Re: huh?
A new episode of "Cruise ships gone wild"?
Posts by Bitbeisser
239 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2011
Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea
Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers
Monday 28th August 2023 17:54 GMT
This is just utter bollocks.
I am a long time Sprint client, who was then transferred over to T-Mobil. And then things immediately started to go south. No longer able to pay my bill in person on a kiosk in the store. Used to be a nice thing under Sprint, in and out and done in 60 secs.
Then stores started to close left and right, some before, some after being rebranded. An hour wait to pay a bill (no, I do NOT pay online, don't bother mentioning). Then more stores (corporate and franchise) closing. Bill kept increasing. Now they add even another $5 each time I want to pay my bill in a store. But T-Mobil is making $2.2billion of profit in 90 days? How much taxes are they paying on that?
Seriously, corporate America has gone fully postal and totally out of touch with the reality of it's customers....
LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity
Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data
Thursday 24th August 2023 17:31 GMT
Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?
OneDrive is the spawn of evil. It is the worst of all places to have your data at. The sheer audacity of Microsoft to decide what to back up and actually MOVING all YOUR data to the cloud, removing everything from your local device is downright criminal....
Thursday 24th August 2023 17:27 GMT
Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?
Why would anyone need to make backups??? All the data is in the cloud, it is safe.
Or so the marketing lore goes.
Sorry, I have that very fight a lot with clients, with only a small number actually realizing how they could be effected when they do not have a current "offline" backup of their data.
Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform
Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font
Mystery Intel bug halts shipments of some Sapphire Rapids Xeons
Monday 3rd July 2023 19:03 GMT
Well, there were times when humans used sharp stones to shape sharp sticks for their tools. Nowadays, tools are created by sophisticated CNC machines/robots.
The evolution of processors over the last 50 years is pretty much equivalent to the evolution of human tools from the stone ages to today....
Microsoft postpones death date for personally licensed Teams Rooms hardware
Apple stomped all over NYC store workers' union rights, judge rules
Thursday 22nd June 2023 17:23 GMT
Re: Land of the free
The problem you try to describe is much rather a more general problem with the way unions (nowadays) work in the US of A.
I am not against organizing a work force to be able to stand up against corporate exploitation, but there are far too many examples of unions turning into an extortion and work-avoidance scheme.
Organizing to get fair wages, working hours, work place safety, that are all fine and noble causes. But there are also unions that are dictating who can work, how much they can work and extort businesses, like it is the case with the longshoremen and in the movie/TV business here in LA, that is something that IMHO should be avoided at all cost....
SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation
BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus
Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug
India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck
Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!
Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in
Salesforce boss Benioff scores payday of nearly $30m amid cost cutting
The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep
Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it
Monday 1st May 2023 18:14 GMT
Yeah, had of those "random" problems once too. Working in a small computer repair shop, one day a local customer down the street brought a computer in. Said it was brand new and would always crash after running for 15-20 min. Put it up on our workbench a bit later and was playing with the computer for half an hour. No crash. Let it sit busy with the screensaver for the rest of the day, no crash. Customer picked the computer up just before closing. Came back the next morning, and 3 more times, always the same, claiming it would crash after those 15-20min.Was working just peachy fine in our shop. The last time he brought it in, on Saturday, he sat himself at our workbench for a couple hours. No crash. Took it home and called half an hour later. It had crashed and rebooted again. As we were just closing the store, I went over to his house a couple of blocks away. Nice home office in a covered, converted patio. He turned the computer back on when I came in and presto, a few minutes later, it rebooted. While the machine came back up, he lamented that he started to think that his place was cursed. While talking, me telling him that I noticed a flickering in the lighting, after that roughly 15min time span, his wife walked into the room and down a narrow staircase inside. When she opened up the door, to a room under the former pattio, the computer crashed and rebooted again. But this time, I did not only notice the light flickering, but also noticed the sound of the compressor of a large freezer in that basement room kicking in. Turned out that the freezer was on the same electrical circuit as his office upstairs and the draw of the freezer kicking in was enough to cause a brownout and subsequent reboot of the computer upstairs. Had an electrician first thing on Monday morning separate the circuits and that computer worked happily ever after...
Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead
Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive
Thursday 23rd March 2023 23:02 GMT
In the US of A (and probably a lot of EU countries) this isn't likely to work. As all mail (unless it is kind of hand delivered by courier) and AFAIK also small packages via UPS, FedEx, DHL are being send through a scanner at the sorting facilities these days that will detect explosives (specially RDX, C4, Semtex), as well as things like Anthrax, so it wouldn't actually reach the intended target in the first place.
Ferrari in a spin as crims steal a car-load of customer data
Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools
Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI
Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page
Friday 24th February 2023 18:26 GMT
Re: Never really gave it a thought.
For quite a while now, I am using Ninite.com to download real browsers and a bunch of other utilities onto new installed Windows systems, and use the same downloaded file to later update those tools in more or less regular intervals. Won't get any annoying banners or pop-ups this way. Well, maybe once, when changing the default browser...
Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ
Crims steal data on 40 million T-Mobile US customers
Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs
Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
Wednesday 18th January 2023 19:53 GMT
Re: Are you ok?
Well, after your first paragraph, I don't think you could be referred to as a "model parent" but rather what is commonly known as a "helicopter parent"
Also, after reading further, I call bullshit on your story overall, as "two years ago", you would hardly been able to buy a "brand new Compaq", as that brand was discontinued by HP back in 2013 and is only licensed for trademark use by 3rd parties overseas...
And skimming over the rest of the rather longish post of yours, I am not sure if this whole post was an attempt at sarcastic parody. If that was your intention, I think you failed. Miserably...
Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name
FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down
Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker
Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus
Friday 18th March 2022 01:56 GMT
Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus
>I work in IT security too, and if you don't understand the concept of heuristic and behavioral detection
>that has been in modern AV tools for decades now, maybe you shouldn't be in IT security, AC #9315347..
Well, don't be to harsh to that guy, with all that tin foil obstructing his view, it is hard not to miss those things...
FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years
Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error
In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox
Thursday 22nd July 2021 01:26 GMT
Well, there is a more or less easy way to work around and use a real FTP client.
But in general, I wonder what bozos started to make the Firefox design decisions at Mozilla. I thought that showing entries in the search field in the address bar was an April fools joke or maybe a glitch that passed through QC, but apparently, they are dead serious about this. Makes me really wonder what's next and if the last usable browser is finally going down the drain...
To have one floppy failure is unlucky. To have 20 implies evil magic or a very silly user
Monday 19th April 2021 02:41 GMT 
Not every programmer understands basic computer technology
Yup, had something like this happen too. Though not at a client but with a co-worker in a programming shop, where she was entrusted to insert/switch the daily backup floppy disc (8", 1MB nonetheless, was about 1985) because the supervisor/sub-boss who usually did this himself was no in that day.
We other programmers were just wrapping up the day, making last minute printouts of what we had been working on all day (BusinessBASIC on an Altos Unix/Xenix multi-user machine).
As one of us had the key to the office to lock up, we were waiting for her to come back up from the basement, where the actual machine was being housed. And waiting. And waiting. After 30 minutes, she still hasn't come back up, so we went downstairs to see what was going on. She was almost in tears, muttering that she couldn't find the previous backup disc in the drive and insert the new one. So she inserted the new one but kept getting an error message from the backup script that no disc was in the drive. Thinking that the disc was maybe bad, she had repeatedly taken a fresh disc out of a new box, carefully labeled it as today's backup as instructed, inserted that one too but just kept getting the error message. The three of us watching her doing this again just couldn't hold back but to fall to the ground and having laughing attacks. Literally.
Turned out she had turned the lever of an empty 5 1/4" floppy drive in the machine the usual 90deg back and forth and inserted the 8" floppy in a thin gap below the actual 8" drive and the casing (custom case, where the opening for the 8" drive was about 4mm to big for the drives front bezel, thus depositing all the 8" floppies within the hollows of that computer case. She turned as red as a raspberry when we showed her that the 8" drive had push/pull lever across the whole width of the drive that would release the disc with a loud clonk and that she had put all the discs instead inside the cabinet. Luckily, we quickly were able to open the cabinet, remove deposited discs, insert one correctly into the drive and start the backup for the day. Didn't told anyone about this, though three days later she gave herself two weeks notice that she wanted to leave the company...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
