Posts by 9Rune5

Re: "despite me being very reasonable"

Trying to short circuit by going to sales is just entitled "I'm too important to get in the queue with everyone else!!"

Or put differently: hampering the sales dept will make it more difficult for the company to add more customers, thus helping to limit the problem of an overwhelmed support dpt.

All within reason of course. There's a difference between having to wait five minutes midday and being put on hold for half an hour (or more...) no matter when you try calling. "Your call is important to us, you just have to wait for an hour while we answer other calls that are also important to us"

Re: professional

Half the world enjoys watching 22 men kick

Well. Two wrongs don't make a right.

I'm not familiar with the service in question, but I would have thought that a "superlike" should trump your filter, unless you have paid extra for a "superfilter".

At least that is the way I would've implemented it.

I don't think you understand how a protection racket works.

"Trick or treat", etc.

Re: "rumuors of Microsoft embracing open Source"

It looked far too nice for Delphi as I remember it, or am I doing Delphi a disservice?

Yes you are.

Many moons have passed since I last used Delphi, but I remember working on a skinnable GUI back in the early 2000s. There were lots of great third-party components, often with full source provided. (We used https://github.com/plashenkov/TBX FWIW) Even if you shunned third-party components, it was very easy to get a decent looking GUI up and running.

then the perfectly correct "coud" should match them by changing to "could".

Shirley, you mean "cloud"?

and the recovery plan was stored only on the system that crashed

I thought they stored the plan on an airgapped server safely tucked away in a small room secured with one of those fancy Yale locks (the ones that require an app to open).

Re: These scammers do not like me.

banking_details.doc.exe with the extension hidden and a word doc icon.

Shirely, for that to do any permanent damage, it would need to run elevated. They didn't ignore the elevation prompt, did they?

I ask, because... Sounds like a fun hobby.

Re: Oh God

SteveT is one of the good guys. I believe the outcome will be just fine.

Re: And service providers...

What you choose to tell service providers is your mother's maiden name can be a secret.

Am I the only one suffering from password reset angst?

My reasoning is this: They ask these silly questions because it is their only way to reset my password. I.e. if I forget my mother's maiden name, my account details will be lost forever and an ogre will eat my dwelling.

Of course I have tried supplying smarty pants responses to those stupid questions. And of course those smarty pants responses are completely forgotten one week later.

I am much more comfortable with 2FA. As long as I don't forget my mobile phone anywhere.

Re: This problem

Right at this moment, there are dozens of suspicious looking files in my home directory on my laptop. A bunch of cryptically named .xls and .mdf files, even though I don't even have Excel or Access installed.

Who put them there? Malware you think?

That was my first hunch and I spent about an hour troubleshooting this. Turns out my brilliant benevolent sysadmin installed a honeypot system that relies on these files to detect malware...

All that anti-malware they have forced me to run for the past nine years have caught nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. They have however caused me quite a lot of needless headache.

Sysadmins need to STFU and let me get on with my work.

Re: Damn

People who think their energy supplier can only want to known about their energy usage for marketing purposes demonstrate massive technological illiteracy.

Which reminds me of a former colleague who faces a £1000 bill because the smart meter kit is too big for his enclosure.

So now he is trying to push his doctor to diagnose him as sensitive to electricity and radio waves... As that is obviously cheaper than embiggening what needs to be expanded.

Smart meters are all fine and dandy until you look into the economics. Better to go all nukes and push down the price of energy.

Easy. Use two zeros.

Re: Careful what you wish for

Oh great. Now I too want a badger icon.

That said, has anyone else noticed how, on imdb, even the greatest movies of all times manage to land a small number of voters (among imdb's top 1000 voters) giving out a score of one?

It makes me wonder if they *always* vote like that, or if there is something else sinister going on. No wonder there is war in the world.

Re: reconnect to host website?

If the FBI now have the host,

They have the domain, not the host.

My guess is that infected routers will have cached the host address. A reboot effectively resets the DNS cache allowing the new A record to be used instead. Not a cure, but might provide a little bit of relief.

Re: Free UPS!

"and a cheap one at that. My home network switch is also a castoff 10/100 from the same generous folks."

I consider myself cheap as well, but last year I bought a fanless managed 24p gigabit switch for roughly £100. I could have taken a few switches off the hands of my employer's IT guys, but when I realized how cheap switches are these days and that the old switches weren't fanless, I decided against it.

Re: Iceland and Norway have EEA membership

I was surprised to read comments here to the effect that Norway weren't keen on letting the UK join EFTA, but according to https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/politikk/i/bpXJd/Norge-vil-ikke-ha-britene-i-EOS---men-kan-gjore-lite-for-a-stoppe-dem that is currently somewhat true.

What is interesting though, according to that news article, is that none of the nay-sayers believe we can actually stop UK from joining. And quite a few voices here in Norway would actually encourage UK to join.

I suspect that the pro-EU voices in Norway don't want to acknowledge that there are alternatives to EU membership, and thus do not want to evolve EFTA into a more viable option.

Re: Israeli security startup CTS-Labs

What you are describing is security by obscurity.

I really don't care. If you manage to get to root level on my box, then it is game over for me.

Besides: Ahem... If you manage to get to root... AFAIK you have kernel access. Which means you are free to install whatever device driver you like. Which in turn... Tadaa... you can flash whatever you can flash from a DOS boot device, be it your old trusty floppy or SD card.

Re: former coworker

"ANY women's naked body looks TWENTY THOUSAND times better than a guy's"

No. Just plain wrong.

Reminds me of the time my wife and I argued for a week about the gender of one of our neighbors. I was convinced it was a bloke (it probably wasn't). Either way, I think we both agreed on not wanting to see ANY naked pictures of that person, on the internet, in an art gallery or anywhere where our travels may take us. I am a staunch supporter of data security now that I come to think of it.

Further more, men are more handsome by default. As proof I offer you the sales statistics from the cosmetics industry, which is heavily reliant upon women buying their crap by the bucketful.