Posts by TReko

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: POP3S

POP3S also doesn't need passwords, it can work with OAuth.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Follow the ego?

What's a bet they got in a new CIO or CEO who wanted to enhance his LinkedIn profile by puting his "stamp" on the organisation by implementing a "modern" solution, replacing "legacy systems" and perhaps even getting a nice little kickback from Workday?

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Sadly point 2, Office in Wine is not possible. There are some very old versions that sort of work.

You have a much better chance of getting a complicated Windows game working in Linux than Excel.

I suspect MS uses many undocumented Windows APIs in their Office products.

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Fire sales soon?

I await the AI crash, so I can buy some discount hardware.

I just hope that the AI crash doesn't crash the economy at the same time.

Whatever legitimate places AI has, inside an OS ain't one

It's all about money not the user

The purpose of putting AI into the OS is so that Microsoft can claim to be innovating. Their share price will go up because of the AI hype and managers who made the decision will get bigger bonuses.

The users of the OS, or any engineering concerns are not at all involved in these short-term calculations.

Microsoft's fix for slow File Explorer: load it before you need it

They already preload MS Office at boot

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/01/microsoft_will_preload_office_apps/

Instead of optimising code, AI says preload for the easy win.

Reminds me of a very old joke:

"c - the speed of light, constant, independent of the speed of the observer.

w - the speed of Windows, constant, independent of the speed of the hardware."

'Keep Android Open' movement fights back against Google sideloading restrictions

Monopoly power

I find the timing interesting.

This announcement from Google came just after they were sentenced to a slap with a wet lettuce for abusing their monopoly power in search.

I guess effective winning the case made them feel that they are free to do whatever they want now.

AI layoffs to backfire: Half quietly rehired at lower pay

Re: "55% will regret those job cuts"

AI's often just an excuse to replace expensive workers with cheaper ones.

At the same time Microsoft announced their big US and EU layoffs, they also announced a $3 Billion investment in Bangalore.

Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

Raspberry Pi is no longer a Foundation - they are a profit making company that IPO'd last year.

A lot of their value is freeloading off the backs of open source developers who worked on Pi software.

You can get Pi clones and even Intel N100/N150 boxes for less with more performance.

The Pi shines in terms of software support and GPIO.

Atlassian drops $1B on company that helps measure dev productivity

The Con in confluence

Here’s another clue for Atlassian specifically: fix all the bugs in your own products.

Jira and Confluence are a hot sticky mess of bugs

Australia to let Big Tech choose its own adventure to enact kids social media ban

Smokescreen

The whole "protect the kids" thing is a smokescreen.

The Aussie government wants to know the real identities of all Internet users, so they can track down and silence those whose opinions they do not like.

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly decides to do hardly anything to break it up

Re: As the Money Flows.....

Minor news story from 2026: Judge Amit Mehta resigns the bench and goes to work as a "consultant" for Google.

Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US government contract

Re: Bribery and coercion

Yes, the text fails to mention how much money MS spent bribing/lobbying politicians.

EFF/Open source has no chance unless they start a GoFundMe to lobby a politician.

FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Backdoors bite back

Salt Typhoon exploited backdoors the US government had forced companies to put in their systems.

This is the key reason that crypto backdoors are unsafe for everyone. If your own government can spy on you, hackers will hack your government to get that information.

It will be the EU, UK and Australian citizens' turn next.

Google kneecaps indie Android devs, forces them to register

Irony

Nothing to do with the appstore, but if you want to root a phone or install your own OS on it, then the primary choice if actual Google Pixel devices.

Almost every other manufacturer locks their bootloader now. Google Pixels are open, and the new operating system like GrapheneOS can relock the security, something not possible on any other Android device now.

KPMG wrote 100-page prompt to build agentic TaxBot

KPMG in Australia in deep trouble

The article fails to mention KPMG is in deep legal trouble in Australia for its tax advice.

A quick scan of the Australian Financial review shows headlines like:

"KPMG ‘orchestrated a large-scale tax fraud’ "

OpenAI's GPT-5 looks less like AI evolution and more like cost cutting

Re: C'mon, El Reg!

Mostly true. MXFP is the Microscaling (MX) Alliance specification, not Microsoft.

Microsoft keeps adding stuff into Windows we don't want – here's what we actually need

Some additional features

1. The active window title bar needs to show it is active like it did from Windows 3 to 7. This works with most apps, but MS Office and Chrome don't work. I have multiple monitors, I want to know which window is going to take keyboard input.

2. Let me change the colours of Windows elements myself. I don't want to choose from a list of 8 pre-approved colour palettes from MS.

BTW: Clipmate is that allows multiple keyboard hostories.

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday baker's dozen: 12 critical bugs plus a SharePoint RCE

Drive by exploitation

So all Windows machines are vulnerable to "it allows for code execution just by browsing to a malicious webpage."

No wonder it's 9.8/10

Microsoft promises to eventually make WinUI 'truly open source'

Re: Choices

Yes, many still think Windows makes most Microsoft's money.

It doesn't. In FY25 Windows accounted for $17B of $281B in revenue - 6%.

LinkedIn and XBox made more money. Windows is a sideshow.

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: The OSA is ultimately destructive

Your comment on too many laws and the resultant erosion of respect for the law is so true!

One could argue that this is by design - if the government wants to arrest you they can always find a law that you've broken. There's a US book about this called "Five felonies a day" - the tittle indicating how many laws the average person in the US breaks.

Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro

Re: Greenshot

ShareX is also good, better than PicPik IMHO

Microsoft CEO feels weighed down by job cuts

Re: It would be a very young and stupid person to go to work for one of these companies.

Headline should read "US job cuts" - Microsoft just announced a $3 billion expansion in India, and is bringing in employees to the US on H1-B visas.

They're cutting expensive American workers, which makes short term financial sense.

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Linux in the BIOS

For a while in around 2005 HP sold notebooks that had a Linux in the BIOS that had a web browser.

You could just boot into it, really easily, if you didn't feel like booting Windows.

Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs

Re: Outsourcing

Yes they announced a few weeks ago: ""Microsoft is expanding our presence in India with a $3 billion investment"

US tech workers are probably too expensive for them.

Microsoft kicks off new fiscal year with more layoffs

Only US roads?

The layoffs are limited to certain geographies. They also just announced "Microsoft is expanding our presence in India with a $3 billion investment"

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

Re: At last. MS has managed to eliminate the Blue Screen of Death ...

Yes, that's crazy. Say the BSOD was caused by a bad RAM chip. Windows just decides to re-install on the bad hardware!

with Microsoft and Crowdstrike you are the tester.

MS got rid of 60% of their QA dept in 2016, "Windows Insiders" users could do the job.

Crowdstrike fired most of the US testers in Feb 2024 and moved testing and most coding to Bangalore, a few months before the disaster.

Re: At last. MS has managed to eliminate the Blue Screen of Death ...

and it now shows even less information, so you have no idea what caused it.

China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Quote from the article

You are correct. Nothing is doing Mach 10 at sea level for more than a few hundredths of a second. The air friction would destroy it.

Maybe a minute at Mach 4 is achievable before heat takes it toll.

The crazy Project PLUTO and SLAM was a nuclear propelled cruise missile. They hoped for Mach 2.5 sustained at sea level.

WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1

True, but it won't happen.

What we need to do is actually to give everyone a patent on application and then force them to defend it when they want to use it.

Currently, most patent offices give examiners 10 hours in total to examine the patent, find prior art and do any office actions. Not enough time for the job.

PCIe 7.0 specs finalized at 512 GBps bandwidth, PCIe 8.0 in the pipeline

Re: Mind blowing

Yeah modern signals are amazing. The DDR5 spec does channel characterization of the link to the RAM, something you'd used to do on an ADSL line or HF link.

Mind blowing

The signal clocks are 32GHz!

32GHz down a copper track on a motherboard is amazing.

LibreOffice adds voice to 'ditch Windows for Linux' campaign

Ancient OS, cutting edge Office?

Yes, Windows 7 doesn't have APIs that more recent Windows have.

But seriously, why do you want to run the newest Office suite on an ancient OS? Surely just stick with ver 25.2 on your old OS?

Perplexity offers training wheels for building AI agents

Mistakes as usual

> interactive map of the Pacific Theater during World War II

According to Perplexity, the British never fought or retook Burma during WW2

Three ways to run Windows apps on a Linux box

Re: $100 going to Redmond

Depending on where you live, you can often get this "Microsoft tax" back by rejecting the licence terms and then calling MS

They make you jump through hoops, and wait a long time on hold in the call center.

China spawns an x86 supercomputing monster, with an AMD connection

Benchmarks?

It is nice to see some more players in the x86 space.

Hopefully performance is now a lot better than when Anandtech (RIP) originally looked at these CPUs

Microsoft dumps AI into Notepad as 'Copilot all the things' mania takes hold in Redmond

Re: Wasn't Notepad itself used as an example program, once upon a time?

Notepad in Windows 3.1 was basically the default system text edit control, set to full screen size.

Microsoft open sources Windows Subsystem for Linux – well, most of it

Re: 9rdr.sys and p9np.dll

WSL2 is HyperV - with Linux running inside it and those hacked filesystem redirect drivers.

It is still a bit buggy, lots of unfixed bugs especially memory leaks in vmmem.sys.

SEC SIM-swapper who Googled 'signs that the FBI is after you' put behind bars

Re: I wonder if anything happened

Yeah, the article is a bit light on how the Feds tracked him down.

Returning the phone reminds me of the original car bomb World Trade Center crew, who went back to the place they rented the blown-up van to try to get a refund of their deposit.

Go ahead and ignore Patch Tuesday – it might improve your security

Re: 24H2

It would be fine if they actually tested their patches properly before every patch Tuesday.

The problem is that Microsoft fired around 70% of their QA dept in 2015 - they now rely on the end-users to test.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Re: Andy & Bill's law is alive and kicking

A 30 year old joke:

"c - the speed of light, constant irrespective of the speed of the observer.

w - the speed of Windows, constant irrespective of the speed of the hardware"

Thunderbird joins Firefox on the monthly treadmill

Re: Exchange

I agree - proper Exchange support for Thunderbird would bring millions to Thunderbird/Betterbird

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

Re: AI strikes again

not just acquisitions - look at what they sold, too.

Intel sold their smartphone chip division in 2006. Great timing.

Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks

Re: Sceptic

>Microsoft develop a code editor, which they release under a very permissive licence for no monetary cost.

Yes, but they did this because their code editor was based on the open source Atom editor (MIT licence).

Microsoft did not develop VS Code from scratch.

Official abuse of state security has always been bad, now it's horrifying

Re: It makes me wonder ...

Very few cases ever go to trial.

The defendants can't afford to defend themselves. They usually take a plea deal, even if innocent. Usually the prosecution hits them with 25years of charges, but is willing to drop to 3-5 years if they plead guilty to a few of the charges.

Microsoft OneDrive file sync apps for Windows, Mac broken for 10 months

Why should Microsoft care?

if it's broken, if you lose your files, it's not like most people have any alternative.

There's no real competition to desktop Windows or Office for most users. Yes, I know Linux, Google and Apple are there, but for most home and office users, it is a Microsoft world, and Microsoft owns that world as a monopolist.

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

BIOS for bare metal

Liam, what do you mean by the comment in the first line "you'll need a BIOS for bare metal"?

Does Freedos 1.4 now only work in VMs, or is it a pun I'm too stupid to catch?

UK finance watchdog spends millions 'enhancing' Workday software rolled out 4 years ago

Re: Sheet

Excel 95 is better than Workday financials - but it doesn't have the cool salespeople.

Boeing's Starliner may fly again, pending fixes to literally everything

Re: Whether or not astronauts will be aboard has not been decided yet

Maybe Boeing will put some whistleblowers on board?

Might be cheaper and less sus than the normal whistleblower hitman option.