Posts by Terry 6

UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

Re: Harvest for the world

You know perfectly well that most of these people are well below the retire with a gong level. And while they do seem to get a very good pension deal, the salary that it's built on isn't great to start with.

Re: FFS !!!!!

See parallel thread currently.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/11/04/uk_f35_capability_crimped_by/

Re: Ha, ha, ha

And, we need to bear in mind that Win 10 still works*. It's the support that is ended. Morally repugnant but perfectly legal.

*And I'm bloody well not ceasing using it it any time soon.

Re: Solution for low salaries in gov IT

All government jobs would be free of basic tax, in a rational world. Their tax is just giving back to the government some of what the government gave to them- with admin costs on top.

In reality it wouldn't work, because however little they were paid there'd be a hue and cry about tax free perks.

I sort of have experience of this. As a local authority peripatetic teacher using my own car I used to get a parking exemption when visiting schools. We'd done this for decades, but it became a public issue when some of the Town Hall staff were caught using it to park outside the council office all day.

But instead of just stopping them there was a general furore about council staff getting free parking- as in "I have to pay to park outside my place of business, so they should too" which sounds reasonable ( and bloody well was for those lazy sods in the Town Hall), until you remember that the actual staff don't pay for their (legitimate work) parking anyway, the employer does. Which was the council. So we were still parking, but we had to get parking vouchers from the council in exchange for funds the council gave us to do our jobs, but now included paying for the vouchers and also the admin cost to the council in providing, distributing and monitoring voucher supply, and the considerable waste of our time ( paid for by council the tax payer) in obtaining batches of vouchers, not to mention all that card scratching, carefully making sure we'd scratched the right bit on the right card for that zone ( we might be in 5 or 6 different zones across the week and two or three on any given day) so we didn't pick up fines and the anxiety of making sure we had a supply in the car of all the right cards for the right zones. Massively stressful to us, and wasteful to the council- just so that we didn't "benefit from free parking".

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: What about username?

Then there's Virgin Media which first started to requires a second email address that's not your VM one as the 2FA, but then decided to make that the username instead of the actual account address.

So I had to remember that to log in to My.chosen.name@vigin media.co.uk I had to type [e-mail]

Then on some of our family addresses, but not,strangely, all they decided that the 2FA address couldn't be the user name either- and I had to supply a third address to log in with.

It got so confusing that I pretty much gave up using them at all - which may be exactly what he were aiming for.

Re: Forcing regular change is counterintuitive

Even better a local authority that insisted staff change passwords every 30 days.

Which meant that a) busy school staff just used to increment a password, often something easy to recall and type, Like Year3AcornClass1..Year3AcornClass2...etc.

B) At the start of each term there'd be queues of staff all calling central IT to get the expired PWs reset from most of the teachers and TAs in most of the primary schools.

C)Not having time to faff about while the kids are coming in if the password wasn't an easy one ( and sometimes even if it was) they'd have a PostIt note near the keyboard and would cross out the number at the end and replace it with the next digit when it expired.

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

See icon

and their reaction was to dock your pay by £100/month because you are clearly don't need that £100.

Which is precisely how my teaching budget was treated, as noted above. Because I hadn't spent all my budget yet I clearly didn't need it. And of course carrying over budget from this year into the next to allow a major purchase in May was so forbidden it was practically a hanging offence.

Bureaucrats and targets rather than just bean counters

A kind of version of Goodheart's law

When the politicians want to reduce government spending and the bureaucrats are tasked with reducing the annual spend they'll cut anything they see dangling. If it increases spending demands for next year or decade that's of no relevance to the target now.

And it's not a new thing. My first year of running a teaching team I planned a proper budget, month by month. And in month 8 I got told that I obviously didn't need all that money and it was being clawed back to give to another team who'd overspent.

That's when I realised why we had cupboards stuffed full of envelopes. Previous occupants of the role had learnt that you had to shift your budget by the end of January. And we always needed envelopes so.....

When I retired, decades later, the service still had the same bloody envelopes going dry in the same rickety old cupboards. I heard that eventually they all got dumped. Lots of other schemes were also in place to try to squirrel budget away for when it was needed.

Developer puts Windows 7 on a crash diet, drops it to down to 69 MB

That's why they should be made available, even installed with the OS at first use, if the users want. But making them compulsory and even removing the option to uninstall them is a different matter

Or those fonts that can't be removed and will never be used (SimSun etc) except in a defined part of the world. Provide and offer yes, require and make unremovable-no.

Surely the point is

A few tens of Mb are enough to get the (7) OS running. Maybe not much else, but it (apparently) runs.

Every single byte on top of an OS beyond that needs to be for a valid purpose. And of course that means tons of stuff. But tons of stuff that should have a use case for the users. Because an OS really only has one purpose, to be a way to let the users use programmes and peripherals.

The OS and a GUI exist to present the programme to the user and identify the core controls, so that the user can interact with the good* stuff as easily as possible- arguably with security functions.

Once the OS starts to control what the users do, present content they didn't request or monitor use without consent it is doing something that shouldn't be in an OS.

*( at least in theory)

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

What I take from this

Not being a dev or anything serious like that........

But we do seem to hear of big data managing projects that cost trillions more than they were meant to, took years longer than they were meant to ( if they completed at all), and still never worked properly ,an awful lot. To the point that the whole industry starts to sound like an enormous scam. Maybe the idea of an all singing, all dancing, do everything system is a bit of a dream

Microsoft suggests temporary registry hack for stricken smart card users

Re: It is amazing

at least stable enough it isn't in the news

Which is part of the problem -if not all of it. It's seldom in the news

Ordinary users are seldom aware and corporate users only know at a techie level, not a CEO level. The news outlets don't bother to report it, because no one cares. And no one cares because the news outlets don't bother to report it.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it

Re: the sums are insane

This has been discussed on other internet forums. Though not as much as it should be and certainly not as much as the aforementioned knee-jerk opinions on the likes of TwitteX.

Our politicians have made a practice of framing issues as zero-sum; if we make life better for others we will suffer. That way they buy support by claiming to protect "us" and newspapers/other media know full well that furthering simple-minded, popular prejudices and feeding popular fears sells more copy than explaining nuanced truth or debunking favoured myths.

Re: Proto mail example

And that's the clincher. There will be some people who'd want that- especially if it was an affordable add-on. But probably only a tiny minority of ordinary ( public and soho)users. And these probably wouldn't be up for all that other stuff at £40/year - especially if they worry it'd go up in price once they're committed.

The Freemium pricing problem

A problem with this model is that the step from Free ( which does pretty much all people need) to Paid,, which is usually far more than they need, is almost always far too steep

So for example Proton mail is free for one address a bit of storage, a VPN a calendar etc.

If I want a bit more there's no £10/year option that gives me a bit more functionality. Say a second address or two and some added filtering Instead there's only a £40/pa option that gives me;

15 GB storage

10 email addresses/aliases

Unlimited folders, labels, and filters

Use your own email domain

Proton Mail desktop app

Dark Web Monitoring

And Tuta Mail is very similar

Almost none of which I'd use So there's no way I could justify to myself (let alone MrsB) paying for that in need terms. And I'm more likely to want to pay them some money for altruistic reasons- there aren't that many who would ( outside El Reg's niche at least).

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: Solicitors

There was also a period I had to go through where an emailed scanned document would do until the signed original could be sent so that they could get on and do whatever it was* but wouldn't finalise it until then.

For a while, too, I faxed from my PC. They wanted me to print, sign and fax various documents. Instead I pasted an image of my signature into the documents and sent then via fax modem.

*Too long ago to remember what any of these were. There were more than one.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

Absolutely. The last thing* an overstretched NHS medic needs is someone telling them that their limited amount of admin support is somehow unnecessary and will be removed.

I worked for years alongside NHS (Speech and Language/Occupational Therapy and sensory impairment ) staff and and my daughter is one- that little bit of admin support they get is a life saver

*Probably not the last thing, because there are many worse, if somewhat more unlikely- (but then again who knows what a cost cutting politician seeking headlines would get up to....)

Re: Fairly Minor but...

A lot of the stories of public inefficiency are wilful misunderstanding. Hospitals do need all that admin staff ( not managers, but administrators; there's a difference) and not just the "frontline" doctors and nurses. Because you don't want a consultant wasting time doing routine admin, or a nurse wasting time ordering in essential supplies. Or a doctor sending out appointment letters. And if a patient on discharge is kept waiting, it's hardly "useless bureaucrats" since the bureaucratic work was waiting to be done- it's more likely very useful but insufficient number of bureaucrats.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: Yes, digital photo's in the '90s

The company itself also had one or more Sony Mavica cameras, writing to 3.5" floppies.

God I remember those- I was so envious at the time

Re: Bah!

Most people hate enforced remaining in the house. WFH is a great thing when you can get out- especially to do something hands-on. But not being able to get out,like in lock-down, is very different.

AC: You got there before me with the "here be dragons" comment.

This was my thought, not having that level of technical knowledge, but plenty of organisational team management experience, risk assessment etc.

If a bit of kit is system critical 1) Everyone with any responsibility for that location should bloody well know it's there and 2) It needs a sign saying "here be dragons" or something to that effect.

That neither of these was in place suggests company wide failings..

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

The deliberate over reach

There are, I have no doubt, people who will gratefully use, even welcome, the core feature of this.

But what MS ( and other big tech companies ) do is add in a whole lot of other stuff round itfor no justifiable reason- like making it difficult to not use.

Microsoft’s egregious spreading of this stuff is beyond belief - but the likes of Meta aren't far behind.

AI "features" are just the most recent and worst examples of this.

There's an argument for making AI stuff available to users. But the tech companies are trying to make it unavoidable. So yes, have face recognition in OneNote or that silly AI symbol in Whatsapp. But that doesn't mean it has to be forced on to users.

Excel recruitment time bomb makes top trainee doctors 'unappointable'

Re: Oversite?

Fairly typical I think. People wo have an automaed system stop thinking about it.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

Re: Ubuntu first, Windows second

"We need to deliver documents as word, so Windows for that and a low powered laptop for that!"

Confused about that statement- a WORD document in almost any format can be produced by most office suites, you don't need Microsoft for that. In that sense there's ben no such thing s a WORD document for decades.

Brits sitting on £1.6B gold mine of Windows 10 junk as support ends

Re: Recycle your electricals now!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm. That's down to your local authority. My own isn't great, but getting there and offloading old tech, recyclables generally and even random waste isn't too onerous.

Re: £1.6B eh?

And you'd be amazed by how many people, middle aged and sometimes younger as well as older- don't have basic IT skills. Excel as a database? You'd be lucky- I frequently meet people who can barely fire up a PC- something they tell me after I've mentioned that my volunteer job is teaching Digital Inclusion.

I get a lot of "I could do with some of that"s

Unconvinced

My best guess is that home users and small businesses will use their Win 10 machines until they cease to work or Hell freezes over.

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Expensive Lessons

A point well made (see icon). You do not want an intern experimenting on production equipments. There may well be an actually good reason why this alteration had not a already been made by the experienced hands. There may even be a bad reason why, but you probably wouldn't want to find out what it was. If you are an intern you are an intern to do interny stuff and learn where the bodies are buried not do the highly qualified and ten years before the mast stuff. This is not rocket science ( unless you're an intern in a rocket factory of course)

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Re: Is anybody surprised?

Not just corporate. It's everywhere. The time that has to be spent by some NHS staff, for example, proving that they are filling every moment far exceeds the amount of time that any of them could get away with skiving- should they want to - and of course almost if not all are doing the exact opposite of that and providing far more than they are supposed to.

But make-work like that, in every sphere, provides a lot of gainful employment for the managers who oversee it, and the managers who oversee them, etc.

Re: If you have a shitty manager

Yep, I agree. It's the digital extension of "presenteeism".

There have always people who impress managers with the quantity rather than the quality of the work, because there have always been managers who are impressed by the quantity of work rather than the quality. One major drawback to the "Work Ethic" is that it isn't a "Good Work Ethic" or even an "Efficient Work Ethic". Some buffoon slaving to produce twice as much work for half as much value, with four times as much effort will be valued in a way that a staff member who is competent, and efficient,who gets a good job done with speed and efficiency often won't.

Alleged Scattered Spider teen cuffed after extortion Bitcoin used to buy games, meals

Re: Help desk

And that does sound reasonable. Very fair point.

Help desk

These do figure in a lot of stories as the weak point.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

Re: Very nearly coffee > Keyboard time there!!

Yeah, been here, struggled with that.....

It really is a time honoured method.

Re: "There's always next week..." the Boss says, unexpectedly.

It's amazing what the feeling that someone is after your job can do....

ChatGPT: Why do most of your users ask for help writing – prose, not code?

Re: Why would you use ChatGPT for anything important?

From what I can gather it's more like she is using it as a therapist. People are stupid.

Actually, privacy issues aside, if it works for that person, why not.

Re: code snippets is where it shines

Yep. As noted, it comes under the heading of not quite as useless as Google

Beats Google

Since Google search is just about moribund- nothing more than an advertising platform, no useful content most of the time, I use an LLM or two.

They aren't exactly reliable, If they don't know they'll make something up*, or go off at a tangent. But at least there's a straight answer (which I verify- Google still mostly works for that, and if not, a different LLM).

*Last night ChatGPT was gaslighting me that there was no iOS 26 even after I'd started installing it.

Dunno why you got the downvote. Have an upvote to make up for it. (And I've seen that cartoon before).

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Oh yes

I've had the LLMs assert confidently and definitively that iOS 26 couldn't possibly exist - after it has been installed on my iPhone. If I didn't already have it I'd have started to think that I was hallucinating.the announcement.

Re: "Even a wrong answer is right some of the time"

And passes you messages from your social media

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Might be cynical but....

If their low/no carbon energy uses the limited pool available, and causes the energy companies to burn extra fuel to supply everyone else, they aren't really carbon neutral-ish.They're just moving it around. i.e. they aren't increasing the supply.

Careless engineer stored recovery codes in plaintext, got whole org pwned

Engineer

Really, someone with training and a job in that sort of work.

It truly does beggar belief.

It's the sort of level of thing I'd be strongly warning my beginners* in my computer basics class not to do.

*OK - they wouldn't be storing recovery codes- probably passwords for their email in a notepad file-, but recovery codes are even more obviously not appropriate

You'd hope not.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

OK. Fair enough. Maybe,,, " a good manager should know the basics of..." is enough.

That's not recursion. It's reductio ad absurdium

The "professional manager"

I do actually agree that managers need training in their role. But the mantra;

that managers manage people and do not need to know the department's subject matter,

is one I've come up against many times.

Always from people who hadn't a clue who was dong the job right and who wasn't. Or what could be improved. Or what needed to change.In other words- anything that could legitimately be called "managing". Pretty much universally they believed in metrics. The result was departments that did a lot of stuff. Staffed by people who worked hard at being busy, And anyone who could actually do the job properly would clear off as soon as they could escape.