Posts by Fred Daggy

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Why? Don't they both keep things cold?

Follow the money: Switzerland remains Europe's top destination for tech pay

Don’t believe everything you read.

Low end jobs have been near sourced and outsourced like crazy. Was laid off after more than 26 years at a company. (It went broke, not my fault, I swear).

Even household name companies, normally associated with Switzerland, have their tech centers in Barcelona, Bulgaria, or Bangalore. Simply NOT possible to find anything with a senior role, despite higher degree, industry certs, experience and 3 languages, two passports. In the end, the network came through but job boards are currently a wasteland. Had to make a decision if I take this job, or make more money on the RAV and (maybe) never work again on account of too much grey hair, on top and in beard.

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Missing one aspect, the customer

In a business sense, the user is rarely the customer. And it seems the customer has been forgotten again.

I'd wager "the big money" comes not from OEM, but fat, fat Software Assurance and MS 365 subs. (not looking at IAAS here).

The customer wants reliability, security and manageability as a priority. Security, is of course, multi-layered and can range from hacking resistant to telemetry free and 100 other definitions. Reliability, it is available for use when and where the customer wants it. Ties nicely in with manageability.

I think home users would benefit from that as well.

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Re: Carry-on regardless

To mangle Galbraith : "Under capitalism, vendor exploits user. Under communism, its just the same, hacker exploits user."

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Re: Sounds awful

I would place a decent wager on all language evolving.

English has always evolved. Look at Germanic, Greek, Latin, Nordic and more lately French influences. Every day, every one experiences new things. Language evolves to convey the meaning of these new experiences.

Groups evolve their own technical jargon (lawyers, medical, IT, different social groups, etc). It molds the group and is molded by the members. It unites and creates the insiders and others. (See Latin in the middle ages among the clergy).

If language didn't evolve the whole world would probably be speaking a single world language.

I offer my heartfelt contrafibularities to Mr Johnson on his new "dictionary". Its a nice historical record. But words change, hence, new editions.

A combination of ..

This seems like a combination of two things

(1) “Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.”

and

(2) Even a stopped watch is right twice a day.

Which will be correct first?

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Oblig Red Dwarf

It has a six in it, but it's not 6,000.

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

Re: PST in Onedrive

If you've a corporate deployment, for Flying Spaghetti Monster's sake, manage the default PST and OST locations.

Use the deployment XML/Group Policy to ensure the default location is something like C:\Exchange. At least by default. Users can still do strange things. Suitably trained, all techs will know to at least start looking.

Never had a PST or OST file work after being opened within Onedrive. Zip archive of PST file in Onedrive, sure. ZIP file reduces the temptation to open a file "just in case" or "just for testing".

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Re: HS2 then

It's not 12 minutes once.

12 minutes, for every person taking the train, every day, for decades.

Enabling more slow trains - that probably save those punters time, every day, for decades.

It becomes hundreds, then thousands, millions and then billions of minutes saved.

Remember: Billions of pounds are spend every year on roads that eventually become more clogged and slower than the original road.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

Re: Don't shoot the messenger

6 figure executives are a dime a dozen. Nothing gets decided by then, nothing gets fixed by them.

Anyone worth a damn is earning 8 to 9 figures.

Re: they were always like that

The UN and in particularly the Security Council: "Unrepresentative Swill". I quote a great Australian Prime Minister in that, but he applied it to the Australian Senate.

Re: What a bunch of mistakes

Nothing insurmountable.

1 - Don't hoard data and you're in the clear.

2 - Cash, provide a big pot of gold for anyone providing "Daggy EU Linux". The VC capital will come.

3 - It has been enshittified. Mostly because of bad security. Who caused most (not all) bad security? I'll leave that as an exercise for the readers.

4 - That's a problem for competition commissions.Most have no teeth. Nor understand the ways in which duopolies function.

5 - Agreed. But somehow good applications still exist for Linux.

6 - AD isn't what AD used to be. Now it's all about Entra. and Facebook login, and Google login, and Apple Login, et al. But what were talking about is a nice glossy front-end to an LDAP/Kerberos backend - that just works. (Well, hides enough of the problems from clueless admins).

7 - Removing the financial incentive to close drivers. Make the copyright/trade secret/patent a much smaller time. Let a hardware make money by making hardware. Everyone wants it because it does what people want it.

8 - The purpose isn't to foster the US, but rather, let the EU control its own destiny. And there are more places in the world than just the EU and the US.

Re: It's not just the software

"All governments have to do to favour FOSS is use it"

In principle, yes. But the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.

If the EU wants to encourage development in their own backyard ; or at least not in Oceania and EastAsia (I mean not in the US or a Russian or Chinese proxy state) they had better fork out some cash.

The EU needs to set the playing field in the EU's favour. Locally hosted, locally coded and locally supported. Set some good rules on accessibility and internationalism and you're probably on a winner. Make it clear that complying with certain regulations is non-negotiable.

If China can get a national distribution of Linux, then so can the EU (supranational). Mandate it for EU institutions. Give 2 to 3 years to comply, no exceptions. Make some open standards surrounding the distribution including init process, FHS standard, File Systems, Windowing environment, etc. If someone comes up with an interoperable version, then it could be used instead or as well.

This gives application developers a stable target ... to target.

Oh, and don't let the standards making body access "industry partners". (Pray they don't come up with IPv6!)

The EU doesn't have to pick favorites, it just has to make standards and show some backbone and stand up for them. With cash incentive, someone is going to bite. Who knows, it might even find a few like minded institutions elsewhere. (Ankara? London? ECJ? World Bank? UN? Ottawa? Canberra? ICRC?)

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: Suggestions?

There was a patch for that. Forgotten if it was a registry hack, or involved replacing a DLL now. But basically as I went around abusing^Whelping users, I installed the appropriate fix.Was not something obvious-

Might have even been something that need to have SP 3+ installed for it to work.

Windows 2000 could power off all by itself! Which is why (among other reasons) it is peak Microsoft operating system. Everything since then has been 1 step forward, 2 steps back.

Experiment suggests AI chatbot would save insurance agents a whopping 3 minutes a day

Re: Say hi to my little ROAII

Costs? Ho hum.

Seen plenty of projects where costs were an afterthought at best. Headline savings were overstated/optimistic/pure fantasy and costs were buried, especially when they were hidden costs like staff time.

In fact, not sure I've seen any project that actually broke even, even when they were necessary. (for example, retiring and replacing out of support ERP) I'm sure this is probably true in 99% of projects at 99% of companies and govt departments.

Lies, Damned Lies, Government Statistics and Corporate Accounting. All the same.

Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

Re: Here's an idea

It would be included in "Due Diligence" type legislation. Have you assessed all the risks?

You don't have to do it yourself, but you need to ensure that (a) someone is doing the checks and (b) check and act on the results.

Here is a reminder: Personal private information is a property of the person concerned. If you release it, even through accident or omission, you've taken something from them. You've taken the integrity of the information and my right to disclose it or not. Its the same as if you had lets someone charge their credit card without permission. It is theft.

One cannot run a business without financial due diligence. Not just about making a profit - one can run at a loss. What you can't do is run a business knowing that the bills can't be paid. There is a word for that, Fraud. So, neither can you run a business knowing that there are significant risks to customer's personal data. I think we need a new word - PI3 (Personal Information Integrity Idiot). Suggestions welcome.

Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board

Re: Nope.

For the money they have spent, and are expected to lose, I'd wager that they could have written their own ERP. One module at a time.

There are a crapton of business functions, but nothing is really rocket surgery.

IceWM soldiers on while Budgie jumps the Wayland ship

Re: Phoenix X11 server

Doesn't solve me problems neither.

Fredd hasn't been on the turps (yet) today ... but he's just waiting for the moment that Wayland is incorporated into SystemD. Then all SystemD would need is a good kernel.

UK government exempting itself from flagship cyber law inspires little confidence

Re: Gravy train

Further to elsergiovolador, if the Govt doesn't excempt itself ... then, OMG, then The Minister would be responsible.

Might even need to fall on his/her/other sword for that failing.

If its spelt out in law, then there is no room for weasel words (well, less, anyway). There would be enough fodder to have another season of Yes, Minister. (Alas that the original case is no longer with us).

AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them

MS?

No, code examples from Microsoft were technically correct, but completely useless. Often, only showing the trivial case.

Much like the help on a field called "Complex widget" that read "Enter a Complex Widget value in this field".

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: KPIs, you get the service you pay for

As you've pointed out , BartyFartsLast, the manglement clearly don't understand KPIs.

Good ones are hard to write - but are worth their weight in gold. Bad ones just doom your company (or yourself, if you're writing them as part of next year's goals).

Understanding that "Re-install Operating System" should be a last resort, rather than a "Get out of jail free card" for the helpdesk would be a good step in understanding the customer. The customer that has paid you money for the product. In days gone by it was a not insignificant purchase - something people invested a lot of time in evaluating options. Today, prices are indicating it is more of a commodity.

Two stories "I bought a laptop from Wotan's Widgets and it broke, the support was bloody terrible" has me crossing Wotan's Widgets off the list of potential suppliers. Whereas, "I bought a laptop from Wotan's Widgets and it broke, but Support got me up and running in 2 hours" means Wotan's Widgets might get an unsolicited call to a corporate sales.

If the customer feels that the support just wants to get you off the call without a working solution, then you've lost the customer, for life. And everyone that they tell the story too. Forget about Instascam, that's the real viral marketing right there.

Its hard to find good support staff, after a while they're expensive, but they're worth it

Its hard to write good KPIs, you need to think and understand, but the time is worth it

Its hard to setup a good Support Center, it can be expensive, but it will create legendary goodwill and be worth it

Cheap out - and you get none of it. (See also Microsoft, 1976, support for the last 15 years).

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Re: "all this is old news"

Problem is, it can be blocked. By you.

But if it has a Wifi card, or even an esim, then you don't know what it's up to behind your back.

A Wifi card can sit there and patiently, slowly and low-power, brute force nearby networks. Live in an apartment building and there will be plenty. Or find one without a password - that's still a thing because some people can't do passwords. Then your TV can send telemetry and update itself all it wants.

Wouldn't trust any of them to not have a "split personality" and divide "consumer settings" and "corporate settings". "Corporate Settings" are those set for and behalf of the company, not you.

Of course, we're all in the habit of opening up our electronic devices and auditing all the chips.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: In the raw, use markup

A PDF file that looks the same everywhere?

Not quite; Try and print a PDF that originates from the US in the civilised world any you’ll get one of two things: “PC Load Letter”, or a document that proportionally slightly smaller than the original.

I think Adobe saw “PC load letter” as bad marketing (there IS such a thing as bad marketing) and therefore made Acrobat automatically shrink letter sized documents to A4. Similar, but not the same.

Remember printing Slackware howto documents before the turn of the century, and almost without fail, the page was formatted beautifully for letter paper. Which meant I had twice as many pages, but with a single, or at most two lines on the second page. Details are foggy at this point but I remember thinking that the author had done a great job of formatting the documents for a very specific paper size.

Take away from all this? Not sure, but in IT, Standards are the things that divide us.

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Most important use case.

Fred Daggy's law of the desktop: "Which is easier to watch porn on?"

See also VHS vs Betamax (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war)

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

Re: "its market share has stabilized on the desktop ..."

... When you need the extra push off the cliff ....

(RIP Marty DiBergi)

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: Providing fairly priced flexible streaming services cuts down piracy

To add to your points, for £30 a month one can buy an entire box set of various TV shows. And, own it for ever. For example, DVD set (not Bluray) of (for example) Friends. If that floats your boat. There's comfort viewing. 1 year's worth of subscriptions can buy a lot of physical media.

If you can run your own media server, then you can take care of multi-device questions. If not, then a paid for streaming service is for you.

However, If you can run Kodi/Plex/Jellyfish/etc, then streaming services only advantage is discoverability. Costwise, streaming is renting entertainment. I'm happy to pay, but gimme phyiscal media so i can watching how and when I want. Also, no privacy endangering, but sell-able profile building activity with the streaming provider.

Outside of the UK, how does one watch old or new Who? The answer was different 3 years ago to what it is today. And it will be different again in 3 years time. Me? I keep watching my disks (albeit shifted to my media server).

"Subscribe to a streaming service and you're entertained for a day, buy physical media and you're entertained for the rest of your life"

Re: Implemention says wut? Copywrong

Get the feeling like there will be an industry funded anti-piracy push. No doubt greased by anonymous bribes, ahem, donations to reelection campaigns.

This is just a test the waters, in a small, well regulated market to see how well tighter anti-piracy regulations would be received.

Perhaps upcoming World Cup and the streamers want this to wield a big stick?

If copyright wasn’t broken, this wouldn’t be an issue.

When Adobe sold physical media, it was cheaper to fly AUS-US, just to buy Adobe products, than to buy locally in Australia. Stupid shit like this

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Re: Its "just" documentation

TL;DR Open Standards are just as important as Open Source.

Open Standards can get lost, ignored, misfiled, etc. But less likely to be lost than really closed standards.

European cloud trade group says EU should have blocked VMware-Broadcom merger

Re: so, what then?

It was, but if no one complains ... then it can't be bad. Now they are abusing a monopoly position. That is much different.

Re: so, what then?

I think then, the best would be to declare them a monopoly and then regulate (1) un-bundling and (2) regulated price and price increases.

And of course, then the various cloud group put their money where their mouth is, and fund an alternative to Vmware.

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

I'd be saying that the email sender actively used my resources without consent. Email server, yes, was open, but no, no consent. Argument goes both ways - at least enough to make the legal think twice.

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Excel is the E in ERP

Excel, or how an ERP is written by the accountants themselves. Except without the security, scalability, reliability, compliance, supportability, auditability and upgradability of a modern ERP.

Costs of that abomination are hidden in years of over serviced, fat Accounting/Finance departments. All Op-Ex, so every one is happy.

Move one file, even migrate to a new file share. Change a drive mapping to a UNC, and the whole lot falls over faster than an Italian football player.

However, most modern ERPs don't have those attributes either, so, really, no loss.

Canadian data order risks blowing a hole in EU sovereignty

Re: Hang on

If the treaty was properly enabled by law (or other legal framework), I guess that would/should be uncovered by an appeal?

If would be at least one of the methods OVH should be looking up to help CYA.

Or, is the RCMP very good at finding a loophole between treaty and law?

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: Interesting choice...

There was that bit about Airbus being a poster child for Google. Presumably, lending the Airbus name gives Google Workspace credibility, so I assume that Airbus is getting a significant discount on retail. This means that they undercut the Microsoft price by a significant margin.

Factoring in the cost of the migration, cost of training, double work during transition, etc, etc, I wonder if the numbers REALLY stack up?

The fact that it has taken 7 years and still not finished, only proves one thing : Don’t buy into vendor lock-in. On prem or Cloud. And it doesn’t even have to be a hard lock, just an ecosystem and laziness. Once you’ve made your choice, you’re stuck with it.

Atlassian ran a tabletop DR simulation that revealed it lived in dependency hell

Re: PaaS

Pasta as a Service? That might be first ever cloud service I sign up my own money for.

Easy on the Rigatoni, its a very lazy pasta.

70-hour work weeks no longer enough for Infosys founder, who praises China’s 996 culture

Re: Out of touch Billionaire speaks out to benefit out of touch Billionaire

I suspected much the same.

Out of touch Billionaire speaks out to benefit out of touch Billionaire

Wealthy Billionaire, living in a bubble, spouts shit that only serves to benefit Wealthy Billionaire and others living in that bubble.

996 is only supportable in very, very short spurts. Actual questions of survival then come in to play.

Like, do I have time to shop for basic essentials and cook nourishing food?

Do I have time to perform basic hygiene and health related activities? Can I clean my living space?

Do I have time to perform basic administrative tasks, such as paying bills and taxes?

Do I have time for basic rest, so i can actually function the next day?

Do I have time to maintain basic human relationships, necessary for good mental health?

(Missing a whole bunch more, not even touched some of the higher needs)

If you have sufficient wealth you can delegate points 1 to 4 above, you can probably manage to do number 5 on a sunday only. And if not, there are enough suppliers of chemical substitutes for number 5. I bet "INSERT BILLIONAIRE NAME HERE" has not cleaned a toilet and discovered they need to go to the shops and buy more dunny cleaner. And then been annoyed because shops are closed and/or run out of dunny cleaner, turning at 30 minute annoyance into 2 hour marathon.

The rest of us grapple with 1 through 5 every day. They take time and their own effort.

The so-called financial rewards provided by "INSERT BILLIONAIRE NAME HERE" are simply not sufficient. Never have been, and they certainly aren't now. Pay us a wage sufficient that I can employ a cook and cleaner, a lawyer, an accountant, a bed in a posh house in a nice leafy suburb, a driver to drive my comfortable car, and I'll think about out. But, "INSERT BILLIONAIRE NAME HERE" will cry, that will hurt profits. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. If you don't pay, you wont get 996.

Already running on a hamster wheel, not going to run longer or faster on that same wheel, unless the rewards are reasonably shared.

Microsoft blanks out BSODs on public displays with new ‘Digital Signage mode’

Must have been bad publicity.

Must have been bad publicity having so many borked display screens around. No wonder MS changed the behaviour.

Now, the BOFH in me says instead of blanking it out, why not display our own ads instead? Keep the ads out of politics and keep it G-rated and no one will probably notice. And pocket the winnings.

However, certainly a number of screens on the local bus company are constantly rebooting into Linux, so the problem in this case isn't windows-specific. For this I blame System-D as it just seems to not cope with the hardware detection cycle. More specifically, can't cope with not getting the network defined. I'd give more details but I normally need to get off the bus at this point.

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Was I a good doctor?

They have spent so long trying to be Apple, they forgot about being a good Windows.

Re: Paint

Copilot's one and only use it to ask it how to turn it off.

Sort of like IE, of any iteration.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

Re: Common sense prevails?

That ... that's a tax. Not a license.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

You have to be f(çking kidding me ....

Final nail in the Firefox coffin for me. Been using Netscape, then Firefox since .... whenever.

Rallying against mediocrity and ecosystems. Then privacy and control, finally, source one can see and touch and compile. Open Standards one can code to.

My guess : People who use Firefox do so out of conscious choice. Mostly because of one of the above things. AI integration flies in the face of all of these.

If I want AI, I will go and find it. I don't want it even coded as an afterthought. NOT EVEN TURNED OFF, NOT THERE!!!!

If the CMO and Tech leads were in front of me, I'd be smacking them (gently) on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, as one might a naughty puppy. "NO! Bad!"

Now, get off my lawn.

Apple knits up $230 sock for your iPhone in time for Christmas

Re: Thinking ahead ...

I was absolutely thinking "Designed by Baldrick" when I saw it.

I can just image him walking up to the CMO and saying "I have a cunning design, my lord".

(Baldrick icon absolutely needed).

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Baking the tape

It's fascinating, and sad, and exciting to hear about the digital and analog archeology being conducted at the moment.

Sad because of what we have already lost. But it's fantastic to hear of the preservation work being conducted by various groups. These old systems deserved to be preserved as icons and relics of our digital past. Hardware and software both.

In the analog world, the groups such as "Film is Fabulous", recovering and preserving media. Some of it thought to be lost. (I've given them a donation of my ill gotten gains to help the work).

Work being done now might be our last chance of recovering anything at any scale. Especially as the independent archivists die off. Many estates, not knowing what they have, simply send stuff to the tip. We also are losing the hardware to recover the media.

Very good podcasts out there which discuss the topics. They seem to be much more informative and thoughtful than anything on YouTube (exceptions apply).

A cold one to the people doing the good work. -->

Tesla board wants to grant Musk $1T in stock, Norway wealth fund says nope

Re: Hmmm "the world's largest such fund,"

Still could, if governments of any colour had the balls to take on the "Mining magnates".

1 - Windfall royalties on mining companies

2 - Proper taxes / royalties on anything dug up out of the ground

3 - Extra taxes on anything not processed at least some way before leaving on a ship. Extra credits back for each extra stage of processing.

Miners deserve to be rewarded for their effort and risk. But, who owns it when it's in the ground? All of us. However, once that stuff is dug up, it's done. It's a finite resource - miners need to pay ALL OF US to use a resource that can't be replaced.

If the stuff doesn't get dug up ... it's still there when some other country has run out of theirs.

Flight simulator fans revive a classic Boeing 747 cockpit

oooooohhhhhh

(Rubs chin) I wonder what the final price would be?

Also, supplementary question, asking for a friend. How much is a kidney going for these days. Fresh, one not so careful owner.

FD.

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

Re: "due to their reliance on the Microsoft Azure platform"

... no ... there's more.

Burstable workloads are much better in the cloud. Specifically, a baseload "on-premises" and then overloading to the cloud.

But that probably only works for the mega-corps. Anyone doing less than ca 10-billion zorkmids is not going to burst that much traffic. Not an edge case, but not far off.

9 in 10 Exchange servers in Germany still running out-of-support software

Re: How do you get through to business leaders?

Agreed.

I would add that it seems that MS-Exchange is just another example of on-premises products being a second-class product. Exchange SE appears to be MS-Exchange 2019 with all fixes in place. No major functionality improvements. No minor improvements. Nada.

Knowing well how complex Exchange is, (Greybeard mode: I start with Exchange 5.0), I am far from surprised.

Wonder what changes under the hood have enabled Exchange to handle cloud level workloads. Probably the code bases have diverged so much by now it would be near impossible to backport.

Back to rant mode. MS, give your on-premises some TLC. Cloud isn't everything.

Microsoft drops surprise Windows Server patch before weekend downtime

Re: Context, wot's that?

My message to Microsoft : Pull your finger out of your arse and start supporting your damn on-premises systems as first class citizen.

Fix and update WSUS and other so-called “depreciated” systems. You’ve very little that keeps us in your ecosystem. That includes operating system, cloud platform, productivity suite, database and messaging. Competitors on all fronts, get your act together.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

Re: Multi Region for a Reason

So ... you're saying ... Infrastructure is hard. Oh my Flying Spaghetti Monster ...

It's almost like you're saying ... (1) you need well trained, loyal staff to do it well and (2) it's going to cost you some actual $CURRENCY to do it well but, (3) it will cost you a lot less $CURRENCY that ballsing it up.

Or just outsource it to a Low Cost Country and have them run a server out of their bedroom. And close your eyes.