Posts by ChrisBedford 316 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Feb 2012
"Banksy didn't respond as its not their show. No one check that while writing the article?"
OK, except
"We asked the organizers of the exhibition what had befallen the screens"
Banksy didn't respond as he wasn't asked, as it happens. And, yes, as it also isn't his show and he already said that.
"Can you please add some examples of what you mean?"
Your whole post would be one. You enumerate enhancements ("not a massive upgrade"? Seriously? That would cost more than many new Windows PCs), which you did to make a Mac run the same speed it did when it came from the factory with 10.11 El Capitan.
I have seen definite slowdowns when updating from 13-14-15 but sure, small amounts that most users would get used to in a matter of a day or so. But that's due to the impressively powerful Apple silicon and little else.
To be clear, my criticism is not limited to Apple. Redmond is just as guilty - maybe more so - under the guise of "enhanced security" and "additional features" (addendum: "that no-one wanted") and there is also a limit to just how much memory or SSD you can add to improve the situation. Usually somewhat cheaper for the PC, though.
Just one PS: yes, sure, you have to have an MS account to start up Win11 the first time (there used to be a workaround until I think this year's 25H2 semi-annual Big Update but they eliminated it) *BUT* it's easy enough to remove that requirement once the machine is running. Just create a new (Admin capability) user - "I don't have this person's MS Account details" and then "Create a user without an MS account". Log out, log in with the new user, delete the MS-account user. *MAKE SURE TO EITHER DISABLE BITLOCKER OR BACK UP THE ENCRYPTION KEY*. I have one MS account I use for this purpose that has probably a hundred PCs "associated" with it as a result of using this technique. It's a bit tedious, sure, but it only takes a few minutes.
"They don't. One strongly suspects you just like shitting on Macs without ever having actually used one."
That's a deeply ignorant remark and makes you sound like the exact person you describe. My Mac-enabled customer base is a lot smaller than the Windows crowd, sure, but I run an old Mac myself and have tried to help a few customers with older (desktop and notebook) Apple machines to upgrade because _*their computers got slower with every MacOs upgrade.*_ When the hardware could take more memory or a new HDD I have done what I could (but of course the iMac that's glued together has to be done by the Mac agents because the replacement proprietary double-sided tape costs as much to import as 8 GB RAM and an SSD) and the computers are now much faster. Almost as fast as they were when new, running the version of MacOs they came from the factory with, in fact. Don't know how anyone can say that's not due to immense bloat.
"The yearly Mac OS updates don't really add a lot of groundbreaking features to the machines"
Not only that, they add *IMMENSE BLOAT* which slows the machine down. So it's all very well to go to all the trouble of hacking the newer versions to run on the old machines, but really, is it worth it? Adding RAM (where possible) and an SSD can only go so far, and then you are stuck with a computer that's really only suitable for pensioners who are patient and don't really mind it it takes 5 minutes to load a web page. Otherwise... shell out absolutely colossal amounts of money for a shiny new Mac that does all the same things the old one did, only with slightly different menus. Yayyyy.
eM Client is good and I installed it a lot for my Little Old Lady clients, but a long way from FOSS. It has a free version, sure (it works unregistered for a month and you have to register it to the email address - they send you a free perpetual licence) but to "unlock" features you have to pay for it.
What features you ask? More than one email address, for one thing. So forget having your ISP-specific email and your Gmail address in the same place. And the other thing that horrified me was that when I set it up for a non-profit - a very charity-funded children's shelter - it worked for a few months and then, apparently after spying on the the email traffic for that time, decided this was "commercial use" and just stopped working, with a ransom "error message".
I switched them back to T-bird. Has some odd quirks like hard-to-find config / setting options (there are at least three separate places to access these different but overlapping menus - and when you google "how to" you'll probably find instructions that reference menus that have changed or moved) and it insists on opening every new window in its own tab. I find unsophisticated and elderly users just don't seem to be able to retain that information and keep opening more and more of them. And Thunderbird re-opens all those tabs next time you open it, without asking. Tedious. It also is set by default to "threaded" conversation view and most users hate this.
"And I bet many of you thought that customer service call centers would be one of the easiest things to switch to AI chatbots"
No, we thought that customer service call centers would be one of the first things to switch to AI chatbots.
And we knew it would contribute still further to the ever-downward-spiralling levels of customer service the world has experienced for the last three or four decades.
... someone googles my name and discovers my social network accounts all end in a black hole, which will alert them to the obvious fact that the accounts have been deleted, at which point I will have been jailed, waterboarded, and disappeared to any one of a number of "detention" centres inside or outside the country.
Yeahhh... in the 80s and 90s, some of the more uptight companies (in South Africa, anyway) still felt that "internal customers" should be afforded the "same respect" as actual customers, so ties were mandatory even if you never saw a single customer ever.
I remember going for an interview in the late 80s in uniform - I was serving in the Navy in an office job, and it was Summer so we were in Whites (not the ice cream suit, but white long trousers and open-necked short-sleeved shirt) and I just drove from the base to the job interview. Took criticism from one member of the panel for being "so casual". Yeah. OK, stick-up-your-arse, thanks for your time... in retrospect, so glad I didn't get that job. not sure if it was about the lack of tie / blazer / crimplene slacks (this was after all still the height of Saturday Night Fever outfits here) or my less than obsequious attitude, but I think I dodged a bullet there...
Parts of that "report" display a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works in the 21st Century. "The fact that the department currently lacks visibility into the origins and security of software code hampers software security assurance" is an outdated attitude to OSS that has no place in 2025, let alone in a top-security department.
Just another example of deploying "the best people" (i.e. "have passed the Trump purity test") in the most important positions.
"absent in the US system because they copied our government with the difference being that you elect a king"
Indeed. Those naive Founding Fathers probably thought that by replacing the House of Lords with an Senate they were putting enough of a "check and balance" in place, but then they completely f^&*(ed up by arbitrarily allocating two senators per State irrespective of population - clearly a massively UNbalanced system
"Oscilloscopes and computers went for more than their new value"
I went to one open PC / equipment auction, once, and never wasted my time again. The cartel of IT companies (probably with collusion of the autioneer) did their homework in advance and made sure to get everything of vaue before anyone else got a chance, and the uninformed public drove up the prices of the junk stuff the professionals didn't want.
I used to be a customer of a DNS server service that Oracle bought out. Cancelled that account at least 8 years ago. I still receive updates from them warning about planned maintenance outages. I clicked the "unsubscribe" link, they kep on coming. I complained to "support", who gave me every assurance that my email had been removed from the databse. They kept on coming. I replied to the support email calling them liars, and they just stopped responding. It wouldn't surprise me at all if I was to find out they have blocked my email address for receiving.
And yet the emails keep on coming. Really tight internal IT department, this company. What's their business again? Oh, IT services? OK then.
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.
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