Posts by David 132

Husqvarna ports Doom to a robot lawnmower – not, thankfully, its chainsaws

Re: Glad to see everybody has avoided the obvious sort of comment

Beyond that, there's plenty of potential for cutting remarks here though...

Re: I'm a Stihl bloke

I got a Milwaukee Fuel electric chainsaw and bush trimmer saw (stop sniggering at the back there!) in last year’s Good Friday sale and I am rather impressed. The 8Ah battery does a really good job of cutting through even thick tree-trunks and it’s lovely to not have to faff around with premix and a persnickety doesn’t-want-to-start gas chainsaw.

I’m sceptical.

Space marines on a lawnmower? Sounds like astro-turfing.

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

Re: "Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry – undoing changes..."

"Go Stick Your Head In A Pig"

VMware's end-user compute unit reportedly headed to private equity firm KKR

So, another megamerger...

...has resulted in increased costs and lower choice for the end-customers.

I am shocked. Absolutely shocked. Who could have foreseen this?

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

It's not called "Brigadoon", is it?

Also don’t forget to pee in your shoe and rub Vegemite behind your ears, as precaution against drop-bears :)

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

And also I'm pretty sure that's exactly the same form of words they used when hyping WiFi 6, and 5, and...

The hardest part of the job must be the riffling through the thesaurus, looking for new adjectives.

"How about 'unprecedented'? Nooo... we used that last time. 'Unparalleled'? Nah, that was what we said about 5..."

Microsoft adds more AI to Photos in Windows 10 and 11

Re: Paint Cocreator

That’s the Home version. The one for professionals is branded as “Procreator”.

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

Re: OK

It does rather seem to be an inevitable rule of the IT industry that all AV products turn to sh!te sooner or later.

Waaay back in the day, I used to use Norton. That got more and more bloated, and when it reached the point that the product was worming its tentacles into my system far deeper and more damagingly than any likely virus infection, I moved to AVG.

That in turn suffered its own enshittification - becoming bloated and succumbing to creeping featurism.

TBH these days on my remaining Microsoft boxes I just run with Windows Defender. Of mixed efficacy it may be, but at least it's pretty lightweight and still (mostly) tame-able.

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

The Reacher Gilt approach to communications infrastructure management.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, openSUSE to get better installation

>PS Anyone heard from shadowsystems who used to post here?

I asked that same question a few weeks ago, and the consensus response was that he's not been heard from in a couple of years.

I do hope he's OK - his comments were always coherent and incisive and put many of us fully-able-bodied commentards to shame :(

Windows 11 users herded toward 23H2 via automatic upgrade

Oops, missed the edit window. Meant to say “no great value to me”!

Sounds a little arrogant otherwise…

I assume both of those require one to be logged in with a Microsoft account not a local one, and as the phrase “over my dead body” is applicable there, I’m not sure if the 23H2 update will have any great value one way or another.

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

No, you’re thinking of Systemd.

(Please note icon!)

Quest Diagnostics pays $5M after mixing patient medical data with hazardous waste

Re: Quest takes patient privacy and the protection of the environment very seriously

Actually the bit of spokeweasel effluvium that got me in the fine article was this:

“Through our meticulous waste audits, it came to light that Quest Diagnostics may have encountered challenges in properly managing confidential patient data, medical waste, and hazardous materials…”

“May have encountered challenges”.

Note the passive voice. It wasn’t our fault, it was those mysterious “challenges”. We tried to do the right thing, but who could have foreseen “challenges”?

“Sorry I was caught climbing out of a house window at 2am with a large bag marked SWAG, m’lud, but I encountered challenges in properly not burgling…”

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

>Is everybody going to have 6 dead grandmothers each year?

Only Nobby Nobbs.

Re: What a strange position to defend.

You'll get Oveur it.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Query: the timing of ads

Mildly annoying but there are only 2 adverts per 40 minutes or so. Less than we were seeing on their FreeVee service.

Slowly, slowly, boil that frog....

Re: Query: the timing of ads

>Once I've finished all 300 seasons of Family Guy that is...

Ech, it went downhill after Season #195. Past that point it was just interminable fights with the chicken, and increasingly forced "hey remember that time Peter did <x>..." flashbacks.

Oh no wait, it was always like that.

Brian and Stewie are occasionally funny but the rest is just stoner-level dross.

(Bracing for the downvotes from FG fans.)

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

“A Game Changer”

If I wrote a powershell script that traversed your drives and deleted every instance of callofduty.exe, fortnite.exe and cyberpunk2077.exe, replacing them with the Freecell executable, would Microsoft make similarly gushing praise of it in a video?

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

“…and had them fired, and now the rest of the article will be finished at great expense and in a completely different style by a completely different team?”

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

You win. Shut down the Internet, folks, that one can’t be topped.

Re: Cybertruck - the gift that keeps on giving...

Hell, never mind BL’s cars… Italian cars of the 70s were more rust-resistant than this.

SAP makes last-minute change to replacement of 80-year-old co-founder

Re: Bravo

Indeed. Perhaps the new candidate unnerved the board by getting larger as he moved away from observers?

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Re: I love Apple...

Re “words speak louder than actions”

You might have mistyped, but I bet any politicians reading were nodding enthusiastically and yelling “finally, someone gets us!”

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Re: Gandhi

That’s been a running joke in all the Civ games as I recall, not just Civ 6. Gandhi will nuke other civilizations with very little hesitation, thanks to the sense of humour of the game developers :)

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

Re: Cnnot use with glasses so need prescription lens inserts

Tenuously related, but an opportunity to share my favourite Groucho Marx quote:

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

Attempts to demolish guardrails in AI image generators blamed for lewd Taylor Swift deepfakes

Down.

Living "down".

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

Did Mozilla also mention…

…the occasional full-screen and un-closeable “finish setting up your PC (by switching to Edge)” popups that appear when starting Windows?

Or the super simple and reassuring-sounding “Use Microsoft’s Recommended Defaults” button in Settings, that makes it oh-so-easy to (accidentally) set your default browser to Edge?

Or the recent kerfuffle with Edge hijacking Chrome users’ tabs?

Frankly, Edge could be the best browser in the world, and I still wouldn’t use it. Microsoft’s clingy, creepy, manipulative attempts to trick people into using it have put it on my “hell no, not ever” list for a long while now.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

> most of them make about as much sense as the potato people from the Salad Nebula traveling thousands of light years so they can cause Type 2 Diabetes in people by getting them to eat too many starches.

Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re: @Alan Bourke - STRAW MAN ALERT

Not to be That Guy, but would this be an appropriate time to transition the PC to Linux? Is your 3D printer etc. supported, or is it Windows-only?

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

These days, many of us yell at clouds.

On-prem is far superior. Fight me. :-P

Re: Not knowing what words mean

Ha! You've reminded me that I got a metaphorical rap over the knuckles from my English teacher at school for mixing up the usage of "frequently" and "regularly". Bless Mr Philpott; it's a lesson that has stuck with me for nigh on 35 years now :)

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Re: But ... I thought computers didn't do Scottish

I have to admit that the clip was not the one I was expecting.

Being of the older persuasion, I thought it would be this one!

Re: Getting 'Dangerous' Info from GPTx

Back in the day, there was a widely-held belief that the three-letter agencies had sabotaged most of the recipes in The Anarchist’s Cookbook, by just enough to make them useless and/or more dangerous to the person following them while remaining convincing-looking.

Or maybe they hadn’t, but had merely put the word out that they had, to spread fear and doubt… who knows?

Anyway, your comment about the recipes being stupidly dangerous rings true; it’s not the first time I’ve heard that from people with actual chemistry knowledge, and certainly lends credence to the “the FBI sabotaged it all” theory!

Microsoft's vision for the future of work is you trusting Redmond to get AI right

Oh, yes.

Me, driving last week in northern Oregon, about 5 miles away from my local Wilco farm store, but wanting directions because I'm coming in via a different route to normal: "Hey Siri, get me directions to the nearest Wilco farm store"

Siri: "Here are directions to the Wilco store in Sonora, California. Your estimated time of arrival is tomorrow at midnight."

Sigh.

In the immortal lyrics of Eric Idle, "Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cos there's bugger all down here on Earth."

Cruise being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the road

Re: "The system, nicknamed Vista"

Vista?

In the immortal words of Moss, “We’re going to die.”

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Where the participants just went Onan on?

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

Re: A better long-term approach...

...or Red Hat, although I'm sure some will disagree.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: On a tilt was...

Oh how delightful if the rack had been providing cloud facilities for a certain credit card company: the Leaning Tower of Visa...

Re: is to gradually push less

>Righting a heavy bike that's toppled over is not for the faint-hearted,

Ah, you've reminded me of a late, lamented dear friend of mine. He was of quite short stature, elderly, smoked like a chimney, but had always, his whole life, hankered after a big touring bike. So one day I drove him into town to pick up his new (to him) Goldwing. Probably a '93 vintage or thereabouts, so pretty chunky, with hard shell panniers & the works.

He was very confident that he could ride it, on the basis that he'd ridden bikes in his youth (i.e., BSA Bantams, circa 1960...).

As you can imagine, a Goldwing 40 years later wasn't quite the same. I followed him back home in my car, at a cautious distance.

My abiding memory is that at every traffic light we stopped at, he'd stop, then like a domino, he'd teeter for a moment and, almost gracefully - but not even bothering to make a futile attempt at stopping himself - he & bike would topple majestically over sideways. So I'd have to get out of my car, lift him + bike up (I was younger then too!), hold him steady till the light went green, give him a push to see him moving, then leap back into my car to follow.

Bless him. RIP Merv. Here's a pint for you, you old sod.

Ha! OK, that one made me laugh.

And gives me an excuse - as if needed! - to post the obligatory Far Side cartoon :)

>And of course some staff members didn't bother to claim- which saved the authority a few hundred quid a year.

...which of course is the point! Make the process sufficiently onerous and/or soul-crushingly tedious, and a decent percentage of people just won't bother claiming money that is rightfully theirs - ka-ching! Trebles all round for the Finance department.

See also: mail-in rebates, HMRC tax refunds, etc.

@Anonymous Custard - I think you might work for my previous employer - what you describe sounds very familiar!

Our admins, back in the day, knew all the ins and outs of Concur and Amex Corporate Travel. A simple email “Hi Kathy, I need to be in Munich next Monday & Tuesday, could you make the arrangements please?” and it would be done; no fuss, no mess, super efficient.

Then it was decided that to save money (ha!) we should all do our own travel arrangements.

Cue lots of senior engineers spending hours of their time wrestling with Concur and battling the Computer-Says-No nature of the corporate travel rules (“Yes, I have not booked the cheapest flight, because the cheapest flight leaves Heathrow at 3AM, routes me via Ulaanbaatar and has a 57 hour layover before getting me to Munich at midnight the night before my 8AM presentation to the customer…”

Sometime around 2006, I was having a corridor conversation with a colleague at our Southwest-of-England Very Large Tech Company employer, when certain other colleagues in our datacenter group approached us, carefully pushing a tall 42U rack that they had painstakingly assembled for an upcoming demo.

Well, the corridor in question was the transition point between legacy office space, and what had been until very recently, bonded warehouse space before being converted to offices.

Which meant there was a short ramped section of floor where the floor levels transitioned.

And so my friend and I watched as this very tall rack reached the ramp, and in glorious slow motion like a mighty sequoia, toppled over, with an extremely expensive crashing/shattering/pinging sound.

So we beat a tactful retreat with our coffees, leaving the DC guys to sob over their pile of bits.

Re: IT Manager to the rescue! - Aside, theatrical near miss

Watch The Goes Wrong Show on the BBC or your catch-up service of choice. A gloriously, magnificently funny riff on that whole concept of prop mishaps, forgotten lines, and everything else that is The Magic Of Live Theatre!

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Re: America...

> tasted electricity in the USA once before and it was not nice!

For best eating, it needs to be in freshly baked bread.

What? Haven’t you heard of a Current Bun?

Cisco: Don't use 'blind spot' – and do use 'feed two birds with one scone'

Re: My safe space

Triggered, no, but you'll be sued by the estate of John Cage for unlicensed performance of excerpts from 4'33".

Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale

Re: "But, as with most legitimate tech, can also be used for evil. "

...with our hands resting in full view on the table.