Posts by DJV

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Re: I often get asked to be on pilots

Not while they're flying a plane, I hope!

Both of you are a twisted pair...

Microsoft's massive Patch Tuesday: It's raining bugs

Looks like I installed Windows Update Blocker just in time!

I will wait a day or two to see if the fallout from this latest round is likely to cause me issues BEFORE unblocking them.

Windows Update is a torture chamber for seldom-used PCs

"then fire it up to check something"

^^^ That's the stage I ALWAYS avoid for my own sanity.

Only 28% of AI infrastructure projects fully pay off, survey finds

Yeah, but (as a great man once said) magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: made for very entertaining reading

Apart from those that didn't read the small print and found themselves at the sharp end of very pointy cockups!

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Another week day hour minute nanosecond, another MS quality issue. Same ole, same ole...

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

I'm waiting for them to integrate a keyboard onto the CPU... should be fun!

Hotpatching goes default in Windows Autopatch whether you like it or not

"running Windows 11 24H2 or later"

Phew, lucky escape there! I'm still on Win 10 LTSC and have no intention of ever downgrading to the shitshow that is Windows 11.

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Re: I've got a bigger navy in my bedroom.

And yours are probably just as seaworthy!

Lenovo, Nintendo sue US government seeking tariff refunds

Citation required

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Norton?

Anything from that company is often worse than having a virus in the first place!

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Write protected cassettes

Back in the 1980s, I was working at a shop repairing TVs and hi-fi.

A new Philips radio/cassette player came out and was one of the first whose cassette mechanics were controlled by a single "control IC". This set the position of a big mechanical wheel where different positions of that wheel determined whether the mechanism was in stop, fast-forward, rewind, play or record mode. The mechanism wasn't allowed to go into record mode if it detected that the tab on the cassette itself had been removed (which they were for all commercial pre-recorded tapes).

This was all very well until the chip developed a subtle fault, which it did with great regularity. The fault meant that, when you selected play mode, the wheel would spin to the play position, overshoot into the record position for a second, before returning to the play position, whereupon it would play the tape as normal. However, that momentary overshoot would erase a small portion of the tape (no more than a second's worth) EVEN if the cassette had been write-protected! So, you ended up with a tape with tiny patches of silence! What a brilliant design - not!

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Re: Probably my first diagnosis in anything resembling tech support was something similar.

One of my previous tower PCs had a power switch right on the top of the front panel itself. The manufacturer had carefully designed the top of the panel so that it was slightly lower than the top of the PC case itself. This meant that placing anything on top of the PC wouldn't accidentally depress the power switch.

Of course, they never factored in cats jumping on top of the PC and switching it off!

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

I see what you did there...

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

I suppose...

...one way of creating passwords might be to use one of the many combinations of three words from What3Words that just happen to be on the grounds of your residence.

Of course, those of us in the British Isles can also use the four-word version from: https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/

For example, the following might be an appropriate password for the "artist" formally known as a prince: pussypounder.weeb.pissartist.fartlozenge

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

Re: Start by NOT using any Google product.

Well, you started out well and then scored an own goal.

AI chatbots waffle on GOV.UK queries, then get facts wrong when told to zip it

Re: AIs may have distinct perspectives

They certainly do - and all of them are wrong!

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

That cracked me up!

"'Well, I'm the other presenter, and these are the people that were in my audience, but we all would rather hear Linus's talk.'"

I would have loved to have been there to see that!

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

Re: a marriage made in heaven

"Oh, good." (said in a Rowan Atkinson / Black Adder voice)

Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024

Ignore patches at your own risk

Indeed, I patch as soon as updates are available on my Linux Mint machines.

However, on my one remaining Windows 10 LTSC PC, I prefer to defer the installation for a few days until I know for certain that the latest patch won't bring the machine to its knees. At least Windows 10 is getting off more lightly when it comes to machine-breaking, untested (until it hits the consumers) junk-filled, AI-written update slop than its younger sibling.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Something....

There, there, there...

Just shuffle off into the corner over there and lick your balls if that's what it takes to make you happy.

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

Re: some sort of long pipe

Is that the one that most people tell him to stick up his arse* and then smoke?

* or ass** for left pondians

** and not a donkey, as even one of those is far more intelligent than a Musk.

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 26H1, but you can't have it

"Microsoft has released Windows 11 26H1 but is warning the vast majority of users that it is not for them."

Microsoft has released Windows 11 but is warning the vast majority of users that it is not for them.

FTFY

As OpenAI and Claude fight over ads, Google says ‘show me the money’

"Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products"

"improve"? Unless it means to turn them off completely, this might be a new interpretation of the word "improve" that I am unaware of.

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

"the generated code is not very efficient."

"reasonable but... nowhere near the quality of what an expert ... programmer might produce."

Well, it does sort of explain the crap that's recently come out of Redmond in the form of Windows updates!

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

Yeah, the coloured plastic of those types plays havoc with the RGB convergence of the CRT!

Re: CRT Monitors...

"Anyone else notice that the anode cap on a CRT is exactly where your thumb lands when you pick one up?"

YES!!! Another ex-TV engineer here.

Did you ever replace an old CRT and not check that the connection to the scan coils was fully home? The horizontal burn line across the brand new CRT was quite spectacular and necessitated its immediate replacement with a second brand new CRT. I did it only once - you don't make that kind of mistake twice (well, not if you want to keep your job).

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

Re: Who watches the watchers?

I'm glad my boss is of the same opinion about AI as I am (i.e. AI is totally shite). Then again, I am self-employed, so...

UK watchdog to rule on £142M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35

CEST was utter shite!

I am freelance/self-employed, building websites for all and sundry. CEST couldn't even handle the idea that I might be working for multiple organisations and decided I should have been employed. CEST was obviously specified by and written by idiots who had no idea of the variation out in the real world.

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

what it's doing and how it works...

...and what it will do in rare but not impossible edge cases.

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Re: hence I can't use the Edge browser

Nobody in their right mind wants to use the Edge browser!

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

What quality control?

Precisely!

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

Re: Assisted Bathing tomorrow

Assisted Burial the day after.

Let them eat sourdough: ShinyHunters claims Panera Bread as stolen credentials victim

Crumbs!

(see title)

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

increasingly inaccurately named Circle

Yep, when are they going to rename it to the possibly more appropriate "Whorl Line"?

Office zero-day exploited in the wild forces Microsoft OOB patch

Re: Uh oh.

I suspect that can be revised to:

Microsoft Bug {$CURRENT_DAY_OF_WEEK} strikes again.

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

Guilty until proven innocent is NEVER the right way to start out. LFR needs PROPER regulation before it gets too pervasive (or is it already too late?)

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Emmabuntüs

When I first saw the name, I thought it was some sort of badly-spelt tribute to one of the Spice Girls

Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud

And Seagate, no less.

Shudders...

Kids learn computer theory with wood, cardboard, and hot glue

Re: Blue Peter

When I was a trainee TV technician back in the 1970s, we had a punched card and clippers system that recorded each job we did by clipping out the appropriate sections around the edge. It was then a relatively quick job to tot up the jobs and their types done each week at the branch by poking rods through the holes and counting those cards that fell out.

An example can be seen here.

Price, battery life, performance – that's how you sell PCs

Re: Killer app?

Notepad withOUT Copilot.

FTFY

S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain

"blindly feeding text into a system without human verification"

Sums up far too many YouTube videos with AI narration - some of the pronunciation variations are nothing short of hilarious!

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Thank goodness!

True!

Back in the 1990s, when I was at university, we had a mix of (never quite enough) Windows PCs and Macs. When you needed to do some word processing, you had to grab the first available computer. Both of them were running Word that had 'exactly' the same version number. However, moving a document between the Windows version and the Mac version more often than not would screw up the formatting in subtle but very annoying ways.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

The problem with the EU version of AWS...

...is the "A".

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

Re: the website has disappeared.

Not even a copy on archive.org?

Anthropic Claude wants to be your helpful colleague, always looking over your shoulder

As far as I am concerned, Anthropic Claude and all of his delusional, hallucinating AI mates can basically F&CK RIGHT OFF!

Then again, they do sometimes give us a bit of a laugh when those who should know better make use of them (Copilot in this case) and embarrass themselves by treating the output as gospel!

2026 brings a bumper crop of Microsoft tech funerals

...at 300% more cost and probably less than 30% as efficient and usable as the old discontinued version.