Posts by Stuart Castle

MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

Re: re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

Part of me almost wishes they'd go back to shipping the OS on floppy disks, I should imagine the cost of shipping hundreds, if not thousands of floppies to a customer would make the vendor think twice about any bloat they add. Not to mention requiring the customer to sit there for the best part of a week swapping disks while installing.

OK, so that's not really practical, but I suspect with a little work, Microsoft could get Windows to a point were the install media is less than a gig.

But then I also wish they'd offer a paid option for Windows that disables most, if not all, the telemetry, or at least gives the user the option to opt in, with a detailed explanation as to what they are opting in to, what data is shared, with whom, and what they will do with it.

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

I used to support a Uni computer lab. Just off the lab, we had a small Audio/Video studio that I also supported.

This studio had a powerful (for the time) PC that as well as doing any AV capturing also controlled the Audio mixer via MIDI. The mixer had, however, analog sliders that were powered by motors. As such, if you sent a Midi command to increase the level of a certain channel, the slider for that channel moved up, apparenly under it's own power.

Because it was a sealed off room, that could be booked freely by students, it frequently got booked by students for purposes other than AV work. Us techs could see this because it was covered well by a couple of CCTV cameras. As a couple of students found out, covering these CCTV cameras was a good way to get thrown out of the lab and have your login account suspended for a few days.

For support reasons, I had, long before, installed a VNC server on the machine, which I generally used if there was a problem on the machine.

One day, I noticed a bunch of students, sitting in a circle. I did not know what they were doing, but it clearly wasn't anything that needed the facilities of the studio. They weren't, strictly speaking, breaking any rules, but they were taking up a resource other students likely needed to use, so I decided to have a little fun with them.

I logged on to the computer remotely and fired up an application that could control the mixer. I set all the channels to their maxium level, then to their minium. I knew that when each slider reached the maximum of minimum level, it would hit the casing of the mixer and make a quiet click. 24 of them doing it nearly simultaneously would make a fairly noticable bang. When I was sure the students were looking, I started setting the channels to random levels. This scared the students and they packed up their stuff and left. I don't think I saw any of them again.

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

I like the phablet style of phone. I have an iphone 16 pro max, and I love it. I do a lot of things on the iphone that that take advantage of the larger screen. Mainly accessing work related apps and websites.

While doing work related stuff, I usually also have a Macbook Pro with me, but it's not always practical or safe to get that out, so a phone with a relatively large screen is good for me.

One thing I wish phone manufacturers would move away from though is this idea that we all only want thing phones. I don't. I have pockets large enough for a slightly thicker phone, and i suspect i'm not the only one.

I think having a larger battery would benefit me more than a thinner one, and perhaps they could use the power saving tech to ensure my phone lasts for a week on one charge, rather than the day that a thinner battery would allow. Perhaps even go back to interchangable batteries.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

One of my old colleagues used to tell a story of when he was a young, newbie support person. We used to have a PBX and the extensions were patched in using the structured cabling used for the computer network with each patch room having a dedicated voice panel. Each socket on the voice panel was assigned a phone number.

One weekened, my colleague was in tidying the connections on the patch panel. He'd assumed that patching the phones was the same as patching the network. IE as long as you plugged each patch into the right switch, it didn't matter which port on that switch you used. He thought it was the same for the voice panel.

It wasn't. As he discovered when, having removed all the cables from the voice panel, he plugged one back in and tried to ring the extension he thought he'd plugged in.

He spent the whole weekend plugging cables back in, then rining extensions and seeing where he could hear the phone rigning. Of course, had he done this during the week, he could have contacted the switchboard, who did have plans of the all the patch cabinets showing what was patched to what.

We currently have a VOIP switchboard, with extension numbers assigned to IP addresses, so it wouldn't matter which port on which switch you plug the cable into, as long as it's assigned to the right vlan.

Labor unions sue Trump administration over social media surveillance

Re: "The EFF said previously that although Trump's executive orders are designed to target student visa holders, because these individuals' networks likely include fellow students that are US citizens, the surveillance likely infringes their free speech rights also."

Ironically, one of Trump's legal cases (and, as a result, his claims his phones were illegally tapped) likely came from the fact that one of his lawers had *his* phone tapped because of some other wrongdoing by him or someone else, and Trump was caught because he phoned the tapped phone.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

At Uni, I discovered that all of the University students were on a mailing list. Being the young niaive thing I was in 1994, I sent a "Happy Christmas and Happy New Year" email to all students., and went home for the Holidays.

It did not go well.

For one thing, I didn't factor in that not everyone celebrates christmas. I also didn't factor in that some people get offended at the thought you might be accusing them (or others) of celebrating Christmas. I got a lot of abuse, both in email and in person for merely wishing that everyone had a nice time (for that was the intention).

The second thing is that I left both delivery and read reciepts on. So, when I got back, I logged in. The computer moaned I was out of space in my home area (they gave us about 2 meg at the time). I didn't know where the space had gone, but thenn I found that the my mailbox was taking up all the space. So, I logged into email, only to get told my Mailbox was out of space. I had over 500 unread emails in my inbox. I read a couple, realised what had happened and started deleting them. As I deleted emails, more arrived. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I was starting to get control of my mailbox back. At some point, I was called into the Computer Lab manager to explain what had happened. I did, and while he was a little irritated, he said I hadn't actually broken any rules and he could see I was trying to be nice, so he told me to carry on, but that I should delete the emails manually, so I learned not to do this sort of thing again.

The good thing was that the Uni locked down access to the mailing lists, so only nominated users could send to them.

In all, I think I deleted over 36,000 emails.

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

You think Trump's companies have to pay tarrifs? I'll lay odds there is some sort of clause in the bill thart enforces the tarrif requirement to say they don't. It'll be buried somewhere in the text, undoubtedly well hidden.

Sysadmin cured a medical mystery by shifting a single cable

When I was a green youngster hoping to get a job in tech support, I went for a job doing IT support for a local private school. As such, they were very well funded, and, IIRC, the job was well paid.

Having applied for the job, I was excited at the thought of potentially working there. I would have been managing a Novel Netware network, with a couple of servers and hundreds of workstations. This was the late 80s/ early 90s, and it was apparently unusual for a school to have as large a network.

The interview was at 1:30pm, so I turned up suited and booted, slightly nervous, but confident and excited. At 1:30, a secretary came up to me and said there would be two interviews, a personell and a technical one. I was quite happy with this, and said so. Then she dropped a bombshell. They had originally arranged the interviews in order of surname, so mine was originally first. They had decided that morning that this was unfair anyone whose surname begins a letter toward the end of the alphabet, so they flipped the list. I was disappointed but didn't see a lot of people in the waiting room, so I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, at 6:30, I had both interviews.

The personell one was the generic personell questions. The technical one, which they held immediately after because they wanted to go home, consisted of an aptitude test and also a couple of PCs, one set up as a server, and one as a terminal. I had to diagnose why they couldn't communicate. I correct diagnosed that the server wasn't plugged in properly.

I didn't get the job. Apparently, although I interviewed well and resolved the tech problem (both of which suprised me as I was extremely stressed due to the delay), I didn't quite score highly enough on the aptitude test.

I was angry at the time, but I think I lucked out. Imagine working for a company disorganised enough to flip their interview list a couple of hours before the first interview. I don't get stressed easily, but I suspect the stress would have killed me.

AWS wiped my account of 10 years, says open source dev

Just to join in with all the other users here.

He apparently and experience professional that has no backups of years worth of work? Even if he had backups on his local computer or a server somewhere (even hosted on someone else's cloud, assuming he needs to use cloud, it would be something..

Tech bro denied dev's hard-earned bonus for bug that overcharged a little old lady

While I do agree that the developer bears little responsibility for the problems (after all, telecoms at a technical level is quite a complicated beast, he may not have been aware of everything that needed to happen to terminate a call), but once they'd detected a problem, the company should have refunded the money without the customer complaining. That is terrible.

Copilot Vision on Windows 11 sends data to Microsoft servers

I used to think being online the whole time was a cool thing. I still do, to a large extent.

But I wish we could go back to the the days when if you wanted Windows, you paid once, and perhaps again for the next major version. I don't like the fact Windows is free because Microsoft still wants to make money from it. As a result, far too much of Windows is now dedicated to tracking you and sending various data on you to Microsoft..

I know about Linux, and I do use it on various machines, but I also do need access to Windows, and, TBH would happily pay to use it, if I could guarantee that paying would disable any telemetry that isn't for reliabilty or safety.

Republican calls out Trump admin's decision to resume GPU sales to China

And the MAGA voters think he gives a toss about them. I wonder if they'll feel the same when he has sold the last vestiges of US industry for personal profit. It starts with selling a given product to the chinese. It ends with your suppliers of that product being driven out of business because the chinese have copied their products and flooded the market with cheap clones.

Junior developer's code worked in tests, destroyed data in production

Years ago, I had a job in Freight Forwarding. It was my job to help prepare the documentation for my various clients exports to various middle east countries. Sometimes, I had to deliver the documentation personally to the relevant country's embassy in London (this was the one aspect of the job I liked, because I love exploring and I got paid to go to all sorts of areas I wouldn't normally visit).

To ensure that customs were notified of the shipments, we had to use a special computer system to enter the details, and print any relevant documentation. For this, we had an IBM AT, connected to both a dot matrix and daisywheel printer, a modem (it used this to upload details of our shipments to an HMRC computer) and a serial terminal. I can't remember the OS, but it was either Concurrant DOS or Multi User DOS.

We had strict rules on how long we needed to keep documentation on shipments (5 years, IIRC), but due to the time required to upload, we were asked by customs to keep the online records to the last year or two, which meant one of my boss's jobs was, on a friday afternoon, deleting any out of date shipment records. For Audit purposes, we still had the paperwork.

The system asked the user to enter the record number to delete. This is terrible UI design, and asking for trouble already. It did allow you to enter a range, which made things slightly easier. My boss had been happily deleting ranges of records for years, and was comfortable doing so. But he made a mistake. He entered the range backward. The software did not check for this, and couldn't cope with it. It happily started deleting everything. When the deletion (which normaly took a few seconds) was still going over 20 minutes later, he looked and realised what was happening. He immediately turned the computer off (there was no option to stop it or quit).

When we got it back up and running, he tasked me with replacing the missing records. They didn't have a backup, and he didn't want to request access to our records from HMRC, because doing so would have meant admitting to an error.

So, I spent the next 3 months knee deep in shipping paperwork, re-entering the details of all relavant shipments on the computer. The company didn't survive much longer, and ultimately I was rewarded with redundancy a few months later.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

RE "Ah, exactly how you'd tell your young offspring *not* to train their private natural language models. The next thing you know, we'll have LLMs exhibiting odd behavior because they were trained on truly warped subreddits."

That bought to mind Grok's recent adventures, along with (and this is going back a bit), Tay.

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

Not IT related, but I was in Vegas for a wedding in 2006. I had a great time, until I got to the airport. I was just going through security and put my handluggage on the conveyor. The guard was quite polite, and chatty, apart from asking all the normal questions (did you pack your bag etc).

All of a sudden, he stopped, so I went to pick up by bag. All of a sudden, he unclipped his gun, getting his hand into position to use it, and said "Sir, please step away from the bag".

Not surprisingly, I almost crapped myself. As far as I knew, all that was in my back was some washing stuff, a change of underwear and my iPod. All of this was allowed at the time.

Thankfully, the problem was resolved quickly. My friend was a smoker, and he'd accidenally dropped a rather large cigarette lighter in my handluggage that they had detected. When he saw it, the guard/agent was happy with my explanation, but would not allow me to take the lighter on board. I didn't mind this. I don't smoke and, TBH, my friend should have packed the lighter in his luggage.

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: "Microsoft was keen that the rollout of the new product went off without a hitch"

Being able to patch software relatively easy is a good thing, undoubtedly, but it's also a double edged sword. I think that when they could only update software by sending out new discs (be they CD or floppy), companies did seem to try that bit harder to get things right.

Now, because they have tools that can update software automiatically within a few hours, and with little cost, it seems that they rush things to market a little too quickly.

It's not unheard of even with physical copies of software to have to download tens of gigabytes in patches.

It's the same in the console space. I've heard there are a few games on the PS5 and Xbox where all that is on the disk is a downloader application. I've also heard that the on the Switch 2, some of the game cards don't even have that. They just have some of code that when the Switch reads it, it just downloads that game..

Ease the seat back and watch some video in your car with next Apple CarPlay

Re: A good example of when new is not better

In fairness to apple, that is a problem that isn't specific to car play. It's a problem with all modern cars that make extensive use of touch screens, and while I think touch screens can provide amazing interfaces, any kind of vehicle isn't a good use for them. For the reasons you say. With physical controls, you can use the control without looking at it. With touch screens, this is a little more difficult.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Never had to drill holes in a server rack, but I remember a few years ago working for a Uni. We had a switch in one of our patch panels that was refusing to connect, and just displaying an error light. It *was* end of life, and was eventually replaced, but to get it up and running again, I thought I'd give it a quick reboot. I did, eventually, and it came back up, but not before I'd accidentally unplugged the wrong switch, taking out the connection to two computer labs that were both full, and had lectures booked.

Luckily I was able to get the switch back up and running before any users complained.

Scammers are deepfaking voices of senior US government officials, warns FBI

This has been going on a while. I saw a scambaiting video a year or so back where the scamer had a very convincing Joe Biden voice and was selling some bitcoin.

Also, the other week, on Youtube, I saw a surprsingly convincing of Kier Starmer walking around a garden, talking to the camera telling me that the UK government recommended I buy some sort of meme coin.

It was obviously fake, because I'm fairly certain the PM isn't allowed to endorse any particular product or service, and no one high up in politics would ever have anything to do with something that could be a scam.

Oh, wait.. Trump has a memecoin. In fairness, that doesn't seem to be a scam. You do get what you pay for, if you pay enough. Time with the President. Now, whether that is legally or morrally right is another matter.

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Pay us money to unlock the other CPUs and memory.

In theory you could, but there is the issue of cost. CPUs cost hundreds, and in the case of higher end ones, thousands of pounds. There is also the problem of finding it. In even a small or medium size datacenter, you may have several machines with multiple CPUs. In a large datacenter, you may have hundreds or thousands of machines with multiple CPUs. How do you find which is affected when any tools you have for detecting viruses would need to run on the infected CPU, so would likely produce incorrect results.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: What "massive disruption" did Harrods experience?

I think the form of the disruption they experienced is largely irrelevant. Hackers gained access to internal systems, and could have done enough damage to bring Harrods (or any company) to it's knees, They could have hacked names and address, what has been ordered, card details. They could have shut down the tills in the stores, and the website. There is also the reputational damage. If people think going to Harrods might cause their card details to be stolen, and ultimately lose them potentially a lot of money, they might be less inclined to go to Harrods.

IT security, done properly, is expensive, and doesn't produce an easily quantifiable benefit (after all, if it's working, you just won't see a difference), but companies need to remember that computers are likely the heart of their business. If they are hacked, it can easily take out the company.

Microsoft boots 3% of staff in latest cull, middle managers first in line

This is a radical idea, I know, but if we (as a race) carry on cutting jobs, are we not going to get to a point where we cannot sustain ourselves economically?

Those 3% of staff Microsoft have cut will all purchase things in their local towns. The people that supply them also have employees, who will also spend money on the local area. That will reduce.

Yes, the money saved will go somewhere. Probably those who are already wealthy in returns on their various investments, but those who are wealthy generally have everything they need, so an extra few million won't make any difference to what they spend. That money will likely sit in accounts, doing nothing for any local economy.

SImilarly, the AI, or other technology Microsoft replace them with will not contribute nearly as much to the economy as thousands of people.

I hate to say this, because I think it will make people think I am some sort of looney left winger or socialist (I am neither), but I think Capitalism has failed in it's current form because it has enabled a few people to horde the bulk of the world's money.

So your [expletive] test failed. So [obscene participle] what?

Re: Been there, done that...

I've dealt with something similar. I was working in a computer lab, and was called to a student workstation because they were trying to use a system we'd set up so they could manage their own accounts on the uni's database server . The student, when he logged in, got the error "Get Back Thickyhead". Feeling rather offended, he came and got me. I apologised for the error, and explained that it didn't mean anything personal. It was just an in-joke within the team. I forget where it came from, or why we did it, but we often jokingly used it amongst the team. I couldn't see why the system was failing, so logged directly on to the admin console and performed the actions the student wanted.

Thankfully, the student was quite happy when I'd finished, and did not put in a complaint.

I went to my colleague, who maintained the system. He explained that it was actually a piece of code that would normally require about 7 things to fail before it was triggered, so the student should not have seen it. Thankfully, he updated the message to say something a little more helpful and less offensive, and also fixed the errors.

India ready to greenlight Starlink – as long as it lets New Delhi censor, snoop

He should, but he won't. Despite claiming to be, he appears not to be a free speech absolutist. He often says that if you advocate for free speech, you have to be prepared to hear or read things you don't like. This is correct. However, people who post things on X that Musk doesn't like, tend to disappear. Not banned, but their posts lose visibility. This is subtle, but it is censorship none the less.

It should be noted, however, that when he promised free speech on his services, he did not promise totally free speech. He promised free speech subject to local laws and other government requirements. He did actually say it would be subject to local laws.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: No Lifecycle Upgrades

Whenever re-install either my work computer or my home computer, I ensure any configs and data that need to be kept are backed up, but when I re-install, I re-install all software from scratch, restoring the backups when I finish.

I also install any software as and when I need it, because my needs change from time to time, so I don't have a massive list of software I install when I re-install the OS.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Re: I am reminded of Eudora

I have to admit, I don't remember Eudora having problems with IMAP. That said, I didn't use it for long. IIRC, I switched to Thunderbird fairly quickly, so it's possible I just didn't use it for long enough to encourter problems.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: Good old radio

Re". iPhone users were certainly lost.

Not sure why you highlight iPhone users. All smartphones get through batteries quickly, and even if they didn't, the various mobile networks would not have lasted that long without electricity, so it's likely any mobile phone without satellite facilities was useless.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Only $1M?

I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but does anyone else wonder if at least part of the reason is vulnerability to hackers. Tapes in a warehouse tend to be relatively difficult to access because someone may actually have to go there and I would hope they have serious physical security protecting them. Putting them in some sort of cloud storage would make them accessible to hackers and much easier for Russia, China or any other foreign state to access.

I can see why DOGE might quite like that.

Microsoft ducks politico questions on Copilot bundling and lack of consent

'Here is a radical idea..

How about a company offer a piece of software with a basic set of features that is entirely functional offline. They can offer it with maybe a year or two of security updates, but any development would be financed by charging a reasonable purchase price tor thr software.

They can offer optional services that can either paid for, or ad supported, but they should be opt in, with clear explanations of what you will be required to do or allow. IE how much you pay, howoften, or what personal data is shared and with who. You can have AI, office suites and other online features, and these can be paid for or free. I'd like to see any paid option disabling any tracking..

Radical idea, I know.

Note: I know that Linux has being doing this for years and is a good OS, with plenty of powerful open source software, but sometimes you need a particular commercial application.

Don't want Copilot app on your Windows 11 machine? Install this official update

I'm in two minds about AI.

On the one hand, consumer AI doesn't have a killer app. I find it handy when using my phone to use Siri to conrol the phone, and I like the fact I can use it to control some of my lights at home. But, beyond conveniance, I don't really see the use of it.

But, while I am happy to use it on either decidcated devices, or a mobile, I don't like it on computers (not even the Siri integration on macOS). Why? Because a lot of people do stuff on their computers they wouldn't necessarily want scraped into some LLM hosted in the cloud somehwere.

Microsoft seem to assume you want Copilot to scrape everything you do by default. By all means, they can offer this, but it should be opt in, with them giving an explantion of what data will be shared if you do. But the default should be that you are opted out.

Apple do ask if you want voice control for Siri as part of the OS setup, but IIRC it isn't the default. However, even they don't explain what data will be shared if you turn it on..

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: If you want a general purpose computer ...

RE: "I think for most people it's what they feel familiar with"

It is, and you'd be surprised how many people go for what they are familiar with even if told otherwise..

An example. A few years ago, I was providing on site AV support for a major conference on evacuation (which was every bit as boring as it sounds), and one thing they said stuck with me. No matter how clearly you signpost the emergency exits, most people when evacuating, will try and get out the way they came in..

Unless given a vert good reason to change, a lot of people will stick with what they know.

Of course, another potential cause of reluctance to change is vendor lock in. If a user has spent a significant amount of money on apps or proprietary add ons for their device, they may be relucatant to change as they feel they will be abandoning those apps and add ons..

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: NSFW iMessage videos

Sort of related, but not really.

When I first started Uni, back in 94, the web wasn't really a thing, and two of our lecturers taught us web design. Just basic HTML, as browsers weren't really capable of much more at the time. Both had us explore their own websites as an example of what could be donw.

One had a sound file (a low quality recording of Smells Like Teen Spirit) on his site. I discovered both this, and the fact that the Sun workstation I was using had quite a powerful speaker when I accidentally double clicked on the link while he was giving a lecture, which got a dirty look from him.

The trend at the time was for people to have a page on their site showing their bookmarks (I suppose with search engines not really being a thing yet, it was one way to help people navigate around the web). The other lecturer teaching us web design had some links to sites that were not what you'd call hard core porn (or even particularly soft core) but did contain a lot of photos of scantily clad ladies..

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Reminds me of a story my old Computing lecturer used to tell from a time she was a Systems Analyst.

She was part of a team that, during the 80s, implemented a huge new computer system for Southwark Council. I *think* it was for Housing, but don't quote me on that. Her team spent months designing the system, and further months implementing and installing it.

A year or so after the go live date, she was passing and popped into one of the offices to see how the system was going. She didn't see a sign of the terminal they had installed so the staff could access the new system, so she asked the staff about it. Apparently, the terminal was being used. As a door stop.

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

We have to use Outlook at work. Our Sys Admins have gone out of their way to block access to our work exchange 365 service by everything apart from Outlook.

Thankfully, I primarily use it on my work Mac or Laptop, and not my phone or iPad..

They used to support connection using the native apps on iOS and Android phones. This worked brilliantly on my iPhone. If I ever needed to set up my iPhone again, I just entered my account details once on my phone, and the accounts were available in every app I needed them, both on my phone and Apple watch (I have my Apple watch face displaying details of upcoming meetings and reminders).

I've got the Outlook app on my phone and it while it can show meetings on my watch, if I ever set up with watch or phone, installing and setting up Outlook is another step I need to do. Seems picky, I know. Especially as I don't generally set either device up again. They just work. But it does not integrate as well as I feel it should.

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

Re: "last week^h^h^h^h decade it was a 60"

I live in a cul-de-sac. You can get into my road from both ends as a pedestrian, but any vehicles can one use one end of the road.

Until last year, whatever GPS/Mapping app I used would not direct anyone via the end of the road that is pedestrian only even if asking for pedestrian directions.

There is main road running by the end of the road. Most Satnavs would not direct anyone to go past my road at this end, tending to take a longer route to avoid a bit of road that according to the various mapping companies does not exist.

Also, down the road, the residents of a few streets have put up official looking signs advising Truck drivers to ignore their GPSs and turn back.

This is what concerns me about self driving systems. They can be excellent at navigating, but if they have out of date maps, they may well have problems. At the moment, you, as a driver, can take over, but how long will that last?

It begins: Pentagon to give AI agents a role in decision making, ops planning

I know a lot of people consider it an awful film, but did none of the Pentagon advisors and staff watch Terminiator 3? This is how Skynet started..

Maybe cancel that ChatGPT therapy session – doesn't respond well to tales of trauma

Re "The team freely admits in their paper that they know LLMs aren't capable of experiencing emotions in a human way."

What the LLM is likely expressing is how other humans reacted to a given situation, which is stored in it's dataset.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Put up or shut up

Re "Apple simply can’t remotely disable it and somehow decrypt the existing encrypted backups."

I am certain I read that Apple have said that for users who leave ADP on, Apple will eventually turn it off and delete all encrypted backups..

How the collapse of local cloud provider caused biz continuity issues in UK government

Unfortunately, they can't ban Fujitsu. While they *should*, for Horizon, the problem is, the Government likely has a lot of elderly mainframes that were built by companies that are now part of Fujitsu, so they need Fujitsu for support.

Under Trump 2.0, Europe's dependence on US clouds back under the spotlight

This is the problem with the cloud. You are using someone else's computer. They (and to some extent their governemt) have control over it. You have some, but if they decide to block your access, you can't do an awful lot. If they turn it off for any reason, you can't do a lot.

This was bad enough before Trump, I don't trust Trump to not just add access charges or block every company in the UK because Kier Starmer has pissed him off..

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Re: All Live Operational Virtual Environment Systems are Go.

amanfrommars has been on The Register since the early 2000s. Their messages never make sense..

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: Idle hands - but whose?

It's not a case of watching their staff.. All they need is a spreadsheet listing users, and how many keystrokes/mouse movements they made. Or their "Productivity scores' if they were using teams during the period that was available. Even if you had hundreds of team members, it wouldn't take long to go through that.

Of course, that doesn't take into account that some tasks take longer than others, and anyone whos job involves long tasks will show up as less productive using measures like the ones I've listed above..

For instance, I was doing remote support during covid. I was basicaly 2nd line support, and it wasn't unheard of for me to spend a couple of hours on one task, where as the 1st liners were solving the simple problems (resetting passwords, restarting machines etc). So, of course they handled many times the amount of tickets my team did, and would show up as more productive on any sheet..

Teams used to show me as both available and away from my desk even if I was sitting at the desk typing something into Teams... Took a 45 minutes phone call to our systems team to sort the problem..

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Re: He's just shotgunning

I do not live in the US, but I am appalled at the apparent lack of standards in the US Supreme Court.

I'm a purchaser for my company, and as a thank you for an order, a network supplier sent me a a branded orange hi viz jacket, a branded orange ball point and an orange packet of sweets.. Probably about £40 worth of stuff. When I declared this, I was warned I should not have accepted it (I didn't, technically, it was left on my desk by a porter). These guys can apparently get away with recieving millions of dollars of of gifts, seemingly with no consequence, and not even a real emphasis on declaring the gifts..

They've only gone and made Doom run in a PDF file

Re: How much ink?

Not sure what model it was, but we used to have a large Agfa printer that took up a sizeable percentage of the available space in the room it was in. It printed out somewhere in the range of several thousand pages a minute , and it earned it's nickname, Fiery.

TBH, I'm not really sure of the specs either, as I had nothing to do with the printer, but it was bloody fast.

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

Re: cost

I'd quite like some reliablity.. I have an Orbi Wifi 6 system, and my mobile devices don't necessarily connect to the nearest, and often fastest Wifi AP.. The other day, I was in my living room, and my streaming box was giving terrible performance (buffering every 20 seconds). When I ran a speed test on my mobile Wifi, it gave terrible speeds.. Looking at the admin website for the Orbis, both devices had connected to an access point in the next room, when the main Orbi router was sitting on a table in the same room. Rebooted the AP in the other room, forcing everything to disconnect, and the speed was fine.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

From my own point of view, for curosity's sake as much as anything, I'd like to find out from Windows Update why it is blocking my 24h2 on my machine..

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs

It's a good idea in theory to introduce an abstraction layer. After all, it makes it potentially much more simple to switch providers, but how much latency is introdoced? It may only be a millisecond or two, but if your application makes a lot of API calls, that could introduce significant latency. If the system is in any way time sensitive, even a millisecond or two could be a significant problem.

Claims of 'open' AIs are often open lies, research argues

In fairness, while some large enterprises do contribute as required to open source, a lot do just take from it, or even use it as a marketing opportunity (as most AI startups seem to).

Microsoft slaps Windows 11 update hold on hardware connected to eSCL devices

At this point, is there anything you can have installed on Windows that doesn't block the upgrade? We have this, Ubisoft games, various drivers.. What else?