Posts by AndrueC

Newly launched civil service pension portal from Capita is crapita, users report

And apparently it's all the fault of the previous providers.

Latest Windows 11 updates may break the OS's most basic bits

You're right! There are several different WLAN cards you can get. You can even upgrade it to Wifi6 apparently.

To be honest this laptop is becoming that one device that you hope will always manage to keep plodding on. The plucky laptop that just wouldn't die :)

Thanks for all the replies, guys. I hadn't even thought about the possibility of it being hardware failure. I really hope that isn't the cause because this is the same laptop (it's a home machine, home network) that I've owned for over 7 years.

I can't blame it for finally succumbing to the march of time (as my Mum would say 'it doesn't owe me anything') but it does everything I need with capacity to spare. Plus it'd be like losing an old friend.

I'll have to see if the card can be swapped out (I found replacing the keyboard last month to be very easy). Although even if not I have a couple of USB adaptors knocking around somewhere so a failure wouldn't mean scrapping my venerable workhorse.

My main laptop appears to be struggling more than normal to re-establish wifi connectivity after sleep these last few days. It had occasional problems a year or so ago but they 'went away' for six months or so. Then they came back with perhaps a 10% failure rate. For some reason the trick was to spot the lack of connectivity at the login screen and wait until it came back before logging in. That usually only took a few seconds. If I failed to notice and logged in anyway it could take a couple of minutes (often requiring manual intervention) before it connected.

Well now it seems to be a 25% chance of failure and I've had it lose a valid connection in the time taken to complete login. It's also failed to find my 5GHz network on several occasions despite my phone confirming that it's fine with excellent signal strength.

I'd have thought it'd be a driver issue rather than the OS but in any case there's no sign of a driver update from Realtek.

Windows 11 needs an XP SP2 moment, says ex-Microsoft engineer

Re: Windows 11 is pretty bad

I think it might be a recent update. My second laptop which is kept permanently docked and has a USB keyboard wouldn't respond to keyboard yesterday. I found that unplugging it and replugging it brought it back to life. It's not done that before.

HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting

Hmmm. My primary HP laptop is now over 7 years old and at the time cost me £499. The design might be older given that it wouldn't have been a new release when I bought it. It's currently running Windows 11 which it automatically upgraded to. I had to replace the keyboard a month ago because despite repeated attempts the 'I' key kept sticking on one edge. The replacement keyboard cost £40 and took ten minutes to fit.

Oh and a year ago I had to re-wire the power adaptor because the outer sheath began to break away near the plug.

Their corporate actions stink to high-heaven but their products seem damn' good.

Are there any alternatives with the same (or better if that's possible) build quality and better corporate behaviour? That's a serious question - good though it's proven to be I doubt this laptop will last forever.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: So you deleted my previous post...

So much for free speech.

There is no free speech here. This is a private forum - their house, their rules.

Russia’s first autonomous humanoid robot staggers and falls on debut

Re: creepy

creepy

without the arms

Yeah but at least we know it's armless.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

Yup. Users want to just power on and do stuff.

Linux is just too damn technical, pretty much right from the start. This article is making exactly that point and it's barely scratched the surface. Android has succeeded because it's so locked down that it's pretty much recognisable and usable to everyone (despite various manufacturers trying to differentiate themselves through what amounts to skinning the UI).

Choice is great..from a technical point of view. But from a customer's point of view it's just irritating and esoteric nonsense.

What we need is another desktop that does everything for everyone.

ISPs more likely to throttle netizens who connect through carrier-grade NAT: Cloudflare

Re: Pitfalls of IPv6

I'm going to backtrack on this slightly. I've actually been doing some research on all things network over the last few days just to satisfy my curiosity after getting engrossed in the Android v DHCP discussion. I now agree that NAT does not provide security features. Or at least that it is dangerously incorrect to make that statement. It is more correct to state that some implementations/configurations of NAT have security benefits.

The point is that NAT is not just one thing. The kind of NAT most of us have come across in our routers is Symmetric NAT and that offers security benefits. But there are several other types of NAT that do not.

So I now think that telling people not to bother with a firewall because they are behind NAT is misleading.

As for whether IPv6 networks could still benefit from NAT I'm not sure. I'm retired now so was only following the discussion out of idle curiosity and I think for now my brain would rather go back to contemplating the mysteries of golf :)

Re: Pitfalls of IPv6

I agree that too many technical types hate on NAT and I've had arguments in the past about how effective NAT is for security. I'll also call bull on the other claim that NAT 'breaks the internet'. That's clearly rubbish given how successful the internet is and how many so called point-to-point only protocols work just fine through NAT.

But I also don't think NAT is so good that we should be adding it to IPv6. A halfway decent firewall will be doing most of what NAT does and other useful things besides. Security is a useful side-effect of NAT but there are other ways to be more secure. And whilst workarounds for NAT have been invented I can sympathise with the idea that it's another layer of complexity that makes some applications more difficult to write than they should be.

So I'm of the camp that NAT was a great solution to a problem with some additional advantages but since the problem doesn't exist with IPv6 let's not bother making work for ourselves.

Re: IPV6 over my dead salary

In a properly configured system user won't notice which stack they are using. The only real issue is without properly set up DNS+DHCP (SLAAC was a bad idea) accessing internal devices via IPv6 addresses is far less friendly. And still too many routers have primitive DHCP/DNS services (i.e. no automatic DNS entries from DHCP leases)

You might want to talk to Google about that. The Android development team responsible absolutely refuse to add support for DHCPv6 other than (coming soon, apparently) prefix-delegation. Their chief developer is apparently adamant that DHCPv6 is a terrible idea and everyone should use SLAAC.

I discovered all this only a couple of days ago while trying to work out why my mobile phone was the only device on my LAN that didn't have working IPv6. As soon as I changed my router (TP-Link) from DHCPv6 to RADVD+RDNSS my mobile phone was happy. Thankfully so were all my Windows machines.

Re: IPV6 over my dead salary

What amazed me was that the previous trial ended because PN were rebuilding their core network. Now I suppose it's acceptable that the old trial servers were not compatible with the new core but how do you build a core network without baking IPv6 in from the start if you already know that it exists? What kind of madness is that?

Re: IPV6 over my dead salary

most CPEs (modems, routers) introduced Dual Stack IPv4 and IPv6 in 2012 in a miraculous coordination so almost everyone's home kit supported IPv6 long before their ISP did.

With varying degrees of success. I remember going through three or perhaps four routers before I found one that could reliably get and hold an IPv6 connection using PPPoE. Thankfully my ISP (IDNet) have very good support staff who were able to help diagnose the issues so that I could report them back to the router manufacturer. Sadly all but one did nothing to fix the issues which is why I had to go through so many before I got one that worked.

If remember correctly one of the routers badged as dual-stack only supported one at a time. When I questioned this I was told that I was expected to switch between v6 and v4 as/when I needed it.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Re: Question is

It's a long, long time since I saw a BSOD. If I had to guess it would be on my dev machine at work as the result of me 'walking where there be dragons' eg; developing a device driver or making really silly IOCTL requests. I stopped doing that kind of work several years before I retired and consequently haven't seen a BSOD for likely over a decade at least.

The argument that you can't cut down Windows to just what is needed is valid - or at least there appears to be far too much that 'is needed'.

But BSODs are a thing of the past or the result of dodgy hardware that would likely cause a kernel panic if Linux was installed - or you'd hope so as the alternative is probably undefined behaviour.

MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech

Re: because...

It's always easier to lock criminals away than to fix the underlying causes. Most people want to think that those who commit criminal acts are subhuman and should therefore be locked away. The idea that criminals are just humans who made bad choices most often through unfortunate circumstances rarely gets much airtime. After all to admit that is to admit that:

a) Any of us could end up on the wrong side of the law.

b) It might all be our (ie; society's) fault..

Re: Controversial opinion....

That would require one of two things:

a)Police officers pulled off other duties in order to walk the streets. That might not be a very good use of their time. Catching a scrote on the street is addressing the symptom not the cause. You're better off tracking down the gang leaders and the people buying the phones and taking them down, something you can't do if all your officers are just walking the streets because that's not where you find 'Mr Big'.

b)Increase the number of police officers so that you can do both things. This costs money (tax rises anyone?) and assumes that you can scale up your current recruitment process without compromising it.

Maybe I'm imagining it but didn't somewhere once run a sting operation with dummy phones that had a built in die pack, like is sometimes used to stop money thefts from armoured vehicles?

New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process

Re: Who actually uses Hibernation?

It's always worked fine for me on Windows. I used hybrid sleep on my office PCs for years. I vaguely recall that many years ago (Win XP perhaps) I had a work machine that wouldn't stay in hibernate and woke back up immediately but that was a long time ago solved problem.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: A taste of the future.

I would assume the bed would adjust itself automatically. Only an idiot would expect it to keep interrupting someone to ask questions.

What I experience is a genuine problem and relates to when I'm trying to get to sleep not when I'm actually asleep. Overall my sleep health is good and I get plenty of sleep most nights. But sometimes it can take me over an hour to actually fall asleep after getting into bed and quite often recently that's because I appear unable to tell whether my body is too warm or too cold. I might feel too warm so get out of bed and open a window but then when I get back into bed I immediately feel cold and have to close the window and put an extra blanket on the bed. Some nights it can take quite a lot of experimentation until I feel comfortable.

I did make light of it and right now it's not a big deal but if it becomes more frequent I might end up trying to discuss it with my GP. Maybe it's something hormonal and I'm getting hot or cold flushes as I approach my 60s.

Re: A taste of the future.

One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.

Sounds ridiculous but (very much Devil's advocate and somewhat tongue in cheek) it would be nice occasionally if my bed could tell me if I was too warm or too cold. It seems to be something that's coming on with age - sometimes I feel cold when actually I'm too warm or vice versa.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: Of course we all know the permanent fix

..and which are more common machines for users these days?

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

The origin of 'timframe' is probably more obvious.

Ofcom fines 4chan £20K and counting for pretending UK's Online Safety Act doesn't exist

Many (many, many) years ago when I was writing forensic investigation tools - as a sideline to writing and using data recovery tools - a library of hashes was readily available. You had to sign up for it which makes sense but it wasn't a secret. The feature was really very useful. Our file system explorer used it by default and it would colour code directories to indicate that they were known installs (one colour, for 'as expected', another colour for 'not as expected'). Our software would also create a separate virtual folder where everything that matched with a 'naughty' hash would appear. We also flagged files whose extensions didn't match what the hash indicated - a common trick employed by 'wrong uns' at the time apparently.

Then again this was so long ago that we were only just starting to consider switching from MD5 to something with fewer collisions and the library updates came on a CD.

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Imagine stepping onto the green, sunlight glinting off your nine iron, while your legs whisper “premium airflow” with every stride. That’s not polyester you feel - that’s ambition, woven into a lightweight textile symphony tuned to the key of “summer dominance.”

No-one is going to respect you as a golfer if you step onto a green with a 9 iron.

Using a 9-iron from just off the green is another matter. That's what the sensible players do :)

Re: Locked room exam

Yup. Some people used programmable calculators to program a handful of often used formula. I used mine to store the formula as text allowing for a far greater variety of assistance. The irony was that I was a programmer so would have found it easier to program the formula.

I remember creating a program on my Casio that when run displayed a rectangle on a graph. You could use the arrow keys to rotate or press another key to start it randomly rotating. I remember that getting it to rotate around a single axis was easy (just plotting using sine I think) but the calculation for getting it to rotate about either/both axis was a lot more complicated.

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

As we've noted before, the supported upgrade path requires PCs to have Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 - a hardware-based security component found in many machines shipped over the past five years

Really? Only the last five years you say? I bought my HP Probook 470 G5 from Amazon in 2018. It has TPM2.0 and is currently running Windows 11.

Trump admin says tech companies are abusing H-1B visas, slaps $100k a year to allow entry

Re: "tech companies have more money than God"

and large passenger jets.

Sky plans to ditch up to 500 staff in the Technology Group

I've never been interested in movies or sport. I forget what package I'm now on but it used to be the basic package+documentaries+HD. It's only costing me a tad over £40 a month. Considering that I spend four or five hours most evenings watching TV (and even occasional afternoons, although I try to avoid that as I don't want to become one of those couch retirees) I'd say that's good value for money.

It's especially good because I never watch live TV so I can jump over adverts. I just pick what I want from what is stacked up on the disk ready. I have a lot stacked up as I've currently just finished watching a true crime series (one of many - a guilty pleasure of mine) that was recorded in October last year.

In fact a lot of the content I want to watch just isn't available any other way. Or wasn't last I looked. The majority of my viewing is true crime documentaries with a smattering of 'fly on the wall dramatically-edited' stuff and small amount of actual drama. It's all fairly niche stuff.

Re: Vote with your feet

Maybe UK Comcast customers might like to vote with their feet and cancel their Sky subscriptions?

That would be cutting my nose off to spite my face. For better or worse watching TV is a major part of my life and Sky and their partners have been providing me with more new content than I can get through for over 20 years now. I don't like some of the things they do but the end result product is excellent from my point of view.

My Sky Q box has at least proved very reliable. I upgraded to it almost as soon as the service went live so it must be six or seven years old. It went through a period recently where the screen would go black when exiting playback of a recording but it's just occurred to me that it's not done that for quite a while now.

I'm actually viewing the forthcoming switch off of the satellite service with some trepidation. Sky Q works well for me.

Re: whose going to buy products

All I can suggest is that you pay as much as you can afford into a private pension in your younger years so that it may enable you to retire a lot earlier.

I made that decision back in the 1980s when I started work. After nearly 40 years at the code face I retired rather than go back into the office when my employer had a brain fart.

But even starting in the late 80s it wasn't easy. My private pension payments were the biggest single monthly bill throughout my working life. I had them on a 10% annual escalator for that entire time. As a result I have a large enough pension to give me a reasonable standard of living for the rest of my life. But the operative word there is reasonable. Gawd knows how people are going to do that today given the high costs of housing and living. I only managed it because I never had to help support a family.

Curious connections: Voyager probes and Sinclair ZX Spectrum

There were a few formal entry points using the RST command but yes it was basically just a command line processor with a variant of BASIC as it's scripting language.

Re: A 280 processor?

Yeah I noticed that as well. Was the article typed out manually then OCRd? Retro technology and all that.

Ah, found it! The CPC range used the 6845. A cursory glance at that page suggests that it might have been possible to avoid copying stuff around RAM by reprogramming the scan start address when the frame was ready. And re-reading the other web page doesn't mean you couldn't use RAM paging - just that wherever the active video buffer had to be within the normal Z80 address space.

So my trick of writing through ROM seems like it would work and wouldn't require you to copy stuff around. Assuming my brief scan of that documentation for the 6845 is correct.

The original Speccy didn't have a dedicated video controller. It was all part of the logic held in its ULA. And I seem to remember a number of sources saying that Sinclair used far more of the gates on that than they should have.

Oh and the Microdrive used the same ROM swapping system as I1.

Most common use for RAM switching would be to swap over the frame buffers, display one whilst you wrote to the other, then swap them over.

Ah. The CPC didn't support page swapping for video. Programmers did of course still render into a buffer to improve performance(*) and reduce artefacts and I suppose you could render into RAM hidden behind ROM which sounds advantageous by in effect avoiding losing twice the address space to video but when complete you'd have to bring that page fully into the Z80's address space by hiding the ROM so that you could copy from there to the video buffer. I imagine games probably didn't use the ROM anyway so likely paged it out once they started running and just accepted having to 'waste' RAM on a video buffer. I think if a game needed more RAM it'd be code and data that they paged rather than video. Maybe just using it like a RAM Drive.

With Interface 1 however you also had ROM switching in the bottom 16k of the address space which must have involved some sort of dispatch vector shenanigans between the two of them.

Good point I'd forgotten about that. If I remember correctly the swap occurred when the I1 detected a specific address appearing on the bus. That triggered it to disable the internal ROM substitute its own contents. I don't know the reverse operation occurred but of course once you're running code on your ROM you can opt for a more specific command. There were several devices that did similar things including once that could pause the computer and allow you to examine memory or dump a memory snapshot to tape or disc.

(*)I know on the originally Speccys that accessing the video area of RAM was slower because the video hardware had priority and could NOP the Z80 while it was working. Unlike the Zx80 Sinclair didn't give the option of disabling frame syncs. I imagine the same was true of the CPC but it had a more advanced graphics chip that could adjust (the chip as in the BBC I think) so there were a few things you could do to be clever.

*Cough*

The Amstrad CPC6128 was released in 1985. The Spectrum 128k was Johnny Come Lately as far as Z80 memory paging was concerned in home computing.

I don't know about the Spectrum 128k but RAM swapping wasn't a huge inconvenience on the CPC. You just divided your code and data into blocks and arranged them as required. Paging was something you did relatively infrequently, something of a context switch rather than something you were continually working around. And again I don't know about the Speccy but on the CPC you could hide one RAM page behind ROM. When you wrote to the address it went through to the RAM so if you were only writing data you effectively extended the address space.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Re: I always thought .....

Coding diarrhoea.

It's AI all the way down as Google's AI cites web pages written by AI

Re: Always a problem

AI generated content should really be watermarked. A watermark consisting of ids for the content and ids for the generator and maybe a few other flags and fields.

That only works if it has 100% adherence. At least now we can be suspicious about everything because any of it might be AI shite. But once the concept of a watermark is introduced some people will assume content is human generated if not watermarked. Then if it is at all possible to avoid watermarking AI content the scheme becomes worse than useless.

As Xi and Putin chase immortality, let's talk about digital presidents-for-life

Friends Come in Boxes.

Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk

Re: If Russia had exploited this ...

Or another war with Iceland over fish?

Traffic to government domains often crosses national borders, or flows through risky bottlenecks

Re: So what about borders

Yes but the fix is not to restrict which countries you can access from!!

You're still missing the point of the article. It isn't about accessing government services from outside the country. It's not about where you travel to. It's saying that data isn't staying within a country even when both end points are. Someone sat at home communicating with their government's website might be sending/receiving data via a different country.

How Windows 11 is breaking from its bedrock and moving away

Re: Slight double standard there

If people were still shipping non-TPM hardware in the recent past shouldn't they be getting a kicking?

I think that's a valid point. I'm typing this on an HP Probook 470GS that I bought in September 2018. I doubt it was leading edge then as I was only replacing my 'daily browser'. Yet here I sit running Win11. It upgraded to it automatically shortly after it went GA.

So my at least seven year old laptop is running a fully supported version of Win11. Why are there machines younger than mine (and lets face it 7 years is old for a computer) that can't be upgraded to Win11? Who's fault is that really?

Now where I could start to be irritated is if my laptop can't run Win12 due to Co-pilot. TPM is a reasonable security feature so I think it fair to make it part of the minimum spec but AI is just a load of arse.

For many of us, our digital environment is primarily Arm or AMD, and a Linux or Unix-derived OS.

I suppose that depends what you consider to be the 'primary digital environment'. If it's a mobile phone or other consumer device then fair enough. But if it's a desktop then '..Linux or Unix-derived OS.' is an overly optimistic view of the market.

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Some things

Yup, just nostalgia with a small amount of jumping on the latest cool bandwagon.

My teenage years were the 1980s. So like you, I can understand listening to vinyl but cassettes were horrible. They were okay for recording stuff off the radio but not for buying music.

But frankly, I've never been a fan of nostalgia (it ain't what it used to be). I moved to digital downloads pretty much as soon as they were readily available. I ripped my CDs to a server using WMA lossless then threw them out. There was a short time period during which I moaned about only being able to download lossy formats but then I realised that I couldn't tell the difference anyway. My audio setup is pretty good: Lyrion Music Server (as it's now called) -> Logitech Touch -> Onkyo receiver but I still can't tell the difference.

And I still buy modern music so some of that is poorly engineered anyway. I think anyone over the age of 30 moaning about sound quality is deluding themselves. You can legitimately express a preference for one format or another but really that's just a preference for a particular combination of distortions (or possibly in the case of lossless digital a preference for a lack of distortion).

Where digital absolutely reigns supreme is in the control and reliability of playback.

My listening preference is to randomly shuffle albums (maintaining the track order). I can now do this at home and I can do it on the move. Thanks to Bluetooth I can maintain playback order between earbuds and car. I walk (and drive) about with over 15 hours of music on tap, moving from album to album without any effort on my part.

I no longer have to put up with cracks and pops while listening to music. I've never had to clean my audio equipment.

I no longer have a background hiss to put up with. I've certainly never had to carefully remove the media and extricate delicate tape from where it's wrapped itself around the mechanism.

I enjoy music. Always have done. To my ears it sounds better than it ever did and it's certainly far less hassle. Anytime I want it there it is.

IETF Draft suggests making IPv6 standard on DNS resolvers - partly to destroy IPv4

Re: ISP Hubs

If you want IPv6... get the government to give BT a kick up the backside.

?

IPv6 availability has nothing to do with BT unless you are a PlusNet or BT Retail customer and although PN was a little tardy rolling out IPv6 it's been available through BTr for several years now.

And there is nothing about BT's wholesale services (ADSL, VDSL or FTTP) that prevent IPv6. In fact as I explained in a previous post - it's not BT providing the TCP/IP functionality in those cases. BT's wholesale service is just a tunnel connecting you transparently through to your ISP's network.

And I can't even begin to imagine why you think it has anything to do with landlines.

Re: And I thought they already do so?

Ah the irony of discussing IPv6 and how wonderful it is on an IT dedicated web site that is still stuck on IPv4.

Meanwhile non-technical sites like digitalspy.com, rmweb.co.uk, toyotaownersclub.com are fully IPv6.

Re: ISP Hubs

If Vodafone does, maybe also other Openreach-based ISPs do too.

Most definitely. The fact a connection uses the Openreach network isn't actually a factor. Openreach do not provide the TCP/IP functionality - only Ethernet or ATM. Openreach thus provides a tunnel that connects you onto your ISP's network. If your ISP supports IPv6 then that's what you'll get.

My own ISP - IDNet - has been offering dual stack IPv4/6 over the Openreach**) network for 10 years now.

(*)In the last few years they've started using other carriers, like Zen and Cityfibre.