Posts by 42656e4d203239

Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

Re: Left hand, please meet right hand...

>>Microsoft's operating system engineers had to make do with what they had someone else on another team in another nearby room has written in isolation.

Yup. That's what happened.

The late DEC guys definitely did know how to write an OS - VMS/OpenVMS stand as shining examples of how to do it 99% right.

The DoS/Win 3.11 guys already in Microshaft were, as mentioned, just writing a GUI shell to go on top of a toy(by comparison) OS. Hence the very different approaches, to very nearly everything, that NT had compared to WinX.

The WinNT team definitely didn't like what the WinX team thought was good code and the WinX team refused to listen to any of the good sense the WinNT team talked about how to do things right.

What we have today is an unholy merge of the two approaches, somone having banged heads together until the two product teams gave in a bit and 'worked' with each other to come up with Win 7(ish - this may be wrong; I blame deficient grey cells due to too much beer)

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Re: How did we ever manage?

>>I've been using the command line for almost fifty years

40 something for me... "something" is probably something high but 40 something is my story and I am sticking to it.

Have a Wednesday beer for the heat and appreciation of someone who once loved diving throught the doucmentation for sys$ calls on VAXen.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

Re: Covid face masks

>>I place a folded receipt over the camera on the tills at Sainsbury and Tesco

In the words of a now long dead old chum "you're too late mate". The till camera will have your pretty visage squirrelled away long before you manage to block the camera.

Have you looked at the range on those things? My kids just dance the magic dance in front of them - even better if its a till with a big old screen showing you what it can see - they love being on TV.

Godot says bye bye AI, bans vibe-coded contributions

Never! Tell me it isn't so....

>>Vibe coders apparently don't understand what their AI servants write

Well now thats not really a revelation is it? MInd you if one wanted to be generous, how many ordinary coders can read the machine-code from a compiler run and say with confidence that they understand how the code does it's job?

I will admit that I am being a little disengenous though because compiling and AI coding are not the same at all - other than both take a prompt and create code from that prompt. Traditional code can be seen, after all, as a prompt for the compiler. At least a compiler just takes the prompt and applies defined rules to it producing repeatable output. Artificial Idiocy, when applied to vibe coding, takes a rough outline of the required result and spits out something that sort of possibly does the job.

"Use real world language to generate your program" is an awfully familiar phrase that people who have been in IT as long as I have been (300 BAUD modems I am looking at you) are used to hearing... it has never worked in the past (COBOL doesn't count) and looks like it doesn't work in the present - at least it doesn't work how it is marketed anyway!

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

Re: Simple

You do know that if its a limited company bailiffs can't go after the director... that's what a Ltd does for a company.

The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

Re: Oh Yes

The first RDBMS I came across was Ingres and used Windows4GL to code a X Windows (and Microshaft windows as well, used pretty much the same 4GL code just compiled it on a Windows box) UI... and have always wondered why other systems were so popular when they were(are?) so flakey.

Back in those far off days, switch off an Ingres server and, unless you were really unlucky, everything just resumed when the power came back. Doing the same to Oracle was a completely different experience - one had to hope that the backup last night worked. Having done both, I have the scars to prove it!

I did see, with some joy, that our printer accounting/management software shifted from SQLServer runtime (or whatever its called these days - Microsoft Database? who knows?) to Postgres recently.

Windows devs rerolled old code to save precious bytes

Compact HTML

Hmmm not really code, but a young dev I once had the pleasure of overseeing wrote some lovely code to display certain data in a particular format using an HTML table (yup - I know...).

Sadly this dev forgot that the letter C in CSS stood for cascading and sent the whole style sheet for every style change (an MS Word one... yet again I know; this was a customer requirement of sorts) with every cell - performance of that page was dire until he worked out (application of clue bat) that he only needed to send the styles once... and then override them if required (it wasn't always).

Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

>>Classical half arsed MS problem.

Yeh - the 'if you upgrade the server, and therefore ReFS, you can't downgrade' thing was great as well

WS2022 with ReFS worked a dream (for special values of dream). Upgrade to 2025, access the disks to do, i don't know, something trivial like a backup (hence update ReFS) and machine dies horribly. Microshaft say its the vendor's problem, vendor says its Microslop's problem - until vendor finds a VM in their test suite which does the same thing at which point Micropenii concededs that there may be a regression, however us poor end users have many Tb of backup data that we can't access.

Yeh I know - test before update - but that means staging a full backup server complete with the full complement of storage. If you can swing that past an accountant you deserve a medal.

ReFS... Resiliant not Reliable

Until recently ReFS/Windows Server had a regression that totally borked some machines that deleted big files (such as, for example, a backup server might do whilst maintaining its ReFS repositories).

The server would work for a while (0<n<some period of time shorter than an hour) then get more and more treacle like as ReFS eats up all available (and unavailable) RAM. If one was lucky one could dive in during the n seconds it was working and disable the processes that were doing the backup maintenance - kind of a problem when its the backup server and access to the ReFS volumes is required for... err... backups and copies of backups.

Only took Microshaft about a year to fix and they only did that becasue one backup vendor had it happen to a VM that they had a working snapshot of so could test things for Microslop.

Anecdote says its not completely fixed however I know of a couple of cases where the problem is, effectively, a Norweigian Blue...

Years after UK Post Office scandal broke, Accenture and OneView Commerce bag contract to replace Horizon

Re: Same requirement for fraud detection?

As I may have mentioned before, my former partner was a victim of the Horizon scandal.

She was accused by a 'witness' of passing money to "family" - interesting seing as her family all live 100's of miles away and we certainly didn't benefit from any fraud she may have been committing (nor did we visit the PO where she worked at the time); we did, however, have to suffer the nights of late homes, bouts of depression and loss of self esteeem after trying to persuade Horizon to actually balance the books, despite scruplous honesty.

This was just as the scandal was breaking so she was encouraged to leave on their terms and no more would be mentioned.

Fcukers. They can all rot in hell.

Firefox 151 helps you edit PDFs – and switch OSes

Re: Who asked for PDF edit?

>>Who asked for PDF edit?

Anyone who is plagued by idiots who think PDF is a valid format for sending out documents that require editing.

>> The annoying part is that all of them behave bad.

Becasue PDF was, originally, a write once file format - print to PDF and view the PDF to see what the document will (very nearly) look like on your PS printer. Yes Adobe has frankensteined on all sorts of "goodies" but the baseline is that it is write once.

Re: why is thunderbird so loved

>>a few mail clients seem to like having "a combined inbox", which is the most awful thing in the world. I have different accounts for different reasons, I don't want them all lumped together

my dear Regtard please accept this --->

Google started doing the unified inbox thing about the time they ditched reader (IIRC - It may have ben earlier. I blame my ncreasingly dim memory on all the beer consumed between then and now) and I hated it then; I hate it now.

London’s BT Tower to get rooftop swimming pool

>>used by BT for private and corporate events for years after

Yup. Can confirm. went up in the 2000's for a BT corporate event (I was a customer, not BT).

>>Was closed due to bomb threats I think.

Yup - was during the troubles.

Re: Is the water

>>Jam on top or bottom?

To increase chaos, one half jam on top, the other jam on bottom...

SWMBO (of the Jam on Bottom sorority) insists that "if you aren't worried about suffocating there isn't enough cream on the scone" - a view point with which I have some sympathy.

Re: Considering

>>Even London gets minor earthquakes occasionally though, and sloshing might be a problem.

The tower sways in the breeze (that, on one occasion, combined with the rotation, caused a colleague to be rather travel sick). London is of course known for its calm weather and distinct lack of wind around high buildings cf. the Gherkin.

Sloshing will definitely be a problem for any pool that goes close to the edge - even allowing for a waterlevel drain around it (as many more conventional pools have), I am thinking that resonant waves might try to empty the pool onto the streets below.

--> /coat becasue you will need one if the sky level bird bath goes ahead...

Passport to £££: Home Office adds £216M to travel doc contract before a single bid's been placed

O really?

>>As well as physical production of passports and other travel documents, the new supplier will have to personalize them with data including biometrics.

Am I the only one that sees a problem with Thales, so the French, holding the biometric data of everyone to whom a UK passport is issued?

I mean it's probably not much better having the UK Govt. holding it but still...

Assuming Thales are responsible for the EES fiasco (apparently their border kiosks have trouble talking to the mothership), I guess it might speed things up for Brits visiting France if the kiosks can just contact Thales with the biometrics to check who is claiming to be the person holding the passport!

Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

Re: Huh???

>>Wasn't the UK once a free country?

It still is.

Anyone can be a member of the Freemasons (obviously subject to whatever selection process goes on in that organisation) however if you are a cop (or employee of the police service) of any sort you must, as part of your Ts&Cs of employment, declare such membership.

Hence dealt with under gross misconduct for not declaring membership of the Freemasons, not gross misconduct for being a member of the Freemasons.

Re: Question for the Brits

>>Why is it a problem for the cops to be Freemasons?

It isn't. What is a problem is for a cop, of any rank, to be a Freemason and not tell the appropriate people.

Trouble is there was quite a long period of time (like forever-ish) when there were some weird outcomes in Courts which, upon investigation, were related to the membership of that grand fraternal society. There were also instances where people were accused of serious crimes and the charges mysteriously went away, only for it later to be found that somone in the decision making chain had been on the square and level, as it were, and kyboshed to process; I seem to recall that those cases contributed to the argument for the establishment of the Crown Prosecution Service.

Now any of the allegations I have just made are from, now quite old, memory of newspaper reports when I was a young thing - there have been many beers and doors walked through since then, so I may be mis-remembering, and i do not intend to libel any of the organisations involved (which, to be fair, have never condoned, in public, such behaviour by their members).

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

When I saw "What about the Sieve of Eratosthenes?" I remembered being taught about that aged 8 or 9... So, to me, anyone not knowing about that ancient Greek seive is a bit odd... I must have had an outlier primary school!

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

>>Tides. Moving/distorting the entire building......

IRIC this is the case for the LHC at CERN - they have, apparently, to adjust for the tide (such as it is) in lake Geneva distorting the ring and also passing traffic/trains can cause geometry/RFI issues.

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

Re: Lazy policing via tech

Trouble is good policing costs money... much more money than a technological crutch.

One could, if one were old and cynical like me, wonder if the systematic defunding of der plod, forcing their reliance on technological crutches, is deliberate so that, at some point, some "far thinking" PM could say "Ooops, the Police can't do their job. Here are a bunch of mates I have who will weed out the weaklings and smash in their doors"

I don't agree with Mr Waters' policitcs, or life choices, but he hit the nail right on the head with that song...

France's 'Secure' ID agency probes breach as crooks claim 19M records

Re: Living and working in France...

>>large famously efficient country

Germany is renowned for efficiency, however that must be owing to a mis-translation somewhere.

What the German authorities/Law-makers are very good at is documentation. The two (Efficiancy and Documentation) are it seems, sadly, mutually exclusive when it comes to anything in Germany.

Sauce - the Brother-In-Law recounted the frankly kafka-esque process of getting new license plates for his cars each year.

AI is reshaping Britain's datacenter map away from London

Re: Translation

>>Slough is considered one of the 7 circles of hell

This is not a new thing - Sir John Betjamin had words to say about Slough back in 1937.

Re: But how ?

>>I know we had a bump of minimum wage, but I wouldn't call a dozen of minimum wage workers (likely subsidised by the tax payer) a huge reward to the economy.

I fear you missed the sarcasm dripping from the OP and forming untidy puddles on the floor...

Microsoft releases Windows Server update fix to fix its April update fixes

so....

With LSASS crashing in a loop, how does one log in to an affected server to apply said hot fix? Does windows actually have a working "single user" mode, a la *nix (can't remember the run-level but there is/was one and you can also do things with a bootable USB, judcious mounts, and a chroot), that can be used to sort out the mess or does one have to resort to third party tools?

IPv6 carried half of internet traffic – for one day, according to Google

Re: IPv6 introduced new problems, so slow uptake shouldn't be curious or confusing

>>That is the theory anyway, I haven't had much success with it myself.

And that, dear friend, is the largest problem with IPv6. Lost of things work in theory but practice is, often, for whatever reason, sadly rather different.

IPv4 doesn't really have many/any "this should work but doesn't" problems in the real world (other than, it could be argued, address block allocation). I have to say that various mutations of IPv4 such as NAT/CGNAT introduce problems of their own making... it might have been easier to adopt IPv6 instead of making CGNAT work(ish) for IPv4!

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

>>Nokia phones always seemed to be the worst for that,

My current work Nokia (well HMD) G21 still affects the PC speakers when I put it close...

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: Obvious from the start

With the advnaces in radio technology (SDR etc) and CPUs it would surely be (lol I know... but for £3Bn you could set up a system from scratch to do it) trivial to add software audio encryption on to the old Motorola UHF radios which would remove one of the biggest gripes about TeTRA (when it was introduced... I had the pleasure of using both systems) - you could even come up with an ironic backronym Police Encrypted Audio Channel Equipment?.

The old UHF system worked, and worked well (as in even coppers couldn't easily break the system; they could, and did, break handsets & batteries regularly). Sadly it was trivial to eavesdrop hence TeTRA, which is sadly much easier to break in terms of utility and handset robustness.

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Re: USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) ?

Dr Who was often filmed at Winspit quarry, just south of Worth Matravers in sunny Dorset... Old quarry, cliffs, caves, what more can a director (or LARPers) possibly want? though I couldn't possibly comment on the latter!

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Re: Two hour on a train...

>>I didnt see that in the ITIL spec

Like all(? certainly most) specs that only tells you what an ITIL compliant system should cover as a minimum. Actual implementation is down to the software manufacturer I guess... so extras like "On a scale of 1 - 10 how much of an idiot/PITA was this customer?" on the ticket closure form are optional.

Whitehall can't cost digital ID until it decides how to build it

Address?

It will be interetsing to know how they intend to prove an address for everyone - in either direction.

At the minute proving you live somewhere is as simple as faking a couple of utility bills and all the digital ID check will prove is that the last time you updated the Govt. database you putatively lived at that address.

Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

MacOS Updates...

I have a fairly old Mac Mini on which the HDMI port doesn't work.

It stopped displaying anything after an OS update one time (I forget what; I do remember massive denials by Apple and others that the OS had anything to do with it, along with many people complaining that after said update their Minis had ceased to output HDMI signals) which was a bit of a problem becasue it was the mini I used to run AC2.

As luck would have it I had previously enabled SSH on the beast so I could remote in and set up the RealVNC remote desktop connection from my Windoze box.

These days I have a new Mac Mini... which is almost good enough, even with Liquid Glass, to use as a daily driver. Sadly Windows is the corporate preferred platorm so I have to have a PC as well.

Generic methods arrive in Golang, but they weren't the top dev demand

Re: Here we "go" again...

>>Prenez cet Euro et achetez un langage informatique moins merdique

Miles Kington would have been impressed... Franglais without the Anglais! I don't know if merdique translates to shittified/shit-like but it should!

Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays

Re: "four to five weeks"

Is the orange turnip actually proposing boots on the ground or is he just repeating the mistaken assumption that the Iranian reigeme will just roll over?

Why does "The West" repeat the same mistakes over and over again in the Middle East?

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

Formal Verification?

>> I do Rust code, formal verification

Do you sweetheart?

AFAIK there is no formally correct compiler for Rust.

There can't be becasue the language is still fluid and rustc changes with every release; unlike C where there are formally correct compilers.

You can't formally verify rustc's output because... well if you were equipped with actual intelligence (as opposed to great pattern matching for prompts, an ability to inferhallucinate and a big corpus of training data) you would work it out soon enough.

n.b. I KNOW I have simplified why rustc cant produce formally correct code but lies to children (well baby LLMs anyway) and all that!

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Eletrolytic Shotgun

I am sure I have mentioned this before. Back in the '80s I was working at a place that used and serviced some fairly good "desktop" non-IBM computers which had built in printers.

Fairly good because their internal switch-mode PSU had a specific cable that was un-keyed. Back in those days these things were chunky with loads of exciting voltages, on exposed conductors, ready to bite - they were even repairable should things go awry, so competely unlike their modern equivalents which are much smaller and are, essentially, replacable components.

The hardware engineers must have been distracted one day because there was an almighty bang from the adjacent hardware den (I was software). We rushed next door to see what was up and the room was filled with snow filled with the shredded internals of a pair of electrolytics which decided to RUD.

It seems someone had reconnected the cable backwards in a previously fixed, now faulty again, PSU and owed many drinks to, plus new underwear for, the other hardware chaps.

Icon because thats what it sounded like in the room next door...

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Re: General Dynamics is American

>>British megacontractor BAE Systems

British - with 40.2% of shareholders being left-pondian.

Having, at one time, worked adjacent to them, the British part of their name is a flag they like to wave when convenient.

Last I heard, the strings are pulled, largley, from across the waves.

ATM takes a kicking yet keeps on ticking

Re: That's tough...

>>Research Machines 380Z

Oh the fun we had using ed (or whatever - it was many years ago) to change RUN to NEW on the BASIC disk... and leaving it lying around for unsuspecting plebs to use to further their knowledge.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

Custard powder explosion also has some great pictures around on the interwebs. Any number (well 1 or 2) people I know didn't believe me when I said "... flour and custard powder explode in the right conditions..." and lost eyebrows in their subsequent experiments.

icon cos any finely divided, combustible, material can be persuaded to get all exciting given the right encouragement.

Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year

Re: Microsoft is improving

you haven't lived until you have been in a German household on New Year's eve.... there are even channels showing this work of art on a loop... channels with it dubbed/performed in various German dialects etc. etc. etc.

Here in Blighty we are, of course, stuck with Jools' Hootenanny recorded in August and the great big yawn of the year... I know where I would prefer to be.

UK backtracks on digital ID requirement for right to work

Re: O Rly?

>>For which people?

probably not the people who have to have the ID...

O Rly?

>>Digital ID will make everyday life easier for people,

In what way?

Digital ID won't make my every day life any easier, in any respect. Various random events every few years - perhaps it will streamline the process but somehow I doubt it.

England keeping pen and paper exams despite limited digital expansion

Re: Poor service from providers

>>Could something like 15 of these help?

Not really; as the desks have to be 0.9m apart its not like the darlings are sitting in a nice row along a bench... so wires everywhere, and, therefore, as another poster in the thread has mentioned, trip hazards are an issue.

Part of the problem is the insistance that the machines are plugged it - get rid of that and much of the trouble with computer based exams in a school goes away.

Part of the problem is the shocking exam software that doesn't tolerate a pupil strting the exam on one machine then moving to another to carry on when the first suffers a problem.

Part of the problem are the interesting requirements for various exam applications used by different boards (and each board has its own variant of the same thing that refuses to co-exist on an end user device, so a school which has several exam boards has a problem; don't ask me how I know)

and the majority of the problem is that the exam boards have been suckered by the "cloud is everything" snake oil and can't see that certain requirements for the exam software contradict the use of the cloud at all!

Hey ho - not my problem - except I have to make the IT here work for the school. I, for one, can't wait till the exams start being electronic only... /s

Re: Poor service from providers

One thing I am not looking forward to is supplying 120 Chromebooks all plugged in (exam board mandates that).

The only space we have that will hold 120 exam regulation spaced desks, for, say, the english exam, is the school hall and that has preceisly 3 13 amp sockets; two on the stage and one at the back of the hall - so none anywhere near where the chromebooks will be required. I wonder where the 30off 4 gangs will be plugged in?

Even if we split the yeargroup up into other 8 other rooms (exam spacing required so only 50% occupancy of seats in a standard classroom) we will still need 4off 4 gangs per room and many classrooms only have enough sockets for the teacher's PC and we would also need to re-room a number of classes to accommodate the exam... into no-existant rooms (or the hall...)

For the IT angle, we have sufficient APs from the LA and bandwidth from PSBA to cope with the traffic.

Still it has yet to come to pass, even on this side of the bridge... so whilst the thought experiments are fun, they serve no real purpose until the dictat comes down from on high.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

>>is your surname Mcleod?

No, and he isthey aren't Spanish, he is they are Egyptian....

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: Fortune and Mason

>>Pricey!

Depends what you are buying. Some things are indeed pricey but others... more reasonable. To be fair, its a long time since I exercised the store card...

As with all of these places you need to actually shop for what you want rather than buy everything, in one establishment, without thinking.

/mines the one with a store card and a case or two of claret in the pocket...

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: Not quite terminal

We had a similar incident, only it was an actual fire at the three phase incoming termination from the grid.

Someone had used an incorrect crimp and, becasue the incoming cable had been stretched to fit (or cut off really close to the exact length required), had, instead of faffing around getting the incorrect crimp off, just drilled the fixing bolt hole out a bit so the larger (correct sized) fixing bolts would fit.

The load in the building was particularly high one day, becasue of reasons, and with a high ambient temp the insulation started to get very warm and started letting out the magic smoke... Much fun was had by all and many curses uttered towards the installer by our, by then, tame sparks.

Oddly he was an apprentice on the job when the building was built and knew who installed it though he never let on (I always suspected it might have been he who made the error of judgement)

>>BNC networking being a ring

Nope - or rather nope when it comes to Thinwire Ethernet (as the marketing used to call 10Base2) - that was a washing line with 50Ω terminator at each end; each machine had a T-piece to connect.

The only ring I can remember is IBM's Token Ring but I don't know if that was actually a ring (two wasn't it? really don't know - I never thad the misfortune) or a logical one...

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

>>I thought the original idea of Darpanet was to automatically route packets around breakages...

Routing stiIl does.

Trouble is that the re-routing fails when many routes point to Cloudflare and the target server is behind Cloudflare's infrastructure with no "real world" IP address, so then any re-route attempt will just wind up hitting a Cloudflare gateway... and consequently be, effectively, black-holed.

Alibaba releases chatbot that produces error when asked about Tiananmen Square

Re: Tiananmen Square

>>they'd just give up on trying to censor Tiananmen Square.

They don't need to try, Winnie the Pooh is managing it rather well.

>>It happened

Did it? /s not from the CCP's point of view it didn't.

>>The entire world knows it happened

no - the enitre world doesn't know it happened. The entire world believes a propaganda film created to discredit the CCP. Apparently.

>>Vast swathes of their own population knows it happened.

I don't think you realise quite how big their population is nor quite how many of them won't be aware of things that happen in Beijing...

In other news our "own" orange ape is trying the same thing about Jan 6th the other year... and what may or may not have been in certain files regarding people, places and situations he, or, more likely, his handlers, would rather the public don't ever get to know about.