Posts by MatthewSt

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Possibly, but in that instance you're instantly collecting a percentage of an amount that you may not have otherwise had

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: Could've been a requirement

An engineer might, but the article states that a manager went...!

Having said that, with it being a round number I wouldn't be surprised if it only went up to 9999.99 before not having the digits to display anything else, so stopped working in some way or another.

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Phone down

I gave Lenovo the same instructions once. They sent the laptop back with the disk formatted and freshly installed Windows.

They just get renamed to "WiFi cables"...

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: Schedule a effing downtime!

As the experts, and the people they've hired to fix the problem, you tell them what you need. If they'd said he couldn't touch the servers they'd have said "we can't do it" so why is needing the power to be off any different?

Ex-NASA Admin pick blames Musk ties for pulled nomination

That makes sense, and I appreciate that's how things are _now_, but I (maybe incorrectly) interpreted OPs post to be "why bother sending humans to Mars when robots will be cheaper".

By that argument we should all descend into a WALL-E style existence, letting robots do absolutely everything for us. Some people want to build, want to explore, want to take those risks. If robots are the only thing we're going to send off-world then is there really any point going?

Odd homage to '2001: A Space Odyssey' sees 'Blue Danube' waltz beamed at Voyager 1

I can't upvote you because you already have 42, so have a beer instead

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: New AC...

Probably thought that VAX was the cleaner's socket

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

> Pulled out of their ass...

Can't spell Canalys without...

Best pricing model for AI? Work in progress, says Salesforce

Re: What's really going on here?

Considering they've called it a high margin opportunity I think it's more likely they're working out how much they can squeeze us for.

"Our AI agent may cost you $20k/year, but it's still cheaper than a human"

Microsoft is opening Windows Update to third-party apps

Re: an interesting shift!

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing... We're an ISV and we currently use the store to distribute apps because it takes care of automatic updates (including targeted rings) for us. I'm saying that if we could opt in for our app to auto update through Windows then we wouldn't need to take a dependency on the store.

In other words... we're the third party app that wants to come bork your system!

Store

Main reason we went for the Windows Store as a distribution method was automatic updates. Having that taken care of with traditionally installed apps could be an interesting shift!

TeleMessage security SNAFU worsens as 60 government staffers exposed

Re: Please Stop Using That Word Incorrectly

While you're technically correct, the frequency of these events suggests that this is indeed a normal situation, very much fouled[sic] up

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Still happening

And Windows was telling me that it "Last ticked for updates" a month ago...

I can't find the details about it now but back in the Vista days one of the languages for Vista had an issue where they'd translated both "Sleep" and "Hibernate" into the same word

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: The Worst...

> one had sat around the whole time with a bemused look on his face and the other had spent all day working on the report and still failed to fix it

Which was which...?

NASA jettisons Neo4j database for Memgraph citing costs

You're looking at Oracle as a cheaper alternative...?

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

MFA/2FA

Solves a lot of these cases... Especially ones where you needed to be verifying Teams attendees are who they say they are!

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

The reason for that was it wasn't a "file format" as such, but it just dumped out the in-memory data for the document

Because of the hard work done by the OpenOffice team in the beginning they got to a point where they could open old Word docs better than Word!

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

Re: Lessons skipped and still not enough paranoia

What? Why wasn't I invited? What aren't you telling me!

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: Another idea

The other points are still valid. You think the banks will be happy with each of the 11,000 branches having its own processes and software to reconcile £1bn+ per month of deposits and withdrawals?

https://corporate.postoffice.co.uk/cash-tracker/what-is-the-post-office-cash-tracker/our-latest-tracker/

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed

Re: Who is to blame?

Unless that technology is provided for them.

You have a government provided secure device, configured with the approved messaging systems, pre-configured internal contacts for other staff members' approved devices, and you don't let other apps be installed on them.

The only thing your users need to do is to not use personal devices. Considering how much noise was made about emails a few years back, I would say that they're all quite up to speed with what's a government system and what's a personal system...

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Re: Definition of math advancement

Goodhart's law in action

Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters

Re: Skype?

Classic Skype used to work when the servers were off too. Those were the days!

When disaster strikes, proper preparation prevents poor performance

Re: Not just off site

My only experience of tectonic plates is when they rub against each other, so if between you and your Mum there's a join then I imagine that an issue affecting one of you would also affect the other...

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

Re: I have a colleague who wants to spend over 40K in AI hardware...

There's a very fine line between laziness and efficiency...

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Re: Genius

Office has already been rebranded on Android as "M365 Copilot"... I wish I was joking

Watchdog fails to stop big vendor lock-in, say UK cloud market's smaller players

Civo?

Does someone want to let Civo know they're UK based? There's a very well hidden page talking about sovereign UK cloud, but all their prices are in dollars.

Up to $75M needed to fix up rural hospital cybersecurity as ransomware gangs keep scratching at the door

Re: Thank you Microsoft...

Microsoft's prices are a lot lower if you're not a profit making entity, so maybe there's a different category of greedy useless shitheads to reform first

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Put up or shut up

Being technically illiterate isn't the problem, it's not listening to people who are. We shouldn't expect our MPs to know everything, but they should have enough critical thinking to understand legitimate expert opinion.

The problem with this specific scenario is that security and accessibility are greyscale rather than black and white.

On the opposite ends of the spectrum you have E2EE and not. In between that you can have a secondary key for decryption (the problem is how you protect that) or N secondary keys, of which you need M to do the decryption (improves the protection because now you'd need to compromise multiple keys) but then you can't call those E2EE encrypted.

Windows 365 Disaster Recovery Plus promises Cloud PC comebacks in 30 minutes

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/local/

For local people...

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

Re: Are we the baddies?

What about upgrades? If you buy a copy of Firefox then will you pay for an upgrade next month when the next release comes out? Or maybe a purchase price gets you a year of upgrades.

Either way, not accepting the subscription model means not accepting the benefits of continuous improvements

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

Re: unfair to the candidates who had submitted their applications on time

Unfair because you may have been racing against the actual deadline, and an additional 8 hours would have given you 8 hours more time to polish, check, finish off etc

Microsoft Azure faceplants in Norway, taking government services with it

Re: "Problems with Azure were confined to one region"

Only US Gov in the Gov cloud

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: ****ing hell

And not only that but every page navigation you do asks you to accept cookies (no matter which option you choose). If only there was a way to store a small amount of information in your browser to remember that selection...

Re: costs mushroom from £2.6 million to around £40 million

The problem is that Oracle can implement what has been asked for, but it turns out the requirements were wrong, or have evolved, so you can either walk away from the contract and not get much of a refund, or you can pay the adjustment fees

Exchange update refusenik? Consider yourself warned by Microsoft

If you want to see where your mailboxes are hosted then the get-mailbox powershell command gives you the server name. All of ours are UK based now, but a few years back they were spread all over Europe.

If I recall correctly we were offered the chance to move when the UK datacentres opened.

> since "newer than March" means April for Exchange Server 2019 and June for Exchange Server 2019, but the company has yet to respond

I think one of those 9s is upside-down

Microsoft throws more cash at its carbon guilt by replanting Brazilian rainforest

Re: It does make me wonder

If you're looking at something like Gridwatch it has a tool tip explaining why you don't see it go all the way up to 30GW (aside from the fact it would require it to be windy across the whole country at the same time).

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

Re: 17 minutes?

>Only two-thirds of calls were answered

Second paragraph

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

PFACAA

All the right letters, not necessarily in the right order...

Same as https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/19/tiktok_supreme_court_petition_allowed/ and https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/24/us_senate_passes_tiktok_sale_act/

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

Step 1

Embrace...

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

Re: if a user were to search for "pasta," images of lasagna might turn up

Is that Open Sauce?

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

Don't forget that the numbers you're looking at there don't include private chargers (unless someone is letting the public use their home one)

Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft

Re: "this option wasn't being made available"

Maybe Microsoft should go and ask Microsoft (the registrant of azureedge.net) if they can keep it...

(if someone needs a quick fix - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/migrate-cdn-to-front-door-retain-edge-domain)

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Or error ID ten T

Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up

That development pace...

... It's glacial!

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

Re: New outlook

It does for our users. Check the configuration, then possibly your users*

* I'll leave it up to the reader whether you think there should be an apostrophe in there

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Close enough

Do you do your little turn on the cat-walk?

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

Re: No need for memory

And of course don't forget Server 2025...