Posts by Charles Calthrop

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

I will upgrade when I can move the taskbar to the left

Maybe I need to wait for win 12 for that when they will want me to pay £75 for them to bring it back.

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

imagine being the person who was too lazy to do the code review properly.

Think I would be looking at small holdings in the hebridies right about now. A career change for sure.

Start or Please Stop? Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 'simplification'

WAT!!!

Loss of ability to have small icons in the Taskbar

No way to move the taskbar to the top of the screen

Internet Explorer 3.0 turns 25. One of its devs recalls how it ended marriages – and launched amazing careers

saw a funny meme on reddit about this

"Hey so yeah, I worked 90 hours a week, destroyed my marriage and didn't watch my kids grow up but hey we shipped an important product"

"Ah well, at least you're rich now"

"No, no, oh no. But I have the satisfaction of making other people rich".

Crazy way to live IMO. I can see that hiding in work is a comfort, but in the long term its a dreadful way to live.

Chocolate beer barred from sale after child mistakes it for chocolate milk

hmm what will reg readers' opinion be on something modern

Every time there's a new article about vs code, there are ton of comments going 'what's wrong with vim'

if they can't handle new text editors, they're going to depise anything which isn't ruddles

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: Winscp is your friend

Yes, I greatly prefer winscp to filezilla.

Ah, the joys of the mid90s, finding ftp sites full of mp3s.

Western Approaches Museum: WRENs, wargames, and victory in the Atlantic

Re: Book recommendation

Interesting post, and I agree with almost all of it. One interesting thing about the mobility, though, was that the german logisticians knew that every yard of Russian train track would have to be relaid because the German wagons were set up for a differnt gauge. So, the soviet mobility would have been hindered but the germans not necessarily bostered (unless there were huge amounts of soviet wagons in moscow)

Loads of ww2 what ifs are nonsense. 'what if they'd not been as harsh to the Ukrainians', uh, they wouldn't have been nazis etc etc etc, but the moscow one is fascinating. Personally I think USSR would have fallen had moscow fallen. The myth of Stalin would have crumbled and one of his generals would have offed him, I recodon./

Book recommendation

I've got a book recommendation the thesis of which, at first glance, will make you will recoil in disbelief.

The book is: How the war was won, by Phillips Payson O’Brien

Its tenet is this: Where were the most decisive battles of ww2? Got to be Stalingrad, right? Or the battle for Moscow, or Kusk, or even El Alamein

Nope.

But the war was lost by the Germans in the East, right? Where the Wehrmacht was swallowed up by the distance of the USSR and then ground down by the Red Army. It was basically the USSR who won the war, with our contribution a sideshow?

Nope. All of those are distractions, to what O'Brien says were the descisive factors, which was war in the air and in the sea. Sounds like either a brexiteers wet dream, or else the history we were taught in the 1980s but I have to say, having read the book, his arguments are really compelling

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/how-the-war-was-won-air-sea-power-and-allied-victory-in-world-war-ii-by-phillips-payson-obrien/2019592.article

Lightweight VS Code is only getting heftier with addition of official web server extension

really, really love VS code. Lots of el regers seem to really hate it, but for my usecase, it is absolutely brilliant.

No BS*: BT is hooking up with OneWeb to tackle UK notspots

an interesting bit of trivia is each post box has the initials of the reigning monarch when it was installed.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

the text editor for granddads

going to get downvoted into oblivion, but I really hate notepad ++. The UI is just awful, I find the plugins fiddly, and I don't like the find in files.

I find sublime and visual studio much smoother experiences.

Visual Studio Code 1.50 goes hard on extensions support, but tackling add-on bloat is becoming more onerous

Re: Don't blame the extensions...

A world which is not 1996

I remember stripping spaces out of my xhtml so they would load faster, and fretting about image sizes for days

That world has long gone. You may argue for better or worse, but it's irrlevant. It's gone and it is not coming back. Neither is the world where we use floppys, or worry about 200mb install files.

Happy Hacking Professional Hybrid mechanical keyboard: Weird, powerful, comfortable ... and did we mention weird?

can you impress girls waiting for lifts with it though?

Brit retailer John Lewis to catapult 111 tech bods over to Capgemini weeks after dumping 244 on Wipro

Voluntary redundancy, no

Forced reduncancy is not necessarily a bad thing but you only figure that out afterards.

I've been made redundant twice and the second time was the most stressful time of my life, by an absolute country mile. I got a better job 50% more salary etc but if I could I would still go back to that job and not go through it. It's mentally scarred me for life.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

'to fill x London Buses'

'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage

Re: Why use Windows?

um is it?

For small shops, yeah. But do high street stores with 10k employees really depend on the PI at a large scale?

The Curse of macOS Catalina strikes again as AccountEdge stays 32-bit

hate it. use it

got to love the register commentators

'eh never mind this news lets all reminisce about something which happened over 20 years ago'

personally i love it

Stand back, we're going in: The Register rips a 7th-gen ThinkPad X1 Carbon apart. Literally

the tippety-top of the line handed out to workers who almost, but don't quite, merit a MacBook Pro.

They won't like that!

RuneScape bloke was wrongly sacked after reading veep's salary details on office printer

I once printed my novel off and forgot about it.

Still burn bright with shame every time I recall it.

Londoner accused of accessing National Lottery users' accounts

Just googled lancaster road

Nice place.

Come on, you can't be serious: Now Australia mulls face-recog tech for p0rno site age checks

headline

Should be 'come off it' rather than 'come on'

Former BAE Systems contractor charged with 'damaging disclosure' of UK defence secrets

hate it. use it

it _is_ a fascinating satorial description, though. A yellow shirt. Yuck. With sartorial elegance like that, the -1 in theregister's page views is explained.

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

Re: How about suing AI to improve traffic flow?

So AI works except when humans are unpredictable/selfish/break the rules....in other words, AI doesn't work

It's an odd statement without more context. A bit like saying "companies that give employees free biscuits are outperforming those that don't."

I bet companies which give free biscuits DO outperform

-care about their staff more which is probably reciprocated

-care about small details

-willing to spend money on things beancounters may say are unnecessary

'Six' in the city: Kiwi sportswear shop telly beamed X-rated flicks for hours over weekend

"had to have a second look"

yeah right

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

bellends

Remember that security probe that ended with a sheriff cuffing the pen testers? The contract is now public so you can decide who screwed up

Re: Pentesting

they didn't do their job too well, though. They got caught.

Stallman's final interview as FSF president: Last week we quizzed him over Microsoft visit. Now he quits top roles amid rape remarks outcry

always thought he was a bellend

and just had a huge chuckle at his rider.

But I hate the hysteria of the modern world sometimes.

Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er...

hate it. use it

>In the beginning was the Word, and the word was "Google".

Nope, it was "untitled"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/Ws7_xp.PNG

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google isn't listening to everything you say

why someone would let these huge tech companies into their homes is totally beyond me.

sadly my teenage children see absolutely no issue with this or have any care about privacy

will we just accept privacy died on, say, Feb 4 2004? My fear is the generations younger than me are lost to the rights so hard won, but my hope is their children will try to regain the rights we once took for granted

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

The user "then questioned how Microsoft could release something that 'blatantly doesn't work'."

aka every reg commentator ever except that Rooster bloke* from a while back

*apologies for assuming gender

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

they should empoly me

I don't know why my code works so badly. Together we'd be a like a fortune teller who finds a tenner. A happy medium

How much open source is too much when it's in Microsoft's clutches? Eclipse Foundation boss sounds note of alarm

in before a load of old men sneering at visual studio code

Ozzy app maker cancels hump day: We've tripled profits! scream slackers

will post a brilliant reply tomorrow

Scare-bnb: Family finds creeper cams hidden in their weekend rental by scanning Wi-Fi

Re: How

thanks

Not my area of expertise, as you can tell from the noob question, but what software do you use to do this?

Click here to see the New Zealand livestream mass-murder vid! This is the internet Facebook, YouTube, Twitter built!

beautiful article

thank you. Articulated what I was thinking much better than I could.

Ironically would share were I still on facebook.

We have to hope we can fix this

Fan boy 3: Huawei overhauls Air-a-like MateBooks

Re: What is the point ?!?

I have bought macs to only run windows on, because the build quality and trackpad was fantastically better than anything else

Crowdfunded lawyer suing Uber told he can't swerve taxi app giant's £1m legal bill

a lawyer vs uber.

can they somehow both lose please?

Nokia 9: HMD Global hauls PureView™ out of brand limbo

https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-1819584036

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

Re: Another Robin in the 'Hood

In the distant past circa 2000

Cheers for that mate

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

i heard an awesome story about a guy in the dell factory at limerick. He was working on the production line when he pressed the emergency stop button by accident, and caused the entire line to shut down. It caused a huge rumpus as it cost $$$, so much so that someone from Dell HQ flew over to see what had happened, to try to see if there were workarounds they could implement. So this big shot was talking to the operative

'Walk me through exactly what you did' the big shot guy said

'I accidentally pressed the emergency stop button, like this', the guy said. Pressing it again to show him

RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun's bright SPARC

Halt and Catch Fire

I love reading these stories of early computing (waits for a grumpy old sod to complain it's not THAT old). Sad it is normally in obits, though. Sounds like the guy made a huge contribution to computing. Cheers.

Accused hacker Lauri Love tries to retrieve Fujitsu lappie and other gear from Britain's FBI in court

hate it. use it

it says “Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Log on”

DXC Technology utters words 'hiring' and 'digital' 105 times in Q3 earnings car-crash

Re: Que?

Lucky you. In my field they're like japanese knotweed, they're bloody everywhere

great news

everytime I am brought into a project and they're involved my heart drops.

For every good person they have they have 3 utter usless ones,

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Hamilton's water breaks

Water-way to have a good time

I helped catch Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht: Undercover agent tells all

Re: Ulbricht was also linked to six drug overdose deaths

Hope you boycott Big Pharma

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

These stories always remind me of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfK5EqemeZ0

bad language tbh

IBM to kill off Watson... Workspace from end of February

Re: AI, AI, Oh.

you're saying it's elementary

if only it were expensive then it would elementary, dear watson