I prefer to use something that actually works.
Posts by DJV
2243 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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Take the morning off because Outlook has already
A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report
Microsoft sweeps up after breaking .NET with December security updates
Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

Re: "but then it got cancelled"
Hah, that end tag made me laugh out loud!
Still, if it had gone ahead, it sounds like it would have been a total shambles as, no doubt, the bods from the UK gov would have kept being replaced and, with all of them having as much clue as three-week-dead roadkill, the incoming ones would have attempted to change the specs willy-nilly resulting in something even more unworkable.
Linux Mint 21.2 includes a bit of feature creep from the GNOME world
helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

In macOS Ventura, Apple has already dropped support for all Mac models from before 2017
What Apple take out, the Opencore Legacy Patcher developers build back in:
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
My late 2009 iMac is currently running Monterey and the Opencore Legacy developers are getting to the stage where Ventura can be run on it as well.
Former Facebooker alleges Meta drained users' batteries to test apps
Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation
Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter
Massive outage grounded US flights because someone accidentally deleted a file
Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss
Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff
Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT


"All software has flaws"
Yes, indeed, and if it hasn't got enough flaws then we can definitely trust Microsoft to add in a few new ones.
I am still reeling from being caught out by their ASR rules cockup from last Friday. Seeing icons disappearing from the desktop (and the Quicklaunch bar - yes, I still prefer to use that!) as well as programs disappearing from the start menu was quite horrifying. That little lot lost me more than a day of earnings.
Microsoft and community release scripts to help mitigate Defender mess

Microsoft are C%&$S!
They've cost me more than a day's work as my PC was one of those hit by their complete lack of testing. I ended up having to reinstall Windows from scratch. I've also had one program fail to re-activate because, Corel say, my activation code has been used too many times!
So, to steal and repurpose a line from Linus Torvalds, "Fuck you, Microsoft!"
Half of environmental claims about products are full of crap, says EU

Re: In a few million years a new civilisation for sure will find our landfills as their fossil fuel
Yep! https://www.wattpad.com/652804505-wisdom-of-the-ancients
US Supremes deny Pegasus spyware maker's immunity claim


Re: Hey, look over there
Maybe they should pay coders a bonus for every bug they fix - what could possibly go wrong?
OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away
Apple jacks up Mac, iPhone, iPad battery replacement fees
Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

Damn, that rings a bell that I had almost entirely forgotten about! As a Norwich resident (still!) I do remember a crazy evening when the mains went haywire. As someone who was into electronics, I had a multimeter and could see that the mains was fluctuating rather strangely. Was it late 70s/early 80s?
Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive
It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary
Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?
Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement
Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen
New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is
Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist
A dip in Alder Lake with an HP Elitebook is spoiled by avoidable mistakes
Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...
20 or so years ago we had a Perl programmer whose main script generated static web pages from the stuff (pseudo/simplified text and images) that the designers wrote.
It had exactly one comment in it. At its most incomprehensible core section, the programmer had added: // This is a skanky hack
To this day I have no idea what it was doing!
Rackspace rocked by ‘security incident’ that has taken out hosted Exchange services
Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?
UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake
Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

Re: And how do I get into the password manager?
Possibly, but if it's a higher-security password manager you'd definitely need the extra leverage of a hefty crowbar. Unless you're the LockPickingLawyer, of course, in which case it would only take a rake and the "Pick that Bosnian Bill and [him] made™"!
iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: Energy has to go somewhere
Yeah - one of my early jobs was as a trainee TV repair technician. Working with Cathode Ray Tubes taught you to respect that 12-15kV (black and white TVs) and up to 26kV for colour TVs.
One senior technician once got zapped with around 25kV between his little finger and his wrist. The muscle between the two stood to attention for several long minutes and he was feeling a tad unwell for a couple of hours afterwards. He certainly didn't do THAT again in a hurry! As this was back in the early 1970s I'm not even sure if we had proper accident report books back then. It was just one of the hazards of the job though it was drilled into us that you NEVER had both hands inside the back of a live TV while fault finding.
Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Re: Found an interesting explanation recently
Very interesting - thanks for bringing that term to our attention. A combination of this and "biting the hand that feeds you" is probably behind a good number of failures.
Of course, when "biting the hand that feeds you" is what your users love and have come to expect... and then you stop doing that very thing, might also be a reason why other things (well, one in particular - not mentioning any names) feel like they are slowly failing and fading away.
Microsoft warns Direct Access on Windows 10 and 11 could be anything but
Intel says it can sort the living human beings from the deepfakes in real time
Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

Re: Bring back the days...
"Bring back the days where HDD's were easily removed, RAM upgrades was via a 2 screw slot at the bottom and batteries were not embedded within the guts of the machine."
Oh absolutely! I recently upgraded a small batch of HP laptops from HDD to SSD for a friend's organisation. Both the RAM and drives were accessible via a one-screw slot on the underside. As part of the payment, I was gifted one of the laptops, which I upgraded similarly, as well as upgrading the RAM. However, not long afterwards, I discovered it needed the CMOS battery replacing, and THAT required the laptop to be completely dismantled and the motherboard removed!
Ah well, 2 out of 3 wasn't too bad, I suppose...