* Posts by John 104

1062 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2009

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Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

John 104

I'm an IT _professional_ and have been for 24 years and I couldn't be bothered with being a gray beard in email. I'm to busy doing actual work to care.

This article reeks of the very tech 'superiority' that is a blemish on the majority of professional, NOT arrogant, workers who are there to get work done for the companies they work for and not push their 'insert I'm better than you because you aren't old school cool like me' attitude. Give us a fucking break and go get a real job.

AMD flips the bird at Intel as it glides past in CPU-GPU stakes

John 104

Re: Let's hope!

I think we all are happy to see Intel get their ass handed to them - again, after decades of market bullying.

HMD offers Nokia phone with novel concept: Designed to be repaired by its owner

John 104

Wireless Charge

Make one with wireless charging and I'm all in. I don't need 5G, but I do require wireless. USB ports get dirty and clogged and eventually stop working. Yes, I could repair it under this model, but not having to use it in the first place would be good.

John 104

Re: the perfect phone for my son

Don't buy your son an overpriced glas house phone and this might not be such an issue...

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

John 104

We have some legacy devices (old IPMI) that require the use of IE. Every time I open IE to get to one of these devices, my session gets hijacked and Edge opens up. It's annoying as fuck and is a work interruption that I don't need, Microsoft.

China's Yangtze Memory reportedly lays off staff, evicts them from company housing

John 104

France. Where when people were told that they might actually have to work something close to a 40 hour work week threw a fit and rioted. Hardly a good example...

Hundreds of Spotify staff stream out the door in latest layoffs

John 104

Needs Work

I've been a paid subscriber for around a decade now. It is convenient, the streaming quality is good. However, why is it such crap at rotating THROUGH your playlist on shuffle? I have a playlist with over 300 songs in it, yet I continually hear the same 40 songs over and over. It isn't a difficult concept to put the entire playlist into an array and iterate through it....

Years late and 36 cores short of AMD, who are Intel’s 4th-gen Xeons even for?

John 104

How does that even make sense? Intel has been stuck on Skylake for almost a decade for Xeon. This new chipset has nothing to do with the old crap, or, not enough to matter due to the age gap.

John 104

And Oracle...

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

John 104

Re: The sticker price ...

Problem with cheaper EVs is that you get stiffed on range. It's still one of the biggest BS factors of EVs. When you buy an ICE you get options for engines, but no matter which one you choose, you get to fill the same sized tank and get nearly identical range. Cheap EVs have crap range unless you 'upgrade' to a bigger battery. But with the upgrade comes the extra cost. Since never have you had to deal with that kind of manipulative cash grab greed with an ICE car.

John 104

Re: The sticker price ...

And the BMW is a nicer car period. Build quality on Tesla's is notoriously poor as well as after purchase support.

John 104

Re: The sticker price ...

@ChrisC

But right now, for me and the thousands of other drivers like me,

I think you meant to say the Millions of other drivers like me. There are MILLIONS of ICE cars on the road, just in North America alone. Somehow the EV market is just going to suddenly appeal to all of the owners of those cars? And the electrical grid is going to magically be able to support those numbers? It's a bad joke and everyone knows it.

John 104

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

Pass that crack pipe over here, man...

John 104

Re: The ICE will be with us for...

@Gene Cash

Difference with your grans is that stores of petrol cans didn't just stop working randomly. They were there or they weren't.

TSMC ramps up 3nm chip baking at Taiwan plants

John 104

faces grapples

Must be a British thing.

TSMC’s CEO is not pleased with the growing US-China rift

John 104

Um

Surely the rift has nothing to do with growing aggression from China in recent years, specifically targeted at Taiwan, China's human rights violations, or the nonsense zero COVID policy that has affected global supply chain, or the increase of ballistic missile testing from North Korea. Nah, these destabilizing events have NOTHING to do with sanctions and restricted trade. Nope, nothing.

Whether it is Apple, Nvidia, etc., worrying about the ability to delivery products to market, or if it is US government suddenly realizing that the chips that power our military aren't made here in the US, both cases require some manner of action to secure either profit or security. Bringing production to US soil alleviates the issue of China and NK causing uncertainty in production and supply of these wares.

When these countries leaders stop being ass holes to their own citizens, and stop with threats about invasion or nuclear attacks, and when they stop stealing technology then the sanctions will go away. Until then, no, they aren't going to be treated like equal players in the global trade market. Sorry not sorry.

Is it any surprise that 'permacrisis' is the word of the year?

John 104

Just Wow

First, what a dismal, depressing attitude, especially the 2nd to last paragraph.

Second, This, "The rising cost of energy and living can be traced to the global effects of the Russia-Ukraine war, started February"

You know, hydrocarbons have their problems and we are working in the US and EU/UK to come up with alternate sources of energy to keep us warm and fuzzy and all that. But if whiners and alarmists hadn't put the cart before the horse and gone 'green' (which is anything but), before having actual, scaled out, viable solutions, well, the world wouldn't be in this pickle, now would they? Coal plants getting fired back up, nuclear plants getting their shut downs reversed, etc. Why, it's almost as though anyone with half a brain might have predicted this sort of thing could happen...

Lastly, if we had true leaders, we wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place. Alas, all we have are politicians who care less about serving the people they are supposed to represent, and more about lining their pockets and getting re-elected. Who is to blame for that?

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

John 104

"66 percent of those who quit as part of the pandemic-inspired "Great Resignation" said they either regret or sometimes regret the decision"

This one has always befuddled me. Your employer took care of you during the worst employment crisis since the Great Depression and you reward them after the dust has settled by jumping ship? Anyone who did this and regretted it had it coming, IMHO.

John 104

Re: The daily commute

Similar circumstance. I motorcycle like the OP, but in the PNW, I took a ferry to get from Kitsap Peninsula to 'the mainland' near Seattle. On the one hand, being on the bike made commuting much easier. On the other, it sucked 3 hours of my day every day going back and forth. Yes, part of it was decompression time, but I'd much rather have the 15 hours a week of my life back, thank you very much. And like above, that's just like working on a weekend. With the extra hours, I can get small projects around the house done and free up my weekend time for other things.

Thankfully, my employer has no intention of mandating a return to office for the IT staff.

John 104

Re: Email remains the most used communication method for work

Of course, then you are paying for gas for your car. Not much home heating savings at that point...

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

John 104

Considering the appeal of SFTW and the history and enthusiastic fanbase for BOFH, and the fact that members read both columns, one has to wonder if this was thought fully through. I mean, workplace accidents and all....

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

John 104

Re: Genuine Question

Agree completely. However, if you can have a standardized(ish) OS and set of apps and behavior in said apps that the average punter can just come in and get to work with... Then you aren't spending a ton of money training someone up. Rather, they can be productive in a much smaller window.

John 104

Re: Genuine Question

@Pert G

Another aspect is supportability in the enterprise. There may be tools to do AD and deployment equivalents, but the open source nature of these tools make getting real support difficult. If I'm hard down for whatever reason, I need support. Now. Not in a few days when someone happens upon my post and decides to answer.

I think what keeps linux in the desktop for corporate workloads is the hassle of it all. It's fun to tinker in it and do work as an IT person. However, when it comes to tools that users need, and administration that IT staff have to do, the goal is to get it working quickly so actual work can get accomplished. The work shouldn't be getting Linux to do a thing that Windows does by just configuring this, download this package, update this library, now modify this config, oh wait, missing another dependency, etc. It gets in the way of the actual goal of whatever the work is. It's gotten a LOT better over the years, but can still be a big pain.

John 104

Re: preaching the gospel

@Graham Dawson

But not all Steam games work on Linux. I tried. Got too frustrating so I just use Windoze. They are making progress, but not enough yet.

US Space Force deploys robot dogs at Cape Canaveral base

John 104

Not exactly sneaky, are they?

President Biden signs CHIPS and Science Act into law

John 104

There isn't a research and development problem with semiconductors in the US. Most of that already happens in the states. There IS a manufacturing and workforce issue that should certainly be addressed by building more fabs on US soil and training a proper workforce to operate them.

As for chip 'shortages'... Come on. There wasn't a chip shortage as much as there was just bad market predictions at the beginning of the pandemic. Reg readers know better.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

John 104

Re: Comparison

@NeilT

Fanboi anger much?

The fact that it is Beta and being 'tested' by owners in the real world where live human beings exist should be frightening enough...

US-funded breakthrough battery tech just simply handed over to China

John 104

Re: I wonder who OK'd this?

Follow the money...

Shanghai surprise? Another analyst sees historic PC decline

John 104

I'm doing my part! Bought two new laptops this year. It was time for a refresh for myself, and the kid got one as a graduation present. Both HPs. You're welcome.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

John 104

So because in the 70s we had less forethought to control the re-entry of orbiting bits we should excuse the Chinese today?

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

John 104

Not supporting or trashing this idea. However, we used to use IPX and managed to move away from that, we used modems and managed to move away from that. If there really is a benefit to the average user with this new technology, then I would expect it's adoption to occur over time. If not, it will be relegated to datacenter ops and most of us won't be the wiser.

John 104

Re: Translation.

LOL. Sounds very British...

Deploying disaster-proof apps may be easier than you think

John 104

An analysis of these tools showed that achieving high degrees of resiliency was a relatively straightforward prospect – especially when the cost of lost business and cloud SLAs were taken into consideration.

HAHA. What a joke. Does anyone honestly think that when given the option to spend an appropriate amount on BCP vs saving the money that the average business will spend for BCP? Time and again businesses have proven that they'd rather go on the cheap. Never mind the cost of lost business revenue during the outage.

As for the resiliency, the only way to really achieve that via the cloud is to use multiple providers. Anyone who is paying attention knows that despite the best efforts of engineers, mistakes have happened that take down entire platforms. Regional redundancy won't help there...

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more

John 104

Re: Just goes to show..

Honestly, this is EXACTLY the sort of uninformed, non-technical, USER type of comment that makes me wonder where the El Reg of years gone has disappeared to.

As a long time Reg subscriber I've watched the site get diluted by viewers such as yourself to the point where an article such as this, about imaging software, mentions that it is intimidating for people to use PowerShell to configure their machine. Then, when someone points out the obvious, you post that you hate reading comments. Perhaps you could slow your roll and get some technical chops. Then the technical aspects of this site wouldn't be quite so intimidating to you.

Always read the comments: Beijing requires oversight of all reader-generated chat

John 104

Re: That would be a huge change

As a long time Reg reader, going on two decades, this is nothing new. They've moderated for as long as I can remember.

As to whether or not being an ass hole or whatever. On one hand, its their site, they can do whatever they want. On the other, free speech...Then again, Reg is a UK company, so, nothing new to see here.

512 disk drives later, Floppotron computer hardware orchestra hits v3.0

John 104

I have both a 3.5 and 5.25 drive in my bin. Nothing to interface them with, though. This inspires me to get a card and make them work. I still have game media from back in the day...

Vivaldi email client released 7 years after first announcement

John 104

Re: Old Man

@Niel Barnes

You forgot real work. We have teams at work and it's great. It really is. Good for a quick message or call. But if I want to engage with people outside my organization, it's email. Always. Leaves an audit trail that is easy to search, and no one can say they didn't get it if I can produce their reply, etc. It's here to stay.

Whether Vivaldi is the answer. Hm. If it took them 7 years to develop this client, how long will it take for them to patch vulnerabilities or add new features? No thanks. But good effort.

Behind Big Tech's big privacy heist: Deliberate obfuscation

John 104

We only agreed to the ad tech armageddon because it happened bit by bit, and we refused to believe where it would go.

Maybe you agreed to it or didn't see where it was going. Anyone with half a brain who was paying attention saw this coming a mile away. But, as was said in the coments here, we are the cat. The humans of the world have been conned in what will probably go down in history (if it is allowed by our tech overlords to be written) as one of the biggest bamboozles ever. A race to the bottom by consumers lured by shiny 'free' stuff to put us where we are today, in a fully surveyed world where everything we do is tracked in one way or another. And people do it willingly.

Toyota cuts vehicle production over global chip shortage

John 104

So we are supposed to believe a VP of a company (Gartner), who's sole business model is "Pay us a bunch of money and we'll say good things about your business so that other people who paid us money to say good things about THEIR business will spend money on YOUR business " vs a company who is shelling out $360 Billion over 5 years. Yeah, I'll count on it.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

John 104

Word Star

Nuff Said

Broadcom to buy VMware 'on Thursday for $60 billion'

John 104

That's right up there with 'serverless apps' and 'continers'

They run on something....

Lonestar plans to put datacenters in the Moon's lava tubes

John 104

"Server's down. Gotta run to the datacenter. Back in a month.

John 104

5 Million?

What morons actually gave this idiotic shyster money?

Apple scraps 3-day return to office amid COVID-19 cases

John 104

At What Point...

...does the world stop with this nonsense and just realize that COVID 19 is here to stay? The continual yo-yo of in the office out of the office, mask up mask off, is a bit long in the tooth at this point. Masks have been proven to be largely ineffective. Social distancing has been proven to be completely ineffective. Vaccines have been exposed for what they are; a profalaxis, not a cure. So why all the continued theatre? Everyone alive is going to get COVID 19 eventually. No exceptions. I went 2 years before I finally got it. It sucked for a couple of weeks and I'm over it and moving on with my life. Some people may end up in the hospital, most won't. Those who feel they are at risk should take extra precaution. The rest of the population of the world just needs to get over it already and move on to the next crisis.

John 104

Re: "not everyone is yet ready to return to the corporate altar"

@Iron

Similar story. Not a 70K employee company, but our dev and IT (which I'm part of) are all permanent work from home. The only folks who have to come in are the help desk guys for those that are on site. When we need to touch a server or switch, we come on as needed, but we completely manage that ourselves because management trusts us to do our jobs.

If you WANT to come in, you can.

Cars in driver-assist mode hit a third of cyclists, all oncoming cars in tests

John 104

Re: This is why I still think

Sure... Here in the US we'll get right on that. We'll make separate roadways for the big rigs to self drive on. Right after we get done with light rail and more Amtrak.

John 104

Re: Pedestrians?

There was an article (here?) not long ago. Sort of a promo from one of the companies that make software. The code in Tesla and Toyota was not up to snuff. In all cases, the cars plowed through pedestrians in a crosswalk. The use case was the car had to avoid a stopped vehicle in front of them, swerving around. Not a good testament.

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

John 104

Re: I would get it fired for inventing Powershell

@Alan Burke

25 down votes from people who have no idea what they are talking about...

To you down voters:

cmd ported many DOS commands for ease of use. It is most assuredly NOT a DOS prompt.

As for Powershell syntax, well, its based on .NET, so that might help you a bit with understanding why it is the way it is. And, Linux shell is no peach either... It comes down to what you are well versed in and spend time using more than anything else.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

John 104

PIN?

A PIN is just a shitty, short password....

As for moving away from passwords and using biometric? No thanks. A password is intellectual property and can not be subpoenaed. A fingerprint or your face, however, can be.

2FA is the way to go and anything peddled as better is just dumbing down security.

Logging and monitoring can be a form of bullying, and make for lousy infosec

John 104

@Bombastic

I agree, a good working environment does require a high level of trust and low stress. But you are still there to work. And if you are in an environment that doesn't suit your personality due to whatever, then move on. No one in the western world is forced to work anywhere.

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