* Posts by wolfetone

4135 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2011

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

wolfetone Silver badge

"Because god forbid anyone would want to verbally place their order with another human in 2024."

I don't go to McDonalds very much now, but every one I've been to in the last 6 months is laid out in such a way where there is no one to speak to in order to place an order. They all want you to use those crappy stand up massive tablet screens. There is a counter but no one is ever at it (or looks to be at it) unless they're there shouting out the order number for collection.

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

"Linux will never be seen as a replacement."

Of all the reasons why Linux isn't considered a replacement, this is right down the bottom of the list. The way you install an application on the Mac is a piece of piss even compared to Windows itself. Yet both the Mac and Linux don't have the marketshare of Windows at a desktop/laptop level.

The reason Linux isn't "seen as a replacement" is down to legacy applications and long standing stubbornness of the only application in the world that can do a job must be a Windows application. Look at the recent article regarding Outlook and how many people are so entrenched in Outlook's way of doing things they have no idea how well other non-Microsoft applications work with Exchange/O365 for email.

It isn't a case of Linux being a replacement for Windows any more, in my opinion. People who know there is a different, better way of doing things have long since left Windows. Whether they've gone to Linux or Mac is irrelevant really. People who can't see an alternative to Windows will never see the alternative because of a myriad of different reasons, and that will be down to old habits and a fear (or even refusal) to modify their way of working to try something new.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Why break things with gratuitous change ?

Some little dickhead at Microsoft has dreamed this up to keep themselves in a job. That's all this does.

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

wolfetone Silver badge

Microsoft's planned phase-out of the classic Outlook for Windows. 2029

I have 5 years to retire before I have to deal with this.

If that's not motivation to retire or move in to something else I don't know what is.

AI models show racial bias based on written dialect, researchers find

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Bias that matches society?

"The fix isn't to change the LLMs, but to fix the deep seated bias in the US society."

It's cute you think the issue rests in just US society.

Only today, on the Sky Snooze Twitter feeds, there are two stories. Headline one: "More than £117m taxpayer's money to be spent on protecting UK Muslims".

The next story, right after that one, has the headline: "Rishi Sunak pledges extra £54m for security of Jewish communities amid record levels of antisemitism".

The whole of the west have a problem, regardless of whether the language spoken is English French or German. We're kidding ourselves if we think the problem is located to just one area.

Plummer talks to us about spending Microsoft's money on a red Corvette

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: I doubt he would get paid today

From a few of his videos I get the impression that he got employed by Microsoft on the back of personal work.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

wolfetone Silver badge

I'm guessing he wasn't fond of waking up at 5am on a December morning to go and pour concrete.

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

wolfetone Silver badge

Dear Michael Cahoon

How are you fixed for a working holiday to Birmingham, UK? I'll even collect you from the airport.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

wolfetone Silver badge
Pint

The newly unemployed AT&T tech got a new job at Meta I see.

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

wolfetone Silver badge

It can definitely bring life to an old laptop. But from my own testing the small footprint doesn't remain small for long depending what you want to do.

My own testing involved setting up a server to run and execute PHP scripts which would read/write data to a remote database. The small footprint of the OS didn't remain that way, not so much the fault of the OS but it's the associated packages the software you want to run requires. It's incredible that you can have a working OS run at idle at such low requirements but it just highlights how heavy and bloated software has become.

It's been 6 months since I tried it for my own use case, and I think what let it down was a piece of automation I wanted to happen that I could get working on a standard Linux device but not so on TCL. It's not put me off using it, but you do have to consider what you'll be using on it and whether the software itself can work within the confines of the resources provided.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Depends on your definition of growler I guess.

Only if you definitely have a girlfriend but no one would ever know who she is because she goes to a different school.

Uncle Sam tells nosy nations to keep their hands off Americans' personal data

wolfetone Silver badge

I thought I lost a month of my life reading this. But no, a quick check of my calendar tells me it's not 1st April today.

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

wolfetone Silver badge

Please accept my apologies for that, I wasn't aware of it.

wolfetone Silver badge

Whyyyyy, whyyyyyyy whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Why?

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Being polite is great

"...added the "asshole boss" premium to your rates."

I always thought it was called the "Wanker Tax".

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Being polite is great

" I would have quickly said "Sorry, I'm not available""

I'd have done it a little differently. I'd have given them a figure for a day rate and swung the lead with it.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

wolfetone Silver badge
Trollface

Re: FUCK the king twat

Think you've got them pegged...

wolfetone Silver badge
Holmes

Re: FUCK the king twat

Diana? Is that you?

wolfetone Silver badge
Coat

Red Dwarf Time

Are you sure Sir? It does mean changing the bulb icon.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

wolfetone Silver badge

"Philip Macpherson, a recently appointed Oracle program lead for the Council, said: "We are looking at doing some options analysis to genuinely weigh up the pros and cons around that to sort of underpin the case for reimplementation [of Oracle] and spec out the outcomes the council's after.""

Dear inmate, how would you like to run the asylum? Here, take the keys and here's the bank book.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

"I so wish users would stop confusing email with instand messaging."

Every day I wish for the sweet release of death to come and cover me whenever I have to deal with some dickhead user who can't understand why the person next to them hasn't had the email they sent 2 minutes ago.

Every. Fucking. Day. Except Saturday and Sunday because thats the only point in the week where I don't deal with them.

wolfetone Silver badge
Coat

"Of course the real lesson should have been learned by Cuban authorities – they're the ones in the wrong in this story."

Close, but no cigar.

Cutting kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social

wolfetone Silver badge

The dark web is one thing. But what about what a child sees at 6pm on the news? Across all spectrums of what we're given really.

It's easier to blame what you don't understand than what you can see.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

wolfetone Silver badge
Thumb Up

Jazz Cabbage

I've heard it called a lot of things, but never this. Now this is my favourite.

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

wolfetone Silver badge

Sooner or later, HP will wake up and realise how much they could save by switching their standard CEO to a CEO subscription. Only pay for the CEO you need to use, and when they get worn out at a predetermined date set by the CEO manufacturer, then they'll get a new one sent to them in the post.

I'm astounded as to why HP haven't thought about doing this given this model works "so well" for their printer division.

Infosys enjoyed a boom in UK government invoices in 2023

wolfetone Silver badge

To paraphrase In Bruges

"Linked to the prime minister's wife, the Indian firm achieves contract wins in open and fair process"

"Somehow I believe, Ken, that the balance shall tip in the favour of culture Infosys, like a big fat f***ing fat girl on a see-saw opposite... a dwarf."

50 years ago, the all-rookie, final Skylab crew returned to Earth

wolfetone Silver badge
Pint

"But what was it like? What was it like to live up there?"

For 99% of people on Earth, that's the only thing we're really interested in.

Fortinet's week to forget: Critical vulns, disclosure screw-ups, and that toothbrush DDoS attack claim

wolfetone Silver badge

"If a 24-hour wait is considered unprofessional, more than three days is a slap in the face."

Apple: **still waiting for an announcement of holding their beers**

Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Oops, we stole it

What's worse is that Toby jug Sunak actively declined to go after the fraud, instead just decided to wipe it clear.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: This sounds familiar...

Who the hell is buying items from Wish and AliExpress and expecting it to be a quality item?

Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: A brilliant testament to analysis

"Somebody devised the whole Bitlocker scheme, failed to encrypt comms between CPU and TPM and thought "this is Good EnoughTM"."

Probably did it and thought "hehe, no one in history has ever been as clever as me".

Remember kids, no matter how smart you think you are there will always be someone cleverer than you out there.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

I read somewhere that it's an FAA ruling and not constrained to the capacity of the device.

I think in Europe they're 25 hours, and the European aviation people ask for the full 25 hours to be kept.

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

Think a few days ago someone at Spirit AeroSystems flagged poorly riveted holes on a few planes currently in assembly. So it's interesting to read this interim report knowing this has been raised recently. Almost as if they knew it would be something that would be coming out.

What's more concerning for me is that the CVR wasn't saved by the pilots. At one end of the scale it screams poor pilot training. At the other, it feels they may have had to hide something (or felt they had to).

I would be interested to read why the CVR wasn't retained like it should've been.

Whether to move off Oracle is the $100M+ question for Europe's largest public body

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: But guys, be reasonable

Given the financial problems I think BCC could do with Jim Bowen taking a full commercial break to count out £180 in twenties.

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: But guys, be reasonable

There is an irony that land locked Birmingham is funding a mega yacht.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Unsurprising....

War is a failure of diplomacy.

The older I get the more I go back to what Harry Patch (last surviving British veteran of WW1) said. And I quote:

"I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder."

What does he know? Other than being in the trenches for the one of the worst acts humanity has ever inflicted on itself.

wolfetone Silver badge

Data is the key thing for AI, not the algorithm. If you provide shit or skewed data, then the algorithm is going to base it's finding on that data. Quite often, if the data you've given it is skewed or wrong then, amazingly, the outcome will be in favour of the bias of the data given.

40 years ago, an astronaut first took flight from the Space Shuttle

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Fake!

"This picture is obviously staged and was taken against a green screen"

Pfft, you believe in green screens?

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

wolfetone Silver badge
Coat

First they come to charge us for IPv4 addresses.

Then they come to charge us for the air that we breathe.

Finally, they come to charge us ground rent for where we're buried in/scattered on.

The Amazon Business Model. Coming soon.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

wolfetone Silver badge

Was the software for the simulator fluent in Jive?

Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope

wolfetone Silver badge

Return to Office was never about boosting company profits.

Return to Office was always about the justification of the role of middle management. They have to be seen to be doing something under the pretense of productivity. When we worked from home they couldn't do that, and that in turn made them worry about their own job security. Which isn't their job to worry about, they want the workers to worry about that.

A worried worker is a productive worker isn't it? Well, that's the mantra of the (many) managers I had the misfortune of working under.

Building a 16-bit CPU in a spreadsheet is Excel-lent engineering

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Always impressive

"It seems that there is always someone who looks at a thing and thinks "hey, can I make it do <some entirely insane idea> ?"."

If it weren't for household chores and the need to procrastinate, we'd never get stuff like this done.

Wikileaks source and former CIA worker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years jail

wolfetone Silver badge

Wasn't it Voltaire that said the most dangerous thing to be is right when the people around you are wrong?

wolfetone Silver badge

I'd like to know how many of those 40 years were for him bringing to light the shady illegal shit the CIA were doing, and how much were for the possession of that awful material?

I try not to be cynical, but I have a feeling they couldn't give two shits about the pornography and were more angry at him confirming what the world already knew about the CIA.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Sigh.......

"Isn't it a pity that most people just want to get to item #3??!!"

It is.

How many work hours are lost a week with the need to restart Windows because it shat itself? Or it's decided 10am on a Monday morning is the prime time to lock itself to do updates for the next hour?

wolfetone Silver badge

Start Menu vs Super Key

You know what, when you look at your keyboard, there are 26 letters there from the alphabet and the super key. In pure day to day computing, does anyone use more than 26 applications? I'm looking at my taskbar on Linux Mint and I only have 10 applications open for the working day. For me those apps are pinned to the taskbar, and I can't actually remember the last time I needed the start menu really.

Sure of course if a newbie starts using it then they'll want a start menu, but then would a newbie be starting off with something so minimalist as these distros?

Web devs fear Apple's iOS shakeup for Europe will be a nightmare for support

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Safari Is An Albatross Around The Necks Of Web Developers

True but the competition exists both on the device and on the web. While the user is locked in to that choice, the developer of the website has to account for it. It forces us to develop for more than just Chrome and Firefox.

I think, with everything going the way it is, Apple opening up iOS to run something other than Safari will just result in users not using Safari and opting for Chrome. When that happens there is less reason for developers to keep things standard and let us slip in to the bad old days of websites only running on IE.

wolfetone Silver badge

Re: Safari Is An Albatross Around The Necks Of Web Developers

As much as I dislike Safari, it's competition. And it's something we just don't have in the web space anymore really.

What I wish would happen would be for Apple to put some effort in to Safari and make it something that's worth being competition or worth considering, rather than being seen as something that "holds" people back. What we're being held back from though I don't know, considering Google pumps any old needless bullshit in to the Chrome and simply expects it to be standard.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

wolfetone Silver badge

We're a Zen customer and we've not heard anything either. But the FAQ says if you're affected then they'd be in touch.

I hope that's the case and we've not fallen through the cracks.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

wolfetone Silver badge

I've found that a lot of people (across the tech skills landscape, from no hopers to professionals) all talk positively about Microsoft Edge. How much nicer it is to use over Chrome, how much quicker it is etc. Then Microsoft do something stupid like this to it.

Guys, you really don't have to do this shady shit. People are going to come to Edge because it's genuinely better than Chrome. But you do stuff like this then people will put up with Chrome's own shenanigans rather than trust a Microsoft product.