Posts by ksb1972

God save the Queen... from Donald Trump. So say 1 million Britons

1 million? So what?

Iirc, close to a million Britons got off their arses to march against the Iraq war. They were ignored.

Why should a million names worth of neatly arranged electrons yield a different result?

Now that's a Blue Screen of Death: Windows 10 told me to jump off a cliff

Am I the only one

Who finds the often eye catching imagery on the Windows 10 lock screen ruined by the typically inane stupid a*se comment MS insist on overlaying on it?

Is there any way to turn off the captions?

What would be better is if one could click to find out more about the place featured in the image.

Binary star bash-up should add new light to Northern Cross in 2022

Re: Well, thats the weather

I've always wanted to deploy some strategically placed massive atmospheric dehumidifiers to clear up the almost constantly cloudy weather we get here in the UK.

Obviously they can be turned off every now & again for when we need some rain.

Mess with the weather? Really can't be any worse than what we're doing to the environment already with all the fossil fuels we've burnt/are burning still.

IBM filed another 8,000 patents in 2016

Re: "...machine learning in response to freeform verbal questions posed by humans"

"Let's see how it answers "Have you stopped beating your wife?"."

Obviously,"I don't have a wife"

Snapchat coding error nearly destroys all of time for the internet

So why

didn't Apple's review of v9.44 catch this nasty bug before they let it onto the App store?

Which of course also highlights the poor testing Snap Inc themselves do.

The bigger they get, the lazier they become me thinks.

Don't pay up to decrypt – cure found for CryptXXX ransomware, again

Why doesn't

Microsoft (assumption Windows is biggest target) simply implement a default policy (via Windows Update) that denies scripts, batch files & executables etc permission to run from temp folders?

Or at least prompt the user with a suitable warning before allowing execution.

The typical attack vector for ransomware is vbs scripts masquerading as invoices or other official looking documents. Most users would at least have the sense to say no to a warning msg that pops up instead of the PDF or Word doc they thought they were opening.

& before anyone says implement that policy yourself, just try doing that yourself first and tell me how easy it is to ensure it works not just for the temp folder but also ANY randomly named subfolder under temp.

MacBook Pro owners complain of short batt life – so Apple kills batt life clock in macOS

Re: Apple only Hard disks

I had the opportunity to work on a 13" MacBook Air recently. 128GB SSD. Mid 2015 model I believe.

Not soldered and definitely not standard. PCIe but using an Apple proprietary connector that has apparently changed approx once a year for the last few years.

Bluetooth 5.0 emerges, ready to chew on the internet of things

Is it still called an industry standard if

a prominent manufacturer's implementation only works with its own devices?

I'm recalling the frustrating experience of trying to Bluetooth a photo from an Android phone to an iPhone (admittedly before the days of popular cross platform chat apps) and failing miserably.

No prizes for guessing which side didn't want to play ball?

BlackBerry-driven robo-car spins its RIMs across Canada

Research In Motion

How poetic :-)

Samsung fires $70m at quantum televisions

Quantum dot TV

Is it on, off or both at the same time?

Newly discovered cave-dwelling creepy-crawly is four times the man* you are

4 times the pleasure

Just imagine if men evolved to have four penises & women four vaginas...

Microsoft warns Windows security fix may break network shares

Re: Nothing to see it will be sorted

In fact, network shares becoming inaccessible upon switching from a local a/c to an MS one is a bug that's been around since Win8.

Despite battling with this for hours on various occasions, only today I happened upon a 'fix'.

Before I continue, I must add that this is for Windows 8 & later boxes with a network share accessible to all ie without a password that previously worked but stops working when the user a/c is changed from a local one to a Microsoft one.

Check the permissions for the share. I found 'Everyone' was missing. So I added it with the required r/w settings.

Next, I tried to browse to the share over the LAN from another machine. I still got the dreaded password prompt. On a hunch, I typed in 'Everyone' for the username and left the password blank. It worked and continues to work just fine.

Yay.

But yes, some parts of Windows 10 suck. But I'm forcing myself to tame it. Not as bad as Win ME for flakiness, and the opposite of Vista for speed, but I've had to migrate to it for my main machine as the recently acquiree i7-6700K is definitely more responsive under 10 than 7.

Crashing PC sales don't stop HP Inc releasing two new ones

Home Entertainment?

How can it possibly fit that bill with Windows 10?

Not unless HP have come up with a Windows Media Centre replacement and forgot to tell anyone

Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform? It's an uphill battle, warns key partner

Nanosoft?

Perhaps Microsoft should have rebranded themselves Nanosoft when microprocessor manufacturing processes moved from micrometers to nanometers.

Too late now though, I suspect we might reach picometers in the next few years. I suppose they could call themselves Picosoft. If they're still around.

Have Microsoft-hosted email? Love using Live Mail 2012? Bad news

Re: Modern synchronization technologies?

Exchange?

Jaron Lanier: Big Tech is worse than Big Oil

Re: Employment: well, yes and no.

Automation usually means fewer people not no people.

Fewer people working still means more unemployment = civil unrest and other social ills. Not unless we come up with a way to feed and house the masses without them having to work.

Romanian ATM hacker exploits vulnerability in FENCE, escapes jail

Really?

"There is little preventing the self-deleting malware from being used in other countries, experts say"

Really? U guess we're all f*cked then!

I would have thought keeping the ATMs secure from physical tampering would perhaps help.

Flash flushed as Google orders almost all ads to adopt HTML5

The root of the problem?

Flash and Windows 10 have that same feel:

Buggy, inefficient and incomplete.

The results of putting the job in the hands of cheap, inexperienced and unlearned coders and project managers.

All led by middle management woefully inept at setting direction and without a clear strategic vision of what the finished product should look like

and how it needs to integrate into the environment in which it will be used.

'Dodgy Type-C USB cable fried my laptop!'

Re: Oh, for a sensible cable...

"How on earth does ANYTHING with a USA mains plug (only, not interchangeable like some clever travel PSUs) get a CE mark, even if it internally can work on UK electricity?"

Probably because in this instance the manufacturer (Chinese no doubt) thinks CE stands for Chinese Export and has probably never heard of Conformité Européenne or chooses to ignore it?

Intel and Micron's XPoint: Is it PCM? We think it is

Trade secrets perhaps?

Why share hints/tips/pointers with your competitors and let them catch up/overtake you quicker?

Which multi $billion corporation wouldn't want to keep a sharp eye on the competition? Especially when it announces The Next Best Thing since sliced bread?

AMD accuses Intel of VW-like results fudging

Re: It's not just AMD saying there's a problem.

Having never really programmed for Windows (unless you count a bit of VBA or a smallish ASP.net VB app), I thought most people used something like Visual Studio to write Windows programs?

And if so, does Intel submit compiler 'modules' or plug-ins optimised for their own chips that something like VS would use?

If so, you can hardly blame Intel for not optimising their plug-ins for AMD chips! That's something AMD should be doing by submitting their own 'plug-ins'.

Microsoft mandates browser-extension defence to malvertising

Re: Didn't understand a word of that

Personally I've never found the uninstall button for IE Add-Ons. Could someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction please?

Outsourcer didn't press ON switch, so Reg reader flew 15 hours to do the job

Who designed that font?

A small local firm I do tech support for forwarded me an email from their ISP late on Fri 27 Nov instructing them to update their router with new DSL sign-in details by Mon the 30th Nov "or it'll stop working".

So I go in near closing time on Saturday to minimise disruption just in case anything goes wrong. Put in the new details just to find the new credentials don't work. Try ringing the ISP only to find their support desk is shut until Mon.

So I ring them up 1st thing on Mon to have a moan. Luckily the guy's more awake than he was when he first sent the details out checks the login attempt log at his end and noticed after pasting the password into Notepad that the two characters in the middle should be lI and not 1I...

At Microsoft 'unlimited cloud storage' really means one terabyte

Re: Bait and switch

I helped a poor witless individual get a 3 plan recently. It's unlimited data from her phone with a 4GB limit on tethered data.

Exploit devs allegedly bag $1m for 'secret' iOS 9.1 untethered jailbreak

Re: Always has to be third party..

I doubt anyone will bother targeting Edge. Especially if it remains as unstable as it is right now. I tried using it yesterday. It vanished just as I was checking out online. No error messages, no warning. Just disappeared.just like that. I completed my online purchase in Firefox without a hitch.

How Microsoft will cram Windows 10 even harder down your PC's throat early next year

Re: a looming disaster

I tried hiding the Windows 10 update. It was only effective temporarily. After a reboot, it had unhidden itself.

Windows 10 is still an ugly mess. Shrinking the Windows 8 start screen down to give "the start menu back" doesn't hide the fact that half the OS is in Metro land (with all it's shortcut unfriendly mouse/touch only elements) and half are still under the traditional Windows UI.

And that's before we even get to the bugs still hanging around since Win8. I've lost count of the number of times I see a Win 8/10 machine bogged down for no good reason that only a reboot clears.

And no one's mentioned how many times oem's have had to make updated drivers available in the last 6 years. I count 5. Win7, Win8, Win8.1, Win8.1 Update & now Win10. Add on 32 & 64 bit variants and it's little wonder so many machines have so many devices that don't work post "upgrade" to Win10. Or worse - crash with Blue Screens.

Re: a looming disaster

Oh, there are all sorts of basic settings that don't carry over post upgrade.

I normally move Public folders off the SSD OS drive to a mechanical drive. Post "upgrade" to Win10, they're back on C:

Freesat BBC iPlayer beta gets red button access

Freesat BBC iPlayer beta gets red button access

Actually the "Sat" has already been cut out all together. Media Centre on Windows 7 already includes something called "Sky Player" which (for an extortionate) subscription (surprise surprise) lets you watch Sky content "On-Demand". http://skyplayer.sky.com/watch/windows-media-center/