* Posts by Nick Ryan

3751 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: if programmed correctly, mean that a straightforward update will do the trick

Even better if the customer could be heavily charged for this change of course!

Nick Ryan Silver badge

You've misunderstood my exasperation about the state of most scheduling systems.

For example where an event starts at 22:00 one day and finishes at 04:00 the following day, the duration is normally considered to be 6 hours, and therefore billable as such. However when an event such as this occurs over the clock change over period the actual duration can be 5 hours (spring) or 7 hours (autumn). Calculating the correct time duration is one thing given the start and end date/times, setting the correct end point as a result of a desired number of hours (for example 6 hours of care) is another.

Luckily nothing I ever had to include in the system crossed time zones, just daylight saving time transitions. As long as event started and finished within the same time zone it would have worked. Where it would (probably) have failed is where the time zone changed between the start and finish times.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Instead of moving an hour and then locking...

The scary thing about this suggestion is that it's totally and utterly logical. :)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Hey, Microsoft!

Ah yes "focused inbox" or the "randomly hide important emails for no even remotely logical or discernable reason" option. I wonder if it's possible to disable this option (Group Policy) however the retarded thing is set by default therefore I suspect that Microsoft's marketing droids will have blocked any attempt at sense. Again.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: historical memory loss

Don't forget that the larger the vehicle (I nearly called them cars, but many are the size of vans or larger these days), the smaller and weedier the kid.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: historical memory loss

Shhh... don't tell others that half of all people are more stupid than average... it'll hurt their minds.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

That's OK if you don't care about time scheduling. About 25 years ago I was writing scheduling software that had to take into account daylight savings time changes and accurately account for the hours in the schedule. It did this through asking the Operating System the real time (UTC) for the given time and using this to work out the duration of scheduled events. I suspect that it would probably fuck up royally with different time zones but it worked very well for what it was needed for (and no competitor systems could cope at all, many required tedious manual adjustments twice a year).

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: USA change its date format ...

It would be OK if the shoddy US developers noticed that the rest of the world used a different size.

It was only a couple of years ago that Microsoft word stopped fucking up the margin sizes in documents by insisting on storing them in antiquated obsolete measure units and doing a conversion time. It was annoying AF setting a margin or spacing to something like 0.15cm only to find it changing to 0.14 or 0.16 when checking back on it. Something like that anyway...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: USA change its date format ...

A rather impressively large number of naval military ships were reconditioned spoils of war. After they were checked for improvements worthy of copying, captured ships were typically just patched up and given a new flag. I understand that some ships were lucky(?) enough to change nations quite a large number of times!

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: USA change its date format ...

I'd be happy if the incompetent US coders actually understood that most of the world is NOT North American and has a different date format and uses standard measurement units and not antiquated Imperial measurements that are currently only used by three backwards regimes in the world.

Showing information in different formats suitable for the target audience is not difficult and not doing smacks of gross incompetence and laziness. Sometimes it's easy to spot that, for example, we are not currently the 3rd day of the 16th month of the year, however other times it's annoying to have to do the mental gymnastics to have to guess whether or not I'm looking at the real date or an incompetent North American developer's output of the date. It was only thirty fucking years ago that it was agreed that if one must display dates in a localised form, it's best to use day number and month name because that's at least translatable compared to two arbitrary numbers.

Thirty years later, I sign into Microsoft 365 admin centre and all the formatting is in American and not English format. As a result, it's very easy to mis-read the mangled dates as something else. Apparently this bullshit is "progress".

/grumpy... just don't get me started on the fact that 12:00am and 12:00pm categorically DO NOT EXIST. The solution to this was created over 100 fucking years ago.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: if programmed correctly, mean that a straightforward update will do the trick

Yep. The world of computing is plagued by shoddy, incompetent and lazy programmers.

I think I first saw this in action in person when the government changed the VAT rate and lots of really shitly designed software promptly crapped itself because it was hard coded. Followed by far too many shit updates to the same software which did nothing more than change the hard coding rather than actually implement it as a time sensitive value.

This was a different failure to Y2K which was about data encoding rather than solely about stupid short-sighted assumptions.

It keeps us in work though...

How experimental was Microsoft's 'experimental banner' in File Explorer?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Usual attempt to see how far they can go before causing real outrage...

Seeing as a developer at Microsoft had to write the code, that the developer was going to have been instructed to write the code, that a planning session or hundred would have been had to plan the functionality, that the infrastructure to host and control the adverts would have to be built, deployed and scaled...

It's neither accidental nor experimental. It's just yet more belligerence from Microsoft and in treating customers, mostly paying customers, as cash cows and people to force advertising on.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Lightning Protection

Not telephone, television! Did anyone else have this craziness of having to unplug the TV during a storm?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Lightning Protection

It's a weird one. Comms cables, such as the usual telephone wiring between a local street box and a house are only going to instantly melt due to a lightning strike. A direct strike to a property's telephone connection isn't going to do much in reverse either other than a very quick destruction of a relatively small amount of the wiring. It's the "near" strikes that are probably the most damaging for equipment.

I remember when young that we always had to unplug the telephone from the house aerial if there was a storm. These days I'm not sure why... a lightning strike that's just travelled 2 miles through air really isn't going to give a shit if the the 50cm between the aerial socket and the TV has a coax cable connected or not... it's fireworks regardless.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Human factor

Crap. Now I know why I should have bought the manual...

Cow-counting app abused by China 'to spy on US states'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: highly sophisticated attack ;-)

Probably the same moment that they learn that SQL injection attacks can be quickly and simply prevented through using parameterised queries and that these have been available for a few decades...

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Had something similar

I remember a site install we had where the idiot installers couldn't be bothered to employ even a modicum of brain power and terminated all the cat5 cables however they felt like. Different on every fucking socket.

When challenged on this they responded "it wasn't their job" and "did it matter" and "well we didn't have the cable pin outs". The immediate response was "would you just do that for an electrical cable as well"?

However having gone into these sites it's apparent that sometimes they probable did do that for the electrical cables as well...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Watch Your Backs

Not to mention Dido Harding (TalkTalk, 'NHS' Test and Trace).

Don't forget, she was also in charge of the 2020 Cheltenham Festival Covid superspreader event.

Well there was a reason why it went ahead despite almost everything else similar in scale being cancelled...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: HR or Steve's Boss

During a probationary period it's common for no reason to be necessary.

Microsoft pulls MSIX discussions into Windows Tech Community

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Splendid. Yet another brain dead implementation of convenience (simple malware distribution) vs common sense from Microsoft.

How long until this becomes yet another abandoned almost-half-finished release from Microsoft that some foolish developers will use to the exclusion of sense?

Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source'

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: The State changed its tune

Name me a religion that is not based on unsound and unproven belief in an entity or action that cannot be observed or even proven to exist by scientific methods.
Pastafarianism. Arguably rather more evidence for this than the others...

Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I suspect that a lot of these kind of sites suffer from the same old problem of just doing more of something that's not working rather than understand why it's not working.

Revenue from ads dropping? Easy! Put more ads on the page. Revenue from ads is still dropping? Aha! Put more ads on the page... and repeat.

In the end we wind up with a site where about the only appreciable non-advert content on the page is the website name and logo at the top of the page, and good luck finding something that isn't an advert or just spam click-bait link "articles".

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Unfortunately having a written constitution didn't stop the great (not great at all) orange monkey making a mockery of due process and the US's twisted ideal of democracy.

One of the few checks and balances against the UK government was the high court, which the current UK government is desperately trying to make as irrelevant as possible. They wouldn't want to be accountable to their actions after all...

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Nick Ryan Silver badge

That's entirely accurate and scary.

The slightly insane thing is that there was nothing really stopping a 32 bit OS from using more than 4GB RAM, nor realistically any single application either (the limit is 4GB contiguous block of RAM).

Easier to just support a larger addressable space without messing around, however this was very common in early MS/PC systems with the "fun" of EMS/XMS memory management.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

As opposed to Windows 8, where the same muppet took very careful notice of every single point, and then did the exact opposite.
. True... I was trying to be nice though! :)

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

The biggest positive change I think was breaking the Windows-land user and developer assumption of having admin rights at all time.
A principle that the dumb developers within Microsoft often break. Install Windows from scratch, congratulations you must assign a user who will be given administrator access by default. Install Microsoft SQL server and where are the data files stored by default? In the Program Files tree of course, which by Microsoft's own guidance should only ever be written to by an account with software installation rights and definitely never used for data or configuration. It was this last point that often caught out incompetent developers and why they usually stated "must have administrator rights to local system" because data files, log files and so on were incorrectly written into an area of the file system that should only ever be read-only. After all, it's only been in the Windows API since about 1995 to ask for and be provided with a suitable data path (1995-ish, mangled by the horrors of Microsoft insisting that Internet Explorer as part of the Operating System to try and justify them abusing their monopoly position with it).

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

Vista typically came with to much junk pre-configured: utterly pointless widgets that just drained CPU cycles for no benefit whatsoever and a really, really inefficient File system interface (explorer) that it was often just unusable. Add in the metric ton of crap that many vendors shovelled onto systems and combine this with pathetically specified systems and Vista was something to avoid.

Windows 8 was definitely not a "good operating system" (article) - the driver model was half broken and the user interface was "designed" by a muppet who looked at a book on good user interface design principles and chose to ignore every single point in the book. From mystery meat navigation, to incomprehensible icons through ridiculously inconsistent interfaces and the utterly blinkered stupidity of trying to make a tablet user interface the only user interface for a desktop PC or laptop. In the end the interface was usable for no systems.

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Clause 1 of the bill

Just like "misleading" is the approved term for "lying" or "criminal actions"

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: That's obviously got no possibility for mis-use then....

Taking back control from the impending transparency and oversight and thoroughly burying it. It's called Levelling Up. It's got nothing to do with you or I, other than being further sources of income for our ruling classes such as the Minister for the 17th Century, Ree-Smogg.

UK government responds to post-Brexit concerns and of course it's all the fault of those pesky EU negotiators

Nick Ryan Silver badge

But brexiteers are choosers... they choose rhetoric, division and lies and then to close their eyes and pretend that their perfect sun-blessed future with an oven ready deal negotiated by the amazing UK negotiator and signed by the same is utterly perfect and the only problem is the evil EU is insisting that the UK implement the terms that the UK agreed to is naturally a problem with the EU and not the incompetent narcissists that currently masquerade as the UK government cabinet and ministers.

Internet Society condemns UK's Online Safety Bill for demonising encryption using 'think of the children' tactic

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: So, 0.2% eh ?

This is entirely true, but only if taken to the correct end point.

We should make vehicle ownership and operation so expensive that only the ruling classes can afford them. This way all the plebs, as in everyone who is not a member of the ruling classes, won't be able to afford them to commit robberies.

Microsoft seems intent on buying the gaming industry with $68.7bn purchase of troubled Activision Blizzard

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

Here we go again...

This will produce yet more steady "improvements" which require any hapless game player to have a Microsoft Account, subscribe to whatever bullshit "Microsoft XBox Zune Gaming Bar Interface (TM)" foists on all unlucky users and so on. Essentially, a long term play to ensure subscribers, no matter how they are generated. If in the meantime the games as developed and sold make a profit, that's good, and promote Windows, that's better, but it's the continual subscription fees that Microsoft are after.

Did Activision Blizzard have any Linux support pending? This will quietly disappear soon enough...

Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Boom .....

All hail the magic smoke!

What begins with a 'B' and is having problems at tsoHost? Hopefully not your website

Nick Ryan Silver badge

proalym ut if I were to guess, I'd guess that they have a poor/cheap infrastructure and no redundancy or failover let alone oad alancing.

Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

Re: Windows 11 Upgrade?

It's more likely that Microsoft's cunning plan would be to force install it into every copy of Windows 10 & 11, particularly the "professional" and "workstation" versions (which naturally need games), with administrators forced to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. Ideally the PowerShell commands will be as badly written as possible to ensure that scripting them is near impossible and the PowerShell library will feel like abandonware as soon as Microsoft coughed it out.

In parallel Microsoft would promote it mercilessly within Windows itself, because that's what the OS is there for. The game will be free at first and then switched to a monthly subscription mode afterwards, linked to Microsoft 365 accounts. The activation of this subscription will be at the end user's discretion and not any administrators and to prevent end users subscribing to this "service", administrators will have to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. The subscription will be something entirely "reasonable" like £2.99 per user per month.

James Webb Telescope launch delayed again, this time by weather

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Sometimes

Please look into things in more detail before coming up with stuff.

Do you think for a second that development of something like this will only use technology that was present in 1996? These things are designed by real, solid engineers and designed to be as flexible and accepting of new technology as late into the process as possible. These are the kind of engineers that don't design something to fail in three years, they design something that in three years it will as far as they possibly can be sure, it will still be working. This is the difference and why Mars rovers are still trundling around while your iPhone crapped itself 30ms after the warranty expiry.

Also consider that the imaging sensors that were put into orbit 20 years ago are so advanced and so specialised that they will put anything that you may consider current to absolute shame. Also whatever is put up now is so far ahead of what was previously up there that the difference is, well astronomical.

Would it be good to have really easy launch and recovery technologies where rapid prototyping and even early failure is an easily recoverable option? Quite likely, however that's unlikely to happen for a long time and while things are moving that way, solid engineering that lasts is still the mainstay of sustainable and long term science.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Colour me impressed...

Amiga HAM mode was more limited because only one of the colour components could be changed at a time meaning that horizontally different sections of an image take up to three pixels to transition from one colour to the other. The fringe effect was quite obvious but often obscured when used with a cheap display which created fringe effects anyway...

Thank you, FAQ chatbot, but if I want your help I'll ask for it

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

They are the slightly more modern equivalent of the telephone menu system, although usually of less help.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Been using it for a while

My guess would have been VT110 for colour, however it was a very long time ago...

Nick Ryan Silver badge
Stop

Also enjoy the ridiculous issue of the Microsoft Office link poisoning the URL. Links that work directly when copy and pasted don't work when clicked from Microsoft Office. Such wonderful support for standards. :(

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Please take the current one too. It's probably the most ugly, uninspiring and just plain awful bridge in London.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Apart from all the bloody server applications that require the GUI to install. Because some lazy oink developer at Microsoft hard linked GUI libraries into the installer.

Revealed: Remember the Sony rootkit rumpus? It was almost oh so much worse

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I understand the efficiency of filename file type encoding compared to file type identification codes at the beginning of a file. With filename file type encoding, as in file extensions, the claimed file type of a file is in the directory index and very quick and efficient to separate out. Where file type identification codes are the only method of deriving a file's claimed type, the first few bytes of every file has to be read in addition to the file directory index. This is considerably slower than just parsing a directory index. The file type identification codes also have to be managed in a largely consistent manner because otherwise they would be duplicated - not that this wasn't a problem with file extensions but it's slightly less obvious to the user that there is a file type ID clash.

While it's not impossible to have a file system where the file identification bytes are included in the directory index this introduces a fair bit of extra overhead and this was at a time when a floppy disk was pretty much cutting edge storage technology - neither fast nor high capacity and any bytes saved was a good thing. [I'm aware of the irony of this given how wasteful the DOS floppy disk format was by way of usable storage space compared to capacity, e.g. 0.72/1 and 1.44/2]

Filtering on file types was not something that was useful only for an icon based interface either as a text based interface that would list only compatible file types is much more useful than one where you only know that the file you are trying to open was an image file and not a document when you try to open it. Naturally, this can happen anyway when it comes to changing file extensions, and I know of far too many apparently tech literate people who have tried to changed a file type simply by changing the file extension... /sigh

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: About Sony...

From those that don't remember this - the Sony rootkit was awful in another way too: It was very easy for other malware to piggy back on the Sony rootkit implementation and be hidden as well. Pure "genius"... firstly for the root kit and then to have it implemented in such as way that other malware could use it.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: You have to wonder

They do look similar but an RJ11 socket is smaller than an RJ45 and it would take a bit of a feat of stupidity or brute ignorance to somehow shove an RJ45 ethernet cable into an RJ11 socket.

If he happened to have an RJ11 cable and plugged one end into the phone socket and the other into the slightly larger RJ45 socket on his phone then that would be much easier. Although the RJ11 cable would be obviously too small for the RJ45 socket, however users...

USB-A plugs fit just perfectly into RJ45 sockets of course...

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: You have to wonder

The mayhem would really depend on what the USB devices actually were... USB storage devices containing unpleasant or unwanted content or USB killer devices that would discharge a huge burst of electricity into the USB port?

Nick Ryan Silver badge

It was called Outlook Express and it may as well have been specifically designed to be a virus propagation platform.

It didn't auto-run executables, however it was a trivial process to cause it to execute pretty much anything. Usually without letting the user know. Combine this with Microsoft's brain dead insistence that nobody really needed to know what the real file extension of a file is (hiding file extensions is one Microsoft's most stupid general UI things to date) and you could have a safe looking file which was an .exe which presented the icon of an image (extracted from the file itself) which was really "xmas.jpg.exe" but shown to the user as "xmas.jpg" with an image icon.

It was replaced by Windows Mail which really wasn't much better in many ways (an absolute horror to use and failed to work with many SMTP implementations until they were hacked up to "support" Windows Mail's broken interpretation of standards and special Microsoft extras. It also feels like some of the really crap rendering and editing code from Outlook Express was moved into Outlook...

UK and USA seek new world order for cross-border data sharing and privacy

Nick Ryan Silver badge

I find it unlikely that it will include any notions regarding data protection or trust.

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Nice drafting

The also accidentally left in a couple of spurious words that should not have been there and the intern who typed them has been fired:

The two nations want a regime that "promotes and advances interoperability between different data protection frameworks, facilitating cross-border data flows while maintaining high standards of data protection and trust."

Pension cold-calling financial services biz cops largest ever fine from UK data watchdog

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: in other

Which is why fines such as these should be directly applied to the person, or persons, that is the owner of the company. Otherwise they'll just have creamed off the illegally gotten money and can just apply the fine to a disposable organisation.