Posts by TVC

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Interesting discussion - thank you.

I only use POP3 for my 6 email addresses. On my main PC I download everything and set the classic Outlook client to delete it fron the server after 14 days and unless it's junk keep it locally, forever. I back up my PST files to a remote NAS box.

I also download emails to my android phone using Samsung Mail every 15 mins and only keep live ones.

I have email pop3 clients on a couple of other machines and download emails to them when I need to. I can go back xx days

So I have virtually nothing left on my ISPs system. And local copies of everything on my LAN.

My wife has her own POP3 email address on my domain and uses her own POP3 client to keep her stuff separate and reasonably private.

I also use MyPhoneExplorer to sync my classic outlook contacts and calendar with my Android phone and vice versa.

Oracle's examplar win over SAP for Birmingham City Council is 3 years late

I project managed an international sales to manufacturing SAP system. It went live in 4 countries over one weekend, on time and under budget. I did the other two countries over the next year.

It can be done.

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

Well done

Well done Cisco.

Sometimes big business can do the right thing.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Yep that's me. Then I go to put the socket set away in the shed and find I already have one, or two.

I think cat food is optimised to have right mix of ingredients and vitamins (mice, birds, prawns, fillet steak etc) to keep them healthy and are very picky, but dogs will eat anything.

Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug

This sort of issue has been around for decades.

Just make the assumption that when you save any sort of edited object, that at least a smell of the old one will be left behind. Save it into a new file or even re-snip it.

Apple bags patent for folding phone that closes as it's dropped

Stick any phone to a cat and it will always land the right way up. Problem solved at zero cost.

200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push

Only just got an S22 think I'll wait for the S24

An S23 Ultra? Where did that come from? I only just bought an S22 Ultra.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

My wife feeds and vets 35 cats. They suffer from three common traits:

1) they burn cash at an alarming rate.

2) they produce a large amount of shit.

3) they are all bloody annoying.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Don't tell 'em Pike

Watchdog warns UK health data platform could damage patients' trust

Even the NHS can't share info with itself so no worry.

I'm not worried. Even my GP can't see my hospital records and vice versa and what I can see like test results are often missing or wrong.

Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie

The delights of punch cards

An early finish to a night shift was often guaranteed by the addition of an extra hole to a punch card deck, resulting in a failed job which would be blamed on the punch card machine. Not that we ever tried it, of course not.

Italian stuntman flies aeroplane through two motorway tunnels

My best through the Blackwall Tunnel was

My best through the Blackwall Tunnel was about 105 on my bike, after several beers, when it was socially acceptable to drink. Some of the trip may well have been on the walls or ceiling! Great days.

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

I've got a Hikvision CCTV system - do I bin it?

I've had a Hikvision CCTV system for a while and it is very good, the best I've had and excellent value - though someone in China can probably watch our cats and foxes as well as us.

After I bought it I realised Hikvision is probably a company I should avoid, as I do with Huawei.

Nothing I can do now. They've had my money so no point in scrapping it and any replacement is also likely to come from China.

The only solution is for British companies to get competitive. I'd willingly pay more for non Chinese stuff.

Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users' devices for banned content, professor warns

No doubt systems have improved but..

Quite a few years ago my corporate system was able to scan graphics in email looking for pornagraphic images and forwarding any it found to my IT team. Apart from the tit and bum photos there were loads of innocent false alarm pictures of kids in baths etc, taken by parents.

It will only take one false alarm to screw up someone's life or career.

'Login infrastructure issue' blamed as sustained Xero outage threatens payrolls

Best use an in house system

Maybe best to use an in house system. It will probably go down as often, for some reason, but at least you have someone ( your IT people) local to go and shout at or sack.

UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music

Re: Wot! No mention of the Hybrid Music 5000?

Brings back memories of Take Five played through the speaker of a TeleType console of an ICL 1904. Loaded via paper tape if I remember correctly.

Apple patches zero-day vulnerability in iOS, iPadOS, macOS under active attack

Don't remember having all this trouble with transistor systems and ferrite ring memory.

Remember the bloke who was told by Zen Internet to contact his MP about crap service? Yeah, it's still not fixed

I guess some jobs just go wrong.

14 years ago I was with Plusnet. I got fed up with 300k downloads and being told I was too far from the exchange. I moved to Zen and my download speed increased immediately to 5mb. Never looked back.

Every time since, any problems have been proved, with Zen's help, to be at my end.

After staring over the precipice once before, Kent County Council considers £500m in outsourcing again

They wouldn't be so short of money if they spent it wisely

KCC have a track record of wasting money.

For example, they just reintroduced operation "Brock" which partly closes the M20 when there was no need to do so.

Russia's Pirs ISS module scheduled to fall away, much like Moscow's interest in the space station

Anyway

What exactly do they do up there all day?

Subcontractors working on CityFibre's £45m Derby rollout threaten to 'rip up tarmac' in dispute over payments

I'm only having a small single storey extension to my house and nothing has happened for three weeks because of a lack of floor beams. People who I rent the site toilet from are doing OK as I pay the rent plus cleaning and emptying but it's not be used.

Toilet company say its the same everywhere.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

Re: Awaiting FlatTards....

All done in Pinewood Studios.

Re: Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

Two Nations but hardly any computing power and able to take 100+ passengers.

Ryanair have just bought a load of 737Maxes and are hiring 2000 desperate pilots.

Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

Not really as much of an achievement as Concorde was 46 years ago.

11-year-old graduate announces plans to achieve immortality by 'replacing body parts with mechanical parts'

You're too late kid.

You're too late kid I already started a few years ago and it's no fun:

Right Knee is metal (now worn out)

Left knee is metal

Artificial heart valve (wearing out)

Teeth implants and caps.

Just look after what you have and make it last as long as you can.

And BTW, IQ is no substitute for experience and common sense.

Kaspersky Password Manager's random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

I don't understand

How do brute force password crackers work?

If I get my phone password wrong a few times it takes a photo of me and wipes itself. Other systems typically lock after a few goes.

Is it that some systems just let you keep trying.

What am I missing?

Laptop option on the way for ortholinear keyboard hipsters in form of MNT Reform add-on

All this new fangled stuff

I started my I T career 50 years ago using a Teletype machine with a roll of paper for a screen. It did at least have a small speaker so you could tell if your program had stopped. Never did learn to touch type but I was a very fast two finger typist even though I was also very inaccurate.

Hubble memory errors persist despite NASA booting long-idle backup payload computer

Give it a thump? Somehow.

Any opportunity for a bit of percussive maintenance?

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

Wait for Windows 12

On the basis that every alternate version of Windows is crap, Windows 11 is bound to be as well so by the time 12 comes out I'll be ready for a new machine and it might all work.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

Windows 10 may be my last Windows version.

Just checked my main machine and it won't run Windows 11 so Windows 10 may well be the last Windows version for me.

SEC still digging into SolarWinds fallout, nudges undeclared victims

Re: Team of 1000

If it was a government agency then, probably, 998 thought about and discussed it and 2 wrote the actual code.

From I'm feeling lucky to I'm feeling Brave: Browser maker erects web search engine beta

I too started using Brave on both Android and Windows a few weeks ago and my experience has been positive. Firefox kept behaving oddly so I gave up with that and Edge is improving but everytime I try it, it annoys me. Will now try the Brave search engine.

Chinese web giant Baidu unveils Level 4 robo-taxi that costs $75k to make

Jump in and if it doesn't like your face it locks the doors and takes you to a Uyghur concentration camp.

There are a lot of people out there who'd like to fire Jeff Bezos into space – but he's doing the honours himself

Amazon Smile

Others have mentioned it here but I'll do it again.

Sign up to amazon smile and 0.5% of what you spend goes you YOUR nominated charity. No hassle at all.

It's not a lot but if everyone did it .............

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

I had a user who had a laptop and external monitor. It was beyond him to understand that he did not have two computers. I suppose having an external keyboard and mouse as well didn't help.

Still he was only the company accountant so you can expect much.

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

I remember fixed head disks.

Nothing new.

I remember using disks with one set of heads per track.

Bloody huge though. Seem to remember seeing one that must have been over a metre across.

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

Phew. Glad I'm no longer in I T

So glad I no longer work in I T. I'd be heading for a nervous breakdown.

Preliminary report on Texas Tesla crash finds Autosteer was 'not available' along road where both passengers died

Re: Best just make a full size scalextric

Perfectly good white lines??

You obviously don't drive on British roads.

We don't even have perfectly good tarmac.

Best just make a full size scalextric

So autosteer needs white lines painted on the road to work then. Might as well have a slot in the road to recharge the car and steer it at the same time. IE a big Scale Scalextric.

BTW what happens if two driverless cars meet each other on a single track road?

Train operator phlunks phishing test by teasing employees with non-existent COVID bonus

I did something similar

I created a spurious email account that had the real company name in it then sent a random selection of staff an email saying we were upgrading their computer to make it faster and asked them to send me their passwords.

25% did. One even admitted they thought it was a scam, but still sent it.

These were generally highly educated, well paid individuals, but obviously idiots.

On another occasion I went round and inserted key loggers into some machines to see what rubbish passwords they were using and to test their eyesight - some were left in plain sight. No one noticed, many were using stupid passwords.

Spy agency GCHQ told me Gmail's more secure than Microsoft 365, insists British MP as facepalming security bods tell him to zip it

An ex GCHQ bod once told me never to use GMail

Odd. An ex GCHQ spook told me that if you want everyone to know within 5 minutes put it on GMail. Mind you that was a few years back so maybe things have changed.

I always assume that as soon as you put anything on the Internet it's probably public anyway.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Re: No TV

I'd love to hear about the vacuum cleaner problems. Far more interesting than this wall to wall, repetative twaddle.

He's dead, sad, happens every day, move on.

UK terror law reviewer calls for expanded police powers to imprison people who refuse to hand over passwords

Surely Government departments like GCHQ can already read all our stuff without a password or don't they want to admit that?

Patch alert for Apple fans: Cybercrooks have already been exploiting this flaw in iPhones, iPads, and watches

Never mind the crooks I'd worry about governments.

If you want to crap yourself about cyber security have a read of "This is how they tell me the world ends". All about the Cyber Arms Race. A really good read and rather terrifying. I knew some of it but not the extent of government (friend and foe) involvement in taking advantage of zero-day vulnerabilities.

A Code War has replaced The Cold War. And right now we’re losing it

I'm currently reading This is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Petlroth. I worked in I T for 40 years and some of that involved me in cyber security but this book is a real eye opener and a thrilling read to boot.

Google to end free unlimited online photo, vid storage, will eventually delete files if accounts go over their cap

Glad I'm backward and don't store stuff in the cloud if I can help it. Have a nice NAS box in my remote backup store (the garage).

Researchers made an OpenAI GPT-3 medical chatbot as an experiment. It told a mock patient to kill themselves

The UK government must be using it

Now it makes sense.

The UK government are consulting it for their Covid policy.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

If you want to get in the shit, let your kids play on your computer. Otherwise, don't.

Simples!