* Posts by Plest

1293 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2020

Page:

Microsoft mystery folder fix might need a fix of its own

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

Billions in revenue and they hire techs with the experience of GCSE computer studies students!

So putting in a user created symlink borks one of the major sub-systems in an operating system used by billions! Brilliant!

I'm not a coder by trade by even my scripting extends to checking filesystem object types when I'm automating processes to make sure I know I'm working with the right objects, it's not even clever, it's just plain f**king common sense!

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

Plest Silver badge
Thumb Up

"They don't include the Windows Store or any "modern" apps."

This gets even better!

AWS claims 50% of Azure workloads would jump ship if licensing costs allowed

Plest Silver badge
Mushroom

A plague on both your houses!

This is why I hated AWS, they're evil 'cos they lure you in with the promise of cheaper FOSS software but then do everything in such a "unique" ( read : shite ) way that it's a bastard to extricate yourself. MS aren't much better, they lure you in on cheap licenses, lock you with a very tight and well designed eco system, then you can't untangle anything and have to move it all out wholesale and keep paying off prem MS licenses costs!

Oh and Google can just f**k off 'cos they're Google!

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Plest Silver badge

Re: How hard can it be to RFI/EMI and Radiation-Harden your electronics?

Exactly, most "toy" drones people play with at weekends are under 250g due to the CAA regs, that includes the battery. every single component is optimised for weight and performance, even light shielding would reduce ffligth time/distance making them useless unless they're made big enough which then makes them easy targets to just be shot down by some grunt with a rifle.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties

Well MS, what's the purpose then? Now don't give me that BS about it helping users to organise, there's something in it for you lot or you wouldn't have coded it and wouldn't have tried 17 times already to foist it on us!

Plest Silver badge
Linux

I think it's time to switch

Been hanging on to Windows as I like gaming but since I got a SteamDeck and hooked it up to my TV, I think now is a perfect time to consider finally switching to Linux on a more permanent basis.

Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

So give me just one reason why my frickin air-fryer needs to be connected to the bleedin' "inta-webs"?!

FFS, it cooks chips and chicken nuggets when the missus goes out to see her sister of an evening once a week and I have to do me own dinner! We all love tech or we wouldn't work in this biz but sometimes I have to question how fecking stupid humanity is with it's insatiable need for info about the most pointless bollocks!

Top 10 billionaires make nearly $64B in post-Trump election stock surge

Plest Silver badge
Thumb Up

Cheers Donald!

Yep, even my savings and pension investments went up by about 2.5% in a single day, and after 35 years of saving it gets me a little closer to retirement a little sooner!

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Plest Silver badge
Happy

"Anything can happen in the next half hour!"

Getting some serious Thunderbirds feeling from the piccies.

Watchdog finds AI tools can be used unlawfully to filter candidates by race, gender

Plest Silver badge

Re: "he was turned down for every single one of the more than 100 jobs he applied for"

"two towers" , 2011?

The NY twin towers was 2001 and Jackson's movie interpretation was 2002.

Six IT contractors accused of swindling Uncle Sam out of millions

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Amateur!

Reminds me of Richard Pryor's character in Superman III. Pryor rips off his company by funnelling money through the payroll system, the head of the corp ( played by Robert Vaughn ) finds out someone is on the make and he says, "He'll want to lie low after swindling so much money, unless he's a complete moron of course!", he looks out the window to see Pryor screaming into the car park in a bright red Ferrari!

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

Plest Silver badge

This is why I do not have many apps on my phone, most certainly no financially related ones! I have an MP3 player, the train timestables, my drone software and whatsapp so the kids can reach me, nothing else.

Merde! Macron's bodyguards reveal his location by sharing Strava data

Plest Silver badge

Simple, the more data you collect on a customer the more valuable that customer and their data becomes, so you slurp data like an obese kid slurps his 3rd MaccyD milkshake of the day!

Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries

Plest Silver badge

Just FYI, tax free lump sums are now capped 25% or max £250k, whichever is the greater

I've been working on Option B for the last 35 years! People in my family think private sector IT work I do is average salaries, gonna enjoy giving them a huge shock when I throw my retirement bash at 56 in a couple of years time!

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

Infosec are mostly useless in corp land

I've yet to meet any infosec people I'd trust to install a piece of AV software properly, let alone have even an ounce of securty knowledge above most quality admins. I know there must be some good infosec bods out there but all I've met so far from infosec are people who couldn't hack it as a proper Linux/Windows/DB admin job and so ended up doing infosec 'cos it was mostly just sitting around in meetings waving bits of paper with Rapid7 reports printed and moaning that no one take security seriously enough despite the constant rounds of patching admins do daily.

Apologies to the good infosec bods but you have a lot of cowboys in your part of the IT crowd, you really need to sort your image out! ha ha!!

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Plest Silver badge
Happy

So long as they do it after 2030, after I retire, as i don't fancy making all those thousands of checks on pieces of software when the remove the DST handling code. I did all thousands of checks back in 1997-1999 in prep for Y2K and I'm planning on avoiding the old 2036 Unix deadline too!

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Plest Silver badge

"AWS might produce a sub-optimal product". Might?!

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Plest Silver badge

We had a little bellend who was the class clown, messed about, screwed around and didn't bother coming in for his GCSEs. He left school, did a series of shitty low paid jobs for 10 years, got married, manage to produce two kids and dropped dead suddenly at the age of 38 from a drug induced heart attack.

I don't wish death on anyone, but life is always a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".

Keir Starmer tells regulators to chill as Microsoft exec takes wheel of advisory council

Plest Silver badge

"The watering down of financial regulation led to the 2008 bank crash."

My understanding was that it was all above board, but bellend equity players played pass-the-parcel with a nuclear shit-ton of mega-debt and that was never going to end well, it was going to go bang sooner or later.

Plest Silver badge

Re: We will rip out the bureaucracy

"re-hire the medical staff and useful admin staff"

You did see this in the OP right? Everyone knows you need admin staff or no has any equipment and patients don't get where they're supposed to be to meet with medical staff at the right time, we don't need a load of overpaid admin consultants wasting tax payers money implementing schemes and projects simply to justify their £125k pay packets!

Anthropic's Claude vulnerable to 'emotional manipulation'

Plest Silver badge

It's actually quite simple how you con this AI models into doing stuff, you simply "ask on behalf of someone" and you ask for small parts of a bigger whole thing you're trying achieve. It's really on secret and it's how everyone is conning these AI models.

The scariest thing is not that people can generate this stuff so easily, it's that the models have enough backend data with probably some absolute god-awful stuff, the frontend is basically like "chocolate teapot", ie doesn't take much to beat.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

It's 2024, get a grip Microsoft, FFS!

Linux was released AFTER Windows in the 1990s and Linux is able to update the system on the fly while you're using it, Windows still needs to sit on the "BSOA" ( Blue Screen of Annoyance ) for 10-15 mins once a fortnight while it updates and you pray like hell the patches will work. Number of times I've had calls from friends and family who's PCs have sat for 45-60 mins on the BSOA, panicked, called me and I've said "Pull the plug and restart, should be OK.". I had one relie in tears once as she was terrified her docs were gone!

It's 2024 Microsoft, you should be able to patch in the background, sign off automatically and request a quick 30 sec reboot to apply, not the charade we have to go through every couple of weeks for simple patch cluster.

Systems like Solaris and others have been able to literally hold an entire patched O/S root on disk to one side, you can boot between them at will, have as many roots as you have disk space for with different revisions of the O/S. We patch our Solaris boxes on the Thu and leave them until Sat morning, flip the boot environments from a master system and reboot the boxes one after another, back in abot 90 secs and these systems are about 10 years old!

RAC duo busted for stealing and selling crash victims' data

Plest Silver badge

Re: Wait a second...

Been on many interviews lately? Last one I had 9 months ago they requested access to look up me up social media and do a basic background check with official third-party agency. I refused the first ( they're going to do it anyway! ) but refusing the second would have sounded very dodgy so I agreed. I've never so much as had a parking ticket or a missed CC payment, squeaky clean to the core.

Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck?

Plest Silver badge

Once did work remote support from a hotel using my SteamDeck!

Once fixed two Windows servers and a Linux box using my SteamDeck in desktop mode, in a hotel room on the North Yorks coast using their TV on HDMI and a bluetooth keyboard! My SteamDeck is the best piece of kit I have ever owned.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Plest Silver badge

Re: AI agents have been the source of much enthusiasm in the technical community

"The "technical community" for me consists of people who understand technology and whose experience leads them to be cautious with their enthusiasm..."

This is also what separates juniors from seniors, bitter experience always breeds caution!

Plest Silver badge

"No password was needed due to the use of SSH keys; the user buck was also a sudoer."

Well straight away i heard alarm bells. It had no password and managed to gain sudo which to me suggest sudoers was unauthenticated, if you do that then you deserve every bit of pain coming your way!

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

Plest Silver badge

"Windows 11....is a glitchy disaster" , that was an easy one!

Down and out: Aegon's pension pothole and TfL's mystery 'maintenance'

Plest Silver badge
Happy

Re: AEGON Pension Nightmare

"and pot size is going down daily" - You sure you're not looking at my work pension by mistake?!

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Aegon

If it's bloody risky but there's a slim chance of pulling it off then run the risk and pray. If you get away with it then you save a ton of money. If you f**k it all up, then you apologise and then you simply have to spend the money you'd have spent anyway on parallel runs! Either way you're no worse off financially.

Welcome to modern IT management, piss poor and shite!

UK Ministry of Defence gets into chipmaking game, buys gallium arsenide fab

Plest Silver badge

Re: Sensible

I believe we can't mine the right kind of ore anyway, we'd need to reconfigure our steel production plants as our ore is of poor quaity compared to the kind we need to import.

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Plest Silver badge
Gimp

Something deeply masochistic about these...

You know where you keep bashing your head against a wall over and over 'cos it feels great when you stop? That's the kind of vibe I get from these little gadgets, like working as a handyman at a dom's flat, you just can't get a enough punishment and you'll do anything to get some!

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Plest Silver badge

Re: we have how long on the lease?

Stop using the crap company supplied ones, get a decent £120+ wireless gaming headset, nothing like having a meeting with your team while cooking up bacon and eggs in the kitchen!

Plest Silver badge
Thumb Up

Yep!

I always mark them "satisfied" to "very satified" and never put anything in the free form boxes. I'm a happy little worker as far as they're concerned and when I'm not then they'll know by the tone of my resigntion letter.

IBM and Oracle to support 280,000 users after winning mega ERP govt tech contract

Plest Silver badge

Re: "total expected tech spending on the project to around £1.9 billion"

I know right? Normies baulk at £150m quid wasted, until you tell them about the billions of pounds wasted on IT and tech projects runs by government morons with all the tech skills of your 90 year old granny!

Plest Silver badge

Ah one more reason why the pot-holes won't be fixed in my town for another 5 years!

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Plest Silver badge

Re: Bye-bye Microsoft.

Precisely! No need to buy corp spy software, you can no get it as part of the Windows enterprise license, baked into the system and I'll bet that within a year there'll be a console you can install ready to tap any laptop or desktop's Recall cache, perfect tool for paranoid PHBs to check we plebs are earning our daily scheckles and not wasting time going to the toilet or eating lunch!

Plest Silver badge

Re: Ridiculous!

Selling the spying service to employees on corp laptops and desktops! I cannot think of any other purpose than as a service for enterprise customers and paranoid PHBs to spy on staff.

Plest Silver badge
Happy

Hey, it'll likely have SSL on the line when it sends the data back to the mothership! There you go, security and privacy taken care of!

Plest Silver badge
Happy

I hear the rest of that statement...."Would I lie to you?"

Plest Silver badge
Happy

How would MS make any money? The days where you bought software and it did exactly what it promised on the box, those days disappeared back around 1999 my friend. Software is for data gathering first and foremost, any productivity you experience with software is purely incidental these days!

Plest Silver badge

Re: Ugh

No, it's to sell the spy-as-a-service to companies needing to check we plebs are working 8 hours a day, especially WFH is more prevalent now, 'cos companies see all those coffee and toilet breaks as a wasting company time and money, with Recall they have proof you wasted 47.6 secs going for a pee and grabbing a biccie when things got busy!

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

We all know perfectly well what it's for, it's for companies to spy on employees to make sure you're working your 8 hours solid and not doing stupid things like taking breaks for coffee, lunch and going for a wotnot, all those activities that companies classify as wasting time rather than working 100% of the contracted 7-8 hours a day.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Plest Silver badge
Happy

Shucks....

There's me thinking all you need to deflect asteroids is a washed up, balding actor and an Aerosmith song!

Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users

Plest Silver badge
Pirate

Superb idea and I can't wait!

As we say in support circles, "More bugs. More consultancy.". Now get your finance dept on the phone 'cos this new contract you're signing is gonna run for a very long while!

Feel free to ignore GenAI for now – a new kind of software developer is being born

Plest Silver badge
Facepalm

All I've seen of what AI has done for developers is a million and one articles on Dev.to showing me how to write an AI powered chat bot for my phone, Windows, Linux, webpage, fridge, garden shed, dead badger I found up the road while out walking this morning! All I've seen Ai do is offer bored developers something to do of an evening so they write articles to get kudos points on social media websites, no one I know has actually done anything practical with AI hooks and APIs, some I know have butchered AI hooks into software to shut their PHBs up so they can put "We have AI in our software!" stickers on the sales pitches.

When I see something useful from AI, that isn't wanking off Sam Altman's ego, then I'm listening until then just give it rest.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Plest Silver badge

Re: Waste of time

Ditto. 4 years and counting since mine worked, complain a few times a year and no one ever comes out to fix it. Manully put numbers into website every time we get the nagging emails.

Plest Silver badge

Mine ain't worked properly for 4 years now! We call up every 3 months, complain, someone supposed to come out, no one ever does, squeeze under stairs one more time to read meter and manually enter numbers into website.

What a complete waste of time and money putting a smart meter in, might has well left the old one there as nothing has changed, still have to send numbers to supplier manually in 2024!

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

Plest Silver badge
Happy

I want Windows11 in my workplace!

Well actually I don't but they won't replace my 7 year old work laptop with a spanking shiny new touchscreen MS laptop unless I relent and take it with company sanctioned Win11 installed. Oh the agony of choice, laptop with more than 8gb memory and battery that last more than 35 mins or.....Windows 11......oh dear gods of fate why do you toy with me for you sport?!

Microsoft's Copilot 'Wave 2' is a tsunami of unanswered questions

Plest Silver badge

6 months ago we had to dumped on our desktops. I instantly asked it to generate a simple example of C++ code to make a basic REST GET, it immediately responded with "I can only offer code in Python.", failure #1. So I took the code, checked it and it was shite and didn't even have the right calls! I've since hidden it and use ChatGpt wihch is far from perfect but can at least provide code snippets in many languages and is way more chatty and polite than CrapPilot.

Page: