Posts by bpfh

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: A first?

I was surprised at my first job where everyone was talking about maintaining POS hardware, and thought that was a bit rough for a S&P 500 company, until I found out it meant "point of sale"...

Re: A first?

Windows ME - Masochistic Edition. Problems easily fixed by an upgrade to Windows 2000....

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Re: So let me recap...

I'm more surprised why in the age of smartphones would someone *buy* smut when the internet exists. I mean, the WWW was only created for 4 things: smut media, cat media, warez and email - to help share the previous 3?

So let me recap...

You let your child read pr0n magazines, and from there he orders things from the pr0n mag that you let him read, and yet your permissive access to pr0n is our fault. How old is your child and should we be worried enough about your parenting choices to call someone?

Apple's iPhone 12 woes spread as Belgium, Germany, Netherlands weigh in

I Just read the press release

Over 100 telephones were tested for absorption rates, and the iPhone blew over the limits.

There are 2 limits: one for direct body contact (held in hand) of 4W/kg the other for proximity to body of 2W/kg. The iPhone was measured at 5.74W/kg for body contact. This is the application of EU law. If one country has found an infraction then this will get the other EU country certification bodies to take notice...

Testing explanation

The ANFR has a video that explains the absorption rate - they French part) and the testing lab (in German). YouTube has auto translate subtitles which are more miss than hit: https://youtu.be/v56fdiamXQw?si=0f5hixl3MRKTW0P8

Someone wants a recall.

I would not complain. I have a 12 and a 12 mini. Reimburse me or give me a 15. Or a 15 pro max for both.

Legal recalls also don't normally require proof of purchase either....

On the other hand if someone has found that the hardware does not meet the standard, I would expect this result to be very very well documented before the National Radio Frequency Agency starts making public declarations...

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Surely...

If Inland Revenue calls taxpayers "customers", a 999 caller must be the same?

From there it's only a stones throw from invoicing emergency services with a 5 grand ambulance ride like The Land Of The Free?

Shades of the 0118 999 skit from the IT crowd comes to mind... nicer ambulances, better looking drivers, and mated to an IBM Support inspired service team "Emergency Services good morning, My name is Kevin and I'm here to help you. What is the nature of your emergency, but before we get started can you please give me your credit card number?"

What 3 words and a number

Add a Luhn code to each W3W, like the last 2 numbers of your credit card?

It then becomes what three words and a 2 digit number....

Other question but I've not been arsed to check: do W3W actually represent an actual grid square that has been painstakingly mapped out or does it encode like gps points to avoid having a few hundred million records in their database?

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

So no more 400 meg installs?

Can they do the same for wifi drivers? I remember when an Intel driver was about 2 meg, then ballooned to 50 then 140...

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Re: Surely this is illegal in some way?

Example for the wiring: ever seen cars (Citroën Xsara for example) where the front electric window commands were in the centre console in the dashboard rather than in the doors? That's beancounters overriding ergonomics to save cash on 3 metres of wire per car.

Why did Fiat's have a spate of electrical issues, despite bomb proof engines? The wiring harnesses especially to the rear lights were cut down to the exact centimetre needed, and not one more - causing wires to snap or connectors to pull out as there was no margin allowed to account for chassis flexibility.

Finally, why did Opel have a spate of breaking driveshafts? Their new financial director ordered that suppliers had to find ways of reducing prices across the board by 20% - ensuring that lower quality hardware was supplied that had no built in strength margin any more...

Surely this is illegal in some way?

You can't (shouldn't) be able to sell a something that contains physical hardware that is locked out - especially knowing car manufacturing penny pinching which has been known to go down to saving centimètres of wiring in harnesses as 5 cents saving over 500 000 units is 25 000 euros/quid/dollars in revenue, so my thinking is that if it's in the car, you did, actually pay for it to be there - activated or not - and it's not something that costs money over time such as an internet connection or map updating.

Hardware angle? HP and IBM sold mainframes and minis that contained extra processors that could be unlocked on the fly or via a few DIP switches.... When the hardware was rented you didn't rent the hardware but the service the hardware supplied and the supplier could provide what they wanted and that's fine, but if that hardware was outright purchased, paying a field engineer 4 hours work to flip some switches behind a panel to activate pre-installed hardware and then read a book for the remaining 3.75 hours is somewhere between extortion and theft in my opinion!

Re: Old, really, old...

I would not say that given the current price of fuel....

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Crapita?

Nuff said.

Corneille said it best in Le Cid

"O rage! O despair! O racle my enemy!

Have I lived simply to know this infamy!"

Or something almost like that

ArcaOS 5.1 gives vintage OS/2 a UEFI facelift for the 21st century

Thank you!

OS/2 4 was Merlin. I was racking my brain for the last 20 minutes!

The presentation manager was built with icons designed by/licenced from Apple and made it a swanky looking desktop compared to previous iterations.

I did look at eComStation a few years ago, and although the multi desktop feature was good, I found it looking more like a discount linux than the OS/2 of yore, although until a few years ago before Credit Agricole upgraded their ATM's of some of their "out in the boonies banks, I had a pang of nostalgia when pulling out cash and seeing the OS/2 "travel alarm clock" icon appear when the computer running the ATM was "thinking"!

Re: Use case?

OS/2 Warp, installed on a pc with 4 meg RAM. I think I very vaguely remember - my OS2 certification is but a distant memory - that the included copy of Windows 3.1 was actually 32 bits, with code changes allowing the windows kernel itself to pre-emptively multitask (so even if an app in the windows "shell" locked up Windows, you could still switch back to the presentation manager and kill Windows on the fly and restart it, without affecting any other OS/2 app (or even DOS sessions).

There was also a sort of "virtualisation" function which allowed you to run "un supported" os'es (as long as they ran on the underlying processor), and I did have a screenshot (possibly now on an old 1.44 diskette and I dont have a drive for those anymore) where OS/2 PM was running, with windowed Windows 3.1 (itself running an MS-DOS command prompt), IBM DOS 7, and 2 launched windowed machine images, one with MS-DOS 1.2 and the other with Linux Slackware.

That did after 20 seconds of successfully launching linux in the PM end up with a trap D, but possibly more to do with running out of ressources on a 4 meg 486 Aptiva!

Luxury!

My first PC was a DEC Rainbow, liberated (with their permission) from the skip of a aviation related civil service, running DOS 2.1 and CP/M, with a 20mb hard drive, same cake box format that could get you arrested in London today as a deadly weapon. Dont drop it, it may go through the floor....

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: Abiword and rant

Notepad++.

That is all.

Re: Abiword and rant

Ah, VB6. There's your problem. Why do you want to use such a simple way of developing a windows UI app?

And I still have not found a decent replacement for VB6 although it still lives on - for now - in Office (even on Mac) as VBA.

Have a beer and welcome to the dinosaur club!

If they could kill Paint...

And replace with paint.net that would be great!

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Re: Alternative body parts

Middle one

Bad software destroyed my doctor's memory

I'm a previous job many moons ago...

Agile was bandied about but it was more waterfall development...

We had a functional project manager team who designed a PowerPoint of the general look and feel of the pages we needed to build. They would come to talk to the technical project managers - and sit with them as they explained their needs and goals, the TPM would explain what was feasible and what was not - or what would be over budget or over time. Once the FPM had an executable design, it went into development within the TPM's team and went to preproduction.

The FPM would then test and check, then return to sit with the TPM and snag the design, if needed get the devs to come and change the design sometimes on the fly, the push to preprod. The FPM went and presented the changes to the stakeholders, got a sign off or another sit at the TPM's desk for adjustments. The FPM's guaranteed the UI/UX/expected functionality with the client, and made the bridge with the technical teams that made the magic happen behind the scenes. Everyone talked, everyone knew what was expected and what was feasible, problems were overcome in real time, clarifications could be asked in real time and projects ended up delivered globally on time and under budget. Having a team that knows ui and ux and able to guide the teams that actually delivered the behind the scenes technology, nobody evolved in a vacuum.

Today I see too many designs that have a technical target to reach, but the ui/ux is forgotten, ending up with a lot of client complaints because what was fast to design is not alway usable or logical... and all it took were 2 empowered project managers out of a team of 30 engineers to make magic happen.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Re: I've been locked out ...

OP noted that they were in the Fire Brigade's "naughty" list, probably for having blocked/locked fire escapes amongst others. Or you find that the only opening fire escapes are in a corridor that you actually thought was a storeroom as it's filled with boxes floor to ceiling...

Re: Almost got locked in

This - and one day you need a favour or a blind eye turned, your friends in security will be more than happy to join you after for a beer as payout.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Re: To add to this...

This. But your printer costs double to triple that of a non ink-tank printer with similar capacity, but if you print a lot this is the way. In my calculations my wife's ink tank Epson is costing less per page than my Samsung (now HP....) multi function B&W laser printer using alternative cartridges from Amazon.

Re: I ditched HP printers

I have 2 netgear plug-in wifi extenders that also require an online account to set up. I have no clue why.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Press the intercom

> FOR 10 SECONDS A SCREACHING NOISE BLARES FOLLOWED BY SILENCE. AN OMINOUS HISSING SOUND STARTS GETTING LOUDER AND LOUDER AS HALON FROM A LONG FORGOTTEN TANK FILLS THE ROOM...

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

So what does the other half of the desktop OS Linux market use?

Microsoft, OpenAI sued for $3B after allegedly trampling privacy with ChatGPT

Re: know-it-alls that collate well but add nothing new and deplete resources

ChatGPT actually gives you the answer rather than telling you to "RTFM N00B" or "Go Google it" despite the first 10 links pointing back to that same article....

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Well...

Seems they could a-ford wasting time on general motor management applications. Christ(ler) on a bicycle...

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

Re: Not this again

I would go as far to say breaking the sound barrier and surviving to tell the tale...

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

37 charges...

Trump that!

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: Makes sense...

Knowing Simon, Director's Chipolatas would be very litteral. And once they found the key, it's off for a joyride in his car, feeding the stray dogs before they bien the car and go off for a pint

BSE is an STD?

Where is the Paris icon when you need it?

Makes sense...

Until someone finds the keys to the director's Mercedes in their Chipolatas...

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Can find them on Amazon ...

262 euros for a pi4 / 4gb / basic case, fan and heat sinks. What I would expect to pay 80 for if they got their supply chain in order...

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Roko's Basilik

It's starting...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Nothing sticks to idiots

Napalm does...

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

Re: I suspect

I suspect that the bottom of the rocket was damaged by that flying concrete, especially given the gas/ fuel streams that seemed to he coming from the lower edge of the first stage, but above the engine exhaust, and you can see a lot of debris flying up within seconds of ignition.

Remember that it only took one dropped socket to detonate a Minuteman rocket - different technology of course here, but having tons of concrete blasted randomly up and out is not going to do precision machinery any good!

Also I wonder if this was also behind any of the other launch failures ?

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Ahh, the Orifice Manager

I had one like that. Was actually a lovely person once you knew the rules, brought her coffee and bagels, and helped her stick it to the coloured pencil department who kept ordering expensive pens only to leave them in every meeting room, or try to snaffle all the office supplies in September when the kids went back to school and some people declared open-day on the supply room where some people in the past had wandered off with 2 boxes of 2500 sheets of paper, all the note books and 200 quids worth of the aforementioned expensive pens...

Not a person to cross or your expenses would get lost for 2 months , which then earned people an ass reaming from the boss to the employee in question for not submitting the sheet before end of month...

Royal Mail wins worst April Fools' joke 2023

Was the poster

Written in Courier?

Microsoft Defender shoots down legit URLs as malicious

And here we go again.

Working for a mailing ESP, we have this recurring issue every 3 months or so where some links are classed malicious when accessed via one domain alias but clean for another.

Microsoft's Postmaster says it's not their responsibility as it's not deliverability but security.

Microsoft's security team says that link scanning is not their purview.

Microsoft enterprise support says they can't help because it's a problem with a recipient on a Microsoft product and not the sender.

Microsoft enterprise support tells the recipient that the sender needs to contact them.

Microsoft public support says that "hum this shouldn't happen, but we can't help you".

Reaching out to Microsoft malware and security contacts who are co-members of M3AWG never answer...

So, globally if you have a link that gets blacklisted, you are screwed and hope that MS realises their mistake after a week or three.

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

Re: Openings in forestry

Hum. I wonder if you could get a well drilling machine cheap... For forestry irrigation needs of course.

Re: Openings in forestry

Maybe but it will be luggage size and shape once it comes out of the car boot...

Openings in forestry...

In the PFY's PFC certified forest in Scotland? Openings about half a metre wide, 2 long and 2 deep?

Wannabe space 'superpower' UK tosses £1.6M at eight research projects

Off topic but...

Back in I think 1986 or 87 as a youngun, I remember looking at an estate agent near Nutmeg Wharf in London, and marvelling at the new dock lands penthouses at 800 000 to just a little over a million and thinking who on earth can afford that astronomical price?

Fast forward to Austin Powers and Dr. Evil asking for one meeeelion dollars and everyone burst out laughing.

Fast forward to today. 1.6 million, and think, yeah that will cover an office, office management and the payroll of 5 engineers for one year if we're careful...

Cancer patient sues hospital after ransomware gang leaks her nude medical photos

Unfortunately ...

Although drawing the board over the coals and under the keel would be good "pour l'exemple"...

It's official: BlackLotus malware can bypass Secure Boot on Windows machines

Blast from the past

I remember in the early 90's rebooting one PC in the high school computer room would randomly display "your computer is now stoned". I initially thought it to be a bit strange, before I learned about viruses, especially boot sector ones. So... they are back again!

Ukraine invasion blew up Russian cybercrime alliances

Re: If Russia gives legal immunity to cybercriminals

The internet was designed for redundant connectivity if one node gets nuked, another node can take over down a different path... The above comments are more along the lines of voluntarily not accepting traffic - and I would not be surprised to see if Russia starts popping off tactical nukes that western ISP's and carriers will be asked (ordered) to suspend any peering with Russian networks or routing of Russian traffic...