Posts by FirstTangoInParis

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Comings and goings

Getting very tired of big companies (not just MS) doing this, and not keeping information up to date.

Exhibit A: trying to install scanner app for aEpson on W11. Oh hey there’s an app on the MS Store. Oh, doesn’t support W11, so why am I even being offered it? Hence the low rating cos the craters didn’t read the blurb. Hey ho, use Epson download. Oh that won’t install as apparently I have Windows Ready Print enabled. Do I? Can’t see that on settings. Various web pages show where it would be. It’s not there. Maybe I’ve added it in Intune. Er no. Something called Windows Protected Print instead. Ok disable that. Force GPO download on client. Reboot. I can still enable Protected Print. Faaaaack. Now download another scan to PDF app off store. That seems to work. Walk quietly away from PC. That’s an hour of my life MS owes me.

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Re: Who cares anymore....

Force MS Execs to use only 8 GB RAM and see how they like it. It’s unbelievably awful. 16 gig minimum kids and you might just get through your day without defenestrating your laptop.

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

Books

Back in the 80s the lecturer was often keen to sell copies of their enormously thick book at a princely sum. I declined because (as I later learned is a thing) I knew I didn’t learn by reading. Plus said lecturers were often poor teachers anyway. These days you can subscribe to such books through sites like Perlego, and if I was repeating this situation today I might use AI to help me summarise such a book.

But teachers must never ever forget that their job is not to get students to regurgitate stuff verbatim but to think for themselves.

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

Re: "New"

The FAA came in for significant criticism when it was found they’d allowed Boeing to do all sorts of things they really shouldn’t have. Hoping that’s been fixed.

Plus Boeing have now got rid of the ‘money first’ attitude that has dogged them since the McDonald Douglas merger and rightly gone back to ‘engineering first’. I couldn’t be happier for them (but I still like flying Airbus aircraft better).

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: Groups!

A lot of people these days kick against the often voluminous company processes. I have to remind them that the processes only exist because someone (sometimes monumentally) screwed up once upon a time, and the process exists to stop them falling into the same trap.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

> I don't think it's anything specifically to do with Microsoft

I beg to differ. Macs have a single OFF button for this. MS has off buttons everywhere including down the back of the sofa and under the fridge.

There’s a number of videos and write ups available for how to do this but MS keep moving the goalposts so check for most recent advice.

If you’re a tenant admin, you can turn it off quite easily and saves users having to do it themselves. Also beware the bit in tenant admin that allows users to self serve on trials and upgrades without authority. Interesting there is no global “turn that off” for that feature, you have to go through those upsell opportunities individually.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

Still copper

So for FTTC the exchange connection isn’t fibre but that’s still a bunch of local copper to support. OR have no advertised clue when they’ll get round to doing away with that. So are Gov pushing OR or is it just when OR can be bothered?

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

So while trying to debug a web page that was refusing to display on the gang of three (Chrome, Edge and Safari) it was only Firefox that pointed out the error of my ways as I’d missed a tag. Fixing that fixed the problem. Kudos to Firefox devs.

Fujitsu joins £14.9B UK framework despite public sector bid freeze

Re: Order

I’m pretty sure the Fujitsu lawyers knew exactly what they were writing. We read what we wanted to see but they knew this day would come and they could weasel their way through.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

It‘s all bad …

There are so many things about the Windows UX that just seem wrong. Like this automatic install thing like it’s still W95. Like turning on services that beat the cr@p out of your PC when it is clearly not the best thing for the user (SysMain, looking at you). Like shoving the misbehaving toddler Copilot down your throat at every opportunity and you can seemingly not refuse or get rid of it. Yes I know MS you’ve spent a bucket load of shareholders money on it, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

Re: Skynet here we come!

Likely it would read the dispensed wisdom of The Orange One on Truth Social and decide someone needs to be given the sharp end of a nuke.

The rest iof it goes like A House Full of Dynamite.

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Re: Total C-Suite fail

McAfee is also one of the most painful products to work with and kills your performance stone dead.

Mind you, there’s also a lovely service on W11 called SysMain that attempts to load your apps into memory to speed up startup but flattens your performance while it’s doing that. Why can’t MS fix the damn problem instead of trying other smokescreen solutions that do not in fact improve the users experience?

Even HP resellers think the price of toner and ink is too high – so HP India facilitated an illegal cartel

Re: "Counterfeit" = "non-HP" or "marked as HP"?

Guessing this is like the “compatible” cartridges sold by supplies companies, but maybe passed off as HP. In any case even HP are moving to ink tanks now. If they price like Epson, ink for that will be a fraction of the price of cartridges.

Patchpocalypse Now: Microsoft tops last month's record with 622 Patch Tuesday CVEs

Re: So...

Don’t know about Sequoia but v26 of everything is getting patch fixes, such as 26.5.1 and 26.5.2 just recently. Even my Series 3 watch got an update not long ago.

Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8 GB Core i5

Re: Principles (again)

I have an original Raspberry Pi doing just that. And it doesn’t ever need rebooting, unlike just about every other solution I’ve tried.

In the average lift, a bit of paper would do just as well, since the adverts rarely change.

The idea of having a FPS on the go between floors sounds quite fun though.

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

Pay the market rate

Don’t know about now, but some years back a civil servant doing the same job as me in industry was getting paid half what I was.

I agree that outsourcing has had its day, but if the CS pay is significantly less than industry then the people they need are not going to even look at this.

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Re: Did no one watch 2001?

Shame the service module isn’t reusable. That could be left behind at the dock.

But the thing about really big (sci fi) spaceships (or even Star Trek space dock) is that you suddenly realise quite how much energy is required to get the thing off the ground.

UK.gov withholds £10M payment from Capita over pensions project fiasco, as dispute continues

Though normally if there’s a big difference between what you were told you were inheriting and what you actually inherited, you’d stop the clock and renegotiate the contract. Not smarm on about how AI is going to save your bacon. Their developers and case handlers must be ready to lynch the exec, surely?

UK.gov vows to cut consultancy spending, then hands up to £350M to consultancies

Wrong viewpoint

Consultant paid three times more than civil servant.

Wrong.

Civil servant paid a third what consultant gets paid.

Fix that, you’re on the way to fixing the consultant problem.

T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

Re: Delightful idea

Management might think perpetual licenses last until the heat death of the universe. In practice I think not. The product was tested on a set of base platform artefacts, particular OS and version, CPU, network cards etc. at some point a bit earlier than management might expect, all the platform goes end of support, so migration to the next certified platform needs to happen.

But then Office 2021, 2024 etc MS are taking the mick. What actually changed between those in core functions, other than one drive window dressing and making the UI worse?

Portuguese bank sign's storage is about to cash out

Don’t knock it. Mine is doing stellar service as a digital sign.

Security boss thought MFA would be too much security

Re: Have you ever been told to make IT worse ?better?

And, pray, what happens when the AI budget runs out of tokens? I suggest your going rate will then be the equivalent of many thousands of tokens. Of the folding kind.

Re: Regarding "yelling"

One location I was in had a fire alarm so loud it made your body vibrate. Like a Vulcan bomber fly past but without the thrill of seeing that.

Re: CYA

MFA a conflict …. Depends how tech savvy / intolerant your users are. In a small volunteer charity situation, MOST users are way down the tech savvy curve and some are tech intolerant. Thus introducing MFA is a super big deal which has to be severely proven to work in all use cases before going live.

21,000 Oracle jobs vanish amid Big Red's big bets on AI

What are they not doing then?

20,000 people are a lot to lose. I don’t know how Oracle is structured internally but in an average multi national that could be like half a division. That would mean the company unable to produce or support one or more product lines, on the scale of not making Sparc chips any more or some Oracle software product lines just went end of sale and support all at the same time. No amount of AI is going to fix that.

As an aside, I wonder if Oracle charges itself for using Java like it fleeces every other company?

Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

So the bot masters will be already ahead of you. They will make Good Boy tokens by the bucketful, based on stolen creds if needs be. Then it will be game over (again).

Waymo hits the brakes after robotaxis keep missing the signs for freeway construction zones

Re: Edge cases

Here’s definitely not an edge case. Idiots driving in the centre lane when there is clearly no traffic in the left lane. We should be allowed short range weapons to deal with them.

> Cars cope with this surprisingly well!

Not the ones I have driven, particularly on mainland Europe. UK road signs are generally more specific about moving between one speed limit and the next, but French and Italian signs largely don’t exist, because the speed limit changes the boundary of the municipality. Enter town or village X, speed limit reduction. Leave and goes up again to some unspecified value. Also the many very local speed limits for a bend or some roadworks. Map data has to be spot on, a lot of it isn’t.

But then I’d really like to know what signage is like in the US. IIRC the signs are mostly written English.

2,000 retired Google Pixel phones get a second life as a private cloud

Oh that's where it went

I wondered where my order for a RasPi 3B went ... maybe it got hijacked and spirited out of the country in a container somehow.

Re: WOW!

Luxury .... we had to carve mathematical symbols on bits of metal so the typist could type our papers for us. Kids today ....

Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

Pardon?

The 1980s called and they want their hardware configuration methods back. So, albeit having turned off the secure protection, one can STILL just FAFO with firmware and brick your super expensive computer? Microsoft really have excelled themselves this time.

macOS 27 beta boots Asahi Linux off Apple Silicon

Re: Bad Apple

> [Apple] devices come with a free OS

No it won’t be free. It will be rolled in with the price of the device along with the cost of all the updates it will get until Apple no longer supports it, otherwise Apple would immediately be making a loss every time there’s an update.

Having said that, Apple’s updates come very slowly compared to the frantic mess that is Windows, though hopefully they are starting to get on top of that now. A retail copy of W11 Pro will set you back over 200 of your favourite major currency, so what margin is a cheap PC maker making? Not a lot.

LibreOffice brands Euro-Office a 'de facto ally' of Microsoft's lock-in strategy

Re: or

> The example I'd use to demonstrate this is mail merge.

Mail merge was useful way back in the mists of early internet. Then spam mail arrived and killed it. The correct tool to use these days is one of the mail services like Mailchimp who don't mind sending gazillions of emails per minute. Your average ISP would spot the mass mailer and block it, and likely send you a snotogram.

Having said that, integrating eg Mailchimp with Libre Office to create an integrated mass mailing experience is something I'd like to see.

Serious ISS air leak forces NASA astronauts to temporarily take shelter in Dragon capsule

Seriously?

Is there a sort of air leak that isn’t serious on a spacecraft? Air is kind of important to them I guess. Also as has been said elsewhere a small crack could lead to something going bang (armchair scientist here!).

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

Re: Physics A Level

You do know that Windows 14 will require a quantum computer, don’t you?

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

I’ve heard stories about someone checking in to a hotel, then crashing the emergency exit to let several more friends in to kip (or other) in the same room. Hotel staff not happy.

Re: Microswat

Using Bitlocker, of course

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

As the saying goes, if the only tool CxOs understand is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to them. Even if their senior staff explain that the thing is not in fact a nail, and therefore a hammer is not an appropriate tool with which to assault it.

AI eyes scanning for bugs create a worrisome Linux security trend

Re: Hardening in progress ...

It’s much the same with MacOS and friends but at least Apple publish that CVEs that got squashed.

Taiwan's train cyber-trauma reveals a global system that's coming off the tracks

Not even replay

I’ve posted on this before but it’s worth posting again.

I happen to have observed that some new cars of the same make and model have IDENTICAL keys and the same key can open multiple cars if they are new enough. I guess the ability fades with time due to differences in operating said keys. That’s not security, that’s just crossing fingers and hoping.

Cisco serves up yet another perfect 10 bug with Secure Workload admin flaw

Testing?

Have they heard of it? Or are Cisco management all ex-Redmond? The reassuringly large amounts of money Cisco charges for this dross is an affront to decent engineers. The trust organisations place in Cisco kit is clearly misplaced. I’m aware of certain issues in Cisco kit used by $employer, and would not be surprised in the slightest if they were present because of lack of testing. That said, Cisco’s habit of hiring then firing a large chunk of its workforce every so often probably doesn’t help keep staff committed to quality products if the execs don’t give a sh1t.

Deus ex machina: Half of US Christians trust AI's spiritual advice

Misinterpreting scripture

This is quite easy to do if you don’t understand or ignore the historical and social context in which the scripture was written and to whom it was written and why. Pick any phrase from any bible book and you could make it say almost anything. Rather like AI then.

AI is getting expensive, but relief is on the way - just not for you

Other fads are available

I read a post elsewhere today reminding us about Hadoop and Big Data. Remember that? Probably useful for the actual big data guys and gals but crickets to the rest of us.

Microsoft says cu l8r to text message security

Think of the admins

One problem here is that Entra is awash with options for authentication, just it is for everything else. This makes it even more confusing for those without PhDs in Entra to understand what options to select. If they are going to ditch SMS that’s their choice but for goodness sake mark it so that we understand it’s being phased out. And please stop with the messages about stuff being phased out that you’re not even using.

ESA boss tires of being dragged around by NASA mood swings

Re: Contracts?

Not only ESA/NASA et al but loads of industry behind them actually doing the work. NASA changing tack with zero notice to ESA and industry partners somewhat screws whatever business case you’d spent ages building and getting funding against. Really not helpful.

Europe built sovereign clouds to escape US control. Then forgot about the processors

Re: 1st amendment?

Perhaps you’ve not noticed that the current US administration seems to regard the entire US legal system as something of an interesting plaything rather than how they should govern?

SpaceX sets date for Starship test that asks: Did we break anything in the upgrade?

Re: It's almost as if ...

Yeah but there’s lots of things that could unexpectedly go bang. There’s a fascinating TV programme on the James Webb telescope where they launched still with 320+ single points of failure which were cut in half by the time the thing was in orbit and unfurled. It’s squeaky bum stuff, you do what you can but at some point you have to light the blue touch paper.

Civil servants to protest outside Capita AGM over pension shambles

Re: very hard to have sympathy

> contracted in because gov departments either cannot afford, or are just not allowed, to hire experts in many fields.

Don’t know current situation but some years back civil servants were paid half what you’d get in private industry for a comparable role. So they have to hire specialists in.

Re: "unexpected case complexity"

Not sure how it works with DWP but usually bidders are forbidden to talk to anyone apart from the bid project office. Any domain knowledge would have to come before that period, and you get judged on answering the RFP. If the RFP is wrong (has been known) then you still have to answer it, and negotiate if your bid is called forwards. Any changes from scope are costed.

But the management on contract is abysmal. Going live with a Minimum Viable Product is one thing but saying it’s all fine is quite another.