Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Re: I dont believe it...

First off, get yourself a domain. That way you're independent of a provider and can move at will by just changing the MX (mail exchange) record. Do NOT get this from GoDaddy - ever

I've had a personal (family) domain for many years (got it as a freebie on a Sun training course pre-y2k). I used to run the server myself (initially on Ubuntu, then FreeBSD then Proxmox Mail Gateway). Eventually I got bored with running the server and migrated my domain over to Zoho. Which, kind of, just works. And I don't get panicked phone calls at 6am from my brother that he can't get his email..

If Zoho start to suck I'll move it elsewhere - there's not a shortage of EU based providers.

Re: One wonders ...

stop being the boiled frog?

You do realise that that's an urban myth? A frog put into water that's being slowly heated will, like any sensible organism, jump out as soon as it gets uncomfortable.

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Re: People will buy Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity stickers?

Police arrested the thieves VERY quickly.

Many years ago I was working at a place and we had *very* expensive RAM going missing from a cupboard that only IT had access to. Manglement had a pretty good idea of who was doing it. So they bought some SmartWater and marked all the stuff in the cupboard when said suspected perps were not in the office.

Sure enough, a week or so later some of the RAM and HDDs were missing. Old plod were summoned and pointed at said staff (both quite highly paid contracters - why the hell they would risk that is anyones' guess!)

Plod promptly got a warrant and raided their houses. Sure enough, bags of RAM & HDDs. Which, after testing, proved to be marked with the correct SmartWater. They both ended up with criminal records and deferred jail. The former making it really, really difficult to get new contracts, especially for the one that lost his security rating due to having a criminal record.

Both were bright people and must have known that they would eventually get caught - so why risk a lucrative career for some short-term gain?. It still baffles me.

Re: People will buy Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity stickers?

where a pile of rust with a vin plate attached was sold

Oi! Don't speak about the Morris Minor like that!

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Colossus meats Guardian and the world is enslaved!

I have no mouth and yet I must scream.

*That's* the end-stage of unrestricted AI.

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

It's that we over-assign intelligence to cats and toddlers

*Cough*

My cats wish me to remind you that they are, in fact, devastatingly intelligent.

When they choose to be. Which, since it requires effort, isn't very often and usually involves the death/torture/mutilation of various small furry prey items.

Toddlers OTOH I would agree about. Happily, other than myself 60 years ago, I have zero experience of said breed.

Re: worn-out engine lathe

I've had to counsel many machine tools past their tolerance limits, poor sods

Did you use the correct oils, incense and prayers to the Ommnisiah?

Machine spirits need the proper rituals to function properly y'know. Not the blasphemous incantations of the Ruinous Powers like Anthropic.

(Yes, re-reading some of the better W40k stuff like Caiphas Cain.)

Re: Pretending to be AI

To quote a comedian (can't remember who) from the late 80's/early 90's:

"It's a puppet you muppet"

(I might have added the "you muppet" bit)

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Re: To be expected

Celsius

That's the commie temperature measurement used outside the US ain't it? Not like good old Freedom Fahrenheit!

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

Or, you know migrate to server 2025 with the steping stones of server 2019 and server 2021

At which point you'll discover that the BC in-house application running on the server was written specifically to run on Server 2012 and won't actually run on a later version. And is reliant on a DB engine version that won't run on later/supported server OSes either.

Working with a 'legacy' environment *really* isn't as simple as 'just upgrade'.

data thieves and advertisers

Tautology.

if you're caught out by something like an OS reaching the end of it's supported life (and not learnt from the last time this happened), then I have little sympathy

Quite a few might be in the position like I was in my last place where I was repeatedly warning the business that quite a number of our servers were out of date, not updated and thus unsupportable (not to mention that the h/w on the in-prem ones was no longer supported by the manufacturer..)

I can sum up the response as "no budget to fix it, you'll just have to do the best you can". The systems that ran on those servers were, in the main, business-critical.

Which is one of the (many) reasons why they are my ex-employer.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

Re: "...rivals Backblaze and Wasabi... Their only advantage is cheaper egress"

Backblaze does not sound comfortable though

Well, they do have a service called 'fireball'..

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Re: Language translation is (nearly) the worst option

I would imagine that the other path of throwing everything away, and starting from scratch in a totally different but supported system, will be even more trouble

I refer the honourable gentleFruit to the current Capita Civil Service pension system as a prime example..

I know, lets take a complicated historical system and do a big-bang cutover to a system that we haven't even got yet! After all, we've got two years two months because of our total inability to manage projects so what can go wrong?

Re: Ummm...

I'm 58, and we did learn COBOL as part of my computer studies course back in 89-92

Yoof! I am, as of yesterday, 61.

And, when I was looking for my first proper job back in (counts fingers) 1988, I did do a 2-week cobol course. I can just about read a Cobol listing and work out what it's doing but anything beyond that..

Nah.

Re: “Could” - if only someone ipays us …

So let's put the code through a bingo machine, nobody will be able to tell if it's right or wrong.

"Bank error in your favour. Collect umpteen squillion pounds"

"SIRI, please tell me the easiest way to launder umpteen squillion pounds"

Re: this is crazy talk

like assembler modules that are called (who's gonna convert that and what do you convert it to)

My first proper job was as a TPF assembler programmer on IBM 3090J S/370 lumps.

Then I realised that a) programming was boring, b) It wasn't my core skill [1] and c) Support had way cooler tools.

[1] AKA "I wasn't very good at the nitty-gritty details. Which, for an assembler programmer is 'pretty much everything'"

Re: COBOL is easy...

The rewriting of the Cobol isn't the hard part. The hard part is the testing, and fixing any errors that come up (and there will be errors)

Someone I know used to work with a banking mainframe running ancient Cobol stuff. His description was "some fairly simple Cobol with 10 million exception cases where the rules don't strictly apply"

Re: COBOL is easy...

The biggest problem about legacy systems is usually that no-one is exactly sure what they do which parts of their function are still required and which are obsolete

One place I orked we found a Novell server humming away in a cvupboard with a "do not turn off" faded sticker on it. No-one who worked there had any idea what it was doing. Attaching a keyboard and display didn't get us any useful info other than Novell was way out of date.

So, after gaining permission from The Powers Above, we turned it off.

That month, the billing cycle failed. The calculations ran happily on the mainframe but the server that generated the billing never got anything. Opps.

Turned out that the Novell box had just one job - on the last day of the month, grab the mainframe data and save it onto the server (which was on an entirely separate LAN to the mainframe).

Fortunately, turning it back on and tweaking it to run the job there and then produced that months bills only a day late.

It then got relocated into the server room and labelled properly with "Monthly billing transfer server, do not power off" and the contact details of the system owner for the billing system (who hadn't known about its existence before..)

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums – in car crashes, that is

Re: Touchscreens...

because I'm shouting at a 1968 Alfa Romeo

We are reduced to one car at the moment (the wifes' Morris Minor). WOuldn't matter even if it had a car stereo - we wouldn't be able to hear it anyway unless turned up to 'ears bleeding' level.

Re: Streaming eh?

Sure, but my vinyl player keeps skipping when I'm in the car.

Many, many years ago I knew a flash git trendy guy that had a car record deck - I think it only played 45s but time and alcohol have blurred my memory

Re: Maybe the music

was so awful the drivers just lost the will to live.

I avoid the popularity trap by just listening to prog rock, folk and jazz..

(And a bit of prog metal)

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Re: Training

But this is the 'public sector' so anything goes and no council officers or seniors will ever be held accountable

Speaking as someone who works in public service in data protection/security - what you say in bunkum.

We spend a *lot* of time publicising that sort of thing and training people in data handling and security, knowing full well that, if we fail, the Daily Wail (and people like you) will go into frothing rages.

Your data is far more likely to be lost via a data breach in the corporate world than in public service. And when was the last time someone at Microsoft or Amazon/AWS got sacked for mishandling data?

DARPA's autonomous missile-firing missile advances toward flight tests

Longshot kick de bucket..

Thank you Rude Boy Ska

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

Re: Spycatcher

The phrase "being economical with the truth" comes to mind

Or, as we used to call it 'a Microsoft answer'.

Conveys *an* accurate truth that's nowhere near the whole truth and is often designed to hide the whole truth.

Yet the UK government continues to throw money at US IT companies …

And corrupt home-grown ones like Crapita..

Which, as someone with a civil service pension, enrages me.

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Re: Feature creep

and even my cat!

My cat(s) are already sufficiently cryptic/cryptid thankyouverymuch..

(6 of them - ranging from 19 years old to 8 months)

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Re: Not my turf but...

I can't imagine I'd opt for anything requiring a subscription payment to the manufacturer

this was a major reason for discarding some marques (*cough* Audi) when looking for a new car recently. In their glossy website some purchased features have a little star next to them and a 2-point font footing that says something along the lines of "installation cost. Use after the first year requires a subscription fee"

Which bought my already extant hatred of Audi (ex-motorbike rider here) up to a new level and I decided that they certainly wouldn't be getting my hard-earned redundancy money (if Capita *ever* manage to produce a redundancy statement for our Finance team..)

Re: Hands-free, but not brain-free (one hopes)

It still divides one's mental attention from the task at hand

As does listening to music, talking to a passenger, having a headache etc etc.

Re: Fine Shield for Drivers

Speeding kills

*Sigh*

More accurately - "inappropriate spped kills". The mere action of exceeding the speed limit does not, of itself, kill.

Doing so in a dangerous, uncontrolled (for whatever reason) manner increases the chance of accident and, since higher impact speed is indeed more likely to cause fatalities, can cause death - of the driver, their passengers and any unfortunate bystanders involved.

But to just say "speeding kills" is mindlessly facile and is a form of reductionist shorthand usually produced for and by the hard-of-thinking set.

Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check

It is indeed. Time to rebrand Meta to something AI related.

I suggest MayAI..

As in "may I have all your data? Well, I've already got it all anyway but it's good PR to ask.."

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"..