Re: Credentials after leaving
> WHY NOT GIVE IT A TRY!?
Take off that red costume with the horns, and stop sitting on his shoulder. It doesn’t suit you and you look ridiculous.
Posts by David 132
3847 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
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Cloud engineer wreaks havoc on bank network after getting fired
HCL modernizes Notes by adding 2023's hot new item ... mail merge?
Oracle share price slides as it misses revenue expectations
Wednesday 13th December 2023 03:14 GMT 
Re: Larry's turnaround plan
Oracle is one of the few companies whose written communications to customers giving details of price rises are composed of single letters & words cut and pasted out of newspapers & magazines.
Also, "Kind regards" or "With best wishes" may be cliché, but either is preferable to "OR ELSE"...
Linux Mint 21.3 and Zorin 17 are beta buddies
Tuesday 12th December 2023 19:16 GMT 
Hypnotix?
I adore Mint - it's my daily driver and powers my NAS - but it's interesting that the article calls out improvements to Hypnotix, the IPTV player app.
In my experience I've never been able to get Hypnotix to work, no matter what country or channel I use, VPN or no. It just spins and times out.
So "improved" in my view could mean as little as "now will at least play Albania's 8th-most-popular paint-drying channel".
Still, a pint for Clement & the Mint team.
Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers
Tuesday 12th December 2023 02:20 GMT
Hey, some of us STILL play BF1942 now.
Cooperative LAN play, just me and a few friends against bots - good fun.
Speaking of, can anyone recommend any modern games that support co-op LAN play against bots? Everything multiplayer these days seems to be online, and I have no desire to play against foul-mouthed kids on the other side of the world, or submit to the whole ridiculous ELO rating thing (it's a game FFS not an application to Harvard)...
Monday 11th December 2023 15:29 GMT
Re: Ah Doom
Frak (or Frak! technically I believe) was a platformer game. I fondly recall playing it on the BBC Bs in our school’s computer room. The music was a jolly sailor’s hornpipe… which, I only learned many years later, meant that ours was a pirated copy, the developers having sneakily put in some primitive anti-copy code that did little more than change the music on illicit copies :)
Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support
Saturday 9th December 2023 20:15 GMT
Re: Merging /bin with /usr/bin and /sbin with /usr/sbin
this is **NOT** something that systemd has any business mandating.
Part of me wonders if there's a Bloody-Stupid-Johnson type thing going on here, where patrons keep funding Poettering out of morbid fascination as to what he'll screw up next.
Systemd 258: now controls mouse cursor management & appearance
Systemd 265: contains the necessary graphics drivers for your desktop. But only for the GPUs that Poettering runs in his personal systems. All others are, by definition, unnecessary. #WONTFIX.
Systemd 280: Now includes the system firmware layer. Will only boot during Poettering's office hours.
Systemd 281: All system directories and files now merged into a single binary blob named PAGEFILE.SYS. "Vastly simplifies my workflow" says Poettering.
I couldn't decide which icon was appropriate - so many to choose from. Fail? Trollface? Facepalm?
Went for Beer in the end because alcohol is an appropriate response to this idiocy. Cheers.
Google's Project Ellman: Merging photo and search data to create digital twin chatbot
What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck
Saturday 9th December 2023 06:44 GMT
*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post [...] Far cheaper than downloading...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes hurtling down the highway" :)
(that famous quote is also a good way to introduce people to the difference between bandwidth and latency, of course)
Friday 8th December 2023 23:35 GMT
Anyone else remember BT Friends & Family, the billing add-on in the mid 90s that allowed you to choose 5 of your most frequently dialled numbers as favourites, and get low cost calling to them?
And I recall the slightly exasperated BT spokesman explaining that while, technically, they couldn't stop you add your ISP's dialup number to that list, "we didn't think anyone would be sad enough to nominate their ISP as a friend or family..." :)
Microsoft to intro dedicated mode for Cloud PCs
Messed up metadata could be to blame for Microsoft's Windows printer woes
Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor
Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970
Friday 8th December 2023 20:43 GMT
Re: Priorities
One critical thing missing, which is an estimate to resolution (even if very finger-in-the-air estimate multiplied by pessimism factor)
The Scotty approach. "It'll take six hours Captain. But as we dinnae have six hours, I'll have it ready in two."
"Wait. Mr Scott, have you always multiplied your estimates by a factor of three?"
"O'course, Captain. How else can I maintain my reputation as a miracle-worker?"
Google releases fix for missing Drive for desktop files
Thursday 7th December 2023 21:40 GMT
Re: Trust the Cloud, they said.
>'Don't mess with things until we figure this out' is sound advice. It is pretty much the thing the resident geek tells family members when they report a problem to them and request it be fixed.
Often heard subsequently in my family, variants on: "But I did what you said and didn't mess with it! After we spoke I just followed this one YouTube video that had lots of views, and it didn't work, and now I don't get Windows on my screen, just some message about 'boot sector not found'..."
GitLab admits IT ineptitude in finance reporting is ongoing
Thursday 7th December 2023 12:03 GMT
Honestly, I’m just trying to wrap my head around the published numbers. Losses in Q3 of $285M, on revenue of $148M… just what are they doing?
Code hosting, right? And they make a big play of being all-in on remote working, so one presumes they have little to no real estate overhead.
Where does $435M of spending go, then? Payroll? Maybe, even if I highly doubt that all 1600 employees (yes, I cheated and checked their Wikipedia page) are being paid at Silicon Valley rates.
Genuinely mystified.
Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions
Steve Jobs' $4.01 RadioShack check set to fetch small fortune at auction
HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers
Monday 4th December 2023 20:36 GMT
Re: Honestly....
I've told this tale around here before, but... my previous employer habitually issued Thinkpads to employees. Proper, IBM ones, rock solid, could be used to batter rabid elephants to death if need be.
Well one year - this would be around 2008 - our IT dept was experimenting with alternative vendors, and issued me with an HP Elitebook of some sort.
It seemed OK, reasonably well put together.
Until I was at a training conference in San Francisco, seated (like the goody-two-shoes Teacher's Pet that I am, on the front row right in front of the instructor), typing notes, and a key flew spontaneously off my keyboard with a sproing!! sound and landed on the instructor's desk right in front of him. True professional that he was, he picked it up and handed it back to me without missing a beat :)
So yeah, I insisted on Thinkpads after that one.
I always knew the rot had set in at HP when they ran that mawkish advert a few years ago, gushing about how they were building on the heritage of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, "and look here's the actual garage they started in, etc etc."
When a company starts telling everyone about its wonderful "heritage" and "values"... run.
Scribbling limits in free version of Evernote set to test users' patience
Sunday 3rd December 2023 18:24 GMT
Re: The whole "freemium" model seems pretty screwed up
I have a Freecell game on my phone. It has annoying adverts; when I’m at home my Pihole blocks them, but not when I’m traveling (which is when I tend to play Freecell… killing time waiting for planes, etc.)
The game offered me a chance to pay and remove the ads. Fair enough, I thought; I get enjoyment out of this, and it’d be perfect without the ads. $5-10? No problem.
$6.99 per month. That’s how much they want to remove ads from a flipping Freecell game. Almost $90 per year.
And so my copy of the game still has ads, which I ignore, and the makers get very little, if any, revenue from me.
Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness
Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books
Saturday 2nd December 2023 18:56 GMT
Re: No problem
Or will pass it as long as it has a suitably Motherhood-and-Apple-Pie backronym, or even just a cute name that doesn't have to bear any relation to the content of the bill. See PATRIOT act, etc etc.
"The Fluffy Kittens and Snuggly Ducklings Act 2024" (inc. rider vii.sec ix: "authorization of deadly force against people with an 'R' in their name")
Or maybe that's just a thing here in the US.
Meta goes to war with FTC over right to profit from kids' personal data
UEFI flaws allow bootkits to pwn potentially hundreds of devices using images
Friday 1st December 2023 21:57 GMT
Re: Is this only UEFI?
Yes, my understanding is that machines starting in legacy BIOS mode - bootsector, etc - aren't affected by this vulnerability.
LogoFAIL, if my reading of this article's correct, relies on a malformed image placed in the root EFI partition on the boot drive. This images is loaded & parsed by the EFI firmware during boot, before the firmware hands over control of the boot process to the OS on its partition.
So if you're not using UEFI boot, and don't have an EFI partition (NB - these are normally hidden), you should be OK.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
