Posts by DJV

Hyundai and Kia issue software upgrades to thwart killer TikTok car theft hack

Re: stuff kept vibrating loose in the engine

It turned out, in my case, that the starter motor and the ring it engaged with weren't actually meant for each other - someone had fitted the wrong part and this was why the starter kept rattling loose.

Re: stuff kept vibrating loose in the engine

In my 1966 Cortina automatic (purchased around 1973 for £80), it was the starter motor that kept rattling loose. When turning the ignition resulted in only a high-pitched whine and a lack of engine turning over noises, it was a case of up with the bonnet and out with the spanner yet again. Later on, something in the automatic gearing went screwy and it refused to go backwards ever again, making parking very "interesting". A lack of funds meant it stayed that way until it got scrapped.

Microsoft tells people to prepare for AI search engine that goes Bing!

Goes Bing?

But what do I do?

Nothing, dear. You're not qualified.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

I prefer to use something that actually works.

A moment of silence for all the drives that died in the making of this Backblaze report

Re: It's all relative.

Having been in IT in one form or another for nearly 40 years, I now refuse to buy Seagate drives due to the number of failures I or the companies I have worked for have experienced.

Microsoft sweeps up after breaking .NET with December security updates

"should only be done..."

"should only be done if you know for certain that all XPS documents your system processes are trustable"

So, they are admitting that yet another of their systems is a security nightmare waiting to happen. Well, nothing new there, then...

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

Re: Another waste of UK tax payers money?

Unfortunately, the "right" outsourcer will always be too expensive. The whole thing is a perpetual example of the Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness!

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

A worrying move in the wrong direction...

Mint has been the Linux distro I've favoured for desktop over the past few years. I hope all of these Gnome CSD changes are easily reversible for those of us who wish to use our computers the way WE want.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Re: In macOS Ventura, Apple has already dropped support for all Mac models from before 2017

Also, search out Mr. Macintosh on YouTube for comprehensive videos on each release and what it will work on.

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

intentionally degrading some user experiences?

I thought that was the only mode Facebook worked in...

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

Re: shunting users towards Windows 11 on grounds that it's better for users (and for Microsoft)

"better for users"?

Citation required...

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: I sometimes wonder what he's up to these days

...or even what he's down for...

Re: To access or not to access

Having tried to unscramble the databases of websites built with WordPress in the past, I suspect this is pretty much how WordPress works normally!

Re: These guys' newsletter?

As a Norwich (UK) resident myself, I was most amused to see that the Norwich and Norfolk Branch of the TPAS had their newsletter featured!

Massive outage grounded US flights because someone accidentally deleted a file

...and then reformats the disk just to be on the safe side.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: Deliveroo is a slippery slope

Obviously too much grease on the food in that case.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Any of these in QA?

Does that mean we can expect even more testing laid at the feet of the public?

Then again, going by their recent track record, I didn't realise they had any QA staff left to get rid of!!

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: "All software has flaws"

Yes, I spent part of the weekend figuring out which Linux programs can successfully replace Windows versions. The day I jump ship off of Microsoft's sinking pontoon (built from duct tape and fuck-all else) is definitely getting closer.

"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?

https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away

Re: carrier pigeon

With part of the message taped to its leg reading: "Please don't eat the pigeon!"

Re: "I feel like I'm having an aneurysm with OneDrive being down"

Oh absolutely! Also, other online storage options are available and it's possible to have more than one running at a time.

cf

cf. almost anything that Microsoft has ever touched (though, credit where credit's due - my MS Internet Pro keyboard is still going strong after about 23 years and only one new set of keycaps, and the current PowerToys is a useful utility - anything else though... meh!)

Apple jacks up Mac, iPhone, iPad battery replacement fees

Fees

And this is why batteries should, by law, be a user-replaceable item.

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

Re: The best 'mosquito'

It was Elektor 1990 - issue 7

https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-199007/32191

It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary

Re: switching the Boss into Dummy Mode

Shirley, there's no need for a switch as dummy mode is the one and only default.

Re: But you need Edge to manage your IoT

Excellent - it sounds like it must have come from the mouth of Dilbert's PHB!

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Re: *not* this Liam

No, if it had been you, you would have been regomised as something other than "Liam" such as "Venial Romp"!

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

FTFY

The one thing he appears to have done well in his time as its owner/CEO is accelerate the pace of feature development.

The one thing he appears to have done well in his time as its owner/CEO is accelerate the pace of user desertion.

Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen

Re: Typo in the worst place?

Yeah, I noticed that one as well. I used to send in corrections and someone at El Reg used to thank me by email reply. Now they don't bother to thank you so I no longer bother to send in the corrections.

Re: Alternatively, MS messed up

No, Shirley not!

Microsoft - guaranteed never to mess up in any month that has a ξ in the English version of the name.

/s

New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is

And next year you will probably find something essential it did that only needs running at every financial year-end but, without it, your company cannot close down the year's accounts. :)

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: mint-green paint

I wonder what the arsenic level was in that layer!

A dip in Alder Lake with an HP Elitebook is spoiled by avoidable mistakes

Re: Photos

^This a thousand times over! But, sadly, nowadays El Reg is nothing but a pale shadow of the hand-biting vulture that it used to be.

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

Re: who would trust Rackspace with anything

Well, at least a nun can ask a higher power when things go wrong!

Re: who would trust Rackspace with anything

I'd trust them to charge exorbitant fees and provide a service that is second to a nun.

Killing trees with lasers isn’t cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?

Re: Microsoft beat them to it

I don't think you need the joke icon when what you say is really the truth!

UK cuts China from Sizewell nuclear project, takes joint stake

Re: looks like fantasy

So, basically, no different from any normal government policy.

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™"!

Re: And how do I get into the password manager?

Crowbar...

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

Re: Outlook for Android doesn't work on some phones

That's an improvement, Shirley!