* Posts by FirstTangoInParis

348 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2021

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Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month

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Re: mother fscker

So I've just noticed that my Family MS359 subscription just went up from GBP 80 to GBP 110 because MS now want to claw back investment on a tool nobody wants. And in fact if you want to know how to write documents and slide decks, effing learn because you'll get zero respect in an office enviroment for relying on AI.

Fortunately I followed the advice to cancel the subscription and it went oh don't go, have this cheaper one instead which is what you already had.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

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Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

So perhaps the random number should have been 6 then?

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

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Re: Homeless?

Homeless due to bank snafu ... almost been there back in late 80s due to bank not clearing funds for house purchase on the Friday evening before a holiday weekend. Sitting there with a hired removal van to be returned next day and not being allowed keys, 100 miles from our previous des res. Fortunately it all went through last minute so we got keys and moved in.

So yes it's a real thing. My sympathies to families affected by Barclays. Oh and charity accounts, both Natwest and Barclays are tortuous for changing signatories, but Barclays get extra rotten tomatoes for losing paperwork emailed to their mandate team by one of their own branches. Local county Building Society? Wha a breeze, how it should be.

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands return-to-office despite remote work pledge

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Oh have a trillion upvotes! Different people DO communicate (and learn) in many different ways. At university in the 80s, lecturers asked us to buy their big expensive book. I decided I’d watch the lectures instead and take notes. Not that I am a skinflint (ok just a teensy bit) but I’m never going to read the book as that makes me doze off. Nowadays we have e books which can be searched for the right bit, and with a subscription is massively cheaper too.

Even Windows 10 cannot escape the new Outlook

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New Outlook on Mac ….

… running 365 is missing the Next & Previous message arrows that have been in Outlook 2xxx for Windows since forever. They are not even in the things you can add. And the threading is a bit naff too.

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

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Re: What About Microsoft Recall ?

If managers have the time to review Recall output, they really aren’t doing their job. I’ve had management who don’t understand the very meaning of vision and strategy, and just become meeting tourists.

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

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Re: " Fallout continues from per-employee licensing shift"

Great minds mis-read alike!

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Re: Not fooling anyone

Free product v one with a price tag ….. surprisingly I’ve known teams select paid for products over free because then they can go after the vendor if things go wrong.

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

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Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

> Might be counting "R's" in a different language. Maybe something like welsh which i think repeats a lot of letters?

In Welsh, those double letters count as one letter. “ff” and “ll” for example. [0]

By the way, according to the Welsh dictionary [1], strawberry in Welsh is mefusen which is feminine. So no r’s here.

[0] https://www.felinfach.com/pages/welsh-alphabet-welsh-vowels

[1] https://www.gweiadur.com/welsh-dictionary/mefusen

Europe, UK weigh up how to respond to Trump's proposed tariffs. One WTF or two?

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Re: Prisoner's Dilemma!

Well he swore to defend the constitution and then hours later tried breaking the 14th Amendment. Starting as he means to go on.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

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Years ago we supplied a customer with a Sun Sparcstation in a metal enclosure with some other bits and bobs. One day said enclosure came back to us having fallen off a pallet while being forklifted. The cards needed reseating but the hard drive was a gonner. Everything else was fine, except a retaining bracket for the Sun was well bent, clearly it had landed with some force. Such a well made computer.

FBI wipes Chinese PlugX malware from thousands of Windows PCs in America

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So you’d have thought AV signatures would have been developed for all AV vendors everywhere? I’ve always wondered about Defender but all AV software on Windows are performance hogs (don’t get me started on McAfee) and there’s a usability trade off to be made.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

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Windows 95 and all that

Ah yes the days of W95 in the corporate environment where users could (and, ahem, I did) do literally whatever they wanted. In particular, I could run Windows Update and install the graphics driver it said it needed. Wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong it caused a BSOD. That taught me never ever to install drivers off Windows Update to this day. Luckily I was on good terms with the IT department so we just put it down to something I should never do ever again.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

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Re: Worrying trend

> The last thing I'm going to do is put my accounting "in the cloud". Besides, it's accounting. How much has that changed in 200 years?

Have 200 upvotes. It’s not the accounting that’s changed with cloud packages, it’s the quality of the software that has nosedived. Quick books desktop worked. Quick books online is a massive pile of poo, I went back to Excel. Stuff breaks for a pastime and the help is useless. Likewise Xero, except a load of stuff (notably bank and supplier feeds) just doesn’t work and looks like nobody CBS to fix it. For example, there is no dedicated field to enter a customer purchase order on an invoice, the forumites have been asking for it for FOUR years and they’ve been roundly ignored.

UK tax collector's phone service 'deliberately' bad to push users online, say MPs

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Oh you should ask the chatbot ….

… but then they don’t know either. I’m convinced chariots got dreamed up purely to mask crap web site design (and I’m talking ability to find information, not how pretty it looks). Having said that the Gov digital service does seem to have got its ducks aligned as the sites are easy to navigate. But I take the point made earlier that you can get ambushed for evidence part way through.

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

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Re: Undersea infrastructure

We’re talking Sweden here so surely we must call the IKEA helpline. Maybe get some meatballs while we wait.

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

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Re: the Wi-Fi connectivity challenge surrounding EVs

Kids in cars with iPads! As well as parents watching films in 4K on their phones for goodness sake!

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Re: Sounds like a BT infrastructure project to me.

I wonder if a mobile phone base station would work? There’s a proper monstrosity in one of the cities near me. I do wonder what happened to making them blend in with the surrounding area … oh yeah it would need a drug handover point. I’ve seen the coin return area in a phone box used for this many a time,

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Yes but no but ….

Quite a few of such chargers appear not to actually be accessible to the average person unless you’re using the facilities of the land occupier. Ferry ports and hotels to name but two. McDonald’s is possibly tempting but you don’t have to eat any of their famously tasteless fries.

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

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IIRC payments providers like Stripe allow devs to use credit card numbers reserved specifically for test transactions. I do wonder if some wag has ever printed a card up with such details, and what the results might have been.

IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door

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Re: But why?

Biggest problem is coverage of mobile networks is where the most people live. Anywhere out in the sticks the coverage is minimal to zero. No good for anything. But then PTT over Iridium satellite phone has been available for some years now and works a treat. PS I don’t work for them!

Parallels brings back the magic that was waiting seven minutes for Windows to boot

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Re: I don't understand why this product exists

I did try running Linux Mint in UTM on a M2 just to see what it looked like but it’s only available in x86_64 and runs veeeeery slooooowly. Better off running Ubuntu ARM version which is incredibly fast. Issue reboot command, swivel once in your chair (quickly mind) and its back up. Wow.

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Re: hard disk drive grinding its way to

Running two pairs of NAS quality 2TB HDDs in RAID 1 on my Ubuntu file server, the first I see about disk issues is noticing one of a pair has dropped out for some reason. I can usually recover it though using mdadm magic. The logs are not usually much help. I’d like to set up the mail notifications to a Gmail account but that’s just too difficult these days.

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

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Perhaps you’ve never tried writing standards. A camel would be a good outcome for a team writing a spec for a long range horse. But someone will have wanted to add all kinds of features and the team didn’t want to waste two years arguing the toss, so they went in as options. Hence a camel could also be fitted with wings, jet engines and aqualungs, but most aren’t.

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

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Re: upgrades

Our Technical Authors used to swear by (not at) Word 97. It was all they ever needed, and it worked for them. There is still nothing wrong with it (apart from all the bugs and zero-days) and frankly Office 20xx is just a different build with a different UI. Just like Windows 11 is a different build of Windows 10 (yes it is; check MS admin tools, 11 is reported as 10.0.0.2xxxx, 10 as 10.0.0.1xxxx).

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

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MS359 web edition is ….

…. trying to be helpful by aggressively telling you your grammar and style is all wrong. I quickly reached for the eff off and die buttons.

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Re: Instead of disabling translation

Also irritating if you work for a multi-national and someone not a native speaker decides to publish a notice in English …. close but no cigar. I wouldn’t dare do that to them, especially after trying to write an email in French and then have my colleague comment over my shoulder that I was textbook correct but it’s not how they would say it.

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No Big(gie) Mac

£3.8B later, old tech supplier flames still burning for HMRC

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Re: Outrageous

Hmm, uk gov are very careful about ethics, I’m sure it says somewhere. Perhaps 100k for a disk drive?

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For a billion per year .....

... I'd be tempted to bid and produce a whole bunch of truly enormous spreadsheets. Yes I'm a firm believer in correct tools for the job, but why is it that every online tool that I've used for accounting and tax stuff breaks several times a year and has help files that don't help at all, driving me back to first principles and to write spreadsheets for said tasks.

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

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Re: "his insurance will only cover the first of three required weeks" of six months

Ok so in the UK, anything that is an emergency won't be touched by the insurers BUPA et al. It's off to the local A&E for you and by golly you'll get good treatment, stifled only by a chronic shortage of beds. I've had this two years running for separate issues and I cannot fault it.

However for elective treatment, you're on the wait list plus the NHS will spend the minimum working out what is wrong with you. If you're lucky enough to have health insurance, you can skip the waitlist and choose your consultant (who also works in the NHS) and you'll get better diagnostics too so they can actually fix the problem rather than just trying this and that.

But ... the costs are all agreed up front between the insurers and consultants, so no unexpected bills. You do pay for some things like meds on discharge, but everything else goes through smoothly.

Zuck takes a page from Musk: Meta dumps fact-checkers, loosens speech restrictions

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Re: Trump isn't president of the rest of the world

Not only Facebook and TwiX but also Substack. It seems anywhere people are allowed to post, sooner or later the non mainstream peeps show up and we get off topic posts on whatever is bugging them this week. On Substack you see feeds that the publishers you subscribe to have liked. Yes you can block feeds you don’t like or agree with but it’s very depressing to have to keep doing it. I left TwiX because of the off topic rubbish and might do the same with Substack. Plus a paid subscription per publisher is a third of a Netflix subscription and I don’t feel I’m getting the content that’s worth it.

CAPTCHAs now run Doom – on nightmare mode

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“Click on the pics of today’s minor celebrity that we’ve got some gossip about. Oh and the odd actual news story too”.

A New Year's gift from Microsoft: Surprise, your scanners don't work

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Re: And here I was thinking that my scanner isn't working because

Gosh I remember that on one of the early MFDs I had at home. Unit folds its arms and pouts like a stroppy toddler until you fix the thing that was completely unrelated to what it was you were trying to do.

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Re: Well...

There's always 25H1 ....

Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, Poland

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FAIL

Horses for courses ...

Kids, just say no to Windows for digital signage. It's not the right tool for that job. I know, I've tried Kiosk Mode and it's useless. Yes I know Windows is used in just about every airport round the world to hopefully display where you're going, but that doesn't make it right.

But then, what is? I've tried Ubuntu, Ubuntu Core, and some other packages without enduring success. And then the sun came up. Big shout out to PiSignage. Get a Raspberry Pi (any model, even Pi 1s), download the player image, register on the web site, off you go. It just works and works and works. It's so good you could (dear Baldrick) brush your teeth with it.

It doesn't help that just before Christmas someone took out the TV it was displaying on with a big step ladder, in true Who, Me? style. I never liked that TV anyway, it was an LG that didn't understand CEC commands over HDMI. Ho Hum.

Second Jeju Air 737-800 experiences mechanical issues following deadly crash

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Re: Accountants At Work??

So for airlines it’s all about revenue per seat that has a bum on it and availability. Everything feeds in to that. Fuel economy, maintenance intervals, weight, turnaround time at the gate, a million other factors too. EasyJet has just opened a new ops centre that can dispatch a replacement aircraft during the day if an aircraft is getting behind (as short haul inevitably does). Mr Ryanair is ranting about late delivery of new 737 Max when he’d recruited pilots and cabin staff to operate them.

For long haul, customers (especially in premium economy and business) are demanding their 3 to 6 grands worth so somehow the airline has still got to make its margins.

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Re: re: end of Gatport Airwick runway

See also the East Midlands airport crash, known as Kegworth air disaster. B737 came down short of the runway straight on to the M1.

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Southampton Eastleigh airport has the M27 to the south, currently filled with masses of concrete barriers for the roadworks that are taking an age to complete. But what really worries the locals is a plane coming down on the docks.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

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Re: My Fastest Fix

A frequent issue with hot desking is that the previous user has decided to turn the monitor (or if you’re lucky, monitors) off. Plugging in your laptop to the docking station gives blank screen(s) all round until you realise this. Then you have to spend time convincing your laptop the screens really are there. I’m pretty sure the cost in time wasted like this is more than the cost of electricity to power said monitor(s) in standby.

'That's not a bug, it's a feature' takes on a darker tone when malware's involved

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Cheap ….

Thirty odd years ago I got interviewed for a job modifying bottom of the range telephone handsets for the home market. I was told I’d be allowed to spend no more than half a day on the design and 50 pence on materials. I didn’t take the job.

I do wonder if today’s bottom end electronics is the same. I suspect it is because I’ve had USB hubs that failed after a few days. On the software front, the companies will pay low wages and will not see even the merit in spending time checking software through source code checkers and analysers.

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

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Nah. Outlook for iOS totally ignores any options and just opens Edge. And complains if Edge isn’t installed, so you have to install it because Oulook says so. That’s one way of getting the installed software numbers up. Bastards.

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

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Re: If only anybody would unterstand that licensing.

Sigh …. Cisco went this way good few years back when you needed 6 licenses just to make one of their phones work. Make licensing complicated and eventually nobody will understand it and neither sales or customers will be happy.

BTW isn’t Office 365 and Microsoft 365 the same thing? You’re telling me there are license key differences between them?

US reportedly mulls TP-Link router ban over national security risk

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Re: So...

Oooooh must be them, innit? Let’s break out the pitchforks and go get them!

Proof, Microsoft, please.

Microsoft won't let customers opt out of passkey push

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Re: So, passkeys

Indeed this is just SSH keys for logging in to services via web browser. The crucial thing being “do you trust this machine”. If said machine is stolen or irreparably damaged, unless there is some second way in (eg an app where you can kill all other sessions and block until you can recover the situation, you’re basically stuffed, about this much: https://youtu.be/Bex5LyzbbBE?si=uc0HnIYEm6eqeLGv

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

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Re: I would have imagined...

Well I guess if you licensed boat loads of film and TV you’d want to know what your customers are engaging with. They spent time and money getting some film or series that someone thought was good, only nobody gets past the first ten minutes. Time to unlicense that.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

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And the second time, and the third time ….. all them floppies installing the world floppiest bit of software. I won’t call it an OS because it was a security nightmare. Anyone could (and usually did, if they were techie) do anything. ANYTHING!!!

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

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Re: The Feds know what's going on

Well they could actually be flying SUVs. Perhaps a startup is running in stealth mode and needed a test flight.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

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Overcharging with Smart Meters

@Lee D

the penny dropped for me a little while back when $elec_purveyor wanted us to increase our monthly payments despite us clearly having enough credit to survive next winter. Then someone on the TV said about being in debt to their supplier. I get it now.

Not only do suppliers charge through the nose for energy to people having to use pre-payment, but they are also trying to get regular customers to give them more money as a buffer. Raking it in on both sides.

No wonder so many energy suppliers have gone bust and many are technically insolvent https://www.pricebailey.co.uk/press-releases/domestic-energy-suppliers/

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

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Re: Th modern workplace

This is similar to Windows Recall but by room cameras rather than per PC. Cameras are usually banned from office areas where any kind of Intellectual Property is generated (aircraft designs, anyone?) for good reason. Boing have just created an IP theft goldmine that hackers will be all over before you can say “cabin crew seats for landing”. Well done them.

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