* Posts by tin 2

498 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010

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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.

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

"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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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...

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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

tin 2

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'

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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.

tin 2

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.

tin 2

Re: My life is now complete...

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

tin 2

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

tin 2

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.

Email seems lost in the post? You might be a Tsohost customer

tin 2

I like others moved to TSOhost some time ago when they were good. Since their service has dropped off a cliff, to the point that when I have something go wrong (latest was a domain renewal that I got billed for, AND a confirmation, but the domain was not actually renewed in the backend) I get a sarky response to my support tickets that *I* must have done something wrong. Crap. And now another lengthy migration is needed.

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

tin 2

“and occurs when the meter is unable to process a reading to secure an outstanding balance”

Except of course that isn't what happened here at all. Cockup followed up by cockup. Which is to be expected.

Utilitarian, long-bodied Nokia 5.3 has budget basic specs - but it does cost £150

tin 2

I thought it was a great idea until seeing a good many people screw up at the barriers on the underground. Hang on that didn't work... double-click, or was it triple-click? ah no the wallet app has disappeared, hang on a sec... sorry about this...

And while waving your £700 phone around. No ta.

Never knowingly under-digitally transformed: Retailer John Lewis outsources tech function to Wipro

tin 2

Re: Director Speak.

Well, I dunno. It probably is an important milestone but a really shitty nightmarish one.

Firefox 78: Protections dashboard, new developer features... and the end of the line for older macOS versions

tin 2

Refresh firefox...

....is linked to by a lot of the troubleshooting documentation, so it kind of is there. I used it last week to great effect. Now just need the same for MS teams.

It’s happened again: AT&T sued for allegedly transferring victim's number to thieves in $1.9m cryptocoin heist

tin 2

Re: 24E6 eggs in a flimsy basket

Yep, I'd want 24FA, at least.

Paging technology providers: £3m is on the table to replace archaic NHS comms network

tin 2

Why is anyone debating this like anything that comes out of Hancock's mouth ever makes any sense.

Pagers are great at what they do, and hospitals need what they do. Just buy a fecking pager manufacturer if the problem is they're going obsolete.

There's no accounting for TITSUP*: Beancounters bemoan Sage cloudy sync software outage

tin 2

Re: "a minority of customers"

You'd better have that coat on and making haste...

tin 2

"a minority of customers"

who here believes that?

Wow, Microsoft's Windows 10 always runs Edge on startup? What could cause that? So strange, tut-tuts Microsoft

tin 2

Re: Remember when...

have 50,000 upvotes.

Don't like Mondays? Neither does Microsoft 364's Outlook Exchange Online service

tin 2

27 minutes to acknowledge a europe-wide outage?

TsoHost swings axe at 'legacy' DIY website builder MrSite, giving customers a month to find alternative arrangements

tin 2

TSOhost have completely lost the plot since they got taken over. Very sad to see.

Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021

tin 2

"a bit irritated at the EU's continued determination to punish the UK"

If you leave the golf club, you aren't allowed to still use the course.

tin 2

Hahaha eBay laggards?! There's no chance of that, they haven't even updated their logo on some of their pages yet. (e.g. search for a car and click the "get the report" link in the item specifics section)

UK.gov dangles £100m for service slingers for back office 'transformation' that'll kill off bespoke systems

tin 2

This, 100%. Everything in this arena is bespoke, unless you have everyone half manually processing the data with shared files and Excel. And even then you'll probably end up with a load of bespoke macros.

No, the trick is to get a well-shepherded in-house team who create, intimately know and love the system they give birth to. But ain't nobody got the kahunas for that.

While waiting for the Linux train, Bork pays a visit to Geordieland with Windows 10

tin 2

Re: Need a bit of Raspberry Pi action

I came here specifically to say this. The "protection" is an illusion.

eBay users spot the online auction house port-scanning their PCs. Um... is that OK?

tin 2

Re: Browsers don't.

Turn off Javascript?! how many websites you visit actually function these days?

Podcast Addict banned from Google Play Store because heaven forbid app somehow references COVID-19

tin 2

"Every time I see an email from Google it is terrifying."

There is a great summary of the problem.

Facebook-for-suits puts on a fresh jacket. 'Classic' Yammer is so 2018. Behold, a public preview of 'New' Yammer

tin 2

Re: Linked-In is already bad enough

I saw that as exactly the point of the mock....

It is unclear why something designed to pump fuel into a car needs an ad-spewing computer strapped to it, but here we are

tin 2

Re: I hated the pump ads...

I agree with you entirely on every level. The problem is that the vast majority of people aren't bothered enough, don't vote with their feet, so it continues.

Serial killer spotted on the night train from Newcastle

tin 2

I remember... maybe late 90s perhaps, they installed new displays - nothing like these - in the underground stations on Merseyrail. They showed testing and then something like "look at the front of the train" for many months, perhaps years. I'm pretty sure they never displayed any actual information and at some point were replaced with the more conventional ones you see these days.

Xiaomi emits phone browser updates after almighty row over web activity harvested even in incognito mode

tin 2

Which peice of shit software developer...

...is sitting there thinking it's fine to add telemetry to private browsing mode*, and doing it? C'mon who are you?

* NVM the more arguable stuff. I think we can all defintely agree that private browsing signals that the user doesn't want any telemetry sending anywhere right?

ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, says it's 'the right thing to do' after months of controversy

tin 2

WOW

"The billion-dollar deal set off alarm bells from the very beginning: no one in the domain name industry had ever heard of Ethos Capital, and it only had two named employees. It quickly emerged it had been secretly created by a former CEO of ICANN, and he had registered the company one day after ICANN made clear it was going to lift price caps on the 10 million .org domains, instantly making the registry worth tens of millions more."

WOW.. wowowowowow. I have no more words. Just wow.

Guess who's back, back again. SE's back, tell a friend: 2020 reboot looks like an iPhone 8 and even shares components

tin 2

all they got to do now is....

.... put a 3.5mm jack on it, and it will be almost the perfect phone.

Move fast and break stuff, Windows Terminal style: Final update before release will nix your carefully crafted settings

tin 2

Re: How about a poll?

You can't have NaN cos by definition it's NaN.

tin 2

Re: How about a poll?

AmigaOS .... Still one of the features I'm not sure how the wider world didn't learn.

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