Posts by DJV

Grok told to cover up as UK weighs action over AI 'undressing'

'not suitable for official communications'

It hasn't been that since the Muskrat took over. Can't understand why "official" organisations still use that cesspit. I got off it as soon as that manchild sunk his claws into it.

Bank of England's Oracle cloud migration bill triples as project grinds on

Re: bunch of cowboys

Well dodged!

I presume you're referring to both Oracle and the BoE with that 'cowboys' statement.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: A video would have been nice

They did - but it's so well camouflaged that it's extremely hard to spot.

Optimus Schmoptimus - Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot is already in mass production

That bit in the video at around 0:45 where the robot observes the human walking past and thinks, "Meatbag... to be eliminated at the earliest opportunity."

Asimov's three laws? Meh, we've heard of 'em...

AMD clocks in with higher CPU speeds, leaves architecture untouched

All these cores, numbers, speeds, charts, TOPS, FLOPS, GLOPS, SLOPS crap...

It's almost enough to make you long for older, simpler times when your CPU had, at most, one or two clock speeds*, followed a simple name and numbering system, and AI was just something that only science fiction writers banged on about.

* e.g. 6502 = 1MHz, 6502A = 2MHz, anything faster? = tough, it ain't available**

** Yes, I know that, later on, faster versions did become available.

Sigh...

Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025

Re: THAT is what everyone wants

Nope, some of us have more sense than that!

Hong Kong’s newest anti-scam technology is over-the-counter banking

Re: Extending this idea will only lead to madness

So, Douglas Adams might have been right about the Shoe Event Horizon!

Keeping Windows and macOS alive past their sell-by date

Re: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 edition?

Thanks, Liam, for the original article back in April 2025. I only have one Windows PC left (the rest are all running Linux now), but I still have a few programs (NOT apps!!!) that still require the Windows behemoth, hence the one rescued via your LTSC article (and the massgrave site).

Windows is testing a new, wider Run dialog box. Here’s how to try it

C**** on a bike!!!

Of all the things that need fixing on Windows 11, THIS is what they prioritise?

What the Linux desktop really needs to challenge Windows

Yeah, absolutely...

What we need is One Standard Desktop!

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Mouse balls

Not a prank, but all this does remind me of when I worked in IT Support back around 1998, long before optical mice were a common thing. We used to get numerous complaints about mice not working due to the build up of crap on the rollers and balls. I used to remove all the balls and take them to the nearest "gents" and give them a good soak in a basin of warm, soapy water. Other staff entering the loo would ask, "What are you doing?"

"Washing my balls," I'd reply.

Infinite Machine e-scooter is like the offspring of a Vespa and a Cybertruck

Re: ciao

Mr/Ms Izzard?

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

"an electrician will trust that you've turned the switch off"

Reminds me of my days in the early 1970s when I was an apprentice/trainee TV engineer for Rediffusion. I had accompanied an engineer called Mack to collect a rental TV that the customer no longer required. As the mains socket was the other side of the chimney breast, the customer had, at some point, extended the mains cable using the then still legal "taped joint" - i.e. twisting the wires together and wrapping the whole thing in insulating tape.

As the customer wanted to keep their section of wire they'd used to extend it, Mack said, "Fine. Please unplug the cable and I will just cut it with these (insulated, thank goodness) snips at the taped joint."

"It's unplugged," says the customer.

Snip - BANG!

"Oops," says the customer, "I think I may have unplugged the wrong cable."

Mack stands there in shock, staring at his snips, which, by this point, had a large, smoking hole blown out of the cutting edges.

US freezes $42B trade pact with UK over digital tax row

You read his book?

You're a braver person than me. Does the book come with a plentiful supply of airline sick bags?

Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot

"its market share has stabilized on the desktop"

Translation: it's finally stopped plummeting from a high of 31% in 2010 to less than 5%.

And before anyone says anything, it's still the browser I use most.

Bishop of Hong Kong tells peers AI is not the devil's work

Absolutely - and both can be summed up as "talking complete bollocks!"

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Oh, thank you SO much for that link!

700+ self-hosted Gits battered in 0-day attacks with no fix imminent

Gogs?

I immediately thought of this!

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

Leo

With a designation of "Leo", I was expecting a really ancient story from the days of the Lyons Corner House tea shops and the Lyons Electronic Office!

And the winner of the Microsoft Christmas sweater is...

Re: Second prize…

...shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!" through the letter box...

FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built

Want to borrow any more shovels for that hole you're digging?

Microsoft 365 boosts prices in 2026 … to pay for more AI and security

Re: Organizations face an increasingly complex threat landscape

Most of the threats are from Microsoft's borked updates!

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Re: AI will change the world

Just not for the better...

Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Indeed. That would have put him in a bind if he hadn't been the right type to fess up instead of cover up and fix the issue. People should definitely take a page out of his book!

Tenstorrent QuietBox tested: A high-performance RISC-V AI workstation trapped in a software blackhole

I wonder...

...how many of those I will find under the Christmas tree this year...

At $12k each, probably slightly less than one!

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

Re: i'd like to have copy or move start doing things immediately.

This!!! Absolutely!!!

You are likely to be eaten by the MIT license: Microsoft frees Zork source

This article would have been published earlier

"This article would have been published earlier, but more research was needed"

Did anyone else read that and immediately be reminded of this?

Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability

Re: Portugese

Yep, same on my Windows 10 UK Edition!

Palhaços!

Now you can share your AI delusions with Group ChatGPT

Re: 'Talky Toaster', sorely missed

You need to improve your aim!

Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely

Re: Did you work for Microsoft?

Of course he didn't! Microsoft never review bugs, that's the customer's job.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

"it calls into question the company's competence"

I think you'll find that they've managed to expunge every drip of competence* that they ever possessed.

* Which was decidedly minuscule in the first place.

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

"Why? Because it's there."

Or, in this case, not so much of it!

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

So, the whole of AWS is built like a line of dominoes...

How malware vaccines could stop ransomware's rampage

"Security pros explore whether infection-spoofing code can immunize Windows systems against attack"

Nope, it's Windows. Insecure by design!

End of Windows 10 support is the perfect time for the Windows 11 installer to fail

I always expect it to f$%& up, so am completely satisfied!

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

Aha, a PTerry fan!

Pro-Russia hacktivist group dies of cringe after falling into researchers' trap

Re: Scolding

Well, there's only one logical solution!

Microsoft 364 trips over its own network settings in North America

Re: Microsoft 364?

Doesn't matter as long as they keep the snake oil flowing, which will enable them to get more suckers signing up to their creaking ediface of shit!.

Clearview AI sees red as UK tribunal sides with regulator over $10M GDPR fine

With a further doubling for every day it doesn't pay the fine.

The beast666 brain is not fit for purpose.

FTFY

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

"make it work like it did before Windows 11 messed everything up"

That is just one more reason in a long list why I am sticking with 10 until my migration to Linux Mint is complete.

Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears

Re: I thought that was a virus, then realised it's just Microsoft

Hardly any difference nowadays!

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

If they listen in on me, most of the time it will be me telling the cat to get off the keyboard!

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

It makes me wonder if...

...some sort of primitive AI has been in operation for about the past 20 years with regards to roadworks gangs.

Nowadays, it seems that most town centres are blighted by a constant smattering of weeks-long blockages of roadworks at significant places which result in a permanent slow crawl of traffic and unofficial diversions of unsuitable vehicles onto rat runs through housing estates. In most cases, little work can be seen to be actually taking place and the amount of road being blocked appears excessive in relation to the parts that actual require being dug up. And as for the "absolute need" to put up temporary traffic lights on small patches of road that only see 2 or 3 cars a minute at most... the mind boggles!

In the past (back when I were a kid and the Beatles were still together), roadworks seemed to take up minimal space and were over relatively quickly - or is that just senility catching up with me?

Hundreds of orgs urge Microsoft: don’t kill off free Windows 10 updates

Re: I do not condone software piracy…

I certainly wouldn't do that, either. Nor would I even install the LTSC version, which gives you a few more years of support. And, oh no, I certainly wouldn't even want to tell you how to go about installing this LTSC version*. So, definitely don't do this! (Innocent whistling sounds)

*Mainly because El Reg has already done so.

Windows 7 surge

Well, I suppose if people are given the choice of:

1) An out-of-support operating system that's full of telemetry, minimal borders on windows so that, often, you can't tell where one starts and another finishes, a hybrid and awkward settings system, gets in your way when you try to do things and has a fugly "flat" and inconsistent look and feel.

2) An out-of-support operating system that has a good, consistent look and feel, windows borders of a decent width, far less telemetry, a single (if archaic) settings system and doesn't nag you quite so much.

...I know which I'd prefer.

Windows 11 25H2 is mostly 24H2 with bits bolted on or ripped out

"security above all else"

And that includes the ability to boot into a working OS.

AI upstart aims to do what mere mortals can't: Make sense of Microsoft licensing

I can just imagine how it will play out...

1) Engineers upload the full text of the license to the confident AI.

2) AI says, "Working..." (using Majel Barrett's voice).

3) Nothing for several minutes.

4) AI system flashes lights and shakes its hardware around a bit.

5) AI states, "Cannot compute!"

6) Big puff of smoke.

7) Shouts of "Fire in the hole!" and lots of panic.

Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1

Re: Win95 installed over the company network

At least nowadays, you can use the excuse: "Wasn't me! It did it itself and I couldn't stop it!"