* Posts by ThePhantom

67 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jul 2009

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Microsoft rolls out stealthy updates for 365 Apps

ThePhantom

Well that explains it...

I tried to launch Word on my Mac and it just hung and I had to force quit it more than once. When I launched Excel and Powerpoint, each one came up with a "verifying" progress bar and it took quote a while. I had to uninstall and reinstall Word. Ugh!

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

ThePhantom

Re: Just ignored a Trump ad

Not the world wrestling foundation?

ThePhantom

Re: Punishment?

Is that you, Nancy Pelosi?

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

ThePhantom

This is no different than Apple tweaking their battery management on older phones. Batteries DO age and fast-charging them to 100% kills them even faster. Where others see a nefarious motive, I see Tesla trying to keep their customers' cars running. An yes, I own a Tesla.

Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political discussions at work' edict blows up in his face

ThePhantom

Re: Sex, Religion and Politics

I agree with you. If the folks who want to spend their time doing non-business things during business hours quit, I don't see any downside.

Chairman, CEO of Nominet ousted as member rebellion drives .uk registry back to non-commercial roots

ThePhantom

Many moons ago, the Silicon Valley credit union (non profit, owned by the members) added some leadership to help professionalize operations. Within 6 months they voted to turn the place into a bank and increase their salaries and bonuses and award themselves stock. Just like Nominet's board, they also unceremoniously were voted out,

UK Supreme Court declares Uber drivers are workers, not self-employed: Ride biz's legal battle ends in a crash

ThePhantom

Re: Not all Californians are idiots...

And some of us who ARE gig workers, like myself, voted FOR the law so that we could remain employes. I was about to be sacked by the company I contracted for because under the law as it was written, I could only write so many articles before I would be considered an employee -- and the company could not afford to make any or all of their free lance writers into employees.

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

ThePhantom

Re: Texans are gonna love this

Which state? Tesla has plenty of dealers in CA. But yeah, CA paint laws are definitely an issue -- I can't even buy real paint thinner here.

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

ThePhantom

I'm at a loss here, The battery pops out for charging and in theory you should be mounting the device with the battery ejected from the unit. Am i missing something?

RIP: NetApp Advanced Technology Group shuffles off this mortal coil

ThePhantom

Citrix did similar many years ago after their XenSource purchase proved to be a lemon. Ah well.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

ThePhantom

Re: I'll give it a go...

Hmmm. Micro$loth to me. Too lazy to actually freaking fix their holier than anything code.

Forever mothballed: In memoriam Apple Butterfly Keyboard (2015-2020)

ThePhantom

Nope. I have an Early 2015 MPB with 8GB and an upgraded 500GB SSD which has travelled with me to every continent except Antartica. It's the machine I use on my dining room table for my morning and evening writing and emails before I move to my Mac Pro for graphics work.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

ThePhantom

Unfortunately I have to agree that Microsoft seems to keep reinventing the wheel rather than making incremental improvements based on customer feedback. They also have a very bad habit of requiring extensive IT support for much of their kit along with forcing you into the larger MS ecosystem.

With Zoom, you just install the zoom software and are done with it. While holier than a sieve, it at least gets the job done.

Pair charged with murder, manslaughter after IBM Aspera boffin killed in New Year's Eve laptop theft struggle

ThePhantom

Welcome to California, where theft under $950 is "victimless" and the San Francisco bay area, where illegals and criminals have more rights than citizens, and indeed, San Francisco, across the bay from where this murder took place, where a person who was raised by Weather Underground members is the new district attorney (prosecutor).

What a topsy-turvy world we live in, eh?

Beware the Y2K task done too well, it might leave you lost in Milan

ThePhantom

In the mid-1980's I was the onsite vendor support for a very early ATM implementation not using a water-cooled IBM mainframe. To keep things on the QT, the bank's Tandem fault-tolerant computer wasn't in the bank's data center, but was hidden offsite. Whenever I was on shift, I was escorted there from the main data center whilst blindfolded. I found out much later that the mainframe was hidden in the retrofitted basement of nearby carpark.

As for Y2K, yeah, I was on call for 48 hours but felt like the Maytag man.

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

ThePhantom

With the recent California blackouts, those with 100% electric cars were left, er, carless. In my case, I have a plug-in Prius along with solar and Tesla batteries, so no problem. But that combination is only for the wealthy.

As for the "300 vehicle models from 40 car brands," most of the 300 are just badge and accessory changes. For example, Most GM cars are really the same vehicles built on the same chassis. Only the labels, dealerships and parts prices differ -- for the exact same piece of hardware. And that is historical owing to the "My dad and his dad bought this brand, so why should I be any different?"

Another issue in the USA is that I cannot order the car that I want, even if I am willing to wait for it to be built. Manufacturers offer a very limited choice of pre-configured "trim packages" so if I want the sunroof, I also have to take the leather seats and the chrome wheels. Or if I want a specific color, it may only be bundled with specific accessories.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

ThePhantom

Many years ago my double-locked door at a Marriott hotel opened to the limit of the chain at 3AM. Long story short, someone claiming to be me went to the front desk said they couldn't get into their (my) room and they gave him or her (not sure which) a replacement key. Because the door was double-locked, it didn't work, so they sent security up with the God key to open the door.

When I heard the door open, I kicked it shut and called the front desk to ask for security to be sent to my room pronto. That's when I was told security WAS at my room -- and I guess I got in, didn't I?

Next AM I went to the front desk to complain about them not verifying the person's ID before giving them a key to my room, and I was told that they DID provide acceptable ID. I had to call Marriott corporate before anyone took this incident seriously, but I did get a security blog entry out of the experience.

Cloud atlas: Oh dear. Now Adobe has mapped out a slowdown

ThePhantom

Re: Probably losing a lot of out-sourced graphic design shops

I agree that Affinity photo does all that I need and I am waiting for their InDesign replacement.

A billion-dollar question: What was really behind Qualcomm's surprise ten-digit gift to Apple?

ThePhantom

During the 1990s Rambus, Inc. famously withdrew from a standard-setting organization (SSO) for memory chips and began suing the other members for infringing its standard-essential patents after the SSO adopted a standard using Rambus’ patents.

Home users due for a battering with Microsoft 365 subscription stick

ThePhantom

Re: Yes, what MS really needs now is more marketing...

Luckily for those of us on a Mac, we can ignore the ribbon since we still have menus. Even when I was on Windows I bought a third party package that reinstated the menus. Who wants to search on the ribbon?

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

ThePhantom

Crank up the subwoofers and get ready to rock and roll: Metallica has its own whiskey, and it was created in part by the band’s music. A blend of straight American whiskeys selected and blended by master distiller Dave Pickerell, Blackened was put through a proprietary “sonic enhancement” process that used Metallica songs to create sound waves that impact chemical reactions taking place in the aging whiskey.

No, this is not a joke.

A boss pinching pennies may have cost his firm many, many pounds

ThePhantom

Dual PSUs - and one power strip

Ah yes. The number of IT managers who think that the dual PSUs are there in case one of them goes out is legendary. I was amazed at the number of dual PSU cords all plugged into the same power strip, or where the "left PSU" and "right PSU" power strips were plugged in to the top and bottom of the same outlet, or different outlets on the same breaker or power panel. It boggles the mind.

Microsoft still longs to be a 'lifestyle' brand, but the cupboard looks bare

ThePhantom

"Adobe too has made subscription access so cheap that pirating seems petty."

Wait, what!? Adobe is a total ripoff to hobbyists who want to use their Creative Suite a couple times a year for tweaking a photo, updating a website, or editing a newsletter. An individual subscription is $600/year.

Trainee techie ran away and hid after screwing up a job, literally

ThePhantom

Many years ago I was an ex-pat ops manager in Shanghai. We were shutting down the office there, so a complete IT inventory was started, using college interns. The intern started in the storage room, bringing various items to me so that I could show him where the part and serial numbers were located.

After an hour of this, I noticed that the status board was starting to go red little by little. It turned out that he was pulling drives from the production servers and bringing them to my desk for help. For the first time in my three years of being onsite, I lost it and started yelling at him. He started crying and when I looked around, I saw 2 floors of engineers had come into the NOC to see what all the fuss was about.

It took me a bit to calm him down, send the engineers back to their desks, and explain why you don't pull components out of running servers.

Microsoft tries cutting the Ribbon in Office UI upgrade

ThePhantom

To this day, I still use keyboard shortcuts and the Office toolbar on my Mac because I am too lazy to search through the many tabs on the ribbon for what I need to do.

Guilty: NSA bloke who took home exploits at the heart of Kaspersky antivirus slurp row

ThePhantom

So why is this fellow being charged when Hillary was not?

Big Tech slams Trump on plan to deport kids

ThePhantom

Re: Not quite.

Nope. "they happened to be born there..." is categorically not true. By law, anyone born within the borders of the United States is a citizen. The issue is around illegals who were smuggled in as children by their illegal parents. Technically, the kids are criminals, but depending on their age, they had no choice. However, they and their parents are still illegals.

ThePhantom

I don't believe there is "xenophobia and attitude towards immigrants and foreigners." There is, however, a negative attitude towards illegal immigrants who come here and end up sucking on the welfare teat. Nearly $50 million in the California state budget will go to expanded legal services for illegals -- and that is what many of us object to.

ThePhantom

"immigrant children born in the United States"

Um, no. The phrase should be "illegal immigrant children smuggled into the United States by their illegal immigrant parents."

Twice-crashed HPE SANs at Oz Tax Office built for speed, not strength, and turned off error reporting

ThePhantom

A long time ago...

Many years ago, a major bank was trying to move off of IBM to Tandem NonStop (now HPE NonStop). The disks kept failing in the middle of the night, so yours truly was dispatched to work the night shift to figure out what was going on.

In a nutshell, I caught the IBM night operator opening the backs of the washing machine sized 30MB drive cabinets and loosening the cables. When the nightly close fired up at 2AM, the shaking of the drives caused the connections to become intermittent, crashing the systems.

Screws tightened, operator fired, problem solved.

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

ThePhantom

ROFL - I have to enter my PIN a dozen times a day when my iPhone 6s doesn't recognize any of my stored prints -- and I have to re-enter them from scratch around every 30-45 days when they stop working entirely.

User rats out IT team for playing games at work, gets them all fired

ThePhantom

Back in the 80's

Same thing happened at a Silicon Valley company that I was working for. We moved from Mac to PC and had to build up a PC support team since no one knew how to use them and they were always BSoD'ing. Fast forward 6 months and while Rome burned, the PC techs were locked in their castle playing whatever it was that they played back then.

As in this story, the entire lot were shown the door.

Installing disks is basically LEGO, right? This admin failed LEGO

ThePhantom

A Chinese tale...

Many years ago, I was the Ops manager at an offshore software house in Shanghai. We hired a just-out-of-college intern to inventory the systems. He started in the storage room cataloging drives in custom enclosures, bringing a few of them to me so that I could point out where the serial numbers were.

After he was done, he started inventorying the server room - and I started seeing RAID volumes losing disks. After the OS volume on one server went offline crashing it, I ran into the room and saw him with a drive in his hand. He has been pulling drives to read the serial numbers.

I started yelling at him. In the 3 years that I was in Shanghai, the engineers had never heard me lose my temper and they came running from all 3 floors. The intern started crying, so I had to hug him to calm him down. I hope no one took pictures...

LogMeIn collapses its 'Cubby' Dropbox clone into LogMeIn Pro

ThePhantom

LogMeIn ripoff

First it was free for personal use. Then $99 with features I use, and now it's $149 because it's adding features that I don't use. All I want to do is remote to my mum's Mac so that I can fix things up when her cats walk on the keyboard and muck things up.

EU ends anonymity and rules open Wi-Fi hotspots need passwords

ThePhantom

When we were just in India, we found that there are no open hotspots and to get the password you need to supply your (local) registered mobile number. Sounds like this will become the standard in EU.

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

ThePhantom

Re: Unhappy memories

Hmmm... they must have been Thai, because Chinese, Japanese, Singaporean, and Korean all drink their tea "black."

ThePhantom

ROFL - On my first trip to India, I asked for and got a cup of tea - but it had milk in it. I asked again for a cup of tea without milk, and the tea boy (yes, they have tea boys in India and tea girls in Japan -- go figure) was totally confused.

It turns out that at least where I was in India, they tea is brewed with milk and not with water. ewwwwww.....

Ditch your Macs, Dell tells EMC staff

ThePhantom

Compaq did the same thing to Tandem Computers when they bought us, and it was field staff first followed by internal. We were located down Stevens Creek Blvd from Apple and besides the green screens for our mainframe systems, we were mostly an Apple shop so it was pretty wrenching for all of us.

King Tut's iron dagger of extraterrestrial origin

ThePhantom

Or maybe... just maybe... the dagger was a gift from extraterrestrials. Hey, ya never know...

Woz says 'Jobs started Apple for money' – then says it must pay 50% tax like he does

ThePhantom

Steve gave away his schematics at the homebrew computer club. Woz, Lee Felsenstein, and a few others could care less about money from us - in contrast with Bill Gates who wrote us a cease and desist letter for sharing a paper tape of his BASIC compiler. It is documented that Jobs took advantage of Woz over and over. Woz would work for fun, and Jobs would profit from it. I remember when Woz used to pull Apples out of inventory for his friends. Jobs didn't like that at all.

Obama: What will solve America's gun problem? What could it be? *snaps fingers* Technology!

ThePhantom

Re: Huh?

"The point is, safeties could be made safer."

Actually, the point is that "safeties are mechanical devices which can fail," and this is the correct answer on the NRA Basic Pistol Shooting course. There is no such thing as a safety that is 100% reliable. And even if there was one, criminals would disable it anyway.

Microsoft's magic hurts: Nadella signals 'tough choices' on the way

ThePhantom

Re: Come Back Nokia?

I had a handful of very cool Nokia phones over the years. Who could ever forget the ultra-cool metal-shell 8800 series?

RSA boss packs his fishing rod and heads for the hills

ThePhantom

Security Dynamics bought RSA and took their name

The two-factor authentication token that we all know and love was developed by Security Dynamics in the 1980's. SD bought RSA and took their name to get traction in the marketplace for their device.

The finest weird people in the world live here, and we're proud of it

ThePhantom

Re: From a Native

Quite true about parties at the Folsom street fair - try to get invited to one at "The Amory" (Kink.com).

ThePhantom

From a Native

I am an almost-San Francisco native. Born in SF but brought up a stone's throw south in Daly City. My dad owned a business in the City and I learned to drive in a column-shift panel van on the hills.

English fellows are in high demand by the City's ladies. Something about the accent drives them nuts.

Richard forgot to mention the dress code in our City versus the UK's City. Business formal means that you wear socks with your Birkies. Business Casual means no socks, and casual Friday could very well mean barefoot.

My former and current employers have multiple offices in London and the remainder of the UK, and every time I travel there I need to dust off my single suit (sans vest) locate my handful of long-sleeve shirts (with French cuffs no less!) and find my one pair of dress shoes at the bottom of the closet. Luckily I collect bow ties that I wear at conferences so that people can recognize me (it's a marketing thing), so no problem there.

And although he touched on the Folsom Street Fair, there was no mention of the sex parties that Google and other companies throw on weekends.

Jony Ive: Apple iWatch will SCREW UP Switzerland's economy

ThePhantom

Re: Bang on

"Was moving a clock off the wall into the pocket, then onto the wrist, really considered cool back in the day?"

>> Absolutely! Pocket watches were required by railroad men so that they knew whether their trains were running on time or not and by town "watchmen" to keep track of their shifts. But before that came pendant clock-watches - which were not worn to tell the time. The accuracy of their verge and foliot movements was so poor, with errors of perhaps several hours per day, that they were practically useless. They were made as jewelry and novelties for the nobility, valued for their fine ornamentation, unusual shape, or intriguing mechanism, and accurate timekeeping was of very minor importance.

Back in the day, wrist watches were almost exclusively worn by women, while men used pocket-watches. Since early watches were notoriously prone to fouling from exposure to the elements, they could only reliably be kept safe from harm if carried securely in the pocket.

But as watches became more hardened, it was clear that using pocket watches while in the heat of battle or while mounted on a horse was impractical, so officers began to strap the watches to their wrist. In fact, watches produced during the first WW were specially designed for the rigors of trench warfare, with luminous dials and unbreakable glass - and the rest is history...

Exclusive SPB t-shirt flies into Kickstarter

ThePhantom

Seriously - white? You really need other colors that don't show belly button sweat.

So, Apple won't sell cheap kit? Prepare the iOS garden wall WRECKING BALL

ThePhantom

All I really want from my iPhone is what I had on my Treo - a way to calibrate the keyboard so that the very consistent mistyping of backspace for M, O for P, and S for A get fixed.

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 claimed lives of HIV/AIDS cure scientists

ThePhantom

No one ever heard of risk analysis?

When I was named disaster recovery coordinator for a company over 30 years ago, the first thing I did was create and publish a policy for how many employees could be on the same transport vehicle, and which officers could NOT travel together. Some stories state that the 100 best and brightest AIDs researchers were on this one plane. That scares the heck out of me to think of what other conference have this risk associated with them.

Microsoft exec: I don't know HOW our market share sunk

ThePhantom

Choice versus forced...

It was pretty obvious that Microsoft software was designed from the ground up to be complicated enough that it kept IT staff and helpdesk agents employed. Therefore, their software was mandated by many IT departments. If you've tried to add a printer on Windows versus a Mac or iPad, you know exactly what I am saying.

Now that the end users have a choice, they have voted on this strategy by buying products that are intuitive to use and don't need an army of sysadmins to configure and use.

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