Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Campbell's CISO canned after lawsuit alleges hour-long rant against staff and customers

Re: Make your own

With a good local market and a slow cooker

Got a beef stew (nice bit of shin, managed to use it before my wife cooked it up for her national dish [1]) in the slow-cooker at the moment. Beef shin, carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, onion, garlic, celery, some herbs, well-reduced red wine with a splash of marsala, mushroom ketchup [2]..

I'm quite looking forward to eating it.

[1] Cornish pasty. Fortunately, we didn't have any swede in the veg fridge..

[2] Prefer it to Worcestershire sauce. More... mushroomy.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: last dns outage I had

all fur coat and no knickers.

I thought that was a good thing?

No, but I got milk

But no bananas!

Re: Mixing Metaphors

Is the veal any good?

*Shudder*

I wouldn't - it's been the special for two weeks and we haven't sold any yet..

Amazon literally tells its engineers not to step outside their assigned role or be fired

Having worked for a few big US companies, this is *very* much how they operate - almost like the US military (which is why the have a high number of backend staff per combat soldier.. perish the thought that a Rifleman MOS should put their own tent up!)

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: I can move it for them far cheaper than that!

But what if you missed and hit Houston ?

Oh well..

To digital natives, Microsoft's IT stack makes Google's look like a model of sanity

Re: Alternative point of view.

seeing as I've been using computers near daily for well over 60 years now

Assisted with building a Nascom 1 in (mumble) 1977 ish (and used it to - hand coding assembler was one of the first things I learnt until we bought the Zeap compiler..

So similar vintage I guess - I was 12 at the time.

Progressed to a BBC Model B (with a brief diversion to a Sinclair Spectrum) then an Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes, a PC running DOS (then OS/2, then linux) then various homebuild DOS/Windows boxen.

Now mostly MacOS/linux/FreeBSD. I do have an old Lenovo Windows laptop but it's mostly for doing stuff that isn't as easy on MacOS (*cough* ebook DRM on books that I buy).

Re: His mistake is in thinking it was designed...

Email is a thing. We know what email is. It's older than the ARPAnet.

I had intra-BBS emails (FidoNet?) back in the mid-late 1970s.. Was slow (depending on how many hops away the reciepient was and how often your BBSOp dialed out) but it worked..

Re: Marketing to the rescue

Try the New Outlook

You have to if you are using a Mac - sure your existing emails and calendar entries are still there but, if you are using Exchange Online, you *have* to use New Outlook. Otherwise it doesn't sync.

Caught us out when we migrated a bunch of people to Office365. They didn't like the "new" Outlook so switched it back to classic then complained about no new emails arriving..

Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49

Re: Those old enough to own reading glasses

Three pairs last time I looked, and another pair for driving...

One pair of (bifocal) glasses for reading/computer use, one (varifocal) pair for driving/dog walking

But then when your prescripion is -12 (with astigmatism) and -9 (with astigmatism) you are somewhat constrained by what you can do - the lenses have to be made of high-refractive index material to not have the edges about the same size as a double-glazing unit..

So glasses are *expensive*. Because of my prescription, the government gives a generous grant (£5 per eye - the optician just gives me the £5 off and doesn't bother to claim becaus ethe byzantine and tortuous claim method costs way more than £5 in employee time)

I sometimes really envy people who can just wake up in the morning and see stuff more than 6 inches away from the tip of their nose. Mind you, these days it's usually a kitten face about an inch from my nose wondering why we haven't fed them yet. And, given that we have 3 kittens, I had forgotten that they all come fitted with hobnail boots for running around during the night in.

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Re: Bubble

Note: uses US-style power sockets throughout

Many years ago I orked in the UK tentacle of a US RTOS company. We eventually moved out of our offices (an old manor house) into a newly-fitted out office.

As part of the fit-out, the US parent decreed that we have to use the same furniture as the US offices - so rather than buying local, everything had to be shipped at great expense from California.

They duly arrived and the electricians took one look at them and refused to touch the US-spec baseband setup - US electrical outlets apparently don't comply with UK standards (who knew!). So we had to have all the basebands re-done (the US HQ couldn't understand why we had to!) which cost yet more money.

The CEO (who had the motto of 'think like a billion-dollar company') was ejected fairly shortly after for thinking like a billion dollar company without a billion-dollar companies resources..

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Re: Linux MInt XFCE works well

I also went the Linux way and installed (with little tweaking) Linux Mint XFCE on a 2009 MacBook Pro

I used my old 17" MBP as a temporary Proxmox host when the RAID card in one of my cluster servers went fizz, fizz, pop..

It would only run 2 VMs but that was enough to keep the emails flowing (and the AD DC up) until the new card arrived.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: We need to go back to an unbloated OS.

There must be at least one tech zillionaire out there willing to fund that

There's the people writing a Windows NT4 clone (can't remember the name) - they could do with some cash..

Mind you, getting a billionaire involved usually comes with unacceptable strings ("I want all the user details, which websites they go to, which applications they have installed, how much they use it. Oh - and I want all their keystrokes. And a backdoor configured so I can get in whenever I want")

Don't cave to Euro censorship or backdoor demands, Uncle Sam warns US tech firms

Re: Luckily for me...

go and get their head checked and prefereably removed permanently

The French did a good line in that (using a British invention naturally) several hundred years ago.

Developer jailed for taking down employer's network with kill switch malware

Does Oracle bill Java by the thread?

Much better revenge - drop an anonymous line to the Oracle necrotising fasciitis team (AKA "licensing") saying that the company were using Oracle products without paying for them. Preferrably *after* installing Oracle wherever you had access to..

Bank reverses decision to replace 45 customer service staff with AI chatbot

Re: It’s unclear if the AI failed to perform as hoped, or...

Commbank just posted a 10 beeeeellion dollar profit

Yeah - but that's Aussie dollars so worth about £6.50 :-)

Transatlantic chip war fizzles as EU and US framework confirms 15% tariff cap

Re: Capitulation

The EU should tear up the agreement. If Trump can do it, so can they

The EU knows full well that the over-privileged man-child bully (Trump) can't deliver and, if it comes to it, can always be relied to back down at the last minute (TACO and all that).

So, if waving a meaningless bit of paper (which he won't understand is invalid unless voted on and accepted by the various EU member states) keeps the orange toddler happy then the EU loses nothing.

China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday

Re: This'll give our idiot government ideas

you think your internet connection isn't already filtered, firewalled and monitored by your government?

I hope they enjoy the copious pictures and videos of the new kittens then..

Molten salt nuclear reactors slated to power Google datacenters in 2030

Re: I assume this will be a Beta release

That would be a good reason for letting the private businesses get on with investment. Unlike government 'investment' it generally has to be worth doing

"AI"..

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

This is exactly what beancounters want

remember the beancounter mantra: "How much would *you* like it to add up to?"

Microsoft's Nuance coughs up $8.5M to rid itself of MOVEit breach suit

Re: OpenSSH

is available for Windows

Yeah - but that requires a basic level of computer competence by the end-user. They have to use (hushed voice) the COMMAND-LINE!

(Yes, I know, not really - stuff like Filezilla exists but that eeevil communist Open Source rather than good God-fearing capitalist for-profit software)

SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test

Re: X is just a swastika with the dashes missing

I aim for the stars... but sometimes I hit London.

Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough.

Although I think even the V2 rockets shunned the place.

Re: V2 site reporting

I played in the crater that was in the field behind the house

Our local woods in Barnet (about a mile away from the house I grew up in) had a number of deep bomb craters from where a WW1 Zeppelin had dumped its bomb load in an attempt to prevent itself crashng (or to crash more softly and without lots of boom boom on board..)

Re: Is there an award for Best Euphemism?

"Ocean synchronous orbit" is a good one.

As is lithobraking..

Boffins say tool can sniff 5G traffic, launch 'attacks' without using rogue base stations

Re: Facepalm

now some grad students with an SDR and a GitHub repo have gift-wrapped a downgrade attack that works in a parking garage

Presumably, they strip the COVID chips out of the 5G signals before decoding them? Or is it the other way round? I get so confused by the moronic conspiracy theories..

DARPA’s Cylon raider autonomous fighter jet advances to next phase

Re: This sounds dangerous . . .

A nice cup of tea and a scone.

I think you mean some toast. Or a bagel.

I toast, therefore I am.

Desktops and printers in coffee shops? Starbucks Korea tells customers to 그만 해

Re: Now I understand

One of those was Starbucks, and analysed the strategy of saturating an area with their shops until any local competition was driven out of business simply by swallowing up all the clientele through the statistical effect of anyone trying to find a coffee shop

Ah - the Walmart technique:

Move into an area, build lots of stores that can undercut all the local shops. Wait until all the local stores have gone out of business then close most of the stores to save money.

End result is that, in a lot of places, Walmart pretty much was a monopoly. No idea if that's still the case with internet shopping!

Re: Now I understand

I do have a soft spot for Mellow Birds.

Unfortunately, all the freeze dried coffee types send me straight to migraineville.

Dunno why - espresso coffee and all the derivatives thereof don't have the same effect. Drip percolators *sometimes* do - I suspect it's to do with how long the water is in contact with the grounds.

I have about 5 shots of coffee a day. I'm now one of those people that can drink a doppio espresso just before bed and then get a sound nights sleep!

Re: Now I understand

If you were some sort of effete social dandy you could order coffee

Many years ago some friend and I were riding round South Wales and decided to stop for coffee.. We duly ordered (the two Dutch guys and I happy to have it as it comes which, in those days, was milk heated in a microwave with a slug of coffee put in from the pot that had been sitting there since opening time - as it ran out, they just stuck it under the percolator and added more.. The Dutch guys were happy because, if the coffee was any stronger, it would have dissolved the spoon and the coffee pot..).

The other English guy got his and said "could I have black coffee please?". He got a frosty reply "that's how we drink coffee round here" from the old matron behind the counter.

One of the younger women hastened to get Nick his black coffee then let loose on the older lady in Welsh. The few words I caught were along the lines of "you serve customers what *they* want, not what *you* want".

(I speak very little Welsh..)

Marc Andreessen wades into the UK's Online Safety Act furor

Re: adult content that can easily be found on the internet

honestly, its gauling all these people who pick you up on every sleight mistake

Asterix on a horse-drawn sledge? I'd read that!

AI coding tools crash on launch, could reboot better in future

Re: Natural vs. programming language

Latin would be better than English, if only to avoid American vs English fights...

No fight here - we speak proper English (or at least *I* do) and the US speaks some awful doggerel of a language..

Re: Natural vs. programming language

while jakes intentions were rather differently nuanced

That's what you get for being a grumpy old man :-)

Re: Natural vs. programming language

English is a great language for poetry and jokes

And pretty good at being used to communicate where both parties don't actually speak English very well (or each others' language!).

Don't you love context-driven languages?

(Also ones with vocabulary and grammar stolen from just about every other language on earth..)

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Flawed technology

I have many times made a mental note that I do NOT want to crash into that

Try riding round a country corner on a motorbike at full [1] beans only to come face to spikes with a large bit of kit attached to the back of a tractor.. (hay baler? Hay turner? Lots of tine pointed at me was all I saw!)

All I can say is that I'm grateful that Honda brakes work really, really well.

[1] Not silly speed but a "decent rate of progression" as my driving instructor would have put it. The same driving instructor that told me "well - you are never going to fail your test for going too slow"

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Re: All because

@VoiceOfTruth: I think you're missing the point

Nah- he's just a troll stirring up crap.

Re: HMRC

You can buy a diesel from the years when everyone thought they were good and pay little tax to this day

Or buy a Morris Minor that has the zero-tax historic vehicle classification and pay no road tax..

(Yes - the car retains the zero rating, even if you sell it)

Publishers cry foul over W3C crusade to rid web of third-party cookies

More of an Okra man myself....

Yet to have it cooked properly - mostly an unpleasant slimy mess. Or mostly raw.

Trump pushes EU into trade 'deal' that several EU leaders aren't happy about

Re: The good, the bad, and the butt ugly

chihuahuas

Are Real People[TM] too! My chihuahua-adjacent Spanish rescue dog says so - loudly and often.

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

Re: I'm trying to make sense of this..

After the Elongates Muskrat apparently blabbed about something that Sumsung was to keep secret at Tesla's request

Never underestimate the reality-distorting effect of the various ketamine mixtures that he self-medicates with..

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Just don't use Windows

I’ve been using Mac and Windows literally for decades

Likewise. And MacOS is my daily use - both for work and home. I do use Windows as well (looks at shiny new Windows 11 work device) but, by preference, use MacOS.

And Homebrew. Want a linux utility? Homebrew will have it. Want to run something unsigned? Just go into Preferences/Security and tell MacOS to "run it anyway".

and it cheeses me off when a Windows user feels the desperate need to dump on Apple users

Again - likewise. Most of them have never used MacOS and just repeat the tired old tropes of "it's more expensive" [1] or "you can't get the software" [2] or even "it's all locked down" [3]. At work I recommend whatever will do the required task whether it be Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux etc etc. Sure - one of the variables is "is the user capable of using the solution" [4] - it's no good providing a barely IT literate Windows user a Mac because they'll hate you and generate more spurious support requests than you can shake a stick at.

[1] Taking into account the quality of the hardware compared to similarly specced Windows machines, no it's not. And I'm typing this on a 2019 MBP - try running Windows 11 on a laptop from 2019 (in a supported fashion.. sure you can install it but the moment you ask for any support MS and any of the support places will laugh at you).

[2] Yes you can. Want to run linux stuff? Homebrew. Want to run Windows stuff? Crossover/WINE or a Windows VM.

[3] No more than Windows. And considerably safer than Windows too. No Crowdstrike idiocy. Sure - there's malware targetting MacOS but it has a harder time taking root (pun intended)

[4] My wife being an example - she's never used MacOS and refuses to start because it woks in a different way to Windows. So she has a carefully-firewalled Dell laptop that I back up all the time, just in case.

Meta joins Google in ragequitting EU political ads over onerous regulations

Re: The US Is Starting To Realize

When the Eastern Invaders come calling this time, don't call us

We gave up on that a long time ago when we realised that, fundamentally, the US was very little different to 1939-era Germany.

The reason they got involved in WW2? Noting to do with "doing the right thing" and very much to do with one of Germanies allies attacking. And let's not forget all the failures that the US has dragged some of us into:

Korea

Vietnam

Afganistan

Iraq

So, no, we won't call. And, hopefully, our politicians will grow a spine and start saying "no" to the next US military failure-in-the-making.

Caught a vibe that this coding trend might cause problems

Re: Mixed results

I love the smell of baked milk in the morning ..

I don't - baked cheesecake makes we want to vomit.

Re: They [programming languages] require us to learn to think in programming terms

The same promises were made by 4GLs beloved of the same tribes of snake oil vendors and manglement of yesteryear

I remember one of those in the early 1990s (I was a mainframe assembler programmer at the time and naturally sceptical of anything that claimed to be able to generate code by just populating a desktop with what was, essentially, a flowchart. Which would then spit out code.

The fad lasted 6 months (and several tens of thousands of pounds) before it got dropped.

Weapons jam: Pentagon sucks at removing foreign objects from its gear, auditors say

Huh, why did DOGE not find and resolve this glaring oversight???

Simple - it wasn't what they were looking for since Elon doesn't supply DoD (yet).

VMware prevents some perpetual license holders from downloading patches

Re: Broadcom “support” portal

it won't be long until KVM becomes the hypervisor of choice, let's face it RedHat gives away free dev licenses for the techs to learn on and RHEL licensing isn't as bad as VMware bundles are getting to be

And there are virtualisation distros like Proxmox that are akin to VMWare in terms of capability. And fully supported with commercial-grade support (which obviously costs money but it's normal money not "your firstborn children down to the 5th generation" money that Broadcom is trying to charge.

A pox on them.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

Re: get off the internet

Is that you Alex (Jones)?

No - I think she's too busy fronting the One Show..

Oh - not that Alex Jones? Silly me, I forgot this isn't a British publication any more..

Re: "AI is changing the way we use our PCs,"...

Been using Linux since you could get the install CD's in magazines

Ha! N00b! *real* linux early adopters had to download it floppy by floppy (with the inevitable re-download when floppy 5 proves too be unreadable - and I didn't have decent internet at home or work so my friend did it at work. Unfortunately, either his or my floppy drive was out of calibration so it was hit or miss whether mine could read them..).

"Mostly competent" would probably be a good description of my skills

Mine were good enough to blag my way into a Unix/network sysadmin job (I'd never used Solaris or Cisco but gave a good impression of knowing what I was talking about!)

Nowadays I mostly use MacOS for desktop (laptop?) use and either FreeBSD or Devuan for server VM use (hosted on TrueNAS which also does stuff like Apple Time Machine)

Biden broadband benchmarks are BS, says Trump FCC

Re: Good. In EU we'll enjoy our 10Gbps speeds with regulated AI...

Even here in the UK the govt is having to pay our near monopoly last mile provider to wire up anything that openreach classes as a 'bit hard'

CityFibre are expanding quite quickly - my Zen connection used to be 900/100 (which is the fastest that OpenWoe would provide). Zen then signed up with CityFibre (who had cabled my area a year or so ago) so now I get 900/900 for £25 less than I was paying with Zen/Openreach.

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

Re: Meh.

That's surprising because in my survey of the world's sausages, I found that German sausages are the wurst

You brat!

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Talk about overthought.

It's almost like it's paid by the word..