Posts by FuzzyWuzzys

Photostopped: Adobe Cloud evaporates in mass outage. Hope none of you are on a deadline, eh?

Sorry but I love my CC photo software

Never had an issue in 18 months of using CC, that includes several weeks spent caravanning in the highlands photographing landscapes with absolutely no data access, had to use a public PC in a local library to check my emails. Had PS ( with over a dozen plugins ) and LR installed on my laptop and they worked perfect for the whole time I've been away from home. With CC I'm getting PS/LR for around £100/year, there's no way I could afford the boxed edition as that would come in around £750 up front, assuming it was still available and it would only have updates for current version unlike CC where I can have any version I want all running simultaneoulsy. Plus I can install PS/LR on two machines at the same time, also something boxed never allowed without dicking about with license transfers.

Call me an Adobe shill if you like but I love CC as I get to use the pukka photo software I could never otherwise afford to buy.

Watch out, everyone, here come the Coronavirus Cops, enjoying their little slice of power way too much

Re: I read that Tweet differently

My father says he knows a local dog walker who has an incontinent dog, she has to walk the dog every 2 hours during the day, she has no garden so she has to take the dog out. She phones the Police every 2 hours 15 mins before going out to let them know she'll be going out again with her dog!

She's 75 and terrified of getting a criminal record or fine if they find her out and about without good reason, she's terrified the dog will panic, stink the house out and need vetinary treatment!

Welcome to the trickier side of lockdown.

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Re: Passwords

The classic XKCD cartoon is superb here, search "correct horse battery staple".

It's especially good fun to come up with 35 character passwords if you regularly shop on LoveHoney!

Re: Technical management tips

"A decent manager holds back the pressure from above. And applies just enough to below."

So true, I'm so fortunate to have one of those.

Tinfoil hat brigade switches brand allegiance to bog paper

Re: Friday

Barnsley, the home of Biff Byford and SAXON!!

Microsoft throws a bone to those unable to leave the past behind: .NET 5 support on the way for Visual Basic

"For what it is worth : i am not a programmer"

Oooh, so close my friend! Talking about code syntax and then dropping this bomb, I can hear the rumble of a flamewar coming...

Re: says that C# is basically a more modern C++

"A lot of developers (especially managed developers) do not know this."

Obviously ones who've never coded in Java ( or C )! The second you go near C# you know instantly it's closer to Java than C. Most people will learn Java and/or C at college so they should be able to see C# heritage immediately. This leads me to assume you're applying the word "developer" to people who've never really used a fully fledged programming language write code and are not "code monkeys" but more "markdown jockeys" from HTML/CSS backgrounds and we know what the two camps think of each other!

MPs to grill Post Office and Fujitsu execs on Horizon IT scandal after workers jailed over accounting errors

Re: Kafka has nothing on this.

"Software is full of bugs these days - is it because we are very good at finding them nowadays, or are we crappy coders?"

They're are a lot of good coders about but they're not given the time our resources to put thing right, their management simply insists of release, release, release.

The problem is that everyone jumped on Agile and very few understood how to do it properly, so you have Mickey Mouse project managers bleating on about agile this and that, then having daily code drops but the wrong kind of developers for that short time scale release cycles, the code just gets more and more mangled on each daily release cycle until they just don't give a toss anymore. Wrong coders with bad project managers can only result in bad code.

Time to svn commit like it's the year 2000: Apache celebrates 20 years of Subversion

Re: svn vs git

To be honest I sort of prefer the simplicity of SVN over GIT, GIT is the more prevalent now but I like to think that SVN still has a place.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save data from a computer that should have died aeons ago

Re: Hybrid children watch the sea

"Death Magnetic" for destructive dev testing, 'cos you really don't care about it!

( I love James H to death, as a spotty 14 year old in 1986, my long blond hair and " big tongue sneakers" Hetfield was my idol and but after Load it all went downhill really fast for them. "Lawnmower Deth", now that's a band to be serious about! )

Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers' network setups, but we do it for their own good

Perfect...

...until they get hacked then you have a perfect "map" of Vodafone customer home layouts so you know which might hold the richest pickings ( clue, the networks with lots of Apple devices given the rise in a Mac malware! ).

Remember that 2024 Moon thing? How about Mars in 2033? Authorization bill moots 2028 for more lunar footprints

Private money

The only way forward is private money...possibly Wayland-Yutani?

'I am done with open source': Developer of Rust Actix web framework quits, appoints new maintainer

Re: He's not wrong

"I stopped giving away software some time ago."

Funny you say this, I used to give my photos away to artists and anyone who asked but it was too much trouble. Initially it was hard to stop doing that and start charging money for them but since I decided to stop giving stuff away and charge people it's been much easier and less stressful. The more you give away the more people seem to want from you and whatever you give is never enough and they want more, they think just 'cos you give something away for free they have a every right to criticise you and the product, whatever it is. Paying customers don't pay until they're sure and 'cos they only pay out when they're sure they almost never complain afterwards.

I hate thinking like this and it goes against my better nature but sadly human nature has taught me that a lot of the time it's simply not worth giving anything away for free that you've created, people rarely appreciate it and a lot of people just want more.

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

Re: Confusing.

We can, they're called VMWare, VirtualBox, Hypervisor and Parallels Desktop!

Dumped the local installs

6 months ago my Missus got pissed off dealing with my business accounts, dropped the old accounts package on Mac she'd been using for the last 7 years and just and went with Quickbooks online. She's happy and I get less grief when I'm on the cadge to spend money!

Y2K? It was all just a big bun-fight, according to one Reg reader

My Dad suffered with Y2K

I was working in in IT at the time and it was the usual stuff.

However my Dad was still working as a tech manager of a chain of leisure centres and he was responsible for Y2K compliance. He had some serious stuff like PCs and boiler room automation systems. However here is a list of the silly things he told me he had to check for Y2K compliance...

- 3 pin plugs

- kettles

- lighting tubes, not the starters or anything attached, just the tubes

- desk drawers(?!)

- tools like spanners and screwdrivers

- plastic trays to hold nuts and bolts

- door handles

- desk lamps

It was months and months of him and his team checking endless lists of items that had no possible way to fail due to the date change but the buildings were places where the public entererd and used the facilities so everything had to be checked and ticked off.

Microsoft: Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, my PowerShell has gone RC

Re: I really...

We perform regular updates direct in AD from the HR database, just the useful employee stuff like job title updates and such like. With 3,500 employees and using about 10 lines of Powershell I can update all the non-critical attributes of all employees direct from the HR DB in around 30 secs. We also automate all new AD user creations ( after a form and details are checked by a fleshy HR manager of course ), the AD user creation with basic dept relevant privs takes about 4.5 secs per user, we have around 90 dept base profiles. If new default apps get installed in the company, we just add the required AD groups to the profile listings and issue an update. We have an Ops team and I build WinForm GUIs using Powershell script, they use them to install software onto systems, things like third-party monitoring agents.

Powershell sits on top of .Net, so you have all the power from the .Net framework if you want it. I'm just a Unix systems admin and I learned C# so I could code plugin DLLs for PowerShell.

If you're not using Powershell day-to-day on Windows, then you're missing out on a huge amount of automation power! Use Powershell to save you admin time so you can spend more time learning more about Powershell!

Want to live long and prosper? Avoid pirated, malware-laden Star Wars free vid streams – and pay to watch instead

Re: I'm safe

"I gave up on all things Star Wars after I wasted perfectly good money on The Phantom Menace."

I often have this discussion with my teenage daughter ( I'm mostly pushing her buttons )...

Me: "There's only 3 films in the Star Wars franchise, IV, V and VI."

D: "Dad, there's 9 and the last 3 have been the best. Why won't you watch the last three?"

Me: "Absolute codswallop! There has and will only ever be three SW films. The other supposed 6 films are not true SW films and never will be."

D: "They tell the story after the Empire fell, the real story so we get find out how the Rebellion fared post revolution. The characters are deepers and more meaningful, it's not all gunfights there human interest."

Me: "There! Right there! We don't want girly lovey-dovey stuff in SW, we want incest, vengeful family members with axes to grind, camp robots and we want people shooting and hitting each other with dangerous laser weapons! If I want to watch naff love films I'll watch films written by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant!"

IT consultant who deleted every account on UK company Jet2's domain cops 5 months in jail

Re: A very stupid thing to do.......

I've worked for some absolute bellends over the years, the sweestest type of revenge is to simply complete all the required documentation and paperwork and then drop them in it by just walking away from a bad situation you know you will never fix. So long as you did what was required to the best of your ability, you're in the clear.

Being vindictive will get you nothing but a bad reputation, the IT biz in the UK is surprisingly small and a lot of people know a lot of other people who know people by name and especially by reputation.

Canada's .ca supremo in hot water after cyber-smut stash allegedly found on his work Mac ‒ and three IT bods fired

Re: Confilicted...

"One one side; As long as the images are not illegal who gives a flying fuck?"

No one actually, however every employment contract including yours, has a clause about inappropriate use of company equipment being grouds for dismissal. So if you're doing the same and storing "grumble flicks" on your work laptop I'd get them off before you get called into HR!

The reason is simple, the company gets it's arsed sued if for any reason said "grumble flicks" on company laptop get seen by a minor or a company client or partner. Exec with smut filled laptop goes to a school to give a talk, puts laptop on school hall display, up pops Shag McNasty doing the horizontal dance.

The other reason is that if you let one person do what they want, then everyone will and the execs are supposedly our betters and should set a good example for we plebs on the shop floor, sadly we all know that's crap and they're worse than us for not using their nous, incompetance is the pathway to upper management.

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

Hmmm

Last two times I heard something like this was Java and Flash! While they most certainly have appeared everywhere, they've also both left horrendous security blight on the world of tech!

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, unencrypted hard drives of staff data stolen

Just the one simple quesiton...

Why is employee payroll data on a laptop, in a car?

If you can answer that and come up with something that doesn't make me roll my eyes then I'll let you off.

AWS has new tool for those leaky S3 buckets so, yeah, you might need to reconfigure a few things

So....

...basically it looks at AWS accounts and sends you an email saying..."REMOVE THE FECKING PUBLIC ACCESS ON YOUR S3 BUCKKETS NOW OR LOSE YOUR JOB YOU MUPPET!!".

Larry leaves, Sergey splits: Google lads hand over Alphabet reins to Sundar Pichai

Google will a Yahoo within 20 years

The problem is that these things worked because of one thing, the vision and drive of the people who started it. The minute you handover a company to someone who only ever sees dollar signs, you can almost bet that that company will be dead in the water within 15 years.

Serge and Brin, whom I think are utter ratbags, but they drove Google, made it into what it is. Jobs and Ive ( and Woz obviously in the early days ), they made Apple into what it is now, Tim Cook is a spineless wally who is just coasting along on what those others have done. Larry Ellison, Gates, Balmer, they all drove the companies they set up but once they start to step back those companies are taken over by commitees of money-men and women, you never achieve anything revolutionary by committee.

Mark my words, Google will be a Yahoo in 20 years time and something else will have stepped in to take over....

Microsoft takes us to 2004 with new Windows 10 so you don't mistake it for Server 2003

Re: gaming platform

Much as a Stadia is a bit of a pile of poop, online, streamed cloud gaming is where it's going like everything else. Sooner or later they'll be no need to a monster PC to play games.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Simple...look at the mascots!

Swings and roundabouts. I like GO 'cos it has fun things like built in lightweight threading, only one looping statement, multple returns off functions and no concept of classes, it's simple, rigid but powerful simple construct. One reason that RUST interested me, just like GO, no runtimes ( one thing I hate about C# and Java, the baggage of a runtime ), you get compiled code for any of the key x86 platforms with native executables. RUST is a brutal, hands dirty O/S working language which appeals to me for making rock solid O/S utils to get jobs done quickly.

The mascots...GO has a cute, cuddly little gopher mascot but RUST has very the heavy metal "mascot" of rusty circular saw blade like Blackie Lawless from WASP used to have wrapped around his crotch in the 1980s!! Ha ha!

Re: Do...While

Or use GO that only has one loop construct. No arguments about what's the best loop construct 'cos you don't got no choice! ha!

Just Docker room talk: Container upstart's enterprise wing sold to Mirantis, CEO out, Swarm support faces ax

Vagrant

Vagrant was killed, MS pushed their Docker fork to blank Virtualbox, I can see Docker as it is today being swalled up and lost. Shame as it's a great little technology.

I've had it with these motherflipping eggs on this motherflipping train

Re: Making a stink about a.....stink

As a born'n'bred Eastend born Londoner there nothing more gorgeous than the smell of cowshite! No, I'm deadly serious! My Missus can't stand the smell of cow doings when we head out to the country on trips, I'm always the first wind down the car windows and fill the car up the countryside atmosphere. Getting a lung full of natural smells does you the power of good and it's better for you than the cack I breathe in all week long.

( "ESC"ape covered in shite, perfect icon! )

Robotics mastermind admits: I pushed over my 1-year-old daughter to understand balance

Not entirely surpised

The more I've learned about Boston Dynamics over the years the more I realise they will invent the Terminators and kick off Skynet! Now we learn more about the sort of people they employ, they really should be "nuked from orbit" just to be sure!

Have you been naughty, or have you been really naughty? Microsoft 365 users to get their very own Compliance Score

It's a great idea and worth playing with to see what it does, but use in production? No fecking way! Can you imagine MS going to town on all your company's data, lableling it all then you come in on Monday and no one can access anything 'cos the labels have locked down the permissions and your local helpdesk is swamped with irate users who can't open their 65 XL sheets.

Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?

Kids!

Must have teenagers! They love leaving every possible adapter plugged into every socket in the house so you have to ask your own kids what you can unplug in your own house else risk a load of moaning!

If you're going to exploit work's infrastructure to torrent, you better damn well know how to hide it

Not exactly torrenting...

We used to do cross-network backups to servers hosting tape drives overnight. We'd get bored on the overnight shift and we'd dig out some Doom and play the security guards in the training room. We only had one net segment and things were OK until after about 2 weeks we all got called in to investigate why the backup times were getting longer and some backups had failed to complete, restores couldn't be done and this had caused serious problems for the business. We quickly learned some net comms and set up our own temporary closed network for overnight sessions!

Cringe as you read Horrible Histories: UK Banking Sector, sigh as MPs finger cloudy Big 3 as future risk

Re: somewhat unfair

Working in IT rule #1: No one ever rewards you for the 99% time you get it right, they only ever punish for the 1% you get it wrong!

Google goes full Anti-Flash-ist, boots Adobe's insecure monstrosity out of web search index

So long "Badger Badger Badger" we loved ye.

Flash was good for the time but it's now time to move on ( we should have 10 years ago! ). So long and thanks.

Microsoft welcomes ancient Project app to the 365 family, meaning bleak future for on-prem

Looks like Larry shot his bolt 20 years too early!

Anyone remember dear old Larry Ellison's vision of his "Network Computer" back in the 1990s? He said we'd all buy one and rent apps from a server over phone lines, he even built prototypes. He knew then that online software rental would be the key to making a pot load of cash if the mugs...sorry customers had ot keep paying to use the software.

Sadly Larry shot his bolt too early, everyone laughed at him and 20 years later those same people are falling over themselves to pay AWS, Google and MS ( not Oracle! ) for cloud services.

Re: How much?

"rental-only model but we see in now in all the software (Win10 any day now surely) "

When have you ever owned a copy of Windows?! It's been license/rental only since v1.0!

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

Back to the old Speccy days

A bit like the old Lens-Lock, "Please place your "digiridoo" and/or "g**h" against the screen and type in the code you can see."

Simples...

They give you 60 secs for free then Clippy appears on screen, "I see you're 'bashing the bishop' or 'doing the five-finger shuffle', would you like some help with that?"

Would you open an email from one Dr Brian Fisher? GP app staff did – and they got phished

Re: Dr Phisher

Unfortunately "Fish" or Derek W. Dick to use his real name ( so he doesn't need to change his name ) is no longer the singer of Marillion and hasn't been since 1988. Fish, sorry Derek, was only with them for 10 years just a quarter of the time the band has been in existance and Derek is a now a respected solo artist. Steve Hogarth has been the singer with Marillion since 1989 and a fine job he's done with them for the last 30 years.

One of Blighty's most-loved charities hands £46m to one of Blighty's least-loved outsourcers

Re: Bollocks

The usual attitude, "it works why mess with it". Hmm, well that's why the ne'er-do-wells that pollute the internet will have a fecking field day with your systems!

Bezos DDoS'd: Amazon Web Services' DNS systems knackered by hours-long cyber-attack

Hooray for cloud-hosting

Lots of thrid-party providers rely on AWS, my Wordpress hosting service hosts it's infrastructure on AWS and the services have been up and down like a fart in a cullender that doesn't know which hole to escape through!

The sound of silence is actually the sound of a malicious smart speaker app listening in on you

Got one, never used it

I was given an Alexa about a year ago, it got installed and we all got bored with it within 2 days and it's been unplugged since! Three people in our house, all tech savvy and not one of us could find a use for it and it's sat in the cable drawer by the TV since.

My father has one and 'cos he's almost 80 and his memory is not as sharp as it once was so he uses his Alexa to make reminders for sorting things out he has to do, remind him to take his meds and such like but he lives on his own and it sits in the kitchen out of the way. He's never installed a single skill and is happy to use it as a clock and note taking machine.

Deus ex hackina: It took just 10 minutes to find data-divulging demons corrupting Pope's Click to Pray eRosary app

Eternal guilt

What I love about this is that Catholics are all about "eternal guilt", they love a bit of guilt. This thing tracks you, reminds you constantly that you must feel guilty and remind you to punish yourself for whatever it is that you did or thought that you shouldn't have. So rather than sneaking off and having a few crafty happy thoughts, this thing will remind you that must never be happy.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

Re: Is it really obsolete ...

True, we do have a throwaway culture but I'd like to think that if there's a machine out there tracking the world's deadliest arsenal there's a ready supply of parts. The last thing I'd like to consider is your average Ops dept personal phoning their manager on a 3am callout saying the missle tracking system is offline 'cos there's no replacement PSU in the storage cupboard!

We're going deeper Underground: Vulture clicks claws over London's hidden tracks

LU's warehouse tours are good too

There's some superb stuff hidden around and under London. I remember a few years ago getting one of the few tickets to go out the to London Underground offsite storage warehouse. The tour was run by volunteers who work at the warehouse and simply take care of LU's artifacts for the love it. It was incredible to see all the stuff they squirrel away after it's been used on the network. Posters, leaflets, signs, bits of trains, a really good day out if you're a bit of a "trainspotter" and you get the chance.

Well, well, well. Fancy that. UK.gov shelves planned pr0n block

The UK gov couldn't block a drain, let alone websites!

"Sorry we didn't have a bloody clue what we were talking about with this internet thingy when we suggested a block, so we asked some egg-heady types, paid them £5m and they said it was impossible to save your kids from the dirty filty paedos and terrorists that lurk on porno websites. So sorry and all, it's all off I'm afraid!"

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

Re: Dr. Ian Malcolm : God help us, we're in the hands of engineers.

We have those at work, I thought that was a good idea...until I looked up the price! £8,000 to have boiling/chilled water on tap in my kitchen, sorry but a £25 kettle and 4 min wiat will do me thanks!

From Libra to leave-ya: eBay, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, others flee Facebook's crypto-coin

We all knew how this would turn out.

FB can't be trusted with a few names, addresses and some mindless tosh about people's daily lives and they expected some of the world's top online financial service companies to support FB's own currency?! Yeah, tell you what as an encore we'll put one of North Korea's top officials in charge of Amnesty International!!!

US games company Blizzard kowtows to Beijing by banning gamer who dared to bring up Hong Kong

Re: couls gamers care less, really?

My wife of 30 years and I both play games, mostly RPGs upon which we dicuss in game tactics, we often spend time watching each other during game session. Our daughter just passed her exams with top marks and has gone on to further study, a mark of the care and devotion we've shown her and her interests. We're mortgage free before 50 and we have our own business selling photographic prints and licenses, oh and I'm also an author of several outdoor photography books which I wrote in between working a full time IT job, spending time with my family and playing games.

I watched a relative die of a stroke in front of me 20 years ago and it taught me that you only get one life and it can be taken in a split second. So you carry on wasting your hate on others Mr AC, 'cos one day you may wake up and realise you wasted your limited and very precious time on this earth and that's the real tragedy.