Posts by Alan Bourke

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Cue a million replies

confusing anecdote with data.

ICE enlists Palantir to develop all-seeing 'ImmigrationOS' eye to speed up deportations

And the Labour Party

have a hardon for letting these goosestepping pricks get their mitts on the NHS

ActiveX blocked by default in Microsoft 365 because remote code execution is bad, OK?

Re: ActiveX?

Yes, it's still a thing in the real world where companies use stuff that has been working just fine for them for a very long time because why would they go through the ballache of changing. Which isn't to say that it shouldn't die immediately, but the real world doesnt' work that way.

Worry not. China's on the line saying AGI still a long way off

Can't remember who said it ...

... but they said something to the effect that what if we have now in the 'AI' sphere is like getting a person into Earth orbit, then AGI is like interstellar FTL spaceflight.

Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

World's greatest democracy

it says here.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Just a thought

Like that on its own would be the dealbreaker for an employer. If they're already in the mindset of looking at Bangalore they're looking at paying peanuts where possible, the fact that you're not in the office is irrelevant.

Windows 11 24H2 strikes again – Outlook might not start with Google Workspace Sync running

"Automate it to send emails?"

"Bahahaha. You delightful young booby."

AWS says AI could disrupt everything – and hopes it will do just that to Windows

Ah yes just like 3D printing

blockchain, VR and so forth.

A new dawn of humanity? Or the latest tech that will have uses in some areas being furiously pumped by the tech sector because line must go up.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

No meaningful automation options

... so your desktop apps that automate it to send emails are screwed.

Re: OUTHOUSE(OutLook)

*Alan Partridge shrugging GIF*

Bluesky keeps growing, and so do its problems

Aw diddums

Is your anonymous hating getting you blocked?

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models

I can see this outside the EU on the home versions of Windows.

Would be sceptical of it happening inside the EU or on enterprise SKUs.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

The old IT saying 'garbage in, garbage out'

... was never more relevant.

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

"... when users run legacy applications."

They're not legacy applications any more than native ARM binaries are legacy applications if run under emulation on x86

Python dethrones JavaScript as the most-used language on GitHub

Re: Bollox

A jazzed up search engine that spits out boilerplate? Fine, it's a time saving tool for certain things. I'll take that.

Old, lazy developers? They've seen hype bandwagon-pumped alleged new dawns of humanity four or five times overt their careers probably, so are healthily cynical.

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

Re: not again

Calm down Alan Sugar. World has moved on.

HPE CEO: 'Best interest of shareholders' to pursue $4B damages from Lynch estate

Re: A storm off the coast of Sicily

Oh there's a batshit insane conspiracy theory behind everything these days.

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

Re: General Court erred

Except that's not what happened, Brexit Boy.

Ah well at least we'll be able to afford a few more bike shelters for politicians ...

https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0902/1467936-leinster-house-bike-shed/

"Answers needed from OPW over €335k bike shelter"

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Ah Concurrent DOS

Fond* memories of setting up cheapo star networks with Wyse terminals hanging off a 16-port serial board. And of course C\DOS didn't run a lot of MS-DOS software like WordStar properly,.

*not fond

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

"Even less relevant was CP/M, which bloated the price for no useful gain. "

Not only that but the C128 implementation was dog slow:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2361/why-does-the-commodore-c128-perform-poorly-when-running-cp-m

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

cue the wailing

About things not staying like Windows XP

Brit tech mogul Mike Lynch missing after yacht sinks off Sicily amid storms

Re: Coincidence or what !!!

Not everything has to be conspiracy you doorknob

It's all drying up: Microsoft to erase 3D Paint from digital store

A very odd product

Who's it aimed at - casual 3d scene artists? Lots of those guys ...

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: Came here for the absolute loons saying it's better than Word

Hey all the millions of you worldwide using Word for years very successfully - what if I told you Excel is a better word processor! I've lifted the veil from your eyes!

By no sane metric are either WP for DOS or Excel a better word processor trhan Word.

Came here for the absolute loons saying it's better than Word

... wasn't disappointed.

FTC grabs controller as Microsoft jacks up Game Pass price by 81%

Obviously it is

if you're 15 and everyone else in your class or group of friends has the latest COD\FIFA\Madden on release day and you'll look like a twat if you don't.

Angry admins share the CrowdStrike outage experience

Re: Beyond me

Tell me you haven't got the first notion about modern Windows etc. Why didn't you put a 'Micro$oft' in there as well like it's 2002? If the cheaper alternatives proved to be actually better in the corporate world outside your bedroom then everyone would be using them.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Fun Times......

You can log into your 365 from another PC or your phone.

Re: Related?

It's a Crowdstrike issue, not Microsoft. Try reading the article.

What, like this one you mean?

https://macresearch.org/macos-big-sur-boot-loop-fix/

Getting sick of evermore intrusive endpoint security suites

riding roughshod over everything else on systems like they have some sort of divine right.

Windows Notepad gets spell check. Only took 41 years

It's a text editor

WTF does it need spellcheck for ?

Windows: Insecure by design

Re: how much punishment are you willing to take?

Medal's in the post.

SoftBank boss says 'artificial superintelligence' could be three years away

This man

is talking out of his hoop.

Digital Realty CTO weighs in on AI's insatiable thirst for power

Ugh I hate

f**king techbros

Microsoft cancels universal Recall release in favor of Windows Insider preview

Oh it'll be back ...

they're postively doing the backstroke in a swimming pool full of AI Kool-Aid now ...

The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver

Re: My main memory of these ...

I am because I don't discuss f**king screensavers.

My main memory of these ...

... is of several customer sites having kittens about terrible performance in networked applications, going out to the site, waggling the mouse on the server to stop the 3D screensaver hoovering up all the CPU, saying "problem solved?" followed by "Don't enable any screensaver other than a blank screen on servers."

By 2030, software developers will be using AI to cut their workload 'in half'

Re: See you all back here in 2030

It's not a form of AI. None of this is. Where is the 'I'?

See you all back here in 2030

when absolutely nothing of the sort will have happened.

Will Windows drive a PC refresh? Everyone's talking about AI

I do, yes ...

That was where we connected things that had no business being on the internet to the internet, when we can't even keep things that make sense to have on the internet properly secure.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

Oh, dead as a doornail ...

alongside email, Excel, COBOL ...

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Nobody wants to hear about it because

they all have their fingers in their ears going LA LA LA HYPE TRAIN LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU and they have $ instead of eyes.

Tesla self-driving claims parked in court

Re: Self-driving cars remain ...

That's the Ozempic answer. Obese due to lifestyle choices and not medical reasons? Here, pay big pharma a stack of money and inject yourself every month for life! Exercise schmexercise.

Americans are shit drivers? Maybe teach them properly, enforce the laws and give them an opportunity to drive less.

Self-driving cars remain ...

... a solution we're many decades from achieving (if ever) to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Neuralink keeps losing the thread on brain implant wiring

Remember the good old Captain Cyborg days on El Reg?

Good times.

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

From our 'what did they think would happen' correspondent.

If you're going to do this, do it in a large shopping centre or something, where passersby are not pissed up kids.

Google Search results polluted by buggy AI-written code frustrate coders

Someone here mentioned Kagi recently

and I'm glad they did

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

"Let's burn electricity on absolute horse shite"

It's the techbro mantra.