Posts by DJV

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

Yeah, but my number is better than your number cos I added 1 to it! (And probably made the font size bigger, so there!)

China's Yutu rover spots 'mysterious hut' on far side of the Moon

It's

Re: Uranus Products

That's their old name, they changed it to avoid the embarrassment.

They're now known as Urectum Products.*

* with apologies to Professor Farnsworth

Why your external monitor looks awful on Arm-based Macs, the open source fix – and the guy who wrote it

"spokespeople were not available for comment"

You surprise me!

(Not)

When you think of a unit of length, do you think of Antony Gormley's rusty anatomy?

Re: dinosaurs are formed from Greek and Latin stems

Ray Harryhausen formed his from latex, apparently.

Nextcloud boss: You gotta fight … for your right … to 'plug into Windows and offer the exact same service'

I have been bitten by OneDrive failures and, for that matter, issues with NextCloud as well, and I refuse to use GoogleDrive because... well... Google. I am now using pCloud. So far, no problems.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

I licked liked what you did there.

Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app

Re: Shame

It takes skill and a lump or two of sugar.

Re: Trailblazers

I recommend the book "A Computer Called LEO" by Georgina Ferry for a fascinating insight into the history of LEO.

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

Re: "when the security of the old ones is actually better"

Ah, you mean they are so old that they have absolutely no inkling about the internet whatsoever.

Yep, that's pretty good security!

Smart things are so dumb because they take after their makers. Let's fix that

Re: "Server error 500"

Maybe it should be along the lines of:

Error code for techies: Server error 500

Translation for normal humans*: Hey, it's not my fault! Me (the bit you're holding in your hand) is working fine. I'm trying to talk to another bit a long way away out on teh interwebs. Teh interwebs seem to be working fine as I am managing to shout all the way to other bit. But the other bit isn't talking back in a way that I can understand. Until it does there's not a lot I can do at my end. I suspect coffee is called for at your end. If you're not at home should I try to find the nearest coffee shop (within walking distance**)? While you enjoy your coffee I will keep trying to talk to the other bit and I will ding at you when things are all happy again.

Error messages like this will certainly not add to the app bloat much, well maybe a little (ok, a lot then).

(* yes, I know what that is implying! :)

(** added if the thing the user is trying to get working is a Tesla***)

(*** other electric vehicles as amazing**** as Teslas are available)

(**** stop laughing)

You forced me to use this fancypants app and now you're asking for a printout?

Nope, not a clue... I ran your response through Google Translate and it blew up.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint laid low. Not by malware, but by another buggy Windows patch

"Days since we last shot ourselves in the foot"

A sad-faced Microsoft engineer has had to reset the "Days since we last shot ourselves in the foot" counter.

Do they party every time it threatens to reach double digits?

Kremlin names the internet giants it will kidnap the Russian staff of if they don't play ball in future

Re: I rather... live at the YMCA

At least the music's better!

ESA's Solar Orbiter will swing past Earth this week – sure hope nobody created a big cloud of space junk up there

Re: Size really does matter in this case

Maybe they should consider a flyby of Donald Trump's ego then...

Academics tell Brit MPs to check the software used when considering reproducibility in science and tech research

What's the betting that...

...in most cases the software used will be Excel (probably an old unsupported version) that's running lots of macros that were programmed by someone who no longer works for the institution, and no one there has any clue how it works, so they will leave it to do its "magic" until the day it dies*.

* which will be 2 weeks before it needs to be used for something super-critical whose deadline can't be moved.

Should be easy to win the rights to .tv when you're name-checked in the contract's tech reqs – right, Afilias?

Re: The Population of Tuvalu is about 12,000

You are Bombastic Bob and I claim my £5!

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

Re: Sounds like the team

And a liberal spraying of WD-40!

We asked you how your biz introduces new IT systems – and here are the results

Re: THis can be dangerous.

Absolutely!

One place I worked at had (for a while) a policy of IT bods shadowing non-IT bods for a short period to see how the non-IT areas worked. Often the benefit was two-way - IT bods understanding how other areas worked and what issues they contended with + being able to suggest improvements (that's PROPER useful improvements as opposed to top-level-management imposed ones) where appropriate.

Later on that policy seemed to slip when changes at the top occurred and I buggered off about a year later after seeing the general downward march into stupidity resulting from said top management changes.

Sheffield Uni cooks up classic IT disaster in £30m student project: Shifting scope, leadership changes, sunk cost fallacy

Concatenated fields

Similar story except, in my case, the client "didn't want to bother" me by asking for a new fields in a customer database table, added secondary data (I think it was eBay and/or Amazon IDs and sometimes both) to the phone number field. 3 years down the line they needed to have this data separated and it took far longer (and therefore cost them more) to unpick the mess, decode which bits were phone number(s) and which were IDs and shove them into separate fields.

I expect there was a lot of "if you'd told me up front you wanted to do THAT with the data then I wouldn't have programmed it THIS way in the first place."

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

We fixed an issue...

"we fixed an issue that kept putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports."

"we fixed an issue that meant the fix that was supposed to prevent putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports really worked this time."

"we fixed an issue that meant the fix that was supposed to really work this time to fix the problem of putting the words 'we fixed an issue' at the beginning of all our bug fix reports did actually work this time even though it didn't last time."

"we fixed an issue ... oh fuck it, it's pub o'clock - just install Linux instead!"

Earth's wobbly companion is probably the result of a lunar impact, reckon space boffins

Re: Looks like a nice place to put an observation deck

And then he tries to get them stoned... (gets coat).

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

Re: An MP today would lose their seat for that

“We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“It saves time.”

Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent

It's a pity we don't do this...

Investment app Robinhood: Extortionist tricked our support desk and made off with customer information

Re: RobinHood, RobinHood...

Your lupins or your life!

New year, new OS: OneDrive support axed for old versions of Windows from 1 Jan 2022

Re: OneDrive is perfectly usable under Linux

Doesn't surprise me. However, in my experience it was often broken under Windows which is why I always turn it off.

Reg scribe spends 80 hours in actual metaverse … and plans to keep visiting

Re: Zwiftbook

A good reason to cycle straight into the volcano*.

* Real or virtual...

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Re: How to deal with calls

Someone at a place I once worked thought that she was "programming" when she was using a wordprocessor to write letters. The laughs coming from the direction of the programmers soon relieved her of that delusion!

Re: How to deal with calls

Reminds me of a software error in one of my programs back in the 1980s. I can't remember exactly what the fault was now but the person sending me the report sheet had written "funny on screen" - yeah, that made it absolutely clear as to what the problem was!

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? South Korea makes Google allow rival payment systems in Play store apps

whether it intends to extend this payment system flexibility to other regions

A company spokesperson said, "[We] will let you know if we have anything to share on that beyond what's in our blog post."

Translation: "Not if we can %^&*% prevent it!"

RISE with SAP? Never heard of it, say 30% of UK users

I could be right*

But maybe RISE has a limited public image problem.

* But I could be wrong...

What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams

Re: split it into two questions.

I would normally agree with you but I've recently downloaded their latest Power Toys and the new Mouse Finder is brilliant for those of us with large multiple monitors who can't quite see where that damn mouse pointer has got to, despite wiggling the mouse around! Two taps of the left-Ctrl key and the pointer is highlighted in a "spotlight". Of course, this "brilliance" is the exception to the general rule of MS crapness and, as it currently stands, the utility does have one annoying bug (hence it fails the "worked properly" part of the question).

Once you've located your mouse pointer you press the ESC key to dismiss the highlight but the ESC keypress is NOT "consumed" by the utility and is allowed to be passed onto whatever window previously had focus. In my case it was the extremely useful FreeFileSync utility which happened to be copying files for me - the ESC caused FreeFileSync to cancel its current operation!

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: society is screwed

Indeed, it (mis)spells the ned of cilivisation as we know it.*

* award yourself points if you know where that quote comes from.

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Re: "living our commitment to openness"

More like MS are living in cloud cuckooland - still, that's nothing new...

Yet again, Cream Finance skimmed by crooks: $130m in crypto assets stolen

"the third such incident for the loan platform this year"

3 losses in a year? Well, that's just careless. Have they tried looking down the back of the sofa?

If your hair isn't already gray, 2022's security threats will get it there, warn infosec duo

Yep

My hair is already grey but I suspect it won't be that way for too long, as I'm also going bald - problem, er, solved :-/

NASA sets a date to begin lunar tuning

Re: a really big stack of movies on board

It will probably include 'The Martian' and 'Apollo 13'.

Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie

A whole lot of hole poking

Back in the 1970s a guy joined the company where I worked and told us about when he worked on some computer system that used punched paper tapes. Everything worked fine for a while but then, not long after they'd had a new boy start, they would get the occasional error after loading a tape. The new boy, who was apparently not the sharpest tool in the shed, was getting bored with doing his punched tape loading role and, to relieve that boredom, would occasionally poke a random new hole in a tape with a screwdriver or sharp pencil. It was only when someone caught him in the act that the source of the errors was discovered.

Microsoft emits more Win 11 fixes for AMD speed issues and death by PowerShell bug

Re: how do you tell what is version 3?

It's the one that actually works

- I'm not holding my breath...

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

I used to live at the address "30 Thor Close" - trying to get people on the phone to write it down correctly was a bit hit and miss as they'd write down 34 and then ask for the road name again. I think we had to resort to saying, "The road is called Thor Close, that's T-H-O-R and the house number is thirty, that's a THREE followed by a ZERO." But even that wasn't enough somtimes...

User locked out of Microsoft account by MFA bug, complains of customer-hostile support

Re: that should bullet proof me, shouldn't it?

Um... how can I put this gently?

Opt-out is the right approach for sharing your medical records with researchers

Re: I don't actually believe the NHS are capable of properly anonymising data

Yep, nothing to worry about there at all. It will probably be done by little Jimmy (some doctor's offspring) as a school project using one of the NHS's ancient Windows XP machines with the data held in an old version of MS Access.

England's Data Guardian warns of plans to grant police access to patient data

Re: Ahhh... Taking back control.

I suppose, because I opted out of sharing my medical data, I am probably now classed by the "Etonians in power" as a terrorist...

Config cockup leaves Reg reader reaching for the phone

"Kildare"

In a hospital?

I see what you did there...

BOFH: You. Wouldn't. Put. A. Test. Machine. Into. Production. Without. Telling. Us.

Hah! New keyboard required!

"Honestly, who could have guessed that boron-coated drill would have gone straight through the lid, the hard drive and the bottom of the server," I ask.

NSO Group's Pegasus malware was used to spy on Dubai princess's lawyers during child custody dispute

Re: Is there a Chinese Wall

Now I've read that, I need mind bleach....

Re: How about Android?

Probably every bit as secure as Windows.

Want to check out Windows 11 but don't want to buy a new PC? Here's how to bypass the hardware requirements

"Just telling users 'tough, we don't support it' is really not an acceptable answer."

If the company has specified that, internally, it doesn't yet support Windows 11 then it IS an acceptable answer.

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

Re: Spineless?

Indeed, even those whose only got turned into newts* due to witches.

* until they got better.

Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?

Re: "assuming that your version of Windows 7 is legit"

"assuming that your version of Windows 7 appears to be legit"

FTFY