Posts by DJV

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

They would have to change the "READY" prompt message to "READY TO ANNOY YOU FURTHER".

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models

"You're probably using Connected Experiences"

Oh no, I'm bloody well not! LibreOffice all the way!

BOFH: The devil's in the contract details

Re: Feels like oracle

...after removing their vice-like grip from your short and curlies...

New York Times lawyers claim OpenAI accidentally deleted evidence in copyright case

How, um....

...convenient!

Accident? My arse!

BASIC co-creator Thomas Kurtz hits END at 96

BASIC was my first language as well

I had been into electronics and had been following the various electronics magazines (Practical Electronics, ETI, Elektor etc.) when they had started exploring microprocessors in the early 1970s before going on to develop their own systems. By the time I had my first hands-on experience with a computer (Commodore PET 2001-8) I could already understand BASIC programming. The first program I received payment for was a payroll system written for a PET with disk drives written for the PCB company I was working for.

After BASIC came 6502 assembler, some 6800 assembler, Pascal (when I moved on to programming Burroughs B20/25 systems), C, TurboBASIC, Modula-2 (for a later university degree), C++, Java (which I learned in order to move to a better job), Visual C++, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, PHP and countless others dabbled with. For a while, I had two broken Jupiter Ace machines from which I built a single working one. Forth was "interesting"!

Fun days!

Microsoft 365 Copilot trips over angle brackets, frustrating coders

a 'user' noted the issue

At least they weren't referred to as programmers.

Any programmer who has had to work on Microsoft's s%&t for more than 10 minutes would know better than to trust this dungheap* called Copilot.

* At least a dungheap is useful for fertilisation of the soil. Making Copilot landfill would just contaminate it!

Musk also wants to fight Microsoft in legal grudge match with OpenAI

What do you mean "going to go"?

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Re: No, Mr Bond. I expect you to open the box!

Yeah, they did but the storage rooms kept burning down.

Admins can give thanks this November for dollops of Microsoft patches

Re: Unexpected addition of Copilot

It wouldn't surprise me!

Unexpected addition of Copilot

No one seems to be mentioning that there appeared to be an extra unwanted payload in this update.

I installed it on my one remaining Windows PC (Win 10) and suddenly found a Copilot icon appearing on my taskbar. WTF? I didn't ask for that crap!

At least there was an uninstall option in the app section of the settings abomination to get rid of it, which I promptly used.

Clues to Windows Intelligence found in Windows 11 builds

Re: staggering

You're absolutely right there! I have only one Windows machine left (for some software that's still not available on Linux - oi, Affinity, get on with it!). All my others are now running Linux in some form or fashion and, after being defenestrated, are no longer staggering along attempting to run Microsoft's turgid mess.

Windows Intelligence

Well, now there's an oxymoron if ever I saw one!

Gang of monkeys escape South Carolina biomedical research facility

Re: Don't leave paperclips lying around

Maybe they let them watch YouTube and they came across the Lock Picking Lawyer's videos.

Microsoft still not said anything about unexpected Windows Server 2025 installs

Another Month/Week/Day/Hour* (*delete as applicable)...

...another Microsoft cockup!

I have but one Windows machine left. My servers have been Ubuntu Linux for years. My laptops are Linux Mint. I just need Affinity to put their graphics suite onto Linux and then I am done with that Windows shit!

Hack Nintendo's alarm clock to show cat pics? Let's-a-go!

Re: message to hackers/crackers

I wrote some software for the Commodore 64 back in the 1980s for a little local company and decided to attempt to protect the disk version from being copied. I remember putting a deliberately corrupt sector on the disk which the loader could check for. If it wasn't found to be corrupted, the loader would then bail out of running the software there and then (probably with a disk read error message). The rest of the protection was (if I remember correctly) by EX-ORing the stream with string sequences one of which was a message that read something like: "THE ENCRYPTION IS 55 LEVELS DEEP" just to put the hackers off. Of course, it wasn't 55 levels deep - if it had been, there probably wouldn't have been room on the disk for the program itself! Fun times!

Dutch cops pwn the Redline and Meta infostealers, leak 'VIP' aliases

Meta? But Farcebook is still up and running!

(Yeah, I know - different "Meta", but I couldn't resist.)

WordPress forces user conf organizers to share social media credentials, arousing suspicions

The Shitshow Goes On!

Time to buy shares in the popcorn industry...

Western Digital wasn't the only one - Windows 24H2 update bluescreens Asus systems

Re: a company that makes great systems

Not sure about "systems" but I've got a Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard. Bloody brilliant and it's now around 25 years old.

But as for their software... meh!

I wonder

I wonder if Microsoft has one of those "X days since last THING" notices on the wall where X is always zero and THING is two words with the last one being "UP".

Wipro orders hybrid work as other tech giants make full-time pants-wearing mandatory

"Fifteen days can be taken for those who are unwell"

So, if you're ill you're expected to go home and work as opposed to taking sick leave to rest and recuperate - am I reading that right?

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: You haven't experienced a Scottish division complete with bagpipes charging at you!

The Kamikaze Scotsmen are the worst - there's no stopping them!