Posts by aks

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

That reminds me of the old adage that 87.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Surely a logical backdoor already exists

There are already ways to compromise specified users and devices once a search warrent has been issued.

The UK clearly want to trawl through big-data at will on a "big data" fishing expedition.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Re: Teams? Forget it..

Microsoft's announcement

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/skype-is-retiring-in-may-2025-what-you-need-to-know-2a7d2501-427f-485e-8be0-2068a9f90472

Re: Teams? Forget it..

£42 for me

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

You heard it here first

I assume that this is our first glimpse of the Windows 12 minimum requirements.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Location or Network or SIM

The article suggests that Apple cripples the service for UK SIM card users.

Questions are:

Will this apply to all users of a UK SIM card wherever the are located or

All users of a network in the UK whatever their SIM.

Depending on the answer, there are obvious was aroud the restriction.

Microsoft to kill off Defender VPN this month

My only motive for using a VPN is to avoid geo-location problems when I travel.

Too many web services ignore my declared preferences for language and region and insist on showing their content in Spanish or Japanese, just because that's where I happen to be.

Other web services lock me out because their advertising revenue is region specific.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

I hope these comments are completely sarcasic as they're utterly untrue. Microsoft's internationalisation isn't perfect but it's very good and continues to improve.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Fried printer

Back in the late 80s we'd got our software running on IBM mainframes, including in Japanese for screens, printers and pen-plotters. We were then tasked with making the software work on a semi-compatible Japanese mainframe. All went well until an office rearrangement when someone decided that the 100v plug on the dot-matrix printer should be replaced with a 230v one. I did finally find a uk company who repaired the blown components.

Happy memories

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

AFAICR the Space Shuttle used the same voting concept plus a differently designed and programmed box that would take over if all else failed.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Which is exactly....

As I remember it, it was the other way round.

The USA wasn't allowed to spy on its own people within the USA so they asked the UK to spy on Americans and pass the information back to the USA. Not sure of any current arrangements.

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

Re: Why do they host ads?

Surely, that's a tautology. It's the purpose of business to make money. They're souless machines, not humans.

Any appearance of humanity comes from the Marketing and Brand Image budget.

Seems to me that this website simply doesn't spend the big bucks using the automated filtering systems used by the big players. I wonder how much they take to run. These filtering tools don't come cheap.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: MS doing their best to slow down the adoption of Windows 11

Off-topic rant.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Porridge time

No argument with the criticism of all of the above but *why on earth* did the courts rubber stamp these convictions? It can't be solely the bottomless pockets for lawers that the Government-backed Post Office had.

Why did no judge raise a red flag?

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

1984 Telescreen

We now live in the surveillance world described by Georgo Orwell. Telescreens in every home (and in your pocket).

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

Re: 'Beacons of hope'

That reminds me of the most successful busineses during a gold rush were the suppliers of shovels, food and women.

Fully agree but would choose endemic rather than epidemic.

Re: Computers for Low-Income People

Many of us here on El Reg have been there, done that with a Bluetooth keyboard, but how many of us use it regularly. Use with a tablet a little more so.

Axiom Space shuffles space station assembly sequence – to get it standalone sooner

Re: Relook at

"trendy, cutting edge" how quaint.

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Re: cry wolf

Specifically regarding IBM:

IBM were quite lax regarding any lock-in to their mainframes. I worked on many of their, and three competing machines in the 1970s and 1980s.

IBM diid use litigation against them with little real effect. It was when the world changed from massive centralised power to smaller, more varied equipment that their semi-monopoly was fully broken.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Search by keywords

All I ever want from a search engine is for it to point me to pages that refer to the precise keywords in my query and to allow me to include negative keywords to filter out irrelevant pages.

That's how I was able to use the first search engines and was quite happy if there were no matches, I'd then refine my query.

I hate having to pose my question as if I were speaking to a person, with full grammar. Most results nowadays are way off the mark.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: Sadly not a item of bad englishes

Not that Columbus actually got to the mainland. Me punished anyone who said that Cuba was an island. He believed he'd reached eastern Asia. The people living there were not Christian so he happily made them slaves. Not a nice man at all.

Mr Intel leaving Intel is not a great sign... for Intel

Re: "it was a very bad fit for investors"

Agreed. They're simply gamblers in the Stock Exchange Casino.

EU irate about geo-locked Apple IDs

The entire basis of the EUs complaint is that the Single Market does what it says on the tin.

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: Are we being fair to the AI ?

In its updated version, this AI will be offering discounted tickets for the B Ark.

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

HarmonyOS goes global!

There are other countries who might be interested in using HarmonyOS. The West and China are not the whole world. I'm thinking of BRICS. India, Brazil, Indonesia are all large markets. Some of them would like to disconnect from Apple/Google if they could control their own markets.

China could easily produce a FOSS version of HarmonyOS to achieve this.

UK sleep experts say it's time to kill daylight saving for good

Re: Leave the clocks alone

Being from Greenwich, I'm biased. Officially, it's called UTC and aircraft use it universally, naming it Zulu.

If I ran the world (heaven forfend), the whole world would run on GMT and simply get up and go to bed at the appropriate time for their longitude. ;)

Re: I disagree

They did that as a wartime measure.

Simply get up earlier. Solves your problem without affecting the rest of us.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Re Microsoft: It seems to me that Microsoft want to unhook from x86 and become much more architecture independent. Assuming a more layered approach to their offerings. If that is so, x86, arm and RISC-V will reside within a discrete layer. Windows 8 (spit0 was an attempt to unify the UX layer across desktop, tablet and mobile, albeit a failed one.

$180 for an overpriced, dubious SSD drive? Maybe don't join the USB Club

Re: The quacking, walking duck.

My 1TB USB stick is on my keyring as we speak. It's not USB 3.0 but cost £5.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Safe Mode

When Windows gets its knickers in a twist, I restart in Safe Mode then run chkdsk. If I'm still suspicious, a full antivirus scan follows. Only then do I start looking at reverting recent updates.

With other, dumber devices, a full power-on reset has been the solution.

Kaspersky challenges US government to put up or shut up about Kremlin ties

Who's backdoor?

I've always assumed that the issue is that Kaspersky *doesn't * have a backdoor.

Biden bans Kaspersky: No more sales, updates in US

Re: Reds under the bed etc.

So, you're suggesting removing your Kapersky products today then go shopping for replacements?

I have always assumed that the USAs issue with their software was the it *didn't* include a back-door.

Really? A sarcasm detector? Wow. You shouldn't have

Re: "sarcasm detection is finally getting the attention it deserves."

As a Londoner living in Dublin, when I brought my American girlfriend to London, she heard an accent which wasn't Irish or English and asked me if it was American. It was Australian.

She had been brought up in the USA thinking of herself as pure Irish. After six months adjusting to Dublin, she was surprised to think of herself for the first time as American. All four grandparents from Ireland and she with pure red hair.

Forget everything you learned playing Lunar Lander: Chinese boffins reveal secrets of Chang'e 5 probe's touchdown

Re: There is...

Technically, I agree but fortunately has the same basic meaning but subtly less emotion. Don't forget that this is a journalist writing the article, although a technology competent one. Which word would you suggest as an alternative? I'm stumped.

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

Re: using adjusted UTC would be the best and makes the most sense

The second is defined as part of SI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

The same atomic clocks used on earth would run differently if they were moved to the moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

That's the reason they're suggesting placing atomic clocks on the moon.

I do like the Customer Service reference. We've all been there.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Ah! Memories!

here's one

https://www.voicesofyouth.org/blog/mental-illness-not-joke

ESA salutes Galileo satellite system meeting aviation standards

Re: "We improved [..] Galileo purely by retuning the software in the ground segment."

The article itself explains that it was the reporting requirements that were tweaked to comply, not operational ones.

Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

Re: Just five more minutes, ma!

SI *is* metric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

The problem was between American feet and inches and metric.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Re: MoneyCrocodile Tears royalty-free images

https://www.shutterstock.com/search/crocodile-tears

Re: Small to invisible

Rufus has an option when converting from the ISO to a USB stick which allows you to prevent the checks for unsupported hardware.

https://pureinfotech.com/rufus-create-bootable-windows-11-usb/#create_windows11_usb_unsupported_hardware

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

No software is perfect. No system is perfect.

The biggest problems here were and are a lack of adequate aggressive testing and apparently no way to challenge the findings, even in court due to the special semi-state status of the PO.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

a fairly study case

I assume this should read "a fairly sturdy case"

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Re: 16 Tons and what do you get?

The hackers are already getting prepared.

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Unintentional Internationalization

Back in the 1990's I was retrofitting Internationalisation to software that was already being sold in various parts of the world but needed to support the more exotic locations such as Japan.

A simple way for me to test my code was to have loadable language tables and the Welcome screen for the USA said "Howdy, partner".

Somebody (not me, honest) decided to add my new code tables into the next delivery.

Unsurprisingly, there were some faxes flying once the latest version got installed.

Happily, this was a quick fix and the final produce worked correctly for 29 languages, including Welsh.

To pay or not to pay for AI's creative 'borrowing' – that is the question

QI-QO

Why not train the model using solely out-of-copyright materials?

One clear bonus would be to raise the quality of the output

The years were worth the wait. JWST gives us an amazing view of Neptune's rings

"click here for a closeup"

This ends up with a 404

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: So answer this.

The article mentions the "owner" of the road. I assume this means that this is a private road across private land.