* Posts by Terry 6

5569 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: I bet in spite of the usability angle, there is little to no fingerprint support

I agree. In computer terms a fingerprint is just a sequence of numbers. Numbers that aren't readable in a normal way because they're sequenced and en/decoded from teh finger pattern by the device's algorithm.

And a password is a.....sequence of numbers. A sequence encoded by the user as keyboard characters then decoded by the device.

But fingerprints are stored locally- on the end of a finger. Which is more secure than a password on a post-it note because they are truly unique and not immediately accessible by miscreants.

Terry 6 Silver badge
Pint

Re: Coincidence...

Icon says all I need to.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

The volunteer/hobbyist nature of FOSS does tend to lead to stuff that works, for most people most of the time. But if there's a glitch or a use case that doesn't interest the devs it will never get resolved.

Which in one sense is reasonable. OTOH when I've dome volunteer work I've done all the jobs needed, not just the fun ones. Yes, as a volunteer in the Community Library I worked with the public and sat on the committee- which I enjoyed. But I also tidied the shelves and cleaned the kitchen. Which is boring but has to be done

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

On what basis *should* that be much of a priority (ignoring all the twaddle about "year of Linux on the desktop" from a small number of strangely shouty people and lazy headline writers)?

Ironically, I sort of agree.

If 'Nux using/making devs were to simply say, "We're the OS for the IT pro and the uberGeek- get off our lawn" and just make stuff too complicated for anyone else, good luck to them.

But they don't. We see on here,all the time, a good range of commentards who'd like 'Nux distros to replace Microsoft.

But if they want distros that replace Windows then they have to create distros to replace Windows.Which to my mind means having both the out-of-the-box simplicity to open, run and store programmes and data how and where they need to, and the possibility of finding clear, consistent help to do stuff that's a bit more complex. Layers.

I'd be saddened if there wasn't user-land Linux for ordinary users who want to escape Microsoft. But I get irritated when the user-land distros lead users astray, getting then started, but then when they want to take a next step leaving them stranded. i.e. If you don't want to lead them on a full journey, don't take them out onto the moors.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Coincidence...

It seems to me that Windows used to do things that ordinary people wanted it to do. Including letting them arrange programmes and files to suit their own workflow. At least within the capabilities of software at the time. Successive versions of Windows seem to be removing people's options- simplifying to a lowest common denominator only version, mixed up with what MS's marketing dept.happen to think is the right way..

'Nux however, and I've tried a few different versions, seems to do things that techies and (particularly) the devs want. Making things easier for ordinary users doesn't appear to be much of a priority.

Surely there can be something that sits between these two. That builds on decades of knowledge of what people use computers for and how they use them. That allows users to do everyday operations out of the box- but with standardised, easy to find, ways to do more complex stuff, for those who want to do something more. Not by becoming 'Nux command line experts, but by following instructions that let them achieve what they want. Zorin and Mint seem to work by giving the users a very narow safe path to follow, to do the most basic tasks, But no more.. I should have been able to click on the "Windows Network" icon that was sitting in the Zorin file manager and see the Windows shares that have that permission. And without spending several hours navigating through pages of unhelpful, irrelevant or contradictory advice. Followed by performing several command line incantations until eventually Zorin let me see my shares. I should have been able to navigate directly to those shares by seeing them in a GUI instead of entering a path ( let alone, as some of the advice was telling me, the IP address of the remote PC or creating a folder to "mount" the remote folder/s into). I should then have been able to select thumbnail view and inspected the images to locate the ones I needed.

Should because these are just ordinary, simple activities that a user ought to be able to do* without jumping through techie hoops. But as soon as users of Zorin or Mint depart from a very narrow path they're lost and sinking in The Great Grimpen Mire.

*When my younger daughter was a kid doing her homework she was once able to navigate from her Windows laptop to the main family Windows PC /Photos/ folder share and find the stuff she needed for her homework. It shouldn't be so much more difficult if the laptop is running 'Nux.

Terry 6 Silver badge

I'm using Zorin

I replaced Windows on one of my machines-my laptop- because I have no need for Windows on it.

And Zorin is great for most routine tasks.

But with Zorin, as with other 'Nuxes I've tried- straying too far from the marked path leads straight into the swamplands.

And the swamp lands have two components. One is that something just won't work in what I'd think of as a reasonable and logical way and the other is that either there won't be any advice covering that particular issue, though there will be lots that sound the same until I read them and find they're actually referring to some niche edge case; or more often (in my experience) the helpful advice found online to resolve that problem won't quite correspond to what I'm facing. Typically the latter will be an instruction to open something in settings and navigate to a submenu then clink on an item.... but the submenu will have all the items helpfully shown in a screenshot- except the one I apparently need to resolve the problem won't be there . The helpful item was, maybe written two+ years previously but has never been updated. Maybe the functionality I sought has been moved, or maybe removed.

So...With Zorin I wanted to navigate to a shared folder on my main Windows PC. Then choose some photos to bring across.

The nice big Windows Network icon in the file manger doesn't do anything when you click on it (I'm sure it must have a purpose, but it's not obvious what that might be). What I'd hoped to see was that shared folders on the Windows PC would appear as folders in the file manager. Or that the GUI would allow me to navigate to the network location that is the Windows PC and thence to the shared folder. But that didn't work. Searching online I found I needed to to use SMB://pathname instead. But that didn't work.Searching online I found some suggestions that I needed to install the SMB first. I did that. It didn't work. There was a few suggestions that I needed to "mount" my Windows folder ( the suggestion was that I should create a folder specially on the Zorin machine to mount the Windows folder in.And put anything I waned to share into that. Which was no use to me at all. Another delve on the internet and I found some suggestions that I needed to install ( with sudo) something that was a collection of letters. I did that. And then the SMB worked. Though I still had to put in some information in a dialogue box that was slightly ambiguous as to what was required. And then, at last, with SMB://pathname I was looking at the contents of a shared folder. As icons. tens of jpg files with unhelpful file names. And generic icons, but no thumbnails to let me see what each picture was. I pulled a few pictures across, just to see if it worked. It did. Fine. And on my Zorin machine I could then see the thumbnails. But not on the remote PC. Viewing pictures on a shared Windows folder can't use thumbnail view in Zoriin it appears. Though finding this out took a lot of internet searching ( and it may not even be true, since I couldn't find anything definitive).

But even simple things like making the useless, almost invisible, scroll bars more usable were difficult, if not impossible to find. As it happens, hovering over the pitifully tiny, barely visible scroll bar makes them become more prominent, almost to the point of being easy to use.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: And this is why

Microsoft, as I've commented many times here, haven't even sorted out the bug with the recycle bin that stops user's selected icons from changing on full/empty unless you edit the registry and add ,0 to the icon paths.And that's been an issue for decades!

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Total confusion

Possibly not everything

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Thunderbird is the replacement for Outlook Express

When I was using Outlook for work I relied on its message sorting, which is way more sophisticated than TB's. And I do miss that. It's the only thing I do miss.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: "Microsoft has warned that those days will be coming to an end"

I agree. While I was locked into Outlook for my calendar ( and email) I was locked into Windows. Once TB had a decent (enough) calendar and sync (add-on) facility I was able to dump Outlook. And now I have a mix of 'nux and Windows machines. It's only Mrs 6 that keeps me on Windows for the main (desktop) PC. My laptop is on Zorin and my Lenovo Yoga convertible will get switched to Nux too at some point, too.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Microsoft

They do seem to be pretty determined to control our data in their cloud. Whether that's a good thing for us or not.

This written with a touch of bitterness. In a moment of madness I let OneDrive start to backup my files and folders. Then found that the process included creating a whole new folder on my PC with local copies of everything that was being backed up to the cloud- already in locations on my HDD- in it. Except that some settings had stopped pointing to and some things had completely ceased to even be in their original location. .After I aborted the backup and removed OneDrive from my PC I discovered that a lot of files had gone missing. Some were in their cloud- some had empty folders in their cloud but the files were missing. Luckily I had a backup that I could quickly restore files from. This is no better than ransomware.

Sunak's defunct SaaS scheme spent seven percent of budget designed to help 100,000 SMEs

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Standard government fare

This brings to mind the home insulation fiasco- which had a similar trajectory. Public had to apply for a voucher in a complex and complicated scheme (e.g. You could only get the payment for some items as a "secondary" when you were having other ones done- but often those required the full amount of the grant). Then you had to get quotes from (supposedly a number of) approved contractors- but there weren't nearly enough contractors approved in time for the start. And many of those didn't even bother to quote, because it costed them money and anyway they already had more work on than they could cope with. So most of the potential applicants couldn't get on the scheme and the scheme collapsed. The only people who got the insulation were the ones who moved really quickly* in the first days ( or hours) after the launch.

*I was online within minutes to get my application accepted.. Because I'm a cynical sod- I knew how it was going to go. And I still struggled to get quotes. I got two, one of which was taking the piss. But that was OK. Because it made the one I wanted sound good. And I did get the much needed insulation done. But not many people did.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Terry 6 Silver badge

Sarcasm

I might be wrong, but some of these comments sounded like sarcasm. And others sounded like they didn't realise these were sarcasm.

But to be fair, sometimes you just can't tell if it is, this being the internet.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Root cause

Since the roadside comms boxes are about as secure as a packet of cheese in a mouse hole there's no arguing with that.

UK and US lack regulation to protect space tourists from cosmic ray dangers

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Who gives a sh**

Nah. Just, literally, do not care what happens to them.. If they suffer consequences it is indeed their choice.

There are, perhaps environmental implications, but I don't suppose this does much more damage than their other activities.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Who gives a sh**

The types spending wasting inordinate amounts of cash to go into space for fun can all rot in Hell-IMHO.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Terry 6 Silver badge

When I was a kid.....

....people rented TVs. In exchange for an affordable amount of cash they had a new TV with the latest improvements, and guaranteed repairs.

I wouldn't want a printer Radio Rentals style. But for some it might be a good idea. So if HP has a deal that included the full package it would make a lot of sense for many users..

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: RE: wise choice

Our Canon G6050 bottle filled printer gets the occasional clog. Not too often considering that it can sometimes go for weeks without being used. Even the deep clean doesn't seem to use much of the ink from the tanks. And then it works beautifully again. The ink bottles are about £10 each and you can buy individual colours as needed. Haven't needed to yet though.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: RE: wise choice

Yep. We have a Canon multifunction inkjet with ink bottle refills for light colour print and scanner use. And an elderly Brother laser for routine monochrome use. The Brother has had a lot of knocking around over the years, uses the chdeapest toner we can find. And just keeps soldiering on and on and on.

Terry 6 Silver badge

A fool and his money

Anyone falling for this blatant scam deserves to pay.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: There's a strategy that few people employ

Often I get annoyed simply because I heard a good song but the presenters announced the title and performer at the start, before I knew if it was something |I might like

For me it's when I turn on a radio station, but miss the start, and then they don't tell you what it was at the end.(Or indeed vice versa too, if I'm listening in the car- as lots of people do). But I guess time is money and if they say the name and stuff twice that tots up to at least a couple of advert slots in the course of a day.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The first one is free

Exactly, though to be fair I'm being a bit contrary too. Because I was effectively doing the opposite of what I said. Going by how it was pronounced in the ad- not the spelling.(Not that I or anyone else at the time would have noticed the squiggle over the e if it was even there)

Key though is changing the pronunciation - which serves no purpose other than to make some marketing wonk sleep better at night. See also "Shkoda"

Terry 6 Silver badge

Which is the point. Not "fix your own WiFi". But........They should do the basic checks first, before they start to faff about with the complicated stuff.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The first one is free

There was no acute ( or s far as I remember any other) letter in the TV advert for "Nestle's Milky Bar". All that came much later.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: ECDL

Yep ECDL was just to confirm a very basic understanding of key IT skills. A "Driving License".

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The first one is free

I tend to pronounce company names as they're spelt. Particularly if I think their chosen pronunciation is some company marketing BS and/or they want to change the way it's been used for decades.

Like the adverts of Milky Bar when I was a kid pronounced it Nestels. That was what they went with. So I'll be damned if now I'm going to call it "Nestley" .

Terry 6 Silver badge

Funny you should write that. Last week I had a Virgin technician round to look at our new hub. It wasn't connecting to WiFi. (But was fine on Ethernet, getting the full effects of the 1gb connection.). The first line phone contact had tried but couldn't find the problem. So they sent a techie. He started by swapping the box. When that didn't work he started swapping fibre cables. Then gave up and said he'd have to come back another day and do something in the street cabinet.

Which struck me as strange- because clearly the 0s and 1s were coming into the hub, or I wouldn't have been getting wired connection.

That evening the WiFi devices suddenly started connecting- the devices that still had the old Hub's SSID and password, that is. And the other ones all regained connection when I put the old password in for the old SSID. Then next day the devices all lost connection, but were still showing the old SSID. I added in the new hub's password, and everything started working. I spoke to the phone support because a) I wanted to let the techie know and b) find out whether anything was going to change with the SSID either in the near future or if I rebooted the hub at some point. They just told me that they couldn't contact the techie direct and I'd have to ask him when he came.

He didn't come.

Some discussions with a (fortunately more knowledgable) phone support- trying to find out where the f**k the techie was- confirmed that the problem had been resolved at their end, because someone had had to make a manual change to something that hadn't switched automatically, which was a common occurrence. and should have been the first thing they checked

Terry 6 Silver badge

You still thinking in terms of an email programme to replace Outlook? Does Sendmail inlcude calendars, contact lists or tasklists? And communicate with other devices to share those things?

Terry 6 Silver badge

I thought that too.

Year of Linux on the desktop creeps closer as market share rises a little

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Repeat after me:

Mailbird is apparently an email client. It appears to have some contact management and synchronises with various online apps. But it does not seem to be claiming to do more than be an email client.

Outlook is not an email client . It is an organiser. It does email. And calendars and calendar rules. And task lists.

There are plenty of email clients. There are not plenty of organisers with email and calendar functions. Basically in Windows it's Thunderbird or Outlook. There may well be others with some level of comparable functionality, but they are certainly not well known.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Familiarity and compatibility

Onedrive is a mysterious beast to me.

When I've used it to sync important files to their cloud it promptly creates a new set of files on my HDD - that I've already got on my HDD, which is why they are meant to be duplicating to the cloud

The last time I tried it (I'd forgotten that bit of stupidity) and had reverse it I found that it had also hijacked my desktop and all my icons had vanished from the screen. They were still in the original location but OneDrive had moved the pointer into it's own folder ffs. They still didn't show up when I changed the location setting back to where it was meant to be!

I literally had to cut and paste the files from the correct folder back into the correct folder before Windows would accept that they were there.

Which is a long winded way of saying that OneDrive is a sack of sh*t.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Repeat after me:

Almost everyone who uses email, understands what matters to them. The email gets written. It has stuff attached to it. It goes to the right people.

It gets replies. The replies get put into the right folder (optional for some users, but should be essential).

Outlook also has calendering. I wish the calendar element wasn't so often ignored by the techies I speak to or see on El Reg.Or in the development of email clients. I assume because they're focussed on email as a communication tool ( which it is of course) rather than an administration tool. Emails often require the calendar to be on hand. Joe emails and says "Can we meet at my office on Thursday 23rd" - you open the calendar tab, check and add it in if it's OK. Then reply to Joe to confirm. Yes you can have a separate programme and open that. But since the two functions go hand in hand it's so much easier to have then together.

i.e. Outlook isn't about email- it just has email as a main purpose. It's an organiser.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Precisely, the issue isn't about Linux under the hood. It's about Linux in everyday use, with everyday software utilities. On desks, doing work stuff.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Repeat after me:

It took me a few years to move from Outlook to Thunderbird, because of two aspects of the calendar component. One was that the calendar wasn't integral for a long time, but an add-on. The other was synchronisation- to other computers and iPhone. and that works well now, but is still an add-on (TBSync) and so relies on the goodwill and availability of a volunteer dev..

I do miss the filter rules of Outlook, even after several years of TB use. TB's rules are very simple and basic, no more than choosing between if all/any of [element] is [content] do [action]. There's no Boolean Logic types of filtering. In Outlook I could use the various rules option for, say as an example, "If the [subject] is [subject name] and the sender is [person name] move message to [subject specific sent sub folder].

Which would then put any messages about a given subject that had been sent out into a subject specific sent folder, rather than them going into the general "sent" folder or just the subject folder itself. And all messages received into a received folder. Very useful if the sender sends out lots of emails which are needed to be retained, only some of which need and get a direct reply. In TB I have to manually retrieve them from the TB Sent folder and place them in the subject specific Sent subfolder.

American Express admits card data exposed and blames third party

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Or just ask for a new card

Most places do. Some small merchants aren't. But then that's one more reason to use more than one card.

Anthropic unlocks Claude 3, claims it's better than ChatGPT and Gemini

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Here's my test for AI

" because nearly all adult humans can with a very modest amount of practice."

Driving North from Jn 1 on the M1 would quickly cure you of that illusion.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: No true AI

I stopped reading because it was boring and rather obvious as to it's content. Whether an "AI" product or not. I couldn't tell that. I agreed with what I read. And that's because it is obvious. Which may well be a reflection of an AI source.Or just what we all know, if we're here.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

Sometimes I answered them and told people they had the wrong number and what the right number is. Usually they were apologetic but one lady rang me back straight away and insisted she had the right number. I think someone somewhere was repeatedly giving out the wrong number.

Ah yes, as a kid a GP on our road had the same surname and almost the same phone number. Respectively CHE 6479 and 7964 I think.

We didn't get too many calls for them. But some of the ones we did get would indeed try again often two or three times, and some could be very nasty when we politely told them we weren't the right number each time. We didn't want to be nasty, because there might be a really sick person.

In hindsight, I'm wondering if that's where my largely negative view of humanity comes from.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Oliver Dowden has the solution - NOT

Destruction of local policing for one.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Oliver Dowden has the solution - NOT

If, that's if, these LLMs/AIs had been knocking around for while and a minister had then proposed something like this it just might have some credibility. But when it's just the new latest buzz word that no one outside of the tech world had even heard of a few months ago, it can never be more than a load of bollocks.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

Boots, when I last used them a long tme ago, seemed to build their business using locums and short term staff.

Health system network turned out to be a house of cards – Cisco cards, that is

Terry 6 Silver badge

There might be a reason

As a general rule, and I assume its the same with network stuff, if an obvious or well known job hasn't been done, before you crack on and do it you should investigate why it wasn't done.

Because if there's a paper trail and you screw up by not following it it's your fault.

Hold up world, HP's all-in-one print subscription's about to land, and don't forget AI PCs

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: AI? Subscription? NOPE!

get one of their "Ecotank" models like I did for my mother or a Brother laser, probably second-hand.

And as it happens, we have a Canon bottle-fill multi-function printer and an aging Brother mono laser that,though not exactly second hand, was bought for student daughter about 11 years ago, then used by my late sister, and now sits USBd to our main PC doing all the routine print jobs, on cheap 3rd party toner.

But our experience with HP was dire* and I 'll never buy anything from them again, ever.

*Hardware was OK. Software was so poor it effectively bricked the machine on an update by making it impossible to install the drivers

Cybercrims: When we hit IT, they sometimes pay, but when we hit OT... jackpot

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: What does OT stand for here?

And then we have to guess what that means?

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Terry 6 Silver badge

The public

I'm probably just an out of touch old guy.....but I've not heard anyone out in the Real World (tm) showing any interest in this AI bollocks whatsoever, beyond the odd, cynical comment related to how it might be used to send us more bullshit. I don't think the general public are going to be demanding AI in their tech any time soon. Not until it actually offers the buyers, small business or private individuals something that makes life,or at least their everyday activities, better. And even then there is probably a price boundary.iWatches sell because of all the people who want to check their running distances, sleep patterns and such like. People do talk about that. No one cares how the watch works this out though, not even to the point of questioning how reliable it actually is.

It's never the tech that sells devices, it's the functions

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: All search engines, now appear to be crap.

Somewhere along the lines they and pretty much all the large companies, moved from "make a lot of money" to "squeeze out every possible penny you can".

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Sums up the whole problem really

Google used to allow that. They got rid of it. It was the first clear signal of the enshitification to come.

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: The thrust of the filing is that Google invested a lot to make its search service excellent,

Google also has a habit of giving you the opposite of a search query. If that is a more common request.

So How do I remove {item}? will give you, as well as the vast swathe of results telling where you can buy the bloody thing, a long set of (you Tube mostly) explanations of how to install one.But not how to get rid of the one you have.

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: does anyone

You may be right. I'd read that it doesn't. But we'll see what happens when my phone is connected to it (when VM sort out why the new hub they just sent me isn't accepting wifi)