Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory

Microsoft: Outlook desktop app crashing due to missing identity setting

There are several hundred things that annoy me about Outlook. One is that it contains an inferior clone of Lotus Organizer - Organizer was brilliant but for some reason they refused to integrate it with... anything, ever.

Then there's the crashing. Outlook and Excel seem to have a competition of who can go the most wrong this week.

The constant UI nonsense - I dread any updates as they nearly always break my workflow because some intern in Microsoft's soi-disant "design" department decided it would look prettier if they moved everything around and changed the shade of green or something equally nonsense.

I could go on, but I suspect it would be a good idea if I didn't - for the sake of my blood pressure, if nothing else.

Facebook hands over chats to cops in post-Roe abortion case

20 weeks is pretty much the abortion limit worldwide. At 23 weeks it's days away from being a viable fetus that could survive on its own - a quick search shows me stats of 37% survival rate for babies born at 23 weeks.

I don't really want to be a killjoy here but this is a case that doesn't really have a lot to do with Roe v Wade - especially as the state in question hasn't actually changed its law in the light of the judgment anyway.

Yes, the provision of private chats is a serious issue, but does anyone really believe that private chats in Facebook (or anywhere else online, for that matter) are really that private?

Microsoft asks staff to think twice before submitting expenses

Re: "think twice before submitting expenses"

This sort of missive from management is usually a sign of something serious going wrong. I've never seen a business - big or small - where this is a good sign.

California accuses Tesla of false advertising over Autopilot

And there was me wondering why Musk moved their HQ to Texas. Now it's obvious - he's hoping for some of that big-business-can-do-no-wrong attitude so beloved by the Texan governor.

Why you should start paying attention to CXL now

Thank you. I'm glad it's not just me getting PCMCIA flashbacks then.

Microsoft thinks there are people on 2G networks who want to use Outlook

Really, the words "on 2G networks" are redundant in that headline. I use it every day. I don't want it, it's just that my company bought it and forces me to use it, much to my displeasure (especially every time it* goes into its new favourite infinite loop of "Outlook has encountered an error... repair now?")

* to be fair, Excel actually seems to do this way more often.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 – using Asahi on an Arm-powered Mac

Re: Fuck apple.

I thought he was giving Asahi Linux a plug, not Apple per se. I'm sure Apple would much rather their hardware wasn't able to run Asahi Linux at all.

Maybe they'll adapt a catchphrase from Redmond: "the Mac ain't done till Asahi don't run."

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: The Tory Government to the plebs

But if they burn the candles, what will they feel the children? /s

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

Re: RAM usage

Trident 8900 cards bring back memories of doing corporate PC support back in the early 90s. I used to like Tridents - for some reason they tended to be easier to set up than the other horrors clients used to waste money upgrading to (because WordPerfect on DOS required the absolute latest graphics hardware, naturally... or perhaps that was the six disks with "flight sim" written on in biro that were sat in the boss's desk...)

Knotweed Euro cyber mercenaries attacking private sector, says Microsoft

Excel macros... why is it always Excel?

I remember installing VB 5 a few years ago to open some legacy project and it said something along the lines of "write code that downloads and executes on the user's machine - without prompting!".

Bless* 'em, how naive they were...

* (that's a euphemism, of course)

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Because the GDPR raised the prospect of rather large fines, the 2002 directive was toothless by comparison.

Microsoft closes off two avenues of attack: Office macros, RDP brute-forcing

I've made a living from Office macros in the past (I was using them as recently as last week) and I do welcome this change.

The number of people who just run things without thinking and then go "oh I thought it was all right to just click yes to all seventeen prompts to open 'ranzomware.pdf.jpg.png.exe.exe.exe' lol" just beggars belief...

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

The BOFH would be proud of you.

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

The problem with "agile" is that the word is now so tainted by charlatans that it's become pure, unadulterated snake oil*.

Every time I hear a manager say "agile" now, I wince. I personally now have only two words to describe it: "considered harmful".

* Ironically, snakes are quite an oily meat and apparently taste like chicken. Bonus: there's only two out of the however many bazillion species of snakes there are in the world whose meat is poisonous, so as long as you're the one doing the biting, you should be safe.

Weird Flex, but OK: Now you can officially turn these PCs, Macs into Chromebooks

If we're talking about resurrecting old hardware, how about some of those Chromebooks I bought a year or two ago for family that are basically now just partially functional bricks that don't get updates any more?

...cicadas chirp, tumbleweeds...

Nope, thought not.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Re: Authoritarianism

What's worse is that most of these authoritarian "think of the children" laws not only do nothing to protect children, but often have unintended consequences that make it harder to do so.

Microsoft intros clothing line that is absolutely not leftover conference swag

Re: Display your ignorance!

Middle managers, however...

I once had a conversation where someone tried to persuade me that the new version of IE (7, at the time) was much better than the alternatives and he wasn't sure why anyone would use anything else. I asked why it was better and the answer was "because it's Microsoft." As to why that made it better, he really didn't have a different answer, except that they were the biggest software company in the world so everything they did must be better.

That emoji may not mean what you think it means

Re: Wha?

There's a famous comment about that painting, along the lines of "what if he wanted to paint a dog and people went 'oh it's screaming' and he just said 'oh... yeah, yeah that's totally what it is.'".

And now you'll never be able to unsee it and for that, I apologise.

Microsoft tests CD ripping for Media Player in Windows 11

Media Player? That makes my eye twitch... more Korean antitrust lawsuits, anyone?

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: Optimist or pessimist... what am I supposed to be

Open sourcing .Net just feels to me like they're using it as a loss leader to sell more copies of Visual Studio. And on Mac and Linux as well, not just Windows.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Reciva Radios

"probably shit but it does exactly what I want it to do" sounds like paradise to me compared to some of the tat I've used over the years.

Microsoft's July Patch Tuesday fixes actively exploited bug

So why on earth did they decide not to block all Office macros by default? I mean, it's not like they're getting a cut of the profits from antivirus firms, is it?

And it's not that big a deal. I mean, even people who use them often (like me) don't really find it much of a hardship to turn them on when we need them.

Microsoft resorts to Registry hack to keep Outlook from using Windows 11 search

Re: Borkzilla has never understood search

Are you sure users demanded it and not the marketing department? Because I can't imagine Microsoft bolting on something just because mere users asked for it...

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

Re: UT

Also,

- one OS to be out of date and unsupported on your TV

- one OS to be targeted by all the malware makers

- one OS to be vulnerable to a zero-day everywhere

Not sure I like that idea.

Re: Real Issue

Active Directory is likely one of the things that the Chinese government wants to get rid of - an authentication system that is possibly open to scrutiny (thanks to the CLOUD act) that states who works where and for what government agency.

Plus the added chaos that could come in case of a declaration of war if the US government ordered Microsoft to just shut off all their Chinese users...

I'd say the Chinese government are probably taking that possibility very seriously, if they're trying to wean the country off Windows.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

Ah Uniplex - sadly its licensing system died at the millennium, meaning almost every keypress brought up a licensing dialog. Shame, if it was still going I'd probably still be using it, if only out of sheer stubbornness.

I did once figure out the format of Uniplex spreadsheets so I could convert them into Excel. Took about four days work and I had a quick Excel macro done to read them in and spit out Excel sheets when management took the decision that out of the hundreds of files, surely they can't all be useful and users should rekey them manually if they actually need the data. I understood it, but my disappointment remains.

Now, where's the nostalgia/greybeard icon?

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

I was in a weird place a couple of years ago where I had to support IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari on a site.

The weird thing is that everything I did worked in everything but one. No, not IE - Edge. Go figure.

Anyway, bye bye IE. You weren't quite as bad as all that, but even so, in your honour I am now going to play "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead" at full volume...

Azure issues not adequately fixed for months, complain bug hunters

Re: "Why did it take five months for Microsoft to mitigate a vulnerability..."

The fact that they seem to be continually taking 89 days to fix something, only acknowledge it when someone says they're going public... this isn't the behaviour of the a reputable and trustworthy cloud provider, it's the behaviour of a clown car full of shysters. How did they get to be number 2 cloud service again?*

* That's a rhetorical question - it's marketing, monopoly power, and idiots who say "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft"

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

Re: Why is it so hard to find a good email program?

That's all well and good, but it was sending the email not only as I was typing it but even if I wasn't. Three of the drafts were the same. All I could work out is that it was sending in a regular pattern of once every ten seconds or so. Very bizarre.

I should point out that it sent the draft I was working on, while I was working on it - with no visible indication that it had done so.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a good email program?

Last time I tried Thunderbird, it sent an email while I was writing a draft. Seven times. Fortunately it wasn't anything serious, but I went back to Mac Mail after that. It may not be as feature rich as Thunderbird but at least it hasn't gone completely hatstand on me (yet).

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Even with them knowing this, I once had an hour-long support call from an accountant wondering why his spreadsheet was wrong.

It turned out that in one cell, instead of having "0.10", he'd written "10p".

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

"Microsoft also liked QUIC so much it created its own version..."

Ah yes - embrace, extend, extinguish...

"... and open-sourced it."

Wait... that's not the Microsoft I remember...

Microsoft delays next Exchange Server release to 2025

Cloud first. Subscription first. They're really trying to fulfil BillG's answer to the question of what it was he really wanted to achieve with Micros~1: "$110 a year from everyone on the planet"

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: Next time

Disasters? To someone with my minimal level of cooking skills, that sounds like a minor triumph.

Microsoft slows some hiring for Windows, Teams, and Office

Re: They can't be that competitive.

Not to mention the basic stuff that the Graph API still can't do (or has four different ways to try and do, only one of which works).

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

Now if I were writing this as a work of fiction, I'd have lots of big executive bonuses, followed by another round of funding, more huge executive bonuses, and then - oh dear, the costs are way more expensive than we figured, time to go bankrupt, followed by executives disappearing to tropical regimes that have no extradition treaties...

I'm not suggesting for one second that that's what's happening here, of course, but after the whole Theranos thing I just can't help seeing grandiose expensive business plans like this without trying to work out an angle like that. Maybe I've been watching too much Better Call Saul...

Clearview AI fined millions in the UK: No 'lawful reason' to collect Brits' images

Re: And the enforceability of this fine is done how?

In other words they can't right now legally sell to ANY business in the UK, or that has a UK subsidiary that would use their technology without automatically becoming liable to pay the fine.

Microsoft revises software licensing, cloud policies amid EU regulator scrutiny

Re: 'turn a long list of issues into a shorter list of issues.'

No, that one is 'turn a long list of issues into a longer list of issues.'

Google keeps legacy G Suite alive and free for personal use

Re: Office 365 Family is $100/year ?

In my experience, all you get for your money is more crashes, more lost work, more frustration and more annoyance. Not worth the money any more.

/edit: oh, and Access. Which was always the only bit of Office that was ever any good.

Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold over bot numbers claim

Re: He might not be stupid

This is, of course, without even mentioning existence of Virgin Galactic, whatever Bezos effort is called, as well as the European Space Agency. But we could be here all day if we start down that road.

The end of the iPod – last model available 'while supplies last'

The iPod classic was great. The nano was good, if a trifle buggy (especially if you're a last.fm addict, as I am, the fact that it sometimes just forgets what you played today is annoying).

The touch however, I could do without. The terrible Podcasts app I just find excruciating. iOS 6 handled it WAY better than anything afterwards.

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

Of course we don't. But unless there's an easily reusable KPI formula for it in one of their college course books, neither do they.

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Re: Ha!! More Misdirection Aimed At Frightening Folk Who Know Nothing About Technology!!!!

If you mean that GDPR doesn't go far enough, I'd agree. But it's a good step in the right direction, at least.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

If they're going to add it in, it has to be tested first. It's a new addition, just as the read/write NTFS support is new in Linux. It's going through the same system they always use for releasing new features. Why is it so bad that it isn't released yet? I'm having trouble identifying what you would want instead, as if they simply sent it out from dev to full release, I bet you would have several (correct) complaints about adequate testing.

Ah yes, Micros~1's testing system that seems to consist of

(a) release

(b) get bug reports

(c) close bug reports with snarky comments as to how users are using it in a way for which it wasn't intended

(d) sit down and have a cup of coffee with Satan.

Outlook bombards Safari users with endless downloads

Re: Why does this remind me..

I also remember the time they made IIS 4 incompatible with IE 4, while Netscape chugged on perfectly happily. Good times.

Windows 11's tablet-friendly taskbar pulled from Insider builds

I suspect there was a bug in it that they couldn't be bothered fixing, or some manager didn't like it. I mean, why would they change the habits of a lifetime by actually listening to user feedback, instead of either ignoring it or replying with a snidely worded piece that's just a longwinded way of saying "you're wrong"?

UK watchdogs ask how they can better regulate algorithms

Re: OMG

Politicians?

Do they understand things?

What things do they understand?

Let's find out!

That would have been a tv show I'd watch. Whether J D Salinger was producing it or not.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

Re: Just charge for access

They're definitely not communists as Marx envisioned it, but then he had a pretty utopian vision in mind. Weirdly, he derides socialism for being this somehow out-of-touch fantasyland and then proceeds to go a step beyond. And yet, Robert Owen* got on the fiver** and he didn't. Quel surprise.

* a man I'd class as an actual socialist - unlike, for example, anyone who's ever been a head of state.

** or was it the tenner? It's a while back and I can't quite remember.

There are nearly half a billion active users of Start news feed, says Microsoft

Re: Fixed it for you

You jest, but I'd guess in most cases that's true.

I've never actually turned it off because I use OpenShell instead and I suspect I probably count in that half billion because it probably background updates itself.

Microsoft partners balk at new licensing scheme, dent growth

Microsoft's long game seems to be to transition everybody to monthly payments for everything and try to get rid of perpetual licences, the channel, resellers, the lot. Anyone who can take a cut of their revenue they now seem to see as being a parasite sucking the cash from their very wallet...