Posts by SteveK

Exchange Server 2019 has less than six months of support left in the tank

So if Exchange SE is just a rebrand of Exchange 2019 with the latest cumulative update bundle, why is support ending for users who have Exchange 2019 with the latest cumulative update bundle? Surely future security updates would be capable of applying to both? The only reason to end the latter and push people to the former is the larger price tag, but if it's exactly the same product how is that justified?

Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs

Re: How pathetic can you get ?

And evil paper straws. Don't forget the straws.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-ends-the-procurement-and-forced-use-of-paper-straws/

Re: How pathetic can you get ?

The person elected to the presidency of the most powerful country in the world is spending his time in personal vengeance

Not all of it. At weekends he goes and plays golf.[1]

[1] https://trumpgolftrack.com/

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

Re: if a user were to search for "pasta," images of lasagna might turn up

I hope this feature has had a rigatoni testing process?

Google India probed after driver fatally followed Maps route over unfinished bridge

Re: Let me get this straight ...

Going back some years, driving up a narrow windy road in a small Italian town in the dark, being dazzled by oncoming traffic, Tomtom told us to turn left, which turned out to be a zigzagging pedestrian staircase down to the car park we were trying to navigate to. Fortunately we decided not to go that route, and always trust eyes over technology when it comes to following directions.

Another time on the same trip that Tomtom tried to kill us (where we did follow the instructions) was when it directed us off the nice Autostrada we were on, and instead took us for a couple of miles through the heart of the Naples dockland districts, at a time when it really wasn't the sort of place we wanted to see...

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Screen savers

It was a struggle to teach someone else about double click. Over the phone we could hear "click" ... a second's pause, "click". He got there in the end.

When my grandfather first got a computer he struggled with this - he'd carefully move the mouse with his right hand to where he wanted it, then let go and move his hand away and whack the button twice with his left hand, and get really frustrated that it never clicked where he wanted, or would end up dragging something. For ages he couldn't grasp that continuing to hold the mouse and clicking delicately would solve all his problems.

Steve.

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

There is no feature that goes in until we figure out how to make it secure. Completely secure. None of the other operating systems … did that. They put the features in, and then they thought about later, how do we make them secure? Well, it's already too late.

He even speaks like Trump...

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

I might be judged for over-using ls every other command.

I have a tendency to create a new directory, cd into it and immediately 'ls'. Quite what I am expecting to find in a newly created directory, I'm not sure? And when I don't find anything I often 'ls -a' just to be sure. I know I'm doing it, but my fingers just seem to have it as muscle memory.

Volvo recalls all of its 72K EX30 cars due to software bug that obscures speedometer

I had one of these as a courtesy car a couple of months back. Car itself was fine, but I really didn't get on with the removal of traditional dashboard instruments (whether physical or screens) behind the wheel. Having the speed as a small numerical widget on a large tablet mounted centrally in the car seemed an invitation to not be looking at the road. I guess they probably offer it as an option to have head-up display on the windscreen and the Volvo dealer cheaped-out on the options list!

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

I once raised a support call with Dell on a machine with a hard disk that was starting to misbehave and report errors, probably in the W98 era. The tech wanted me to wipe and reinstall, which I was reluctant to do, not for fear of losing data which was all backed up, but just because it was clearly starting to fail and it would be a waste of time. He then sent me some instructions to do some diagnostics, which involved running debug.exe and entering a bunch of hex and running it - it seemed a bit excessive, but went with it - whereupon the 'diagnostics' nuked everything.

Subsequently deciphered the hex back into x86 code to find it simply stuck some numbers into registers and jumped to some BIOS system call to overwrite the boot sector and partition table with zeroes. As expected, the reinstall didn't magically fix the faulty disk that was clonking away to itself and which was duly swapped, after unnecessarily wasting several hours of my time. Not happy.

Anthropic unlocks Claude 3, claims it's better than ChatGPT and Gemini

Re: After spending the day with an LLM yesterday...

Similarly, I was impressed with its apparent understanding and ability to 'follow' a conversation as it twists and turns. Yes, it's just an algorithm and has no true understanding, but it certainly has a very good parser. Last year I was testing it out on fairly pointless trivia and giving it increasingly vague followon questions, avoiding names and facts, although the final sentence of the final answer made it plain that it really isn't aware of context:

Summarise Blade Runner in 10 words

Futuristic detective hunts down rogue androids in dystopian Los Angeles.

Who was the main actor?

The main actor in the original Blade Runner film (1982) is Harrison Ford, who played the character of Rick Deckard.

How old was he when it was made?

Harrison Ford was born on July 13, 1942, and the original Blade Runner film was released on June 25, 1982. Therefore, he was around 39 years old when the film was made.

And what's the name of the other guy?

The other guy in the original Blade Runner film (1982) is Rutger Hauer, who played the character of Roy Batty.

What was the other film he was in?

Rutger Hauer has appeared in many films throughout his career, but one of his most notable roles was as the character of Lothos in the 1992 horror-comedy film "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". However, he is perhaps best known for his role as Roy Batty in the original Blade Runner.

Would I rely on it for anything important? No, it's a toy. I spent a couple of hours playing with it, and asked it to create:

* A pub quiz on a variety of topics (then asked it to create a pub quiz WITH ANSWERS, then also citing sources as I wasn't convinced);

* An initial draft for items to include in a risk assessment on steel toe cap boots that HR want us to wear whenever we carry a box - this sort of thing it is good at, effectively collating and abstracting other similar content that it has indexed although I would check it thoroughly;

* A child's bedtime story about a girl and her cat (which was very sweet, then asked for chapter two which took a much darker turn TLDR: cat died, girl heartbroken and held slightly disturbed funeral)

* A list of song titles with a word replaced by 'camel' (Not sure why I asked that, but my favourite was Hotel Camelfornia) which then went off on a tangent about whether camels could live on the moon? (AI said no), even with a spacesuit? (AI said no, citing a list of reasons such as lack of food and water and high temperatures) and even if wearing some sort of hat? (AI said even though a hat would protect it from sun, there would still be a lack of atmosphere, food and water and extreme temperatures). Later in that conversation it cited Terry Pratchett when considering the existence of space turtles.

At this point I switched it off and went and had a beer.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Re: Nine nines and an explosion

hooray, this is a leap year - our uptime will exceed the baseline.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Re: Boarded by Pirates

it's such a good example of how we all used our imagination to fill in the blanks back in the day.

A few years back a couple of us were talking about how with Elite Dangerous, the graphics had finally caught up with how it looked inside our imaginations when we were playing the original.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: Keepers of...

I've known a few "keepers of" in my time.

Here, someone had the additional job title 'Keeper of the Scientific Books' which I think is a good one. She's retired now, not sure who has taken on that title (it is an official title rather than a 'known as').

They'd also jealously guard the purchasing budgets. I once placed a requisition for ordering 10 RJ-45 plugs, only to be asked, "Do you really need 10, won't 5 be sufficient?" I did point out the pack size and MOQ were both 10!

Back in the days when online ordering was not quite so common, and procedure meant that ordering stuff for the stationery cupboard rather than for my own department had to be sent to a PA who would ask accounts to raise an order, I had requested N boxes of high density floppy disks.

The accountant proudly gloated after it had gone through that he'd saved us more than £20 by changing the order to standard density floppy disks and that I really should be more observant when looking through the catalogue. A week later I repeated the order and made it clear who was responsible for having bought a stock of floppy disks that were half the capacity and of virtually no use to anyone.

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

I may have commented on a similar tale before, but about 10 or so years back I had a call from my minion who was manning the fort (just the two of us) while I was on my way through France as there were network oddities that he couldn't fathom. So I spent a couple of hours drinking coffees and using the free WiFi in the medieval city of Carcassonne while I connected back over VPN and remotely dumped network traffic and switched bits of network off and on to pinpoint the problem. Nice location to just sit in a fairly empty outdoor cafe courtyard enjoying sun and coffee... I don't think I even claimed for the coffee on expenses!

To this day I still don't actually understand what the network was doing. In short, Cisco switches were passing IPv6 traffic over a spanning-tree blocked port, causing a network loop and associated storm. Resilient link from the stacked pair of 3750s at the core to two units in an unstacked (as they didn't support stacking and thus couldn't do an aggregate to different units) cabinet of 2960s, using spanning tree to block one of the links. The port correctly showed as in BLOCKED state and all config was correct. IPv4 traffic was not passing through it, but network monitoring and port mirroring showed that IPv6 was passing. It had worked fine for several years prior to this but waited until I was driving to the south of France. I administratively disabled one of the ports rather than using spanning tree until I got back, which sorted the problem. The faultreoccurred a month or two later, after which I just kept the spare link disabled with a note to enable it should the live link or the switch it was connected to fail. Was clearly something triggering it which wasn't present in normal circumstances but never got to the bottom of what that trigger was, but it did instill in me a fear and mistrust of spanning tree...

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: I'd quite like an X-term

I do have, squirrelled away, an old NCD X-terminal. Square form factor, 1024x1024. Only 15" I think, and mono, but so crisp and clear compared to VGA PC monitors of the era. Sadly only runs X11R4 in ROM, no idea whether there was ever any way to upgrade it or network boot it to a newer version.

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

EDF said it would have no cost impact on British consumers or taxpayers. The power station had been due online by 2017

Well, it clearly will as if it had been completed and was running by now, it would have been reducing our dependency on gas for power production, and would have had an impact on our energy bills as a result. (ok, I know that's an over-simplistic view and probably the cost of non-gas-energy would still be higher, but I'm sure there would have been some impact)

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Re: Botched Aircon

I came in just after New Year last year and similarly found the server room to be a wall of heat, 40+ degrees. Thought the AC had failed at first, but on investigation found that some vagrants had climbed over the fence and down to the sheltered area outside our basement server room and turned the power breaker off for the AC. Apparently the master switch had to be located there rather than internally. It is now protected with a lock to prevent unauthorised switching, and better temperature monitoring...

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

Re: "it was customary to Hasselhoff unlocked PCs"

For a time at my workplace we would use the screen rotation hotkeys on people who left their machines unlocked

I did once encounter someone who had done this to himself with inadvertent key pressing. He hadn't said anything or asked for help but I couldn't help noticing as I passed by that he'd turned his CRT monitor upside down to keep working.

Russian anti-satellite test added to a 'pressing threat to security' in space

Just speculation but ...

Given the timing of the creation of this debris cloud a few months before the invasion of Ukraine began, you have to wonder whether this was a planned event to make it harder and/or more risky for the US and other governments to get monitoring equipment into orbit or to use it as effectively.

I have no idea one way or another and no agenda to push, it's just the way my brain joined the dots.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And we also want EV's?

Last month I used the grand total of 12kWh of grid power to run my home.

Shame that you still have to pay the daily standing charge to the power company even when you're not using any power.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Still no answer...

Isn't Dulwich where the Elder Gods stalk their prey?

LIDAR in iPhones is not about better photos – it's about the future of low-cost augmented reality

Teams does that sometimes, leaving the background in perfect clarity but blurring the meeting participant...

Google issues third emergency fix for Chrome this year

Re: How happy I am

A strange game. The only winning move is not to browse.

How about a nice game of chess?

Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants

Re: On Call

I foresee a future episode of On Call, where our IT hero has to debug the cause of some degraded web app performance, only to find that the whole rack is overheating due to a large brown lump stuck in the inlet hose.

Many years ago, we had the opposite problem. I work in old Victorian buildings, with walls up to a couple of feet thick, with plumbing frequently contained within.

One room was frequently getting toilet blockages and unexplained leaks. On investigation, it turned out that the cabling contractors, who had some years previously installed Ethernet throughout, had managed to drill through and then run Ethernet cabling across the waste pipe from the toilet which was running inside the wall between two rooms. This was causing an obstruction, and resulted in many jokes about log messages and so on.

Another 100 space tourists buy a ride from Virgin Galactic: $25k of that ticket deposit is 'non-refundable'

Re: Don't you have to go into space in order to be an astronaut?

Really? According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (admittedly from a 2019 report):

To be in the top 1% of income tax payers in the UK (i.e. to be among the 310,000 individuals with the highest income), a taxable income of at least £160,000 is required. £236,000 is required to be in the top 0.5% and nearly £650,000 to be in the top 0.1%. 43% of adults pay no income tax and to be in the top 1% of all adults (or the top 540,000 people), a pre-tax income of at least £120,000 is required.

SpaceX-powered trip to ISS grounded by 'medical issue'

Re: It's probably gas...

Ah, so it wasn't really 'rogue thruster burns from the Soyuz module' that changed the station's altitude a couple of times recently, but overuse of the space toilet..

Analogue tones of a ZX Spectrum Load set to ride again via podcast project

Just remembered the graphpaper with the colour grid copied onto it using 1,2,3 and 4 to represent the colours.

My dad did it. Will have to mention it next time I see him

My mum did ours.. She used the 1,2,3,4 model on graphpaper too. Clearly the way to do it!

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Surely using western transliteration of Russian, Japanese names etc is the sort of thing they'd be trying to prevent with their 'decolonization', and all names must be in their original language?

Windows terminates here. Please remember to finish setting it up on arrival

More annoyingly it repeats that screen periodically, after installing W10 version upgrades or some-such, whether you wanted them or not, which is most likely what has happened here,

With a Lidl bit of luck, this Windows installation will make it through the night

Re: "a system was placed last winter"

I think it pushes you down the 'finish setting up your device' thing when you next login after it (automatically) installs W10 feature upgrades, in the hope you'll accidentally not turn off the various 'let me send your info back home' options.

Whether they should have full internet access (in order to fetch the updates) or just limited to being able to show updated content from corporate servers, or not be set to only install approved updates are other questions though.

Here boy! Making the Sample Fetch Rover that'll collect soil from the Red Planet

All the rover need do is package whatever it's sending in metal cylinders and fire them back at Earth, aiming for Horsell Common. It'll be a million to one chance, but still they come.

Microsoft patches PrintNightmare – even on Windows 7 – but the terror isn't over

Re: Why?

If you have print servers elsewhere in the organisation, the DC runs a periodical job of cleaning up old jobs, allegedly.

I read that too (although think it was more about cleaning up old print queues rather than print jobs), don't understand why it's the domain controller's job to clean up after the print spooler running on another server - let that server do it rather than run unnecessary services that do more than is even needed on a domain controller. At the very least separate the housekeeping functions to another service.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

I have a bunch of SPARC desktops and servers that have been gathering dust in a basement (along with my collection of acquired SGIs, all waiting for a time that I never had to bring them to life) which I'd been thinking to scrap. Maybe I'll try eBay instead...

Microsoft demotes Calibri from default typeface gig, starts fling with five other fonts

I reserve a special part of hell for the people (and I'm not just talking one or two) who over the years, when asked to provide a photo of something for a website or whatever, have taken or obtained a suitable photo in digital form, inserted it into Word and sent me the resulting document.

Europe is falling behind in AI, we need to launch our second machine learning-powered satellite soon, says ESA

A network of AI satellites?

Did they learn nothing from Terminator?

Nvidia may be mulling lopping Arm off Softbank: GPU goliath said to have shown interest in acquiring CPU design house

Re: What is the point ?

Having its arm twisted you mean?

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Re: Kids Toys

A few years back we went to Christmas markets in Aachen. Every time they needed to interrupt the music coming over the PA system with a message, it was preceded with 'Achtung achtung'. We all were expecting to be warned of raiding Spitfires each time..,

Drones must be constantly connected to the internet to give Feds real-time location data – new US govt proposal

Re: Turn it round

Actually it could be quite useful for golf. Many's the time (well, once or twice anyway, ahem) that I've wished there was a tracking device fitted to the ball.

They appear to exist (whether they have yet come to market is another thing):

https://chip-ing.com/

https://www.golfpunkhq.com/equipment/article/the-genius-ball--golfers-dreams-come-true

There was another one on Amazon, but that turned out not to use GPS but a direction finder, and had to buy a dedicated handheld device to track it.

Turn it round

Just curious. How would people react if it was turned around and applied to other hobbies?

Guns come to mind as ownership seems polarized. Sure, you can own a gun. But it must be connected to the Internet, constantly report where it is, whether it is loaded, whether safety is on and whether it is being fired. And if it can also be blocked from operating in certain areas, that would be grand.

I suspect some rather strong views would emerge.

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

Re: Selective deafness

I agree on the obsession with thinner/lighter. Now, on a laptop that does make some degree of sense and I can see that many people appreciate that when travelling (with the trade-off of having to carry a pile of adapters and accessories - or more likely in my experience turning up at their destination without any chargers, adapters etc and expecting that we have a full set of all of these things for them to borrow. But that's a different rant)

But it doesn't make sense on desktop machines. Going on about how the iMac is a couple of mm thinner after removing the optical drive etc. It's a desktop, it's not intended to be carried around, so does it really matter? I'd prefer it to have the functionality, expandability and repairability than be thankful that it's 100g lighter on the one occasion that it needed to be moved across the room.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

Re: Not sure, but...

What is this Bing of which you speak?

A small black rabbit of toddler age, who lives in a strange and undefined relationship with what appears to be a knitted 'carer' 1/3 his size, in a town filled with similar pairings of knitted creatures and their oversized wards.

At least, that's what I've gleaned from watching with my 3 year old in the mornings.

More info

This news article about the full public release of OpenAI's 'dangerous' GPT-2 model was part written by GPT-2

Trawling websites

I just gave it a paragraph or two copied from an email discussion about virtualization. It threw back a few more buzzword-laden paragraphs, and ended:

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I gave it the first verse of Jabberwocky and ran it a few times. The first few weren't too bad, then it seemed to trip over itself a bit (hardly surprising) and start writing an essay about the poem instead (more surprising).

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The gyre and gimble in the wabe,

(1) The original poem, and (2) a later version. (3) The "Mamey" that was originally part of the poem, with additional words added by the author. The original poem:

Woe unto thee! wherefore dost thou gape,

As with one mouth and a single look

The mome rath doeth borogoves?

The "Mamey" that was added in the later version:

Wherefore dost thou gape, as with one mouth and a single look

The mome rath doeth borogoves?

The original poem has the line "the mome raths outgrabe" and the later

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Re: Ring mains surely?

But I didn't see any power sockets?

Re: Maybe the owner doesn't like to look for a socket?

..would suit family of androids with poor battery life..

Re: Ring mains surely?

this place is in Birmingham, not Cupertino

West London, not Birmingham. Just outside Harrow, which probably explains the price-tag.

Looking at the full set of pictures on the sellers site I also noted (at least) 4 double outdoor sockets in the garden along the outside wall of the conservatory.

And as I commented elsewhere about the front photo, it's not a garage on the side of the house, that's the fusebox and meter cupboard.

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

I know nothing of this particular range of kit, but one thing raises some hitherto unmentioned flags.

If it talks back to a standalone DNS-resolvable address, and they let ownership of that domain lapse for someone else to buy, what potential breaches of data security will arise from all of these still-connected devices talking back for someone else to listen to?

Mobile operators say they'll go halfsies with UK.gov on £1bn network to bring 4G to rural folk

...to bring rural coverage to 95 per cent of the UK

Sorry, are they proposing to reduce to rural-level connectivity to almost the entire population?