Posts by logicalextreme

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

Cause they were twats.

New GitHub Copilot limits push AI users to pricier tiers

Re: Hook 'm, then pluck 'm

Oh this played very well in my head. Well done.

Amazon CISO: Iranian hacking crews ‘on high alert’ since Israel attack

Re: Moses?

Tablets, malware, I don't know where to begin

MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek – plus it's true open source

Re: Dragon cute

It's verbose, but not nearly unhinged enough.

Snowflake and Databricks bank PostgreSQL acquisitions to bring transactions onto their platforms

Re: The Gartner write up is bollocks

Same with Snowflake. It's like using old MySQL with the default storage engines — it'll happily let you declare all sorts of essential constraints and then promptly (and silently) ignore them. Cue reams more code if you want to do even the most basic checks on incoming data.

They do offer something called "hybrid tables" which are essentially rowstore rather than columnar and offer a smattering of RI, but they're not really the point of Snowflake AFAICT and they're mysteriously not available in Azure. Like, at all. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: Alarmist?

I'm excited for this. I have a ThinkPad that I need to get over to Mint when I get the SSD upgraded; I'd settled into Win10 under duress but its time has come. I'm expecting to like one of the desktops Mint provides more than anything else, but used to use Kubuntu as my daily driver back when Windows 8 was trying to break everything (I do love configurability and a bit of transluscence). If they play this right they could turn the tables — I got onto KDE and Linux as a desktop through word of mouth back then; if they can get this manifesto out well then I have a reasonable chance of getting off Win11 at work!

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Correction

devmgmt.msc feels like home

Re: Really pissed off with MS

Ah, glad to see someone else uses notepad++ and notepad as separate tools for separate jobs.

Re: Correction

Good point, when they get rid of the Run box we're all screwed.

Tech suppliers asked to support single electronic health record across England

Agreed, though I think in this case there's going to be a lot of rekeying the data from the last attempt to create a single health record's project management system into the latest attempt's project management system. And the data from the last attempt was in turn rekeyed from the attempt before that, and that in turn…

No elephant icon but you get the idea.

Re: Decentalise It

Holy wow, I just posted this link on the M&S data leak article and this was the next comment I came to. Glad it's still rattling around someone else's head, though I couldn't remember what it was called (nor the word "pod"; I had "cube" in my head for some reason) so had to scan through TBL's wiki article to remind myself.

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Re: There are alternatives.

Oh and WRT companies having their own stores on Amazon and eBay — a lot of them already do; some see it as "multi-channel" and some even end up closing down their self-run points of sale. I worked for a bricks-and-mortar entertainment (e.g. CDs, DVDs) retailer back in the day and by the time I left the company (2004 or 2005 I think) they were making most of their money selling things on Amazon Marketplace and eBay, because the overheads were lower and they could even sell the products for a higher price as customers assumed the eBay or Amazon price "must" be the cheapest.

As a mildly amusing aside, when I interviewed for my final job in their head office I got to eavesdrop on a meeting between the Accessories buyer and a supplier that was happening in reception due to lack of meeting space, wherein I discovered that the relaunched Chewits we had inexplicably been told to display in boxes at all the tills were in fact the highest-margin item in the company. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

My personal trouble with it is that I refuse to use Amazon to the point that I've found manufacturers who literally only sell through Amazon and abandoned any hope of obtaining their wares. It must be a good business model for some as I always get in touch with them to ask if there's any way I can buy their stuff and the answer's always no. eBay I can live with though the interface is even worse than Amazon's.

Re: There are alternatives.

Sounds like TBL's weirdy "pods" concept, which I'd be mildly interested in if it went anywhere but haven't heard much about since it kicked off close to a decade ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project)

Re: Checkout As Guest Option Must Be Mandatory

Retailers should really be getting rid of or at least anonymising that information after there's no reason for them to hold it anymore, though it can be easy to argue the toss on that in various ways and I can count the number of times I've seen it happen on one finger (and that was only to reclaim disk space).

A couple of mitigations for the more privacy-minded might be to get things delivered to one of those bajillion locked thingies or dropoff points and use a payment processor that you have an account with, though the only one I've used is PayPal and they seem to fling your name and address at anyone you buy from regardless of whether either are necessary for the transaction in question.

Re: as a regular customer ...

I've only ever seen perishables reduced to a decent price and by a decent percentage (considering they can't be sold after the store shuts that day) in the Co-ops near me. Admittedly the percentage thing is down to the fact that they've become a decent price from the full Co-op price, but it bloody works — marked down around 1500, reduced shelves empty by closing.

(That said, sometimes Co-op's "reduced to clear" prices strongly imply that they understand neither the concept "reduced" nor "to clear").

Near me there are also some Tescos (the crappy overpriced convenience ones), a Morrisons, an M&S and an Aldi. Their reductíons are so slim as to be practically nonexistent and seem to be a waste of yellow stickers as well as the stock they're presumably lobbing into the skip every night. Morrisons is by far the most egregious; you can count on a full fridge unit absolutely overflowing with meat, dairy, ready meals, snacks, fruit and veg right before closing every single night. Reductions are usually a few pennies at best. I hope the staff get to take it when they close.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Bye guys

Nothing too sweary from me; I'm foul-mouthed in person but tone it down a bit in comments and messages in favour of wit and sarcasm.

However by the end of my first "proper" IT job (first line moving up to second line and application support) I'd automated and replaced huge swathes of manual work for the service desk and wider company with all sorts of unholy scripty email-parsey ETL-y stuff I'd probably laugh my tits off at today. There did however in the absence of suitable monitoring systems remain a few of the more stultifying manual checks/processes that it fell to first line to perform and check each month, so rather than have it be a copy/paste job on random bits of shell script across various OSes, I wrapped them all into a PowersHell script to do all the various gubbins at the push of a button; connecting to wherever it needed and doing the job for the operator with as much exception handling and helpful messages as I could muster.

Just before I actually left I converted a photo of myself pulling a face into ASCII (okay 8859-1, whatever) art and had the script print that into the console output with the words "MISS ME?" in huge letters. Wasn't due to be run for almost a month so I'd completely forgotten about it by the time I picked up the phone to hear a colleague cackling on the other end of the line.

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

Yep, I've been complaining about it for years. The default storage engines for MariaDB and afaik MySQL now support RI out of the box, but the damage was already done. You can't move these days for code-first stuff with questionable ORMs, attempts to hamfist everything with document databases and the resultant loss of any semblance of truth that goes along with it.

I know the most about SQL Server and it's a very competent RDBMS but I'd always advocate for Postgres based on license cost, love of FOSS and general de-MICROS~1ification.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

The thirteenth Duke of Wybourne? With my reputation?!

Re: Computacenter - Not The First Time

I think now every time I see a crimping tool I'm going to wince.

British govt agents step in as Harrods becomes third mega retailer under cyberattack

Re: M&S Store shopping - no stock at the best of times

It's a "bring your own cheese" world these days.

Zorin OS 17.3 takes the Brave step of changing its default browser from Firefox

I think "lambasting" is perhaps a strong word to use given the comment started with the words "Er, you know…".

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Mmm

Wonderfully put.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

A dip made of human excrement

would make Pringles taste better. If AI fails at that task it's more hopeless than I even gave it credit for

Oracle says its cloud was in fact compromised

Re: use and abuse

I tried to sign up many years ago on the basis that they were the only people not requiring a credit card for a free cloud tier in advance — unfortunately none of their (required) MFA services worked for the signup; I tried with multiple email providers and phone numbers and their support staff were unable to figure out the problem. So I ditched it as I couldn't imagine the actual cloud platform was up to much if the signup process was so broken.

Windows 11 poised to beat 10, mostly because it has to

I have to agree. Forced to use Win11 at work, and not wanting to overload it with too much low-level stuff due to the industry I work in and other reasons, I manage to keep it barely functional with a combination of PowerToys and WindHawk. I'm older now so don't feel the need to tweak everything so much, just attain a relative level of comfort and efficiency; but Win11 is the first since a long time where I've felt compelled to mess with it to get it back to a usable state. Windows 11 is simply a worse experience and one that's pushing me to Mint on my personal laptop if the touchscreen support is there.

FaunaDB shuts down but hints at open source future

Re: Did they even have a product?

I'd never heard of it either.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Re: Who, me?

A-effing-men. If you've got a disability, you get a pass from me. Outside that if you need wheels for your luggage, you've got too much luggage.

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

Re: From cool school, back to old school, or closed school.

Alternatively, Microsoft: Tomorrow's trash, Today™

Re: From cool school, back to old school, or closed school.

Today's best trash is MS. FTFY both

Re: From cool school, back to old school, or closed school.

Never tried the Remote Desktop App but I'm willing to bet I could land on the desktop of my choice using the keyboard quicker than the store app could even load whatever godforsaken GUI it probably uses to manage the connections.

In fact if I had it installed I doubt I'd even be able to find it on the start menu, given recent Windows versions' ever-more-questionable ability to match the application of the name that you literally just typed in verbatim, as opposed to some other application whose name may or may not share the first letter of what you typed.

Re: MS Renaming

Nobody at my last job could understand why I thought "data platform" was a stupid name for the "system" (a vaguely disparate bunch of DBs in a SQL Server instance running on an Azure VM, thus achieving the throughput and latency of a mid-range mobile phone from 2012) they'd brought me in to manage.

This shit always reminds me of the Jack Dee line about disliking the term "OAP" because it's like telling somebody the same thing three times.

Re: RDCMan

Cheers for highlighting it to me — wasn't aware of exactly what it did (have been meaning to go through all of the tools since they were winternals but really all I use anymore is procexp). I rarely need to RDP anymore let alone view a bunch of connections simultaneously, so I'll stick with three-character aliases for connections that I can invoke from Win+R and bear rdcman in mind for some ghastly future where I'm a sysadmin again

Cloudflare's bot bouncer blocks weirdo browsers

Re: I don't believe in coincidences.

You can switch user-agent string easily in Vivaldi, though not with that nice little switcher on the main window like they had in the Gecko versions of Opera (last time I checked, anyway). I'm not sure whether you can set it to report differently for different sites without an extension, though.

Cloudflare are certainly getting dafter recently

As for general user-agent fuckery, Vivaldi gave up five years ago.

Murena boss says customers about to wake up from its cloud storage nightmare

Re: WAG

£200 to store 2TB for a year and people wonder why I don't like cloud. You could buy yourself two 2TB hard drives and pay for a training course to teach you how they work and how to back up to them within a week for less than that.

Phantom of the Opera: AI agent now lurks within browser, for the lazy

If anything like this shit comes anywhere near Vivaldi I'll be abandoning it for Lynx or possibly just giving up on the Web entirely.

I haven't found anything particularly limiting about Vivaldi for my own use case, though I have different bugs in the same version of the browser on different machines that I need to file with them when I can be arsed.

Having to watch anybody try and fumble their way around any other browser, especially on a work call, makes me look away from Windows and start eyeing up the nearest window.

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

It hasn't.

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Re: SQLite

Wish they'd migrate the bloody Registry over to it then.

Microsoft joins CISPE, the Euro cloud crew that tried to curb its licensing

Re: Step 1

That or a homophone

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

Much as I'd like PowersHell to get in the sea, if you're already using it for daily tasks then you'd probably rather kill processes via it rather than another MS UI.

Contrary to some, traceroute is very real – I should know, I helped make it work

Thanks for the read. Humbling, entertaining and a reminder that we should appreciate and pay our network engineers more. (I do not understand networking)

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: Seems like a pattern

And don't even get me started on the mess that Atlassian are making of the industry.

Re: Seems like a pattern

Aye, I've seen and understood conflicting keyboard shortcuts cross-appplication before and will again but never in a month of Sundays should you hit F5 expecting to "refresh" your inbox and have it straight up delete the email you happened to have selected instead.

I believe it was technically Lotus Domino that was at fault, but it really makes you question Hanlon's razor

Re: Seems like a pattern

F5 in Lotus Notes when in a list of mails would delete that mail. Learned that lesson the hard way.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

Re: "on Android there's a setting the app can utilise"

Or a web browser. On the occasions I'm forced to use Ticketmaster I just log in to their website in a private tab. It even does the ridiculous blue swishy thing just like the app does, you know, for "security".

QNAP NAS users locked out after firmware update snafu

Re: Understatement of the year from El Reg…

Don't call me [citation needed].

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: Context in reporting....

Over 300,000 grapefruits though.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Re: Speaking of losing keys

Ouch. Did that with my mum's car keys once as a bairn. They went down well, but it didn't go down well.

Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did

Re: After digging out an old utility

ADMINS

Do YOU know where YOUR PFYs are?

Re: Passwords

Well worth reading through. Should've been an On Call itself.

Bravo