Posts by J. Cook

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: Hey kids....

Ooo... more shares for the C level for their golden parachute! /sarcasm

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: As per the OP's story

Place I used to work for did something similar; Customers generally did either pre-pay, payment due when job is finished, or at best NET 5 for invoicing. From their suppliers, they wanted net 30 or 60, and would pay on the evening of day 30 or 60; They had a problem keeping suppliers, because they all got tired of the beancounter who was doing that.

Place I'm at now is MUCH better about paying it's bills.

Legacy Update updated – so your old Windows can be, too

I can think of a few things, like controlling an ancient CNC mill that the manufacturer has completely disowned (or has gone out of business) and the like.

Vibe coding platform Replit's latest update is infuriating customers with surprise cost overruns

Re: You want Vibe? Then pay!

Probably ROFL-ing, although the entire concept behind this makes me want to ralph.

If I want vibe coding, I'll have my cat walk across the keyboard...

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

Re: Crud begets Crud

... Oh, kind of like a handful of apps that refuse to work on windows 11, but worked fine in windows 10? Or stuff that worked just fine and dandy in windows 7, but just stopped working or started working really poorly under windows 10 despite it being compatible?

(I won't get into the utter train wreck that is the audio subsystem with windows 10 and 11, only to say that there's a reason why I have a five channel analog mixer on my desk with an analog mic with the entire mess being output into the line-in jack on the machine...)

There's only been three real paradigm shifts with MS on the desktop side:

9x to XP (dropped the old kernel for the NT kernel)

XP to windows 7/8.1 (the former is debatable, but the latter was a major enough shift)

windows 7 to windows 10 (massive UI changes)

Server OS has a couple more:

NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 (UI, much better kernel)

4.0 to win2K (properUSB support and Active Directory)

windows 2003 to 2008 (major UI overhaul)

2008 R2 to 2012 R2 (Another major UI overhaul)

2012R2 to 2016 ( (akin to the windows 7 to 10 move)

There's been a slow decline with versions past 2016, mostly in that it's being shifted into a cloud endpoint, and of course AI being threaded through all of it, regardless if it needs it or not.

I'm honestly not sure what server 2024 is gonna look like, we've not deployed it here as 2022 is still under full support and will be for a while, even if the windows 10 (which it shares code with) is being EOL'd.

Elon outs $16.5B Samsung chip deal Tesla asked to keep secret

Re: So....

... I thought that the older models had the LIDAR sensors in them, but a firmware update disabled them in favor of 100% optical recognition.

Still not buying anything made by tesla until they fix their build quality and get rid of it's CEO.

VMware reboots its partner program again – and it looks like smaller players are out

Re: But The Register consistently hears that many VMware customers plan to quit the vStack

It takes time to make foundational changes, especially if it involves buying new hardware to replace hardware that still has some of the shiny on it, but doesn't have the new company's Official Seal of Approval(TM) (*coughs*Nutanix*wheeze*) or involves scaling a knowledge cliff to learn a new product.

... so does curare; personally, I'd use pure capsaicin oil for the greatest effect.

Re: and history repeats its self as Broadcom unloads both barrels into both feet again

They are certainly acting like it.

guess I'm gonna have to learn KVM and either cope with Proxmox's UI, Nutanix's "we'd like to sell you a forklift upgrade for roughly the same price you'll pay for vmware support", Hyper-V and the unreliable mess that is Windows Server (even the core edition), or possibly the Morpheus thing that HPE bought- I need to research that one and see if it's worth adding to the proof of concept I'm running.

AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs

Re: This Leaves Me Out

Solid design, lousy software support. But that's Sony for you. :(

Re: Solution?

Or if the manufacturer cared enough to still support it past five years. (*cough*SONY*WHEEZE*)

(Had a laptop that was pretty damn good for it being a 2002 vintage model- it ran XP without any complaint, the onboard graphics were actually decent enough to do some gaming, and it ticked every box I had at the time. fast forward three-four years, to find that there was a bug in the display driver that caused hard locks, but the drivers from manufacturer of the GPU didn't recognize it because the laptop's OEM (Sony) had a custom BIOS for the GPU; They never provided a single driver update in the 5 odd years that had elapsed between introducing that model to when I discovered this issue. Shame, too, as it was a damned solid machine at the time that was supremely easy to work on, had hot-swappable drive modules, and the option for a second battery which gave it a ridiculous amount of run time for the day.

Citrix signals return to the mainstream hypervisor market with a product it says isn’t quite ready for the job

We dropped Citrix like a hot rock a handful of years ago at [RedactedCo] primarily based on 1) having to re-build a configuration for their load balancer/ application proxy appliance after even minor updates (and other issues with it); and 2) tell us that the product could handle a specific configuration and wasting nearly a week's worth of time between myself and the VAR we had brought in only to find out that it absolutely could NOT handle said configuration AND lying to us repeatedly about it until we escalated to one of the architects for that product.

I have ZERO faith in anything Citrix develops or sells to be fit for any purpose whatsoever.

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Re: Agression and shouting

Even better- he was self-aware of his limitations and weaknesses, and had things in place to mitigate those.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Re: It's time we celebrate the Banana!!!

I see your song, and raise you these two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yModCU1OVHY

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO7M0Hx_1D8

It's time for a pint... just not a banana flavored one.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Re: Honestly

It's a cooler day here in Hell, Arizona, US- the high temp is predicted to be 99 degrees F (~37 degrees C). Last week we averaged the 110 F range (which made a lot of people here say the F word...)

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

:: awards you One Internet Point ::

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

When I built my new workstation, one of the applications I was trying out for controlling the many ARGB lights inside the chassis used a static window size of 1024 x 1080, which is larger than the monitor I have on my test bench (1280x1024); Made for moving around in the app *quite* annnoying.

(I ultimately ended up controlling the fans using a dedicated microcontroller, because nothing in the PC chassis market was able to do what I wanted it to do.)

Fixed dialog and application window sizes are NOT best practice for ANY platform, period.

VMware and Siemens spar over where to stage software licence showdown

Re: Still using VMWare and Oracle and Unity...

More or less correct.

I've been tasked with finding alternatives to vmware in our environment, and of the three viable choices we have (Hyper-V, ProxMox, and Nutanix AHV), the first one might end up being the one we go to, even though it's the least desireable choice- The UI and UX for Proxmox is not exactly friendly to someone unfamiliar with Linux, especially on the configuration side, and migrating machines over will be... interesting. (And not in a good way.)

I'm stalled out with testing AHV, because the community edition of the install ISO up and chose the wrong damn network interfaces instead of what VMware and ProxMox does and ask the user at the keyboard what network interface to configure during the process, so I have to dig up a script post-install to fix that in order for me to finish configuring the damn thing to begin with.

Nutanix would also us rather buy their hardware instead of the validated hardware we already own, so it'd be more of a forklift upgrade costing more than the support contract that VMware quoted us back in March. (And we'd also have to buy additional hardware for what we have anyway, because AHV doesn't like using things like external storage appliances, even if they are on a dedicated SAN.

While there's a probable migration path from VMware to Hyper-V, it's going to involve down time (much like ProxMox's migration process) and adding in the instability of Windows Servers as a Hypervisor, which frankly scares me.

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

Re: Phone down

Had to do something similar with a laptop- we had purchased the 'accidental damage' coverage for the unit at the place I was at, and in this instance, the machine had soda dumped into it.

I put a note in with the machine (after pulling the hard drive with had HIPAA-level data on it) that the drive was not supplied for that reason, and outside the scope of the repair. The company was also informed of that when I set up the repair order.

It got repaired and returned, and it sprang to life just fine after I reinstalled the drive on it.

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: The BOFH is slipping

Yeah, but that requires actually doing the work, and it's a waste of an otherwise productive weekend, even at those inflated rates.

US Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier crew left half-fed by contractor-locked ovens

Re: Are those ovens standard commercial ovens?

That's why they are called "mess" halls... /sarcasm

Re: What the heck are they supposed to do in an extended wartime situation?

I worked with a guy for a while who we hired from a PMC (Private Military Contractor, aka mercenary / "Private Security" company) who did their IT.

He ultimately quite and went back, because if someone was yelling at him (or flinging lead at speed) he could shoot back.

(One of the many people we had who joined and left because of the toxic boss we had...)

Re: What idiot signed a contract that forbids maintenance on basic tools?

... and then goes to work for the contractor after they get out of public service, or into the lobbying industry for the same reasons. /snark

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: VAX field service engineers

... or lathes, for that matter.

seeing a bodie bent in ways it was never intended to does something to the deep paths of one's brain. (and possibly bringing up the contents of the stomach, too.)

How Amazon red-teamed Alexa+ to keep your kids from ordering 50 pizzas

Re: Yeah but...

Yeah, someone tried that with me as well, but I had already changed the wake word on it.

Personally, I'm going to be ditching the things here shortly because of the changes to the T&Cs for things, especially now that the madlads at Home Assistant have cooked up a voice assistant that works entirely on-prem, provided a sufficiently powerful box to run it on...

Your graphics card's so fat, it's got its own gravity alert

Shame cases no longer have a front side groove for cards to seat in. I ended up designing and printing a brace to combat the card droop in my case. (it's a little odd because it sits in a stand that holds it at an angle.)

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: Sheer genius!!

Oh, a light show with the smoke and flames! :D

The LittleGP-30: A tiny recreation of a very big deal from the 1950s

Re: GP

But if you curse at it, does it issue you tickets in leiu of toilet paper or the three seashell method?

mines the one with the "Demolition Man" movie logo on the back.

Crimelords at Hunters International tell lackeys ransomware too 'risky'

Re: Leak Soup

... perhaps some leak spin?

:: runs out the door before the rotten tomatos can be thrown ::

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

I had, at one point in time, a Lexmark Optra S, which was a 12ppm beast of a machine in it's day. Except I never really used it, and on that printer, the OPC drum portion of the toner cartridge did eventually die on me from disuse.

The other reason I got rid of it was because the process for replacing the paper pickup/feed rollers required almost a full teardown of the damned thing, including pulling the main drive train out.

The HP laser printers (at least the medium to large business class models) were built for long service life- the pickup and feed rollers were super easy to replace, and you got a set of them with a maintenance kit, which was every 100,000 to 150,000 pages, depending on model.

The less said about the "L" series models, the better- those were pretty crap.

Re: HP

Ah, the old Tektronix Phasers (as I used to know them before Xerox bought the technology) and their crayons.

Beautiful print quality, and once they were up to temp, you sent it a print job, and it would crank out full bleed color prints at a rate unheard of for that size and class of printer.

The downsides? a 20 minute warmup/cooldown period, and during the warmup phase, it ate a full set of crayons, which IIRC were not exactly cheap either. And the place smelled like someone had put a box of Crayolas into an oven as well. :D

Fond memories.

Fresh Wine-flavored version of Mono released

Re: Web apps

Well, for a while there was a windows port of Safari, but Apple dropped it like a bad habit a number of years ago. :D

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

... and also to cause the insurance company to deny the claim because it was coded wrong. /sarcasm

Still can't get to your Outlook mailbox? You aren't alone

Re: Decades later, it hasn't changed.

Well, there's the whole momentum thing with Exchange, and that it's a reasonable mashup of calendering, email, and contact management in one single application / server. I'm not saying that it's good by any means, but finding a replacement that's not worse is... difficult.

My experience with dealing with Outlook and Exchange is part of the reason why I have grey hairs already. (and dealing with a support team that, at one point, was under the opinion that the RTM release of Office would work out of the box with an up to date version of Exchange without having to have a service pack and a minimum of three critical patches installed to make that connectivity work- this was a 9 month argument that was a major stressor.)

Re: The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

a long time ago at a different employer we ran into a problem where the dial up internet service we were using wouldn't let us cancel service without authorization from the person who had set up the service- said person had passed away unexpectedly, and their replacement was getting things sorted out. We had to get copies of the death certificate in order to cancel each account, or at least until one of the owners of the company contacted someone high up over at the ISP, who agreed to do a "one time" bulk cancellation for us. (There might have been involvement from lawyers, I can't remember.)

The replacement service was much more sensible.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Re: Nuns!

:: hands Doctor Syntax the steel ruler to dole out pun-ishment ::

Re: Schoolboy error

That's something you have to get into the habit of.

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Re: $7,500 a month

I expect the OP was speaking from experience on that one... :D

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: How much ink?

They forgot to turn that option off in the print preferences. :: snicker ::

Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego

Sadly, I cannot partake in this model- what little display space I have is taken up by the two lego models I have already (the D&D set and the "Majestic Tiger" model.

I really need to dig out that large tote filled with various bricks n peices, and maybe take a month (or two) amassing the containers to sort everything out proper-like.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

I will note that the RP2040 microcontrollers have a pretty solid spot on my desk: I have one running as a macropad, and another one running as an ARGB controller (or will once I get the custom PCBs I had fabricated delivered and built). None of the arduino's have the horsepower to run those tasks with the flexibility that these little critters have.

I also have a pair of Pis (a v3 and a v4) running Pi-hole on my network, something that they've been doing for a few years, and frankly, I need to build a fresh new image of both of them as they are passively outdated, OS wise. Sure, I could have picked up a couple cheap USFF boxes, installed linux on them along with Pi-hole, but then there's moving parts (mostly cooling fans) and they drink FAR more power than what I currently have.

I have a third Pi4 that was running OctoPi for the older 3d printer, which is taking a break until I get more bench space cleared for it, and a fourth that has been a test bed for a voice-assistant thing I've been wanting to cobble together.

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

Re: It happened to the McLaren F1 fuel injection first.

As always, there's an XKCD for that:

https://xkcd.com/488/

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Also lunch time

I partially fixed that by blocking out my lunch time on my work calendar.

I say partially, because I have cow-orkers who don't bother looking at the busy/free times when they set up the calls...

Re: Someone else's number

Had a similar problem; people would call my extension asking for someone who wasn't there, and then refusing to call the correct number i gave them.

that stopped cold after I said "Look, I've given you the CORRECT number to call for this matter, and I've asked you multiple time to remove this one? If you continue, I will consider this harrassment, and forward it all to our legal department."

never got another call from them after that.

Re: Warren's big mistake

And that's the exact reason why [RedactedCo]'s policy is "if you need a mobile device, we will provide one for you" and we do NOT like having personal owned devices connected, because we don't control the device.

Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Hey, at least Vista was partially usable.

But still; cleanse it with fire.

Re: Full Metal Panic: Wubuntu

... That's more than enough to make me run away screaming.

(for the kids that never heard of it- Windows ME took all the bad things about the windows 98/ 98se codebase, tried to put the UI from windows 2000 over it, and failed miserably enough that OEMs either kept windows 98 SE or went directly to windows 2000, which was based on the NT codebase and what we are using descendants of.)

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Checking the boxes

Negative, although I do have pyromantic tendencies. :D

I am certainly a friend of Dorothy, though.

Microsoft says premature patch could make Windows Recall forget how to work

Or, as Microsoft calls them, customers. /rimshot

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Re: As noted

*cracks knuckles*

Thunderbird is my primary mail archive- I have it configured to copy down my messages to local storage, and have done so for the past.... decade or so. My profile is ~ 16 GB, which makes moving it between machine an interesting affair. :)

The bulk of the archive is in a separate profile folder, and once or twice a year, I spend the hour or so trimming the fat out of the mailbox and moving messages to that archive. it's not fast, but it's solid, and that's what I'm after. Now if search function had a better UI, I'd be super happy with it, but I can't complain about the price at least. :) (that, and It's Not Outlook. :D )