* Posts by Youngone

1575 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2009

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Scottish Titles

England almost immediately regretted getting a Stuart on the throne, and it took nearly half a century to get shot of the stupid bastards.

American jailed for smuggling controlled tech to Iran

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Re: No win, no fee

Every time I install Windows I have to tell it what country I live in, and I have to scroll past North Korea. I have often wondered what would happen if I selected that option.

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

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Re: But still

Americans do seem to be very afraid of each other for some reason. I've been there and didn't feel the need to go armed, even in the really Third-World bits.

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

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Re: PABXs

That's what my ancient Samsung Officeserv PABX's have. I have just got off a Teams call with my Telecom rep who told me all copper services are being turned off nationwide this year, so we're going to have to bring forward our upgrade plans I suppose.

End of an era.

US and EU looking to create 'critical minerals club' to ensure their own supplies

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Re: What about Canada and Mexico?

It seems to me that America was super keen on free trade until it didn't suit them suddenly, when China did that thing that Marx warned everyone about, and started to use capitalism against itself.

China priced some of these elements at a low enough price that the competition closed down which is capitalism 101. If America wants to compete I suppose they'll have to match the subsidies China has.

Generative AI is out of control: Nothing, Forever is a Seinfeld spoof about nothing... forever

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Re: Generative AI is out of control

That particular run from amanfrommars1 was actually grammatical, and made a point. He's improving.

Oracle, Microsoft barely compete for a quarter of their US Federal contracts

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Re: No brainer

True, but so what? One of the things America was designed to do was to siphon money from poor people to rich people, and this is just another example.

They even coined a term for it, 'pork barrel politics".

Experts warn of steep increase in Java costs under changes to Oracle license regime

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Re: Right, but do all those businesses...

Oracle did that to the vast corporate octopus I work for a couple of years ago, gambling that it would be too hard and expensive for us to ditch them, but we're in the process of doing exactly that.

The rumour was that we spent about $US25 million per year with Oracle for the Asia Pacific region which has now been entirely moved to SAP (which is a whole other story).

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

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My son, who is just beginning his career was approached by a recruiter recently wondering if he wanted to look at a new opportunity?

Eventually she admitted it was IBM, and when he laughed and said "no thanks" she sighed, and said "sorry to bother you".

Broadcom's $61b VMWare merger faces another hurdle: UK's competition watchdog

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Increase Prices?

The plan is always to increase prices. How are they going to pay their creditors if they don't increase prices?

Does anyone believe this stuff anymore?

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Youngone Silver badge

Tell that to the guys who run the multi-billion dollar empire I work for. Their mantra is now "everything in the cloud" and Microsoft's cloud features pretty heavily.

Not that I care either way. Not really my problem.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Youngone Silver badge

Re: If you owe the bank...

Arming the good folk of London with Halberds and marching on Piccadilly would be way more fun than some stupid nuclear contraption.

I expect Charles will get around to it once he's retaken Calais.

Youngone Silver badge

Re: If you owe the bank...

Pikesmen? The Tower is full of halberds and other sharp things.

I can't imagine why the King doesn't just arm the people of London and march to Piccadilly Circus. It's not that far.

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

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Re: Centre of Excellence

Can I borrow that book when you're finished with it?

Some bloke explained to me about how friends are electric and I've been avoiding them ever since. Don't want to get shocked.

Twitter stiffed us on $2m bill, claim consultants in lawsuit

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Re: What does Musk hope to gain ?

I wonder if he's just kicking a bunch of cans down the road because Twitter doesn't generate enough money to cover it's costs.

Atlassian CEO's bonkers scheme to pipe electricity from Australia to Singapore collapses

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Re: rich dreamers

I wandered lonely as a cloud full of electricity...

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

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Re: Leeching off a leech

People might be downvoting because of the lack of compassion, it's true, but Icon Factory thought they were farmers when they were in fact sharecroppers.

Tone deaf? Microsoft must have booked Sting for Davos because he's a good singer

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Jeez, this is just cringeworthy!

They're not booking Sting to appear "with it" and they don't care what we think of them because why would they?

They booked Sting because they like his music and have enough money to make him forget about any principles he may have had.

Indian official reveals 'plan' to build a national mobile OS

Youngone Silver badge

What Lessons?

I want to know about "manufacturers that learned a hard lesson in risk management when they put all their eggs in the China basket" and what those lessons were because from what I can see they're still all in on China and are making just as much money as they ever did. <br>

Why has China suddenly become the bad guys? I mean, they've always been bad guys but we didn't used to care as long as the money continued to flow.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Youngone Silver badge

We got the same pep talk from our new CEO, although I understand the GM of the branch I work at pushed back with a list of ancient equipment that needed replacing 10 years ago and is currently preventing us us from "being the best we can be".

I think he asked for $10 million and he won't be getting any of it.

NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again

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Re: "he provided several stories"

You might be confused about who runs America.

Cloud Software Group confirms 15 percent headcount cut

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Re: Citrix Marketing

We're a Citrix customer and we are currently cutting them out completely.

Most because of the quality of their products.

Questions asked about Chinese takeover of UK tech company

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Everything for sale... or not.

I'm old and can remember when China decided to open itself to the West and courted foreign capital.

Many of us objected, saying that we shouldn't prop up an authoritarian regime, but we were told that trade was the way to liberalisation because as people get richer they want political freedoms also, so we could help the Chinese become a democracy.

This was a lie.

China has used the greed of capitalism against itself and stories like this illustrate that quite well.

I have stopped caring, because it makes no difference to me which awful greedy capitalist owns everything.

What goes up must come down: Logitech sales tumble amid PC slump

Youngone Silver badge

Cutting?

PC makers are definitely not cutting prices where I live. In fact they're still going up.

Youngone Silver badge

Logitech stuff is really good in my experience.

Vanilla OS 22.10: An Arch and Fedora-compatible Ubuntu

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Re: Gnome...

Gnome is not going to kill off other desktops. Too many of us like them.

I certainly hope not, because despite being a very keen Gnome user, having other DE's around can only be a good thing.

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Gnome...

I love Gnome.

Nexperia calls in the lawyers to save Welsh chip fab deal

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Re: ASML

We have been lazy in the west about this stuff, relying on a single company instead of creating a robust ecosystem.

The West decided to do unregulated capitalism, so industries have become consolidated and competition is nominal in many of them.

I for one find it very strange how free and open markets are suddenly not the best course of action. Maybe we've been lied to.

Fancy climbing into ALP over New Year's? Fresh preview versions of SUSE's distro and NetBSD 10 are here

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Over engineered, anyone?

I thought that sounded weird. Glad I'm not the only one.

Youngone Silver badge

Trousers

Trousers.

New Year's Trousers. Must be capitalised

FTX CTO and Alameda Research CEO admit fraud, pair 'cooperating' with Feds

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Re: That must hurt

The massive over confidence comes from being born into the ruling class.

They've been told they were special since they were born and probably never really had to face any real consequences until now.

I'm sure its all come as a huge shock.

Apple accused of censoring apps in Hong Kong and Russia to maintain market access

Youngone Silver badge

Re: What's the alternative?

To be fair to Apple they're just doing capitalism.

The vast American corporation I work for pretends to have the same respect for human rights that Apple does, but also profits mightily from the Chinese market.

SystemRescue 9.06 is here with the shiny new Xfce 4.18

Youngone Silver badge

Re: dd

That is hilarious.

Not for you obviously, but you brightened up my day, so thanks.

To the Banmobile! Huawei inks deal to create global high-end automotive brand

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Here is one thing to note when reporting.

I imagine the Latin Americans look at China as a business partner and note that the Chinese have never overthrown a democratically elected government.

Not in Latin America anyway.

Youngone Silver badge

Many other nations have barred it from selling its comms wares within their borders.

I live in a 5-Eyes nation and two of our major mobile networks use Huawei kit almost exclusively.

In fact, if I sign up for a new internet connection any one of the ISP's I deal with will send me a Huawei router.

Apple 'created decoy labor group' to derail unionization

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Communists

China learned many of its anti-labour tricks directly from the United States.

Have you heard of Company Towns, or Company Stores maybe? There was a popular song about those at one point.

Treating working people like serfs is baked in to American labour laws.

Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged

Youngone Silver badge

Re: "Hybrid"

Our "flexible" working arrangements means you can apply to your manager for 1 day per week work from home and if you want more than that the next manager up has to approve it.

Any more than 2 days is not considered.

When one of the team I work in quit a few months ago he cited the "flexible working" as one of the reasons he was leaving.

No, nothing is going to change.

CERN, Fermilab particle boffins bet on AlmaLinux for big science

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Rocky

I'm using Rocky because it has the better logo.

South Pacific vacations may be wrecked by ransomware

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Weird

The headline is stupid. It's New Zealand. The word is holiday not vacation.

Unless they're thinking about Vanuatu, in which case the word would be Vacance.

El Reg is getting weird.

Industrial robots in China push people out of jobs, slash wages

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Robots do the sh*tty jobs, let 'em have it

You see, robots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I send wave after wave of my own men at them until they reach their limit and shut down. Here, look at the medal I won.

SAP still struggling to convert ECC customers to S/4HANA, says Gartner

Youngone Silver badge

We threw out Oracle and replaced it with S4/Hana.

Oracle worked, but was old and clunky and not easy to use. I'm pretty sure they threw some sort of license audit at us too.

I suspect S4/Hana is pretty good, but the contractors who are doing the work for us are terrible which makes SAP look bad. The problem is that we are a massive American corporation and the drive is to send every process possible to countries with the cheapest labour, so we've got what we paid for.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Youngone Silver badge

I am quite happily using Win 11 here on my work laptop, and it's fine.

It not better than Win10, but not really worse either in my view.

Microsoft's problem is that they have decided that users are not allowed to upgrade on perfectly good devices due to some completely arbitrary reason.

Why can't I run Win 11 on a 6 year old Dell Latitude 7470 I have in my possession? It has 16 GB of RAM and a 4-core processor, but is not good enough apparently.

As recession looms, Workday warns that legacy HR systems need updating

Youngone Silver badge

Re: Workday is perfect for inHumane Resources

Hi Battsmn, do you work at the same company as me?

Every system we have works exactly as you've described, to the point that when a manager employs a new staff member (which for most of them is maybe once a year or so) a colleague and I who have nothing whatsoever to do with HR are now the go-to people to get all the paperwork in order because we've managed to figure it all out for ourselves.

It doesn't help that our local HR manager is completely disengaged from her job and doesn't understand how any of it works herself, but every procedure not directly related to manufacturing or selling the product we supply has been outsourced to low-cost parts of the world, and we are now getting what we paid for.

Yes, I am looking for a new job actually.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Youngone Silver badge

Re: If everyone is back in the office..

...but is BORING being stuck on your own all day.

What's even worse is that the rest of my family might be working from home too. Don't make me talk to them.

'Pig butchering' romance scam domains seized and slaughtered by the Feds

Youngone Silver badge

I had a whole series of friend requests on Facebook, at one point, from attractive young ladies who seem to have forgotten to put a blouse on this morning.

Fortunately, even when I was young and smooth, attractive young ladies of that sort never showed any interest in me so I'm under no illusions now.

University orders investigation into Oracle finance disaster

Youngone Silver badge

This is also almost identical to the ongoing incident at a large corporation I happen to work for, but in this case we turned off a working (sort of) Oracle system and turned on a shiny new SAP system.

I have just finished talking to an outside contractor who provides a very important service for us, and while he was apologetic he won't be working for us anymore because he no longer believes our finance people's assurances that he will be paid on time.

Fortunately for me, I can make this someone else's problem. I also have a job interview next week.

Foxconn workers protest over pay and lockdowns at iPhone factory in China

Youngone Silver badge

Re: You're not paid to think, shut up and do your job

Weirdly, there are people who still think communists were the bad guys, and our side are the good guys.

I know.

HP Inc to lay off up to 6,000 staff, cut costs by $1.4 billion

Youngone Silver badge

Re: I am surprised there's anyone left to lay off!

My son's company uses HP laptops and desktops and he is pretty happy with them, including after sales service, although that might change if half the techs get the bullet.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Youngone Silver badge

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

...do some actual research...

On Facebook or Youtube?

US offshore oil and gas installation at 'increasing' risk of cyberattack

Youngone Silver badge

The point the GAO is trying to make is a little bit lost in the details, but it amounts to the fact that the oil and gas industry is important to America, but is not very profitable to the companies that run it, so what they need is an injection of taxpayers money to help them solve their security problems.