Posts by Chasxith

Supply chain management vendor Blue Yonder succumbs to ransomware

......unless it's Carling

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

Apple, the fashion brand that makes computers

^ That'll likely get me some downvotes.

I won't deny that their computers are rather lovely from an engineering and design perspective. Had and still have a 2011 Macbook Pro (running Ubuntu now). It's a beautifully built machine with a screen, keyboard and touchpad that make it feel impressively modern for its age.

However, it feels that the adage "A fool and his money are soon parted" is something Apple have taken on wholeheartedly in the past decade or more.

M$ get castigated and rightly so for their stupid W11 hardware requirements - but Apple have been doing that for years with forced obsolescence, on occasion with machines barely 5 or 6 years old. My own macbook was obsoleted in 2017 when they removed support for the model in OSX, a laptop that cost over £900.

Beats me how anyone can realistically justify the initial outlay on anything that lasts such a short span of time, especially for the price. I certainly wasn't going to buy another apple product after that.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: I’m sure I won’t have to endure it…

But AI must mean its better, right?

Right?

If anything maybe it's a blessing that the Copilot+ hardware is (for now) way out of the price range of anyone that may expect me to provide tech support for a W11 machine in the future. When next October rolls around I hope to have moved off to Linux Mint or Ubuntu - W10 can squat in a closed off VM somewhere just in case I need it for something.

Not looking forward to the enforced upgrade that will eventually roll around at work (although I will miss my old faithful 2014 i7 HP tower). Certainly intend to stay on W10 for as long as I can get away with it.

Smile! UK cops spend tens of millions on live facial recognition tech

¨....I had an onion tied on my belt, which was the style at the time.....¨

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

Re: Just pull the plug on that damn thing...

But some people just can't get enough.

Makes me wonder what it's policy of truth is. Hopefully it won't end up as a question time.

Yes, I'll get my coat (and get behind the wheel)

Microsoft flashes Win10 users with more full-screen ads for Windows 11

Re: Linux in the new year

Old laptop suggestion is a good one.

I acquired a 2015 HP Elitebook with a i5-5200U, no or RAM SSD or battery. £40 off the Fleabay spares or repair section. Bumped the ram up to the 16GB max with some spare modules I had lying around, threw in a 500GB SSD and bought a brand new battery off iFixit (Battery and bottom cover are tool-free removal, HP designed it rather well). Was also pleased to find it was the posh model with the 1080p IPS screen.

Running Mint XFCE, it feels just as sprightly as my two year old W10 work laptop (Dell Latitude 11th gen i7) with comparable 5ish hour battery life. It's a lot quieter and cooler running than the Dell, and has proper trackpad buttons rather than a clickpad - what's not to like?

Prepare for an AI policy upending under Trump, say experts

Re: when AI goes bad

Would anyone notice if we replaced dodgy donny with a LLM, though?

Wait, scratch that. It'd start making more sense.

Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

Re: Forget about games on the Mac

I got a 13" MacBook Pro back in 2011 for my college studies (at the time the family computer was a mac mini). The intel IGPU was never going to be great, but it could sort of run WoW and a few other games. Sadly Apple didn't seem to have realised that computers run really hot when they don't have any ventilation in the casework whatsoever. After a year or two of that treatment I more or less cooked it....no, they're really not suited for gaming.

On a more pleasing note it still survives as a daily driver, running Ubuntu 24.04 with no issues.

Gaming these days is done on a W10 desktop but I'm increasingly building up the confidence to switch it to a good solid Linux distro.

Billionaire food app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

One thing that's a given

....is that Linkedin will be full of vomit-inducing fawning posts, mostly AI written, about what a "visionary" this guy is. What a dick.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

Re: they had "played central roles in the censorship cartel," by employing a fact-checking site

We are talking about the same people that invented "alternative facts", after all....

Robot runs marathon in South Korea, apparently the first time this has happened

Re: Keep One Eye on the Future

I guess unlike my last dog at least this one can't drool all over...well, everything. Although equally I don't think I'd want the robodog trying to climb onto my lap for a cuddle.

Fedora 41: A vast assortment, but there's something for everyone

Surprisingly slick

Thanks Liam for the suggestions of the "atomic budgie" spin. Set it up on a "newer" spare laptop (i5-5200U, 16GB RAM) and finding it very easy to set up and use....Budigie seems like a nice mixture of attractive UI yet nowhere near as heavy as GNOME or KDE. All very responsive and slick.

So far setting it up for my usual "daily driver" stuff it has been pretty straightforward - mostly used the terminal to install stuff but nothing so far that you couldn't do via GUI for those who find terminals a bit scary...

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

Re: Gen ai is useful when you hate the reader

I've noticed people have started to use it for eBay listings too.

It's a wonderful way to ensure the specs in the description don't match the photos, but will tell me that a scruffy 10 year old HP Elitebook is "the perfect stylish companion for home, office and travel."

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Re: Coming soon: The Trump-Truck!

Does it come with a roof lining that threatens to escape whenever it's windy?

Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

Re: Non-payment

Just before leaving work today I noticed copilot trying to sneakily install itself on the start menu of my elderly W10 work PC....if it's not M$'s machine, they're definitely treating it as their property. It's genuinely the behaviour I'd expect from fscking malware.

Going to uninstall it in the morning (or at the very least break the sw to the extent it doesn't work)....I already know that reporting it to IT will be enough of an excuse for them to bin my nice powerful desktop i7 and try to swap it for an overheating Dell laptop like my colleagues suffer with....

Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini

Re: Same old, same old Apple

I have owned a late 2011 intel Macbook Pro 13" from new, bought when the Retina macbooks hit the market and still use it.. It got dragged out into the light from under the bed where it had sat for a few years, and refurbished heavily. Found it Incredibly easy to service, upgrade the RAM, fit a brand new battery and swap the spinning rust for an SSD (pleasingly it used a completely standard SATA interface). Installed Ubuntu on it and use it daily - the only complaint is that it runs a little hot and loud due to no ventilation on the bottom casing.

The "Retina" model in 2012 was the start of the decline at Apple with proprietary SSD's and non-upgradable RAM.

If I'd bought that machine instead it would have gone off to landfill long ago.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Re: Some of it self inflicted

DDG browser sounds worth a go - despite happily using Firefox for years, the Android version has never been particularly stable in my experience. One popular news website always seems to crash it after remaining on the same page for a while.

Stuck with Mozilla browser, then Firefox, for pretty much those 20 years (used to keep the portable version on a USB pen drive so I could use it on school PC's rather than put up with the trash that was IE6).

Still use it today at work and at home, Chrome has never felt "quite right" in comparison, and I'm sure web pages appear less readable somehow when I've tried it.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: I have a question

As that sad clown continues to thrust more and more of himself into the limelight, it appears the only thing he understands involves preening his own ego.

Much like donald, he throws teddy out of the pram when his dumb decisions don't make him popular and/or lose him yet more money.

Maybe they should both fuck off to Mars as "test pilots" for Elmo's rocket?

Will Windows Insiders find Recall lurking under the Christmas tree?

I still can't say I understand -why- anyone would want it!

Windows 11 continues to creep up behind Windows 10

Re: needs a dose of Gov

More like a nudge..

Re: needs a dose of Gov

Exactly the experience with my parents.

It wasn't until last year that I realised my dad's elderly iMac was way past EOL for updates from Apple. He has eventually agreed after much explanation that it requires replacement with something that is more secure and up to date (never mind the HDD that must be getting increasingly untrustworthy inside). Beyond home finances / web browsing and his music / photo collections he doesn't use it, his daily driver usually being an iPad. A bit like an iPad, he'd rather a computer that "just works".

Mum took about a year of convincing to replace her ten year old android phone with something newer that could actually run things like whatsapp and allow her to keep in touch with everyone easily.

There are plenty out there who don't have someone tech-savvy to assist with replacing their out of date stuff...

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Re: works OK on thunderbird

They have QA, it's just in this case it's the end user.....

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

Was a 1980s era office building with a "fuck it, that'll do" attitude to maintenance from the landlord. By the early 2010s when our firm were there, it had received rather a lot of that treatment.

Of course the switch-offs were...uh, mistakes.

My favourite single point of failure so far had to be discovering that an entire office of 25 desks, PC's et al had been wired through a single domestic lightswitch by the entrance door. Walk in, flick the switch and everything sprang to life with a nice loud -crack- from the swtich.

Turned out the previous tenant of the space was rather lazy and/or ignorant of basic electrical practice.

Convincing the area manager to sign off the rewiring job was difficult until there were a few "full office shutdowns" in the middle of the working day due to someone flicking the switch by mistake.

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Cobblers

The day I believe M$ is interested in "green" issues is the day they stop developing bloated, resource-hogging messy software that requires increasingly large amounts of resources to run....the short lifespan of the wooden building doesn't feel like it squares with any kind of sustainable thought, either.

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

Re: This like Jony Ive

Apart from various fondleslab phones / lablets, the least repairable computing device I have ever encountered has been a 21.5" 2013 iMac. Even with several years experience of servicing various electronics from laptops to robots, the concept of having to rip the screen off to replace the 1TB spinning rust located within fills me with dread. Apple added an extra wheeze to the 21.5" model by embedding the display panel within the glass for some reason - so if you crack it, it's completely game over. If any form of repair had been considered in the first place, I'd have assumed it was designed by a sadist.

Ten or so years ago I used to think 4GB was enough for web browsing and a few documents. Now it's 8GB to sufficiently run an OS and smoothly access the increasingly bloated content out there on the web.

If I spend a lot of money on a computer I expect it to last me a fairly long time - so to future proof anything 16GB is a minimum given current upwards trends in terms of resource demands from OS's, software and the internet in general.

Re: And what about our friend Linux.

I'd argue 4gb on W10 / W11 isn't sufficient for a web browser, outlook and Teams running at the same time. My work wagon (W10) regularly consumes 4gb at idle without anything launched (mostly thanks to OneDrive syncing), and hovers at around 9-10 GB usage with outlook, teams and several Jira pages open.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Agreed. My currently employer doesn't care what my start and finish hours are so long as I do my 37,5 a week. Four years now of doing 07:00 to 15:00 and shaving at least half an hour off my travel times thanks to less traffic has been wonderful.

The job before that was firmly 9-5 with no exceptions ever. The company MD used to regularly sent out typed missives complaining that people were clocking out at dead on 17:00 and therefore "not working their contracted hours". People just clocked out 60 seconds later instead - I don't get how he thought it was going to make people do more work.

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

"Like Linux distros revived by children"

Ubuntu Unity springing to mind there? So far it's been going for four years and at least six releases, so.....I think your cynicism is misplaced.

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

Is it just me, or...

Something about the phrase "manufactured intelligence" sounds slightly sinister....

Microsoft says its Copilot AI agents set to tackle employee tasks in November

Re: Coming?

It certainly appears to be doing their UI design if W11 is anything to go by!

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

Oh gods the flashbacks

This reminds me all too well the time we had something similar that caused a full line stop in the factory for three days due to the sole incoming inspection test rig going down with faults on its internal networking. Everything was connected via network switches - internal on the rigs network chain.

Despite having no knowledge of the rig or what it did I somehow found myself getting dragged into helping diagnose the issues as the test rigs used apparently had similar tech and comms systems to the robots I repaired elsewhere in the company. Manglement were getting increasingly desperate (and loud) about the line stop. I arrived to a mess of wires on the test bench and two severely pissed off manufacturing engineers.

We eventually found a RJ45 cable connected into two of the internal ethernet switch's ports. The genius who built the rig had decided to not only make all the RJ45 cables the same colour, but another genius manufacturing line tech had grabbed a spare (identically coloured) cable from the cupboard to connect his laptop to "the internet". Upon finding he got no connection on his laptop, he just tucked both connectors neatly "out of the way" and didn't collate this with why his test station now doesn't work....

I left it to the manufacturing guys to explain this to their colleague (and likely apply a steel toecapped boot to his backside)

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Re: How long...

It appears to be a altogether far more infantile measurement contest going on.

Intel lets go of 2,000 staff at Oregon R&D site, offices in Texas, Arizona, California

Re: Cutting R&D

If Intel keep this up they'll end up in that wonderful spiral of not knowing how to fix product issues because anyone with the knowledge of said product will have left. Pissed off people don't tend to bother with handovers, oddly enough.

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: My collection

They're just past the milk and cheese aisle, if you reach the bread and baked goods you've gone too far. Only available in some US states though.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Re: My migration plans to Linux

When my partner last visited, he borrowed my Ubuntu Cinnamon laptop a few times. He was navigating around its menus with no difficulty - we're talking about someone here who until last week didn't notice the media / volume /brightness keys (or the illuminated keyboard) on the laptop he's had for four years, bless him.

I'd already punted Win11 off that laptop, and my Win10 desktop is likely to get the same treatment next year, along with a separate small W11 SSD that will get used as and when needed (likely with most of the update features ripped out).

Sadly I will be stuck with W11 at work (although I'll be ensuring I only upgrade when they force me to do so....)

Chinese boffins build soft robot finger that can take your pulse

Re: I see a lot of potential here

Is that a robot finger in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Using iPhone Mirroring at work? You might have just overshared to your boss

Exactly this, although I can never quite figure out why quite so many of my colleagues let the two mix!

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: Function keys on a touch bar?

In the images I'd found, I hadn't spotted exactly where the power button was - only that it wasn't a key on the keyboard! What a stupid design.

Function keys on a touch bar?

Among my collection of junk PC's for tinkering I have a somewhat elderly 2008 era HP 2250 laptop. Someone in their design teams back then decided to stuff a touchbar above the keyboard for the volume adjustment and a few hotkeys - it's borderline unusable thanks to no physical feedback.

You'd have thought after the Apple touch bar mess several years ago that designers would have given up on those ideas by now.

I guess at least Dell haven't popped the power key into the keyboard next to the Delete key like some other business laptops produced by HP and Dell recently...

Tesla Cybertruck recalled again. This time, a software fix for backup camera glitch

Successful launches

Has elmo had one yet apart from SpaceX rockets?

I don't hold out much hope for any demo of the "robotaxi" after the cybertruck window debacle.

If it relies on the existing flaky Tesla self driving tech it'll likely behave in the same way as a johnnycab from Total Recall and try to run someone down.

Valve powers up Arch Linux – because who needs Windows when you have a Steam Deck?

Re: Woa - desktops = production??

Begun that journey myself with a custom-shop purchased desktop tower PC in 2021. It begun as a "whatever I can get that's available" spec sheet, and has started to get small upgrades here and there into something very capable. All the original parts got re-used and built into a cheapo second case as a tinkering rig once I felt confident enough to build something myself.

Mh. If it further reduces reliance on Windows for PC gaming then there's an overall benefit.

There are far worse companies than Valve to partner with - M$ for example.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

Re: Train your users not to trust anyone

My firm did the same thing. The fun bit was everyone getting their P60 (end of tax year docs) from an external contractor no-one had ever heard of, with an incorrect company name appended to the email. The attachment? A macro-enabled MS word document! (.docm)

Naturally a large number of people reported it as dodgy to InfoSec, who did appreciate the response in a "we're really not impressed with Accounts" manner.

Accounts themselves sent a snotty email a day later complaining about all the enquiries they had received and telling us that we should have known the external accounting contractor existed.

This scenario also regularly happens to our CEO who types in a similar manner to really bad/obvious scam emails - lots of Times New Roman, bold fonts and weird formatting.

Bring the joy of train delays home with your very own departure board

Re: Hint

Ah yes, a lovely old clattering Solari. Remember the Liverpool Street one well.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: Human-fired power station

It'll have more corporate bullshit though. Like below courtesy of Gemini:

## Overly Corporate Job Titles for a Human-Fuelled Power Station

### Executive Roles

1. **Chief Combustion Coordinator**

2. **Vice President of Human Heat Harvesting**

3. **Director of Sweat Equity Management**

### Technical Roles

4. **Human Fuel Efficiency Engineer**

5. **Biometric Burnout Analyst**

6. **Ethical (or Unethical) Compliance Clown**

### Operational Roles

7. **Human Fuel Intake Scheduler**

8. **Power Generation Cheerleader**

9. **Waste Product Enthusiast**

10. **Public Relations Spin Doctor**

Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu – but with a different focus

GNOME is never my first choice.....

But in honesty, I do like how GNOME 47 worked on my little 2013 era 11" HP laptop with its hard to use tiny trackpad. Hit the meta key and type the name of what you want to open, and it works in a fairly slick way when driven 99% from keyboard commands. Looks good on a less-than-ideal-resolution TN screen too.

Just a shame in stock configuration you can't customise the panel as much as other distros.