Posts by David 132

Win10 still clings to over 40% of devices weeks after Microsoft pulls support

Re: Bloat like never seen before

Yeah, I know, "unpolluted" is a relative term, as is "as snappy as Windows 10"... damning with faint praise, surely.

But you know what I meant, I hope.

Re: Bloat like never seen before

To be fair to Windows (ugh. Sorry. I just threw up in my mouth a little) that sounds more like the typical corporate image bloat. I have a similar-specced machine from my employer and by the time the corporate stuff had been added on (VPN client, endpoint management, watchdogs, etc etc) it was brought to its knees - the fan whines constantly and the battery now lasts a comparable time to yours.

By comparison, I have a couple of slightly lesser-spec Thinkpads running plain unpolluted Windows 11, and they're as snappy as Windows 10 and get 8+ hours on battery.

'What the hell, Microsoft?' Users hit with incorrect ESU and LTSC Win10 out-of-support messages

Re: Ms Patch Tuesday

LOL

Leela: "Shut up, Terry..."

Re: Ms Patch Tuesday

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Labor organizers accuse Rockstar Games of 'ruthless act of union busting' after layoffs

Re: Labour

Or as an American friend of mine pithily explained the labour/labor, neighbour/neighbor, colour/color thing to me, a Brit, a few years ago... "We declared independence and got rid of U"

Robotic lawnmower uses AI to dodge cats, toys

Re: I really can't see them taking off (at least not in the UK)

“I really can't see them taking off”

That’s the Flymo version.

Re: I really can't see them taking off (at least not in the UK)

Just a gang turf war.

Attackers dig up $11M in Garden Finance crypto exploit

Can’t possibly be true

Criminal behaviour involving crypto? Surely not. I am flabbergasted. Scams, rugpulls, thefts & fraud are unheard-of where crypto is concerned. It attracts only people with the highest, most irreproachable ethical standards.

My worldview is shaken to its core.

Microsoft 365 business customers are running out of places to hide from Copilot

Definite shades of the old Penny Arcade comic-strip with pizza executives struggling to find new places to cram cheese.

Ah, here it is.

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

Re: Start me up

As I've observed before, Start Me Up was an inspired choice of theme-music for the Windows 95 launch, if only for the line of the lyrics they inexplicably didn't use: "You make a grown man cry..."

And I guess a prescient nod to the power-management problems that plagued older versions of Windows, and continue to affect even the new ASUS Xbox Ally handheld... "If you start me up I'll never stop / I've been running hot..."

Re: Hold that thar pig steady

"Hey, what you lookin' at me like that for, Jethro,?"

"Well fer shore y'did a real nice job with that thur lipstick, Cletus, but I reckon it was s'posed to go on the oinky end of the pig..."

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

How many outages is that now?

Are we at the "happenstance", "coincidence", or "enemy action" stage of the count now?

This is Doom, running headless, on Ubuntu Arm… on a satellite

Pfft. I regularly playget paid to play a game called Powerpoint that is minutes per frame, or indeed hours in at least one episode of terrifying infamy.

I'm still confused, 14 years later...

The "Antique Code Show" article that this story links to, giving the Reg's 20-year retrospective on Doom, was published Wed 23 Nov 2011, and opens with the words "id Software’s Doom – the definitive first-person shooter – is 20 years old today. It was uploaded to the University of Washington’s servers at midnight, 10 December 1993"

Now is it just me, or was there some very odd date-calculation going on there?

Did we move away from the Gregorian calendar at some point in the intervening period, losing several days again?

A pint for all concerned in this latest endeavour, nonetheless.

High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses

Re: X-ray to read cards?

I always thought it was to prevent yeast infections, from their loafing around all day.

I don't think I've ever, in many decades, finished a Monopoly game. They invariably descend into sulking, acrimony, "I'll lend you €2000 from my stash to allow you to pay the fine you owe me so you don't have to drop out" and so on, until the participants just drift away out of sheer boredom.

Clue(do) on the other hand, and especially its fiendish mirror-counterpart, "Kill Doctor Lucky"... now, those are fun and can be played without losing friends and alienating people.

Sora makes slurfect deepfakes of celebs spewing racial epithets

Re: Altman, for example, screams "I hate knitters"

Well, that one had me in stitches.

Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum

“Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum”

Well, yes. Mrs Microsoft is very proud of her child and won’t say a harsh word against him.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Re: consistency

Three fifteenths?

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

I haven't used iTunes since they ditched CoverFlow, which shows how long ago it was.

Nowadays I use VLC on my iphone and copy the music I want across using its LAN browser. I'm a Luddite and prefer my music collection to be in the form of actual mp3/FLAC files I can play wherever & whenever I want, rather than being chained to a streaming subscription.

Oh, and for playback on the PC I'm a fan of MusicBee. With the excellent 3DBee plugin it's a fair approximation of the old, good Coverflow iTunes.

Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'

I approve of your puckish sense of humour.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

With apologies and due credit to whoever wrote this a few days ago: "The Cloud is just distributed Single Points of Failure".

Excel is three sheets to the window on iOS as update borks everything

"iOS Ain't Done Till Excel Won't Run"?

This seems excessively careless even by Microsoft's recent standards.

Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Re: For fun

Ah, yes! "Lab rat"! How have I not made that connection before? I'm clearly far too literal. "It's a man with the head of a mouse/rat in a lab coat".

This is why I suck at Pictionary.

Re: For fun

I fondly remember that; I also recall that holding down certain keys (ctrl-alt-shift?) and clicking on the Windows Flag icon in the Windows 3.1 Program Manager "About" dialog box would display a scrolling list of the developers. And if repeated several times, the icon would change to - again, IIRC, it's been 30 years - a representation of Bill Gates, or randomly (in every sense) a man in a lab coat with a mouse's head.

Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge

Re: "Trust me ..."

I have two goats (Nubian/Pygmy crosses, FWIW). One is named Tolliver (as in, Tolliver Groat) and the other is named, what else, Stanley.

I do not however have a cat named Mr Tiddles. That would be silly.

Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no

Re: One point in favour

Obligatory XKCD. Yes, that one.

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

Re: A taste of the future.

Good question. It's a single mattress, king-size. We sleep separately; not because of marital discord, but simply because a) she tends to be very restless at night, and b) we have dogs, both of which sulk if they don't get to sleep on a people bed, and one of whom is extremely flatulent, necessitating an open window even in the depths of winter. I don't blame her for exiling herself to a separate room :)

For what it's worth (and I really don't want to sound like I'm shilling this product) the BedJet does offer a two-zone version, and if you want, special sheets with separate cavities sewn in for the airflow. We didn't bother with either. It's definitely the most energy-efficient way of giving her a warm bed without melting me, the dogs, or the whole house.

Re: A taste of the future.

Jesting aside, my wife bought - on an impulse, on Prime Day - something called a BedJet a couple of years ago. It's basically a small under-bed fan heater / refrigerator, with a duct to direct the air under the bed's lower fitted sheet. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Well, that's what she thought & had immediate buyer's remorse, until one day out of curiousity she had me set it up on her bed.

Well, now she's hooked, and swears it's the best thing ever. When she gets cold - I'm choosing my words carefully, because I don't want to sound like a sexist pig, but she does seem to feel the cold a lot more at night, shivering even when I am passing out from heat - it'll blow carefully-temperature-monitored air straight up the bed from her feet onwards.

And no, it's not cloud- or subscription-based, we're not QUITE that daft, and it has both a physical remote control and a WiFi direct phone app.

Before that, the state-of-the-art in bed heating was a hot water bottle, or in extremis, me holding the covers up on the side and wafting a hair-dryer carefully up and down. This is apparently an unqualified improvement :)

Re: Really?

for a penny a month

You got a whole penny?

Y' spoiled southern pansy, yer don't know how good yer had it!

Re: A taste of the future.

I suspect that at least in the case of the "smart mattress" the company responsible will keep the product active for somewhat longer than the usual IoT tat. $200/month to "monitor sleep data"? That's a ridiculous revenue stream.

SAP users still wrestling with business case for S/4HANA

Re: Anyone take this at face value?

I had "Marketing" in my job title for over two decades (I'm in remission now); allow me to take the liberty of translating SAP's words:

"The SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition package is not just a solution; it is a gateway to a future of limitless potential recurring subscription revenue for us, and unprecedented business agility control by us over your business, as we'll have it firmly held by the cojones"

Re: 95% of legacy users

It makes the Queensland Pitch Drop experiment look frantic and hasty by comparison, doesn't it?

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

heyrick: posts thoughtful comment on the limitations of current AI; gets 6 upvotes as I write this.

me: posts 60-year-old Monty Python quote; gets 17 upvotes.

Ah, the Register. Home of quality intellectual debate.

Have a virtual pint, heyrick.

Re: Password manager

"Swordfish"

I will not buy this record, it is scratched. My nipples explode with delight.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

Re: "Microsoft's quality control department"

SGWilko’s quoting Genetic Engineering by OMD, which used a Speak’n’Spell for some of the lyrics. And is a top track, up there IMHO with “Maid of Orleans” and “Sailing on the Seven Seas”.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Re: I photocopied my bum once...

I broke a flatbed scanner by sitting on it.

It was a pane in the ass.

Feeling lonely? Microsoft Copilot can now listen to your every word, watch your screen

Re: The Horror

I have a large number of ducks, and geese to guard them, and goats. They're endlessly amusing and very photogenic.

And my wife has threatened to divorce me if I, one more time, offer to show our friends "unsolicited duck pics".

In the immortal words of Dorothy Parker...

..."What fresh hell is this?"

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

Re: How dialog box options have changed over the years

From the company that infamously redefined the [X] Close Window button to mean "Yes, please go ahead and perform the Windows 10 upgrade", what else would we expect?

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters rage-quit the internet (again), promise to return next year

Delusional

"As per the exceptional circumstances by which the FBI tried to obliterate our legacy, we've exceptionally decided to temporarily renounce to oblivion [sic] and promptly hack them back,"

I can't decide whether their communiqués should be read in the voice of Comic Book Guy, or Eric Cartman.

Clearly emotional maturity and education aren't their thing.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

It was a cracking plan, though, albeit a fraction of what was needed.

Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition

Re: products that people wanna buy?

OTOH, a product literally named the "B Arc"...?

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

In this era of quantum computing we should all be using ROT52 at a minimum.

OK, that got a rye chuckle from me.

Teens arrested in London preschool ransomware attack

Re: 17 eh ?

What's the betting one or more of the scroats' affiliated ransomware actors dobbed them in, for overstepping the line and attracting too much attention from the authorities? No honour among thieves, and all that.

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

Re: "each key sounds different"

To stymie the keyboard-listening attack, perhaps this? Leroy Anderson - The Typewriter

Deloitte refunds Aussie gov after AI fabrications slip into $440K welfare report

Re: AI Prompt: Write a report justifying this conclusion.

"Policy-Based Evidence Making", in the finest Whitehall / Beltway [delete according to side of pond] tradition.