* Posts by Pirate Dave

1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008

Warning: Microsoft Teams Free (classic) will be gone in 2 months

Pirate Dave Silver badge

" let's discuss OneNote and Sharepoint, which need to either be written for the 21st Century or euthanised."

Careful, there. One bloated, resource-wasting Electron app (ie - Teams) is bad enough, don't give them any more bad ideas.

Google unleashes fightback against ChatGPT, a Bard by any other name

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: I wonder.....

Another question - how long before Bard gets an entry on KilledByGoogle?

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: aren't authorized to do much if they "accidently" sniff traffic they aren't authorized to sniff.

Well, they might or might not, but giving them virtually unlimited authorization and a mandate to "keep the internets safe" seems like a generally Bad Idea.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: @CommonBloke - Hell no

Yes, but in those instances, they are looking for very specific traffic from (relatively) specific endpoints, and aren't authorized to do much if they "accidently" sniff traffic they aren't authorized to sniff.

That is several magnitudes of order different than the Government giving itself relatively unlimited power to snoop on any and all traffic and take any actions it deems necessary against any party that it decides is acting in a way that's unsavory. All "for the public good", of course.

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: An interesting precedence ... and thought ....

"The whole world may yet burn"

You may not be far off the mark there...

https://www.space.com/doomsday-clock-moves-90-seconds-to-midnight

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Hmmm

LOL. Two thumbs down. Must be some FAA officials on here.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Hmmm

So if the US Gubmint thinks a balloon is a chinese spy vehicle, they will refuse to shoot it down, and will let it merrily continue on its way?

So if the US Gubmint doesn't know that a balloon is NOT a chinese spy vehicle, but is instead carrying a model rocket, will they still refuse to shoot it down for long enough for it to shoot the model rocket into space and make history? Maybe that woulda been the answer years ago...

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

So, eh, does this "AI" run as part of the local client, or will it be a "cloud" process within Sharepoint/Azure/etc? The Teams client already uses ridiculously far more memory than it's worth. I can only imagine the bloat from adding AI on top of that will push it beyond "ludicrous". Great move, Microsoft. Making things worse, one day at a time.

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: There's always a fallback option

"the inevitable local glitch that cuts you off the interwebs."

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Microsoft nuking itself off of the interwebs. There should already be redundant links into your DC to overcome the simple loss of local carrier. But if the Mighty Microsoft blows out its own core in such a way that it's out for a day or two or five, then the business world that's bought into their candy-coated dream is fucked. Sure, it can be overcome to an extent, but the truth is, for most non-huge businesses, there aren't many "hot spare" replacements for O365 itself that are plug-and-play ready in 10 minutes to keep things flowing across the business.

And that's the real crux of the problem - MS has built this huge silo of a system and gotten a lot of businesses dependent on it, but MS still suffers a great deal of internal stupidity that keeps fucking it up. And if you're in whole-hog, it's very difficult to overcome a major outage.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: We all depend on the cloud, whether we like it or not.

We must be doing it wrong. We DO have leased fiber between each remote site and don't rely on the cloud for the actual "mission critical software" that runs on our AS400 at Corporate. That's by design, though, not a happy accident.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I'm not disagreeing, but for places that have gone in whole-hog on the Office365 train, where exactly do they fall back to if that train runs off the track? If Teams in O365 is borked, what are the options for a 1-2 day outage? Or OneDrive/Sharepoint? Or Exchange? I mean, for the vast majority of corps that are O365 slaves, if O365 shits itself at this level, then they are just SOL. And that's by design of Microsoft, since they don't want to play well with others.

Oh, 07734! Internet Archive debuts vintage calculator emulator

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

The poors

Never could afford or justify the $$$ for one of the HP-48's, but did get an HP-20S for a reasonable price and used it to get through a year and a half of Calculus and a year of Physics. None of that fancy graphical stuff or high-end RPN gee-whizzery, but it did have just enough crude macro capability to be useful. I still use it every now and then. I eventually picked up a TI-81 and spent a week ooh-ing and ahh-ing that it could draw functions. The TI didn't survive a fall a few years later.

I also remember about 7 or 8 years ago being gob-smacked that I could get a pretty decently functional (but non-graphing) scientific calculator at a dollar-only store for a buck. Whoda thunk it...

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: ...

no, I know what it means. I guess I must have posted very slightly after AC further up.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: ...

Whoosh...???

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Yep

Home Depot's partnership with Facebook is much more insidious than this. A few years ago, the wife and I were in the local Home Depot looking at kitchen sinks, something we had never done before (well, not since the rise of the Internet, at least). She had her iPhone in her purse, my Samsung was left out in the car. She at no time used her cellphone during our visit to HD, nor did we actually buy a sink. The next day, when she opened the Facebook app on her phone, she was immediate hit with Home Depot ads for kitchen sinks and faucets.

Never forget, your eyeballs are Facebook's primary product.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Annnnnnnd...

I just tell them I don't have a phone. "Sorry, I got rid of that a few months ago".

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: The first domino?

No. The GWIA process would blow-up sometimes if a From or To address was really weird, but for the most part, it just plodded along.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Does not make sense

Ballmer reads El Reg???

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: The first domino?

I felt the same pain on the Groupwise side. Doesn't matter how wonderful the server parts are, if the users don't like the client because "it isn't Outlook", you're already on borrowed time.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"Critical Business activities are impacted majorly this morning."

Yeah, that's the white streak of fear that I made damned sure Manglement knew was a possibility when we migrated to Office365 several years ago. That we could come in one day, and Microsoft could have blown itself out of the water during the night, and nothing would work for the entire day. It was felt that the possibility of that was more than offset by us not having to manage (or pay for) an on-prem mail system, so we went full speed ahead. But yeah, Microsoft soiling itself was, and remains, a major menace to the system they're selling.

"CEO Satya Nadella ascribed this to customers "optimizing" their cloud spend, and predicted that growth would resume once Azure can deliver the AI customers want"

The only AI I "want" is one that tells the Microsoft techs "If you push out this config change, you will likely break all Office365 operations across all Microsoft domains. Are you Really Sure you want to do this?". Too bad Microsoft hasn't figured out how to do that yet. They certainly have enough failure event data points to train the system with, though.

NASA, DARPA to go nuclear in hopes of putting boots on Mars

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Go with throttle up

So how do they plan to deal with the demonstrators this time around? Isn't there usually a huge fuss (and news coverage) by the anti-nuclear folks every time NASA ever mentions putting nuclear material in or on a rocketship? And those were just small nuke battery warmers or something like that, not something large enough to propel a vehicle to Mars. I think this nuke engine idea has legs, but depending on the social/political winds up to launch day, it may never leave the launch pad, and may not even get that far.

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Not to kick a puppy when it's down, but hasn't Ukraine been home to quite a few hacking/cracking/virus/spam/phish/ransom groups in the past 20-25 years? Perhaps not state-sponsored groups like in Russia or NK, but not very actively state-policed either, if memory serves. I mean, God bless 'em if/when they kick the Ruskies back across the border, but they really shouldn't wear white to their NATO Cybersecurity wedding, should they?

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

"Every office has one – the inexplicably cheerful, kind and generous co-worker who brings in cake and/or biscuits and leaves them somewhere for their weight-sensitive colleagues to graze on."

No, "every office" does NOT! Dammit, I knew I shoulda took that other job so I could have been eating cake and cookies, maybe even pies, all these years. Manufacturing is no place for civilization. Bummer.

Like Uber, but for China: Beijing creates state-owned meta rideshare service

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"safe in the knowledge that data is handled by the government rather than private concerns."

This being China, that surely requires a stretch of the definition for the word "safe"...

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: OMG

there's a GUI for that? Dang! I thought the only way was w32tm.exe. What was the control panel's name?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

"$800 million of increased energy costs "

Sweet mother of Pearl. What was their "normal" energy costs then? And how much of that was/is being frittered away in Azure doing nothing really useful except keeping CPU heatsinks warm? I can sort of see why some states want to target datacenters.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Just a symptom...

I don't think the subsidies are very large for small family farms. Dad had a farm of around 180 acres in Kentucky, and I think the most he ever got was like $5k. If memory serves, that was to PREVENT him from growing tobacco (which he didn't do anyway, but Uncle Sam pays per acre). Nothing to do with crops he actually wanted to plant (which was, mostly, grass for hay, I think).

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Just a symptom...

Welcome to the New Georgia, where we all live at the pleasure of Atlanta...

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Yeah

Yeah. I didn't get in trouble at work, but the wife was PISSED one month when the power bill came in and was $75 more than usual. I had gotten up to about 20 or 30 various 486/pentium motherboards and power supplies strung up in the crawl space under the kitchen, all dangling from wires tied to nails and screws I'd put in the joists. Pfft, we don't need no fancy computer cases to look for aliens. All running Linux and the SETI client 24/7. She was not amused in the slightest and I spent a good week in the doghouse for that stunt. So I cut down to my 5 fastest mobos and took the rest to work and found a spot to run most of them there.

Things were simpler then. Good times indeed.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Yeah

I did similar at the university where I used to work, although I used the screensaver client, not the always-running client, so it generally didn't cause any problems like ALF ran into. I put it in the Ghost image that we used on the Dell GX1's in our computer labs. It took those 233 MHz PII's a few hours to grind through each packet (or whatever it was called), but they were far faster than the 486's and Pentiums I was running it on at home, and there were 50 of them. I did manage to crack the Top 500 for EDU (maybe even the Top 100) before all was said and done.

AFAIK, we never did find E.T, though.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

The question is - how does he like his cats?

Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Expected

This is what happens when you use ChatGPT to write your antivirus update code...

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Eh?

Doesn't seem like it would be too hard to either setup a VPN or have out-of-country proxy servers to do this, especially for "official" government computers. I mean, getting drivers/updates from Intel and Microsoft seems like a pretty low technical bar to cross to begin with. It ain't like the Ruskies drilled a hole into Carnivore.

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

Pirate Dave Silver badge

This. A hundred times this.

IBM shifts remaining US-based AIX dev jobs to India – source

Pirate Dave Silver badge

So IBM has/had around 160 AIX developers in total? I can't decide if that seems a lot or too little.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Nobody else has asked, so I will.

I wondered about that, too. If the Apache tribal leadership had an "official" issue with the use of their name for the web server software, I'd think they would have taken it up with the software people long before now.

This, though, sounds like a few guys who either a) wanted some free press for some reason or b) went looking for something to get offended about. Possibly even both.

After long delays, Sapphire Rapids arrives, full of accelerators and superlatives

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Yeah. With all these new "accelerators", I do wonder how many spectre/meltdown/etc-type vulnerabilities will be found in the next few years, and whether the workarounds for them will render the accelerators useless.

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

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

The only bullshit here is coming from you, buddy.

It's been a few years since I went thru this, but ISTR the 12v battery is buried in the trunk. I don't know if there are remote clip-on points for a jump-off in the engine compartment or not, didn't try to look. We'd had the car 3 years and it was used when we got it, so it was not abnormal for the battery to need replacing.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

"If the hybrid pack goes offline the car is dead."

The car is also dead if the normal 12V battery goes dead. Yeah, that got my son a few years ago when he was away at college. His Prius wouldn't start or run. He had it towed to the local Toyota dealer, who banged on it for a day, charged him $500 for the diagnostics, and said he needed a new battery pack that was three or four grand. I called the dealer and had them tow it back to the dorm. I drove down, looked around, then went to Advance Auto and got a new $120 "regular" battery for the engine itself, installed it, and the car was fine as could be, and still is.

We took it to the dealer originally because we thought only they could properly diagnose an issue with their hybrid, since it's "new" and "complicated". But it turned out that all they were diagnosing was how much of my wallet they thought they could remove. I will never again trust a Toyota dealership for anything.

2002 video streaming patent holder sues Amazon and Twitch

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Patently

Patents, in general, arent bad. Software patents, however, should be flushed down the toilet.

No more holidays for US telcos, FCC is cracking down

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Age verification

Well, that's a Federal thing now. One of the measures passed last year and now in effect requires sites that sell guns (and maybe parts?) to "verify" that the viewer is over 21 years old. And by "verify", so far most of them just have a button to click that says "I certify that I am over 21 years old" or some such, nothing as onerous as this requirement before being allowed to look at another person's naughty bits that Louisiana has.

Uncle Sam OKs vaccine that protects honeybees against hive-destroying bacterium

Pirate Dave Silver badge

It could just be the influence of the corporate lawyers where "may" is their Get Out Of Jail Free card if, somehow, the vax does NOT work for a keeper or group of keepers and hives are lost. "We said "may', so you can't sue us if your hive still dies". It may not have anything to do with actual efficacy.

Dell said to be planning purge of Chinese chips from products by 2024

Pirate Dave Silver badge

" expanding definition of what counts as 'cutting edge tech'"

I hope this doesn't expand to include pocket-knives, or we will experience the greatest pocket-knife shortage in history, since most of them are made in China these days. The Knife-show channel will go completely out of business. Better start stockpiling now.

OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I'm still wondering if the various outages are related to MS being too trigger-happy at disabling Basic Auth across their empire. As I understand it, they had set a deadline of November at which time they were definitely, absolutely going to start disabling it in Office365. (unless you went through some silly wizard and requested they turn it back on temporarily). That's roughly the same time frame in which these mystery outages started happening. Could just be a coincidence of timing with bad code updates, or could be they're unknowingly torching their services from within in their glittery-eyed zeal to make life suck a little more for us admins.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Pirate Dave Silver badge

At these enormous capacities, this doesn't seem (to me, at least) like a big enough issue to warrant taking over such a phrase as "non-binary memory". I mean, if they were talking old school 1536 bytes per chip vs 1024, that might be noteworthy, but at these huge sizes it all gets sort of nebulous anyway once you round it to the nearest whole number and tack "GB" to the end of it. "Non-binary memory" as a phrase should be kept for something truly earth-breaking, IMHO.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Thanks John. Glad to see I didn't miss something obvious.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Smoke and mirrors?

"Those of us old enough to remember EPROMS and static ram chips will know that this is not a new idea."

Or Intel's '486-SX line...

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Did I miss the point of this article, or is this just a lot of words to say that some DIMMs will come in off-size increments? The subhead makes it sound like the new CPU tricks Intel is up to with their disabled capabilities until you buy a license.

And what's the deal with the "non-binary" terminology? That seems like a Big Title With Implications for what is really just a packaging trick at the factory. I would think "non-binary" would be tri-state memory, right?

I must be missing something...

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Sometimes bringing your work laptop on a trip pays off

But most times, going camping in a remote area with no cell service and no Internet pays off much, much more.

Southwest Airlines blames IT breakdown for stranding holiday travelers

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

"In a call with employees, Watterson blamed the extended delays and cancellations on outdated scheduling software, "

So, no two ways about it, the blame lies with manglement's reluctance to spend the money to update software and systems. Where have I heard that before? Or, perhaps the better question, iwhere HAVEN'T I heard that before? Seems to be a common theme these days. Because cheaping-out on updates/upgrades never, ever comes back to bite you in the ass...