Posts by David Hicklin

Samsung eyes $80B quarterly profit as memory buyers pay the price

Re: Squeezing consumers out

Nah we will just wait and sit this one out until it all comes crashing back down again as part of the BOOM and BUST cycle.

And sweating more out of the current stuff is also good for the environment

Cheapskates wouldn't pay for security help, got hit by ransomware, and went bust months later

Re: So, emails suddenly get sent with a download button ?

You have to set your Internet Scam shields to Paranoid level these days.

I have mentioned this before but I help run a riding club website and the scamming junk that pours into the email inbox is immense. They are also as the article says getting better all the time.

Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing

A different collision risk...

I do wonder when there will come a time when the risk of collision when launching a manned rocket to orbit becomes to high...

Brighter isn't better and more is less. The AI slowdown is nigh, no matter who says what

Re: Is it just me

It's not just you - I found the article almost unreadable and though "is this AI slop?"

BT buys TalkTalk out of administration to keep 2.5M customers connected

Re: Vital national infrastructure

I am in my mid 60's and although not something my parents suffered from I can remember other people having party lines and long wait times to get a phone.

Buyer missed one option and got 1% of the cable they needed

“1 Whizbang computer, remaining parts to follow”

This is quite common (or at least used to be) when approaching year end and some budget was left to order something, have a token delivery and invoice the lot against it.

Often not only would the remaining budget be clawed back but next years budget would be reduced on the basis that "well you did not need it all last year". Totally counterproductive.

Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached

Re: What wonders does Copilot perform?

That was my take on when people crowed about being able to summarise an email.....like email has been in general use since the early 1990's (so lets say 35 years) - how the hell have they coped in the meantime ?

Re: CoPilot

> And why the feck do most new laptops come without a charger nowadays, leaving you to try to source one that is compatible?

I suspect they all charge via USB-C these days and everyone is assumed to have a suitable USB-C charger on hand already, all in the name of being kind to the environment maximising their profits as I bet the price was not reduced by the cost of the charger !

BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting

Re: How doers it feel

> Depends… last time we had ‘color’ for colour, this week it’s ‘center’ for centre

Could do with a plug-in for Firefox to convert american spelling to King's English on the fly....

Microsoft cells out, crams multiple values into Excel boxes

Re: Same as it ever was

> leaving you with no option but to take out an O365 subscription to fill in those forms

There is a place waiting in Hell for people like that.

in any case I will demand a paper based form if that ever happens - not everyone has a computer !

Government contractor exposed path to immigration records

Re: That's the holiday risk..

And me ???

HSBC decides Samsung Secure Folder and Android's Private Space are no place for a banking app

Re: A device we can sufficiently inspect

> Nationwide now demand you give them a face scan to send money in the app

Really ? That has never happened to me or the other half who are both with Nationwide - and quite happy with it

UK’s uncrewed experimental sub shows it can fire torpedoes

Re: why call a submarine Excalibur?

Probably chosen with a nod to the ww2 x-craft x-10

Your cloud survived everything except the real world

Re: Hang on.

> So they didn't set up, by checking one or two boxes and paying a bit more, mirroring in another region?

But the cloud was sold on being resilient and you will never need a backup ever again

> but I do know that there's less than 20k planes flying globally at any moment.

The main problem here is that if the restore takes say 30 minutes, then all it will tell you is where the plane was 30 minutes ago........

Re: How much *useless* data out there is being stored?

> I'm sure you are aware of the difficulty of getting users to ever delete anything (from fileservers, Sharepoint, mailboxes, etc) though!

I actually had great fun going through all the documents on our groups NAS share just before retiring with the brief to nuke anything that was obsolete, and oh boy was there lots !

Files and software from 2003 (almost the dawn of modern computing) that was long dead and would not even run on a modern system - nuked with great pleasure

But yeah, until then nobody wanted to get rid of it - at least they could blame me later once I had left the place for good.

Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on

Re: No More NPRINTER

I loved using NPRINTER , indeed I loved the Novell Networking in general...oh those were the days...

> only the ridiculously expensive case for what could house a top-notch workstation

And that is what you have to watch for on places like eBay where often they are selling peddling a picture of the item and make the description deliberately misleading

How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation

Re: Other famous lies

Before retirement it used to be a regular pain for the company laptop updates to be pushed out on a Thursday afternoon and often the only time you notice that they have quietly arrived is when you 'shutdown' (as I always did) at the end of the day...and then spend 20 minutes waiting for them to complete.

And just closing the lid to stop updates would not work as eventually they would be forced on you and your laptop WILL UPDATE NOW -NO EXCEPTION!

Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill

Re: We might have solved out connectivity problem by opening the door

> remote disconnect function in smart meters was primarily for demand management / load shedding

I think the "wet dream" is to have an off switch for Smart^TM appliances like fridges, freezers, water tank heaters and the like sheddable should there ever be a shortage of generation capacity.

Oh and it might be a conspiracy theory but spot pricing could also be done when everyone is switched over and not just for the "free" period offers that come and go...

Test environment let anyone access live customer data

Re: Temporary last forever, permanent is gone by the end of the day

As your monitoring system is expanding, eventually you will need a temp monitor to monitor the monitoring program.

SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22

Re: Oooh, fingers crossed!

> but good grief if the new V3 ones aren't a massive 2 tonnes now

So potentially more able to withstand re-entry when the orbit decays?

BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs

Re: Do they realise what they are saying?

> "higher than expected number of calls at the moment"

That seems to be the standard message from any company these days, I ran up earlier this week for breakdown on my horsebox and the greeting message said the same due to "the high temperatures that the UK is experiencing", obviously their office heating must be switched on already !

Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad's corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel

I have some sympathy with Dave for being so upfront and honest about it and not blaming others for his misfortune.

Hopefully some form of negotiated repayment can be reached

Twitter workaround worked around again: X's lawyers cancel XCancel again

Re: Public entities should leave X

Whatever happened to having a website where they can post updates to? It used to be the in thing....

September's Windows 11 patch needs an emergency patch of its own

Windows 10

Don't worry, there are still updates going on that can bork things, one of my windows 10 vm's each time it is started has the "defender is disabled" warning hen it is running just fine bug (will be fixed sometime by a new definition set).

US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace

There is no word on the nature of the weaponry

"There is no word on the nature of the weaponry, nor on how and when it was launched"

Just ask the Russians, I am sure they will know!

Re: Tell me that alien life exists...

> all species are warlike (evolution result: if they were not they would not try to outcompete others)

I would have though that most species reach our stage but go no further either:

A - Destroy themselves through a nuclear war aka WW3 (we still have that option)

or

B - Destroy the environment of the planet they live on leading to extinction (which we are having a dammed good try at doing)

Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware

Re: Indeed.

Was about to say the same - this would automatically be a red flag for me.

Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button

Re: You really pushed the big red switch?

> It hadn't and there was a short from neutral to earth (no, I know, I don't understand why it caused such problems either)

In very sensitive systems it can be enough to trip an ELCB.

Re: You really pushed the big red switch?

> The turtle moves!

By coincidence I am reading that book at the moment !

Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs

Re: Downsized

> The USA of today, is built on short termism.

I think that applies to just about any large corporate entity that is beholden to the stock market, its just easier to "let go" in the USA

Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

Re: Utter contempt for customers

The only "customer" that Micro$lop cares about are corporate ones as they are usually locked in, imagine trying to switch over a Micro$lop shop with 30,000+ servers and 100,000+ end users who are all on windows and have been for over 25 years now....

The rest of us are just noise to them

Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data

> Recently passed legislation (in the UK)

It is also part of the Fraud (as you mention) and Money Laundering checks, and if you are evading paying tax that you should be paying then I hope they throw the book at you (or whoever)

Also that sort of data mapping about you has existed for ages and not just with governments.

I do get what you mean about savings accounts interest, I am well below the threshold for that and it still appeared as a deduction, fortunately I am just below the (reduced) tax threshold this year so not paying any tax either!

The aircraft might not be flying, but the certificate has gone on vacation

Re: Oh yes we do

> One of my jobs is to "pump" borked flight plans into our software. To make sure they cope.What the hell are they running?!

Ah but did you test with every conceivable version of borked input data ??

Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists

> Honestly though you point about fixing Earth rather than setting up Mars is spot on.

Longer term (in the scale of billions of years) we will need to evacuate Earth as the Sun nears the end of it's life and swells to a red giant.

Mars could be a stepping stone but eventually the belt or even Jupiter/Saturn's moons would be required.

After that we either find a younger star with a nice planet or all known life goes extinct (except maybe for the microbes)

Dell's 52-inch enormo-monitor is a tsunami of impractical fun

Re: Dunno about impractable.

> Overall I agree multiple smaller screens are better: cheaper, higher resolution (as in pixel density).

We had multiple monitors via a docking station at work. Only problem was that if you locked the machine (and it self locked after 2 minutes of inactivity) everything got moved to the bigger central screen and you had to unpick everything each time.

Boss wrongly claimed IT deleted his files, refused to learn the one-click fix

The issue is that "common sense" is *not* very common

Re: Really stupid file organisation

At my last job before retirement they had rules about how documents should be stored as in the folders should be structured <just so> and the files prefixed <just so> depending on their content/function.

99% of the people at the place just ignored it, and where I did see it there was loads of folders of which 99% were empty.

BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation

Re: "Don't say that word. Or the T word. It's worse than Candyman."

> The way I catch up is to start by deleting every email

We had a director who said that any email where he is either cc'd or bcc'd gets automatically deleted as if was not actually addressed *to* him then it was not his problem.

AI job cuts could come with a costly undo button

But will get paid ??

Re: ...paying for those cuts in the long run

Its like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

Re: Oracle won’t need to worry about rehiring

> Except it may be that the scale of the failures are that not even the US or Chinese governments have the ability to do so

Well the US can just increase it debt but it's borrowing costs are going up, I think the Chinese let them burn rather than bale them out. Forget the UK as we are up to the eyeballs in government debt.

Re: Numbers please

> It’s hiring to replace natural wastage/loss. That seems to have seized up completely

Well we are almost at the end of the Boomers retirement spike, I was born in 1961 so near the tail end and my school 2 years later was half the size it used to be as the numbers crashed.

So the last decade will have seen a lot of replacement hiring which will have stopped by now - as well as the drive to reduce numbers in the name of profit.

German optics giant ditches greenfield SAP migration

Re: "realign” its ERP migration plans by moving its existing landscape to the new platform…

> I guess it translates to: "We had such grand plans - new everything, no expense spared - until the bean counters threw buckets of ice cold reality over our hubris. We wil now stay where we are, use what we have and migrate our system calmly and quietly as befits a good stolid German corporate citizen."

I suspect that they started down the greenfield path until they realised that they had customised the R/3 system to hell and back to fit the company processes, and it was simply going to be too disruptive and expensive to change the company processes to fit the new system without another shedload of customisation

Nitter lives to proxy another day after taking legal advice

Not really but as mentioned elsewhere I just wish organisations would stop using *just* Twitter for announcements

Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium

Re: The Bangles foresaw all this...

> I definitely wish it were Sunday

Get to retirement and every day is a Sunday

Terminated employee cost company hundreds of thousands of dollars because nobody revoked access

"but continued to be paid for a further six months "

How the heck does that get squared with the tax man ??

Insider: Red Hat is capping devs' bot budgets

Re: And don't forget...

> Of course, that's before they even start making back the money they invested in the first place... if they ever will.

is the plan not to float the AI company on the stock market just before it implodes so that the investors get their money back and all the mugs who buy the shares are left with nothing ??

Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up

So he was "certified" then, just not in the way you wanted !