Posts by hairydog

Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

There is no way that any of our PCs will go to Windows11, so some are living out the last months of Win10 support, others have already made the switch to Zorin.

No complaints from users moved to Zorin. A seamless transition in every case so far.

The result: a faster, quieter machine with better hardware support. Some obsolete peripherals have come back off the shelf.

The only downside is that the names of the apps are changed. That only takes a short while to get used to.

Personally, I've had trouble getting good drivers for certain colour printers on Zorin, but those printers don't work on Win10 either.

Artemis II astronaut: 'I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working'

Re: Isn't it odd...

Outlook depends on stuff, yes. There are standards, which Outlook mostly ignores, so what it depends on /is/ likely to be Microsoft

The engineer replaces the socket for your benefit.

If an engineer cant find a fault, the customer gets charged over £100 for the fallout, so they 'find' a fault in the socket, replace it and you aren't charged.

Doesn't fix the problem, but it saves you money.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

I have stuck with Huawei where possible. Not regretted it yet.

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

Yes: a Trump

I'm guessing that magas don't realise that Trump is a synonym for fart.

Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus

Re: What a waste

Erm, the article you commented on clearly explains why its not suitable to site it in the UK. Was it that you didn't read it, or that you didn't understand it?

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

Re: "weapons of mass stupidity" ✓

What are people using 16GB PIs for? Well. I use one as a web and email server, amongst other things.

I suspect that an 8GB one would be as good, but for just a few pounds difference, why not?

My primary reason to use a Pi when other, more powerful, machines are no more expensive to buy is mostly down to power consumption.

Running 24/365 and using less power make a big difference, especially because it allows smaller UPS capacity - and it makes less noise keeping cool as well.

Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

I quietly rejoice at this.

In the (distant) past, I worked for a company that was royally shafted by the 'squeaky clean' Which?

Since then I have (possibly unfairly) assumed malice or corruption behind all they do.

Trump promises nuclear datacenter permits in 3 weeks, calls Greenland 'big beautiful ice'

Re: For someone who apparently doesn't like communism....

Everyone has Russia for an enemy. It's just that some nations haven't noticed yet.

The sane is true for the USA. Clearly an enemy.

Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

Re: This is now not a joke

Windows for Warships was a version of XP last time I had anything to do with it - only about five years ago.

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: Erm

Isn't 'servicing' what boy pigs do to girl pigs to make them mummy pigs?

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

Re: I recently 'dined' at Luton Airport

The problem is that they don't know YOU are there: they just know someone who has possession of your bank card is there.

The card processor probably wants at least some cardholder details to approve the transaction.

California cops confused after trying to give ticket to self-driving car

Re: Science upended by the desire for entertainment and revenge.

That is the exact opposite of what happens.

Are you a Trump supporter or something?

Workers fear for their jobs as JLR's latest shutdown extended

Re: JLR and the Cloud-first, software-defined network

"...a further example of JLR accelerating delivery of its Reimagine strategy through collaboration with leaders in their fields, while driving synergies and business excellence within the wider Tata Group."

Tata press release, December 2013

So glad they got that sorted!

Europe's largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more

Re: £20m budget provision to support and run the system

Pay the person, the Employers NI.

Pay for the office they work in, the heat and light.

Pay for the computer, phone and connectivity.

Pay for pension contributions and insurance.

Pay for HR overheads.

Pay for accounting for all the above.

..oh, and pay the person. Maybe 40% of the total.

Re: sell them something that doesn't fit their processes

Indeed.

Birmingham council is the biggest in the world, which makes them think they need something different.

But does it? Having 10,000 dustbin lorries is only different in scale from having 100 dustbin lorries.

I can't imagine that there really is anything different about the task Birmingham faces to what Rutland has to do, apart from the scale of the task.

More of the same is not something different.

Big clouds scramble as EU Data Act brings new data transfer rules

Re: Hmm

Er, no. That is a very Trumpian* viewpoint.

*Trumpian: completely wrong, based on misinformation, showing a lack of understanding, and mostly harmful.

Johnson, Cummings met Thiel months before Palantir won NHS pandemic role

Re: Britain is run by corrupt people

The honest ones get hounded out, with the conniving of the media and the establishment.

Jeremy Corbin: the prime minister we were denied because he was too honest and decent.

Microserfs ordered back to the office, given 10 days to appeal

Re: Creeps

In my last permie job, I worked from home. It worked really well, until the company started to tank and I was made redundant. At the time, it was not good news, but as it turned out ,it was wonderful.

Working for myself was more interesting, more rewarding and much less stressful.

My only regret is that I didn't make the shift sooner.

FTC chair accuses Google of treating GOP's emails as spam

Re: PS

Learn from.the owner. Tell them your email address has changed.

Re: PS

Don't Toyota cars come with a seven year warranty? Why would you replace it with five years of warranty left?

Seems obvious

The reality is that the Republican target demographic is the less well educated, less intelligent slice of the population. The people who are less likely to explicitly mark spam as spam.

August update leaves Windows reset and recovery dead in the water

Re: Windows Fail

It's up to the customers. You could choose to buy an Indesit washing machine, or pay twice as much for a Miele that will last yem times as long and probably never go wrong.

The same is true for a plethora of other items, where cheap crap is more popular than extensive quality.

You can't blame manufacturers for choosing to make what customers choose to buy.

One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

In the shortest term, shareholders are benefiting from asset stripping but providing an essential service well would be far more profitable.

Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progress

Re: Sure, Linux could make a truly usable desktop system....

The problem with winhelp was the compiler. They never got it to work properly .

Back in the day, I used to have three different winhelp compilers on my PC, each with different sets of bugs.

I had to choose the version that was least worst for that task.

If only they could have sorted it by teleading a compilertjat worked properly: winhelp would have been a superb tool.

How to find forgotten Wi-Fi passwords and SSIDs in Windows and Android

It is only telling the user who put it there in the first place

Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers

Re: Synergy!

The idea of a Twlesla had nothing to do with Musk. The first Tesla was on the road before he got involved.

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

The attrition rate for bullets is around 100% but they have been used for about 200 years.

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Re: Sad but true

The cost of switching to Linux might be higher than the cost of switching to Windows 11 (it may be lower) but it's a one-off cost.

Sensible businesses will factor in the cost of switching to Windows 12 and Windows 14 as well.

After all, if 11 makes MS money, that the sensible next step for them.

If it doesn't make MS money, bailing out of an increasingly-unsupported OS makes even more sense.

Folks aren’t buying the PCs that US vendors stockpiled to dodge tariffs

Re: How to sell your stockpile of PCs.

Presumably to install windows 11.

Why? Even more spyware? An even worse UI?

Windows 10 seems pretty reliable and it works. I can't see any advantages to me to switch to 11.

I don't see any advantages to anyone else either - except Microsoft and hardware vendors.

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Clearly this only makes sense for mobile phones that are not mobile, but does it allow for the fact that not all phones can use all the bands, and not all the operators support all the bands?

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Re: unsupported browser

There are two approaches. You can build to web standards or you can cobble websites together and tweak them until the seem to work.

If you choose the latter, your wobbly pile of poo will only work on some browsers so ypu need to warn the others off.

If you codebit properly, it works. IE.2 is long gone.

Windows 11 market share stalls ahead of Windows 10 cutoff

Re: Has anyome seriously tried Zorin OS

I upgraded a laptop that was running XP to Zorin a year or two ago.

The non-technical user says it's fine once you get the hang of the apps having different names. Faster to boot, more responsive than XP had been, and the cooling far runs cooler. And updates are easier and less disruptive.

Right now I have five PCs running Win10 but they also have 0patch running so I'm not sure which will go to Zorin and which will stay on 10.

None will go to 11, that's for sure!

There may be better distributions than Zorin, but it seems to work just fine, and happily runs any peripherals plugged in, including an HP scanner that has been 'dead' since Windows 7.

The main problem with desktop Unix is all the choices and the nerds picking holes in one distribution or another in a very unhelpful way.

Zorin seems fine to me. There may be better, but it'll do.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

What does lifetime mean?

I have never worked for BT, but I have worked at BT.

There I noticed an offer to employees of a service (may have been mobile or broadband, I forget) that was very good value, and was for life.

In the (very) small print, it said thst lifetime was defined as being as long as you worked for BT.

I'm not sure if that was corporate arrogance or a death threat. Quit or retire and your life is over.

With that company, either or both were possible.

Does UK's Online Safety Act cover misinformation? Well, that depends

Re: Speed?

Other users may be as nasty as the original poster, or be part of the same bot farm. Down voting and reporting is a routine task for peddlers of misinformation

Windows intros 365 Link, a black box that does nothing but connect to Microsoft's cloud

Re: OK, not exactly the same

In the UK, where electricity prices are astronomical, running a device 24/7 has a cost.

Every 10 watts less saves £20 per year.

Firefox 136 finally brings the features that fans wanted

It seems as if Windows devices only use the primary dns if it works. If it doesn't work, they switch to the secondary dns until that doesn't work. Stupid, but this is Windows.

I used to run two piholes, but now the primary is Adguard Home, backed by a pihole secondary. Not yet sure if that's better, though.

Mega city council's Oracle finance fix faces further delays

Exceptionality fails again

What, exactly, does Birmingham Council do that every other council in the country does mot do? I accept that Birmingham is bigger than other authorities, but they don't seem to have more responsibilities than smaller authorities.

So why can't they buy/lease/hire a clone of a working system, rather than reinvent the (square) wheel yet again?

You're going to do what to the feature? Microsoft defines what it means by 'deprecation'

Re: Status quo.

...for how long?

None of my computers meet Microsoft's requirements for Windows 11, so even if I wanted the extra surveillance and intrusion. I couldn't have it.

When Windows 10 is no longer safe enough,they will all switch to Zorin or similar.

Not a single new Windows feature in the last decade has been of any interest or use to me.

Clearly I'm not their target demographic. I wonder who is.

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

Re: TikTokTakToe

It seems more likely, possibly more acceptable, that Trump's America will die a horrible death. Hopefully not taking the rest of humanity with it.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Hard to Fork? Why?

This is a genuine question.

How is it hard to fork a project?

I thought you just do it. At first, you have a precise copy of the forked-from project. That's not hard.

OK, I accept that it would be difficult (OK, near impossible) to turn Wordpress code into good software, but the forking bit looks really easy.

What am I missing?

Re: how "incredibly hard" it is to create great software

I really don't understand why Wordpress is so popular. It is slow, bloated, insecure, difficult to use well. And it's from a mini-Musk.

But it is definitely popular. I stopped hosting it on our servers because of its security holes (or its plugins' security holes) many years ago, and some clients have chosen to go elsewhere rather than use something else.

Will 2025 be the year satellite-to-smartphone services truly take off?

Am I missing something?

Starling provides data connectivity. Why not use that to use a form of VOIP? Is there some technical issue (latency?) that prevents people using the blindingly obvious way to make voice calls over Starlink?

Boeing busted by employee over plans to surveil workers, quickly reverses course

Seems to me that Boeing is like a lot of other businesses who have offices but are not too clear how much of the office space is needed. Monitoring occupancy makes sense, as long as it's monitoring desks, not users. I've worked in offices crammed to the doors with desks, but never enough chairs. I've worked in offices that had my team huddled in one clutch amongst vast swathes of empty desks. And that was long before the pandemic.

Amazon accused of cheating low-income Prime users out of two-day deliveries

Re: Exactly what the AG is doing

Amazon offer next day across Europe, which is not that much smaller than the USA. They fly stuff from hub to hub where necessary. I'm not convinced it's a good idea, but it could be done.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Yet again, they've messed up on the power supply.

Why on earth do we need to have a 5.2v 27w USBC power supply?

Every other mobile device is fine with a standard USBC PD power source, so the chippery must be uniquitous.

Re: Pictures, pictures, pictures

That's what a Pi5 is. The whole point of the 500 is to be all in one

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Im not sure where to find a secondhand thinkcentre for less than £20, but assuming you can, I can tell you what a Pi can do that a thinkcentre can't: be frugal on power.

I have an HP Microserver Gen8 downstairs, switched off because it uses too much power to be left running 24/7. You can run loads of Pis and still use less power (and make less noise).

Microsoft tries out wooden bit barns to cut construction emissions

Timber not really a long-lasting construction material?

Well, the wall behind me is timber framed. We know when the timber was felled, and can safely assume the wall was built that year or the next.

Less confident about whether the watle and daub infill is original or not, but it may be.

The timber was felled in 1531.