Posts by Anonymous IV

Is it Patch Blues-day for Outlook? Microsoft's email client breaks worldwide, leaves everyone stumped

Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 worked last night, and still works fine this morning.

What can have gone wrong?

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

Re: Partial blackout story (not UPS, though)

> The power flicks** took out 1 phase blew the fuse on the roadside utility pole.

Aha! A phase worse than death...

PC printer problems and enraged execs: When the answer to 'Hand over that floppy disk' is 'No'

Re: We had the inverse issue

> She was also in charge of the office furniture

This reminds me of an obnoxious and officious Buildings Manager of a multi-storey office building in R*dh*ll in the last century. The IT Staff on site awarded him the honorary title of Head of Carpets, to recognise his true competencies...

No Wiggle room: Two weeks after angry bike shop customers report mystery orders on their accounts, firm confirms payment cards delinked

Re: At Chris G, re: Lycranthropist.

> A Porsche roadbike?

Yes, they made them for a short period (2010 or earlier?) "for the man who has everything". It would have been a man, too.

I suspect that it was a rebadged (and repriced!) version of a bike from a high-end manufacturer, like Bike Friday or Riese & Müller.

I think they soon realised that riding a Porsche bike didn't have the same cachet and took considerably more effort than sitting in a Porsche car. And the bikes rapidly got stolen by nefarious individuals, however good a lock you put on them...

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

Fawkes?

"He's just zis guy, you know..."

(with apols to Mr Z Beeblebrox)

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Re: Yeah right

> You call that satire now, but you just wait and see what happens if the orange oaf gets to see it

Is it known what he thinks of the Sarah Cooper lip-sync videos which use what he has said to [even more] comedic effect?

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Shafted!

Nothing like something groan-inducing on an otherwise boring Friday?

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Re: Cables with labels on

> Code should always be self-documenting

Except, presumably, in write-only languages like APL?

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: Nothing to Heil nothing to Fear.

Classic linked headline just seen on Google News:

Coronavirus simulation shows a single cough can spread germans across two supermarket aisles

And there was me thinking that the only problem was with sun loungers and beach towels!

Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network

Re: ah yes there were times at work they went round and audited the machines

Your story about ZIPping some files twice reminds me that there was a theory going the rounds at the time probably on FIDOnet, that you could reduce the size of any file to the absolute minimum amount possible - 1 byte (or maybe even 1 bit!) - by recursively ZIPping the files, then its ZIP, then the ZIP of the ZIP, then...

It didn't take much intellectual effort to determine that this theory was flawed, but its proponents were adamant that it would work!

Absolutely everyone loves video conferencing these days. Some perhaps a bit too much

Re: Paris...

> He kept asking on the phone if I could take him a copy of Whateefee. It took ages to figure he meant What HiFi.

Thank heaven the chap didn't want a copy of McAfee...

Marriott Hotels hacked AGAIN: Two compromised employee logins abused to siphon off 5.2m guests' personal info

Expectation

The statement that 'an "unexpected amount" of guests' data was accessed' leads to the question, "just how much data were they expecting to be accessed"?

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, health secretary Matt Hancock both test positive for COVID-19 coronavirus

The wisdom of (a very small) crowd

On my officially-mandated exercise session, I was walking along the canal towpath when I passed two dubious-looking individuals sitting on one of the benches. This is what I overheard:

First yokel: "Do you know why that Boris Johnson has caught Covid-19? "

Second yokel: "No, why? "

First yokel: "It's because he shut down all the pubs. It's karma! "

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Re: The cleaner did it.

"Bob's" story is so reminiscent of...

With torch shining bright he strode on in the night

'Til he came to the room with the safe.

"Hello son, I hope you're having fun."

"You've got it wrong, sir, I'm only the cleaner."

With that he fired, the other saying as he died,

"you've done me wrong." It's the same old song forever.

Sophos was gearing up for a private life – then someone remembered the bike scheme

> Any suggestions on a replacement AV provider?

How about <gasp!> Microsoft? Their Windows Defender has improved greatly since the early days, and it's built-in to Windows 10.

The self-disconnecting switch: Ghost in the machine or just a desire to save some cash?

Re: How much?

> Exactly how much cost savings could you achieve by renting half a rack instead of a whole rack from a 3rd-party datacentre?

Enough to satisfy a bean-counter, I would imagine.

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

Re: Questions II?

> What is "Bing"?

Bing used to be a manufacturer of a fizzy drink available in East Kent (at least) in the latter half of the last century, notable for the swing metal, ceramic and rubber stopper used to close the bottle, if not for its taste.

What a pity that they (probably) didn't trade-mark the name, which would have prevented MS from using it for a search engine...

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

Re: Adobe = shit.

> For all values of shit.

Surely, "for all values of Adobe"?

(This assumes that Adobe has any values, of course...)

> Operating systems don't just rot or break by themselves ffs.

You must surely be familiar with the concept of bit fade?

Like its Windows-noob-stabilisers OS, Zorin's cloudy Grid tool is Linux desktop management for dummies

Re: Latin is still killing me

So the font should be called something like "Sine Oblito", but that would spoil the feeble joke.

I would propose Chronic Sans...

Beware the Friday afternoon 'Could you just..?' from the muppet who wants to come between you and your beer

"Rogue registry entry"

I commend someone who could find a rogue registry entry which would cause the cursor to move randomly around the screen.

Many of the registry entries are rogue; none is likely to be implicated in a random screen movement event...

Ministry of Justice bod jailed for stealing £1.7m with fake IT consulting contract

The wisdom of lawyers...

"This was a sophisticated fraud … and would have resulted in further loss to the taxpayer if it had not been discovered."

You don't say!

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

Re: blister packs

We had occasion to buy a whole bunch of Duracell CR2032 CMOS batteries for some second-hand PCs we'd bought.

* taking off the PC system unit case, removing the old CR2032 battery - 10 seconds

* cutting round the 'child-proof' blister pack (two layers of plastic) - about a minute, and a LOT of effort

* inserting the new CR2032 battery and replacing the case - 10 seconds

The plastic shroud is so tough and so close to the battery that you stand a good chance of actually cutting the battery. In any event, after a few of these replacements you're left with very sore fingers.

Perhaps the firm should be renamed "DuraPackaging"?

We've found it... the last shred of human decency in an IT director – all for a poxy Unix engineer

Re: Indeed

> Too often these days a boss takes the paycheck and skirts off when the fallout arrives.

Did you really mean to say that? If yes, one presumes that the boss was done for sexual harassment quite rapidly...! :-)

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Do...While

Is there any language other than Algol W which employs the useful construct, a trivial example of which is;

x:= (IF y=z THEN 3 ELSE 7)

? (I hope I've remembered this properly!)

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Re: Interesting problem

> Perhaps it's Hilbert's Hotel and a coach containing an infinite number of new guests was being checked in by another clerk.

No doubt at a Poisson rate of arrivals!

Remember the big IBM 360 mainframe rescue job? For now, Brexit has ballsed it up – big iron restorers

Re: Disposal cost

> I only have vague memories of working on these types of machines from my time at Durham University, using both an System 360/65 and a System 370/168

In the early 1970s Durham University used to make use of Newcastle University's IBM 360/67 which ran Michigan terminal System (MTS) time sharing. The link between Newcastle University and Durham University was described as costing "a diplomat's ransom"! But presumably you are referring to a slightly later era?

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

The vagaries of CEOs

For no good or obvious reason, a team which for some years been known as "Organisation and Methods" was renamed by our somewhat dubious CEO as "Systems and Methods".

The members of the team took great delight in answering the phone with "S & M - can I help you?"

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

"The mouse that never worked in the afternoon"

A very similar account to this story was posted in November 2016.

I won't repeat my tale of the Amstrad PCW8512 diskette drives, similarly affected by direct sunlight...

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

Old COBOL operation-sequence joke

Dredged from the depths of my memory, so may be incorrect:

DIVIDE 8 INTO CAKE GIVING SLICES.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: Barclaycard, c 1997

> > Barclaycard had just laid off everyone in the IT department...

> > Someone had, at some point in time, left a floppy in the drive

> I suggest that these two statements are related.

You forget Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Police ICT Company kills £500m procurement, no longer wants one box shifter to rule them all

"The tender strategists"

I like that concept! Clearly not the usual hard-nosed bunch...

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

Re: Sick companies self identify

Quite some time ago there was a situation where a network group, part of <Huge Bank PLC>, based loosely in the southern half of the UK, were completely unaware of the existence of a second network group doing identical work, but loosely in the northern half of the UK.

(If you had worked in IT for <Huge Bank PLC> this information would have come as no surprise...)

Mods I have known, Mods I have loved, Mods I have hated: Motorola's failed experiment is now a savvy techie's dream

Mods I have known...

When I read the headline I thought, "Oh goody! Andrew is going to do an article about the inimitable and irreplaceable (and irreplaced) Sarah Bee, former Moderatrix of this parish, and greatly missed." But sadly no, and even more sadly he, too, is going.

Royal Baby guff can never compete with these exponents of the keyboard.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

Re: 3 football fields?

A football field is about 0.01 whales, but I can never remember the conversion factor between whales and Wales.

The important factor is that "everybody sings in whales"!

Blundering London council emails unredacted version of notorious Gangs Matrix to 44 people. Data ends up on Snapchat

Grossly negligent

If Newham Council were grossly negligent, surely they should have been fined £144k not £145k?

(Asking for a gang member.)

(Oops...)

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Compulsory ending to all research papers

"They suggested further study might be warranted".

Put down the cat, coffee, beer pint, martini, whatever you're holding, and make sure you've updated Chrome (unless you enjoy being hacked)

Chrome updated itself automatically

If your PCs/laptops were powered on any time over the last three days (from 5 March onwards) it's highly likely that Chrome has already updated itself.

If you need to check a bunch of them, then use

dir "\\<pcname>\C$\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application" /ad

on each PC, and look for the folder named 72.0.3626.121

Or perform the equivalent in PowerShell!

UK Ministry of Justice: Surprise! We tested out biometric tech in prisons and 'visitors' with drugs up their bums ran away

Re: "campaign group Big Brother Watch"

It's another one of those opaquely-funded groups which try to change government policy at 55 Tufton Street.

That seems a very limited ambition. Do they intend to extend the scope of government policy changing to the rest of Tufton Street? The whole of the London Borough of Westminster? London itself? Further? I think we should be told...

ReactOS 0.4.11 makes great strides towards running Windows apps without the Windows

I wonder how long will it be...

... before we can say: "20nn is the Year of ReactOS on the Desktop"?

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Re: Hardware option

> EMO mushroom buttons

You had EMOs all that time ago? I thought they were called Goths...

From Red Planet to deep into the red: Suicidal extrovert magnet Mars One finally implodes

Re: Wish I'd Thought Of That

"plausible enough for the gullible"

Gullible's Travels, perhaps?

LibreOffice 6.2 is here: Running up a Tab at the NotebookBar? You can turn it all off if you want

Re: Font problems

Look up "Microsoft Truetype core fonts for the Web" (or variants thereof), and download them.

This will give you Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana and Webdings.

Bask in Microsoft's 2002 fontal generosity!

[You knew you wanted Comic Sans...]

Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary

"hostage-grade cable ties"

Worthy of a computing Oscar!

NHS England digital boss in hot water over 'puff piece' written about her future employer

Re: There is no such verb as "to pen"

Indeed there is, as Alister says.

It is unlikely that the centuries-old habit of forming verbs from nouns will cease in the foreseeable future.

Salesforce has named a chief ethics officer and yes, the job description is appropriately woolly

Have Salesforce management been watching W1A?

... especially the aptly-titled BBC Head of Values...

Lenovo superdishes not-so-superdosh for Superfish superloss: $40 waiting for you if you bought adware laptop

"Did you buy a Lenovo laptop with Superfish software on it?"

"Then you may be eligible for a compensation payout. Contact one of our trained experts at Former-PPI-Scammers today!"

How long before we see these?

Bright spark dev irons out light interference

Re: Spark plugs on old Vauxhalls

> Amateur radio 160 metre transmitters were low powered

Is Top Band still used?

DBA drifts into legend after inventive server convo leaves colleagues fearing for their lives

Re: Why? Just why?

> Are you literally claiming no one in the military has ever played a prank on a cow-orker?

Orking a cow sounds like an offence under the Welfare of Animals Act 2006.

Military persons should be more careful...

Re: But can I get F1 on my BT account

> I remember as a puny undergrad having to use the hideous terminals Programming Simula/67 and Fortran

They were perfectly decent terminals - for the time. I'm surprised that you didn't program in Algol W and 360 Assembler rather than Fortran and Simula. But I suppose things were made easy for the undergrads of that time... <evil grin!>