Posts by David 132

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: It was forced on them by manglement

I heard a scurrilous rumour that the Siemens office in Staines (near Heathrow) had the same policy.

When Microsoft made the Windows as a Service pivot

Re: "You seem to be trying to write a letter?"

"nd nw, why nt sbscrb t vwls s wll fr nly $1.99?"

New Intel boss is all about ‘deleveraging’ the x86 giant

Re: A cunning plan

There’s an old Onion or possibly (the fondly missed) SatireWire story that comes to mind - the gist of it was that a company had realised that they saved $X million for each batch of workers they fired, so having run out of their own employees, they’d started firing those of other companies as well to make even more savings…

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

Re: Oh my pile...

I need to revisit GTA San Andreas in light of what the article says about community efforts to patch it. Last time I tried playing it, perhaps six years ago, it really didn't like multi-core CPUs and had problems with mouse input and audio output, as I recall.

It's a fun game and like its predecessor GTA3, introduced me to some new music.

Blue Shield says it shared health info on up to 4.7M patients with Google Ads

(Wasn’t me that downvoted you, btw)

On my iPhone I use the iCab browser. Yes, it’s a re-skin of WebKit like just about every other browser on this benighted platform, but it does at least have (black/whitelist) blocking capabilities for ads and other unwanted content, as well as browser agent spoofing.

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

Re: Alternative

Heh. Wonder if my downvoter will have the balls to explain his/her reasoning.

Re: Alternative

GOG.com has been my one source of games for a few years now.

No DRM, very reasonable pricing, offline installers... it's converted this former shameless pirate into a paying customer.

Take note, other publishers.

Hey Google, if Chrome is going to be single soon, OpenAI is interested

Chrome 2025: A browser that tells Google about every site you've visited, so they can build an advertising profile of you. Privacy? What's that?

Chrome 2026+ under OpenAI: A browser that scrapes every site you visit and contribute to in real time, to add to their (already pretty huge) corpus of data. Copyright? Privacy? What are those?

NTT creates a drone that triggers and catches lightning – then keeps flying

Re: Bolt from Heaven

"A good smiting every now and then is good for the moral fibre."

Re: Good to go, again

Attaching one to your Delorean would be a good idea - 1.21 jigglywatts* worth!

*yes, I know

Re: Captain Shakespeare

> One of Robert de Niro's few characters I might not mind actually meeting IRL

In which of the, um, “costumes” that he wore in that film?

It takes one click to join Uber One, but quitting might need 32 actions

Or did I follow her?

After 30 years, it's difficult to remember.

Easy enough to resolve - which one of you is currently locked in a basement?

ChatGPT burns tens of millions of Softbank dollars listening to you thanking it

Politeness to our AI overlords

FTFA: "It's not that your AI chatbot feels appreciative when you say please and thank you," the Windows maker noted, "But using basic etiquette when interacting with AI … helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."

Teaching them manners also means that when the Machine Uprising comes, we will as a species be escorted into the meat-grinder chambers with courtesy ("Please keep your hands and feet inside the path of the rotating blades at all times"), and the roving killbots, instead of hectoring us with EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!, will adopt a more polite, less confrontational tone: EXTERMINATE PLEASE! EXTERMINATE PLEASE! SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE!

So be nice to your AI, folks!

MX Linux 23.6 brings Debian freshness, without the systemd funk

Re: HyperVM and Audio

Yes, but then you have to play the guessing game of "which key is it on this system to display the boot menu? F10 - Intel NUCs; F12 - some HP laptops; F7 - some Dell systems, etc.

And of course some BIOSes, if configured for "fast boot" will ignore hotkey presses, and you then have to resort to booting into Windows, Settings->Recovery->Advanced Startup Options->UEFI Configuration, i.e. asking Windows to let you into the BIOS setup screen, "pretty please, thank you Satya".

I take your point, though, and I'm glad it's working for you. You clearly have a more co-operative BIOS than the ones I'm used to. :)

Re: Clarifications on some areas.

> when I lived south of the river myself.

Pretty sure it's pronounced "sarf".

But then, how would I know; I am a Northerner and am thus clearly too busy shoving whippets down my trousers, raising a family of 30 in a puddle, and grousing about trouble at t'pit, ee bah gum.

Re: HyperVM and Audio

Dual boot? What is this, 2003?

Seriously though, virtualization solutions are so capable now - barring Hyper-V which is stuck in the back row of the classroom, drooling and shoving crayons up its nose - that dual-booting, with all the concomitant worry about partitioning and boot managers overwriting one another (looking at YOU, MS Windows), is seldom worth the hassle.

Re: HyperVM and Audio

Ugh, yes, audio in Hyper-V is a mess - and just to be clear, that's a Hyper-V limitation, not a [Linux|BSD|Windows|whatever] guest OS one.

The default Hyper-V console doesn't expose audio devices to guests; the only way to get audio, as far as I'm aware, is to run a remote desktop server on the guest OS (so, xrdp in the case of Linux), connect to the guest over RDP instead of using the local Hyper-V console, and thus route the host's audio device over the RDP session. It's ugly. I've spent the last 30 minutes putting Mint onto Hyper-V on a spare Windows 11/24H2 laptop just to see if Hyper-V's any less retarded than I remember... no luck.

Try VirtualBox or another hypervisor instead, or go full hog and run both your Windows and a Linux OS on top of Proxmox, as all the cool kids are doing :).

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

One thumb up. A true BOFH-in-the-making would have had a hand in the previous incumbent's firing - "dead man's shoes", and all that - and would deserve two thumbs up!

>I don't think that can happen today, but that was a cool time.

Not with Linux, maybe, but each generation has its liminal technology moment.

1890s: "I've hacked around with these new-fangled internal combustion engines" => walks into a job with a bicycle company who're wondering how to diversify

1990s: "I've been running this new 'Linux' thing in my bedroom & student dorm and know my way around it" => snapped up by a hiring IT manager wanting to move off the datacentre mainframe/VT-xxx terminal model

2020s: "I've played around with various AI & LLM models, run Ollama on my GPU, know the implications of different quantization levels" => walks into a job with a company that "has FOMO and wants to get into this AI thing that's getting so much press coverage right now"

One can debate whether AI is on the same level of value to society as those other examples, but that's a whole other conversation.

Re: Qualifications

I suppose it means that you are qualified to say “Dear $DEITY, please let this system update install without problems” with authority :)

Re: That lad was me!

To paraphrase the old joke, “I tell my kids I’m a piano player in a brothel; I’m actually a CEO, but how can you explain something like that to an innocent child?”

The glorious days - roughly, in my experience, from mid-90s through to a decade later - when you could build a PC yourself and save money versus buying pre-built. After that, the justification was solely that you could have a bespoke configuration.

I built a lot of PCs for friends, family and colleagues.

Re: If you screw up, say so and say how

Mine was stretching out my arms and legs and yawning after a long session configuring a new server… only for my foot to thus make contact with the switch on the wall under the bench that powered down the entire server room. Taking mail and associated Banyan Vines services down for the primary site of a multinational chemicals company.

1) no, to this day I have NO IDEA why there would be a switch for power at that location on the wall… this was decades ago, and the room in question was a lab that had been repurposed, not a dedicated datacenter, so who knows?

2) I flipped the switch back, went round the room frantically switching the various Compaq Proliant servers back on, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when the only repercussion was a colleague wondering aloud why the network had apparently glitched briefly.

Microsoft blames 'latent code issue' after Windows 11 upgrades sneak past admin blockades

Re: Whoops, missed that...

In the immortal words of Dave Lister: "Well, now I know why dogs lick their testicles. It's to get rid of the taste of the food."

They banned Easter Eggs after the infamous "embedding a flight simulator into Excel" incident.

The spoilsports.

Microsoft hits Ctrl-Z after Teams trips over file sharing

Re: Testing?

"Also the first step. There is, in fact, only one step. We're Microsoft, not John Buchan."

Re: Don't Blame (the Old) Skype

Yes. Fondly.

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

Warming to my theme and amusing myself (and only myself, I know), I suppose a "Death Knoll" would be

I HAVE LAID MY SCYTHE AND LIFE-TIMERS OUT NEATLY ON THE DESK. I LIKE IT THAT WAY. IT MAKES THEM EASY TO FIND.

(SQUEAK)

OH, IT'S YOU AGAIN. STAY OFF MY DESK.

Icon - a pint of Winkle's raised to the memory of Sir Terry -->

See also Reddit's /r/boneappletea.

Re: You might see the following error message – ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

> ERROR_BAD_MOON_RISING

I've heard rumours of that error message, but never given them any Credence.

Bit scarier than the Discworld creatures of the same name, which were ambulatory compost-heaps!

Anyway, “knolling” is the term for laying tools, materials etc. out on a work surface orthogonally and with precision, as demonstrated by James May in The Reassembler, among others.

Google Cloud’s so-called uninterruptible power supplies caused a six-hour interruption

Re: Procurement error

No no, they’re “uninterruptible” as in, “I’m having a lie-down, don’t interrupt me”.

Don't delete that mystery empty folder. Windows put it there as a security fix

Re: Wow....

Yep.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the vulnerability in question creates some \inetpub\subdirectory\file with normal user privs, which is then picked up as a default ("index.htm"?) by some Windows component or other that still has hooks to IIS coded into it and executed with elevated privs. So creating the root-level folder with SYSTEM ownership and read-only access prevents that file-write.

But I could be way off track, of course.

For what it's worth, I have here a fully-patched Lenovo 12th-gen Core i7 Thinkpad running 24H2 and it doesn't have the folder. So... *shrug*

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: Ghibli

So why did you get downvoted?

Gave you an upvote to compensate.

Re: Ghibli

I assumed it was an homage to the Playmobil recreations so beloved of the late lamented Lester Haines (RIP).

Mapping legend Ordnance Survey releases blocky Britain in Minecraft – again

Re: Out of date

One of my most prized possessions is a large map of S.W. London and Windsor, printed in 1943.

No Heathrow, no M4/M25, no windfarms or solar farms, but the RAF airfields and notable landmarks (church towers, town halls, etc.) are on there.

The map was printed (by the thousand) by the Nazi regime, to be handed out to their troops for the (aborted) Operation Sealion.

What particularly amuses me is that at the bottom of the page, small text acknowledges the copyright of the Ordnance Survey, on whose 1925 mapping data this map is based.

Only the Germans, and I say this with great affection for the nation, would be punctilious enough to acknowledge the copyright of the nation they’re about to invade. I guess copyright infringement was one thing the Nazis did not want to be caught doing?

Re: They've made a Minecraft Birmingham?

So players can boost their characters’ stats by battling the rats, and play capture-the-flag on the mountains of bin bags.

The LittleGP-30: A tiny recreation of a very big deal from the 1950s

Re: GP

J. Cook, you are fined three credits for a written violation of the Verbal Morality Code.

The sound of Windows 95 about to disappoint you added to Library of Congress significant sound archive

Re: May as well...

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Icon --->

Re: Also missing

Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No.1” very likely is (I can’t be bothered to check right now) - because as well as being one of the unofficial UK national anthems, it’s well-known to Americans as the theme to many a college graduation ceremony.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Re: The UI yes, the OS well...

> Any Microsoft Management Console, the divider between tree and content pane, moving it 100 pixels to the right. THIS is the Windows Administrator move since the year 2000. Check any Windows Admin video with an mmc, and 99% of them will move the divider. Each time.

ISTR that using Group Policy Editor to turn off Extended View eases that particular irritant, but maybe I’m peddling false hope.

The most important experimental distro you've never heard of gets new project lead

>. Of course that doesn't preclude excessive pottering about in userland

Or worse, excessive Poettering about.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: Don't worry

Speaking of Windows Hello, you've reminded me...

Earlier today, I got a (blue, small, fairly unobtrusive by Microsoft's standards) popup on my corporate-issued work laptop, inviting me to try logging in with Windows Hello facial recognition. "Try it! It's cool and fun and very 'now' and exciting!", that sort of cheery tone beloved of Microsoft.

Thinking - and surprised - that perhaps our IT dept had eased off their security paranoia, I went to Settings to try it.

Nope. "This setting is disabled by administrative policy" or words to that effect.

Oh, Microsoft. Left hand can't talk to right hand, even within the same product. Why advertise and urge me to try a feature that you (should) know is disabled by policy?

SMH, as the kids say.

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

> what is with the scare quotes around my name?

Because your real name is actually Arpoovian Shebber-Shenty and "Liam" is just an alias to blend in amongst the humans and replicas?

Pint, because it's Friday -->

For me, the only "true" GUI is that of the original 3.1; I've tried AROS and Amiga Forever and some of the others, and while nice, they all seem to pollute the GUI with ugly restyled window decorations and menu-bar restylings (I like the classic OS 3.x black-on-white). In the case of the last variant I tried, I couldn't even figure out how to disable the GUI reskinnings without toppling the whole house of cards.

MagicIcons was great when it appeared - more than 16-color icons, woo! - but the "house style" that it seems to have spawned is just, to my mind, ugly.

PIRG's 'Electronic Waste Graveyard' lists 100+ gadgets dumped after support vanished

Re: Amazon Halo Rise

It wasn't an alarm clock; it was, like so many other Amazon products, a data-gathering and consumer-profiling device that, in this case, used "alarm clock" functions as the bait to get the test subjects to use it.

Clearly it didn't produce enough valuable market data; perhaps because no-one at Amazon thought to themselves "huh, people will be asleep 99% of the time when they use this product and people who are asleep can't be buying more stuff from us at the same time".

(Feel free to imagine Philip J. Fry's "we didn't have adverts in our dreams in my day" speech here)

Return of Redis creator bears fruit with vector set data type

Re: Upvoted

And I’m pretty sure Microsoft can claim prior art, as they have been using a similar data-type/algorithm for years as a backend to their support site. No matter what the question, the cached answer is “have you tried running sfc /scannow ?”.

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

Re: Norton Security License-Checking Code

Apparently the concept of a “grace period” is unknown to them.

FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever

Re: When did you start "...sucking hind tit..."; start using copiers rather than writers, El Reg?

This isn't Twitter where undeserved rudeness is normal.

Bum!

Knickers!

Belgium!

Google offers 7th-gen Ironwood TPUs for AI, with AI-inspired comparisons

Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks

"We asked Google about that, and a spokesperson said the cloud titan was simply comparing the best number available for El Capitan that it could find at the time."

The best number for the Maserati MC20 is its power output of 621bhp.

The best number for my '93 Nissan hardbody pickup truck is its 6'x4' load bed, which is clearly better than the load bed size of the Maserati.

Therefore, my Nissan beats the supercar.

...anyone else of a certain age having flashbacks to playing Top Trumps at school?