Posts by ComicalEngineer

Bing Wallpaper app, now in Windows Store, accused of cookie shenanigans

Who uses Bing anyway?

On the few occasions I've actually tried it, the search results it gave me we garbage.

As for a wallpaper app... the sort of thing aimed at 12 year olds who can't abide an uncluttered workspace.

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

I have an ancient Acer Aspire 15" laptop. It originally came with Vista, which I updated to Win7. It cost £299 from Tesco and was originally used for the kids to do their school homework on.

Replacements:

250GB HDD replaced with 750GB HDD and lately a SSD. 1 screw on the access panel, 2 screws for the disc holder. 5 minutes.

Keyboard replaced as one of the keys broke off. Cost £12 and took 10 minutes (5min to find my reading glasses and work out where the clips were)

Now on its' 3rd battery. 2 catches on the base, less than 30 seconds total job time. It took longer to unwrap the new battery.

Memory added, removal of one screw from the small cover on the bottom. Took longer to find my screwdriver than fit the memory.

OK, it's not light, in fact it's nicknamed "the slab" as in paving slab, but it's perfectly adequate for internet surfing and writing reports. (I have a 1.5kg HP laptop for travel).

I expect that the slab will outlast me.

AI PCs flood the market. Their makers hope someone wants them

If you want to invest in AI, I have opportunities for shares in the South Sea Island Company, and Tulips, lots of tulips.

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

I may have mentioned before, but from experience with our local council, some of their systems are still using legacy software which runs in a DOS box under windows. Some of the software has been out of support for over 15 years to the best of my knowledge, but it still works. Their IT systems are outsourced and quite a bit of the software has been customised when out of the box systems would have worked fine. I am willing to bet that many of the customisations are not properly documented.

The main issue with council systems is the integration of all the different parts which for an individual may include Council Tax (with e.g. single person discounts where applicable), disability living allowances, social housing, highways (including car parks, road repairs, street lighting and road cleaning), waste & recycling services, housing & supported accommodation, planning & building control, education, support for vulnerable people, social care, policing etc etc.

Any single person may have issues that overlap several different topics and it is the integration of these individual needs that causes many of the issues.

It would have been far more sensible to have migrated the services over a period of time running them in parallel to get them debugged and properly integrated rather than try making a single massive switch.

But there again, it's politicians and the only thing they are renowned for around here is lining their own pockets and furthering their political careers. Ryman recently ordered in another batch of brown envelopes so it will all be OK in the end, none of the councillors will be held to blame. [/SARCASM OFF]

Unbreakable Voyager space probes close in on a 50 year mission

Just wait until "V'Ger", comes home to study the "carbon units"

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Phone call from my boss:

Help, my printer isn't working and I need to get this report out by lunch time. (Days before emailing PDFs). Our centralised IT support (outsourced to IBM at the time) were quoting next working day (Monday) to come and look at the problem. The rest of out team are either not IT literate or else also out of the office.

My boss shared the office with another manager and they had a common printer with a two way switch box to allow either user to use the printer (remember them?) We go through the usual, is the printer turned on, does it have enough paper, is it jammed, is the cable plugged in etc.

I am out on another site at the time about 10 miles away so I drop everything, jump in the car and head back to HQ.

I walk in and immediately realise the the switch is set to the other user (who is also not in that day). I turn the switch and the printer starts churning out multiple copies of the report. To make it even funnier, the switch is clearly labelled with the user's names on each position.

I quickly open the printer queue and kill the next 20 copies of the document.

My boss at the time having a First Class honours degree in engineering from Cambridge (UK, not Mass.). I am allowed to go hone early as it's a Friday on the proviso that I keep my mouth shut..

Windows 10 given an extra year of supported life, for $30

As I've noted elsewhere, I'm one of those heathens who insists on having the menu bar on the left side of the screen. I've also *inherited* a number of computers as I've been doing my job for over 30 years. In chronological order:

* Dell Dimension 8300 running XP. Not connected to the internet but has 2 pieces of legacy software that can't be replaced.

* ACER Revo i3 running Win7 very happily. Not used much but again has some legacy software that will only run on 32 bit!

* Another ACER also running Win7 - kept just because it has never broken and has a large HDD used as a file backup

* Another ACER Revo i3 running Win10 that sits in the kitchen for video streaming and as the house file server

* Fujitsu Q520 i7 running Linux Mint (my daily user machine)

* HP Probook running Win 10

SWMBO has a Dell laptop with Win 11 which she mainly uses for web browsing, email and writing simple documents Having tried Win10 I absolutely detest it. I feel no desire to re-learn the interface that's worked perfectly well for over 20 years, and I'm fine with the Win 10 start menu.

Nor do I need or want any machine which has an Artificial Idiot installed.

Floppy discs still run a U.S. metro? Japan steps in with 'project kill floppy'

Re: Hey, it's MUNI

For info, the 483s were extensively refurbished in the late 80s / early 90s.

Many EMUs have had working lives of 40+ years (Class 502s and 507s on Merseyrail,several Southern electrics especially the 404s). They have had long lives because they are simple, reliable, easy to maintain and robust.

Many of these have only been scrapped due to disability access requirements.

Just saying.

Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact 'mitigated'

I departed from Outlook many years ago when MS decided to charge £99 per copy rather than bundling it with Office. As we have seven Windows PCs in the house (including wifes & childrens' PCs) I'm damned if I'm paying £700 for an emailclient. We all moved to Thunderbird which works well for us, and then M$ changed the email security settings for 3rd party clients and also changed a bunch of Teams settings meaning that I had to spend a happy couple of hours reconfiguring everything.

It seems like M$ are fiddiling about with stuff to justify their existence. I don't need any more features, I just want the damn thing to work properly!

Saying goodbye to the tech dreams Microsoft abandoned with Windows 11 24H2

I just wonder how long before M$ moves to a full subscription model for Windows?

When you buy a WinXX machine it will work for a period and then demand a subscription to continue working....

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

A couple of years ago I quit my former small company (I was a director & a partner in the business) after I discovered the two secret company bank accounts that I wasn't supposed to know about. Cue my *partner* having a shouty fit about me not needing to know about the accounts.

What my idiot *business partner* didn't realise was that I own the permanent license to the (now very expensive expensive) CAD software that we had used for many years, and it was installed on a machine that I had paid for. I was also the only person remaining who understood how to do the drawings (he never bothered to learn and everyone else who did know left when I did).

Thus the CAD machine and another desktop containing some legacy modelling software went into the back of my car as I left, along with the relevant documentation, license keys, cables and monitors.

Ooops, former *partner* is no longer able to service a goodly number of very large clients who have instead come to me for work as I also have copies of all the drawing files (most of which I produced) and configuration files for the modelling software.

His business is shutting down, I currently have too much work and a 10 week waiting list of jobs.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Office 2024 unveiled for Microsoft 365 refuseniks

I bought several copies of Office 2010home and student some years ago.

I still have 2 licenses left :) which will see me past retirement.

In the meantime LibreOffice is nearing full compatability with Word unless you have some complex formatting.

Microsoft hits go on Windows 11 24H2: Fresh features, bugs, and a whole lotta AI

Sounds like a "make it more complicated so it can break in even more ways kind of upgrade with added AI"

although I baulk at the thought of using "Micro$oft" and "intelligence" in the same sentence without adding a negative.

Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview is a glitchy disaster

I remember that the first year or so of Win10 updates used to break our office printer set up - every single time.

Why should Win11 be any different at borking machines? After all M$ have had more time to practice.

Infosys scores deal to write code for EV-maker Polestar

Just waiting for a car to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that".

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Trust Micro$oft?

I'd rather stick my head into the mouth of a hungry lion.

Capita wins £135M extension on much-delayed UK smart meter rollout

Had a technician [NOT an engineer] call to look at our property.

Our gas meter is below ground level and our electric meter is on the other side of the house in an area with no phone signal.

So no chance of them being any smarter than the meters already installed. Evidently our meters are also too far apart as they need to communicate with each other.

The joys of living in a very solid house dating from the 1850s.

Said technician departed to "put a note on our file" the the property is not suitable for a smart meter. ROFL.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

In 2020 BMW brought in a system where the car had the hardware installed from new but you had to pay a subscription to activate it.

You want the heated seats to work? That will cost you £X per months sir (or madam).

Needless to say that this went down like a lead brick and BMW quietly dropped this lunacy a couple of years later ... and never mind the queue of hackers prepared to *update* your software for a small fee.

BMW currently charges quite a lot of money for various *software services* like being able to book a service from the car, video streaming etc. One of the options is to activate the "auto parking" *service* (a service for the same BMW drivers who don't understand what the indicator stalk is for).

I don't drive a BMW and never will.*

And I can park my car between the white lines without computer assistance.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

As a consu;ltant engineer i travel to places which are not easily accessible by public transport and I cover the whole of the UK. My last couple of trips were to Cornwall, 3 6 hours and 320 miles. Even with a full charge starting out I'd have had to stop for an hour even assuming I could find a service station with a working and available charger. Then I'd have to hope that my hotel had a working and available charger for the way home. The hotel I stayed at (a Premier Inn) had no charging facilities.

In contrast,my 2.0 litre Volvo XC40 (Euro 6 compliant, with DPF and Adblue) does 58 MPG on the motorway driven sensibly and will do over 500 miles on a tank, taking 5 minutes to refuel at a cheap supermarket or filling station.

Having driven an electric car I have to say that I hated the experience. Too many distracting gizmos, bings, bongs, chimes and stupid flashy graphics, never mind the obvious 2 tonne weight making it handle like a truck.

Thankfully when I want some fun I have a Mk2 Golf GTi in the garage for proper motoring.

Just one other point, all our bleating about UK car emissions is trivial because China and India both commissioned gigawatt power stations this month, and continue to do so every month.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Late 80s, still running DOS and Lotus Symphony in a 100 year old building ....

Random crashes of certain PCs including the high powered "luggable" *laptop* computer used by the equally high powered American accountant who had been parachuted in to tell us how to run the company (one of the ones that had no battery but you could carry it in a suitcase- the computer, not the accountant).

One day his computer blew a fuse and there was the unmistakeable smell of burning insulation and a small puff of magic smoke accompanied by a scream and a stream of US language investive audible all the way down the corridor.

Turned out that the circuit that included our computers was also one of the phases which powered a large 450V, 3-phase electric motor on a high shear mixer in the adjacent building. Turning the mixer on or off caused a massive power spike through the circuit. As it was only turned on or off once or twice daily (and ran 24/7) switching on or off didn't often coincide with office hours. Oddly, the other side of the building was on a different circuit fed from another 11kV incomer.

Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda

Typical of a company being absorbed by a bigger company with borrowed capital and then being divested later.

From Wiki:

In February 2021, the Issa brothers and TDR Capital acquired Asda, with Walmart retaining "an equity investment" in Asda, a seat on the board and "an ongoing commercial relationship".[13] The deal came after an acquisition by Sainsbury's was rejected by the Competition and Markets Authority. As of June 2024, the company is majority owned by TDR Capital following the sale of Zuber Issa's 22.5 per cent holding to the company.

Asda have history here as they massively overpaid for Gateway supermarkets in the 90s and nearly went under then. there was a massive round of cost cutting then, which coincided with me buying there.

The Issa brothers was a massively leveraged buy out which left the company with a debt pile and causing a culture of cost cutting and general penny pinching. Our local Asda has no staff on the manned tills until after 10am and even then only one or two. I go in only when absolutely necessary.

Colour me shocked that they are going for cheapest option IT provider. I'm sure that the quality of the technology will *improve* markedly. [Not]

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

In the days when my job at a university (late 80s) involved coding in Fortran 77 and an IBM PC cost the same as a new small hatchback.... we found out that BBC Basic is remarkably similar to F77, similar enough that we could write our fairly complicated mathematic routines on a BBC and test them out before porting them onto the IBM PC that three of us shared, and was always in demand. Now working for a university had it's advantages, one being that buying computer equipment received an Education Discount from certain suppliers. Thus, I purchased my own BBC Master 128 and green screen monitor at a healthy discount (25% IIRC).

The Master wasn't the most convenient shape to sit a monitor on and so I purchased a "Viglen kit" wich consisted of a new main box with a flat top big enough for the monitor, and a separate keyboard on a short (about 2'6") cable. The Viglen box also had sufficient space for two 5.25" floppies making it a much better fit for my digs. The Viglen kit supplier said that they would install it for free and so I duly took it in to the shop.

Whilst taking to the technician doing the work, I was shown a BBC B which had been in for repair. If anyone remembers BBCs, there were several ports including a four channel analogue input port at the rear. The owner of this particlar BBC had decided to use the machine as an oscilloscope - no problem as the Beeb could do this. Only he connected the analogue port (which is 1.8V) direct to the 220V mains supply....

Needless to say there was a loud bang and the machine stopped working. On receiving the machine, the tech opened it up to find the top of the A-D converter chip had blown off and a matching dent on the inside of the casing. More in hope than expectation a new A-D chop was ordered and soldered in (you could do things like that with a Beeb).

Switching the repaired machine back on, it worked perfectly, the A-D chip having acted as a fuse.

How I miss my BBC.

Linux Deepin 23: A polished distro from China that Western desktops could learn from

Who wants a Linux front end that looks like Win 11?

Never mind one written by the Chinese.

I'll fetch the 11 foot bargepole, the one that I keep for the things I wouldn't touch with a 10' bargepole.

LibreOffice 24.8: Handy even if you're happy with Microsoft

Libre Office Writer - whisper it quietly - is better than Word.

I write complex and quite lengthy documents having a variety of page formats, standard A4, A4 landsape and often A3 landscape. Whereas every time I insert a different page format in Word I have to go back and reset the margins and borders, Libre Office retains the same margins & borders automatically.

Oh, and you don't have to have the bl**dy ribbon.

There is one small issue with the new version, if you use special characters using the keypad e.g. ALT+0176 = ° then the new version won't let you do this out of the box as ALT+0 being up another function (can't remember what as I've changed it) hence you need to go into the settings and remove all the ALT+0 keyboard shortcuts. Once done it doesn't come back and so Karma is restored.

Other than that, I note that compatability with MS .docx has been improved.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

Back in the dark ages when a 486 was the dog's doo-doos, our analysis lab (large chemical company) bought a top of the range IBM tower case. As the bench top was too cluttered for this beast (nearly 30" tall and about 24" deep plus space for the cables) it was installed under a desk. This thing was connected to a set of analysis machines which periodically made the processor run at 100% CPU for 10-15 minutes at a time processing the analysis data.

Then it started throwing wobblies and producing various random errors. It was removed to the IT dept where it worked fine. It went back & forth between the lab and the IT bods for several weeks.

Chatting to the lab manager whish waiting for some results from said machine I realised that it was located up against the hot air duct that provided heating to the lab. The heating would turn itself on and off based on the room thermostat and in this case the computer was sucking hot air into the CPU which was getting it hot enough to start producing errors. This only happened when the machine was running at 100% CPU and the heating was operating at the same time, hence the randomness of the problem.

Moving the PC to the other side of the desk stopped the problem.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Now if someone could write a control panel app for Win 10 / 11 ...

I always found the XP control panel absolutely fine to use but it seems that like everyting MS it takes more time, more clicks and more sreen space to make simple changes.

I remember being migrated to Office 2007 and finding out that basic keyboard shortcuts had almost all changed and took one more keyboard click than before.

Thankfully Linux Mint does 95% of what I need for my job and I only need Windoze occasionally.

PS: I absolutely detest SWMBO's new Dell which came with Win11. Thankfully all she does is email, surf the web and write textdocuments on it.

Keir Starmer says facial recognition tech is the answer to far-right riots

I am, in a small way, amused that the worst Director of Public Prosecutions in my living memory, Sir Kneelalot Starmer, the man who refused to proescute Jimmy Savile or the Rotherham Grooming Gangs, is going to set up an "army" of police office to tackle these riots.

Shades of the Special Patrol Group and Flying Squad.

I'd laugh if it was funny.

And the elephant remains sitting quietly in the corner in that the UK has been irrevocably changed by uncontrolled legal and illegal migration, and that integration of many immigrants is never going to happen as they remain in ghettoes with their own race / religion / countrypeople.

I am old and I despair.

[/off rant]

Re: Buy Shares In Hoodies.....ASAP......

Capita.

And then watch your facial recognition be leaked to the Chinese

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

Re: Happened to me

Re Kia bings and bongs ... I'm sure that there will be an enterprising bod with a laptop and an OBD cable who can turn off the noises.

UK Surface owners can now take misbehaving laptops to Currys

One thing I've always looked at when buying is whether the PC I'm buying can be easily upgraded or repaired.

One look at the M$ Surface and a quick read of some reviews made it clear that it was like an iPad by a company that I trust less than Apple.

The thing I have that's difficult to repair (other than my phone) is an ancient ipad mini which has never gone wrong and is mainly used for emails, light surfing and as a Kindle. When it dies I'll probably buy a cheap Android fondleslab.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

A young lady secretary of my acquaintance in the days of DOS had a tower case next to her desk which she used as a coffee cup stand! This was fine with the old IBM 386s with a solid case which were more or less liquid proff. Then she got upgraded to a full fat 486DX (not IBM) which had air vents on the top. This lasted just over a week before it expired with a smell of burning PCB as hot coffee dripped onto the video card.

IT boss had a fit of the screaming abdabs....

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

I can see absolutely no reason that I would want an AI PC. My brain is perfectly adequate for my work tasks and anything else that I want to do on a computer.

Never mind that AI is power hungry and will put up my electricity bill. When I'm working (report writing) a low power net-top is perfectly adequate for my needs, and indeed that's what I normally use running Linux Mint.

Having just spent a *happy* couple of hours removing crapware from SWMBO's Win 11 machine I have no doubt the M$ will use Windoze AI machines to syphon off large quantities of data back to Redmond - without any explicit permission to do so. Additionally, AI will probably (almost certainly) be used to drive "targetted advertising" which can only get worse with each Win iteration as M$ monetize Win to the max.

Once my final M$ wedded customers have disappeared off into history (about another 2 years) I won't have any need to run Win, and I certainly won't be upgrading my Win 10 machines to any future version and indeed I'm looking forward to the day when M$ stops issuing Win 10 updates.

UK county council misses deadline for £7.3M RISE with SAP system launch

From grim experience, I don't thnk any of the councils really knows what they want and in any case, the requirements are so complex that there isn't one single package that does everything they need, and there are multiply legacy systems that still need to be integrated into the whole.

In addition, there are few, if any, people in local councils who can actually grasp the complexity of what is required. Think about integrating: Council Tax, incoming Universal Credit, education, transport, social care, planning, fire & public safety, waste management, highways, trading standards etc etc and you can see some of the complexity.

No-one really has an integrated software system which can bring together all of the above (not SAP, not SQL, or anything else I've yet to come across). In some councils they are still running DOS based interfaces for critical systems (I know because I've seen some).

Then the idiot councils who are trying to migrate everything at once without proper testing.

The whole thing is somewhere between an omnishambles and a fustercluck.

The S in IoT stands for security. You'll never secure all the Things

After our dishwasher broke recently (over 5 years old and decided to stop washing with a small of burning insulation) we looked for a new one.

Wow! Do I really need / want a dishwasher connected to my wifi and phone via an app?

No I damn well don't. Higher cost, more things to go wrong and risk of being hacked.

We bought one of the few dishwashers currently available that doesn't require an internet connection.

The IoT seems (to me) to include a lot of pointless junk doing stuff that nobody needs. OK, I get that you may want to turn your heating on an hour before you get home on a cold day, but did you know that you can get a *smart* cat litter tray? Home fragrance dispenser? Alexa enables smart toilet with auto heated seat and built-in speakers?

And there really is a *smart* toaster. Thankfully it didn't make production.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/toasteroid-app-controlled-smart-image-toaster#/

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

Re: decades old MS-DOS or Windows 16-bit software on 32-bit Windows 10.

I'm running 32 bit Win 10 on an aged Acer Revo NetTop (1.5GHz i3) simply because I have one piece of mission critical software which will run on Win10 32 bit but not on 64 bit. It works fine and does the job for me. I expect that it will see me through to retirement in a couple of years time

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

Re: Billions

One of my cars is 35 years old and requires little more than an annual service plus consumables [brakes,tyres etc]. Mk2 Golf GTI. I expect it will see me out even with me using it regularly.

One of my other cars is a 17 year old MX5 [Miata to US readers]. The 9 year old battery died last week. Other than that it continues to run happily.

No car on the planet gets the TLC that any aircraft gets in its' lifetime [with the exception of F!, NASCAR etc] , and I can tell you from experience that an F-35 gets an incredible amount of maintenance for each flying hour.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

I've only managed to watch three AMZN prime shows through:

Picard -- Utter drivel and TBH Iwas reading a book at the time

Bosch -- Excellent

Reacher -- Much better than the Tom Cruise films

However, the number of films where I've watched 15-20 minutes and then binned it is legion.

I've also been caught out by the "free with ads" 15 minutes into a film and WTF was that?? Then another 15 minutes for the oldies among us there's a Max Headroom episode called "Blipverts" in which micro adverts cause people's heads to explode. The AMZN ads nearly caused mine to have an unscheduled rapid disassembly.

I will retain Prime only for the delivery, mainly because my adult children can also use the same account to buy stuff. I'll just stop watching the videos and do something more productive instead.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

I run Win 7 on an old laptop because it has some legacy software on it. It's also absolutely fine for doing basic tasks like report writing (most of what I do). My kids as why the Win7 desktop looks like XP - the answer being because it's clear and it just works without getting in the way.

I also have a more modern HP laptop running Win10 on an AMD A8. I'm absolutely fine with Win10 now that M$ have stopped breaking the printers with updates. I'll be even happier when it reaches end of support. Mostly I work on a Fujitsu Q520 i7 running Linux Mint. I also use LibreOffice on the PCs and only use Word/Excel for some specific customers.

SWMBO has a new Dell with Win11 - which I've tried and utterly detest. In particular because I'm one of those heathens who likes the taskbar on the left hand side of the screen. It's been there since I used Win3.11 and I can't be bothered having to download another app to make the interface do what I could do in every version of Windoze since 1992ish.

I fully subscribe to the concept that the operating system should be there to facilitate getting work done and not to getting in the way. Something which M$ seem to have lost sight of.

I will be retiring shortly and my current PCs will see me out. It's extremely unlikely that I will ever need Win11 :D

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Obsolete hardware and software ....

I have a couple of legacy machines (one is a 24 year old Dell Dimension) which have some legacy explosion modelling software on them. I was going to bin the Dell as it's a big lump of metal taking up space and hasn't been used in anger for about 3 years -- until a customer emailed me and asked if I could do some modelling using the obsolete software package which their work had been done on in 2004. The software is no longer available (hasn't been since 2015 when support ceased following the retirement of the writer) and runs under DOS (or in the tweaked version which I have) in a DOS window.

The original input files were sent to me on a 3.5" floppy.

Fortunately the Dell still has a working floppy drive.

The output result files were returned to the customer via email with the revised input files.

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

A 0.5 kg (1.1lb to our transatlantic cousins) has a Kinetic Energy energy of 14 MegaJoules should it hit a stationary object.

Of couse if the other object is travelling in the opposite direction then this would be the sum of the two kinetic energies.

Anyway, to put this into perspective, 1 kg of TNT has 4.184 megajoules of energy, so the KE of an object in LEA (about 17,000mph / 7600m/s) is equivalent to aproximately 3kg of TNT.

Sooner or later a very small object is going to make a very large dent in a very important lump of spaceware.

Digital revolution at HMRC left 99,000 UK taxpayers on hold over five-day fiasco

Made a PAYE/NIC payment including my UTR reference, got a snotty letter telling me I hadn't paid and would be penalised for the overdue payment. 45 minutes on hold and then a 15 minute conversation and it's their mistake, only it's my mistake for not having put a 4 digit date on the end of my UTR -- something that is not requested anywhere on the form. WTF!!!

Eventually straightened out by a helpful young man, but that's an hour of my life that I'll never get back.

As for VAT returns MTD -- don't get me started....

India Big four outsourcers all have people problems

Re: Pay cuts and no hires?

Yes, they've run out random phone numbers to ring with the opening gambit "I'm from Microsoft..."

On a more serious note, the whole outsourcing to India model is becoming less popular and costs are rising.

ChatGPT is also seen as areal issue and I expect mass layoffs in the not too distant future.

India takes second punt at soft lunar landing with launch of Chandrayaan-3 mission

Spending billions on a moon shot, but 2/3 of the population living in poverty without proper sanitation?

Wow, some priorities.

Miscreants exploit five Microsoft bugs as Windows giant addresses 130 flaws

Microsoft has morebugs than the Nnatural History Museum :(

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Every so often Farcebook puts "sponsored content" (adverts) into my timeline. Every 3rd post will then be an advert which adblock+ can't recognise and block. On these days I simply stop looking at FB until they stop spamming me. Mostly I use FB for messenger and to catch up with some old friends so no real penalty. I studiously don't use any company that advertises on FB if I can help it.

Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner

Anyone remember the Bruce Willis film surrogates?

"Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots, a cop is forced to leave his home for the first time in years in order to investigate the murders of others' surrogates"

I'm seriously hoping that the Metaverse it doesn't catch on.

Re: Is there a Gartner-Cycle for Gartner-Cycles?

Barbarella.

They put her into the orgasmatron.

I don't think the metaverse has reached this level yet.

Microsoft dabbles in self-repair with Surface devices now DIY-friendlier

Simple answer is not to buy stuff that can't be repaired or upgraded easily.

I'm running an old Toshiba laptop that's had a new SSD replacing the original HDD and the memory increased by adding another memory chip.The machine has two convenient panels on the base which can be removed in about a minute using a simple crosshead screwdriver. The battery can be removed by sliding two clips across at which point it can be slid out. This machine is nearly indestructable.

My new HP also has two panels held by a couple of crosshead screws albeit that the battery is slightly more difficult to remove than the Tosh.

I looked at the M$ Surface and decided that it was over-priced for the specification and not easily repairable / upgradeable and so bought HP. Similar reason for not buying Apple despite quite liking the MacBook Air.

Multi-tasking blunder leaves UK tax digitization plans 3 years late, 5 times over budget

Despite running a very simple business I got caught up in MTD some years ago. With the old VAT system my quarterly return was calculated on a spreadsheet and I typed the numbers in. A quick check of the numbers and hit submit. Job done. All on a Linux machine.

Now I have to buy a piece of software to upload the values calculated in my spreadsheet, the HMRC system does not work with Linux BTW, so no chance of free open source software and i have to keep my Windows PC alive. Then I have to create a spreadsheet that the MTD software recognises (Excel) and have the software upload the same values I used to type in. Only you have to re-authorise every few months which means going in through the Government Gateway to get a new authorisation code....

Need I say that the process takes about 10 times longer than it did before MTD, but it's making things easier / better (although not for me).

Colour me a shocked rainbow that the whole thing is a complete fustercluck.

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

My previous company was based in a business centre that catered specifically for small businesses. The office we leased had issues with a leaking roof and were were forced to move after the roof fell in (literally). Fortunately the leak and the roof bits missed the network server and the two desktop CAD machines we had, but meant that half the office space was unusable.

We were offered another office within the building which was abot 10m from our original office. On contacting BT to move our fibre broadband over we were told that this would cost £1,200 plus VAT at 20%. We were then put onto an old copper wire which occasionally reached the dizzy speed of 1MPs but usually hovered around 0.5MPs. Really useful if you need to do video conferencing.

We binned BT and instead got an EE wifi hub which was delivered the next day and was giving around 30MPs - adequate for our purposes.

BT continued to pester us about our closed account for over 6 months.This included never being able to talk to the same person twice, and our alleged customer account manager turned out to be an Indian call centre.