Posts by tin 2

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Replace with AI? Hahahahahahahahahahahaa

I presume they haven't actually *used* any of the stuff around at the moment masquerading as AI.

You can run Windows 11 on just 200MB of RAM – but should you?

Re: Microsoft dfoes not care if you can run their software...

Windows has always been a subscription. That's why every few years the OS you paid for is suddenly absolutely definitely full of holes, unsupportable and you need the new one.

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Nothing about it in either quality or age makes it worthy of the name (classic).

If they said we are retiring Microsoft Teams Free (complete bollocks version) I might be less outraged by this.

Former Microsoft UX boss doesn't like the Windows 11 Start menu either

Re: Genius?

Indeed yes. And wondered at the time (and still do, just less regularly) who the hell thought squishing the entire set of functions of the computer down into one button bottom left was a good idea in the first place.

Perhaps it wasn't and it was just "another thing we can try to protect by patents". And the computer-user world lapped it up.

Hospitals to use startup's AI tech to predict A&E traffic

or just...

... overprovision the room, beds and staff a bit, and in particular let the staff have some downtime, R&R, look after their own health and not feel like they're running off their tits for 14 hour shifts.

I'm absolutely convinced the cost will be about the same, or perhaps in the (very big) round, less, and the department will be able to cope with the peaks when they come just by having slack.

The obsession with JIT is pretty flaky in industry. It doesn't need to be the case in things like healthcare.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

Re: Dear NHS - Get well soon

I agree with you entirely. A fact I was introduced to a couple of years ago, and have had cause to check again recently that I wasn't horribly mistaken is that the NHS costs, from the public purse, per person, LESS than healthcare in the US.

Again: from public funds in both cases. That's before any insurance, deductibles, bankrupcies, gofundmes and ofc loads of people actually not being entitled to treatment in the states.

They're paying more per capita in taxation for healthcare than we are, and ours is ostensibly "free" at the point of use.

If one sits and thinks about that and what it means is going on, it's utterly mind boggling.

The Ghost of Windows Past haunts a street corner in Bermondsey

contact the computer manufacturer to determine if you need to repair or replace the disk

As if! Who writes this stuff?

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Or brand spanking new. I used to deal with early Cisco callmanager stuff that couldn't do a lot of what long discontinued PABXs could handle fine.

It was like some dudes had just hacked together some code that was a bit like a PABX, bigged it up massively, and then sold the company to Cisco to handle the fallout.

Also time critical shizz on windows 2000? Do me a favour!

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Re: Internet dependency

This. I've been a bit staunch "my old POS is fine" in recent years but getting more so now with stories like this.

Bring on the Cuban-style vintage car maintenance era sez I.

Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done

"and reduce your carbon footprint"

how about turning those mountains of servers that create, analyse, and chuck out worthless shit based on metadata of metadata of data that isn't really needed for the original principles of Facebook to actually work?

tsoHost pleads for 'patience and understanding' as sites borked, support sinkholed

Intriguing that people should say their support tries hard. I have found them nothing but dogshit awful for years.

For the marketeer that has everything – except a CPU fan

"Far be it from us to wonder exactly what sort of software stack requires such power in order to populate that 84-inch screen"

And of course you'll still occasionally spot animated stuff running at 2fps, cos the software devs have been racing hard to keep up squandering all that hardware horsepower for the past 30 years!

UK watchdog blesses Virgin Media and O2's union, says there's no risk of market distortion or competition loss

Re: Now you only have one choice for a complete shit service instead of two!

But have you ever had a fault? How that's dealt with is the mark of a good or not-so-good provider.

OVH services still not fully restored as boss rates ongoing recovery efforts a 'real nightmare'

Re: DR plans?

I think quite the opposite.

Yes they've perhaps made some bad choices, and when they discovered and decided to move on from those bad choices, they didn't move quick enough to remove anything that still leans on the bad choices (the well documented power inadequacies, the "DC" made out of storage containers)

However if I have a service that is basically one set of stuff on one server, I always run the risk that if it breaks, gets nicked, goes on fire, or a plane crashes into the building, it's gone. 100% gone. Not that it might come back or is backed up somewhere by someone who's not me, or will get restored in good time. That it's gone.

That OVH is doing all this crazy reclaiming/cleaning/rehousing is - in most cases I understand - beyond what they're on the peg to do, and that's good for those that bought a service that might evaporate into thin air, crossed their fingers it wouldn't when they really ought not to have, and then their thing did indeed evaporate into thin air.

That there's people with services - critical or not - that they've not been able to yet rebuild elsewhere is striking. Not even a backup?! In fairness I have a service like this, and should it go pop it will be proper inconvenient, but I will cry to myself not to the provider.

That there's a high %age chance their data at least will be available once again to do something with seems to me to be very good service. I could easily see something like 1&1 or HostEurope going "ahh well there's that lot gone, sorry about that" and inviting you to start afresh with perhaps a few days of contractual service credit at best.

OVH reveals it's scrubbing servers – to get smoke residue off before rebooting

Re: This is very low-rent

I actually thought they were cleaning and getting stuff up and running for people who hadn't got any kind of resilience to have a hope of getting their stuff off?

Although flip side, if they are cleaning so thoroughly.... is it a fire damaged server?

Workday bets big on staff coming back to the office by splurging $172.5m on HQ and five more Bay Area buildings

Must be a lot of buildings full of people twiddling their thumbs

...only takes 1 junior web dev to create a load of text boxes wrapped in impenetrable dynamic HTML5 "UI"

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Re: Is there a lesson here about putting your eggs in one basket?

I agree but I don't think that lesson is for OVH tho. They have another 24 DCs around the world in 10 locations. If you're hosting your stuff in one of their locations, your DR is automatically in another location, possibly not even with OVH, in case they have some kind of business-oriented problem.

Or... you don't have DR, which in itself is a DR strategy.

Does make me wonder though about all this "dual power supply this" "UPS that" "multiple internet feeds the other". Maybe that's all really really pointless, and host your stuff in at least two different places with as least commonality as possible is the only strategy.

Put your money into making the code handle it, and have bits of the back end infrastructure die regularly as a matter of course, because it has and will be affected by single points of failure relatively regularly. So when the big disaster happens, your code is used to it.

CD Projekt Red 'EPICALLY pwned': Cyberpunk 2077 dev publishes ransom note after company systems encrypted

bonus points...

...for "down the shitter". English hackers then?

There's no 'I' in Teams so Microsoft issues 6-month warning for laggards still on Skype for Business Online

Put aside your love or hate for the workflow of teams for a sec...

...just on a standalone client basis it STILL can't even work out if it's successfully delivered a message to the other end. I just can't wrap my head around how the code could be so bad as to not be able to definitively work it out 100% of the time.

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

anyone hankering over a bit of Guru Meditation?

Have a bit of USA's Prevue Guide channel with the local cableco's Amiga having a bit of trouble live on air... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x9Vado0S7M

Very little helps: Tesco serves up 3-for-1 borkage special to self-scanning Tesco shoppers

Yes!! I do wonder why the current version of windows is still called windows when it doesn't actually have any windows in it anymore, just the edge of the apps running into each other.

Ubiquiti iniquity: Wi-Fi box slinger warns hackers may have peeked at customers' personal information

Really?

Is that "hosted by a third-party cloud provider" or actually "hosted by us using a cloud provider"?

I'd be willing to take a bet that it's the latter and some crap blame shifting. Which if the case, demonstrates continued bad faith.

Be careful where you log into GitHub: Dev visits Iran, opens laptop, gets startup's entire account shut down

I'm a little confused as to why Github has a system whereby they check if anyone's access is from Iran, investigate (albeit crappily automated or no) and then block your (company's) account, rather than just blocking any access at all from Iran? Seems.... odd.

Google Cloud (over)Run: How a free trial experiment ended with a $72,000 bill overnight

"Unfortunately, a billing budget "does not automatically cap Google Cloud or Google Maps Platform usage/spending," according to the docs."

and that... is a crappy thing.

On the 11th day of Christmas TalkTalk took from me... the email address of my company

I think us geeks here are guilty of mixing up businesses with tech businesses.

Most (small) non-tech business I know couldn't give the slightest shit about computers, phones, internet connections, domains, websites and all that malarky. They absolutely know they need such evil things but look elsewhere for that stuff to get sorted out, to enable them to concentrate on what they do & the reason they're in business - plastering walls, preparing food, whatever. For the same reason they're likely to call a plumber if the sink breaks, they're likely to rely on other people or business to sort their tech.

Even though *I* have long held it makes loads of sense to have a domain and at the very least forward your mail to somewhere so the address people know never evaporates, why on earth should we expect a business owner to understand, nay second-guess that this might happen? Or even that it "looks bad" just cos _we_ all know that @talktalkbusiness looks bollocks (and even then, not for any good reason other than we know TalkTalk is bollocks).

Going to someone that holds themselves out as SomethingSomething *business* seems like a perfectly good idea on the face of it. If I'm a business, I've bought a business service from a big place that provides business services. It even has business in the name. Sounds good to me. The likes of us and/or regulation should be holding the likes of TalkTalk to a higher standard.

Manchester United email servers remain offline amid what is being called a 'ransomware' attack

Re: They're suining Football Manager

I'm not following why a Raving simulator needs rights from the FIA....

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

PHP... misconfigure your webserver (or have it misconfigured for you) and there's your undercrackers on display in public. That's probably a massive oversimplification but is the reason I stayed away.

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

Of course we also need to accept (I am sure most wont and await mass downvotage) that Windows 7,8 and 10 only actually exist to prize more money out of your hands. Sure there's some back end stuff that might be a bit of hell to transplant, but Win 10 aint actually so far from XP that we've had to fork for 3 supposedly completely new products in the interim.

It's a gravy train and most of us are on it.

Fancy a steaming portion of Kentucky Fried Bork? A fingerlickin' flub that's pure poultry in motion

Re: Waste of a PC - why not use a digital signage solution

oh yeah seen that one. My mind boggled. I wonder how many of them still have all the PS3s still working.

Atari threatens to hit fourth VCS shipping deadline, provides pictures of boxes as proof of product delivery

"It is unusual for a company to post pictures of its product being boxed as proof it exists"

So true. But if they're so close to shipping, why not just ship and have them land at peoples houses as definitive proof, rather than jump around a few days earlier about boxes on pallets? Weird.

McAfee seeks $2bn return to stock market after Intel unpleasantness

Came here to say...

....things that people already said. I know nobody whos actually in IT that has a good thing to say about anything McAfee. Can only imagine they drop their pants on pricing all the time, and someone somewhat higher signs up to making their IT unusable for a 5 year contract.

Hootsuite melts ICE deal after staff revolt: CEO vows not to divide biz like agents divided families at the US border

Re: Sympathy for the devils

Alternatively, 100 people give you some feedback and if you're a normal person you introspect a bit and have a think about if you're being a massive penis or not. Or you can just leap around ranting that you're the boss I suppose.

First-world problems: The pumpkin spice latte is here, but the Starbucks loyalty card app has wiped my balance

Pumpkin spice latte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LhEf6hWAIE (contains swears but none of you are in the office anyway, right?)

This is how demon.co.uk ends, not with a bang but a blunder: Randomer swipes decommissioning domain

Re: Demon lives in the Netherlands!

XS4ALL are ending too? Crazy to have such a well known name and squeeze the value out of it by basically extinguishing it. These big companies with their branding mania...

God yeah I remember that too. Ridiculous. Talk about unnecessarily naffing off your subscribers that you just acquired at great expense and were already guaranteed to be pretty unhappy.

Mine went further in that (amongst other things) on the day of switchover my broadband went down and stayed down. Along with an email saying congratulations your broadband is up and running! They couldn't fix it, cue lots of "reset the router" "plug into the master socket" etc BS.

There was a litany of mistakes. I remember holding that there wasn't a single facet of the service they hadn't screwed up. I also posted a factually accurate, narky, but clean rant on their message boards in the hope something would happen. It did. They deleted it due to not being within their T&Cs. I was apoplectic.

Sky are a company that deliver great service while you're taking a service, it works without any effort on their behalf, and you keep paying. Any of those things go wrong they are the absolute worst.

Came here to say the same thing. Have an email system that can handle multiple domains, and register the domain with whoever for £15 a year. Whatever the issue is I can't fathom. I can only guess that the corporate branding maniacs have got their hands on it.

Also proves definitively that the big boys don't give the slightest bit of a shit about their customers, really.

oh god... Be unlimited. I forgot all about them. Anyone who held out eventually unceremoniously moved over to the dogturd factory that is Sky. Terrible.

We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

Re: The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k

Those people who's not realised Windows already is a subscription are not paying attention. Or are still running WFW 3.1

Re: The people who wrote it said that it would take them weeks to fix, at a cost of ~£5k

Given that huge swathes of people across the world are continually gainfully employed "upgrading" companies from Windows version X to Windows version Y, which are all pretty much just the same thing with many layers of lipstick on, I'd be quite confident to say MS have perfected this gravy train as well.

Woman dies after hospital is unable to treat her during crippling ransomware infection, cops launch probe

Re: Why should hospitals be 19th century?

You definitely can create proper air-gaps though with only-secure strictly-neccesary comms between several systems that understand what both ends want and expect, and then don't blindly execute whatever's been sent across. It's very doable.

Problem is implementing that properly over x-hundred systems is expensive, time consuming and in most delivery cases pretty much impossible without buckets more time, energy and $ going to the people implementing. In hospitals in my very limited experience, the barest minimum of time, energy and $ aren't even on offer, never mind copious amounts of them.

Speed. Any business that considers IT a cost-centre only, I recommend they try to run their business on paper and pen for a month.

I've been in a few businesses, ones that can completely run on pen and paper, and ones that refuse to even put a procedure in place. But even the prepared ones work markedly slower when they're doing everything without a computer.

Your anti-phishing test emails may be too easy to spot. NIST has a training tool for that

I like to click on them....

... to enter swears and humourous invalid information on whatever "enter your bank details, PIN, etc here" forms. Precautions taken of course.

0ops. 1,OOO-plus parking fine refunds ordered after drivers typed 'O' instead of '0'

100% this IMHO. Lots of talk about stupid people, mistakes, typefaces, standards etc but frankly the fine is about whether you paid and not about whether you can remember your reg, not mistake 0 and O, and/or operate the bloody machine.

Re: Simple Software Fix

Does work in the car park situation though, because if the random combination of 1AI1AA IA11AA both come and park in the same car park at the same time, and one of them accidentally enters their registration number wrongly, then how about just letting them off the $2 or whatever it is for the sake of everyone's sanity?

Amiga Fast File System makes minor comeback in new Linux kernel

So I believe.... and I'm not certain about both of these to don't kill me....

- Windows got memory protection in 3.0

- While Wikipedia says that they are, I'm not sure how an OS that can lock up such that the mouse pointer doesn't move is pre-emptively multitasking. Surely the system is able to steal back resources to run the code keeping that alive? I've seen that behaviour on Win (lots), Mac (a bit) and in the past couple of days - and very alarmingly - Linux. Maybe I don't quite understand what pre-emptive multitasking actually is. But again, if a 7MHz Amiga can do it, your 1000s of MHz 30-years-more-development whatever bloody well should be able to.

Not the case. A lot of OSes were of that nature at the time and... lets take an example of the "winning" one... new iterations came out over and over adding the stuff needed as the underlying computing power came along.

The Amiga failed due to Commodore being a very shit dysfunctional company, and the companies that tried to take on the mantle of Amiga being even more shit and dysfunctional. That's all very well documented.

100%. And having just read https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/04/on_call/ and some of the comments, I am very glad circumstances drove me to getting one, and having to persist with it long into the reign of the PC. It's a genuinely very slick OS, was a pleasure to use, and while of course now dated, delivers some lessons OS creators have somehow still not learned. I still boggle when certain (thankfully rare) situations cause Windows' or a Mac's fundamental underlying OS processes to grind to a halt while something is busy.

Re: My life is now complete...

or really efficiently, depending on how you look at it.....

Re: My life is now complete...

Don't be daft. almost none of the games used the OS's file system.

Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe

Re: Huh?

Totally. and especially in Asda. Check out myself on an ignorant machine that undoubtedly will need a harassed and overburdened member of staff come over to sort out at some point? All while having RECORDING IN PROGRESS flashed in front of your face? Don't mind if I never come in your shitty store ever again.