Posts by Nick Ryan

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

I knew there was a reason that I still have the old projectors... in a cupboard...

Universities offered software to sniff out ChatGPT-written essays

Re: Just expell anyone caught

The key word is caught.

This implies either:

• a university official having direct and trustable observation of a student using ChatGPT
• An infallible detection method on the output results from ChatGPT

The first would have to be accountable and trustworthy and not just go on hearsay and accusations but be a recorded incident. The second is subjective as there is nothing stopping student's own writing being similar to ChatGPT output and vice-versa.

Therefore rather going further down the route of backwards thinking, it's better to consider that firstly ChatGPT is a tool and secondly that the capabilities of such systems will improve.

ChatGPT output is far from perfect, however how about consider its use as a tool? One can generate the core of a document, the structure as such, and then go through the document and rewrite and restyle this in one's own language and understanding overlaid on top of it? There is little different in this compared to a student taking previous examples on the same topic and using them as templates for their own work. This is different to plagiarism, this is research - both in the subject and ways to present the subject (which is almost as important). Also consider that it's known that many students pay other students or people to write their work for them, therefore the emphasis on ChatGPT is ridiculous.

In the end, the only way to really test a student is going to be do so in a controlled environment. This does not necessarily have to be the pressure of a tightly controlled exam, but could be a much longer process in a controlled environment. Students who relied on something or someone else for their earlier work will not be able to perform, students who used something or someone else to assist them with their work will be discernable by either their understanding or lack of.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Don't forget

Unfortunately the US also have far to many hardcore historical revisionists who want to "return to the grand old times", entirely neglecting that the "grand old times" included even more misery, persecution and, effectively, slavery. However those that want this are the only ones who benefit - as in the top 0.0001%. While the UK doesn't have quite so many literalistic theistic (I suspect most just use their "religion" as an excuse for their behaviour rather than have any actual belief) woman and non-hetero haters as the US elected, the UK is unfortunately following along nicely and this includes isolationism - Brexit, for example.

12:00 AM and 12:00 PM categorically cannot exist.

12:00 is the middle and as AM is "before midday", midday cannot ever be described as before itself. Likewise, PM is "after midday" and therefore midday cannot ever be described as after itself. It's like deciding that 4 is a larger number than 4, except when it's a smaller number than 4 of course.

Midnight is the same amount of time both before and after midday therefore it is simultaneously both before and after it at the same time.

Those who are too clueless to understand the problem claim that there are "accepted standards" where 12:00 am is always midnight.. except when it's not, and vice-versa. With localised context, it's usually possible to make an educated guess as to whether or not some muppet writing 12:00pm is referring to midday or midnight, but not always. To work around this, established standards were created and these are called "the 24 hour clock".

As for claims of 12:00pm being midday or midnight, consider this sequence... 10am, 11am, 12am... or 10pm, 11pm, 12pm. Now as soon as one goes past this time then the am/pm switched, for example: 11:00am, 11:55am, 12:00am, 12:05pm. There: perfect sense and absolute nonsense in the same sequence.

Software engineer accused of stealing $300k from employer was 'inspired by Office Space'

Unfortunately, or possibly more likely fortunately, people get greedy and fail to stop. If he'd stopped early on and reverted the code to non-abusive and worked through logs and logs to show diligence on tracking down something that he knew was no longer there, he'd probably have gotten away with it. But just like gamblers who can't stop even though they are losing everything, the compulsion for "just one more" strikes.

Integrity and accountability is why I always ensure that audit logging is enabled and not tinkerable with as far as ever possible, even by me. That way if or when I have to force access onto sensitive data there is a log and I know that such as access is recorded, which is peace of mind in a lot of ways.

Re: Two thoughts...

I wondered that about not deleting his plans, but I suspect that if there was any hint of a well managed IT infrastructure in place, he lost access to the laptop when his login account was disabled. This would depend on the laptop getting notified of the account closure which is one potentially problematic hurdle. However if he did delete the file but didn't know about VSS copies, which are not uncommon because they are very useful, just no longer enabled by default, then there would have been retained copies of such files easily available.

As for being promoted and getting more money... the chances of this happening are? Probably not a lot.

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Re: rebooting the system

He was... it was rather frustrating.

In a past company the sales department decided that they, alone out of everyone in a sweltering warehouse with offices attached, needed air conditioning. Nobody else was permitted air conditioning because they were not sales and therefore not important.

The air conditioning unit was placed above the server rack, which was in a caged off area of the warehouse. I immediately raised this as a potentially serious risk but was told to STFU because I was not in sales and therefore I was just being petty and jealous.

A month later the cheaply fitted air conditioning unit emptied water into the server rack. I was not quiet with my "told you so".

Re: rebooting the system

I get that all the time... "My WiFi is not working".

Do you mean your WiFi or your Internet connection?

WiFI connected fine. Red light on the Internet connection on the router flashing to show lack of Internet connection.

Re: rebooting the system

I had an assistant who was struggling with getting a server service working properly for him and no matter what he did he couldn't connect to it. He restarted the service, the server and all kinds of business disruptive things. Eventually he asked for assistance on this and I sat and watched the process...

As he connected a popup window was shown and he immediately closed it before I could read it. He was unable to connect.

I had him try again, and was able to briefly read the message before he closed it. I asked him to go slowly but he still pigeon pecked the popup window closed.

Getting annoyed with him by now, I told him to not close the effing popup window this time. He left it open briefly before closing it. I got to read the message this time: "Access denied, check security configuration", or similar.

His user account wasn't a member of the appropriate security group to access the service. Add appropriate group membership to his account and he was working fine. FFS

BOFH and the office security access upgrade

Re: All I want for Christmas is...

Unfortunately a large proportion of Americans seems to be under the impression that America is the only place in the world and American is the only language and locale in use.

Which explains why my fucking computer, alongside Microsoft's total lack of testing anymore, despite having the American locale removed and only having English remaining has randomly decided that my keyboard is American. Again. There is no option to change this because the only keyboard input locale enabled is English...

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Re: Here we go...

H2 fuel cells are very cool, however they are not a viable mass market way to generate electricity. They work incredibly well in very tightly constrained scenarios, for example the Apollo lunar modules, as they could be fed pure oxygen which meant that they worked quite efficiently with useful water as a by product... however they are not that efficient unless you also want the heat generated at the same time.

For use as a heater in a commercial or residential setting, the electricity generated could be used alongside the heat generated in the process for heating. The combination of the two would work well in theory, as long as you want the heat. However the degradation of the fuel cell due to not using pure oxygen will add up quite quickly and this rapidly reduces the efficiency further as well as the "clean" credentials of the technology.

Some of this is quite possibly fixable with research and development but it doesn't remove the fact that as the smallest molecule there is, H2 is an absolute arse to store. It being rather explosive doesn't help much either. One upside it that in a moderate/open air leakage scenario it's not dangerous as long as there's no oxygen and a source of ignition - the hydrogen will rapidly head upwards and dissipate quickly.

Re: Vans and Lorries

Precisely. When battery packs are standardised and swappable then we will have useful battery powered vehicles. The batteries that have been removed can be pretty much charged up at leisure, maintenance performed on them of necessary or retired, and the driver gets to drive away almost immediately. It's the only sane way to operate such a system without potentially inventing new aspects of physics where somehow electricity gets into a battery unfeasibly quickly without it exploding or otherwise heating itself out of shape and usefulness and chemistry joins in somehow to provide a higher energy density for a vaguely reasonable cost.

Until then, we'll either have relatively short distance vehicles with annoying recharge times or swappable batteries.

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Re: Had M2 become popular...

A huge problem with Pascal was a lack of direct support for defined variable types. One could specify "word" and "longword" and other nonsense terminology and hope that the bloody compiler would generate a structure of the exact size required. A lot of leaping through hoops was required at times.

Variable portability where one just doesn't really care is good for much code, but for real world code that interacts with external systems being able to easily and clearly define the exact data types is critical. For example, just including support for int8, uint8, int16, uint16, int32, uint32 and so on would have made life tolerable instead it was a farce of having to override error handling and compilation checks for "byte" depending on whether or not it was representing a signed or a unsigned integer. The horrors of real vs float vs numeric(?) were pretty nasty too.

Re: Had M2 become popular...

Part of the abject pain in Modula-2 was Wirth's delusional dream of single pass compilation, while entirely forgetting that in the real world one often has to implement code that self-references and where multiple units rightly need to depend on each other. One had to put in place all kinds of really non-intuitive structures just to work around this restriction and the problems that it forced on use.

Other than that kind of horror, the other problem with Modula-2 when I was forced to use it was the utter scarcity of third party libraries, in particular quality third party libraries that weren't cobbled together by an amateur coder and then sold as if they worked in any meaningful way (suffered from these)

European telco body looks into terahertz for future 6G comms

Re: 6G

That's just a power issue. The solution is easy - broadcast using more and more power until the signal gets through.

Possibly not mobile friendly but if one can't explode one's mobile battery in order to get a couple of bits of data through, what's the point in having them?

Where are EU going with that Teams antitrust probe? Microsoft wants a word

Re: Microsoft Torture Suite

Other than insisting on copying everything to servers in a regime with no data protection (US), it's the incessant random problems with cameras just not working, screens freezing (sharing screen and un-sharing sometimes fixes this) and the usual dumb interface with randomly placed things that are not intuitive at all. When you know where to find something it's OK, but there's nothing whatsoever intuitive about any of it. Recently we've had USB devices stopping working in systems using teams for no reason whatsoever - unplug and plug them and they start working again immediately.

Microsoft are said to be working on Teams 2.0... undoubtedly it'll break compatibility with systems used by those stupid enough to use dedicated "teams" hardware and probably with the current version of teams and knowing Microsoft they'll find some marketing bullshit excuse to claim that it's "Windows 11 only". However re-writing something this horrible from scratch isn't a bad thing therefore as it's grown as an organic mess over the years and just got slower and more resource hungry every time. Never a feature added that didn't promote further lock in of course.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Re: Welcome to the Global Village

Beware the big white bouncing ball.

It all goes to show that Tesla was successful despite Musk, not because of him.

A dip in Alder Lake with an HP Elitebook is spoiled by avoidable mistakes

Re: crapware

This is why windows media is available. It's much quicker to just wipe and reset the machine to a sane and clean configuration than repair the stupidity that the likes of HP inflicts on their systems. I've had systems in the past what couldn't upgrade because the boot partition was too small as it was below Microsoft's recommendations.

Any new system I have goes through this process:

• Insert USB media
• Boot up system
• Curse the fact that the "boot from USB" option is not working because some twatt decided that the function keys are now media keys by default rather than function keys
• Hard shut down the system as who cares, the OS is going to be wiped (power button held for 5s)
• Start the system up again
• Get the wrong function key
• Hard shut down the system again
• Start the system up again
• Somehow get the USB boot menu up
• Delete all partitions, none of them have any use and have the installer to just do it's thing. This is the point when dual boot can be provisioned.
• Have a clean install of the OS... eventually.

It is, of course, possible to use custom boot images and mass deployment techniques such as boot from LAN and a deployment manager, but the overall process is similar in many ways, just using net boot instead of USB boot.

Re: Not a fan of recent Elitebooks

On the odd model a touchscreen is standard, on most other models it's an optional extra.

Sometimes useful but usually just a pointless and annoying gimmick. When using the keyboard and mouse (or at worst touchpad), reaching up and inaccurately poking the screen isn't a convenient or effective interface. Also very annoying when moving the laptop as the screen frequently gets touched then. Dirty, greasy fingerprints always look good too, and these screens are not so hard wearing and easy to clean as a typical tablet or phone screen.

Touchscreen is, of course, vital for when folding the laptop over and trying to use it as a tablet.

Re: Photos

Exactly this. Oi! El Reg, we'll bite harder unless you listen.

I did, eventually, find some pictures of what are probably of the keyboard in question. The comment about the alternative locations of the alternate key inputs is a bit weird as a brief check of the laptops that I have at hand, many have them in the top left, some top right, some directly above the normal letters, some with the normal letters shoved to the top left with the alternate centred. Frankly, it doesn't matter that much as long as it's clear. However, what is poor is the appalling use of a nasty thin typeface on the keys. It's bad enough having to read web pages designed by some dimwit designer who thinks that the harder the text is to read the better, but it's even less acceptable on a bloody keyboard. At least on most websites I can override their choice of "stupidly narrow trendy font in a mid shade of grey" with relative ease, can't do that on a keyboard.

I'd also prefer it if the bloody function keys' primary function was the function key, not to default to whatever random set of functions that I usually can't be bothered with using very often. Different on every damn laptop of course. Just looking at the three closest to me here instead of refreshing a folder or website I will instead be making my display dimmer, turning off the internal monitor in favour of an external one or muting the audio. None of these are more important than refreshing the damn page.

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

The use of publicly available data is still covered, as in the appropriate use of such data. Hoovering up publicly available data and using it for purposes other than which it was originally provided is not permissible.

This is, of course, rather the opposite of what many of the typical barely-legal advertising data organisations want to do, therefore there are all kinds of pathetic and annoying ways that they lie about this. I suspect most people here will have come across the lie that "you received this email because you subscribed to these messages on our website" and that's the kind of thing these kind of organisations take part in. Usually they just lie to the companies they sell the information to, claiming that it was all provided properly and the recipients are willing recipients when they are nothing of the sort. The company selling the information just disappears, usually to reappear with a different name a few weeks after they receive an ICO fine (on the rare occasion this happens) and the company that used the information gets their reputation tarnished further.

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

An interestingly backward view. You can consider it a good or a bad thing for the EU to do this but if the EU is adding restrictions to lock out foreign competition it is the EU cutting themselves off from that competition.

This is about data sovereignty and not restrictions on trade. Overseas multi-nationals are not being stopped from starting or operating in the EU, just that it is being made very clear in local law that the likes of the US Cloud Act cannot and will not be accepted - the US's laws have no place outside the US.

It is little different from the threat the EU made about cutting itself off from London. They changed their minds as the Eurozone would suffer a hard recession for doing so but it would be EU action to cut themselves off.

The "EU" never made such a threat, it was the usual nonsense and lies thrown out by quasi-legal groups such as the "European Research Group". What was announced was that UK-EU financial trade relies heavily on a lack of additional restrictions and that therefore if the UK was stupid enough to leave the EU then it would make a major impact on many UK financial institutions that operate(d) within the EU. The earlier drafts of the UK/EU agreement even made specific provisions to retain the UK financial operations however the UK government rejected these for the usual stupid "sovereignty" reasons. As a result the UK financial market was cut off from operating in the EU directly. There were ways around this which is why there are so many new additional operations opened in various cities in the EU, however these have not tended to centralise in one location.

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

Possibly but- "The statement filed by 13 industry associations, including the US Chamber of Commerce, Japan’s Association of New Economy, and the Latin American Internet Association

US Industry lobby and protectionist groups are not exactly going to not complain about anything that impacts their harvesting of the dollar... ethics, laws and so on are a distant consideration for these king of groups.

Many examples of equally stupid and self-serving groups are available everywhere as, for a price, there are always politicians willing to be bribed (lobbied) to push forward agendas. Look up the insane "Locomotive Acts" in the UK where the train companies bribed politicians to push this crazy law... which was rather ironic as they suffered similar laws pushed against them previously by the canal companies who were threatened by trains. The red flag vehicle law was even copied into the US for a while too.

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

To be honest I consider it a strength that the US isn't homogeneous but each state being able to play to its strengths.

It's the most comical and ridiculous notion that some in the US have (that and claims that the US is a democracy and christian)... It would be rather more accurate to rename the US "the Disjointed States" or similar.

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

This is the key point, it's about the US deciding that it's reach extends to overseas subsidiaries and it can practice the "American Way" and just take whatever data it feels like. The list of agencies that can demand non-US data is extensive, it's considerably more than just the major agencies or central government.

The EU ruling is to ensure that the data and operations are operated legally and properly and to make it clear that US laws cannot override other nation's laws just because the US decided to say so.

Take the specific example of Microsoft Ireland, the US was pushing for free access to data held in Microsoft's data centres located in Ireland. They had established protocols to request access to this data, but they tried the route of demanding that Microsoft Ireland, a subsidiary of Microsoft US, had to just provide the data with no delays and to do so with no questions whatsoever. Microsoft Ireland is a company registered in Ireland and it is wholly and totally subject to the laws of Ireland, not the US. The US responded to this with the "cloud act" which required that non-US operations and subsidiaries fall under the law of the US when it came to data. This put Microsoft Ireland in a rather tough spot...

The quick and dirty solution, of course, was to just mirror the data in Microsoft Ireland to Microsoft US, in the name of "global coverage" and as soon as the data was stored in a regime such as the US, the data was freely available to any US agency that demands it.

The EU law is to ensure that EU located data remains in the EU and other nations do not have arbitrary access to it without going through the proper legal channels. It's definitely not so much about anti-competitive actions and making it harder for overseas multinationals to establish local operations, it's about ensuring that they do so with the same legal frameworks. While the usual cheerleaders are spittling on about how this is an attack on US corporations and it's going to make it impossible for them to operate and some nonsense about "innovation", which is mostly about wringing every bit of money out of consumers, the operational impact is trivial. It's not as if, for example, Microsoft Ireland don't need locally based staff and teams to oversea their systems and it's not that they can't apply their economies of scale and experience to managing and deploying their ventures.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: Good luck getting the advertisers back now

All the other stupid stuff aside, I was staggered that he paid* so much for a business and within days was stating how it was so close to bankruptcy... that's not a great investment and not something that a typical backer would tend to go for. This leaves the two main options of a predatory purchase or a long term investment. Pissing off all suppliers and staff and reinstating vile individuals is not a long term strategy; this leaves the option of a predatory purchase. However, why, just to be petulant and extract revenge, would there be a predatory purchase? One could understand if the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, Google or Apple bought Twitter as they'd borg the product into their other options and rebrand it before too long, but Musk? Just not an option.

* I suspect that when it comes to paying this means something different as in more pretend to pay or take a loan to pay based on some other nonsense and then saddle the victim company with the debt type of payment.

Re: Twitter “poll”

When it comes to the orange criminal, there are so many rabid followers in his cult that they'd hardly need bot accounts. As for whether the capabilities of most of his cult followers extend beyond being mindless bots, that's a different question but there was a lot of recorded evidence showing that a huge number of the interactions with his account were bots.

Re: twitters dead

Unfortunately the usual decriers of this refuse to look anything up and just spout the same spiel over and over again in the hope that it changes anything. These are typically the same folk that claim that brexit is a great thing yet get incredibly defensive when asked to list the actual benefits for anyone other than the 0.005% of the population and immediately turn to insults and denial and word twisting.

There are also quite a few people that see climate change, as in local warming, as not a bad thing as they have such a localised short term view that they just don't see impacts elsewhere or impacts on the livelihoods of anyone living after them.

Orion snaps 'selfie' with the Moon as it prepares for distant retrograde orbit

Re: What's wrong with this statement?

From what I understand internally NASA use proper units but convert them to outdated imperial units for reporting to the three countries on the planet that are still backward enough to be using them.

China declares victory over teenage video game addiction

Re: Yeah right

Elbonia?

Locked out of Horizon Europe, UK commits half a billion to post-Brexit research

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

The shocking online racist "adverts" shown to the elderly, vulnerable and otherwise gullible were something else. All funded by the same bunch of incredibly rich people of course, as in the only ones anywhere that have benefitted in any way from brexit.

The deceitful ads showing people harassed and busy A&E departments, full of "fornerrs" and then cutting to a bright, breezy change of the single white elderly person being shown immediately by an attractive white nurse to see a smiling white daughter. Except the reality is that those that funded brexit campaigns were those same people behind the destruction (privatisation) of the NHS and why there is so little money it. That the NHS was propped up by non-UK natives and these all left due to the unwarranted and spiteful hate they were receiving is another subject glossed over time and time again by the brexit apologists. Who are only able to deflect queries about the benefits of brexit or to just switch to pathetic blaming of "others" as to why brexit has been and is so damaging for the UK.

Re: "the UK remains open to association"

I'm still waiting on an actual benefit of brexit to normal people. Apparently there are loads... come on, list five.

Microsoft's attempts to harden Kerberos authentication broke it on Windows Servers

It's a part of Microsoft's Azure/Microsoft 365 only stance...

It's a part of Microsoft's Azure/Microsoft 365 only stance...

The bloody error messages, when they are eventually tracked down, state that the Microsoft Azure connected/enabled device is not able to authenticate. Except neither the client nor the server system are in any way Azure enabled and the Microsoft reporting command "dsregcmd /status" confirms this.

In other words, it's yet more Microsoft shite that was only laughably tested against their own Azure/Microsoft 365 systems and nothing else at all.

Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison

Re: The rich investors deserved it.

...and stuff like this wouldn't take long to get a well judged response on from somebody who knew what they were talking about. These experts, now decried by the political press as being naysayers in all forms, are experts for a reason and know their subject. Not all will agree but with blatant nonsense like Theranos' claims any independent with any half reasonable level of expertise would have come down on the "this is bullshit" side pretty much instantly. There are occasions when something may warrant a little more investigation, but that's also a reasonable response - as in "it's probably bullshit but there is a chance that they could be onto something, checking in more detail is recommended".

Physics and chemistry don't bend to charlatan's wills.

Re: Pro tip

Also a really good idea to cosy up with the usual politicians when doing so. These politicians really hate it when independents try it on in their traditional territory.

Re: For UK residents

Which is rather reflected in the percentage of the US population that live in prisons

Re: already suffered by being stigmatized

If she was innocent and stigmatised then that's a fair argument. However, as she has been found not innocent then the stigmatism (which now sounds rather ophthalmic) was rather justified and therefore people doing the stigmatising should be applauded.

Republican senators tell FTC to back off data security, surveillance rules

Re: Simple approach?

Exactly this. We're going to continue adhering to GDPR rules even though Ree Smogg and co are determined to trash the UK's data protection equivalency all in the pursuit of halfwit ideology and the abuse of data by their linked businesses, such as Palantir and equivalent quasi-criminal organisations.

Windows breaks under upgraded IceXLoader malware

Re: "The emails contain a ZIP file"

True, however this is where phishing comes in and the hijacking of a contact's genuine account. Emails coming from the expected source work a lot better than randomly names emails coming from equally randomly named email addresses.

This is where experienced users are able to question expected attachments which is rather more difficult that files provided strangers.

None of this forgives the retarded stupidity in software that auto-executes content in a fucking file allowing the malware to take hold through just opening a document. Every time this stupidity is squashed another dimwit software developer adds further auto-execution capability in a different place or a different manner.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: AdDuplex...

For good reason. It permits users to install random arbitrary software on company computers. I suspect that the hoops required to disable Microsoft's automatic billing mechanism, as in users could start subscriptions to random software services and there's no control over this were the final straw for many.

A company curated Microsoft Store would be fine, but definitely not a wild west of uncontrollable rubbish that will often steal data and copy it to regimes with no data protection whatsoever, such as the US.

A sensible regime where a company "Microsoft Store" could operate and only provide a selection of applications would be OK, allow this company to deploy their own applications through the same "Microsoft Store" and it would be it actually useful.

Global recession, companies necessarily saving money and not wasting it, PCs largely having reached saturation point already... and Microsoft feel the need to release a new "last version of windows" with fictitious hardware requirements.

Re: OS X?

Yeah, but doesn't the blind person really appreciate how much improvement there was through applying paint colour 48956 (legally registered trademark colour) over everything? In particular a really thick application of this to ensure that there is no tangible difference between anything at all and absolutely no edges anywhere. This paint was expensive therefore it will be used everywhere to demonstrate the superiority of the colour. The application of typeface 9093, which is a dedicated new typeface designed with exclusively narrow strokes to make it as hard to read on all devices unless font scaling is set to 800% and even then only the truly discerning will be able to appreciate this. Mostly because the standard text colour is 48957 which is the very similar to colour 48956 just marginally darker. 48956 would have been used as the text colour as well except one of the unwashed (not in the marketing department) complained too loudly and a very costly compromise was made to adjust 48956 darker by 0.05% and billed to the complainant's department.

Re: As a Win11 user myself, don't bother if you don't have to!

A machine with 8GB runs (walks slowly) like a dog (snail) with Teams on auto-start after login. Many users have either taken to not logging out to avoid the pain, which just delays it as eventually performance becomes so bad that a restart is required and that's aside from windows updates, or they remove Teams from auto-start and start it later when they have a gap in work.

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: "gather the data for the purpose of understanding [...] the crisis in treatment waiting times"

Also the enforced privatisation of large operational chunks of the NHS through forcing hospitals to no longer use internal services and instead to have to out source these same services to an external organisation. Which will always cost more of course, as there's another level of profit to be made, and it's very common to find direct links between these external organisations and politicians and Tory party donors.

Re: And after

Oh no, there was definitely millions more promised every week for the NHS. The criminal Boris Johnson stood in front of a big bus with it plastered all over the side and promised it personally.

There are even pathetic excuse-makers around who enable liars such as this who have tried to claim that the NHS has already been given this extra sum. Except that the extra sum they were deceitfully trying to claim was just the inflationary increases in the NHS budget that tend to go through every year... nothing actually additional to this and nothing like the lies on the brexit bus.

Re: I'm sorry

It's short termism and greed combined with a desire to finish off the NHS. The NHS had the capability to do a great many things and did them in-house where appropriate. Now the line of "where appropriate" is gone and almost everything has to be farmed out to contractors to do instead. While in some situations this is a good idea, given the scale of the NHS farming almost everything out to contractors is only going to significantly raise costs, distance those doing the actual work from the organisation (people removed from an organisation are not so motivated) and line the pockets of those with interest in the companies doing the contracting.

Re: Hidden backlog

Ah yes, the "great american way". Where if you not rich enough you can just suffer and die in pain. The US has the worst medical health of any "developed" nation, more personal debt incurred by medical needs and more individuals desperately trying not to pay for even basic medical care. Hell, many would rather walk tot he hospital if they could rather than have to pay for an american ambulance.

America does not have a functioning society - a functioning society looks after all members of the society. America pretends to be christian, the politicians won't get voted in if they don't at least pretend to be christian loudly in their profiles. Yet absolutely none of what christian morals are meant to include, looking after each other, everyone's equal and so on are applied in any way whatsoever. A "society" that caters only for those at the top 0.005% will become more and more unequal over time, and more and more draconian measures will be put in place to put down those not in the 0.005%. The reversion of females to second class citizens in the US under fundamentalist pretences is part of the journey. Where will it end? Don't know, but it's going to be messy.

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Re: Get that green screen capability baked in

It's only a feature that was requested years ago.... why would Microsoft ever want to implement something Teams that users actually want rather than something that pushes yet more lock-in? They'll probably introduce video quality controls first... no wait, that doesn't enforce lock-in either.

How about coding the application so it doesn't require an obscene amount of resources at login to start the damn thing up... because all the MS developers are going to do is to pre-load everything possible into memory and call this "optimisation"

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Re: "The telephone providers are in the business of providing a sound link from point A to point B"

There are a couple of issues with fax transmissions over VOIP. Firstly the frequency range that a FAX uses to communicate is not necessarily supported in enough integrity to allow fax transmission and secondly VOIP uses lossy compression algorithms which will cut out some of the fax data. Either of these on their own would cause serious FAX transmission problems, but both together can almost kill it stone dead. Fax is quite a resilient protocol though and if it doesn't succeed at the first speed it'll drop down to a slower speed and so on. Eventually it could go through on a VOIP connection but it's far from guaranteed.