Posts by mdubash

Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade

Try Affinity Photo.

Affinity

Amazed so few gravitate towards Affinity Photo and Publisher, which between them cover off what Photoshop and InDesign do. Definitely worth a look, and no subscriptions... Been using them since Adobe drove me away with its gouging.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: Cat has own laptop

Causing you to spend the next 15 minutes removing cat hairs from the keyboard?

Re: Cats and keyboards

Like adding ribbons...

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: cheers

I wish I didn't remember those days.

Even Google struggles to balance fast-but-pricey flash and cheap-but-slow hard disks

Hierarchical storage

Didn't we call this hierarchical storage--back in the 90s?

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Re: There a starman....

Wires beat radios every time.

It's spelt 'fibre'.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: Skylark

Same applies to Heinlein

Re: The other problem with sending people to mars is

That overtaken bit? That's been written about in SF too.

Unlikely to happen befre Trump's term as POTUS ends, eh? When do we suppose that's likely to be? Given the Orange One's propensity to ignore the rules and the Holy Constitution, I'm taking no bets on it being in 2028.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: Truly exciting.

Great game - I still occasionally play it. Eek!

Here's how a Trump presidency could change the tech industry

Re: "regime"

The assumption being that voting = democracy whereas a moment's thought shows that it ain't necessarily so. Demoracy is the theory: voting is but one tactic for achieving it.

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto: Japan's bullet trains to ditch drivers

Re: Just to clarify a point

So there's a lack of money in the public sector due to billionaires hoarding it and not paying their taxes - yet somehow this is the fault of working men and women organising themselves to retain a slightly bigger yet still thin slice of the pie.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Friend of mine (at the time) wrote an entire book with a QL. In fact, he waited until he could get one - about two years - before he started actually writing it.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Hard cheese? Where's Terry-Thomas when you need him?

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Simple rule

I was thnking Snowball from Level 9...

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Not a diehard Windows user here (I wouldn't have said). I've used quite a few Linux distros over the years and of course all my servers run Linux; I'm quite comfortable with the CLI - that's where I started with the BBC Micro!

But Linux desktop? Half the software (hyperbole check) I use is available only on Windows so it's either spend ages finding an equivalent and losing years of familiarity or use some gruesome kludge like WINE. Been there - and the hoops you have to jump through are many and not all issues are resolvable.

Life's too short: an OS is about support for the apps, not the OS itself; I don't spend ages interacting with the OS but with apps. Yes, Windows does force some horrid choices on you, like the M$ = Disney approach to the UI, like it's single-user only lockdown, and like its licensing.

I should add that the years I spent faffing with GEM, DESQview, OS/2 and even NeXTstep are not included in my mental map of what really happened back then... :)

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Re: "This being 20 years ago now"

As a now-retired tech journalist, I can report many agreements from many marketing managers of tech companies that customers preferred lots of flashing lights on their expensive bits of enterprise kit, all to impress the client's manglement.

I can fix this PC, boss, but I’ll need to play games for hours to do it

I recall my first encounter with networking: IBM Token Ring. The drivers for that were so huge that you had to choose whether to join the network or run Word Perfect - my writing weapon of choice at the time (1987).

There didn't seem to be any EMM stuff around to help, then, either

Re: Config.sys joys

Spent days doing that, reboot, tweak more, reboot... So sad that DESQview never went anywhere.

Claims emerge that Citrix has doubled price of month-to-month partner licenses

The word "license" is a verb. What Citrix has done id change its licence (noun). It's a useful distinction.

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

Re: The problem with Notes

...and the fact that the client was single-threaded, which made it slow, especially if the network was clogged. It wanted to sync? Just wait until it's over, no point in trying to do anything else.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: outSHONE

Ditto 'obligated' when 'obliged' does the job.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Re: "speach"

Not so true. As a beekeeper, I've dealt with hornets and wasps, and the latter are far more likely to have a go just because.

Individually, hornets are placid creatures. Just don't go near their nests though, or they mount a full-on Operation Overlord.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

I still miss the BRS.

Re: I'm no expert

Yup, done a fair bit of delving in my time, from the BBC Micro (which in my case fulfilled its brief of sucking me into compoting) onwards. Not so much any more though. Life's too short...

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

Grove

Only the paranoid survive.... Now, who said that?

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

They weren't alone: as I recall (as an ex-practitioner of that particular craft on PC Magazine), every non-Apple mag had to practically get down on their hands and knees and pray obeisance to the great black-jumpered one (for it was he in those days) to get review kit, and even then you'd be lucky unless you promised favourable results. So we didn't...

Re: Tim Cook's punishment?

It's worse than that. In the US, the phrase 'Can I get <whatever...>?' (heard in shops) is endemic. Of course you can get <whatever>. The phrase should be 'May I have <whatever>?'

But here in the UK, 'Can I get...' is heard with increasing frequency. Grrr.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Thunderbird the client who would not die

I too was a TB addict. But since the browser now renders my provider's emails in pretty much any way I want, I couldn;t see the point in a separate app. I now - like everyone else and despite my best instincts - live in the browser. It's a bit like OS wars: ultimately, I don't really care about the OS, I care about the information and the apps. Life's too short.. mutter mutter...

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Re: Stories from Grandad

Tell that to my home colour laser printer. I had wastefully to bin it because one tiny piece of plastic - the part that secures the flappy paper sensor - broke, so it refused to believe there wasn't a paper jam. I explained it to the machine on multiple occasions, and even 3D printed a replacement but all for naught. A new printer cost only £250...

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Re: Nominative determinism

Tyler is guilty....

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Re: spaghetti

But then you can't wind it round the fork, as il Dio intended...

Samsung’s midrange A54 is lovely, but users won't feel seen

Re: Reviews are pretty pointless these days

Yup. I've been buying Xiaomi phones around the £200 mark for years. All have worked fine, and accept headphone jacks and SD cards. I remain astonished that people are willing to pay £1,000 or more for a nice badge.

Google accused of ripping off advertisers with video ads no one saw. Now, the expert view

Or does Google think that despite not wanting to watch ads inserted at random points into videos I'm enjoying that I will be any more willing to rush out and buy the product/service? I'm not alone in my firm policy of not knowingly buying anything I've seen advertised: in doing so I'd not only have paid both with my time/data/electricity, I'd be paying more overall through higher prices incurred by paying for the company's advertising budget.

I don't think so.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

If only there were more unionisation, salaries might be better...

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Re: So you could say...

Well, he hadn't SATA upon his laurels...

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Re: Small screen non-2-in-1... why?

I made the mistake of buying not one buyt three of those, thinking each one was an exception. They're fragile. The first two pretty much came apart in my hands, the third I sold because it was inordinately noisy and ran very hot. At last I got the message: not going there again.

I would recommend looking at a 17-inch LG Gram. It probably wouldn't give Liam's X1 a run for its money, but my six-month-old version is very light, is fast and thin - and despite its 17-inch screen, it costs £600 less than an X1. I still think it's the best laptop I've ever used - and I've been using (and occasionally reviewing) them fior 30+ years.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

Would that be a Hovis-232?

Heads to roll at Lenovo amid 'severe downturn' in PC sales

Quality downturn

Have to say that, following 20 years of buying IBM ThinkPads then Lenovo kit of various sorts, usually updating on a three-year cycle, the last two or three systems have disappointed. Cost-cutting shows. Creaky hinges, display backs that fall off or aren't very secure andhinges that fail have all happened over time. It's not even as if the machines had a hard life, certainly not in the last five or six years.

Took me too long to switch vendors: six months ago I bought a 17-inch LG Gram and couldn't be happier with its rock-solid performance and reliability. I can't see me returning to Lenovo.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: "substantial"

Windows wouod still dominate because you don't need to train ordinary users how to do the basics: they've trained themselves on their own time.

LibreOffice 7.5 update: A great time to jump on this FOSS productivity suite

Re: Ribbonphile

Yes, the one product that MS makes that I do really like is OneNote. Reminds me a little of Lotus Agenda....

Re: Time to toss them a few more bucks for a software suite I use on Linux, Mac and PC.

LO offers a choice of UI. I've tried them all, including the much-vaunted ribbon - which looks like a splurge of icons has been vomited onto the screen. By contrast, the standard toolbar option, looking much like that found in the last half-decent MS Office, ie 2003, is all most people will need. It's simple, intuitive and highly customisable.

An IT emergency during a festive visit to the in-laws? So sorry, everyone, I need to step out for a while

Re: Ch-ch-ch-changes

Another side to that multi-facted coin is finance...

Hybrid multi-cloud is a mess to clean up, not an innovation to excite

I seem to recall writing this same article 15 years ago....

tsoHost pulls plug on Gridhost service with just 45 days' notice

Re: Posting on CPanel?

Totally agree. I have sites on there, and I've had no emails. Not until someone told me the site was gone did I find out. So crap.

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

Obviously, it can't have been worth it, for me, paying for when Evernote decided to limit the free tier to two devices as I switched to (eek!) OneNote in 2016. Veery happy with the experience, good UI, cross-platform, no device limit....

Logitech, that canary in PC coal mine, just fell off its perch

I want an update to the last keyboard they made which has a set of 12 function keys running up the left-hand side of the device - where God intended them to be. Mine's worn out. The F keys are fully configurable, so you can make it work just like an IBM AT keyboard. If only...