Posts by James O'Shea

UK civil servants – hopefully including those spending billions on tech – to skill up in STEM

Re: How about the ministers go next?

Be careful what you ask for. You might get it. Herbert Hoover was a STEM guy, from Stanford, starting as a mechanical engineer before switching to geology, and before being a politician, was a professional mining geologist.

Dwight David Eisenhower had a STEM degree from the USMA at West Point.

James Earl Carter, Jr., had a STEM degree from the USNA at Annapolis.

Several other Presidents and Senators have been graduates of the USMA or USNA, with alleged STEM degrees, 'cause that's what those institutions hand out. Few of them have actually used their alleged STEM education; some were very good, some were bad, most were mediocre. Hoover, who was in the 'pioneer' very first class to graduate from Stanford, did use his STEM education. And was an utter disaster as a president. As far as I know he's the only President with a STEM degree who didn't graduate from one of the military academies. It is possible that most don't want another Hoover.

Atari pulls nostalgia power move and buys homebrew community forum

Re: PWNED

Only if a meek little shoe-shine pup starts speaking in rhymes.

There's no need to fear; Underdog is here.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

that is not a 'peldge'. And I notice that you have failed to answer the other questions.

Try again.

Windows August update plays Blue Screen bingo – and MSI boards got the winning ticket

Gee

Has no-one at Microsoft considered having their installers do silly things like, oh, conduct compatibility checks before installing?

Tesla's purported hands-free 'Elon mode' raises regulator's blood pressure

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

Think of it as evolution in action. A squashed kid, a major lawsuit, one less self-driving car... After a while children will stop suddenly walking into roads. One way or another.

Exits, to 'Stairway to Heaven'.

Re: To activate the Elon mode...

Especially fire trucks.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

I see your Ark and raise you Thor and Ogun and Huracan. And even Zeus gets a mention.

Crom is over there, drinking. If he cared, he could generate a light show, too. He doesn't care. Unless you spill his beer. Bad idea.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

Re: There's an opportunity there

At home, I have a nice simple system: several external 10TB drives (soon to be replaced by something bigger) connected by USB3. Carbon Copy Cloner on Macs and Macrium Reflect on Windows and Clonezilla on Linux back up the entire contents of selected volumes trivially. I then disconnect the drives until next time. (Apple also has TimeMachine, but for best results, that shouldn't be disconnected.)

I have to invest in an array and software to feed it over the network... except that by unplugging the drives after the backup (to a disk image. usually), I cut back on the chances that someone naughty will play with my backups. Accidentally or deliberately. Using the 10 TB drives means I can stick multiple images on one drive. Single point of failure, but mitigated by TimeMachine on Macs and dropping images across the network on Windows and Linux. And dumping important files onto USB sticks. Multiple USB sticks, just in case. When I go to the array, I'd have to dismount and remount the array, and that might be... interesting.

At the office, we have tape. And arrays. And massive paranoia.

Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception data-leak attacks

unless I'm missing something...

these hacks are mostly a problem for major networks, right? Yes, small/home nets are vulnerable, but it's too much trouble for not enough gain to hack them. The money's in corporate and government and similar nets. I have to care at the office, but not at home, correct? Or am I missing something?

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

Re: functionality

You _do_ know that Office 97 will work in Win 10, don't you? The installer won't work (and neither will the installers for Office 2000 and 2003) but if you can figure a way to get it on the system it will, mostly, kinda-sorta, run. I know one guy who absolutely refused to move from Office 2003, and has been doing ever more elaborate hacks to get it to work on newer versions of Windows. I just let him know that he's on his own for support, the younger guys in the office back off slowly when 20-year-old software is mentioned. And he's responsible for getting it to read DOCX etc files, there was an extension that provided compatibility, I have no idea if it still works or where to find it, nor do I care.

Re: functionality

Around here, the school will usually provide a 'free' Office Education account. They are good for four years; they used to be renewable, now not so much, but it's trivial to just get a new one instead... if you still have anything to do with an educational institution. At the place I do adjunct instruction for, the Office account can be installed on four devices without complaining. Guess how I know.

In addition, the school puts a copy on every school computer, including the ones they lend to students. All students (and staff and faculty, even peons like adjuncts) get Official School Accounts. I have an Official School Laptop, which has the Official School Account installed. I have access to multiple school desktops, all of which can have the Official School Account, all I have to do is log in with my school ID. I also have the other account, installed on my home desktops (one Mac, one Win10) my laptop (Win10) and my iPad Pro. And I have the office account as well. I have, for example, four OneDrive accounts, three 'business' and one 'personal'. The 'business' accounts are the school account, the office account, and a school account for a place I no longer work at, it's been a year and they haven't turned it off yet, the installer for Office still works, too; the 'personal' account is my Office Education account. Apparently you can have unlimited 'business' accounts but just one 'personal' account, I had OneDrives available from other places, including OneDrives which shipped with the desktop and laptop, but turned them off as There Can Only Be One.

In any case, unless the school is taking the piss, your daughter should not have to pay a penny.

Meanwhile, it is correct that many formatting settings in LibreOffice and _especially_ in OpenOffice have problems with MS Office. Every now and again I install either or both and test them; they still manage to mangle certain DOC, DOCX, and most especially PPTX documents, and they do it in predictable ways and have been doing it since at least the days of Office 2010. I have reported the problem to both LibreOffice and Microsoft; in both cases, the report sank without a trace. (LibreOffice is at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided; it's incredibly difficult and annoying to report bugs to MS... and then the daft buggers just ignore you. Why, it's almost as if they don't give a fuck.)

I have no idea who causes the problem, MS or LO/OO. I just note that there were problems moving from Office 2004 (Mac) and Office 2008 (Mac) to Office 2010 (Windows), problems mostly fixed with Office 2011 (Mac), and a good thing too, as there was no Mac version of Office 2013 and the next Mac version was 2016. I know that if you have complex documents, including tables, tables of content, tables of authority, indexes, and multiple images (such as, oh, a 175 page annual report, and yes, there's a reason why I pick that particular example), LO/OO barf all over.It's not that particular original document, subsequent documents also caused barfage. As I said, it's quite predictable. Note that Google Docs and Apple iWorks do NOT have this problem; indeed, a way to get Office 2004 or 2008 files to work properly in Office 2010 was to run them past iWorks first, just open them and save them in DOCX or PPTX or XLSX. Problem goes away.No, I can't explain it.

Note that I have a _lot_ of iWorks documents... and both MS Office and LO/OO can't handle them properly, if at all. But iWorks can read MS Office and LO/OO documents...

Frankly, I am about to stop even trying with LO/OO, it's been over a decade and the problem persists. I'll just be using MS Office, or iWorks, and have done.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Re: an arbitrary metric space

It's always good to blame the French. It's usually their fault, and when it's not, it should be.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

hmm

why didn't he go the whole hog and call it XXX? Instant massive name recognition. A huge following, including most of the twits. And his fave demigod like girls named 'Stormy' and 'M-something-central-European' who 'starred' in certain vids. A match made in heaven...

Re: A fool and his money are soon parted

Apparently he borrowed the money.

Google asks websites to kindly not break its shiny new targeted-advertising API

Re: Suprising that Google hasn't heard of "SEO"

McAfee AV is extremely easy to remove. Watch this video for quick and easy tips on how. And on other important IT matters, especially involving backing up. Personally, I think that the back-up methods advocated in that video are vastly superior to most people's lame backup systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg

Ex-FBI employee jailed for taking classified material home

Re: Orange man...

One upvote for the Stainless Steel Reference.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Sure you can. Indeed, it's been done. The problem is, in every previous case the beacon marked the place where the wreck was found... if the beacon survived the event that caused the wreck. Imploding at 3800 metres down will cause dieseling, where the imploding air causes everything in its path (which is everything inside the sub) to catch fire. Briefly. Until the water arrives to put the fire out. Very few things can withstand the dieseling followed by extreme pressures. Aircraft transponders will work even at extreme depths, but that's because the pressure gradually builds on the way down. Aircraft are designed o keep air pressure in, not water pressure out, and won't go very deep before cracking and letting water in, at which point pressure inside and out is equal and builds slowly as the aircraft sinks. They were already at depth, two hours out of 2.75 hours to target, when the signal was lost. If the thing imploded, there will be pieces of sub scattered over a wide area. USS Thresher, lost in a lot shallower water (2600 metres, not 3800) was scattered over 130,000 square metres. There will be fewer big pieces and lots of little pieces (No nuclear reactor or steam turbines). Don't even bother looking for bodies, the dieseling will have effectively vaporised them.

Well, they're dead

Even if the sub hasn't imploded, which it probably has, the nearest rescue subs would be the American Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle assigned to the Atlantic... except that both American DSRVs have been decommissioned and replaced by underwater drones, and this thing is likely 2 miles (3 kilometres) down, where the American DSRVs were designed to rescue from 600 metres and had a never-exceed depth of 1.5 km.

Note that the drone has a design depth of 610 metres. That's not happening.

The American DSRVs, now no longer with us, were about as good as anyone else's DSRVs, and a lot closer than most. Mystic, the Atlantic DSRV, could have been on site in under 24 hours, possibly under 18 hours. But it's gone. And even if it were available, there's the problem of finding the sub. DSRVs are not speed demons and don't have the best search equipment, there just isn't space. Even if Mystic was available, it is extremely unlikely that the sub would be found in time.

You go deep, you go alone, lads and lassies.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: Did it talk?

It's from Red Dwarf. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=talkie+toaster+red+dwarf

Red Dwarf showed the Federation as it really was: a fascist police state similar to, but worse than, East Germany.

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

Re: Security fail by design

Hmm. So... you can't change the screen background on Win11, eh? Golly gee whilikers, I guess that the one and only Win 11 machine around here isn't really a Win11 machine. That, or Microsoft is shipping machines with the company logo as one of the allowed wallpapers. Hmm. Let me see, can I change that? Settings/Personalize/Backgrounds. Hmm. Now the wallpaper is the original Apple six-color apple.

There's lots of things wrong with Win11. There's no reason to make stuff up. Especially stuff which can be demonstrated as total bollocks in under 30 seconds.

Nearly 1 in 5 academics admit close encounters of the anomalous kind

Re: Cool

Physics says how they must be constructed. If you have the very best reaction motor, a photon rocket, with an exhaust velocity of c, it is trivial to work out what the mass ratio must be to get to any delta vee you need. Mission delta vee is the total change in velocity required to complete the mission: gas to get there and back, that is. Delta vee is equal to exhaust velocity times the natural log of mass ratio.You plug in the value of your delta vee and your exhaust vee, you have your natural log of the mass ratio. And then you know what size ship you have to have. You can't get a better rocket than a photon rocket. (There are a few problems with thrust, but that's engineering. Fixable, with enough magic tech.) Now, if you have really magic tech and have a reactionless drive, you don't care about mass ratios. You do still care about power levels. Straight Newtonian physics, you don't even need to pay attention to Einstein, again dictates what size ship you need. If you're slower than life, you need life support for decades or centuries of travel. If you're fast than light, you still need life support for your trip time. That means space to park stuff. Again, it is trivial to work out what you need.

No, the classic small craft ain't big enough. They could be landers, sent down from a mothership in orbit, but the mothership is going to be quite large.

Re: Cool

If you have a picture of _something_, well, that pic can be reviewed. However, there aren't a whole lot of pictures.

Re: Sigh

That's it exactly.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Re: Not only mice

Nailing him down would be expensive, noisy, and messy. Duct tape is cheaper, easier to use, and some can be deployed to take care of the noise.

FORTRAN lives!

FORTRAN lives!

I was just reading the latest doom-and-gloom FORTRAN (not, repeat, NOT, Fortran) article at https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/02/the-skills-gap-for-fortran-looms-large-in-hpc/?td=rt-3a which is bemoaning all kinds of things FORTRAN.

Well... if you need someone who knows FORTRAN IV and 77, and can make code in any language, including C++ and Java look like FORTRAN (difficult, but doable if you're bloody-minded enough, and I am), well, I'm available. Of course, I'm rather pricey, but if you really need FORTRAN code, it's not as though you have much of a choice.

Storing the Quran on your phone makes you a terror suspect in China

Re: Quote from the religion of peace...

1 Samuel 15 is one of my fav Bible chapters. It's not the worst one out there. There's the ol' boy who sent his concubine out to be gang-raped to death, and then chopped her body into pieces and sent one piece to each of the 12 tribes of Israel. (Judges 12:25-30...) And there's the bit where a prince rapes his sister. Actually, rape seems to have been a very popular sport in Biblical Israel.

Another of my favs is where one ol' girl nails one ol' boy's head to the ground by applying a tent peg and a hammer. (Judges 5:24-30). And, yeah, there was more rape a bit later on. Rape was a very, very, VERY popular sport in the Bible.

And there's the young miss who prefers that her men (her many men...) have the, ahem, members of donkeys. An ancestor of Catherine the Great, no doubt.

There are all kinds of fun stuff in Judges and both 1 and 2 Samuel. And many other parts of the Old _and_ the New Testaments. But the Old Testament had the Really Good Stuff. Lots of it. And ol' Muhammad, umm, borrowed large sections of the Old Testament, including the Really Good Stuff, and re-wrote it a little. Often to make the Really Good Stuff be even better.

Pornhub walls off Utah in age-verification law protest

Re: VPN Anyone?

There are a non-trivial number of Mormons in Nevada. And, given that Nevada infamously is heavily into sex, gambling, alcohol, caffeine (a no-no in Mormonism) and the US Air Force, which is well-supplied with personnel heavily into sex, gambling, alcohol, and caffeine, the Mormons there tend to be, ahem, Hard Core.

Exits to 'Charlie, He's My Darling', a song that implies other practices that Mormons won't like.

Re: Why do some posts have a bold black line above them

It means that:

1. You are running an ad-blocker or similar

2. there was an ad in that space

3. you are being either obtuse or snarky, insufficient data to determine which

4. for those who aren't paying attention, I'm being snarky

Time to sell Utah residents some good proxy services so that they seem to be coming from, oh, California.

Dropbox drops 16% of staff, points finger at hard-up customers and AI

So...

In the Beginning, there was DropBox, which gave a fair amount o storage for free, and I could access it on any of my devices, and the price for getting more storage should I need it wasn't too outrageous.

At about the same time, there was iCloud. Free storage, but the price for adding more was greater than than what DB charged. Still, I could access it from any device. And there was GoogleDrive. More storage than iCloud and DB combined, access from any device, and free. Additional storage available for a reasonable rate. And SkyDrive, which became OneDrive after Murdoch's Minions tried to extort cash from the Beast of Redmond. Vast amounts of free storage, accessible from any device. I mostly used cloudy storage to move things from one machine to another.

And then, DB restricted free accounts to only three devices, significantly reducing its value. Frankly, the only reason I had to keep it was that Marvin, an ebook reader on iOS that I like, uses DropBox as one way to load new books. I don't need to move that many books to Marvin; I put DB on one Mac, iPad, and WinBox. And I didn't go to a paid account.

Meanwhile, I have multiple OneDrive accounts with 1TB each (a 'personal' account, thanks to Office365, and three 'business' accounts, thanks to various people I do or did things for. You can have one personal and multiple business accounts live simultaneously. I had cloudy storage overflowing. Apple did the unthinkable and cut prices. I cranked up my iCloud account. DB _increased_ prices. And Marvin has joined the Choir Eternal. Frankly, the others deliver more storage to _all_ devices much more cheaply. Why, exactly, do I need DB? Even the free version?

America ain't exactly outlawing gas cars but it's steering hard into EVs

Re: Distances

Err... I have to go to a location 70 miles from base twice a week. There is no recharging point near that location, not even a slow recharger. I have to go to a location 170 miles from base once a month; no rechargers within 10 miles of that location. There is a rapid recharger roughly 11 miles away. Every time I go by, all connections (there are a half dozen) are in use. Possibly I have bad timing. Possibly it's the only charge point in a large radius and is heavily used. Every once in quite a while, I have to go to a location 500 miles away. I have no idea how many rechargers are close; I suspect very few, if any.

Sorry, it's just not on, not until there are more rechargers.

Had enough of Android? First 'Focal' based Ubuntu Touch is out

Re: It's a phone

The iPhone. had 512 MB RAM and 16 GB storage. The Honeycomb had from memory, as I can't get hold of it right now, 256 MB RAM and 1 GB storage. It was pitiful. It could not run Ice Cream Sandwich, not enough RAM.

Re: It's a phone

"Your phone froze, so you wrote off an entire tech ecosystem?"

Yes. At the time, there were few/none Android tablets. And I use a phone AS A PHONE. A lot. If the phone freezes,I miss calls. This is a PROBLEM, especially when the phone in question was subsidised by the company for use on company business, most especially including making and recieving calls. Which doesn't happen if the phone freezes.

If the iPhone had given trouble, I'dhave dropped back to a feature phone. The iPhone did not give trouble. I see no reason to complicate my life by adding an Android device, which, based on past experiences , might not work properly (note that I was not the only person to have problems with Android phones; thanks to price, a substantial majority of compay devices were Android. Because a LOT of users had trouble, and notjust with Honeycomb butbwith Ice Cream Sandwich and Jellybean, more than 90% of company devices are now iDevices. And, for the tablets, 100% are iPads, iPad Pros, and a few Surfaces. It says a lot that users will go Microsoft rather than Android. ) and WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO RELIABLY MAKE AND RECIEVE CALLS. Others may not. We do.If assorted Android devices hadn't been shit, things would be different. Now there are very few Android devices left in the company, and the number is falling. We will probably stop supporting Official Company Apps on Android Real Soon Now.

Re: It's a phone

"Installation on iDevices is not currently possible as far as I'm aware."

Right, that's it for me, then. The only Android device I have is the Honeycomb phone, which is buried in a junk drawer somewhere in the home office. (Yeah, the telco I got it from didn't want it back when I replaced it with an iPhone.) I suspect that a Honeycomb device, even one which worked, won't do well with Linux.

There are Adroid devices at work... but not many, and they're company devices, and I can't justify screwing around with them, even if I thought that they'd work with Linux, which I don't.

Re: It's a phone

Frankly, sayonara, laddie, if it doesn't work as a phone. One of the defects of the Android which I dumped was that it froze. Another was that the microphone worked when it felt like it. It wasn't a working phone. It was replaced. The fact that it froze meant that it wasn't much use for any reason; even as a small computer, it wasn't reliable. It was also limited by the tiny amount of RAM and storage it shipped with. The iPhone actually worked and had more RAM and storage.

Again, I have a few old iDevices hanging around, and if Linux works on them, I'd jailbreak them and try it out. Does anyone have any clue as to if this is even possible? But before I go to the trouble of getting Linux, jailbreaking, and installing, I would like to know how well Linux supports actual phone calls. There's just no point in my moving forward with Linux on an old iDevice if the comms won't work. I can install Linux without comms on a desktop or laptop right now. (Aged desktop, first set up with Win 7, just had a hard drive failure. Rest of the hardware works. The new drive, and Ubuntu, will be going in over the weekend.)

The site implies, heavily, that comms are supported, but also that support for _anything_ is limited to Fairphone 4, Google Pixel 3a, Vollaphone 22, Vollaphone X, and Vollaphone.

I suspect that I am not a member of their target audience.

It's a phone

For me, the #1 use for a cell phone is... as a phone. How well does Linux support using it as a phone? I can make and take calls on my iPad, because Apple so decreed. My iPhone handles all my comms needs, except when I need to do a call using a number on a web page, as I usually use the iPad for web searches. I used to have an Android. I moved to iPhone specifically because the Android (it ran Honeycomb, but not very well) was shit, especially at calls. (It froze. It froze a lot. I missed incoming calls because it froze). I really don't need to have a Linux device that has problems with calls.

Also, I have some older, no longer supported by Apple, iPhones, (iPhone 5, iPhone SE 1st generation...) and if I jailbroke the things, I'd try to install Linux there... if it worked on iPhones. Does it? I have an ancient iPad 1st generation, in addition to the new iPad Pro that I use daily. Will Linux work on the old boy, if jailbroken?

Finally... seriously, how good is Linux with a touch interface? Seriously?

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

Re: You don't understand the issue at all

do what you like. Take the consequences.

Re: You don't understand the issue at all

"Pretty sure the issue people are concerned about isn't having such cropped but not cropped photos on their phone, but that they've shared them via email or posting on social media or the web."

1. Don't do that.

2. If you must do that, do the image manipulation on a platform with reliable tools, such as a desktop and send only the manipulated images.

3. Don't do that.

"Let's say your wife or girlfriend took an R rated selfie to send to you, then cropped the naughty bits and posted to Facebook. Ooops! Or maybe she likes posting to some of the more risque reddits, cropping her face out of the photo to prevent embarrassment or trouble from her employer (i.e. if she's a teacher or something)"

1. Don't post pix to Facebook. It never ends well.

2. Don't post pix to Reddit. That never ends well either.

3. If an unedited pic might cause problems, DON'T BLOODY POST IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. It's not hard.

Just as I don't understand why anyone would screw with an image using tools on a phone, I don't understand why anyone would email pix that might cause problems, or, worse, post them to Arsebook or any other 'social media'. There have been so many stories over so many years about how badly this can go that only complete idiots would do it... and I think of this as being evolution in action. You post something which, if your employer finds out about it, might get you fired? Welcome to the ranks of the unemployed, laddie/lassie, and it'll be all your bloody fault. I have zero sympathy.

Hmmm

I don't have this problem because:

1. I have an iPhone, not an Android

2. even if Apple is sufficiently stupid as to have a similar bug, I upload all (repeat, ALL) photos to one of my computers (Apple, Windows, Ubuntu, usually a Mac 'cause it's easiest) and DELETE THEM FROM THE BLOODY PHONE. All image manipulation is done on a desktop machine. I might, if I feel like it, stick any photos I want on the phone into something like Apple's Photos, which cloudifies stuff; I don't usually use Photos, in large part because I don't bloody trust cloudy crap. (Yes, the photos are automagically dropped into Photos ninth first place. Yes, I nuke 'em good from Photos. If the photos ain't on the bloody phone, or in the bloody cloud, they can't be bloody hacked.) At the current time I have exactly 15 photos on my two iPhones. Three of them are images used as wallpaper for the phones and an iPad, I didn't like the wallpaper which shipped with the iDevices.

3. if I had an Android I still wouldn't have this problem, see 2. above. I used to have an Android, a Very Long Time Ago. When I did have the Android, I'd feed photos (I didn't have many, the Android was shitty, had a bad camera and not much space and I didn't have it for long anyway) to Windows machines, work there, and delete from the phone. Mostly to conserve space, that thing was really short on storage.

Can someone explain to me why people keep lots of photos on phones and even do image manipulation there?

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

Re: Xerox and foolishness

if you look up 'idiot' in the dictionary, you'll see a reference to 'Xerox Management'.

Intruder alert: WH Smith hit by another cyber attack

Re: Offers

They still are on about that? It's been years, decades even, since I last set foot in a WH Smith's, mostly because it's been a Very Long Time since I've been in the UK. I always felt lucky if I managed to escape a Smith's without chocolate or some such. One would think that they were a confectioners or something of the sort.

Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit rule

Bah. Humbug

If Firefox created a version which ran on iOS and which could handle the plug-ins and extensions that FF on desktop can, particularly UBlock Origin and NoScript, I'd change in a flash. The adblockers which run on iOS at present are nearly useless.

Memo to Mozilla: I'd actually pay for a web browser which could do adblocking/scriptblocking on iOS. (Google need not apply. I don't trust them.)

200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push

Re: "a 16-inch 2880 x 1880 screen"

That's a damn good question.

You're kidding, right?

8 GB RAM? 256 GB storage? On a machine expected to play with large images/video/whatever? They're out of their tiny minds. My Lenovo laptop has 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage, and I regret buying it as that ain't enough. And the RAM and storage are soldered in and can't be upgraded. I should have got the version which has 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage. And I don't play with large images/video for a living. Any 'creative professional' who depends on Android + Windows talking to each other without issue (yeah, right) and uses under 12 GB RAM and 512 GB storage is going to have serious problems.

New York again mulls letting people pay the state in crypto

Re: Why can’t I pay in magic beans?

You can eat the beans, you can't eat the crypto. Beans are much more valuable.

Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss

Re: What a load of cobblers

Needs salt.

Gonna run System Restore in Windows 11? Microsoft says some of its apps won't

Re: Do not use

There are ways to bypass that nonsense, most of which being methods that MS doesn’t like. I don’t actually give a damn about what MS likes or dislikes.

Do not use

I stay as far away from MS ‘backup’ and ‘restore’ tools as possible. Instead I use tools like Acronis and Macrium. On Macs I use Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. Note that that’s two different tools, making two different backups, for each OS. If something breaks, it’s unlikely to break the same way with both, and at least one backup will restore properly. And yes, I am willing to spend money for backups.

Business level backups usually involve tape. Yes, tape. I’ve been using tape for literally decades, it works. I typically use dedicated backup software for tape.

The first and last time that I used MS tools was back in the 1990s. A test restore had problems. A second attempt at a test restore failed, in a different way this time. I got 3rd party backup software and never used MS tools again. This is why you test your backup by restoring it to a test system. If you can’t get it to restore, you have a waste of storage, not a backup. I still test backups every ever so often. Just in case.

Punch-drunk Apple Watch called 15 cops to a boxing workout when it heard 'shots'

Hey, Siri

Fuck right off. Do it now.

Note that Siri is disabled on every Apple device I have. Cortona was disabled on Microsoft devices. I don’t own any Amazon or Google voice assistant devices.

Die, Siri, die. And take all your little friends with you.

This can’t be a real bomb threat: You've called a modem, not a phone

Re: "They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

Nah. If I made a bomb, it would actually work. Building bombs is easy. The hard part is getting them to explode at the right time. I would have picked a somewhat larger, stronger, fae to make the delivery, too.