Posts by Steve Kerr

Dentists sue ex-contractor for holding web domains hostage in biz fight

Re: and they owe him $400K

Certainly a lot to chew over.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Currently have a work laptop on windows 11 and home desktop is windows and laptop is Linux.

So many things annoying in windows 11, it's a mess, I prefer to have the taskbar on the side yet some arbitrary decision by microsoft to not allow that move because "we can't give users choice" is so annoying. I'm sure since windows 95 you could move the taskbar to where you want and NOW they've decided you can't?

So - at end of life for Win 10, my desktop will remain on Win 10 for the foreseeable future because, sod them.

UK watchdog hints Voda-Three merger will likely pass

Re: How about approval only if...

You got there first - have exactly the same, 3 as personal, voda as work.

I reckon there's some kind of sharing already in place as several months ago I suddenly got signal on 3 where there was none before but I always got voda at those points.

Two years after entering the graphics card game, Intel has nothing to show for it

Late to party - I've gotn an Intel Arc 770 with 16gb RAM.

For what I'm using it for it runs fine (mostly Eve), runs 2 clients in 1920x1200 OK - which is what my monitors are.

Is it a world beater? Far from it, is is flakey? It certainly was in the beginning but much better now, it's pretty much OK.

Price wise, it was cheap compared to the others on the market in the same space and I balked at paying 2x-3x the price for what was supposed similar performance.

So, for the moment, for the price I paid, it does the job I want and for me has been pretty good value!

One day I will probably go back to Nvidia or AMD but like I said, it does what I need for the moment.

Doesn't help that it's in a PC with an AMD CPU so that was quite entertaining. in the beginning

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

Canada

I would've thought the easiest way to get assisted suicide was to go to Canada, get a Doctors appointment and say you have a bit of a cold, before you know it, they'll be offering assisted suicide and already strapping you down.

All joking aside,I believe the one thing you truly own in your life is your life and it is up to you to decide if you've had enough (with multiple psycharistrists evaluation, reviews etc... as per dignitas so you still need to pass through testing to make sure you have the mental capacity and also to determine that there is no coercion etc...)

Medical profession and religious crowd out there push that people should live to the end at whatever the cost to them, their loved ones etc... to what I would call extreme cruelty at a persons most needed moments. As many have said elsewhere, you wouldn't put an animal through that much pain and suffering and some are gleeful at prolonging a human (animal) pain and suffering.

probably get downvotes and dislikes for this viewpoint!

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: Strangest?

Nearly took a pigeon to the face at 70mph whilst riding a motorbike (visor closed) had to duck and felt it skim past my head.

Also once, a coach in front of me hit a pigeon, saw a shape spinning off in one direction then I was surrounded by a cloud of feathers.

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Don't know the truth in these

Was told a story of a failure of the fixing for the spindle in a multi-disk platter.

Think where you spin the handle until it's locked into place when you put it into the drive.

So the fixing bit failed and the disk platte departed the drive went through the glass top and embedded itself into the ceiling, was told of this happening in the late 80s when I first started work, there may or may not have been someone close when this happened!

the other story I heard was a computer manager who had enough and brought a gun in and shot the mainframe to death.

Again, don't know the truth behind either!

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Working out in Romania a long time back for a number of months, used a hotel that was used by film companies, so got to meet a bunch of actors (i don't know who is who so don't remember who!) and film crew.

Been in some expensive hotels in stockholm, well, everything is expensive really!

Funniest was a hotel in Guernsey where every room has its own colour co-ordinated style from the bed linen to the walls and paintings, the bed was high enough up that you could either roll out of bed into a standing position or get into bed without bending your knees or falling onto it! Seems it was the place to go for the restaurant and bar. Anyway, one of my colleagues had to stay there once and when he went to check in they said "Are you sure you're at the right hotel?" - That was hilarious when he told me the story!

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

Doooom!

back in the day I remember people playing mutliplayer nertwork Doom as a means of testing network stability! if your network could stand up to that then it was working pretty good for the the day!

SWIFT embraces central bank digital currencies after sandbox success

Being that I've dealt with SWIFT for about 33 years, payments within SWIFT don't take days to compete, they generally go through in about a second.

What does take time are banks and financial institutions connecting to SWIFT dealing with the payments if they have clunky bankoffice batch run systems. Also, if they do things like switch off their SWIFT connection from say 5pm on a Friday until 8am on a Monday (or overnight) then anything pending being sent to/from will get held up on SWIFT and will be delivered when the institution next connects. Where things are delayed, the sender of the SWIFT message can get a delayed delivery report that will give a list of anything that is delayed by a recipient institiution.

So yeah, it's not so much SWIFT that is the problem but the clunky financial institutions connecting to it with ancient backoffice systems and ancient banking processes!

More answers on request!

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Joys of developers and testing

I do like to test to destruction of applications.

Create a test plan with a bunch of scenarios including things like loss of server, loss of database server, loss of database, loss of table, application falls over, bad data, stress testing,

Developers are fond of saying "but that will never happen" to which the response is "what if it does?" "But it won't", "well lets see....."

One app had to have about 14 months of work done because there were so many issues that it wasn't ready to see the light of day and certainly not customer facing! could write a 10,000 essay on that!

Also, got kicked off of a college prime server after the "email wars" between 2 sets of colleges IT students back in the 80s! Fun times!

Sandra Rivera’s next mission: Do for FPGAs what she did for Intel's Xeon

FPGA's

Looked around and they do seem to have their uses where creating bespoke hardware solutions would be expensive and if they being used to prototype ASICs before final manufactering, that sort of thing.

Personally, I've only come across FPGA's in the MiSTer emulation arena where cores for FPGAs have been designed by people to fully emulate original computer hardware with all the original timings. I got hold of one of the boards after a long time trying and they're pretty funky and cool and most certainly people have put a lot of work in to get them as exact as possible.

Sometimes for a solution, you don't need multicore fast generic x86 CPU when something lower powered will do when all the requirements can be met in an FPGA core without the expense of tooling up to produce some custom boards.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Bye bye ESXi

I was using ESXi on an intel NUC (slightly entertaining with multiple core types), was originally going to use Nutanix but requires 3 physical disks/ssds to install.

When I heard about broadcom, I was thinking about changing it as I wasn't using it for too much as after much looking decided to go with Proxmox which I'm still learning about.

Was a fairly straightforward install though I only thought about exporting the VMs and trying to import them after I had already blatted it!

Still, for the moment, Proxmox suits my purposes apart from it moaning about the lack of a license every time you login even though there's a free version (for non-prod use).

Shame really as after using VMWare for years actually quite liked it!

Onto learning new stuff!

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

I've had people email me late in the evenings, beyond 10pm and at weekends and then message/call me 5 minutes later to ask why I haven't responded.

My general response is, it's outside of working hours and therefore will not be responding until the next working day and tell them if it's an emergency, they can raise an out of hours call and then there's an audit trail and a followup overtime claim for at least an hour - they can then justify the cost of the overtime that I'll be getting!

As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix

Big user of Nutanix has all our stuff is hosted on it, we've got VMWare on Nutanix as well.

We've migrated a lot of stuff from VMWare to AHV and been pretty straightforward so there's an easy(ish) migration path.

Was going to run the community version of AHV at home but unfortunately, the NUC I'm using to play virtualisation does not support the min 3 SSDs I would need unfortunately. I could do it under Proxmox but rather defeats the point! Though possibly will try again on a small lower power form factor machine at some point.

Remember when enterprise administration was more than just a browser dashboard?

Sad times!

When I went to a visit to TNMOC, it was rather a shock to find a lot of the machines I've used from early home computers to large mainframes are now museum pieces!!!!

I done work experience on an ICL 2966 running VME & George 3 and a financial institution I worked for had a couple of ICL 2966's, amongst other things like an IBM 4381, Wang, VAX's, HP 3000's, Tandem nonstop, Stratus! A bygone era.

Used Prime computers whilst in college

Bad eIDAS: Europe ready to intercept, spy on your encrypted HTTPS connections

Re: At last! A Brexit bonus!

I somewhat think that what the UK government will want to do is somewhat more draconian than what the EU are proposing.

I would even hazard that they will ask their friend, pooh bear to help - or at least the government mandarins that drive a lot of policy (regardless of the party in power) will.

Waiting for the UK government to make using VPNs illegal with a life sentence if/when caught!

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Sounds like a really am a figment of my own imagination!

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Amiga hard disk partitioning

Made mistakes with Amiga hard disk partitioning

Whatever tool I was using to do it (may have been inbuilt one) didn't compare the size of the disk against the size of the partitions.

From memory, you had to specify the start/end block for each partition.

Somewhere along the line, I got confused and managed to create a partition or extend it beyond the end of the disk, what this ended up doing (unknown to me at the time), was wraparound the partiton back past the beginning of the disk (as that's what this partioning app done) - this particular tool didn't check for validity it seems!

Only noticed some days later when weird things strted happening and files got corrupted - took ages to sort out that mass, I think I actually had some backups that I managed to restore (done to VHS tapes no less) - no idea what I lost but I don't think it was much as I was only about 19-20 at the time so didn't have much of importance!

Fun times!

Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11

Annoyances

Got windows 11 on a work PC now

Seems to be spending time fighting againt it - so many things are a pain, the most annoying the forced location of the task bar - I know there are probably hacks etc.. around being able to change it, though this is a work PC so there's a limit to what I can do to it (and also corporate policy restrictions). I prefer to have the start bar on the side but no, microsoft says I'm not allowed to do that with the default install of windows 11.

So my own PC, I'm waiting for something better to come along (new framework laptop when it arrives will have linux), gaming PC will be sticking to windows - maybe windows 12 will be better.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Re: Task failed successfully.

You got there first - pass the CAPTCHA test based on human mistakes for doing them - except when the bots are programmed to do that too!

Brit broadband subscribers caught between crappy connections and price hikes

Re: Ofcom rules?

Think beardy sold it years ago, it's a split between Liberty Global & Telefonica now.

Not heard good things about the first one

Bosses face losing 'key' workers after forcing a return to office

No more office

Mentioned in a previous comment on a previous article.

Company I work for used this as the opportune time to downsize their offices round the world where possible, 90% drop in space in european head office and moved to a managed office space elsewhere with some available hotdesking where needed.

So they've seen a way in saving a lot of costs - certainly in the UK but I would think elsewhere as well.

Suits me fine! (though I know for others home working does not suit them for a variety of reasons)

Third MOVEit bug fixed a day after PoC exploit made public

Automating internal attacks

Only a passing comment.

You would think if you have software that is written to be public internet facing that they would an internal set of automation tools that continually attempts to exploit their own software

So you would have a segregated network where you would use the same sort of tools that miscreants would use and then coninually attempt attacks at a variety of supported versions of your software.

I know if I was running a software vendor, I would do something like this.

For some internal software in the past, I have done things to try to break it though people moaned about why i was doing this - I said, we need to understand what will happen to all the interconnected components if something goes wrong, e.g. someone accidently deletes the contents of a table in a DB or services fail or servers fail.

Basically, test it into destuction - it's also a fun thing to do and it means that when it goes live to customers you've tried to minimise the chances of failure, though people can be quite good at breaking things by accident!

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

That media deletion virus

When I worked for an bank, we had lots of AV and mail AV to protect our stuff.

We also had lots of issues with file server storage always being low - back when 100-200 GB of fileserver space was a huge amount

Whilst on holiday, we had that virus pass thru that zero lengthed all media files, that came from our owner back as we didn't (until then), have mail AV on those links as we thought they were trusted.

Anyway, we recovered about 70% of our file server disk space pretty much immediately (only reason I knew was someone called me whilst I was in France).

When I got back we got so many requests for restores where when checked responses were "please provide a business justification to restore madonnas greated hits" or some such.

only area that got media restored was marketing.

We were much more aggressive in identifying and removing music/films without notification after that.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Weight limit flight to Albania

Once flew to Albania for work and was on an airbus of some description.

Only about 40-50 passengers, the plane was at its weight limit.

The front few rows were filled and so were the rear few rows and only single window seats on the left hand side of the plane, someone wanted to move form the crowded front/back but was told this was not allowed because the plane was at its max carrying weight due to cargo and the seating arrangement was due to balance.

From gatwick it took most of the runway to get off the ground, landing in albania where the runway was short came in so low was skimming the fields for a minute then literally smacked into the tarmac just after the dirt and braked so hard I headbutted the seat in front and had to use my hands to push myself off the faceplant. Plane done a 180 at the other end with the wing actually over the dirt at the other end of the runway, was like doing a 180 at 20mph in a very large reliant robin!

As for passenger weight, I've seen a lot of videos from er....larger so called influencers bemoaning plane seat & aisle widths and saying that they should be given extra seats for free, to me, to be fair, should state your weight+baggage weight approx when booking tickets and pay the difference or refunded the difference at weigh ins at the airport - could be done discretely - only fair to charge per KG for travel, a bit like sending stuff via a parcel company!

Microsoft enables booting physical PCs directly into cloud PCs

Corporate use

I can see a use for this in a business setting - for instance, with a lot of WFH nowadays (myself included), rather than supplying laptops/PCs to employees they could do one of a couple of things.

Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect to a virtual PC on a hosted environment or provide a cheap thin client, like a RPi to connect, this means that companies can reduce phsyical hardware supplied to employees which would make it a lot cheaper.

Saying that, they don't need to run in some cloud providers environment as companies could just host it all themselves in their own environments using things like VMWare Horizon or one of the mass of other products out ther.

it wouldn't surprise me if companies go down that route, I fully expect that the company I work for would do that as literally only use the laptop for teams and outlook and my actual work is done thru hopping onto other secured hosts and from their jumping onwards.

Let white-hat hackers stick a probe in those voting machines, say senators

I'm sure i read something a few years back about suggestions that the voting machines go to be checked & tested by the Nevada gambling commission where they would also hold the software in escrow. As they're good at making sure the software in gambling machines does not skew the payouts etc..

From memory, the voting machine vendors point blank refused.

i saw a video as well where they got members of the public to watch whilst a sealed voting machine that was used in local elections was made to produce the "correct vote", they were sat in the room watching this happen, they were shocked at how easy it was to manipulate.

there needs to be more oversight of these machines and their software.

There was a push to use open source voting software where the source code was open to everyone to view, don't know what happened to that initiative though.

Also, I'm not American or in the US so the above is based on being an outside observer on stuff I've read.

IBM launches Watsonx to help enterprises streamline workers out the door

Re: Watsonx won't be any different from Watson

Although if it suggested that a bunch of middle managers and all of the upper management be dumped because it would be better to direct the company, it would be turned off so quick, you wouldn't believe someone could move so fast.

Microsoft suggests businesses buy fewer PCs. No, really

Re: As much as I like VDI

Because how else are they going to monetise you for a monthly fee for something you'll never own?

Payments firm accused of aiding 'contact Microsoft about a virus' scammers must cough $650k

When I get round to it, going to set up a VM that talks out to a squid proxy that will redirect to a local webserver hosting my "bank".

The PC will be in its own subnet so can only see the local gateway which will route stuff specifically.

Going to group policy it to the eyeballs and then go thru the entertainment of wasting their time.

My current go to name to give them is Benjamin Chow or Ben Chow for short - say it together and then look up Hindi swear words :-)

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Possibly "Windows for helicopters" wasn't such a good idea.

Windows: Your update has been installed and restart has been issued, please do not turn off your helicopter during this process.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

We have a few names - for people

We have some names rather than acryonyms for people - some of which is part of peoples names but won't say here.

We have named (internally in the team) certain colleagues as

Mr Shouty

Sargent Major Shouty (SMS) - ex army who believes he can treat civvies the way he treated people in the army, doesn't work!

Captain Chaos - he actually knew about this one and accpted it was was quite funny.

There are more but not saying those ones and many I've forgotten!

Atlassian to dump 500 – by email – in the name of 'rebalancing'

Re: I’m fine with it…

jira is OK once you get used to it.

I'm more for the slow, painful and excruciating death of those responsible for "confluence"

News Corp outfoxed by IT intruders for years

I think they're called "reporters" in the loosest sense of the term

Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved

Re: Bring it in

Think that's heading in the direction of Judge Death from 2000ad

Accidental WhatsApp account takeovers? It's a thing

This is an issue with these "social" media companies

It's not a phone company problem, it's a social media company issue.

They're binding their service to a phone number and not an account, if it was bound to an account then this wouldn't happen.

huge copout from fakebook/whatsapp blaming someone else for their decision to bind accounts to a mobile number.

OK, there are other issues where companies send SMS messages for 2FA too so there are more complexities to it.

There's also a responsibility for the account owner to delete their phone numbers off of their social media.

So it's a mix of social media companies and the people with accounts with those services.

I would think there would be some kind of "migrating to a new number" thing in those apps, not that this wouldn't be used by identify thieves - it's a complex subject thinking more on it.

Giving up and going for a lunch break!

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

No more office

The company I work for is just in the process of dumping its London office, they don't want to pay for the space, but if people are WFH, they don't have to pay for it, so that's a win/win for them.

They are going to rent a small managed office as a "collaboration space" for the things where occasionally you do have to do some face to face stuff.

As most of my communication is with people in different offices in the UK, europe, asia & the US, it doesn't really matter where I am to work, the added benefit is that I'm on call so waiting for 90 minutes for me to get to the office or get home to look at things becomes a few minutes so the company wins on quicker support.

China's Yangtze Memory reportedly lays off staff, evicts them from company housing

Re: I had much the same experience in Stockholm.

Did not know that - thanks for that insight, have worked in Stockhold a fair bit (staying in hotels for a couple of days) but wasn't aware of that rental market.

Changes afoot at Salesforce after activist investor Elliott takes a decisive slice

Re: "improve operating margins"

or IBM!

Twitter will lose 32 million users by end of 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts

Virtual users

Is that 32 million actual users or 32 million bots?

It's 2023, let's check in with the metaverse... Nope, still doesn't exist

Had a quick look on how to acess

Saw some fancy websites.

Saw some quotes about how it's going to change everything

Saw it's fragmented already with many different metaverse sites.

Saw nothing of interest

Lost interest.

Looks like it's stillborn.

Wasted 7 minutes looking at this stuff.

Going to look at something more interesting which to be honest, is anything else.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

When I was doing electronic systems in college - certainly with a few people that shouldn't have been allowed near anything electrical, we had one guy who produced entertainment.

They used to have these plug boards with which you could fit components that was sort of a bit like lego, you could slot in these blocks that had components and a description of what it was on it, they were powered by a separate 12v power supply.

We heard a big bang and everyone turned round to see a mushroom cloud billow up to and across the ceiling and a look of horror on the guys face.

We never worked out how he managed to cause a transistor (I think it was) to lose its magic blue smoke.

We did jokingly create the "Theory of Random Connections" off of the back of what he done which was the running joke for the rest of the college year.

Fun times.

Apple exec sues over 'ageist' removal of $800k stock bonus

Re: Foot. Shot....

From the looks of it, all future RSUs are already NULL as looking behind the scenes, they're trying to manage him out.

So yeah, he's suing for ageism.

Chinese-linked cyber crims nab $529 million from Indian nationals

Love when the Indian scammers call

Have some great calls with the scammers until they start swearing at me - much entertainment.

Although it's crap that people got scammed out of money, is a bit funny that the what seems to be the majority of scammers are themselves being scammed.

The icing on the cake is if those scum that scammed people out of money were then scammed out those illgotten gains.

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

Queen Elizabeth - demon driver

I think she has done so much for country, even amongst her own problems in her own family, just like every other family.

I do mourn her passing.

I was at Windsor Horse Show last year when we were asked to just wait for a minute.

These 3 black rangers pulled up next to us, they were going pretty fast, surprised the first one didn't do a handbrake sliding stop.

The drivers door opened and out got the queen, was totally aghast as she was just in front of us, I've got photos of her that close too.

She was watching one of the native showing classes, not in the main ring either, just the side ring and they had a chair there for her to sit on and watch.

We went and saw some other things and when we can back past she was just leaving, getting in the drivers seat leading the way, we saw her driving on the road up to the castle and she was accelerating away from the others, she must have been doing at least 70mph! Total demon driver, it was brilliant.

After the loss of Prince Philip it was so nice to see her so happy at Windsor watching all the horse.

A great loss to the country.

Nvidia books $1.32b inventory charge as PC market slows

Yup - charging significantly over MSRP whilst not actually dropping the prices to lower than the original MSRP for cards which are a couple of years old now.

So yeah, you're stuck with inventory because you're unwilling to drop the prices to something more acceptable to the market.

It's why I'm still using an 8 year old graphics card because I'm not paying those prices for yesterdays technology. Charging a premium for bleeding edge I can understand.

AMD have seen the writing on the wall and are starting to drop prices, Nvidia have their heads in the clouds still riding the crypto boom (and bust)

CityFibre loses appeal against Openreach discounts for ISPs

Unfortunately where I live the only fibre provider currently is price gouging the local area which I suspect won't stop until BT finally roll out fibre here.

Had a major row with one of their door to doors sales people that got aggressive after I said no, not interested. Believed he was entititled to know all the reasons why I would not switch there and then. His attitude pretty much sealed why they would never get my business even without considering their eye watering prices.

BT currently listed my area as before 2025 but I suspect will be after the heat death of the universe.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Turning up at work to a bunch of police

In a previous job turned up for a shift with a bunch of police that wanted to talk to me - scared the crap out of me.

Turns out, they wanted to listen to a voice recording of a particular line (lots of dealer lines & also some switchboard lines were recorded) and management told that to come to the building and I'd do it but didn't tell me that they were arriving.

These were analogue tapes that had something like 48 lines recorded and the tapes ran for 24 hours at a time.

Anyway, I ran thru a tape over a time period for one particular external line whilst they listened (and obviously I did too).

What transpired was there were some bomb threats being phoned in to reception, in listening to a scratchy recording, could hear a woman in the background and a child, it was one of the managers in the midsts of a mental breakdown phoning in bomb threats. Don't know what actually happened to him in the end. I was asked by the police about what I thought I heard.

Have had to listen in to a bunch of other dealer conversations which included hearing the sex lives of several of the dealers - oops!

Next major update of Windows 11 prepares for launch

Nothing of appeal

I've looked at it (on a VM) and currently, I see nothing on it which is giving me a "wow, must migrate to this immediately" as opposed to "kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of my pram"

For some people out there it may be OK as it seems they are trying to go for the MacOS type look but in a Microsoft way.

Maybe windows 12 will be better, to me, this is like the Windows Vista/8 version, they've tried something different, it's going to fail so they go back to something similar to XP/Win7/Win10