Posts by Mike Lewis

Windows 11, not AI, kick-started the PC upgrade cycle

I used Rufus to bypass the TPM check and install Windows 11 on my PC with a 14-year-old i5-2400 CPU. It's been running well although it won't update beyond 23H2.

In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out

From programmer to project manager

"Many developers have encountered situations where a brilliant engineer is promoted to management, resulting in the business losing a good engineer and gaining a bad manager." That happened to me, apart from the "brilliant" bit. I went from flow-driven programming where I worked with a computer on one problem in depth for a long time to interrupt-driven managing which required working with people needing quick answers to a wide variety of problems.

Windows 10 refuses to go gentle into that good night

Re: Windows 10

Sometimes laptops need their own variant of the OS. I bought a used Dell Latitude 5480 with Windows 10 from a refurbisher. It ran well but wouldn’t update. I worked out that the refurbisher had installed the bog-standard Windows 10 when it needed the Dell-specific one. I downloaded it from their website, installed it and now the updates work. I’m reluctant to install Windows 11 with the Rufus hack in case there are similar problems.

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

I quit Prime. You can too, eventually.

I quit Prime last night. I had to click on three buttons before it finally acknowledged that I wanted to leave. I was worried I had somehow missed a fourth until I got a confirmation email that I saved in case they charge me anyway.

The TSA likes facial recognition at airports. Passengers and politicians, not so much

What's the current state of the art?

Can it still be confused by wearing glasses and smiling?

'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

I had a manager with an intermittent fault

He was nice and supportive and even told me once "Nobody ever died wishing they had spent more time in the office" when he felt I was working too hard. Then one day, he made a really nasty remark, completely out of character for him. I thought "What?" A few days later, he was off sick with a migraine.

That turned out to be a regular pattern. Every six weeks or so, he'd make a cutting remark and I'd think "Uh-oh, Alan's getting another migraine" and right on cue, he'd be off sick again. I'm not sure he realised what was happening.

Microsoft patches the patch that can brick Surface Hub v1 screens

Really?

They didn't test it on their own hardware?

DOGE worker's old creds found exposed in infostealer malware dumps

Target acquired

I suspect that DOGE employees will be targeted by hackers trying to get the government data they downloaded.

Boeing 787 radio software safety fix didn't work, says Qatar

Oh great

I wrote the audio part of an air traffic control program. We had backup communications channels on each card, backup cards, backup racks of cards and two generators. Then the plane manufacturer stuffs it up.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

That happened to me

"We quickly learned he had been passed to us because he wasn't very good,"

I left a job after my contract wasn't renewed and the programmer who replaced me was incompetent. It turned out his former manager just wanted to get rid of him. I quickly got a new contract just down the hill. About once a week for a few months afterwards, my old manager would call and ask me to fix things. During my lunch hour, I would run up, make the changes then run back down. The sysadmin kept having fits as I wasn't supposed to be in the building let alone on their computer system but there was nothing he could do.

Microsoft is redesigning the Windows BSoD to get you back to work ‘as fast as possible’

What about the black screen of death?

I fixed my neighbours' computer - again - and told them not to move it. Of course they moved it and got a black screen of death. It turned out that version of Windows on that hardware was particular about where you plugged in the mouse.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

The Microsoft Support Community isn't much better

Someone asked how to add "Copy to folder" and "Move to folder" to the context menu of Windows 10's File Explorer. Microsoft advised them to reinstall the operating system.

I knew it was two simple registry changes with Windows 7 so I made a VM of Windows 10, did the changes and it worked.

I reported my findings and got an email from Microsoft congratulating me on having solved my problem.

Your days of driver sync via Windows Server Update Services are numbered

We're moving towards...

Subscription as a Service.

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Attack of the clones

1986 was the year PC clones became readily available which hastened the demise of the 8 bit.

In my case, I bought a Commodore Vic-20 in 1982 and wrote a BBS for it in 1984. It had multiple rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. One of my users gave me my first job as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!" Thirty years later, he wanted me to work with him at Google.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

DAT spat

Backup tapes on a DAT (remember those?) were getting corrupted so the unit was sent to Sony to fix it. No problem found. They were still getting corrupted so the unit, cable and controller card went to Sony. They still couldn't find out what was wrong.

They asked me to have a look at it and I spotted the problem right away. They had laid the cable across the back of a 21" CRT monitor. Cable moved, problem solved.

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

Powerful Hardware?

> Windows 11 is one of Microsoft's most poorly performing operating systems, in part due to the powerful hardware it requires.

Windows 11 is running quite happily on my thirteen-year-old Intel i5-2400. I did have to use Rufus to bypass the TPM requirement when installing it.

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

Re: It's the TPM that kills it for me

Windows 11 is working fine on my thirteen-year-old PC. I just used Rufus to bypass the TPM requirement.

Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all

It seems to me...

that the cloud is useful when you cannot predict your load. If you're running a site with a predictable load, you can provision it for that and keep it in-house. If you have one that sometimes needs many instances then out-house is the way to go.

Survey finds that four in five enterprise endpoints could run Windows 11

Windows 7 to 11

I had no problems upgrading my thirteen-year-old computer from Windows 7 to Windows 11 after using Rufus to bypass the TPM 2.0 requirement. Windows 11 is the least irritating one so far. Perhaps MS could say that in their advertising.

Tesla slashes vehicle and self-driving-ish software prices as shares plummet

Re: "an essential part of doing business in the auto industry"

They're a backup for the horn.

Microsoft lifts years-old compatibility hold for Windows 11

Re: Those drivers have been available for ~2 years

Microsoft has a tester?

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

That reminds me of Lily Tomlin's line

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

Can noise-cancelling buds beat headphones? We spent 20 hours flying to find out

During my last trip, my earbuds were losing the battle with the cabin noise. I found that noise-cancelling headphones are very expensive so I bought some hearing protectors to wear over my earbuds.

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

Re: Spite, I tell you, spite!

The infamous demented register architecture.

Why a top US cyber spy urges: Get religious about backups

Backups are important

I returned from a holiday to find that the system administrator had wiped my hard drive and the backups. He said he thought I had left the company. Fortunately, I had backups on computers in other cities that he didn't know about.

WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage

Re: SPOF anyone?

And Australia's entire EFTPOS network by correcting a spelling error.

Someone fixed the code they were assigned, noticed a message in adjacent code was incorrectly spelled, corrected it and down went the network. The length of that message had been hard coded in the program and correcting it changed its length.

What goes up must come down: Logitech sales tumble amid PC slump

Logitech quality was good but has declined

Old K120 keyboard: used for many years with no problems.

New K120 keyboard: letters wearing off keys after only one year.

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

Not all accountants are bad

I worked at a small company with a clueless CIO. When we had network or computer problems, he would poke a few keys to confirm it wasn't working then ask our accountant to fix it. He was quite good. They made medical equipment.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

Re: Awwwww, poor Microsoft

I'm still using an eleven-year-old i5-2400 with Windows 7. It's fast enough to do everything I need, apart from embedding subtitles in videos, while running at 100% all the time for Folding@Home and BOINC.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Perhaps it's just me but...

I find speaking to a computer is weird. The one time it would be useful doesn't work. When using Google Maps in the car, saying "OK Google, I know where I am now" or "OK Google, Maps off" do not silence it.

WASP malware stings Python developers

Re: Double check your spelling

I can see someone typing in "colourama".

Microsoft feels the need, the need for speed in Teams

Just getting it to work would be nice

Only the organiser has both audio and video. Half of the attendees have audio but no video; the other half have video but no audio.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

I'll be buying a Chromebook

I was going to buy a laptop with Windows 11 until my cousin kept having problems with it crashing. I googled "Windows 11 keeps crashing" and there are a LOT of people with that problem.

Microsoft Outlook sends users back to 1930 with (very) mini-Millennium-Bug glitch

I fixed my first Y2K bug in 1988

I was working on air conditioning control software when I found it and thought "Buildings stay up for a long time. There's a good chance this program will be running after 2000."

I keep wondering if I should have told someone.

Goodbye, humans: Call centers 'could save $80b' switching to AI

AI Scam Calls

We're going to have AI initiate scam calls and learn to change what they say to get the most money.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Saved by the backup

I returned from a holiday to find that the system administrator had wiped my hard drive and the backups. He said he thought I had left the company. Fortunately, I had backups on computers in other cities that he didn't know about.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

Re: Government procurement

> mindless automatons following a script without any regard for the actual outcome

That happens in private industry too. A company making an automated analyser decided the project would be done with C++. Unfortunately, the programmers they hired knew only Visual C++, not embedded programming or anything about hardware. The project was finally completed years late after spending a lot of money on replacing burned out stepper motors.

America's chip land has another potential shortage: Electronics engineers

That describes my career

I started out by studying power electrical engineering, switched to electronic engineering then changed to software, writing device drivers and fixing bugs in the ones from the chip manufacturers.

Amazon shows off robot warehouse workers that won't complain, quit, unionize...

In the future...

These might be known as Amazon's halcyon days between hiring workers who complain and robots with AI who complain.

Internet Explorer 11 limps to the end of Windows 10 road

Re: I never thought I'd say this but...

I'm referring to looking at an RSS feed file in a web browser, not using a podcast client to download it.

I never thought I'd say this but...

I'll be sorry to see it go. Of all the browers on my PC (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, IE and Opera), it's the only one that renders RSS feeds correctly.

Hawaiian Airlines to offer free Wi-Fi via SpaceX's Starlink

Opportunity Missed

Decades ago, I was working for a now defunct company developing small base stations for mobile phones. I told my manager "We can put them in airplanes and connect to satellites to get the signal!"

"Don't be ridiculous" he replied.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

Backup Internet Connections

I had a team of three technicians trying to fix my broadband and failing. The fault was found days later by a fourth who discovered after quite some time that another company's technician had disconnected me at the junction box while repairing my neighbour's connection.

I rely on the Internet for medical reasons so I have my usual connection plus a 3G modem and the hotspot on my phone. All three use different ISPs in case the fault is with the ISP's network. If the power goes off, my laptop batteries will last a total of 21 hours and I can charge them in my car with a 12 VDC to 240 VAC inverter.

Microsoft Teams unable to send and receive calls for some after update

Running normally?

Does "running normally" mean it's back to only one person having both audio and video while half of us have audio but no video and the other half have video but no audio?

Wolfing down ebooks during lockdown? You might want to check out Calibre, the Swiss Army ebook tool

Avoiding Kindle

I use Calibre to convert the books I bought from Amazon so I can read them on the Moon+ Reader Pro app. It has a far better user interface than the Kindle.

Microsoft tweaks Teams and Viva to help bridge gap between frontline workers and their managers, among other things

Common enemy

The only bonding I felt with my peers while using Teams was against the common enemy: Microsoft. After we switched to Zoom, we could resume our usual infighting.

Survey shows XP lingers on while Windows 11 makes a 0.21% ripple in the enterprise

Which OS

When my Windows drive died four days ago, I had to decide which operating system to install out of Windows 7, Windows 10 and Linux. Windows 10 has a bad reputation with Microsoft's "Ready or not, here I come" installation of buggy updates, changing user preferences and hiding settings, all of which make Windows 7 appear more reliable to me. Linux was not a practical option as I have so much Windows software so I reinstalled Windows 7.

There's something to be said for delayed gratification when Windows 11 is this full of bugs

Black screen of death

> Windows 11 introduced a novelty in the Windows world: a black screen of death.

That was actually introduced by Windows 7.

I fixed the neighbours' computer - again - and told them not to move it. Of course they moved it and got a black screen. I found out that Windows, running on that particular hardware, was sensitive about which USB port you used for the mouse.

140,000-plus drivers sent $60m in compensation checks after Amazon 'stole their tips'

Re: Once again

Nothing is gong to change untll company executives are fined and jailed. To a company, a fine is just another cost of doing business.

If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002

Re: SHOCKED! JUST SHOCKED!

That's one reason why certain companies keep getting government contracts even though their previous projects failed. They know how to wade through the paperwork. Programming? Not so much.