Posts by Dave K

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Nuke from orbit

Heh, I wrote better-organised code than that when I was an 11-year-old being taught to program in Pascal by my dad on our old 386!

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: "HR tries to think appy thoughts"

1996 is when the PFY was introduced if I recall. Blimey that seems a long time ago!

808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

There is a fantastic multi-part series of articles on Ars Technica covering the creation of ARM, how it came to be built, why its power consumption was so low, and of course what happened over the following years with ARM being spun off from Acorn. It's well worth a read.

And Happy Birthday ARM!

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Familiar!

"Complicated contracts which can only be cancelled on a harvest moon in a leap year by repeating the word "multifunction" backwards, three times, into rotary dial telephone, after calling the unlisted phone number of a squid farmer in East Bangladesh. And leaving a message."

Has Simon been looking at some of the lease agreements from one of my former employers? This sounds strangely familiar!

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

Not sure this is going to do Tesla much good.

DOGE was only the tip of the iceberg for the anti-Musk sentiment around the world. It doesn't change the fact that he did two Nazi-salutes (which he has never apologised for), nor him trying to (essentially) bribe voters in Wisconsin recently, nor of course his unwavering and very public support for the orange man-child.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: My hot tip

And replace the Start Menu.

And replace the Taskbar

And block all the adverts for Onedrive / O365

And block the Microsoft store

And set up a local account and bin the "Microsoft" account

And stop Teams auto-launching at boot.

But yeah, once you've done about 30 different things to modify and tweak the living shit out of it, it becomes acceptable. A glowing endoresement I think you'll agree!

Please sir, may we have some Moore? Doesn't look that way

fairly obvious

For several decades, we knew this time would come for one simple reason: there is a limit to how small circuitry on microchips can become. Once you are down to atomic levels (gates and components only an atom or two in size), you cannot shrink further. It is physically impossible.

Even as you approached those limits, the difficulties with shrinking more become ever-more-difficult to overcome.

We've been spoiled by several decades of consistent progress, but you cannot argue with physics.

The only alternatives (other than efficiency gains) are to use either organic compounds in completely different approaches to conventional silicon, or quantum processing. I do expect these will come to fruition eventually, but the whole "keep getting smaller" trend always had finite phyisical limits at the end of the day.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Simple, it's a bare-faced lie. It's typical marketing bluster for trying to explain away a crappy change. Anyone who can use bypassnro actively does NOT want a Microsoft account, it's not something a home user does by accident...

Musk's xAI swallows Musk's X in ego-friendly, all-stock deal

Really??

"the future could not be brighter"

And yet with people departing in droves, revenue dropping from $5bn in 2021 to $2.5bn in 2024, that has to be a very low bar they've set themselves if the current situation qualifies as a resounding success ...

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Re: We are human ...

Exactly this, he made a mistake and owned up to it, rather than trying to weasel out with excuses. Respect!

And as mistakes go, it's not major or anything.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Horses for courses

You are consuming information - audio, visual or whatever.

Agreed, plus there are still options for keeping it supported:

1) Install a Linux distro

2) Install Windows 11 via Rufus with the hardware checks disabled.

The second option isn't completely perfect as you'll have to do an annual "feature" update from installation media as Windows Update won't grab feature updates automatically, but it does work.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Trump can do what he wants here (sadly), but why does the Trump name also show up for none-American users (Mexican users excluded of course)? The UK recognises it as the Gulf of Mexico, so why display Trump's vanity name for it underneath? If the UK were to decide it's called "Gulf of Atlantic" for example, then Germany declares it is "Das Strait" would we end up with 4, 5, 6 different names beginning to show in parenthesis? Just show the internationally recognised name for it for none Americans and leave it at that.

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Maybe not, but back in the 1950s those systems sure did fly!

BOFH: Engage Hollywood Protocol – because nonsense always looks legit

A good one this week, loved the little twist at the end. Happy Friday!

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

A solution looking for a problem.

Even if you *do* use some AI tools, what can an "AI PC" do that you can't do with an online AI tool such as ChatGPT?

Until there is a clear functional use for these, customers will vote with their wallets.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Re: Dual SIM phone

Exactly this. Back when I was a techie, the listed mobile number for me was my work phone. I did not have Outlook or Teams on my personal phone, and when it came to home-time, my work phone was turned off. Once or twice I did get a query on a Monday morning "I was trying to reach you over the weekend", my response was simply "I'm not paid to be on-call and was out enjoying the weekend with my family".

We did used to have an on-call rota for a while - I was part of it. But then they ditched it after deciding it wasn't cost effective to pay people to be on-call over the weekend - and I was buggered if I was going to sacrifice my weekend without any pay for my trouble.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Well they managed it back in 1995 OK. To be honest I just think it's laziness from Microsoft. Their telemetry will tell them that only 1% of users move the task bar (for example), so they can't be bothered to put the effort in to add the functionality back. They're too busy banging the Copilot drum instead, or thinking where else in the OS they can add some OneDrive adverts...

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

I worked at a University from 2006 to 2012 in IT. Our department ran its own IT systems, which actually meant I had a budget for PCs, a couple of servers to administrate, plus a remote NAS for backups (as well as a tape-safe for local ones). Was a fun job overall, but reading stories like this tells me why the department invested in their own IT instead of relying on the central facilities...

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

Exactly this!

CD drives took off because they could hold massively more data than floppy disks, and provided much faster transfer rates too.

USB sticks took off because they also massively exceeded the capacity of floppy disks, and were easier to write to (and much smaller) than CDRWs.

3D Graphics cards took off because the resolution, quality and speed at which they could render games far surpassed what CPUs were capable of, so were rapidly adopted by gamers until they became pretty-much mandatory.

SSDs took off because your PC booted much faster with an SSD than a mechanical hard drive, and applications opened in a fraction of the time also. SSDs are now mandatory for a lot of newer AAA games.

AI PCs.... Nope, I got nothing....

Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist

Re: "It was just another sentence"

And test it too. Spin up a test version of the system, ideally with a copy of some real data and then implement the change on the test system to see if it works properly. This should be the case for changes on any critical systems really, always have a test environment you can break and rebuild without impacting production.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Needs more processing power

Depends how that ripped DVD is being decoded. The Pi has hardware decompression capabilities, so will depend if VLC is using the hardware or just the main CPU. I use my Pi 4 as a media centre with Kodi and it can happily handle 1080p H265 videos without breaking sweat. Of course, Kodi is much more lightweight than a full Linux distro...

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

So you'll soon (maybe) be able to get a Dell Pro Max laptop with an AMD Ryzen Max Pro CPU.

For Pete's sake...

With 10 months of support remaining, Windows 10 still dominates

"I want my OS to load and get out of my way."

Amen to this, have an upvote!

The OS should be a secure platform that allows me to run my required applications. I don't want ads for Edge, Office, OneDrive etc, I don't want stupid restrictions or UI failings to make it harder to do my work, I don't want pointless notifications popping up all the time.

Win 7 was perfect for this. Nice looking, flexible, did what I needed.

Win 10 was ugly as sin and very messy, but was capable and flexible enough that it worked.

Win 11 is restricted, limited and enshittified. The Start Menu is appalling, the taskbar is lacking basic functionality, the UI looks nice, but is messy and badly designed. Despite the drawbacks, it offers no practical benefits over Win 7/10. No thank you!

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

One of my quickest fixes was regarding a laptop that wasn't charging. User confirmed from the power icon in the system tray that the device was connected to power and was showing as being "plugged in", but it wouldn't charge. I went up, took a look at the user's docking station (this was the era of the big Dell E-docks) and immediately noticed the power connector was not fully plugged in (quite a bit of the steel barrel was visible). Slotted it home and the laptop immediately started charging.

Turns out with the Dell E-docks that it is possible to have the power connector sufficiently connected to power the laptop, but not enough for the laptop to know the wattage of the power brick, and in that situation it'll report that it has power but will refuse to charge. I think the call took me about 20 seconds - which included the time taken to check the system tray and confirm it was now charging correctly.

WhatsApp finally fixes View Once flaw that allowed theft of supposedly vanishing pics

I was wondering that as well. How do you stop someone from using the snipping tool to grab a copy?

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

Re: Warren's big mistake

No, he means Microsoft mobile apps. Like Outlook for mobile which is slower than a dehydrated slug, has a massive floating "New E-mail" button that obscures part of the message you're trying to read, and which randomly decides not to show you new e-mails because Intune is "syncing your policy" in the background. Of course, it doesnt tell you this, it just doesnt bother showing you that urgent email that arrived in your inbox 15 minutes ago...

Microsoft confirms there will be no U-turn on Windows 11 hardware requirements

It's not just the TPM though. My PC has a Ryzen 7 1700X CPU. It has built-in support for TPM 2.0, but Microsoft considers the CPU "too old" and hence Windows 11 is unsupported on it. Same for the Kaby Lake i5 NUC that I have. Both systems work absolutely fine for everything I throw at them, yet Microsoft considers them "unsupported", despite them having the necessary security capability.

Point is, I'm not going to rush out and buy new hardware I don't need, just because Microsoft and their hardware cronies want me to spend money in order to experience the restricted and ad-laden world of Windows 11.

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: Microsoft should add copilot to...

Or better still, Copilot can fly the plane for you, leaving you to play Flight Simulator without even having to touch a button - what could be better?

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

Fastest one I ever had was when working in support at my first job for a local UK council, fresh out of uni and still quite green.

Call came through that a PC in the front office wasn't working and just had a black screen. I did the usual phone troubleshooting of "is it turned on?" "Oh yes, there's a green light on the front". "OK, turn it off, wait a few seconds and turn it back on again". "No, still nothing, the screen is blank".

So as it was only one flight of stairs, I popped down. Walked over to the PC and hit the power button, only to see it spring into life. I learned a simple lesson that day - don't assume the users know the difference between the PC and the monitor (yes, they thought the monitor was the PC and were just turning the screen off and on again). I think the visit to the office took all of 10 seconds - 30 if you include me explaining that the little Dell box under the monitor was in fact the computer...

Edit: And a second one a number of years later for a PC where the mouse wasn't working. User had actually unplugged the mouse and plugged it back in, still no joy. I walked over, picked up the mouse and peeled the gaffer tape off the sensor. Laughter from some guys in the office as their prank had worked and one rather red-faced and irritated user!

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

Re: Crt

Wow, we've found someone who hasn't seen "This is Spinal Tap", including the legendary scene where inches and feet are mixed up for a piece of scenery:

"The problem wasn't that the band was down, the problem may have been that there was a monument of Stonehenge that was in danger of being crushed... by a dwarf!"

That setup would have lasted even less time at a previous workplace I was at. This particular workplace had access-controlled doors for every floor/wing of the building. You know, the usual scan RFID card to open the door setup. Then when leaving, there was a button to press which opened the door, all standard stuff. Except that the door-release button looked remarkably like a light-switch, and was in fact right next to the actual light switch.

I've honestly lost count of how many times people tried to open the door and just switched the lights off instead because they hit the wrong button...

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

I have an Itanium CPU that I pulled from a server at work that was being scrapped a number of years back, mainly just grabbed it as a random collectible oddity, but that does remain the only Itanium system I've ever actually come across in my career. Every other server at that place was x86.

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

Re: Cruel

Hmm, I'm not sure sure about minimal resistance. I've seen a lot of companies stick to Windows 10 for quite some time. I'd say it's more a case of having to upgrade to W11 to avoid paying lots of charges for extra support rather than wanting to. Of course there's also been a lot of delays whilst companies have waited for hardware Refresh programmes to deplete the amount of "incompatible" devices on their estates.

Now we're down to <1 year of "free" support left, and the fact that most machines on the estate will be compatible (excluding a few 5+ year old devices), we're now entering a time when the W11 upgrade projects are gathering steam. But like I say, upgrading because they have to, not because they see any real benefit from Win11.

Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed

I'm not sure if they ever broadcast the 25 minute versions. By my understanding they'd filmed or partially filmed around 9 episodes in "25 minute" format towards the end of 1964 before Lew Grade saw a screening of the pilot and demanded they extend them to 50 minutes. Given that it wasn't originally broadcast until September 1965, so I expect they extended the originally filmed episodes prior to broadcast, meaning the original 25 minute versions never saw the light of day.

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

Re: Function keys on a touch bar?

This is always what happens when "designers" have free reign and nobody considers usability.

You get the power button right next to "delete" and directly above "backspace" (yes, this is what I have on my work HP laptop - what could possibly go wrong?), a keyboard which looks sleek but is a pain in the arse to type on, and trackpads that are so large you could land a 747 on them and which you have to disable whilst typing because you keep catching them with your wrist and moving the cursor.

If only someone at Dell, HP etc. could try testing a prototype in the real-world first before realising that these are stupid ideas that should be nuked from orbit...

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Or my pet-peeve of a line whenever you're in an office to fix a problem that has been logged:

"Oh, by the way - whilst you're here..."

And of course you're boned either way. Say "yes" and fix the extra issue and people just hoard problems for when you visit and it looks like you take an hour to fix a 15-minute problem. Say "No, please log a ticket first" and you get the inevitable feedback about poor IT support. You just can't win...

AI to power the corporate Windows 11 refresh? Nobody's buying that

Sooner or later, the AI bubble will burst. At the moment, it feels like 20+ years ago when we were in the height of the dotcom bubble. Building a website was seen as a guaranteed way of getting rich, investors were flinging money at anyone who said "hey I've got an idea about a website", without any business plan or any clear design on how this new website would turn a profit.

Then the bubble burst. The good ideas, profitable sites, those with potential all survived. The crap disappeared, and many people who'd blindly thrown money at stupid gimmicks ended up out of pocket.

That moment will come with AI. Hopefully soon. Not saying AI will go away, it has its uses and it will survive in areas where it can actually offer useful value to people. But the pointless implementations, those that have no chance of making any money and which 99.9% of people are shunning, those will die off, and good riddance.

And let's face it, MS has a wealth of experience of jumping onto failed bandwagons. Just ask the teams behind Windows Phone, Cortana, Silverlight, Zune, Paint3D...

Thank you, Reg Readers: On Call has turned 500!

Both columns have been great additions to the Register's portfolio and brighten Mondays/Fridays up considerably. Here's hoping to another 500 "episodes" of both, Cheers!

NASA confirms who is flying and who is not on SpaceX Crew Dragon

Is it really coming from the speaker? Or given that it's a Boeing, are those ping noises simply the rivets falling off the door frame?

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

Re: This is the evidence!

Quite probably, but it wasn't just picked up here. Ars Technica also ran the same story. At the time of writing this, that article had nearly 300 comments, mostly saying pretty much the same thing as here: Settings is shit, and only contains a fraction of the functionality of Control Panel.

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

Same here, I remember having to park the heads before switching off on our first PC (an old 386). I did however rename the executable that did this from the rather boring "DPARK" to "BYE". I was easily amused as a teenager...

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

I developed a bit of an eye-twitch whilst reading this, brings back so many painful memories of supporting VC rooms - particularly Cisco Telepresence rooms in my past.

I do wish I'd thought of removing the features sticker though!

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: undeniably less attractive than the modern Settings app

Agreed. Sounded like a good idea at first as Control Panel can be a bit cluttered and messy, but then they blew it.

Loads of more advanced functionality missing, plus replacement of check boxes with those silly toggle switches. Any UI element that needs a text field next to it to tell you if it is on or off clearly fails at what it is supposed to convey.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

"Success!" I say to the Boss on his next visit. "I've brought up our accounting server!"

"Oh, the finance department will be pleased."

"No, no, I meant OUR accounting server. The one we use for tracking overtime."

---

Wonderful, it's important to get your priorities right!

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Bet he was bricking it when he saw who was in-line behind him...

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

I would add that deploying a ring 0/kernel level driver that takes input from a regularly updated content file and which does not perform sanity checking on that input file is also criminally negligent.

Even given their dodgy/insufficient testing processes, this whole mess could have been avoided if the driver validated the content file before attempting to execute it...

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

I'm looking forward to the episode of "Who, Me?" off the back of this...

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

Exactly what I came here to say. I've lost count of the times my Merc CLA has:

* Randomly claimed a single-carriageway road is a 70 limit

* Randomly claimed a dual-carriageway is a 60 limit

* Spotted a sign for a slip-road and insisted the speed limit on the dual-carriageway has dropped to 40mph

* Spotted the first of those "30mph in 300 yards" sign and insisted I'm in a 30 limit right now

* Wrongly claimed that completed roadworks are still present, so I must be in a 40 limit on the motorway (the old mapping data curse)

Thankfully, you can turn the warning beeps and flashing of the "perceived" speed limit off so that it just displays it in a static manner without nagging. However if it tried to actively impose those limits on my driving, it would be frankly dangerous.

It's the same mess with that hateful feature of lane-assist. Again, sounds good until you realise it:

* Can't cope with contraflows

* Often gets confused when white-lines have been re-drawn

* Attempts to override you swerving an obstruction such as a pothole and attempts to steer you into said obstruction

* Gets confused when low sunlight reflects off shiny tar repairs (attempting to suddenly swerve you into oncoming traffic).

Again, it's a feature that I consider more "dangerous" than "safety". I'm less lucky in that this system turns itself back on every time I start the car, but it has become muscle memory to go into settings and disable it each time.

This ultimately is the biggest problem with these so-called safety features. They sound fine on paper, but there are simply too many times when they don't work properly and attempt to override your vehicle control in a dangerous manner.

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

Re: They took his pager

And if he was charged...