Posts by StuartMcL

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: What about Outlook (less shitty)?

I'm still very happy with Pegasus Mail and I get happier ever time I have to set up an Outlook installation

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Re: what the experts are saying

"Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle" - Lochie

Microsoft declutters Windows 11 File Explorer in the name of Euro privacy

Stability? LMAO

> However, it is essential to remember that there is no guarantee of stability, even in the Beta channel.

However, it is essential to remember that there is no guarantee of stability, even in the final Release.

There, FIFY

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Ook! ( tr. "It can all be found in the Library of Unseen University")

Azure networking snafu enters day 2, some services still limping

Cloud a.k.a. Relying on other people's infrastructure you have no control over and trusting them with your data and applications.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Replace "Beginner" with "casual programmer" and I am 100% on board

@Bsquared "I would love to have a clean, intuitive programming language like BASIC that would run on my Windows workstations and let me hack quick, simple programs together with simple GUIs.."

I do that frequently with PowerBASIC :)

(Sadly no longer available for purchase)

Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks

> It's the thing that, after a certain age, sprouts wildly from one's nostrils.

And ears and eyebrows and the tip of your nose!

The stuff on the top of your head doesn't disappear, it migrates.

Must be a long time since you actually looked at a BASIC implementation.

Today you will find most or all of the following:

Integers

BYTE, WORD, DWORD, QWORD, INTEGER, LONG, QUAD

Floats

SINGLE, DOUBLE, EXTENDED,CURRENCY,CURRENCYEX, DECIMAL

Strings

STRING,STRINGZ,WSTRING,WSTRINGZ

VARIANTS

...

Re: Anyone who has a blanket rule banning GO TOs...

Guess we need to ban JMP in Assembler as well :)

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Re: I have

> 19 orders of magnitude

This week,

>> with the total fine doubling every week.

Check out what it will be in a month or a year :)

Pro-Iran groups lay groundwork for 'chaos and violence' as US election meddling attempts intensify

Re: The Biggest Influence Operation is Hidden In Plain Sight

Or maybe some voters are seeing past the propaganda. Just this week a second rabid pro-terrorist anti-semite politician lost a primary to a more moderate candidate.

Tiny solid-state battery promises to pack a punch in pocket gadgets

Sadly there is no official Register unit for time ???

According to the converter, there are two: Scaramuchi and Truss.

See https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/truss_reg_standards/

Tiny11 Builder trims Windows 11 fat with PowerShell script

When I'm Cleaning Windows

A bit time consuming, but the first thing I do with a new install is run:

O&O AppBuster and O&O Shutup from

https://www.oo-software.com/en/

(I am not related to George Formby :) )

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Re: My way or the highway

> Not all uses of windows are appropriate for online accounts and MS know that).

Not all geographic locations are appropriate for online accounts . Microsoft forgets that

(They should get some of their people to try working in a "third world" country for a while.)

Boffins fool AI chatbot into revealing harmful content – with 98 percent success rate

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

> The basic problem is that models are full of toxic stuff

But who decides what is toxic and what is not

Uncle Sam plows $42M into nurturing fusion breakthrough

Really???

> which needs to end its reliance on fossil fuels owing to their contribution to potentially devastating climate change.

Assertion unsupported by facts.

Excel Hell II: If the sickness can't be fixed, it must be contained

Re: Application abuse

... including being read into any DBMS, including SQLite. Which just re-emphasis the point that Excel is not a DBMS

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: Problem of evil?

> Would a post-human society capable of creating a simulated universe be as unethical as to allow all this suffering?

You might just as easily say:

Would a being capable of creating a universe be as unethical as to allow all this suffering?

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

> f you need to do gigs on a mobile, then you are a far bigger loser than the money it costs.

In many parts of the world , including mine, mobile data is the only internet access that the vast majority of the population has access to.

In fact it's the only internet access that many businesses have as well.

(Guess ththat makes me a loser.)

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

Re: hundreds of tiny legs

Where would those tiny legs come from? Sapent Pearwood from the Agatean Empire of course.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Re: "The caller had paid the bill, but wasn't happy."

Ah yes, Friday Night SBS often said to stand for "Sex Before Soccer"

If AI drives humans to extinction, it'll be our fault

Re: Ignorance is Bliss and Heaven Sent and Much Appreciated by AI and ITs Likes

Yep more evidence of what we have always suspected: the amfM ensemble is just "AI"s

With dead-time dump, Microsoft revealed DDoS as cause of recent cloud outages

> Microsoft users can at least take heart that the Windows giant has found "no evidence that customer data has been accessed or compromised."

Always bearing in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. :)

Australia fines tech companies for exploiting foreign tech workers

Re: Nobody tell the medics.

What part of "skilled workers" don't you understand?

Re: "the plethora of deadly creatures found in the one-time prison colony"

But nobody mention the dropbears!

AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo

Oh goody!

Another IPCCC like body is needed so that we can all have annual junkets to luxury resorts at taxpayers expense and pretend to be doing something about this "existential threat".™

Astronomers clock runaway black hole leaving trail of fresh stars

SO which is it?

"and immediately realized they had stumbled on something unique when they looked closer."

Just how did they determine that it was "one of a kind" in the entire Universe?

"Now, the team is on a lookout to find more of these newborn star streaks in space."

If it's unique, there's no point in looking for more.

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

And VBA?

Let us not forget what MS Access and VBA can do in the hands of a competent developer. It's still a great RAD tool for small to medium data applications , especially if hooked to a decent RDBMS backend,

Re: PowerBasic anyone?

I still use PowerBASIC frequently. If you are working in Windows and don't need 64bit compiled applications, it's hard to beat:

Very fast, very small executables and very powerful,. There's very little you can't do with it.

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

Re: Cost

I suspect that a WW1 biplane would have had difficulty getting to 40,000 ft to fire at that balloon.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

Re: Mail servers can and should just run and run.

I'll stay with my Pegasus Mail and Mercury Mail Server thanks. Who needs all the other fluff that MS bundles with email?

Lockheed Martin demos 50kW anti-aircraft frickin' laser beam

Re: Stryker

Don't call me Shirley.

(Someone had to say it)

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: My favorite new article

NFTs are no more a fraud that Hunter Biden's paintings being offered for half a million dollars`

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: Politics on mailing lists...

> Unfortunately it's a (the first?) real world example of Orwellian doublethink

You mean you missed the doublethink inherent in the "Infaltion Reduction Act" ?

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

Re: Chrome on desktop

> TFA?

Tea for Two?

or "

T" for "Two"

Two Factor Authentication.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Re: She was a good one

> I hope her last words were "Over to you Charlie son, don't fuck it up"

More likely "Bugger, I was hoping Charlie would go before me",

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: Hmmm...

> "My Linux installs updated tzdata a couple of days ago, this was probably why. I didn't bother checking the changelog."

Does it have a separate entry for Chile as opposed to Pacific SA Time? If not, you have the same issue.

Re: Hard Coding Ahoy

It's just a set of Registry values in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\<ZOne name>

The full zone info is stored in a 44 byte TZI structure in each zone's entry

The problem is that Chile doesn't have its own zone entry, it is considered to be under "Pacific SA Standard Time."

It's probably time that MS created a separate Zone entry for Chile considering the number of times they have changed. That's easy enough to roll out with the next update, but every machine in Chile would need to have it's regional settings changed to the new zone.

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

Don't worry about the lizard people. They've already answered that question:

https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-drilling-questions/

Could this unleash the lizard people that inhabit the inner sphere?

How do we know they did not already drill up using this technology and are already amongst us?

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

Re: California roll

Strange! I've driven in a lot of countries (including UK, US, Aus, NZ, various SEA and Pacific nations) and everyone one had Stop signs and laws that made it an offence to not obey them.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

And Furuno!

Similar problem with Furuno marine GPS products on 2 Jan 2022. Many of the models have no fix.

https://www.furuno.co.jp/en/news/notice/notice_category.html?itemid=753&dispmid=965

Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook – after US-EU date confusion in IP address log

"h" in 'erbs

And two "a"s in car-a-mel !

Australian government in talks to buy Pacific Islands' top telco

Re: Byzantine?

"If there is a buyout, the Pacific nations will have to revert to cheaper, faster, more reliable HF telephones"

Not in the largest market (PNG). They'll just switch back to Telikom as many former Digicel subscribers have done over the last year or two.

As an aside, the fact that Digicel currently uses Huawei equipment is going to make it an expensive exercise giving the Aus antipathy to it.

It's about time! NASA's orbital atomic clock a boon for deep space navigation – if they can get it working for long enough

10 million year test?

> " NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock loses one second every 10 million years, as proven in controlled tests on Earth."

Proven? You mean it's been running for 10 million years? It will still be running in 5 million years time and will have lost 1/2 a second?

I suspect they mean "lost time at a rate ot one second per 10 million years over a trial period" which is a very different matter..

Calendly’s new logo perceived as either bog-standard or kind of crappy

"No sign of anyone falling for the cock and balls design yet"

Try a search for "Doughboys and DirtyBird logos" :)

Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code

Re: Backticks

So how much code (SQL or anything) is written on an Android device using an OSK?

Turns out humans are leading AI systems astray because we can't agree on labeling

Re: Small off duty ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB-NnVpvQ78

FBI confirms Zodiac Killer's 340 cipher solved by trio of amateur math and software codebreakers

Re: FBI confirmation

That someone had developed an alogirithm or set of rules that extracted a meaningful and seemingly relevant plain text when applied to the original data

BCC is hard, OK? Quite a lot of orgs blurted your email addresses in GDPR mailouts

In Pegasus Mail:

Options - Sending Mail - Checkbox 'Suppress BCC listings when sending mail" should be checked!

To quote David Harris:

"Suppress BCC field listings in outgoing mail BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is a useful, but poorly-standardized feature. There are at least four ways a BCC field could be written into a message:

It could be omitted altogether

It could be present, but contain no addresses at all

It could contain only each individual recipient's address

It could contain the addresses of all people receiving the BCC

All of these methods have adherents and detractors. By default, Pegasus Mail lists all the BCC recipients in the BCC field of mail it sends: if you would prefer that no addresses were shown in the field, then check this control. When this option is turned on, the BCC field will simply contain the text "(Suppressed)", without any addresses."

The Sinofsky Letters: Defenestrated Windows overlord corresponds

Re: XTree Gold?

ZTree Win only takes up about 4MB on a USB Drive and feels just like Xtree Gold - it's still my FM of choice.