Posts by Anonymous Custard 2796 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
It does raise the question for dealing with confidential customer data where you personally have signed an NDA (as opposed to a blanket NDA between your and their companies).
As any email you receive containing such information or possibly with it attached can be read by your company IT admins etc should it take their fancy, presumably even using company-provided communications means would/should be forbidden?
You think you've got problems - mine plays Ode to Joy by the Muppets (with a little help from Beethoven)...
That said it's certainly a unique ringtone and I always know when it's my phone ringing when I've left it on my desk when I get a coffee etc. It always raises a smile when people hear it for the first time too (and is quite infamous around the office, although thankfully I don't get that many calls on it).
And yes it does often end up on silent mode, but only because I've turned it off to silence those damn annoying pop-up ads without mute buttons when I've been playing a game on the phone and forgot to switch the ringer back on again. Why can't the iPhone have seperate volume controls for ringer and media?
Not to mention examples like (the now Microsoft owned) Github, which doesn't support IE at all (even IE11) and presents you with a banner suggesting to use Chrome, Edge or Firefox if you open it up in IE.
That said it does generally seem to work under IE11 (at least last time it did when I had to quickly do something from work using their supplied IE11 anyway).
I still occasionally have to do it on my optical intellimouse. Not around any ball/roller of course, but MS in their wisdom put 4 pads on the corners of the base to give some clearance between the pad and the emitter/detectors.
They seem to collect gunk and crud just as well as the old mice innards used to.
And yes it is oddly satisfying cleaning it all off occasionally.
A bit off on a tangent, but reminds me of a skill I learned whilst doing undergrad lab demonstrating in my postgrad days. The UG were working on the lab benches (basically big tables) with the normal stools/bags etc so you couldn't really work beside them, so tended to work across the table from the other side.
They all had lab books etc, into which we also would write stuff to help them along whilst explaining the particular experiment they were doing. It always caused surprise during the first few weeks of doing this when I'd pull their book towards me and start writing in it upside down (ie so it was still facing them and they could read it normally). Was always easier doing that then turning it round, writing my bit and then having to turn back for them to read.
Towards the end I was told my upside-down handwriting was actually neater than my normal writing. That said I hold a doctorate, so my normal writing looks like a drunken spider's output anyway.
Single ended cotton buds (Q-tips for the leftpondian readership) used to work great as well.
Used the cotton end to wipe, and the non-cotton end to scrape/scratch anything that was particularly attached and hanging on tightly. Or if all else failed then an unbent paperclip for the latter job (and of course any decent helldesk minion or BoFH has several of those around for poking in holes...)
at least they won't forget their numbers
And it neatly deals with remembering their luggage combination as well...
And the article doesn't even have the best (or rather worst) part - on mobile they decided that a background in a shade of bruise purple would be just the thing to top everything off.
So basically they've taken a logo that they were worried about people cocking up the implementation of, and more or less pre-cocked it up for them.
Absolutely awful. You've had your fun, now can we have the old logo back please?
It's a rare and happy day when we take something emitted by Microsoft that we're told is busted and find it works a treat.
You kinda get the feeling someone in Microsoft has got their parity bit flipped, or at least has a reversed understanding of what "working" means compared to the rest of us.
Either that or this really is an alternative reality mirror universe? If so do we have to grow a hipster goatie like Mr Spock?
Verily, I am the literary equivalent of an embarrassing robotic vibrator.
Well you've always referred to yourself as a "a freelance technology tart", so what'd you expect?
Not to say that it wouldn't be a great line to have on your business card, somewhat like the "consultant nymphomaniac" ones that a female friend of mine occasionally used to use when she was feeling wicked...
...and scientists theorise that smaller objects have settled in the valley, or "neck", where the lobes meet, giving a brighter appearance
Nah, my money's on an interstellar scarf. Just wait for the further images when a giant carrot and a few large lumps of coal are found on the surface.
We've had rubber ducks and now a seasonal(ish) snowmen. Nice to see that nature really does have a sense of humour. Top boffinry all round though!
It's one of the first things you learn at uni when you go into post-grad education (and for the advanced player even undergrad education).
Forget professors and lecturers - if you get on the good side of secretaries, security, storesmen and technicians (including syshacks) you can get absolutely anything done and in an amazingly short time.
The best lesson I ever learned in education, one that's served me very well in my real life pretending to be gainfully employed (well I pretend to work and they pretend to pay me, so it balances!).
Editted to add - I see I wasn't the only one to learn that lesson. Nice one big_D!
It's always reminded me more of this Darwin Award winner, and of course the subsequent televisation courtesy of Mythbusters (at least 3-4 times over).
But yes that image is now nestled in there as well.
Definitely a massive engineering thumbs up though, wonderful news for a Monday morning.
So brush up on your CHR, DEX and INT*. Syspaladin or open-sorcerer, Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, you too could solve those office disputes with a simple cast of a 20-sided die. ®
* Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence... Sigh. Sadly, we didn't have to look this up. Other fantasy games can be played with a D20. Not sold separately. Ahem. [Reg dork-desk]
Umm, isn't CHR charisma, not strength? Probably more appropriate in the circumstances I guess though, at least unless things get less than diplomatic.
The D20 has always been a useful solution for such things, either by rolling as this time or if all else fails as a projectile weapon...
Or you could always just follow the link in the article to the mentioned thread and the details therein?
Anyway, to save the time:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\
Windows\System]
"PublishUserActivities"=dword:00000000
(the key is all one line, but el Reg's board is too thin due to having so many ads down the sides)
Ah yes the memories of EcoNet come flooding back, the joys of A-level comp-sci in the 80s...
My teacher foolishly let me borrow a copy of the manual, at which point I of course duly wrote my own versions of all the priviledged commands which worked surprisingly well. I think it may have been a rite of passage thing anyway towards earning system privs, which I ended up with later on (the project I was working on conveniently needed them).
That said when I did get such privs of course the first thing at least two of my peers (who hated one another) asked was for me to give them the password of the other one (so that they could "have some fun" with the content of the accounts). So I of course duly obliged, by swapping the passwords over so they each had the password of the others account but no longer of their own. To say the resulting Mexican stand-off was quite interesting when they realised they'd got just what they asked for, but not what they actually wanted.
Even the teacher enjoyed that one, with a stern wagging of finger at me before promptly cracking up laughing and complimenting me on an interesting way of coping with the request and dealing with the two of them.
Likewise, a little while back. Albeit on only one of my landline phones - an old wired one which is kept in service for exactly that purpose.
All of the other ones (DECT cordless jobs) were of course absolutely dead as the power cut had taken out the base station so no transmission to them, and of course the phone designers (BT, or at least the phones were branded as such) hadn't thought to include a back-up battery or capacitor cell in the base station for such eventualities.
Given that those DECT phones seem to be about all that many retailers sell these days, one has to wonder in the case of such events how many people are actually effectively cut off from landline phones as well. Not that it matters so much in this age of mobiles I guess, but it's certainly a though.
You forget these are Microsoft minutes of which they quote...
We have learned from copying and downloading times in File Explorer and Internet Explorer that they bear very little resemblance to real-world minutes in duration, and are best thought of as measured on a rubber wristwatch...
The one we used to do on "left unlocked" machines was to make up faked contact versions of various higher-up people in the company (using their address-book name but a bad email address), and then send nasty/dodgy/embarassing email to them from the machine, with a cc to the users email address. And of course deleting the contacts afterwards, plus the bounce messages from the fake addresses.
So when they came back, they found a message in their inbox that they'd apparently sent to various managers/board members/anyone we felt like and duly of course panicked. It went on for a surprising length of time, both for people not learning to lock their machines but also not hearing about it being done.
Most companies that do use Windows 10 are probably rather more picky about if/when they do update stuff, so that the unfortunate public can act as the canaries for all of this.
For example I'm typing this on my company PC, which has a fairly much uneventful Win10 config, albeit the 1703 build rather than anything too cutting edge. I doubt our corporate IT group are unusual in such caution.
Aside from the public users (of which I'm also one at home, although I don't rush to update there either) it's the small business users I feel especially sorry for. Those not large enough to be able to be so choosy about what, when and how they run, but in real financial danger if it does go tits-up.
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