Posts by David 132

Microsoft suspends free trials for Windows 365 after a day due to 'significant demand'

Re: elastic?

Obligatory XKCD.

84-year-old fined €250,000 for keeping Nazi war machines – including tank – in basement

Are you right there, Father Ted?

All these comments and I can’t believe no-one else has mentioned the first thing that came to my mind… the acquaintance of Father Ted who had an even more complete collection.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Re: Adrian Mole

Curse you, now I have Ian Dury’s theme song going round and round my head.

“I’m profoundly in love with Pandora…”

Re: FFS not this shit again

Wheres the cynical bastard icon?

I don’t think you have to be particularly cynical. Anyone with the world awareness of a concussed cuttlefish can see that this is exactly what is going on.

So this icon will probably do.

Re: Not Buying

Yes, agreed, but as has been pointed out elsewhere, corporate beancounters vastly prefer Opex expenditure to Capex. If you’re an IT manager, it’s much easier to get approval for the former.

Hence the move everywhere (Microsoft, Adobe, etc) to nudge everyone to the subscription model. Own nothing, and be in hock for evermore. And I hate it.

Good points.

However, my inner stickler compels me to mention that the word in your first sentence should be “alluded”.

Redpilled Microsoft does away with flashing icons on taskbar as Windows 11 hits Beta

Re: Don't get TOO far out of the way

FWIW, I wrote a trivial applet a while ago that allows you to choose actions - notification message, run a specified script/EXE, sleep/shutdown, play sound - at specific battery remaining %ages. I'm happy to share the C# source if you want it.

Re: Nicely played on the screenshot there, Tim

Ooh, you cynic.

Nicely played on the screenshot there, Tim

The red pill (and pink background) replaces flashing icons.

Very subtle.

I'm running the dev build on a laptop here, and I have spent a lot of time saying "WOT?" to myself, generally followed by "...the hell?" / "...are they playing at?" / "...maniac decided that putting the start menu a random distance along the taskbar was a good idea?"

WireGuard VPN gets native port to the Windows kernel

Re: Good for Microsoft

I may have misunderstood, but I don't believe Microsoft have any involvement in this, any more than they do in any other hardware drivers. This is just the WireGuard creator rewriting the tool to run as a kernel-level driver rather than as a userspace module.

So your warm fuzzy feeling about Microsoft might be premature!

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

Re: Fuse works seamlessly on KDE

Upvoted just for mention of HBCD. God, is that still going? I remember X years ago when Hiren was my go-to resource for fixing Windows machines. ISTR it was legally a little dodgy at the time - lots of the mega-useful software included on it was actually full/licensed versions. Did it go legit?

Google says Pixel 6, 6 Pro coming this year with custom AI acceleration

Re: ?

They probably didn't have a banana handy.

Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings

Re: do we really need light emitting food containers?

What?!? You’re not using blockchain yet in your food container implementation?

Luddite. Neanderthal.

Sysadmins: Why not simply verify there's no backdoor in every program you install, and thus avoid any cyber-drama?

Re: the sunny island of Heraklion

Don't ask me. It's all Greek to me.

We can't believe people use browsers to manage their passwords, says maker of password management tools

Re: My password is secret

In a similar spirit of full disclosure, mine is **********

Re: Mixed model

I feel like digging passwords out of that part of your anatomy is really scraping the barrel of your bottom.

Hungarian tech store closed by World War II bomb

This seems like a good opportunity to link to Bob Newhart's monologue on amateur bomb disposal...

And my hovercraft is full of eels.

Beige pencil stockists on high alert as 'Colouring Book of Retro Computers' hits the crowdfunding circuit

Re: no colouring required

Fun trivia fact*: Most of the 70s/80s computers that we think of as beige were actually designed as pure white.

Alas, the designers didn't take into account the fact that everyone in the factory and on the assembly line smoked.

*actually not a fact

UK's National Museum of Computing asks tunesmiths to recreate bleeps, bloops, and parps of retro game music

Shout-out to Allister Brimble

Allister Brimble's music was basically the soundtrack to my youth. I had several of his Amiga demo floppy disks (and indeed, still fire them up under WinUAE occasionally). His versions of the Art of Noise Peter Gunn theme, and Crockett's Theme, were awesome.

Big thumbs up to Allister, wherever he is now.

Somewhat later and with 8 additional bits, but:

Lemmings 1 & especially 2

Lotus Turbo Challenge 2

Supercars II

…on the Amiga of course.

Re: Wot! No mention of the Hybrid Music 5000?

Ah, you beat me to it, mentioning Golden Brown. I had it too - probably the same version - for the BBC Bs in the school lab (Room 1, on the right just before the cafeteria, presided over by Mr Higgins). Blew my mind at the time that a computer could do such “realistic” music.

Then a little later, if memory serves, I got the game Zanthrax on my Speccy, complete with synthesised speech, and my ghast was even more flabbered.

I've got a broken combine harvester – but the manufacturer won't give me the software key

Re: The Wurzels

Saw them performing live in Swindon a few years ago. Utterly awesome. Together with plenty of scrumpy and pork butties, it was a great evening.

Latest Windows 11 Preview a well-rounded update – literally

Re: The next step...

Yes, provided you don't mind not getting a good 5G signal.

Re: Needs a better name

Given my recent battles with Windows 10, the front of the dog is not the end that comes to mind.

Or to quote Carwash the cat: "Ah. The more intelligent portion of the animal."

Kaseya obtains REvil decryptor, starts sharing it with afflicted customers

Re: Update

In other words: yes, they paid the Danegeld.

Microsoft has a workaround for 'HiveNightmare' flaw: Nuke your shadow copies from orbit

Re: AC Naturally

With a sufficiently long USB and display cable, all attacks can be remote.

Tomorrow's wireless world will be fatter, faster, and creepier

Re: This is stupid

Luddite. You haven't lived until you've seen the 8K HDR Dolby Atmos remasters of Roobarb & Custard.

The old New: Windows veteran explains that menu item

Re: Always an important consideration

Exactly. To repeat a comment I made in these parts at the time of Windows 8's introduction:

"We wanted familiar ways to do new things. What Microsoft is forcing upon us is new ways to do the familiar things."

Still topical, alas, and I wish it weren't.

Re: Always an important consideration

I think it's /usr/bin/get --direction off --object lawn --ownership my, but I might be getting confused with Powershell...

Troll jailed for 5 years after swatting of Twitter handle owner ends in death

Re: Eurotrash

Ah yes, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Antoine de Caunes, "Allo, my Eenglish chums..."

It was excellent late-night-after-a-curry-and-pints fare, and did more to foster pan-European understanding than a thousand European Union grands projets.

Re: calling someone's accent British makes little sense.

Actually, I am now chuckling at the mental image of Rab C Nesbitt as a movie villain.

“Mr President, we think he’s threatening to blow up the Earth, but he might just be yelling at his pet budgie…”

Akamai Edge DNS goes down, takes a chunk of the internet with it

Re: Downdetector?

Ah, but if you don't have a functioning "U" key on your keyboard it would be inaccessible.

Imagine the scenario - yor day's already going badly because yor keyboard is acting p, everyone yo email thinks yo're American with yor talk of "neighbors" and "colors"... and to top it all off, yo can't even figre ot why yor favorite web RLs aren't fnctional...

Re: Downdetector?

Business opportunity: DownedDownDetectorDetector.com

Spanish cops cuff Brit bloke accused of playing role in 2020 celeb Twitter hijacking

Re: Lost the El Reg black marker?

So instead of publishing the suspect’s phone number, you’d have them publish the combination to my luggage instead? Thanks a bunch…

Gung-ho tank gamer spills classified docs in effort to win online argument

Re: Do not take your work home with you.

(Yes, I know outdated, mine's the moth eaten one.)

The one with arrows all over it and a handy spherical cast iron paperweight chained to the ankle, if we're doing outdated prison images, shurely?

Maybe they could reveal the colour of the boathouse door while they're at it?

Engineers' Laurel and Hardy moment caused British Airways 787 to take an accidental knee

Re: Is there some special reason...

Random humour I saw on Reddit recently, which tickled my sense of the absurd:

"Shut up step-ladder! You're not my real ladder!"

US legal eagles representing Apple, IBM, and more take 5 months to inform clients of ransomware data breach

Have you seen the price of dimensional lumber lately??? Your quoted $1200 might be a woeful underestimate. Last week I bought some 2x4s and 3 sheets of 19/32" OSB, and was impressed/alarmed that they were "worth" more than the truck I put them in.

Northern Train's ticketing system out to lunch as ransomware attack shuts down servers

Re: Northern Train's ticketing system

Indeed. Contrary to what the KLF averred, it's not grim up North. I used to regularly get the train between York and Chester/Liverpool - clean, punctual, friendly staff, no problems.

Re: Shockingly bad design

Honestly, my first thought when I read this was, "I bet they left a USB port accessible on the machines". Nooooo. They wouldn't do that, that would be a n00b mistake, surely?

Journo who went to prison for 2 years for breaking US cyber-security law is jailed again

What an idiot, if true.

What makes me cross about this - subject to his appeal, etc etc - is that Comstock were apparently generous enough to give him a pretty good, white-collar job, giving him a second chance even though they must have known his criminal record. And now by his reported actions, he's betrayed the trust they put in him, and poisoned the well of goodwill - making it that much more difficult for any other ex-cons seeking to go straight and rejoin society.

Way to go, dipshit.

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

Re: This is confusing

Or to quote the great Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Re: So it's like using a boat to drive across a street."

Ah, if you wanted the car to stay put while the water flowed around it, should have bought a Morris Marina. The clue's in the name.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Re: Your headline reminds me...

Next you'll be claiming that your name isn't Bruce or Sheila.

Re: Oldskool TV and pot plant

“Norwich”, if we’re now playing that game…

Re: It’s amazing what you learn here.

Yeah but he prefers to use the easier Emacs…

…he finds Vi Hard.

How to keep your enterprise up to date by deploying the very latest malware

Re: Huh...

In context, it's really a poultry sum.

Re: this apha code is not fit for production!

It's dwarfed by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

This page has been deliberately left blank

Re: He's lucky it was just some t-shirts...

Best I ever saw was a (wannabe) US Marine Corps member who was so committed, he got their motto tattooed across the back of his neck in large letters:

“SMEPER FI”