* Posts by ITS Retired

362 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2010

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Microsoft reveals which Windows bugs it might decide not to fix

ITS Retired

These bug fixes... Or not

"The document also explains that it rates bugs on a five-step scale - Critical, Important, Moderate, Low, and None – and that Microsoft only fixes Critical and Important flaws."

So, after a while the software will be so full of Moderate and Low bugs, as to be unfit for purpose?

ICO smites Bible Society, well fines it £100k...

ITS Retired

Re: How is this helpful?

Prison sentences for the CEO and anyone working there that condoned the illegal action. It has been obvious for a long time, that fines do not work very well. It worked quite well for Iceland and its banks.

Windows Notepad fixed after 33 years: Now it finally handles Unix, Mac OS line endings

ITS Retired

How much Slurp did Windows add to Notepad with this "Fix"?

I'm suspicious of any improvements and fixes Microsoft does anymore. What useful function did they take away? There has to be something, even something as simple as Notepad.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

ITS Retired

I'm over 70 and have an Atlanta Georgia AM streaming Oldies on the Internet. Free. So some of us over 50s do have an interest.

However, you are correct about HiFi and real life. Real life is better if you can get far enough away, so as to not damage your ears. WTH is up with 130 db @ 300 feet, anyway?

Windows 10 Springwatch: See the majestic Microsoft in its natural habitat, fixing stuff the last patch broke

ITS Retired

Re: Zzzzzzz

That's not hate. It is well earned despise.

CEO insisted his email was on server that had been offline for years

ITS Retired

Re: Deleting emails

10,000+ emails in her inbox? I think mine has that many unread ones. She seldom deletes anything. Over 15 years worth of (web-mail) e-mails.

If she doesn't think it demands her immediate attention, it often goes unread. When ask about it, she will then find and open it.

US, UK cyber cops warn Russians are rooting around in your routers

ITS Retired
Holmes

Aren't we doing the exact same thing to Russia?

Of course we are. Also we are doing it to any and every entity that has a router, regardless of laws and countries the router is in.

Why do you think the Internet is actually so slow? It is not any DoS, it is our own government filling the Internet up with data sucking traffic.

Go away, kid, you bother me: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla kick W3C nerds to the curb

ITS Retired
Unhappy

bombastic bob: Using tiny light grey text on bright white background should be PUNISHABLE by DEATH!

There, fixed it for ya. Otherwise you are correct.

Almost every website does this light grey on white thing now. What is wrong with black on light gray. Light gray being close to the print shade on this site.

I am also noticing that dead tree, print material is doing this now.

Any social media accounts to declare? US wants travelers to tell

ITS Retired

Re: its optional....

No, no, no... That would not be enough hassle. You have to arrive at our border first, so they can then refuse entry. After the refusal for entry, you have to spend hours, or even days, waiting for the flight back -- Both ways on your dime of course.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

ITS Retired

Re: Driving 101

Safe driving also includes movement on both sides of the road, not just whatever may or may not be on the road. The human brain is not very multi-user.

If you are looking for children, then you might not see the motorcycle. If you are looking for cars at an intersection, them you might miss seeing any people. The list can rapidly get longer then the brain can process in the time given to react. So no making up lists of stuff to look for.

If anything moves against the background, pay it some attention.

Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email

ITS Retired

Re: Terribly American

Many people here in the US of A and elsewhere have a real problem with anything reminding them that we humans are animals too. They often use the children as the excuse to deny this, instead of the proof we are.

Equifax hack worse than previously thought: Biz kissed goodbye to card expiry dates, tax IDs etc

ITS Retired

Re: Clearly allowing companies to hold this kind of information should not be allowed

"Then add in real punishments if they abuse the system or attempt to get around it by pressuring their customers for information unrelated to the transaction."

Why don't we go after the CEO, the Board of Directors, middle management and anyone else in the chain of command and personally make them responsible and paying for correcting the wrong, including prison.

This dipping into the company's petty cash to pay a fine is obviously not working.

Creep learning: How to tamper with neural nets to turn them against us

ITS Retired
Childcatcher

So, if I understand things correctly...

This is another step towards machines thinking just like humans.

F-35 flight tests are being delayed by onboard software snafus

ITS Retired

Re: Hindsight is the view after you have used your arse to look at something, not eyes and brain

@ Grant Fromage, you are not seeing the profits being made here. That is the important thing. Actual war is secondary to the profits. Why? Because actual war costs money in replacing stuff this expensive, when it gets blown out of the air by some pilot, in a 50 year old fighter jet, eye-balling it in.

C++? What is this Windows 10 software?

Electronic voting box makers want kit stripped from eBay – and out of hackers' hands

ITS Retired

Re: Ontario, Canada doesn't have these problems . . .

"In Ontario, and many other jurisdictions, a recount is easy - just rerun the scanning operation."

Using different scanners than used the first time!

If there is a discrepancy, first check ballot count against voter count. Then check the accuracy of the original scanners. If election fraud is indicated, then start looking for people to put in prison.

In a few election cycles, honest elections might start happening.

Nest's slick IoT burglar alarm catches crooks... while it eyes your wallet

ITS Retired

Re: Game Cams

Some common sense there. You are correct.

I triggered the burglar alarm at a isolated work location one time and spend 10 to 15 minutes finishing the work I went there to do. I was 10 unhurryed miles away, when I was notified by the truck 2-way that the alarm went off. I had to go back and reset it.

Paranoid management thought we needed the burglar alarm because the building was off by itself. There wasn't much to interest a burglar anyway. A waste of money.

Opportunity rover survives Martian winter for eighth time

ITS Retired
Holmes

Re: The American Government Might Be Run By The Biggest Idiot Of All Time But . . .

And some people say governments can't do anything right.

They they run for office and prove themselves correct.

US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

ITS Retired
Joke

Re: If you can't get rid of the guns ...

"Last box of .22 I had, two rounds failed to work!"

Maybe they were reloads.

How we fooled Google's AI into thinking a 3D-printed turtle was a gun: MIT bods talk to El Reg

ITS Retired

"One, or a few, false positives, yes. Massive amounts, no. If everyone is triggering automatic security systems and the human searchers cannot find anything suspicious, at some point the humans will assume the system is wrong and ignore it even when it does flag a real positive."

It doesn't matter as long as the proper people make a profit on the machines.

Google faces $10k-a-day fines if it defies court order to hand over folks' private overseas email

ITS Retired
Holmes

The US 'own' the air space over its country.

That air in that space, moves from West to East, over the Atlantic, across Europe and on across to Russia and China. Therefore the US owns the air over Europe, Russia and China and can charge them for its use.

Makes as much sense as this BS. Whatever happened to countries sovereignty? When is the rest of the world going to tell the US to take a hike?

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

ITS Retired

We cooperate with Russia because we need them to ferry

our astronauts back and forth from the ISS. Why? Because we would rather add another 70 billion dollars to an already bloated military budget, than spend what is necessary to do the transport ourselves.

But Russia is otherwise our enemy? Really? Why does our government need enemies to fight, except for profit? Don't get me started on the Middle East.

China makes too much of our stuff, so we don't want to upset them too much.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

ITS Retired

Re: Typical Gates thinking...

Well, Bill Gates was rumored to be using his own OS.

AI slurps, learns millions of passwords to work out which ones you may use next

ITS Retired
Happy

I used to use street names and town on Oahu. But then I used a spreet sheet to keep track on my passwords.

Pennsylvania cops deploy electronics sniffer dog to catch child abusers

ITS Retired
Facepalm

Re: Probable cause

"I usually try to put the dirty laundry right on top."

Doesn't matter. They don't care, as they wear gloves. Probably the same gloves all day, or until they get a hole in them. How many hash marked skivvies, smelly socks and recently used toys have those gloves come in contact with, before they handle your clean stuff.

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

ITS Retired

Re: In my experience ...

Not enough people think this way. Too often, if the end user is having problems, the blame is on the end user, instead of the programmer or tester, where it actually belongs.

I've stood behind users with a clip board, during program development, watching where the user was having trouble. Fix the program once up front, during development, so you don't have to fix each new user to the program. Cuts training time significantly.

Boffin wins (Ig) Nobel prize asking if cats can be liquid

ITS Retired
Megaphone

What is the frequency response of this Baby Pod?

And how loud can you turn it up to? Does it come with Blue Tooth for the on the go women? That wire might lead to some embarrassing questions.

Is it safe to use while driving? Do you have to be pregnant to use this thing? Is it a IoT device? So many unanswered questions.

This article has been deleted

ITS Retired

Re: Serve and Protect

Entrapment laws? In this day and age? Surly you jest. We still need to keep the 'For Profit Prisons' full, to extract the proper revenue to keep the owners happy.

Massive iPhone X leak trashes Apple's 10th anniversary circus

ITS Retired
Holmes

Re: This isn't a leak

That blatant display of cynicism probably means one has a clue to what's actually going on.

So cynic away.

'Independent' gov law reviewer wants users preemptively identified before they're 'allowed' to use encryption

ITS Retired

"Why do they never suggest banning people on watchlists from using encryption?"

Simple, because they assume everyone should be on the watch list. Why differentiate, that requires thinking.

So what's in the new Windows Insider build? Bug fixes, an AR goof-around, and a font

ITS Retired

Bug fixes?

Wouldn't that require a massive rewrite?

Verizon kicks out hot new Unlimited* plans

ITS Retired

Re: It's always busy on the roads I travel

"Mostly as despite my paying a seeming fortune in road fund licences, the infrastructure is not maintained beyond a poor level, and as for the construction of additional capacity, one can but dream."

Wat? Upgrading and maintaining the equipment and use money earmarked for the CEO's salary and bonuses, to say nothing about the stock holders? Doing that ignores what is important here.

Q: How many drones are we bombing ISIS with? A: That's secret, mmkay

ITS Retired

Re: Interesting stuff

"Who wants an endless cycle of escalating revenge?"

Why do you think we have a terrorist problem now? We are over there interfering in their countries, killing their people. The more "terrorists" we kill, the more terrorists we make. Somebodies must want this endless cycle of escalating revenge, because it si sure happening.

Judge yanks plug out of AT&T's latest attack on Google Fiber

ITS Retired

Google in Kansas City MO

When Google Fiber came here, the cable companies and AT&T up graded their outside plant, increased speeds and lowered prices. Never mind they had many, many excuses as to why it was not practical before Google arrived.

Before Google, competition and regulation... wat dat? Collusion ruled. Google's 1 gig internet at $75 a month sure beat $100+ at 50 meg or less.

Batteries that don't burn at the drop of a Galaxy Note 7? We're listening

ITS Retired

Re: Lithium batteries are last century's technology

"They want slim batteries they can use all day."

Actually we are being told that is what we want. The protective case on my smart phone more than doubles the thickness of the phone and I like it that way, because it is much easier to hold on to.

If they would increase the thickness of the phone a bit, then the need for a protective case would be lessened because the phone would also be more fold resistant. Also the protection could be built in, instead of added on at extra cost.

It took DEF CON hackers minutes to pwn these US voting machines

ITS Retired

Re: There's a fix for this

The problem with electronic voting machines is that the "paper trail" doesn't have to agree with the real vote either. They are computers, after all. We need to go back to hand counted, pencil and paper ballots.

Who care if we don't know the winner until the next day? Other counties can do this for millions of votes, why can't we?

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

ITS Retired
Happy

I use an old IBM PC keyboard. It could double as a boat anchor and the keys, make their own click. I don't need the computer to make a click sound with each key press. All the legends look like they are still new.

The only thing missing are the windows key, and who uses those, except fanboys anyway? Until I found this keyboard in a dumpster with an 286/386, I had worn the legends off of several keyboards. With my four finger typing, I need to be able to see the key legends.

An AI can replace what a world leader said in his video-taped speech. This will end well. Not

ITS Retired

I can hardly wait till their is an app for that

$1.99 with one year of free updates. You know it is coming.

America throws down gauntlet: Accept extra security checks or don't carry laptops on flights

ITS Retired

How about if we stop making more terrorists in the first place?

"Kelly said. "Instead, we must put in place new measures across the board to keep the traveling public safe and make it harder for terrorists to succeed.""

It might take a generation or two, but if the United States gets out of all the counties we should not even be in in the first place, world peace might break out.

Kaspersky files antitrust suit against Microsoft

ITS Retired

Re: Boo Hoo

You seem to be assuming the MS is competent in coding. If they can't get their OS secure, how can anyone assume their AV and security software is any better?

7 NSA hack tool wielding follow-up worm oozes onto scene: Hello, no need for any phish!

ITS Retired
Facepalm

What's worse?

WannaCrypt/EternalRocks style malware? Or taking a chance on Microsoft not killing all their operating systems, except Windows 10, with their beta security updates?

I do not trust MS to do anything not in their own interests. They do think they own our computers and can tell us how they want us to be using them.

It's 2017 – and your Mac, iPad, iPhone can all be pwned by an e-book

ITS Retired

I do.

I don't really like clouds for storing my stuff.

Australia considers joining laptops-on-planes ban

ITS Retired

You hit on the problem

Politicians don't use computers. That is what their staff is for.

As far as most politicians are concerned computers are devils tool because leaks of their malfeasance are leaked and spread by computers.

Never mind the many business uses in flight. Or just keeping. The owner with games and movies sane during long flights.

If it boot up in the TSA line, it should be good to go. There isn't a whole lot of spare room inside a laptop for anything else.

Linux Mint-using terror nerd awaits sentence for training Islamic State

ITS Retired

Re: And this what to do with Linux, again?

It's not MS Windows, so it must be be some scary operating system that actually works as advertised.

To say nothing about being able to use it without the OS tattling on you to the mother ship. Who, but never-do-wells would ever use such a system?

Apache OpenOffice: Not dead yet, you'll just have to wait until mid-May for mystery security fixes

ITS Retired

I prefer OpenOffice

over LibreOffice. Why? Because it seems smother, easier to use than LibreOffice.

I have both on my computers and only use LibreOffice, when I need to, on certain, newer MS Word/Excel documents I receive from others.

A very Canadian approach: How net neutrality rules reflect a country's true nature

ITS Retired

Re: Temperature?

It is the higher temperatures, the farther south you go that fries the brain. Even North Dakotan and Minnesotans are affected by the extra heat.

I find Canadians more laid back and friendlier all round than us USAns... And better educated on current events too.

Boss swore by 'For Dummies' book about an OS his org didn't run

ITS Retired

Re: But the real issue is

"As a previous poster kindly pointed out, it is formally classed as "cheese" and only just escapes being labelled as "tile grout" on grounds of colour."

That is because of the gritty feeling of this "chocolate" in your mouth. Good chocolate is smooth, no grit at all. And it melts in your mouth and still tastes good, with a pleasant after taste.

I agree, most of the cheap stuff sold/labeled as chocolate isn't really.

Microsoft raises pistol, pulls the trigger on Windows 7, 8 updates for new Intel, AMD chips

ITS Retired

This should help Apple and Linux

How can Microsoft do this legally? Or does anyone care anymore.

Machine vs. machine battle has begun to de-fraud the internet of lies

ITS Retired
Facepalm

Re: Consider the source(s) of your beliefs about Syria and Assad

"Might" no longer be toxic??? Why take the chance?

Microsoft IE11 update foxes Telerik dialogue boxes

ITS Retired
Childcatcher

Re: Yet more proof MS fails.

"It doesn't make that much difference. You should be testing the patch, and if it breaks something, you don't apply the "mega-patch" until it's fixed. If you have a real reason to need a separate hotfix for something in the patch, Microsoft PSS can usually assist..."

How is the run of the mill home computer user suppose to do that? Web mail is a stretch for many of them.

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