Posts by Tim 11

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Re: How to kill the proposal...

That's a non-starter because obviously the law wouldn't apply to politicians - haven't you watched the news in the last couple of months?

It's time to kick China off social media, says tech governance expert

Re: "If we are banned there, we must ban them here"

I think it's swings and roundabouts.

There is definitely a viewpoint that says our more open and transparent society(*) is a better one to live in, and one of the challenges of living in that society is that we have to learn to cope with misinformation. By this kind of "tit for tat" response we would be lowering ourselves to playing the game by their rules.

* feel free to flame me with examples of where our society isn't sufficiently open and transparent, but you have to accept it's a lot more open than China.

AI-powered browser extension to automatically click away cookie pop-ups now promised

Who could possibly have predicted...

...that forcing every web site to put up a dialog which you need to click "accept" before you can use it would have the "unexpected" effect of training users that whenever a web site puts up a dialog the easiest way to get on with your life is to click "accept" without reading it

Congratulations EU wonks, you just made the problem a whole lot worse.

Amazon’s cloudy desktops creep towards cloudy workstations

Is this an article or an advert?

Just sayin'

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

surprised it took that long. The first thing I do when logging onto any server is check that explorer setting

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Re: Still Avoiding Them

OK I'l bite - HDDs ?? WTF !?!

I must admit part of me was expecting this climb-down but part of me was expecting amazon to announce their online own payment system.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Our accountant complained to me that her PC headset wasn't working properly so I went down to investigate.

as soon as she plugged the headset in (analogue 3.5mm jack plug), a dialog popped up which will be familiar to many dell users asking whether the device plugged in was headphones, microphone or headset. She immediately pressed escape. "Did you read that?" I asked "No" she replied, "Stupid annoying message comes up every time I plug it in"

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

Of course it's true that Windows 7 was based upon vista, but to justify vista's existence on that is to miss the point. Vista was simply not finished, it was not ready for release and should never have been released until it was at a level of stability similar to that achieved with windows 7.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: Several times...

reminds me of a story from a friend of mine. His dad had some problem with the computer that couldn't be resolved over the phone so friend asked the dad to bring the computer over next time he visited.

Dad turned up carrying just the monitor which he assumed, since that was by far the biggest component, that was where all the gubbins was.

Trojan Source attack: Code that says one thing to humans tells your compiler something very different, warn academics

Re: No examples

Just find paste some arabic/hebrew text and some english text into the same text file with an editor that supports it, then dump it out as hex and you'll see it

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

What if he had given away the software so others could de-pixelate the images on their own pc. Would either of them have been committing an offence in that case?

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

Re: Not that macOS is in any sense perfect …

It all depends what you mean by "downloaded" - npm install? git fetch? visual studio template? Almost all the code I write work on is "downloaded" from a git repo even if I wrote it myself

Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

sub-£500

doesn't anyone else find it amazing that in these days of ever-cheaper electronics, "sub-£500" is even a thing.

I've never even spent £200 on a phone; anything over that is in the "more money than sense" category.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

"rekindle the passion of fans"

fix the UI (yes just go back to windows 7 if you must)

remove the adverts and crapware

then you might stand a chance of getting your fans back

Tolerating failure: From happy accidents to serious screwups … Time to look at getting it wrong, er, correctly

Tim Harford's book "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure" has some more great examples - a really interesting read.

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

"unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators"

I presume that just means more adverts?

every time I go back to Windows, I wonder at the fact that a paid-for operating system is forever pushing adverts in your face when the free alternative is blissfully free of them.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

Basically there is too much money in the world, and we're running out of things to invent, so the only way to get economic growth is abstract investment bubbles, like a pyramid scheme.

Home office setup with built-in boiling water tap for tea and coffee without getting up is a monument to deskcess

it's a joke right?

reminds me of when homer simpson designed a car

https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: This is why they should be banned.

There's only one type of person in this world - the ones that think there are 2 types of people in the world. They're all wrong.

Ad banned for suggesting London black cabs have properties that prevent the spread of coronavirus

Seems a bit harsh

At the risk of inciting a flame war, the decision seems a bit harsh to me. I would imagine the risks of catching anything from the driver in a black cab with the screen is significantly less than in a normal minicab due to the screen. On balance I think that would be enough to make the difference between whether I felt safe enough to use one or not.

The evolution of C#: Lead designer describes modernization journey, breaks it down about getting func-y

Re: Full circle?

I'd disagree. From where I sit, functional programming is all about immutability and avoiding side effects, separating the function from the data; whereas OO is about encapsulating and mutating state. In many systems there is a place for both, and C# is trying to allow either paradigm to be used.

A non-OO procedural language like C is IMHO just an inferior option to OO - it's mutating state but without the encapsulation that OO offers.

Just my 2¢

Microsoft sprinkles a little Skype Meet Now integration on Windows 10 for Insiders

Re: What about Teams

You should probably expect all the remaining products called Skype (I think there are 3 left - Skype UWP, Skype for desktop and Skype for business) all to be renamed "teams" pretty shortly, then the transformation will be complete.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

to mis-quote monty python: "That's not a new web browser, it's just chome with the word 'chrome' crossed out and the word 'edge' written on in crayon"

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

Ahh yes, the ability to remove useless unwanted apps - there's a poignant reminder of the good old days.

Re: I've just uploaded my music collection to...

Hmm, that's OK if you're already paying for google drive or if you only have 15GB of music. For someone like me with 150GB that's £8 a month which is almost the cost of a streaming music subscription. Anyone recommend any free alternatives for uploading your own music to the cloud?

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

Re: How bad is it?

As someone who has worked almost exclusively on ASP.NET for the last 20 years, MS would have had to try really hard to force me to move to Ubuntu, but earlier this year they managed it.

The straw that broke the camel's back was actually a performance problem with Jest node.js test runner, but having moved to a UI that doesn't look like it was designed by a color-blind toddler, I'm surprised to say I'm now using Ubunbu for 99% of my workflow. Would I move back if the Windows UI went back to Windows 7 style? I'd say that's 50/50.

Hi, Google Duplex here, trying to book a haircut for a socially inept human. Sorry, 'COVID-19'?... DOES NOT COMPUTE

Relying on human operators

Aha! I bet if you took apart one of their so-called self-driving cars you'd find an illegal Bangladeshi child-labour immigrant stuck in the engine compartment with a periscope

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Re: Invalid and Valid

From memory, Microsoft service agreements use some kind of weasel words to the effect that a service is only considered down if no part of the service is running at all. Couldn't log in to your email? but the login page appeared didn't it? so the service was up but just in a degraded state.

Time to burst out graphing: Get the Windows Insider experience... by taping a calculator to your monitor

"Outlook search has also been fixed"

I presume you meant to say "one bug in outlook search has been fixed". Searching in outlook has been a debacle since day 1, and I doubt they've rewritten it from scratch now.

Log us out: Private equity snaffles Lastpass owner LogMeIn

Re: better solution?

correct horse battery staple

Re: why is this an issue

Theoretically they could change the encryption algorithm to one that has a back-door and re-encrypt your vault next time you type in the password, and you'd never know.

In reality, my hunch is that the risk is low - the bigger a company is, the more concerned it tends to be about internet security and obeying the law, but in the world of password management it pays to be a bit paranoid (especially as there have been demonstrated attempts of governments trying to interfere with encryption), and many would argue that unless it's open source, you can't rely on it. I certainly have some sympathy with that view.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

Re: Not sure where to go

For anyone (like me) who has been out of the loop and feels overwhelmed by it all, I think this video is a useful way to spend an hour of your time - less if you skip over the bits you're already familiar with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pThnRneDjw

Microsoft's Teams goes to bat for the other team with preview on Linux

Electron?

I thought teams was built using electron? surely in that case portability is automatic?

Windows 10 Insiders: Begone, foul Store version of Notepad!

Re: A good u-turn

Notepad++ is, as its name suggests, the Notepad equivalent of C++. Too complicated and confusing unless you're an expert in it.

I'd be happy with normal Notepad if they would fix a few obvious things like (1) actually putting in line-ending detection (instead of just blatantly lying and pretending you have); (2) handle at least moderately large size files (e.g. 100MB - not exactly big for a log file); (3) put in a keyboard shortcut for "goto line"; (4) actually display the current line number. Surely this would be a trivial amount of work

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Do...While

Most looping is iterating over data structures, and nowadays most languages have some kind of ForEach which is a godsend.

For the other type of loops where you're waiting for some condition before you exit, I almost always prefer an infinite loop with an explicit breakout when the condition is hit, rather than the different while/until constructs which force you to move the condition to the beginning or end.

UK public sector IT chiefs shrug off breach threats: The data we hold isn't that important

Evidence?

This is just shoddy shit-stirring journalism and we should be expecting better from el reg.

The article (and Sophos) are automatically assuming that the people they interviewed are deluded or dishonest but there's no shred of evidence that what they are saying is false - I'm sure there would have been just as much uproar if a small majority of private sector IT chiefs claimed their data was less important than that held in the public secctor.

Obviously tax returns, confidential medical records, passport details etc are important, but maybe they were included in the nearly-50% who didn't agree with the statement. We can't know unless there's some kind of analyis of what the true picture is.

I speak as someone who is about as far to the anti-public-sector end of scale as it's possible to get, but politics shouldn't trump truth.

The safest place to save your files is somewhere nobody will ever look

Welcome to America - the land of free speech

Back in the 90's the sales demo machine for one of our apps suddently stopped working and started generating very scary INGRES error messages. On closer inspection, it couldn't connect to INGRES because there were no database drivers installed.

On finally getting hold of the person who had set up the machine in the first place, it seems he'd seen fit to install them in a directory called C:\TEMP which had then been deleted by a subsequent user who assumed that the contents of that folder would be a good candidate for purging to free up disk space

You rang? Windows 10 gets ever cosier with Android, unleashes Calls on Insiders

Unified comms anyone?

If you ask me, it's pretty shameful that in 2019 we've only just invented a way for your computer (which is probably already connected to the world's primary network) to communicate with someone on a phone (which is probably also connected to the same network). if you'd have asked me that question 30 years ago I would have expected us to have got that figured out by the year 2000

Love Microsoft Teams? Love Linux? Then you won't love this

Re: ETA

+1 - writing the app in javascript using a cross-platform technology and then not releasing it on linux is completely baffling, from a technical standpoint at least.

Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS source from the museum and sticks it in GitHub

apple keyboard

even to this day you don't get the # key printed on a macbook air UK keyboard

Why are sat-nav walking directions always so hopeless?

Re: As you might expect...

In spain recently I asked for "te negro con leche" which I understand to be the normal way to request the closest approximation they have to a proper cup of tea.

A couple of minutes later, a teapot appeared, accompanied by an empty cup but apparently no milk. I thought I'd give it a stir before asking for the milk but when I opened the lid, I found the contents of the teapot was a teabag and hot milk - no water at all

Still using Skype? Good news! After HOURS of meetings, Microsoft reckons it knows when you're Not Active

Don't diss skype until you've tried skype for business

The presence model of Skype for business is more like rolling a dice. often i receive an email telling me I missed a conversation when i've been online the whole time, then when I log onto the outlook web app on my home laptop a week later, the conversation appears there instead. if you happen to have S4B open on both laptop and phone, you will only get notifications to none-or-one of those devices, and it's totally random which one.

etc. etc. etc. </rant>

Hello 'WOS': Windows on Arm now has a price

Re: How much?

"Apparently Windows 10 S has an app in their store which flicks the switch and changes it to normal Windows 10"

but this thing doesn't have an Intel (or Intel-emulating) CPU so presumably it won't be able to run x86 and x84 native windows apps. So this while thing really boils down to nothing more than a reinvention of windows RT. Can someone explain how I'm wrong?

Ex-UK comms minister's constituents plagued by wonky broadband over ... wireless radio link?

Re: @AndrueC

Not really.

Another way to overcome the problem would be to allow providers to charge more to the customers that it costs more to supply to, and let the market determine what is a reasonable price for broadband in a small village.

Connected car data handover headache: There's no quick fix... and it's NOT just Land Rovers

let's go back to the good old days... oh wait!

in the olden days (and probably still today for 90% of car owners) you can make a copy of the key before you sell your car (or house for that matter, or anything with a key in it) and still get access even after the ownership has been transferred. is this really any worse than that?

What happens to your online accounts when you die?

Re: IMHO

I'm not sure I see it as so much of a problem.

The world is changing fast and your kids don't like the same music/movies/games as you and generally don't want to *own* digital content in the same way older generations are interested in owning things. In fact, apart from houses and the odd sentimental keepsake, I reckon people will be increasingly less interested in inheriting things from their parents at all.

Wearable hybrids prove the bloated smartwatch is one of Silly Valley's biggest mistakes

power consumption

Re: the TicWatch part of the story, what's sad is that the manufacturers have to switch to a different operating system to conserve power - surely any OS intended to be used primarily by battery powered devices (android, IOS etc) should be designed to use next-to-no power when inactive, and perform only the necessary functions at any point in time.

Official: The shape of the smartphone is changing forever

soon they'll be announcing an "upgrade" to a 24:12 aspect ratio for high end phones - bigger is better, right? ;-)

Leatherbound analogue password manager: For the hipster who doesn't mind losing everything

Re: Just do what the NHS does...

Here's another NHS secret: Want to break into any nursing home? the door code is 1066.

OTOH - Don't want to break into a nursing home? hmm yes I can see that :-)