* Posts by tin 2

497 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010

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Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

tin 2

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

While that is to be applauded, it still could all easily go under microsoft.com. This is just rebranding for rebranding BS sake.

HPE blames GPU shortage for contributing to unexpected sales slide

tin 2

"At this point, readers might wonder if, in that context, HPE's planned acquisition of Juniper Networks is such a good idea."

Truth, and not just for the reasons discussed in the article. Problem is, and I mean this with all goodwill to Neri, that he literally can't say anything else. The doublespeak in the call (networking is soft/buying jnpr will fix it) means nothing and we still have to draw our own conclusions.

tin 2

Strikes me HPE might be able to win providing some services relating to code efficiency?

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

tin 2

This is a bandwagon like I've not seen before. Sure there have been many "must have" largely marketing BS in this industry in the past, but for everyone to go all in on something that really hasn't proven anything yet, I just find bonkers.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

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"Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want"

I'm bemused by this quote. I think it's pretty clear that browser market share is just market distortion.

Whatever comes pre-installed (historically IE, now Edge, Chrome, Safari) gets used the most. Whatever gets advertised as the thing you should definitely use instead (Chrome, and to a lesser extent Edge) often replaces the pre-installed thing.

There's no competition here based on what people want.

tin 2

Re: Whatever.

I probably don't understand the ins and outs so much, but for a long time relied on whatever browser to actually tell me what was going wrong when something was going wrong.

My personal browser of choice is also Firefox.

tin 2

Re: Firefox just does not work on some web sites.

I don't run into many at all that won't work on FF - and the response for me is that the site is not incompatible with Firefox, it's incompatible with the supposedly open and well-documented standards that these bloody browsers are supposed to render.

I remember IE6, the stuff that was written for it's extended ecosystem, then the abandonment of that browser and multiple, very expensive websites that didn't work in anything else, even when IE itself was long dead, and the support, migrations of browser and application platforms, and the extreme expense involved. That should be a history lesson that's recent enough for all in IT to remember, or have the story passed on as recent enough to be vivid.

Demand the website, webapp or whatever the hell else is supposedly written for the web - whatever that means anymore - works in _all_ the browsers. One of the easiest ways is to obstinately continue to use FF, even if just for that one reason.

tin 2

Indeed. I shall not.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

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Re: It depends on the use-case

Strong disagree. More should run their own if they can. Likes of MS and Google are deciding mail works to their rules, and they need to be shown that the rest of the internet will not accede.

Amazon calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators

tin 2

soo..

they went bonkers splashing the cash while they thought payday was coming, and now it's not, immediately and desperately need efficiencies... Entrepreneurial...

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

tin 2

Re: Building software is hard...

This is bang on. It's how the humans involved respond that is key.

Official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants to swallow Juniper Networks in $14B deal

tin 2

Re: does juniper do much in the "AI" space?

"HPE seems to have so many different switching platforms under their roof, hopefully they can consolidate the user interfaces at least"

There's no chance of that. Comware was on the block 7-8 years ago, and yet go on their site today and you can see their "new" (and recently re-renamed) Comware range. ProVision-based hardware is still sold and recommended on the website even tho that was getting retired 3-4 years ago. Under HPE's tenure another two breeds of switch were invented. Integration on the control plane side has been inexplicably poor - try to determine which of the CX range of switches can be managed in Aruba Central? Who can tell? The only switch range they've properly EOLed is the Aruba MAS, which is probably because the 3 people in the world didn't get upset too much.

HPE has no strategy, leadership or anyone with any gumption or skill in this area, and so it will continue.

HPE said to be moving in on $13B deal for Juniper Networks

tin 2

Re: Installed the last ToR and core switches, management switches from Juniper in new DC build

"Should HPe properly integrate the Aruba and Juniper product lines"

hahhahahahahhahahhahahhahah! hahahhaha! hahahhahahah! hhahahah!

Hhhahahhah!

hahahahah!

oh go on, tell another!

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

tin 2

Re: From what I can recall ....

Came here to say the same. I'm sure it's a non-starter if it requires cables draping across the pavement.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

tin 2

Amiga pedantry. Sorry.

A2000 still had a 68000. Possibly it was upgraded or was a 2500, but it didn't have an 020 -because- it was a 2000.

tin 2

Re: Out in the fields

and Slack, Teams. Throw in a bit of a dodgy network into the mix and their error handling is revealed to be... well... absent.

tin 2

Re: The real lesson...

This.. That's the reason and most certainly NOT that C is in any way inherently better at it than assembly!

Mozilla CEO pockets a packet, asks biz to pick up pace the 'Mozilla way'

tin 2

Re: "Backed by the non-profit that puts people first"

Indeed.. it needs some research into the yacht(s) and mansion(s) factor. For corporates that seem to be charging a "reasonable" price too, and ofc public bodies (heated swimming pool in your Yorkshire manor, anyone?)

tin 2

Re: "Backed by the non-profit that puts people first"

Have to agree.. I'll support in non-financial ways, as I believe we need to retain some diversity in the space, but won't be putting a single £ into the pot when there's also one single person taking 5500000 of them out.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

tin 2

"the horror that was nested tables inside nested tables inside nested tables"

Oi!

(returns to web app created in 2022 that does exactly that.... and is nice and responsive with it TYVM)

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

tin 2

Re: Two sides of a coin (aka Someone wanted a new printer)

Yep! When I broke the laserjet 4050 here, I immediately replaced it - with an identical one from Ebay.

Also I learned my lesson, don't try and clean them :)

Brit borough council apologizes for telling website users to disable HTTPS

tin 2

Re: Dear editor

AFAIK http/2 can also be vastly slower than http/1.1 so it doesn't follow that one means the other and therefore something that it might do, but quite possibly not, should be cited as something it directly does.

US Trademark Office still wants to keep faxes, but is willing to try this cloud thing

tin 2

Fax is still a fascinating punchbag

The IT world has inexplicably failed to create anything as simple and effective as the fax, yet every time someone either looks to keep or replace them, we scoff. I find it most interesting.

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

tin 2

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?

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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*?

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

"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

tin 2

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

tin 2

"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

tin 2

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'

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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?

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

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"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

tin 2

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

tin 2
Trollface

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

tin 2

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.

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