Posts by Nematode

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

As a Chemical Engineer* by pre-and post-IT-ism, units were the very bread of life. One company I worked for had a US parent whose design programs were all in British units. This side of the pond we wanted metric units. We found there was a switch in the input deck which output the results in metric (though we still needed the inputs in British units, go figure). So we duly started printing (this was the 1980s) the outputs in metric - yes, °C, kg, bar, etc., jolly good. Though one of the stream properties caused raised eyebrows - mPaS, milli-pascal-seconds. This turned out to be the only thing we ever learned from them, since it turned out to be out old viscosity friend, the cP, centipoise.

(*enables you to talk engineering to a chemist, and chemistry to an engineer)

Re: Honestly

Minus 40 is also minus 40

Microsoft 365 brings the shutters down on legacy protocols

Re: .doc and .xls also at the funeral parlour

Yes, I am assuming Libre Office will be at least a rescue tool. Have already used it to convert a couple of xls files which MS Office borked on.

.doc and .xls also at the funeral parlour

It took a random article in a magazine (remember those?) for me to find out only today that as well as Win 10, M$'s protocols bonfire is taking file types for the old Word and Excel (and presumably PowerPoint and Access?) and junking them, about the same month as W10 EOL.

Ok, anything still using those file types is old, possibly (though I'd hesitate to say "probably") not needed again, or is in current use and can easily be saved as a .***x file (or e.g. .xlsm with macro). Not nearly as well known about as W10 EOL, but people need to assess and if necessary convert. Also stop updates to older Office programs (2010, 2013, 2016 etc) so M$ can't deprecate your old files beneath the radar. Go to settings and remove updates to applications.

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Remember...? Yes, I ruddy well do. We were on holiday on a narrow boat near Heyford, two families, each Mum Dad & 2 kids. I was taking the boat through a lock and wondered where all the help had gone. The boat was kicking around with the influx of water having had the ropes demanned by said disappeared crew and for some reason whilst managing it all alone, I stubbed my sockless big toe, which bled everywhere and ruddy hurt. Eventually the crew returned and asked me "Did you see the Shuttle go over?". Blue words emerged, mainly at their negligence making me really hurt my toe, and after a little while more words on why tf did they not realise I couldn't see it due to being deep in a lock? Of course, the water rush had blanked out the 747's noise.

No, I ruddy well don't want a Lego version, it'll only remind me.

Logitech's latest keyboard and mouse combo is wired, quiet, and suspiciously sensible

At least the layout is right

Unlike most laptops with home, end etc etc all over the place, or M$'s horrendous curved or split layout.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

What part of Linux? I really don't care, as long as it works to run Windows programs from the menus. Asking whether it would be in the kernel is *exactly* the sort of question that puts people off Linux.

And as for Libre Office, a decent sized complex Word document such as I used to build pre-retirement is *not* exchangeable with LO in a corporate environment without glitches, format problems and others.

The "Linux industry" needs to seriously get its act together and start appealing to ordinary users who wouldn't know a distro or a command line if it bit them. 1. Recognise the potential. 2. Stop having so many damned distros, each crap (or highly specialised) one reflects on all the rest. 3. So people can leave the Win ecosystem but keep their Win applications, make a Windows emulator part of Linux, don't rely on WINE or VMs, make it easy, and make it darned well work properly.

Remember, an OS should simply let people use their programs to Do Work with, then get out of the way.

But yes, I hear your comment about the "Linux industry" not being a single coherent entity. But what really is needed is someone (Linus?) to recognise the potential and work to make that the obvious option for ex-Windoze folk. Doh, that would be another distro. Aaarghhh.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

Times like these I always imagine the Muppets Swedish chef sketch/song..

Dummmm de dumm de dumpy dumpy dummm...

Dad da da-da da da dum

Bork! Bork! Bork!

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

Yes, Trump is the Project 25 diversion

"Are people really this stupid these days ?"

Yes, unfortunately more than 50% of the American electorate thought Trump was a Good Thing, and much evidence suggests they still do. Cue famous quote - see https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mencken-white-house-quote/

Incidentally, that quote used to be on Wikipedia under Mencken (not a great chap, but an ace quote), but that site's trust rating has been plummeting, with barely disguised partiality breaking out all over.

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

Yup. A rooftop LoS connection between two Old Street (London) offices would regularly go down if there was fog or mist. Many happy hours twiddling thumbs whilst waiting for it to disperse.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

Thames Water case heralding a return to the Watergate headline?

Microsoft is opening Windows Update to third-party apps

What could possibly go wrong?

Before addressing the "how", try fixing Windows to (a) not need nearly as many "updates" (=bug fixes), (b) test the damned things before release, (c) have the update process not take over an hour, most of which seems to be a silent download connection, interminable "pending" messages, useless % complete counters, and chuntering CPU with often no disk activity and (d) not need to reboot.

Unless of course those creating 3rd party updaters can do that better than M$ (which seems likely). In which case just (a) and (b) above

UK tax collector puts half a billion on table for call center services

"The complexity of the tax system (and welfare & tax credits systems) is largely due to Conservatives"

I thought it was Gordon Brown, ISTR tales of how the tax code took up ever-increasing shelf length during his tenure

Xyzzy

Not that model again...

"plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of £500 million"

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

If you think...

There's a saying in the oil and chemical industries, from the great Trevor Kletz, that "If you think safety is expensive, try having an accident". Events like Flixborough and Seveso come to mind.

Here, perhaps the saying should be "If you think security is expensive, try getting hacked".

Post Office finally throttles delayed in-house EPOS project

Cloud?!

For goodness' sake, I understood that many of the problems with Hor-lies-on was that transactions failed through peridodic comms difficulties and that clearly there was no satisfactory recovery / rationalisation / syncing. When will our esteemed "leaders" who think up these "solutions" realise that Cloud simply means "someplace elses's servers". A rock-solid on-premises program shouldn't be hard to create (or even adapt an existing one), where even local power cuts could be dealt with with UPSs, and then database records synced to a server, though the need for central storage of this in formation is moot, imho.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

One upside: it won't be too long before you'll be able to get a plumber when you want one, or chippy, sparky, etc. When no-one can get any other sort of job, they'll realise that these trades are irreplaceable and they'll start to re-train. No robot or LLM is ever going to be capable of bending round the back of your toilet to fix the leaking gasket.

Re: Perhaps Amazon workers . . .

"Make America Medieval Again."

Un/fortunately, not possible, much as The Donal is trying his best. Medieval ended 1500, the US started 1776. We'd have ro invent a new word for such an American Regression. Any suggestions?

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Re: Hiring candidates who can't pronounce their own name?

Ruaridh

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

UPS - not

Used to work for a major DCS vendor who also made their own kit whose practice it was to fit UPS's in many of the nodes. We only found out later, after some of our UK customers' systems started bombing with power dips that, no, they were *not* UPS's but battery back-ups with a finite switchover time. On test, some of these took up to a second to switch =:o

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Don't quite see why you needed ChemEng or chemistry skills. Still. As our prof used to say, the advantage of being a chemical engineer is that you can talk chemistry to an engineer, and engineering to a chemist.

Meta to feed Europe's public posts into AI brains again

Re: Does anyone know...

AFAIU, (and read in their ts&cs), their AI does not have access to your conversations. It only acts like another contact/conversation. If you don't engage, and you delete the initial Hello conversation, it disappears except for a stoopid blue circle you can't get rid of

Er, allegedly.

Er, and if true, for how long.

Just go to Signal instead.

Still browsing like it's 1999: Fresh tools that keep vintage Macs online and weirdly alive

Preparing the world for 30 years of regression caused by Trump's "policis"

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: My 2 cents...

I think there is a Reg edit for that. Search for it

Tip 0

Forget Windows 11

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: Mozilla have

They do know their shortcomings and are working hard to overcome them. The biggest problem is a legacy codebase.

But I'd genuinely be interested to know which particular things lead you to your conclusion.

Re: Email is dying

Most webmail interfaces are utterly horrid, and - for those criticising TB's UI changes - are constantly tweaking their UIs to "improve" them = make them even less "intuitive".

Webmail also doesn't do POP which remains a good option where you want to remove potentially private content from Someone Else's Server, and also don't trust Google etc. not to read your mails to figure out what to sell you. And to be able to have your backlog mailbase always available (and without paying money to a provider for big gigabytes). And to have an instant search (of which TB's instant indexed search is good, with Copernic as an altenative). Ok, you have to do your own backups, but you're already doing that on your machine anyway, er, aren't you?

I'm rarely inconvenienced by not having mail available online since my travel devices use IMAP and I know when I've finished with a subject and can finally file it under my POP mail.

Works for me.

Re: It is not the ecosystem

That must have been a long while back. TB has had reply to selected text for many years

Re: cheers

"The new design of Thunderbird isn't really for existing users"

Well, as a TB user since about 1802 (the year, not the version), I really have no problem with the so-called new interface. The worst - and transient - change was wider spacing of the menu items, but currently (128) and for some versions back, there's been a simple "density" option. But you can still configure the toolbar and their icons, and add toolbar shortcuts for many of the things on the apparently much-detested hamburger menu.

The one thing which would really bug me if it weren't for the ReplyWithHeader add-in is the legacy reply "header", On (date), (user) said:.... That, in a world where spoutlook and gmail use full headers, really is a weird hang-on, and should really be a built-in (and default?) option. The code is already there since they use a full header when Forwarding. But then Apple does mini-reply-headers (Unix legacy?) as well.

Perhaps Moz should consider that as soon as a new/trial user loses their full reply header (and is unaware of the add-in), then that is probably a big enough turn off for them to become ex new users.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

GSoD, BSoD, whatever, still SoD. Now there's a name for it.

Windows 11 roadmap great for knowing what's coming next week. Not so good for next year

Having re-re-re-tried Linux in the past months, it's still not up to what I need, for all its advantages. Too many programs I use don't have a Linux or browser-based version, no decent auto/incremental/mountable backup solution that can do what I do with Macrium, Libre Office nice but also can't do what I do with Excel, several other shortcomings, and when I depart this mortal coil first which is the statistical likelihood, I am not happy that SWMBO would be able to get the help she'd need if a Linux broke.

So, going to turn off TPM on our Win 10 machines to stop the risk of Win 11 invasion, and delight in having no further updates. Possibly will go 0patch.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

I'm moving more and more left in my thinking since retiring and getting old. Just think what all the money spent by fantasists like Musk, Bezos, Gates etc on going to the Moon, Mars, or on equally useless and cliquey projects, could do for world health, welfare and peace if applied locally. There is no Planet B, as the expression goes.

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

Microsoft: take a good hard look at yourselves and realise how ridiculous you look to the outside world. An OS should allow you to run programs, then get out of the way.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: Baffling

Ditto, on SWMBO's machine, though I went to 2019 on my latest laptop. That's the revision at which they started frigging with updates which change the functions and interfacing with the cloud yadayada. Mind, using a Local account does make things better.

Re: Baffling

But at least including "TV" in the name(s) gives you some sort of clue as to the function, unlike an increasing number of things these days where the name made up by marketing bears no relationship to what it does. Like, er, Outlook, or er, Excel, or er, Access, or, er Powerpoint, or, er... I think the point is clear. Mind you, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, etc.

After three weeks of night shifts, very tired techie broke the UK’s phone network

Re: Kegworth

A bit like navigating in the car. "Ok, in a minute, nitvyet, carry on, ok, aaannd... TURN LEFT."

"Dang, I meant TURN RIGHT!"

"Why did Left come out of my mouth?"

We've all done it. But not while flying a plane :(

Privacy warriors whip out GDPR after ChatGPT wrongly accuses dad of child murder

Spot on

You beat me to the same comment.

LLMs desperately need a post-processing layer reality check. No good having an input data/ pre-processing check as that doesn't protect against hallucination.

I had a really good example recently. It quoted a citation which, unsurprisingly, didn't exist. However, interestingly the make-up of the citation, i.e. authors, journal, title, doi, was very close to real ones of the same. So even for a citation, it mixes up input data and creates the output. Clearly a citation has to exist exactly, but it doesn't seem to understand this.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Name Solution

It's called G.I.M.P. Gee eye emm pee. Sorted. Move along now.

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

Fairly sure on my W10 it's just Settings > Apps > (find copilot) > Uninstall

No idea at all on W11, and I very much doubt I will ever find out. I'm sure you can work out why.

AI running out of juice despite Microsoft's hard squeezing

The obvious problem for me...

...is the I/O.

For LLMs that means words in (whether written or spoken), and largely words (or pictures) out. So, in Elon's fantasy world where no jobs will exist, who is going to input the words and take the necessary action on the output words? LLMs are not so clever that they can magic up the reality of "the brilliant solution that no-one could possibly have conceived without it."

For things like machine learning, e.g. detection of cancers, the ML and subsequent analysis is a fraction of the total workflow. Ok, AI can write appointment letters, but I can't see a machine taking over telling someone they have what looks like a cancer, and certainly not actually administering surgery, or radio or chemotherapy.

And ultimately AI has proven many times that it has no handle on Reality, against which to check itself. At present it can't even check a citation it gives actually exists and isn't itself a fabricated amalgam of a bunch of maybe-relevant citations. Ok, some humans suffer that too, but you can do something about humans and you'll never be able to train AI on what constitutes reality, only someone's words on what they believe reality is.

AFAICT, the best use case under the AI banner remains the expert system type of application, with proper curation and checking of data in and output, and we'd rightly still call that an Expert System.

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Nothing worked if it was foggy

At an old gig in Old Street, in a satellite office, the network was connected back to HQ via line of sight off the top of the buildings. Foggy? Nah, nothing possible, wait for it to lift. Much coffee was consumed whilst waiting

AI models hallucinate, and doctors are OK with that

Jeez, it's hard enough for those of us in the aortopathy community (which includes EDS, Marf, LDS, etc) to get over to doctors sometimes about these conditions that we could do without an LLM training doctors to ignore the condition as "it's probably just an AI hallucination."

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Block AI crawlers?

Shurely blocking AI crawlers shouldn't be too hard? I sense a commercial opportunity here, complete with database of AI IPs.

City council rejects inquiry into £130M Oracle IT disaster

Councils. 1001 ways to say no.

Europe's largest council kept auditors in the dark on Oracle rollout fiasco for 10 months

Re: To err is human...

"To err is human...

To really cock things up takes a computer."

And to make an absolute mess of everything takes a Council.

Councils: every day finding ingenious new ways to not do things.

Pet gripe: our local county council will (eventually) mend a GBFO pothole but having mobilised the road mending team to a distance of possibly 20 or 30 miles, the team leave another obvious pothole, a mere 3 metres away, totally alone so they have to re-mobilise some weeks later, having meantime wrecked Many Suspension Components.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: Kick it down the road and let the next idiot deal with it.

IT Admjns ARE indeed to blame, usually for managing to keep the show on the road.

LTS rules OK. (Where there is one)