Posts by DJV

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

I have that saying framed!

Re: Cats on computers

Mine used to do that. The day I replaced the CRTs with LED flatscreens was hilarious as both cats jumped on top of the monitors and fell down the back unable to understand why the monitors had slimmed down drastically!

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Bricking implies devices become useless

Yep, pretty much Microsoft's aim with the constant enshitification of Windows.

Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet

Re: 37.85G ISO

37.85G? Crikey, sounds like everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink!

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

Did you even read the article properly? Or are you just a shill for Ubisoft?

Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers

Re: You know what I'm gonna say, Reg

Just like Vermin Mediocrity!

Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA

Fine

I think they should fine these companies using the chessboard and grains of rice principle. Starting at 1 penny (or cent, it doesn't matter which), it would bankrupt them within 2 months of non-compliance.

Free Blue Screens of Death for Windows 11 24H2 users

Re: "it clearly has its hands full"

The hands are too busy holding the guns that are continuously shooting at the feet!

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

Re: You might see the following error message – ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

Yes, unless it's after you've wiped every shred of Windows from your PC and installed Linux instead!

The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned

With the plummeting stock markets...

...maybe it's time to invest in popcorn shares.

Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users

Re: we're not sure their presence counts as a "tip."

The whole thing is a complete "tip" - as in, it should be thrown on one and forgotten about.

Re: My hot tip

"Oh, come on, Windows 11 isn't all that intrusive once you remove it completely."

FTFY

Legal clock ticking for Microsoft over alleged software license abuses

Looks like...

...Microsoft's usual "wait it out and hope it goes away" strategy is going to come back and bite them very nicely in the bum. However, in terms of $$ it's peanuts to them, so let's hope the EU have the guts to make it hurt more than just a few peanuts for a change.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium...

...have all just turned into unobtainium.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Re: The Moral of the Story

Hah, you beat me to it.

"We coded day and night for the two months to create the software we had said already existed."

And they've been doing the same ever since!

UK threatens £100K-a-day fines under new cyber bill

Re: a requirement?

Bloody essential, more like!

If there's any chance a minister actually knows the slightest smidgen about what they are in charge of, there could be the impending horror that they may have "ideas" of their own and make an even bigger dogs bollocks of the whole affair than if they knew nothing!

Keep* 'em ignorant, I say!

* For most of them, that's not a problem as they have never reduced their full 100% ignorance quotient since birth. It comes with the territory!

Specsavers takes off the Oracle glasses, sees better ERP options

Let's hope...

...they can see their way out of the Orrible/Oracle mess!

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: very first version contained malicious features

From memory, I can't recall Windows 1.x having anything resembling a feature at all!

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

They used to make good keyboards. I'm still using a 1999-vintage Internet Keyboard Pro (the version that came with both a PS2 and USB connection).

However, in general, their software sucks (though the current PowerToys has quite a lot of good features).

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: staying awake

I was on a TOPS course (Skillcentres - remember them?) in Chelmsford back in the early 1980s doing a Radio/TV/Electronics course. The lecturer spent one warm afternoon droning through some technical stuff that was sending everyone to sleep. He was lecturing from just in front of the bench I was sitting at. There happened to be a TV remote control on the bench so, to everyone else's amusement, I started aiming the remote at the lecturer and pressing the OFF switch continuously. Once he realised that everyone was chuckling, he stopped to see what I was doing. He did get the joke and brought his lecture to a halt a few seconds later to everyone's relief.

Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting

Re: I use the Golden Gate Bridge.

Yes, I live in a mostly boring flat area (Norfolk) though, as I live on one of the more bumpier parts, I can either get a clear view of the Norwich Southern Bypass as it passes over the river or not depending on the weather (or, in summer, possibly the local trees).

One of my cats will bury herself underneath the top covers on my bed if it is or is going to be cold. Not exactly forecasting but probably as good as any aardvark that I know of!

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

Re: Update optional?

As soon as I heard about the possibility, I disabled automatic updates on my printer. I will only reenable it when there is a proven ability of "downgrading" to an earlier version of the firmware.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients"

He probably could have said, "I think we should reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" and I bet no one would have been any the wiser!

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

Re: MS Powertoy

Yes, I use it often, though I can't understand how Microsoft managed to let some actually useful software out into the wild. I thought that was against MS company policy!

They want a video?

I'd send them this.

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

Re: Would you care to share how one uninstalls copilot?

One finds a reputable Internet search engine (i.e. NOT Google!) into which one enters the phrase windows 11 uninstall copilot. Perusing the results should enable one to achieve one's requirements!

Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users

Re: Hoover, Candy, Hotpoint, Whirlpool etc

Oh yeah, and aren't Indesit (or, more appropriately, In-De-Shit) part of that unholy alliance?

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

Hopefully! I want to know how big a boat of Windows 11 refuseniks I will be in when October comes!

Framework Desktop wows iFixit – even with the soldered RAM

Fast RAM / Slow RAM

Maybe they should have allowed the ability to add extra RAM that doesn't work quite as fast. This has shades of the old Slow/Fast RAM in the Amiga, though that was for a different reason to do with the CPU sharing memory with the custom chips which made it slower for the CPU to access.

Are you cooler than ex-Apple design guru Sir Jony Ive?

Re: because he was prepared to listen to everyone

Peel's taste in music was amazingly wide. I even remember being totally gobsmacked one evening hearing him play Sheena Easton's 9-To-5 on his Radio 1 show in between things like the Fall, Killing Joke and the Only Ones. He said that he had absolutely no idea why he liked 9-to-5 but he did and so he played it!

I also remember him playing a band that a friend of mine was in - Silent Noise - and, a little later on, he let them mime to it when he was doing a gig at the UEA!

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Re: I suppose there could be worse buyers than Amazon

Yeah - HP, there would be a 15-minute, muzak-filled gap between each scene of the film.

Re: Live and A.I.

Fantastic - though it does need a lot more obligatory nookie at every opportunity!

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

HP ought to...

...go and look up something called the Streisand Effect!

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

Re: Great

At last, a valid use for this!

Why AI benchmarks suck

Just in!

Snake oil salesmen declare how much better their Brand X is when compared to rivals' Brand Y and Brand Z!

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Well, don't get angry about it!

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

If you go to Open Street Maps and type "Gulf of Mexico" in the search, it pops a pin in the centre of the Gulf of Mexico. If you search for "Gulf of America" it gives you a location in Russia! Seems legit!

UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers

Upvoted especially for the term "loonpants"!

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: The real problem

I suspect the question here should be, "Could they do any worse?" With previous incumbents such as Boris "bodies pile high" Johnson and Liz "I crashed the economy" Truss, plus the latest idiot going back on pre-election promises, an AI system would have to be pretty bad to do even worse.

February's Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft offer just 63 fixes

Outlook?

Apparently, according to several sources, KB5051974 also forces the new Outlook app on users. So, after the customary reboot, I went searching for Outlook in order to delete it but found it conspicuously absent!

Maybe it saw that I was using Thunderbird/Betterbird and decided I was already a "lost cause" and didn't bother to install it.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Ultra 10

I was "gifted" one of those as part payment for some website work around 2004. I tried updating the Solaris install to the latest version and found it ran like treacle. So, I ended up trying out Gentoo Linux on it as, at the time, that was one of the few distros that would run on Sparc. After several false starts, I managed to get it running as a LAMP server which helped in my embryonic, self-employed website building business.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

Pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

I never opted in and never will do.

Spending watchdog blasts UK govt over sloth-like progress to shore up IT defenses

Air gap

The first thing that needs to be done is to immediately air-gap anything that doesn't need to be networked or public-facing. Those remaining then need to be investigated and resolved with high priority. Everything else can either stay air-gapped or only returned to full access once fully evaluated and any shortcomings fixed.

It shouldn't take them more than a couple of centuries...

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Re: Bros was nice back and then

No, I never did like Matt and Luke Goss.

(Another victim of that damn 10-minute edit window!)

Look for the label: White House rolls out 'Cyber Trust Mark' for smart devices

I initially read that as...

US Cyber Musk Fart...

Nick Clegg steps down as Meta's top flack in favor of more Trump-friendly candidate

Brave Sir Cleggy...

...ran away.

[sings the ghost of Neil Innes]

Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs

Re: I am reminded of the transport systems used in (IIRC) Logans Run

With a few small changes, I am reminded of the Docklands Light Railway!

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: If I was in charge

Damn good job you're not, then!

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

A lovely BOFH Christmas present!

Ahh, as good as the PFY gets, he is still a long way from becoming a master!

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: Here, let me do that for you.

Here, let me f*** that up for you.

FTFY