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Posts by El Duderino
21 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2016
Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%
Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'
Tuesday 7th January 2025 06:21 GMT 
"Not that users have much of a choice to move with Microsoft to a Windows 11 world"
They do though. Last week a mate asked me about the Win10 EOL; his laptop is getting on a bit (as is he, at 70 now) and he basically only uses a browser and Thunderbird. I told him he could either buy a new laptop or we could move the thing to Linux Mint, which would of course require some getting used to. He chose Mint.
Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order
Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield
Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash
Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?
Not even the ghost of obsolescence can coerce users onto Windows 11
Thursday 5th October 2023 17:50 GMT 
MS can zuck* off
Ever since they started their Windows 10 telemetry snooping bullshit, I installed O&OShutUp10 (once Windows 7 updates were no more) and started working on my migration. Now a happy Linux Mint user, all code that was previously written with MS stuff has been migrated to other environments, and LibreOffice replaced MS Office. So long MS, have a good life (or not, don't care).
* (Just like all the 'social' crap)
Prepare to be shocked: Employees hate this One Weird Clause
Friday 3rd February 2023 12:49 GMT
Re: Too broad: You can't work in IT for 2 years.
In a different context, I was once pulled into a programme in $BIG_COMPANY for which I was asked to sign an NDA. The genius who had drawn up the NDA (the PM) had basically stated 'you don't talk to anyone about this, except to the programme manager and his PMO team'. I refused to sign as I had to talk to others in the organisation to get all the data I needed. Said PM also waved my concern away saying it was just a poor choice of words. As $BIG_COMPANY was enjoying itself with major sacking rounfs, I didn't take the bait and told him to reword it properly then. He never did, and I never signed.
Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk
Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake
Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk
In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up
Monday 22nd August 2022 17:35 GMT
Re: And don't work too fast either!
In 1988 I was pimped out to the municipal tax department of a neighbour country for six months. They had one mini on which development, UAT, and production were run, and on top of that their file system layout was a complete mess.
I was hired to bring order to that chaos (they had a second server too by then) and arrived there on a Monday morning and got to work after introductions and expectations had been dealt with.
Just before lunch I asked the guys when we could discuss my plan. They suggested 'how about next Monday morning?'. I told them I was hoping to do it 'today' right after lunch (which we did) as I was ready to dive in :) No violence ensued.
Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore
Monday 4th July 2022 09:31 GMT 
It was the second half of the 90s
I was working in $BIG_COMPANY's European IT organisation that managed several hundreds of servers. One of those servers was in Germany (I was not) and needed rebuilding to swap the existing discs with newfangled arrays. It was an extremely important server too, of course (bad things don't happen to crash-and-burn boxes) and a shitstorm would ensue should anything untoward happen to it.
That Saturday morning everything looked fine, a customer engineer was onsite in Germany taking care of the hardware swaps. Diagnostics ran successfully, the result of the backup jobs had been checked, two full backups had been made, nothing could go wrong - famous last words.
Rewind to a couple of months earlier: I had suggested to my boss to implement backup verification because 'a backup that cannot be restored isn't a backup'. The suggestion was put in the freezer because that would be too time consuming, and perhaps we'd revisit that idea later. We did indeed.
The first restore failed. So did the second. Blood pressure was rising. My faithful onsite helper in Germany fetched tape set after tape set and in the wee wee hours of the morning we had a functioning box again, and I seem to remember that the data loss was marginal - if any.
On Monday I had a little chinwag with my boss and told him that either we implement backup verification NOW or this was the last box I'd ever rebuild. Shortly after that we had the process in place. Those were the days.
Zuckerberg wants to create a make-believe world in which you can hide from all the damage Facebook has done
Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds
Friday 3rd July 2020 20:03 GMT
Screwdriver
Late 80s or early 90s (too many brain cells have meanwhile been obliterated to recall the exact timeframe) I worked for a software house that had its first RISC mini delivered, an HP3000/925 which I was eager to get my mitts on. The kit had been delivered, the customer engineer arrived and off we went to the data centre (read: basement of the house where the company was situated).
I dutyfully and impatiently assisted him getting my new toy racked, experiencing those Christmassy emotions I vaguely (same brain cell thing) recalled from my childhood, after which the moment suprème arrived and we powered the mighty machine up. The system console (an HP2392 or 'Calypso' terminal) was sitting on a desk next to the rack which was about 2m high. The Calypso stayed quiet and just offered a green glare. We booted and rebooted (or at least attempted to), checked cable connections over and over again, unracked and reracked, and all seemed fine, except we didn't see anything happening on said console.
That is, until I eagle-eyed - after 2 or 3 hours of unsuccessful troubleshooting and both of us contemplating to declare it a DOA, despite all diagnostics giving it a clean bill of health - noticed that a screwdriver (not of the liquid variety) that early in the process had fallen off the top of the rack, had hit the 'Stop' key on the keyboard, which sent a Control-S or X/OFF. The Calypso actually displayed 'STOP' below its function key blocks at the bottom but we had been concentrating on the void in the rest of the display.
We both still bring that up today. Good times.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
