I have that saying framed!
Posts by DJV
2513 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
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People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative
Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?
Commodore OS 3 is the loudest Linux yet
Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online
Asia reaches 50 percent IPv6 capability and leads the world in user numbers
Europe hits Meta, Apple with €700M in fines for flouting DMA
Free Blue Screens of Death for Windows 11 24H2 users
Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft
The Reg translates the letter in which Oracle kinda-sorta tells customers it was pwned
Microsoft lists seven habits of highly effective Windows 11 users
Legal clock ticking for Microsoft over alleged software license abuses
China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals
Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad
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
Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole
Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition
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
Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently
Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied
Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update
Official HP toner not official enough after dodgy update, say users
Windows 11 adoption picking up speed, but older sibling still ahead
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
HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'
This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice
Why AI benchmarks suck
RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101
After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected
UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers
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)
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...