Posts by Snapper

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Re: Not a Trump thing.

My daughter still has Long Covid and can only work four days out of five and goes to bed no later than 8.00pm.

Not a great life in your late 20's!

Re: Not a Trump thing.

Don't disagree.

I live in Kent UK and there were several scares about a new 'Kent variant'. At this point no-one knew when a new variant might turn up and it seemed a 50/50 chance if it would be weaker or possibly a much more deadly version.

We forget too soon.

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

Re: Tagline of the time...

Just not add up accurately...

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: Suggestions?

Ha! I had a client General Manager) ring up to say they had been the target of a burglary and lost two laptops, so could we replace them under warranty!

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Mazda CX-5 track information

Hah!

My 2017 Honda Jazz lists every CD (Genuine or ripped) as Track 1, Track 2 etc. The controlling interface for all media makes Windows 95 look pretty and efficient.

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

I'll Grant you that one!

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Re: Gerry Anderson - space visionary

IIRC in one episode (ok fanboy here) Fireball XL6 crashed on take-off and XL5 had to take over a dangerous mission.

Ah, Saturday mornings in the early 60's with the fire lit and a 14-inch black and white tv!

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Excel

I saw a young lady client (a Geography Degree under her shapely belt, presumably with statistics involved), type in a list of prices into Excel, then open the drawer of her desk, pull out a calculator and proceed to add up the numbers and type in the answer at the bottom of the 50+ prices.

Users left scrambling for a plan B as Dropbox drops Dropbox Passwords

Re: Here's a great alternative

Last time I had to break a 'password-protected' Excel list of passwords it took me about 10 seconds, and that included the two sips of coffee.

Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Just.....

Just how many times to Microsoft's clients have to say...

"You had ONE job!"

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

Re: Zelenskyy sure seems to hold a lot of cards

Trump does not have what sane people call a sense of humour.

His idea of a joke is to denigrate or insult people. He has no compassion or empathy for anything except himself, money and power, in that order.

Introducing Windows on arm. And by arm, we mean wrist

Re: Most wanter Windows wrist watch

Depends on where they are made I guess!

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

Re: Hand

This! This is what I hate about Microsoft!

They 'upgrade' an already pretty shitty app and remove the way you can see if there are unread emails in a folder!

WTAF!

The only thing I can think, and that's nearly 40 years of putting up with Microsoft's shit, is that after the next, next 'upgrade' we will have a 'new' feature.

Re: Hand

I think you have just described Microsoft......

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

Re: Not surprising

I hear they had they had a 1:1 print out of their EULA on one floor just so people could marvel at the physical size of it.

There, FIFY!

I passed it many times on the way to the Apple Store.

It looked exactly the same but the Apple Store had customers.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Re: When was it ever otherwise?

And with no taste apparently!

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Excellent points!

Veteran Microsoft engineer shares some enterprise support tips

Well....

One has to wonder why Windows software needed such strong anti-virus software in the first place.

Microsoft has always said that 'other' OS's suffered from viruses too, but did anybody fall for that excuse?

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

"Microsoft's advice is to reboot your PC'

I've been hearing this for over 40 years...........

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: Bullshit...

I think the word they should use is 'prevented', not 'prohibited'.

Think about it.

Re: Is there no product liability at all?

Luckily we are still using some of those nasty EU laws, which gives English consumers 6 years of product coverage from 'wear and tear'. Still not sure why in Scotland it's 5 years, but then they have the Haggis population to regularly slaughter.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Re: Auto Delete

Yeah, did that on Macs too!

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Re: Hmm

It bought us the time to get the shadow factories set up and to re-arm. Chamberlain was not an idiot.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

WD has form

Apart from their blatant selling of HD's for NAS drives which were technically incapable of being re-silvered, WD has history as far as this sort of thing is concerned.

When Apple launched macOS 10.9 Mavericks back in 2013, a lot of my clients found that any WD drive attached to the Mac had just been wiped. At the time I strongly encouraged my clients to have backups so if the backup was a WD drive, that got wiped. if a second backup was also a WD drive that got wiped as soon as it was plugged in. Cue a lot of frantic emails and phone calls early that morning.

Apparently WD had been warned by Apple that there were problems with the software drivers, but WD ignored the advice.

Data was recoverable but like any drive that's been wiped you tend to get lots of folders with 10,000 photos in each starting with 00001.jpg for example. Luckily the modified dates were not wiped but it nearly put a couple of my designer clients out of business.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

It was the IT teachers sending out PowerPoint templates to the kids in US Letter format that got me, everything looked squished when you eventually got the fucker to print.

Re: Superceded years ago

I once saw a company create a catalogue of high-res photos (containing the photos) in Excel, then try and send the resulting 8GB package by email to 10 people around the world.

In 2005.

Re: Badly managed for years

I suspect that the ideal solution would be to have a conversion app that can import .pub files and export them to....ummm.....a cut down Publisher from Affinity?

Who in their right minds would want to be the support person manning the phones for that one?

World Wide Web Foundation closes so Tim Berners-Lee can spend more time with his protocol

He's baaaack!

Apple ropes off at least 4 GB of iPhone storage to house AI

Re: "about the size of an HD movie, for now"

LOTR

Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

Re: so true

Got a client who needed to share the text of her new (technical) book with 5 editors. Word does not allow the editors to choose their own colours for comments. They are allocated at random when the document is opened..

I mean, fuckit Microsoft, you had ONE job!

Boeing's Calamity Capsule returns to Earth without a crew

Re: uh oh

Plus it's only got 3 berths!

There's 7 crew up there now, so 4 would have to sit in the windy seats in a 'real' emergency.

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

Done it.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Reminds me of a claim by a sysadmin

What are these 'counters' you speak of?

Re: Prison

Hah! We drive on that side because most people are right-handed/brained and...

Could use their stronger right arm to put the brake on their horse-drawn wagon.

Could use their sword arm without having to reach across their body.

Can judge distance with their dominant eye, so better at passing something coming the other way.

Can change gear with their left hand and control the wheel/steering with their more controllable right, giving a noticeably lower accident rate than 'other' countries.

You're welcome.

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

Re: Digital signage has it's detractors...

Same here at Waterloo where the flippy-panel signs went the length of the concourse. It was a LOT less stressful waiting for the audible clue to look up from your paper to see if your platform had been announced.

The tension is palpable at Victoria as some of the platforms are a good distance away from the main concourse and I'm convinced there is going to be a major incident one day at the barriers.

All y'all love AI, right? Get ready for Gemini in Nest cameras, Google Assistant

Re: Wait, wait, wait...

The principles will last 4 years, just like 'Do No Evil' and the rest of the discontinued Google stuff that people relied on.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: Don’t people look after their devices?

Young spoilt brat of a seriously rich daddy handed me her 17" MacBook Pro.

Wet, sand inside and out and keyboard sharply dented in several places.

"I left it on the beach and a wave broke over it, then when I was trying to dry it out a friend walked across it in high heels.....how long will it take to fix?"

I cannot wait till lunchtime.....

Worn glasses sinc 10 as I was -6 in both eyes and couldn't see the blackboard. Obviously moved to contact lenses as soon as possible in the 70's.

Now, when I'm reading in bed I remove the contact lenses and don't use my glasses and everything within 30cm like fruit, skin, watch-faces etc, shows the most amazing detail that glasses and lenses take away.

Re: Dropping the phone while gardening

A certain company staffed almost entirely by 80 of the fair sex that I did the tech support for, had a visit from a team of their company counter-parts from another country including the second-in-command of the whole company.

This young lady could only be described as a fashion victim and a Queen Bee. Nearly everyone started copying her mannerisms and way of working, which included taking her office MacBook Air everywhere with her, and with the added frisson of using it as a clutch-bag to hold pens, keys and lippy between the keyboard and screen.

I'm sure everyone reading this is aware of how a nutcracker operates.

A week of her sailing round the office with her coterie resulted in eight broken screens and a very stern notice from THE BOSS that computers are precision instruments and should not be considered fashion accessories or indestructible or else!

For myself I favour the leather belt phone holder. I know exactly where my phone is at all times, can retrieve it and have it at my ear in less than 2 seconds, plus the phone is protected and can't fall out. Old fashioned yes, stylish no, but I don't really care about that. It gets the fucking job done even if I'm crawling around under desks. I obey my requirement.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: Why use Crowdstrike when you have SELinux?

Ah, the famous 'fully locked down Windows system'!

That's the one in the sealed underground room under the ocean floor, turned off and unplugged?

Thought so.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

I've just checked my Mac Pro (upgraded) and it's Early '2009' and running macOS 13 Ventura. It will probably outlast me!

Users rage as Microsoft announces retirement of Office 365 connectors within Teams

Re: A shower of shite

A young Steve Jobs famously said "They have absolutely no taste, and I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products,"

He also gave a lot of back-handed compliments to Microsoft and Gates. "Microsoft made a lot of applications for Macintosh and they were terrible," he said, before complimenting "but they kept at it and got better and eventually dominated the Macintosh application market."

Jobs' back-handed compliments didn't stop as he said that Microsoft are great opportunists but "I don't mean it in a bad way" he continued. "They are like Japanese and they just keep on coming," he said.

Jobs also said that he had no problem with Microsoft's success and that they "earned their success, for the most part," but what he had a problem was that Microsoft made "really third-rate products."

He didn't stop and continued lambasting Microsoft. "Their products have no spirit in them, their products are pedestrian." He said that what's said is that most customers also didn't have that spirit.

Jobs was then asked whether he was sad that Microsoft had "won" and Apple lost. He said, "what saddens me isn't that Microsoft had won but that their products lacked insight and creativity."

Microsoft Stores all close their doors in China

Microsoft Retail

I work in London and until a few months ago and for many years before that frequently used to pass the Microsoft Store on Oxford Circus (junction of Regents Street and Oxford Street, which must be one of the prime retail positions in London with a rent to match), about 200m from the Apple Store on Regents Street.

The Microsoft Store was an undisguised copy of the Apple Store, with almost the exact same wooden tables, lighting and layout. Funny thing was I very rarely saw anyone apart from bored looking staff in it, unlike the Apple Store that frequently had to restrict customers numbers and had a queue outside.

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Re: Airline revenge

Yup, a LOT easier than trying to do it in cafés.

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 update after boot loop blunder

Re: Don't blame MS

Yeah well, if you add up your time dealing with your computer over a few years you more than get your money back by buying Apple. They last longer and are more secure as OOB as well. Apple doesn't sell your data, unlike Microsoft.

And that's 3 recalls for Tesla Cybertruck in as many months

Re: It's not a Recall

I notice you don't state what you have liked to use the Valerie Singleton for.

America's best chance for nationwide privacy law could do more harm than good

Re: You get what you pay for...

Twas ever thus!

Microsoft admits to problems upgrading Windows 11 Pro to Enterprise

Solution

Better Recall it then!