Posts by Roger Greenwood

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

A Letter

Dear commentards above,

We don't give a fig about you, the interested, the educated and the engaged. You are almost too few to count. We have largely stitched up the education, retail and business sectors in most of the world to ensure that the vast majority of people are not even aware that an alternative desktop OS even exists. Apple is a brand, Google is a brand, Microsoft is a brand, that's what matters, people buy and trust brands thanks to modern marketing. We take orders from businesses by the thousand for each little winger like you on some obscure tech comments page. It's not that we don't like you, we just don't care.

Yours,

Microsoft.

I see you’re riding an Uber to work. Would you like a cheap coffee on the way?

If someone else is driving.....

... I'll have a G&T, thanks.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: Incorrect labelling

We once sent a driver to York Road, Leeds. He rang eventually from York (the city). Lets just say his stack capacity was limited and he only stored the first word he heard.....

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

Re: Only issue...

Even when you hand dig, in many places the services are very close together and a 6" cast iron pipe looks like any other - Gas or Water? Yes the gas men drilled the wrong one so everyone down the hole got wet. Cue lots of angry local residents as the water had to be cut off to fix it. Mapping isn't going to solve that.

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

Re: From experience ...

"For every 2 people trying to help you get the job done safely, properly and efficiently there are half a dozen trying to stop you."

Makes sense. Also, they don't ever send 1 inspector to do anything, they send several. No wonder the costs are high.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: If I wanted to get there

Sadly I agree. The solution could have been to force shops to make it clear what you were paying for the OS when you bought your new shiny. Could still be done, but of course it's not in anyone's financial interest except the user. Last 2 laptops I bought (for home) came OS free which is much easier to find these days.

For a business the initial OS cost is almost irrelevant so no pressure there either.

Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Re: I wonder ...

Could be, I genuinely can't remember. For well over 25 years now, when anyone asks for DOB (especially online) I ask myself how could they check? If I don't think they can then I fake it, usually 1/1/70 but several others. So far not been challenged, and it's nice to get all those birthday wishes several times a year.

I wonder ...

... which date of birth they have for me?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

The next one is "dog", do I get a prize?

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: Fun stuff

Fun indeed. 48V probably won't kill you if you touch it, 400V is a different beast and once a short gets going (and it surely will) the effects will be spectacular. Fusing is one thing but arc fault detection might also be a good idea. I sort of see why DC is attractive for final distribution though - reducing use of all those pesky heavy and lossy AC transformers.

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

Beer

That is all.

Hubble Space Telescope is still producing science at 35

"Is there space in the budget ..."

Nice, I see what you did there.

Privacy died last century, the only way to go is off-grid

Re: And even then...

There are some folks partly there, I know a few. No passport, no driving license, no smart phone. In some cases they only got a bank account a few years ago so pretty minimal footprint. They are working age for a few more years, not everyone has embraced technology like those reading this. How do they manage? Mostly cash, no credit and use family and friends (e.g. we send payslips by email so they ask a family member).

Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update

"A lengthy outage occurred.."

Is it just me? I read that as outrage...

disclosure:- I don't use outlook, just an interested observer.

China's EV champ BYD reveals super-fast charging that leaves Tesla eating dust

Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?

Mine is a plug-in so I could dip my toe in the electric car driving world. It is still a complete mess of different charging and billing systems of course (UK) but I can imagine it working great eventually as long as we shift away from this obsession to always refuel on demand in seconds. Endpoint charging is a long way away though - just look at any hotel car park, hundreds of spaces but few if any charging points. I always ask but am rarely successful.

Vans and wagons are different - they often need to go long distances all day every day but do not seem to be discussed much in the mainstream media.

p.s. our works forklift is electric and has been for decades, bit slow though.

Nvidia's Vera Rubin CPU, GPU roadmap charts course for hot-hot-hot 600 kW racks

Power

Cooling is one thing, but imagine the size of the backup battery/UPS/generators required for these things. Put a few together and pretty soon you need your own power station, no wonder SMRs are being worked on, and taken seriously.

Things are looking down for cutting-edge cosmic observatories

"Finally, ice is transparent at radio frequencies."

Well I never knew that. I thought water generally was pretty opaque to RF, isn't that how microwave ovens work?

Also you referred to Greenland, which I understand is due to be renamed "East Alaska" very soon.....

Windows 11 adoption picking up speed, but older sibling still ahead

"...flow of fixes to which users have become accustomed"

You miss spelled "pissed off by"

Trump tariffs forcing rethink of PC purchases stateside

Re: Education

"..average bog standard kid".

You can't just be average any more, you have to give at least 110% if not more.....

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

Re: Normal

Ed Milliwatt, I like it. Real nerds may also know him as Ed 0dBm

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Grok

I know that English is a wonderfully flexible language and that meanings change over time, but I am sorry that this particular word has changed so much in only 64 years. The article could have said "noticed" and most would understand.

Example of one version of the original definition:- "Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience."

My coat? The one with "grumpy old man" on the back.... ;-)

Absolute Linux has reached the end – where to next?

Re: I'm old enough to remember

"There is a good chance that was from PC Pro magazine... And I helped put that together, and I wrote the accompanying 2 part feature."

There is more than a good chance Liam, and I am still a subscriber, mainly for the real world stories at the back. Anyway thanks, it has been my main OS at home since those days.

Re: I'm old enough to remember

Happy Days. I just checked and I think my first distro was SuSE 5.2, late 90s, which came free on a magazine cover. Can't remember the hardware now, but as with every computer since there never seems to be enough memory or disk space - even today!

Eurocops take down 'secure' criminal chat system known as Matrix

Re: In other news.....

Could have been worse for the criminals, it could have been mossad putting something in the phone .....

Canada passes new right to repair rules with the same old problem

Re: Follow the money ..

I wonder where they got that idea?

Judith : [on Stan's desire to be a mother] Here! I've got an idea: Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb - which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans' - but that he can have the *right* to have babies.

Francis : Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother... sister, sorry.

Reg : What's the *point*?

Francis : What?

Reg : What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?

Francis : It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

Reg : It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.

(Life of Brian, 1979)

New Jersey man admits shipping sanctions-busting tech to Russia

" ..military-grade spectrum analyzer."

Can he get me one? Asking for a friend.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

Re: Thames Water

Well the alternative (when overloaded or blocked) was to let it flow down the street so I think those victorian engineers knew what they were doing. We may not like it today, but it is working as designed. As in Russia maybe we could have spent a little more time upgrading in recent decades.....

BBS legend Ward Christensen logs off for last time at 78

Re: Good memories

We used to dream of 14.4k, in our day it was 300 baud or 1200/75 if you were lucky. Tell that to the kids today and they won't believe it.

(Pint for all those involved who made it work)

Wanna watch a movie? Sure! Lemme just park the lounge room

Boxy vehicles

Most of the ones in Tokyo already look like that on the outside, you just don't see so many in other places (yet).

A last look at the Living Computers museum before collection heads to auction

"The difference between a basic shampoo and dish soap is the coloring and scent for the most part."

I keep saying "it's just soap" when referring to many cleaning products and am then corrected every time due to the huge difference in price. Marketing:- you won this one.

Yes I have worked in a soap factory, very slippery underfoot.

CrowdStrike president cheered after accepting 'Epic Fail' Pwnie award

Re: This workplace has been incident free for X days

We used to have a "purple plunger of doom", awarded to the last person to fsck it up (3ft handle, plunger on the end). No one wants to work next to that for long.

We also used to have a huge clock, about 2ft diameter, awarded to the last one who was late for work. These things are jokey ways to keep people focussed and at least aware of consequences so I hope it works for him.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

Excellent name

Who says computers can't be fun.

Some decades ago (college course) we were introduced to various project/programming/data analysis methodologies e.g top down, bottom up, JSP (Jackson Structured Programming) etc etc. Our lecturer was real old school so he also told us about the one method we really needed to learn and would always find a use for:- JFDI. Still use it today.

Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership

Podcast level

When you can hear the podcast from the ear of a fellow traveller better than your own.... (and yes it's 2 techbros talking bollocks drowning out Marina Hyde)

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

"...and if there's any way to get it back again."

Such a good line.

The answer of course is that the cost/ease of retrieval is directly proportional to the importance of the data.

Unless you want stuff to remain a secret, then it will become public knowledge a few seconds after typing/copying/saving etc.

50 launches, 1 knighthood – Rocket Lab CEO talks heavy-lift rockets, Venus, and Musk

Re: balance?

Usually industrial scale oxygen is a by-product of nitrogen production, so they tend to go together e.g. chemical industries, ammonia etc. Very energy intensive as well. Yes I worked at ICI some decades ago.

High-flying drones on a leash could blow traditional wind turbines away

Re: Seen from a pilot's point of view....

Around here (within sight of Emley), modellers normally only fly with line of sight on relatively clear days. Hang gliders similar, some launch from the same hill as Holme Moss mast or other hills around but don't normally go cross country. The nearby airfield (Crossland Moor, also known as Huddersfield International Airport) handles larger light aircraft but they look at the maps as pointed out above. Balloons pass by occasionally, but again on calm clear days. None of the above should be flying at night, and we are pretty much smack on the approach to MAN and sometimes LBA so there are various other limits. A large, well known, static mast is the least of your worries.

ASUS creates a substance: Ceraluminum, which fuses aluminum and a ceramic

Re: Marketing

By definition half the world is below average on lots of measures, including resistance to bullshit marketing (I work with some). But they still have money to spend and are a valuable part of society. The rest of us (ahem) may make different choices, but we are in the minority and we probably spend less on consumer goods anyway.

The Reg builds official Lego Artemis and Milky Way sets

Saturn Launch Umbilical Tower

Well played for a kids toy Lego, well played.

Bill advances to exonerate hundreds in Post Office Horizon scandal

The latest computer weekly article (Tuesday I think) is a great read. Go find it.

Tech industry sheds some light on the planet's situation via LinkedIn

We are doing our bit, the printer ran out of ink today so we are printing less scrap paper. The time saved is probably being spent booking next year's holiday. Lovely article, thanks.

Oracle Fusion rollout costs 15 times council's estimates in SAP rip-'n-replace

Re: Reality

It got a bit complicated in the 90s. A friend worked for a local council (computing dept), at one point they were running 3 very separate systems to do the same thing:- Old rates + business rates (tax on property), council tax (which replaced rates and was applied individually to every adult), new rates system when council tax was dumped. They all had to run in parallel for many years due to non-payers and those in arrears. Anyway it kept him busy.

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

The distributed computing thing was solved a while ago, as you say for research it's a good fit. I have some machines (which have to be on all the time) running Boinc even today.

Miles of optical fiber crafted aboard ISS marks manufacturing first

Hang on, why don't they just dig down to the centre of the earth which also must have zero gravity and make it there? Do I have to think of everything?

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Locks.

Agree, essential skill. At the apprentice training centre one of the firtst things you made was your own toolbox. You then got to padlock it to keep your tools safe. Next skill was picking locks so you could nick tools from other apprentices, or, in the case of one imaginative oik, open the box, fill it with hydraulic oil, refit lock leaving no trace.

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

Re: Desktop OSs are so passé

Collaboration is very important. 20 years ago (small business) we started using a feature in excel where a spreadsheet could be shared. It worked ok but was always flaky and when it crashed we had to shut down the app on all machines and restart. Sometimes that didn't work so we had to round trip the shared file through openoffice (which removed the crud). We could live with this as it only happened every few weeks but the file was used constantly by several people in different parts of the building. Then we discovered google sheets and have used that since without problem. Businesses generally don't care what the app is called or who owns it, we just want it to work! Libreoffice has been working on this feature I believe but I don't think it is there yet. Big business will have a "proper" solution perhaps, involving databases and stuff, when many just need something simple to share.

Re: Genius

Prost!

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

Re: Perspective

"spilling trade secrets"

Good point, I assume that most manufacturers use existing designs to make the next one, so releasing ALL the details of any product even if obsolete would be a leap too far for many, especially where software is involved. I think they should, but I like tinkering with stuff. Perhaps after some years of going EOL but defining that is going to be a challenge.

Catch Java 22, available from Oracle for a limited time

I came here for the catch 22 puns and quotes

and have been disappointed so far.

'That's some catch, that catch-22,' he observed. 'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed."

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

Re: KB5001716? Again!?!?!

Wow, what a pain!

Makes me think of the phrase told to me many years ago "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom". Some things are just not worth it.

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Lets have some music in here Boiler