Posts by Geoff Campbell

Copilot for Microsoft 365 might boost productivity if you survive the compliance minefield

Re: Costs or free

CoPilot is a range of products. The stuff given away for free is mostly just a search engine with a bit of fancy packaging, the chargeable stuff is more seriously generative.

GJC

Windows 11 continues slog up the Windows 10 mountain

Re: It does...

Oh, OK - I can confirm it's there in 24H2, you'll be pleased to hear.

GJC

Re: It does...

It's right there on my Mouse Settings page, labelled "Scrolling Direction". Do you have the latest release installed?

GJC

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: Boeing and Intel...

Good spot. Yes, seems like it might.

GJC

Re: Rapid push away

They really don't have any faith in the poor little fella, do they? Seems to me that the faults logged are rather more severe than the publicity releases would have us believe.

GJC

Pneumatic connectors

I pointed out elsewhere that there are plenty of workable gas-tight quick-detach connectors available for about three bucks a pop. My garage is full of them.

Space flight will only really become commoditised when the engineering starts using that sort of off-the-shelf component.

GJC

Re: IF it lands.....

There's a sort of sine-wave thing that goes on in some classes of company, it's very notable in the German car companies. For a while, the engineers run the place, and the cars produced are brilliant but expensive to build. Then the owners notice that they aren't making any money, and put accountants in charge. The cars get really rubbish, but cheap to build, and profits rise. Then people stop buying the cars, so the owners put engineers in charge. The cars get good but expensive to build, and profits go down again. Rinse and repeat.

GJC

Chinese broadband satellites may be Beijing's flying spying censors, think tank warns

Re: They're ignoring the similar risk for US companies

I can only assume that you live somewhere fairly urban.

Out here in Wales, the population density isn't huge by London standards, but there's a fair few of us rattling around the hills. Starlink is the only significant option for stable, fast Internet in a large chunk of the country - we do have 4G coverage, but it's barely enough to maintain a telephone conversation, let alone decent Internet service.

GJC

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Re: What makes a minicomputer?

Yes, seriously. Entry level for a business micro in the mid-'80s was £2-3,000, anything really well spec'ed would very easily break into five figures by the time you'd added memory, storage, a printer and several thousand pounds of software. We were selling stand-alone DTP packages for £15,000 or so, back in the happy days of 40% margins on hardware.

Three digits for a micro meant a self-build CP/M machine or home computer that no serious business would even acknowledge existed, let alone contemplate using (with the exception of the Apple II, which had a surprisingly long life in labs and other coal-face bits of big business).

That only really started to change with the advent of the Amstrad PC1512 in the second half of the decade, and that would never be considered by any significantly-sized business. Very handy for small businesses running on pirated copies of Lotus 123, though.

GJC

Re: What makes a minicomputer?

Mainframe - seven digit price tag

Minicomputer - six digit price tag

Microcomputer - five digit price tag, or occasionally four digit if you wanted to go cheap.

'80s money, of course, when seven digits really meant something.

GJC

Microsoft pushing, pushing, pushing Edge in Defender slammed as a 'dark pattern'

Re: NextCloud

I'm guessing we won't see any kind of factual answer to this question. Which is a shame, as a heavy user of OneDrive I'm curious, too.

GJC

Intel's microcode fix to save Raptor Lake chips may only work with default power settings

I find this rather pleasing, in a way.

Overclocking *should* be dangerous. It always used to be, you stood a good chance of frying your chip if you pushed the limits too far. It's nice to be back there again.

GJC

Apple is coming to take 30% cut of new Patreon subs on iOS

It Just Works

There is no technology in the modern era that doesn't Just Work(tm). Even Linux, bless it.

In particular, every single Android phone I have ever owned has Just Worked(tm). Have you ever tried one?

GJC

DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage

Hang on a sec...

30,000 attendees paying $460 in cash? That's just about $14million. In a country containing 300million registered firearms.

It's a wonder they haven't been raided, multiple times.

GJC

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Stock value

As I type, CrowdStrike stock is 76.25% higher than it was 12 months ago. So the markets have pretty much discounted the entire thing.

GJC

Intel to deliver fix for Raptor Lake CPUs made 'unstable' by voltage snafu

Too much complexity

If I may channel the spirit of the Reg's FOSS desk correspondent for a moment, this is a sure sign that CPU design has got massively too complex, as a result of poor software design favouring brute force performance over parallelism.

Back in the 1980s, the Transputer demonstrated what could be achieved by a very simple processor design in a big array, coupled to good software designed to take advantage of the parallelism this allowed. Then we ignored that lesson, and went for brute force instead.

I'm not hopeful that this is being fixed, as I see few examples of mainstream software really, truly utilising parallelism. Oh, well...

GJC

Copilot+ PCs software compatibility issues left to you to sort out, with help from crowdsourcers

Re: nice measure...

I've been using a Surface Pro X with Windows on ARM for my travelling machine for five years now, and for that sort of basic Office-and-browsing need it worked very well, but the new Snapdragon version is definitely a step up from there.

You're quite right, Microsoft won't do the same as Apple, but then they aren't really trying to, for the reasons that you state plus others, too. I think this is a good move forward and the first step in trying to divorce some of the legacy stuff from modern requirements, which is good. Previous attempts to release a pure modern Windows with no legacy were stillborn, sadly, which I think was a real missed opportunity.

I was having a chat with a friend over the weekend, who raised an interesting point in amongst all his normal anti-Microsoft ranting - it would be very nice to be able to turn off the Intel emulation stuff in WoA, and run purely ARM-native. That would give a great environment to work in, and some excellent first-line protection against about 95% of malware, too.

I agree on the 87% figure. It's a pretty meaningless statistic anyway, it could be measured in so many different ways, so I suspect they've just plucked a figure out of the air as a placeholder for "lots".

GJC

Re: nice measure...

MS Office is ARM-native, too, and for general business use, Office plus a browser is pretty much 100% of usage these days.

I'm very much liking my Surface Pro 11, but there is some caution required if you use older or niche software. Google Drive is a particular problem, and I confess I have no idea why they aren't releasing an ARM-native version, or at least fixing the initial architecture check in the code so it will run under emulation. I hate conspiracy theories, but the only thing I've heard that makes sense is that Google see WoA PCs as a threat to Chromebooks, and want to slow down its adoption.

GJC

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: The ribbon

I was assuming that you were aware that the keyboard shortcuts appear on screen as soon as you press the Alt key, but it appears that you are arguing from a position of supreme ignorance about how the product works, so I really am done here. Enjoy whatever software it is that you use, and I will continue to get excellent use out of Word.

GJC

Re: The ribbon

But just for you, I just logged into Office365 and fired up the online version of Word, and that has the search box in exactly the same place, for exactly the same utility. In fact, the online version of Word appears to have developed a lot recently, it's looking very good.

Now, can we drop this, please?

GJC

Re: The ribbon

No, it isn't an option. Straight out of the box, vanilla install.

You appear to be referencing the web interface into the online-only Word 365. I have no idea what that does, it's a cut-down convenience feature for occasional use.

GJC

Re: The ribbon

I just fired up Word, and the search box is right there, centre of the top of the window. I typed in "table" and got a list including "Table of Contents" and "Insert a Table". Seems to work fine.

GJC

Re: The ribbon

1) The menu shortcuts still work, if you have the muscle memory to use them.

2) There's a very good search box which will take you straight to the rarely-used stuff that isn't on the immediate ribbon use-case.

3) For the very-commonly-used stuff, the ribbon puts those functions right in front of you, immediately accessible. That's the point - shave a few milliseconds off the stuff that you're doing hundreds of times a day, perhaps in exchange for a few extra seconds on the stuff you do twice a year.

I rather like it, myself, and did from the first time I used it.

GJC

RIP: WordPerfect co-founder Bruce Bastian dies at 76

Re: I had no idea

MS Word has never been free, has it? Part of the Office bundle, sure, but that's paid for, and Microsoft weren't the only ones to do a complete office suite as a bundle.

GJC

Re: Nice write-up

Yes, indeed. I was supporting a WP and spreadsheet file translation package at the time, which jacked into email so you could email attachments to colleagues and they would be automatically translated from your WP format to their WP format on the fly. As I recall, it supported 54 different WP file formats, and about a dozen spreadsheet ones.

A few years later when Windows had got itself established, MS Office basically had the market to itself, excepting a few specialist things for, say, medical or legal markets.

GJC

Nice write-up

I worked with WordPerfect a lot in the '80s and through into the early '90s, it was a good product on MS-DOS, but the transition to Windows was rather fumbled.

I always thought that the name was a stroke of genius, linking the product to the generic WP so that when people considered a Word Processor, they automatically first thought WordPerfect. Of course, it being a decent product didn't hurt any.

I remember the dying days of the typing pool, when skilled WordPerfect people were commanding £15-20/hour, which back in those days meant a week of solid work could buy you half a semi-detached house in Woking.

GJC

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

They really are, you know.

GJC

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

Huh? Corporates replace their computers on a 3-5 year cycle. That's the one market that you can pretty much guarantee will be running hardware that is quite happy with Windows 11.

GJC

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

I have been using Linux since, um, 1994 I think it was. Certainly 1995, as I set up a whole company using it that year (after compiling from source and fixing the bugs in the 3Com network drivers). Within arm-reach of me now are more Linux machines than any other OS.

On my desktops and laptops? Windows all the way. The Microsoft ecosystem Just Works(tm), and allows me ultimate freedom in which devices I choose to use on any given day. Do I trust Microsoft? No, no more than I trust any other corporation, which includes Apple and a whole bunch of contributors to, and distributors of, Linux, too. Are Microsoft being constantly and minutely examined under a microscope so that every little flaw comes to light in seconds? Yup. That'll do for me.

Downvote away. It's your own time you're wasting.

GJC

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Five years

We got Starlink (in Wales) over three years ago, and there were areas of the UK ordering it before that, and the US got it first, before the UK. So the first satellites into operation must be pretty much five years old. That seems to fit the lifespan prediction to me.

GJC

Re: The race is on

It's an interesting answer to the Fermi Paradox. It looks like once a species gets to a certain size, pretty much any technological advance runs a high risk of the unintended consequences being species-threatening.

GJC

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Re: HR Dept

That is certainly true.

GJC

Re: Actually the most inappropriate applications

I won't take any lectures on writing style from someone too frit to put their name on their messages. I've been signing off online messages for four decades now, I'm not stopping just because some prick on the Internet doesn't like it.

GJC

Re: A&A

An excellent ISP, run by proper techies. Well worth a look.

https://www.aa.net.uk/

GJC

Re: Actually the most inappropriate applications

I'm an incurable optimist, but it would be great to have an AI set up to scan the whole support call database, and compile an FAQ based on that.

What a wonderful world that would be. It ain't going to happen, though.

GJC

Re: HR Dept

No, that's unfair. I have known many intelligent, hard-working HR people (actually, more than most, as I used to write and support a personnel system, many decades ago), but what you have to realise is that your objectives are not their objectives. Once this is established, things normally go well enough.

GJC

Re: Actually the most inappropriate applications

I used to run an ISP, back in the days when 80% of the customers were technical, and the 20% who weren't were happy to profess their ignorance and use support time as a learning experience.

It was utter bliss, and I like to think we gave good service as a result.

GJC

Re: Actually the most inappropriate applications

The FAQ battle was lost a *long* time ago. At best these days you might get an FAQ written by an actual serving member of the support team, but mostly they seem to be written at the same time, by the same people, and to the same dreadful standard as the rest of the documentation. Utterly pointless, in most case.

GJC

Re: Dream a little dream

Who's hallucinating whom? As it were.

GJC

Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

Re: Why bother?

I can't, and won't, speak for anyone else, but I still use Windows on my end-user devices because the wider Microsoft ecosystem meets my needs perfectly and cheaply, and doesn't ever cause me any problems.

I'm very familiar with Linux and FreeBSD, I use both for other purposes, and for my requirements they are very inferior to Windows on end-user devices.

You may downvote at will. I care not a jot.

GJC

Re: that is not 'capitalism'

Capitalism is the worship of capital. "Fair exchange" has never had anything to do with it, at all - if anything, that's more of a Socialist concept.

GJC

Raspberry Pi IPO is oversubscribed multiple times

Re: Oversubscribed

My very first thought. I love their products, and I buy loads of them. That would probably stop if the prices rose significantly.

GJC

Re: "Certainly while I'm in charge."

Only if you measure "success" as "maximum profits".

In the short or medium term, it's quite likely that the best interests of the company, and thus the shareholders, might be served by a more considered, lower-profit approach. The list of corporations that have maximised short-term profits by gutting the company is almost endless, and every single one was a tragedy.

GJC

Analysts join the call for Microsoft to recall Recall

Re: Even if….

<shrug>

You don't like it, don't use it. I don't think I'll be adding it into my daily working patterns, precisely because I am normally pretty well organised and self-sufficient, but on those occasions where it can solve a problem, I suspect it will be invaluable. And for this sort of free-ranging discussion, where I might want to reference a website article I saw in passing three weeks ago, I think it will prove to be brilliant.

I'm also not sure about your assertion that it's an old idea, either. Can you point me at any system that has done this in the past?

GJC

Re: Regedit

Well, it's a valid data point, but on a completely disconnected axis.

GJC

Re: Even if….

You aren't just presented with a cache of screenshots. The point is that the screenshots are analysed by the machine so that you can ask vaguely-worded questions about stuff you were doing last week/month/whatever and the computer will guide you to the right place to pick up on it - this is why it is only available on machines equipped with a decently chunky NPU.

It sounds to me typically Microsoft - a rather brilliant idea, implemented with absolutely no regard to the unintended consequences. I'll be evaluating it *extremely* carefully, and then probably disabling it until a more secure v2 is rolled out.

For the record, by the way, this is really already v2. There was a brief appearance of a feature called Timeline, which gathered all your recent file accesses into a single easily-navigated reference list. It was occasionally very useful, and I was always puzzled why it appeared and then disappeared so quickly. Given the timeline for developing Recall, I guess we know the answer to that now.

GJC

Re: Regedit

Don't know what you've done to your PC, mine finds and executes Regedit instantly when I use search.

GJC

Windows 11 tries to escape Windows 10's shadow with AI muscle

Re: The only AI feature I would actually welcome...

That's pretty much what CoPilot+ will be doing, as I understand it, or at least one of the core features. I'll find out on the 18th.

GJC

Re: Meanwhile ...

You are not alone. I put Windows 11 on my PCs right back at beta release, and it's worked fine for me ever since. I have no idea what people are doing who suffer all these problems, but perhaps it's just a sign of how wide and deep the hardware support is for Windows?

I'm still very happy with the Microsoft ecosystem, it does everything that I need for my PC use, and means that I will never have that awkward "well, it opens fine on *my* PC" conversation with any of my customers.

I do have a number of machines running Linux and OpenBSD, it's fine for the tasks I picked it for. Everyone should run what they like for the tasks that they have, but please, please don't turn it into some sort of tribal warfare nonsense!

GJC