Posts by steviebuk

Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech

Pointless. As Ian Hislop pointed out, every government, ever has raised taxes the first year they get in. The farmer inheritence tax is an attempt to get land back from Baron's etc. Although he is a tit a lot of the time, Jeremy has highlighted issues with farming, although slighly undone all his work by admitting his buying of the farm is a tax dodge. With him being forced to sell fields it would mean people like Kaleb could afford to buy land to farm. We should possibly look to the French model, if you own farming land it must be farmed and not used for the likes of shooting.

Are we

Turning into China?

Apple beats expectations, but drops in China

China has long been an important market for Apple

There's your problem. Being a billion dollar company and having no issues about trading in a country that continues to abuse its "Developing Country" status and has massive human rights issues. "What, people are censored there? Jailed for questioning Winnie the Pooh, I mean Xi? Oh well, as long as they make me more billions I don't actually give a shit" --- Tim Apple.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: Passwords

I'd have just hung up and not even bothered the conversation. There's that article from the US years agp where the admin of a council was let go then refused to give over all passwords. Eventually went to jail for it. I know you did a handover so I'd of just hung up on him.

Re: Passwords

Yep. Where I was I did that to a current engineer who was bring rude, this was over 10 years ago now. Only on call for a min, told him if he carries on being rude I hang up, he carried on, I hung up. Had been there long enough I wasn't gonna take shit anymore. After thinking I had to accept the abuse.

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

Quality simply

a MASSIVE cunt.

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

Never chuck them. Mention it over at datahoarder on Reddit. Someone would love to archive those.

Thanks

Thanks to Prof. Kurtz for allowing me to walk in to a WHSmith as a kid in the 80s and write

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

20 GOTO 10

I was too square to type anything rude.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 struggles to take off

True but I'd argue this has happened time and time and time again by big companies that have the infrastructure to cope. They knew this game was going to be big but clearly decided to not put enough cash to have that extra "just in case its massive on launch" instead would rather it fail like all the AAA releases.

If that is the case, they SHOULD have an offline version and everyone just accepts that the offline map is lower quality. Relying purely on online means its simple a new version of DRM and once the game tanks and MS have had enough, the servers get turned off making the game useless.

Its one of the reason I was really annoyed with my Elite Dangerous banking on Kickstarter. David lied claiming it would have an offline version then changed his mind midway through "for the experience". Once they give up that game (and the company hasn't been doing well lately) that whole game will be dead, unlike the original Elite that is still playable to this day.

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

And the tax he cut was for his rich friends. The tariffs will effect us in the UK as well apparently. I was planning on waiting before I build a new PC to get cheaper parts but might have to buy soon instead because of the idiot orange man.

Yep. 4 years of him lying, none of his supporters thinking "Hang on, so he claimed the election was stolen in 2020, so what happened in 2024? Did the Dems totally forget how to steal an election in 4 years? But hold on, a few days before the election he said they were already starting to steal the election again, but that never happened, so was it all a lie? Did he say that they were stealing it again near election day so if he lost he could claim it was stolen again? Is everything he says just one big lie???"

This is the problem with Trump voters, they don't think or question, they just shout 'merica!

Re: In this case

Much like the hispanic undocumented worker they recently interviewed on the news, said he voted for Trump as he'll sort out the economy, they pointed out to him they'll also be deporting him, despite him having lived there for 20 years. He clearly didn't realise that. And Trump won't sort out the economy. He inherited Obama's good economy which he then ruined, he'll inherit Biden's and then proceeded to ruin that, like he does all his business'. He's made Tom Homan his border czar who's clearly a racist and you also have the walking dead weirdo Stephen Miller.

In this case

I hope they loose. You get what you voted for. You signed a form because you did no reseach on the smarmy cunt that Elon is and most likely went on to vote for Trump because "Eggs are too expensive". They'll be a darn site more expensive when Trump gets in and puts in his tariffs.

No, the orange one won without this anyway, because 51% of Americans are idiots.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Dave's Garage

The man that create Task Manager had a nice long chat with Raymond on his YouTube channel. Well worth a watch.

Just wish I'd found programming easier but I really struggled with it in college. We got taught Pascal and I made a lottery app but never bothered to look into how to do graphics so it was all text based. I then upgraded it in 2000 for Visual Basic and for my HND course. Got that running recently in a VM and fixed a 19 year old bug in my installer. Was a simple fix, no idea why I never resolved it back then.

Wrote a sniffer program in Pascal to sniff user names and passwords when people would login to their network account in DOS in college. That was the best I got and most of the code was taken from the Pascal help file and a Pascal book I had. Wish I'd understood assembly and then just code in general, a lot of the time the logic just does my head in.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

Re: National Science Advisor

Mr Beast would probably be a good choice as he's also been caught scamming on his YouTube channel, or should I say "allegedly" and then attempting to hide all said scams by removing "live" vids of his mates signing his name for him. So he'd pair well with the convicted crook that is Trump.

Re: DOGE

Its still a valid arguement because Elon is a cunt (to be blunt)

DOGE

What's the betting a certain arsehole cuts spending at NASA or suggests it, to the bone, so that a certain someone who has a space company can get more contracts.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

...but then increases its carbon footprint massively, but we'll wash over that.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Its one big grift

Elon will use the department to hawk his coins. Trump will use 4 years to play lots of golf (while making the secret service pay for the hotel rooms again making him money) and use the house to launder money to pay off all his debts. Other people will be doing the important parts, just a shame he's got nut jobs in the positions now. It was well known he wasn't interested in any of it when he first got in, it will be the same again as he just used this to avoid prison.

It appear 51% of American's are idiots. A military vet said in some comments I read "I hope no one ever says "Thank you for your service" to me ever again, as they've just shit on my service by voting Trump in".

Fujitsu does not trust Post Office in use of Horizon data in future third-party prosecutions

Doesn't help when you see the mentality of the people that gave evidence. Can't remember her name now but the jobs worth manager, who clearly shouldn't been in her role, despite the person she was involved in prosecuting having been found innocent. She still, at the enquiry kept mumbling without being asked, that she still thought they were guilty and that "The husband did it". Despite all the evidence showing it was the Horizon system. That is one of the main issues and sadly, people like that are still there. Unless they have a big clean out, all the "old guard" will still be there and still continue to defend and act like this. I saw this at the last place I was at until, finally, all the old guard was either pushed to retire or made redundant. All the old guard from the 80s acting like it was still the 70s with their "Its just banter innit. Oh she likes it, its just banter innit".

And worse they are still using it and still using it to prosecute. Our local Post Office still uses it as see it on the receipts.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

A country

that is stupid enough to not only re-elect Trump but allow him to even run when he was/is a convict fellon and insurrectionist can be ignored.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Re: Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Its because of shitty internal politics and SLAs. Some tit has decided what the SLAs are and when the IT manager is shit, they want to stick to those SLAs instead of explaining to the customer its better, in this case that is affecting everyone, to breach the SLA and find a fix instead of rebuilding. Very rare to get a manager like that, we had one and he was amazing but sadly left due to all the internal bullshit politics.

About 2 seconds

is my quickest, not counting walking up to the desk.

Just walked in, got grabbed "Oh great you're in, the screen on my desk isn't working and I've rebooted the laptop".

Looked at laptop, looked at screen. Laptop was black screen with bit of a glow, that gave it away.

"Yeah, you need to switch the monitor on"

Done.

They felt ashamed.

I've seen that before, can't stand IT departments like that. Like the time we had laptops that would get into Windows (some were still on XP) and explorer would freeze for about 10-15mins when accessing network drives. Was random. We were just told to "Rebuild them". I said "But that's not fixing the issue is it. It takes at least an hour or so to rebuild and give them it back. They then have to set all their settings up again. Just give me a chance to fix it". I was told no. REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING. Eventually, the manage in IT that kept saying no got hit with the bug, so I was FINALLY given time to fix it (mainly because she was going on leave for 2 weeks so didn't care).

Ran process monitor and process explorer, just watched process monitor for anything odd. We'd seen before in Task Manager (which is shit) it would show explorer running at 50% when the issue occured. So I watched that with process explorer. The best thing with process explorer is you can see within the process, not just, as Task Manager showed, explorer running at 50%. In Process Explorer you can see all the .dll's that process is running. And there it was, a .dll within Explorer that it had called, was what was running at 50%. The .dll was related to our encryption software we were using on the laptops, but what did it do? Went to the PGP site and found an article about it, that it could cause hanging. Turns out all the .dll did was scan network drives for encrpyted files, if it found any it would change their icon. It can be disabled. We only encrypted the laptop so it wasn't needed. Disabled it, problem went away.

What was once an over hour rebuild now only took about 1-2mins.

Got no reconition for that.

UK orders Chinese biz to sell majority stake in Scottish chipmaker

Re: Good, however,

That's a change then as the sale was paused because of the issue, then the Tories eventually said "No, its fine to sell it to the Chinese". I assume the new government reversed that.

Good, however,

The Tories allowed a Chinese company to buy the fab in Newport IOW, so that's just has bad and needs to be undone.

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Greenwashing

It has to be said this is clearly greenwashing. The industry is ignoring the likes of Micorsoft have caused their carbon emissions to increase this year because of Copilot.

UK councils bat away DDoS barrage from pro-Russia keyboard warriors

Re: suspected online hackers

I now actually like the booking system as before, the queues were nuts. All the way down the road leading to the site and a bit more.

Microsoft accused of 'greenwashing' as AI used in fossil fuel exploration

Re: Sigh....

A lot of us would like solar but can't afford it. I'm in a conservation area so not allowed panels on the roof, besides, the old Victorian roof probably wouldn't be able to handle them. Wouldn't mind an EV but go nowhere to charge it as don't have a drive, don't want to go anywhere near Chinese EVs.

Making clothes last longer, I bought some offcut leather from the local haberdashery and used it to patch up my dewalt trousers I use for DIY instead of throwing them and replacing. They are still fine, just had a arse in the arse area. The leather works well.

Fast Fashion should be banned.

I've been pointing out for a while with using Microsoft's CoPilot we're contriubuting to that energy waste. Falls on deaf ears. Microsoft carbon emissions have increased this year by at least 20% purely because of AI bollocks.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

This like Jony Ive

Where you get so big because the so called "jesus" Jobs loved you that no one can question you, so when you release such shit as the Hockey Puck mouse you oddly get away with it. Ive has also been form over function. Fuck whether something is repairable or not, just make it look nice. He'd have been a master designer in my eyes if he'd also, cleverly, made the shit he designed repairable. But then we know Jobs never wanted anything to be repairable, he wanted people to have to buy new. We know this from Woz who faught for the upgradable Apple 2, originally Jobs didn't want expansion ports, but Woz objected and thankfully got his way. Jobs should of thanked him as the Apple 2 is what kept Apple afloat all those years.

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Lotus 1 2 3

Being new in the IT world in 2007 (took a while to get an IT job for reasons) we obviously used Office and Windows XP. Kept seeing the odd job where knowing Lotus Notes etc was required. Being new I thought it was something I might have to learn. Thankfully I never wasted my time on it. And realised, as I became less green, these were companies stuck on old tech.

I remember when....

a college friend, introduced us to Words new feature. We were all in college in the 90s doing IT and went to his house. He had the cool stuff and introduced us to Words new feature, it was amazing, the squiggly line under mis-spelt words. Back then it did seem cool.

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Re: Not tell friends and family what you do for a living...

You can. I applied for "the service" once, on a whim as I had no work experience in IT at that point. The letter said you can tell family, just try keep it to a minimum.

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

Re: Can't understand the apps

Using the app to pay for parking "was" useful. Then I looked at the sign last year where I park for taking the dog on the beach. Reasonable price but turns out they add 20-25p to the app price for "admin". So I pay cash all the time now, fuckers. The Parish Council has ignored my request to update the inaccurate sign so anyone that gets a fine now can have it thrown out until they update that.

Congress to Commerce: Sanction more Chinese chip firms to stop Huawei's evasion

Re: Only going to slow

Yep. They also send all the wumaos out so you'll end up being downvoted by them, but it also means you're touching a nerve.

China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets

And why....

....are they still being allowed to exploit their "developing" status to get all the benefits of such status. They clearly aren't "developing" and need this removed along with all their benefits. The CCP have already argued against this because the CCP love to exploit all loop holes.

Drone maker DJI sues Pentagon over ‘Chinese military company’ label

That's just wumao whataboutisim. There is a massive difference when a dictatorship does it, to supress its people and anyone that critisies Winnie the Pooh. No one was put in prison for saying Boris was a liar during his cosplay as PM. Or put in prison and silenced for saying Taiwan is its own country and independant. It doesn't need to be "reunited" as it was NEVER a part of mainland China or owned by the CCP. Its its own indepentant country. The ROC fled to Taiwan in the 50s and 60s and the PRC took over the mainland and eventually ruined it. The CCP are just upset Taiwan is a very successful democracy and now just act like a child who wants what the successful kid at school has got. You could argue the CCP are the invaders of mainland China and really Taiwan owns the mainland.

Just think, in the UK I can say this and no one will come and knock my door down. Say it in China and wait for it to be wiped from the Chinese Internet and then the fuzz will get sent round to make you disappear for daring to speak against Winnie the Pooh. Ironically its not even a Western insult Winnie the Pooh, it was created by the Chinese people so they could freely talk about Xi without getting censored, until he realised and had the term banned.

All the wumaos are about.

Totally disagree. Its well known the Chinese struggle to create anything these days without ripping off someone elses design. This might not be how dji came about but the CCP have cracked down on lots of companies over the years. Any company over there has to allow the CCP access. What better way to collect intelligence by making a successful drone that could, potentially, send at least screenshots, of all it films.

I've never owned one so have no ability to monitor its traffic. But would be interesting to see what data it sends.

An example is mechanical keyboards. I wanted to try one but they are all too loud. So I tried an epomaker after my nephew had one. Granted, feels OK and is quieter than the main western brands. But the software for it wants to always phone home, the firmware update, despite manually downloading wants to phone home and even worse the drivers that run the keyboard attempt to phone home. No reason for any of it to do so.

Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

Re: Anyone still buying WD?

Datahoarder visitor on reddit by any chance?

Re: Anyone still buying WD?

I have lots of WD passport drives and they've lasted years.

X to allow third parties to train their AI models with social media users' data

Re: Garbage in, Garbage Out

They're learning from my early posts from 2009-2010 that, in a piss take of others genuine "Sitting down to eat dinner" "Getting in my bath", I spent a few months walking to work with posts of the sea " Going to work"...."Going home " it was riveting.

Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire

Re: problem is

When they have billions to lobby anything is possible. And if you had someone like Trump is in power then all bets are off, look at Joe Manchin for example.

problem is

Letting Amazon and Google "manage" these.

When that side of the business starts costing too much we'll all be reading here, on our Pip-Boys and in our bunkers about the fault that happened during the week when Google/Amazon's small nuke reactor to power their shitty AI, had a melt down due to a failed software update. Because the month before they'd laid off a few 1000 staff at their nuke power sites due to "costs".

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Re: School rules

They'd let the two students kill each other. Then they wouldn't have to deal with it. Its the type of things they do in specification gaming tests. Like the AI that kept killing itself at the end of level 1 so tbat it wouldn't fail at level 2.

Welcome to 'merica

"now suing to rectify"

What is that countries love for suing all about. The only people that benefit are the lawyers.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

Hello Richard.

Free software can exist if people are still willing to also pay.