when we had some Ultra 10 workstations shipped from the US and my boss switched one on... And that day we all learnt to check the voltage selector!

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

"only replaced the motherboard."

That made me laugh so much, thanks!

How many times as a techie do we go through the following?

Us: Did you change anything?

Them: No

<repeat until>

Them: Well I did do X (but that won't have caused the problem)

Us: AAARRGGGHHH!!!!!!

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Cobol...

Similarly when I was at Aston Uni the standard lanuage for the course (or at least the first 2 years) was Modula-2 (aka Son Of Pascal). Also on (almost) the first day one of the lecturers stood up and said "...we could teach you somethign commercially viable like Ada, but we're not into that..." The next year the standard language was changed to Ada...

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Use/Abuse of people who try to help

Yes, we had something similar at my place (in UK). US had BYOD and our manager (who had transferred over from US) suggested we do that too. Many people were in agreement until I asked the simple question of "Doesn't installing the MobileIron client mean that it has the ability to wipe said device?", to which the reply from the guys who would be administering it was "...well it can, but we'd never use that functionality...". At that point everyone changed their minds and we got them to supply company mobiles.

GenAI comes for jobs once considered 'safe' from automation

Re: Riveting read that report (not)

Yeah, to me it came across like:

<Charlie Brown Teacher Voice>Blah, blah, blah, some over-hyped AI rubbish, blah, blah, blah<\Charlie Brown Teacher Voice>

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: After digging out an old utility

About a year or two ago we hired one of our previous interns, who wasn't even born when I'd started working at my current place! A 100% way to feel old!

Bandai Namco reportedly tries to bore staff into quitting, skirting Japan’s labor laws

Whilst in Japan earlier this year I saw a lot of that sort of thing. People waiting around by entrances to garages etc to wave flags and blow whistles if a vehicle was coming out. Also if there were some work going on with barriers/hordings/cones/etc then there would be a few people doing the work, and one lucky soul fully kitted out in day-glo stripes with a flag/baton just in case it wasn't obvious...

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Quickest fix: Had a call that monitor wasn't working. So I walked to desk, reached behind the monitor and pushed the power cable in.

Annoying stupid fix: There was an NT server that frequently shit itself, and the fix was to switch off on. But this was some time back before useful things like iLO/iDRAC/etc, so I had to go all the way into the office, press the reset button, then go all the way back home. Annoying as that was my last ever night on call at that company.

AT&T intends to quit VMware, Broadcom claims in legal broadside

Re: Quick Payback and strong IRR

I seem to recall that the AT&T of today is most definitely not the AT&T of yesteryear. They share the name and are both telcos but that's pretty much it. Off the top of my head what was AT&T (or at least their US consumer telco stuff) was broken up into several companies (the Baby Bells). And many years down the line after much buying/selling/mergers/etc one of those companies wrangled the rights to call itself AT&T.

Slightly similarly on this kind of thing see also Atari.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: Never for rudeness, but..

On a recent Zoom call I was obv not happy about somerthing so I must have pulled a face/rolled my eyes/etc. One of my colleagues messaged me to remind me I had the camera on... Not sure if anyone else noticed!

We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too

Reminds me of all those companies thinking they could use blockchain for something or other a few years back.

Actors can license AI voice clones in union deal

I can't see this ending very well for anyone apart from the studios and ad-flingers. Why pay pesky humans and deal with their demands and baggage when you can just type a few sentences into your very own StudioVoiceGPT (or whatev) and have it spit out some suitable audio rather sharpish?

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

I usually use a small sticky label to do the same thing. Makes life so much easier!

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Yep, this is pretty bad. Got a call from my colleague in HK (I'm in UK) at 0700 to ask if I could log in as they were having problems. I couldn't either. So I'll just twiddle my thumbs for now and let the Windows guys figure it all out. Hopefully it hasn't messed up all my Linux boxes!

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: Crows

Absolute genius move! Love it!

The Reg builds official Lego Artemis and Milky Way sets

Not the Playmobil of older El Reg, but I very much appreciate such an article. Interesting to see how the SLS literally stacks up against the mighty Saturn V.

The Milky Way set also seems to have tipped my brain into the Lego as art view (opposed to just a model on display). I like the attention to detail pointing out it would be a bugger to dust!

BOFH: Come on down to the dunge– erm … basement

Am now getting PTSD flashbacks regarding differential/single-ended SCSI and terminators etc!

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

Ah, this all may explain why myself (a sys admin), the DBAs, the CTO and countless others all got an email a few weeks back from Oracle asking that as we're using Oracle DB on RHEL if we'd like to consider using Oracle Linux.

Fortunately my colleagues and I could quite happily come up with tales of woe concerning Oracle, to ensure their approach went nowhere.

HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition

Ain't nothing going on but the rent

MD comes out of his little office and his gaze falls upon a rather large amount of empty desks. We're paying money for this office space he thinks. And it comes to pass that thou shalt come into the office at least once a week if hot desking (there are not enough hot desks to accommodate all the potential host deskers), or if you have a fixed desk, though shalt come into the office at least two or three days a week.

Me, I'm happy with my flexible hybrid. I have my fixed desk and so do have to venture in. But I'm happy to do that and I get to choose which days (no-one really cares). That way I can work around my own life but also can choose to go in to meet up with people. Sometimes it really is easier to get stuff done in person opposed to Zoom etc.

Overall I think horses for courses. Not everyone is the same and likes doing the same things. But I feel there has to be a little bit of meeting somewhere in the middle.

Did IBM make a $6.4B blunder by buying HashiCorp?

I also recall something similar with Oracle many years back regarding Hudson, which led to the devs forking into Jenkins.

And on the same lines, with Oracle yet again, there's OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

Synthia

<Fallout 4>Who would do that? A synth!</Fallout 4>

Great name choice!

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

I recall setting up something similar in MS-DOS 6.22 to load whichever strange combination of settings for sound card/joystick, CD-ROM, network and who knows what else in order to play specific games.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Yep, was going to say exactly the same thing.

They've already lost some potential sales at my place. And I suspect the higher ups are more than likely to decide that in the next 18 months or so our VMware estate will shrink somewhat.

Broadcom says VMware to grow revenue by double-digit percentages all year

On one hand it's hard to see why they're not going to make loads of cash when what was ~£50 per core goes up to ~£400 per core on some sort of whim.

On the other hand, I suspect such increases may force people/businesses/etc to look elsewhere and not give VMware the money they thought they could rake in.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

Re: Backwards

Wow, not thought about LOGO in who knows how long! I'm sure that (on BBC at school) and a family friend's ZX-81 were my first exposure to computers and getting them to do something.

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

At my place of work we were a Notes shop for a very long time. From memory we were on 4, 6, 8 and maybe 9. I suppose I had Stockolm syndrome as I didn't really mind it (yes, it was a bit of a shock moving from Outlook back in 1999!). It was someone funny seeing the reaction of new hires when told it was Notes not Outlook. Ironically this also included several CTOs who always said that we'd be replacing Notes with Outlook, but many of them departed without doing so. One potential reason for this was as others have said, Notes was more than just email/calendar. We had various databases and apps in there as well.

But eventually the inevitable happened a few years back and we went to Outlook 365. I think the Windows guys must have done a fair bit of work testing it all as the migration was smooth enough. But it did take a while to tweak Outlook to my needs.

The other side effect, which I find very funny, is when there's a problem with email and some high up bod has a go at Windows, who then point out it's due to something at Microsoft or Proofpoint and there's not much we can do about it!

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

Re: music copyright cases and rights are a pain

The Verve got caught out for two reasons:

1) One way or another they ended up using a longer sample than what had been agreed/cleared.

2) The sample in question was from an orchestral arrangement of The Last Time (not the Stones version) whose copyright was owned by an obviously very litigious guy called Allen Klein who used to mange the Stones during part of the 1960-70s. Note he was doing that in a personal capacity and I believe it didn't have much (or anything) to do with the Stones themselves. Though I'm sure they didn't complain about nay extra royalties etc...

Slightly fortunately the rights to Bittersweet Symphony have now been passed back to The Verve (who whoever of them is credited with writing it), but I doubt that will ever recoup what being sued and the lack of royalties over ~20 years

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Ah Modula-2, that was the base language for the start of my degree back in 1992. On pretty much the first day one of the lecturers stood up and said "We could teach you something more comercially viable like Ada, but we're not into that". The next year the base language was indeed changed to Ada...

If I mention Modula-2 then I usually refer to it as "Son of Pascal" to give people an idea of what it is, as they may not have heard of it. Though to be honest back then I had a hard time figuring out the move from BASIC/COMAL on a BBC to Modula-2 (and all the other langauges we had to mess with; Ada, Lisp, C to name a few) on a Sun box, which probably explains why I'm a sys admin now! Though I think after all these years I have figured out procedures, functions and libraries!

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

Ah Doom, how different it all was. I recall a friend of me telling me about it, saying how monsters could turn the lights off and it was pretty scary (for the day). Then later on I learned the fun of network deathmatches, though as it was initially on IPX it was the network that was getting fragged until the TCP/IP version came out. And somewhat later than than I used to make my own WADs based on silly things like my student halls layout or the office.

Whilst it wasn't the first of this type of game (ID's own Wolfenstein series came first), I think it was probably the most influential. In fact last Christmas I purchsed it for my Steamdeak to have a bit of fun, but my 13-year old nephew wasn't enitrely impressed!

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

What is it with the systemd devs finding obscure ways to provide info? If it's inteligent enough to produce a QR which will point to what might be wrong, then surely it could cope with just printing it on the screen where we can see it without having to resort to jumping though hoops. It's bad enough having to use journalctl to find out what's going on because they decided that wrting to logs was far too obvious.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Not all Doctors . . .

My firend's wife is (now) an anaesthetist consultant and in the past she's commented that I must be intelligent to do computery stuff and know loads of other useless stuff. My reply was she's the one with years' worth of medical training, exams and qualifications which are not exactly a breeze to get!

Back in the 1990s I was a compsci student and our facaulty was called something along the lines of Computer Science And Applied Mathematics. I can only assume that once upon a time it was the Maths dept who when acquired a few computers and eventually morphed into being more computers than maths. This had an interesting side effect of some members of stuff being computer bods and some, older and long serving staff, being maths types with a passing knowledge of computers.

I can't recall if it was the 2nd or final year, but we had a lecture, modelling and simulation I believe, taken by one of the older maths-focused staff. He would spend ages going through OHP slides of how you select menu items in Matlab on a Mac (as it was mainly a Mac and Sun Sparc shop at the time, very few PCs) and then bang through loads of equations on the board at speed usually missing out a few steps. This didn't help my understanding of all the numbery stuff...

The saving grace was that every other year his exam papers would ask the questions on the same subjects. So it was possible to pretty much learn a concept parrot fashion and pass. Annoyingly for my finals the first question wasn't the one about random numbers as I'd expected. But I managed to blag my way though the rest and passed. I always womndered what mark I would have got if it had been the question I expected. Mind you my friends were amazed as I was useless as maths (which is pretty much what modelling and simulatuion turned out to be). It helped that the course was one of the few compsci ones at the time which didn't require A-level maths as a pre-requisite.

UTM: An Apple hypervisor with some unique extra abilities

I looked into this when I got an M1 chipped Mac. I had some x86_64 Linux VMs I thought I'd still want around and used to use in Parallels. In one case a basic command line only CentOS 7 VM. The good news is that after a bit of messing with the various options etc I did get it to work. The bad news is that it was somewhat on the slow side.

Whilst it was an interesting little technical problem to find a solution to, it's not something I felt the need to continue with. So I bit the bullet and decided not to bother about older OS that was x86_64 only and just used some later aarch64 varients (if available) via Parallels instead. Given that I'm an old git now and I'm a Linux sys admin and spend all day messing with boxen, when I get home I want something that not only "just works" but also doesn't tempt me to try and "fix/tweak" something. As that usually ends up with said something not working or going down some sort of rabbit-hole.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: @StrangerHereMyself - They'll try

I seem to recall they came in Linux and XP flavours. The Linux ones were most likely returned because people thought as it had PC in the name it would run Windows apps, which it obviously wouldn't. They XP ones may have been returned as they were horrendously underspec'd to run Windows no matter what Microsoft said.

That second point led to the netbook, in the original concept, effectively failing. As pretty much all consumers wanted something that ran Windows OK and had a suitable screen size. And so netbooks got bigger, bulkier and more expensive until they were pretty much normal laptops.

I had a Linux one and rebuilt with either Ubuntu/Mint as the default distro it came with was a right mess. It was a useful bit of kit once you could sort it.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

My US colleagues tend to follow a pattern of having whichever poor soul is on-call being the one to do CMs/patching/etc after work (~5pm their time) on Friday evening.

Given that they know our culture (hic!) and possibly more so that we can't mess with some servers during their working day, we tend to do our round of the same thing on Saturday mornings. People have commented on if it's wise doing such things with a hangover, but on the main occasion I recall making a boo-boo I hadn't been out the night before.

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

Re: And Pottering continues to screw up Linux for its primary purpose....

Yes it's become increasingly obvious that a lot of changes are being made so he can happily have his Linux laptop work exactly like a Windows laptop when he's using the free WiFi of a coffee shop for hours on end.

The annoying thing is that the vast majority of Linux installations are servers/appliances/etc which don't need a lot of that crap, but now have it thrust upon them if a systemd-based distro.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

I used to have something similar (alongside standard UK keyboard PC). That's helped when I've logged onto a US box and the keyboard mapping gets a bit squiffy.

As someone else mentioned, the onscreen keyboard can be very useful!

Though all of that still doesn't stop some of my US colleagues using certain non-alphanumeric characters in passwords which can be interesting to try and type...

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Yeah as a PS5/Mac gamer the entire MS/Bethesda thing hasn't done me any favours. I'm really looking forward to Starfield, but have to hope it runs OK on a Steamdeck as I'm not going to build a dedicated gaming PC and neither am I going to jump ship to Xbox. Similarly I forget who owns Obsidian now, but Outer Worlds 2 is also an MS exclusive.

To give MS some credit I think Game Pass is a good idea (Sony's variations are somewhat lacking in comparison I feel)... but it's only a matter of time until they start ramping up the prices etc. Though like all these things it seems to be a never-ending round of (increasingly expensive) subscriptions. Oh you want to go online; subscription. Oh you want to play/rent these games; another subscription.

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

Shame, I've always found MS mice to be OK. When I got a new Mac last year I deliberately sought out a fairly basic wired 5 button mouse, mainly as I don't really get on with the Magic Mouse (and I have a thing against such wireless devices on a desktop).

Also got an old MS keyboard around here somewhere. Not an ergonomic one, never could get used to them.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

On chat the other day on of my colleagues referred to a Jira "thicket". I don't know if it was a typo, but given the contents and reporter I found it quite apt. I have since decided we should use this new word appropriately in the future.

WFH? Google Cloud's offices like a 'ghost town' before new policy

Re: right

During Covid my employers decided to take advantage of moving to a smaller office as to not pay as much rent/facilities/etc. They were also quite happy with how things were going with all the WFH. Then when it was time to come back everyone in IT got thrown under the bus saying it was hot desk only (which funnily enough isn't very appealing to many people). Also some other departments insisted that their staff had permanent desks... to which they hardly ever used. And so the result was an office that could be pretty empty to which the head of the company was usually heard complaining, along the lines of "we're paying for all this, so why aren't people using it". Things are a bit busier now Tue/Wed/Thur but Mon and especially Fri can be pretty barren.

Microsoft makes Windows-on-Arm in VMs on Macs official – with Parallels for starters

Pretty good considering. Most GFX options set to high at 2560x1440. I'm fairly happy with it as my only other option on the Mac is to run via Nvidia GeForce NOW streaming (which is OK, but can get a bit laggy and pixelated). I've not yet had to rely on the ultimate fallback which is a Steamdeck using a USB C hub to connect to kbd/mouse and TV! Though that too works OK.

Mind you I've tired to play Xcom 2 (Win11/Parallels) and that just continually crashes out after the first tutorial mission.

I find some of the contents of this article to be slightly surprising. Mainly as I've been running a licenced (well, nothing complained) Win 11 VM on Parallels on an M1 Max Mac for just under a year now. Mostly runs Win stuff OK (I only really use it to play World Of Warships) and it gets fairly frequent updates.

Still, I suppose, nice that it's now somewhat "official".

Calculate Linux: It's like Gentoo, but for businesses

At work we have a "slowly being phased out" internal distro which once upon a time started as Gentoo. Way back when as a slight aside from that I did install Gentoo on a VM at home to have a play and it was somewhat enlightening how bare bones a Linux can be.

But time has moved on and at work it's morphed from a small, fast, lightweight distro which did one thing well, to a porky and time consuming pain in the bum which requires excessive hand-holding to do anything and is not exactly dependency friendly when it comes to some software we'd like to use. Intersting while it lasted, but replacing it with RHEL will make our lives much easier.