Posts by bpfh

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: 'likely a reference to XKCD'

First thing that came to mind was Dilbert 9999999... : https://www.random.org/analysis/dilbert.jpg

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: cue the wailing

Every new version's second edition or service pack you mean?

Re: cue the wailing

Not so much higher spec but drivers and hardware had native Vista drivers and the other shoehorned XP drivers that would work as long as you didn't look at it funny.

I bought a "Vista capable" laptop that ran like a sloth with the flu on Vista but was quite snappy downgraded back to XP.

My stepson on the other hand built his desktop using hardware that was specifically stamped "vista ready", and had zero issues with it for years.

BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit

Re: can I call you Chris?

Let's eat Chris!

Re: Loose

Wait until the FM200 alarm go off. That on its own should guarantee movement. Add laxatives and a stuck door, his MBTF should be about what? 90 to 120 seconds - when ever the fire suppressant starts to release ...

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Re: This feels like an own goal...

Did the same. 40 euros every 18 months to get all the colours - and currently this reload will only need to do the black one.

You may at some point need to look at how to change the ink cleaning sponge, which is a bit involved, but otherwise my wife has printed thousands of invoices, client reports and product specs, just need to ensure you print a few full colour pages per month to avoid head clogging.

Re: never again

I got a Samsung printer for this reason. Cheap toner, rugged (mono printer scanner copier). Samsung is a reputable brand aren't they? They are not going to stop a well known brand are they?

Then they sold their printer branch to HP :(

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Re: Stalking and financial abuse

Turn on the YouTube app on your phone and say "I wonder why I don't see reaction videos".

They should start appearing in 24 hours.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: Look Out!

Lotus notes was a group collaboration tool that had an email extension. Outlook was an email tool that had group collaboration extension.

Unfortunately the groupware extensions for outlook were clunky outside of public folders and the email extension for notes was clunky, but that was its main "killer app" use, forgetting the background power it used to have.

I liked notes - easy way to get server managed CRUD database apps to end users with local offline replication.

Email sucked though as it was not HTML compatible and it's html to rich text conversion consistently broke the layout.

Notes was the big tool box IBM sold you when you only needed a Philips screwdriver.

Outlook was the Philips screwdriver that you never knew had 10 bits and 5 sockets hidden in the handle.

Bit the bullet on Mac

Missing notes, which were great for quick references, but over the year, Outlook has been slowly going back to Outlook Express (or Windows mail for those who are too young to remember it).

Yes, I'm old and I still think Outlook 2000 was peak outlook...

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: PFY's responsibilities

Piece of tape over the 2 inner pins of a USB cable. All lights turn on, no data.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Re: What a strange position to defend.

Roger that

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Re: CRUD (almost) to the masses

There may be reasons for differences, but Notes HTML email compatibility was left standing in the dust. Standards moved on, Notes did not, and this is the comparison I meant: I've seen side by side comparisons of emails where hafl the message went missing, for.... no good reason, the Notes rendering engine just coughed and died, and forgot to render the page. Or the HTML message got borked and decided to have a margin down the left side of the message to the middle, so you could only see 50% of every line... or it would misplace an image logo in a signature, and blow that in the dead center of the page, directly over your content.

If I remember correctly, Notes didnt natively render HTML, but coerced HTML into RTF, and, like Outlook up to 2016, carried on using the rendering engine of the previous century.

Also, IBM licencing fees were insane compared to anything else, and getting a location document set up for POP & IMAP was far from as easy as getting Outlook set up to use an Exchange-free email setup.

So, end result; As much as the corporate overlords may have had their reasons, when the sales team cannot read their client's emails, and when the director cannot read his mistresses missives, the company gets a swift overhaul.

Which in the end is a shame, because companies judged Notes for email, when email was only a tiny part of what the Notes/Domino environment was capable of doing.

CRUD (almost) to the masses

The notes db platform allowed you local or server hosted databases, where you could see the underlying records or make a nice gui that when done correctly should also work over the web. It was not as user friendly as MS Access but didn't have the size limitations.

I used to say Notes was a application generator including email app, and Outlook was an email app with an application generator (VBA), but Notes dropped the ball with so many compatibility issues, with email being the killer app of the 90's to 00´s, not being able to read html email and having attachments go missing was probably the final nail in the coffin when every copy of windows came with outlook express and people could compare how "bad" their company software was compared to what they could have at home...

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Re: Looks at LOHAN beer mug in cupboard

I know. Does anyone know what happened to LOHAN after the Spaceport America debacle?

Looks at LOHAN beer mug in cupboard

Will she ever get a shot at space?

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Obligatory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

And netflix

Their recent stock crash due to losing a few hundred thousand subscribers was equal to the full monthly subscription cost of those lost users for I believe 91 years.

Investment has gone from investment to betting.

Inb4 NFT!

Re: Horses *did* protest

You are under the misguided idea that a company has any responsibility to its employees.

Henry Ford wanted to increase his worker's salaries over the shareholder's dividends to ensure that his employees could buy their own Model T, increasing sales, was taken to court and lost: A company has a responsability to its shareholders. Employees are just an annoying cost that impacts that profit...

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

"Behold as I smite thee with the mighty sword Cluebringer !"

Infosys co-founder calls for youth to work 70-hour weeks

Took fraud crimes out of the figures

So no investigating the PM, his family, the cabinet and their families?

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

Re: Coca-Cola Y3000

I saw this on sale in Holland - it's a sort of sweeter Coke Zero blended with coke lemon and coke vanilla.

I suspect no AI was involved and they just mixed all their Coke flavours together and sent it...

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

Re: Uhm, what?

My thoughts exactly!

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Don't worry

After 6 to 12 months the battery health settings will throttle the cpu, bringing temperatures back to normal levels.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Ahhh, finally 46 gbit bandwidth

And plugged into a fibre connection that gets 150 meg on a good day.

Pot calls the kettle hack as China claims Uncle Sam did digital sneak peek first

Re: Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law @A.Coward

First of all, given some of Huawei's code, it's not going to be hard.

As for other countries doing it? Well, yeah, the NSA has been upgrading Cisco stuff for a while when required: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/amp/

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...