Posts by David 132 5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
CDK have taken the coward's way out, paying the Danegeld and emboldening the ransomware scum. The next company attacked by those vermin will be ever so grateful to CDK for validating the business model, I'm sure.
Paying ransoms should be made illegal, under any circumstances. With extremely stiff criminal sanctions for any corporate officers found doing so.
You’ve reminded me of the old joke that the most popular themes for literature are: religion, the aristocracy, sex, and crime-solving.
…On which basis, runs the joke, the ideal, guaranteed-blockbuster-sales first sentence for a novel would be:
“ ‘Hell!’ said the Duchess, ‘I’m pregnant. Whodunnit?’ ”
FTFA: Crisis-prone IT services outfit Atos says it is among the top 11 percent of companies in the industry
…which screams “we’re not in the top 10%, but if we stretch the criteria to 11%, we can juuuuust scrape in, and 11 is close enough to 10 that no-one will think it looks weird, right?”
At least they didn’t have to go with “we’re in the top x% of IT services companies whose names begin with ‘A’ and who are French”
Because I’m a masochist, I used this guide to get Stable Diffusion running on an Intel integrated GPU - specifically, a 12th-gen vPro laptop with 32GB of RAM.
I’m happy to report that it works. Fairly slow, but admittedly not as bad as I feared it’d be. The first image when switching model/device does indeed take a while (maybe 5 mins?) but subsequent ones take around a minute or two.
One tip… when running the web gui batch file, I was warned by Python that the installed version of Pip was superseded. Foolishly I upgraded to the latest version (24?), which broke things. Stick with the default versions and all seems to be OK.
That, and the recent requirement to create a Teamviewer account before you can use the free, personal version to do remote connections - technically, last I checked, only one party to the connection has to have an account, but it's still a PITA.
I have happy memories of using TV a decade or more ago to do tech support for my family - even a non-technical parent can follow instructions along the lines of "go to teamviewer dot com, click the download button, run it, then tell me the 6-digit code that it's displaying." But of course, enshittification being a constant in the universe (along with death and taxes) they had to progressively make it more complicated. Alphanumeric codes ("is that a lower case L or a 1?" etc), account registration, and as you alluded, all-too-frequent accusations of commercial use.
I think I've related this one before, but...
A couple of years ago, when I was working at $BigCompany, I was doing development work in Visual Studio.
One day I'd been merrily coding, building, modifying... until I started a compile/build process and VS spat out so many error messages I couldn't begin to read them all.
Essentially, it couldn't find any of my source files, except the one currently in-memory in the editor.
After a few frantic minutes of thinking my SSD had corrupted itself... it turned out that the company's IT dept had chosen that moment, right in the middle of the working day, to switch on OneDrive on my PC, which meant that all my files had been moved - not copied, or linked - from $USERPROFILE to OneDrive's own preferred folder structure. Whilst being used.
So being the good, dutiful little office drone that I am not, I immediately moved them all back to their rightful locations, nuked OneDrive with prejudice, and continued coding.
(And yes, I'm sure some of you will be tut-tutting that I wantonly scorned IT's centralised backup scheme, but the fact that it just whisked my files away without even a prompt or a warning, did rather make me see red...)
That is indeed dangerous knowledge, and should be used sparingly, if only for the sake of your liver!
My own revelatory moment was when I discovered that in the country that's now my home, beer can be purchased in 64oz reusable "growlers" (stop sniggering at the back there, Brits) for a considerable saving over the per-pint price. For those evenings when a can is far too small, yet drinking an entire bottle of wine is de trop, a growler gives just the right flexibility!
Obvious icon. As I write this it's a gloriously sunny Friday evening, the lawnmower & tractor are cooling & resting after a hard afternoon's work... and so am I. Cheers.
Indeed. I remember when 20MB was as infinite as the Grace of God.
In fact, it was the (nominal) capacity of my first ever hard drive.
I, too, feel old.
It's not just sales. CDK touts an all-in-one package that can handle every aspect of an auto-industry business - timekeeping, parts ordering, service quote preparation, warranty checks, etc.
So the outage is causing havoc for any CDK-using garage that wants to perform repairs, recalls, tyre/oil changes...
I’m sure the HPE execs are shocked that the UK CMA is carefully weighing up the pros and cons of this acquisition; I mean, that’s something they’d never consider doing themselves.
Whenever I read about HP(E) doing another acquisition, that Philip J Fry “Shut up and take my money!!!” meme comes to mind.
And then I read that it’s to protect children, and of course immediately suspended my outrage and indeed critical faculties. Because for such a noble goal, how can any of us be against this? It’s not as if the EU would ever extend the law to encompass other forms of evil, such as terrorism, voting for the wrong political party, saying uncomplimentary things about political leaders, or putting bins out early.
So let’s give this our unqualified and unquestioning support. It’s for the children.
(Please note icon.)
Thumbs up if you think Asda will be the “star” of a BA-style IT meltdown in the next 12 months. And in possibly a brave move by me, thumbs down if you have full confidence in their ability to seamlessly transition infrastructure, business support solution, IT provider and personnel without major issue…
Couldn’t agree more. In a previous project I had to manage a team of software developers from the Indian subcontinent (and no, this isn’t going to turn into a racist rant, or at least that’s not my intention).
They were keen and enthusiastic, but deflected absolutely everything they could back onto me, to the extent that at one point I had to figure out - and patiently explain to them several times, with examples - the mathematics necessary to calculate & display 3-or-more benchmark results normalized to the lowest score. (e.g. if you have scores of 500, 750 and 600, and you want bar graphs showing 1.0, 1.5 and 1.2).
Lovely people, and they got the job done, but only with a lot of heavy lifting on our side.
> And then there's the problem of losing the lot if a screen fault occurs (as happened to mate of mine while driving).
As happened on my wife’s LR Discovery. The infotainment system is Windows (CE?) based, which should have been our first warning (honestly… British luxury car, using Windows, bought second-hand… has any car had so many red flags around it since the Locomotive Act of 1865?) - anyway, it failed recently, and BSOD’ed continuously. So not only did we lose backup camera, radio, satnav, car settings, and more, but we also had the distraction of a large central touchscreen flashing blue, rebooting, flashing blue, rebooting… oh, joy.
It’s a long-standing Volvo tradition to have random sh1t obscuring the screen.
My XC70 is obsessed with telling me which seatbelts have been used, or when it’s connected via Bluetooth to my phone - even if I’m reversing at the time. Yes, thanks Volvo, being told that you have connected, just like the 500+ times before, to my phone, is WAY more important than me being able to see my back-up camera…
