Posts by Spanners

Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security

Every time...

Over the last few times that MS has produced a new version of Windows and made the old version (even more) obsolete, I have seen people announce that they will no longer touch this rubbish. I see people agree that there are suitable alternatives or workarounds.

Then I see big organisations spend billions on throwing away functional computers that are not up to spec and they go onto the next, short-term, solution. Whether it is corporations, civil service or the NHS, they all spend huge sums that could be better used on swelling the profits of hardware manufacturers and Microsoft.

There are alternatives. Why aren't we using them?

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: There it is

"Pension pots"

People under 50 don't need to worry about pensions. They will be well past 75 before the owners of the current government allow them to retire.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: What about the hard of hearing?

One of the things that is causing me to keenly look forward to the demise of the internal combustion engine is the ones that are "specially modified" to sound like a tractor doing 70mph!

I'm not far from a main road and these things sound ghastly and then when they slow down they gough, pop and splutter because they are so badly tuned

There is a Tesla living near me. They do make a little noise. It wouldn't be hard to turn that up a little. Someone could make a law about it. The law could get them to be quieter in the evenings and at night. That is not something that the chavmobiles do,

Tesla Build

Over the years, I have not developed a good impression of US engineering build quality. Tesla has merely confirmed this.

Do we know if the ones made in China are better? I expect that when they start churning them out in Germany, they certainly will be!

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: Every single time

We developed a habit of plugging the mouse and smartcard KB in a particular way because of this.

Now someone else often rolls things out so I assume it no longer matters.

Re: Every single time

My Chromebook only has 2 USB C ports as well. I just paid a fraction of the price.

We challenged you to come up with tech predictions for 2024 (wrong answers only) – here are some favorites so far

Passwords

People will finally pay attention to the "experts" who advise them to use their product instead of an ever longer passphrase and 2fa.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: Too many to count

Are you insinuating Brownian Motion?

Re: not "British English"

Whether they like it or not, you can't easily change the physical location of a country. The "British Isles" will remain after the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is gone.

In the same way, the UK remains in Europe even after "they" have got us (temporarily) out of the EU.

We are still here. We still have a lot of empty space - Dartmoor, Salisbury Plain, Scottish Borders, Highlands and Caithness to name a few. With our demographic shift, we need the immigrants that certain bigots are trying to keep out so we can slowly vanish like Japan.

Nope. We are still here but our skin is becoming less pale - a bit like the USA then!

Error names

I tend to think of it as an OSI layer 8 error.

Re: Too many to count

I have had calls in the past that, when they start talking, I interrupt them and ask them to remove whatever is on their KB as the, recognisable, buffer overflow is drowning out what they say.

They do so and announce that I am magic as the noise is what they were calling about...

Re: @Korev "Well the Z in Regomised is still there..."

...a British English website.

Nope. We speak English, not "British English". They han have their US variation if they want...

Re: Seems to me that ...

...and "anonymized" to indicate...

But they don't get to tell the world to spell "anonymised.

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

Teams

If the worst comes, you can do teams through your browser - whichever one you fancy.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Re: Child protection

I'm surprised the marketing bunch haven't asked to ban those.

They will. I have heard marketeers say that the British habit of making the tea when the adverts come on is some form of theft.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

It may be legal in the USA, but

<p>It sure as F. is illegal here!</p>

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: Depends.

British English

Calling a correct spelling "British English" is quite common in the USA.

Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders do not speak "British English", just English.

Yes, we all have our variations. Written English, however, is fairly standard, except in North America and I don't blame the Canadians.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Re: If you bid too low

Because a granny charger has a 13 amp plug on it, it will be limited by that but it will be very sufficient for most people.

If we average the 30 miles per day described in another comment, that will need 7.5kwh. Your granny charger will do that in under 3.5 hours. You plug it in when you get back from work and you can unplug it before you goto bed.

Re: increasing reluctance in the insurance industry to actually insure

unlike the older chemistries

Hopefully, you included the hydrocarbon systems so beloved of the uninformables?"

If someone "invented" it as a fuel source today, it would get nowhere and be banned in quick order...

"So instead of charging it at home or a handy lampost, I have to break my commute and pay how much?"

"You want it paid for in US dollars?"

"You want hundreds of billions of $ to go where? To who?"

"It stinks!"

"It puts what into the atmosphere?"

"We will put lead in it for a few decades?"

"So if the fuel tank is punctured that stuff will burn? How hot?"

"In a strong enough accident, it will explode?"

"and Hollywood showing how a car blows up if shot at will surprise few?"

"and you can put some in a milk bottle and use it as an incendiary bomb?"

The sooner we can get rid of this stuff, the better! Yes, we will still have the Daily Mail trying to persuade us that our batteries will catch fire if we go too fast over a speed bump. Will that make its readers drive more slowly?

Word turns 40: From 'new kid on the block' to 'I can't believe it's not bloatware'

Re: first time I saw MS Windows

That's still very much the case today.

And we keep telling them this and we keep getting advice about it from the Department of Bright Ideas!

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Agreed

Despite not being a Micro$oft fan, I was sad to see them leave. At least there was an alternative to Android.

International Criminal Court blames spies for 'targeted and sophisticated attack'

There will never be any evidence that Netanyahu engineered the whole thing.

No genuine evidence. I would not put it past certain criminal groups to manufacture some though..

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

Re: Who’s Jon Stewart

He is a minor TV personality in an insignificant country far away from the developed world.

Boris Johnson's mad hydrogen for homes bubble bursts

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Fusion waste?

You mean Helium?

Re: Electricity for heat pumps

Cost overruns.

The good news is, that in comparison to HS2, this project does not carry the same risks of cost growth. However this power gets to us, it does not go through leafy Conservative constituencies requiring it to be re-routed in as expensive a way as possible.

Neither Devon or Morocco are represented by old Etonians, members of the blue rinse brigade or even dodgy landowners.

If someone wants to chain themselves to undersea rocks, that is up to them. If Devon is having a few blue MPs at present, they should have replaced them with adults by the time the project gets there.

San Francisco mayor suggests police drones and CCTV can cure city's crime woes

Re: The name is fitting

"prohibition stops almost nothing"

It's worse than that. Prohibition creates and increases crime.

In 1918 USA, how many gangsters made a living from alcohol? How many were doing so 10 years later? It created crimes.

I would be interested to see how many drug kingpins there are in Portugal right now. Banning things makes them desirable to people. Illegal things are profitable. People get involved in illegal trade and push it.

Banning stuff does not lower the problem. It makes it bigger and more dangerous.

‘How not to hire a North Korean plant posing as a techie’ guide updated by US and South Korean authorities

Re: Techies get drug tests in the US

Drunk/stoned techies very often save the day

Conservative and corporate organisations (you know, the big state) still like to work under the pretences that the 18th amendment still applies and that we are winning the "war on drugs".

I remember a film that summed it up.

"You have a beer at the end of your day. You have a drink problem!"

"No. You are a Mormon. You have a problem with drink."

Europe mulls open sourcing TETRA emergency services' encryption algorithms

"used in Europe, the UK, and other countries"

We may have "left" the EU but we have not actually moved the physical location of the UK.

We are in Europe.

Lenovo PC boss: 4 in 5 of our devices will be repairable by 2025

Re: Battery safety

Back when you could pop open the cover and put a new battery in

I preferred it when the battery wasn't inside.

There was a sliding catch at each side underneath and the battery could just be lifted off. Total time for replacement was between 15 and 20 seconds!

@Ozan

The more Apple-y it is, the less I want it anyway!

Re: Thinner laptops?

Did many people really want them much thinner?

I have never cared about thickness. I like them lighter but that has nothing to do with weight.

With phones I definitely dislike them getting thinner. The first thing I do when getting a new one is to buy a "wallet case". This has the advantages of making them easier to hold, protecting them and somewhere to put my driving licence & library card.

No. Making kit ever thinner is from marketing departments who misunderstand the actual point of what they are interfering with!

Musk's first year as Twitter's Dear Leader is nigh

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

Chrysler has never had anything to do with GM

I never said they did. Although openly US made vehicles are uncommon, we have a few Chryslers and, more recently, Tesla's. We have certainly heard how they as well made as other US engineering products...

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

Have you heard of an obscure brand called "Vauxhall"?

I said openly. This was a boardroom/financier led thing. The Vauxhalls we got were not made in the USA or even to US engineering "standards".

Re: Going downhill fast, and so is Twitter

"General Motors which then overtook Ford"

Maybe in boardrooms but outside the USA nobody knows of any cars openly made by GM.

I have seen a few Chryslers, but, they are not regarded well by petrolheads I know. They tend to have a worse opinion of US engineering than me.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Re: Landscape/portrait

right in the middle of the screen with "always on top"

I could have done with that setting many years ago. Our hospital had a software update forced on us by Mr Blair and a couple of civil servants happily redesigning things one weekend.

This was in the days before network driven updates for everything and we designed the system update ourselves. It finished with the user having to do a reboot. We found that users would click on the message telling them to reboot without reading it and so we would get a lot of calls saying "this new thing doesn't work".

Using my recently acquired VB "skills" I made a small app that went full screen, red with white writing, "This computer has been updated. Please restart it." I removed the screen furniture so they couldn't minimise or close it. They did what it asked.

A few months later, we used the same purpose for yet another upgrade. In the meantime, our crafty users had found that <alt>+<Tab> could get the annoying message to go away. When we got the call that the application was broken, we would go to the PC and swop the message back to full screen and point to it.

If I had been able to force it to stay on top, it would have helped (Until they discovered <alt>+<F4> anyway.)

Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe

"trying to replace the EU legislation"

If our government manages to rush in something before the next election, would it be possible to dump these changes and reinstate the current rules again?

NYC rights groups say no to grocery store spycams and snooping landlords

Doing anything else is silly.

At some point in the future, hopefully, next year if the tabloids allow it, there will be an election that throws the current lot out and we get adults back in charge. That will set us on course to undo much of the damage caused by Brexit. Any kicking out of EU regulations to put in lobbyist-friendly ones will be reversed.

Dutch consumer groups sue Google over its entire business model

Re: Attack the advertisers to get results

I like to think that adverts don't work well on me.

I rarely notice them. If ever one becomes annoyingly hard to ignore or it reminds me of inappropriate behaviour on their part, I will just put them on my "try not to do business with this lot" mental list.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

Re: Paperless office

... the paperless office...

I remember hearing about that being imminent, when I was at college in the late 70's/early 80's!

I still don't have a flying car either!

My first question

Is this going to be a way to make printers only work with the latest version of Windows?

I see this as a way to

1. Punish all the people who don't jump to the latest shiny version of Windows quickly enough. and

2. Make anyone who wants to sell a Windows-compatible device have to make it everything else incompatible.

Someone will mark this down as it is paranoid. It's not. It is based on Microsoft's actions in the past.

I have a Laserjet Pro MFP. I had to install drivers for Windows. My Chromebook and Android phone, saw it on the network and just added it. I prefer that to adding drivers. If MS can follow this example, that will be nice.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Enter Password

That reminds me of...

"I just had an error message"

"What did it say please"

"error"

"What did the error say?"

"ERROR!"

"I'll come round. "

5 minutes later...

"Your password has expired and must be changed"

"See! I told you it was an error message"

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

@gauge symmetry

I suspect that after they have got rid of the invaders, that will be on the list.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

And Nato didn't move. Countries on its edge moved themselves in.

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

NATOs borders have never been "pushed" anywhere.

They have been pulled in by the people in much of the former Soviet Empire - Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary and even Czechoslovakia as was. Those countries asked to join. This was not a case of some special forces pushing into a country and setting up airfields.

This is in comparison with how all those countries above formerly ended up in what became the "Warsaw Pact". Russian soldiers would have come in in the process of kicking Nazis out - fair enough. They would send in their spooks (like Putin) to make sure that their supporters got into power and anyone against them ended up dead or abroad.

What happened if they wanted out? Hungary in 1956 is a good example. If Hungary freely decides to leave NATO, we will move our tanks out of the country, not reinforce them!

Re: WTF?

Except that it made no difference to the possibility of nuclear war.

It just allowed the Russians to continue having weapons that they are using to kill Ukrainians. If they did not have those weapons, they could kill fewer people, blow up fewer blocks of flats, fire less cruise missiles into burger bars and schools.

Theirs is the blood on Musks hands!

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Because MS has not yet released the documentation about the latest changes?

Re: I miss ClarisWorks

developers of Pandas

Fiat Pandas? My mum had one of those.

Re: Missing functionality

"We know better than you do how you should work."

I find the attitude something that Microsoft learnt from Apple and it is yet another reason why I would prefer to avoid both of them!

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

Re: Conflict

It all depends on what you call "right wing".

What everyone except the US considers moderate and central, they see as very left wing. These US, right-wing nutters do not consider themselves as such.

If the owners and senior management of Google and Microsoft consider themselves left wing, they are probably, like US Democrats, "center-right".

Not really

Wouldn't that be balanced out by their increasing age?

When I left school in 1978, I would have been conservative because of the type of school it had been.

With age, and hopefully maturity, I drifted to the centre (I have several LibDem family members), and then, maybe left of that.

I have seen the harm that "the right" has done in this country and several more elsewhere.

No, increasing age has not moved me to the right as described in a US saying. Reality has moved me leftwards.