Posts by K555

Trump remembers to appoint science panel, fills it mostly with tech bros

Re: Well of course...

I once heard someone who thinks Musk is a genius say "It's just amazing what he's managed to achieve!"

Well yes, I too am fairly amazed by it....

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

I feel like those switches don't turn the card off, they just tell the driver you'd like the radio off like a wireless toggle on a function key.

So you're still at the mercy of software.

I was once on a client site on a call out when another issue got phoned into our office. A user (a particularly whingey one) was reporting one of their screens had failed. It made sense that I just pop to the machine in question rather than the support desk talking it through on the phone.

I sat at the desk and tried to ignore the whingey noises emanating from behind me. Looked at the monitor and saw there was no power light.

My first thought was actually "shall I pretend this takes me a minute to find or shall I just push the power button first?"

I split the difference and switched the monitor on after a little look around the desk.

From behind me, the immediate reaction was "well why was it turned off!?"

Facebook went down for about three hours, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business

probably down to the areas you frequent

That doesn't quite ring true for me. Facebook had an incredible habit of drudging stuff up I didn't care about and shoving it my face. MAYBE if I didn't actually add any 'friends' and stuck exclusively to small groups it wouldn't been better, but I struggle to imagine that being the case.

In my case, I know exactly what I browsing looking at when the 'final straw' popped up. It was the 'FreeNAS' (as it was then IIRC) user group. A bot had gotten in there and put up a video I really didn't want to see. I mindlessly let it run before I realised and it made the rest of my week really really shitty. I reported it for spam and content and Facebook came back once on an auto review saying there was no issue with and then twice with a human review to say it didn't violate any of their content restrictions.

And it probably didn't violate any laws, it really wasn't the worst thing I'll ever see. But I didn't want to see it. And I certainly didn't need to see it whilst I was using my free time to indulge in an interest. And yes, it was bot spam, but I stepped back and realised that, at least once a week, Facebook would piss me off.

So I deleted my account. I can't say it was 'wonderful' to be free, I was pretty indifferent overall.

Re: Despite the rabid hatred of SM on here...

Minus the holiday photos, I've managed to hang on to all that I need post using social-media with a mobile phone and some contact numbers.

Granted, I have to pay a mobile carrier for this but I think most people do that on top of their free Facebook accounts anyway.

Re: Oh no !

Pictures of a minion with some text over about how special grandchildren are. Right next to a post about how the youth of today are awful.

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: OVH

I'm behind CG-NAT at home (cheap service). I have a little OVH VPS I use in order to get a private fixed IP for services like e-mail. DNS, PTR, SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc all set correctly.

It's been on a few arbitrary blacklists based on subnet, I get that... it's a cheap VPS. I've been able to delist the specific IP with most if I run into a block. Can't do it with Microsoft services, so I just live with not being able to e-mail them.

I totally get that OVH are 'known for it' and I could run up a 2nd IP elsewhere if I was that bothered. But, by the same logic, every time an M365 account gets hacked and sends out a phishing link to everyone in it's address book with a link some hookey file hosted on sharepoint, everything will have come from a Microsoft IP.... I might blacklist those ;)

OVH

Pretty sure they had all of OVH Europe on a block list.

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

Re: “We are closely monitoring the situation"

What were they doing before?

They were busy not finishing Star Citizen ;)

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

Re: Not doing Agile right.

Don't assume or try to diminish consensus. I thought Agile was a shit idea well before I'd heard any opinions on it at all.

I first found out about Agile when consultancy/development firm turned up that proclaimed 'we use Agile' and I had no idea what it was. So I went straight to (pleasingly basic*) Agile website. Having read it I concluded it's pretty much a very wordy extension of wanting to jump to bottom-up programming and a bunch of egocentric behaviour around avoiding the boring bits. Basically, it's a manifesto on how to be me doing my A-Levels.

Re: Not doing Agile right.

"Working software over comprehensive documentation"

Sorry, it's not that I 'can't grasp' this. I totally get it and it's plainly ridiculous - you'll just end up with neither.

Not doing Agile right.

"Kern is quick to acknowledge how the manifesto's ideals were subverted"

Whenever you critisise Agile, the 'not doing it right' gets wheeled out.

Every. Single. Time.

When you write a law or set out a process, people will make use if it. And if it lets them roll out half baked crap, that's what they'll go for.

Google presses play on 30-second Gemini musical slop generator

Is it still somewhere around Kid Rock levels of generic?

Price of popularity: Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress

Re: Inevitable?

Go into more detail or find a better analogy? If you don't know what more you can do than use a term and list things you don't like, I think you'll find Twitter very accommodating.

The criticism of systemd is usually it's pervasiveness isn't it? Not it's following of expensive and short lived trends?

And how does that equate to Windows users loving 'fashion victim' software? Are we saying they're into faddy init systems?

Re: Inevitable?

Saying 'I'm not sure if it's true or not' isn't an attempt making an argument.

I'm telling you that I don't understand your use of the term 'fashion-victim' in relation to software. It's not commonly used and it's not immediately obvious what it's supposed to imply.

Re: GNOME on a cheap laptop

I do love a downvote for saying that I find something fine to use. Guess what... I quite often say "Linux" instead of "GNU slash Linux" too ;)

Re: Inevitable?

I'm not sure if it's true or not because I don't really have a clue what "fashion-victim" software is describing.

GNOME on a cheap laptop

I've got a laptop that was very much in that age / price range (Ryzen 3250u based) and I find it perfectly satisfactory running GNOME.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

We've replaced Seth McFarlane

So it's not being written by manatees after all?

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Diesel gate era VW

They'd far rather you leased it rather than own it. Covers up massive software flaw. Constant check engine lights. Gearbox might just refuse to select gears on occasion.

Yet the masses still think VW is a safe bet and think if you happen to run a 15 year old Toyota you're driving something due for the scrap heap.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

A friend of mine who works in motorsport used to have a position that involved being sat on a stool in the pit watching the telemetry coming in from the car. As exciting as F1 is supposed to be, that required wrapping his leg around the stool in a certain way to prevent him falling off if he nodded off mid race.

And when you unscrew the VGA lead, you've got a 50/50 chance it'll take the screw from the graphics card with it.

Did you ever try to lift one of those NEC ones with the BNC inputs? They're were like twice the weight of a normal CRT for the same size. IIRC, in the earlier series of Stargate SG1 they were the monitors in use around the SGC - including some hung from the ceiling. I think Walter should've been more worried about one of those coming down on his head than what might come through the IRIS.

I've often wondered if some Yoga positions could be named after moves specific to IT personnel.

"Leaning over desk"

"Reaching back of cab"

"Fitting AP to ceiling"

I'm reality, I think we're more likely to get types of lower back pain named after us.

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Re: Snap

Maybe it does for many other reasons, but in this case isn't the bug that the package "sets the XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable equal to $SNAP_USER_DATA/.local/share."?

I'd not lay that one on Snap itself, but the package. Unless I've misunderstood.

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

"Agile and standups doesn't make sense any more,"

Any more?

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Re: Great

Nooooooo.... not at allllll...

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

Re: Bollocks. Utter bollocks

When Cloudflare went down, taking a great number of sites and services with it, the end user tickets we logged were all for ChatGPT being unavailable.

One office manager logged a tongue in cheek ticket saying "staff don't know how they'll survive".

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Re: Internet memes ?

Worse than teenagers. Looks like web designers.

2026 brings a bumper crop of Microsoft tech funerals

Re: What about Windows Server 2022?

It also comes with the bonus that they stop fiddling with it.

Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote

They're good for teaching kids an early lesson in decision making.

Abort, Retry or Fail?

Re: Ahhh... reminds me of Star Trek

The only reason that the Scutters don't do that is that they have a better union.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Re: So you signed up

Judging by the style of writing, it was trained on posts from people that haven't even reached junior high.

We had a super irritating user at a client CAD department for quite a while. 'Tech Guru' know it all type that was constantly taking snipes at the IT, insisting he should be provided with a Macbook (despite 95% of his day job being on software that had no Mac support) and trying to ask pointed questions to make himself look superior (we worked out that these often came from an Arse Technica article published that day).

He actually moaned about having to change the backup tapes in an e-mail with "I don't see the point in this when we really should have RAID!".... to which I got to reply with "Pop on google, type 'RAID is not' and then tell me what the auto complete come up with".

Anyway, he also sat tucked in the corner during work hours beavering away on his personal photographic hobby. I full well knew he had a hooky Adobe Master Collection, complete with a modified hosts file to prevent it phoning home to Adobe and deactivating.

Whenever he'd particularly annoyed me, I'd browse across to his system drive and go 'clean' his hosts file out.

Starlink claims Chinese launch came within 200 meters of broadband satellite

Re: Drugs in ink cartridges?

The printers still check a chip on the cartridge to confirm it's genuine HP Heroin.

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

Scenario #2:

Coop went to Disney World

Windows 11 still barely pulling ahead of 10 despite end-of-support push

This quote stood out

"The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc."

I'd say the primary blocker is having better things for you IT department to be getting on with than replacing one OS with another one that doesn't provide your organisation any tangible benefit (in terms of productivity) and pisses off half the users.

Boffins build 'AI Kill Switch' to thwart unwanted agents

Kirk logic bomb time.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Ducks for cover

Going by the tone of the comments here, I'm gonna be judged.

I work for a customer that have no dedicated space for their IT kit and also love to have ideas on rearranging their office. Depending on who's doing the rearranging, they'll always elect to move the rack to the room they don't personally care about. So it gets relocated on a semi regular basis.

I've worked out that if I take the doors off their hinges, you can wheel the rack through them so it doesn't need to be stripped down and rebuilt every time.

I've also worked out I can wheel it across the entire ground floor within the runtime of the UPS....

Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds

Re: "They can probably set up a printer faster"..?

As I'm over 30, I know entirely how to deal with setting a printer up.

"Hey, you do IT. Can you help me set up this new printer I got?"

"No"

The Steam Machine rises again as Valve readies 2026 hardware trifecta

Re: Sigh

I don't think it's aimed at anyone who's first concern is systemd.

Windows 11 26H1 is coming ... for new processors only

Do you remember the update that caused Windows 10 to blue screen when you tried to print with a type 3 print driver? I don't think they were drivers from low volume manufactures either, it included HP IIRC.

That's not a small subset. How little testing must you do not to notice you can't print?

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

There have been some recent instances of people on the Norfolk coast having their mobiles roam to Maritime networks at a potential cost of cabillion pounds a minute.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: No Sense of Humour

I knew someone that had a sense of humour that dropped no hints and he didn't need to actually know someone to inflict it upon them. He briefly worked in a bank, which he hated every second of.

One of his colleagues asked if he could pass them a letter opener and, absolutely dead pan he told them "Sorry, after the last incident I'm no longer allowed to handle sharp objects near co workers".

I did say he worked there briefly.

Re: cold wire

We have to deal with many small 'web development' companies who churn out the standard Turdpress affairs. Every site comes stuffed with as many out of date untested plug-ins as possible that call APIs that are long since deprecated or make DNS lookups for non existent records. Then, when the front page takes 27 seconds to load (complete with a 3 minute full motion video they've uploaded with a codec suitable for distribution to HD IMAX cinemas) they come back with "something wrong with the server".

One of these companies had an e-mail signature with the logo of about 10 vendors they used across the bottom and the staff all had titles like 'Level 4 tech solutions expert'

So every time I responded to them, I'd make my own e-mail signature more preposterous, adding another company logo (I've got a western digital hard disk in this PC... add Western digital. I fancy a Sausage Roll... add Ginsters) and changing my job role to things like "Level 27 Support Mage"

You can now test drive Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10

Just hit 'update' in the updates UI on 42

I have one PC attached to the TV that runs Fedora because Debian distros simply won't boot reliably on it. It's a flat install and used for nothing more than the web browser.

It bricked updating 39 to 40, 41 to 42 and now 42 to 43.

But hey, 40 to 41 was a peach.

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Reminds me...

I just retired my personal Exchange 2003 server (SBS 2003!) earlier this year because Server 2003 didn't support the TLS standard my mobile e-mail client now demands.

It had a good run. I couldn't actually log into the thing for about 2 years because I moved the VM and tripped up the activation on it. The telephone activation is long since defunct but I eventually found out that you could activate it using the Microsoft Games telephone activation (which I guess they keep alive for people who want to play the original Halo on PC?) as it appears to use the same code generator! Then, during the uninstall, it prompted me for Disc 2 of the SBS 2003 installation.... that caused a lot of rummaging through the old action pack CD wallets!

Fun times.

Game on! Penguin levels up as Linux finally cracks 3% on Steam

To be fair - "just because a game launches doesn't mean it runs well enough to play" is equally applicable on a Windows box! I've spent many many hours trying to get rid of glitches in Windows games on running natively on Windows, if I ever have to spend 20 minutes googling and tweaking a Windows game to run on Linux, I'll give it a pass.

I've exclusively played games on Linux since 2020 and my experience is that nine times out of ten I actually have more of a fight with the bloatware launchers that big companies bundle that I do with the actual game.

I'd also say I have more luck with games than productivity applications. Because they want their own look and feel, they have their own in game menu systems which are a direct translation. If I have a glitchy application in Wine, it's usually the Linux desktop window dressing not quite matching up with where it would be in Windows, leading to blank or unclickable buttons or Windows bouncing off into the ether (Adobe, I'm looking at you).

Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough

By 2014 people had realised that you really should use Microsoft Excel to build databases.

Re: Interesting, I guess

I don't know if I'd call it a special case, because it's part of my day to day work, but I guess if you're not doing admin and support on systems that involve Windows you might.

It's incredibly handy to be able to quickly mount a disk image from a Windows VM as a loop device and then read and write files on it. Saves console access and recovery mode shenanigans.

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

Re: It's a free OS that lives on a $5 storage card in a $35 computer.

Quid, init.