Posts by ChrisBedford 302 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2012
If you are not useing OneDrive, go to Settings -> Apps -> Startup and switch OneDrive to OFF. This has worked for me to stop it from nagging to set it up.
While you are there you might like to look through the list and switch off other MS apps that have been set to start automatically whether you use them or not - Edge and Teams the most notable resource hogs among them.
...you have to micro-analyse every word, graphic, chart, and table it produces, double-check facts, and just generally micro-manage it as if it was a 1st-month intern. In other words, you have to take more time over its output than you would have done producing it yourself.
The difference between an AI and an intern is that you have to keep doing that for as long as you keep using it - AI is never going to outgrow the 1st month stage, at least not in terms of trustworthiness. We've all seen the reports of ChatGPT and other bots Making Shit Up and arguing the toss over patently untrue statements - MAGA politcians, in other words - so there's really no point in ever going down that road, as far as I can see.
Thank god I'm old and will never have to work in a coporate environment where Copilot drives the dystopian nightmare. It's bad enough living in the dystopian political nightmare driven by China, Russia, and idiots like, well, the entire UK Conservative Party.
"legacy media doesn't tell both sides of the story"? Really?
I don't know about the UK but look across the pond and you'll see the legacy media bending over backwards to give Trump's camp "equal time" by pretending he's not the most toxic thing to happen in that country since it was a country.
1984 is here, it's just taking a little longer than Orwell invisioned. "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—"... and so on. It's the end — no longer just the erosion — of privacy, and the irony here is that the Tories are the idealogical bedfellows of the GOP who TRUMPet personal freedom so loudly.
What really chilled me was not that end-to-end encryption might or might not be outlawed, but the casual way it's just nonchalantly mentioned in passing in the final sentence. Way to bury the lede, El Reg.
"POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work in any situation where you need to access your mail from multiple devices"
Yes it is (horrible) but there are ways it does work with multiple devices (just tell your client software not to delete immediately on download)
The problem with IMAP or any other sync-with-the-server type protocols is that your service has to support however large a mailbox you want to keep, and I have users for whom 50 GB falls under "getting started". Even a home user has no trouble getting up to 5 or 10 GB and many retail ISPs think that a 1 GB mailbox is generous (and they charge exorbitant monthly fees to even upgrade customers to that much. A few MB is not an unusual limit with some ISPs and one of them still, in 2024, doesn't support IMAP). Yes, I know, switch to Gmail or something but some people are a bit - er, how shall I put this - reluctant to change their email address.
"I don't see why you can't archive IMAP mail to a local folder/mailbox and then it doesn't matter who deletes the original mail or when it happens." - That would be a PST file, though, wouldn't it? Which is also not supported (er, "yet")
"As for lack of PST in the original post, the work around is to keep paying that subscription" - well unless you intended that remark sarcastically, that's naive.
"Who buys a desktop or laptop in order to use the bundled apps"
Apple users. Many of them buy / use very little else. Many swear by Mail, and it was far superior to the Outlook for Mac until about a decade ago which just cemented Apple's position in that market. Pages and whatever passes for a spreadsheet are adequate for 99% of home users. Safari, although horrible to those used to Firefox or Chrome, is not really that bad and for a long time was the only option on iOS devices so that established it for those users too.
So, yeah, assuming your experience is mirrored by everyone else is a classic projection error.
...is to use (or create) a dummy MS account at the OOBE stage then as soon as thee first sign-on appears, go to Settings and create a new user account - this time you have the option of setting up for a user without a Microsoft account (don't create a password! You have to answer those stupid security questions if you do). Sign out, sign on as the new user, delete your MS account-enabled user.
Now if you want the user to have a password press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] and create one.
The caveat (apart from the obvious waste of time) is that MS remembers the dummy account and offers to clone previous PCs created using it. After the first time using it you have to take an option at the bottom to "set up as a new PC" (duh).
I didn't bother to read all 161 offered comments because once you've skimmed about a quarter of any forum on ElReg you can be pretty much assured you've sampled all the opinions in the rest... and oh, boy, do we have a bunch of diehard conservatives here. Not [i]quite[/i] Luddites, it must be said, but the resistance to change is [b]strong[/i] with these ones, eh?
OK, having said that, let me hasten to add I'm pretty much in the same camp. I do find the constant change-for-change's-sake "improvements" extremely tedious and the way Windows has bloated way out of all proportion is absolutely [i]staggering[/i]. Not even mentioned in the main article: how much slower everything runs since even the first version of Win10 was released. I remember clearly as it was only 7 years ago - and it was - that a Core i7 with 8 GB RAM and a hybrid SSHD was plenty fast to run Office and switch between apps with alacrity... yeah, now, not so much, and that's even if you have stuck with 10. If by some miracle your PC with those specs from that time accepted the "upgrade" to 11 it's going to be - er - sluggish as an ashthmatic sloth, yes. Or was that slothful as an ashthmatic slug.
[b][i]But[/i][/b] (und ziss is a bick butt) there are some aspects of the UI that have definitely improved, and features added that have definitely added functionality. Have you tried opening a PC with say a 2 versions old Windows and tried to do anything? Apart from trying to remember where to find the controls, because of course Nadella has to move them around, there are many things you might like to change that simply can't be done in the older OS. Yah, sure, go ahead and edit the registry... ha ha ha no thanks, even if that's an option.
And also But: Apple is no better, and in fact I'd argue that MacOS hasn't really had any meaningful improvements since it was OSX. And while MS haven't really forced a wholesale hardware change since WIndows 7, Apple's "closed ecosystem" periodically renders all existing hardware redundant and they tell you hey, tough titties. Plus, in their relentless Tech Bros fever they have been selling un-upgradeable hardware for a decade now, because obviously since places like MacWorld have been able to add memory and replace HDDs with SSDs and that is seen as taking upgrade business out of Tim Cook's pocket, yes? But not to be mistaken for a Company That Doesn't Innovate, Apple changed the MacOS numbering scheme so that whereas previous huge changes in technology were mere "dot-one" updates, since 2019 they are making tiny incremental changes and giving them whole-number upgrades. Meh. You're going to have to work a bit harder than that to convince me.
For HP, the IP is all in the print head which is on the cartridge
Yeahhh... I'm not sure that's true. They have for decades been bragging about how "advanced" and "superior" their inks are and I have seen obvious print quality differences between genuine & 3rd party cartridges (although it's not possible to know for sure whether that was because of the ink being better or the heads being worn out since the cartridge may have been refilled, even multiple times). In any event HP and other printer mfrs do hold huge numbers of patents on inks.
we have seen no access to operational systems at these water facilities, nor have we seen any impact to the provision of safe drinking water
Also
At this time, it appears that Cyberav3ngers is the only gang targeting Israel-made gear in US critical infrastructure facilities
"Have seen no access" and "appears" are not the most confidence-inspiring phrases in this context.
"explained that the explosion in advanced machine learning methods have rendered the defense obsolete"
Verb is conjugated for the subject of the sentence, not the adjectival phrase (or whatever that is) that comes after it. The *explosion* HAS rendered, not the methods. Bah humbug.
1. My satellite TV service is interrupted by heavy rain, and that's using a 40cm fixed dish. How reliable is sat phone communication?
2. How many satellites will it take to carry the number of calls that an emergency system will have to handle?
"trust but verify"
The most oxymoronic piece of advice I've ever heard. And I hear it a lot. People quote it all the time without apparently listening to the words or thinking about what they mean.
If you trust something or someone by definition you are dispensing with the need to verify. Conversely, if you verify something or someone you by definition do not trust them or it. The two actions are completely and 100% mutually exclusive, no way to overlap those two circles.
"It's a sign of severe depression and loneliness when managers use a company as a some sort of way for providing paid for friends.
I am surprised workers don't feel being abused by this behaviour, because in reality they become nothing more but escorts.
If people go to pub for a drink with their work colleagues, that is an extreme red flag."
100% in agreement with the first two paragraphs. But the last one? No that statement is something of a "red flag" in itself. It's one thing to value your own privacy, and respect others', but you can't be completely antisocial. I've worked at a couple of companies that organised "pub evenings" and the occasional weekend getaway and they were always fun - because no-one forced anything on anyone.
And of course there is always the Christmas party when at least one (ahem, non-)couple end up "hooking up" for a quickie in the bushes. But I think that's a separate discussion.
"Testing and changing all devices that know that 240/8, 0/8, and 127/8, etc, are 'special' is a bigger job than making them just use IPv6," tweeted Adrian Kennard, who runs UK ISP Andrews & Arnold. "The 0 address being usable probably only helps local networks."
Yah not to mention it's just a way of dragging out the transition by giving admins an excuse to delay it another year - or two, or three. Sounds to me like more work than actually just biting the bullet and making the jump to IP6
Why bother? They'll only move them again.
Because, you dimwit, it will be at least 5 years before the next version of Windows comes out.
Sure, a lot of the changes feel like change for its own sake - e.g. right-click on the taskbar for Task Manager has been a feature since at least WinXP, but now it's on the Start button (WHY?!) - and it can be frustrating when you have to work with various versions, but "not learning because they'll just move them again" is churlish and cutting off your nose to spite your face.
"Fatally wounded" eh.
Your computer has something wrong with it, you're running some dreadful old legacy software, or you've managed to break a setting or the registry, or something.
I have two desktops running W10 and they've been in service for more years than I care to try and remember (Core i5 gen 3 and i3 gen 7 - the latter replaced a couple of years ago because the hardware of its predecessor expired) and I run loads of software on them, the i5 is my primary workhorse which I use all day, every day and the i3 is used as a small business file server. I keep them 100% up to date and I honestly can't remember when last an MS update broke anything significant. Sure, they ask to reboot at the most inconvenient times, but I run a Macbook as well and so does Apple.
There is a culture of criticising and blaming MS for everything that goes wrong with a PC when in my experience nine times out of 10 it's user error or something random or minor that can be fixed without a lot of trouble.
Seriously, what is all the FUD about?
Apart from a couple of minor inconveniences here and there, I've not yet seen a W10 update that didn't improve things in some way or another. And I have worked on *A LOT* of WIndows 10 machines.
A very lot.
There's a culture of dissing everything that comes out of Redmond BECAUSE REASONS but I have decided it's almost always down to BS and emotions, very very little actual logic or valid argument.
"It became commonplace to ship PCs with "try before you buy" AV packages that encouraged the new user to activate the software for free, only to receive truly terrifying warnings a month or so later about shelling out for continued protection"
A practice that continues, expanded, to this day. If you remove the McAfee that ships with your PC, instead opting for the "free" adware from say AVG/Avast, you get daily scareware advisories that are in fact total BS.
"Chinese State [...] responded [...] by denying that TSMC was the reason the country was seeking reunification with Taiwan"
Oh, yah, sure. And Peng Shuai is 100% OK, Hong Kong is still a democracy unencumbered by authoritarianism, and the Dalai Lama is welcome to come home to Mongolia and preach independence.
Oh, yeah, that's another thing I've learned - applications should never, ever, become foreground unless the user has explicitly requested it in the last half second or so
'
I know, right? And yet multiple MS program do it - several times, just for good measure - every time they feel the need. Never mind the opportunities to shut down important apps, if you're not the world's best typist you might not be looking at the screen while entering something important - only to look up and find you've entered an Office activation key into the wrong screen. This can be ever so slightly frustrating.
I couldn't find a reference to the aircraft model on a quick re-scan but let's assume something like an A300 Airbus, which typically seats about 240 PAX and has a gross take-off weight of around 132 tonne. Let's say 200, and if every person on the manifest was an adult female booked in as "Miss" that would be a miscalculation of 200 x (69-35) kg = 6.8t or 5% of gross weight.
Seems a bit over-dramatic to make out this was some kind of huge thing. Bear in mind the actual number of people misrepresented is going to be a small fraction of the total, certainly less than half, so closer to 2%.
You sound like every old person with *shit* eyesight that has ever compared HD to SD. If you can't see the difference the extra £2 a month costs you, don't pay it. Or buy a better TV set. But stop whining about it, the rest of the world can't all be wrong.
...did not think of the first, most obvious troubleshooting step: phone the location of the server.
Seems IT nerds had their heads even further up the proverbial drainpipe back then. Unless this story is apocryphal. But Harry would never spin us a tall tale, now would he? Would he?
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