Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Great success! Finance app was able to inform user that their action was unsuccessful

Hence the euphemism "having a quick Barclays"

And this is what that message invoked in my head:

"Thank you for failing to complete your transaction with us.

"As a gesture of goodwill, you will only be charged 50% of the normal transaction fee for this failed transaction.

"Have a good day, and we hope to rob you mercilessly again some time soon."

Uber plans to ride out of stable Singapore, move APAC HQ to high-tension Hong Kong

"It's time for the government to regulate ride-sharing so we can bring jobs and investment to lower wages and put local taxi drivers out of business in Hong Kong."

FTFY

Microsoft brings WinUI to desktop apps: It's a landmark for Windows development, but it has taken far too long

Yay, just what we didn't want - yet another way to develop desktop apps with that fugly flat look that Microsoft will decide to delete and rewrite in a couple of years anyway.

This is why people are getting wary of Google - that feeling of the rug being pulled underneath them every five minutes. It's getting to be the same from Micros~1.

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

Re: They're correct, it isn't a package manager

If it just downloads MSIs then it sounds a lot like the old Windows Platform Installer. Thus reinforcing my long held belief that Micros~1 just likes reinventing the wheel.

UK MPs to off-payroll workers: Delay IR35 reforms until 2023? You wish

One of the main reasons for using a limited company is literally to limit your exposure to legal issues. For example, if your agency messes up, doesn't get paid by the client and decides to sue you for the money, you simply declare your company bankrupt and open a new one. If you're self employed, you just sell your house and car, declare bankruptcy and go live under a bridge.

No, this didn't happen to me, but someone I know.

Project Reunion: Microsoft's attempt to tear down all those barriers it's built for Windows developers over the years

Re: So let me get this straight

They really do seem to be wanting to alienate all their customers. I kind of imagine Micros~1 product development discussions going like this:

"Are people buying this?"

"Yes"

"Do they... like it?"

"They... seem to."

"Then burn it down! Build something new and incomprehensible in its place! Burn it all down!"

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Re: 1% are the 1%

My guess is that joke is Goon Show era. Probably said by Milligan (as Eccles) to Secombe, as that's the voice my brain used when reading it.

Driveway karaoke singer who wanted to lift lockdown spirits cops council noise complaint

Re: One song is too much

I believe the response expected when someone sings it badly at a football match is to chant back at them "You'll never walk... again"

However working in IT and never having actually been to a football match I cannot personally verify this and therefore it remains an urban legend.

Still, did you see that ludicrous display? I mean, the thing about Arsenal is they always try and walk it in...

Microsoft doc formats are the bane of office suites on Linux, SoftMaker's Office 2021 beta may have a solution

Re: @Zolko - Trust Office

Judging by recent updates, they do actually seem to be making significant progress in making the whole of office unusable.

HPE loses second key exec in as many weeks

Re: you clearly saw a copy of the email

Is he really retiring, or are they just purging the ones that they think might vote in favour of a takeover by a Xerox?

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: What annoys me intensely ...

I usually take my coffee without blood, thanks.

I'd make a witchsmeller reference here but there's probably only two of us that think the first series of Blackadder was the best so I won't.

Re: Not quite Windows

Upvote just for "Light Azure Screen of Bereavement" which I think I shall purloin and begin using on a regular basis forthwith.

Britain has no idea how close it came to ATMs flooding the streets with free money thanks to some crap code, 1970s style

Re: Experienced tester.

/me cackles in InterCAL...

QUIC, dig in: Microsoft open-sources MsQuic, its implementation of Google-spawned TCP-killer QUIC

Re: the good thing about standards

It's an atavistic reaction. Microsoft hates anything they didn't invent and can't make money off.

Microsoft! Please, put down the rebrandogun. No one else needs to get hurt... But it's too late for Visual Studio Online

Yeah, but Codespaces reminds me of Codeplex, and that makes it feel like a last ditch rebranding of a failing product?

(Also, price cuts? Not really in Microsoft's DNA, price cuts...)

Who's still using Webex? Not even Cisco: Judge orders IT giant to use rival Zoom for virtual patent trial

Teams works better than Skype for Business? That's odd, my experience so far has been the other way around. Maybe I'm on some kind of internal MS blacklist?

Florida man might just stick it to HP for injecting sneaky DRM update into his printers that rejected non-HP ink

HP used weasel words to imply they were going to change their behaviour, then didn't. And the EFF maybe didn't spot that, maybe couldn't afford to continue and felt they had to take whatever they could get, or maybe hoped HP would learn a lesson from the whole thing.

The Adobe Flash Farewell Tour 2020: LibreOffice to axe export support for .SWF in version 7

Re: "Word 2010 users should upgrade to LibreOffice."

Ah, the Ribbon. A horrible, horibble, horrible UI that Microsoft for some reason seems to think is now an industry standard.

Re: "Word 2010 users should upgrade to LibreOffice."

But I bet my Excel 2019 outperforms your Excel 2010 in terms number of crashes per day, strange decisions around how undo works, and how long bugs are still around that got reported when Windows 3.11 was the new kid on the block.

I admit, all of those are bad things, but hey...

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: Anything outside the US

The latter really do have a problem with going over fragile bridges, though, I'll allow them that.

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Exactly what I was thinking - it wasn't broken, so why do we need a new standard? Surely only a loony would believe that comma separated values apparently can only handle three items, no more, no less, and are incapable of going past 255 it would seem.

I thought the idea of CSS and high level languages was to make it easier for humans to do this stuff, not harder. It appears I was wrong.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Bring back win98 UI

NT 4 without the Internet Explorer 4's "enhancements" installed on it was just about as good as Windows UI was ever going to get.

I'm glad it's not just me that feels that way.

It's not just Windows either, iOS is a horrible soup of evil these days. Every time I see someone on a movie with an iPhone with a pre-iOS-7 interface I almost want to cry. iOS 6 was so nice.

These nasty flat interfaces really need to go. What evil scum decided we can't have nice interfaces any more?

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Re: Extraordinary surveillance powers set to be injected into govt orgs

Because naturally you can't trust people in the rest of the world not to have the virus.

Same reason Portugal probably won't be reopening the borders with Spain or anywhere else any time soon either.

Microsoft 365 invites users to 'Ask Me Anything' – as long as it doesn't require a clued-up exec to deliver clear answers

Re: The problem

Would a boatload of money be enough to make a mid-80s yacht rock album? Or would it just be enough to pay for the cocaine?

Re: There's just soo much churn

Too much churn and we could be looking at a Ballmer style disaster. I wonder if that's what he meant?

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

I eventually ended up as a TalkTalk customer after they bought Tiscali, after that bought WorldOnline. I never really noticed this because I always used Google's Public DNS. Mainly because, at the time I did it, the DNS servers of whatever-it-was-called-at-the-time was up and down more often than a drunken fiddler's elbow during a lockin.

That said, I can't really say I'm surprised by TalkTalk being shady. I seem to recall this DNS hijacking was actually inherited, probably from Tiscali, which was very fond of doing shady things like that.

Google calls a halt on Chrome 82, but the version 83 beta has arrived early – so it's coding and bug finding time ahead

Re: Happy Web Dev

All I can ask is why you feel the need you punish yourself like that? Who hurt you so badly?

April 2020 and – rest assured – your Windows PC can still be pwned by something so innocuous as an unruly font

Given my experience of ActiveX controls, looking at it the wrong way is enough to stop it working.

(Cue eye twitch while remembering "business critical" support requests...)

From Brit telly presenter Eamonn Holmes to burning 5G towers in the Netherlands: Stupid week turns into stupid fortnight for radio standard

Re: or as people outside the UK know him, "Who?"

To invoke the spirit of the late Sir Terry, I would advise you to cherish your ignorance on that point.

Doom Eternal: Reboot sequel is cluttered but we're only here for the rippin' and the tearin'

This makes me nostalgic for classic Doom, but definitely doesn't inspire me to buy Eternal.

The original Doom, Duke Nukem and Blood 3D. Maybe I'm stuck in the past but they're still my go-to sources for exploding demons/aliens/zombies.

Tribunal halts all Information Commissioner's Office cases because UK data watchdog can't print or organise PDFs

Did I read that right?

If I read it right, the fusty antiquated tribunal system asked the ICO - the watchdog in charge of regulating electronic use of data - to produce electronic bundles - PDFs and the like, a nearly ubiquitous option these days. And they couldn't.

I can't get my head around the fact that the ICO are supposed to be the technology people here, and they're not up to the level of the court system, which everyone thinks is stuck in the 19th century. The people in charge of regulating the use of computerised data couldn't actually produce computerised evidence.

The mind boggles. I can't even think of a decent metaphor for it. The best I've got is Microsoft making the next version of Office 365 only run on a Commodore PET.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

Re: Teams makes me sad

We still have an alternative at work for video meetings. We won't be giving that up until Teams gets a lot better at video conferencing.

Teams makes me sad

I never actually thought it would be possible to make me miss Skype for Business. And yet, such a thing has happened.

Ofcom waves DAB radio licences under local broadcasters' noses as FM switchoff debate smoulders again

Just forget it

Literally. Switch off DAB, totally. Don't even bother.

Let FM radio continue to broadcast - it's still around in most countries in Europe, it'll be around in most other countries forever, to be fair.

However digital radio is already being supplanted by Internet radio. We don't need another digital device doing radio when the phone can do Spotify and a gazillion internet radio stations (including the wonderful Arctic Outpost AM1270), and we don't need to upgrade our car radios every five minutes either thanks, so if I were in charge I'd just shut down all the DAB stations and say "no, sorry, FM, MW and LW will carry on, but we're giving up on digital radio because it's a total and utter waste of everyone's time".

Flame icon because reading this back it seems the closest. (Maybe we need an "honestly why are they bothering" icon?)

ZX Spectrum prototype ROM is now available for download courtesy of boffins at the UK's Centre for Computing History

Re: Troubleshooting a prototype

My Commodore 128 was like that. It's probably still in my ex's garage, which means it probably died in the floods a couple of years ago.

His comment about preservation is quite true. If I go to a museum to see the one and only prototype of the Spectrum, I'm not too bothered whether it works - its value as a artefact is the key thing. I'd want to see the original prototype, as it looked, with all its original components. Whereas if I want one for myself, I probably wouldn't care too much about the actual model so long as I can switch it on, use it and tinker with it (although I doubt I'd want a 16K one).

It's a bit like going to a museum to see an amphora they've dug up from ancient Rome. I'm quite happy to see a replica next to it, but leave the original as the bits and pieces you dug out of the supermarket car park, please?

Google tests hiding Chrome extension icons by default, developers definitely not amused by the change

Extensions are hidden by default?

That'll please a lot of people. Such as malware writers, crypto mining junkware developers, password thieves, spyware purveyors...

"I can't see any possible downside to this, whatsoever. Nothing could possibly go wrong." - the same people who thought ActiveX was a good idea, probably.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

"If it's Boeing, I'm not going."

I think you found my new philosophy of flying...

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Been having problems since about 1pm this afternoon (about 3 hours now), so this doesn't really surprise me.

Freedom of Information coverup clerk stung for £2k after deleting council audio recording

Re: Million dollar question

A lot of councils actually do. I do know of at least one council that used to live stream them and then load the video up on their website - and this was back in the early 2000s, so you just know they were using RealPlayer...

Yeah, I can second that. The stories I could tell... were I not afraid my ex employers might decide to sue me.

We checked in with the new Windows 10X build, and let's just say getting this ready for late 2020 will be a challenge

Re: "Microsoft cannot afford a re-run of Windows 8"

To be fair, Windows 3.1 probably still works better than a lot of its later incarnations.

I mean, someone had .Net apps running under Win32s the other day, so it sounds like it might be time for a redux reboot...

Firefox 74 slams Facebook in solitary confinement: Browser add-on stops social network stalking users across the web

I didn't install it. Basically because I have an instance of Firefox kept around that is JUST used for Facebook, nothing else. And it breaks Scrabble.

I'll probably put it back when the EA Scrabble gets deleted from the web sometime in June.

Capita hops on UK's years-late, billions-over-budget Emergency Services Network to keep legacy system alive

Given how long it takes to do this sort of thing, I expect it to be announced as mission accomplished and fully operational the day before a different vendor announces they're turning off the lights on their 4G service because nobody uses it any more.

(Can we have a world-weary cynicism icon please? I seem to need one these days.)

'Up to 300' UK heads to roll at Brit IT services firm Allvotec, with 200 jobs offshored to Bulgaria in cost-cutting drive

You'll see a lot more of this soon, I'm sure. After all, never let a crisis go to waste - it's a good time to bury bad news, if nothing else.

AI startup accuses Facebook of stealing code designed to speed up machine learning models on ordinary CPUs

That would still violate intellectual property laws, though, which can be extremely painful. For example, ask Google how its little tiff with Oracle is going.

Secret-sharing app Whisper shared secrets like last known location and actual password tokens in exposed database

Someone basically say PostSecret and went "what if PostSecret was an app... we'd be millionaires". Probably forgetting that PostSecret had an app and closed it down.

Google: You know we said that Chrome tracker contained no personally identifiable info? Yeah, about that...

If Google can use it track you, so can your ISP. Or anyone doing a man-in-the-middle attach, like SuperFish* or some nonsense like that

Just a thought - I wonder if this was one of the tools they used to bust people who used TOR recently?

* that thing Lenovo used to load on ThinkPads that was super buggy and they wouldn't let you remove it, that's the one I'm thinking of anyway.