* Posts by Sub 20 Pilot

199 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2014

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Microsoft gives tablets some love in latest Windows 11 build

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: "to curate the canvas on your own"

Aye. A total clusterfuck of pointless marketing speak. Down 10 % of the cunts in a bucket and maybe the rest will shape up and give us a fucking OS that sits there doing OS'y things and not bloody interfere.

I even get these fucking emojis in professional work emails.

Covid in not the problem, covid is the solution. Humans are the problem. Sadly it is killing the wrong people.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Sub 20 Pilot

I take it you have never had to work in a foreign country, in remote areas where an online connection is either impossible or achieived only via a SIM running at a few kb a second if at all, at a high cost.

There has NEVER been a time in which I thought it was a good idea to have all my files on someone else's computer, probably in a different country with no means of support or access if there was a problem. The only person affected financially when this goes wrong is me. It costs the provider nothing and there is no means of recouping my financial loss against them due to their T & C's.

Why is it so difficult to accept that people should have their files locally. Yes, back up to the 'cloud' if you want but DO NOT force everyone into having to store everything there.

We do not all live in the middle of silicon valley or London.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

It has been a very long time since computers were there to make one's life or job easier. They are only there to prise money out of the user and to make billions for the arseholes who run the companies.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Concepts are hard to understand

I disagree. The windows folder system is a fucking mess. There are loads of named folders and directories, some inaccessible, some randomly so. Even worse, most programs save to these standard folders randomly whatever you set as default. Always has done since Win 95.

I have my own folder structure for my business, my personal stuff and more importantly, for a first response team for whom I deal with IT stuff.

I have looked at dozens of backup utilities over the last 20 years and all default to backup up windows folders, which you can not remove. Followed by a hit or miss way of adding non windows sanctioned folders. No good for what I need and to be honest, this is not an edgy unique set of circumstances.

It may not be relevant but to have everything in a set of folders the same as every PC in the bloody universe just makes the whole thing so much easier to target.

Why the fuck would I want all my critical work dumped into random 'my files' my documents' ' my pictures' etc. nonsense, on the C drive when it makes sense to put all files related to one job in one folder on a different drive. Anyone trying to find shit will target those folders so would it not make sense to dump them and make users create their own folder structure. Also the non OS drive location can be taken out and put back into another system if there is a major problem.

Is it just me who thinks this is a problem, if so I need to find a planet with intelligent life on it.

Stop pandering to the fuckwittedly dense and let the partially sensible people have a go.

Cyberwarfare looms as Russia shells, invades Ukraine

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Shutdown their Cloud accounts

Also this would lead to a few multi billionaires losing a bit of income, those living in the US, I mean, so it will not be done however easy it is.

US winds up national security team dedicated to Chinese espionage

Sub 20 Pilot

This is always the case. US feel they can do anything they want to, including invading other nations on a made up excuse and spying on other nations, including people who thought that they were allies of the US.

The whole Huawei affair will bite us ( in the UK ) in the arse one day because we rolled over without question and did Trump's bidding. No matter what GCHQ had previously said and no matter what spyware will be present in US based equivalent kit.

I can not fault Trump's ''america first'' stance at the time, but all other nations should do the same and put their nation first, not be forced into putting the US first.

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Still Avoiding Them

To date I have managed to avoid giving amazon a single penny and will keep doing so. When they pay a reasonable rate of tax in the UK I might reconsider.

I know people who whine about their tax practices and use them all the time, saying that they really had to buy that top or new gadget and it was not available anywhere else or may have cost an extra 3p.

Nothing is that crucial that you have to go to them.

We get the privacy we deserve from our behavior

Sub 20 Pilot

It is the same principle as the shite websites that say: 'do not untick the box if you don't want to be not notified of our special offers'' and ''do not tick the box if you want to not opt out..''on alternate boxes.

I normally walk away from them and find a less crooked alternative. If there is a 'feedback'' form I leave a scathing message telling them that their underhanded methods will guarantee I never visit their site and spend money there.

Make assistive driving safe: Eliminate pedestrians

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: On foot, on crutches, in wheelchairs

I just carry on, let them bang into me and bounce off. My general lack of concern and the sudden shock of crashing into a relatively solid object (Years of martial arts and physical training) means that most don't say anything but generally bugger off slightly bruised.

The sad dumbing down of the Highway Code does not help. The general lack or interpretation by entitled pricks who seem to think that any vehicle should be able to stop from a legal 30 mph within 3 feet because they can not be arsed to look up from their rivetting screen while crossing a road will sadly result in trauma and stress for law abiding motorists.

Darwinism will take it's course but sadly, to the detriment of these people.

Microsoft tempts G Suite customers with 60% discount

Sub 20 Pilot

I am not a fan of google in any way but have 3 paid accounts for personal and business use. I want to be paid for my work so will pay for a working service. Microsoft on the other hand, seem to be hell bent on getting rid of me as a paying customer. ( Yes, I have PC's running Windows os have paid for the operating system.)

I run several online meeting services on my systems, including Zoom, ring central, google and Teams.

Considering that Teams is provided by the manufacturer of the OS I find it impossible to believe that they have not been paid a bonus for sabotaging it.

Each and every time I need to use it results in a number of reboots, failed log ins, requests to open a one drive account, failure to find that account and random crash during use. Up until the last month it took an average of one hour to get the thing running and when it did I could heat my whole house with the heat coming out of the laptop fan. ( I am not an IT tech but do have a reasonable idea of what I am doing.)

Finally lost it and installed it on a cheap Huawei phone, took about 20 seconds to download and install and let me use it immediately with no crashes , stuttering or indeed any issue. I would happily and gladly pay for this because after all this is what I use to make a living. I just can not see the logic of a program running on an alien system a million times better than on it's own native OS and for free.

Google may be a tax dodging parasite in some parts of the world and may be a greedy blood sucking entity but at least they, along with Android, allow me to do what I need while Microsoft are doing their best to fuck up every single aspect of my use of a PC.

If the whole clusterfuck of a company died tomorrow it would do the world a favour.

Microsoft manages a mere 51 security fixes for February update bundle

Sub 20 Pilot

Finely polishing the turd you mean.

CIA illegally harvested US citizens' data, senators assert

Sub 20 Pilot

Would this be from the same nation who were gibbering about the Chinese government allegedy ( but unproven ) doing the same thing a week ago, telling visitors to the Beijing winter games to use a burner phone. Fucking hypocrisy at it's best.

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Ask other users in our forums...

Must thank you. That is the comment of the week.

Sub 20 Pilot

Brilliant column as always Sir.

As the reluctant unpaid and unqualified IT support bod for our emergency first responder team here in the UK I am currently dealing with the unfortunate sale of an excellent mapping utility to a much larger and foreign company who I assume wanted the user list and good bits of the utility.

The previous owner and administrator of the company was the most helpful person in the world and I wish him the very best in his retirement, for all he did for us.

The new owners are a bag of fucking shite. A clusterfuck that makes Boris and his lot look like fucking amateurs. Everything you have listed here is duplicated in their infernal ''log in'' system, which does not work and which takes 10 minutes for each and every person I try to sign up, even though 99.9% of the info I have to type in is the bloody same as it is one fking organisation.

If they want money, just fucking ASK for it, we will pay if reasonable or will tell you to piss off if not. Don't keep pissing on us and tell us it is raining. Or as they say in your neck of the woods: ''ne me pisse pas dessus et ne me dis pas qu'il pleut.''

Have a bloody good weekend Sir.

FBI says more cyber attacks come from China than everywhere else combined

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: "the USA and its allies have had some wins"

It is no more or less open than the US. Look to see how many other nations have massive human rights abuses but which supply the US with oil or whatever else it needs. These are coincidentally never castigated by the US or the UK. Saudi, UAE, Qatar to name but a few. Human rights abuse at the highest level, but, hey, never mind we get cheap oil from them. Let us fuck China instead. Short sighted moronic view of the world.

Sub 20 Pilot

Nothing to do with the fact that the US, primarily Trump and his fuckwitted followers, have done nothing except demonise China and his successor seems to be not much better. Look to see how much the US break into systems, spy on others - as attested by whilsteblowers - not just demonised by the land of the fuckwit.

Crypto outfit Qubit appeals to the honour of thieves who lifted $80M of its digi-dollars

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: The Cloud...

You, Sir, have cut through the bull shite and wank of the marketing cunts over the last decade and provided what I can only describe as the Perfect Description of the whole cloud clusterfuckery.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Good luck with that

And wasting millions on pointless investigation into someone saying the wrong word which upsets some Guardian reader.

Or a pretent investigation into no 10 - I will put money on the result being: ''we thoroughly investigated the evidence but did not find enough to warrant a case'' - even though nothing bigger than a mouse can get into and out of the place without CCTV or logging in/out and photography / ID logging etc.

And that it will be released the day when there is another bit of bad news to hide behind. I have half suspected that the SG report was held back hoping that Russia would have invaded Ukraine by now so a great time to release..

I am afraid our government or the current alternatives are not fit for purpose and the police, of which the vast majority of hard working, dedicated officers fighting against the scum and the guidelines, are also run by people who are more concerned about political correctness, thought crime and box ticking.

How have we arrived at a point where a crime against someone can be dismissed while the same crime against someone else is a ''hate crime''.

To badly paraphrase Gene Hunt - a hate crime, as opposed to one of those friendly murders.

The human race needs wiping out in general but some poeple, even more so.

How to get banned from social media without posting a thing

Sub 20 Pilot

Your good lady has summed up social media in one sentence and this is by far the most accurate summary that I have seen.

The sad thing is that people feel they have to advertise on it which further reinforces it's pervasion into all aspects of life. I have an FB account which I probably look at once a week to see what friends are up to in other parts of the world.

This worked well in the early days of FB but in the last few years you need to scroll past thousands of adverts for unrelated companies as 'something that may be of interest' , requests to 'like' advertising pages put up by people you know or otherwise and the fact that every company can fob you off with a complaints department which consists entirely of a fucking twitter or FB page and their only reactive response is to delete anything that makes them look shite(ier) if that is at all possible. All utilities, airlines and major companies in the UK seem to do this.

If the whole lot died tomorrow along with the anti social fuckwits who promote it all it would make the world a nicer place. Whoever thinks that influencers are a good thing should be spurned as the pointless waste of the oxygen that they must inevitably be.

Have a good weekend Sir, your weekly column is one of the things that keep me sane.

Bouncing cheques or a bouncy landing? All in a day's work for the expert pilot

Sub 20 Pilot

Having several qualifications and experiences incuding a lot of flying in and piloting various types of aircraft I would conclude that the pilot son was a fucking moron.

Windows boss Panos Panay talks up 'new era of the PC' – translation: An era of new PCs

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: A market ready for disruption ...

Almost everything you listed was a bag of shite and unneccessary.

What I need from an OS which I have paid for is something that sits in the background and lets me get on with work or whatever else I need a PC for.

I do not want adverts, things I have deleted returning after an 'update', pointless shit all over the place, constantly moving or hidden settings, forced upgrades that fuck about with my time using the PC and constant nagging to use a pointless app store, cloud service or a subscription to O365.

The first company that produces an OS that works quietly without all this shite and still allows me to use autocad and a suite of other windows only programs will get my money.

Hive View security camera customers left in the dark as some gear gives up the ghost

Sub 20 Pilot

I have never understood this mad rush to put everything in the cloud and buy the latest shite that will have more holes than a teabag. I suppose it is down to the arseholes who market the stuff, the fact that they are allowed to do so by brain dead goverments and what appears to be the general dumbing down of the UK population.

Why do people think that having their whole life connected to the internet is a good idea ? Even in a perfect world of secure software, stable operating systems, well protected servers and excellent security this does not seem to be a good idea.

Surely the whole nation can't be that dumb to think that it is sensible to wire up an insecure baby monitor and camera or heating / alarm controls to the web ? But there again, how many millions have a spyspeaker device in their house that listens to every single word on the offchance that they can use it to play a song without having to physically do anything.

Dumbing down indeed.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: How many?

For 'Pope' - read 'Chief Exec'' as they all manage to deny any knowledge of wrongdoing under their tenure. Ban the fucking lot.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide....

They must have got that domain name because someone else had ''www.theylookafterthemselvesand cuckyou.com''

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide....

As we used to say in less politically correct and morally judgmental times - ''same c*nt, different tie.''

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide....

Let us not forget that Blair's gov was pushing for this type of surveillance years ago. Most political parties are the same.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Inrage and outrage

Possibly a bit like 'increment' and 'excrement'...

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Inrage and outrage

I sincerely hope that nobody relies on you for sensible advice on communication safety.

Vulnerabilities and censorship tools among hot new features in Beijing's Olympics app

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Definitely a requirement to buy a burner phone

I wonder what other nation does this ? Is it not a problem when the USA demand all manner of privacy invasions if you want to visit ( I don't object to it - their country, their rules.) So why is it such a problem when China does it. Usual Sinophobic nonsense from the West, all bending over for the US.

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Back in the good old days...

Agree with everything except smoking on a plane. Have never smoked and fucking hate the smell - nothing to do with health. Absolutely hate waking up with stale smoke on my clothes when travelling or working in non EU countries.

100% in favour of people smoking if they want to just keep to your own house / space. I have never pissed or spat on the corner of anyone's plate and said 'just accept it or stay home' which seems to be the primary attitude of hardcore 'freedom smokers' everywhere that I have been to.

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Sub 20 Pilot

One question ( I have not read through all comments so may already have been answered.)

If this was a non US company and american people died in both crashes, how much shit would have hit the fan ?

How much more shouting and threats from the US government threatening sanctions, huge fines, extradition of execs to face court action in the US etc.

Total fucking hypocricy once again from the US, same as all the shouting when the BP oil platform collapsed in the gulf od Mexico, Obama demanding UK heads on sticks and billions in reparations, not quite so when US companies were resposible for the same type of ecological disaster worldwide ( Bhopal is just one, use google to find your own.)

Same shit different day. Now and forever more.

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Sub 20 Pilot

Pathetic.

Like a lot of posters before me, I am fed up of the usual small fine handed out to cunts like these along with the protracted appeals system that cost the taxpayer much more than the treasury ever get back.

Time to put proper fines in place as a disincentive. If the governmernt or their toothless agencies can not do so then let me do it. I will probably charge less and get a billion times more into the treasury as, to be fair, would most normal people if asked to deal with the problem.

I can not begin to count the number of shithole companies that I have unfortunately had to register an email address with in order to get something done or a problem sorted and no ammount of 'unsubscribe' or ticking of the relevant boxes will stop the fuckers from sending emails several times a week as, according to their twisted view of the world, we have a ''relationship''.

Sadly, nothing will change. Roll on Covid-22 and hopefully it will wipe out humanity as it is beyond repair.

Apart from that, have a nice weekend. Unless you are one of the spamming cunts, in which case, fuck off and die.

Microsoft's Teams Essential tier seems designed to coax people on to Business Basic

Sub 20 Pilot

Once again MS tries to force it's way into people's working life with absolutely nothing of any use. I use 5 different collaboration / meeting tools and all the other 4 running at the same time, would use a fraction of processor, disk and memory as teams. I can heat the room I am working in with my laptop if in a teams meeting for an hour.

What the fuck have they got running in the background ?

I have actually turned down work in the last 6 months because it would have involved 2 or 3 teams meetings per week. Life is too short to produce that much heat and waste power for a phone call with a fucking blurry stuttery video.

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: At Gene Cash, re: wrong error message.

Post of the week SS !

Seen this type of thing happen over the last 40 years but not so brilliantly described. Never been a fan of the Imprezza ( I was an avid RS2000 fan and had a few, standard and stupidly modified.) Easy to work on and a lot of fun but admittedly well before the electronic stuff that took over and made cars very boring.

Have a very good weekend Sir.

UK.gov emits draft IoT and smartphone security law for Parliamentary scrutiny

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: How will it work?

Re your first point about Chinese stuff.

How exactly is this different to the junk and unsecured crap pushed out by amazon, google etc ? I don't mean the stuff they advertise or sell on behalf of others but their own brands of spy-speaker rubbish, unsecure doorbells, baby monitirs etc.

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

Sub 20 Pilot

Not quite. A gas boiler / flue installer in the Uk needs to be registered with Gas Safe - almost the same as tho old corgi reg. An oil /kerosene installer needs to be registered with OFTEC and a solid fuel appliance installer needs to be registered with HETAS.

In real terms, all proper installers spend a lot of mney on crap bits of paper to show that their install will not gas you.

Fake 'BT' caller fleeces elderly victim of £30k in APP app scam

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: How does this work?

Regardless of their status and wealth, is it not true that they are still an accessory to the crime if they get paid for helping criminals to steal money from others ? That is my underestanding of UK law in any case but will stand corrected if wrong.

Is it OK to use stolen data? What if it's scientific research in the public interest?

Sub 20 Pilot

For those who say 'NO' unreservedly, what about the stolen / captured machines and codes which eventually led to the end of the second world war. Is this still stolen data that should not have been used ?

In almost 60 years of experience I can say that there is no black or white mostly, it is all a grey area.

Governments ( as noted above ) will do what they like and fuck everyone else.

To me, if stolen data can be used for good and can possibly prevent a reocurrence of a problem then at least something good comes out of it.

What I do not accept though is any commercial profit made from the same.

So to summarise, if someone can improve humanity's lot from stolen data and is doing so on that basis then yes.

But for Google, Amazon and other similar parasites to be using stolen data to increase profits then no fucking way.

Something phishy: Tech recruiters jabbed by fake COVID-19 Passport scam

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: I wish I could filter for emoji.

That is the most sensible thing I have read all week.

To that I would add excrutiating crap such as ''reaching out to our stakeholders'' instead of 'contacing our customers/ victims' and similar bastardisations of our language. If something needs saying, say it, don't wrap it in shit first.

Also a 'rate your experience' email about 12 seconds after contacting a company. If the fuckers could respond in that time when there is a problem it would be bloody marvellous.

Have a good weekend wherever you are.

H.

Beijing wants its internet to become 'civilized' by always reflecting Marxist values

Sub 20 Pilot

Sounds like the BBC.

Microsoft adds hybrid meeting features to Teams, including interruption-detecting AI

Sub 20 Pilot

Fuck the new features...

How about making the bloody thing work on an MS Windows PC without having to wait 5 minutes for the software to open up, meanwhile making all other operations unusable, thrashing the disk, using about 90 % of the memory and running the laptop fan hard enough to heat my house.

If I have to reboot the laptop, it takes an additional 5 minutes of disk churning before you can do anything while this bag of turds is trying to open up, even though after each time it does this I remove it from the MSCONFIG start menu.

Then tells me to open an MS account as it does not recognise the one I eventually use to log on when I do need to use it, leading to another 10 minutes of nothing.

My mother could have come up with a better program and she doesn't even own a fucking PC.

There really does need to be a world wide programme of killing these marketing bullshit fuckers one by one until the rest get the point. Sadly Covid is killing the wrong people.

ExpressVPN bought for $1bn by Brit biz with an intriguing history in adware

Sub 20 Pilot

Meme merde, jour difference.

I am not an IT tech in any way but I would say that in general, any small successful outfit has a potential few years to become really good at what they do. Then the arseholes and parasites buy them out and either kill them off as potential competitors or turn them into a bag of useless shite.

Anything bought up by Google, MS or FB will suffer this fate. Fucking parasites the lot of them.

Very sad.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Pragmatism

No that is just dumbing down.

Sub 20 Pilot

If you like them then fine but as far as being used for professional communication and even worse, medical communication is quite frankly stupid. We have a language for such things - use it.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: F**k emojis

My response to professional communications sent by text or using such bollocks has always been to send it back and ask for an intelligible communication using a recognised language.

Any one will do, I will sort out from there but this sort of shit lazy communication has become endemic and the use of emoji bollocks just makes it more poitlessly complex to save people from actually composing a sentence.

And yes, before anyone asks, I have lost work through this but frankly if people can only communicate in visual grunts then I have no desire or need to work for them.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: F**k emojis

Response of the week !

I can communicate freely in 4 languages and in a restricted way in a number of others. We really need to stop dumbing down for the sake of the imbecillic who forego a free education ( in the UK at least ) but yet are at the forefront of entitled whining to have things dumbed down to suit their needs.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Accessibility Fail.

This is just trying to put a plaster on a gaping wound. When a screen reader does it's thing - reads the fking screen, which is what people want them for, why complicate matters with a lot of crap to suit the hard of thinking and the lazy.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: Accessibility Fail.

Well said SS. Have a good weekend.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: History repeats itself

Because in medicine you need accuracy perhaps ?

How long will it take someone to sue the NHS when their emoji turns out to mean something else. Bowel cancer / leukemia / insert other condition here... is pretty much unequivocal. A tiny bloody smiley symbol could mean anything.

If your Doc says you have prostate cancer you don't go off to a party thinking that you are OK, but if you only have a smiley face that could signify anything then you could potentially do just that.

Fucking stupid idea and a further dumbing down of communication routes that have been well established for hundreds if not thousands of years.

I do think that humanity has run it's course and this type of bollocks is the cure, much like Covid-19 being the solution for the planet and not the problem.

Sub 20 Pilot

Re: To be honest if you define literacy like that, the bar is set pretty low.

If you want proof or increasing illiteracy within the UK go and talk to someone in industry or in high end education.

They will confirm that the level of illiteracy and lack of common sense, along with a lot of other shortcomings are on the increase. Sadly the level of entitlement and self belief is on the increase amongst the same people.

I have worked in my industry for almost 40 years and the level of ability amongst the last generation and possibly the one before is declining.

If you want to believe otherwise then feel free, just don't put the onus of proof onto those who know otherwise through years of experience. If you think we are wrong then you come up with the evidence against it.

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