Posts by mrdalliard

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

Hardware Requirements

Not that long ago I bought one of those cheap Asus E210's a little while back. It's got 4GB of memory 64GB of storage.

The RAM is not upgradable.

It regularly nags me to upgrade to Windows 11. I have no idea why any sane person would do this. I've heard of people doing it on the hardware and task manager showing 85%+ memory usage before you even attempt to do anything else. It was a cheap (i.e. £150) machine, so I know it's never going to live forever, but that said, when it comes to the end of its lifespan on Windows 10 I'll install another OS on it.

M.

China sets out world domination plan for its digital currency

Did they watch Mr Robot too?

**coughs**

Dark Army?

75 million smartphone sales up in smoke in Q1: Let's drill down into which brands took the most pain

Re: Not a surprise

I'd imagine that Apple's fortunes went relatively well due to the launch of the new iPhone SE, which by modern smartphone standards is certainly not one of the most expensive and a good few people have been waiting for a successor to the first.

As phones go, the second-generation SE is "good enough".

I'll confess I bought one for launch day. It's the first time I've done that and it's also the first "new" phone I've bought in 4 years. Given that it's got the iPhone 11's processor in there, I can imagine it'll be supported for a good few years. It's a tool for me. I don't need anything larger or with a full screen.

Smartwatch owners love their calorie-counting gadgets, but they are verrry expensive

1 Day Battery Life?

I know people regularly cite the one-day battery life of an Apple watch, but from personal experience (I've had a series 2 and now wear a reconditioned series 3) that's the worst-case scenario.

Using mine as a timepiece (the horror!), payment device, activity tracker and running watch with Strava, I'm still getting three days out of the battery. Sure it's not a month, but that'll do me fine. I'm not constantly looking to charge it overnight.

Icon: In honour of those that worse polo-necks.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: Another click in the wall

>>(Some say that you can do a full restore from a Time Machine backup, but I've never had the nerve to try it.)

Tried it about six months ago, worked flawlessly. I nuked my machine and did a clean install and used the backup to restore my apps and documents. The one time I relied upon it, it delivered, so I can't really complain.

Three UK goes TITSUP*: Down and out for 10 hours and counting

Also applies to virtual network operators too...

ID Mobile customer here. Similar issues.

Hands off our phones, says Google: Radar-gesture-sensing Pixel 4 just $999 with a 3-year lifespan – great value!

That Pixelbook - Eh?

I'm struggling to work out who pays 629ukp for a laptop that's scuppered from the start. Are the prices on these things gradually creeping upwards?

I've never seen something so unappealing. People criticise Apple, but at least my six-year old Macbook Air is still eminently usable and getting OS updates.

Plusnet is doing us proud again with early Christmas present for customers: Price hikes

I went mobile...

I was a PlusNet customer for years, but their customer service has been a continual race to the bottom since they were acquired by BT. Instead, I now use 3's mobile broadband. Admittedly the speed isn't quite the same as a fixed line, but it's cheaper, has been pretty reliable (I work from home fairly regularly with it) and I don't have to worry about OpenWretch coming along and screwing up the infrastructure.

Fixed-line telcos need to be nice to their customers, or else whey will go they way of the dinosaur.

Electric vehicles won't help UK meet emissions targets: Time to get out and walk, warn MPs

Re: 50 miles???

Yes, I was thinking that.

I'm curious as to why I got a downvote for my comment, too. It's a sad reality that no landlord is ever going to stump up thousands to put panels on the roof of their property and I'd certainly have a screw loose if I paid for the cost to put the tech on someone else's house.

I also live on a street corner, next to a junction. Aside from the practical considerations of having a charging point where I live, it would be just plain unsafe to have one sited there.

Re: 50 miles???

Yup. I live in a flat. (Rented, so no chance I'm going to be able to put panels on the roof and my landlord certainly isn't going to suck up the expense).

The closest my car can be parked is 100 yards down the road.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

Re: Works for me

>> And when I see the cost, and the 'almost a whole day!' battery life, of an iWatch, I think I bought the right thing.

To be fair to Apple, that's pretty much a worse-case scenario. I've got a Series 3 (got it from the "reconditioned" Store significantly less than the usual price) which I use as a fitness tracker, timepiece (remember that?), Strava logger and contactless payment device. I get 3 days out of my 42mm watch. It's been rock solid.

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

Re: I remember floppy disks

I remember taking on a random IT job for someone who wanted SCO Unix installed. It was a fairly simple job, apart from the fact that they'd gone out of the office for the day and left me with a mountain (approximately 30) of floppies....

...and had forgotten to give me the licence key sheet.

Guess what SCO Unix does if you don't have the licence key to hand and want to complete the installation at another time?

Yes, it deletes the entire bloody install.Really didn't want to have to go through the pain of all that floppy-swapping again. :/

We don't mean to poo-poo this, but... The Internet of S**t has literally arrived thanks to Pampers smart diapers

I'm sorry, I'm still laughing at "crotch goblin's defecation".

Well done, everyone.

Exclusive: Windows for Workgroups terror the Tartan Bandit confesses all to The Register

Fun and games....

I remember working for a company called Seagram in the late nineties. They decided on a policy where you weren't allowed to change any settings on your PC whatsoever, including the wallpaper. We all had our wallpaper set to the "Seagram" coat of arms. When I logged in each day, I'd routinely change it. Because I changed the settings, a particular tech support drone who felt it was her need to enforce this would tell me off each morning as I started to work. My old wallpaper would get removed from the PC overnight and reset to Seagram's corporate standard.

So, one night I decided to keep the coat of arms, but using paint.exe, I rearranged the letters of the company name and came up with the nice anagram of "Arsemag", instead of Seagram.

The following morning, the drone just said to me, "You're not funny, you know". I never had the settings reset again.

ood new, fanbys. Apple spds up n-str McBook latop kyboad rpairs, ccrding t hs leakd mmo

2014 Macbook Air

Can testify that my five year-old Macbook Air is still doing just fine. The keyboard is still good to use. Whilst I could probably do with putting in a new battery sometime over the next twelve months, it's still a robust workhorse for me that also has normal ports and doesn't need a pile of dongles.

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Nope.

"Let me make it simple: if there was a universal AR standard and a universal AR app, or if it just ran in a web browser without proprietary plugins, everyone would be using it, every day, for everything."

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't, just like 3D TVs and VR never really became properly mainstream.

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

Have to agree....

The two reasons why I've not upgraded from my 6S:

- iOS12 Has generally been OK.

- My phone has a headphone socket.

Not sure I have enough "courage" to abandon that one yet....

Apple breathes new life into MacBook Air with overhauled 2018 model

Re: Well it will look so stylish...

Fails? Have you actually used one? I've had my Air for five and a half years. It's still a damn good machine. Admittedly, it's not get retina-this and touchbar-that and the battery doesn't quite have the capacity that it did, but I'd say that it's the best portable Mac I've had. It's surprisingly solid and dependable.

I do have to say, though, that removing the SD card slot and all those other ports on the new model was a mistake - and let's not forget they've also adopted that new keyboard. I think I'll be keeping hold of my current machine for as long as I can.

Roughly 30 years after its birth at UK's Acorn Computers, RISC OS 5 is going open source

More Of This Sort Of Thing

I have to say that this is great news. RISC OS Is still a damn good OS, which given the prevelance of nasties on other operating systems seems to reenforce it's place as a safe platform for getting things done.I know, it doesn't have cloud-enabled-this and voice-assistant-that, but to be quite honest I don't want them anyway.

My StrongArm RISC PC (which I think is about 25-ish years old now) is still going strong on RISC OS 4.02. It does internet-type stuff nicely with NetSurf, streams some of my favourite internet audio and still allows me to do the odd thing in !Impression Style (which is still infinitely easier to do things in when compared to Word). I generate PDFs of anything I want to export elsewhere.

The machine still gets regularly fired up for many a reason. It's a great bridge machine to the DOS world (via my PC card) and there's still some great old games that I love. I might take the plunge and upgrade in the future, although my only worry is if the PSU goes pop - they're in short supply these days.

There's a whole pile of applications out there which could take advantage of a safe ad stable OS such as this with such a small footprint.

Dixons Carphone 'fesses to mega-breach: Probes 'attempt to compromise' 5.9m payment cards

"We are extremely disappointed and sorry for any upset this may cause."

<gah>

What is it about corporate statements?

Instead of "We got compromised and we're sorry we let that happen.", we get that. There's this continual thing in corporate communications where they're "sorry" that an event occurred and they're "sorry" about any inconvenience caused, but why do they word things in such a way that almost distances them from taking any ownership, like "Sorry. We fucked up" ?

Again.

</gah>

M.

Apple hit with another faulty hardware lawsuit – this time it's the Watch

Had experience of this.

Had an original Apple Watch that exhibited this issue. The screen clean popped off and underneath was an extremely swollen battery.

When I went in to the store with the watch, they didn't quibble whatsoever. They immediately saw the issue, said they'd replace it and sent the replacement by courier to my home. The original series 0 watch was replaced with a series 1 - so to their credit, they replaced it with a faster and shiny new device. I can only say they acted reasonably, given that it was well and truly out of its warranty period. I wonder if other manufacturers would have given a replacement in similar circumstances.

My only concern is what happens if it does it again. I only hope they'll do similar with newer generations - so if this action forces them to widen the remit of the replacement scheme, I'm all for it.

Zuckerberg gets a night off: Much-hyped Euro grilling was all smoke, absolutely no heat

Re: Perhaps we need to

>>Block Faccebook in the national firewall for a day.

>>Watch FB panic then

Really? Is that what you think will happen? I would suggest it wouldn't panic at all.

If the UK blocked FB at a national level (not that this would be remotely possible unless we had a great-wall-of-China-esque setup), then I suspect we'd get more outcry from the UK masses who were unable to post pictures of their dinner, Jimmy's first day at school and watch cat videos.

Facebook keeps the proles mindlessly entertained - and they knows it. Blocking it would only ensure the company and the UK populace could play the victim. Most people genuinely don't care about what Facebook has done. We are a minority.

Julian Assange said to have racked up $5m security bill for Ecuador

Stupid Question Time

Doesn't the embassy have a six-monthly fire-alarm evacuation test as per most establishments in the UK? And if so, does that mean Mr A stays in the building, potentially being allowed to burn in the event of a fire? Could they not use good old 'elf and safety' grounds to boot him out of the building and stand in the car-park until the all-clear is received, like everyone else?

"Not our fault you've had to come outside, guv, just following the rules."

(Or is the Ecuadorian embassy an extension of Ecuadorian soil, and therefore exempt from such things?)

Obvious icon.

M.

Facebook admits it does track non-users, for their own good

Re: RE: As a never-signed up non member....

You've managed to point out *exactly* how easy it is to uniquely and accurately track him!

They have his circle of friends *and* they also have his real name. I don't know about you, but I don't have two friends with the same name. Similarly, I don't have two friends with the same name *and* the same face*.

Thank you. Precisely my point.

Add in that Facebook has probably slurped contact data from the mobile app on your phone, combined with some idiot giving your e-mail address away in that "invite your friend on to Facebook" page and you can then see how very easy indeed it is to triangulate all the data and build a profile of someone who isn't actually a user.

...and yes, I might just be in a few photos - but who said I consented to it?

RE: As a never-signed up non member....

I'm having this battle at the moment, trying to get Facebook to divulge what information they know about me even though I'm not a member. I know that some of my real "friends" have tagged me in pictures, mentioned me in events and discussed me in comments.

Now because I don't have an account, I can't manage or "untag" this stuff, even though it's information about me that's in the (semi) public domain, even before you start to look at advertising data or whatever.

I've had two responses from Facebook in relation to the case I've opened with them. So far, and I'm not sure whether it's via just plain obscurity or stupidity (I suspect a bit of both), they don't seem to comprehend that:

- I can't manage an "account", so can't do anything about the data they hold.

- That if I had an account and it was deleted, everything was removed. (And I know it wasn't).

My last reply to their support-people mentioned the "right to be forgotten" in every way, shape or form. Funnily enough, it's been nearly a week since I've had another response.

I imagine this will involve a lot of banging my head against a wall at least until GDPR kicks off, but I'm going to keep badgering them out of principle.

Icon = Mr Zuck.

iOS 11.3 update throws Jamf-managed iStuffs into a loop.. into a loop.. into a loop... into a...

Stuttering Music

I've had stuttering music issues since the update. Any track I play seems like it's been subject to a Fatboy Slim remix after about ten minutes of playing. The stutter seems to occur at regular intervals. Posted the problem to the discussion forums and it seems I'm not alone. The issue happens whether you're using Spotify, MP3s, Tidal, whatever, which suggests something more fundamental is b0rked.

I wonder if this Fatboy Slim thing is supposed to replace the U2 virus we all had downloaded on to our devices a while back?

M.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

Re: LiDAR doesn't work in the dark? WTF?

AI is not intelligent because it still only understands what it's seen before, and doesn't yet appear able to put together a hypothesis like the one that enabled me not to kill a cycilst. Personally, given that self-driving cars still can't cope in the relatively benign environments they are being trained in, I think we are decades away from genuinely autonomous vehicles.

I live in Cornwall, where roads are distinctly un-uniform in arrangement. There is absolutely no way a system such as this could cope with Cornish lane-driving, ever. If a lone cyclist went undetected, imagine its behaviour when going around a steep corner to be presented with a horse-rider, flock of sheep on the road, etc...

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

>>If you'd told people then that 40 years later you'd be expected to throw the whole lot away and buy a new one each time you wanted to upgrade, they'd have thought you were off your rocker.

Bought any Apple kit recently?

Burn-In

Wonderful stuff. At the age of ten, my parents bought me a ZX-81 and I spent countless hours using it. My poor black and white TV got completely ruined in the end by "burn-in". Watching regular TV programmes got quite hard (as the picture got fuzzy) and images/listings that I left on the screen for too long ended up getting burnt in to regular viewing.

I went from the ZX-81 to a Vic-20, which seemed a novel thing as it had sound, colour, a larger memory and a fairly reliable dedicated tape drive.

I never looked back - I've been in IT most of my working life.

'Quantum supremacy will soon be ours!', says Google as it reveals 72-qubit quantum chip

QX-81

I fully look forward to playing with my Quantum QX-81 within fifty years of playing with my ZX-81.

Or maybe I don't. I'm not certain.

Wearables are now a two-horse race and Google lost very badly

Re: Why is Garmin

I had a Garmin Forerunner 205, which was great for just running. That's perhaps where I should've just stayed and never gone to a "smart" device.

Since then, I've had four other Garmin devices, all of which failed. I've ended up using an Apple Watch Series 2 with Strava, which admittedly does fine even if it doesn't have the stellar battery life that the Garmins did.

I didn't really want to go down the Apple route, but I can't contest that the thing has been pretty reliable. I'd still be using a Garmin now if they hadn't kept failing.

Windows slithers on to Arm, legless?

Re: .Net

>> If you want to run on Intel or ARM on Windows or Linux, then Java is the obvious answer.

Java you say? There is no question to which Java is the obvious answer. Everything about it is an exercise in frustration (and I speak as a Tomcat admin). And then there's that 5 second...

.

.

.

.

....pause that's never been eliminated.

Facebook told to stop stalking Belgians or face fines of €250k – a day

Peak Facebook

I hope to see it go the way of MySpace, Bebo, etc... There are indications that user numbers are finally heading south in some countries.

It will hopefully get legislated/litigated out of existence and that people will recognise it for the true evil that it really is.

Crappy Christmas! Dixons Carphone dials back profit expectations

I'd also imagine that new iPhone users would now go to an Apple Store instead, as the separate cost of phone and sim are cheaper than being fleeced by a reseller for a standard two-year overpriced contract. I've did it for my last iPhone purchase and it saved me a significant amount per month.

Beer with the savings.

Least realistic New Year’s resolution ever: Fix Facebook in 365 days

Re: Facebook is a reflection of society...

>>If you really want to fix Facebook... you first need to fix society...

+1 For this one. I can only give an anecdotal story in relation to this one.

Back in December, I'd decided that I'd had enough of the general narcissism, attention-seeking garbage that is FB's news feed and decided (without warning anyone else), that it was time to delete my account, so I filled in the deletion request so that the account was removed in time for the New Year.

(Here's a thing - why do you have to wait two weeks for the damn thing to be removed?)

As has previously been mentioned, Facebook is like digital crack. It's hard enough to remove the account in the first place, but various tricks are employed to stop the deletion - namely if you've ever had anything else linked to the account. Ping! It springs back into action - and you didn't even have to log in to the site to reactivate it.

So, finally, by the 2nd of January my account has gone, thank {$Deity}, but I'm now viewed by a lot of my friends/family as "the weird one" because I choose not to regularly spunk up my details of what I had for dinner last night for all to see.

When did society get so broken that we willingly invited surveillance into our lives and that not wanting it was "weird"?

Facebook Messenger ... for who now? Zuck points his digital crack at ever younger kids

Re: As a childless curmudgeon.

>>Children appear to be seen as a meal ticket these days, the more you have, the more £££ the govt will give you.

Your post comes across more as a Daily Mail style rant against "bloody scroungers" than anything that has a degree of relevance to the original topic.

Go on, tell us about the immigrunts.

Pro tip: You can log into macOS High Sierra as root with no password

Re: They are busy setting Root passwords...

>>This is the final step to bankrupcy.

I should very much doubt this is the final step to bankruptcy. You've seen how much money they have in the bank, right?

Internet addict sent to an anti-addiction boot camp is no longer an addict. Because he's dead

Re: Parenting 101

>>But that's hard to do even here. The only creativity-encouraging toy I can find in the shop is LEGOs.

The plural of LEGO is LEGO.

That is all.

No, Apple. A 4G Watch is a really bad idea

RE: No, Apple. A 4G Watch is a really bad idea

Sleep tracking is possible on the Apple Watch. I use "AutoSleep" and it seems to do the trick.

As I get 2 - 3 days out of my 38mm watch anyway, there's no immediate need to have it charging up each night. Mine usually gets charged during my morning "getting ready for work" routine.

Zuck sucks up upstart Ozlo so it can stop sucking at chatbots

Re: Chatbot AI

I've just tried this question with a system called "Replika" and got the answer...

"It's hard getting out of bed, isn't it?".

Sweaty fitness bands fall behind as Apple Watch outpaces sales

Re: Quick question

>>interesting that yours failed. Which models, if you don't mind me asking, failed?

2 Garmin Vivosmarts (1 strap disintegrated, 1 screen failed)

1 Garmin Vivosmart HR (Band started coming away from main housing)

1 Garmin Vivoactive HR (Not as water resistant as you'd be led to believe)

Shame, really, as their portal is pretty good.

Re: Quick question

>> I am sure I said "normal people"

Have an upvote. Running a half-marathon on Sunday and questioning my sanity already....

Re: Quick question

I wear this crap.

I run about 20 - 25 miles a week and have had various Garmin devices. All of which failed within their warranty period - and I'm not careless. After four failures, I decided to jump ship. I had charging problems, failing screens and one water-resistant device which obviously wasn't. With four years of data on Garmin's Connect portal, I didn't really want to jump....

However, I now use Strava on my second-generation Apple Watch - and it does "just work". Sorry if that doesn't fit in with your sweeping generalisation.... but I will admit to being a convert. It's done pretty well.

Nokia's 3310 revival – what's NEXT? Vote now

Can we have a revival of the Nokia 8210, please?

If the Psion 5 wins by a landslide (and it should), then the Nokia 8210 needs to come back at the same time.

I've still got my Psion and used to use it as an e-mail device back in the day. It connected via infrared to my Nokia, which was the modem. Good times. Saved taking a laptop anywhere - and far smaller.

Finally, that tech fad's over: Smartwatch sales tank more than 50%

Re: Batteries

I have a Garmin VivoActive HR and the battery life is pretty awesome - I get over a week per charge (sometimes up to 10 days), and that's with a reasonable amount of GPS usage during running, which I do 3 times a week.

Not all smartwatches have dismal battery life like Apple's offering. I don't need a battery-wristband...

World religions stake out positions on Pokemon Go

Who'd have thought it?

"@pontifex authorises Pokédex"

Facebook offers end-to-end encrypted chat – if you find the right setting

Re: How much you want to bet

...or you have to shoot 10 hoops in their messenger app to enable it. </bloat>

The 100GB PHONE! Well, it has shades of Chrome, so not quite

Battery Life?

I know the article mentions that battery life will be good, but I can't see how. The constant shoveling of data through a mobile connection (and a poor one if you live in Cornwall like I do) just spells for appalling battery life. No thanks.

And when the mobile network goes down? (Like O2 have regularly done)

Back to school: Six of the smartest cheap 'n' cheerful laptops

Re: Windows for students: just say no

It's worth knowing:

1) Apple does educational discount (that's worth it).

2) Apple's Applecare is a tiny fraction of the usual price for educational customers.(i.e. ~48ukp, instead of several hundred)

All of a sudden, it's a lot more worth it.

iPhone 6, Watch: Hate it or really hate it, Apple's now a $604.77bn biz

What? No "Peak Apple" mention?

See title. Maybe they've given up flogging that horse to death.