Posts by Big_Boomer

Open-source AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers

FTFY

"AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers". Open Source has nothing to do with it.

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

QR Codes

Better still, show it a big QR Code and have all kinds of code and instructions injected into the control system. They fool many people, so AIs should be a doddle.

House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16

Make the Parents responsible for controlling access to anti-Social Media?

I nearly swallowed my pen when I read that in one of the comments. Are these the same parents who have no idea how their phone/tablet/PC works and have to get their 10 year old to fix it for them, and yes THAT is the majority amongst non-Techie parents? And that is for parents who actually care about their kids (which to be fair is most of them), but there are plenty of parents who just don't give a crap and see the inevitable results of their bareback shagging as an inconvenience and a resource drain, so they are never going to spend any time with their kids, let alone educate them or read to them, and they all expect the school system to do their job for them.

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Answers on a postcard to,...

Please post your suggestions for a new name for Notepad. (BloatPad? AITookAShitPad?) Really get creative with it! <LOL>

Global economy shrugs off US tariff shock, tech spending does heavy lifting

Re: Trick

Which the seller/sender promptly rolls into the price on the next item they send to the USA. Trust me, only the buyer is going to pay OrangeBaby's Tariffs, and since they are all import tariffs that means US residents. Customs might get away with that "trick" for a few items but pretty soon the sellers are going to either raise their prices or stop sending to the USA.

A few years ago the idiot UK government started requiring overseas companies to pay the import duties on sales under £135 and the result was that most small overseas companies simply refused to send to the UK. Before that I used to buy regularly from a small business in the US that supplied what I needed all from one business, but afterwards I had to source it all locally.

As for the Tangerine Muppets latest threats of tariffs, bring them on. The rest of the world is now 100% sick of his bully-boy tactics and bored of pandering to a spoilt narcissist. Even if our governments do nothing many people I know are now actively seeking non-US products, even if it costs them more. Imagine if the rest of the world starts doing what Canada has been doing since his tariffs. If the USA wants isolation, the world will give it to them. No doubt you can take Greenland by force, but you will crash your economy and effectively secede from NATO, and all because the brat you elected threw a temper tantrum because somebody dared to not give him what he wanted.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Funny

Yes,... funny. Here you all are moaning about your TVs watching you when you have been walking around with the perfect surveillance device in your pocket/handbag/hand for years. It has microphones to listen to you, several cameras to watch you, and is almost always connected to the internet. I know that they are being monitored for nefarious use but that has never stopped anyone as they find ways that do not get detected, or else it is your government who is doing the watching.

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

Walk away

Having worked in Support for several decades, it's the only way to deal with know-it-alls. I had one start on me when I walked out of his office and I told him straight to his face that since he knew it all already he didn't need my expertise. He then tried to badmouth me with my boss and with the company CEO, both of whom knew better. Several hours later he asked me politely if I would help him with his problem and in 15 mins it was fixed. The twat never apologised and from then on we stayed away from each other. I am not perfect and I do occasionally make mistakes, but I will not put up with that kind of treatment from anyone.

BBC tapped to stop Britain being baffled by AI

Less and less relevant

I like the BBC, I like programmes like QI and Red Dwarf and Monty Python and many others that probably would never have been made on commercial TV. I don't listen to BBC radio much any more but grew up listening to R1 & R2. However, these days they seem to be screening more and more repeats and cheap documentaries full of padding and time wasting drivel. As a consequence I find myself watching less and less TV as I actively HATE most commercial TV with their race to the sewer programming and constant nagging to buy sh!t that nobody wants. Even Discovery seems to be headed to the sewer with it's endless promotion of fantasy crap like "ghost" or "Bigfoot" shows and a seemingly non-stop chain of programmes about Gold obsessives. I am glad I grew up in the 70s and 80s when TV was good. The TV is on most nights, but for most of the evening it is quiet and acting as moving wallpaper.

Microsoft research shows chatbots seeping into everyday life

F*** OFF!

Gemini on my phone & Tablet, Copilot on my laptop and desktop, and every single day one or the other of them gets told to F*** OFF after asking if they could help with what I am doing. I don't have the option or currently want to use Linux so please don't start preaching that again. What I would like would be to be able to 100% delete all such "AI" garbage from my devices so I don't have to waste my time every day telling glorified F***ING CLIPPYs to F*** OFF!!! Roll on retirement day when I can wipe everything and go Linux, although knowing my luck by then that will also come with a nice helpful "AI" that want's to be my friend. Please let the sodding bubble burst soon so we can get shot of all this crap we are being force-fed. If you love "AI" then good for you. I don't want it and I RESENT having it constantly pushed at me because some marketing A-HOLE thought it would be a good idea.

Britain plots atomic reboot as datacenter demand surges

Short-sighted politicians

Our incompetent politicians chose short term electability over long term energy security and so let our home grown nuclear industry die out, and now they and everyone else are bemoaning what was done. My Dad worked for TNPG on Hinkley B back in the 70s and saw what was coming so transferred to a US nuclear power company, but even that faded away in the 90s. Too many NIMBYs wanted cheap reliable electricity but they all wanted it generated in someone else's backyard.

Then we had Chernobyl where a poorly built nuke in country that lacked reasonable safety precautions blew it's top (non-nuclear but effectively a big dirty bomb) and now everyone wanted nuclear power banned everywhere, regardless of whether it was well built, safe, and reliable or not. In Japan money grubbing cheapskates decided NOT to listen to the engineers who told them to put the emergency generators on the roof of the containment vessels, and that (helped by the Tsunami) gave us the Fukushima meltdown.

Because of the Calder Hall/Windscale fire in the UK we were one of the first to regulate the nuclear industry and rightly so, but that regulation has now turned into a monster that needs cutting down to size. So, here we are with nearly no nuclear power industry of our own and having to buy ours from the Americans, Chinese and French. We currently have 4 sites generating power, Hartlepool, Heysham (1 & 2), Torness and Sizewell B, but 3 of those will probably end power generation in the next 5 years, which leaves us with Sizewell B. France on the other hand has about the same population level as the UK, but has 56 (soon 57) nuclear reactors generating power versus the UKs 10.

Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense

Gullibles gonna gullible.

The gullible are always going to believe/trust whatever they are told, especially when the info comes from a source that they already believe/trust for whatever reason. It is the basis of Religion and Government since forever. The problem here is that they are believing/trusting a piece of software that has as much integrity as a wino on LSD, and yes some of the worlds people/organisations also fall into that same lack of integrity. My pet hate about AI is the inevitable consequence that it's users will stop thinking about things themselves, and instead rely on the AI to do their thinking for them. So, whoever controls the AI's, control the gullible. Anyone for Big Brother Mind Control?

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

It's a random Friday in November,.... it's The Register's Passwords Article Day 2025.

People are, have always been, will always be terrible with passwords. That is because the idea of passwords itself is flawed and insecure. 2FA is better but is clunky and difficult to use. No, I don't have any ideas on how to identify people in a more secure and easy to use way, but a good start would be for such identification to only be required for very few websites and applications. As it is every TomDick&Harry website requires identification so that they can spam the crap out of you with marketing garbage.

Network operator ponders building a new submarine cable – on land

Why?

If they need more capacity around South Africa, then add more capacity there. Trying to build it across land on the least politically stable continent on the planet is going to be damned near impossible. Even once in place and operating, a regime change in any one of the nations it traverses will end up with threats to cut it unless $$$$ are forthcoming. Also, chances are that laying the cable around South Africa will be WAY cheaper than building a reasonably secure over/under land cable.

NHS left with sick PCs as suppliers resist Windows 11 treatment

Not at all surprising

What many outside the medical devices field don't know is that most medical devices require extensive testing and approval to ensure that they won't cause unintended effects to staff and patients. That testing costs a ****ing fortune, takes years to complete, and has to be done for each and every region where your devices will be sold because of course every region has different requirements for testing and documentation. So, MS announce that they are ending support for Win10 in just over 1 year under the massively flawed assumption that everyone can just jump to their latest shiny-shiny at will. Most medical device companies typically operate on a 5-10 year refresh cycle depending on the device, and MS and their marketing people can just go sit on a massive **** and rotate if they think otherwise.

Ours run the latest versions of Win10 LTSR and Win10 Embedded and we will get them to Win11 when the testing/documentation is done and not before. Many such devices sit behind their own firewalls and have other protections so the fact that the OS is flawed and requires constant patching if exposed to the internet is normally not an issue.

And before the Linux/Unix people start bleating on about using that instead, some of our devices do run on certain flavours of *nix but there are other issues there that make life difficult such as the fact that the user base are all Windows people.

Microsoft gives Windows 11 a fresh Start – here's how to get it

Open Shell

I've been using Classic Shell and more recently Open Shell for many years now. It means I get to have a stable menu layout how I want it. As others have said, since the abortion of a Start Menu introduced in Win8 MS seem to have completely lost the plot and are now desperately trying anything and everything. Their best bet would be to allow people to customise their Start Menu how THEY want it, rather than how some Marketing twonk wants you to see it. I use Open Shell with Win11 with no problems at all, but I don't use a top or side Taskbar so can't comment on those. I have a nice Win7 style Start Menu in a lairy lime-green with what I want, where I want it.

Everyone needs an AI phone. No, don't hang up, it's true

I already regularly have to tell my phone to Fark Orf as it pops up "helpful" little suggestions on how to do something other than what I am actually doing. I also waste probably 30 mins per day doing the same on my PC where it "decides" that I am doing something it feels it can help me with, so I then end up having to undo what it's done and then try to figure out how to disable that function. I don't know who decides what is warranted interference in what I am doing, but I would be quite happy to ""re-educate" them,..... with a large HAMMER!

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

I enjoy those moments when I get to gloat and on a few occasions I have hung up on a support call, and after making 100% certain that the call has ended, have shouted "I ****ing told you what was causing the problem right at the beginning, but you would not listen to me because you were certain it could not possibly be YOUR equipment at fault!". As others have said, I am quite happy to accept that the fault might be in my companies equipment and I fully expect that the customer also accept that it may also be in their equipment. Whenever I hear people telling me that it couldn't possibly be in their kit, I detect the stink of someone covering their own arse, or at best someone who can't be bothered to do their job.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Bubble, bubble,....

bubble, bubble, bubble,.... and yet many are so "invested" in it that we will keep on having it thrust at us for a long time yet. <sigh>

AI skeptics zone out when chatbots get preachy

Gullibles

The gullible believe what they are told, especially when they are told something that confirms their existing biases. The source is pretty much irrelevant as we have seen since the advent of "social" media. The rest of us disbelieve pretty much everything until we have checked what matters to us. Yes, we also probably suffer from confirmation bias but even there we are sceptical and willing to change our view should it be proved to be wrong. "AI" is just another source of lies, distortion, and outright bullshit to go along with the media, "social" media, national "intelligence" agencies, marketing, etc.

One in six US workers pretends to use AI to please the bosses

Tool

I see "AI" as a tool. When I need that particular tool I will use it. In the meantime, the tools I have are doing the job just fine. I have tested the use of AI in support of what I do, and whilst one AI produced data faster and more efficiently in one specific area, another AI hallucinated stuff that does not exist and generated outright bullshit. A decent search engine can do the former.

This whole "everyone must use the company AI" has the same stink as all these return-to-office mandates. Somebody invested too much money/ego into it and is determined that everyone see what a great idea it was of theirs. What is going to be really funny is watching the panic amongst the "AI" promoters and advocates when the bubble bursts.

Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule

Apples and Rutabagas

A 4 day week may well work better for some people in some roles, and a 3, 5, or 6 day week may be better for others. The point is FLEXIBILITY. Back when most peoples jobs involved repetitive production line work having people there to do the work was necessary. Now it no longer is and comparing modern jobs to that type of job is comparing Apples to Rutabagas. "Office" jobs in particular are in no way comparable to factory work any more than they are comparable to farming, bricklaying, etc. My job is Tech Support but I am not required to be on call most of the time so there is no need to be available all of the working week. I do need to be able to contact customers during THEIR working hours, but where I do that from and for how many days per week very much depends on my workload and the customers needs. My work hours are flexible because often customers cannot assist with fixing issues during normal work hours, so I am flexible about when I work and I fully expect my employer to be flexible concerning work hours as well, and they are. Expecting everyone to fit into one mould/pattern is a sign of incompetent management and an inability to move with the times.

AI creeps into the risk register for America's biggest firms

Who would have thought,....?

Huge amounts of money wasted on this mostly useless "AI" garbage and some are still throwing money at it. Oh well, some will make money from it and the rest will write the cost off and then lay off staff to recoup the money they wasted. Bubble-bubble-bubble.

C-suite sours on AI despite rising investment, survey finds

Predictable

All I can do is shake my head and laugh. Everyone I know of that has half a brain has been talking about the bubble on "AI" hyper-hype for years. Oh wait, listening to anyone other than shareholders and other C-Suite people is not possible for them. Oh well, at least they will soon get kicked out with a nice fat severance package only to be replaced with another clone. <sigh>

Game, set, botch: AI umpiring at Wimbledon goes long

Something else that AI is just as bad at as Humans?

I'm shocked I tell you, shocked that AI can be just as crap at something as us meatsacks. Sounds like a lot of investment for nothing,.... yet again. Bubble-bubble-bubble <LOL>

Ordnance Survey digs deep to prevent costly cable strikes

The sooner the better,....

but it will probably be shit and incomplete.

I wanted to put up a fence in my front garden and queried the gas/electric/water companies as to where the feeds for my house would be. They answered that they didn't know as the builders fitted those and they had no data. So, I went ahead and fitted the fence posts with 600mm long spikes and,... yup, you guessed it, one of them nicked the gas feed pipe and my house filled up with gas. It turns out that gas and electric feeds are only required to be buried 375mm (2 bananas) deep and worse still they can be buried together and are often not where you would expect them to be. I opened all the doors and windows and disabled anything that could cause a spark and called the gas board who responded impressively (we had 4 vans there at one point). After shutting off the gas feed to the area, they dug down to where I had hit the gas pipe and the electric feed was right there next to it. 30mm one way and I would have been at the centre of a big badaboom! The pipe got fixed PDQ (impressive what they can do) and I got billed £1000 for my sins. I consider it a cheap price since I still have my life and my house, but 375mm is NOT deep enough for something as dangerous as gas & electric feeds and detailed mapping of where they are placed should be required for ALL installations.

BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex

Bananaman ROOLS!!!! (drools?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananaman

The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge

That's just ****ing HILARIOUS

So, Google AI results have decreased the footfall on the very sites of those who pay Google to INCREASE that footfall? That is a fucking epic example of shooting yourself in the genitals <ROTFPMS>. Well done Google, you created a market and now you are destroying the same market. So, what are your AI's gonna scrape for info when everyone blocks your scrapers because you are costing them money and giving nothing in return. The worlds biggest Freetards hoist by their own idiocy.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Why recycle?

I always keep my previous phone as a backup should I have a problem with the current one. By the time I no longer need it (5+ years old) the best offer I get from the "recyclers" is a couple of £ so not even worth the hassle of dropping it into a supplied/postage paid bag and dropping it into a letter box. I gave up subsidising the credit industry years ago when I started buying my own phones and have never looked back. I see adverts for S25s & i16s for £50+ per month and wonder why. I have an S25 as a work phone and it's no better than my personal Poco X4 I paid £300 for 3 years ago.

Brain activity much lower when using AI chatbots, MIT boffins find

No big surprise

Asimov predicted exactly that in his Robot series of books some 70 years ago. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies, and the same holds for the brain. I have no problem with using AI to perform drudge jobs, but using them to pass any kind of test is utterly pointless as you will have learned nothing. It reminds me of the endless streams of certificate bearing idiots I have had to work with over the years. Having a degree/diploma/certificate does not mean much if you can't do the job you were hired for. They used to be an indicator that you were capable of learning, but in my experience they are becoming more and more worthless and the advent of LLMs is only going to hasten that.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Bulldozers

I was on that ship. It was a trip across the Bay of Biscay. The ship hit a big storm and a crane snapped it's chains and tipped onto several cars. Our Volvo 145 was pancaked and we only managed to get our suitcases out after they cut the roof off with angle-grinders. I don't remember much of the voyage apart from puking my soul out. I was 10 or 11 years old.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggests threatening AI for better results

Disable, uninstall, deactivate

That is my attitude to AI. Microsoft, Google, etc. They all seem hell bent on ramming this garbage down our throats but so far it can be avoided if you try hard enough. I have resisted switching browser for ages, but it seems that enforced AI is finally going to achieve that. I may well be a grumpy old fuddy duddy but I find it just gets in the bloody way just like that infernal fucking Clippy disaster back in the late 90s. Google search results are now utterly useless even if you scroll past all the AI and sponsored shite, and Bing is much the same. So, I'm disabling it as best I can and if that fails, then it'll be replaced with another browser.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

The cause of the problem is poor design of WiFi Access Points. I live in a typical, crowded, English housing estate (subdivision for the Americans) and I can see the WiFi routers for my 6 nearest neighbours on most of my devices. However all of our AP's have decided to use the same channels when there are at least 3 possibilities each at 2.4 and 5Ghz. So, I manually changed mine to an empty channel, and guess what?.... Yes, the automatically managed APs changed to follow mine. Two of them didn't so I assume that they were manually set. Even having only 4 on the same channel has improved throughput so I have left it there for now. Living in an Appt block must be a nightmare. At least 6Ghz signals won't carry as far as 5Ghz. I have CAT6 cabled all of my devices that are easy to cable (PC's, TV, set-top-box) because they don't move, but tablets and phones and such are via WiFi.

Homeland Security boss says CISA has gone off the rails, vows to set it right

Totally predictable.

Ancient Orange and his flunkies rely on misdirection, half-truths, and even outright lies, so they can't possibly have somebody independent and trusted point out their "inaccuracies" can they? I mean it makes them look incompetent at best and downright criminal at worst. Expect more of this kind of thing over the next few years as they dismantle all the checks and balances that keep the USA a democracy. Soon to become the Peoples Democratic Republic of North America if he carries on like this for the next 1360 days.

Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, economists claim

So, massive investment but no real effect on productivity,..... so what is the ****ing point? Other than better pattern recognition than humans I have yet to see a single real world use for "AI". Perhaps it will show just how much of a waste of space so many people in business really are but I don't hold out much hope for that either. Even as a toy "AI" is seriously flawed, but at least there it doesn't really matter, except that people believe it's bullsh!t without bothering to check. Just this last weekend a non-technical friend stated a "fact" that he had been told by a certain browser manufacturers "AI" that turned out to be a complete load of hogwash.

Elon Musk makes another cut – to his time at DOGE

He's full of Russian Seamen?

Fixed that for ya ;-)

Trump's tariff turmoil leaves IT projects in deep freeze

FOLLOW THE MONEY!

Who is making money from Ancient Orange's on/off/on/off tariffs? Somebodies are making a killing from the stock-markets yo-yo every time he spouts yet another pronouncement.

Personally I am so bored of hearing about him and his drivel that I am starting to switch off the news and regularly avoid articles like this one.

Procter & Gamble study finds AI could help make Pringles tastier, spice up Old Spice, sharpen Gillette

Another week, yet another desperate attempt to validate their investment

Oh well, the Tawny Tariff Tosser will soon make it all moot as spending on AI will plummet when world trade slows dramatically.

EU: These are scary times – let's backdoor encryption!

EU, UK, USA,... all dumbfuqs

This is just the latest round of government dumbfuquery. They don't understand something so they make grandiose statements on how to fix it (despite advice to the contrary) until eventually someone either explains it to them using words of less than one syllable, or else they get fired/voted out. As for the anti-EU comments above, you should be proud that a Brit thought of this stupidity first!

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Econ 101

Spot on, and it is because they are neither Communist nor Socialist no matter what they claim. As for not having gulags in the USA, tell that to the 1.8 million people in prison (0.7% of US population). Oh wait, I can hear the excuse that they are criminals and yet we hear the EXACT same excuse from North Korea, Russia, China, etc.

Re: Econ 101

VAT & GST are SALES Taxes. You know, the one that in the USA you have to add to everything depending on which state you are in. The ONLY difference here is that it is charged at the same rate everywhere in the country (countries that are about the same size as a US State) and is included in the price you pay rather than you having to calculate it yourself. Items are Zero rated for export simply because it is assumed that Sales taxes get charged where they are sold to the end user.

As for your comment about "Liberals", can I remind you about Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Ferenc Szálasi, all of whom were Fascist Right-wing Leaders. Being an insane genocidal maniac isn't a left or right thing, they are all batshit mental and need putting out of our misery. Real "Liberals" believe in caring about/for others and helping people who cannot help themselves regardless of nationality, colour, creed, or religion. We have this thing called EMPATHY where you try to imagine how it would feel to be in their place, and how nice it would be if someone helped you, and how you could then go on to help others. Your lot only seem to be able to think with their wallets as GREED is your God! You are selfish and see everyone else as a drain or cost that you shouldn't have to pay for even when you have WAY more than you need. And no, I'm not a "gawd-damned Commie", nor even a supporter of Socialism, but your idea of greed politics nauseates me.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Poor service

Sat here at my desk in my upstairs office, I get 2 bars on 5G, 2 bars on 4G, 5 bars on 3G (with O2). Downstairs I get no signal at all on 5G, 1 bar on 4G and 5 bars on 3G. I only need enough bandwidth to browse web pages and for Google Maps to work, so 5G is of little use to me. The service in my house is so intermittent that I have to enable WiFi calling to get a steady signal level and not end up dropping calls due to the phone switching between 5G and 4G and 3G. That to me is a piss-poor service level and I don't see great coverage or service level elsewhere around here either. If you are in a big city, the coverage seems adequate and usable, but outside a big city (I am in a 30k population town some 40 miles from central London) the service is piss-poor and getting worse. The UK networks need to step up and actually provide what they have been promising for ages now instead of whining about <insert multiple excuses> for their piss-poor performance. I don't mind paying more IF it gets me a decent service level, but that has not happened for a long time now despite paying more and more. We pay more for a worse service and are expected to just suck it up.

The post-quantum cryptography apocalypse will be televised in 10 years, says UK's NCSC

Sounds sensible to me

Put a 10 year deadline on it, knowing that the various departments will undoubtedly not be able to complete it on time. Like most such things, usable QC is waiting for a breakthrough that will make it viable. Such breakthroughs are unpredictable but still need to be planned for. We do the same with a particular friend who is ALWAYS late. We tell everyone else we are meeting at 19:30 but we tell him 19:15, so he mostly arrives by 19:30.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: The only way to deal with Progress Bars...

That works well, except for that when you do that the moment you turn your back it pops up a little message asking you if you are sure you want to do the Update. There is a place in HELL in the super-laxative department for those who thought those were a good idea. A progress bar is fine, but it needs to move at least a little every minute or so. Percentages are like weather forecasts, it's somebody's educated guess but really shouldn't be relied on.

London is bottom in Europe for 5G, while Europe lags the rest of the world

Re: Crap network coverage

It's a Victorian era building that has brick walls and plenty of windows, but even that seems to be enough to block their crappy signals. The problem seems to me to be that they have switched to higher frequencies in search of better bandwidth, but have neglected the need to add additional cells to maintain the coverage they used to provide. So, we are paying more and more for a less and less useful service. At home I have to use WiFi to get a half decent data rate and even to make phone calls. That is a piss poor service that I am paying over the odds for. Having the capability to get high bandwidth is utterly useless if I can't get it when I want it. I used to have the same problem (with a different phone) when commuting on the M25. Calls would get dropped because there was never enough bandwidth to cope with the daily traffic jam on the approach to the Dartford Tunnel.

Yes, I chose my beer and dinner over looking something up online. Not interested in "Social Media" when I am actually with friends. :-)

Crap network coverage

I live 40 miles from London in a typical commuter town (population 30k) in a large red-brick estate and the coverage here is shockingly bad. I have to use WiFi calling from home because of no signal in my house and just last Saturday night I was sat in a pub and my phone was reduced to HSDPA and wouldn't load any webpage. I asked my friends if any of them had data coverage and it was the same across the board and across all 4 UK networks (O2, Voda, EE, 3). The pub is 200m from a major (3 lane each way) road and 4 miles from a city of 200k population. This wasn't some back-of-beyond place and yet the coverage indoors is utter crap across vast swathes of the UK. Outside the pub we all had between 2 and 5 bars of signal (whatever that means) and everyone was getting 4G. We seem to be paying more and more for ever decreasing coverage, when it should be the other way around. Personally I think that the problem in the UK is that the networks here were over-dependant on 2G and therefore never invested in quality coverage for 4G & 5G. Now that 2G is switched off they are seeing the holes in their service and indoors seems to be the biggest problem for 4G & 5G.

Printers start speaking in tongues after Windows 11 update

Do you mean the 24H2 that has so many outstanding defects that most are avoiding it like the plague? That 24H2? <LOL>

Microsoft adds another Copilot hotkey – this time for AI voice chat

"God damn the Pusher"

Well, if MS don't provide a "disable this shortcut" option, I am sure the aftermarket will. They do seem very determined to push their Co-Crappy in our faces don't they? Sad really, as that kind of marketing NEVER works because all you do is get peoples backs up who then create a way for others to avoid your crap. It's like those "interactive" adverts on Android games, where you have to click 3 times to close the advert. All that does is reinforce my determination to never ever use/buy that product or anything made by that company.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Upgrade cycle

Most Admins I know (and myself when I was an Admin) tend to upgrade the OS, and back-office software like SQL Server and Exchange, when they replace their hardware. From what I have seen the same seems to hold for VMs as well. If we jumped every time MS released a new whatever we'd have to learn to bloody levitate, so we ignore the marketing blather and stick to our renew cycle. About the only time that anything gets upgraded outside the renew cycle is when a new feature in, or new version of, whatever software our users are running requires a later version of whatever. Most software I know and use can happily run on 15 year old versions of SQL Server and really don't need the latest whiz-bang version. We don't run it on versions that old, but that is mostly to maintain support. Sorry MS, but no matter what your marketers, management or shareholders think, none of us give a crap about your margins or dividends. Our job is to provide a reliable service to our users, and more often that not your software (and especially your Updates) are the cause of what little unreliability slips past us.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

OhNO! Nobody is buying what we are selling!

And the reason for that is that it is A) Overpriced, B) Not what people want, and C) Full of Bloatware crap that we have to spend hours disabling or uninstalling. I looked at buying a new PC late last year and concluded that I simply didn't want to be paying £2k for a 2nd-tier PC (CPU and GFX card both released over 12 months ago).

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

Separation is vital, or burnout swiftly follows!

Before I figured out to keep work and home life (and mobile phones) separate, I spent 3 consecutive weekends in customer server rooms up to my eyeballs in messed up SQL DBs. The following weekend the expected call came at 07:30 on the Saturday but I was at my sisters house at the other end of the country and was physically unable to help so someone else got dragged in. On Monday morning I was called in to the company owners office and before he started in on me I slapped an envelope on his desk. He angrily asked me what that was so I told him it was my resignation. That shocked him out of his impending tirade and set him right back on his heels. When he asked me why, I let rip with my tirade and to be fair he listened to it all. He then calmly told me he couldn't understand why I wasn't willing to work myself to the bone when all the other consultants were quite happy to work evenings and weekends. Turns out they all got share-bonuses, but because I had come up the hard way (via tech-support) I was not in the bonus scheme nor was I earning ANYWHERE near what the others were on despite doing the same job and doing it better (hence me getting called EVERY time the shit hit the fan!). He asked me to take my resignation back and I did, but the offer they made me 2 weeks later was still nowhere near what the others were getting, so I resigned, started a new job the day after I left and never looked back. Their loss.

Since then I have never allowed any employer to take the piss. Some have tried and have received the "Sorry, I am 200 miles from home riding my motorcycle", or "Sorry, I have to take my partner to hospital" type of excuses (some real, some not). I am happy to work extra hours and am flexible with evening and weekend work, but I get time off in lieu for all extra hours worked and flexibility if I need time off during the week in return. Now I am only ever "on call" by pre-arrangement and for a limited period only.