Posts by Dave K

Microsoft sends Outlook Lite to the great inbox in the sky as memory costs skyrocket

> "It is unclear why Microsoft is abandoning devices with limited storage and memory."

Too difficult to bolt Copilot slop onto them perhaps?

Notepad sheds Copilot from toolbar as Microsoft gives subtlety a try

Re: It's not all bad...

Notepad++ does most those of things as well...

The draft functionality, plus having several files open in tabs is actually useful. Adding Copilot and text formatting options definitely is not however.

IT manager approved downtime over lunch, but made a meal of it

I'm no longer on the front line for this kind of thing, but back when I was I'd use the word "serviceable" to describe them.

By and large, being careful and labelling/patching carefully as you go can prevent a dog's breakfast from ever forming. On the one occasion I joined a company with a pig's ear of a comms room, we arranged for a weekend of overtime to carefully re-patch/label the whole room and test everything afterwards. That way when something inevitably didn't work afterwards, we had plenty of time (and an extra day if needed) to get it working whilst the building was empty.

Some of the phrases to make sysadmins quake in their shoes are "It'll only take a few minutes" and "It'll be straightforward". You can guarantee that fate will throw you a curveball if you try for a quick fix during business hours...

So many youngsters in IT would act in this way, then get surprised at the older and more experienced coworkers saying "No, leave it alone". There's a very good reason for that - an untidy but working server is better than a tidy dead one.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

It's a pain in the backside. I have a laptop which I use when travelling. Sometimes (depending on required company events), it might not get powered up for 2-3 months at a time. Then when I do power it up, it always insists on running like a pig for ages, taking 15 minutes to shut down due to the application of updates etc.

I have to admit that I ended up installing "Windows Update Blocker" as it gives me an easy way to enable/disable updates, plus an easy way to see the current status of the Windows Update service. It's not ideal, but it at least stops the thing from trying to update when I'm trying to shut the laptop down in order to board a flight, or any of the other infuriating times when Windows decides to spend ages updating at a deeply inconvenient time.

I then typically try and remember to power it up at home every now and then, enable updates and let it catch up. But even then (prior to installing the blocker tool), it had a habit at times of thinking it's all up-to-date, only to discover a nice fat update that needs to be installed the moment I'm in a hotel room or airport with crappy slow Wifi or something.

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Re: mandated AI

If that's the definition of your boss's job, I know a great starting point for cutting a position and hence salary expenses...

Re: mandated AI

It's just stupid. What ever happened to judging employees based on how good a job they do instead? If someone excels without AI, what's the problem?

If AI is genuinely useful, those who use it should excel and this should be evident in the quantity and quality of their work. In this situation, those who don't use it and who's work is suffering in comparison may need to adapt. But when your only metric is "Barry used AI 23% more than you so he's getting a bonus and you aren't", you're just part of the slop machine.

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

Thankfully it was a breeze to fix...

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

In the current world of Online Safety Act and other stupid bits of legislation which require you to hand over your ID and security to dodgy third party websites, a VPN is actually far more useful than you think - and I'm not talking about browsing porn!

At present I use two browsers: Vivaldi for normal browsing (where I want to be identified as a UK user for shopping, news and the likes), and Opera because it has built in VPN. I've lost count of how many websites I've visited that are either peppered with "Content not available in your region" overlays because of embedded Imgur pictures (such as Nexus Mods, various forums and the likes), or those that block copious amounts of content because I refuse to sacrifice my own online safety by uploading scans of passports to verify my age (ie, Reddit). Opera with VPN allows those sites to just work normally and in full for me whilst protecting my own "online safety".

Having a simple free VPN in Firefox makes it increasingly viable for those sort of sites as well and is a good thing IMO.

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Re: Edge

Also because more and more enterprises are just enforcing the use of Edge for browsing - just as they used to do with IE about 20 years back.

There was a period of time when IE was on the way out and original Edge was so rubbish that IT orgs rolled out Chrome across their estates. However now that Edge is also just a Chromium browser and installed by default on Windows, many IT orgs are feeling there's no need to deploy, manage and patch a second browser, so Chrome is often being removed leaving Edge as the only option.

Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

Re: Fundamentals?

This. It also integrates dreadfully with OneDrive. I hate that if you duplicate a file in a OneDrive-linked folder, you can't reliably rename it until it has finished syncing. If you do, then half-way through renaming it, Explorer will randomly select the entire filename so you end up accidentally wiping it. Why?

Or there's the stupid bit where you rename a file and open it, only for Excel to show the old filename and throw a "This file has been renamed, we recommend saving it to get the new filename". At what point is that good design? Why does Excel show the old filename? Why does it need to be saved to grab the current filename? What sort of useless, inept shit is this?

MS really needs to go back to the basic fundamentals of what a quick and reliable file manager should be, and fix Office's file handling as well for that matter.

Re: I have an idea

Controversial take, but I'll give you an upvote. I think lots of people look at Win10 with rose-tinted glasses, but it was not a good OS. It was just better than Windows 8 and "OK" overall - hardly a glowing endorsement. The UI was flat, dreary and boring. It was hopelessly inconsistent with a mis-mash of old/new dialogs, the Start Menu was merely "OK", but nowhere near as good as Windows 7's menu. It started the push towards "you must use a Microsoft account", albeit it was easier to bypass. Basically, it always felt to me like an unfinished piece of "beta" software that never got completed. There was way too much about it that screamed of unfinished placeholders and other bits that felt roughly bodged together.

Win11 is a funny one. The UI is far more smooth and consistent - it actually looks like they gave a crap about how it looked. Unfortunately, they then enshittified it with ads, dumbed it down by stripping out customisability, implemented an awfully restricted and basic task bar and Start Menu, gave it ridiculous system requirements that blocked perfectly capable systems from running it, then spent most of their time bolting Copilot icons everywhere instead of fixing the multitude of gripes people had with it. If it had landed as a more polished and customisable Win10 without all the enshittification and dumbing down, it probably wouldn't have received such a negative reception.

FWIW, I do prefer Win10 to Win11, but Win7 remains the last MS OS where I feel they made a genuine effort to deliver a polished product that would be well received by users, instead of just doing what they wanted to do instead. Saying that, if MS were to put a concerted effort into fixing the pain-points of Win11, adding more customisability and trying to design it to be what people want, maybe the animosity towards it will fade. Oh, and MS: Allow local accounts again!!

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

In other words, PwC wants employees who can't think for themselves and who have to ask an AI to think and write for them. This should end well!

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Yep! I'd read tales about people confusing the two, but never really believed it until I came across this situation myself.

> Have you fixed a fault by merely flicking a switch?

Yep, but rather boringly in my case, the switch in question was the power button.

It was back in 2004 and I was fresh out of University and working in IT support for a local council. I got a call to say that a PC in the office next to the front desk wasn't working and was just showing a blank screen. Despite being young and green, I did ask if it was powered on (ie, is there a green light on the front), yes there was apparently.

Given that the office in question was only a 30-second walk from my desk, I decided just to pop along and take a look at it - quicker than troubleshooting over the phone. The moment I walked into the office I saw the problem. The monitor was on, but the slimline Optiplex underneath the monitor was not. I hit the power button and it booted up just fine. Turns out it was a shared machine that was usually powered on 24/7, the current user was not IT literate and had never had to turn the base unit on before. Users of that system usually just logged off and switched the monitor off at the end of their shifts.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Re: Well that lasted long

Problem is that they risk the opposite. AI fatigue is real, they run the risk of people getting so sick and tired of AI interfering and being so obtrusive that they refuse to use Copilot out of principle. I'm one of them! It has its uses, but it's so unbelievably annoying when you're stuck with it on a corporate laptop that you take great pleasure in giving it the middle finger.

In short, they're attempting to boost uptake by ramming it down your throat and don't seem to realise that this will result in many people gagging and throwing up rather than swallowing it.

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Here we go again

As soon as I saw the headline I thought "Let me guess, they're going to vomit Copilot all over it". I guess I'm not wrong.

Where I work, they've recently deployed Copilot licenses to the entire estate and it's an absolute pain in the arse. AI Icons and overlays that follow you around everywhere (and cannot be disabled), repeated popups and nag screens pleading and begging me to use and chat with it, a literal swarm of Copilot icons spread far and wide over every possible surface. It's so intrusive it's obtrusive and I absolutely despise it.

It's like trying to work whilst having a 2 year old toddler tugging at your sleeve and saying "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! I want to help! Daddy I want to help! Let me help!". Not what you want whilst trying to concentrate. The AI bubble cannot pop fast enough for my liking.

Urgh...

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

I get this, but if "ordinary" people wanted and used them, surely they would have been a roaring success the last two times MS dabbled with widgets (Win98/Vista) and MS wouldn't have promptly scrapped them moments later.

Exactly, it's not like they haven't tried this before. Every time they've tried adding widgets, they've crashed and burned because the vast majority of people don't want them. But this is Microsoft - never let the users get in the way of screwing things up eh!

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

Re: "tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

The emergency services are NOT the local council. You're comparing two entirely different bodies and are coming across as a major idiot in the process. Even then, if you phone 999 and ask stupid questions, you will be hung up on and may be reported to police for abuse of an emergency contact number. It's not there for you to phone up and ask random questions, it's there to report emergencies.

Similarly, phone up your council's housing number with a legitimate question about social housing and you'll get help. Ask stupid questions instead and you won't. The number is there for council tenants to get help/assistance, not for stupid random questions. Same goes for e-mail. Contact the council tax team with a stupid question and of course they'll delete the e-mail without replying. It's not what the mailbox is for and it's not what those public servants are being paid to do.

Re: "tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring"

Clearly you've never worked with public servants. I have. (here in the UK, I was IT support for a local council some time back), and the vast majority work pretty hard. I'm willing to guess you haven't worked with public servants, have no idea what they do, so you're just going straight in with a baseless "they must do nothing then" approach, which is deeply misguided.

At the place I worked at, there were teams dealing with social housing request/maintenance etc, teams collecting/processing/chasing council tax, teams dealing with planning proposals/disputes, teams managing various infrastructure such as libraries/leisure centres/community centres, the list goes on and on. Just because you don't know what they do doesn't mean they're not doing anything.

As your your comment of e-mailing random government/council bodies with random questions, did it ever occur to you that those people may in fact be busy doing their JOBS and hence may not have the free time to just sit there and reply to every inane query that you send through?

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Been there!

I'm sure many of us have been there in fact. I had one many, many years ago when working at a council as IT support and I encountered a Dell desktop that was showing graphical corruption - including on the BIOS screen. I tried swapping out the RAM, no joy. So, I phoned Dell's support.

The guy was obviously working from a script that included "Re-install the OS" as a troubleshooting step, no amount of trying to point out that the OS has absolutely nothing to do with the BIOS screen would get him to budge. In the end the simplest option was to say "I'll give that a try", hang up, go and fix a few other issues around the place, then phone back an hour later and say "OK, I did that and it didn't work".

Magically, we suddenly got an engineer scheduled to come out and swap the motherboard - which fixed it, fancy that!

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Re: Neat trick

Yeah, the only way "Shut down" could have been involved with the full-blown BOFH version would have been "Shut"ting the lift doors after lobbing the aforementioned PC "down" the lift shaft. But only after making sure that a couple of trailing cables from it have unfortunately snagged on the clothing of the two office bullies first of course.

Try finding that in the system logs!

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: It is a sad day for Microsoft

Yeah, looks like Contoso migrated to Linux and LibreOffice. Probably to get away from all the Copilot bollocks...

Dell says Windows 11 transition is far slower than Win 10 shift as PC sales stall

Re: "the potential of the AI PC"

As it stands, an AI PC is a solution looking for a problem. It will remain that way until a genuinely useful program/feature comes along that can actually utilise the NPU.

If there's no killer feature that can utilise the NPU and provide real-world benefit? What's the point in shelling out for an AI PC? At the moment, the only thing they've got is "future proofing"...

Microsoft exec finds AI cynicism 'mindblowing'

That's the issue in a nutshell. AI is like having a young, enthusiastic intern working for you. Sure there's a few simpler bits and pieces they can probably help with, but they are prone to making mistakes and lack the experience of the more grizzled veterans on your team.

So when you have something vitally important to work upon, you'd be crazy to hand it off to the intern because there's a high likelihood of mistakes in the work they'd return, and you'd have to spend a lot more time testing, validating and fixing their work. So in these cases, you'd usually either hand it to one of your more experienced and dedicated co-workers, or you'd tackle it yourself - because at the end of the day, you're accountable for the end-product.

There is a place for interns to provide some cheap value, but there's also a lot of cases where you simply need skill and experience for a piece of work. Plus of course with an intern, you're trying to train them up to become the grizzled veterans of tomorrow - something that doesn't really exist for an AI tool.

That's how it is for me. I'm accountable for the work I produce. Yes, I delegate some bits of it to co-workers in the team and utilise some "cheaper" heads for certain more utilitarian bits, but anything that's mission critical I either tackle myself or only entrust to someone who's competence and experience is without question. Why on earth would I risk my job and my credibility by allowing AI to make a botched attempt at my work just so I can grab a cup of coffee?

Commodity memory prices set to double as fabs pivot to AI market

AI - the gift that keeps on giving...

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

"evolving into an agentic OS."

Here we go again, MS doing what they want to do - not what users want them to do. Truly the era of enshittification shows no signs of abating...

Dame Emma Thompson gives the 'AI revolution' both barrels

Re: Speaks for many of us

Exactly. My wife sometimes struggles to structure letters, statements etc. in a way she's happy with. She now asks ChatGPT to draft something, sometimes asks it to re-write in a more concise manner, then reviews, tweaks and ultimately uses that. It saves her time and she finds it useful. That's great! It's a tool being used for a beneficial purpose.

Similarly, I have some colleagues at work that find Copilot useful for generating minutes/actions off the back of Teams calls. Again, no problem with this. If an AI tool is providing value, great!

It's the incessant nagging, the icons and popups all over the place, AI being shoved into stupid places where it provides no value, updates that turn AI icons/features back on after I've disabled them. Those are the problems.

Speaks for many of us

Well said Emma, many of us feel the same way.

I want to be clear, I have no problem with AI tools existing. They have some (limited) uses, certain people like to use them and that's fine.

What I do object to is having them rammed down my throat all the f**king time. I'm sick and tired of Copilot popups everywhere, Copilot icons appearing where they serve no purpose (ie, Notepad), Teams desperately and repeatedly nagging me to pin the Copilot icon to the toolbar, Adobe Reader displaying popups telling me I can "use the AI assistant to summarise this" when I'm just trying to view a boarding pass, AI icons and nags appearing in instant messaging apps (looking at you WhatsApp).

Heck, the other day I was in the market for a replacement vacuum cleaner and there's now a Samsung cordless vac range with AI and a connected app. For Pete's sake, why? Who on earth is asking for this? I told my wife (who likes and regularly uses ChatGPT), her response "That's just stupid!".

Vendors need to realise that they are in serious danger of alienating an increasing large volume of the population by nagging and pushing AI too incessantly and in too many stupid places. We're sick of it to the point that I now actively avoid anything marketed as AI, because it'll just be filled with irritating, annoying and pointless slop most the time.

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

If I wanted a lighter phone with less functionality, I'd also want it to be smaller in terms of dimensions, not just thinner and flimsier...

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

Re: AC = Artificial Clairvoyance

Copilot can "listen in" to the meeting (assuming Teams) then create minutes/actions off the back of it. Not used it myself, but I know a couple who have.

Boris Johnson confesses: He's fallen for ChatGPT

Re: Johnson sacking

Both actually. It was the Chris Pincher affair that brought him down to start with.

Notably his MPs being informed that he had never heard the sexual misconduct allegations about Pincher before, many of them parroted this to the media. Then within 24 hours, the media showed proof that he had in fact been previously informed. As the latest in a long string of scandals and with his own MPs feeling lied to by Blonde-Leader, that triggered the waves of resignations until he folded.

Of course, had he survived that, the misleading-parliament scandal could well have ended things for him if he wasn't already gone...

Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one

AI implementations have been around for a good couple of years now, yet still no "must-have" AI feature has arisen that needs this NPU. All we've seen is a small handful of gimmicks that make little real-world difference. Meanwhile, MS's approach is "Please buy a computer with a pointless CPU feature. I'm sure we'll find a useful purpose for it eventually!".

Maybe instead of blathering on all the time, why don't they try working on a useful feature instead. Make people *want* to get a PC with an NPU, rather than repeatedly pushing them to buy something which currently has no real-world benefit?

Saying that, I am also concerned that NPUs will become part of Windows 12's requirements - despite how useless the NPU currently is...

Amazon will refund $1.5B to 35M customers allegedly duped into paying for Prime

Re: I quit Prime. You can too, eventually.

I ended up being conned into signing up for Prime several years ago.

The website usually has a big green "Yes, I want Prime" button at check out, with a smaller grey "No thanks" button next to it. A few years ago, they changed it such that the grey button *also* became a "Yes I want Prime" button with the opt-out shifted to an ordinary link underneath. Obviously thanks to muscle memory, you go through checkout and click the small grey button. To say I was pissed off when a big "Welcome to Prime!!" screen appeared is an understatement.

Thankfully it was just a free trial, but I immediately cancelled it, then swore blind that I would never, ever pay for Prime as long as I lived thanks to their dodgy, underhand tactics. I do actually try to avoid buying from Amazon where I can, but sometimes the cost/palaver involved with avoiding it is too much.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: Stair oil

That and the building address being part of the local Ambulance driver's "knowledge" test...

Stair oil

I started to think that the BOFH would be screwed if they ever got a "healthy" head of HR that liked to take the stairs for a change, but then I remembered the PFY's "stair oil" from a few years back and realised - there is truly no safe way of migrating between floors in that building...

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Perty cool study

They vary in terms of effectiveness. I find the "driver assist" features in my Merc CLA to be OK. Never had an issue with phantom braking and the "lane assist" is pretty laid back as well and only intervenes if you actually drift across the white lines. My sister's Skoda Fabia however is awful. Constantly tugging at the wheel, even when you are in your lane, plus it's utterly unable to cope with single-track roads and contraflows. It's now muscle memory for her to disable it every time she starts the car. Ironically, she feels safer that way!

Office 2016 and 2019 face October 14 execution date

Literally the only feature in earlier Office that I miss is the XLOOKUP function in Excel. Even then you can work around it via INDEX/MATCH. I can't think of anything else I use in Office that hasn't been present for 20+ years...

Microsoft Surface 7 laptop: Nice hardware, shame about the OS

"there remains no killer AI app to justify the hardware"

Yep, still a solution looking for a problem. Who knows, maybe a killer application or two will eventually come along. For now though, having an NPU and "Copilot+" certification is largely irrelevant.

How did you find the performance of none-native code on the device? Would be interested to hear how x86 code performs and the impact emulation has on battery life.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Honey, I'm ~

Google tries to trump iPhone launch with AI-powered Pixel 10 range

Re: Sooo

The bubble hasn't yet burst unfortunately. It's the current in-fashion shiny-shiny for developers, so to try and justify all the work that has been done with AI, they're just shoving it everywhere. The bubble will hopefully burst soon, a lot of the AI shit will go away (where nobody is using it or where it's not generating any value) and we'll hopefully end up with a more sensible deployment of limited AI in areas where it actually has some uses.

Personally I can't wait for that moment to arrive. I'm seeing more and more AI-fatigue kicking in as people become increasingly sick and tired of having AI shoved down their throats at every possible opportunity...

Millions of age checks performed as UK Online Safety Act gets rolling

"without collecting or storing personal data, unless absolutely necessary."

Hands-up how many people believe this? That these sites will not store anything and will discard photos/scans as soon as they process them?

There's no way in hell I'm going to upload sensitive, personal data such as driving license scans to a random, unverified 3rd party website when I have no idea of how they're processing that data, how it may be stored, etc. etc. It's just asking for a data breach and a treasure-trove of sensitive information being leaked online.

Of course, so many people think you're only affected if you watch porn. However, I've seen these age checks popping up for large sections of Reddit (anything flagged as NSFW - including simple subreddits like r/beer), songs on Spotify with explicit lyrics, etc. etc. It's just ridiculous.

So, it'll remain a hard-pass from me regarding uploading facial scans and passport photos and instead I'll just get around the censorship via VPN. What a bloody mess...

Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos

Windows 10 was not a "good" operating system. At its best, it was "okay" - which isn't exactly a glowing endorsement.

I often think it gets remembered more fondly than it should due to what came before (Windows 8) and after (Windows 11). But let's be honest, the ads, the increasing pushes for a "Microsoft account", the way MS forced it on people in the early days - including downloading it without permission and over metred connections, the way it was *way* too trigger-happy to reboot after installing updates, none of these were good things.

That's before you get to all the other issues. The flat, boring, lifeless and utterly depressing UI, the split between Settings/Control Panel (*still* not resolved), the annoying and cheap-sounding "bingy-bong" sound effects, the broken throbber (only OS I know where it isn't a smooth, looping animation), Metro applications that ignore accessibility settings. In essence, it constantly felt like a piece of unfinished, beta software. Never like a finished and polished product. Way too much of it felt like half-finished "placeholders" that were still awaiting the final code/sounds/design.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer it to Windows 11 - even if Win 11 does look nicer, but it was not a "sane" or good OS. You've got to go back to Win 7 for that.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Well, the map view is correct in my experience for where I live - Three and EE get a good 4G signal that works indoors, O2 and Vodafone get a rubbish Edge signal that only works outdoors.

But then on the "performance" view, O2 gets 81% whereas EE only gets 80%? That I don't get. How can I be "more likely" to stream video on a flaky 1-bar Edge signal than a 4-bar 4G signal? I mean, both count as "having coverage" I guess, but it's completely at odds with what the map view (and reality) says.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!

>> "I can foresee a new hardware requirement: minimum 42" 4k screen."

That's going to make future laptops a bit of a bugger!

Please tell us Reg: Why are AI PC sales slower than expected?

And yet you never see that mentioned in the advertising blurbs!

What is the use case for these? To me, it still isn't clear. I don't use AI at all, but my wife does use ChatGPT at times - however she doesn't need an "AI PC" to use that.

I'm still waiting for a big app or a big use-case/clear benefit from having an NPU on your PC. And no, that abomination known as Recall doesn't count!

To me, it's just another case of a solution looking for a problem...

VodafoneThree's a crowd – now comes the hard bit

I'm wary of this because the small Scottish village I live in has a decent 4G Three signal (network I currently use), but a pitiful 2G Vodafone signal. Really hope they do things properly when merging the networks and they don't just decide to scrap the Three network and move everyone to Vodafone's infrastructure. Otherwise I'll need to try and find a new provider!

It also helps that because I've been with Three for a long while, I still get free EU roaming from them (they only introduced roaming charges for "New" customers back in 2021 or so). Vodafone however have slapped roaming on everyone. Again, another part of my current service I hope isn't degraded. Not holding my breath through...

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: And the lesson we learn today is:

Unless the "percussive maintenance" requires bludgeoning a lazy server admin over the head with aforementioned hammer drill...